by Alex Oliver
“I think they will,” Felix chewed on the inside of his cheek to keep back tears. “But whether it's worth it or not, I don't know. I miss him so much.”
Aurora laughed and sniffed simultaneously, a sob in a brave disguise. Her free hand groped out and closed on his, squeezing reassuringly. “Yeah,” she agreed. “Me too.”
He didn't tell her that at least she had her daughter. At least she would enjoy watching all the matches, all the new families forming. At least she'd feel somehow affirmed by it all in a way he wished he could too, but didn't. He wasn't jerk enough to say it. But it drove him to hand his few remaining duties off to Ademola and go back down to the core of the world, where Nori slept on the threshold of the room that should have been his.
It was always so quiet between the golden doors. All the thinking going on around him made no sound, and the rush of Felix's own heartbeat in his ears drowned out the faint hiss of Nori's breath. He steeled himself and sat down next to Nori's nest of wrappings anyway, putting a hand on the first uncovered inch of skin he could find. It was Nori's throat, where his pulse rocked against Felix's fingers like the first real thing he'd sensed today. “Are you there?” he whispered, half to the body and half to the air, the dust around him. “Nori, are you there? I need to talk.”
Nori's pontoth body whipped itself together from the dust. When it was done, Felix had to choke back a painful shout, as shock, joy and fascination warred in him. Nori had refined his avatar to the point where Felix couldn't tell it from the real thing. Instinctively, he leaned away from the wired in body and into the avatar's open arms. It was warm, even, and the texture of the skin was perfect, and the sensation of being held by it was as comforting as it had been to wake in Nori's arms and know that nothing was expected of him.
“I want to be with you,” he said, before he'd had a chance to think it through. “I don't want to be left out here alone. Nori. Let me in.”
Delight crept over Nori's face like a sunrise. “I want you in here with me,” he said, squeezing Felix's shoulders eagerly. “I want that too. And it's so… You'll love it, Felix. It's so big. There's so much to see and explore and understand. I'm trying to persuade the Preserver that intelligence can be used to solve problems – that with its help we can have no impact, or even a beneficial impact on this world. And I think. I think it wants to live. You know? It doesn't want to turn itself off, not really. If I could show it how amazing it is to love…” he trailed off, his eyes sparkling. “I think it would be perfect. But...”
“But?” Felix's mood had already lifted. Not only did he want to be with Nori, but this sounded much better than continuing to grub for food on a frontier planet with everyone trying to kill them and wailing babies making it impossible to sleep at night. Yes, he did want this. He really did.
“There isn't a place for another Controller,” Nori leaned Felix back against his shoulder. It didn't feel like stone at all, warm and pliable as the fingers that brushed over his regrowing curls. “If you wanted in properly, I'd have to convert you, with the pontoth, so that you'd have a body like this one – immortal, untouchable. Even if the Preserver decided to kill all humans, you'd still survive, here with me.”
Immortality he wasn't so sure about, but Nori couldn't mean that literally. Eventually Cygnus would blow up, everything on it would die then. With rest promised at some point in the future, he could face a long life.
He felt simultaneously as though he was rushing into this and as though he had wanted it ever since they had slept together in that capsule hotel on Snow City, when all his rigid boundaries had begun to dissolve. He wanted to have the chance taken away, or to commit to it right now. Whichever, as long as he didn't have to continue in this half-life of indecision any longer.
“Do you really think I'd make a difference, if I joined you – you and Bryant and It? I have my duty to protect all these people – but could I do it better if I was with you?”
Nori looked like he was prepared to agree with anything Felix said if it helped him to decide to join the collective. But that was a persuasive argument in itself. “I think it might swing everything our way.”
“It'll be like a kind of death?” he asked, bracing himself.
“No,” Nori tilted his head so he could rest his stone cheek on Felix's hair. “It's like waking up and finding you're superhuman. I promise you won't ever want to leave.”
