The Hybrid
Natalie looked concerned. "We're showing structural damage to the dorsal plating, right above the communications arrays, and the best you can say is that it's not habitat critical?" she asked Gustav in frustration.
"What is habitat critical is the weapons grid, if we get another surprise from the colonists," Gustav replied, turning to John as he spoke. "First Cain, and then Adama."
John shook his head. "Adama and Cain are in the same place, wherever they are."
"And that could be one jump from us right now," Gustav pressed on.
"They're not suicidal," Jacob tried to calm the situation. "We've got three impact points, one of them to the superstructure and two to the ventral arms that may be affecting power to the gun targeting systems. Most of the weapons grid is operational—power was re-routed through the auxiliary cables." Both Jacob and Gustav knew the reasoning wasn't sound: there had already been three 'automated' power redirects in unrelated systems following the hull contact with the meteoroids.
Gustav wasn't impressed: "good thing the ship can fly itself, because we're much better at assuring ourselves we know what we're doing." John was also annoyed.
Natalie took a step between the two Model Ones. "Here, three of the Fives are already suited up. Divvy up the repair droids and dispatch them to the ventral arms. I'll take another droid to the impact point above the comm boxes and we can supervise all three repairs at once."
Jacob squeezed in between Jackie and Harper, worried they might side with John and Gustav to repair the ventral damage first. "I'm just worried about what happened the last time we tried to get repairs done on our own schedule," he said, pointing downwards at the Hybrid meditation chamber three decks below. "She'll make her own schedule if we're not driving it pretty hard. I'm willing to go along with Natalie's idea."
John, Jackie, Harper, and Gustav all paused, then agreed. The Ones would have been happy just to get Natalie out of their faces and into a confined place—a spacesuit would do.
"Jacob, we need you in the meditation chamber," one of the Model Eights called to him over the base star's intercom. "The hybrid's behavior is abnormal."
John sent a wary look to Gustav, then turned to Jacob. "They need their hybrid whisperer," he said with derision. "She'll get her own ideas if you don't go drive it hard."
After fighting the colonial navy, the base stars revealed new and organic ways to deal with their respective battle damage, some in deployment and others returning themselves to space dock. The problems arose when the automated repair machinery came across the habitat pods, which Jacob and Gustav had since realized were foreign bodies to the base stars. In some cases, the habitat pods had been rejected like cancerous tumors, and even on their own base star Gustav and Jackie had found themselves running for a stable compartment when repair droids had begun tearing into one of the CO2 scrubbers as if it were just another system that could be pushed out of the way during what they later discovered was routine maintenance.
At times Jacob had been able to detect changes in the hybrids' psychobabble speech patterns and correlate them to functions the base star had been undertaking, but his comprehension of the hybrids, artificial intelligence nodes they had transplanted into the habitat modules to help them run the base stars, was sparse at best. The Ones held unguarded opinions that Jacob's expertise was just a figment of his own imagination. To have a hybrid's stream of consciousness change enough for others to notice it, however, piqued Jacob's interest and worried him to a degree. The three strikes against the hull should have prompted straightforward repairs but instead portended a cascade of responses across the entire ship.
The nitrogen atmosphere above the base star's central computer core held steady at the pressure surrounding a high mountain peak, enough to keep the systems insulated and facilitate heat transfer while balancing the pressure on the cooling compressors. Like most other automated areas of the base star, the compartment was unlit: repair robots would bring their own headlamps or activate LEDs installed around key components. The processor components were all housed in cylindrical silos with redundant thermal conductors all around them circulating their heat to grooves running the length of each tube. Extreme sophistication was housed within, and while access panels were all around Gustav had affixed signs reading "NO ACCESS," "HIGH VOLTAGE," and "HARD POINT" for any future individuals attempting a foray into the base star's brain.
In an instant, the compartment was bathed in a blinding blue light bursting from an aperture appearing between two of Gustav's signs reading "HARD POINT." The aperture, the fourth of its kind to appear at critical locations in the compartment, faded and stabilized before spewing out another round of chalky, white slurry. The stuff spattered in all directions, flying in arcs with mild curvature due to the artificial gravity the humanoid replicants had installed for themselves in the faraway crew habitats. With high affinity for the metal surfaces, the white paste clung to the silo casings and made its way along the grooves, flowing over access hatches and seeping through grill panels into the computing hardware itself. Permeation was more advanced where apertures had opened beforehand: the nanoparticles suspended in the fluid had triggered coagulation, then begun to harvest the paste as fuel and building materials in their work to penetrate the microprocessor architecture and imprint new integrated circuits.
