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| There Ain't No Justice |
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| #122 |
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- Metamorph -
Chapter 05
by Arifel
V
It is respectable to have no illusions,
and safe and profitable, and dull.
Joseph Conrad
we didn't converse at all on the return journey, until we approached the
point where we'd seen the neutrino-sources.
`do you want to drop out of warp and check them out?' Lydya asked. I
thought for a moment, then replied,
`no. firstly, we have no idea how powerful they are. secondly, if they
examine us and think we're typical humans - despite what they've
observed so far - they'll know we've gone way beyond the bounds of their
Edicts. if they can't damage us, they'll certainly do some damage to
the rest of humanity. thirdly...' i paused. `thirdly, i want to have
some goddamn fun before i have to start thinking about overthrowing an
evil galactic empire. i want to go back to earth. i want to lie in the
sun on a tropical beach. i want to make a shitload of money and give it
all away to some charity. i want to freak out some straights.'
`well, i can't argue with that. hey, over there - ' she pointed. an
asteroid, roughly banana-shaped, about three kilometres across its
narrowest axis. i grinned; it would make a good test subject for my
mining machines. i dropped out of warp and jetted closer. it rotated
slowly, distant sunlight creeping across jagged edges.
this was, to me, a familiar pattern; when confronted with a painful
truth or a nasty situation, i'd occupy my mind with something else.
i'd built a prototype sculptor, tangled in my hair like a flea; i shook
it loose and activated it with a brief nanogravitic pulse. it hung in
space before me, turning slowly, legs wiggling like a new-born
butterfly. as soon as its head found the asteroid, a blue spark appeared
at the tip of one leg and it vanished. my mass-sense tracked it zipping
towards the asteroid; enhanced vision saw it approach, turn over and
hit, travelling at about three meters per second. as soon as it touched
down, it sank into the asteroid and was gone. together, we'd refined the
design until the replication time was now ninety-five minutes. they'd
have to chew away about one-third of the mass before it could be made
cubical, say, ten thousand million tonnes. with each sculptor weighing
exactly 0.08 of a gram, that would take one hundred and twenty-five
thousand million million of them, and because of their low mass, it
would be just over ninety hours before they'd multiplied enough to
consume that much mass. i didn't want to wait around here that long, but
Lydya wanted to see them working, so we hung in space for almost four
days, watching the jagged creases smooth out, watching the elongated
horns of the asteroid slowly erode. we received chatty telemetry from
the neural net once it was up; at one point, when it started requesting
additional information, i thought we'd gone and created a new
intelligent, gestalt lifeform. we sent it some software updates, and
after that it restricted its thoughts to sculpting.
it was almost ninety-one hours before the final shape emerged; up to the
point where the sculptors swarmed, it appeared to be a fuzzy, dark grey
cube. then we received a final signal from the net, and the swarm of
sculptors lifted away from the surface. before, where there'd been a
boring grey asteroid, there was now a glittering cube, intricate designs
etched into the sides in copper. one day, an astronomer with a good
telescope and a knowledge of the films of Clive Barker was going to get
one hell of a shock.
the sculptors clustered together into a single, cloudy lump, like a
piece of cotton wool in a glass of water, and turned. we felt gravitic
pulses as it searched for a new target; it found one almost immediately.
pale blue fire flickered along one side of the cloud, and it slowly
drifted away. we followed it until we saw its target, a potato-like
lump nine kilometres across. my back-brain came back with the figures:
shape would require consumption of six point two percent of the total
mass of which was approximately six hundred and thirty-five million
million grams, which could be eaten away in a matter of minutes by the
huge number of sculptors currently active. when their number reached
three hundred thousand million million, they would divide into two
groups. i suddenly had a vision of the solar system in a year's time,
with hundreds of clouds of sculptors flying back and forth, searching
for asteroids to convert into cubes. my final update to their software
ordered the swarm to divide into two groups; ten percent of them would
stay on, scouting the asteroid belt for potential cubes. the other
ninety percent would plot a course for earth and, on the way, build
themselves into a kind of silicon foam-bubble material, each sculptor
taking apart its neighbour and packing it into the shape of an anvil the
size of a bus.
we followed the swarm until the first anvil formed. it looked evil,
menacing, and very heavy; it was about eighty-five percent vacuum and
would sink through the atmosphere slowly, settling wherever it fell like
a house made of polystyrene foam. if it fell on the ocean, it would
float.
together, we watched the anvil drift towards the point where earth would
be when it got there. then, without warning, i powered up the
half-field drive and sent,
`come on, let's go home. there are other things i want to do.'
`do you think i've lost too much of my humanity?' i asked, rotating
slowly within the field-bubble along the axis of our path, eyes closed.
`what do you mean?' Lydya sent back.
`well, i used to be obsessed by either food, or sex. and it seems that
i don't have any interest in either, at the moment.'
