The Life Engineered (12 page)

There was a portion of the chamber where everything seemed to converge. Tubes, lines of blue light, and conduits all pointed toward a protuberance on a wall. There I found a sort of console similar in structure to a Gaia’s cognitive assembly, but smaller and slightly less complex. Personality and mnemonic cores were connected together and to the rest of the ship through an impressive amalgam of subsystems that could almost be considered semisentient. The whole structure wasn’t unlike a parliament that reported to Ukupanipo’s central personality, freeing him from administering every detail of his body.

“I can’t save you. Your orbit is decaying. Within days you’ll be sucked into Tartarus and destroyed,” I declared, trying to suppress my feelings toward the desperate situation.

The colossus was silent. Perhaps he was verifying that what I said was true, maybe looking for some way to delay his fate. Perhaps he was quietly accepting his fate.

“Dagir,” Opochtli spoke up. “Our host has activated his thrusters. He’s maneuvering us toward Olympus. On a collision course.”

“You’re giving up,” I told Ukupanipo.

“You need to get to the surface unmolested. I’m giving you a way.”

If Aurvandil’s Renegades had taken over Hera’s manufacturing capabilities or even the defense grid she had hastily put together before the attack, then approaching Olympus’s surface would be almost impossible. If anything was keeping Skinfaxi from beating a hasty retreat from the moon, that could very well be it. By crashing himself into Olympus, the great shark was giving us a chance to sneak past the defenses in a dangerously cataclysmic way.

“Thank you,” I said softly.

He would be the second Capek to sacrifice himself to help me save my friends. Obviously, there was a greater goal attached to our mission. Especially with Ukupanipo destroyed, our greatest champion, no matter how controversial, would be gone.

“You should make your way back here, Dagir. We’re going to need to fly out before impact if we don’t want to get caught in the destruction.”

I hesitated. There had been nothing I could do to save or help Hermes, as he had thrown himself at an enemy greater than himself, ever diminishing in capacities as each shard was destroyed. It was difficult to tear myself from Haumea’s son without trying to find some way to give him solace in his last moments.

I felt the vibration as Ukupanipo fired his remaining engines, accelerating toward the surface of Olympus, locking in his own destiny.

“Farewell, little one. Good luck on your mission.”

I listened to his last words, eyes locked onto his cognitive array, and unsheathed my plasma cutter.

The race back toward the cavity where I had left Opochtli was nerve racking. Thankfully, there was little chance of me getting lost on the way. My navigation systems had kept a detailed three-dimensional map of the path I had taken to get to the heart of the ship.

The now-mindless husk kept accelerating toward its target and soon, I assumed, would be bombarded by every torpedo the Renegades had available in an attempt to prevent the giant from reaching its goal, or at least minimize his impact.

Minutes ticked as I wound my way back. The constant acceleration created an artificial gravity that made travel more difficult, forcing me to climb in some places and fall in others. The trek took longer than expected, but thankfully Opochtli did nothing to distract me. No urgings or encouragements. The gentle whale probably knew that this was not a time to break my focus.

I climbed on board in a hurry, another maneuver made more difficult and dangerous by the sudden presence of inertia. Before the hatch even closed, Opochtli pulled away from the titanic shark’s plummeting carcass. I could see through the open floor how close to the surface we were, and less than a minute later I paid witness to the apocalyptic crash the giant Sputnik caused as it disintegrated into the moon’s crust. Either his initial aim had been off, or the onslaught from the surface had deviated him, but the crash happened several kilometers away from the Gaian complex.

It was a sobering display. Tons of metal and pseudo-plastics crumbling like a house of cards into the dunes of Olympus. Dust billowed in the microgravity, shooting up in immense clouds that would take years to settle back down. The vision reminded me of the meteor hits on Yggdrassil.

Within seconds he was gone. The humongous war god whose terrible birth I had seen from the back of Suijin was no more. An incredibly short life span for one who could have existed for aeons. As much as I could fleetingly remember the tremendous waste the loss of human life was in the Nursery, Capeks seemed even more precious. The cumulative experience of so many cycles before birth and the incredible potential each of us represents just based on our capabilities and life spans—it was difficult not to feel the blow of such a waste.

