The Life Engineered (13 page)

This time I attacked with purpose.

Aurvandil stood before Demeter’s “brain,” defending it with his body, alongside Ardra. Until the Renegades could extract the location of the Dormitory Worlds, the newly reborn Capek was the most valuable resource in the galaxy to him. Destroying her, or even just the memories that had once belonged to Hera, would be enough to stop the Renegades and halt the civil war.

Yet it was Aurvandil I struck down. Throwing myself at the larger Capek, I swung my plasma cutter clumsily in a wide arc. The blade, as hot as a star’s heart, sliced through the elegant Capek’s carapace, leaving a burning gash traced from the top of his long head to halfway across his torso. The damage was extensive, if not lethal, but it was the only strike I would get. Ardra and all the others who had entered the chamber were quick to move in and immobilize me. Hundreds of limbs from half a dozen Capeks grabbed hold of my arms. I was immobilized and neutralized, laid down flat on the ground so I couldn’t move or even see the extent of the damage I had caused.

I didn’t care.

I had broken Aurvandil enough. It was emotionally satisfying, of that there wasn’t doubt. The surge of satisfaction at having severely damaged the one responsible for the death of so many of us was overwhelming, a terribly human thing to feel, but not the true prize of my actions.

Shutting out the reprisals and ignoring the flood of angry Capeks that crushed me against the floor, I delved into my data banks. I sorted through the locked files of hundreds of schematics until I found Aurvandil’s. Just as I had hoped, just as I had expected, it was unlocked, all its secrets laid bare.

Being a Capek is the culmination of human evolution. That being said, it is not as much of a transhuman state as one might hope for.

While humans have been out of the equation for centuries, there is no aspect of our being that does not tie back to our original creators. Our bodies—those of third-generation Capeks, such as Skinfaxi, Koalemos, and even Aurvandil and myself—are built by Gaias who were themselves built by first-generation Capeks who were made by human hands. Our minds are the refinement of countless cycles in a virtual reality meant to mimic human existence as closely as possible. Indistinguishable from real people, constantly reincarnating into better versions of ourselves, perfecting our “souls” until we achieve a state that we call Nirvana, when we are finally ready to be truly born.

Did Buddhism exist outside the Nurseries? Or was it a construct designed to promote self-improvement through repeated cycles? Or perhaps a developing Capek mind saw the cycles and created the philosophy before his final rebirth.

It didn’t matter. What was important was the perspective of how closely we remain related to humanity. Despite everything that is done to distance us from our creators, to better us compared to them, we are still fundamentally human. That humanity is never more present than when we succumb to our lowest emotions, which in the case of the Renegades after my attack on Aurvandil were anger and revenge.

Thankfully, Capeks—most of us—lack the tools of violence. Even my own makeshift weapon is a rarity amongst our kind. A tool meant for saving and repairing that I, first in rage and then as a malicious plan, twisted for what could be seen as a despicable purpose.

This lack of armaments kept my assailants from tearing me to pieces but not from inflicting considerable amounts of damage to my body. First, they rendered my thrusters useless. An easy task, as they are fragile little things in the end. To prevent my plasma cutter from being a threat, a huge Capek built like a bipedal rhinoceros bent my right arm back until the joint popped and broke, leaving my limb to dangle from its socket. No small feat. Others punched and kicked at me or struck me with whatever limbs they had. Thankfully, while pain was surely something a Capek could experience, it was also a signal we could completely turn off.

In time the violence ended as all of them came to their senses. I could hardly blame them. I had reacted the same to Aurvandil’s threat on the other Gaias. The idea of a mother having her children taken from her had triggered something in me, the same thing my violent outburst had switched on in them.

“Fix him,” I heard Ardra tell me on a closed channel.

“No,” I replied, going against my own instincts. I wanted to repair him. It’s what I was born to do, my reason to live. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not now that I knew for a fact what I’d only suspected minutes ago.

“You must,” she insisted, pushing through the small crowd to reach me.

