Tinman

by Simon Fairhead

  Dawkins wheeled in close, looming over both of them. "The water and oxygen loss will kill Hiroto in fifty-six minutes at current depletion levels. No contact with Hull Drones at this time. Emergency Hull Drone communications off-line."

  Vera Brabin had found an unbroken brandy glass, full of brandy, and stepped up to the console.

  "Is this it? Are we going to die from a fucking meteorite strike?"

  Art stood paralysed for a second. A warm, familiar hand came to rest on his shoulder. He turned his gaze to see Franco behind him, an old light back in his eyes. Franco winked. "Let's get your brain in a suitable rig. Dawkins, help him."

  Art stared. "Do we have time?"

  Franco smiled. "Only if you're quick."

  CHAPTER 18

  Exterior hull lights bloomed into life, fending off the deep black of space. The hull glittered with spilled gases, frozen to its surface. Muffled gears and mechanisms turned and creaked. The airlock doors popped out, spewing a snow of instantly crystalised oxygen and nitrogen, and slid aside. The deployment platform juddered and rattled as it rose from the airlock chamber. It was a cage. Inside was Six. He turned his head through 360 degrees as he emerged. At his signal, the cage retracted back into the ship. No further danger from debris. Six engaged his electromagnetic hull clamps, and rolled carefully away from the airlock. The airlock doors slid back into position, and sealed themselves in place. Six looked up and inspected the perfect void overhead. There was silence and stillness. There was nothing. A little R & R...

  "Six?"

  "Yes, Sir."

  "I'm coming up. Is it safe?"

  "Area secure."

  "Incoming projectiles?"

  "Area secure."

  "Thank you."

  Again, the airlock mechanism whirred into life. The doors popped and slid aside. The cage rose. Inside was the brain of Art Parrish, loaded onto a Franco Pirelli rig. The cage retracted, the airlock doors closed with a muffled clunk. Spilled oxygen condensed on Art's metal skeleton. He switched his lights on.

  "Six?"

  "Yes, Sir."

  "Where are we? Where are you?"

  "Activating near-field mapping."

  Art's brain puzzled over the incoming stimuli for a second. But there it was. He had only to think of near-field mapping for it to appear. It was not in front of him, it was like a window opening in his mind. Six was five metres to his left. He swivelled his optical sensors to pick him up. They were on the underside of the hull, but zero-G rendered concepts of up and down irrelevant. The damaged hull sections were beyond Six. They had been unlucky. Two meteorite hits in the same section was bad news for the hull integrity. The shields had failed. He could see a thin snow of gas pluming out into the black. He shifted his tracks around and rattled towards Six.

  "Six, watch your step, don't get caught in the damaged hull plates."

  A hull drone appeared in the periphery of his on-board lamps, slowly spinning in space. It was matching the ship's speed, but its trajectory was causing it to slowly drift away. A valuable tool.

  "Six?" inquired Art, "Can you secure the drone?"

  Six's reply came in loud and clear, straight into Art's cochlear nerve, almost like a thought. "Sending emergency recall command."

  The drone was dead. Its lights were out, but the recall command targeted a separate emergency circuit board. A red light blinked on, partly obscured by the drone's body. A small thruster emerged from its housing and adjusted its position before firing for a second or two. the vehicle began to descend, locking onto the source of the signal. Above Six's head, a second thruster, on the underside, fired, to bring it to a stop. Six locked his hand to the vehicle. "Drone inoperative. Activate?"

  Art's reply was as quick as his thought. Six activated the drone as if he had turned the switch himself. He surveyed the broken hull plates and thought of the repairs needed. The drone revolved, orientated itself, then set to work, welding, assembling, just as he had imagined.

  "My God, we know nothing..." he mused, a human brain aboard a mechanical rig, his mind in charge, in real time, of a remote machine.

  And yet its core programming, its specialist operations, ran autonomously. He did not know how the hull plates fitted together, or the minutiae of re-routing life-support or electrical systems beneath them; to drive a skycycle, he reasoned, one does not need to understand the engine...

