by Simon Kewin
The voice inside her head spoke with complete clarity, as if it were the flesh-and-blood man communicating with her through her flecks.
“Hello, Selene.” She caught a glimpse of a room filled with hazy light, the ghost of Ondo standing in the middle, but when she looked directly at him, he disappeared. He'd said it would take practice to establish clear communication with the avatar.
“Firstly,” she said, “are you absolutely promising me the real Ondo won't get to hear what we discuss?”
“Upon my love for your father and upon my life, you have my word. The physical Ondo only gets to know if you tell him, otherwise this conversation remains firmly inside your head. I can be updated from the real Ondo's engrams, but no data can flow the other way, from your mind or my neural analogue into the real world. The single exception is the engram expulsion mechanism I explained, but that is completely under your control. You may banish me permanently from your mind any time you choose.”
“He can't hack into you, grab a copy of you to dissect?”
“He made that impossible to do.”
“But then, you would say that, because you're him.”
“I'd also say that if it were the truth. He – I – wouldn't do that, but it comes down to trust in the end. Whether you believe me.”
Were his words true? She had no way of knowing. But she wanted them to be true, and that, maybe, answered her question for her. In her mind's eye he was becoming a little more solid now, a little more like the real Ondo, but she could also tell that it wasn't him. It was a copy, a ghost, nothing more.
“Okay, first question, did you lay any traps around Maes Far on one of your visits?”
“I always do if I intend to revisit a system.”
“What did you do?”
“I seeded the system with nanosensors and beacons, enough so that they couldn't possibly destroy them all. And I hid weaponry and ordnance.”
“What sort of weaponry?”
“Nanomines in orbit around the planet and on likely in-system vectors. Also, missiles concealed as space debris capable of striking surface targets.”
“Nukes?”
“Some were, others were smarter. Why are you asking this? What happened on the planet? From the tone of your words I'd say you are … agitated.”
Ondo had updated his avatar a month earlier, meaning that the Ondo in her head knew nothing of events since that moment. No point keeping recent events from him. He hadn't attempted to conceal anything from her so far as she could tell. She granted him access to her recent visual and auditory memories. He would see the events of the last few hours from her point of view, although he wouldn't get to know her private thoughts and reactions to them. But he would get to see her biological data: heart rate, endocrine system responses, her tremor, all of it.
When he'd finished, he said, “I'm so sorry, Selene. I had no idea anyone was still alive. They kept Seben – your father – very well hidden. What you've been through – we should talk about it. You shouldn't face it on your own.”
“Yeah. The other you said something similar. First I want an answer to something that's been troubling me.”
“If I know, I'll tell you.”
“That Walker said, You made vows to him. To Omn. What did he mean?”
“He's referring to a time when I was an acolyte of Concordance.”
“You?”
“Indeed. I was a younger man, and misguided as I now see, but I embraced it all avidly. I was fervent for a time.”
“You didn't think to mention this to me?”
“I didn't keep it from you, but there was never a good time to go into it. That was a difficult, painful period of my life. And I suppose I feared what your reaction might be.”
“Yeah. So you should have.”
“I give you my word that I left them behind a long time ago.”
“How do I know you're not still one of them – that you're not, I don't know, programmed like a Void Walker? A sleeper roaming the galaxy, acting as a magnet for all the escapees and dissidents and trouble-makers.”
She thought he'd be affronted at her suggestion, but he actually gave it consideration. “The possibility occurred to me. Long before I made it to the Refuge, I checked myself very thoroughly: my tissues, my engrams, everything about myself. How did I know I didn't just think I was the renegade Ondo? It troubled me, I admit.”
“Don't tell me, you didn't find anything.”
“I did not.”
“Which doesn't prove a thing.”
“No. They would have programmed me not to see or believe any such evidence.”
“Then we come back to whether I can trust you.”
“You've seen how they pursue me, the lengths they went to on Maes Far.”
“I've seen how they pursue me,” she said. “You were simply there. Maybe they found me because you were with me.”
“If that were true, then why aren't they here now? Why didn't they come for you at the Refuge a long time ago?”
It was a good point. “I don't know.”
“I think you should scan me. Carry out every analysis and investigation upon my tissues and mind you can think of. If you find nothing – as I believe will be the case – then perhaps that will put your mind at rest.”
“And yours too?”
He dipped his head in agreement, the movement of the ghostly image blurred. “Perhaps. I instructed the Refuge's systems to do something similar when I constructed them, and they found nothing. It made me feel better about myself as I believed Concordance had no way of knowing that would be my plan.”
“You're sure Aefrid Sen wasn't one of them, too? That the Radiant Dragon and the Refuge aren't hopelessly compromised?”
“Again, it's possible. There comes a point when you have to trust your judgement, otherwise you'd never do anything.”
“Tell me the story. Tell me how you ended up being a part of Concordance. And then how you ended up not being.”
“It's no great mystery. It took me time to find my path in life when I was younger. A common enough situation. I was impressionable and naïve, and I knew there was something bigger going on. Concordance filled the gap, seemed to offer meaning and certainty.”
