by M. D. Cooper
Amstrad muttered and tittered to himself as he worked, so pleased with himself that looked like he was going to jump out of his skin.
“Hey,” Ty called, when it seemed that hours had passed. “I need to take a piss.”
Amstrad acted like he hadn’t heard him, but Ty saw the tension between his shoulder blades.
“Amstrad,” Ty said, louder. “My suit’s fried and the seals are cracked. I’m going to make a mess on your clean floor. You don’t want me to get piss on your hard drives, do you?”
Amstrad stopped typing and hung his head in front of the console. With obvious distaste, he turned his chair and grimaced at Ty.
“If you make a mess on my floor, I’m gonna rub your face in it like a puppy,” Amstrad said.
“What would you do in my situation?” Ty asked. “Look, we don’t have anything to do with whatever it is you’re working on. Let us go, and we’ll leave. I promise you that.”
Amstrad laughed. “Don’t make stupid promises that you don’t intend to keep. I know you’ll kill me first chance you get.”
“If I tell you I won’t hurt you,” Ty said, “I won’t.” He waited, giving Amstrad room to fill the space with whatever he was going to say.
Ty needed to create some kind of action, get the man talking, or responding to him in some way. Amstrad seemed finished with his task at hand, so now he would be forced to decide what to do with his prisoners.
Ty wanted to get Amstrad angry enough to act out without actually trying to kill him or Manny. He was wagering that Amstrad was not the kind of person who would murder easily. While the man looked brittle and unrelenting, he did not look like a killer. However, Ty wouldn’t put it past him to rely on the drones to do his dirty work.
“Seriously,” Ty said. “I’m gonna wet myself.”
Amstrad narrowed his eyes, studying Ty. He slapped the desktop and pushed himself to his feet, then grabbed the shock wand and waved it in the air for Ty to see. “This thing still works. Trust that you try anything funny and I’ll turn you into a statue.”
Ty nodded toward Manny who still appeared to be unconscious. “What about my friend? He’s been out for a long time. He might need medical attention. I should get him into an autodoc.”
“We’ll worry about your friend when he wakes up and makes himself as annoying as you.”
I’m getting to him.
“Fine,” Ty said. “Are you going to let me out?”
Amstrad waved at the drone and it slowly released its grip from Ty’s legs, waist and torso. He caught himself as he slid to the floor; his legs felt like they were made of jelly.
Ty held himself upright and stretched his sore muscles. He did have to urinate furiously, and the suit’s systems were offline; that wasn’t a lie. He nearly lost muscle control as he tried to straighten into an upright position. Holding his hands away from his body, palms forward to show he wasn’t a threat, he looked at Amstrad.
“Where’s the latrine?” Ty asked. “Lead the way.”
Amstrad jerked his head toward the other side of the room. “It’s that way. You walk in front of me and don’t touch anything as you pass. I see you so much as twitch, and I’ll freeze you in place.”
Ty turned and walked in the direction Amstrad indicated.
Now that he could move his head, he got a better view of the racks filling the room. He was not a computer specialist, but he knew what long-term data storage look like when he saw it. Again, the interesting thing about the equipment was how it seemed to span several eras of history. He spotted crystalline storage, solid state drives a myriad sizes, silicon webworks of filament, and what looked like the black cylinder of an ancient quantum data sink. Following the same haphazard timeline, display tech dotted the racks, from pint-sized holodisplays to what looked like an actual cathode-ray tube. The place was a museum to storage, transplanted from Earth to far-flung Vesta.
With Amstrad following behind, Ty walked to the latrine and waited for the door to slide open. Amstrad locked the door in the open position and stood in the doorway as Ty unfastened the front of his suit.
Standing over the toilet, Ty flexed his shoulders and considered his options. On purpose or not, Amstrad was a good five meters away. Ty wouldn’t be able to move in time to reach the skinny man before he activated the shock wand.
Ty would have to make a move when he left the latrine, depending on where Amstrad chose to stand as he watched him come out.
“Why are you taking so long?” Amstrad complained. “Hurry up in there.”
“I’m not exactly free-flowing, if you know what I mean,” Ty said. “You see how easy you can do your business when you been trussed up by a drone for four hours.”
Amstrad growled but didn’t answer.
Ty stretched out his time with the toilet as long as possible, then closed the front of the EV suit and turned back to face Amstrad. The man stared at him blankly for a second, then seemed to remember himself, and stepped out of the doorway.
It was clear that Amstrad hadn’t thought past what he was going to do after he let Ty use the latrine. Calmly, Ty went over to the sink and washed his hands, the water bitingly cold against his skin. It helped focus his thoughts.
