Rockets and Ray Guns - An Anthology of Sci-fi short stories

Part 5

Blaine quickly discovered that Bartholomew was right. Sitting beside one of the shuttle's portholes allowed him a view of the planet as it first grew rapidly against the background stars. It became a horizon as their pilot took them into the atmosphere, dropping lower to streak over forest and jagged mountain peaks as they did a topological sweep on their way in. And he found that, instead of fear growing at the sight, excitement did.

With his pulse beginning to pound from enjoying the flight, it was almost too soon when the shuttle banked over a relatively barren stretch of ground and prepared to land.

"First-landers usually pick somewhere a bit blasted to make landfall," Bartholomew explained from across the crew cabin when Blaine threw him a quizzical look. "That way they don't torch too much of the local flora and fauna when they hit their landing retros. Not to mention, the likelihood of something nasty, like a contagion or a toothy beasty waiting for us when we pop the door open, drops considerably when the local environment is hostile."

"Contagion? Like a virus? But it'd have to be highly adaptable to infect something that evolved on a planet hundreds of parsecs away."

"Which is logical," Bartholomew conceded with a nod. "But you can't convince standard humans of that. They think 'new planet, new bugs' and they're all going to die of some horrid disease, every time they step out onto one. That's why they send people like us to check it out first." He looked over at Blaine and smiled somewhat grimly. "Simanoids, synths, and AI's, ... we're a bit more disposable."

Blaine nodded in sudden understanding. That was the real reason he was selected. Not because of skill or experience, but because, as an assembled being, he was disposable.

It was a grim realization that hung over him during the nine hours they spent on the surface, taking air and soil samples, checking for bio-contaminants, and compiling an index of the local wildlife. It even dampened his enthusiasm for stepping onto a planet for the first time in his life, having been assembled and grown in an orbital facility.

His mood was so obvious that Bartholomew stepped close to take him by the hand.

"Don't worry, chum," the genetically altered chimp said reassuringly as he looked up at Blaine. By this point in the mission, they had determined the atmosphere was safe to breathe and both were carrying their encounter suit helmets. "I'll make sure we aren't disposed of this mission."

Looking down, Blaine gazed at the simanoid for a long moment.

In that one sentence, the chimp had shown him more humanity than any of his handlers at the facility had, combined. And it neatly illustrated Thaddeus' earlier point: the misbegotten children of Humanity's twisted genius had to stick together and help each other. Because their erstwhile creators certainly wouldn't help them.

He was about to say so when, without warning, he felt a strange sensation ripple through his head. Then the sunlit world around him faded into a place of blue-tinted shadow, dominated by a massive world filling the sky before him.

For a moment Blaine panicked. Had he been transported offworld by an unseen force without him looking?

His answer came not in words, but in feelings. No, he hadn't been transported anywhere. What he was now experiencing was a memory, a vision of the distant past. Somehow the stars had access to that memory and now they were passing it on to him.

But for what purpose? The answer came quickly after he asked the silent question. It was a memory from one of the original gateway builders. Possessing vision with a different color scale than his own, the world through their eyes was blue-touched shadow.

With that new knowledge quickening his breathing, Blaine watched as a hand was raised and a holographic representation of the world appeared in front of him, complete with symbols marking points of interest. He instantly recognized the world as the twin of the one he was standing on, the memory telling him that it had exploded long ago to create the rocky ring and the dust cloud they had flown through after exiting the portal.

So the stars themselves could access the memories of the ancient aliens that created the gateway network. But how had they passed those memories on to him? Unless, ... the stars had told him with their whispers that he could hear, but not quite understand. And he had remembered their words.

"Because I'm a starsinger," he whispered hoarsely, the undeniable truth in the realization rocking him back on his metaphysical heels.

Somehow the process of being converted to pure energy for transmission along the gateway network had changed his synthetic mind, attuning him to other energies surging through the network. Energies like the metaphysical connection the stars had to each other in the vast tapestry that was the fabric of reality. A connection he had tapped into.

That thought led him to the memory of the symbols, glowing red as they passed by his mind's eye. The stars had shown them to him and, somehow, he knew they were related to the gateway. If anything would know about the gateways, it would be the stars, since they watched it being built hundreds of millions of years ago.

If they knew about the gateways, then perhaps they would also know how to turn one back on.

"I need to talk to the captain," he said as the blue shadowed vision faded and more symbols began to float unbidden before his mind's eye, confirming that the stars indeed knew how. Not only that, but they knew how to command the gateway to send them to any place the network reached.

"The captain? Why?" Bartholomew asked, clearly puzzled.

Blaine looked down at him.

"Because I know how to turn the gateway back on," he said as he embraced his new existence.

No longer was he a nothing, a nobody, a mere synthetic. Now he was something significantly better. And he was going to use that new knowledge to help others like him, Bartholomew and Thaddeus to explore the universe. He would help them by giving them unlimited access to the gateway network with his newfound knowledge granted by the stars. And with that access, they would have something they had never had before.

Absolute Freedom.