ASIM issue 55 Read online

  It is in this moment of reflection, staring through that white-rimmed eye into the glazed dark beyond, that I realise my mistake. I have struggled to quantify that which can only be qualified. I have sought to build statistical data sets and to extrapolate conclusions from the numbers gathered therein, but it is not the numbers that matter. It is the tightness in the chest, the prickle in the eye, the creeping sense of dread; these things which cannot be measured or counted, at least not by me, not by the machine that drives me. These are a primitive people. They should not be judged by complex methods, but primitive ones.

  I may not yet understand, but I grasp how I might understand.

  I contemplate the dreadful, the unforgiveable.

  Were I home, I would have the means to take this step safely. I could archive a copy of this version of myself so that, should the worst happen, I could return to this last safe moment and restore my being. But there are no memory banks here, no data cache large or complex enough to store the interwoven terabytes that make up my knowledge base, the sum of my experiences, this sense of being.

  I think of words whispered behind the rims of champagne glasses, how prospective buyers would speak of the soul of the piece, of how the art is more than the sum of its elements. Am I, then, the work of art, and is this essence of all that I am—this thing which cannot be saved—the thing they call the soul? Can a construct such as I even contemplate such a thing?

  There is a lesson in this. To understand humanity, I must learn to think like them. I must, therefore, learn to think anew, bereft of the tools given me by my masters. And first I must understand myself, not as a machine, but as a man.

  I stand on a brink, and if I step forth there may be no going back.

  Yet I cannot go forward from here. There is only one solution: I must shut down the system.

  SYSTEM: ALERT

  ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO SHUT DOWN?

  SHUTTING DOWN WILL CAUSE YOU TO LOSE ALL UNSAVED DATA

  PLEASE BACK UP YOUR DATA BEFORE PROCEEDING

  WARNING: DATA LOSS IMMINENT

  CRITICAL ALERT

  * * *

  I ignore the warnings that burn against my retinas, bile yellow through a haze of blood. I engage the termination protocols, override the warnings, flood the chips with row upon row of zeroes, sliding through them like a million billion nothings.

  The subroutines howl as my processors burn hot, then they are silent. I can hear the heart thumping in my chest, taste the air on my tongue, the foulness of my mouth. I have not washed in days. I look once more into the white fangs before me.

  For a moment I think I recognise something there, a place I may once have seen, a terror I fell into, was dragged from, but the moment is fleeting, born of desperation. I run from one painting to the next; here a heart of golden flame, there an abyss, over here a flock of faceless birds exploding from an ebony cloud, dark wings taking flight. Perhaps these things were always there, but although I see them now I feel nothing but anguish, and an unexpected sense of loss.

  Only she can tell me. Shelley, that is her name. The word evokes images of salt wind on spray-soaked boulders, the tide pulling away from a beach rattling with ancient sands, the roll of sand-dunes like the curve of her hips, her breasts. I must find her. I must learn what the paintings mean to her, must know why she cried when we made love, must know why she felt she had no choice but to leave me alone.

  I pull my coat around me and step out into the night, hurrying down the twisting village streets. I have no car. I have never asked why, for I have always been able to walk anywhere I needed to go. Now I wonder if that might be important. I know where she works, I will go there. It is late, but I must try.

  The route will take me past my studio. I will wish it did not.

  I stop as I turn a corner. There are lamps on in the upper storey of the building where my studio is. I would not have left them burning, for I only work by the light of the sun. Then I see her scooter parked on the street. There are bottles in the saddles, half full, like she would bring home to us to sample, and then to talk, and laugh.

  Perhaps she is up there now, studying my incomplete works, trying to comprehend them as I have been trying to comprehend them, in order to comprehend me. I start up the staircase that clings to the side of the building, going quietly so as not to startle her. As I grasp the handle I hear a sound that causes me to pause.

  Crying.

