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There had always been three, of course. Stretch, and Clench, and the half-forgotten microwaved remains of a scrambler killed by an uppity grunt—kept on ice next to its living brethren, within easy reach of Cunningham’s teleops.
“We could engineer ourselves back into nonsentience, perhaps. Might improve our odds in the long run.” She looked at me, a rueful sort of half-smile at the corner of her mouth. “But I guess that wouldn’t be much of a win, would it? What’s the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you’re alive?”
finally saw it. How long would it take an enemy tactician to discern Bates’s mind behind the actions of her troops on the battlefield? How long before the obvious logic became clear?
Szpindel had had it all wrong. Amanda Bates wasn’t a sop to politics, her role didn’t deny the obsolescence of Human oversight at all. Her role depended on it. She was more cannon fodder than I.
“By chance. But every dandelion is a clone. Their seeds are legion.” Another smile, not remotely convincing. “And maybe it takes more than one try for the placental mammals to conquer Australia.”
“I can imagine what it’s like,” he said quietly. “Please don’t make me do it again.” I fell instantly silent. “I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms.” There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. “But I do only what you force me to. You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can’t reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can’t be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you
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“Yes, if your purpose is only to transmit. Now you have to convince. You have to believe.”
“Can’t afford to let the truth trickle through. Can’t give you the chance to shore up your rationales and your defenses. They must fall completely. You must be inundated. Shattered. Genocide’s impossible to deny when you’re buried up to your neck in dismembered bodies.” “You played me,” I whispered. “All this time.” I’d known something was going on. I just hadn’t understood what. “I’d have seen right through it,” I told him, “if you hadn’t made me get involved.” “You might even read it off me directly.”
“Amanda is not planning a mutiny.” “What? You know about—” “She doesn’t even want to. Ask her if you like.”
He nodded as if I had. “Synthesists can’t have opinions of their own. So when you feel one, it must be someone else’s. The crew holds you in contempt. Amanda wants me relieved of command. Half of us is you. I think the word is project. Although,”—he cocked his head a bit to one side—“lately you improve. Come.”
“Shuttle bay. Time to do your job.” “My—” “Survive and bear witness.” “A drone—”
Bates. Her mutiny was underway. No, their mutiny—Bates and the Gang. I’d known. I’d imagined it. I’d seen it coming.
passageway, passing in and out of shadow.
“Who do you think shut it down, Keeton? The fucker went rogue. I could barely even get it to self-destruct.” Her eyes went briefly deep-focus; all down the spine the surviving drones launched into some intricate martial ballet, half-seen in the shifting cone of her headlamp.
“She said she was trying to escape—” I remembered. “She fucked up.” “Not by that much. She couldn’t have.” We were all rated for manual piloting. Just in case. “Not the Gang,” Bates said.
I’d seen scramblers. Hundreds of them, sailing naked through the void, their arms spread wide. Some of their arms, anyway. “They were carrying—” Bates nodded. “Weapons.” Her eyes flickered to some unseen distanced for a moment. “First wave headed for the front end. Blister and forward lock, I think. Second wave’s aft.” She shook her head. “Huh. I would have done it the other way around.” “How far?”
Sarasti. His dead eyes stared from a skull split like a spiked melon. Globules of coagulating blood clung to his hair and skin like engorged ticks. “Go with him,” Bates said. Sarasti grunted and clicked. There were no words. “What—” I began. “Now. That’s an order.” Bates turned back to the hatch. “We’ll cover you.” The shuttle. “You too.”
“Why did you kill him?” I said. A whole new alarm started up, way back in the drum. A sudden breeze tugged me backward for a moment, dissipated in the next second with a distant clang. The corpse held out the handpad, configured for keys and a text display: SEIZNG CLDNT CNTRL.
“Was it ever him?” I asked. GO. “Tell me. Did he ever speak for himself? Did he decide anything on his own? Were we ever following his orders, or was it just you all along?”
DISLKE ORDRS FRM MCHNES. HAPPIER THS WAY.
think he’s warning me to stay away.
Oh God, how I treasure it. I treasure every word.
weeks later, Stretch and Clench use that body in the course of their escape.
Electricity and magnetism stir random neurons in Susan’s head; farther down the timeline a whole new persona erupts to take control, to send Theseus diving into Rorschach’s waiting arms. Blind stupid random chance. Maybe that’s all it was.
He saved my life. He—Humanized me. I’ll always owe him for that, for however long I live; and for however long I live I’ll never stop hating him for the same reason.
were. They must have been sentient to some degree, but that semi-aware dreamstate would have been a rudimentary thing next to our own self-obsession. They were weeding it out. It was just a phase. They were on their way.
thing is, Humans can look at crosses without going into convulsions. That’s evolution for you; one stupid linked mutation and the whole natural order falls apart,
think I know what’s happening back on Earth, and though some might call it genocide it isn’t really. We did it to ourselves. You can’t blame predators for being predators. We were the ones who brought them back, after all. Why wouldn’t they reclaim the...
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I’m Human again. Maybe the last Human. By the time I get home, I could be the only sentient being in the universe.
Yumiko Oasa has reported finding infrared emitters47,48—
