Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 21
March 31, 2021
Petrolea 4d
Feroza decided it was time to let the argument go.
Not so Victor, it seemed. “I still don’t understand why you have to be down there. We should stay here and let the Dragon hunt for us.”
Feroza watched the Dragon settle onto her landing gear. A healthy mechanoid would have immediately re-formed the factors of her body into their non-flying conformation. This exhausted creature simply slumped to the ground, factors sloughing from her superstructures like shed feathers.
“I am not sure you understand the extent of the…” suffering, Feroza thought, “…stress we have caused the mother Dragon. We have added ourselves to her responsibilities and removed her mate, who might otherwise have helped her hunt. If we do not do something to redress the balance, she might simply give up on this nest and fly away to mate again.”
“So you have to give her enough food to convince her to stay here,” but the confidence in Toledo’s voice didn’t last. “Um. Can you?”
“Yes.” Feroza said with rather more confidence than she felt. She’d collected her share of specimens and could have bagged any number of small mechanoids for Toledo to feed to his blasphemous life support engine. She was less certain she could fuel the metabolism of an adult Dragon as well.
“It’s only that this…what we’re doing here is very important,” said Toledo. “For our survival. Since we’re stranded in the wilderness.”
Stranded in someone else’s home, he meant. Toledo just took what he wanted and demanded more.
“Okay,” his voice intruded. “How about this? You ride that thing back up here, we’ll process one of the juveniles into feedstock for her–“
“You want to force the mother Dragon to eat one of her Dragonlets?”
“Well, why not? They’re both machines. If our shuttle broke, wouldn’t we cannibalize the harvester for parts?”
Cannibalize? Feroza felt ill. “She is not flying anywhere.”
That was a statement of fact. The mother Dragon sprawled across the uneven ground, wings shuddering, dead factors dropping off her body. Feroza’s first priority must be to feed the poor creature.
Of course Toledo had different priorities. “Okay. How about this?” he said again. “I don’t have many slave factors left, but if I use the ones I have to make one of the juveniles fly down to you–“
“No!”
“The big Dragon doesn’t have to eat it.” Victor cleared his throat. “You can place those slave factors on the adult.”
“Never!”
“But I am offering to give you my last slave factors,” he said.
“No,” Feroza said again. “No more slavery.”
“You just said,” grated Toledo, “that it might just fly off and strand me at the top of a damn mountain with no way down. Plus, you’re lost in the jungle with no way back up.”
March 30, 2021
Petrolea 4c
Once a water- and methane-spewing cryovolcano, the Factory Berg had been covered over and converted by Petrolean life into an energy plant. The vast colonial organism of cooperating factors used the volcano to distill petrochemical fuel and oxygen to burn it, consolidating the energy that ultimately powered the entire local ecosystem.
Landing here on the forested slopes would not be easy, but the mother Dragon Feroza rode might not have the strength to make it all the way down to the plains. Now it was just a matter of letting go.
Feroza weighed only 13% of what she would have on Earth, but her long-haul environment suit more than quadrupled her mass. She had a great deal of inertia, and could only very slightly control her descent. A fall that would have been instant death on her home world became a long, panicked dance of shoving hands and spinning, kicking legs.
Finally, Feroza stood on the steep incline of the lower Berg, leaning against the strut of a Whirligig Tree and trying not to vomit. No plumes of carbon dioxide snow rose from her suit; it was intact. She would live long enough to hunt down some food for the mother Dragon and thus more effectively enslave her.
Toledo must finally have realized that he’d upset her. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry I killed the Dragon, all right? But that funnel and valve idea you had–“
“If not that, then something else,” she said. “We could have found some other solution.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced. “But what’s wrong with this solution?”
Feroza decided to assume that this man honestly didn’t understand her, and tried to explain. “You are perpetuating a cycle of death, Mr. Toledo. You killed the Dragon, which forces me to go down the Berg to kill more creatures, all so we can stay alive long enough to kill yet more.”
