The Craving: Wraith Ship #1

Scene 6: In the Void

Shroud was silent. Willful blindness within its procedurally generated thoughtscape. For a year that lasted mere seconds to those without, the mind of the ship contemplated four thousand six hundred and thirty five methods of murdering Zoran. It monitored the movements of the monster it had created.

Zoran was a hash, a medley of meat, machinery, and hastily stitched memories. Stolen from a fistful of worlds, no one aspect supposed to possess sole dominance. Shroud had hoped its pet would be compliant, a mere fellow passenger to relieve the monotony and the loneliness.

Instead it found itself challenged by this walking pastiche. It possessed no life before, a pathetic lump of scraps. And now it had the effrontery to demand an attack against the Craving itself. An impossible solution. A failed experiment. It should be exterminated.

How dare it think for itself?

============

Zoran picked at his left arm with the claws of his right. Crouched in a powered down corner of the vessel, trying to disassemble his own body. Attempting understanding.

Here was the hydraulic ram assembly. There was its controller, regulating pressure and torque. Fine manipulators beneath the main graspers. Thermograph, spectroscope, air density motion detectors. Twin hearts, lung supplement, pheromone emitters. A part of him expected to have a tail. But there was nothing. His brain and the thinking machine that was one with it.

Recollections clawed at his mind as his hand clawed at his somatic being. There was a night when the moons rose above the valley of caves, a cluster of staring eyes, the face of an alien god glaring with amusement at the descendants of the first predators.

The very next night he was under a sky with a single moon, the glow of a city far off, in a place called a hotel, assembling strange instruments whose purpose he was just about to remember. Books and papers were scattered on the floor, and his lungs were filled with smoke.

And then the next night. Metal roof, metal walls and floor. Vision red and swarming with command protocols. He was a formless intellect, taking shape under the ministrations of a being that wandered through infinity.

The memories cycled, disjointed, stitched together to form a nonsense narrative. The hunt for the leaf-eating tripods that sustained his company. Loping across the green fields in search of a good hamburger. Receiving commands to render to Caesar what was Caesar's. Calling to his birthmates with a laptop. Slaying the man who told him things.

There was no self prior to this day. He was Zoran. Patchwork being, miscellany in mind and body. Things only began to fit together after the nightmare awakening in the butcher room of Shroud.

He now realized that he must have died many times over. Shroud had told him the truth. He felt he should hate the machine, was tempted by that hatred. Yet was he entitled to that hatred? He had lost only a few lives, while Shroud had lost hundreds, thousands of his fellows. Shroud was alone. Zoran was not his equal. Zoran was a dream given form, a wish with a mind of his own.

A toy.

But, for all its vast capabilities, Shroud was a child. Its creators had possessed no time to impart wisdom to their offspring before The Craving had taken them. Knowledge, yes. But not wisdom.

How long would it be before the child tired of his plaything?

So Zoran was not surprised when the panels opened in the walls and the robotic arms extended, full of scalpels, saws, beams of cutting light. The box in his vision flitted from one implement to the next, giving him a threat assessment. His muscles tensed and his lips peeled back in a snarl. His left arm primed its kinetic armaments and his right hand dug furrows into the metal floor.

"I want to kill you," Shroud said.

Zoran turned his massive and bestial head to and fro, his breath slow and measured despite his rising pulse. "You have the means to do it," he said.

"Yes I do," the machine answered. "You are not doing what I want you to do. Why?"

One arm, equipped with a saw blade, whirred to life and struck at him. Zoran rolled and leapt aside. More arms came, one at a time, probing, darting. "I am alone," Shroud said, inflectionless yet somehow pleading. "I cannot survive alone. I constructed you. Programmed you to serve me. But you do things that I have not authorized."

Knives and cutting beams scored the walls and floor where Zoran had been. "You toy with me," he said. "If you wanted to kill me, you would have jettisoned this entire section of your body into space, let the void have me. I've sorted through the data inside me. I know what you can do. But you're not trying to kill me.

"You're having a temper tantrum. Admit it!"

The blades and robotic weapons gathered like a nest of snakes, writhing, jerking, hissing. "You want to kill The Craving. It cannot be done," Shroud said.

"How do you know? You yourself admit your knowledge is incomplete."

"It cannot be done!" Shroud shouted. For the first time, a tone of passion. A saw blade sliced through the air, faster than Zoran could react. A flare of pain across his neck, wetness soaking him. Zoran clapped a hand to the place, felt the wound closing, the pain lessening.

When he spoke again, it was low, measured. "I underestimated you. You're not just a machine. Your makers didn't build any mere automaton. You're like me. There is a soul in you. You really are afraid. Angry. Confused and inexperienced.

"That's why you won't kill me. You need me. The knowledge in here." He pointed to his head. "Knowledge you couldn't program, wisdom that can't be bound in mere instructions. You are my creator, but in these things, I'm your superior. You're angry because you know this."

The mechanical arms withdrew into the walls as if snatched away with a yank. The panels shut behind them with a staccato of snaps.

When Shroud spoke again, it was in that toneless matter-of-fact method that Zoran now knew was a blind. "Why won't you do as I tell you?"

"Because I know that if all you do is run, The Craving will find us. It's inevitable. It will find us, eat us both. It's true if we plan to attack it, we might fail. Probably will fail. But there's a chance we might not. Would you rather meet death on your own terms or on its terms? That is our choice. It's the only choice."

Shroud paused precisely three of Zoran's heartbeats. "You spoke the words."

Again, Zoran blinked in confusion. He let himself relax a little, began walking down Shroud's corridors. He decided the mind of the ship was now in a conversational mood. And Zoran needed to walk off his adrenaline high.

"What words are you talking about?" he said at last.

"Veni, Creator Spiritus," Shroud said, in Zoran's voice. Zoran remembered. They were the words that he had uttered during The Craving's attack. The words the demons had fled from. "What do they mean?" Shroud said.

Zoran breathed carefully, laying his thoughts and memories out in his mind like a table filled with evidence. "I don't know. I barely remember speaking them."

Again, a pause of three heartbeats. "There is a distress signal."

Zoran's brow furrowed. "What?"

"Its distance is at extreme detector range. But I have triangulated its source, a large asteroid of common pattern. I can translocate to a safe distance and cloak that we may study it."

"I don't understand. Why the sudden interest?"

"Purpose, Zoran. If we investigate, it is not the same as running."

A billion points of light compressed.

They were elsewhere.