Chapter 7
Evie
Later that night, I am lying in bed with Arkon, his hands playing with my naked body in a slow, sensual way.
The rest of the day was not as interesting.
Arkon had a lot of data to parse, Drak went off to do whatever it is he does, and I was left to my own devices, sitting around, thinking about things to steal, then deciding against it because I knew how much trouble I would be in if I got caught again.
He really is too pretty to be a war hero.
I guess, if I look beyond the stunning features, the incredible hair, and the dragon eyes, I can sense the resolve and cool temper that fits with someone who commanded thousands and fought in wars.
I think of warriors as big scarred-up guys, but I guess if you only ever piloted ships there wouldn’t be many scars.
From what I’ve seen you either survive unscathed or it’s the end of you.
“You were good for Drak today,” he says. “I appreciated that. I’d kill him if he put a finger on you, so I am glad you did not give him a reason to.”
That bloody statement gives me the opportunity to ask what I have been waiting and wanting to ask.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were a war hero?”
He cocks his head to the side before answering me.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were a habitual sneak thief?”
“Because I wanted to get away with stealing stuff and I figured it was better if you didn’t know what to look out for,” I say boldly. “But that excuse doesn’t hold up for you.”
“I am past the point of wanting to talk about war. The Fematrix is about peace,” he says. “That’s why I am involved in this project. She is going to be more than a weapon. She is going to be a beacon of hope.”
“A beacon of hope with missiles,” I smirk.
“Yes, and more. But we hope she never has to use them.”
“And you’re going to use my brain to program it? Or me to fly it?”
“You, if you are able to be properly tamed, will be the equivalent of an interstellar warship of a kind never seen before. You will be communicating with her through quantum channels, directing her actions.”
“That’s a heavy responsibility,” I murmur.
“It will be, but you will not be acting on your own. We will be there always to oversee you. Think of it like a video game you get to play.”
There’s something unsettling about that, the notion of piloting a creature of unimaginable powers while aliens give me commands and I am expected to execute them without question. They have to know there are limits to what I will do.
For now, though, I let myself enjoy Arkon’s ministrations.
* * *
I spend increasing amounts of time with Drak. Arkon is often helping the juniors and now that the machine training doesn’t have the sexy stuff attached to it, Arkon is happy to let his counterpart supervise me.
I can’t say I mind. Drak likes to drop lore that I find fascinating, and then when I do see Arkon, there’s some tension that builds up from Drak having been with me that makes him particularly attentive.
I start to think Drak’s not that bad. He likes to spoil me from time to time in ways Arkon didn’t. He lets me get away with stuff, like language, that Arkon would whip my ass for. Whenever I get sassy with Drak, he just kind of smirks and lets it go.
The spoiling culminates one day when I get off the machine and find that what looks to me like an absolute banquet has been laid out on a small table.
“What’s all this?” I ask Drak. It looks delicious. It also looks like food I absolutely cannot eat.
“He’s not been sharing our food with you, has he?” Drak murmurs the question almost seductively. Not in a sexy way, in the way a chocolate cake is seductive. In the way crepes with fresh cream make you want to just give into pure instinct. That kind of way.
“No, he says it’s poison,” I say. “He’s very strict about it.”
“This won’t hurt you,” he says. “I’ve made certain to isolate the proteins and minerals that are poisonous to humans. You can consume this quite safely.”
I don’t quite trust him, but I also don’t see why I should be suspicious right now. He needs me, after all. I am the one who is the interface for his glorious invention. Hurting me makes absolutely no sense.
He extends one of his hands, holding out a beverage that looks like a milkshake and somehow smells like every single food I have been craving since I got here.
Berries and cream, and chocolate and pumpkin spice and…
somewhere in the vestigial parts of my mind, I remember a cautionary tale about a factory in which delicious things were made, but I can’t recall the details and the instinct to sip is too great.
“Oh, my god,” I mumble. “This is so good. This might be the best thing I have ever eaten in my life.”
“Have some of the pie,” he says, pushing a plate of what looks like chocolate pie over to me. “This should be like a taste of home.”
I take a forkful and discover that it has a thick, pudding-like heft with a cake consistency.
When I put it in my mouth, it tastes like the best cake I have ever consumed in my life.
The taste is rich and flavorful, not too sweet.
It is dense and airy at the same time. Someone has studied the human palate to within an inch of its existence and knows exactly what the mouth wants.
“The machine fed me the recipe,” he says. “Pun intended. We have analyzed so much data from you now, we know precisely what will taste good to you.”
“Wow. That machine really works. Do you mean the one inside the goddess?”
“Yes,” he says. “You could call this the food of the gods.”
“Ambrosia,” I mumble to myself.
I am starting to feel a little heavy and relaxed. I didn’t know it would feel so transformative to finally get food in me that didn’t taste like the colors gray and beige mixed together.
I smile and there’s a giggle on my lips, a warm haze running through my veins. It feels faintly familiar, but in a way I can’t entirely access. I feel as though I’m trying to remember something, a faint bell is ringing in the recesses of my mind. But it doesn’t matter, I’m sure.
Drak is helping me stand up, guiding me with one hand under my elbow.
“Good girl,” Drak praises. “You are ready to merge with the goddess.”
We go deeper into his ultra secret private office with the heavily guarded doors and the special markings to let everyone know they absolutely should not be there.
I glide through the doors with him, feeling almost as if my feet aren’t touching the floor.
I can’t feel my body like I usually do. Odd.
“How do I merge with it? More suckers?”
“Oh, no,” Drak says. “Those were training apparatus. For the merging, we’ll make a small incision…” He reaches out with a fingernail that is surprisingly sharp and runs it round in a line from my forehead all the way around the circumference of my skull.
“And we’ll remove the brain,” he says with a smile.
