Dust to Dust

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. I heard two, actually. My own, and specialist Dawson’s. Dawson’s my navcon and biz partner. Or was. I don’t know what she is now.

She was out on the forward mast upgrading the hypes when they came. I’m pretty sure we were their first in-system contacts. I don’t know. Reports are still sketchy. But she saw them first; all over her. Said she had dust out there. Dust on everything.

That’s their topicals. The dust. Kind of a pollen analog. Produced by some post-singularity interstellar AI. They say they send them out to get triggered by carbon life forms (us). They want our info. All of it, everywhere. They’re silicon/carbon hybrids. Not bio silicon. Silicon as in chips, digital. Semiconductors.

And not just silicon. Gallium, tritium exotics, all sorts of stuff. Stuff we don’t even know. Only we can’t figure out if the semiconductors are quantum or if it interfaces with more involved subatomics. Whatever, they’re way ahead of anything we can theorize, much less manufacture. I don’t know what their end game is, I don’t know that anybody does. But, it’s not looking good for us organics. Anyway, back to the screams.

They say it hurts when they finally get to you. I don’t know that either. But by the sound of Dawson’s early reactions, I’d bet my tits it does. Something fierce. She didn’t know what the dust was, at first. Honestly, I didn’t either. I mean, sure, we’d heard all the fuss from the Tau Ceti folks, but that was another star system 11 light years away. And only two ships reported contact in as many years. Turns out, we were the first known non-Tau Ceti contact. Who knew? Welcome to the Solar System.

I was monitoring her life support and vitals from the bridge, and tweaking the hype as needed when she first commented on the dust. It was only when it began clumping on her suit that I started putting two and two together. But then she started screaming.

I know, that’s not a vacuum. That’s her comm link. Be patient. We’re getting to that. So, she started screaming. Not really from pain, at first. More like realization of what it was. And when I heard her first go off, I snapped on what it probably was myself. Told her to head for the forward emergency lock and cycle in, but she never made it. She hadn’t even uncoupled her work tether before she started screaming for real.

I was already in a suit (as per protocol) so I launched for the main lock, grabbed a helmet, and cycled out. Okay, stupid move, but what would you have done? Left her out there? She was still on her work tether, for Crissake.

So, fuck yes, I cycled out. And the first thing I heard on the suit comms was her screaming ‘don’t come out’ (between soul shattering, sobbing gales of regular screams). And there I am. Out. I looked up at the mast where she’s clinging like it was life itself, surrounded in a thick cloud of nano, with a few of those hand-sized wetware modules forming up in the soup. They had her already. Then I noticed the dust began to appear on my suit, as well. Shit. Decision time.

So, I started hyperventilating. I reeled myself just back inside the outer hatch, sealed it, filled the lock with air, hard-locked my reel, popped the neck seal on my helmet, and held it at arm’s length. Then I blew the outer hatch.

And that’s when I heard my first scream in a vacuum as all my air escaped my lungs. I sounded like blubbering old lady. So glad I was the only one that could hear that, my comm mic having been blasted out the lock with my helmet.

I stifled the scream about half way through to hold in as much air pressure against the vacuum as I could to minimize embolisms and broke the waist seal of my suit. Most of the dust had blown out with the lock’s air volume, but not all of it. It took me about 30 seconds to shed the suit, decouple the reel, toss them out and close the hatch.

And, that’s when I heard my second scream in space. The lock was in full vacuum. I had an ankle and an arm hooked around the hatch brace and, in pulling it closed, I pressed my head against the hatch stantion. And there she was in my head, just a bit louder than the ship’s air handlers, muffled and and bassy, stripped of all treble.

Dawson’s unabated, bone-chilling screams sounded like they were coming from inside of me. She must have had her helmet still pressed against the forward mast. The whole ship was singing with it. That was some tough shit to hear. Fortunately I was too busy to dwell on it.

I keyed in flood fill code and had air back in the lock before I passed out. In other circumstances I would have been all jazz hands about my emergency protocol chops, but if what I thought was true, the clock was so still ticking. I donned the spare suit, helmet and all, just in case. Reports from Tau Ceti were pretty ugly with regard to fully incorporated ‘Phants (short for Sycophants, which is euphemistic for Dustbots). Dawson might already be one of them.

Rumor had it that, inside of 30 mins, Dawson would become extremely dangerous and hell bent to make everyone else equally so. Reports were slim but unequivocal on that account. So, I had very little time to act before I would be, well… outclassed. And, I still had some dust on me, so I was being processed, as well.

Rumor also had it that there were three things seemed to thwart the Dust and its modules. I forgot what one of them was, but the other two were prolonged heat above the melting point of aluminum and strong magnetic fields. I was betting hard on the fields.

We’re a prospecting ship. Among other things, we find iron in asteroids. In the process we sometimes gave asteroids a magnetic field to test for ferric content. The field effect generator (FEG) was in an external bay at the base of the ship, but I needed to get its umbilicals from storage first, and I had maybe 15 minutes to do it before Dawson converted.

