Hydrogen Steel

by K. A. Bedford

  He was trying to untether himself. I reached out and put my hand over his, stopping him. He muttered at me to let him go.

  “What’s the bloody matter, Smith?” I blurted, too loudly, too forcefully.

  Gideon was so surprised he stopped struggling and stared at me. “McGee?”

  “What’s the matter with you?” I said. We had been through all this crap before, but I felt like nothing had been resolved.

  Gathering his wits, adjusting his tight suit, he straightened up as much as possible. “I’m quite busy.”

  “What do you call that just shooting off when I ask you a simple bloody question?”

  “McGee, this isn’t the time…”

  “You’ve hardly said three words to me for days now!”

  He looked astonished, and then a little embarrassed. “McGee…”

  “You’re making me feel like bloody shit, Smith! Like something you stepped on and you can’t get off your shoe, you know that? Did you ever think about that?”

  “It’s not like that,” he said, doing his best to keep his voice even.

  “Like hell it’s not like that! What’s the matter with you? Aren’t I good enough for you now that you know what I am?” I had intended this last to come out as a nasty snarling sarcastic sort of outburst, but instead I heard my treacherous voice breaking as I said it, crippling the intended barb.

  Gideon looked stricken now, and like he didn’t know quite what to say. “McGee…”

  “I’m listening, Smith. I’m all bloody ears!”

  “Look. McGee. I need to spend time here. I need to keep an eye on the helium-three levels…”

  I was shouting at him before he finished. “That’s bullshit and you bloody know it! You could get a feed to your headware!”

  “As it happens, that’s not the case, because of the hardware in here, there’s…”

  I was all over him again, shouting him down. “That is such bullshit, you are bloody full of it, Smith! Full of it! You know that? Do you?”

  Now he looked at me. His expression was cool. His eyes looked they were taking my measure, to several decimal places. This was a look I’d never seen in him before, and I was starting to think, I don’t really know this man, do I?

  “McGee. Zette. Listen. Just listen.”

  Suddenly I didn’t feel quite like jumping down his throat. My heart was banging away like crazy. I realized I was starting to feel a twinge of fear. The shadowy lighting was creepy.

  “McGee,” he opened, his voice crisp, “I need you to understand something.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Just listen. It’s not your ‘secret identity’.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I couldn’t give a shit about all of that if you paid me a million creds. Do you understand?”

  I was set to yell at him again, but he held a hand up, just slightly, a throwaway gesture of effortless authority. I shut up.

  He went on. “Yes. That day, at my place, when I found out about you, it was a surprise. A big surprise.”

  “I bloody knew it.”

  “But not a complete surprise.”

  I, on the other hand, at this point, was completely surprised. “What?”

  He said, “It was the surprise you feel when you learn that a crazy idea you had in the back of your mind, something incredibly far-fetched, turns out actually to be true. You sit there, staring, and you think, Well, I’ll be damned, she really is a disposable! How extraordinary!”

  “You looked like your favorite pet dog had died.”

  His face flickered through a few shades of cryptic feeling at this, and then he looked back at me. “I’m old. I don’t handle surprises well. It takes me time to adjust. There’s a lot of thinking to do.”

  I remembered the salient thing he’d said. “You suspected I was a disposable all along?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” I was starting to shout again.

  “You do your best to repel friends and people who want to be your friend. You live alone, avoiding all contact if you can. You look like you’re worried you’ve got a contagious disease and you can’t afford to get close to anyone because they might catch it. And yet, when you first came to Serendipity you also looked like this behavior of shunning people was new to you. You weren’t good at it. You were clumsy and even, dare I say, a bit rude to people.”

  Now I just stared. After a moment, shocked at the precision of his observations I swore. “You are bloody well full of it Smith!”

  He allowed himself a small, warm smile. “There you go now.”

  I wanted to hit him.

  He continued. “You let me befriend you, to the degree that you allowed, because I kept my distance, didn’t pry, and tried to treat you properly. I never asked you anything about your past, because you looked like it was a source of deep shame for you, and that suited me.

  “Then there was this Kell Fallow business,” Gideon said, continuing the diagnosis. “A disposable capable of doing things for himself, undertaking dangerous journeys, behaving, in a word, just like a regular person. And putting himself at great risk in order to reach, of all people, you. Why you? Puzzling enough that there should be disposables capable of doing all this, but why should one such individual attempt to find you?”

  “So you had the crazy idea that the simplest explanation would be that I was one of these disposables as well, and that Fallow not only knew that, but also knew I was a copper of some sort.”

  “It explained everything, even if it was extremely unlikely,” Gideon said, looking a little bemused. “My apologies for my brusqueness of late. I have behaved deplorably towards you in our confinement.”

  “And you flinched when I came in here just now,” I pointed out.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You tried to get the hell away from me! You looked like I disgusted you.”

  “I certainly did no such thing.” He lied well, I noticed. He sounded very plausible.

