Edge of Dark

by Brenda Cooper

  He took another sip of beer, tried to figure out what to risk. “I can’t choose for Lym. Not from way out here. So I have to get home.”

  “But if you could?” she asked.

  “I’d fight.”

  A few solemn nods and a grin signaled that he’d chosen right.

  “Do you have a ship?” the woman asked. “We’re going. We figure they might let us go, since we don’t matter any. That’s what we’re hoping.”

  He thought about the little seventy-five pod and the keys to her. “Only a small one. Are there more in the bay? Anything useful to get from here to Lym?”

  “Can you fly?”

  Nona could. Every ship had a flight AI anyway. “Depends on the ship.”

  The biggest man of the group stepped up to him. “If you rat us out, I will offer you to the robots myself, and if they don’t want you I’ll tear you in half. Do you understand?”

  Charlie wasn’t sure if he could take him or not, but the right thing to do was act respectful, so he did. “I won’t tell on you. I don’t wish you any harm.”

  “Why tell him anything?” one of the women who hadn’t spoken yet asked. The expressions on other faces agreed with her.

  The big man said, “Because I was on Lym once. For six months. It’s the most beautiful place in the solar system.”

  Charlie smiled. “It is. By far.”

  The woman wasn’t satisfied yet. “Keep him with us. That way he can’t rat us out.”

  “No time to babysit,” the big man said. He thrust his hand out. “I’m Larkos. Meet us in the ship’s bay in two hours.”

  Only two hours? “I’m bringing a friend who came with me. She needs to get off, too.”

  “Don’t tell her anything until you meet us,” the woman insisted. She still hadn’t offered her name.

  “Not until just before,” he promised. “But she’ll need to gather her things.”

  “Go,” Larkos said. “If you’re late, we’re leaving without you.”

  Charlie’s beer was almost gone. He hadn’t figured out who was in charge without Shoshone. Maybe no one.

  He had made friends. Perhaps. He wanted another beer, but decided to nurse the dregs instead. There was still nowhere to go, so he went to a window seat and sat, staring out at the Bleeding Edge. Nona was surely still there, still inside. If she came out of there in two hours, he had a plan. If she didn’t, he supposed he still had a plan—to take her and the little seventy-five ship.

  But what if she didn’t want to go? Then what?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  NONA

  Nona followed the robot. Beyond the doorway, the Next ship felt open and big. Rooms and corridors were sized too big for humans, and she shivered in the cold air. The Bleeding Edge hummed and creaked more than the sleeker Savior, or even the Deep. Color and odd-shaped designs coded areas and access levels and utilities, leaving the impression that she walked into a child’s playground rather than a starship bristling with serious weapons. It wasn’t beautiful or artistic, but rather confusing and almost riotous.

  After just enough turns to leave her feeling lost, the bot led Nona into a room with white walls and four seats around a table. Four seats? Shouldn’t there be five?

  A pitcher of water and a single glass sat on the table. The robot poured for her, holding the glass out until she took it. “I’ll come back for you. Don’t go anywhere else.” It left, although Nona had the sense it didn’t go far.

  The Chrystal robot came in, still wearing the blue dress. She was followed by two men who Nona recognized from pictures. Soulbots. They moved like people, looked like people, the differences so slight she couldn’t name them even though she felt them.

  Nona tried to hide a shiver.

  All four of them regarded each other in silence.

  The Chrystal soulbot looked like her friend. The dragon tattoo glittered in all its shimmery blue and green glory. The same dark hair spilled down her shoulders, maybe a little longer. Her eyes were the right shades of brown mixed with green, and her smile warm and natural.

  Maybe too smooth, too natural?

  The men were the same; they looked right and not-right. Nona had never met them, but she’d seen hundreds of pictures of them. Jason, who had been with them a long time. Jason had long dark hair highlighted with purple, and broad-shoulders that must have been born and nurtured in a weight room.

