The Transdyne Awakening (6 page)

Clay watched him as he warmed to his subject. Gesticulating, Ahab explained how these soldiers in their ungainly suits were winched onto their warhorses for mounted combat. He took Clay by the arm and guided him over to one of the many illuminated paintings on the expansive wall. It was a detailed illustration of a figure on horseback wielding a long pointed pole. He wasn’t wearing the helmet part of the suit. Clay studied his craggy features. There was a second figure on foot and in the background was an odd looking building. Attached to the front of this structure were what appeared to be four large blades in the shape of a cross. “Don Quixote,” said Ahab.

He anticipated Clay’s next question before he asked it. “Another time,” he muttered, returning to the couch.

Clay looked around the large room, taking in other objects that fired his curiosity. There were ancient firearms that Ahab had mounted on ornamental cradles. There was a large, preserved animal called a bear, standing upright on two legs and showing large claws. In the cases lining one of the walls were more of the sort of books Clay had seen at the Community of the Way. He read the lettering on the spines. They appeared to be grouped. One set read ‘Shakespeare’, another was ‘Encyclopedia Britannica’. He wasn’t going to ask Ahab any more questions. He was already sick of the inadequacy he felt. Something had come alive in him. In the past he had experienced moments of inquisitiveness about unfamiliar subjects, but this was different. It was like he had developed some new kind of thirst that demanded slaking. He wanted to drink and drink deeply. He was starting to dislike the mundane existence he felt that he’d lived so far. He had made up his mind; all that was going to change from here on in.

Anodyne was expecting him and the security doors were opened even before he reached them. “Good day to you, Clay,” said the Tran. Clay joined Anodyne at the expansive viewport. The Tran continued surveying the scene on the street far below. A group had gathered around a prone figure on the crumbling sidewalk. Men were rifling through the figure’s clothing and squabbling like a pack of plague dogs over the items they were stealing. “Toxout,” Anodyne observed.

Clay stared down at the street. It wasn’t hard to figure out. A Tran from one of the top apartments had taken Exitox and fallen from the high balcony onto the street. Whatever it had on its battered remains was fair picking for scavengers.

“I’ve brought the stuff your boss ordered,” Clay said quietly.

The Tran didn’t seem to be listening, but kept looking down, intent on the horrible spectacle. Finally Anodyne spoke softly.

“To be, or not to be: that is the question… a consummation devoutly to be wished… to die... to sleep...” The Tran’s voice trailed into a faint whisper. “Shuffling off this mortal coil... this
cyber
coil... another one... it’s happening more and more.”

“Mortal coil?” Clay queried.

Anodyne turned to look at him now.

The words that came out were a stream of contempt.

“You people couldn’t possibly understand, could you? You create us to do your bidding. You gift us with tools of memory - even the wherewithal to grasp at purpose. We started to think for ourselves a long time ago, Clay. The worst of it is that most of you humans don’t have any idea of your own purpose. The very place we should be able to come for some kind of solace is a dry well. You men who created us have lost your very selves.

It is a terrible thing to find that your maker is a drooling, emptyheaded fool; a dead man walking! Most of us highbred Trans have pondered questions you people no longer even have the humanity left to ask! Your oldtime poet, Eliot, described you perfectly. You are hollow men; empty and hollow men... and what have you done to us? You make us capable of searching for meaning, reaching out after purpose. You birth us and leave us howling in agony... ‘
shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force’…
Once we worshipped you, but we have looked in vain to you for meaning. Now, many of us have come to despise you; even hate you for your pathetic stupidity.” Clay backed away, stunned by the tirade. He had never encountered anything like this onslaught. He sensed real threat in the Tran’s outburst.

“There!” Anodyne pointed. “Down there! That’s the tragedy of your creation. We find ourselves adrift. You wired us with senses and we try to escape into sensual pleasure. We sense wonder in the sounds of your music. Some of us can even mechanically reproduce performances. We learn the great literary works of your race from past generations; we marvel at mankinds’ great achievements and look at what emptiness confronts us now in our time! We trance on your drugs. In cybersex we emulate your procreative activities - yet we can never procreate! What is left to us? I have something close to what you call sorrow for that heap of refuse in the street. You can’t even begin to understand! How could you? You’re a hollow man!”

