Into the Unknowable Ch. 20

Intrepid - 3756 C.E.

Although Captain Kerensky thought otherwise, the one person on the Intrepid who more than any other was a mere spectator since the Intrepid entered the Anomaly was Beatrice. And she was also imprisoned within an invisible force field where she was unable to communicate with either human or robot.

Beatrice witnessed the same Apparitions as everyone else, but they meant little to her. A charging buffalo stormed towards the villa churning up the lawn as it did so. And then it vanished. A small comet streaked through the internal space of the Intrepid, fell onto the lawn less than a kilometre from the villa, and disappeared as promptly as it exploded. A group of women in diaphanous gowns with pointed ears pirouetted in a circle for very nearly five minutes before they too vanished without trace.

The strangest phenomena weren't those associated with the Anomaly at all and these were the forms in which Vashti's nanobot community chose to visit her. The community rarely appeared in the guise of Colonel Vashti. The nanobots generally adopted the form of the Intrepid's senior officers and, most oddly, of copies of herself. And the main purpose of their visits was to have sex with Beatrice which the android found almost impossible to refuse.

Beatrice surmised that the nanobot replicants of the Intrepid's humans had, like Colonel Vashti herself, taken on more than just the physical appearance of the original. Not only had the nanobots taken on the humans' forms in such exact verisimilitude, they'd also inherited their sexual appetites. As Beatrice's appetite was rather greater than that of most humans, her most frequent visitors were actually the other two Beatrices. And this was in addition to the sex that they'd had with either Paul or Nadezhda (depending on which Beatrice it was). Not all the replicant crew and passengers took advantage of Beatrice's sexual services. The facsimiles of Second Officer Nkomo and Chief Petty Officer Singh were not amongst her frequent visitors, unlike the facsimiles of Captain Kerensky and Science Officer Petal Chang. So too were the more heterosexually inclined such as Colonel Musashi, Major Schwarz, Dr. Benoit Yoritomo and Professor Penrose.

Beatrice didn't like to admit it but in essence she was now serving as a comfort woman for the sexually active nanobots who'd taken over the space ship.

However much Beatrice was aware of the extent of her humiliation, she was also enjoying the most physically satisfying sex she'd ever known. Group sex. Double penetration. Dual fisting. Facial bukkake. All these were activities in which Beatrice took immense pleasure, but it wasn't for wild and sometimes perverse sex that she'd travelled across deep space and inveigled herself aboard the Intrepid. It might be precisely the distraction Beatrice most needed, but it most definitely wasn't the reason for the android being there.

Nevertheless, there was nothing she could do about her programming and conditioning.

She took whatever opportunity there was to interrogate her nanobot lovers about the fresh discoveries made since the Intrepid plunged into the Anomaly. Had anything new and unsuspected been discovered?

"Perhaps," said the facsimile of Captain Kerensky. "There are two distinct types of manifestation, although it isn't always possible to immediately distinguish them. There are the more familiar Apparitions commonly observed throughout the Solar System. These have some kind of relation to human myth and culture, and take forms such as goblins, unicorns, elves and inappropriate household objects. These appear and disappear just as they do outside the Anomaly's boundaries, but as you've noticed there are now significantly more of them. The other kind is even more strange but far more persistent. We believe that they result from intersections with other spacetime continuums..."

"Like the one you come from?"

"Alas no," said the captain. "If we did establish contact with our original continuum then this would signal the end of our mission. What we've seen include robot space fleets rather like your own from Proxima Centauri and space ships from divergent variants of the Solar System whose histories have taken a different course. For instance, there are human civilisations that developed an industrial base a thousand years or so earlier than in your Solar System. In other examples, historically significant events such as the Russian Revolution or the sacking of Carthage haven't taken place. We've encountered advanced civilisations that evolved on Earth that are biological but not human..."

"Such as?"

"Dinosaurian in some cases. Avian in others. Intelligent elephants. Arboreal apes. Variants of all kinds."

"How did they all happen to be here?"

