Darkship Renegades (28 page)

“That was your computer alter ego?” I asked. “Charming.” No, I didn’t doubt it. It was the only way to make sense of what had been, up till then, a bewildering mix of warnings and attacks.

He nodded. “And I tried to stop it, and…it attacked me. I managed to erect an…electrically disruptive barrier on the way to the front room, so we had access to the communication…but then you insisted on running in here.”

I didn’t say anything. If he didn’t understand that groping and kissing unwilling females might make them insist on running somewhere, I couldn’t help him. He remained the same bewildering mixture of aged genius and twelve-year-old boy.

I tried to sound as calm and sane as I could. “So,” I said, “that is what is wrong. Now. What are we going to do about it?”

He shook his head. “I don’t see that there is anything we can do,” he said. “We’re stuck in this room and locked down, and we have no tools and no weapons. I couldn’t take the peripherals on, even with tools and weapons. Oh, and it’s taken my lenses…Kit’s lenses. We’re screwed.”

I gritted my teeth. “A fine help you are. Kit would never give up.
You
never give up.”

“Oh, yeah? What do you think we could do?”

A CHANCE IN HELL

“What I don’t think we should do is shut up and die slowly.”

“We don’t have any way to commit suicide,” he said. “No way, at least, that will be a certain thing or less painful than this.”

“Stop. Suicide is becoming a habit for you. Considering how hard you’re fighting to stay alive when you shouldn’t be, I’d think you’d be a little less fond of the notion.”

“What? What do you mean?”

I realized that he had no clue what he’d done—how his former body died. He knew about Kit, so the brain impression being restored must have been from after the time when Kit had been created and the nanocytes designed. It was more or less obvious, though, that he couldn’t know about his death. Not unless he extracted that knowledge from Kit.

He’d got who I was, and how I’d come from Eden, I supposed, though frankly he might have got it from our interaction in the
Cathouse
since he’d awakened in Kit’s body. I had no idea how sharing information happened or if he could get something Kit wasn’t willing to give.

I don’t think so,
Kit said, in my mind.
At least not if I really fight him on knowing it, and if it’s something important. Oh, personal life and such, I think he got instantly. But…he hasn’t asked how he died, and I didn’t want to tell him. I think he thinks it was the Hampson’s.

Jarl’s eyes widened. “So, I did put an end to myself, didn’t I, when it became obvious I wasn’t fully myself anymore? Yes, I had mechanisms in place to commit suicide if needed, but if you think that is a sign of weakness, you’re wrong.” He looked highly offended at the idea. “You have no idea what it is like to lose who you are and to know there is no way out, or at least no way out of that body. I tried…” He opened his hands. “I thought it was my duty to go on living, in another body, even if my…ego had to face death in that one. But when death becomes inevitable, suicide is not dishonor.”

I glared at him. I couldn’t even argue. Oh, I don’t think I would do it. Remember, my primary directive was to survive and I’d fought on forlorn odds before. Going down in battle will always, to me, be preferable to surrender.

There might be a paradise after death, though I doubt it. It makes no sense to have perfect happiness, before or after death. The human mind is not designed to be perfectly happy and it could be argued it is—from some angles—the worst form of torture.

As for life after death—real life after real death, not what Jarl was trying for—I refuse to state an opinion. Insufficient facts. On the one hand, we have no way to prove it exists. On the other hand, there does seem to be something, some particle of life and thought that we can’t summon at will, though we can get rid of it very quickly and efficiently indeed. Which means…nothing. I’ll find out eventually. I see no reason to go exploring that uncertainty until there is absolutely no other option. I know life on this side exists, and that as long as I can keep processing oxygen and food, I can hold that life.

Oh, yeah and water. I really wanted to process some water and soon.

However, I also wasn’t about to judge someone else’s choices on the matter. Why not? Because I’ve never been there. Also, because I’m not infallible. Also because I didn’t have to. I suspected a lot of the choice between survival and suicide was a personality thing, and I couldn’t have someone else’s personality for a while to fully judge the matter.

