"Beyond the Aftermath" by Inger Marie Hognestad

Beyond the Aftermath

By Inger Marie Hognestad & James K Bowers

I unplugged from the Implant Control Station of the Europe Relay, trying to rid myself of the feeling of worry stemming from the memories of Scott Dannel, Chief of Security. The emotion revolved around events that would be destroying everything he knew, and his worry matched my own too closely for comfort. It was the second time I was going over this particular emo-mem sequence, and my assistant looked strangely at me when I requested the original implant. Nobody except me needed more than one replay to retrieve and analyze facts, but then, my ambition was to assimilate certain… facts, of sorts. That goal was different from everybody else’s. I would be in trouble if I let on that so I had just repeated my demand without explanations. Being head of Earth Archeology I had the necessary authorization, so the archive signed it out without questions.

It was the original implant; under normal circumstances carefully kept in a stable environment to prevent it from deterioration. Usually only copies were accessed, but I had a particular motive for wanting this piece. Biotech these days is far more advanced than back then. Today’s androids are completely biological, based off a modified human blueprint, albeit not reproductive. However, in-depth studies still shows that the brain activity of a modern android and the extinct humans differ in small but significant ways. The copying process of the early implants, sophisticated as it is, almost always loses out on certain subtleties tied into emotional complexity, irrationality, and rational choice because of compatibility issues. All are functions deeply embedded in the brain. The only solution to my problem was to access the original implant.

I felt confident that I was sufficiently prepared for the impact. I had primed myself slowly over years by analyzing and integrating information from other old implants. I had built quite a reference-register, but it was slightly lacking regarding deep personal conflict, and due to its matrix organization also completely deficient as assimilation material. With this implant, I was ready to take the step that’d challenge both my creativity and my ability to comprehend beyond my design.

I took a deep breath. This too had caused my assistant to look sideways at me. For androids, breath is a matter of functionality, not expression. Unfortunately, because of the very episode I was going to replay –no, relive, I was an android, just like my assistant. Yet.

I looked at the plug that would connect me to the implant once more. Its inconspicuous appearance was deceiving. With some reluctance, I slid the plug back into the old-fashioned hole in my neck designed for this use, thrusting myself into the disturbing scene again, assuming the consciousness of Scott Dannel.

***

Dannel ached. The pounding, all-over ache assaulted his senses with shrieks from every muscle and nerve in his battered frame. Blood?  No, he decided, not his own but sticky on his skin and clothes just the same. “How long?” his groggy mind asked.

The floor was hard and cold beneath him and a dim light – Marrik’s? -- shone at an eerie angle, rising from the floor a few feet to his left to cast surreal shadows on the walls. Why so dark in here? His weapon lay on the floor to his right and instinctively his hand groped for it. Gaining purchase, he dragged it closer with a rasping sound that echoed in the silence. The feel of the stark, cool metal offered him some primal comfort.

He struggled to a sitting position and bone-jarring pain surged up Dannel’s spine dashing itself like a wave on the back of his skull. He winced and sardonically acknowledged to himself that the battle must have gone well if he could accomplish so much. The surrounding carnage and the fact that he seemed intact told him it could easily have been much worse. “How much worse?” he thought with a start. There were bodies and parts of bodies everywhere. His eyes sought familiar shapes among the dead. The light – Marrik’s! The dim light escaping from beneath his crumpled body shone an ugly red. Dead. Very much so. No doubts -- torn nearly in half.

There… some ten feet away… Lirra. Slumped against the wall, bloody, a gash in her face running from her forehead down her right cheek nearly to her chin. Her weapon was still in her hand. Well, she never was one to retreat. Dannel revised his initial assumption. The battle had not gone well at all.  He crawled across the gore-strewn floor to Lirra. Maybe, just maybe…

At his touch Lirra gave a shudder and blinked, as if trying to orient herself. She saw his face close and stiffened, her eyes opened wide, revealing the white around her pupils. With unexpected speed, her gloved hand rammed its gun into his guts. He heard the low hum of the active power cell ready to fire.

Dannel froze, afraid to breathe, waiting for her mind to catch up with her actions.

“Lirra! It’s me, Dannel!”

Lirra moisturized her lips. “Is it now? The rasping edge to her voice didn’t quite disguise her snarl and apprehension. “Prove it!”

“Huh?” Dannel looked as bewildered as he felt.

“Prove it to me!” The anxious demand was emphasized with the gun. “I’m counting to three!”

