The ranger was beautiful. Try as I might, I couldn’t reach even to the knee of his exoskeleton. The armor on his chest shone with the blue tinge of tempered steel, although the material wasn’t actually metal but something far stronger. He had two powerful arms (humanoid machines traditionally had two) and a dozen other adapters, capable of drilling, cutting, welding, shooting, and who knows what else. There were also several electrical ports, although the majority of them were located in the head. Come to think of it, there was nothing else in the head aside from the various inputs and outputs; that, and perhaps a few sensors that the designers wanted to place up high. All told, the ranger looked like a highly advanced machine, making my Carrier pale in comparison. However, Carrier, despite having a name, is in fact a machine, both fairly capable and fairly dumb at the same time, while the ranger was human.

He paid me no mind, connecting immediately to Carrier to get the local surveillance feeds. I surreptitiously connected as well; I have a right to be curious as to what brought such a prominent individual to my neck of the woods. What I was able to discern made me whistle and give pause. Turns out a capsule carrying a human passenger crashed somewhere near the emitter, and the passenger was so important that the best of the best was engaged for his recovery.

To be honest, I can’t recall anyone ever being rescued alive from such depths. From the periphery, sure, I myself am an example, but from right under the emitter . . . I figure any ranger would be torn in two halfway to his destination. Of course, if the ranger is being controlled by a human, all bets are off.  He might be destroyed even quicker, or might make it all the way. This one was clearly determined to try.

“Pardon me,” I asked loudly, “what route are you intending to follow?”

The ranger did not turn, but I could feel in my bones that I was being thoroughly scanned: height, weight, composition of sweat and saliva. Even then, what followed was not an answer, but a counter-question:

“Identify yourself.”

“Mowgli,” I replied, without a moment’s hesitation.

I don’t know whether it’s worth being proud of or not, but there are tons of rangers out there, and only one of me. And my none-too-polite interlocutor clearly knew who I was. Not from personal knowledge, perhaps, but certainly the information was available in his data stores.

“You won’t make it there,” came a terse reply, and the ranger turned and marched off. He could safely fly for the next two kilometers, but preferred to proceed on foot. A reasonable precaution.

I watched him for a bit, then went to get ready. I was curious to see how far the ranger would get, and how he would go about saving the passenger if, in spite of all probabilities, the latter turned out to still be alive.

I had no exoskeletons, protective shield generators, or laser turrets in my possession. To use these natively, at the subconscious level, a person must start learning from day one, and I was found when I was over two months old. Too old to become a fully integrated member of society. Amma, who found me among the broken remains of a passenger module, carried me back to her lair, and raised me alongside her cubs, taught me all kinds of things, but mental interfacing wasn’t one of them. Soft, warm, and wonderfully gentle, she could instantly transform into a fully coiled steel spring. A necessary ability in order to survive in the nearby woods, which weren’t even woods really, but dense thickets interspersed with mucky swamps. I had Amma to thank for feeling at home in this rather uninviting land. I wondered—what would have become of me if I hadn’t been found by people? But I was found, even if a bit late, and I am thankful to the ranger who took me from the lair but did not hurt Amma and my older brothers and sisters, who were desperately trying to take me back.

I was taught human abilities, and I even learned a few of them. I know how to use some of the things in a ranger’s arsenal, but only on a conscious level, meaning with a 0.2 second delay, which in modern conditions is an eternity. As far as the full complement of instrumentation, computational dynamics and just regular life stuff, it is simply beyond me. I could not learn how to navigate in a modern city, and so I had to live on a station by the emitter, where real people appear no more than twice a year. Which isn’t that infrequently, by the way. Any human presence floods me with an avalanche of emotions, even if I am not all that likely to run into any visitors on the massive and sprawling station.

I have learned long ago that it is better to wear clothing in the woods, so I put on overalls and selected a pair of athletic shoes. I stocked my shoulder pack with some meds, a few basic instruments, and a modest amount of food. One can always feed oneself out in the woods, but I suspected I might not have much time for hunting.

The packing took about five minutes, during which the ranger disappeared from view. Not a big deal—the trail he left behind could be followed by a blind man, if he was so inclined.

I picked up a stick that I usually took along on my excursions, and began to follow the trail. I planned to catch up with the ranger on the second day. Sure, at the moment he was plowing straight ahead at a rather brisk pace. But once things started to get difficult, he’d definitely slow down.

Fine drizzle floated from above. Not rain; real downpour begins only when a large interstellar ship, of the type that carries a crew, gets caught within range of the emitter, and that only happens once or twice a year. Drizzle comes from cargo capsules, these perish in countless numbers, and the emitter is always enveloped in a cloud of mist.

The stench of rotting grasses filled the air. The local swamps are host to plants from a million worlds, not to mention a near infinite number of hybrids that have bloomed here since the emitter came online. Thankfully, the emitter doesn’t affect animals and cyberfauna, else the place would be packed with mutants. It seemed to me that the local woods should be a heaven for biologists, but the biologists themselves appeared to be quite skeptical of this, insisting that any geneticist worth their salt could grow plenty of fascinating monstrosities in a lab, making the local specimens of negligible scientific value.  Only naturally occurring biocenoses were worthy of study.

