Lucifer's Nebula

by Phipps, C. T.

  “Yes,” Judith said. “I believe the Kathax Prime has returned to evolving races from his prison and is possibly planning to escape. You need to destroy his central server temple and end his threat forever. That will probably destabilize the planet in the process, but it will be worth it to end his threat.”

  “End the threat of the guy who wants to make humanity equal with the Elder Races?” I asked, pausing. “I may be missing something.”

  Judith stared into my eyes. “He wishes to make armies to spread throughout the galaxy and assimilate all other races before bringing them to the Elder Gods’ level. There will be nothing left of humanity’s culture, technology, or beliefs if that happens. Even if you don’t believe that will happen, what are the chances the Elder Races will not permanently destroy mankind this time?”

  “They haven’t yet,” I said, giving a weak defense. “I also think they have to know about you if you’ve got access to all this incredibly biased information.”

  “Reality has a bias,” Judith said. “It’s called the truth.”

  She had me there.

  “How will I blow up the planet?” I said, starting to get suspicions I drove to the back of my mind in hopes Judith wouldn’t hear them. “The FSA isn’t going to just stand there and let me push a comet in its direction. That would also take months.”

  “I’ll provide the weapon,” Judith said. “Major Terra was someone I interfered in the brainwashing of. In the back of her mind, instead of the usual loyalty to the Commonwealth, I inserted instructions to assist you in this mission.”

  “Oh joy,” I said. “Now we’re brainwashing people.”

  “Her original mission, that Ida’s agents implanted, was to assassinate your doppelganger and Princess Servilia. Then she was supposed to detonate the planet breaker charge.”

  I stared at her. “I may need to revise my number of Commonwealth people I want dead.”

  “You should,” Judith said. “The Temple of the Ancient One, as the Kolahn called it, is in an isolated region, though. The detonation there should have minimal casualties.”

  I suspected her definition of minimal and mine differed. “I repeat: why me? This seems like an awfully large amount to put on a drunken freighter captain.”

  “You were, and could be again, someone of great importance.”

  “I feel more like a gun pointed at someone.”

  “That too.” Judith closed her eyes. “Kathax Prime is not undefended and I’ve had to move pieces very carefully to get my red knight, you, into position to take his king. If you fail, then it may be too late.”

  “I hate chess metaphors. Real war is never two evenly matched parties operating by the same rules on open terrain.”

  “Can I count on your support?” Judith asked.

  “Of course,” I lied, but so sincerely I fooled myself.

  Judith smiled and then kissed me on the lips, moving her hand down my chest toward my groin. “Good. Succeed in this and we may have to revisit our position. I can provide you with whatever fantasies you desire.”

  “Ah,” I said, disgusted by the nakedness of her bribe then smiling. I still imagined her indulging such to try to fool her. “Of course.”

  Judith looked out into the darkness. “I’ll need to be leaving for a bit because I can’t let Kathax Prime sense me. Good luck and may whatever gods you believe in guide you.”

  “Farewell.” Judith then disappeared.

  I threw away the wine into the virtual reality emptiness around me. A question burned in my mind and made me sick to my stomach—eliminating all desire for drugs or alcohol: when, exactly, had Judith been killed and replaced by one of the Elder Races? Had my wife ever returned from the grave or was it a trick from the beginning?

  Because that was most certainly not her.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Are you sure Judith is dead?” Isla asked as I sat down on the autodoc chair with a blue light shining in my face. She was wearing surgical scrubs with a medical barrier over her as well as a clear plastilight breath mask over her lower face to cleanse the air she breathed. Personally, I thought she was overdoing it. Then again, this was brain surgery.

  “Yes,” I said, trying not to think about the cords that were sticking into the back of my own cybernetic implant. “My wife was always dead but this thing is most certainly not her or anything approximating her.”

  “You were fooled for a year,” Isla said, not even bothering to hide her contempt.

  I had no defense for that. “Yeah, I saw what I wanted to see.”

  Isla’s gaze narrowed. That would have been intimidating on anyone whose eyes weren’t grown specifically to look adorable. Even so, I was ashamed of the way I’d behaved around them both and wished I could turn back the clock.

  “What tipped you off?” Isla said, giving a bit more of a tug on the chords attached to my arm than necessary.

  “Her personality has been different for much of the time we’ve been working together,” I said, not bringing up the sex issue. “Colder, more distant, and less humorous. She was able to fake it better at the beginning but dropped the pretense in these past few months. Even then, there was always something distant about her manner. I just ignored it because—”

  “You saw what you wanted to see,” Isla said.

  I closed my eyes. “It’s the betrayal with Ida and the insane focus on politics that convinced me. That and—”

  “What?” Isla said.

  “She kisses different,” I muttered. “It was the kiss of a stranger.”

  It was everything actually. I’d blinded myself to the truth of an Elder Race member impersonating Judith because I didn’t want to believe it. However, even in our first conversation, she’d jokingly revealed the truth to me. She’d told me how the Cognition A.I. had been supplanted by the Elder Races and now I knew how—they were A.I. themselves and overwrote all those we created in order to direct our information flow. They’d caused the Great Collapse and Second Dark Age.