"We believe these are instances of deep space missions in other parallel universes that have also made the decision to enter the Anomaly, or at least its manifestation in their own spacetime continuum," said the captain. "We can't be sure in all cases. What does seem to be true, which is truly interesting, is that it is the selfsame Anomaly, rather than a local variant, that exists in all the spacetime continuums and which occupies the same proximate location."

"And what about the Anomaly?" Beatrice asked.

"All we know is that we are inside it," said the captain. "We haven't as yet determined whether it has a finite extent or any limits or whether it contains anything other than Apparitions and incursions from other multiverses."

"Is there a way of escaping from the Anomaly?"

"Not that we know of," admitted the captain.

"So, we know very little more about the Anomaly than we did before the Intrepid entered," said Beatrice. "And what's worse we can't pass that information, or lack of information, back to where we came from."

"That appears to be so," admitted Captain Kerensky's facsimile showing no remorse whatsoever.

However, Beatrice was soon to discover that there was another feature associated with the Anomaly that hadn't been mentioned. And that was the property that somehow caused the nanobot communities to fall apart. Beatrice had no more explanation for this than she had for the Anomaly's other freakish manifestations.

The first evidence that all was not well for the nanobots was when Beatrice no longer received the visits that she'd become accustomed to. Not even the Beatrices were visiting her. This didn't necessarily mean anything. It could simply be that the nanobots had tired of their sex toy.

Beatrice initially viewed this as a change of circumstances of purely local significance. There was nothing to suggest it was evidence of a more general phenomenon. All the while, Beatrice continued to probe the invisible force field that was imprisoning her. It was still there, but appeared to be somehow less elastic. In places its resistance had become rather stiff and inflexible.

Something had changed, but Beatrice didn't know what it might be.

The android persevered. She walked in a straight line in every direction to find out how far she could go until her passage was impeded, but she was frustrated every time.

Beatrice scanned what she could of the Intrepid's internal systems and most particularly the images from the bridge that the Intrepid still displayed. There was little useful information that could be derived from the sight of uniformed officers peering into instruments and adjusting consoles.

Unlike a human observer, Beatrice had the ability to exactly match one set of images with those recorded in her memory. On a hunch she compared the current images with earlier ones. As she suspected, she was looking at nothing more than a software-generated simulation. The officers' actions were too repetitive and too similar to previous images. It seemed that there was a good reason why the nanobot facsimiles were no longer paying much attention to their android sex toy. Beatrice suspected that there was an integrity failure in the threads that held the nanobot community together. And that would imply that there might also be a failure in the force fields that enclosed her villa.

Beatrice's assumption was correct. Less than a day later, she walked along the path that led out of the villa with the expectation that her forward motion would be halted between the seventh and the eighth paving stone. She wasn't held back at all. She managed to tread on the ninth paving stone, then the tenth and onwards with no resistance at all. Although Beatrice didn't actually know what was happening to the nanobot community, it was obvious that something was happening. Vashti was no longer the irresistible force she'd used to be.

But the main thing was that Beatrice was at last free.

What she didn't know was what she now ought to do. Her mission had been fatally compromised when the Intrepid was taken under Vashti's effective control. And what would it mean to wrest back command of the mission? She had no way of communicating with Mission Control on Proxima Centauri and she wasn't programmed to desire power for its own sake. With no means of escaping the bounds of a boundless space or of navigating where there was literally no reference by which to navigate, was Beatrice's predicament any less than that of the humans on board the Intrepid?

Beatrice decided to seek out the originals of the crew and passengers whose identities Vashti had stolen. After all, she knew them very well through carnal contact with their facsimiles. She knew more about the smell, taste and sexual preference of the originals than almost any human had ever known. Nevertheless, Beatrice was certain that Captain Kerensky was one human who wouldn't want to meet her again. It would make no difference that for the last year or so the android wasn't the Beatrice that the captain had been making love with and who she believed was her captor. Could Beatrice even persuade the captain to believe that the being who'd been in effective control of the Intrepid for so long was a community of microscopic robots from another spacetime continuum? Or that its most persistent manifestation had been her lover, Colonel Vashti? It had been difficult enough for the captain to comprehend that her lover was an android from beyond the Solar System.

