Further: Beyond the Threshold

by Chris Roberson

  Time moved at a snail’s pace as we sat, unmoving, on the floor of our cell.

  Finally, there came a shuffling sound on the far side of the door, and with a deafening clang, the hatch swung open.

  An imposing figure stood in the doorway, horns longer than those on any of the Iron Mass we’d seen so far, a wicked scar down the left side of his face, his right ear missing its lobe. He was no taller or broader than the rest, on reflection, but something about his posture, about his bearing, suggested a much larger man. He glared down at us, his ice-blue cat’s eyes narrowed to slits, and something like a smile curled his lip.

  “Before you stands Commander-of-the-Faithful Nine Precession Radon, House of the Ideal’s Pure Expression, leader of these men. You will dine with me.”

  SIXTY-THREE

  Having heard Jida’s story of the Iron Mass and what had happened the last time anyone from the Entelechy had laid eyes on them, I wasn’t sure what to expect next. But whatever possibilities might have crossed my mind, being on the receiving end of an attempted conversion was not one of them.

  “Our creed requires us to give every organic a chance to embrace their destiny and join us in working toward the birth of the Divine Ideal.”

  We were seated on thin cushions around a low table, the man called Nine Precession Radon at the head and me at the other end, Jida and Bin-Ney on either side. Small cups of some strong spirit were in front of us, but so far, only Radon had taken a sip, the rest of us watching warily.

  “I remember the last time the Iron Mass spread their creed,” Jida said, eyes half-lidded, teeth clenched, “and you got yourselves exiled from civilization in the bargain.”

  “Civilization?” Radon laughed, a startling, barking sound. “Exiled, do you say? Ha! It was the greatest blessing ever to befall my people that we were excised from your so-called Human Entelechy. We should never have submitted ourselves to be ruled by a consortium of mechanical miscengenists and disembodied digital ghosts.”

  ::I hope he doesn’t mean me,:: chimed a voice in my ear.

  I struggled not to react, but to keep my expression neutral.

  ::Amelia?:: I subvocalized.

  ::Sorry I’ve been gone, but I got distracted catching up with old movies and lost track of time. Did you know they made holographic adaptations of The Chronicles of Zenna in the twenty-third century?::

  ::Amelia, we’re a little busy here at the moment…::

  ::I know, RJ, I’m just kidding. I seem to have missed a lot of the plot, huh? Who’s the fruit bat?::

  ::Keep quiet, will you? We’ll talk later.::

  I turned my attention back to Radon, trying not to glance at my signet ring, which I’d forgotten was still on my finger, and thinking about ways having Amelia on our side might work to our advantage.

  “The people of the Entelechy are weak and complacent,” Radon went on. “There is neither fire nor passion in them. And only a hand that can grasp a sword may hold a scepter.”

  “Is that why you attack the first people you see after five thousand years of isolation?” I said, keeping my voice level. It was too early to say which Interdiction Negotiation strategies might apply in these circumstances, if any, but I saw no reason to aggravate matters until I had a better picture of what we were dealing with.

  “The first people? Oh, no, my dear boy,” Radon said, smiling broadly. “We might not have had any contact with the Entelechy before now, but we’ve encountered countless other outposts over the millennia, cultures scattered out like seeds during the Diaspora. And all of them have either come to accept the wisdom of the Divine Ideal or paid the price for their misbelief.”

  A pair of Iron Mass entered the room, carrying trays of food. As they set them down at the center of the table, one of the servers started coughing and didn’t stop as he retreated to the corner of the room. Finally, he stopped and, at a glance from Radon, muttered a sputtering apology.

  “W-what price is that?” Bin-Ney asked.

  Radon ladled a mound of grayish-green gelatin off one of the trays onto a plate before him, and smiled wistfully. “Death, of course. Though, some serve their purposes, even after their life is terminated.” Radon glanced to one of the two servers, a woman, and said, “Fluorine. Do you recall the stories of our forebears launching the severed heads of their enemies as missiles against their brethren?”

  The woman—Fluorine, evidently—smiled and nodded. “What about Oxus, Commander-of-the-Faithful?”

  Radon clapped his hands, almost gleefully, like a kid opening a present to discover precisely what he’d ask for.

  “Oh, Oxus,” he laughed, slapping the table’s surface with the palm of his hand. He turned to me and grinned, as though eager to share a favorite joke. “On the planet Oxus, you see, a woman begged to be spared when her colony was put to the sword for refusing to accept their place in the divine order. She told my brothers that she had swallowed a data crystal and that the information on it would be invaluable to them. After ripping her open and removing the crystal with his own two hands, the leader of the house ordered his men to disembowel every captive to see what they might have secreted away.” He guffawed loudly. “What do you think of that, eh?”

  The male server coughed again, a long series of convulsions wracking his chest.

  “You seem very powerful,” I said, applying a bit of Interdiction Negotiation technique, trying to find some leverage with our captors. “I imagine most people who meet you are very frightened.”

