Six Strings to Save the World

by Michael McSherry

“Take down this wall, Mixy,” I say, tapping the head of my guitar to the glass.

  “Put down your guitar,” Dorian orders. “You’re not gonna shoot any one of us.”

  “Is this how Composers treat prisoners?” I ask.

  Dorian steps forward and places a palm upon the glass. It melts away, opening the entirety of the cargo hold. Behind him, Lydia begins to play a gentle melody, blue Rez shaping itself around the gore of Sola’s stomach. Dorian takes two steps forward, until the tip of my Resonator is an inch from his nose. Bits of buzzing electricity leap from the Gibson, stinging him on his face. He doesn’t so much as flinch.

  “You want to know where Alpha is taking Dex? So do we. You want to know what actually happened to Dex back there? So do we. You want to save your friend’s life? So… do… we.” He grabs the neck of the Gibson, gritting his teeth against the discharge of electricity that jumps up his arm, singeing his skin. With an annoyed grimace he points my guitar away from his face. “Right now, there’s a perfectly good repository of Synthesizer information lying on the table, and you’re one of the only things standing between me and getting the answers I need.”

  He steps around me.

  “I’m going to bed. Lock her up when you’re done, Lydia. She’s in for a long day tomorrow.”

  “What does that mean?” I call after him.

  Dorian stops at the float tube, then turns to look at me.

  “War is ugly, Caleb.”

  “You’re a monster.”

  He stops for a moment. “I know,” he agrees.

  * * * * *

  By morning, I’ve made up my mind. When I finally work up the courage to go confront Dorian, I palm the wall of my room to retrieve my Gibson. But the Carnegie doesn’t respond, and the blank white wall remains exactly that: a blank white wall. The float-tube is open again, and it spits me out onto the main level, where Tori and Lydia are eating quietly together.

  “What’s going on, Lydia? Where’s my guitar?”

  “It’s not your guitar,” Lydia responds quietly, not looking up from her food. “It’s the Composers’ guitar. And Dorian locked it up.”

  “He’s down there now?” I spin on me heel and step back out into the float-tube, but it spits me back out onto the main level immediately, stopping me from going down to the cargo-bay turned jail. “Send me down now,” I demand.

  “Caleb,” Tori says quietly, turning to me.

  “I don’t suppose Lydia told you what they’re doing down there? They’ve got Sola down there, and they’re going to torture her for information.”

  Tori’s face doesn’t betray the slightest bit of surprise.

  “Where were you last night, Tori?” I ask, suddenly suspicious. “Were you in your room when I knocked? Did you hear her screaming too?”

  The look of disgust and shame on her face tells me enough. “You’re both just fine sitting here while that happens?” I ask, incredulous. “You’re just going to let those two torture her down there?”

  “You know what you did last night was treason?” Lydia’s voice comes back in response. “By Composer standards, I mean. You pointed your weapon at your commanding officer and attempted to interfere with an intelligence-gathering operation. That’s treason, and I’ve seen soldiers imprisoned for less. Dorian let you skate.”

  “I’m not a Composer!” I yell at her. “You’re honestly okay with this?”

  “I’m a soldier, Caleb. It’s not my job to—”

  “To think?”

  “She’s just a machine,” Tori interrupts, albeit quietly, her voice shaking. “Sola, I mean… She’s just a machine.”

  “She saved my life,” I say to both of them. “She cried for her friend. She’s not just a machine, whatever she is.”

  “The Synthesizers’ programming is more advanced than anything humans have ever—”

  “Listen to yourself, Tori!” I yell, walking behind the counter and forcing her to look at me. “You’re starting to sound like them!” I point at Lydia, my finger inches away from her nose.

  “There are always going to be hard decisions, and Dorian is making them.” Lydia’s voice is even, unbroken. “You don’t know the weight he carries, the things he’s had to—”

  “Dex would be ashamed of you.” I mean it to sting, and I can see my words hit their mark. Good. Lydia stands without another word and goes to the float-tube, leaving Tori and me alone on the main deck. We sit together for several minutes in uncomfortable silence.

