The Island of Hope (8 page)

"Okay then," she sighed and slipped out of the library as quietly as she had entered. Instinctively she knew he wanted to be left alone.

Simeon hardly noticed her leave.

He got up and approached the shelves stacked with long rows of books. Despite the headache and the feeling of his spiritual bankruptcy, he needed to get some information himself, without the machine's aid. He glanced over the books' spines, but none of them caught his eye. Then he noticed a thick stack of plastic paper taped together.

"LOGBOOK," he read. "
ISLAND OF HOPE
COLONY. Started on 10.07.2607 Galaxy Calendar."

He returned to the table and, his heart sinking, turned the first page. His inner voice suggested that this was what he'd been subconsciously looking for on the bookshelves.

He scanned the printed lines,

"10
th
July 2607. There are thirty-two of us. Twenty-nine men and three women, the remainder of the crews of fifteen hundred spaceships engaged in the battle."

Simeon buried himself in reading.

It seemed to him that he was seeing them – irreconcilable enemies capable not only of meeting inside the spheroid shaken by explosions, but also of shaking hands.

Glancing over the even print, he grasped the sheer terror of their despair, all their hardships and hopes, as this was the kind of life he himself knew.

They had welded together several surviving spacecraft, connected them by airlocks and sealed them. Then they had given a name to their little world amidst the raging hell of collisions. They called it
The Island of Hope
.

As he was reading, he couldn't help visualizing them living within these walls, as if those people had come back from the past and stood in his mind's eye like a row of ghosts.

They had not despaired.

Page after page, he followed their struggle and conflicts, their friendship, love and hatred. The people lost in the middle of Great Nothing had gradually become aware of the monstrosity of the war. They saw the light.

"19
th
December 2607. Finally we located a repairable spacecraft and towed it off to the base. It's an LX light raider. We'll have to repair and rebuild most of the onboard equipment, restore all external communications, the radar system and so on. We are up to our eyeballs in work. The spheroid continues to shudder, but not as badly as before. We hardly ever move away from the base, and even this spacecraft has been found nearby. Sergei has already warned everybody about the activate battle robots he's come across during his sorties. Good job he's a cyber wiz! He managed to disarm them, otherwise we would have had it! It gives you the creeps just to think of all those battle machines waiting for their hour to come.

"We have to get out of here, the sooner the better. This place is not just terrifying, it's the testimony of our insanity, exposing it in front of the rest of the Universe.

Still, they had perished. They would never know who or what had been the first pebble that had started the avalanche. Three months later, when the repair works were in full swing, the spheroid was shaken by the first explosions of a new war between machines. The people began to act frantically, speeding up the repairs and building some defenses around the colony. But by then, the skirmishes between machines had already spread over the whole spheroid, and separate groups of robots kept breaking through their defenses sowing destruction and death.

That was a cruel and unequal battle. Simeon could hardly imagine those days when machines were teeming everywhere. As far as he could remember, they were few and far between: the robots' frenzy of mutual destruction had peaked around the time when the final tragedy of
the
Island of Hope
took place.

The people inhabiting the tiny world wanted desperately to live, but they had all perished, one after another. They'd believed they could escape, so they continued fighting until there remained only two of them. They were Yanna's parents whose carbonized bodies he saw in the airlock near a destroyed battle machine.

Simeon turned the last page. He was crushed. Only now did
he completely realize where Yanna had come from — and who he himself was. His father had gone through a yet harder tragedy than
the Island of Hope
's fate. Because he had been alone.

And Mother?

Simeon shook his head sorrowfully as if answering his own thoughts. He knew nothing about her.

Turning in the chair, he wanted to get up when he caught sight of a figure frozen in the library's doorway. Andor.

Simeon reacted without thinking: a knee-jerk reaction refined by years of practice. He whipped out his
MG
, pointing it upwards.

The android didn't move. He stood in the doorway, looking eerily like a man yet his steel parts glowed like the most dangerous of machines.

"Hi, Andor," Simeon said, lowering his weapon.

"Good afternoon, sir!" Andor stepped into the library. "I am glad you're back."

Simeon couldn't shoot and he knew it.

Andor sat in the opposite chair. Simeon studied his shimmering armor, his almost human face and the logo on his chest indicating a self-developing cybernetic system. He didn't know what to think. What was this creature? A friend? An enemy? Or... a slave?

"Why did you leave?" Simeon asked him.

"I knew you would kill me," Andor answered without hesitation.

Simeon's hand reached for the gun. "How sure are you that I won't kill you now?"

Andor shook his head. "I'm not. But I know that you have changed. Before, you were guided by your instincts. Now you possess enough information to make an unbiased decision."

