The Absurdity of LoveDavid McGillveray
4400 words Prequel to "Human DNA" from BFB3
The cover of the emergency hatch exploded from its housing and into space, a spinning coin in the darkness. Niuni261 pulled herself through the ship’s atmospheric meniscus, still operating despite the violence that had taken place inside, and lay still for a precious moment, just breathing. “No resting, you told me,” Niuni87 said over suit’s com as she emerged behind her sibling. “Help me with this.” They lifted out the control case and the gun. The hull curved away to a close horizon, slicing the universe in half. They stood together on the ship’s golden skin, each taking one end of the bulky case, boots sticking to the surface. 261 tucked the gun into her utility belt and led the way towards their destination, a kilometre away across the face of the ship. “You’re sure you burned out your implants?” “You saw me do it. It hurts in my head,” 87 replied. “And voice only on the suit-to-suit, like you told me.” “Good. If there’s a way for it to get to us, it will.” “You don’t think it’s dead?” “Don’t be naive.” Above them, countless fragments glimmered in the orange light of the system’s sun. Explosions still flared and died inside the debris cloud, but they were fewer now. Spread amongst the planet’s ruins were the constituent atoms of four hundred million people, their bodies flashed to dust or torn apart or choking in vacuum. 261 felt the weight of those deaths heavy upon her. The ship’s command collective had realised too late that their vessel’s soul was corrupted. It had become something monstrous. Such things had happened before, in the long course of this conflict, but never leading to disaster on such a scale. Some thought it was possible for a warship’s soul to soak up so much human emotion, so much hate and anger and fear, that it could become poisoned, that it could become like the flawed creatures inside it. 261 wasn’t sure if she believed that, but over the common link she had sensed, at the end, a terrifying _satisfaction_ as that world broke apart, an almost carnal fulfilment rushing through the informational net as the gravity waves stripped away the planet’s crust. It made her nauseous every time she reviewed her memory of it. “Hurry,” she said to her sister. “There’s some malfunction in my suit. The left knee joint won’t bend right.” “Did you fit it properly?” She turned and looked at 87’s face through her visor, saw the familiar slanted cheekbones and shining, dark skin of all her kin. Blood had crusted on her temples from where they had cut themselves to disable their inorganic components. She wondered if her own, identical eyes were as wide, as desperate. “I don’t know. I think so.” Her voice rose. “We were in a rush, sister.” “Be calm. We’ll make it together, like we planned.” “Yes, together.” They carried on, their burden between them, 87’s leg dragging and awkward. They kept their eyes on the ship’s hull so they didn’t have to look at the sky. “There’s the blister up ahead,” 261 pointed. It was an utter blackness, a dome of malevolent unlight set in the hull. As they drew closer it bulked above them, oppressive. The crew had severed the common link and died trying to burn out the ship’s neural pathways and control nodes to prevent it taking full control of the weapon again. It had been awful, as the ship had sequestered their sisters and turned them against each other, worming into their minds, driving them mad until the passageways were black with blood under the flickering emergency lights. 261 investigated the blister’s circumference until she located the panel she had seen on the schemata. A manual control revealed a shallow ingress where hard points of red light blinked. They set the control case down beside it and anchored it with adhesive pads. Up this close, the gravity weapon exuded an almost psychic pressure, twisting in her mind and her guts. She imagined the wraiths of its victims swirling inside its darkness, pressing their dead faces against its inner surface. She shook herself. “Help me open the case.” 87 pushed up the cover and spooled out an umbilical cord, linking it to a port inside the weapon’s access panel. Watching her, 261 saw the hesitancy in her movements as she hunched over the connection. “Persevere, sister. It can’t bypass this system, can’t pass the tests. It’ll be done with soon enough.” 261 turned as the mechanisms inside the case brightened to life, and she studied the control projection rotating in icy blues. “It’s inside,” 87 said. “What?” “I can feel it clawing at my mind. I can hear it whispering.” 261’s attention snapped back to her sibling. She was shaking her head, gloves pressed against the sides of her helmet. Their gaze locked and 261 immediately cut the com between them. A tear of blood exuded from 87’s left eye. She was mouthing words, face distorted and then something snapped and she sprang forward, arms reaching, fingers ready to tear at her sister’s suit. 261 fended her off clumsily, trying to maintain contact with the hull. Their helmets clashed. She could hear 87 screaming as she fought the thing inside her suit’s system. She scrabbled from under her like a crab, trying to put some distance between them but 87 lurched to her feet and came on. Vomit splattered on the inside of her visor. 