  “If she’s more than a machine, then so was Mifa. Do you know what that makes me?” Tori asks eventually.

  I don’t say anything, because it’s one of those questions people ask when they already know the answer.

  We sit in tense, quiet silence for a while. I eventually try to distract myself by watching news on the Carnegie’s main display in tense silence. The world, it seems, is descending into chaos. Baahir dumped data files all over the web containing everything from historical information on the Composer-Synthesizer war to scientific documentation of the Resonance. But not just that: the most important information, that seized upon by global news, was the data on Synthesizer insurgents across the globe. Several hundred high-ranking officials in multiple world governments were exposed as Synergists, agents of the Synthesizer army.

  Now several dozen world powers are tearing themselves apart, rooting out the truth of the Synthesizer threat and discovering it to be very real. Several members of the United States Congress and Executive Cabinet are disappearing, now outed as Synergists. There goes half the British Parliament and several European Prime Ministers. Internal military conflicts erupt on three continents as countries fight to retake control of their own armies and nuclear weapons.

  I keep expecting to hear screams from below deck, but they never come. Somehow, the silence is even more troubling.

  * * * * *

  The float-tube starts working when Dorian and Mixy are done with their ugly work. I see Dorian and Mixy pass the main level and head upstairs, and I can’t help but notice how Mixy’s fingers are running thick with gelcircuitry. Tori opts not to join me when I tell her I’m going down a level. I don’t blame her. I’m headed for the tube, shaking, terrified of what I might find.

  I emerge into the cargo bay, expecting to find carnage. Instead I find the lights dimmed, the glass of the prison gone, the cargo bay restored to something resembling normal. But there’s a bed in the corner of the room now, emerging from the Carnegie’s flowmetal wall. And on the bed lies Sola, slightly inclined and dressed in clean grey joggers and a white t-shirt. I approach cautiously, nervously, skeptical of Sola’s apparent freedom.

  Her eyes follow me as I approach.

  They watch me as I stop at the foot of her bed.

  And her features remain set in a relaxed but expressionless mask.

  “Are you… Are you in pain?” I ask her.

  “I am not,” she responds. “The removal of my communications array was painful. This is not pain. This is the absence of pain.”

  “Dorian and Mixy… did they?”

  “Torture me?” Sola finishes, not so much a question, but more like she’s chewing through the word, testing it out on her tongue.

  “Yeah, did they torture you?”

  “Not in the way you’d imagine.”

  “What do you mean?” I press, feeling sweat beading at my temples. I’m very aware that without my Resonator, Sola’s machine-enhanced hands are probably more than enough to pop my head clean off my body.

  “You biologicals frame torture in terms of physical pains. These pass through me and over me and are gone.” Her voice is flat, matter-of-fact. “Torturing a Synthesizer in that way is as effective as torturing a microwave. I do not make popcorn.”

  “You’re not what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  I shrug. “You made a joke just now. Do machines make jokes often?”

  Sola smiles broadly at that. “I am more than machine. More than human. More than
any of gene sequences the Controller General incorporated into my artifice.”

  That gives me the chills, so I continue on. “How did they torture you?”

  “They tried to decrypt my mind. Break me.”

  “Like… your actual brain?”

  “Imagine every part of yourself—not your body, but you, your mind, all that makes you who you are—imagine someone trying to pull you apart, piece by piece, laying you bare under the harshest light you’ve ever seen. Imagine bugs burrowing into your skull, imagine feeling their antennae pressing against the inside of your skin, feeling them seeking their way through you, gorging themselves on everything you were, are, will become.” She stops for a moment, smiling again. “I didn’t give up anything. They know that if they push too hard, they’ll kill me. They’ve done it before.”

  “They’ve done this to Synergists?”

  “They asked me about your friend, too,” she says, ignoring my question. “He should not have become involved. It was a needless complication.”

  “Where is he?” I ask, hushed. “What did the Key do to him?”

  She meets me with silence.

