“They twisted him into something else. Something unliving.”
“What do you mean?”
Saskia’s expression was one of intense curiosity. Seen through the eyes of the meta-intelligence, she simply looked like a machine scanning for data.
Jesse wouldn’t have seen it that way. Jesse gave her knowledge. All the meta-intelligence gave her was information.
Judy didn’t answer Saskia’s question. Instead she went on with her story.
Three hours later, a swarm of tiny probes approached the plastic envelope. Those passengers floating closest scattered in a screaming windmill of bodies as the probes pierced the bubble. The panic that had been building finally rippled out across the enclosed space, and then, with something of an anticlimax, evaporated into embarrassment as the humans realized the probes had resealed the bubble after they entered. Now the probes darted about through the confined space, sucking up bubbles of urine and eating feces. Other probes emitted pale bubbles that floated, honey clear, in the air.
The voice of the Free Enterprise sounded.
“Drink the nectar. It will sustain you for the next few hours, before we arrive on Fraxinus.”
—Fraxinus, said Jesse with some satisfaction.
“I can see something out there,” said Judy. “Something big in the shadows of the ship’s superstructure. I’m sure it wasn’t there before. I think you’re right, Jesse: something is watching us.”
She looked around the bubble, saw the other passengers laughing as they sipped at the golden bubbles of nectar.
“Why feed us now, I wonder? This feels like a distraction. What is it doing out there?”
Judy and Jesse spent the next few hours peering out suspiciously through the plastic walls of the bubble. There was something out there, and it seemed to change subtly even as they watched it.
—Maybe I’m getting paranoid, but it seems to be looking at us.
“Hmmm,” answered Judy. She was finding the strange looming shape that hovered just beyond view increasingly unsettling.
—You’re biting your lip, said Jesse.
“Am I?”
Time passed. All around the bubble, the passengers gazed at Judy suspiciously. She ignored them.
Fraxinus turned below them in green and blue and white swirls.
The envelope was collapsing, squeezing passengers towards the waiting ships sent up from the planet below. The familiar white curves of the Earth-designed fliers and shuttles were a welcome relief after the madness of the Free Enterprise.
The plastic walls folded in on themselves in gentle waves, pulsing as they formed the passengers into groups, just the right number to fit onto a waiting ship. Somehow, even though she had been closest to the waiting vessels at the beginning, Judy found herself near the back of the carefully separated warm packages of humanity that were being gulped down. Just as the suspicion took root within her, the walls pulsed again, and nobody noticed that Judy had been trapped in a little bubble of her own. No one noticed when silver arms intruded and seized her, and a meniscus formed around her and she was dragged off through the walls into the cold space beyond.
“Hey!” she called, “help me! Hey, over here!”
She waved frantically at the sleek white shape of an Earth-built flier, sliding past nearby, but the AI inside did not seem to notice her as a probe carried her up and away from the friendly shapes of the waiting ships below, up, up to the schizophrenic logic of the Free Enterprise. She felt a scream curling somewhere down in her stomach, growing as it wormed its sick way around and around, working its