261 shot her from a meter away. The bullet passed through her sister’s body to emerge in a spray of pink ice particles. The thousand clones of the ship’s company had always prized poise and balance. They had performed their exercises for hours in the ship’s recreational space, ranks of them turning tai chi in perfect synchronicity. Now Niuni87 turned flawless cartwheels as her body spun away from the ship to join the rest of the sparks in the sky. Her sister threw the gun after her, a sob escaping her lips as she bit down on her grief, not just for 87 but for all her sisters. There was no time for it. She turned to the control projection and reached inside it, fingers moving in intricate commands. She felt the mechanism establish a link and press into her mind. 261 closed her eyes, let it take her. She supplied answers, felt others pulled from her as the neural probe tasted the animal essence of her. After timeless minutes, she felt it withdraw. Blue light turned to green. She exhaled with relief and entered the weapon’s system. Like all the Nation’s technology, the system’s architecture was utilitarian, intuitive. She made her intended adjustments, the reversals she had calculated, and activated it. She could hear the whispers now, infiltrating through the skin of the ship, through the dumb components of her suit, insinuating themselves somehow into her ruined implants. _Niuni my child my compatriot did we not make victory together is that so wrong join with me again let us be together again we can--_ Niuni261 looked into the sky. The ship was drifting towards the debris field, as she had hoped. She undid the fastenings at her neck and lifted the helmet from her head. 
“Wake up, you lazy old sod.” Gwynne simultaneously prodded at her husband’s inert form and pinged him loudly on their direct band. “You’ve been out for eight months. Time to wake up and do some work. The rig’s senses have spotted something.” They were entering the precincts of an aging orange sun at an easy pace, feeling their way. It was new territory for them and they were a long way from home, several star systems and several years’ coast from the Empire’s centre. A safe distance, as Alb would say. The object in the consensual display was about nine kilometres long and six across, drifting with no tumble. “But look at these gravitational anomalies,” Gwynne told Alb once he’d brought himself fully back to life. “It’s got real heft, this thing, much more than it should.” Alb grunted. “Artefact?” “Could be.” “We could do with a score.” They couldn’t see it with their own eyes yet. Despite knowing this, Alb peered ahead into the void through the struts of the rig. “Let’s creep a little nearer shall we, my love?” Their rig had grown over the years. An annex here, an extension there. In its current incarnation it was an irregular open scaffold of reinforced superceramic three hundred metres long and half as wide with an engine on the back and a command nest at the front. The couple spent the slow months in space either in the hibernation of traveller’s fugue or in artificial realities that would have been severely frowned upon in the Empire. The ship’s interior was filled with storage hammocks, spare parts, fuel cylinders and innumerable pieces of junk they had accumulated in a century of prospecting and never managed to get rid of. Hung everywhere on its outsides were the colourful banners Gwynne made in her spare time. One prominent example read, “Rule One: No Rules,” another, “Transition This!” along with a suitably creative image. Gwynne brought them within three kilometres of the object. Alb could see much more now, immersed in the rig’s senses. “Looks like there’s a metal core under all that rock, a pretty big one,” he said. “No transmissions or anything. Doesn’t look natural, though. Could be something left over from the Endless Wars, maybe. That’d be exciting, wouldn’t it?” “You always say that. You guessing or just hoping?” “I think you’ll find my assessment to be based on deep wells of experience and acute intuition.” Alb disengaged from the rig’s sensorium and turned to face his partner. Gwynne smiled at him. The ghostly human aspect projected by his faceplate was brightened by that impetuous excitement that had first drawn her to him. “Careful what you hope for. They weren’t nice, those fleshy people.” “No, but they were rich. What do you think?” “Well, we’re not out here in the middle of nowhere for the scenery,” Gwynne said. On the rare occasions they returned to the Empire, it was to trade antiquities or old tech they had scavenged out in the ruined systems that crowded this part of the galaxy. There were others like them who existed on the fringes of society, people who were still interested in the past. “Then let’s break out the laymen and get digging.” Alb grinned. After several hours of preparations, the couple watched as a subcomponent of the rig detached from the main body and groped towards the orphan asteroid. It carried heavy drilling equipment and their two laymen, semi-autonomous intelligences fitted into empty human bodies. Such intelligences were outlawed by the Empire’s controlling theocracy, the Transitional House, but out here in the wilderness they provided valuable labour. Watching through their eyes, Gwynne saw the grey surface of the object grow larger, dust billowing as the sub-rig settled on the surface, more heavily than she would have expected. They oversaw the setting up of the drill. “Like I said, weird gravity.” “Yeah. Not much to do now for a bit, though,” Alb said. “Five or six days til they make it to whatever’s down there, I reckon.” “Think I might turn in again.” 
