Onliest

by J Daniel Batt

  The old iris unit popped off despite the bot’s wriggling under her fingers. Was it anxious? Did robots get nervous? She knew it was not in pain, but it did jostle more once the lens and iris were gone—discomfort probably from its primary sensor being dulled. Everything must be blurry, she thought. The new piece slid in easily.

  “Calm down,” she hushed, then held a bit tight as she grabbed the top part of its shell and popped it back into place. Once she felt the give and heard the expected click of the magnetic clips joining, she relaxed her hold, patted its head and said, “There you go.”

  With a nearly inaudible whirr, the eye-bot focused with the new iris. It closed and opened a few times. Then the eye-bot popped straight up off the workbench, whistled once, and then flew out of the garage door into the open air of the Disc.

  Blip sighed, “Wish my counterpart were that easy.”

  Syn allowed herself to relax and slid down to the ground, plopping her legs straight out. Fixing things had always calmed her. The anger and anxiety had melted away. The delicate work required so much focus—the random butterfly of thoughts just faded. “Sorry Blip. This must be frustrating you as much as it is me.”

  “I’m not frustrated. I’m confused. I just don’t understand how...” he clipped his sentence short and then after a pause said, “I don’t understand how it came to be. Where it came from.”

  Syn narrowed her eyes. That’s not what he was going to say.

  The minutes passed by in silence. The minutes built into an hour. Over and over, Blip floated in a slow arc around the other companion, scanning and rescanning, his casing glowing green as his various sensors did their job.

  Syn sat on the ground, feeling the exhaustion of the day. She yawned, surprising herself. “Oh, that’s not good.” She stood up and grabbed a scanstick from the table—an all-purpose scanner tool for bots that detected levels of various electrical activity inside, the status of their anti-grav generators, and other critical information. She walked over and began to move the stick across the bot with careful precision.

  “I think I’ve searched for most everything that thing will tell you,” Blip said.

  Syn smiled. “Ya, but at least it’ll talk to me. You’ve been doing your thing for a while now and haven’t told me a thing.”

  Blip paused and looked at her. “What’s the stick saying? Have you picked up a reading on its primary systems?”

  She glanced at the tool and was surprised to see no reading whatsoever. She thwacked it against the palm of her hand hoping to jostle it to life and then ran it back over the white surface. Grimacing, she said, “Nothing. I’m getting nothing.”

  “Ya. That’s why I haven’t given you any of my readings. I haven’t any. Nothing. Not a single thing. Even for the inert systems—the default ones—there should be a basic reading even if this thing was off. Antigrav generators never cycle entirely down. But nothing is registering. Either this thing has a casing that prevents any reading, or it has never been turned on before.”

  Syn ran the scanstick over it again. “That’s impossible.” She slapped it on the table once and glanced at its small screen. Nothing. She smacked it against her palm. “Oh, come on. That’s not possible.”

  Irritated, she hit the stick against the bot on the table, “Come on, you stup—”

  The companion bot’s case flashed red, casting a crimson glow on every surface of the garage.

  Both Syn and Blip leapt back. Blip’s own white case reflected the red, causing him to look as if he had been drenched in blood. The light flashed again, and then in a grating, alarmed tone, the companion bot bleeted out “J. One. Three. Zero. Two. Room ninety-nine. She’s in J1302-99. J1302.99.”

  Just as quickly as it had sparked to life, the red light dimmed, and the room was only illuminated by the sparse blue lights lining the edges.

  “What was that?” Syn shouted at Blip, her back against the workbench. She had snagged a wrench and was holding it with white knuckles in case the thing attacked.

  Blip was frozen, staring at the inert bot. He stammered, “I…I don’t…”

  This time, the wrench Syn threw hit him with a sharp clang, and he jostled back to focus.

  Syn pointed a finger at him, “Don’t say that. I’m sick of hearing you say that you don’t know. That’s garbage, and you know it.” She jabbed the finger at the lifeless bot, “That thing just rattled off some address. To a room. And said someone was there. Blip, is there someone else on this ship? Who was he talking about?”