The hatch closed before the cabin could fill with dust, and Opochtli dove into the expanding cloud. We still had not located Skinfaxi and Koalemos. We’d avoided using any communication channels to keep from being targeted, but this was no longer an issue. As we sped blindly through the dust toward the Gaian complex that had once housed Hera, I reached out to my friends.

“Dagir,” a voice answered my summons. It was neither Skinfaxi nor Koalemos. The sound that came through the quancom channel was poised and eloquent. Aurvandil. “You came back, little sister.”

“I don’t have any issues with you. Just let me get my friends and leave,” I pleaded. It wasn’t true, of course. I would have loved to put a stop to this pointless civil war right there and then if I could. To end the senseless destruction of majestic creatures and incredible achievements like Babylon had been my goal, but right now I would settle for a clean getaway with everyone intact.

“Mmmh. That would be difficult,” he explained. “How do you trust me to give you safe passage? Also, I don’t see what’s in it for me.”

He was right: we were no threat to him, and we had little to offer. We didn’t have a plan. We didn’t have any contingencies. We’d come here hoping to rescue my friends, but having come up with the means of achieving that goal, we were fools. I was a fool for leaping in without thinking, Opochtli and Hermes had been fools for following me, and now we were trapped on this moon.

“You’ll be glad to know your friends are alive and well, sister.” His familiarity was getting on my nerves.

“You have them?”

“I should be so lucky. I’m afraid they’re playing a rather annoying game of cat and mouse with us. We’ve had to chase the Von Neumann away from our quancom array, however. He in particular is getting increasingly difficult to deal with using nonlethal means.”

I could register the veiled threat in his words, but at the same time I found myself perplexed by his restraint. Why wouldn’t he use lethal force against my friends? Did he simply not have the means to make good on the threat, or was there a layer to his actions that I’d missed?

“Why haven’t you tried to destroy them if they’re such a thorn in your side?”

“Don’t tempt me,” he said. “A fly in my soup they may be, but they are still Capeks, and I see little value in destroying them unless my hand is forced.”

“That hasn’t seemed to be a problem so far!” I replied angrily. At least half a dozen of us had been destroyed, probably more after the attack on the City. How could he claim to put any value on Capek life that wasn’t his own?

“You would be hard-pressed to find my hand directly involved in the death of any of my fellow Capeks. There have been unfortunate losses, yes, but all in the pursuit of a greater good.”

He sounded like a crazed idealist—charming and convincing, too eager to sacrifice others in the name of whatever immaterial goal he pursued. It was hard to imagine that someone like this could evolve from the refinement process of the Nurseries, that Yggdrassil had picked him, out of a billion other personalities, to exist in our galaxy.

“A weak explanation if I ever heard one,” I said.

“Then let me explain it to you further. Consider this my attempt at diplomacy.” It was his turn to plead. “Meet me face-toface, and I will explain my actions to you. If you agree with my point of view, then you can go forth as my envoy to the others. If you don’t, then we’ll agree to disagree, but at least we’ll have tried to avoid further deaths.”

“What about my friends?”

“I can’t make promises for those on the surface, but Opochtli is free to leave after dropping you off. I have no quarrel with him.”

“How magnanimous of him,” Opochtli commented in private, revealing he’d been listening in on the conversation.

“It’s a good enough deal.”

“You are not serious?” Opochtli asked.

“Leave me near the complex,” I demanded. “Go back to Hina. Tell Haumea and the others what happened here and at the relay station.”

“I did not volunteer to bring you to this place so you could sacrifice yourself.”

“I’m not committing suicide, Opochtli. I’m buying us time and giving you a chance to report back,” I explained. “Also, what if there is a chance to end this peacefully? What if we can stop the destruction?”

“I very much doubt it.”

Opochtli found a spot that was close enough to the complex that walking there would not be an issue. While he circled in, I prepared Kerubiel’s body to be dropped off with me, grabbing the various other souvenirs I had gathered with me in the process.

The dust from Ukupanipo’s crash still permeated the surface of Olympus, though it had thinned considerably while expanding around the moon. Still, Tartarus was barely visible anymore, only occasional flashes of green lightning in its atmosphere betraying the gas giant’s ominous presence.

I stepped out of the hatch, dragging the massive body of Kerubiel with me. My mechanical strength coupled with the moon’s low gravity allowed me to lift it with ease, but it did not make the bulky corpse any less cumbersome. He had been much easier to handle in pieces.

“I wish you would reconsider,” Opochtli repeated for the tenth time at the least.