I must be a poor biologist, because every time I tried to grow a fascinating new plant or animal and install it in the woods, it was immediately eaten, trampled, or destroyed. Which I take to be a sure sign that biocenosis of the local woods has long become self-contained. There was no other conclusion I could reach, being myself a product of said biocenosis.

Once shrubs gave way to swampland, the ranger’s progress slowed, just as I had predicted. While I followed an established trail, he marched forth in a straight line, bravely perambulating across the deepest marshes. While there was nothing there to damage his synthetic flesh, there was plenty to slow his colossal form.

I camped at Stone Knoll for the night, a rare leech-free spot hidden amongst the bogs. Not mosquito-free, though. Amma had it made; no mosquito could penetrate her thick fur. She died several years back. I buried her right there in the woods. Since then I have taken to using the word “amma” to refer to my brothers and sisters, as well as all others of their kind, wondrously powerful and beautiful animals. Black fur with silvery bristles, fangs to make a tiger jealous, paws equally adept at running across rocks and swamps. Where they came from, how they ended up in the woods is unknown, although no one has investigated it specially, of course. In scientific literature ammas are mentioned exclusively in articles about Mowgli, that is, myself. The articles say it’s possible that a few thousand years ago a traveling zoo or an exotic animal hunting party crashed here, and ammas somehow managed to survive. This is nonsense, of course, since there are no such animals on any of the planets in the known galaxy. Most likely, ammas are a feral, multi-evolved descendant of some smaller animal, a favorite pet of some lost space crew.

All ammas took me for one of their own, even the ones that have never seen me. Which is strange, since all smells of the den should have faded a long time ago.

There was a convenient fissure at Stone Knoll, inside which one could make a fire, which is exactly what I did. The smoke kept the bloodsuckers somewhat at bay, while the fire served as protection from fangers—small, but rather bitey and highly annoying creatures.

I woke before dawn and resumed my journey as the first glimmers of sunlight cut through the misty haze. The ranger put some distance between us during the night; he didn’t require sleep, just kept on striding toward his far-off goal. He could have flown, but it isn’t recommended in the proximity of the emitter: you could crash, or even bring down another ship, and not even here but in some other quadrant of the galaxy. I read a lot on the subject, but never quite got to the bottom of it. Some scientists believe there is a reverse feedback loop, others argue there is not. But either way it is not something you’d want to risk.

After Stone Knoll, you start encountering frogbots and chips dust. The dust would spread even further, all the way to the station, if it wasn’t for the endless curtain of mist. Water-soaked dust settles onto the moss below, where it quickly rusts. The water in the bogs is rust-colored, and not good for drinking. The rest of Earth—that’s what I call my planet—sees no rains at all, ever. Earth is a completely arid planet, the working emitter is the only source of water, and if it wasn’t for the wind drying out the woods, the area around the emitter would have long turned into one giant swamp. As it is, the woods are not too wet, and lichens have spread out to near a hundred kilometers from the water source. The lichens also do a decent job at filtering out chips dust, which eventually just turns into regular dust. Otherwise, who knows what would have become of the desert areas.

Frogbots were various small amphibians; what they all had in common was that each creature had a chip at the base of its skull. Who installed these and why, what these chips connected to, I had no idea, and to be honest, did not particularly care to know. It is my deeply held belief that living things should be living, and mechanical things should be mechanical. Possibly this is because I also don’t have a single chip in my entire body.

The closer to the emitter, the more I ran into hybrid creatures and locally sourced cyberorganisms. I could taste chips dust in my mouth. I should really say “chip dust,” but I like “chips dust” better, and since no one besides myself currently cares for this phenomenon, “chips dust” it shall be.

Aside from venomous amphibians there wasn’t much danger here, not to me, anyhow. How the ranger would make out I had no way of knowing. A few times I thought I heard explosions in the depths of the woods, but I wasn’t completely certain, and then I had more important things to do than strain my hearing. All of a sudden rain started pouring down from above, and there was a clap of thunder. I hurriedly pulled out and activated an umbrella.

An umbrella is not a thing that keeps out the rain. Rain I can take, I am not made of sugar. An umbrella is a gravitational shield, used to protect one from falling debris. I carry mine around in an air-tight bag, to protect it from chips dust. Now it will need to be replaced; a used umbrella is unreliable, there is no telling where the dust has penetrated and what changes it might have made to the umbrella’s software.

An umbrella won’t help against a five hundred passenger liner coming down on your head, of course, but there were no crashes of that magnitude in my memory, and an umbrella can indeed absorb the hit from a standard cargo capsule, that much I’ve verified.

This time around the umbrella did not get to demonstrate its defensive capabilities. The capsule which caused the rain came down almost half a kilometer away from my location. The spongy ground under my feet shuddered. There was the sound of an explosion. The rain immediately turned back into the usual drizzle, as if someone up there turned off a faucet.

A cargo capsule crash is a pretty commonplace event. Sometimes ten to fifteen of them can come down over the course of a single day. The galaxy is immeasurably huge, millions of trips take place every second, yet there are only twenty seven emitters in all. It is actually surprising how rarely out-of-control ships come flying at my head.