“I’ll give you that up against odds like what you faced, it’s entirely possible I’d have chosen suicide also,” I said. “But we’re not up against that kind of odds.”

“How not?” he asked. “They threw us in a room with broken machinery and left us to die.”

“Right. Have you even tried the door? A machine naive enough not to kill us, but to store us with broken equipment, as though it could pick us up later—” I refused to think of ways in which it could pick up our component parts and use them. “Might very well think that we will not try to get out because it told us not to or something. How much of your knowledge did you upload into it, anyway? If it helped you design the powertrees, how crazy is that design?”

Jarl shrugged. “It had all my knowledge, and initially, it wasn’t, as you call it, that naive. But I will grant you that since I left, it might have lost…well, its operating memory, the part it uses to…The part that feeds the personality, might not remember humans, or that humans are different from machines.”

Or given that Jarl had considered himself in many ways a biological machine, built for a purpose, it might never have fully grasped the distinction. “But surely it knows what biological organisms need to survive. There are trees and birds and things outside, as part of its domain.”

He shook his head. “Other than tracking you and setting traps, I don’t think it has done much outside. I left the maintenance program dormant, and I don’t think it has bothered with it. You see, it really is like a human, in that it has various forms of memory and…and knowledge. What it doesn’t need, or isn’t in any way relevant to its…essential processes, which are the ones I set, it knows but doesn’t think about.”

Like Kit not realizing that Zen was his female clone, because he’d never put together the facts that he was a Mule and so couldn’t have biological sisters, and that she couldn’t be “just” the daughter of his adopted parents because she looked nothing like the Denovos. It hadn’t been in any way important or relevant to his life. I nodded. “Fine. So, how do you know it has realized the door needs to be locked? Maybe it thinks that we will simply stay in here because we’re programmed to.”

He shrugged and shook his head, as though what I said was too stupid for words. But I dragged myself up, walked to the door.

It didn’t have a knob, or anything that could shield a genlock. It was just smooth dimatough, except around the edges where…I squinted. Yeah. Around the edges there was a seam where some…thing had melted ceramite or perhaps dimatough—which required higher temperatures but could be melted—to weld the door to the frame.

I hit it with the robot arm I was carrying. I didn’t think about it. I just hit it. Hard. Then again. Then again.

“Thena, please.” I became aware that the robot arm had become a few shreds of ceramite and wire and that—from the look of it—Jarl was standing prudently just outside the circle of flying debris, his arms akimbo, saying my name in a plaintive tone. “Please stop. You can’t break it.”

My arm, holding what remained of the robot arm, was tired. So tired I didn’t think I could raise it again. I gave the door a halfhearted kick, that didn’t even budge the seal, though it did seem to me to evoke a series of skittering sounds from the outside. Like those horrible spiders.

I swallowed hard. My foot hurt now. It wasn’t a good idea to kick ceramite doors with bare feet, a fact you’d think I’d remember. I turned around, to face Jarl, though I wasn’t sure what I was going to tell him. It’s just as well, because he just opened his arms and hugged me.

All right, we were both naked and it should have scared me, but it didn’t. The hug was the most sexless touch I’d ever experienced from that body, and as the warmth of his skin, the uncomfortably tight grip of his arms communicated itself to my mind, I realized that Jarl was that scared, that he wasn’t viewing this as hugging a naked female, but just as human comfort.

Still, it was Kit’s body, we were both naked, and Jarl had all those funny, funny ideas about us becoming a breeding pair of supermen or something. I pulled back a little, trying to extricate myself from the circle of his arms without being violent or even rude about it. In the situation in which we found ourselves, human unkindness was the last thing we needed.

I shifted my hands from his arms to his shoulders, in order to push gently away.

Movement under my fingers made me look. My first thought was spiders. My second thought was wordless terror as I jumped away. “They’re on you,” I said. “The little ones are all over you!”

TREMORS

“I know,” he said. And he was completely calm about it. “Are they on you?”

