Lacuna: The Prelude to Eternity

by David Adams

  “That is super creepy,” said Liao, watching the construct chitter and click as it spun out a new limb for her.

  “I’ve gotten used to it.” Saeed observed the process with fascination. “I quite like seeing them work, actually. It’s amazing how precise and detailed they are and how wondrous the kinds of things they can create. Anything from a new piece of computer hardware to a main battle tank, or even larger. The Toralii Alliance used thousands of these things to build their ships, whole swarms of them building starship after starship.”

  “Logistics,” said Liao. “The ultimate tool for winning wars. That’s an impressive and terrifying industrial capacity.”

  Saeed tapped on one of the medical consoles, bringing up the results of a diagnostic routine. The arm twitched and spasmed as it was tested. As the test ran, he turned back to her. “Even worse, I don’t think we truly understand their full capacity yet. The only thing working in our favour is that, while they might be able to replace their losses very rapidly, their drone technology isn’t trusted—they employ constructs throughout their vessels, but they’re never given any kind of authority or command. They must have crew. Crew take time to train and can make mistakes.”

  There weren’t that many Humans left. Even if every single survivor was a trained crewman and able to serve on their ships, the number of vessels the Humans could field was depressingly low. Constructs could ease some of the burden, but how far could their help go? After Ben, Liao didn’t trust them either. “Do you think we could have fully automated ships in the future?”

  Saeed’s expression was a mixture of cautious hope and whimsy. “If they did, I would largely be out of a job. The military wouldn’t need butchers to sew up the living and give a time/date stamp to the dead. Strangely enough, I welcome such a sea change.”

  “As would I. People talk about increased mechanisation taking something away from war, as though stripping it of the last lingering vestiges of the honour and nobility it had in the First World War. They consider Predator drones to be impersonal, dishonourable weapons, cowards’ weapons, the tools of the lesser man.” She regarded the tiny, withered stump of her arm. “So say people who have never seen the insanity, the illogic, the terror and stupidity of war. They know only the safe comforts of a warm bed and a land protected by cruel men ready to annihilate, with extreme prejudice, any threats to that land. War is a place where people die like dogs for no good reason.”

  “I couldn’t have said it better,” said Saeed. “Hopefully, more of them die than us so that misery is not ours to bear.”

  “That’s not enough for us now. There are so few Humans remaining. We have a technological and numerical disadvantage. We need industrialisation on a grand scale.” Liao watched as the construct lay more of its synthetic skin in layers, building the prosthesis. It was strikingly artificial, with exposed pistons and tendons and wires. The skin did not protect as a Human’s might, as an outside barrier. Instead, it was laid directly over the pistons, circuits, and mechanical pieces, building them up layer by layer.

  Finally, Liao addressed the elephant in the room. “I don’t know. It doesn’t look biological. It really does look archaic, as though its secret power source was steam or something. If this process can build spaceships, why can’t it build a limb that looks Toralii? Or Human?”

  “It almost can.” Saeed grimaced slightly as though admitting some embarrassing secret. “The Uncanny Valley is a well-recognised trope when designing artificial things intended to look natural. Have you seen movies with CG people in them? Even though they use motion-capture and facial scanning and have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, they always look fake. Human beings have a truly amazing ability to analyse faces and forms. We can instantly tell if something is pretending to be something it’s not, and this discovery is often unsettling for us. The Toralii, apparently, have a similar issue, and the way they get around it is by not trying to blend in although realistic prostheses are created on occasion. For the most part, though, a prosthetic limb’s artificialness is acknowledged and accepted. There is no cultural shame in losing a limb, so they deliberately craft them in ways which reflect that this body modification is the product of a machine, not nature. They’re practically minded in this regard, adding scanners, sensors, sometimes weapons; a prosthesis can even be a fashion statement in some circles.”

  “Weapons?” That last bit caught her attention. “You mean the claws, right?”

