The Immortal Game (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  After a moment, Bishop moves a piece. Interesting, Rook thinks. The most common played move in this situation was bishop to B5. Here, Bishop moved his knight to C3, which, according to chess theory, was the “quietest” continuation possible. A very subtle move, not aggressive at all, and amateur players often thought it was a mistake until the trap was sprung later. This puts us in a classic Three Knights Game. The question is, did Bishop do it by mistake, or was he up to something?

  “And you think these exponential and imaginative problems will never be solved by computers?” the alien says.

  Rook is still looking over the chessboard, considering Bishop’s move, and wondering for the first time how much skill the Ianeth has been holding back. “Not without accepting the fact that an organic brain is an upgrade, and not a downgrade.” He considers moving his bishop to B4. It’s playable, but maybe too early, because White can play knight to D5…so how about bishop to C5…?

  Apparently Bishop notices his hesitation. “You’re taking a while to think. Why aren’t you playing knight to D5? It seems the most logical move.”

  “That’s too dangerous,” Rook says. “If I do that, you can take the E5 pawn and grab back some material with a fork at D4.”

  “Fork?”

  “You haven’t covered tactics yet?” Rook finds that hard to believe, considering the Ianeth’s ability to absorb vast amount of historical data. That’s suspicious. “A fork is an attack that causes two separate threats. It doesn’t matter that the opponent sees the move coming, your opponent can’t rescue both of his attacked pieces. They have to choose one or the other. Knights and pawns are especially good at it.”

  “I see.”

  “With a fork, the point isn’t always to try for one piece or another, the point is to make your opponent sweat. The point is to mess with his head, affect the rest of his game with that one move, that one agonizing decision.”

  “I see.”

  Do you? thinks Rook, watching the game progress. How well do you see? He decides on a move to G6, hoping to prepare it for F5 or transpose it into a classic Scotch Game, if he gets a counter-attack at D4. As he watches the chess pieces moving, though, Rook believes he’s witnessing an emerging pattern, an increasingly sneaky and sophisticated plot. The pieces move slowly, and there are lures…My God, how long has he been pretending to be ignorant?

  He doesn’t let on to his suspicion—maybe that wouldn’t be appropriate in this deception play the Ianeth were so fond of?—so he just keeps playing, watches closely. Suddenly, Bishop starts making several obvious mistakes, too obvious for how well he was previously playing.

  Bishop manages to even pin one of Rook’s pieces for the first time—a pin being any time a defending piece cannot move, because it would expose a more valuable piece to attack.

  Rook catches Bishop in a skewer. That’s the reverse of a pin. It occurs when two pieces are attacked in a line—rank, file, or diagonal, as long as it’s a straight line. Ducks lined up in a row, so to speak. When the more valuable piece out front moves out of the way, it leaves the piece behind it open for capture.

  “Checkmate.” Almost too easy, and now I know why.

  “Copy that,” Bishop says, betraying nothing. “Good game. I’m all finished here. I’ll be there momentarily.”

  Rook now considers the depths of the alien’s mind. He thinks back on their conversation. He thinks back to what Bishop said about rescuing him, and wonders what else he might be concealing. And it suddenly occurs to him that he’s never actually asked Bishop how he ended up a captive of the Cerebs. “Hey, Bishop, mind if I ask a personal question?”

  “Go ahead, friend.”

  “How did you get caught by the Cerebs?”

  Silence.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Copy that. I’m all finished here. I’ll be there momentarily.”

  Rook determines to never bring it up again. If he doesn’t want to talk about it, neither do I.

  Ten minutes later, Bishop steps back onto the Sidewinder. Finally, they’re all done with the stations. At the end of the twelve-day work haul, Bishop sits in the co-pilot’s seat, not panting and not looking tired. How do Ianeth express exhaustion, I wonder? Rook thinks, cycling up for takeoff. “We ready?”

  “We’re ready. All twelve stations are now slaved to me. Just give me the word when and where you want them moved.”