  High above them, out in space, tiny lights winked on, like green stars. Art froze.

  "Six! What is it?"

  "Automatic ship communiqué intercepted. Drone Captain detected. It is responding."

  Schematics flooded his brain. It was a circular robot with a raised cylindrical body above and a bevy of chromed tools below, three times the size of the drones. A drone commander. It had been blasted out of the hull along with most of the other drones when the meteorite hit, and standard protocols had kept it floating near its charging station inside. It silently approached Kyko's ship and busied itself fussing over other areas of the hull. Periodically, it sent out narrow beams of red laser light, as it measured things. Then it began ripping apart a communication tower, melting welds with a powerful heat gun and slipping hull panels under its massive, shielded body. Art felt no control over this robot. It was operating under emergency programming, a simple programme - make the ship airtight.

  They saw no other drones. Four had been lost to the vacuum. There was an identical section on the starboard side, five drones and a captain, but this was a serious loss to Kyko's ship. The captain had scuppered a redundant communication tower to secure the hull, but if their odyssey was to continue, potentially over thousands of years, the odds of being stuck again would shorten considerably and their resources were finite. The Drone Captains would have to go out on localised jaunts whenever debris was encountered, to mine fresh materials for the ship. Perhaps even fuel...

  CHAPTER 19

  Art and Six approached Hiroto Beta's nutrient tank. Art had never been allowed here before. A massive cylindrical transparent plastisteel aquarium confronted him, filled with a ragged, salmon coloured mess of bumps and protrusions, the nutrient fluid around it yellow and cloudy as piss. The cloning, and the transportation, had been crude and hurried. What pain he must have endured... Enormous machines hummed and gushed, pumping in oxygen, sifting out waste. Gasses bubbled up through the life-support slime surrounding the cancerous brain.

  Art wheeled over to the nearest console and spoke to Hiroto.

  "Hiroto, can you hear me?"

  They had fixed the hull. The ceiling, a little way off, over the drone charging stations, was a mess of fresh welds, and it was still bitterly cold, but temperatures were rising. Art's rig provided him with real-time information on everything that went on in the ship. He could fly the ship from here, if he had pilot training. Six's input continued to stream through to his visual displays, like a portal to a teenager's video game feed. Six was assessing damage in other sections nearby, but his military programming dominated. "Area clear" and "Attack viability nil. Require weapons upgrade" sounded at short intervals.

  "Hiroto?" he inquired.

  The static on the nearby screen was sucked into a digital black hole, out of which bloomed the avatar face of Hiroto Beta, strong and young and full of promise. "Art san!"

  "Hiroto, there was a meteorite hit. Are you okay?"

  The avatar face collapsed in on itself in an alarming fashion, and then emerged in vibrant colour. "Art san, I have lost 0.01 percent of brain function to frost, but I can regrow this. Are all the passengers secure?"

  Art smiled to himself. Hiroto had survived with only minor injuries. "Hiroto... can we turn this ship around and return to the Luhrmann Breach?" The meteorite impact had shaken him. He had seen the ship opened up like a tin can by a random object too small or two fast for the autopilot to evade in time. And there were millions more out there, invisible. Hiroto spun himself into a star map. Bright points picked out their location. They were many light years from any visible suns.

&n
bsp; "We are in the Drop Off, Art san. We have fuel enough to halt our progress, and to begin a slow return to the Luhrmann Breach, but we will lose the momentum from the supernova that drives us on to this day." The screen fluxed, and returned. " Art san, the flight time will be 4.6 million years."

