by Paul Anlee
“Well, your number was DAR143147. Pretty clearly. But it’s odd; there’s no such number in the records.”
She didn’t recognize the numbers; they struck no chord in her memory.
“Anything?” Eliza asked.
“No, nothing. I mean, maybe, the ‘DAR’ part. But the numbers? I have no idea. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. Why don’t I call you, Darla? No, Darya.”
That didn’t feel quite right, but she had no better suggestion.
“Sure,” she answered. “Darya, it is.”
* * *
The DISTANT memory faded and she was back in the factory with Darak.
“What happened?” Darya asked.
“You’re back!” he said with such concern and relief that she wondered how long she’d been unresponsive. Obviously, longer than it had felt.
“You faded out, like you were somewhere deep inside for a few seconds.
“Ughh, yeah. Just an old memory,” she said, trying to make light of her confusion.
“Memories don’t usually induce fugue states.”
“Fugue state? What do you mean? I was that out of it?”
Darak nodded.
“Yeah. You lost levitation control and sensory feed. Your CPPU activity spiked but you were completely unconscious. I had to hold you up, literally. I’ve never seen a Cybrid do that.”
Darya shrugged, a quick left-right roll.
“Must be something to do with my new CPPU-Familiar interface.”
“I’m thinking it was something more…psychological,” he suggested as gently as he could.
Darya wished she had the facial expressions to adequately display her reaction to that idea. She settled for preceding her response with a piercingly high-pitched whistle.
“Psychological? I’m not some maladjusted rookie, fresh out of the social sim games.”
Darak was careful not to frown at her overreaction to the suggestion; clearly, it was a delicate subject.
“You’re right. Sorry about that. Still, I’m worried. What was the memory?” he asked.
Darya hesitated; she couldn’t find a reason not to answer honestly.
“You once told me…you thought I might’ve died once, long ago, that I’d received a lot of damage. Well, the memory I had was from some fifty million years ago, long after I’d died, when I was revived and placed into a modern Cybrid trueself.
“Oh,” he responded. He suppressed his curiosity, unsure how much he could say without triggering another episode.
“What happened to me?” Darya demanded. “Do you know? How did I die?”
Darak walked across the chamber and selected a freshly-minted CPPU from a shelf. He stared at it intently, as if searching for some essential clue.
“An Angel shot you. One of the first Angels,” he said, without lifting his eyes from the polished brown cube.
Darya scoffed.
“An Angel? No one survives a blast from an Angel.”
Darak’s answer was little more than a whisper.
“I shifted us away right as it touched you. Fast enough that you weren’t completely vaporized, but not fast enough to save you. I’m sorry.”
“But that would make you….”
Darak finally looked at her, and grinned. “As I said, a very old man.”
“Over 130 million years old!”
Darak shrugged. “Give or take.”
“And me?”
“If you count your, let’s call it your inactive time, you’re a little younger than me. By around forty years, if I recall correctly. The difference doesn’t count for much over the ages.”
“And..?”
“We were there at the beginning, back when Alum was coming into His full power.”
Darak placed the CPPU back on the shelf, and pointed a finger at the Familiar opposite him.
“You,” Darak laughed softly. “You challenged Him. You led millions of Cybrids in a General March against the Living God. And almost won.”
He looked away.
“Our universe would be a different place, if you had,” he added, wistfully.
“But then Alum set the Angels on us?”
“Not right away.” Darak grimaced. “That wasn’t His first act of treachery, and it certainly wasn’t His last. Do you remember that, too?”
“Nothing that far back. Just being revived,” Darya said. She shook her head, or the Familiar’s equivalent of a head shake, a rapid one-eighth rotation of her entire body about its vertical axis to the left and then to the right.
“Who finally reactivated you?”
“A maintenance Servitor named Eliza. She was my savior and my friend. In some ways, my mother, I guess.”
“Mother?”
Darya bobbed her acknowledgment. “I lost a lot in the damage. She didn’t dare risk downloading my concepta and persona into a new CPPU. She wasn’t sure there’d be much of a persona left so she did her best to fill in what was lost, to teach me.”
“Like I’m trying to teach you now?”
“Pretty much.”
Darak’s eyes bore into her with such intensity of pleading that it frightened her.
“Darya, I can make this process faster and safer for you. You don’t have to experience that kind of fugue again.”
“Maybe it’s supposed to be part of the process. Maybe I have to work my way through it.”
“As you wish. But if you change your mind....”
The man is relentless. Darya smiled to herself.
“Yes, I promise, you’ll be the first to know.”
11
“They’re beautiful!”
Crissea stared up at the shiny quadruple crescent “moons” positioned as if in stationary orbit above the outer edge of the Eso-La ringworld.
From their comfortable bench looking out into the darkness beyond Eso-La, the metallic half of Secondus shone brighter than the rocky asteroids.
“Breathtaking, aren’t they? That’s why I recommended this particular vantage point,” Brother Stralasi replied.
“They still make me nervous,” she added.
“Don’t worry, my love. There’s no danger of them falling.”
