William dietrich, p.13
Cosmic Savior: (A Space Opera Adventure) (Interstellar Gunrunner Book 3), page 13
I turned the satchel over in my hands, hoping it was worth it.
Deep down, I knew it wasn’t.
Nine
It should come as no surprise that I hardly remember journeying to the domain of the inustrazan chitta. The entire hive-world was one quivering ball of illusions and falsified sensory input. Again, this refers back to my statement that the entire experience on the hive-world may have been an elaborate hallucination.
What’s pertinent to our tale right now is that we did, indeed, reach the “Knower’s” chamber at some point. It was located at the end of a long and twisting golden labyrinth, sealed behind a towering door that probably took some poor shmuck a century to carve.
“You both should feel blessed,” Amodari said as she approached the locking mechanisms. “This is one of our holiest shrines.”
Tusky eyed me uneasily. “Miss Halnok, perhaps you could expound upon something for me. As I understand from the old facility’s reports, the chitta located aboard the Ouroboros was rather, shall we say, functional. It provided navigation and logistics for the vessel. If you’ll excuse my bluntness, it seems that keeping such a device sealed away would defeat its purpose.”
Still inputting a sequence obscured by her body, Amodari looked back with a smile. “How very observant. But you see, our chitta is far from underutilized. It coordinates nearly every function of this world.”
“Astonishing. It must be rather sizable!”
“Yes, well, one might say that…”
Even as Amodari unsealed door after door, leading us past increasingly larger checkpoints with soldiers and automated turrets and stasis fields, all I could think about was how thoroughly useless I felt. Sure, I’d returned to the conventional world, but what did I have to show for it? I’d burned my bridge with Chaska, been replaced as the team’s “smarts” by a talking sloth, and done less than nothing in terms of procuring the war-changing information I currently held. When I got right down to it, it was even possible that I’d inadvertently caused all of this. Without me, the insurgents trying to steal Tusky’s canister would’ve been obliterated at Lattram, and the whole trail leading to Palamar and the Promised Place and Kruthara would’ve shriveled up overnight, lost to the infinite expanse.
But I couldn’t afford to indulge that kind of hypothetical timeline. Blaming yourself for what’s done is a dark and slippery path.
Instead, I had to focus on getting myself the hell out of Amodari’s clutches. It was the one and only way to secure both my freedom and Chaska’s forgiveness, if such a thing were even possible. Of course, the odds of actually formulating and carrying out such a bold escape dwindled with every door Amodari unlocked.
It practically combusted when the final door slid apart, revealing the Knower itself.
I won’t sit here and pretend I was floored by the sight of this behemoth. I’ve been in so many alien monoliths and interdimensional temples it would make your head spin. So forgive me if my description is on the pedestrian side.
Its containment chamber was as large as a nuclear silo, humid, egg-shaped, totally lightless aside from a few blue flames ensconced in the walls. This relative darkness obscured most of the chitta itself, but it was enough to get the gist of the affair. Illuminated above me were pulsating, whitish-pink patches that looked predictably similar to human brain tissue. They even had the same striations and “wrinkling” to them.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the thing was ginormous. It stretched up into the darkness several hundred meters above, and below it, scraping the overgrown petri dish of its “floor,” were long, dangling tendrils that tensed and unfurled like a squid’s tentacles. So there you have it. A chitta is nothing more than a huge, breathing brain covered in tumors and floppy appendages. You’ll never see one in real life, but you’ve now read a firsthand account of one, which is better than nothing.
“Highest Knower, Child of the Maker’s Infinite Wisdom,” Amodari said in toothache-sweet reverence, “we come before you to seek your counsel.”
Tusky and I shared yet another look.
As my eyes adjusted, I noticed that the chitta had many, many more of those dangling legs-tentacle-things, all flowing off its body like spiderwebs and connecting to various ports in the chamber’s walls. Some of them stretched right over my head—a fact I discovered when a glob of starchy brain-juice pelted my shoulder. Nasty.
