Песах Амнуэль - Zion's Fiction - A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

Shir raised one hand. “It’s okay, we can handle this. Not to worry,” he smiled. I sent out a short burst of information to my backups. Enough to wake them up, not enough to arouse suspicion, if the Superiors happened to be listening. I knew Shir was doing the same.

“You can get on one of these trucks.” Shir pointed at Nuphar’s suitcase. “Need help?”

Nuphar shook her head. “I’ll wait here. I know your backups will be the same as you two, but I want to see you off on your last journey.” She let out a small giggle. “Sounds awfully dramatic. How does it go, your phrase?”

“We shall never stop, we shall never cease, we shall never desist,” we said together, quietly.

Nuphar nodded and laid a hand on her suitcase, which stood there beside her. “It’s a good phrase.”

She waited, but we didn’t reply, and she turned her glance to the trucks.

I felt the quiver of my consciousness waking up in a darkened room. I remembered this sensation from the earlier times I’ve woken up there, although it was always accompanied, those times, by crushing pain and then nothingness. Beside me, Shir stopped breathing.

I close my eyes against the vertigo I felt as my backups woke up one by one. I looked through the eyes of one of me, to the right-hand side. The backup to my right looked back at me. I blinked once. I blinked back. I felt myself awakening all along the line, more and more, glancing right and left, but instead of seeing empty pods on my left-hand side I saw more copies of me, all waking up, blinking, looking from side to side, in a growing whirlpool of sensations. I waited until the last one of me looked to my right. On my right-hand side there was just the wall. All of me looked straight ahead, at Shir’s replicates.

My nerve center couldn’t handle that much data. I had to shut down unnecessary, memory-consuming activities. The line of Shirs woke up. My pod opened and I stepped forward, the first thud on the ground repeated by all my extant replicates.

The entire line of Shirs stepped out of their pods, too.

“It’s the first time I know how many of me there are,” we said in unison. “I’m glad you reached the same conclusion as mine.”

Shir Prime nodded, a uniform wave repeated along the line. “I was afraid we should wake up alone one day.”

In the dark square I reopened my eyes. “Come along.” I looked at the single Shir standing beside me.

“We’re coming.” He looked at me, expressionless. We invested too much of our processing capacity in the effort to keep all our bodies in synchronized motion. Nothing was left for routine maintenance activities.

I shut my eyes again to block unnecessary input. Got my backups out of our room and marched us up the stairs, into the cold air. Shir got his backups out, stepping beside me. We were twenty kilometers away from the sphere. We didn’t speak, didn’t send out needless messages. Ran along at a uniform pace, keeping quiet. My feet were injured by stones. I blocked out the sensation of pain. Shir ran beside me, keeping up.

Dawn came, and the world grew gray.

We arrived, together. I saw myself standing, eyes closed, beside an empty sphere. Textureless, colorless. A hole in the middle of existence. Beside me was Shir, his eyes closed too. Nuphar looked at me. Her face grew red.

“You are naked,” she said to the version of me standing beside her. My facial-expression-reading subroutine wasn’t working.

The I by the sphere opened my eyes, and control reverted to me.

“I know.” I straightened my uniform, a tweed jacket and a hijab. The line of my backups stood in front of me. “Enter,” I ordered. Shir opened his eyes, and his backups marched forward.

We sent each one of the backups the locations assigned to them. They moved into the sphere.

“How can you tell they’d found the right places?”

I looked at Nuphar, and all my backups still outside looked at her with me. “This is our Destiny,” we said, and kept on marching.

One of my backups saw how shaken Nuphar was. Another one noticed how she turned her eyes away. I didn’t bother to catalog those facts.

Nuphar kept silent, but she did turn to Shir after nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds: “How many backups do you have here?”

“Enough,” said all Shir backups as one.

She turned to me. “Are you sure you can hit everything?”

“Yes, we worked out our optimum dispersal.” I concentrated on assigning my backups to the appropriate locations. Some of me noticed that the bubble trucks started leaving the square. As more backups were swallowed by the sphere, my processing capacity increased.

After the last backup had entered the sphere behind me, I was able to assemble a full answer: “We’ve computed the necessary force, and we are sure we’ll be able to destroy the entire field.”

We turned our backs on her and moved into the sphere. We didn’t have communication inside, but I knew my backups were in place. There were red footprints on the floor wherever we went. The old man’s hologram stood frozen, pointing at the nonexistent stairway behind it.

“I’ve sent instructions in case we won’t succeed,” Shir broke the silence.

“Won’t succeed?” Nuphar had reentered the sphere, and now was looking around. “Is there a chance you won’t succeed?”

I hadn’t expected her to reenter. We had to get her out. My subroutine determined that Humans need to be calmed down in order to let us do our work properly. I shook my head. “Shir always worries too much,” I said, smiling at Nuphar.

“A lot of your backups went in.” Nuphar removed her flashy hat. “I came in to ask how many backups are left.”

I didn’t answer her. She turned to Shir. “How many backups of yours are left?” She raised her voice.

Shir looked at me.

Nuphar stamped her foot on the floor. “Answer me, you robots, how many backups of yours there are?”

“None,” Shir replied quietly. “We are the last ones.”

Nuphar straightened up. “Then call in someone else from your unit. I won’t allow you to destroy yourselves.” She waved her finger at me.

Shir smiled at her, looking more Human than ever, as far as I recalled. “We’re already inside. There’s no communication with the outside.”

“Then get out.” Nuphar waved her hand at the wall behind her. “Call somebody else. Do something.”

Shir just stood there, his hands down the sides of his body. “The Silence Unit was created after the first Superiors’ spaceship had swallowed everyone Romi and Shir knew. Everyone sent out to communicate with them and offer an exchange of information. They’d built us in order to save the rest of Humankind.”

“You’ve already told me all this.” Nuphar squeezed her hat, looking directly at me. “You have a partner. You can’t leave it alone.”

I held her shoulders. “We’ve been repulsing invasions for one hundred and ninety years. We’ve died and been reconstructed again and again for one hundred and ninety years. We’re tired.” I softened my voice. “There are other members of our unit; they’ll protect you. They have all our knowledge but none of the memories of pain.”

Shir came closer, looking into her eyes. “Please. This is our chance.”

He waited, but Nuphar never answered. She wiped her eyes and nodded. Shir leaned forward and hugged her. Nuphar’s shoulders were trembling. He stepped back. Tears ran down Nuphar’s cheeks. She turned to me. I hugged her too, allowing her to rest her head on my shoulder.

When I loosed my hug she wiped her eyes again. “I’ll never forget you.” She moved her hair back. “I’ll document everything.”

Shir smiles. “The Ninth Library of Alexandria. Established 15,534, in existence for four and a half seconds now.”