The Forever Watch

by David Ramirez

  I have traced out the edge of where the built-in security of the Command upload will respond. Archie has mapped it out. I think, if I chose, I could pull it away and look and know.

  It won’t help anyone though, knowing. It won’t change anything.

  So I choose not to undo that part of the ISec conditioning. If I change my mind later, I believe it would take Archie all of a second’s work. She knows it already.

  I think about secrets often. A secret that could make too many people give up. We’ve already got so much destructive behavior with Mincemeat’s disease progression and the effects on our children. I am starting to come around to Karla’s point that it would not take a secret much worse than that to tip the balance.

  It is hard enough living on the ship and carrying out the mission. The confinement, the testing, the ironclad roles we are shoehorned into for the rest of our lives.

  Homeostasis on the ship is so much more fragile than I had thought.

  Archie continues to mature. She often pings to get my attention, shows me things just to see how I react. She processes old movies, requests clarification about human behavior, asks me to elaborate on the taste of cold water. In her way, Archie is also making the best of the time we have left.

  Time ticks unstoppably. The body continues its prolonged death. The boringly practical facilities of the Bridge take shape. More conference rooms, offices, bathrooms, barracks, recreation rooms, gyms, training rooms, data centers, planning rooms, kitchens, mess halls, armories, the specialized manufacturing centers that produce Enforcer armor and assorted ISec and Behavioralist amplifiers.

  In the here and now, I lift a coffee cup to my lips.

  The hot fluid slices through the oil and fat left behind by the fried tofu and onions and eggs that Lyn brought to me for breakfast. Archie chatters in my thoughts, tries to eavesdrop on the signal data from my tongue and mouth, tries to interpret information. The inside of my mouth too is being converted to nanites. I will not have taste for much longer.

  Hennessy insists on fixing my makeup. It is probably more like painting a mask made of metal. I let him because it comforts him, and me, even if it only emphasizes the differences between what I am and everyone else.

  In the distance, kilometers toward the bow, my love’s former followers are killing, and being killed.

  The battlegrounds are fluid. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, all these things are plastech and respond to will and fury, exploding, melting, reforming, becoming sword, becoming shield, cannon, bunker. But the original structure of the ship, that which the Strangers made, is vastly tougher and more resistant to change. Those ancient, armored ellipsoid compartments, ranging in size from a hundred meters across to kilometers in diameter, are joined up with adjacent halls by the relatively narrow power and data shafts and air locks. There, the fighting is fiercest.

  The Archivists took the original command deck, but all those control systems have been locked out. They are trapped in the forward compartments. And their supplies, the food they brought with them and the emergency stores for the Bridge staff, are running out. Their only chance is to break out of the envelopment. Some surrender. Most throw their lives into the fire.

  Each time Barrens comes back to me, he is paler. During the meetings in which the top officers discuss after-action reports of encounters between the mutineers and our Enforcer-led militia, he says nothing. When we are alone, he rages in furious whispers about the madness of his old friends.

  “What are they doing? They’re wasting all these lives. It’s over!” He turns haunted eyes to me. “Was I like them? Ignoring consequences because of ego?”

  I can only kiss him.

  He shakes off these black moods as soon as he feels my cool, metallic lips. “Sorry. Sorry.”

  He falls into restless slumber. There is no sleep for me anymore. The body shuts down for a few hours but the mind enters a murky half dream. Through Archie, I am always present on the Network, awake or not.

  Bright purple pings like bell chimes echo on the map of my awareness, luminous orange arrows drawing my attention to one figure whose silhouette is lit up with a white halo.

  My attention zooms in there, at gate 19E. A battle is going on even now.

  This night, ten Enforcers lead 1,012 Adjusted men and women in a fight over one of the great tunnels.

  One Enforcer spreads his arms to the sides and claps them forward. Lightning ripples up from the power coils in the floor. The floor breaks up, becomes a wave of death rushing toward the attackers, and as it crests and approaches them, it changes form, becomes a swarm of razor-blade locusts.

