Black Shift (The Consilience War Book 1)

by Ben Sheffield

  Konotouri Delta – March 18, 2136 - 1430 hours

  Konotouri Delta plunged to the surface, a spinning bolus catching fire in the atmosphere. One small blessing was that limited oxygen kept Andrei and Ubra from full awareness of the situation.

  With no landmarks or wind, there’s was no sense of speed in space, no sense of your own motion. Easy to feel that you’re floating, gently orbiting a planet like a dreamy shepherd.

  But gravity exerts nearly the same force at four hundred kilometres as it does on the ground. To avoid falling, motion is required.

  Sideways motion. Incredibly fast sideways motion.

  The station stayed in orbit through the same principle of centrifugal motion that allowed for artificial gravity in the habitat wheels. At a distance of 400 kilometers around a rocky planet with the radius of 2,000km, the Konitouri needed an orbital velocity of more than three kilometres per second just to avoid falling down.

  Faster than a bullet from a gun.

  Detached from the main apparatus, Konitouri-Delta began a slow terminal descent, spinning downwards towards Caitanya-9’s storm-tossed surface.

  It was a fall the station was never designed to survive.

  Andrei and Ubra spent much of the last few minutes in a dreamlike state of wonder. The oxygen in their blood was dwindling, and as the habitat wheel spun down through the atmosphere they started to float, both mentally and physically.

  We’re free.

  Free, and about to die.

  Psychedelic patterns coalesced in front of Andrei eyes, in stark contrast to the dismal surroundings around them. Occasionally an object floated past his vision, a pencil or an expended clip. Andrei waved his arms around, giggling, as if he was a magician controlling them with waves of his hands.

  Occasionally, bolts of lucidity broke through the dreams.

  They were falling. Soon the gentle pull on his stomach would become a gut-knotting wrench as they entered Caitanya-9’s atmosphere and picked up speed.

  Andrei tumbled about the room, feeling every wall and floor vibrating with an unearthly hum. A massive spasm of metal popped open the side of the habitat wheel, revealing the thick ichor of space beyond.

  Stars.

  A sky full of them.

  Then the falling habitat wheel completed another blind revolution, and the planet filled his vision. A vast disk, wreathed in cloud, flashes of lightning illuminating a landscape of dark purple.

  He looked across at Ubra, she was stupidly blinking into the distance, as if focused on some point an infinity away that only she could see.

  He giggled, his brain failing.

  This wasn’t a habitat wheel.

  It was a dehabitat wheel.

  Fragments of English spun in his head, clashing and colliding in abstract new grammars. Memories emerged from pockets in his head, things from before Amnon had scrubbed his brain like a countertop and flung him into space, vague memories of crimes committed and sins done, shot right through with a crystalline spine of fact: I am Andrei. I am A Wake. I inspire fear and dread. I am invictus.

  He stared through the hole, watching the landscape hundreds of kilometres away. It was no longer purple. His vision was growing as pale as a bleached photograph,

  Andrei dragged Ubra away from the burst side of the Konitouri, and back into the labyrinth of chambers and rooms.

  There was no plan to survive. Not now.

  He just had a vague sense that part of the station was going to crash into the planet, and that the further away he was from that part, the better his odds were.

  “Where’s Zelity,” he heard Ubra through his comms. “He has a tattoo…a tattoo on his chest…pangolins…” Her lips no longer formed cogent words after that, and her head lolled back, passing in and out of unconsciousness.

  The station began to disintegrate. The rooms flexed, bending at impossible angles, heating up as the station air-braked in Caitanya-9’s atmosphere.

  Amnon brought me out here as an experiment. Assur thought, watching rivets burst from the wall.

  It had no heat shield.

  I was never supposed to find out my own name.

  It would spin through the atmosphere like a discus until flew apart.

  I want to kill him.

  The flaming debris would spread over hundreds of kilometers.

  I want to slit open his stomach, cut out handfuls of his fat, and choke him with them.

