Analog Science Fiction And Fact - June 2014 (19 page)

The girl's skin was milky. Her eyes were blue—not unheard of, but a bit of an oddity on one with such dark hair. His host body responded to hers. This close, he could smell the red dot.

There was no doubt.

She was a survivor. Another of his kind.

His head nearly exploded with questions. Every cell in his system wanted to link. His human eyesight grew wavy as his eyes teared up. Could it happen? Could the two of them be the ones to make their civilization whole again? Hiram struggled to find words. What do you say in a situation like this? Where have you been all my life? Do you come here often? When were you launched?

He reached out to her with his need to link, but she was vacant, a wall of silence.

"Do you want to go to the beach?" he asked when the next song transition came.

She ran a hand over his shoulder and up to cradle the back of his head, drawing him closer as if to kiss him. Her finger grazed his red dot. Her eyes grew suddenly wide, and she stopped moving as she was just now sensing him for the first time.

"No," she replied.

Hiram pressed closer, putting his hand on her waist. He felt her stiffen. The pressure of his hand seemed to keep her rooted in place as waves of sound played over them like surf.

"Can I get you a drink?"

"No," she said again. "I'm going to the ladies room." And she bolted through the crowd.

Hiram waited for nearly thirty minutes before asking another girl to check on her.

It was no use.

She was gone.

He felt a sense of loss deeper than any he could remember, a loss that shredded him as certainly as if she had exploded and sent stardust shrapnel across his universe.

Why had she run? What had he done wrong?

He tracked her, of course. To connect was ingrained in him, and knowing there was another survivor on the planet gave him renewed hope. She wasn't hard to find the first time. It took only a few dollars placed in the right palms and a bit of asking around in local hot spots.

But she ran again, and then her apartment was empty.

The next time he found her she was in Arkansas.

Then Vancouver.

Then she was tending bar and waiting tables at a pub in the tiny Scottish town of Pitlessie. Each time, she ran.

Then she went dark. Nothing. Was she dead?

Sixty years passed before he saw her again.

He was on a vacation tour of Africa, wearing a host named Kanady, a body that was thirtyfive-years old and that lived in the Caribbean. He worked at fishing docks and dealt genetically refined cocoa extract on the side. She was wearing a guide, a woman of Norwegian descent who had come to the veldt country when she was eight. Her name was Brita. It was a purely random happening, and it took her days before she recognized him and slipped away, this time escaping while their troupe was out camping, leaving her coworkers with the task of taking care of them, and trekking back on her own.

He sent her a notice, then, passed through the safari company.

"I thought you would like to know that I am through chasing you,"
he said.
"Live a good life. I wish I knew you."

He was back home in Nassau, two weeks later, when she sent him the note that asked him to join her for dinner.

He put the paper into the pocket of his work shirt, and kept it there the rest of the day, thinking about Brita as he worked to mend nets and watched over a contractor who was up-fitting a power boat for a rich client. It was simple work, work that kept his mind occupied and left him feeling like he had accomplished something at the end of each day.

The Shanty was an open restaurant with a roof made of thatched palm leaves and a touristy view that looked out over emerald waves. The aromas of warm crab and cold fruit laced with alcohol drifted on the late afternoon breeze. The sun neared the horizon, and lit Brita's cheeks, which, since her Nordic skin was fair, seemed to be in a perpetual state of sunburn.

She was seated at a table overlooking the beach, drinking something orange. He sat down and ordered rum. They looked at each other over the distances of three feet and a thousand years. The waitress left a plate of papaya.

He reached to connect with her, but received only a cold, empty vacuum.

"Why don't you love me?" he finally said.

She stared over the surf and rolled her straw between her fingers.

"I'm broken," she finally said.

"What do you mean?"

"I can't be with you. I don't..." her voice broke. She took a deep breath through her nostrils, then drew on her drink, taking half of it down at once.

"I know what we are here for," she said. "I know what you expect. But I am blank. Don't you see? I cannot connect."

Suddenly it was clear. She had not been blocking him—not shunning him at all. Instead, she was damaged and unable to fulfill her purpose for being here on this planet. Maybe radiation in deep space had taken its toll. Maybe it was something else. All he could say for certain was that he looked at Brita and knew she blamed herself, and that she felt the weight of her people on her shoulders.

She didn't cry. He was impressed by that, though maybe he shouldn't have been. She didn't seem to display any emotion at all. Perhaps that was part of the problem. Or perhaps at one point Brita had despaired over her condition, but the years had left her with nothing but this cold resignation that radiated from her like a beacon.

He didn't say anything at first. Just reached out and touched her hand. How would he feel if
he
were the one damaged? How crushed would he be? He cleared his throat.

"You run because you're embarrassed."

"No."

He waited.

"I run because every time I see you it reminds me that I am a failure."

Kanady, who had been Hiram before that, and who had been many others prior to Hiram, sat back.

"I see," he said.

She pressed her lips, then sighed and reached for her purse.

"I wanted you to know why I can't see you again," she said.

He nodded, trying to comprehend this more fully as she slid off the stool and moved away, leaving him behind once again, passing the bar to walk out the door.

"Look at those two," said a man at a table across the dining area. "I think they're breaking up."

"Tell me we'll never be that way, all right?" his partner replied with a hint of snark.

"Never, love. We'll never be that way."

If Kanady had overheard them he might have told them how humans are flawed, how their lives are too short to feel connections as deeply as those whose lives span millennia. Or maybe he would have just nodded and told them how lucky they were to live in such a condensed moment together, holding hands and connecting for only a few scant years, how lucky they were to have each other even if it were only for this brief moment in time.

But he did not hear them.

Instead, he put money on the table, and he left to follow Brita down the beach where she was walking away.

