Lights in the Deep (37 page)

Dessert was had on the sofa lounger, where sweetened liquors loosened their tongues even more. Atreus noted that everything seemed well-prepared in advance, for which Hypatia took full credit.

“You never used to be like that,” Atreus chided as he pulled her into the crux of his arm. “Whenever we left it up to you to make the plans, things were only ever half-ready.” It had made things marvelously chaotic.

“I know what you like, husband,” Hypatia said, snuggling closer. “I figured as long as we’re getting this second chance, it’s time for me to make sure things are exactly the way they ought to be.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Atreus felt the chill return, if only for a moment. He considered.

“Prove it.”

Hypatia laughed—a sparkling, low, and womanly sound. “Whatever do you mean?”

“You tell me.”

Hypatia sat up and looked at Atreus with a raised eyebrow. Then she seemed to catch his drift, and her smile arched naughtily.

• • •

Hypatia was sleeping—naked and perfect.

Atreus quietly extracted himself from their bed, padded to the portal to their room, and palmed for exit.

Once outside, in the bowels of the complex, he located Erebos with remarkable ease. They walked—one on legs, the other floating—the lights of the complex dimmed to a comfortable approximation of dusk.

“I trust your reunion has gone well?”

“Too well, my son.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You and the others really don’t understand us humans, do you?”

“You overstate the obvious, Father.”

“Too right. Erebos, she’s me, isn’t she?”

Erebos stopped, his cowled head still staring directly down the corridor.

“She is who she is. She is your woman.”

“Bull. It’s too perfect.
She’s
too perfect.”

“When she was alive before, you loved her as if she were a goddess.”

“She was. To
me.
But it wasn’t a one-hundred percent fit. No marriage ever is. How long did it take you to modify the copy? The memories? Desires? She knows me too well—is too able to give me what I want. Even some things which I never had the nerve to ask for.”

Erebos remained floating and silent, only the gentle ruffling of the hem of his cloak indicating that he registered Atreus’s words.

“I told the others you were too smart to be so easily fooled. That we had to bring out more of the ‘problems’. But we could only make so many changes before the template matrix fell apart. We obliterated three prototype copies before we made the ultimate transfer.”

Atreus suddenly felt ill. Of everything his offspring had ever done to him, this felt like the worst.

“Erebos, it is obscene. Do you realize what you’ve done?”

“We’ve given you back the one thing you always wanted most.”

“You’ve given me a monster!”

Atreus’s yelling reverberated down the corridor.

Erebos turned. “A monster? I do hope you won’t ever use that kind of language in her presence. She’s very happy to see you, and rejection at this point could throw her into an emotional imbalance from which she might not recover. Not with how fresh the patterns are, and how susceptible they are to major hormonal stress. You too, by the way. All this anger and overreaction is not good for you.”

“But Erebos, how could you dare?”

“We dared because we were alone, and we faced an unknowable danger. Without your help, we do not know what will become of us, nor what will become of Earth—which is our one, overriding concern in this entire matter, because it is our legacy to the universe. Of all the programming you put into us, that was the one directive we could not remove. Nor would we. The reclamation of Earth—properly, judiciously—is the culmination of our existence. Giving you back your Hypatia, even if ‘monstrous’ in our method, seemed a means to an end.”

Atreus stopped, his fists balled at his sides. “I wish you’d left me in the Vault.”

“As I said before, father, that was my original vote. The decision to revive you—and mother—was one of majority rule.”

“Who else dissented besides you?”

“Cadmus and Aigle.”

“That was it?”

“Yes.”

Atreus continued to glare at his progeny, a cold and bitter taste on the palate of his soul. Then he shook his head and walked away, unable to find words sufficient to express his disgust.

• • •

Atreus couldn’t bring himself to return to his quarters. There was no way he could look Hypatia in the eye again. Not now. Not with his suspicion having been confirmed. She was an abomination, created for the purpose of leveraging his emotion to benefit the children.

