Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 25 / Chapter 27 –>

If he really wanted to think about it, Brett could have chosen to blame Liston for what he planned to do. Liston had given him the idea. Liston had pointed him in the right direction. Yesterday, he had said the organism largely eschews the left portion of the brain. Instead, it draws its harvest from the right hemisphere and the pre-frontal cortex specifically. . .The pre-frontal cortex of the right hemisphere stores our autobiographical memories, our mechanisms for accessing emotions, and current theory suggests, our concept of self-definition. It makes us who we are.

But Brett had let it roll past him then, unheeded because it didn’t seem to have any value except as a way to understand the mechanism of the organism. He had gained wisdom during the night, this morning finally seen the possibilities, and now his heart thrummed in his chest. It was a feeling that reminded him of hope, though he couldn’t say for certain that was in fact what he felt. It had been too long since he’d felt it to remember.

Brett stood in the bio lab on sublevel four, inside the biological hazard containment bubble where Djen and Micah had pored over the organism’s secrets, dissecting its micobacterial menace. He was not wearing an e-suit as the large and red-lettered signs instructed. He hadn’t waited for the negative pressure atmospheric systems to cycle before opening the second, secure set of doors. He only briefly paused for the dissipation of the emergency antibacterial vapor which automatically released from the chemical vents because he hadn’t followed proper protocols, and that only because the mist had a tendency to be corrosive. He didn’t even close the two sets of sliding doors behind him to activate the filtration vents. The biohazard bubble had endlessly redundant precautionary systems. For Brett, the entire idea of precautions seemed somewhat ludicrous in hindsight.

On the pale counter surface in front of him sat an array of diagnostic equipment, a pair of Hamer microscopes with wide knobs for easier use by gloved hands. At the end of the counter was the high, stainless steel tube of the scanning electron microscope’s vacuum chamber. The SEM’s monitor was on and it displayed a false color image of the organism at extreme magnification. Brett looked at it only long enough to recognize it as one of the pictures Micah had shown them two nights ago.

The work area was littered with crumbs of dirt from the coring samples they’d taken from the thermal vent. There were swaths that were mostly clean, where it looked like one of them, probably Micah, had swept the surface with a forearm. Brett wasn’t a biologist, but he could recognize that it would have been unacceptable practice under normal circumstances. As it stood, it was just more evidence of the haste with which they’d conducted the investigations. It was a wonder they’d had any success at all, and Brett had to consider for not the first time that Ilam’s contributions had more to do with it than he was admitting.

Ilam had lied to him. Not just about the nanomechs, but for their entire tour, and Brett found that he didn’t hold it against him. Ilam wasn’t the only one to be harboring secrets.

As he surveyed the work area, he knew the haphazard quality of the research benefited him, what he was looking for. If they had been in less of a hurry, less frazzled, they would have swept the entire biohazard unit, destroyed everything, taken every possible precaution.

Brett was glad they hadn’t. This wasn’t a necessity, of course. There were other options open to him by which he could achieve the same end, but he was thinking about time and his understanding that he might have precious little of it left.

He saw what he had come for. Beneath the counter, midway between the Hamer scopes was a storage chest with temperature controls. The digital thermometer readout read an interior temp of 37°C. Body temperature. Brett knelt there, opened the door. On the shelf inside sat a black plastic rack which contained four stoppered and labeled test tubes. Written on the labels in Djen’s nearly illegible script were words like ‘First Core’, ‘Midlevel Core’, ‘Magma Chamber Floor’. Each tube was filled a pale blue fluid that was both nutrient rich and light refractive for better resolution under the Hamer scopes. He knew that in the fluid swam invisible bacterial communities. Maybe billions of them in each. A supermassive dose of bacteria saturated out of the soil samples in which they had survived for centuries, maybe millennia.

Brett picked out the four tubes and slid them into his breast pocket where they clattered against the stubby vial of Ilam’s nanomech therapy. There were other things he needed from the lab as well, and he wandered about for some time rifling through drawers, opening cabinets, selecting bits and pieces of equipment that appeared useful.

When he had taken all the things he would need, he let himself out the door and sealed it closed behind him. He made other stops along the way. Some took longer than others, but Brett knew Persia station. He’d probed its crevices thousands of times, knew its secret places. His access carried him anywhere he cared to go.

