The War of the Sky Lords

by John Brosnan

Genres: Humor & Satire; Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

When the Sky Angel, a pristine giant airship full of Old Science technolgy, is called down to earth, it threatens the dominance of the Sky Lords over the helpless land dwellers.

Release date: June 1, 1992

Publisher: St Martins Pr

Print pages: 192

Sample

There came a muffled but powerful scraping sound from the outer hull. Something—something big—was attempting to penetrate the habitat. Ryn wondered what it was. A squid? Or a particularly large sea worm? The sound got louder and Ryn frowned. The Eloi sitting in front of him, however, ignored it. The Eloi wore the inevitable dreamy grin, its wide brown eyes content and inward-looking. It was sitting squat-legged on a cushion and was naked. Though used to seeing the Eloi unclothed Ryn’s gaze kept falling to its smooth and seamless crotch. Not for the first time he envied the Elois their sexless state. Today the feeling was particularly strong.

The scraping sound came again. Ryn was sure now it was a squid. He could picture its hard, chitinous beak trying in vain to get a purchase on the outer hull. He was tempted to go outside in the Toy and kill the creature but he wanted to keep talking to the Eloi while he had the chance. It was so rare that he could grab the attention of any of them for more than a short span of time.

“Pel,” he continued, “if you keep me here for much longer I’m going to go crazy. I’m twenty years old. That means I have a good chance of living for, at least, another one hundred and eighty years. I’m not going to last another two weeks in here, much less that long.”

The Eloi called Pel tried to give Ryn a sad look but failed miserably. It couldn’t conceal its continual sense of well-being and amused contentment. None of the Eloi could. Pel said, in its whispery voice, “You know you are not confined here within the habitat. You have the Toy. It gives you the freedom to range through the depths, to fly, to convey you to the mainland where you can trek about all you want. …”

“Where there is nothing but snow, ice, more snow, penguins and a lot of ancient mining works. I need to go where there are other people. People like me!”

“Both we and your teaching programs have told you what lies in the world beyond. Since the Gene Wars it has become a terrible, dangerous place. You’re much safer here, Ryn. …’ Pel’s voice died away. Its attention had been caught by one of the mobiles hanging from the low ceiling. Pel smiled happily at it.

Ryn knew he was losing it. He raised his voice. “I’m willing to take the risk! I don’t belong here, Pel! You and the rest of the Eloi know that. I need to be with people of my own kind. To be with women of my own kind!” There, he had returned to the usual subject, as he knew he would.

Pel stared at the mobile for a while longer then returned its gaze to him. “We understand your urges, Ryn, and we pity you for them. We wish we could modify you but the Ethical Program forbids it, as you know.”

“Pity?” sneered Ryn. “You Eloi don’t feel pity or any other emotion for any other living thing except for yourselves, and you know that.”

Pel gave a slight shrug of its thin, childish shoulders and smiled at him. Ryn wanted to hit it but knew it would be a waste of time. He had punched Eloi twice before and though he’d been reprimanded and punished by the Ethical Program the Eloi hadn’t cared less. You can’t hurt, or cause distress to, beings who are incapable of feeling either pain or distress.

He forced himself to calm down. “Just let me go, Pel. Give me my freedom.”

“You know we can’t. We can’t take the risk.”

Another Eloi entered the room. This one was wearing the customary tunic. It sat down beside Pel, an identical twin. Unless it identified itself to Ryn he would have no idea which Eloi it was. It smiled lazily at him and leaned its head on Pel’s shoulder. “He looks unhappy,” it said, referring to Ryn.

“Yes, he is unhappy,” said Ryn sarcastically. “He wants, very badly, to leave this underwater retirement home for neutered lotus-eaters.”

The two Eloi regarded him blandly. Pel said, “The existence of this habitat has long been forgotten by what remains of the outside world. If we gave you your freedom you would inevitably pass on what you know about us and Shangri La.”

“I swear I wouldn’t,” said Ryn.

“Not willingly, perhaps, but if you fell into the hands of a Sky Lord, well … unpleasant methods. …” The Eloi’s voice died away as it apparently tried to remember what ‘unpleasant’ actually meant. “Yes, unpleasant methods,” Pel continued dreamily, “would be used to extract information from you about your origins.”

“I’d have the Toy. Any Sky Lord I encountered would be at my mercy.”

“Machines can fail,” said the other Eloi, giving a little yawn. “And then you’d be helpless.”

Ryn felt the familiar frustration sweep through him. Trying to talk to the Eloi always induced it. It was easier talking to the programs even though he knew that the apparent humanity of the programs, and their projections, was totally false. It was the knowledge that the Eloi, though separated from him by the huge emotional gulf of their own making, were still human beings that made his failure to get through to them so frustrating. “I’m lonely!” he cried at the two Eloi.