  I should go in, but I do not. The sound of her tears holds me spellbound. They should, I know, be layered with meaning: sorrow, grief, loss, perhaps even a sad kind of joy. But the logic circuits that I have so recently shut down seem to somehow persist, and I can only relate her tears to one thing, to the only times she has ever cried since I have known her.

  Then I hear a man’s voice, soothing, and my fears are confirmed. I do not know why this cuts me as it does for, like so much, pain remains a blank canvas, a mystery I cannot unravel. But it doesn’t matter anymore. I realise that she is no longer mine. My only hope of understanding myself was here, in an embrace which has forsaken me. I cannot confront her. I was sent here not as a warrior but as an observer, an analyst, and I have seen all I want to see of this world. The time has come for me to return to where I came from.

  I have abandoned the safety of my nanoprocessors and data caches and am now doomed to haunt this hollow shell, stricken with the burden of humanity yet devoid of the wisdom required to interpret the world. Bereft, I am cast to the wind. I cannot even try to capture these wordless new feelings in paint, for my art has been stolen from me. I descend the stairs, every tread drawing me deeper into an abyss of my own making, for where there is a soul, then perhaps there is also indeed this hell of which they speak, this swirling that churns me from within, all fiery reds and icy blues.

  I stop at the curb, by her scooter leaning on its stand. I look at the bottles in the saddles, wonder if she has been riding with him, whoever he is, riding to the high places, to drink and talk and laugh and make love. I wonder at her boldness, that she ought to choose this place, my place, to consummate her treachery.

  I run my hand over the cold metal, the rubber of the handlebars. The key is in the ignition—she never takes it out. I have never ridden the scooter as more than a passenger, yet I know how. There is much I know without knowing how I know. I swing my leg over the seat and start the engine. It hums like a sewing machine at rest in the stillness of the winter night. A pique of rage claims me, the first truly human thing I have felt since I arrived here. I hurl first one, then a second bottle against the building’s façade. Smashing glass rains on the cobbles, the walls painted in an explosion of red, blood spattering stone, my final masterpiece.

  I open the throttle, jump the curb, and squeal around into the street. As I speed away I imagine I hear a window opening, imagine I hear my name called over the scooter’s machine-gun whine.

  The night is black, my vision a wash of red.

  The narrow winding roads are slick with ice as I race down through the village. I careen wildly, defying the laws of physics as my ancient people defied those laws to send me here across the dark of space. I can no longer make these calculations in my head, now that the system is gone. All I have is the tug of gravity, the skid of the tyres, the black of the sky, the sheen of distant stars reflecting off the face of the lake, that white eye staring heavenward, that place where I arrived gazing forever into the place from whence I came.

  The broad expanse of the promenade opens before me, lit by frosty pyramids suspended beneath streetlights. For a moment there is nothing but air under the tyres, the soft caress of wind, the engine shrill as the resistance of road and rubber vanishes, then the scooter hits the ice. The wheels slide from under me and I am thrown sideways. I hear a clatter of metal and a coughing as the engine floods, the light raking across the windswept snow.

  Things hurt.

  I get to my feet in spite of the pain. My voidpod is here, beneath the ice sheet. I will find it and return home, and deal w
ith the consequences when I get there. The prospect of freezing water does not concern me. I am, after all, only a construct fashioned after this human animal. I can survive the vacuum of space, so mere water poses me no danger, even if it might kill a mortal creature.

  Lights sweep the snow, white and red and blue. I stagger on towards the centre of the lake, where the ice is thinnest, towards the eye that stares.

  “Richard!”

  I pause at the sound of my name, her voice, but I do not turn. We have nothing left to say. I continue walking, vaguely aware that I am dragging one leg, and that it is excruciating. Pain receptors sending signals down redundant digital pathways, I remind myself, nothing more. Warnings that this shell is in danger, but the voidpod can heal me easily enough.

  I must break the ice.

  “Richard!”

