Lacuna: The Prelude to Eternity (12 page)

Fingers, joints, knuckles. The humerus was cut off just where her real limb began; it flared into a thin cup that seemed too small to her, a reminder of just how atrophied her limb had become, how thin it was since the muscle had been removed. The prosthetic ended in thin strands of circuitry, tiny tendrils that would be implanted. Around that was a metal shoulder, designed to fit over her existing one and augment it, along with thin metal sheets to anchor it.

The tips of the fingers were sharp claws housed in a metal sheath.

Slowly, piece by piece, a rough approximation of a Toralii skeleton was laid out, simplified and made of metal, reduced down to Human size. Every component was forged with the patience of an immortal being—errorless and tireless, repetitive, simple actions creating complex devices. Then the construct began to spin a form of skin, layer upon layer of paper-thin sheets of metal, each one covered with circuitry, insulation, and then sprayed with a protective filament that hardened almost instantly.

“That is super creepy,” said Liao, watching the construct chitter and click as it spun out a new limb for her.

“I’ve gotten used to it.” Saeed observed the process with fascination. “I quite like seeing them work, actually. It’s amazing how precise and detailed they are and how wondrous the kinds of things they can create. Anything from a new piece of computer hardware to a main battle tank, or even larger. The Toralii Alliance used thousands of these things to build their ships, whole swarms of them building starship after starship.”

“Logistics,” said Liao. “The ultimate tool for winning wars. That’s an impressive and terrifying industrial capacity.”

Saeed tapped on one of the medical consoles, bringing up the results of a diagnostic routine. The arm twitched and spasmed as it was tested. As the test ran, he turned back to her. “Even worse, I don’t think we truly understand their full capacity yet. The only thing working in our favour is that, while they might be able to replace their losses very rapidly, their drone technology isn’t trusted—they employ constructs throughout their vessels, but they’re never given any kind of authority or command. They must have crew. Crew take time to train and can make mistakes.”

There weren’t that many Humans left. Even if every single survivor was a trained crewman and able to serve on their ships, the number of vessels the Humans could field was depressingly low. Constructs could ease some of the burden, but how far could their help go? After Ben, Liao didn’t trust them either. “Do you think we could have fully automated ships in the future?”

Saeed’s expression was a mixture of cautious hope and whimsy. “If they did, I would largely be out of a job. The military wouldn’t need butchers to sew up the living and give a time/date stamp to the dead. Strangely enough, I welcome such a sea change.”

“As would I. People talk about increased mechanisation taking something away from war, as though stripping it of the last lingering vestiges of the honour and nobility it had in the First World War. They consider Predator drones to be impersonal, dishonourable weapons, cowards’ weapons, the tools of the lesser man.” She regarded the tiny, withered stump of her arm. “So say people who have never seen the insanity, the illogic, the terror and stupidity of war. They know only the safe comforts of a warm bed and a land protected by cruel men ready to annihilate, with extreme prejudice, any threats to that land. War is a place where people die like dogs for no good reason.”

“I couldn’t have said it better,” said Saeed. “Hopefully, more of them die than us so that misery is not ours to bear.”

“That’s not enough for us now. There are so few Humans remaining. We have a technological
and
numerical disadvantage. We need industrialisation on a grand scale.” Liao watched as the construct lay more of its synthetic skin in layers, building the prosthesis. It was strikingly artificial, with exposed pistons and tendons and wires. The skin did not protect as a Human’s might, as an outside barrier. Instead, it was laid directly over the pistons, circuits, and mechanical pieces, building them up layer by layer.

Finally, Liao addressed the elephant in the room. “I don’t know. It doesn’t look biological. It really does look archaic, as though its secret power source was steam or something. If this process can build spaceships, why can’t it build a limb that
looks
Toralii? Or Human?”

“It almost can.” Saeed grimaced slightly as though admitting some embarrassing secret. “The Uncanny Valley is a well-recognised trope when designing artificial things intended to look natural. Have you seen movies with CG people in them? Even though they use motion-capture and facial scanning and have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, they always look fake. Human beings have a truly amazing ability to analyse faces and forms. We can instantly tell if something is pretending to be something it’s not, and this discovery is often unsettling for us. The Toralii, apparently, have a similar issue, and the way they get around it is by not trying to blend in although realistic prostheses are created on occasion. For the most part, though, a prosthetic limb’s artificialness is acknowledged and accepted. There is no cultural shame in losing a limb, so they deliberately craft them in ways which reflect that this body modification is the product of a machine, not nature. They’re practically minded in this regard, adding scanners, sensors, sometimes weapons; a prosthesis can even be a fashion statement in some circles.”

“Weapons?” That last bit caught her attention. “You mean the claws, right?”

“More than that. We chose this particular design because it’s rugged, low power, and highly modular. The forearm can have all manner of implants, including a limited-capacity, low-power plasma pistol. Those take some time getting used to. The pistol pops out of the casing, fires, retracts, etc. when a ‘virtual muscle’ is squeezed. Training the brain to move something that hasn’t been there your whole life is difficult and takes time to master. The weapons are almost always unloaded for the first year of a new installation.”

“We don’t have a year for me to get used to the thing.”

“This is a good point, and it seems unnecessary to have one.” Saeed smiled politely. “I’m sure a pistol add-in would be useful, but why not keep your sidearm for now, Captain?”

Liao had seen firsthand the incredible damage plasma pistols could do, melting a hole straight through one of the
Beijing
’s bulkheads. That kind of firepower would be an asset for her to have, especially discretely. “For now,” she agreed. “But fabricate an add-on anyway. I’d like to start training with it as soon as possible.”

“Let’s just try with the base arm first, shall we, and work on add-ons later.” He regarded her curiously. “You’re more impatient these days.”

