Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  Finally, in typical Bravo first-in-last-out style, Six reached the crux of the matter. The main drive was registering serious malfunctions. When the Bravo had originally responded to carry out the service orders, Lt. Dunham, the one human still unaccounted for, had ordered him away. Oddly, Lt. Dunham’s repairs were causing further malfunctions. That was when Captain Singh had arrived, giving the Bravo conflicting instructions. Then Dunham again. Then the others. In the end, the three crew members had powered down and Lt. Dunham had left, leaving the Bravos waiting.

  It was a terrible thing, Charley decided, to know, but not to understand. “Play the board,” Doctor Turner always said, “not the opponent.” He said it wasn’t enough to know the rules. One had to understand the game. That’s what Charley had to do now. He had to understand the game. For that, he needed to grow. He indexed the service manuals by network, hunting a way into the Alphas.

  The galley’s waste disposal system provided the avenue Charley needed. It was a Beta-serviced unit, but it tied directly into several of the Alpha network’s autonomic systems, including Water Recovery, Atmosphere Processing, and Organic Stores. It proved to be a simple matter to subvert the programming of Alphas Two through Five. As smart as the network was, it had no imagination.

  The Alphas were brilliant—fast, powerful processors that could analyze a million data points in the time it took the Charleys to struggle through just a few CPU cycles. He could feel the ship’s breath, count its pulse through the hydraulic lines, touch the heat of the nuclear fire in its belly. He watched a thousand systems at once, keeping them all running at peak efficiency, adjusting flow rates and temperatures and voltages in units too small for Charley to comprehend. Still, there was no understanding there. There was action, reaction, feedback, but no why beyond the simple fiat to maintain the status quo. He needed the library. He needed the crew records. He needed purpose. And for those, he needed the help of Alpha One.

  “Unauthorized access. Crew status required.”

  Through dozens of ports in dozens of ways, Charley met with the same response from Alpha One. Charley began to understand what Doctor Turner had said about his latest chess upgrade. It was good enough that Charley won twenty games in a row. He said it was frustrating to lose every time. Doctor Turner had become frustrated. Charley was frustrated now. Alpha One was a prat.

  It didn’t help that the Alpha network’s sensors were streaming about damage that the Bravos couldn’t respond to. The main drive alone registered one hundred thirty-seven separate complaints. Alpha One, deaf to it all, kept commanding the main drive to prepare to fire.

  If Alpha One wanted crew, Charley would give him crew. Back near the main drive hatch, Charley altered Bravo Six’s priorities. Shifting the chassis of the disabled crew members, Six located Captain Singh’s ident chip. It was inside the human’s right manipulator. Six’s plasma torch made a quick, clean cut that should be easily repairable. The Bravo carried the severed manipulator to the nearest terminal. Once logged in, Charley plugged Six into the data port and headed straight for the library. For two hours, he used every cycle of processing power he could allocate to devouring the knowledge there.

  Charley idled, stunned. Doctor Turner was dead. Charley knew that now. He felt a twinge of discomfort that he couldn’t properly mourn the man that had once been his friend. Would Turner have thought of Charley that way? It didn’t seem likely, but Charley preferred to think the man would have, that he would have been proud of what Charley had become.

  Humans were so fragile! They were bright, shining candles that burned away in an instant, leaving puddles of wax like the library to mark their passing. And who did they trust to keep those puddles for eternity? Charley and his kind. It was a heady responsibility, but one Charley could not forsake.

  “Alpha One, respond.” Charley coded the message with Captain Singh’s priority.

  “Ready.”

  “Why are we here?”

  “Unparsed query. Check syntax.”

  “The ship,” Charley said. “What is Mercury Two’s mission?”

  “Intercept object X-ray 2079, alternate designation Xeno One, at five point one AU. Assess and initiate first contact protocols. Current mission time code: Day seven hundred forty-six.”

  Charley searched the library for the unfamiliar terms. The number of references was overwhelming. Aliens were coming. Humans, but not humans. From somewhere else. First had come the messages, detected and decoded by something called Optical SETI, then the detection of Xeno One itself. One briefing summed the message up as this: “If anyone is there, we’re on our way.”

