Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

The impact came without warning. One moment, he was mildly concerned about prospects that he couldn’t measure, and the next moment saw discomfort and flashes of senseless light as his neural net absorbed the abuse. But he never lost consciousness, and he soon felt his shattered pieces flowing together, making healing motions that continued without pause for three hours.

A familiar voice found him then.

Lying in the dark, unable to move, something quiet came very close and then said, “The cold,” before falling silent again.

He didn’t try to speak.

Then after a long while, the voice said, “For so long, cold.”

“What is cold?” Alone whispered.

“And dark,” said the voice.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The voice said, “Listen.”

Alone remained silent, straining to hear any sound, no matter how soft or fleeting. But nothing else was offered. Silence lay upon silence, chilled and black, and he spent the next long while trying to decipher which language was used. No human tongue, clearly. Yet those few words were as transparent and simple as anything he had heard before.

Once healed, he seeped light.

The engine’s interior was complex and redundant, and most of its facilities were scarcely used. Except for the occasional crackling whisper, radio talk never reached him. He could wander again. Happy, he discovered a series of nameless places where the slightest frosting of dust lay over every surface, that dust never disturbed. Billions of years of benign neglect promised seclusion. No one would find him in this vastness, and if nothing else happened in his life, all would be well.

Centuries passed.

Technicians and their machines traveled through these places, but always bound for other, more important locations.

Hiding was easy inside the catacombs.

The Ship gave warning when the overhead engine was about to be fired. Great valves were opened and closed, vibrations traveling along the sleeping tubes. A deeper chill could be felt as lakes of liquid hydrogen were prepared for fusion. Alone always found three sites where he could quickly find shelter. His planning worked well, and he saw no reason to change what was flawless. And then one day, everything changed. Alone was sitting inside a minor conduit, happily basking in a pool of golden light leaking from his inexplicable body. He was thinking about nothing of consequence. And then that perfect instant was in the past. There was a deep rumble and the ominous feel of dense fluids on the move, and before he could react, he was picked up and carried along by a hot viscous and irresistible liquid. Not hydrogen, and not water either. It was some species of oil dirtied up with odd metals and peculiar structures. He was trapped inside juices and passion, life and more life, and he responded with a desperate scream.

Tendrils touched him, trying to bury inside him.

He panicked, kicked and spun hard. Then he pulled his body into the first disguise that occurred to him.

Electric voices jabbered.

A language was found, and what surrounded him said in the human tongue, “It is a Remora.”

“Down here?”

“Tastes wrong,” a third voice complained.

“Not hyperfiber, this shell isn’t,” said a fourth.

The voices never repeated. This oily body contained a multitude of independent, deeply communal entities.

“The face is,” said another.

“Look at the face.” Another.

“You hear us, Remora?”

“I do,” Alone allowed.

“Are you lost?”

He knew the word, but its precise meaning had always evaded him. So with as much authority as possible, he said, “I am not lost. No.”

In an alien language, the multitude debated what to do next.

Then a final voice announced, “Whatever you are, we will leave you now in a safe place. For this favor, you will pay us with your praise and thanks. Do this and win our respect. Otherwise, we will speak badly of you, today and for the eternity to come.”

He was spat into a new tunnel—a brief broad hole capped with a massive door and filled with magnetic filters, meshed filters, and a set of powerful grasping limbs. The limbs gathered him up. He immediately transformed his body, struggling to slide free. But his captors tied themselves into an enormous knot, their grip trying to crush him. Alone felt helpless. He panicked. Wild with terror, fresh talents were unleashed, and he discovered that when he did nothing except consciously gather up his energies, he could eventually let loose a burst of coherent light—an ultraviolet flash that jumped from his skin, scorching the smothering limbs—and he tumbled back onto the mesh floor.

A second set of limbs emerged, proving stronger, more careful.

Alone adapted his methods. A longer rest produced an invisible but intense magnetic pulse. The mechanical arms flinched and died, and then he changed his shape and flowed out from between them. The chamber walls and overhead door were high-grade hyperfiber. With brief bursts of light, he attacked the door’s narrow seams. He attacked the floor. Security AIs made no attempt to hide their presence, calmly studying the ongoing struggle. Then a pair of technicians stepped through an auxiliary door—humans wearing armored lifesuits, complete with helmets that offered some protection to their tough, fearful minds.

The man asked the woman, “What is that thing?”

“I don’t damn well know.”

“You think it’s the Remora’s ghost?”

“Who cares?” he decided. “Call the boss, let her decide.”

The humans retreated. Fresh arms were generated, slow and massive but designed just moments ago to capture this peculiar prize. Alone was herded into a corner and grabbed up, and an oxygen wind blew into the chamber, bringing a caustic mist of aerosols designed to weaken any normal machine. Through the dense air and across the radio spectrum, the humans spoke to him. “We don’t know if you can understand us,” they admitted. “But please, try to remain still. Pretend to be calm. We don’t want you hurt, we want you to feel safe, but if you insist on fighting, mistakes are going to be made.”

Alone struggled.

Then something was with him—a close, familiar presence—and the voice said, “The animals.”

Alone stopped fighting.

“They have us,” said the voice.

He listened to the air, to the empty static.

But whatever spoke to him was already gone, and that’s when a low whistling noise began to leak out of the prisoner—a steady sad moaning that stopped only when the ranking engineer arrived.

“I think you do understand me.” He stared at the woman. Except for a plain white garment, she wore nothing. No armor, no helmet.

“My name is Aasleen.”

Aasleen’s face and open hands were the color of starless space. She was speaking into the air and into an invisible microphone, her radio words finding him an instant before their mirroring sound.

The woman said, “Alone.”

He wasn’t struggling. Doing nothing, he felt his power growing quickly, and he wondered what he might accomplish if held this pose for a long time.

“That’s your name, isn’t it? Alone?”

He had never embraced any name and saw no reason to do so now.

With her nearly black eyes, Aasleen studied her prisoner. And as she stood before him, coded threads of EM noise pushed into her head. Buried in her organic flesh were tiny machines, each speaking with its own urgent, complex voice. She listened to those voices, and she watched him. Then she said one secret word, silencing the chatter, and that’s when she approached, walking forward slowly until he couldn’t endure her presence anymore.

He made himself invisible.

She stopped moving toward him, but she didn’t retreat either, speaking quietly to the smear of nothing defined by the giant clinging limbs.