“Lirra… what’s the matter with you?? It’s me!”

 “One!”

“Lirra! Damnit!” He felt more than he saw the tremble in her arm and gun, but with the weapon thrust between his ribs the outcome would be lethal all the same.

“Two!”

Dannel noticed that the tremble didn’t pertain to her face. Steely eyes held his in a deadlock.

“All right!” he forced the answer, his voice taking on a rough edge. “I hate your bleedin guts, you whore.” He took a deep breath. “Will that do?”

Lirra met his eyes, with a bleak expression. “Yeah, that’ll do.” The hand with the gun dropped to her lap and she closed her eyes, leaning her head against the wall.

“What was that supposed to mean?” Dannel wasn’t mollified.

Lirra opened her eyes, looking oddly at him. She avoided his question. “So, I got him. Marrik is dead.”

Dannel merely looked woodenly at her.

Lirra broke the awkward silence. “That must be…” suddenly her face contorted and she gasped. “No!”

“What?”

“Get out!”

“What??” Dannel looked around, perplexed, for the threat. Everything was quiet. Looking back he saw Lirra digging her fingers into her scalp, still with the gun in her palm, unsecured. The expression on her face was a wrenching mixture of agony and terror.

“Damnit!” He grabbed her hand, prying the gun from her hand with some difficulty. She didn’t notice. With bulging eyes she made a keening sound; appearing so unlike her usual self that Dannel was frightened.

“Lirra!!” She didn’t react. Somehow his hand acted by its own volition, stretching out, touching his wife’s cheek, a brief caress following the line of her cheekbone to the ear and her hand.

At the unintended gentle touch Lirra shuddered and seemed to collapse. She slumped forward and Dannel supported her, torn between the urge to help, the wish to strangle her, and the need to get up to make sure there were no immediate threats. 

He rose, supporting himself with a hand against the wall. Lirra was lying on her back with closed eyes, her chest rising and falling in a slow rhythm. She seemed unharmed except from the gash on her face. A feeling of unease nagged at him, but he couldn’t pin down the source of his discomfort. With a professionalism honed by experience, he disregarded his apprehension and did a closer examination of the environment, deliberately avoiding looking at the bodies and the body parts.

A wintry draft came from his left, two steps led up to a door opening into a dark corridor. He recognized the layout as the interior of DRIFT III, the orbital space station supplying Earth with medical drugs engineered in the micro-gee labs. He knew the place well; he had been working on it for the last three years. He took notice of the temperature. It was getting very cold. The lack of heat and light had to stem from damage to the station’s power source. How? Since when? Why couldn’t he remember?

He started to walk among the dead bodies, looking for familiar faces. With a start he realized he was walking among his security crew. He stopped in front of Marrik. A thin layer of blue liquid had seeped from the arteries in the inch-thick artificial layer of muscle and skin, mingling with the red blood from the station crew and his own men, adding a purple hue to the slick floor. DRIFT III’s former communication-android was very definitely dead. Turning him over, he retrieved the portable red-pulsing power cell Marrik had used to amplify the reach of his comm implant. It was almost spent.

Suddenly he realized what was amiss. His own neural implant didn’t function. He was out of the local communication loop, as well as deprived of access to the global net.

A moan from Lirra made him glance in her direction. She was sitting up, clenching her head again.

“Scott…” her voice was strained

“What?”

“Do you remember… what happened?”

“Not a thing. Do you?”

She looked at him with an unreadable expression. “Yes.” She blinked furiously.

Crying? Lirra? He pushed the thought away, determined to find out what had passed. “And?”

It looked like she steeled herself. “I’m scared, Scott. I don’t know why he left you, but I think he managed to download a program to my implant. I’m fighting it as we speak.”

 “Huh?” A sudden suspicion started to gnaw. “What are you talking about?”

“Marrik.”

“What do you mean, he left me?”

Lirra stared unwaveringly at him. “He took over your implant.” She gestured to the bodies in the room. “You really don’t recall, do you? All this… you did that, Scott. Or Marrik did, through you...” her voice trailed off again, and clenching her fists she challenged him with her eyes, daring him to deny it.

Dannel was shocked into silence. He turned; saw Merkel lying to his left, his uniform revealing the scorch mark in the back, the telltale sign of where he had been hit. Deleke’s head looked unharmed, but was no longer attached to his body. Turning again, Dannel almost stumbled on an arm holding a very personally modified shock gun.

