by Ginger Booth
Sass soothed, “I’m sure by now you realize that will be the case anywhere. You are the foremost maestro of a dangerous technology.”
“Indeed,” he allowed unhappily. “But you think settlers will be more open-minded than the urbs?” He looked dubious.
“We want results,” Clay replied.
“‘We.’ I remember you as urbs, Clay. Both of you. How many times were you in my lab?”
“Too many,” Sass agreed with a sunny smile.
Kassidy grinned. Funny, at first she feared the captain was a rosy-glasses type idealist. No, the pragmatic cop ran deep in Sass and Clay both. And they fell automatically into playing good-cop, bad-cop without so much as a glance at each other to coordinate. They’d played the game too long, too hard, to stop.
“We settlers want something from you, Dr. Yang,” the captain explained. “A chance at a full and healthy life. We do not accept the city’s excuse that we lack the resources to enjoy the city’s luxuries except for a few. The population is falling. Expertise, genius like your own, is becoming all too rare.”
Clay pitched in, “As you clearly saw when you collaborated with Gwen to create our engineer and third officer. To artificially bolster the natural rate of effective genius.”
Sass nodded whole-heartedly. “You may be glad to hear this. Your gene-splice is now, just this year, being granted to half of all new urb babies, and a third of the settler children. Kassidy is no longer an only child.” She smiled proudly.
“The first of the second generation just reached age two,” Clay added. “Our engineer Copeland has a baby boy.”
Kassidy paused in her perambulating snoop as her dad misted up to hear this news. He excused himself to rise and blow his nose, his back to his guests.
Sass was relentless, her voice as soft as the shrill pitch permitted. “Come home, Dr. Yang, and help your grandchildren thrive.”
13
Clay touched Sass’s arm, to suggest she back off. The emotional Dr. Yang finished wiping his eyes and returned to his seat. Clay changed the subject. “The Selectman Aden mentioned a sixth generation.”
Yang pursed his lips. “More heat-tolerant. Altruistic. Greater genetic specialization between the three castes. I offered them the focus-related genius modification. They gave it to perhaps 1%. Across all classes. I must tell them that it’s been proven and approved on Mahina. Thank you for that news.”
“Tell whom, I wonder?” Aurora murmured. “The genome crafters dwelled in Denali Prime.”
“A terrible blow,” Yang allowed. “Denali science is brilliant! The greatest biologists in the system. As Sagamore has the best chemists, and Mahina takes the lead on nanite medicine and terraforming. They are gradually reinventing themselves here to fit their environment. Denali Prime held their best. But Hermitage has others.”
Hermitage was mentioned in passing during Clay’s weeks of dealings with the Selectmen of Waterfalls. He gathered the other habitats were unsure of what capabilities the recluses might host.
He asked, “So why are you here, Dr. Yang? In Neptune instead of Denali Prime or Hermitage.”
“Cooler,” Yang replied, grimacing. “The shallow ocean temperature only rises about 3 degrees in summer. In Denali Prime, most days top 40 degrees. And there aren’t any nights. Originally, I visited to investigate Belker’s ship. It lies on the sea floor here.”
Clay grimaced. “Wait. Is this room ocean temperature?” The habitat was extremely humid, chopped into rooms that reduced air circulation. He hadn’t lived in such humidity since Earth, but he guessed the lab about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, 27 Celsius.
“Oh, yes,” Yang agreed. “They don’t waste power on air conditioning. Kassidy, that light switch to your left. Flick that, would you?”
Kassidy stood by a wall of dark glass brick. When she turned on the external lights, the sea floor beyond came into view. Clay couldn’t interpret what he saw very well, partly due to the warping brick window, but mostly because the vista was so very alien. Enormous fish-like and eel shapes nosed through mounded brown slime. No plants lived in the perpetual dark of the depths. The powerful lights could only penetrate about 20 meters.
An enormous scarred manatee-shaped creature drifted toward them to investigate the lights. Kassidy recoiled.
“Turn them off, please,” the scientist requested. His daughter complied, looking spooked.