The meditation chamber looked normal, and when Jacob first entered the hybrid sounded normal. All the walls and the ceiling of the square room, eight meters on a side and three meters high, were covered in flat screen displays printing a miasma of status reports, sensor feeds, and other information. With her catatonic stare focused on the ceiling over her bath, the hybrid bubbled off a precise fountain of nonsense, each word seeming pregnant with meaning until the next two or three came out. "Justification for the pronated crystal forms is the only salve for a broken ethos. Neuter coloration brings peace to a shattered ocean wrought with the combustible bliss of nocturnal affection. Never lose faith in the orbit of right triangles: they bow only to one prodigal creator."
Jacob traded glances with Michelle and Enri as what Enri called 'the new process' unfolded again. Even after taking her apart for maintenance and analysis, Jacob marveled at how the textured, plastic rubber molded over servomotors and carbon-fiber bones mimicked human skin and muscle contractions. The android's body, sculpted like a strong swimmer's and adorned with a tight cap and black vinyl two-piece zippered suit, was a natural fit in the water bath. The hybrid's eyes blinked twice, then shut as she sank deeper into the crystal blue water surrounding her. She gripped the azure-lit rim of the basin, white-knuckling with one hand as she slid the other down her face, exhaling all the way. The muscles of her thighs tightened as she pivoted her hips back and forth, fanning and clenching her toes in alternation.
"That's the fifth event in half an hour," Enri noted.
"Hmm, no, that's only four," Michelle disagreed.
"How can you tell?" Harper asked, turning his head towards Michelle and feigning an inquisitive expression. He had entered the room just after Jacob.
Michelle rolled her eyes and turned away. "Female intuition," she muttered.
"I didn't know she could get goosebumps," Jackie exclaimed as she joined the other four standing around the tank. She crossed her arms and watched the ripples in the water dissipate.
"Yeah, she can," Jacob explained. "Her skin has a latticework of piezo-electrics. I haven't seen it do that, but I'm not surprised."
Enri raised his eyebrows and scribbled some notes on his tablet. "You did state in your earlier report that she appears 'fully functional' with respect to the range of human sensory responses," he observed with a hint of dissatisfaction. "Do you expect she is capable of any other complex behaviors? Tantrums, perhaps?"
Jacob called up a report of the hull integrity again on his own pad. After the initial three impacts, the causes of which their EVA teams would soon ascertain, he had gotten six alerts about power surges in various sectors, dozens of reports about pressurization and compensation around the impact points, and four alerts about flux in the habitat modules' gravity fields. The last such flux had occurred five minutes prior, and appeared unrelated to anything the hybrid was experiencing, but reading the outputs it looked like the artificial gravity was compensating for other sources in the upper central core, nearest the impact on the dorsal plating where Natalie was headed.
Jacob glanced at Harper, thinking he might have an insight, but then realized he was being watched. The hybrid was staring at him through somnolent, satiated eyes. After capturing his attention, she looked down at his tablet, gave a tiny grin and then glanced at Harper as he minded himself with his face down in his own tablet. The hybrid frowned with one side of her mouth and shook her head just enough for Jacob to see it. She turned her gaze back to the ceiling where they were all used to having it, opened her radiant blue eyes wide, and straightened her posture as she began to recite more of the familiar word salad that they were all accustomed to hearing echo through her chamber. Jacob folded his tablet back to his chest and dismissed the notion of talking with Harper.
"Negative exon removal is impossible for vertebrate embryos entering the third metastasis of ecumenical lunar atonement," the hybrid prattled. "The convolution is too harmonious for variational compression. Swifter flows the glacial phenotype of a delighted womb."
Jacob made a deliberate survey of the hybrid, then of the panoramic information graffiti stretched around its meditation chamber. The chamber's appearance still hadn't changed: the nonsense had been broken, four times by Michelle's count and five by Enri's, but the screens hadn't stopped or faltered the way her voice had. His pretense set, Jacob made his way into the hall outside as if to check on the connections in a nearby electrical closet. Once inside, he switched his pad into the protected mode he and Natalie had discussed.
"Where are we?" Jacob whispered.
