Arc 1 – UGF Cleveland
Chapter 3 – Havlen

Havlen is depressed. He hates playing handler to these silent wakers—watching them stir, talking to himself, attending their needs. There is something strange about this Cluster of colonykin. The four of them seem conspirators with only themselves, excluding each other and by extension excluding all else, even Havlen. He watches their black eyes absorb every drop of information laser-casted by him and their other instructors. Stock-still, they stand in well-lit rooms and still seem to carry some indispersible darkness about them. He wishes to communicate with these creatures without the assistance of his rudimentary Intelligence as a conduit. For once, he only wishes he could fully understand, be fully understood.

On the fourth day of their educational cycle, one of the colonykin turns out to be a dud. Their name was Thyla, and they were the second-born of their Cluster. An average species by all accounts. White fur, black eyes, the high, pointed ears dominant in their DNA sequence. They suffer a catastrophic aneurism in their sleep. Havlen is assured by Captain Rayet that Thyla’s death was painless. “This sort of thing happens, as you know by now,” Rayet says in his stern, gray voice. “An Uplifting can be rejected. Sentience doesn’t turn out correctly. This is for the best. You wouldn’t have wanted to recycle this one.”

Faced with Thyla’s empty sleeping cabin while the others of the Cluster prove their physical capabilities—lung capacity, blood flow, strength—Havlen’s depression takes on new, creeping angles. Thyla’s bedsheet remains undone, just the same as it would’ve been when the recyclers came to take Thyla’s body away. He removes the sheet and presses it into a laundry chute. He flips the mattress to the fresher side without the little spot of blood where Thyla’s head rested as they slept. They hadn’t been alive long enough to acquire possessions. Other than the standard ordinances, the room is clean. Havlen finds himself without much to do to get it ready for whoever’s assigned to it next. Will the new occupant know about the old, dead one? It’s hard for Havlen to predict what the colonykin transmit to one another. Surely, they have secret channels he is excluded from. Their intelligences are much more powerful than his and he trusts that something like that—something smart—cannot be stoic and silent all the time.

He sits on the edge of the turned bed. No longer Thyla’s, no longer anyone’s. He pulls his tail up onto its surface, letting every muscle and bone unwind, pressing the paw pads on his thumbs into the sockets of his eyes and seeing bright stars in the blackness of his eyelids. He imagines the harsh occlusions of his making: calcium fibers threading into bones, sinews stitching the blanketing muscles, skin draped over the skeletal form. Because he’s overseen the process so many times, he knows how painful it is—though he can’t remember what it felt like. To be born. To be new.

He hadn’t heard her passing by, but when he removes his thumbs from his eyes and clears the spots from his vision she’s there, standing silently, overseeing him. It’s that oddball—Andra. She looms in the doorway of Thyla’s room. The tips of her lithe ears touch the head jamb, bending at their upper corners just slightly. Light from the hallway shines through the thinnest parts of their membranes. Havlen fixates on the thin, red veins gleaming in the blackness of her skin. He’s still thinking, mostly, of himself. He cannot muster the courage to look Andra in her pitch-black eyes. He believes he knows what he’ll see there—damnation. Something like it.

// incoming transmission from # allow? //

Havlen blinks once, jogging his intelligence into motion. Yes, this gesture indicates. Allow.

// A.309 (12:01 SD1.24.509): comprehend dew falls upon gravestones in mother’s garden / we will retreat for a period of mourning / he fasted for 40 days and 40 nights & he was hungry / we did not know her well / enough / sadness we see //

He finally lets his gaze coast down into hers. Andra’s eyes are wide, unblinking, but not cold as he feared. She tips her head slightly at him. Trying to communicate without words, maybe.

Shaking his head, Havlen says, “I did not understand that very well, I’m afraid. Your intelligence’s reactions to stimuli seem to be caught in one of Cleveland’s on-ship databanks—that’s what I’ve been told, anyway. There have been other colonykin like you. With garbled intelligences. I think there’s a programmatic fix for that, if it bothers you.”

