Repercussions
Page 18
She closed her eyes. It was just too much enthusiasm at the moment.
After taking a moment to compose herself, she sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the table and put her feet on the deck, keeping her eyes on them and away from Mr. Bobbing Smile.
“Thank you. I think I’ll get out of your way and have a nap in my cabin.”
She stood, turning her gaze toward the doorway, still avoiding the medic.
“Of course, of course. A good rest in familiar surroundings is all you need now. I will order a nutritious drink for you; please have it all before you rest. You have been out for several days.”
As she exited the medbay, Katrina laughed out loud.
* * * * *
It was late in the second shift, and Katrina was in her cabin. For once, she was enjoying the feeling of motionless movement that came with travel in the dark layer. The ship was on the final leg, and they would be within a day’s flight to Sanctuary when they came out.
As Katrina thought about returning to her people’s home, she realized that she was smiling. She had been smiling a lot since their escape from Captain Houston.
May he be dead in his grave before I ever have to leave Sanctuary again.
Rising from her desk, she took a deep, cleansing breath, stretching upward until her bones popped. She stood straight, eyes closed, mind clear, and began to recite her new mantra.
“I am Katrina, daughter of the despot Yusuf, friend of the Noctus, liberator of the Hyperion, wife of Markus, president of Victoria, searcher in the dark.”
Her arms began a slow, floating motion downward.
“I am the lover of Juasa, vessel of her memory, the survivor of the fields, despot of Midditerra, pirate and avenger of slaves.” Her spine curled gently to follow her arms, as her hands brushed her knees. “Matrem of Sanctuary, friend of Troy, my fellow searcher in the dark. I am all of these things and embrace them as me.”
Her feet made a semi-circle turn to cross at her ankles as her legs curled with her spine, always following her arms’ slow motion.
“They form my foundation, they give me purpose. My memories are my strength, the proof of my convictions. I am the soft reed that grows along the shore. One foot in the river, one on land. I bend in the wind, I weather the flood, I persist, I survive. I wait.”
Her elbows touched the deck, and her body followed, until she was bent over her crossed legs, face-down, almost flat.
“I touch all these things, I live in their worlds. All of these things touch me. They become a part of me. My beliefs, my persistence, my absolution are found in them. I am always Katrina.”
Now her back arched upward, pulling her shoulders back, and she slowly opened to the lotus position like a flower.
“My world will often move in unexpected directions, because there is no true north—there is only here. This does not change who I am. I will continue to be Katrina, always myself. Never less again, and always embracing all that I am.”
THE END
ABOUT PENNY BROWN
Penny Brown lives in the Midwest United States, in a small town with twelve churches, two stoplights, and one grocery store. She is not sure what is inside the twelve churches, but she can tell you where to find the mayo and why they moved the egg display in the grocery store. She likes to sing the blues, work needlepoint, and author stories no one can read. Her favorite achievement is her kids. She says that she is the single parent of two only children because there is a twenty-year difference in their ages.
Her children never understand why she thinks that is funny.
CRASH IN LOVE
BY JAMES S AARON
FROM THE AUTHOR
This short novel came about because the Aeon 14 fans asked for more Crash the Grey Parrot. Why wouldn't I oblige?
I've come to really enjoy Crash and his positive attitude in what can be a dangerous and disheartening world. I especially like his interactions with the jaded characters on Cruithne Station. Crash helps remind them of their humanity, and also that the world can have amazing things in it, like love and friendship...and puzzles.
This story might also be called "Crash Levels Up," since he learns a bit more about how to control his environment and protect his flock...as well as his heart. Or maybe it should be called "Crash Kicks Ass," since there's a good bit of that, too. I'll let you decide.
Thanks to everyone who has grown to love Crash. I think there's more in store for him in Aeon 14.
James S. Aaron
Eugene, 2018
M. D. Cooper’s Note:
I know I was stoked to get more Crash! For those of you wondering where this story fits, it comes after the events of Vesta Burning.
PART 1 – SERIOUS PUZZLES
THE HOT PROBLEMS
STELLAR DATE: 8.21.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Cruithne Station, Puzzlehead Forums
REGION: Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
the new voice in the forum said.
Those were the magic words in Cruithne Station’s Puzzleheads forum, a shared Link space for a special breed of obsessive that lived for puzzles.
Users circled the post like piranhas around a calf.