"I was guided by my experience!" the boy interrupted him. "And you — you contradict it."

He was dead tired. Making small talk with a robot was the last thing on his agenda.

He frowned at the android. It was clear that this machine was different. It didn't really contradict his experience, it was more like an exception to the rule. He couldn't think straight; he'd had very little experience in logical thinking. After all, these were his first steps in mastering the most perfect instrument for survival in the Universe: a mind armed with knowledge.

"I radically differ from all other machines," Andor said, breaking the lingering pause in the conversation. Was he reading his thoughts? "You have nothing to fear from me," he added. "I've already told you I can't hurt a human."

Simeon grinned, "D'you mean the three laws of robotics or something?" he asked, suddenly remembering them from the mine of useless information the teaching module had crammed him with.

Andor understood his sarcasm. "The laws of robotics were created a long time ago, and they worked as long as people stuck to them. But in building their battle machines, they had to ignore them. I don't abide by them, anyway. Laws are nothing compared to the AI psychology."

"Are you an AI?!"

Andor stared at the boy with his unblinking bulging eyes. He looked as if he desperately wanted his face of steel and plastic to be capable of expressing emotions. "I am an experimental model," he confirmed. "My creators failed to go through with the experiment. They were killed in a battle. I was created as a self-developing system intended for independent reconnaissance of very distant stars and planets. I was to develop by constantly updating my knowledge and making independent decisions – and that was all. Probably those who created me did not suppose that in the course of time I would become capable of emotions."

Simeon shook his head in disbelief. "Unbelievable," he whispered to himself as if he was thinking aloud.

"From the point of view of known technology – yes, you could say so. An electronic copy of a human neuron is a complex device several cubic inches in size. Now imagine the size of billions of neurons forming a real biological brain. But I operate on a different principle. Inside me, they used the revolutionary technology of a photon data transmitter. Now, I am afraid, this technology is buried with me here forever," he meaningfully knocked on his chrome-plated skull.

"Do you get upset?" Simeon asked on a hunch.

"Of course I do. But my emotions differ from the human ones quite a bit. They are colder, more rational. I'm a machine, after all."

Silence hung in the air. This new information was too sudden.

"But you educated Yanna! What's rational in that? Why did you do so?"

"What do you mean, why? Did you love your father?"

"Of course I did!"

"And who do you think my parents are?"

Simeon was at a loss. The question didn't seem to make sense.

"People," Andor answered curtly.

Simeon dug his fingers deep into the armrests. Stars alone knew how hard it was for him to grasp all this. New information, new problems. And he'd have to learn to solve them!

Suddenly he realized that this was what he wanted to do. His life took on a new meaning. He wasn't a little boy anymore, chased by metallic monsters and hiding from them in dark passages.

Now he was a Man.

The android rose. "I got the impression Yanna expects you to join her for dinner," he stated. "Once you're finished, I would like you to familiarize yourself with the colony’s defense system."

"Fine," Simeon rose and looked at Andor. "Will you join us?"

The android nodded his consent. It seemed to the boy that a faint semblance of a smile touched the robot's steel lips.

7.

A
battle robot was scrambling to safety.

Its worn units and rickety body were about to disintegrate, but some software equivalent of the self-preservation instinct was now running within this very expensive machine, driving it farther and farther away in its fruitless attempts to shake off the enemy.

Corridors, halls, compartments, shafts, shell-holes, heaps of trash, human bodies and crumbling skeletons of machines – they all flashed before the sole undamaged video camera of the battle machine that had once been so menacing .

Suddenly its radar located a target. Fountains of sparks showered the deck as the robot braked. His gun turret turned, but the scarlet dot had already disappeared from its radar.

The machine's computer instantly recalculated the target's route. The turret of the vacuum gun moved once again and fired, shelling the bulkhead behind which the man was hiding.

It was a sight begging to be depicted by a mechanorealist's brush. The ugly robot towered in the center of the crumbling reactor room, its search radar warily moving its antenna. The grotesque pose of the battle machine somehow suggested frustration. Had the monster been capable of experiencing fear, he'd be trembling as its processor couldn't really tell whether the enemy was still here. This was the fourth time the machine had encountered this particular enemy, but every time its target somehow escaped, mocking the computer's logic based on always taking the shortest route.

The robot didn't know it was dealing with Man.

The gutted wall emitted a reddish glow, illuminating the room.

Yanna licked her dry lips. Simeon made a warning gesture and stepped forward. He was holding the pulse gun pointing it down, as if not afraid of the bulk of the planetary battle machine towering over him.

