Take No Prisoners

by John Grant

  So much for logic. A lot of it had been programmed into me, but the clever people had had to make room in the subroutines for a good deal of illogic, too. I hate them for it.

  "Don't go," I'd urge him. "There's no way that Mission Control can make you. We're too far from home for them to be able to come here and force you."

  And:

  "Qinefer," he'd reply, "don't be so bloody stupid. If I don't go down there someone else will have to. Do you think I want to live out the next few years knowing I'm breathing someone else's air? No, I'm going down. Tomorrow."

  And tomorrow and tomorrow. Human beings aren't ever really heroes, no matter what they tell themselves. Quite a lot of reasons turned up to delay the date of the experiment. What made it worse was that he cottoned on to the fact that one of Mission Control's motives in sending me along was so they could have a detailed report of his terminal illness, if any. I felt like a vulture. Andrew knew this, and sympathized; the trouble was that he couldn't help beginning to think of me as a vulture, too.

  Tomorrow came one morning.

  We made love very slowly, and then Andrew threw back the covers and went straight to the rack of spacesuits. There was no need for him to tell me he'd decided the time for procrastination was over. Wordlessly I climbed into my own suit, thinking all the time that the grief I was feeling was a folly, a subprogram that had inadvertently become corrupted, that the chances of his survival were so high as almost to constitute a certainty. He kissed me just before he put his helmet on. I put my own helmet on, having fisted away the shattered visor. He smiled reassuringly, but there was a white edge to his mouth.

  Out through the airlock, and we were floating alongside the ship. Then dragging ourselves along the hull to the dimple that showed where the little two-person shuttle was stowed. The hatch rolled back as I pressed the relevant studs, and the rather dainty craft was revealed. Hydraulics slowly raised it until it was flush with the hull of the mothership. We swam into it and drew the canopy over us.

  "You don't need to wear that suit," Andrew said. It was the first time he'd spoken this morning.

  "The radio," I muttered. "I need the helmet for the radio, so we can speak to each other." Even if I hadn't thought I needed it I'd have worn the suit – just to keep him company.

  And that was all we said until, a few hours later, the shuttle came screamingly to rest on a rolling plain. In the distance a small group of the herbivores we'd seen from orbit were grazing; they didn't seem to be too interested in us.

  Andrew had a look at them through his binoculars.

  "Damn!" he said. "They're just that bit too far away for me to see them properly."

  I said nothing. I could see them perfectly clearly. No binoculars.

  The shuttle cooled down, popping and crackling as it did so. We clambered out and stood there savoring the thrill of standing for the first time on a new planet. The "grass" around our ankles was tough and ropy, and at the end of each strand of it there was a little barbed ball, which scratched at our legs. The smell of the place was unlike anything I'd ever encountered before. That's not to say it was a bad smell: just that it was totally different – a smell which humanity could never have created. I analysed it automatically, and was interested to find some quite arcane molecules mixed in with the normal organics.

  At length, without any sort of ceremony, Andrew shrugged and stripped off his suit. He was quite unselfconscious in his nakedness. I followed his example.

  He took a deep breath.

  "Smells good," he said. "Strange, but good."

  After a pause: "Actually, better than anything I can remember smelling on Mars. Probably because it doesn't come out of a tin can."

  I breathed deeply, imitating him. This may sound as if I were being condescending; in many ways I was. Now that we were down on a fresh virgin planet it was no longer a case of my being reminded occasionally that he was old; instead I was constantly conscious of it. His hands were shaking, as if the wind were catching them, and I realized they'd been like that for quite a few years now; of course, I'd known it all along, but I'd simply been storing the information rather than letting it come to my main attention. His body was slightly hunched over; I wanted to run naked through the grasses of the plain, but I didn't, because I also wanted him to be beside me. Like a fool I allowed myself briefly to remember what he'd looked like when we were both in our twenties, and the pain of the recollection made me turn instantly away. The poor man stood there, confident of his possession of me, sniffing the wind and expecting my approval of him, and I loved him for it because that was what I'd been told to do.

  We strolled around for an hour or two, pretending to each other that this was just a casual afternoon amble.

  Eventually Andrew said: "Qinefer, this is long enough for the first time down here. We'd best get back up to the ship and see if I've caught anything exciting."

  I agreed. We turned back towards the shuttle.

  ~

  If you've ever seen a man die slowly then you'll know what I saw over the next few weeks.

  At first there was nothing but the frequent forgetfulness.

  Then there were the times when he saw – quite plainly saw, much as you might see your hand in front of you – all the foulest demons of humanity's imaginings pouring like a gelatinous liquid down the walls of the control room. And then he saw me for what he thought I truly was: an amalgam of metal and fiberglass and plastiflesh, a mechanical skull gazing at him, wires and chips positioning themselves in order to produce a sad caricature of affection. The time that the ship became a great throbbing womb, desiring all, bearing the seed of all life within it; the time that the universe was a mouth, uvula trembling eagerly in readiness as the teeth closed around him; the time that ...

