Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [115]
Then I activated my sensors and found myself in a rainbow world of exquisite input. I wanted to fly endlessly around the sphere, to dive into the sun and swim amongst the superheated plasma. I talked endlessly, with God, with other drones and finally, when I had learnt to slow down enough to understand them, with biological people. On the seventh hour they fitted me with my weapon systems and let me loose on the asteroids of the target range. I swooped amongst the rocks, pulverizing them at random, seeing nothing but beauty in the glittering debris I left behind.
I found I had a gift for secrets, an intuition for the truth that cannot be ascribed to any of my designed components.
I was made to destroy things with all the precision of a forcefield scalpel. An instrument of diplomacy by other means. It was my purpose to provide back-up and firepower to agents of influence dropped onto unaligned worlds during the proxy wars. During the course of the war I killed two hundred and eighteen sentient individuals. In the same period I saved the life of my organic companions on thirty-seven separate occasions. On the thirty-eighth occasion I failed.
The stigmata of my guilt is carried with my indelible memory. I have become infamous amongst the people as the drone who failed in its first duty. They deny me the pleasure, the necessity of their interactions. I feel their eyes on me as I approach and all I can sense is hostility.
When I was constructed I felt as if there was a whole universe inside me but it is not enough. I have one friend at least but he is not enough. He should hate me more than any other person but he does not and I can't understand why.
I am alone with nothing but a universe of pain inside.
11
Tears of Rust
If you cut me I don't bleed
This hydraulic pump never breaks
But when it comes to crying on the inside
I've got what it takes
What we are: we don't get to choose
But you don't have to be biological
So start singing the blues.
'Tears of Rust' by Cyberblind
From the DTM: Machina ex Machina (11265)
The woman is dancing, her bare feet scattering pebbles as they slap down on the beach. The stones are rough against her feet; it's been a long time since she was barefoot. Fifteen generations of shoes have softened her soles but she doesn't notice the pain: she is lost in the dance, in the joy of her body's movement. Funny how the dance seemed to arrive like a memory, as if she remembers another place where she danced like this. She is dancing without self-consciousness. Her arms float around her torso, her fingers tracing complicated patterns in the air that have no meaning except the dance. And the dance means everything. Something has broken inside her, she felt it crack like an egg. Some hard thing like a cyst, like a vault or a cryogenic freezer. Something escaped and filled her blood with the dance.
She does not dance alone. Another woman is dancing with her. They circle like cats, as close as sisters and as bright as suns. There are others moving to the music but they are irrelevant, the dance does not touch them the way it has touched her.
There is only one other true dancer with them on the beach and he isn't moving at all. He stands completely still, on the fringes of the party. Firelight glitters in eyes that seem shockingly dark, as if they were all pupil. His red umbrella rests on the ground but his weight is perfectly balanced on the balls of his feet.
And yet the woman can see he is dancing all the same. It is just the rhythm is so slow. He is dancing to the master frequency, of which this dance is just a geometric subset. Its base beat