6
There were three more Mud Men milling about outside of the Genesis Chamber. As they approached, Sally Brightly took aim and scored yet another headshot with her drive-rifle. She smiled as she burst the creature’s head open. She squeaked. Her mouth was open and her clean white teeth flashed. This was fun for her. It was thrilling.
Aelfwyrd grabbed Charlie by the arm. “How many of these are we going to need to kill?”
Charlie frowned. The idea bothered him.
Aelfwyrd continued, “If these were our workers, maybe we should save them so they can get back to work eventually?”
Charlie called out. “Sally, what do we know about the control collars?”
“They’re David’s work. His notes will all be gone, but I’m sure he’ll be able to figure it all out again eventually.”
“And how many Mud Men did we have working on the ship?”
Kalligeneia answered. “Almost 350. That number might be closer to 300 by now.”
“I don’t want to kill them.” Charlie’s voice was pleading.
Sally was confused. “What about Allambree? He’s a good man. He’s our friend. You may not remember but -”
Charlie raised his hand, cutting her off. “We don’t have to kill three hundred people to save him.”
“They’re not people, sir.” There was laughter in Sally’s voice.
“They’re not robots either. If we were using them as slaves, then we’re the ones in the wrong. We have a responsibility to end this as peacefully as we can, and then take them back where we got them.”
Sally was disappointed. “Captain, we’ve got to save Allambree. We’ve got to find the rest of the crew. And after that, who’s going to do the digging?”
Charlie turned to Aelfwyrd. “There must be a central device which controlled the collars. Would you be able to figure it out?”
Aelfwyrd reached up and thoughtfully pushed the red tufts of hair away from his face. “This technology is more advanced than anything I’ve ever seen. But if I built them, I should be able to. Maybe we could make them go to sleep and just stop fighting?”
Sally stomped. “I’ll be darned and ironed if I’m gonna let them keep hurting Allambree, sir.”
Charlie turned to Kalligeneia. “Where would we find what we’re looking for?”
“David has a lab near worker housing. He experimented on their bodies there.” Her face suggested that she expected the second sentence to shock the captain.
“Where’s worker housing?
Kalligeneia gave the men directions and it was arranged that she and Sally would rescue Allambree while Charlie and Aelfwyrd went to try and restore the control collars. Charlie gave them orders to secure and defend the Genesis Chamber in case anyone else woke up there.
Aelfwyrd and Charlie quickly and quietly made their way over an ornate bridge covered with images of planets and stars. The various orbs blew in the wind and their spinning created a soft whispering. Each orb played a different note, like wind-chimes.
“We have beautiful women on our ship.” Aelfwyrd noted.
“Yeah, and some seriously ugly monsters.”
“They’re the same to you, aren’t they? You’d fight to protect the monsters just the same as the women, wouldn’t you?”
Charlie thought for a moment before he answered. “No, I wouldn’t say that. But the Mud Men aren’t worthless. They’re living creatures.”
“They have a purpose?” Aelfwyrd offered.
“I don’t like thinking that’s the point of living beings. It’s not about how useful we are. People shouldn’t be just tools.”
“It’s strange that on a ship where you’re the captain we have over three hundred slaves.”
“Mighty peculiar.”
“Can you imagine why you would have approved it – maybe ordered it?”
“Like you said, not easily. Not lightly. It’s contrary to everything I believe.”
Aelfwyrd chuckled. “How queer that we would find ourselves puzzling over the decisions and motivations of our own selves. These creatures were enslaved because you wanted them to be. And me, I apparently murdered you dozens of times and I have no godly idea why I would have done that. Even my notes are evaporated. And why would that be? Why would the god-like future-people who made this ship set up a system which deleted the notes of an exploration mission? It’s a puzzler.”
They came upon an enormous statue of lions fighting one another. The muscular cats were all piled up biting and scratching and rolling over one another. There had to be hundreds of the lions, each at least as big as a real one. The work of art itself was more than forty feet high. The lions’ bodies were made of the same white stone as the rest of the city, but their eyes were blue and yellow and green, of incredible detail. They looked like living eyes, not simulations.
“You made it possible for humans to live on Mars?”
“I did. I changed the human design. Terraforming was a wonderful dream, but harder in practice than anyone dreamed. Oh, you could make things a little nicer, a little more favorable, but in the end it was better to give men skin that could process the radiation, lungs which could make use of what they were given, and bones more appropriate for the local gravity.”