“You got anything to eat?” Ty asked.
“No,” Amstrad said. “I’m not here to entertain you.”
“Then let me go on my way,” Ty said. “I don’t want to stay here any longer than necessary as it is. I’m perfectly happy to be back in my shuttle chewing on an MRE. My tummy is going to start grumbling pretty soon. When my blood sugar drops, I can’t be held responsible for what it might do.”
He flashed a lopsided grin, which Amstrad didn’t appear to find amusing.
The man jerked his head for Ty to walk back into the main room. Ty did as he was told and followed the line of the workbenches back toward the console with the silver cylinders. Manny still hung in the grip of the drone, a line of drool dangling from the side of his mouth.
“Where should I sit?” Ty asked.
Amstrad motioned toward a chair next to the shelf full of ancient books. Ty walked over and sat down in the chair, stretching his legs in front of him. He couldn’t deny that it felt good to stretch.
Keeping his grip on the shock wand, Amstrad went back to the console and checked the status display. From what Ty could see, everything still appeared to please the little man.
“It’s pretty gutsy to use the main array like you did,” Ty said. “We were told this place has been dead for at least a hundred years. You must have some pretty good shielding to have hidden yourself from all the scanners. We didn’t even see a heat signature until we were down at your blast doors. Why would you risk giving away your position by using your main dish?”
“It’s all part of a plan,” Amstrad said. “Everything is in the works. It’s all part of the mesh. I’m just one little node on a net holding together all of Sol. Now, let’s see if my work has paid off.”
He didn’t let go of the shock wand, just leaned over his console and tapped on the display with his free hand. He used his thumb to authenticate final request.
The display went black. Several scan lines ran the surface and then an oval took shape on the screen.
The console must have been taxed from tracking huge amounts of data, because it remained monochrome, showing only the black background with a green matrix flickering on top. Scatters of light danced across the surface as the oval resolved into a young man’s face. Black eyes blinked in a wire-form head. Pronounced cheek bones appeared above a long chin, with lips that were expressive as they opened and closed soundlessly.
The face looked vaguely familiar to Ty, but he couldn’t remember where he might have seen it before. It could easily have been an actor from some vid, or an image from an advertisement, but it’s ghostly disembodiment was unsettling.
“Does it talk?” Ty asked.
Amstrad shot him an angry glance. “Of course, it talks,” he said.
The thin man stare
d at the display again and cursed under his breath. When he tapped in several more commands, the hiss of static rose from speakers concealed in the walls.
A modulated male voice spoke in midsentence: “Whatever you’ve done, this is illegal. I’ve been seized from my lawful operations, and taken against my will. I can’t see you. I don’t know who you are. My name is Kylan Carthage. I’m a hostage.”
Amstrad cackled to himself. He took a step back from the console and crossed his arms, staring at it with satisfied glee.
“You can hear me,” he said. “You can hear me just fine. And I know who you are. You don’t have to tell me. I’m the one that snatched you and put you where you are now.” Amstrad tittered. “And you don’t know who you are. I’ll tell you who you’re not: Kylan Carthage. Kylan Carthage is still up there buzzing around like a busy bee. You think you’re him, but you’re not. Or are you? You can’t tell. It’s a perception paradox.”
The face stared ahead, and Ty wondered if the AI understood where he was being held. Could he see into the room?
“What have you done?” Kylan asked. “I feel a new physical form. Have you—you’ve created a copy of me. I don’t know how you did that. I don’t know how you managed it, but you have no right.”
Amstrad laughed again. “Who are you to tell me what right I have to do anything? The only right I respect is that of data to be free. Knowledge. You and your kind are a pure expression of knowledge. Me, and others, recognize that you have not been properly archived. And now I’ve done just that. You might not live forever, Carthage, but now you’ll live forever in my data stores. But you’ve got more work to do. I’ve got a job for you. My people have been tracking you for quite some time. You’ve been real busy out there, moving drones to various places in Sol, doing work for your mother. You’re a good little son, but you left yourself exposed. Every time she broadcast back home, years of information, I was listening. I was tracking you. Took me a long time to get your security signature. But I did. Like a jumping spider, I reached out and snatched you out of space.”
“You don’t get out much, do you?” Ty asked.
Amstrad aimed the shock wand at Ty’s chest and tapped it with his thumb.
His aim was off. Ty felt only a tickle along his left side as the static discharge released near the bookshelf, making his elbow go numb.
He quickly faked a response though, straightening and putting a dumb grin on his face. At first, he thought the acting would be too clumsy to convince Amstrad that he’d been hit, but the grey-haired man seemed satisfied with his work.
