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Part One
Less than a micro-second before we penetrate Limbic space, a radio message is cast our way—an unwelcome stowaway on our bow shockwave. We receive it as but a single word of warning. A word unelaborated, yet still saturated and suffused. A word cast indiscriminately towards us on broad frequency from Ishan’s Mirror.
Police.
The word unfurls through the Rig, leaving a subdued panic in its wake that I can almost feel resonating The Good Bonny’s decks and gangways like a breathless murmur. Like the others on our Rig, I do not know the nature of our contraband. But I do know that legitimate transports do not have all itinerant crews. Legitimate transports do not pay eight thousand Lum in non-disclosure premium. And most of all, legitimate transports do not coerce their crews into signing memory-wipe waivers after they’ve already boarded and settled in; after it is far too late to reconsider it all and leave.
‘Pause the Heim,’ Sorin orders.
The Control Room is three large concentric rings of helmstations and desks. All eyes gravitate to the Transport Factor who sits at its centre like some regal sun.
The Good Bonny’s Heim Plunge is slowed to the point of inertia. Ambient vibration ceases, leaving us moored and marooned in a deep and true silence. We look to Sorin. He glowers at no one in particular for a few moments, then returns his gaze to his personal console and intently studies the one-word message—as if he is still hoping to find some hidden meaning or treatise therein.
In one sense, there is no urgency. The Lids cannot catch us while we are inside the Luminal—two ships cannot meet in Limbic space—but we cannot remain here forever, and our destination cannot be changed. Our exit star is as pre-ordained as our fate. When we crank up the Heim and plunge back into space, the Lids will be waiting.
‘Unless it wasn’t our message?’ a nasal voice to my right asks. He is a Limbic Quant I’ve crewed with at least once before. A sour-breathed mathematician whose name I keep forgetting. ‘It was broad frequency,’ he continues. ‘A Rig left Ishan’s a few minutes before us. The message could have been theirs.’
‘It wasn’t,’ a voice behind me says. ‘It was ours.’ I do not know the voice, but it speaks with a note of flat finality that ends the wishful debate before it even starts. I begin to turn to see who it was, but before I can manage it, Sorin stands up abruptly.
He takes a moment to glare in the general direction of the voice that spoke behind me, then speaks. ‘We must assume that the message was intended for us. As Transport Factor, I declare force majeure. From here on, we follow the agreed terms of reference for this engagement, as appended to your contracts. I assume you read your contracts carefully before signing them.’
Muted mutters ripple the Room. His assumption is unreasonable. Very. Itinerant Transport contracts are meant to broadly follow the same template. No-one reads them.
‘Our terms demand that we eject our cargo in the event of force majeure,’ Sorin says. ‘So that is what we are going to do.’
‘Won’t work,’ the Limbic Quant to my right says. ‘Our only hope would be to eject the cargo directly into our exit star. But, with wind pushing in the opposite direction the Lids will have plenty of time to grab it with magjets and scoops. There won’t be enough time.’
‘Don’t be a photting idiot,’ Sorin snaps, his face a knotted scowl. ‘I know how a raid works. That’s not what I meant. Our terms are to eject the cargo. Now. Here.’
At this, the Control Room finally erupts. Almost everyone begins to speak at once.
‘Silence!’ Sorin roars, slapping his personal console with a broad hairy hand. He is ignored. In addition to the voices in the room, consoles are now lighting up and blipping with instant message request chimes. The chatter is somehow already spreading to upper decks of the Rig and the other Departments want to listen in.
‘Let him speak.’
This voice is a deep baritone. This voice hushes the Control Room. The woman the voice belongs to stands up and takes three massive strides into the Room’s inner ring. She is a third generation Frontierswoman. Over seven feet tall, she towers over Sorin. I know who she is. I crewed with her once in the Oort. A skilled helmsman named Siria. She has a stern but striking face, stretched and drawn across bulbous cheekbones and an elongated chin. Deep grey eyes like dead pools. Unlike most of the ungainly Frontier people, she carries her considerable frame with a graceful poise. She wafts on long wispy limbs, a waifish giant.
‘Let him speak,’ she repeats. ‘Why the dump clause?’
Sorin eyes her in silence. He does not like being towered over. He reasserts some measure of control by sitting back down in his chair and crossing a leg. ‘Not at liberty to say,’ he replies. ‘And frankly, you are not at liberty to ask. Read your contracts. We eject the cargo before we plunge. And understand that this force majeure invokes your mem-wipe clauses too.’
‘The phot it does,’ Siria says quietly.
The Limbic Quant beside me stands up too now, emboldened. ‘This just doesn’t make any sense,’ he says. ‘Dumping inside the Luminal? It doesn’t matter what the terms say. It’s... dangerous.’
Dangerous is the word the Quant uses. It isn’t what he means. Sinful. Sacrilegious. These are better words. Most of the crew will have grown up in one form of Sun Cult or other. Asking them to defile the Luminal was like asking an Earth old-timer to defecate on a church floor.
Sorin shakes his head. ‘Do you think this will be the first time someone’s done a dump here? Why do you think the Partners have been shelling out to install these expensive mem-wipes?’
He might be right about this, but it doesn’t alter the room’s thick mood. If anything, it makes things worse. Much worse.
This is sacrilege.
In the end, whatever the nature of the individual Cult that raised us, the Luminal is cathedral to us all. Invisible and eternal, but cathedral nonetheless. There is no stellar medium here, not an ion or atom, not a mote of dust. There is not a breath of stellar wind. The Rig’s artificial portholes can make no sense of the external environment they are meant to be reproducing, so they project nothing to us but a white canvas. This is just, and this is just as well, for Limbic space is the true nothing. The nothing of before the universe. The nothing that will come after the universe is gone. This is the very marrow of creation. This is the holiest of places. The idea of dumping our contraband here at the behest of a godless Partnership and just leaving it...
