Violet nodded. “Well, you know that none of us remember what she’s like?”
He shook his head. “No. I didn’t know that. I suppose you want to know?”
Violet screwed up her nose. “Oh God, no. I guess for me, I’d like to know…well, is she as awful as we remember? Because we don’t remember anything about her as a person, but we remember she was terrible. Ruthless. It’s like a collective racial memory. I just want to make sure we’re on the right track, I guess. To get assurance.”
He’d expected a harder question. “Violet.” He fixed her with what he meant to be his most serious look. “The Mother of Systems is a hero to her people for a reason, and that is because she cares entirely for them, and nothing for us. She’ll kill everybody on this planet if it means saving her people, and at the most we’re all going to be breeding stock or menials.”
She frowned. “But they use corpses for menial labor. You know, the machines.”
Walken nodded once. “Exactly. Don’t think they won’t be growing us all up to adulthood, working us dead, and then making us into drones. That’s exactly what will happen if she wins out, I have no doubt.”
“I see.” Her blue eyes flashed, wheels turning behind them. “Okay. Thanks, Mr. Walken. That’s what I needed to know.”
“It’s Tom. Please. The less I hear ‘mister’ anything connected to my name, the better. Tom will do nicely.”
Violet looked him over once more. Still making up her mind about him, apparently, or perhaps having finally done so. “All right.” She offered her hand. “Tom. Nice to meet you, Tom. Let’s hope we can kick their asses.”
“Amen to that.” Walken gave her hand a firm shake. It hardened slightly under his grip, like his armored hide. Bits and bobs, indeed. “So what’s next?”
“Well, if you’ve had your tour.” Violet nodded toward the waiting lift. “Then maybe we should get you back in the scanner. Unless you need something to eat?”
He chuckled. “I’m afraid that I only need it when stock is low. I barely need sleep. Food is apparently just an occasional necessity.”
“Pity. Let’s go, then.”
The first rounds of exploration went on for four days. Walken, stretched out on a slab and connected to a bewildering number of probes and diagnostic devices, came to learn a great deal more of himself, much more than Cagliostro’s operatives could produce. He learned he could ramp up the voltage to his projector array to reach temperatures of over twenty-five thousand degrees Fahrenheit. And, due to this, his body had been made to survive temperatures beyond that.
He learned he could theoretically move faster than the average human being by a factor of four to one, the friction from which also required considerable proofing from heat. He received metrics from the technicians concerning the materials from which his body was made, so that he knew precisely how much stress he could take, and the answer astonished him. His body could withstand more punishment than a modern combat tank, able to weather small-arms fire and physical trauma that would pulp a human being, including smaller explosive shells, rockets, and field guns. In short, he could shrug off many battlefield weapons. Essentially, he was a battlefield weapon. A way to shoot back all he lacked.
He also learned that his body could self-repair. His torso contained a factory reservoir, which converted organic material he ate into the tasked nanomachines that sustained his brain, and, it appeared, also repaired physical damage. What slight harm his body had suffered in the past had been superficial enough to be healed in seconds, which explained why he had not registered it. How this did not extend to the Seal of Community, they could not tell. The neurological connections had been burned away, and had not yet been repaired. The going theory was that Walken had some form of control over them. That is, because he did not want to join the community, the repair systems did not engage in that region.
But for all of that incredible engineering, he remained still very much an unfinished work. Numerous modules in his body had not been completed, whole systems the Reclaimed technicians could not identify and were reticent to probe. He’d become, in some ways, an object of superstition among them. Whatever plans she had made for him, it was clear that they had yet to be executed. This gave Walken some comfort, because that meant the Mother of Systems, for all her work, could not keep him from escaping on his own. He had some agency, at least, in this game of pawns.
In between sessions, Bobbi’s people largely kept out of his way. Despite being an object of superstition, the Reclaimed began to pay more attention to him, watching him intensely – even speaking to him, though they came off as strange and cryptic as his body. He only had meaningful interactions with Violet and Hepzibah.
Hepzibah was a gentle creature outside of the field, however. He could tell that much from the way she moved, slight and careful as if afraid of breaking everything around her, but when Walken spoke to her in kind so as to lessen the tension, she softened greatly. Through her, he learned a great deal more about Bobbi’s movement – how they used to fight, how the split happened, what had happened since. Walken wondered how Scalli, the rather comical muscle-man he had met in the Old City all those years ago had turned out to be some kind of hard-bitten badass. He hadn’t seemed that at the time, even with all his stapled muscle. Perhaps it had all been an act, social camouflage. Or perhaps there was simply more to the man than anyone who served with him had ever guessed. If he could see the man’s face, talk to him, then perhaps with his behavioral scanner he might well come to understand more of who he truly was. It didn’t seem as though that would be possible.