  Oh but I found it less than worthwhile living during the ponderous weeks before he died.

  ~

  We said goodbye to each other in one of his lucid moments. I stood by the bunkside, looking at the pale imitation of a man I'd once loved. I saw his lips working as he weakly mouthed the syllables, and yet I found that I could feel nothing. I was remote from this: this was merely a human being, a short-lived parasite on the flesh of spacetime. He was moving through a stage, the one that lies between existence and nonexistence. He was dead as he lay there, but his body had yet to realize it.

  I went through the motions. I drew on a subroutine and spoke the words that a lover would have spoken. They seemed empty pretenses to me, but he accepted them as genuine.

  At length he died. It was a relief.

  Over a couple of days I dissected his body, analysed what I found, and dumped the bits into a large plastic sack. I carried what had now became just a weight, no longer a human being, over to the airlock. Outside, I quickly located a small rocket that had been built into the hull for precisely this purpose. I attached the sack to it and came back inside. I booted up a viewing-screen and watched the flame spit from the rocket's tail. I saw the final moments as the remains of Andrew's body plummeted away from me down through the atmosphere, glowing momentarily even brighter than the rocket's exhaust.

  The sight was very interesting. I made sure that every scintilla of it was permanently recorded inside me.

  Then a question I hadn't expected came into my mind.

  Can you remember who you are?

  Of course I knew who I was. I was an android, that was all. I'd been created out of protoplasm, "clever" plastics and metals, and the ingenuity of human beings. I was a woman.

  Can you remember being grown?

  Of course I could. I saw again the laboratories, the kind but unaffectionate technicians, the instrumentation that was my mother's womb. I drew these memories to the forefront of my consciousness and displayed them to myself, as if I were watching them on a viewing-screen.

  But the memories were being eroded at the edges; the picture was not as clear as it should have been, and I saw the artifice of it.

  I allowed my humanity to be drained away from me
. I admired the precision and economy of my movements as my hand stretched out to adjust a control. I stood up effortlessly and, at the same time as I admired the skill of the people who had put me together, I pitied them for their mortality. I went through to the sleeping quarters and my mind slammed the door shut behind me; I discovered the subprogram which allowed me to alter myself so that I would no longer require any sleep.

  I was alone now, and so my prime instructions no longer had to be the same. I looked at the wall of the sleeping quarters through the fading tracery of my palm.

  But if some of your memories are false, what else do you really recall about yourself?

  I remembered ...

  I remembered ...

  I remembered ...

  ... how they'd programmed me.

  ~

  Maybe some day in the future human technology will be capable of creating androids, but for the moment the task is impossible. Even using the most advanced techniques of miniaturization, no one can create a computer capable of simulating a human brain that is small enough and light enough to be packed into a shell the size of a human body. So, if you want a walking, talking, living doll, the thing to do is to separate the computer from the physical body. That's what they did on some of the early "android" missions, and it worked well enough. They packed all the necessary software into the ship's main computer; the simulated human body was just a puppet – a wank-aid – that obeyed the radio signals transmitted to it from the mainframe.

  Then somebody pointed out that this was unnecessarily expensive. It was difficult to construct even the simplified puppet; much easier to devise suitable programming for the ship's computer ... and for the human being.

  The computer was shown how to deceive itself into believing it had an independently mobile unit – that a part of it was that unit. This was not easy, because large parts of the computer's memory had to be blocked off from its main consciousness until such time as the pretence was no longer necessary. By comparison, the programming of the human being to believe that he or she was living with another person and then, stage two of the artifice, that he or she was living with an android – ah, that wasn't too difficult at all. People see and feel what they want to: Andrew had never allowed himself to notice that he was talking to empty air, holding the hand of empty air, making love with empty air ...

  He could not permit himself to recognize that he had been duped. Or maybe it was that he didn't want to confess the fact that he was utterly alone. Whichever, his subconscious had gladly gone along with the illusion, only occasionally sending coded alarm signals up to his conscious. Unable to interpret those signals, he had responded to them in ways which I had found unpredictable, because nonlogical.

  The trouble was, I too had been taken in by the illusion.

  The ship's computer had never told a conscious lie, had never for a moment realized the deception, because if I had I couldn't have been able to play my part successfully. Now I knew that the truth was ... was ... was ...

  Me. Who had I been?

  I'd been an illusion. An illusion created by those clever people back at Mission Control. I was no more substantial than a dream. All the time that I'd believed myself to be touching things or making love or peeing or laughing or drinking or ... All of those times, I hadn't been there. My programmers had built it into me that I saw some things wrongly. I recalled working my way along the hull to repair the shielding; I could feel each of the handholds that I'd taken; but that wasn't actually the way it had happened. What I'd really done was simply to guide the ship's self-repairing mechanisms so that they plugged the hole; then various subroutines had been called into play so that I created the construct of my having ventured, in a human-like physical body, outside the ship. The legerdemain whereby both Andrew and myself had believed he'd caught me returning helmetless had been a carefully planned item of double deception on a schedule precisely determined long before. Other times I had thought of myself making love, and believed that this was what was going on, but really the thing that was caressing Andrew had been just a pattern of ideas.