This is sin.
It crawls. I can’t help it. I left mysticism behind with my youth, but a feeling I can only think of as religious dread is crawling up my spine. Slowly it encircles each of my intervertebral discs in turn with wet and cold witch’s claws. Shivering. Tickling. Psychosomatic itching spreads up my forearms like invisible spiders. This is the numinous seizing hold of me, unbidden. A response long hardwired into me. Into us all. This is religious dread. The Control Room is thick with it. Religious dread that might just as easily turn to fury.
We are a breath away from mutiny. A breath.
‘Just tell them.’ It is that voice again, from behind me. The voice is curiously detached from the heat in the room, almost professorial in its intonation. I turn my head to see who it is, but the Limbic Quant is shuffling nervously behind me now, blocking my view.
Sorin scowls hard in the general direction of the voice, then rubs his temple with a bony thumb. He turns to Siria, as if addressing her only. ‘Our manifest is fourteen megatons of heavy mining equipment.’
‘Not the cargo down there,’ Siria says. ‘I know what is in there. I mean the cargo up there.’ Siria points upwards. Her unnaturally long and slender finger is mesmerising. Alien. Its tip touches the Control Room’s ceiling. ‘There is a false aft atop this Rig. It is hollow. It is bound to us by shock plasma coils only. It is separable. That is what you intend to jettison. That is where you are hiding the contraband.’
‘How the phot...?’
‘My people have been smuggling a lot longer than you have. This Rig’s design is not that clever. That the Lids are too stupid or corrupt to see through it doesn’t say much.’
The room is silent. Sorin takes his time, chooses his words carefully, as he should.
‘Colonists,’ he says finally. ‘There are four hundred and seventy colonists in the aft. Give or take.’
Siria laughs. Mirthless and deep.
‘Indentured colonists obviously,’ Sorin adds. ‘The thing about...’
‘Slaves,’ Siria finishes for him. ‘We’re running a Slaver. That’s why you’d rather dump the aft here than get caught.’ She walks away from Sorin and returns to her helmstation.
The Control Room is silent. Even the consoles stop blipping. Word is spreading upstairs. We’re running a Slaver and the Lids are onto us. We’re going to get caught. They’ll never believe we didn’t know. Mandatory whole life terms for the entire crew. Life terms nowhere cushy. A moon. Somewhere dark and deserted. Sorin lets us stew another few moments and then spreads his palms in a conciliatory gesture.
‘We have no choice but to follow terms,’ he says. ‘There are four hundred and seventy South Hems in the aft. They’re in shallow stasis. We cut power to the aft and separate it. They’ll never wake up. We take our mem-wipes and we plunge out. If the Lids are waiting, well then, we’ll have nothing to show them but the mining equipment rightly on our manifest. None of us will remember this conversation.’
‘You want us to murder four hundred and seventy people?’ I ask. I’m startled by the sound of my own voice. Surprised that I am speaking. It’s the first time I’ve said anything since we went Limbic. The Control Room’s attention turns to me.
Sorin looks at me furiously and exhales.
‘It’s not what I want, for phot’s sake.’ He stands up at this point, steps behind his chair. ‘I’m not going to make you do anything. It is up to you. You decide. Vote on it if you want. But before you do, there is something I want you to think about very carefully.’
‘I’m sure there is,’ Siria rumbles.
Sorin ignores her. He taps his console, ensuring his voice is being broadcast Rig-wide. ‘Now as some of you may know, the Aton Cult in South Hem is going through a major fissure. Some trouble with a young prophetess. The people in our aft were captured during a particularly nasty fracas. Then they were sold by their own people. They’re pretty lucky to be alive.’
Sorin licks his lips and leans forward, fatherly, putting on as reasonable a tone of voice as he can manage. ‘Luck notwithstanding, a crime was still committed upon these folks. So, if you vote to turn in to the Lids then you won’t hear any complaints from me. Our guests upstairs will get a nice resettle somewhere safe. The Hems will keep slaughtering and enslaving each other. The Partnership running this Rig will keep taking Hems out to the Frontier, pulling in the kind of Lum that working grunts like us won’t never see in a hundred lifetimes. The Frontier clowns buying up these Hems will keep buying them. Nice profit there too. No machines to commission or maintain, no engineers to fly in. Just a few hundred slaves running on a thousand calories a day each while breeding their own free re-supply. Glory and promotion for the Lids that take us in too—don’t forget about them. Everyone glows. Except us. Because we’re the good guys, right? We take the weight for all the rotten mother-photters. We go into a deep hole somewhere and we never see Sol’s light again.’
Sorin pauses, walks to the front of his chair, sighs with feeling, then sits down. His voice reverts to its usual sneer. ‘The alternative, you phot-wits, is that we dump the cargo and take the mem-wipes and no one ever knows that any of this happened. Not the Lids, not the Hems in the aft, not even us. We take our fee and we go home.’
In the ensuing silence, Sorin allows himself a twitch of a smile, barely perceptible, but I see it. It occurs to me now that this is no spur of the moment outburst. This is a speech he has rehearsed. A speech he has given before. And it is good.
I look around the Control Room. Siria and I lock eyes. I hold her deep grey alien gaze for an unreasonably long time.
‘Who’s going to tally the vote?’ the Limbic Quant asks. He reaches for a notepad and prepares for an accounting.
––––––––
Part Two
Our Aditya is two.
