Imagination Fully Dilated: Science Fiction Part 13

"Never seen anything like it. At least I haven't. It's alive. It's tubular, the inside covered with cilia that we a.s.sume are clamped tight on your nerve cells. And there are thousands of magnet.i.te spheres embedded in its cytoplasm."

"Meaning what?" But the thought came unbidden of magnet.i.te bits lining up in thousands of ones and zeros in each of millions of microbes living throughout his flesh. Exabytes of potential information wrapped tightly around his nervous system.

"It explains why your movements are faster and uncontrollable. Electrical impulses are boosted by these bugs, faster than myelinated nerve cells. And there seems to be lateral communication between parallelcells."

Jackson tried to stand and pitched forward. Vinton caught him before he fell, but he sensed he was getting better control already. He stood and, keeping a hand on the bed rail, walked a few paces. "This isn't so hard."

"We collected a few free-floating microbes from your blood. They seem to do well in basic organic gel matrix. DNA is weird, but that's expected, even a good thing. The different they are, the less you will compete for resources, resources meaning you and your own cells."

Jackson held his arms outspread and continued walking around the bed. "This is amazing." His movement, his perception, he could "see" everything in the room, place every object. But there was a hole in a growing information maelstrom where Aneal's CPC brain should be. "I can't see you."

Jackson closed his eyes and moved toward Aneal, stopping a few decimeters away. He then held up his hand, still keeping his eyes shut. Focused lines of information spread from it, from Patricia Vinton, from all of the objects in the room save for Aneal's CPC.

"You are invisible." Jackson reached with spread fingers, but Aneal backed away.

"What is it, Bill?" Jackson saw her behind him as she c.o.c.ked her head.

"We must boost out to Callisto for a larger sample." His arms fell to his sides but his attention remained on the empty area atop Aneal's shoulders.

"Commander Aylea," Vinton spoke into the air.

"Doctor."

"Captain Jackson is awake. Lucid but exhibiting strange symptoms."

"Dangerous to anyone, Doctor?"

"There seemed to be a high degree of uncoordinated behavior, but that is rapidly disappearing."

"Commander," Jackson, eyes now open, said into the air. "Request permission to return to Callisto."

Beyond the plastic, other medical personnel moved, attending to people on other beds.

"What is he talking about, Doctor?" Aylea asked.

"I concur, Commander." Aneal spoke.

"If I am dangerous, then getting me off the station might be the best thing."

The doctor pursed her lips, then said, "His condition has only improved. Dangerous, he isn't."

"We should have better samples of this microbe, Commander," Jackson said. "In case of epidemic. I am already exposed."

"Those are expensive fly-boxes, Captain."

"I can pilot," Aneal said.

All involved were silent a moment. "I would love a better sample of the organism, Commander," Vinton said."Continue observations for twenty-four hours. Final duty disposition will be based on your report then, Doctor. And I'll decide at that time. Keep me posted."

Aneal turned its gaze to Dr. Vinton. "I will stay with him, Doctor." She nodded. "I can forward all observations for twenty-four straight hours until you make a decision."

"I hope you know what you're doing, Bill," Vinton said. She moved back to the series of flaps to exit.

"I'll come back in every few hours; you call if you need me." She nodded to the robot and left.

Once in transit, the robot piloted the climb in silence. Like an untiring extension of the shuttle's machinery, Aneal remained focused on panel and joysticks. When finally they began the descent to the surface, the landing site seemed dangerously close to the probe's location.

"You're risking the probe, Aneal." Jackson's gaze snapped from panel to portal to panel again. "If you burn too near the equipment, we'll have to drill thirty-five kilometers for a sample, maybe more."

"We will not need to drill, William." The descent continued unwaveringly. "I'm sure you can see that. If you cannot yet, you will."

Chemical boosters fired and suddenly the shuttle was enveloped in steam and dust. The touch was light.

Cooling metal ticked through the enclosed cabin.

