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

Alone had to stop his brother.

But how?

He quit running.

The voice that had never identified itself—the conscience that perhaps was too ancient, too maimed and run down, to even lend itself a name—now said to him, “Go away. This is the wrong course. Go!”

Alone would not listen.

Standing on that barren plain, he made himself grow tiny and exceptionally bright, washing away the darkness. In an instant, the enormous chamber was filled with a sharp white light that reached the walls and rose to the ceiling before vanishing in the next instant.

Then he was dark again, drained but not quite exhausted.

With the last of his reserves, Alone spun a fresh mouth, and in a language that he had never heard before—never suspected that he was carrying inside himself—he screamed into the newly minted darkness, “I am here!”

Suddenly a dozen machines emerged from their hiding places, plunging from the ceiling or racing from blinds inside the towering rock walls.

Alone tried to vanish.

But the machines were converging on him.

Then he grew large again, managing legs. But the power expended by his desperate flash and careless shout was too much, and too many seconds were needed before he would be able to offer the many kind of chase. After thousands of years, the door of a trap was closing over him, and in the end there wouldn’t even be the pleasure of a hard chase fought to the dramatic end.

Since their last meeting, the two organisms had walked separate lines—tightrope existences inspired by chance and ambition, deep purpose and the freedom of no clear purpose. An observer on a high perch, watching their respective lives, might have reasonably concluded that the two souls would never meet again. There was no cause for the lines to cross. The odd machine was quiet and modest, successfully avoiding discovery in the emptiest reaches of the Ship, while the engineer was busy maintaining the giant engines, and later, she was responsible for a slow-blooming career as a new captain. The remote observer would have been at a loss to contrive any situation that would place them together, much less in this unlikely terrain. Embarrassed, Aasleen confessed that she had had no good idea where Alone might have been and not been over these last tens of thousands of years. For decades, for entire centuries, she didn’t waste time pondering the device that she once cornered and then let get away. Not that she was at peace with her failure. She was proud of her competence and didn’t appreciate evidence to the contrary. Somewhere onboard the Great Ship was a barely contained speck of highly compressed matter, and should that speck ever break containment, then the next several seconds would become violent and famous, and for some souls, exceptionally sad.

This was a problem that gnawed, when Aasleen allowed it to. But as an engineer, she handed her official worries to the Submaster Miocene, and as a novice captain, she had never once been approached with any duty that had even the most glancing relationship to that old problem.

She told her story now, assuming that her prisoner would both understand what he heard and feel interested in this curious, quirky business.

Then several centuries ago, Aasleen and another captain met by chance and fell into friendly conversation. It was that other captain who mentioned a newly discovered machine-building species. Washen had a talent for aliens, Aasleen explained. Better than most humans, her colleague could decipher the attitudes and instincts of organisms that made no sense to a pragmatic, by-the-number soul like her. But the aliens, dubbed the Bakers, had been superior engineers. That’s why Washen mentioned them in the first place. She explained their rare genius for building inventive and persistent devices, and millions of years after their rise and fall and subsequent extinction, their machines were still scattered across the galaxy.

“Bakers is our name for them,” Aasleen cautioned. “It shouldn’t mean anything to you.”

Alone was floating above the cavern floor, encased in a sequence of cages, plasmas and overlapping magnetic fields creating a prison that was nearly invisible and seemingly unbreakable. Drifting in the middle of the smallest cage, he was in a vacuum, nothing but his own body to absorb into an engine that everybody else seemed to fear. With a flickering radio voice, he agreed. “I don’t know the Bakers.”

“How about this?” Aasleen asked.

Another sound, intense and brief, washed across him. He listened carefully, and then he politely asked to hear it again. “I don’t know the name,” he confessed. “But the words make sense to me.”

“I’m not surprised,” Aasleen allowed.

Alone waited.

“We know what you are,” she promised.

His response, honest and tinged with emotion, was to tell his captor, “I already know what I am. My history barely matters.”

“All right,” Aasleen allowed. “Do I stop talking? Should I keep my explanations to myself?”

He considered the possibility. But machines and teams of engineers were working hard, obviously preparing to do some large job. As long as the woman in the mirrored uniform was speaking, nothing evil would be done to him. So finally, with no doubt in the voice, he said, “Tell me about these Bakers.”

“They built you.”

“Perhaps so,” he allowed.

“Seven hundred million years ago,” Aasleen added. Then a bright smile broke open, and she added, “Which means that you are the second oldest machine that I have ever known.”

The Great Ship being the oldest.

Quietly, with a voice not quite accustomed to lecturing, she explained, “The Bakers were never natural travelers. We don’t know a lot about them, and most of our facts come through tertiary sources. But as far as we can determine, that species didn’t send even one emissary out into the galaxy. Instead of traveling, they built wondrous durable drones and littered an entire arm of the galaxy with them. Their machines were complicated and adaptable, and they were purposefully limited in what they knew about themselves. You see, the Bakers didn’t want to surrender anything about themselves, certainly not to strangers. They were isolated and happy to be that way. But they were also curious, in a fashion, and they could imagine dangerous neighbors wanting to do them harm. That’s why they built what looks to me like an elaborate empty bottle—a bottle designed to suck up ideas and emotions and history and intellectual talents from whatever species happens to come along. And when necessary, those machines could acquire the shape and voice of the locals too.”

Nothing about the story could be refuted. Alone accepted what he heard, but he refused to accept that any of it mattered.

Aasleen continued, explaining, “The Bakers lasted for ten or twelve million years, and then their world’s ecosystem collapsed. They lived at the far end of our galaxy, as humans calculate these measures. The only reason we’ve learned anything about them is that one of our newest resident species have collected quite a few of these old bottles. In partial payment for their ongoing voyage, they’ve shared everything they know about the Bakers. It’s not the kind of knowledge that I chase down for myself. But Washen knew that I’d be interested in dead engineers. And she mentioned just enough that I recognized what was being described, and I interrupted to tell her that I knew where another bottle was, and this one was still working.

“‘Where is it?’ she asked.

“I told her, ‘Wandering inside the Great Ship, he is, and he answers to the very appropriate name of Alone.’”

The captain paused, smiling without appearing happy.

Alone watched the workers. An elaborate needle was being erected on the cavern floor, aiming straight up at him.