The Burden
by
Bill Wolfe
Darus surveyed landscape and wished, for the thousandth time, that he was able to translate the panoramic view from a shuttle or atmospheric craft into recognizable cartography when he was on foot. Ashen ground, pewter sky, even the damn air was grey with the spores from the only flora this rock ever produced, a slate-colored lichen. Even on his first and only visit to Earth, everything had looked 2D to him from ground level -- but this was becoming ridiculous. He shifted the burden to his left shoulder and started toward a series of bleak, rolling hills that may have been the serpentine formation he hoped were those that he remembered to be south of the outpost. He mused that they may only seem familiar because they differed so little from those he had already passed.
The air recycler in his suit hummed and throbbed to his increasingly uneven breathing. His nose told him that he’d have to rest soon. No matter what the suit specs said, he knew his scrubbers were lagging behind. Though thirsty, he was reluctant to take a sip of the recycled water from the nipple situated beside his chin. Last time he'd done so he thought he had detected a slight urine flavor. But perhaps it had just been his imagination. There would be fresh water at the outpost. Better to wait until he reached those stupid hills. Maybe then he could take a rest and let the scrubbers catch up with his body's output. The sour smell of his own breath told him they would need the time for at least one full cycle through the suit's reservoir. He wondered why nobody had ever thought to add a breath mint cache to the suit's emergency supplies. After all, they had room for Carbohydrate Supplement Number Four ... a sugar pellet. Why not make it a mint, as well? And whatever happened to Carbohydrate Supplements One through Three? Were they defective? After ten thousand years of civilization it takes three tries do get a piece of hard candy right?
Almost absently he realized that fatigue and sleep deprivation were taking their toll. His mind was beginning to wander. The chrono HUD above his visor told him he had been walking for nearly six hours. He would definitely have to rest soon or he was likely to walk off one of the very few steep bluffs that were one of the reasons the military had chosen this dirtball in the first place. And maybe if he stopped for a while he would be able to figure out where he was. His gruesome and leaking burden shifted in the makeshift sack slung over his shoulder. Was that movement he felt? Darus shuddered.
When he reached the taller of the small line of hills he stopped to set his burden down and to stretch his tired shoulder muscles. Should have taken the time to find a beltpack somewhere in the wreckage, he thought. He was carrying this thing in the frayed remains of a seat-cushion cover. He'd found the torn seat right next to it and it had seemed better to cover it up with something as soon as possible: more respectful, somehow.
The view from this new vantage, however, was inconclusive. The line of rolling terrain to the south didn't look like anything he'd seen before. The formation looked a little like an advancing line of moles. Funny, he'd only seen one mole in his life and he was pretty sure they didn't march anywhere, let alone in single file. Yet that was the image invoked. His mother used to say that the mind is a strange and wondrous place.
Darus thought about his mother as he rested on the rounded gray crest. Now there's a safe subject for thought. Good ole' Mom. What was that other quote she used to like to toss out when she saw someone who should have known better but was about to make a big mistake? Oh yeah, 'Never underestimate any man's capacity to rationalize.' Wonder what the Momster would say if she could see him, now. A familiar contour in the distance caught Darus's attention. There were two valleys to the north that could have been those he used to hike with Marienne.
Marienne! The memories invaded despite his exhausted efforts to think of something ... anything ... else. Her rich mahogany eyes, flecked with pale gold, could flash like lightning when she was angry or they could be as welcoming as Grandma’s kitchen at Christmas time. He remembered the way the corners crinkled as she laughed, just so. Darus surrendered a sob and cursed his uncooperative brain. Silently, he relived what should have been telling moments. The lovemaking, the playful, naked teasing in their survival tent, their refuge from the confines of the outpost. He remembered her smell, her taste, the feel of her body in the night. The knowing looks between Abdul and Gert when they would enter from the airlock after one of their "treks." How could I not know? he demanded silently. What’s the matter with me that I couldn’t tell? But even now, knowing what he knew, he couldn’t.
She had seemed so wonderful. Not perfect, not at all, but as flawed as anyone. She had moods, strange, incomprehensible, and yet not so different from other women he had known. He recalled the excruciatingly suggestive way she would lick her lips when she was engrossed in some particularly sticky calculation concerning field strength and power requirements for the compact detection and warning system that the foursome was installing on this useless, ugly rock. She had really shown flaws during the cramped weeks aboard the small ship, a gutted Silicata seed pod, traveling to this system. The spats between her and Gert about shower times when their recycler broke down en route were often adolescent, petulant, and both he and Ab had found them quite entertaining. And they were also completely normal. Her biting sarcasm and easy humor were as irritating and endearing as her obscure quotations from twencen literature.
