Godlike Machines by Jonathan Strahan [Editor] Page A

points. Hard, non-biological forms bulged under drum-tight flesh. His eye sockets were stuffed with faceted blue crystals, radiating a spray of glowing fibers. There was something not quite right about the shape of his skull, as if some childhood deformity had never healed in the right way. It was hairless, papered over with translucent, finely veined skin. His lips were a bloodless gash.
    “The music,” Galenka said, breaking the reverence. “You think it’s coming from his head, don’t you?”
    “I think music must have comforted him during his journey. Somewhere along the way, though, it swallowed up his mind. It’s locked in a loop, endlessly repeating. He’s like a rat in a wheel, going round and round. By the time he came out of the wormhole, there couldn’t have been enough left of him to finish the mission.”
    “He made the Matryoshka sing.”
    “It might have been the last thing he did, before the madness took over completely. The last message he could get through to us. He knew how alien the artifact would have appeared to us, with its shells of camouflage and disguise. He made it sing, thinking we’d understand. A human signal, a sign that we shouldn’t fear it. That no matter how alien it appeared on the outside, there was something human at the heart. A message for the species, a last chance not to screw things up.”
    “Would it have killed him to use radio?”
    “He had to get it through Shell 3, remember-not to mention how many shells we’ve come through since Shell 4. Maybe it just wasn’t possible. Maybe the simplest thing really was to have the Matryoshka sing itself to us. After all, it’s not as if someone didn’t notice in the end.”
    “Or maybe he was just insane, and the music’s just a side-effect.”
    “That’s also a possibility,” I said.
    The impulse that had drawn my hand towards the patterned wall seemed to compel me to reach out and touch the pilot. I was moving my arm when the figure twitched, convulsing within the constraints of the couch. The blue lines strained like ropes in a squall. I jerked in my suit, nerves battling with curiosity. The figure was still again, but something about it had changed.
    “Either it just died,” Galenka said, “or it just came back to life. You want to take a guess, Dimitri?”
    I said nothing. It was all I could do to stare at the pilot. His chest wasn’t moving, and I doubted that there was a heart beating inside that ribcage. But something was different.
    The pilot’s head turned. The movement was glacially slow, more like a flower following the sun than the movement of an animal. It must have cost him an indescribable effort just to look at us. I could read no expression in the tight mask of his face or the blue facets of his eyes. But I knew we had his full attention.
    The gash of his lips opened. He let out a long, slow sigh.
    “You made it,” I said. “You completed your mission.”
    Perhaps it was my imagination—I would never know for certain—but it seemed to me then that the head nodded a fraction, as if acknowledging what I had said. As if thanking me for bringing this news.
    Then there was another gasp of air—longer, this time. It had something of death about it. The eyes were still looking at me, but all of a sudden I didn’t sense any intellect behind them. I wondered if the pilot had conserved some last flicker of sanity for the time when he had visitors—just enough selfhood to die knowing whether he had succeeded or failed.
    Tension exited the body. The head lolled back into the frame, looking sideways. His arm slumped to the side, dangling over the side of the plinth. The fist relaxed, letting something small and metallic drop to the floor.
    I reached down and picked up the item, taking it as gingerly I could in my suit gloves. It was a tiny metal box with a handle in the side and I stared down at it as if it was the most alien thing in the universe. Which, in that moment, I think it probably was.
    “A