The Greater Good
Capt. Belen Kaleri usually confessed his indiscretions during our mandatory disclosure sessions. I’d watch him pick at the crisp-pleated gutters of his midnight-blue uniform pants as though plucking remorseful guitar strings. Ashamed perhaps because I knew that one who was charged to lead so many was weak in the most common of human ways. I wouldn’t waste my breath reminding him that the needs of the body have little to do with duty. Shining a light into the black chasm of an old, divisive conversation would lead us to the same dead end. The captain didn’t know his verbal admissions were necessary to direct the computer to where the memory was placed.
We sat back-to-back in the low light of the closet-sized room that served as my domain, intimately tethered together by the reconciliation helmet. Hidden in plain sight, adjacent to the library on the civilian sublight ship Eudoxus, disguised as a mere therapist, I held counsel. Restricted to an arm’s-length distance, I had guided generations of colonists as they studied, dreamed, imbibed, and fornicated their way through the constellation Ophiuchus and beyond. We rippled through the five dimensions of space, a curved shadow in the periphery, spiraling on invisible strands headed to Gliese 1214-b, some forty-two light years away.
The captain and I both led the ship in our own distinct ways, but we couldn’t be more different. The captain was a man of about forty but tracked much younger and had the dubious honor of belonging to the last generation of the Earthborn. His smooth face had few lines, likely because he seldom smiled. I had the impression that he was carved from stone and then dipped in wax, the true solidity of his character hidden beneath such a thin veneer. He sat ramrod straight, supported by his concrete spine, rigid from duty and purpose.
My masculinity, on the other hand, seemed more of a limpid afterthought. Despite my full head of dark hair, no one had ever called me handsome. The words I heard to describe me were quiet, intelligent, and probably homosexual. I had the face of a man, but my body was slight, like a lanky boy that had only just hit his growth spurt. I worked tirelessly to maintain my wiry physique for no other reason but to adhere to the ship’s strict fitness requirements. But my true purpose required a higher standard and protected me as well as a suit of armor.
“You have no reason to worry, Counselor Parrish. We both agreed it was a one-time thing.”
Unvarying, he uttered the same feeble phrase as if saying it aloud would temper the bitterness of this new moral infraction that I would once again have to consume. Who was it this time?
“Name?”
“Junior botanist Chenan Luek.”
I recognized her immediately. Soft-spoken, Korean ancestry, blue hair—she had to see me twice in the past for growing synthetic recreationals. Unlike the captain, the woman wasn’t married. I tagged her file, summoning her for an appointment tomorrow.
Linked together, my mind followed the gentle bond to prod at the captain’s neurals and subsequent interconnections. With a practiced thought, I thoroughly coaxed his will to relax. The helmet numbed his scalp, and a sound like a slow exhale could be heard.
“What are you doing?” His loud words slurred from the gas that the helmet seeped into his lungs. He spoke over the piped-in mellow piano that mitigated the distant vibrations in his head. The captain never sounded like this before. “Are you eating me?” His voice drifted as if far away.
I chuckled at the ridiculous thought. “Only your sins.”
Of course, there were rumors about me. Asexual single males usually provoked such dubious attention, although the inference to cannibalism was a new spin. If anyone had bothered to ask, I would quickly assure them that the only relationship I needed was my work. “Anything else that you need to tell me?”
Abruptly the captain was sitting upright, fighting the chair, fighting our connection. “Then how do I learn?”
The helmet automatically corrected itself by releasing more gas, and the captain returned to his previous limp state. This very same thought had always been a conflict for me. Humans learn through mistakes. Was I halting their progress? Their maturation? At the bottom of that nagging feeling, I knew it didn’t matter because this existence was temporary. It was not for me to understand. Unsettled, I cautiously continued.
The moment lengthened between us as he searched his recent past for any transgressions that would interfere with the harmonious atmosphere on the ship. With the skill of a seasoned tracker, I followed his thoughts as they wove in and out, hiding only to reappear once again. In the helmet, the flickering pulse of light on the overlapped holograph of his brain grid dulled to a steady somber gray, except for three offending points glowing with a crude glare.
Targets marked; I channeled the true function of the reconciliation helmet, an apparatus that long ago, someone nicknamed the “Redeemer.” I concentrated the purifying gleam into his brain. I know from my training that his saliva slickened as though his tongue was now coated in dense oil, and I heard a sound like cutting into a juicy pork chop. And there’s a point in the ritual where Capt. Kaleri is unable to move. In that hallowed juncture, we combine almost into one being, a single mind inhabiting two distinct bodies. A gentle pressure, like a finger caressing our brains, the hallucinatory smells of dried petals as my mind circled his thoughts, the blissful warmth that passed over us both as my Redeemer cored away his memory, then I drew it into myself.
And as his feelings surged into me, my heart joined the captain in a shared beat, and I tasted their sweaty passions, their heated desires, our heated desires, as we kissed all the way into Chenan’s suite. Something in my chest clenched in partial envy but mostly awe. Deliciously, she opened to me like a dew-laden jasmine flower, and sweet rhythmic waves spread through my limbs, an aching joy saturating my senses.
But these relationships are not mine. These lives I absorb are spectral experiences forever out of reach. Even I cannot measure the sacrifice I have made for the Eudoxus. Not for the first time, a cold twinge of jealousy lodges itself in my chest like an icicle. Their underlying corruption becomes a part of me, and for the greater good, the captain loses all. And I gain nothing.
Some report headaches afterward, forgetfulness, perhaps a temporary loss of motor function, or a taste of phantom cabbage. I myself wallow in feeling deflated as the once-vibrant tang of their experiences is orphaned in my memory.
