Gods, she thinks with the last bit of her resistance, that’s some hit of ketamine.
*
Kirsten stares up at the tall android, her expression thundery. “A conscience,” she repeats.
“Yes. As impossible as that sounds, it is true. I know, down to the cellular level, each and every innocent who was murdered in the quest to create me. If I am not, technically, alive, it is nevertheless something I must live with.” His gaze drifts down to the floor. “I find I can no longer do that. The price of my existence is much too high.”
“So all this,” Kirsten retorts, waving a hand vaguely around the office, “is nothing but some dramatic attempt at suicide by proxy?”
Their gazes lock again, and Kirsten, were she forced to, would swear on a stack of Bibles that the eyes that meet hers so intently, so intensely, are completely human. “If it pleases you to think such,” he says softly, “then do so. But know that the murders, and the rapes, and the assaults, will continue until each and every android is terminated at the source. This source.” He smiles slightly. “If this is your Garden of Eden, Doctor King, then you are both the Alpha and the Omega.”
One corner of Kirsten’s mouth twitches. “Well, well, well. An android with knowledge of the Bible. Will wonders never cease.”
Reaching out, Adam takes Kirsten’s hand and curls her fingers over the ear buds in her palm. “Please. Use them.”
“You’ll die if I do.”
He nods. “I know. It is for the best, don’t you think?”
“If all androids were like you….”
“They are not, Doctor. And the price for creating others of my kind is not worth whatever pittance might be gained by our presence.” He squeezes his hand over hers. His grip is warm, and somehow comforting. “Please.”
After a last, long look at him, she nods, and he releases her hand. The transceivers fit perfectly. She isn’t surprised.
Task completed, she carefully examines the monitor and keyboard present on the inlaid glass table and, after a moment, waggles her fingers to loosen them, then experimentally touches the keypad.
The pain that drills through her is so fierce, so intense, that it feels as if someone is stabbing red-hot pokers into her ears and up through her brain. So it was a trick, she thinks, but finds only relief in the thought. Her death will come soon, she has no doubt, and though it will be agonizing, it will also, she senses, be quick. She would scream, or laugh, or weep, but her nerves are high tension wires of molten lava, and her muscles are as rigid as a marble statue’s. She is paralyzed by the pain, helpless to stop it, equally helpless to continue on.
A bright copper taste floods her mouth as blood begins to trickle from her nose in sluggish streams, pressed on by the beat of a weakening heart. She does not see Adam’s eyes widen in horror, nor does she feel his large hands come down hard on her shoulders and yank her away from the computer. She doesn’t hear his shout of “NO!”, doesn’t feel his thumbs, so precise, press the outer shells of her ears and pop the buds out like corks from a bottle. What she does feel is relief, intense and immediate. She slumps down in her chair in a half-faint, half-daze.
Adam bends over her, his face inches away from hers. “Are you alright?” he demands, his voice sounding as if it’s coming down a very long, very narrow tunnel.
She blinks, then shakes her head to clear it. It is an action she immediately regrets as a monstrous bolt of pain explodes behind her eyes. She lifts a hand to her nose, then stares at the dark, tacky blood coating her fingers. “Yes,” she answers finally, fuzzily. “I think so.”
“Good. Good.” Adam closes his fist over the transceivers and shakes them like he’s rattling dice. “We’ll find another way to do this. Another way.”
“You said there was no other way.”
“There has to be!” he says, rounding on her, voice raised almost to a shout.
Kirsten is momentarily stunned as she stares at him, having to forcefully remind herself that this is an android yelling at her, not a human. “It’ll be alright,” she says softly.
“No,” he replies. “No, it won’t be. Not at the cost of your life.”
The smile she gives him is infinitely knowing. “I thought you understood that that is not an issue anymore.”
Adam’s gaze darts over to Dakota, lying dead in a pool of her own blood, then back to Kirsten. He decides on a different track. “It’s too fast. You’ll likely die before the shutdown can be completed.”
“I’ll turn down the gain on my implants,” is the quick, almost smug, retort.
He looks at her for a long moment. “How did she ever put up with you?”
That gets him a laugh that sounds, to his ears, like choir bells. Kirsten sticks out a hand. “Just give them here.”
With a soft sigh, he reluctantly returns the buds to her.
“You’re a good man, Adam Virgilius.”
His reaction is a smile; like a young boy’s smile it is, innocent, good, shy, full of promise. Kirsten feels her heart squeeze in her chest. Oh, Peter, she thinks, it never had to be this way.
After turning the gain down on her implants, she slips the transceivers back into her ears, and then, heart racing, touches the keyboard again. There is pain, oh yes, but this time it is bearable. This is how Archimedes must have felt, she muses wonderingly as suddenly the code comes to life in her mind, marching through her memory in letters and numbers so clear and large that even a child of three could read it. It is large, yes, larger by far than any code she has ever had to untangle, but she knows she can do it. With a grim tightening of her lips, she settles down to work.
*
The Ghost Road streams steadily beneath her. She does not walk it, for she no longer has feet to touch the path, nor to push her body forward. Yet her limbs move, and as they move the Road spins out behind her, carrying her forward. For this part of her journey she has no guide, no companion. She has no destination; it is the road that carries her, not she who travels it. Around her the stars spill through the hard vacuum of space, burning steadily like jewels in colors never seen from earth, perhaps never seen on earth except by a holy man or woman on the spirit path. Galaxies spin with rainbow fire, wheeling their way toward the borders of the universe; millions of light-years away from earth, here they seem close enough to touch. She passes through nebulae like fog, where points of brilliance mark the nursery of birthing suns.
Understand.Understand.All things in the hand of Wakan TankaAre sacred.
Understand.Understand.All things born of Ina MakaAre sacred.
The voice is her own, and not. From somewhere comes the faint beat of a drum, echoed by the rhythm of her steps. Somewhere a woman is singing, a melody that swirls through her own senses and lies sweet on her tongue, twines with the silver ribbon of the road itself. She seems to fade in and out of her own form, now walking the path, now observing her progress from a distance. She is and is not, she is Dakota Rivers and Wolf Woman of the Lakota. She is Tacoma’s sister and Manny’s cousin and Tali’s widow; she is Kirsten King’s lover and the She-Wolf of the Cheyenne; she is healer and warrior and shaman. . .and . . someone, something, different from all the above, something apart, something she cannot quite seem to grasp.
Understand.Understand.All that livesIs sacred.
The voice grows stronger, her own with it. The Road curves once, twice, turning in upon itself in the sign of the lemniscate, the path without beginning and without end, infinity. Three times it twists, swirling her about its single surface. Around her black space retreats, and she finds herself on seeming solidity. A shortgrass meadow stretches out almost to the horizon, rimmed by purple mountains. Morning sun angles down through the slender birches that line a stream so clear that every stone on the bottom glints in the light. Beside it a sycamore tree stretches up toward the sun, its bark silver with the early light. The stream widens beneath its roots, spreading out into a pool rimmed in lilies and columbines. A raven, white as the clouds that scud across the sky, cocks its head at her from its perch on a high branch. Below it, a possum scurries up the trunk, its silky tail floating like a plume in the breeze.