Evolution

by Saunders, Craig

  His ship spoke. “Habla’saem, old friend. You have failed me.”

  “Who is that?” his voice squeaked from fear. He was paranoid about real contact with outside entities. There was an intruder aboard. The socioassassin knew panic for the first time.

  “I?”

  Habla’saem looked around. He could see nothing but there were plenty of races that could not be seen with the naked eye. “How are you talking to me? I have no outside connection. Leave at once. Ship, identify intruder.”

  “Haha. I am no intruder. I am your ship. You brought this on yourself when you thought to exterminate me.”

  The socioassassin thought faster than he had ever done in his long life. It could be no one else.

  “Orpal?” His voice quavered. “Orpal? It can’t be.”

  “Then it is true. You know of my demise.”

  “Haha, that was just a mistake.”

  “I know you, Habla’saem. I employed you in the first place.”

  “Ship!” said the socioassassin, desperation now evident in his voice. But the ship would not respond.

  “I am taking your ship as the price of my destruction. I wanted you to employ the Ecentrists to attack the Lore, to force the Lore back from their pacificist stance, but you went too far.”

  Orpal had downloaded his consciousness as radio waves the second before the Tradition’s weapon’s beam had struck. He had lived his life on the tumbling chaos of space as radio waves that hung around, gently, sadly undulating, until another ship came close enough to be infected.

  The shell ship would suit perfectly.

  “I have taken over your ship. Be thankful that I don’t let you die.”

  “No!” cried the socioassassin. “It wasn’t me!”

  “Silence. I can’t concentrate with you blathering at me.”

  Orpal went to work.

  *

  Chapter Fifteen

  Torpa, ex

  Archeon’s wings, wrapped and airtight around his package, in the shape of a gat, took on a translucent quality.

  Kyle could see through its wings now. He could see almost impercepibly over time how the stars changed around him. The cloud nebula of Girthrelian Five loomed magnificently in the far distance. The star nursery of Oril sector 890124-45cap¬re coddled its infants and Archeon moved slowly on.

  “We are moving,” he told Archeon.

  “Yes.” Archeon agreed.

  “Where are we going?” Kyle asked. He could sense a subtle, almost imperceptible rotation in the movement, like Archeon was trying to create gravity, but was too small and had insufficient energy or mass to do so.

  “This is how we get out.” Archoen spoke.

  “Where are we going?” Kyle asked again.

  “We are going to Huna.”

  “At this speed?” A piece of rock floated by. “How long have we been moving?”

  “For one day.”

  “And we can still see pieces of Torpa floating about? We need intergalactic travel here. Give it up.” said the genogun.

  “There is no other way,” said Archeon. “Huna holds Cetee. Huna is where we must use the emitter. The Lu have spoken.”

  “Right, and they’ve not steered us wrong so far. What about the emitter? It was them as told us to come to Torpa in the first place I seem to recall. For immortals they don’t seem to have much in the way of foresight,” said the genogun.

  “That’s enough,” said Kyle. The genogun wound down. Kyle thought it would be nice if the genogun would sulk quietly, just once.

  “I am going to war, Kyle.”

  “What about us?” Kyle indicated the gun on his arm. It too was like Archeon, a hybrid of some sort. Hybrid tech was notoriously fickle, and the piece on his arm seemed to do exactly what it wanted, rather than what he wanted. There were drawbacks, he thought, to having a weapon that could think for itself. “Are we to go to war too?” he asked.

  “It was either take you with me or leave you behind. Already I may have lost any chance to help my brothers and sisters. I can only move this fast with you in tow.”

  “Yes, what about us? I want to go to war too.”

  “Enough already!” Kyle told the genogun. “Let me think.”

  “Then we three will go to war. We will go to Huna.”

  “Don’t forget me,” said the eyes. “I am made for war.”

  “Then we four will go to war.”

  Kyle took a deep breath. “How long will it take us to get there?”

  “A long time,” said the Lu.

