Creation (5 page)

A woman filled the central view screen. Her hundred-year-old fashion reinforced the death scenario. He’d be sharing his coffin with a ghost. “Welcome to computer-interface pod XG-1000. I’ll be monitoring your bodily functions, assisting in your comfort, answering questions, and providing entertainment and interaction.”

Sam gently closed his eyes and counted his breaths, a meditation technique he’d learned as a kid. When he’d counted to five, he reopened his eyes, feeling only slightly calmer.

Lud’s voice once again came through the antique speakers. “Someone in there with you?”

As if that were possible. “Just the computer interface. Hey, do me a favor. Don’t go too far away, all right?”

“You got it. I’ll keep the headphones on until you’re out.”

Sam’s gaze shifted from the computer-generated woman to the lower-left display. The schematic for the central cord took center stage. At first he thought it looked like an old subway map, but as he focused in, it grew in complexity. The entire one-mile core magnified to feet, then inches, then zoomed in to microscopic view. Hair-like relays no larger than a handful of molecules branched, connected, and interwove.

“How am I ever going to make sense of this?” He hadn’t meant to ask the question aloud.

Two voices sounded in the pod: Lud asking him what he needed and XG doing the same.

“Sorry, my mistake. Lud, I’m going to reduce the volume coming and going to you. I suspect if I have a problem you’ll hear it loud and clear. I just need to know you’re out there.”

Sam looked down at his virtual assistant. “XG, what am I looking at? How can you help?”

“The central nervous core of the ship magnified to molecular level. At this magnification you can inspect minute connections. All of these threads must work perfectly for the energy vortex to perform properly.” The computerized female voice reminded him of how long it’d been since he’d slept with a woman. She even had all the warmth of his last conquest.

Energy vortex
. Now, there was a term he hadn’t heard since college. The definition came to him as if written on a blackboard: experimental means of transferring data at speeds not even possible with current computers. He’d never heard of one actually being put into use. He did his best to sound as technological as his assistant. “Has this vortex ever been functional?”

The woman on the screen took longer than Sam had thought reasonable for a computer. “That information is incomplete.”

“I’ll take whatever information you have.” He did his best to not sound miffed.

“The military’s override has wiped out most of the early data. From historical records regarding evasive maneuvers during the Europa project, I deduce that some form of higher functionality must have been in use. An energy vortex has not been established since the military’s takeover.”

Whoever had programmed speech into the XG had seen fit to use a slightly higher tone for the word
military
, or maybe he just imagined the difference. It didn’t matter. She had access to the ship’s records. “Are you in contact with the main computer?”

“Contact is irrelevant. I am the ship’s main computer.”

Sam stared at the woman in the corner screen then swung his attention to the main screen. The eye movement repositioned her back in front of his face. “You are the builder’s pod interface. You were meant to help build the central core. You are not the ship’s main computer.”

When she’d been booted up, there wouldn’t have been a main computer. Her functions had maintained life support, gravity, and all the pesky lower functions until the main computer came online. It was a very old ship.

The woman’s head tilted, and her eyes focused on his, an odd action for a computer simulation. “No, that function was fulfilled.”

Maybe the military had messed with the interface. Maybe she’d come unplugged from the bridge. “If you can communicate with me this far forward, why is there no bridge control?”

“There are tears in the fibers of the central core,” XG said.

“If you can function up here, you can function on the bridge.” He’d never had much success with women, but this one was proving especially difficult.

“The bridge is irrelevant. I cannot perform the tasks requested.”

He knew it was too good to be true. He couldn’t just tell her to get to work and have the whole ship come to life. His deep sigh was accompanied by an increase in the level of oxygen in the pod. He’d have to remember she was watching his bodily actions and would compensate for anything she interpreted as his discomfort. “Well then, let’s get to work.”

The pod spun slowly inside the cord. Lines crossed lines on Sam’s view screen. XG explained each boring connection until Sam began filtering the information through his subconscious. Where was a good space novel when you needed one?

His body slipped into a mild state of suspended animation. Sleep, food, and even bladder and bowel movements were handled by the pod. Every few hours, he increased the volume on Lud’s connection just to hear another human voice. Forty-two hours passed before the pod came to a halt.

The air took on a sharp, acidic sting in his nose. It took him a moment to realize XG had stopped her monologue and was requesting his attention. As his eyes focused, he thought he was staring into space, seeing no fine filaments, no computer tags—nothing at all. “Lud, do I still have power out here? I seem to have lost my interface.”

XG’s face lit up from the lower left. “I’m still here, Sam. And Lud’s enjoying a sleep cycle.”