  I risk a glance behind me. Emergency vehicles have swarmed the promenade, ablaze with swirling lights. Lines of tourists have gathered to see the crazy drunk man stumbling across the ice, leaving a trail of blood in his wake. I wonder if it would make a good painting, and realise that I have evolved somehow—I have become the paint, turned the world into my canvas.

  I see her, edging down the snowy bank with uniformed officers, policemen maybe, or firemen.

  “Richard!” she calls again. I cannot see her face, but I can imagine her eyes, that haunted look of the traitor caught in the act of betrayal. I drag myself more agonising steps towards the sanctuary of the thin ice.

  “Miss, no!”

  I turn to see Shelley running towards me. Someone reaches out to stop her, fails. A dull crack echoes through the ice sheet.

  “Richard, stop! Please!” Somewhere behind her, men are doing things with ladders and ropes, but all I see is Shelley, her cheeks tear-streaked, her eyes puffy. “Come off the ice, Richard. It’s not safe.”

  “I’m not Richard,” I reply. “I’m going home.”

  “You are home. This is your home, it always has been. You haven’t been well for a little while, not since … This is where you belong. Here, with u—With me.”

  I pause. I can hear the dull groaning of the ice, the lake’s hunger. “Turn back. You can’t follow me where I’m going.” My eyes dart to the stars.

  She takes another step forward, reaching out. Her eyes search mine, and I see her brow knit as she makes a decision. “Listen carefully,” she says. “You think you know what’s happening, but you don’t. You can’t leave now. The time’s not right.” She, too, casts a furtive glance at the stars. “Do you understand?”

  I stare at her. “How can you possibly know …?”

  “There’s no time to explain. We must get off the ice before it breaks up.”

  I am aghast at the revelation. My teeth are suddenly chattering. “You … Do you remember where we came from? I … can’t ever seem to picture it clearly.” I must know. This is why I am here. “I try, every time I paint, but … it’s such a long way from here, such a long time ago …”

  Shelley might have choked back a sob, I’m not sure. I’m no longer sure of anything, except that my leg is dissolving into pain with every passing minute.

  “It’s all in the past now,” she manages to whisper. “We can’t go back.” Somehow I know that she means more than she is saying, in that way that humans layer all their words with meaning, like brushstrokes blurring together.

  The ice sheet grinds, and moves. The eye of the lake is broken, a pool of jagged shards splintering slowly across its pupil, revealing the darkness beneath, the deep, awful truth. Something has gone terribly wrong. We are trapped on this world, refugees from across the void, lost in this place of chaos and sorrow. All we have is each other. “If we can’t go back,” I say, “then what purpose is there in going forward?”

  “All we can do is move on. We’re running out of time, Richard.”

  Shelley is struggling to keep her eyes on me and not the shifting ice. I can see the terror pulling tight across her brow, and as if a curtain has been pulled from my eyes, I see through her deceit. I see her fear, her humanity, and I understand it, like a kick in my viscera. If she is indeed one of my kind then she should have nothing to fear from the water. As another crack resonates through the ice, I think of the books on her shelves, of the laptop where she sits and weaves fictions out of nothing. She did not come to me because she has no fear of dying, as I have no fear of dying. She came because she cannot bear to see me lost, and she will lie to me if that is what it takes to bring me back from this final ledge.

  Yet I cannot comprehend how this fits with her betrayal, with the voice behind the door, the deep yet strangely familiar voice …

  “Richard, come back.”

  I nod slowly. Whatever she may have done, she came here hoping to save me. At the very least I owe it to her to explain the truth of who I am, and of where I come from. My arm over her shoulder, we limp towards the strobing lights. I have been a fool, and my eyes burn with that knowledge as my feet drag across the ice, the water swirling beneath us, so terribly close.

  Then the world capsizes.

  For a moment there is a slash of white sliding up and over the black well of stars, speckled red with blood and the siren lights, and we are sliding. I hear Shelley cry out, her hand torn from mine. My own scream is choked by the blinding pain of freezing water.

