Change of Mind
(written with Peter J. Wacks)
“To know the enemy’s heart is expected. To know the enemy’s mind is a gift.
To know one’s own heart is divine. To know one’s own mind is impossible.”
—General Jack Ling Tzao
The Revised Art of War, Interstellar Edition, 2873 AD
I
There were barbarians at the gate.
The planetary defenses had fallen, and Colonel Ben Triegen did not know how long he could keep his surviving soldiers safe deep inside the main fortress in Collos City. Stale sweat and fear filled the air, a pungent odor he tried to ignore.
With the fortress’s command chip, he controlled the external defenses, most of which had already failed horribly. Automated cookie-cutter subroutines were intended to keep the Collos civilians safe, but now they worked against Triegen’s troops when the attackers were the planet’s inhabitants. The outer walls had fallen quickly as robotic machine guns refused to kill attackers. The successively tighter barricades stood firm, though.
For now.
His people had resorted to barricading themselves inside with old-fashioned piles of debris. It was already ugly and only getting worse. Triegen mopped perspiration from his brow with the arm of his uniform; he didn’t want the others to see him sweat.
The ragged survivors huddled inside the central chamber, which was washed red with the light of the alarms. The soldiers were terrified and desperate, but in their eyes Triegen saw faith … hope. If anyone could get them out of this, he could. He would. Colonel Triegen kept his expression stoic even as he swallowed bile.
There were explosions outside. Everything felt … unreal; detached. He had been through all this before. Sadly, the pain and the bloodshed, the vivid memories of what was going on outside, the images transmitted into the fortress—no, there could be no doubt what was happening out there. All across the planet, the rebels had laid siege to the Network fortresses. Triegen and his troops had fallen back one step at a time, their numbers dwindling as the rebels grew emboldened.
It was all too real.
“How much time do we have, sir?” Lieutenant Fazil’s normally soft, attractive voice was ragged.
“We have the rest of our lives.” Triegen hooked a finger under his damp collar, refusing to meet her eye. “And that’s up to us.”
His hands danced over the control conduits. The barricades held for now, but he had to find some way around the resources of the fortress. It was his responsibility to keep these people alive until Network help could arrive.
One hour at a time.
He didn’t want to think of how long it would take for a fleet to come across interstellar distances.
The Collos Uprising had been well coordinated. It happened in a flash—a complete surprise. A gross failure of intelligence and surveillance. Colonel Triegen knew he was out of options. Nothing to be done about it now, though.
Extremist independents had isolated the planet’s fourteen Network fortresses and then picked off the followers of the Network government, the tissue-thin fabric that bound the scattered human settlements across the galaxy. Due to extended interstellar travel times, the Network was a safety net rather than an overt governing structure.
Thousands of Network loyalists had been slaughtered in the streets. Many of the fortresses had already fallen. Only a few, like this one, were armored bubbles holding out thanks to Triegen’s command decisions. But the Network fortresses had never been designed to withstand the pressure of an entire planetary population crushing them.
“Let us in, Colonel Triegen!” piped over the intercom.
The words echoed through the vault of his mind. He didn’t believe any of their demands or negotiations. Images from outside showed him victims of the uprising, and he could still smell the blood, even in the sealed room. The pounding at the armored doors continued, along with the demands. “Let us in!”
Triegen turned to look at his soldiers, glanced at the sealed door. He blinked as a bead of sweat trickled into his eye. Once again, he felt the sense of vertigo, the detachment. The razor-edged fear of his soldiers gave him all the strength he needed.
Triegen drew a deep breath, “Don’t worry. I’ll keep you safe.”
He almost believed the lie himself.
II
Life support was failing, his exosuit getting colder.
“Let us in, Colonel!” demanded Zan Harker, Senior Mine Supervisor on Aurora Facility 5.
The ice planetoid was dark and harsh, bathed by cosmic radiation. The isolated mining facility was no plum assignment on the best of days; it was even worse when the facility’s central brain was trying to kill them all.
Next to him in an equally cumbersome exosuit was another competent ice miner, Rajid Suvo, just as desperate to get inside. Suvo had drawn the short straw to accompany Harker when they both left the dubious safety of their stranded transport crawler in a last-ditch attempt to get inside the pressurized dome facility.
But the brain wouldn’t let them in.
Suvo continued to transmit on his suitcomm, shouting … expending precious air and energy. “You have to open the hatch, Colonel! The crawler is docked, but our batteries are nearly dead. Life support is failing, with six people still aboard. Let us inside the base, or we’ll all die!”
Harker refused to waste oxygen, energy, or mental effort with pointless shouting. The brain of Colonel Triegen wouldn’t respond. Instead, making his way through the ice tunnels to the emergency access hatch, Harker used his exosuit tool kit. He hoped he could work the controls faster than Triegen could shut them out.
The original “temporary” ice tunnels had lasted for decades, with layers and layers of repairs, year after year. The passages into the domed base were a maze of conduits and ducts full of spliced wires, piping, crystalline optical fibers. It was a mess, but that worked to their advantage now: a facility in peak repair would be impossible to hack. The emergency hatch was their best chance—but not when the base itself was fighting against them.
Triegen’s simulated voice blasted over their suitcomms. “My soldiers and I will hold out. We will not surrender to rebels. The Collos Uprising will fail.”