  “More than that. We chose this particular design because it’s rugged, low power, and highly modular. The forearm can have all manner of implants, including a limited-capacity, low-power plasma pistol. Those take some time getting used to. The pistol pops out of the casing, fires, retracts, etc. when a ‘virtual muscle’ is squeezed. Training the brain to move something that hasn’t been there your whole life is difficult and takes time to master. The weapons are almost always unloaded for the first year of a new installation.”

  “We don’t have a year for me to get used to the thing.”

  “This is a good point, and it seems unnecessary to have one.” Saeed smiled politely. “I’m sure a pistol add-in would be useful, but why not keep your sidearm for now, Captain?”

  Liao had seen firsthand the incredible damage plasma pistols could do, melting a hole straight through one of the Beijing’s bulkheads. That kind of firepower would be an asset for her to have, especially discretely. “For now,” she agreed. “But fabricate an add-on anyway. I’d like to start training with it as soon as possible.”

  “Let’s just try with the base arm first, shall we, and work on add-ons later.” He regarded her curiously. “You’re more impatient these days.”

  Her reply came without much thought. “I guess nearly getting burned to death makes me realise I don’t have anywhere near as much time as I need to accomplish everything in my life that I want to do.”

  “Well, what is it you want to do?”

  The construct finished its weaving. Liao regarded its product, steel grey, a strange matte metal, its surfaces smooth and perfectly machined. It lay on the ground, palm up, limp and inert as though it were freshly sliced off a living creature. Its fingers, claws retracted, seemed to reach out towards the bulkhead of the medical facility, and Liao couldn’t help but imagine it was weakly struggling to escape. It was a metal mirror of her own arm, burned off on the surface of Velsharn, neatly sliced from her body.

  “I want to kill a lot more Toralii.”

  Saeed’s face tightened, and he pointedly avoided continuing that line of discussion. “There’re some tests we must run on the prosthetic before we install it. Maybe have some dinner? I’ll have one of the orderlies deliver it to your quarters.”

  “I have quarters on the Rubens?”

  “We’ve allocated you some,” he said. “Temporarily. They’re the VIP quarters. Slightly below the Captain’s lodgings in terms of luxuries, but I think you’ll find them sufficient to your needs.”

  “Those will be more than fine.” She stood and, giving the metal hand one more look, departed.

  The quarters were fine, with thick sheets and comfortable pillows filling a bed sized for a Toralii, but despite the luxury, sleep came roughly. Liao tossed and turned, eyes closed but unable to truly rest. Just when her body started to relax, pins and needles grew on an arm that no longer existed. She tried ignoring it, tried rubbing the stump, tried a mild sedative. Nothing seemed to take away the ache. She felt heat, cold, cramping… any number of sensations, even though there was no flesh to relay them.

  That was a new thing, that sensation. Saeed had warned her, and she had prepared for pain. Instead, it was every other feeling—distinctly uncomfortable, certainly, but drugs could take pain away. Nothing seemed to soothe the itching.

  She couldn’t possibly have thought she would ever miss the tank.

  Four hours wasn’t much when it came to sleep. She had done greater things with less. She would endure. Eventually, after fitful squirming, Liao dressed and retur
ned to the med-bay. One of the advantages of her very short hair was that the effects of diminished rest were not compounded by the necessity of taking time to make herself presentable, not that anyone would see her on the Rubens anyway.

  “Don’t you ever sleep?” she asked Saeed as she returned. He and Saara were waiting for her by the completed prosthetic.

  “I daydream about sleep,” he said. Liao didn’t laugh. Saeed smiled widely. “A joke from medical school.”

  “For some of us, it’s not a joke,” Liao said.

  [“Are you well rested?”] asked Saara. [“The device will be, in a limited sense, interacting directly with your neural tissue. The most critical time is the first few days and weeks, and most especially, the first few hours. It is best you are at your baseline when exposed to the link so that the device ‘learns’ how to work with you.”]

  “Baseline for me is pretty tired,” said Liao, “so mission accomplished, I suppose.” Her eyes fell upon the prosthetic, now resting on a white cloth draped over one of the examination benches, lit by overhead lights. The tendrils of its cables ran into a computer. “How did the testing go?”

