Seven
Never had Jon felt so utterly helpless, so completely, finally beaten. In his electronic incarnation, Korok had become an all-powerful part of the very ship, a vessel in which they had been reduced to the status of crawling vermin.
They had no weapons; no plans; no hope. And even if they had possessed weapons would good would they do against an enemy that was an intangible essence; an electronic mist that could be anywhere and do anything?
He gave a wry smile: at least if they had had weapons they could kill themselves and cheat Korok of his final triumph by escaping into death.
He looked around; half decided to take that ultimate act. What could be used?
There was nothing in this room.
What about that antechamber, he thought. He remembered the objects he had seen when he and Shana had walked in. Those metal sheets, could they be rolled up and pushed down the throat to cause asphyxia?
It was then an incredible thought hit him almost like a physical blow.
Those things had been in part of the Education Room; ergo, they were tools for learning, for information.
What if those who had designed the Fatal Scimitar had planned for a possible problem with the ship’s operating system? What if they had stored information in a non-digital, physical form? A form that could be read without software.
It was their only hope. He dragged Shana12 to her feet and ignoring her startled cry pulled her into the antechamber. He spoke to her quickly and quietly; the last thing the others needed was false hope. Once aware of his idea the pair took out a few of the metal sheets and, after some experimentation, slotted them into viewers.
To his incredible joy, the sheets did indeed contain technical data, data which could only be read by biological eyes when in these viewers. Somewhere there must be schematics for the layout of this vessel!
Shana brought the others in and rapidly set them to work, each to a viewer and a stack of the related metal records.
It was a wearisome task. Many times Jon had thought that the next sheet would give him the knowledge he needed. And each time he was disappointed.
And so it went on.
It was Jarm who found it and his cry echoed all around the antechamber and into the main room. Everyone rushed to look over his shoulder and saw a technical blueprint of their vessel and prison; the aptly named Fatal Scimitar.
It consisted of a wide cylinder with a great nozzle at one end for expelling the propellant gases. The habitation area was in the mid-section of the cylinder, rotating around the long axis to simulate gravity and as far away as possible from that blazing exhaust. But not too far, for dwarfing all the other structures on the vessel was the great shallow cone of the collecting dish. In operation, a magnetic field would be generated, many dark kilometres across and powerful enough to rip iron from the bodies of any biological entity that got too close.
Using knowledge that only a short time before he had not possessed Jon could see that the hydrogen collected by that great ram scoop would be accelerated by a series of microwave generators and lasers and emerge as a massive thrusting jet, burning outwards at a significant fraction of lightspeed.
Jon’s freshly expanded technical knowledge marvelled at the skill which had gone into producing this system; for it was the only feasible way of crossing the tremendous gulfs between the stars without being trapped in a runaway system of demanding ever more fuel to propel ever more mass.
Whatever their undoubted faults, the Protectorate had not lost scientific knowledge.
(Or was it the slave labour of the Degenerates a part of his mind wondered.)
But that was not the end of their labours. They still had to find a way to the Control Room and that took almost as long as finding the overall schematic.
But find it they did.
They stood up from their wearisome task and looked at each other. A quiet determination appeared to be radiating from them, almost a tangible aura.
‘We all know the way now?’ Jon asked, looking at each of the survivors in turn.
They all nodded.
‘Then we’ll be on our way. But first, an experiment.’
To the others’ surprise, Jon crossed to a nearby information screen and activated it.
The unblinking man appeared.
‘We want to surrender,’ Jon said in a broken voice, ‘we’ve suffered enough. We want assurances we’ll be well treated.’
As he had more than half expected the unblinking man’s visage disappeared and was replaced by another face.
The flint-like features of an implacable, dark, heavy-boned man.
Korok.
‘I am disappointed. Very disappointed,’ came that granite voice, ‘Disappointed in your weakness and also that you know so little of the Protectorate. It is not those who surrender who obtain our mercy but those who fight to the glorious end.
‘Think on that before you surrender.’
The screen went dead.
‘Why did you do that?’ gasped Jarm, ‘You’ve just made him angry!’
Jon turned. ‘I could have taunted him. Threatened him. But this way he thinks we’re beaten. It might give us an edge, who knows?’
‘We’ll certainly need that,’ Jorl muttered, ‘as all we’ve got is our fists.’
‘No,’ Jon said, ‘we’ve got more than that. We’ve got our brains as well. Come on.’
And with that, they left the Education Room.
The corridors stretched before them, cold, grey, metallic, slowly curving. Each section looked exactly the same as the previous one. To minds on the edge of abject despair it appeared that their search would never end, could never end.
Jon became aware that his Shana was trying to speak to him. He had put Shana36 ahead of him and Shana12 beside him; so worried was he that he might fail to distinguish them. He turned. ‘Yes?’
Shana placed her hand on his shoulder, trying to slow his furious march but he did not allow that. They must get to the Control Room!
Shana spoke, breathing heavily as she matched his furious pace. ‘The High Official Generation Room – I know what it is.’
‘And’
‘I didn’t have the knowledge before the Educator but now I do. Jon, it’s exactly the literal meaning of the words. Korok, Maroun and the rest of them – they’re going to come out of it!’
‘Nonsense. All we saw were tanks with organic chemicals in them. If they were going to travel on this ship in physical form why wouldn’t they be in the pods?’
‘Jon, we look human but we’re not. We have the bodily shape but our proteins are not natural ones. We were designed to survive a journey of this length – and even then some of us didn’t survive, Shev told me. Ordinary humans are not robust enough. They had to find another way.’
‘So why not travel as a simpler structure – a collection of zygotes.’
‘Anything of great biological complexity would be at risk of degradation in the high energy environment between the stars. But those tanks contain everything that a human body is constructed from, but in the simplest, most radiation-proof form, just the basic molecules, protected by metres of lead shielding. A sophisticated nanotechnology could construct a human body from those compounds once the environment was safe.’
‘A body. But only a body. It would know nothing.’
Jon was not looking at Shana otherwise he would have seen her exasperated expression.
‘Jon – think! If the consciousness, the memories, the identity can be extracted from a biological brain, digitised and uploaded then the process can be reversed – a digitised mind can be downloaded into a biological brain!’