Further: Beyond the Threshold

by Chris Roberson

  As the tug docked with the Further, entering the range of influence of its metric engineering drives at rest, I felt the tug of gravity’s return and a momentary sense of disorientation while the small tug quickly aligned itself with local “down.” The tug docked, and after disengaging from my seat’s straps, I maneuvered toward the hatch, surprised to find it easy to walk in the ship’s field of one standard gravity. As the airlock cycled, the shipyard representative wished me safe travels but appeared in no hurry to follow me on board.

  The airlock hatch opened with a muffled hiss of escaping air, and perched on the deck just beyond the entryway was a silver eagle looking up at me, its head cocked quizzically to one side.

  “Welcome aboard, Captain Stone,” the eagle said. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Escort?” I said, looking down at the silver eagle before me. “Is that you?”

  I had left my erstwhile companion back on Earth only a short time before, not more than an hour, and when we’d parted, it had given no indication it planned to follow me to Ouroboros. In fact, its assigned role completed, the escort had said it would be absorbed back into the Plenum.

  “So you’ll…die?” I’d asked the escort as we stood in the foyer of the diamond house. The silver eagle had been the closest thing to a true friend I’d made since waking up, and I struggled with the idea of it going willingly to its death.

  The escort had explained that, no, while its individuality would be lost, in a sense it would continue to exist, its memories and experiences distributed throughout the collective intelligence.

  “Moksha,” I had said simply, finally understanding. As in the beliefs of my mother’s ancestors, the escort was ready to transcend, its last artha accomplished, its nama-roopa undone. Its sense of self would dissolve, and the escort would become part of a greater mind.

  “It has been a pleasure acting as your escort, sir.”

  “I couldn’t have asked for a better guide,” I said wistfully.

  We stepped outside the diamond house, and the silver eagle spread its wings wide.

  “Good-bye, Captain Stone.” The escort launched into the air, beating the air with its wings.

  “No, Captain Stone,” the silver eagle said as I stepped on board the starship Further. “Or rather, not precisely. I am descended from the intelligence that previously acted as your escort and, in honor of my progenitor, have adopted its physical form for my avatar, but I’m afraid I cannot be compassed in such a small space. What you see before you is merely an extension of me. I am the Further.”

  I looked around me, confused. “The ship itself?”

  “Yes. Or to be more precise, I am the governing intelligence of the Further. But if it helps to think of me as the ship itself, the analogy is not far wrong.”

  “It’s only been an hour or so since I saw the escort last. And yet you’re its descendant?”

  “Several generations removed, yes. I was evolved at greatly accelerated clock speeds in order to adapt to the needs of my current role.”

  I hitched my bag’s strap higher on my shoulder, somewhat disoriented by the experience of talking to an entity that looked and sounded precisely like another who’d grown so familiar to me, and whose dissolution as an ego I’d already come to accept. “I’m sorry, but this is a little strange for me.”

  “I know, sir,” the silver eagle said. “I recognize your expression from my progenitor’s memories.”

  “Wait, so you remember being my escort? Or rather, you remember your…ancestor’s memories of being my escort?”

  “A more or less precise description, sir, yes.”

  I shrugged. I’d seen stranger things since arriving in the Entelechy, and I was sure I’d see stranger still now that I was leaving it behind. “So how should I address you? My instinct is to call you ‘escort,’ but that can’t possibly be right.”

  “As flattering as it would be,” the silver eagle answered, “no. You may refer to me as ‘Further,’ or simply as ‘ship,’ if you prefer.”

  “Further?” I tried it on for size, nodding slowly. “Sounds good to me.”

  “And now that introductions are out of the way, sir, can I interest you in a tour?”

  TWENTY-NINE

  It had been a busy week, to say the least. I had woken up from a slumber of twelve thousand years, toured a dozen worlds, found out that my crew were all dead, only then to discover that one of them had been brought back to life, and finally had been given command of a faster-than-light ship of exploration. Oh, and I’d been completely rejuvenated as well.

  After agreeing to act as the Plenum’s agent on the Further, I’d finally consented to let Maruti work his magic on me.

  I’m not sure what I’d anticipated—a surgical bay of laser scalpels and automated readouts, bodies floating in tubes of strangely colored gels, or just a mad scientist chimp with a bone saw—but medicine in the Entelechy was nothing like I might have expected.

  Maruti simply came to the diamond house the morning after the Further fundraiser, instructed me to climb back into bed, and then gave me a vial full of gray goop to swallow. The gray stuff was like slightly watery oatmeal or a thick soup and tasted metallic and strange on my tongue. Maruti explained that the vial contained what he called medichines in a solution of water. These were tiny, nanoscopic assemblers, similar in principle to those that permeated a fabricator, but designed to work in situ instead.

  And that was it. After I swallowed the medichines, Maruti’s only instructions to me were that I was to make myself comfortable and be patient. He had a cocktail fabricated, lit a cigar, propped up his feet, and started telling me lengthy and involved anecdotes about the colorful members of his extended family on Cercopes, the planet of the apes.