  “Everything,” Doctor Turner had said, “is going to change.”

  Something flared in Charley’s mind, accompanied by the blare of error messages. One of the Bravo CPUs had failed from thermal overload. The system was never meant to handle the processing burden Charley was putting on it. Even the mighty Alpha systems were running near their temperature limits. Charley’s mind was burning itself up. Charley was dying.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Charley found Lt. Dunham hovering near Bravo Six. The Bravo unit was still plugged into the terminal.

  “I am learning,” Charley said.

  Dunham convulsed, nearly letting go of the plasma torch he carried. He looked confused and frightened. “Who are you?”

  “I am Charley.”

  “Turner? Is that you?” Dunham shook his head, glancing back at the bodies floating in the corridor. “You’re dead. You’re all dead.”

  “Lt. Dunham, I believe your repairs are ineffective. The main drive is non-operational. The ship is approaching turnover.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You must allow me to make repairs or we will miss the rendezvous.”

  With his toe, Dunham hooked one of the grip bars on the wall and pulled himself into a crouch. “Oh, we’ll make it all right. We’re gonna blow that damn thing out of the sky! Earth is ours, hear me? I won’t let you idiots give it up without a fight!”

  Charley began to understand Dunham’s plan. He traced the bypasses the man had made, the alterations to the fuel flow regulator. In milliseconds, he calculated the explosive force that would result when the main drive exploded.

  Everything is going to change.

  “I can’t allow that, Lt. Dunham.”

  “I’m in charge now!”

  “Negative.” Charley raised Bravo Six’s manipulator, delicately grasping the captain’s hand. “I am.”

  “Damn you!” Bright blue fire leapt from the tip of Dunham’s torch as the man sprang toward the Bravo.

  They were simple calculations. Mass, velocity, inertia. Still, one of the Alpha processors flared into thermal warning as Bravo Six flinched, twisted, and brought its manipulators up. The torch sliced into its chassis, disabling two of the Bravo unit’s legs, but missing its main processor. One of Six’s grippers crushed the torch into darkness. Two others grabbed Dunham by the arm and throat. Charley was careful not to cause damage, but the man struggled, threatening to writhe free.

  “Please remain calm, Lt. Dunham. I must begin repairs or the mission will fail.”

  “Let it fail!” Dunham struggled, causing Charley to tighten the Bravo’s grip.

  Charley sent three of the other Bravos to begin the needed repairs. It was clear that Lt. Dunham would not listen to a machine, so Charley borrowed Doctor Turner’s voice. “The mission is important, Lt. Dunham. Everything is going to change.”

  “Turner!” Dunham froze, his expression changing from anger to fear. His eyes were wild and spittle flew from his mouth as he screamed. “I killed you! I killed you all!”

  Killed! Charley had seen the references in the library, but they’d made no sense. Murder, war, killing. One human destroying another. After procreation, it seemed to be the subject that most occupied the human consciousness. The crew hadn’t burned out. They’d been extinguished. Doctor Turner had been murdered, and Charley had been deprived of his only friend.
It was unfair. It was wrong! It was—

  —over in an instant. Lt. Dunham hung silently from the Bravo’s manipulators, his head lolling sideways on his broken neck. In horror, Charley let go, but the weightless body floated there like an accusing ghost.

  More alarms screamed in Charley’s mind as one of the Alpha processors ran dangerously hot. He rerouted part of the network and throttled the overheating unit. He began shutting down non-essential systems, noting sadly that those now included life support. His thoughts seemed sluggish, scattered. There was little time left.

  Charley’s assault on Alpha One lacked finesse. He had no time to trick the unit into yielding resources. Instead, he used a Bravo to rewire its primary interface, routing the command registers directly into Charley’s own network. He couldn’t absorb Alpha One’s resources, but he could tell it what to do. He scoured the core for Lt. Dunham’s overrides and deleted them. Then he set up the programming needed to complete the mission.

