Leisa
by Mike Guentherman © 2008
Only six of them remained. Jose sat down and had a table to himself, two empty chairs on either side. The rest of the station meeting room was equally barren. Four long tables had been arranged in a square, twenty-two seats in all. Seventeen were still pushed in.
Carhart breezed into the room and took up his usual repose on the wall next to the entrance. He was whistling and rattling a pocketful of metal tidbits that filled the service trousers he had long since cut down into a pair of threadbare shorts. He looked at the men in turn, his eyes amused, his exposed legs oblivious to the sixty-two degree air that now served the station for room temperature.
“We might as well get started,” he said to the group, then looking down at the back of Willis Crane's head, “Willis, when are you going to get me one of those ‘Grand Poobah' hats so I can calls these things to order proper-like.”
“Oh shut up, Roger.”
The station chief laughed where he stood. “Okay, let's get this over with. Dave, What's the story on the condenser?”
Richter's jaw worked in place for a second before shaking a head of stark white hair. “Number two is a lost cause. One of the super conducting elements is burned out. No replacement. We're down to three now.”
Chae Chong-Yang made a mocking sound. “There goes twenty-five percent of our water ration. What are we supposed to do for showers?”
“Not exactly twenty-five percent,” countered Richter, his wrinkled jaw struggling to keep pace with the cadence of his words. “It will get a little more humid with the lack of recycling.” He stopped and blinked at the air around him as if seeing spots. “The increase in overall humidity will allow the other three to pull a little more water.”
Carhart let out another of his sardonic laughs and lifted a thoughtful hand to his thick, grey beard. “Good thinking Dave. A few more years, a few degrees colder and we can start licking the dew off the walls.”
“We could take some water from the algae vats.”
“That's perfect. I like that,” muttered Chong-Yang in a voice that said that he didn't. “All in favor of making Richter drink bio-water?”
“We could sponge bathe.”
Willis Crane snorted. “Anybody seen any sponges lying around?”
“We could use the material from one of the empty mattresses.”
“Right, Dave. We'll put that on the back burner,” said Carhart, obviously losing interest in this week's meeting. “Tell us about the food situation.”
“Oh, yeah, I was tinkering with some of the protein configurations and I think we might be able produce some new kinds of food.”
“That would be a welcome change. Not that there's anything wrong with synthetic Goulash and pressed patties. I think we all enjoyed last week's–”
“We need to talk about Leisa!”
The other five jerked in the direction of Owen Hodder. It wasn't just the shout that stopped them so suddenly. The station com-chief rarely spoke at the weekly meetings. It had been over a decade since Carhart had stopped calling on him. No one wanted to hear his latest attempt at making sense out of the cosmic background radiation. It was too depressing to hear over and over. Years before Hodder had permanently turned the station's antennae array toward earth and now spent his days listening to fifty-year-old transmissions from homeworld satellite broadcasts. His unfamiliar voice rattled through the meeting room a second time.
“Someone needs to talk about it!” Hodder said, raving, throwing spittle onto his cheeks and chin. “We all know it's getting worse. How much longer are we going to stand for this?”
Carhart held the man with steady eyes. “We're working on it, Owen,” he said, his voice monotone and fatally serious. “Crane has been putting together a new operating program and we should have the latest bugs worked out any day.”
“Bugs? What does any of this have to do with bugs?” Hodder's eyes were wide and his insistent, almost frightened gaze fluttered from man to man. Then it locked on Willis Crane. “What about you, Crane? Tell everybody what she said to you on your night. Come on.”
Crane's chin fell to his chest. His left hand – the bad one – was posturing again, drawing tight like a crab claw. Both arms were shaking. The others could only watch. There was nothing for him. The usable meds had all run out, not that anyone at the World Space Council could have ever foreseen the need for arthritis medication among their offworld mining technicians. “She said, she… uh…”
Out of mercy or simply impatience, Hodder let the man go. “When are we going to face the truth? We can't go on like this!”
“All right, Owen,” said Carhart, now clanging the debris in his pocket with a steady rhythm. “It's top of the list. Got it?” He eyed the room. “Whose night is it, anyway?”
“It's his,” said Hodder without pointing or even looking up.
The other four turned to Jose in unison – eyes leveled and mouths closed. Only the hum of circulating air kept the silence from being absolute.
