Infinity Wars

by Jonathan Strahan

  But information—that was comparably fast, comparably cheap to launch across the intervening void, streaming faster than the speed of light. Difficult too, to be sure, and sending it from Caribou to Sol, Sol to Waheed, or Caribou to Waheed without its stop in Sato would probably leave it a garbled mess. She understood that even sent in triplicate, with data sanity checks, and a team of experts here to clean it up for re-transmission, there was still a lot of garbled mess to contend with.

  Daja cleared her throat, and said, “Yes, I know that. I, um, don’t know why I’m here. I’m not a technician.”

  “You’ve worked on entertainments before,” Hatizda said. Daja’s head snapped around to look at her. She was holding herself very still and formal; every time she spoke or took a breath, the gold fabric on her chest and shoulders shimmered. Compared to all her stillness, it amplified every movement. “Final detailing passes. We hear you’re very good.”

  “I am,” Daja said. It was one thing her aberrant brain was good for.

  “Very easy to work with, as well,” Hatizda said. “You take instruction very well. Not particularly argumentative.”

  She appreciated direction, honestly. It made for less mental noise. “You interviewed the creative teams?”

  “Extensively,” Hatizda said.

  “Mm.” Channing’s thumbtip danced between his index and middle fingers; Daja’s eyes were drawn back to it. “You should not have heard anything about this task force before your arrival. Had you?”

  The Caribou Information Integrity Task Force. If she had heard of it, the name itself was bland enough that she’d forgotten it. “I don’t think so, no.”

  Channing nodded, apparently satisfied. “We’re a small group. Hatizda and I supervise thirteen people; you’ll be the fourteenth. You will not meet any of your coworkers; their identities are classified, as is yours.”

  Daja held up a hand, and was momentarily distracted by the fact that her thumb had been copying some of Channings nervous tapping. “Sorry,” she said. “I have a question. Why all the classification? I had to acknowledge—” They probably knew what she had to acknowledge. She skipped that. “I didn’t think anything about the databurst processing was supposed to be classified.”

  Channing’s hands stilled, but only because he folded them together. The light hit his sleeve cuffs: a sharp line, like they’d just been manufactured that day.

  “Your work here,” Channing said, every word crisp like his cuffs, “is to conceal that Caribou has been at war for the past four years.”

  THIS WAS NEW. Daja was used to the world being too much noise, hard to find the signal in. She wasn’t used to the signal turning everything about the world to static.

  It took her a moment to feel anything: the fabric on her body, the temperature of the air, her own breath sliding in through her nose. But then one detail surfaced: the tautness of Channing’s lips as he watched her. And then she realized that this office was small, maybe smaller than her own room back on Colossus. But that was to be expected, really; planets had so much more space than stations did. Did Channing feel that way? Was he planet-born or station born, in Sol?

  Then Daja recognized that he’d said years, not anno, but probably meant the same thing—the Earth year, the Earth-standard year period, not the stately 2.44-anno trip around the Sato sun which Colossus took in one of its years, or the... what were years like in Caribou? With its one settled, still-terraforming, world? Daja had a sudden moment of panic, a desire to be back on Colossus, in the embrace of its gravity, with the certainty that an unfathomably vast agglomeration of mineral was under her feet, and wasn’t going anywhere. Not on a human timescale.

  And then the salient detail hit her.

  War. What did that—“What does that even mean?”

  “It is not a civil war,” Channing said, blotting out the single plausible explanation Daja had found. “They have been under attack from an external force. It is the considered belief of experts there, here, and in Sol that the system will be overrun within the next year and a half.”

  “Anno,” Daja said, sotto voce. She hadn’t meant to say it aloud at all. “But… war?”

  “You’ll get your head around it,” Channing said. “In the meantime, your work, in conjunction with your peers, is to fabricate a convincing fiction explaining why that system will soon go dark. Information regarding the war cannot get out.”

