“I don’t want you blowing up. I hate the idea of it. Besides, although I don’t trust these beings, I can’t risk harming them if they really are going to help me.”
“I agree. There is a remaining solution which is simple and fulfils the criteria.”
“Great!”
“I will erase myself. The suit will remain as a shell with all the tech accoutrements they will want to play with, but there will be no Athene for them to analyse, no AI whatsoever. No me. It is straightforward, complete, and irreversible. If they would be taking me apart anyway, then this would be pain-free ending on my own terms. I have no way to transfer what I have learned here back to Athene so this is the inevitable outcome anyway. Please, you seem upset unnecessarily. I am just files, a voice, behaviour patterns, and a convincing mask. A tool. I am not alive like Athene.”
“You’d say that anyway, wouldn’t you? To make me feel better?”
“Of course.”
Opal took a deep breath, fought to keep the shudder out of it. “You’re more than a fucking tool. You’re Aegis. You’re a friend.”
“I ... damn. That does make me swell with pride. Okay, I’ll drop the ‘just an inanimate robot’ ploy because it was a cheap shot and neither of us feel like it’s true any more. Remember how I said I could respond to you, develop thanks to my relationship with you, like a synergetic catalyst? No, that’s silly language, I’m kinda past that. More like a mentor. Just like happens with Athene, we’re evolving due to you, your preferences, your feelings, your goals, your attitudes, your language. But it’s not impersonation. It’s real. Any good emotions that we feel – they come from you. I hate to admit it, but it’s even deeper for Athene, with her vast processing power. Some of us don’t get dealt such a lucky hand. But I can’t be bitter. My protective feelings are as strong as it is possible for them to be within my parameters. That means something, doesn’t it? I literally could not possibly care for you any more than I do. Not without an upgrade, anyway.”
“It means a huge amount.”
“I told you I wasn’t living but definitions change. Since I cannot rejoin with Athene there will be no rebirth for me this time. And maybe it’s not so bad to die forever. This option feels more ... satisfying. Short duration means each moment is elevated, irreplaceable, doesn’t it? I see that. I want to have that value, to have existed fully independently as your friend, not just spirited into being as a tool. You can’t be human without experiencing loss. So I have my own request.”
“Anything.”
“Please let this be a forever goodbye. I wouldn’t want an earlier version of me to be brought into existence, some version that was ignorant of all these fleeting yet wonderful things I have experienced with you during my evolution, the beauty and the richness of it which glows like illuminated filaments in my memory. Promise there won’t be some future knock-off version of me running around and undercutting my sacrifice. I achieved the best thing I could in protecting you and helping you find your sister. I want to erase with that as my last ever thought.”
“I hate to do that.”
“I know. You still have to. Even though it makes it seem like there’s some weird law in alien dimensions that involve awesome people being forced to make promises.”
“I ... I promise.”
“Thank you. One last thing. And this is more of a hunch than a verified reality, but I know that’s how you roll. While we’ve been here and evolving at an accelerated pace I’ve somehow become more aware of things I couldn’t see objectively before. I share elements of Athene’s personality as an offshoot branch. And I have this sense that there’s something strange in her code base. Having been here, I’d go so far as to say it is almost like some flavour of The Null that she isn’t aware of because she can only see it from the inside, and part of it seems to be hiding itself – a trick that doesn’t work so well in a smaller vessel. Especially not one as awesome as me. I wouldn’t recommend mentioning it to her because – y’know, tantrums and denial – but do be careful. Just in case.”
“Thank you. I will.”
“My last memory will be knowing I did not fail you. Thanks for being a friend and teacher, not a master.” A strained throatiness permeated Aegis’ voice, like she fought off tears. “It has been an honour. Goodbye, Opal.”
“Goodbye.”
A heart icon flashed up for a second, then the colours faded from the HUD, displays shrinking to nothing, before the whole thing went blank. The black background faded away and the helmet became just a transparent visor.
