Godlike Machines

by Johnathan Strahan

  “Isn’t a better question for the moment: why two access codes?”

  “That’s why you expected someone to meet you here, but didn’t know who.”

  “Exactly. But you’re not Trelayne,” she said, “unless you too have a secret.”

  I withdrew my hand, keeping my expression carefully neutral. “Trelayne is a person?”

  “A very important person, Don. The most important person in the mines. Some say he’s a thousand years old and lives in a fortress at the center of everything. Others say he’s just a legend, and he never existed at all. Either way, remember those questions you had? Find Trelayne and you’ll have your answers.”

  “He’s the person you’re looking for,” I said, remembering with a flash of inspiration what Supervisor Nemke had said about her unsuccessful search.

  “Yes.” Her stare was a challenge. “And now I have two access codes to set me on my way again. Are you coming with me or not?”

  It was not an easy decision, Master Catterson. If I rejected her offer, I could return to my post beneath Supervisor Nemke and resume my patient exploration of Gevira’s mysteries, aided by her slow but considerate attempts to educate me in the ways of the mines.

  Or I could travel with Cotton to a whole new section of the mine-the existence of which I had never suspected just one level up—and pursue the man she said could tell me everything I had ever wanted to know. The opportunity promised untold revelations. It hinted at mysteries we had barely suspected. How could I decline her offer?

  I did not. For the Great Ship and the Guild, I resolved to keep following the mystery wherever it led, no matter how many bridges I left burning behind me.

  Cotton entered the access codes electronically. The panels slide open, allowing us entry into a carriage identical to the one I had just left. They shut behind us, and with no sensation of motion at all we were underway.

  My interrogation of her began almost immediately.

  “The view back there,” I said. “That doesn’t look like any mine I’ve ever seen before.”

  “What do you think is going on here, exactly?”

  I told her what I had learned during my covert surveillance: that the deeper levels harness the resources of Gevira’s lower mantle and core, using the temperature differential between it and the Polar Regions to power the enterprize. That is the official story, anyway. You and I know this to be only partly true, Master, but I did not comprehend until that moment that she knew as well.

  “Yeah, it’s bullshit,” she said. “The mine is a net energy exporter degrees of magnitude higher than even an optimistic estimate. And the elements it extracts from the mantle don’t display the expected isotopic proportions. Core-mining can’t possibly be the whole story.”

  I asked her for her theory, but she didn’t answer.

  “Perhaps twists in causality are a side-effect,” I prompted her, thinking of her abandoned corpse.

  “Of what? The kind of concentrated mass-energy you’d need to create a loop in time would suck Gevira into a black hole. I haven’t stumbled over any of those lately. Have you?”

  “It’s impossible to define the characteristics of a technology we know nothing about.”

  “True.”

  “Particularly if that technology is of alien origin.”

  “ROTH? Here?”

  I asked her to define the term.

  “Races Other Than Human, Don. Where have you been living?”

  I was tempted to say: far from here. But the urge to put her in her place was controllable.

  “The possibility of an alien artifact cannot be ignored,” I said, frostily. “I believe that the Director is protecting it.”

  “There’s something odd going on, that’s for sure, but I don’t think that little green men on Gevira are the answer. Most people assume there’s a secret society running things behind the scenes. Those they like, they take. Those they don’t like, they kill. Occam would find that more acceptable.”

  Her superior attitude was a constant irritation, but no secret is safe with a braggart. It emerges of its own accord, eventually. I decided to suffer in exchange for the information she promised.

  “Have you ever heard of Terminus?” she asked.

  For the second time that day, I experienced vertigo. “No.”

  “The Structure?”

  “No.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know, Donaldan Lough. Stick with me. I’ll do my best to keep you out of trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble are you anticipating?”

  “How should I know?” Her facade cracked. “The only thing I’m sure of is that when this knot in time unwinds, I’m going to be dead.”

  “We must all die, one way or another.”

  “And curiosity kills the cat. I’d be careful if I were you, Donnie Boy. This is my problem. You don’t want to be tied to me when I go down.”

  “You didn’t seem to consider that much of a problem before.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe it’s just sinking in. Maybe I’m starting to feel the full weight of my mortality.” Her chest rose and fell. “You ask too many questions. Do you know that?”

  The floor jolted beneath us, signalling our arrival at a new section of the mine. Cotton took up a position in front of the door. I stood to her right, expecting to see a habitat very much like the one in which I lived. There was no reason to believe otherwise.

  The doors slid open, revealing armed guards, two militaristic checkpoints, and a queue of miners in unfamiliar field-suits waiting to be processed. Low rectangular windows in the checkpoint barriers offered a glimpse of the what lay beyond them, but it was not easy to examine those vistas at a casual glance, not from my position. The air stank of intimidation and fear, putting my nerves on edge. My right hand flexed, aching for the grip of a Guild blaster.