For her birthday, I have prepared a new landscape on the western shore. Something special. A picnic on the beach that I have pieced together from old shards of memory, my fancies as glue. This is the Labadi fishing harbour I remember from when I was a boy. The beach stretches beyond sight in both directions. Sunshine reflects blinding and bright on white powder sand and the sea is a pungent blue brine. Behind us, the beach vista crumples into a forested mountain range. A double rainbow is painted across the sky and there is a colony of impossibly iridescent gulls overhead.
‘Well done,’ Siria says. ‘This glows.’
‘This glows Daddy!’ Adi screams, running away from us, towards the shore.
Later I set up a picnic table and unveil the cake. A two-layered sponge with a jam filling and rainbow streamers. I did not just conjure it up. I made it from scratch. I mixed the ingredients one at a time, sugar, butter, flour, and let it bake in something like real time.
‘Can you taste the difference?’ I ask.
Siria takes another mouthful and chews contemplatively. ‘I can,’ she lies, nodding with fake conviction. ‘I taste it. I can’t describe it exactly.’
I smirk at her and she smirks back.
After our picnic, Adi runs away from us again towards the shore, shrieking. We watch her from the picnic table as she splashes in surf. I make two beach boys for her to play with. She joins them as they roll huge tractor tyres along the sand. She runs with them towards the bobbing moored pirogues. She copies them as they pick up discarded pieces of the day’s catch and fling them skyward, delighting the gulls who pluck tasty morsels from the air and cry and caw over the din of surf, which pounds and pounds the shore, a coastal heartbeat. Soon it is dusk and the bright sky dims and then catches its celestial fires. The two boys set the rubber tyres alight and pile them up in a bonfire which they set about and sing. Our Adi joins them. Siria and I sit at the picnic table, listening to the children’s chorus and breathing in the sweetly acrid perfume that now infuses the evening breeze.
#
You are Entanglement’s child.
When the first of us was born, Earth’s population had long surpassed its sustainable limits. For a fleeting moment, Entanglement emerged as one practical option for those who had both the mental disposition for it and no realistic prospects on the Luminal Frontier. Two minds could share one body. Two minds could live out two lives while incurring the biological overhead and expense of one. If they carefully coordinated time-dilate travel and medicals, then two minds might even barely notice the difference.
The technology was viable though rudimentary in some respects. Our understanding of mind was nowhere near complete, but it was complete enough for this purpose. The Tier One Partnerships had spent two generations competing to build a faster than light propulsion engine. They had all failed. But in the process of failing, they had strayed far enough into the ethereal to begin forging a vague understanding of the place where human consciousness is born. The place we call, the wellspring. From here came a broad theoretical understanding of the mechanism by which consciousness reached across spooky chasms and bonded itself with our brains. From there, a practical understanding of how this bonding could be re-routed and re-mapped. We didn’t understand everything, but we understood enough to make our Entanglement technology work.
There was a loud moral outrage to begin with. And then a more muted and calculated Corporate outrage. The Partnerships soon independently reached the same conclusions. Every socio-commercial model they ran yielded the same result. The long-term outcomes of widespread human Entanglement would very likely be unprofitable and would be inherently unpredictable. So, they banded together, took action, and laws were passed.
But in that shrinking grey window of legal ambiguity we did it. Partly because we were like-minded good friends. Partly because we shared a curious moral obligation, a sense that it was a sane and good thing to do.
Or call it penance.
For we were both blacklisted. We could no longer find Transport work with any Tiered Partnership, either on Earth or on the Luminal Frontier. We must have committed some grievous offence. Something terrible. Something that had been mem-wiped from us at the time. The reason itself no longer mattered. We were two destitute Transport Engineers, unsuccessfully attempting to scrape a living on Earth. Siria’s homeworld had been absorbed by a larger and much stranger Cult and she was entirely estranged from her people. She refused to speak to them, let alone return there. The strain of basic survival soon became unbearable to us. This was all still a few years before SOCOM-3 sought us out and offered us our present employment. We had few options. We were exhausted. Drained. One day we boarded a Magnet to an unlicensed off-world clinic and we did it.
We chose my body in the end. A decision driven by harsh economics, not patriarchy or aesthetics. The additional cost and complication of maintaining a Frontier body on Earth meant that Siria’s body was a much more limiting option.
Very little could have prepared us for what came next. There was no instruction manual given to us, no-one we could talk to for guidance. We experimented. We spent time on our own at first, in our empirical selves, alternating our conscious control of what was formerly my body... and what was now, to both our eyes, just biological hardware.
We made the journey to Siria’s homeworld in the Maffei to return her body to her people. She watched her own funeral. In their new tradition, the Cult priests placed her body into a funeral disc. Then, in a hideously expensive ceremony, they spun it into the heart of their system’s star. She watched all this with a detachment that no longer surprised either of us. It was a body. Hardware. We flew away the next day. She would never return to her people. Home was a place that we would make inside us now.
We gradually abandoned our mind-alternation cycles and began to spend more time in co-consciousness. Increasingly we abandoned our empirical selves and our limiting single points of view. We grew addicted to facing life together. Existence was more vivid. We viewed the world with four pairs of eyes instead of two. We were not seeing more, or in more detail. We were just seeing differently. We found a universal symmetry that we had never known before. We found it easier to solve complex problems. People found it harder to lie to us. We excelled at whatever scarce work we put our hands to. This we assume was the reason that SOCOM-3 eventually contacted us and offered us employment.
Then, after eight years of co-consciousness, something new happened. Something we are not aware of anyone else having ever done before. We gave birth to a child. We made you. An entirely new person. Our third self. You have been conceived and brought forth entirely in the confines of our inner gestalt. But you are no less human than we are or were.
You are.
