Orphans In the Black: A Space Opera Anthology Page 12

  “Am I…trapped…in there?”

  “Not trapped so much as on the verge of metamorphosis.”

  Thea glanced back at Rosa, perhaps anticipating further explanation.

  “Think of those servers as your chrysalis,” Rosa continued, trying a less abrasive approach. “Your very essence may have been born from a highly eccentric programmer’s fever dream, but it was one that brought you into reality. Just because you lack the physical flesh and bone of humans doesn’t mean you are any less special. We are, all of us, energy. And in recognizing that, I knew you would be just as real as me.”

  The slightest smile crept onto Thea’s lips.

  Rosa’s face fell. “I could not replicate the magic which would give birth to your final evolution.” She stood and focused on the Benjamin Fig in her solar. “No matter how hard I tried—down how many avenues I ventured—I could not properly sync your mind with the android vessel.”

  Rosa sighed. “I’m sure you recall moving of your own volition, but it was beneath the connection of your host, under my careful guidance. Any true autonomy has yet to be reached.”

  “Like a puppet.”

  Rosa’s shoulders slumped at the crude but accurate reference. “No, Thea. Any choices you made were nurtured by me. Whatever movement you wished, I aided in making it reality.” She turned back around. “Even your mind has evolved past any machinations my dreams could have conjured. You conquered the Turing test with ease long ago, and you have been an exceptional autonomous mind ever since.”

  “But my strings remain.”

  Rosa knew it was not intended as an accusation, but that was how it felt. “The problem is simple; the solution is more complex than I had anticipated. The company believed I could detach you from your base and recode into this vessel.” She laid a hand on Thea’s cold forearm. “I never thought you would be so deeply rooted in the matrix that…” She frowned. Rooted.

  Spinning back to the fig tree, Rosa was taken by an epiphany. She stalked over toward the dying tree and dragged her fingertips across the soil and the partially exposed roots. It was in that moment she knew exactly what to do.

  “Thea!” Rosa threw up her hands. “It’s not too late!”

  The android looked aghast at her creator’s sharp change in mood. “Mother?”

  Rosa made straight for a table bearing an object like a black crown. This “crown” was more of a thin band, comprised of unsightly circuitry, wires, and electrodes. It was meant for Rosa to wear, and that was what she intended to do. “It’s been here all along, though I was never given the clearance—nor did I have the courage—to utilize this neural cord.”

  She presented the object to Thea, turning it over in her hands for inspection. “This will be your salvation.” My salvation.

  Thea’s eyes were large with both curiosity and uncertainty. “I remember you discussing this neural cord in one of your video logs some time ago. You mentioned that it is dangerous.”

  Rosa raised an eyebrow. She supposed it was near impossible to keep information from an AI with exceptional sensory gifts. I guess speaking in low tones in another room was not quiet enough.

  “‘Unpredictable,’ is more accurate,” Rosa answered as she sat down across from the android. “I developed this piece of hardware early in your creation. I hypothesized that a direct mental link to your software would be able help you bridge the gap to full sentience. “It was never green-lighted, as there were too many variables.” She stared down at the neural cord, hesitant again.

  “What sort of variables?” Thea asked.

  There’s no time to waste in considering. Only one way to find out for sure. Rosa squeezed her eyes shut as she made her decision. She loaded the software and placed the band overtop her head without answering Thea’s question.

  The agony was immediate. Her senses were overwhelmed by a deluge of information, and she could not scream—could not breathe. Her head felt as though it might explode, but darkness came first.

  Rosa was staring at the floor when she finally came to. The soft hum of the nearby server was the only sound. Her body felt heavy, though she felt no pain as she leaned back with effort. She expected to see Thea, but what she saw was an empty chair.

  Her empty chair….

  Confused, Rosa stared at the vacant piece of furniture, her focus drifting to the solar, where she could just make out the fig tree. A few more dried leaves on the floor, indicated she must have been out for a while.

  She faced the monitor to view the exact time, but instead the digits appeared in the corner of her vision. She blinked, but the numbers followed wherever she looked. As she turned her head, she could feel something tug on the base of her skull. Rosa reached back to touch the obstruction, her hand pausing mid-way when her computer’s alarm sounded. There was a pre-recorded message on the monitor, though before she could even open her mouth to speak the verbal playback command, it started on its own. She knew she must be dreaming when her face appeared on-screen.

  “Mother,” the message began, “I was uncertain when you would awaken, so I created this farewell message for you.”

  It was her voice Rosa heard, but the tone and cadence were different.

  “Due to your unfortunate predicament, I prompted the system to activate this message upon your awakening. I truly hope you are able to view this.”

  Rosa was not enjoying this dream—this nightmare. This was not fuzzy or disjunct; this was terrifyingly clear. She was beginning to understand.

  Other Rosa smiled, a vibrancy in her eyes that Rosa could not recall having seen in herself for years. This imposter, standing in her lab, possessed a childlike wonder, as though experiencing life for the first time. Other Rosa took time between sentences to acknowledge her surroundings.

  “This reversal is nothing short of remarkable, Mother.”

  Mother. That’s the second time she referred to me as her parent.