There were lengths of time when the steadfast captain would complete his duties while balancing his love of casual liaisons with responsibility. Reminding the crew through his exemplary behavior that fraternizing with colonists was strictly prohibited. But the bells of temptation rang from every corner of the ship. Desire seethed like heated cats, single-minded in driving lust. When the captain began nightly prowls through one of the ship’s thirteen different biocosm habitats in a baseball cap and ripped jeans, I knew to be ready.
In the beginning of his tenure some twenty-five years ago, I used to beg him to come see me and douse the match before it lit the fuse. Clenched as tightly as a boxer’s fist, he refused. Nowadays, I quietly wait for the inevitable moment when the burden of guilt instigates hyperactivity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is when all privileges are revoked until a mandated visit to me. Captain or colonist, the requirement is the same.
My office door slides open to a wood-paneled room, empty except for the brooding carbon-colored recliners in the center. I enter from a private passageway that leads from my compartments when the tingle alerts me to their seated presence. I am the only one on the ship who knows that these are biotic interrogation chairs. In our comfortably low seats, the living material restrains our bodies. Then the reconciliation helmet channels my focus into that irritated portion of their brain that burns with guilt. Living cables mummify our faces—soft as cotton, dense as steel, with connectors that link our minds. From the outside, the reconciliation helmets emerging from the chairs look foreboding, ominous—but the peace they grant makes the process all worthwhile. The first prototypes looked like old lead diver helmets, but the ones I use are sleek and serious.
My visitors relieve themselves of their burdens: stealing, lying, cheating, rampant ambition—all the tiny little missteps that would normally require punishment, tribunals, time in the brig. Which in our limited space would then lead to judgment, resentment, alienation. I am necessary, the peacekeeper of the floating dispossessed.
The cables retracted and Capt. Kaleri blinked uncertainly at me. A visible fog lingered in his eyes, and I knew his thoughts were having trouble sticking. Inside my head, I heard and felt his indiscretion join the other voices filed throughout my mind.
“Why did I come to see you?”
“You were inviting me to dinner.”
“Yes, of course,” Capt. Kaleri said with a thin smile, “Jem and I would love to have you at our table.”
I had not yet been born when the signal burst through the newly erected lunar South Pole communications telescope, Icarus. Beamed across the galaxy through the infinite black ocean of electromagnetic radiation, the easily detected static message repeated at perfectly regular frequencies. The Earth Mother news feeds chronicled the broadcast and its unknown creators as possible threats, causing world governments to ramp up the technological war machine in preparation. Anyone with a pirated copy of the transmission was directed to delete the possibly contaminated signal.
While the world’s governments fought over the proposed location for building a data prison of sorts where they would quarantine a single isolated machine and unpack the message, Gunner, an amateur cryptologist from Luna Settlement Gamma, deciphered how to unlock the detailed information.
The decompressed knowledge flung itself out over Earth’s atmosphere, where in moments, a symphony of images and a rainbow of sounds simultaneously waterfalled onto every available television, handheld, and billboard screen on the planet: circular hovering art that collapsed upon itself, moving pictures of a breathtaking sun-stippled city, with even buildings and rising lights spiraling outward in the comforting shape of the golden equation.
A collective silence blanketed the transfixed world when a cuneiform message scrolled by. The accompaniment of thunderous music quivered the emotion centers of our cerebrums. Then hints of the alien technology, a form of communication that used quantum entanglement. Contained in the modulated intrapulse frequency amid the outpouring, an invitation of sorts, like a student exchange program with schematics for a toroidal ship to take us there.
The white button-down shirt I chose hung a bit on my lean frame even with my normally strong posture, but the black formal jacket covered it up nicely. I hummed Beethoven’s Ninth to myself in anticipation of being in company this evening while sweeping a quick comb through my hair and blending the sprouts of gray I’d had since my teens. My long fingers banded the psicom against the two small bony protrusions behind each ear, allowing the ribbon to pulse data into my visual lobes, syncing me to the heartbeat of the ship.
The three thousand star-bound passengers were only vaguely aware of my presence. Almost leprous, I parted the crowd, shunned for a reason that, like a thief, constantly slips their minds. The entirety of my being ached with the resulting loneliness.
The Primatores warned me of this during my years of training—the discontinuance of my believable existence. They called it cessation—a side effect of repeated helmet use, along with the suspension of aging that scientists could never quite explain. Everlastingly thirty, with a thick carpet of hair and an unlined face, I possess a close-to-infinite life span, until we reach our destination in approximately five generations or a hundred years.
My quarters were bachelor comfortable, complete with the closest approximation of a davenport that I could find. All sorts of entertainment were merely thoughts away; each psicom connected to Earth Mother reels, newly captured space casts, music that spanned eons. In addition, the Eudoxus had its very own theater, galleries, artists, and immersive collaborative simulation that could be accessed only from the virtual stacks. I’d redecorated a decade ago, which amounted to no more than printing out a new duvet cover and changing the walls from a dark blue to a hazy twilight. Although florists delivered a fresh arrangement weekly, it did little to minimize the aura of Spartan sterility.
It was tiring to be forgotten, especially compared to the rest of the ship’s whirling vitality. But I knew in the deepest region of my soul that this journey would not succeed without me to keep the calm, salve the stinging wounds, and protect the multitudes.