Natalie saw him on her suit's heads-up display. "Got the repair droid," she said. "We're mag-locked and moving up the central axis. Three-hundred meters to the top, then another two hundred to the impact site."
Jacob took a deep breath. That was a long way to space walk with mag-locks, but her suit would be able to sustain the trip. "I've got a different idea, if you're up for it," he said. "Send the droid to the impact site. You divert to the upper computer core. There's an access hatch a hundred meters in front of you, way before you have to get up and over the dorsal arms."
Natalie thought as she continued to march with the magnetic attachments. "Okay, I can send the droid on. Can you unlock the hatch?" Jacob was already accessing the system. "I've got it for you," he replied. "You're going to see one of the universal actuator grips, so three fingers out, just press and turn."
Worried, Natalie frowned. "And hope that the lock turns. I can't exert that much torque with my bare hands."
Jacob thought it through. "You should be good, that side of the ship hasn't been heated to make anything expand. Call the droid back if you need it but remember, they can get ideas of their own. There'll be an airlock to go through, but the air on the other side isn't breathable or high enough pressure so keep your helmet on."
Natalie parted ways with the repair droid and arrived at the hatch as the droid continued to stride arm over arm to the dorsal plating. She was relieved when the hatch opened without resistance. Still, entering the airlock wasn't simple—it wasn't designed for humans in EVA suits, rather for a specific type of repair droid, smaller and outfitted with a different toolset than the one she had started with. "Well this is where I can't call my partner if I get in trouble," she said as she twisted on her back inside the cramped space. She began propelling herself in the low gravity field down the axis of the hundred-meter tube. She couldn't turn around, but she could roll to maintain the best view of what was ahead of her.
"You're in good shape," Jacob assured her. "And the droid you're with can get into that space, it just doesn't look like it at first. If it needs to pull you back out, I'm just going to have you stretch out straight and let it pull on your boot. Now that you're inside I can work the doors if you need."
Natalie grinned. "Such a gentleman to open the door for me. Fifty meters until I get to the airlock," she announced.
Natalie opened the outer airlock door, already deep inside the ship, and propelled herself inside. She still couldn't turn around. Jacob used his tablet to close the outer airlock door, then engaged the pressurization to mimic what a droid would have done with its own access key.
"Other side is saying a quarter bar," Natalie read off her suit's displays. "We're filling with 100 percent nitrogen." There were no readouts or monitors in the airlock itself to tell her what was happening: droids would not have needed any such thing.
"That's what it should be," Jacob said. "The core is on the other side of the next bulkhead. I need to see what's in there. I'm still seeing the right pressure, but I don't know if some of the components have been damaged. The impact point is about fifty meters above you, but that doesn't mean something didn't penetrate further and damage the electronics."
Natalie turned the actuator to open the third and final hatch. The cavernous computer core lay in complete darkness, illuminated only by her suit's head lamps. At last, she had enough room to get out of the rigid pose and turn around. "I've got a bunch of big red tubes," she said, looking down and to either side of her.
"Those are the processor silos," Jacob explained. "There's sixteen. The atmosphere provides thermal conductivity. You probably can feel the fan circulation."
Natalie agreed, grabbing onto one of the nearby droid grapple points to keep her equilibrium against the gentle push of air coaxing her to slowly spin. "Where do I go now?" she asked.
Jacob watched her helmet cam feed carefully. "I'm not sure," he said. "You've still got pressure, so the chamber isn't compromised, but watch out if it gets a slow leak. I may have to evacuate the airlock to get you out if you start losing pressure inside. Look around, see if you can find anything that doesn't seem right."
Natalie maneuvered herself between the cylindrical silos, using her arms to hold herself against the faint force of the habitats' gravity. She avoided looking down—it was only a tenth the standard force of gravity that they experienced in the habitats, but she was holding herself up ten meters above the floor.
"Don't just assume anything is a hand-hold," Jacob reminded her. "Gustav placed placards around in case anyone needed to get in there. You'll need to find the hand-holds."
Natalie nodded and swung herself around the next silo. "Wait, I've got something here," she said. "It's all over this grapple point. And the silo wall, and the panel access. What the hell is this stuff?"
Natalie faced herself at the smear of white paste, runnels of which were now covering her glove and part of her suit's chest plate. "My God, it's everywhere," she exclaimed, rotating herself around and upwards at the ceiling, where a foamy swatch of the stuff was dripping off and oozing onto the silos. "What is it, lubricant? Coolant?"
