by Alex Oliver
“You've all forgotten,” Morwen whispered, as they let themselves be lead towards a radial elevator, “that Principality already docked at Seraph base when they let Keene and Autumn off. Which means that Seraph base is infected.”
Lali thought of little Autumn the first time she'd fed her; the warm weight and solid feel of her, a smell like malted milk, and the way she'd smiled when Lali booped her on the end of her nose. It gave her an ache the size of this station to think of the poor kid getting killed now, after so much work and trouble, and she didn't even want to know what the captain would do when she found out.
“They'll need to quarantine themselves to stop the whole fleet catching it,” she realized, only then stumbling on what was probably the greater concern. Kingdom ships called at Seraph base all the time to take on fuel and armaments. It supplied half the fleet.
She felt her imagination wake up to the threat late, and it was all the more horrifying for the wait. Because with half the fleet infected and each of those ships going on to call at another way station, another world, that stuff would spread throughout the galaxy like wildfire. They wouldn't have the several thousand years she'd been banking on for it to reach other systems by galactic drift. They'd be lucky to have a decade.
“You get it now,” Morwen nodded, watching her face. “But it gets worse.”
“How?!”
Morwen smiled. “The Principality coupled on here to deliver us. Which means that stuff is already on board this station too. As we don't move and can't be used to help the spread, it's got no reason to restrain itself for us. We'll probably be destroyed first.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Nori and his nodes
Nakano Nori gazed up at the rings of Cygnus 5 and despaired of his life. Luminous against the night sky, the rings shone four or five different shades of aquamarine, with a middle stripe of champagne yellow. When the sun was behind the planet, the rings still lit up the sky, looking brighter and more solid than they did in the day, out-dazzling all but the brightest stars.
Around him, on the flat land between the city's cave entrance and the enormous lake, the survivors of the penal colony and the survivors of the prison ship Froward were gathered around camp fires, sharing the food he and Mboge had brought back and laughing in the face of destruction. Perhaps their isolated meat-space brains were too small to process the full scope of the disaster that was the pontoth. Maybe they'd just decided there was nothing they could do, so they might as well enjoy their own full stomachs and their own safety while they could still find pleasure in both.
He hadn't ever intended to come back here. He'd had such plans, and all of them involved being off this rock, away from these people. None of them had involved threats to the human race and all their technology, and now--
Felix Mboge caught his eye. Felix was deep in conversation with Captain Campos, who had left Xan Hu's ship looking dangerously thoughtful. Nori wasn't as familiar with the woman as Felix was, but he hadn't missed that she had been dropped into the network of their world with nothing and immediately become its central processor. When she looked thoughtful, therefore, it meant changes were coming. Felix seemed to have faith they would be good changes, but experience had not proved him right so far. At least under the old governor they had only had to face starvation, not the kind of massive guilt that came with unintentional genocide.
And yet he still warmed all over when Felix looked up, saw him watching and smiled. Felix – Felix was why he was still here. Because he'd never before had someone who thought of him as a creation complete in itself, as a wonderful thing. He'd never had someone willing to die for him before. There had been something about lying in the man's arms that had made him feel as though he had been connected again. As though complex messages had been exchanged by their skin and muscles and bones that neither of them had been privy to. Even now, he wanted to walk over there and fit himself into Felix's side, to soak up the heat of his body as though the chemical information exchange could fill the hole in Nori's head where his creche-mates had once been.
Maybe they could exchange information, because without being told he was wanted, Felix got up and walked over to Nori, reaching out for him. Nori folded himself into Felix's strong arms and pushed his face into Felix's neck, breathing in the pheromones. There was something in this – there was a connection being made, a port opening between them. He just wished it wasn't all on this wordless, animal, instinctive level.
“I wish I could see what you were thinking,” he said, rather than waste either of their time on redundancies like 'hello'.
“It's mostly panic,” Felix joked. Nori thought it was a joke, at least; Felix was smiling. “But it’s laced with gratefulness that you chose to come back with me. And also a bit of awe at how beautiful you look in this light. If this is the end of all things, and you're here with me, I have a lot to be thankful for.”
“I suppose you want sex,” Nori said, surprising himself. His creche had been mind linked in infancy and puberty had been chemically suppressed because it interfered with the elasticity of the brain and introduced drives that were not profitable to the corporations that had owned them. When he'd been decoupled and shipped off to this prison colony, he'd been too busy trying to reassemble a functioning mental solipsism to think about such inessentials. But he'd heard that some people regarded sex as a drive, almost a need, and now that he had a boyfriend, it would doubtlessly impose itself on him.
Felix laughed, ducking his head with embarrassment, while Nori considered whether sex might not also create a feeling of chemical connectedness that would make it worth the various indignities involved.
“I suppose if you wanted it very much, I could try,” Felix muttered, his head still down and his face turned away. “I was lucky enough to be created naturally virtuous, in the sense that I've never really been tempted toward any kind of fornication myself. But if you…?”
