It was true that Jess had a memory of using a jumpgate. But it wasn't his memory. It was a copy transferred over to him by the weird green pod in his arm. He still didn't know what it was. No one had asked him about it. But he had a strong feeling that Commander Zhang would be keeping close tabs on him. Along with other people. Unknown figures. People hiding in the shadows of the human network, waiting and watching.
The jumpgate memory was sharp and clear. But it seemed to be lacking some crucial dimension which allowed Jess to relate to it. It was like the memory of watching a scene in a movie, rather than participating in a real event.
As such, the sensation of moving through the jumpgate had the surreal quality of a first-time experience.
It was as though an entire cosmos of stars had been forced into a cylindrical aquarium, and now Jess and Lady Stanford were the fish who swam through it.
Jess saw a clock in the wall. It showed hours, minutes, seconds. The seconds seemed to move by like molasses. Each one hung on the screen for a disturbing length of time before finally smearing into the next.
This strange phenomenon didn't last long, luckily. They were out of the jumpgate again in the space of about two subjective minutes.
Jess was aware that such a trip through space could not be undertaken without incurring a time debt. In the days before jumpgates, that debt would have been in the area of years. But now it was mere hours.
The longest jump in the human domain, from Earth prime to the extremely distant Planet 11, would incur a debt of eighteen hours. Jess was amazed to find this little factoid so readily in his memory.
"Here we are," Lady Stanford announced. "I haven't been back here in ages!"
The Starframe stayed stable. It did not spin, bob, or tumble. The view through its windows were stationary. So perfectly motionless that they almost couldn't be real.
Jess's first view of the human homeworld, Earth prime, came with mixed emotions. One of them was a certain fascination at seeing the birthplace of the enemy. Another was righteous fury; what nerve they had, to keep their own world so pristine and perfect but to destroy his and fill it with their garbage.
The other emotion was joy. Unbridled happiness at finally returning home.
That was the emotion of Edwin Caldwell. If the scientists were right, and the brain was the only thing that made a person, then Jess really was Edwin Caldwell now. It was no disguise, anymore. It was not an illusion. All of Caldwell's memories were intact. They were muffled somewhat by the dominant Nerian personality, but Jess could still access them easily.
Occasionally the border between him and Caldwell would blur and he would become two people simultaneously, with conflicting ideas and feelings. Those events were frightening, but he was getting a better handle on preventing them.
Jess got out of his seat and moved through the interior of the Starframe. He discovered that Lady Stanford liked to employ the zero gravity technique that Caldwell had pioneered.
As a Nerian, Jess had never been in zero-g. But as Caldwell, zero-g was part of his everyday life. All he had to do to activate that expertise was to relax and clear his mind; it came to him automatically, a familiar reflex. At the same time, he remained Jess Starfall. The conscious thoughts of Caldwell stayed hidden.
Swimming through Galgaran was a rare experience. It felt like the initial discovery of an innate talent. It was exciting, invigorating.
He reached the little window and looked around. He could see the moon off to his right, half of its cratered face lost in shadow. Like the shameful face of a teenager with acne, hiding from the world. For billions of years its face had been undisturbed by anything but asteroids. And then a single visit by some tiny creatures called humans had kicked off a new era. Nowadays, the moon was half-covered by a sprawling city under a sparkling environmental dome.
There was no civilian jumpgate which led directly to Skyway University. Only approved personnel were allowed to go there. The jumpgate to Skyway was sequestered on the moon, in the huge complex of the human government buildings. Somewhere near the Hivemind itself. It was the only terrestrially bound jumpgate in the galaxy. Great precautions were taken to ensure it did not accidentally swallow the moon and deposit it somewhere else.
"We're going to intercept a government transport ship," Lady Stanford said. "You should get suited up."
Without taking her visor off, she pointed in the direction of a locker on the wall. This also caused Galgaran to point. The knifed finger of the Demon Mech stabbed forward into space, indicating nothing in particular.
Jess went to the locker and proceeded to bundle himself into a spacesuit, whilst Galgaran crossed vast stretches of emptiness.
By the time he got back to the window, breathing heavily in the claustrophobic helmet, he saw a pinpoint of white in the distance. But it was growing fast, coming closer.
"Ninety seconds until closest pass," Lady Stanford said. "Get moving."
"Where?" Jess almost asked. But then the latent mind of Edwin Caldwell told him. Jess suddenly knew all about Starframes, even though this was only his second time being in one.
There was a hatch in the floor near the platform where Lady Stanford hung in her Vitality Replicator. Opening it, Jess saw a narrow ladder leading into the dark recesses of the Starframe.
He closed the hatch behind him and descended. He barely fit down the shaft in his bulky suit. It was a comfortable outfit to wear; a constant circulation of air kept him cool and prevented the humidity of his exhalations from settling inside his helmet. Still, he couldn't help but feel boxed in.
Lights flicked on around him as he climbed, detecting his presence. He used his chin to hit a button on the inside of the helmet; this activated a light bubble on his chest, which cast a semi-circle of brilliant light. 180 degrees of illumination.