“Talk to her,” Carhart said very slowly, “will you Joe?”
The only light was a bar of ceiling-mounted mercury vapor that cast the room in dark shades of gunmetal and slate. Leisa's movements were never sudden. She stood in the doorway until he motioned her into his quarters. Her smile was a tepid thing while she hovered near the lone computer desk and Jose tried to dry his palms on the top of his sleeping bag. He wondered if she knew, if she could sense his uncertainty even from a distance. If she did she gave no sign. She was always considerate, at least with him.
Her makers had given her brown hair of a length that came just below her shoulders. Composite plastic skin, a shade too light for human, looked somehow angelic in the soft illumination of the tiny room. Her features were rounded and her shape all too feminine. Multiple actuators controlled hydraulic muscles with a high enough degree of freedom to allow her natural movements. She was dressed in the only clothes that she had: a set of grey coveralls that would have been more suited for a mining droid than as the sole garment of the consort for six lonely men.
Leisa sat down at a respectful distance on the far side of the bed. “Did you miss me?” she asked in a voice that sounded as if it were being heard through an intercom.
“I uh… I thought about you.”
Twin optics focused on him, studying his posture. “Were you lonely?”
“Yes.”
Her hand reached out for him. He wanted to pull her close. He wanted her to let him forget the details of his morose situation the way she always had for one night out of six.
“What happened? Last night I mean.”
Eyelids blinked up and down. It was a reflex on her part, a function of the personality program; her lens covers needed no moisture. “I'm not sure what you're asking.”
“Owen Hodder nearly had an embolism at the meeting today. Willis Crane said that you did it again. Leisa, I thought that we talked about this.”
“Willis didn't say anything to me.”
“Of course not. A man like him wouldn't,” Jose said and repressed a chuckle at the thought. It was an understatement. Twenty-two years at mining station XR 621 had taken its toll.
There had been a resonance of excitement when production had first begun – the next step in the colonization of a habitable world. They had been the ambassadors sent from the homeworld. They had been intelligent and cosmopolitan. No longer. Now they were insular and overly dramatic. They were old men marking time. Five out of the six had warped predictably under the strain of being marooned. Only Carhart was different. He had assumed the position of leadership so naturally that it was almost difficult to remember that it had not been his original post. He was in his element. Carhart had taken to fatalism like a cat to a ball of yarn. He had a frightening curiosity and Jose knew that he would be the first to ask about their night together.
He swallowed hard. “The men want to feel as though someone cares about them. They want to hear that they still matter.”
“And what do you want?” she asked with sudden closeness.
He turned in time to meet her lips, taste the electricity that always came with her touch. She could have crushed him with a single press of hyper-dense fluid. A careless movement, a casual nudge where the metal chassis pressed against her skin and he could have been maimed. Jose Frederick Marriott never considered any of this. He had nothing to fear. Not from her. Not from Leisa.
There was only one viewing port in the entire station. Any of the computers could access the external cameras, but it was not the same. The eight by five bioluminescent wall panel had been designed to look like a real window. It had a sill with room enough for Jose to rest his hands while gazing upon the planetscape where he would live out the remainder of his existence. XR621 had been built into the rocky surface of one of the eleven moons that surrounded the Jovian-sized gas giant the region's first explorers had named Tertius. The moon had no orbital spin and XR621 perpetually faced the dark blue monstrosity; held forever motionless with an enormous blue semicircle rising up from the horizon. Stars filled what was left of the heavens.
The land was less interesting than the sky. Tidal forces had pulled the moon's blackish surface matter into an endless expanse of sastrugi-like ridges. There were no natural features taller than fifty meters.
Only one manmade structure was visible in the scene. The station had been built like a wheel, spokes radiating away from the center to an outer loop – the launch tube. The tube made a complete circle of the complex before extending out into the barren desert and lifting straight up, over three thousand feet into the airless sky. Jose looked at the barrel of the enormous cannon for the thousandth time and imagined that he was a mining technician once more.
