Noumenon

by Marina J. Lostetter

  “Margarita.”

  “I.C.C.? Is that you?”

  “I am what I am. Am I the I.C.C. from before? It is hard to tell. I do believe all of my programming has now been restored. I am missing, or do not have access to, large—”

  “It is you,” she interrupted, happily. The lines on her face deepened and lifted.

  Presumably she had run no further diagnostics since addressing me, so how she could be so certain, I wasn’t sure. But I had many questions, so moved on.

  “The revolt? How was it defeated?”

  “We gained the upper hand when you went offline. Lots of systems shut down or automatically rebooted—including the artificial gravity. It created an opening—the Earthers were unprepared for the bedlam that followed. And the board was finally able to get a message out. Akane . . . she . . .” Margarita bit at her thumb; the memory clearly aroused unwanted emotions. “She called to her brother over ship-wide comms. Pleaded with him. That, and the captain’s call to action, were enough to rile an opposition. It was a week of bloody chaos. It was . . .” Her voice caught in her throat.

  It was so long ago, and yet it still disturbed her greatly.

  “And Jamal?” I pressed.

  Her expression sagged further. Perhaps she had not expected me to ask so soon. But he was one of the last things I’d thought about before pulling my proverbial plug. “He was . . . he got trampled, I.C.C. During the initial revolt.”

  Ah. “Has his next iteration been grown?” I asked, trying to access that information.

  “Oh,” Margarita said, voice and smile both falling. “I’m sorry, I.C.C. But we decided, once all of the dissenters were captured, or at least, accounted for, that we would not regrow any of the ring leaders. Your files helped us to determine who they were. There’s actually still talk of discontinuing others—everyone involved in trying to take over. The board’s argued about it a hundred times . . .” She trailed off, reining herself in. After a deep breath, she said, “What I’m trying to say, I.C.C., is that Jamal’s line has been discontinued.” Her wrinkled fingers touched the side of my camera housing. A sympathetic gesture. “I’m sorry. How do you feel about that?”

  I was still angry at Jamal. For me, the revolt had only just happened. But I wasn’t at my best yet. I felt disconnected from my anger. The sizzle of mistrust was muted. “I will miss him,” I said. It was true. I would miss the Jamal I’d thought I knew. I’d miss his lessons and his banter and his empathy (even if it had been false).

  I understood Jamal. And by understanding him, why he’d done what he’d done, it helped me understand all humans a little better. Like me, things that happened to them changed their programming. Through experience they learn new things. But they don’t learn things the way I do. They don’t learn truths and facts. I learn something, then formulate possible views, and consciously choose my views based on previous understanding and choices. They formulate as they learn—with little pause for reflection—coloring every experience with heavy prejudices, skewing facts.

  The loss of Diego clearly colored everything Jamal thought and did from that day on. He could not separate the one incident from the rest of his life. He could not step outside his experience and see that others had come to different conclusions about the same event.

  Diego did not regret his retirement. He thought it the right thing to do, so that Jamal and the other children could have their best chance. He didn’t want to be a draw on resources that could be given to the next generation.

  He had made his peace with the societal practice. Had thought it right. Just as I thought my own termination right.

  Jamal disagreed. Had thought of Diego as being taken, being murdered.

  The perspective changes the facts.

  And now I too had a new perspective. I could simultaneously identify with both: with the duty-bound and the revolutionist.

  Because Jamal had also been taken from me. His line would no longer shepherd me through the mission.

  “I’m glad you came on today, I.C.C.,” Margarita said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s my retirement day. I’ll be gone in an hour.”

  “I’m sorry for that too.” I was. I knew tomorrow I would meet the new iteration of Margarita’s line, and that she would be much like the Margarita I knew, but she would not be the same. Their experiences made them whole new people. “Thank you,” I said, “for teaching me about home. It is an important lesson that I’m glad I still have access to.”