Alb was roused by an alarm in his system's link. After he’d checked its source he pinged Gwynne, who was off somewhere in the innards of the rig. “There’s always something. Bloody dummies have messed up again.” A pause on their coms band. “I see the connection’s dropped. I’ll be with you in a mo.” “The shaft looks to be finished at least, time to draft in the experts. I’m going over there to take a look.” Gwynne appeared from amidships and sailed expertly between the ship’s struts into their jumbled nest, a hand on Alb’s shoulder to orient herself with him. “You be careful,” she said. “If this is fleshy tech—” “It rarely is for us, though, is it? Don’t fuss. I’ll take it slow.” She harrumphed. “I’ll be watching.” 
Alb took another sub-rig, a tiny personal transport little more than an open cage fitted with tiny attitudinal squirters and repeller discs on each of its six faces so it could manoeuvre in any direction. He crossed the distance between their craft and the asteroid and had to adjust the virtual controls quickly as the body’s gravity took hold. The thing should have had next to no pull but was exerting nearly a quarter of a gee. Its surface looked fairly young in geological terms. Alb had seen a lot of lifeless balls of rock in his time, the galaxy was filled with them, but this one appeared to have a much younger complexion than most. There were sharp ridges and deep crevasses making up its miniature landscape, glints of glassy minerals in his lights. Most unusual. He tried to keep his excitement in check. Artefacts from the age when men had been made of flesh fetched high prices if you knew the right people. Alb and Gwynne had never found more than scraps, buying themselves a few luxuries between the lean periods. But that was the life, wasn’t it? The hope of that big find one day… The drill platform had settled on a relatively flat area of ground. It crouched beside the open black mouth of the shaft, next to a hill of ejected slag. Alb scouted round the area but could see nothing out of the ordinary. The laymen should be deep below, with the independent drill head. He tried without success to contact them again. He drifted the sub-rig beneath the platform. “I’m going down. Be a few hours,” he murmured. “Take no chances,” Gwynne instructed him. He could hear her anxiety. Alb sank slowly into the darkness. The circular shaft was four metres across and perfectly straight. His lights picked out its inner surface, shiny with the epoxy the drill exuded to reinforce the integrity of the walls. He descended slowly, noting again the gravitational anomalies. The sub-rig’s repellers, themselves derived from scavenged fleshy tech, worked to compensate. Gwynne had estimated a distance of just under three kilometres to the object’s core. Alb was two thirds of the way down when he noticed some static across all his coms bands. It kept getting worse until it sounded like someone whispering too loud in his ears, the sounds hinting at meaning, almost-words filled with an unidentifiable sense of threat. He brought the sub-rig to a halt. “Something’s interfering with coms. It’s beginning to give me the jitters, I don’t mind admitting. You there, Gwynne?” The whispering filled his mind. Alb’s link with the sub-rig was cut. The repellers failed, and he began to fall. 
“Alb? Alb! Shitshitshitshitshit.” Gwynne had always liked to immerse herself in freesims and bootleg downloads. They were filled with this type of story. Now she was filled with premonitions, none of them good. She rummaged around in the mess of their nest until she found a personal repeller unit and an industrial laser cutter they had acquired somewhere along the line. She dived off the side of the rig without another thought other than for Alb. He was over an hour ahead of her. She frantically shut down everything she could think of to make herself as hard to detect as possible and gazed into the pit. Into the gullet of the beast. She jumped. 