  “Powerful?” Radon shook his head. “I am merely a servant of the Divine Ideal and accrue no power to myself. Now, tell me…”

  The server’s cough became much more violent, until finally he doubled over, hacking up a huge wad of bloody sputum that thwacked into the floor at his feet.

  “Is he OK?” I asked.

  “Psht,” Radon said dismissively. “He merely has the sickness—or one variety of it, at any rate. The ships of the Iron Mass use fission engines, leading to high rates of radiation-related illness among us, but since members of the Iron Mass seldom live longer than one hundred years anyway, we don’t consider it a major cause of concern.”

  He glanced over as the female server helped the other, first to his feet and then to stagger out of the room.

  “Besides, we live for the world that is to come, not the world of the moment.” He leaned forward on his elbow and looked from me to Bin-Ney to Jida and back. “Now. Are you prepared to accept your personal role in the evolution of the divine?”

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Nine Precession Radon rambled on, talking about the glorious plans of the Divine Ideal, the god who waited for humankind at the end of time, and how every living being—excluding those who didn’t fit the Iron Mass definition of “living”—had a place in the grand scheme, if they so chose.

  I could tell Jida was not weathering all of this terribly well, but she managed to keep quiet through most of it. Bin-Ney, for his part, looked like a deer caught in headlights, his mouth hanging open, his thoughts on something terrifyingly unpleasant. I’d been trained to resist any number of different varieties of torture as part of my Interdiction Negotiation instruction, but listening to Radon, I was reminded of nothing so much as the four days I spent ferrying a pair of religious missionaries to Mars; they’d seen the Cutter 1519, with its close quarters, as a perfect opportunity to refine their proselytizing skills before spreading the good word among the red planet’s colonists.

  Radon had the same manic zeal, the same true-believer glint in his eye. That he had red horns instead of hair, and wicked spurs on his elbows and knuckles, and wasn’t dressed in a short-sleeved white button-down shirt and black tie were about the only things that differentiated him from them—that, and the fact that the missionaries hadn’t, at any stage, held my life in the palm of their hands.

  Given Radon’s stories about what had happened to misbelievers, I figured it was in our best interests to feign curiosity in his nonsense screed until some possibility of escape presente
d itself. So I nodded politely, made appropriate noises, and prodded him with questions a time or two, when he seemed to suspect our interest was on the wane.

  The meal of green-gray goop was tasteless but fairly filling, and when the female server had returned—with no sight of her coughing companion—and cleared away the table, it seemed that our audience with the commander-of-the-faithful had come to an end.

  Radon called for guards to usher us back to our cell.

  “We’ll continue these discussions at a later hour, so in the meantime, you can contemplate your place in history. Later, we’ll test your resolve, to see whether you are truly prepared to accept the Divine Ideal as your personal destiny.”

  I didn’t like to imagine what a “test” of our resolve might involve, and didn’t ask.

  A quartet of spear-wielding guards led us through the cramped corridors, taking a different route than we’d previously followed. After a few twists and turns, which I imagined might have been intended to keep us disoriented about the internal layout of the dome, we came to a juncture barred by a closed hatch. Three of the guards kept us under careful watch, while the fourth went to a panel set in the wall, touched a series of flickering lights, and then the hatch opened.

  We went through, and I saw that there was an identical panel on the other side of the hatch. Going down a long corridor, we took a turn to the left, another to the right, and then found ourselves back at our cell.

  The guards shoved us through the open hatch and then closed it behind us. We were back in the green-tinged darkness, as far from freedom as we’d been before. Or so it might have seemed.

  ::RJ,:: came the voice of Amelia in my ear. ::I think I have a plan.::

  SIXTY-FIVE

  The first steps of the plan were so simple, so clichéd, that I felt a little embarrassed even attempting them. But after considerable deliberation, no other options presented themselves. Besides, I figured, fads and fashions being what they were, maybe after twelve thousand years the oldest trick in the book could be new again.

  I positioned myself by the hatch, leaning against the wall, looking as casual as possible in case there were cameras or other viewing devices secreted around that we couldn’t see—and since they could be virtually nanoscopic, or the walls themselves could be transparent from the other side, it was no stretch of the imagination to think that there were. Then Jida lay on the ground, her legs doubled up to her chest, and began moaning softly. Bin-Ney took up position over her.

  We waited until we heard the tromp of boots outside the door, then I motioned to Bin-Ney, and he went into his act.

  “Help!” he shouted as loud as he could. “I think there’s something really wrong with her! She might be”—and here he paused unnecessarily for dramatic effect, the back of his hand to his forehead, looking almost like he might swoon—“dying!”

  I stifled a sigh. I knew I shouldn’t look to an Anachronist for verisimilitude, but I hoped his hamming wouldn’t get in the way of the plan.

  The tromping boots stopped at the door, and I heard a muffled exchange. Then, with a groan of metal on metal, the hatch slid open.

  “Oh, thank you,” Bin-Ney swooned, while Jida groaned loudly. “She’s really, really sick!”

  “Quiet in there,” came the barked voice from the other side of the hatchway. Positioned where I was, hidden by the side of the door, I couldn’t see out, but I could tell from the Iron Mass’s tone, and the fact that they weren’t coming through the door, that they weren’t exactly buying it.

