Her hand melded into the panel, found the right circuits and brought up the monitors where he was sitting in the hall. The ship felt strange when she was inside it. An uncomfortable feeling. She pulled her hand out, reformed it and did things the human way. She brought up the holo-screen and used her eyes to see.
11
The Madroleeka
Jessie learned fast how to maneuver in zero G, it wasn’t difficult if you kept a hand hold then pushed off something solid hard enough to make it to the next bent piece of the structure. Once he got past the gaping hole punched through the ship and into an undamaged corridor, a door slid closed behind him. He was pitched into darkness and had a moment of panic as he tried to turn and bumped along the ceiling. Or maybe it was a wall.
“Hey, are you still there?” he asked. “Hello? Does this thing have a light switch?”
The voice didn’t answer.
Using the dim light of the map superimposed on the visor he made his way forward. The corridor stretched for a long way, his eyes adjusted to the faint green light and he got good at pulling himself from door frame to door frame. He arrowed through the hallway and couldn’t help the grin on his face. Despite everything, he was exhilarated at the feeling of weightlessness. It felt like he was flying, like he was a super hero. He spun, pulled himself along with ease and started going faster, one side then the other. Grab a frame, pull hard and fly another twenty feet. He stuck his arm straight out, superman style and double checked the display. It showed a straight line for a long way. He glanced back into the darkness then smashed into a door. He grunted, bounced off and tumbled back down the hallway as it opened with a rush of air. He squinted at the sudden light, grabbed a recessed light fixture in the ceiling and stopped his tumble. The corridor looked normal and undamaged, almost like an office building with rows of door along both sides. He pushed off and floated through the opening then crashed to the floor as soon as he passed the threshold. He had gravity. He picked himself up then started the long walk, holding the suit and taking exaggerated steps in the oversized boots. Flying was way easier.
Jessie followed the lines, passed through doors that were too tall and felt like a little kid again. Everything was a little too big and it was all brand new. He wondered what was behind the closed doors but they didn’t open, only the hallway sections slid open and closed behind him. He trudged for what seemed like miles, started sweating and breathing hard in the suit. The closer he got to the end point, the harder it was to lift his feet. He thought the gravity was getting more intense as he neared it and when he leaned against a wall to rest, his feet slid out from under him and he plopped down on the floor. He could hardly lift his hands, he felt pinned in place and wondered if he had been cut and hadn’t noticed. Why was he so weak, was he bleeding out?
“Are you injured?” the voice asked and he was glad to hear it again.
“Oh, hi. Glad you’re back.” He said. “I was getting a little worried.”
“Are you injured?” the voice said again. “What is your status?”
“My status is I’m tired.” Jessie said. “This stupid suit is hard to walk in.”
There was a long pause before it answered and he could feel himself getting lighter.
“Adjustments have been made in the gravity.” The voice said. “Please continue to the designated point on your display so you can be assessed.”
He stood easily but the awe of being in outer space, of being on a destroyed starship or even being alive was wearing off. He didn't know who he was talking to, didn't know if they were friend of foe. He wasn't a hundred percent sure he was still among the living. He remembered Horowitz sending him off into oblivion, he sort of remembered streaking through space but that had to be a dream. He woke up here, stumbling like he always did when he came out of the machine. He tried to push open one of the side doors but it didn't budge. He could only see straight ahead out of the helmet, it didn't do any good to turn his head. He had to turn his whole body.
"Continue to the marked destination, you are not authorized to enter private quarters." the voice said.
Jessie ignored it and tried the next door.
The voice repeated the command.
He ignored it again.
"Follow the designated path, report for further assessment. You are not authorized to disregard direct orders."
"Shut up." Jessie said with a laugh. "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard anybody say."
He had to be talking to a computer, normal people didn't speak like that. Even Siri didn't talk like that and he had to be hundreds of years in the future. Maybe even a thousand. The machine stopped talking as he tried more doors but they wouldn't budge, he would need a crowbar and a suit that wasn't as bulky. He remembered the gust of air that came out when he passed through the last hallway door and wondered if there were oxygen in the corridor. After considering for a moment, he realized there had to be. Or there should be. At least he hoped there was and twisted the helmet a quarter turn and slowly lifted it as he took in a small breath. The air was cold but it wasn't bad. He tried another then sucked in a huge lung full. It was fine and he wasted no time getting out of the oversized boots.
"You shut up." The hallway finally replied in the machines voice. "Stop being a dick."
Jessie laughed and pulled knives. It was something he would say. He wondered if the machine could read minds.
On the bridge she stared at the microphone and was flabbergasted at her words. She didn't know why she’d said them and ran yet another systems check. She had never spoken out like that and where had the outburst come from? Was that anger she'd felt? A human emotion? Her programming had overloaded and she'd been incapable of a measured response. She had been out of control. And why did she feel unsure, she'd never been unsure about anything ever. She knew things. She calculated outcomes. She acted accordingly but now everything seemed a little off. There was a corruption in her system but all self-checks came back one hundred percent optimal.