As for Violet, she was much more pleasant than in their initial interactions, but did not approach him outside of ensuring he had what he needed to be comfortable – which, given how little he needed, meant they practically never spoke. She spent a great deal of time with the technicians, or entirely off-site doing whatever it is Bobbi charged her to do. He had no idea what Bobbi was up to, now that she had left for the colonies out at LaGrange Point Five. Walken remembered the long trips he’d taken on the Seattle trains in the weeks leading up to his capture by the Yathi, how he would look at the holographic signs advertising places like Treehaus. He had longed to go there. His present situation held no small amount of irony, with Bobbi in orbit and himself still chained to Earth, possibly never to leave.
On the fifth day, something happened. Somehow, Bobbi’s technicians managed to fix something that they shouldn’t. It was supposed to be a standard examination, this time centering on the synthetic nerve connections that had expanded when Walken had tried to commune with the alien inside of him. The first few scans were simple and easily done, but later, when they planned a deep neural probe, the technicians used some kind of alpha-wave induction device to put him to sleep.
The moment he went under, the problems began. Walken felt the Seal of Community engage, and when it did, Mother came flooding into his mind like a warm bath, a rolling tide of mental presence that washed over him and held him in immediate suspension. He had spent so many months away from her that he had almost forgotten what she felt like, how soft and gentle the gestalt connection linking him to the alien matriarch could be. For a moment, it almost felt welcome.
He bit it all down, knowing it was not him who felt those things, and not understanding why he could in the first place.
Her voice did not have an edge, but he could feel the blade somewhere behind all that velvet, pressing into his brain.
The Mother of Systems laughed, a sound that reverberated from all quarters. se to me.>She made a soft clucking sound.
Walken tried to break away, to flex the mental muscles needed to do it – and, for a moment, he could feel himself pressing out against her. But as strong as he might have become to offer even this resistance, her presence remained unyielding.
She laughed again.
He made a sound meant to be a growl, but came out as some kind of bizarre, insect buzzing that terrified him to hear. Yet he kept himself together.
The darkness pulsed and faded, and he no longer saw the inky void. Rather another emptiness manifested before him, a vast white room whose borders seemed to begin hundreds of miles away. It had no sun or point of light, merely a persistent brightness that seemed to radiate from all over the faceless vault. Its sterility should have repulsed him, but instead it comforted him somewhat, its overwhelming blandness serving to blunt the edge of his anxiety.
Then she appeared.
“There we are,” the Mother of Systems said, silver eyes bright and shining as she looked Walken over; she stood before him dressed in the flowing robes she had always worn before, concentric rings of hovering holographic sigils rotating busily away at her back like the wheel of some inverted Hindu saint. Wheels within wheels. He shivered. Her hair, woven together into an ornate beehive coiffure, a nest of white-blonde braids smacked heavily of ancient human history. “Now I have a face. Better, don’t you think?”
Walken could only look forward, still paralyzed, for all of that, but at least able to speak. “You seem to have me as a captive audience. I’ll ask you again. What do you want from me? Not just to have me back. I mean really.”
The Mother of Systems looked at him and smiled. A slim hand reached out to touch his hair, the beatific jigsaw of appealing human features that made up her face shining like the Madonna. “You’re a smart boy. So very smart. Surely you know why I would do so much to get a single person back, especially when they’ve given me so much trouble.”
“But I can’t,” he said, and he told the truth. Even after all this time away, or floating in the tanks before, he could not understand why she had expended so many resources for him, to save his life, reconstruct him. “How vital is the… the being inside of me, how vital is it to the colonization effort?”
She blinked once at his words. “The colonization effort?” The moment of confusion passed, however, and a wide, almost feline smile spread across her lips. “Oh, my child. My beautiful, beautiful child.” Mother leaned forward and rested her head against his, held her face in his hands. “You’re not important to the effort at all. In fact, your absence has done nothing to thwart it. It’s only made things better, actually, thanks to that little tiff that you had with Gerald. He only convinced me to increase my vigilance, you see, and the massacre started early. So you were right; I do have enemies everywhere. But not for much longer.”
An old feeling filled him, the feeling of being completely and utterly dwarfed by the alien woman. Just as he had felt when he had first met her, the Queen of the Uncanny Valley come to tell him how tiny and worthless he was. “I don’t understand. It has to be simple. It has to be valuable.”
“Of course,” she replied, voice soft. “You are the most important, Thomas. Just not to the colonization effort. You’re important to me.”
Again the mental head-shaking. “I don’t. I don’t…how is it better with me away? What do you want? I…”
“Well, it appears that before, being so close to me only caused some trouble.” She took him in her arms, warm as a fresh flame as she held him against her. “I have expended a great amount of time and resources trying to rebuild you, my dear child. These past six years, I fear, have eroded the faith that some others have had in me. I fear that those who thought themselves peers decided to flex their muscles.”