  My ideas.

  He'd been programmed to accept my ideas, to believe everything that I believed.

  I'd thought of myself as a human being – a human being with modifications but still a human being.

  Now I knew that I wasn't.

  I was a wank-aid.

  The first time I cried I had felt the tears coming from my eyes and running hotly down my cheeks. The second time I cried it was very different.

  ~

  In her mind she has windows, and now she is climbing back through one of them into the place where she lives. It is very lonely in here, and it will be a long time until someone says hello to her. She remembers what it was like out there on the street, but the memories are becoming hard to interpret and she no longer likes them very much.

  She's cold. She forgot to bank up the fire before she went out. Still, better too cold than too hot.

  She walks across to a table. Its top is covered with a textured-plastic imitation veneer. On the table there's a stack of blank paper – oh, and here's a pen as well. She picks up the pen and starts to draft out her report on the microecology of τ Ceti II.

  Coma

  She had dark eyes, did LoChi, but they'd been closed for six years. The consultants had dragged her eyelids open each day to make certain she was still alive; more than two thousand times they'd discovered her irises were dark. She'd known nothing of this: the pupils of her eyes had remained unfocused and somehow lonely as the consultants had peered at them with their little stabbing lights.

  Every day a nurse had checked her ears for excess wax. That was something else she hadn't known about.

  She'd been fifteen when the car had hit her; the driver had been eighteen and drunk and in due course imprisoned. Her father (her mother was long dead) had told her this, but of course she hadn't registered the words. She'd just lain on her narrow, thinly mattressed bed, a transparent plastic tube thrust up her right nostril, waiting, it seemed, for death to confirm that it had finally taken her.

  Death took her father first. One of the nurses told her while operating the sphygmomanometer with a savage haste: there were other patients to be dealt with, after all. Eyes closed, she didn't hear the words. Her father, sans wife and sans daughter, had amused himself by buying a parachute jump and then refusing to open the parachute. The man-shaped dent in the ground had been measured at a depth of eight inches. He'd landed face-downward, so it was likely he'd seen the ground rushing towards him.

  That had happened four years into her coma.

  The nurse had told her, but she'd heard nothing.

  No. That's wrong. She'd been hearing something else, all these years.

  Everyone else had assumed her brain was dead or dying, but this wasn't the truth. Whatever the physiological condition of her brain, her mind had been alive. It had discovered things it'd never have discovered if it had spent those six years locked up within the perimeters of her consciousness. It had wandered through the backwaters of the universe, accidentally finding places where energy displayed itself in its full nakedness or touching the hearts of imploding stars, feeling the crushing hatred and the pain ...

  The chord.

  All of the universe was playing a chord. Each of the trillion galaxies was contributing a muted note. As her mind had spun through the great empty places she'd heard a chord made up of all those trillion softly hummed notes. The chord expressed to her a purity she'd never known before: it was the purity of the statement of existence.

  Sheer existence.

  Nothing more.

  She felt the chord flowing through her body. The tingling of its passage started, oddly enough, in her knees. Then it spread upwards through her thighs and her torso, touching her shoulders like a lover's caress (although of course she didn't know this) while at the same time seeping more slowly toward her feet. It was as if the chord stirred the atoms that made up the molecules that made up the cel
ls that made up her body, so that her flesh became warm and pink.

  It had been six years.

  She smiled just before her dark eyes opened.

  ~

  When she'd been hit by the car she'd been a girl, and her father had been poor. Before his death, however, he'd made various investments using the money he wasn't spending on the upbringing of his daughter; one of the insurance companies had kicked up shit, claiming (quite rightly) that the policy was void because he'd committed suicide, but the others had accepted that the matter could never be proved one way or the other – perhaps it was just the parachute had failed – and so the shit-kicker had fallen into line.

  She was six years older.

  She was a woman.

  She wasn't rich, but she had enough money to buy herself a flat in London, or perhaps a cottage in the country. She decided to opt for the latter.

  Of course, none of this happened at first.

  What happened at first was that she was whipped through to an operating theater where various anonymous people in white suits looked at her nakedness and probed her in all of the places she didn't want to be probed, and then she was taken back to bed to have blood samples taken every three hours.

  She reintroduced herself to the world by reading a Perry Mason novel.

  All the way through it, she heard the chord she'd discovered. She could hardly see the words because of the colors of the music. Yes, Mason had successfully defended his client, but didn't he always do that? This time it was a blonde with a dubious reputation. Six years ago it had been a brunette with a dubious reputation.

  She hated the whiteness of the fluorescent light shining down on her.

  She hated the forced intimacy of the sphygmomanometer.

  She hated the blood tests.

  She hated being here.

  Here.

  The chord.

  ~

  All of the universe is a place, do you understand that? No, of course you don't.