SoliS

"That's okay, Mr. Charlie. Everyone is beautiful now. It's in the programming of the vats that grow us. They will make you beautiful, too." The scraping sound grinds louder, and the mouth of the tunnel brightens. "Please, let me in!"
The psybot whirs backward. "I need time to think."
"There is no time!" Mei anxiously turns to face the clangor in the tunnel. "Aparecida is coming! Please."
"This is happening too fast," Charles complains. "I must get used to this machine first. You're confusing me."
Out of the tunnel, Aparecida appears, slouched under shoulder-wing torchlights, her slinky length spike-studded, sleek as a moray eel with a long, curved, genitally blunt head and a razorous brow ridge hooding lenses of molten embers. She slides closer. Glint-toothed tentacles lash the ground ahead of her like shock ripples in water.
Mei slaps on her com-link to The Laughing Life and shouts, "Munk! Open the core chamber's port-side access hatch' Now!"
Bolts spin, the panel slips aside, and Mei jumps backward into the geodesic chamber. Manually, she heaves the panel back into place.
"How did you do that?" Charles asks in a fright.
Before she can answer, the psybot whisks forward, and its pincers grab her legs and slam her to the ground. "Hey!" she cries. "Stop that!"
"It's not me!" Charles calls. "I'm not doing it."
The pincers jab at Mei's statskin cowl, and she twists and contorts, using a desperate agility to avoid their stabbing blows. With a mighty heave, she lurches free of her jetpak as the psybot seizes her collar and tears at her flightsuit. Her hands fumble with the ignitor, and the jetpak flares a blue burst that bangs Mei against the wall and knocks the psybot to its side, tractor treads running.
Charles squawks, "Stop it!"
Mei shakes off the stardust sprinkling her vision and, wielding the jetpak as a weapon, strides over to the psybot. With controlled spurts that make her flesh hop on her bones, she cuts away the androne's pincer appendages and lower body. Hoisting the upper segment of the psybot by a writhing eye-stalk, she bounds away as Aparecida's slashing tentacles smash the geodesic wall behind her into a blizzard of sparkling motes.
"What have you done?" Charles cries. "What' have you done to me?"
"Munk!" Mei screams. "The command pod! Open the pod!"
Ahead, the mirror surface of the clustered spheres wrinkles, and a portal appears close to the ground. Mei throws the eye-stalk segment of the psybot before her, tucks herself around her jetpak, and somersaults into the command pod. "We're in! Shut the pod! Munk-hurry!"
Through the constricting portal, Mei glimpses Aparecida lunging toward them, tentacles thrashing, ax-edged arms whirling, jaguar body slumped in a full-tilt charge, a gaze of gorged fury in its slick metal face. The entry shrivels close, and a tremendous boom rattles the complex and the small bones in Mei's ears. Quake-force juddering trembles the ground.
"What is happening?" Charles asks out of the darkness.
"Aparecida is trying to break in. But she can't. This is a prestressed alloy no demolition androne can breach." in the glow from her statskin cowl, the severed psybot with its wavering eye-stalks looks like an exotic sea plant. "Munk, turn the lights on in here."
Static drizzles over the com-link, and Munk's voice comes in jagged chunks: "…evasion. Wolf Star has deployed … Repeat, can't respond, must execute battle evasion. Will contact you again when-"
"Munk! Detonate the explosives! Munk, respond! Detonate the bore-drill explosives!"
"Can't. Programming prohibits-"
"Damn your programming! You're a rogue androne now. Use your free will. Save us, Munk!"
"Evading Wolf Star destroyers. There are. . ." Static fizzles into white noise.
"You have control of the factory," Charles realizes.
"Yeah," Mei admits, feeling through the dark for the switch box she knows is somewhere to her right. "This ore processor belongs to Apollo Combine, the company we work for. Or used to work for." By the slim light from her cowl, she finds the switch box and wrenches it open to reveal a colorful hive of circuitry. She probes the mesh of neon-bright conductors with a filament tool, and the interior lights up.
They are in a chamber of tall, intersecting crystal sheets-controller plates-that contain all the directives for operating every device and procedure in the ore processor. Beyond, Mei knows, through narrow companion-ways, are the vaults that store the repair supplies. She shoulders her way among the controller plates to a knee-high central frustum that houses Charles Outis's brain. It is made of the same translucent, crystalline material as the plates, and inside it she discerns a vague ovoid outline.
"Don't touch that!" the psybot commands.
"I'm sorry," Mei says, "but I must turn off your senses for a brief time. Everything we say is being relayed to Wolf Star, and we have no chance of getting away so long as they're spying on us."
"Leave me be!" the psybot shouts. "I don't want to go with you."
Mei ignores him, snaps open the top of the frustum, and lifts out the clear plasteel case with the brain inside it. The convoluted tissue is suspended in colorless gel and a chrome net, the support system that sustains it. Awe at the antiquity of the being in her hands and revulsion at its nakedness mix in her.
"This is Wolf Star speaking," the psybot says. "You are in violation of Commonality salvage-rights law. Your life is forfeit unless you immediately surrender the wetware with which you have absconded."
Mei places the plasteel case on the ground, grabs her jetpak, and fits its vent to the ripped end of the psybot.
"The Laughing Life is in violation of salvage-rights law," the psybot declares. "It is being stalked and will be destroyed. You have no means of escape. Surrender the wetware now, or face the-"
Mei fires a blast of the jetpak that lifts her toward the curved ceiling and shatters the psybot to spinning shards. She lands on her heels and dances backward with the inertia, crashing into the controller plates with enough force to knock the breath out of her. There is no sound in the virtually airless chamber, yet she hears with her bones the pounding atop the pod stop. An ominous
silence pervades her. And in that palpable emptiness she feels suddenly tangential to life, fugitive to the world of sounds, to the living world, as though she brinks on the emptiness of a void greater than being, where the dead enclose the quick.
2
Remains of Adam
OVERCOME BY A SENSE OF UNREAUTY AND AMAZED That her Life is going to end here in the presence of an archaic human, Mei Nili picks up the capsule with reverence and stares through the milky plasteel at the brainshadow and the silvery net that sustains it. The idea strikes her that she can talk directly with this man using the electrodes in the net and the signal processors of the core chamber.
With a feeling of eerie portent, she returns the brain to the frustrum. She goes quickly to the switch box and, using filament brushes from the tool unit of her jetpak, connects the core chamber with her com-link. "Mr. Charlie, can you hear me?"
"Aye, yet strange you sound."
"It's the translator," Mei explains, relieved to hear a human voice again, no matter how comically distorted. "It must be having difficulty converting your archaic language."
"I be black in the kingdom of the blind!"
"I'll try and make some adjustments." She attempts tapping into the powerful logic boards of the controller plates, hoping she didn't damage them too badly in her collision. "I'm going to get us out of here, Mr. Charlie. But first I'm going to see if I can fuse the transmitter units in your support system with the translator mode in my com-link-my compact communications system. That way we can talk once I remove you from the core chamber."