Konrad

Reel’s implant lay face up on Konrad’s desk, the slate-gray metal standing out against the dark-grained wood. It stared up at him accusingly, the dead lights like the eyes of a corpse. Dried blood rimmed the edges, exaggerating the effect.

Priceless, hyper advanced technology, all to myself, he thought bitterly. All it had cost was his only friend. And maybe any chance of an alliance between our two nations. Every interaction they had with the Torellans from here on out would be tainted by this betrayal…assuming there even were further interactions.

And a betrayal it was. Lusser could bleat about the need to win the war, and von Braun could hide behind the petty justification that he had no choice but to follow orders, but Konrad knew the truth. Excuses. Thin pretexts. They had seen a chance to take what they needed, and they had seized it without a moment’s thought for the damage it would do.

Worst of all, this was his own fault. If he had never sabotaged the transmission system, Reel wouldn’t have stayed. Negotiations would have gone through her captain, and Reel would have returned safely to her people. Hell, they probably still would have gotten all the technology they wanted, just not as fast.

You were so damned desperate to keep her here. Excellent work Konrad, here are your thirty pieces of silver. He prodded the implant; it was silver that he couldn’t even spend. He hadn’t even managed to get the damn thing to do anything. Like the transmission unit, it looked to be a solid piece of metal. Unlike the transmission unit, he’d found no hairline gap for him to peel open. No openings, no hatches, no screws to undo or tabs to unclip.

Gingerly, he turned the plate over, revealing the bundles of thin threads he’d seen when...he stopped, swallowing hard. When they’d removed the implant. He pushed the memory away, peering at them. What were they? The wires hung motionless now, twisted and coiled around each other on the underside of the implant like a ferns fronds, but they’d moved with a life of their own. How had they done that?

He felt a peculiar mix of revulsion and marvel. Those had been inside Reel’s skull, wound deep down into her brain…assuming her brain was anything like a human’s, of course. Now he could see that there were hundreds of them, and they had neatly coiled themselves into place. He reached out to touch one, thought better of it, and grabbed a pair of tweezers instead.

Gently, cautiously, he teased one of the colorless, clear bundles of thread at the edge closest to him free. It was slick as glass, and stretched under the tweezers when he managed to get a good grip on it. The fiber resisted him, trying to draw back into its tight coil like the tendril of a beanstalk pulled free from its perch. He squinted at it. Was that a braid? Groping blindly with his free hand, he pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk and pawed through it, knocking tools askew. His hand closed on the handle of a long-neglected magnifying glass. He swiped it roughly over the surface of his grimy lab coat to clear some of the dust, then held it up. The strand leapt into focus.

It was a braid; the strand was really made up of eight fibers, and as he peered at those fibers Konrad thought he saw even finer lines through the dirty magnifying glass.

“Impossible,” he muttered.

“What was that?” a voice said behind him.

He started, almost throwing the tweezers and the magnifying glass across the room. Turning, he found one of the two engineers that had been working the accelerometer problem peering in at him. The older one. The walrus looking one.

“Sorry,” he said, twitching his mustaches and looking at the implant curiously. “Didn’t mean to spook you. What’s impossible?”

“Hello Dr…Dr. Wal...” Konrad trailed off lamely, unable to fill in the man’s name. The other man obviously knew it too, by the raised eyebrow. Konrad felt his cheeks heat, but forged ahead. “Do we have anything stronger than this?” He waved the dirty magnifying glass in front of himself weakly.

“You took the microscope down to your lair a few months back,” the man replied in a clipped tone.

So he had. Forgetting his earlier caution, Konrad scooped up the implant, brushing the tendrils with his fingers. They moved under his touch, licking up around the stray fingers before he flinched back away from them.

The other man was looking at him strangely, somewhere between being affronted and concerned. “What are you doing, anyway?”

“Getting a closer look at this,” Konrad stuttered. He shoved past the man into the hall, making for his basement room. He remembered taking the microscope, but not what he’d done with it…

“You’re welcome!” the other engineer called sarcastically to his retreating back, but Konrad barely heard him as he hurried away down the basement stairs.

He found the microscope still in its olive-green case, the name “Winkel-Zeiss” stenciled across the top. He couldn’t remember why he’d brought it down here, but it rested on the same bench where he’d stored the scattered pieces of his calculating machine, after Reel had smashed the table. Konrad picked a coil of wire off the top of the case, setting it aside on the bench. It had been part of a field medical kit, emblazoned with a red cross, and came with three lenses and a variety of stains. He left those where they were; all he needed were the lenses. And somewhere to put it…Every surface of the room was covered in parts and tools.

