“Kim, I’m a pilot-spesh.”
“So what?”
“Damn it, Kim. My ability to love is removed. Artificially removed.”
Her features froze. Then came a sheepish little smile. “Alex … you’re kidding, right?”
“Nope. It’s true, baby. I’m incapable of love. Anything but that.”
“How can … love be removed?” Kim’s voice quivered. “It’s like breathing … walking … thinking … Alex! You’re pulling my leg! You’re joking, right?”
“Kim, I’m telling you the truth. It is common knowledge that pilots, detectives, and tax collectors are genetically modified to be incapable of love.”
“Why?! Why pilots?!”
“We have a feeling of confluence with the ship, Kim. It must be … well, it’s probably something like love. It’s like with the hyper-channel, you know. There cannot be more than one hyper-channel in the galaxy. Same with love. Either you can love people, or you can have confluence with the ship.”
“And you chose a chunk of metal?”
“The ship is not a chunk of metal, Kim,” said Alex quietly. “It’s alive, though not sentient—it’s a biomechanical organism. And I didn’t choose. None of us chose. No one has figured out how to ask for an embryo’s consent yet.”
“Alex …”
He was expecting an explosive reaction. Was ready to face it. Ready to have Kim punch him, if her fighter instincts took hold of her. Ready to see her run away in tears.
Once again, Kim surprised him.
“Oh, you poor thing …”
She hugged him with the impulsiveness of a hetaera and the forcefulness of a fighter. She made him sit up. Pressed his head against her small, firm breasts.
“Alex … you poor darling …” He was suffering, all right—the pose she had bent him into was very uncomfortable. Besides, his pilot instincts were telling him that this pose would be dangerous, should the gravity vector suddenly change. But Alex kept mum and waited.
“I won’t leave you!” cried Kim suddenly. “I won’t, no matter what! They couldn’t have removed your love completely! You will fall in love with me! I’ll teach you how to love! I swear I will!”
Her skin scent was cool and gentle. Maybe perfume, maybe natural pheromones. When the scent became spicy and heady, Alex realized that it must be pheromones.
He freed his head from her embrace and returned another kiss.
Alex had never been one for great sexual exploits. His best achievement must have been participating in the traditional graduate orgy at the pilot academy. The event started at sundown and lasted till sunrise. And it was devilishly multifaceted, with sex simulators, tonics, invited geishas, fellow graduates … Even some exclusive virtual images from the world’s best modeling agencies. The graduates had held a big fundraiser to get them. Alex had never suspected that one girl, young and inexperienced, could excite him so much.
Kim was putting her heart and soul into it. They tried several old but fun sexual diversions, drank a bottle of dry wine from the bar, then began anew. But as soon as Alex started to feel he was participating in some exhausting sport competition, Kim quieted down. Maybe she really was well tuned to his emotions. Then again, she may have been watching the Demon.
“Should I let you rest?” Kim lay on her stomach, slowly caressing his shoulder. Her pose was a compromise between her next attempt to seduce the captain and the inescapable need to rest. “You’ll have to be back on the bridge soon, right?”
“In three hours and seventeen minutes.”
“Your internal clock is very accurate.”
“Part of my specialization. I feel time to one-tenth of a second.” He slid his hand along her spine. Thank God, Kim didn’t bring up his inability to love again. Perhaps she felt sex was a worthy alternative. Or maybe she was still coming up with a crazy plan to overcome his specialization.
“You have a little scar …”
Alex looked down at his own stomach. Yup. The scar was really thin, but went all around him, like a belt, just below the belly button.
“I told you … there was an accident. I was torn in half.”
Kim winced.
“Poor thing. It must’ve hurt like crazy?”
“I lost consciousness immediately. I hardly remember anything.”
“So what happened?”
“We weren’t going to land on Quicksilver Pit. Docked at one of the orbital ports to get some fuel. Our orientation engines had a small malfunction … so I went to the aggregate module. That’s also a part of a pilot’s job—small engine systems repairs. And then …”
Alex lapsed into thought.
“No, I don’t remember. There was a flash … and that was it. There was a minor problem with the force field generator, and plasma burst out at the very moment I entered the module. The burst was not a big one, so I wasn’t incinerated. But a shard of the generator cut me in half. I got lucky, though—our fighter-spesh was walking down that passage. He heard the explosion, took me out, and hooked me up to an IC unit. Then he took me to a shuttle, delivered me to the planet, and brought me to the hospital. I hope William doesn’t get into trouble for that.”
“Into trouble?”
“Do you have an inkling of how much it costs to regenerate half a body? I had a comprehensive insurance plan, so the company had to pay up. I think they would have preferred to have a nice elaborate funeral for me instead.”
“But they could have just re-attached your other half …”
“Nope, they couldn’t. William didn’t waste any time, and that was what saved me. But he had only one IC unit handy, so he had to choose what was more important—the top half or the bottom half.”
Kim smiled.
“The top half … they patched up the bottom half just fine.”
“Even better than before. My left leg had been broken twice.”
“Another accident?”