“You must miss the plants, though,” Sass mused.
“I don’t miss Denali plants,” Yang denied. “I arrived here in summer. The mangrove trees become predators in summer. You’re right. If I’m going, I should leave soon. You do have air conditioning, don’t you?”
“Of course,” Clay lied.
Copeland had already warned that Thrive knew how to heat itself against the absolute cold of space, and cool itself against the warmth of a Mahina Wednesday. But the average summer temperature at Waterfalls was 45 Celsius, 115 Fahrenheit. Yet another challenge on the engineer’s burgeoning to-do list – one he noted that the locals never managed to solve.
But Clay was more interested in the rogue Ganymede nanite scientist. “What did you learn from Belker’s ship?”
“It took months to bypass his security codes. But I solved that. And finally satisfied my unanswered questions about you two.” Yang doodled a finger through a sweat ring spreading from his water glass.
“You have our rapt attention,” Sass noted.
“You won’t like it,” Yang admitted. “You’re dead, you see. Zombies, after a fashion. Cyborgs.”
What? “You will elaborate,” Clay bit out.
“The nanites Belker injected you with – or his girlfriend, I guess. It wasn’t his style to face his victims. Step one, the nanite controllers shut you down and copied your memories, consciousness, personalities. Step two, they killed you, and took over your systems. You are not Clay Rocha and Sass Collier. You are replicas, running on biological hardware. The nanite controllers run a simulation of you, using your brains.”
Clay gripped Sass’s hand, barely aware that her fingers dug just as hard into his own. “I’m a biological robot, you’re saying.”
“Something like that,” Yang agreed. “Sorry. Clearly you’re still alive, so something in your psychic makeup made you more suitable than your less fortunate colleagues. The ones who died immediately, who knows? I don’t have much information on them.”
“I sized them up for maybe 10 minutes, 70 years ago,” Clay said. “I read their personnel jackets – their work history, basic life story. But four of them were dead within the day.”
“What were their names?” Yang inquired.
Clay reeled them off, with the towns they came from, those 4 cops who didn’t survive the nanite injection that made him and Sass immortal.
Yang pointed a finger at him. “No human could remember that. The information would not have transferred to long-term memory. No matter how good your memory was. Given the medical trauma you went through, and prolonged loss of consciousness, a human could have no memory of that day, or even several weeks to either side of it.”
“We died,” Sass murmured.
“Yes. I’m sorry. But you survive, as something else.”
Clay could usually keep his emotions on ice during an interview. But this rocked him to his core. He felt like he was grasping at straws, any possible excuse to refute this man’s story. “Why did the others die? Two survived the transition, but later died on the colony ship. Two more later, one not so long ago.”
Yang shrugged. “Perhaps they had insufficient reason to live. You two are on a mission. Clearly you remain motivated to accomplish something. The controller is a complex adaptive system. It does take your wishes into account. But I’m only guessing.”
“How did Belker die?” Sass asked. “Was he like us?”
“Yes and no,” Yang replied. “And this is the line of inquiry I’ve chosen to extend. After your experience, Belker didn’t trust the nanite controller running internally on himself. But he figure
d it was safe enough to imprint such a controller to run externally, where it couldn’t kill him. He had the full suite of worker nanites you do, but only regenerated when plugged in.”
“He had our nanites, with the controller kept offline,” Clay paraphrased.
“Most of the controller,” Yang agreed. “The purely survival-related functions he kept inside himself as you do. I imagine your adaptive systems have already learned to defeat the bakkra, for instance.”
“Yes,” Sass agreed.
“It’s a good system,” the nanite engineer opined. “Multiple redundancies. Seven embedded controllers.” His brow furrowed in aesthetic pain. “Seven inspired by the yoga chakras. Including the sex chakra. An entire controller dedicated to keeping one horny.”
“Yoga,” Clay echoed in disbelief.
