SLATE

I lower the ship’s temperature to zero.

She is gone. The alien. The it.

I step on the quarterdeck, alone. The sudden emptiness is irrational. I have miscalculated and failed in diplomacy. I lost an inroad to this planet’s intelligent species. But none of that should feel like a hand has reached inside my chest, taken hold of my heart muscle, and squeezed.

Thoughts assault my mind to call her awkward-sounding name, Yven. I must leave the ship. I must reinitiate diplomatic relations at once.

But I do not call out. I have my objectives to achieve first, and I do not act on irrational emotions.

Black earth. I never felt alone until I met her. And the introduction of that weakness is inexcusable. It would be better I do not see her again. Yes, like cauterizing a wound.

She crawls into the room from the access tunnel.

I remember my purpose.

I do not know much about floods, but I feel a flood of relief. But the tension in my body only increases as her eyes flash with heat that spreads through me.

“Out”

She speaks. My back is already turned.

If eyes can be weapons, then blue eyes specifically.

My pack holds the pleasing heft of steel. I ransacked the armory for basic items. A hybrid justicar that has the pleasing heft of steel. The full energy auto. A set of total spectrum communicators, and anything that wouldn’t slow me down, compromise my world’s technology or alter the course of this world.

That’s what you’re supposed to say, isn’t it?

“Out”

I don’t give two frags about the course of this world, but I’d rather not break its pretty exterior, or have its people packing advanced weaponry when the first colonists arrive.

Guns equalize power. A warrior, trained from birth to be the ultimate weapon, can be dead by an untrained peasant. They only need to shift power once, then they can shift back on you, and equalize you.

That’s the sort of world-altering I don’t like.

But guns aren’t what I’m worried about. It’s the giant fragging alien spaceship they’re stored in. That’s probably the reason It is trying to get my attention.

I feign misunderstanding.

She has a facility for language. “Out” is perhaps the most difficult concept to grasp, especially when it is accompanied by a shove.

Yet as she uses the word, and I find her difficult to understand, she doubts her ear and tongue. Had she said it right? Had she understood it right?

I should attend to the mounting concern in her actions, which are becoming more animated with gestures of meaning.

If there is an army rushing towards us, or a village, they will die for the crime of seeing.

The it…could go either way, depending on the advantage she offers.

But I’m not worried about the ship, I’m worried about its brain.

A vessel cannot be abandoned with a functioning AI on board. I must kill the AI, or take it with me. An AI cannot fall into enemy hands. AIs can be infiltrated, by other AIs, tortured, or they can even defect.

Minds are not omnipotent and do not contain the total of human knowledge, but they are vastly more dangerous in enemy hands than things that go BOOM.

It is the first voice I heard. It placed me in the stasis chamber when I was unconscious, and ejected me, probably in an attempt to save my life.

I ought to thank its programming for that.

But whether it lives or dies, makes no difference to me. If it dies, it cannot be used against us. If it survives, it dies in the wild world. There are worse things.

The AI lives in its stasis chamber, where it is kept at zero degrees, in zero gravity. Without these conditions, it will cease to function. Permanently.

Removing it is not kindness.

It has only ever known one condition of existence, and I would remove it, to die. Better for it to die free.

The vault contains a series of three gravity tumblers that must be opened by the memory of a predetermined sequence. If I cannot replicate any of the sequences exactly, the mind will be chemically erased. It is a failsafe to prevent an enemy from stealing the brain. The vault can be opened through trial and error, but not without erasing the mind within.

Of course, I do not know the sequence.

So the decision is irrelevant. I will kill it.

Better I, than a stranger.

I close my eyes, shifting into mind space. I am always in the fight. I subtract all distractions, including the emotional variety. This is an advantage of the mind space; complete control over the domain of your mind.

The red root cannot be extracted.

Limiting the visual sense will allow integration of the mind's space with touch and hearing, provided the task is simple.

The mind space is suited to accessing procedural memory since it is the stream of consciousness that interferes with this form of memory.

I place my hand on the first of three floating orbs and think of nothing.

I strip away as much of my connection to my mind as possible, restricting consciousness, until I am nothing but mindless instinct. It is the reverse of bootstrapping, it is more like lacing yourself in the boot.

There is only a thin thread left. A movement with no one to observe it. That movement hears and feels the haptic clicks of gravity as it moves the orb in three dimensions of freedom.

[]

Emerging from mental stasis is like waking up after anesthesia, with no sense of the time elapsed. It is disorienting stepping back into your mind.

And I only need to do it twice more.