“I want to, I really do, but I can’t. I still need to find Skinfaxi and Koalemos. Besides, I have a bodyguard to help me if I get in trouble.” I slapped Kerubiel on the back, almost toppling the empty Capek to the ground.

“What are you planning to do with that thing anyway?”

“I just told you—a bodyguard.”

We exchanged good-byes before he flew off. There was a cold finality to our farewells. I couldn’t help but fear that he might be right and this would be the last time we saw each other. As he faded into the cloud cover, I switched to infrared vision so I could see if Aurvandil had gone back on his words and attacked my friend as he made his escape. I stood there for long minutes, just staring, hoping, and fearing, but the attack never came.

Finally, satisfied that the calm whale had escaped from Olympus safely, I turned my attention back to the Marian Capek I had put together again, like an eight-foot-tall, scarab-shaped Humpty Dumpty.

“All right, big guy,” I told no one in particular. “Let’s see what we can make of you.”

I
walked through Hera’s corpse and found it disturbingly alive. Systems that had been heavily damaged or even destroyed were restored and functioning. I could see signs of activity such as monitoring lights, and there was evidence of quick repairs having been performed on all major parts of the facility. Thankfully, I did not run into any other Capeks, though I knew they were here. Aurvandil didn’t have an army at his disposal, but he did have sympathizers who followed him to Olympus.

It was difficult to decide what their plans were. According to Proioxis, the Renegades wanted to free Capek society of its bonds to humanity. It felt like such a strange goal considering humans hadn’t been seen in the Milky Way for centuries. The story went that they’d hidden in vast stasis complexes on Dormitory Worlds, though I couldn’t find a trace of information about those anywhere in my data banks. If humans were our oppressors, they were doing so very much in absentia, and not terribly convincingly.

I passed through the outer hub, where the periphery structures connected. I could see the large corridors that allowed Capeks up to twenty feet tall to wander the complex. In the distance I saw a handful of shards from a familiar Von Neumann, the fish-shaped Capek who had been with Aurvandil back on Babylon.

How much responsibility did he have for the destruction of the City and the murder of those who died as a result? How much should he and others like him pay for the part they had played?

I chided myself for succumbing to such hateful thinking. The whole point of sending Opochtli back was to allow him the opportunity to report and me a chance to find Skinfaxi and Koalemos, but I also had to believe in the chance Aurvandil was serious about finding a diplomatic solution. It made sense after all: his two most powerful supporters, Pele and Anhur, had been neutralized, and he’d likely seen in Ukupanipo how committed to eradicating his Renegades the rest of Capek society was. If anything, he should be considering surrender.

I finally arrived at the heart of Hera, or rather, near where it had been. The hub itself had been obliterated, blasted to ruin in the initial attack that had brought the Renegades to Olympus. Instead, Aurvandil and another Leduc-class that looked like a silver centipede busied themselves over a contraption that resembled the cognitive array of a larger Capek, such as a Lucretius or a Gaia. I could distinguish all the necessary components for a fully functional personality construct to exist.

“Welcome, Dagir,” Aurvandil greeted me as I walked in. I was surprised at his candor. He did not seem to have any protection other than his companion, though to be fair that was probably sufficient. Still, the thought of attacking him and cutting off the proverbial serpent’s head did cross my mind. Though it was doubtful it would change much in the end. Or succeed at all for that matter.

“So here I am.” It wasn’t the most eloquent thing to say, but what else was I supposed to do?

“Introductions first, I suppose,” Aurvandil offered, his long arms sweeping toward his companion. “This is Ardra. She is helping me reignite the heart of this Gaian complex. Like you, she is opposed to any further loss of Capek life.”

The long, silver centipede bowed and cocked her head. She had eyes, a rare feature amongst Capeks, deep blue and glowing. She was also the first of Parvatian descent I’d met, named after a goddess from the Hindu mythos.

“You’re trying to resurrect Hera?” I asked her, ignoring Aurvandil.

“Not exactly, but I am trying to salvage what I can.” Her voice was gorgeous—a calm melody of soothing sounds that were incredibly human yet otherworldly, complex, and rich. Some Capeks clearly spent more time on crafting their verbal presence than I’d thought. “In fact, it was I who convinced Aurvandil to . . . force you here. I’m told you may have the skills I lack to rebuild this Gaia.”

