by B. V. Larson
Chapter EIGHT
“Bugs,” Ensign Braxton said with his full square-toothed grin. He rapped on Turtle’s broad chest with his knuckles. They were alone, standing in the psychonaut Red Room where assignments were given. “Today, you get bugs. Come on, Turtle, act like you’re breathing.”
“Yes sir.”
Braxton shook his finger in Turtle’s face. “Attitude, Turt. I want to see more of that poster-boy attitude. For your followers.”
“There aren’t many anymore, but I’ll try, sir.”
The ensign checked his list. “You’re on output 906.” He pointed to a glowing chart on the wall. A starburst twinkled on the board: 906.
“Yes sir.”
“Radioactive world, life form type IC3.”
Braxton looked up and grinned. His face was broad and flat and his eyebrows lay in black swaths across his forehead. There was a small piece of lint stuck to the left eyebrow that Turtle kept involuntarily looking at.
“Big fat bugs,” Braxton continued. “Low intelligence, but, as you can tell by the designation, they’re carnivorous.”
“Yes sir.”
“Come, come, Turt, where’s that enthusiasm? These bugs aren’t big on signaling alarm, as far as we can tell, so it should be an easy run. Think you can be a convincing bug, Turtle?” The piece of lint moved up and down with the eyebrow.
Turtle ignored the man’s question. “What are we looking for, sir?”
Ensign Braxton checked his handpad. “There’s some kind of technology down there, and it’s unlikely it’s theirs. So your bug needs to look around. One of our remote sensors picked up some anomalous radiation in the area.” Braxton paused and Turtle thought he was finished.
“Oh,” Braxton said, tapping his temple once with his index finger, “just a footnote: About two days ago one of your fellow psychos got flashed while he was doing a preliminary down there. But like I said, really, this should be a cakewalk.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Terminally flashed. We shot him into the core yesterday.” Braxton humphed a chuckle. “They said it smelled like burned cabbage down there for an hour.” Big grin. The piece of lint fell off onto his cheek.
Turtle’s mouth began to dry. “I want to look at his recording before I hook in.”
This would be the first time he had ever followed anyone who’d got terminally flashed and he didn’t clearly remember what the procedure was supposed to be.
“His records won’t tell you anything. We’ve been over them half a dozen times. A complete mystery. He had the host walking along and then—zap—another bug got him by the back of the neck and cinched him. The host was terminated. Should have been an easy out, but, unfortunately, there was a minor malfunction in the resource retrieval module—couple seconds delay. It’s been repaired.” Braxton jerked his head a little to one side. “You should’ve been at the deader’s send-off. Didn’t you get the invitation?”
“No.”
Turtle wondered if Lonna had trashed it. Braxton was right, he should have been there. Others would have noted that he hadn’t shown up. “I need to see the recording,” Turtle repeated.
“You got it. Get yourself down to 906 and it’ll be there when you are. In the meantime, Turt: Enthusiasm.” Braxton winked as he left, as though they shared some secret. When he turned, the piece of lint fell off his cheek and drifted to the floor.
Turtle stepped on it as he walked back to the slip-space lift and stepped into a booth. As he slid the seven levels to his output station, he experienced true nonexistence while he wondered what had gone wrong. How had he ended up like this? He and Scarn were recruited to be heroes, but the need for the human element had pretty much been discredited by the reality of a psychonaut’s life. They were explorers of a sort, sure, but they didn’t get to plant any flags in the soil of distant worlds. They got to crawl around as strange worms in strange dirt instead.
Now Braxton was on his case more than usual for some unknown reason.
In the beginning, she had always been there, front and center, easy to laugh, easy to please, easy to look at, easy to get in bed with. In proportion to the sweetness they had, the current rottenness seemed to just about even things up.
Live and learn, he thought, and wished there was an easier way; it tended to chew up one’s life at a troubling rate.