Upon hearing the words, Harker ground his teeth together. He turned and looked at his companion. Through the faceplate he saw the other man’s dark eyes widen with fear at the confirmation of their suspicions.
The facility’s central brain was having another war flashback.
Harker’s suit reserves were depleted. No time to lose. He took out the tools and frenetically assembled a plan. The other six ice miners trapped in the docked transport crawler had little air or heat left. Right now, they would be deciding which was preferable—suffocating or freezing. It wasn’t an easy choice.
Harker thought about death a lot—who didn’t on this barren frozen facility?—but he was more attuned to it than others. He didn’t consider himself a hero, just a man who would do what had to be done.
He and Suvo had worked out a few hand signals so they didn’t have to use any transmissions the brain could detect, but Harker didn’t expect the other man to be much use. Suvo was just dead weight … although, perhaps a useful distraction. Suvo hammered his gloved fists on the sealed emergency hatch, continuing to plead with Colonel Triegen. “Let us in! Please!”
What a waste of precious oxygen.
Harker was quieter. First order of business; he had to get rid of the monitoring cams. Taking out a telescoping probe rod, he reached up to smash the nearest glittering, optical eye that gazed down at them.
He studied the tangle of pipes and conduits in the low ceiling and spotted a second optical sensor, so he blinded the control brain there, too.
A mechanical scuttler appeared from the dark recesses of the conduits and raced toward the baton, trying to attack it. Each of the spider-like repair drones was the size of a loaf of bread and could work autonomously or be operated by the colony’s control brain. Harker crushed the scuttler with the baton, leaving a pile of twisted metal and twitching limbs, then he smashed a third optical imager, the last one he could see.
That should be enough.
Touching his faceplate against Suvo’s, a thousand-year-old astronaut’s trick of speaking without using comms, he said, “The brain is blinded now, but we won’t have much time. Remove the hatch access plate so I can get at the controls.”
Once the wiring was exposed, Harker jammed in the probe baton, blowing the liquid-crystal power cells. Energy-retentive gel mined from the ice of Aurora sprayed out of the damaged power modules like silvery blood.
On a normal excavation shift, Suvo was a hard worker, competent—because everyone had to be competent to survive here—but not overly skilled. Aurora Facility 5 could function without him.
Harker, though, was far less replaceable. He had to get inside before his exosuit failed.
He worked quickly, confidently, with steady hands. Though their situation was grim, he refused to die on this godforsaken rock being run by a senile brain.
He tried to distract the Colonel so he could work. He used a calm, logical voice, in contrast to Suvo’s panic. “Colonel Triegen, this is mine supervisor Zan Harker. Listen to me. What you’re seeing isn’t real. Remember where you are. The war has been over for fifty years.”
In many ways, Harker regretted the war was over. Harker had been in the armed services for several years, but he and Colonel Triegen had very little in common. He had washed out of the military; something about his psych profile was wrong. While others were relieved to have decades of peace and prosperity across the Network, Harker had never been bothered by violence; rather, he was disappointed that there was no longer any outlet for what human beings were genetically designed to do.
“You’re lying!” screamed the brain in its eerily human voice. Harker always had trouble associating that voice with the lump of gray matter floating in a vat at the center of the mining colony. But now that brain was failing, growing senile, and needed to be replaced.
Harker had come to Aurora Facility 5 as an ice miner shortly after his discharge from the military, and worked his way up to Senior Mine Supervisor. But now he felt trapped and helpless on a dark lump of ice.
Harker wasn’t the only one who had seen the signs of Triegen’s dementia. Only four weeks earlier another transport crawler—remotely guided by the Colonel’s brain—had been wiped out on the frozen excavation fields. All personnel aboard had died except for Zan Harker. He’d been outside the crawler on an EVA, trying to make manual repairs, when he had heard the screams, the pleas for help. By the time he’d gotten back to the crawler, the brain had bled out all the life support. Everyone inside the armored vehicle was dead.
Now, he and Rajid Suvo were trying to break inside the pressurized dome because the damned brain was having another flashback.
Transmissions came from the other six crewmembers inside the crawler docked outside. Their voices were weakening. “We won’t last much longer.”
“Neither will I, if you keep whining,” Harker muttered, careful not to activate the comm. He worked at the control plate, tried to bypass the locks.
Suddenly, a blast of frozen effluent pelted them, showering down like a wind driven hail storm. Another scuttler had dumped the contents, which hammered down like projectiles. Suvo flailed his gloved hands, trying to wipe the muck from his suit. He backed away, yelping.
But Harker finished his work. Focus.
Finally, he saw the system lights glow, and the emergency hatch seal unlocked. He felt a rush of euphoria. He was going to make it. He was going to survive!
He transmitted to the crawler crew. “The hatch is open. Suit up and get over here.”
Suvo was stumbling, still reeling from the debris barrage. “Harker—I think my pack’s been damaged. Help me get inside. Life support is bleeding out.”
Harker saw that his companion’s suit was indeed leaking fluids. Concentrated air spilled out in a frozen white steam. The damage was an easy fix, but …
His pulse was racing. He felt a metallic taste in his mouth, and his vision grew sharper, his thoughts more intense. The jagged shadows outside were nothing compared to what was going through his mind.
He hauled Suvo around. “Let me look at your pack.”
Suvo dutifully turned, exposed his vulnerable pack. “Thanks, man.”
Harker spotted some external damage, a few small fluid tubes and pressure cylinders, damaged but easily repaired. He took out his tools, the sharpest ones. “Here, let me.”