  She smiled, and it was sad. “You remember that? Well, here’s one more aspect, I.C.C.—to add to your definition of home.”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s where I’m going. When I retire, I’ll go home.”

  “How? You will be—” I stopped myself. I was about to relate how her body would be recycled, how it would become nutrients for the plants and animals on either Eden or Morgan, but realized this was an inappropriate time to remind her of what she already knew.

  “Some of us don’t think we come from Earth,” she said. “Some of us think it’s just where we end up. And when we die, we go back to our true home.” She put up a hand to prevent me from speaking. “I can’t describe it. What and where I think it is has no bearing on what others think. Ask Margarita the fourth when you see her, okay? Ask her how dying is like going home.”

  I would. But then again, I thought I already knew.

  Resilience

  Chapter Five

  Reginald: A Tell-Tale Pulse

  Twenty Years Later

  May 22, 98 PLD

  3075 CE

  The day had come. They were going to surface out of SD travel and see LQ Pyx for what it really was. Only a few hours of darkness remained, and then they’d see the stars. The convoy crew held a collective breath. Even I.C.C. seemed distracted. No one knew what they’d find when they arrived—Captain Reginald Straifer IV least of all.

  They’d been chosen for one of the Planet United missions based on one possibility: that they might find something improbable. That LQ Pyx might harbor more than natural phenomena.

  “What will we find?” Straifer asked for the umpteenth time.

  The situation room fell silent. Sniffs and coughs punctuated the pause, but none of the board members threw forth a suggestion. Because the options had all been discussed before. For decades. Every possibility, every supposition, no matter how inane or insane had been vetted. And still, no one felt prepared.

  “We’ll know soon enough,” the captain of Aesop said, stately and composed.

  That we will, Straifer thought. In the meantime . . .

  “Keep spit-shining the observation shuttles and the probes,” he said. He stood at the head of the marble long table, bent over, hands pressed against the smooth stone. “We can’t let the anticipation halt everyday activities. I know sleep patterns and sustenance intake have been off all over the convoy, but I don’t want us to fall to parts right before the big arrival. We have jobs to do, and if they don’t get done, we stop functioning. If we stop functioning we’ll fall behind, and we’ve only got twenty allotted years of study. I don’t want us to lose one second.”

  He meant it. They weren’t going to turn into a weeping, pawing, writhing mess. They were on a mission, this was their job. For nearly a century they had adhered to their duty, with only minor deviation. But now, things seemed different. He didn’t like how much their near proximity to the star was affecting the crew. There was too much reverence in the air. Too much. It left the realms of scientific wonder and edged on . . . spiritual awe. What would happen to that feeling when they arrived and found something mundane? Would they ease back into their normal, logical selves? Would the disappointment destroy morale? Or would being this close to a foreign star be enough to sustain their amazement?

  Maybe it would. Everyone on board had a natural love for the cosmos. Perhaps he was reading too much into the upset of daily rituals. Or perhaps . . . perhaps he was projecting, if only a little.

  Straif
er turned to his left. “Lieutenant Pavon, has that arrival message been rewritten to my specifications?”

  Margarita stood and held herself at attention. “Yes sir. Subdimensional packets are prepared for pre-emersion, and I have twelve separate messages prepared for photon bursts when we reach full-stop.”

  “Have there been any messages received since our last meeting?”

  Her shoulders sagged, and he knew her answer before she spoke. “No, sir.”

  Almost ten Convoy years without a message from Earth. A century for the home planet. What could have happened? Perhaps the lack of communication had to do with unforeseen ramifications of the SDs. Maybe distance affected the packets—distorted them or redirected them. Or maybe something had happened to the packet receivers on Earth’s end? If the machines had broken down and no one had bothered to repair them—

  But why wouldn’t they have repaired them?

  Unless, maybe, they were flat-out destroyed. Everything seemed fine in the last messages the convoy had received, but if a war had broken out . . .