He had one last stop to make, and he hurried because he knew time was short. He had begun to sweat in his haste. He could smell himself, and it was unpleasant. He didn’t actually recall the last time he’d showered.

He strode down the corridor that divided sublevel five, his heels a click and echo that seemed to push him along. There were speakers at the intersection and he heard the distinctive crackle of static that indicated a system broadcast message. Brett stopped, looked up, waited. Something turned in the pit of his stomach. There were three people awake and alert in all of Persia, and no reason he could think of for a system broadcast that wasn’t a bad one.

He was certain this was something he wouldn’t want to hear.

“Brett, this is Ilam. I’m in the third level rec room. I need you to meet me here, and I’d suggest you hurry. It looks like we’ve developed something of a situation.”

At first he did not understand what it was about the rec room that would qualify as a situation, but it took only seconds for him to remember. The sick from the medical bay, placed there for safe keeping.

Brett began to run.

#

The first thing he saw upon entering the rec area was Liston. He found this curious, since it was Ilam who had contacted him. Ilam should have been here, and if both Liston and Ilam were here, then there was no one overseeing the convalescence of the crew in med bay. He paused in the doorway, panting from the run and the climb up two level ladders, on the last of which he’d almost fallen, almost broken his goddamned neck.

His next perception did not illuminate the darkness. Liston lay across the body of a crew member Brett couldn’t identify because the doctor had hunched himself over the man’s face. Brett had the brief and senseless thought that Liston had decided to go ahead with his own mech implantation, then realized he ought to check on the sick one last time and fallen unconscious from the sedatives sooner than he expected.

But then he moved closer and saw that the angle of Liston’s neck was all wrong. The skin stretched too tightly on the left side. The doctor’s head lolled against his right shoulder. A bruise as dark as thunderheads had begun to stain the skin just above his coat collar.

Brett looked up, sucked in his breath. It only got worse.

The remaining bodies, lain side by side as though awaiting triage in a field hospital, bent in ugly poses. Limbs stuck out in odd directions from beneath the blankets. Mouths were open, howling without sound. Glassy eyes stared at the ceiling. In places, there was blood, rich and crimson, turning the thick blankets a sodden, blackish color. The figure nearest him, the meteorologist Kritzer, had the shaft of a standing lamp driven through her sternum.

Brett took his eyes away. He scanned the room, and there was Ilam in the corner, except Ilam wasn’t looking at him. Ilam focused on the opposite corner, the open space between the arm of the couch and the wall where the lamp which had skewered Kritzer had once stood.

In the corner stood Ritter.

He seemed to sway, buffeted side to side by a wind Brett could not feel. His eyes were open but unseeing, his lips parted and his jaw slack. Ritter held his arms at his side in a casual pose. To Brett he looked pale, tinted an unhealthy blue that made him look as dead and staring as the corpses along the floor.

Ilam flicked his eyes toward Brett, but they didn’t remain. Ritter drew both of their attention with the irresistible pull of a singularity. Brett returned Ilam’s acknowledgement just as briefly. Ilam held a gun in his hand, the snub-nosed firearm Ashburn carried. Probably, Brett thought, the only accessible weapon on the station since Ashburn had flash-welded the munitions cabinet closed.

Brett said, “Ilam?”

“He’s been like this since I arrived,” Ilam said. “Liston came down about an hour ago to perform some routine examinations on the patients. After forty-five minutes, I grew concerned and came to see if he needed assistance. I found him the way you see him. His body is still warm.”

Ilam waved the gun vaguely. “I saw that Ritter wasn’t doing anything particularly threatening at the moment, so I procured this from the security office and locked down the med bay. Then I paged you. I didn’t want to do anything that might be construed as rash without your approval.”

“Ritter did this?” He had to ask. He couldn’t imagine it.

“Look at his hands. There’s blood under his fingernails.”

Ilam’s tone was sarcastic, flat. Who else would it have been, if not Ritter? Everyone else in the station was either sedated or dead. Except Brett, of course, who had been wandering the levels, who wouldn’t accept the mech treatment, whose sanity might become suspect at any time from Ilam’s perspective.

“He was comatose,” Brett said, trying to make sense of it. “Could this be related to the therapy? Maybe it made him crazy.”

Ilam gestured in Ritter’s direction. “Look at him, Brett. That isn’t a man who has recovered.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Spontaneous emergence from the coma, I think. This group wasn’t sedated. Liston and I didn’t see the point.”

