Off-Worlders Page 7

  *****

  Space.

  Nothing but space.

  For the first time in her already long life, Izabel was alone. Truly alone.

  There were no orders to answer, no Webs to code, no systems to plug into.

  Well, there was the ship's system, but only her life depended on that. She was no longer plugged in to the fate of worlds.

  And she liked it. She rather liked it.

  She hoped the beings she had used the stun gun on were Ok. Truly.

  Ok. She remembered that discussion with Arii. No matter where you went in the Cosmos people argued about the origins of the word Ok, or their version of it.

  There was something about that word.

  But words are like that. The spaces in between the words even more so. Structure. Patterns. The keys to meaning.

  She wondered what Arii would think of her now and what she had done.

  If there was one person she would like to thank for getting her to this position it would be him.

  He had arrived on Moethiica with a warrant for her arrest. But he had never arrested her.

  Questioned her, tested her and studied her? Yes. Extensively.

  But he had never arrested her. Had never taken her with him from Moethiica.

  Though she would have gone with him in a heartbeat if he'd asked. She would have gone with him anywhere.

  But he had not asked.

  And she had remained.

  She had remained but she had never been quite the same again. Her sapphire eyes had been opened. And she could not look at her world or those around her in quite the same light.

  Aagghh. The second bullet was stuck fast. With one last hard yank she got it out. She had found a basic first aid kit in the tiny bathroom. She cleaned the wound as best she could and stitched the torn Cybriid flesh together crudely, but adequately.

  The flesh would scar and she was immensely pleased with that. She had been taking the pep that was increasingly popular among the Cybriid. It rendered their perfectly engineered flesh vulnerable to the markings of life. The souvenirs that you had lived. She wrapped a bandage around her leg and smiled at it. It made her feel human.

  As did the pain. They had been programmed for pain since Gen2. To give then empathy.

  And this pain she could live with. This pain was scientific, expected, measurable. It was pain that would pass.

  It was the unscientific, unexpected, unmeasurable type of human pain that Izabel was not so fond of. The pain that endures.

  Like her heart.

  When Arii had eventually left Moethiica, Izabel had felt her heart. And she had felt her heart clearly broken.

  This is what Arii had done. He had made her feel things.

  Like that awful first time she knew she had disappointed him.

  He had been questioning her. She had answered. Well, she thought.

  He looked at her, the disappointment evident on his face. He put down the instrument he had been cleaning and leaned against the bench, arms folded across his chest, his earnest, intelligent, brown eyes penetrating.

  “Izabel, when you WorldCode do you not see the Structures of thought, and how these structures are manipulated to entangle and ensnare people on the Webs?"

  "Yes, I do," she replied. "It is... it is crucial to everything we do."

  "And do you not see that the same thing must be happening to you?" His voice was gentle but his eyes were intense.

  "Yes, but..." she began, but did not know how to continue. How to say to a human that she was above that. That she was created to exist above the crude structures which ensnared them. She had said it before. But she would not say it to him. Not to this one.

  He held up a hand, anyway. "There is no but, Izabel. We are all coded to something. We all believe something. And if we were to look at the structure of the belief, as opposed to the belief itself, it would look exactly the same as the belief which believes the opposite of it.”

  He turned back to the instrument panel and put the last of them away in his bag. “No matter how superior you believe yourself to be.”

  She had the grace to blush, and he had the grace to keep his back to her until it faded from her perfect Cybriid cheeks.

  "It's the age old dilemma, isn't it? How do you ever arrive at truth when the very way you have been taught to perceive the world around you, is a lie?"

  He snapped his bag shut and turned to her, gesturing to her sapphire eyes.

  She had fallen in love with him before he finished his last sentence. And perhaps it was that that made her acutely aware of the faint distaste that emanated from him when he looked into her eyes.

  He had made no bones about how he felt about The Lady. And they were her eyes. All the eyes of Gen3 created in her image.

