Chapter 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.