Emitters do not trap and knock cosmic travelers out of the sky, far from it. Quite the opposite: they lay down galactic highways and guide ships large and small along these paths at faster-than-light speeds. That’s exactly how it’s described in textbooks. But since the law of large numbers continues to apply, once in a while a moving spaceship drops out into Riemannian space not at the target destination, but next to the nearest emitter. Even when this happens, the vast majority of stray ships are not destroyed. They fire up their launch engines and escape to a safe orbit, where they are picked up by rescuers. The only thing to fall to the emitter is working mass, which in all modern engines means water. That is why there is always some amount of rain around a working emitter, even though they are built exclusively on arid, lifeless planets. Well, on planets that used to be that way, anyway. Nowadays there is an area of moisture around each emitter, large enough to allow plant and animal life from crashed ships to survive and flourish.

An emitter has to be placed on a planet with significant mass, otherwise the very first large liner that runs off course will knock off its orientation, causing it to somersault through space. Even as it is, the revolution of the planet around its sun and the movement of the star through its galaxy causes enough fluctuation to send your Ptolemaic epicycles reeling. Which is why there are occasional issues with routing.

Most spaceships that get into this kind of trouble simply refuel and retry, getting to their target destination just fine on the second attempt. Only a tiny percentage of particularly unlucky ones end up crashing onto the surface. One or two out of millions. Nothing to be done about that, there are no absolute safety guarantees in anything.

The capsule that had just fallen was lying in a swamp, half-submerged. Its hull split open, the cargo was scattered around at a considerable distance. I freaked out at first, seeing splotches of blood and pools of red gunk. Only a powerful smell of fruit served to calm me down. The capsule was transporting a load of fresh raspberries, which were now splattered all over the area. What joy for the animals and the semi-cybernetic frogbots!

And then the seeds, carried all over the place in hundreds of thousands of bellies, will germinate and sprout, and raspberries will begin to grow on this land, which has never before borne such delights. Although it’s possible the plants won’t make it in this environment of constant rain. Natural selection is a brutal force, particularly in artificial biocenoses.

I did a quick estimate and found that a standard capsule would hold around twenty tons of the delicate berries. That’s a lot of people left without an exquisite dessert! But at least I would get to try some, I was not leaving it all to the frogbots. I located an unruptured container, cracked it open, and moved a few packages of ripe berries into my pack. One I opened immediately, and continued on, occasionally tossing a handful of flavorful raspberries into my mouth.

I had to seal and put away the package pretty soon, however, because the taste and crunch of chips dust was spoiling the experience. It would do well to save my teeth, too; cybernetic larvae are quite abrasive, and can leave you toothless in no time if you aren’t careful.

A while ago, when I was first learning the ways of humans, I was rather concerned to learn that dust particles are in fact embryos of cybernetic organisms. What if these embryos develop into chips right inside me? That is very likely the manner in which frogbots first came into being. Subsequently, it turned out that my body had already developed an immunity to this crap, and so, try as they might, my human caretakers couldn’t manage to implant even a single chip. Which meant that simple dust had no chance whatsoever.

Meanwhile, there was more rather substantial noise ahead, and it sounded like combat, not the roar of another falling capsule. The ranger encountered an opponent.

A few hours later, I came upon the site of the battle. A hundred-armed cybersquid decided to attack the ranger, suffered a resounding loss, and was now being taken apart by tiny crabs. The computational center of the squid was smashed to smithereens and overrun by decomposers. Each was busy hauling some tiny component off to its lair, in the hopes of using it to grow its own capabilities. The cyberfauna of the woods was almost entirely composed of interchangeable pieces. This principle was born of human ingenuity, and so the parts from fallen ships do not go to waste, everything finds its use. The squid’s tentacles, possessed of a certain amount of autonomy, were still moving, although they, too, were being assaulted in the attempt to break them apart into individual building blocks. Should the assault succeed, there would be many more spare pieces; should it fail, the tentacle would grow its computational power instead, giving birth to a new, initially small, squid.

The mechanical horde ignored my presence entirely: I had no useful components to offer, and was therefore of no interest. As to traditional flesh and blood predators, I sit at the top of the food chain: I can eat them, but they can’t eat me. Provided, of course, that I am being careful.

From this point on, the ranger’s tracks were no longer a straight line: either he began to choose his path more carefully, or else the squid damaged one of his legs and the ranger was limping.

This important question quickly resolved itself. The ranger had to make a stop to take care of his damaged right leg. As it turned out, the squid had nothing to do with it; rather, the joint was damaged by chips dust. I don’t know how exactly it made its way inside, but once there, it began to re-configure sensors and control mechanisms. The leg took on a life of its own, which is not very conducive to fast movement. I can’t say how the ranger went about solving this problem, but apparently he managed it. The surrounding rocks were thickly covered with dust that showed no signs of activity. It was now just dust, useless to local cybersystems, no longer fit for utilization. Its fate was now to rust and turn to ore in the bogs. It would be good to find out later how the ranger accomplished this. I don’t much like chips dust and would gladly reduce the amount of it in the woods.

