Engineering Infinity (16 page)

That caught my curiosity. So, for
the first time in a month, I sped up to realtime, swam up towards the hatch,
poked my way out through the tank meniscus, and kicked off along the corridor.

I noticed at once that something
was wrong: a couple of the guideway lights were flickering, and one of them was
actually dark. Where were the repair crews? Apart from myself, the corridor was
deserted. Halfway around the curve of the tunnel I saw something lying
motionless against a wall. It was a remora, a simple-minded surface cleaning
creature (a true
robot,
in the original sense of the
word). It hung crumpled beside a power point. Thinking it had run into
difficulty trying to hook up for a charge, I reached out for it - and recoiled.
Something had punched a hole through its carapace with a spike, right behind
the sensor dome. Peering at it, I cranked my visual acuity up to see a
noise-speckled void in place of its fingertip-sized cortex. Shocked, I picked
up the pathetic little bundle of plastic and carried it with me, hurrying
towards my destination.

Barrelling through the open hatch
into the dim-lit sick bay, I saw Doctor-Engineer Wo leaning against a surgical
framework. “Doctor!” I called. “Someone attacked this remora - I found it in
the B-zone access way. Can you -” I stopped.

The sick bay was lined on every
wall and ceiling with the honeycomb cells of surgical frames, the structures
our mechanics use in free-fall lieu of an operating table. They were all
occupied, their patients staring sightlessly towards the centre of the room,
xenomorph and anthrop alike unmoving.

Wo turned towards me slowly,
shuddering. “Ah. Lilith.” Its skin was sallow in the luciferine glow. “You’ve
come for your sister.”

“What’s” - a vestigial low-level
swallow
reflex made me pause - “what’s happened? What are
all these people doing here?”

“Take your sister. Please.” Wo
rolled sideways and pushed two of the frames aside, revealing a third,
sandwiched between them. I recognized you by the shape of your head, but there
was something odd about your thorax; in the twilight it was hard to tell. “You’d
better get her back to your module. I’ve done what I can for her without waking
her. If and when you start her up she’s going to be hungry. What you do about
that is up to you, but if you want my advice you won’t be there when she comes
to - if experience is anything to go by.”

I noticed for the first time that
Wo was not only ill; one of its tentacles was truncated, the missing tip
protected by a neatly-applied occlusive caul.

“What happened to your -”

“The bit rot has affected a third
of us, Lilith. You’re one of the lucky ones: there’s nothing better than a
thick blanket of water for cosmic ray shielding.”

“Bit rot?” I still didn’t
understand what was happening to us.

“Radiation-induced
dementia
. You may not be familiar with the condition:
dementia is a problem that used to affect our progenitors when their
self-repair mechanisms failed. Decaying neural networks malfunction by
exhibiting loss of short term memory, disinhibition, mood swings, violence.
Eventual loss of motor control and death. In us, the manifestations are
different. Our techné triggers a
hunger
reflex,
searching for high-purity materials with which to build replacements for the
damaged, purged mechanocytes. And our damage control reflex prioritizes motor
control and low-level functions over consciousness. We’re quite well-designed,
if you think about it. I’ve replaced your sister’s techné with fresh marrow and
mothballed it: she’s stable for the time being, and if you can find her
feedstock that isn’t contaminated with short half-life nuclei she’ll be able to
rebuild herself. But you should get her to a place of safety, and hide yourself
too.”

“Why?” I blinked stupidly.

“Because the techné I shoved up
her marrow is some of the last uncontaminated material on the ship,” Wo pointed
out acidly. “There are people on this ship who’ll crack her bones to feed on it
before long. If she stays here I won’t be able to protect her.”

“But -”

I looked around. Not all the
silent occupants of the surgical frames were unconscious. Eyes, glittering in
the darkness, tracked me like gunsights. Empty abdominal sacks, bare rib cages,
manipulators curled into claws where Doctor-Engineer Wo had flensed away the
radiation-damaged tissue. The blind, insensate hunger of primitive survival
reflexes -
feed and repair
- stared at me instead of
conscious minds. Suddenly my numb feet, the persistent pins and needles in my
left arm, acquired a broader perspective.

