[b]Dogpatch[/b]

Night in Dogpatch was a new experience.

In Nai Kolkata, and in most places where humans lived, lighting was controlled. He was used to illuminated walls that flickered white like wax paper lit by electric candles, and which could be adjusted with the use of simple consoles. Where there were no walls, streetlights and spotlighted fountains pushed the darkness into the poverty-stricken batman ghettos and seething underworlds that people like Laz rarely had to see. Space had been the same. The Aro had mimicked the day-and-night cycles of planets. Though adjustments could be made, subtle changes in lighting took place throughout the ship automatically as one hour gave way to the next. In the depths of space, the same had been true for orbital stations. It made people feel happier, Laz had been taught. Soft-light fought off depression and anxiety. He had no reason to argue - he had grown up with it. Now there were no lights, and he saw the truth in that wisdom. It made him nervous. 

 This place was different. There were a handful of aging floodlights on the catwalks above, each cracked and chipped and buzzing with heat. They faced toward each other so that the nets were visible. Down on the ground, the only light available poured weak from windows, or came from strings of LED beads that hung from the gutters in wide, festive arcs. Distant flashes teased at the corner of his vision, in the wilderness beyond, where luminescent hunting flowers struck at their pray with glowing gulps. And there were corners where the darkness grew thick. Those were the worst. What was there? What could those corners be hiding? He looked, but he could not see. The Brahman jungles were a living blackness, and the thought of what they concealed put Laz on edge. He was afraid of what might be out there. He couldn't help but look. 

Animal noises overwhelmed the human. Croaks and buzzes from beyond the pit overwhelmed the whir of power stations within, and the faint singing of Choral Flowers matched the bass reverberations of indoor music. Down here, there was no breeze. Humidity hung in the air like a stale breath. There was something else about this air, something different. It was natural. Here in the wild, there was something purer about the air. The human stench was stronger; the smell of spilled grog and old sewage was unavoidable, but there was something else. Something wet. Something floral. It was mud and compost, new fallen rain on thirsty sponge-fungi and new fallen shit on a patch of sludgy moss. It was musty and green, decomposition and life. It smelled great, but it was overwhelming. Like the rest of this place, it only helped to wear him down. 

Laz's nerves were undone. He had spent the last several days on a zero-g drop through the worst of his emotions. He only wanted to fall asleep, to go unconscious for days, and to wake up a week from now in his own bed. He took a deep breath and fingered the pipe in his front pocket. It was small, with two bowls so that one could be filled with water from which moisture could be sucked into the pipe 

The pirates had given one to all of them. Laz had smoked Tak before, but it was expensive in the safe zone. The plant was native to this side of the world. It grew like a weed, sprouting from steel walls as easily as it did rocks or dead wood. It was one of the few chemicals that had the same neurological effect on humans as it did on the Tkrai - calming, soothing, and in many ways deadening. When he was in school, they told him that it felt the way you would expect a tree to feel. 

Down here, the drug was beloved. 

He plucked a flower from the wall, mushed it into paste between his thumb and forefinger, and pressed it gently into the second bowl. With one hand, he ruffled through his pockets. They had given him a lighter. He knew he had it. Somewhere. He cursed himself. Should he even be smoking this shit? They gave them the pipes to keep them sedate. It seemed so obvious, so devious. Part of him felt like a traitor for accepting to use it, but what else could he do? Wallow? Rebel? If he tried to gain his freedom by force, he would surely die. He wanted to see his family again, and to find where Eury had gone. He didn't want to die here. Where had that lighter gone? He fumbled.

A finger reached out in front of his face and startled him. Its tip was glowing orange like hot metal. It [i]was[/i] hot metal. Laz watched, dumbstruck, as the finger lightly touched the bowel of his pipe and set it aflame.

"I smoked." a low, song-like voice explained. "Cigarettes, I think." There was a lost sadness in the voice. 

It was the cyborg. The same lonely cyborg he had seen in the bar. In the dark, it was a shadowy giant - an outline of sharp steel points and designs, with a body designed to mimic an exaggeration of a military uniform. The cyborg was a stranger to him, and a hulk that could snap his back without a second moment's thought, but Laz was not frightened. It [i]felt[/i] harmless. Pitiful. Could he truly feel pity for a being like this? Whatever was in its mind, it was a human granted long life in a body that would never falter. Laz could see that humanity in the slick monochrome metal of its eyes. There was life there, but it was not a powerful one. 