I was already feeling my arms, my body, my head under my hair. As soon as I’d jumped away, I’d started a pat down. I suspect it was instinctive. But I felt no movement anywhere, and shaking my head didn’t make anything fall out onto the floor.

I looked back up at Jarl, then stepped back, until I was as far away from him as I could be. “I’m clean,” I said, even as my mind processed the fact that we’d both been naked and unconscious in this room, probably for a good dozen hours. Why had they infested him and not me? It couldn’t be attraction to body heat, or they’d be on both of us. “Are they all over you?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Mostly my head, though some fall to my shoulders.”

It couldn’t even be attraction to the very weak electrical field that human brains generated. They’d be on me too. It had to be the genetics, but if it was the genetics, why would they concentrate on his head? His genes were the same all over his body, right?

No, I wasn’t an unlettered savage. I knew that some individuals were chimeras who had different genetics all over their bodies, but Jarl had been a designed individual and Kit was his clone, and I didn’t think that kind of makeup would be practical or acceptable. So, Kit was the same all over his body…The machines should be interested in his whole body.

I looked up and met with a very weird expression on Jarl’s face. It was a smile, I suppose, but it was the sort of smile you’d expect in someone who not only knew he was going to die in an atrocious way, but knew that he would endure the tortures of the damned on the way there, and that there was absolutely nothing he could do to avoid either.

“Don’t you understand?” he said. “The nanocytes are still active, and the nanocytes communicate with each other by a method that is used by computers. Electromagnetic communication. They…these things are attracted to it, they’re possibly trying to communicate with my brain directly. I don’t know. I feel…very odd. But I’ve felt very odd since I woke up in the
Hopper
. So I’m not sure they’re doing something, but it’s entirely possible they are.”

“If you think,” I told him, my voice more shrill than I intended, “that I’m going to be locked in here with three of you, you have another think coming. It’s bad enough that there’s you and Kit, but if your computer self is going to join the party, I’m going to do something we’ll both regret.”

He sighed. “I don’t know what you imagine we can do. We’re at the mercy of the computer and the peripherals. It’s possible it will realize we need to drink and eat if my vital signals go down. Or it’s possible it won’t. But whether it does or not is not under our control, and there’s nothing we can use to escape here. They took everything we had, every weapon.”

He was right on that, I thought. But then I looked around at the debris of the robot arm. I was being an idiot. My ability to assemble and create machinery had not only kept me relatively unscathed through my hell-raising childhood and youth, it had made me ultimately welcome in Eden and made it possible for me to travel with Kit. It was instinctive, meaning I could never put it into words. I just knew what worked together. And what didn’t.

And here I was in a room full of machinery and parts. Okay, so the light wasn’t the best in the world—it was low enough not to hurt Kit’s eyes. But there might be a solution for that in this room too. A lot of these server robots had lights, so people who saw them in deserted corridors, late at night, in hotels, didn’t just see a dark column moving towards them. Lighting them up tended to avoid collisions with guests who were much the worse for the wear.

At any rate, my throat hurt with dryness, and I was starting to feel distinctly peckish. Which meant that I needed something to distract me. And machines could usually distract me even in the worst circumstances.

I found a light first, in the front of one of the server robots. Extracting it and attaching a battery to it took a little longer, particularly when it came to finding a still-functioning battery.

After a while, Jarl seemed to take an interest in what I was doing, and stood up, as though to walk towards me, but I yelled, “Don’t. I don’t think those things will transfer to me, not if they are attracted to the nanocyte signals as you say, but I don’t want to try it out.”

He glowered a little, but as I turned the light on, even if it was aimed at the space in front of me, he seemed to lose any wish to help, and retreated to sit back down again. He rubbed the middle of his forehead with his fingertips, and I thought his head must hurt. Then I wondered if the little machines were causing that pain.

And if they were, what could I do?

I could get out of here.

First of all, I needed to figure out some sort of burner from these components. This was definitely easier said than done. For some reason it didn’t seem customary to equip cleaning and serving machinery commonly used in the hospitality industry three hundred years ago with lethal-force lasers. Who knew why? You’d think that one could find all sorts of useful things to do with killing lasers when it came to a resort hotel. Loud guest…zap. Rude customer…zap. Insufficiently clean lodger…zap.