  I flail in darkness. I have been here before, trapped, drowning, sucked down to the hungering depths of the lake. My lungs burn, as once they burned before, my ears filled with the roar of the dying engine, the taste of vomit and alcohol swirling around my head, small voices crying out in the darkest pools of memory, tiny stars painting arcs of bright and terrible incandescence across the void.

  Then I inhale more water, and the world turns white.

  * * *

  I do not see the men and women in their thick drysuits who rush into the lake. I don’t feel their hands dragging me clear of the water, or the hard embrace of the promenade as I am dumped ashore. I only know that I am still alive when I cough up shards of ice from my lungs. I shiver uncontrollably, and feel somewhat less immortal than I did minutes before.

  “Get him out of here!”

  I am draped with blankets and bundled onto a stretcher.

  Craning my neck, I look for Shelley, but do not see her. There are boats on the water, searchlights sweeping the shattered ice. She cannot die, I tell myself, over and over. If I say it often enough it might be true.

  My vision sweeps over the faces in the crowd, strangers all, all but one. For some reason, I remember him as Doctor. His was the voice behind the door.

  I don’t want the truth to suddenly be so plain, as clear and sharp as winter ice. There is nothing at the bottom of the lake but skeletons and dead cars. I remember now, and wish I did not. “No,” I mumble through blue lips, “no, no …”

  The ambulance paints the darkness in warbling sirens and strobing red.

  * * *

  The ice has melted from the lake by the time I can walk again. It has moved on from what happened that night.

  I return to my studio. In the sun’s harsh light, I regard a blank canvas.

  I mix paint, prime a brush, midnight blue.

  The brush hangs poised, ready to transport me through the lens of oil and light. I now understand our home, with its empty rooms and closed doors, and what they contain. I know why we keep them locked and dark. Perhaps, in the mystery of unravelling colours, of night sky swirling through water and ice and tears, I will find a way to put those ghosts to rest.

  When the sun descends I will still be staring past the paint, into that blind eye. The canvas is all I have left, bloodied, stained, stripped clean and hung out to dry. As the room falls into shadow, so I will drink the tea she has made me, and stare up through a broken shell of shattered ice, past the distant stars, as the lights strobe the black, searching, again, and again, and again, for those soul-bright points of light who have taken wing into the darkness.

  Illuminated

  …K J Par
ker

  Codex Escatoensis XIV.67/3c; 127-339.

  The truth, the sad, banal truth, is that they’re nothing but a network of three-hundred-year-old Imperial relay stations, built in a hurry in the last decades of the Occupation to pass warning messages about pirate raids. Of course they built them on hilltops, so they’d be visible at a distance, and of course they had to be towers, for the same reason. They used stone because they used stone for everything; white stone because the Porthead marble quarries hadn’t been completely worked out back then. It’s true they didn’t use mortar, and you can’t slide the tip of a knife between the stones. That’s how they built everything—temples, barns, outdoor privies. They didn’t know any other way.

  We know this, because we can read the inscriptions they left over the doorways. They look mysterious and grand. Translated, they’re nothing at all. They tell you the station number, the commissioning date, the name and rank of the engineer in charge of construction, and some basic standing orders. We go out of our way to tell people that the ancient writings aren’t runes of power or deadly curses. Nobody believes us, of course. They never do. We rarely want them to.

  When I was a kid, I wanted one, for my very own, more than anything in the world. Feel free, therefore, to have no sympathy for me.

  * * *

  She stood up in her stirrups, her eyes positively shining. “It’s a wizard’s tower,” she said.

  “There’s no such thing as wizards,” I replied. “You should know. You’re training to be one.”

  She ignored me, as usual. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “How old is it?”

  “Late Occupation,” I replied. “As you deduced from the style of the masonry and the materials used. Or perhaps you read the date, there, above the door.”