The Life Engineered Read online

  “Mother Hera,” I said over a closed quancom channel. “The files I was given by Yggdrassil regarding Koalemos list him as a septuanian construct, yet, including the missing shard, there are eight.”

  “And you noticed me isolating one just now,” she answered. “That shard is not part of my son. It is an aberration implanted there to manipulate him. I intend to rip the secrets of its origins out of it. I was afraid you and your companions might have been responsible but—”

  “Why would we have brought him here to be discovered then?”

  “Exactly.”

  We walked deeper into the complex, Aurvandil and I, accompanied by the disembodied presences of both Hera and Skinfaxi.

  “How long will brave Koalemos’s repairs take, Mother Hera?” asked Aurvandil, who had remained quiet ever since my interruption. Was he mad at me for disobeying him? I wouldn’t think speaking about Yggdrassil’s fate was such a big deal. Hera would have found out eventually.

  “Oh, it will take time, my friend. Over a day to be sure. Probably more. I will not bore you with the details, but a large portion of his neural pathways need reconstruction.”

  My ego was a little bruised. I had made a conservative estimate of about twelve hours of work, considering the massive capabilities of a Gaia-class Capek, and had been fairly happy with the quality of my work on the little Von Neumann. Apparently, I had overestimated myself. I guess there was only so much to expect from a first try.

  “I apologize if my attempts to save him proved insufficient,” I said.

  “Do not worry about it,” she said before switching back to a closed channel. “Your work was impeccable, little one. Koalemos will be as close to healed as anyone can make him within six hours.”

  “But you just said . . .”

  “I have my reasons.”

  After a lengthy trek we ended up at the central hub of Hera. I had seen these same machines before, if significantly less intact. Everything was as it had been within Yggdrassil’s heart, but with less burnt pseudo-plastic and torn metal. Passageways were easy to navigate and well lit, eventually leading us to the seat of Hera’s Nursery.

  “Here, last child of Yggdrassil. Connect your mother’s Nursery to mine. I will take care of her children as if they were my own.”

  I dug up the schematics necessary to do a proper installation of the mnemonic core. It was still a hack job by any measure, but it was sufficient to effect a data transfer. Considering the little block of memory contained the time-frozen information of an entire world’s history, billions of personalities going through hundreds of cycles, the transfer would likely take some time.

  As I put the finishing touches on the installation, letting Hera handle the specifics of initiating the actual copy of data, Aurvandil was walking around looking at the intricate mechanisms that made up the awesome creature that was a Gaia-class Capek. It occurred to me that in all likelihood very few Capeks had the opportunity to see this side of their progenitors. Both the technically minded and philosophically inclined would indeed marvel at these sights and what they represented.

  “Mother Hera,” I asked, again in private, “is it possible to extract a specific personality from a Nursery?”

  “Of course. That is how you, your siblings, and all thirdgeneration Capeks are born. Once you’ve gone through enough cycles that you attain Nirvana, the state of being we consider necessary to adapt to the infinite possibilities of existence as a Capek, then you are plucked from the Nursery. I believe you know the rest.”

  “What about a personality that hasn’t reached Nirvana?”

  “It can be extracted, but there are too many things that can go wrong, from catastrophic culture shock to personality defects.”

  “Oh.”

  I became introspective at that point, unsure why I was so obsessed with the idea of the Nursery and somehow getting back in contact with those within. According to Yggdrassil, I and any third-generation Capek alive today had “lived” hundreds of successive lifetimes, reincarnating after each, learning, evolving, and refining our personalities. I had probably met hundreds of thousands of people during those lives, the echoes of their memories becoming the building blocks of who I am. Why would I want to reach in and pluck out a specific one?

  It was hard to tell how long I’d been pondering the issue when suddenly a familiar phenomenon snapped me out of my reverie. For a second the weak gravity of the moon of Olympus vanished and in fact reversed a little.

  “Faxi?” I said over open channel, my voice pregnant with worry and fear.

