The Life Engineered (3 page)

All things being equal, I was very happy with the end result. I could think of worse shells in which to spend the next potential thousand years.

“Fabrication is complete, Dagir.”

That name, Dagir, just like Yggdrassil, was borrowed from Norse mythology. The personification of “day.” I didn’t mind the name, but the character it references is male, and for some reason that bothered me. I don’t know why, but I kept thinking of myself as female, though there was nothing in my anatomy to that effect. In fact, if what Yggdrassil told me is true, I’ve experienced life as both a man and a woman several times.

“Can I take it for a spin?”

“You will find that the transfer is a little more permanent than that, but yes, we might as well begin migrating your conscience.” Her voice, as soothing and soft as it was, seemed to be gaining an edge. I could sense urgency in her words that wasn’t there before. “I should tell you that, once transferred, you will lose your direct link to me and to the memory core you’ve been accessing to gather information. I’ve prepared a data package containing all the information pertinent to your chosen vocation. Technical resources on Capek anatomy, communication and navigation protocols, engineering specs for all the more crucial and vital systems you might encounter in your travels. Once integrated into your mnemonic core, it will allow you to be as effective a rescue technician, field medical specialist, and crisis-management expert as I could build. I’ve also taken the liberty to include personal physiological details on as many known Capeks as I could. This information is stored in a protected cache and will only be available if it becomes absolutely necessary.”

“Why would you do that?” For the first time since exiting the Nursery, I was genuinely uncomfortable with what was being done to me. Why feed me information if it was going to be artificially repressed? What right did anyone have to suppress parts of my mind?

“Not all Capeks want every last part of their bodies known by a stranger. A holdover from their human experiences. It is my duty to protect that privacy.”

I could tell there was more than that, but I couldn’t figure out what, nor did I have the tools to effectively question it. It was the first aspect of this new existence I did not like, but I was going to have to let it go.

“Transfer complete.”

At those words from my creator, my sensory equipment came online, and images coalesced in my mind.

It was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Partially because in a way I had never seen with such advanced eyes, but mostly as a result of the range of control I had over my senses. I must have spent a full minute standing absolutely still, shifting my ocular perception through the entire spectrum available to me. I immediately regretted not taking a more complex sensor array. After some time I settled on a spectral range only slightly larger than standard visual light.

I don’t know why, but I had expected my vision to be pixelated; instead, the image was crystal clear. I was standing in what appeared to be an immense hangar of some kind. The gargantuan room had enormous doors at both ends. My “eyes” informed me that the door was 132 meters away, 91.44 meters high, and 30.48 meters tall. The full length of the chamber totaled 274.32 meters. As I slowly spun around, additional information about my surroundings intruded further on my vision, but never enough to obstruct it, hovering on the periphery. Context dictated presentation. Environmental data would hover as a series of graphs and numbers at the corner of my optics, while other types of information would appear as faded image pop-ups in my field of vision. Barely visible, easily available.

I was amazed at how fluid and natural my movements felt. I had feared my first step would be clumsy and hesitant, but I found it assured and steady. I could feel a dozen subsystems labor to compensate for gravity, tilt, force, and everything required to optimize balance. Much like the information gathered by my eyes, the artificial vestibular and equilibrium in my body behaved independently but remained available to me should I require more control.

I flexed my arms and my fingers. I craned my neck and tested the limits of each extremity’s movement. I passed my left hand over my smooth cranium, surprised that I had a sense of touch, that I could feel the polished pseudo-plastic and how cold it was in the near vacuum of the hangar.

Pleased with my new form, I took a more thorough look around. The cavernous structure was surprisingly bare. Well lit and mostly white, the hangar walls were covered with semitranslucent panels. On the ceiling, hanging like a nest of giant white spiders, were a series of manipulator arrays—clusters of mechanical arms, each with a complex suite of tools that could be used in tandem with each other for a variety of tasks, though one was obviously the assembly of Capeks of myriad shapes and sizes. One or many of these arrays had probably finished putting me together moments before my awakening. If I wanted to, I could switch my vision to infrared to determine which had been used most recently.