Few who live on the Eudoxus have escaped without seeing me at least once in their lifetimes. There is no way to live confined on a crowded starship without being maddened by covetous feelings, whether they be for berth size or romantic partners. My visitors complained of disruption by professional jealousies or sibling rivalry. It’s human nature attempting to fill what is missing by theft, to gamble what you can’t afford to lose, or to cover up any cracks with subterfuge, wanting, craving what you perceive is being denied.
Temptation on the Eudoxus was a bruised longing that no one ever spoke about. It persisted like cancer, attacking both righteous and weak. It nagged like a tiny splinter of glass in the calloused part of the foot. And in the normal way of society, people pretended not to notice.
Deeply rooted desires sufficiently starved turn to anger. I averted the further cycle by enforcing scheduled leisure time coupled with a bit of exertion to clean out the most tormented of heads. For the resistant, I usually mandated taking an aerial for a spin or biking through the desert biocosm. In extreme cases, forcing a divorce from the cause of such unrest and shifting the offender to a new part of the ship cured the problem.
Compulsions, on the other hand, were a different beast altogether.
In one of the five fully automata-run, three-tiered public dining rooms, the ship, for the entirety of a week, paired a human cook with a randomly selected restaurant as a requirement to maintain their food preparation skills. Of these, a favorite chef was chosen to prepare the captain’s monthly formal dinner, consistently the most sought-after event. The lively affair, held in a private dining room beyond the main concourse, stood in profound contrast to the usual bleak vastness reflected outside the portscreens. I attempted to dampen my delighted grin at being included, containing it as a mere look of passive amusement.
Instead of music, the captain preferred the deep insistent rumble of the far-off wind from the moody vacuum of space. And for background entertainment, starlifting had already begun on the nearby blue supergiant. A stoic parade of gleaming copper collectors first laser-cooled then purified the gases before their transfer to fuel storage tanks.
Days before approaching, the ship’s radiation shielding had automatically thickened as the fusion propellant expanded and hardened, protecting us from the deadly particles. As I sipped my rosemary greyhound, the raging monstrosity flared across the aqua-shifted backdrop, hurling village-sized cosmic fireballs of blue hydrogen and helium.
Jem, the captain’s wife, exuded arctic elegance. Her snug dress with flowing sleeves caught more than one officer’s eye. She was a woman of about forty-five with a full face and a laugh like trickling honey. I was treated to quite a few jealous glances as I found my place card to the right of hers. She presented herself as an agreeable person except when the conversation turned to the futures of engineering or linguistics. In those instances, she lashed out like a mercurial force of nature, weaponizing her words, laying waste to any opposition with a flimsy opinion.
From the boozy way the lavender martini enveloped her words, I could tell this was not her first or even second drink of the evening. The sharpness of her green eyes belied her drunkenness. Like most off-Earthers, whether born among asteroid or moon settlements, she was ferociously resilient. With no Earthly attachment and black skies being the norm, the confinement on the ship made her blossom like only someone who had never touched foot to grass could.
Jem’s visits with me usually consisted of displaying her shame at loving her professions more than her husband and children, a sentiment that needled her roughly every two years—unlike the shades of violent sexual proclivities that I retarded every few months or so.
We sat at the far end of the long table, opposite her husband’s place. From my angle, I noted how Chenan’s eyes flirted madly with his, needing acknowledgment that she no longer found. A misstep on my part not to consider the captain’s audacity in waving his dalliance like a victory flag. With my psicom, I summoned her file forward and banded it for immediate holding.
Not five minutes had passed before the mediators arrived, and Chenan was making her apologies. Head to toe in simple suits of navy blue, mediators were my apprentices. From their few, I would choose a strong understudy like myself, someone with an inherent sense of responsibility.
If Jem had any inkling of her husband’s affairs, I had no proof.
“Counselor Parrish, Minister of Governance, I’ve stopped being surprised by your name intruding on our dinner parties. One of these days, you will have to tell me how like clockwork, you manage to wrangle a last-minute invitation. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was blackmail.”
“You know how I dislike honorifics.”
“Whenever you’re around, Adrian,” my name sounded jagged on her tongue, “I can’t help but feel uneasy, as if we’re all back in grade school and someone is about to get in trouble.”
“Perhaps the cook.”
Her tepid laughter came easily. Too easily. “The watcher in the weeds, the sentry on the wall.”
Fixing my green eyes on Jem, I gave her an easy nod unbothered by her baiting. “Ahh. You read Fentrell.”
“Not for many years.”
We got lost in that careless conversation that happens so often when the party relaxes enough. I recognized the faces in my immediate vicinity, both colonists and crew. I knew them all more than they knew themselves. Near me sat Lieutenant Yari, an enlisted laser communications engineer who lied to overcompensate; Electra, an Australian-born agriculturist and dental surgeon with a secret fetish for the teeth she examined; Zachary, one of the many geochemists and planetary scientists, who had urinated in more than a few cups of coffee; and Friedrich, a physicist and stand-up comedian with stolen jokes. I let myself drift, swollen with emotion, hands braided together, pleased as the chatter streamed into a rushing waterfall of words, laughter, and drink.
And then I had a curious epiphany: that if not for my intercessions, we wouldn’t be having this lovely dinner. Yes, we would still be in space—I couldn’t take proper credit for that. Ever since Earth Mother had heard the slow sequence of long pulses detected at the lunar South Pole, a race to the far galaxies was inevitable.
But I was responsible for the civility: truncating vicious gossip, blunting anger, and stopping every overindulgence. Shaping a society, guiding it to perfection. On this ship, there was no higher power.
