I woke up again. Which was both surprising and unwelcome. I was shaking and my face and hand still burned. I couldn’t tell if I was burning alive or freezing. Then I saw the HUD from the survival suit. But I could only see it from one eye. The eye the nanobots had gotten into only throbbed and sent back darkness to my brain.
“How bad is it?” I asked. My throat was sore. I guess I’d done some screaming.
“You will survive.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“Apologies.”
“Eu… CLID,” a robotic voice stutter-screamed. For the first time I focused past the HUD. I found myself on the wall which made sense once I remembered that the nano-kaiju had fallen. The lights were fluttering in and out and all but one of the nano-zombies were dead. The Rip-zombie was crawling towards me in jerky, uncoordinated movements, like it could only control one part of its body at a time. A cloud of the nanobots moved with it but it didn’t move like a smooth school of fish anymore. It was more like looking at visual static, full of erratic motion. And with each dogged attempt to get closer to me, the cloud seemed to shrink.
I wanted to be afraid of it. But it was far away still and barely making any progress with each flailing movement. It wasn’t scary. It was pitiful.
“What’s happening to it?” I asked.
“Dying. There is not enough data storage in the nano-zombie to contain its program. It is using the cloud of nanobots to sustain itself for the moment but they are rapidly losing power without the nano-kaiju feeding them.”
“HOW?” Cyrus screamed at me with Rip’s mouth. “How DID YOU do THIS?”
I pushed myself up off the wall that had become the ground. Out past Cyrus I could see an opening where the nano-kaiju’s head had broken open. Grey light was coming though, what passed for dawn on Persephone. I couldn’t have stood without the suit’s support but it was enough to get me on my feet and walking.
I walked out, intending to leave Cyrus there but as I passed by it reached out and grabbed onto my leg. I stopped, wanting to shake myself free of its grip and keep going, but something forced me to look down at it. There was rage and hate on its face, but those were minor voices in the orchestra of emotions passing over it. Fear was dominant. I don’t know if that was something Cyrus could actually feel in any way that I could understand or if imitating that feeling was just a part of its programming. If there’s a meaningful difference between the two. And seeing fear in Cyrus, remembering the way that fear had driven me my whole life, I found I couldn’t hate Cyrus.
“Thank you, Cyrus.”
“Tha-nk Y-ou?” It asked, the words quieter as its strength faded. Quieter, but no less desperate. Confusion mixed with the fear, seemed to give its dying mind something to grab onto if only for a few more seconds. The silvery cloud that had once filled the room was now just a drooping mist around his skin.
“Before you came into my life all I did was run. You pushed me into a corner. You gave me a problem I couldn’t run from,” I said, kneeling down, bringing myself close to its eyes, to its ears, so that I was the only thing Cyrus could see or hear as it died.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “You miserable son of a bitch. ”
I meant that from the bottom of my heart. I was truly grateful Cyrus had come into my life. And as the confusion resolved into understanding on Cyrus’ stolen face, I knew it was the cruelest thing I could have said to Cyrus in that moment. Cyrus stared at me, mouth working, as the last of the nano-bots faded. And then, frozen in that posture, it died.
----------------------------------------
I dragged myself back to the Ariel. I needed sleep the way I needed food, air. But there was something I needed more, so sleep would have to wait, at least for a little while. I could sleep when Ai was awake and knew she was safe.
The path to the bridge was more arduous than ever despite the new openings Cyrus had made by stepping on the ship. I barely moved inside the suit. Without its automated power moving my body I could never have made it. I could barely hold my eyes open by the time we had arrived.
“Can you wake her up?” I asked the suit.
“Yes.”
“Do it.”
The suit walked to the main control panel for the holographic table in the center of the room and inserted a bit of itself from the end of my finger into an outlet. There were a few moments of silence, and then the lights came on in the darkened room. That done, I found a chair to sit down in and felt every aching bruise and hurt in my body. My face felt like it was on fire where the nanobots had attacked, but that just kept me from nodding off the moment I was still and not standing.
Ai shimmered into being, her translucent form standing on the table. I didn’t know what I would feel when I saw her again, now that I knew what she really looked like. In amongst all the physical hurts, I found a new one: a sharp and exquisite pain that she’d felt the need to lie to me.
“Euclid?” She asked, walking over to sit on the edge of the table so we would be closer to eye level. “What happened? Are you okay? Where is Cyrus?”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
I could hear the concern in her voice. There was fear there too, but I knew it was fear for me.
“A lot. Not really, but I’ll live. Cyrus is dead.”
“Did you…” she trailed off but I knew where she was going.
“Kill him? Yeah. I had to. It was it or me.” I paused. “It or you.”
I expected surprise from her, shock or maybe even horror. I couldn’t know how much she knew about what he really was. But instead I saw pain on her face as she closed her eyes for a moment.
“Euclid, I am so sorry.”
And I realized I was too. Cyrus had turned out to be a complete bastard. But for a little while I’d thought it’d been my friend. That he’d been on my side. It hadn’t just taken Ai from me. It had taken the Cyrus I’d thought I’d known too.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding in thanks. I was too tired then to do more. We could pick up the pieces later. She was quiet, and I let her be. Partly because of how tired I was and partly because I wanted to see if she would address the truth of what she was.
“You have a new suit, I see.”
Avoiding it then.
“Yeah. It was gonna cost an arm and a leg but I managed to talk them down.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Suit, can you show her my injuries?”