  “Let’s get some rest. We’ve earned it. We’ll test the mass drivers tomorrow.”

  “I can assure you they all work fine, though some may be slower than others—”

  “I prefer no vagaries,” Rook says. Vagaries foster illusions, and illusions are intense handicaps if not kept in check. He knows this, and he wants to know exactly how well these spheres can move. “We’ll test them tomorrow.”

  Rook tries to stay awake to work some more on telemetry, but the body asserts its own imperatives. He sleeps, but wakes up in the middle of the night cycle to a series of loud thuds. Getting up with his pistol ready, he moves down the main corridor and finds the Ianeth in the forward hold, arched back and with both hands and feet on the floor, performing some variation of the push-up that must only make sense to Ianeth biology. Over the last few weeks, he’s noticed Bishop doing more of this late-night exercising. “Somethin’ on your mind, pal? Somethin’ keeping you up?” The alien doesn’t respond. Rook goes back to sleep, and in the morning they begin moving the spheres around.

  Dozens of enormous, mile-wide panels open up all around the spheres, on every hemisphere, and though some don’t work as well as hoped, they do enough to get the defense stations moving around. “Let’s move this one here to…Sector twenty-seven.”

  “Affirmative, friend.”

  It takes ten minutes to move the stations a thousand miles. Not too shabby for something the size of a small state, Rook thinks. “How the hell do those drivers move that much mass?”

  “Our most powerful mass drivers utilized an annihilated anti-exomatter mixture.”

  “Very nice. Go ahead and return them all to their home positions.”

  “Affirmative. Where do you want me to move them after that?”

  “Nowhere right now. And hopefully not for a while longer. We’ve got other work to do, finishing up the derelict ship.”

  Six more days of hard labor. Rook skips quite a few meals, and Bishop almost never eats. A few simple tests are run on the old ship, enough to see that its thrusters are coming online and the main console is communicating with them. A bit of fuel is going to have to be sacrificed from their Sidewinder in order to get the derelict moving, though.

  Finally they step back and watch the ship’s thrusters activate—its vertical thrusters are all but shot, but it can at least hover off the ground a few feet. Rook syncs the ship’s slave circuit to his wrist computer to control it remotely, gliding it carefully out of the cave. He even runs it through a clumsy landing. He gives Bishop an approving nod, but it’s a bit premature. One of the pistons on a landing strut ruptures, and the whole thing cants to one side.

  “Well,” he sighs. “At least we got her out.”

  “I must once more voice my concern over towing this thing into orbit. The keel-frame is the most dangerous sort of structural problem—it’s the core of a ship like this. If the core is shaky, and if it starts to come apart, it will do so in large pieces falling towards the ground, smashing to pieces.”

  “I think we can do it.”

  “This planet may only have point-two stronger gravity than Earth, but that’s significant, despite how tough these Sidewinders were made. With a battered keel-frame like this one has, that extra point-two is dangerous. Also, these ships were designed with systems to counter gravity in order to lift off. None of those systems are currently working on the derelict.”

  “But the vertical thrusters will—”

  “Provide only enough upward thrust to lighten the load a little, but once we reach the upper atmosphere, there will be turbulence. The ship is too damaged to b
leed off those effects.” The alien looks at Rook seriously. “I’m telling you, friend, this is what I do. It is my job. I was born into it. If you lift this ship off, the problems are going to compound. The g’s and the velocity necessary to escape the atmosphere will cause great turbulence, it will shake this ship to its foundations, and the shattered keel-frame which runs through the whole ship will buckle and cause systemic problems. This whole thing will shake itself apart.”

  A few seconds of gnawing on their problem. We got us a whole passel o’ problems with this thing, as ol’ Badge used to say. “Well, we’ll have to find a way.”

  “There is no way.”

  “Then we work some more on it until we find a—”

  “We can’t. Sometimes a thing is so badly broken it isn’t reparable, unless you tear it apart completely and start with a new keel-frame and rebuild from scratch, which would take two people months to rebuild. You saw how the support strut gave out. That’s just one of a myriad of problems that—”

  “Fix it.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t care how, just do it! We need this to…” He trails off.