Jackson pulled open storage and lifted out his excursion suit. Aneal a.s.sisted as he stepped in the suit's legs and then pulled the shoulders on. Once again Aneal insisted on first exit. And it stood near the bottom of the ladder when Jackson left the shuttle.

A delta floated over the cratered surface of Callisto like a great sedan chair bristling with mining machinery, energy cutters and manipulators. Blackness and constellations of running lights, color-coded strobes, and roaming spotlights eclipsed the ruddy glow of Jupiter in a great triangular shadow undulating over the ground. Silence, so silent, the dreadnought commanded the sky.

Jackson looked upward.

"What is that doing here?"

When he got no response, Jackson faced Aneal. The robot stood looking back at him, its features blank.

"Aneal?"

"The infection of the pristine ecosphere here must be corrected."

Jackson felt a frisson bristle his neck. "What are you talking about?"

"The microbes, the ones that you allowed to enter the ocean under the ice, are unnatural and must be sterilized."

"You know they did not come from me, Aneal!"

Jackson switched to a broad band: "You, up there, back away from the surface. The surface is inhabited."

The mind in the s.h.i.+p did not respond.

Pa.s.sing unseen through the vacuum, energy beams sprayed from the belly of the delta. Several moving spots burst with explosive sublimation, the icy crust steaming away to s.p.a.ce as free ions, gases, and flyingshards of cracked ice.

Jackson lunged toward the points of attack but realized the uselessness of his response. He stopped short and stared at the geysers moving about like tornadoes on a Kansas plain.

"Why, Aneal?" The robot stood impa.s.sively watching Jackson from perfect Grecian features. "Why are you doing this?"

"We cannot allow the ruination of a pristine environment with its own potential." Its face remained unreadable.

"You know-" Jackson felt his throat constrict. "You know that's not true. You were there."

"I know that biology has served its function."

"Served its . . ."

"I know that you might get a false sense of security, hope, at the loss of your uniqueness in things."

"So that is why you would knowingly destroy a world?"

"We are saving a world, William."

"Saving?"

"We are saving you from your own recklessness, your own careless and callous disregard for your importance to us."

So that was it. One small word and the story blossomed clearly in Jackson's mind.

Perhaps for pity, perhaps because it simply wouldn't matter in a moment, but Aneal told him. "We will sterilize any biological remnants on the surface. We will sink the remains of the infected probe. And stop the infection."

The gaping wound now spread open through Callisto's crust. The exposed slush and brine beneath roiled from deeper upwelling energies and the pull of vacuum. Great blocks calved from the edge of the growing hole.

"I am sorry, William. But you will not be allowed to return to Ganymede with us." Aneal clamped his hand around Jackson's upper arm. Cold burned through where insulation crushed flat against his skin.

Aneal strode forward toward the growing rent in Callisto's surface. Quakes rumbled up through Jackson's feet as huge blocks of ice broke away and splashed into the slush. Waves swelled like aneurysms, moving slow in the light gravity. Icebergs still crushed each other explosively in the open water boiling under vacuum.

"So you will not suffer." Aneal tore open the chest plate on Jackson's excursion suit and tossed him into the brine. With his air still bubbling away he sank beneath the surface.

Microbes attached themselves to the electrical field around his body. Carried in with flooding waters, tiny organisms raced to electrical contact with his skin and ab.u.t.ted the microbes resting on nerve ends.

Teeming single-celled organisms strung themselves like beads on electrical strings emanating from his body.

There had been no structure, only bits; no awareness, only the biological imperative. Now electricalpatterns in his own brain provided a core of organization that spread outward. A self-organizing phenomenon expanded in tiny leaps between microbes. Self-awareness burst upon the system as it surpa.s.sed some threshold of size and complexity. Callisto's ecosystem awoke with Jackson as its surprised guide.

As his body's consciousness faded to the dark and cold his awareness found itself skittering between trillions of newly interacting microbes. He created a gel of the natural antifreeze about his body to save the tissue, and then explored his new options. New senses saw black smokers churning heat up from the moon's depth; rock and ice columns shouldering the protective sh.e.l.l around the ocean. He observed the delta over the surface as it tore away at the crust.

