The union of man and machine pushes the limits of what it means to be human.
— GENERAL AGAMEMNON,
New Memoirs
His psyche swam in flashes of memory, sparking electrical impulses that leaked out of his mind. Quentin Butler thought he was dying.
The cymeks had dragged him down, grappling with their articulated metal legs. They could easily have torn him apart, just as they had shredded the hull of his crashed flyer. As he’d scrambled away in the radioactive atmosphere, the fallout had already been burning his flesh, his lungs… and then the gigantic walker-forms crushed him—
His last vision was one of dismay and hope: Porce Bludd flying toward him, attempting to rescue his friend, then limping out of range, home free. When Porce escaped, Quentin knew he could die with some measure of relief.
The explosion of pain, the stabs, the cuts, the burning… And now his thoughts were trapped in this endless loop, playing the last visions over and over again. Nightmares, memories, his life draining away.
Occasionally, like bubbles rising to the top of a boiling pot, he saw Wandra when she had been young and beautiful, an intelligent woman filled with the zest of life. She had laughed at his jokes, strolled arm-in-arm with him through the parks of Zimia. Once, they had gone to view the huge monument made out of a wrecked Titan mechanical body. Ah, the clarity of perception, the sharpness of perfect recall.
The two of them had had so much joy together, but the time was far too short. He and Wandra were a perfect match, the war hero and the Butler heir. Before everything had changed, before her stroke, before the birth of Abulurd.
In a recurring memory flash— a burst of stored chemical data in his brain, released in his last moments before death?— he again saw Porce successfully escaping from the cymeks. Quentin clung to that brief spark of joy, knowing he had accomplished something good at the very end.
But the darkness and oblivion suffocated him. Inner dread made it worse, as if he was reliving those awful, endless hours during the defense of Ix, fighting combat robots in the deepest cave channels. An explosion had brought the walls and ceiling tumbling down around him, and he had been buried alive, left for dead like his seven crushed companions. But eventually the rocks shifted, and Quentin had clawed and pushed, finally clearing a breathing space. He shouted and dug until his throat was raw and his fingers bloody. And finally, finally, he had worked his way upward and out into fresh air and dim light… and the amazed shouts of other jihadis who had never expected to find him alive.
Now the oppressive blackness was all around and inside him again. He screamed and screamed, but it did him no good, and the darkness did not go away….
After a while, the pain changed, and he became completely disoriented. Quentin was unable to open his eyes. He heard no sounds. It seemed as if all his senses had been stripped away. He drifted in a kind of limbo. This didn’t match the descriptions of death or Heaven he had read about in religious tracts and scriptures. But then, how could any prophet know for certain?
He couldn’t feel any part of his body, couldn’t see a glimmer of real light, though occasional flashes of residual neuron bursts flickered in the darkness of his unconscious sky.
Suddenly there came a lurch, and he seemed to be tumbling in zero gravity, floating… falling. Distorted sound returned to him, echoing all around with a clamor he had never before heard. He wanted to clap his hands over his ears, but couldn’t find his hands. He couldn’t move.
A female voice sounded thunderously loud around him, like a goddess. “I think that’s part of it, my love. He should be aware now.”
Quentin tried to ask questions, demand answers, scream for help— but found he could make no sound. Mentally he shouted, crying out as loud as he could imagine, but he could not find his vocal cords or his lungs. He tried to take a deep breath, but sensed no heartbeat or respiration. Yes, truly he must be dead, or nearly so.
“Continue to install the rest of the sensory components, Dante,” a gruff male voice said.
“It’ll be a while before we can communicate with him,” said a second male voice. Someone named Dante? I know that name!
Quentin was curious, confused, frightened. He had no way to measure how much time passed, only the occasional indecipherable sounds he experienced, the ominous words.
Finally, with a crackle of static and a blaze of light, vision returned to him. In the glare and the jumble of indecipherable sights, he focused until he recognized the horrific images before him. Cymeks!
“Now he should be able to see you, Agamemnon.”
Agamemnon! The Titan general!
Around him he saw smaller walker-forms, not designed for combat or intimidation, but still monstrosities. Brain canisters were installed in protective cages beneath the walkers’ control systems.
Quentin and the cymeks were inside some sort of chamber… not out in the open skies that he remembered from Wallach IX. Where had they taken him? One of the cymeks continued to work in his field of view, raising slender, sharp arms, each of which ended in a strange surgical instrument. Quentin tried to thrash and escape, but was as ineffective and immobile as before.
“And this should establish connections with all the sensory endings that remain intact.”
“Including the pain receptors?”
“Of course.”
Quentin screamed. He had never experienced such agony. It was worse even than the suffocating darkness. Now, the stabbing pains went to the core of his soul, as if every centimeter of his body were being flayed from him with white-hot, dull knives. A shrieking, raucous cry rippled through the air, and Quentin wondered if he had somehow caused the noise.
“Turn the voice pickup off,” said the gruff male voice. “I don’t need to hear that racket yet.” Agamemnon.
The machine with the female voice came into his field of view, moving smoothly, as if making seductive gestures, but she looked like a sinister spider. “It’s merely neurologically induced pain, my pet. Not real. You will get used to it, and then it’ll be only a distraction.”
Quentin felt as if atomic warheads were going off inside his brain. He tried to form words, but his voice refused to work.
“Perhaps you don’t know where you are,” said the female cymek. “I am the Titan Juno. You’ve heard of me.”
Quentin quailed, but could not respond. Years ago, he had attempted to rescue members of the enslaved citizenry on Bela Tegeuse, but instead they had turned on him and tried to deliver their prisoner to Juno. They hadn’t wanted to be freed— they had wanted to earn the “reward” of being converted into neo-cymeks. He remembered her synthesized voice like metal scraping on glass.
“We have taken you as a specimen and brought you back to Hessra, one of our bases of operations. We are building new strongholds on abandoned Synchronized Worlds such as Wallach IX, where we found you, my pet. But for now, our main facilities are here, where the Ivory Tower Cogitors once lived.” She made a strange lilting sound that might have been a laugh. “We have already performed the most difficult part. We’ve cut away and discarded the broken meat and bones of your body, leaving your lovely brain intact.”
Quentin took a long moment to realize where— what— he was. The answer had been obvious, but he’d forced himself to deny it until the quieter male cymek— Dante?— adjusted his optic sensors.
“You will learn to manipulate things on your own, using thoughtrodes, given time and your choice of mechanical bodies. But now perhaps you would like to see this for one last time.”
On the table Quentin recognized the bloody, sagging body that had formerly been his own. It was battered, bruised, torn— showing just how hard he had fought even up to the last minute. It lay there like an empty suit of flesh, a disconnected, discarded marionette. The top of the head had been cut away.
“Soon you’ll become one of us,” Juno said. “Many of our subjects consider that to be the greatest reward. Your military expertise will prove quite valuable to the cymeks— Primero Quentin Butler.”
Even though his vocal pickup was not connected, Quentin howled in despair.