Further: Beyond the Threshold

by Chris Roberson

  Not all the members of the “crew,” using the term loosely, had positions, with some of them acting only as passengers. And other positions were traded back and forth between the crew, at will, from time to time, whenever the mood struck; it would be complicated for an unaugmented organic mind like mine to follow, but the Further itself kept track of the crew and their responsibilities from instant to instant. In order for two members of the crew to trade positions, they needed only to inform the Further and it entered the record.

  There were many times when I’d been tempted to offer the command chair to First Zel i’Cirea, if only to escape more of her withering stares.

  Zel was treating me to one such stare as we all stood around the control center in an awkward silence. There were politics at work I didn’t understand, but I knew enough to recognize that the corvid brothers had sided with the Amazon in some sort of power struggle I didn’t even know was taking place. I was on the other side, the hapless unfrozen caveman, unsure even how I’d managed to give offense in so short a time.

  Xerxes, not standing on ceremony, took a seat and configured the table in front of em to display astrogation information. One of the corvids, Hu or Mu, I couldn’t tell which, was occupying the next seat over and leaned over conspiratorially.

  “My brother and I helped design the control interface, you should know.”

  “Did you?” Xerxes answered, sounding not at all impressed. “Well, be sure not to mention ‘design’ to our good physician”—ey nodded toward Maruti—“or else he’s liable to respond with another of his irrational outbursts.”

  Before Maruti could respond, his teeth already bared, the entry to the bridge slid open again, and a pair of young women entered wearing matching one-piece suits of flashing green.

  “Well, look,” the two said in unison as they loped down the steps, “the gang’s all here!”

  “Namaste, Madam Jida,” I said, pressing my hands together at my chest.

  “Oh, don’t be so formal,” one of the two said, sliding into the seat beside me. “As ambassador extraordinary of Jida Shuliang to the universe at large, I suppose the correct term of address is ‘Your Excellency.’”

  “The rest of me is getting my quarters in order,” the other said, dropping into the seat on my other side. “But I’m already unpacked and ready to go. So when do we launch, already?”

  And that was that.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  There was one more member of our command crew I hadn’t met yet, though I didn’t know it until I reached my quarters and finally unpacked.

  We had just left Ouroboros, powering away from the Entelechy at speed, the transition from normal space to the distorted bubble of space time that enclosed us entirely imperceptible. The only sign that we were moving at all, in fact, was the view beyond the hull as the stars in front of us slowly began to cluster closer together, their shades shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum, while the stars behind were red and drawing nearer one another.

  I’d given the order to depart from the bridge, but once we were underway, there wasn’t much to do or see for a few days. The metric engineering drives could maintain the distorted region of space around us for five standard days, during which time the bubble would be moving through normal space at a rate of ten light-years per day. At the end of five days, the bubble would collapse and we’d revert to normal space, after which the drive would recharge for another standard day, more or less. (The recharge cycle could be shortened by a few hours if we cut back on other power usage, but as that would mean shutting down gravity, environmental controls, and even life support, I doubted any of us would be in that much of a hurry.)

  The Further, therefore, could average a maximum of fifty light-years of travel every six days. At top speed, it would take us just under one year to travel from one edge of the Entelechy to the other. For this first hop, though, we’d be taking a short shakedown cruise, journeying from Ouroboros to a planet called Aglibol, some forty light-years away.

  For the next few days, then, we had little to do but settle in and wait. I had scarcely seen my quarters, stopping in only briefly after arriving to drop off my scant luggage, and with no responsibilities keeping me on the bridge and Zel and her corvid cronies still fixing me with hard stares, I decided it was high time to unpack.

  The quarters I’d selected were simple, even Spartan compared to the opulence of the diamond house on Earth. A sitting room, a smaller room with a bed, a small kitchen, an office with a desk and chairs, and a washroom, all configured more or less to “Information Age standards,” or so I was told. If that meant I could understand the functioning of the toilet without needing an expert’s assistance, it was fine with me.

  One wall slid aside to reveal a kind of wardrobe, and unpacking my bag, I hung the sherwani coat, white churidar pants, and juties up on hooks and, after taking out the rest of the contents, hung the empty bag itself on another hook. Then I returned to the sitting room, set the Space Man action figure on a place of honor on a shelf, put the handheld beside it, and then hung my holstered cap gun from a peg that helpfully protruded from the wall when I needed it. Then I was left holding only the diamond case Amelia had given me when we parted in Central Axis back on Earth. I sat down at the table and set the case down in front of me.

  I looked at the case for a long while, thinking about my former crewmate. I understood her reasons for staying behind while I went off to the stars, but that didn’t make her decision any less difficult to take. This was an amazing world in which we’d found ourselves, and it was a shame that we wouldn’t be able to share it with one another—whether simply as friends or as something more.