  Jida moaned, howling loudly.

  “Keep it quiet,” said another harsh voice, “or you’ll soon have something to moan about.”

  This wasn’t working. I wasn’t surprised. It was time for something a bit more direct, and a great deal riskier.

  “Hey, where’s the other one—”

  Before the Iron Mass had completed his question, I’d jumped to one side, landing right in front of the open hatch in a crouch, and launched myself at them, barely even taking time to gauge their distance and position.

  The Iron Mass were both armed with spears, as I’d anticipated, but hadn’t had them at the ready. If they had, I doubt I would have lasted three seconds. As it was, I managed to tackle one of the Iron Mass to the ground before the other had a chance to respond.

  The force of my blow knocked the air out of the first Iron Mass, which gave me a split-second advantage. While his companion lunged at me, swinging his weapon downward in a wide arc, I grabbed hold of the spear of the Iron Mass beneath me. Both hands on the fully extended handle, I yanked it back and to the side, forcing the spear’s blade up behind me with all my strength.

  As I rolled to the side, the spear pulled from my hands, its tip buried in the abdomen of the attacking Iron Mass. Strangely colored blood flecked the corners of the attacker’s mouth, and his own spear clattered to the ground as he looked in confusion at the weapon protruding from his belly.

  The Iron Mass on the ground scrambled to get up, swinging his arm to one side, the spurs on his elbow clawing across my calf, but I kicked out and caught his jaw with the heel of my boot, and he fell back to the floor, groaning.

  Shouts of alarm sounded from down the corridor, and I knew I didn’t have time to stop and pick up one of the weapons as a trio of Iron Mass barreled toward me, only meters away. I took to my heels, running the other way. I reached the end of a short corridor, jogged left, then took a quick right. I sprinted, running as fast as I could, but the footfalls of the pursuing Iron Mass came closer and closer.

  At the end of the corridor was a closed hatch, the same one we’d come through when returning from our dinner with Radon. On the wall beside it was the control panel—my goal.

  I reached the control panel of twinkling lights only steps ahead of the Iron Mass. I held my hand up and laid my palm against the cool, smooth surface, hoping against hope that this worked. Only an eyeblink later, the three pursuers caught up with me. The one in the lead swung his bone-spurred fist at the side of my head, the impact sufficient to jar my teeth and sending lights fireworking across my vision. Somehow I kept on my feet for an instant longer, my hand still held to the control panel.

  The next Iron Mass raked his elbow spur across my back, cutting my shirt to shreds and opening huge gashes in the flesh beneath. The third knocked my knees out from under me with the butt of his spear’s handle, and I went down like a marionette with its strings cut.

  I lay on the ground as the three stood over me, taking turns getting their kicks in, occasionally leaning down and pounding my face or body with their spurred fists. My mouth filled with blood, and I could feel myself losing consciousness.

  Just before I fell away into a bloodred darkness, I could hear a tiny, distant voice in my mind.

  ::OK,:: Amelia said. ::I’m in.::

  SIXTY-SIX

  Amelia had noticed the interface when we were marched back to our cell.

  From the signet ring, and using the evidence of my senses routed through the interlink, she’d been able to work out that the control panel was slaved to the local area’s security and environmental controls but that, in addition to manual input, the controls received commands from farther up the hierarchy of the mining platform’s computer network. Since the network would have to register any manual changes made—such as opening a secured door with a pass code—that meant that communication between the interface and the network was somehow bidirectional. It might only have been a small back door, and it might have been closed and locked, but hidden in that bit of twinkling lights was a route into the master controls of the mining platform.

  The broadcast range of the signet ring was pretty short, not much longer than the length of my arm, and was pretty low bandwidth, at that, so she wouldn’t be able to gain control of the computers from within the signet ring, but Amelia thought that she could reconfigure the holographic projectors to download her source code into the platform’s computers. From within the system, she’d hopefully be able to work out ho
w to open the doors remotely, locate our weapons, and help us escape from the platform.

  I’d asked whether she couldn’t just download a copy, and not her operating code, but Amelia explained that it didn’t work that way. A mind, even a digital one, wasn’t just software. An emulated mind mimicked the cellular basis of an organic brain, the structure of the synapses replicated digitally. That was why the first artificial intelligences, millennia before, had been based on uploaded human minds and not engineered from scratch.

  As a result, Amelia couldn’t just duplicate her files and dump them into the computer; if she did, she’d only succeed in planting a copy of her memories, lacking any conscious awareness. In order for her to be of any use, she’d have to move her entire source code into the computer, lock, stock, and barrel.

  The plan had been for me to get the signet ring close enough to the interface for the transfer to take place. And, of course, to keep it in place long enough for all of the data to download. Amelia’s voice, broadcast from within the network to my interlink, was proof that it had worked.

  The only problem was the next part, with me recaptured after an apparent escape attempt and Amelia stuck inside the platform’s network, unsure how to work anything but the most rudimentary communications systems.

  I just hoped that I survived long enough for the effort to have done any good.