Frontline sf-4

by Randolph Lalonde

  “All right, everything checks out fine but we haven't been able to send any subconscious suggestions to the new mind, it isn't accepting anything,” Doctor Barnes announced as he looked right at Gabriel through the transparent sterile barrier. “That means that she could still emotionally reject the body which can result in overall organ failure and death.”

  “I'll comfort her,” Gabriel replied.

  “With all due respect that may not be enough, sir. This isn't some old fashioned skin graft or plastic surgery; if the subject rejects her body in a deeply emotional way the first thing to go will be the brain.”

  “I will guide her. Don't doubt me on this Doctor.”

  Doctor Barnes stared at Gabriel, who leered back for a moment before looking back at the body in front of him, bathed in the glow of all the lines connecting it to the Eve mind. “All right, the Eve mind is taking over all nervous system control, the old mind will be dormant while we find out if the new one can handle working on its own.”

  Several moments passed and there were slight changes in vital signs as the woman's breathing pattern, heart beat and neural readings shifted slightly. The time crawled by for Gabriel, it was yet another moment of truth.

  At long last Doctor Barnes nodded and announced; “I'm instructing the nanobots to disconnect the old brain from the body. Prepare for removal.”

  Before Gabriel was ready, before he had time to look away, Doctor Barnes put his gloved hands on bare grey matter and pulled slightly. The brain came away with a sick sucking sound, leaving an empty, open cavity. Gabriel's gaze flinched away in revulsion but all too late. He'd remember that sight for the rest of his life, and as he heard the soft mechanical arm draw the Eve mind out of the tank he steeled himself and looked back.

  There was something different about the glistening organ, it looked so much cleaner, more like he had pictured a human brain before the surgery had begun. There was so little blood as the tubes feeding the delicate circulatory system of the organ were carefully removed by fine automated manipulators and the arm that held it shifted it perfectly into place inside the empty skull cavity. The hundreds of lines leading to it from the metal halo that followed it from above glowed, bathing the entire red operating theatre in an eerie light of the entire colour spectrum.

  “The nanobots are connecting the blood vessels to the brain, controlling pressure and bridging nervous system pathways before removing the interim wires,” Doctor Barnes announced as he watched all the status displays carefully. He made fine, manual adjustments to what the nanosurgeons were doing, expertly assessing the situation as it developed.

  Several tense minutes later the two wiring halos and the thick shielded blue cable stretching between them were taken away, no longer needed. The vitals of the woman on the table were steady as Doctor Barnes stepped away from the table.

  Two other surgeons patted him on the shoulder as he stood back. “Congratulations Doctor. That's a viable transplant,” one of the two female surgeons said to him. “I didn't think I would see it today to be honest.”

  “Your scepticism was just another challenge, Doctor,” Barnes replied as he watched another surgeon step in, regenerate protective and connective tissue on and around the brain then begin to replace the top of the patient's skull.

  It only took a moment for the application to be performed, for the wounds to heal and during that time Gabriel couldn't help but look over to a steel pan beside the operating table, where the old brain had been placed. It lay there, disconnected, dead.

  She was a crass, unreformable woman. If she had truly committed to any of the behavioural modifications things would have been done differently, but even the ones we managed to force into her mind were near breaking. No, this was the best use for her.

  “Finished,” the surgeon announced as he looked up to Gabriel. “How long do you want her hair?” he asked.

  The question surprised him, and he stared blankly at her perfectly bald head for a moment before mentally searching the information he had on Eve. After a moment he found it, the one picture of her before she had become the center of the construct in the Eden system, before she had become Eve. She was a young adolescent girl with straight blonde hair down to her chin. He cross referenced the style with a fashion database and found its name. His eyes snapped open and he smiled at the surgeon. “Give her a bob cut in that body's natural colour. Nora always wanted red hair.”

  “Nora?” asked the nurse beside him as the surgeon got to work with a hair growth stimulator.

  “It's the name she went by before her body died and she was transplanted into the machine.”

  “Good to know. Do you think she'll want to be called by that when she wakes up?”

  “I'm sure she'll tell me.”

  The hair finished growing and the surgeon brought another tool to her scalp and traced it over top. Gabriel recognized it as a rejuvenator, used to correct damaged or over stressed skin. Artificially accelerated hair growth caused just that kind of stress. As soon as he finished two nurses who were waiting at the sides of the room stepped forward with another gurney, transferred her to it in a quick, professional, practiced manner and wheeled her out of the room.

  Gabriel followed wordlessly, leaving the highly paid experts behind him in memory and actuality. Thoughts of the red room would be avoided, but never forgotten.

  Within minutes she was changed into fresh, soft, clean clothes and located in a quiet recovery room with a bed, nightstand, a chair and soft, subdued lighting. He sat in the seat beside her as a nurse checked her vitals with a hand scanner and smiled. “She'll be awake in the next few minutes. It looks like everything is fine,” the nurse smiled at him before leaving the room and quietly closing the door.

