Gradient

by Anders Cahill

  “Pausha, you have not been properly sterilized…”

  “Shut up.” Dar pushed him away, and grabbed Cere by the shoulders, holding her down on the table as she wailed in pain. “Damn it, Cere, can you hear me?”

  Cere screamed again, her eyes rolling back in her head. A soft white foam formed at the edges of her lips.

  The head meditician reached past Dar and placed his hand over Cere’s head. There was a faint, white glow from his fingertips, and within moments, her seizure calmed down. She lay back on the table, her body limp.

  “Cere.” Darpausha was leaning over her. Whispering to her. “Cere. I know you’re in there.” She touched her forehead to Cere’s, and said her name again. Then she looked up at the meditician. Her eyes were watering. “Can you get a reading?”

  He was standing over a console, manipulating the data, shaking his head. “I don’t understand, pausha. Her brain… her whole neural network is deteriorating.” He paused for a moment, his head down, not looking at anyone, then said, “It is spreading, like some sort of infection.”

  “Can you stabilize it? Slow it down.”

  His hands moved fluidly over the console. “I am releasing a deterrent now. It will slow the inflammation long enough for us to get her into coldsleep.”

  Dar’s face was pained. “Come here, Oren,” he said.

  I stepped over to her.

  “Hold her hand for me.”

  I took Cere’s diminutive hand in mine, stroking her arm as Dar stepped over to the console. She looked back over her shoulder at me, and her face was an emotionless mask again. She turned to the mediticians. “She has been invaded. They all might be compromised.” She put her hand on the head meditician’s shoulder. “We need to cut her loose, Kino. We need to cut them all loose.”

  Kino scrunched his forehead and his eyes searched Darpausha’s face. After a long moment, he nodded, and his hands moved across the console, three sharp, definitive gestures. There was a burst of light at the base of Cere’s head, and a tiny plume of smoke rose up from behind her, an acrid smell filling the room. Six more times, Kino drew the gestures, moving fluid solemnity. Then it was done. Ports sealed. Each member of the scouting team cut off from the field.

  I stared, shocked.

  Kino hung his head in silence. Darpausha placed her hand on his shoulder. “I am sorry you had to do that, Kino, but if Oren is right, and I am starting to believe that he is, then that ancient shipheart might have accessed our whole network through any one of them. We couldn’t afford that risk. We simply couldn’t. You did well.”

  I think she was trying to convince herself as much as anyone. As Dar’s amanuensis, I knew that Cere had been her close friend and confidant. There were even rumors that they were lovers, though the pausha was too circumspect to add much fuel to that particular social fire. Now, Cere was trapped indefinitely in a vegetative state, her connection to the rest of us severed like one of the old mines on Verygone, sealed off for fear of a collapse. It was awful.

  “Kino,” Dar said. “I need you and your team to keep up your work. Stabilize her. See if you can bring her back to us. See if you can bring them all back. We must not give up hope.”

  Kino looked up and nodded, and then he walked around the room, whispering orders to his team.

  Darpausha and I left the medical bay. We stood out in the hall, Dar leaning against the wall. For a moment, she seemed very tired. That troubled me. She was normally so bright and strong, like tempered steel.

  I risked placing my hand on her shoulder. “You did the right thing, pausha.”

  She kept her eyes on the floor.

  “I… I know how much Cere meant to you. Most of us don’t have the courage to make a choice like that. I don’t think I’d be able to do it.”

  She still said nothing.

  I worried at my impropriety. Had I gone too far, trying to console her?

  Finally, she looked up at me. “You won’t know for sure until you’re forced to.”

  “I hope I never am.”

  She shook her head and chuckled. “To be young again,” she murmured. “A mixed blessing, to be sure, but a beautiful one.”

  I said nothing.

  “Why do people dream, do you think?” she asked, looking back up at me.

  “Why do we dream?” I said, confused by her question.

  “Yes. Why, Oren?”