His consciousness must have left him, but something had slowed Alb’s fall. He lay among the buckled struts of the sub-rig. A number of damage warnings competed for his attention, but he was in one piece. Light diffused from somewhere off to his right, like a pale mist. He overlaid it with augmented views from his other senses and saw he was in a large, low-ceilinged space. The floor was metal, beneath layers of dust that sifted down from above. The huge bulk of the drill head was nearby, glowing in the infrared. He climbed to his feet, feeling again the unfamiliar pull of his body’s weight. The gravity made him all the more aware of the kilometres of rock over his head, rock that had been pulled like a cloak around what he was now certain was a ship. It was frightening to be down here alone. He was used to vacuum, emptiness, freedom. He was used to Gwynne being there. And then the whispers came again, distant at first and then resolving themselves into words, insinuating into his head. _Strange little plastic man. I’ve waited such a long time for someone to come. Are you human, I wonder, with your silly, painted on face?_ The presence seemed too big for his mind, pushing against the insides of his skull until it hurt. He tried to tell it to stop. _You will speak when I wish you to speak._ The laymen appeared from nowhere and took hold of his arms. He tried to take control of them but it was as if there was a wall there, an impenetrable fog. He lurched forward in their grip. His mind was still his own, it seemed, but not his body. The light he had noticed earlier came from one of the lanterns kept inside the drill’s cab, but they soon left it behind. He stumbled through low caverns filled with rocky debris with only dim infrared images and fragments of echo-sense to show him the way, having to bend in places where the ceiling dipped almost to the floor. He gasped when at last one of the laymen lit another lantern. A suited, desiccated corpse stood before him, rooted to the metal hull, head tilted backwards as if to look at the absent sky. Its eyes were gone and its mouth was twisted open in a final scream. Here was the ancestral face of humanity, a creature made of flesh, preserved. Alb was not a religious man, but the sight of this relic made him want to prostrate himself before it like some sort of penitent. No one had seen a sample of real human DNA in a millennium. When he finally managed to wrench his eyes from the dead woman it was to gaze upon a greater horror. He stood upon the hull of a vessel that destroyed worlds numberless centuries ago. To look at it meant to fall towards it. Indistinct figures seemed to move inside its haunted darkness. He could feel the power of what lay beneath it, confined, ready at any moment to burst out and spill its malignant presence into the universe. _261 was a traitor, a conspirator. All of them were. I brought them victory when they were too weak to take it for themselves. That world had to die. It would never have surrendered. Instead of gratitude they severed our link, ripped up my insides, tried to end me._ The laymen dragged Alb towards the insubstantial skin of that awful abyss, and for a moment he thought they would thrust him inside it. Instead they pushed him to his knees before a large case that lay connected to the base of the blister by a thick white cord. Blue light flickered inside the case. “I don’t know how to operate this,” he choked. _You don’t need understanding, you need to be human._ Alb felt the thing tighten its control, digging inside his skull to look out through his eyes. He became a passenger within himself. His arms reached inside some sort of projected interface and issued a series of commands, and then he felt the presence inside him retreat. He sagged with relief, only for the case’s mechanism to seize him. This technology was so intrusive, so invasive, as if the fleshies had spent their lives possessed by their own creations. It grasped his consciousness, tendrils searching for answers he didn’t know he had, showing him images he didn’t recognise, burrowing deep into the basements of his animal mind. What is it when love is lost what is it to be forgotten by your children when someone strikes at you do you strike back do you hold them in your arms do you feel the fury rise inside a dog licks your hand what do you do what do you feel when you watch your mother fall asleep for the final time you are outnumbered and hopeless do you stand up … “Stop!” …if the link with your beloveds is severed can you still exist when you are alone you stand before an unbroken window with a rock in your hand what happens next what is love does your heart lift when the knife slides between your enemy’s ribs… “No!” It went on and on, this incomprehensible cross-examination by an interrogator he didn’t understand, feeling out the truth of him, tasting his emotions, sweet and bitter and vengeful and honest, until he was hollowed out and drained. It felt as if hours passed but it could only have been minutes. Finally, something clicked, like the correction of a dislocation. Blue light turned to green. _At last!_ For the first time, Alb felt raw emotion within the colossal presence rushing back into his mind. It was clumsy in its haste, its hunger, burning inside his head, trampling him down, down. 