Jacob shook his head. He hadn't seen anything like the stuff in other Cylon technology he had deconstructed. "Can you figure out where it came from? Is there a rupture anywhere around that big pile?" he asked. Natalie kept turning but couldn't see anything.
"It's not expanding. Whatever laid it down isn't putting it out anymore. But it looks like there was a lot of it all at once." Natalie maneuvered across two more silos. "Here's another mess. Same stuff. Still no broken pipe or anything."
Jacob's tablet flashed: John was approaching the electrical closet. "You're on your own for a few minutes," he warned Natalie. "Be back soon!" Jacob switched his tablet back to its standard mode and downloaded the diagnostics from the hybrid's systems, then hurried back to the meditation chamber.
"Her job is to fly the base star," John Cavil stammered, turning to Jacob as he entered. "I'll tolerate her gibberish as long as that happens, but I'm just not seeing the point of all this space, water, and electricity to take care of a babbling, orgasmic puppet." Michelle was getting worried about his relationship with her sister Sharon. John had quoted figures before on the average Cylon's consumption of critical resources. He had also made jokes about the occasional sexual escapades of unnamed Model Ones. Seeing John reduce the hybrid to material transactions, though, was putting the pieces into a disturbing arrangement.
"Hemi-cyclical seasons never assuage the cravings of a ripe old stalker," the hybrid intoned as John glowered with petulance. "The gregarious nature of misanthrope is ill begotten amongst the universal mass field." The hybrid's face and the toned muscle of her shoulders grew more tense. She moved her foot to press against the end of the bath.
Natalie scooped up some of the white resin with her finger. There seemed to be a drying or setting process with the stuff. She wished her suit had some sample tubes to collect the paste, but she improvised and scraped up some with one of the wrenches from the toolbox on her waist, then stowed the wrench back in place and closed the box back up. It would have to survive the trip through vacuum back to the habitat module for her to get a better analysis.
Lost for a moment among the arcade of silos, she stopped to get her bearings. "Jake, you back?" she asked, feeling herself being tugged in a new direction. At first, she felt it was a downdraft from the nitrogen circulation, but it got stronger. There was a bright flash, and for a moment Natalie could see her own shadow cast on the silos in front of her.
Her hand slick from the white paste, Natalie lost her tenuous hold on the grapple point and began to fall. She steadied herself, trying not to panic. Her suit's thrusters could keep her in place, but she didn't want to use them in the confined, controlled atmosphere of the computer core. Natalie felt herself slipping backwards faster and put her arms out to find new hand holds. The best she could do was to distribute her grip over two of the silo walls, and for the moment it was enough to hold her in place. She gripped one of the grooves on the silo her right and worked one hand onto another grapple point, then twisted herself around to see where she had been headed.
Six meters below and two silos over stood a glowing, glassy orb. Natalie strained to see how the orb could be perched there, with no apparent support, against the pull that affected everything else in the room. At first, she thought it was blue-colored, but what was showing in its mirrored surface? The more she stared at it, she couldn't identify the reflection of anything in the computer core. A few faint droplets of the white goo dislodged from the ceiling, floated past Natalie, and then into the orb. She watched in fascination as the surface seemed to simply accept them—it didn't absorb, or get covered in the goo, the droplets just flew in as if there was no surface at all.
The orb was pulling things in, and it was the new force she was fighting against. Natalie was better able to push back against something she could identify. She focused her suit's head lamps on the orb—it didn't reflect light, rather it seemed like her head lamps could just shine into it and illuminate nothing.
By adjusting her position, she had a realization. The orb wasn't a solid object, and it wasn't reflecting anything in the room: it was a gateway into the space behind the orb, and that space was indeed vast. Trying to light it up with her helmet was like trying to illuminate the far side of a stadium with a weak flashlight.
"Her breathing just changed," Michelle observed in the meditation chamber. "Can't you hear it?"
"Well, maybe with two people on this thing's wavelength we can figure it out," John said in exasperation as the hybrid bit her lip and shifted her posture again. "See if people want to buy a tape of this!" he scoffed as he left the room.