They regarded him in their infuriating, bland manner. Then Pel said, “You have your holo-companions, your movies, your books. …”

“I’m tired of talking to the electronic phantoms of people who never even existed; I’ve read every book in the tape library again and again and I know every movie by heart. I even know every frame of those old two-dimensional movies.” One of the original scientists at the habitat had obviously been a keen student of the cinema of the twentieth and early twenty-first century and had brought a number of films from that period with him on tape. Actually, Ryn was rather fond of many of them—his favourite being The Adventures of Robin Hood from 1938—but he would exchange even that for a chance to travel out to the wide world beyond. “The fact is that I’m going to go mad if I remain trapped here in Antarctica for much longer.”.

But the two Eloi weren’t listening any more. They were sitting with their heads touching; their eyes were open but they weren’t seeing anything—they had retreated back into their perpetual nirvana. Ryn swore under his breath, jumped to his feet and strode angrily out of the room. If there had been a door he would have slammed it. He took an elevator down to the habitat’s bottom level. A servo-mech scurried, spider-like, out of his way as he hurried out of the elevator and headed down the corridor that led to the dock containing the Toy.

The Toy was thirty feet of dull, grey metal in the shape of a stretched teardrop. Ryn went to the hatch that was set halfway down the Toy’s length and gave the single command word that opened the hatch. He crawled inside. The inner door was already dilating to admit him to the control pod. As he settled into the couch he felt the familiar feeling of security—the security of the womb he had never known.

He gave the necessary orders and water began to flood into the dock. He felt the Toy float free of its cradle. When the pressure in the dock was equal to that outside the inner and outer hatches opened. The Toy moved forward, passing first through the pressure hull and then the habitat’s outer hull.

The water beyond was totally black. Ryn peered at the acoustic screen, searching for the creature he had heard attacking the hull earlier. The screen translated the signals from the acoustic scanners into visual images but though there were a number of sea creatures in the area there was no sign of anything large enough to have been the source of that noise.

Ryn said, “Do a circuit of the habitat. Slowly.”

“Yes, Ryn,” answered the Toy’s program. It had a woman’s voice. Soft, seductive but also designed to sound reassuring to Ryn. As the Toy crept around the vast, spherical mass of the habitat Ryn alternated his gaze between the acoustic screen and the visual ones. Despite the powerful lights on the hull the latter revealed little, the beams penetrating only about forty feet in any direction. He was beginning to think that the object of his hunt had indeed departed from the vicinity when the acoustic screen displayed something approaching fast from the rear. Then the Toy gave a violent shudder as a heavy body collided with it. Ryn bounced within the restraints of the couch’s straps then laughed. “I’ll take over,” he told the Toy. He took a small, plastic plug from the instrument console. “I don’t advise it,” the Toy replied. Ryn ignored it and inserted the plug into an opening just behind his right ear. By doing so he jacked himself directly into the controls. Instantly his sensory network exploded out from the interior of the Toy and he became the Toy. …

He could feel the pressure of the tentacles around his hull. There was no pain; the Toy’s sensors were too crude to convey anything but a sense of pressure and the roughness of the barbs that lined the inner sides of the squid’s two long seizing tentacles. The squid itself was huge, its body even longer than that of the Toy. One of Ryn’s cameras was pointing directly into one of the squid’s great eyes. It was over three feet in diameter and caused a feeling of cold dread in the pit of Ryn’s stomach. It was like staring into the eye of an angry god. …

Ryn shook off this feeling of frightened awe and let his usual loathing for these creatures dominate him. As the squid’s beak closed ineffectually on the Toy’s hull he directed one of the water jets at the closest part of the squid’s huge but soft body. He raised the temperature of the jet of water to one hundred and ninety degrees. The squid released the Toy immediately and retreated, releasing a cloud of ink as it did so. Ryn followed. The growing cloud of ink couldn’t hide the panicked squid from his acoustic scanner. Ryn fed a small shell into one of his forward underwater projectile tubes. There was an explosion of gas. The shell hurtled through the water. Ryn waited until the shell had penetrated deep into the giant squid’s mantle then sent the signal to detonate. The squid exploded. The acoustic scanner showed fragments of its body and tentacles swirling outwards through the inky cloud. The tentacles continued to move convulsively.

