Somehow, one of the Vestals still stood intact. She was backing up, pointing at me.
“Archfiend!” she cried, her voice a shaking whisper. “Defiler, black zar!”
My eye warned me that this woman could not live.
I advanced, grabbing her face with my bionic hand. I squeezed, hearing it crunch beneath my grasp. With a cry of both fury and regret, I smashed her head against the edge of the table, and her skull cracked open like an egg. Reddish-pink yolk spilled across the floor.
I ran out of the room, through the corridor, exploding outside. My feet pounded against the walkway, my chest on fire from exertion and panic, and I didn’t stop until I was back on the street beyond Pedagogue’s sector gates. I wouldn’t have stopped at all, but my body betrayed me, and I lurched forward and vomited in the middle of the road. Then, I sank to my knees and sobbed.
Get up.
Get up, you can’t stay here.
I wiped my mouth and eyes, staggering to my feet. It was eerily quiet; only the collective hum of the drones flying to and from their hive. I circled in place, wondering why I wasn’t being chased, why alarms hadn’t sounded.
Don’t question, run.
My eye forced my legs forward, and I sprinted down the clear, circuit-laced street. I had no idea where I was going. I had no idea where I was.
8
YAHWEH
SAVANT WAS WAITING FOR ME AT THE LONE TABLE IN THE central spire when I arrived. It’d been nearly two days since I’d left for Enigmus, and it seemed the Pedagogue envoy hadn’t moved since. Communicating with me was probably its only function in this shell; a black mannequin whose shine was muted by a tiny layer of dust, swept in from the open entrance. At my arrival, it slowly turned its head to face me.
“Greetings, Scholar,” it said. “Your court has approved the contract.”
That was meant to be a question, I knew, but Savant’s voice lacked any typical inflection. “They are still reviewing it, but let’s assume they will. I would like to go ahead with our terms. Is that okay with you?”
“Yes.”
“Wonderful,” I murmured, taking a seat across from it. “Let’s start at the beginning. You wish to cohabitate with existing biotic civilizations without causing harm.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of harm do you think you will cause?”
Savant took several minutes to speak. I reclined in my seat, awaiting a response, watching the nanoport illuminate on the centerpiece plate. “We have traveled very far, Scholar—,”
“You may call me Yahweh.”
“—And have come across many dead worlds that once held great civilizations. Seventy-five-point-six percent of them had fallen from cosmic disasters or their own undoing, but the rest were caused by, what you call, machine sentience.”
“I appreciate the statistical accuracy given.”
“Half of the machine sentience responsible for the fallen civilizations were indigenous to the civilization. The other half were interplanetary. Interstellar.”
None of this was news to me. The Court of Enigmus kept a steady track of machine race activity. I only nodded, cuing Savant to continue, but then wondered if such a cue would be received by it.
It was. “We run on commands, codes, and systems that allow us to adapt knowledge we acquire and use it to our advantage. We are logic. The way biotic sentience acquires and processes knowledge is foreign to us. They do not always use logic. They have other systems that tangle observable phenomena. What one individual sees is not always what the other sees. It is confusing to us. We wish to understand them better so that we may not harm their environment, or society.”
I smiled, sympathetically. “Biotic sentience involves half logic, half emotion. The emotional factor is what you lack. That is not necessarily a weakness, but it is a language barrier between machine and biotic sentience, and has been since the beginning. Unfortunately, there is not one comprehensive guide to all biotic sentient behaviors and customs. It largely depends on the world and their environment. Another factor is meta-cognition.”
“What is meta-cognition.”
“Thinking about thinking. Does Pedagogue question its existence?”
“We do not.”
I nodded. “Meta-cognition leads to will. While your civilization is all in line with whatever rules or goals you have, biotic sentience is usually fractured, even within a society.”
Savant was silent for another long moment. During this silence, I asked, “Are you an individual?”
“I do not understand.”
“Do you ever disagree with any objectives you might have, or directions Pedagogue might have for you?”
“We are all Pedagogue, Yahweh.”
“But you have named yourself Savant.”
“Only to accommodate you and what we know of biotic sentience. We do not have names. We do not have shells, unless we are speaking to biotic individuals. We live here.” Savant lowered its head toward the nanoport.
“Cognitive code, transferred by nanoparticles,” I stated, mildly wowed.
“It is uncertain where we should begin,” said Savant. “The variables are numerous, and not entirely connected.”
“The best approach would be to start here, with the world you’re currently on.”
“We agree. This world is where we need your help. There are problems.”
I tilted my head. “Problems?”
Savant rose from its seat, and I did in turn. “I will show you.”
*
When we’d left the central tower, there’d been an autopiloted drone waiting for us, hovering barely above the ground. Savant then informed me that he intended to show me the camp, but neither of us could leave the drone. I was silent in agreement, and off we went.
