Chapter Two: Counterbalance — Part 3

Orchid felt a lonely tear streak her dark features, leaving a line of heat in its passing. She had been alone so long, had hoped in being alone that the pain would simply go away. Rather than pass into oblivion, the pain had turned to a numb sensation that affected her to the core of conscious thought. She could no longer feel the need for closeness directly, it was as if she were touching the world through many layers of soft gauze.

Mother had left for Earth nearly eighteen years past, had given her no advice on men or on making friends. As a seven year old, she had relished in the freedom, answering only to her instructional drones, and waging intellectual war with her bander, Spunky, at every opportunity. When she was still only a twelve-year-old genius, after having met so few boys her own age who she could consider good for anything but sex, she decided that with rare and incalculable exception, the male of the species must be horribly deprived of higher cognitive abilities.

After a few failed relationships during her teenage years, she had decided that men sucked and she would trust nobody of the opposite gender except, of course, her brother. Even her brother, who’s technical genius was parallel to her own, unnerved her with his lack of understanding and basic logic that came, based on her observations, rather naturally to women. Even to women who lacked the caliber of intellect Orchid had crammed between her ears. Her brother assured Orchid that, given enough time around members of her own sex, that Orchid might gain enough evidence to counter that bias, but thus far, Orchid’s perceptions were holding constant.

In contrast to this bias, Orchid so enjoyed conversations with her brother that his current absence brought her pain. Living alone with her brother on an asteroid, hidden from the rest of the universe, had taken its toll on Orchid’s social skills. Her incredible intelligence also damaged her relations with those who would otherwise be her peers. She could find nobody who could understand her, and only her brother matched her wit, her intellect, or understood her motives, even when he disagreed with her. Her brother who traveled so much she rarely had anybody but her banders to talk to, was also the only person — or android, for that matter — she had ever met who could hold a conversation with her without drawing to a point of confusion.

Orchid listened to the water drip through the oxidation system on its way to the breeding ponds, drop by drop, all one hundred thousand drops synchronized and sounding oddly like one mighty, magnified plop in the silence of the large laboratory. The drops fell slowly in the weaker gravity, and were also larger than one would expect if one were to have experienced water drops falling on Earth. The water fell with such precise cadence that Orchid found herself almost in a trance. Her nose lingered on Geine’s residual scent, and could feel in her fingers the last heartbeat marking his death. She had minutes to try to save him, minutes that passed to quickly, but Orchid, being stubborn and determined, would not give up.

She had struggled so desperately to produce a blood-borne molecular robot that would get him started again. He lay on artificial life support for days, his mind shattered, his body growing weaker. Geine had only came to life on his own at the cajoling of her final microscopic robotic fix. He had come back to life without memory, without the conscious ability to think and function, and he lay there, staring at the ceiling, gurgling incoherently. While is body and mind began working physically, if not cognitively, the collectively intelligent microdrones worked to reverse the damage all the way down to the cellular level, Geine stared at her through eyes that could barely even blink, and which flickered closed and open for sometimes minutes at a time.

Orchid looked after him for weeks as his mind slowly rebuilt itself from the startlingly chaotic mush it had been some time before. She tended to his body as one would tend a baby. Much like a baby growing into adulthood, once he had the capacity to do so, Geine left home. He had packed his bags, set his suit’s coordinates, and left a sloppily written note thanking her for her hospitality. Or more precisely, the drones had, because whatever had been Geine before death was now wiped free of his mind. Orchid doubted he even remembered who she was.

Memories of that horrible day, the day he left her, cut away a tiny section of padded numbness, allowing Orchid the comfort of a second tear, which streaked down her face, following the path of the first. Geine had been somebody she could talk to, at least. He had been good in bed, and had been smart about fixing machines. Had he not shorted out his nervous system while doing live circuitry repairs on a malfunctioning android visitor, he might still be maintaining her computer systems, might still be occasionally having sex with her, and might still go out dancing with her between his various mechanical experiments. He was never as smart as her in the analytical sense, but he did have charm and a genuinely caring heart, and that more than made up for his inability to calculate quasi- and multi- dimensional processes.

If not for distractions of the more current kind, Orchid might well have sat sulking even longer. Her bander hovered into view, a silent, nondescript sphere of purely inorganic, and flawlessly polished metal. It simply drifted back and forth, to and fro, just to the edge of her vision, continually distracting her until she turned directly to it, and spoke.

“Hey Spunky, what’s the signal?” she asked, knowing why it was bothering her, even though it wouldn’t tell her with words.

Spunky, by its very nature, said nothing to anybody. As best as Orchid could tell, Spunky didn’t like talking to humes unless it was absolutely necessary. Spunky used text for most of its communications, and found anybody illiterate in his or her own language to be annoying. Spunky was one of the original banders left by her mother, and it followed Orchid everywhere. As usual, it simply hovered in front of her, as if watching what she was doing, as if calculating her every thought by the subtle nuances its androids senses were keen to notice. Spunky activated a transmission, broadcasting the image of a man Orchid despised with such certainty that it threw her emotions from dark nostalgia to bitter vengeance. Orchid had only a moment to tighten down her thoughts, put on her mask of confidence, before the feed became live.