Edge of Dark

by Brenda Cooper

  These were the people who had Chrystal. Dammit. He checked on the robots. Jason and Yi stood close together, holding hands. Jhailing stood just behind them.

  Charlie moved to stand behind them all, so that he could see their reaction as well as whatever bad news was about to come.

  The screen flashed and a new image replaced the old.

  A court of sorts. A man in black with tattoos all over him, a woman with the same black clothes but light brown skin free of marks. Both wore their hair in braids that hung long over camouflage shirts. They cradled weapons. A couple with short hair, pale eyes, and neater uniforms stood on either side of them.

  Whoever was broadcasting had pasted names near each image. The deeply tattooed man in front was Vadim. The dark-haired woman who matched him was named Nayli. The short-haired couple were Darnal and Brea Paulson, neither name familiar to him. A small box opened on the screen and identified them as “Dangerous mercenaries who were wanted by multiple stations, including the Deep.”

  Vadim nodded at the cameras and said, “Thank you for joining us. I promise to make this worth your time. Many of you are familiar with the Shining Revolution. Those who are not, will be. We are old and venerable—we were born at the end of the age of explosive transformation and we have remained. We have waxed and waned in size as the need for us has changed.” He paused for a breath and leaned toward the camera, his eyes fierce. Theatrical. “Right now, we are growing quickly. A hundred people are joining our cause every second. We invite you to do the same. Join us. To understand why, please listen for a moment as my wife Nayli explains her reasoning to you.”

  Nayli was beautiful. He shoulders were broad and her face a bit broad as well, but in a way that added to her fierce beauty. She glowed with health. Well-defined muscles rippled beneath the fabric of her clothes when she moved.

  “Long ago we decided to outlaw the marriage of mind and machine. We wisely chose to say that machines must serve man. If we become servants of machines, we will lose our very soul. And yet we have named the pirates at the edge of our star system soulbots, and implied that they have souls rather than that they take them. But I say they are eaters of souls.

  “The events of the past year have born this out. The eaters of souls killed a station. An entire station. When they ripped the High Sweet Home from its orbit, they brutally murdered almost everyone who lived there. There were hundreds of thousands of human souls on the High Sweet home. Military men and women. Traders. Farmers. Scientists. Teachers. Children.” She paused, staring at the camera, as if daring anyone to deny the atrocity that had happened in space. When she continued, her voice rose. “That’s not the worst of it. The pirates kept a handful of humans to destroy more slowly.”

  She sounded so reasonable. In spite of his fears for Chrystal, in spite of the fact that he liked Jason and Yi, a part of him didn’t entirely disagree with her. It made listening to her feel like bifurcation of himself. He clenched his fists.

  Jason and Yi didn’t show any outward reaction, except that they had gone as still as statues.

  Nayli continued. “They took living beings—living men and women just like you and me, and they destroyed their bodies and uploaded their brains into robots. They killed them.”

  Another pause.

  “This was not an act of war. It was deliberate murder.”

  Another thing he agreed with. Dammit.

  She slowed her delivery, each phrase provided with a pause after it for effect. “We don’t know what it felt like to be their victims. How much it hurt. Whether or not they knew what was happening to them. Whether or not they gibbered in fear on cold stretchers while the abominations beyond the Ring cut their skulls open.”

  Jason and Yi stirred in front of him, Yi putting an arm around Jason’s shoulder. Charlie wished he could see their faces. He had never asked them how they became soulbots and they had never offered. Had it been so horrible?

  The screen switched to coverage of the Next’s announcement on the Satwa. The footage showed a scene Charlie didn’t remember watching in the Satwa’s bar. It showed Chrystal, Jason, and Yi standing among many other robotic figures, including some of the large and fluid forms that seemed least human. Vadim took over the narration. “The Next introduced their pets to us when they came here. Make no mistake—they look like the people who were killed to create them, but they are not those humans. Those humans are dead.