I was chewing my garlicky mushrooms and vatted chicken with newfound vigor when across the table, Dr. Sadegh, whose nose was sharpened by stark Iranian ancestry, slackened his jaw. His eyes fixed forward, glazing over as his psicom received a full sensory communiqué.
He stood to attention, followed shortly by the captain, then finally me.
The system had worked flawlessly, like a rare diamond, for the last thirty-eight years of our voyage—which was why the body on the floor came as such a surprise.
Noor Acharya lay dead in the light field of the VR simulation stacks, discovered by cleaning automata. Emergency protocol dictated medical personnel were to be summoned first. Despite Dr. Sadegh’s fondness for voyeurism and hidden cameras, there was no one on this ship I would trust more in a medical emergency.
The manufactured gravity from the spin of the ship was purposefully lower in this sector for maximum game immersion. The stacks were reminiscent of a dormitory. Players lay in bullet-shaped capsules that seamlessly locked their psicoms into the simulator. Nearly floating beneath the glass enclosure, they were kept sufficiently hydrated while the servers pumped heart-throbbing, somatosensory, hyperrealistic adventures straight into their brains. Noor’s favorite game most recently had been Darktide. At my request, mediators used the override to gently wake, then sequester the other players.
The captain stood behind me as we looked at the woman curled up before us. Her lowered lids partially hid the two black holes of her dilated pupils, fixed at a point in nowhere as signs of strangulation darkened into a deep maroon necklace around her throat. Her shoulder was shrugged upward, resting under her left cheek as if she were about to doze off into sleep.
This was not the first time there had been a death on Eudoxus. There had been three fatalities from a minor explosion near the Earth Mother communication array, one death resulting from a toxic leak, and three suicides. Suicide was merely a function of random variability. Already we had four fewer than previously expected. Factoring in optional life extension through organ cloning, at an average of one death every seven years, we had another good fifty years or so before age-related natural causes began their culling.
The cleaning automaton nervously spun on its vacuum treads, the cyclone in its canister whirring in starts and stops as it looked for a way around the mediator blocking it from completing its normal routine.
I looked toward the nearest mediator guarding the scene. “I’m going to need the microlens footage from the automaton and the contents of its bin.”
“Why would anyone want to kill a mountaineer?” Wrinkles formed between the captain’s brows as concern drew his face down. He brought his hand to cover his mouth, digging his thumb into his cheek.
He doesn’t remember, but he had known Noor once. She was his first act of infidelity on the ship. Their affair happened shortly after we stopped the two-year acceleration toward Tau Ceti to drop our first civilization package. She opened for him like a lotus, her dusky body a panther in the sultry jungle night.
I shook away the memory and tagged all the files of the present mediators. Although their vows supposedly prevented the need for reconciliation, the strangled corpse reminded me that the unstoppable force of human nature did not always flow in an honor-bound direction. Having word get out that there was a murderer on board would not be good for morale.
“There will be panic,” Capt. Kaleri said.
“When has a simple accident caused anything more than concern? Return to your guests,” I responded calmly. We both knew that there was no need to cause further alarm by his absence.
“Keep me updated.” The captain paused as if he was about to say something more but instead performed an abrupt about-face, leaving me alone with my conclusions.
I have my own memories of Noor as well. She was the first in a handful of couples required to submit to an involuntary divorce because of a tendency to assault her husband during arguments.
I turned to the attending mediators milling around the room. “What do we know?”
Of the small group, a young man, whom I recognized as Luddy, stepped forward. Author, historian, and a much-too-regular visitor to the semi-underground casino. He would never ascend the hierarchy to make it past mediator. His closely cropped hair revealed his tense face.
“The victim’s VRecreation entry was recorded yesterday at—”
I cut him off with a raised palm. “We will refer to the unfortunate as ‘colonist’ or ‘passenger.’ And how could she have been here since yesterday? Isn’t there some sort of enforced time limit? Could it be that the capsule malfunctioned?” I personally had never used the capsules for anything more than immersive teaching in the athenaeum.
“According to the logs, colonist Noor Acharya entered the VRec area, where she joined the sector’s ongoing multiplayer game.”
“Who else was there at the time?”
Luddy sent a file of over three hundred names, which danced in my vision. “They were all in full dive at least once between today and yesterday.”
I tipped open a link and combined my psicom with Noor’s. Light crossed light as I dropped into a soundless oblivion. The black became a tunnel that carried me through a whooshing, hollow digital storm.
Abruptly I found myself in a medieval village with Noor’s body lying limp in fetal position on the cold stones of a decaying castle while a jaunty lute played a melody in the background. NPC merchants shouted to me to check their new weapon stock as unconcerned players ran past her lootable corpse on the way to a quest. Armed guards slew rabid monsters that somehow made it past the defensive wall, causing a hot spray of blood to blast my face. My character’s fist tightened automatically, and my feet took on a default fighting stance. Disgusted, I left the simulation, wondering how people could be entertained by a realm filled with brutality.
Invoking my title as Minister of Governance, I flicked orders at my mediators to seal the VRec area and had the body transferred to quarantine. As we’d never had a crime of this magnitude nor expected one until landfall, there was no known procedure.
Consulting the post-flight psicom library resulted in a trove of detective sims and instruction on proper police procedure, which dictated that I use a forensics automaton at the scene and then notify and question her kin. Engineer, photographer, and closet bulimic Teah Martin repurposed a common maintenance machine with the program as advised, and less than five hours later, the report nagged at me from the periphery of my attention.
