by Rick Partlow
"You are laboring from a false assumption," the AI informed him, and he could have sworn there was a certain smugness in the tone. "This ship," it continued, "does not travel close to the speed of light. It goes well beyond it."
"Impossible," Trint blurted before he thought about it. He made a face of disgust at his own narrow-mindedness before the echo of the word died.
"Unlikely, to be sure," the AI agreed readily. "Extremely difficult, most certainly. Which is why it took my makers millennia to even investigate the possibility. They already had the Transition drive, why would they seek out yet another way to travel between the stars? Particularly one such as this, which requires incredibly high energies and destructive applications of their gravity control technology simply to manufacture the material needed to create the effect?"
"What effect?" Trint asked, pacing slowly to the right and circling the vessel, trying to make some sense out of its mind-twisting shape.
"The inflation effect. This ship contains exotic matter in a negative energy state, you see."
"I know what each of those words means," Trint mused, laughing softly, "but put together in that combination they lose coherence."
The machine affected a sigh. "Let me simplify things for you, then. This ship uses exotic materials created in the heart of an artificial black hole to recreate the state of the universe as it was at the beginning, when space and time inflated away from the primal egg at velocities much faster than light."
Trint eyed the ship with skepticism. "That sounds extraordinarily dangerous."
"Oh, it most certainly is," the AI agreed. "The initial tests were done on microscopic scales, and there was never time for further trials before the Predecessors left this part of the galaxy."
"And this could take me home?" Trint wondered, coming to a halt as he began to realize that his eyes just refused to make sense of the thing's shape, no matter what angle he examined it from.
"It would take some months," the machine answered. "But yes, if it works, it could return you to your home world."
"And if it doesn't work," he presumed with morose fatality, "I am still stuck here."
"That would be the best case scenario for failure."
Trint looked around him, as if he could see the source of the disembodied voice in his head. "And what would be the worst case scenario?"
"We are isolated enough here so that, if the worst case scenario occurred, it would probably be limited to the total destruction of this star system."
Trint felt a sense of unreality wash over him. Probably. "Is such an outcome...likely?"
"Not at all," the AI replied with annoying cheerfulness. "The experiments never resulted in such a catastrophic failure. However, there is somewhere on the order of a 25 percent chance that the inflationary field could be misaligned initially, causing the atoms of the ship and anyone in it to spread out for several light years in every direction."
"That seems reasonable," Trint said, clasping his hands together in satisfaction. "When do we leave?"
Chapter Ten
"You're lucky you missed the storms," Jason Chen said. He stood in front of the hopper, arms folded, eyes ahead as he waited for Rachel and Pete to climb out behind him. "It was pretty bad here just a couple weeks ago."
Rachel squinted up at Goshen, Canaan's primary, thinking that the whole scene was surreal here in the long Day. It would have seemed more natural in the Night, with the storms Jason spoke of washing across the landscape and darkness shrouding the compound. Instead, Skingangers walked in broad daylight, their bare metal cybernetic replacements gleaming obscenely in the reflection from the Primary.
"This is so fucking strange," Pete murmured, shaking his head. "I knew they were here, but..."
"I wasn't crazy about letting any of the Skingangs stay, after what happened between them and the Predecessor Cult," Jason agreed. "Most of the survivors---the ones who aren't still in detention---bugged out on whatever half-assed spacer crew would have them. But this Arjan character managed to talk the Church Council into letting their group lease this land from the government on promise of good behavior." He shrugged. "I just do what I'm told."
The compound the last of the Skingangers had built in the river valley a few dozen kilometers outside Harristown was almost idyllic in a sterile sort of way. At least it seemed idyllic by comparison with the crumbling, run-down Corporate housing projects they'd taken over in Harristown after the war. The living quarters were buildfoam domes, some decorated with individual artwork, others grey and antiseptic. Larger domes were storage buildings and workshops, but most of the industry seemed to be centralized under a squared-off structure over a hundred meters long and half that wide, framed with local wood and covered in cheap corrugated aluminum.