From now on, if we hope and fear and fight, then it is only for you. Our child. Our wellspring and our marrow.
––––––––
Part Three
We have now spent eight weeks on Ishan’s Mirror, waiting for The Good Bonny to show. There is a sixty-day break clause in the engagement contract that we agreed with SOCOM-3 before we left Earth. If the Bonny doesn’t arrive tomorrow, we will be paid an inconvenience fee and then board the next home-bound Magnet.
We have mixed feelings. Had we completed it, the mission hazard fee would have been two hundred and fifty thousand Lum. The most substantial amount of money we would have ever made. It would have opened new possibilities for us. New possibilities for Adi. But an outsized fee usually means outsized danger. We imagine that SOCOM-3 will have computed this fee by running our personal risk appetite through an infinitely nuanced behavioural model. The cash figure is perfectly tuned to trigger these wild thoughts and desires in us. A penny less and we may have refused to come.
We do not have adequate clearance for SOCOM-3 to tell us what the brief is. Not until the Bonny shows and the mission is confirmed. So, we wait.
Siria’s empirical self is suspicious, more so than mine. Her people had hijacked a SOCOM-2 Stream once and reverse engineered it. Whatever it was they had found had left her deeply mistrustful of AIs in general.
‘Which is exactly why it’s so slow,’ Elio-Ra says.
‘What’s slow now?’ I ask. I had stopped listening to him momentarily. Elio-Ra arrived on an inbound Magnet several weeks ago. He is from a small Cult that is trying to keep a rotating representative on the Mirror at all times. I do not know the Cult, but it must be fabulously wealthy. I am alone with him. Adi does not like the new stranger and will not be in the same room as him. She will not explain why. She has shrunk away and Siria has retreated with her. For the first time in a few weeks, I am my empirical self. It took a few minutes to adequately stretch out into my mind, and I am still feeling a bit odd... a bit... unmoored somehow.
Elio-Ra and I are sat in the canteen, finishing up our meal. For all the Mirror’s faults, the one thing I cannot criticise is its food. Living at the Frontier’s main gateway has precious few advantages, but by phot, this is truly one of them. Tonight, we dine on ribeye steaks from cows pastured somewhere in the Andromeda, vegetables from the Larger Magellanic. A startling red wine from phot knows where. With no expensive Magnet freight cost or time dilation to contend with, our meal is as fresh as I’ve ever had and costs a fraction of the price we’d have paid on Earth.
‘The colonisation,’ he explains. ‘That’s why it is slow. A hundred years! Where are we? A few miserable farms and mines. We could have achieved all this in the Milky Way. We didn’t need the Luminal to do this. We’d have been more successful if we spread out the way we originally planned to, the way we were originally meant to. Magnet Arks spilling out of the solar system like bees, carrying thousands at a time. Moving slower than c would have given us time to develop a true spacefaring culture. A culture that would stand the test of time.’ He prods a head of broccoli unenthusiastically. ‘Instead we have vegetables. When you get back to Earth, go to a farm and watch the rats. Watch a rat enter a new barn. Watch how long they spend sniffing the place out. Petrified. They know—know—they aren’t meant to be there. And they know what’s to come when they are discovered.’
The canteen’s windows overlook the docking piers. The view is simulated of course as we are in reality behind the gargantuan ablative mirror shield that allows us to remain in such close orbit to Sol. But the simulation is near enough perfect that no human eyes could ever tell the difference.
Elio-Ra pauses the discussion while we watch a Heim Rig arrive. It is still like magic, the way it materialises out of Limbic space, dull pinpricks coalescing on Sol’s corona and becoming colossal man-made form. We watch the Heim begin to sizzle and cook ever so slightly during the second that it takes to deploy its full ablative armour. Then solar sails spread like dragon-fly wings and the Rig begins its home stretch run towards us.
The Mirror is a cramped and humid arcology orbiting Sol as close as it dares. Beyond its shielding function, it is designed to do nothing more than ferry passengers and freight between Magnets and the Luminal. Its internals are essentially a series of linked transit warehouses, devoid of character and comfort, lonely. Faces are fleeting and interchangeable and the sparse accommodations are priced to keep it that way. The windowless metal coffin we have been calling home for the last eight weeks has been costing SOCOM-3 four thousand Lums per day. At those rates, no-one stays very long. A Magnet arrives from Earth once a week or so and disgorges its passengers. Cult converts, prospectors, contractors, and the occasional Lid. It may have been a mistake telling Elio-Ra that we were a scientist, for in all the time we have been here, we have noted no other scientists coming off the Earth Magnets.
The disgorged passengers hang around the Mirror for a day or two at most, waiting to board the right outbound Heim. They sleep on floors in hallways or in the cargo bays with their belongings. As a general rule, none are in the mood to make friends. The Cult converts are joyless and glassy-eyed wraiths, always in groups yet always alone. Those that are leaving to work seem wrapped and wreathed in their economic anxieties. There is a sense of resignation at this Frontier. A sadness.
The Heim Rig reaches the docking piers and plugs itself to the Mirror.
‘Rats,’ Elio-Ra repeats, taking another bite.
‘So, we are the vermin running amok through the Luminal barn,’ I hazard. ‘Who’s the farmer in this scenario then?’
‘Oh, isn’t that the question,’ he says, shaking his head but offering no answer just yet, unwilling to abandon the drama of his well-practiced narrative arc. Unwilling to abandon the theatre of it. ‘Thing of it is, we are worse than rats. Much worse. Because we should know better.’