Her reply came without much thought. “I guess nearly getting burned to death makes me realise I don’t have anywhere near as much time as I need to accomplish everything in my life that I want to do.”

“Well, what is it you want to do?”

The construct finished its weaving. Liao regarded its product, steel grey, a strange matte metal, its surfaces smooth and perfectly machined. It lay on the ground, palm up, limp and inert as though it were freshly sliced off a living creature. Its fingers, claws retracted, seemed to reach out towards the bulkhead of the medical facility, and Liao couldn’t help but imagine it was weakly struggling to escape. It was a metal mirror of her own arm, burned off on the surface of Velsharn, neatly sliced from her body.

“I want to kill a lot more Toralii.”

Saeed’s face tightened, and he pointedly avoided continuing that line of discussion. “There’re some tests we must run on the prosthetic before we install it. Maybe have some dinner? I’ll have one of the orderlies deliver it to your quarters.”

“I have quarters on the
Rubens
?”

“We’ve allocated you some,” he said. “Temporarily. They’re the VIP quarters. Slightly below the Captain’s lodgings in terms of luxuries, but I think you’ll find them sufficient to your needs.”

“Those will be more than fine.” She stood and, giving the metal hand one more look, departed.

The quarters
were
fine, with thick sheets and comfortable pillows filling a bed sized for a Toralii, but despite the luxury, sleep came roughly. Liao tossed and turned, eyes closed but unable to truly rest. Just when her body started to relax, pins and needles grew on an arm that no longer existed. She tried ignoring it, tried rubbing the stump, tried a mild sedative. Nothing seemed to take away the ache. She felt heat, cold, cramping… any number of sensations, even though there was no flesh to relay them.

That was a new thing, that sensation. Saeed had warned her, and she had prepared for pain. Instead, it was every other feeling—distinctly uncomfortable, certainly, but drugs could take pain away. Nothing seemed to soothe the itching.

She couldn’t possibly have thought she would ever miss the tank.

Four hours wasn’t much when it came to sleep. She had done greater things with less. She would endure. Eventually, after fitful squirming, Liao dressed and returned to the med-bay. One of the advantages of her very short hair was that the effects of diminished rest were not compounded by the necessity of taking time to make herself presentable, not that anyone would see her on the
Rubens
anyway.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” she asked Saeed as she returned. He and Saara were waiting for her by the completed prosthetic.

“I daydream about sleep,” he said. Liao didn’t laugh. Saeed smiled widely. “A joke from medical school.”

“For some of us, it’s not a joke,” Liao said.

[“Are you well rested?”] asked Saara. [“The device will be, in a limited sense, interacting directly with your neural tissue. The most critical time is the first few days and weeks, and most especially, the first few hours. It is best you are at your baseline when exposed to the link so that the device ‘learns’ how to work with you.”]

“Baseline for me is pretty tired,” said Liao, “so mission accomplished, I suppose.” Her eyes fell upon the prosthetic, now resting on a white cloth draped over one of the examination benches, lit by overhead lights. The tendrils of its cables ran into a computer. “How did the testing go?”

“It worked flawlessly. Piped the neural links into a test bed, ran some diagnostics. The articulators do the job pretty well. They squeeze like regular muscles and, according to the tests, should be linked up to the same nerve endings as the original limb, so the amount of discomfort you experience should be minimal.”

“Given how I slept last night, minimal discomfort would be a great goal to aim for.”

Saara frowned sympathetically. [“You were in pain?”]

“Every single other sensation but,” she said. “Which is very odd.”

Saeed only nodded thoughtfully. “Not entirely unexpected. Everyone experiences it differently, from what I’ve read.” He tapped on the computer’s keyboard. “Right. Ready for this?”

Ready as she was ever going to be. “Sure. What do I do?”

“Lie down on the bed and try not to move too much.”

She did so, resting the stump near the device. Saara adjusted Liao’s forearm, getting it comfortable, and aligning the prosthetic to the stump of her limp. Seeing the device up close brought out the detail; the metal skin was cut with tiny grooves, almost invisible to the naked eye. The device was incredibly elaborate, despite its outward appearance, a juxtaposition of technology levels. The device was both very primitive—exposed metal, bare rods and pistons—and quite strangely advanced. Compared to her real arm, the prosthetic was oversized and awkward, and she imagined that the difference in dimensions would take some getting used to.

The tendrils of the device snaked out toward her. Saeed injected a local anaesthetic into her stump—she barely felt the needle’s entrance, truth be told—and she watched in curious fascination as the interface cables slipped past her skin, burrowing into her flesh. She could
feel
the cables move inside her, squirming around her bone, twisting and aligning, linking up with the real nerves that remained.

A sensation of spreading numbness was the first thing she felt, moving out from her new fingers. Pins and needles sprung up all along the metal; the device jerked as it turned on, and instinctively, Liao clenched her new fist to avoid the painful tingling.

The prosthetic complied instantly, metal fingers closing in on themselves. She opened and closed the hand experimentally. It was as though she had never been wounded. Her new limb felt so natural to her. The fingers moved just like her flesh ones had. The wrist turned, the elbow bent, everything was as it had been. Not even… it was more: stronger, tougher, more sensitive.

However, it was less, too, in some way she could not quantify. Replacing parts of herself with a machine seemed to be denying some part of her humanity. It wasn’t just that it was a Toralii arm poorly resized for her. It was taking something from her, a leak in her soul.

Out of all the feelings she had anticipated, that hollow emptiness was not one.

She decided to replace that emptiness with ambitions. Eden had broken her—she had put a pistol to her temple, and only the vaguest whispers of self-preservation had kept her alive. She had a chance at making up for that moment of weakness. The hour of her redemption had come.