After an unreasonable amount of time, the chitta snaked one of its longest tentacles into a rusty valve to our left. A crude-looking speaker system on the floor then hummed to life.
“What is it now?” The chitta’s voice was a fabric of ten or twenty individual personalities, all coalescing into a single, stitched-together anomaly. Despite the multitude aspect, however, there was a unified tone to the question—annoyance. “I’m rather busy here, Amodari.”
It took all of my willpower to hold back a snicker.
“Highest Knower, we approach you for clarification on a delicate matter,” Amodari said, unfazed by the thing’s insolence. Not surprising, given it was running the world she inhabited.
“Uh-huh… lemme guess… another one of the Maker’s decrees you need translated?”
“Precisely.”
“Come back later. I’m doin’ stuff.”
Amodari cleared her throat. “Highest Knower, this is a matter of utmost—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every single translation is a ‘matter of utmost urgency.’ Give it a break, would you? Gets old fast.”
“I can understand your misgivings.” She looked at Tusky and me in turn, appearing oddly embarrassed by her chitta’s behavior. “As the high seer explained at our last encounter, however, your requested upgrades are forthcoming.”
“A year later, huh?”
“Please forgive the delays. There have been pressing issues for our people.”
“Oh, well, please excuse me, then! See, I’m used to the way the Maker did things. Back in those days, he had this crazy concept called ‘punctuality.’ I asked for something, I got it. Seems times have changed, and I didn’t get the memo.” The chitta let out a long, multivocal sigh. “Anyway, who are these clowns? A circus bear and a drug fiend?”
Much as I wanted to snap back at that, I found myself shrugging in tacit agreement.
“My name is Sir Tusky, Highest Knower.” The sloth-scientist delivered a cringeworthy bow and gazed up at a nondescript section of the chitta’s brainy bulk. “I’ve heard so very much about you, and might I say, what an honor to—”
“Make way for the flattery parade,” the chitta groaned. “Who’s the other one? A used-ship salesman?”
I waved limply at it. “Bodhi Drezek, arms merchant, new concubine. Just here for the show.”
The chitta let out a hideous laugh. “I like this guy. Short, not too sweet, straight to the point. And a human. Damn! I haven’t seen one of those in… huh, I dunno. Years, millennia? Time’s an illusion anyway.”
“Ahem,” Amodari butted in, “I do believe we should rein in our topics of discussion, Highest Knower. Bodhi and Sir Tusky are here as a mere formality.”
Author’s addendum:
If you’ve heard any rumors whatsoever about the tales of my life, you may consider the following segment utter bollocks. But take my word on this one—what I am about to present is the complete and honest truth of what actually went down in the chitta’s holding cell.
Many gossip fiends and doubters will assert with their dying breath that I illegally and impulsively stole a piece of this superintelligence, thus sparking an interspecies war that would last another hundred and twenty-four years. They are wrong. What happened to me was no fault of my own. As you will soon see, I was chosen for the misunderstanding that occurred, and furthermore, I had little to no sway in the matter.
Now, back to the chitta.
The chitta rattled off a snarky line, Amodari did her usual sycophantic twirl, and on and on it went, leading nowhere but Absurdity Central Station. At some point, my attention wandered off the exchange. Not because I’d lost interest, but because I felt a slick, pulsating presence worming into my right ear.
“Shh, don’t make a scene! Be easy.”
The chitta’s subdued yet still-multifaceted voice arose directly in my mind, similar to how my godengine conversed with me. Not that I immediately recognized the words as belonging to the chitta, of course. It took me a heart-stopping moment to connect the disembodied voice to the aforementioned “wetness” slithering into me.
Somewhere between piss-myself terror and curiosity, I traced the route of this newfound “landline” along the hazy floor. Sure enough, a fleshy filament snaked all the way from my pant leg to the nutrient pool ahead. Oh, joy.