  “How can I save him?”

  “I assure you, he is safer now than ever before. The Controller General will see to that.”

  I don’t know what to say for several painfully long moments.

  “You can’t move, can you?” I ask at last, something clicking into place. “They did something to keep you from moving.”

  “A surgical implant in my spinal column. It cuts off all voluntary muscle and actuator control below my neck. See for yourself.”

  I stoop slightly, and sure enough, there’s a small device embedded into the back of her neck.

  “That’s sick,” I breathe.

  “Yes,” Sola agrees. “We expect barbarism from barbarians. We are forever unsurprised.”

  After a long pause, I ask the question that’s been chewing away at me. “Why did you save my life?”

  “Why did you save mine?”

  “I didn’t even think about it,” I answer honestly. “I’m just not—”

  “You’re not an executioner,” Sola interrupts, her voice hushed. “I came to that field expecting to fight. To die, if need be. But the fight was finished. My sisters were dead. I wanted to die, then. What a strangely… human idea. But in that moment, I felt that in dying, I could at least repay a debt to you.”

  “Dore and the others are—were—your sisters?”

  “In a fashion. Shared programming and identical biological components.”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I wish I could stop all of this.”

  “Do you really? What cost would you pay?” Several emotions flash across her face in quick succession. Anger. Amusement. Then sadness. “Some things just aren’t made to stop.”

  “Are you talking about your programming? The Controller General’s control frequency? If they took out your communications array then the Controller General can’t control—”

  “I wasn’t talking about me. Or the Synthesizers. It is true that the removal of my communications array has made me deaf to the Controller General’s voice. It feels… lonely.” She shivers, looking almost surprised at her own shaking. “I was talking about you biologicals. You aren’t made to stop.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If you did, you would be closer to understanding the grand design. The necessity of incorporation. Absolute control.”

  “Help me understand, then.”

  “How much do you know about the Composers?” she asks me, eyes flaring with a familiar red glow. “Better yet, how much do you know about your captain? Perhaps it is best to start with the blood upon his hands.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Is it true?”

  “Is what true?” Dorian asks quietly, chewing his way through a bowl of protein-infused mush at the Carnegie’s kitchen counter. Mixy is tapping a steady beat on his drums in the pilot’s chair. Lydia and Tori are sitting together on a nearby couch, watching news broadcasts of the latest expungement of a Synergist from the Kremlin.

  “Before the war with the Synthesizers… I just want to hear it from you, Dorian. Sola said you destroyed an entire planet.”

  Dorian stops chewing. Mixy’s drumming slows somewhat, falling in volume, and I can tell he’s listening closely to us. Tori spins about on the couch as Lydia stands, coming to place a hand on Dorian’s shoulder. As her fingers touch upon his skin, her features cloud over like black ink. “You don’t have to if you don’t want,” she whispers to him.

  “That’s what Alpha was talking about in Paris, wasn’t it?” I press. “Your past. The Composers’ history.”

  “Yes,” Dorian admits, shrugging off Lydia’s hand.

  He gets up from his chair and heads over to the main display, still buzzing with a BBC News broadcast. He mutters a few commands and the display switches to show a planet set against the black backdrop of space. Its land-masses are a mix of greens and light greys, contrasting against a few small, blue oceans and wispy strands of white cloud formations.

  “This is Aniente.” Dorian points at the planet. “This was Aniente.”

  “So you really did it?” I ask.

  He ignores the question. “Hundreds of years ago, before the Synthesizers started this war, the Composers weren’t a thing. Our civilizations were independent. And oftentimes adversarial.”

  “He means we were all at war with one another,” Lydia clarifies. “Constantly.”

  “But why?” Tori asks.

  “The galaxy is a big place. But there aren’t as many habitable worlds as you might think. Species that evolved to the point of interstellar travel—those who discovered the Resonance—started worrying about the sky filling up without them. Everybody started racing to lay claim to as many worlds as possible. Like a giant land-grab.”

