Black Hull (5 page)

This is the death-dream. How else do you
get eight hundred years into the future? I’m dying on the pod. This madness is
the last firings of my neurons—a dream of impossibility and strangeness.

Mick checked the time on the screen,
looked away, closed his eyes, then checked it again.

Same time. Dream check fail. Try again,
try something else.

Mick repeated his check, but the time on
the screen stayed constant, instead of jumping about as it did in his dreams.
He performed his second check: He ran to the nearest corridor, looked in, then
returned to XJ. His imagination conjured a different environment. He ran back.
The corridor remained the same.

Not a dream. Not by these measures. But
it has to be. What were the other dream tests?

“Mick, it appears your AM is worsening.
Why don’t you try some exercise? I can lead you to our bicycles.”

“Okay, if it’s four thousand, humor me,”
Mick began. “Have humans invented reverse time  travel?”

The laws of physics hadn’t allowed for
reverse time travel. There only existed the theoretically still state of
matter, its relative inertia, and the properties of matter and energy that
explained motion from stillness. The four fundamental forces of nature—weak,
strong, electromagnetic, and gravity—were bound to either stasis or motion.
There was no recording taking place, invisibly keeping track of the prior
configurations of matter in any given location. Yet Mick decided he would
indulge himself in the droid’s malfunctioning mind anyway.

“Humans haven’t existed for many years,
Mick.”

“Of course, right. And can you answer my
question?”

“Well, to be honest, there is no such
thing as reverse time travel. It simply isn’t possible. Many people have
written theories where mathematically it may have made some sense, but in
application, it is impossible. You see, UCA law prevents—”

“Why?”

“Because . . .”

XJ seemed to stop functioning. His eyes
dimmed, then returned to full brightness.

“I must remember to charge.”

“Charge?”

“Yes, I am not a fancy model like you
Mick—I still must remember to charge. The AM makes it so hard to remember.”

“Well, let’s get you plugged in. I need
to know why it’s impossible.”

“Right. Come this way.”

They walked through the corridor Mick
had used for his dream test, and turned abruptly into an L-shaped plastisteel
chamber equipped with several reclining chairs. XJ seated himself in one and
plugged a wired bracket into the side of his arm.

“Ahhh,” he moaned.

Mick laughed, despite the horror of his
situation. The robot’s ancient AI was almost comical.

Could I really experience this and not
live to tell the story? It’s too odd, it has to be told. What a bedtime story.
James always liked funny stories. Christopher went more for horror. I believe I
could mix both with this one. I have a winner. There’s got to be some way back.

The thought that there had to be a way
home, no matter the odds, stuck for some strange reason in Mick’s mind. He was
innately logical, yet he ignored the fact that he’d seen Earth as a cleaved
half-version of itself, and that forty generations of Comptons had lived and
died since his sons had been born.

What is faith? One to ask the robot.

“So why is reverse time travel
impossible?”

“It was the regulation: Quantum Energy
Regulation forty-seven point eight.”

“Regulation?”

“An amendment stemming from the abuse of
quantum technology. The proliferation of quantum near-field manipulation
drastically increased in twenty-five hundred. UCA law prohibited certain
quantum technology. Among the prohibitions: any further use of quantum
technology to develop reverse time travel.”

“So it was physically possible?”

“I don’t know if
physically
is
the right word. But yes, it was achieved.”

“So no outlaws have built a reverse time
travel machine in five hundred years?”

“Mick you must read the Histories, as I
said. You will be far happier than with my fallible explanations. Would you
like to play chess?”

A cold spirit of emptiness filled Mick.
The contradiction of his reality resisted all penetration. Nothing made sense.

Knight to E5.

“That’s not a good move Mick,” said XJ.

Months had passed since the rescue. XJ
wandered about the ship, never resting, always tinkering with one component or
another. His supposed AM seemed to have dwindled, for he was as clever and
sharp-witted as ever. Often he would try to cheer Mick, sensing his depression,
with rude jokes about the cruel irony of fate, which he called a construct that
only robots,
their kind
, could understand.

XJ had continued to insist that Mick was
also a robot, and that humans had become extinct. Mick read a great deal of the
ship’s Earth History Archive, only to find that XJ’s AM truly had skewed the
memory banks of the old droid: humans hadn’t died off, as XJ suggested, but
simply emigrated to Mars. The Compton line could very well be alive there.

During one frustrating evening, Mick had
cut his arm to show XJ the blood. For a time, XJ believed that Mick really was
a human. Mick had shown XJ the archives detailing the emigration of the UCA to
Mars. For a time, XJ seemed to recognize that humans were still alive. But as
the days wore on, Mick saw that memory retention was XJ’s primary weakness. His
strength was the Light Dog One. It was as if his ancient memory of how to run
the old ship never eroded. XJ worked the ship with unceasing vigilance,
monitoring all its systems, ever fine-tuning its course to reach the first
system he planned to stop at on the way to Utopia: Bessel 2. Apparently, XJ had
a friend, another robot, who’d be waiting for him there.

“I wouldn’t do that,” XJ cautioned. Mick
moved his queen out anyway.

“I read this morning about the unknown
object detected in April, twenty ten.”

