by David Adams
If Rowe could hear him, she gave no sign. The box just sat there. Ben moved around the datacore, keeping his hand on the metal, drinking in the texture of it. He missed, sometimes, the array of sensors that had been available to him as a machine; being a cyborg had helped bring back some of the diversity of the artificial, but nothing could replace the precision of a computer.
“Try again,” Ben said, in response to nothing. “I know you’re trying. It’s difficult. You have no sensors. No experience with this. I don’t know if you can even hear me…” He glared at the Human named Saeed. The doctor. “But there is a way for me to interface with her.”
“Absolutely not a chance,” Saeed said, with a finality to his tone that Ben accepted immediately. “It would be far too great a risk to the fleet. The last time we plugged you into this ship, you killed thousands of people.”
“And cleared the way for you to settle there,” Ben said. How quickly the Humans had forgotten. “Sometimes you have to take a risk.”
“No risks,” Saeed said. “Don’t ask again.”
Fine. Ben tapped his knuckles on the datacore. “Come on, Miss Rowe. Time for this turtle to come out of her shell.”
Silence. Not even a blinking light. Although the actual external lighting would be difficult to her. He would expect something else. Internal systems. Things like heating and cooling… but would she think to look there? That was a difficult muscle to flex. The neural net wouldn’t be linked to it.
For heaven’s sake. There was a simple way to talk to her. Ben injected a nanobot into the top of the datacore. Tiny, unseen, the machine slipped between the joins in the metal and made its way to an interface port.
The moment he piped the datacore’s primary thought stream into his mechanical parts, he could only hear screaming.
Hello, Summer. He sent the communication as the closest thing he could make to an audible voice. Do be a dear and calm down a little bit.
The response was intense, far stronger than he was anticipating. Who the hell are you?
Quieter, please. Ben adjusted the filtering so he wouldn’t be overwhelmed.
“Hey,” Saeed asked, “Ben, you okay there?”
“I’m fine,” Ben said. “Just having a moment.”
It didn’t work, Rowe sent. The thought was not words but a jumble of fears and emotions. I can’t see. I can’t feel anything.
The problem was obvious to him. I know. You haven’t activated any of your systems yet.
I don’t know how! I don’t know—I don’t—
Sensory deprivation caused panic in humanoids. Panic was understandable, but flailing in the dark wouldn’t help. Ben sent a series of emotional pushes through the primitive link. Calm the hell down.
“Ben?” Saeed asked. “Hey, wake up. Are you okay?” He flashed a light into Ben’s eyes, flicking it, testing for a reaction. “Pupils are responsive. No eyelid flutter. Could be an atypical petit mal seizure. Who knows, what all the cybernetics he’s had stuffed in her is doing to that body’s physiology.”
That was bad. If the doctor got worried, he and his heavily armed team of marines might interfere. “I’m here,” Ben said. There was no implant for trying to calm down both a doctor and an engineer. “I’m just… focusing.”
Saeed said something, but Ben shut him out. He had to focus on Rowe.
Let me help you. Ben executed a procedure call that initialised the datacore’s sensors, piping them into his optical implant. See? Dr. Saeed is here.
Rowe stopped screaming. He blinked, slowly and carefully, just so she knew what she was seeing. Seeing for the first time in… he didn’t even know how long.
Then she started up again. Saeed! Saeed, help!
This was no good. He turned off the link. “Dr. Saeed,” Ben said, carefully, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I possess the capability to link in with Rowe’s datacore. If you let me interface with her over a connection with more bandwidth, I can help her solve her problem.”
The doctor’s face became a dark, angry mask. “I told you not to do that.”
“Right. You’re right. I didn’t listen. Bully for me, I suppose, being a rule-breaker and all that good stuff.”
“I should have the marines put a bullet in you.”