Again, there came the sound of gunfire from a distance. Who on earth would he be fighting at this point? I honestly couldn’t understand.

Intrigued, I hurried toward the noise. What I saw was completely out of this world. The ranger managed to pick a fight with a bearmech. This construct is so huge that it is barely capable of movement. It is trivial to avoid it, should one so desire. But once it gets its claws in you and begins to deconstruct, resistance is pointless. As it applies to all cybernetic and semi-cybernetic systems, anyway.

Nevertheless, the ranger was managing to resist. One of his appendages, raised high up in the air, periodically lit up with the blue glow of plasma, and strikes of lightning lacerated the massive bulk of the bearmech. But even those could not do serious damage to a beast made of billions upon billions of mutually interchangeable blocks. A bearmech’s purpose is simple: grab and deconstruct. The ranger was a hundred times more advanced, but for that very reason not nearly as robust. The ranger had certainly analyzed the primitive construction of his opponent, but what of it? Several horrendous scars from the laser turret proved that the ranger attempted to use the same weapon that made fast work of the squid, but in this instance it wasn’t effective: the bearmech was rebuilding itself at a faster pace than it was being carved apart. The plasma whip was proving similarly ineffective, even though it was targeting the most active spots. Neighboring areas immediately activated in place of the burned out blocks, and the bearmech kept on devouring. It managed to knock the ranger, whose damaged legs proved a detriment, down to the ground, and was slowly pulling his head into its maw. Strictly speaking, the beast had no actual maw, nor did the ranger have an actual head. Both simply had a variety of ports, perfectly compatible between the two systems. That’s where the battle raged: an invisible struggle for control, a war of electronic circuits. If the bearmech had a clearly identifiable control center, even a highly redundant one, it would be possible to physically destroy it, but what is there to be done if every part of the massive monster is effectively such a center? If the ranger was simply a machine, it would have long lost the battle for control, but the human hidden deep in its bowels continued to fight.

And what could I do? Absolutely nothing. Run up to the bearmech and solder off a piece of something? I didn’t have as much as a soldering iron for the job. If I had been allowed to travel alongside the ranger, or, say, ride on his shoulder, I could have warned him to avoid this spot. But all I could do now was stand there and watch him be taken apart into component pieces.

The plasma manipulator ceased glowing and lowered down, limp and lifeless; the arms, which were trying to break contact and haul the ranger’s mangled body away from the bearmech, stopped moving as well. Blocks of plastoceramic armor popped off the chest and sides of the ranger one after another. I couldn’t shake the persistent feeling that the vanquished ranger was being eaten alive. Although he was merely being taken apart, of course. Deconstruction as a form of feeding.

The bearmech paid no attention to me, most likely its sensors did not discern biological objects. As for the ranger, even if he could still see, there was no longer anything he could do.

I approached the plasma manipulator. It was completely devoured from the inside: no controls, no power sources. These all had redundant copies, to the best of my knowledge, but all were gone. The plasma generator itself was fine, of course, there wasn’t a whole lot that could happen to it. It could be used manually, with enough effort. It was unclear whether it had an accumulated charge: all the sensors and indicators were gone. But even if it was fully charged, I could only fire a single shot—there was no source of further power, the broken power circuits were now feeding the bearmech instead. Not that there was much sense in it anyway: the ranger had been firing wildly, all to no avail.

I checked the manual controls, sat atop the dead servomotor, and waited.

The ranger’s insides, now open for public viewing, were impressive indeed. I can’t imagine how one can possibly control all this stuff simultaneously. The man encaged inside the machine was a true professional. And yet, the dumb power of the bearmech broke him. It must be terrifying to feel yourself paralyzed, deaf and blind, sensing only the inevitable creep of the all-devouring power. For his consciousness hasn’t gone, biology continues to work to the very end, and an operator of a machine as advanced as a ranger undoubtedly feels his equipment like a part of his own body. I know this from theory; I am not capable of similar feelings myself.

The ranger’s torso was now a heap of scrap metal: small metallic and plastic parts, plugs, spacers, useless to the bearmech. Some of it would be processed later, but for the time being the cybernetic monster kept inching inexorably toward the holy of holies—the central cage that housed the human. He was incompatible with the bearmech’s crystalline intellect, and the beast could not intercept control of the man. Therefore, the objective remained unmet and the battle continued. The foe must be devoured down to the last microblock.

I knew that the bearmech also had some kind of manipulators and locomotors that it used to retrieve remote prey and even effect incredibly slow movement, but I’ve never seen them in action before. These were hidden away deep during combat, as they would have been immediately targeted by the ranger. Now, something akin to a multi-jointed appendage or the tentacle of a squid slid out from the shapeless mass. Several of these quickly took care of the locks on the cage and dragged out the prize that was hidden inside.

At first I froze in surprise. This is what they call a human? Something puny, pinkish-white, with feeble arms and legs, it squirmed and screeched desperately, trying to loosen the iron grip of the manipulators. For their part, the manipulators ignored the wriggling protoplasm, methodically pulling implanted chips from the pink body.

