Морган Райс - Return

She stood there glaring at them, and General s’Lara held up a hand for silence.

“I will not speak on this,” she said. “My own thoughts are too conflicted. Logic demands one thing, emotion another. Yet I would ask, are we beings of pure logic? Are we like them? I don’t know. It is time for us to divide.”

She bowed her head, and above them, Kevin saw dancing lights buzz around as AIs talked and debated, presumably balancing the feelings of the Ilari with the needs of logic. To Kevin, they looked like swarms of angry bees moving around, shifting and splitting, then recombining in different combinations as the debate between them went on.

From down where he stood, Kevin couldn’t begin to work out exactly which way the debate was going. He could catch snippets of it if he tried, but there were so many different fragments that even he couldn’t begin to work out which way it was going.

Finally, something seemed to be happening. Kevin had the sense of the AIs shifting, moving into stacks, forming into groups as they made their decisions. Two blocks, one red and one blue, appeared on the surface around the edge of the room. The groups seemed close; so close that Kevin couldn’t count them, and couldn’t begin to guess which one was larger. He could see some AIs still buzzing around, reviewing the facts or discussing them with those they were connected with. Slowly, though, the count settled, and the groups stabilized.

Even then, Kevin couldn’t guess at what the outcome was.

Kevin watched out of one of the ship’s windows as space passed by in a blur, stretched and bent to let the ship pass through by the power of its shields. He, Ro, and Chloe sat together in a room that was open and airy and almost empty. To his surprise, General s’Lara was there too.

Kevin flashed back, recalling General s’Lara’s hand on his shoulder, after the trial.

“We have made our decision. It seems… it seems that you will all be permitted to stay among us. You will be taken to our outpost world, and together, we will seek a way to stop the Hive. I just hope that we can find a way to do it.”

Kevin could not believe how close they had come to death. He snapped out of it and looked around.

“Don’t you need to… I don’t know,” he said, “be in charge of the ship?”

“As if my ship would let me tell it what to do,” she said. “We work with our AIs. We do not enslave them. That is Hive thinking.”

“Kevin and Ro aren’t the Hive,” Chloe said, hotly, maybe a little too hotly.

“I never said they were,” General s’Lara said. She seemed to be watching Kevin and Ro carefully though.

Kevin thought he understood. “You’re trying to learn more about the Hive, aren’t you?”

The general hesitated, listening in that way that said she was in communication with her AI again.

“Yes,” she admitted. “You and Purest… sorry, Ro here have been a part of it. You’ve had access to everything that it is. You can help us to understand it better. You might actually be able to help us beat them.”

“I’m not sure they can be beaten,” Ro said. “I’m sorry. I feel… hopeless.”

“But you managed to break free,” General s’Lara said.

“With Chloe’s help,” Ro replied.

Kevin nodded. Without Chloe, none of them would have been able to escape.

“I still want to know as much as you can tell us,” the general said. “What is it like being a part of the Hive?”

Kevin wasn’t sure that he had the words to explain it. Even so, he wanted to try. “It’s like… there’s this web of connections, and every one is a living thing. It’s being a part of something bigger, and feeling that nothing matters but that whole.”

“It’s beautiful,” Ro added. “But we have no way to feel that beauty. We feel nothing. No conscience, no happiness. The Hive is everything.”

“Well, that means negotiating is out of the question,” General s’Lara said. “Still, maybe there will be something. We’ll be there soon.”

“Where?” Kevin asked. He had no idea where they were heading; hadn’t even considered that they had to be going somewhere .

She gestured, and one of the walls shifted, providing an image of a planet. It seemed small on the screen, but was a bright point of color in an otherwise black and white view of space. It was largely green, in a way that seemed strange compared to the blue of Earth.

“This is Xarath,” the general said, by way of explanation. “Most of its water is underground, but the plant life comes up to the surface. We have a small base there. It was never intended to be a home for all of us, but we will have to make it one. I’m told that it is beautiful.”

“How long until we reach it?” Kevin asked. He had no real sense of how fast the ship was moving. Was it as fast as the Hive ships? Faster?

“A few more minutes. We have been folding space to get closer for a while now, but most of the delay has been to try to lose the Hive forces tracking us. We will need to be some of the first onto the surface. Come with me, we should get to one of the landers.”

For the second time, the general started to lead them through the inner workings of the ship. People turned to stare at them as they passed, and while some of them seemed to be waiting for orders from the general, others were definitely staring at Kevin, Chloe, and Ro. Not all of them seemed friendly.

“Looks like not everyone agrees with the trial,” Chloe said. She sounded to Kevin as though she was ready to fight off anyone who looked at them for too long, or in the wrong way. He could see her altered hand clenching as if ready to punch someone.

“People get to disagree,” General s’Lara said. “We are not the Hive, where everyone must obey. They can think what they like, but we have made a decision the fairest way we can, and I doubt anyone will act against it.”

She didn’t seem entirely certain to Kevin, but then, he thought, how could she? She was right. Unless they controlled every mind there like the Hive, there would be no perfect harmony. Kevin would rather have people giving him odd looks than have to live without his own thoughts, his own choices.

He and the others followed the general to a hangar where a number of smaller ships sat, looking like darts waiting to be spat out by the giant mouth of the ship. General s’Lara led the way to one that was partly blackened by fire.

“Here. My own craft. I’ll show you the planet. Come on.”

The inside of the ship was stranger than the outside. It looked as though it had been patched and rebuilt so many times that there was hardly anything of the original left.

“I worked on this one myself,” General s’Lara said, and then did the glancing away thing again. “Yes, all right. We worked on it. Take a seat and we’ll fly down.”

There were chairs that looked more like armchairs than the kind of benches or flight seats that Kevin would have expected from a military craft. It seemed strange to have such comfort in a general’s ship.

“What’s it like being linked to an artificial intelligence?” he asked.

“It’s like being two halves of a whole,” the general replied. “They can provide more information, react faster, and work things out that I never could, but we provide the emotion and the intuition. It works.”

Kevin tried to imagine it, and couldn’t. The closest he could get was the connection to the Hive, and that had been nothing like the way General s’Lara described. It sounded more like a kind of perfect friendship, the way he’d had with Luna back on Earth, each of them filling in for the other’s weaknesses, each of them looking out for the other without question.