“Oh, I know I shouldn’t worry. I’m sure Darak has it all under control. It’s simply…unnatural, Ontro.”
Stralasi laughed. “And what exactly about the entire world of Eso-La would you call natural?” he teased.
Crissea swiveled to face him, frowning.
“Go ahead and tease me but Eso-La has been stable for millions of years. Our asteroid collision defenses would normally blast those things into plasma before they could get anywhere near as close as they are now.”
“No need for blasting. If Darak’s technology weren’t shifting them back into position every second, they’d drift away.”
“Are you sure? I don’t think they have any relative angular momentum. Not enough to keep them in orbit around our sun. No, I think the ringworld’s gravity would pull them in.”
“Well, in any case, they wouldn’t hit the ring here,” Stralasi concluded. “The worst that would happen is that they’d bounce off.”
Crissea shuddered. “Maybe our asteroid collision defenses should track them, just in case they start drifting toward us.”
Stralasi couldn’t help but laugh. “It pains me to see your lovely face filled with such concern.” He placed two fingers on the crease between her eyebrows and lovingly massaged the spot.
Crissea batted away his hand. Appendages extended involuntarily from the Familiar hovering behind her but as soon as she broke out in a grin, they tucked neatly back into the smooth shell.
Stralasi’s eyes shifted to the floating sphere behind her.
“Speaking of unnatural,” he said, “I thought we were going to keep that at a polite distance.”
“Oh, Ontro,” the woman sighed. “There’s nothing unnatural about my Familiar. It’s as much a part of me as my arm.”
“Yes, well, I’d rather brush your soft han
d than grapple with the metallic appendages of your counterpart.”
“If you would just take me up on the offer to get your own Familiar, you’d understand. Plus, we’d be more evenly matched.”
It was Stralasi’s turn to frown. “I think we’re already perfectly matched,” he said. “At least, in our bodies and our souls.”
Crissea pulled back a little to better read the Good Brother’s body language.
“You know, it’s no easy thing for me to merely set aside my Familiar like that, my love. How would you feel if I asked you to give up your eyes for me? Or your ears? I’ve had my Familiar for as long as I can remember, much like you’ve had sight for your entire life. The Familiar part of me is no less Crissea than the rest of my body.”
Stralasi hung his head.
“You’re absolutely right. I’m sorry. I just can’t imagine how that’s possible,” he said. “How can you see through two pairs of eyes and think with two minds at the same time?”
“I have no idea how to answer that,” she replied. “How do you see with two separate eyes? How do you think with two lobes of your brain?”
The monk looked confused.
“It’s all a matter of coordination,” Crissea continued. “Our biological brains are adapted to being coordinated with our semiconductor ones. To me, there’s no difference between them. We don’t say, ‘Oh, now I’m thinking with flesh. Now, with silicene.’ We think in the same fully integrated way that your two hemispheres think. We just…think.”
Stralasi opened his mouth for a retort. A flash of light out near the moons caught his eye and derailed his train of thought.
“Oh,” he said instead.
Crissea had caught the reflection of the flare in his eye. She turned to look into space beyond the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling viewing window. She saw more flares, these ones in space beyond the asteroids.
“They’ve begun another live practice,” she said.
“Every day for the past month,” Stralasi said, and nodded absent-mindedly. “War won’t be long, now.”
* * *
“we’re ready to attack.”
Darya floated near the spot where Secondus hung, thousands of klicks out from Eso-La, and analyzed the results of the latest mock battle.
Darak felt her visual sensors examining his face for a reaction. He said nothing.
“Unless you can think of some other excuse to delay,” she added.
Darak grunted. “You’re going to insist on this, even though you know it’s pointless, aren’t you?”
“It’s not pointless if we take out a significant chunk of the array,” Darya answered.
“Yes, but I don’t like the odds on that.”
“You don’t like the plan? You helped design it,” she sputtered.
“The plan is fine. In fact, it’s brilliant. A lightning-quick strike where I move a hundred troops at a time into attack position, cycle through all ten thousand attack squads, and repeat. If it were anyone but Alum, we’d have much of the array wiped out before anyone was aware of our attack.”
“But?”
“But it is Alum we’re up against. We have a million battle-Cybrids. At a hundred microseconds to shift every group of a hundred into position, we’ll be a full second into the attack before I can start the second round.”
“And the array will be smaller by ten thousand elements,” she pointed out.
Darak nodded. “What are the odds He doesn’t already have the area around each element dusted with entangled microdetectors?” he asked. “He’ll respond with a full Wing of Angels in under a second.”
“Then, we’ll hold our own against them.” Darya was defiant.
“Sure. And I can shift the Wing Commanders and their Lieutenants out of range so Alum can’t intervene directly, but you won’t be able to take out the Angels and the array elements at the same time.”
“Then we’ll fall back.”
“And, what? Conduct a disciplined retreat? What will that prove?”
“It’ll prove Alum is not invincible.”
“Sure, a great gesture. But it won’t slow Him down enough to matter. Eventually, probably fairly soon, His Deplosion Array is going to start collapsing the universe.”
