Noemi swallows down the lump in her throat. “That means a lot, ma’am.”
Baz sighs again. “Ganaraj won’t be happy we didn’t put you on report. It might be a good idea to… take a break from flying for a while. We’ll find something for you to do on the ground. Preferably a duty you can fulfill all alone, without anybody else to piss off.”
“Yes, Captain.” This solution strikes Noemi as one that will compound the problem. “But I need to find a way to be a part of the squadron again. More than I was before, if possible. I think that would be better.”
Always, she’s stood at the fringes. Sometimes she feels like she’s been lonely her entire life since her parents died. Esther was the only friend who ever understood her, and Esther’s grave is in the heart of a star all the way across the galaxy.
Baz doesn’t seem to see it that way. “You’ve always been independent, Lieutenant Vidal. That’s not a bad thing. Learn to embrace it. Not everyone has to be a ‘people person.’”
It’s all Noemi can do not to laugh. That’s not something she’s likely to be mistaken for.
Since Esther’s death, she’s only been special to one person. One who saw her more deeply than even Esther ever did.
One nobody else on Genesis would admit is a person at all.
The captain’s tone turns gentler, more thoughtful. “Some Second Catholics meditate, I know. Do you?”
“I’ve tried. I’m not very good at it.”
“That’s the secret about meditation—nobody’s good at it.” A quick smile flashes across Baz’s face. “You need to find center, Vidal. You need to refocus. If you do that, I think the people around you will sense it.”
“Maybe so,” Noemi replies politely. She gives this about a zero percent chance of success.
Either Baz doesn’t pick up on Noemi’s skepticism or she doesn’t care. “The next time you meditate, I want you to ask yourself two questions. What are you fighting, Noemi Vidal? And what are you fighting for?”
The questions resonate more deeply for Noemi than she would’ve thought. Disconcerted, she stares at the floor as she nods.
“You’re free to go,” Captain Baz says. At least she won’t push the meditation thing any further. “Try not to step on any toes on your way out?”
“Yes, Captain. But—I wanted to ask about the stars. Have the scientists figured out what they are yet? What they were supposed to do?”
Baz shrugs. “So far nobody has a clue. Nothing obvious has shown up. Nothing not so obvious either. Maybe it wasn’t official, or serious. Maybe some Earther with more money than sense decided to make harassing us his new hobby.”
“Maybe,” Noemi says. But she can’t bring herself to believe it. Those projectiles from Earth could only have been intended to do them harm.
If they failed, that means others will be coming. This time, she won’t have a chance to shoot them down.
2
HALF A GALAXY AWAY, ON A LUSH RESORT ISLAND OFF the coast of China, Abel is crashing a party.
“Thank you,” he says to the George model who hands back his identibadge, the one Abel personally programmed with false data. George mechs are only equipped with enough intelligence for uninteresting bureaucratic tasks, and this one performed only routine checks, all of which Abel had taken into account. It would take a far deeper inquiry to discover any issues. Even a human would’ve been unlikely to determine that the man walking into the party is not actually named Kevin Lambert, is not a lifelong resident of Great Britain, and is not a potential investor in Mansfield Cybernetics.
The party fills a large, oval, translucent bubble suspended not far above the ocean, surrounded by a few smoky side rooms and corridors that wind around it like the precious-metal setting around a jewel. So far, attendees number approximately two hundred and seventeen; he’ll finalize this count once he’s certain he’s accounted for people who might be in bathrooms or hallways. There’s at least one service mech for every three partygoers, a mixture of Dogs and Yokes handing around food on trays, a couple of scantily clad Fox and Peter models no doubt provided for after-party entertainment, and three Oboes in the corner, playing music just loud enough to ensure people can still converse.
Abel’s information about popular music aged badly during the thirty years of his confinement. He’s still catching up. After nearly a century of slower, gentler, neoclassical music, up-tempo tunes have returned to popularity. This song, with a hundred and forty beats per minute, is clearly meant to echo a human heartbeat in a state of excitement, thus stimulating listeners on both conscious and subconscious levels….
Then he stops analyzing the music and simply asks himself, Do you like it?
Yes. He does.
A slight smile on his face, Abel walks into the heart of the gathering. He’s surrounded on all sides by the rich and beautiful—slim bodies garbed in richly patterned kimonos, jackets and trousers cut to emphasize attractiveness, and silk dresses that do little to conceal every curve and plane of the bodies within.
Only 3.16 meters beneath the transparent flooring, the dark water ripples past, waves forming under their feet to break on the distant shore. Soft bands of light sweep downward repeatedly as if the illumination were flowing along the walls into the sea.
The dataread tucked into Abel’s black silk jacket pulses once. Rather than pull it out, he simply taps his chest pocket and localizes the range of his hearing. The crowd’s murmuring instantly becomes muted.
“How’s it going down there?” asks Harriet Dixon, who works as the pilot of Abel’s ship, the Persephone. She’s generally full of bubbly optimism, but she gets nervous when she can tell Abel isn’t telling her the full story. “Finished trading the ‘big and sparkly’ yet?”
He snags a glass of champagne from a nearby Yoke’s tray to complete his image as a partygoer. “Not yet.”