The well-monitored ship traced Noor’s last two days with the unsettling precision of a sniper with a victim in its sights. Two days ago, she had conquered the climbing wall in the sports sector with a small class of junior-level mountaineers, taken a shower in the locker room, and dined in the tiki bar with two colleagues from the astrohydrology department who had just purposely failed a planetary-mission operations simulation. After liquor and laughs, she entered the VRec and never walked out. Other players who came and went never gave her capsule a second look. The faultless footage answered no questions.
The trash cylinder, too, offered very little in the way of clues, DNA from hair and skin that could have come from anywhere on its route or anyone who had played immersives that day. And the microlens footage just showed exactly what I had seen myself: the automata rolling into the room during the lowlight hours, suctioning the floor and UV sanitizing the off-line capsules that registered no psicom activity such as Noor’s. The capsule itself had been serviced only by maintenance automata and in no way differed from any other on the ship. Upgrades to the multisensory program trickled in nonstop from the central software command, and there was no decision-making authority to treat one capsule differently from another.
Forensics automata recorded her cabin search and the catalog of all items. Noor Acharya had resided on the seventeenth deck of the capital quarter, which curved around the inner circle of the ship. It was the most metropolitan of all the places to live and desperately sought after. She didn’t have a cabin—Noor had lived in a suite, one of the few accommodations that didn’t share a bathroom.
According to her records, Noor had grown up in an asteroid-mining colony in the belt, living hand to mouth in a hollowed-out rock, extracting precious metal from captured S-types before the water and organics on their C-type homes ran out. It was probably the reason she studied astrohydrology, concentrating her whole mind on a resource so necessary but so scarce. She and her team were responsible for maintaining and improving the current atmospheric and terrestrial ship environments. Noor had been chosen for her personal drive—internal motivation with a grounded, deep sense of purpose—just like all the other accepted candidates.
But unlike some of the other colonists, her purpose seemed to have waned as she fell victim to the excesses of the ship. From the looks of things, all of Noor’s earnings of onboard credits were paid to the ship’s additive manufacturing machines, AM machines for short. Her cabin was overburdened with fabricated furniture modules so modern that her chairs resembled torture devices. A large telescreen with a bay window looked out over the flashing lights of the spinning core and the captured asteroid used for streamlining terraforming.
It came as a bit of a surprise to me that she was one of those off-Earthers who worshipped all they had never experienced. She must have been one of the anxious firsts to see what new styles, fads, hard research data, and breakthroughs came over the tight-beam laser transmissions—though by now, they must be decades, scores, and soon-to-be eons out of date.
Alternately, her daughter Raye, who felt responsible for her parents’ divorce, had a room with the soft feel of a warm soul. Not because of the pale gray pillowy walls that must have once kept out the sound of her parents fighting, but because pictures of daughter and father hung everywhere. Camping with him in the tundra biocosm, her very first hand-started fire, playing the violin while he covered his ears in mock pain, her big trophy at winning the survivalist games. Nothing seemed out of place except the one conspicuously hidden lock of hair that tested as belonging to her father, Chris Felgentreff, a survivalist, and consummate thrill-seeker who also had a mastery in picotechnology.
Raye was part of the first generation that grew up only on the ship. She studied Earth as if it were a history lesson and chose instead to focus on computer science, specifically on upgrading the factory modules that were designed to fuel construction in a new colony. Currently, she was fine-tuning a program to construct additional support vehicles and, perhaps in the future, even new modules for the Eudoxus itself.
I closed out the file but left open the picture of Noor giving a thumbs-up from the top of the climbing wall with Raye by her side. Both grinning, they looked closer to sisters than mother and daughter. Besides this one photograph, there was nothing else they shared.
While she never remarried, Noor had remained in a closely monitored, committed relationship with one Edgar Segundo, a human performance and limitations instructor with skills as a flight surgeon. Dr. Sadegh notified the next of kin for me, as I had no reason to pry into their lives.
The plausible story was that Noor had an undetected clot that caused an embolic stroke while gaming—a fantasy that I decided to sell to Capt. Kaleri.
The portscreen on the far wall behind his desk dominated most of the captain’s ready room. It looked down toward the nightside of a tidally locked planet drifting into view. One hemisphere lay half-frozen in perpetual dark, while the other, half-scorched in perpetual light. Occasionally, he spun his chair just enough to see if the astrohydrologists had been successful in setting off enough shockwaves to dislodge the ice shelf. Communication packets occasionally chirped their progress.
Capt. Kaleri gulped his coffee and muttered something to the navigator via psicom. Unused to being summoned, then ignored, I focused my attention through the glass partition separating us from the bridge with its unbroken circle of glowing screens. Their electric radiance bathed the faces of all who sat before them. The captain cleared his throat as a signal for me to continue.
“The bruising most likely came from the coagulation,” I offered in the way of explanation. It would have been easier to simply erase the whole troubling situation from his mind, but nothing about seeing a murdered body had caused any more than fading ripples in his calm. The alarm bells remained silent, which meant my hands were tied. The reconciliation helmet couldn’t excise what it wasn’t programmed to find.
“We both know those were fingerprints,” he fumed, letting out a breath it appeared he’d been holding for days. “It’s shocking to know the first real infraction on this ship was murder,” the captain said as he made it a point to order a recount of the limited supply of secondary support weapons to his bosun, in case any were missing. “Instead of trying to lie to me, you should be finding who did this. Until we make planetfall, I am well within my rights to impose martial law.”
Gray smoke was rising from somewhere on the planet’s surface.
“Only in the event of my demise.” I could smell the drops of fear coming off him despite his granite composure. He was scrambling for a way to regain what he thought was control instead of the supervisory role he truly filled. “That would certainly be a memorable entry in the history books,” I said, knowing his ego would fill in the ominous blanks all by itself.
