Read Halo: First Strike Online
Authors: Eric S. Nylund
Tags: #Science Fiction - Adventure, #Fiction - Science Fiction, #Video & Electronic, #Action & Adventure, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Imaginary wars and battles, #Space Opera, #Halo (Game), #General, #Space warfare, #Science Fiction - General, #Human-alien encounters, #Games, #Adventure, #Outer space, #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Computer games
man small and red-haired and cocky, felt hat on the back of his head, the woman just a bit dumpy but carefully groomed, her blue cotton dress clean and starched and ironed, hair permed and combed, lipstick and nails red and shining. Gonzales watched as the man bought a carton of Lucky Strikes and a box of pouches of Beech-Nut Chewing Tobacco. The man said something to the young woman behind the counter that brought a giggle, and Gonzales, though he leaned forward, could not hear what was being said He followed the two by a lacquered plywood magazine stand, where a skinny girl or eight or nine in a faded pink gingham dress lay sprawled across copies of Life and Look, reading a comic. She looked up at him and said, "Tubby and Lulu are lost in the magic forest " Gonzales started to say something reassuring but froze as the girl smiled, showing her teeth, every one of them sharp-pointed, and she dropped her comic book and began crawling toward him across the wooden floor, her eyes fixed on him with a feral longing And he noticed for the first time that he was not he but she, and he looked down at his body and saw he wore a simple white blouse, and in the cleft of his breasts he could see the tattooed image of a twining green stem "Jesus Christ," Gonzales said, sitting up in his bed and wondering what the hell all that had about. In the dream he had been Lizzie: that seemed plain, though nothing else did. He lay back down with foreboding but went to sleep some time later, and if he dreamed, he never knew it. 10. Tell Me When You've Had Enough Lizzie sat at a white-enameled table, holding an apple that she cut into with a long, shining knife. It sliced away dark skin without apparent effort. She heard noises from the room beyond and looked up to see Diana and Gonzales come in. "Hello," she said, as she put down the knife. She held out half the apple for them to look at. "A beautiful apple, isn't it? Seeds from the Yakima Valley, not far from Mount Saint Helens." She bit into a slice she held in her other hand. She got up from the table and said, "The apple grew here, in our soil. Many fruits and vegetables thrive up here, animals, too. We give them lovely care, bring them pure water and rich soil, give them sunlight and air rich in carbon dioxide, tend them constantly. You'd think all would thrive, but of course they don't. Some wither and die, others remain sickly." She stopped in front of Diana and looked intently at her. Diana said, "Living things are complex, and often very delicate, even when they seem to be strong." Lizzie said, "That is true, but Aleph understands what life needs to grow and prosper in this world." She gestured with a slice of apple, and Diana took it. "Its apples," Lizzie continued. "Its people." Diana bit into the apple. She said, "It's very good." Lizzie laid a hand on Gonzales's shoulder and squeezed it, to ay hello. She said to Diana, "You have an appointment with the doctor. We'd better be goingthrough here, this way." She led the two down a hall, through a doorway, and into a large room. Over her shoulder, she said, "First you can meet some of the collective." # Lizzie watched as Gonzales and the woman stood talking to the twins, obviously fascinated by them. No news there: most everyone was. Slight and brown-skinned, black-haired, with solemn oval faces and still brown eyes, they appeared to be in early adolescence. In fact, they were a few years older than that. Their faces had the still solemnity of masks. No matter how close you stood to them, they lived some vast distance away. The Interface Collective gave them a home, them and all the others. StumDog, the Deader, Tug, Paint, Tout des Touts, Devol, Violet, Laughing Nose some Earth-normals, others unpredictably, ambiguously gifted. Some had heightened perceptions and an expressive intensity that came forth in language and music. And there were holomnesiacs, possessors and victims of involuntary total recall, able to recreate in words and pictures the most exact remembrances, les temps retrouv indeedthey experienced the present only as the clumsy prelude to memory and were almost incapable of action. And mathemaniacs, who spoke little except in number, chatted in primes and roots and natural logarithms, could be reduced to helpless giggling by unexpected recitations of simple recursionsFibonacci numbers and the like. Apros, who had lost proprioception, their internal awareness of their bodies, and so perceived space and objects, matter and motion, as solids and forms floating in an intangible ether; they moved through the world with an eerie, passionless grace that shattered only when they miscalculated their passage and came rudely