Fornication! An ugly word for a peculiar thing. It was Nori's turn to laugh, embarrassed himself for having suggested it. He tightened his arms around Felix and squeezed him, relishing the little grunt he got as he pushed the air from Felix's lungs. Everything about Felix was perfect. He had no idea why he hadn't spotted it earlier. “To be honest it seems like a waste of time, but I thought maybe you…?”
“No no. Let's not bother at all.” Felix's dark eyes reflected the rings in a dazzle of gold, or maybe it was just the way he was looking at Nori as if he was the answer to an impossible query. “How wonderful you are. But I sadly did not come over here just to enjoy your company. Did you get the message that Captain Campos wanted you to take over Bryant's research on the pontoth? Have you had time to find out if there's anything you can do?”
Nori had indeed got that message earlier in the afternoon. It had filled him, at first, with a gleeful sense of vindication. Nori had been the smartest person in the colony before Bryant turned up. He was the one who'd figured out the Lice's programming language and got the launcher functioning again. He had been going to do great things before Bryant waltzed in and took over. Bryant had apparently told Campos that Nori couldn't be trusted. And now Bryant had fucked up, monumentally, and it was up to Nori to fix it. He wouldn't try to deny he was pleased about that.
“Come with me,” he grabbed Felix's hand and tugged him away from the fires, back up to the city. “I'll show you what I'm up against.”
Outside, in the dark, surrounded by people, he'd felt isolated and irrelevant, but walking with Felix, hand in hand, down the long spiral beneath which the city was laid out like a circuit board, he felt a surge of … something. Possessiveness, maybe, because look at this place, where the channels of thinking stone ran through every part of their architecture as though the whole city itself was a computer. But it was, of course. The whole world was.
“I wonder why they built huts of twigs,” Felix mused, as they came low enough to reach the buildings of woven withies with their luminous flowers. “If they were so advanced that they could
turn back their own evolution, build the imps and the launchers, why did they want to live in houses without roofs? Why aren't there, I don't know, kitchens? Pottery? Plates?”
“I can make a guess,” Nori turned in to Bryant's laboratory and folded back the panels of the walls to allow light inside. It wasn't quite enough, so he also fired up one of the camping lanterns they had brought from the first colony. “The Lice had very strong legs – lots of very strong legs – and pincers. I think they kept their houses roofless so they could climb out over the walls and go up into the netting.” He gestured at the many hanging vines that criss-crossed the cavern in every direction, starring the arch of the roof with glowing blossoms.
“The floor was for interfacing with their networked computers as the increasing complexity of its connections slowly turned it into a planetary intelligence. They climbed up there for socializing and,” he shrugged, “meat-space stuff. The same stuff humans do outside. I think they might have been nocturnal – they seem to have only come out of the city at night.”
Bryant had left the room scattered with half-finished projects. Nori bent to pick up a handful of vials from the floor and peer at the tiny cramped writing. Nope. He couldn't read these labels either. Sighing, he packed them carefully into the rapidly filling ‘Investigate later if you're still alive’ box and stirred the mess of bark paper on the operating table in the center of the room, hoping something vital might accidentally fall out. “And they were herbivores. They ate most of the plants outside – just grazed them straight off the ground. Didn't need kitchens or plates. Maybe that's why they had so much time on their hands to think.”
“What did you bring me here to look at?” Felix asked, seeming torn between fascination and the realization that time was short and he really ought to be somewhere else right now.
“Just this.” Nori gestured toward the room with its clutter; indecipherable squiggles had been scrawled on cracking bark paper. Pried up bricks of extra computing power lay jerry-rigged with cables and ten-year old monitors torn from the out-of-date hospital at the colony. Vials of unknown nano were littered across the floor or sitting in wicker baskets unlabeled. “You think a man who works like this keeps clearly organized and accessible records? So far all my progress has consisted of clearing enough floor to walk on. I've never seen anything so slovenly.”
Felix grinned, a teasing light in his eyes. “To be fair, Bryant was being rewritten himself while this was going on. And trying to come up with quick fixes to war and famine. He probably wasn't at his organizational best. But I hear he's still very much alive in there. Why don't you go and ask him to help?”
Pfft. As if. No, this was Nori's operation now, as it should have been from the start. He wasn't going to cock everything up and he didn't need help from a man who had. On the other hand…
This idea came to him as though a glass cage hemming him in had cracked and let through a breath of clean air. On the other hand, Nori wasn't a prisoner here anymore. Campos wasn't going to stop him from calling for help from the people he did trust. She had encouraged it, in fact. “Any resources you need,” she had said. “Anything I can do. It's yours.”
Fingers trembling, Nori fired up Bryant's computer and found the one file he did recognize, because Bryant had copied it everywhere – a full analysis of the composition of the pontoth. Then he hugged Felix tight again for luck, rubbing his nose against the man's neck, reminding himself of one connection while he renewed another. “Thank you.”
“I'd better go do many of the thousands of things that still have to be done, with half of us in the hospital,” Felix murmured, cheek pressed to the top of Nori's head. “But... you're welcome. I guess. Come to me again when you're ready to sleep? That was nice, I thought. Sleeping together. We could keep it up, if you want?”