“But if I did?”
“Then I'd make you a new body just like your old one. Or you could take mine. I won't be needing it again.”
Felix almost reached out to Nori's discarded body in its cocoon of tubes, a pang going through him at the thought that it had been so decisively rejected. He didn't complete the motion, because that wasn't Nori anymore, was it? “You wouldn't come back too, if I asked it?”
Nori shook his head. “I'm right where I belong, Felix. I'm what I always dreamed I could be. I don't think you'd ask me to give that up. Not if you were here with me.”
It came down to the wire. A wave of terror overwhelmed him for an instant. How could he still exist if the pontoth took him apart? He'd be dead, wouldn't he? What lived on? Would it really be him? Clearing his mind, he sent up an arrow prayer of supplication and desperation. Stop me. Stop me if this not the right thing to do. If this is not your will, stop me.
The terror ebbed.
“Then go ahead,” he said. “Let me join you. I'm ready.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
Aurora enters the machine
“Felix?” Aurora made her way down to the Destroyer's chamber, her neck prickling with eerieness as lights swam along the wall accompanying her. It knew she was here – it was following her with its mind and what? Honoring her by lighting her way? That was new.
She shouldn't have let Felix out of her sight, after that tearful confession. God knew, she could sympathize with the crushing despair of being responsible for the whole colony while the person you loved was being changed into something you couldn't follow. He'd let her get away from it and find her feet again. She should have done better for him in return.
What she thought was a corpse in the antechamber had her running in there, heart athunder. She almost stepped in a fresh pile of dust on the way, had to pick her feet up and hurdle over it when she saw the uniform mixed in with it. Her blind rush came to a halt against the door jamb of the inner chamber, where a quick and guilty glance showed Bryant still entombed and pierced her with continuing misery and resentment. This was why she stayed away when she could.
When her breathing had steadied, she peeled herself away from the wall and went to investigate the antechamber's new mounds. One, like the victim of a giant spider, was wrapped in a similar wire and tube shroud to Bryant's. She recognized him by his socks, which had Snow City, free-est of free ports embroidered around the top. Nakano Nori, wired in just as Felix had said.
But the other pile? She edged closer to it as though it would sting her, and lifted the jacket out of it with gritty fingers. There was the small hole in the fabric at the shoulder where Felix's hand had shaken when he cut off the Froward's patch and rank badge. A white gleam among the dull green dust was a head-set of sensors, leading via a brick computer to a gold plated jack. She sat back on her heels with a choke of grieved laughter. How like Felix to have got himself consumed while somehow managing to leave all his resources to the colony.
“You idiot,” she bared her teeth at his remains. “Yeah, yeah. The clothes will be useful. Whatever it is you've got in your pockets will be useful. But I don't want any of it more than I want you. What did you do?”
The dirt stirred itself under her hands in a way that made her leap backward, rubbing it frantically off her skin. As she was pressed to the wall it formed itself into another of the Thing's God-damned avatars, like the half-baked mockery of Bryant it had thrown out to convince her he wasn't interested in her anymore.
“Captain,” it said, and the voice began as something synthesized, but over the course of one word refined i
tself until it was recognizably Felix. “Aurora. It's me.”
An expression of astonishment and pleasure passed across its face, and the color changed, restoring its skin to the rich dark brown that Felix had been before the photosynthesis gene-enhancements. It looked down at its brown hands, disappearing into a replica of a Snow City jumpsuit, and grinned with a joy she didn't think she'd ever seen on the man's face. “It really is me. Wow! This is--”
It looked up. He looked up, radiating a pleasure almost smug in its intensity, but dialed it back at whatever look it found in her eye. “Aurora. You probably think I killed myself, but I-- It's not like that at all. I feel I can do more here. I can protect you and the others better from here. And I… I couldn't do what you can do. I lived without Nori all my life, but once I found him, I didn't want to do that again. I hope you understand. I didn't die. This is a better life for me.”