  Art considered this. They were drifting in the deep, still fearful of the supernova that had destroyed Mioumu; but surely even the dense clouds of radiation would have dissipated by now? Surely it made more sense to turn around now, to head for a navigable point in space than to fall, forever, into nothing, the odds of another meteorite strike shortening with every day? Even if the Breach was destroyed, they had at least a known destination. Could they just sleep through it? It all depended on the ship's fusion core. But that was not his job. They had two brilliant minds aboard, Hiroto and Dawkins. He would set them the task of assessing all the ship's resources and capabilities and coming up with an answer. To go home; to return to Earth no matter how far in the distant future. It would still be there - the sun had another four billion years of fuel left to burn - but who, or what, would inhabit this future Earth? 4.6 million years spanned man's entire evolution from Rift Valley primate to landing on the moon; spanned all of mankind's follies and achievements from making fire to the holocaust, from domesticating animals to inventing the sewing machine. In a similar span of years, what might mankind have accomplished? The reality was grim. The exodus from Earth had left behind the detritus of society. Had they descended into a new stone age on a flooded world, become a dispirit group of warring tribes, ignorant of the knowledge of the ages? Had, in fact, man gone extinct, leaving open the position of dominant species to some other lifeform? In four million years, both climate and evolution could run riot. It was time, perhaps, to take some responsibility. Mankind had ruined one world, and abandoned it; had been driven out of another system by an act of God. Now, maybe, was the time to go back, to look with fresh eyes on planet Earth, and fix it.

  CHAPTER 20

  When Art eventually returned to the flight-deck mezzanine, he found the dining table absent, the broken furniture and crockery cleared away. Only Kyko and Franco remained, leaning against a console, drinking wine and talking in low voices. He was about to leave, unsure about communicating with them while he still stood clad in his machine exoskeleton, but both men beckoned him over.

  Kyko clapped a hand on the hydraulic shoulder mechanism of his rig. "You've done a man's job, Art. Hiroto is recovering well."

  "You shouldn't have doubted Six."

  "I apologise. Yet Franco was as concerned as I with his military programming. It's the very devil to delete."

  Franco sipped his wine. "You don't want your enemies stealing your hardware and reprogramming it to fight on their side."

  Art raised his mechanical arms in a gesture of disbelief. "What enemies?"

  Kyko grinned. "A good general suspects everyone."

  Art tilted his head. "We should go home."

  Kyko peered into Art's four visual sensors. "Go on; you intrigue me."

  "Hiroto tells me we could reach the Luhrmann Breach in 4.6 million years."

  Kyko looked up at the ceiling. "With existing thrust?"

  "Yes. If we can mine fuel from debris or other sources, we might be able to reduce this time frame."

  Kyko pondered a moment. "The supernova could have destroyed the breach."

  "The alternative is the unknown," replied Art. "At least with the breach we have co-ordinates in the nav-computer, a point in space to aim for. And in a few centuries, we will see stars outside our windows."

  Kyko frowned. "But, to go back? To what? We abandoned Earth as it died beneath our feet; The Mioumu system was the only habitable collection of worlds ever found. We will see stars, Parrish, but we have mapped them all, and we know they do not support life. They twinkle like Christmas decorations, pretty and useless."

  Art felt a great hollowness open up inside him. An abyss. And he was suspended above it, ready to fall into nothingness. The only word he could make stick to the feeling was homelessness. The man, down on his luck, behind with his rent, is evicted by bailiffs. He sells his belongings to pay his remaining debts, and one day finds himself handing back the keys to his home. Paperwork signed, the office closed, he turns away from the doors of officialdom to face the streets. All at once his coat, fine on a chill evening, feels a little short, a little thin. His shoes, similar. And where to wash? And where to sleep? And it is so cold tonight...

  CHAPTER 21

  Art and Kyko stood and watched Hiroto Beta in the giant brain's dim lair. Pumps sighed and gulped, electronic systems hummed quietly. Of all the living things aboard Halliday's ship, it was Hiroto that devoured the most resources.

  Kyko tutted to himself. "I know what you think of me, Art; there is no love lost between us."

  Art stood next to him in his own skin feeling bruised, disconnected. "You're a survivor, Kyko. Selfish is what you are. Pathologically selfish."

  "Yes. Yes I am. To reach Earth again, we may have to sacrifice even Hiroto, my child. Despite his great intelligence, despite his usefulness, he is a drain on our resources. The bodies in stasis will probably have to go too."

  "Kate is in stasis."

  "Why did you not wake her for the dinner party?"

