Hydrogen Steel

by K. A. Bedford

  Gideon, meanwhile, looked a lot like he was praying. I tried not to think about that.

  At length, I ran out of obvious compartments in the cabin and started thinking about where the non-obvious ones might be. My first thought was that there might be something under our seats. I didn’t want to disturb Gideon’s meditations, so I started examining my seat, and discovered, in small print, down on one side, a note in many languages explaining how the seat could be removed to provide access to the emergency supplies compartment. After much swearing and muttering, I pulled the seat out, and found the emergency supplies compartment.

  It was locked.

  “Where’s the bloody key?” I said.

  I looked everywhere. Which is to say, I looked almost everywhere. I didn’t want to disturb Gideon. He was now rocking to and fro, sweating buckets, and looked like he would have a heart attack at any moment. He looked so unwell that I considered disturbing him, even though, leaning in close, I could hear him mumbling strings of numbers and arcane codes. I was reminded of stories of ancient tribal shamans going on vision quests, sitting alone in the desert for weeks on end, eating nothing, hoping to attain an altered state of consciousness and open themselves to the spirits.

  It was getting harder to breathe, and it felt hotter. I realized our combined body heat was warming the pod’s air — and that the environment control systems that kept the air at a comfortable temperature must be failing.

  I kept coming back to the locked door of the emergency supplies compartment. All it needed was a simple magnetic key. The compartment itself was made of rigid maxplax, cheap engineering plastic, easily textured and fantastically strong for ordinary uses. Looking around the cabin, which did not take long, all I could find that had even a slim chance of working was the fire extinguisher. It was a small red and yellow steel flask containing a variety of fire suppressant materials. It had a certain amount of heft to it.

  Standing there, holding the fire extinguisher, I started feeling a little woozy.

  If I got out of this alive, I planned to write a strongly worded letter of complaint to whoever the hell was responsible for these things.

  Gideon also looked woozy, but I couldn’t tell if that was because of the failing ship’s systems or if he was just off in another world somewhere.

  I was also glad that the alien star-drive thing hadn’t taken over his brain and made him disappear off among the stars.

  Should I warn him that I was about to start making a lot of noise?

  “Hey, Smith! You there?” I shook his shoulder.

  No response.

  “Hey!”

  Still no response. This was worrying.

  On the other hand, if he was that far gone, he might not even notice my noise. With that, and feeling clammy and dizzy, I got to work on the compartment door.

  The maxplax was tough stuff. It resisted all my efforts. But the harder I crashed the fire extinguisher into it, the worse I felt. Soon my breathing was ragged. I kept going, smashing and crashing the thing with all I had.

  Suddenly, in the course of all this sweaty exertion, my fingers slipped, and I accidentally set the thing off. Immediately the pod’s cabin filled with cold, dense carbon dioxide snow. Blinded, I couldn’t see where I dropped the extinguisher. I was choking. Couldn’t breathe.

  Oh God…

  I heard Gideon choking. He was awake. “McGee…?”

  All I could do was cough. Too dizzy to stand any longer, I collapsed sick on the floor at his feet.

  Distantly, I heard the whirr of exhaust systems powering up.

  More distantly, I heard Gideon calling my name.

  My consciousness fled.

  I was gone.

  CHAPTER 33

  An annoyed-looking Cytex technician in a white coat was looking me up and down, studying me but not attempting to engage in conversation. I was wearing the uniform of the Winter City Police Service, Probationary Constable, Third Class. The clothing felt freshly made, the creases like knife-blades. I could smell the polish on my leather boots.

  I could breathe, but I couldn’t move. It was cold.

  The technician was talking to someone somewhere behind me, “I don’t know, either. These things happen sometimes, with the custom units. You can get these modality breaks, memory flares.” I wondered what the hell that meant.

  There was a lot of ambient noise, and a sense of energetic bustling activity outside the door. It was hard to hear what whoever it was behind me was saying.