Aurora wanted to say, “You scarcely know the man. You've been together a couple of months, and now this?” But she didn't. How long had it taken before Bryant was as necessary to her as air and food? Couple of weeks, if that.
“I don't even know if that's you talking,” she said instead. “Maybe it's just figured out how to do a better job of looking like one of us.”
“It doesn't actually understand how to lie,” he said, frowning down at his clothes until they transformed themselves into a pair of black slacks, and a woven green jumper of a style similar to the garments the fabric task force had begun to produce. “That's a human trait. It also doesn't see why it would bother. I like the creature, actually. It's just doing its best.”
How many people had died so far because of this thing? Thousands. If you counted the InfiniTech disaster, it was millions. If you counted the destruction of the entire Louse society, and whatever other intelligent life it had wiped out since, you reached numbers she didn't have names for.
“I don't think Felix would like a mass murderer.”
He shook his head, exasperated. “It was doing what it thought was best. What it thought it had to do to fulfill its purpose. Bryant's been telling it that intelligence is a good thing – that we can help it look after the galaxy properly. It doesn't have to kill us all and then switch itself off. Nori's been telling it about how much better it feels when you're not alone, and he brought me on board partly so I could tell it what it was like to have people to protect.” He ran hands he didn't need through his replica hair, as though that could possibly still comfort him. Maybe it did.
“The truth is, we were all kind of murderers at one point, when you think about it. We grew out of it. This planet's AI is young. It can learn too.”
The words gave her a flash of memory – Bryant throwing up after he'd watched her kill the first of the convicts so she could take their swoops. She'd been amazed that a murderer could have such a weak stomach, and then convinced that maybe he wasn't a murderer at all. It had taken her until now to realize that while Bryant wasn't a murderer, she was. She had spent her career conquering, killing, oppressing people whose beliefs differed from hers. She didn't get to be self-righteous about this. She didn't get to be unmerciful.
“I don't know,” she blew out her doubts on a gusty breath. “Convince me then. Tell me what's going on. Fucking report, okay?”
“I can do that,” he took the headset from her hand, and placed it over her hair, wiggling his fingers down to clear spaces for the sensors to attach. His skin felt human, warm, even though it was made of stone, and the gestures were precise, almost fussy, so very Felix it was all but impossible to believe it could be anyone else. Now she'd stopped talking, he'd gone back to wearing the satisfied look of someone for whom everything has turned out well.
“We all figure you need to experience it to really understand. And the Preserver wants to meet you. It noticed that you hold Bryant's leash. It knows you're significant.”
“I don't,” Aurora sneered at the thought that Bryant would capable of having a leash of any sort. The man did what he wanted at all times, and she valued that. “I don't think he even thinks about me anymore.”
“Why don't you try being inside his head,” Felix laughed. “And then tell me.”
It sounded scary, intimate. Maybe more intimate than sharing bodies. She was tempted to cry off, but why should Nori and Felix and this alien thing know Bryant in this way, and she should not?
“Okay, show me.”
“Kneel down here next to Nori.” She had already almost forgotten that this wasn't Felix's real body. It didn't startle her to be taken gently by the elbow and guided to the side of Nori's cocoon. As she folded herself into a comfortable position beside it, a dozen wires retracted from around the throat, and the head turned away from her as if pushed. That was nasty, but she let Felix take the jack end of the wire and poise it over the socket at the back of Nori's neck. “You might want to close your eyes.”
He pushed it in, and a wall of sheer joy hit her like a hammer to the stomach. She was faintly aware of doubling up over it, because it was so strong, clenching in her guts and singing up her spine and setting her blood off into solar flares. Her sense of time was the first to go, and then she lost track of her body, only vaguely aware she had fallen over and was now lying next to Nori's shrouded form. It didn't matter, because everything was wonderful.
