by Stephen Case
Aggiz usually answered with a shrug. It was his stock response to most of Beka’s comments and queries, almost always followed by a lapse back into the silent study of his monitors. Right now, they showed a graphic of the human brain mapped out in a dozen different colors. Even after working beside him for several days, Aggiz was almost as much of a riddle to Beka as Davis was, though apparently a more benign one.
“I can’t imagine what he has planned.”
It had been a long day for the both of them. She sank in the low chair beside Aggiz and propped her feet up beside one of the monitors he gazed into.
“Mm,” his eyes were glued to the highlighted neural pathways before him.
“So who was it, Aggiz?”
He turned to her and blinked. “Who?”
“Your link to the Fleet, of course,” she gestured at the lab around them. “Who do you know buried in that Brick? Why are you here?”
“Ah.” Aggiz blinked a few more times. He looked up toward the Brick that loomed above them. “It doesn’t matter.”
Beka realized with a start that he was blinking back tears.
“I’m sorry, Aggiz.”
“She wanted to renew our License. She was young.” He shook his head. “But I said no. I told her I wanted to focus on my work.”
They were interrupted by Eleanor.
“I don’t understand,” she was fuming. “I don’t understand why it can’t just be a computer.”
Beka asked, “What do you mean?”
“The memories. I understand that the amount of information in a human mind must be staggering. But I don’t understand why a computer—possibly with enough memory to hold every book ever written—can’t hold and interpret a single individual’s memories.”
“I don’t think it’s a simple a matter of storage capacity,” Beka said patiently. She looked at Aggiz, who nodded his head in agreement while keeping his eyes firmly on his monitor. “It’s a matter of processing structure,” he muttered. “Even our fastest computer systems aren’t built like a human brain. They don’t work like one.”
“But surely they would be enough for something? All we need is a phrase or an image, just a clue, a lead.”
“Davis would be the person to talk to about that,” Beka said. “There might be a way, but how many ghosts are we willing to vivisect to put together a picture of what had happened?”
“I have already talked to him.” She sighed. “How many minds have we pulled out of the Brick so far?”
“I don’t know exactly how many. But everything we have been doing so far,” she pointed at herself and Aggiz, “has been theoretical. I don’t know if I’m ready to try it on an actual mind unless we’re absolutely sure it’ll work.”
When Eleanor left, Beka slumped back into her chair.
“She scares you, doesn’t she?” she asked him. His eyes had not left his monitor the entire time she had been there.
“Scares me?”
“Come on! You’re terrified of her. You can’t even look at her directly.” Beka watched Eleanor’s departing form across the floor of the laboratory.
“Ah.” Aggiz swallowed loudly and finally glanced up. “She’s, uh,” his brow furrowed as he worked to get the words out right. “She’s used to getting what she wants. Always. And I can feel her, you know. I can tell. She’s probably working out what she wants right now. I don’t know. But she gets what she wants, that much is certain.”
Beka leaned back and studied Aggiz’s face. That had been insightful. She glanced back to Eleanor. She was now outside the lab, speaking with the guards beyond the door. Beka saw her laugh easily at something one of the guards said.
True, she was the admiral’s personal attaché, but who was actually in control here?
*
After a week—an infuriatingly long one of simulations, data-parsing and evenings spent trying not to wonder whether her sister was dead in space or her mind had already been carved up by one of the other teams she was sure were working at dozens of other Bricks on various ships— Admiral Tholan appeared in the lab with Davis. Beka had not seen the Admiral since their first conversation, the day after she learned of Jens’s disappearance. He looked much older now, almost haggard. The search for the Fleet must not be going well, Beka mused. If there were indeed other teams working on the same problem, they must not be any closer to getting any answers either.
Davis led Tholan to where Beka and Aggiz sat.
“Are you ready to splice out memories yet?” snapped Davis.
Beka stood. It had become second nature for her to ignore Davis’s tone. “I’m confident that we now have high enough resolution to isolate and extract memories and only memories from a ghost—from an uploaded consciousness.” Tholan nodded silently at this. “But I still don’t understand why. It would destroy the mind we would use, and—as I’ve explained several times—we have nowhere useful to dump the memories.”
For once Davis was silent. His fox-like face, however, remained sharp and watchful, as he looked over to the Admiral and studied him. The admiral spoke, his face brightening, “But you are indeed sure that you can bring out the memories of a soldier intact?”
“I am. With Aggiz’s help. He’s isolated the right neural networks. I can disentangle them from the Brick.”
“Good.” He patted her arm absently, his eyes still on the Brick.
Davis had a hungry look in his eyes. “So, do we have your permission to proceed?”
The haggard look returned to Tholan’s features. “You do. I’ll have the first receptacle delivered in the morning. But you understand,” he turned to throw a look of such intensity on Davis that the thin scientist flinched visibly, “that if anyone ever finds out about this, I will disavow any knowledge of the entire operation.” The admiral’s voice grew sterner. “Finding the Fleet is critical, of course. But what you are about to attempt violates every military and civilian law in the past three hundred years. And if that ever comes to light, you can be sure that it will not be traced back to me. It will be on your head, Davis. You will take sole responsibility for this.” He looked around the bay and then stabbed his finger at the Brick. “I hope to God that there are some answers in there which are going to be worth it all.”