“They’re hungry,” explained Wo. “They’ll
eat you without a second thought, because they’ve got nothing with which to
think it - not until they’ve regrown a neural core around their soul chip.” It
waved the stump of a tentacle at me. “Jordan and Mirabelle have been rounding
up the worst cases, bringing them here to dump on me, but they’ve been
increasingly unforthcoming about events outside of late. I think they may be
trying to keep themselves conscious by...” A tentacle uncurled, pointed at the
pathetic husk of my remora. “Take your sister and go, Lilith. Stay out of sight
and hope for rescue.”

“Rescue -”

“Eventually the most demented
will die, go into shutdown. Some will recover. If they find feedstock. Once the
situation equilibrates, we can see about assembling a skeleton crew to ensure
we arrive. Then there’ll be plenty of time to prospect for high-purity rare
earth elements and resurrect the undead. If there’s anything left to resurrect.”

“But can’t I help -” I began,
then I saw the gleam in Wo’s photoreceptor. The curl and pulse of tentacles,
the sallow discoloration of its dermal integument. “You’re ill too?”

“Take your sister and go
away
.” Wo hissed and rolled upside down, spreading its
tentacles radially around its surgical mouthparts. “Before I eat you. I’m
so
hungry
...”

I grabbed your surgical frame and
fled.

I carried you back to our module
without meeting anybody, for which I was happy. Once inside, I was able to turn
up the light level and see what had happened. You were a mess, Lamashtu; were I
one of our progenitors I would weep tears of saline to see you so. Ribs hollow,
skin slack and bruised, eyes and cheeks sunken. Wo had split open your legs,
exposed the gleaming metal of your femurs, the neatly diagrammed attachment
points of your withered muscle groups. There was a monitor on the frame, and
with the help system I managed to understand what it was telling me. Muscles
damaged, skin damaged, but that wasn’t all. Once upon a time our foremother
bunked atop a nuclear reactor in flight from Mars to Jupiter; the damage here
was worse. Your brain... there was not much there. Eighty percent of it
dissolved into mildly radioactive mush. Wo decanted it, leaving your cranial
space almost empty. But your soul chip was intact, with your laid-down backup:
given a few litres of inert, non-decaying minerals you could grow a new cortex
and awaken as from a dream of death. But where could I find such materials?

I have an ionization sensor. As I
swept it around the module I saw that even our bed is radioactive. If you were
to eat its aluminium frame and build a new brain from it, your mind would be a
crazy patchwork of drop-outs and irrational rage.

I needed to find you pure
feedstock. But according to Wo, the entire ship was as contaminated as if it
had been caught in the near-lethal blast radius of a supernova, or flown for a
quarter million years close to the active core of our galaxy.

There was one obvious place to
look for pure feedstock, of course: inside the cortical shells of those
survivors who were least affected by the magnetar burst. Inside my head, or
people like me. What did Wo say about the symptoms? Anger and disinhibition
first, loss of coordination only late in the day. I ought to be able to trust
those who aren’t angry or hungry. But I looked at you and wondered, how many of
them would also have friends or lovers to nurse? Any friendly face might be a
trap. Even a group of rational survivors, working together, might -

I shook my head. Trying to
second-guess the scale of the breakdown was futile. There might be other places
where feedstock could be found, deep inside the core of the ship. The
never-used, mothballed fusion reactors: they would be well-shielded, wouldn’t
they? Lots of high-purity isotopes there. And with enough working brains and
hands, surely we could repair any damage long before they were needed for
deceleration. The cold equations seemed simple: with enough brains, we can
repair almost any damage - but with a skeleton crew of senile zombies, we’re
doomed.

So I collected a bundle of tools
and left you to go exploring.

The darkened corridors and empty
eye-socket spaces of the
Lansford Hastings’
public
spaces are silent, the chatter and crosstalk of the public channels muted and
sparse. They’ve been drained of air and refilled with low-pressure oxygen
(nitrogen is transmuted too easily to carbon-14, I guess). There’s no chatter
audible to my electrosense: anyone here is keeping quiet. I pass doors that
have been sealed with tape, sprayed over with a symbol that’s new to me: a red “Z”
in a circle, evidence that the dementia cleanup teams have been at work here.
But for the most part the ship appears to be empty and devoid of life - until I
reach the F Deck canteen.