  “I…” Blip started but paused as Syn wrapped her hand around another silver-colored wrench on the table next to her. Blip paused. “We’ll find out.”

  Through clenched teeth, Syn growled, “You’re absolutely right we will.”

  Blip turned and looked out at the darkening Disc. “It’s too late now. We’ll go in the morning. It’s too far away, and it’ll take a long time.”

  She searched her memory. J. What lift was Settlement J closest to? He was right. Her mind was tired. She couldn’t place the settlement. Couldn’t think of how to get there. It wasn’t close, she knew that. “Ugh,” she said, “You’re right.” She dropped the wrench, and the clang filled the garage. “First thing tomorrow.”

  She walked out into the night through the open garage door, nearly tripping over Eku, who had fallen asleep on the path out front. She dug her fingers into the cat’s fur and said, “Let’s go Eku. Bedtime.”

  The cat yawned then stood, and the two walked to her tree, fading into the darkness, leaving Blip alone with his mirror image lifeless on the table before him.

  3

  Journal Entry: First Memories

  The Unauthorized Journal of Syn

  Section 7

  Composed 2759

  My first memories were of the white porcelain room that I later discovered was called Integration Bay One. It was also called my crèche. Integration. I was the one being integrated. Blip and I have celebrated that day as my birthday. I’m sure that I technically had a birthday, but from what I can discover, the transition from fetus to child didn’t include a mother. Or a father. Just a Blip.

  That’s right. I was born in a machine, and I stayed in that machine for several years. The pod tinkered with me while I hibernated. I do remember dreaming, odd shapes, things with frightening eyes, and then words and smells and colors, all jumbled together. My brain was soaking up the constant feed of information that they sent me.

  And the definition of “they” isn’t easy to answer. While the former inhabitants of the ship, the ones whose bodies are now glistening in the moist dirt of the body farms, were intelligent, they weren’t the ones that created me. I thought, at first, they might have been. Perhaps those first few weeks, maybe months, of searching through the Disc was a search for my creators. Maybe I’d run across one of them that would see me and exclaim, “Syn! You’ve woken up! You’ve found us!” That was my hope. With each new house we entered, I replayed that scenario until it faded away.

  Blip helped me dig up the records. I was planned long before the ship was launched. I was the Eve—an engineered human that was just a bit stronger, smarter, and faster, and I was designed to be the first on Àpáàdì, the Earth-like planet formerly known as Kapteyn-b. I was supposed to be woken up, though, right before we made planetfall, not decades before. My designers were on Earth. I suspect I had a real mother, or at least, an egg-donor. But that egg and me were nothing alike. The videos explained how they went through each line of DNA and custom-tooled me. Entire sections of the nice TGAC code were pulled out and reinserted with others. Maybe some animal. Maybe something unseen before. I know I can see as well in the darkness as the big cats that now prowl. I know that I can hunt better than most anything I’ve encountered out there. I’m fast. I can do a kilometer in two minutes.

  For all that comprehensive planning before the ship left Earth, the morons on the ship screwed it up. The entire mission went to the sewers, and someone woke me up way too early. I’ll be an old wo
man when we hit Àpáàdì. If the idiots had at least left me alone, the ship would’ve woken me up right as I entered the elliptical plane of Kapteyn’s Star. If that had happened, all of the ship’s mission and plans would’ve worked out. No, there wouldn’t have been any of the actual ship inhabitants to make it, but at least one human would’ve stepped foot on the second Earth. Humanity would’ve made their home on two different planets. Not now. Idiots.

  A blinding light hung in the center of the integration room and it hurt to look at. My eyes hurt. My ears hurt. I woke up, slamming my head against the slowly opening glass. The shock caused me to puke. Yes, the miracle of birth—my first few moments—was me hurling the vilest green crap from my weak stomach onto the glass in front of me. I stumbled out into the ship, my first few steps, covered in my own green vomit, rubbing at my eyes and screaming because they burned. Every sound was horrible. My ears were working for the first time, and I just wanted to drown myself. I didn’t know that’s what I wanted. I just knew I wanted to plunge into something that would block out all of the sound, all of the madness, all of the absolutely insane sensations.