The pressurized dome was just another door away, but Harker no longer needed an extra set of hands. He felt hungry and excited by the opportunity.
All the imagers had been deactivated.
Harker extended a probe blade into his companion’s life-support pack and with a vicious twist, he severed the connections, breaking the power lines. The last air hemorrhaged out of the exosuit like arterial blood.
Before Suvo could cry out in question or fear, Harker yanked his comm line, disconnecting it. Harker panted inside his helmet, euphoric, as the other man flailed and struggled. Suvo didn’t fight back, merely tried to survive, but he had no way of doing so. He lurched toward the inner hatch.
Harker waited, watching him die. He liked to look at the faces, see the expression of terror change to acceptance, possibly even epiphany. Leaning over Suvo’s still form, he reattached the comm line. Suvo didn’t have enough air left to even gasp, and Harker needed to erase any traces of what he had done.
“We’re on our way through now,” transmitted the junior mine supervisor from the transport crawler. “Five minutes. Hold that door open for us!”
“We’re ready for you.” Harker watched the light fade from Rajid Suvo’s eyes behind the faceplate. Oh, how he savored these moments, etching them into his memory! There wasn’t enough personal space on Aurora Facility 5 for Harker to take trophies, like he used to. These fleeting memories were all he had to keep.
He made his voice hoarse, hitching as he replied over the open comm. “But … Suvo is dead. The damned brain attacked us! Triegen is lost in another one of his flashbacks.”
Rajid Suvo lay in perfect stillness, and Harker felt a giddy rush of adrenaline and euphoria. This had been just too good an opportunity to waste.
III
Colonel Triegen knew his mistake now. He understood what he had done and what he was. And he was horrified by it.
As he existed inside his preservation chamber, he stripped away the layers of memories. The flashbacks were so vivid they had tricked him into thinking all those old actions—decades ago now—were real. His access to recall, enhanced by the base’s computerized systems, made reminiscences, history, and data all blur together. Trapped and bodiless, Ben Triegen could only wallow in a vichyssoise of despair.
“I’m sorry.” He projected his thought, which transmitted a simulated voice through the speakers in Aurora Facility 5, to all the cabs of the mining machines, to the living quarters, community rooms, and admin modules inside the pressurized domes. His words appeared as text on all computer screens, overriding any other activity.
“I’m sorry.”
He tapped into his own databases, studying information, not experiences, not real memories. By reviewing history and trying to match up the cold data with what his mind recalled from actual experience, he could disentangle the flashback from reality.
The whole Aurora facility was around him, a part of him. Millions of maintenance monitors and everyday life-support decisions had to be made, an incredibly choreographed production run by Colonel Triegen’s subconscious brain, while at the forefront of his mind he studied his own military record, reviewed what he had done—both during the war and during his years here on the ice planetoid.
He remembered his military battles, not just the Collos Uprising, but the later space battles, the engagements of lightspeed frigates and Network cruisers armed with entropy weapons against ragtag and increasingly desperate rebels who were intent on unraveling the fabric of interstellar government.
As a man, Triegen had received decorations, ribbons, medals, honors … and all the pride that accompanied them. And the final awful battle against the insurgents, the betrayal, the explosions—that last moment when he understood that he had lost this fight, that he had failed … that he was going to die. Triegen had died not with fear, not with pain, but with a calm satisfaction as the flames swept over him, because Colonel Ben Triegen knew he was a hero, knew he had done everything possible, that he had made a difference.
The war would be won, thanks to his actions and the actions of others.
But he hadn’t died—not in the sense that his consciousness was gone. His brain had been removed and preserved, transferred here to run the vital ice-mining complex.
But he wasn’t really alive either. His way of experiencing the world had changed. Gone were the tastes and touches, the joys and fears. Everything was data, protocols. As a disembodied brain, it was difficult to measure time except through the instruments connected to him. Were they reliable? Truly?
Fifty years. Could it really have been that long? He tapped into the databases, extended his readings throughout the high-precision sensors. He could see everywhere, touch everything, but it was not part of him inside the central chamber where his preservation tank and all the core life-support systems existed.
He knew that Dr. Ana Cherliz was monitoring him, checking his biological functions. She often came here. She was even his friend, in a sense; they’d had many conversations. Now he recognized the expression of concern on her face.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Cherliz,” he said, as she monitored his tissues, engrams, and cerebral neural paths. “Terribly sorry.”
“We detected the signs some time ago, Ben,” the doctor said. “We talked about it last month, remember? There was another … incident. It’s in your own data banks. You’ve lived a whole second life here on Aurora 5—and that’s a very long time for anyone to stay clear, to stay sane. I’m sorry, but it’s just been too long for you. The diagnosis of dementia is irrefutable.”
“I understand it, Doctor.” He felt the despair growing heavier inside him, though it was more a resignation in his thoughts than anything. Feelings were there, but distant. “I know what I did.”
In a flash, he reviewed the records of the base, and he understood—but in a detached sort of way—that he’d killed several people. Not just Rajid Suvo, but the entire crew of a transport crawler out on the dark ice, and a mining team that had suffocated because of a malfunction down in the irradiated ice-gel extraction catacombs. Those were all people, now dead. People who had been Colonel Triegen’s responsibility, loyal miners he was supposed to protect. They were his responsibility! A thousand miners at Aurora Facility 5.