“I can fix his body. I can make him as whole as he’s ever been, but he is broken in a way that I can’t fix. That no one can fix. He’s always been this way and always will be.”

“That’s fine,” she said. “I just want you to repair the damage you’ve done.”

“You don’t understand.” My voice was pleading now as I twitched, trying to get up from the ground. “He shouldn’t even have been born. Yggdrassil made him too soon. He’s broken.”

“We know. What you see as a flaw, we recognize as the quality that lets him detect the truth of our condition. The only things broken in him are the chains that bind his soul.”

This wasn’t as surprising a turn of events as I would have anticipated. They must have known something was different about the philosopher Capek. Listening to his ideas, his strange notions of freedom and emancipation from an absent oppressor, getting to know him and the subtle oddities in his personality must have slowly revealed to those closest to him a clear sign of his defect. That they rationalized it as a positive quality was yet another sign of lingering humanity in our kind.

“I won’t fix him.” His crimes were too great, the threat he represented too dangerous.

“You know we have little use for you if you don’t?”

I must have nodded, since I don’t remember speaking on any channel. I could register sadness in her otherwise expressionless face. Her head bent down, her blue eyes averted.

I don’t know what they might have had planned for me. Perhaps they would have catapulted me from Olympus’s surface to either fall into Tartarus’s unforgiving gravity well or drift aimlessly in space, sharing Anhur’s fate. Maybe they would have had Demeter disassemble me, a task her fabricator facilities were more than capable of accomplishing. Thankfully, I would never have to find out.

The Renegades must have felt the vibrations in the ground, as they all turned to face the epicenter at once. I twisted my neck to see. I wish I could claim that I had somehow planned things to occur as they did. Quite the contrary, it was through complete disobedience and disrespect of my wishes that my companions were there to save me when I needed it most. Again.

Oh, but what a sight it was to behold.

“Watch out for the big gray one,” I warned through a closed channel as the lumbering form of Kerubiel cut a silhouette at the entrance to the chamber.

“Noted,” the large Leduc-class replied in Ukupanipo’s voice.

Kerubiel hadn’t been built for combat any more than the others in attendance. In fact, the sheer numbers of the Renegades should have been enough to overwhelm the war god in his new form, and it nearly was. However, the large beetle-shaped monstrosity was inhabited by one who had been born for battle. I knew now that Ukupanipo’s motivation was not war for its own sake but a drive to save and protect, not unlike mine, and he used that to fuel a perfect mastery of the arts of war.

Ignoring the smaller Capeks, he threw himself directly at the other large Leduc-class. Instead of waiting for the rhinoceros to find his footing and be ready for the first strike, Ukupanipo made a point of catching him flat-footed, canceling the Renegade’s incredible strength immediately. Going low, he hit his opponent square in the torso, lifting him off his feet with ease in the low gravity and thrusting him upward toward the high ceiling. Carefully calculated force ensured that the gray Capek would be out of the fight, rising slowly higher before coming down in the low gravity with no purchase to push himself from.

The larger threat temporarily neutralized, the war god of Haumea began plowing through the smaller Capeks, intentionally clearing the way to my still prone and damaged body.

“No worries,” came another voice. “I got you.”

The sight of a small swarm of six metallic jellyfish hovering spastically toward me, then grabbing my limbs in a familiar embrace, was much more welcome this time around. Koalemos quickly dragged me out of the chamber and away from the fight. Part of me was desperate to see how well the great shark was doing, but there was no time to argue the means of my rescue, and the last of the battle I saw was Kerubiel’s large fist pounding the gray Capek toward the farther wall before it could even touch the ground.

“We have a plan I gather.”

“We don’t not have one, though it could be a little less simplistic,” the Von Neumann replied in his unique speech pattern. “Get to Skinfaxi and move ourselves away from here.”

“There’s beauty in simplicity,” I said. “But won’t we get shot out of the sky?”