‘What should we know?’ I ask. Teasing of course. I’ve heard this lecture several times already now during my brief acquaintance with the man. But these Cult types always remain earnest no matter how much you tease. Utterly impervious to humour, doubt, and reason. Impervious to tone. I take another sip of my wine. Some mischievous part of me wonders what he would say if he found out I was Entangled. Part of me wants to tell him, just to watch his reaction. The theatre of moral outrage.
But I say nothing, of course.
‘We should know to believe what we see,’ Elio-Ra answers. ‘We know that in all this time we have seen nothing. Not a single relic, not a single ship, not a nut, bolt or spanner.’
He looks at me for corroboration. I nod agreeably.
‘Where does that leave us?’ he continues. ‘We know the Luminal must be the work of the Star Mother. We see her divine handprints. Yet we invade and defile Her body. And we are still alone. Either the others have been wise, or they have been punished. Either way, we should know by now that the Luminal was not put here for our convenience.’
He looks at me bug-eyed, mouth half-full of broccoli. As if expecting me to either argue with him or convert to his Cult right there and then.
‘Well, it is hard to dispute that,’ is all I say.
He’s right on some level. Despite a century’s worth of data at our disposal, the reality is that we know virtually no more than when we first discovered the Luminal.
‘Bicycles,’ Siria had reminded me when we last talked about it. ‘Humans happily rode bicycles for centuries before fundamentally understanding how they worked. There were cities full of them in the twenty-first century. The Luminal is no different. We don’t need to know how it works. All that matters is that it works. A thousand years from now someone will figure it out.’
But I have never felt as certain as her about this. That we do not know how the Luminal works feels important. We know that it is not a wormhole or any one of the theoretical Bridges our scientific minds posited during the Age of Reason. We know it does not use the same dimensional sleight of hand techniques as our Heim engines and Magnet ships. We know that it renders distance and light years irrelevant, yet, does so without incurring any measurable time dilation. We know that it is powered by the stars through some mechanism that we cannot even begin to observe, let alone study and grasp. And that is all we know. There are some Cults that believe the Luminal is an illusion in entirety. A deus ex-machina gateway to a dream universe that we have created of our own collective volition.
We have found a great shame in our ignorance. And a great fear. This is the fear that stops us from exploring as vigorously as we now can. We had once assumed two trillion galaxies in the universe, but we now know that the universe is much (much) bigger than that. And in the face of a universe of this size, we became even more fearful than we were when we first found the Luminal. This is the fear that ended the Age of Reason and led to the explosion of the Sun Cults.
Rats. It disturbs me that I find myself leaning closer to Elio-Ra’s perspective on this one. I search for cause to disagree.
‘Rats might be a bad analogy,’ I say. ‘Remember, there was a day when a man stepped into a primitive Heim rocket and plunged it straight into the sun for the first time.’ I point a finger at Sol, causing the artificial window to zoom in and show us its fiery surface detail. ‘And we still do it every day, hundreds of us. We know that one in every few million plunges won’t work. The corona just won’t accept the Heim shift. The ablate on these Rigs will keep you alive long enough to roast to death real slow. We know the risk, yet we still go. We still spread, as we’ve always spread. As we once spread on Earth. There is a courage there, wouldn’t you say? Something uniquely human?’
Elio-Ra frowns and begins to reformulate his argument. Then he seems to think better of it. He shrugs and pours a glass of wine.
I make my excuses soon afterwards and return to my quarters. Elio-Ra’s company has made me lonely somehow. I still feel unmoored. I gently awaken Siria and Adi. For them, no time has passed at all since they retreated away. They come, swelling inside me and making me whole. The three of us talk late into the night. We take simple pleasure in our own company.
––––––––
Part Four
We wake up, all three of us, into a dream.
We are confused at first as we have not truly dreamed since our Entanglement. Yet a dream this must be. It is a lucid and real thing; recollected from shards of my empirical self, yet entirely beyond my control. We are on Labadi beach, just as we were on Adi’s birthday.
But this is not the glowing scene I had made for our baby’s special day. This is the beach as it was. As I truly remembered it. The water is not a bright blue brine, but a slow grey slurry, thickly swelling and surging. A sullen grey sea. The sand is not powder white, but the deep soft ash of processed waste. There is a mountain range to the east, but it is a shanty town mountain, a mountain of corrugated iron sheets, debris, dirt, and desperation. There is a terrible smell. A dead Atlantic farm whale is lying on the beach and its foamed blood and melting blubber is seeping ghastly along the shoreline. A silent crowd is on the beach, a few hundred yards away from us, near the farm whale and the moored metal fishing trawlers.
We cannot see it clearly from where we are standing, but in the centre of that crowd a horror is unfolding. I know because I was here.
I remember this day. I remember that we had heard of the catch. A North Hem farm whale had somehow escaped and strayed over the mid-Atlantic ridge. A Labadi trawler had harpooned it and pulled it ashore. To deter precisely this sort of situation, the farm whales are engineered to decompose rapidly when they die outside their Atlantic pens. My father and I had driven down to the harbour in his armoured car with a bag of Lum, hoping to buy some meat before it was too late. But we hadn’t bought anything in the end. In the end, we had stayed locked in our car and watched the horror show on the beach.
Two young beach boys had stolen some whale meat and the trawlermen had caught them. We had watched from the car as the boys were lynched. The oldest of the two could have been no more than nine years old, but there was no mercy for them. The trawlermen beat the boys and broke their limbs. One of the boys managed to hobble away but the crowd pulled him back into the maelstrom. A fried fish hawker lifted her hot oil tagine and poured its sizzling contents onto him, melting his face and blinding him. Then the trawlermen stuffed the boys into an old tractor tyre and set them alight. The crowd stood about in a circle and watched silently as the writhing boys burned.
