Брендон Сандерсон - Cytonic

“Scud,” I said. “How did you not notice?”

“I have no idea,” he said, his voice small. “I guess I’m more alive than I thought, and am experiencing some of the same effects you are. Indeed, a lack of time awareness would seem to fit with what we know of delvers.”

Well, that would explain why the others trusted me with M-Bot “so soon.” It wasn’t soon.

Nevertheless, my brain struggled to make sense of it. With an effort that felt almost painful, I thought back over the repairs I’d done. Stripping down the landing gear on all four ships. Doing booster maintenance. Light wing repairs…

I immediately reached out to Chet.

Have you contacted the AI? he asked.

Yes, but…Chet, how many days do you think I’ve been in here, captured?

Six? he guessed. I’ve been sleeping off my wound a lot though. So maybe seven or eight?

Fourteen, I said.

He was silent for a moment. Then I felt the emotional equivalence of a sigh.

It is dangerous to stay in one place long, he said. This happens, Spensa. I’m sorry.

“Can you set alarms?” I asked M-Bot. “Calendar alerts? We should start aggressively acknowledging each day. See if we can remain more focused.”

“Yes. Yes, that’s a good idea…”

I sensed worry in his voice though. Even if Chet expected this sort of thing, I felt it incredibly strange that it affected M-Bot. I did remember sleeping, but found I couldn’t count the times I’d done it. This place played havoc with my sense of time in such a way as to make it really difficult.

Two weeks? A lot could change in a war during that time. Were my friends all right? I needed to accelerate my plans for escaping. I had to find a way to upload M-Bot’s mind into one of the starfighters. Preferably one without a crystalline alien occupying it.

“I’ll be honest,” Maksim said, lounging across the sawhorse, a wrench dangling from one finger. “I always thought something was wrong with me. I was taught about how mean and naturally angry humans were, yet I didn’t feel any of that, you know?

“Well, my owners presumed their training kept me under control. They had this whole therapy process they said ‘cured’ aggression, and so were able to get the permits for a human child. They got me when I was nine, and had me sit around and hum.”

I looked up from my diagnostic screen, where I’d been quietly preparing to advance the next step of our plan. Peg had mentioned that the base scanner needed some maintenance. I wasn’t certain when that would happen, but I wanted to be ready to go when it did.

For the time being, I was doing my best to fit in. And I had to admit I enjoyed chatting with the others. “They had you hum? Like…you know…” I made a humming noise.

“Exactly,” Maksim said. “They’d have me sit on a little mat and just hum. For hours at a time. They said it was a special ‘proprietary process.’ I guess it was the tone I was humming that made it distinctive? Still not sure, honestly, though they had me at it for twenty years.”

“Anti-aggression therapy is big business, Spin,” Nuluba said from where she sat on the floor nearby, poring over some spreadsheets. “Many parents are terrified that their child might be too aggressive. They’ll pay big money for treatment. Any treatment.”

“It is a failing,” Shiver said, her crystal letting out peals from where it had grown on a box nearby. “Though the humming treatment sounds…unusual, there are more reasonable therapies available. I think many people in the Superiority are working hard to create a better society, but…some of us question if our goals are worthy. The entire system vibrates with an unsteady tone. It cracks itself with such sounds. We are…too polite sometimes to accept this.”

Maksim nodded. The beard made him look older than the early thirties he actually was. I’d always imagined that a long rugged beard would make a man seem like a warrior. Maksim disabused me of that image. He looked a lot less like a warrior than he did like a guy who’d been lost wandering the caverns.

His relaxed manner, though, made me curious. I’d assumed all captive humans would be intense like Brade. Yet this guy was so laid back, he could have gotten into a napping contest with…with someone I used to know…

With Nedd. That was it. How had I forgotten Nedd’s name? Maksim could have gotten into a napping contest with Nedd and held his own.

“I learned to act real fearsome,” Maksim said, grinning. “I’d growl, and show my teeth, and even wave my hands and say ‘Boingar boingar.’ I told them it was my clan’s battle cry. My parents would have found that funny. We didn’t have a clan. Only a little family trying to live as normal a life as we could in a research lab.”

He glanced away then, like he often did when he mentioned his parents. He’d been denied contact with them after being sold to the pair of varvax. Now he couldn’t remember their faces. Few of the pirates had been in here long enough to forget their pasts entirely, and many had been in a group the entire time, slowing the process. But from what I’d been able to gather, the effects were showing regardless.

“The Superiority failed you, Maksim,” Nuluba said. “Shiver is right, though I will say it more strongly than she. It failed you, as it has failed so many.”

I’d been keeping an extra close eye on Nuluba. She looked imposing in her shell-like exoskeleton. Did she realize I was plotting my escape? Was she watching me like I watched her?

“What about you?” I asked her, trying to sound nonchalant. “Did the Superiority fail you as well?”

“In a way,” she said, the faceplate of her exoskeleton revealing the small crablike creature that was her true shape. “Or I failed it. I was a bureaucrat.”

“In the government, I assume?” I didn’t really know how other nations did things. “How high were you?”

“High?” She waved her arms, seeming amused. “Everyone always assumes that we varvax are ‘in charge’ and must be ‘so important.’ I assure you, we’re not! My. Some are, Spin of the humans, but not me. I was stationed in an irrelevant department of an oft-ignored utility. I lived on Tuma.”

“I hadn’t known that,” Maksim said. “Wow.”

“Tuma?” I asked.

“Prone to acidic rainstorms,” Maksim explained. “But near some nice resource farms. Mostly automated. Cheap place to live. Very cheap.”

“Well,” Nuluba said, “I did customer analysis for the methane utility farms. I had a lot of information—including population statistics for many planets, so I could judge trends in customer usage. Spent too much time with that data, maybe.” She turned away then, lowering her arms. The exoskeleton mimicked the way her smaller crab body moved inside. “I started asking questions. Too many questions. I was thrown in here almost before I knew what had happened…”

I frowned to myself, turning back to my work. What was Nuluba hiding? Varvax still baffled me. For example, I’d recently discovered that the fluid-filled inorganic exoskeletons weren’t straight technology, but were somehow grown and hooked directly into the varvax’s nervous system. How did that work?

“We in the Superiority failed so many,” Shiver said. “Often you grow so large—so comfortable—that you feel the cavern must be right, because it is what has been. You’re used to it, and it’s right, so everyone else must be right as well. You resonate with self-assurance, ignoring the shifting rocks that might someday lead the cavern to collapse, crushing every crystal who lives there.”