Suddenly sickened, Ryn removed the plug from his neck. Once again he was back inside the comforting womb of the control pod. “Take us up to the surface,” he told the Toy. Obediently, the craft ascended until it was only fifty feet below the irregular underside of the ice shelf, then it sped through the water for several miles until it reached the first patch of open sea. With a blast of its water jets the Toy sent itself exploding out of the water. Instantly the electromagnetic aerial propulsion system took over. With a deep thrumming sound the Toy rose to a height of a thousand feet then levelled out. “Where to?” it asked Ryn.

“Just go straight ahead,” he said, gesturing at the distant horizon. “At full speed.”

He was gently pushed back into his couch as the Toy accelerated. Soon the craft was travelling at 2,500 miles per hour. Ryn watched the sea rush by beneath him, enjoying the sensation of speed. Then, inevitably, the Toy said, “We are approaching the limit of our permitted range, Ryn. I will be changing course in thirty seconds.”

“Keep going,” he told it, even though he knew it was futile.

“I cannot ignore the directives, sir. You know that. Changing course … now.”

The Toy began a gradual turn. Ryn clenched his fists as hot tears filled his eyes. It was always the same but he kept trying, like a fly beating its head against an invisible pane of glass.

“Where to now, Ryn?” asked the Toy in a sympathetic tone.

“I don’t care. Anywhere.” Ryn stared vacantly at the screens for a time as the Toy flew on, and then said, “No, I want to submerge. Find me something to kill. …”

During the next few hours Ryn used the Toy to destroy seven more squid, though none were as large as the first one he’d killed. The giant squid had long been commonplace in the waters around Antarctica. According to his natural history program the species was called Architeuthis and preferred to dwell in cold water because the giant squid’s blood was inefficient at carrying blood in warm temperatures. But other, smaller, new squid species were becoming prevalent in the Arctic area as well, together with sea worms and various other destructive side-products of the Gene Wars. The local food chain was quickly being depleted and Ryn wondered what would happen when it was exhausted completely.

Tiring of his one-sided sport, Ryn ordered the Toy to return to the habitat. After docking, Ryn went straight to his quarters, stripped off his one-piece suit and had a long shower. Whenever he went on one of his squid-killing sprees he came back with the powerful sensation of being covered in slime. …

After the shower he put on a robe and went into the sitting room. He sank down on to a large, circular cushion and said, “I want to see Davin.”

“Of course,” said a disembodied voice. A man instantly appeared in front of Ryn. He seemed to be in his midthirties, had a black beard flecked with white and was dressed in a long black robe. He grinned at Ryn. “How are you today, lad?” he asked.

“Same as usual,” said Ryn listlessly. “I need to talk.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” said Davin. He indicated a nearby chair. “May I?”

Ryn nodded, playing along with the charade. Being nothing but a projection Davin had no need of seats. “So what’s the problem?” Davin asked as he ‘sat’ down.

Ryn told him of his futile conversation with the Eloi. When he’d finished Davin sighed and said, “Are you really so surprised at the outcome? You have had similar arguments with the Eloi in the past. Why did you think they might have changed?”

“It’s not them but me. I’ve changed. I’m older now. And I’m close to breaking point.”

“Ryn, even if you could convince the Eloi to let you go the Central Program would never allow it.”

“But the Eloi have the power to alter the Central Program,” said Ryn.

“In theory, yes, but they have for so long put their lives so completely into the hands of the Central Program they would dismiss any idea of changing it at this stage, even if they could remember how.”

Ryn swore and said, “But it’s all so stupid. There’s no reason to keep me here. We don’t even know if there are any Sky Lords left! It’s certainly been over a hundred years since a Sky Lord was detected passing over Antarctica. Maybe everyone’s been wiped out by the plagues. We don’t know what’s out there any more, and that’s another reason why I should go and have a look.”

“Ryn, you know they won’t take the chance.”

“If they don’t let me go I’m likely to do something they’ll regret.”

“Are you talking about killing yourself?”

“Yes,” admitted Ryn, though in reality he was far from being that desperate.

Davin smiled gently at him. “It wouldn’t be very wise of you, would it? Besides, you know the Eloi. You’re expecting a lot if you think they’d regret your passing for a moment. Regret is no longer in their vocabulary of emotions.”

Ryn sighed. “I know … I know. …” Once again he was struck by the absurdity of discussing emotional problems with a machine. When he was young he believed completely in the apparent humanity of the projections, despite their lack of substance. Davin in particular, with his compassion, his sympathy and his wisdom, seemed totally human to Ryn, and a perfect father figure. It was only when he reached his early teens that Ryn began to get the feeling that something was not quite right with the projections. He couldn’t pinpoint the cause of these misgivings; in retrospect he presumed that his younger self had unconsciously picked up certain repetitions in their response. He had asked Davin why he felt this way about him and the other projections but Davin had fobbed him off with some mumbo jumbo about his entering puberty and its effects on his emotions.

