Twelve
Like a child pulling a cover over itself in the dark,
Jeremy Kael increased power to the field engines and folded time and space
so tightly about his warcraft that he risked turning himself into a
singularity. A gentle hum could be heard from the soliton torus of
quantum fluid spinning in the gut of the ship. He had nothing to do now
but wait for the arrival of the only human being in the universe of any
importance to him.
"Can I sleep with you, Jeremy?"
How old had Myla been at the time? Three or four at
most. How few nights had he ever fallen asleep before she crawled
innocently into bed with him in the darkness? Not many.
If only she could be with him now. He ached for
her. Soon, though, she would be his forever. Once at his side, he would
never let her go. There would be nobody to take her from him. Khalin had
given his word.
Myla had been at the center of his life for as long
as he could remember. The death of Myla's parents had been more of an
emotional blow than the death of his own. Khalin had severed his contact
with her, and life without her had been like being thrown bodily into the
cold of space. Only on rare occasion had they managed to meet and to talk
together for a few quiet hours.
He had not known human warmth until Myla. He had not
known it since. His own parents had been reasonable people. Cold
people. His associates were more machine than human, even the human
ones. Some, like Japher, were entirely MI and knew nothing of emotion.
Myla was one of the last surviving Nats in the colony.
Maybe it was true that he hadn't possessed emotional
needs before his relationship with little Myla. It had been suggested by
those who misunderstood his suffering that he had been contaminated in
some fashion by archaic thought processes.
He thought it more likely that only the Nats knew how
to be fully human. Maybe he had been given a taste of what life was meant
to be. If so, Myla had more to teach him than all the artificial
intelligence in the universe, if only he could reach her in time.
He saw activity on the scope. A transport rose from
the surface of Covonia followed by a Hive probe. Jeremy could see in an
instant that Myla wasn't going to make it. What had Nome and Hague
expected of a child?
"Myla, run for it!"
She tried. The transport accelerated half the
distance to Immamat and then destroyed the Hive probe. In an instant,
Hive warcraft shot up from the surface of Covonia. Myla plunged behind
the vast bulk of Immamat at maximum velocity, just a hair's breadth below
the speed of light.
Jeremy lost sight of her. An instant later, a
circular shockwave of plasma burst out from behind the pale green planet.
"Myla, no!"
Suspended in horror, Jeremy waited for telltale
gravitational disturbances that would speak of a destroyed field drive.
The plasma shockwave in itself meant only that Myla had struck something
solid. The transport could survive an impact with its field intensity on
near maximum.
Nothing.
Jeremy fell back in his seat and scanned the belts of
debris slowly wheeling about the gas giant. The Hive warcraft reappeared
from behind the limb of the planet, scanning surrounding space for the
spatial distortion of a field generator just as he was doing. As Jeremy
watched, they gave up the search and headed back to Covonia. If they
understood that she may have survived impact with orbiting degree, they
understood as well that she was dead in space, trapped and helpless.
Numbed, confused, and on the verge of total
despondency, Jeremy stared at the screen. Where had she gone? Myla had
always been a clever child, but a child nonetheless. There had been no
escape from Covonia. How could she have done so?
Nome must have known all along. Nome was capable of
a kind-hearted gesture when dealing with the stubborn child. This
hopeless mission must have been Nome's parting gesture of kindness, a
futile gesture.
Now what? Jeremy tried to imagine life without
Myla. He would be exiled without her, a creature of emotion adrift in an
inhuman world of cold, calculating duty.
An echo from a distant memory sounded in a daydream.
"Turn the light out for me, Dikki!"
Jeremy let the memory play through, knowing something
pertinent had brought it to mind.
Myla loved the electrical storms that raged when
Immamat's radiation belts brushed Covonia's outer atmosphere. Nome had
ordered Dikki to keep her inside during the dangerous disturbances. That
particular night, Myla had slipped into his bed and tossed the covers over
their heads. Her sweet breath washed against his face, her eyes as
electric and filled with energy as the storms she so loved. "You know how
to disengage the door alarm! Let's go outside and watch the lightning!"
Myla's defiance was immune from Nome's wrath, but not
his own. He made excuses, but he had seen hurt in her eyes, so he had at
least fulfilled her one request and disabled the alarm so that she alone
could escape and go outside to watch the storm.
Forewarned by previous escapes, Dikki had been alert
for lies and deceit, but Myla had raised the thermostat in the bathroom,
left the shower running, and she had recorded her voice calling to Dikki
to turn out her bedroom lights. Dikki had taken it all at face value
without realizing that he had been tricked still one more time. Machine
intelligences had little ability to associate aspects of their
reality in the way humans did and, therefore, no creativity.
Dikki had alerted security when he finally discovered
her missing, but security had no knowledge of Myla's devious route through
the ventilation ducts. MIs could think like lightning itself, but they
did not calculate the kinds of transcendental possibilities of which the
human mind was capable. They could not think outside the box. Myla had always been mischievous. She had never
failed to keep one step ahead of the unimaginative machine intelligence of
the colony.
She had never failed to keep one step ahead.
"Oh!"
Jeremy sat up and scooted closer to his screen.
"Oh, my!"