Darus searched his memories for the hint, the odd look or out-of-place word which, though unnoticed at the time, might later have revealed that there had been something amiss, something wrong. Nothing. And Darus was the one who knew her best. Neither Gert, with her constant reference to her "woman’s intuition", nor the sensitive, serene Ab had intimated any suspicions about Marienne. But they couldn’t have known her like he had. They didn’t sleep with her. They never told her that they loved her. But he had.
Suddenly, without preamble, his empty, maudlin sentimentality was replaced by a snarl of visceral anger. He would not let her get away with this! He had the proof of her duplicity, her treachery. He had his burden. He would, in the end, have the last word. Grimly, he shouldered his load and continued toward the northern valley, where he hoped he might recognize the lay of the land. Perhaps he would even find an old campsite. Pure water was poisonous to the local flora and the old tent they shared on their little 'treks' had always leaked.
Abdul, the only real pilot on the crew, had been at the controls. He’d taken the small shuttle to manual mode in order to do a quick flyby of the outpost, ostensibly, of course, for a final inspection to assure that the camouflage was as perfect as possible. Darus couldn’t help but imagine that some sentimental aspect in Abdul’s character just wanted to say goodbye to what had been their home for two months and to snatch one last look at what would be his little group’s contribution to the war effort. Darus remembered a hard left bank away from the site. If he was correct, that should have been Ab taking a due southern heading, making for the equator. It had been less than a minute, about time for Ab to have switched back to computer control, when Darus, and all his hopes, his plans, his illusions, had literally, come crashing down.
Darus, a construction specialist and certainly no engineer, was fairly certain something had gone wrong with the small shuttle’s drive. The black box, stashed safely in his leg pouch, would surely shed light on the exact cause of the crash when he brought it back to the company. He felt a chill when he thought of the many trips he’d made up to the ship in the same little craft. He’d usually been alone since both the small and the large shuttle were human-made, not Silicata, and fully capable of ferrying people and goods back and forth with nothing more than verbal orders to the ship’s computer. Yes, he was sure that it had been an accident. A small malfunction that, had they not been flying so low, Ab would have quickly corrected. It would have been just a scare, nothing more than a story to tell to bar mates and bored grandchildren. Half the listeners wouldn’t even believe it.
"Pseudogravitics don’t fail."
"Shuttles are as safe as houses."
"One in a million malfunction." Yeah. Right.
"Grandpa, what did you do during The War?"
The War. That’s what everyone called it. Darus was neither particulary socially conscious nor patriotic but even he realized that this wasn’t a situation that would suffer neutrality by anyone, for any reason. And, privately, he even had to admit that he was a little proud of the work he had done, as a civilian contractor, of course, which may have aided the War Effort, even a bit. He’d never been tempted to Volunteer, however. He just didn't fit the military mold. He wasn’t a coward, really, working in space could be damn dangerous at times. He’d seen his share of accidents and had lost two close coworkers over the years, one to the vagaries of chance and another to the misfortune of the negligence of others. Darus had no doubts that he earned his hazard pay. And he had always just collected it and moved on. He was a drifter. He never committed to anything but short-term contracts. It had never occurred to him to wonder why.
Marienne’s story was different. She had "retired" from the Navy after some unspecified incident. Abdul, a Marine Colonel, had known more and had tried to bring it up one time on the long trip out. Marienne had silenced him with an oddly military gesture. Darus and Gert, the two real civilians, had been discussing a relatively new Silicata species that would probably be called spiders. It had just been made public before they left Sanctuary that some of the more advanced Silicata predators, the morays and orcas, had changed tactics. Usually, engaging with a dazzling arsenal of energy weapons, chemical, fission, fusion and antimatter bombs they would, like their namesakes, simply tear their opponents into manageable chunks. Then they would leisurely ingest the parts they required for replication, repair or growth. Some were now, however, purportedly releasing swarms of smaller Silicatas, specialized robots to board disabled ships. The Big Heads, safely ensconced in their warrens on Radio-Free New Geneva, had started calling them spiders for obvious reasons. There were even rumors of prisoners being taken.
