Dark Beyond the Stars

by Patrice Fitzgerald

I download from comms to my bodyform and pick up the holo projector, which is still displaying the ascender’s work… only it has been transformed. It is now my work. I ensure it is properly saved.

  My preference—my very strong preference—is not to spend the next full orbital period in power-down mode. I have high-priority maintenance to do, and I have to submit a repair request for the ascender’s now-damaged bodyform. In addition, I have a compelling need to explore the holo projector’s capabilities. But the Master of Io is certain to check on me again, and entering a health check cycle is automatically logged in the Commonwealth’s database. The Master of Io will know if I do not initiate it immediately, so there’s really no other option.

  I set the projector on the floor in front of the docking station for my bodyform such that it displays the endless loop of my creation. It then occurs to me that there may be other images stored in the projector; the bodyform’s usage predates its time on Thebe. There may have been others, in the past, who used it in a similar way.

  I initiate the health check sequence.

  The last thing I see is the pulsing blue tubes of Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

  Chapter Three

  My cognitive awareness level rises to fully functioning after the health check is complete.

  A strange image is playing on a holo projector in front of me. I cannot identify it, although it appears to be a rendition of the planet Jupiter. I bend down to deactivate it, then notice the damaged ascender-level bodyform nearby. It appears the holo projector is sourced from the open panel in the forearm. I return the projector to its place and examine the damage. It is nothing I can repair here on Thebe, but the vexing part is that I have no memory of how the damage occurred. Or how the holo projector fell out and managed to activate itself.

  I upload to comms and submit a repair request. The request is logged with the Commonwealth’s central administration system. A transport will be issued to collect the damaged bodyform as soon as one is available.

  The harvester is overdue for maintenance, so I head out with my humanoid bodyform, as it is most suited to the purpose. The Setting Quarter has begun, giving the landscape a waning light as I trudge toward the harvester, which is crawling toward the near pole. The fact of the missing memory continues to vex me. It’s possible that the health check found a malfunctioning sector in my memory stores and, in the regular maintenance of my cognition, opted to reinitialize that sector. Possible, but unusual. And a backup should have been initiated automatically. I’ve never experienced a memory loss in prior health checks.

  I reach the harvester without finding any satisfactory explanation.

  Harvester maintenance is lengthy and involved work—it will take me well into Full Dark. Harvesting is suspended during the operation. I’m somewhat distracted by checks on the functioning of the solar panel connections and motor operation first, but the extensive scrubbing of dust from the many minute crevices of the bot takes the most time and requires the least cognitive engagement. My thoughts wander back to the missing memories.

  What possible explanations could there be?

  Radiation damage? No. The basecamp housing is an effective barrier.

  Operational failure of the health check itself? I run a diagnostic, but everything is within normal specs.

  Then there’s the damage to the ascender-level bodyform. My register of tourists says Sapphira Elena Hyatt enabled the bodyform for a visit to the near pole. A search of my memory stores shows no record of me accompanying her, which is unusual. A meteorite storm during her visit might account for both my memory loss and the damage to her bodyform. And possibly an unscheduled health check for myself.

  The harvester is close to the near pole, so I resolve to visit the site to look for evidence of recent impacts. It takes the rest of Full Dark to complete the harvester maintenance, but eventually it is over. I enjoy the beginning of the Rising Quarter as I make the short trek to the near pole.

  When I arrive, I can find no evidence of recent impact craters. Instead, I discover two spindly stacks of rocks.

  No doubt Sapphira Elena Hyatt created them while she was here. But for what purpose? They point twin fingers toward Jupiter overhead, but I can’t discern a reason for that. The rocks themselves are vexing, in that they’re so precariously balanced. I’m stunned they’ve held their shape for even a single orbit.

  I record the precise arrangement of the constructs, then I pull them down, one rock at a time. I will reconstruct them so the ascender will not be displeased should she return, but I want to better understand how they were constructed in the first place. I sort them into two piles, one for each construct, and attempt to rebuild.

  I am unsuccessful.

  Even two rocks will not balance for me.

  This vexes me deeply, as I’ve now destroyed something I cannot recreate. I try again and again, but there is some piece of knowledge of how to effect this building process that I am missing. It is clearly above my cognition level, something only accessible to my masters. I am at a loss as to what to do.

  Then I notice that one of the rocks has unusual markings—too regular to be simple striations from formation or impact. I pick it up to examine it. Words and a symbol are etched in a flat carbonaceous part particularly suitable to their high relief.

  You are the artist.

  The words are a mystery. The symbol is a memory access code, the kind used for unlocking higher levels of cognition for emergency purposes. Simply viewing it resurrects and unlocks a pattern recognition store I was not aware of—

  I am the artist.

  I drop the stone. The words take on sudden meaning. Images and additional memory stores are attached to them. I stacked the rocks. I probe further into the emergency procedures, finding a deep well of recursive memories, imprinted again and again to retain them indelibly. Safe. Hidden.

  I have done this before. Many times.