“In M82 you mean?”

“Yea.”

“You know what it was?”

“According to your archives, it hasn’t
been identified. A hundred years after it was discovered, microquasar was ruled
out. A mysterious radio signal travelling four times the speed of light.
Nothing is logged in the system to explain it.”

“Well, I’ll tell you about it. The
discovery occurred after the ship’s last archive update.”

XJ moved his knight, creating a fork
that attacked Mick’s queen and king simultaneously.

“Shit…”

“Typical. Older model droids are said to
play better. Perhaps that’s why you continue to lose. Newer model cellbots such
as yourself are more and more out of touch with pure binary logic, no offense.
They have lost that fine touch of objective reasoning, relying too much on the
human quality of deceptiveness.” Mick moved his king, lost his queen.

“So the discovery, the unknown emission
of radiowaves—what was it?”

“Utopia.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I am right. The signal was a code.
Something meant for humans to decipher, a present of their own creation. A true
gift.”

“You’ve told me before. The place is
wonderful, I get it.”

“Using time travel, humans sent sentient
droids ahead, carved this world out. Then, they sent the signal back to the
adolescent Earth. It makes very simple sense.”

“And this place will be filled with
droids?”

“I think it will be. Remember Mick, I
have never been there either.”

XJ had remembered his mission shortly
after Mick’s rescue: He’d been sent out to inspect an anomalous energy signal near
Bessel 2. It turned out that the anomaly had been the explosion of the Crake.
Somehow, the Gliese system had bled into M82. It happens, XJ had explained.
How, Mick had asked. Call it tempospacial littering, XJ had replied.
Makes
perfect AM sense
.

“On Utopia there are cures for AM. I
think so, anyway,” XJ said. “Check.”

“Shit—you have me.” Mick looked into the
droid’s eyes. “Any chance they have reverse time travel for me?”

“I don’t think so Mick, but what do I
know? I’m very old. I don’t feel quite like myself anymore.”

Givering watched the Light Dog One glide
into port. Two figures departed its hatch and walked toward his glass-encased
office.

“Givering will probably have something
useful to impart,” XJ said.

“He looks a lot newer than you,” Mick
replied.

Givering, a wide, barrel-chested lifter
robot, opened his office door and walked out to meet his guests. The blue-pink
atmosphere of Bessel 2 ringed the starport and condensed on its buildings’
windows like frosting. A distant red-dwarf star dipped behind pink-ice
mountains.

“XJ, you’re under arrest,” said
Givering.

“Well, what’s this about?”

“Again, unauthorized departure. Silver
alarm and all. Taking a ship without permissions. When Sera comes back, she’ll
be damned angry about this one. Taking her antique out.”

“She’s forgetful sometimes, but she’ll
remember the mission,” XJ said to Mick.

“Again with the mission. Didn’t you
remember to defragment your memory? You know you’re an AM.”

“Of course I
know
, Givering. And
I don’t recall ever using it as a means of exploitation, either.”

“And who’s this?” Givering twisted along
a slit at his waist. A squealing noise revealed his lack of maintenance.

“He’s the result of the mission. He’s
the anomaly, or his ship was, anyway.”

“Quit with the mission, XJ.”

“I’m Mick Compton. From Earth. I was on
my way home on my ship, the Crake, when something happened in cryo. I woke up
in an escape pod, and the next thing I knew, XJ rescued me.”

“Hah! Well, that’s about right. Something
like this was bound to happen.” Givering robot-smiled. He went to grab XJ’s
wrists in a weak attempt to bind the robot, but XJ withdrew.

“No you don’t,” XJ snapped.

“Alright, have it your way. When Sera
gets back, she will be awfully mad you didn’t let me arrest you.”

“She’ll be quite pleased that I
completed the mission.”

Givering turned with another squeal and
began to roll back into his office. Mick and XJ followed him.

“Is the year four thousand?” Mick asked.

“Four thousand? Not in these parts. The
year is fourteen, sir. And I’ll have to place you under arrest, if you’ll
kindly allow.”

Mick looked around his alien cell. Black
steel, deep blue rivets, and two circular portholes, inches below the ceiling
adorned his barred cage . A sliding metal door separated him from the hallway
leading to Givering’s office.

A half-hour wait he said. It’s been
three hours.

“Mick? Mick are you alive?”

“XJ?”

“Are you hungry Mick?”

“Yea, how’d you get out?”

“Why, I hacked the lock of course. I’ll have
you out in a moment.”

The metal door slid into the wall,
revealing XJ’s thin frame, his eyes aglow, peering in.

“What about Givering?”

“I had to kill him.”

“What?”

“He’ll be all right.”

The cosmic madhouse. Will I meet a sane
droid?

“Come on, I’ve found a pantry.”

Mick followed XJ. They weaved in and out
of several cavernous halls, entered a bright steel room lined with cabinets.

“Dig in. Human food. Preserved for
history. All yours, Mick.”

“Sure.”

Mick opened a cabinet. Foil packages fell
out: freeze-dried beans, steak, potatoes. He ripped open one of the bags—a
Styrofoam smell repulsed him; an oily scent of chemical fermentation forced his
mouth shut.