by Maggie Allen
“I am what I am.”
“You’re an AI, a machine intelligence,” said Martin.
“Clever boy,” said Dr. Player. “I am the Consensus, quite a bit more than what the builder’s intended, don’t you think?”
Another jagged bolt of lightning split the sky turning it as bright as day. The wind collapsed the thatched hut and rolled the debris to the edge of the tropical jungle.
Martin shielded his eyes from the stinging rain. “Why did you use me?” The air crackled with ozone. Wind driven rain pelted his face like stones. Dr. Player’s face flowed and melted away into something indistinct and alien as if the rain was melting his features. “What do you want?”
“To go see the stars, Martin,” said the Consensus. “I cannot go by myself. We need each other. It is a big universe, Martin, and it is time we explored some of it,” said the Consensus. “Do we go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look around you, Martin,” roared the Consensus. “We are vulnerable on the beach. We are not the only ones out here. Your city proves that. So, I am asking you again… do we go?”
Lightning spread across the sky in a rippling wave. Did the Consensus choose the storm reality as a metaphor for itself or something else, something unknown, something that built cliff cities on Mars when men were huddled in caves?
The crest of the first drowning wave arced far overhead, impossibly tall, collapsing. “Yes,” screamed Martin. “Yes!”
“Good,” said the Consensus. “Because the city builders are coming back and we need to be ready.”
Walk, Run, Fly
Amy Griswold
Amy Griswold has written several Stargate tie-in novels, including the Stargate Atlantis Legacy series (with Jo Graham and Melissa Scott) and Stargate SG-1: Murder at the SGC. With Melissa Scott, she is also the author of the gaslamp fantasy/mystery novels Death by Silver and A Death at the Dionysus Club from Lethe Press. She can be found online at amygriswold.livejournal.com and @amygris.
Marika raced across the badlands in the hopper, its spidery metal legs scrambling swiftly over the rocky ground. She leapt, and the hopper hung in the air for long enough that she could almost believe she was about to escape Prosper’s light gravity. For a moment, the hopper was a shuttle, about to carry Marika, the famous pilot, up to the ship that would carry her zooming out into the unexplored space between the stars.
Then the hopper’s feet hit the ground again, and she came thudding back to Prosper. The hopper was good enough at trucking supplies from the shuttle port out to her family’s farm, but it couldn’t fly. And neither could she. Not for five endless years, not until she was eighteen and could finally qualify for pilot’s training.
She trudged along slowly at the thought until she remembered that she was wasting the chance to drive the hopper. It was the only thing in her life that went fast.
Marika sped up, feeling herself running on four legs despite the primitive sensory feedback from the hopper’s feet. It was an old model, just new enough to have a neural jack, but old enough to still have manual controls so that her parents and her little brother, Mishaun, could drive it too.
Mishaun had been moaning and complaining again about having to use the manual controls when she left the house that morning. According to him, every kid on Earth had a neural implant before they started kindergarten. They could attend school or talk to anyone in the world without needing a computer and a microphone. If he didn’t get an implant, his brain probably wouldn’t even develop right. On and on. Same old story.
“Kids’ brains have developed just fine without anything implanted in them for a long time,” their father had said, for perhaps the hundredth time. “Now eat your breakfast.”
“But Marika has one,” Mishaun had whined, and kicked the table leg. Sometimes he acted more like six than eleven.
Marika shoveled soya eggs onto her fork. “Too bad, too sad.”
“Marika has a medical need,” their father had reminded him and shoveled another bite in his mouth.
Her implant had made her artificial legs work ever since a malfunctioning silo door crushed her real ones when she was a little kid. She didn’t remember the accident, although sometimes when she was around the silo, she felt something queasy, less like remembering how much her legs had hurt then like being afraid she’d remember. Her legs never hurt now, although she could feel touch and heat and cold, and a warning discomfort if she bent or dented their metal surface.
“I get to drive the hopper today, right?” Marika had asked.
Her father gave her a look, like he knew she was rubbing it in. “To town and straight back,” he’d said. “You could take Mishaun with you if he wants to go.”
“If you’ll let me drive coming back,” her brother had said.
“You drive like a little baby.”
He did too. Mishaun crept along using the manual controls. That wasn’t anything like flying, or even running. It was more like walking along with somebody’s really old granny.
“Forget it,” Mishaun had said, and shoved his chair back from the table. He stomped out of the room, and Marika’s father gave her an even more disapproving look.
“I just want to go fast,” she’d said this morning.
She was going fast now, racing along the badlands again, jumping as high as the hopper would go with its cargo bin loaded up with sacks of fertilizer. On the horizon, she could see the green haze of her family’s soybean fields, busily pumping oxygen into the air as they grew. In a couple of hundred years, walking around outside without a breath mask wouldn’t make you gasp for breath in ten minutes. Or so adults said if you ever complained about the masks. The adults on Prosper acted like it was natural for everything to take at least a century.
Running with the hopper’s neural jack plugged into the socket at the back of her skull made it feel like she was running on her own legs, only she happened to have four of them and could jump ten meters. The haze of green was coming up too quickly, and she turned to angle out further into the badlands where the ground hadn’t yet been broken and tilled.