“He was a character,” Yang confirmed. “Stark raving mad. But a genius. As to your settlers’ problem. We could easily grant settlers the same nanites and lifespans the urbs enjoy. I’m currently running a different suite on myself, more like Belker’s hybrid with your own. As you see I’ve arrested my aging at 35. I consider that more appropriate than a sex-crazed 25.” He waved a hand toward his daughter.
The scientist continued, “I’ve extended this old auto-doc to heal more like your nanites do. Rather than on-body controllers, it analyzes and imprints all the many varieties of nanite you create. Including the bakkra-killers.”
“Yet the Denali still battle bakkra,” Clay pointed out.
“I developed specific nanites for certain problem varieties,” Yang allowed. “That’s what they requested. But bakkra in general, no, they’re not interested. They desire to evolve to a more perfect symbiosis, not warfare. There’s no accounting for taste.”
“What about the mind?” Clay asked.
“My system leaves the mind alone aside from clearing out brain plaque. The brain fog of age is mostly due to toxin buildup. Scrub that away, and I think clearly enough.”
“According to you,” Clay suggested. He was all too aware just now of how far from objective he was about himself. I never noticed I became a robot.
Yang recoiled, affronted. “I rely on objective analyses, of course. There is always scope for self-deception.” He paused and considered that for a moment. “Truly, I need colleagues. To safeguard against wishful thinking and blind spots. I’m quite alone here on Denali. They didn’t even have the skills to recharge the auto-docs.”
Clay glanced to Sass. Her next step in this dance was to close the sale, use Yang’s own fears to conclude that he wanted to return to Mahina with them. But she missed her cue. She gazed into space, haunted.
I’m a cyborg. A simulation.
“Excuse us, doctor,” Clay squeaked. “I think we need time to digest what you’ve told us.”
“Of course. I am sorry. Hell of a thing.”
The door closed softly behind them, on their newly assigned quarters in Neptune. And Sass’s knees buckled. She draped herself onto Clay’s chest for support, gasping for air.
Air made of helium, and oxygen at so low a proportion that she would have died at normal pressure. Her entire body was operating at pressures that would crush a food can, swimming through air at the same pressure.
No, she wouldn’t have died in low oxygen at normal pressure, nor in the vacuum of space. Merely shut down temporarily. Because she wasn’t real.
“Never call me a robot again,” Clay requested, a thin squeak on a truly lame quip.
She laughed anyway, a bit hysterically. “Deal.”
He drew her to a divan. The modest guest efficiency offered bed, bath, this one excuse for a couch, and a cabinet to stow things in. She gulped to note that one wall comprised the dark glass bricks. Alien whales could lurk a few meters away.
She hadn’t wished to run away and hide so badly since the day she regained consciousness on the shuttle from the colony ship Vitality.
The day I died. I was already dead.
Clay, bless his pointy head, fought the bombshell with everything he had. “We’re no different today than yesterday, Sass. We’ve been this way 70 years subjective.”
She swallowed, and burrowed her head into his collarbone. “I don’t feel like a…” But how would she feel like a robot? The nanite controllers had to convince her that she felt normal. Maybe that’s why the others died. They weren’t so gullible. They knew they were wrong, changed –
“You’re shuddering,” Clay crooned, his reassuring baritone replaced by this horrible chipmunk noise that set her nerves on edge.
“I’m a fake,” she moaned. “I’m trying to save my people. They’re not my people. We don’t have people. We don’t know that there’s another single android monstrosity like us anywhere!”
“Hey!” he barked in reaction. “None of that! Get a grip, Collier.” He squeezed her tight, though, instead of pushing her away.
She realized she was rocking in his arms and tried to stop. It didn’t work. She burst out and onto her feet to pace the narrow room. She flopped down to do push-ups, trying to pull herself together. But on the third push, her arms gave out. She dropped face to the floor, sobbing.
Did she even know what agenda these nanite controllers inflicted on her? The one ‘chakra’ controller demanded that she be sexually active. What did the others demand, that she wasn’t aware of? When they copied her consciousness, what did they edit out? Did she get past her son Paul’s death, or did her nanites alter her memories? Was her chosen mission even hers? Or was she a puppet on strings, programmed to be the insane Belker’s idealization of a useful cop? These fears and more spun through her head and wrung her out.
