The Forever Watch (48 page)

“Why are you doing this?”

“Don't read anything into it. I have to keep you functioning until we don't need you anymore. You're a limited-duration investment, and we need as big a return as we can get before you Retire.”

Archie stands behind her, sticking her tongue out.

Right.

The main chamber of the rooms allocated to me is dominated by the oversize XO's terminal in the center. As I sit in the padded throne Hennessy is particularly proud of, I move my point of view through the ship's systems. I look at Karla's reflection in the powered-down screens, I look at her from above, from behind, from the side.

She is older than me. Without her makeup, I can see that she must be in her forties or so, despite the trim, hard figure that can only be the result of many hours of dedicated physical training and good nutrition. It is in the faint lines around her eyes and mouth. It occurs to me that she must have gone through Breeding Duty at least once already. What was it like for her? Did she also feel that hollow sadness that gripped and clutched deep inside? Did she need medication too? How much worse was it for her knowing that her child would be one of
them
?

I reach out with my thoughts and log in to the terminal. As the cooling fans hum to life and the screens flash and flicker, I am distracted, wondering about her. What was the color of her skin before it was bleached by the appearance and growth of her powers? What were her eyes like?

Lyn and the gofers have gotten the Bridge terminals all hooked up, interfaced with Archie and humming. There are proper kitchens now, a long, broad hall that serves as the barracks for most of the Bridge staff, a mess hall, a great big industrial laundry, a library, a gym, garages for the vehicles. Hennessy has finished construction of the vertical farm, but it will still be months before all the crops are planted and the livestock is delivered and we become self-sufficient.

My major duties shift to something I can do better than anyone else: working with Archie. What will help bring an end to all this is surveillance, intelligence.

So while my friends deal with their subordinates and all the work it takes to repair the damage in the Habitat and return some normalcy to the ship, I spend my days teaching my AI girl to spy on the Archivists, predict what they will do next, and point out potential targets.

Archie already likes to watch people, now that she has learned more about imaging and how people see. The tougher lesson is how to explain which people and what activities need watching, and the reasons why.

I could type about as fast using my mind's
touch,
but just now, I indulge in the use of my fingers. Who knows how much longer I will have them all? The old-style hardware keys clack and click. Something about the sounds is reassuring.

Behind me, Karla is a silent presence, watching.

“Talk to me, please. It's rather irritating if you're just standing there.”

“You need to concentrate. What you're doing could be a difference of thousands of casualties.”

“I won't be distracted. I'm just curious. Tell me about yourself.”

I do not see her sneering. But I can imagine it. “What do you want to know?”

What do I want to know? Why do I want to know? “Anything, I guess.”

“Hmph. Beethoven. Brahms. Bach. Hendrix.” She rattles off the names of composers and musicians across time, across history. She thinks to me slices of time. Like me, she is a devotee of Thelonius Monk. Herself seated at a piano. Her fingers arched just so. The feeling of ivory under the tips. Days of music.

One moment of rage. Her birthday. The other children around her floating, crying, hysterical. The plates with the food exploding, shattering.

And then, tests. Test after test, administered by men and women in green coats. Audio of her eavesdropping on the discussions between her Keepers and the Behavioralists that kept coming back to evaluate her.

Injections. Pills.

The deep brown of her skin fading as she got paler and paler.

A stolen kiss, some boy, just before she was taken away.

She keeps telling me the story that way, flashes of memories, while she recites dates and times, facts, the names of the people she met. Brutal training. Headaches that reduced her fellow OCS candidates to tears. Days spent paralyzed as the tissues of her brain swelled up, changing. Therapy. Relearning how to stand, to walk. She never regained the ability to play the piano—the reflexes are gone—but she does learn how to paint.

Time reels by while I play my own music in my head. Setting Archie to work I never designed her for. Building up an expanded code of conduct and ethics—I would like for her to understand when
not
to watch people too. This is a true bond. Archie has emerged, developed autonomy and adaptability, true sentience, and what am I doing? Tinkering with the bits and pieces of her personality and memories, Adjusting her to behave as will best benefit the Noah.