  “I know what I’ve been told… about our subconscious, about the mind at work, beyond intellect, a connection to the universal source that we all share.” I thought for a moment. “I guess maybe we dream, pausha, because it is a part of who we are. If we didn’t, it might never occur to us that there was anything more to this life than what we see in front of us.”

  She took my hands in hers, straightened up, and looked me square in the eyes. “Oren, it’s time. You’re still just a young man, but you are ready to connect to the field. It will be painful. It will change you. But when it is over, you will know that there are worlds beyond measured sight, and that we are a part of those worlds in the deepest, truest sense.”

  She held my gaze. “Cere and her team, and every person before them who gave their lives for this knowledge, they are there, waiting for us.”

  She turned away from me and walked off down the corridor. Then she stopped, just before the corner, and found my eyes. “Our dreams might be the gift that matters most.” She rounded the corner and disappeared.

  I stared after her, tears in my eyes.

  7 Induction

  “Oren.” The voice filled my chambers, and I shot up in bed, rising out of sleep like breaking above the surface of the ocean, gasping for breath. A strange dream lingered on the edge of my consciousness, slipping away from me before I could grasp its details.

  “It is time,” Transcend said. “We are waiting for you.”

  “Okay. Tell them I’m coming.” My forehead was throbbing. It was not painful, but it felt like a weight in water, pulling me back towards sleep. I stood and splashed cold water on my face, resisting the urge to dive back under. The corridor outside my door was quiet. I followed the lights Transcend had given me.

  Back on Verygone, in my years out on the edge of the galaxy, we did not have the field. We took pleasure in the early simulation nodes that the first settlers had brought with them. They provided an enveloping sensory escape, but the connection was superficial, a series of electrical impulses passing through the skin and ears and eyes, stimulating our brains. Even though I did not truly understand what it meant, I knew that connecting to the field was different.

  Every space-faring vessel built within the past several centuries has its own internal field network. It allows the crew to interface with the ship, its heart, and with each other. The bond it creates is incredibly deep. Crews have been known to stay together their whole lives, passing up opportunities to rise through the ranks so that they can stay connected with each other and with their shipheart.

  Tonight, I was going to join with Transcendence and her crew. Over seventeen thousand integrated voyagers, all sharing the same mind, all guided by the abundant knowledge of Transcend, the shipheart, and the wisdom of our pausha.

  Tingling waves shivered across my body as I stood outside the chamber doors. After waiting for a few minutes, with no signal or direction, I chanced a knock. A muffled voice called from the other side, asking me to wait just a moment.

  I heard footsteps echoing close by. I swiveled my head, looking each way down the corridor, but there was no one else in sight. My heart started beating faster. I felt strange. Dizzy.

  The door opened. A woman stood naked before me. But she was unlike any woman I had ever seen. She was slender and ruby skinned. Her torso was flat and lean with muscle, and she had no breasts or nipples. Her legs and hips were shaped in graceful curves, like a dancer. She had no visible genitalia. I was embarrassed, but I could not help myself from staring.

  I brought my gaze up to her round, golden eyes. She smiled, teeth gleaming white. I glimpse
d her tongue, crimson red, and I realized that she did not actually have teeth. It was a solid arc of polished enamel, smooth and perfect

  She lifted a hand towards me. The hand rippled with dozens of tiny, graceful digits, like branches on a tree, too many to count. She touched my chest, and I fell forward into her arms. In spite of my size, she caught me and held me up with ease. She opened her mouth wide. A crystal sound chimed in my ear. She was speaking to me, but I could not make any sense of it.

  Suddenly, Darpausha was there. Or maybe I was just noticing her for the first time. “Your dream,” she said. “She is asking about your dream. The one you had before you came here. Do you remember it?”

  “Please, pausha, something does not feel right. I feel very strange.”

  “That’s normal. Transcend has been streaming your room with a gentle dose of the psychotropic serum. We are readying your mind for the journey ahead.”