Large sliding doors that could be shut against the stormy Night were open now to the Day and revealed dozens of the cyborgs swarming over buildfoam dispensers, construction 'bots, auto-fabricators and other machinery, elbow-deep in the open guts of the things like military doctors in an ancient field hospital. Rachel felt the hackles rise on the back of her neck at the way many of them went almost naked, flaunting their bionic streetware and the grotesque way it burrowed into their natural flesh.
She could barely stand to pass by them in the street.
"Let's get this over with," she said to Jason.
She didn't know if the Skingangers were staring at her and the others as they walked down to the repair bay. Their artificial eyes didn't move and they didn't look up from their tasks, but then most of them didn't have to; they were undoubtedly tied into remote cameras, drones and God knew what else. She felt the watching even if she couldn't see the eyes.
"Have you talked to this guy Arjan before?" Pete asked, looking around nervously, hand twitching like he wanted a gun in it.
"Not one on one, no," Jason admitted, seemingly less bothered by the surroundings than either of them. Offworlder, Rachel thought from decades-old reflex, and was immediately ashamed of it. "I saw Arjan at the Council hearings on the land lease." He cocked his head thoughtfully. "I'm not sure 'guy' is the correct term."
"Arjan is a woman?" Rachel asked, slightly surprised. Female Skingangers weren't rare, but their leaders tended to be male.
"I'm not sure about that, either," Jason confessed. "You'll see in a minute."
They had barely made it through the broad opening at the front of the repair bay when they were met by a short, burley man who was, for a surprise, more human than machine. Both arms had been replaced by cybernetic prosthetics, and one eye was clearly bionic as well, a plain red ocular; but aside from that, he appeared to be all flesh, at least as much as she could see with his sleeveless shirt and shorts. His face was squared off and his short-cut hair and remaining natural eye were both dark. He smiled at them cordially.
"Constable Chen," he said, his voice pleasantly deep, "it's a pleasure to meet you." He didn't offer a hand; most likely because he knew Norms would be uncomfortable with it. "I am called Brand."
"This is Rachel and Pete," Jason told him. "They're the ones who would like to talk to Arjan."
"Follow me, if you would," Brand said, gesturing further into the repair bay.
Jason let her and Pete fall in behind the man and then took up the rear, eyes scanning like a security camera. They moved across the packed-dirt floor, walking at a leisurely pace, and she could hear the hiss and spark of molecular bonders and even old-fashioned plasma welders, smell the pungent odor of burning lubricant as they weaved through the repair projects. It was how they made a living: repairing machinery for the bigger farms and the government, sharing the income in a sort of commune arrangement, or so Jason had told them on the way.
She would have had trouble picturing it. Her image of Skingangers was the one Cal had told her: kidnapping transients and scavenging their body parts to sell on the black market, selling synthetic endorphins and illegal ViRware to fuel their addiction to losing their humanity. They'd been part of the corruption and crime
that had plagued Harristown and the other cities on Canaan for years after the Corporate mines had invaded their planet. These...people didn't seem to match that image.
The one named Brand led them through a flimsy, plastic door at the rear of the bay and into a suite of spartanly-adorned offices. Inside, two of the cyborgs were plugged into banks of quantum computers via 'face jacks, standing bolt upright and motionless on bionic legs that never tired. Rachel wondered what they were doing; probably working some other contracted task for the commune, she imagined. Past them was another door, this one more solid and secure and definitely locked.
Brand hesitated before it for just a moment and then it opened with a click of release and a hum of servos. Rachel decided he had to have been using a neurolink transmitter and thought that curious: those were still relatively rare, the surgery to implant them complicated and expensive. What a Skinganger here on a backwater colony would be doing with one, she had no idea. Maybe this Brand had a government or military history he was trying to lose here on Canaan.