Vacuum does not transmit sound, but it seemed to Yanna that she heard the hoarse wail of servomotors when the robot's gun turret began its deadly turn. The mechanical monster had been designed to beat human reaction times, but to Simeon, machine time was no enigma. His brain and his muscles had their own millisecond countdown; he could clearly see the convulsive movements of the mechanical limbs as if in slow motion.

The two black eyes of the vacuum turret had no chance. Simeon's pulse gun beat them to it, his rounds piercing the armor somewhere around the main drive. The robot shuddered, striking up fountains of sparks with its caterpillar tracks; the follow-up shot sent it into a spin. The machine's central processor registered a destructive vibration when something heavy struck its body twice near the motor; the external sensors were disconnected, unable to bear the impact. Now the only way the computer could perceive the world around it was via a video camera, its lens pointed to the part of its own armor coursing with power surges.

Two shadows appeared on the molten remains of the crimson wall. They approached.

"It's disintegrated," a radio frequency reported.

Yanna smiled.

Simeon turned, picked up the empty magazine, reloaded and peered into the robot's smashed electronic interior. Its crackling innards were aglow with green sparks and surged with electric charges being rerouted to new control circuits pulsing with green indicator lights.

The machine's processor was restoring the system, trying to duplicate the lost functions.

Yanna followed his stare and took a step towards the power unit of the machine. Simeon softly pushed her hand aside.

"What's up? It's trying to rebuild its control circuits!"

"Let it be," Simeon pointed at the smashed engine, the ripped tracks and the mangled fragments of the gun turret. "It won't kill anymore."

Yanna imagined the battle machine sentenced to spend an eternity in the silent gloom of the destroyed room, trying to grasp the meaning of it all. Some of Simeon's decisions were admittedly rather strange.

He turned round. Yanna's pale face, lighted by the surges of green lightning, betrayed bewilderment, her eyes feverish. She'd liked the pursuit, but she couldn't relate to the weird feeling Simeon experienced every time he had to kill a machine. True, he didn't enjoy hunting as much anymore – he had shown to them all and to himself who was the master of the spheroid.

"Let's go home," he suggested, having lost all interest in the agonizing remains of the machine, "Andor's waiting."

“Wait,” Yanna tugged at his sleeve. “What are you saying, I don’t understand-”

Simeon shrugged. “They can't control us anymore.”

Yanna pressed her helmet against his visor, trying to look into his eyes. “So that's what this risk is all about?”

He grinned. Did life qualify as a risk?

The infrared eye of the battle machine glowed maliciously in the darkness behind them. Simeon knew what would happen later on. The robot's processor would persevere in its fruitless attempts to restore control of the broken servomotors until its energy had run low. Then the ominous light of the infrared scanner would fade and ultimately, go out.

That was his revenge, if it was possible to apply human feelings to a machine.

"Let's go," he repeated, taking Yanna by the hand.

A narrow utility corridor took them to a shaft that reached the very surface of the spheroid. The exit was safe – it was concealed by a dilapidated control room riddled with shell-holes that offered a view of a steel desert stretching out for dozens of miles.

Simeon helped Yanna to climb inside the control room and froze, scrutinizing the close horizon. She sat down, also peering into the distance. They'd done it many times before. The control room was their favorite place in this part of the steel planetoid. Yanna had got used to the magical colors of the metallic island, but she constantly discovered something new, as if she was gradually, step by step, discovering the stern beauty of crimson colors and their many hues.

The blurred outline of a spiral nebula rose above the ragged horizon. Clusters of starlight froze overhead in the bottomless coal-black sky; a few blood-red dots were sliding past: the spheroid's satellites.

The ragged steel desert underfoot sloped towards the close horizon; here and there, frameworks of hull structures or whole bodies of destroyed spaceships towered over the Abyss.

This was their world. Their Island of Hope. Five years ago they'd met inside its heart inhabited by mechanical death. It was a miracle – two children who'd survived and matured, transforming into a young man and woman. Two saplings of life, seared by nuclear folly, sealed within their pressurized premises, had then made their way to the surface, defying the law of probability.

They were utterly happy but also sad.

Simeon and Yanna loved each other stronger than a brother and sister, more passionately than any amount of young lovers could – they were two parts of a single whole, shuddering at the thought of the time when they had lived separately.

The inspection finished, they left the control room and went to the spheroid's surface. The safe tunnel leading to their dwelling was within ten minutes' walking distance.

Habitually Simeon scrutinized each detail, the slightest motion or change in the familiar landscape, but the process was practically subconscious and didn't prevent him from thinking. Lately he had often felt some dissatisfaction. The more he read, the narrower the steel sphere of the Island of Hope seemed to him. Here, there were no other colors except for the crimson radiance of the nebula, there was no spaciousness except the immense abyss of the cosmos. He tried to imagine other planets —
living
planets with millions of people inhabiting them, but his imagination was like a caged bird thrashing against the bars – it returned time and time again to the poor reality of the steel labyrinth.

