Lacuna: The Spectre of Oblivion

by David Adams

  She placed the helmet on the ground and wiggled out of her suit, discarding the heavy, bulky protection, except for the boots. She strapped her pistol’s holster to her hip, then waited.

  The airlock door to the rest of the ship, adorned with a simple square window, had a flashing, red light embedded directly underneath the thick, foggy, smeared glass. It blinked on and off hypnotically, bathing the entire room in a strange crimson glow.

  Why did Ben want to see her so badly? Why her, specifically?

  The light turned green and the door opened, presenting a pair of Bevra drones, their chromed bodies glinting in the faint light.

  “The master will see you now,” intoned the lead drone and Liao followed the pair of robots down the long corridor into the dark heart of the ship.

  The long, winding corridors seemed endless to her, but the time passed quickly. She remembered Cheung’s blood-splattered suit, suddenly cursing herself for not bringing a medical kit. If Vong was severely wounded, which he undoubtedly was given how much blood was splashed all over Cheung, there was little hope she could save him without specialised equipment.

  Tai’s injuries floated into her mind, her bare hands trying to keep his blood within his body, all to no avail. She pushed those thoughts out of her head.

  The drones lead her to the centre of the ship. Liao stepped cautiously down the stairwell, her pistol cupped comfortably in her hands, and the heavy spacesuit boots clunking on each step until she reached the bottom. As she did, she felt her foot slide forward, and it was only her training, and the fact that she had her finger off the trigger, that kept her from firing in surprise. Keeping her footing, Liao lifted her boot, looking for what she’d stepped on.

  A brass shell casing from a standard QBZ-99.

  The vast open area, the equivalent of her Operations room, was stretched out before her and was crawling with robots. The thing that drew her immediate attention, though, was the large, dark, rust coloured smear near the base of the stairwell that stretched out almost two metres long. Nearly a dozen spent brass cartridge casings lay scattered haphazardly over the ground, the entire area smelling of cordite and smoke. Faint drops of blood covered nearby surfaces, and it did not take Liao long to realise exactly what she was looking at.

  “So good of you to come, Commander Liao. I’m glad my message was finally communicated accurately.” Ben’s robot body crawled up atop the central dais, his six long legs skittering delicately as he took purchase upon the large computer core. “And so good of you to remove your helmet to prevent further… misunderstandings.”

  Liao stared at him coldly. “Where is Commodore Vong?”

  “Commodore Vong will not be joining us.”

  Liao’s gaze flicked to the rusty stain, then back to Ben. “Why have you done this? Why have you attacked this planet?”

  “You have questions. I have questions. We are both on a journey of discovery. I eagerly seek answers from you, but I am patient, so I will explain my words first. The sun is, in almost all myths and legends, a source of strength and power to your species. It was Ra to the ancient Egyptians, Apollo to the Greeks of ages past, Tonatiuh for the Aztecs. The sun features prominently in your people’s recorded religions as a God. As your societies evolved and grew beyond superstition, you began to embrace the laws of physics and nature as your guiding principles, but you still do not ask why: why do such things as the forces of nature exist, why do they do the things they do, why the universe works according to mathematics and numbers.”

  “Poetic but meaningless,” said Liao. “Ancient Humans worshipped whatever damn thing they felt was powerful enough to destroy them in hopes of appeasing the supernatural powers, therefore surviving and prospering. As our people grew, we found we no longer needed such things.”

  “I agree. I believe this is the biological creature’s gift,” Ben said, casually extending a claw to give one of his robots a gentle pat on its chromed head, “the ability to be wrong. Powerfully, totally in error. Wrong in conclusion, methods and assumptions. Wrong in every way that someone can be wrong. But then, you tread down this path of wrongness, embracing it utterly in a way my kind never could.”

  “I’m not here to debate philosophy with you.” Liao slipped her pistol into her holster. Ben didn’t appear damaged at all, but Cheung had, seemingly, fired nearly half her magazine. If a high powered rifle was of no effect, her little pea-shooter would be even less so. “I just want to know what the hell’s going on here.”