Every eight hours, someone makes me stop working. Sometimes it is Lyn. Sometimes it is Hennessy. They feed me, remind me to bathe, medicate me to sleep. Sometimes, there is a message from Barrens; the memory of a kiss, the great big bonfire of everything he feels for me. And then I keep going.

My awareness of the seconds ticking away never goes away. The chills. When I next take off my shoes, I prepare myself for the possibility that my toes might not all be there. Always, Archie is working the nanites, converting organics to inorganic, filling in dead cells with silver circuitry.

The Doctors attending to me are astonished by what's going on with my nanites. I don't let them examine me often, and Karla's primary concern is ending the chaos on the ship, not catering to the whims of Doctors who want to study a strange case of nanite mutation in someone who's dying anyway.

Out there, Barrens is hunting down his old friends. He is now an ISec weapon, just as Miyaki was when she was sent to assassinate him. It must be killing him, inside.

As though summoned by my thoughts, he returns, stomping in through the corridors. I think of him all the time, and it took him a week to make it here. He strides in by the guards and checkpoints, muttering and cursing as he strips off his bloody coat and gloves.

I am tempted to lock the last set of doors between us. He has not seen what's happened to me yet. He doesn't know. It suits Karla to make sure he doesn't know, until he finally sees me.

This is that moment.

It would be easy to hide. Open a hole in the wall, step through, and close it behind me.

He stops when he sees me. Says nothing for a long time. His breaths are puffs of mist; Hennessy has programmed the environmental controls to drop the air temperature wherever I am. The Doctors tell us that it will slow down the progression.

“Uh. We'll just … let you two talk. Yes.” Hennessy rises from his station in the corner, almost physically drags Lyn out of the room.

Archie leaves too.

Seeing through artificial sensors robs me of the sense of looking straight into Barrens's eyes. Only now do I feel cheated by my blindness. Otherwise, the vision from so many angles, with zoom even, is superior.

“Hi. How was your mission? I've been…” Talking gets tiring. I am too nervous not to. It spills out of me, mundane chatter about the work I am doing with Lyn, the food Hennessy has been plying me with, the little touches I have been decorating into the furniture of my quarters to remind me of home. “Karla's been cooking for me too, sometimes. You should try her primavera.”

Barrens glides close. He pulls off the shades. His trembling fingers trace the silver lines up my cheeks. His touch stops short of the bandages wrapping around my head and over my eyes. I press harder into his touch. Medics have coded routines into my Implant that reduce the pain and the cold, fooling my nervous system. I override them now, so that I can feel the chill in the air, and the warmth of his hands. The dull aches along my spine sharpen and lengthen into needles puncturing all the way through me. It is worth it.

Running out of things to say, and out of breath to say them with, it fades out of me on “I missed you.”

“Me too. It's … it's a different look for you.”

“Yeah.”

He clamps down on the subtle movements of his facial muscles. “Haven't they been feeding you?”

Leon. Leonard. I'm …

We are still and silent. I imagine he is racing through his memories. Beyond the distracting flash of all the new metal on me, something is familiar in the slow way I am moving, in the hollowness of my cheeks. When he glances down at my hands, the pads on the fingertips that have not been chromed are bruised from the pressure of my typing. Under the nails that remain, the skin is red and purple.

It happened so much faster with Meena, but if he plays it back at a fraction of the perceptual speed, or checks the documentation from the ISec data package, there is only this.

Please. I want to waste as little time as we have left with tears.
Read
me, you big oaf. You don't have the talent, but you know me.

Barrens swallows. He pulls me out of the chair and embraces me, softly, softly. His voice rumbles in his chest, vibrates into me. “Let's get something to eat, okay? I want my turn, cooking for you.”

He tries a smile. It fits how I feel. Just this side of brittle.

“Okay.” Kissing him feels as if it will bruise my lips too. I suppose one good thing about all the nanite encrustation on me is that it conceals the bruises.