Turtle stepped out of the slip-space lift onto a probe unit deck and headed for the booths. On both sides of the passages, in shallow niches, there were the output consoles. The monitors, the biometric control units, and the inevitable tangle of temporary patch-cables, wires, and bypass modules were everywhere. Tranced-out psychonauts in their Spang suits sat at the units with the contact on their foreheads, surrounded by jittering level indicators.
Each month, it seemed like they were able to reach farther out, many light-years from Tarassis and her lonely journey. Most of these worlds would never be reached by humanity, Turtle suspected. But still, the scientists sent them farther abroad, as if they were looking for something. On a thousand continents on a hundred strange worlds, alien lifeforms found their minds inexplicably inhabited by a second consciousness.
When he explored, Turtle usually didn’t find the experience exhilarating. Sometimes, nothing detectable happened. Sometimes the aliens he infected thought they were speaking with their gods. Sometimes they went mad. Sometimes they died, and if they died, the psychonaut depended on the United Tarassis coherent resource reassembly modules (CRRMs) to instantaneously get him the fuck out of the dying brain and back into his own empty head.
If the recovery equipment was faulty, and the psychonaut survived at all, he could expect to survive with a deranged personality—part human, part alien, part paste.
Until a few weeks ago, Turtle had been a proud psychonaut, but with the news releases pointing out to everyone they were mere tools for the science crew, the work didn’t feel at all heroic. It just seemed dangerous.
Turtle took his time strolling to the far end, to 906. At 905, getting set up and ready to hook-in was someone Turtle recognized from training. What was the name? Jefferson? Jerrison?
The man saw him and held out his hand. “Jamison,” he said of himself. “Crewman first class. Yeah, I remember you and your pal Scarn.”
Turtle shook his hand.
“When did they start you on the probes?” Crewman Jamison asked. He was a broad-faced person, one of those guys with blond hair and dark eyebrows. “I’m finishing up my fourth month.” He spoke animatedly, flipping the contact unit around his fingers. “I’ve got MH1’s today. Dull, man. How about yourself? Any special interests?”
His enthusiasm was making Turtle tired. “Nothing much.”
Jamison pointed into the 906 niche. “Somebody left you a memcube a minute ago. You following somebody else’s work?”
“The last guy in this rack got flashed,” Turtle said. He sat down and tried to concentrate on what he was supposed to do. He didn’t want to end up getting shot into the core for simple lack of attention. “I’m finishing up what he started.” He began setting up the codes and fail-safes.
When Turtle and Scarn had graduated from psychonaut training, they had been as excited as Jamison, but even Turtle hadn’t been as squirrelly.
Now, on the job, squirrelly excitement had no place when living in the minds of aliens and trying to figure out what you were seeing, trying to understand where any significance lay, trying to comprehend the first thing about their alien logic, and trying to determine the nature of alien culture and technology. He had been trying to do all that, but now, according to news reports, it was just a hazardous exercise.
But if machines could do it all just as well... which he didn’t believe... why were the major discoveries made by humans?
“...got flashed about a month ago,” Jamison was saying.
He was still talking. Turtle shook his head to refocus on the present.
Crewman Jamison leaned back with his butt against Turtle’s console and g
estured excitedly. “But it wasn’t that big a deal. He was okay after a few weeks, up walking around, able to feed himself. There’s also been some low talk, too, about Captain Stattor okaying cheap replacement parts, but I don’t believe that. He would be sabotaging a critical exploration project! Accidents are just bound to happen anywhere, you know?”
Turtle already had the memcube slotted and the contact on his forehead. He activated the playback without answering Jamison.
The memories of the dead psychonaut began to play in his head. It was more than a vision, he felt as if he were really there.
After a momentary buzz between the ears, images began to take shape. He was then looking at an alien world through the translated perceptions of a lumbering insect. Indicators said that the animal was land-based and weighed thirty to forty kilograms.
The perceptions of the insect as recorded by the previous psychonaut showed a half dozen similar six-legged things nearby. They were brownish, covered with short bristles, with an extended abdomen of interlocking segments.
