Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

The cold alloy door shuttered open at a touch, with a refreshing rasp of metal on metal, and they stepped inside. Silas had guessed right; the room was dominated by a shielded reactor and mountainous banks of monitoring equipment. Pustules of brown flesh still grew from cracks here and there, but for the most part it was a sanctuary of geometric surfaces and hard edges. Clean, cold, solid.

The door hissed shut behind them, and the noise turned Silas’s head just in time to see his newfound companion’s death throes. He gave a shocked howl and jumped back as the thing dug deep at its rotting tissue, pulling it away in strips and clumps. Spongy flesh shredded and tumbled to the floor.

“Are you molting?” Silas asked, dumbfounded.

“You talk too much.”

Silas nearly swallowed his tongue whole. The voice was heavily accented, something Outer Colonies, hoarse from disuse, but it was human and it matched the bone-gaunt woman now clambering out of the steaming mess of meat. She was tall, spindly almost, with dark hair cropped to stubble around a wide-mouthed face. Her eyes were hard black graphite.

“I’m Cena,” the woman said. “I’m a ghost. Formerly… a mining tech.” She gave a ragged laugh with no light left in it.

“Silas,” Silas said. “Failed virtuoso, freethinker technician.”

Cena picked a wriggling bit of biomass off her shoulder and flicked it to the floor. She said nothing.

“What the fuck happened here?” Silas demanded, slumping to a crouch. He’d meant to ask it gruffly, like some kind of amped-up cybersoldier, but his voice broke in two and it sounded how he felt. Desperate.

“Love,” Cena said.

“Love.”

She nodded, lips pursed, and Silas imagined he could cut his finger on her cheekbones.

“You’re post-traumatic crazy.” He put his head in his hand. “That’s great. That’s really swank.”

Haley’s neural patterns would start eroding in another hour. Silas watched the time display pulse accusingly in the corner of his vision.

“I thought I would do this forever,” Cena blurted, breaking him from his thoughts. “I thought I would just do this forever. I thought I would eat the ship and shit the ship and wear the ship until one day I woke up grafted to the wall like Ahmed and Slick Jack and Omir and Su and all the others.” She took a deep trembling breath. Released it. “But now I’m talking to a failed virtuoso named Silo.”

“Silas.”

“Yeah.” Cena shook herself. “I’ll tell you what happened. Just promise me you’re real.”

Silas promised. Cena told him.

“I’ve been signed to Dronyk Orbital for six years, now. No. Seven. First long haul on a bioship, though. She’s called the Anastasia. We launched with a twelve-person crew, heading to one of the alloy belts. Solid crew. I’d shipped out with most of them before. The babysitter was new.”

Silas felt a heart pang. Dronyk hadn’t allocated them a babysitter to pop in and out of cryo during the six-month haul, to keep the freethinker company and check in on the sleepers. Maybe a babysitter would have spotted Haley’s damaged equipment.

“His name was Pierce. Twitchy little man. Head full of ports and data stacks like a porcupine. I think it was his first long haul.” Cena folded her arms in the Lazarus position, the universal sign for cryo. “So eleven of us went to sleep. Pierce stayed awake for the first week, to check the pods, calibrate the freethinker. Then he was supposed to join us until the first scheduled thaw. But he didn’t.”

“How would you know?”

“We didn’t.” She shook her stubbled head. “Not until we thawed six months in for full physical. Pierce was waiting for us, very happy, very twitchy. Said we’d found something better than a nickel vein. Said the ship’s freethinker had crossed the Turing Line.”

“Fully sapient?” Silas demanded. “The Anastasia’s fully sapient?” He lowered his voice, as if the freethinker might hear her name like gossip across a crowded party. Fewer than a dozen AIs in the known universe were confirmed to have crossed the Turing Line. Their innumerable brethren were only self-aware in the most basic sense.

Cena shrugged. “That’s what he said. That was his excuse for staying warm for six straight months and burning through the food and water.”

“But a mining ship freethinker?” Silas was still stuck on the previous revelation. “No way could it go sapient. Not nearly enough codespace. AIs cross the Turing Line in mega labs, not on a rig financed by Dronyk fucking Orbital.”

“He explained that, too,” Cena said wearily. “A metal ship, no. But a bioship, yes. The freethinker was already tapped into a crude nervous system. And at some point she started growing gray matter. Hardware to wetware processing.” Cena encompassed the bioship with a wave of her arm. “She has all the codespace she needs, now.”

Silas rocked back on his haunches. “Shit,” he muttered. “So this isn’t even a freethinker running a ship anymore. They really are one big borg.”

“Pierce called it evolution.” Cena laughed again, the same ugly sound. “He had been talking to her for six straight months. Docked in, you know. He was losing his fucking mind.”

Silas felt like he was losing his. He could picture pulsating flesh all around him, but now peeled back, exposing the filigree of neurons, sodium and crackling potassium, neurons swimming up and down a vast lattice of canals. As much space as any mega lab. Enough space for a self-aware sapient intelligence.

“He used up all the food,” Cena said. “Feeding her. He hacked into all the supply rooms. We still had the hydroponic garden, but he’d stripped most of that, too. And we were still six months out from the alloy belt. Omir and Slick Jack wanted to feed him to the ship.” She paused, then gave a sickly grin. “He beat them to it. We had him locked in a store room until we figured out what to do. Argued all nightcycle. And when we went to get him in the morning, he was gone.” Cena’s black eyes seemed to glitter. “Anastasia let him out. Stupid of us not to have someone watching him. But we were upset. Scared. We checked the cams. They weren’t wiped. We saw Pierce sneak out. He went to the equipment hold first, to get a slicer.”

“Slicer?”

“Cutting tool. Uses superheated plasma.”

Silas thought of the sharp glinting shapes they’d passed in the dark, the rotary saws and line cutters. He was not enjoying this story. His skin was crawling with it.

“And then.” Cena paused, frowning, her tongue sliding along her yellow teeth as she shook off Silas’s interruption. “And then, after he had the slicer, he went and set it up by a cluster of nutrient tubes. Anastasia sealed off the corridor, I think, so we wouldn’t hear it. He cut off his legs.”

Silas had known it was coming, in the back of his mind, but he still flinched.

“The stumps cauterized clean, and I think he must have shut off his pain, or something, with one of those stacks in his skull,” Cena mused. “Otherwise I don’t see how he could have managed to get the second one off. He shoved them into a nutrient tube. Did his right arm, after, wriggling around on the floor like a worm. Shoved the arm in. Then it was just him. Inching. Got in headfirst, but by the way his stumps were twitching, I don’t think he was dead for at least a half hour. Anastasia took him nice and slow.”

Silas hit the release on his hood and gave up a thin, bubbly vomit his stomach had somehow managed to churn together.

“Don’t worry,” Cena said, as it spattered the floor. “Anastasia can clean that up, too.”

“Why the fuck would he do that?” Silas rasped, once he’d resealed his hood. The bioship’s atmosphere was obviously breathable, but with a dank rotting taste. He would take recycled any day. “Did she get into his implants, somehow?” he asked. “Did she puppet him?”