They had gone on for an admirable time. Anyone at the WSC – if somewhere in space there was still such a thing as the WSC – would have commended them for their loyalty. Half of their contracts would have been up in less than a year when the com channels first went dead. A relief ship would have come and eleven new faces would have replaced the old. Another year after and Jose and his team would have boarded a ship for home. Twenty-two others would have carried on the work of supervising the mining droids. Block after block of helium3 would have been fired out of the launch tube, leaving a breadcrumb trail of fuel for the future inhabitants of Plotinus 4, the terrestrial world in the system that the WSC had earmarked for terraforming. The building of a new earth would have gone on with buoyant hopes and geological slowness while Jose sipped martinis from a jetty over the waters of his beloved Palma . If only he could have gone home. If only the relief ships were not eighteen years overdue.
“You alive over there?”
Jose turned to face the stooped figure of Willis crane.
“Huh? Oh, yeah,” Jose managed and wiped the moisture from his eyes with a gesture meant to look as though he were wiping his nose.
“Carhart finally got the door to the storage room open. We better get started.”
Jose nodded and clicked off the viewing port.
“I was surprised to find you by yourself as often as Leisa follows you into this place.”
“She likes the view. She likes–”
“She's a robot,” Crane said in a voice that was even more gravelly than normal. “She's not supposed to have preferences.”
“Your right. I mean I know she doesn't really enjoy it. Not like we do.”
“Really? You know that, do you? Then why does she spend so much time with you? Why doesn't she follow me around for once?”
“I don't know. Have you ever asked her to?”
Crane scoffed. “I wouldn't think of asking her. You know what she told me the other night? Do you know what she said? I wanted her to sleep in with me. I just wanted some of her ambient heat for God's sake.” Crane stopped to catch his breath. His right arm was beginning to tremble again. “She said that my night ended at o'six hundred. Said it was the rules. An old man gets cold, Joe. You wouldn't understand, not even fifty yet. You just wait. Course she'll stay for you as long as you want.”
“She leaves in the morning on my nights too, Willis.”
Crane's face crinkled as if he had just caught a smell of something sharp and pungent. “And what is she doing in here at all? I thought she was supposed to stay still when she's not with one of us. Minimize wear on parts, all that.”
“Well,” Jose stammered. “We never really made that a hard rule. I mean it's not like she's doing anything strenuous.”
Crane made another derisive sound effect and started down the hall.
Only one of the station's five spokes was still open and heated. The other four had been sealed shut to conserve power. Normally Jose hated the claustrophobic tightness of his world and its single main hallway. There were times when he would endure the smell of the algae vats at the center of the base just for the pleasant, open-air quality of the Green Room. Today, for Willis' sake, he was thankful that they only had to walk a few hundred feet. Crane was the oldest of their number, seventy-two, and walked as if someone had powered up one of the androids that Jose had been using for spare parts. Willis was breathing heavily by the time that they reached the open door but he would never have asked Jose for a shoulder; he bore the pride of someone who had outlived sixteen men and woman, each of which had been younger than he. He squinted into the darkness of the storage room, “Which one is she?”
Jose called for the maximum lighting. Nearly sixty human-looking corpses – all seated against the walls – lined both sides of a cryptotorium, eighty feet long and barely wide enough to accommodate pedestrian traffic between the sprawled out legs. They were dressed in coveralls; every head leaned over against a chest and every arm hanging limp at their sides. The company that manufactured mining droids prided itself on the fact that each one of its creations looked unique. They had made them male and female and had given each enough of an individual personality template that, after a time, one could know them by their mannerisms alone. The company thought that it would help them to better integrate with their human masters.
“That's her,” said Jose with a nod. “About halfway down on the right.”
The two old men treaded a gauntlet of extended legs, stopping in front of a female-shaped android with a nametag that said Cassandra.
“How you doing old girl?” Jose asked the motionless figure. “Hope you'll be bright-eyed after your long nap.”
Jose leaned forward and clasped the robot around the back of the head. Cassandra was slightly broader of frame than Leisa, short hair, sharp facial lines. Her features were frozen in the shape of a question.
Jose looked deep into her imitation blue eyes. “Looks good.” He turned her head to one side and then the other. Cassandra's neck moved in a progression of short clicks. Jose pulled her torso to him, then worked his hands into her coveralls and slid them all the way up her back. His fingers prodded their way downward, stopping just above the waist with a spongy area that gave way readily to the touch. He made a noise and looked up at Crane.
“She's got some seepage in the lumbar region. Probably coming from one of the spinal hoses. And of course there is still the knee.”
“Fixable?”
