Engineman - Eric Brown [116]
But where are you now?
-- I am transmitting this from my Paris base via a satellite link, accessing the shipboard logic matrix of the Sublime. I am also communicating with Dan Leferve in his berth.
Mirren questioned how Fekete could be communicating with two people at the same time.
Again the chuckle. -- I am now, in effect, a machine. I can replicate myself ad infinitum. I could even, if I so wished, communicate with a million people simultaneously. I am speaking to you via your occipital leads.
A thought occurred to Mirren.
Do you realise that Dan and others of his persuasion will deny that you are any longer human?
Mirren was aware of humour in the reply. -- Ralph, I myself doubt whether I am any longer human, as you would define the term. I am, however, a thinking, feeling, morally conscious entity. Call me transhuman, if you wish. I have already had this argument with Dan. We have moved on from that, to the reason for my communicating with you. My time is limited; with each passing second you move farther from the solar system, and my signal weakens-
Why have you contacted us? Mirren asked, unable to work out why Fekete, loath to accompany them on this mission himself, should instigate what was surely the most bizarre dialogue in the history of star travel.
There was a pause.
-- Upon my death and resurrection in this realm, Fekete began, I learned of Olafson and Elliott's deaths, and investigated. I had unlimited resources open to me, and access to vast amounts of information. I naturally assumed that we, the Enginemen selected by Hunter for this mission, were being targeted and killed because someone did not want the mission to succeed. Coincidental as it may seem, we were targeted for altogether another reason.
So Hunter was right, Mirren thought.
Fekete paused. Mirren thought he had lost the link. Then he continued. -When I discovered the real reason, I attempted to contact Dan and yourself to warn you to abandon the mission. Of course I failed, until my sensors detected the Sublime. Now I can but warn you to take care.
The real reason? Mirren asked.
-- In the days before my death I relived three sudden and involuntary flashbacks of our last voyage and the crashlanding of the Perseus Bound. These flashbacks were strange in that with each one I was given an increasing amount of information: I recalled nothing of the journey to begin with, and then with each flashback I recalled more and more... But I suspect I need not go on: you no doubt have undergone the same?
Mirren assented.
-- Leferve and Elliott, and Olafson also; which I found out while investigating Olafson's movements before her death. I spoke to her husband, and he mentioned that Christiana too experienced these attacks. He told me that she had contacted her doctor at the firm for which she worked, a subsidiary of the Danzig Organisation. I decided to investigate further. I insinuated probes into the medic's information matrices and discovered a communiqué he despatched to the head of the Organisation.
Fekete paused. The signal was growing appreciably weaker. Mirren was aware that, when Fekete continued, the voice in his head was little more than a whisper.
-- What Olafson and the rest of us witnessed in the jungle after the crashlanding was enough to have the Danzig Organisation, when they found out about our flashbacks, order our extermination. For we all witnessed what occurred and we all, if we lived, would eventually recall it.
-- I scoured what were now my memory banks. So much - unconscious and subconscious memories, desires, terrors of childhood that made me what I am - is stored in files I rarely access. What happened after the crashlanding had been