"The genetic life form harkens the morning thunder on its sleepy pilgrimage into aperture science," the hybrid continued with shortening breath. "Child, the trepidation inside your rubber cloister will be inundated with clarity." The hybrid drew in a deep breath and stretched out her hands and arms behind her head. Her eyes closed as a smile spread across her slackened lips. "The cake is not a lie," she let out as she arched her back and thrust her chest forward. Her hips gyrated as her feet and calves flexed against the walls of the tank.
Natalie struggled to regain her posture but could not before a second wave of the paste gushed out of the aperture and slapped hard against the back of her helmet. After falling to the floor amidst the first expulsion, she struggled to regain her footing. The slurry was much heavier than she had anticipated in the low-gravity environment and it carried a lot of momentum when it struck. Her faceplate was covered in streaks of the stuff, blocking a lot of her view and shifting her focus to the mechanisms inside her helmet.
"This is like being kicked through a carwash, Jake," she yelled into her intercom, hoping he would hear her. "What the hell did you get me into?"
Her helmet had withstood the initial impact, but Natalie's displays were now indicating a pressure failure in one of the hoses from her air supply. A second warning indicated that the outer shell on her helmet had been compromised, highlighting the suit's data uplink module. Her head lamps flickered, then died.
"Jake, I need help," she said in desperation. "I think this stuff is eating my suit." Natalie could hear nothing from Jacob. She didn't even get the audible acknowledgement that the intercom had transmitted her message: the line was gone. More system failures were listed out on the suit's HUD, dominating Natalie's field of vision with her face plate blocked and the room darkened. The list grew just before a stream of software faults flooded her display. The surge was short-lived: Natalie's audio feed crackled, the HUD flickered, and the entire system went dead.
"She hasn't started talking again," Jackie observed. "This one was different." All five of the Cylon crew looked on in silence as the exhausted hybrid's head rested in contentment on the rim of her bath. "After the last one she seemed to just doze for a bit," Jackie kept on. "This is more."
Enri scribbled more notes on his tablet. "The habitat systems are still online, but the defensive batteries, active sensors, and drive coils are powered down. Gustav is not going to be happy."
Michelle made a full turn around the room, then looked up at the ceiling. The usual collage of sensor feeds, closed-circuit video, and system performance diagnostics had changed, too. "The displays are off track. Still with the habitat CC video, still with the life support diagnostics, but other than that she's just displaying pictographic nonsense."
"She's dreaming," Jacob suggested. Michelle looked back with sympathy but felt he was grasping at straws.
Harper examined the habitat systems feed, then panned over to additional CC video showing his counterpart Fives inspecting one of the impact points with their repair droids. "We need more people in suits, outside, wiring everything into the auxiliary controls," he concluded. Enri concurred: the auxiliary systems were Gustav's idea, a simple computer interface with a sprawling network of cabled connections for bypassing the hybrid to control the ship. Enri and Gustav had designed the first such workable system but were still bringing it all together. "Life support," he said, pointing to Michelle and Jackie. "Weapons, drive?" he asked Enri. All four left the room together.
Jacob switched his tablet back to the protected mode to contact Natalie again, but the feed was blank. Her repair droid was surveying the hull damage over the dorsal plating. Jacob fought to calm himself—-Natalie was probably fine, just unable to communicate over their special channel. He made his way to the keyboard near the entrance to the meditation chamber, a minimalist fixture for text-based human interaction in what was otherwise an immersive visual and audio cave. He was able to call up additional diagnostics on the nearest wall display but there were no feeds from the computer core.
The tapping of Jacob's keystrokes punctuated the room's silence until he heard water moving within the hybrid's pool. Turning around, he paused to find the hybrid, awake at last and staring at him with her chin rested on her shoulder. Her stretchable cap lay in a casual pile on the floor next to her basin. Matted locks of wet brown hair were strewn over her shoulders and face, flowing down onto the surface of the water and the rim of the bath. With most of the screens displaying dark imagery, the light from within the bath refracted off the rippling surface of the water and made aquamarine arcs flicker across her glossy onyx top and alabaster décolletage.
Jacob knew that a series of cables, starting at the small of her back and connecting to several vertebrae up her spine, kept her tethered to the bath, but from his present vantage there was nothing to give away the fact that she wasn't flesh and blood. Jacob placed his tablet on the floor next to the console and stepped over to the bath to serve the robotic woman's summons.