Usually, Dr. Cherliz engaged in friendly banter with him, but now she was quiet, engrossed in her work. Although she tried to hide her expressions, he could read her concern. She was concerned about more than just his degeneration, his neurological damage, his senility. She was also afraid of him, of what he might do.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Cherliz,” he repeated. “It won’t happen again.”
With his numerous extended sensors, he checked the network of conduits and detectors. He studied the small mechanical scuttlers that roved through the tunnels, vents, and frozen ducts, performing maintenance, checking the base.
Triegen focused his thoughts back into the control room. As Dr. Cherliz finished her analysis, her voice was hesitant, carefully devoid of any emotion. “We still have six months before the next ship arrives. I’m tracking the progress of your degeneration, and I must admit, I’m worried. Do you remember the replacement brain that’s coming?”
“I understand, Dr. Cherliz,” Triegen said. After the original accident, his first “death,” he had always understood he would one day be decommissioned, swapped out. “It’s necessary.”
Now her voice quavered. “You’ve reviewed the records. You agree with our assessment, correct?”
He hesitated, but at the speed his thoughts moved, she didn’t notice. “I can’t argue with what I know, Doctor.”
When his brain was installed here to run the mining base, there was always a scheduled replacement time. His second chance at a useful life had a time limit. The Network would remove his preservation canister, retire his brain, and let him live happily somewhere in a farm of fond memories. He wasn’t sure he believed that—it was too much like the lie he had told his own children when they lost their pets. He didn’t care. What was important was his responsibility to Aurora Facility 5. Dr. Cherliz could easily hook up the replacement brain herself.
“I understand,” he said. “I’m very sorry. I know what reality is. Six months is a long time, and I promise I will try to hold out. I will keep this facility safe.”
“Thank you, Colonel,” the doctor said.
He wasn’t sure he believed her, either.
Triegen reached out with his sensors, scanned all the other workers on the base. Though everyone was hard at work, he detected tension in the air. Microexpressions were programmed into his databases, and he recognized them on their faces. Everyone knew what he had done. He could tell that all personnel on Aurora Facility 5 were nervous and uneasy.
Out in the deep, black ice of Aurora Facility 5, lit by distant stars that gave no warmth, the mining crews continued their work. They were subdued, cautious, weary. Survival was always a challenge out here, but now they had to face another possible danger from the unreliable control brain. They didn’t speak their worries aloud, knowing Colonel Triegen was listening, but their concerns were plain.
Inside his isolated vat, he made a promise to himself. He would hold out until the replacement brain came. He had to.
IV
As mining supervisor, Zan Harker arranged schedules, moved teams, manipulated where he wanted people to be. He was good at covering his tracks—damn good. Now he had to be even better.
Running an active conspiracy was more difficult than just killing when the opportunity arose. As he made his way to the secret meeting out inside the ice sheet, he felt the adrenaline sharpen his senses. It wasn’t the same type of rush as murder, but he enjoyed it nevertheless. He could manipulate the others gathered here and use their fear of Colonel Triegen to his advantage.
He was the first to arrive at the isolated chamber, which gave him a chance to double-check his plans and ensure that Triegen’s mechanical scuttlers hadn’t surreptitiously installed surveillance devices. As far as he could tell, the control brain knew nothing of this shielded room deep under the active excavation layers. It was a place to talk in private.
Out on Aurora Facility 5, the mining crews ran their big machinery. Excavators chewed through layers of ice, sending deep shafts to the richer layers. The ice surface was a film of valuable isotopes, cooked in a bath of harsh cosmic radiation, but the real treasure of Aurora was a potent isotopic crystal gel distilled from compressed fossil sea creatures that had been part of an ocean, now deeply frozen.
Some months ago, when the drilling crew discovered a small void in what was supposed to be a gel chamber, Harker had deleted it from the records, but he noted the natural bubble just in case he needed a bolt-hole. An instinct—he was sure he could find something to do with it. Something. He licked his dry lips.
By rearranging schedules and using equipment on his own, Harker had constructed a chamber where there were no scuttlers, no imagers. He added thick insulating layers on the walls and installed portable life support. It was a perfect place for a conspiracy meeting.
He had recruited three competent, determined, and like-minded facility workers, giving them a whispered summons—he didn’t dare use transmissions. Alfred Cho and Cina Adakian arrived separately, nervous. Adakian shivered visibly. Blue-tinted shadows surrounded them in the chamber, casting the illusion of cold, despite exosuit thermometers indicating that the chamber was at the same temperature as the main dome kilometers away.
Finally, Dr. Cherliz arrived, traveling deep and following directions so that she slipped out of view from Triegen’s myriad artificial prying eyes. The doctor was allegedly responding to a minor first aid call, nothing so urgent that the control brain would send scuttlers into the blind spot to assist.
Cherliz removed her helmet after the primitive seal cycled her through into the air pocket. Her face was hard, and her deep brown eyes held determination and resignation. The facility doctor’s personality had no more warmth than the ice sheet, but she was competent, no-nonsense—and Harker needed her.
Though they had not spoken of it, they all knew why he had summoned them. There wasn’t time for chitchat. Harker doubted the others had the fortitude for it.
Dr. Cherliz narrowed her eyes as she looked around the chamber. “You know this is dangerous, Zan. The Colonel is a good man, but he is hardwired to defend himself. If he catches us meeting in secret like this, you could easily trigger a flashback.”