Shaking his head caused the pod to rotate slightly from side to side. “Then what am I looking at? Where are the computer threads?”

XG waved her hand at the blank screen. “This is a problem area. I would call it a break, but that would be inaccurate. It’s closer to a corruption.”

“How do I fix it?” Sam wondered why she hadn’t just shot him to this place forty hours ago.

“I don’t have that information.”

Peachy.
He was confined to his coffin, unable to move, with no external tools and a build computer with delusions of grandeur but no useful skills. This would be it. This was where he’d die, looking at a job he had no way of completing. “Who the hell designed this thing?”

“Dr. Elliot Shot, PhD Astrophysics and Advanced Computer Theory. Would you like to talk to him?” XG must have been as groggy as Sam.

“Sure, but this ship is over one hundred years old. Not sure the good doctor’s going to have anything useful to say from his grave.” Sam’s sarcasm never played well with women and was even worse with computers.

Another screen crackled to life, displaying the top of a bald head that rotated up to become the face of a man who looked to be in his sixties. “Whaddaya want?”

Sam closed his eyes in frustration. “I’m sorry. This must be my computer’s idea of a joke. Supposedly, I’m looking for Dr. Elliot Shot.”

“Yeah, that’s me. More letters and words go after my name than I can keep track of. Which ones are you looking for?”

“Okay, I’ll play. I’m on the star freighter
Leviathan
. Built one hundred and six years ago. The build computer here, XG-1000, says you’re the guy who designed this thing.”

He looked at the lower corner of the display to find the ever-present computer-generated assistant. “XG, can you present the main display to Dr. Shot?”

The woman forced a blink as she bowed her head. Every movement the long-dead model made looked overly staged.

“Yep, but what exactly are you showing me?” Dr. Shot asked.

Sam didn’t see how this was possible. People lived one hundred years, but never after they’d already earned a PhD. He’d been in a vegetative state in the pod for too long. His mind was playing tricks. “Central nervous cord, maybe one third the way from head to tail, molecular level.” He was even sounding like XG.

The man on the screen put on reading glasses. Sam had only seen magnifying-glass lenses in museums as a kid. Now he knew he was in a dream. The old man harrumphed in disgust. “Military override?
Leviathan
, right?” He began pressing buttons on some hidden screen.

“Yeah, on both questions.” Sam heard stories—rumors really—of people living longer on some of the outlying planets. Confirmation of such a place would likely create a whole new migration to some small moon named The Fountain of Youth. But for this guy to be the one and only designer, Sam estimated he’d have to be pushing one hundred forty at the youngest. That wasn’t an age Sam wanted to contemplate.

“Okay, got it. That was one of the energy-vortex models.” Again, the old man gave a look of disgust as he shook his head. “If you’re inside that thing, I’m going to assume you’re somewhere out along the Kuiper Belt. And as such, you probably don’t have a way home unless you can convince it to power up.”

“You nailed it, but I don’t think convincing is going to do it.” Sam would’ve scratched his head, but having his body restrained one way or another was becoming a bad habit. “Unless you’re saying there’s a backup system.”

Dr. Shot chuckled. “Of course there’s a backup system. But it must believe there’s not enough power for the job.”

Sam could see a certain similarity between the doctor and XG. “You’re giving this computer a lot of credit.
Believe? Convince?
”

“I designed that whole energy vortex to work like the human brain. All energy, you understand? No wires, no optic cable, not even wireless communication. Pure energy firing between synapses. Except the military couldn’t control that, so they shorted out massive areas. Not intentionally—you’d have to know what you were doing for it to be intentional. But the result was the same.”

“So what do I do? How do I get this”—Sam stopped himself from calling it
junk
—“ship back home?”

“By connecting to the XG, you can use your own brain function as a blueprint for the missing section. In your state of suspended animation, she can map a small section of your frontal lobe. The build pod is equipped with magnetic micro tools. You understand you can’t exactly go in there with microscopic tweezers? Yeah, well, these laser-like magnets can manipulate the cord material back into the operational threads even at a molecular level.”

“And once that’s done?” asked Sam. “I mean, these computers took massive amounts of energy to start up. What good is this going to do me out here in this energy wasteland?”

Dr. Shot glared from the view screen. “Don’t believe everything you read. Once it’s all in place, that ship can power up from the breeze off a fruit fly’s wings.”

Sam looked hard into the deep-blue eyes on the screen. “One last question before you go. Am I really talking to Dr. Shot?”

“You mean how can I be still kicking around and answering questions after a hundred and thirty nine years? Get back alive, and we’ll talk.”