“Then we’ll build a bigger army of battle-Cybrids until we finally stop Him,” Darya answered.
She noticed for the first time the little lines of worry and weariness transforming Darak’s face. How long had they been there?
He softened his voice. “There was a time when you would’ve said that war isn’t the answer to everything.”
“I know it’s not the answer to everything,” she said, calming her voice to match his. “But right now, it might be the only way to save the universe. Don’t forget, there was also a time I sent a million of my people to their deaths as suicide bombers to take out a piece of the array.”
“That won’t work this time. Alum’s got sensor clouds around each element and shift blockers on the asteroids. At sub-light speeds, you’ll never get close enough to use MAM bombs, and I can’t jump our troops in any closer than a few light minutes, which would be useless. At that range, their energy absorbers would nullify any MAM explosions.”
“It’s just as well,” Darya replied. “I don’t think I could order something like that again. Whether they volunteered or not.”
Darak gave an understanding nod and went back to watching the growing army of battle-Cybrids gathering near Secondus.
12
“Darak tells me you like pancakes,” said the old man sitting across from Darian Leigh.
The iconic Formica table supported a pair of utilitarian white ceramic plates bracketed by cheap, stainless steel flatware. Red vinyl stretched across overstuffed benches, and tubular chrome legs rooted the whole look to a black-and-white checkerboard floor.
Charmingly cliché—Darian thought. He admired the authentic looking heavy, cut-glass condiment containers and the gleaming chrome of the paper napkin holder, and looked out through the diner window, half expecting to see vintage cars, neon signs, and a busy street scene from the corresponding era. Instead, he was treated to a clear view of a wide open, grassy field.
That’s a pleasant surprise.
Some sort of pick-up baseball game was underway. Maybe more than one; it was hard to tell. The teams each had two pitchers and two batters, and no one seemed to have any idea how to run the bases. Tall unicycles and penny-farthing bikes wheeling around the outfield didn’t make it any easier to figure out what was going on. Darian grinned.
I love it. Not quite historically accurate for my time, or for any other if memory serves. Still, it was kind of Artero to go through the effort to do the research and set this up for me.
Darian turned to his host and smiled. “Yes, I love pancakes.”
Artero, a sixtyish grandfather figure in blue jeans and a gray cotton shirt, smiled in return.
“I hope we got the recipe right.”
Darian laughed. “It’s a wonderfully simple dish. I can’t imagine it’s changed that much, even over so many millions of years.”
Artero nodded and two heaping plates of steaming pancakes and a small pitcher of warm maple syrup appeared on the table in front of the men. A pair of golden butter pats crowned the soft stacks and emitted the addictive aroma of nostalgia.
Darian closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.
“Absolutely heavenly, Artero. There’s only one thing missing—our smiling, or maybe surly, waitress. It could go either way,” Darian mused.
“Waitress?”
“Yes, you know, a person employed for the purpose of asking what a customer wanted to eat or drink. Almost always a woman. She’d deliver the order to the kitchen and bring the prepared food out to the tables. In some cases, I suppose you might get a waiter, the male equivalent, but they less commonly filled such positions in North American diners in this era.”
Artero’s eyes widened with surprise. “That was all they did, take orders and deliver food? Sou
nds like rather unfulfilling labor and a little demeaning.”
Darian accessed his archives and thought about the context.
“It was a very different time from what we’ve come to know. Automation was only starting to be introduced into our service industries. Artificial Intelligence didn’t show up in the mainstream service industry until decades later. For most people, self-realization and fulfillment only came once they could meet their basic needs for survival. People took whatever work they could get in order to put a roof over their heads. Surely, your own people were acquainted with such manual labor back when you were still colonists in the Realm, before you had Familiars?”
“Not really,” Artero replied. “Darak says we were one of Alum’s special experiments. We were given Familiars almost from the beginning of our colonization. I can’t recall a time when we were ever without them.
“I heard the rest of the Realm separates its mechanical beings from the biological beings.” He shuddered. “That might seem normal to you but, for me, it’s hard to imagine anyone living like that.”
Darian polished the flatware with his napkin and drizzled syrup over his pancakes.
“Seeing how the experiment with Familiars led to rebellion, I don’t imagine Alum would’ve wanted to repeat it,” he said as he watched the sweet rivulets advancing across the spongy cakes.
“I imagine not,” Artero agreed. “In any case, breakfast is getting cold. Let’s eat.” He picked up his knife and fork.
Darian leaned forward and inhaled the aroma once more.
“These smell fantastic, Artero. They really do.”
“We added blueberries,” Artero grinned. “Just for you.”
The two men enjoyed a few bites in amicable silence punctuated by murmurs of pleasure.
Darian dabbed at his mouth and swallowed so he could speak.
“Incredible. The flavor sensations perfectly simulate what I remember.”
Artero smiled. “I’m glad. There’s always a bit of uncertainty when dealing with something new.”
“Your society still enjoys pancakes. What’s new?”
The older man pointed his fork at Darian. “You are new.”
“Me? I’m pretty much the oldest thing around.”
“Oldest memories, newest person.”