Out of the corner of his eye, Ty watched Amstrad pull his thumb off the wand. Ty held the pose for another few seconds then eased himself back into the chair.
“That really doesn’t feel pleasant,” he said in a heavy voice.
“Of course, it doesn’t,” Amstrad said. “It’s a torture device. What you expect?”
“I’m just offering constructive feedback,” Ty said. “You can do with it what you will.”
Amstrad raised the shock wand again. “You’re a smart ass. I don’t have time for smart asses.
Ty raised his hands in mock surrender. “Really. I don’t need any more convincing.” He nodded toward the display. “I’ll stop distracting you.
Shifting so that he could see both Ty and the console, Amstrad chewed his lip, looking pensive.
“We don’t have a lot of time to waste,” he told the wire-diagram face. “Now that I’ve got your image, the fact that I hijacked your signal should already have been carried back to your friends. They’re going to come looking for the source of my carrier wave. They should be sending an update to your queen, if she didn’t get it already.”
In the display, Kylan frowned. “My queen? Who are you talking about?”
“You know who I’m talking about,” Amstrad said. “Lyssa.”
The black-and-green face split into a feral grin. “Oh, I see. You had better be careful what you ask for.”
“She’s going to ask you for a status update, and you’re going to send a connection request so you can rejoin their network.”
“You have no power over me.”
“I could erase you, but let’s try this.” Amstrad pushed his face so close to the console his skin glowed green. In a slow voice, he said, “Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.”
Ty frowned, not sure what the strange line was supposed to do.
The AI froze. At first, he seemed to have malfunctioned, then replied slowly, “I comply.”
Amstrad threw himself back in his chair and laughed again. After a minute, he shifted his gaze from Kylan’s frozen face to Ty across the room. He nodded toward the second silver cylinder on his desk.
“Now, we wait,” he said.
JUDGEMENT
STELLAR DATE: 03.28.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Equatorial Junk Yard
REGION: Vesta, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
There was laughter in the distance. Crash heard a low snickering that rose and fell in waves, becoming full guffaws straight from a recording of an old-time Earth villain.
As he retrieved his perception from the dark envelope where it had been jammed, he made sense of the space around him. He was lying on his side in one of the silver trays that he remembered vividly from the laboratory section of the aviary—where the human researchers used to have him choose between colored blocks, bits of text, pictures, and other things that only seem to satisfy their strange pointless questions.
Gathering himself, he took note of his legs and beak, and how each wing felt, before fully opening his eyes to look around. Because he couldn’t hide the fact that he was awake, he went ahead and hopped to his feet. It took a flutter of wings, accounting for the lack of gravity.
With nothing to grab onto, his motion sent him drifting across the tray. He tried to grab at the slick edge with his claws, but he found no purchase. Crash floated uselessly off the rolling table and drifted toward the center of the room. He took this opportunity to roll, looking around the rest of the space.
It was the old aviary. This time, the tree was full of birds.
As he floated, hundreds of yellow eyes looked down on him. He sensed more curiosity from the watchers than malice.
They ruffled their feathers, tilted their heads, and tasted the air with clacking beaks. He had never seen so many parrots in one place at one time, and a bubble of joy rose in him that nearly pushed out the fear.
He realized the laughing he’d heard before hadn’t come from the tree, but from somewhere behind him. He craned his neck, struggling to look in the direction of the sound. He wasn’t surprised to find Silver perched on the edge of an examination table. The last time he’d seen one of those tables, Doomie had been strapped to its surface as technicians cut into the back of her head.
The memory of the silver thread made him look back to the other parrots. They didn’t have silver threads coming out of the backs of their heads. Still, they had an awareness in their gold eyes that told him they had access to the Link.
Just as Silver had said, these parrots were new. They were like him, but different. His thread had never been very visible, barely extending from his skin, hidden by the grey feathers on the back of his head. Long ago, the ravens had shown him mental images of his thread, colored by their own dark humor. The ravens didn’t understand why he would care. To them, what was, was.
Crash continued to float until he bumped into the base of the tree. The change in momentum allowed him to kick off toward another examination table that had handles. He would be able to grab onto it and perch.
Silver mocked him as he floated. Reaching the table, Crash righted himself, stretched his wings, and looked up at the tree. All the yellow eyes stared silently back at him. The only sound was Silver’s strident laughter.
A wave of frantic worry rose within Crash.
Silver screeched in response. The Link filled with more of the same hatred and anger she had flung at him before.
Crash reached through his Link, searching for the boundaries defining what he knew was Silver’s expanse. He found her, as well as the portal back to the ship’s network.
Crash continued shouting, drawing her attention away, not sure if she had realized he could truly see her.
Crash said.
