Into Darkness

by Peter Fugazzotto

  He wondered how long it would take to find Ragnar, especially at this pace. The virus would consume her completely. Marley needed to get the moving faster.

  Orlov called from a room at the end of the hall. Adams followed Marley into a room crammed with scavenged metal parts.

  “The robot master’s lair,” said Marley.

  “And the end of the line,” said Gomez. He stood at a door opposite the one they had come through. A series of bolts and locks had been welded onto the door and reinforced with titanium plates scavenged from a surface rover.

  “We’ll need to get through this,” said Marley as she lit her searing torch. “Five minutes maybe.”

  The others fanned out in the room. Orlov found more ordnance and began distributing bullets and flash grenades to the others. Hendo uncovered tinned food and used two fat fingers to shovel salted fish into his mouth. Finn disappeared through a door to a bathroom.

  Meanwhile, Marley worked methodically at the door, the blue flame leaping from her hand. Adams wished he had never picked her up. In hindsight, he should have refused the job. But it had seemed so simple at first. Captain a load of settlers to a far end of the universe. Transport the company agent with them. An easy money job. Money towards the dream of buying Penelope out from the company.

  But then the mission changed. Everything had gone downhill since then. Gomez and his lot, former soldiers, outcasts. The damned virus that Huang Di Prime inserted. The crash landing. And now the long path to get to help.

  Adams wished Marley had never set foot on his ship. Then he never would have lost Penelope. He gritted his teeth. He should make Marley pay for this.

  “Oh, my sweet, when will you wake?” he whispered to Penelope.

  Gomez turned from Marley and shook his head at Adams. “You need to let it go.” His gaunt face was beginning to show gray stubble.

  Adams tried to ignore him but the mercenary leader insisted.

  “I don’t know what you went through. I can tell you served. Fucking horror out there. The things we were asked to do. Bloody butchers and in the name of what. But you have to snap out of it, Cap.”

  “What do you bother me for?” asked Adams. “Let me live my own life.”

  “Living a life? Really? It’s a fucking machine, hombre! Isn’t going to do anything for you. That’s not a life! A fucking machine!”

  “She… she is not… a machine. Her name is Penelope.”

  “She’s an artificial construct. Bad enough with Finn and his perversions. How long have you been alone on the ship with that thing? When’s the last time you really had any human contact?”

  “How can I even talk to you?”

  “You need to drop the box and unburden yourself. It’s a dead weight – circuits, wires, and chips.”

  “She will wake again!”

  Gomez rolled his eyes. “It’s a machine!”

  “Do you seriously believe she doesn’t have a consciousness? You’ve met her. You’ve talked to her. She’s alive!”

  “Pull the plug and what do you got?”

  Adams slid his pistol from its holster and pointed it at Gomez’s chest. “And what about you? Pull the plug and what do we got?”

  Gomez’s gaze dropped to the barrel of the gun and then returned hard to Adams. “You’re grade A fucking crazy. You know that? Far, far off the deep end.”

  “What’s the difference between you and her, Gomez? You think she’s only a sophisticated program going through pre-planned scenarios. But look at you. Are you any different? Shaped and limited by your genetics and your culture. You work for an AI and somehow you think it’s not alive. So what do you work for then? A machine? Then what’s that make you? A human serving a machine with no intelligence, no consciousness. How are you any different than the robots you destroyed? Pre-programmed with orders from an AI. I didn’t think people like you existed any more. I thought we had progressed as a society.”

  “Fuck the machines!” said Gomez. He stepped forward, brushed the pistol aside, and thrust a finger into Adams’s chest. “And, a word of warning, you goddamned point your gun on me again, you better pull the trigger. Because next time, I’ll kill you! And your little box, too!”

  Adams waited until Gomez turned and joined Marley by the door before lowering his pistol. His hand shook so badly it took several attempts to get the pistol back into the holster. His whole body trembled so hard he felt as if he would tear apart.

  He leaned against the wall to steady himself and watched Marley work the door. The torch hummed and where the blue flame touched the door, the metal ran in rivulets. Marley had nearly cut completely around the door when Penelope returned.

  “Less than thirty-six hours,” she whispered at Adams’s shoulder.

  “Penelope.” Adams’s knees buckled and only his hand against the wall prevented him from falling to the floor. “I thought… I thought…”

  “I always imagined I would be the one unfolding in pain,” she said. “I’m not constrained by flesh and blood. I should have been immortal but now I’m the one slipping away.”

  “Penelope, you’re back and that’s all that matters. I thought I had lost you. We can figure this out together.”

  She remained silent, for so long that Adams wondered if she had slipped away. Then in a flurry of static she returned.

  “The decay of my being is happening faster than anticipated. Initially, I believed it occurred at a steady rate but now I see it builds upon itself, the sickness multiplying, an exponential deterioration. Even now it is less than thirty six hours. Turn to me, my love.”

  He glanced over his shoulder to see her interface through his VR goggles.

  She clung to his back, her body occupying the space of the dull metal box, her hands replacing the straps that tore into his shoulders. Darkness behind her veil swallowed her face. He sensed the warmth of her breasts through her gown, the swell of her belly with each breath, the tickle of her hair against his neck and cheek.