  Being born is tough. Don’t call someone a “baby” as an insult. Babies are tough as nails. Babies come out and manage to make the whole bloody, nasty affair look cute and adorable. They cry a little but then in moments are cooing against their moms. I didn’t get that luxury. There was no mom to grab me and hold me tight and say, I love you. It’s okay. Shhh. There. There.

  No, instead, I got the taste of my own puke and Captain Pote’s deep voice exclaiming, “Welcome to a new world. You are the hope of our entire endeavor. We are all anxious to meet you. We can’t wait to find out who you are. We’ve planned for you for decades, but you are unknown to us. Don’t lose heart just yet, little one, you carry the greatest responsibility on your shoulders ever given to a human. You will be the first of humanity to settle a new Earth. You will be the first one to descend to our future home and ensure its safety and survivability for us. You are both forerunner and, in a way, our guardian angel. You will protect us on that planet from forces we have yet to understand. So, prepare yourself. Use these next few weeks to make yourself ready, and I look forward to having you sit and join my daughters and me for dinner. Happy Awakening Day, little Eve!”

  The video shut off and there I stood, a naked little six-year-old, just told that I would be the savior of this people. My feet stuck to the floor because of my own puke. I left a green set of footprints from my birthing capsule to the couch. I found a blanket, and I curled myself up in it, blocking out the light, blocking out the sound, blocking out the torture of this new world.

  Since this is confession time, and I'm honest with you, you should know I pissed the bed a lot back then. Okay, I didn’t even know what a bathroom was until day two. Imagine that, of all the instruction videos they could have thrown at me, the location and proper use of the bathroom, was one scheduled for day two. The second day—day two! Can you believe it? Seriously, they were morons. When you're born, the one thing you want is silence and food and then a place to relieve yourself. Babies get diapers. Not me. I got a great big bed to turn into my own personal litter box.

  The first video, after Captain Pote’s wonderfully inspiring message, was on the education plan they had set up for me. I’m pretty sure that first video used the word “pedagogy.” Why did they think I would care about that? These geniuses had launched an interstellar craft with a mini-world, a small self-sustained version of Earth in a great rotating Disc, and they still didn’t understand children. They didn’t understand humans.

  Maybe that’s why the whole thing went to the sewers. They knew engines. They figured out laundry, and they figured out life support. The food was solved. General biology and the entire balance of private geo-system was planned out meticulously. But they still couldn’t prepare for the uncontrollable insanity of humans.

  It’s been years since they all died, and the ship’s systems are working correctly. The ship is still flying at top speed toward Àpáàdì. The Disc still spins. Gravity still works. The food producers in the lower level farms are still growing food at a break-neck pace. There’s more food than I can keep up with. The air is pure and clean. I’m healthy. The water in the great river Lokun still flows.

  But the humans are all dead. Each and every one of them except me. Captain Pote killed seven himself in those last days. He had piled the bodies up in his office when I found him. He had ended up stabbing himself straight in the head. Ugh. I think the blood is still on his desk.

  They all went mad. Anger and greed and fear.

  And someone had also managed to wipe the system’s memory of the records of those last few months. I don’t know what sent them all into a raging mania. I don’t know what started the “Madness.” There’s no exact moment recorded for when it happened. No luck finding that precise info. But I know they’re all dead, and they’re dead because they killed each other. With knives and sticks and bricks and anything that they could bash into another person’s skull.

  Humans.

  To Hell with them.

  4

  J1302-9_

  “The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.”

  —Marcus Tullius Cicero, Philippics

  The world hung frozen and silent around her. She yawned, and the soft noise of her breath filled the quiet of her world. The treehouse was draped in the sapphire of nighttime from the false moonlight from above. Across the room, with a deep, rumbling, stuttering snore, Eku slept, curled up and looking more like a housecat than ever before. A few other housecats slept around it, one tabby nuzzled into Eku’s thick coat for warmth.