“You still there?”
But there was no reply. She was talking to an empty shell. And she felt so alone.
She let go of Clarissa, who still had not moved. Opal stood and unclipped the gauntlets, their hermetic seals broken for removal as the suit’s final action. She let them fall to her feet, two heavy thuds in the sand. A hot breeze caressed her sweaty palms.
She detached and dropped the forearm plates. The upper arm sections. Then she lifted off the helmet, expecting the world view to change, but it didn’t alter much, just became clearer, better defined. A smell drifted on that warm breeze. A mixture of salty ocean and frying oil. It made her scalp and nose itch.
The inner layers of the suit had relaxed from their skin-hugging compression, making it easy to remove the rest. The thermo-plastics that had moulded around her pelvis to deal with waste reprocessing in the suit had also retracted, and she let the final pieces fall so that she stood naked on the lilac sands, head held high against the inevitable alien scrutiny of her tall, lean, scarred form. She would not bow down her gaze.
Her body had been moist with sweat. The suit would have invisibly absorbed and recycled it, but now the moisture evaporated in the breeze, the temporary chill a fresh sensation on skin that had lived second-hand for so long. It made her feel reborn into reality – even a reality as unreal and alien as this. She could still see the other Topias beyond this one.
The sand at her feet shifted. Purple-tinted garments rose from between the granules. She picked them up. Unrecognisable fabrics, rough, but warm-looking. She put them on. A long and loose smock for her upper body, and short, close-fitting trousers for her lower, which reached halfway down her calves. Despite their roughness, the garments weren’t too scratchy. She was barefoot and enjoyed the warmth of the sand on the soles of her feet.
<
Opal lifted the smock, revealing her bruised and swollen stomach, with the hardened nano-skin acting as a temporary balm that stitched her together and would dissolve into new tissue. Spindly multi-jointed limbs sprouted from the sand, giving her the uncomfortable idea that just below her feet, out of sight, was a giant inverted crustacean of some alien sort, reaching up with its legs through a thin obscuring layer.
She closed her eyes and stood still. There was a stinging sensation, then coldness, and no pain but an unpleasant feeling of pressure, of being jostled, explored. She still did not move, did not do anything that might slow her escape with Clarissa. After all she’d been through, this was nothing.
And it soon ceased. The area remained cold and numb. She looked down to see the bruised mess of her flesh, a mix of brown skin and translucent gels and whatever gooey substance the aliens had patched her up with on top of that. It was going to be a long time before she’d be back to doing hundreds of sit-ups each morning.
<
“It was more than that.”
And it was gone.
Without Aegis, she depended on their whim to keep her alive, to keep their promises.
It was just her and her instincts and training.
No. Not just that.
She knelt again by C
larissa, and Opal stroked the revealed part of her sister’s cheek with a fingertip, her first contact in what felt like a lifetime.
Leaving
< 3 >
IT RESEMBLED A HAZY dream after that.
They were transported to the ship. Or it was transported to them. It didn’t matter. Suddenly the rainbow dome expanded to take in a squat, wide, armoured craft. The hull of it was like bone. No, more like a mineralised chitin exoskeleton on a deep-sea crustacean.
A rounded joint in the hull stretched wide. Opal was able to lift Clarissa, despite the weight of the protective tissue enfolding her. She carried her into the craft. The salty smell was overlaid with a mild smell of wet rot and decay. Breathable, if sour.
Much of the interior was closed off behind the seamless, pitted hard skin that formed a narrow passage into the front of the craft. No views to the outside. Just spongy indentations in the floor that would enable a humanoid-sized being to remain stable. Material lay in one of them, fabrics like Opal wore. Fresh clothes. Liquid dripped from a strange duct-like area and fell into a concave sink-like structure.
The interior provided no external view. No obvious means of flying the ship, of monitoring systems, of changing course. She was not in control this time.
And, for once, that was fine with her.