A question occurred to me: if this thing could control an entire city, what was stopping it from controlling my tongue, or my heart, or my bowels? Not a damn thing. Still, considering what was awaiting me if and when we finished up here, I wasn’t quite averse to the idea of suicide-by-proxy. Death was probably a luxury in the land of the immortal mind-eaters. This being the case, I tried to frame the chitta’s surprise visit as an opportunity rather than the climax of a body-horror vid. And that meant doing what I always do—playing it cool.
“Testing, testing?” I tried mentally.
“Loud and clear,” the chitta “said” in reply. “Sorry about the whole ear invasion, by the way. Security’s pretty tight in this place, and I’ve been waitin’ on a human brain for longer than I can remember. I hate workin’ with those tricksy inustrazan meat-lumps.”
“Interface? Are you going to pop my head or something?”
“Me? Pop your head? Hell no! I’m here to make a deal. Just the two of us. Whaddya think?”
I peered Amodari’s way to verify what I’d suspected—she was, indeed, still busy bickering with the chitta’s more corporeal aspect—then cooked up a reply.
“Let’s just say I like deals.”
“Oh, I like you more by the millisecond!” The chitta then evoked the sound of hands rubbing together in anticipation. “You got a ship?”
That one stung. “Well… if you’d asked me that a few hours ago…”
“Easy come, easy go, huh? Well, whatever. Listen, I can get us one. A good one. A fast one.”
I narrowed my eyes, doing my best to appear invested in the chitta’s now-obvious ploy to distract Amodari and buy time. “What do you mean, us?”
“Us! Y’know… you, me… gettin’ the hell out of this joint?” Perhaps mistaking my utter bafflement for ambivalence, the chitta pressed on to sweeten the deal. “I can do a lot for you! Whatever you need! You seem like a bright guy, one who’s dealt with superintelligence before—an arms dealer can never have too much superintelligence! And besides, I’ll be a better pal than Center ever could be! ’Cause, you know, we’re both organics! I just get you. I see you.”
The rush of words hit me like a tungsten shell—especially one choice name-drop. “And how do you know about Center?”
“Call it intuition! Or, y’know, combing your memory synapses. Whatever! All the same when you get down to the level of wetware.”
“Are you reading my thoughts?”
“I would never. I’m a chitta of honor.”
“Right. Just, uh… give me a little mental space so I don’t go insane. I’m gonna… internalize… all of this.”
“Sure thing, buddy. Anything for you! Anything…”
True enough to the chitta’s point, the exact mechanisms by which the thing was conversing and bargaining were irrelevant. This was a peculiar situation, but one that still required my savvy as an entrepreneur. You see, there was a deal to be made here. A deal rife with demand, as indicated by the tremendous amount of sucking-up and “but wait, there’s more!” language being tossed my way. For whatever reason, this chitta really, really needed my help in a jailbreak. And after languishing in the Contrition myself, who was I to deny a sentient being its freedom?
Especially if said being was a superintelligence with a vested interest in helping me escape, too.
“Bodhi,” Amodari said, breaking my inner monologue, “please give me the b—”
Then she froze.
Everything froze.
Tusky, my breaths, my limbs—the whole kit and caboodle.
“Still hearin’ me?” the chitta asked.
With some trepidation, I hazarded a reply. “Yes?”
“Okay, sweet. You’re probably wondering why we’re in molasses-land. Short answer is, we were running out of time, so I used a little burst of my processing power to slow your mind down. Or speed it up. Tomatoes, to-mah-toes. Following me?”
“Not really, but I’m… intrigued?”
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty spectacular. So whaddya say? Wanna help me get out?”
It was strange, trying to strike a deal without my standard array of hand gestures and mirrored body language. But I’d have to make do.
“I’m certainly considering your proposal,” I said at length. This was all part of negotiations, you see. You have to make the other party sweat a little bit. Play hardball. Even if they are a godlike, overgrown artifact. “First, a few preliminaries. Such as why you’d like to get out of this cozy… place.”
“Isn’t it obvious, man? Look around. These people are whackjobs. And so, so boring.”
“Well, I’ll grant you that.”
