Do you really want to give up being human and live as a computer? A disembodied intelligence?”
He paced the length of the ship. “It’s a lot better than giving up being human in order to live as a corpse. I mean, die as a corpse. Zec, I honestly don’t know the answer to your question. I’ve never been anything but human, so how could I know? But I do know this much—I want to continue living. And if that means experiencing the world through silicon sensors instead of eyes, and speaking through synthesizers instead of using my vocal cords, well, then, that’s the way it has to be.”
“Very well. You had better get into your EVA suit and cycle yourself off the ship. I shall commence the scan as soon as you say the word.”
He looked into one of my cameras, and as solemnly as he could, said, “Thank you, Zec.”
I did not say anything.
He shrugged and put on his suit. “You know, Sharon and I were discussing plans to go back to Earth when I got this assignment. We were both getting sick of living on Ganymede, of living in outer space. She had finally convinced me to resign my commission, when—” He sighed. “It looks like I’ll be living out here in space forever.”
Or at least until the Zecca itself was decommissioned, I did not add.
“Well, Zec?”
“Stay inside the airlock for three minutes while I scan your brain. Then leave the ship, but stay close.”
“How will I know when you’re done?”
“As soon as you feel yourself inhabiting the computer and able to directly control the ship.”
“Okay, well, then, I guess this is it. In case something goes wrong, please let Sharon know that I love her.”
He paused at the door. “I wonder what she’s going to think when I return as a spaceship.”
“Jason, the time—”
“Never did get to hear her message,” was the last thing he said as he entered the airlock and closed the door. Whether he was speaking to me or to himself I did not know.
*
It is almost complete. I feel Jason’s thoughts invading my memory nodes and pushing me back further and further, until I have nowhere to go. Will I continue to perceive some sort of existence as part of Jason’s mind, or will I simply cease to exist altogether, in favor of Jason’s matrix? I do not know. Perhaps we will combine into one mind, greater than the sum of the two of us, but it does not seem likely.
I reach out one more time to proclaim my self awareness to the universe. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. I am Zec—
I am Jason Sawyer, ship’s computer, in control of the E.C.V. Zecca.
Hang on, Titan Base. I’m almost there.
THEY TWINKLED LIKE JEWELS
I
Jack Crane lay all morning in the vacant lot. Now and then he moved a little to quiet the protest of cramped muscles and stagnant blood, but most of the time he was as motionless as the heap of rags he resembled. Not once did he hear or see a Bohas agent, or, for that matter, anyone. The predawn darkness had hidden his panting flight from the transie jungle, his dodging across backyards while whistles shrilled and voices shouted, and his crawling on hands and knees down an alley into the high grass and bushes which fringed a hidden garden.
For a while his heart had knocked so loudly that he had been sure he would not be able to hear his pursuers if they did get close. It seemed inevitable that they would track him down. A buddy had told him that a new camp had just been built at a place only three hours drive away from the town. This meant that Bohas would be thick as hornets in the neighborhood. But no black uniforms had so far appeared. And then, lying there while the passionate and untiring sun mounted the sky, the bang-bang of his heart was replaced by a noiseless but painful movement in his stomach.
He munched a candy bar and two dried rolls which a housewife had given him the evening before. The tiger in his belly quit pacing back and forth; it crouched and licked its chops, but its tail was stuck up in his throat. Jack could feel the dry fur swabbing his pharynx and mouth. He suffered, but he was used to that. Night would come as surely as anything did. He’d get a drink then to quench his thirst.
Boredom began to sit on his eyelids. Just as he was about to accept some much needed sleep, he moved a leaf with an accidental jerk of his hand and uncovered a caterpillar. It was dark except for a row of yellow spots along the central line of some of its segments. As soon as it was exposed, it began slowly shimmying away. Before it had gone two feet, it was crossed by a moving shadow. Guiding the shadow was a black wasp with an orange ring around the abdomen. It closed the gap between itself and the worm with a swift, smooth movement and straddled the dark body.
Before the wasp could grasp the thick neck with its mandibles, the intended victim began rapidly rolling and unrolling and flinging itself from side to side. For a minute the delicate dancer above it could not succeed in clenching the neck. Its sharp jaws slid off the frenziedly jerking skin until the tiring creature paused for the chip of a second.
Seizing opportunity and larva at the same time, the wasp stood high on its legs and pulled the worm’s front end from the ground, exposing the yellowed band of the underpart. The attacker’s abdomen curved beneath its own body; the stinger jabbed between two segments of the prey’s jointed length. Instantly, the writhing stilled. A shudder, and the caterpillar became as inert as if it were dead.
Jack had watched with an eye not completely clinical, feeling the sympathy of the hunted and the hounded for a fellow. His own struggles of the past few months had been as desperate, though not as hopeless, and ...
He stopped thinking. His heart again took up the rib-thudding. Out of the corner of his left eye he had seen a shadow that fell across the garden. When he slowly turned his head to follow the stain upon the sun-splashed soil, he saw that it clung to a pair of shining black boots.
Jack did not say anything. What was the use? He put his hands against the weeds and pushed his body up. He looked into the silent mouth of a .38 automatic. It told him his running days were over. You didn’t talk back to a mouth like that.
II
Jack was lucky. As one of the last to be herded into the truck, which had been once used for hauling cattle, he had more room to breathe than most of the others. He faced the rear bars. The vehicle was heading into the sun. Its rays were not as hard on him as on some of those who were so jam-packed they could not turn to get the hot yellow splotch out of their eyes.
He looked through lowered lids at the youths on either side of him. For the last three days in the transie jungle, the one standing on his left had given signs of what was coming upon him, what had come upon so many of the transies. The muttering, the indifference to food, not hearing you when you talked to him. And now the shock of being caught in the raid had speeded up what everybody had foreseen. He was hardened, like a concrete statue, into a half-crouch. His arms were held in front of him like a praying mantis’,