  “To what?”

  Rook fumes. “Just fix it, damn you!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?!”

  The alien suddenly roars. “Because this ship is like its crew, it’s dead and it’s never coming back!” It’s the first time Bishop has raised his voice, and it takes us back as much as Rook. “I’m sorry to put it to you like that, perhaps it’s inappropriate, but…you saw my own people down in the cave, you saw how some of their systems still work. Lifeless husks that are still twitching. The bodies have some rudimentary systems that still work, but you can’t make them stand up and dance, Rook. Don’t you see? Some things that are broken can never be fixed! Not ever again!”

  Rook huffs, and storms off a few paces, hands on his hips. Finally, he turns back to face the alien. “All right, then. This is…this is not doable. If we can’t lift it off, then I guess it’s out of the plan.” He bites out a curse, and kicks the dirt. The earth shakes. Off in the distance, Thor’s Anvil erupts anew, giving off low booms, but there is no lightning today. The only lights are the exterior ones shining out from the Sidewinder. “Maybe this plan wasn’t meant to happen, anyway. Maybe it’s like you said, survival of the fittest. Maybe it’s time for us to bow out of the evolutionary race, let the Cerebs have it all. I dunno.”

  Bishop says nothing to this. Another temblor carries through the earth. Whatever massive creature(s?) stirs beneath us seems to have no thoughts on the matter, either. So far below, they are supremely unaware of the interstellar struggles. Rook considers this, and for a moment, seriously contemplates digging into the ground, using the exo-suit and their particle-beam weapons to dive belowground. If there really is an ecosystem down there, maybe…maybe we could subsist off of it.

  “Tell me the plan.”

  Rook turns to look at the alien. “What?”

  Bishop walks over to him. “Tell me the plan.”

  “What plan? My plan? What does it matter now? We can’t even get it off the ground.” He chuckles mirthlessly. “Literally.”

  “Still, I would hear it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, as you say, what does it matter now? I can’t confess it to my captors.” The alien gives him a shrug. “So come. Tell me.”

  Rook waves him off, walks away a few paces, and stops. He looks away at Thor’s Anvil, only visible because of the red-orange molten lava that outlines some of its top and middle features. Then, he thinks, The hell with it. Why not? What does it matter? He turns to Bishop. “My father was a big history buff. He told me this story. In the 1700s, there was this machine called the Turk. It was a chess-playing automaton, built almost two hundred years before the first computers. It was constructed and unveiled by a man named Wolfgang von Kempelen. If I’m not mistaken, he meant to impress the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria with it.”

  Just then, the ground trembles heavily, and both the Sidewinder and the derelict ship wine and shake.

  Rook continues. “The machine was essentially a giant table, on top of which was a chessboard, and behind which sat a life-sized mechanical human, dressed in Turkish robes and a turban. In its left arm it held a smoking pipe, and its right hand rested on top of a large cabient connected to the chessboard. For eighty-four years this machine did a tour of Europe and the Americas, and during that time it defeated some very famous chess players, and even some statesmen. Hell, it beat Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte.”

  Bishop perks up here. “I know that second name. It was in some of your ship’s historical files. He was a statesman and strategist.”

  “One of the greatest strategists. And not too shabby at chess, either, from what I understand. Bonaparte wasn’t too happy to be defeated by an unthinking machine.”

  “So, the machine worked, then.” As an engineer, we can be sure the alien finds this most impressive.

  “Oh, yeah, it worked just fine. There was only one problem. It was a fake,” Rook says. Bishop tilts his head quizzically. “A mechanical illusion. See, the interior of the machine was built to look extremely complicated, so that it confused people to look at it. It was made to look all clockwork, with all sorts of gears and cogs spinning inside. And it was designed so that if the front and back doors of the cabinet were opened at the same time, a person could see through the machine.”

  Bishop tilts his head the other way. “Someone was inside the machine.”

