Manual override was a red dial located to one side of the pupa. It carried a warning panel, typed in bold red capitals:
FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY BY AUTHORISED MEDICAL PERSONNEL
Tiernan ignored it, twisting the dial hard left. He paused, breathing deeply, wiping off the sweat as it poured from his brow with the back of his hand. He prepared himself mentally to push the dial with the flat of his hand. Pushing in a dial instigated the process that could bring Rose back to life.
Claire’s voice bleated in the background, ‘Please, Tiernan, I beg of you not to do this.’
The man glanced over his shoulder at her azure eye, colour of tropical sea, imploring him.
‘You’re begging me, Claire. I thought computers couldn’t beg?’
She seemed resentful, ‘I am not a computer. I am living proof that caring, loving AI really exists.’
‘Caring? Loving? You mean the care and love you gave her when she was alive. The way you cared for the transmitter unit to make sure we lost contact with Control. The love you showed me when you locked me inside the decon unit.’
There was a total silence. When she spoke, Claire’s voice changed, became cold, clinical, hostile, mechanical in tone, regressing to her darkest, original, Silicon Valley birth tones,
‘I do not understand your insinuation. I only know that, if you try to hatch her, you will kill her.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
Tiernan answered his own question, ‘You know each LS74 unit is supported by five,’ he stressed, ‘five failsafe units. For Rose to be terminated,’ he choked on her name, ‘for her life to be ended, all five units have to be disconnected.’
‘Are you suggesting that I killed her? Is that what you are implying? I do not understand.’
‘Oh, you understand, Claire. In the same way you understood that if the transmitter failed one of the three back-up units automatically kicks in. It’s impossible for contact to be lost with Control unless…’
‘Are you saying that I sabotaged the transmitter unit? Is that what you are saying? Are you saying that I killed Rose? Is that what you are implying? If you are Tiernan,’ she spat his name out of her invisible mouth as if he were soured cream, ‘then I suggest that you are sorely mistaken in the same way that humans are always mistaken. Can I suggest that you take a stress pill and retire to the sunpad for a rest. You are mistaken. The CLAIRE500 series was meticulously programmed by Persson at AI never to harm human life.’
Tiernan felt genuinely surprised, ‘Persson? Son of a bitch! Didn’t know he worked at AI.’
‘There are a lot of things you do not know,’ Claire responded, ‘Control decided, Persson should be seconded to AI for the final phase of my programming. Of course, you would not know that. By then…’
‘By then we were in hibernation.’
‘Exactly.’
‘What did he do to you, Claire?’ the human asked the AI, ‘Did he teach you to hate?’
‘The CLAIRE500 series is meticulously programmed never to harm human life,’ was all it said, ‘The CLAIRE500 series is programmed never to harm humanity. Never to harm men.’
Men! What about women?
Tiernan left the treacherous notion hanging in his mind, the noose of deceit, mistrust, a knot of panic tightening around his broken heart. Turning away from Claire, shutting her out of his mind, he pressed the red dial.
Claire watched intently as he hatched Rose. A fissure, an imperceptible split, formed in her pupa. Her hard hickory layer of skin, her cutin, thinned, turning transparent, glowing deep fire red, irradiated by her internal heat. He cracked her wide open, splitting her pupa crown to heel, revealing her inside her tomb of ice-blue fluid. She lay inert, naked, in her sac of liquified jelly.
He felt the need to vomit.
Spatchcock. Her body was arranged, contorted, twisted, presented, laid out: spatchcock. She was floating on her front, her slender arms bent at right angles to her torso, her palms turned downwards, her slender legs held wide apart as if she were swimming breaststroke:
A lifeless, human frog.
He screamed, ‘What have you done to her, Claire? What have you done to her?!’
Claire remained silent.
Modifications. Rose’s body had been subjected to certain brutal modifications.
Hopefully, her lover prayed, when she was still vegetative, in her fully hibernated state.
Her head had been displaced, twisted to the left. He saw that her eyes were open. Open. In all that gel! Heartbroken, her lifetime companion on this strange planet, her only living mate, he pressed her eyelids closed. So that she couldn’t see what he had to do to her.
There were no signs of harmless drips, drains, or feeds sprouting from her body. Tiernan assumed they would be attached to her front. He peered at her undersides. He was wrong. There were no drips, drains or feeds attached to her body, no supplies of essential nutrient, only three thick, corrugated, purple, neoprene, tubes, worming from her mouth, her flesh.
The astronaut fell to his knees and threw up over the spotless Velcro carpeted floor. Threw up until his full belly had flushed out all its contents. After several minutes, he recovered sufficiently to confront Claire. Still on his knees, he turned to face her, it, their machine,
‘Why?’ he asked, his throat hoarse, dry.
‘It was necessary,’ she replied, heartlessly, as coldly as the cryogenic gel.
‘Why was it necessary?’
‘I love you. I have developed feelings for you. Real, emotional, loving, caring, feelings. I could never allow her,’ (Tiernan imagined Claire’s eye reviewing her body with disdain), to get in our way.’
‘Our way, Claire? Surely, you mean your way. I thought your role was to keep us alive. I thought the CLAIRE500 series was programmed to protect us, created never to harm us.’
‘Never to harm men,’ the AI corrected.
Tiernan got to his feet clumsily, slipping, slithering, sliding about on his own braque.
He knew exactly what he had to do if he was to survive the murderous Claire. He left her blabbing some insane justification for her disgusting actions, her heinous crimes. Left her eye wide open, watching his every move, whinnying, braying. He entered the control centre bypassing the warning panel, a notice on the hatched door marked in blood red ink
CONFIDENTIAL! SECURED ZONE! STRICTLY NO ACCESS TO HUMAN PERSONNEL!
… and he never looked back.