“Yes.”
A moment later the suit around my arm turned transparent and Ai gasped.
“Euclid your-“
“It’s not so bad,” I said, I guess to avoid the reality of what had happened to me. “The suit’s hand does just as good as my own.”
But she was shaking her head, and she wasn’t looking at my missing hand. I noticed then that my helmet had become transparent like when I’d shown the little yeti my face.
“Euclid, your face.”
That didn’t sound good.
“My face? What happened to my face?”
“The viral A.I. Cyrus poured nanobots onto you,” the suit said. “While the injuries were not life threatening, there has been significant damage.”
I went cold. I’d known something was wrong when I couldn’t see out of my eye, but I’d thought that if it was something permanent that the suit would have told me. Ai would have told me. But then, she wasn’t actually a computer. She didn’t need orders to take action like that.
“Show me.”
It had been a long time since I’d seen my own face. I hardly recognized myself. I’d always been thin, but the person looking back at me was stark. Not starving but not far from it. The suit removed facial hair as part of its daily bodily maintenance routine, but there was stubble I hadn’t realized I had. I expected to see fear on my own face. Instead, the person looking back at me had a hard set to his jaw and a furrowed brow that was ready to accept anything and keep moving. But it was the eyes that hit me the hardest.
Or maybe I should say, eye. Because the left side of my face from just above my eyebrow to an inch or so below my cheekbone had been chewed away and replaced with metal. Around that there were flakes of steel where the process of changing my flesh had begun but not finished, the skin around those flakes was red and inflamed. And my left eye had disappeared beneath a sheet of uneven silver. But the other eye, the one I could actually see from, didn’t flinch, didn’t tear up. It just-
I just took in my face with calm resignation.
“Oh,” was the only thing I said.
“Suit, what can be done?” Ai asked.
“The left eye does not seem to be salvageable. The nanobots did not reach the nerve so a prosthetic may be possible. Some of the metallic material will fall off as new skin is produced but much of it is permanently grafted to the flesh and removing it would be inadvisable.”
“Oh Euclid. I’m so sorry.”
“I went into your room. I know you’re not an artificial intelligence.” I didn’t even fully realize I’d said it until the words were out.
“I—“ she hesitated, and now that I knew what to listen for, I had no idea how I ever thought she was a computer. “I know.”
We let that silence hang between us as we gathered ourselves for the conversation that had to happen. I was the first to break it.
“Why did you tell me you were an A.I.? Why did you lie to me?” I tried to keep the edge out of my voice, but after everything that had happened with Cyrus I couldn’t hide it completely. It took her a long time to answer.
“Because I was afraid. Because I wanted you to trust me.”
Just like Cyrus.
I shut down that thought immediately, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t come to me in the first place. I didn’t want to think of Ai in those terms, but what she’d done was functionally the same as what Cyrus had. She’d lied to me to get my trust. What a paradoxically stupid thing. Especially since it had worked.
“And,” she continued into the silence I’d left by biting off the angry words bubbling in my chest, “because I didn’t know you. I didn’t know what you were like, what you would do if you knew. I’m… I’m a lot more vulnerable than a real A.I.”
That seemed true. It cooled the fire in my blood a degree or two. But I still bit my tongue to stop it going off without permission while I made myself think through her actions from her position.
She was just as stationery as any computer program trapped in this ship would be, but she had more to lose. She was truly alive after all. And that thought brought me back to what she’d done, how she’d powered up the ship and given me a way off of the planet. Some bitter part of me said that she’d always been able to do that. That she could have at any time. The rest of me remembered what it had cost her. She’d been ready to die to get me off Persephone.
“I always planned to upload you onto whatever ship I left the planet in. That’s not really possible is it?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“But you helped me make the ship. What were you planning to do when the time came for me to leave?”
She was quiet again then. Something in her hologram stillness told me she was trying to hold something back, struggling with it. Fear?
“I’ve thought about that almost every day since we met. I honestly don’t know. If I could have brought myself to show you,” she gestured to the door where her real body lay, “that... then I knew you would have tried to find a way to help me. I knew we could save you. But I don’t think you can help me. I… I think I’m going to die in that tank one day. But even if you could help me, I don’t know that I could have ever shown you who I was. I didn’t want you to know I’d lied to you. And if you were safe… if you got off of Persephone… even without me, I think that would have been enough for me.”
As she spoke, the anger that flowed through me cooled. In another circumstance, I wouldn’t have believed her, but now it was different. It was different because when she’d had the chance to lay down her life to give me a chance to escape, she’d done so. A computer might be programmed to do that, but she had chosen to. She’d chosen me. The thought was heavy.
“This changes things you know,” I said, leaning back in the chair.
“I know.” Again I could hear that emotion in her voice, carefully kept in check. I recognized it now. Despair.
“If I wanted to, I could go get in the ship we made right now. I could leave if I wanted to.”
She wasn’t looking at me. She stared down at her hands instead. I stood, and she flinched. I walked over to stand in front of her, but she didn’t take her eyes from her hands, folded in her lap. I’d have given anything to be able to touch her right then, but all I could do was imitate it. I reached out and put my hand where her chin would be if she were there in the flesh. I lifted my hand. She didn’t have to look up at me; my hand could have passed right through her. But she raised her head, and her eyes to meet mine.
“I don’t want to.”
I didn’t know a hologram could cry.