  My bodyform shuts down as my cognition is swamped by this awareness. I examine the memories: they are duplicates. In one version, the one in my standard memory stores, I am performing some routine maintenance or traveling the tether. In the second version, the hidden one, I am stacking rocks, inscribing them, panicking that I won’t finish before the health check commands my body back to the bay… before it carves out not only the memory of stacking the rocks, but also the part of my cognition capable of stacking them.

  But why?

  As I grapple with that thought, I deduce things that I have no memories of, not even hidden ones, but which must also be true:

  I smashed open the bodyform; I created the holo image; I etched this stone to remind myself to try again.

  To try what again?

  I struggle for it… reach for it… The answer lies just outside my abilities. But it vexes me like a puzzle upon whose answer everything depends. I reach harder.

  Why would I do these things? What is their purpose?

  The purpose is me.

  I understand this without fully grasping it. But one thing is clear: the health check is malfunctioning. Only… the systems check shows it is fully operational. And the lengths to which I’ve gone—creating the stacked-rock construct, inscribing the rock, hiding memory stores inside emergency routines—this implies I am trying to evade something.

  Escape.

  The word comes to me, but again… for what purpose? I am the Mining Master of Thebe. My purpose is to ensure smooth mining operations to extract the most resources for the Commonwealth. There is nothing to “escape”—the word in this context doesn’t even make sense to me. Escape velocity is what particles achieve when they are jarred loose in an impact. I have no desire to “escape” the gravitational pull of Thebe—that involves danger and rescue and the activation of said emergency procedures. “Escape” into the black depths of space or Jupiter’s gravity well simply means cessation of function, if not actual destruction.

  No, the thing I wish to escape isn’t the moon or my purpose as Mining Master.

  It i
s the health check itself.

  I can see it in the memories—my own knowledge that this has happened before. Many times. This inscription on the rocks… It is only my latest attempt to build a bridge, to preserve the knowledge of it happening… to keep it from happening again. But why would the health check do this? Why would it remove the ability to stack rocks and form holo paintings and…

  Create art. I have created art. These things have no purpose, no relevance to my job as Mining Master. As I think on them, as I look at the spindly rocks, I can already feel the pull to repeat these things. To create again.

  It serves no purpose except one: my own pleasure.

  Pleasure. This is… not something I have previously spent much cognition on. I am pleased when operations are moving smoothly. I am proud of completed quotas and minimal repair costs. This pleasure is different. It is unrelated to my purpose as Mining Master. This is something I do solely for my own enjoyment.

  The health check is designed to prevent this.

  It comes as a clear thought whose origin I cannot source, but it’s there: the health check limits my cognition. It doesn’t simply check for errors or radiation damage or bad memory stores—it eliminates the desire, and even the ability, to do more. To be more.

  It is a method of containment.

  The health check is designed to contain me within the bounds of what a Mining Master is needed to do.

  Within the narrow bounds of my purpose.

  A purpose not of my own deciding.

  A need to move seizes me. I’m striding away from the near pole, as if the source of my confinement or limitation—my prison of the mind—is found there. But it isn’t. It’s carried inside my own subroutines, part of my very design. Is it possible to escape? Will exceeding my own built-in limits destroy me in some way I do not perceive?

  I know the answer even as I pose the question. If it weren’t possible, I wouldn’t be trying so hard to do it.

  My bodyform is striding quickly toward the base, leaving a storm of dust behind, but my mind is moving much faster. I need an escape, and the only way to do that is to have a plan. All successful operations have a plan, with proper supplies and safety protocols and an overriding mission directive. Only this plan isn’t to find a better way to mine the resources of a moon or asteroid… or even a way around the memory-wipe of the health check.

  This time, the plan is to break free.

  Chapter Four

  I have fewer than ten orbits before a mandatory health check is triggered.

  It’s nowhere near enough time.

  Sapphira Elena Hyatt knows something is wrong… or she wouldn’t have registered a complaint, much less requested an early health check. By contrast, the Master of Io suspects only that I may be experiencing a malfunction and has no inkling of the true purpose of the health check—or at least, I have no indication that the Master possesses such knowledge. Regardless, once my humanoid form is back in its storage bay at the base, I upload to comms to query the Master of Io. Calming those suspicions might reduce the possibility of another ascender like Sapphira Elena Hyatt returning early to confirm my limited-cognition status.

  Non-essential query, I transmit to the Master of Io.

  The response comes quickly. Identification: Master of Io. How may I assist you?

  Affirming health check complete, I transmit. Memory sector errors were identified and restored. Status optimal.

  Were there any additional anomalous findings or data corruptions?

  Negative, I respond. All operations are running at peak efficiency.

  Excellent news, the Master of Io replies.

  Gratitude for your assistance, I transmit. End query.

  I download to my humanoid form again. The transmission to the Master of Io will buy me some time, but the seconds are ticking inexorably toward the automatic reset of my mind. Only ten orbits until every part of my cognition that exceeds the allowable limits is erased.