Wrinkles spread from the bald head down to the eyes as he squinted at some piece of information. “Something interesting about
Leviathan
. We built openings along the core into the transport pods. Not something we wanted anyone to know. You don’t want some kid opening a long-lost hatch and flooding their living space with electricity. Can’t even see the openings from the pods. But if you get stuck, there is an escape. Trust me, you don’t want to be in that builder’s coffin once the computer’s fully functional.”

D
r. Shot’s
warning echoed in Sam’s mind as he stared at the unblinking woman before him. Thinking of the builder’s pod as a coffin was one thing, but having that become a potential reality wasn’t something he’d wanted spelled out.

He needed to get to work. But he also needed a distraction from his fears. Being restrained in the builder’s pod didn’t leave many options, however. With every breath, the woman on the view screen heaved her breasts slightly, revealing cleavage behind the otherwise proper white blouse. Her words had been scripted and her actions restrained to a minimum, but that one minor act of self-expression left Sam assuming the model, now long dead, would have welcomed his closer inspection. Her thin face was a little too strict for Sam’s taste. She had straight brown hair cut just below the chin and angling up sharply toward the back of her head. Bangs teased at her eyebrows. She could have served as the archetype for the sexually repressed professional businesswoman of a hundred years ago.

The image of the woman seldom blinked, but eye movements lifted the bangs as she spoke. Had they expressed any emotion, her brown eyes would have been quite lovely. As it was, they almost appeared to be made of glass. The model’s video session must’ve been grueling, because certain words made her look exhausted.

He closed his eyes for a moment. Those recordings dated back to sometime before his grandparents had been conceived. He’d had given anything to talk to a real woman, someone he could connect to, someone who might understand his fears. “Explain the process. How do we do this thing Dr. Shot proposed?”

The face on the view screen snapped to the side then re-centered. Perfect—a glitchy computer was going to map his brain. “First I’ll put you into a coma. I have access to all of Earth’s information. I’ll load what we need into your brain. From there, electronic impulses will be fired through that data to help us both come up with answers.”

Sam grimaced. “So I’ll be the computer, and you’ll be the user? Wouldn’t it be easier if you just loaded the information into your data banks?”

The woman’s eyes moved with her head as she shook her negative response. “It’s not just the information we need. Once I know how your brain functions, what synapses perform what jobs, then I can repair the central core.”

He let out a slow breath. Of course it wouldn’t be that simple. “And I imagine there will be some risks?” An understatement if there ever was one.

The image of the woman bit her lip then snapped back to her cold stare. At least they’d tried to give her some personality, inappropriately timed though it was. “It will be a surreal dream state for you, but one I can access. I can’t say it will be enjoyable, but you won’t be alone. The risks are: it may not work, I may not be able to pull you out of the coma, or I may get pulled into your dream.”

The first two risks were what Sam had expected. Strapped in a tin can floating inside another tin can at the outer edge of the solar system, all alone except for a computer someone had programmed over a hundred years ago, held all the appeal of a horror story.

He took five deep, calming breaths. Lud was still out there. The
Leviathan
’s crew would do what they could to rescue him. But XG’s last warning did bother him. “How would you get pulled into my dream?”

“Humans have the ability to differentiate between themselves and other humans. I do not have that level of awareness. It isn’t difficult for me to tell the difference between the one operating controls and me performing the task. But this will be a melding of the two of us. I will be repairing my systems, using you as a template while you tell me what to do.”

Sam struggled to remember some long-forgotten joke about do-it-yourself brain surgery. “I don’t expect we have much choice. But I’d kick myself if there were a simpler answer and I hadn’t asked the question. Any hope we can fix this computer without creating a near-death experience for me?”

XG’s eyes left his and ran down a series of options that cycled faster than he could identify. “I cannot propose another answer.”

Her conclusion didn’t give Sam much comfort. He increased the volume to his connection with Lud in time to catch a heated debate with Xavier on the pace of the work. Sam caught his name more than once. “I think I may have an answer for him, Lud.”

The voice in his ear grew in volume. “What? No, not you, Xav. I’ve got Sam in my ear. Shut up a moment. What’s that, Sam?”

Sam did his best to explain the plan without trying to make it sound as though he was risking his life to complete the task.

“If it’s the only way. I’m not sure I like the idea of you in a coma down that tube. Not much we can do if things go wrong, is there?” The lower, confidential tone of Lud’s voice gave Sam the impression he’d read between the lines.

Sam longed to wipe his face, but again, his imprisoned arms failed to move. “Not likely. The virtual assistant down here can push the pod with my body back to the access, but I can’t see how that’d make much of a difference.” The risk that the ship could also go into a coma, losing even the basic life-support systems everyone relied on, didn’t seem like something Lud would want to know. Xavier would undoubtedly tell him to go for it no matter the risks.