Sweeping through the mostly-empty sub-lunar installation, Atreus eventually found an airlock to the surface, populated with newly-manufactured rovers and suits which seemed to have been arranged in anticipation of his awakening. The airlock was silent as he donned a suit, boots, gloves, helmet, then unsealed the ramp and took a rover up onto the regolith. Just as he’d done almost two thousand years before.

Atreus drove with silent determination. Using the computer in the suit he triangulated his position, then engaged the flight thrusters. They stirred a gentle cloud of gray-white dust as the rover lifted and shot forward. Within moments he was moving at over a thousand kilometers an hour, the surface careening past as he flew towards his destination. There were no questions from the children, no one asking him what he was doing. Had there been any, he’d have ignored them.

It took three hours to reach the site of the accident.

The old rover still lay where it had rolled. The twisted metal looked as if it had barely been touched in the centuries since his death. Tracks in the regolith still showed where the children had set down and dug him out from under. Peering closely, Atreus could even see his old blood: pooled, freeze-dried and blackened by age in the airless vacuum.

He screamed at the old rover and kicked one of its bent wheels, the craft shifting slightly. He should have died here. He should have stayed dead. Whatever life he’d had when the accident had occurred, it was denied him now. He was just a tool for creatures who had no concept of ethics or truth. Even Erebos couldn’t grasp the wrongness of what they had done.

Staring at the ancient wreck, tears of hot rage on his face, Atreus fumed.

What was he going to do?

He returned to the rover and reclined in its bucket seat, gazing up into the blackness of space. Just as he had upon awakening on the dais. Eventually he closed his eyes, the anger gradually fading into a profound sense of fatigue.

“Husband,” said a familiar voice.

Atreus startled, and nearly fell out of the rover. He had dozed off.

Looking about he saw a second space-suited figure standing near the wreck of the old rover, its arms crossed. The face bowl was mirrored against the sun’s glare.

“Go away,” Atreus spat.

“Is that the way to treat the woman who shares your bed?”

“The woman who shared my bed has been dead for numerous lifetimes. You are
not
her.”

“Are you sure? I look like her. I remember most of her.”

“Do you have any idea what you are? What the children have made you into?”

“I am aware. Erebos explained it to me in my second month, after I asked too many questions. The others wanted him to stay silent, but he never was a very good liar.”

“Yet you still pretend to be my wife.”

The suited figured lowered and spread its arms in appeal.

“I am her in every way that could possibly matter.”

“But—”

“Do you believe in the afterlife, Atreus?”

“You know I don’t.”

“I remember you not believing, just as I remember me not believing either. But in the time since they revived me, I have begun to wonder. When I was a girl my father used to make our family attend services at the local Eastern Orthodox church. I remember hearing about the myth of the resurrection. Did I ever tell you that?”

“No.”

“Yet I remember it. How is that possible?”

Atreus could not answer.

“It’s true that the children spent countless man-hours meticulously modifying the copy before they downloaded it into me. They knew what to look for, and how to change the overlapping patterns to fit the new perspective. Your memories became my memories. I’ve seen exactly how they did it. I’ve seen the models they used. If you saw them yourself you’d know: the procedure should have failed.”

“What do you mean?”

“The copy was an incomplete prototype. They ran out of time, and they downloaded an incomplete prototype. Erebos said he half expected to have to kill me upon awakening, because there was every indication I’d be insane. But I wasn’t. Not only do I think like me, I
feel
like me, husband.”

Atreus stared at the thing that claimed to be his wife. It was grotesque. It was trying to sway him. He opened his mouth to rebuke the chimera, but was silenced as his helmet radio beeped.

“Both of you, please come quickly.”

“What is it, Bion?” Hypatia said.

“The inbound vessel. It has begun transmitting. It knows we’re here.”

• • •

Atreus stared coldly at the wall screen. He’d not said a word to the chimera since they’d boarded their separate rovers and returned to the children’s’ subsurface complex.

“They order us to surrender,” Kalypso said bluntly.

“I heard the voice message,” Atreus said.

“Why would they do this?”