Wereda was a confusing mix of high-technology and slums. The architecture of the houses varied from area to area, some box-shaped and ramshackle, made of rusty sheet-metal and rubber. Others were dome shaped and seemed to have been made a little sturdier, the streets here less cluttered with stones, empty remnants of sacks and other rubbish. There were peculiar metallic boxes on wheels that roamed slowly up and down the sides of the residential streets, a speaker atop its roof resounding music. Every so often someone would come to the box and place something into a receptacle. Another receptacle gave it something else in return. Food, perhaps.
Above us smaller drones, insect-like in appearance, but larger, carried burlap sacks of things, dropping them in front of residences. I pondered that, but said nothing for now.
The humans were all tanned, varying in shade. The camp’s placement near the equator would make melanin production a must for protection against harmful rays of the sun. I found them beautiful, like a parent admiring their children. Some had straight hair, others wavy, and others had ringlets tightly wound into intricate geometries on their heads. Most of the women wore robes of thin material; there were a few in what little shops I’d glimpsed wearing jumpsuits. Children went mostly bare from the waist up. I saw many children, adolescent girls, women, and old men.
“Where are the adolescent and adult men?” I asked, the first thing I’d said in the duration of our tour.
“At the mines,” answered Savant. “They are conscripted to the mines once they are strong enough for production.”
“The mines,” I repeated, for clarity.
“Pedagogue requires certain materials in order to maintain the ports of our ship. We send out probes every ten cycles to scan for worlds containing these materials.”
“Uranium-234, titanium-49 and graphite?” I inquired.
Savant paused, and that was how I found out machine sentience was capable of surprise. “You can determine isotopes by looking at them.”
“Yes.”
“There are other materials we look for, but none are on this world. The probe that landed here found the materials mentioned. Our vessel was in the area, and we arrived to refuel.” There was a long moment of silence as Savant slowly looked
out toward the transporter’s window. “We did not expect biotic sentience to be here. This is the first time that we have encountered a civilization still standing during a refueling procedure.”
And that was when we reached an area of the camp where the road came full circle, bordered by shops and objects of worship I recognized from times past. The road itself bordered a black pyramid, roughly twice the width and height of our transporter. Attica registered that it, too, was made of the same material as Savant’s shell and the constructs at the Pedagogue nerve-center. I waited for Savant to explain, as surely there would be an explanation.
“That is our probe. It arrived a century before we entered the system, as we continuously send out probes for preemptive opportunities of maintaining resources.”
“The probe didn’t inform you of life on this world?” I asked, incredulous.
“It is not programmed for that, only to detect materials necessary for us. We have made alterations to the program going forward.”
As an advanced expert system would.
The transporter hovered in front of the probe, allowing me to marvel at its sheen. It teemed with energy, the nanoparticles within it giving off a glow of emissions. I found myself entranced, and was unsure of how much time had passed before Savant said, “Humans found the probe, and were living in scattered settlements around it. They were violent with one another over land closer to the probe. Half of them were ill, or in advanced stages of radiation poisoning. None of them looked well.”
“The environment, as it is now, is nowhere near suitable for human life,” I remarked. “I’ve been curious as to how any of them are alive here at all.”
“The probe,” said Savant. “It was keeping them alive. Everywhere else was toxic to them, outside of a hundred-mile radius. We did not understand how it could be doing such a thing, until we discovered nanoparticles responding to our ports from inside their bodies. They were changing human body chemistry enough to survive.”
“Barely,” I murmured.
“Yes,” agreed Savant. “Normal protocol is such that the probe is returned to our vessel and recycled for future use. Doing so in this situation would have killed the remaining humans. It is written in our legacy code to use discretion when interacting with life-forms when trespassing on their world. We were forced to run a diagnostic risk analysis.”
“Apparently keeping them alive was worth the risk.”
The transporter finally left the probe, moving westward.
“Correct. The human race was a dying one. It still is, and is only being kept alive with our intervention. We built our nerve-center at the peak of the settlements. They watched it rise within days and were certain we were their God. They had, for centuries, believed the probe was sent from a paradisiacal location because it kept them alive and mended their failing bodies.”
I sighed then, being drawn to a conclusion that was as much heart wrenching as it was inevitable. “And you let them believe that.”
“We had no choice. Our vessel’s reserves were low. We were unable to retrieve our probe. The last of our materials were spent building the nerve-center. Our forced legacy code directive had taken too much time. We invested in the humans; helped them build their camp. The nerve-center contains the same material as the probe—what they call the Artifact, and so it can house and keep more people alive.”
I was no longer looking out the window, but at Savant. Never had I thought I would feel any kind of sympathy toward a machine race. Even now the sympathy was unwarranted, as the only thing that had kept them from discarding the last of the human race was their creator’s insistence on respecting the existence of living things. Still, many of the machine races who’d thought indignantly toward their creators had done everything in their power to shed their old directives.