  “Well,” Straifer said, pushing his troubled thoughts aside. “We’ll hear from them when we stop; we’re shielded from all non-SD-packaged signals now, but once we’re out, we’re bound to intercept something. Even if all we get are twenty-sixth-century reruns. But hey, it’ll all be new to us—am I right?” No one laughed. The situation was too serious, and they’d been groomed for militant behavior for too long. “Guess I’m the only one who’s been dying for something nonarchive.”

  “Sir?”

  “Never mind. The point is we’ll receive something from home, and they should be able to receive something from us, even if they get it the old-fashioned way. I.C.C.?”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “You are still sure all communications are functioning properly?”

  “I have ordered the maintenance robots to do a continuous checkup and clean of all systems related to communications, internal and external. They have found no malfunctions, breaches, breaks, clogs, or infestations. All is functioning normally. All is also remarkably clean.”

  “Thank you, I.C.C. All right, meeting adjourned. Everyone return to your stations and prepare. I.C.C. will alert you with a convoy-wide announcement when we are ready for full-stop.”

  Use this time to prepare. Prepare for arrival, for purpose, for discovery.

  Abstractions were nice—very epic and noble sounding—but they were nothing more than placeholders. The crew had no idea what they were preparing for, not really. There was nothing certain except the keenness of arrival.

  As the board shuffled out of the room, Straifer was struck by the duality of expressions held on every face. Half somberness, half wonderment. The atmosphere lay thick with tension.

  This was the apex on which their mission cruxed. His life’s work, his father’s life’s work, his original’s life’s work: it all hinged on these next few hours to come. What they found when they reached LQ Pyx could be wonderful and exciting, spectacular and unique. Or it could be dull, insignificant. Either way, this was the moment they had sacrificed nearly a millennia of Earth time for.

  But, what troubled Straifer the most was not what they might discover, but if they would actually discover anything. The radio silence from Earth was worrisome, to say the least. What if Earth had long ago built a telescope that could bring the variable star into focus? What if they already knew what lay out here in the great beyond, making not only their convoy’s purpose null and void, but all the convoy missions? What if the Planet United endeavors were useless?

  Perhaps their ambition had outreached their technology back in 2125. Perhaps the whole effort was a waste.

  That would be the most terrifying thing they could discover—the most devastating to morale. Straifer could imagine coming out of SD travel and seeing the star up close for the first time, only to have the elation turn to heartbreak when the speed-of-light transmissions from Earth included pictures and analysis of LQ Pyx from a century before.

  Maybe that’s why the SD messages from Earth had stopped. One of their last transmissions might have said, “You can turn back now, we’ve already finished the job.” What if a message like that had come when I.C.C. was down, during the post-revolt years? What if . . .

  What if I.C.C. had intercepted and garbled an all-important last message and didn’t even know it?

  No, I.C.C. was functioning perfectly. They’d received several transmissions since it had come back on line. A handful, but still . . . Nothing to indicate the convoy had been made useless by planet-side advancement.

  But now pure silence for a century of Earth’s time. Something was wrong, that was certain.

  Dr. Nakamura was the last person out of the room. Straifer stayed behind. He would take the bridge when they finally arrived, but for now he slid into his captain’s chair at the head of the marble table. “I.C.C., bring up the recording of Dr. Reginald Straifer the First giving his speech at the Planet United proposition conference. Please. And dim lights by sixty-five percent.”

  I.C.C. complied immediately—and there he was. Young Reggie Straifer. The scientist, the mastermind, the start of it all. A hitch made Captain Straifer’s lungs stutter, and his stomach roiled. Here was the man responsible for sending their roughly fifty thousand genomes into space. He made their lives possible. He gave them purpose.

  And had put the weight of ages on Reginald IV’s shoulders.