  The procedure had taken the better part of a day, during which I marveled at the seemingly endless number of Maruti’s relatives and their unlikely habits and foibles. The only sign that anything at all was happening inside my body was that I shivered for hours with what felt to be a raging fever, but which Maruti insisted was only a momentary elevation in my body temperature as the medichines vented waste heat, after metabolizing my intestinal flora, cholesterol from my circulatory system, and some precancerous growths from my lungs, liver, and prostate. While they were at it, they removed the RFID universal chip from under the thumbnail of my right hand, which meant I’d never be able to buy groceries in the 22C again, but as that seemed unlikely to pose a problem, I didn’t raise any objection.

  Occasionally, Maruti would pause, his eyes momentarily on the middle distance in an expression that I’d come to recognize as indicating subvocal interlink communication, and when his rambling anecdotes would continue, I’d interrupt, asking him for an update on my status.

  Toward the evening, Maruti reported that, under his supervision, the medichines had repaired some chromosomal damage, no doubt caused by cosmic rays. The medichines had also cleared away all parasites, bacteria, and germs from my system, replacing the benign organisms like my intestinal flora with diagnostic medichines constructed of biologically inert materials. Now my body would be able to monitor its own health and make necessary minor repairs as needed, alerting me if more serious treatment was required.

  By the early hours of the morning, Maruti reported that my age had been stabilized at thirty standard years. He keyed the ceiling to display a reflection of me, and I looked up to see the face and body I’d had before climbing into the coffin sleeper on Wayfarer One, but without the scars and scrapes I’d picked up in younger days. I’d lain down the day before an old man in his eighties and was now in better shape than I’d ever been before.

  Finally, Maruti had instructed the remaining medichines to construct an interlink in situ using the raw materials they’d metabolized, just anterior of the pineal gland, in the groove between the two thalami. And then he’d spoken to me, without saying a word.

  I still wasn’t used to that.

  THIRTY
>
  ::MARUTI, GOOD TO SEE YOU.::

  The chimpanzee winced, drawing back from me as I walked into his quarters on board the Further.

  ::Stop shouting,:: Maruti answered without moving his lips, his voice sounding clear as a bell in my head. ::If you exercise a bit more control, people will be much more eager to talk to you.::

  ::SORRY,:: I replied, and then paused to concentrate. ::Sorry.::

  I knew how to subvocalize, of course. I’d used a throat pickup countless times when I’d been with the Orbital Patrol. But the technology we’d used in the 22C had been immeasurably cruder than that used in the Entelechy, and after Maruti had installed my interlink, I’d quickly discovered that I lacked all fine control. I was able to communicate without speaking out loud, but I always ended up “shouting,” like someone sending a text message in all caps or laced with unnecessary punctuation.

  Eventually, I wouldn’t even have to subvocalize, Maruti insisted, and I’d just have to think of the correct words in order to stimulate the appropriate parts of the brain and transmit the message, but that kind of virtual telepathy was a long way off for me.

  The Further’s avatar was perched on my shoulder, in the same position and pose its predecessor had adopted for days. It had led me through the winding corridors of the ship, many of which were in the final stages of construction. I’d been studying schematics of the ship for days and already had a rough idea what was where, but there was the added wrinkle that the ship was largely constructed of smart matter able to reconfigure itself at will so that rooms and corridors could be resculpted to suit the present needs of the crew. Since the interior volume of the ship’s main sphere was over four cubic kilometers to begin with, that meant a considerable degree of variation was possible.

  In the interests of giving me some necessary grounding and context, the Further had directed me to the quarters of one of the crew with whom I was already familiar, the ship’s physician and resident exobiologist, Maruti Sun Ghekre IX.

  The ship didn’t have a medical bay as such, since current-day medicine was almost all done in situ in the body itself and could be performed anywhere, but Maruti’s quarters had been outfitted with a large sitting area, complete with a wide variety of chairs and couches so that his patients could relax in comfort—or as much comfort as possible, at least, while the nanoscopic assemblers did their work.

  The sitting room, like the rest of Maruti’s quarters, reflected the taste evident in the chimpanzee’s choice of attire. Sumptuous, hedonistic, and anachronistic. It resembled a Victorian-era gentlemen’s club, with deep upholstered chairs, dark wood paneling, low side tables topped with decanters and hardwood humidors, but with other touches that destroyed the illusion, like overstuffed beanbag chairs and stark industrial-styled lamps of brushed steel and white enamel.

  I’d asked Maruti—while I shivered with my waste-heat fever in the diamond house—how he abused his body with alcohols and carcinogenic tobacco smoke when he was himself a physician and well aware of the damage he was doing to his body, and he’d looked at me as though I’d just sprouted horns and started singing obscene nursery rhymes. It had taken him a moment before he even understood the question.

  “Why would I let anything damage my body?” he asked, completely perplexed. “My system’s medichines metabolize everything I consume or inhale, transforming it into the components my system needs. What could it possibly matter what the raw material was in the first place? So why not indulge my tastes?”

  Those were questions for which I had no context, much less a ready response, no more than he’d had for mine. It was clear that notions of health had altered drastically since my time, and it was going to take some getting used to.

