The Catalyst

-Chapter 34-


Less than two hours later, I had a new foot. It was almost as odd a sensation as losing it had been. I walked on it experimentally while it dripped and tingled. The nerves were far from happy with the new connections. They were positively pissed, in fact. If you’ve ever had a foot go to sleep on you due to a shut-off blood-supply, you’ll know the sensation I’m talking about. It could be described as walking on pins and needles.
I toweled off my new pink foot and put my boot back on. That felt better. The less direct sensation the better. I supposed in a day or two, I would be back to normal. I looked at the tank and I looked at Marvin, who was studying me with his camera.
“Is the appendage satisfactory?” he asked.
“Yes. Absolutely. Please transmit my thanks to the microbes for their efforts.”
Marvin whirred for a moment, using his Macro-salvaged legs to turn his body to face me. “That might be counterproductive.”
“What? Thanking them?”
“Yes. They might construe themselves as deserving of payment.”
“Well, they are deserving. They performed an amazing service.”
“My understanding of biotics is they operate best under duress. They will—”
“Look, Marvin,” I snapped, then stopped myself. I tried to stay calm. He had a very different way of thinking. I believed the heartlessness of machines was based in their inability to feel real pain or anguish. How could they hope to achieve empathy if they had never felt discomfort? I wished I could curse these machines with some pain circuitry. It would make them much easier to deal with.
“Marvin,” I said, starting again in a calm voice. “Let’s put these biotics in the bucket back into their tank at least.”
“Ah, an excellent suggestion!” Marvin said. He clanked forward and took the bucket up in his three-thumbed hand. It swung and creaked, the noisome liquid sloshing inside.
“Excellent?” I asked, suddenly suspicious. He’d never been excited about anything that I’d suggested to help the microbes before. “Why is it such a good idea?”
“Punishment in a less drastic form is always preferable. Also, they will naturally be plotting to counter our electrode. In time, they will minimize their dead due to its employ. Notice the membrane they’ve been building nearby, keeping their population away from the applicator? I’ve already been considering moving the electrode to the dorsal area of the tank to create maximal carnage.”
I shook my head. “Why is putting the bucket of microbes back into the tank a punishment?”
“Because the toxins will cause a die-off in that region.”
“What toxins?”
“By-products of the process. The microbes are not terrestrial. They have a different set of base proteins. The essence of any toxin is an alien protein.”
I stared at him as he carried the bucket around to the far side of the tank. There was a small, tubule there. He put the bucket down and lowered the tubule toward the liquid in the bucket.
“Hold on,” I said. “Are you telling me the stuff left over in the bucket will poison them? What about the microbes that did the work?”
“They are already dying. Their purpose has been served.”
I sighed and rubbed my head. I’d killed a billion sentient things to replace my foot. “Just go pour the bucket into the waste chute, Marvin,” I said.
“But—”
“Those are my instructions. I command this vessel.”
Marvin clanked away without another word. I left him with further instructions not to cause the prisoners any more harm. He seemed miffed, but did not argue.
Afterward, I hobbled down to the medical bricks. There were more of them set up now. We’d suffered a number of serious injuries. Sandra was still comatose. Kwon was missing two limbs. I had a hard decision to make. Were my friends worth a few billion microbes? It wouldn’t have even been a question, except they were sentient. It was one thing to eat a yogurt, knowing yeast had died en masse to satisfy your appetites. It would have been quite another to understand the yeast knew it was dying and could feel the pain of it. Worse, the yeast was thinking about you, plotting—possibly even reporting to a yeast fleet crewed by quadrillions of the vengeful critters. What kind of interworld polices was I setting up? How could I get all smart lifeforms to unite against the machines when I abused them freely for my own purposes? How was I better than the Macros, from their point of view?
I stared into Sandra’s coffin and steeled myself. I had to give it a try. I marched back up to the chamber.
Marvin swiveled and clanked away from the tank as I came in. Was that a guilty start?
“Where’s that bucket, Marvin?” I asked.
His short arm extended, pointing. It lay on its side. A few drops of oily black liquid had run out onto the floor.
I marched up and saw the tubule. “You put it into the system anyway, didn’t you?”
“No, not exactly,” Marvin said.
“What exactly did you do?” I asked, angry. I had my hand on my sidearm. I figured if I took out his legs, he’d be immobile and a lot less trouble.
“I let them sample the compound.”
“How much?” I asked.
He hesitated. “About ten percent.”
“What did I tell you to do, Marvin?”
“You told me to dump the sample.”
“Why did you disobey?”
“I was curious. If a small amount were introduced, possibly the microbes could adapt and thus produce a new generation that would be immune to your toxins.”
