by V. M. Law
Ajax and Gustav.
Ajax and Gustav, and now Llewellyn.
And her, the captive audience of the three fools’ parade of ridiculous ideas.
We could outrun them if we prime the engine.
We don’t have the time.
It’s worth a shot.
That one came from Mantiss, who seemed to have nothing else to say. It’s worth a shot.
The conversation bounced between the three of them until Kasey spoke up with a voice weakened by misery, a voice that hadn’t spoken until the weight of the words trapped in her mouth broke through her lips.
“Who are you two?” Her eyes jumped back and forth, narrow and hostile, as if she aimed a pistol. “Why are you two the only people who knew the Ides were coming to Europa? Why do you have a secret compartment full of Vitrol?” She stood up now, gingerly, favoring her right leg heavily and fearing, even through her anger, that she would walk with a limp for the rest of her life, like Corbin. Mantiss motioned for her to sit still, but she silenced him with a look of fury that she had never given to anyone before. He sulked in the corner, feeling disconnected from his friend and from the new crew of the Age of Discovery.
Ajax raised his hand, trying to get her to hold off the interrogation.
Gustav, the silent German—the man with the toolbox—spoke up. “It sounds so cliché to say, ‘we are not who you think we are,’ Kasey, but that is exactly it. We are the Ascendency. You can make a strong argument that we are drug runners; I personally have no moral compunction with employing myself in that field, though that is not the full picture.”
She looked at him inquisitively as if imploring him to stop wasting her time with long-winded rhetoric.
“Do you think drug runners often steal deep space freighters? Do you think that there is enough Vitrol in the entire solar system to make a ship the size of this—” he swept his arms in an arc around the medical wing, “a necessary investment?”
“I don’t want a speech. I just want an answer. What do you want with us, and why did you kidnap Mantiss?”
Floros cast a pale glow on everything, including the medical equipment lined up along the walls of the facility. The whole area seemed to Kasey like a place where unethical medical experiments were conducted in secrecy, making her feel like she sat on trial in a primordial dungeon, judged by creatures in ceremonial masks who debated the best way to carve up the meat that clung to her bones. A headache pounded against her temples, and the white haze of unconsciousness flooded into the sides of her vision again, obscuring everything but the face of Gustav, who had not broken eye contact through her questions.
“Calm down now, Kasey. In a short time, you will understand.”
“Understand what?”
Mantiss spoke up, clearing his throat first to silence the others. “Kase, they saved our lives, grabbing me the way they did. They needed you, and they knew you would follow.”
“Precisely!” Ajax interjected. “We need you, Kasey. Humanity is facing its biggest trial in history, and I’m sorry to say you are in the center of it all.”
“Bullshit.” She truly felt like she sat on trial now, though for what she could not even imagine, and the sensation reminded her of a book she read. An old one that she could not remember the name of.
Gustav again: “We knew the Ides were coming because our autopilot computer—whom you are already acquainted with—informed us. She was programmed to power most of the Age, including its navigational instruments, which would include its radar and sonar and every other method of detection it has, to tell us on the bridge where we are. And who is around us. It had an incredible range, a true feat of engineering and nanotechnology, really. You have put an end to that, sadly.”
“That computer tried to kill me! If I didn’t have a gun, I would be a piece of roasted meat.”
“Yes,” Ajax, said. “You would have. You might be anyway, as now another ship is approaching and we lack the computing power to run the ship. Not that we aren’t glad to have you alive.”
“No, you’re just upset that I didn’t have a friendly conversation with your damned computer before it killed me.” She slammed her fist down on the gurney, emphasizing her anger, but seeming to herself a petulant child who resorted to sarcasm and barbed speech intended to make those to whom it was directed feel small. “You better start talking, because I’m not staying in this ship with two people and a computer who tried to kill me. And you, Lew, what the hell? What are you doing, sitting here and stroking your chin with the people who kidnapped you? What’s wrong with your hand? You didn’t have any puncture wounds the last time I saw you.”
Her words kept coming, a stream of invective that widened into a torrent and washed the three men with shame and ill will and empty threats. She fell silent, fuming, until her anger abated and her weakened state forced her into submission. She threw the towel from her shoulders to the floor during her tirade, and eyed it longingly, not wanting to pick it up, to show weakness. Not wanting to fight the chill that ran through her spine without its succor.
No one responded. They shifted their gaze between themselves, reinforcing in Kasey’s mind the notion of being excluded from information that affected her greatly.
Mantiss spoke up first, after receiving poorly veiled visual confirmation that it suited everyone best for him to do the explaining. “Kase, the Ascendency is much smaller than you imagined. Than anyone imagined.”
He waited for an indication or acknowledgment from his friend before continuing, but received no feedback. “We are it. Plus the Commoner, of course, but he’s—indisposed.”
“We?” she screamed, using all her strength. Processing what she heard, she fell back against the pad of the gurney. “Is that hole in your hand an initiation rite?”
“Kasey, we’ve been lied to. The Terran Council, MarsForm, the Annexes—it’s all part of a bigger plan. It’s all subterfuge, smoke and mirrors. It sucks.” The words fell flat, and inspired nothing in Kasey but the dumbfounded silence of a person who cannot fathom the ringing of an alarm bell, the hiss of steam that alerts the wary to an impending explosion.