Automatically, the suit had keyed into the processes of the Starframe. The countdown to their fly-by with the transport ship was displayed on his HUD.
He reached the bottom of the ladder with twenty-two seconds to go. For a moment he fought back a rising panic, swallowing bile that tried to climb up his throat. But then Caldwell's mind kicked in, telling him where he needed to go.
There was a tubular apparatus on the wall behind him. Like a coffin. He slid the lid off, lay inside, and pulled the lid back into place.
The tube lurched into the wall, slotting into an airlock. It stopped. The inner doors shut, locking the atmosphere of the Starframe in. The outer doors opened, emitting a blast of super-cooled air and a plume of ice dust. The tube fired out at great speed, ejected from an area on the Starframe's body roughly where defecation would have happened on the body of a human.
In essence, Jess was shit out by a giant robot. Farted out on a rush of depressurized atmosphere.
He hurtled through space, hearing the distant whine of contracting metal. He could see stars through the lid of the tube. And then there was darkness, as the cargo bay of the transport ship caught him like a baseball mitt.
The tube drifted through a matrix of differential gravity fields, which slowed his speed and slowly dropped him toward the floor. He came out on the other side at about ten miles an hour, roughly one three-hundredth of the speed at which he had been ejected from the Starframe. He touched down on the floor of the cargo bay, sliding on slick metal until he bumped into a wall and stopped. A coffin-bound spaceman delivered safely but unceremoniously.
Above him, a light emitting device flicked on and painted the lid of the tube with a warning message: Wait for third beep, then open lid slowly.
The beeps sounded inside his helmet. On the third one, he pushed against the lid and slowly slid it aside.
Sitting up, he saw that the gravity matrixes had deactivated and the doors of the cargo bay had shut.
He unlatched his helmet and climbed out of the tube. Wasting no time, he stripped out of the spacesuit and took several deep breaths. It turned out that he was claustrophobic. Of course, Edwin Caldwell wasn't. The contradiction caused a s
trange sensation of wrongness. Jess would have to work on his fear response if he wanted to pass himself off as the professor.
There was a lot of work to do. Everything he needed to know was already locked away in his head; he just needed to find the key.
***
I was greeted on the small transport ship by a tall, gangly flight attendant. She had the long, spidery fingers, splayed toes, and pale skin of someone who had spent too much of her life in zero gravity. Her parents had probably worked in space, and she had grown up under weak g-forces. By now, irreversible damage would have been done to her body, especially to her heart. She would not be able to set foot on Earth, or any planet with more than half of normal gravity, for longer than a few hours.
I pitied her. But she got to spend her life in the open, voyaging freely from place to place, without fear, without the pressure and weight of an entire race on her back.
We made our way through the ship. She showed me into a cabin where artificial gravity pulled me to the floor. Earth gravity. It was weaker than what I was used to on Planet Nera. I felt wonderfully light, incredibly strong and solid. But I also felt like I couldn't quite breathe properly, and I always had a vaguely nauseating sense of drifting.
Food was served. No one looked at me funny when I refused to eat. They assumed that being fired out of a Starframe - at faster than three hundred miles per hour in one direction whilst the momentum of the Starframe itself carried you at hundreds of miles per minute in the other - was not great for the appetite.
We landed at the moon an hour after my rendezvous with the transport. The gravity there was about equal to Earth, as well. At least it was inside the bubble of the lunar cities. Outside, I watched tourists and workers bouncing along on the grayish-white lunar regolith, floating up like balloons and sinking as though falling through water. It looked like a lot of fun, but I didn't want to subject my body to any more unusual experiences today.
There were security checkpoints as we entered the city. I made it through all of them just fine. I was not stopped or questioned. No one looked at me twice. I was surprised that they couldn't smell my fear, or at least see it in my posture and expression. Because I really was terrified.
I was entering a new life in a new body. I was an infiltrator, a lone soldier, fighting for a cause that no one else cared about.
But I had the voice of Edwin Caldwell to keep me company. Always he whispered in the back of my mind. He was a ghost, a spiritual guide through this strange new world. I could not be rid of him. I had become him.
Chapter 8: Skyway University
Two jumpgates in one day. Jess had an idea that this was not standard procedure. The government's infrastructure was everywhere. You would never find yourself without a place to rest in between uses of those strange portals.
But Jess saw no reason to linger on the moon. As beautiful and wondrous as it was.
To reach the jumpgate to Skyway, he had to cover his entire body in a lead-plated spacesuit. The fields used to inhibit the jumpgate were highly radioactive.
For some reason, the designers of the suits found it necessary to install Geiger counters in them. Jess could hear the exponential increase in radiation as he climbed up into the jumpgate chamber. He didn't understand why that was necessary.
It was slow at first.
Tick...tick...tick.
And then it became very fast, very suddenly. Jess was terrified. He very nearly started to climb back down. But there was someone behind him. A young woman who was also travelling to Skyway.
"It's OK," she said through the radio; her voice was distorted by the bombardment of radiation, nearly carried away. It was like a distant message received from across an irradiated wasteland. A hope that could never be reached.
