by Audrey Faye
Not the smartest, was he? I glanced at his tag, which said Grimshaw 86, his construct batch. He glanced at mine, which said Kessler 129. Our eyes met and in his gaze, I saw a world I had forsaken by becoming involved with Paul. Somewhere in the barracks this man would have eight brothers and sisters with whom he had gone through programs ever since he had been awoken, with whom he’d share his private life and to whom he turned for emotional support.
I looked away, uneasy, trying hard not to think of Aphrodite, who had been my closest sister.
“How long has this been going on?”
“About half an hour. Apparently, an external computer malfunction sent a massive burst of data that locked up the system. Now it seems it caused a lot of software to disappear.” He jerked his head at a new and louder siren. “That’s the air composition alarm going off.”
I should have looked at the computers at the Research Station. If this outage caused climate control to fail in the hut for any length of time, a lot of our equipment would be frozen into a very expensive heap of plastic and metal junk.
Not good enough, Hadie Kessler. You’re supposed to be focused on the tech.
An emergency team was waiting for Paul at the medbase: two nurses and a doctor, all without construct tags.
“We’ll take care of him now,” a nurse said in a voice that meant, You are no longer needed.
“I’d like to stay. I want to know what’s wrong with him.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You can wait over there.” She pointed to a couple of chairs in the corner of the room, next to the medical waste bins.
I so hated that condescending tone when Pristines used it on me, the tone that said they were better than me, the tone that people like the Grimshaw construct seemed to be happy to accept.
I sat. I waited.
A doctor asked Paul questions. He sat propped up on pillows, simply staring, blinking occasionally. Then they took him to a machine that scanned his brain—there was plenty of activity within. They took off his clothes, but found nothing except the traces of mud on his hands. They washed him, and put a hospital gown on him.
Then a young doctor came to me and asked me about Paul’s medical details.
Spilling Paul’s personal data felt like betrayal; he had only one set of them. As construct agent, I went through so many personality swaps that my biological form had become separated from my mind, one lot of data patched onto another, dumped into a body that felt right for my task. I and my sisters had been old, young, male, female, politically conservative and progressive. Name the vocation, condition or opinion, and it had been grafted onto me. There were backups in various places.
With that thought, I got an idea. “Could you kick-start his mind, reset his memory with a backup?” It was a chilling thought, too. Imagine pressing the delete command on the only copy of yourself and then not having a spare. That was as good as committing suicide.
Surely Paul had left a backup somewhere. Even Pristines couldn’t be that stupid.
He gave me a wide-eyed stare. That was obviously out of the question. “That shouldn’t be necessary. He’s in no physical danger.” He sounded like he’d just taken a mouth full of sand.
“But he’s not even reacting to us.” I raised my voice, too much. A passing nurse glanced over his shoulder, and met my eyes.
“He will be fine. I’m sure he’ll recover on his own.”
“He doesn’t look fine to me.” He didn’t react to anything. His eyes remained unfocused, his face in that marble aristocratic mask. “Can I please talk to the senior doctor?”
“Sure, wait here.”
I sat and waited. Nurses walked past, casting me glances.
Eventually, the doctor came, beckoned me aside in the corridor, away from beeping heart-rate monitors and Paul’s unresponsive body into the beeping alarms of the habitat and its unresponsive systems. Medical personnel walked past, shouting at each other about resets and emergency generators. Power flickered.
“Look, Miss . . .”
“Hadie Kessler 129, Surface Exploration Branch.”
The corners of his mouth twitched. “Miss Kessler, to be honest, I have no idea why he behaves like this. Apart from the occasional electrical shiver, his body functions normally. His brain shows a lot of activity, which is good. You say he came out from under the ice like that?”
“Yes.” I dug in my pocket for the glass ball and held it out to him. “This fell out of his clothes. Do you think that could have anything to do with. . . ?” I felt like a tether dangling in empty space, idle, hoping against hope that something would latch onto it.
“What? That?” He frowned at the ball, and looked at it from different sides. “I can’t see how a marble could have anything to do with his condition.”
I put the ball back in my pocket, feeling stupid. I knew the ball hadn’t been there before. I knew that it couldn’t have entered his suit while he was under the ice. But the doctor was going to think I was an idiot. “Is there anything you can do . . . to help him. . . ?”
“Not at this stage. We will need to run a number of additional tests, but they are quite invasive and we will need to obtain his next-of-kin’s approval to do them. Anyone we could contact?”
I shrugged, hugging myself. I didn’t want them to do any more tests. They would find nothing. Paul’s condition had something to do with the flash, and with the ball. “He grew up on Ganymede. He has two sisters there.” I remembered the names: Lori and Anka. Obsessed with marrying well and the latest fashion, according to Paul’s stories.
“Parents?”
“Still alive. Also on Ganymede.” Distant, aloof, little interested in the pursuits of their academically-gifted youngest child.
“Do you have any means of contacting them?”
“I could find out.” But the idea of doing that made me feel sick. Would they care? He had shamed his Old Earth family, after all. Since I moved in with him, I only remembered Lori having contacted her brother, and that was to gripe about how he should have made an effort to come to some family occasion.