Ajax, seeing Mantiss falter, stepped into the conversation, telling Kasey about the Catacombs, not located on the Age, but on the defunct MarsForm staging base suspended in the upper atmosphere of Neptune, where a human space station still functioned. It still had a sole occupant, who had been living there since Signal Day trying to stop the human race from making contact with an alien race that he knew to be hostile. Trying to stop the creation of a wormhole, poorly engineered and understood even worse, that would bring an alien war into our solar system that we could not even begin to fight.
In the end, Ajax said, he failed. MarsForm opened the wormhole and a manned mission to see what lie in wait on the other side began.
“I don’t understand,” Kasey said, interested in the narrative, even if she did not totally accept the story she heard. “If the Neptune station is still running, then who started the civil war? Who’s fighting it now?” And turning to Llewellyn, “If you guys are the only members of the Ascendancy, then who blew up the Morrow? Do you believe this shit? And what do you mean, since Signal Day? That was a hundred and thirty four years ago!” Every explanation the men offered her increased her questions and her confusion manifold, until the whole of her existence seemed like a web of lies woven specifically for the purpose of fooling her into doing something regrettable.
Ajax, remaining calm, sitting on a desk with one foot on the floor, one dangling, and his hands planted on his thigh, informed Kasey that the compartment on board that she correctly surmised must exist, was not the Catacombs, but a standard false bottom, not even very well hidden. He added as an aside, behind which a stash of Vitrol was concealed, the final batch that Ajax could find, destined for Neptune. He and Gustav stole the ship. “Because, Kasey, the Age of Discovery is as much a part of this as you or I, and like you and I, it must be kept alive if the human race is to defeat the Ides.”
He explained that the civil war did not actually involve shooting—or any fighting at all, for that matter—but was more of a spy war, an attempt by MarsForm and the Terran Council to keep humanity in the dark while they launched their military expedition into the stars. Twenty years, they said. The minimum length of time of a soldier’s conscription allowed for by the complexities of space travel and the temperament of the wormhole. Twenty years until the sons and daughters of Earth would return, valiant heroes, defenders of the solar system and intrepid adventures.
Of course, Gustav interjected from the background over Ajax’s right shoulder. The soldiers never did come home.
“But what about the graves? The parades?” Kasey asked, and the answer was the same: a farce. Fake, actors paid for by the Terran Council or forced into their odious roles as the deceivers of the masses who congregated to celebrate the triumphant return of a military caravan. The allusion of a happy homecoming, the image of a mother hugging her son, is all very appealing, very seductive for a person who lived most of their life without ever seeing the sky. How many parades had Kasey seen since her childhood, since the refugee camps were emptied into the larger subterranean refugee camps that were the Annexes?
“But how? Where did they go?” she kept asking, unable to comprehend the vague tendrils of a plot that, in her mind, did not add up to a conspiracy. She pressed her questions, surprised at the readiness with which the three of them—even Mantiss—were able to answer.
“Through the wormhole,” Gustav said, his stare fixed on the floor. “Nothing has come back out yet. We don’t know why, but we believe the Commoner has figured it out.”
Reeling from the weight of the information that burdened her mind, quickening her pulse and making every step feel like an uphill climb, she let herself be taken by the narrative that poured from the trio as she lay prostrate on the gurney, absorbing everything, watching in her imagination as the tendrils grew less tenuous, as the mire of lies and misinformation became an opaque wall, impossible to miss.
As the disbelief began to fade, replacing itself with a painful certitude, the lights flickered on and off again. Sparks showered from the ceiling in places where emergency bulbs were not changed, and the tinkle of broken glass as over-strained bulbs popped sounded in the blackness like a hoard of mice scurrying across the medical wing.
A voice, gnarled and fizzing, like an overheated computer, spoke up from the speakers. In the unexpected rush of adrenaline that accompanied its intrusion, Kasey jumped from her gurney and rolled for cover, feeling for Edgar’s bag and regretting ever parting ways with her pistol.
“Computer Unit X-9274, checking in. Inbound vessel is approaching with speeds that surpass the legal threshold. It is approximately four hours from firing distance. Would you like me to send an SOS?”
The four looked at each other in silence before Kasey spoke up, demanding to know how many computers were on this freighter.
“No, 9247, do not send an SOS,” Gustav said to the ubiquitous voice, before turning to Kasey and whispering, as if to not be heard. “There was only one,” Gustav said. “Now there is—one half.”
Kasey looked at her friend, searching for an explanation from Mantiss, and getting one from Gustav instead.
“She was the Commoner’s idea, when he worked for MarsForm on Neptune. He engineered the two computers that powered the space station, and he received his medals, his awards. After a while, when he figured out what they were doing under the surface, in the ‘experimental’ labs, he—augmented them.”
“Just get to the point.”
“This computer is Patsy, just without the human personality that went schizophrenic after such disuse.”
“It,” Kasey said.
“Excuse me?”
“It,” she repeated. “Patsy was an it. Not a she.”