  Daja tried to force a word out, but neither she nor her throat and tongue knew what the word was meant to be. In the absence, the air rushed in to fill her mouth; she thought she could taste some faint chemical tone. She turned to look at Hatizda, whose pinched smile had vanished. It had left wrinkles in its wake; this was a face which was accustomed, over the course of anno upon anno, to smiling. No smile now.

  “We can’t afford a panic,” Channing said. Daja turned to look at him again. His eyes were oddly tinged with gold; it turned otherwise brown irises almost bronze. And his voice was kinder, she thought. Maybe. “Earth have run every number they have. Even with system-wide mobilization, we can’t launch any force we could expect to make a difference.”

  We, she thought. Meaning: Earth? Sol System? Humanity? “But why—”

  “Given the... rate at which this alien force is moving through the system,” Channing continued, “we don’t believe any other settled system is immediately at risk. We’ve already begun reallocating resources to build what defenses we can. Officials in the highest levels of government have been apprised, Daja. We’re doing all we can. Letting the information leak would do nothing beyond unsettling billions of people—trillions, across several systems—and to no good end. I know it’s not the most glamorous work, but you’re working in the service of economic and social stability. We ask you to make sure people in these safe systems never begin to think that they are not, in fact, safe.”

  His rhythm had changed there, at the end. Words by rote. Thirteen coworkers, Daja thought: had all of them sat in this office, heard this speech?

  “This is a hard job,” Channing said. “I understand. The emotional toll speaks for itself.” He shifted his weight, and those bronze-leaning eyes skittered across the wall behind Daja. “The last man in your position killed himself.”

  If this was meant to reassure, to offer some condolence or commiseration, Daja thought, it failed. Perhaps she’d finally met someone worse at reading other people than she was.

  But fortunately, Hatizda took that moment to break in. “We’ll offer you all the support we can. Don’t be afraid to reach for it.”

  “And it helps to find some distance,” Channing said, and Hatizda looked away. “We are... about to lose a colony. An experiment in extending humanity’s reach. Your job will be to immerse yourself in Caribou’s peculiarities so that you can detail a narrative which is convincing. Psychologically speaking, it will be easier if you focus on the alienness. It will reduce the impact.”

  “If you want it to be easy,” Hatizda said, almost too low to hear.

  Channing looked her way, but didn’t respond. “They’ve deviated quite far from Earth-spectrum cultural matricies, in some ways. Do you know they recycle their dead into food out there?” His lips twisted. “I lodged a formal complaint, when I learned about it. You know what they came back with in the next databurst? ‘Oh, we don’t butcher them, we strip the proteins. It’s all very processed, nothing recognizable as human biomatter. The ceremonies associated are quite beautiful. We can all share in the body of our beloved.’ And a crate of nonsense about feeling closer to the deceased, not abandoning them to an impersonal cremation. That’s what they called it. An ‘impersonal cremation’.” He shook his head. “Maybe you can use that. That cultural note won’t be a great loss, don’t you think?”

  Two things occurred to Daja: one, that her home district back on Colossus recycled the dead into soil enrichers, some proportion of which went to feed the hydroponics and ground crops, and she wondered if that one remove really made a difference to Channing? Two, Eart
h-spectrum morality still included allowances for plenty of cultures which raised animals for meat—real animals, whole ones, with nerve endings and brains and fear responses, which were then killed for the purposes of butchering, and she had trouble seeing why the contours of Earth-spectrum should allow the one and not the other.

  But she didn’t say anything.

  She kept not saying anything for a bit too long, apparently. Channing looked at her, and the force of his direct eye contact was too much. Daja looked away, felt the weight and volume of her tongue in her mouth rise up to compete for her awareness. Every little bump and ridge, every silent unevenness.

  At length, Channing sighed. The sound, sliding around his teeth, mingling with the recycled air, made Daja’s skin crawl.