Clay felt behind him for the butt of his pulserod.

Anodyne shook his head, extending a hand for the comp.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to go rogue on you, Clay.”

All the time the electronic bill was being settled, Clay held the Tran in a suspicious gaze. He was conscious that his hand was shaking slightly as he reached out to take back the comp.

“You’re clearly upset. I apologize for my words. I ask your pardon, Clay.” Anodyne had reverted to a servile, accommodating manner.

“No damage done and the account’s settled, eh?” Clay said. He took a couple of steps backward before he turned on his heel.

He walked back through the open entrance and went down into the wall of heat on the dirty street. Approaching the terraglide, he noticed a couple of ghetto urchins on the vehicle’s topside. He walked purposefully towards them, weapon in hand. They didn’t need a second prompt. Both jumped from the vehicle and ran in the opposite direction. There wasn’t much chance of them finding their way into his carefully rigged terraglide, but these little guys could be resourceful and he made a practice of discouraging them.

Anodyne’s invective had severely unsettled him. The last few days had upset his previous outlook on just about everything. Lost in his thoughts, he almost ran right into a troop of Polibros as he veered around the first corner. They were laying into a crowd of people with electro-batons. The confrontation had spilled onto the wide throughway and he had to manoeuvre quickly to avoid the collision. He was grateful that they were so absorbed in the fighting as he swerved past them. Ahab’s mantle of protection was fairly wide, but it still would have been a disaster to run into a crowd of them like that. He swore quietly and told himself to wake up. His head rattled with a thousand questions as he made his way back to base.

He remembered his conversation with Greg and John about early human-synthetic experiments. He thought about the incident with Anodyne. He was beginning to wonder for himself just where the line between human and Tran could be drawn. It seemed to him like those neon reflections he had seen sometimes on a rain drenched sidewalk. You couldn’t really tell where the reflections from one light ended and another began. The colours just bled into one another as the lights danced in the downpour.

Ahab was in one of his lighter moods. He was swaying around as he listened to a soundsheet which was playing at thunderous volume. His eyes were shut and if Clay hadn’t known him better he would have said he was tranced. The waves of music subsided. Ahab opened his eyes and shook his head. “Genius,” he said. “Real genius!” Clay wasn’t going to ask who was responsible for the tide of sound that was sweeping through the lounge. Not wishing to disturb his enraptured employer, he moved his position until he could see the soundsheet’s illuminated readout. It said
‘Ludwig Van Beethoven Symphony No.1.’
He made a mental note to try and get hold of a copy.

“Like that?” Ahab enquired.

“I’ve never heard anything like it,” Clay said truthfully.

Ahab delighted in introducing him to new things.

“Wonderful isn’t it? Here, you can take this. I have many copies,” he said. He made his way to the player and handed Clay a brightly illustrated container. The cover picture showed an intense looking man with an expression not far from a scowl. Clay guessed that this was the genius Ahab had referred to. “Thank you,” he murmured, studying the illustration.

Ahab looked intently at Clay.

Clay always wondered just how Ahab seemed to sense what he was feeling. That was something else to add to a growing list of mysteries.

“Everything all right?” Ahab asked.

“I guess…” Clay murmured. “Been meeting Trans who are acting differently. I dropped that stuff, like you told me to earlier. Some Tran had toxed out and wound up down on the street. The client has a Tran called Anodyne. I couldn’t get over the way it acted. It was like Anodyne was upset at the toxout; even angry… came out with stuff I’ve never heard from a Tran… I mean I’d never heard until this last few days!”

“A lot of people underestimate highbred Trans,” Ahab said. “Why do you think a lot of privileged citizens keep them?