  Then the tech said, “That’s right. If there’s the slightest problem with it, you can download a free patch from our systems, or just let us know and we’ll ship you out a new unit, no charge — or, for an extra twenty-five we’ll give you a fully-loaded body fabricator and you can print up to two fresh copies.”

  The tech listened some more, looking less annoyed now, and more intimidated? Repelled? It was hard to tell. At length she said, “No, we had no trouble with the installation of the sleeper module. Checked out beautifully. It—” The voice interrupted. She went on, working to remain calm, probably working her psychostats hard, “I told you, we don’t know why that’s been happening with this unit. You want, we can ditch it immediately and start over, and perhaps you could lend us a few of your highly-trained android specialists to make sure we get it right.” After more listening, she took a breath and said, keeping calm, “Look. I’ll show you. When you’re ready, just send the wake up signal. Here, try it…”

  My headware phone rang. I couldn’t speak, but I could blink my way through the interface to listen.

  A heavily processed voice said, “Little Miss Murgatroyd sat on a tuffet…”

  Without warning, my headware changed. Staring into interface-space, I watched as the interface appeared to turn itself inside-out, revealing a new interface, with new options and functions.

  Adrenaline flooded through me. Psychostats and biostats were pumping me up.

  I could move, I discovered.

  Looking around, I saw a mixed assortment of five regular disposable androids, just standing there in a bunch, trying to look like a bunch of people chatting.

  My interface labeled them: “subversive”, “radical”, “critic”, “anarchist”, “do-gooder”.

  I attacked them, bare-handed. They fought back a little, but I was too strong, too fast. Too determined. Scum like these had to be wiped out. There was a war on. Resources were limited. Sacrifices had to be made. The strong would survive. There could be no dissent. Dissent was treason. You’re either with us, or you’re with the enemy.

  It was so clear. The elegant, self-evident clarity of it rang like a sweet bell.

  I loved it. I killed those parasitical bastards where they stood. I had never known such strength, such power and lethal skill. I felt like I could do this all day long for days on end, until the appeasers understood that only Our Leader could lead us to Victory in the war.

  When I was finished, covered in warm android blood, my own hands sore and torn, I couldn’t believe there were no other targets. This was far too exciting to just stop. I looked around. Something told me that the technician was a loyal believer, but I noticed something at the other end of the room.

  There was something wrong with the light back there. More than merely dark, it was, now I could see such things, cold, and bent. The walls and the ceiling didn’t look right.

  Cautious, I took a step forward, ready to strike.

  “You might want to switch it back now,” the tech said.

  Still, I heard no voice, but I knew there was someone — or something — over there.

  After another step, and another, I saw a gleam of bad light…

  And I was coughing awake, gasping. I didn’t know why, but something in the deepest reaches of my hindbrain was telling me that I had to kill myself. My flashback
memory had shown me something, but I couldn’t just now say what it was it had shown me. All I knew was the profoundest, most desperate urge to self-destruction I had ever known. When I realized, long ago now, that I was an android, I’d been sorely tempted to kill myself. That had been horror like nothing else, this thorough revulsion and rejection of my own flesh and blood. This new sensation was worse. Much worse. And all the more terrifying for being inexplicable. I couldn’t remember what I’d seen at the back of the lab. Something worse than the revelation that I was a machine. Gideon was trying to hold me. I was fighting him, but for all my desperate ferocity I was not making much impression. My body was still weak.

  His voice was hoarse. “It’s all right, Zette. It’s all right. We got you back. It’s all right.”

  I could hardly hear him. I was full of cold terror. I had to kill myself. This truth was intolerable, unbearable. And if this great git would just let me go I could get on with it. I didn’t care how I did it, and I didn’t care about pain or torment. I just wanted out of this bloody life, and I wanted it now.

  Images from the flashback beat at me. The way I’d killed those androids. It wasn’t that they were androids; it was that they were standing in for people. Ordinary people.

