A. Attanasio - SoliS

"What have you done?" Charles cries. "What' have you done to me?"
"Munk!" Mei screams. "The command pod! Open the pod!"
Ahead, the mirror surface of the clustered spheres wrinkles, and a portal appears close to the ground. Mei throws the eye-stalk segment of the psybot before her, tucks herself around her jetpak, and somersaults into the command pod. "We're in! Shut the pod! Munk-hurry!"
Through the constricting portal, Mei glimpses Aparecida lunging toward them, tentacles thrashing, ax-edged arms whirling, jaguar body slumped in a full-tilt charge, a gaze of gorged fury in its slick metal face. The entry shrivels close, and a tremendous boom rattles the complex and the small bones in Mei's ears. Quake-force juddering trembles the ground.
"What is happening?" Charles asks out of the darkness.
"Aparecida is trying to break in. But she can't. This is a prestressed alloy no demolition androne can breach." in the glow from her statskin cowl, the severed psybot with its wavering eye-stalks looks like an exotic sea plant. "Munk, turn the lights on in here."
Static drizzles over the com-link, and Munk's voice comes in jagged chunks: "…evasion. Wolf Star has deployed … Repeat, can't respond, must execute battle evasion. Will contact you again when-"
"Munk! Detonate the explosives! Munk, respond! Detonate the bore-drill explosives!"
"Can't. Programming prohibits-"
"Damn your programming! You're a rogue androne now. Use your free will. Save us, Munk!"
"Evading Wolf Star destroyers. There are. . ." Static fizzles into white noise.
"You have control of the factory," Charles realizes.
"Yeah," Mei admits, feeling through the dark for the switch box she knows is somewhere to her right. "This ore processor belongs to Apollo Combine, the company we work for. Or used to work for." By the slim light from her cowl, she finds the switch box and wrenches it open to reveal a colorful hive of circuitry. She probes the mesh of neon-bright conductors with a filament tool, and the interior lights up.
They are in a chamber of tall, intersecting crystal sheets-controller plates-that contain all the directives for operating every device and procedure in the ore processor. Beyond, Mei knows, through narrow companion-ways, are the vaults that store the repair supplies. She shoulders her way among the controller plates to a knee-high central frustum that houses Charles Outis's brain. It is made of the same translucent, crystalline material as the plates, and inside it she discerns a vague ovoid outline.
"Don't touch that!" the psybot commands.
"I'm sorry," Mei says, "but I must turn off your senses for a brief time. Everything we say is being relayed to Wolf Star, and we have no chance of getting away so long as they're spying on us."
"Leave me be!" the psybot shouts. "I don't want to go with you."
Mei ignores him, snaps open the top of the frustum, and lifts out the clear plasteel case with the brain inside it. The convoluted tissue is suspended in colorless gel and a chrome net, the support system that sustains it. Awe at the antiquity of the being in her hands and revulsion at its nakedness mix in her.
"This is Wolf Star speaking," the psybot says. "You are in violation of Commonality salvage-rights law. Your life is forfeit unless you immediately surrender the wetware with which you have absconded."
Mei places the plasteel case on the ground, grabs her jetpak, and fits its vent to the ripped end of the psybot.
"The Laughing Life is in violation of salvage-rights law," the psybot declares. "It is being stalked and will be destroyed. You have no means of escape. Surrender the wetware now, or face the-"
Mei fires a blast of the jetpak that lifts her toward the curved ceiling and shatters the psybot to spinning shards. She lands on her heels and dances backward with the inertia, crashing into the controller plates with enough force to knock the breath out of her. There is no sound in the virtually airless chamber, yet she hears with her bones the pounding atop the pod stop. An ominous
silence pervades her. And in that palpable emptiness she feels suddenly tangential to life, fugitive to the world of sounds, to the living world, as though she brinks on the emptiness of a void greater than being, where the dead enclose the quick.
2
Remains of Adam
OVERCOME BY A SENSE OF UNREAUTY AND AMAZED That her Life is going to end here in the presence of an archaic human, Mei Nili picks up the capsule with reverence and stares through the milky plasteel at the brainshadow and the silvery net that sustains it. The idea strikes her that she can talk directly with this man using the electrodes in the net and the signal processors of the core chamber.
With a feeling of eerie portent, she returns the brain to the frustrum. She goes quickly to the switch box and, using filament brushes from the tool unit of her jetpak, connects the core chamber with her com-link. "Mr. Charlie, can you hear me?"
"Aye, yet strange you sound."
"It's the translator," Mei explains, relieved to hear a human voice again, no matter how comically distorted. "It must be having difficulty converting your archaic language."
"I be black in the kingdom of the blind!"
"I'll try and make some adjustments." She attempts tapping into the powerful logic boards of the controller plates, hoping she didn't damage them too badly in her collision. "I'm going to get us out of here, Mr. Charlie. But first I'm going to see if I can fuse the transmitter units in your support system with the translator mode in my com-link-my compact communications system. That way we can talk once I remove you from the core chamber."
"What heinous wickedy-split plans have you toward me?"
"I mean you no harm," Mei answers, tediously struggling to find the right pathways among the circuits. She subvocalizes her curses, not wanting the archaic brain to hear her frustration. "I'm taking you to Solis to grow you a new body-a whole and beautiful body-if we can get away from here."
"Much virtue in if," Charles says mournfully. "With broodful nod, proceed. What choice for a miser in a poor house?"
"Right." The pinhead bulb atop her filament brush flickers, then lights up, indicating she has opened a new pathway among the microswitches. "Okay! I think I've got it. Am I coming across more clearly, Mr. Charlie?"
"Yes, a lot clearer," a soft voice comes over her comlink. "You sound intelligible again."
She blows a satisfied sigh and slides to the floor. "Now all we have to do is get out of here without getting killed." She closes her eyes, reaching inward for the rageful strength that has carried her this far from the reservation. "It must seem ironic to you," she says quietly, "to have survived all this time only to wake up and discover your life is in jeopardy."
"It's not a happy feeling," the archaic mind admits. "I've been disoriented since I've woken up. Can you tell me what year this is?"
"Time isn't marked that way anymore, Mr. Charlie. I mean, on Earth there are still standard years, each with three hundred sixty-five and a quarter days. But each community has its own reckoning based upon its origin. On the reservation where I come from, we were in the year seven hundred forty-eight when I left."
"So I've been dead over seven hundred years," he says in a whisper so faint it is almost only a thought.
"Longer than that, probably. Our reservation was one of the most recent. What did you call the year when you lived?"
"I died in the twenty-first century. Does that mean anything to you?"
"No. I only know that the archaic age had its own reckonings for time.
Religious ones, I think."
"Yes. Maybe you can tell me when the archaic age ended."
"I don't really know. I mean, I wasn't much interested in history. Do you know about the Maat?"
"No."
"Sometimes they're called neo-sapiens. They're what became of humanity after we mapped the human genome and amplified our intelligence."
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