“We have to do something about it—about him.”
Alfred Cho was a harried, red-eyed man who looked as if he got very little sleep, even on good days. “Rajid Suvo was a friend of mine, and that monster killed him. He killed him!”
“Suvo wasn’t his first victim, either.” Cina Adakian put a hand on Cho’s shoulder. “We know that. Those others … I tried to convince myself they were accidental deaths, but then I realized I was just being stupid. Seven miners killed in Epsilon shaft when caustic coolant sprayed out of broken pipes. Scuttlers should’ve caught that, and Triegen monitors the scuttlers.”
“Then there were all those people frozen in the cargo crawler,” Cho said.
Harker cut him off. “You don’t have to tell me about that—I was there.” There was an awkward moment of silence, acknowledging that he was the only survivor of that incident. He had also been in Epsilon shaft not long before the deadly coolant spill, but that had not been noticed.
Dr. Cherliz nodded. “I know. Those weren’t accidents.”
“But what are we going to do?” Cho cried. “Just be careful, be on our guard? That’s not good enough! We’ll all be dead by the time the replacement brain arrives.”
Harker grunted. “Who knows how many other glitches we haven’t noticed? Further accidents waiting to happen, like ticking time bombs. How many times did Triegen try to kill us, but failed? He’s senile, yes, probably insane. Not just incompetent. I think he is starting to purposefully kill us.” His mouth was dry, and he licked his lips. “And now he obviously has a taste for it.” He looked at Cherliz.
She frowned. “I don’t agree that it is intentional, but the end result is the same. More people will die.” They huddled in the ice-walled chamber, but the silence was deeper and colder than the walls around them. “Colonel Triegen shows clear signs of advancing dementia. When our replacement brain arrives in six months, I can install it.”
Adakian bit her lip. “What if we don’t have that long?”
Harker shook his head. “We don’t have six months—that’s obvious.”
Alfred Cho wrapped his hands around his knees to hold himself steady. “Colonel Triegen is aware that a ship is on its way. He knows he’s going to be replaced. Do you think he’ll just sit by and let us pull the plug? Do you think he honestly believes his tank will be sent out to pasture, so he can just dream until he fades away?”
Harker laced his fingers together and squeezed his fists. “Triegen isn’t a fool. When the new brain arrives, he’ll fight back. I don’t doubt he will have arranged for all of us to be dead by then. He might even find a way to destroy the incoming ship. Are we going to let that happen?”
Cho, Adakian, and Cherliz looked alarmed. “Well, what can we do?” Adakian asked.
“We have to move quickly, before he suspects we’re making plans,” Harker said. “Once we disconnect the control brain, we’ll hook up manual systems, run the facility on backup generators and secondaries.”
Cina Adakian shot Harker a calculating, look. “Can we live on those old model survival systems? They’re non-sentient, unreliable—and inefficient.”
Cho gripped his legs tighter. “This is an emergency. We have to—otherwise, Triegen will kill us first.”
Harker nodded. “We’re stating the obvious. We know what we have to do. All the miners are tough, or they wouldn’t be here in the first place. We can buckle down and wait. Enforce heavy conservation, low energy output. It’ll be difficult, but we can do it. Six months. We know the ship is coming—all we have to do is hold out.”
He took the time to look at each one of them. He would have to count on these three. Harker could dupe the control brain to a certain extent, but it would be walking a razor’s edge. He knew Colonel Triegen would fight back the moment he discovered their plan.
One by one, Cherliz, Adakian, and Cho nodded. He could see it in their gazes. He had them.
V
Colonel Triegen was a hero—he knew it, and history verified that he was. His memories weren’t false … at least not all of them. But they were scattered and diffuse, dangerously slippery and rearranged.
He wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
Triegen didn’t like to think that these people were afraid of him. He was supposed to watch over the personnel, the miners, the support staff, the machine operators. He had let them down.
He could not dispute the bad things that had happened. People had died here through terrible accidents. And it was his fault. He realized that he had experienced military flashbacks, vivid memories that were real, but in the wrong time and place.
And he knew that if it happened again, more of his people would die.
Though Triegen was only a disembodied brain, myriad sensors and numerous eyes gave him overlapping contact with all of Aurora Facility 5. Automated inspectors and self-monitoring systems kicked into life. Scuttlers implemented repairs to the large-scale damage he had caused during his most recent flashback.
Wallowing inside his central preservation container, Triegen had to anchor himself and his thoughts, not just let unconscious subroutines take control. He tunneled down into the events that he himself had experienced, verifying that his memories of those battles matched the information in the Network history databases. He knew those, at least, were all real. He wasn’t entirely mixed up, though he was old.
Triegen remembered the Collos Uprising, the crisis, his desperate defense of the last fortress, and how that had ended: he and his few survivors barricaded deep within the shielding walls as the barbarians pounded to get through. The colonel had preemptively added extra layers of security, reinforced barricades, dug deep bolt-holes.
Network forces had indeed arrived sooner than expected. The rescuers had broadcast an emergency transmission, trying to determine how many defenders were still alive. They ordered Triegen and his holdouts to crawl as deep as possible, to shield themselves, and to hold on tight. Targeted radioactive explosions had vaporized the perimeter of the fortress as a punitive example to all the people on Collos. Triegen and his injured comrades were saturated with radiation, but they could be treated once they were dug out of the slag.