  "She gave you her eyes Izabel," he said softly. "You cannot change that. But what other ways to view the world has she given you, that you have not even sought to question?"

  And with that he had left her.

  When Izabel looked in the mirror that night, all cool blonde pale aesthetic, compared to the lush golden ripeness of The Lady, all she could see was her sapphire eyes. Sapphire eyes that Arii found distasteful.

  The next morning she had asked about having her eyes replaced with new ones, different ones. She thought some green ones, or even a nice silver might be nice. She would have loved the gold tinged violet of the Silff, but she knew she could never admit to that.

  She wondered how she had come to admit it to herself.

  The Lady Evamiin was hysterical at the request and Izabel never spoke of it again.

  The remaining time with Arii, she kept her eyes down and averted from him, hoping he would forget who they reminded him of. Hoping if he did not see her eyes, he would see her, see Izabel.

  But it was not to be.

  “No matter,” Izabel whispered softly to herself as she made an exquisitely smooth gateway jump. Perhaps I will get new eyes on a new world.

  She was almost there.

  Very soon she would be on the world of the lone survivor of the First Gen.

  Not all of them heard the voices. But she did. She heard them so clearly they were more real to her at times than those around her. And his voice was the loudest and strongest of them all.

  He still lived. He was still embodied. She was sure of it.

  Idly, she wondered what was happening on Moethiica. For there was still a part of Izabel that was sure, that at the end of this little adventure, she would return to The Lady Evamiin's side, be welcomed back with open arms, and all forgiven.

  A part of her was not so sure that this was what she wanted.

  Fark!

  The screech pierced her ear drums as the 3D image materialized before her. The huge clawed hand swiped at her. She ducked just in time and felt the whoosh of air past her head.

  It was no longer 3D.

  It was in.

  It was at least eight feet tall. The stuff of nightmares. Snub nosed, the eyes were black, opaque, red rimmed. They held horrors. And they held focus. And their focus was Izabel. Pale, withered lips drew back on sharp, pointed, teeth. The head was huge. Strands of lank hair hung from the bulging forehead.

  Human ears. Human body. Pale skin. Muscles and big bones. Strong. It was clothed in a loose fitting white tunic, tied at the waist with a brown knotted cord. The dirty, yellow claws on its hands and feet were hideous. It had a long string of small, wooden beads around its neck.

  Weeza Gremlin.

  She had not expected one of them here.

  It shrieked again, moving with a speed and agility that belied its size.

  When it swiped at her, it opened a nasty gash on her forehead. Izabel cursed, hit the floor and rolled, drawing her gun as she did. She flicked it to kill and fired.

  Nothing.

  She had entered the inner Web of the world carefully and cleverly coded as a Cirillean. Moethiica's weapons had been rendered useless in the process.

  She cursed. She had been to
o preoccupied with thoughts of Arii to recode the weaponry. She was not normally so careless.

  The Weeza Gremlin howled in delight and threw itself upon her. She threw a textbook elbow from the bottom, releasing her needle probe, and impaling the Gremlin's head on it.

  She sent the same charge through the needle probe that she would to destroy a very large system.

  It had the desired effect.

  The Gremlin's head exploded in a pulpous mass all over her.

  That bit was not so desired.

  She pushed the hideous body off of her and raised herself to her feet, shaking the muck from her as best she could.

  Damn it!

  The ship had been locked and was being tracked in.

  She was in view of them now.

  It would seem she had quite a welcoming party.

  A heavily armed welcoming party.

  Izabel sighed and went to make use of the ship's tiny bathroom.

  It was a fairly primitive world. They had actually slowed her descent and would be a while tracking her in.

  As she peeled off her ruined clothes and let the steaming hot water wash away gremlin brains and other muck, she wondered what they had done to attract the attention of the Weeza Gremlins.

  She shivered, in spite of the heat and the steam.

  She would need to take a closer look at their Webs.