  “Not five minutes ago. I came in here and you couldn’t get away from me fast enough! You looked like you were going to be sick!”

  “I was surprised out of my scone, McGee. Hasn’t anyone ever surprised you so much you jumped?”

  “Yes, I’ve been startled like that often. Very unpleasant. But then, when I see it’s nothing to worry about, I settle down.”

  “I’ve been having something of a difficult time these past weeks,” he said, looking like it was costing him something valuable to admit it.

  I’d never known Gideon to admit to anything resembling discomfort, and certainly not to something as gauche as illness. This was a revelation.

  Even so, I was still uncomfortable. To smooth things over, I said, “You’ve been having a tough time with the suits, too?”

  “I’ve never felt more loathsome in my life.”

  “If we ever get ourselves out of this—”

  “Oh, we’re getting out, McGee, even if we have to dig our way out with bare hands!”

  I allowed a small smile. “If we get out, the first thing I’m doing is getting this ship better emergency suits, and more of them!”

  “Agreed,” he said, nodding. He looked uncomfortable in his suit; I saw him squirming slightly. “There is simply no escape from this miasma…”

  Later, as we floated together, watching the helium-three indicator needle climb imperceptibly towards the green zone on the dial, I said to Gideon, “My whole ‘terrible secret’ thing does freak you out, doesn’t it?”

  “More than I can readily convey, McGee,” he said in a quiet voice. “I must offer you my humblest, most abject apologies. I just can’t help it.”

  “It’s okay. Believe me, I understand.”

  “There
’s something fundamentally wrong about it.”

  “Yet you’re quite happy to order up a disposable to indulge your weekend captain fantasies,” I said, thinking about Simon, cooped up in his storage pod on the bare minimum of life support.

  “It’s one thing to use a tool, McGee; quite another to find yourself questioning your most basic assumptions about the technology.” He looked horrified. “I keep thinking, what if all disposable androids can think and feel and have inner lives, but there’s something in the design that keeps it locked down, something that, in a few cases, fails to work?”

  “Don’t forget, I’m a unit the company doesn’t officially make. So was Fallow. We’re some sort of secret operation the industry’s got going.”

  Gideon was still stricken. “We can’t be parties to slavery, McGee.”

  “You don’t know for a fact that regular models are alive in that sense.”

  “But what if they are? What if they are? What if, when we cheerfully recycle them, we’re murdering people?”

  This stopped me cold. More to the point, it was something that I had also wondered about, in my darkest moments, late at night, worrying about how I could keep people from finding me out.

  Gideon continued. “I’ve had countless disposables working for me over the years. They’re extremely handy devices, very versatile. And, when you’re done with them, you just ask them to go to the nearest recycler. As easy as that. And they always smile and nod and say, ‘yes, sir!’ and off they go, without a second glance or a moment’s hesitation. And you think nothing of it. They’re no more alive than headware. They’re talking but they don’t understand what they’re saying, like trained parrots, imitating speech without understanding it. But what if they did know, but couldn’t say so?”

  “I know,” I said.

  He looked at me, but it was such a different gaze from the one he had always shown me. He was looking into my eyes, as if searching for something deep within me. I looked back at him, uncomfortable, but refusing to look away from his stare. Looking away would make me look weak, lessen my “reality”. Already I could see that it might be hard from here on getting Gideon to see me as another person, an equal, no matter what I did to demonstrate that I was plainly still the person he knew.

  “What are we going to do about this?” I said after a long while.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and that sounded like the hopeless voice of truth.

  “I will, of course, keep your secret, McGee. You need not fear anything from me.”

  Surprised, I blinked a few times. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  “I must confess to feeling somewhat disturbed about knowing you’re a glorified machine emulating a ‘proper’ person, while at the same time being careful to consider your feelings to the extent that I feel an apology is required, and not just any apology, because you are a person. And, I hope, despite everything…” He did not finish.

  To cover how touched I was — and wryly amused — at this gesture of Gideon’s, I babbled on, “You know, some schools of philosophy have always held that human beings are simply organic machines lacking any real spiritual or supernatural qualities, like souls, spirits, or anything iffy like that. The mind is just an emergent property of all our brain cells working at once.”

  “You conceal your erudition well, McGee.”

  “Some things I can hide.”

  We floated there a long time, not saying much, watching the helium-three dial.

  At some point later, he suddenly said, in a flat affectless voice, “I understand about secrets.” He did not look across at me.

  I looked at him. “Oh?”

  “Oh yes. Secrets,” he said, “can eat you alive. They can drive you mad. Secrets can be the most destructive things in the universe.”

  “Got a few yourself?” I asked, curious about this turn in our conversation. Gideon had never spoken to me like this. It occurred to me he was trying to open up a bit. I was, sort of, touched.

  “Everyone has a few, in my experience”, I said. “Small ones, big ones, life and death ones.”

