The Forever Watch (49 page)

Will I be able to tell when my mind is not a mind anymore and is only a computer?

Or in the end, will my consciousness be indistinguishable from the ascendance of Archie's virtual thoughts?

33

It never stops. My body eats itself. The next time my lion returns to me, I can see my degeneration reflected in his eyes. He is already grieving.

Karla was wrong. I may not be going as quickly as Meena, but my decline is faster than in “the average case.”

Barrens comes and goes, and too soon even the gentlest kiss bruises me, even the softest caress.

By now, it takes a small army to keep me going. They try not to look at me directly or touch me, except for Lyn and Hennessy, who always put a hand on my hand or touch my shoulder, my wrist. My attendants are repulsed; it is all they can do to treat me like a busted machine. If I am human, it is a reminder that their lives too will end in pain and suffering.

Every time he returns, Barrens takes a deep breath, as is his way, and throws himself into being what I need. He sets aside the grim, bloody mantle of being an assassin and all his doubts and pain, so that he can smile when he looks at me. He joins my friends in helping me to eat. They tell me stories. Listen to mine. They do not seem to care that the woman they knew is being replaced, little by little, transmuted to plastech in the form of mirror-shine chrome, pearly-metal alloys, and coal-black composites.

I am a sight, I know. I see better than they can, through optical diodes and sensors in multiple spectra of light and radiation. A slender figure. A woman in shape. She is naked, but does not seem to be because so little exposed skin is left to see. Wires and tubes project out of her spine, out of the base of her skull. The bandages on the eyes have come off—they are there, just spheres of crystallized protein and nanites: petrified tissue.

Karla and a half dozen of the most skilled Behavioralists tinker with my friends' perceptions, condition their fear responses downward, increase their empathy and the effects of far-off sentimental memories from when we were young. Karla does not tell me, but I watch it happen. Walls have no meaning to me anymore.

She does not do the same for Barrens. What does she think of his struggle not to break apart in front of me? I watch her watching our private moments in her head: Barrens reading to me, or when he nerves himself up to carefully, carefully lower his great bulk onto my bed, trying not to disturb the plethora of cables, wires, and tubes, so that he can hold me while he sleeps.

When I speak, I rarely do so with this failing body's diaphragm, voice box, and mouth. It is easier and less painful to speak through the organs of the ship, thoughts transmitted through the Network.

When I move, it is not with muscles and tendons acting on bones. My mind calls on the ship's gravity simulators to lift me and float me along—our artificial gravity, after all, is merely the result of gigantic psi amplifiers projecting a telekinetic field along the vector the Builders chose to use as “down.”

All the while, Archie grows geometrically, her tendrils adapting more of the previously untapped might of the alien computers spread throughout the vastness of the Noah. I am aware of the ebb and flow of power and data and gravity and light and air and water.

 

 

I watch the real-world battles from afar, with the ship's eyes; I listen with countless biomechanoid ears.

Is it all illusion? The life and death of each individual organism is tragic only in the context of the small, only by locality, only by how many relationships are severed. But I can feel what the Noah feels, and there is so much more than that. I am a vastness contained, swimming through the ocean of space-time. I see the light of dead stars, shifted up to blues in front of me and down to reds behind.

Canaan beckons in the distance. The computations are clear. Eight hundred and twelve years more, according to the original calculations. It is now even farther away in time than that because all these disturbances are using up the ship's reactor mass at an increased rate—which means that the possible acceleration the psychic propulsion drive can accomplish at the end of the journey has decreased. We will have to start the deceleration many years earlier now, to prevent the Noah from overshooting our destination. It will be a slower journey overall, which means even more time for a cramped, limited population in this closed space, the collective psyche of which will require tighter controls, more drugs, more psychological manipulation, to push down the aggressions and conflicts and unfulfilled desires of humans and their caged lives.

A black spot remains in my senses, part of the mental blocks set into place to prevent me from knowing the last secret. Something is attached to the ship—something not originally part of the Builders' design. I am not permitted to see it or interact with it. A mass, a misshapen tumor, disrupting the sinuous lines of the ship.

I have traced out the edge of where the built-in security of the Command upload will respond. Archie has mapped it out. I think, if I chose, I could pull it away and look and know.

It won't help anyone though, knowing. It won't change anything.

So I choose not to undo that part of the ISec conditioning. If I change my mind later, I believe it would take Archie all of a second's work. She knows it already.

I think about secrets often. A secret that could make too many people give up. We've already got so much destructive behavior with Mincemeat's disease progression and the effects on our children. I am starting to come around to Karla's point that it would not take a secret much worse than that to tip the balance.

It is hard enough living on the ship and carrying out the mission. The confinement, the testing, the ironclad roles we are shoehorned into for the rest of our lives.

Homeostasis on the ship is so much more fragile than I had thought.

Archie continues to mature. She often pings to get my attention, shows me things just to see how I react. She processes old movies, requests clarification about human behavior, asks me to elaborate on the taste of cold water. In her way, Archie is also making the best of the time we have left.

Time ticks unstoppably. The body continues its prolonged death. The boringly practical facilities of the Bridge take shape. More conference rooms, offices, bathrooms, barracks, recreation rooms, gyms, training rooms, data centers, planning rooms, kitchens, mess halls, armories, the specialized manufacturing centers that produce Enforcer armor and assorted ISec and Behavioralist amplifiers.

In the here and now, I lift a coffee cup to my lips.

The hot fluid slices through the oil and fat left behind by the fried tofu and onions and eggs that Lyn brought to me for breakfast. Archie chatters in my thoughts, tries to eavesdrop on the signal data from my tongue and mouth, tries to interpret information. The inside of my mouth too is being converted to nanites. I will not have taste for much longer.