Andra shakes her head once back at him. Havlen laughs dryly.

“You like to be incomprehensible?”

//A-309 (12:02 SD1.24.509): affirmative. for now. //

//A-309 (12:03 SD1.24.509): Havlen (?) //

Hearing his name whispered on the voiceless currents of his brain jars him. Especially if—as he suspects—Andra’s intelligence is plumbing a databank for its language acquisition at this stage in its power-on, his name should not be a fact it has access to.

“Do you have a question,” Havlen cautiously asks, “Andra?”

A slow moment passes. Andra twitches her left ear. Her tail switches behind her.

She shakes her head once. No, no question.

She dismisses herself into the antiseptic hall.

Once again alone in the sleeping cabin of a dead stranger, Havlen is depressed.

#

Perhaps it is because he is alone on the ship—not really, of course. Not in a physical sense. But his Cluster has all gone off-ship, scattered across various planets and commander-class vessels. Long ago, he was given the chance to do the same. But he chose not to. Why?

He asks himself this question frequently. Why as he shakes out the contents of Thyla’s security chest, making sure none of the clothing articles hold fast to spottings of her blood. Why as he inspects the mess hall tables for food crust, as he sweeps the corridor, as he checks the schematics on the Uplifting Accrection Chamber control panels, making sure they’re emptied for the next Uplifting cycle, whenever that will be. Why as he sits in as minutes-keeper for another of Captain Rayet’s meetings with the nearest UGF command station. Why as he kowtows to Captain Rayet afterward, tells him “Of course, you’re doing all the right things, you’re following procedure to the letter,” and “A few duds per cycle can be accounted for, statistically speaking, genetic material is fragile under such conditions as we keep it, biosynthesis is a fickle and imperfect artform at which you are only ever improving, Captain.” Why as he licks Captain Rayet’s boots, again, always, this dance with authority that involves spouting generous and flattering lies Havlen finds it impossible to believe Rayet buys into. And then Rayet does. And then Havlen asks, again, WHY does he fall in line for this idiot dog.

He knows the answer. He is afraid of the answer.

The why is in his coding. He does everything he was designed to do, without fail. He never tries to think of alternatives, because he fears he won’t be able to think of any. His pathways, if hard-coded, are set in stone. Immutable. Concrete.

#

Perhaps his depression stems from routine. His waking hours rarely change. When he is finished moping in Captain Rayet’s shiny, windowed cabin at the south end of the corridor, he heads out to check that the older of the clusters is getting along well in their Trick training. CC #308.1, Melnick, is stationed in the Uplifting annex’s tiny medical bay. Little more than a sterile room with a single examination table, a militant array of computer consoles and micro-tools whose purposes Havlen cannot discern even after nearly a decade of his Handler duties, a narrow window looking out on the Oort belt, a not-so-narrow sink for rinsing hands and arms and elbows. Melnick stands with the biological medical staff around the table—almost camouflaged in their jostling ranks by their shared gloves, masks, and scrubs. The smaller brown wolf never remains long at the forefront of the action, however—she tidies up the workstations as told, or holds scalpels, or angles the intense overhead light to new areas of the patient’s body. Meanwhile, the biologically born doctors chatter into the telecom device hovering around their ears. Havlen latches onto their casual familiarity with terminology. Their words, at least, offer him a place to feel comfortable.

In the hours since Thyla was reported dead, they have opened up her chest cavity, taken samples of her muscle tissues, weighed her organs in clear containers. Hollowed-out, they have now turned her onto her face to begin on her spinal cord and brain case. Streams and clots of Thyla’s blood slick the steel floor, forming rivers, gathering around a drain in the floor Havlen knows leads to a biomass recycling tank—Thyla’s wasted matter will be used for something, someone else in the near or far future. Does this lift Havlen’s spirits?