There was no time to lose. The bearmech had no care in the world for the ball of organic material in its grip, but in its hunt for the chips it could easily torture the little human to death as a side effect.

I set the targeting cone of the plasma manipulator to its narrowest setting, took aim, and fired. The accumulated charge was only partial, but it was enough for a pretty good blast. The bearmech’s manipulators, still busy with the vivisection, were sliced in two, and the little man was suddenly free. He needed to run now, and was probably sending mental commands to that effect, except there was no longer anything to carry them out, and his own legs were no good for running. I suspect he even slept in a special suit, if not a full exoskeleton. Analyzing recordings of city life, I’d seen that the majority of the populace wore something to that effect.

The bearmech extruded a few pseudo-appendages, feeling for the shooter. I dropped the now-useless blaster, ran to the helpless human, grabbed him under the arms and began to haul him away from the bearmech and the remains of the ranger. We crossed a large puddle and stopped. The little manling—I couldn’t bring myself to think of him as a full human—was whining, blood was seeping from sores on his feet, which dragged along the ground. Gaps from the removed chips resembled open wounds.

Seemingly, my rescuee was trying to take a closer look at me, but I was farther away than the display screens he was used to, and he was having trouble focusing. I am not sure how much he was able to make out, but his question seemed better fit for a language recognition protocol:

“Identify yourself.”

He could no longer scan me as he did on our first encounter, but I replied in the same manner:

“Mowgli.”

“Yes, right.”

Well, look at that, something made it into his own memory!

“Do you think you can walk?”

He attempted to stand, but immediately fell over on his side. It was pretty clear: there was little he could do without his mechanical facilities, little he could remember or know without the informational ones. I’d have to carry him. I emptied my bag, adjusted the straps and the bag itself so that the hapless rescuer could fit inside.

Raising my head from my handiwork, I took in a wondrous sight: with a mad look in his eye, the ranger was staring at his hand, whereupon sat a large, blood-filled skeet. His hand was literally swelling before my eyes, as it happens with highly allergic reactions. He must have been in quite a lot of pain, but did not even think of defending himself, reacting only with a slow, drawn out whine that issued through his clenched teeth.

I never could understand where all the bloodsucking insects in the woods came from, by the way. Fish, leeches, and amphibians make total sense. Nearly every spaceship has aquariums, terrariums, and other preserves of domesticated nature. But someone transporting a bunch of mosquitoes?

There is not much prey for mosquitoes in the woods, so the bloodsucking females have long adapted to vegetarian forms of sustenance; they still retained the apparatus, though, and drank their fill whenever the rare occasion did present itself.

“Skeet” is what I called the degenerate hybrid of a mosquito and chips dust. This particular beastie is what was currently luxuriating upon the ranger’s ballooning hand.

I flicked off the swollen bloodsucker, opened the bag wide, and said to the ranger:

“In you go.”

He climbed in without a word, rustled around in there, making himself comfortable, then said, in that same tone used to talk to machines:

“I can’t locate the ports.”

“There aren’t any,” I replied, not without a hint of glee.

I passed the ranger the tube with healing cream, instructing him to apply it to his wounds, and carefully closed the opening valve so that not a single skeet or mosquito could sneak inside. I couldn’t venture a guess which of the two was more dangerous to the little man. The valve was made of the thinnest mesh through which the ranger could breathe, see, and talk. All in all, he was going to be riding with all the comforts possible under the circumstances.

I used the remaining material to form a small sack, stuffed it with a few things that might come in handy on the road, hauled the bag with the rescued ranger onto my shoulders, and we were off.

“Wrong direction,” came the tinny voice of my spinal parasite just a minute later. “We need to go the other way.”

“Really? What for, pray tell?” I inquired, without slowing my pace.

“A human is dying there. I must save him.”

“You should save yourself, for starters. You can’t take two steps without your machine. And I can’t carry two at once. I’ll get you back first, then return for him.”

“The shipwrecked human will starve to death in that time. His capsule has water, but very little food. Leave me here and go for him.”

Well look at that, kid’s got character. Thinking not of himself at a time like this, but of his charge. A real ranger remains a ranger even stripped of all his machinery. Though he was obviously exaggerating: “the shipwrecked human will starve to death.” Way to be dramatic. If the capsule broke open, he has been dead for two days already, and if it survived, let the guy fast for a week, it won’t do him any harm.

“Wrong direction,” repeated the ranger creakily.

“I make it a point not to change direction halfway through a trip,” I replied. “Besides, I don’t even know the location of the downed capsule. I don’t have its coordinates. Do you?”

“I did in the augmented memory, but it has been destroyed.”

“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Either way, we have to get back to the station to retrieve the coordinates.”

“This is bad,” declared my back-rider and fell into a long silence.

I moved along at a brisk pace and made only a single stop in a place where pools of clear rain water were trapped in the leaves of a gigantic lady’s mantle. I ate quickly and attempted to feed the ranger, but it turned out that he could eat neither my crackers nor the sublimated meat. He drank some water, nibbled on a few raspberries, and that was all. I massaged my achy shoulders, and we pressed on.