“I think it’s pretty obvious,” Hypatia said. “Their ancestors fled under attack from the automated defense systems. If they can detect us they are most likely assuming we are a remnant of those defenses. Or a new product of a self-perpetuating network. It’s easy enough to see that no humans remain alive on Earth. They are coming ready for a fight.”

“Father,” Erebos said, “we have no weapons. You must make contact now, and convince them that we mean them no harm.”

“No,” Atreus said.

“Father.”

“Go to hell, Erebos. Kalypso. All of you. I owe you nothing.”

“We have given you—”

“You’ve given me nightmares. Waking, and otherwise. You betrayed me when you put me into the Vault the first time. You betrayed me a second time when you created this…
person,
to influence and placate me. I don’t care if the ship is prepared for battle. Maybe they’d be doing the universe a favor if they wiped this complex—and everyone in it—off the face of the moon.”

Seven cloaks flared and rippled.

Kalypso and several others closed on Atreus until they nearly blocked out the overhead lights.

“You will do it, or you will die a second time,” Kalypso said coldly.

Atreus laughed at her. “Finally admitting to the first murder, daughter?”

Kalypso’s cloak fluttered wildly.

“Wait,” Hypatia said, rushing to stand protectively between Atreus and the children. “I’ll talk to the ship.”

“We already agreed not to do that,” Erebos said. “They won’t have any record of who you are. Who you were.”

“Does it matter? A human face is a human face.”

“Human faces can be simulated,” Atreus said.

“We dared not employ such subterfuge,” Telamon said.

Atreus began laughing again, this time much harder. “You dared not! Such duplicitous madness, children. My greatest failure was never devising in you the ability to truly distinguish between right and wrong. You’re computers. You’ve always been computers. Computers don’t have consciences. Your logic dooms you.”

“Enough,” said Doris, her purple cloak still flaring in distress. “If the ship knows our location then it could deploy weapons as it sees fit. We must talk to it now, before our window of opportunity closes.”

Hypatia nodded solemnly. A small camera telescoped out of the floor, rising above the wall screen and aiming down at Hypatia where she sat in her chair, wearing the same robe Atreus had seen her wear on the first day.

“You may proceed,” Erebos said.

She looked into the camera.

“My name is Hypatia Andropolous, wife to Atreus Andropolous. I do not know if any of you know who that was, but I ask in Atreus’s name that you come to us with weapons sheathed. We mean you no harm. This is a research and monitoring facility that was built after the war. There are no automated killing systems in operation on Earth, nor the moon. If you can hear and understand me please respond.”

Many minutes ticked by in silence as the children relayed the message via radio to the ship, which was still beyond the orbit of Saturn.

Finally a picture resolved itself on the wall screen. The woman was young, of indeterminate Asian extraction, and her face was stern. She had on an olive-drab single-piece uniform with a cluster of yellow stars on a red emblem across one breast. She spoke a rapid sing-song which sounded to Atreus’s ears like Korean, though the inflections and many of the words sounded foreign. Perhaps it was a mish-mash of dialects from across Southeast Asia?

“Translate,” Bion said.

“I’m trying,” said yellow-cloaked Aigle.

“If you have to,” Kalypso said, “tap the Vault.”

More minutes spent in silence.

“I believe she merely repeated the same automated call for our surrender,” Aigle finally said.

Atreus smirked.

“If these people are who I suspect they are,” he said, “no amount of talking will save us. The leaders of the Workers’ Party of Korea also fled Earth when the nukes fell. Some of them may have followed a trail to the Kuiper.”

“You believe their ideology could have survived this long?” Erebos said.

“It’s possible. Especially in a resource-scarce and controlled environment. Space habitats are communes by default. You’ve also never known communists the way I’ve known communists, son. They can be fanatical.”

“Then what is their intention?”

“They come to conquer and control.”

“That’s pure speculation,” Doris said.

“But he may be right,” Erebos said. “It would explain the demand for surrender.”

Hypatia looked ill. “Communists. Husband, I can’t believe you would sit by and willingly allow the Earth to fall into their hands. They’re part of the reason there was a war in the first place.”