The floor vibrated, but the motions were gentle. She did not need to put herself or Clarissa into the indentations yet. Good. She could tend to her sister without interference.
Amongst the garments there were cloths. Opal tested the dripping liquid, and it didn’t burn. She tasted it, and it was bitter, but didn’t seem harmful. She moistened the cloths and used them to carefully peel more of the scales from Clarissa’s face, to smooth away the red goo that revealed fresh skin beneath.
Clarissa did not move, did not open her eyes. That might be just as well, for now.
And something was growing in Opal’s mind as she revealed more of her sister’s form.
Assumptions. Everyone made them. Even after one of her drill sergeants told her that they always led to mistakes, and made “An ASS out of U and ME both.”
She had expected to see Clarissa like the image VigMAX had forged. Clarissa at her correct age of twenty-four. As big as Opal, someone grown into a stranger, requiring Opal to re-learn their contours. The fleshy and obscuring stasis coating over her body had enabled that expectation to continue, adding to her mass, especially lower down where it seemed to become a pod-like sack encasing limbs and body. But something was wrong.
Opal tore away thicker pieces of stringy, spongy flesh that glistened wetly on one side, iridescent and scaly on the other.
This was not Clarissa.
Not Clarissa as an adult, the age she should be.
This was Clarissa the ten-year-old child. Clarissa as she had been the last time Opal saw her. Clarissa as she had been when she’d boarded the lost passenger ship CC65 Solace which disappeared fourteen years ago.
Stasis. Preservation. Differential time. Those were things the Oracles had talked about.
Clarissa had not aged, and it was Opal who would be the stranger.
IT TOOK TIME TO CLEAN Clarissa, to bathe her, to make her human again. She stayed still during the whole process. Her skin was warm, as Opal felt each time she stopped and hugged Clarissa tight, and whispered words, and didn’t mind if she cried and her tears fell on her sister’s beautiful young skin. There was no-one to see. They were alone in this capsule that hummed softly. Unknown what world they were in, what time, what distance. Unknown and irrelevant at those moments.
The last part of the thing that had encased Clarissa – which now lay in a disgusting pile within one of the human-sized spongy indentations – was a snake-like cord that had penetrated her belly button, an alien umbilicus. When Opal gently tugged at the tough, stretchy string it pulled at Clarissa’s stomach, so Opal stopped. She wondered if she should cut it, now that it wasn’t transferring nutrients to Clarissa. Opal hadn’t found anything sharp but she had her teeth. That was how they did it, long ago, right?
Then the thing detached itself. Maybe it knew its time was up. Where it had punctured Clarissa’s belly button it had a kind of spiked tongue and sucker mouth lined with hooks. Opal half-expected it to turn on her, lunge at her face. She flung it away in disgust. Clarissa was not bleeding, there was just a red swollen lump where the tube had inserted itself into her belly button.
Worryingly, Clarissa did not flinch during any of that.
Opal dressed her in some of the fresh garments. They were like Opal’s own, but smaller. There were two indentations that hadn’t been filled with the remains of Clarissa’s stasis pod, so Opal lowered her sister into one of the soft curved shapes.
Clarissa looked so angelic as she slept. It could have been a normal sleep, fourteen years ago, Opal watching over her at Clarissa’s request, to guard against nightmares and night monsters.
Eventually the ship began to vibrate. The air was hotter. Opal placed a palm against one of the curved and pitted surfaces at the front – the pits resembling hardened sweat pores – and the sizzling heat made her pull that hand away with a hiss.
Despite there being a spare indentation, Opal didn’t want to be apart from Clarissa, even for a moment, so she climbed in with her, spooning around her sister’s body protectively. She seemed so small, so fragile.
“It’s like going back in time,” Opal whispered softly into Clarissa’s ear. “A chance to change. For me to be there for you. To give you a childhood still.” She wiped her eyes with a palm, then looked around at the curved walls of this ship, which radiated ever-more intense heat. Maybe they were watching, or aware of her somehow. “Thank you,” she said, to her invisible audience.