“No. I had that since childhood … just kid stuff. I jumped from the fifth floor, on a bet. I figured a pilot-spesh would be okay. What I didn’t take into account was that I hadn’t had my metamorphosis yet.”
“I jumped, too. But not from so high up. My bones aren’t as strong.”
Alex smiled, wrapping two fingers around her wrist. The girl was looking thoughtfully at him. “You know … I have to tell you this one thing …”
“Kim, you don’t have to do anything.”
“Yes, I really do.” Kim got serious. “I have to tell you … about … this.”
She slid a hand across her stomach and held out the gel-crystal a moment later.
Alex said, with no hesitation:
“Kim, I really have to warn you! If the Imperial police have an official search out for this crystal, it is my duty to report you and turn you over to the authorities.”
“There is no search out for it.” Kim shook her head. “I give you my word. It’s a very large crystal, isn’t it?”
“Very large. Very expensive … that is, if it works.”
“It’s working as we speak.”
Alex cocked his head. Carefully took the crystal from her hand, looked through it at the light. Along its facets, a light whitish film was gathering, or perhaps it only seemed to be.
“Then we have to recharge it, Kim. It looks like it’s been running autonomously for quite a while.”
“That’s exactly why I took it out. You do have a spare control center, don’t you?”
“I do.”
Kim nodded.
“The computer in my cabin isn’t capable of feeding such a large crystal. But yours will probably manage.”
Alex got up silently. Went over to the terminal, snapped off the processor panel. In a small port lined with a moistly trembling bio coating, there sat another crystal, a tiny one, less than point two inches in diameter. The brackets of another port were open. Alex tried the crystal against the opening, gave a contented nod. It would fit. Just barely, but it would. Kim had also gotten up and was now standing next
to him, pressing her warm, firm thigh against his leg.
“You understand what I’m doing?” Alex unfolded three tiny, thin bracket arms—each one could rotate on its axis and then be fixed in place in two different positions.
“No.”
“These are the crystal’s information chain conduits.”
“But why?”
“Who knows what kind of programs are in it? The crystal will get its charge, as well as access to the infonet. But it won’t be able to interfere with the ship’s controls network. That’s the recommended procedure for recharging uncertified gel-crystals.”
Alex inserted the crystal into the port. Its aperture trembled, then contracted, tightly hugging the transparent cone. Only the three little conduit arms helplessly wobbled in the air, unable to reach the crystal.
“I could cut off the information input as well …” added Alex pensively. “And leave only the recharging function on. Well, this ship has nothing all that secret on it, really… .”
“Don’t cut it off!” said Kim hastily. “He’ll be really bored!”
“He?”
“I better start at the beginning.”
Alex looked at the crystal, shrugged, then closed the panel.
“All right, baby.”
Kim sighed. Then said quickly, in the same breath, as if jumping off a cliff:
“My friend is in there. My best friend.”
“An artificial intelligence?”
“No, he’s human. Just like us.”
“This is a great start. That is, it’s a great place to stop. Kim, darling, let me take a shower and change? Then you can tell me the rest, okay?”
They took a shower together. There was nothing erotic about it; Kim simply couldn’t wait to start telling her story. She must have been longing to share her secret with someone for a long time now.
Alex put on light overalls, sat down on the bed. Kim didn’t go back to her cabin for a change of clothes, but simply wrapped herself in a bath towel. Alex didn’t mind—she looked even better this way.
“I was nine,” Kim began, having settled, legs and all, into an armchair. “And I … well, it just so happened that I had absolutely no friends back then, girls or boys. I had lots of pals, you know, but not a single really close friend.”
Alex nodded.
“I found a friend in virtual reality.” Kim smiled gently as she said this. These memories must have been pleasant for her. “His name was Edgar. He was my age. We hit it off, became good friends … you know the way it happens in virtuality?”
“Yeah. At that age, I also liked virtual reality. Especially spaceflight simulations.”
“Well … these were not spaceflights. You see, he didn’t have a real body.”
“What?” Alex raised one brow in surprise.
“Edgar told me he had been in a car wreck. Back when he was really small, only three. They couldn’t save him, so they just transferred his consciousness into a gel-crystal …”
“Kim!” Alex raised his hand. “Wait a minute! Stop right there. This is utter nonsense! A gel-crystal this size costs as much as a good hospital. So it’s much less expensive, not to mention more … humane, to reconstruct a body, even if it has been smashed up into suspension.”
“They couldn’t get him to the hospital on time. Just managed to transfer his mind into the crystal.”
“Hold it right there! Let’s suppose the boy’s parents could afford it … although I can’t really imagine such a thing. Why couldn’t they reverse the process, grow another body for him, say, by cloning the old one or generating a new one out of his parents’ stem cells? They could then transfer his mind back into the clean brain. I’ve heard of such cases, except they were famous scientists and politicians, not little boys.”
“That’s right. I’ve been telling you a bunch of lies.” Kim smiled. “But they aren’t my lies … that’s the crap they told Edgar. Don’t forget, we were both just nine.”
Alex nodded.
“All right, then. Go on.”
“Edgar grew up in the crystal. In the virtual worlds. His playmates came and went back to the real world, but he stayed there. Always. At first, his parents would visit him, often, in their virtual bodies. After a while, they stopped coming. He was thinking they’d simply forgotten about him, had more children, or whatever … He was really upset about that.”