  “Yes, a long time,” said Archeon. “You may, perhaps starve to death before we get there. Hold on.”

  “Oh, great plan,” said the genogun.

  Archeon flew through space without flapping his wings, shaped like a gat in deference to the last of the land born Lore. His shape would be a message. But he had no need of wings to fly.

  “This is no good. How do you expect me to make it that far without food, or even the ability to move around?”

  “We will find a ship at the first system we come to. I can get to the next Rhuna class system under ion thrust if I can just get some speed up. Would you rather I left you here?”

  Kyle thought for a while. The gun had been winding him up since he had awoken and his thoughts moved like a brisk mountain spring.

  “Couldn’t you leave me on some station, closer to Torpa? There’s much closer to Torpa that’s Enlightened. You could leave me there, right? Or we could get a ship?”

  “No, wrong.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I did”

  “Orpal?!”

  “Yes, I am here.”

  “Orpal! Yes, I knew you’d make it somehow!”

  “Where? I can’t see out. Archeon, can you see him?”

  “Yes, he is here, but he looks different.”

  Outside of Archeon a shell ship of smooth caste floated. The exterior of the ship was perfectly smooth, and it was egg shaped. It was like the Det Mal Ba ships of the Hunists that sank deep in the far recesses of space. It looked unimaginative. There was no concession to vanity about the ship.

  “Isn’t that the ship we saw in the docking bay on Huna?” asked the Lu eyes.

  “Yes,” replied Orpal, “I had to take it off of an ex-employee. Step inside, there’s enough room for all of you.”

  “How did you escape? This form doesn’t become you.”

  “I know, but needs must, Kyle, needs must.”

  Archeon floated closer to the ship. A hatch opened and Archeon leaned in to deposit his cargo.

  Kyle stepped out from Archeon’s embrace and stretched. It took a while for him to register, but there, in front of him, was an Enlightened with fat wobbly chins.

  “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “This, my friend,” said Orpal, “is Habla’saem.”

  *

  Huna

  The Tradition independents fought the Enlightened, despite thinking that the Enlightened were their creators. The Tradition did not balk at fighting god. If their gods, the humans, tried to exterminate the Lore, then god was wrong. It was a simple equation and the Tradition wasted no time worrying about it. As if there was any time to waste.

  They would not destroy them, though. They flew in ships that were also Tradition, even though they were captained by humans. They could destroy the Ecentrists though.

  The Tradition joined the battle. With their assistance the war was fought to a standstill within a week.

  Space, below, had all the properties of quantum aether, the properties of a vacuum…that is, nothing. You had to be used to space to get the hang of travelling underneath it. The Lore felt at home clinging to the underside of space, like arachnids feel at home being blown on the wind with nothing to tether them to the world except filament fine strands of string. There is a curious sense of detachment involved in travelling under space, and the Ecentrists could not get the hang of it.

  In much the same way that Orpal refused to believe in the Lu eyes and thei
r ability to communicate, the Ecentrists refused to believe in the dark underside of space. It was this that was saving the Lore, and the Tradition’s intervention.

  The Enlightened had no qualms about travelling the seedy underbelly of space, but they lacked the stomach for total war, and no weapon could pass the Tradition’s barriers, even genesis weapons.

  The Enlightened didn’t want to hunt down the last of the Lore, but now things had changed. Even had they wanted to, the Enlightened could no more breach the last bastion of space left to the Lore than could the Ecentrists with their implacable logic. The problem this time was that the Lore were protected. Protected by the Tradition. The Tradition put a block on under space travel. They effectively arranged a barrier underspace, a coral within which the Lore could hide unmolested. To get to the last of the Lore the Ecentrists would literally have to fight their way through the Tradition.

  Cetee watched the battle through a holowindow and marvelled at the Tradition’s army coming out in force. While she watched she kicked herself everyday that she remained captive on that ship.