  “It worked flawlessly. Piped the neural links into a test bed, ran some diagnostics. The articulators do the job pretty well. They squeeze like regular muscles and, according to the tests, should be linked up to the same nerve endings as the original limb, so the amount of discomfort you experience should be minimal.”

  “Given how I slept last night, minimal discomfort would be a great goal to aim for.”

  Saara frowned sympathetically. [“You were in pain?”]

  “Every single other sensation but,” she said. “Which is very odd.”

  Saeed only nodded thoughtfully. “Not entirely unexpected. Everyone experiences it differently, from what I’ve read.” He tapped on the computer’s keyboard. “Right. Ready for this?”

  Ready as she was ever going to be. “Sure. What do I do?”

  “Lie down on the bed and try not to move too much.”

  She did so, resting the stump near the device. Saara adjusted Liao’s forearm, getting it comfortable, and aligning the prosthetic to the stump of her limp. Seeing the device up close brought out the detail; the metal skin was cut with tiny grooves, almost invisible to the naked eye. The device was incredibly elaborate, despite its outward appearance, a juxtaposition of technology levels. The device was both very primitive—exposed metal, bare rods and pistons—and quite strangely advanced. Compared to her real arm, the prosthetic was oversized and awkward, and she imagined that the difference in dimensions would take some getting used to.

  The tendrils of the device snaked out toward her. Saeed injected a local anaesthetic into her stump—she barely felt the needle’s entrance, truth be told—and she watched in curious fascination as the interface cables slipped past her skin, burrowing into her flesh. She could feel the cables move inside her, squirming around her bone, twisting and aligning, linking up with the real nerves that remained.

  A sensation of spreading numbness was the first thing she felt, moving out from her new fingers. Pins and needles sprung up all along the metal; the device jerked as it turned on, and instinctively, Liao clenched her new fist to avoid the painful tingling.

  The prosthetic complied instantly, metal fingers closing in on themselves. She opened and closed the hand experimentally. It was as though she had never been wounded. Her new limb felt so natural to her. The fingers moved just like her flesh ones had. The wrist turned, the elbow bent, everything was as it had been. Not even… it was more: stronger, tougher, more sensitive.

  However, it was less, too, in some way she could not quantify. Replacing parts of herself with a machine seemed to be denying some part of her humanity. It wasn’t just that it was a Toralii arm poorly resized for her. It was taking something from her, a leak in her soul.

  Out of all the feelings she had anticipated, that hollow emptiness was not one.

  She decided to replace that emptiness with ambitions. Eden had broken her—she had put a pistol to her temple, and only the vaguest whispers of self-preservation had kept her alive. She had a chance at making up for that moment of weakness. The hour of her redemption had come.

  [“The link is complete,”] said Saara. [“Grafting on the support structure now.”]

  Liao watched as the upper part of the limb unfurled, folding over her shoulder and latching onto the skin, anchor points affixing. Those hurt—the local anaesthetic did not reach that far—but she gritted her teeth through it, enduring the pain, clenching her new fist to help. The metal groaned as she applied pressure then slowly relaxed as the pain faded.

  “How do you feel?” asked Saeed, dabbing at the small amount of blood that leaked out of the small wounds.

  “Good,” said Liao. “That last bit was rough. It’s all good now, though.” She sat up, her balance off. The prosthetic weighed more than she’d anticipated. Liao steadied herself, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. She rolled her shoulder experimentally. “No, it feels good.”

  [“Excellent,”] said Saara. [“The prosthetic will take several days to fully integrate, and there may be residual effects, but at the very least, it does seem to have made a strong link.”]

  “Like it was made for me.” Liao flexed the strong metal fingers, admiring the sheathed claws at the end of them. “You know, this might be a big advantage. I suspect at least some of our inability to communicate with the Alliance is biological difference—we’re just too different. At least a part of me looks Toralii now.”

