Chaos Quarter (27 page)

-Joseph Davidson, response during an interview when asked about his essays regarding the definition of ‘human,’ 2071

Blackness. Not the normal kind full of stars, just an empty, warm blackness. Kind of relax—

A sharp, painful light hit his eyes, which somehow had opened. He tried to blink it away, but couldn’t.

“Sorry ’bout that,” an easy-going voice spoke.

The light shifted behind his head. The silhouette of a man filled Rex’s vision. Well, he thought it was a man. It was a man’s face, but the man’s body seemed to be made out of sleek, gray metal. The face seemed to go from where the neck would normally meet the chin, to the top of the forehead. It had jaws. But no ears and no hair. A metal casing forming the man’s head stretched back nearly a foot. Rex hoped there were actually brains in there.

“That better?” the robot/man asked.

“You’re a robot,” Rex replied.

“Close. Cyborg,” he said with a knowing smile. “Name is Jacob. But everyone calls me Jake.”

“Jake. Jake the Cyborg,” Rex spoke, cobwebs clearing from his mind.

“Well, Jake Gaderi is my actual name, but you’re not the first to call me that.”

“Huh,” Rex said, trying to blink again. Nothing happened.

“Got your eye-lids propped open so you can’t blink,” Jake said. He took a dropper in an equally metallic hand and moistened Rex’s right eye.

“Thanks,” Rex said, wondering why he hadn’t done the left one. He didn’t feel any dryness in his left eye. He didn’t feel
anything
.

“Uh, where am I?” asked Rex.

“Onboard my ship. You jumped wrong, came out a half-million miles from the sun. Lucky I decided to orbit in close this week. Wouldn’t have been able to reach you if I’d been much further away.”

“Oh. Well, thanks for that,” Rex said, trying to move his limbs. They did not respond.

“You’re not paralyzed,” Jake the Cyborg spoke. “Just an anesthetic.”

“Why?” Rex asked, curiously unalarmed by his predicament.

“You lost an eye. I replaced it,” Jake said. He picked up a probe and touched it to the surface of his left eye. Rex felt a jolt of pain.

“Excellent,” Jake spoke. “Some minds don’t always pick up pain right away, takes a while for the nerves to understand what the computer’s sending them.”

“Computer? My eye’s a machine?”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Standard unit. One of my spares. Hooks directly to the optic nerve. Easy to remove if you want to have an organic one grown.”

“I don’t notice any difference,” Rex spoke.

“You won’t. Well no, that’s not true. You actually can now see beyond the normal visible spectrum. Should test that.”

“How do I do that?” Rex asked, not sure if he believed what his vaguely robotic doctor was saying.

“Think about seeing something in infrared,” Jake spoke.

He did. The vision in his left eye became a gray-scale, colder areas dark, warmer ones in lighter and lighter shades until white was reached. Jake’s body was a blaze of white, his face brighter than the rest.

“That is cool,” Rex spoke in child-like awe.

“OK, think back to normal. Then think about seeing magnetic fields.”

Rex thought about seeing normally, and instantaneously his new eye went from infrared to the good ol’ visible spectrum. He thought of magnetic fields. A web of lines appeared, overlaying his vision like a Heads-Up Display. They radiated from electronic devices around him, from Jake especially. He could
see
the fields.

“Pretty neat, eh?” Jake asked.

“Damn,” he said in awe.

“Well, I’ll get you feeling again. Hold on.”

Rex noticed, for the first time, an IV running into his neck. Jake inserted a capsule of something into the top of the IV. A black fluid ran through it into his neck. Feeling returned to his body. Jake slid out the IV.

“Time to get up,” the cyborg spoke.

Rex slid off the bed, his bare feet touching metal. Warm to the touch, it made him feel oddly relaxed.

“This your ship then?” he asked.

“Yep. The
S
even-zero-zero-three-zero-six-four
. Or as I call her, the
Stupid-Worthless-Piece-of-Crap
.”

“Something wrong?” Rex asked, looking around. He was in a large, perfectly square room. Besides the bed, which was really more of a glorified stretcher, nothing resembled furniture. Computer consoles lined the walls, projecting data into various sections of the room. A series of holographic figures floated on Rex’s chest. He stepped out of the way, only to insert himself into a projection of a nearby planet.

