In Heaven and Earth Read online

  In

  Heaven

  and

  Earth

  Amy Rae

  Durreson

  Copyright © 2015 by Amy Rae Durreson

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  About this book

  This book was originally written for the 2015 Love is an Open Read challenge hosted by the MM Romance Group on Goodreads. My gratitude for the story prompt go to Wintermute, who set up a scenario with a doctor discovering the lone cyborg survivor of a disaster. This edition has been polished, and also contains a bibliography giving the sources of the quotations that Vairya and Reuben trade.

  Chapter One

  THEY found the cyborg frozen in the heart of the city, his face turned towards the uncaring stars. He looked more statue than flesh and steel, poised in midstep, but even from the end of the street, Reuben could see the glimmer of light in his eyes that meant he had not been deactivated.

  All around them, the bodies of the fallen swayed and drifted in the streets, barely tethered to the station by the remnants of the platform’s gravity. Many of the city’s lights still shone over the airless streets, illuminating the bluish tone of the bodies’ skin, the frost that surrounded their mouths and eyes, and the frozen blood on their lips.

  Only the cyborg still stood upright. He only wore a thin white chiton, fastened by a loose gold cord. Pretty but useless, Reuben thought disdainfully, because it had still exposed his skin to the cold, and frost marked both steel and flesh.

  “I’m going to check if he’s responsive,” Chanthavy said, her voice crackling over the coms. “Start gathering IDs from the dead. We’ve still not accounted for half the population.”

  “Aye aye, captain,” Meili responded, her tone light enough to be mocking. She’d been getting more brittle and sarcastic with every street full of bodies they traversed. At least this wasn’t another school.

  Quietly, Reuben moved along the left side of the street. They were all encased in double layers of ward suits, one to keep them warm and breathing in this vacuum and another layer below to protect them from disease if they found any survivors. Even Reuben, who always expected the worst of any human outpost, had never imagined wearing his emergency gear here in Caelestia, one of the great space cities.

  He bent over the first corpse, holding his gloved hand out to touch her face. The DNA reader shivered in the glove, making his palm itch, and a moment later a reading came up in the corner of his vision:

  Ha Nawabi, citizen code: CL782093HY890, Employment: Records clerk, Taloquan and Dai, Importers, Estimated Time of Death…

  “Record to database,” Reuben commanded, blinking the scrolling text off. He didn’t need to read that. She was dead, like the rest of them. No data would help her now.

  Chanthavy was bounding closer to the cyborg, her feet leaving the ground with every step. Reuben watched as he moved towards the next body. She was the captain, but the still figure of the cyborg was unsettling him. He was the only one of them who had ever been to war, and old battle instincts were making his scalp creep with sweat under his helmet. He didn’t trust the last man standing, whether it was in a battle, an election, or a massacre.

  The cyborg did not react as Chanthavy sank to a halt in front of him. She reached out cautiously, the medical scanner in her glove flashing red, and touched his cheek.

  The cyborg reacted so fast that Reuben barely saw the flash of movement before its cybernetic hand clasped Chanthavy’s throat and began to lift her.

  Reuben was already bounding towards them, leaping through the air with all the grace the Rigel Orbital Fleet had forced into him. He hit the ground just hard enough to thrust him forwards with the perfect momentum to slam into the cyborg, grabbing his shoulders to stop himself from bouncing back. All three of them went sailing backwards across the street, carried by the force of Reuben’s blow.

  They hit the opposite wall softly, but Reuben had his arm locked around the cyborg’s throat by then, wrenching his head back hard enough to hurt. He caught a glimpse of Chanthavy’s shocked face through the screen of her helmet, but then he brought his suited knee up hard. There were sexless cyborgs out there, but they were rare, and this one had looked all male.

  And if it was male, human or machine, a knee to the balls would distract it.

  The borg doubled up, releasing Chanthavy, and its foot caught the wall, pushing them both back into the street. By now Reuben was convinced that this borg had no military augmentations. Increased strength, sure, and greater physical resilience, but none of that mattered if you didn’t know how to use them.

  Reuben, on the other hand, had survived General Ahrima’s combat medic training. Came top of his class even, which made him the most dangerous doctor in the galaxy and a damn sight more lethal than many professional soldiers. So it didn’t take much to press the flailing cyborg down to the ground and hold him steady enough that Reuben could press his hand against the borg’s bare chest.

  “Sedate,” he told the suit and watched as the borg’s eyes widened and went hazy.

  Reuben held him there until he was convinced the borg was unconscious. Then he commed Chanthavy. “You all right, captain?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, and Reuben managed not to wince at her cool tone. His crewmates didn’t like to be reminded of his past. “What was he trying to say?”

  “Say?” Reuben repeated.

  “He was mouthing something. Didn’t you notice?”