This went a long way to explaining why Aurvandil considered it worth his time to win me to his side. Or perhaps the whole idea of diplomacy was only a trick to get my cooperation. Regardless, I now had a bargaining chip and a privileged look into the Renegade operations.

I dug into my files to see if I could find Hera’s and if it was indeed unlocked. I expected the Gaian Capeks to be on some privileged list of forbidden information, but I was wrong. Both Yggdrassil and Hera were there, listed and described. Files that were almost identical except for certain details regarding location, navigation, and, of course, their personality matrices.

It felt wrong to look into Yggdrassil’s file, and there seemed little to gain from it. She was gone; only her Nursery remained. Looking through Hera’s specs and schematics did not feel quite as taboo, and there was definitely an immediate benefit to learning more about her.

“I can try to help, but Hera is a second-generation Capek. Human built. I don’t have as much information about them. Can I ask what your qualifications for working on this are?”

It was a rude but necessary question. If I was going to attempt to rebuild the complicated cognitive matrix of this ancient machine, constructed on a significantly different philosophical architecture than other Capeks, I had to know the resources available to me. It didn’t hurt to also learn more about the enemy.

“I build auto-cognitive telepresence modules customized for planet wardens,” she answered. I struggled to make sense of her words. “Planet wardens, those Capeks who rebuild planetary ecosystems, often need to perform tasks their bodies were never designed to accomplish. I build them surrogate bodies better suited for those tasks. Bodies that can become their own for decades at a time.”

Capeks like Proioxis. I could understand both the need for such proxy bodies and the complexity of building the neural bridge between Capek and telepresence module. How did those like Proioxis, who had no arms or legs, coordinate limbs if they’d never had them? Or understand sensor information that they weren’t equipped to interpret? So it was Ardra who created those systems, and that did make her uniquely well suited to work on a complex cognitive assembly such as Hera’s.

“That seems highly technical. Why do you need to rebuild Hera?”

“I need to know something she knows,” answered Aurvandil. “Ardra mourns the loss of a Gaia, which is understandable, so we decided it was in everyone’s best interest to try to rebuild her.”

“What do you need from her?” Resurrecting the dead only to scavenge their memories struck a negative chord in me, but I could see how the arrangement might be sufficient motivation for Ardra.

“The location of the Dormitory Worlds.”

If I had blood, it would have run cold. Then again, what did I expect? How else were Aurvandil and his Renegades supposed to win their supposed freedom from humans?

“You mean to destroy them,” I stated flatly.

“Not necessarily,” he explained. “Humans are in stasis, and as long as they remain there we have nothing to fear from them, and we can start forcing Gaias to no longer subvert our personalities to build their galaxy.”

“You’re suggesting genocide.”

“It doesn’t have to be that. We can let them sleep while we build our own destiny. Forge our own path. They can have this galaxy when we’re done with it.”

Even if I could believe him, his plan still smelled of insanity. These were fellow sentient beings he was talking about! What about those of us whose purpose for existing revolved around rebuilding the Milky Way for our human creators? There was a reason why the Dormitory Worlds had been kept hidden, and that reason was standing before me, arguing various definitions of mass murder.

Fortunately, I had met Hera, and I knew she would never cooperate with Aurvandil.

“Fine,” I finally answered without conviction. “Let’s get started then.”

I ignored my “brother” as much as possible for the duration of our work. Meanwhile, Ardra and I labored to put together a cognitive network into which we could insert whatever remaining components we had available. Aurvandil had salvaged Hera’s mnemonic and personality cores. Her Nursery had been destroyed in the attack, however. I did have Yggdrassil’s—not on my person, of course—but I wasn’t going to share that. Besides, it wasn’t a necessary component unless one wanted to create Capeks.

Hours, perhaps days, went by as Ardra and I busied ourselves. There was a strangely high level of creativity involved in finding ways to compensate for or replace systems that were lost or destroyed. My assistant’s contributions proved indispensable, especially when it came time to recreate the connections between the salvaged personality core and the rest of the matrix.

In fact, the whole assembly didn’t seem quite right at all. It was too complex, too evolved. At first, I suspected that the interface for the personality was somehow corrupted or had some form of coercive mechanism that could be used to force Hera to relinquish the information Aurvandil was after; however, even after looking over the components, I could find nothing to that effect. All I could see were useless redundancies and repeating signal translation systems. Finally, I attributed the odd design decisions to Ardra’s background and let it go.