Apparently though and much to my surprise, people who ran hotels were not like me, and weren’t interested in eliminating nuisances. Or at least not permanently.

I grumbled a bit at their failure of imagination, mostly because this place was starting to feel like a tomb, with Jarl sitting up against the wall, looking boneless and odd like a broken doll. I wondered if he was asleep or perhaps passed out, but frankly I didn’t even want to think about what would happen if the computer took control of him.

He might be emotionally twelve years old, but his personality enshrined in the computer definitely was. And it probably made sense, because not only didn’t the machine have human emotions—or at least I didn’t think so. No nerves, no instincts, nothing—but it hadn’t even been in touch with human behavior for three hundred years. So even if, once upon a time, it had had the memory of Jarl’s thoughts and emotions, now the only thing it would have would be very, very attenuated memories, most of them probably not even in that present and obvious part of itself that would be the equivalent of consciousness.

Meaning, once upon a time, since Jarl’s personality had been uploaded to it, it might have been able to fake human. Or at least to almost fake human. But now? Now it wouldn’t even know in which direction to point to find “human.” At best it would manage the more intellectual and detached sort of emotions, like boredom. But it had no gonads and no interest in women, beyond a remembered interest via Jarl. So, a twelve year old trying to make me do interesting stuff.

Think how much more interesting it could get, if he could control Jarl’s/Kit’s body and get a reaction from me?

I shuddered and I returned my attention to the machinery.

No lasers were no lasers. Again, reality is what it is, and after a certain point one can’t change it. One can adapt to reality and use it, or die. I could get some sharp bits of the machines to make passable knives, and bits of wire to make sheaths and straps for my ankles and arms. I wished very much I could make clothes too, but I was aware that this was silly.

Clothes have many uses, from bedazzling the members of the opposite—or same, depending on your preference—sex, to protecting the body in case of collision or abrasion…or of course, the vacuum of space. In this case, given that all I had at hand was wire, and little scraps of fabric that were designed as thermal insulation, and that at best they could be made into three tiny triangles to cover the more usually covered parts of the female body, none of those functions would be served. No, leave clothes alone.

Then I realized that my spectacular barbarian princess knives in their sheaths were quite useless. I couldn’t, after all, use them to stab machines. Even the smaller ones would do nothing but break, and let me dull the knife tip on floor or wall.

So I was magnificently equipped to fight off whoever opened our door—and why would they open our door?—provided they were living, breathing creatures, who probably couldn’t get in here, unless they had Jarl’s genetics, anyway. Right.

Did I ever say I was intelligent? No, I believe I’ve admitted that, like my late, very unlamented sire, I was cunning. I usually could find my way out of trouble because I could read other people, or know how to scare them. But here, the computer wasn’t people. And the chances of its—his?—sending people against us were slim to none. Actually the chances of its sending anything at all to open this door were slim to none, and I still had no idea how to get out of here.

I looked at Jarl again. Right. At least I could fashion something that would get rid of the spiders if they should open the door. Or at least something that would kill enough of them to make them stay away from me.

So I set about adding to my fabulous prehistoric weapons with a selection of hammers. Hammers are actually more useful than knives, if you must fight.

Unless you’re good at throwing the knives with unerring accuracy, you probably won’t get much joy out of them. But a hammer? If you can throw a hammer in the general direction of your foe, it doesn’t matter exactly where it hits, nor if the right bit is uppermost. If you hit someone with a heavy enough flung hammer, they will be at the very least distracted. If you manage accuracy of aiming, then you can kill someone.

You can kill someone with knives too, of course, but it’s a much more exact craft, and it must be performed up close and personal.

I had just fashioned a belt from wires, and hung it with hammers all around, when I heard Jarl speak.

His voice sounded very young and very scared, and the words echoed, forlorn, in this locked chamber, “Mother, I’m frightened.”