Nobody knew why or what this change meant. Regardless, Darus took the hint and never brought the subject up, even when he and Marienne were recounting their family histories and first loves in the heady, early days of their relationship. Darus had wondered if, perhaps, that was why their relationship had seemed so smooth, so free of conflict. Could it have been a little too smooth? After all, two different objects cannot truly touch without some friction. Any construction worker could tell you that.
Even during the accident, when they had first been thrown forward into their restraints, Ab’s incomprehensible Arabic swearing sounding far away and tinny in his headset, Marienne had clasped for his hand. As the small craft plunged to destruction, the terror in her eyes had mirrored his own. When he awoke after the crash, strapped to his seat but unscathed, he was still gripping her hand, his forearm aching and cramped from the sustained effort. He found most of the rest of her inside the twisted fuselage. No words had been spoken.
The contours of this valley looked familiar. If he was right, he was only about an hour from the outpost. All he had to do was return and summon the big shuttle, the one Gert had started calling The Truck, from their ship, in orbit above. The return to Sanctuary was automated and preprogrammed. Policy held that nobody on the mission should know exactly where the EW outpost was located. They all knew, of course, that it had to be about four hundred light-years from Sol. Probably a little more, so that it would already be in place when Earth’s early radio transmissions passed through this system. Darus was, as always, bemused by the Military’s penchant for superfluous secrecy. Suddenly, he stopped.
If it hadn’t been for the accident, nobody would know. The four of them would be safely on their way back to civilization. Abdul and Gert would probably have resisted temptation for the rest of the journey and Darus and Marienne would ... what? They had made no real plans beyond blowing their bonus with a week at the L5 Hilton. And if he hadn’t found her as he had, knowing she was dead but needing to see it for himself, even he would know only that he’d lost her. He certainly hadn’t had the stomach to look too closely at Ab and Gert’s mangled remains in the cockpit. Her secret would still be safe.
Was it her secret? Somehow he had been assuming that Marienne had knowingly deceived him. His burden, the evidence of her deceit, had been his revenge. He realized that he had wrapped his desire to strike back at her in the flag of duty. It is an easy honor that coincides with our base desires. But who, exactly, was he striking against? Marienne was dead. The woman he knew and loved had died, he was sure of that ... but when? Had it been only hours ago?
Again the anger washed over him. For the first time since he acquired his burden, he resented it. Who was he, anyway? Just a rent-a-tech. A road whore, overpaid and expendable. No loyalties but to the Almighty Credit. He’d been hired to do a job for the Military. And he’d done it. The outpost was up and fully operational. If any predators investigated this system in response to Earth’s transmissions, they wouldn’t look too closely at this ball of dirt. It was radio silent, with a silicata-unfriendly gravity well and it was, Darus was convinced, just too ugly to be interesting. But this lonely rock in space would be watching for the predators.
Like most of known space, this system was populated with new and potentially profitable species of Silicata. Mostly processor shrubs and rock worms, but Ab had reported scanning what may have been an exploitable new species of nukeberry tree. No thorns. Very interesting. But orders were that there was to be no harvesting, not even samples or seeds. They were to leave no evidence of their presence behind in the system, at all. The outpost, like the shuttles, was completely human. No Silicata tech to give it away if one of the big boys, a hammerhead or stoat, came sniffing around. If the outpost was attacked, it was defended well enough to spew compressed subspace data in all directions for microseconds before self-destructing.
Or would it? Anyway his job was done. Nothing to do now but file his report, pick up his pay, get drunk and wait for his next job. He thought it likely that a team would be sent to investigate and at least clean up the crash site. What would they find? What passed for rain here was acidic. Would there be anything left of the bodies? He didn’t know.
It wasn’t fair that he should have to make this decision. Why was it up to him to bring his burden to the attention of the Military? They’d apparently had their chance and had failed. They would find out sooner or later, they always did. If he told them, then they would know about Marienne. Darus felt a surge of protective desire begin to wash away the anger he had been carrying. Marienne’s memory would be soiled. Her life of service negated by the evidence that he, her lover, her friend, now carried in a makeshift sack. He would be the agent of her dishonor. Of all the indignities, his would be the last.
He realized that for some time he had been following familiar landmarks. He knew where he was. The outpost was just over the next rise. The time had come to decide what he was going to do and he understood that he just couldn’t go through with it. Slowly he placed his burden on the ground and walked toward the outpost. He still knew the entrance codes, after all, he had been the last to leave less than eight hours ago. Less than eight hours. God, how much the universe had changed in that time.
