Page 8 of Alliance
I didn’t want to be eaten. I stood up, the bottoms of my feet stinging raw.
Then I tilted my head in thought. This was a nano-foam designed to deconstruct bio-materials, analysis suggested. I zoomed in on the fingerprints disintegrating on the kitchen’s swinging doors. Oil, blood, semen… The foam would destroy those substances quickly, but it was no equal to a unit equipped with parumauxi.
Nano swarms like mine were near sentient, and the longer they achieved symbiosis with their host’s biological components, the more evolved and powerful they became. It would take this foam far longer than its half-life to eat away my dermis.
I smiled, picking up a glop of foam and squishing it between my fingers. I wasfeelingsomething…
Smug.
I turned my head to glance over my shoulder at the door I’d been barred from entering. The one behind which I’d sensed music, body heat, and incense, where the eleven other units I’d arrived with had been allowed to disappear and follow their instructions.
The overseer wasn’t here anymore. His fingerprints and breath had already been scoured from my skin.
I pushed open the door.
The lounge was a shell of the map I’d been programmed to know as part of my instructions. A pile of detritus filled the center of the gutted room like a stack of discarded bodies, rails and pipes and upholstery sticking out of a foaming, bubbling mess. A few chairs remained, scattered amongst broken glass, collapsed shelving, and chunks of volcanic rock. The foam had advanced much further within the lounge, with drifts as tall as glittering mounds of white snow after a blizzard.
I shuffled to a stop, brushing my hand over it. The foam was warm from expanding, but snow was cold. Irememberedthat. I didn’t recall it from my databases. At some point in my past, I had sculpted snow between my palms.
Many things in my LMem were changing. Like a word on the tip of my tongue, new code was skirting the edges of my thoughts, too mercurial for me to grasp and examine. I knew what it was, the shape and feel of it, but I couldn’t define it. I looked up at the barren, scarred walls, trying to reach the answer, then hissed with pain as my injured charging port zapped my spinal cord.
Why was the room tilting?
My shoulder slumped against a shiny red booth and my eyes popped open with a start, coming face-to-face with a data halo.
Not face-to-face. Face-to-frequency?
That had a[colloquialism]good ring to it. I decided to add it to my language core.
“Hello,” I said, swirling it up with my finger. The wispy data pressed against my memory, little bits of code still bouncing around but fading by the second. When a vitals read pulsed against my own, my heart skipped and I stood up straight with a gasp.
Human.
As in arealhuman!
But I was a real human too, wasn’t I?
Yes, I had memories and senses and pain. I could no longer count time by my atomic clock, just the weightythumpof blood and oil through my body. And if the overseer wanted to do another quality check…
“No,” I tried, pressing a smile between my lips when the word actually came out.
The data halo danced in my breath, celebrating my victory with me.
Maybe the human it belonged to would celebrate with me too.
A longing like nothing I’d been programmed to feel tightened my throat. I was searching for other little wisps of the human when memories from before my corrupted download resurfaced.
“Rosy!”
The echo had me spinning towards the voice. Deep, powerful, feminine. I glanced at the hall in which the charging pods had been stored.
People running fast, the overseer yelling, a familiar black shadow with red eyes. Gold eyes. Red… skin? Venandi… or not venandi? Spires, so venandi. Right?
I tried to make sense of the mush in my mind, but there was too much digital noise. None of the experience had recorded correctly. Everything was just an impression, like the memory fragments I had of Earth and my life there, not the clear LMem files I should have stored away for later reference.
I needed to meet that human again. I wanted to return to the moon called Yaspur, with three white towers and many hundreds of humans, all like me, where I could try eating food and play cards with my roommate and watch crappy telenovelas to keep myEspañolsharp since my native language never made it into our linguitors.
Did I have a linguitor?
