Bin swiveled quickly…
… to see something very large, looming in the dormer opening. A slithering, snakelike shape-wider than a man-that wriggled upward, its head almost filling the slanted entrance. Robotic eyes began to glow, illuminating every crevice of the cavity. Evidently a powerful fighting machine, it seemed to examine both of them-not only with light, but also pulses of sonar that frisked their bodies like ungentle fingers of sound.
A sharp spotlight swerved suddenly downward, at the soldier’s pistol sidearm, lying on a broken chunk of wood. Abruptly, a whiplike tendril emerged from its mouth and snatched up the weapon, swallowing it before either human could move. Then a booming voice filled the little hiding place, made only slightly murky by the watery echo chamber.
“Come, Peng Xiang Bin,” the mechanical creature commanded, as it began to open its jaw wide. “Now. And bring the artifact.”
Bin realized, with some horror, that the serpent-android wanted him to crawl inside, through that gaping mouth. He cringed back.
Perhaps sensing his terrified reluctance, the robot spoke again.
“It is safe to do this… and unsafe to refuse.”
A threat, then. Bin had plenty of experience with those. Familiarity actually calmed his nerves a little, allowing him to examine the odds.
Cornered, in a rickety sunken attic, with just a few minutes of air left, facing some sort of ai superbot… um do I have any choice?
Yet, he could not move forward. So the serpaint made things clear. From one eye, it fired a narrow, brilliant beam of light that left steam bubbles along its path. By the time Bin turned to look, it had finished burning a pair of characters into one of the old roof beams of the Pulupauan royal palace.
CHOOSE LIFE.
He thought furiously. No doubt the machine could simply take the worldstone away from him, with one of those tendril things. So… it must realize… or its owners must… that the worldstone required Bin’s touch in order to come alight. Still, he extended a finger and palm-wrote for the creature to see.
I am needed. It speaks only to me.
The serpent-machine had no trouble parsing Bin’s handwriting. It nodded.
“Agreed. Cooperation will be rewarded. But if I must take only the artifact, we will find a way.”
A way. Bin could well imagine: Offer the stone new candidates for the role of chosen one. As many as it took. With Bin no longer alive.
“Come now. There is little time.”
Bin almost dug in his heels, right then. He was sick of people and things saying that to him. Only, after a moment’s stubborn fury, he managed to quash both irritation and fear. Lugging the heavy satchel, he shuffled a step closer, and another.
Then he glanced back at the Chinese special forces soldier, who was still staring, wide-eyed. There was something in her expression, a pleading look.
Bin stood in front of the sea monster. He put the satchel down in the muck and raised both hands to write on his palm again.
What about her?
The robot considered for a moment, then answered.
“She knows nothing of my mission, owners, or destination. She may live.”
Quiet thanks filled the woman’s eyes, fortifying Bin and putting firmness in his step, as he drew close. Though he could not keep from trembling, as he lifted the satchel containing the worldstone and laid it inside that gaping maw. Then, without its weight holding him down, he rotated horizontal and turned his body to start worming inside.
It was the second strangest act he ever performed.
The very strangest-and it puzzled him for the next hour-was what he did while crawling inside… when he slipped one hand under his belt, drawing out something filmy and almost translucent, tossing it backward to flutter out of the sea serpent’s jaw, drifting below where its eyes could see… but where the soldier could not help but notice.
Yang Shenxiu gave it to me to protect from the attackers, and now I’m giving it to one of them. Does that even make sense?
Yet, somehow, it felt right.
The doctors want me to exercise. To inhabit my new body and get used to its senses. But I’m reluctant.
Not because it hurts. It does, often intensely. But that’s not my reason. Pain doesn’t have the reflex power it used to possess. I’ve been through so much already, it’s become a familiar companion. I tend to view it as… data.
Was that a terribly robotic thing for me to say? In keeping with the electromechanical fingers that I flex and the gel-eyes that track from the same sockets in my head, where once stared the brown irises I was born with? But no, I’m not revolted by any of that. Nor even to find myself now a compact cylinder, riding around on cyborg seg-wheels. The clanking-whirring aspect isn’t as bad as expected.
I admit I was surprised, the first time I looked through these eyes at my new, mechanical hand, and saw what it was holding. That forty-thousand-year-old stone tool-core that Akinobu Sato gave me, back in Albuquerque. For some time I could only stare, as my new fingers flexed, squeezing the ancient artifact as-involuntarily-my other new hand came over to caress it. The touch sensations were a creepy mix of familiar and bizarre.
Oh, it was good to feel an object again, though the sensory web feeding signals to my brain triggered accompanying glitters of synesthesia. Sparks seemed to follow, each time I stroked the ancient facets where some pre-ancient engineer once fashioned blades, using the highest tech of his age. Turning the stone over, I heard tinkling sounds, like distant, fairy bells, ill tuned, smelling of both soot and time.
“Why did you give me this?” I asked the docs, who answered, in some puzzlement, that I had asked for the Pleistocene stone relic. Out of some unconscious sense of irony, perhaps? A juxtaposition of tool use, from man’s beginning and his end, like in that Kubrick film?
I had no memory of the request.
Oh, this whole process is fascinating. And I’m not ungrateful! Dr. Turgeson asked me, today, if I was glad I chose to participate in these experiments, rather than take the other option-
– diving into cryonic deep freeze, hoping to waken in a more advanced age with better medicine.
Well, why not hang around here and now, when I’m appreciated and fully capable of staying in the game? With vision and mobility, I may yet have a career, dashing about the world, interviewing celebrighties who won’t be able to say no to the famous hero-reporter in her hard-cased segsuit and never-blinking cyberais. Anyway, who wants to bet on cryonic resurrection in some rosy future… with the artifact aliens saying there’s no tomorrow?
That’s not the problem. Nor was I much upset the time Wesley came to visit, accompanied by his new wife. Their offer to do a group-thing was flattering. (My ovaries are one part of me that survived the explosion intact.) But I wasn’t interested.
No. My complaint is just this. That I look forward to down time. To turning off the distracting new body and surrounding world. To dive back into the cyber belowverse for twenty hours out of twenty-four. Joining you, my real friends. My smart-mob comrades. My fellow citizen-soldiers. My hounds, sniffing and correlating and baying after the truth!
So, what do you have for Mama today? What happened during the brief but tedious time I had to be away, dealing with the physical world?
57.
The Basque Chimera.
Mei Ling knew the words, of course. Everyone on Earth had heard the legend: How a brave maiden offered up her womb to carry the seed of a reborn race. A type of human that had gone extinct tens of thousands of years ago.