“Any relatives locally?”
“No.”
“All right, then I’ll ask administration to get onto Ganymede. Thank you, Miss—” He turned back to the door.
“Wait.”
He stopped, his hand on the door handle, frowning at me.
“He has me.”
He gave me a sharp look and I glared back. Seriously, everyone in Envio 2 knew of our relationship. It had been splashed across the gossip columns and had even made it to other colonies. Mars Base didn’t care; I heard constructs could marry there, but it was big news amongst the uppity Old Earth families on Ganymede. Top Scientist announces engagement to construct agent.
Shit, they all knew what it cost us both. Me—my sisters; Paul—a promotion out of this hellhole to Ganymede University, the most prestigious of prestige institutions. He would have gotten it, if only he’d walked away from me. But we were in love.
So yes, I would always be there for Paul. Because I had nowhere else to go. Because he had no one else.
“That, I think, might be slightly problematic.”
What? Then it came to me. I said, in a low voice, “You suspect me of having attacked him, don’t you?”
His face went blank. “At the moment, we cannot rule anything out.”
So he did suspect me. And suddenly the reactions from the medical personnel made sense. “Do you? Tell me to my face, yes or no? I would never do anything like that, do you hear me? I love Paul, and you know that. No matter what happened with that construct who went berserk and killed his boss. That has nothing to do with me.”
The doctor gave me a cold stare, and went back into the room, slamming the door behind him. I ran to the door, but it was locked. The panel said, enter security code.
Fuck it!
It had all been a ploy to get me out of the room.
Those Pristines thought our relationship was inappropriate and made every effort to pr
etend it wasn’t happening. These people weren’t helping Paul; they were only keeping him from me. They were more interested in keeping up appearances than in healing him.
A nurse came past and went up to the door, keyed a code into the pad—
I called out, “Excuse me. I need to get into that room.”
She turned, raising her eyebrows at me. “Do you have authorisation to be in here?”
“My partner is in there.”
She looked at my tag. The expression on her face said not bloody likely. “If no one has given you a code, go to the front desk and ask for one.”
Palming me off elsewhere, as usual.
“Or you could just let me in.”
“Sorry, you can’t go in there without authorisation.”
“Watch me.” I shouldered her aside, and pushed into the room.
She shouted, “Hey! Stop!”
She must have pressed an alarm, because a siren started wailing, but it only added to the general din of various alarms that were already blaring.
I ran to the bed.
“Come, Paul!” I dragged him to his feet.
He was still clumsy, but a little more secure on his feet than previously, I thought. I draped his arm over my shoulder and moved towards the door, mumbling at him, “I’m taking you out of here. These clowns have no idea what’s going on, and—”
“Miss Kessler, what do you think you’re doing?” That was the doctor again.
“I’m taking him home. You don’t know what’s wrong with him, and you can’t help him. I can see no point in keeping him here. He needs care from someone he loves—”
“You can’t take him—”
“And watch you do nothing? You don’t know what’s wrong with him either. I’m taking him home. Once you get any idea of how to help him, you’ll know where to find us.”
“Take one step further and I’ll call the guards.”
I laughed into the shrill sound of various alarms blaring in the corridor. “Good luck with that. I think they have other priorities.”
I pulled Paul into the corridor.
Fortunately, at least the air composition alarm had stopped blaring. I hoped the trouble had been sorted out.
Walking Paul down the corridors of the habitat wasn’t easy. More than before, his muscles seemed to go rigid with the little spasms of pain. We constructs knew these things without spoken words or facial expressions. The ability unnerved Pristines sometimes, but it came with being only a segment, a partition of a larger whole, one of many people connected in mind but not in body. We learned to see feelings in a way our creators had not envisaged, and right now I saw Paul’s pain. It was orange. Never mind what the doctor said, whatever had got hold of him was tormenting him.
Paul’s unit was one of the executive apartments on the ground floor of the residential wing. Here, with lush green plants and moist warm air, it was almost possible to forget the harsh climate outside, except for the lousy gravity.
I was glad Paul had insisted on having my hand scanned for access to the unit. Habitat Operations had been reluctant, but after that huge fight with my sisters over my relationship with a Pristine, I had nowhere else to go. I held Paul with one hand while I fumbled with the door’s access lock.
I opened the door, parked Paul on the bed and covered him with a blanket.
What now?
I let my gaze roam over the interior of our bedroom and lingered on the wall screens displaying pictures of us. One with both of us dressed up in our best, and Paul holding up his Science award in a gesture of victory, his other arm tightly around my waist. Another one very intimate, both of us lying on a crumpled satin sheet, gazing into each other’s eyes. I remembered that picture well, because it had been taken on my birthday. Everyone knew that constructs didn’t have birthdays, but he had given me one—as a birthday gift.
