No Shelter Among the Stars

Chapter 14- A Pilot

Gypsy followed Tasla down another short hallway. She traced a carved line in the elaborate, shipwide, pattern. Her gloved finger slid across words written in a language she didn't recognize and a black handprint, she stopped and looked a the bizarre markings. She placed her own hand within the larger handprint. What was its significance? A few steps ahead, Tasla stopped and looked back at her.

She lifted her hand from the handprint. Then she walked up behind him, and he started walking again.

"It was a signature," said Tasla quietly. He reached up and massaged his temple.

"Signature?" said Gypsy.

"His handprint. It marked his identity...to the spirits," said Tasla, he waved his hand as if indicating to invisible entities in the air. They stopped at a door. Noise vibrated from the room behind it. He banged on the door and it slid open. A rhythmic sound, like metal tapping against metal and revving engines echoed through the hallway.

Gypsy followed Tasla into a dimly lit room of exposed wiring and improvised machinery. A chaos of torn up and rebuilt power and data coils surrounded a pale, hairy man sitting amongst a collection of colored vidscreens. She had the distinct feeling of stepping inside the nest of some kind of biomechanical spider.

She stepped over some large cables that snaked across the floor and up the walls. More cabling hung like vines from the ceiling. Near the man in his nest of glowing monitors was a raised plinth. As soon as it caught her eye, she approached it, looking through the steelglass to the white brainlike biological super computer sealed inside. Static crackled around it as she raised a hand to hesitantly touch the torn up and rewired sides of the plinth, and the letters, B.R.A.I.N.

"You really did it," she said, bending to look closer. "I thought you might have just torn the whole unit out somehow." She traced a panel that had been crudely ripped open and the mismatch of mechanical parts extending out and humming with energy. She looked over at the seated man, Spiro. For the first time, she saw that his legs were all but gone, encased in a tank of semitranslucent fluid.

"We wouldn't have had time to tear it out," said Spiro, stroking his beard. "And it wouldn't have worked anyway, the Brain is hardwired into every system in the ship. Some parts of the network, like the entirety of the life support systems, we would have had to practically rebuild from scratch."

"Then how?" asked Gypsy, involuntarily glancing at the crystalline bones with strings of flesh in Spiro's tank. Tasla nodded at Spiro, then he turned and walked out.

Spiro slid his hand over the control panel across his desk. One of the screens in his nest flickered and she saw the white brainlike core that rested in the rewired plinth. On the screen the white shell vanished and she saw the synthetic organism inside it. A mass of gray fleshlike mechanics and tiny silicon veins. As she watched, the screen flickered again and she saw the left side was covered some kind of greenish fungi, and a collection of needles with thin tubes of blue and red fluid. She took a step to look closer. Another part of the organism looked like it had been sliced off and reattatched with translucent stitching.

"How is it still functioning?" murmured Gypsy. She lifted a hand, almost touching the screen. She could see quick flashes of light from the biocomputer's neural network, some parts were dark, some flashes were different colors.

Spiro shrugged, he said, "It's constantly suffering something akin to a psychotic break, but through some trial and error I've broken down its fundamental judgement and oversight conditioning. The trick was leaving the rest of its functions unaffected."

"This looks incredibly unstable," said Gypsy.

"Depends on the function," said Spiro.

Gypsy slid her hand over the screen, magnifying the parts infested by the greenish fungi. "What is this?" she asked.