"That was long ago." it said. 

Laz didn't know what to day. He could feel the cyborgs physical presence next to him, and he looked up at the sky, at the IU station orbiting above them. It was so brighter than the stars, it gave out a halo of purple. Seeing space, so big and so distant, it boggled his mind to think he had been out there only a handful of days earlier. Some of those distant points of lights were planets. He had visited them, and saw them in in all their colors. The stormy eyes of Indra. The sullen darkness of Shiva and her twin. They were out there, far away. From here they were just specks. 

In the corner of his eye, he saw a flag catch the air from a vent and flutter. It was pure red, the dark of the night giving it the hue of a bloodstain, with a proud black two-headed eagle dominating its center. It made him feel uncertain. He remembered old lectures about wars and occupations, about genocide in Persia and the first battles fought in space. That flag had a history. Who were these people, exactly? He had never truly been told by anyone what Dogpatch was about. 
 
"Are these people Russian?" Laz asked. 

The Cyborg was slow to answer. Laz looked up at him. He stood seven foot in height, and his shoulders were as broad as a warbot, but it didn't matter. It, he, looked irredeemably pathetic.

"No." he answered. "Why would it be?"

"That flag." Laz pointed up. The cyborg followed his hand like a dog studying where a toy had been thrown. "Putinate." Laz said. "And Captain Carpenter was wearing a Putinate coat." 

"That is Carpenters quarters." the cyborg replied thoughtfully, spitting every word. "He collects."

"He collects?" Laz asked. The cyborg paused again. For ten seconds, there was nothing but a silence and the sounds of the night. 

"Putinate memorabilia." the cyborg replied.

"A Russian named Carpenter?" Laz asked. Another pause. Laz was beginning to feel impatient. Should he ask it any more questions? The conversation could take all night if he did.

"His mother." The cyborg said. Laz got the gist of the answer and asked nothing more.

Laz put the cyborg out of his mind. He watched as three Tkrai warriors climbed the pit's cliff-face. They moved like cats with human minds. The Tkrai Laz had seen before, those that lived in the safe zone, were broken down. They tried, and some did better than others, but in Nai Kolkata and the cities of humanity, they were square pegs being forced into round holes. To see them in their element had changed the way he thought about them. In the jungles, they knew more than the humans. They moved through the branches with ease, and they knew how to use the landscape to their advantage. They knew how to own it. Laz's father had always insisted that they should "Just ship the Tkrai out of the safe zone and be done with them." It had always seemed so callous and cruel, to take their homes and force them into a place they did not know. This was the same lesson they taught in schools. The Turks against the Armenians, the Americans against the Cherokee, the Russians against the Turkmen, history was filled with this sort of story. Forced relocation that became genocide. There was no reason to think that it would go any better for the Tkrai. 

Seeing them here now, however... seeing them in the unspoiled parts of the planet made him question that reasoning. This was where they belonged. They did not see the danger. The climbed along the walls and trees as gracefully as men moved along the ground. As one of the creatures lifted its leg, he saw the light glimmer off a polished Huile - a Tkrai shortbow. It was strapped to its shin in the same way that the shark-fin blades had been. It was an affection of the three dimensional way they fought, and they operated it with whatever limb was available. Laz the Tkrai aim down its leg, pull the mechanism with its second foot, and fire a bolt. A high twang resounded, and a fluttering bug fell from the sky. It had taken so little effort, aiming as fluidly as it climbed. Humans could not do that with their own weapons. Not with the grace that the Tkrai had. 

The warriors made it a contest. Laz heard the twangs repeat, one after the other, like strings being plucked on an untuned guitar. 

"I used to be Russian." the cyborg said unexpectedly. Laz watched it think. He watched the subtle twitches in its mercurial mask. It was struggling. What was happening struck Laz all at once, but the Cyborg said it before he could even consider whether or not to ask.

"Before the Slowness. I don't remember." it paused again. "I was Russian."