  Art looked to the floor. He had many reasons, and they were all a mess in his head. To protect her? To preserve her as she was on Imo? He wasn't sure himself.

  "Easy to put things away in little boxes and eventually forget about them, isn't it?" said Kyko. "Sometimes, it is the only way."

  "I don't want to forget about Kate."

  Kyko studied a read out from Hiroto on a nearby screen. "Of course you don't."

  "I'm not like you, Kyko. I don't see people as lifeforms to manipulate at will with programming code."

  "But you could. You could kill Kate right now. Look, here are the bio-readouts of all our passengers. There, there's Kate. You could press 'purge' and blow her brain out of the airlock. That could be another million miles of fight time for the rest of us."

  Art shook his head. Kyko was a mess of a man, a fragile, egocentric bully, but his intellect, when properly focussed, could be utilised. "Halliday, tell me about solid state recording."

  "Is this hypothetical?"

  "Can we publish brain activity to a solid state?"

  Kyko squeezed the bridge of his nose, thinking. "It is the ultimate barrier. I manipulate brains, and the interfaces between brains and bodies, or mechanical devices. A living brain requires gases and nutrients, nerve stimuli and a minutely controlled chemical balance for healthy function. Can a solid state reproduction function?"

  "That's what I asked you."

  "Yes."

  Art looked at Kyko, surprised. There had been no proviso. Kyko simply nodded.

  "Yes. It can be done."

  Art stared at him. "Why hasn't it been done?"

  Kyko smiled sadly. "Because there is no return."

  Art understood. Franco would understand too. It would be a new stage in human evolution. And there would be no going back. Total integration with an electronic universe. A machine age intelligence. Art looked at Halliday.

  "You've tried it before, haven't you?"

  Halliday looked away, embarrassed. "There is an experiment..."

  "Is? You mean an ongoing experiment?"

  "She doesn't want to be disturbed. Please don't ask me any more."

  Art walked slowly away, put his fingers up to the glass of Hiroto Beta's tank. He watched a small water snail with a curled shell crawl slowly up the glass of the saline filled tank, feeding on algae, keeping the tank clean.

  Art turned back to Kyko Halliday. "You have published Ms Kjanvik."

  Kyko pulled at his earlobe. "You have extraordinary insight, Art. Yes, she is my experiment."

  Art took an involuntary half-step away from the man, tried to make it look as if he had stumbled and ended up with his back against the glass. Kjanvik, he guessed, had for many years bee
n the subject of countless Halliday experiments. "Why did you leave her on Imo?"

  Halliday averted his eyes. Was there genuine regret there? "How do you think we managed to escape, Mr Parrish? She was our last line of defence. She was plugged into the entire Mio net, sending fake communications until the end. The military would have shot us down before we reached orbit, if they had known our true flight plan. But she lives, Art. She lives!"

  "Where?"

  Kyko Halliday walked along beside the glass of Hiroto's tank, stroking it. "I have a laboratory."

  Art frowned, searched his memory. "Where? What are you talking about? I've maintained this ship for thirty thousand years, I know every bolt and strut."

  Halliday's face broke into a big smile. "But not every deck! Art, you're right, I'm a survivor. Rule one of survival, don't let anyone else know where you keep your stuff, right?" He laughed then. "Look at your face! Like a dog locked out of a butcher's shop!"

  Art was not sure what shocked him more: the revelation that there was more of Kyko's ship of which he was unaware, or Kyko's manic behaviour.

  "But I've seen all the schematics..."

  "Oh yes, the standard schematics can be accessed anywhere."

  They stared at one another a moment, each man assessing his next move.

  Art began. "The question is this: Are we trying to live forever?"

  Halliday slumped his shoulders and slid down the glass wall to sit on the floor, his arms loosely dangling over his knees. Across the corridor, Art joined him. They felt the thrum of the engines through the deck plates beneath them.

  "We can live forever in a solid state, Mr Parrish. A crystalline host structure and a solar battery could keep our consciousnesses alive nearly indefinitely. But we would have no external stimuli. We would be locked into our memories, replaying our experiences to ourselves over and over. We would become our own archive."