  Yi was newer to the family. He had fascinated Chrystal so much that while they were all dating, Chrystal had written long notes about him to Nona, describing how brilliant and driven he was, what a good head he had for business. In truth, the family had started truly prospering after they added Yi, who was reportedly a prodigy at engineering and DNA, at physics and math. Yi looked like an anti-Jason: anorexic and thin-limbed, with unruly dark hair that flopped over wide, round eyes and sharp, high cheekbones. He had no decorations or tattoos, or anything else unique except his gawkiness.

  Katherine was missing. Katherine and Chrystal had been together for decades; almost always together. Chrystal’s family structure had been solid for years, and it had started with Katherine. Nona wanted to ask, but she was afraid to.

  The look on Chrystal’s face was human and full of apprehension and fear. Not of Nona—never that. Perhaps fear of what Nona thought of her now, of whether or not Nona would accept her.

  The look didn’t belong to a robot. It belonged to her friend. She had seen it before, and it was such a signature expression it couldn’t have been copied.

  The look drove Nona up out of the chair. She folded Chrystal in her arms. At first, Chrystal felt resistant, and then just stiff, and then she slid her arms around Nona and the two of them stood there for a long time. Holding Chrystal and being held by her felt good. No, it felt great. She had been so afraid for so long, so certain Chrystal was dead. But she wasn’t. Not exactly.

  The first overwhelming tide of relief ebbed, and Nona gradually became aware of a subtle sense of wrongness. She trembled in Chrystal’s arms, but Chrystal was a rock. In spite of making the right movements, Chrystal’s reactions were subdued at best. Her movements felt too fluid, as if she were an animated dancer instead of a real girl.

  Chrystal didn’t smell human. Maybe that was it. Emotions smelled, and Chrystal didn’t. A subconscious thing.

  Chrystal didn’t tremble or cry or make a single awkward move.

  Nona still sensed a connection between them, but it wasn’t as exuberant or sweet as she remembered.

  She put a hand on Chrystal’s cheek. “I’m so sorry this happened to you.”

  Chrystal shook her head ever so slightly “Don’t be. It doesn’t do any good.”

  Nona wiped at her eyes and Jason handed her a tissue from a box on the table.

  “Thank you,” Nona said and then she whispered, “I hate them for this.”

  “Remember we are in the Next’s ship, and I am now at least partly the Next’s creature,” Chrystal whispered back. “They are with me always now. We share a network, a world, a place. We talk to each other. I am myself and I’m not. Please believe both of those.” Then she repeated one part of it. “I am myself and I’m not.”

  Nona nodded. “Okay.”

  Chrystal sat down and smiled. “Tell me a story. How did you get here?”

  Tell me a story. Whenever they were away from each other for long, they said that. Nona wanted to cry all over again, and hated it for a weakness. She picked up the water glass and drank, covering her face briefly with one hand. When she regained control, she said, “We were on Lym, me and Charlie, when we heard about the High Sweet Home. We were sitting in a skimmer with a wide sky above us and a waterfall in front of us. As soon as I heard about the attack, I started trying to find out how you were. We left soon after and came out here, and we watched for you and listened for news every day. We didn’t hear anything for so long, I was sure you were dead.”

  Chrystal looked slightly alarmed, and then she smiled, her expression almost natural. “You shouldn’
t have come,” she said. “Now you’re in as much danger as I am.”

  “Aren’t we all in danger?” Nona asked. “No matter where we are? Who we are? The Next are going to change everything.”

  “Yes,” Yi watched Chrystal with concern. “It’s not your fault that Nona came, and she’s right. No one is safe.”

  “Do you understand the Next?” Nona asked Chrystal. “Can you speak for them? Already?”

  “I don’t have any authority. But they’ve been training me in what to say to you to help you understand them.”

  “And what did they tell you to tell us?” Nona asked.

  “In a minute. First, I want to know about you. You mentioned a Charlie. Who are you two to each other?”