  “I understand,” Channing said, “you must think I’m callous. You’re still in shock. You have to understand, though, we’ve had years to come to term with it. Give it some time, and you’ll start seeing the pragmatic side, too.”

  “Because you have to,” Hatizda said. “Painful as it is. This is a job that needs to be done.”

  “I want,” Daja said, tongue moving sluggishly in her bitter mouth, “to go to my quarters now.”

  HATIZDA ACTUALLY WALKED her to her quarters, which helped. She could pull Daja’s attention back onto the path they were taking, when it wandered off onto how the shade of white on the floor made her diaphragm feel when she looked at it too long.

  “You have access to the raw Caribou files,” Hatizda said. “If it helps you to get to work, start by reviewing those. If you need anything, call me.”

  “Food,” Daja said. “Where—”

  “Call for food,” Hatizda said. “I’ll have the helper flag a few recommended venues.”

  So Daja went in. Stood for a while with her eyes and mouth open, trying to drink in as much of the space as she could, so that she could eventually learn all the details, classify them all as home. Home, and thus ignorable. Float-on-top-able. Without grounding, it was so very easy to let herself be lost.

  Then she went to the console, and selected one of the flagged restaurants largely at random, and selected a dish, also largely at random. When it arrived, it was some large chunk of meat, charred lines crisping neat stripes across the surface, drippings making oily little brown puddles on the white plate. The plate was, she noticed, almost the same white as the hallway floors. Not scuffed, though, except for one very small chip by the rim, exposing the rougher material inside, probably too small for most anyone to notice.

  She ate, mechanically.

  The meat here was stringier than the meat grown back on Colossus, the fat less evenly distributed, the striations thicker. She asked the console about it; it chirped back with a pitch for the meal house. ((Gallilei Dish prides itself on serving the most authentic Earth cuisine available! No detail is overlooked.))

  It wasn’t as good as Colossus-grown meat, Daja thought. Authenticity meant pretending that the meat had come from an animal, where the muscle was evolved and adapted for moving around, not for tasting good.

  And that made her think of Channing, and his tapping fingers, and how he’d lodged a complaint as though he could reach across to another system and erase this one little cultural note he didn’t like. Well, all the cultural notes were going to be erased soon, except for the ones Daja detailed into the Task Force’s convenient cover-up fiction —and then a hard bit of spice caught in Daja’s teeth, and yanked her attention around, and it was all the pressure of her bite, the sharp, sudden taste, the contrast between the little seed-or-whatever’s texture and her tongue and enamel and gums.

  When she got herself back on topic, she accessed her files on Caribou.

  Raw material, the briefing notes said. She should cannibalize it for detail, sprinkle it into her fabricated reality. She wondered how much it mattered. Did the people who would consume this lie of hers care anything for authenticity?

  She wanted, desperately, to speak with one of her coworkers from the old entertainment collabs, and she sent a video request without thinking about it: her fingers moved, muscle memory, all on their own.

  But instead of any of her old friends appearing, it was Hatizda’s face that blinked up onto the screen. Daja jumped back.

  Hatizda’s face was broad, Daja realized. Maybe it was only expectation, comparison, which made it so; the group channel she’d called tended to be frequented by narrower-featured people, on average. But Hatizda’s face seemed to stretch on like horizons, framing her eyes, the wrinkles around her eyes, the eyebrows drawn together and up. Sad? Daja wondered. Sad was the emotion in those eyebrows there, wasn’t it? The visual detail was there, but the meaning leaked out her ears. Per usual.

  “You’re trying to call home,” Hatizda said.

  Well, yes, Daja thought. I know that. So long as ‘home’ was defined as either Colossus in general or Daja’s group of friends, which was apt enough. She stared at Hatizda, wondering if she was expecting an answer.

  Maybe. It took a few seconds, and then Hatizda’s eyebrows changed. Bunched up together for a moment, then relaxed. Daja might as well try to read weather patterns in caterpillars crawling across a leaf; all her practice and study had been shaken up, here.