The Slowness. It was the horrifying last step in a Cyborgs life. Their bodies were repairable. Blood-pumps could be restored, limbs shined and oiled, but the human brain could never be replaced, nor could it ever be fully repaired. Philosophers had argued about the nature of the soul since the dawn of time. It if existed, it was in the organic matter of the brain and the unbroken chemical message that it carried. It could be born, and it could take damage. When the object was altered, patterns changed. Personalities faded, or evolved into something different from what was there before. But the consciousness was the same. Humanity had known this, it had been the basis of their concept of the soul since before written history, but it had been hard to understand as precisely as they had wanted. You could upload a persons personality onto a computerized drive, but you could not upload their consciousness. The copy would have its own consciousness. It was sensible when you considered what would happen if the upload did not involve the destruction of the original - once you turned on the new copy, consciousness could not be split. Somebody could not be two brains at once. We were stuck in our own bio-chemical system, and if somebody want to live forever they had to accept the sanctity of their own brain-matter.

But this caused a problem. Metal was not the natural host of the brain. It had to be suspended in fluid and kept separate from the mechanics that kept it alive, and kept its host active. There was, as the saying went, "Nothing perfect in this universe". Solvents and chips found their way into the barrier fluid, and occasionally they caused damage. This would have hardly been noticeable if a cyborg's lifespan was as limited as a humans, but this was not the case. Cyborgs could live for centuries, and a century's worth of damage started to add up.

This was the slowness. The human brain that seated its consciousness wore down. It took gradual damage until one day the cyborg was senile. Imperfection rendered them lost and stupid. This cyborg had probably been proud once, in some distant past. Now...

"I am sorry." Laz said. What else was there to say? He had never met a Cyborg before, and he had less experience with slow ones. 

It paused again. It struggled. "I am too." it finally lamented.

There was a profound quiet. He looked at it, studying its face like a human's. Its mercurial silver was dull. Only smooth lines portrayed thought or expression, but there was an expression there. Laz could read it, as plain as if it were human. It studied the air. Was it searching for something to say? What did it know? Laz was struck by a thought, that this cyborg might able to answer his questions if he did not mind to wait. His thoughts immediately went back to Dr. Eury Florin. He had seen her in the Catina, aboard the Aro in a time and place desperately out of his reach. Surely she had been brought here. He had not seen her, but he knew she had been brought to Brahma. It was the only thing that made sense.

"Do you know anything about the prisoners?"

The cyborg looked at him. Was it suspicious? Confused? It was hard to say. Everything Laz read on its face was obscured by its malaise. 

"You are a prisoner." the cyborg said, assuring itself. It took a moment to think, "You will be going to Kartago. All of you will be going to Kartago."

"There were others." Laz insisted. His heart pounded in his chest. Did he want to know.

"Others." the robot echoed. "Yes, others. I know now that there were others."

In this silence, Laz anchored himself to his question. This was what he would grab onto. Eury Florin. He hadn't loved her. She had just been a girl, another player in the cat-and-mouse game that was human sexuality. He hadn't loved her. He hadn't loved Kyla Kgosi, the daughter of the Aro's Captain, though he did miss the sum of her parts, and how the ebony gestalt looked in low midnight lighting. Any feelings he had for the woman he left back home, his sister-in-law, were hardly romantic either. He had thought of his youth in terms that the post-blog era writer Cayden Corlino had voiced during the second-sexual revolution of the late twenty-first century. "You are fun and we are young, and life ends too soon to worry about the rest." 

He wanted to know because wanting to know would keep him sane. It was goal - a reason to live. 

"I do not know their whereabouts." the cyborg completed its thought. "They don't inform me."

That was the first defeat. He felt it knot within him, and it strengthened his curiosity. He would find her. He would find Dr. Eurydike Florin. If he could find her, he could save her. And if he could save her, maybe he could save himself.

He felt the Tak kick in. Had it waited for this moment? His muscles loosened, days worth of tension melting like an stiff underlayer of skin. He stared northward, at the purple crown of Brahmapura where it lay above the twilight dark of the jungle canopy. It was brighter here, like a primeval god ascending the horizon. It put the sky around it in a state of permanent twilight, and the northern sky was an indigo canvas pierced by few stars.

Laz wondered where they had taken his pistol. He wondered where they had taken Dr. Florin. He suddenly realized that, in resolving to answer these questions, he no longer felt helpless.