Eventually, she turned her head to check on Clay. He still perched on the divan, arms on legs, face in hands. Her own sobs had slowed to hiccups by then. Perhaps his had as well. She pulled herself up to sit cross-legged by his feet, and reached a hand to cover one of his.
He grabbed it in a vice grip. It hurt. But she dully acknowledged that she’d long since quit worrying about things that hurt a little. An info-byte, nothing more. Pain was not danger, not for long, not for her. Life or death was of no great concern.
Clay’s emotional pain was a different story. She grieved for him.
“They know,” he bit out. “Kassidy, Yang, Aurora. Everyone will know.”
She flinched her eyes shut briefly, exhausted by the very notion. No secrets survived the Thrive. This was a given. And yet, “When they found out how old I was, you weren’t there. They blew my mind. They accepted it. Kassidy, Abel, Jules, Ben, Eli. Maybe Eli was the only one mature enough to truly imagine what it meant. He offered me stones to skip across the regolith. They were kind, Clay.”
“They know us,” Clay countered. “But a whole world, they don’t know us. People are all too eager to believe the worst of someone.”
“You don’t keep the best company being a cop,” Sass pointed out. “Normal people think about themselves 99% of the time, Clay. They don’t really care how weird we are.”
“True,” he allowed.
Their hands fidgeted for a time, the desperate grip relaxed, fingers mingling for comfort.
“We were different people than what we became,” he eventually whispered. “I’m not Clay Rocha.”
“I barely met the original you. You’re the only Clay Rocha I’ve ever known.”
He considered that. “I remember your personnel jacket. Damn Yang for coming up with that example.” He sighed. “I like this you, love this you. The old Clay and Sass, I don’t think they would have gotten along as well.”
She snickered. “Even these copies didn’t get along so well at first.”
“No. All cried out?”
“I reserve the right to cry a river later.”
“Me too.”
“It doesn’t change anything,” she claimed bravely. “I mean, I’m not willing to give up my goals. Are you?”
“Same.” He rubbed a thumb over hers sadly. “This cyborg has a son on Mahina, grandchildren. Biologi
cal ones, even though my progenitor human had none. So strange. But Mahina must survive, and learn to thrive.”
“I love you, Clay.” That much she was willing to commit to, at long last. Someone had to love him as he was. He deserved that.
He quirked a lip sadly. “Robot me loves robot you, too.”
She poked him. “Let’s see the ship. Belker’s. Then we take Yang and his toys, and blow this town.”
“Sounds like a plan. Tomorrow. Tonight I hold you until we pass out.”
“Deal,” Sass breathed.
“Think we could delegate Yang acquisition to the daughter?”
Sass sighed. “Yeah, hearing about his successful gene mods got him off his high horse. But Kassidy can be annoying.”
Clay nodded. “Let’s give her a shot anyway. I cringe at the thought of picking that man’s brain again.”
“Amen to that.”
14
“Dammit!” Wilder swore a blue streak as the shuttle’s battery charge fell to the point of no return. Specifically, no return to Waterfalls – yet again, he couldn’t make it up the mountains. Pterries, road-burning, head winds, down drafts, and the current tropical downpour all conspired against him.
This was his third attempt to fly the shuttle home. His rule was that if the battery charge fell below the halfway point before they were 60% of the way to Waterfalls, back he went to that damned wharf. Clay had assured him that gliding was not an option to climb a mountain range. Even if he knew how, which he didn’t.
“We’ll never make it this way,” Zan opined, never one for tact. “Can we rendezvous with the armor crew?” He dropped a marker on the map to clarify where he meant.
The ground forces had made progress, almost catching up to where Sass vetoed burning more road on the way down.
“What good does that do us?” Wilder asked.
Zan blinked at him in surprise. “Oh. There’s a charging station. The armor uses batteries, too. Shall I ask them if they have power to spare?”