But what good were they to him? The only thing that really mattered right now was the implant. “The hell with it,” he muttered. With one arm, he swept a great swath of the bench clear with one arm, throwing relays, wires, and transistors to the floor in a clatter.

It was the work of a moment to set up the microscope. Hand trembling, he caught up the same coil from the implant with the tweezers and stretched it over the microscope’s stage, peering down through the lens. The strands jumped into sharp relief under magnification, revealing eight more fibers making up each of the original eight strands. He rotated the lenses to increase the magnification, his heart in his throat. More strands jumped out at him, impossibly fine, thinner than spider silk. He turned the lens housing one more time.

The thinnest of them filled his view in the microscope, and within its clear body he saw even tinier structures, too small to see clearly. The strand bent, and the components inside shifted as the tendril tried to coil itself back into place.

He let it go, sweating. No wonder he hadn’t been able to find a way to open the plate. The circuits, the computer itself, was housed in those tendrils, like...like particles in a liquid suspension, moving freely. The impossibility of what he’d been trying to do crashed down on him; he’d never be able to build something like this. Not with all the resources of the Reich, not with a hundred years to puzzle it out. It might as well have been magic.

The tendril drew itself back into a tight bundle as he watched, with a mind all its own. He wondered at that, briefly. Was it just to protect the equipment from damage? Had all the threads survived their rude removal from Reel’s brain? They didn’t look to be torn…But how could he ever know, when there were so many tiny pieces involved? He reached out one tentative hand, making to touch the tendril he’d been looking at with the tip of a finger. His breath caught as it reached back out to him, meeting him halfway, and curled around his fingernail. It reminded him forcibly of a Renaissance painting, something by Michaelangelo…

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The Creation of Adam. Konrad thought, and had to stifle a slightly hysterical giggle. But which one of them was God?

He was pretty sure it wasn’t him. He had thought himself clever, thought he could puzzle it out, but he saw now there was no chance of that. The thing was probably smarter than he was…

He stopped, that thought echoing in his mind. What if it was? What if…He picked it up, and his stomach roiled as he looked at the massed tendrils.

It was almost certainly a bad idea. But he’d had nothing but bad ideas since the day Reel had landed, so what was one more? Before he could think about it too much, he smoothed his fringe of hair out of the way and pressed the tendril side of the implant to the baldest part of his head. Probably it would do nothing. Almost certainly.

The tendrils stirred lethargically against his bare scalp, then stopped. He sagged, half in relief, half in disappointment. Nothing else happened. The thing had to have been built with one piece of anatomy in mind; not even a species as advanced as the Torellans could have built to anticipate every possible bodily configuration…he tried to pull it away, and it resisted him.

Oh. There, now he felt it. It didn’t hurt, not at first. The strands were too fine for that. But he pulled harder, and felt his skin yanking back, stretching the stitches on his head.

Then the pain came. It started as a tingle, like the first brush of a mosquito bite. That escalated to a pinching, a stabbing sensation. He scrabbled at the plate, fingernails failing to find purchase; he had no leverage, no good angle at which to pull, and the pain was mounting, the tendrils stabbing into his flesh, into the bone, like tiny drills. He couldn’t think, couldn’t even breathe, as he slumped forward onto the bench, knocking the microscope over.

Crazy images flashed through his mind, of space, of ships, of mechanical parts he’d never seen before and couldn’t possibly name. He saw a vision of a tremendous structure, made of multiple wheels stacked alongside each other, sailing its stately way through the stars.

Through the pain, wonder bubbled up. How did you build something like that? But no sooner had he thought of the question than he knew the answer. It was all there; you brought all the little pieces in the hold of a big ship, and then you put them together, using little ships to move them around…In a flash he saw the whole project, from beginning to end. It was like having a checklist in his mind, from the very first strut to be floated out to the last bolt to be tightened.

The implant was exactly like Reel had said, he realized, as the pain faded to a bearable throb. Everything a person could need to know, right there in their head. All you needed to do was ask.

He had a million questions. What were those big rings? And he knew, instantly, that they were the mining platform. The implant walked him right through it. Each one exerted gravity on material that passed through the structure in a different way, vibrating it apart on a molecular level. The plates lining the interior of the rings generated the gravity, same as they did in the ships. Tugs collected the material at the other end…

He forced the thought backwards. It generated gravity? How?