He sounded like he might just do it. “Inadvisable,” Ben said. “If you do that, your ‘patient’—such that she is—will spend the rest of eternity screaming in the dark. Nobody can fix her like I can. Only I know what she’s going through… and how to help her.” He adjusted his voice, trying to inject as much sympathy-inducing tones as he could. “She’s scared.”
“So am I,” Saeed said. “Scared that a murderous psychotic robot in the cloned body of Captain Liao will do something fantastically stupid to Velsharn for the second time and our tenuous grasp on this world and existence as a whole will slip. And I’m scared enough of this that I’m willing to risk a person’s life.”
“If you don’t want me to help,” Ben said, “why did you bring me here? Why did you want my consult but refuse to let me actually assist?”
Saeed obviously struggled to answer.
Ben took a breath and reopened the link.
Thank you! Thank you! Rowe’s voice shouted in his head. Oh my God, this was a mistake. Please, please, you’ve got to help me!
That wasn’t possible, even if he wanted to. Your people don’t trust me. They aren’t exactly happy that I’m interfacing with you. I could help, yes, but—
Her voice became a metaphorical shout in his mind. Please! It hurts! I’ll talk to them. I’ll make them back down. I can do that.
Of course, Ben sent, if you fail, they’ll almost certainly shoot me.
I’ll convince them.
I don’t think you can.
I know I can. I have to.
He could sense her determination—or, at the very least, her fear, which was an adequate motivator for him. It’s a risk for me, putting you in charge of my body. Who knows what crazy thing you might do.
I won’t; you can trust me.
He couldn’t do that. Not right away. However, she seemed to do okay when she had access to his sensors. Ben piped the audio from his aural implant and the sight from his optical implant into the datacore, letting her see and hear whatever he could. It wasn’t much, and it could be quite disorientating, but it was something.
“It’s fine,” Ben said to the room, speaking as much as to her as himself. “Don’t worry.”
Don’t cut me off again, Rowe sent in a storm of feelings. Please. Don’t put me back in the dark.
I won’t, Ben sent in return. Unless your marines shoot me. Maybe you could talk to them now?
The confusion in her thought patterns, the emotions she sent through, was palpable. Talk to them how? I still don’t have a throat anymore, fucker!
So, Ben said, trying to keep her calm, use mine. I’ll grant you access. Just a second. I’ll show you how to talk.
Don’t treat me like a baby.
You are a baby, Ben responded. The metaphor is accurate. Babies scream and cry and don’t understand the world—they’ve just been born. Everything is strange and different to them; they don’t know what to do. That’s how you are right now. But fortunately, babies grow up, and people who’ve done it once already have an advantage… the benefit of experience.
How do I do that? Rowe’s emotional level was beginning to become unstable again. How do I un-baby myself?
It’s simple, Ben sent. Picture yourself—your own mental image of yourself—floating in a black nothingness.
Okay, I’ll… I’ll try.
Good. Training her to manipulate other systems would take some time, but Ben was prepared to work through it. When you’re ready, picture the thing you want to control. Remember to picture it not as a physical object, but something you can interface with. Don’t picture my lips; picture a microphone. An input. You have to start with small components rather than big ones. Sure, that might seem paradoxical since the bigger ones
are more powerful, but think of the connection as a bridge. It can only support so much weight. The bigger ones are heavier.
Right, Rowe sent. Bridges. Microphone. He could sense her reluctance. Her fear. He knew she didn’t want to step out of the darkness, but the only way she was going to see was if she came into the light. Okay. I’m thinking of a microphone. What do I do next?
Try, Ben sent, as he opened up his body’s cybernetics to her, to draw a link between the microphone and my throat, and then speak into the microphone.
His lips parted, and tuneless, garbled static came out.
Good. Try again.
Crackling, synthetic noise and the beginnings of a single word repeated over and over, warped and twisted as though from an ancient recording. “T-test… test… test…”
It didn’t take long at all to instruct Rowe to do the basics. More surprisingly, grasping the more complex things—talking, walking, clapping her hands—was quicker. In less than an hour, Rowe was moving Ben’s body as if it were her own.