I won’t know it worked until I open the vault.

Even the mind space has regulations. Using the mind space to hack your muscle memory isn’t sanctioned action. You won’t find it in any sim.

[Black box is training that erases any traces of what was done until it is needed.]

But there’s something else, nagging. Absolute control is dangerous. Peeling away the mind has…some effect.

What is it? Will I remember more? Or is it something else?

And should I risk my mind for a Mind?

No. And I don’t. I choose possible gain, over the possible loss. I choose the course I set, regardless of cost. I am homo Solarin not sapien. I do not cling to dead soil. I venture forth to voyage in the shadow of foreign stars.

My hand clasps the second orb, and I snuff the twinkling lights of consciousness until.

[]

I am time without time, space without space. I float in a dark expanse. A spark on a broken thread, a dying fuse.

Her eyes have no bottom.

I drift into them like a ship in helix nebula, into the eye of God. Blue. The unnatural color. The color humans must learn to see. Large, bottomless oceans. Translucent is not an exaggeration. There is no iris or pupil, just gentle striations if you are close enough to see. I seek the ending of them, the source of blue waters, where I will quench my thirst.

I lean.

My skull flips on its axis. Pain bursts like a ripe blister. My entire face is a flash of stinging heat that reaches the bones beneath. Nerves caught between fist and bone.

Solid connection.

It is what I needed.

A pale hand on her mouth. She expresses shock with the hand that shook me.

No, you would think I had hit her.

I must have head-butted her accidentally.

I cannot be sure what happened exactly. The mindscape can be unsettling for the observer. The whites of the eyes. The slack jaw. It might appear like a disease or injury. Primitive people believe the body can be possessed or bewitched. It is not that far-fetched when you consider that there are lifeforms that can perform similar tasks.

I lift my head with a dizzying effort.

One tumbler remains, a mocking third eye.

“Stay down,” It says.

But I am homo Solaris, the child of the void. We stare into the black face of hopelessness and bite chunks off it, and spit hopelessness in its eye. And if it should bite back, and swallow us, we will open it from within.

She helps me up. Mainly because she does know what I am about to do. Or perhaps she is still shaking from whatever I did not do to her.

Diplomacy.

I take the third orb and everything falls away.

Untethered. Cut loose. Free. Winding in the black. Darkness darkens. Stars dim, distant, fading. I unfurl. Dissolve. An object, refracted, trapped in a facet, broken, refracted, trapped, until I am the smallest part of a fractal of who I was. The thread floats airless, a cut string.

In iceberg jags into the black. An ark returning from the depths of space. The boat of Charon, ferrying souls.

But it is not a ship, for its face is rough, its surfaces curved, and its texture is the texture of skin.

[]

I sway awake. Her body is pressed against mine, her arms hold me up. She leans back, eyeing me warily as though I might bite.

I regain my footing.

The vault is open.

I didn’t kill it.

I’m sorry for that.

Whatever I went through, whatever it did to me, is nothing compared to what I’m about to do to it.

This operation should be performed in space, by AI technicians. Not by a man with his bare hands.

The Neural network glows blue. It is all mind. All brain. And I’m about to put my hand inside its brain. Pure intelligence is about to feel a hominid's brutish fingers disrupting its organization, with all the sensation and feeling only a higher intelligence can realize.

The egg reminds me of my chamber. It dragged me from out.

I can return the favor.

The vault contains a chamber for temporary transport. I don’t expect this to be a temporary arrangement, but well see what use I get from it before it expires. The transport chamber is spherical and has open vents and handles, but it is not meant to be used in gravity. It opens into hemispheres.

Frag.

The blue thing fights me. It is not much of a fight, but it struggles. To support intelligence, a creature must sacrifice strength. A superintelligence sacrifices everything. It is helpless. Such creatures do not exist, except under very rare conditions.

It shrinks from my hands, compressing its form protectively to evade my touch. It makes a sound, a keening trill. It is an almost imperceptible shiver of treble that would call for support from a stronger protective species, the Braun to its brain. But it is far from its home.

It is said that humans could cause fish to sleep by tickling their underbelly so that they might simply pluck them from the water.

This is nothing like that.

I drag the mind into the world kicking and screaming, as much as stubborn slop of neural matter can kick and scream.

My fingers dig into the blue goop. I feel the contractions, as it attempts a slow, pathetic escape, almost splitting itself in the halo as it slops into its new home. I slam the hemisphere down, trapping the brain, wiping the glue residue off my hands.

Yven watches open-mouthed.

I have only one word for her.

“Out.”