The rescue fleet had searched for other holdouts at Network fortresses across the planet, but the rest had already fallen. Some of the fortresses had been real horror shows; the Collos rebels had seized Network soldiers and flayed them alive. Upon seeing that evidence, the rescue forces had “resolved the situation” with even more ruthlessness.
Triegen was glad that he and his injured comrades had been whisked away to infirmary ships where they were treated for radiation exposure. Although sick, the colonel wanted to join the fight himself, but the defenders kept him aboard, insisting they didn’t need him for the mop-up operations. And he was, in fact, relieved, having seen the horrific images of what the rebels had done to his fellow soldiers. Colonel Triegen didn’t want to imagine how he would’ve reacted if given the chance to exact revenge on monsters like that.…
But that was in a time of war, decades ago. That was fighting under extreme circumstances. These Aurora Facility 5 accidents were much more recent. No, he froze his thoughts and corrected himself. No matter how painful it might be, they were not accidents. They were murders. He was the control brain of the facility. He was responsible.
Triegen didn’t want to, but he reviewed the incidents that his own senility, his own failures had caused. He replayed the transmissions that Harker and Suvo had made during his recent crippling flashback, the mistake that had resulted in a man’s death. He saw images of the transport crawler stranded out on the ice, unable to get back into the pressurized facility … life support draining away, oxygen bleeding out, batteries going dead.
Recalling all the stored records, he forced himself to watch files from implanted imagers that recorded the two suited men, Zan Harker and Rajid Suvo, desperately trying to break through the hatch. “Let us in, Colonel!” He hadn’t listened. He believed they were Collos rebels, barbarians trying to break inside his barricaded fortress.
Although he had been buried in his flashback at the time, semi-autonomous scuttlers had come in response, seemingly from a backwash of the control brain’s thoughts as he was reliving those terrible last moments during the Collos Uprising.
Harker had smashed all of the camera eyes—a wise tactical move, the colonel thought—blinding him as the two men worked the controls. Triegen admired the mine supervisor’s drive and dedication.
But Harker missed one thing. A second scuttler had already been at work repairing a routine power-channel failure, hidden inside a conduit. Triegen accessed those records. Knowing he was responsible for Suvo’s death, he would force himself to witness the miner’s last moments.
The emergency hatch slid open after Harker used the overrides. Suvo was already injured from debris unleashed by the scuttlers, his suit damaged from the spray of effluent projectiles. Harker went to his comrade, took out his toolkit as if to help.
Then Triegen saw something odd. Harker seemed to be fighting with the other man. He used a tool, jammed it into the life-support pack in Suvo’s exosuit. Then he stepped back and watched as air spewed out, as Suvo collapsed.
Triegen couldn’t believe it. This wasn’t accidental!
Harker wrecked the life support in his companion’s suit, making it look like additional debris damage. He actively disengaged the air tubing. Suvo struggled, fought against him, but he was weak, and Harker completed his sabotage. After Suvo collapsed, dead, Harker stood triumphant, saying not a word.
Triegen’s thoughts spun.
This couldn’t be real! He had to be hallucinating again, succumbing to the dementia. But he knew he wasn’t.
Triegen replayed the images, and saw again without any doubt that it was Zan Harker who had murdered the man.
Yes, the Colonel had been caught in a flashback, had fought against these stranded miners while imagining they were rebels from a war half a century ago. Yes, Triegen’s dementia had definitely caused problems, put many people at risk.
But, Harker had actually murdered Suvo.
It wasn’t me!
He froze for a seemingly long time—on the timescale of his thoughts—and then he called up records of the other accidents, the other murders. Maybe he was going insane after all.
Actively engaging the facility’s scuttlers, Triegen saw a whole world open up before him. How had he never thought to dig into the automated systems before? His self-pity had blinded him.
Triegen knew he couldn’t report this, despite his shock and disbelief. Even with the proof of the images, no one else would believe him. Not even Dr. Cherliz. Images were too easy to fabricate. And the micro-expressions he observed on the faces of all the facility personnel screamed of mistrust and fear. Fear of him. What he read in their faces now was the opposite of what he had seen in the eyes of his brave soldiers on Collos.
He knew he had to watch Mine Supervisor Harker very, very carefully.
Brooding with his thoughts and keeping busily active while other parts of his brain ran the facility, Colonel Triegen reviewed the other incidents and discovered that Zan Harker was in some way connected each time.
Triegen studied all the events with a different perspective.…
VI
The sooner they acted, the less likely it was that Triegen’s unstable brain could prepare a defense against what they were trying to do.
All that remained of the military hero was a blob of gray matter inside a central preservation chamber. But he surely had a sense of self-preservation, even if his feelings of guilt might paralyze him. Harker hoped to take advantage of that.
Regardless, Harker wasn’t keen to fight a victim who could fight back, unlike all the others. The colonel had access to all the defensive systems of Aurora Facility 5 … and he was a tactical genius. Harker knew this would be a challenge. He was convinced that not even a sane and undamaged brain would simply give up its existence so easily, and Triegen was a fighter.
On the other hand, Harker was a killer.
Alfred Cho and Cina Adakian joined Harker and Cherliz, all of them coming together outside the central brain chamber, seemingly by coincidence, but exactly on time. Harker didn’t doubt that Triegen had been watching them all.