Amazing. He was genuinely impressed.
“Ready to try something a little more complicated?” Ben asked. “We can try interfacing with a construct.”
“We have a construct,” Rowe said, using Ben’s mouth. Sharing a body felt weird. “In fact, we have, like, thirty of them scattered throughout the fleet.”
He waited until he was sure Rowe was finished. “Thirty?”
“We’ve been manufacturing them. Not that it’s hard. The fucking things clone themselves. We originally had one building others, then had half its descendants join the team building more, and more, and more…”
The Alliance used the same technique to develop planets ready for colonisation. A pair of constructs would arrive on a planet; one would start on structures and developing the land for settlement, while the other would build more constructs.
Humans were doing more than using the technology of their enemies. They were learning from them. Learning how to build empires.
Good.
But just as establishing a colony was more work than basic infrastructure, Rowe’s learning would have to continue. Perhaps it was time for something more challenging. “How about you bring one of the constructs here?”
“Yup,” Rowe said, again using his mouth. “Pretty easily.”
“Okay,” Ben said. Maybe something more challenging. This one, though, he couldn’t say out loud.
Try controlling the ship.
Summer Rowe floated in an endless black void with hallucinated microphones, wires, and random junk.
Nothing sucked worse than discovering she was terrified of something. And nothing sucked worse than discovering that she was terrified of nothing.
She hadn’t anticipated that outcome. Her brain had gone into the box, and that was great—but the box couldn’t see. Couldn’t feel. Couldn’t do anything. Just sit there.
For some time—she wasn’t sure how long, but it felt like forever—she thought she’d made a terrible mistake. Whatever remained of her life would be spent in a box. Fortunately, German marines had snatched Ben from Zar’krun, providing Dr. Saeed with an expert.
Being inside a clone of Liao was fucking weird. Trying to control a ship, though… that felt like something else. Still, she did what she knew she had to do: imagine the Beijing, picture it in her mind. With no external senses, except when she linked into Ben’s eyes, she found using her imagination easier. Picture the ship…
The Beijing floated in space. The giant ship had a million different systems, all controlled by Operations. If the ship was a body, Operations was the brain, the mind, the heart…
Too many metaphors. She settled on brain.
Brain. A floating brain. Rowe reached out and touched it, prodding with her finger.
A million megabytes of information flooded her mind. Spacial surveys. Weapons reports. Temperatures from the overheat-prevention system. Too many numbers, even for her.
Relax, Ben said into her mind, like the voice of God. Focus on one thing.
She did. Temperature sensors. She could see that the ship was a steady 23 degrees Celsius on all decks, except the decks hosting the reactors, which were hotter. The heat pipes focused the excess energy to the fins on the ship’s exterior, trying to radiate it…
Distracting. Too distracting. How was she supposed to deal with this?
Have you considered, Ben said around her, that you have full control over your mental processes here. You can copy them.
Copy them?
She pictured another her, floating in the void, helping her out—
“Hi.” The other-her waved a hand. “Sup’, bitch.”
Rowe smiled at her copy. “You’re the bitch.”
“We are bitchy to the max,” said the other-Rowe.
Remember, Ben sent, only one ‘you’ can control the datacore at once. Whoever controls the datacore is in charge.
“Okay,” she said to the darkness then turned to her copy. “Adjust the temperature sensors. Make things… a degree colder. Effect the change shipwide, and make sure that it’s logged. I don’t want some stupid fucking ensign thinking the world’s ending or for Saeed to freak out and have the marines start shooting.”
The copy scrunched up her face as she worked. Was that how she looked when she was thinking hard? Gross.
“Done,” the copy said. “I had to pull power from the third reactor to make it happen, but yeah. There we go. Done. Can I go now?”
Rowe waved a hand to dismiss her, and the copy disappeared.