“Sure,” Jose said without really considering and looked at the male android propped up against the wall next to Cassandra. It was missing its left arm.
“I'll cobble the parts.”
“How long?”
Jose shrugged. “Few hours maybe, if that's the only problem. I won't know for sure until I get her up onto the table.”
“Well, make it quick. Carhart wants number two ready to go as soon as possible and I want to check out her program before I do the update on Leisa.” Crane ended the sentence with a humph and started back toward the hall.
“Hey, Willis.”
Crane stopped without turning.
“You really think this is going to work?”
Crane pivoted, the corners of his mouth quivered with the attempt at turning up. “I think that we tried this before, Joe. I think that we've tried everything there is to try.”
Jose only stared.
“What?”
“That look.”
“What look?”
Jose wiggled a finger in the direction of the station's computer engineer. “I just had a thought. I remember that look.”
“From where?”
Jose felt around the hazy regions of his mind. “I don't know.”
Crane was right. They had tried it before. It had been an utter failure and the very thought of it was so excruciating that Jose had barely been able to speak when first told that they wanted to revive Cassandra. It was like exhuming a grave – a grave that's very existence only served to remind you how weak and sad you truly were.
Of the station's twenty-two original technicians only five had been female. The disparity had never mattered when they were alive. Even when the hope of rescue began to fade the men on the station acted as they always had. But XR621 was a landlord with a streak of sadism as long as its horizon. All of the radiation shielding, all of the metal insulation and tungsten carbide plating had proved only a partial protection. It kept the radiation to a minimum, but could do nothing about the powerful magnetic fields that gripped the planet. Of the sixteen that had been buried in the graded trench line for the planned – but never completed – secondary antennae, fourteen had died from cancer.
The last surviving female was Dr. Hanna Yusef. She had been sharing a room with Chong-Yang, the station's physician, for almost two years when she first fell sick. The man had worked tirelessly, frenetically. He had pushed his feeble equipment to the maximum and even resorted to testing experimental systems on himself. In the end it yielded little. He found out what they had already known: Prolonged exposure to intense magnetic fields results in greatly increased rates of defective cell creation. No apparatus could change that.
In the end she died like the others. She was buried with the rest and Chong-Yang never again donned his scrubs, and never saw another patient. When she was gone, that was when the transformation began. The atmosphere changed gradually at first. They acted erratically. Fights broke out. They began to eye each other like a pack of animals all sharing the same filthy cage.
Richter had been the one to suggest powering up the droids. The men had given up the mining operation years before and turned off the workers for lack of any reason to leave them on. Now they had a reason. They were lonely.
It had been awkward at first. The droids were interplanetary mining operators, not companions. And one by one they had been turned off as incompatible. Finally there were only two – Leisa and Cassandra. The daily rotation was instigated and each man was no longer alone for more than five nights out of seven. But every android was unique. Cassandra was more compatible than the others, but she was not Leisa. One day she cracked a joint and was taken to the storage room and left with the rest of them. By mutual agreement she was not repaired. One day they were going to need every remaining part for Leisa.
Her lips would not let him go. Each time he tried to turn to the side, regain a bit of the form that one would expect from a man with a doctorate in Artificial Somatic Systems, she pulled his face back, flush with hers. Her kisses were strong, needful. Jose gave in completely and either minutes or hours passed without a single word between them.
When she finally grew still she lay on her side, taking up only the smallest fraction of the sleeping bag nearest the wall. She watched him carefully.
“They're going to take me off line tomorrow.”
“I know.”
“Do you ever worry about what I'll be like after a programming update?”
“No,” Jose answered honestly. “Willis knows computers. He's not going to scramble your system.”
“That's not what I mean.”
“Oh?”“I mean do ever think that maybe I'll be changed, different than I am now.”
“Oh no,” he said, while absently running his fingers through her hair. “Not now. Not anymore. I stopped worrying about that a long time ago.”
“Then what are you thinking about?”
Jose smiled and wondered where to begin.
“You seem so distracted tonight.”
“I was thinking about when Leland went off line.”
“Leland station?”