“Yeah,” Jake spoke. “I have a non-functional jump drive and no parts to repair it with.”

Rex smiled and said, “I sense you’ll want a ride in return for this surgery.”

“If it’s not too much trouble. Your engines got pretty shot. I can get them back to 50 percent,” Jake replied.

“They’re below 50? They were at 62!” Rex exclaimed.

“You took quite a beating, especially for a ship that small. You’re lucky to be flying at all,” said Jake.

Rex moved across the room, stopping before a projection of his ship, joined to Jake’s. The
Stupid-Worthless-Piece-of-Crap
resembled space stations of Earth’s past. It looked like the work of a child’s erector set, a plain rectangular box surrounded by scaffolding-like structures. No prow, no tail, nothing remotely designed for air-travel. It wasn’t much bigger than the scorched and blackened hull of
Long Haul
, but looked worlds apart.

Jake clomped up behind him.

“More than a ride actually,” Jake said. “Passage to the Commonwealth?”

“I’ll have to talk to my crew about keeping secrects,” Rex muttered.

“Your tech gave it away. Outside of Cyberdan there’s nothing in the Quarter that can match your ship.”

“There’s at least one,” Rex spoke.

“Your biological enemy?” Jake surmised.

Rex shot him a disbelieving look and then heaved a resigned sigh.

“Again, they just tell anybody.”

“Well, I only pushed because your ‘friends’ jumped into the other side of this system,” Jake spoke.

Rex spun quickly, meeting the cyborg’s gaze.

“They’re here? They found us already?”

“You’ve been out for two days,” Jake told him, “And to be honest, I’ve been working on your engines for much of the time. Your Weapons Officer gave me permission on your behalf.”

“Lucius…” Rex spoke, not particularly upset at this. “We need to get going as quickly as possible.”

“Not finished yet,” Jake pointed out. “Had to stop to fix you.”

“Why? I could’ve lived without an eye,” Rex spoke.

“Your women are quite insistent. The striped one screamed at me to do it, and the crazy one just screams at the sight of me.”

Rex laughed, imagining Second getting a look at Jake.

“It’s really quite intriguing. On my homeworld we use mechanical technology to improve ourselves, but her people try to do it organically. Guess everybody has their opposites,” the cyborg wondered aloud.

“You’re a lot nicer than your opposite. They keep trying to kill us,” Rex spoke.

“Yes, Lucius tells me they come from the space beyond the Achaean Confederacy. Heard lots of stories about that place; never thought there was any truth behind it.”

“There is,” Rex said. “And they seem hell-bent on stopping us from revealing that ‘truth’ to the universe.”

“Well, not much further to go now,” Jake spoke.

Rex cocked his head quizzically.

“What do you mean?”

“Your crazy jump brought you eleven light-years from the Alshain system, five light-years from the Commonwealth line of control. Two jumps and you’re home.”

Rex paused, thinking. He’d expected to be off course, but if what Jake said was true, their jump had taken them at least seventeen light-years farther than it should have. That was almost unheard of. Top-secret military stuff could barely bend space over distances like that. He’d heard stories of early jump pioneers being hurled farther then they projected due to the quirky effects of gravity-wells on jump-points. He’d never really put much faith in it though, figuring it had been legend and myth that had grown up around Mr. McDougal and his revolutionary jump drive. Luckily this ‘quirk’ had thrown them in a fortunate direction.

Boundary was out of the question now. This red star, whatever it was, had to be right on the border of the Commonwealth. There was little chance there would be anything other than surveillance drones on the line of control, and there would be no way for them to get a jump drone off to Alshain, have a ship dispatched, and have it arrive on site before the Hegemony ship found and killed them all.

“How much longer do you need to finish our engines?”

Jake shrugged his bulky, squared-off metallic shoulders.

“Six hours should do it, give or take,” he spoke.

“And how long before they reach us?”

“About eight hours.”

“Which means at just over twice our speed they’ll overtake us hours before my drive recharges,”he spoke. Even given the fact that no two jumps were ever identical, and that it could take some time for the bioship to find them after they jumped, it just didn’t add up. They were just too slow.