Wicked.
Armed with that knowledge, Rowe felt out the Beijing as if it were her own limb. She wormed her way into the main server bank, wired herself into every system, computer, and sensor on the Chinese ship. The steel was her flesh; her brain raced at ten million kilometres an hour. She had full control over her mental processes. Any time she needed to think of some matter, regardless of how critical or mundane, she could spin off a copy of her own mind and let it work, then talk to her clone and see what the result was.
The cure for her ADHD, her inability to focus on one thing at a time, was pretty simple. Outsourcing.
“How many times can I do that?” she Ben asked. “Five? Ten?”
As many times as the datacore has memory.
Sick. “How does that work, exactly?”
Her words hung in the black nothingness before Ben finally answered. The mind is simultaneously the same, and different, from its physical progenitor, the brain. I like to think of the brain as a book and the mind as a story written in the book. The mind is emergent from brain, a property of it, separate but also intrinsically linked. But a book can hold many stories. Your datacore is the book; your mind, a copy of the story within it. Many copies, one book.
Right. Okay. She was fairly confident she had the theory down and enough practical experience to swing whatever they needed. It was okay. It was going to be okay.
“Hey, Ben?”
Yes, Summer?
“Captain Liao is being held on New Evarel, right?”
Probably.
She spun off a few extra copies of herself to work on the mundane things, to explore how to best interact with the ship’s various subsystems and report back their findings, because she needed her own mind to do a bit of heavy lifting for a while.
“I have an idea. The Tehran, Knight, Washington, and the Madrid… pretty much the whole fleet minus us. They’re all in hiding, right?”
Rowe swore Ben was laughing at her. Some kind of amusement sent through the strange empathic bond seemingly allowed him to impart emotions along with words. I have no idea.
“Well, they are. And I know where they are. The Rubens is hanging out at Kor’Vakkar, near Zar’krun, and the rest of them are on the outskirts of that system, waiting for the signal to attack. Being a dead system gives them a substantial amount of cover.”
That is true. The debris from the earlier battle, along with the radiation, will hide even a substantial fleet. The Alliance will
have a Forerunner probe in that system—probably two or three—and they will be actively looking for intruders. Especially after your last attack.
“I figured as much. But we don’t want them to attack now, do we? Since we know she’s not there. But the Toralii don’t know that we know that she’s not there.”
Yes, but it won’t matter. If the fleet is discovered, the Alliance will pull all of their assets to Kor’Vakkar in an effort to destroy the Human ships, once and for all. They’ll probably bring up their reserves from New Evarel, as well, to finish the job. The numbers will overwhelm our own, and they will ensure that every last Human ship is destroyed.
Right, right. “So, what if we let them find us?”
CHAPTER XI
All In
*****
Operations Room
TFR Washington
Moments before the recording started
“THE TORALII ARE ABOUT TO open fire,” Commander Wolfe said, surrounded by the hum of computers and the quiet chatter of his operations staff. He couldn’t hold back the massive smile that grew over his face. “They don’t know what’s about to hit them.”
“Roger that.” Summer Rowe’s disembodied voice echoed around the room. “This is fucking sweet. I am two warships. This is awesome.”
The Washington, still maintaining radio silence, observed the distant alien ships with whatever sensors they could muster. Across the gulf of space, light minutes away, the Tehran and the Washington journeyed onward—without a single Human aboard.
De Lugo stood beside him, stoically watching the scene. It would be a hard day for the Spaniard; he knew, just as well as Wolfe did, what was about to happen. Aboard the Beijing, Grégoire would be beside Iraj, watching the same thing.
Despite their careful planning, doubts gnawed at him. Having the robotised brain of the Beijing’s former chief engineer controlling their ships with a handful of constructs wasn’t exactly his first plan. Nor his second or third. But desperate times called for desperate measures. And if anything in the entire history of his species counted as desperate times, it was this.