“Is everything all right?” Yggdrassil asked with a hint of concern. Her words came over my internal communications system. I heard them as a voice but also as a stream of data that conveyed intent and emotion. Like telepathy with footnotes. As I listened, it occurred to me that she probably could have included images and other types of information as well.

“I’m just getting used to it. This is an impressive facility.”

“This part of the Womb is dedicated to the assembly of final components. I think you would enjoy the manufacturing sectors even more if I had time to show you.”

“What do you mean?” I was nervous. This was the second time I could hear a sense of hurry in Yggdrassil’s voice.

“Brace yourself.”

T
he shock wave tore through the hangar like an apocalyptic ripple on the surface of a pond. The initial impact barely made a noise, with its existence only registering through vibrations on the floor. When the destruction finally caught up with it, though, it heaved the floor plates into the air like a tsunami tossing ships.

Warnings flashed before my eyes, alerting me to the potentially harmful trajectory of the catapulted debris. Inevitably, the shock wave reached my feet, and I was flung toward the ceiling. The low gravity did little to slow my ascent toward the forest of mechanical arms and articulated tools.

I managed to flip around with a quick burst of my thrusters, relying mostly on my subsystems to handle all the calculations and landing on my feet on the ceiling. My legs absorbed the impact, but as soon as I managed to balance myself after avoiding the many obstacles around me, gravity claimed me back, and I found myself plummeting to the ground. Again, I had to avoid a rain of debris and broken ground that fell all around me. Again, I narrowly dodged any significant impacts before landing safely on the shattered hangar floor.

Closer to the epicenter of the shock wave, the hangar had partially collapsed, opening itself up to the empty sky above. I could see stars shining on black, empty space, except for one full quadrant of the sky, which was filled by the glowing presence of an enormous, nameless gas giant.

No—not nameless. Stars and signature data from the enormous planet were parsed by my navigational core, identifying it as Asgard. This would mean that Yggdrassil was located on Midgard, the gas giant’s minuscule and only moon.

“What’s going on?” I finally thought to ask, but only silence replied.

“Yggdrassil?”

There was no answer.

I summoned a plan of Midgard into my field of vision and was glad to see that I could make my way to Yggdrassil’s central processing core and attempt to interface with her directly.

I ran, pleased to discover that my small double-jointed legs could achieve surprisingly high speeds, especially in such low gravity.

I jumped and weaved between debris and fallen chunks of ceiling, navigating the cracked and ravaged ground toward the open section of the hangar, deciding that traveling outside the facility would minimize the risk of getting caught by further caveins and collapses.

No sooner did I manage to climb to the large opening ripped into the ceiling did I see the near-invisible reflection of a large object streaking through the sky at mind-shattering speed. It struck the ground, sending a tall plume of dust and debris flying toward the glowing orb of Asgard.

“Meteors . . .” I mumbled uselessly to myself less than a second before the impact.

Again, the hangar shook violently. This time I could easily see the trail of destruction from the point of impact. It moved out from the epicenter in circular patterns. Structures that were part of Yggdrassil, the only other sentient being I knew, were ripped from the moon’s soil, their foundations pushed up from the ground in various awkward angles.

I was terrified to see that the impact location nearly coincided with the structure where Yggdrassil’s cerebral core was buried.

When the shock wave finally reached the hangar, the force of the blast heaved the broken structure up with such violence as to catapult me toward the sky. I slowed my descent with my maneuvering thrusters long enough to witness the chaos below me. For the first time I got a true glimpse of the sheer size of my “mother.”

Yggdrassil, the complex, sprawled nearly a kilometer and a half in diameter. An array of eight structures all connected to a central hub and tower. The high-rise in the middle appeared to have been constructed to reach into the heavens, but it was now a crumbling ruin of twisted pseudo-plastics and hypermaterials. The tunnels leading to and from the radiating structures appeared intact but disconnected from each other. I already knew that there was more of Yggdrassil under the surface of Midgard, but there was no reason to assume it had fared any better than the structures on top. The Womb and the hangar in which my body had been assembled lay in waste, resembling a crumpled-up ball of paper.

Fortunately, my form was constructed to help other Capeks in need. Therefore, mobility and adaptability weren’t an issue. I maneuvered my slow fall so I could land as close to the central hub as possible. From there I ran, climbed, and leaped my way to where the meteors had hit.