The admiral strode out of the bay alone, leaving everyone staring on his back.
“What does he mean, Davis?” Beka asked after she had recovered. It didn’t take her too long to absorb all that. Still, the admiral’s grim demeanor had been so sudden and severe that she felt the temperature of the entire bay had dropped several degrees.
Davis was still watching the admiral’s departure, his jaw working silently. When he turned back to Beka, his expression was impossible to read.
“He means that he’s agreed. We’ll have a vehicle for those memories, Beka.” He took a deep breath as though steadying himself. “And now something good will finally come from a very, very old mistake.”
That was all he would say, besides telling Aggiz and her to pack up and call it a day. They would start again early the next morning. Beka thought perhaps Davis was speaking of something from his own past, something that might explain his own interest in the Fleet and his passion for this mysterious line of research.
She was wrong though, or at least for the most part. He was talking about a mistake a few hundred years old. And Beka would soon learn that there were more ghosts in this very shipyard than the Fleet’s sailors trapped within the Brick.
*
Beka sat upright in her bunk, her mind racing. She had finally put the pieces together. Something about what happened today had been bothering her, but she hadn’t been able to figure it out. Now she knew.
She couldn’t shut her mind down; it was her curse. When they were in school, her sister used to wake up in the night to find Beka either wordlessly turning a problem over and over in her mind or bent over a page of calculations. Give it up, Jens would tell her. Let it go. Some problems aren’t that important.
Some pro
blems shouldn’t be solved.
But Beka somehow never had that luxury, or rather, her mind did not.
Now that she’d put it all together, sleep was impossible. Instead, she stared out her window. The view was free of the glare of the dwarf star, which was shadowed by the bulk of the shipyard. She had given up trying to locate the yellow point of light the admiral had indicated from his office window after the few days.
Every military and civilian law of the past three hundred years.
She shuddered involuntarily.
A very, very old mistake.
Three hundred years ago. That would have been about the time the last of the Colonizers were leaving System. It was ancient past for her, but not more than one generation for the Colonizers, traveling on their relativistic ships from System. She had learned the history of that period in school, and she had read enough to know that the histories themselves weren’t completely accurate. The books were biased. There were things that weren’t spoken of. There were many gaping holes in the narrative.
One of those holes centered on a primary cause of the Colonizer exodus.
She spent the rest of the night staring at the ceiling, waiting.
*
There was no dawn in space. No grey light came to the expanse beyond her window to tell her that she could finally give up on trying to sleep. Nonetheless, her alarm sounded and she rose, dressed, and brewed herself some coffee. She was weighing whether to take a long shower or skip it to run a final series of simulations for the day when someone knocked on her door.
It was Eleanor.
“I thought you might want some company. And breakfast.” The older woman was holding up a tray with a teapot, a plate of what looked like English muffins, and some dark jam and butter.
Beka nodded mutely and stepped aside as Eleanor entered. She was wearing a floral dress that could almost have passed as a robe, but she wore it like a uniform. Beka watched her set the room’s single small table with graceful efficiency.
“Tholan said he put you on the spot yesterday.” Eleanor smiled. “From the way he talks though, he’s impressed.”
Beka shrugged and dropped into a chair. “That’s nice to hear, I suppose.”
“He’s not overly generous with praise.” She seated herself across from Beka and leaned forward. “He’s pleased with your work. Davis is too, of course you’ll never hear it from him though.”
Beka wasn’t sure why Eleanor was here or what she wanted, but she figured she’d use the opportunity to try to get some information about Davis.
“Who is he, Eleanor? What’s his connection with the Fleet?”
“Davis? He is an enigma. He was the first person Tholan pegged for his idea to build a team of personally-invested specialists, though I’m not sure if it wasn’t Davis himself who planted the seed. He’s never Licensed and has no immediate family, so his connection with the Fleet is not clear to me. I think he’s more interested in the Colonizers than in the Fleet itself, to be honest.”
“The Colonizers?”
“He wanted to be on the Fleet. He was supposed to be a part of a scientific advisory team, but that team was pulled at the last minute. And no one’s going near the Colonizers now until we figure out what they did to our ships.”
“So that’s why he’s doing all this?”
“I don’t really know. I don’t understand the man.” Eleanor shrugged. “You must be very worried about your sister.”
Beka registered the sudden change in subject with wariness. Then, to her surprise, she realized that she wanted very badly to talk about Jens. Aggiz and Tsai-Liu both carried around their personal losses, and that very fact somehow made her own burden seem redundant.
“I am,” she said, taking a muffin, wondering where Eleanor had found such a delicacy.
Eleanor arched an eyebrow. “Do you want to talk about her?”
“I do.”