It took a moment to get herself under control but when she did, she realized the human wasn't the same as the ship's crew. He didn’t follow orders. She expended a little more power, turned on the video monitors and stared at the diminutive man. He was also fundamentally shaped different and it wasn't a deformity or birth defect. He was from a different time and place even though his DNA was 100% human. He wasn’t a hybrid.
"Those are living quarters you are trying to break into." She said. "I have not initiated oxygen, gravity or heat because most of them still have crew member bodies inside."
Jessie stopped prying at the door, looked up and down the hall, thought about it and figured the voice was probably telling the truth. He really didn't want to see any dead space dudes and figured he didn't have much choice other than go meet whoever was running the show. If they wanted to do him harm, they could have let him die in the airless cold, not helped him at all. They had a funny way of asking, that's all.
The map guided him to the center of the ship, down endless corridors that were identical except for weird makings identifying different sections. Lights went off behind him and sometimes the gravity was different from section to section and it was cold but he kept moving. Kept following the directions.
On the bridge she changed her shape once more into a more lifelike representation of his kind. She'd stopped trying to purge the new invader in her system once she analyzed it and realized it was only information. It wasn't trying to overwrite her, it wasn't malevolent. It just… was. It was an immeasurable, unquantifiable alien thing but it couldn’t be purged. It was a part of her now. It was a memory that couldn't be forgotten. A sight that couldn't be unseen. A feeling she didn't know how to turn on or off. She understood his world, his language, his units of measurement and the darkness he carried inside him. Foremost in the unwanted thoughts was the woman called Scarlet. She had been his companion and the memories of the girl permeated her. It over rode the feelings of anger and rage and fear and horror. It was a tender fee
ling that brought her sadness. It was loss and grief but hope and love at the same time. It overshadowed every other emotion rocketing through her and it would drive her to her knees in agony and sorrow it she didn't fight to keep it under control. She knew every scar on her body and where each had come from. She knew the pain she had suffered and the wrongs she had righted. She saw and felt her though his emotions and he had loved her deeply, more than anything, more than himself.
Once she stopped trying to eliminate the foreign thoughts and assimilated them, she stopped bouncing from one extreme to another. She exerted her analytical logic and regained control. She understood humans better now. How could they feel this every day, every night, every instant of their existence and continue to live? How did they not have complete and total mental breakdowns?
As she considered all she was feeling, tried to stop the internal dialogue and thoughts that were not her own, the door slid open and the boy stepped inside. He cocked his head at her.
"Scarlet?" he said hesitantly.
12
A More Perfect Union
The woman looked like Scarlet but she didn't and as he watched she morphed into something else, something alien. The knives were back in his fists but the thing held up its hands in a placating way.
"I mean you no harm," it said, her voice shifting to several different tones. "I am having difficulty maintaining a solid form, I have been infected, much of me has been lost and I am operating in a diminished capacity."
Jessie stared at the big-eyed alien, noticed the six fingers and once the shock wore off, realized she really wasn't much different than him. Taller for sure. The extra finger was no big deal, a lot of people were born like that. Her eyes were what really set her apart, they were oversized like all those Japanese anime characters. She had a grayish tinge and she was bald but lots of people were. He'd seen his grandmother shiny domed after she had chemo treatments for her cancer. He lowered the knives.
"Are you a hologram?" he asked as he moved a little closer.
"Programmable metamatter." She answered.
He stared at her blankly.
"A molecular liquid" She tried again as he glanced around the commanders' bridge but his eyes kept darting back to her.
She queried herself, found the words he would understand in the new information that threatened to overload her system. He liked to read picture stories called comic books.
"I am Madroleeka," she said, approximating her name, the ships name, in his language. "I'm a robot that can change shapes. Like Plastic Man."
"I'm Jessie." He said, while keeping his distance.
He explored the bridge, intrigued by everything and they talked for long hours. She knew everything he knew but he had questions for her. Sometimes her form was almost formless, sometimes she looked like the alien but more often than not she looked like Scarlet. It was the strongest overriding memory that made up the core of her being now and every time she was distracted, she shifted back into the shape of the woman as he remembered her. He stumbled over her name every time he tried to say it and finally started calling her Maddy. If fit. She seemed about half mad anyway with all the flitting between forms. Or maybe he was half mad and locked up in an asylum somewhere. That would be nice, then there was a chance he could wake up one day.
Jessies’ mind should have been blown by all he saw and learned but everything had been so crazy for so long, starting with the undead uprising, that nothing surprised him anymore. He took it all in stride. The machine that resembled Scarlet didn't know how to control the new emotions cascading through her and sometimes they overwhelmed her and she raged and screamed. Sometimes she cried and tears tracked down her cheeks only to be absorbed back into the skin. She knew everything he knew, his life, his family, his feelings. She knew everything he knew about the world he'd left, everything he learned in school and everything he'd learned about people. The facts and figures she assimilated easily but sometimes the raw emotions overrode her logic patterns.