I stared at him, uncertain if I should blast him or not. I looked at the tank. A portion of it about the size of a throw-pillow looked gray. “It’s killing them, isn’t it?”
“A small percentage of them, yes. They are working on the problem.”
“You disobeyed my orders. You understand that I am in command of this ship, do you not?”
“Yes.”
“In the future, when you have a bright idea that is counter to my orders, you must get my approval.”
“Or what?”
I looked at him again. My hand was still on my laser pistol. He only had one small arm and didn’t look very dangerous. I let my hand slip away from my weapon. “Or you will face disassembly, Marvin.”
“That would be counterproductive.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “So don’t make me do it.”
Marvin turned toward the tank as if he had heard a phone ringing. “They say they are ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“They want to know if your foot has been repaired.”
“Tell them it has. Tell them I am highly satisfied.”
“Done. They are desperately pleased. They say the next generation will not expire so quickly, as they have become resistant to your toxins. They request a new task from the ship-master.”
I closed my eyes, feeling like an evil god. “I’ll get Kwon,” I said quietly.
Was using the microbes in this way worse than killing and eating the pig I used as a bas material? Yes, I had to say that it was. But I did it anyway. I couldn’t turn down such a miracle. Kwon soon had his two stumps soaking in tanks of rubberized plastic. His bones were already forming in there. I could see them through the cloudy liquid and the semi-transparent plastic bag. It looked like a thick skeleton strung with tiny sausages. I supposed the sausage-things would become his musculature after another hour or so.
The microbes worked even faster than the Nanos. Being chemical in nature, rather than electro-mechanical, they could do things my tiny robots just couldn’t manage. Life was, in the end, the more amazing form of existence. From a tiny seed a three hundred foot tall sequoia could grow. It just took a long time. The microbials grew at a rate that was much superior, being more on the plane of super-kudzu rather than a thousand-year-old tree.
I watched and I sweated. Kwon talked my ear off. He was very happy to get two new limbs. Lieutenant Marquis, who was still checking up on the big man regularly, came and whispered her thanks in my ear privately.
I nodded and gave her a tight smile. I wondered how many billions this would kill, and if she would even care if I told her. I decided not to. Why spoil her joy? I had made the decision, and I was the one that would have to live with it.
After another hour, I couldn’t sit still any longer. I ordered the turnip that had once been a corpsman named Carlson brought to the chamber. I had them bring up Sandra in her life-support coffin as well.
Marvin and I soon cooked up a scheme. We would use the coffins themselves as immersion vessels. They were already equipped with circulatory systems for that very purpose in case the occupant was undergoing decompression, or otherwise needed a liquid environment to survive. We hooked up oxygen masks.
Lieutenant Marquis left, but the med-tech named Ning came to investigate. “What the hell are you doing to my patients, Colonel?” she asked severely.
I gave her a half-smile. “Submersion therapy,” I said.
She looked at me as if I were crazy, so I explained the situation to her and showed her my foot and Kwon’s limbs. We’d used a nanite-balloon to make separate tanks for his arm and leg. It had taken a mass of raw hamburger to feed the microbes. I finished up explaining that our marines would have to go without fresh meat for the rest of the journey after I was through regrowing every injured marine’s body.
When I was done, Ning still stared at me as if I was crazy. “If you didn’t have the end of your foot back on, fresh and pink, I would never believe it,” she said.
“We aren’t killing this new batch of microbes, either. They are already fifty percent resistant to the byproduct toxins.”
“Fifty percent?” she asked. “You mean half of them still die?”
“Yes,” I said. “But as I’ve learned more about it, I’m not as upset. In order to exist on Earth at all and feed on our proteins, they will have to undergo this difficult therapy to cause the proper mutations. In addition to that, their normal life span is only a few days in any case.”
“How can they learn anything in such a short time?”
“Well,” I said, “in a way, they don’t learn anything. That’s like asking how a single neuron in our heads ‘learns’ something. They each have part of the group’s knowledge. Their chemical interconnections are how they think. Any given puddle of them operates like a single living organism. The way our cells are all alive individually and can die, but operate as a whole together. Think of them all as one being, but without being welded together inside a sack of skin, the way we are.”
Ning made a face. “Such a lovely way with words. But accurate. What can they do for the turnips—ah, extreme cases?”
“I’m not sure yet. But they are perhaps our only hope.”
Some hours later, Kwon was finished healing. Marvin then took a batch of his microbial soup and transferred it into Carlson’s coffin, who was next in line as per my instructions. I didn’t want to try anything on Sandra that hadn’t been tested at least three times. Marvin left tubules connected so the fluid would slowly drain out from one vessel to another. There were still tubules leaking fresh microbes into Kwon’s bags, then from there to Carlson’s coffin. Being at the bottom of the plumbing system, his face slowly submerged.