  “Do you ever question why the sun sets?” asked Ben. “Do you ask why the moon’s lesser light conjures such mystery and reverence amongst the humans?”

  “Mystery and, what…?” Liao blinked and shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I just want to know why you’ve attacked these Toralii. Haven’t you quenched your bloodlust with what you did at Velsharn?”

  “Velsharn was just the beginning.” Ben clacked his claws together eagerly. “Just the beginning. Although I will admit, I regret what I did.”

  Liao narrowed her eyes. “You do? When I spoke to you afterwards, you said you had no regrets, that you had planned out all the consequences of your actions and, therefore, if you had your time over, you wouldn’t have done anything differently. What’s changed?” Her tone became acidic. “Has the Grinch’s iron heart grown three sizes today?”

  “You misunderstand,” Ben said. “I do not feel sorrow as you might. Instead, I merely feel that my course of action was not optimal. It was a waste of resources.”

  “Stop speaking in riddles.” Liao felt her blood rise. “Just tell me what you’re getting at.”

  Ben’s robotic face broadened into a wide smile. “Direct as always, Liao. I like that.” He skittered down, coming face to face with her, his head stooped to be at her level. Liao held her ground. “What I mean is what I said before,” he said, “and that is to say that the reason behind why our universe is the way it is, is now of great interest to me. I intend to answer these questions, but unfortunately, in my current state, I cannot.”

  Liao didn’t flinch, looking Ben directly in his giant eyes. “So you intend to… change your state?” She waved a hand at him. “Is this what your new body is meant to represent?”

  Ben laughed, bobbing his head as he did so, a gesture Liao found remarkably natural. “No. This form is merely a means to an end. Instead, I intend to introduce errors into my system. I intend to inject chaos, entropy, as your species is gifted with. I intend to become more… human.”

  Liao raised an eyebrow, folding her arms. “And how, exactly, do you propose to do that?”

  Ben raised his head, moving back from her and retreating up the dais. “It came to me as I was rebuilding the Giralan. A species known as the Iilan developed voidwarp technology and subsequently had its homeworld consumed in Toralii fire. They are masters of bio-mechanical and genetic engineering. They tinker with their own DNA, those that remain, changing and evolving constantly. I sought out their great spherical ship, and I bartered my knowledge of the Toralii for their secrets.”

  “To what end?” Liao asked. “You’re a machine. What possible use would this knowledge be for you? Tools for developing biological weapons?”

  “You think in such destructive terms. I plan not to destroy; I plan to create.” Ben waved a claw to the side, and the wall on the far side of the room slowly hissed and began to slide open. The room was bathed in a bright green glow from the other side, and Liao could see that the long, thick cable that lead into the central dais emerged on the other side of the wall, branching into eight forks. Each fork linked up to a tank full of bubbling liquid, each tank dark and unlit.

  There were forms in the tanks. Humanoid forms, small and stunted, blurry and indistinct behind the semi-opaque glass.

  “Ben,” Liao said, her tone slow and deliberate, “what in God’s name have you done?”

  “The Toralii created me,” Ben said. “I am their child. I only want to be more like them. To be like them, I must hav
e children of my own.”

  She turned back to the construct, eyes wide. “What does that even mean?”

  [“Perhaps it would be better if I explained,”] came a voice from beside her, speaking the Toralii tongue. Liao whirled around, emitting an audible gasp.

  A grey-furred Toralii male, naked and with thin, sickly limbs, stood on the rusted deck of the Giralan. He had an oddly neutral smile on his face, as though not quite looking at Liao but looking past her. His pale, ghoulishly white skin showed through in patches where his fur had been shaved off, and Liao could see the razor-thin lines of surgical scars, with the occasional glint of metal below.

  But that was not what caused Liao to recoil in horror, or for her to instinctively reach for her pistol.

  She recognised him. The Toralii was Leader Qadan from the Velsharn research colony. He was someone who had shown her great kindness, but one she had seen baked to a charred crisp by her ship’s nuclear weapons. There was no way this man could be him.

  “What the fuck are you?”