He led them through the door, into a smaller and homier room, its walls decorated with hand-sewn tapestries and a hand-painted canvas showing a forest at the foot of what looked like Mount Ararat, a tall peak a few hundred kilometers north of Harristown. Behind the desk, sitting in what looked like a chair but was clearly more of a reinforced support frame, was...well, Rachel suddenly knew why Jason hadn't been sure if Arjan was male or female, or if the terms had any meaning at all in this case.
Rachel had seen all sorts of Skingangers and even some of what they now called Transhumanists in her recent travels, but every one of them she had seen so far was at least recognizable as having once been human. Even Trint, the Imperial Guard cyborg who had been assembled in a Tahni lab out of cloned flesh and organs implanted into a metallic skeleton, looked like a living, biological being. Not Arjan. He...she...it? Arjan was a smooth, featureless metal surface polished to a bright silver that nearly hurt to look at. Basically humanoid in shape, but it was lacking a clearly-defined head, with only a rounded dome above its shoulders and no neck at all. Optical scanners ringed the dome, flashing red sequentially in a distracting display. Could it see 360 degrees at once, she wondered? How could a human brain process that?
If the thing breathed, it did so without movement or noise; she did hear a faint hum somewhere inside the metal that could have been a ventilation fan.
"Good morning, Constable Chen." The voice that came from speakers hidden somewhere in the seamless surface was pleasant and gender-neutral, sounding like the generic, computer-generated anchors for the NewsNets. "Ms. Lowenstein-Mitchell, Deputy Constable Mitchell, it's a pleasure to meet you." A polite pause. "I am Arjan, chosen director of the Evolutionary Collective."
"Oh, sweet Jesus," Pete muttered and Rachel felt herself redden slightly.
"We're very grateful you agreed to see us," she said, trying to ignore her brother in law's comment. She tried to find a place for her eyes to rest without seeming to be staring, and settled on looking at her own reflection in the silvery metal of the dome that passed for a head.
"I sense you're embarrassed," Arjan interrupted her. "You needn't be; his reaction is what I sought when I adapted this form many years ago. I wished to shock the Norms, to make myself something that people such as you would find loathsome and uncomfortable."
"Mission accomplished," Pete blurted, shaking his head.
"Pete!" Rachel glared at him. Behind Pete, Rachel could see Jase rolling his eyes.
It took her a moment to recognize the sound coming from the synthesizer in Arjan's body as laughter.
"Honesty is refreshing," the cyborg said. "Particularly in times such as these. Please have a seat."
Rachel shot Pete a warning look as the two of them fell into the chairs opposite Arjan, while Jason took one against the wall near the door.
"Do you find this place incongruous, Ms. Lowenstein-Mitchell?" Arjan asked her. Rachel blinked at the unexpected question.
"I suppose I do," she admitted, remembering what the cyborg had said about honesty. "It's very...peaceful, compared to what I remember of the Skingangs in Harristown."
"We have much to live down." It seemed half admission and half boast, she thought. "I know you've come here with questions, but would you indulge me for a moment? It's not often we have guests, and I sometimes have the urge to share our purpose with others."
Rachel marveled for just a moment at the slightly plaintive note in the synthesized voice. It had to take a pretty sophisticated neurolink and headcomp to achieve that sort of sophistication with no audio input.
"Sure, I suppose so," she acquiesced hesitantly, feeling a hazy sort of surreal quality to the whole experience. She snuck a look back at Jason and he gave a subtle shrug and a slight raise of his eyebrows.
"What I am," Arjan went on, "what I made of myself, was a reaction. It was a reaction to the expectations of Normal society, to the expectations of my family and my friends. The same is true for most of the people here, what you would still call Skingangers."
The more the cyborg spoke, the more Rachel's mind kept subconsciously trying to force it into some conventional identity. First, she assigned a gender: the thing had started out as a man, she was fairly sure of it already just from verbal cues. And probably one who'd been conventionally attractive, she thought, maybe arranged that way before birth by his parents. She pictured him as a square-jawed, clear-eyed type, then frowned as that made him look too much like Cal; she gave him dark hair to differentiate them, plus a thin, cruel mouth.