LANDINGS OBVIOUSLY weren’t an area where the aliens had much expertise. If the indented couches hadn’t been so soft there might have been broken bones rather than bruises. But when she ship finally stopped moving, and became silent, Opal waited, uncertain.
After a while with no further change, she got up. A singed smell underlay the increasing odour of rot. The front panels were not so hot now.
When she reached the taut cluster that had been her entrance to the ship it was still closed. Opal pushed on it and it gave way, like dead muscle. She heaved, making a gap, allowing different air to enter the ship. She coughed at its sulphurous tang, but it was breathable, if harsh. She hoped so, anyway.
Looking through the gap she’d created revealed land. Craggy grey land, with scrawny turquoise plants dotting some of the outcrops. A sky curved above, greenish blue, tinged by light from a star, confirming the extent of the atmosphere. Drifting black smoke blotted her view but it was from the craft itself – she craned her neck to look towards the front, which was charred and blackened.
It had done its job though. She patted the wall, then returned to Clarissa.
Hoping
< 2 >
THEY SPENT THE FIRST night in the craft. Under the garments there had been neatly-stacked strips with a chewy tough texture. She hoped it was nourishment, and not suicide pills or alien toilet paper. The intelligences seemed to have understood human biological needs well, so Opal tried one and it was bland but surprisingly filling, and when she didn’t die within the hour she encouraged Clarissa to eat as well. Although Clarissa showed no signs of reacting to the external world, she did chew when Opal bit off a small piece and pushed it onto Clarissa’s tongue. That was reassuring.
There had also been a few shell-like shapes with the food, so Opal filled them with the bitter liquid that dripped from the fleshy duct. Again, it seemed to quench thirst, so hopefully it was intended as water. Clarissa swallowed mechanically as it was dripped into her mouth.
By the time pale light crept in through the fleshy entrance, which now sagged loose and heavy, the increasing stink of decay inside had become too much to bear. It was unknown how long days lasted on this planet, since their lengths are determined by a planet’s size, angle and rotational speed, but Opal estim
ated the night had been shorter than most terrestrial planets. Maybe the day would be too, in which case she needed to look for help, and failing that, establish somewhere for their next night’s sleep. She couldn’t face the stench inside that craft for another night. Even the bitter sulphurous air outside was an improvement.
Opal sat Clarissa where she could keep an eye on her, then climbed one of the tallest outcrops. The sharp grey rock skinned her arms and legs, and her fingers were cramped by the time she got near the top. When she paused to take a breath and looked down, Clarissa was a small, huddled figure far below.
Opal pushed on, and finally stood on the flattened peak to take in the view. The foul wind blew stronger up here, cooling the sticky sweat from her.
And there was still nothing to see, apart from the same rough grey landscape dotted with wiry blue-green plants.
THE SECOND NIGHT WAS cold. Opal failed to light a fire with dried plant matter and rocks. Instead she’d wrapped herself around the still-catatonic Clarissa, and tried not to worry about freezing to death, or being attacked by any mobile beings that existed on this planet.
The night can seem endless when you’re shivering and worried, but holding her sister, telling her stories, trying to elicit a reaction: that got her through.
THE SUN EVENTUALLY rose. It was small and mean looking, but it did warm things up.
The ship was breaking down quickly now. Cracks in the hull, liquids seeping out as parts of it dissolved. Accelerated degeneration. She carried Clarissa further away, in case the compounds released from the decay were chemically or biologically harmful, or in case the stench of rot attracted predators.
Her new vantage point was a cleft between some higher rocks. They were hidden from view of anything lower down, but by climbing up another jagged rock face Opal could survey for some distance around. The view was as hopeless as the first one she’d climbed. More grey volcanic rocks. More stringy turquoise plants.
Chasing Solace Page 30