  “These robots were created by the soul-eating machines that we banned from our lives. They are them. They are not us. They were merely fashioned to look like us, to fool us. The Next claim they started with the brains and memories of specific humans. If they were in boxes instead of pretty, nearly-human bodies, we would abhor them immediately. We cannot assume that they have the souls or the hearts of the people who were killed to create them.”

  Amfi glanced at Jason and Yi curiously. Charlie took a single protective step closer to them. Jhailing stood entirely still, showing no emotion whatsoever.

  The camera returned to the meeting room, and now Chrystal sat at the head of the table, recognizable as the woman from the video on the Satwa.

  Her face looked so frightened and miserable that Charlie wondered if the revolutionaries had made a mistake and created a victim people would identify with. Her hair was a mess; her blue dress had been partly torn off, demonstrating that her exposed breast had no nipples.

  Her forced semi-nudity offended him.

  One of her hands looked wrong. She held her wrist canted far more to the right than a normal human hand could possibly manage.

  Nayli talked again, giving Vadim credit for capturing Chrystal, and for keeping her. Footage, which the revolutionaries must have ripped from security cameras showed them walking through hallways on the Deep with Chrystal being herded at gunpoint. A time-lapse sequence showed Chrystal sitting up all night in a jail cell, awake but not moving, not talking, not drinking. The recording was bright and over-exposed, giving her skin a texture that looked far less human than he remembered.

  Anger boiled up Charlie’s spine, as well as shame. These were his people. Not the Revolution—he had never been part of that. But they were humans, full humans, set to hate another being they didn’t understand. One he had come to admire.

  He hadn’t realized that until this moment. Seeing her treated this way made him angry and erased the schism inside of him over Nayli’s words.

  Vadim took over. “When we were bringing her here, after a full night of sitting up and plotting and planning rather than sleeping, she got away from us. Single-handedly. We had weapons on her, more than one. And yet she escaped.”

  Meaning you made a mistake, Charlie thought. Chrystal was too smart to run in a closed environment, so she must have been very, very scared. Robot or not, she wasn’t sophisticated.

  A screen showed her in a corridor, running, the skirt of her blue dress rising and falling beautifully. Vadim’s voice described how she ran faster than any human, faster even than the ship’s robots. They had needed to commandeer the ship’s AI to help trap her. Even then, when they had her fair and square, she had almost gotten away. One of the face cameras from a squad who had caught her recorded her turning a corner into them.

  The view switched to an overhead security camera in the corridor. It went to black and white, but it was clear and high resolution.

  Charlie watched in horror as Chrystal turned to escape. A man stood with a weapon and an intense look of hatred on his face. He fired. His shot cost her her footing and she fell. He whooped, screeching his triumph in a way had once seen an illegal hunter act when he brought down a tongat.

  Chrystal reached out to grab the man who had shot her, and threw him far down the corridor, bouncing after him awkwardly with her shattered foot. He knew the moment the man’s neck broke. When they showed it in slow motion, Charlie could see the moment of death.

  Back in the conference room, a split screen showed the dead man’s head matted with blood and a pool of it behind him on the floor
of the corridor. Close enough to see the empty stare in his eyes. The other half of the screen showed a picture of Chrystal’s ankle and nearly-severed foot. A few clear drops of oil glistened there. They must have leaked from a torn tube the laser that had sliced her foot hadn’t cauterized completely.

  The couple behind Vadim and Nayli stepped forward and spoke for the first time. The man, Darnal, said, “We pronounce this robot a creation in violation of our most basic laws and social structures as a society. We will destroy it in the same way that we destroy anything else that we don’t need, and we will recycle the robot’s parts into raw materials.”

  Brea said, “Nayli, you may do the honors.”

  Chrystal started. Her face filled with fear, eyes wide, lips thin, jaw tight. More feeling than he had ever seen her display, something feral and alive that didn’t want to die.

  Charlie’s mouth dropped open. So fast. No trial. No chance.