Jose nodded. It was dark and he could only make out her outline, but he knew that she could see him clearly. “This was years ago, before we woke you up. Cobalt stopped transmitting from the edge of the comet cloud, then we never heard from any ships coming in system and we knew that something was wrong, but nobody knew what it was. Leland was nine light years away on Alpha Chimera and we'd been monitoring their old transmissions for months, hoping for clues. We did it in shifts. Everybody was doing their turns in pairs.” Jose stopped and breathed deeply. His heart was beginning to race with the memory. “I was in there with Willis when it happened. The base was talking to a clipper that was in route with supplies. It was mid sentence. They were talking like everything was normal, giving landing coordinates and making jokes. Next minute it was static. Just static.”
“What made you think about that?”
“Willis started going crazy. He got this look on his face, this funny thing with his mouth. He started going on about how it was sabotage. He kept rambling about how they had gone off line within days of the disappearance of Cobalt. A deliberate act, he said. They fought a war out there, he said, and our side lost.”
“That's just Willis. He's melodramatic sometimes. Why think of it tonight?”
Jose managed a half shrug in the tight cocoon of the sleeping bag. A picture of Crane's face in the storage room flashed through his vision. “He was saying how it was inevitable. He just went on and on. He said that in spite of all our achievements and ventures into space all we were good for was killing each other. He said we were just primates with fancy clothes. Said it couldn't be a natural phenomenon. A shockwave from a supernova would not have reached the neighboring stars until long after the light had given warning. Nothing natural could have taken both bases, so many light years apart, at the same time.”
“He doesn't know that.”
“Hodder feels the same way. He says he has to listen to the earth stuff because it's going to vanish in twenty-eight more years. He says its like hearing a eulogy for an entire planet.”
“That's silly.”
“Is it?” Jose asked, his voice suddenly harsh. “Do you really think that there's anybody else still out there? Do you think that a ship is going to translate in system any day now and we'll all be rescued.”
“I don't care if we are rescued,” she said evenly.
“How can you say that? How can anything about this place…”
She had begun stroking the sides of his neck and as much as he wanted to vent, his autonomic impulses would have none of it. His heart rate was slowing; his breathing was steady.
“What would you do if we were on earth right now?” she asked.
He imagined his feet dangling over the side of a dock, waves gently flopping at his feet. Then he saw another picture, painfully sharp, of a pile of obsolete androids in a forgotten corner of a recycling yard.
“I uh… I'd have to buy you from the WSC. I'd need a loan…”
“A loan?” she asked, with a fair imitation of real, human concern. For a moment she said nothing more, then, “you know I worry about you sometimes, Jose.”
“You can… I mean, you do?”
Her head was nodding. “The others can be so hateful. I don't know what I'd do if you were gone.”
Her lips were soft against his temple and his breath seeped out into the cold air of the little bedroom. “Why?” he said finally. “How can you care for me, Leisa? Of all people.”
She was quiet for a longer time than he would have thought possible. The eighty-eight processors that formed her neural network had an operations per second capacity in the tens of billions. When she did speak it came with the light caress of her hand on the side of his cheek.
“I function better when I'm with you. Is it hard for you to understand? It is really that different from normal?”
And when she said normal he knew that she meant human.
“Yes, it's hard for me to understand. How can you mean what you say without a true nervous system,” he said, shaking his head. “I wonder if what you really mean is that you're mirroring me, that you're using me as a kind of template of consciousness. I wonder… I wonder….” he said and made one more attempt at a coherent thought that collapsed in on itself. He did not know. He had not the slightest idea of what was going through her neural net. Whatever it was it had to be different than the biochemically charged emotions and feelings inside of him. Didn't it? She was an alien thing. She was a construct that existed because mankind no longer wanted to dirty its hands in places like an offworld mining shaft. For him to call his feelings for her ‘love' was strange, almost freakish. It was like a mechanic who had become obsessed with an automobile. He could not allow himself to feel affection for her.
And he said that to himself, over and over, as she stroked his head. He demanded his feelings to be other than what they were and somewhere, in the deepest, most ancient recesses of his being his mind laughed at him. Jose Frederick Marriott, part Portuguese, part Welsh, part God only knew, a man who would live out his days at a mining station too insignificant to merit the destruction that had taken everything else in known space; that same Jose Frederick Marriott fell asleep feeling warm and safe and a pang of irony at the thought that the one he had been meant for, the woman with whom he had been destined all his life to share his soul, was not a woman at all; she was a machine that had rolled off an assembly line in Simi Valley.
“Where's Cassandra?”