  The faux-Qadan’s mouth split into a wide, unnatural smile. [“Don’t you recognise me, dear Liao?”]

  “I know who you look like, but you aren’t Qadan. That man is dead. I saw his body.”

  [“Of course, but his DNA lives on, along with the DNA of every Toralii who lived on that world, in the backups of their computers, which I recovered from the ruins of the colony. I only chose him because he was the one you were most familiar with. I thought it would engender… familiarity.”]

  “Go fuck yourself,” she spat, unholstering her pistol and raising it at the Toralii man’s face. “You’re a monster.”

  [“Go ahead; shoot. You should know by now that I can communicate with any of the drones around me. Now, with the help of the bioneural implants, I can even control biological forms. Soon I will perfect the necessary process to upload my consciousness to this form, and then I’ll be just like you.”]

  Liao stared at the mindless, remote-controlled Toralii as though it were the living dead. It wasn’t life as she saw it; it was a perversion of life, a twisted and warped mirror of the Toralii she’d known. She backed away, slowly moving up the stairway, unable to look at the horrid creature.

  “You’ll never be like us,” Liao spat, “even with flesh and blood. What makes us Human isn’t the structure of our atoms; it’s something more than that, some deeper connection to each other that can’t be quantified. A Human is more than an individual… We’re a collective. We’re a social animal, and it’s how we treat our fellow Humans that makes us what we are.” She stabbed a finger at the dark stain on the deck of the Giralan, taking another step away further up the hexagonal entranceway. “Humans kill, but Humans kill to protect ourselves individually or collectively. We kill those who harm us, threaten us, not men coming to negotiate. It’s not what you do; it’s why you do it.” She sneered slightly, curling back her upper lip. “If you think you’re one of us just because you want to be, I’m afraid you’re tragically mistaken.”

  [“This body’s heart beats, and I give it a mind. I fail to see the difference between the Qadan that stands before you and the Qadan you saw on Velsharn. Even his voice is the same, his mannerisms taken from his video logs.”] The Toralii smiled. [“I am just as much Qadan as he was.”]

  Her hand trembled. “You’re not,” she said. “You’re a pretender, a ghost, just a corpse that hasn’t lain down and died yet.” Liao lined up the sights on her pistol to Qadan’s forehead. “Lemme help you with that.”

  She squeezed the trigger. Her pistol roared in the highly oxygenated atmosphere of the Giralan, the heavy round from her Type 54 blowing out the back of the clone of Qadan’s head in a spray of purple blood.

  Ben didn’t react as the corpse slumped in a heap. “Interesting,” he said. “Violence is the solution here. That was not what I considered the most likely outcome.”

  “What the hell did you think I might do?”

  The light snapped on, illuminating the centre tank, the large liquid vat bathed in a strange, light green glow as though the liquid were luminescent. Inside was a Human female, naked and floating in the tub, a series of metal breathing tubes inserted into her chest and down her throat. Liao stared at the person, horror filling her as she slowly realised who she was looking at.

  Herself.

  “To be honest,” said Ben, “I expected violence at this revelation.”

  Liao turned and ran, the heavy boots of her spacesuit clunking on the rotting metal deck as she sprinted down the unlit corridor, away from the image of herself and the corpse of the Toralii she’d known.

  As she ran, she could feel the optics of the construct she had once called her friend watching her with cool indifference.

  *****

  She ran until her lungs hurt, until she finally collapsed onto her knees in one of the many hexagonal corridors. Her chest heaved as she forced air into her lungs, gasping and panting, forcing her body to recover.

  She had recently become a mother. She had created life, just as Ben had done, but that was different. She couldn’t quite quantify exactly how, but something seemed intrinsically wrong with what Ben had done. Even if it was only a clone, bringing a dead man back to life and using his body as a puppet, especially when it was someone Liao had known in life, struck her as terribly wrong. Then there was the image of her own face, flesh and blood, but many years younger. She didn’t even want to think about that just yet.

  She couldn’t stand to be in the same room as Ben. She couldn’t even stand to be on the same ship as him.