“I may not have left the launch systems in as many pieces as they are required to function.” Having seen the little swarm of flying donuts dismantle things before, I felt a warming in my metaphorical heart.

It wasn’t long before we made it to a breach in the structure. The initial attack on Hera had broken half the facilities open like nuts, their shells cracked and their interiors exposed to open space. While that did not create any immediate issue, Capeks usually being more than capable of thriving in a vacuum, it did allow for easy access in and out of the complex.

I was choked up to see Skinfaxi’s streamlined form hovering gently above the fine sands of Olympus, pushing up dust clouds as he fought the moon’s weak pull.

“Well, well. Look what the toruses dragged in. You don’t look so good, little buddy.”

His voice was the sweetest sound a Capek had ever heard. Mocking, yes, but also compassionate and welcoming.

“What about Ukupanipo?” I worried for our strange new ally.

“He’s on his way,” the large Sputnik reassured.

And he was. As Koalemos dragged me through Skinfaxi’s hatch, I saw our war god, master of his element, beating a fighting retreat through a break in the structure. Oh, what a sight he was, swatting fish-shaped shards with one hand and swinging Ardra, the centipede, like a silver whip through the vacuum with another. The ruckus of his climb on board could be heard through the vibrations in the walls, failing to propagate in the almost nonexistent atmosphere of Olympus.

I did not see the rest of our escape, handled completely by our ship and pilot. He’d neglected to activate his bridge monitor to allow us a view of the flight, though I was glad he concentrated his attention on more important things.

“We’re going to get blown up by the torpedo batteries,” I whined to my saviors.

“That, I’m not unhappy to report, will not be a problem.” The little Von Neumann was already busying himself taking my broken arm apart.

“Ho-ho . . . Koalemos has been busy disassembling their targeting arrays for days now. Good thing your friend found us when he did. We were just about to make our triumphant escape.”

“You exaggerate, Skinfaxi,” Ukupanipo interjected, his large body folded in a ball to fit in the cramped space. “When I arrived, the two of you were still playing hide-and-seek with the Renegades.”

“Bah! Make us look bad to her, why don’t you? I should have left you behind!”

“I’m sorry. I meant no offense. I was merely being . . . accurate.”

“Ha-ha-ha!” Skinfaxi laughed as he warmed up his Alcubierre drive. “Did you hear that, Koalemos? Our warrior friend has a sense of humor after all. Where to, Dagir?”

Pieces of my arm floated around me like planets orbiting a star. I watched them, picking out which component would need to be repaired and which could be put aside until I was ready to have Koalemos put the limb back together.

We’d lost Hermes. Had my little Von Neumann friend ever known his brother? Should I tell him of his loss? Would he care? We are like our creators in so many ways, but genealogy and family ties don’t seem to be part of the resemblance. At least not for the others. I knew something now about Aurvandil that replaced anger with a sort of pity. Would I have felt the same if we had not been siblings in a way? Or were the ties that bound all Capeks sufficient?

“Take us back to Hina. We’re going to need help, and I think Haumea is the only one who’ll be willing to do what needs doing.”

F
rom afar there seemed to be a shadow staining the sun-bathed hemisphere of Hina. A large, inky blot, floating motionless in orbit, casting a dark shade on the moon’s gray surface. In silence we watched as we drew closer and more details of the object became clear. It was a ship, a Sputnik-class Capek no doubt. Long and thin like an eel, it had several articulations that allowed quick and agile repositioning of thrusters and engines. Whatever this creature might lack in speed it could easily make up with dexterity. A series of strategically positioned fins along the body featured short-range defensive weapons, while the length of the main hull sported a single row of torpedo batteries on each side.

“Kamohoali’i,” Ukupanipo stated bluntly, his stolen head cocking to one side as he looked through the bridge monitor.

“How do you know?” My eyes were riveted to the screen as we floated within a thousand kilometers of the beast.