He was unaware of his own maturity and of the fact that his future worried him. For a few years already, survival had ceased to be a pressing matter. More and more often he turned his thoughts to the stars, especially as he knew perfectly well: the spacecraft forming the spheroid had used to travel through space.

* * *

How nice it was to be back home!

Simeon stepped out of the airlock, removed his helmet and froze.

Something was wrong.

His mind didn't yet have the time to work out the reason for this vague anxiety when his hand closed around his
MG
; he stepped forward, shielding Yanna with his body, and listened.

The air hissed as it was pumped under pressure down the sealant of the internal hatch; a tired valve in a regenerator's pump moaned rhythmically, begging for a replacement; control panels beeped. But now a new note added to this familiar white noise: a sound completely alien to these premises, a deep and hollow hum coming from the library.

Yanna dug her fingers into Simeon's shoulder. She heard it too: a deep, menacing drone full of dormant energy.

"What's that?" she whispered.

"Don’t know," Simeon shook his head, taking a step forward into the transparent tunnel leading to the life-support automatics. By association, he remembered the day he'd first come here, stealthily advancing along this same corridor exactly as he was now.

The noise grew. Now it sounded like an overloaded generator about to explode; the growing tension lingered in the air, almost tangible.

A strong clear note added to the deep drone.

The sound vibrated in the air, echoing from the walls and changing its pitch until it finally transformed into a precise and harmonious rhythm. Simeon unclenched his fingers. His
MG
slid down its holster. Faulty generators weren't capable of synthesizing music. He took the last step towards the library's door. The pulsing melody was pouring into his mind; it was gentle and velvety like the cosmic gloom filled with icy stars, intense and unrestrained like the bubble of thermonuclear reaction; it was calling him, disturbing and questioning — the perpetual motion of a human mind.

Andor stood at the center of the library.

The melody that had at first frightened and then fascinated Simeon, was streaming out of the concealed intercom loudspeakers. The bulkheads vibrated with the rhythm.

Silently Simeon shook the android's hand stretched out to greet him. He looked into the robot's eyes. His quizzical stare was filled with silent reproach. Andor was too unpredictable and tended to rely too much on the young intellects of his human masters.

"This is the Cosmic Symphony," the android explained quietly. "It was composed many centuries ago on the planet Earth, the historical cradle of mankind. I've found it in a record library on one of the cruisers."

"Andor, you're a gem!" Yanna exclaimed. Her fear was gone, her eyes glistening with pleasure.

Music was everywhere. It was pouring from one compartment to the next, following the two young people and the android.

Was Andor aware of the psychological effect of certain sorts of music?

They sat down at the table, but Simeon suddenly felt that he could neither talk nor eat. For some reason there was a hot, suffocating lump in his throat. He put aside his fork and raised his eyes, unable to express his agony. Tormented by doubts, dissatisfied and haunted by new unknown desires, he could finally name his frustration. The subconscious fear of the unknown had died in his heart, replaced by the anticipation of a new loss and something else, yet unidentified, that this Cosmic Symphony had stirred in his heart.

Probably Andor hadn't meant anything of the kind when he'd discovered this memory crystal amidst the debris and carbonized bodies, its discs containing the last surviving music file. He hadn't expected this reaction from Simeon when he decided to play the file in the library.

Simeon felt the melody stir bitter feelings in his heart, similar to the foreboding of inevitable loss.

A nostalgia for the stars he'd never known.

The unrestrained celebration of human nature, a subconscious craving for enigmas that had made the first cave-dwellers throw back their heads and peer into the bottomless abyss of the Universe.

And a painful, annoying question: who are they, the people who permitted mechanical creatures to torment their children?

The reality of the Island of Hope burst again, this time due to the questions put forward by the mind of a grown-up man.

Without a word, he rose from the table and left the compartment almost at a run.

It had happened so fast that Yanna was taken aback. She jumped to her feet to follow him, but Andor softly prevented her from doing so. "I know where he's gone. Give me a few minutes," the android said.

* * *

A machine's mind is not without its ghosts. Especially if the said machine is a rational creature and the formation of its intellect took place in extreme conditions when all criteria of what's real, wrongful or correct had become a mere convention depending on the agendas involved.

In this respect, Simeon and Andor were very much alike. Both had been born and grown up here, among the dead. It was probably for that reason that they understood each other without a word.

The android had forever remembered the first spark of his consciousness.