Attanasio, AA - Solis

"Jumper Nili, I will use the codes to countermand your portal control."

Mei tugs a small pliers from her tool kit and inserts it into the switch box with a deft twist. "I've cut the code link to the portal. You can't stop it now. It will open in ten seconds. Our lives are in your hands, Munk."

"Don't do it, Jumper Nili."

Mei sets the timer and retreats down the aisle of controller panels. She removes her jetpak and sets it beside her on the floor. "Get us out of here, Munk."

"Help us!" Charles calls.

In The Laughing Life, Munk pulls away from the command console abruptly, as though it has become white-hot. He stands erect, suspended by his conflict in a bitter, utter stillness. Ten seconds for a silicon mind is ten eternities in which to dwell on the permutations of the future. Munk locks into a frozen logic loop: If he does nothing, Mei and the archaic human will be lost

ever-yet if he detonates the explosives, he will have defied his primary programming, and he will-forever after-endure the claims of insanity, of loss of guided control, of uncertainty in his own behavior.

There are no feelings to guide him. If he trusts his C-P programming, he will detonate the explosives and destroy not only Phoboi Twelve and Aparecida but also his identity as an androne. If he does not act, there will be no grief, no remorse, no sadness at the loss of an archaic human. He will go on, a rogue androne, salvaging errant mining equipment to earn the credits necessary to replenish his power cells. Eventually, he will meet other jumpers, add their interviews to his developing anthropic model, and so continue to fulfill the inner directive of his creators.

In the tenth second, Munk decides to leave his primary programming intact. The uncertainty of existing without it is the most puissant emotion he has ever experienced, and he crouches over the command console and turns The Laughing

Life away from Phoboi Twelve.

Over the comlink he hears the shouts of Jumper Nili and Charles Outis as the portal opens and Aparecida comes for them. The wildness of their anguished yells pierces deep into his C-P program. He adds that to his anthropic model. And then he hears the gusty roar of the jetpak. Jumper Nili has launched it ahead of her. He can tell, for it Doppler's away from her shimmering cries, thuds loudly, and

whines to a stop. She has struck Aparecida with it, driven the androne back a few paces, and purchased herself two, maybe three extra seconds.

Such resistance is absurd, he thinks, and realizes, of course, such absurdity is the very source of being human-to live and strive simply to live and strive, even for a few extra seconds, to go on living and to make the laws according to which one lives, to program oneself which, to the androne, is madness and yet something more, a willful desire to set one's own limits in a universe where there is no real edge to anything, where the interpenetration of cosmic energies and molecular flow and accidents creates an eternal flux despite all

programming, all structures, all the crystallizations of the silicon mind, even those seemingly impenetrable sanctuaries of purpose, identity, and safety created by the Maat.

And all at once, Munk's plight ends. Though he still does not understand, he comprehends why the Maat put a human heart inside his androne bulk. They never intended him to be human, only to be as free as a human-as free and as absurd. Without hesitation, he generates the firing codes for the bore-drill explosives and sends the detonating signal.

Mei Nili is hunched among the controller plates, gawking in horror with Charles as Aparecida casts aside the crumpled shape of the jetpak and springs toward them. Her prodigious head slung forward in a gaze of flame-cored mineral intensity, tentacles slithering ahead of her steely, clacking claws, she is death itself.

A searing flare of white fire bleaches the androne to a skeletal silhouette and consumes her in a wincing radiance blind as any darkness, and she vanishes like a tattered shadow into the wraith world of all nightmares.

The portal reflexively squeezes shut under the blast. The brunt of the shockwave tosses Mei against the far wall with a sickening thud, and she slumps lifelessly, a cast-adrift body in the reduced gravity.

"Mei Nili!" Charles bawls, and then, "Munk! Munk, are you there? Mei Nili's hurt! Hurry!"

Munk receives the distress signal from nearby, where he has watched the silent holocaust billow into fiery tatters. He steers The Laughing Life into the infrared haze to recover the scorched command pod. Resorting at once to his primary programming, he ignores the emotional valence in Charles's message and calmly guides. the cruiser through the debris of the explosion. The heavily damaged Wolf Star has swiftly retreated, dwindling to a bright star in the galactic haze, leaving behind pewter shards of fused blackglass, twisted

finjets, mangled hull plates, and melted shapes of plasteel among the rapidly cooling dust cloud that is all that remains of Phoboi Twelve.

The command pod itself has separated into several heat-tarnished spheres whirling doomful and mute as absolute rock among the cosmic dust. Munk gently docks The Laughing Life against the sphere emitting Charles's signal. The controller plates recognize the company vessel, and the pod mates its portal to the cruiser's pressure hatch and accepts Munk with an inrush of heated air.

Charles, unprepared for the sight of the bulky humanoid with the chrome hood and featureless faceplate, utters a weak groan. "Munk?"

"Yes," the androne replies, hurrying to Mei's body.

"Have no fear. The danger for you is over, Mr. Charlie."

Munk checks the oxygen content and pressure of the air mix in the pod as well as the temperature to be certain that they are adequate to sustain human life, and assured of that, he unzips Mei's statskin cowl. His thick hand hovers a centimeter above her face, not only attempting to measure her rate of

respiration but also at venture, daring for the first time to touch human flesh.

His sensors can detect no gas exchange at all. His first contact is to the side of her neck, trepidatiously feeling for her carotid pulse. None. "She is dead."

"No!" Charles cries. "She's not dead. Not yet. It's only been a few minutes. You've got to start her breathing. Do you understand?"

"How?" From his memory-allocation files, Munk filters cardiopulmonary therapies. He retrieves the first-aid-for-humans program that his makers installed in the earliest andrones and that persists in him at a low level of

his operating system as a kind of racial memory.

"Force air into her lungs," Charles calls desperately.

Swiftly, the androne positions her under him on the deck, his fist placed over her nose and mouth, his finger pistoning air into her lungs. A vigorous thoracic massage follows as he pumps her rib cage with his fingertips, feeling her bones stressing to their breaking point. He considers applying a small electric jolt, when her heart thumps back to life and she gasps for breath.

Mei shudders alert, peering up blearily at the crimson lens bar in the black faceplate, and she feels the bright magnetic touch of his living metal against her flesh. Alertness jams into place as he lifts his electric presence from her and she takes in the intersecting crystal plates and mirror-gold concavity of the pod.

And then, quite unexpectedly, she finds herself blinking at the kneeling androne with tears welling in her eyes. It is as if everything she had ever refused to reckon with, the sadness and loneliness, is trying to rise within her involuntarily and all at once, overflowing from her as much in release as in pain. Awareness of the blackness that has relinquished her under the androne's ministrations taps into the very source of her grief.