Crash the Grey Parrot perked awake immediately at the query. He had never heard one like it, and that made the puzzle especially interesting. Puzzles that were hard were a dime a dozen. A puzzle that was interesting was something to get excited about.
The Puzzleheads were more than just a forum; it was a way of life. A Puzzlehead saw puzzles everywhere, from instruction manuals to dating, and the puzzles shared in the group were intricate constructions of problems that typically built on each successive answer, until the ultimate solution was not only correct, but revealed something to anyone who solved it. A great puzzle was a journey, a game of chess between masters, an experience that transcended time and distance.
Crash often got emotional just thinking about great puzzles before he solved them. The idea of any new puzzle was enough to make him drop everything and apply his complete focus.
He had been a member of the forum since he first came to Cruithne. No one there knew he was a parrot, and he enjoyed his anonymity enormously.
Mentioning prime numbers in the Puzzlehead forum was like dropping bloody chum in Shark Town.
Several other people popped up on the Link, expressing interest in the problem. None of them seemed to care that the new questioner was anonymous. People were often anonymous here, like Crash. If their puzzles were terrible, they didn’t last long. Those with excellent contributions or obviously sharp minds, like Crash, maintained their anonymity.
a frequent contributor named Tally said.
The newcomer considered the question.
It was a decidedly female voice, with a sharp warmth.
Celest didn’t hesitate as she shared the data set with the forum.
Crash tracked the interactions. Seventy-one different participants grabbed the file. He took his copy and place
d it in quarantine. He would let someone else get burned if it was an attack. They would report soon enough.
The hive mind reported the file clean.
The challenge had been delivered.
Crash thought Tally’s quote didn’t quite fit the conversation, but it was a serviceable response to Celest’s melodrama.
People often came to the Puzzlehead forum trying to make a splash. They acted haughty, then disappeared with their tail feathers drooping in shame when someone cracked their submission immediately.
Like all the others, Crash spread out the data set in his mind, quickly scanning the theorem for an initial impression. The first read piqued his interest. His fifth read had him entranced. It was obvious the theorem was new. It processed primes, and it had been created by a singular mind. The numbers were gorgeous.
Crash spread his wings and ruffled his feathers, surprised by the way he felt as he read through the puzzle for the sixth time. Whoever had made this was amazing.
CRASH ENAMORED
STELLAR DATE: 8.21.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Cruithne Station, Night Park
REGION: Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Conversation across the Link might have been Crash the Grey Parrot’s favorite form of entertainment. He laughed for hours at the practical jokes the ravens played on the tourists of Night Park, loved the soft sounds of the chicks in the high nesting box, but found the most satisfaction in tracking all the voices of Cruithne Station.
In truth, he loved puzzles and math problems, but he had solved most of the readily available ones. He had already spent years sifting through the Mesh for new theorems to solve. He appreciated the problems brought by human friends like Fugia Wong, but he solved them too quickly.
So he had spent the last few years listening to the voices of Cruithne Station through their various Link communication channels, from bars and back alleys, and semi-public Link forums, to the Port Authority traffic control, where freighters, passenger ships, Terran Space Force, privateers and pirates all hustled their way through the nexus between Earth and Mars.
He sat on his branch high in the plascrete tree in the middle of Night Park and listened to the voices on the Link, jumping from place to place, working on the greatest puzzle of all: humans.
A new puzzle had entered the conversation a few years ago, when SAIs began to appear in the public Link forums. He already knew a Sentient AI named Xander, a shard of the leader of the Psion AIs on Ceres, and Xander was the best at hiding himself among humans. Other SAIs weren’t so capable. Crash recognized them by their stilted language and instant responses. They certainly weren’t as organic-sounding as Lyssa, the leader of the Weapon Born SAIs, who, until recently had appeared weekly on the news feeds to try to mediate the rift between humanity and the Psion AIs.
Humans were equally strange. He often determined their strangeness simply by a voice’s difference from the other people he was listening to simultaneously. He’d had long conversations with his friends Fugia Wong and Ngoba Starl about why humans acted as they did. Ngoba believed in a basic cunning goodness in all people, while Fugia kept her heart inside a steel vault and seemed irritated by anyone who didn’t act the same.
