“Dammit, Abel—”
He ignores Noemi’s fury. The Tare staggers closer, her half-destroyed face more terrible in the brighter light. Abel doesn’t share the instinctive human revulsion at what looks like a life-threatening injury, but there is nonetheless something uncanny about the tilt of her head, the exposed illumination from the circuits of her mechanical brain. When she speaks, she reveals a damaged larynx, sounding more like an ancient type-to-speech reader than either mech or human: “Simon says stay.”
“Are you in contact with him right now?” The mechs seemed linked, before—to one another, and to Simon—which means Simon doesn’t have to be in the same room with the Tare to speak for her. Abel takes one step toward her, but the Tare points and stomps her intact foot.
“No! Simon says stay!”
Finally Abel remembers the game human children play, which for some unaccountable reason is attached to this name in particular. No doubt to a child called Simon, this game was even more appealing. “I’m staying. See? Am I speaking to Simon right now?”
“May-be,” singsongs the Oboe, who continues shuffling closer. Bloody wire hangs from some of the gashes in her leg.
From below Noemi calls, “Abel? What are you doing?” He doesn’t dare follow; at this point in the “game,” he shouldn’t be moving.
Simon is only a confused child, trapped in a mind he doesn’t understand. Abel may be the only individual who can ever help him make sense of it, the one native speaker of a language Simon must immediately learn.
The Tare and Oboe stand on either side of Abel, effectively pinning him with his back to the enormous crevasse. They’re not operating independently; they’re being controlled by Simon with a level of coordination that goes beyond any standard protocols. Queens and Charlies perform military procedures programmed into their circuits, or they can respond to combat cues independently. They can’t do both. Tares and Oboes lack any strategic functionality—one practices medicine, while the other provides entertainment, usually in the form of music. For them to behave as they are now, they have to be operating as though they are parts of Simon’s own body.
“How are you doing this?” Abel looks through the blank golden space of the Tare’s missing eye, hoping Simon is looking back at him. “How do you control the others?”
“Well,” the Tare says, in the suddenly serious way of small children, “it’s like there’s a machine part of me and a me part of me. I have to forget all about the me part of me and just be a machine. That part’s way more fun.”
Abel frowns. Virginia said something like this to him not long ago, that he should embrace his mechanical side more often. He’s always tried so hard to reach for his humanity. He’s not sure how to reverse that.
A skittering sound, then a thud tells him Noemi has successfully reached the lower level from which she might escape. Although he wishes she’d leave the Osiris without him, he understands she never would.
The Tare wobbles forward and puts one hand on Abel’s chest. “You’re like me, aren’t you?”
“In many ways.” Abel smiles in a way he hopes will read as reassuring. “We both synthesize the human and the machine.”
Frowning, the Tare steps back again. Abel curses his own precision; synthesize is too formal a word for a small boy. “You don’t look like me. You look right. I don’t look right. I look all messed up.”
“That can be fixed. Everything that’s wrong can be fixed. You just need to—”
To what? Abel realizes he doesn’t have an answer. The most logical outcome would be for Simon to return to Gillian, who understands both the body and the soul involved far better than anyone else. But Gillian is cut off from her usual resources; if she weren’t, Simon wouldn’t have been re-created so hastily and poorly. Abel would like to take Simon on as a project, to offer him guidance and friendship, and to figure out his inner workings over time, with the help of the excellent scientific equipment available there. But cooperation with Gillian is impossible. Taking charge of Simon would in effect mean kidnapping a little boy, promising to make him better without being certain that was even possible.
“Abel?” Noemi whispers. His sharp ears catch the sound, but responding is still inadvisable.
Through the Tare, Simon smiles. “You’re like me and you’re not like me. We’re alike and we’re different.” The Tare model’s hand fists in the folds of Abel’s shirt. “I want to see how you’re different.”
“I’m not sure that you—”
“I know! I’ll take you apart. Then I can see.”
Abel blocks the Tare’s forearm, breaking her grip on his clothing. He draws upon the few child-psychology texts in his databases and says, simply and firmly, “No.”
Both the Oboe and the Tare seize him, and the Oboe yells, “Simon says!”
With one shove, Abel pushes them both back—but not far. They’re mechs, even if not for combat, and they’re stronger than any human opponent. When they both rush at him, he jumps upward as high as he can, which is just high enough to grab the ridge above them. As he dangles there, the Tare and Oboe leap upward, too. The Oboe doesn’t make it—her broken leg keeps her off balance, and she clatters onto the floor and rolls off into the crevasse. A series of distant crashes makes it clear she’s being dashed to pieces.
One down, he thinks—the Tare is coming nearer, her blank golden light of an eye boring into him.
“Abel!” Noemi cries. “Will you get your metal butt down here?”
My butt is made of flesh and is designed to be pleasant both to see and to touch, he’d like to say, but this information can perhaps wait.
He lets himself drop, falling past the Tare to Noemi’s side, where he catches himself on the floor of her level. Noemi makes a half-strangled sound of fear before he pulls himself up, but the instant he’s next to
