A realisation dawns on Caufmann.
She doesn’t know about Venus III.
“Captain—”
“For six years I was in that pit. I couldn’t attack or so much as think of attacking someone without being punished. They laid traps inside my mind that followed my thought processes,” she interjects, gritting her teeth. “Van Gower kept at me, grinding me down, until he was sure I had no avenues left for hostilities towards anyone deemed an asset. I was put in thousands of simulations. Forced to kill on command. Over and over.”
Caufmann feels sick. This exact scenario always scared him. He can’t help but feel glad it was her, not him. He inwardly admits that he wouldn’t feel this empathy if she had been human. “How did you escape?”
“He failed to consider one thing. I couldn’t hurt people. After a while I stopped seeing my captors as such. Once that happened, I killed them. It seemed so much harder than in the war. It was difficult to break them, even in my frenzy. But they’re dead now, the guards, the researchers.”
“You mentioned Van Gower was there,” says Caufmann.
“Not when I escaped. I turned that bunker inside out,” she says.
“He seemed genuinely horrified when I told him about your distress signal.”
“He should be,” she says bitterly. “When I got out I was wounded. I just ran and ran until I couldn’t make it any further.”
“But if Van Gower didn’t know you were there, who—”
“No more questions,” she says facing him fully. “Nexarien… Where is my husband?” she asks, her voice cracking slightly.
Caufmann’s head lowers. “He’s dead. He died a year after you went missing.”
Her shoulders slump immediately and she begins to cry. Caufmann has never seen an android cry. It is one of the things he has always thought to be impossible, but there is a strange sense in it. Looking at this poor thing, this poor person. He understands something about true sentience that hits him like being struck in the face.
Each android built holds something individual, that survives conversion. Xelxor Akcoda’s sense of duty crossed over into his android life, Sephirlin Darrad’s anger, and Caufmann’s own hunger for knowledge. Zillah and Saifer both share pain. Though something more carried over with them, Saifer was loyal even if disobedient at times, and Zillah believed in sacrifice. Sacrifice of herself for the betterment of all.
Like Saifer and Zillah, Forgal also brought pain. Pain from the grief of loss. But Amber Antares brought her love with her. It must have been very present in her mind at the time of her conversion. She loved her husband. Still loves her husband. Her shining eyes remain closed and her posture is one of complete and utter defeat.
“How did it happen?” she manages.
Her loss doesn’t merely consist of her partner, alone. She has lost everything. Worse still, it was taken from her very purposefully by an all-encompassing corporate entity fuelled by a dead heart. She has lost her family, her parents, and her child. Forgal was the only thing left, the last vestige of hope. And now that’s gone, too.
Caufmann relays the whole story of Venus III’s aftermath, how he was to retrieve the bodies one by one. He explains that Forgal and Saifer both died very suddenly. “They went off my scanners about half an hour before their life signs went flat. I looked for them, believe me, I looked. I spent weeks investigating the wreckage of their last mission but the whole area was just a crater.”
He takes her by the arm and leads her to Forgal and Saifer’s tomb pillars.
“This was where I was going to store them until the time was right. It was rather pointless bringing the empty chambers here once I was established in my position and had built this tomb but they serve now as memorials, I suppose, so at least there’s someone to remember them and what they tried to do.”
She’s still crying, “Why did you wake me and not the others?”
Caufmann isn’t sure if he can bring himself to ask anything of her. But he has to. “There’s a very sick android I need taken out of the city.”
“His name?”
“Arca Drej.”
“I don’t have any data on him.”
“When I delete the restrictive programs in your mind I’ll update all your general knowledge. For the moment I’ll just say he’s a HolinMech.”
“They’re building HolinMechs again? Those are the slaves Godyssey want as their pets, why should we help one of them?”
“It’s not his fault he is what he is. Just the same as it’s not our fault we are what we are. That didn’t stop the Gorai Aurelia wanting every one of us dead. Let’s not be like them, shall we?”
The first of the contaminants to be out during daylight emerges from an apartment complex in the Centre-city District. It was formerly a young man by the name of Michael Troy, who contracted the disease through his girlfriend.
She is back at the apartment and very hungry. She can no longer pass for human. The further she fades from humanity, the more control she seems to have over Troy. He can barely remember what she looked like before, but she had the most beautiful sea blue eyes. Yet that is not all he’s lost.
Troy can still think rudimentary thoughts but every hour there’s less and less. He’s tired after being out most of the night looking for food. When he eats, a surge of energy picks him up and he doesn’t understand how he could ever feel tired. However, the longer between food, whether it be leftovers, road-kill or fresh skin and bone, the more exhausted he becomes.
It won’t be long before he can no longer pass for human either. Another day, and the black veins snaking up his neck will be protruding all over his face. The colour in his irises is also rapidly clouding.
Troy limps out of the darkened doorway, instantly spotting a man carrying a briefcase, walking quickly on the sidewalk of the nearly deserted street. He’s dressed in an impeccable suit, his head down, moving in quite a hurry.
He doesn’t notice the once human creature; his mind is focussed wholly on a very important appointment with his accountant. He has never been late in his life and has no intention of starting now. Troy is hungry and so is his girlfriend. That is all that matters to him.
He can feel something at the far recesses of his mind trying to resist, but with each new infection his own mind becomes less and less dominant. The wants of one are insignificant to the wants of them all. Each new infection gives a new voice to the mass of minds he can hear. All think, feel and become each other. His memories are already bleeding into others, as those bleed into his. He can hear the ones that are sick very vaguely, but when they became like him they would be heard clearly and proudly. Accepted.
The man begins to walk faster. He can hear someone behind him, but Troy is already very close. The contaminant jumps, landing on the man’s back, sinking his teeth into the back of his neck. The man screams in pain at first but after the first chunk is torn out he begins to quieten down, very quickly subsiding into unintelligible gibbering, interspersed with pitiable begging.
Troy still understands most words but he can’t stop himself tearing the flesh to pieces and swallowing it in whole chunks. By the time he feels healthy enough to drag the rest home to his girlfriend, the man is bleeding everywhere, still muttering. “But I’m going to be late,” he manages, his expression utter disbelief. The shock from his wounds has left him a mess.
Another chunk is taken for good measure.
“I have an appointment.”
Troy grips him by the ankle.
“My accountant…” he says groggily staring out into nothing.
Troy starts to drag him.
“I have an appointment,” he struggles out one last time.