“I'd like that,” Nori realized, finding himself suddenly with a more than theoretical wish for the world not to end. He really had felt knitted back together by having slept pressed to Felix, like something inside that had grown famished when he was alone had been eating butter and licking its lips after. Satisfied, that was the word.
He waved Felix out of the building and closed the door behind him. Would his creche-mates recognize him by his face instead of by his mind? Would he recognize them? What if, in being severed for so long, he had changed? What if he had fallen out of harmony and he wasn't able to follow them anymore?
Before he worked himself into a worse state of terror he activated the pinholenet and connected to the server that housed his old creche.
Sky picked up. He didn't recognize the face, pallid as it was, with the eyes that darted through invisible screens of text before briefly fixing on him. But he knew her serial number--processor YT898008356--which displayed in the corner of his screen. “Hey,” he managed to get out before his eyes filled with water and his throat closed. “It's-- it's me. NN4340850-93-9.”
Her face did a… thing. It was probably a combination of shock and delight and the opening of a comm channel to everyone else, and the query to the grid to see if he could possibly be speaking the truth. Then the disappointment when she tried to reach him and couldn't connect.
He'd been doing the same thing himself, internally. It hurt, hurt to know he was still unplugged, that he would never go home. But it was painfully good to see her again, to know she still existed. He had so much to ask – whether any of the others had been taken in the Kingdom raid. Where they were, if so. How much she was charging per second, because the computing power of human wetware didn't come cheap. But in the time it took him to wonder these things, she had already chased down every news report about him, synthesized it and come up with a projection of what he was calling about.
“You want help destroying the pontoth? I've...” a flicker. “Urbanfox's got you a couple of sponsorship deals to finance the research. Send us what you've got and we'll take it from there.”
“How... How is--” [everyone].
“All remaining units have adjusted to our new map.” She frowned, looking up to the left where the data transfer must be showing. Nori was sending across the information Bryant had gleaned about the chemical composition of the pontoth, the analysis of how it interacted with itself and the central well of power that was the planet. It was a hell of a file, large even Nori's standards.
“Though it was…” a pause where she seemed to be consulting an internal thesaurus, or perhaps asking the others for a word the consensus could agree on. “Detrimental to our functioning to be without you and the others at first. We felt… like a fabric with rips in it. We thought we would unravel.”
He hadn't even realized she was so fucking homely. Not much of a chin, or a nose, her hair a kind of dust color and her eyelashes the grimy brown-gray of long term spiders' webs. Inside, where it counted, she was a feeling of clarity, a boost of power and insight, like skimming your glider of thought out into a wide warm sky and feeling the thermals lift you, higher than you could ever have risen alone. He didn't want to be looking at her face, damn it, in this stupid existence where the only thoughts he could hear were his own.
“How are--” [the others who were arrested and severed with me?]
Even without being connected to her, the speed of her processing meant she could predict his sentences before he could actually say them. He remembered being on the other side of that, being infuriated by how slow the users seemed. Now for the first time he appreciated that the constant interruptions were no fun either.
“Racetrack killed himself two days after capture. Recursion had a mental breakdown and ended up in psychiatric care rather than prison. She gets trapped in her analysis spirals – can't find a way out. You remember Throwthedice used to do that for her.”
“What was her--” [outside name], Nori was going to say. [Maybe I can bring her here and I can do it for her. Even two minds would be better than one.]
“Obsessive compulsive disorder.”
It felt like the ground had shaken under him, like the roots
of the mountains had shuddered. “What?”
Sky actually took her attention from her implanted monitors and looked him straight in the face, frowning. “Her diagnosis. You were going to ask what kind of a mental breakdown. She was diagnosed with debilitating OCD.”
Nori felt the spit in his own mouth like he was drowning in it. He wanted to break something, or better still steal a spaceship and go straight back home, plug back in, so there would never ever be the possibility of a misunderstanding between them again. The whole creche had heard what he'd said, had analyzed it and fed back their answer to Sky. The people who understood him best in the universe, the people who were him, didn't know what he had been thinking. It wasn't their fault, but he still felt betrayed.
Just to fucking show them, he decided not to tell them their error. He would cling on to it instead, reminding himself that he wasn't there now. He was here. He couldn't go back to them, and if Felix couldn't be part of his creche now, he didn't even want to.
“If she could somehow be brought here, I could help her,” he said instead. “Providing there's a future for any of us.”
Sky’s focus was already scattered again. “Initial plans suggest developing an antigen to the pontoth. Something which spreads in the same way but has no other purpose but to attack the pontoth and disable it. Projections are good. We will begin assembling a first test immediately and get back to you when we have firmer results. Urbanfox calculates exceptionally high dividends from patenting and licensing the results.”
Somehow Felix's ridiculous idealism must have transferred itself into Nori's head via the network of speech and sympathy, because the possibility of making a profit from the ability to defend your planet from destruction had not occurred to him. And now that it had, he felt a little queasy about it. “Ergh, it's the future of the human race. You've got to--”