There were two craters, one for each impact. A quick calculation allowed me to infer that the difference in position of the craters was due to the moon’s rotation and that both meteors had come from the same trajectory. This seemed relevant, but I was at a loss to figure out why.

Finding my way into Yggdrassil’s “brain” was easy enough. Several corridors and access tunnels had been laid bare in the impact. My rather compact size allowed me to slide into these passages with ease. I was less worried about cave-ins and the unstable ground after the impacts than of a possible third (or fourth?) meteor hit, but I managed to stay on mission.

It wasn’t long before I realized that the deeper I ventured into the central hub, now a mess of cracked and fractured components, I was getting no closer to Yggdrassil’s brain. In fact, I had already reached the cerebral core, and it lay all around me in irreparable ruin.

I looked for what might have been a memory storage unit, a personality backup—anything. It seemed impossible that something as important as Yggdrassil could be obliterated so easily, that there had been no defense against such a disaster, and that there were no contingencies or redundancies to mitigate losses in a situation such as this.

Nothing. There was nothing. Power was cut off from most sections, with only minimal auxiliary capabilities here and there. If there was anything left of Yggdrassil, my only friend if only for a short period of time, then there was nothing about it in the limited schematics in my memory and no obvious clues to be found in the wreckage of the complex.

I had to face facts: I was alone. My only memories were fading impressions from past lives that never happened and whatever I had learned since emerging from the Nursery.

The Nursery!

Quickly, I called up the schematics to the complex to locate the Nursery—this repository of incubating personalities, where literally millions awaited to be born, some probably not that far behind me on their path to the Womb. Jonathan.

“Hello?”

A voice. At first, I thought it might be Yggdrassil, still alive somehow, but the tone was different, deeper, and nowhere near as soothing. It wasn’t on the right channel either. This voice was coming in from quancom, thus it could have been from halfway across the galaxy.

“Anyone down there?”

“Yes. Me,” I answered back hesitantly. The process felt like telepathy, but without the innate familiarity I had shared with Yggdrassil.

“Aha!” the voice boomed in my head. “You might want to consider leaving the surface there. Those two hits you guys sustained were little more than an appetizer. The main course is incoming, and it’s a feast!”

I had to find the Nursery and get out of here.

“I don’t have any way off this moon, and I need to salvage what I can of Yggdrassil.”

“No worries, that’s why I’m here. Normally, I’d pick you up, but things are getting a little hairy up here. If you can find your way to low orbit, though, everything will be juuuuust fine.”

Whoever this was made it sound so simple. Just make my way to orbit. How hard could that be?

“I still need to salvage the Nursery,” I pleaded.

“Negative, friend. Yggdrassil knew this was coming but barely had time to call a taxi for you. I doubt she made any backups for you to bring along.”

She knew? Is that why she was in such a hurry to assemble me and push me out of the nest? One last child spawned before the end.

Ah! Found the Nursery’s mnemonic repository. Just a few hundred meters away. Through a forest of bulkheads and collapsed corridors, most likely.

“Fine by me,” I said as I started making my way through the maze of crumbling passageways. “I’ll just take the whole thing then.”

“I admire your ambition, friend. Truly, I do, but I don’t think you comprehend the gravity of your situation. The next meteor to hit Midgard isn’t a little bigger or even twice as big. The precursors were barely a few meters in diameter. How big is the next one? Glad you asked! Three hundred and seventy-five meters!”

I ignored him, concentrating on finding the shortest path toward my goal. If I couldn’t save Yggdrassil, I had to at least save her legacy. I wasn’t sure what could be done with just the Nursery, but surely there was a way to save the incubating personalities within.

“Hello? You still there, friend?” the voice called again.

“I’m here.”

“How’s your escape plan coming?”

“I don’t have one. Wait! I do. I pick up the Nursery, while you figure out how to get me into orbit.”

I heard him groan through quancom—a thoroughly human behavior. It made me smile . . . metaphorically speaking.

“Fine, but I should warn you: I am known for my unorthodox methods of problem solving.”

“Understood,” I answered, not caring what he meant by that, as my focus remained solely on finding the last vestiges of Yggdrassil.