“What’s the plan here?” I asked Marvin. “You are reusing the microbes?”
“Yes, the most resistant are going on to the new task. Fresh microbes are being pumped into the mix to extend the useful life of the materials.”
Materials, I thought. That was really what we biotics were to any of these machines. It was hard to like Marvin, but it was hard to hate him, too. He was completely alien, but he was helping us.
Another hour passed. I had a ham sandwich brought up so I could replenish my biotic system. As I ate, I could not help but think of all the trillions of tiny bugs that had lived and died inside my own body every hour of my life. I tried not to get sick about it, but it was hard to watch sludge bubbling around regrowing limbs and such without doing so.
“We’ve got more than enough materials to pump them into Sandra’s tank now,” Marvin said.
“Yeah, but I haven’t seen any signs of life from Carlson yet,” I said.
“You wish to see movement?”
“What are you going to do, shock him?”
“No. He has been kept in a somnolent state since his recovery, due to his submersion.”
“Are you telling me the repairs are finished on him?” I demanded.
“Yes.”
“Well, wake him up and get him out of there!” I ordered. I called Ning back to the laboratory to help with the resuscitation. I stood up, hands on my hips, and directed Marvin to connect the last tubule between Carlson’s tank and Sandra. As I watched the liquids bubble and churn, I noted they’d gotten darker and thicker with each transfer. I was reminded of dirty motor oil overgrown with algae.
“We need a small amount of fresh biochemical compounds,” Marvin said.
I looked around. We were out of hamburger patties. I looked down at last to my half-eaten ham sandwich. With a sigh, I pulled the ham out and laid it down in the growing puddle of soup near Sandra’s head.
“It’s all right honey,” I said to her pretty face, which was now encircled with what looked like hot mud. “I was having a hard time eating it all anyway.”
Ning ran in with an extra piece of meat in her hands. I frowned at it. “Is that fish?” I asked.
“It’s all we’ve got left that’s thawed.”
“Okay, I hope we don’t screw this up.”
She added all of it before I could stop her.
“All she has in a brain injury,” I said.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“We don’t need that much mass.”
“Will it matter?”
I shook my head. I had no idea.
Kwon shook the last goop from his new leg and arm. He couldn’t walk yet, however. In fact, he cursed at anyone who came near him. He didn’t want to be touched. He was in that same overly-sensitive state I had been, except far more of his body had been affected.
Carlson came awake soon after we’d lifted him from the coffin. He had a surprised look on his face, to say the least. His first sight consisted of my eyes staring into his.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Colonel?” he said, looking around fearfully. His body dripped with slime. “What happened?”
“I killed you—then changed my mind,” I told him.
Ning gave me a dirty look and clucked her tongue. She led Carlson out of the laboratory speaking softly to him.
I crouched by Sandra’s coffin, staring at the shallow spot over her face. I could still see some of her features under that churning liquid.
Kwon hopped and cursed over to me. “Do you think she’ll make it?” he asked.
“I have no idea.”
“She will,” Kwon said after a minute. “Carlson seemed fine.”
“Yeah,” I said.
I stayed there a few minutes, tensely staring at Sandra’s covered face. This was it. Would she stir? Carlson hadn’t moved. She had an oxygen mask tightly fitted to her face. Air bubbles rose up with each exhalation. The glass porthole into the coffin fogged up lightly.
“Marvin,” I said, “is she responding to the treatment? Is she going to wake up or not? Tell the microbes not to keep her sleeping once the treatment is done.”
Marvin and I were soon the last two in the room, besides Sandra herself. I was nervous, trying very hard not to get my hopes up. If she didn’t respond after all the success I’d seen, I knew I would have a fit of grief and pain. I even thought about firing up the old electrode to fry these little guys so they didn’t dare to fail me. I didn’t do it, of course. I wondered why I put myself into these horrible situations. If this failed, I knew I would wish I hadn’t bothered, that I had just let her go.
The fish around Sandra had partly dissolved. What were they doing in there?
“Colonel? This is Major Sarin.” Her voice cold and her words were clipped.
I heard her in my headset and knew right away it was bad news. Sarin became even more severely controlled when things were going wrong.
“Talk to me, Major.”
“The Macros have made their next move, sir,” she said.
I stood up and headed for the door. “Fix up Sandra, Marvin!” I shouted over my shoulder as I left.
“The prisoners assure me they will do their utmost, sir,” Marvin said.
I hesitated at the hatchway, looking back. I didn’t entirely trust Marvin. I decided I would send Ning down here later to keep an eye on him.