  Rood nods. “A sliding chair was placed inside, so that the person inside could slide around and hide as observers opened the various doors—it was most likely a dwarf or some skilled contortionist hiding inside, but nobody ever knew for sure. The chessboard was thin enough to allow for a magnetic link underneath, and each chess piece had a small magnet inside. The underside of the chessboard had corresponding numbers, one through sixty-four, and allowed the person inside the machine to know which pieces had been moved outside. He used a system of levers and pulleys beneath to control the mechanical dummy. Most people focused on the dummy moving around, smoking his pipe, and the theatricality helped with the deception.”

  Bishop nods appreciatively. “A worthy piece of engineering and misdirection.”

  “Many people thought the Turk was powered by supernatural forces. It made some people cower in corners once they saw how clever it was, they were so certain dark forces were kept inside. Matters of intelligence were once revered, and even mistrusted—like riddles, for example, which in the beginning weren’t just games for children, they were matters of life and death because one had to be smart enough to unriddle them, like the riddle of the Sphinx, and Samson’s riddle in the Bible. Matters of intellect have always frightened people. Chess was called the ‘game of kings’ not just because of the main pieces, but because kings and wealthy barons would want to show their intelligence by playing the game masterfully. For a machine to be able to beat a man at a game of riddling or a game of chess, or any game of intellect…it terrified people. It got inside their minds, made them question their sanity.”

  “What does this have to do with our predicament?”

  Thor’s Anvil rumbles, erupting louder and angrier. A geyser of lava slowly begins to climb the dark sky. Rook looks around at the world he’s been driven to. “My father told me that when you’re playing chess, you play the person, not the pieces. The pieces are just a means to get inside the opponent’s mind.” He looks at the Ianeth. “We have to get inside their heads.”

  “How?”

  “By making them think they’re up against something they’re not. That was the plan, anyway.”

  “How do you mean?” the alien urges.

  “Look, Napoleon and all those chess masters couldn’t have just been duped by some dwarf who just happened to be a chess prodigy. It was the Turk itself, it got inside their heads. The idea of the machine. They thought they were playing against something…grander. Bigger.
A machine with a soul, some genius thing with satanic properties. It worried them, made them make mistakes. It probably also rubbed at their pride—they became self-conscious, aware of how foolish they’d look if they lost to a dumb machine.” He looks at the sky. “When we first landed on Kali, I got to thinkin’ about those stations up there, and everything we’ve got down here. We’ve got all these resources—the derelict, the stations, even the corpses here—but they’re all dead things. Inert. And I started thinking two things: first, how do you use dead things as a resource? And second,” he says, turning to look at Bishop. “How would history have changed if Napoleon and his fleet had faced the Turk equivalent of a battle fleet?”

  Bishop remains quiet for a moment, then nods. “I thought I understood the relevance of this game of chess, but I can see now it runs much deeper with you. It is your language.”

  He snorts out a laugh. “My father would’ve been proud to hear you describe me that way. But yeah, the way I see it, the way he taught me, chess is as much a game of psyching your opponent out as anything.”

  Bishop stares at him. “Psyching?”

  Rook nods. “In matches, it wasn’t uncommon for a Grand Master to figure out his opponent’s pet peeves and exploit them. If the opponent didn’t like the smell of nicotine or smoke, then you lit a cigar, or at least placed it on the table nearby to suggest you might light it later. If your opponent didn’t like a certain person being in the audience, perhaps an old enemy or an ex-wife, then you might make sure that that person sits in the front row to watch the match.”

  “Psychological warfare,” Bishop notes. “Your father taught you this with chess?”

  “My father taught me history. A lot of the psych warfare stuff was drilled into us in the Sidewinder Program at ASCA. I’m a saboteur, remember? A kind of fighting engineer like you. My prime directive was to stealthily enter warzones, and undermine my opponents. One of the main lessons we learned in SODD training was that sabotage isn’t always about just a direct win, sometimes it’s best used to demoralize.”