It was too obvious. She wouldn't have killed herself,
given an option, and Jeremy could see one obvious option. The explosion
had been a ruse. Myla's transport had taken the place of the planetoid
she had destroyed. The Hive could have deduced the possibility for
itself, except that a cold shutdown of the engines would have been viewed
as suicidal and Myla dismissed as a hazard that had eliminated itself.
Humanity had survived the Hive only because of such unimaginative, literal thought
processes.
Jeremy groaned in dismay. He would have to risk his
own life now to save her. She wouldn't have shut the engines down had she
not counted on his intervention. To reach her, he would also have to
mimic a ballistic object plunging into the inner system, although he could
not afford to shut down his own engines completely. Myla's rescue was
going to be like sneaking into the jaws of a carnivore to pick an
insignificant morsel from between its teeth.
Jeremy made the necessary calculations, briefly
accelerated to feign the trajectory and speed of an incoming cometary
body, and then put the engines on idle. He would have to hibernate during
the long journey to the inner system. Myla would have to do the same to
conserve air and battery power. Almost eagerly, he put the process into
motion…
…and awoke with a proximity alarm sounding. He came
to full consciousness in an instant, saw that eighty standard hours had
passed and that his nearly dormant ship stood in the path of an Hive
armada of large warcraft moving in from outside the system.
Almost in the same breath they saw him as well.
Invisible forces reached across intervening space, held him fast, and
penetrated his field and his hull. Jeremy's ship was cut away from around
him. His field of view filled with a chaotic mass of gleaming machinery
invading the hibernation compartment like hordes of manic insects.
Screaming, Jeremy flailed at the invaders. Between
one heartbeat and another, he was jabbed and probed and restrained,
stripped naked, and hauled away down a flexible tube by a succession of
mechanical arms. Impact with a solid deck knocked the breath from his
lungs.
A feedback system was set in motion. Lights flashed
on around him, bright at first, then self-adjusting to a more comfortable
level. Air pressure and temperature followed suit. The walls changed
color to a deep blue, and the texture beneath him altered to a soft,
quilted surface. Sounds like discordant music rose and fell and settled
to a soothing melody of a half dozen repeating notes, almost like the
humming of a woman's voice. The air took on a tangy, fresh scent.
It calmed his panic. It did nothing to alleviate his
status as a specimen. They would toy with a mind no machine awareness
could hope to understand, and then the true horror would begin. The
prospect of vivisection triggered unbearable terror despite his tranquil
environment.
He screamed. He did not stop until the tranquilizing
dart embedded itself in his thigh and dissolved.
"Do not be afraid," a synthetic voice murmured, as if
a machine could understand what it meant to be afraid. Sooner or later,
the Hive would be overpowered by advancing human technology. In the end,
when they saw their own destruction looming before them, they would know
the closest equivalent to fear possible to them. It would be the only
vengeance humanity would ever realize for the suffering the Hive had
inflicted upon uncountable millions.
"Tell us what you are feeling," the voice said.
"Cooperate and you will be rewarded."
A gentle ache cramped Jeremy's stomach and began to
intensify.
"Color to the blind," Jeremy murmured "sound to the
deaf. Feeling to the Hive. Do you understand that?"
The ache became knives tearing at his gut.
"Cooperate," the voice all but whispered to him, "and you will be
rewarded."
"I'm feeling anger, damn you! I'm scared!"
The pain eased. "Is anger instruction?" the voice
queried.
Jeremy spoke from the cocoon of his moment of
relief. "Anger is something you don't understand."
"But we wish to understand."
Jeremy sighed heavily. "You attach numerical values
to human behavior, as if you can find a formula to explain it.
It's futile, but it's the best you'll ever do."
"We have no feeling?"
Jeremy thought about it. Machine intelligence
possessed a rudimentary consciousness. "A kind of curiosity, maybe.
Japer was curious."
"Japher."
"A human-controlled machine intelligence. A friend
of mine."
"How did Japher manifest curiosity?"
"Questions about human existence."
"Please provide your answers to Japher."
Jeremy chuckled. "You know all the words of our
language and their meanings. You must have analyzed every possible
combination by now. Am I going to speak words you haven't already heard?”
"Comprehensive definitions of all words of your
spoken language are on record," the voice protested. “You may yet express
a combination that may imply facts we have not as yet deduced.”
Jeremy thought of Myla and the kind of life she could
have revealed to him. "Words are just symbols. If you can't experience
the subjective reality of individual words, you'll never know what they mean."
"Then you understand our problem."
"Words cannot define what we feel, and feeling is
what makes us human," Jeremy said. They'd never understand. He sat up
suddenly and looked about the empty, blue and
quilted room. "Maybe I've got something new to tell you after all,
something that you've never heard before."
"You will tell us about feeling?"
"I'll tell you that life isn't worth living without
it."
"Life as value. It is not a concept we have as yet
calculated."
Jeremy felt a sensation akin to a warm glow.
"Cooperation has been rewarded," the soft voice said.
The irony of it, reward for
such a trivial insight and such a nice feeling without Myla in his arms
was too much to bear. Jeremy began laughing at the blunder they had
made. Their notion of reward was utter torment. Swiftly, his
laughter rose the scales to hysteria, and not even the sting of another
tranquilizing dart managed to stop it completely.
