Mallory felt the idea changing him. Suddenly he realized he had to survive, no matter the cost. He had to be there, tomorrow and the day after, to help in what small way he could.
“All right, Chameleon. We’ll play it your way. I’ll be damned if I’ll die out here, like this, after what I’ve been through. Hell, the worst part’s behind us, right? We haven’t come this far to lose it all now.”
Chameleon was silent.
“Chameleon? I said—” And he understood. The switch. Like before. The period of silence, the gap while the change took place.
“Chameleon,” Mallory said, “listen to me very carefully. We are going to live. You’ve convinced me. And you’re still the optimist. Your fluidic synapses are trying to change, but that takes a minute or two, doesn’t it? Don’t let it happen. You’ve seen how bright the world can be, how positive thought can overcome almost any obstacle. You don’t want to go back to being Dread.”
Silence.
“And you don’t have to. Believe in yourself. You are the pinnacle of artificial intelligence. You’re a marvel. You can reprogram yourself at will. You can become the opposite of your host, the mirror image. But you don’t have to become that. You can make a choice to become more. You can become whole.”
Mallory waited, listening for that inner voice. He could be here a long time before they found him. He could go crazy if Dread returned, filling his mind with paranoid suspicions of flesh-eating plants and deadly airborne viruses. He could freak out and do something stupid. This wasn’t pessimism; it was simply reality. Something he’d learned was neither white nor black but every shade in between.
He didn’t want to die.
So he waited.
And, presently, Chameleon spoke.
“Thank you,” was what Chameleon said. “Thank you, Mallory, so very, very much.”
Two days later, a star was moving among the other stars in the lunar sky. The Cascadian hadn’t awakened, but its respiration had continued, keeping Mallory alive if somewhat lethargic. The C02 content of the air was a little higher than he would have liked, but he was sure it would cause no permanent damage. His sunburned face was a greater irritant; it had been inevitable despite his best attempts to shield himself from the Cascadian’s life-giving light.
“Do you see it, Chameleon?”
Chameleon said yes.
Mallory considered. It could be an asteroid or a piece of space junk or even a Cascadian ship. He had no right to assume it was rescue. But he knew it probably was.
And Chameleon? Chameleon shared these doubts and a thousand others, but he kept them to himself. It would do Mallory no good to hear them now. And Mallory’s welfare, now and always, remained Chameleon’s only concern.
My greatest patient, Chameleon thought. My greatest success.
Mallory had made progress, and he’d brought Chameleon with him. Nothing must undo that work. So Chameleon buried his doubts, buried them deep, and when he looked out again through Mallory’s eyes, he knew that moving point of light was an Earth ship. And he knew that the landscape need never again look quite so forbidding or inhospitable—whether it was the landscape of Alaska or the Moon or even the landscape of the soul.
Chameleon had no doubts at all. Chameleon was Hope.