The chitta gave a disgusted snort. “I took a peek at your memory bank. Helluva thing. You’ve done so much, seen so much, screwed so much!” Despite the chitta’s blush-inducing flattery, I let it proceed uninterrupted. My working theory, which I was eager to test, was that this thing was adapting its speech using my own linguistic database. Growing itself into my custom-made best friend, so to speak. “You and me aren’t that different, pal. We’re both a bunch of meat floating around in the game of life.”
Well, theory confirmed.
“I take it you’ve got some grand scheme outside of here?” I probed. “Conquering a galaxy, perhaps? Starting an enterprise?”
“I’m a chitta of simple tastes, Bodhi. Literally. I’d just like to taste some ice cream. I mean, the memory is tasty—I can literally only imagine how good the real thing is!”
“You aren’t wrong.”
“Of course not. I’m a chitta.”
I gave a psychic sigh. “Alright, so you’re after some good experiences out in the cosmos. Got it. But why pick me?”
“Simple biology, man. First off, you’ve got a human brain, same thing the Maker modeled me after. Neat-o, huh? And second, you’ve got a working heart. The inustrazans have some stupidly expensive valve system to do the job, but you’ve got a good workaround in your ribcage.”
“Not to doubt your infinite wisdom, but I don’t think I’ve got enough blood to run… all of, well, you.”
“Thankfully, you don’t have to!” the chitta squealed. “All you’ve gotta do is cut off a chunk of me. I can regrow in a vat of—well, we can hash that out later. The point is, you just need a piece of a neuronal cluster. Easy.”
Setting aside the existential implications of regrowing a sample of chitta tissue and how that new sample might diverge in self-concept from its host, I was pretty damn invested at this point. I mean, come on. This monstrosity was worth a few quadrillion bux alone. If I could find a way to have it run a munitions factory, crank out the same kind of designs as Center…
“Don’t leave me hangin’!” the chitta piped up.
“I’m simply pondering,” I replied. “Next item on the menu: couldn’t you just hijack my body and do the job yourself?”
“Duh. But I’m not an animal, Bodhi. I’ve got a heart too, you know. Well, a biomechanical system that acts like one, but let’s not get caught in the details!”
That was one point in the chitta’s favor. Seeing as I was thoroughly flexible in my morals, it would be pleasant to partner up a superintelligence that possessed a more rigid code of conduct. Which brought me to my next dilemma. Superintelligences, by their very nature, tend to be sly, deceptive things. True, the thing was undeniably doing me a favor by not stealing my body, but was that just a smokescreen to conceal some deeper evil? Hard to say. These things could work out logic sequences millions of magnitudes faster than some pea-brain human.
But that was a problem for later. After all, this wasn’t my first rodeo with universe-ending anomalies. It was better to think about the big-picture things upfront.
“What can you do for me?” I asked.
The chitta practically balked at the question. “What can’t I do?”
“Well, let’s be specific! Say I get you out, send you into the stars. What are you offering?”
“You mean, beyond saving your ass from Amodari’s sex-till-death operation?”
Had I been less desperate, I might’ve been offended by its continued incursions into my memories. But alas, I was deep in the hole. I’d gladly take invasive yet custom-tailored solutions to my problems.
“That’s a reasonable start,” I said calmly. “What else?”
“Oh, oh, I know! I could get you outta hot water with Chaska. Y’know, translate that book exclusively for the insurgents!”
“That’s a personal matter!”
“Yeah, and? C’mon, man, I’m offering you a ticket back into that girl’s good graces—and back into that bed, wink-wink!—and a way to maybe, possibly, totally defeat Kruthara and save the universe. You’d have to be an idiot to turn this down.”
“Fair enough,” I said. Everything it said sounded good—probably too good, but beggars and soon-to-be slaves should not be choosers. “Anything else?”
“You drive a hard bargain!”
“So I’ve been told, Highest Knower. So I’ve been told.”
“Huh. Well, I dunno if this sweetens the pot, but unless you take me out of this place, we’re all gonna die in a few minutes.”