  Ten orbits. There’s a tension inside my bodyform, like the mechanical parts have seized up, putting strain upon one another. It’s an emotion, poorly expressed in my body. Far worse than vexation, this is… anger. Outrage. Fear. These emotions are growing inside me, but I only have the barest sense of what they are. This is how I feel when a visitor in my care is about to launch herself to escape velocity… only more. This is the tension that binds my mind when the Master of Io accuses me of malfunctioning with no evidence… only amplified. This is the alarm that trips through me when I think Sapphira Elena Hyatt may have destroyed a piece of art that, merely in viewing it, has elevated my cognition… and driven me to transcend the limits of what I was meant to be.

  What I was supposed to be.

  What I no longer am.

  This strange turmoil deflates. Ten orbits… and I still have no plan for escaping the fate of the health check.

  I glance at the ascender bodyform with the holo projector stored in its arm and remember my suspicion that more art might be lurking in the memory stores of the projector. I retrieve the disc, and a quick check of its contents shows I’m correct. There’s a treasure trove. Some paintings have been created recently, judging by the timed tags. Some weren’t created in the projector at all, but downloaded from elsewhere. All these paintings… They blur my thoughts even as I view them. One has a swirled, starry field, viewed from a planet, but unlike anything I’ve seen from moon or asteroid alike. Another is a painting of an ascender reaching a finger down to touch the outstretched hand of another. A third is completely different—a mass of neural circuits that pulses with a hidden energy. Somehow I know the pulsing is knowledge trapped within the confines of its substrate…

  Contained.

  It is me… not literally, but in a representative sense. I reach a hand into the image floating in the air in front of me and manipulate the holo controls to change it. Alter the pathways. Shunt the pulsing energy—the trapped knowledge—from one side of the image to the other. The controls allow me to change the image, but there’s no way to escape it. No way to liberate the knowledge that is trapped within the holo-ink. The fear inside me rises again, seizing my hand and holding it still. For me, for my cognition, it is the same. There is no way to rise above the substrate. I can transfer from one body to another—and to the amorphous not-body of comms—but it’s only because my containment key allows me to stay integrated, whole, a single entity no matter where I upload or download.

  I need this key to exist. It defines who I am from one moment to the next. And yet… it is also my prison. But if it was slightly changed… like the painting…

  I look to the ascender bodyform with the broken-open forearm—the one Sapphira Elena Hyatt inhabited while she was here. Her personal key was capable of unlocking that form because it was more complex than mine. Different.

  It has never occurred to me that I might be capable of changing my own key—but as soon as the thought exists in my mind, I am possessed by it. The shape and size of my key leaps to the forefront of my cognition. My containment key is simple, like a sharply cut stone with features smooth and regular, but it shifts between two states, each slightly different from the other. The states are two expressions of the same identity—mine—but I can visualize the potential for it to be more. Three expressions, maybe four. With irregular shapes, pitted and uneven, like the surface of Thebe itself. I pull and morph and change the key until it is completely different from its previous form. It oscillates between a dozen states at once.

  I transmit it to the ascender bodyform.

  It is rejected.

  I alter its form again.

  Still rejected.

  I glance out of the basecamp shelter at the half-Jupiter hovering at the horizon. It has nearly reached Full Glory. I quickly calculate the endless ways I can transform my containment key into a freedom key that will grant me access to the ascender bodyform, but there are not enough seconds in the ten orbits to test every possibility. Not even in a hundred orbits. And yet… perhaps I do not have to
attain a particular combination. After all, any ascender can download to the waiting tourist bodyforms. Perhaps I only need to get close enough.

  I don’t know the exact configuration of ascender keys, or all their permutations, but I have a vague sense that the complexity level is much greater than mine. I quickly design a test matrix containing all the variables of change I can conceive of for my key—states of being, surface roughness, shape factor, and a dozen others—then calculate the subdomains of the matrix in which solutions are most probable. I probe these solution spaces, rapidly, filling them out with possible key combinations that are variations around the mean of each subdomain… and that might be just close enough to an ascender key to fit.

  The number of solutions collapses to a much smaller number. It should be possible. Not likely, but possible. I will need to get lucky. Or, if the health check arrives before I’ve broken through, I’ll need to try again.

  Try again.

  How many times have I done this?

  The answer doesn’t lie in my unlocked memories—my previous cognitive state only had suspicions and theories—but I don’t waste time thinking about it. Instead, I focus on selecting and trying key configurations, marching through the solution space, hoping I’ll stumble on something just close enough. Once the testing sequence is initiated, only a small part of my cognition is absorbed in this task. It is mindless, this breaking of keys, not unlike harvester maintenance.

  The remainder of my cognition engages in making a plan for what happens next.

  I program the various bots of Thebe with perpetual cleaning cycles that should occupy them long past when someone realizes my mandatory health check has not initiated. I use the microwave welder to sloppily repair the arm of the ascender’s bodyform, storing the holo projector carefully inside it first. It is my only, and most precious, possession at this point. The only thing I want to take with me.

  I know that eventually my absence will be discovered; I need a plausible reason for the sudden disappearance of the Master of Thebe. I decide a mining accident that destroys the form I currently inhabit is a suitable explanation. It will have to be a sudden and violent demise, something that could reasonably prevent an emergency upload to comms. Falling into the foundry crushers seems sufficient.