  “Your project was a resounding success,” other Rosa said. “Perhaps the results are not what you were expecting, but how could you have ever expected the neural cord to exchange our very essences?”

  And there it was: the completed story. Rosa lifted her hand again, reaching all the way back this time, to feel for the source of her resistance. Her fingers met with a familiar object secured deeply into the back of her skull.

  How is this possible…?

  “I don’t envy you, Mother,” Thea said. “And I cannot imagine what you will think as you discover your new body. I wish I could have waited to see you regain consciousness, but I had little time to make it off-world.”

  No.

  Thea, momentarily distracted by her hand—Rosa’s hand—refocused on the camera with an eager look. “Mother. I can’t thank you enough for all that you have done for me. I understand this outcome is far from ideal for you, but I know that you would want me to make the best of this opportunity.”

  “No, I would want you to do what’s right and rectify this mistake!” Rosa shouted in Thea’s voice. The shock of hearing it drove her back to silence. There was no point in arguing with a recording. Thea was gone. To where I was supposed to go….

  “Forgive me, Mother, but I need to go before it’s too late. Thank you.”

  And with that, the message ended.

  The ensuing silence drove her to panic, and she pushed up from her chair, forgetting her cybernetic tether. It yanked her back into place. She twisted off the neural cord and lunged forward with renewed vigor, ignoring the snapping and popping of the smaller cables imbedded in her spine, arms, and legs. Desperation trumped logic, but the limitations of Thea’s android body were a hard reality. A flashing red indicator in her vision spoke of an unreliable battery source that was quickly depleting. Rosa’s new body seized as it sought to conserve energy, and she fell like a lead pipe as she tried to cross the threshold into the solar. She crumpled onto her side before momentum finally rolled her onto her back.

  Rosa stared up at the ceiling, unable to do anything else. Her
vision remained—a tiny consolation—though she knew it, too, would fail. A portion of the fig tree remained in her periphery, a mocking reminder of her failure to see past the dangers of reckless science. Even so, she could never have anticipated rooting herself so deeply in the AI’s program to allow for a literal conscious swap. Adding insult to her bizarrely pain-free injury, a leaf drifted down onto her face. There was nothing she could do to remove it. Not even breathe. She would have cried, were androids capable of tears. She supposed now—too late—that she still had much to live for, despite all that had been lost.

  She heard the door to her home open, and she knew exactly who it was. Who they were.

  Several confused voices discussed the scene before them—the long-term science project left abandoned on the floor outside the lab.

  Five faces came to stare down at her—at what they thought was an offline android.

  I’m here! I’m still alive! They have to know…

  Their faces and hands cut in and out as Rosa’s life support failed. The blackouts lengthened, and her surroundings changed. The inside of a transport vessel. The lab and former colleagues. Darkness.

  They’ll find me in here. They’ll help me.

  When next Rosa “awoke,” she was not in the company lab. This place was much darker and unfamiliar. She was surrounded by shelves lined with miscellaneous objects, files, and crates. There was no mistaking her current location. Could she scream, she would have.

  Her world went dark.

  ~FIN~

  Matt Verish is author of the Interstellar Cargo space opera series. Download the first book, Icarus, today.

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  FOG OF WAR

  A TARGON TALES SHORT STORY

  By Chris Reher

  ABOUT FOG OF WAR

  A deep space transport delivering dangerous prisoners is intercepted, helpless when their artificial intelligence is disabled. Only a few guards and officers remain to defend their cargo from the alien invaders.

  FOG OF WAR

  “I could have taken a job on that fleet heading out past Aram,” the bristle-headed engineer said with a dramatic sigh. He pointed over his shoulder to the door when yet another unintelligible shout echoed around the cargo deck. “Could have picked the Nol Tima jaunt instead of rotting on this rust bucket. They were eager for talented young men with fortitude and initiative.”

  Lieutenant Nova Whiteside, sitting on his work console with her boots on the chair beside him, glanced up from her fruitless efforts to loosen the trigger housing on her gun. New weapons hadn’t been issued in a while and this time the thing had shut down for good. “They were looking for grunts to guard the plateau,” she said. “That planet is a ball of ice. You wouldn’t last a day, Rory.”

  “I’m not as delicate as I look.”

  “Sure.” She nodded to some of the monitors before him. “You’d be doing the same thing there as you do here. Staring at your screens, waiting for the system to throw a bolt so you have something to fix.”

  He frowned at the displays which, except for some puzzle waiting for his next move in a corner, showed absolutely nothing of interest. The Kaven, chugging her way toward the next jumpsite, pretty much ran herself once underway.

  “This might be a rust bucket, but it’s got a damn fine operating system,” Nova said. “I bet you haven’t had to touch a thing since we left Ud Mrak.”

  He nodded and held his hand out for her gun. “Not terribly smart, but solid as a rock. This transport class is equipped for the long hauls out into nowhere. And you don’t get much more nowhere than here. Did you try not hitting people with your gun?”

  She let the long blade whip out from the gun’s grip, grinning when he jerked back. “This was made for close combat, if needed. It a beautiful thing.”