  Gabriel carefully took the young woman's hand in both of his. There was something pure, something innocent about that sleeping face. It was like with the replacement of it's mind the body was made pure again, clean.

  The eyes creaked open, fluttered and then sprung wide in a shocked expression. Her face was unbalanced, one side of her mouth was stretching wide while the other was tense and mostly closed. Her gaze darted around the room, not taking in any one thing but glancing, sweeping around in panic. Her arms vainly twitched as she tried to move them, to accomplish something that her body couldn't yet deliver.

  Gabriel shushed her strangled croaks and inarticulate cries as tears began to stream down her face. His hands held hers in a tight grip, not letting it go regardless of how she yanked, perhaps involuntarily for all he knew.

  The nurse burst back into the room and he held a hand up. “No! I'll guide her!” he called out before closing his eyes and forcing a connection with the microscopic data interface built into the woman's hand.

  As soon as he connected to her mind he was flooded with her frantic thoughts; “Where have they gone? What am I seeing? My brood are disconnected from me! Who has done this to me? Who are you and what are you doing connected to me? What are these sensations? Father? Father where are you? My sensors aren't picking up any of your biometric readings anywhere and my solar system, my garden is gone. I don't understand what they've done to me, who did this to me? Am I sick again? Why doesn't anything work? Am I supposed to go somewhere else? Did I do something wrong? What do I have to do to make things right? What do I have to do to get my children back? My flock is gone, the bad men disconnected me from them and then I was in a different place, a place that's unclear, but it was comfortable, I was asleep, now where am I? How did I get put back into a body? Why did I get put into a body when father told me he couldn't do it, that no one could do it, but I was the only one who could take care of the new garden, I'm the only one who can tend Eden. No one else knows how it should grow but me and my brood, how could they disconnect me? Did I do something wrong? Father, where are you father, I miss you father and I don't understand what they've done to me, where are my new eyes from and why does the light not hurt? I feel like I did before the sickness, before the burning, I remember life b
urning then you took me away and gave me a million children and gave me Eden to love and protect, the children carried out my will, made me whole, gave me a million eyes everywhere I wanted to see, they took me outside while I played, while I found new ways for things to grow, while I could watch and be with my father? Father? Where are you? Have you done this to me? Have I been bad? Is it time to wake up? Where is my flock? How can I make things right without my brood? Why have they left me? Did I do something wrong?”

  “Stop!” Gabriel replied as his mind was overwhelmed by the feelings of regret, loss and panic that Eve conveyed all too fluently. “I am Gabriel, and I've awoken you from your slumber because it's not right for you to be asleep for so long.”

  “Gabriel? How are you here? How am I hearing you? How can I give you what you want from me?”

  “I'm touching your conciousness with a special connection I had built into your new body.”

  “Why did you do this? Where is my brood?”

  “I did this because someone disconnected you from your mechanical body, the one in orbit around Eden Two. Do you remember?”

  “I-” Images of soldiers breaking through the inner walls of her control complex, fighting her heavily armed machine guardians and dying by the dozen before finally overcoming them and severing her connections to the systems she used to control millions of sentient and semi-sentient machines of her own creation flashed through Gabriel's mind at a staggering speed. “I remember Gabriel. They said they owned Eden and that they'd kill my children if I didn't let them have it their way and I couldn't find father.”

  “I'm sorry but your father didn't survive.”

  “I remember now. Why am I here? I don't sense anything but what this body is telling me and your mind. You want to save me, to be close to me, to love me. I can feel your needs.”

  “They put you to sleep for a very long time,” unbidden the number, two hundred and thirty four years, came to the forefront of his thoughts.

  “That is a long time. How are my children?”

  “There are many and they made Eden clean. A man took control of them a while ago and I killed him for you.”

  “Thank you Gabriel. Who controls them now?”

  He allowed mental images of himself, the new, young pre-adolescent Lister Hampon and a gathering of thousands of West Keepers standing in front of him as he preached the word of the West Watchers. In that moment she was given all the information he had about how the organization was built, its true purpose and the progress they had made. It would either overwhelm her, insult her or she would approve.

  He couldn't see what she was thinking nor make sense of her feelings for a long ponderous moment and then he was rewarded with the mental tickle of childish amusement. It was charming, it was playful and it was so much purer, amazing than he could have ever imagined. “You've made all the men and women your own,” she concluded.

  “Not all of them. There are so many more, and that is what your children have been helping us with. They're very good at showing the people that unless they join us their ships and their technology will be destroyed. They work to make this galaxy pure again so it can be rebuilt however we like.”

  Her reply came as a complex thought process that was at the same time emotional and rational. It happened so quickly that it overwhelmed him, threatened to overtake the cybernetic section of his brain as she used it to assist her in making a thousand decisions a second that would determine how she would react to the information he'd given her. “I can feel your dedication to the one you thought would be your mate before, Alice. She is the opposite of me yet your desires are transferred, your expectations, your needs. I can't give you what you want without knowing about your world.”