  In the old days, Nona would have told Chrystal about her conflicted feelings, and that she had just wanted him to kiss her. “We’re both ambassadors—me for the Diamond Deep, kind of by accident. Or at least, not very officially. Charlie is an ambassador for Lym. I have a ship; we came out here in it. A big cruiser mom had built for me. Do you believe that?”

  “Really? You have a ship?” Chrystal brightened, her new eyes alive with excitement. “Is it here? Can I see it?”

  Bitterness rose in Nona’s throat, but she managed to find neutral words. “It’s somewhere safe. No one knows how frightened to be of the Next, but after what happened to you, the bets are that we should be very frightened.”

  Jason’s voice was warm and rolling, a little sexy. “You should be frightened. You should leave us and run away.”

  “That’s not what you’re supposed to tell us,” Nona observed.

  “No.”

  Yi said, “The Next were all human once. Now their aims and dreams are different. That is already true for us three, a little.” He stopped and waited for Nona to nod, as if he needed to be sure she understood his point. “We’ll never be human again. Don’t be fooled. We think faster, learn faster. We run faster, jump higher. We don’t need to drink or eat. We don’t need air or a narrow band of temperature. We are designed for space and spaceships, which you are not. If you weren’t with us, it would be colder in this room. We are alive, but we are not human.”

  Nona drank some water, acutely aware that the others weren’t drinking.

  Yi continued. “We won’t evolve backward into flesh.”

  Chrystal glared at him.

  He smiled, and the infectiousness of his smile drew a smile from Chrystal. He continued. “We’ll evolve forward, until we too can inhabit silvery robotic bodies, or perhaps even the bodies of spaceships.”

  A siren song about a robotic future. Nona shivered, the hand holding her glass shaking.

  Yi must have seen it. “Yes, really. We are becoming more than we were. So much more. Jhailing Jim does not lie when he promises humans an evolution of their choosing.”

  Jason took over. “But the Next don’t comprehend what we lost, or that more is not always better.”

  Nona hadn’t known what to expect, but certainly it wasn’t this conversation.

  The white walls and simple furnishing and lack of any distractions but water were wearing on her mood, scratching at it like a swarm of not-quite-right.

  Chrystal had spoken the truth. She moved with her own mannerisms, still had her own family—most of them—and still remembered her friends. She clearly cared what Nona thought of her. But she had also become something—different—than she had been. “Surely the choices are not as simple as they say,” Nona mused. “Surely they’ll negotiate.”

  “We don’t know,” Yi said. “We are not of them. Not yet. We’re in some middle area in their culture where they’re teaching us things. It feels as if we’re children, maybe not yet even in grade school. We have value to them. We were told it was okay to be honest with you, and we have been. We were told to tell you to trust them, that they keep their word.”

  Yi glanced at Chrystal, who picked up the narrative. “I’m sure they will ignore you if you ignore them, as long as you give them access to the resources they want. They may want a lot, though.” Her voice softened. “I have never been to Lym. I don’t know for sure what they want there, but I think it is rare metals. Perhaps they can be asked about treating it well, or even about putting it back in order when they’re done.”

  Nona imagined Charlie’s reaction to being told Lym was likely to be ravaged, and if he was lucky, the bullies might fix it up before they left. “Lym is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. There are waterfalls and wild animals and untouched forests and sky. Charlie will die to protect it—I’m sure of it. And maybe he should. Nothing Gunnar created in his private reserves on the Deep is anything like it at all. Nothing.”

  Nona was amazed at how flexible Chrystal’s robotic features were, at how they looked sad in a deeply nuanced way at this moment. “The Next are very single minded.”

  “Tell me all of the things that you know they want,” Nona asked.

  Chrystal shook her head. “I’ve told you what they have shared with me. They want us to be examples of what you can become in the short term, and they themselves are examples of what you can become in the long term. In all cases they believe they are far better.” She looked down and then back up. “They are more capable. As are we.”

  “Capable of life. But is that the same as capable of love?” Nona asked. “Is that what you lost?”