`i was like that, just after my Change.' she paused, reminiscing. `oh,
yeah. i did some weird shit when i Changed. you get over it soon
enough.' another pause. `would you like to come to dinner with me when
we get back?' i smiled.
`i'd be delighted.'
she'd darted off somewhere once we'd entered earth's atmosphere. i
dropped into the garage where my car was stored and drove it to the
nearby beach. it felt strange, driving a car; i was uncomfortably aware
of how dead, how unresponsive it was. i began making plans for giving
her a degree of sentience, a nervous system. yeah. when i was finished
with her, she'd be able to drive herself.
as i looked for a place to park, i thought, why stop there? mass-
conversion power-system, so she'd run on fresh air... hype the engine
up, rework the suspension... the tyres'd have to be replaced completely.
a reproductive system? why not. it'd have to be parthenogenetic, at
least, at first...
i got out of the car, walked down onto the beach. it was late at night;
no-one else here. the scent of wind over afternoon-scorched sand was a
familiar one, as if no time at all had passed since i'd walked along
this beach at night, out of my mind on vodka and angst.
i walked into the shallow water; it soaked into my jeans, and the
combination of recent extreme cold and vacuum on Nereid, and the salt
water did something to them; they began falling apart, the threads
breaking into segments about a centimetre long.
i waded out until the water rose up to my chest, the tatters of my
clothing floating away with the waves. i analysed the water, and found
that there were, after all, minute traces of gold in it. previously i'd
believed that that had been some kind of urban myth. i knelt down,
submerging, a six-inch slash opening up in my chest, lined with cilii. i
swam forward, sucking water in through the vent, filtering it and
expelling it from a hole in my lower back. there were some interesting
pollutants, but all i was interested in for the moment was the gold.
i reached down and scooped up some sand; it had more gold in it than the
water did, so i swam down to the bottom and started gulping it down,
moving about like a vacuum cleaner, slowly accumulating enough gold to
pay for dinner at the restaurant. as i swam back towards the shore, i
formed it into a little ingot, about the size of two matchboxes, and
stamped a five-pointed star into the top. there was a small group of
teenagers on the beach, so i hid my genitalia and made my lower half
resemble denim before emerging from the water, the ingot hidden inside
me. they gave me some strange looks, and as i climbed into the car, i
realised i still had a huge gash in my chest. i smiled and set my body
to developing a loose skin made of finely woven black cotton, silk,
denim and leather. by the time i got to the restaurant i was decently
dressed, the gold ingot sitting in my back pocket.
i parked the car, got out and sat on the bonnet, mulling over a plan to
convert nitrogen into gold using low-energy sub-atomic manipulation. the
answer suddenly presented itself, as answers so often do, and within
minutes a replica of a two-dollar coin formed on the palm of my hand,
perfect in very detail except for the fact that instead of a
copper-gold-nickel amalgam, it was pure gold. i was sure that the
waiters wouldn't mind. i just hoped that they'd notice, and not put the
coins into general circulation.
i kept producing coins until i had seventy dollars' worth; i was working
on coin number thirty-six when Lydya dropped out of the sky, wearing a
sheer black dress with a gauzy train, her long black hair braided over
one shoulder. i slid off the bonnet and offered her my arm; together,
we entered the foyer of the restaurant.
the food was just as good as the last time i'd been here; i refrained
from fully examining it with my Metamorph senses. i wanted to enjoy it
simply, as a human would, as i would have a month ago. after about
forty minutes, however, i was growing bored. while carefully placing
small squares of charcoal-grilled steak into my mouth, i played about
with the external layers of skin, changing their colour and texture.
ignoring the stares of the other diners, i settled on a pitted metallic
grey, as if i were a statue cast out of lead. not to be outdone, Lydya
changed her surface appearance to that of green marble, diagonally
veined with dark red streaks. i grinned, and altered my frame, slowly
stretching until my head almost touched the ceiling, skeletally thin.
the other diners would stare for a few minutes then, apparently, decide
that we were part of some elaborate video prank. i resumed my original
shape but kept the metal surface texture.
`this is...' i began.
`yes?' she said, briefly turning into translucent jade, vague outlines
of her internal organs (i hadn't known that she still used them) visible
through her skull.