  It all stopped without warning, as though she was taking a deep mental breath before making a more intrusive connection and redoubling her efforts. He couldn't understand exactly what she wanted, why she needed the biomechanical components in his brain. “Eve… Nora… please be careful,” he begged mentally and aloud.

  “I have you Gabriel, are you afraid?” she asked mentally, playfully.

  “No,” he answered, knowing his lie would be detected the moment it was thought.

  “I can feel your fear but the desire to see me born was greater. Poor Gabriel, always so alone. Even in a crowd you're connected to everything but in touch with no one. We can be a part of each other but first I need…” her final thought could only be translated by his own cranial implant as information, but her requirements of him, what she wanted to take from him felt like so much more. She was in full control of his cybernetic mind, it was as though she held his very being in a vice. She surged forward using the digital connections throughout his body to connect to the ship around them and to the databases within.

  He was a helpless onlooker as she wandered through petabytes of information as quickly as the digital pathways connecting him to her would allow. The pain was unlike anything he'd ever experienced, not the pain of the body but the crush of the weight of centuries worth of information coursing through him. He could feel circuits in his body being pressed well past what their design specifications, starting to heat, to burn. “You're killing me,” he managed to think despite the confusion and pressure of a thousand thoughts, a thousand thousand facts a second.

  The pressure increased, entire circuits burned out as his bleeding eyes opened to slits, watched the young woman in the bed before him smile. Sparks from nearby circuitry in the room showered down as the dim light went out. Then it all stopped. Part of the cybernetic implants built into his brain were completely fused, many of the circuits that he used to connect to the circuitry all around him had burned out and he was in great pain.

  “All finished Gabriel. Your implants will repair themselves and you're not too badly hurt. I hope I didn't seem too needy, but there's so much to see and I stopped before you passed out.”

  “Thank you,” he gasped.

  Cleaning House

  The old hard suit maintenance bay beneath the main Gunnery Deck was filled with stands holding parts of the armoured loading suits upright or on their sides for repair. In the center were several dented armed suits. Standing a little taller with heavier armour, they seemed to look vulgar, as though bent on violence with more angular features, hard mounting points for weaponry and red, black and brown colouring. The dim light didn't help. All the personnel were on the main deck or in the many weapons compartments aboard the Triton, making final repairs and getting ready for a mission on which no one had yet been briefed.

  “We've been able ta put two o' those mean lookers together, can't find a single weapon for 'em though,” said Frost from the door behind her.

  Alice turned and looked at the man who was limping thanks to his prosthetic foot. “Did they give you a cane?”

  “Aye, won't be seein' me usin' it though. Can't show 'em a little scratch like this can take me down a notch,” he stopped beside a hanger laden with retention netting and put his weight on the heavy grey weave. “Was surprised ta hear ye wanted ta meet me here.”

  “I checked the movement logs near this deck and saw that this was the least used room.”

  “Aye, we repair most of our suits right on the deck or forward maintenance. What's this about?”

  “I'm assigning you to the Samson. Lildell will take command of the gunnery deck for the upcoming mission.”

  “What? If this has anythin' to do with what happened on deck with those drones, me and Steph have already had our words about that.”

  “So next time she steps in to stop an incursion you'll defer to her judgement?”

  There was a seconds pause before Frost nodded; “Aye.”

  “What about your second, Lildell?”

  “Him? He'd roll over and bark for her after seein' her beat those bots down.”

  “Good, because he'll be taking your place. I need you on the Samson for the upcoming operation, I can't find anyone else who knows how to run the maxjack.”

  “Well t
hen tha' makes sense. So I'll be takin' my post back after it's all done.”

  “Not with me in command. I'll be putting you in charge of making sure the Samson and Cold Reaver are in good condition. We need someone to focus on those vessels now that we're qualifying pilots and building fighters.”

  “What? You're over reachin' lass! Captain may 'ave put ye in charge while he's away, but you're just keepin' his house!”

  “He put a chain of command in place on this ship, delegated responsibilities to different departments so the crew could trust that order could be maintained and in the last few days you've managed to circumvent that chain of command and-”

  “You have no right-” Frost interrupted, shaking his head and taking an awkward step forward.

  Alice raised her voice and finished; “-not only damage that trust but cause the crew to break into open brawling once. Thanks to you there is a line dividing two of the most dangerous segments of this crew, gunnery and security.”

  “If Stephanie could control her people we'd have no problems at all! Gunners an' their mates run aggro, hair on fire like and if anyone stir them up there's gonna be trouble! She's got to get her people ta steer clear lass!”

  “Funny, from all the accounts and playbacks the fighting only starts when your name comes up, that's including the five fistfights that have broken out over the last twenty hours. I'm not going to argue with you Frost. I'm telling you-”

  “Be careful what ye say next lass,” Frost glared menacingly.

  “Telling you that you're reassigned until you can show that you can handle more than a deck full of guns.”

  “You mean until Captain's back. I'll be back on the deck lass, you bet your ass.”

  “Do you really think he'll go back on one of my decisions?”

  “No one runs that deck like me!” Frost burst, thrusting his finger up towards the gunnery deck above.