“I don’t think I see your current point.”

“It’s possible that the older, more instinctual portions of the brain awakened without the corollary awakening of the higher brain. It would be highly unlikely, but we don’t have much against which we could reference the current developmental state of his mind. The mechs are rewriting his neural topography. The organism is entrenching itself. It becomes feasible that he could operate with a mind something less developed than a modern human’s.”

Brett furrowed his brow. “That doesn’t explain why he killed them all. Even if the reptilian cortices revived first without the benefit of the higher brain for guidance, he would have been more likely to run than fight.”

Unless he woke hungry, Brett thought, but didn’t say it. He was thinking aloud, that was all. Trying to make sense out of something for which he had no real answers.

“I didn’t say the emergence was natural,” Ilam said. Left to think about it, Brett also wouldn’t have said it. “What would you like to do?”

“How long has he been like that?”

“Since I arrived the first time. If it weren’t for the fact that he’s standing, I would have guessed that he’s receded into the coma again.”

“Is there any way to evaluate the progress of the therapy? Maybe this was a side effect.”

Ilam shook his head. “Not without getting closer. You can feel free to examine him if you’d like. I’ll stand back here and just point the gun at him if it’s the same to you.”

“If it isn’t the therapy and it isn’t some vestigial evolutionary reaction to premature waking from the coma, what is it?” Ilam didn’t answer him, and he didn’t need to. They already knew the answer. “Has he said anything? Done anything but stand there?”

“I haven’t honestly made much of an effort to communicate. I was waiting for you, Commander.”

Brett understood the hint. He said, “All right, cover me so I can get closer.”

“You’re covered. Just try to stay out from that line between the gun barrel and the lunatic scientist, and you’ll be fine.”

Brett took a wide step around the line of corpses. There was a path between them and the furniture they had pushed back to make room for the crew the evening before. He swept his attention between Ilam on his right and Ritter in the corner to his left. He moved slowly, tried to appear unthreatening. When he reached a point about a meter from where Ritter stood, he stopped. He glanced to Ilam again, just as Ilam tightened his grip on the gun. Brett saw that his knuckles were white.

He turned away, sidled a little nearer until he was certain he stood in Ritter’s field of vision. Ritter made no perceptible response to his arrival. Brett cleared his throat.

“Ritter, can you hear me?”

No action but the stare. He might have blinked, but Brett wasn’t sure.

Louder, he thought.

“Ritter, this is Commander Brett. Can you hear me? Are you there?”

For an interminable moment, there was nothing. Then Ritter began to scream.

Brett leapt back, unnerved by the abrupt change, tried to cover his ears. His feet tangled in an obstruction behind him. Too late, he flailed his arms to keep his balance, realized it was the feet of one of the dead he had tripped over. Brett landed hard on his back, sprawling. The body that broke his fall made a noise like a gasp, and he shouted.

“I’m going to fire,” Ilam said, calm and hard.

Brett lay still. “Wait.”

The scream continued. It rose from Ritter’s wide-hung mouth, a sort of mewling noise. It was forlorn, anguished, ancient. A sound never before made by a human throat, a human voice.

Brett sat up, then levered himself to his feet. He told Ilam again to wait, though it was unnecessary. There was more than the scream now. Another sound like chaotic whispers interlaced Ritter’s non-voice. Unseen speakers muttered and gnashed their teeth together, lifted their cacophony in a vibratory hum.

What is it? Brett thought, but he found no answer. He drifted toward Ritter, thrust his head forward to hear words that seemed garbled by echo. With each step, the sound grew louder, more distinct. He edged nearer, close enough that he could smell Ritter’s unwashed body, taste the dank corruption from his breath. What had once been Ritter had become repulsive, but Brett went on.

Without warning, the gates of heaven opened, a storm burst into his mind, and he froze.

#

What he saw at first was simply a smear of color, a world of unnumbered billions of atoms, spiraling molecules, multihued latticeworks of matter. Much of it was gray, but even the blandest gray shone with shades and illuminations, opalescence that was not any color he had ever known. Then there were wide swatches of crimson and emerald, gold and aquamarine.