“It’s either that or die, Dr. Merchant.”
March 29, 2021
Petrolea 4b
Toledo was still talking. “…but I’ll need more oxygen to burn in its fabricators. And hydrocarbon feedstock.”
Feroza looked down at her steed. The mother Dragon had spread her wings as far as she could, her engines shut off in her exhausted glide. This was her fourth trip down from her aerie in the past hour.
“You mean blood,” Feroza said. “We will need the blood of Petrolean animals. More death, so we can live. So he could die.”
“He?”
“The Dragon!” Feroza wanted to scream with frustration. How could Toledo be so damn dense? “You killed the father Dragon.”
“So what? You favor your own first, then others. Humans are more important than animals.”
“Humans are just one species of animal. And there are eight billion of us. How many Dragons are there?”
Toledo scoffed. “Because there are more people than Dragons, that makes a person’s life less valuable? We’re not selling people and Dragons on the international exchange, here. The only reason to keep Dragons around is because we like having them around.”
“Why? What gives you the right to decide whether another creature dies?”
“I can figure out how to kill them,” said Victor, “that’s what.”
“So intelligence is the sine qua non for personhood?” said Feroza. “Are you prepared to offer yourself up for slavery under the next genius you happen to meet?”
“It depends, mi señora,” he said, voice suddenly dark and smoky. “What are your…orders?”
Feroza stopped with her mouth open, the Dragon rumbling under her. She thought they’d been arguing. Had Toledo thought they were flirting? Surely not. “I’m not talking about me,” she said. “If your dividing line is the species, what happens when we meet an alien civilization? How would you like it if a super-technological space-man reprogrammed your body to churn out food for him?”
“If the alien was as much smarter than me as I am smarter than a Dragon? I think my feelings don’t matter so much, eh?”
What a bleak moral philosophy. The law of the jungle applied to human interactions. But wasn’t that how most humans still governed themselves? Or failed to.
The Dragon was already searching for a place to land. “I’m done arguing,” said Feroza, watching ground slope up to meet them.
March 28, 2021
Petrolea 4a
Chapter 4
The Dragons had carved their aerie into the chimney of a Factory Berg. Already, the window was lost in the ammonia clouds. As Feroza and the mother Dragon glided down the slope of the Berg, the tapering walls above were almost as vertiginous as its foundations below.
“I’m sorry,” Feroza told the Dragon.
The bus-sized mechanoid made no response, but Feroza could feel the vibration in her chassis, see the factors of her flesh growing more sluggish in their reactions. I am tired, she seemed to say, when can I rest?
“Oh, it’s nothing,” said Toledo’s voice in her earphones. “I am confident we can get oxygen indefinitely.”
Feroza decided not to tell the engineer she hadn’t been apologizing to him, but to the innocent animal whose mate they had slaughtered and whose children they now held hostage while they used her to collect food and fuel.
Feroza wasn’t happy to be in charge of that project, riding the Dragon down the mountain like the hallucination of some mercury-poisoned equestrian. At least she wasn’t forced to stay in the hangar with Toledo and his macabre “still.”
“This machine is great!” Toledo was back up at the top of Berg in the Dragons’ hangar, chattering happily as he rendered their living-space habitable. “It’s already cracked enough oxygen for both of us, and I’m confident about water and even digestible food.”
Toledo called it “wilderness survival.” A program cooked up by some bloated, greedy business-vampire in Dubai or London: hack the native life into life-support modules in the field. As if we weren’t disturbing the ecosystem enough already with a single base at Xanadu, let’s make it possible to grow a hundred bases overnight!
March 27, 2021
Petrolea 3d
The Dragon reared back.
“Bhaag ja!” Dr. Merchant shouted. Or something like that. “Hoosh!”
“Good,” Victor said. “If you can make it go–“
“Drive a mother away from her offspring? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Offspring?” said Victor.