It does not. He moves closer to the examination table.

“Mister Havlen,” snaps one of the doctors—a heavyset blue jay. Havlen rolls through his internal rosters of staff for the Uplifting annex, locates her profile photo in a folder of others that flash invisibly in his eyes: Nara Klein.

“Hello, Nara,” Havlen replies.

“I’ll ask that you please scrub in before getting any closer to the autopsy proceedings. Thank you.”

He steps back a few vital feet. “Just checking in on Melnick, ma’am.”

“Regardless. At least put on a mask, will you? By the door.”

He does as instructed. The mask is made of a thin, breathable, sterilizable synthetic material. It is identical to the ones he wears during the Uplifting process, when the gasses and fluids within the Uplifting Accretion Chamber are at their most reactive, their most dangerous. They have a lingering smell even after the molecules and cells have settled into place, and he smells that acid-tinged reek now: it escapes from Thyla’s organs, resting in their plastic containers around the room, and from her opened-up chest cavity and her opening-up brain case, it still clings to her fur and plays in the inert pools of her blood. Perhaps some of the awful stink comes from Melnick, or maybe he’s even smelling himself. Who’s to say?

The body of the white wolf on the examination table. It could be his body. The only things separating him from Thyla is species, gender, chance, and time.

“How is Melnick coming along?” Havlen risks asking. “Assessment?”

Nara replies curtly, “You’re contaminating the audio log for the autopsy, Mister Havlen. But to answer your question: she’s keen with instructions. She’ll make a fine Life Support Engineer, though I wouldn’t trust her to run an operating theater.”

“She’ll never have to,” Havlen says, but what he means and what Nara knows is that a biosynthetic like Melnick—an Uplifted creature—would never be allowed to wield the amount of authority and clearance required to run an operating theater. Nara’s critique of Mel’s performance is a non-issue.

“Why not?” Havlen asks anyway.

Nara’s look could curdle his breakfast, even buffered by her PPE. “Because, Mister Havlen,” she replies, “she panics, she’s flighty, like so many of her class. As you know. Will you shut up now? Was my assessment satisfactory?”

“Satisfactory,” he concedes. Nara doesn’t look at him again, but he sees Melnick’s occasional, slightly curious eyes dart to him in the brief spans of time between the doctors’ orders and their fulfilling the orders. He wonders what Melnick’s implant has on him—rote information, or fully-fledged opinions and feelings?

How a piece of technology can feel things, how it can possibly get creative: it’s completely beyond his ability to imagine. His own intelligence is nothing but a way to access, store, and visualize information. A spreadsheet, a convenient application, a storage unit appended to his brain. No-S. He knows Melnick’s appearance through proximity, and because he was the one (he is always the one) to press the correct buttons on the computer that brought them into being. He watched them happen. He knows Melnick mostly through the information the UGF Cleveland has about them. The exact millisecond of their first step out of the Uplifting chamber, their height, weight, emotional and intellectual indexes, pawprints, scores of tests taken, the names of tests they have yet to take.

Melnick knows none of these reductionist facts about him. And he feels at-odds with this. He does not like to think that, without the façade of recorded fact, they must speculate. And this speculation, or his speculation about there being speculation, also depresses him.

He speculates as he watches Melnick tear her eyes from him that, if they think of him at all, they do not think he is a good animal. If he was in their position, he would not think highly of himself at all.

*********

(A/N) And...another chapter! If you haven't read the other two, you can find them on my page. All installations of the first arc will share the same thumbnail, then I'll change it for the arcs to come. This will be the last chapter uploaded for at least a day or two, since I have some work to do tomorrow, and I can't be putting that off any longer. If you like the story, feel free to leave any comments, or watch my page, since I plan on updating rather regularly : ) Anything helps me stay motivated!

Even if you don't interact and prefer to be a silent reader, I appreciate your time and support <3