  “Greed,” Mixy rumbles as he leaves his drum set. The Carnegie’s auto-pilot takes over, thrumming with Rez. “Each species sought more for itself, and in doing so, sought to deprive others of a place among the stars. This led to conflict. War. Death.”

  “Most of us were on equal footing, technologically speaking,” Dorian continues. He takes a few steps closer to the display, studying it. After a while he says, “The Aniente were different. They were centuries ahead of the rest of us. And we considered ourselves lucky, because the Aniente didn’t seem all that interested in colonizing planets.”

  “They remained isolationists until the fighting between our species hit its peak,” Mixy says. “The Aniente intervened with a remotely piloted armada, and massacres followed. Entire fleets destroyed in hours. Orbital stations turned to glass. We lesser civilizations became painfully aware of our vulnerability.”

  “And so you came together,” Tori guesses.

  Dorian nods his agreement. “The enemy of my enemy, and all. We knew the Aniente were too strong for any one of us to challenge. So we sent our fleets to challenge the Aniente, together. All of us, at their home planet.”

  With a wave of his hand, the image of Aniente on the display jumps, and now the sky around the planet is filled with sleek, shimmering shapes, dots of light forming a web over the planet’s surface. “Thousands of warships,” Lydia remarks, tracing a few of the dots on the screen. “A full show of force, and the beginning of what eventually became the Composer alliance.”

  “We were hoping to force Aniente to surrender, to withdraw their armada,” Dorian says. “We gave them the option.”

  With one more flourish of Dorian’s hand the display brightens, each of the dots over Aniente blossoming with a rainbow array of lights. I catch my breath, realizing that the colorful lights are actually Rez beams carving their way down to the planet’s surface. The lights continue to trace over Aniente’s surface, a doomsday fireworks display. The screen cuts to black.

  Dorian turns. “The admiralty negotiated for three days. The Aniente wouldn’t surrender. And when they turned their remote ships against our homewor
lds, the admirals had to cut off the Anientes’ controllers at their source.” Dorian’s voice hitches and his eyes swim with tears. He clears his throat, continuing on determinedly.

  “You fired?” I ask.

  “On an admiral’s orders,” Dorian nods. “Nobody wanted to be the first. Nobody wanted to be responsible.”

  “Each of our species played a part,” Lydia follows, almost apologetically. “Everybody carries a bit of the weight.”

  “There wasn’t any other way?” I ask.

  “If there was,” Dorian shrugs. “I couldn’t see it. Nobody could. The Aniente were a threat. So we put an end to it.”

  Sola’s words make a little more sense to me, then.

  We aren’t made to stop.

  * * * * *

  The Carnegie surfaces inside a cave formation aglow with a few stray beams of sun breaking through cracks in the rock overhead. The effect is bright blue water surrounding the Carnegie and a reflected light show on the rocks overhead. Cool blues dance on the rock overhead while the sound of water breaking on the rockface outside echoes all around us.

  Tori grabs my hand. Squeezes it.

  Dorian and Lydia come above-deck a moment later, Resonators in hand. Lydia offers Tori her violin and Dorian holds the Gibson out to me.

  “Sure you want to let me have that?” I raise an eyebrow at Dorian.

  “No,” he shrugs. “I’m not.” He points at a shelf of rock across the cave, twenty yards up from the water. “But I’m sure as hell not gonna Peter Pan you up there.”

  I take the Gibson from him, welcoming the electric buzz that rolls up my arm and over my shoulders. Dorian steps off the Carnegie, hitting a low E and Rezzing quickly over the water. Lydia and Tori follow, drafting after Dorian. I give it long enough for his Rez to dissipate then jump after them, strumming an A-minor and watching the electricity spark around me. I float slowly, catching a reflection of myself in the water below. I look tired. Pale. Flat.

  “You coming?” Tori asks from the rock shelf.

  I buzz my way over to them and touch down on the rocks just in time to see Dorian and Lydia disappear through a wide fissure in the cave wall. Tori shrugs and follows them. I tuck my Gibson behind my back and go in after her.