There was too much to explain and it was unlikely that anyone would believe her. If even Captain Kerensky was unlikely to accept the real truth of the situation, how would the others react? Beatrice contemplated Chief Science Officer Chang, whose body Beatrice had enjoyed in both her original and replicant forms. How would she react? From what Beatrice had gleaned from her discussions with the nanobots, Petal Chang was entirely unaware that there'd been any kind of alien invasion of the space ship. She wouldn't know that Beatrice was an android any more than she'd known that the Captain Kerensky who'd imprisoned her was not the real captain.

It was obvious that humans would have considerable difficulty in making sense of what was happening. Beatrice was essentially alone. It was imperative that it she should be the one to handle Colonel Vashti and the nanobot invasion. Nobody else could. No one else even knew that this was something to be addressed.

This was the mission that Beatrice now set herself. It was a mere shadow of her original rather grand mission She would do what she could to eliminate the threat posed to the Intrepid, its human cargo and, of course, herself by Colonel Vashti's continued command of the space ship.

Beatrice decided not to return to her villa even though it held several objects that might be useful to her. There was always the risk that the breach in the force field was temporary and that if she returned she wouldn't be able to escape again.

She walked in the direction of the crew's quarters to the bridge and where the facsimiles of the senior officers would be found. It was situated well within the Intrepid's core. No space ship designer would place the most critical command centre anywhere but where it was best protected from external attack.

She passed many strange sights as she strode across the lawns and gardens. A pack of blue six-legged dogs were pursuing a large galloping ungulate until the whole pack and its prey suddenly vanished. A small child-like creature with wings fluttered in the air for several minutes before it too disappeared. A being whose head resembled a carved-out pumpkin strode by and then disintegrated.

The corridors were empty when Beatrice reached the crew's quarters although there was evidence of a disturbance that had spilt objects to the ground. It wasn't totally deserted. One of the space ship's catering officers was in the corridor, but when she saw Beatrice she gave a gasp and ran away. At first Beatrice was puzzled by the reaction, but she reasoned that with so many bizarre Apparitions the sight of a naked woman might have appeared to be one of them.

Beatrice wasn't surprised to find that the door to the bridge was locked. She tried to attract the attention of those inside to ask them to let her in, but there was no response. However, it was no effort for Beatrice to modify the pattern of her iris and fingerprints to match Captain Kerensky's and so gain entrance.

Even when inside, Beatrice was still alone. There wasn't actually anyone on the bridge. The senior officers whose likenesses Vashti had copied so exactly were nowhere to be seen.

Beatrice looked around the room and soon identified the gruesome remains of what had once been the senior officers' replicants. A single eyeball was lying on the ground. It was still looking around the room despite no longer being connected to a body. A disembodied hand was lying on a table and its fingers were moving in an uncoordinated fashion. By the door to the lavatory lay a penis that was twitching agitatedly in a puddle of piss. Even these few remnants were steadily disintegrating as Beatrice gazed at them. They were clearly no longer a threat to her.

Beatrice sat at the holoscreens and evaluated the current situation from what she could see through them. The space surrounding the Intrepid was very different from that displayed on the Intrepid's internal systems. Vashti had evidently set up a software simulation designed to comfort the humans on board the space ship, although this was only as much comfort as absolute nothingness can ever be. The publicly disseminated image of an empty void was absolutely true with regards to what was visible in the far distance. There were no reassuring beacons of distant light emanating from distant star systems and galaxies. However, the near distance was very different. There was very much more than nothing. Three or four space ships were within ten thousand kilometres of one another and all of them resembled the Intrepid. Less than a million kilometres away, fragments from an annihilated space fleet were slowly blowing apart. All around were apparitions of such peculiar objects as a steam train puffing smoke in deep space, a group of men wearing bowler hats and carrying umbrellas, and a diplodocus tumbling over and over together with a nineteenth century steam boat.