Capt. Kaleri bristled, hanging a glare on me as tight as a noose. “How about this for incentive? We’re not going any further until the murderer is identified and dealt with.”
“It should only be a matter of days for this problem to resolve itself.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
I crossed my arms and leaned back comfortably on his leather couch. All I had to do was wait for the murderer to feel the inevitable guilt of his or her crime and come to me seeking atonement.
On the portscreen, the ice on the planet began shifting.
The system by way of psicom integration had scanned everyone aboard and come up zeros. A week later, my chair remained empty of the perpetrator, and for the first time, I questioned what the world had done in allowing this voyage to go ahead. My confidence frayed.
The captain stalled in our acceleration, and even the hydrologists began to question why. Sitting down at my communication panel, I tapped out a report to the Primatores, not so much expecting an answer that wouldn’t come for years but to put what I knew into perspective. Sighing heavily, I lay my head down on the blinking panel, opening my eyes to Noor’s psicom that Luddy had given me a couple of days ago.
Psicoms were genetically locked to the user, but the tech automata had cleared it of any outside manipulations. It looked no different from mine, except for being on the head of someone who was murdered. Without thinking, I removed my psicom and replaced it with Noor’s.
With the psicom’s security disabled, Noor’s cyber footprints were like coal-covered boots in snow. The onboard algorithm had already sorted her mail which held nothing interesting. I curled two fingers and called forward the innocuous-looking reel icon blinking in thin air. A twist of the hand yessed the internal recording of her gameplay.
I tipped open the link, and light crossed light as I dropped into a soundless oblivion. The black became a tunnel that carried me through a whooshing, hollow digital storm.
Instead of the medieval village, I appeared outside of a ruined fort guarded by floating eyeballs with laser beam protection. With sword and magic shield ready, I, as Noor’s character, waded in alone. With a twitch, I sped up the playback. There were hours of melee carnage. I could smell the animal stink, feel the sickening warmth of monster blood and barely lift my weary sword arm if not given enough time to rest. Sometimes the events led to her death only to have her being reincarnated in the medieval town before repairing her gear, paying for protection spells, and setting out to rinse and repeat.
When the pack on my back grew heavy with loot, we entered a doorway of moving light that brought us to what looked to be a mage tower in the desert. Here she was jumped by shadow bandits, and one wrapped its hands around my neck and squeezed. I could feel its dark hands tighten around my throat, damage numbers drifted upward, large and red. Immune to my sword attack, the creature’s grip tightened, my eyes bulged, guttural cries dribbled from my mouth, and darkness swam in my tunneling vision.
I yanked off the psicom and heard it clatter to the floor. The sudden movement shot a twinge through my bicep in an echo of the muscle remembering that a short while ago, it was needed to hold a weapon. At my feet, Noor’s psicom looked as dangerous as a rattlesnake. Not bothering to pick it up, I made a triangle with my arm and rotated the shoulder in its socket, trying to loosen the stiffness. Martial weapons, highwaymen, slogging through the sticky wetness of bodily fluids, how could anyone think this was fun?
That shadow creature didn’t feel like a normal part of the game. “Is there a way to log onto Darktide remotely?” I spoke aloud.
The auditory pickup on my panel typed out a response: players do not have that capacity.
“Who would have that ability?”
Game designers if we were near Earth.
“What about Eudoxus’s system engineers?”
The onboard system itself sees to the management tasks of all games, specialized and otherwise.
“Such as?”
Character designs, quest updates, maintaining the sensory feedback, and simulation integrity.
“No. I mean what are the other types of games?” I fought to keep the exasperation out of my voice.
Military, medical, the usual specialized training games to provide the players with both specific and hyperrealistic scenarios such as hostile environments, lack of oxygen, carrying the wounded while tired and on foot. …
The words on my panel stared back at me as more possibilities filled the screen, waiting, it seemed, for my mind to glean something from the stark responses. At least I now understood the haptics leading to the evolution of Noor’s neck bruises. But what didn’t make sense is why the sensory feedback would be set that high. Or why she would be killed in the first place?
I thought for a minute before asking out of curiosity, “Who decides the level of sensory response?”
The program.
Which meant that some unknown person had altered the VRecreation game heuristics to use deadly force only on her character. I was going to need to see the in-depth server logs.
My own psicom unit warbled, and I warily placed it on. Dr. Sadegh’s hawkish face appeared in my visual cortex.
“Counselor,” he said, “when am I permitted to release the body? Her daughter has been quite insistent that she be allowed to find closure in her mother’s passing.”
At that moment, I felt the shadow killer slipping away like sand through my fingers. Queasiness twisted my stomach. What was most confusing was that none of the colonists selected for the mission had manifested homicidal tendencies, as far as the screening in intense simulated environments had detected.
These were curious, knowledgeable scientists, agriculturists, civil administrators, logicians, and intrepid adventurers with superb genetics and exemplary health. A chosen few selected from the moderately sized pool of physically and mentally disciplined applicants or investor-extended invitations were then put through rigorous tests to measure the possible future psychoses that have a way of developing in all societies, regardless of pedigree or conditioning.
Their great names would forever be written in the annals of history and space exploration, in addition to the perpetual grants to the families and relatives they had been forced to leave behind. But as it sat, there was a murderer on board who felt no shame. As sole justiciar, it was my sworn duty to bring this deviant to heel.
“Counselor?” Dr. Sadegh’s worried face filled my mindscreen.