“Remove the brain,” I repeat in my pleasant haze.
“That’s right, and then we’ll install it in the robot, and you and the creature will be the same thing. Well, your consciousness will control the various functions assigned to it anyway.”
“You want to put my brain in the robot,” I repeat.
“That’s right,” he says, his tone soothing and warm and friendly. “Just pop your brain right in there.”
“What brain will you put in my body?”
“You won’t need a body after that, human. You’ll be part of something much bigger.”
“Does Arkon know about this? He likes my body.”
“We will let him keep it,” Drak says. “We can put you on machines to keep the basic functions running even without this delightful little meat computer.”
It feels to me that there’s something wrong with this plan, but I can’t fully articulate exactly what at this precise time.
Odd, I know. It’s like my thoughts have been turned down, and the part of my mind that was afraid of things has been completely disconnected.
I’m going to join with something beautiful, something bigger than myself.
And all it’s going to take is a little cut.
* * *
Arkon
I feel something sever inside me. I am in the midst of helping the juniors recalibrate a joint system that keeps inverting itself, but in an instant I know something is wrong with my mate.
She has become something of a constant presence in my mind and body, and her absence is very tangible even at a distance.
This is a feeling I have not had before, but I’ve heard of people talk about mating bonds.
Hard to tell if it represents something real, or if I’m just starting to get paranoid at not having her right by my side all the time.
I immediately use the intercom to talk to Drak.
“Drak?”
“Hm?”
“Is everything alright with Evie?”
“Yes,” he says. “She’s doing well. Deep in the simulation right now.”
I feel a little intellectually better and get back to work, but over the course of the next hour or so, the feeling grows until I can no longer push it away.
“I have to go,” I tell the juniors. “I’ll be back in a bit. Hold fire on this until then.”
Evie’s advanced simulation time is technically over now. She should be back in my office, but she’s not. And somehow I knew she would not be, even before I looked in there. She’s gone. I can feel her absence in a way I did not even know I could feel her presence.
Would she have run away? No. There’s nowhere to go. And she’s never shown any signs of trying to escape. If she had, something would be missing. Maybe something is.
I try to stay calm, though inside, I am already raging. The warrior I have had to be all my life knows when he has lost something. Ground, territory, advantage, anything.
I go up to Drak’s lab, telling myself that of course there’s a very reasonable explanation for this. He’s held her back late. She needs to do a little more. He’s found a way to iterate something…
The door to his lab opens, and he is standing there, almost like he was waiting for me.
“I can’t find Evie,” I say, only half-meaning in the physical sense.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I have her.”
“Thank the gods,” I sigh. “I was worried something had happened to her. I’m going to take her home now. We need to talk about these disappearing acts she keeps pulling…”
“She can’t go home right now, she’s indisposed,” he says.
“What does that mean? Where is she?” The tension is returning as quickly as it disappeared.
“She’s still here, but you are going to have to get used to her being different.”
He is backing away toward the guards, I notice. Not wanting to face me on his own. Not wanting me to have physical access to him without backup.
“The human was always disposable,” Drak says. “We told you to choose a reasonably priced one for that very reason. Not that you listened. The transport costs were well over budget.”
“I thought she was going to be an integral part of the construction,” I say, as I consider how I will kill him. I want it to be painful. Very.
“And she is. Going to be an integral part. Her mind will power the Fematrix’s bionic centers for centuries to come.”
I force myself to sound calm. I speak in an even register that I hope disguises the fact I am thinking of the many ways in which I will imminently kill this man if it turns out he has indeed done what I think he has done.
“I’m not comfortable with that. I want her to keep being herself. Intact.”
“It’s too hard to put a whole human inside the machine.
It makes more sense just to remove the brain, once the training process is complete.
The brain can be run on human fluid analogs.
But an entire body requires exercise and nutrition and all sorts of various other inputs that will, over time, degrade the brain. This is the best for the machine.”
“Drak. What did you do?”
“Don’t be angry,” he says. “That won’t make any of this any better, and it may make it worse.”
“Why?” I ask the question with a flat chill.
“I may have removed her brain, inserted it into the machine, and she may have absconded with the machine.”
“Where is her body?”
“Nice and safe on life support. I know how attached you are to that four-limbed little freak.”
I punch him so hard his ancestors feel it. The entire front of his face becomes one flat surface for a moment.
He collapses with barely a grunt, just drops to the floor like the soulless thing he is.
I feel as though I am on autopilot as I lecture myself about my carelessness. I should never have allowed her out of my sight. I should never have trusted Drak. He has no sense of limits when it comes to things like this. He does things because he can, not because he should.
And now he has given her consciousness unfettered, direct experiential access to a machine so powerful it could end wars, and civilizations, for that matter.
* * *
I go to the med bay, walking as if I am still on autopilot. I do not know how to process this level of betrayal, or this amount of loss.
“Drak, she’s…”
I ignore the doctor as I walk into the bay and see Evie there. Her body, at least. The part of her that makes her, well, her. Is not. That is out inside the cold of a machine. What is left is her physical form, feigning life.
I can see her breathing. Some relief creeps back in, but it is limited. I know that the human form was not meant to be kept this way.
The look the doctor gives me is apologetic.
“Tell me you did not do this,” I say, compiling my mental list of people who need to die.
“I couldn’t stop him,” she says. “He had already initiated the removal of the cerebellum, and I thought she might perish if I were to try to stop him.”
“So he’d been planning this alone, then? Someone built in a direct capacity in the machine to allow a human brain to be connected to it?”
“Drak’s brilliant. Nobody really understands that thing other than him,” she says. “He could have done all sorts of twisted things without anybody knowing. What I can tell you is that her body is safe right now, and I think we can reattach her brain if you can retrieve it.”
“Retrieve her brain,” I repeat. “How hard can that be?”