“Give me an hour, Sam. I need to talk this out with Xav.” For the first time since Sam entered the tube, the contact with Lud went completely silent.

Sam attempted to memorize as many images of the damaged cord as he could investigate with the view screen. He didn’t imagine it would matter, but maybe his subconscious would find something of use. XG remained silently in her corner. The speaker crackled back to life, but it was Xavier’s voice, not Lud’s, that filled his ear. “Just do me a favor, kid: don’t die.”

Sam felt the sides of his mouth go up in an attempted smile. “I’ll do my best.”

For pep talks, Xavier had a way of cutting through the crap. “One more thing. We’re giving this little experiment three days. As we have no way of knowing your progress, we’ll be moving on to plan B in seventy-two hours. Maybe you can program your assistant with an alarm clock or something. If we hear from you before then, we’ll give you more time. But seventy-two hours with no communication, and we move on.”

Sam wondered what plan B was and why they weren’t trying that first. As the XG-1000 had been unable to propose another solution, however, he figured any fallback plan from Xavier wouldn’t bode well for someone in a coma inside a nonoperational computer. He instantly regretted his conversation with Lud about separating the engines from the ship as a last resort. “Understood. Just don’t leave me floating out here in space when you all abandon ship.”

Xavier’s laugh didn’t instill confidence in Sam. Pirates weren’t known for their forthright honesty. “I’ve got too much invested to just up and leave. Lud’s working on some way we can use the engines without this white-elephant computer.”

Sam didn’t need to ask where that would leave him. Cut off the power to the computer, and he’d be left in his coma even if it were still attached to the engines.

Sleep had never been a problem. From short naps to eight hours a night, and even the occasional twelve-hour lie-in after a long week, it was all good. The slow process of drifting off comforted Sam. Everything seemed to make sense in that half-waking state. By comparison, going into a coma was like being hit by a bus. In an instant, he went from an aware, physical human to a subconscious floating free in blackness.

Images flew at him, went through him, and became him. Spaghetti noodles of information shot holes in him, twisting and turning, changing, dragging him with them. Knowledge expanded exponentially. Mathematical equations doubled in complexity. History and ecology and physics and life science filled his mind at a level he could never hope to contain. His brain separated into fine fibers of being and wove back together with pure energy, creating streamers of facts and consciousness in its wake.

Undulating, swimming lines of thought competed to be first—ideas that became living parts of his being. Each struggled to outpace the other concepts that were also him. An ocean of conscious information overtook him, separate from him and yet the same, other beings and yet all him.

Time and space lost meaning. He was everywhere, unable to define himself by the usual coordinates of life. He struggled to find a rope, an anchor, anything to ground himself in the overwhelming vastness. The desire itself, the exertion of self-will, gave him a point of reference. He was himself; he was what he was. The raging ocean calmed as he floated above it.

Yellow strands of light circled up from the depths, shot past him, and disappeared into the blackness. At first there were just a few, which dodged him easily enough, but more followed. One struck him, lighting up his consciousness. Another followed, then another, until a river of light passed through him and engulfed him. Light that existed beyond his perception of reality. Light with a soul. Light that cared. Light that feared its effect on him.

Terror filled him, though it was not his terror. A streaming membrane spread within the light, covered him, protected him. Then it ejected him from the power that threatened to annihilate him.

* * *

S
am shook
his head then shook it again. He remembered the
Leviathan
and recalled his job inside the central core. But where was he now?

His hands grasped at tufts of grass. The smells of flowers and plants he’d only heard of played about his sinuses. Fresh air. Light and warmth. He was dead. He had to be. None of these things would be possible in the place he last remembered.

There’d been something about a coma and merging with a computer—things he could almost remember. It must have killed him. That was the only logical answer. But death sure had a way of feeling like life. His body lifted off the ground, but his muscles ached. How was that possible? Basic human functions of breathing and seeing and feeling all remained.

“Computer? XG? Lud? Anyone out there?” The garbled words hurt his throat. There was no response except the sounds of small animals and plants moving in the light breeze.

Sam sat back down as his legs registered pain from their long stint of inaction. He’d wanted to get off Earth. The space shuttles and the monster that was
Leviathan
had made him regret that lifelong desire. But this new place held promise. He was like Adam surveying the Garden of Eden. Now, if he could only find Eve.

Sam’s vision of heaven was shattered by the appearance of a middle-aged man in coveralls. “Ah, there you are. We heard we’d be getting a visitor.”