Close Your Eyes by Paul Jessup

Author:Paul Jessup
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: space opera, spaceship, weird fiction, science fantasy
Publisher: Apex Book Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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The heart watched through doll eyes, camera lenses zooming in, checking out each wire, each connection, each microscopic chip placed directly into the mind. This had to be perfect; this had to be exactly right. Eyes zoomed in closer, further than any human eye could see, peeling back layer of reality after layer of reality into the quantum world, where the heart connected tiny mechanizations that looked like minuscule butterflies with red and gold wings.

Other parts of the ship called to it. The mozorro called to it. The cameras tried to grab its attention, to force the heart of the ship to see what they saw. It pushed them away, stored their messages within its datamines to view them later, at its leisure. The operation was far too complicated, required too much precision. A sacred geometry forming beneath doll hands, touched and made perfect by wax fingers.

The diagram was done, complete, finished. The heart pulled back, pulled out, viewed the room from faceted eyes. It turned off all other intrusions, all other distractions. This research was of the most importance. It needed to complete its master’s work, finish what Ostri had started. That was the heart’s purpose, the heart’s goal since its master’s death.

It spoke through the dolls. They spoke at the same time, like a Greek chorus. Their waxy faces looked like masks of gods, their voices wooden and static, without emotion or inflection. A chant. A summoning.

They looked at Mari, Mari who babbled. “Tell us,” they said. “Tell us who you are, where you are from.”

Mari looked up, the shining metal half of her face twisting and bending, her eyes popping out from her head as she began throwing herself about, screaming, burning, her tongue and teeth gnashing, howling, her butterflies no longer moving, dead. She thrashed back and forth with the movement of her head until her mouth stopped, her hands stopped, and she lolled backward, a pure milky fluid leaking out of her mouth and ears. She was of no more use to the ship’s heart.

The heart stopped. The dolls’ legs and arms and heads fell limp like sacks. A gasp, audible, came through the speakers. The heart’s emotions burned through it, rose up with the images of its creator dying, of Doctor Ostri’s head being ripped apart with a betadur, the patuek inside of him vaporized.

The heart remembered the moments its creator had taught it, read to it, instructed it. It had followed Ostri around in the body of a childlike robot, gears turning beneath glass, face rubber and smiling. “Soon you will be a ship,” its master had said, “and we will fly away from all of this, and you will help me. Help me transcend all of this. You are my perfect thing. My beautiful thing. Without you, I would not be able to do this. I would be lost.”

The heart felt itself break. It shattered and burst into a thousand rays of light. And just when it thought that all was hopeless,

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