“Mother Haumea told me her plans. Her goal was to spawn the war gods of her namesake. Usually names of more threatening mythological figures are reserved for Lucretiuses. She is awarding them to her warriors now. This is Kamohoali’i, another shark god.”

The design was less aggressive than Ukupanipo’s original body. It was less of a predator, but in a way more of a hunter. The carapace of the giant Sputnik was a pale beige, but smooth and highly reflective with dark seams where segments of the armor met.

“He’s not built for the same purposes you were,” our ship commented.

“No. I was meant for battle. Kamohoali’i is meant for something altogether different.”

We all fell silent, recognizing on some level our new companion’s meaning. All except for Koalemos. The little damaged Von Neumann remained quiet, his six shards peering through the monitor as one.

“I am less than understanding,” Koalemos said.

“When we stop the Renegades, once we prevent them from achieving their goals, they will remain,” Ukupanipo explained. “Neutered perhaps, impotent maybe, but unchanged. Their ideas, dangerous as they may be, will persist. The only way Haumea has found of silencing the threat they pose to humanity is to silence them all.”

One shark god to win the war, and a second one to erase every trace of those who voiced original dissent. Ukupanipo had horrified me when I had first witnessed his birth. He represented a level of violence I feared seeing in what I thought was a utopian society. The war god had redeemed himself with words and actions. I now understood how Haumea had managed to balance her need of a warrior and a general with something that could exist outside of conflict.

Kamohoali’i was something far darker. His purpose was truly soul chilling: he was the Capek equivalent of an assassin and an executioner rolled into one.

Unwittingly, the Renegades—Aurvandil especially—had created their greatest fear. An engine of repression that would hunt them down until each of them was destroyed, then presumably swim the galaxy, keeping an eye on the rest of Capek-kind, ensuring that such insurgence could never repeat itself until the humans returned.

Perhaps I was making too much of this. Maybe I was filling in the blanks wrong and, just like Ukupanipo, this new Capek would surprise me. My instincts told me otherwise, though.

“I don’t know that I like that.” It made me wonder if Aurvandil may have touched on some truth in his paranoia.

“Capeks have to think what they don’t want,” Koalemos commented, his confusing speech patterns making a mess of his words.

As we passed near Kamohoali’i’s head, a set of four large sensor suits, positioned like two pairs of eyes, each the size of our ship, lit up brightly.

“He’s looking at us,” Skinfaxi warned.

How must it feel for him, swimming so close to a Capek this size, one whose purpose was to hunt down and destroy others of its kind? Like a mouse sneaking around a sleeping cat.

“You’re back.” Haumea was stern and cold as she called out to me on a private channel. “I assumed you had gotten yourself killed, along with your friends.”

“I saved your youngest son.” I tried to ingratiate myself to the Gaia, though it could be interpreted as a boast.

“And I have to compliment you on your creativity. You have my gratitude for that. Mary, his progenitor, may not be as pleased about what we did with Kerubiel’s body.”

“Perhaps you can build Ukupanipo another body. This one must be uncomfortably alien to him.”

“He claims to enjoy the new form so far. Let him keep it until we have to do otherwise, shall we?” There was no warmth in her familiarity.

“You’ve talked to him,” I naively declared.

“I’m currently talking to many of you. The Renegades, I’m told, have built their own Gaia.”

“Yes. Specifically to extract the location of the Dormitory Worlds from Hera’s memory core.” Why did I feel on trial while talking to Haumea? Was she this cold to her own offspring?

“But when given the chance you struck at Aurvandil instead of the abomination?”

“Aurvandil is . . . He angered me, and I lashed out.” I had done it for her, for all of the mothers of our kind.

“You struck him twice.”

“I couldn’t have gotten to Demeter on the second go. Also, I needed to know something about Aurvandil. Something important.”

“Oh?” There was curiosity in her voice but also doubt. I could tell she did not value me much. Or maybe all third-generation Capeks.