  Nobody would ever find their remains. If they weren’t burned away in the air, the next revolution of Somnath or Detsen would bury them.

  Andrei Kazmer is a killer. He tried to steal that from me, but now I have it back. I fall with no justice obtained, except the truth.

  The station was now intolerably hot. The walls burned his hands.

  I am one with the Spheres. I am one with the Defiant. And I will join them in death.

  The glass on the cabin window shattered. Chunks of flying polyglass nipped at his face, drawing blood. It vaporised instantly, like red confetti.

  I want to fall as flaming vapours upon my enemies. Burn Amnon. Burn his armies. Burn Terrus.

  He was flying around like a ragdoll inside the cabin now. His mouth was moving, screaming and cursing.

  Just kill everything.

  Now they were in freefall, screeching at maximum possible velocity through the atmosphere of an alien world.

  Kill me.

  Then the station broke into pieces, and air rushed to fill his world once again. He was at the center of a maelstrom of metal – slats meant to orbit in space now gripped by the rough embrace of the wind, struts designed by the cheapest bidder now facing the harshest elements.

  And he was the cheapest part of all.

  He looked down, and screamed.

  He was hanging over an angry ocean of boiling clouds – purple, red, blues, spilling and confluencing like an artist carelessly mixing paint. Lightning flashed. Low-pressure systems breeding hurricanes. Below the carnage, dozens or hundreds of kilometers down, he could see the harsh primordial landscape of Caitanya-9. Rocks like sharp teeth. Subduction plates swallowing each other. Jagged lines criss-crossing, like knives sharpening for his demise. Everywhere, a land in ferment.

  It was like plunging into the digestive juices of a vast, world-spanning monster.

  He fell, his stomach past his throat, his limbs nearly torn from their sockets by the wind. He was like a molecule, powerless, vulnerable.

  The wind buffeted him in all directions, up down, sideways, clockwise, counterclockwise. He felt stretched, contracted, as if the planet was Procrustes, resizing his body on blind whims.

  He started to spin, dizzyingly, whipping in tight corkscrew loops across all three axes. With his final surge of consciousness, he saw his place in the universe.

  A bag full of rotting water, ready to be splattered on the ground.

  Ubra? Where’s Ubra?

  There was no Ubra, and there never had been. There was no Zelity. No Amnon. Nobody he could exact vengeance on.

  Truthfully, there wasn’t even Andrei Kaz

  There was just him and the planet. An impersonal god that hated no more than it loved. A planet of sandstorms and razors.

  And he was just Andrei Kazmer, shooting downwards into the planet’s dark engine.

  He died long before he hit the ground.

  Sky May Be

  The Doorway – March 18, 2136 - 1440 hours

  The Defiant were preparing for the next assault on the digging site when they noticed something in the sky.

  White-hot flashes streaking downwards into the atmosphere. Like a tiger’s claws, scratching the air.

  “Look.” Zandra said, pointing. Most of them had left their Spheres after the Shield was disabled, anxious for some fresh air. Only a few perimeter guards were still combat-ready.

  “What?” Mykor asked.

  “Meteor showers.”

  “There are never meteor showers here.” Mykor said. “The moons just absorb all the detritus that comes flying thr
ough space.”

  Her father was anxious, highly strung. One of his men had gone into the hole to investigate the Doorway, and hadn’t come back.

  He could face invading armies, but this was something else. This was the unknown.

  “Something just entered the atmosphere.” Zandra said. “I’m going to check it out.”

  Mykor scowled. “We need you here, girl. We’re down on manpower and you’re probably the best Sphere fighter we’ve got.”

  “I said check it out. Not abandon you and never come back.” She took determined strides towards her Sphere. “This could be something we need to know about.”

  “I don’t give a shit. Stay. That’s an order, as your father and your commanding officer.”

