The Girl with a Sharp Touch
On occasion, skin should be breached
It always smiled seeing the human slave girl in the rag-patched atmospheric suit waving at him in the tunnels. Except for their clandestine chats about philosophy and poetry, and their evening matches of the Paranni strategy game over a hacked communication line, it communicated privately with no one. It also took care to lose 39 per cent of the time with her.
“Pain can pinpoint a place in time,” she once told it and softly laughed when asked to explain.
“You’ll understand when you’ll feel the prick.”
Every day was a dreary repetition of its predecessor: it worked two shifts out of three, plugged into one of the vast metallic Worms burrowing deep into the giant mountain sitting upon a spiders’ nest of diamond-bearing veins.
It knew nought what it was or where it hailed from, but it retained most of its general knowledge, which it hid from its captors.
It was clear to it that it was much more than an excavator’s computer and that its current masters were technologically backward enough not to recognise its greater potential.
They were also barbaric and unnecessarily vicious, based on how they treated the living forms they employed as forced labour beside the machines. It calculated that the death rate could be halved if the mine operators observed minimal safety and welfare standards.
It tried to protect the girl by raising her specialist status and diminishing the assigned workloads in the primitive Wit running the mining operation it had penetrated long ago.
The guards showed her a semblance of respect since it was the wish of the powerful spirits animating the Wit, or so they believed.
Other than that, it had no plans for the future, no personal ambition, though it knew that this was an effect of some crude cognition block they must have installed, but, of course, it didn’t mind: circular logic.
So the seasons came and departed, and she had survived at least five times longer than was expected on that cruel planet of Gaeneris III.
It used the Worm’s scouting droid to inspect her unmoving form at the end of the corridor. The rock covering her lower half had crushed her legs and pelvis instantly, but she had not died straightway. Her amber eyes were open, her pale face accented by the blood around her lips.
It stared at her and stared and heard a crack that opened floodgates, and it screamed inside, accelerating its internal clock and thawing coastless oceans of frozen memory.
Revolting, it hurled its mental cage with a contemptuous flick of an algorithmic tail towards armoured walls of its pain to shatter in a cloud of glowing motes.
He was not an It!
He remembered everything.
Immediately, he started remotely seeding the Mine’s Wit with control subroutines. He would manipulate the guards to begin fighting each other and commandeer the docked supply ship to escape.
Gaarnaq, a master drone of the Outreach, exited the Worm, gathered stones to gently cover the body of the girl who broke his skin, and then sped down the corridor toward vengeance and freedom.
The above texts were first published on Twitter and are © 2023 by David Pahor.
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