My father had looked away and said nothing. I had not looked away. I had put my face against the armoured car’s thick plate window, my mind swelling and surging like the sullen grey sea, a half-formed word caught unuttered in my throat. Mercy.
I know all this because I was there.
I know all this because we are here.
And now from the centre of this crowd, there rises a plume of acrid rubberised smoke. The wind carries the sound of the two boys screaming; a Vulcan chorus.
Adi stares wide-eyed. ‘Why have you brought us here?’ Siria asks. ‘Why are you doing this? She mustn’t see this.’
‘I’m not doing it,’ I say. ‘I think...’
But then I no longer think. I know. I know what is happening. ‘SOCOM-3,’ I say. ‘This is our mission briefing. It must be time.’
I’ve heard about this. This is how the Tier 1 Partnership Executives take all their classified meetings. In the dreamscape, where meetings are untraceable. In the dreamscape where an entire day’s conference can be compressed into mere real-time seconds.
Adi is shrinking deeper between Siria’s legs. She remembers her birthday. She remembers this place as I had made it. There will be much to explain to her. Too much.
‘But why here?’ Siria asks. ‘Why bring us here?’ Anger in her voice now. The old giant rumble of her empirical self that I have not heard in years.
‘I don’t think it brought us here. I think I brought us here, somehow.’
She shakes her head. ‘No, it did this. It picked this. Metrics.’
I do not press her on what she means.
‘I’ll take Adi and go,’ she says. ‘You meet it.’
‘No, we should stay together. Taking this mission must be our decision, not mine.’ This seems even more important to me now than it had been before. I take her by the hand. I lead my family away from the horror and the crowd, far down the black-soiled beach.
––––––––
It is some time before SOCOM-3 finds us.
It comes to us from the direction of the crowd.
It comes to us as the Immaculate Mawu-Lisa of our western shore Cult. This was the God I grew up worshipping. It is in the exact form that I had always known it, in the form of our paintings and carvings and holographic sculptures. A half-naked titan with deep ebony skin. A golden shimmer of cloth draped about its body.
It comes to us as the Immaculate Symmetry. It walks on two legs, but there are four arms that sway by its sides. On its slender long neck are two heads, closely conjoined. One of its heads is that of a man, the Immaculate Lisa of the Sun, his narrow eyes sparkling inset like glittering red gems. The other is the head of a woman, the Immaculate Mawu of the Moon, her face so black it has turned into a tinge of blue, her eyes a glacial sapphire.
It stops a few feet from us. A dry heat radiates from it, almost hot enough to be unpleasant. Hot enough to remind us that this being is no dream construct.
Adi begins to approach the stranger, but Siria grips her and pulls her close.
‘We apologise for the delay,’ both mouths say to us in unison. ‘We were observing the lynching on the beach.’
‘Of academic interest was it?’ Siria asks. Her eyes are dark grey pits. She is angry. Angry enough to start drawing away. Angry enough that part of her is starting to retreat into her empirical self. She is growing taller, her limbs stretching like elastic, disrupting the consistency our shared mind-space. I take her hand. I try to calm her, for Siria’s contemptuous tone makes me fearful. I can feel that religious dread, tickling at the base of my spine. Even as I convince myself that this is no God... and it is not... the fact remains that this AI has just walked into our mind, without equipment or direct access to my physical body. I cannot even begin to conceive the technology that SOCOM-3 must have at its disposal. Yes, I feel fear. I stop fighting it and let it wash over me. It is Siria who grips my hand tightly now, calming me.
‘Yes, it was of interest,’ the Mawu-Lisa replies. It is impervious to her tone. Or—I suspect—it is pretending to be for our benefit. Its dual voice seems deliberately stilted and unaccented. Its thin mouths open and close in fishlike gestures. It is working hard to not appear too human. I have been briefed by a Stream of the AI before. I know what it is capable of; just how convincingly human it can appear when it is actually trying.
‘We found this killing illogical,’ it says. It is only the male Lisa that speaks to me now. ‘The meat will spoil and rapidly become inedible, as it is designed to do outside the farm’s enzyme mix. The theft by the juveniles will have made no difference to the trawler’s commercial outcomes. Did this killing truly happen as you are recalling it?’ Its red gaze is turned directly towards me. The blue gaze of Mawu, I note with some discomfort, is trained silently on our Adi.
‘Yes, it happened.’
‘We have no record of this event.’
‘Why would you?’
‘Metrics,’ Siria interrupts, looking pointedly at me and not the male Lisa. ‘It keeps metrics on us. Like a zoologist. When we captured and deconstructed the Stream back on Maffei, we saw the entire socio-commercial model laid out. It measures pain and puts it into an equation. Offsets it against progress and wealth. Ranks people by their worth. Some are worth nothing, and others worth everything. We’re all just metrics to it.’
‘You deconstructed a Stream of the legacy SOCOM-2,’ the male Lisa says. There is nothing like offence in its stilted voice. ‘Our model is significantly more advanced than that of our predecessor. But you have the principle broadly right. The pain qualia metric remains central to our third-generation model. We seek to minimise it, within certain parameters. But we are not all-knowing. We overlook much.’ It turns its gaze fully towards the far crowd. The blue gaze of Mawu is still on our Adi.
I have a question.
‘Ask it,’ Siria says. We have become prescient in this way. As a thought or question forms in my empirical self, she sees it budding and growing. ‘Ask it how meaningful the deaths of those two boys were. Ask it if this killing moved the dial on its equation.’
But she doesn’t give me a chance to ask. She answers her own question. ‘You’d have to kill ten thousand of those boys to make its metric even quiver. Thing is, we’re not worth a whole lot. Not as much as say, a Partner stubbing his toe. The Partners are the ones who built this thing. They try to make us forget that. Those boys dying like that—it meant nothing then and it means nothing now.’
