David Farland - Beyond the Gate

But after that, the Roamers did not go to the human lands seeking rebirth, for even the wisest and most human among them had been found unworthy.

And the colors swirled, and Gallen began to recall the life of Entreak d’Suluuth of the bird tribe. And just as suddenly, he was in the night again.

There was a searing moment of pain, and Gallen found himself lying on the ground. He could smell grass and mud. There was a familiar weight of his mantle on his head and shoulders.

The night felt so strange, so cold. Gallen struggled up, until he could see Maggie squatting over him, her dark red hair limned by moonlight. She was holding his hands.

“Oh, Gallen, are you all right?” she asked. Gallen’s mantle heightened his vision, and he could easily see the lines of worry in her face. In the darkness the pupils of her eyes dilated to a seemingly unnatural width.

Gallen struggled to his feet. It was well past midnight, and silver-lined clouds rolled across the night sky. Two minutes. He had been under for two minutes, and in those moments, he somehow felt the weight and pain of two lifetimes. He’d tasted the flavor of those lives, of people’s feelings, in a way that he’d never imagined. “We are our bodies,” the Bock had said. And Gallen wondered if that creature really understood the depth of those words-understood the sense of peace the Roamers felt in traveling the wide earth, or the passion the Makers felt while kneading mud for the potter’s wheel.

Gallen recalled dozens of experiences, all whirling like butterflies in his head-Doovenach tasting wild anise for the first time; an old man of her tribe dying of hunger. Koti as a young man, painting a tin glaze over a pot before it went into a kiln.

Gallen felt as if he were tumbling, tumbling; his emotions were still jangled. He felt exultation that was somehow displaced, without a reference to any experience he could imagine. Right now, he thought he should be feeling relief at getting free of the Inhuman, or disgust at his own humanity … or something. But the Inhuman:” probe seemed to be stimulating his emotions directly.

“I … can’t think. I can’t think!” Gallen said.

“Why not? What are they doing to you?”

“Memories-” Gallen said. “I’m remembering lives.”

“The dronon made the Inhuman, and they don’t want you to think!” Maggie said, squeezing his hands. “Whatever the dronon show you, they don’t want you to think. Gallen, I know how memories are recorded. They can be edited. They can be misremembered. It’s easy to fake them. But even if these are genuine, the dronon don’t want you to think: you might disagree with them, and the dronon don’t tolerate that.”

Gallen looked up at her, knew that she was speaking what she believed was the truth, yet dangerous thoughts kept flooding through his mind, welcome snatches of memory. He felt far more experienced in life, far wiser than ever before. He reveled in his new memories, as if they were a new great cloak that weighed heavily on his shoulders, but was yet new and comforting. The memories that the Inhuman offered were sweet and exotic and tinged with pain, and he hungered for more.

Maggie was human, and she accepted the human agenda without question. But neither she nor Gallen had ever looked beyond the human agenda. Neither of them had really considered whether the benevolent Tharrin were running the universe in the best possible way. Gallen remembered the deadly rose, left as a warning on Fale. And now, Gallen recalled the lives of the people of Babel, saw how their lives were thrown away, how their needs were ignored. They suffered. They suffered. Ignorance, poverty, lawlessness, death. The humans of Tremonthin could protect the people of Babel, sweep all of these ills away, but they did not.

“Maggie,” he whispered. “I need to go under again. I need to know more!”

“Not right now,” Maggie said, squeezing his hand. Her eyes were frightened, and he knew that she didn’t want him to ever go under again. “Give your head some time to clear. Rest.”

“Soon, then,” Gallen said. “I want to go under soon.”

Maggie’s eyes were large and frightened, but Gallen suddenly knew that there was nothing to fear. The Inhuman had never sought to kill them, had never sought to harm them. Gallen felt dazed, as if he were whirling, and he knew he was too tired to stay awake much longer.

“Promise me,” Maggie said, her voice tight, “that you won’t go under again without telling me. Promise me that!” She took him by the collar, held him, her lips just inches away from his.

Gallen gazed into Maggie’s wide eyes, and wondered how he would tell her of the things he’d seen, the things he was beginning to guess-about the Inhuman’s beautiful plans.…

* * *

When Maggie woke at dawn, Gallen was gone. She hoped that he had not tried to wrestle with the Inhuman once again. Whatever he’d felt the night before, she had seen in his face that the Inhuman was more dangerous than she’d imagined. It had seduced him in only a moment, and she feared that he had wakened hungering for its touch.

She stalked around the camp all morning, wondering if she should tell the others, wondering if Gallen would come back at all. She retrieved the broken Word from the bushes where she’d thrown it the night before, then went outside of camp, put her mantle on, and Maggie silently asked her mantle to feed her information on the creature-its probable functionality.

Immediately, the mantle showed her a schematic for the creature, detailing the known hinges in its joints, its sensory apparatus, its own brain and system of energy storage. The body of the Word was just a simple machine designed for invasion. It was too small to be self-aware, and therefore would try to complete its only task rather doggedly, and stupidly, at times.

But the information she needed most was not available. Once the creature invaded its host, the nanoware inside was extruded into the host’s brain, and that nanoware could not be studied without microscopic sensors that Maggie’s mantle did not have.

So Maggie asked it to make a guess about the most logical functionality of the thing based on current technology. The mantle suggested that the system required several components: an antenna system to receive signals; an amplifier to boost the signal; a power system to power the amplifier; and a neural interface that would let the Inhuman’s message be sent directly to the brain.

Beyond those four systems, Maggie didn’t know what else the Word might have incorporated into it. But Maggie considered each of these systems, wondering how to sabotage them.

The antenna was first on her list. Her mantle said that since the human body already worked as an antenna, receiving radio signals due to the electromagnetic field created by ionized salts within the body, the Word would need to do very little to actually receive the signals. The body already could receive signals, it just wouldn’t recognize them. But solar interference during the day might distort signals, weakening them to the point that they would be worthless. And beings living underground might not receive the signals at all. And the dronon may have taken these factors into account.

Her mantle whispered that the human body could be greatly enhanced as an antenna by temporarily introducing small amounts of metallic salts, and Maggie suspected that such metallic salts would disperse evenly throughout the body.

But the main thing that the Word needed was not a better antenna, but a good amplifier, and that amplifier would be powered by converting body heat into electrical energy.

Maggie noted that the servants of the Inhuman had kept the Word close to their bodies, kept them warm, and she suspected that the biogenerator was concealed in the body of the creature, probably with the amplifier. If she could get that biogenerator to cool, the Word would die.