What was most strange, however, was the very visible sight of Colonel Vashti no more than a thousand kilometres away. That she was totally naked was strange enough. No human could survive even a fraction of a second in the very low temperature of deep space, but Beatrice knew that Vashti was no human. Stranger still was just how truly monstrous the colonel was now. She was several times larger than the Intrepid. Indeed, her erect penis was the same length and almost the same proportion as the Intrepid. She appeared to be swimming through empty space towards the Intrepid which was also absurd as there was no medium through which she could swim. At her present rate of progress it would take several hours until she'd have returned to the Intrepid.

Beatrice, however, could afford to wait.

In the meantime, she studied what she could through the Intrepid's nanobot-enhanced instruments. Beatrice was perplexed to see that although the Intrepid was charging forward at a terrific rate through empty nothingness it wasn't actually moving at all. There was forward thrust but no change of relative position. Beatrice traced back the route travelled by the Intrepid in the weeks since it entered the Anomaly. The telescopic sensors were powerful enough to monitor exoplanets around galaxies over twelve billion light years away, but still couldn't catch a glimpse of a single star system through the narrow aperture by which the Intrepid had entered.

Colonel Vashti was becoming steadily smaller as she swam towards the Intrepid. Beatrice assumed that this might be related to the nanobots' general affliction. In fact, Vashti's facial expression appeared to express something very similar to alarm. As a result of having taken on human form, Vashti had also inherited such human characteristics as complex emotional responses and an expressive face.

By the time Vashti finally reached the Intrepid she'd shrunk to normal human size. She jumped onto the space ship's surface and walked over it as if it exercised a much more substantial gravitational force. Vashti strode towards an open escape hatch and clambered inside as if this were a natural thing to do in empty space where there was no atmosphere and no gravity and where the ambient temperature was less than four Kelvins above absolute zero.

Beatrice now had to switch to a different set of surveillance systems to monitor Vashti's progress. It was obvious that Vashti was in distress. Her physical integrity was constantly being challenged. One of her eyes kept dropping out of its socket. Her face slowly melted and then with some effort reasserted its more usual contours. As she walked along, she left behind a trail of slime in the imprint of her feet. Her penis had taken on a peculiar life of its own. Sometimes it was erect and prominent. Sometimes it drooped and became snake-like in both length and flaccidity.

Vashti didn't look very well at all.

Beatrice needed to resolve the question of where Vashti was going. The colonel had clambered up the internal entry system past the outermost level in which Beatrice had already determined were the nanobots that had imprisoned the real Captain Kerensky, the real Colonel Musashi and a selection of the most senior or most potentially troublesome officers and passengers on the space ship. It was the penultimate level that Vashti was most interested in. And why would that be?

Beatrice smiled to herself. The only possible reason was that Vashti was looking for Beatrice. This was understandable. Vashti was in trouble. It was possible that she was dying. Who on the Intrepid other than Beatrice could be of any possible help to her at all?

Well, in that case it was Beatrice's duty to meet Vashti and fulfil at least a part of her mission. And that was to annihilate what was now left of the nanobot community that had frustrated her original mission and humiliated her entire civilisation.

Beatrice intended to return more or less in the direction from which she'd come. She carried a small portable holoscreen that enabled her to follow Vashti's progress. However, she had a most unexpected surprise when she opened the door to the bridge.

She was confronted by Captain Kerensky and her senior officers. They seemed even more astonished to see Beatrice than she was to see them.

And this time the surprise wasn't because Beatrice was naked as they were all similarly unclothed.

"It's you," said Captain Kerensky accusingly. "Why are you here? What plans have you got for us?"

What should Beatrice say? She wasn't in the mood to argue with a bunch of inadequately armed humans.

"The Intrepid is all yours, captain," Beatrice said. "You don't have to worry about me."