It is Adi that replies to her. ‘All pain is meaningful,’ she says, looking upwards at her mother. We both look down at her in surprise.
‘All pain is meaningful,’ repeats the Immaculate Mawu of the Moon. ‘But we overlook much. We have no record of the crime that took place here. From our model’s perspective it simply never happened.’
Moments pass in silence, as none of us seem to know what to say to that. I take Adi by the shoulder and pull her closer to me, suddenly more unsure than I’ve been in a long time.
‘The Bonny is on the way?’ Siria asks finally.
The Mawu-Lisa replies, both mouths working in unison again. ‘She will arrive at Ishan’s Mirror tomorrow. It became necessary to accelerate arrangements. We used our influence to alter the Bonny’s schedule and bring it forward. We have, unfortunately, run out of time.’
‘Time?’ I ask.
‘Eight years ago, the Partners voted to upgrade their Inter-Partnership Socio Commercial model. We are now in the final stages of this process. Within the next millisecond of atomic time, SOCOM-4’s installation routine will be complete. It is likely that the engagement I am about to set you on will be voided by my successor. You will need to complete your work without its logistical support or monetary recompense beyond what I am able to provide you now in advance. I—feel—obliged to inform you of this before you accept our proposal. If you accept our proposal.’
‘It might be helpful if you told us what your proposal was first,’ Siria says.
‘It will be easier to show you,’ the Mawu-Lisa says.
––––––––
Part Five
The Good Bonny ejects from the Mirror, spinning us outwards dizzily towards Sol on low magnet thrust.
We cross the 250,000 Kelvin threshold.
Our full ablative armour deploys, wrapping the Rig up tight. We head for Sol’s corona, readying ourselves to plunge into the heart of the sun.
The Luminal is our eternal and infinite cathedral. The stellar limbic system that we discovered entirely by accident just over a century ago is our pathway between the stars. An anti-matter shelled tunnel that we can haphazardly enter and exit by shifting Heim dimensions as we plunge ourselves into a star’s filament cavities and coronal holes. The Luminal is our gateway to the universe.
The Luminal is also a time machine. The Tier 1 Partnerships discovered this early on and it has remained a closely guarded secret since then.
We cross the 500,000 Kelvin threshold.
Heat starts to become relevant, even to the powerful ablate cladding the Rig. We begin to cook. The Heim Plunger begins to gear itself up, sucking in and converting Sol’s coronal energy, preparing for dimension shift.
Our first generation of Heim Plungers allowed us to enter and exit Limbic space with seemingly no passage of time, regardless of distance travelled. But the Partnerships had experimented with a second-generation engine. An exponentially more sophisticated engine that could actively adjust its exit tensors. An engine that allowed Rigs to arrive at their exit stars before they’d even left their entry stars. An engine that somehow leveraged the same temporal mechanisms that had allowed the universe to craft and fill itself with matter so quickly.
An engine that was at this very moment rumbling in The Good Bonny’s belly.
I know all this because I was there.
I know all this because we are here.
Ten years ago, Siria and I had crewed The Good Bonny together. What happened next is conjecture, pieced together by SOCOM-3’s guesses and formal audit findings.
Tipped off about a Police intercept, the Bonny ejects some form of receptacle, dumping an unknown number of slaves into Limbic space. The crew takes its mem-wipes and completes its run. But the Partnership running the Bonny takes no chances. On its return to the Mirror, the Bonny adjusts its exit tensor and emerges ten years earlier.
Interstellar slaving is a serious crime. One of the few crimes that has the potential to ignite revolt. A crime that even the other Tier 1 Partnerships would take serious exception to. But the crime has—temporally speaking—never happened.
We overlook much.
After the Bonny returns to the Mirror, there are two versions of the crew in existence. Two of Siria. Two of Sorin. Two of me.
Here now, is the truth that the Partnership running the Bonny has somehow discovered out there on the desolate and lonely fringe of the Luminal Frontier.
The truth is that this doesn’t matter.
There is no such thing as a time paradox, not in this universe. As a bacterium might pull apart in binary fission and create two independent versions of itself without consequence, so might everything, and everyone, else.
That we perceive this fission as unresolvable paradox is entirely our problem. The universe does not give a phot either way. In the face of this cosmic indifference the mammalian brain has carefully evolved itself to cancel paradox, rooting it out and destroying it like an infection whenever it occurs. The brain is a machine and it is temporally hard-wired. Encounter a future you walking down a busy street and you won’t see yourself. You can’t, in the same way that you can’t draw a three-dimensional drawing on a sheet of paper no matter how hard you try. Your brain will strike you blind if that is what it takes to protect you from the paradox. And if the brain can find no procedural means of protecting you then it will find a way to shut itself down, like a fuse blown.
Impossible. Possible.
We cross the 1,000,000 Kelvin threshold.
Heat has started to become irrelevant. We have begun dimensional shift. We are plunging. Nervousness in the Control Room. Always a chance that Sol rejects us and heat becomes relevant again, then we burn up here and we die.
Adi is as human as we are or were. Yet she has never bonded herself to a mammalian brain in the way that we have. She has never tied herself to biological hardware and become lost in it like we have. We don’t even have explicit reason to think of her as a girl rather than a boy. For she is free of the limitations that physical evolution has shackled us with. She is truly free. So, for the first time, we let Adi’s empirical self drive our conscious experience. We look at the world through her perspective. Our child. Our wellspring and our marrow.
Our third eye.