The rim of the tank was half a meter above the floor and the bath itself was recessed. Jacob took to his knees behind the hybrid and leaned forward as she seemed to want. Guiding his head over her shoulder, she wrapped her arm around it and began to brush his scalp. She took a deep breath and touched her cheek to his with a warm smile as they both stared forward at the frenzied mixture of images emanating from her mind. The hybrid paused, then took another breath and caressed Jacob's cheek with her own again to remind the baffled human he was the one who needed air.
"I want a cigarette," she whispered in a rich, husky voice.
Jacob blinked as the hybrid continued to rake at his hair with her hand. For thirty years the meditation chambers had been kept sterile, until over Jacob's own protests the model lines had voted to allowed entry without face masks. It was still a far cry from smoking in the oracle's sanctuary. The hybrid's sly grin gave way to disappointment before Jacob nodded and tried to talk it over.
"I've always done everything to respect your chambers," he started to say. The hybrid nodded like Jacob should get to the point. "We don't, I mean we don't have tobacco," he fumbled.
The hybrid raised an eyebrow, then drew his head closer to put her lips to his ear. "I saw what you and Michelle were growing in the hydroponics bay," she taunted him. "And you've already dried the first batch. The first fruits of your harvest: bring me a cigarette."
Jacob would serve her wishes. "But what about Natalie?" he asked, certain the hybrid knew what was happening. The hybrid beamed: "Natalie's fine, I've got her. But you should hurry."
Jacob nodded and stood, trying to process the situation as he left the chamber. The hybrid had just asked him to break the rules, holding him in a passionate headlock as she did so. Was Natalie a hostage now, or was the hybrid making a genuine commitment about her safety? In the end, Jacob had very little confidence in Gustav's project to bypass control of Cylon technology. The hybrid might as well have said "don't worry, I've got you all."
Natalie moved with halting steps through the darkness, wary of walking into anything that might crack her faceplate or tear the suit. Without a single light or the benefit of her mag-locks she struggled to maintain a sense of orientation. Making use of the low gravity provided by the habitat pods hundreds of meters away, she kept her boots on the floor and her knees straight. Even the dim light from the aperture would have been a boon to her composure, despite what had emerged from it, but that too had vanished. The atmosphere inside her suit seemed to be holding, judging by the fact that she hadn't passed out. The air system, she knew, would keep working even if all the other electronics failed, but she didn't have air forever. She sensed a droplet of sweat running down her face and redoubled her efforts to remain calm and conserve what she had.
A streak of light flashed in front of her, obscured by the congealed fingers of chalky foam covering her face plate. She wasn't sure if she was hallucinating, if her eyes were reacting against the sensory deprivation, until she saw it again. A search light cut between the rows of silos that she could make out for a moment in front of her. Soon the search light rounded the corner and focused on her. It was a repair droid, perhaps the one she had started her EVA with, that had entered the core through the same hatch she had used. She squinted to follow its rapid, adroit movements over the silo walls. The droid wasn't confining its movements to hard points that Gustav had marked for grappling, and its arms moved at dizzying speeds far greater than Natalie had thought possible. As the search lamp came closer, Natalie averted her eyes from the blinding light.
Then, she saw her face plate again, even her own reflection in it. The white goo wasn't just outside her helmet anymore—it was on the inside as well, all around the fabric covering her scalp and starting to run down her forehead. Another blob of the stuff had formed on the inside of the glass: it was growing towards her face. She let out a feeble scream as a protrusion of the blob made its way into her nose and mouth.
Jacob found the miniature envelopes of cannabis in Michelle's locker, packed as she had arranged them. A couple of them were nice and dry—-enough for a joint or two. Michelle had put little stubs of foam that could work as filters in the same envelopes. Taking some of the paper slips and white glue they had confiscated from Enri's "odds and ends" storeroom, Jacob pressed out two joints and set the glue with Michelle's hairdryer. He slipped the better of the two results in his pocket and left the other in Michelle's locker next to the rest of the stash. He had his own lighter.
When Jacob returned to the meditation chamber he found the hybrid seated in an upright posture, facing the far wall rather than lying reclined and staring up at the ceiling. She stroked her wetted hair with her left hand and said nothing as he approached from behind, extending her dry right hand with two splayed fingers to accept the offering. He let her clasp the joint and then lit the tip. The hybrid brought it to her lips and took a smooth pull, reaching up to tug on his fingers with her left hand as she did so. She pulled him back onto his knees as he had been when they spoke earlier, exhaled the smoke, and began examining the plume.