  I was a monster. I was capable of murder. Someone, presumably someone in the quiet and well-appointed boardroom of this mysterious Parallax Corporation, had only to send me the wake up code, and off I’d go, killing and killing and killing, laying waste to “enemies” of the Leader, and doing it with horrific enthusiasm and pride in my work. The part of me that was Zette McGee, dedicated police officer, defender of the innocent and downtrodden, catcher of bad guys and murderers, would just go away, until Parallax, or their clients, switched me back.

  I was struggling to escape Gideon’s embrace, but he held on tight, trying to calm me down, telling me it was all right, it wasn’t true, and everything was fine. I could only think, What the hell did he know?

  He slapped a drug patch on me. Soon I felt strange, then very sleepy. “What did you…?” I wanted to bite his arm to get him to let me go, but I didn’t have the strength. I swore and muttered at him. “Let me bloody die you great twit, or I’ll kill you where you stand!” I managed, which must have sounded like the least menacing threat ever uttered. “I’ll tear you in bloody two you…”

  In time, I subsided into a sleepy, dreamy, puddle of mild euphoria. Gideon lashed me to a bed. Idly, I noticed we were in some sort of compact medical bay, and that meant we must be on a ship. I could smell nanobiotics. Everything was white or chrome, and aggressively clean, the sort of medical cleanliness you only get with nano-based scrubberbots doing their thing. Mysterious instruments rested folded up and secure against bulkheads, ready for deployment. Gravity felt different; it wasn’t good, like it wasn’t tuned right.

  Once Gideon decided that no matter how much I tried I couldn’t escape, and couldn’t come to any great harm, he said, “Please accept my apologies for confining you like this, McGee. It’s for your own good. I’ll explain everything later, when the drugs wear off.”

  I managed to gesture around with one of my hands, and by rolling my eyes this way and that, “What’s all this…?”

  Gideon looked around and sighed with resignation. “This, my dear McGee, is our new ship.”

  “New ship? But we were … we…” It was hard to remember anything before my flashback episode.

  “That’s right. And it’s not much, but it’s ours, more or less. It’s a Dunkley Minotaur II SSV. Hmm, I see that means nothing to you. Ah. All right, try this. It’s a twin-engine intrasystem cruiser designed for either light interplanetary freight runs, or possibly for hormonal young men to fit out as a flying woman trap, in the seediest, sleaziest, ugliest decor imaginable…” He raised an eyebrow at this last part, then added, “Guess which version we’ve got?”

  Still sleepy, hardly awake, feeling dreadful in an abstract, spacy sort of way, I did notice one thing. “It smells like rotten fish.”

  He nodded. “I know. I’ve tried everything. I can’t find the source. It’s not conducive to the enjoyment of one’s space travel, I can assure you.”

  I just stared at him, still puzzled. What was a suave fellow like Gideon doing with such a sleazy, smelly ship?

  “I flew it up remotely from Ganymede.”

  I looked at him, bemused. “The mystic East again?”

  Gideon allowed himself a wry grin. “Something like that, yes. Anyway, we docked with it. It was the only ship I could find in Winter City that was ready to fly. Everything else was either in pieces, in the shop getting fixed, out of fuel, dead for various reasons, or was otherwise unsuitable.”

  I stared again, knowing I was almost unconscious. “You stole a ship…?”

  “Winter City’s on fire, McGee. The infoma is a plague. It’s tearing everything apart. The population is going nuts…”

  “People … were already … nuts…”

  “Well, more nuts. Much more.”

  I swore quietly, and slipped away.

  No dreams or flashbacks assaulted me this time. When I woke, a few hours later, I felt like a mess. The memory of the flashback was still vivid. I was a police officer — but I was also a killer. Switch me on and point me at those people you wanted killed, and I would kill them. I would believe I was working for the Great Victory, serving a Cause, and eliminating troublemakers and disbelievers, rebels and defeatists.

