Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [33]
Nhliziyo yami!
They had stopped, wedged in a narrow deep groove that snaked down the crater’s slope. Settled over the same patches of skin, the cold became intolerable. Then it eased.
They lived. As pain retreated, Nathi dropped their invisibility to free some nanobots. Ah, sweet relief!
Pain? That was how Nathi knew the anesthesia of the anterior cingulate cortex had worn off. He did not renew it. Their neurons had adjusted, and—how could one live without pain? How could one grieve?
And how to gauge danger?
A fast shadow skimmed over the crater, covering the stars. The Dancer shrank into the groove. Their skin was now blue from lack of oxygen, showing through the thin layer of glassy water, sprinkled with red Martian sand. They hoped that whoever looked for them would not expect to find a naked girl encased in layers of exotic glass.
They waited.
Nothing.
Then, they felt it. Like the mourning toll—if you were swung to strike the bell, and not its tongue. Like deep vibrations of bass music well below the range of human hearing. Below the metasilk’s range, too.
Not sound, but a slow pounding against their electromagnetically sensitive skin.
They have a fucking ELF transmitter!
Nathi checked himself. He shouldn’t have used foul language. But the girl said nothing. This was no time to dwell on sharing a body with a young girl at the brink of puberty. He knew that she had grown while in coma. Nature didn’t wait. But their mutual education had to wait—they both felt the urgency. At their frequency below 30 hertz, the ELF waves penetrated just about anything, including their body, soil, and rock. The Dancer couldn’t be located with that, leaving barely a dent in the enormous natural ELF resonator chamber, reaching to the top of the ionosphere. But that was not what the Extremely Low Frequency waves were being transmitted for. Nathi had cut off all their connections to e-World, blocked any contact at radio frequencies. Nothing could force them to accept connection—except this.
The low frequency meant that the signal seeped into their minds extremely slowly. High bandwidth contact was impossible. But, if there was a backdoor left in Nathi’s digital mind that responded to a short command, he could be made to open the rest of his communication channels.
Damn.
They meant to crack him open. Worse—those waves overlapped the brainwaves’ theta range. What if they had installed a similar backdoor in the girl’s analog brain, too? She showed the signs of relaxation into a hypnotic state. Or was that drowsiness simply from fatigue? Well, Nathi could fight either; he knew how. But he couldn’t help himself.
The dastardly command kept seeping into their minds like the susurrus of a magic incantation. How long before the phrase was finished?
Think!
He looked for spare nanobots, tried setting them in oscillations in the ELF range…. Pointless. Their body made a poor ELF transmitter, metasilk or no metasilk, much less a jammer. Worse—they couldn’t stay too long inside the crater, either. Their energy reserves were inching slowly into red. They had to reach the Needle to recharge.
Fight them.
The girl spoke quietly, but their shared mindspace reverberated with a calm force.
Fight? he said.
We have to. Or we will never be free—always in hiding. We can beat them—you and I, together. Open yourself, and let them come. She focused their eyes down the slope. Look.
THEY FOUND HER SPRAWLED ON THE CRATER’S FLOOR, FACE to the stars, just a few steps beyond the bottom of the slope. The hardest steps of all—out in the open—but they knew that they had to make them.
Her ferromagnetic