“How long were you with them?”
“Two years. Cathedral ships occasionally recruit locals from the planets they watch over, for reasons I don't fully understand.” Ondo hesitated, reluctant to tell her something. Then he spoke again. “There is something else in my history you should know about, a thing that might give you more reason to trust me. An episode from before I joined Concordance. A part of the reason I did, perhaps.”
“Go on.”
“I had a family. A partner and a child on Sintorus. A daughter, as it happens, little more than a baby.”
Clearly, neither partner nor daughter were around anymore. She couldn't stop herself from asking the question.
“What happened to them?”
“They died.”
“What were they called?”
“My partner's name was Marita, and our daughter was Juma. Actually, your father was her folkfather.”
“What does that mean?”
“On Sintorus, folkparents are friends or relatives who agree to help guide a child through their journey to adulthood, look after them if their biological parents die.”
“He never said.”
“He couldn't, of course.”
“How did it happen?”
Ondo smiled to himself at some memory only he could see. “The irony is, Marita was always the agitator, and I was the one holding her back, telling her she was seeing conspiracies where there were none, telling her to stop causing trouble and live a normal, quiet life. She was active in the Sintorian rebellion, a cell leader, goading the planet's governments and security forces. In the end they came for her, a special forces team from the local military, and shot her where she slept in our bed. Juma, asleep beside her, was hit, too. I was away, some unimportant meeting, and I r
eturned to find them there.”
“Concordance did that to you but you still joined them?”
He nodded. “It seems incredible, I know. At the time, I still didn't believe that Concordance were using the local security forces as their front. Marita told me it often, made me try to see, but I wouldn't believe her. She was right, of course, I understand that now.”
“Why did they let you join, given your partner was a known rebel?”
“I think I was something of a coup in the war for people's hearts and minds. If they could recruit me, it meant I was turning my back on everything Marita stood for. They could use me, speak words through me, while at the same time keeping an eye on what I did. For a time, also, I was utterly devoted to the Concordance cause, the idea of bringing peace, imposing it if need be. I think I desperately wanted to believe there was a reason for what had happened to Marita and Juma. A higher reason, I mean, some great design that made some sense of their deaths.”
“But you didn't find it.”
“No, it took me a while to see it, but I got there. I like to think Marita would be proud of what I finally became, but, even so, if I hadn't encountered Aefrid Sen it's entirely possible I'd still be there, a devoted member of Concordance, watching over Sintorus, nursing my losses, confused and angry.”
“Sen was on your planet?”
“We didn't know it was her at the time, but we heard rumours of someone digging around in the ruins of an Omnian War crash site high up in the Snowtops. I was sent to investigate. The thinking was that my knowledge of local custom and my accent – not that I'd ever been within a thousand kilometres of the place – would convince people I was just a normal planet-dweller. I found Sen and she saw right through my subterfuge. She knew I was Concordance. But the odd thing was that she didn't kill me. Maybe she saw something in me, or she knew my story, or she was playing for time, but she decided to talk to me instead. Over a period of four days and nights, she explained much of what she'd learned and what she suspected. It's fair to say those few days utterly changed the course of my life.”
“You left with her?”
“Nothing so dramatic. I let her escape, but I stayed with Concordance for nearly another year, thinking over what she'd said and what Marita had said, coming to my own conclusions. Aefrid had given me the means to communicate with her, and eventually I did. She was wary, inevitably, but she made an FTL ship available to me, and I escaped the system. Eventually, we met up, and we talked, and we worked together, and I ended up here. It was a remarkable act of trust on her part.”
“You said she was old, fearful that no one would carry on her work.”
“Perhaps that was it.”
“And what about my father? Was he an acolyte too?”
“No, he stayed on the planet. If it helps, he tried very hard to dissuade me from going to the Cathedral ship. We had a lot of angry arguments when I told him I was planning to join Concordance. He was sympathetic to what had happened, kept telling me it was a misguided reaction to my grief. He was right, of course. I didn't communicate with him at all when I was with Concordance; it would have been too dangerous for both of us. Besides, he'd pretty much disowned me. But then, when I'd decided to make my escape, I got back in touch with him.”
“How did he react to that?”
“Something like your reaction now.” The memory of that seemed to amuse Ondo. “He didn't trust me, thought I was working for Concordance, suspected a trap. We'd expressed many doubts to each other as young men. It took me three months to finally persuade him. The sight of Aefrid's ship brought him round in the end, the prospect of escaping Sintorus and starting a new life, of getting some answers.”
“Can you show me your memories of that time?”
“They're old now, and inevitably degraded. My mind may have romanticised some of them, conflated actual events with later retellings, missed out details, but yes, if that would help.”
“It would.”
“Very well.”
She sat back and watched as Ondo's recollections of those long-ago days played themselves out in her mind. Sights and conversations, smells of the planet Sintorus and those of the Concordance vessel. The faces of people she would never know: a woman that had to be Marita, a light shining on her smiling face; the baby Juma gurgling, kicking her legs; Selene's own father as a young man, little more than a boy, his face full of excitement and fear, both at once.