  “What if it’s a second army of Amnon’s? Don’t we want to know what we’re up against? Again, I’m scouting, nothing more. I’ll be back in three mnutes.”

  He broke eye contact, knowing that while he stayed and argued, ten other tasks were piling up. “Come back soon.” He said. “We need you.”

  She grinned, gave him a thumbs up, and then went over to the quartermaster and requisitioned field gear. A tent. A polyfleshing diode. Supplies of water.

  Why does she need a tent for scouting?

  Mykor was exhausted. Partly by the battle, partly by the discovery of the Doorway, and mostly by her.

  He just let it go.

  Soon, she was away and flying. And when she was sure she was beyond the zone where her brainwaves would be communicated to other, she laughed.

  No more!

  She’d had enough. Enough of fighting, of being in peril, and far more than enough of her father’s insanity.

  She tried to gauge her feelings.

  The twenty or so surviving humans that comprised the Defiant, scurrying around on a neverending hunt for buried treasure. That they’d finally found the treasure was a happy accident, and one that she was happy to take credit for. After all, she’d been the one who’d found Golestani, as well as the one who’d killed and polyfleshed Nyphur so that they’d have a spy on board the ship.

  And he’d had the gall to reproach her for that! Their first legitimate success in decades!

  Her anger passed quickly, and she started planning her next move.

  Surrender to Amnon’s forces? She’d become a prisoner of war.

  She had a feeling that her knowledge of the Defiant would make her a handy asset to have – enough to guarantee her safety.

  She could tell them exactly where the floating fortress was, as well as how exactly Vanitar technology worked.

  She could even infiltrate the camp at his forbearance, and deactivate the Vanitar Shield.

  She glowed with happiness at the thought of being of such use. She knew nothing of Sarkoth Amnon, her father’s old friend, but she knew he’d treasure her more than any five of his divisions. The rewards would be rich.

  Soon, I’ll be off this world, and on a vessel bound for Terrus. I’ll be the first of the Defiant to return to our homeworld.

  But first, she’d do exactly what she’d said she’d do: investigate the flash.

  Her father was correct. Meteors didn’t fall on Caitanya-9.

  She was fairly sure that those were the flashes of ships airbreaking. And when ships landed on this world, fortuitous things happened.

  Come back soon. He’d said. We need you.

  I’m sorry Nyphur. She thought to herself. There’s just a slight problem there – the feeling isn’t mutual.

  She flew for some time in serene relaxation. With Detsen gone, the sky was completely free from the threatening spectre of the moons.

  Finally, she arrived at a scene of carnage. The earth was scarred black from heat, and littered with debris.

  As she’d thought, some sort of spacecraft had landed. Unfortunately, the landing had been a crash.

  It had broken apart as it deorbited, scattered into thousands of parts, few bigger than a few meters across. Disappointing. There would be little to save, and certainly no survivors.

  She was about to give up, when she overturned a dislocated blast door and found a dead man lying on the rock.

  Perhaps he was a man. He was right on the borderline where you stopped being a corpse, and started being human remains. His arms were twisted and snapped at odd angles, and his spine had a 60 degree bend in it that cartilage was never meant to withstand. His body was pocked and cratered with burn marks, like regmaglypts on a meteor.

  She touched him, and he was warm. Perhaps the heat had thawed him through.

  Could it be possible that he’d only recently died?

  Experimentally, she unclipped the polyflesh diode from her belt. This was interesting.

  If I turn myself over to Amnon, they’ll know I’m defecting from the Defiant. There’s no other group of people on the planet.

  But this man…this man…

  …he’s most likely from the Konotouri. Either way, if I bring him back he’ll have no memories.

  Polyfleshing is usually used to heal injuries. When it’s used to reanimate a corpse, it has the exact same effect Black Shift does – the brain’s chemical state is erased, and set to baseline. He could be anyone…and I could be anyone.

  The battered corpse was covered in waves of particles.