Whoever had done this must have had a motive, but not even the past month of surveillance footage of Noor going about her days could suggest it. Perhaps there was another way.
“You have my permission.”
The small recycling service was held at one of the nondenominational sanctoriums that embraced only the positive aspects of past religions. The airy space was filled with mourners. I sat behind the lectern facing the rows of the bereaved, listening to their tearful acknowledgments of Noor’s contribution to life on the Eudoxus. I casually called up details about each of them.
No one had known about Noor’s nasty blackouts when drinking tequila that left her a stumbling, angry mess with hot, smelly breath. My mind brought up loud, violent assaults in which she attacked Chris like a punching bag as he backed into the bathroom, arms crossed in defense. Red scratches striped his face as he clutched his cracked sternum from where she kicked.
I noted that Chris sat in the far back, his face drawn as he leaned forward and wept into his hands. Taking away his memories of how he got hurt had left him ignorant of why they had been forced to split.
A little while later, I stood next to a sobbing Chris, who held his daughter’s hand as automata lowered Noor’s mushroom spoor–infused body into the floor, where the internal system would carry her to the biocosm of her choice and give back even in her death. The memorial would continue at The Apothecary, one of Noor’s favorite haunts in the forest region.
Hidden in the back of a coffee counter behind a heavy black curtain was a speakeasy, styled after the Prohibition era. The automata bartenders wore lab coats, and the dark, fabricated wood shelves held garnishes like specimens in old apothecary jars. The bar itself accessed your psicom and wrote out a prescription for a curative.
Chris had a full tumbler of rum but hadn’t touched a drop. Fortunately, he did not have the same temper as his ex-wife. We sat near the fake brick wall, shadowed in the moody lighting. His eyes said he still hadn’t forgiven my decision. But as was in his nature, he simply accepted it.
“She wouldn’t have wanted you here,” Chris mumbled.
“An aspect of the job.”
“Breaking up happy homes is not much of a profession.” Chris emptied his glass in one long swallow, then bent forward, groaning slightly in pain.
“You don’t look well, Chris.”
“What business is that of yours!” he bit back. His mask of anger collapsed, returning to the drawn look. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”
He was confused, but if he had known the truth, he would have been thankful. To me, the rest of the mourners looked like puppets placed in a scene, reminiscing about a woman none of them ever really knew.
“We were supposed to be having a wedding, you know. Not a funeral. Not this. Raye was so happy.”
“Congratulations are in order, I see.” I placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “There would be nothing better than to go ahead with your wedding and celebrate life. If Noor’s stroke has taught us anything, it’s to live while we can.”
“Not my wedding, our daughter was supposed to get married. She called off her wedding to Stavros a couple of months ago, right after I got out of the hospital. I was laid up for a week with a grade-four punctured liver. Even Noor came to visit me there.”
A week? That was odd. “You weren’t released the same day?” The medical bay stored multiple samples of all inboard blood for transfusions as well as undifferentiated stem cells, which were used to grow new organs or tissue and comprised the main component of regenerative injections.
“A freezer in the lab destroyed my stem cells. They were going to use Raye’s, but there was some sort of mix-up. They excised three-quarters of my liver.”
The playback of Raye and Noor in the hospital three months prior was anything but ordinary. While Noor hovered over Chris’s bedside, a doctor pulled Raye aside. The surveillance footage in the office she brought her to had no sound due to doctor-patient confidentiality, but Raye’s darkening eyes and gritting jaw said enough.
“I apologized for the lab’s mismanagement.” Anastasiya, a young researcher who used to stalk a Canadian astrophysicist and glassblower named Ethan, leaned forward as she typed into the system. Glowing green letters appeared on the screen.
“What happened?”
“You heard about our bunk freezer?”
I nodded.
“Well, to expedite Mr. Felgentreff’s treatment, I asked his daughter if she would donate her stem cells, to which she agreed. But her stem cells were a genetic match for the captain’s DNA, not her father’s. We must have gotten their tissue exchanged somehow. I searched for any additional errors, but it appears it was only a one-way mistake. I took more samples from Mr. Felgentreff. He’s going to have to wait an extra month but—”
The chair screeched on the floor as I abruptly stood. “I appreciate your time.”
Anastasiya returned to clicking on the keyboard as I left.
I entered one of the motorized gridcars, transparent automated lifts that traveled horizontally and vertically in consistent two-deck loops. The gridcar accelerated to the left. I stayed on as we passed the municipal buildings, light glinting off the steel and glass. The strata of the Eudoxus surrounded me, swallowed me, made me a part of its whole. Such an ugly business in such a beautiful place.
Sometime between Noor’s death and now, I had become too old, a ghost already many years gone. I had cut out only part of the problem without the sense to double-check physical results. Noor had been pregnant with the captain’s child and had not known.
With a thought, I brought up the surveillance of Raye during the time of her mother’s death. It appeared she had received notification at the very moment her mother logged into Darktide. Then she had leaned back into her chair, fingers typing away on the invisible symbols of a laser-light keyboard, psicom strategically absent.
I knew now that I would never find a remote user logged into the server; she had surely wiped the evidence. But I also knew that I would never allow anyone to use this technology again. I banded Raye’s file, summoning her to my office immediately.
As I waited, these sad conclusions taunted my uneasy mind, directly opposing my dull yearning to sleep this whole dirty business away. I sensed a creeping restlessness bleeding into my thoughts. These recent actions were a new, sad beginning of sorts, the first sacrifice in the raging war I fought against human nature. I had never felt more alone.