  Reuben hadn’t, and he felt his heart quicken. He had been trying so hard to just be a doctor again, but it seemed like his good intentions hadn’t survived the first brush with violence. He took a moment to steady himself before saying, “I’d like to get him up to the ship. He’s the only survivor we’ve found, and even artificial flesh won’t stand the cold for much longer.”

  “Go ahead. But remember, Doctor, that the Sirius Conventions grant him the same rights to care as a genetic human.”

  “I know that!” Reuben snapped, his stomach clenching. Did she really think he, of all people, would disregard the law? Could a man ever escape his past? Biting back everything he wanted to say, he activated his connection to the ship. “Eskil, I need to bring a survivor on board.”

  “Someone lived through it?” Eskil demanded immediately. “Just one or are there—”

  “One,” Reuben said. “Cyborg, not military, showing signs of emotional distress, potentially violent. I need a blue room.”

  “Got one ready for you. In five, four, three…”

  Reuben closed his eyes so he didn’t have to watch the world go white as the transporter jerked them onto the Juniper. When he opened them, they were in one of the smaller sickbays. A blue force field separated it from the rest of the bay, and three gleaming robot aides were already moving forwards, hovering beside him to await orders.

  “Lift the patient onto the bed and commence scan,
” Reuben told them, relinquishing the cyborg and rising to his feet. He let the robots do their job as he stripped off his outer suit. He padded over to the bed, and tapped the wall to activate recording. “Commence log. This is Doctor Reuben Cooper, trauma surgeon, medical licence number 67249106, currently assigned to Medical Explorer Juniper, on the third circuit. We completed a tour of the Gamma Auriga Sector approximately thirty-six hours ago and entered hyperspace to transition to Caelestia for resupply and a rest period. On entering Caelestia space, we received a mayday message from the city. We advanced under shields and discovered the city was—”

  His voice caught. He could only be dispassionate for so long, and he had to fight back the sudden knot of fear, panic, and grief in his throat, swallowing hard. “On our arrival, the city appeared to have lost atmosphere and have reduced gravitational capacity. Our instruments indicated that there was no breathable air left in the city. There was no evidence that life pods or emergency shelters had been activated.”

  What the hell had happened down there? How had the entire city died so fast that no one could get away? There were supposed to be so many fail-safes built into the orbital platforms that they would maintain atmosphere under anything but a full military bombardment. Even then, sectors were supposed to seal off and maintain local conditions the moment there was an atmospheric breach elsewhere in the city.

  There wasn’t even a scorch mark on Caelestia.

  “Captain Som, Lieutenant Peake, and I proceeded to the city surface. As of fifteen hundred hours, we have located one survivor, currently under examination. We have explored approximately five point three percent of the city surface and confirmed five hundred forty-six fatalities.”

  They might find another cyborg, or just possibly someone with the kind of military augmentations that would let them survive outside a ship’s hull for a few hours.

  A beep from the robonurses pulled his attention back to the bed. The patient was naked, with the scan data gathering across the wall beside him. Reuben glanced at it, noting there was nothing scarlet enough to suggest critical danger and then tapped the contagion report to enlarge it.

  No known pathogens and, more importantly, no symptoms suggesting the presence of an unknown or forgotten infection. With a sigh of relief, Reuben broke the seal on his isolation suit, kicking it off. One of the robots picked it up with a scolding beep, but he was too busy drawing a proper breath to care. He had heard that city folk here in the peaceful prime cities, used to the parks and gardens of the orbital platforms, found ship air stale. After five hours in a sealed suit, nothing tasted quite so sweet to him.

  Rocking back on his heels, he considered the data before him: some minor scrapes and frost damage, especially around the meld points between skin and cybernetic components, a slight excess of nitrogen in the blood, already normalising, a dark spot on the brain scan. He brought that up and out to examine properly and gaped.

  It was a three-D rendering now he had enlarged it, the two halves of the skull folded back neatly to show the brain.

  There was nothing there. The rendering showed that the inside of the skull was coated with something that gleamed and glittered like jet, but there was nothing else material there, just flickers and pulses of light darting in a web across the empty space within. Down towards the base of the skull there was a patch where the crystals had gone dull and the lights were flickering in repeating patterns, looping round and round in an endless circle.

  He had never seen anything like it.

  “Eskil,” he said. “You near a wallscreen? I need a consult.”

  “Sure. Anything to turn my back on the death toll.”

  “Any more survivors?”

  “No.”

  “Damn. Sending you a brain projection. Any chance you can tell me what I’m looking at?”

  Eskil was their resident cybernetic expert. Reuben knew more about flesh than circuits.

  “Open up for me, baby,” Eskil murmured to himself. “Sorry, Coop. Screen up here is on the blink again. Now, let’s have a look— well, fuck me sideways with a hypercortex!”

  “Rather not,” Reuben said. “What’s that about?”

  “ID!” Eskil said, sounding suddenly shrill. “Have you got an ID yet?”

  “No. Is it dangerous?”