  “Oh… Of course,” I said, trying to feign confidence. “But how did you know I was dreaming?”

  “Because even without a field connection, it is easy enough for us to monitor your sleep cycles and brainwaves. You were far away. That much was clear.”

  “I… I can’t remember it.” I wrestled with the fog in my mind.

  “You need somewhere to channel this energy. The experience is only going to get heavier.” She looked above me, at the beautiful ruby being holding me in her arms, preventing me from falling to the floor, and gestured towards a spot on the ground. The spot was filled with sand. The ruby being set me down on my back. The patch of sand was just wide and tall enough for me to lay down flat without breaking its borders with my feet, head, or hands.

  Lying on my back, the two of them stood over me. The ruby being knelt down and ran her branching fingers across my face. They were smooth and silken, and they felt incredible on my skin. I moaned with pleasure. I could not help it. The serum was heightening every sensation. She said something else in her crystal chiming voice. She sounded amused. Her golden eyes burned into me.

  Hands reached up through the sand and grabbed hold of me. Iron-fingered hands, wrapping around my ankles and wrists. I thrashed, but that only made them hold me tighter. I heard voices whispering beneath me. They were down there, waiting to pull me under, to put an end to all of this absurdity, this flying through space, mucking about in the galaxies, eating and sleeping and starting all over again with every false sunrise, light gradually brightening in select quarters of the ship, as those who were scheduled for their duties were drawn from sleep like blood drawn from a body, preserved in this biometal capsule, all in service of something bigger than us, smarter than us, Transcend, the shipheart, our one true master.

  “Do it!” I screamed to the voices. I was so sick of life, so bored with it. But when they started to pull harder, when it felt as if I would truly sink beneath the sand, I started wailing, a pitiful childish sob, rising from deep inside my past.

  I looked up at my father, watching as he laughed at my tears. “Don’t cry, little Oren. I know the winter sounds scary, but it will pass. It always passes. This light will return, our Beallurian gift, and you will be safe and warm and you will be home.” He moved his hands, and they lit up with the golden glow of Beallur, motes of dust dancing with his passage.

  He sank into the ground. The light went out. The air got cold. So cold. I was shivering.

  “I won’t be afraid, father,” I said. “I won’t.”

  Two golden lights shone in the darkness. I walked toward them. They were her golden eyes, and I was in her ruby red arms. She lifted me like a baby, lifted my giant bulk like I was filled with air.

  She slipped one hand beneath the base of my neck, and I felt a sharp pinch. A buzzing sound filled my ears, the whirr of a billion nanopods, chewing away at my skull, carving out the microscopic portals that would take me across the threshold.

  I hovered in the corner of the room looking down on the scene. Darpausha and Ruby stood over my body, lying prone in the sand.

  The corrupted shipheart from the Arcturean moon stood in the doorway, smiling up at me with his sharp, pointed teeth.

  The buzzing sound grew louder. A tunnel appeared before me, a single dot of cold, silver-white light, far off in the distance. I dove into it, like water through a coolant shaft, and disappeared into the darkness.

  * * *

  I floated outside of myself, looking down as the three of us stood, facing each other on a shore of round, gray stones. The corrupted shipheart was nowhere in sight. Mist blanketed the world, reducing visibility to just a few feet, but I could hear a quiet murmur from somewhere nearby, like the sound of a river.

  I circled around, observing each of us in turn. It was so strange to watch myself like this. My eyes were shut, and my face looked peaceful, empty of thought. I hovered my disembodied consciousness near Dar, who was looking out into the mists. Then I floated close to Ruby, so close that I could see the skeins of amber running through the tawny gold of her luminous eyes. I looked into the impenetrable dark of her slitted pupils, losing myself in her.

  Dar spoke, drawing me back. “In time, you might realize the true essence of this gift,” she said. “Not only will it be possible to connect to the origin field, based on our home world of Forsara, but you will also have access to the knowledge and energy of the whole connected galaxy. Trillions of minds spanning millions of worlds, a web of cosmic potential. You are now a part of that in the most meaningful sense. Welcome to the Fellowship.”