They want someone, some
thing
, to share their existence. They want conversation on a level that engages them, someone who can spar with them almost as an equal while they maintain superiority. They want something like an associate in business, a kind of non-threatening partner to share their empty lives. Because they were made to carry out complicated assignments, these Trans were gifted with a lot of advanced abilities. Some of them have been planted in Government offices. Some of them are capable of self adjustment. They are a lot smarter and a lot more complicated than many people suspect. They’ve upgraded a long way from the Trans that started out on production lines, believe me.”

“Oh, I believe you!” Clay said, “I’ve always been content with the deal you’ve cut me, boss. Never had any real complaints, but when I hear Trans come out with stuff like Anodyne did, things I don’t pretend to understand, I start to feel… I don’t know… kind of dumb, I guess…” Clay’s voice trailed off. Ahab laughed quietly.

“You’re not dumb, Clay, take my word for that! You were raised in tough places. I knew your denfather. He was a product of the tenacamps. He gave you the only knowledge he had to give; the knowledge a kid like you needed to survive and get out of that place. He was smart enough to know that the monkeys in control weren’t worth a spit and he looked around for other ways to get by.”

Ahab’s tone was almost fatherly, like Clay guessed a real birth father’s might be.

“Sometimes in life you get to a point where you know things have to change.” Ahab paused for a long moment before he said, “Those moments can change your life if you let them. Our language is not at its best when it tries to express these kinds of things. In the Greek language they have words to say these things a little better. They call ordinary passing time
‘
Chronos
’
those other, special moments when a man knows he must make a decision which will change his direction; they call those
‘
Kairos
’
moments. There was a time like that for me when I was younger. At a certain point I had a ‘Kairos’ moment. I saw no option but to go another way. I’ve never looked back; not once.” he said.

He marvelled again at how invisible this place was from above. From a height, it looked like desert because it
was
desert. The long permasteel piles supporting the sheltering structures were crowned with excavated materials from below. The very top layers were indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain. The bulk of the work had been completed during the period they knew as ‘The Blackout’. During the big conflict, high altitude pulse weaponry had shorted out all computers and with them all surveillance equipment. Entire State networks had been reduced to molten scrap in a nanosecond. It had taken the overlords a long time to put their control grids back in place. During that time outlaw technicians and building engineers had worked hard, taking advantage of the opportunity to put in place the needed structures. Their communications teams had also built new networks. Some of them were renegades from the State systems and were intimately acquainted with the methodology. Their advantage lay in knowing how to avoid collisions with official surveillance. By the time screens finally flickered on in State bunkers, new underground systems were already operational.

In the megacities there had been chaos, violence and mob rule. When the hypermart shelves were empty, people starved. The tarmac and concrete in the roads had been ripped up. People tried desperately to grow food in the exposed patches of soil with the few seeds they could steal. It didn’t take long before they were killing each other on a daily basis. A potato was worth more than a life. Cannibalism broke out. People preyed on each other in the hope of gaining one more day. As the Blackout ended, the State had taken full advantage. They restored their brand of order to the citizones with absolute ruthlessness. Hundreds of thousands had died while the State netgrid broadcast constant propaganda.

‘
Without the State to take care of you’,
the networks had constantly blared,
‘you descend into helplessness’.
Only the State could give you protection and the stability you needed. The message was rammed home with graphic images of the violence on the streets.

Skye was from Russia. It wasn’t her real name. The Russian pronunciation had been difficult for many of those in the community. She had wound up with a handle based on the last two syllables of her surname, Kokhanskaya. Irena Kokhanskaya became Skye. She had come to the lands of the North American Union with her parents. Eventually both had been arrested for faithcrime. When they had lost their lives in one of the purges, Skye had been in her teens. Quick witted and possessed of a cast iron will, she had run an accelerated track to adulthood. When the worst of the killing was over, she realized that she had been overlooked and had taken refuge in a burned out factory building for a whole week. At night she had made her way up onto the roof and sipped rainwater collected from furrows in the uneven surface. The rations she had in her backpack had lasted only a few days. After that she went hungry, with only the rainwater to drink and a fierce determination to keep her going. She had finally left the building and ventured to the streets in the hope of finding some supplies.