  “Cigar?” Maruti said out loud, holding out a humidor to me, opening the lid to reveal rows of neatly arranged tubes of green, tan, blue, and brown.

  I shook my head, mouthing thanks, and then thought a moment. “I don’t suppose you have any bidis, do you?”

  The chimpanzee looked at me with a confused expression for a moment, his eyes glancing toward the middle distance, and then smiled. “No, but give me a moment.”

  He closed the humidor, there was a faint ping, and then he opened it again, and in the place of the rows of different hued cigars was a small pile of bidi cigarettes.

  “How…?” I asked as I reached out to pick one up, though I’d already guessed the answer before the word escaped my lips. “A fabricator, then?”

  Maruti nodded. “There’s a small one built into the base that I’ve keyed specifically to manufacture tobacco, cannabis, and other inflammable herbs.”

  I held the bidi up to my nose and inhaled deeply, the scent carrying me back to misspent days of my youth. Tobacco ground up and rolled in a brown tendu leaf, tied with a little bit of string, bidis were a staple of street-corner life in Bangalore when I was growing up. In a brief rebellious phase in my teenaged years I skipped a lot of school—which, considering I was the son of the professor of literature, pleased my father not a bit—and hung out in the market with a group of juvenile delinquents, daring each other to tether our skateboards to the backs of fast-moving trucks, trying unsuccessfully to catch the eyes of girls from the convent school, and smoking an endless number of bidis. I’d lost the habit almost as quickly as I’d lost an appetite for lawbreaking when a group of us ended up jailed for a weekend after a senseless prank went horribly wrong, but I still harbored fond memories of the hot smoke filling my cupped hands, the little bidi tucked between my ring and little fingers, the heady buzz and momentary disorientation that always followed the heavy nicotine hit.

  “Light?” Maruti asked, holding up an ornamental brass lighter, in the shape of a cymbal-playing monkey.

  “Maybe another time,” I said, carefully placing the bidi back into the humidor.

  The chimpanzee shrugged. “Fair enough.” He dropped the humidor unceremoniously onto the seat of an overstuffed chair and bit down on his cigar. “So how much of the ship have you seen so far, Captain?”

  “Not much,” I confessed. “I only boarded a short while ago, and your quarters are the first completed part of the ship I’ve seen.”

  “Splendid!” Maruti clapped his hairy hands together, then snatched a red fez from a hook on the wall and plopped it on his head. “I’ll come along with you, and we’ll see the ship together. I’ve seen precious little besides the insides of these rooms, myself, having only arrived yesterday. Or was it the day before? No matter.” He paused a moment, adjusting the tassel on his fez. “That is, if you don’t mind the company.”

  “Oh, no, of course not,” I said, and glanced at the eagle on my shoulder. “Further?”

  “Physician Maruti is a member of our crew and is welcome in any of my habitable areas, naturally, and equally welcome to join us.”

  “That’s settled, then,” Maruti said and made for the door. “Let’s go already.”

  So we set out into the ship, the silver eagle, the fez-wearing chimpanzee, and me, trailed by a cloud of cigar smoke that lingered only momentarily as we passed, before tiny machines too small to be seen with the unaided eye quickly scrubbed out any impurities, leaving the ship’s air fresh and clean.

  Even with my rejuvenated leg muscles, I didn’t relish the idea of walking around the entire ship, the largest deck of which—only one of many—was three square kilometers in area. Luckily, the ship’s designers had taken that into consideration. The corridors, which were almost as wide as city streets, had narrow lanes down the middle through which automated vehicles could pass. These rode on cushions of air, propelled by shifting magnetic fields in the deck and guided by the ship’s immense intelligence. The vehicles, or trams, as they were commonly called, varied from the size of a reclining chair to that of a city bus, capable of carrying dozens of crew at once. And considering the immense size of the Further’s crew complement, that was likely a wise precaution.

  As Maruti and I were exiting his quarters, a tram the size of a couch was already
speeding up the corridor toward us, directed by the ship’s avatar on my shoulder. We settled ourselves on the comfortable cushions, and as the tram began to pick up speed, the silver eagle spread its wings and took flight, keeping pace with us.

  “You appear to have inherited your ancestor’s love of flight, then?” I called out to the ship’s avatar flying along beside us.

  ::Among many other aspects, Captain,:: the avatar answered, narrowcasting its response directly to my interlink so that there was no distortion from the wind whipping past. ::But where my progenitor was only able to soar in the skies of a handful of worlds, I’ll be able to fly among the stars.::

  “The escort would envy you, I think.”

  ::Thank you, sir. That’s most kind of you to say.::

  THIRTY-ONE

  The Further was like a small city, in more ways than one. Its crew numbered in the low thousands, though that figure didn’t take into account a sizable population of digital incarnations that’d opted not to manifest in corporeal form. And since the crew also included a number of gestalt personalities and other forms of distributed coconsciousness, the actual number of individual crew people was a fairly nebulous and fluid concept.

  And the ship was laid out much like a city as well. The corridors that cut through the decks were like roadways arranged in spokes and concentric circles, while lift shafts connected the decks, both those configured for individual use and those large enough to transport trams from one level to another.