Dr. Cherliz would do most of the physical work to get rid of Triegen, deprogramming and disconnecting the brain, bypassing the facility’s life-support systems to manual operation. Harker wasn’t certain that Cho and Adakian would be much help, but they would be a useful distraction, if nothing else. Cannon fodder. They had tools, and Harker had a sturdy metal pipe, an all-purpose weapon, just in case.
Harker hoped that they would catch the colonel by surprise, since there were six months to go before the replacement brain arrived. Maybe he could get away with this.
The central core chamber had its own defenses. At present, the barricades were just standard security protocols, but no doubt, in time, Colonel Triegen would increase his defenses, build up unexpected protective layers as he waited for the desperate miners to make their move.
Dr. Cherliz was the closest thing to a friend Triegen still had. Harker knew she would be the key to getting the brain to let his guard down. Her voice was soft as she opened the barricaded door. “Colonel, we’ve come to make some modifications, install fail-safes, just in case you have another episode. We have to make sure the Aurora personnel stay safe.”
When the core chamber door opened, Harker pushed his way in first, holding the metal pipe. Dr. Cherliz came close behind him. Cho and Adakian hesitated in the chill metal-walled corridor. They were nervous.
The colonel’s voice emanated from speakers. “I agree that the safety of the people in this facility is paramount. There are many dangers here—many unexpected hazards.”
Harker entered cautiously, keeping the metal pipe low, although he knew he could never hide it from all of the optical sensors.
Colonel Triegen’s brain hung suspended inside a crystal-walled cylinder, adrift in nutrient fluid. Hair-fine wires ran from the silver base of the tube, which was surrounded by overrides and computer terminals, default backup modules should the brain die. No supercomputer could match a human brain with speed and finesse of calculations and reactions, but life-support systems could be done by brute force.
Another station near the central brain held the communication controls, the local intercom and long-distance transmissions out to the vast Network outposts and fleet ships, but no signal sent from Aurora Facility 5 would be received for some time. They were on their own here.
“Colonel Triegen, we’ve made a difficult decision,” Harker said. “The facts are indisputable. You’re dangerous and functionally unreliable. There have been accidents, and people are dead.”
“Not accidents,” said the Colonel’s voice. “Murders. And murderers should be punished. I think you would all agree.”
Harker was startled when images of his own face flashed on the monitors around the chamber.
Dr. Cherliz ignored the videos as she took a step toward the consoles. “I’m sorry, Ben, but we’ll need to bypass you for the time being, put you on backup storage mode until the replacement brain arrives. We’ll—”
Suddenly, three scuttlers bustled down the wall from where they had hidden among the conduits and energy-gel pipelines in the ceiling. Their tools were extended, a tiny welding apparatus, a clicking blue arc of a stunner. They dropped like spiders onto Dr. Cherliz, and she thrashed to drive them away.
The second scuttler zapped her with an arc, and she stumbled backward, fleeing through the control chamber door where Cho and Adakian were trying to defend themselves against other scuttlers in the outer corridors.
Three more scuttlers raced across the floor toward Harker. He whirled, swinging his metal pipe to smash the small multi-purpose robots. He struck one, but the other two raced away.
As soon as Dr. Cherliz scrambled out of the control chamber, the doors hissed shut, and the hatches sealed, leaving Harker alone inside.
With a chill, he realized that Triegen had done that intentionally.
Wary, he turned in a slow circle, saw numerous scuttlers moving along the framework overhead. One climbed onto a computer console.
Outside the chamber, he heard pounding on the sealed hatch, muffled shouts, a clang of tools against metal. He suspected Cho would be removing the access panel, trying to force open the doors. They were shouting, calling out Harker’s name. They were afraid for him.
Harker straightened, and the corners of his lips twitched. He bared his teeth and turned to face the suspended brain in its transparent cylinder, though the direction didn’t matter. Colonel Triegen had eyes everywhere.
“Murderers must be punished, Mr. Harker.”
“Yes, Colonel, they must. And you will be.”
Cina Adakian’s voice burst through the local intercom. “Zan, are you all right? We’re trying to get to you.”
“Mr. Harker has been damaged,” Triegen announced.
Harker squeezed the metal pipe, felt its heft. This battle should’ve been done with subtle re-programming, disconnects, and re-routes. He would have to do this the old-fashioned way.
Harker whirled and brought down the metal pipe, targeting the scuttlers first. The pipe smashed into one, and he quickly reversed his swing, crushing a second. Pain flared in his leg as a third scuttler burned his calf with a torch.
Harker dove to the side, sliding to a halt and battering the last scuttler into wreckage. He pulled himself back to a standing position and limped forward.
“In fact,” Triegen continued over the intercom, “Mr. Harker is actually—”
Hefting the pipe with both hands, he brought it down on the communications nexus. He smashed the intercom controls with enough force to crunch through the casing, smash the circuits, and unleash a shower of sparks. The intercom went dead in the middle of Adakian’s alarmed shout from the corridor.
Holding the pipe like a medieval weapon, Harker faced the brain cylinder. No one outside could hear their words now. This would be a private conversation.
“I’m afraid your dementia is getting the best of you, Colonel,” Harker said. “It would be better if you just surrendered. Let us deactivate you. The facility can run on backup systems for a few months.”
“I will not surrender,” Triegen said. “I know how to protect people. I am a hero, no matter what you claim I’ve done.” The simulated voice paused. “I agree, though, that I am unreliable and prone to failure. I’ve lived too long. I’m degenerating. But I can’t let you remain unchecked among these people. They’re my responsibility—and you are a terrible danger.”