The rocky ground was patched with dead vegetation and everything looked unfocused through the murky atmosphere. At some distance, another animal, a shaggy crawling thing, squirmed listlessly toward a pile of rocks.
Without preliminaries, Turtle sensed a tickling at the back of the insect’s head and then the memcube went blank. It was over as quickly as that.
The insect’s death and the psychonaut’s panic merged. The terminal brain-scramble had been recognized by a recorder and put on a separate track for later analysis.
Turtle had both heard and seen cases where the psychonaut had entered the mind of an animal that had already been targeted for predation. Or perhaps just the startle response was enough to trigger an attack. In other words, this could have simply been bad luck—not anything that the psychonaut did wrong. Just the food chain in action, one more time.
Turtle pushed himself back from the console and took slow deep breaths; he needed to focus on this.
“You going for the real thing now?” Jamison asked. He flipped a mini-controller from his fingers like a coin and caught it.
From where Turtle sat in his formchair, he could see Jamison’s console. It showed a half-completed Build-A-Body game he had been amusing himself with. Certain features had been exaggerated, but he had so far left it headless. Intruding thoughts told Turtle that it was not a good sign that Jamison had not hidden his fantasy.
“How dangerous you think it’ll be? Huh?” Jamison wanted to know. “A ten on the scale? A five?”
“Beats me,” Turtle said as he entered the various access codes and waited for clearance. It also escaped Turtle how, surrounded by 22nd Century technology, the happiest guy he’d seen in a month, grinning right next to him, was a certifiable halfwit. Was this some kind of devolution?
“Tell me what you’ve heard about defective components,” Turtle said. “You said you’d heard talk.” Turtle continued to enter codes and did his best to pretend everything was just fine.
“On the guest decks there’s word lately about how our program kills a lot more alien hosts than it used to. They say it’s because we’re using low-grade replacement parts and when we do the insert, it scrambles up their minds. If it scrambles the wrong part, the heart stops, or respiration stops, or blood pressure drops, or—”
“I get the idea.”
“Are you mad about something?” Jamison asked. “Are you mad at me?”
Turtle stopped with his hands over the sliders and finally turned his full attention to Jamison. “I’m not mad at you, it’s just that I’m getting ready to put my life on the line here, you know?
“I get it.”
It was true that several of Turtle’s hosts had checked out while he was in them, but their deaths hadn’t been so quick that there had been any retrieval difficulties for him. He thought that he had just had a run of bad luck. But maybe not…
Turtle polished the platinum side of the contact unit on the front of his Spang suit and pressed it firmly to his forehead.
Everything was set.
“When you come back, Mr. Turtle,” Jamison was saying, “I have my own little memcube here.” He pointed to a plastic bag on the floor under his output unit. “It’s a good one. A lot of hot-action special-interest material, if you have any special interests. Very popular on Deck 17. Can’t pass it to you over the UT system, but you can borrow it for a while,” he said confidentially. “It’s in the bag there,” and pointed again.
“See you later, Crewman.”
Turtle focused on what he was going to do. First, he cleared his mind and urged himself to be observant, the crucial obligation of any psychonaut.
A quick once-over on the settings... and he hit SEND.
There was a momentary buzz in the middle of his head, and, like his psychonaut predecessor, he was in the consciousness of one of the large slow-moving insects. He felt the alien resist his presence in a skittery confused way, but before panic seized the insect, Turtle froze its physical body so the fear might not be evident to the other nearby insects.
He then forced the insect to move its head from one side to the other and to look behind to make sure there would be no repetition of what happened to the other operator.
His host bug and three more of the same species had been walking toward a green-glazed pond. The thick atmosphere dimmed the outline of the water and gave everything blurred edges. He forced his host to continue down the gradual slope to the water.
Fifty or sixty meters away, he again spotted one of the shaggy awkward things he’d seen on the recording. It crawled erratically over the weeds and small rubble.