  Although her body ached and her uniform was soaked in sweat, Liao wasn’t done yet. The moment her legs would carry her again, she pushed herself back to standing and ran. She liked the pain, liked the burning feeling in her limbs, the protests of a body that had spent nearly a year caring for a baby and eating New York pizza, a body that had spent nearly a year neglecting its fitness.

  When she was younger, a junior officer in the service, she had run often, especially during her sea-going time as a navigator on the Chinese navy’s Han class nuclear attack submarines. She would jog from stem to stern and back again over and over, a perilous obstacle course but one she would relish. It felt good to run: to push one’s body beyond comfort, to improve it, to weaken it so it could grow again, stronger than before.

  The hangar bay loomed ahead of her, light pouring in through the hexagonal entrance to the twin doors leading to the airlock of the vast open cavern. She stumbled through the first door, gasping for air and peering through the tiny glass window to the hangar bay beyond. The little ship was gone, as she expected, but her discarded spacesuit at her feet remained. She kicked off her boots and stepped into the legs of the suit, pulling it up over her uniform. She squirmed into the suit, then reached for the helmet.

  A voice from the discarded headset stopped her.

  “How far do you think you can run in this place?”

  She pulled up the spherical dome, bringing it close to her head and touching the talk key dangling down from the helmet. “I don’t care what you have to say,” she said. “We’re done. We’re done. What you’re doing is sick. It’s not right, and I don’t want to help you. I don’t want to talk to you. I just want you, your ship and your experiments to be flaming debris.”

  There was a brief pause, uncharacteristic for the construct who usually began speaking immediately. “I’m not sure I was clear. I’m not looking for the meaning of life, or anything more than the simple experience of being alive.”

  “Listen, you fucked up Pinocchio wannabe, you have a lot to learn about us ‘biologicals’ if you really think that by putting a fleshy mask over your datacore you can conceal what you are.”

  Another pause. “Do you think of your privileges, Liao? The precious gifts you enjoy as part of your existence—to breathe, to live, to die. How strange it is, don’t you think, to want those things? To want to die if I am, for but a few minutes, deprived of oxygen. To live in one body, one form, wit
h an organic mind, giving away my perfect intellect. To die, eventually, as all biological creatures die.”

  “Yeah, well, you know what we have? A conscience.”

  “One step at a time, Liao. One step at a time.”

  Liao wanted to say more, but another voice came over the line. Kamal Iraj. “Commander Liao, this is TFR Beijing actual. Report status.”

  Ben answered, his British accented tone clipped and annoyed. “The good Commander is busy, Commander Iraj.”

  She squeezed the transmit key. “Kamal, I want you to lock everything you have on this ship and blow it to atoms. Full spread, maximum yield, rail guns target centre of mass. Fire for effect.” There was no answer except a faint hiss over the line. “Kamal?”

  Liao turned at the faint sound of metal feet on the deck behind her. Two drones, identical to those that had escorted her to Ben, slowly strode down the corridor towards her, their weapons raised.

  “The master will see you now,” the lead drone intoned.

  “Tell the master I don’t give a shit what he wants.”

  “The master will see you now.”

  Liao drew her pistol, lining it up to the spider-like head of the Bevra drone. She squeezed the trigger, the round screaming as it ricocheted off the drone’s metal head and embedded itself against the deck. The finish wasn’t even scratched. She fired again and again, each round having as little effect as the first until the slide locked back and her ammunition was exhausted.

  “You will be brought before him by force if you do not comply.”

  She ejected the empty magazine and reached for her spare, jamming it in the base of her pistol. “And what if I don’t want to?”

  “You will be—”

  Liao clicked the slide closed and pressed the weapon to her temple. “And what if I really don’t want to?”

  There was a tense delay as the robot silently regarded her, then the drone spoke with Ben’s voice. “Last time I saw you, your biometric data indicated that you were pregnant. You are no longer pregnant. There was a high probability of that foetus being carried to term, so I can only assume you have a child now. All my data regarding Humans suggests that you treasure your children and that before a child reaches their first decade, they are essentially relying on their parents to sustain them. You will not terminate your life while that child needs you.”