  “Space fold right above us,” he answered with a measurable amount of alarm.

  “Is it Anhur?” I thought I already knew the answer.

  “Yes! And Pele, another Lucretius Capek, and three other large Sputniks.”

  What was going on? This sounded like a full-fledged invasion fleet. If Pele was anything like Anhur, there was little chance that we’d be able to escape with our lives.

  “We cannot stay here,” Aurvandil cut in, his voice commanding and sure. “If our suspicions are correct, then they are here to destroy Hera.”

  “We can’t just abandon her!” I protested.

  “We won’t.” His answer was confident, giving me hope. “Mother Hera? Please, eject your mnemonic core. We will take you to safety.”

  The plan was daring but efficient. We would save what was crucial of Hera—her personalities and memories, along with her Nursery. The essence of her being would go on. We would find a way to build her a new body.

  “No.”

  “Please, Hera,” Aurvandil begged. “We don’t have much time.”

  “I refuse. I will stay and defend myself and my children.”

  “Then you leave us no choice,” the elegant Capek announced sadly. “Dagir, can you cut her out so we can take her with us? I’m sure once we reconnect her and rebuild her she will see it was for the best.”

  For a moment I did not know what to do. I couldn’t disobey Hera’s wishes, but at the same time I could not bear the loss of another Gaia. Their value to Capek society was too great. Aurvandil was right: she would see reason once things were settled.

  I rushed over to where her mnemonic and personality cores were connected and began pulling the necessary systems out. This was a more complex operation than ripping the Nursery from Yggdrassil, but I had to work fast. I did not need Skinfaxi to tell me, but I suspected torpedoes and other large-scale weapons were being fired on us. That was without taking into account whatever methods of internal defense she might be deploying at this very moment. Why couldn’t I go anywhere without it exploding around me?

  “Don’t do this, child!” Hera implored in private.

  “I’m sorry. I have to,” I answered, more to myself than anyone else.

  Before she could plead with me further, I unsheathed my plasma cutter and severed her personality core from the complex’s network. Aurvandil was waiting, ready to take it from me so I could repeat the process on her memory core, which I also handed him.

  “Come!” he called urgently as he ran back the way we’d come.

  I followed for a moment but quickly turned back, retracing my steps. I grabbed Yggdrassil’s Nursery and yanked it free.

  I caught up with Aurvandil just as he was running through the hangar toward Skinfaxi, taking bounding steps in the moon’s low gravity. The enormous roof had opened up, exposing the sky, half empty black space and half Tartarus’s dark clouds. I recognized Anhur’s terrible form, spines and all, hovering overhead. Lower in orbit, a slightly smaller but still enormous creature undulated through the sky, like an immense centipede. Powerful engines propelled the second Lucretius, throwing off long columns of fire from all over its body.

  “Pele,” I muttered, awestruck.

  I turned back to continue my desperate run toward Skinfaxi. My friend and companion was already moving to pick up Aurvandil as the first of Anhur’s torpedoes impacted the complex. The hangar was hit hard, and I barely saw Skinfaxi run full
speed into the elegant Capek he called “brother,” knocking him down like a rag doll before angling upward, pulling out at full thrust through the opening. I couldn’t tell if this had been accidental or not. I’d seen Skinfaxi navigate the crumbling remains of an asteroid at high speed. It didn’t seem that even this sort of impact should have shaken him so.

  Massive concussive shocks knocked me into a wall, and I was hard-pressed to keep my grasp on Yggdrassil’s Nursery. Through the clouds of dust and broken debris, I saw a large Sputnik, the one that had been floating outside the domed window of Babylon, hovering next to a shaken but otherwise intact Aurvandil. The tall Capek, still holding on to the components of Hera, looked around and spotted me before climbing on board his accomplice and taking off. Abandoning me.

  “Faxi?” I asked, unsure of what was happening.

  “Sorry, little buddy, I had to dust off. Things were getting too hot down there.”

  I couldn’t argue with him. “What about Koalemos?”

