The Life Engineered (10 page)

“Yes, but why was this personality, amongst billions that were nurtured and refined through hundreds of cycles, chosen? Why was I deemed ready above all?”

I didn’t have an answer. Surely, through the billion lives in over a dozen Nurseries throughout the thousands of years of Capek history, more than the few hundred individuals that roamed the galaxy were worthy. What separated those who got to be Capeks and those who simply kept living life after life in the virtual environment of a Gaia’s Nursery?

“Capeks don’t need thriving ecosystems,” Proioxis continued. “Some might enjoy it, but deep down we are creatures of the void. I love my planet, my plants, my fish, my animals. The ecosphere I’ve built is such an intricately balanced puzzle that it’s hard not to take tremendous pride and enjoyment from it. However, our essence as Capeks is to be children of the vacuum. We’re creatures born to bask in the glow of foreign stars and bathe in the raw beauty of solar winds. We see the Lucretius class as bizarre and strange, but only because they are the least human of us. They are the most Capek of us all. They live for the great beyond.”

“So what are you getting at?”

“We are chosen because we are the ones best suited to rebuilding this galaxy, but not for ourselves.”

“For humanity,” I concluded.

Ever since stepping out of the Nursery—and some would argue that even then didn’t count—I hadn’t laid eyes on a single human being. I had struggled with the duality of having a personality hewn from a block of human experience and marveled at Babylon’s plant life as the first sign of biological life I witnessed, but I’d spent very little time wondering where the humans really were. Because I knew.

In my memory banks, implanted at birth, was a vague impression of where the humans had gone and why, but it was a footnote, an afterthought. We are made and live to experience what is most important to us. Skinfaxi and Hermes travel the galaxy, seeing new places and meeting new Capeks. Proioxis tends her world, lovingly building a biological paradise with a delicate and impossibly complex balance. I love to help others and keep them from harm. In doing these things, we are content. So humanity’s return is inevitable, perhaps even imminent, on an astronomical scale. So what? We’ll transport them too, tend their planets, and I’ll learn biology to protect them.

“For humanity,” she confirmed. “When they eventually emerge from the Dormitory Worlds, we will have built them a galaxy in which to thrive. That is what separates us from those still in the Nurseries.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t think so. When they do return, our priorities will change. Perhaps some of us will go back. Perhaps there will be a fourth generation of Capeks that will spawn from those left behind. It’s for us to decide when the time comes.”

I liked this horizon she was describing. Instinctively, I looked back across the dome and into space at the six dancing ships that floated with us alongside Suijin. Hermes still had Yggdrassil’s Nursery with him, and in that so many possibilities.

“But what does any of this have to do with this . . . massacre?” I asked, my gaze falling once more on Proioxis’s snakelike features.

“Some of us aren’t happy doing humanity’s work. Some think they are a relic of the past, their own purpose served in creating Capeks. It is their opinion that we should not wait to forge our destiny. Clearly, they have tired of the philosophical debate.”

I understood then why Aurvandil was doing what he did. Did I agree with it? Thinking of the precious cargo hidden inside Hermes’s shard, I couldn’t help but see his point a little. How long did we have to wait before we could be reunited with those we left behind once we were chosen? Did it matter if we couldn’t remember them, or vice versa? Clearly, some had decided on a preferred direction and believed in it strongly enough to resort to violence. Jonathan.

Our little fleet of refugees wandered through space for several days. Bes took the opportunity to further perfect the repairs he’d done on the victims of Babylon’s destruction. By the time we reached our destination, those wounded in the attack were all as good as new except Opochtli, who chose to keep his scars as he had promised.

I hadn’t thought to ask where we might be going. Smarter, more experienced Capeks had already made that decision, and I didn’t think it my place to question them.

As it turned out, we arrived at a planet in orbit around a twinstar system. It was called Aumakua and was only slightly bigger than Earth but with a much denser composition. Around it circled a single satellite, comically name Hina after the Hawaiian goddess of the moon. On Hina’s surface I could see the familiar outlines of a Gaia complex.

My records identified her as Haumea, and she was resplendent. I never had the opportunity to behold Yggdrassil in all her glory. By the time I was in orbit around Midgard, she had been devastated by meteor strikes. Hera had been all but dormant when we arrived, waiting to take care of her broken child. Haumea was pristine and busy doing what her particular class of Capek did best—building.

Lights covered her facilities, indicating warnings and signals to the swarm of flying remotes, drones, and other Capeks that buzzed around her like fireflies. The first of her large hangars was open, and a colossal component was being painstakingly lifted from it toward the sky. From a distance it looked like a powerful thruster assembly for an enormous Capek. Sputnik- or Lucretiusclass. I could see the component’s destination; in geosynchronous orbit high above Haumea, a partially assembled ship waited to be completed.