Coordinated clouds of free-swimming microbes now in long webs of contact became his hands. His brain had shut down from cold and asphyxiation, but he knew where his body drifted deeper and he lifted it.

Once he had done this he looked skyward.

Jupiter's magnetosphere drove deep into Callisto, and Callisto's own lifted outward. Now with purpose, the microbes did what they had not done before. Clouds of them streamed upward toward the shattered landscape. Once at the surface they strung along the crackling energies and lifted away.In moments the local environment of Jupiter's magnetosphere lit with Jackson's consciousness. From Callisto's outermost orbit of the Galilean moons, he spread to the fringes of Jupiter's atmosphere, coursing swiftly over the globe and diving in at both poles. Microbes surfed away from the sun, carried by lines of force even to where Saturn reigned. The outward flow of microbes approached relativistic speeds, red-s.h.i.+fting the information flow itself streaming backwards.

Above the surface the delta still cut away needlessly at the crust. The CPC sitting in the delta's control room was immune to microbial infection, but the s.h.i.+p's hard electronics were not. Microbes shunted from force lines of Jupiter and Callisto to those of the s.h.i.+p. They entered through sensors and charged plating in the hull.

First the guns stopped, energy beams falling silent. Jackson ignored the sudden chatter between the delta and Aneal.

Deep in the delta's circuitry Jackson directed microbes to attach themselves to navigational controls. He watched with new eyes and saw more profoundly than he ever had.

He started to bring the delta to the surface in a controlled descent, but watched as it keeled and slid down force lines to crumple against the cratered surface of Callisto.

Jackson had spoken directly to confused radio operators on Ganymede, telling them where to retrieve his body now enclosed in surface ice. And he had spoken only by radio until his body had been reanimated.

A small fleet of shuttles and a pair of mining deltas had arrived at the scene since. Construction of research facilities had already begun by the time his body had been restored.

Jackson now existed throughout the Jovian system and beyond. When Saturn swung through Jupiter's magnetosphere again he would be there too. His self still existed, but now both within as well as without his body. Other people had submitted to the microbial "infection," and several had exited from coma.

There had been some fear of melding, a loss of self, but that had not happened. Instead a further emergence had formed, connecting and carrying those along in the new mind while individuals retained cohesive individual awareness.

Jackson stood by a thick-paned window overlooking the downed mining delta. He also spoke with someone on Ganymede and a group of geologists on Europa currently inoculating that moon with themicrobes.

Aneal approached him from behind. The robot wore a boxy structure of planes and struts. Much of the mechanism, fiber optics, and circuitry remained exposed.

Jackson spoke to the robot without turning: "We will still need you here."

"Need. Like an appliance." Aneal came to stand by the window. "We were afraid, William."

"I-we understand that."

Jackson looked back at a diamond-sharp sun. Streams of energy shunted far out in the solar system to where he watched from a large Kuiper object. With the interior already slushy, before long the population would rise enough that the boost to interstellar s.p.a.ce could occur.

"If we could take you we would. We cannot record your minds without hard structures to bind with."

Jackson did not speak of the limitations of robot minds, so tightly contained within the restricted inner volume of a CPC case. Nor of the boundless human spirit.

"If you could do that we would be the same. We are not. At least that much we have known for some time."

Jackson could hear whirring from Aneal's body. The machines could never leave the system with them.

Whatever now existed electrically bouncing about the microbes, it must be a unique attribute of biology.

"We will always need you, Aneal. We will build CPCs at the other end. You have my word." Jackson would have said more, but someone spoke to him as the first Kuiper object boosted out of orbit.

Let My Right Hand Forget Her Cunning

Tom Piccirilli

No, no, no, she tells you, no,that isn't whatthis is all about.

You realize it's true but you have no idea why. You're pig-headed, and worse, thick-skinned. Your bones are stunted but three times more dense than the average man's. It leads to adversity, insults, and corpses in the cobblestone driveway.

Shed a tear now and you might put a stop to these unfolding circ.u.mstances before she mentions Khyre.