  “I’m on board,” the little Capek replied. “Beware, Dagir. Aurvandil is not a friend.”

  That much was obvious at this point. I should have listened to Hera. There was little time for recriminations, however, as I needed to figure a way to escape Olympus—and soon.

  “Guys? Any idea how I get off this rock?”

  “Don’t be worried. You aren’t without help,” the Von Neumann reassured.

  I looked up to the sky. The signature glow of two dozen thrusters, betraying another volley of incoming torpedoes, cut through the rising dust cloud. From Hera’s second hangar, violently pushing themselves upward, dozens of small rockets appeared on the horizon. A veritable arsenal had been unleashed on the heavens at once, and I would not care to be the one on the receiving end.

  Instead of watching the spectacle, however, I decided to put my efforts toward remaining intact.

  “I choose life,” I mumbled, quoting Koalemos’s desperate plea.

  Once again I found myself climbing to the top of a hangar. This time, however, I had a much more solid understanding of what was happening around me.

  When I reached the hangar’s roof and pulled myself onto the side of the sliding ceiling, I looked up to see Pele covered in concussive blasts, being chewed apart by a hundred small explosions. She’d known. Hera had known and prepared. That’s why she gave Aurvandil an inflated estimate of Koalemos’s repair schedule. She was buying time.

  As Pele broke apart, slowly pulled in by Olympus’s weak gravity, Anhur was carefully breaking orbit, his lethal payload delivered. It didn’t matter anymore. Assuming these invading Capeks were here to capture Hera’s memory and personality cores, then their mission was accomplished.

  Once again this left me stranded, with more torpedoes incoming and nowhere to run. I couldn’t climb high enough for the explosions to throw me into orbit, and considering what was waiting for me there, I doubted I’d want to anyway.

  I braced for impact, trusting that Skinfaxi and Koalemos would make it off-world safely. I held on tight to the Nursery, regretful that I had not been able to save it or Hera’s. It had been a short life, all things considered, but the things I’d seen!

  “Grab on, hold on, and make it tight!”

  I looked up to see a strange craft, perhaps four meters in length, sleek and aerodynamic. It resembled a smooth white plastic sunflower seed but was all engines and thrusters.

  With little hesitation I hopped on. As I did, a small hatch opened out of nowhere.

  “You’re gonna need those hands for holding,” the ship said urgently.

  I wasn’t sure I could trust this newcomer. What if it was a ploy to take the Nursery from me? What if it wasn’t? It didn’t matter; anywhere was safer than here for my precious payload. I dropped it into the new Capek.

  “Fantastic and excellent. Now grab on—this is gonna get . . . wild!”

  And it did. Whoever this Capek was, it was built for speed, maneuverability, and acceleration. With no atmosphere to cause friction, little gravity to hold it back, and no biology to worry about, there was no limit to what a well-built Capek could do. Before I could protest, we had accelerated to what my systems told me was over fifty thousand kilometers an hour.

  My new friend aimed straight for the incoming torpedoes, dodging between them before any could react and intercept. In fact, this Capek was moving faster against the gravity well than the incoming missiles were toward the moon.

  After the torpedoes, we had to weave through the debris that had once been the Lucretius-class Capek Pele. Taking a moment to look around, I noticed four more ships more or less exactly like the one I was attached to—another Von Neumann.

  As we cleared the last of Pele’s vestiges, I saw that we were heading straight for Anhur, his overwhelming and terrible presence looming ever larger in my field of view.

  “Watch this! We’re going to mess with that guy!”

  My new companion seemed to almost be shouting, even though we were communicating through quancom. I wanted to protest that I’d rather make a clean escape than mess with a Capek of the destructive capabilities of Anhur, and that our payload was too precious to risk on childish stunts. Yet there was something about the self-assurance of my ride and savior that made me trust him and whatever he had in mind.