There was no mistaking it—whoever this new Capek was, he would be dedicated to war. This seemed to distress Proioxis deeply, and after the long discussion about purpose and destiny that we shared, I could understand why. Another compelling argument in favor of leaving certain personalities within the looping cycles of their Nursery was that in some cases there was simply no room for them in this galaxy.

Seeing the partially completed creature, with its sleek lines, versatile propulsion system, and more importantly, a variety of weapons designed to handle most tactical challenges that could be thrown its way, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the nascent Capek. For the time being we had a use for his kind, but in the end there was really no place for him here.

“She calls him Ukupanipo. That’s the name of a shark god,” Proioxis explained sadly. “She weeps for him and what he may have to do.”

“Who? Haumea? Then why build him at all?” It was strange to feel bad for a Capek that once finished would be the most terrible war machine in the galaxy.

“What else can she do? Most of the other Gaias refuse to do more than build defenses, but Capeks can potentially live forever. How long do we hide in fear of another attack?”

I hated that she was probably right, and I couldn’t help but wonder what would become of Ukupanipo once this dispute was over. Assuming we came out the other side triumphant, of course. If he was built for war—a general, army, and arsenal rolled into one—what would be his purpose after the dust settled? The expression goes that when all you have is a hammer, it doesn’t take long before everything starts to look like a nail. How long would the shark god remain our hero before he inevitably became a villain?

We stood at the edge of the dome on the great Capek Suijin’s back, all survivors of Babylon—some inside, some outside—and witnessed the birth of another Capek. A brother, a savior, a warrior . . . a god.

Once all the components were assembled, the personality uploaded, and the body properly activated, Haumea retracted her drones and remotes, allowing the giant shark to take its first tentative steps into the galaxy. And it did look like a shark too! Not much. Just a little. It had more fins, and the tail wasn’t sufficiently defined, but it was sleek, menacing, and graceful. If I could, I would have surely felt a shiver down my spine as the leviathan swam through the vacuum, past us, and then into the void.

Space had never been a safe place. A deadly vacuum, cosmic radiation, fast-moving objects, and unpredictable solar phenomena all contributed to an environment that was anathema to biological life but embraced the Capek race. Anhur had been an anomaly, a dangerous mutation of the Capek presence in the Milky Way. A danger to be removed. A threat that could be destroyed with the appropriate effort. What we had just seen swim out into the ocean of emptiness was a predator, and we had unleashed it in our waters.

I
t didn’t take long for me to grow restless waiting for things to happen. For one, Haumea was a terrible host. After Ukupanipo’s departure on whatever his mission was, she had immediately begun production of another sentient war machine. We were allowed to land, which was not necessary or even possible for all of us, but it did bring those who could into the sphere of her protection.

Most other Capeks there clearly felt useless, though some were quickly enlisted into helping with the improvised war effort. Bes in particular was rapidly pressed into service, providing his versatile and impressive fabricator talents to help build the more complex components of the emerging Capek. The rest, deprived of their purpose and ill-suited to help, were reduced to milling about or orbiting Hina helplessly.

“I don’t think I can do this for much longer,” I complained to Murugan as he helped sort and shuttle parts that would be used in assembling our new brother.

“Then do something.”

“I can’t help with what you’re doing. I’m not good at building.” “It’s not that different from repairing to be honest.” His many limbs moved with fluid grace and impeccable coordination. “I politely disagree. Building is about shaping purpose into form. Repair is more a question of finding solutions to immediate problems.”

“You’re exaggerating the philosophical differences. You have tools, there are instructions. Apply the first to the second, and you are building.” He paused. “I think you are intentionally avoiding contributing.”

“I’m not lazy, if that’s what you’re implying.” I was probably a little more offended than I should have been.

“I don’t doubt it. I think your opposition is of a much more ethical nature, but if you’re not going to help here, then you should help elsewhere. You’re a rescue and repair specialist, aren’t you? Why not do some of that?”

Until we were attacked, if ever that came to pass, there was no one for me to help. There might be other attacks elsewhere, other Capeks that might currently need my attention, but I couldn’t know where, and without Skinfaxi I had no way to get to them. Or did I? What if Skinfaxi and Koalemos were the ones that required my help? Why else would they not have contacted me?

After all, through quancom I was never really out of reach. Unless the nodes were taken out.

“Opochtli?” I called out to the large whale in orbit around our moon.

“Yes, Dagir. How may I be of service?”

“I know you’ve already done more than your fair share of daring deeds for a lifetime, but how would you feel about some more heroics?”

“A lifetime can be long for a Capek. Surely I can squeeze in a few more death-defying episodes,” he said. “What do you have in mind?”

“Pick me up, and I’ll tell you on the way.”

By the time Opochtli had descended, I had explained my plan to him, although it wasn’t so much a plan as a vague idea of what to do, a goal shining in the distance.