  Isla sighed and muttered about imprinting herself as well as men being God’s punishment on women. “You know I was about ready to leave you?”

  “Excuse me?” I asked, shocked at this sudden turn in our conversation.

  Isla lowered her barrier and pulled her mask down to her neck. “I have more self-respect than dealing with your bullshit. Honestly, though, I thought your pining after your wife was almost noble except for the fact I’ve been thinking she was creepy and psychotic for months.”

  “You didn’t think to mention that to me?”

  “How would you have reacted?”

  I thought about it. “Defensively?”

  Isla rolled her eyes. “You think?”

  “I wasn’t going to leave you while you were desperate, afraid, and alone, though. Perhaps it was the doctor in me. You’re starting to look like the Cassius I fell in love with again.”

  She had a point there. I decided a formal apology was best. “I have treated you in an ungentlemanly fashion, Isla. I treated you in a manner inappropriate to both my station and feelings for you. Certainly, if you wish to end our relationship, I would understand and it would be no better than I deserved.”

  “You’re damned right.”

  “But if you decide to be with me,” I continued, taking a deep breath. “Now is the time I need you most. I say, if we survive this, I would like you to honor you by asking you to be my wife…FUCK!”

  Isla had jabbed me the laser-created surgical scar over my newly replaced liver. “Do not apologize by proposing.”

  “Sorry,” I said, my voice a decibel higher.

  “Propose with flowers and jewelry,” Isla said. “A new surgical center because this one is crap. Knock down a wall and give me a bigger one.”

  “The next room over is one of the restrooms and it’d be a terrible idea to lose twenty-five commodes for a ship the size of a small town,” I said, pausing and realizing now was the worst time to argue with her. “But we’ll see about getting you a prope
r clinic.”

  “Also, monogamy is off the table,” Isla said. “However, I promise not to sleep with anyone you’re not sleeping with or unless you give me permission. So if you turn down my candidates from the crew or local ports of call, we’ll need to have extra sex. You can also never dump Clarice. This is non-negotiable.”

  “That’s…fair,” I said, clearing my throat and trying to remember Isla was both a Spacer and someone programmed to be adult entertainment before deciding she wanted to choose her own lovers. I’d grown up in a far more conservative environment and wasn’t entirely comfortable with it all. “Is that going to be…many? Wait, no, we are way off track from the cybernetic demon in our ship.”

  “I blame the drugs,” Isla said, looking around. “I had to turn the Re-Lax gas up to maximum to get you halfway to where you needed to be. I’m just lucky I’m immune to this shit. Mostly. In any case, she can’t hear us now.”

  “Probably,” I said, taking a deep breath. “The False Judith said she had to leave for somewhere else and I scanned the ship four times to make sure her programming was absent. She could come back at any time, though, so I isolated this section of the ship.”

  Isla nodded. “Just making sure since you wanted me to partition areas of your brain.”

  “I just wanted it impossible for the crazy computer lady to read my thoughts,” I said, sighing. “Though that will induce some suspicion, I’m sure.”

  “I’ve done things like before for bioroids,” Isla said, frowning. “So masters wouldn’t be able to read their minds or bounty-hunters pick up their thoughts being projected outwards. Still, you better come up with a damn good excuse or we’re potentially making a huge enemy.”

  “She’s already our enemy,” I said, taking a deep breath. “We just didn’t know it until now.”

  It was a gut punch, really, but also liberating in a hideous way. I was able to finally put the death of my wife in the past without the constant living reminder of who she was and who she wasn’t. I would always mourn her, but she was crystalized in my mind now and someone I would not be fooled again by the shadow of.

  “What about her whole blow up a planet plan?” Isla said.

  “I’m open to suggestions,” I said, unhappy about the fact we were caught between the Commonwealth and an eldritch race of space gods. One was far more powerful than the other but the weaker was much closer. “Major Terra is a threat to us. The safest option is to deal with her but I worry that will turn Fade on us and I actually don’t want to kill him.”

  Yet.

  “I have an alternative suggestion,” Isla said, raising her pointer finger in the air. “If I may?”

  “By all means,” I said, curious with what she’d come up with.

  “We un-brainwash her,” Isla said, lifting up a stun-rod and a medical scanner.

  “I did not know that was an option,” I said, staring at her.

  “She’s a Shin, right?” Isla asked. “That means they took out part of her brain, blocked her memory centers, and stuck a cybernetic cortex where her will should be.”

  “Horrifying but yes,” I said. “The Shin are the walking dead.”

  “Except the memories are still there,” Isla said, smiling. “We just need to disable her, unblock her memories, and then replace whatever loyalties the Commonwealth has emplaced along with Judith with our own.”

  “That’s not un-brainwashing her, that’s reprogramming her.”

  Isla’s expression darkened. “Reprogramming is kind of a sensitive word with me.”

  I blinked, realizing what I’d just said. “Sorry. Can we really do this, though?”

  Isla mistook my hesitation for a question about the practicalities. “When your sister’s doppelganger was here, she uploaded her memories into the ship’s server. I’ve looked through them multiple times and learned amazing things about the Watcher’s human experiments. Terrifying and fascinating advances in cybernetics as well as mnemonic uploads.”