Eating is a recreational and
social activity: we may be able to live on an injection of feedstock and
electrolytes and a brisk fuel cell top-up, but who wants to do that? The
canteen here mainly caters to maintenance workers and technicians, hard-living
folks. In normal circumstances it’d be full of social diners. I hesitate on the
threshold. These circumstances aren’t normal - and the diners aren’t social.

There’s a barricade behind the
open hatch. Flensed silvery bones, some of them drilled and cracked, woven
together with wire twisted into sharp-pointed barbs. A half-dissected skull
stared at me with maddened eyes from inside the thicket of body parts, mandible
clattering against its upper jaw. It gibbers furiously at teraherz frequencies,
shouting a demented stream of consciousness: “Eat! Want meat! Warmbody foodbody
look! Chew ‘em chomp ‘em cook ‘em down! Give me
feed me
!”
Whoops
, I think, as I grab for the hatch rim and
prepare to scramble back up the tunnel. But I’m slow, and the field-expedient
intruder alarm has done its job: three of the red-sprayed hatches behind me
have sprung open, and half a dozen mindlessly slavering zombies explode into
the corridor.

I don’t waste time swearing. I
can tell a trap when I stick my foot in one: someone who isn’t brain-dead
organized this. But they’ve picked the wrong deck-hand to eat. You and I,
Lamashtu, we have inherited certain skills from our progenitor Freya - and she
from a distant unremembered sib called Juliette - that we do not usually
advertise. They come in handy at this point, our killer reflexes. Hungry but
dumb, the zombies try to swarm me, mouthparts chomping and claws tearing. I
raise my anti-corrosion implement, spread the protective shield, and pull the
trigger. Chlorine trifluoride will burn in
water
,
scorch rust: what it does to robot flesh is ghastly. I have a welding lamp,
too, an X-ray laser by any other name. Brief screams and unmodulated hissing
assault me from behind the shield, gurgling away as their owners succumb to
final shutdown.

The corridor cleared, I turn back
to the barricade. “This isn’t helping,” I call. “We should be repairing the -”

A horrid giggle triggers my
piloerectile reflex, making the chromatophores in the small of my back spike
up. “Meaty. Spirited. Clean-thinking.”

The voice comes from behind the
barricade (which has fallen silent, eyes clouded). “Jordan? Is that you?”

“Mm, it’s Lilith Longshanks! Bet
there’s lots of eating on those plump buttocks of hers, what do you say, my
pretties?”

An appreciative titter follows. I
shudder, trying to work out if there’s another route through to the reactor
control room. I try again. “You’ve got to let me through, Jordan. I know where
there’s a huge supply of well-shielded feedstock we can parcel out. Enough to
get everyone thinking clearly again. Let me through and -” I trail off. There
is
another route, but it’s outside the hull. It’s your
domain, really, but if I install one of your two soul chips, gain access to
your memories, I can figure it out.

“I don’t think so, little buffet.”
The charnel hedge shudders as something forces itself against it from the other
side. Something
big
. If Jordan has been eating,
trying desperately to extract uncontaminated isotopes, what has he done with
the surplus? Where has he sequestrated it? What has he made with it? In my mind’s
eye I can see him, a cancer of mindlessly expanding, reproducing mechanocytes
governed by a mind spun half out of control, lurking in a nest of undigestible
left-overs as he waits for food -

I look at the bulging wall of
bones, and my nerve fails: I cut the teflon shield free, cover my face, and
launch myself as fast as I can through the floating charred bodies that fill
the corridor, desperate to escape.

Which brings us to the present,
Lamashtu, sister-mine.

I’ve got your soul - half of it -
loaded in the back of my head. I’ve been dreaming of you, dreaming
within
you, for days now.

In an hour’s time I am going to
take my toolkit and go outside, onto the hull of the
Lansford
Hastings
, under the slowly moving stars.

I’m going to go into your maze
and follow the trail of pipes and coolant ducts home to the Number Six reactor,
and I’m going to force my way into the reactor containment firewall and through
the neutron shield. And I’m going to strip away every piece of heavily-shielded
metal I can get my hands on, and carry it back to you. When you’re better, when
you’re back to yourself and more than a hungry bag of rawhead reflexes, you can
join me. It’ll go faster then. We can help the others -