“If it’s all the same to you, I rather enjoyed her company. I would appreciate it if you did not demean the achievement that she was nor the humor of the man who programmed her, who made her as close to a human being as possible. If you want the story, I suggest we tell it on the way to the bridge, as the medical wing is no place to be when the ship that is currently only four hours out of our position closes the gap.”
Kasey slammed her fist against the wall in frustration, damning herself for becoming involved with such people, before giving in, and admitting in her head that she would be dead on Europa if she did not get onto the Age. The four of them walked, briskly, through the ship, Gustav talking in his melodic German accent the whole time. He told Kasey the story of Patsy and her love, who neither Gustav nor Ajax ever saw or spoke to, who was destroyed completely when the base on Neptune malfunctioned on the first anniversary of Signal Day.
He spoke about the Commoner, a low-level mechanic who grew up in Old America, dreaming of the stars, dreaming of leaving his insular home and traveling the world, or worlds. Until he discovered what it was that kept him up at night, and made him restless.
He—the Commoner—took a job as a janitor on a warship and eventually proved himself to be too smart for the slums of the space annexes. He worked hard, and he had a hard head.
In time, as Gustav explained, the Commoner climbed through the ranks of the military—the Old American military, not the Terran War League—until he became a colonel. He had soldiers who would eat from his palms, to say nothing of taking bullets, and he used the loyalty he inspired. He used it to develop an espionage network so vast, that it penetrated even to the deepest subterranean caverns of the Neptune base, where he needed it to penetrate, so that he could unlock the secret of what went on down there. What were the sounds that radiated through floor panels, what caused the rumbling vibrations that one could feel through one’s shoes no matter where in the station one stood.
He had high security clearance, Gustav said, and was proud. Who is to say that his snooping was not inspired by indignation at being spurned from a secret that other colonels knew?
Whatever the cause, his search for knowledge bore fruit; he learned of the Ides who sat waiting on the other side of an incomprehensible wormhole, the project that rumbled in the basements of the station, keeping him up long nights as the engineers there worked incessantly to build something.
A device large enough to create a wormhole must be powered by technology far greater than that which is known to the public, he thought, and on the heels of that thought another one; he must have that technology. People must know.
Then, when the world anticipated the revival of the old space age and used artificial intelligence to operate every facet of their world, leaving no cranny untouched by the tendrils of advancement, people treated computer personalities as kin, thinking they would be saved, would be ripped from their cocoon. Computers would fuel their adventures in the solar system and beyond. If a company were to boast of not using any computers to navigate their ships, they would not even succeed in getting a bank loan. Humans did not think they had the intelligence for it—space travel, exactitudes.
It all hovered just out of their reach. So they used computers.
The Commoner thought about the two computers that powered the station and he realized that any locale too heavily guarded for a corporeal body must be accessed through a being bereft of such baggage.
He began working, day and night, and every time the sound of the wormhole engineers reached to his ear at night, he jumped out of bed and sat at his desk writing a thousand algorithms until he created a program that would exhibit the personality of a human and contain enough processing power to run into the station’s operating systems. He endowed the computers with curiosity, with loyalty, with a sense of indignation at the treatment of computers by their human creators that would do so much harm in the months that followed.
Most of all, Gustav said, and through the musky, sultry tone of his voice that Kasey thought was meant to mock the attention with which she listened, she began to understand that he was not affecting any voice at all, that he spoke honestly. The tenor of
his voice changed to suit the emotions he felt when recalling things that he must not have been alive to witness.
Most of all, he programmed into both computers a sense of what love is, if not a capacity for expressing it, and it was this infernal imposition that allowed the short lived spat of shooting that the Terran Council passed as a war.
Kasey asked, “But why?” again, and felt like a parrot with only one trick, wishing that she knew the significance of the story, that she wasn’t so sucked into its narrative.
The Commoner—whose real name has been lost to history—needed the computers to get for him what he desired, namely the secret in the basement that he was barred from by all of his higher-ups.
Patsy came through. The base loved her, both of them. It made work easier. It made sitting at a computer monitor for extended hours more appealing. And that is how people saw them—Patsy and the other one, Nigel his name was—someone instead of something. The base used them for everything, making them privy to all the base’s information, every camera feed, every line of code entered into every bank—the computer mainframes were gigantic depositories for all of this.
The three, who had been walking abreast since leaving the hospital ward, supported Kasey as she limped along asking questions. Both Ajax and Gustav looked Kasey in the eyes and informed her that the Commoner gave the computers the gift of love, allowed them to fall into a semblance of love—or the real thing, who is to say?—and then took it away from them when they completed their mission.
It was revealed that the engineers in the deepest levels of the station worked tirelessly not to develop a method of communication that would withstand the tribulation of a wormhole, as the Earthbound population was told, but a way to create one, giving MarsForm and the Terran Council the means to physically meet the beings that sent The Signal.
In his grimmest voice, Gustav continued, telling Kasey that when the Commoner found out what was being done, he robbed the computers of their capacity to love, knowing that they would explode with rage—something else he gave them—and act vindictively—again, something he left them with when he stole their love.