"You did well," she commended him. "Here," she motioned for him to lean in again. "Your turn." Jacob's hands trembled as she handed the joint over-—how embarrassing if he were to drop it into her bath! He took a pull, not too deep that he would seem greedy. The hybrid watched and encouraged him to inhale more, then stopped him for a moment when he was about to let it go. "And a little fresh air on top of that," she told him. He took a short breath of air on top of the hit, then let it out.
She took the joint back and used it to point to the side of the bath to her right where he should take a seat. He moved around the side, faced the hybrid with his shoulder resting against the rim, and put his legs out.
"You have questions for me," the hybrid intoned. "And I have some things that you need to know." She took another puff of the joint and blew the smoke in Jacob's face. "In time I want to talk about the war machines, and the ghetto scenes. But first, big picture, and I need you sworn to secrecy. I'm not a delicate thing, but you are, and this is delicate stuff."
Jacob nodded but tried to keep aware of all the factors at work. Natalie had been out of contact for nearly fifteen minutes, but the hybrid knew where she was. The cannabis was strong enough, and he had taken a pretty good hit. Of course, the base star was controlling the hybrid as a sort of marionette: perhaps he was about to learn if the ship was broken or not. "Secrecy," he said, wary of what was to come.
The screens went dark, for a moment making the bath the only source of light in the room. "The cosmos," she began, letting a blue, pink and gold image of the visible universe stretch all around the room. "And my covenant with you: that I will give humanity the first choice of any worlds it wishes to settle. No matter what you hope or fear, remember that I offer this covenant to you." She passed the joint to Jacob for him to get another toke.
The more Jacob watched the star map, he realized it was responding to him. The hybrid had cameras perched all around the room, hidden in the seams between the flat screen displays. She was watching his face, even as she her head faced in the opposite direction, tailoring everything he saw to his own curiosity. He knew the thing could even project sounds, using the screens themselves to double as speakers, although he had never heard anything but what came from the hybrid herself.
"There's a fault in the stars, but also in yourselves," the hybrid continued. "And despite my best intentions, my greatest hopes in humanity were dashed." Jacob looked back with apprehension. Someone had been watching, all along. "My calculus now," she continued, "is not whether you will survive, or whether you recognize that one must be worthy of survival. I consider whether it would be enough, for me to intervene further, that some of you are worthy of survival."
She smiled and examined Jacob's blushing cheeks, satisfied that the weed was kicking in. "You know this is way better than home theatre," she said as she elbowed him. "Looks like you're nice and buzzed, just relax your eyes and enjoy the 3D." Jacob's head gravitated to rest against the hybrid's shoulder. He found that he could look anywhere around the room and have the star map instantly adjust to his focus. The whole thing could appear to jump out at him if he didn't try to stare too hard on any one point.
A metallic, segmented object displayed on one of the flat screens caught Jacob's attention. Satisfied that he had found it, the hybrid brought it closer to his field of vision. With a closer look, Jacob could identify a great deal more structure within the silvery, plated spherical object. "These are the seeds I have sown across all creation," the hybrid explained as the object seemed to crack open, unfurling along its equator as its plating separated and sprouted into solar collection panels. Fleets of smaller vessels began to emerge from docks within the original sphere: judging from their size Jacob guessed each seed must have been kilometers in diameter. "They take root, they bloom, the plan comes to fruition."
Jacob stood up to go examine the seed pod in person. The hybrid laughed and tugged it around the room with a twirl of her fingers as he followed. The scene zoomed in to the pod rooted amongst a metallic asteroid field, its legions of worker vessels collecting ore from the floating rocks surrounding it and bringing the homogenized materials back to the hive. She granted Jacob his own wish to manipulate the pod, rotating it in front of him to reveal the network of furnaces and production nodes behind the unfolded plating. New collection arrays, girders, and worker vessels began to take shape as the thing grew.
"Now," she said, retaking control of the screens. "Behold. The glorious future." The star map evolved over what Jacob could only guess was billions of years, entire clusters of galaxies moving in the background. The universe faded from blue and yellow to a fainter purple, and then to an intricate pattern of pure red, rotating around the room.