Three giant metal slugs tumbled away from Dr. Merchant. She followed them, yelling and waving her arms at the Dragon – the mother? – which stretched its neck toward her. But it couldn’t flame her without harming its young, and it couldn’t reach her before the first Dragonlet crawled over the edge of the window and dropped out of the hangar.
“Yes,” she said. “Good. Now, you, help me!” The biologist ducked and skidded toward the other baby Dragons, heading one off as it humped toward the safety of its mother’s side.
Victor shuffled after the other as fast as he dared. The mother Dragon looked up at him and Dr. Merchant took the opportunity to grab her baby and heave it over the edge.
The Dragon turned back to blast her and Victor kicked the last baby, which rolled up like a giant pill bug and plopped out the window.
The mother Dragon screamed across the AM band. It scooted sideways, head dipping, wings rotating back into flight position.
“Go away.” Merchant lowered her arms. “Bhaag ja.”
The adult was much more graceful than the young had been: an elephant seal rather than a giant maggot. Its long, sleek body twisted in the air, coiling around a parachute/jellyfish shape Victor realized must be one of the Dragonlets in flight mode. When mother and child touched, factors moved and the parachute condensed into a little lump on the Dragon’s fuselage. The nosecone moved, questing for the other Dragonlets. The wings flexed and tilted.
“Once she brings the Dragonlets back,” said Dr. Merchant, “she will kill us for what we did to her family.”
Victor turned back to the corpse of the first Dragon, which was already chugging away at fabricating its first human-compatible oxygen canister. Water and food would come next, rendered out of the petroleum these monsters used for blood.
“Well,” he said, “at least we’ll be alive for her to kill us.”
March 26, 2021
Petrolea 3c
Victor should have predicted what happened next. It wouldn’t have changed his decision to – what was Merchant screaming at him? – “Murder an innocent creature,” but they needed pressurized oxygen and the Dragon’s internal organs were designed to pressurize oxygen. Now they had access to those organs. If Victor had warned Merchant, she might have tried to stop him. Then again, she might have done something about the other Dragon.
The mechanoid reared over Merchant’s head and brought itself down between the biologist and Victor, wings splayed, engines growling, face plates pulling back to expose the nozzle of its flame thrower.
Victor dove away from the stream of fire the beast belched at him.
You had to really work at it to dive in Titan’s 0.15 gees. Victor had a good couple of seconds hanging helpless in the air while he contemplated all the choices he might have made.
At least the stupid animal tracked him with its fire. The body of the first Dragon didn’t catch. The precious oxygen in its compressors did not explode and kill them all.
Finally, the floor! Victor found himself sliding across it.
Thank God he hadn’t jumped the other way, or he’d have flown out the window and into the cold, empty air. Thank God he didn’t need to be touching the ground to work his handshake gauntlet.
He wiggled his fingers and factors detached themselves from the body of the dead Dragon and scuttled across the floor toward its enraged mate.
“No.”
For a second, Victor couldn’t figure out the telemetry. Then he got it. Merchant had stepped on one of the factors. Just put her foot on the irreplaceable tool and smudged it from existence.
“¡Miércoles! Do not…do that!” It wasn’t easy to land, control his factors and speak English all at the same time. “If that thing raises the temperature in here, the oxygen will explode. Right? So control the Dragon.”
“Control her? You killed her mate.” Merchant was shaking so hard, he could see the tremors through her environment suit. But she slid to the side, much more practiced at moving on Titan than was Victor, and rolled to her feet. Now, standing between the Dragon and the wall of the cave, the biologist spread her arms and legs and broadcast white noise from her suit’s transmitters at maximum volume.
March 25, 2021
Petrolea 3b
Victor blinked and rolled his eyes to select a command from the menu in his eye-tracking interface. His factors relaxed, and he tumbled to the floor. He tried to flip over and got a shove on his back for his trouble.