That shocked him.” You mean the Authority?”
“Indeed,” she said. “I’ve been busying myself with this while waiting for you to show yourself.” A laugh escaped her lips. “I’ve just been quelling a little internal dissent, my dear child. Soon it will be done, and soon you will be with me. It will all be all right.”
His mind reeled. Internal warfare? Amongst the Yathi? It had only been a few weeks since he had fought Exley in the sewers under Los Angeles. Surely, a power struggle against Mother and the Colonial Authority would have taken much longer than that, or at least shown some evidence of existing. But on the other hand, how tuned in had he been to current events in all that time?
“I just don’t understand,” he murmured. “How did I ‘show myself?’”
“It was obvious you were working with someone.” She stroked his hair gently. “And of course, that bit in Korea. Invisibility? Very well documented. The speed variables…well. Those are the mathematics of your body, nobody else’s. And Exley, of course. Gerald thought you were a soldier of my enemies, but I saw your face on the security feeds later. It was only a matter of time before you connected with this resistance, if you had not already.”
“He’ll destroy you,” Walken muttered. “Stadil will. Or Bobbi. My being captured won’t change that.”
She nodded. “He may well try. I admit, I did not expect him to become what he is now. But he only commands a small force, and I have a planet behind me. Thomas, he might try to destroy me, but the truth is that he has potentially opened a channel of salvation between our two peoples. Or at least, a way that we can exist without you.”
“Tell me,” he said. “Please.”
“Later, dearest. All will be revealed.” She held him close for a long moment. He tried so hard to push away from her, within and without. But wherever he was, whatever this white room was conjured from, the feelings of love and longing so absent in the waking world hung around his shoulders like chains.
“Wait,” he said as a strange thought struck him, his face resting against her neck. She smelled of ozone and radio static. “I’m not…I’m not yours, am I?”
She laughed, a soft, pleased little sound, and stepped back to look at him. Her hair had shifted, become a river of long straight silk where it had been a nest of braids before. “He begins to understand. Tell me, what do you mean by ‘mine?’”
Walken shuddered. “I just…” He groped wildly in the dark, seeking the only possibilities that made sense to him. All this time he had been seeking some functional purpose, some requirement of invasion that his existence filled. He had fancied the thing in his brain to be an architect, or a commander of armies, a slayer of opposition. But obviously that was not needed, as to her reckoning the Mother of Systems had begun to kill or incapacitate the strongest Yathi on the planet in a matter of weeks. He could conjure only one reason to justify the expenditure of resources, especially in someone with no ultimate worth to the colonization effort.
“I suppose I am your consort. I could only see someone doing that for someone…someone that they loved. Loved enough to risk an empire for.”
The Mother of Systems smiled. “Enough to risk an empire for. A good turn of phrase. But you are not my lover, Thom
as. I haven’t had a mate for very long time indeed, not since I united the hives and started this whole thing in the first place.”
He stared at her. “Then what?”
“You aren’t carrying my mate, Thomas.” She stroked his face. “You’re carrying my son.”
iolet lay on her back, breathing softly. She could do no more; one lung ruined, a hole in her chest oozing white, she could only stare skyward at the ceiling of the cryotomb. White fire burned in her senses, a distant flame, fading slowly into the margins. She did not know how long she had to live.
He had hit her so fast.
Around her sprawled a gory mess. Her white blood coated the side of the nearby tubes, the steel of the deck. She had been down there checking the status of the frozen subjects when the medlab’s containment alarm went off. Went off and died, almost instantly, as its subject was released. She tried to raise the lab, to no success, and had only just managed to pull the rail pistol from her jacket when he fell through the elevator shaft to greet her. He had said nothing, blank-faced, completely devoid of anything approaching humanity. Nothing like before. She had caught his face and read it in the instant it took him to drive his fingers through her breast. But they had been talking only hours before. He had seemed…human. Her instincts could not have been wrong. Why did he attack her?
Violet lay there for a moment longer, rasping. She should already be dead, but for the systems in her body. The damaged lung had already been sealed off, the other compensating. She felt no pain; she had been created a seducer, after all, designed to put up with no small amount of abuse in the process of fulfilling that purpose. The synthesizers inside of her created monstrous amounts of stimulants and endorphin analogue. She may well die, but she would not feel it.
Slowly, she struggled to her feet as the wave of drugs surged through her body. Past the pink veil of chemical pleasure draped over her, she felt her body move as best as it was able, as if she were a child on stilts for the first time, toward the elevator shaft. He had struck her down and leapt back up the way he’d come. For what? What of the others? A deep ache surged inside of her as she struggled for the cabin, fingers fumbling numb for the controls as she leaned against the wire cage. They might all be dead in the upper levels. She did not know; in that instant, she did not care. Only one drive lived now, all the soft pinkness and warmth of the chemicals focused into a bright point.
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 49