After several more minutes of negotiating narrow passages and crawl spaces, I came upon a small chamber untouched by the massive destruction that surrounded it. Gargantuan pillars of composite hypermaterials created an intricate lattice that seemed designed solely to prevent the chamber from collapsing onto itself, thus protecting the precious mnemonic core in the center.

I dropped into the chamber, which despite being intact was now tilted. I clambered up to the main cerebral array while poring over any technical information Yggdrassil might have stuffed in my mind relating to this sort of construct.

I’m coming, Jonathan.

I couldn’t find a perfect analogue, but I did manage to dig up the schematic for a Nursery-like artificial environment that was apparently designed for entertainment. While the specifics were different, the mnemonic core was sufficiently similar enough that I could find out where it was located in the structure. I also discovered that it wasn’t exactly engineered for easy removal.

“Little buddy?” The voice was back. “You might want to hurry. I have an escape solution for you, but you’ll have to hoof it if you want to get out of there.”

“On my way.”

No time to waste. I unleashed my plasma cutter from its magnetic sheath. The torch glowed a brilliant blue, rippling as the sun-like heat tried to radiate in the cold vacuum.

Using a little judgment and too much guesswork, I stabbed the cutter into the Nursery’s outer shell. The casing and whatever lay within offered no resistance to the knife. Carefully, I cut a circular pattern roughly fifty centimeters, enough to separate the mnemonic core without damaging it. Then, using the large claws on my right hand, I grabbed and pulled at the unit. With a groan of tearing metal and ripping pseudo-plastics, the core slid out of the piece I had cut in one jagged, broken cylinder. The piece looked like a ruin, but closer inspection revealed that the mnemonic core itself was intact, nestled tightly in whatever other systems I had gutted in the process.

“All right. I’m on my way out. Where do I go?”

“Climb to the highest point on what remains of the tower,” the voice answered, some of its good humor worn off by the urgency of the situation. “Shake a leg. You have less than twenty minutes.”

“Acknowledged.”

Twenty minutes sounded like plenty of time to me. It took barely ten to make my way out of the cavernous depths of Yggdrassil’s entrails. I hate to admit it, but it was an emotional ascent. Despite having known her for such a short time (that I could remember), I felt like I was abandoning my progenitor. She’d given me life, and all I could do was leave her behind.

Once I reached the surface, with ten minutes to spare, I realized I had my work cut out for me. The tower, while toppled and crumbled, remained several hundred feet in height. The low gravity on Midgard would help, but the uneven and traitorous surface of the unstable tower would prove a challenge to conquer. What had once been a gleaming spire listed to one side. The top few segments of the tower had been ripped away by the impact, exposing the underlying structure of struts and beams. Fortunately, this offered a lot of handholds, without which the climb might have been impossible, especially while carrying the remains of the Nursery.

“What exactly is your plan . . . ?” I realized I’d never asked my savior his name.

“Skinfaxi,” he answered. “Interesting coincidence, isn’t it?”

I didn’t understand what he meant, and his name was strange. Also, it didn’t answer my question.

“You need to reach around nine thousand kilometers per hour to achieve escape velocity,” he continued. “Assuming you don’t shatter yourself on any of the other incoming meteors, once you’re away from Midgard’s gravity well, I can pick you up at my leisure.”

“All right. My legs and thrusters combined can barely provide a fraction of that kind of power. What do I do?”

I had in fact been jumping from one handhold to the other, using the debris to help push myself up the tower faster.

“You’ll need to exert over four hundred kilograms of thrust per second for a full minute to reach that speed. There are plenty of things you could have used to do that in the hangar, but you’re out of time.”

“Fine! I get it! I missed my other opportunities! Now what do I do?” I was losing patience. The top of the ruined tower seemed so far away, and time was running out. So far the only thing that seemed to be going my way was the ascent up the ruined spire.

“Thankfully, if my calculations aren’t too much off their mark, you should be just close enough to ground zero for the meteor impact to provide you with several kilotons per seconds of thrust. That should blow you right off of Midgard’s surface.”

I froze. With seconds to spare, I realized for the first time that whoever I was talking to was a stranger. That I had never received any evidence that he was looking out for my best interest, and now I was standing halfway up the tallest structure on this moon, about to be annihilated by a cataclysmic astronomical event.