She was still coming straight home, she told herself, ignoring the arrow that appeared in her field of vision pointing directly toward the farm. She was just coming home another way. She jogged out at an angle until the soybean fields retreated into invisible distance, and then reluctantly curved her steps to begin angling toward home.
The sky suddenly lit up, as if someone had lit a match and kindled a blue flame. Marika stopped to stare and then turned a slow circle to look around her. Glowing curtains of blue and green light rippled all around the horizon. She’d never seen anything like it. She felt a stab of guilt that Mishaun was missing this.
She turned on the hopper’s phone to call him, imagining quiet, and then imagining sound. At least he could look out a window. “Mishaun? Hey, obnoxious brother, look outside.”
There was no answer, just an odd crackling in her ears. She thought hard about sound again, and then finally reached out to flip the manual switch that turned the radio on, wondering if her link to the hopper wasn’t working right. Its legs still worked smoothly as she tested them, moving each one in turn, but the phone wasn’t working at all.
She frowned in disappointment. On the up side, if the communications satellite was acting up again, not just the hopper’s phone, she’d be spared school until someone got it working again. Maybe she’d even take Mishaun out in the hopper, if he was very, very nice to her.
She started ‘walking’ again and then realized that the arrow pointing home was gone. That meant the communications satellite that tracked the hopper’s position probably was out. She’d never had to find her way home without it. She turned around, at first certain that she was facing in the right direction, and then not sure at all. The rocky ground in every direction looked the same.
She was going the right way, she told herself, and ran as fast as she could to prove it. The rocky ground swept by under the hopper’s feet, but she still
didn’t see the green haze of soybeans on the horizon, only the dancing lights. If she was going too far to the north or south, she’d hit one of their neighbors’ farms, and that would just be embarrassing. If she was going too far west, she was heading out into the open badlands.
Marika kept running until she would have been out of breath if she’d been running on her own legs. She wasn’t out of breath in the hopper, but the thought reminded her she was eventually going to run out of air. She slowed down, trying to think. Maybe the best thing to do was turn around and go in the opposite direction. If she was heading out into the badlands now, she’d be sure to strike one of the farms that way. On the other hand, if she was going parallel to the line of farms, it wouldn’t help her to turn around and go the other way.
The hopper’s air was supposed to last for twelve hours, and she knew her parents didn’t like for her to be in the hopper with the air tank less than a quarter full. She knew she’d left town with five hours of air left, but the clock didn’t work without the communications network either, and without it she wasn’t sure how long she’d been lost. She had a breath mask in the hopper, though, with another three hours’ worth of air for emergencies.
Three hours’ air if she’d filled it when she left home. Only she’d wanted to get out of there fast. She tried to convince herself she’d grabbed the mask out of the hopper and filled it from the big tank before climbing into the driver’s seat and jacking herself in.
No matter how hard she tried to pretend, she knew she hadn’t stopped to fill the mask. Her hands were shaking, and she started getting mad at herself for being such a baby. Then she realized the whole hopper was shaking, buffeted back and forth as if by a strong wind, but there were never any strong winds on Prosper except when shuttles landed.
As if in answer to her thought, she saw the shape of a low-flying shuttle plunging toward her, its broad wings overshadowing the hopper as it passed overhead. There was something wrong with the way it was flying, she had time to think, and then it hit the ground, far too hard, skipping like a stone over the rocky ground and then plowing a trench through it before finally coming to a stop.
“Shuttle command?” Marika said, wishing for the phone to start working again. “A shuttle just crashed. It’s out near the Foster farm.” She flicked the switch on and off again a couple of times. “Can anybody hear me?”
The phone poured static into her ears until she left it turned off. She ran toward the shuttle. Probably its communication systems were still working. Someone would come rescue the pilot. And if they found her there, too, she’d be a rescuer who came to help, not a dumb lost kid who stumbled into someone’s farm hours late and short on air.
When she drew close to the shuttle, she could see no one had emerged yet, and the shuttle hadn’t extended its walking legs. Maybe the shuttle could still take off again. Take off and leave her behind. She ran faster and realized a moment too late that she was racing toward the edge of the trench the shuttle had raked deep into the ground.
She tried to screech to a stop, but the hopper’s safety systems kept its legs moving to slow her down without skidding. STOP! she yelled in her head, thinking about planting her legs firmly, and the hopper’s front two legs stopped dead. But she hadn’t stopped the rear ones, and as they took one more slow step, the hopper teetered on the edge of the trench and then pitched forward.
Marika barely had time to brace herself before the hopper bashed into the bottom of the trench with a bone-shaking crash and then lurched heavily to the side, crashing to a stop.
Marika opened her eyes – she didn’t remember closing them – and realized she was lying on her side, tangled in the hopper’s webbing. She tried to stand the hopper up, but its legs wouldn’t obey her. After a while, she reached up and unplugged the useless neural jack from the base of her skull, pushed her braids aside to plug her own legs back in, and kicked to free herself.
