The Belter's Story (BRIGAND) Read Free Page A

with the weight of him and my shoulder blades sprayed agony down my back, I carried him the whole way. His once joyful form was cold, stiff and blue by the time I stumbled home.
    Sardar bowed his head and said something that I didn’t understand. Madera sat and folded her arms over her face. The whole community acknowledged his loss. We mourned. He was reclaimed. We went back into the ice. And that was the end of my twin brother Jase.
    Except it wasn't.
    I'd been spending most of my time in isolation and nobody seemed inclined to interfere.  Su never left my side. I sat silent for days as she muttered and whirred around me. On the third night I finally snapped. The shock of my brother's death had given way to anger — at myself, at everything. Like an arc seeking ground, my rage flew at Su. I grabbed my cutter, determined to chop her into radioactive rubble, but she skittered back from my grasp, hovering at eye level.
    And then she spoke.
    Crom, It’s Jase. It’s us.
    I dropped the cutter, raising my hands to my ears in a reflexive reaction.
    Crom, don’t do it. We're in here. We don't know how, but we are.
    Every Belter had heard about this — about miners going insane and conversing with their bots way down in the deep, but this was different. This wasn’t Su.
    It was Jase. Or at least it sounded like him.
    I rubbed my eyes and drew my hands down over my face. This wasn’t how the experiment, my experiment, with Su was supposed to go. "No, no, no, no." I mumbled. There was something about the europine. And the bots. Some kind of connection. Awareness maybe. Communication. But not this.
    Jase/Su answered in Jase's voice, Yes, it worked. You never told, but we understand now — a little. You knew Su saw something in the rocks. The colors. You wanted her to pull them apart. To show you what they are. You thought the diggers were eating… no that's not right… taking from them. You were close, but you didn't see the rest. The diggers. They're… we don't have the words. The body? That's not quite it. The others. They see. They know. They tell. And the bots… they hear. They don't comprehend, but they listen. You already know that.
    I stared wide eyed at the little fixbot. Of course Jase knew. Su knew so now so did Jase. The europine had changed her, strengthened whatever it was that drew her so unfailingly to the clusters in the ice.
    "You keep saying, 'we'. Are you Jase?"
    We don't know, Crom. It's not like that. We are Jase and Su and… more. We don't know how to say it.
    "More? You mean the europine? What does it do?" I already knew part of the answer. I'd known what Su was doing when I tried to save Jase, because she'd done it to me. More than once.
    It didn't hurt, although if I let it go on too long, it left me tired, like I'd worked a double shift in the deep. It gave me something, a perfect awareness, as if I was seeing the world around me for the very first time. It was the most complete I had ever felt and, despite the fatigue, despite the fact that I seemed to have aged years in months, I had come to crave it.
    We see. And you see with us. But we take — to keep the other alive. It's the way. We take, but not too much. And we give. We share. We need you, Crom.
    I knew what to do. I closed my eyes and held out my arm. Su settled gently on my wrist, resting her extensible against my skin. A moment of pressure and then a flood of perception. My senses multiplied a thousand times. I could feel the pulse of my own blood in every capillary. I could smell the drift of organic molecules and skin flakes wafting gently from my body. I saw the almost imperceptible glow that surrounded every living thing. My hands shimmered with it.
    So did Su, but her colors were different, brighter, more alive. She wasn't just a bot. She had become a new thing, part bot, part Jase, part something else altogether — a thing that needed. That was its nature. It pulled. It took something that had to do with the glow. My glow. Like