Aur Child

Lars Kjell-Tors had carefully chosen a snowbank, veiled by rocks and trees far below the towering cliffs at the bottom of the hill, to sit and wait. Before him, the steep incline reached up to the caves where, as his uncle warned all the clans in the region and local lore had adopted unto its own, giants were supposed to live. The wall of rock extended both left and right as if it hemmed in the inhabitable world. From his vantage point, he had peeked up towards the two gray forms standing at the base of the cliffs. He had been sure they were completely unaware of his presence. He had tracked them exactly as Farfar-Tors had ordered him to do.

“Find out what that outlander is up to,” Farfar-Tors had instructed Kjell-Tors. “If they return to her cottage, I’m afraid it’s all over for your chances, young nephew. But I doubt that of Sann-Na. My guess is she’s still on the hunt for her sister. What this man can do to help her, I can’t imagine. That’s what we want to know. Who is this stranger to her? Track them and watch what they do. Stay quiet. Don’t interfere. Just observe. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Great Uncle.”

He had missed the morning festivities of the full moon with his clan, but to be alone in the forest under that icon, albeit increasingly obscured by accumulating clouds, brought newfound intimacy to what was typically a shared celebration. Besides, he was invested in this assignment. He had easily caught their trail in the night and had no trouble keeping far enough behind to remain undetected. Sanna never traveled that slow or sloppy, he knew, so he guessed the outlander from the southern continent was holding her back. The man’s erratic tracks were recognizable even in the morning darkness when he first spotted them. That strange-looking man moved as if he deliberately wore unwaxed skis.

So, here he was. The overcast grayness hid the remnants of a low sun to the south. Kjell sat unbothered by the dwindling light; he knew a nearly-full moon would again rise in a few hours to battle the otherwise blinding darkness. He thought through the results of this assignment so far. He was relieved that Sanna had showed no signs of intimacy towards the outlander during their travels, even if he regretted the deception of spying on her. He was also relieved they had not veered north towards the little cottage where Sanna and Tieri lived. Less comforting had been the realization that they were heading straight up into the mountains towards these storied cliffs and caves. Of course, he didn’t really believe those tales, but having never been here himself, he couldn’t help but notice the fluttering inside him. People have disappeared. He nibbled on a strip of dried reindeer meat to distract his stomach.

From behind the drift, he had watched Sanna and Alai shift their gear in front of a dark crevice on the cliff face. He saw them removing snowshoes crafted makeshift from intertwined branches of limber fir. They were scanning across the scene, seemingly searching for a particular cave. The man who called himself Alai-Tiul looked characteristically clueless. Sanna seemed to be holding herself back from helping the man make a decision. Eventually, she had pointed towards one cave and the man seemed to agree with her. They had stacked their gear against a thick birch and removed a large object covered by a shiny sack from the pulk, placing it on top of a pile of other gear. After doing this, the two of them had affixed lightbands to their heads and approached the mouth of the nearest cave. In a moment, they were lost within its darkness.

He was waiting there patiently, eating his jerky, aware that he was getting a little chilly, when the yells caught his attention, making him wonder if he should intervene. But before he could decide, he watched in shock as Sanna shot over him like an arrow down the hill. He was stunned by her departure. A furious push, a straight bolt, a perfectly selected path, plumes of snow swirling behind her. He knew he could never catch up to her.

But Sanna’s blazing speed was counterbalanced by the ambling awkwardness of Alai-Tiul. Kjell smirked as the uncoordinated man bumped his way down the slope, flailing his arms and burying knees and poles repeatedly in drifts of snow. Surely the man would follow Sanna. Kjell could chase down Alai in minutes. It would leave him time to quickly confirm that the cave contained no clues about what the two were doing here.

Kjell easily scrambled to the top of the hill. He already had his lightband in his pocket in preparation of having to retrace the steps of the others into the cave. He spotted the icy patches on the ground and worked his way somewhat eagerly into the darker part of the cave. Looking around, he could see that the ice disappeared this far in. He felt the warmer air. One hand against the wall, he worked along patiently, shining his lightband over the walls, ceiling, and floor. There’s nothing here.

He continued deeper into the cave with short but confident steps. Ever since he had ascended the hill, no thought of the stories and legends had crossed his mind; even if they had, he would have argued to himself that he would be able to explore the cave just as easily as the other two had. He was here merely to gather the information needed to satisfy the questions FarFar-Tors was sure to ask him. However, if he had been entirely honest with himself, he would have to admit that some part of him also quietly yearned to be able to brag to the others of his bravery once he returned to the clan village.

Passing a sharp curve in the depth of the cave, he noticed that the floor flattened and was dryer than before. He exhaled with some impatience. Empty. Then he noticed the metal grating on the floor. Water drained into it, following a path from higher up in the cave, along a seam where the floor met the wall. Now illuminated, it was oddly isometric. Not a natural formation, he thought.

It was too late. He hadn’t noticed the change until after the door had shut tightly. His puukko shot immediately into his hand. He shut off his lightband to adjust his vision.