Technically, humanity and the SAIs were locked in a cold war. Since Psion had seized Ceres, the majority of SAIs had been leaving humanity for a place in the AI city Psion. A few, however, either held out for their own reasons or moved like spies in places like Cruithne, where security was loose for any number of reasons. Since the battle at Vesta, tensions had risen even higher, and few SAIs risked exposure. He didn’t think an SAI would risk activity on a public forum to share puzzles, of all things.
As Crash spent several days poring over the theorem that Celest had left with the Puzzleheads, he grew increasingly uncertain that any human could have developed the problem, but it was equally unlike anything he’d ever seen created by artificial intelligence. He moved from trying to solve the puzzle himself to reviewing the history of puzzles involving prime numbers.
Eventually, someone posted a question in the group’s shared Link space, and then the conversation became a fiery debate about the theorem. No one had proved it. No one could believe it existed. Some of them wanted to immediately turn their efforts to outing Celest, while others wanted to protect the sanctity of the puzzle. They didn’t care who had made it. They were grateful it existed.
For the first time in recent memory, they had encountered a problem they couldn’t solve.
They were, of course, quite flustered when Crash delivered the answer.
ANALYTICAL FLIRTATION
STELLAR DATE: 8.24.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Cruithne Station, Night Park
REGION: Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
It was an elegant problem that demanded an elegant solution. Crash spent three days moving through the numbers, applying known proofs, approaching the variables from different disciplines in both human and AI maths, until the answer came to him in the midst of a series of raven-inflicted practical jokes.
The ravens communicated across the Link using images and emotions, never words, and the flashing images of a businessman in Night Park chasing his runaway assistance drone—stumbling and grasping as the bot wove between shoppers in the bazaar—supplied the systemic shifts that fit like a key in the whole puzzle.
An array suggested itself to Crash, and he applied it to the theorem. The primes responded, and everything balanced.
He had solved the problem.
Crash let out a joyous squawk and flapped his wings. The parrots nearby gave him sideways looks, but they were used to his strange outbursts and just bobbed their heads at him.
Etiquette demanded that he post the proof in the Puzzlehead forum to let others attack his methodology. That would also ensure he had a public statement of being the first to reach a solution. Sometimes others in the group proved a prospective answer wrong; Crash knew that would happen in this case. The proof appeared designed to demand a specific solution. He was either correct, or spectacularly wrong.
The thing was, something about Celest’s voice made him want to share the proof with her before he posted it publicly. He wanted her to know it was him—which she would know anyway, if he put it in the forum—but mostly he wanted to share that moment with the mind that had conceived the theorem.
The question was, how did he reach her? There had been an endless of list of taunts and debates in the forum that called her out to prove who she was, explain how she had developed the proof, or admit where she had stolen it. She had answered none of those demands.
Maybe the only way he would be able to reach her was through the forum.
Crash turned his mind to tracking down the Puzzlehead called Celest. He moved through every database in Cruithne and found nothing, then worked back through shipping manifests and communications logs. He enlisted the help of several investigative NSAIs, pushing them to scan decades of stored information.
There was no record
of a mathematician called Celest. While there were millions of handles that included ‘Celest’, none of them demonstrated the same level of intelligence—or should he just say it… genius.
After wasting two days in fruitless search, he finally posted the response in the forum and waited for her to respond.
As he expected, the other Puzzleheads attacked his response. He waited as the taunts died down. They quickly saw that he was correct, and then the complete wonder of the proof became clear.
The usual responses of praise and disgust filled the forum. Crash couldn’t bask in the accolades and envy as he normally would. He was too anxious for her response.
After hours of taunts and praise, the conversation eventually turned to irritation of Celest, since she obviously didn’t respect the Puzzleheads enough to respond to their quick ownership of her proof. She should at least admit defeat. She wasn’t going to be one of those weak-willed mathematicians who disappeared with their tails between their legs, was she? It was already weak that she had posted anonymously.
When the response came, there was no critique or opinion about the answer, only a simple,
A new unknown proof hit the Puzzleheads like a bomb.
The ‘please’ left them all silent for a few moments, until the arguing took off. Why should they look at her stupid puzzles?
Only, they were far from stupid.
Crash took his copy of the proof and slipped away, stretching his neck and clacking his beak before opening the file to see her new challenge.
He let out a squawk that set the ravens into a rage. This proof was more difficult than the last.
The ravens rose over the fountain in a flapping black cloud that reflected Crash’s state of mind.