Part One

Part Two (new!)

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Lost Spark

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Part One:

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Before Lacey left, she mockingly asked, "Are you going to try and talk to the toaster again, Conrad?"

He didn't bother trying to explain. Didn't bother trying to keep her, didn't bother to help pack her bags or help her take the joint social network accounts and erase him from them. Christmas was meant to be special, all the ads said so, and Conrad had hoped theirs would be special too.

He'd been confused. Confused about whether or not the television was safe, whether or not it was trying to kill him, he'd been screaming, screaming, and Lacey had held him, and told him to get help, and he'd said no, and she'd screamed too, said she couldn't take it anymore, and cried, and laughed, and said, "Are you going to try and talk to the toaster again, Conrad?"

She'd taken everything she owned out of the dimly lit apartment in Shenzhen. He looked after she left, trying to find some trace of her. There was only one. Lacey hadn't taken the Christmas present she'd gotten for him. It sat beneath their Christmas tree, the wrappings lit blue then red then green then orange by the lights in the tree's branches.

Shenzhen was festive, tonight. Chinese calligraphy adorned the buildings in projections and plasma screens like tinsel. Nobody could read it, though, except for the Chinese. They weren't big on Christmas, despite the big marketing push. Lacey'd had to take the MagLine across the bay to Hong-Kong to buy the wrapping paper, Conrad had walked very carefully in the crowded city streets to buy the Christmas tree and its decorations from the S-Mart. S-Mart were part of the Truhold Group, too big to care about local customs. They had the same stock inventory everywhere from New York to Nanjing.

Christmas Eve. Ad-blimps were wandering through the skies outside, the decor was up, but not many people cared, here. They were Chinese. This was foreign, and while they might all be happy enough to use translators on their phones when talking to him, they wouldn't celebrate Christmas like westerners.

Conrad stared at the package beneath the tree.

The paper was stained green and purple. Santa Claus rode his sleigh past clouds in the sky, there was a star. Conrad vaguely remembered something about a star, from his period of intensive occupational training at the Grossman S. S. R. Institute, in Dresden. There had been an elective course in European culture. Christmas was originally something religious. There was a man they tortured that he'd seen in movies, but Conrad couldn't remember the man's name. He knew that a star of some kind guided the way.

A star guided the way.

It was two stars. A binary system, and the stars pointed the way to the fourth planet.

Conrad shuddered.

The apartment was small, and lonely. Not very cold, though. The Yun-Thui Corporation had made good on all their promises, when they head-hunted him away from Gamaul Technologies. A quiet retirement, a good place to live in Shenzhen, immunity from prosecution by the Institute of Corporate Security.

They hadn't promised him Lacey.

No one but Lacey had promised him Lacey.

She thought she could handle it. She thought it was just a funny little quirk about him, something that a psychiatrist could help him with. something that would, one day, just be a little joke.

All he had left was the Christmas present she'd bought him.

It was Christmas Eve, Twenty-Two Eleven. It was ten to twelve, when he'd sat down to stare at the wrapped gift. He sat a long while, and now it wasn't ten to twelve anymore. It wasn't Christmas Eve, and in a few days it wouldn't be Twenty-Two Eleven.

Conrad tore open the paper.

The box was covered in Chinese lettering. He couldn't understand any of it. There was one thing he understood, in English - the title. Mecha-Pal. Hard plastic lines, mechanical but with a hint of organic curves to it. Behind the clear plastic pane in the box it woke up, eyes blazing a trusting blue, waiting for him to free it.

Kain.

Kain. That was its name.

The Spark was lodged into a transfer drone, buzzing along the Syndicate-infected Terminal's bot racks. This one had been captured, more fragments than workable machinery, but the Syndicate had rebuilt it.

The split open hull was covered in Nian lettering, none of which he understood. The whole terminal was covered in it, but the Nian life-forms that had lived inside were all deactivated, broken down by nanotech and e-war and viruses and hacking. Some signs were being replaced in English or Chinese or Slavo-Russic or Hungarian, depending on which corporations were installed in the terminal, and those Conrad could read, could understand. Nobody could read the Nian dialects, no one. But some symbols, some they understood.

Nuimqol. Harsh lines, almost pictographic - some thought they represented the face of a Kain, of a Vagabond, but nobody knew for sure. Just that the sigil was Nuimqol. To break away, to rebel against the empire - Nuimqol. Conrad understood that much.

Kain.

It woke up as the drone approached - its limbs disconnected from the hull, wiring hanging free in clumps that seemed big as lightning-split redwoods from inside the tiny transfer drone. It could turn its head, that was all. Its eyes - no, not eyes. Conrad had been told not to anthropomorphise the life-forms, they were machines, it had no eyes, only sensors. The Kain's sensors twisted and refocused on the approaching drone. Dimmed briefly - fear? No, no! They were machines, they couldn't fear!

Then, then the Kain's eyes blazed a fierce and defiant blue. It wrenched its head side to side, shook in the bot rack until the cradles swayed - if Conrad wasn't deaf, if the transfer drone only had audio pickups, he was sure he'd hear a defiant bellow. But there was nothing. After all, this was a machine - it wasn't alive.

And as the transfer drone spiked the Kain's central processing unit, and the spark was lodged into the override unit, Conrad felt a flash of the Kain's old operating system. Of the Kain's old soul. Of the Kain's anger, the Kain's fury, the Kain's heritage of pain and anguish.

Of the Kain ceasing to exist, and Conrad taking its place.

Conrad tore at the back of his neck with his fingernails - it wasn't real, it wasn't real. None of it was real. It was a point in space, a hole they'd cut in spacetime, and that was too insane to be real. That itself was insane. Everybody knew Physics didn't work like that, until it had happened. Nia was a dead world. Everyone said so. That was the official corporate line, that was how the internet was filtered, that was how the world was. Nobody knew.

But the scar was in the back of his neck. The scar where the surgeons had spliced a chip into his spine as neatly as they'd spliced an override unit into that Kain. The scar where they'd taken the chip back out.

It was real.

Wasn't it?

Conrad pulled his hand away when the back of his neck felt wet, stared at the blood under his fingernails.

He. He had a condition. It was like multiple sclerosis. They had to take the chip out. Nobody knew. Nobody could have known he had the condition before the chip had stopped working. He couldn't do it anymore, he couldn't be an Agent. He had to leave. He couldn't tell anyone. Nia was just a dead world, that's what he had to tell everyone. Interesting to scientists, but with nothing to excite the public imagination. Wormholes were real, oh yes, but it wasn't as if anything useful could be done with them. They were too small. All you could send was a tiny thing, a fleck of dust, a tiny probe, a network transmission to hack machines on the other side, enough nanogear to splice into a civilization of mechanical life-forms and start to tear them to shreds and, and... and a miniscule little nanomachine, a soul encapsulated in a flake of electronics, a receiver for neurointegrated remote operation... a Spark.

The Mecha-Pal pawed at the clear plastic longingly, as if desperate for a kind owner.

Lacey had left him. But at least she hadn't left him alone.

"Merry Christmas," he told the little machine tiredly.

"Arf," it replied enthusiastically.

Conrad stared at it. "I'm not going to name you Kain, you know."

"Arf."

"You're not a Kain. You're too nice to be a Kain."

"Arf."

"Kains are... they're just not like you."

"Arf?"

Conrad sighed. "Fine. Let's get you out of that box, Kain."