“But what was really going on?”
“He’d been stuck into the crystal on purpose!” Kim tossed back her hair. “Can you even imagine? There wasn’t any car accident! His memory got placed into the crystal, and his body … we don’t know what they did with it! Maybe they threw it away. Maybe it’s out there somewhere, in a vegetative state. And maybe his memory got copied, without erasing the original, and there’s another Edgar somewhere, alive and well.”
“Why?” Alex shrugged his shoulders. “Kim, this is a crazy story. Why would anyone screw up a little boy’s life like that? A crystal which contains a human consciousness and is also, I assume, capable of sustaining some semblance of a living environment … the cost is simply inconceivable!”
“All you talk about is money,” Kim snarled. “Alex, the thing is that Edgar is a very rare kind of spesh. It was an experimental mutation. He is a spesh to create speshes.”
“A genetic designer?”
“Yup. You don’t have to change the body for this specialization. The eyes will never match an electron microscope, anyway. All the alterations were done to his mental processes. It was a project of the Edemian government … they had decided that Edgar didn’t need a body at all. That he’d be better off growing up in the crystal.”
Alex studied the girl’s face as she spoke. Was she lying? Didn’t look like it … she seemed to believe her own words. When she was telling him that first legend, she spoke with a smirk, as if to say, “Can you believe how stupid I was to have bought this stuff?” But now her voice held real sorrow. Kim believed what she was saying. And really wanted Alex to believe it, too.
“But why make it all so complicated?” he asked. “I believe that there are assholes in the Edemian government. Just like anywhere. They may be assholes, but they aren’t idiots. It has been obvious to everyone for a long time now that transferring a mind to virtual reality has a lot of drawbacks. The mind still feels the illusory nature of that existence and slowly the person … the human mind … goes insane. When the first human consciousness was copied into a machine, back in the twenty-first century, it was the computer genius David Kross. He managed to have a normal existence for thirty years. But then …”
“Yes, I know.” Kim nodded. “I’ve studied everything I could about the field. These weirdos were hoping to get the most out of Edgar. They wanted absolutely nothing to interfere with his work. They didn’t want him to have or do anything but work. They also wanted to make multiple copies of his mind, if the experiment was successful.”
“Then they shouldn’t have let him out into the common virtual space.”
“They didn’t. He broke out by himself. He’s a genius, Alex!”
“All right, so how come you ended up with the crystal?”
Kim smiled.
“It happened a year ago. Edgar organized his own abduction. He hacked into one of the military cyborgs that were guarding the lab with the crystal. The robot took the crystal, mailed it to my address, and then destroyed itself, along with the whole building. We were both sure that the trail was lost, and that the crystal was considered destroyed in the fire. I … I took care of Ed. I had a good computer, and I managed to hook the crystal up to it. We were still virtual friends, except now Edgar was free. I was thinking that as soon as I could work, I would quickly save up for a new body … any body. Ed said, ‘Make me a baby, or a geezer, just don’t make me a girl.’ Except I think at that point he was ready for anything … We would transfer his mind, and he could really be human again.”
“Then you could be sisters, like the Zzygou,” commented Alex. “Suppose I believe yo
u. So something went wrong?”
“A month ago.” Kim tightened her lips. “I … I messed up. I told Mother about Edgar. I was sure she’d understand! But she reported me to that lab. That’s why I simply can’t go back to Edem! We managed to run away, but they’re looking for us.”
“Probably unofficially. This sure is fishy business.”
“The security agency always prefers searching unofficially.”
Alex drummed his fingers against the wall. The story Kim just told him was not completely impossible. Idiocy is universal. Someone could have thought up this idea of raising a genius-spesh in a virtual world. This genius could have deceived the security agency. An excitable girl-spesh could have fallen in love and run away to become a galactic fugitive.
But what irked him was the melodrama. Alex was ready to believe in any coincidence … but not when the chain of events so strongly resembled a soap opera for young, hysterical girls and their sentimental grandmothers.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” asked Kim bluntly.
“I don’t know. You, I believe. I think.” Kim’s features turned gloomy. “As for your body-less friend … How do you communicate with him, Kim?”
“Through the net.”
“You do understand that I have no intention of letting him into the ship’s network. Any other options?”
“Hook up to the crystal directly. His home is there … his own virtual world. Just talk to him, Alex! You’ll see right away—it’s all true!”
“You love him so very much?” asked Alex.
“Yes, I do!” Kim looked at him proudly. “But not the way I love you. You’re my lover. And Ed … he’s like a brother. Or maybe even a child. He’s so helpless, you know, inside the crystal. And there are many things he doesn’t understand, even though he’s a genius.”
“You got yourself into a colossal mess, Kim!”
“I know.” The girl nodded. “But I couldn’t act any other way.”
Alex almost let slip that everything would have turned out quite differently had she been an ordinary fighter-spesh. As soon as she was past the metamorphosis, she would have gotten such a boost of civic responsibility that she’d personally take “Ed” back to that hypothetical lab.