  When we got close enough to the leviathan, my ride engaged his faster-than-light engines and surprised me by creating a gravity shift of enormous proportions. Instead of the space-time distortions of an Alcubierre drive I was expecting, I felt trapped in a crushing gravity field so powerful I could see it affect the gargantuan Capek we were flying toward. Then another part of the galaxy was pulled right between us and Anhur.

  The lumbering behemoth became partially stuck in the field of overlapping reality, too large to go through the space fold, but too slow to escape its pull. As we passed him, flying at incredible speed while making barrel rolls, we moved on to a different part of the Milky Way, and once we had gone through, my new friend terminated the space fold.

  Five of Anhur’s thruster spines had crossed over with us, and when the universe snapped back into place, the molecule-thin portions of him that were neither here nor there were stretched across light-years, severing the pieces clean off their original host and leaving them to drift, broken, in space.

  “Ooooh yes!” my new companion shouted in victory. “A clean break, if I do say so myself.”

  There was no small amount of bravado in its voice—not that I wasn’t grateful for the timely rescue.

  “Yeah. That was very good.” I tried to share its enthusiasm. “Um, to whom do I owe my thanks?”

  “I am Hermes, at your service.”

  RETURN TO BABYLON

  There was no stranger feeling. After the space fold, I was left floating astride a bizarre Capek out in interplanetary space. It took a moment for my navigation to pinpoint exactly where he had taken me, though knowing didn’t make me feel any better. Stars were tiny points of light in the distance. I couldn’t see any planets, not even on long-range sensors. If we were within a solar system, we were so near its edge for it not to matter.

  I’d maneuvered myself to sit on one of Anhur’s dismembered thruster-spines. I did not feel comfortable riding a strange Capek and was getting disoriented floating around with no point of reference.

  Hermes had excused himself, saying his attention was needed elsewhere. From our short discussion, I gathered that he was an odd cross between a Von Neumann– and a Sputnik-class. Much like Skinfaxi, he was a born traveler and enjoyed moving around the galaxy, seeing new places, meeting new people. Where my first companion was more interested in transporting passengers, Hermes was a messenger, carrying sensitive information and small goods or serving as a mobile quancom node. He offered to take me with him, but I opted to stay after securing his promise that he’d come back for me.

  I wanted to inspect the broken pieces of the malicious Lucretius that had been hunting my friends and me through the galaxy. It helped keep my mind off of
Skinfaxi’s and Koalemos’s fates, but more importantly, I was hoping to find some clue as to why explorers like Anhur and Pele had abandoned their vocation in favor of violence against their own kind.

  As luck would have it, the damage done to Anhur unlocked the files I had on the leviathan. This was a twofold blessing. It allowed me complete and unrestricted access to everything about the functioning of this Capek—a precious resource considering how dangerous and secretive his kind were reputed to be. The other good news was that Hermes’s daring prank must have done considerable damage to the monster.

  There was a lot to learn about Anhur and the whole Lucretius line of Capeks. In broad terms they were sentient cities designed to fly the gulf between galaxies on great explorations. The personalities that were adequate for this kind of mission, the level of isolation and independence that were to last thousands of years, were difficult to find in a Nursery. Those like Anhur were equipped with every conceivable technology, up to refineries and fabrication complexes. A Lucretius was thus capable of consuming materials to assemble new items, systems, or automatons. Aside from the multiple types of propulsion systems available to them, they were also equipped with a primitive version of a Nursery, a virtual world where they could store their personalities to better endure the trials of intergalactic travel.

  “I’m back,” Hermes called out all of a sudden. His prideful exuberance was gone. “You have to come with me.”

  I latched onto the little ship as he once more folded space for the convenience of fast travel to distant places. This time, however, I recognized the destination: we were going back to the City—or so I thought.

  As we approached Ziggurat, I could somehow tell that something wasn’t quite right.

  “When Hera realized who had sabotaged my little brother Koalemos,” Hermes explained, “she contacted me. I’m one of the fastest Capeks in the Milky Way, so she wanted me to come and assist you in saving what was most important to her. I also went out to warn as many of the other Gaias as I could. I sent messages to some but had to visit others.”