As we walk, side by side, he seems afraid to hold me, and I will not have it. I grab his great big rocky fist and squeeze hard.
Don't change the way you touch me. Not yet.

He does his best. He has little of Karla's refined skill or Hennessy's intuition and creative use of ingredients, but simple, hearty, tasty food, he can handle.

For a while, I try to help with preparing ingredients and things in the small kitchen for the officers, but my fingers, my wrists—my whole body is stiff and ungainly with all the nanofiber running through it. The joints ache after a few minutes, and then I give in and use my talent instead. Celery and carrots and onions hover in the air over the pot and split themselves before jumping in. Salt and pepper shakers float and dispense a dash here and a pinch there. Mason jars open, bay leaves and thyme dance by.

“You're supposed to be letting me take care of you,” Barrens grumbles as he sears a cut of synthetic meat in a pan.

And you will. “I want to do this with you, while I can.”

The stew is good. We eat as much as we can stand. We sleep. And in the middle of the “night,” we open our eyes and look at each other. Hunger is tempered by tenderness as we move, slowly, together. I dial down my anesthetic routines all the way, and if my nerves are afire with pain signals informing my brain of the slow deaths of my organs, there is still this pleasure, the stretching of tissues, the swell and pressure and friction of being alive, and the touch of our emotions. It is better than programs and drugs, and for a while I can forget and hold on to that ephemeral bliss. It is a snow fort built against sorrow: an instant of denying death.

 

 

He leaves in the morning, with a kiss, and a muttered curse. “More orders. She … says she will try to give me a little more time with you.” His hands flex and clench, and the openness of his eyes shutters itself behind a lost resolve. “I'll … I'll see you.”

“I'll be waiting.”

Karla has new assignments for me too. She unloads all of the lesser work I was doing onto Lyn and Hennessy, who are getting accustomed to working with Archie. My AI girl is still an “it” to them, sometimes alarming and strange in her responses. They are slower than I am with her, but they still get it done.

Once Archie seems reliable enough to Karla, based on the quality of the reports Archie produces on potential Archivist activity in the Habitat and on the movements of the armed masses in the unmapped zones, my abilities are tasked to ending the conflict.

I am not to participate directly in the physical battles being fought over the halls and corridors and geography of the ship.

There are other battles, however. There are skirmishes on virtual ground, in the Nth Web, where Archie's swarm subunits are my soldiers, and I, the general, direct them against the Archivists' lesser, copycat AIs; and of course, there is my personal combat, within. Those battles are not battles at all—a cloned process of Archie's can step on the carefully crafted machine learning viruses like bugs and stamp them out.

Barrens sends me little packets of thought and emotion throughout each day. The way he felt when he saw me again after my Breeding Duty. The disbelief when he first kissed me. The wonder, when he first touched me and I touched him back. Rarely, he sends me a new memory that is happy, on the rare occasions he is able to turn one of the Archivists to us.

As Archie integrates more and more into the underlying, alien software of the Builders, the ship and my body seem to converge. I was already blind. Then, I am deaf, listening through sensors the same way I see. Then the pain starts to get so terrible the required pain-relieving meds and programs make my physical self fade away, as my interactions with the outside world go more and more through the ship instead.

The power Archie directs toward the nanomachines of my Implant compensate as more and more of the cells in my body die at random. Where muscle and bone and membranes and soft tissues fail, the silvery substance fills in the cracks, glues me together, substitutes for failing biological functions. Blood volume stays the same, cells and proteins replaced by catalytic superfluids and janitor robots. The days pass and the flesh diminishes.

And I forget things. At random. While dying brain cells can be replaced by the artificial connections and processors of the nanobots, transferring the memories from wetware to hardware is not perfect in that moment of death. Sometimes, one sense or another in a distant event of old just vanishes. Sometimes, they are confused. Colors might change or sounds or textures or tastes. The first rose I received loses its smell. My first kiss has no face. I might forget an item in the list of things I have to do. Ah, well. I had already lost so much to the Command upload, I do not even remember how much I have already forgotten.