As he and the other insects neared the slicked water, they drew closer together until, at the edge of the pond, their sides and stick-legs poked into each other. Then, without preliminaries, they seized his host in their serrated pincers, lifted him up over the water’s edge and dropped him in.
The water was oily and astringent. It slopped over his host’s head and gave everything red-edged sparkles
He let the terrified insect’s mind have free rein, hoping its instincts would have the best chance to climb out of the muck—but it thrashed chaotically and the mucky bottom closed around it up to its knee-joints.
Don’t panic, Turtle told himself. Hosts had died on him before and the retrieval units had automatically kicked in, always in plenty of time, always just as they should... and he just wanted to go back to his quarters that afternoon, have dinner with Lonna, argue with Lonna, screw Lonna’s brains out... or, better yet, see Iris one last time.As his host sank deeper, its nerve ganglia began shutting down.
Above him, through a meter of the thick fluid, he could see the three other insects.
They impassively watched his host while his struggles brought the stinging viscous liquid between the segments of his thorax and burned like melted lead.
In full panic, Turtle screamed inside the insect’s mind. The thing reared, made an underwater shriek and sank deeper. The surrounding liquid flowed into his neck joint and everything turned to fire.
His eyes felt scorched out of his head, his stomach smoldered…his brain ignited.
Chapter NINE
“...and then you lifted right up and kind of arched your back,” Crewman Jamison was saying. He scooted his chair closer to Turtle’s bedside. “Then you made this squeaking noise. I don’t know how you did it. That sound wasn’t even remotely human.”
He pointed at his throat and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “I tried making a noise like that, but I couldn’t do it. Then this white stuff came out of your mouth. I thought I should call the medtechs.”
Turtle studied Jamison’s face. There was something wrong with this person.
“No one wants to work at 906 anymore,” Jamison continued, “And d’you know why? Because they fixed it again. I saw the parts they were putting in—real cheap crumbly crap. Now, everybody’s jockeying to get an old output that hasn’t had any repairs done on it recently. UT saves
a bundle with cheap spare parts and guys like you and me get dicked for it. Actually, you got dicked for it. I’ve been getting to pick my outputs.” Jamison paused. “You look like shit.”
Turtle felt like an evolutionary error, and Jamison wasn’t helping. Without moving his head, he counted five tubes coming out of his body.
“How do you feel?”
“I’d rather be unconscious,” Turtle wheezed.
“Yeah,” Jamison said, standing up. “Some days, I feel like that. Hey, I just got a glimpse of Ensign Braxton coming this way. And this—” He took a pink memcube off a side table and put it on top of Turtle’s chest. “This came for you a while ago. No name on it. Says it’s entertainment. Well...” He twitched his eyebrows up and down. “See you later. When you’re better, I still have that hot-action cube they like on Deck 17. Whenever you’re interested.” He winked heavily and left.
Turtle closed his eyes and tried to absorb the lovely silence.
Ensign Braxton’s flat face suddenly loomed over him. “Tough luck, son. Can you talk?” He grinned and showed his short square teeth.
The ensign made him ache inside and out. He closed his eyes.
Braxton turned and bellowed. “Nurse!”
Turtle opened his eyes when a thin woman in white linen appeared in the doorway. She had a slight symmetrical plumping of the lips, a surgical option popular among those who leaned toward sexuality. Her black hair glistened.
“Yes?” She smiled a weird fat-lipped smile. At least he knew she wasn’t a synth. They didn’t do cosmetic surgery after they were molded. There was no need.
“I want this man to be able to talk to me,” Braxton said.
She kept up that pleasant smile as she stepped to it. The puff of her upper lip revealed the small triangle of her two front teeth. She went to the foot of the bed, selected a line hanging below the bags of fluids, and minutely adjusted the valve.
Turtle felt something cool moving inside his leg which soon faded away.
“You feel like talking now?” Ensign Braxton demanded, his face again hovering over Turtle’s.