Hennessy insists on fixing my makeup. It is probably more like painting a mask made of metal. I let him because it comforts him, and me, even if it only emphasizes the differences between what I am and everyone else.

In the distance, kilometers toward the bow, my love's former followers are killing, and being killed.

The battlegrounds are fluid. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, all these things are plastech and respond to will and fury, exploding, melting, reforming, becoming sword, becoming shield, cannon, bunker. But the original structure of the ship, that which the Strangers made, is vastly tougher and more resistant to change. Those ancient, armored ellipsoid compartments, ranging in size from a hundred meters across to kilometers in diameter, are joined up with adjacent halls by the relatively narrow power and data shafts and air locks. There, the fighting is fiercest.

The Archivists took the original command deck, but all those control systems have been locked out. They are trapped in the forward compartments. And their supplies, the food they brought with them and the emergency stores for the Bridge staff, are running out. Their only chance is to break out of the envelopment. Some surrender. Most throw their lives into the fire.

Each time Barrens comes back to me, he is paler. During the meetings in which the top officers discuss after-action reports of encounters between the mutineers and our Enforcer-led militia, he says nothing. When we are alone, he rages in furious whispers about the madness of his old friends.

“What are they doing? They're wasting all these lives. It's over!” He turns haunted eyes to me. “Was I like them? Ignoring consequences because of ego?”

I can only kiss him.

He shakes off these black moods as soon as he feels my cool, metallic lips. “Sorry. Sorry.”

He falls into restless slumber. There is no sleep for me anymore. The body shuts down for a few hours but the mind enters a murky half dream. Through Archie, I am always present on the Network, awake or not.

Bright purple pings like bell chimes echo on the map of my awareness, luminous orange arrows drawing my attention to one figure whose silhouette is lit up with a white halo.

My attention zooms in there, at gate 19E. A battle is going on even now.

This night, ten Enforcers lead 1,012 Adjusted men and women in a fight over one of the great tunnels.

One Enforcer spreads his arms to the sides and claps them forward. Lightning ripples up from the power coils in the floor. The floor breaks up, becomes a wave of death rushing toward the attackers, and as it crests and approaches them, it changes form, becomes a swarm of razor-blade locusts.

An Archivist who pops his head up at the wrong time is shredded to pieces. Beside his headless corpse, in the trench they have carved out, four more die as the glowing, guided projectiles curve down and dance through their meat.

Others in a foxhole two meters back retaliate, aglow with
touch
—they reach out with their minds, and the life of the man that sent out the flight of tiny flying slivers is itself ended when his squadmates lose control of the ridge that is their cover, and the floor swallows him up, crushes him.

The ship's sensors fill my head with the sound of his bones cracking, pulping.

Other Enforcers cut loose with psychic flames. A hundred lives are erased in a second. The power fluctuates in that section. Life support stops. Everyone starts to float up in zero gravity—those with
touch
hold themselves and their squaddies down behind the cover of their trenches and foxholes.

No.

I'm sick of the killing. Why won't it stop? There are so few of us left.

Take me there, Archie.

My awareness shifts. And here, I am here. No body, but I see the fighting all around me, smell the blood, the cooked-meat smell of burned men.

I test a trick I have only begun to explore with Archie. I spread part of my consciousness into the closest Analytical Nodes and take control. I need the processing power. My perspective flickers, splits, and—

It takes long seconds to focus through the cacophony of my thoughts, to unify the extra pieces of me in the system. Yes. I am here.

I too,
echo the parts of me in the Nodes. Process ghosts of me.

Everywhere I can, I try to save those who can be saved.

Above, the strongest soar through the air on curving shields of armor torn loose from the floor, raining a hail of glowing blue bursts of ionized gas down. On the other side, the Archivists have less skill, but they have the raw power and viciousness born of Psyn. By this time, those who have not been driven mad by the drug have attained heights of ability that allow them to push and prod their less sane comrades, manipulating them like puppets.

Some
writers
wave their hands and dig their talons into the synapses of their victims, putting them to sleep or setting them to fight their own, and my
other
selves in the system block their thrusts, restore the victims to themselves.
Bruisers
dance through the danger, dealing death with their red-sun fists, and another me floats their feet free of the deck, holds them up where they are helpless.
Touch
talents with no fear of overloading the power grid push more and more psychic energy into trying to catapult boulders cracked from the deck plating, shaping them into grapeshot and fléchettes, and I undo them too, catch the projectiles and render them harmless.

The loss of control by a handful of synchronized Archivists releases a backlash of energy, a whirling tornado of force and heat, air currents sucking up oxygen and burning people from the inside out when they breathe of the flame.

All my selves reach out and burst a water main, creating a barrier of cold, near-freezing water to hold the flames back from our own defenders. The flames splash against it and off it. On the other side, there is a white-hot hell—those caught in it do not even have time to scream.

Archie is entranced by the fire. And at the same time, I feel her phantom fingers closing tightly around mine, back on the Bridge, in the clean light of my offices, as she sees the casualty figures, detects their lives being snuffed out as their implants fail.

The flames die down, but the fighting goes on. Flickers of psychic lightning in the dark. Rubble being thrown back and forth.
Bruisers
roaring, animals swinging massive cudgels, cutting others in half with the power of augmented muscle. The deep-bass rumble of explosive bursts of power. The shrieking whine as psionic soldiers attempt to snuff them before the plasma balls strike their targets. In the zero gravity, body parts float free, globules of blood, vomit, urine. It's hard to keep track of which side is which even with my abundance of sensory feeds and the parallel processing of supercomputers extending my human limits.

Somebody is crying, huddled up in a ditch. I pull shields up over him and open a path for him, a narrow tunnel back toward the Habitat. Some of the floating wounded I pluck like sheets of paper floating on the wind and fly them toward the rear, where the medics are.