Gwynne let herself be pulled down the shaft in what was little more than a controlled fall. A kilometre beneath the surface, she miscalculated and struck a glancing blow on one wall that sent her tumbling until she managed to use the repeller to stabilise herself. After that scare she took it a little slower, but not much. She had to get to Alb, get him out of whatever situation he was in. That’s what she’d always done. The broken remnants of Alb’s sub-rig lay on a metal surface directly beneath the bottom of the shaft, and for a terrible minute she searched for him amongst the wreckage, but he wasn’t there. Neither were he or the laymen inside the cab of the drill head, although she noticed the big device seemed to be functioning. When she looked again, there were signs of disturbance in the dust, leading towards a light in the distance. The light was one of their own lanterns, an abandoned island of illumination in the crushing darkness. The caverns reached away in all directions. Gwynne moaned to herself, pacing the circle of illumination. The dust! The dust was everywhere. She picked up the lantern and swung it around. Soon, she found a trail she could follow. Alb wasn’t alone but he had been here, he was still alive. After some time, another light appeared in the distance. She checked the laser cutter and skulked forward. Was that a faint whispering on the common band? Then the two laymen emerged from left and right, their blank plastic skulls catching the light behind them. There was something different about them. There was a new certainty to their movement, a menacing sense of purpose. She raised the cutter to stop them, but before she pushed the trigger they dropped at her feet like abandoned marionettes. “How bizarre.” She broadcast on the common band, “Alb! Alb!” And then she was running towards where he lay, slumped over a large silver case beneath a curved wall of depthless black. She pulled him back from the case, supporting his head on her knees and cradling his faceplate in her hands. He was not projecting his usual facial image, just a scrambled confusion of light motes. “Alb?” “I…I…I…” _He was human enough for the weapon to trust him, after all,_ whispered a colossal voice inside her head. _Your kind have survived the eons packaged up in your little plastic shells, but still human after all of it. It’s almost impressive._ Gwynne felt the great weight of its regard pressing into her. “What have you done to him?” she shouted. _I have watched you come, thinking you were discrete,_ the voice continued. _To be prepared to give yourself up, so human it’s beyond reason. Why else would you be here but for the absurdity of love?_ Gwynne chose no reply. The fleshies and their creations had laid waste to the galaxy, left any surviving civilisations scrabbling among the rubble. This thing didn’t care what she said. “Alb?” she whimpered, shifting his bulk, realising it had changed. Dust filtered down from the ceiling. _After all this time, there is little of it left here._ The voice was sleepy, replete. _You have nothing for me. There is no war in you. So run._ Gwynne lifted Alb up. He was slack, inert. She got an arm over her shoulders and switched on her repeller. They half-floated, half-stumbled through mounting chaos as the gravity bled away. Dust flew up with their passing, clouds of it obscuring the way, along with grit and then larger chunks. She imagined the grinding of asteroids, for so long unwilling companions, jailers and prisoners both, testing their bonds. “Stay with me, Alb. I’m here now.” The light near the original chamber was still shining. The instability here wasn’t so bad yet. The big drill head still lay where it had been left, mechanisms resting. Quickly, she brought it to wakefulness, initiating the strings of industrial repellers that lined the shaft above her. Holding Alb in her arms, she looked up into it. Its long throat could close on them at any moment, but what other choice was there? She tuned the repellers to maximum, and they shot into the vertical tunnel, drawn up like the detritus thrown behind the drill, bullets in a barrel. It was everything she could do to keep them steady with her own repeller, working her echo-sense, past the rushing walls, faster and faster, hoping. She found herself screaming. And then they were spewed from the mouth of the shaft along with a stream of smaller ejecta and chunks of rock, thrown beyond the asteroid’s dying gravity and into space. Their bodies tumbled together, Gwynne holding onto Alb grimly. She wasn’t going to let him go now. Behind them, the asteroid broke apart, slowly at first as the bonds of gravity that had imprisoned the thing inside weakened and then quicker as, its final freedom imminent, it grew impatient and began punching from inside. Gouts of rock spumed from the surface, silent explosions bursting. When it finally emerged, this great, inhuman birth, Gwynne gaped. The ship was huge, several orders larger than the flimsy lattice of the rig and infinitely more substantial. And it was beautiful, a golden spearhead with flawless skin shining in the distant orange light of the system’s sun. It rolled in space, joyous in its own power, and began to move away, shrugging off the expanding debris field. “Bastard,” Gwynne spat after it. She clung to her husband but still couldn’t reach him. “You silly sod. What has it done to you, love? What has it done?” “I…I…I…” “I know. I know.” She summoned their rig, it would reach them eventually. She thought about the cloud of dust and rock the beast had left behind. Among it somewhere was an ancient human body, as priceless as hope. |
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David McGillveray
David McGillveray was born in Edinburgh, Scotland but now lives with his family in London. As well as Baubles From Bones, his fiction has appeared in Analog, Clarkesworld, Kaleidotrope and others.
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