  What trinket could Amelia have given me that could possibly make up for her absence?

  I slid the case open, and inside I found a signet ring, the color of silver, set with a red gem. The stone might have been a fire opal, and indeed, it seemed to glow with a kind of inner light.

  An inner light that quickly spilled out into the room around it, glowing brightly.

  “It’s about time you opened that case,” said a familiar voice. “It was getting stuffy in there.”

  Suddenly, on the table’s surface stood a miniature holographic projection of a woman, no more than thirty centimeters tall.

  “G’day,” the projection said in Amelia Apatari’s voice, winking. “Did you miss me?”

  THIRTY-SIX

  I think my heart stopped beating for a moment, and only my years as a battle-hardened expert in Interdiction Negotiation kept me from jumping up on the chair and screaming like a little girl.

  “What’s the matter, RJ? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I…I…” was about all I could manage.

  “Of course, technically, I suppose I am a ghost, come to think of it.”

  “But…but what…”

  “If you don’t unclench a bit, my dear Ramachandra, you’re going to blow an o-ring.”

  I still held the signet ring in a white-knuckled grip, and when I looked down at it, I could see the lights dancing deep within the fire opal whenever the holograph moved. Startled, as though something I’d thought was a stuffed toy had turned out to be a live snake, I dropped the ring and sprang to my feet. To my credit, though, I didn’t jump on the chair and scream, however tempting it might have been.

  “What are you?” I said, and then followed quickly with, “Well, Amelia, obviously…but how?”

  The tiny woman on the table sighed, a sympathetic expression on her delicate features. “Sit down, RJ. I’m supposed to help you, not give you a bloody coronary.”

  I found my way back onto the chair, regarding the ring I’d dropped onto the table warily, as though it might bite me.

  “It’s like this, mate. When I decided to stay in the Entelechy rather than come with you—that is, when Amelia Apatari decided to stay—she knew she’d be leaving you without any connection to your own world and time. And while I wasn’t willing—while she wasn’t willing to sacri
fice her own dreams to come along with you, she wanted to do something to make it right.”

  It was strange, watching the little figure, the table faintly visible through her translucent body, who seemed to find it difficult to remember she wasn’t the woman she so resembled.

  “You remember Maruti saying that he’d reconstructed a more or less complete version of my consciousness and memory from my…well, from my ‘remains,’ right?”

  I nodded numbly.

  “Well, I asked Maruti if he could just update the copy with my recent memories and download it into something you could take along with you.” She nodded toward the ring sitting on the table a short distance from her. “The ring was Maruti’s idea. Stylish, don’t you think? Complete with its own holographic projector.”

  “So you’re…what? Some kind of…copy of Amelia?”

  “Technically, I’m a digital incarnation of Amelia’s consciousness housed in the ring. I can run as a virtual emulation inside the ring itself or interact with the outside world either by direct interlink communication or by holographic projection.”

  “Wait, I’m still not sure I understand. Amelia stayed back in the Entelechy, as we discussed, and you’re a full copy of her mind. Does that make you…alive? I mean, are you sentient?”

  The little holographic projection pursed her lips in an expression I’d grown to recognize in the years I served beside Amelia. It was the face she made whenever reminded of a fact she’d sooner forget.

  “Well, actually, when ‘Amelia’ asked for the copy to be made, she insisted that Maruti keep it just below full sentience. I remember her being worried about creating a fully self-aware version of herself if it was only going to be, for all intents and purposes, someone else’s property. But I don’t know. Do I seem subsentient?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that, or even the faintest notion what one might be.

  “I feel the same as I always have, if you ask me,” the holograph went on. “So either sentience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be or that chimpanzee might have pulled a fast one.”

  I reached over and gingerly picked up the ring. Holding it up to my face, I peered into the depths of the gem, as though I might catch a glimpse of Amelia’s mind somewhere in there. “It’s been a while since Amelia gave this to me. What have you been doing in there all this time, anyway?”

  The projection laughed, Amelia’s laugh, familiar and throaty. “Well, it looks like cramped quarters, but there’s quite a bit to be said for being a digital consciousness. Sure, I don’t have a physical form, but I’ve got perfect recall and enough processing capacity to simulate any environment I choose. So I’ve been lounging around, rereading all of the Taimi Taitto, Girl Reporter graphic albums I loved as a kid, eating my favorite meals, and revisiting my favorite places. And even made a few new stops along the way. Paris in the 19C was particularly nice, I thought. Honestly, if I didn’t know I was an emulation, I’d never have guessed it.”

  Tentatively, I slipped the signet ring on the ring finger of my right hand.

  “And you’re just going to ride along with me, then?” I said, looking from the ring to the woman on the table.

  “Sure,” the projection answered, and I found I couldn’t think of her as anything but plain old Amelia. “Just think of me as your personal advisor.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head slowly but smiling all the same. “This is going to take some getting used to.”