  All were sleeping. All were still. But there was no Blip.

  He was never there in the middle of the night. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t power down. He’d come and rest beside her as she dozed off every evening, but she knew that once she fell asleep, he was up and about, onto the tasks at hand. Reviewing repairs, analyzing the environment, checking on plants.

  Or that was what he told her he was doing.

  Syn narrowed her eyes and stood up. In that quiet hour, her own body felt loud. Perhaps he was somewhere else entirely. Olorun was huge, and she was quite small.

  As she stepped out of the main room and descended the stairs, a thought bloomed. Blip had nearly eight to ten hours a day away from her. He could live an entire other life in that time. And she would never know it. What was he doing right now? Perhaps late at night, he would meet up with not just another companion bot, but with many of them. Perhaps there were secret meetings every single evening without her. Perhaps tonight they were holding a funeral for their fallen comrade. Was Blip secretly mourning the loss of a hidden friend?

  Syn shook her head as she stepped through the wet, cold grass in her bare feet. The chill bite sent shivers up her spine.

  Syn stepped out of the trees, into a small clearing, and the thought echoed again. She muttered, “Who can I trust?”

  Did she hear a response in the wind? Did the leaves rustle and say, you’re alone? And again, the tree creaked: all alone, little girl.

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The air wafting over the river filled her senses. A smell mixed of the spreading moss from the far banks, the racing fish, and the moist spray from the rapids created a sharp tonic. If she had been groggy from sleep, she was now fully awake. Far, far away, behind the rush of the river, she heard the slight buzzes of bots floating across the Disc. Above her, clearing the air, were the jellyfish: massive bots unburdened by gravity floating across the sky, pushing the clouds around. Beyond that, she heard the crunch, crunch lumbering steps of the treemovers—the spider-like giant bots that served as the caretakers of the forest. The entire artificial ecology—an ecology of bots—never stopped their toil. She wondered, did they have some hidden world they built, behind the walls of the Disc, that they escaped to when I’m not looking?

  So not everything was asleep. Was Blip with them?


  The wind moved down the Disc and whipped the loose fabric of her pants around her. She only wore a thin blanket across her shoulders, and the breeze yanked at it, threatening to rip it from her. The world was painted in blue and black. A bruised world. Perhaps this was the true sight of the world. Perhaps daylight was a mirage, she thought. Perhaps it was only at night that the truth was revealed.

  Again, that dark, bruised voice in her skull whispered: all alone.

  And a single tear ran down her cheek.

  She stared up at the curving Disc towering far away and reaching up above them, its end veiled in the shadow. Blip was somewhere out there, but she did not know where.

  She shivered again, but the wind was not blowing.

  What else is out there?

  The single set of doors were shut tight, and the string of lights parallel to the center slit were black. A fan behind Syn, far behind, whirred up slowly, juttering a few times as it did, cycling air through the vents above, a hollow sound through the empty corridor.

  Syn slid an orange paint-covered finger across the wall as the running lights at her feet lit up. She smeared the orange paint in a half-meter long line. “There.”

  “Room J1302-97,” Blip said as he floated up to the large doors.

  “We’re looking for J1302-99.”

  Their hunt had led them to one of the settlements on the side opposite of her tree—this was the side that she had explored only recently in detail. They were near the thirteenth level of the settlements. The entrance path around this level opened up on one side to look out at the Disc and the sweeping jungle that moved off in both directions. The jungle twisted up and disappeared into the clouds above their heads. There were still several corridors, like this, that she had not touched. They spent most of their time in the jungle or by the water or, more and more often, floating through the zero gravity of the needle. Yet, the settlements had to be accounted for. It was still amazing to her that after several years of being awake on Olorun, there were still a few places they hadn’t ventured. The settlements had begun to bore her—they all seemed the same. House after house after shop after office after store. It was an endless repetition of a boring life.