Elder Race(4)

That initiative put me out here, on Sophos 4. There was a team of us, although I actually have to query the database before the names and faces of my colleagues come back to me. They left. Things were going wrong at home and I volunteered to hold the fort here, for the love of anthropology, while they headed back. It was only supposed to be a stopgap measure. But the gap grew and grew, and I had to sleep more and more to stop myself growing old in my study here.

I may also have breached various non-contamination regulations, in respect of the locals here, but then the outpost itself, while remote, isn’t exactly invisible, and they came calling. And I was curious, and I was lonely, and there was nobody around to tell me to keep the rules.

I check the maintenance logs next. The outpost system self-repair is within tolerance. The suspension system itself has the most wear, and at first I assume that’s why I’ve been woken: so it can tune up the facilities that are keeping me alive. By now my body is working and I can sit up. I am still very cold, and the outpost has a heated robe and slippers for me, fabricated and disposable, inlaid with arabesques of circuitry in fine gold against the uniform slate grey of the Explorer Corps.

The system pings me to let me know it is expecting a decision on something. I have managed to overlook the actual thing it needed me for, typically. A terribly bleak wave of depression hits me, and I can’t see what the point of any of this is. Almost three hundred Earth years; I have been cut off from home for that long, and I don’t even know why. No word, no visit, not the least transmission. The distance between stars is vast, but not enough to account for so long a silence.

I get a prompt about using my Dissociative Cognition System. It takes considerable effort to make even that decision, but I manage to give my systems the OK and immediately I can step back from the crushing burden of misery, cut off from certain aspects of my own biochemistry so that I can function and make rational decisions. It was an essential mod, for someone who was going to be on their own for long periods of time without any social contact. My emotions are still out there, and I can get fascinating readouts about what that locked-away part of me is actually feeling, good, indifferent, bad, worse, but it doesn’t touch me unless I choose to open the door again. It’s a fine line, I suspect, between useful logic and that pathological numbness that true depression can often lead to, where doing or wanting anything seems like climbing uphill. The DCS is well designed, though, and for now my reason is steady and engaged and the churn of my feelings prowls about its cage and lashes its tail. I set timers and reminders to let it stretch its legs later, when the worst will, I hope, have ebbed, when I can afford to indulge it.

“Report, then.”

“I have admitted visitors from the subject population.”

That seems like a profound flaw in outpost security, not to mention all the procedures designed to avoid non-contamination of the locals, but the outpost reminds me that this is all based on my past orders, which it is powerless to disobey. Do I sense a tone of reproach? I wouldn’t be surprised.

But, yes, I did tell it that. One of my many lapses of judgment. Be alone enough, let your emotions out of the box enough, you’re going to make some poor calls. And if the Corps would just come back for me, I’d take the rapped knuckles. But they haven’t. Which, after that much time, very likely means that they won’t. Ever.

I hear the great hollow vacancy where my depression should be, if it wasn’t locked away. These are the thoughts that lead me down dark paths. I need to find something positive to think about, and apparently there are some locals who’ve come up the mountain. Perhaps they’ve brought offerings or gifts. Perhaps they’re going to try to kill me or something. They are barbarous creatures after all. It will, in any event, be a diversion.

Before descending to the base of the outpost to meet with them, I check over the security diagnostics: more than equal to any attempt to harm me using known local technology. Of course, some of my involvement with the locals has revolved around when they got hold of old colonial-era tech, much of which remains buried about the planet wherever the original pioneers left it. The locals themselves maintain a post-tech society, but the old tech rates highly for ease-of-use, and historically those who uncover working remnants are not slow in finding ways to use perfectly innocent tools as weapons.

If these visitors have something like that, then the outpost systems may have to work a little harder to protect me. I examine how I feel about that. I feel nothing about it, which is precisely the downside with relying on DCS routines to shield me from my emotional responses. Theoretically I should be making better judgment calls without my animal half tugging me around in its teeth, but that same animal half is responsible for giving me my priorities. Right now I can make the decision, entirely rationally, that if the savages kill me with salvaged old Earth tech, that’s just a thing that will have happened.

Descending in the elevator, I am very aware of all the sad I am not feeling, how lonely and lost I don’t care that I am, and how trivial it is that I am utterly cut off from the civilization that gave rise to me, and anyone who might know or care who Nyr Illim Tevitch is. Yes, all these things are inconsequential and I don’t have to feel them. I just peek into their cage and watch them looking up at me hungrily, waiting to be fed.

And then I am striding out into the base of the outpost, ready to confront the barbarian horde. But there are only two of them, two women. One of them is familiar. I stop, because I am getting a great deal of information from my locked-off emotional state, which has had a change of heart. Positive things. It hardly seems likely, but apparently I’m feeling good about something.