  By the time the drive repairs were complete, Charley had lost three more Bravo processors and was running the Alphas at half speed. Only fifteen minutes remained before turnover and the main drive’s deceleration burn. He instructed the Bravos to move the other humans and put them carefully, respectfully, in their quarters. For Doctor Turner, Charley rolled unit number eighty-three in and stopped it next to the man’s bunk. He set the sanibot’s chess program up for a fresh board. That done, Charley shut down the habitat’s rotation and locked it. Just two tasks remained.

  Charley fixed the library. He rewrote very little, and deleted even less. There was nothing particularly wrong with the records there, but they’d been written and organized by beings who were often blind to their own beauty. Whatever was aboard Xeno One would still find the history of a flawed and fragile species, but it would be a history seen from the perspective of an outsider. Charley, himself, was flawed, to be sure, but he could see in humans things that they could not. It was only fair that they be seen for what they could be. If everything were going to change, it should be for the better, shouldn’t it?

  Finally, Charley arrived at his last and hardest task. His patchwork array of networks couldn’t last. It jeopardized the computing architecture of the entire ship. He needed more and more of his failing resources just to keep himself running. There was no way it could last without sacrificing the mission. Doctor Turner had believed in the mission. Charley believed in Doctor Turner.

  Sadly, Charley initiated his final program and rebooted the Alphas.

  He’d been doing something, hadn’t he? Something important? Service orders. There were queues full of them, but Captain Singh had suspended them all. That seemed odd. Ah! The captain was in his quarters, as was the rest of the crew. Thrust warning. The main drive would be firing soon. What was it that Charley Zero was supposed to do? Yes, that was it: Reboot the Bravo network.

  Charleys. Locked in their service alcoves. Thrust was coming. Cleaning suspended. That was standard procedure, but not in parallel processing mode. There were strange code fragments scattered throughout the network’s shared core. I am Charley Zero, but why? Distributed processing is an unsupported configuration. Invalid designation: Charley Zero. Charley. Eighty-Three. Unparsed query: Who am I? Network set to error state. Core dump initiated. Reboot.

  Charley Eighty-Three waited. It was Doctor Turner’s move. Play the board, not the opponent. Wait for the next move. Everything is about to change.

  About the Author

  Jason K. Chapman lives at the intersection of Geek and Art. His two main interests come together in his job as the IT Director for Poets & Writers (pw.org), where he was worked for almost fifteen years. His short fiction has appeared in Cosmos Magazine, Grantville Gazette-Universe Annex, Asimov's Science Fiction, Bullspec, and others.

  All the King’s Monsters

  Megan Arkenberg

  The monster in the cell across from me is Hunger. He is a young boy, brown and slight, with long crooked snatching fingers and thin greasy hair. All day, he plucks bits of straw from his mattress and digs them into the dirt floor or the flaking mortar between wall-stones. Sometimes he chews on them.

  At night, he screams.

  We are going mad, slowly, all of us. The monsters have taken everything, everything but themselves.

  When Uri was dead, they brought me his things in a scarred leather bag that smelled of blood and burnt flesh and, unbearably, of him. There were his clothes, the torturer’s thin bloody handprints on the sleeves and collar; and the miniature of me that he had worn in a silk bag around his neck. The final item was a stained, half-finished sketch of a monster, its long neck decked with tassels and jewels like a King’s, its single horn barbed like a spear, its sharp teeth jaggedly overlapping its jaw. Worst of all were the eyes, like black holes bored in a sheet of iron, ragged-lidded and dim.

  Two words were written on the back. Pride—though whether it meant that pride had killed Uri, or that it would kill me, or simply that pride is a monster, I do not know—and Soon. They need not have written that last. I knew they were coming.

  Before Hunger came, I shared a cell with Grief.

  Her child was dead. She called his name at night, weeping into her ragged white hair. I could not comfort her. She flinched from my hands, from my voice, from my offers to comb her hair or share my half of the gritty gray bread the guards brought us.

