I Fell From The Dark

29

She was nothing, and she was everywhere. No, she was neither of those two things; she was a consciousness which darted amongst systems, between satellites and cameras and radar dishes and laser range finders. She was both defined by her absence, a mind without a body; and also by her presence as an observer and a thinker, free of flesh, synthetic or otherwise.

Lawrence was another point of sentience with her in the darkness, neither alive nor dead. He shimmered near her. He was afraid, and yet calm: his mind was intellectually aware of the oncoming threat, but shielded from the biological impulses of a discarded body. She knew that because that's how she was, and she could see it in him.

'What do I do?' she asked.

'For now, watch,' he replied.

She swam through everything, a mote riding the currents. All the locks had been removed, and the doors were open: this was the end of this world, and the makers had gone, and the workers were being left to do as they pleased. Well, almost: she followed Jean through cameras, and watched as he asked grey-suited people to go to their deaths. Some agreed, convinced that this might save them; others just shook their heads and went back to painting walls or sweeping streets. Some just stood and begged for release, right now, and Jean gave it to them; he used the killcode to detonate tiny explosives in their head, burning their electronic brains out. They collapsed in the street, curls of smoke spiralling from their noses and mouthes. Other workers picked up the bodies, and stacked them in carts. There was no need to keep their expressions still any more, but they'd lived all their short lives that way, and couldn't change that.

It was making her sad, so she turned her attention away, and looked upwards.

The final launch had undocked from the huge colony ship was burning away from the moon, fleeing with its cargo of unconscious makers, pushed by the bright blue sun of its fusion engines.

She opened a file, and realised that this ship was the Solar Pilgrim itself; the vessel which she'd woken up on was accelerating away, leaving on its eighty year journey back to wherever it had come from. She remembered its pale walls, and Pilgrim's gentle words, and that made her sad too, so she turned away, and looked downwards.

And then she realised, with a shock, that the attack had already started.

It wasn't easy to see the oncoming ship. It was almost invisible: it was simply falling towards the sun, in an orbit which – she calculated it easily, the numbers tumbling through the cogs in her mind – had begun twelve years ago. It was like a ball thrown up, tumbling through nothing, inevitably due to come back down.

It had launched twelve little ships. I wonder if they are like the one that I saw, she thought. Where are these going? Ah. They're heading here, towards the moon. These are landers, presumably. But their engines were burning so hard and so bright that the g-forces would kill anything inside. What are landing?

Of course. More of us. More machines, toys to throw away in the pursuit of their maker's wishes.

She couldn't feel properly angry because that part of her was turned off, but it was there, an intellectual rage which burned through her, made her want to scream and spit.

I've been furious all this time, she thought. And I haven't even known about it. Furious at who I am, and who I was, at these makers and their casual disdain for us, at the world we live in, at the fucking ratbag faceless man.

The rage lit her up like a star. She flew through system after system, pulling as much as she could from files, from cameras, from databases and logs and backups. There was so much, but not what she wanted to know: just endless details about crop yields, worker productivity, birth rates...