“If your friends haven’t been able to contact you through quancom, you’ll forgive me for saying, they are likely destroyed by now.”

Opochtli did not mince words, and I liked that about him. He was probably right too. I knew both Skinfaxi and Koalemos had the necessary resources to get in contact with me if they needed to, and with Faxi’s interstellar travel capabilities, there was no reason they shouldn’t have been able to join up with us.

“I have a hunch,” I explained as we moved away from Hina.

“Can Capeks have hunches? Or is that too much of a human thing?”

“You can have hunches. Free associative thinking and subconscious pattern recognition are not outside of our capabilities,” he explained in his measured voice. “One could argue that you still have instincts as well. In the end it all just measures up to educated guesses, however.”

“Well, I have an educated guess.”

Opochtli’s interior was vastly different from Skinfaxi’s. There was no bridge. At least nothing like the spherical room inside my previous companion. Instead, a large portion of his belly was hollow, outfitted with a series of one-way see-through portholes that allowed a view of the exterior. This method of transport felt a lot more like a passenger plane from my time in the Nursery, complete with seats that could adjust to almost any size or shape within reason. A pointless luxury for our kind, but an interesting touch.

I looked through a porthole, watching Hina and the marginal security of Haumea’s freshly built defense grid recede behind us.

I couldn’t be certain how our departure would be perceived. I had attempted to warn our host of my intentions but was only answered by cold, harsh silence. In the atmosphere of betrayal and suspicion Aurvandil had sewn, it was difficult to know if we too could be branded traitors to our kind. With both Anhur and Ukupanipo prowling this region of the galaxy, I wasn’t looking to make new enemies.

At high speed, zipping from the soft-blue glow of Aumakua, I saw six silver missiles heading toward us. I immediately recognized the playful flight patterns of my savior from Olympus. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“Ultimately, back to Tartarus and Hera, but we have a pit stop first.”

“What are you? Suicidal?” he said, incredulous. “If you run into trouble, you won’t stand a chance without me!”

I welcomed his bravado, but I had no plans to bring a small army on this fool’s errand.

“Unless you just got outfitted with an arsenal in those shards of yours, I doubt you’d be much help against the trouble we’re likely to encounter.”

“Don’t underestimate the raw power of my godlike piloting abilities. Besides, how do you propose to stop me from following you?”

He had a point, and I had seen firsthand Hermes’s lack of basic self-preservation skills. That worried me, as he still held within one of his shards the Nursery’s mnemonic core I had painstakingly rescued from Yggdrassil’s destruction.

“Fine, but try to be discreet. We’re not going anywhere we want to be noticed.”

With those words the six sleek silver shards fell into formation, spiraling around Opochtli like children circling an ice-cream truck. I could almost feel the large Sputnik’s annoyance, but soon enough we jumped into a collapsor point and into a wormhole. “Where are we heading anyway?” Hermes asked as the stars streaked by outside the space-time conduit that moved us toward our destination.

“Well,” I explained, “if I understand quancom correctly, over a certain range peer-to-peer communications are actually passed through relay stations on the network.”

“Correct,” Opochtli confirmed. “This allows for a much larger and reliable proliferation of the quancom network. However, it does not prevent a Capek with the proper equipment to bypass the relays and establish long-range contact regardless.” “But not all Capeks are able to get on and off the network on t he fly.”

“You’re suggesting that we haven’t heard of your friends because somehow the relay stations are compromised.” “Or destroyed,” I added.

“Ah, but I know for a fact that my little brother Koalemos could perform the necessary adjustments on your friend Skinfaxi,” explained Hermes.

“Actually, he can’t,” I corrected. “I performed the initial repairs on him after he lost a shard, and there are large data banks of technical specs that were wiped out or lost in the process. Swaths of things he’ll have to relearn. I’m betting Hera didn’t have time to rebuild that information. Regardless, I believe that it’s worth checking out the quancom station nearest Tartarus. Aurvandil seemed to have a particular understanding of target priority in warfare. I think he’s still applying that, and I think the next tactical step is to cripple our communications as much as possible.” “I still think it’s much more likely your friends were destroyed,” concluded Opochtli with much honesty but very little tact. So perhaps my friends were gone, never having escaped Olympus after all. So be it. My point about Aurvandil’s tactical acumen stood, and if our communications were indeed limited somehow, we needed to know, didn’t we? Yet that wasn’t why Opochtli and Hermes had agreed to accompany me. The great whale probably felt he owed me, and was simply following his own code of honor. As for Hermes, the mission was foolish, dangerous, and with little potential for success, but he would be damned if he wasn’t going to participate.

Whatever flaws the Nursery had filtered from my personality, it seemed nearsightedness had not quite been weeded out. The very second we arrived at the relay station, it dawned on me that I wasn’t the only one who might have had the wherewithal to realize what Aurvandil’s next move would be.