The remains of Marienne’s impromptu celebration had been placed in the recyclers. Ab and Gert had come back from captain’s quarters wearing sheepish grins and avoiding eye contact with the others. Marienne, her skinsuit open and her visor up, smirked knowingly at Darus and then busied herself with last minute preparations for leaving the site forever. The senior members of the team were married, but not to each other. Ab and Gert had conducted their relationship with strict professionalism for the entire assignment. However, close quarters, undeniable mutual attraction and Darus and Marienne’s unavoidably ubiquitous physical relationship had combined to form a tension between the two that sometimes felt like a fifth presence in the modular confines of the small erosion cave where the Early Warning outpost was located. The passive sensor outpost was invisible now, a drab patch at the base of an equally uninteresting bluff. It was undetectable by any known tech except, of course, from someone who had just spent the last two months installing it.
The wrap party had been a release in more ways than one. Ab, apparently not an Orthodox Muslim, and Gert had indulged in a fair portion of the bubbly, certainly, but in Darus's humble opinion, neither could be considered to be truly trashed. And if that was the excuse both would later use when explaining it to themselves, well ... that was okay with him. When they disappeared into Ab’s larger sleeping quarters, Marienne and Darus sat frozen, sharing wide-eyed, smiling grimaces until the first faint moan was heard. Then they both dissolved into quiet giggles and decided to take a long last walk in the poison atmosphere outside the airlock. "Well, it’s about damned time!" she said, once they were clear of the cave. Her voice sounded smug through the normal distortion of Darus’s headset.
His feelings on the subject were mixed. Like many confirmed bachelors, Darus harbored an idealistic opinion of marriage. His own mother had an affair and left his father when Darus was ten. His stepfather had been okay, a little gruff and strict but not a bad sort. Darus had grown up separated from his father and had vowed never to do that to his own children. On the other hand, Abdul and Gert’s little fling posed no intrinsic threat to their respective marriages and both had struggled painfully to remain loyal to their spouses.
Loyalty, there was a concept that Darus had never truly considered. Where did his loyalty lie now? He realized that he had left his burden behind out of his sense of loyalty to Marienne, or, possibly, to her memory. But what about his duty to himself, and, droll as it felt, what about his loyalty to humanity? Odd thought, that. It seemed that loyalty, duty, responsibility and all those ephemeral considerations were unlike other emotions; they didn’t really just come naturally when the time was right. If you never put yourself in a position to call upon them, they became just words in your lexicon. Without these qualities, was organic life any different from Silicate?
####
Humanity had been monumentally fortunate. The galaxy was swarming with silicate life forms that were complex enough to warrant a biological Kingdom of their own, Silicata. The five Kingdoms: Animalia, Fungi, Plantae, Protista and Monera, were just going to have to scoot over in the textbooks and make a little room. Actually, make a lot of room ... a whole lot of room. Silicata life might just be more common than any other; and dozens of new species were added to the catalogue every day. More space in space, as the saying goes.
We just happened to evolve in an otherwise unremarkable solar system that none of the predators inhabited. There is abundant evidence in our solar system that our asteroid belts and our sun were being exploited up until the first part of the twencen. But then they had all packed-up and left. When we started cranking out our radio noise, the silicates with the benign version of the universal programming -- which simply mandated that they make sure that there is no intelligent life in the system before operating -- scattered like pond fish from a dropped rock. And we didn't even know it. In 1901, astronomy was in its infancy.
We were already mining the asteroid belts and puzzling over the evidence that something had been there before us when a predatory Silicata limped into Sol system on a failing FTL. It was a Scorpion which had been shot to hell in what we later learned was the last battle fought by the doughty Tilthz. Fleeing the carnage and looking for a safe place to hole up and heal -- away from the scavengers of its kind -- it had intersected Earth’s radio sphere. For over two hundred years we had dumped our cacophony of electromagnetic junk into the void, an ever-expanding beacon to the cosmos.
In the ocean, when warm-blooded animals are born there is a visible puff of birth fluid released with the infant. Perhaps radio noise is the equivalent announcement of the birth of a technological civilization. During their millennia-spanning history in space, the TrisTillan have documented over a thousand planets nuked and particle-beamed back to the stone age, or extinction, by Silicatas. Would human civilization have survived orbital bombardment in 1911, ten years after Marconi received his first transatlantic radio signal?