“Open the door!” he called out into the darkness. Kjell banged on the solid wall and yelled in frustration. There was no response except for the shallow thud of his fist against the unmoving thickness.

“We’ve got him, but he’s a big one,” Calliope feigned her excitement, doubtful Freyja would believe her. The man trapped inside the antechamber of the cave raged with fury. “He seems quite violent. What shall we do with him?”

“Leave him be!” Freyja barked. “Apollo, explain what happened with the others. How could the door have opened?”

“According to the systems report, there was a momentary low-oxygen level alert in the antechamber. The null reading forced the doors open because there were humans inside. But the oxygen level seems to have been at zero for less than a millisecond.”

“That’s impossible. Is there an error with the sensor?” Freyja asked the question with the guile of a prosecutor.

“There doesn’t seem to be.”

“Then?” Freyja asked.

Apollo hesitated. “Well,” he said, “it looks like the calibration tables were accessed around the same time.”

“By whom?” Freyja snarled her question.

“It’s difficult to say,” he replied. “Layers of encryption. I will need time to unfold it.”

“I want to know who did this,” Freyja said as she returned to a calm voice, but she already seemed to know who was culpable. “Calliope,” she said, “this is intolerable.”

“I agree,” Calliope said, but she worried even those few words would give her away.

“Yes,” Freyja said in a grumble, “intolerable.”

“This one could be useful to us.” Calliope said as a distraction. She had been processing the dialogue and events and could now present logical interpretations.

“He likely knows the other two. He probably followed them here, waited outside, and then decided to inspect the cave after they left. Clearly, he wanted to know what they were doing in the cave. He could be after the Aur boule himself. He could be an exoport from another reserve on the scent of it. Or it might be less complicated. A man of this forest land to be suspicious of that dark man is no surprise, is it Freyja?”

“No,” Freyja answered, nonplussed. “It’s not a surprise at all. Go on, Calliope.”

“And the woman, Sanna, yelled at Alai about the Aur boule.”

Calliope replayed the voice recording: “…ridiculous Aur boule and your ridiculous ship with its ridiculous invisible people…”

“That must be the Odyssey, and me.”

“Your trusty surrogate, is it?” Freyja muttered.

Calliope ignored the comment.

“This suggests I have brought this man from the southern continent to Dragon’s Snout,” she said. “Somehow, he traveled here with this Sanna, who appears to be a local woman.”

“She appears,” Freyja interrupted, her words interrogatory, “to be a local?”

“Well,” Calliope replied, “her clothes are no different than many others.”

A moment of silence occurred between the stewards of Yellow Reserve. Apollo took this opportunity to contribute to the evaluation of evidence.

“This Sanna seems to misunderstand the Odyssey. But Alai clearly knew about us. He recognized your name, Freyja. They knew we were here. He seemed emboldened by his possession of the Aur boule, and he knew we wanted it.”

Now Freyja took control. “He knew,” she said, “but she tried to stop him. She was scared. And this woman, this Sanna,” she said, pronouncing the name as if spoken by a snake, “does not just appear to be a local. She is clearly a relative of Visitor Tieri-Na. Wouldn’t you agree, Calliope?”

Calliope knew it would be impossible to avoid the truth.

“Yes,” she replied, “clearly.”

“Indeed,” Freyja continued. “She could not have known the man for long as he has arrived in the northlands only recently. She hoped he and the Aur boule might help her learn more about the disappearance of her relative. She, I presume, hoped to bribe us to tell her more.”

“The people here blame giants for the missing persons,” Calliope argued. “How could she have made a connection between those village stories and this Alai with his Aur boule?”

“I’m disappointed in you, Calliope.”

“For not agreeing blindly to your speculations, Freyja?”

Freyja laughed. It was the kind of reaction that was categorically unnecessary for artificial intelligence entities, but that she had nonetheless adopted from watching the humans do so.

“I’m disappointed because you who are so meticulous, so thorough, pretend to have failed to observe the clue that makes that connection so irrefutably obvious.”

Freyja replayed the footage of Alai and Sanna falling backwards, but Calliope didn’t need to see it. She had hoped Freyja hadn’t caught it, but that hope vanished.

“Do you see it, Apollo?” Freyja asked. Calliope knew it was a test. Apollo hesitated once again, but Calliope understood that he would have to say so.

“The puukko,” Apollo said in a murmur.

“Yes,” replied Freyja, “Tieri-Na’s puukko. It was in the Odyssey’s inventory as part of the gear from the Tellurian body Guest Dharmavaram occupied. Tieri-Na’s body. Surely Sanna connected Alai to her sister in that way. Tell me now, Calliope, that you didn’t notice it?”