  I thought about the people I’d met in the course of investigations, and how many brutal homicides revolved around secrets that someone knew and someone else wanted kept quiet. Secret dirt, secret shame, secret money, secret madness. It was all there, even in the dumbest, simplest murder cases. Mr. X kills Mrs. X after he learns that she’s been sleeping with Mr. X’s best friend, something she and the friend have been keeping secret from Mr. X. Then, Mr. X keeps his knowledge of the affair secret until the moment he kills them, and then himself. The rest writes itself.

  Gideon was right. Secrets could devastate.

  At another point, he said, “Please excuse me for asking, and feel free to tell me to mind my own business if you want, but I’m curious.”

  “If it helps, sure. Ask away. What do you want to know?”

  “Well,” he opened, looking, of all things, bashful. “Do you feel like a human being?”

  I laughed a few moments, before the stink in my suit turned it to choking coughs. “What do you mean?”

  “You feel ‘normal’, like anybody else, that kind of thing?”

  “I never felt ‘normal’. Does anybody? I mean, I seem to have spent a lot of my life, both the bits that I assume are programmed life-experience and the bits that I’m assuming are ‘real’, plagued with self-doubt, anxiety, misery, hating myself for this or that. Terrified that if I spent all my life up to my ears in the horror that people inflict on each other it would somehow contaminate me…”

  “So, yes, is what you’re saying?” He nodded, thinking it over.

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “It was a surprise when you learned you might not be a real person? Is that right?”

  I stared. “Of course. It was…” I paused for a moment to gather my thoughts. Where to begin?

  “It never occurred to you that perhaps you were thinking about it using the wrong tools?”

  “Would you mind clarifying that for those of us down in the cheap seats, Smith?”

  “McGee, look. How many ‘natural’ human beings do you know of?”

  “You mean like ‘orthos’?” Orthos were a traditional class of human being who liked to boast of not having been altered by technology in any way — even while many of them sported headware, artificial tissue for medical problems, and various other kinds of technology-born improvements.

  “Yes, like them, but genuine natural human beings. Never been fiddled with.”

  The only ones I could think of were isolated groups of starving colonists on failed settlements which had originally been intended as low-budget Promised Lands of self-sufficient prosperity and harmony for people looking to get away from it all and return to “traditional” values and beliefs. Flash-forward a few decades, and many of these poor wretches were too broke to afford livestock feed, let alone body upgrades, or even medical improvements.

  Gideon finished the thought. “We are almost all post-humans now, some more — much more — than others. It’s in our germline cells. We’ve been edited and polished over the decades. We can’t help but be something other than ‘natural’ human beings. If anything, what we are now, in all our variation, is the new ‘natural’ state. Do you see where I’m going with this, McGee?”

  This was more like the old Gideon, all professorial and pompous. “Go on…”

  “Your body is a biological machine with at the very least an emulation of a human consciousness in your wetware brain.”

  “Something like that.”

  “The only difference between you and me, really, is that you were extracted from a nanofabrication chamber, a functional adult female with a lifetime of programmed memories, while I was born to a wetware mother. In all other important respects we’re the same, aren’t
we?” It was interesting watching his brain sort through the problem.

  “You’re pretty bloody old…” I said, starting to smile.

  “Ah, but like cheese, I get better as I age.”

  “You certainly smell like old cheese.”

  “I fear I smell rather worse than that, McGee.”

  I looked at him. I felt awful. “Smith…” I wanted to apologize, again. I never thought of myself as someone who was always apologizing to people. “I just…”

  “It will take me time, McGee, as I said. But I’d also like to say I don’t have a problem with you. I’d like to be the sort of fellow who effortlessly accepts the odd things the universe throws at him.” He looked a bit downcast.

  “I know.”

  “In the meantime, tentatively speaking, and until further notice, I think I can say I’m more or less all right about you. If that’s all right with you. If it’s … enough.”

  “How about we take it a bit at a time?”

  “Sounds good,” he said.

  We floated there a while longer. At some point we broke for something to “eat”. The heated food goo in the emergency supplies tasted like no food I’ve ever known. It tasted “brown”. I wondered how my digestive tract would deal with proper food if and when we got out of the tube.

  Gideon sucked on his own food bulb, but sometimes I still caught him looking at me with that same “how can there be a real person in there?” look in his eyes. If we survived this, I imagined he’d spend a lot of time looking at Simon the same way, wondering if there was a real person in there, too, trapped and unable to speak for himself. I caught Gideon looking at me like this now. “What? What is it now?”

  “It occurs to me that it’s pretty impressive.”

  “What’s impressive?”

  “This technology, this process that created you.”

  “Glad you’re impressed, now would you stop staring at me like that!”

  “I don’t mean to be rude.”

  “It’s just a little uncomfortable.”

  He nodded. I had the sense a lot of the time that he’d love to poke me with sticks and study me under microscopes. “At what point does a replica become so perfect in its duplication of every last detail that it is in every respect the thing itself?” he said.