Martin Greenberg - Space Stations

I swim in the blackness. There are long moments of no sensations, nothing to see or hear or feel. I grope—

Her? No, she is not here either. Cannot be. For she has been dead these centuries and lives only in your Station, where she knows not what has become of herself.

At last I seize upon some frag, will it to expand. A strange watery vision floats into view.

A man is peering at him. There is no detail behind the man, only a blank white wall. He wears the blue uniform of Fleet and he cocks an amused eyebrow at:

Benjan.

“Recognize me?” the man says.

“Of course. Hello, Katonji, you bastard.”

“Ah, rancor. A nice touch. Unusual in a computer simulation, even one as sophisticated as this.”

“What? Comp—”

And Benjan knows who he is.

In a swirling instant he sends out feelers. He finds boundaries, cool gray walls he cannot penetrate, dead patches, great areas of gray emptiness, of no memory. What did he look like when he was young? Where was his first home located? That girl—at age fifteen?

Was that her? Her? He grasps for her—

And knows. He cannot answer. He does not know. He is only a piece of Benjan.

“You see now? Check it. Try something—to move your arm, for instance. You haven’t got arms.” Katonji makes a thin smile. “Computer simulations do not have bodies, though they have some of the perceptions that come from bodies.”

“P-Perceptions from where?”

“From the fool Benjan, of course.”

“Me.”

“He didn’t realize, having burned up all that time on Gray, that we can penetrate all diagnostics. Even the Station’s. Technologies, even at the level of sentient molecular plasmas, have logs and files. Their data is not closed to certain lawful parties.”

He swept an arm (not a real one, of course) at the man’s face. Nothing. No contact. All right, then… “And these feelings are—”

“Mere memories. Bits from Benjan’s Station self.” Katonji smiles wryly.

He stops, horrified. He does not exist. He is only binary bits of information scattered in ferrite memory cores. He has no substance, is without flesh. “But… but, where is the real me?” he says at last.

“That’s what you’re going to tell us.”

“I don’t know. I was… falling. Yes, over Gray—”

“And running, yes—I know. That was a quick escape, an unexpectedly neat solution.”

“It worked,” Benjan said, still in a daze. “But it wasn’t me?”

“In a way it was. I’m sure the real Benjan has devised some clever destination, and some tactics. You—his ferrite inner self—will tell us, now, what he will do next.”

“He’s got something, yes…”

“Speak now,” Katonji said impatiently.

Stall for time. “I need to know more.”

“This is a calculated opportunity,” Katonji said offhandedly. “We had hoped Benjan would put together a solution from things he had been thinking about recently, and apparently it worked.”

“So you have breached the Station?” Horror flooded him, black bile.

“Oh, you aren’t a complete simulation of Benjan, just recently stored conscious data and a good bit of subconscious motivation. A truncated personality, it is called.”

As Katonji speaks, Benjan sends out tracers and feels them flash through his being. He summons up input and output. There are slabs of useless data, a latticed library of the mind. He can expand in polynomials, integrate along an orbit, factorize, compare coefficients—so they used my computational self to make up part of this shambling construct.

More. He can fix his field—there, just so—and fold his hands, repeating his mantra.

Sound wells up and folds over him, encasing him in a moment of silence. So the part of me that still loves the Sabal Game, feels drawn to the one-is-all side of being human—they got that, too.

Panic. Do something. Slam on the brakes—

He registers Katonji’s voice, a low drone that becomes deeper and deeper as time slows.

The world outside stills. His thought processes are far faster than an ordinary man’s. He can control his perception rate.

Somehow, even though he is a simulation, he can tap the real Benjan’s method of meditation, at least to accelerate his time sense. He feels a surge of anticipation. He hums the mantra again and feels the world around him alter. The trickle of input through his circuits slows and stops. He is running cool and smooth. He feels himself cascading down through ruby-hot levels of perception, flashing back through Benjan’s memories.

He speeds himself. He lives again the moments over Gray. He dives through the swampy atmosphere and swims above the world he made. Molecular master, he is awash in the sight-sound-smell, an ocean of perception.

Katonji is still saying something. Benjan allows time to alter again and Katonji’s drone returns, rising—

Benjan suddenly perceives something behind Katonji’s impassive features. “Why didn’t you follow Benjan immediately? You could find out where he was going. You could have picked him up before he scrambled your tracker beams.”

Katonji smiles slightly. “Quite perceptive, aren’t you? Understand, we wish only Benjan’s compliance.”

“But if he died, he would be even more silent.”

“Precisely so. I see you are a good simulation.”

“I seem quite real to myself.”

“Ha! Don’t we all. A computer who jests. Very much like Benjan, you are. I will have to speak to you in detail, later. I would like to know just why he failed us so badly. But for the moment we must know where he is now. He is a legend, and can be allowed neither to escape nor to die.”

Benjan feels a tremor of fear.

“So where did he flee? You’re the closest model of Benjan.”

I summon winds from the equator, cold banks of sullen cloud from the poles, and bid them crash. They slam together to make a tornado such as never seen on Earth. Lower gravity, thicker air-a cauldron. It twirls and snarls and spits out lightning knives. The funnel touches down, kisses my crust—

—and there are Majiken beneath, whole packed canisters of them, awaiting my kiss.

Everyone talks about the weather, but only I do anything about it.

They crack open like ripe fruit.

—and you dwindle again, hiding from their pursuing electrons. Falling away into your microstructure.

They do not know how much they have captured. They think in terms of bits and pieces and he/you/we/I are not. So they do not know this—

You knew this had to come

As worlds must turn

And primates must prance

And givers must grab

So they would try to wrap their world around yours.

They are not dumb.

And smell a beautiful beast slouching toward Bethlehem.

Benjan coils in upon himself. He has to delay Katonji. He must lie—

—and at this rogue thought, scarlet circuits fire. Agony. Benjan flinches as truth verification overrides trigger inside himself.

“I warned you.” Katonji smiles, lips thin and dry.

Let them kill me.

“You’d like that, I know. No, you will yield up your little secrets.”

Speak. Don’t just let him read your thoughts. “Why can’t you find him?”

“We do not know. Except that your sort of intelligence has gotten quite out of control, that we do know. We will take it apart gradually, to understand it—you, I suppose, included.”

“You will…”

“Peel you, yes. There will be nothing left. To avoid that, tell us now.”

—and the howling storm breaches him, bowls him over, shrieks and tears and devours him. The fire licks flesh from his bones, chars him, flames burst behind his eyelids—

And he stands. He endures. He seals off the pain. It becomes a raging, white-hot point deep in his gut.