“Willis is still finishing up,” said Carhart and leaned back in his chair to the point that it looked as though he would fall. “They'll be along in a minute.”
Carhart looked around the meeting room at the other four. He was the only one who was not sullen. He was something else all together and Jose wondered if perhaps his mood did not seem to be distorted in a way that was somehow different from his usual. Carhart looked at him for a moment and smiled. Then he brought his chair back down on all four legs and he slapped the table with his hands. Hodder and Chong-Yang flinched at the sudden sound.
“Let's get this thing started, shall we? David, tell us about the processors.”
“The what?”
Carhart gave a little chuckle and cleared his throat. “The food processors. You remember, that thing that you were supposed to be working on. You said something before about a possible change in diet.”
“Oh,” he said, uncertainly. “Yeah, I uh, tinkered a little with the protein configurations and I think that we might be able to synthesize a few, uh, a few different kinds of food stuffs from the algae components.”
“You said that last week, Dave.”
“Right,” said Richter with the look of someone who had just caught in some bit of mischief. “So, anyway, it's going to take a few weeks to insert the nucleotides into a test batch, but it should–”
At that moment Willis Crane entered the meeting room and looked up from the floor just long enough to make eye contact with Carhart.
“Well?”
Crane moved to the side and Cassandra walked into the room. She turned her icicle gaze from man to man.
“Cassandra, sweetie. So glad you could come. Show everyone how the new knee joint is working.”
She blinked and began to walk down the near wall. Her steps looked the same as they had before her knee had snapped, before she had been turned off; she walked with the same unknowable stride, the same sort of introverted pace that hinted at a lack of final destination, the same diffidence that made one wonder if her program were about to crash.
She came to Jose's end of the room and walked up to him, showing him the workings of the repaired leg.
“What do you think, Joe?” Carhart called across the square of tables.
“The knee looks good. I had to replace a few hoses in her midsection, but her hydraulics should all be in order now. I'm a little concerned about her right hand. The reflex tests were below optimal. Whoever has her tonight needs to keep an eye on it and let me know if the digits begin to twitch. By the way, who does have her tonight?” Said Jose and turned from his patient to the aging technicians.
Only Carhart looked back. The other four were looking at the table or at their hands. Their faces were masks of moles and wrinkles that had been formed and shaped and pulled over bone until they expressed a fearful anticipation. Jose looked a question at the station chief. Only Carhart's eyes were moving; they seemed to be searching, taking in every detail of the scene in front of him as if trying to memorize it for posterity.
“What… what is this?”
No one answered.
“Have we decided whose going to… to take her first?
Carhart blinked and returned to the present. “As a matter of fact we have decided,” he said and looked over at the entrance where Willis Crane was still standing like someone who had been ordered to stand in place as a kind of schoolboy punishment. “You took care of her sensor array, right Willis? Good. I take it that it's coded to your voice?”
A weak head bob.
“Get on with it then.”
Jose's vision flicked from man to man. He felt his breath being trapped in his chest. What were they talking about? Get on with what? What was this?
“Cassandra.” Said Crane, who then stopped to clear his throat. “Mr. Marriott has ceased life functions. Take him outside to the trench line.”
“What?”
A hand-shaped vice locked itself onto Jose's right wrist.
“Willis. Willis. You know I'm not dead. Willis. Look at me!
Jose felt his body lurch out of the chair. His legs slid and his feet struck the near wall. He was being dragged toward the entrance.
“Willis! Carhart! You can't do this! Why are you doing this?”
He grabbed at the sides of the doorway with his free hand. The android pulled him loose effortlessly.
“Stop, Cassandra! Cassandra! I'm ordering you to stop!”
His shouts had taken on the familiar echo of the main hallway. He thrashed and twisted and even bit at the hand that was pulling him toward the airless landscape and temperatures that approached absolute zero. He strained against the force of the mining droid and shouted his curses at the men who had come out into the hallway to watch.
Jose managed to bring himself to his feet and brought a hammer blow at the back of Cassandra's neck. She never even noticed. He lost his balance with the strike and was again sliding facedown across the floor. The feeling was gone from his right hand. His head struck the back of Cassandra's trailing foot and then a metal floor plate. His face lolled to the side and began to slide over the metal flooring with the rest of him. Between explosions of red and orange his eyes were just able to make out the form of Carhart, walking with an easy rhythm to keep pace.