  “Ah, what have you got to worry about? It’ll be beaut!”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  It was late in the ship’s night, the percentage of the day when the lights in the corridor were dimmed and many of the biologicals in the crew let their bodies rest, and I was propped up in my bed, trying to read.

  I’ve always been something of a bookworm. It comes from having a writer for a grandfather and a professor of English for a father, I suppose. Our house in Bangalore was always full of books. When I left home and moved to Ethiopia to start university, I brought a few of my favorite books along, many of them handed down to me by my grandfather—Robert Heinlein’s Space Cadet, Cordwainer Smith’s Norstrilia, Iain Banks’s Use of Weapons. After graduating, when I signed on with the Orbital Patrol, mass restrictions meant that I had to leave all of the books behind, and so I brought digital copies along instead. I included my handheld in my mass allotment on board Wayfarer One, years later, and loaded onto it every book that I could lay my hands on, everything that I’d ever read and everything I’d never found the time to try.

  Now, finding myself in the distant future in a rejuvenated body that, according to Maruti, need never age, I had all the time in the world. And since we were still days out from Aglibol and I couldn’t sleep, I saw no reason not to catch up on my reading.

  But my damned interlink kept getting in the way.

  Perhaps I should explain. I’m fluent in several languages—English, Hindi, Kannada, and Amharic—and the books on my handheld are written in all four of those, with a sizable percentage in other languages I can’t even read but that I thought the other members of the Wayfarer One crew might enjoy.

  That night, propped up in my bed on board the Further, with Amelia entertaining herself in some virtual environment inside the ring sitting on the side table, I paged through the handheld’s index, seeing if anything sparked my interest. I thought I might try something new, but then chanced upon something very old, indeed.

  I’d been forced to memorize and recite whole stanzas of Goswami Tulsidas’s epic poem Ramacharitamanasa in secondary school, and though I preferred other versions of the Ramayana, there was still something about this 16C Hindi version that resonated with me.

  I tapped the title listing on the display, and the first stanzas scrolled on the screen, but I was immediately disoriented as the Hindi characters were completely obscured by glowing roman letters superimposed over them, a precise translation of the text into English.

  Puzzled, I called up the handheld’s menu interface but could find no settings that could account for the translation. I scanned a few more pages of Tulsidas’s text and found the English translation superimposed across all of them.

  I closed the file and called up a few more texts. All of the English texts displayed fine, but any other languages were obscured by the same superimposed translations.

  It wasn’t until I dropped the handheld onto the bed that I realized that the superimposed text was not on the display itself, but seemed to hover slightly above the display. I picked the handheld back up, turning it first one direction and then the other, and slowly began to understand what was happening.

  The table in my sitting room was made of the same smart matter as the control center on the bridge, and with only a little effort, I was able to configure it into a touch-sensitive display. Using my index finger as a stylus, I wrote out a few simple words and phrases, in Kannada, in Amharic, even a few simple words I knew of Spanish, Dutch, and Russian. In each instance, as the words were completed on the display, the superimposed translation would appear—and, as with the handheld, hovering just above the surface.

  It wasn’t the displays that were providing the translations. It was me.

  It had to be the interlink, of course. It interrupted the flow of sensory input from my ears to my brain and substituted my language of choice—Information Age English—for whatever language the speaker was using, provided it had the full grammar and lexicon in its stores. There was no reason it couldn’t do the same with visual information. I was surprised not to have noticed the effect in the few days previous but, on reflection, realized that I’d seen very little in the way of written language since arriving. Perhaps a culture able to beam data back and forth directly between their heads had little use for the written word? Or was it simply a question of taste and style? Or had I just been unobservant?

  Whatever the case, it was pretty annoying. I could see how instant translations could come in handy, but the inability to turn the thing off was just a damned nuisanc
e.

  Maruti would likely be able to tell me how to set the preferences on my interlink, configuring it to my liking, but it was late, and I had little desire to get dressed and traipse out into the darkened hallways. Was there some sort of communication or phone system I could use to call him?

  And then I remembered that interlink communication didn’t require line of sight. Maruti had explained that an interlink could connect to the infostructure, and though we were cut off from the datascape of the Entelechy, there was a smaller shipboard information environment that could serve the same purpose.

  “Maruti?” I said out loud and then repeated, concentrating. ::MARUTI?::

  ::Can you please stop with the shouting, Captain?:: immediately came the reply, sounding as clear as if he were in the room with me.

  ::Sorry. I wasn’t sure if this would work.::

  ::Well, clearly it has.:: Strangely, I got the impression of a sigh. Clearly, nonvocal communication could also be transmitted by interlink. I’d have to be careful about that. ::I’m quite busy at the moment, enjoying a glass of port with another of our crewmates, that delightful Ailuros from the café. Is there something I can help you with?::