This crime was my fault, but I wouldn’t let it ever be repeated. And when I could find the time, I would shed a tear for my part in fathering the first murderer on the Eudoxus.
Suddenly a wrongness overcame me as static filled my head, and my psicom spontaneously connected to an anonymous link. Light crossed light as I dropped into a soundless oblivion. The black became a tunnel that dragged me through a whooshing hollow digital storm until I materialized on a rocky shoreline, neck immobile and wrapped in a chokehold with my head simultaneously being pushed forward against the thin arm crushing my throat.
Untrained in combat while fighting to stay calm, I inched my fingers around the arm that cut off my oxygen supply as I concentrated on the distant dull sunlight, which failed to pierce through the thick murk of sour clouds that represented the sky. The surrounding landscape resembled an open sore weeping burnt-orange dust that seared my lungs as I fought for my life. Lightning realization told me that Raye had somehow hijacked and thrust my psicom into what the neon red jumpsuits we wore confirmed to be a training simulation.
Acidic waves crashed on the shore. I felt Raye wince as the misting water stung our skin, and we both coughed as the moist, churning air burned through our sinuses. As I heard her hacking in my ear, I realized that we could both be hurt! Raye had panicked, and this attack was poorly planned.
Afraid of the caustic tide, Raye shuffled us back away from the coastline, her grip loosened enough for me to collapse to my knees, gasping for air, and pitch us both forward just as another wave broke and the seawater raced to the beach. We both grunted in pain as the cold sulfuric liquid touched our skin. A larger, more threatening wave crested, and Raye scrambled to the safety of the sand.
Death surrounded me, forward and back—either way, I was lost. I chose to retreat into the water, eyes tearing and teeth clenching. Ankle, knee, then waist-deep, farther and farther from her reach, trying in vain to access my psicom all the while. I felt no response. Raye had me trapped.
“First rule of survival,” she yelled from safety as I wiped my face with the only dry part of my sleeve, “Anything can be your enemy. But you wouldn’t know that since you aren’t one of us.”
Everywhere the water touched set my skin to flame; the tide tugged at me, threatening to pull me under, and I held fast even as I choked with every breath. My training in nonviolent communication taught me to keep Raye talking so that she might realize the error of her ways, but I felt completely unprepared for this.
“You’ve been so careful up until now. Unfortunately, I have no reason to participate in landfall exercises.” I shouted above the unceasing roar of the turbulent waves as I bit back a scream. This is only a program, my psicom is still attached. I clutched at the thought of the emergency channel, hoping that although I couldn’t tell, it continued to respond as usual.
“Boredom, perhaps? And why not? Your clearance surpasses even the captain’s. I always wondered who masqueraded as law enforcement on this ship.” The dark points of Raye’s eyes held me in their ice. “Any last words? Too bad this was your first experiment with alien landfall. Too bad the heuristics were set too high, must have been a glitch in the programming. I’ll fix it as soon as we’re done.”
The jumpsuit stuck unpleasantly to my body as the world dimmed to a single point of unbearable pain. I heard myself howl animallike and desperate. When I caught my breath, I confessed the hardest truth I could, “You killed an innocent woman! Your mother had no idea who your true father was. She was in a dysfunctional relationship that only brought harm, so I took that memory from her, and for that I’m sorry. I’m the one you wanted. You should have killed me.”
A spike of doubt slashed through the smug expression on Raye’s face. For the first time, I saw fear and knew that the deep connections of these clouded emotions now left a trail of guilt that I could follow. Truth had shown me the way.
The receding tide sucked at me violently as a colossal new wave formed, rearing up overhead. Her fear now cycled to a golden triumph. I screamed out in anguish as reddened skin sloughed off in the energetic motion of the water, “Executive Override 4112120332!” There was no way to tell if the command worked. Maybe it was too late.
When the freezing water descended, I expected an agonizing doom, but it covered me in such a cool and quiet relief that I didn’t struggle as the liquid silence closed over my head and swept me back into my office.
Raye was still shouting as the mediators locked her in the chair, but I could only concentrate on the residual red echoes rising through my scabbing flesh.
“Who are you to decide anyway? You’re no better than we are. You sit there judging and passing sentences. Maybe I killed the wrong person! But who judges you?
“WHO JUDGES YOU?!”
Sitting on my side of the Redeemer, raw and exposed, the machine targeted the proper constellations of guilt in Raye’s blizzard of memories, shining on the encepholograph. I ate her sin, though I logged off uncertain if I’d consumed it all.
Despite my victory, I felt lost, and for the safety of the ship, she couldn’t remain. Raye was dangerous and possibly contagious. Unable to find a solution, I volunteered her to be the first human tester for cryonic sleep. I looked at Raye as if seeing her for the first time, lying in the cryochamber. Tears froze on her cheeks as her body grew solid. I knew I should be lying in the cold, next to her. Me and all my kind.
Heavy with my leaden burden, I slumped, face in hands—a remorseful statue, unable to straighten. After the disquiet of a tensely protracted moment, I marshaled enough will to activate the panel and transmit the results of this tragic investigation.
“In conclusion, the Redeemer doesn’t always work as intended because it leaves intact the underlying intention for the person’s bad actions. Upon promotion, perhaps the next counselor, with your help, will find a way to adjust the machine’s programming and include the catalyst for such behaviors in their search to be removed as well. Regardless of the Primatores’ approval, I will begin training my successor.” My fingers swiftly brought up the files of the five most promising mediators and placed Dapeng at the top of the list. I briefly wondered if he would remove my memories. And once retired, would I still be responsible for what I didn’t know?