He needed to tell her he understood, and that he would always be here if she changed her mind. He needed to tell her she would be all right. But mostly he needed to tell her he didn't care about tomorrow, that he had long ago stopped worrying about whether he would be one of the pairings that might extend their species. He had learned that life isn't about tomorrow. Life is about today. Kanady needed her to know how lonely he was, how much he yearned for someone like her, someone who understood his pain and who he could understand in return. He needed her to understand how much it had meant to his life merely to know she existed.

As he walked across the beach, waves rolled over the sand to leave clear, dusky patches that erupted in mole crabs digging their way toward China.

They towed the Ai Weiwei back to the Lagrange point. The ship was more battered than any ship had a right to be, and still return.

In one piece would perhaps have been an exaggeration. Had the vessel held any crew before, it certainly did not now. The hull resembled, in places, a lace doily, more holes than reality. Both engines were more or less intact, but the port system drive was clearly fried, char marks around the exhaust.

In fact, it was obvious to any observer that the Ai Weiwei was a dead loss. This was not a ship that would fly again without the kind of total rebuild that cost more than a new ship, far more. The only reason to tow her in was for salvage. Recycling.

That did not really affect the tugs. They were only doing their job. The one being it affected most deeply was Ai Weiwei.

Her crew had, indeed, died, although a ship such as her carried very few crew members. Humans were her backup... and her emotional support.

She mourned, for even a machine can mourn her comrades-in-arms. Her own survival felt to her like a bitter irony. Painful, even. That she should be so resilient as to survive when the humans, so much more "important" in the scheme of things, were not.

Maybe they would send her out alone, and bitterness flowed through her at the realization that she did not want to go.

This was the Solar System. This was home for her. She had been built and activated here, in this space between the Earth and the Sun. In this sanctuary, to which the enemy had yet to come. Had yet to come thanks to the effort of her and her sisters. Many of them, by sweet irony, named after activists for peace.

She knew who Ai Weiwei had been. Not even a she. A he. An activist. Centuries ago. When humans had still fought each other. That was unimaginable now.

Or perhaps only unimaginable to a mind designed and carefully programmed to fight those wars, yet awake and with emotions and feelings. The only reason she felt no physical pain was because she had been blessed with the capability to turn it off.

She wished she could do the same thing with her emotions.

The shipyard was a graveyard. Ai Weiwei was far from the only ship that drifted, half derelict, where they left her. Left her with a promise that she would be visited and checked on, a promise she was not sure she should believe. This might be a dumping ground, and many still felt that the ship-minds were not people. Were not deserving and worthy of the same considerations.

They left her, then, with only her grief for company. The remains had been removed for burial in space, and they might not even consider that she would want to be there, by vlink if nothing else.

They left her with nothing to do but remember.

Being a machine, she could have erased her memories. Could have let them go into a void, but then she would not be the person she was.

Would not and could not, and grief washed over her again, a grief she could no more let go of than she could fly on her own.

Which might never happen again.

"AL–9764,
named 'Ai Weiwei.' Dead loss except for the ship brain. Would you agree?" The officer's voice was deadpan as he checked on his tablet.

"What's the state of the brain?" the woman walking next to him asked. By their light step, it could be determined that they were not on Earth, but some world with lighter gravity. In fact, they were on a spin station not far from the ship graveyard.

"Functional with some emotional trauma."

"I don't understand why we don't just do memory edits on them. They're computers, after all."

The officer scowled at her. "Ma'am," he said, lightly, but rather in the manner of a man talking to a woman he had to show respect for even though everything in him preferred not to. "Ship brains are very complicated. Editing their memories tends to remove one instability and introduce another. Sometimes they do it themselves, and then we have a mess." That was not entirely true, but he would not let her mind rape the beings he cared for.

"I find it hard to believe a computer would show such initiative. But that's beside the point. Can the brain be salvaged and transferred to a new ship?"

"Yes. But she might need..." His lips quirked. "Therapy, for want of a better word."

The woman just shot him a look. "We're in the middle of a war. A war we are, I would note, in grave danger of losing, and you want to give therapy to a jumped up toaster. Transfer the intact brains. Send them out again."

"I want to have a..." He tailed off as it really hit him that she wasn't going to budge. A civilian politician, who should have absolutely no say in military activities. Yet she did. Oversight committees. As the man in charge of the shipyard, he held the rank of admiral, but he was not respected in the way a combat admiral, somebody who had come up through the ranks, would be. Truth was, he was only an engineer.

And Ai Weiwei was a mess. The ship had done her job. She'd denied a jump gate to the opposition, barely making it through herself before it blew. Now somebody would have to move another jump point out there, either by slowboat or by committing one of the huge capital ships. Neither side had many.

She had lost her entire crew and she had limped back. A human who had lost their entire unit would not be sent right back into combat.

But Ai Weiwei was just a ship. He scowled, then his comlink went off. Thank goodness. "I have to go, Ma'am," he said, bowing respectfully to the civilian and then leaving as quickly as basic etiquette allowed.

"Thanks," he said into the comlink.

"You don't know what I'm calling about."

"You rescued me from Secretary Carroll. I'd rather deal with a decompressed compartment."

"It's nothing like that. Not quite, anyway. Come over to the shipyard and see."

Reluctantly, the admiral made his way in that direction. Or, perhaps, less than reluctantly. He didn't want to deal with something he had to "see for himself." But it did get him away from an officious civilian he badly wanted to ship back to Earth.

Ai Weiwei floated. Her body might be damaged beyond repair, but they had hooked her up for debriefing. Data flowed through her processors and networks, which equated to thoughts in her mind. Complicated thoughts.

Go out again. She couldn't. She was finally home and safe, except there was no home for her. Or for any of the humans. Nobody was getting discharged until the war was over.