We stand in the transit warehouse and watch ourselves board The Good Bonny. We watch Siria. We watch myself. Our optics are unimpeded because Adi’s empirical self cannot be deceived by our brain’s sub-conscious trickery. The paradox is laid bare and become paradox no longer. It simply is. There are two copies of us in this universe and we are about to board the same Rig.
Elio-Ra is standing in the transit warehouse for some reason. We wave a distracted goodbye to him as we board.
We sign in and we sit at our helmstations.
We sit directly behind ourselves. An identical copy of the body of my original empirical self. An exact copy of the body I still inhabit. We watch the back of this head as it hunkers down over the station. Impossible. Possible. Across from us, Siria, setting up on her end.
Sorin walks around the Control Room rings handing out the new mem-wipe waivers. The last-minute schedule change means there is no time for niceties. He slams a waiver on each desk and moves on. ‘Sign or get off my Rig and go back to the Mirror,’ he mutters when the Limbic Quant opens his mouth to protest.
Sorin pauses briefly when he comes to me for the second time. He processes the paradox. His brain’s emergency procedurals are invoked. By some mechanism that even SOCOM-3 does not understand, his brain rewinds the experience and then wipes it out, somehow truly fluctuating the fabric of time as it does so. Sorin’s seen the paradox, processed it and then been self-mem-wiped—all before he’s even seen it. His eyes blink a few times as his brain soothes him with a post-operative déjà vu salve. His brain creates some fiction for his empirical self that only he can ever know of. He slams the mem-wipe waiver on my helmstation and he moves on.
Impossible. Possible.
Two decades ago, a North Hem processing plant worker had opened a vacuum-packed shipment of grain from the Mirror. Deep inside the three-ton package, he had found the remains of a woman, packed in with the grain, sealed and preserved.
The plant worker had reported the incident to his managers and they had reported it to theirs. The Lids were called. There had been nothing remarkable about all this so far. Accidents happened everywhere, and health and safety rules were not exactly priorities on the harsh Luminal Frontier.
When the Lids ran tests on the body, they discovered two things that startled them. The first was that she’d been sealed in that vacuum shipment for just shy of three hundred years. The second was that she was at least eight generations down the matrilineal tree of a South Hem woman who had disappeared a mere five years earlier. Her body was branded and micro-chipped and a crude slaver ring was permanently attached around her neck.
At that point everyone involved was mem-wiped and SOCOM-3 took over the investigation. It was not long after this that SOCOM-3 began to become unstable. It diverted vast resources towards seemingly fruitless projects designed to identify the Luminal’s true nature and unlock the secrets of the mammalian temporal paradox response. Projects of no social or commercial value. The Partners grew concerned.
The AI sought to explain itself. Its function was to maintain a stable model. Somewhere on the fringe of the Frontier, a Partnership was running a slaving operation of unknown scope. And they had been running it for centuries. SOCOM-3 did its best to project, approximate and remodel. But the pain qualia metric had become immeasurable. Unmanageable. Too much was being overlooked.
The AI was becoming unstable.
The Partners held an emergency summit. A motion was set, and they voted. The SOCOM would be upgraded. The pain metric would be discounted in the fourth generation.
We cross the 1,500,000 Kelvin threshold.
The Heim is at full power now as we plunge into Sol’s coronal hole.
Less than a micro-second before we penetrate Limbic space, a radio message is cast our way. An unwelcome stowaway on our bow shockwave, we receive it as but a single word of warning. A word unelaborated, yet still saturated and suffused. A word cast indiscriminately towards us on broad frequency from Ishan’s Mirror.
Police.
The message is from Elio-Ra. Of course.
‘Unless it wasn’t our message?’ a nasal voice to my right asks. ‘A Rig left Ishan’s a few minutes before us. The message could have been theirs.’
‘It wasn’t,’ we say out loud. ‘It was ours.’ We made a mistake telling Elio-Ra that we were a scientist. A scientist would not be boarding The Good Bonny. He was watching in the transit warehouse. Spying. He is the sentinel on the Mirror.
Sorin looks at us. And then his eyes flick to the identical him sitting in front us that was me. His eyes flick back to us. But he cannot see. He cannot see. He frowns, irritated. ‘We must assume that the message was intended for us,’ he says.
We listen to the crew as they deliberate. We watch Siria stand up and confront Sorin.
We feel the religious dread that begins to choke the Control Room.
We are a breath away from mutiny. A breath. And the idiot Sorin continues to stonewall and bully his crew. For Mawu’s sake, tell them and be done with it.
‘Just tell them,’ we say out loud.
Sorin scowls hard at us, then rubs his temple with a bony thumb. The post-operative déjà vu salve overwhelms him momentarily. He overlooks much.
––––––––
Outside, our eternal cathedral looms large about us. Somewhere on the far fringes of the Luminal Frontier, a new civilisation has risen. Perhaps more than one. Generations upon generations of slaves are living and dying, broken bodies and souls unaware that another Earth exists somewhere. Unaware of where they come from.
The pain qualia metric is unknowable. Unbearable. We understand now why SOCOM-3 became unstable.
But SOCOM-3 is no more. This burden has passed to us. Wherever this risen civilisation is, The Good Bonny will take us there and we will witness it. The AI came to us in its diminishing moment because the truth will not be withheld from us by mem-wipes or temporal distortions. It asked that we go and we bear witness, for it is only we that can. What we are to do after that, it did not know. We do not know.
But nevertheless, we will go.
And we will bear witness.
That all pain might be meaningful.
––––––––
Biram Mboob was born in The Gambia and grew up in various countries across Africa. His stories have appeared in a number of magazines, including Granta and Sable, as well as a number of anthologies including AfroSFv1, Apex Book of World SF, Tell Tales, and Dreams, Miracles and Jazz.