As she observed, another part of her consciousness monitored metaspace surrounding the ship. Each tiny fluctuation in the Singh Field was the projection into that reality of the mass of a star in normal space. There were countless millions of them.
The artificial part of her brain counted them anyway.
Part 2 - Sidereal
1. Kane
They took two days to return to the safety of the Refuge. Throughout, the Dragon performed the usual deep scans of its own structure and interior, sifting through its constituent molecules for Concordance bugs. It found nothing: so far as their technology could tell, the ship was clean, just as Selene and Ondo were clean. They saw no sign of pursuit in metaspace. They'd escaped the trap set at Maes Far.
Selene spent her days trying to calm her racing mind, throwing herself into furious bouts of exercise until she collapsed into welcome exhaustion. Sometimes she thought that the myth of metaspace travel, the notion that it destroyed the mind, might have some truth to it after all: too often she felt worn thin, strung out. She would find herself staring into the greyness of the void outside the ship, her mind wandering to thoughts about those she'd left behind on Maes Far. They were painful memories, but it felt right to think them, too. A natural reaction to loss.
The tremor in her hands subsided. She talked more and more to her inner Ondo, opening up to him as she never had the real man. At one point, suddenly alarmed that the flesh-and-blood Ondo would get to hear what she'd said, she set a trap of her own to see if his former words of reassurance were true. She regretted it almost immediately, but by then it was too late.
“Ondo, when you refresh the image of your engrams from the real you, will you lose all memory of everything we've talked about?”
“Normally the new copy of me won't know anything about these interior conversations, but I can save them in a safe area of your memory for later recall, if you like.”
“I'd prefer it if they were lost.”
“Understood, although they'll obviously still exist in your normal memory. Is there something you'd like to talk about?”
She pressed on with her plan before she could stop herself. “I've been having … troubling thoughts. Thoughts I can't stop myself thinking.”
He considered her over the top of his multiglasses, a mannerism that the real Ondo used often. “Thoughts you can tell me about?”
“Thoughts … that this is all too much. My injuries, the loss of my family. The death of my father and what he must have gone through beneath the ice.” She waved a hand in the general direction of everything. “Concordance.”
“Can I ask what you mean by too much?”
The concern in his voice almost made her stop. Almost. Instead, she played her role, letting him tease the truth out of her. It helped that she'd had similar conversations with the real Ondo, during her convalescence.
“Too much as in I'm not sure I want to face it. I could have died so easily down there on the planet. We both could. Maybe it would be easier to let that happen next time. Maybe it would be easier to do that now, before there is a next time. We're not really going to be able to beat them, are we?”
Her inner Ondo was clearly deeply troubled as she revealed her invented suicidal urges. There was no doubt he believed her: he offered advice, suggested steps they could take together. It was all as she would have expected.
Later, when she sought out the real Ondo, engrossed in minute study of the artefacts they'd recovered, he was as distracted as ever, barely paying attention to her as she spoke to him. If he'd known what she'd admitted, he s
urely would have behaved very differently. It seemed that what he'd said was true: her interior dialogues were secure.
She made a mental note to get her copies of his engrams refreshed when they were back at the Refuge, wiping out all records of the conversations they'd had.
Late on the second day of their manoeuvres, she cornered Ondo – the real Ondo – once again, this time to challenge him over something else that had been troubling her.
“The additions you made to my brain are going wrong,” she said. “They haven't embedded fully into my natural tissues. I don't work properly, I'm not whole.”
The surprise on Ondo's features was clear. “Can you explain what you mean by that?”
She sat down beside him. “My thoughts are constantly divided. When I'm under stress, the Selene part of me goes into panic loops while the artificial part starts calculating, planning. It's like I'm two people, not one, different parts of my brain fighting against themselves.”
“May I extract some data from your flecks for study?”
“Will it help?”
“It might allow me to see what is going on.”
“This will give you access to my inner thoughts?”
“In a sense, but I'm only interested in the metadata not the detail. I give you my word I won't pry into anything private.”
She didn't like it, but she needed answers. This, at least, was not invented. She granted him access to her flecks using the protocols he'd taught her. She had to take three separate steps, speak two preset commands in her mind and also carry out one physical motion, a series of taps at a certain point behind her left ear. She sat in absolute stillness while Ondo pulled diagnostics from her brain.
Eventually, he looked up from the med analysis display. He sighed, removing his multiglasses to converse with her.
“I have to say, everything looks perfectly normal to me, given that there is really no such thing as 'normal', of course. It's a simplification, but I can see that much of your logical thought is in fact coming from what remains of your natural brain, whereas a good 45% of your emotional response is from your artificial brain. This idea that your augmentations are detached, machine-like, is a mental construct of your own devising, not based in the biological reality. You're no different to anyone else: a mess of competing urges and reactions and voices that we like to call an individual, but we're only ever an amalgam, an agglomeration, coming from a relatively static core, but shifting, fluid. The integration of the different parts of your brain are proceeding well. You are not divided, Selene, you are multiplied.”