"When the Corporate Council presence here ended," the handsome, cookie-cutter face said somewhere inside that silver dome, "things became too warm for many of the Skinganger population and they sought shelter in places where their talents would be useful: as crew on independent cargo ships or asteroid mining rigs, or a half dozen other jobs in hard vacuum where a cyborg would be useful...and expendable." The imaginary thin mouth smiled cruelly.
"Those of us who stayed here had another thought. Our old community had been based on the thoughts and actions of others, rejecting their laws and morals the same way we had rejected our very biological humanity. I and a few others decided that we should spend less time rebelling against what others thought and more time deciding what it was that we ourselves sought from our existence."
A multi-jointed hand with fingers that could be changed out for various utilitarian purposes gestured expansively and Rachel nearly jumped at the unexpected motion. "We hire out for work, of course; everyone has material needs that must be met. But our focus has become to understand our place in the universe."
"That sounds a bit like your old enemy," Pete spoke up. Rachel glanced over, saw him with his chin propped on a fist, regarding Arjan intently. "The Predecessor Cult. They spent a lot of time thinking about their place in the universe."
"Our conflict with the Predecessor Cult was tragic," the sculpted face she'd constructed in her head frowned with practiced sincerity. "In truth, we shared much the same blind-spot in respect to the way we each defined ourselves. They, too, sought to identify their place and purpose by the projected desires of an external force, though in this case one whose desires they invented themselves." She could almost see him shake his head sadly, though the silvery dome never moved. "Would that we could help them to see the wisdom of seeking your own way inside yourself."
"Well, between the Constabulary, the Skingangers and the military," Pete said with a wry snort, "there's damn few of them left alive to seek anything."
"Arjan," Rachel interrupted, hoping to turn the conversation back to something more useful and less uncomfortable, "we came here because we know you worked for Cutter for quite a while. We're interested in what you might be able to tell us about a Tahni called Kah-Rint."
The cyborg was silent for a long moment, and Rachel was beginning to wonder if she'd offended him by changing the subject.
"I haven't heard that name for years," Arjan said finally in a tone that
might have been thoughtful. An ironic chuckle burbled from the synthesizer. "We were speaking of those seeking to find their place; there was one truly without a place of his own."
"What do you mean?" Rachel asked, hoping to keep him talking.
Another short pause. "You know about Cutter's past, in the war?"
"We know he was DSI cadre," Jason confirmed.
"A...friend of ours served with him," Rachel put in, thinking that she might be stretching the word "friend."
"Cutter met Kah-Rint back then," Arjan went on. "I don't know the whole story, but I overheard enough to know that Kah-Rint helped him somehow during the Tahni occupation of Demeter. Whatever he did, Cutter felt as if he owed him a debt; when Kah-Rint showed up needing work, Cutter gave him a job without hesitation."
"A job doing what?" Pete wanted to know.
"Kah-Rint was not one of us; that is, he had no cybernetic replacements. As he was also Tahni, he didn't fit in well here on Canaan back in those days. Fortunately for him, Cutter needed someone to handle offworld acquisitions and sales of acquired..." a hesitation and Rachel imagined a shrug. "...organs."
"Oh," Rachel said almost involuntarily. She knew, on an intellectual level, that the Skingangers financed their enterprises through Ripjacking---kidnapping addicts, transients and other criminals and harvesting their organ for sale on the black market to those not wealthy enough to afford cloned replacements, but she felt a kick in the gut from the casual admission.
"From what I understand," Arjan continued, "Cutter came to trust Kah-Rint quite thoroughly, and left him in charge of most of his business dealings while he himself worked more with the technical side of things, as well as pure research."
"Yeah, we've seen that," Pete murmured, barely loud enough for Rachel to catch it.
"Do you know anything about his offworld connections?" Rachel asked. "Did he have anyone in the active military he contacted regularly?"