With a jerk, he drew himself back. Distance fractured his perception, re-correlated his senses. He plunged away from a precipice that was both vast and submicroscopic. Brett felt that he blinked. His vision cleared. He looked out of eyes that were not his upon an alien landscape he could not name. But this was his body. He knew it by the hum and sway of his long and supple limbs, the patter-thump of his heart. He looked down the slender and willowy length of his torso. It was his clothes that he wore, silken and shimmering and warm in the light of the bright yellow sun.

About him was water and vales rolling with hills and grass as soft as kittens. There were trees, tall and thin with leathery, scented leaves. In the distance, a fog shrouded city. Amber and glass that sparkled where the sun struck. Beams of strong and dusky bedrock woven with lavender steel. Beyond that naked mountains that climbed feet to shoulder into the clouds until their snow-capped peaks vanished from sight.

The wind blew and the scent in his nostrils was that of growing things and warm soil, but beneath that, decay, corruption. And he knew it wasn’t mist that shrouded the city, but smoke. The smoke of fires. The stench of burning.

He felt the despair, and at the same instant a mad, rushing kind of glee, as though it was a wonder he had wrought, but could not recall. He ran the slopes of the hills, up to rounded tops, then down again. His bare feet sprang up from the ground and he raced on, tireless, laughing, free. When his breath grew short, he ran faster. The blood pounded in his head, squeezed circles of explosive darkness across his eyes. He ran until his heart would shatter, then ran on.

And at the end, he spread his arms out wide and lowered his head and leapt up high. The ground vanished beneath him, and below was a vast plain, streaked with rivers. The valley of an idyll viewed from a mountain height. He watched his feet leave the ledge. He folded his body into a dive, and if he still laughed as he plunged, he could not hear it. The rush of wind blinded his eyes and deafened his ears.

He thought he flew, but knew it was illusion. It was fantasy.

And then it was not. The image shifted before him and he peered out beneath a harsh and glaring light into a world that was bleak. Everything was metal and glass, dingy in the way all well-lived places are dingy. A worn space, a weary space. Before him stood a creature, dwarfish in his proportions. His skin was coarse and pale, his body broad, his hands small, his legs stunted, knobbish, ugly. A thick boned thing who stood near, in a strange and hostile place. More of its type lay on the floor, bundled beneath scratchy linen that was blotched with red running to black. The thing had drawn close enough to emanate menace.

It was familiar, but known in a way he couldn’t remember. His skull thumped when he tried, so he didn’t extend the effort. It was better this way, to live with the hum and flow, the billowing breath of memory which whispered in his thoughts. It embraced him, and from nowhere, he smelled butter and baking. The crisp brown crust of his mother’s apple cobbler cooling on the table. With ice cream and the glass dessert dishes that made that noise, that tink! when he rapped the side with his fork. He sat up in his bed from where he had lain on a wet and dreary Saturday, reading the latest Sol Bergeron adventure. He still wore his pajamas, the black and red checkered flannels with the feet in them, the ones his brother said were for babies and girls, which was probably true enough, but he wasn’t ready yet, not just yet, to set them aside.

He left the book where it lay and crept out his door and down the stairs, careful past his father’s office door because he’d been told to hold his tongue and keep it down–with Armen adding the ubiquitous or else that was a constant theme of his life. Dad was home but he was working, consumed with aquifers and water tables and drainage for the weekend.

And he’d been good. All morning and half the afternoon, quiet as a mouse, as a louse, as a grouse, though he wasn’t exactly certain what that might be. But very good, nonetheless, and if Armen was over at Sebree’s house and little Niki still down for her nap, there was a chance, faint but apple-delicious, that mom would be in the kitchen and in her best of moods and he would have an early treat. A rare occurrence, but one he had known once, he thought, and if not himself, then Armen had and told him it was possible at least. Though he had to admit if he thought about it that Armen wasn’t always to be strictly believed.

But that also wasn’t right, wasn’t true. Again the scene melted, and Brett stumbled into a universe of darkness, gray and black, mottled with lightning strikes of violet conflagration. This was also himself, and a place that he knew. An oasis in a vast and blinding wilderness. Here there were others, likenesses, community that shared space at the troughs of goodness. He saw it without eyes, knew it by touch and taste, the vibratory pleasure of those who were near. And he was not a he or a we, but an I of many parts and far-flung coherencies. A mind of one thought but a billion branches acting in concert, and that thought was hunger. They huddled together, pressing side against side, stroking their long filament tips end to end, purring and feeding.