This is untrue. He sold the diamond they mined from a meteor near Saturn as soon as they made landfall on Earth. His other tasks do not concern Harriet and her partner, Zayan Thakur. Involving them would only put them at risk. Abel has begun calculating the morality of lying in more complex ways, of late.
“As long as you’re not losing it at a casino,” Harriet says. “That stone’s going to fetch us enough to live on for months! If you manage it right.”
“I will,” Abel says. In fact the price he got could probably pay for a full year’s operating costs. He will cut Harriet and Zayan in for equal shares of the haul, but he has chosen to distribute larger windfalls in smaller, scheduled installments. When he met his crew members six months ago, they were very near the point of starvation. The natural psychological result of such privation is the impulse to spend any funds as quickly as they come in, sometimes on pure extravagance. This isn’t unique to Harriet and Zayan; most Vagabonds are so used to living on scarce resources that they’re often unsure how to handle prosperity. Such luxuries don’t tempt Abel.
His one temptation lurks at the far edge of the Earth system, monitored by security satellites—the Genesis Gate.
The pathway that would lead back to Noemi, and probably to his own death.
Sometimes that journey seems worth the price.
“I promise I won’t gamble it away,” Abel adds. “I should be back on the Persephone within two hours.”
“You’d better be.” That’s Zayan, clearly shouting over from his ops station. “Or we’ll turn Earth upside down looking for you.”
“Security stations, too.” Harriet’s picked up on the fact that Abel uses false identification and tries hard to avoid interacting with Queen and Charlie models. She is highly intelligent, but understandably has not figured out precisely why he avoids them. No doubt she’s assumed he’s in trouble with the law on some system or another. “You’re the luckiest Vagabond I ever saw. But everyone’s luck runs out someday, Abel.”
Abel doesn’t have “luck.” He simply has a better understanding of probabilities than any biological life-form. The effect is much the same. “You
won’t have to search any security stations. I promise.” As a George model steps to the acoustic center of the room, he adds, “I’ll be in touch once I’m done here. Captain out.”
No sooner does he silence the dataread than the music stops midbeat. The human partygoers fall silent just as quickly as the mech band.
A spotlight falls over the George, who calls, “If we may have your attention, the program is about to begin. Our Mansfield Cybernetics presents your host for tonight, renowned scientist and philosopher Dr. Gillian Mansfield Shearer.”
Applause breaks out across the room as a woman in her early forties walks to the heart of the light. In the distance Abel overhears someone whispering, “I can’t believe she’s here tonight. I thought she would’ve sent a representative—”
“This is important,” says that person’s companion. Abel doesn’t bother looking to see exactly who it is. Gillian Shearer is his lone point of focus. The brilliance makes her red hair gleam. At 154.12 centimeters in height, she stands shorter than the average human female, but her posture and intensity suggest greater power. The plain black dress she wears looks out of place in this room of glamorous gowns and silk suits—as if a funeral attendee had suddenly walked into the party. It hangs slightly loose on her, as though she had lost a great deal of weight in a hurry, or she is one of those humans who considers fashion a waste of time.
Dr. Shearer has a strong nose, and her hair has a widow’s peak. These are features she and Abel share, because they inherited them from the same DNA.
Abel is Burton Mansfield’s creation; Gillian Shearer is his daughter.
Abel steps halfway behind a taller partygoer. Probably Gillian’s human eyes can’t make out anyone’s features past the glare of that spotlight, but Abel’s taking no chances. She might notice his strong resemblance to a younger Mansfield, or she might simply remember him.
Abel remembers her.
“I wish I could talk with Mommy again. Mommy always knew how to make it better.” Gillian looks up at him, tears welling in her blue eyes as he carefully applies the synthskin to her bloody knuckles; she says he’s better at it than the household Tare. In this moment she is eight years, one month, and four days old. “Daddy says someday I’ll get to talk to Mommy, but why isn’t it now?”
Robin Mansfield died some months before Abel achieved consciousness. He has assumed Burton Mansfield believed in no supreme being, but perhaps the concept of heaven would comfort a child. “That would be very far in the future.”
“It could be now! Daddy got it all wrong.” Gillian’s scowl is too fierce for her tiny face. “Instead he made you to take care of me.”
“And for other purposes,” he said, smoothing the synthskin with his fingertips, proud to have been chosen ahead of the Tare. “But I’ll take care of you.”
Perhaps he should remember her fondly. But everything that reminds him of Burton Mansfield has been poisoned for Abel, possibly forever—and that includes his daughter.
“Assembled guests,” Gillian says. The greater depth and resonance of her voice is to be expected post-adolescence, but it nonetheless startles Abel. “For two generations, Mansfield Cybernetics has stood alone in its capacity to create, update, and perfect the artificial intelligences that support our society. It’s now hard to imagine how we would manage without Bakers and Items to handle complex but mundane tasks, Dogs and Yokes to perform manual labor, Mikes and Tares to care for us when we’re sick, Nans and Uncles to tend our children and our elderly, and the Queens and Charlies that keep us safe throughout the galaxy.”