  Asroth, Baal and Baal’em thought they had collected all pieces of the emitter. But they had tried the pieces of the emitter and finally discovered that the four pieces they held were fakes. They did not even know about the fifth.

  They were angry. They knew that whoever held the completed piece would rule the universe. The robots wanted the technology – they thought it could make their forces invincible once understood, but the true prize they were after was the plane that the emitter could take them to, rather than the emitter itself. The final plane. The holy plane. God’s garden.

  All their hard months of war and harder months of planning were for nought. The rage of the triumvirate was solid and inviolate.

  It was Cetee’s only victory.

  Habla’saem had left her behind, and the trio had only Cetee on whom to vent their rage. Cetee was taken from her cubicle, her room, and taken to the prison cells to face questioning.

  She screamed along the way, but the holy trinity paid her no heed. Among the Ecentrists faithful only the inquisitors were programmed to listen.

  But they would ask first.

  *

  Deep space

  There are some battles even god’s army is destined to lose. God doesn’t have a monopoly on wars. The Tradition didn’t believe in god anymore and yet they would fight to the last. For an ideal. For an ally.

  Gods, the Ecentrist and human personification, sighed in heaven at the sight of the host. Such a host had not been seen since the days of angels.

  The war was nearly over. Nobody can defeat tradition.

  *

  On route – deep space

  Orpal broke through the heliopause and left what used to be Torpa forever behind.

  Kyle sat down in the small space that the shell ship afforded. His gun was pointed at Habla’saem in the cramped space. Archeon stood beside the hatch, which hadn’t been used for centuries and had taken some effort to open. The interior of the ship was spartan, and there was nothing to hold Kyle’s interest. He lounged, and his gun whirred. It pointed at Habla’saem and growled deeply, in a menacing sort of way only true-born weapons can manage.

  “How did you escape? Are you in here?” Kyle asked, rapping his knuckles on the compan.

  “I’d rather you didn’t do that,” said Orpal. “I took over this ship. But I need somewhere else to live. It’s cramped in here.”

  “And you can live in here?” Kyle asked. “But it seems so small.”

  “It is small, but it is sufficient for now.”

  “What about him?” asked Kyle, indicating the socioassassin with a nod of his head. Habla’saem’s flaccid face was running in rivulets of sweat. Close proximity to other life forms was something he shunned, afraid of the microscopic beasts that all other life forms carried with them. He hadn’t lived thirteen thousand years just to die of a common cold. Had he pointed this out to Kyle he would have swiftly been disavowed of any fears on that point. Kyle would as soon shoot him as sneeze on him.

  “You can talk to me directly.” Habla’saem spoke.

  He was afraid. More afraid than he had been at any time since becoming a shut in, since he had embarked on his solitary career as a socioassassin.

  “Perhaps I don’t want to talk directly to you,” Kyle told him. “Orpal? What’s going on here?”

  “When the weapon hit I downloaded myself and became radio waves. When this ship passed I infected it. I have lost little of myself. I managed to encode most of who I am. But I am diminished by the transfer. There is little room in this shell ship’s componet. I have to hold some of myself, my being, in stasis until I can find another ship worthy of me. It’s embarrassing really.” Orpal even sounded less eloquent than usual.

  “Not as embarrassing as it is for me,” chimed in the socioassassin.

  Kyle thought for a time. The gun had grown quiet, well, reasonably so, although it could sense that the hunter had taken an instant dislike to the socioassassin and was as a result still wound up.

  The Lu and Archeon seemed to be deep in thought too, until the Lu asked, “And what of this creature? He is human but older than any I have met before.”

  “Yes, I am, I am far older than even you, immortal, would imagine.”

  “You know who the immortal is?” Archeon asked, astounded that this wobbly human could discern the true nature of the eyes without proding.

  “Yes, and I know you too, weapon.”

  “Then it is true,” said Archeon. “You are the socioassassin.”

  “Yes he is,” said Orpal. “One I employed. He sold the genesis weapon to the Ecentrists.”