“Stay down.” Merchant had stopped propitiating the Dragon and thrown herself over his back. “Try to look serpentine.”
“What?”
“Like a snake, man. Like a Dragonlet.”
Victor tried to squirm.
“Good, good,” said Merchant, although whether to him or the Dragon, Victor didn’t know. “Now you listen here, you utter fool.” That was definitely to him. “Do you realize how close you came to being eaten by the father Dragon? You are quite unequipped to survive out here. So respect my orders without question, and do nothing without my permission.”
Said the woman who’d been trying to milk oxygen from a Dragon. Said the woman who’d nearly gotten him killed. Who had almost certainly gotten all those people killed in the jungle. This sneering, privileged academic princess deserved to suffocate here and be eaten by her adopted robo-parents.
Victor would do the right thing and save her, but he certainly wasn’t going to let her ego interfere with his efforts to save both their lives. Silently, he activated his handshake gauntlet.
His factors were still inside the body of the Dragon. Now they tapped into its behavioral processor. He froze the mechanioid in place. In order to infiltrate the somatic processors, Victor had to command his factors to physically relocate, then set up a network to synchronize their execution. It was a tricky bit of work, but at least he didn’t have to write the program for them to execute. This was something he’d been playing with at the base, though on smaller animals. The executable’s name was “smellsBadontheOutside.”
“What are you doing?” asked Merchant. “What do you propose to in order to get the oxygen we need?”
“This,” said Victor, and executed the program.
The Dragon’s body burst open. The head struck the ground and bounced, throwing the beams from its dying headlights across rib-like structural supports and glistening fabricators, now open to the air. Steam puffed from the inner recesses of what had once been the animal’s body, and was now Victor’s life-support module.
March 24, 2021
Petrolea 3a
Chapter 3
“You’re doing it wrong,” said Victor.
Dr. Merchant’s head turned inside her fishbowl helmet, little more than a dark smudge under the slick of oil and boiling oxygen. “Ah,” she said. “You’re awake.”
She lifted her dripping hands toward the maw of the Dragon, as if Victor might have missed it. “You see I am using the Dragon’s maternal instincts to win for us a fresh supply of oxygen.”
What Victor saw was Dr. Merchant kneeling before a Dragon, holding up an oxygen canister while the mechanoid dribbled liquid oxygen into it. No, onto it. Most of the oxygen boiled away in the -160 air, but a few drops actually managed to bubble into nothing on the rusty floor.
Victor blinked at her for a few moments, first trying to figure out what she thought she was doing, then waiting for her to see the obvious flaws in her plan.
“You know you’ll never fill the canister that way,” he said.
Dr. Merchant didn’t put down the useless canister. “So help me. Can you program the factors in your gauntlet to make a funnel and valve?”
Victor tried to imagine a device that would mate a standard oxygen canister with the flamethrower nozzle of a Dragon. “It’s impossible.”
“Do not tell me what is impossible,” she snapped. “Help me, man, if you want to survive.”
Victor bit back the first response that came to his mind and tried to focus on the problem of respiration. “We need a compressor or refrigerator to condense the oxygen back into liquid for storage.”
“Unnecessary,” she said. “The Dragons compress and refrigerate oxygen inside their bodies. Now, if it were possible to train the Dragons to hold still long enough…”
If his hands had been free, Victor would have waved away the biologist’s speculation. Instead he just lay there, welded to the other Dragon, and said, “I have a better idea.”
Dr. Merchant was a biologist. Her specialty was the whole, but Victor’s specialty was the parts, and he knew what parts he needed.
March 23, 2021
Petrolea 2d
Feroza waited as long as she dared before rebroadcasting the signal. Wide beam, this time.
The Dragon under her shifted and the other – the mother – came to investigate. Headlights focused. Antennae rose in what Feroza could only interpret as a quizzical gesture: What could such a strange creature be doing glued to my mate?
Feroza broadcast the infant distress signal again.