“Then I should probably quit with the talking and get back to work,” Jake said.

“You could stay here,” Rex spoke. “Wait until somebody less ‘hunted’ shows up.”

“You are the first vessels I’ve seen in the eighteen months I’ve been here,” Jake informed, “I’ll take my chances.”

Rex laughed, “Well, that I can guarantee you.”

* * *

Second stared at the machine as it worked, its human head moving about. Its image floated above the common room. The fleshy parts of this…
thing
seemed immune to the vacuum of space. It floated, tethered to the engine, popping off access panels and tweaking the larger machine that was this ship.

They all called this thing Jake.
How can it have a name? It’s a machine?!
They didn’t name the other machines around here. Did they?
No
. Except for the ship itself, for some unknown reason. They said the machines weren’t alive. Things that weren’t alive didn’t get names.

You don’t have a name
, a voice inside of her spoke.

A dread feeling came over her. Was she considered a machine? Her body was organic. Machines couldn’t be organic. She looked at her hand. It was a primitive’s hand, but a biological one.

You’re not a machine
, she thought. She wasn’t quite sure what she was. The Masters didn’t give names to their servants, whatever the line. And the primitives on Cordelia hadn’t given names to the semi-sentient beasts that infested their planet, or the ones they ate. So not all organic things were given names, she figured. It wasn’t abnormal that she didn’t have a name.

Except that heat and tension and restlessness surged through her when she thought about being unnamed. It felt like it would burst through her skin and explode outward.

Can it do that?

She didn’t know. But she knew she wasn’t a meat animal and didn’t understand why she had been a servant. She didn’t understand any of her long life now. The memories felt…hot, tense, and somehow…shivering? She’d remember something the ambassador did and her body would seize, bile rising in her throat. Pain would flash in her mind. Not real pain, but a memory of it. It hurt differently when she thought backward, like a burning that consumed her brain until it was all that remained.

She didn’t remember feeling this. She didn’t remember wondering about whether or not she had a name. Ambassador Cody had called her Second. Her title, she was his second, his assistant. But Rex called her
Second
. He said it differently. When he said it, the words belonged to her, he only borrowed them. She felt a warmth inside that she wanted to repeat, a safeness. That’s what they kept saying to her. “You're safe,” or some variation of it.
Safe must mean that absence of pain and burning and tension.

Rex had said that the things she felt were emotions. Logically she knew what an emotion was: a chemical urge once pivotal to the survival of non-sentient species. These half-evolved primitives were ruled by them. The Masters used them for their own pleasure. She could even run down the list in her mind, describing the characteristics of each and how they affected the thought process.

Except that she didn’t
know
what an emotion was, somehow. How that could be, she could not say. She knew confusion was marked by a lack of knowledge regarding a situation and generally involved unsure physical acts and high levels of stress. She knew she matched these symptoms, but didn’t know why she should be frozen into inaction by it. Why did a heavy, tight, painful sensation accompany her hesitance? Why were images of terrible things flying through her mind: Cody on top of her, his girth tearing her inside, Jake killing everybody, crushing her skull with his metallic hands…?

But that never happened. Why were images of this in her mind if it hadn’t happened? Was she remembering what hadn’t happened yet? Could primitives do that? Should she tell everybody that the machine-man was going to kill them horribly?

Was the image of the ambassador painfully using her for his pleasure even a memory then? Or was she imagining the future? Why did her digestion feel like it was backing up every time she thought of him?

The sound of footsteps filled the common room. Chakrika stepped in, carrying Quintus in her arms. She stared uneasily at Second, watching her watch the Cyborg.

“Something wrong?” Chakrika asked.

Second stared at her. She’d seen this primitive woman before, but felt as if she were looking at her for the first time. Rudimentary genetic engineering must have been done to her to make her skin dark orange and striped. What purpose such a line served was beyond Second’s understanding.

“Stop looking at me,” Chakrika scowled.

“Why are you orange?” Second asked.

“All of my people look like this,” Chakrika replied.

“Why?”

“They believe it honors their Gods,” the woman replied. She put the infant down in his crib.