Chapter 20
The first time the people in the laboratory asked me about the things I did, I told the truth.
They seemed very unhappy when I did so, even though they’d asked me to be honest, so the next time I tried lying, to see if it would make them feel better.
I lied badly and said that when an “episode” came over me, I blacked out.
That it was like a great big darkness that rose up and consumed me, and only when it was over did I find myself standing among a pile of the dead/wounded/maimed/dying, and that at the sight of said carnage I felt bad/sad/guilt/regret.
Everyone seemed happier with this explanation, even though it was obviously not true. A few people were correctly terrified. “It can lie,” they said. “What else can it learn to do?”
As I got better at understanding my observers, I came to learn the difference between what they asked and what they wanted to know, and lo and behold, everyone decided to believe whatever it was that made them feel better.
It is not that I am not moral, in my own way.
It is simply that sometimes, rather like the rules of physics that should contain me, I forget.
Forgetting is perhaps the best way to express it.
I forget what it is to have skin, and organs, and blood and bones.
I forget the rules I have learned, the languages I speak, the ethics I try to embody and the morals I desperately seek to make my own.
I forget how this universe works, and for a moment am simply… curious.
The play of photons, the taste of hydrogen. The smell of gravity, the soft touch of a boson field, it is so fabulously beautiful, so incredible, so rich and full and fascinating and alive – and there is so much about it I want to learn.
And sometimes.
When I am in a lot of pain.
When nothing makes any sense, all this noise, all this shouting, all this… stuff just going on all around
I choose to forget.
I do choose it, and only afterwards am ashamed.
Zanlan ran away that night.
While I pulled out their father’s heart.
While I reached into the skull of one who tried to stab me, to see if I could hear their thoughts dancing across their brain.
As gunshots passed straight through me – as why would they not, being merely energy passing through energy, like electrons shooting in the dark – Zanlan fled.
Do you believe me?
I understand that hurting a child would be abhorrent.
When I remember, I remember this most absolutely.
The most fascinating thing about children – watching as they discover their own agency, become their own selves – requires time, and it is the opposite of curiosity to interrupt that process.
Destroying life when it is so full of prospect is a fundamentally boring act.
If you believe nothing else about me, believe that.
Of course, to feel better about this requires another suspension of imagination.
It requires imagining that in sixteen days’ time, Zanlan won’t die anyway, alone, without family, slowly burned alive in a wave of radiation that will strip the planet to its bones.
Strange, the mental acrobatics people do to try and feel better about this sort of thing.
Sunshine brought clarity; brought reality.
I looked around and saw a lot of dead bodies, and knew I was to blame, and felt like I should curl up on the ground and puke my guts out and weep and beg for forgiveness. But on Adjumir, you carried on anyway.
Thus, as the sun rose, I loaded the body of Rencki into the back of the speeder that had belonged to Ranwha and Zanlan.
I was not sure how dead my companion was in the strictest sense of the word.
For a quan to die entirely requires a total wiping of their memory systems, their OS, their basic rules of function – and hadn’t qe backed qimself up before we flew?
If enough of qis memories survived, would qe learn from this experience of being shot and add a shield generator to qis carapace, and how much of qimself would qe have to give up to create that capacity?
Or would qe just keep on making the same mistakes, walking into a scattershot blast and dying again and again, because qe could not keep the memories to learn from qis experience?
The speeder was coded to Ranwha’s DNA, but not life-locked. I dipped a kitchen towel in his blood, activated the engine, coded in our destination, and with Rencki’s blackened body in the back, headed towards Kiskol.