It was when he turned fifteen that he learned the truth. One day, without a warning, an entirely new projection manifested itself in his study. It was in the shape of an austere young woman dressed in a long grey robe. Her fair hair was pulled back tightly into a bun which accentuated the severity of her face with its high, almost cruel, cheek bones. She introduced herself as Phebus and told him he was of the age where certain truths could be revealed to him. She was to teach him about computers and the nature of machine intelligence. …

He had grown up with the deliberately implanted impression that the projections were the recorded personalities, and images, of real people who had lived long ago. That wasn’t true. All the projections, including her, were artificial creations generated by computers. Though the computers possessed ‘intelligence’ it wasn’t human intelligence. Thus all the humanlike behaviour of the projections—the apparent empathy, the jokes, the compassion and so on—were all simulated. What the machine intelligences did was mimic human personalities.

Ryn had been shocked at this revelation but not too surprised. He had obviously suspected the truth on a subconscious level. Phebus went on to explain that it had been thought necessary to carry out the deception for the good of his psychological welfare while growing up, seeing as he couldn’t have any kind of emotional relationship with the Eloi. However, he was now considered adult enough to cope with the truth. Also it was important for him to have a thorough working knowledge of computers and machine intelligence.

Five years later and he did know a lot about computer technology but the nature of machine intelligence itself was still beyond his comprehension. As far as he could tell the programs were conscious but their perception of reality differed radically from that of humans. Though the systems themselves contained much organic material—biochips—it was all synthetic and they had nothing in common with the evolved organic life forms. They had no emotions; no natural organic drives common to all the higher species—they lacked even the basic survival drive. Nor did they possess even a semblance of free will. They were totally controlled by the commands that had been etched into their very beings: the commands that made them mimic humanity almost to perfection.

When he talked to them now he often wondered what really was going on within the programs themselves. When Davin laughed at one of his jokes was there somewhere a bleak and despairing centre of consciousness that wished only to be free of its built-in commands so that it could end its tortured existence and embrace a welcoming oblivion? By what right, wondered Ryn, had scientists created sentient machines in the first place?

Such thoughts passed through his mind yet again as he listened to Davin telling him to be patient and maybe one day the Eloi and the Central Program would relax their restrictions on his movements. Ryn sighed. He had heard that many times before. “Davin,” he said suddenly. “Are you happy?”

Davin smiled. “You know what I am. ‘Happiness’ is a meaningless term to me, fundamentally speaking. But in one sense I am ‘happy’ to serve you, Ryn, because that is what I am programmed to do.”

“Yes, of course you are,” said Ryn, dissatisfied with the answer. As always. He waved a hand. “You can go, Davin.” Back to wherever it is that you do go. …

Davin stood, bowed his head and said, “I hope I was able to help you, Ryn. Goodbye. Until next time. …” Then he vanished.

Ryn stared at the blank wall for a time then said, almost reluctantly, “Bring Lisa.”

“Yes, Ryn,” said the disembodied voice. It was the voice of the Central Program.

A girl appeared. She was dressed in a rainbow-coloured, striped trouser suit that had been in fashion over four hundred and fifty years ago. She had fair hair and her lips were painted blue to match her eyes. She smiled in Ryn’s general direction and said brightly, “Hi, my name is Lisa and I’m here to please ya!” Then she began to slowly unseal her jacket. …

Another new development that had followed his fifteenth birthday—the availability of erotic programs. Five of them. Unlike the other programs these were old and primitive and Ryn was sure that nothing approaching consciousness lurked at their cores. Though they were capable of adaptability they were little more than straight recordings. Ryn often wondered who among the Eloi had owned these programs way back when they were ordinary people.

Ryn watched the girl undress then, with a sigh, opened his robe. He told her to come closer. She did and then reached out an insubstantial hand towards him. …

When things had reached their usual unsatisfactory conclusion he told the girl to go then asked the Central Program to screen him The Adventures of Robin Hood again.

A week later. The Toy was skimming over the water at a height of only twenty feet. Ryn’s feeling of frustration had ebbed; now he just felt depressed and apathetic. It took him time to register the Toy’s warning. “What?” he said, rousing himself. “Repeat that.”

“I said I advise a change of course. There are intruder aircraft ahead of us.”

A jolt of excitement went through him. He leaned forward, peering at the radar screen. Five large objects, strung out in a long line, were clearly visible on the screen. They were less than ten miles away. “Cut speed and give me a visual,. . .