And then the others came.

I sensed them from the edges, felt them for what they were, hideous beasts of monstrous metallic carapace. Rotating teeth like grinding saws and fine, razor arms tipped in steel and blood. They hovered above the troughs, shining swarms of buzz and stab and grappling, rending limbs. They made a noise as they came, a creaking, screeching, rumbling roar that sent quivers through his gelatinous self. The others, the aliens, they killed where they came erasing the sense of what had been, numbing the distant tendrils of understanding, sweeping down from the high places and the slick, winding paths from trough to trough. They touched my distant self with storms of swords and left only devastation and darkness in their wake.

Behind them came more. Row upon row of those that were like but different. These more menacing. Less fierce, but irrevocable, immutable, mindless. They transformed the face of the world. They crumbled the mountains and starved the high springs that fed the troughs, and where they wended nothing that had been remained the same.

I knew pain. Loss and emptiness and outrage.

#

As suddenly as they had come over him, the flood of images ceased.

Brett felt himself tumbling, plummeting from a height. His stomach turned, the spin of vertigo made him wobble, but he stopped the gyre before he fell.

There were more, he knew. An eternal round of thoughts unremembered, memories untapped, entire lives forgotten. He had been snared in a web of eternity by a mind intent upon showing him all of it. Or not even him, perhaps, but that which was inside him. A mind speaking to itself.

But he remembered the rage, fierce and brilliant, and he understood whether or not the communication had been for him.

>He opened his eyes, for a fraction of a second looked at Ritter; their eyes met. Even in the dark and vacuous depths, Brett could see the faint spark. He wasn’t alone in his understanding.

Then the shot rang out, a firecracker pop in the enclosed space, and Ritter’s head exploded in a maelstrom of blood and bone and alien screams.

#

Brett ran his hand across his mouth. It came away bloody. Fragments of bone, hair and flesh had lodged in his two day growth of beard. He scrubbed at them with his forearm as Ilam came to stand beside him . Ilam’s chest rose and fell rapidly. His breath came in short gasps. Ilam goggled at the body with his mouth open, as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

“You killed him,” Brett said, without accusation. “Why did you do that?”

“You wouldn’t answer me.”

It was explanation enough. Brett knew he would have done the same.

“For how long?”

“Two minutes. Perhaps three.”

“You look a little shaken. I thought you’d been in the military.”

Ilam shrugged. “Never done one like that before. Close up, I mean. With a gun.”

Brett turned to him and nodded his approval, so Ilam would know. “It was a good shot.”

“Aye.”

There wasn’t much else to say.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Ilam asked.

“What did you see?”

“You tried to talk to him. He began that caterwauling and you went rigid. Both of you, as a matter of fact. I got no reaction from either of you and determined something must be wrong.” Ilam hesitated, rolled his eyes from Brett to Ritter’s body. “I assumed you required assistance. I was right, wasn’t I?”

Brett nodded. “It was them. The organism. Not organisms, plural. Just the one, I understand that now. It doesn’t have a concept of individualism, only a corporate identity. I think they only understand their existence as a portion of the greater. . .flock. Except flock is our word, and for it, the flock is one.” What do you mean when you say ‘I’? It was difficult to verbalize, and he knew he was doing it badly. “It communicated with itself, I think the same way we communicate between neurons or between brain segments. Whatever is in my brain shared messages with what was in Ritter’s.”

“What sort of messages?”

“Images. Memories. I saw–no, that isn’t right–I experienced some of Ritter’s childhood. I experienced the existence of the organism in real-time, as the mechs invaded his brain. That’s why he killed them, Ilam. The organism understands what we’re doing because it has access to Ritter’s experience, maybe to all of our experiences. It seems to understand the source of the invaders, if not the technology. It has no defense against them, and it’s angry. This was retaliation for what we’re doing to it right now.”

Ilam shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense, Brett. Why would it kill the host as retaliation?”

“Because it understands its life cycle. It’s been dormant for a million years, since the last time, since there were others. It can wait. It has the mechanisms to exist, and it has no individual survival instinct. The corporate mind reflects that if one copy survives, the entire organism survives.”

He stopped there and pressed his fingers against his temples. The memory was too fresh, and it was painful to recall. He could still feel it–the confusion, the fear, the numbing sense of loss as parts of the ‘I’ were eradicated.

