Edward Lee: Mangled Meat

The material fell off the limbs and torso like cheesecloth; what lay there afterward was an intact humanoid male. Sturdy, well-formed physique, unblemished skin, long hair and beard. When I weighed the naked body on the spec-grav scale it came up the same: one hundred forty-six point four pounds. Which meant the suit had no perceptible weight. But even before that, I hooked the body up to the sensor monitors.

It was still alive.

Those initial convulsions hadn’t been a reaction from exposure to air pressure or heat; they hadn’t been autonomic or the result of perimortal nerve conduction. The body maintained a regular heartbeat of about seventy pulses per minute and registered systolic/dystolic blood pressure in the normal range for humans. Pulmonary expansion and collapse was normal too; the VO was breathing .

But the electroencephalopeg readout was the kicker. Alpha, beta, and theta four-wave brain patterns indicated a 1.0 synaptic coma.

But with slow-gradual improvement.

The VO wasn’t dead. He’d been floating in the victor for more than twenty centuries…but he wasn’t dead.

How could that be? No food, no air, no climate control?

But he was still alive.

Would he come out of the coma? If so, when? Everything was an avalanche of questions now. The victor was generating power. The operator was alive.

What next?

We didn’t know.

“We should vector back to earth now,” Yung suggested that night in the chowcove. He was drunk on synthbeer and so were most of his men. At least the Navy guys weren’t around; they were passed out on byhydrognine in their doms. “Fuck the rest of the mission,” Yung blurted. “This is more important.”

We both lit up Premier Menthols, sucked in the nicotine-laced steam. “The OAC would never allow it, Sarge,” I reminded him.

He leaned closer. “Yeah, but maybe we can override the fucker.”

“No way—too many safeties. It’s a fuckin’ federated crime. We try something like that, we lose everything. The only reason the OAC didn’t overhear your saying that is because—”

”Because its programs are too busy processing all this new data—I know that. That’s why I’m talking to you now. We just made the find of all of human history, and that goddamn motherboard is gonna make us finish the survey. That’s three more years, pal.”

“Yeah, and it’s also operating orders,” I said. “We can’t beat the program, Sarge. You and I both know that. We all signed on for the dime—we do the dime.”

“Aw, fuck all that fuckin’ protocol shit,” he said, waving a hand. “Christ, we’ve got an intact alien victor, we’ve got star charts from an extraterrestrial databank, and we’ve got the goddamn pilot in a coma. That’s enough to override the fuckin’ operating procedures.”

I was about to beg to differ but then the OAC blipped onto our HUDs.

:-mAINFRAME pROGRAM aNALYSIS iS nOW cOMPLETE. BASED oN cURRENT iMRPOVEMENT cALCULATIONS, tHE vICTOR oPERATOR wILL REGAIN fULL cONSCIOUSNESS wITHIN fORTY-tWO mONTHS. tHE sURVEY pLATFFORM iS oNE hUNDRED aND sIXTEEN lIGHT yEARS fROM eARTH. EMERGENCY gUIDELINES dICTATE aN aLTERNATE mISSION iTERNARY-:

“The fuck is that shit!” Yung yelled.

:-sTAR cHART cONFIGURATION cONFIRMED oNE hUNDRED pOINT zERO pERCENT. fOREIGN vICTOR’S pREVIOUS tRAJECTORY cONFIRMED. fOREIGN vICTOR’S fUTURE tRAJECTORY cONFIRMED -:

“Yeah!” I shouted and hugged Yung like a brother.

“The fuck?”

“The OAC knows the victor’s final plotted destination! And it also knows its debark point!”

Yung clearly wasn’t a brainchild, but even before he could mouth another gripe, the OAC shot him its orders:

:-sSG yUNG, pS mOS 11E40. rEPORT tO r-dOCK aSAP. dO nOT cONTEMPLATE aCTIONS wHICH tHE jUSTICE cORP mIGHT dEEM aS mUTINOUS-:

“Don’t you get it?” I asked Yung. “The OAC input those star charts into its own program files. It determined where the victor was coming from and where it was going to before the beryllium flux depowered its engines! Get to your post!”