The implant showed him a diagram of a gravity plate, and steps for calibrating and maintaining it. Check that the dark liquid levels are adequate. Check that the drive metal has not corroded. Check that power is being correctly supplied…Parallel to that, the implant gave him a list of symptoms to help diagnose problems. Anomalous gravity, negative gravity, inconsistent gravity…

No, this was a repair manual. He wanted to know how it worked, why it worked. A set of ball bearings, made of drive metal, floated in the dark liquid tank. Driven by a magnet, they spun the dark liquid into vortexes…Why did that matter? What did it do?

There was a sharp buzzing in the back of his skull, and he winced. The implant must still be settling in, but at least it didn’t hurt so badly anymore. It also didn’t offer any insight into how the plates made gravity. The ball bearing spun, whirled around, whipping the dark liquid into a vortex, but how did that actually–

The implant buzzed again, sharper and harder, and Konrad winced, rubbing at it. It felt terribly wrong in the back of his skull, intrusive, but he didn’t have the spare brainpower to worry about it. A wealth of knowledge was unfolding in his mind, he was learning more in seconds than they had in weeks of tinkering. But it was all so superficial, he needed details. How did the vortex create gravity-?

Pain lanced through him like liquid lightning, every muscle in his body going into spasm. He’d have screamed again if he could have opened his jaw, but all he managed was a desperate whine as he pitched over onto the floor. He shook and seized on the rough floor, every thought but one driven out by pain.

Help!

“Who’s Stricken?” a gruff, alarmed voice demanded in his head. Through the fog of pain, Konrad realized that the voice spoke Reel’s language. And he could understand it, as clearly as his native German. “Yerry, is that one of your crew? They’re broadcasting to everyone.”

“Negative, Argo,” a higher pitched voice responded. “That’s Reel’s implant signature though.”

“We have her back online? Reel, can you hear me? The captain is coming for you, he should be there soon, just hang on.”

The shakes started to fade. Konrad tried to form a conscious thought, tried to answer, but couldn’t manage it. The captain was coming? Here? He went limp, slumping face down on the dirty floor. His body felt like it had tried to tear itself apart, and his head hurt too badly to hold onto words. But the question rose back up, unbidden, to the forefront of his mind again.

Why did spinning dark liquid make gravity?

Another sharp stab lanced through his head, and Konrad screamed aloud. Shouting and pounding footsteps sounded above. Someone must have finally heard him. The gruff, old voice came back into his mind. “Reel, stop thinking! You’ll burn yourself out if you keep this up!”

Burn myself out? More pain. Distantly, he heard the doors crash open, and people pounded in to surround him, shadowy figures that he couldn’t make out. Someone gasped, and strong hands clutched at the plate, their fingernails tearing his scalp while other hands steadied his head.

It hurt as much coming out as it had going in. The voices in his mind cut off, and he went limp as the last tendrils slipped free. He drifted in and out of consciousness as his rescuers lifted him and propped him upright in a chair. He blinked bleary eyes back into focus, his head throbbing. What were they saying?

“…something, damn it man! Say something!” Von Braun hovered inches from his nose, eyes wide with fear, and his hands on Konrad’s shoulders.

“Something,” Konrad croaked back at him.

“Did it addle his brain?” someone asked.

“How would we tell the difference?” Lusser’s familiar, hated voice. He stepped into view, staring down at Konrad with one lip curled. “That was monumentally stupid.”

It was, but who cared what Lusser thought? “You would know.” Konrad said weakly back to him. Oops. He hadn’t meant to say that aloud.

Lusser purpled, but relief washed over von Braun’s face. “By God man, are you alright? What did it do to you?”

“It…” He struggled to put the thought into words. “It showed me things.” He could still see snatches, the diagram for the gravity plates, the rings. Not all of it, but some.

Von Braun searched his face, waiting for him to say more, but Konrad couldn’t think of anything else to say. “So it’s just like Reel described? A memory bank, a communication device? Did it work for you?”

“Yes,” Konrad answered carefully. He put a hand to his stinging, bleeding head. “But I can’t recommend it.”

Lusser kicked at the implant where it lay on the floor with the toe of his boot, disgusted. “If this is what it does to people, I can’t imagine why they’d want more of them.”

I know why, Konrad thought, but he didn’t trust himself to speak. Pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, and he didn’t like the picture they formed. The captain was coming here...

“I need to ask Reel some questions,” he blurted out, struggling to rise. He made it halfway before von Braun had to catch and steady him. “Can I speak with her?”

Lusser and von Braun traded a look. “Sort of,” Von Braun answered grimly. “I suppose you’d better come see her.”