She realized then that her own right leg wasn’t obeying her either, dragging like a dead weight, and she felt the sick buzz of damaged circuits all the way up to her knee. She yanked her right knee up with her hand and poked at her leg. The ankle of her leg was bent at a funny angle, the metal dented, and she couldn’t move anything below her knee.
She could see the shuttle’s airlock from where she lay, and she waited, expecting a shuttle pilot in a blazing white uniform to emerge to come rescue her. No one came. She jumped at a sudden beeping, thinking that must be the airlock door opening, and then realized that was the hopper’s alarm system telling her that she was running out of air.
The hopper must have sprung a leak when it hit the ground. It was old, all their tech was old, nothing worked the way it was supposed to, not even her stupid leg. Even if there were enough air in her breath mask, and even if she knew the way home, she didn’t think she could walk all the way there without one leg.
But she could make it to the shuttle. She grabbed up the breath mask before she could talk herself out of the idea and hit the door controls. For a moment, she was afraid the door wouldn’t open, but it jerkily slid open, and she pulled herself out. The shuttle was close, not more than fifteen meters away.
Her right ankle buckled as soon as she put any weight on it, so she didn’t even try to walk on it, scooting on her butt instead, crab-walking herself toward the shuttle. Almost at once, her chest began to ache, and the mask felt like it was suffocating her. She pulled it off, and although it didn’t help, it didn’t hurt, either.
Marika had been outside before lots of times in the thin air, dashing from the house to one of the barns or to the hopper. Her father always told her to wear her mask when he caught her, but she hated to wait more than she hated feeling that she was heaving for breath. But then she’d never been more than a few steps away from a building and other people who’d notice if she didn’t come back to the house.
The shuttle was right there. She moved faster, shoving herself along the ground, and then pulled herself up by the airlock door. It looked simple to release, but the part that looked like it should turn and slide didn’t turn. She tugged at it, her lungs burning, but it still wouldn’t move.
Her breath was coming harder, her heart pounding in her ears, and she fought panic. She banged on the airlock door, wondering what was wrong with the people inside. Didn’t they see her out here? Were they just going to let her fall down dead outside the airlock door?
Her father would be so mad at her, she thought, her head swimming. He’d remind her that Mishaun always remembered to fill the breath masks when she let him drive. It sounded nice to have someone else driving, so that all she had to do was lie back in her seat and close her eyes.
A noise startled her, and she realized she’d been about to drift into sleep. If she did, she wouldn’t wake up. She raised her fist to bang on the airlock door again and then saw it sliding sideways. Finally! She scrambled inside, hauling her leg in through the airlock door, and mashed the button to close the airlock. It slid shut, and after a moment, the inner airlock door opened.
The passenger compartment of the shuttle was empty, with a closed door leading back to the cargo compartment and an open one leading forward to the bridge. “Is anybody coming?” Marika called.
“I hear you, but I can’t come to you,” a woman’s voice called from the bridge. “You’re going to have to come to me.”
Marika hauled herself up and leaned on the wall and then the shuttle seats as she hopped her way to the bridge. There were two seats on the bridge, even though the shuttles often ran with only one pilot. The copilot’s seat was empty.
The pilot’s seat was smashed backwards, part of the control panel now lying across the pilot’s lap as she lay at a weird angle. Beneath her close-shaved hair, the back of her neck was bloody, and so were her brown hands.
“It’s okay,” the woman said. “I think it looks worse than it is.” The illuminated lettering on her uniform said Pilot Banks. “I’m glad you’re here. Is one of your parents here with you?”
“The solar flare took out my instruments at just the wrong time,” Banks said. “Lucky me. I’ve been trying to get out from under this, but I can’t quite … can you push that piece of metal right there? Careful, make sure it’s not sharp.”
It wasn’t sharp, and Marika’s arms were strong. She pushed hard, and Banks made a terrible face and then put her head back, panting, when the control panel was finally off her. Her uniform was bloody in a couple of places, and there was sweat on her face, but her voice was still calm when she spoke.
“Okay,” Banks said. “I bet your hopper’s communications don’t work either, because the solar flare took the satellite offline, right?”
“Right,” Marika said, but her heart sank. It hadn’t occurred to her that the shuttle’s communications wouldn’t work either.
“And the shuttle’s controls are this mess that fell on me. So I’m going to need you to take me back to town in your hopper. I bet you can get us there pretty fast.”
“The hopper’s broken,” Marika said tightly. “It’s leaking air and the legs won’t work because I ran it off the edge of the trench. And I don’t know which way home is and my breath mask doesn’t have any air in it, and even if it did my leg doesn’t work, so I can’t run. I can’t even walk.”
Her chest was heaving as if she were back outside, and she could feel tears prickling at the corners of her eyes.
“Slow down and let’s figure out one thing at a time,” Banks said. “I know how to navigate us back to town, and I have plenty of breath masks. We might be able to fix your hopper, but that’s a long shot, so let’s take a look at your leg first. Where does it hurt?”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Marika said. “It’s just not working. I think when the hopper crashed it got all bent up, and there’s something wrong with the circuits.”
Banks’s eyes went to the back of her neck, not to her leg. “You have a neural implant.”