He had taken me out to dinner. I remembered drowning in his loving gaze. He told me about his youth and how he’d never felt that he fitted in. That was part of the reason he had taken this job away from his family in pioneer territory. A couple of years down the track, and Envio 2 was no longer a pioneer station. We lived well and comfortably. We hadn’t discussed leaving. I’d just assumed we’d stay and live in our unit, but then he’d said something truly amazing. He wanted me to have his child? I thought he was kidding, but no. He told me how he planned to smuggle in a year’s supply of oestrogen to counter my built-in contraceptive.
Tears ran over my cheeks.
“Paul, please wake up. Talk to me.”
I stroked his cheek. It felt cold and clammy. I kissed his lips; they remained slack. I stared into his eyes and tried to pick up emotional vibes. My link with him would never be as strong as the links with my sisters had been before I had severed them, but I felt nothing.
“Come on, Paul, tell me what’s wrong.” I choked. I sat there for a while, tears dripping onto the hand I clutched to my chest.
Never mind what everybody said, I was going to do something. That arrogant doctor didn’t care; it seemed I was the only one who did. Maybe I should tell his high-ranking family at Ganymede. Certainly those worms in the hospital would run for them.
But . . . Paul’s sisters would only have me banned from the apartment, have the locks changed so I couldn’t get in. And I had nowhere else to go. No, that wasn’t an option.
I took the glass ball out of my pocket, the only indication I had that anything unusual had happened down there. Just how had that thing ended up in his suit?
The Research Division museum had more of these glass balls, huh? Well, I hated to be reminded, but one of my sisters worked there. I’d send her some images. Go and compare the samples, read all the notes researchers had made on these balls, and on other things they had found in the lake. If Paul couldn’t do his job, I would have to do it for him.
As construct agent, I also had some extra features, such as not needing a camera for a scan. I held the ball on my open palm and raised it to my left eye.
Focus. Blink. Scan.
My vision of the room dissolved as data streamed into my brain. But it was not an image of the glass ball that I saw.
Thousands of pinpricks of light floated before me. They wavered in a kaleidoscope of colour and fluid movement, like waves in a sea, until an image formed from their rippling luminescence.
It showed me . . .
My own face seen through Paul’s eyes.
A blinding flash of light.
Coloured ripples formed images of humanity: ancient cities of Egypt and Greece, the old world capitals, London, Paris, Rome. Modern starships: the New Horizon, the ship that had offered the first passenger service to Mars, the Gateway, the ship that took every colonist who came to the outer solar system. The colonies. The Moon, Mars, Ganymede, Titan, and Earth.
And then . . .
Something different altogether. A place where the sky was yellow and buildings, if they could be called that, globular and silver. Creatures, or “things” that looked like white strings of chewing gum, “walked” in streets, traversing silver walls as if they didn’t exist.
A dark world where the sky was black and where I saw nothing moving, but where the main currency of communication was sound, deep, reverberating in my chest.
My vision expanded.
Jets of images streamed across space, forming a giant spider’s web that snaked to far-flung reaches of the galaxy. A lilting voice whispered words beyond the edge of my hearing.
I jerked back, disentangling myself from the image. I sat there, panting. What the fuck was that?
Paul had turned his head. For a moment I thought he was looking at me, but his gaze was unfocused. He whispered some indistinct words.
I jumped up.
“Paul!” I shook his shoulders.
He didn’t react to my words at all, but mumbled words I couldn’t hear. His eyes held a fevered, crazed look. He was turning his head this way and that, as if searching for something.
“Talk to m
e, Paul. Say something.”
No reaction. He’d gone back to his unresponsive state.
Never mind sending an image to Research. I’d go and ask them about this glass ball in person.
I scooped the ball up in a towel and put it in my pocket without touching it, I made sure Paul was comfortable and ran out the door.
The Research Division occupied a wing in the Habitat Operations building on the other side of the Dome. To get to it, I had to walk past the recreation section with its shops, cafes and gyms, all bathed in the dusky light of Titan’s sky.
Overhead, a few cleaner robots crawled over the outside of the Dome in their never-ending job of scraping off the organic stuff that grew on every surface. We weren’t sure if grew was the right word—Paul and I were researching that in the lab—but at times, the stuff seemed to be alive. It had a strange tubular structure, but nothing that could qualify as a cell membrane or a nucleus. It multiplied by sectioning off parts of tube which then moved around in the tarry substance it either secreted—but how?—or attracted. Was it alive? No one knew. What was the definition of “alive”?
Nothing on Titan’s surface had ever harmed anyone. If it was life, it was so primitive and different from us that it probably couldn’t do any harm. In fact, we’d been absolutely convinced of that.
This ball, if it was alive, might change that.
The Habitat Operations building. A low, squat affair with a bunker-like structure and small windows that could be sealed in case of a Dome failure. It was dank, cold and dark inside.
Surface Exploration, where Paul and I worked, was on the ground floor, down the long hallway where footsteps echoed like in a mausoleum, but I wasn’t going there today. In the massive hall, I waited for the elevator platform and let it carry me to the second floor, where I came out in an equally dark and cavernous hall, the walls lined with reproductions of the more exotic of our electron microscope images.
On the far end of the hall was the reception desk, where a woman worked in a small pool of light cast by a desk lamp. The light made golden reflections in her bronze-coloured hair.