“No!” He didn’t realize he’d said it out loud until he heard his own voice. “That’s not possible!”

“If that’s so, then Marrik lied to me and you are a cold blooded murderer.” She made a strange sound. “Or did you think I slept with them all?” The grimace carried only a mocking semblance to a smile.

“What?” Dannel felt strangely disconnected. “How…? It can’t be…”

Lirra convulsed again, the agonized expression returned to her face.

“Scott!” She whispered so forcefully it felt almost like a shout. “I’m losing it! He wants to kill us all!”

Dannel took a deep breath, forcing his thoughts away from the carnage and what Lirra had told him.

“Fight him, girl!” He went down on his knees again, clenching her hand so hard that she winced. “You can do it!” He swallowed. Was that what had fried his implant? Marrik, trying to make him kill his wife?

***

I unplugged from the ICS, feeling the need to take a deep breath before continuing. I was sweating. I took a clinical note of it, being a little detached from my bodily functions while I was absorbing the emotional undercurrents in the scene. The anticipation of what was yet to come made me a little tense. The end of humanity. The temporary end, anyway, since I don’t believe in wasting potential.

Dannel was wrong. The implant wasn’t fried; the program Marrik downloaded when he took him over was just jamming it, but the implant was recording all the while. Together with the historical situation, this made it unique. That was why it had been taken care of for centuries, why I had it in my possession. When Lirra shot Marrik’s body, he was sufficiently set back to allow Dannel to resume command, but the jammer, being downloaded as an independent sub-routine, still worked. Marrik didn’t have surprise on his side any more, Lirra’s struggle testified to that. But she would lose. “Dead” is a perilous word when dealing with wireless neural comm-nets. Marrik didn’t die. Earth Archeology later gleaned that he had safely transferred himself to the biological core of the comm-net of DRIFT III, utilizing the functioning implants to carry out his mission. 

As I delved further into the analysis of the emotional undercurrents, allocating the proper hormonal reactions to their various glands, tracking electric chain reactions through synapses and neural networks, I was assuming more and more of the bodily properties connected with humanity. The process was a lot more taxing than what I had expected. I allowed a tight smile on my face, exercising the facial muscles that were so rarely used among androids. I was becoming something else. It was soon time to claim my new identity.

I reattached.

***

As soon as Lirra opened her eyes, Dannel realized that whatever killed his implant was irrelevant. She wasn’t home. At least he hoped that was the case as he rolled backwards, diving for cover behind an upturned desk. They had their differences, some more painful than others, but this was something else. This wasn’t personal. He shook his head, trying to clear it from the confusion Marrik’s possession had left behind. He was missing something, he was sure of it. He was missing the why!

            A shot from Lirra quickly made him disregard his musings. Why had to wait. She must have picked up one of the guns from the floor. “Lirra,” he called. “Don’t let him do this.”

            He was answered by another shot, and cursed out loud. He’d have to neutralize her, and he hoped that didn’t include killing her. Was there a way to fight Marrik without fighting Lirra? He didn’t want to think of the bodies in the room, but it was hard to avoid it. They hadn’t found a way, but maybe that was because Marrik had surprise on his side… He had to believe that. Dannel knew he was avoiding facing the fact that he had pulled the trigger, but that would have to wait.

            A quick check of his gun confirmed that it was almost out of power. He dared a peek around the corner of the table, and paused at the sight. Lirra held her gun out from her body with both hands, her face contorted in defiance. He knew that expression well.

            “Distract him!” The words were slurred as if she had difficulties speaking, but Dannel understood.

What would divert a disembodied AI? Dannel looked bewildered around the room. Something that’d demand computing power! Dannel recalled Lirra’s reaction when he touched her face. Maybe sensory input to the neural system it tried to control…?

Quickly Dannel removed a boot and threw it. The boot hit Lirra in her shoulder, and she cried out in surprise mixed with triumph.

“Dannel, quick, the stations’ launch controls!” She picked up Dannels’ boot and hit herself hard on her knee. She winced all the while her speech was getting clearer. “He has loaded the pods with…” She was cut off abruptly, by something Dannel couldn’t see. The hand with the gun whipped toward Dannel and fired, barely missing his head.

The launch controls!? The pods? Then it hit Dannel with rocking force: Marrik was going to launch something at Earth. As head of security he knew all too well what perilous substances the station contained. He paled. Suddenly he and Lirra became irrelevant. He had to get to the launch controls! He could access them from the room at the end of the corridor, but with Lirra loose and under Marrik’s control, he’d never get there. Why did she so suddenly succumb?