It was dark by the time we reached Stone Knoll. I started a fire and made the ranger get out of the bag. What I discovered defies description. First off, the little parasite covered himself with the entire supply of healing cream. But what was far sadder is that he expected that the bag, like a space suit, came with a built-in life support system, allowing one to urinate and defecate in situ. The raspberries gave the poor guy the runs, and he shat all over the bag and himself with it.

I had to wash out the bag in one puddle and the ranger himself in a neighboring one. He bore these trials stoically, complaining only a single time with a pathetic:

“I didn’t know…”

“What do you know?” I wanted to say, but held back, remembering the time they brought me to one of the populated planets, to a fairly small city, by today’s standards. Everything there moved, flickered, talked with incredible speed. I couldn’t keep up with anything, everything kept changing, new states of things as indecipherable as the previous. I couldn’t last thirty minutes there, was evacuated back home, and have been living here by the emitter ever since. So, no reason for me to turn up my nose and praise myself for being so special. The ranger was brave enough to enter the woods where he was very quickly gobbled up; whether I’d ever be able to screw up the courage to stick my nose inside some megametropolis was still very much in question.

The ranger slept in his bag, with the opening valve sealed tight. He refused breakfast, so we departed early, at the first hint of faint morning light.

I was almost running, even though I knew that running through the woods was a bad idea, even in places through which I’d passed hundreds of times before. My pet parasite kept mumbling something about access levels, that Carrier wouldn’t allow me to see all of the information, because it isn’t available to regular users. Ha! Me, a regular user? I may think very slowly, but I’ve had years to get around the various layers of security. My caretakers figured that Carrier would monitor me, but in reality, I’ve been monitoring Carrier. Machines may be thousands of times faster than humans, but a human is still going to be the one in charge.

There was also the question of what to do with the ranger. I mean, he couldn’t just stay in the bag while I took the second trip through the woods. Then it came to me: the station had my crib, from when I was two months old. The crib was roomy enough for the manling’s miniature frame. And, it had basic ports, which I never did learn to use, but which would come in extremely handy for the ranger. But, most importantly, he would be fed, hydrated, healed up, and kept safe from anything that might come flying out of the woods. Last thing I needed was for him to get infected with chips dust and turn into some kind of anthropomorphic frogbot.  Besides, the crib was going to coddle him and treat him to some educational programming for newborns.  For some reason I found this last fact amusing.

The ranger was thinking on similar topics; he mumbled ceaselessly, at any rate, addressing either me or perhaps his long-gone data stores in a string of incomprehensible commands. The common thread in this delirium tremens was a refrain on how we might now venture back into the woods together, since he failed to do it on his own.

Finally, I snapped.

“What is it with you? Can’t you see, there is no way through here for the likes of you. Why do you need to come along?”

The answer surprised me.

“Because I am a man.”

His response had nothing in common with my logical altercations with Carrier. To a question of “Why?” the ranger simply replied: “Because.” Which meant it wasn’t so much a response to my inquiry as the result of his own internal deliberations. That kind of thing I could understand.

“I’ve read a lot of ancient literature, I watch contemporary footage as well, though at one-tenth the speed. A man is supposed to be strong, and you’d be considered a weakling even among our pampered contemporaries. I mean you couldn’t even digest a few raspberries, which everybody eats. Nutrient-rich mash is more your speed. How could you possibly be a man? If anyone here is a man, it’s me.”

He laughed, I think. I mean I didn’t know how else to interpret the sounds he made.

“Strength isn’t about lifting weights. Any loading bot does that better than you. Strength is about information, the ability to access it, process it, and make decisions. For this, one has to give up some things, among them the ability to eat raspberries and run about barefoot.”

“Lot of good your information did you. A dumb bearmech gobbled you up along with all your knowledge.”

“I ran into an unknown, unstudied phenomenon. Unfortunately, the data was destroyed. Because of the proximity to the emitter, I was unable to transfer it to the mainframe. But I remember that I encountered something unknown, that is the most important information of all. The specifics can be filled in later. The real tragedy is that I couldn’t rescue the human. So, I have to go back. Because I am a man.”

Say one thing for the little manling, he certainly had an iron will. Only iron rusts awfully quick out there in the woods.

“A man should know what his limits are, and not get in the way of those who can do more. I can do more. I’ll go to the crash site myself, and make it, even if I don’t have all the information. ‘Because I am a man,’ as you say.”

“How could you be a man? Even biologically speaking, a man isn’t about overdeveloped muscles, but about primary sex characteristics, which your beloved ancient literature is too modest to mention. In my current state I am unable to ascertain your knowledge on the subject, but I must disappoint you: you are not a man.”

That was a low blow. I desperately wanted to give the bag a good shake to make the parasite shut his mouth, but I merely clenched my teeth and quickened my pace.

The station was within sight. I covered the last half kilometer at a trot, careful not to shake the snot out of my precious manling. I pulled the bag from my shoulders as I went and placed it in the corner, unopened, as soon as I got to a clean chamber. I instructed Carrier, then activated the crib, heretofore dormant for many long years, moved it next to the bag. I unsealed the valve, letting the ranger loose. Pointed at the crib:

“Get in there.”

