Shakespeare: Ariel's song, The Tempest
Behrooz Wolf was four trillion kilometers from home, floating uncomfortably in free-fall in the territory of people who hated him, surrounded by a silence so total that it hurt his ears. In that environment, the familiar technology of form-change was his lifeline.
Sylvia had led him to a chamber containing four change tanks. Two of them were empty. The others contained the bodies of two dead farmers. At Wolfs request, they had been left untouched by their fellows until he arrived at the farm. He and Sylvia went at once to the transparent ports and peered in.
She took one look and turned away. Bey heard the sound of retching. He ignored it. He had seen too many illegal and unsuccessful form-change experiments to allow them to affect his stomach. He had work to do.
He rotated the two bodies using remote-handling equipment and examined their anomalies with the tank's internal sensors. Both had originally been male, and according to the tanks' settings both had been using the same program. The intended end point was a form with thickened epidermis, lowered metabolic rate, and eyes protected by translucent nictitating membranes. The men had been preparing for an extended mission outside, away from the farm's main bubble. According to Sylvia, such missions were absolutely routine, and the form-change program that went with them had been used a thousand times.
Bey would not take her word for it. He intended to go over that program instruction by instruction. But first he wanted to localize the problem area, and the only evidence for that was the end products in the tanks.
He studied the two corpses. Both men had experienced significant mass reduction—not called for by the program. The limbs had atrophied to stumps, and each torso had curled forward to leave the overgrown head close to the swollen abdomen. Death had come when cramped and shrunken lungs would no longer permit breathing.
"Did you ever see forms like that before?" Sylvia asked softly. She had herself under control and was hovering just behind him.
He shook his head but did not speak. It would take a long time to explain that the final form was close to irrelevant. His diagnosis of program malfunctions was based on more subtle pointers: the presence of hypertrophied fingernails and toenails on the flipperlike appendages, the disappearance of eyelids, the milky, pearl-like luster of the membrane-covered eyes, the severe scoliosis of the spinal column. To someone familiar with form-change, they were signposts pointing to certain sections of program code.
Bey began to call program sections for review. His task was in principle very simple. The BEC computers used in purposive form-change converted a human's intended form to a series of biofeedback commands that the brain would employ to direct change at the cellular level. Human and computer, working interactively, remolded the body until the intended form and actual form were identical, and then the process ended. The chemical and physiological changes were continuously monitored, and any malfunction would halt the process and set emergency flags. The process could fail catastrophically in two ways: if the human in the tank did not wish to live, or if there were a major software problem.
Bey could rule out the idea of suicide—it always resulted in death without any physical change except biological aging. That seemed to leave nothing but software failure, but he could see one other complication: the equipment had not been provided by BEC. It was a hardware clone, and the programs that went with it were pirated versions. There could be hardware/software mismatches, something that only BEC guaranteed against. His job with this setup would be ten times as hard.
He began to examine a new section of code. Behind him, he was vaguely aware that Sylvia was leaving the room. That was a relief. She could not help, and she was a potential distraction.
Line by line he followed the
Casey Treat
Garrison Keillor
William Kuhn
Griff Hosker
Bella Love-Wins
Amish Tripathi
Andrew McGahan
Sharon Lee
Robert Weverka
Jean Ure