Майкл Бишоп: The Final Frontier: Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

Beck was pumping information back all the way to the mother system, so that the Compact could devote some fraction of a fraction of its massed computing ability to the issue. The minds of all its connected citizenry. Its supercomputers. Maybe even, it was rumored, artificial intelligences.

“But if they are intelligent?” I asked. “How do you prove it?”

Beck cocked his head. “The Compact is working on it. Has been ever since the individuals here signed the contract.”

“Then why are you out here?”

“Yes…” He was suddenly curious about me now, remembering I was a distinct individual, lying next to him. I wasn’t of the Compact. I wasn’t another drone.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It was good you asked.” He flopped over to stare at the ceiling again. “You’re right, I’m not entirely needed. But the Compact felt it was necessary.”

I wanted to know why. But I could feel Beck hesitate. I held my breath.

“You are a Friend. You’ve never broken contract. The Compact ranks you very highly.” Beck turned back to face me. “We understand that what I tell you will never leave this room, and since I debugged it, it’s a safe room. What do you think it takes to become a freelance scientist in this hostile universe?”

I’d been around enough negotiating tables. A good Friend, with the neural modifications and adaptive circuitry laced into me from birth, I could read body posture, micro-expressions, skin flush, heart rate, in a blink of the eye. I made a hell of a negotiating tool. Which was usually exactly what Gheda wanted: a read on their human counterparts.

And I had learned the ins and outs of my clients businesses quick as well. I knew what the wider universe was like while doing my job.

“Oslo has pent-up rage,” I whispered. “His family is obsessed with the Earth as it used to be. Before the Gheda land purchases. He wants wealth, but that’s not all, I think. Cruzie holds herself like she has military bearing, though she hides it. Kepler, I don’t know. I’m guessing you will tell me they have all worked as weapons manufacturers or researchers of some sort?”

Beck nodded. “Oslo and his sister London are linked to a weaponized virus that was released on a Gheda station. Cruzie fought with separatists in Columbia. Kepler is a false identity. We haven’t cracked her yet.”

I looked at the drone. There was no deceit in him. He stated these things as facts. He was a drone. He didn’t need to question the information given to him.

“Why are you telling me all this?”

He gestured at the bunk. “You’re a professional Friend. You’re safe. You’re here. And I’m just a drone. We’re just a piece of all this.”

And then he moved to spoon against the inside of my stomach. Two meaningless, tiny lives inside a cold station, far away from where they belonged.

“And because,” he added in a soft voice, “I think that these scientists are desperate enough to fix a problem if it occurs.”

“Fix a problem?” I asked, wrapping my arms around him.

“I think the Vesians are intelligent, and I think Kepler and Oslo plan to do something to them if, or when, it’s confirmed, so that they can keep patent rights.”

I could suddenly hear every creak, whisper, and whistle in the station as I tensed up.

“I will protect you if I can. Right now we’re just delaying as long as we can. Mainly I’m trying to stop Cruzie from figuring out the obvious, because if she confirms they’re really intelligent, then Oslo and Kepler will make their move and do something to the Vesians. We’re not sure what.”

“You said delaying. Delaying until what?” I asked, a slight quaver in my voice that I found I couldn’t control.

“Until the Gheda get here,” Beck said with a last yawn. “That’s when it all gets really complicated.” His voice trailed off as he said that, and he fell asleep.

I lay there, awake and wide-eyed.

I finally reached up to my neck and scratched at the band of skin where the air monitor patch had once been stuck.

Points on nothing was still just… nothing.

But could I rat out my contract? My role as a Friend? Could I help Oslo and Kepler kill an alien race?

Things had gotten very muddy in just a few minutes. I felt trapped between the hell of an old life and the hell of a horrible new one.

“What’s a human being?” I asked Beck over lunch.

“Definitions vary,” he replied.

“You’re a drone: bred to act, react, and move within a shared neural environment. You serve the Compact. There’s no queen, like a classic anthill or with bees. Your shared mental overmind makes the calls. So you have a say. A tiny say. You are human… ish. Our ancestors would have questioned whether you were human.”

Beck cocked his head and smiled. “And you?”

“Modified from birth to read human faces. Under contract for most of my life to Gheda, working to tell the aliens or other humans what humans are really thinking… they wouldn’t have thought highly of me either.”

“The Compact knows you reread your contract last night, after I fell asleep, and you used some rather complicated algorithms to game some scenarios.”

I frowned. “So you’re spying on us now.”

“Of course. You’re struggling with a gray moral situation.”

“Which is?”

“The nature of your contract says you need to work with me and support my needs. But you’re hired by the freelancers that I’m now in opposition to. As a Friend, a role and purpose burned into you just like being a drone is burned into me, do you warn them? Or do you stick by me? The contract allows for interpretations either way. And if you stick with me, it’s doing so while knowing that I’m just a drone. A pawn that the Compact will use as it sees fit, for its own game.”

“You left something out,” I said.

“Neither you, nor I, are bred to care about Vesians,” Beck said.

I got up and walked over to the large porthole. “I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for them?”

“What would?”

“Whatever Kepler and Oslo want to do to them. Better to die now than to meet the Gheda. I can’t imagine they’d ever want to become us.”

Beck stood up. There was caution in his stance, as if he’d thought I had been figured out, but now wasn’t sure. “I’ve got work to do. Stay here and finish your meal, Friend.”

I looked down at the green world beneath, and jumped when a hand grabbed my shoulder. I could see gray words tattooed in the skin. “Cruzie?”

Her large brown eyes were filled with anger. “That son of a bitch has been lying to us,” she said, pointing in the direction Beck had gone. “Come with me.”

“The gourds,” Cruzie said, pointing at a screen, and then looking at Beck. “Tell us about the gourds.”

And Oslo grabbed my shoulder. “Watch the drone, sharp now. I want you to tell us what you see when he replies to us.”

My contract would be clear there. I couldn’t lie. The scientists owned the contract, and now that they’d asked directly for my services, I couldn’t evade.

Points on the package, I thought in the far back of my mind.

I wasn’t really human, was I? Not if I found the lure of eternal riches to be so great as to consider helping the freelancers.

“The Vesians have farms,” Cruzie said. “But so do ants: they grow fungus. The Vesians have roads, but so do animals in a forest. They just keep walking over the same spots. Old Earth roads used to follow old animal paths. The Vesians have buildings, but birds build nests, ants build colonies, bees build hives. But language, that’s so much rarer in the animal kingdom, isn’t it, Beck?”

“Not really,” the drone said calmly. “Primitive communication exists in animals. Including bees, which dance information. Dolphins squeak and whales sing.”