Polite applause briefly fills the room. A meter from Abel, a Yoke stands still, tray of champagne glasses in her hands, a useful object in human form. He cannot reject Gillian’s assessment of a Yoke as no more than that; the sense of self within him—his soul, Noemi called it—is shared by no other mech. But he still looks into the Yoke’s eyes and wishes he could see another soul looking back.
Gillian gestures at a nearby screen, which lights up as the spotlight falls dark. Different models of mech appear in rotation—leonine Queens, designed to fight; humble Dogs for manual labor; silvery, inhuman X-Rays that project the faces of others. “We’re constantly updating and perfecting each of the twenty-five models of mech in current production. However, those models have remained fundamentally unchanged for decades—primarily because the service they provide is capable and consistent. But my father and I had another reason for maintaining the models as they are: We didn’t want to dramatically alter the market until we had an innovation worth altering our entire galaxy.” On the screen, the mech tanks growing shapes in rough human form shift into red bubbles—Force fields? A polymer? Abel can’t tell from visual input alone—with shadowy fetal shapes inside. Gillian doesn’t smile, but she lifts her chin so that her face is bathed in the crimson light of this vision of the future. “Now, at last, we believe we’ve made that breakthrough.”
Applause bursts out again, more enthusiastic than before, as the screen image shifts into the forms of two embryos with brightly glowing mech components in the area of the head. The embryos rapidly shift into fetuses, into infants, and then into two fully grown mechs—not a Charlie and a Queen, but with faces like the children those two models would have, if they could reproduce.
Now, it seems, they can.
“Organic engineering,” Gillian says. “Superstrong structures within made up not of metal but of organic compounds, manipulated to create material far more resilient than bone. Mental capacity that will allow for greater individuality of programming while maintaining the essential separation between human and machine. Self-repairing capacities that go beyond healing minor injuries, rendering the next generation of mechs nearly immortal. We’re calling them Inheritors: mechs that can carry on the best of what came before, while helping us realize our ambitions for the future. That’s what we believe we’ll be able to offer this galaxy—not decades from now, but within the next two to three years.”
Excited murmuring rises as the lights go up. Abel understands why. These people are anticipating not only better, more useful mechs, but also investment opportunities that will make them even wealthier than they already are. (He’s observed that human avarice almost always outstrips human need.)
His principal thought is different from theirs: Soon I’ll be obsolete.
In some ways. Not all. The new mechs will be limited mentally; they will not develop souls. Yet knowing any mechs, anywhere, will be more advanced than him in any way—it’s a new sensation, one Abel decides he doesn’t like.
He’d gleaned rumors of this, mostly through various bits of research chatter coming from Cray, in particular from Virginia Redbird. It was his curiosity about a potential new cybernetic line that brought him here. But he’d hoped the new mechs might be more like him. That they might be people rather than machines.
That he might no longer be alone.
Gillian says, “Organic mechs will be able to reproduce, thus reducing manufacturing costs.” Raising one eyebrow, she dryly adds, “Reproduction will be on command only, so no one need worry about any unwelcome surprises. And we’re pretty sure we can improve on nine months’ gestation time—something human mothers might be jealous of.”
As the crowd chuckles, Abel imagines the possibilities. The thought of a pregnant mech, carrying something that is more device than child—something intended only for servitude—revolts him profoundly. A human might call the reaction “primal.” All Abel knows is that he cannot abide the thought of it.
Gillian seems disquieted as well, her eyes downcast, but her tone is even as she continues describing her creations. “They’ll be cheaper to create and therefore to own. They’ll retain all the advantages of mech labor while removing the disadvantages. Tonight, I hope to speak with each of you personally about our research, and about the potential that lies ahead for our company, for your participation in our next great endeavor, and for the betterment of our entire society—all through the creation of the most sophisti
cated mech ever.”
Abel feels like this title belongs to him still, but mentioning him would undoubtedly upset the flow of her sales pitch.
“My father’s vision has transformed this galaxy once.” Gillian’s blue eyes have taken on the intensity of a gas flame. “His legacy has the potential to be greater still. Mansfield Cybernetics intends to lead the way not only in mech engineering, but also through a revolutionary vision of the future that promises to expand the capacities of humanity itself. With your help, we can transform the galaxy again… together.”
The loudest applause of the night breaks out as she steps off the dais and nods at the Oboes, who all resume their song on the very note where they left off. None of the Oboe mechs show the slightest reaction to this revelation. They’re not programmed with enough intelligence to care.
Abel, however, will be thinking about Gillian’s speech for a long time. It did not fulfill his hopes of finding another mech like him, but it is nonetheless significant—
His visual field of focus shifts upon identifying a threat: Gillian Shearer, who is staring straight at him.
Her look lasts only 0.338 seconds, not long enough to immediately betray him but more than long enough to create an unacceptable level of risk. Abel doesn’t even glance backward as he turns to go.
He weaves through the crowd, moving against the tide of those pressing forward to get nearer to Gillian so they can hear more about this vision of the future she’s offered. Walking speed must be calculated to balance the value of haste versus the cost of drawing attention.
His calculations must have been incorrect, however, because through the din he catches Gillian’s voice. “That man—the blond one—he looks familiar, can you get—”