Yung rubbed his face, blinked hard, then he got up and left the cove. The OAC cut him a big break.

:-cE jONSIN, dT1163-: the OAC told me next. :-tHIS iS aN iNSULATED mESSAGE. MOST oF oTHER cREWMEMBERS aRE cLOSE tO mUNTIOUS aCTION. THEREFORE i aM cOMMUNICATING tHIS mESSAGE tO yOU aLONE-:

“I understand,” I said.

:-aTEMPT tO cOERCE rEST oF cREW nOT tO mUTINY. THIS iS oF pARAMOUNT iMPORTANCE-:

“All right,” I agreed. “But why?”

:-oAC aNALYSIS cOMPUTATIONS cOMPLETE. YOU mUST mAKE a mORE dETAILED eXAMINATION oF vICTOR oCCUPANT-:

I ran back to the medcove. The naked body still lay on the table. I’d run every kind of scan possible on the nude body, and everything was coming up humanoid. But there were five anomalies that the OAC had indexed that I didn’t know about yet.

I stared at the TRI graph, and then I knew what the OAC was talking about. We couldn’t go back now. We had to go on.

We had to.

:-mAKE tHIS iNFORMATION aVAILABLE tO tHE rEST oF tHE cREW. cONVINCE tHEM oF iTS iMPORTANCE. tHEY wIll nOT tRUST mE bECUASE i aM nOT hUMAN-:

“Will do,” I said.

See, what the OAC had been doing all along was not only analyzing displayed star charts in the victor and all the other displayed info, it also analyzed all of my triax-tomes and resonance scans of the VO’s body once I cut the suit off. I didn’t see these things, but the scans did.

I read the output data over and over, all the while staring down at the naked and comatose body on the table. The long hair, the beard, the glazed eyes.

Then I read the tome scans a last time.

Healed-over wounds were present between the navicular and cuboid bones of the feet. Healed over wounds were present just under the pisiform and tubercle bones in the wrist. And one other healed over wound was present between the fourth and fifth rib bones on the thoracic cage.

Then I knew.

A fingerprint on the hull over twenty-two hundred years old? The OAC analysis of the victor’s star charts left even less doubt. The victor’s debark point had been verified by gauss trails: they’d been from earth somewhere between 29 and 33 A.D. from a place in the ancient Middle East referred to in Late Latin from Aramaic, a word meaning gulgū ltha, or Golgotha.

When I explained to the rest of the crew exactly what this might mean…the strangest thing happened.

The men who’d been raised as Christians quickly became atheists. And the men, like Yung, who’d been raised as atheists converted to the ranks of Christendom.

But me?

I guess I fall somewhere in between.

This all happened on the third day. Seven more have passed since then, and I don’t know how much planar space we’ve folded since then, not with the i-grav engines running full tilt half way into the redline. Someday, yes, the VO will probably regain consciousness. But who knows how long that will take? Months? Years? Decades?

Doesn’t matter.

The star charts that were activated when I cut open the suit—they didn’t just indicate the debarkation point of the victor. Those charts also showed the final destination grid .

We’re taking our passenger back to where he came from, and I want to see what’s waiting for us when we get there.

Look at me…

Heyton sat in the chair with his pants down. A glance across the squalid room revealed his pitiful reflection in the mirror: a ludicrous caricature.

The magazine shook in his hands.

If my dear dead parents could see me now…

It had been the best business day of his life. He’d just flown in from Dallas, having sold the IAP system to the Texas State Police and two dozen county departments. Blocher, his boss, had had a proverbial cow. “Heyton,” he’d said, “I’m promoting you to deputy vice-president and I’m doubling your salary.”