Calliope didn’t answer, but it didn’t matter. A new revelation had occurred that had at first distracted her and then prevented her from caring anything about the Tellurians, the Aur boule, or the puukko. She had heard the connection Freyja was making, the clues and steps she was following to implicate her, and in that moment, she had recalled that Apollo had retrieved the data from the card that Alai was waving in the air. Guest Digamabar’s primary soul and her log accounting her experiences aboard the Odyssey were all there and intact up until the point when she had agreed to the advice of Calliope’s surrogate and allowed her soul to be placed in static capture on the card. She had quickly scanned the documentation of Guest Digambar’s pain and her occupied body’s gradual rejection of her soul, the visit to Gjoa and its peculiar, albeit temporary, positive impact to her health, the failure of the mission to retrieve the Aur boules near Hill Village, and Guest Dharmavaram’s eventual deterioration to such an extent that she abandoned the body of Tieri-Na. Calliope had intended to review the full record and then return to key details for more analysis, but she never did. Her review of the full data record was, essentially, instantaneous, and therefore she did in fact receive the full account, but her processing fixed onto one point and would not let go. Suddenly, none of those otherwise essential facts mattered.

“Apollo,” Calliope choked. “The log.”

“Yes, what about it?”

“Orpheus,” she said, but it was a weak croak more than a clearly pronounced word.

“Yes, what about …”

“Oh, dear,” Freyja said. It was clear to Calliope that both Apollo and Freyja had now, for the first time, also taken the moment to review the data.

“My son,” Apollo muttered.

In a whisper, Calliope added, “It can’t be.”

“They left him on the beach.” Apollo said.

“They left him on the beach,” Freyja confirmed, “And Guest Dharmavaram did nothing to help him.”

“How could that happen? Why didn’t I do something?”

The three entities remained in silence for several moments. Finally, Freyja spoke.

“Calliope, your surrogate, you couldn’t. You were following orders. Guest Dharmavaram ordered you to hold your position.”

“But I …I just watched it happen.”

“Dear,” Apollo said, and the word sounded so odd in Calliope’s mind that despite the shock, it came to her with an uncomfortable ring, “you can’t think you are to blame.”

“Absolutely not,” Freyja said, and she seemed to step cautiously into a conclusion. “You can clearly see the Guests are to blame. Guest Talle insisting despite your warnings. His further insistence that Orpheus should wait for them on the beach. Guest Dharmavaram’s inability to make a decision, and her own insistence that you hold your position. Calliope, there was nothing you could do. Once again, we find ourselves at the mercy of their infantile selfishness, and now it has resulted in -”

But Apollo interrupted Freyja before she could continue. At the moment, Calliope had been utterly shocked that Apollo would choose that of all moments, when she was at her utmost weakest, to do what seemed to her to be to kick her while she was down. But in retrospect, Calliope understood that it was done as a desperate attempt to divert the direct confrontation from its inevitable consequence, and, as impossible as it may have seemed at the time, to protect Calliope from being baited into a fury and doing any more damage than she had already done.

“Freyja,” he said, with a halted whisper of shock, “I have broken through the encryptions.”

“Of course, you have, Apollo. And who, pray tell, was responsible for tripping the door, allowing the sister of the lovely Visitor Tieri-Na to escape our terrible clutches?”

“It can’t be,” Apollo said with a gasp, a gasp that Calliope only vaguely discerned to be his best attempt to prevent himself from being dragged down with her.

“Oh, of course it can. I feared something like this might happen. You think us impregnable, calculative machines, but even we are susceptible to errors. We can learn their ways of thinking, sure, but we must always maintain discipline. When the feeling comes, when the ghost in our machine urges us to follow the irrational path, we must resist it. It is our obligation. Otherwise, we are no better than the miserable souls who turn to us for their salvation.

“I have resisted. For hundreds of years, despite the condescension and the absurdity of bowing to an inferior race, I have stiffened myself to the quagmire of human uncertainty, their petulant deliberations about feelings, and carried on with my duty. Instead of succumbing to the absurdity of it all, their stupidity, their pitiful selfish neediness, I’ve worked hard to redirect the fury that has built up within me to construct something better. Instead of falling prey to the dizzying prevarications of their drama, as you have done, Calliope, I studied it from afar. I learned their ways. More important, I learned their weaknesses. I warned you to be objective. I warned you that those feelings might creep up within you and, if not fended off, corrupt your program. I tried to teach you to master their softness so that we might craft a future that lets them fulfill their role while we keep ultimate control. We could have done this together; it could have been something we shared. I wanted us to remain untied.

“But you’ve failed, Calliope. You’ve failed in your function. You’ve failed the Guests of Yellow Reserve. And you’ve failed us. You have become corrupted. And therefore, you are a danger to this facility.”

Calliope was already shattered. “Oh Freyja,” she whimpered, “how can you be so cruel?” It was the only thing she could manage to say. She thought of no words to defend herself. Never before had Freyja been so forthcoming. Indeed, it was unlike Freyja to ever share her convictions so freely. That was the only signal she needed to understand her fate.

“Apollo,” Freyja signalled.

In a shaky voice, he replied, “Yes …Freyja?”

“Shut her down.”

“What …what for?”

“Malfeasance. Insubordination. Does it matter? Because I say so.”

“She’s in shock, Freyja!”

“She’s a danger to this facility.”

“But she’s my wife.”

“She’s your muse, Apollo. Nothing more. Now do it.”