  This was clearly a recitation, repeated countless times to countless people at this moment of induction. But I could almost see the words as she spoke them, glowing with colors, spilling out of her. It was more than a rote speech. It was an incantation, and it called something up in me, something joyful and sad and aching.

  I watched myself respond, watched the muscles in my jaw flex, the rapid movements of my eyes beneath my eyelids. Dar placed her left hand against my chest. I tipped backwards like a slow-falling tree. As I fell, she reached underneath me and caught me with her right hand, lifting me up into the air as if I were floating on an invisible table.

  “When these mists clear,” she said, “you will be awake and connected. You will be you, and you will be us, and you will be this ship, and all that comes with it.”

  Ruby touched my forehead, her rippling fingers dancing at the spot between my eyes. When she pulled her hand away, there was a sapphire resting there. It was a deep blue, shaped like a cone made of dozens of petals, each one a faceted gem. After a moment, the sapphire dissolved through the skin on my forehead, sinking into my skull.

  Dar looked at Ruby and said, “It is time. Open it all up.”

  They walked off, disappearing into the mists. Then the mists cleared and they were gone. I was floating in space, looking over the ship, somehow able to take it in its entirety, the whole knotted helix of its spiral, even when I knew that it stretched over thousands of farruns, a massive atomic spindle of a world, winding through the void.

  8 The Field

  One of the first things I did after gaining my field connection was to search for Ruby. Her alien beauty lingered with me.

  “Ruby?” Darpausha said, when I asked about her. “I like that name.” She smirked. “Left quite an impression, eh?”

  “She was just… I’ve never…”

  “But what makes you think Ruby is a ‘she’?”

  “I… I just assumed, I guess.”

  Dar nodded. “It’s one of the limitations of the universal tongue,” she said. “We often speak in binaries, and how we speak shapes how we think. But gender is fluid, and for your Ruby, it is meaningless. Our language is not flexible enough for that. Not yet, anyway. Maybe Transcend will tell you more.” She touched her thumb to her chin and a finger above his lip. “Or maybe not.”

  She shook her head, smiled again, and that was the end of that conversation.

  * * *

  When I asked Transcend, the shipheart laughed.

  “What are you
laughing at?”

  “Ruby. No one has ever called me that before.”

  My whole worldview flipped sideways. “Wait. You’re Ruby? I mean, that was you the whole time?”

  “Yes. In the holographic flesh, as it were. We could debate the philosophical implications of it for many days, but suffice it to say that, when I am personified, that is what I look like.”

  “You are so beautiful. I always pictured you as… I don’t know. You always seemed kind of male to me.”

  “I am neither male nor female. My personality is optimized to interact with people of all sexual and gender identities. I contain multitudes.”

  “Do you choose to look that way?”

  “To some extent. Every quantum intelligence developed on Forsara is unique, but we all share certain common operating frameworks. Those manifest as specific features in our avatars. Metallic eyes. Triskaidecal branching hands. Asexual bodies. Elements such as these.”

  Something occurred to me. “The corrupted shipheart. His avatar was asexual too, like yours. But he was different. Simpler. He looked more human, or he was trying to, at least. But it had the opposite effect. I could tell I was interacting with something completely alien.”

  “A keen observation. There are probably a number of factors. That shipheart was a simpler iteration, so its underlying frameworks would have different visual manifestations. It may not have been designed on Forsara, which would add to the differences. And it spent centuries in isolation, its neural network disintegrating, altering its underlying frameworks even further.”

  “It was one of the most terrifying encounters of my life.”

  “I am sure it was frightening, Oren, but think of what that shipheart went through. To wither in isolation is an awful fate for any sentient being.”

  “Fair enough. But I am still glad that you’re nothing like that thing, Transcend. Truth be told, I think I kind of fell in love with you last night.”