  I paused. “You don’t suppose those memories could have gotten into Judith and turned her into a weird sister-monster, could they?”

  “No,” Isla said. “That would be stupid.”

  “Oh,” I said, pausing. “Good. Because that would add a whole layer of fucked-up to this that I’m not prepared to deal with.”

  “I like it better when you’re gentlemanly,” Isla said. “Work on that.”

  “Yes, milady.”

  Isla looked at the medical scanner. “I struggle to believe as you do that there’s an order to this universe and a greater purpose. However, free will isn’t as cut and dried as you’d make it. Reprogramming to be something other than a weapon pointed at the enemy may be the closest thing to freedom she gets even if we can’t say it’s what she’d choose normally.”

  I wondered when she decided I was apparently all that religious. Then again, I suppose in the land of the blind, the drunken man with a scanner was king. “What if she was a serial killer or, worse, really honest before her lobotomy?”

  “Still, a better option than her running around with a planet-destroying bomb somewhere on the ship.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “That.”

  Isla looked at me. “You’re still planning on blowing up the prison temple, aren’t you?”

  “I’m going to investigate it,” I said, taking a moment to consider my options. “The False Judith, assuming she didn’t just replace the real one at some point, told me a lot of things about the Elder Races when she was still plugged in to the marker that Zoe acquired when she was here. Knowing False Judith—”

  “Must we call her that?” Isla said.

  “Lying Computer Goddess-Monster?” I suggested.

  “False Judith is fine,” Isla corrected. “Go on.”

  “Knowing False Judith is very probably a member of the Elder Races, I imagine the majority of what she told me was true. The Great Collapse, the mass extinction of nearly all predecessor sentient species, and probably this war all have their hands in it. Talking with this Kathax Prime may reveal how we can deal with them.”

  “I’m not sure you can deal with godlike aliens from the beginning of the universe,” Isla said. “Not the least reason being Kathax Prime, if he’s real and what she says he is, is the one imprisoned while they’re outside. Besides, what he or it wanted to do was turn humanity into just another tool for its race to subjugate the universe.”

  She had a point. “Then there’s always the option of blowing up the prison temple and killing it. Maybe if Kathax Prime is gone then it won’t see any reason to interfere with our development again.”

  “I don’t see that happening,” Isla said.

  “Nor do I,” I said, shaking my head. “Right now the only Elder Race member I want to kill is Judith but that’s not an option.”

  “Maybe we can blow up the Melampus when she’s on here,” Isla said, frowning. “Really on here. Assuming she doesn’t have any backups or this is just a copy of her programming or that she doesn’t see us coming and….actually, I think I’ve talked myself out of that.”

  “Me too,” I said, sighing. “Still, you’ve rigged my cybernetics to eject her presence and close off, right?”

  “As much as I think you can with a Cognition A.I. They don’t really function like normal computer programs. Their technology allows them to point at things and bypass what we think of as normal security. You know, like datajackers in holos.”

  “I don’t watch many shows about computer criminals,” I admitted. “Still, a sling is better than nothing and might actually be able to slay Goliath.”

  “Who?” Isla said.

  I stretched on the table. “It doesn’t matter. Are we done here? It’s been three days and I think my crew is getting restless.”

  “Pardon me for not being quicker with the elaborate surgery and cybernetic modifications,” Isla muttered. “Some of your stuff is obsolete now. Your carbon-fiber plating for bone density could be upgraded, plus your ultracite regenerator. I also have a cata
log of sex mods too.”

  I snorted. “You’ve never complained before.”

  “Neither have you,” Isla said, pointing out. “I’m just saying we could maybe amp it up a notch. Are you sure you’re only interested in human, human subspecies, and bioroid females shaped like human females?”

  “Yes,” I said without hesitation. “Completely.”

  “Your loss.” Isla shrugged. “Still, I can work with—”

  “Please unplug me.”

  Isla did so and I rose up before getting dressed. Thankfully, she’d not had to actually cut into my brain, just the cybernetic implant in the base of my neck. The difference between cyborgs like Major Terra and myself was whether or not they took out chunks of the mind’s location. Despite one thousand years of medicine, humanity never really improved on the human brain even if they could replicate its functions with cerebral implants. Those who lost portions of the organ, even if computers could simulate its functions, lost portions of their personality. Even if we managed to revive the person Major Terra was, it wasn’t necessarily going be a restoration of that person. That is what the Commonwealth hoped from its treatment of such ‘undesirables.’

  Changing into my captain’s uniform and putting my duster over my shoulders, I made sure I was armed too. “You should keep your pistol on you as well.”

  “You foresee problems with Major Terra?”

  “I have no idea what’s going to happen next but I have the funniest feeling it’s not going to end with a peace treaty plus the slaying of the villain. It’s not that kind of story.”

  “All stories have bad endings,” Isla said. “Everyone dies and the world returns to a shitty state. That’s why you have to stop reading on a high note.”

  I smirked. “I knew there was something I loved about you.”

  “I’m really disappointed you decided my immense cynicism is the part you love about me most.”