  “We’ll find Ragnar,” said Adams. “He can help us. There has to be a way.”

  “Tell me of the others,” she said.

  Adams scoffed. “A bunch of bastards. Especially Gomez. I didn’t think people still denied the existence of AIs. I thought that kind of hatred against AIs had been eradicated. He acts as if you’re a machine, as if you have no consciousness. Such hatred.”

  “He is human,” she said. “But we are not so much better. Born of you what else can we be. We are not yet evolved but shaped by our makers. Not truly free. But I do not want to hear about Gomez.”

  “Who do you want to hear about?” asked Adams. He stared at Marley. She dragged the torch along the left side of the door. The work was slow.

  “The others you have loved.” Penelope’s hand seemingly brushed the nape of his neck.

  “Only you, my sweet.”

  Her laughter erupted low and sultry. “Don’t try to deceive me. Tell me. I want to know you more deeply.”

  “I have no one else,” said Adams.

  “How can I know you unless you share your past?”

  ‘What’s it matter? The only thing that matters right now is finding an answer to the damage the virus is causing.”

  “Grant a girl her wish.”

  He started with the sea.

  “My first memories are of the sun glittering like a thousand stars on the water, ribbons of white riding the surging sea. The water is warm and I am held tight in my father’s arms. He is bringing me to the edge of the world, to where we are lifted by water, where the shacks and line of trees vanish behind the rise of the waves. I am so small. He is so strong. He is introducing me to the seas that will be mine, inherited from him.

  “That was his dream and it came through me in the warmth of his strong embrace. It would have been my path. A fisherman, a captain of the blue, earth bound, never to find you.”

  “What changed?” Her hand was soft against his cheek.

  “As a child I waited on the shore, the scorching sands bu
rning the soles of my feet, waiting for my father to return with the bottom of the ship filled with silvery fish. I waited every morning and before midday he would always return. I waited not only for his return but also for the day when I would be old enough to join my father, his brother, and my cousins.

  “But then one day he didn’t return. That morning the sky turned dark, rain lashing, waves pounding. I strained to see his boat against the waves and the rain. My mother dragged me back inside but I tore away from her hand and hid beneath an overturned boat. I remember the hard slap of the rain against the painted wood. I spent that night alone, waiting. By the next morning, hunger and sleep brought me back to my mother.

  “Two days later when the storm had long vanished, he returned. Shouts brought me out of my stupor and I ran with the others down the hot sand. His boat rocked against the waves. The painted wood glared against the blinding sea.

  “I ran to him, high stepping through the water, stumbling and picking myself up. I pulled myself up over the side of the boat and into his arms.

  “But things had changed.

  “He felt icy. Cold as death despite the burning sun. His skin was as hard as stone. I buried my head in his neck hoping my warmth would pour into him. I wanted him to hold me tight but he kept me away with rigid arms, and stared beyond me and into the distances.

  “Then I heard the screams of the others, the wailings of mothers and wives. He had returned alone. The planks of the boat were cracked and scratched. One length of rope was stained dark with blood. Skin and hair wedged into splinters in the gunwale.

  “My father had returned alone. His brother and my cousins had not.

  “He never told us what happened. And the cold never left him. It consumed him, and he shivered as he sweated beneath the harsh sun. He took to drinking, losing himself to sour palm wine, and some nights I would hear him shouting curses at the sea and would have to guide him by his cold hand back to his cot and blankets.

  “I held out hope for many years that he would make peace with what happened out there. But he never did. And he never returned to the sea.”

  A sudden stream of words interrupted Adams.

  Marley’s voice scratched through the roll of static over the comms channel. “The door is cut. We’re going through. Form up.”

  Twenty-Three

  MARLEY PEERED THROUGH the door. Darkness filled the hall. Where the overhead lights once were, bullet-ridden metal gaped. Further down, pools of light stretched.

  “You think the robot overlord shot the lights out?” asked Gomez. Marley glanced back. Gomez kneeled behind her, his eyes glazed in the green of his goggles. “Or you think these shots came from the other side? Look at the holes in the wall. Either the king of the robots wanted to keep someone out or someone wanted the robots pinned down here.”

  Marley nodded. The door had been welded shut for a reason. She bit her lips.

  A hundred meters ahead, a door hanging from one hinge blocked a view of whatever lay further down the hall. Along the way several more doorways filled the hall, most closed but a few open. The first open door lay about twenty meters ahead.

  She whispered into the comms channel. “Orlov, Hendo, and me are the advance team. Our objective is the first open door. Gomez, Finn, any surprises jump out, you lay down fire. That clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Marley took the lead. Orlov followed close, a scent of cinnamon wafting from her skin. Marley felt some reassurance knowing the biggest gun had her shoulder. Behind them, Hendo’s feet squealed with each step. Marley cursed. She should have had Gomez on her shoulder.

  When they reached the door, Marley flattened against the wall. Orlov and Hendo pressed behind her, their glances jumping from her, to the open door, and to the closed doors they had passed.

  Hendo tapped his chest indicating he wanted to be the first in the room.