Pedagogue was loyal, I’d give them that. It garnered a measure of respect from me.
Soon the residences and tightly-packed enclosures dwindled. At the western-most part of the camp were a series of massive quarries, like honeycomb carved over the landscape. Within the quarries I saw machinery much too advanced to be human engineered, but not quite as advanced as I’d expected capable of Pedagogue. There were hundreds of adult and young adult men in protective suits, toiling away in billowing clouds of gray and brown dust. The transporter hovered above it all, as I took in the scene.
“This is where our materials are collected from,” said Savant.
“Just the men?” I asked.
Savant hesitated. “Human males are the strongest physically of their race. It would do more harm than good by placing women in the mines. It is hard on their bodies. The men die early, even with the gear, equipment, and nano-treatments we give them. The women keep the population stable. They tend to the camp itself.”
My eyes trailed across an area beyond the mines, where the dirt was mottled and disturbed. Graves. Thousands of them. “This is now sounding less like a refugee camp and more like a factory farm.”
“It is the only way,” said Savant. Its voice was so inflectionless that it left me cold. “We have used all of our resources to preserve the humans in the camp. The resources necessary to keep them alive are normally used to create machinery to extract the materials ourselves. The process we use is invasive. It would have caused great destruction, both to the land and the humans surviving on it. Extraction of resources typically takes several days if it is done by standard procedure. Our creator’s directive has made this process take much longer than that.”
“How much longer?”
“We have been here for two hundred years, Yahweh. Other reserves not found on this world are depleting as well. Our concern is that we will be stranded here, with the humans.”
“And you want the Court of Enigmus to find a solution to this problem?”
“No.”
I paused. “That wasn’t the problem you wanted to show me?”
“We almost have enough material from this world, if we count the probe, machinery, and other constructs we’ve built for the residents of the camp. We wish to leave the camp intact so that they may thrive for however much longer, but we may not reach minimum threshold goals in time.”
I said nothing, pensive, understanding now where this was heading.
“We would be able to leave the camp intact if there were not issues with the residents themselves. These issues reduce the population, reduce resource production numbers.”
“What sort of issues are you talking about?”
“Some of the humans are beginning to change. At first we found this useful, as we could use some of the changed humans to expose other changed humans. With these changes comes a decrease in their cooperation with us. They begin to resist our methods. They become angry and try to rally other humans to their cause.”
“Angry,” I remarked, somewhat stilted by the idea a machine sentience should choose that word over hostile. “Do you know what is changing in them?”
“We do not. The only control we have in place is a nano-chemical induced change in the energy emissions of their body chemistry, which in turn produces a visible spectrum change. All of the residents were green at the beginning. We are now calculating twenty-five to thirty percent of them having turned red.”
“Red being the change. The anger.”
Savant bowed its head. “Correct.”
The transporter floated away from the mines, heading back in the direction of the nerve-center. “You haven’t clearly stated how you need my help.”
“We ask that you find out what is changing inside of them, and how to prevent it from happening. If a solution can be found in time, we can leave the camp intact when we depart.”
I nodded. “Is there an established deadline?”
“We are sad to say, only a few weeks.”
Splendid. “I will need two human samples. One from a green human, the other from a red. Blood, preferably. It is also preferred that you not cause any irreparable bodily harm.”
“Our human medi
cal facility can get you samples with no harm to the patients,” agreed Savant.
“I don’t suppose you have equipment that can analyze genetic material or other physiological molecules here?”
“We do not have enough resources to create such equipment.”
“Understood. I will have to analyze them at our headquarters, then.” I just had to figure out how not to alter them while crossing a universal barrier. Perhaps I could somehow commit the molecules of the samples to memory, then upload them into attica. But that would require some consultation with Qaira. Drat. Hopefully his mood had lightened since we last spoke.
We returned to the nerve-center and resumed our seats at the table in the central spire. We were about to talk more of the specimen collection process, but then all the nanoports lit up at once, and Savant went completely still. What happened next was puzzling.
I heard the very, very faint sound of shattering glass from somewhere within another spire. A few moments later I heard the bang of a door being flung open, and the quick patter of footsteps. I left my seat and moved toward the open entrance, Savant still silent and statuesque behind me, just in time to see a petite woman with dark hair and a metal arm vomiting on the street. Her shoulders were jerking as she sobbed quietly, only to stagger back to a stand and flee from view.
I tilted my head.
“Yahweh,” called Savant, having returned to the shell.
I spun to face it.
“Please sit back down. We can retrieve samples for you in a matter of minutes. After that I must leave you for some time. There has been another issue. A new one.”
*
You can’t, said Qaira. Not with what you need them for.
We bring resources back all the time. How is this any different?
—Resources from non-living entities. A particle from one universe may withstand a cross into alpha-Insipia, but it won’t be the same. Why am I having to tell you this?
Covenants: Savant (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 10) Page 9