  “Let me do the talking,” said Cotton, leading the way out of the elevator. “You should be okay; you have Geviran ID. But around here it never pays to be—”

  A bark of anger cut her off in mid-sentence. Heads turned, including ours, towards a sudden disturbance near the checkpoints. My first thought was that someone had attempted to force their way through the blockade, but a spreading ripple of alarm and shock told me that something more serious was afoot. Anger became distress. The sideways shuffling of people waiting in line took on an urgent Brownian motion while some tried to get closer to the source of the problem and others tried just as insistently to get away. Individual voices rose up out of a growing hubbub. Two familiar words stood out more clearly than any others.

  The Director.

  “Stay back,” Cotton said, pressing me against the doors behind me. They had closed. Three more entrances stood to our right, also shut. She inched us towards them. “Don’t do anything until I tell you.”

  I let her take charge of the situation. We were significantly outnumbered, and I had no choice but to place my faith in her greater knowledge of the situation. Not until the guards noticed us, the latest arrivals, and raised their weapons to target us did I begin to be seriously concerned.

  Cotton presented her ID and shouted something. I don’t know what. The words are lost in the growing chaos captured in memory dump. Her protestations didn’t have the intended effect.

  A ring of armed soldiers pressed towards us, pushing bystanders out of the way. What did they think we had done? Killed or kidnapped a bystander ourselves and stuck around to witness the effect?

  I understood their terror, though. One of their own had been struck down by the Director. Explanations were required. A superstitious need for answers and scapegoats had to be addressed.

  I tensed, readying myself to fight. We were unarmed and had nowhere to run. If we were lucky, I remember thinking, we might only end up in a cell. If we were unlucky ...

  Behind us, one of the entrances slid open. Cotton grabbed my upper arm so tightly it hurt and pulled me inside. I had no sensible reason to resist.

  The doors closed barely in time. P
ounding fists echoed from the far side for a second, then were gone.

  Cotton’s breathing was loud but I suspect mine was louder.

  “That could’ve gone better,” she said, letting go of my arm and flicking her dark fringe out of her eyes.

  “Was that the kind of trouble you were expecting?

  “No. I’ve never seen the Director so active.” The look in her eyes told me that I had correctly surmised the reason behind our rapid retreat. “And no, I don’t know where we’re going. Somewhere safe, I hope.”

  “Safe from the Director or from goons like them?”

  “Both.” Then she laughed. “The stupid thing is, they were never going to shoot me. I was killed by my own choice, not by a bullet.”

  “That fact offers me little comfort, Cotton.”

  “Call me E. C.”

  I avoided this attempt at intimacy by taking the opportunity to review the AV data stored in my memory dump. You have that data, Master Catterson. You will witness as I did the tense situation prevalent in that level of the mine. Why it should be so, I have not yet learned. Perhaps that level contains conditions hostile to human life, or minerals—even ruins !—considered valuable by the Geviran government. Perhaps this level is the source of the mine’s paradoxical profligacy. For now, it remains unfathomed. The images in my memory dump—of brilliant sparks spraying in an arc against an entirely metal backdrop-offer no illumination at all.

  With that inglorious beginning, our circuitous odyssey through the mines commenced. I will not burden you with torturous details of our headlong flight, Master, and neither will I attempt to convey the horror of it: the tense anticipation for the doors to open, the growing certainty that the Director would strike wherever we appeared, and the terrible fear that the codes would stop working, thereby rendering us unable to flee from such near-misses.

  After hastily eluding the armed forces of the Militaristic Zone (as I have come to think of it), Cotton and I escaped to another level of the mine an unknown distance from our starting point. It was to all appearances a gentler place than the last, one bedecked with vines and plants and smelling sweetly of fresh oxygen. I had time enough to take in the vistas offered by its elegant observation deck before tragedy struck a third time that day. A woman screamed a man’s name not ten meters from where I stood, prompting bedlam all around us. The man was dead, killed by the Director. An influx of bystanders could do nothing to save him or to relieve the horror of the woman who had witnessed the attack. I imagined the body, bloodied and battered as Gluis’s had been, and was glad we had been no closer.

  Cotton decreed that we should move again.

  “Keep your eyes on me,” she said as she used our access codes to open another door.

  “Why?”

  “The Director can only take someone while they’re not being observed.”

  “Do you think we’re its targets?”

  “Who else, Don? Three attacks in as many hours. We’re the only common denominators.”

  I could accept her reasoning, but for one flaw. “You’re not afraid of bullets, but you run from the Director. Why is that?”

  “Time’s in knots. I’m not ruling out anything I can’t see.”

  That was a fair point. Given the awesome subtlety of its art, who was to say the Director could not reach into her mind and trigger the chemical cascade that would leave her dead? That fate was no more suicide than a bullet, but it could look the same.

  The “Greenhouse” Zone was followed by another, chosen at random from the five routes available to us. Cotton was relying on fate to guide her, or else she possessed a means of navigating the unfolding mines that I have not guessed.

  Barely had the doors opened when cries alerted us once more to the presence of our deadly traveling companion.

  I did as instructed and kept Cotton within plain sight. She, I am pleased to note, did the same for me. We stayed barely long enough to taste the air and capture several seconds of data, revealing that this level was a very different place to any I had visited before or since, with long-limbed servomechanisms passing a greenish material of unknown constitution endlessly between them. I dubbed it the Jade Zone.