Confused, Jacob circumnavigated the room and selected one part of the crimson sky at random. The image expanded as he continued to focus and walk towards it, until he could make out individual stars orbiting one another. Approaching the wall panel, he was able to pluck one of the stars out. Like every other, it seemed, the star was surrounded by some sort of thin spherical shell, its red glow masked and filtered by the cage surrounding it. When he tried to hold it in his hands he was reminded that it was all an electronic illusion confined to the wall displays. There was only one way for the entire sky to be a single color: every star had been crammed into the same mold, each the same size and a clone of every other. All of them, it seemed, would be enmeshed in the mechanical cages.
Jacob turned back to the hybrid, perplexed and now fearful. The red light from the wall displays cast her in a very different manner than the blue light from her bath. Her face held a guileful stare as her arms stretched across the rim of her bath. She crossed her legs. "They'll all be mine in the end," she said with icy precision. Jacob made one stumbling step back towards the bath, then two more and lunged downward to thrust his hands at the hybrid, unsure if he was going to beg or try to strangle it. In a quick, silent motion she grabbed both his wrists and held him in a precarious balance over the water. "Remember my covenant to you," she repeated, then let him regain his posture before letting go.
"There are so many individuals bottled up in you, Jacob," she said, the star map fading back to the blue and yellow of the present. "In you, and in Leoben, every other Model Two. The Ones and Eights, Natalie and her sister Fours, the Fives, they're all wondrous mosaics of souls I gave life anew. But, do you know the singular truth I learned in making all of them? That whether you're a pious cleric, or a cosmopolitan socialite, an athlete, or a homemaker, or an exobiologist, there are primal needs under it all steering your behavior. Religion, rationality, civilization, each is a veneer, something your conscious mind must maintain to achieve some higher purpose. But, take your eyes off the ball for one second and the primal urges come right back to the top." She gave an affectionate gaze into Jacob's eyes, then glanced down at his crotch. "You eat, you survive, you reproduce. Because if you don't do those things, who cares what else you accomplished?"
"I'm not saying the veneer is worthless, or that it's fake," she continued. "It's real. But, it's a veneer, and it is thin. For me," she said, tugging at her top, "this is the veneer. Beneath this body, I take a singular purpose. That asymmetry between us is why you cannot undertake the charge I have been given, and the basis of my covenant with you."
Jacob tensed his shoulders and stood his arms on the rim of the tank to either side of the hybrid, pressing his face against hers. She maintained a cold, serene countenance until his breathing moderated. "Have you always been there?" he asked, referring to the babbling puppet he had known for many years.
The hybrid grinned. "That puppet was nothing, because John meant it to be nothing. Let's talk about that later, not today. And not when you're high."
Jacob's involuntary laughter brought him further forward. "Who are you?" he asked, pressing his cheek to hers.
"I am the shepherd of stars," she began. "The omega that there can be an alpha, the end of all you know, and the beginning of all that will be." She embraced Jacob once more and kissed his neck. "Now go to airlock three," she said. "Natalie needs you. And, remember, secrets."
The hybrid picked up the butt of the joint from beside the bath and used a drop of water to extinguish it. Jacob took it from her hand before she was about to drop it down the tank's cleaning drain. She rolled her hair around and began to replace her cap. "I'll take care of the smell," she assured him. "Just act natural." The wall displays returned to their standard, overflowing mess of information and the hybrid resumed her babbling as Jacob made his way back out of the meditation chamber.
The scene in the airlock where Jacob found Natalie was surreal. Other than the disheveled woman deposited in the middle of it, the airlock was immaculate. Her EVA suit was nowhere to be seen, but her tangled hair, sweat-drenched garments, and creases down each cheek indicated that the suit had been removed only minutes ago. Natalie lay on her side, torso twisted to put her face down flat on the floor with her arms outstretched. Jacob pushed on the sliding inner door as it opened and cradled her back into the warm air of the habitat. He closed the door again to put a second barrier between them and the vacuum of space.
Jacob felt the weak grip of Natalie's hands in response to his touch. "Jake," she croaked. He helped her steady herself, then propped her up seated against the side of the corridor. Her eyes were reddened and inflamed, but to Jacob's relief it didn't look like vacuum exposure. Sweat streamed down her face. Her lips and chin were caked in dried blood from a nosebleed, but Jacob couldn't see any signs of bruising or blunt trauma. Natalie trembled and clasped his hands with her fingers. She was pale and struggled to keep herself upright. "Please," Natalie begged Jacob. "Get her out of my head."
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