  An Archivist who pops his head up at the wrong time is shredded to pieces. Beside his headless corpse, in the trench they have carved out, four more die as the glowing, guided projectiles curve down and dance through their meat.

  Others in a foxhole two meters back retaliate, aglow with touch—they reach out with their minds, and the life of the man that sent out the flight of tiny flying slivers is itself ended when his squadmates lose control of the ridge that is their cover, and the floor swallows him up, crushes him.

  The ship’s sensors fill my head with the sound of his bones cracking, pulping.

  Other Enforcers cut loose with psychic flames. A hundred lives are erased in a second. The power fluctuates in that section. Life support stops. Everyone starts to float up in zero gravity—those with touch hold themselves and their squaddies down behind the cover of their trenches and foxholes.

  No.

  I’m sick of the killing. Why won’t it stop? There are so few of us left.

  Take me there, Archie.

  My awareness shifts. And here, I am here. No body, but I see the fighting all around me, smell the blood, the cooked-meat smell of burned men.

  I test a trick I have only begun to explore with Archie. I spread part of my consciousness into the closest Analytical Nodes and take control. I need the processing power. My perspective flickers, splits, and—

  It takes long seconds to focus through the cacophony of my thoughts, to unify the extra pieces of me in the system. Yes. I am here.

  I too, echo the parts of me in the Nodes. Process ghosts of me.

  Everywhere I can, I try to save those who can be saved.

  Above, the strongest soar through the air on curving shields of armor torn loose from the floor, raining a hail of glowing blue bursts of ionized gas down. On the other side, the Archivists have less skill, but they have the raw power and viciousness born of Psyn. By this time, those who have not been driven mad by the drug have attained heights of ability that allow them to push and prod their less sane comrades, manipulating them like puppets.

  Some writers wave their hands and dig their talons into the synapses of their victims, putting them to sleep or setting them to fight their own, and my other selves in the system block their thrusts, restore the victims to themselves. Bruisers dance through the danger, dealing death with their red-sun fists, and another me floats their feet free of the deck, holds them up where they are helpless. Touch talents with no fear of overloading the power grid push more and more psychic energy into trying to catapult boulders cracked from the deck plating, shaping them into grapeshot and fléchettes, and I undo them too, catch the projectiles and render them harmless.

  The loss of control by a handful of synchronized Archivists releases a backlash of energy, a whirling tornado of force and heat, air currents sucking up oxygen and burning people from the inside out when they breathe of the flame.

  All my selves reach out and burst a water main, creating a barrier of cold, near-freezing water to hold the flames back from our own defenders. The flames splash against it and off it. On the other side, there is a white-hot hell—those caught in it do not even have time to scream.

  Archie is entranced by the fire. And at the same time, I feel her phantom fingers closing tightly around mine, back on the Bridge, in the clean light of my offices, as she sees the casualty figures, detects their lives being snuffed
out as their implants fail.

  The flames die down, but the fighting goes on. Flickers of psychic lightning in the dark. Rubble being thrown back and forth. Bruisers roaring, animals swinging massive cudgels, cutting others in half with the power of augmented muscle. The deep-bass rumble of explosive bursts of power. The shrieking whine as psionic soldiers attempt to snuff them before the plasma balls strike their targets. In the zero gravity, body parts float free, globules of blood, vomit, urine. It’s hard to keep track of which side is which even with my abundance of sensory feeds and the parallel processing of supercomputers extending my human limits.

  Somebody is crying, huddled up in a ditch. I pull shields up over him and open a path for him, a narrow tunnel back toward the Habitat. Some of the floating wounded I pluck like sheets of paper floating on the wind and fly them toward the rear, where the medics are.

  Stop that, Karla thinks to me. Let them take care of themselves. You need to focus on the big picture.