  “Not if— get the ID, man. Get it now.”

  Reuben reached up to tap the DNA scan data, activating the search function. “Waiting for the database. What’s your problem?”

  “You,” Eskil returned, but he clearly wasn’t trying. “Come on, you antique crapsack of technology. Talk to Eskil, darling.”

  “There are some things I don’t need to know about you and the computer,” Reuben said. Eskil’s reactions were making him nervous, and he rubbed his wrist, feeling the ridge of the tracking implant beneath the skin. He couldn’t afford to be involved in another disaster, not with his history.

  The database chimed softly, and the cyborg’s personal data appeared on the wall. From Eskil’s indrawn breath, he could see it too.

  Designated Name: Vairya

  Sentience category: Cyborg, TC4

  Citizen number: CL00000000001

  Place of manufacture: Terra

  Date of manufacture: -1 Galactic Era

  Specialist category: Archival unit

  Current employment: Gardener

  “A gardener?” Reuben said incredulously and then took in the data again. “From Old Earth?”

  “That’s Vairya.” Eskil sounded like he was on the verge of a religious experience. What was it about machine life that sent so many people off the edge of rationality?

  “No surname?”

  “He doesn’t need one. He’s a TC4. A real live TC4 in our sickbay.”

  “Why don’t you help us both out by assuming I have no idea what you’re talking about?”

  “T for Terran, C for Codex, 4 for the final generation.” Eskil spoke with the slow condescension Reuben had last heard from the Senate War Crimes Lawyer on Alpha Centauri, right before Reuben started to produce the evidence to support his statement. “Jogged your memory yet?”

  “Because Rigel has always been known for its expertise on artificial life, clearly,” Reuben pointed out and regretted it as soon as he heard Eskil draw breath. He had alienated the women within weeks of joining the Juniper, maybe because he wasn’t humble and contrite enough to satisfy their outrage, maybe because he couldn’t be bothered with all the social niceties they seemed to think were necessary. Eskil, on the other hand, was easy to talk to, mostly because he saw humans as a minor distraction from his true love. Reuben knew he mattered less than the ship in Eskil’s mind, but he’d be damned if he lost his last bit of tolerable human company.

  “Sorry,” he muttered reluctantly. “Forget I said that. What’s so special about a TC4, then?”

  “They were made on Old Earth,” Eskil said, and that note of awe was back in his voice. “Look at when he was made, Coop. They were the last Terran cyborgs ever made. His mind contains everything humanity ever knew: history, science, literature, music, art, everything. They thought humanity was doomed by then, and the TC4s were… well, humanity’s final record, the thing that would outlast us.”

  Humanity was doomed to repeat the same mistakes, Reuben knew, and they had never stopped chasing after immortality. And somewhere, somehow, surrounded by nanites who responded to every human whim, someone had expressed the wish that everything should be preserved, made as strong as diamonds, made to last forever, and uttered that command aloud, out of madness or carelessness or who knew what strange whim.

  And the nanites had. At first slowly and then at ever-increasing speed, everything on Earth had been transformed, carbon to carbon, flesh and earth and leaf, all changed into diamond. Some semblance of life had still flickered on, but all the subtleties of thought had faded as the relentless flood rolled over every living thing.

  The only desire left in the gleaming creatures which had once been human was to follow that first imp
erative, to preserve everything as they had been preserved.

  The last survivors of humanity had been those who had been off planet in those last desperate months: spacers, miners, crazy colonists in sleeper ships.

  And, as Eskil explained, a handful of cyborgs, sent hurtling off planet as the last scientists on Earth sealed the atmosphere behind them, trapping themselves and humanity’s doom together.

  “‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,’” Reuben said softly. Ahrima had quoted that little fragment of Old Earth at him countless times. It had been years before he searched out the whole poem and realised just how bitter the irony was.

  “What’s that?”

  “Something your borg here would know, if you’re right. How the hell did he end up as a gardener in Caelestia?”

  “The stories said he was dead. They’re fucking myths, Coop. Only thirty ever made, and less than twenty of those even made it off Earth. Humanity was fucked, or so everyone thought, and by the time the survivors started paying attention, half of the TC4s had vanished beyond human space. Those that were left— well, six of them suicided once they realised humanity was going to make it.”

  Reuben cast a worried glance towards his patient, who was still sleeping peacefully. He looked as young and innocent as an angel, one of the pure and wrathful type they had venerated on Rigel platform, maybe, but just as unsullied by life as those blazing creatures. Satisfied that his patient, this Vairya, wasn’t about to hurt himself, he asked, “Why?”

  “They used to programme pacifism into their cyborgs, back on the old planet,” Eskil said, sounding disapproving. “They couldn’t fight back, even to save themselves—”

  “Fucking hell.”

  “Yeah. The TC4s, on the other hand, could fight, seeing as they were humanity’s last hope, but they gave them an overdose of compassion, just to stop them from becoming monsters.”