  Nobody had ever polyfleshed a body that was this damaged, or one that had been dead for this long. There were rumors that the longer you left it, the more scrambled the original personality became. Very well. Let her blaze trails.

  Soon she would have a new man.

  We will walk hand in hand to Amnon’s camp, and we will tell them that we fell out the sky, and have no other memories, save that we are husband and wife.

  Mission Interruptus 5

  As Black Shift became a popular method for interstellar transport, culminating in official Solar Arm endorsement in 2085, psychologists predicted traumatic effects. The memory replacement modules only effectively restore about 99% of your memories, and many details are subtly distorted. You might remember a white fence as black. You might recognise your mother and call her a completely different name.

  It was though that brains would be unable to reconcile these errors and corruptions. Take a computer program, edit a few values at random, and recompile. It will almost certainly crash.

  Few of these effects have materialised. This has forced a rethink on how the human brain works, and what it’s primary function is.

  Now the position of psychology is that the brain does not construct an accurate image of reality. It merely fudges together a stable and consistent version of reality.

  The brain accepts data inputs, and has to sort those inputs into various boxes. If it receives some data that doesn't neatly fit into any box, it uses an approach that's essentially Bayesian: it assigns a prior probability that takes into account past sorts and uses them to predict the category of new information.

  For example, if I write "c0lonoscopy" or "colonoscpoy", your brain immediately reads it as "colonoscopy", despite the misspellings. Your brain thinks it's far more probably that I meant to write "colonoscopy" instead of inventing an entirely new word with a different meaning. Obviously, this is at odds with reality. You yourself can look and see that “c0lonoscopy” has an 0 in it. Your brain doesn’t care, it corrupts things just so they make sense. Sometimes it does this so effectively that the the brain doesn't even notice (for example, you didn't notice that I typed "the" twice in the previous sentence.)

  The important - and disturbing - thing is that everything has to go into a box.

  Your brain cannot allow data to be unsorted. Unsorted data is like an uncompressed file on a computer: it takes massive resources to manage if you have to keep track of its full component parts. Sorting something as "lion" is easier than carrying around fifty thousand rubrics such as "large orange shape + sharp teeth + fur + claws + mane" etc, particularly if you're about to be eaten. If you are not careful, your brain will shove all sorts of non-lion things into that lion box.r />
  False sorts are a common problem in the human brain. And unlike computer code, we cannot rewrite them. We are stuck with the fact that our minds corrupt reality constantly and unconsciously.

  In other words, false memories are a feature, not a bug.

  The trouble with these Bayesian-derived processes is that you get escalating stacks of errors. Once the brain falsely sorts one thing, this alters the posterior prior, and it will probably sort the next thing wrongly too, and on and on in a domino effect of ever increasing error. At the end of this slope lies psychosis, madness, and schizophrenia. As soon as one false fact is introduced, it often creates more false facts, until your entire memory is altered in the name of rationalising that falsehood.

  Memory does not work like a video camera, faithfully recording every detail of an experience. Instead, memory is a reconstructive process. Every time we recall an event, our memory will be based upon some more or less accurate memory traces but the mind will often automatically fill in any gaps without us being aware of it. In general, we remember the gist but not the details.

  But, under certain circumstances, we can develop entirely false memories for events that never took place. This remarkable counter-intuitive finding has been demonstrated in hundreds of well controlled scientific studies using a wide variety of methods. For example, volunteers might be repeatedly interviewed regarding events which their parents have confirmed they experienced during their early years. Without the volunteers’ knowledge, however, one additional event will be included which their parents have confirmed they never experienced, such as getting lost in a shopping mall.

  In another piece of research, volunteers were asked whether a number of fairly common childhood events, such as breaking a bone, ever happened to them personally. In an apparently unrelated study, they were then asked to imagine some of the events they initially said had never happened to them. They had to make these imaginings as vivid and potent as possible. Later, they were again asked about the events on the original list. This time, they were more likely to report that the events they imagined happened really did happen.