To help, she put a hand against Jess's back. She did not push. It was just a simple human contact, meant to give him strength.
Jess climbed onward. The girl below him was fearless and motionless. He had no choice but to keep going. She kept her hand on him. He wanted to shake it off at first, but... after a minute, it started to feel good.
He didn't know if that was Edwin Caldwell's feeling, or his own. There were a lot of things he was afraid of now. But one of his worst fears was that he would lose himself. He might succeed in saving his people, but at what cost?
He entered the huge, spherical chamber. The jumpgate shimmered in the air over his head, a scar on the flesh of reality. He could feel its pull on the top of his head, pulling his entire body up through the spacesuit and pressing his skull painfully into his helmet.
The ladder extended further, beyond the opening in the floor. Jess climbed until he reached the last rung. He had to cling to it, like a balloon that didn't want to float away. He was now a dozen feet above the floor.
"Just jump for it," the girl said. "It'll pull you in, and I'll see you on the other side."
It was natural for his Nerian half to distrust her. But the increasingly stronger presence of Edwin Caldwell knew she was right.
He launched himself up off the ladder and fell into the whirlpool of the jumpgate.
***
At the bottom of the ladder, Rama Ishmael stared upward. He heard the encouraging words of the girl over his radio; they were tiny whispers, all but lost in the storm of static.
Then the young man jumped for it.
His trepidation could just be the result of his trauma. The last five years had been hard on him. Losing his arm, being abandoned. It had been a long time since he had used a jumpgate. But that didn't change the facts. Edwin Caldwell had used this jumpgate, from the moon to Skyway, at least twenty times. He was a veteran.
Even so, Ishmael could conclude nothing. His suspicions went unsupported, but also unabated.
He didn't even know what he was suspicious of. Maybe he thought that Caldwell had somehow been radicalized during his time on Planet Nera. Maybe he had given himself over to an enemy cause. Revenge on humanity.
But that didn't explain his lapses in memory, and the difficulties he had when doing routine things.
Ishmael had no choice but to keep following.
When he came through the jumpgate, he was startled. He had never been to Skyway before. He didn't realize how seriously and religiously the designers of the University followed the techniques they espoused.
Namely, the technique of flying through space at a high speed, totally defenseless, disoriented and confused, without losing your shit and getting yourself killed.
From Ishmael's perspective, he entered the jumpgate headfirst and emerged feet first, as though taking a quick dip and then popping back out. However, he was no longer in the containment bubble on the moon. He was hurtling through the void, falling toward a glimmering silver object far below.
Skyway used a singularity, enmeshed in differential fields, to manipulate the bodies of people coming through the jumpgate. Ishmael had picked up speed during transit, and now launched out in excess of four hundred feet per second. If there had been wind resistance of any kind, if he had not been in the vacuum of space, he would have been instantly torn apart. Turned to red mist.
He felt his lunch rising into his throat.
Skyway University lurched upward to meet him. He saw it growing larger between his feet. He entered it through a doorway, designed to let travelers in but not to let air out, and continued falling. He flashed through rooms and atriums, past milling students and marching professors. Some of them waved and smiled at him, standing on the floor of the university, their axis of gravity rotated ninety degrees relative to his.
Finally, the little duct he fell through took a downward curve. He felt his axis of gravity switch, and he moved through a pocket of what he could only describe as thick air, designed to slow him down. Then he landed on his feet, softly, inside a locker room.
The young girl who had offered Caldwell her words of encouragement was grinning from ear to ear. She looked like she wanted to take the whole ride over again.
Caldwell him
self was taking it well enough. He sat on a bench and composed himself.
Ishmael had never been subjected to such a violent trip before. He ran to find a toilet to vomit into. When he returned, shaky and stinking of bile, Caldwell gave him a suspicious look.
"Are you following me?" the young man asked.
"Are you paranoid?" Ishmael asked. "Because paranoia implies guilt."
They stared at each other for a moment. Both of them knew they had reached a stalemate. There was nothing more to be said.
***
Her name is Lynn.
Humans have a being they like to call God. He is an imaginary friend, responsible for the creation of life and the universe. Even so, humans seem to think this god has a special preference for the most violent and evil of his creations; humankind. They assume he pays special attention to them and gives them the things they need.
That being said, let me add this; God help me, I think I'm falling for this girl. I felt it the first time she set her hand on my back, when I heard her ghost-like voice over the radio. In that moment, separated by many layers of lead and vacuum-ready material, and by the static of radiation, I felt close to her. I knew she would become important to me.
But I don't want it. I never wanted it.
The hell of it is, I don't know whether these are my feelings or the feelings of Caldwell. Do I, the Nerian called Jess Starfall, have it in me to fall in love with a human? Or is this just an infection, a virus of human memory, altering my emotions?
Either way, it doesn't matter. Love is one of those events that doesn't consider your opinions or your wishes. It just happens. Often when you least expect it. Sometimes a person just gets under your skin and in your head without your permission.
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