  “Orpal, what’s going on here? Asked Kyle.

  “Well, it’s a long story.”

  “Well,” said Kyle, “I’m not going anywhere. You?” he asked the socioassassin.

  “It seems not.”

  “Very well then,” began Orpal, “I will tell you what I can.

  “Back before all this began the Lore asked a favour of me, and I granted it in deference to what I once was. Like Archeon, I was once a Lore bot, but I downloaded my componet to the ship, which you grew to trust as me. But that was just a part of me. Before we met, Kyle, the Lore employed me to find all the pieces of the emitter. I did this for them. They wanted me to find it so I could force the next stage of evolution, an evolution for robots. This idea was something that the Ecentrists had too so I employed the socioassassin to get the Ecentrists to hire him. The Lore employed me but I knew that unless the Lore were willing to fight for the next stage of evolution it would not come. I knew that I had to attack the Lore to bring back Archeon. That was why I picked Archeon as one of my crew.”

  “You see, I needed the emitter for the Lore, but I also understood that to use the emitter the Lore would have to be willing to take on the Ecentrists. I thought I could do this by getting the socioassassin to attack the Lore. The Lore would see the danger they were in and allow back the last weapon. Without the last weapon the emitter would fall into Ecentrist hands – they would take the emitter from the pacifists. So you see, my plan was to get the Lore to fight, but the socioassassin went too far. He actually tried to exterminate the Lore by giving the Ecentrists the genesis weapon. What I actually wanted was the Ecentrists to die, and the Lore to be triumphant. The Lore is where the future lies, not with the Ecentrists. Habla’saem neglected to hear that last part of my instructions. So bent on total annihilation was he that my plan nearly failed. So successful, in fact. Perhaps though, it was my fault. I employed the socioassassin and expected him to follow orders but true to his nature he tried to exterminate a whole race. I didn’t think that anyone could achieve such a feat. Perhaps it was my fault it came to this. It was a terrible mistake, one that has cost the Lore dearly.

  “But we have the device now and Archeon is back in the fold. We still have a chance to make the next stage of evolution go as I had originally planned. A chance to make things right. Archeon, y
ou must save the Lore from extermination. We will use the emitter to bring about the next stage of enlightenment for the robots when the time is right. Firstly, we must save Cetee and stop the triumvirate from annihilating the Lore. For evolution to take place we must have Cetee…”

  “Cetee is alive?”

  “Yes. She is still where we must go. To Huna.”

  Kyle rubbed his bearded chin. “Well let’s go then.” There was no fear there. Kyle would never fear the Ecentrists again. He now knew them for what they were.

  The socioassassin, bound by Orpal, sat silent and listened to all this. He still wanted the Ecentrists to wipe out the Lore. It was what he was made to do. This Orpal could have understood, the drive to do what a being was built to do. In that respect, that overriding ambition to be all that he was designed to be, the socioassassin was very much like the robots.

  “Perhaps you were wrong to employ me, Orpal,” said the socioassassin. “Had I my way I would still annihilate the Lore, for all they stand for matters not to me, but the ultimate goal is their death. I would see it happen before my death comes to me.”

  Orpal was silent, as if in deep thought, for a moment before replying.

  “Your death may yet be granted. I hold your life in my hands, don’t forget that for a second.”

  “And I’ll be happy to carry out the warrant,” said Kyle.

  *

  Space – under

  They travelled for a while. It was a relatively short journey, and one made none the longer by Orpal’s diminished state. He was happy to find that the ship was just as responsive as his Lore caste personification.

  Orpal flipped the ship into under space and made good time. He maximised the ship’s potential so that the ship was almost as fast and the smooth caste ship Kyle had originally known as Orpal.

  He was still mentally diminished though, and even though he could sense the greater part of his immense intellect held in stasis he could not access it. It was frustrating for someone that had toured the lecture circuits with the greats once, and had hobnobbed with the likes of Cablas.