  Nayli drew her weapon and pointed it at Chrystal.

  The camera drew back so that the audience could see that many more armed revolutionaries were in the room, all staring at Chrystal, all ready in case they were needed.

  Nayli looked at Chrystal, her expression deep. Not anger or hatred. Something far more complex.

  Chrystal glanced around the room and then back to Nayli, her eyes wide. It looked like she could talk, could say something if she wanted to.

  But she didn’t.

  Nayli swallowed.

  She and Chrystal looked at each other, and for a short second Charlie thought he saw a flicker of compassion on the beautiful revolutionary’s face.

  “Now,” Brea said.

  Nayli pulled the trigger on what must be a laser weapon similar to the one that had been used on Chrystal on the corridor. It severed the top of Chrystal’s head and a piece fell off, clattering onto the ground.

  Jason groaned audibly. Amfi swore. Charlie tensed.

  The next cut took one eye and left the other, the next the rest of her head. Chrystal’s body fell to the floor, and Nayli stood over it, holding the trigger, cutting and cutting until Vadim took her hand and she stopped.

  Tears ran down Nayli’s cheeks.

  The camera zoomed in on a piece of Chrystal’s face: part of her mouth, open, and a cut-away bit of chin leaking fluid.

  Yi and Jason were holding each other tightly, faces tucked into each other’s shoulders.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  NONA

  Pain and anger shot through Nona as parts of Chrystal fell onto the floor. Disbelief warred with the truth of the visuals. Her hands shook. Small and strange moans escaped her lips.

  Strong arms encircled her and Satyana whispered in her ear. “I’m sorry. But don’t lose it now. You can’t. Stuff your anger deep inside and put it away. Let it influence you on the stage.”

  On the screen, Vadim was putting out a call to people to join the Shining Revolution. Satyana snapped at Gunnar. “Turn it off!”

  The room went silent, except for Nona’s gasping breaths.

  “You can’t come apart,” Satyana whispered, as the others began to move and react and talk in low tones. “You can’t let this anger drive your choices and decisions. You are part of the Voice. You must be strong. You must be strong.”

  Satyana’s words sounded like her mantra. Nona felt a tear streak down her cheek, probably undoing some of the fabulous makeup job. “I will,” she said out loud. “I will.”

  “Ten minutes,” Gunnar said.

  Nona closed her eyes, repeating again, silently, “I must be strong. I must be strong.” Then she added, “I must be strong for Chrystal.” It dawned on her that there was something to do now. She stood up and surveyed the room, gulping air, aware of every eye on her. Satyana’s hand on her back steadied her. The Councilors were all there, every one of them. Even the tall, blond man who was the current Architect. As soon as she had enough breath to talk, she did. “Some of you got a chance to meet Chrystal. Dr. Nevening and the Economist both did. The rest of you were supposed to, and would have if she hadn’t been stolen from us. But we—humans—were the enemy there.

  “Chrystal did not deserve to die. She didn’t deserve anything that happened to her—not what the Next did to her and not what we humans did to her after that. We saw her kill a man on screen, but keep in mind that she killed a man had just shot her and gravely wounded her, and who still had a weapon pointed at her. She killed in self-defense.”

  A whole room full of Councilors and aides watched her. Gunnar, too. And Winter Ohman in the corner. She almost stumbled into silence, and Satyana rubbed circles in her back. “Go on,” she whispered.

  “Chrystal had been shot just moments before she threw the man down. Soulbots feel pain. I know. I spent weeks with Chrystal in transit. She came from here, she was a child on the Deep and we went to the same schools, played together. She felt like herself, and she felt to me—who had been her best friend—like herself.” She stopped, realizing she was running out of time. “Our focus in the next few years needs to be on keeping humans from killing humans over this. The Next may or may not be our enemies, but we are our own enemy.”

  The Historian raised his hand and she called on him, and then realized she was calling on the Historian and felt a little weak inside.