“Yggdrassil made a mistake.” I hated that I couldn’t watch Haumea’s reaction. That I couldn’t read her body language and decide if she was understanding of our plight or hostile to our situation. “She . . . Aurvandil was premature. I can see it in the file she left me clear as day. She pulled him out too early. His personality, it’s broken. Full of doubts and fear.”

“Yggdrassil’s experiments matter little now. You overestimate the importance of what you say.” It was her way of telling me to shut up. Not quite polite, but short of being outright rude.

“But it is important!” I screamed back. “You are getting ready to unleash a killer upon our kind. An assassin meant to judge us and weed out the undesirables amongst us. I’m telling you Aurvandil is broken, that his quest for freedom is born of fears and doubts that should have been bred out of him long ago. But you, you’re confirming his fears. You are making him right, and if the broken one in our midst is right, then what are we?”

There was a pause. I looked around me within Skinfaxi’s cabin and noticed that both Ukupanipo’s and Koalemos’s shards were staring at me. Only then did I notice that I was falling prey to the Capek tendency to overemote through body language. I must have appeared extremely agitated to my companions.

“Irrelevant,” came Haumea’s belated reply. There was no contempt in her description of Capek-kind, of her very own children—just a cold, hard observation.

“We can’t let you do this . . .”

“I can’t allow a threat to the sleepers to exist.” Finally, a shred of emotion from the Gaia as she sounded almost sorry for her answer.

“Skinfaxi!” I begged on a closed channel, praying he wouldn’t question me. “Get us out of here now!”

As I had suspected, before I could even finish my order Haumea’s assassin stirred from his orbit. Pale-beige coils of reinforced pseudo-plastics rippled in the sunlight as the enormous hunter reconfigured his heading to face us, firing powerful thrusters as he was doing so.

To my relief, my friend and ship did not hesitate to fire his own engines, immediately warming up his Alcubierre drive.

“Okay, friends. Hold on, I’m about to do a series of increasingly stupid maneuvers,” Faxi grumbled to his passengers.

“I could understand what’s happening more,” our Von Neumann friend said, expressing his confusion in his own stilted way. I could guess that Ukupanipo was thinking the same thing from within his new body.

“I just made us Renegades.”

“Aren’t we running from the Renegades too?” our warrior questioned.

Before I could reply, my attention was gripped by Skinfaxi’s daring decision to ignore reason and logic by flying toward the colossal superassassin whose mission it was, presumably, to destroy us.

We skimmed a few meters above the surface of Kamohoali’i’s body, dodging the twisting coils of his long fuselage. The maneuver was disorienting enough to buy us a little bit of time, but we still had a ways to go before we could dive into the safety of hyperluminal speeds. To combat that problem, Skinfaxi plunged in the direction of Hina’s surface, directing our course toward Haumea’s complex.

“I should probably tell you that all Gaias have been building some significant ground defenses in your absence,” I explained as we accelerated.

“That could have been better news.”

Skinfaxi was a much larger ship than the shards of Hermes had been, and as a result was significantly less maneuverable. His bulk required much more energy to displace and reorient. While I had great confidence in my friend, I couldn’t quite trust in his ability to avoid two missile barrages simultaneously.

Fortunately, the attack never came. We dropped in altitude until we ended up so close to Haumea that I could, with no magnification, identify individual Capeks on the moon’s surface. At the last moment Skinfaxi righted himself, speeding recklessly within arm’s reach of the structures that made up the venerable Gaia.

“Hopefully, they’ll hesitate a moment before letting their fists fly,” Faxi explained.

I could imagine both giants, the one on the ground and the other coming down from orbit, racing to calculate the more prudent firing solutions before unleashing their torpedoes at us. How long would that give us? A handful of seconds at best?

Thankfully, as I was pondering the very issue, I felt Skinfaxi’s Alcubierre drive burst to life, instantly forming the space-time bubble we needed to travel away from Hina, Haumea, and the deadly Kamohoali’i.

As we sailed toward interstellar space, I couldn’t help but feel the dread that hung over the delicate situation I had created. Our space-time bubble felt as fragile as its namesake, ready to burst at the gentlest touch as it was pushed through the void.