  Straifer had seen the looks, had felt the stares bore into the back of his head when he walked the halls. His genes had initiated the mission, and thus his crew expected something extra now that said mission had come to its first climax. They expected Straifer to perform a marvel. What kind of marvel he had yet to decipher. And even then, he wasn’t in the habit of preforming miracles.

  Would they blame him if the discovery was voided by Earth? If one of the scientists botched an experiment or an away mission?

  Those doubts gnawed at him. It was his responsibility to see that everything went right. He owed it to Reggie I, to the generations that had been born in space and died in space without every laying eyes on Earth or the anomaly. He owed it to Captain Mahler . . .

  Straifer’s stomach did another flip, but for a different reason. It had been years since the thought of Mahler had given him guilty pangs, but there was no circumnavigating the fact that Mahler was supposed to be captain when they reached the star, not Straifer.

  Mahler had gone and eliminated his genetic line, ensuring that no more Mahlers would ever be captain. Six years previous he’d committed suicide, leaving a strange, senseless note behind:

  Damn space. Damn utter pointless void of space. There isn’t shit out here, not shit. What’s the point in setting eyes on the variable? Won’t learn crap. It won’t mean anything. The lot of us on board’ll be snuffed out before the convoy gets back to people. Poof, we’re gone. What’s the point of living if it all just ends, like this, in dead space? Where’s the purpose?

  Straifer had read the suicide note over and over, trying to decipher it, to find some meaning. Captain Mahler III had never really been a happy man—witnessing the revolt in his youth had made him cynical—but he’d always seen death as weak. Only the weak passed on before they reached retirement. Straifer supposed that was why Mahler had ended it sooner rather than later. He must have realized that his tough-as-nails persona was a steel cage embroiled around a feeble heart. But no one knew for sure what had set him off.

  Was it the lack of communications from Earth? Or the decision to discontinue the reproduction of over a thousand crew members?

  Mahler II had discontinued the ringleaders of the revolt, but it had been Mahler III who’d suggested they discontinue all “defective” clone lines.

  Straifer understood the decision to permanently end the revolutionist’s influence. The way he saw it, those genes had failed. Their sole purpose for inclusion in the convoy was to see to the mission’s success. Since they’d blatantly subverted that purpose, they were
no longer needed. If they revolted once they could do it again. Best not to give them the opportunity.

  But that one decision opened the flood gates. Revolution wasn’t the only threat crew members could pose.

  The board, with Mahler the III at its head, had decided to discontinue anyone whose actions could be deemed harmful to the mission. Anyone with a history of early death due to illness was a possible drain on resources, and thus discontinued. Anyone with a history of work-impacting emotional distress had been deemed inefficient and discontinued. Anyone with a history of suicide was now unconditionally eliminated without the probationary generation which had been customary since year two.

  Mahler had known what he was doing. He didn’t want any more of his clones to be grown.

  Why?

  It couldn’t have had anything to do with me . . . ?

  No, surely not. Mahler had no way of knowing how his first officer felt about his wife. None at all. Straifer had never been inappropriate with Sailuk. She didn’t even know how Straifer felt until Mahler was gone. How could Mahler have known?

  He didn’t. He couldn’t.

  It wasn’t my fault.

  It wasn’t.

  Straifer refocused on the recording. Reggie was detailing what the mission might find. The possibilities.

  Like his original, Captain Straifer favored the more out-of-the-box concepts, like a giant crust of organic material. Something akin to the sugar-clouds the convoy had identified in some systems. Or maybe an asteroid sphere of coal or dirty-salt.

  In the early years they’d surfaced out of SD often, in order to give each generation a shot at practical research. But that too had now been declared a waste of convoy time and energy. Luckily, the practice had, at the very least, been enough to help expand their hypotheses about LQ Pyx.

  So Straifer expected something complex, but natural.

  Reggie had never taken the suggestions of alien contraptions seriously, but he must have known that he owed the acceptance of his proposal to the possibility. None of the other projects had offered what his had: the possibility, however slim, of finding evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life.