  Saara held her arm up, dwarfing Liao’s prosthetic. Her yellow eyes shone with amusement. [“It is… cute. That is the only way I can describe it. Like one from a child.”]

  “I was hoping for intimidating.”

  [“Alas, Captain, such a thing would rarely be intimidating to a true Toralii warrior.”]

  “So maybe that’s another title they’ll add onto my name whenever they feel the need to make the whole thing even longer than it currently is,” she said. “Liao the Kittenclawed.”

  They laughed.

  “Now,” said Saeed, a wide, eager smile growing across his face, “there’s one more person you will want to meet.”

  Liao stiffened with anticipation, unable to keep the feeling contained. The door to the med-bay opened, and one of the nurses brought in someone she had wanted, more than any of the others, to see. Liao steeled herself. It was important that she remained calm, controlled, dignified…

  But when the nurse brought Allison out, aged eighteen months and with a face full of curiosity, dignity went out the window, and she cried uncontrollably. Liao reached for Allison like a starving woman, her arms hugging her, dragging her child close to her chest.

  “Careful, careful,” the nurse said.

  Her child. Liao’s fleshy arm shook as she hugged her baby, eyes closed, breath coming in ragged gasps.

  Allison began to wail. Liao, fearful she had hurt the baby, released her grip, but the child was unharmed. Instead, she was recoiling from the metal of her mother’s prosthetic.

  It was cold, Liao realised. “I’m sorry,” she said by reflex, guilt welling up within her. “I-I thought I crushed her.”

  [“She is unharmed,”] said Saara. [“Do not worry.”]

  How could she not worry? Her own child, for whom she had given so much, reacted with fear around her. Allison squirmed away, back into the nurse’s hands.

  “Yeah,” said Liao, her tone completely unconvinced. “I think she just needs some time to adjust.”

  “So do you,” said Saeed. “It’s a big change. Muscle strength, coordination, temperature… everything is going to be different. It’ll take some time to get it right. Don’t take this to heart.”

  She knew, rationally and logically, that Saeed was right, but that couldn’t shake the nagging doubts that gnawed at her. “I know.”

  Saeed stood, passing a critical eye over the arm, apparently to satisfaction. “Well, now you’ve got your arm back, I suppose
you should get ready for the big relaunch, yes? A Broadsword from the Tehran will take you down to the surface.”

  The Beijing, her other child, was returning to space. Kamal would be in charge, of course, but when it came to the operation and relaunch of her ship, she should be on board. She had to be there.

  As much as she wanted to be here instead.

  CHAPTER IV

  Even the Mighty

  *****

  Operations

  TFR Beijing

  Space near Velsharn

  THE BROADSWORD NIGHT RAVEN TOUCHED down with a dull thump and the fading whine of engines powering down. For a moment, there was nothing, and then the voice of the pilot filtered through the ship’s systems.

  “Captain Liao, we have arrived. Welcome back to Eden.”

  With a faint hiss, the loading bay door opened, and daylight from Velsharn’s star poured in, followed by the powerful scent of fresh air, blooming flowers, and the faint, distant scent of the ocean. An undercurrent of the smell of civilization—oil, bodies, muck—came with it, a synthetic tinge to an otherwise perfectly natural and wonderful breath of air, but the dominant smell, lording over all others, was nature, clean and fresh.

  Savouring the moment, she breathed deeply through her nose, taking it all in. Living in the Toralii healing tank had had no scent, and the air aboard the Rubens was sterile and empty. This was full of life, exactly what she needed.

  Liao walked down the loading ramp to the landing area. Night Raven took off behind her, returning to the sky. She walked from the large clearing into the settlement proper and, as typically happened, her presence drew whispers from all around.

  They were not entirely happy whispers. Liao knew, as much as she had accomplished in command of the Beijing, her tenure had not been perfect. Initially, when Saeed had told her she had made Captain, she felt she didn’t deserve it. She didn’t think that anymore. Self-pity would accomplish nothing, and to dwell on the past was weak thinking. It would get her nothing.