“First I have to get the coordinates . . .”

“How are you going to get them? You haven’t got a single functioning chip left.”

“Not true. Besides, I can use voice commands.”

“Oh, voice commands now! You planning to pathfind with voice commands, too? Get in there. This is the only mechanism on this whole station that’s built for your kind. It will restore your basic complement of chips, at least.”

The ranger sighed and, wiggling like a worm, crawled into the crib.

There. The crib wouldn’t let him out until he was healed, until his chips and ports were restored and tested. The crib goes about its duties slowly and methodically, it’s programmed to service newborns, not out-of-commission rangers.

I took five minutes to pack, five more to locate and copy all the data about the recent crash onto a portable memory infoblock. I processed the coordinates first, the rest would have to be adapted to my mode of consumption on the way to the site. Even if chips dust got to the memory before I got the chance to process all the information, I already knew the coordinates, and not even a bearmech could eat those out of my head.

I looked back at the crib before walking out. The ranger was muttering something imploringly, but I did not bother to listen closely. The burning insult inside my chest wouldn’t let me. Big freaking deal, this little man with his primary sexual characteristics. . . . What, that little ding-dong between his legs? That’s a primary characteristic? Please, he can pull the wool over someone else’s eyes.

I’ve never had to travel through the woods while trying to ingest illicit information before. But it seemed to be going smoothly.

The route was nearly identical to the one I took the first time around, when I was following the ranger in his straight-through tramp toward the target. I made a couple of detours around unpleasant spots—the most direct route isn’t always the fastest—and there was no raspberry picking this time. I spent the night, my third in a row, at Stone Knoll. At this pace, the spot was going to run out of brushwood, and I would have to do without a fire, keeping warm by the solitary heat of a thermacapsule. I had to expend thermacapsules on the previous nights as well, because with the ongoing drizzle the brushwood would not catch otherwise. Once this ranger thing was over, I was going to get back home, get myself nice and dry, and then it’d be desert trips only for me, thank you very much. I was going to stay out of these woods for at least a month.

Meanwhile, the infoblock kept whispering details about the crashed capsule into my ear. I wished it had started with the data on the passenger instead. A passenger capsule is no liner or starship. Size-wise, it’s even smaller than a standard cargo capsule, and designed for a single individual. They are used in situations where there is an urgent need to travel some irregular route, where even a single passenger is uncommon. The traveler lies down in the capsule and goes to sleep, or watches a VR movie, and in about three hours they reach their destination. Faster would be better, of course, but they haven’t invented instant teleportation quite yet, and probably won’t in the foreseeable future, either.

But this particular capsule was strikingly different from the norm. Instead of standard life support systems it had all kinds of additional equipment, the purpose of which I couldn’t figure out even if I tried. I mean, I probably could, but it would take years. So I did my best to filter out extraneous information and try to grasp the main idea instead. And I managed it! It was a medical capsule for transporting patients in critical condition!

The human body is incredibly complex, more complex than all the rangers and bearmechs combined. Sometimes, it can break down in ways that cannot be handled by ordinary medicine. These types of patients are sent to specialized medical centers. A mere three hours, and you are there. . . . But then disaster strikes, and suddenly the patient, if he is even alive, is lying there sealed inside a medical bay.

The ranger could have warned me about this. He could’ve at least told me what medicine to bring, instead of regaling me with tales of woe. Not like I am one to talk: I kept chattering about hell knows what – manhood, fortitude, anything but the job at hand. And I left without bothering to listen, when the ranger was obviously trying to tell me something. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t speak louder, his throat wasn’t made for it.

It was too late to go back, all I could do now was keep going and be ready for anything. Including the possibility that the patient had died of starvation.

I never did learn about the passenger. The earphone clicked, then came a brief bit of music, which abruptly turned off. Just a few notes, not enough to guess the melody. One look was enough to realize the problem. The memory infoblock fell to the constant attacks from the cybernetic small fry, the electronic contacts were breached, and now any frogbot could read from the infoblock and write back its own data, assuredly fascinating, but completely nonsensical. You couldn’t see where the breach had occurred with a naked eye, but I did spot a skeet sitting right on top of the gadget. Presumably it hacked in straight through the casing and was now breathlessly transmitting some random chunk of data, scavenged long ago from some long-gone device. Quite possibly it was indeed something musical, and the skeet was now sharing the notes of some three hundred year old smash hit. Except that right now I didn’t need music, I needed a diagnosis and medical instructions!

Cursing, I turned off the infoblock and chucked it into the bushes. Let the frogbots feast.

I’ve never had to move through the woods this fast. There were no trails out here, so I just ran straight ahead, not even bothering to avoid the spot where the ranger met his demise. Obviously I didn’t scale the heap of junk that was still visible amongst the scorched bushes, but I did sprint right along the edge of the bearmech, even though I’d normally try to avoid it.

The capsule crashed about two kilometers from the bearmech, meaning that the ranger had been mere minutes from his target. I did not want to imagine what would have happened had the capsule landed right on top of the cyberbeast. As it was, the area was actually reasonably stable, since the bearmech had consumed all its smaller brethren.