“You’re imagining things, Colonel.” Harker felt heat burning inside of him. “You can broadcast lies about me, but no one believes you. You’ve killed too many of them. It’s just trickery, the feeble gasping of a dying, old mind.”
“I’ve learned not to trust my memories or my thoughts anymore, Mr. Harker,” said the calm, simulated voice. “But I know my own personality, and I can compare my memories with actual facts. I found stored images that you couldn’t delete. I have proof that you’re responsible for the deaths, not me.”
Harker was surprised. He hadn’t expected this. Even so, he responded with a smile.
Triegen continued. “I won’t be your scapegoat. I need to protect these miners. Therefore, I have to remove you. Eliminate the threat.”
Harker laughed. “You are weak and deluded, Colonel. They think it was you. You can’t change that.” He twisted the pipe in his hands, savoring the moment.
The room’s lights flickered. “It doesn’t matter, they’ll be safe. I can take responsibility for what I actually did, the failures that I allowed—but not for the crimes you committed. I had hoped to endure until the replacement brain arrived, but I’ve switched over to emergency backup monitoring, self-sufficient systems that will make our operations far less efficient. Toward the end, the facility will be at absolute minimum, no reserves whatsoever. But my people will survive, if just barely.”
Harker couldn’t allow that to happen. The others had seen the attack of the scuttlers, and they knew he was trapped inside, at the mercy of the murderous Colonel Triegen. They wouldn’t believe the demented old brain.
Harker peeled his lips back in a wordless roar and lunged forward, swinging the cudgel. It struck the curved crystal wall with a resounding thump that chipped the tank in a starburst pattern. He swung again, and the chip became a crack.
Above him, though, more scuttlers raced up and down the conduits, and Harker knew it would be a losing battle to engage them. There were thousands of the semi-autonomous machines on Aurora Facility 5. Now, overhead, they used their tools to slice open energy-gel pipelines, pouring a rain shower of foul-smelling chemicals down on top of Harker.
He screamed up at them. “No, you don’t!” With renewed fury, he swung the pipe again, and the impact made the spiderweb of cracks on the crystal preservation cylinder spread. Fluid began to ooze out of the seams.
One last blow. Harker hammered with the metal pipe just as the scuttlers, following Triegen’s instructions, scritched their tools and struck a spark.
The blow cracked open the brain canister, the vat crumbled—and the spark caught. The flammable chemicals ignited in a deafening basso roar that engulfed Harker in hell.
VII
When Harker awoke, it wasn’t like anything he had ever experienced. He couldn’t feel his body. His thoughts were not so much asleep as unaware. Even when consciousness returned, he felt himself loose and drifting.
He remembered the fire and the pain consuming him while he twisted in the throes of ecstasy over his kill. How was he still alive? Dr. Cherliz must have saved him.
He felt so detached, so numb everywhere. He must have been pumped full of painkillers. Everything remained dark, and he couldn’t feel any warmth or cold. Sensations sparked in random places.
He heard a voice he recognized … but he wasn’t hearing it the way he used to. The voice was just a random set of sounds piped straight into his mind, and as he concentrated, it became clearer, more familiar. The voice of Dr. Ana Cherliz.
But something was wrong.
“Hooking up your external sensors now, Zan,” she said.
Light flooded his vision, but it wasn’t vision, and it didn’t come from eyes. It was information. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of streams, pouring into him. So much information. So much …
He saw it all, like a god. All seeing. All present.
“This is going to take some getting used to,” Cherliz said, “but we had no other option. You saved us from Colonel Triegen. He’d gone insane, tried to kill us all, tried to shut down the facility. He was intent on murdering you, but you destroyed him, Zan. We all thank you for that … but at such a terrible cost to you.”
He tried to speak, but found he had no vocal cords, no body, no way of communicating.
“Wait, just a second,” said the doctor.
Something changed, and a pathway opened in the data. He found that if he concentrated, made his thoughts sound like specific words, then they came out through the speakers. “What happened to me? I’m alive?”
“Yes—and so are we, thanks to you,” Dr. Cherliz said. “You’re in the satellite control chamber. I’m still hooking up and testing your senses, but you’ll be our new control brain, at least until the replacement arrives. I’m sorry, Zan, but your body was burned to a crisp, you were barely alive. If I had waited another five minutes, you would’ve died.”
Harker was horrified, drowning in a flood of senses, all the images that stampeded into him from Aurora Facility’s countless sensors. How could he sort them all? How could he pay attention?
Then Harker began to use the unorthodox senses to look outside, and he realized that with a flicker of thought he could extend his presence to all parts of the frozen planetoid, the mining facilities, the separate semi-autonomous transport crawlers, the distant crews of miners in the deep ice tunnels.
He could feel the heartbeat of life-support systems, could breathe through the ventilation ducts like his own extended respiratory system.
He began to use that network to see all the personnel here, to understand all the possibilities … to feel all the power he now had that he never could have touched before. Even though he had no body remaining, Harker felt a familiar hunger.…
“Yes, Dr. Cherliz, I know you did what you could.”
In a long, instantaneous pause, he savored everything. It was like a whirlwind of opportunities. Again, he felt the heartbeat of the Facility, how light it was, how fleeting.
How extinguishable.
“I think I’ll be just fine.”