against the world's physical factsthey could hurt themselves quite badly with a moment's miscalculation. People wondered how the IC held together and did its work. Lizzie knew the answer: Aleph. It stretched nets over the entire world below, seeking special talents or the capabilities for previously unknown sensory or cognitive modalities varieties of being or becoming that she had grown used to thinking of collectively as the Aleph condition. Having recruited them, it appealed to what made them strange, and in the process usually tapped into the core of what made them happy or, in many cases, wretchedly unhappy, and gave them outlets for their condition, and thus for their uniqueness. As a result, they were loyal to each other and to Aleph past reason. She also understood their interest in the case of Jerry Chapman. Some saw the possibility of their own immortality, while others simply welcomed the extension of their native domain: the infinitely flexible and ambiguous machine-spaces where human and Aleph met and joined. "Come on," she called to Diana and Gonzales. "Charley will be waiting." # In the center of the room stood a steel table, above it a light globe, nearby an array of racked instruments set into stainless steel cabinets. "The doctors are in," Lizzie said. She pointed to Charley, who stood fidgeting next to the table and the massive Chow, a still presence at the table's foot. At Charley's direction, Diana lay face down on one of the room's tables. Her chin fit into a sunken well at one end. Charley put clamps around her temples, then covered her hair with a fitted cap that fell away at the base of her neck. Charley's fingers gently probed to find what lay beneath the skin, and as his fingers worked, he looked at a real-time hologram above and beyond the table's end. The display showed two cutaway views of Diana's neck and the bottom of her skull: beneath the skin, on either side of the spine, she had two circular plugs; from them small wires led away forward and seemed to disappear into the center of her brain. As the doctor's fingers moved, ghost fingers in the hologram reproduced their course. Charley took a long, needle-sharp probe from the instruments rack next to the table and placed its tip on Diana's neck. As he moved it slowly across the skin, its hologram double followed. The hologram probe's tip glowed yellow, and Charley moved even more slowly. The hologram flashed red, and he stopped. He moved the probe in minute arcs until the hologram showed bright, unblinking red. The instrument rack gave off a quiet hiss. Charley repeated the process several times. Charley said, "She's nerve-blocked now. I'm ready to cut." A laser scalpel came down from the ceiling on the end of a flexible black cord, and a projector superimposed the outlines of two glowing circles on Diana's skin. The hologram showed the same tableau. First came a brief hum as the fine hair on those two circles was swept away, then Charley began cutting. Where the scalpel passed, only a faint red line appeared on her skin. "Any problems, Doctor Heywood?" Chow asked. He stood next to Gonzales, watching. "No," she said. "I've been on both ends of the knife really, I prefer the other." At the foot of the table, Lizzie said, "It can't always be that way," and laughed. Using forceps, Charley dropped two coins of skin into a metal basin, where they began to shrivel. Two socket ends sat exposed on Diana's neck, dense round nests of small chrome spikes, clotted with bits of red flesh. Charley moved a cleaning appliance over the exposed sockets; for just a moment there was the smell of burning meat. "Neural fittings," he said, and two more black cables descended, both ending in cylinders. He carefully plugged one of the fittings into one of Diana's newly-cleaned sockets. "Okay," Charley said. "Let's see what we've got." Diana's eyes went blank as she looked into another world. # Charley, Chow, Lizzie, and Gonzales sat in the large room that served as a communal meeting place for the Interface Collective. Diana lay back in a metal-frame and stuffed canvas sling chair. Lizzie noticed her hand going unconsciously to the bandaged, still-numb circles on the back of her neck. From the full screen at the end of the room, the Aleph-figure watched. Charley sat with his hands in his lap. He said, "We've got a problem: insufficient bandwidth in the socketing, which translates into a very undernourished socket/neuron interface. Primitive junctions you've got there. That means ineffective involvement with complex brain functions, so you get swamped by information flow. It's worrisome." He took the cigarillo out of his mouth and looked at it as if he'd never seen one before. Chow said, "In the early years of this program, we took casualties. Some very ugly situations: serious neural dysfunctions, two suicides, induced insanities of various kinds. Until we finally learned how to pick candidates for full interfacelearned who could survive without damage and who could not. Now, things have got to be rightpsychophysical profile, age, neural map topologies, neural transmitter distributions and |