I did not have to search for the capsule for too long, the thing was half a hundred meters long and almost ten meters in diameter. Not something one could hide in the bushes, it was visible from afar. It was immediately obvious that the capsule did not break apart, but rather landed with enough control that the protective gravitational fields were able to cushion the impact to the passenger. So he was alive, then. I could only imagine his state, being sealed inside like that. Four days he’d been stuck there now. And he was seriously ill, to boot, otherwise he’d have been traveling in a standard passenger capsule.

Air and water are always available in abundance in any capsule, but food is another matter, even in a medical capsule. It’s meant to fly for two to three hours at the most. There isn’t much food required for that short a period, even for sick passengers.

Having arrived at the crash site, I was now glad that the destroyed infoblock managed to inform me about the workings of the capsule before its demise. Had it not, I would have been running circles around the thing, trying to figure out how to get inside. Instead, I was able to get my carefully protected communicator hooked up to the capsule’s medical ports in a matter of minutes. I decided against going straight for the passenger. Not knowing the diagnosis, I could end up killing him simply out of lack of circumspection. I’d screwed up enough out of unnecessary rashness already.

This time the information was all about the patient.  There was no name, just some kind of identification number. Gender—male. Age—seven days. Diagnosis: rejection of the core set of chips responsible for social adaptation. Indication: emergency procedure to forcibly implant the chips . . .

These last words I processed more or less automatically, only because I was unable to breathe and disconnect from the darn machine.

Age—seven days! Four of which the child spent locked in this freaking gas chamber. Oh yes, he is being cleansed, injected with fluids, flipped side to side . . . and fed, for a little while at least, until the meager supply of food ran out. But he was locked in there all by himself, and even a seven-day-old baby can feel that.

It’s surprising quite how many thoughts can run through one’s head while one’s hands hastily pry open a medical compartment. It would’ve helped to have a chip which could instruct the compartment to open automatically, but I had to make do with what I had.

The child was alive. He appeared to be sleeping, but as soon as the doors of the compartment slid open, he opened his eyes. He wasn’t crying, he was waiting.

I pulled a water container out of its socket, tossed it into the bag. Then lifted the child in my arms, pressed him to me, covered him with my jacket. He’d be warm there, and protected from the tiresome dampness, at least.

The little guy began to move around, poking at me with his tiny face. Sorry, little one, there is nothing there for you, nothing but appearances. The ranger denied me the right to call myself a man, but he didn’t call me a woman, either. A child wouldn’t go hungry in a woman’s arms, but me . . . what’s the use of a breast, if there is nothing in it?

This time around my bag contained not only homemade crackers and pemmican, but also a few bars of nutrient-rich paste, suitable for the miniature ranger. But the paste was no good for a newborn, even if I was to mix it with water.

The woods dragged on and on. Dry in some parts, swampy in others. Tons of edible plants everywhere. Edible for me, but not for the child.

Rust-colored water splashed under my feet, my breath became ragged, my side cramped. And only a tiny part of the way behind us. It took me thirty hours to get there, moving alone, traveling light. How long would it take me to get back?

Several heavyset herbivores noticed me and bolted away through the bushes. I could take one down if I tried, but neither warm blood nor pre-chewed meat would do the boy any good. He needed milk, which I didn’t have.

The child shifted around again, began to cry quietly.

I won’t make it, came the thought. There is not enough time.

The mush under my feet wasn’t deep, only up to my knees, but it was marshy, and I couldn’t run. A little off to the side was a stretch of sharp rocks, fissures, impassible thickets. Moving through there was nearly impossible, quite easy to break one’s legs, though.

But that’s where the sharp, deeply familiar scent came from.

A narrow fissure, a rocky overhang, forming something resembling a cave, and a deep darkness, impenetrable to an untrained eye. But I could see everything. A beast rose quietly from the depths of the lair. Snow-white fangs, black fur with silvery bristles, emerald-green eyes with vertical pupils. The master of the woods, the only beast stronger than me.

I went down onto my knees, offered the child on outstretched hands.

“Feed him, amma. He will die without you.”

For a long second the amma stood motionless, then tumbled heavily onto her side. She pushed apart her cubs with her sharp muzzle, freeing up a heavy nipple. The child immediately grasped onto it, began to suck loudly. Amma carefully licked her new cub.

I stood there on my knees, thinking that from this moment on, my life had a newfound meaning. I will not give up this child to anyone, amma and I will raise it ourselves. He has no parents of his own; the little humans that work so well with information have no ability to conceive, carry, and birth their own children. This little boy was conceived in a test tube, grown in an incubator, and so whosever genes he is carrying won’t be too attached and too distraught. And I will not allow them to forcibly implant him full of chips. My son will grow up to be like me.

And one more thing. I will try to find myself a real man, or, if there are no more of them left in the world, I’ll make do without, but I will definitely have children. No one will dare stick chips into their brains, but they will know ammas as their own family.

The ranger said I was not a man. He was right about that, after all. But he better not dare say that I am not a woman.