“What do you mean there were others? Who?”

“The people of Archae Stoddard. They were like us, Ilam. Not human, no, but people. Organic creatures, technologically advanced, beautiful in some ways. Beautiful the way the planet used to be before the plague.”

The plague. The word slipped from his lips without his willing it. He didn’t understand it at first. He turned it over like an alien artifact, insensible and completely outside his experience. Then he recalled the desperation, the mad and laughing rush. The plunging, doomed leap of flight off the mountain’s edge. It wasn’t an outside memory to him. It was his, and he understood things because of it.

Ilam said nothing, and Brett continued.

“We’ve been baffled by this organism because it doesn’t seem to fit any standard categories we have. We assumed–that word again–that even though it was alien, it still had to conform to our definitions of life as we’ve observed it. It is alive, but it isn’t natural. It’s a mech.”

Ilam opened his mouth, seemed to realize he had nothing to say, and closed it again.

“A completely biological technology. Sophisticated enough to alter its genetic material for dramatic leaps in adaptation. Single generational mutation to promote fitness. It was programmed by the inhabitants of this planet to do many of the same things we design our mechs to do, but it’s biological in nature. They wanted it to do what we’ve encountered. They gave it consciousness, the ability to communicate extrasensorily with itself. Then they willingly accepted the implantation of the organism because it would link their minds, expand their neural matrices. It was a technology that would improve their unity, their knowledge, their entire experience of their world. Their mechs were the dawning of a new age of understanding.”

“But something went wrong,” Ilam said.

“No. That’s just it. Everything went right. Too right. The organism thrived inside them. It linked their consciousness man to man, woman to woman, and it made them wise. Wise, and then insane. They couldn’t control the creatures they’d made because they’d given it sentience. They couldn’t stop it from generating one massive hive mind out of the entire planet. After a time, they didn’t have the will to stop it.”

“What killed them, Brett?”

Brett surveyed the memories of devastation with eyes haunted by grief. Grief he had no right to feel. “Some didn’t want the implantation. They didn’t want to grow beyond the bounds of their understanding, because they believed it made them something other than what they were to do so. They enjoyed the dichotomy of mind and body. Eventually, there was war, and the non-mech faction released a counter bacteria designed to kill the organism. Except it killed more than that. It killed everything. Bacteria destroyed the tall and slender trees. It razed the grass. It devoured every living thing.

“Except the organism. It survived in pieces, here and there. It fed off the detritus of its shattered world and it reproduced, and when the food began to run out, it adapted and found a way to harness the life of the bacteria created to destroy it–Micah’s autotrophs. For several hundred thousand years, they’ve evolved together, the big steering the small. You understand?”

Ilam nodded slowly. “Then it is sentient.”

“It is, but it can’t comprehend our non-biological mechs. What it understands is that the world began to change. It has some concept of racial memory, so it recalled what the world had been like before. When it began to be that way again, it revived itself. It recreated the programming for which it had been designed. It has been attempting to complete those functions with us.”

“And because we’re different than the designers of the original organism, it effects us adversely,” Ilam said.

“Not that it exactly did wonders for them, not at the end of the day.”

They were silent for a moment. In a quiet voice, Ilam asked, “What did it feel like?”

“Vastness.” He didn’t know how else to describe it. “I could have been aware of any one of them, any set of them buried anywhere on the planet. The same way, I suppose, I can choose to lift one of my toes, or touch something with my finger. They’re everywhere, and any one of them can choose to be anywhere or everywhere at once just by willing it.”

That was only part of it. A dozen other words that were close, but not the actuality, came to mind. Harmony. Unity. Pleasure. Freedom. All of them abstracts that didn’t adequately cover the things he felt when he delved into the memory he had stolen.

He remembered the hum of the organism, the sort of fluted, purring song that had filled the black wilderness. It was there, all of those words, all of those concepts, thrilling through the song it had sung. A song as old as humanity. A song as ancient as the windblown face of Archae Stoddard.

“You knew something like this would happen,” Brett said.

But Ilam frowned and shook his head. “I suspected the organism was sentient. I’ve told you the reasons. I thought, based on that, it would attempt to find a way to communicate. But I didn’t anticipate any of this, or I wouldn’t have spoken to you so vaguely. There’s much in what you’ve said that would have been of use to us had we known it earlier. We spent so long just trying to understand the damned thing.”