Like all the predators, the scorpion, a midsized opponent, at best, immediately tried to silence the largest source of coherent EM. Humanity, prepared by our history of conflict, had finished-off the wounded behemoth only to find that it had been almost ready to spawn. There were fifty-four immature, unprogrammed, scorpions in its pouch. Each had a small, but fully-functional FTL. And scorpions, like their namesakes, were born ready to sting. It was a true treasure trove by any standards and remained our largest cache of functional FTL’s for nearly thirty years. By the time other predators were attracted to our spore, we had already been contacted by the Parang. Humanity had joined the fray.
It seems that most civilizations, if they survive to explore space, eventually send out their version of the Von Neumann Device. A self-replicating machine programmed for some function, usually the mining and processing of the next system’s resources. EURO-NASA had launched a few simple versions before our first Silicata encounter. And ours, too, had included the benign programming equivalent of: MAKE SURE THE SYSTEM IS UNINHABITED BEFORE FULFILLING YOUR FUNCTION. After all, we don’t want to piss-off the neighbors, do we? But there are two ways to implement those instructions, and the universe is really, really old.
There are theories and postulates concerning data drift and programming corruption due to ionizing events and whatnot, but the basic truth is that evolution is inevitable. Single-celled organisms in Earth’s primordial ooze were less complex than any self-replicating robot miner. And just look what those primitive prokaryotes did with just a few billion years and one measly planet to play around in.
To the Kingdom Silicata, the universe is one big ecosphere, an immense sea where energy-rich "shoals," usually a star but there are other sources, are surrounded by "plant" Silicates that do exactly what their organic cousins do: collect and store energy and minerals in a medium that something will eventually find a way to utilize. And, of course, make more of themselves. Many of the plants have nasty defenses that can only be bypassed by feeding them the raw materials they need to survive. The "fruit" -- be it processor spheres or photoelectric webbing, forever batteries or even nukeberries -- can be harvested by anyone who can supply more raw material than is contained in the finished product. It is a natural economy not unlike the biological. Is feeding a nukeberry bush raw plutonium and harvesting the 'fruit' any different from supplying an apple tree with plenty of water, sunshine and manure?
Or is it symbiosis? We didn’t invent the complex ecology of the Silicatas, but we do use it. Spacefaring technology couldn’t survive without harvesting Silicata "produce." Darus was as fascinated as anyone with the just-released TrisTillan vids of the Crappers, which are rumored to gobble-up the smaller natural singularities -- sometimes called black holes -- and, somehow, process them into the esoteric matter which makes FTL possible. Puts a whole new meaning on the term: 'Shit Job.' In the Silicate kingdom there are parasites that feed off the living and scavengers that clean up after them all. There are plants, grazers, burrowers and even something that fulfills much of the role of fungi. For some species only their seed pods can travel FTL while others, like Earth's first encounter with the scorpion, bear their young live. Almost every ecological niche ever encountered or imagined is represented in the Silicatas ... including, and especially, the predators.
More like Earth’s sharks than any other terrestrial analogue, they are driven to a frenzy by structured radio noise. To them, it’s like blood in the water. Exoprogramologists, the geneticists of Kingdom Silicata, have identified at least thirty distinct programming origins in the Silicates so far examined. This probably means that thirty or so biological civilizations -- perhaps countless billions of years in the past -- must have sent self-replicating machines out into the void. And absolutely all share an imbedded imperative to see to it that there is no intelligent life -- as defined by radio signals -- in the area before proceeding with the mission. Perhaps it is a kindness to assume that these long-dead organics programmed their machines to simply scan for intelligent life and to assure that there is none before continuing to fulfill their function. Surely it was a fluke -- rather than by design -- that over the eons some of these creatures have interpreted these instructions to mean to make sure there is no intelligent life in the system.
And then there is the interesting little fact that Silicates never make exact copies of themselves. There is almost always some material available to either the offspring or to the parent that is different from whatever the original specs may have called for. But the worst of all is the interbreeding. Somewhere, somehow, either by an organic culture trying to harvest the nonpredatory Silicates or as some strange 'mutation' of some other programming ... the Silicates developed a subroutine that allows them to translate and incorporate any kind of programming into their systems. And just like the organics, eventually, everything gets eaten.
It is evolution at its finest, producing both subtle variations in the next generation and strange, chimerical hybrids. Many of the hybrids fail immediately and are -- in turn -- consumed by one of the carrion eaters. But some of the hybrids thrive, continuing on to form viable species of their own. To continue the metaphor, all the Silicata are female and all reproduce as soon as they have eaten their fill. The most conservative estimates put Silicate evolution at fifty-times the pace of organic. In some ways, Silicates are more like life than life, itself.