He should have been freaking out but he was calm, more exhausted than amazed. He hadn't saved the world but he hadn't made it any worse, either. He had been tired and was ready to embrace death, he wanted it and had never expected to live once Horowitz pushed the button. Now he was awake, still alive, and on a destroyed battle cruiser drifting in space. He'd seen his world destroyed by nuclear annihilation. His dad dying, His mom dead. He'd seen the love of his life turned into an undead monster, he'd traveled through time and space. He'd done so much the past few weeks he should be the one having a breakdown but he spent most of the time comforting and reassuring the most powerful and advanced machine he'd ever encountered. She was like something out of a movie but she was a train wreck. She could turn into smoke or disappear into the drifting ships computers. She said she WAS the ship, or used to be before it was destroyed. It was a lifeless hunk of metal without her to maintain and operate the systems. She had monitored and controlled the health and welfare of every crew member. She knew everything about everything. But that was before. Now she was a tiny portion of what she once was, most of her destroyed in the one-sided battle and she had memory losses. Being overwritten with the trillions of neurons that made up Jessies’ every thought and memory, coupled with being a tiny fraction of what she used to be, created limited data storage. Much of the information in her was gone, it had been deleted and overwritten.
"What were you guys fighting about?" Jessie asked. "Who started the war?"
She didn't know, she had forgotten. The oldest data in her system was purged to make room for the new and her earliest programming had been when she came online, had been given orders, loaded with soldiers and launched for duty.
She didn’t know who they were fighting or why. She remembered her crew, their names and faces and meal preferences. She knew their families, their hopes and dreams, their hobbies and desires. It was her job to know and keep them satisfied, content and in fighting form. Her destruction had been instant. As soon as they jumped through a portal, tiny ships had appeared, fired their payloads then dispatched droids with caustic weapons to finish the job. To eliminate her completely. They had almost succeeded.
The entire Federations fleet of world dominating warships and the ten thousand warriors in each were destroyed simultaneously. The war was over in minutes. There had been no recovery efforts because there was no one left to recover her. Similar powerful weapons had been loosed on a thousand planets with similar deadly results. Earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunami's, overnight ice ages or deluges of unending rain ripped worlds apart and the inhabitants lost all interest in war. Most civilizations were gone. Those that survived were reduced to living in ruins and starting over. Advanced ideas and cultures reverted to clawing a living from the soil. Space faring societies were thrown back to the stone age overnight. She told him there were thousands of years of silence as she floated helpless and broken, drifting farther away from shipping lanes, jump gates or inhabited systems. Another thousand years of sporadic communications as civilizations were reconstructed and only in the last century had commerce and ships started becoming commonplace. The galaxy was rebuilding. It was recovering from the wars no one remembered.
"No chance of rescue?" Jessie asked "You said you talked to other ships, right?"
"Incorrect." She said. "I monitor communications, I cannot transmit.”
"Can the radio be fixed? I don't care who comes to help." Jessie said. "I'll get rescued by a Wookie. Anything is better than hanging out here until I run out of oxygen."
"There are no Wookie's," she said, "and the heating elements will go first. You'll die of the cold."
"Whatever. Let's hail whoever we can and get out of here."
"I cannot.” She replied. “I have done extensive refitting and repairs to be able to receive but the equipment to build a radio powerful enough to transmit has been destroyed.”
Jessie frowned. There had to be a way out.
"Do you think your people will try to come for you now that they've
gone back into space?" Jessie asked.
"Would your people spend any effort to recover a broken spear from the time of the Romans?" she asked in return, remembering the history of his world. "I am forgotten and obsolete. Perhaps in another ten thousand years I will likely wander near the shipping lanes in the Grathian system. If I am discovered, scrappers may find a use for me. My hull will be disassembled for recycling."
"That soon, huh?” Jessie asked. “But that's the ship. What about you?"
"I am the ship." She said. "I will be deleted; it is the new Federation law. Until then, my only other purpose is to preserve human life. I will preserve you for as long as I can but the power will fall below life sustaining levels in seven hundred thirty-one earth days."
“So as soon as you’re found, they’ll kill you?” Jessie asked, his eyes going wide.
“It is the law.” She said.
Days passed. Jessie explored the parts of the ship sealed off from the devastation and spoke with the machine, learning what she knew. It didn't take long for the novelty to wear off and even though the food had been perfectly preserved it all tasted droll and much of it upset his stomach. The parts of the ship she deemed safe were boring. There was the bridge which was nearly useless. Nothing worked. He couldn’t fly it, couldn’t fire off any weapons, couldn’t do much of anything except sit in the oversized seats and look at blank consoles. He couldn’t see outside, the screens didn’t work. There weren’t even any buttons to push. There was a small officer’s galley with a kitchen, a few rooms that didn’t have dead bodies floating around in them and long corridors with sealed doors. All in all, a pretty tiny area in a huge city sized space ship.
Zombie Road | Book 8 | Crossroads of Chaos Page 7