`it makes me want to do something that will make them sit up and look.
something that they won't be able to explain away as a stunt, or a
special effect, or a hologram.' i thought for a few moments. `i have
this strange urge to lie in the sun on the beach of an island in the
pacific, somewhere. i'd like to be able to buy it.' my head was
swimming with plans, things i wanted to do. i smiled at her. `i think
i've regained my inspiration.'
a week later; Lydya had gone off to visit some guy named Boyd in
America. i'd converted enough nitrogen into gold to be able to purchase
a house and fill it with very expensive furniture. i'd decided to make
a film.
i hadn't decided whether or not i'd use human actors; it would have been
easy to simply visualise the whole thing inside my head and project it
into the lens of a film camera, but that was too far removed from the
process of building sets, costumes and lighting.
i sat in a huge, ornate armchair, one leg up on the arm, staring into
the open fire, details whirring around inside my mind; plans for
nanomachines to build the sets, to generate the null-gravity field (it
was set in space), to form into three remote-controlled shells,
meat-puppets which would be the primary actors.
when finished, it had no overt dialogue; a sound-track consisting of
twenty minutes of soft, jangling music along the lines of the Cocteau
Twins, followed by half an hour of slightly harder-sounding
semi-industrial sounds. the whole thing had a vaguely dark aspect.
i had no idea how to go about distributing it other than inviting some
of my old human friends around to my new house, to view it. one or two
of them wondered where i'd been for the past few months, but they
weren't really interested in my answer.
i aimed the projector at a large blank wall in a room filled with
couches and chairs, turned down the lights and started the film.
the titles come up in bright, burning red on a black background: `Each
Sleek Dominion' (the title didn't mean anything; i'd selected the
words at random, and they seemed just as appropriate as any other).
opening shot, a starship (the standard, ornate, over-detailed
flashing-light-dotted kind ordinarily associated with
late-twentieth-century SF films) flies towards a gas-giant in a binary
star system. the ship assumes an orbit around the gas giant. many
beautiful shots of the ship against the star-field.
inside, a young woman dressed in a glittering black latex uniform
floats before a two-dimensional holographic screen on which are images
detailing her upcoming mission; a rendezvous with an alien ship. her
pale face seems small and delicate due to the shock of black hair that
floats around her head like a lion's mane. her hand drifts out and a
finger intersects the plane of the screen; the images freeze. the
sleeves of her uniform come down into finger- stalls over her thumb
and pinky. she floats closer; we see a look of concern plain on her
face as she examines the images (we are too close to the screen to see
more than a dozen or so translucent grey-green scan-lines).
she waves her hand through the screen and it vanishes. arms folded,
eyes closed, she floats backward through the gloomy control-room, lit
from below by instrumentation, flickering lights. her breasts move
strangely beneath her uniform in zero-g.
her second-in-command - a young woman wearing a similar uniform, her
crimson hair cut short, four pale-white animal claws on a leather
thong around her neck - floats in through a circular hatchway set in
the wall, folds herself into a ball, tumbles, straightens out and
shoots towards her captain. they embrace, kiss and there follows a
slowly paced yet torrid lesbian scene, during which they strip off
their uniforms, generally nibble and lick each other, ending up in a
position where each is grasping the other's thigh and grinding their
hips back and forth.
cut to: outside, where a gigantic grey-green craft shaped like a
conch-shell spirals through space towards the human starship. it
halts a short distance away (this is where the industrial music takes
over). cut to the inside of this ship, which is uncomfortably
Gigeresque; a huge hallway which curves around and out of view, lit by
harshly bright white spheres, filmed on an angle.
(all of these scenes were actually done on earth; i'd bought an old
gymnasium, knocked out the first and second floor and set up a series
of gravity filters in the football-field sized space. i'd had to make
the place airtight because whenever the zero-g effects were on, the
air tried to rush out of the roof.)
the young woman, naked, floats through the spiral. a hessian bag is
tethered to one foot, and it jerks along behind her. she explores the
hallway until she reaches the point where the gap is around twice her
height; she then turns back and follows the spiral outwards again.
she is met by some kind of alien, resembling three rubber balls joined
together inside a stocking, bright yellow slick- looking surfaces.
the spherical sections deform, shudderingly, as if they were balloons
full of jelly. the leading sphere (with four double-jointed but
otherwise disturbingly human-looking arms arranged around the side)
comes to a blunt-nosed point, like a teardrop. the alien and the girl
float about two metres apart, each cautiously regarding the other.
the girl opens the hessian sack and produces a cat-o'-nine tails,
which she lashes back and forth confidently. the alien cowers, the
two outer spheres contracting towards the centre one, the arms
partially retracting into the front sphere. the girl gently brushes
the whip across the alien's snout and says something reassuring;
(no subtitles... i was originally aiming for a dream-like mood; i got
away from this as what passed for a plot developed, but occasional
touches remained)
the alien appears to relax and the arms emerge. somehow, they move
closer together; the alien grasps her legs with two arms and the snout
elongates and grows narrower at the end. she spreads her legs and
sinks down on the end of the snout, shuddering. as they thrust
against each other alternate segments of the walls begin to glow in a
sequence, light pulsing towards the centre of the conch. as she
approaches orgasm, the lights pulse faster...
cut to: outside; the alien ship is glowing, the pulses spiralling
inwards faster and faster; the whole ship glows bright blue-white,
there is a dazzling flash (a few frames of pure white) and the ship is
gone. close-up of a slowly turning bubble, a wobbling gelatinous
balloon, the captain visible through the transparent sides against the
starry backdrop.
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