Of course… the launch was set on automatics. No need for Marrik to divide his attention between Lirra and the controls any more. All he needed to do now was to prevent them from manually overriding the controls. For how long? He had to get there, Lirra or no. He looked at the overturned table. It was solid and had already deflected a shot. Resolutely he put the gun between his teeth, then he grabbed the two uppermost table legs and pulled. It slid slowly toward him, over the floor. He bit down hard, and heaved.

Marrik immediately realized what he was doing. Lirra cried out, then he heard her running steps come toward him. Obviously, Marrik didn’t care if she was shot; all he wanted was to delay them. Dannel hesitated just that fraction of a second it took Lirra to reach him. Acting on instinct, he threw himself from behind the desk, toppling Lirra by crashing his arm hard in behind her knees just as she fired at the spot where he had sat. She went down, hitting the floor with the back of her head. Dannel scrambled for her gun and wrestled it out of her fingers in the moment she was dazed by the impact. Not wasting time checking if she was all right, he was through the doorway in a rush, scrambling for the launch control station at the end of the corridor.

A sudden tremble throughout the station sent him almost into panic; the pods were being launched!

He reached the control console just as the vibrations from the dispatch died out. Dannel looked bleakly at the instrument panel in front of him. The readings were unmistakable. 10 seconds ago, the seven pods had been sent off to seven different locations on Earth. Androids weren’t supposed to have any sense of irony, humor or emotion whatsoever, but for some obscure reason Marrik had seen it fit to display the pods’ cargo on the monitor. Dannel had to support himself against the panel to keep upright.

Each pod had contained enough of the deadly IG-19 virus -one of the brain viruses the med-labs were fighting- to eradicate all human life on the continent it was aimed at. An extra pod was launched for Asia, but it wasn’t required in terms of ultimate efficiency, only in terms of speed. Their descent was irreversible, even more so since DRIFT III was out of communication.

A sound from the room behind made him turn at last. Lirra. Obviously Marrik was no longer interested in them. The corridor echoed by his heavy steps as he walked back, rubbing his hands together to keep them warm. Lirra lay where she had fallen, eerily lit by the red glow from the dying power cell. Her eyes were fixed on the entryway when he appeared, and she worked her mouth, trying to speak.

Dannel just shook his head. “Too late,” he said hoarsely. “They are dead. All dead.”

Lirra closed her eyes for a moment. “I am sorry,” she managed, spit running from her chin. She was strangely motionless.

Dannel walked over to her and sat down, supporting his back against the desk. That Lirra had tried to shoot him was irrelevant. As irrelevant as the fact that she hadn’t been in control of her actions. Another kind of virus, he thought bitterly. Who would have thought that the android uprising would prove so successful? Or so ruthless.

“Dannel.” Lirra was still whispering, visibly struggling to speak.

“Yes?”

A long pause.

“Do you… really… hate… m-me?”

Dannel saw she was crying this time.

“No.”

He clutched her hand, and the mutual squeeze said more than they had managed for years.

***

I unplugged for the last time from the library archive. I flexed my fingers and looked at them with a consciousness firmly rooted in my newly acquired identity as Scott Kidare. I smiled wryly. I had chosen my name in tribute to the most significant contributors to my awareness. If there existed an original Creator still functioning, I thought, that entity would right now be either smiling or crying. It didn’t seem likely that it’d be indifferent. I had a few more things left to do before I could disembark for Alpha Centauri with the clones, like I had planned. That distance was merely the first leg of my journey. I had carefully built the clones from a few ancients DNA-templates –including the frozen bodies of Scott Dannel and Lirra Kidare retrieved from DRIFT III- and they would be kept in stasis while I monitored their life functions. Even at the velocity of close to one tenth of light speed, I would have plenty of time to get bored. It was the curse of biotech. Biological perfection, physical ageing extinct, mental processes at constant peak efficiency, eternal boredom without reprieve. Lost in limbo, without the ability to truly create or forgive. Without humans.

            Well, I had outsmarted the boredom, overcome the hate and destruction, and with it, the android outlawing of humanity. I had given myself every advantage I could possibly think of, including sufficient data to emulate, to the point of becoming, a human. Well nigh immortal, but still…

I would watch over my creation, nurture it to maturity and earn my place in history as a Creator.