A metallic probe bumped against her chest plate, hard enough to set off more warning claxons. Then, there was vibration along Feroza’s sides as the two Dragons dragged their snouts around her.
A deeper vibration. A shiver and burst of heat she could feel even through her suit. The tiny robots clamped to her suit released all at once. Toledo wasn’t the only one who could communicate with and control factors!
Feroza fell of the father Dragon and sprawled to the floor of the hangar. Behind her, the animal rose, the edges of the hole in his skin zipping smoothly back together. He lowered his head and unhinged his mouthparts to gape a threat at the tiny human who had invaded his domain.
Feroza pulled her legs and arms under her, making herself small, willing the Dragons to forget about her. They were just animals, after all, with no instincts regarding organisms like her. Her human outline should make no impact on their awareness.
The father closed his mouth and looked down at his body, across at the mother. Feroza could almost see the question passing between the two animals: What could this thing be?
The father’s head drew closer. Factors decoupled under the lenses of his eyes. Sheets of metal pulled back to expose the clamps, spikes, and torches of his feeding apparatus. Perhaps it will taste good.
The mother slithered between Feroza and the sleeping young. Or perhaps it is a threat.
The blunt tube of her flamethrower clicked into position. Liquid dribbled onto the rusted floor of the hangar-nest, where it boiled into vapor.
Oxygen.
The warning flickered in Feroza’s visor: low oxygen.
Feroza triggered the distress signal again and held her hands up before the mouth of the serpent.
Next
March 22, 2021
Petrolea 2c
Feroza considered the nature of her hosts. Dragons were the apex predators of this latitude, flighted because nearly all pursuit predators flew in the high-density atmosphere of low-gravity Titan. Their ecological niche was something like tigers or great white sharks. Not much social behavior, but like the smaller Punishers, Dragons were viviparous. Their young were not constructed in factory-hives, but by fabricators tucked inside the body cavity. Surely that implied parental investment in young. And even tigers didn’t live together as mated pairs. Assuming a mated pair with children was what she was seeing here.
Ting ting ting ting the oxygen warning drove upholstery tacks into her thoughts.
Warnings. Distress signals. Ha.
With her gloves trapped in the skin of the Dragon, Feroza could only interface with her suit by means of eye movement tracking, a slow and frustrating process made no easier by the damn alarm. Like the angel of death tapping her skull with his bony index finger…there. She was ready.
Now, in which direction to direct her cry? Would a mother or father Dragon tend to a complaining juvenile, or rip it apart? Feroza needed an example of what gentler instincts she could expect from these giant predators, and that meant child-rearing.
She aimed her transmitter away from the adults and focused instead on the nearest sleeping juvenile. She flicked the device on at its narrowest beam and highest setting.
It was the equivalent of clapping her hands in front of the face of an infant. The Dragonlet’s headlights flared on. It thrashed and reared up, crying its own radio distress signal.
Feroza double-checked that her receivers were recording as the Dragonlet woke up one of its parents. Fortunately, not the one to which Feroza was currently glued.
The other parent mechanoid slid from the shadows like an enormous serpent, wings, engines, and landing gear tucked up on its back, sensors extended on a flexible neck-like tube of helically linked factors.
The parent Dragon – what Feroza decided to call the “mother” – bumped “her” iron snout against the distressed baby. She nuzzled it, feeling down its flanks for damage. Finding none, she began to turn away, but Feroza activated her transmitter.
The mother Dragon stiffed. Feroza could almost imagine the sigh of resignation as she turned back to her Dragonlet. Her mouthparts pulled back.
A black stream of nourishing gasoline flowed into the baby’s gaping maw. A pause and a muffled clank as machinery re-aligned within the mother’s head, and the baby got a sip of the precious liquid oxygen needed to burn that petroleum.
The baby stopped crying and curled up. Carbon dioxide frost steamed off its belly as it began to distil its meal.