She might have stayed there for hours, just gulping up a positivity she hadn't felt in years while her mind tried to make sense of anything else. Probably would have done, if she hadn't previously had the experience of controlling Bryant's nanotech with her mind. In a way, that was all the pontoth was – a proliferation of nano with a mind of its own.
Despite being directly harnessed into Nori's head, it was the planet's mind she encountered first, nosing at her boundaries like a massive and curious dog. Its presence was crushing, but not, she could sense, from malice. Only from sheer power. If it did kill her. If it did kill all mankind, it would not be from hatred, but from principle, in the belief that it was protecting all existence from dangerous doctrine. And wow, she could really empathize with that.
“But you don't want to, right?” she thought at it. “You don't want to kill us anymore? Felix said something about how you'd have to switch yourself off if you did?”
I am an intelligence. It wasn't exactly words she heard, she felt the thought at a pre-verbal level, at a level at which she would also have felt an untruth, if Felix had been wrong about it being unwilling to lie. I am not an exception. If intelligence must be destroyed then I must be put to sleep, last of all, as I did after I had sent the predecessors into another galaxy. I will wipe out your people and return to sleep.
There was want in that, but it was the desire of someone with a burdened mind, yearning for a simple solution. It had been trying to persuade Nori around to its point of view, thinking he was an ally, but all Nori had done in return was to provide it with more examples of how in his past life as part of a think tank he had used intelligence to solve problems, to make things more perfect.
“There has to be a way for intelligence to be used to improve the galaxy, not to destroy it.” That was Nori's mind drifting past her like the touch of something quicksilver, conductive. Something that threw out ideas like fruit falling from the tree, and made everyone around them think faster and better.
“You know the people of the Amazon rain forest in Old Earth gardened it?” Aurora offered. This was her history from somewhere in her mongrel genes. “They increased the biodiversity, enriched the soil, developed better food plants and medicines, all of it without damaging the ecosystem at all. We could do that here, if you showed us how. People on other worlds could figure out how to fit with their own, particularly if we had someone like Bryant on the outside, to adapt the people to the world and not the other way around.”
Nori's mind had passed her by. When she concentrated she could feel him at a distance checking up on what the InfiniTech newcomers were doing in their ships. But she could now also feel Felix's mind, his personality, like a bubb
le of warm gold, sturdy and safe - and simply reassuring in its very essence. It stretched out a tendril towards Nori's presence and, where the two met, the entire landscape of their mental conversation became suffused with joy, admiration and peace. It felt complete, as though a broken thing had been made whole.
She couldn't have missed the yearning if she tried. I want that, the Preserver was saying, with everything but words. I don't know what it is, but I want it.
“It's called love.” The yearning was so familiar, it could have come out of her own heart. Despite herself, Aurora performed the mental gymnastics she thought of as smiling--close as she could come without a body--feeling unexpectedly protective of the alien machine. It wanted the way a child wanted, as though its desire must be satisfied or nothing would ever be worth anything ever again. It made her feel old and cynical, and that cynicism was an ice-cube in the sea of their mutual regret – something she could more or less cling to to keep her head above water.
It was good to think Felix hadn't been wrong to feel smug about his prospects. He loved and was loved so well that a world envied him. “Real, reciprocal love is something you can only feel for another intelligent being,” Aurora explained, all the more convincing when she knew it could feel her knowing this and could feel her speaking the truth. “Someone who isn't you, but whose survival and happiness is more important to you than your own. That's something you could probably have with us. If you didn't kill us all first.”
Sometimes he talks about love too, it said, puzzling over the term with an ache she felt hopeful about. Felix had been unexpectedly right again about whether it was possible to like the creature, once it had grown past the stage of casual violence.
“Who?” she asked, wondering how it could still hurt her chest and throat when, as far as she knew, they weren't in here with her. Maybe the power of her want was folding space, breaking the laws of physics, until all possible places in the universe were right here, aching to hear that he still remembered her. She hadn't forgotten him. “Who else talks about love?”