  It is analysis that she wants out of me. Analysis, intelligence. Doesn’t the woman sleep?

  I pull back, back into my body, next to Barrens. In the confines of this wasting flesh, this dull pain, the weakness, the nausea, I almost jerk back out into the system. But I don’t, though I do leave those digital aspects of me there, in the fight. It hurts, seeing them dying, knowing each one is a line that ends forever, a diminishing of far-fallen mankind. I have to try what I can, and nobody else can do this.

  In the map room, Karla paces back and forth, watching the displays showing the same battle I am watching. She thinks I am done, she doesn’t notice the parallel Hana emulations still trying to save people, one crewman at a time.

  Karla stops and looks up to the ceiling, messages me, That little stunt of yours. How much longer before you can close away entire sections of the ship? We could just cut off life support to them, wait them out.

  I do not know. I can do it already in some places, but these large chambers and halls, they’re made of the Strangers’ ultrahard, crystallized plastech, the bones of the ship itself. I’m afraid of messing with them; I might damage the Noah and not be able to fix it.

  Karla winces as another precious Enforcer falls.

  She doesn’t feel another me cocoon away a boy that put up his hands, an Archivist crying out his surrender. Every little life counts.

  She goes on thinking to me, Well. We never thought we’d have that option in the first place, in the old plans. I’ll commission a feasibility study. When this is over.

  She leans in closer to the display, taps a red dot indicating one of her squad leaders. She squints, sends him orders. I could listen in on it, but do not.

  She places her hands on the projection and brings it closer, zooming out. She examines the three-dimensional mess of the ship’s structures, and the clouds of dots indicating the presence of Archivists. She rotates it this way and that and shakes her head. This is something else the previous Ship’s Captain could never have imagined.

  Dempsey, whenever Thorn tries a major attack like this, it’s always to cover for something else. Use our favorite new toy and find out what it is.

  In my bed, Barrens rolls away in his sleep. I use telekinetic force to lift my man closer, back to me, and I hold him tight, even if it hurts to do so.

  I have grown beyond where Karla can read my thoughts. Either too much of my brain is now electronic, or perhaps the way I can migrate some of my thinking and personality onto the ship’s computers makes my thoughts too different. Or Archie is shielding me even further, now that she is starting to understand something about the concept of privacy.

  I can safely ponder the likelihood that Archie and I have become something more than Karla expected. She is starting to fear us, but she still needs us, and it will be a relief to her when I die. She’s finally started listening to my Doctors, who are insisting that I am dangerous, that my nanites are infected with something else beyond Mincemeat. It would make their fears even worse to know that it’s not some random mutation, but the influence of the AI on my body. But she still needs me too much to lock me away in quarantine.

  Archie puts Karla’s request together faster than it takes me to explain the request to Archie.

  Far away, parts of me are crying because someone in front of us has been torn apart. We can taste the blood soaking into the cracks of the deck. But they, I, we, keep trying.

  I report, From the pattern of assaults, Thorn’s group is feinting to try to draw us into attacking here, and here. The message is packaged with a data stream showing a simulation generated by Archie and me—blue dots being pursued by the red into the fore-section, along the biggest shafts. Power is fluctuating at these points—I place green crosshairs on the image—suggesting that when he has drawn enough of us in, they can trigger perhaps a bomb of some sort to kill off that raiding force.

  Karla sees it, nods to herself. Then we shall strike exactly where he hopes we cannot do so. See? You saved hundreds of lives with a bit of intelligence. Now, get some sleep.

  But I don’t. The battle finally ends and I pull myself fully back into one place, and the headache is terrible. Memories overlapping from more than one point of view. Magnified emotions. I don’t think that’s a trick I’ll be trying again soon.

  I need to do more. I must. Or there is no reason for my coming to this, no purpose to the sacrifices of those who have been lost.