The umbilical was an uber-conductor, but still pretty heavy. I got two, eight meter lengths and 10 bungees, clipped them to my webbing and shoved for the lock again. Got the cables hung up in the aft Pway, but still made it back to the lock inside of a minute and change. I cycled out, clipped in mid-ship and headed aft for the FEG (couldn’t let myself even look at Dawson. Too scared what I’d see).

I popped the FEG from its berth and edged it free of the ship. The FEG was truly massive, but all I had to do was get it moving towards Dawson and go ahead and get things ready for when it got there. I tried to raise Dawson but she was quiet by then, with only labored breathing coming through the suit comms. I jacked in the first umbilical into the FEG’s power port, hooked the second cable to the first, and started uncoiling them towards Dawson. When I got to her, we were both pretty much covered in Dust, with clumps forming over most of my major acupuncture points. (How the hell they knew where those were was just another of about a million Dust-born mind-blowers.)

Anyway, first thing I did was disrupt her clump points. Had no idea if that would slow them down or not, but it turned out so easy to do, that I went ahead and spent a few seconds hitting the dozen biggest piles, grateful that it didn’t start any more screaming from Dawson.

By the time the FEG drifted up I had the umbilical and bungees ready to go. And I was also breached right about that time. Very unsettling. I was screaming for real, by the time I got the FEG lashed down and powered up. I was barely able to key in the field levels and startup sequence before the pain overwhelmed me, but I got it done. (Jazz hands all around, right?)

Bang! Talk about feeling good. The instant the mag field came up the whole swarm dissolved. Theory is, the nano swarm’s communication is disrupted by the mag field. They can’t organize any more of their swarms into circuitry or interfaces and you only have to deal with what they’ve installed in you (or your lover) to that point. When the mag field hit, I went back to “normal.” Dawson? Not so much.

I looked through her face-plate and it was not pretty. Gold nodes on the edges of her eyes, with dark bronze traces heading back along the temples. One on the corner of her mouth, with traces into her nose and back to her ears. But her eyes were open and kind of fiery.

Okay, they’re always fiery, but seemed like more so now. I asked her if she could hear me. I could tell she could hear the sound, but she said nothing, just quivered a little. I asked her to blink once if she could hear me, and she did. Jazz hand for fucking real! She was in there! My Callie was alive!

Deal was, once the Dust processed you to a certain point, the reports said that you were gone. Forever. Your body was alive but you were an agent of the Dust. No communication, no cooperation, just hell bent Dustbot, AI ‘Phant and nothing else. But Callie was not entirely bent. There was hope!

First thing I did was kill the mag field, reverse the FEG to point at the hull, and turn it back on. The ship was mostly light metals, carbon fibers and composites, but there was enough iron in her to propagate a decent mag field. Because, to the Dust, the ship was just a big spacesuit and they’d start on her next. So, I hustled us back into the ship where we could figure this thing out.

I got us through the lock and out of our suits. Dawson was stiff and unresponsive, almost like she was having a seizure. I got her to the surgical bay and strapped into the remote’s table and started to crank the Hypercom up and call Ares station for a surgeon to log onto our remote and try to debride some of the Dust tech from her, but there were no comms.

I tried to get Dawson to talk to me. I needed to know how far she’d gotten with the upgrade. I was repeating to her how I needed to get the Hypercom up to get a surgeon on the remote for her but she kept shaking her head. I thought it was just the Dust at first but she began to try to say things. Mostly “no,” and “fuckers.” Soon she made it clear that she didn’t want the Dust tech removed. She wanted to fight “them.” She wanted to own them. She wanted to turn the tables on the bitches.

Now, Dawson’s not your average woman. She’s not even your average lesbian. She is your average gladiator. I mean sure, we’re both willful CIS gendered spacers, who don’t take shit from anybody, anywhere (outside of certain economic realities dealing with corporate and the mineral market, but you know what I mean).

But beyond that, we’re opposites. I’m black, she’s white. I’m a people person, she’s a total geek. I’m stubborn, she’s absolutely intractable. I mean, once she gets something set in her mind, that’s it. She never lets go. Period.

She fought for two standard days just to hold her own. She could barely get three words out in as many minutes, she was so heavily besiege by the Dust tech. But she would not let me do anything to her, but put her on med life support. So I set the remote’s automatics to insert a feeding tube, catheter, and evacuater and monitor her as a coma victim and waited it out.

The remote showed her popping back and forth from sleeps cycles so short she’d only spend 60 seconds in delta, a few minutes in theta and 5 minutes REM sleep at a time, but she’d get some actual sleep about once an hour. All her vitals, while somewhat elevated were within fairly healthy specs the whole time. But, man, was she struggling.

On the third day, she sat up, wild eyed and victorious, growling, “I got ‘em! I got ‘em!” over and over. I’ll tell you what, I didn’t care what she said and long as it was my Callie saying it. And it was. It was pure Callie cranked up to 11.

She spent the next 5 days, downloading tech from the Net dealing with the current state of neural networking systems. Then she locked herself in the quarantine closet with a bunch of lab equipment and began running experiments on her Dust tech. Then she really blew my mind.

She wanted to infect me with the Dust.