“What’s Mars like?”
“Cold. Big. Empty. I could really think on Mars. It was never full of people and animals. Even with my work, it never would be. There were natural limitations which meant there would never be billions of starving and screaming unwashed citizens with nothing to give minding your business.”
“Is that how you really think of people?” Charlie had a sour look on his face, like he had just sucked on a lemon.
“Honestly? Most of them. There were too many people in the world and no point in them. Look, there are only so many jobs to go around when you have a society. How many actors can there be when thirty billion people will all see the same movies? How many novelists do you need? The construction is all automated. After a while, even most scientists are just doing the exact same thing as a thousand others. It’s the black swans, the people like us. The only purpose to having so many people is that marginal increase in odds that someone worth-while might be born.”
Charlie stopped walking. “You’re wrong. You’re not the future I fought The Machine to make possible.”
“I am. Because of my work, by the time I retired there were over ten million men, women, and children living on Mars who all carried the DNA I had written. And after my time? Titan, Europa, the Asteroids. I bet there were people swimming on Neptune. Humanity could go forth into other solar systems and galaxies your telescopes didn’t even know about, and every one of those people contained just a little bit of my invisible genius hand, literally my microscopic signature. Allambree, he’s eight feet tall and he lived most of his life on an alien world breathing alien air and exploring the ruins of a dead alien civilization. It was my work which made his birth possible.”
“But the point of human beings is not simply how useful they are.”
Aelfwyrd laughed. “So, what is it? How much they love one another? How many believe in Santa Claus with all of their hearts? Look at the language. There was never a knife or a sword whose point wasn’t intended to slide into a being. ‘Points’ are sharpened for stabbing, especially the points of human lives.”
“You know, when I killed that robot. I was destroying a tyrant who wanted to make a world which was nothing but useful and efficient and didn’t see any place for organic life at all. You and he could’ve made great pals.”
Aelfwyrd started walking again, slowly. “You’ve got me wrong. I believe in organic life. I believe in people. I believe in you. You’re a hero of mine. You wrote about higher goals. You didn’t think men and women should spend their whole lives struggling to feed their families and put roofs over their heads. You said that when that was held up as the ultimate dream, almost no one ever managed to do anything better. I might not have gotten the chance to do my work if you hadn’t civilized the world in yo
ur day.”
Charlie smirked. “Don’t blame me. I don’t remember any of that.”
They walked between two rows of trees, real trees. They were all tall and straight and strong, covered with leaves, and looked to be at least a century old. The bark was thickly covered with a flowering vine which Charlie could not identify. Charlie could see and smell a sweet sap dripping from the wood. There were animals living in the vines. Some of them looked like fluorescent chipmunks or squirrels. There were butterflies and at least one spider. The flowers could be seen dimly glowing red when the shadows from above covered them. Charlie imagined that if there had been no light coming from the green and blue sky above then the glowing flowers and mammals would have been enough to light the path.
“It seems strange” Aelfwyrd spoke slowly. “That the people who made all of this decided to choose a version of you who hasn’t lived most of his life yet. You redesigned society. You were the last president of the United States. That’s the man who should be captain of this ship, the man with those experiences. You’re not him yet though, are you? You’re just a singer who got sent to war. You should be Lincoln, and you’re just Elvis. I can’t imagine why we would want Elvis.”
“Is there a reason my later experiences would make me less effective?”
“No.”
“Maybe there’s a recording or a book I can read to find out about the rest of my life?”
“Sure. I’ve read a few of them, but that doesn’t make me the man you were meant to become.”
“I thought you said I was a black swan?”
Aelfwyrd joked, “Well, you still might be in your ugly black duckling phase.”
“What about my eye?” Charlie pointed at the third eye in his forehead.
“Is it functional at all?”
“I only tried opening it once, and that didn’t go well.”
“Well, it might be they gave you the eye for a practical reason. But the more interesting possibility is if it’s a mistake.”
“A mistake?”
“What if the program which summoned you up into our world malfunctioned? What if the powers that be wanted you to have all of your memories and look just like the man you used to be, but they mucked it all up and put a digit in the wrong place and wham-bam you’re not the man they ordered?”
“You think I glitched?”
“Well, let’s not be negative. Call yourself a black swan.”