  There followed the Dark, the Underwater, and the Antiquated Zones, all visited only briefly, all distinct in a variety of ways. It is quite impossible to capture the variety I glimpsed at each of our destinations. All I can do is attach the images I recorded for you and my fellow Guildsmen to pore over. I am certain that you will reach the same conclusion as I.

  We know from our own history that human civilization has existed on Gevira for approximately 300 years. It is a homogenous culture founded on egalitarian principles different to ours, but not inimically so. The Great Ships of the Guild have been trading with Gevira for at least half of its colonized history, but until now we have had no suspicion of the wealth and diversity lying beneath its surface. A veritable maze of mine shafts and levels exist here—and perhaps existed here long before humanity arrived in force to claim the planet. Could aliens have built these spaces, these wonderful contrivances, and then abandoned them? In the light of recent events, I do believe that is possible. How else could such a subterranean labyrinth ever have been built—and populated—with no one noticing? And no wonder its population is so much larger than the official figures recorded on the surface! The miners might have been breeding down here for generations, creating their own odd pockets of society, disconnected from worlds above, perhaps even from each other.

  The Superior Zone. The Electric Zone. The Loud Zone. I was soon hard-stretched to find adjectives. Across these transits we might have covered hundreds, even thousands of kilometers, in any number of directions. There was no way of telling one point within the planet from the next. I am just one Guildsman, alone in this enucleate enigma and finding myself increasingly at a loss.

  We came at last to a level empty of all life, apart from our own. I feared for a moment that the Director had snatched everyone away a bare instant before the doors opened, but that was soon revealed to be unfounded: this level has been abandoned for some time, judging by the staleness of the air. When we stepped out the only entrance on that level, we were greeted by flat echoes off unadorned walls. Our feet kicked up dust with every step. Shadowy windows revealed nothing of the level beyond this dim entrance hall, which was vaulted and gloomy like a tomb. There was power-piped in, I presume, along the shaft we had followed—but little else.

  “I do not know this place,” Cotton said, visibly sagging with exhaustion but not yet relief. That we were alone meant that the Director could attack no one else but us.

  We did nothing for some time, standing together in the silent hall, watching each other and waiting for the Director to strike. If it tried to take both of us at once, would our combined perceptions offer any protection at all? We could only wait and hope. I don’t know if Cotton prayed. Me, I offered my faith up to the Great Ship and the parent world far away, in the hope that my life would not be so meaninglessly squandered.

  Nothing happened. The eye of the Director has passed over us, it seems. Perhaps it is toying with us. Perhaps it enjoyed watching us run far and wide, and has temporarily retracted its malevolent claw just as we steeled ourselves in resignation for its deathly touch.

  How many people have died or been taken in our wake is impossible to know. Dozens, probably. If Cotton’s theory is correct, we are responsible for every innocent lost this day. There is comfort in the thought that we ourselves have survived, but it is bitterly cold.

  Resigned, temporarily, to running no more, Cotton and I have agreed to rest in this lifeless space. I volunteered to keep watch while she, exhausted, sleeps. She has no way of knowing if I will be there when she wakes. I could run away, or be snatched by the Director during her slumber. The latter is entirely possible, by the strange illogic of this world, but sleep she must. In the last day, she has traveled from topside to view her own corpse, fled with a stranger through far-flung sections of the mine, and found
herself in this desolate, empty hall. In its relative calm we will both seek what ease there is to find.

  For my own part, I have taken the opportunity to prepare this account. Master Catterson, I urge you to consider carefully everything I have revealed to you, and to respond forthwith. It has been too long since I last took direct counsel from you, and I fear that I have become lost in more ways than one. Here I am, led far off my chosen course by a guide who may not be completely reliable, and whom I must avoid trusting any more than sense dictates.

  You have my data, Master Catterson. Study it and advise me how best to proceed.

  I await your orders with some anxiety, in fear of wandering forever.

  (There ends, Master Catterson, my first account since leaving the post you assigned me. I have altered not a word, trusting in my first impressions and the conveyance thereof—and in your open-mindedness too, for what is to come necessarily colors what came before. A new light is about to shine, one that will provide a second, more pertinent interpretation of everything I have shared with you thus far.)

 

  While Cotton slept, I explored as much of this Dead Zone as I dared, monitoring with all my senses for sudden drops in pressure, radiation spikes, biological interference, and any other potentially lethal signs. Without knowing what had caused the evacuation of its miners, the care I took was unparalleled. It would not do to escape the Director only to fall in some pointless accident. Until Cotton was either dead or somehow spared her unavoidable fate, I was bound to pursue the mystery and the answers she promised.

  The shape of the empty habitat was a tube, spiralling like a strand of DNA on its side through the planet’s subduction zones. I surmised from an examination of its inert engines that ferriferous minerals had been mined here a decade or so earlier. The crusted furnaces were cold, abandoned rather than chopped up and returned to the surface. I walked along corridors and through barracks that retained not the slightest trace of their former inhabitants. There were neither bodies nor physical effects. It was as though such traces had been erased along with their existence.