  I teach Archie some of what I was trying to do in that fight. Unlike me, her consciousness was designed around being able to split off trains of thought, threads of processing effort. She can be in every place, in every battle, making a difference. Though not too big of one, or the power drain on the grid will be too much.… And at the same time, we can’t let Karla find out just how much Archie can do completely independently, including manifesting psionic power through the ship’s structure without any human input at all.

  Aside from all the other burdens assigned to me, I take on the nearly undecipherable mass of information in the aliens’ archives. Not that I can understand more than the barest fraction of it even with Archie’s help.

  My appetite diminishes. A month into the symptomatic phase, I cannot eat anymore, and my meals consist of a continuous drip of white nutrient sludge going directly into the remnants of my veins.

  Still, when he is here, Barrens smiles for me. When my nausea is not too bad, he might lift a spoonful of broth to my lips or a chip of flavored ice.

  A false dawn rises. Many of the halls and rooms of the Bridge now have sky-simulation apps running, even if it is only through a fake window. It helps. Back in the Habitat, order is almost restored.

  He sits next to the half platform, half chair in which I am wheeled around. Around us, the machines protest at the feedback they cannot interpret from my changing body.

  “You look happier.” I can project my “voice” out of any object I desire. Converting things into speakers is easy.

  “Happier? No. I have stopped regretting, that’s all.”

  Cameras shift and zoom in on his face. “Oh?”

  He shrugs. A jumble of his thoughts rides the current into my head, about personal responsibility and atonement. No talent for telepathy still, but weighed down with fatigue and strain, Barrens’s thoughts jumble and leak as he uses his Implant to message me, flashes of emotion and sense impressions riding on the words. I’m at peace because we’ll finish it, you and I.

  Another battle occurs close to the Archivists’ last strongholds.

  The lines return as Barrens grimaces and frowns. Karla is in his head again. He glowers and protests at every mission. He does not want to leave me. We know, the three of us, that my time is almost up.

  “Do I gotta—

  “But—”

  We both know how it will end. He could let himself get wound up. Get so upset that his hands tear through the doorknob on his way out, his footsteps denting the floor. But still, he will do it.

  He cannot walk away.

  “All right, all right! I�
��m going,” he exclaims up to the air. “This is the last one!”

  Barrens kisses me again. Each one carries shadow and light, the bitter taste of not knowing if I’ll still be here when he returns.

  “Be seeing ya,” he whispers.

  Hey.

  Ya?

  What I feel for you—

  Yes. Me too.

  And he is gone once more.

  My condition starts to accelerate within an hour of his departure.

  My heart reaches 50 percent artificial components. My body is half-fused into what has become the throne of my dreams, the seat at the center of the world. All glittering metallic surfaces, smooth except for the cables and tubes for nutrients and waste and data and power that have spread head to toe, I see the looks the others cannot help when they see that body: indifference, as though I am just another system terminal. It becomes harder every day to tell if I am a living being, with a soul, in a dying body, or if I am already dead, just a ghost composed of information, just signals on the computers.

  I cannot walk or stand anymore. I have not the strength to even raise my head off my pillow. Attendants roll my body onto its side to clean me and attend to the sores on my flesh. Each time they do is a fearsome ordeal, as skin, muscle, and bone want to tear away with each movement.

  When my friends think of me and cry where they think I cannot see, how can I explain that I am not unhappy? Even though I am going to pieces, even though the pain is an unstoppable flood building and building behind the cracked walls that the medics put up with drugs and neural blocks, a part of me spreads its wings. With Archie as my guide, wrench, sword, shield, chariot, and wings, my consciousness soars through the Noah. This broken shell is not a prison.

  In many ways, I am free. I spend afternoons watching the deep-sea fish in the aquatic areas of the biomes. I listen to birdsong and dance with the lights playing on the floors of the dance halls, which have reopened in Paris Section, rehabilitated and productive and ordinary again. The parts of me that I believe now run on the nodes are aware of so much.