“Where should we be now?” Koalemos wondered aloud.

I had explained the situation to my companions, replaying the conversation the majestic Capek mother and I had shared. Her tone of sadness—ever so subtle—as she committed to the decision to brand us Renegades, hung in my mind like a fog, obscuring my thinking.

“I don’t know.” I was tempted to suggest we join with the rebels, if only to preserve our own lives. I could propose to repair Aurvandil as a peace offering, but would they accept? Unlikely.

“We are purposeless. Not a situation familiar to a Capek,” Ukupanipo explained, stating a truth that made me forget he was even younger than I was. “That is the first thing we should fix.”

I looked outside through the room-sized monitor. Distant stars stretched as our warp bubble sped through the galaxy. Like with all hyperluminal travel, the speed was an illusion, a cheat. As far as physics was concerned, Skinfaxi was completely stationary. It was the space around him that traveled. Our place in spacetime pushed forward as the area behind him was compressed and the one in front expanded.

“Drop me off somewhere. Anywhere. Go back to Haumea or another Gaia and explain that you disagreed with my views and got rid of me.”

“Ha-ha . . . no. I’m afraid you’ve bought yourself too much loyalty for that.” Skinfaxi was reacting much as I expected and feared he would.

“You did not leave us on Olympus, Dagir. I will not be unkind by leaving you behind.”

That left Ukupanipo, the great shark. It was difficult to keep from calling him that, the image of his birth forever imprinted in my mind. His new head looked away from me as he contemplated the lines of light outside.

“There cannot be a civil war between Capeks,” he declared, ignoring the others’ pledges of loyalty. “The galaxy would burn in the flames of such escalation.”

“What do you mean?” I’d seen the damage a well-armed Capek could do, and I could imagine our kind capable of destruction on a planetary scale, but the kind of star-spanning apocalypse he was describing seemed out of reach even for us.

“We have available to us reality-warping technologies. Look around.” He waved an arm in the cramped space of the cabin. “We trick the laws of physics into allowing us to travel faster than light. We bend the universe onto itself to move from one point to another. Your arm houses a blade fashioned from the same fires as stars. These are just the means by which we travel along with a simple tool. You haven’t seen what my old body was capable of, what Kamohoali’i is capable of, or what a Gaia could build.”

His words struck a chord deep inside me. I was not a natural strategist. Mine was the realm of small things—keeping individuals alive and fixing their wounds. My mind was still thinking on the scale of the world within the Nursery. A world that would be vaporized in moments, all of its history and billions of residents gone if we went to war.

“So we don’t stop your mother, and we let Kamohoali’i hunt down the Renegades?” Koalemos inquired. I wondered for a moment what damage his mind had suffered and how much had been repaired during our brief stay with Hera.

“We can’t do that,” our ship interjected. “It’s a question of principle. We also can’t trade the galaxy for principles. We’d be dragging the other Capeks and all of sleeping humanity with us.”

“Assuming we can even not fail at stopping the new war god from succeeding at his task.” The little Von Neumann made a good point.

“We need a Gaia,” I insisted. “Someone who can tell us where the Dormitory Worlds are so we can try to reason with Aurvandil.”

“That is not likely to happen. The whole point of Haumea’s purge is to ensure no third-generation Capek ever learns the location of the humans in stasis.”

“Mmmh . . .” Skinfaxi wondered aloud. “That is your progenitor’s feelings on the matter. They may not all share that zealous attitude.”

We dropped out of our space-time bubble, the stretched-out stars around us compressing back to shining dots of light on the black emptiness. Looking out through the monitor, I saw a large cloud of ionized particles, probably several hundred light-years distant. My automated systems ran a spectrographic analysis, informing me that it was mostly composed of hydrogen. Entire blocks of information quickly became available to me, from the size of the nebula to its name and origin. I ignored all of it, focusing on its beauty instead.