Grief, Brett thought suddenly. That was enfolded in his memory also. Grief at the loss of a part of himself, part of the organism as the nanomechs swept in with their slicing, grinding arms to reave from him a piece of his soul. The feeling clung to him, left him empty and tired.

He said, “That’s why you pressed me so hard from the beginning. You knew it had something to say that might be valuable to us.”

“That isn’t actually the reason at all.”

Brett gazed at him, uncomprehending.

“I’d been watching you. I had researched your history. I knew, Markus, that when the final push came, if we could devise a therapy to counteract the organism, you would refuse it if it meant choosing between saving your life and leaving Emily behind. The sentience of Cassandra, Emily as Cassandra, and the sentience of the organism are the same issue. The organism as you describe it is part of a higher mind. I’d anticipated that on the evidence of the coordinated attacks on our Engines and our installations. Separate any of those agents from the corporate body, and they cease to function. They cease to live.”

“And you think Emily without Cassandra can’t survive.”

“I do not. And if she did, it would be short lived and she would almost certainly be insane. The system has been engineered to deny her freedom. They were thorough, Markus. The programmers did extensive work to keep the biological component from ever functioning on an awareness level again. They knew what they were doing to her, and they made damned sure she would never come to understand it for herself.”

“You don’t have the evidence to support that.”

“And you don’t have any evidence at all except fantasy to support your belief that she is still conscious. Listen to me, the organism is sentient, but not on a component by component basis. You said so, it isn’t individuated. It’s consciousness resides in the correlation, the coherence of communicating units. Separate a unit from the overmind and it would cease to function.

“Don’t you see? It is the same model of consciousness. The individual doesn’t retain selfhood outside the context of the environment. It has no identity. There is no self-definition except as a piece of the greater whole. It is completely irrational for you to accept the validity of the one without accepting the other.”

Brett scowled. “We’ve had the rest of this conversation already. Leave it at that.”

Ilam raised his arms, tried to go on. “Brett–”

“I understand,” he barked. He didn’t allow himself to become angry, but he was finished. He wasn’t going to argue about it again. “I see what you were trying to do. I appreciate the gesture, Ilam. But we disagree here. We disagree fundamentally. That’s the last I’ll say about it.”

Ilam seemed to accept it as the final word. He scanned the rec area, his eyes lingering over the bodies of men and women they had known. He tucked the gun away in a pocket of his shipsuit.

“We should do something about them,” he said.

“We’ll lay Liston out, and Ritter as well. Cover them with blankets. That will be good enough.” It was hard to say something so callous, like swallowing stones. “When you lead the others down to the Escape Module, don’t come this way.”

He thought about it a few moments more, then said, “Belay that. I’ll clean up here. You take your gun and seal yourself in the med bay with the others. The organism knows what we’ve done, and it might try something like it did with Ritter again. The sedatives the others took should keep them immobile until our mechs finish the job, but I don’t want to take any chances. Can you handle the rest without Liston?”

“Yes.”

“What about your own protocol?”

“I don’t need it.”

Brett understood. “Call me if you need anything. Use the system broadcast message like you did the last time. The moment you’re ready, pack them up and get them to the module. Don’t come looking for me. I mean that. We’ve all said our good-byes, and I may not be in any condition worth arguing with by then. If I try to impede you in any way–”

“I have the gun,” Ilam finished.

“Don’t hesitate.”

“No.”

Brett knew he wouldn’t, and it made him feel a little better.

“After you seal the doors to the Escape Module, hose the interior with the decon agents. That’s what they’re there for.”

“I know that.”

“Don’t remove their mechs until after you’re airborne. We can’t have them re-infecting the crew.”

“The mechs will begin to dissolve spontaneously two weeks after the last contact with any incident of the organism. They’re programmed that way.” Ilam grinned. “Do you want to command this escape or are you going to let me do it?”

Brett stopped himself and smiled in return. “You’re right. You can handle this.”

“Tell me I’m a good boy, pat me on the head and send me off. That’s the way mum used to do it.”

They shook hands for the last time.

Brett said, “Get out of here.”

“This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you what a pleasure it’s been to serve with you.”

“You already did that.”

Ilam winced. “Rats. I did, didn’t I.”

<– Chapter 25 / Chapter 27 –>