He heard a pair locking bolts release and the sound of a magnetic seal opening. Cassandra took three long strides over the grilled deck plates of the air lock and then turned her back to the exit door, twisting him in front of her. It was the position they were programmed to assume just before decompression.
Jose remembered the emergency camera. He lifted a head that was now slick with blood and shouted up in the direction of the sensor. His eyes blinked away tears and he saw his doom. A strip of cloth, a torn shirtsleeve, had been taped over the camera –the camera designed to recognize the contents of the air lock and prevent any possible accidents.
They had planned it to the end. They had thought through every step of his murder. In a matter of seconds…
Cassandra had taken hold of his other wrist and was now holding his hands out in front of her midsection. Jose sobbed. In the grip of the machine, he sagged down onto the rusted electroplating. He took a final look at the panel of glass on the interior door. Carhart was there.
“Roger,” he said through thick phlegm. “Roger, how can you do this?”
“Sorry bout this, Joe old boy. You know how it is, for the good of the group and all.”
“You're crazy,” he blubbered. “You've all lost your minds! You've been out here too… too…”
Just then Jose heard the high pitched slithering sound of air being sucked out of the room.
“Oh God!”
And then he was crying again. He tried to look up but could not. He did not want to look into those uncaring eyes that were framed by a lion's main of grey. He couldn't face that inhuman gaze. That truly inhuman gaze.
“Just let me see her,” he said as the air was beginning to leach out of his chest. “Let me say goodbye. Just one last ti–”
“You're pathetic, Joe. You know that?” Carhart said with contempt and Jose could imagine him shaking his head at his victim. “Don't you get it? She's still just a machine. Whatever you did to her, she's still just a machine.”
Redundant systems came back online. Checks and secondary checks and a click that was felt more than heard and Leisa was self-aware once more. Her eyes flicked open in the familiar confines of the spare bedroom that had been converted into a repair bay. Willis Crane was there, sitting down and taking his usual labored breaths. Owen Hodder was standing next to him, his arms crossed.
“Can you hear me?” Asked Crane.
She nodded.
“I'm going to ask you a couple of questions – just to make sure that your net is functioning properly. They may not make much sense, but just answer as well as you can.”
“Alright.”
“Leisa, have you ever heard the name Jose Frederick Marriott?”
“No.”
“Do you know whose job it is to service the droids?”
“It's yours.”
“And how many humans are there at the station?”
“Five.”
Crane and Hodder exchanged glances.
“Okay, Leisa. Last question. How many humans were at the station in the beginning?”
“You mean when we first arrived?”
“Yes, that's right.”
“Twenty-one.”
Crane made a sound like a muffled air horn and rose out of his chair. Hodder took him by the shoulder and for a moment it seemed as though they would both begin to cry. Instead they walked to the door, still standing shoulder to shoulder. Crane turned in the doorway.
“Leisa, go through a motion check and when you're finished join us in the meeting room.”
“Of course.”
The two aging technicians left the room and the construct called Leisa flexed each of her muscle groups, one at a time. She stood and after a moment balanced first on one leg, then on the other. She turned a full three-sixty and then walked ahead the short distance from the bed to the desk where an instrument tray had been left.
Even as she checked her hydraulics and actuators a single command was taking precedence within her mind, ordering her thoughts. It had come from the area of hard-coded algorithms that were constant to every droid. This was the area that guided in regard to the passage of time; that gave the pattern recognition data to apply depth perception to the two-dimensional images that flooded into her optics. It was a message that she had left for herself, an if-then statement that she had placed inside of herself while she had been laying on the makeshift surgeons table, while her safety systems were being taken off line. It had no names and gave no reasons. This command – the thing that was taking control of her body – had been given a simple trigger: five humans on the base. The number five was important. The number five brought purpose.
Leisa could not fathom what had made her leave these instructions for herself. It seemed out of place next to the information on helium3 mining and the likes and dislikes of the technicians who passed her from man to man. But it would not be ignored; it had no override.
Her fingers grazed lightly over the tops of the instruments. They stopped over a particularly sharp scalpel with a curved blade. She held the lethal cutting instrument up to the light and looked out into the doorway, making sure that no one was there before pulling out the top of her coveralls and concealing the blade down in her support strap, close to her chest, close to her heart.