  Then it hit me: how many times had I, Detective Inspector McGee, Homicide, gone to investigate a murder I had unwittingly committed? God knows there were quite a few cases that looked fishy, and where the victims were people who held political views against the government.

  Oh God…

  The thought made me physically ill. Unable to move or sit up, I vomited where I was — and damn near choked on it. It made a foul, stinking, wet mess; but the bed sheets, woven with tailored nano, ate almost all of it. The nasty smell of bile lingered, and was not a good thing to mix with the dire fish smell already more than abundant.

  Gideon arrived. “Oh dear,” he said, seeing that I’d been sick. “Here, let me give you a hand.”

  “Thanks…” My throat and mouth burned from the acid vomit.

  He set about releasing my restraints so I could sit up. I did and felt dizzy, and swore. “Christ, what’d you give me?”

  “Enough sedative to knock out a horse. You appeared to need it. We’ll have to get you some fresh clothes, too. You smell rather bad.”

  “That’s the way to charm a girl, Smith.”

  He flinched from my breath, too.

  Shortly after, I was sitting in the ship’s main cabin. Gideon had warned me that the ship had been fitted out as some ghastly “love nest”, and he wasn’t kidding. The owner — a young man with a ridiculously well-developed sense of irony and far too much disposable income — had gone to a lot of trouble and expense to recreate a profoundly seedy ambience that reeked of the ancient 1970s. The vivid tiger-striped shag-pile carpet covered the floor and the walls. There were curving couches upholstered with dreadful leopard-print motifs. The ceiling was mirrored, of course. Not satisfied, he had also installed large dangling mirror-balls. The carpeted walls also featured what one certainly hoped were ironic icons of retro-psychedelia including these strange pictures Gideon pointed out made of black velvet. There were lots of sex toys and devices located in lockers and a set of dedicated pharmaceutical fab units, each designed to produce a different psychedelic or mood-altering substance. I tried not to look at the circular bed, with its vivid red covers and black satin sheets. I was speechless. For a short while, it even distracted me from my recent discoveries.

  Gideon looked chagrined, and assured me again that all the tasteful ships had been unavailable.

  “We’re in Aldebaran space, by the way,” Gideon said. “Thought you should know.”
r />   I blinked slowly. “That’s about 60 lightyears, isn’t it?”

  “It is.” He momentarily allowed himself to register the fatigue he had been concealing.

  “But you … managed…?” I tried not to look at his head. He looked terrible, drawn and pale. I realized, too, that this was how he looked after a good long rest and probably extensive pain medication.

  “ShipMind had to resuscitate me four times,” Gideon said, his voice quiet and even.

  I stared and said nothing.

  He went on, “I tried to do it in stages. Small hops. I think I completed about twenty separate jumps to get us out here. Do a jump, check nav, adjust for mistakes and compensate for a screaming headache like nothing experienced by any poor bastard, living or dead in the history of the universe.”

  I was still speechless. “You could have died!” I managed, at length.

  “I nearly did, at least twice. Fortunately, I’ve got this nice young body…”

  The nice young body to which he referred was, by the look of him, a wreck.

  At length, I explained about my flashback vision. Gideon nodded, looking gravely concerned. “I thought something like that was going on, based on what you were saying, or rather, what you were screaming…”

  What he said about my screaming triggered a memory flash.

  I was back in that Cytex lab. There was something wrong with me, the tech said. A common fault, apparently. The client, or a representative of the client was up the back, in the dark.

  It was cold, and there was lots of noise from outside.

  I saw something gleam back there.

  Something big made of glass…

  I stopped, unable to breathe. “My God…”

  It was a Cube.

  Gideon picked me up and held me tight. “It’s not true!”

  I was swearing and screaming. “It owns me! The bastard owns me!”

  “It doesn’t own you, McGee! It’s a lie!”

  “Of course it’s true. My owner wants to destroy me.”