SoliS

A weary fatalism closed on me. "I had better hopes for my species," I muttered, more to myself than to the human-looking thing before me. "This is just the kind of monstrous future I was afraid to find instead."
"Disease is monstrous, Mr. Charlie. Old age is monstrous. There are no diseases or senescence in our era. If you cooperate, you will live usefully and indefinitely without pain or suffering. If you choose not to cooperate, the resectioning of your brain will be conducted humanely. You will simply go to
sleep and not wake up."
Anger torqued in me, and I knew that if Sitor Ananta so desired, a few squigs of the stylus would render me utterly pliant. But I could plainly see that the creature enjoyed this sadistic manipulation. "The idea of going to sleep and not waking up sounds pretty good to me," I said with all the enthusiasm I could muster.
The look of surprise on that smug, puerile face was well worth the stabs of pain that followed when Sitor Ananta got stylus in hand. Pain has many colors. That creature found the shades most disagreeable to me, and though I fretted about what this monster would do to the delicate, glass-faced beings who had used me to teach their young, I blurted out the desired information before very long. Then blackness followed.
And in the blackness there were blind memories of beetling talk interspersed with deaf dreams of glittering needles and red crisscrossings of laser light. More darkness came afterward, with pieces of hot perfume . . . and then sleep.
When I woke next, I was here, in the command core of a mining factory, somewhere, I assume, in the Asteroid Belt, writing you. At least, this seems like writing: Blue blips of words appear before me at will when I speak, all of it easily retrieved when I wish. As for who you are, I'm not sure yet. Eventually, I will find someone interested in my story. Perhaps the lewdists or the Friends of the Non-Abelian Gauge Group will seek me out again if the information I rendered to Sitor Ananta has not led to their destruction. I only described what they allowed me to see-those eerie milkweed tufts drifting into a jade sky above a red desert, those four-fingered people in their clear armor and transparent faces with brains like surging clouds. . . Who are they?
That any faction other than the Commonality will contact me seems unlikely in this remote, airless place. Still, there must be other mining factories out here in the Belt. Perhaps someday I will learn to communicate with them. That is the hope of my courage each time I decline the sessions of slow-motion orgasm that follow the long, tedious work cycles. There is no other time to write, and I feel I must write to retain some sense of myself-to be someone. Otherwise, I am just this machine, a regulator of drill trajectories, coolant flow rates, melt runs, and slag sifters. This is a life in the frost-light of a perpetual computer game.
Actually, it's not much different than life was before, except that, since my brain is maintained in a state of continuous glucose saturation, I never get hungry. I'm lonely, of course, but there's enough stimulation to fend off madness most of the time. A vivid dream life seems to offer the psychic hygiene of sanity. And the claustrophobia I suffered from in my former life appears to have been adjusted for by my installers. More often than not. I do accept the rapture sessions-the blissful immersions in the secret sea. I've earned them, and they give my will the mettle to go on.
But every once in a sad while, like right now, I need to affirm my sense of myself, to create the fiction that I am something more than this. We all live by our fictions. We create stories in order to fill the emptiness that is ourselves. And because we must create them with strength from nothing, they make us whole.
Recently, after much dickering with the luculent control displays, I have learned how to use the factory's memory-storage system to transmit radio messages into space. I am going to send what I have written here. And when this is received by the Commonality, I may well be cut into smaller, more convenient parts-but by then it will be too late. My story will continue to exist, expanding into the dark at the speed of light, maybe even to be heard by you. And if you do read this, then I will have failed better than I could have hoped.
This time I'm throwing the boomerang of my life to where it won't come back, at a target I can't miss.
And so-
With my soul in my mouth, I begin– Swollen with dreams, I awoke from the dead…
1
The Laughing Life
With MY SOUL IN MY MOUTH, I BEGIN. The radio message arrives at Apollo Combine's thrust station on the Martian moon Deimos as Munk is in the docking bay, busily unloading rhodium sheets from a freighter. He is a large androne with a chrome cowl, black intermeshing body plates, and articulated face parts that have no human referent apart from a crimson lens bar that, under a pewter ledge of brow, serves as eyes. Those eyes dim for a second after the androne receives the broadcast and his silicon brain replays it several hundred more times, analyzing all its components until he is satisfied that the message is genuine.
In the next second, Munk scans the docking bay and formulates an action plan that will enable him to respond most efficiently to what he has learned. The bay is empty. Apart from several programmed handroids working with him as stevedores, he is alone. The thrust station's other sentient andrones are either deployed or in the maintenance pit. Only two vessels occupy the cavernous bay: the rhodium-laded freighter with its enormous storage nacelles and silos and a small cruiser with three fin-jet thrusters and an asymmetrical black-glass hull.
Apollo Combine, for some mortal reason Munk does not fathom, has named this cruiser The Laughing Life. Surely, that is some kind of wry joke. There is nothing inherently funny in what this ship regularly does: conveying jumpers and androne workers among the factories, smelters, and mines of the Asteroid Belt. Perhaps-if the jumpers who named this vessel were at all philosophical-they would say that they laugh at the rare joy of being where life does not belong, in the void, separated by a thin barrier from the near absolute zero of the vacuum and its invisible and deadly sea of gamma rays. But jumpers are genetically designed to be a phlegmatic and wholly unpoetic lot.
Life itself, Munk imagines, thinking about this ship's name, is laughing simply because it can. The absurdity of life blindly groping from necessity to freedom is what led consciousness out of the constraints of biology to the enhanced freedom of his own existence, the metalife of the androne and the great adventure of the silicon mind. So, perhaps, for that reason he, too, should laugh. He is not sure. All he knows for certain is that he has heard a human voice calling for help out of the void. More than anything, he wants to respond, and in the one second that these thoughts and observations have occupied him he has devised a strategy for using The Laughing Life to go to the source of this radio signal.
But to fulfill this plan, he needs human help. For a fraction of another second, Munk reviews the profiles of the forty-two people who work for Apollo Combine on Deimos. In that fractional moment, he not only identifies the one jumper best suited for this mission, he also patches into the duty roster and learns that the jumper he wants is currently in the thrust station.