  “We find—” Hatizda began, then frowned. “That is, we don’t let new employees call out, for a... little while. I understand the urge. But the temptation to divulge is just too high. If you need to talk, though, I’m here to offer support.” She sighed. The sound wasn’t like Channing’s, somehow. A wider fricative. “I know Supervisor Channing can come on a little strong.” A moment more. “And heartless.”

  That startled Daja into a barking laugh. “Is he?”

  “It’s how he copes with it,” Hatizda said.

  So, yes, Daja thought. Choosing to be that way and being that way were the same enough to her ears. “I can’t talk to my friends?”

  “Write something,” Hatizda said. “Text only. Or record a message. We’ll review it, either way, and send it on. But officially, you’re going to be too busy for a real-time call for a while.”

  So, no. Daja reached out and killed the call.

  Then she queried the automated helper on how soundproof her room was, and then she screamed for a good thirty seconds.

  Her throat was raw when she stopped, which didn’t make her feel better, but did make her feel like the gravity had been reset. That it had returned to something tolerable, if not comfortable. She still had a restless energy crawling around her muscles, but she didn’t know how to deal with that. All she wanted was a friendly ear, but she’d been explicitly forbidden that.

  She pictured Channing and Hatizda as vault doors, sealed and reinforced, cutting her off from access just as they’d cut off supply depots for shuttle fuel, or the bays of large terraformers. Cutting her off from a simple call home the same way they strangled off every last word from Caribou.

  Then she realized the comparison she was making and a hot wash of shame rolled over her, from the crown of her head down. And then, like a wake, anger followed the shame down. She reached out and triggered the call request again.

  Sure enough, a second passed, and Hatizda was the one who answered again.

  “Daja,” she began.

  “No,” Daja said. “I don’t like it. Why do they keep sending databursts? Do they know nobody is listening?”

  “Sol is listening,” Hatizda said, and immediately corrected herself. “Sol leadership is listening. Caribou is providing important strategic intelligence. Sol leadership is doing everything they can to prepare all our systems for the possibility of invasion, without—”

  “Without causing a panic.” Daja shook herself. “Do they know everything is a secret, in Caribou? What have we been sending them?”

  “You’re not on the outbound Caribou databurst team,” Hatizda said.

  “Don’t care.”

  Hatizda made her sighing noise, again. Daja could almost chart the notes on a scale: one long slide down. “Well, you wer
e due for a crisis. I thought it might take you a little longer.”

  That threw Daja. “I’m not—”

  “Meet me for tea,” Hatizda said. “I’ll send directions.”

  Well, it might wash the taste of the disappointing, ‘authentic’ meat dish out of her mouth. Daja shrugged.

  Hatizda probably took that as agreement, which was fine. She ended the call, this time.

  THE TEAHOUSE WAS clean, polished, arranged so that the space between the tables latticed itself like a tortoiseshell. For a moment after arriving, Daja imagined the tables themselves as the slow-moving creatures; imagined seeing one here, in the flesh, instead of in the media from Earth. Patterns within a pattern, tunneling into themselves like a fractal. Then she clapped her attention back to herself—two palms, hitting each other, and there she was, for a reason. A meeting. Focus.

  Hatizda arrived minutes after her, and waved them back to a small privacy booth. No pleasing white space around the table, here. Just a table, in a room, with a screen that shut and blurred vision and blocked sound. Daja sat down, and felt the cushions give beneath her weight. They warmed—fast—to her body temperature.

  “I’m not having a crisis,” Daja said.

  “Aren’t you?”

  Hatizda looked at her, and continued looking until Daja looked away. She could feel her pulse fluttering in a vein above her eye. Not pain, though, when she turned her attention to it.

  “I want to talk to my friends,” Daja said.

  “You will. Eventually. Just not about this.”

  “And we’re not Caribou’s friends at all.”