The words came out slowly, but it was not long before entire stories began spilling. On an abstract level, Beka knew she was not sharing anything profound. These were normal reminiscences from a shared childhood. The jokes Jens would crack, over and over, with the punch lines that never came off quite right until Beka begged her to stop. Trailing Jens through school, always one year behind. Watching her from the sidelines. The long arguments about Jens’s enlistment.
“The only boys who ever came to the house did for Jens,” Beka found herself saying. “She would force me to go to parties, tell me that it was good for me, and then I’d lose her for the rest of the night. She had this way of knowing just what to say, how to talk to people. I tried for years to understand it and emulate it, but it never worked for me like it did for her. We thought for sure she’d …” Beka paused.
“What?”
Beka shrugged. “Get married. She had a place at one of the Outer Rim academies. She’d find someone there and then we’d go visit her in one of those glass-lattice cities on the Spurs in Inner System.”
“But she enlisted?”
“Yes. It took us all by surprise, especially my parents. There were arguments. And then she was gone. I think my parents were afraid that I would follow her, as always.”
Beka reached for another muffin.
“The strangest thing though, was that it was only then, only through her transmissions home—not the ones to all of us, but the letters she sent to me only—that I finally started to get to know her. I always thought that she was the confident one, but she told me that she had grown up lost. That she had admired me, the one who was always in her shadow.” Beka sighed. “I don’t know if she was happy in the service, but she sounded… more certain of herself than she ever had before. And I realized something I had never seen when we were younger: she was always just playing a part others expected her to play.”
“What did she look like?”
“Imagine me but taller, thinner, and with long chestnut hair instead of this mop here.” Beka tossed her curls impatiently.
Eleanor was silent, watching her intently.
She spoke without tears, but they were there, audible at the edges of the words and in the tightness of her throat. She spoke around them, quietly and steadily.
“You know what I’m afraid of, Eleanor?” Beka pushed her plate away. “It’s not that I won’t know what happened to Jens. Somehow I know that she would know I did the best I could. She would understand. No, I’m afraid that nothing will be the only thing I have to bring back to my parents. They were disappointed in her decision, but once she made it they were also intensely proud. I don’t want to go through all this only to have nothing to give them.”
Eleanor continued to watch her silently. She had sipped her tea but eaten nothing.
“I know what Davis has planned,” Beka finally said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “At least I think I do. And the thing is-I’m not even sure I care anymore. I’m fairly certain that I’m going to walk into the lab this morning and see something right out of a nightmare. I’m going to see something that’s not supposed to exist any more, something that has been used to terrify children for the past three centuries. And Davis is going to ask me to put human memories in it. And I think I’ll do it, because I need to know too. Just as much as he does.” She paused for a moment. “I never gave my sister enough credit for her decisions. And now all I can do is try to figure out what happened to her. Who killed her, if she’s dead, why, and how to keep it from happening again.”
“You really think you can splice out a ghost’s memories?”
Beka nodded slowly. “And put them where Davis wants.”
Eleanor gathered the plates, cups, and saucers and replaced them on the tray, her expression unreadable. “If Davis gets his way, and it looks like he will, you may be sorry your research made it possible. You’ve heard the blanks scream. Like animals.” Her full lips thinned to a line. “This will be worse.”
Beka watched her leave. She took down the surplus jacket from beside the door and draped it around her shoulders. T
hen she sat for a time and stared out at the stars, hunched against the cold, and frightened.
Sixteen
The Grenada proceeded slowly. Her captain was grim, his lips pursed. The crew was silent. They had abandoned two of their own.
Hammersmith was out there somewhere, dying.
The scout ship jumped from place to place following marked coordinates, carefully crossing and re-crossing the search grid, keeping sensors extended to detect any sign of their own ships and Colonizers. The Colonizers weren’t supposed to have light lines or jump-sets. They weren’t supposed to have more than the generational ships they had left Earth in. But something had destroyed the Fleet, so nothing could be assumed anymore.
Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen-the number of destroyed hulls Grenada marked and mapped on her slow search kept going up.
All as dead as the Rowan Hamilton, yet barely a fraction of the total Fleet.
“Pull back to the original light line terminus,” was the order from Command. “Let’s see if we can find those medical frigates.”
Grenada jumped again. She reemerged on a gravity slope, precariously balanced for a wide pass over the cluster of greedy singularities. Dust swirled into them slowly like soapy water in a half-clogged drain. It was not a pretty sight.
The captain was not optimistic. “If there was anything in orbit here, they might have slipped too far down the gravity well by now.”
One scanner bounced back from something metallic. It had registered an energy signature.
“Command, we’ve got a live one,” he transmitted. “Or at least something with some power.”
“Copy that, Grenada. Calculate a trajectory that will take you on a close pass safely.”
The scout ship began a carefully calculated tumble down. The singularities were small, but their orbits were tangled. The event horizons were sharp, tight, and overlapping. It took several minutes to coordinate a pass.
A dead ship, its hull caked in dust, hung several thousand kilometers above the point of no return. The Grenada passed by it with enough momentum to launch grapples and pull the larger ship to a safer distance. Her engines strained, tension in the grappling cables moaned through the deck plates.