  He stood up. The makeup artists had done a good job with him, too, and he somehow looked taller and more commanding than she’d ever thought him before. “I found Chrystal very human,” he said with precise diction. “She was also smart and perceptive. I only spent an hour or so with her, but that was enough to convince me that she did not deserve the death that we just witnessed. I will have more to say on the dais where this conversation should continue, but there is one historical perspective I will offer here and now. Acts of terrorism seldom result in more freedom for anyone, including the terrorists.”

  Leesha said, “I agree. Chrystal seemed like a fine young woman. She also looked very afraid when the Shining Revolution took her. She had feelings.” She inclined her head, her hair magnificently coifed and glittering with fresh jewels. “We have work to do. We should go prepare.”

  Perhaps Leesha had recognized that Nona had run out of words. Nona wanted to thank Leesha and Dr. Nevening, but there wasn’t time in the hustle of being led onto the stage. Making her way to the other room felt a little like walking through gauze, as if a fog had enveloped her and made her limbs heavy and turned the walls and art on the Star Bear surreal.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  CHARLIE

  The screen in the cave went dark. Someone brought the lights halfway down. A respectful move. Charlie watched Jason and Yi in silence, a deep anger welling up and swamping his sadness. Chrystal had made him laugh, had made him worry, had been open and so very human there were times he forgot what had happened to her.

  Had she ever forgotten? Even for a moment?

  Amfi walked over to Jason and Yi and touched them. She said nothing, just touched them, one hand lightly on each man’s shoulder. Charlie followed suit. He and Amfi looked at each other. He noticed tears in Amfi’s eyes, which made him blink back his own. Here he was, crying for the second time in as many days. He almost managed not to let a tear actually fall, but then Davis’s hand was on his shoulder and all five of them had become linked in the shock of the moment.

  Charlie cried.

  Jhailing Jim came closer, but didn’t join the circle. He watched.

  After a time, the circle opened up and out and Charlie felt like a fully separate being again. His anger and sadness had been washed away by his tears, leaving him full of emptiness and deeply sad.

  A long silence fell across all of them, and Charlie used the time to gather himself back up, to return to the task at hand.

  Jhailing was the first to begin something new. He gave a respectful half-bow to Amfi and Davis, and said, “Thank you for your hospitality. You represented humanity well when you left me in a comfortable captivity and checked on my welfare. I appreciate that you came to talk from t
ime to time, and that over that time you came to understand us more. Now that there is an agreement to ratify, I’ll be going to town with Charlie to help him do it. You are welcome to accompany me.”

  Davis said, “No, no thank you. I’ll stay here and wait. But I’ll let you out.”

  “No need.”

  “What?” Amfi asked. “Could you always have left?”

  “I always could have found a way—some way—to leave. But I didn’t fall into captivity on purpose. A piece of me broke, which affected some of my ability to communicate with machines and others like myself. I was unable to call for help. I could talk with Yi and Jason once they arrived here, but my ability to communicate long distance had become limited.

  “This is how you and your friends held me after you captured me. Without the repair robot I would not have been able to complete the negotiations.” Jhailing nodded at Davis. “But now I can open your doors without help.”

  Davis looked irritated. Charlie wondered about the robot and Jhailing and Yi and Jason all ending up in the same place. It didn’t seem possible that it was engineered; it had to be coincidence. But it was neat.

  “The little robot fixed you!” Yi sounded surprised.

  “Yes,” Jhailing answered Yi. “I am grateful for the loan, but it is still your repair-bot. You may need it again before our ships land on Lym.”

  “No one has permission to land yet. We have to go to town,” Charlie said.

  Davis glanced at Amfi, a pleading look on his face.

  She said, “I’ll go. You can stay.”

  Davis said, “Thank you.”

  Charlie concluded Davis would be glad to be rid of all of the Next, at least for now. “We’ll stop at the ranger station on the way, maybe spend the night. We can be in Manna Springs early.”