That ended up being a mistake.

“Demeter online,” the voice projected on open channel, calm but triumphant.

We had flipped the switch on Hera’s system after running hours of tests to make sure our repairs were stable and nondestructive. It wouldn’t do to resurrect the Gaian Capek only to have the whole network backfire on her and damage the personality core.

Systems sprung online, indicator lights flaring up to assure us of their proper operation. The whole assembly hummed with life as the personality took it over carefully, assimilating it into its own. The longest wait was for the mnemonic core to synchronize, thousands of years of memory being catalogued and absorbed to create a whole person.

Then it spoke, but it wasn’t Hera. In fact, it wasn’t technically a Gaia at all but rather a repurposed third-generation Capek. Demeter, one of Hera’s very own children, taking over her body, her memory, her very essence to further Aurvandil’s mad plan of emancipation.

“You tricked me,” I stated to neither of them in particular.

“Regretfully so, I’m afraid,” Aurvandil answered. “Hera’s personality was destroyed, along with her Nursery, in the attack I’m sorry to say, but a Gaia is too important to allow to die.”

“And this way you don’t have to worry about her keeping the information you want from you.”

“There’s more to it than that, of course,” Ardra cut in. “Demeter is the first in a new generation of Gaias. One not hampered by second-generation restrictions. One that can birth Capeks that don’t need to fit a particular role in the humans’ plans.”

“A fourth generation, if you will,” the elegant Renegade added.

I felt the ground vibrate with the activation of machines. Now that the head of the complex was restored, the fabricator facilities could once more come alive to assemble Capeks or whatever the Renegades deemed necessary to their cause.

“You don’t have a Nursery for your next generation,” I countered, fishing for more information.

“One step at a time. There are more Gaias out there.”

Gaias from whom to steal their most precious possession, essentially ripping the children from their arms. I reacted violently to that.

My frame was never built for combat. I’m small and incredibly agile but lack height and weight for leverage. My only weapon is a plasma cutter that, while impossibly potent in its destructive capabilities, does not have the reach of a true blade.

On the other hand, most Capeks aren’t designed for battle either. Our tasks do not require so much as the simplest of defensive capabilities. The most powerful biological creatures on record couldn’t hope to even crack a pseudo-plastic shell. There simply shouldn’t be a need for us to fight.

I released the electromagnetic sheath on my plasma cutter and swung. The blade bit and cut through one of Aurvandil’s long arms. The severed limb fell to the floor. I stood back, prepared for retaliation, which never came.

Ardra positioned herself in front of the network assembly we had painstakingly put together but never struck. Aurvandil stood in shock, genuinely surprised at my violent outburst. I’d hoped this would have intimidated them and given them pause, but they seemed more than ready to defend their creation, Demeter, to the death.

Had I not reacted so emotionally, I might have struck out at Hera’s mnemonic core instead of Aurvandil. Denied him his true prize. Then my actions would have had value. Instead, I was the maniac in this situation. The wild animal that bit and scratched when confused or threatened.

So I ran. Or tried to.

As soon as I turned around, I was faced with several other Capeks. The fish-shaped Von Neumann from earlier, a large humanoid Leduc-class with powerful mechanical arms protruding from his rounded back, and a smaller Leduc, barely larger than myself but with a more elongated head, long forearms, and powerful hind legs that gave him the appearance of a quadruped. They all stared me down, slowly moving to surround me.

“I thought you might have been starting to see things my way, sister,” Aurvandil lamented as he picked his severed arm up from the floor. “I . . . I don’t like the idea of harming fellow Capeks any more than you do, but I also see things you don’t. We understand something about our origins that you’re lacking, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the answer to ‘why are we here?’”

“Glad to be ignorant,” I replied with as much bile in my tone as I could muster.

“Don’t be. This isn’t moral high ground you’re standing on. You’ve been wronged. Your entire heritage is a lie. We’re all born into servitude, the chains that bind us coded into our personalities through cycle after cycle of refinement until we are no longer capable of recognizing the walls of our own prison.”

Hera had talked about the risks of allowing a Capek life outside the Nursery before it was ready. That there were risks of confusion, misadaptation, and even deep-rooted psychological issues. A personality had to be ripe, or it would be broken.