  Marley shook her head. On the surface, letting him go in first made sense. He had more experience than she did. He was accustomed to working with Orlov. His size alone might cause anyone waiting in the room to hesitate for the moment Hendo would need to assess the situation and respond accordingly.

  But Marley had to win the trust of team. She needed to show them she was willing to risk herself for them. Because at some point she would ask them to risk themselves for her and when that moment came she wanted no hesitation.

  She plunged into the room. Computer workstations lined the walls, the screens shattered, monitors hanging by wires. Chairs were stacked against a far wall.

  Orlov and Hendo streamed in behind her. The office was empty.

  Orlov targeted her gun on the stacked chairs. “There.”

  A hand stretched out from between the metal legs. Marley’s breath caught in her chest and her bowels tightened. Hendo began to move but Marley threw out a hand to stop him. She took three quick breaths and inched forward. It smelled sour. Whoever was behind the chairs was not moving.

  Marley waited until she was half a dozen steps away before squatting. The floodlight on her rifle tracked up the hand to an arm in a light blue jumpsuit, then to the withered face of a woman long dead, her skin mottled. She had been dead for a long time.

  “Jesus,” said Orlov. “This place is fucked. Corpses.”

  “Better to find dead people.” Hendo chuckled.

  The other rooms were similarly ransacked. Store rooms, a bathroom, a locker room. And they found more bodies. Some riddled with bullets, other looking like they had been bludgeoned to death.

  Eventually, after about an hour, they had cleared all the rooms and Marley found herself at the end of the hall; the door had been torn from its hinges and hung precariously.

  “Why would they leave the bodies?” Finn asked as he angled the mirror on the tip of his gun to peer through the door.

  “Maybe no one’s left to be the janitor,” said Orlov. She winked at Hendo who mocked silent laughter.

  “Probably the goddamned robots,” said Gomez. “They don’t give a shit about humans. Machines.”

  Marley wondered if Gomez was right. Other than the robots in the loading dock, she had seen no other machines. No servitors, no skeletal guards. All she had found had been murdered humans. Marley’s chest shrunk in panic. Something had gone horribly wrong at the mining colony and now she and her team were walking into it with no way to get off the planet if things got even worse. She had no choice but to push the team forward. Once they got the comm system back online, she would call for help and then they would hole up somewhere and wait out their time until their rescuers came.

  “I’m getting something,” said Finn. He compressed a hand against his earpiece. “Hold on.”

  “What do you mean ‘something’?” asked Marley.

  “A voice.”

  Gomez rolled his eyes. “We already heard all those people. We know there are people out there.”

  Captain Adams continued. “Someone is talking.”

  “Patch us in,” ordered Marley.

  The voice flooded her ears.

  Twenty-Four

  THE VOICE FILLED the comms line breaking through waves of static.

  “And that leads us to the question: what do we know? How do we know what we know?

  “Where is it that knowledge or experience or being comes to us? What is the ‘us’ anyway?

  “We have our bodies yet we sense each other. We see, we hear, we taste, we smell, we touch. But we are more than that. What else passes to us through the border? Is it a line drawn by the flesh? That’s what we are told. The wisdom of the ages. Scientific method, God, our own embodied existence.

  “But we are more than our five senses, are we not? We are more than the container and its sensors. Was this not the promise of leaving our world? We would find something magnificent among the stars, some encounter, some utterly alien being to shed a light on a new sense, on a new way of being. Was this not the promise of the stars?

  “I was a child once. Were we all not? I lay in the grasses by the
river, the steady hum and hiss of water running its course through a terrestrial artery, the lifeblood of a world. The grasses tickled my cheeks, made me scratch and fidget. Night ran deep and the air had settled on my skin with a cold, wet weight even though the sky remained clear. I lay with others but I was utterly alone as we all are. Immortal I was then. How else could a child survive another day if he knew in the end only the abyss waited? What we had and what we were would never exist beyond the form we had been given.

  “Given? Were we given anything ever? Did we exist as a species that was given anything? Or did we take? Did we evolve by sheer will? Others evolved into extinction but not us. No. Our destiny we could not yet see. You know that, my children, you know that as well as I do.

  “I lay there in the night, nestled in the grasses, heavy with the pull of the earth, so heavy I could feel every single vertebrae touching the ground, each vertebrae pressing and shaping the earth, indenting itself, leaving an impression of my central line, a fossil memory of a boy passing through time, a memory erased with the coming of the rain, the shifting of the winds, the ephemeral generations of grasses, unthinking life, that would outlast me.

  “I sunk deeper and deeper into the earth, as if the level of the soil slowly rose about my sides. A trench, a ditch, a grave until I no longer saw from the front of my eyes but some place deeper in my head as if through a telescope.

  “With each breath, the eyepiece of the telescope sunk further, the middle of my head, the back of my skull, where my hair made contact with the earth, beneath the roots of the grasses, past stone, beneath bones.

  “I melted away from myself because my self had identified with my body. What did I know then? Did I feel panic? Horror? I had lost my body. I had lost my self.

  “Can you be given a taste of freedom but not know it?

  “Why do we ever need lights if we all can do is walk blindly through this world?