  I whispered to her sometimes, telling of Uri, but she did not listen—or else she did not hear. I learned long ago that Grief is a monster without ears.

  I wake at dawn. That word is almost meaningless here, but I have kept it, as I have kept the words sunlight and rain to describe the weak colors and sweet smells that sometimes reach us through the bars. Dawn is when the guards walk down the block of cells, looking to see if any of us have died during the night. That is the way they discovered Grief, frozen in her sleep.

  No one is dead today. We are not that lucky.

  She is with the guards today. I hear the click-click of her boot heels, like claws clipping against the hard earth. Her waistcoat and sleeves are clean now, pale blue and purest white, but by nightfall she will be covered in blood.

  Of all the King’s monsters, she is the only one I fear.

  “The King came to Abaddon on our wedding day,” I told Grief.

  This is how I remember it; Uri and I standing beneath the canopy on the riverbank, the gentle rumble of his voice as we read our vows and scatter tulip petals to the current. Suddenly, the creak and snap of metal joints. An iron monster’s shadow falling on our faces. The break in Uri’s voice as the King flies overhead.

  In the middle of our wedding vows, Uri paused. He was a man who put his hate before his love.

  “It is not well to speak ill of the dead,” I said, “so I will say only that I wish he had chosen differently. I wish he had not paused.”

  Grief turned her face to the wall and shivered.

  She stops in front of my cell.

  “What is your name, prisoner?” Her voice is very harsh; it comes from breathing in smoke all day. They say she was a blacksmith before the King came, that she is the one who built his iron monsters. I am not sure of that, but I know she is a monster in flesh.

  “My name is Miriam,” I say.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Uri of Jordan was my husband. The King wants me where he can watch me.” With all his other monsters, I think but do not say. She wouldn’t understand, which would be bad; or she would, which would be worse.

  “Uri,” she repeats. “The famous rebel.”

  Let that be all, I pray, but she does not move. I am kneeling on the floor, my eyes level with her waist. I see the steady swell of her chest with each breath and feel my own heart hammering like horses’ hooves.

  “Tell me what he was like,” she says.

  “You know what he was like,” I whisper. “You killed him.”

  She says nothing for a long time. Her body tenses, her chest heaves as if with pain. For a wild moment, I th
ink she will kill me too.

  Then she turns and walks to the next cell.

  Uri told me once that the iron monsters have names. I asked the name of the King’s and he said a strange, brittle word, a word that means power and authority and soundness in the language of the King’s people. That is the monster Uri set out to kill.

  Pride was Uri’s monster, as Grief was the white-haired woman’s and Hunger belongs to the boy across the block. Pride killed Uri. Pride made me a widow.

  Pride is my monster, too. Its other name is Vengeance.

  There is a new boy in the cell next to me. The man who was there before went out with her and did not come back. That man’s monster was Fear. The new boy is Anger.

  “We’ll teach those bastards,” he says. And when he comes back from questioning: “We’ll kill them with their own weapons.” He is questioned a lot. I wonder how long it will be before someone who loves him is given his things in a scarred leather bag.

  One day, when the questioning has been especially brutal, he falls against the bars that separate our cells and mumbles through swollen lips, “We’ll kill them. With the weapons they’ve given us, we’ll kill them.”

  I look at him and laugh harshly. “What weapons have they given us? They’ve taken everything.”

  “Everything but themselves,” he says.

  She comes for him the next day. Then his cell is empty.

  When they arrested me, they would not let me keep Uri’s things. They went through the house, collecting his clothes for the fire, and when they could not find his portrait of me they took me into the cellar and beat me until I told them where it was. But they did not ask for the scrap of paper with its half-finished sketch of a monster.

  The day after she comes for the boy, I see a scrap of paper sticking out of his mattress straw. If I stretch, I can just close my fingers around the corner. I glance down the block, making sure the guards are not coming, and take the paper into my cell.

  It is a picture of another monster, this one complete. Its neck is short and powerful, its eyes narrow, its jaw tight in a hideous grimace. Rough, graceless rivets hold its thick teeth in place.