Now, over a century after that first encounter, Earth is nearly radio silent. But our allies have assured us that we face at least a three-hundred-year window of vulnerability. Sol System’s population is twenty billion. There is no way to hide that from a voracious predator. They are vicious and relentless and at least a dozen sentient races are battling them for their very existence. They are the answer to the twencen puzzle concerning the lack of radio noise in a universe that should be full of it. But that isn’t all. There are nastier things rumored to be lurking out there. Subspace echoes and hazy reports from diverse cultures of whole schools of predators being rounded-up and ... trained? Eaten? Nobody knows. There is no theoretical limit to how far the Silicatas could have advanced in even the most conservative time allotments. To the insects of the Namib desert, the gerbil is a master predator. Have we met the Silicata equivalent of the fox, or the tiger, or Man? Should we even worry about it? Could Darus, or his burden, change anything?
####
His code opened the outpost’s small airlock. Everything inside was as they had left it only hours ago. Darus spotted a plastic champagne cork that had escaped his hurried tidying. His first breath outside the confines of his suit brought a veritable smorgasbord of sensations. The outpost air was much drier than the canned crap he had been breathing and his thirst struck like a suckerpunch. As he quenched his parched throat and washed away the scuzzy film that seemed to coat his whole mouth, he thought he caught a hint of Gert's perfume. The scent made his eyes water with grief. Gert had usually sprayed it on just a bit too heavy. Marienne, on the other hand, had always smelled only of soap and military-issue laundry detergent. Darus shrugged out of his pressure suit and stood there, crying unabashedly as the chill of his own drying sweat sent shivers through his body, accentuating the racking sobs of true mourning.
When the shivers and the tears finally stopped, Darus felt cleansed in way he had never before known in his adult life. There was just a ghost of a memory of once feeling this way when he was a child, crying himself to sleep alone in his room. He remembered wondering why, even though nothing had changed, even though he had still seen the tears in Daddy's eyes when he dropped Darus off at the apartment his mother shared with that man, he still felt better after a good long cry. It was a simple, basic need that the adult world seemed unable to fulfill. He wondered what else he may have lost as he grew, leaving childhood behind. He found a clarity of thought and emotion that seemed to cut through all the turmoil and indecision with which -- he could now see -- he had only plagued himself.
He accessed the comm, and as he spoke the sequence that would summon The Truck, he made his decision. After all, he wasn’t the first guy in history to find out, by accident, that the woman in his life wasn’t the person he thought she was. His father had learned that lesson and, in Darus’s opinion, in a much harder way. And Darus also knew that learning this didn't mean that the woman in question was bad. He still loved his mother -- even though she had deceived his father. She had still been a warm, wise and caring woman and if she had regrets, she dealt with them within herself. Marienne's deceptions in no way obviated her worth as a person. His duty now was simple. He couldn't even imagine why he had been so torn about what to do in the first place.
The love he had shared with Marienne was real. The good times would stand by themselves, in his memory, which was the only place that really counted. Her anguish was over, so were her joys, her hopes and her plans. She was beyond any more intrusion or sacrilege, or even redemption. He couldn’t change any of that. He knew now that his burden had never been in the sack, he had carried it only in his heart and in his head.
####
The transport had been designed to be cozy for four. Darus found it quite roomy during his long journey back. He slept when he felt like it, walked around in his underwear and only showered when he could no longer tolerate his own company. It was amazing how quickly he returned to bachelor mode.
In the ship’s medical closet was a small freezer. What had been Marienne’s head rocked slightly as the mechanism tried to move the frozen, but already ruined lips. The brain processors installed by the Silicates, though still active, were increasingly unable to stimulate those muscles. And without a specific muscular twitch pattern, the self-destruct could not be triggered. This whole situation had not been anticipated by the Masters and the processors had no programming to cover this kind of problem. Much of the jaw had been crushed on impact but delicate polycarbon filaments which had been carefully strung through the organics of her neck muscles sparked occasionally when the twitching caused their torn ends to touch and short. The left eye had collapsed but the right one, the organic lid no longer able to flutter its horrid mockery of her once-sultry wink, stared outward at nothing, nothing at all, a tiny frozen tear in its corner.
THE END
© 2005 by Bill Wolfe
Bio: "Bill Wolfe is a resident of Knoxville, Tennessee, and writes because he has an unnatural penchant for pain. You can read his best work on bathroom walls in all the finer truckstops, nationwide."
E-mail: Bill Wolfe
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