  Chrystal smiled once again. “I still love my family.” She paused and then continued. “The Next don’t want to be distracted by a war. If you become useful to them—in the way that they think of as useful—then you can come out and play. If you leave them alone, fine. But if you cause an uprising? You’ll be squashed.”

  Nona heard each use of the word you as repudiation of Chrystal’s humanity, and she hated it. “And they really expect all humans to make the same choice? Are they that naive?”

  “I don’t know,” Chrystal said.

  “Are they unified? Do they all want the same thing?” Nona pressed.

  Yi answered. “The ones we’ve met are.”

  Nona looked from one to the other. “If you were still human, what would you do?”

  They looked back and forth between each other, their facial expressions subdued.

  Nona finished her water, waiting, feeling awkward.

  Chrystal answered. “Knowing what we know? Help them or stay out of their way, but don’t become them. If you ask us this again in a month, we might say you should become them.” Chrystal glanced at Yi. “It doesn’t take long to forget some of what it was to be flesh. We are trying hard to remember, but we don’t have the same structures in our bodies any more, the same body memory, blood memory. Ours are the memories of machines.”

  Yi nodded. “There is an attraction to what we are becoming. The closer we get to it, the more we forget what we lost.”

  Jason cleared his throat. “I won’t forget. Ever.”

  Yi gave Jason an incredibly gentle look for a robot. “You’re closer to your old self than I am, closer by far. But each time we learn something new, it intrigues you.”

  Nona had expected it to be impossible for robotic bodies to blush, but nonetheless Jason’s cheeks seemed to redden slightly as he looked away.

  She had no idea what to say.

  Chrystal gave her a long, measured look. “It’s not a pretty picture. But you need to go and decide. You and the other humans. We can’t help you.”

  “I don’t want to go yet,” Nona blurted out. “I miss you so much.”

  Chrystal stopped dead in her tracks, as unmoving as a statue. Then she said, “I miss you, too.”

  Chrystal talked like Chrystal, moved like Chrystal. But the creature in front of her didn’t feel like Chrystal no matter how much Nona wanted her to.

  Nona really needed to cry, but she wasn’t about to do that here. She might hurt the robot’s feelings.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHRYSTAL

  As soon as Nona left, Jason took Chrystal’s hand. The actual haptics of the touch were cool
robotic hand to cool robotic hand, but she felt warmth from the gesture. “That was far harder than I expected,” she said.

  “Really?” Yi asked. “You looked very happy to see each other.”

  “I missed Nona long before this happened. I missed her the whole time we were on the High Sweet Home. We’ve been friends since we were little girls.” She let her words trail off.

  “She said she’d be back,” Jason said.

  “Talking to her made me feel more different than anything else has made me feel since . . . since this all started.”

  Jason squeezed her fingers. “I felt that, too. Like in the time it took her to start to reply to a comment, we could have had a whole conversation.”

  “I think that’s part of why the Next created us,” Yi said. His words came fast, the way they always did when he was learning something. “They can barely slow down enough to talk to us, to help us. I had a long talk with Jhailing Jim once about it—the one in our heads. He said it’s very hard to work with the newly born, that we’re slow.”

  “Don’t use the word born,” Jason snapped.

  “I agree,” Chrystal said. “We were born from our mother’s wombs. What the Next did to us was death and engineering.”

  “Meeting your friend made me feel more like a robot.” Jason swung his purple hair around, looking more like a person than a robot in that moment.

  Chrystal laughed and withdrew her hand and stood up. “If anything happens to her I will come apart. I can’t take it if they do this to her.”

  “Even if she chooses to become like us?” Yi asked gently. He reached across the table and picked up the water pitcher and the single glass and the box of tissues that had been there for Nona to use. “It’s not that far-fetched. I might have chosen it.”

  She stared at him. “Really?”

  “I’ll never know what I might have done if asked.” He looked away from them, staring at the wall. “I’ve always been fascinated with artificial intelligences. I talk to all of the ship’s AIs that I can. There will be others like me. There will also be old people, and young. There will be poor people and the sick and the lost. The curious. Some will choose this.”