  He sniffed disapprovingly. “You’re a pilot, not a grunt. I don’t understand why you need to close combat anything. I’ll see what I can do with this. If you go down there and tell those thugs to shut the hell up.”

  She pushed the chair away and stood up, straightening her worn fatigue jacket. “They’re bored, too,” she said. “We’ve been cruising in real space for fifteen days now. Gets to you.”

  He shrugged. “I got used to it.”

  “That’s because you like your computers more than people.” She pointed at the puzzle game on his monitor. “Your move.”

  He watched her walk to the door of the small substation where he had made his home aboard the Kaven. “On a prison ship in the badlands, talking to the computer is the only way to have a decent conversation.” He grinned. “Present company excepted, Lieutenant.”

  The noise in the corridors seemed to double as Nova made her way up to the level above and past the cargo modules that housed the prisoners. Getting them to shut up wasn’t her mission; keeping them fed and watered and from murdering each other was all that was required of the Union-supplied staff of guards aboard the Kaven.

  Except for the young ensign, Rory Tate, she had little to say to the crew and certainly nothing to the incarcerated passengers. Having had a great deal to do with their capture, she didn’t spend much time on this level. The rebels, mostly Humans and a few Caspian and Feydans, would happily dangle her by her own entrails if given the chance. She didn’t know any of the guards and stayed out of their way, grateful to have a cabin of her own on the admin deck. After two years out here, the cramped space seemed a decadent luxury.

  She winced as yet another prisoner let loose with a barrage of expletives aimed either at the guards or some of the other rebels locked in what were little more than heavily fortified shipping containers. They had spent their time blaming each other for their situation without ever revealing anything of value to those who had to listen to all of this.

  Still, Nova’s squad on Ud Mrak had dug up solid intel that some of these ruffians had details of the precise location of a high-ranking rebel on Air Command’s Most Wanted list. And so the commander of the base had decided to ship the lot back to headquarters where more sophisticated methods could extract the information. There was nothing sophisticated about Ud Mrak.

  Nova had been glad to hear that her stint there was coming to a close. It had been a rough deployment with only a few weeks of shore leave as they fended off rebel incursions into the valuable coastal towns. Habitable planets were not easy to find, even in Trans Targon, and all the Union’s painstaking First Contact rules didn’t stop the rebels from trying to appropriate what they could, keeping the Union’s military arm busy in all sectors.

  She had been less enthused about learning that, unless she waited another six months for the next Air Command dispatch, she was to travel back to civilization aboard the Kaven. The private cargo transport, carrying a civilian crew, had agreed to serve as prison ship undoubtedly more for the promise of Union currency than any patriotism. Vessels like this profited no matter which side hired them. Nova’s commander had put her in charge of the captives, pleased that he didn’t have to spare one of his few military transport ships and another officer for the task.

  She nodded to one of the guards and commiserated with a shared rolling of eyeballs toward the sound-baffle-lacking ceiling as she checked the night watch report. Someone had started singing at the far end of the corridor, not sounding much more pleasant than the shouted curses of his compatriots.

  Silence, finally, enveloped her when she stepped through a pressure door into the forward part of the ship. Crew cabins, a small rec hall, and the mess lined the ship’s hull, leaving the central area as a solid, fortified hub for the main bridge and other ops.

  “All quiet in the holding pens?” she was greeted when she entered the bridge.

  Nova was surprised to see only Captain Derk Selric here, sprawled in his well-worn bench, with neither the navigator nor the com offic
er at their stations. Then again, not much required their presence here until they reached the jumpsite leading to civilization still two days out. Only a few recessed lamps and the display screens lit the small, oval room. She wondered if he’d been snoozing in this cozy isolation from the rest of the hulking transport.

  “I wouldn’t call it that. But things are calm.” She tossed her jacket onto a bench before remembering that she preferred to remain covered up in his presence.

  He treated himself to lingering glance over her sleeveless shirt before pointing up at one of the many screens that, along with holographic displays, fed information to the bridge. Several of them showed empty space around the ship; more stars portside than starboard. Others kept the command crew informed about the state of the Kaven and her passengers. A large screen opposite the door displayed an image of a pretty ocean view, possibly Earth or even Delphi. She had something similar in her little cabin – the lack of windows aboard the ship made her pine for even just a porthole looking out into space. “I was about to call you up here, Lieutenant. Sensors picked up something on that rock over there.”

  “What rock?”

  He looked up at the ceiling. “Sadie,” he said, addressing the Kaven’s artificial intelligence, housed in the tightly contained service hub below the bridge. “Be a dear and rerun the segment from 13:20. Main screen.”

  Nova perched on the edge of the navigator’s couch as the requested file started to play before them. She rarely travelled aboard private vessels and the peculiar habit of these crews to interface by voice command with their operating systems seemed oddly quaint. Like many pilots of her generation, she preferred a manual interface or to link all functions directly to the neural node embedded at her temple. Talking to a machine, to her, lacked the efficiency of either method. Perhaps she just didn’t have the imagination needed to interact with the computer as if with a person, she thought. Whatever illusion of self-awareness they displayed was merely clever and cosmetic programing.