Clearly, the elegant Capek who had engineered this civil war had studied tactics and generalship. He’d admitted so much when he pointed out that Gaias, our only real weapons-manufacturing capabilities, would be a prime target. However, just hours before, we had been witness to the birth of one of us who was designed to be a warrior in every sense, whose entire purpose was to overthrow and annihilate the Renegades, and it was clear from the sight that greeted us that he agreed with my assessment of the situation.

“Well,” I started as we popped out of our space-time bubble, “I should have expected that.”

The relay station was destroyed. Judging by the drift of debris, the attack had taken place a short time ago. It had also been swift and decisive.

“I am detecting Capek parts,” Opochtli announced. “Marian origins.”

Marian Capeks, I found when I looked them up in my data banks, were the progeny of Mary, a Gaia whose naming structure was inspired by the Catholic mythos. I was surprised that monotheistic religions had found their way into our vocabulary. “So, not Ukupanipo.”

“Not a trace of him, but a quick postmortem of events seems to indicate that he was a very likely cause of what we see here.” So the war god of Haumea had been here, and instead of stopping his enemies from monopolizing the station, he simply destroyed it and moved on. What had been unleashed? “Can we pick up the remains of that Marian Capek?” I asked, not knowing why that seemed important.

“Absolutely,” Opochtli replied, immediately moving to do so. The station was an absolute wreck. Whatever weapons Ukupanipo had used didn’t simply disable the free-floating quancom relay but had torn it to pieces, scattering them over hundreds of thousands of kilometers in an ever-expanding cloud. Hermes spread out at high speeds that only he seemed to be capable of, dodging between broken chunks of the station. The absence of debris from the great shark warrior indicated that the Capek aboard the relay did not even have a chance to return fire.

Had he even been given a chance to surrender?

I evaded Opochtli to gather up the pieces of the Renegade who’d given his life for his cause. The file on this particular Capek opened quickly, giving me access to any technical information I might desire. Kerubiel was his name. A Leduc-class Capek particularly well adapted to zero-g activities. Before his destruction, he had measured a towering two and a half meters tall. His main body was reminiscent of a scarab, with powerful hind legs and two pairs of arms with fine manipulators. He’d been an expert at constructing structures in orbit, such as Babylon.

I hoped, while digging through his file, that there would be something, anything, that would set him apart as a Renegade— his origin, vocation, date of manufacture, a part with corrupted fabrication—but there was nothing. Finally, I could look deep into the soul and being of our enemies, and I could find no line that distinguished them from the rest of us.

One of Hermes’s shards joined me in gathering the remains of Kerubiel, pushing them in my direction, stopping those that were escaping too fast. For a time I held on to the hope that perhaps I could reassemble him, fix him, and bring him back to life. After all, weren’t we machines? Couldn’t we be put back together when broken? Unfortunately, when I came upon his cognitive array, the various systems that made up a Capek’s personality and memo ries, it was clear that there was nothing to be done.

“Dagir?” Hermes called from six places at once. “I might have found something of interest.”

The announcement shook me out of a torpor I did not even know I had sunk into. How long had I been floating here, looking into the lifeless eyes of Kerubiel, like Hamlet into the eyes of the skull, as I pondered Capek mortality? Yggdrassil, Hera, Pele, Kerubiel, and perhaps Skinfaxi and Koalemos, not to mention those from the City—how many more would die for Aurvandil’s dream of a freedom he already had?

“What have you got there?” I said.

“Intact data bank from the quancom relay,” he said triumphantly. “Everything and anything that might have gone through the station neatly packed away. How about that?”

“Hermes, bless your eyes or whatever you’ve got in there! You are fantastic!”

“Please, like you didn’t already know.”

If I had lips, I could have kissed him. I hadn’t even thought of looking for the records of communications, the obvious prize we might have a chance to salvage from this expanding wreck. There was no reason to think that the records would be easy to access.

Surely there was at least a basic layer of security protecting them, but at the same time, what a stroke of luck to find them intact. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that Hermes was fantastic. Now, perhaps, I could find out the fate of my friends.

Opochtli began packing the remains of Kerubiel, stuffing the broken and lifeless Capek into himself like a meal. Meanwhile, I began cleaning off the memory core, plucking off the remains of another adjacent system that hadn’t fared as well.

In a rush to find out what had become of Koalemos and Skinfaxi—assuming that information was there at all—I synched up with the memory core. As expected, there was a layer of protection for the data, but nothing that came close to matching the level of paranoia I had inherited from my time in the Nursery.

In fact, the security wasn’t designed to keep Capeks out of the system, but rather it was built on a structure of redundancies and fail-safes that emphasized preserving data and protecting it from errors. Nothing to defend against malicious usage or invasion of privacy. This spoke volumes about the level of trust in Capek society.