Exodus

by Alex Lamb

  Will fumed as he glanced about. This was the last moment in the world’s official history? No, he realised – these were the last moments in the life of the person he’d once been. Of course there was no shared history beyond this point. If Elsa was to be believed, the intervening years had been experienced from billions of different perspectives at once. The clones probably stored that information in a totally different way.

  He marched back out into the helical corridor, bumping an unsuspecting Will-duplicate on the way. This copy wore a fuzz of short black fur and had weirdly wide-spread eyes. He looked almost like a Galatean domestic robot.

  ‘Watch where you’re going,’ said the robot-Will in a synthetic-sounding voice.

  Will forced back a snarl of disgust, muttered an apology and kept walking. He could feel the copy’s eyes on his back as he strode away.

  Even if he couldn’t learn about the recent past here, he could at least fix the damned holes in his memory. He decided to head straight for the first major gap he’d identified – his reaction to his lost wife Rachel.

  He followed the ramp to the nearest elevator site and stabbed the old-fashioned button marked down. When the elevator appeared, he found a clone inside wearing an outfit that was part Surplus Age lift operator, part clichéd academic attire. He had a tweed jacket with two rows of brass buttons and leather patches on the elbows. The elevator featured a pair of armchairs, a reading table and a bookshelf.

  Will hesitated on the threshold. He hadn’t expected to be confronted by a human operator. Nobody had done a job like that for centuries.

  ‘Can I help you?’ said the clone in the lift.

  ‘Take me to Rachel, please,’ said Will tersely. ‘First encounter.’

  He dearly hoped he hadn’t somehow given his ignorance away simply by asking.

  Fortunately, the lift operator looked delighted by the request.

  ‘An excellent field of study,’ he said, grinning broadly. ‘I assume you’re referring to the human original rather than the Transcended simulacrum?’

  Something deep inside Will’s mind lurched. The shadows in the elevator abruptly gathered depth.

  ‘What did you say?’ said Will.

  The lift-librarian regarded him uncertainly. ‘A simple question, my dear Will,’ he said. ‘We historians strive to be precise, that is all. I assumed you were referring to the woman herself, and not the alien shadow which …’

  Will missed the rest of what the clone was saying. He gripped the elevator door to hold himself steady as blocked memories burst free inside him.

  The Transcended.

  They were the feature of his former life that had eluded him. Suddenly the fragments of his past made much more sense. He’d encountered them, back during the war, and they’d changed him. He hadn’t been truly human from that moment forward.

  That was why the presence of clones had so disturbed him. He’d tried to make backups of himself in his former life and failed. The Transcended had stopped him. And that was why he’d had the gall to take on Snakepit’s planet-sized intelligence. Because he’d been humanity’s only living super-weapon. That was why he owned a starship and why he’d been betrayed.

  Now that he remembered that shadowy race, it astonished him that they’d somehow slipped his mind. His meeting with them had shaped the entire arc of his life. How could he possibly have forgotten?

  Then he understood: the fault in recall wasn’t his. He’d been prevented from seeing. And with that thought, one last, terrible memory landed like a comet in his mind.

  The Transcended had killed him. Will had discovered that they were responsible for Snakepit and the race of monsters it had spawned. So they had shut him down. They had pinned his mind open and dissected it while he was still conscious.

  Will screamed as the vivid horror of that moment flooded back into him. The next thing he knew, he was on his knees, gripping the elevator doorway with bloodless knuckles. The lift-librarian stared at him with wide, frightened eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Will, dragging himself to his feet. ‘Unexpected side effects of a little mental massage. I’m still integrating my new identity. I’ll be fine.’

  He backed away from the elevator.

  ‘Please,’ said the lift-librarian awkwardly. ‘Don’t walk. You should sit down. I’ll ring for help.’

  ‘No,’ said Will. ‘No time, I’m afraid. I just remembered something important.’

  He walked back up the ramp as fast as he dared, trying not to break into a run.

  ‘Wait,’ said the lift-librarian, but Will wasn’t hanging around to see what help looked like. He had the awful sense that he’d given himself away again – badly, this time.

  The lift-librarian stepped out of his elevator study and started following Will up the ramp.

  ‘Please!’ he said again. ‘Will! This isn’t safe.’

  Will didn’t look back. He headed straight for the door to the Mettaburg concourse.

  The domesticbot clone moved to block his path. Will darted around him and began to jog. He strode into the arrivals area to lose himself in the crowd.

  He was about halfway across the station when a curious clanging filled the air. From an unmarked archway, four new clones appeared – each twice the height of the other pedestrians. They wore tiger-striped police uniforms and eerie plaster masks bearing Will’s face.

  ‘EVERYONE PLEASE STAND STILL,’ one of the monsters announced in a voice like thunder. ‘A DISTURBANCE IS BEING INVESTIGATED.’ Suddenly, Balance seemed a lot more menacing.

  It took a few moments for everyone in the room to clue in. Many of the copies kept walking. Will took advantage of the lag and moved straight for the exit area. He muttered his destination under his breath over and over, in case departure needed an incantation like the one that had lit up the signposts.

  ‘Mettaburg! Mettaburg! Mettaburg!’

  He had no idea why the simulation hadn’t simply frozen at Balance’s command, or why commuters still appeared to be coming and going. He simply didn’t understand enough about how this place worked, but while it was letting him leave, he wasn’t complaining.

  ‘PLEASE STEP AWAY FROM …’

  Will didn’t hear the rest because the station vanished. His eyes flew open to reveal the walls of an open gravesite overlooked by a high, wooden ceiling with the words Welcome to Mettaburg painted on it in red.

  Will drew a breath of fresh air and groaned with relief. He’d made it out. Just. No more exploring. This time he was headed straight for the Proustian Underground as fast as he could, presuming Balance didn’t catch him first.

  3.2: MARK

  Rather than return them to the resort, the Fleet offered Mark and Zoe an executive suite in the officers’ dorm near the shuttle station. They reluctantly accepted. Once there, they locked the doors and raised the privacy baffles. Mark didn’t have anyone he wanted to say goodbye to on Galatea other than his wife. The Gulliver had been his home for years, and most of his friends were either dead or out on missions of their own. Even if they’d still been around, Mark wouldn’t have traded a moment with Zoe for any of them.

  They both wanted their last night together to feature sex prominently, but in the end it comprised a lot of quietly frantic holding and a total lack of sleep. They lay on the grey, standard-issue bed-foam and stared at the ceiling while the weight of impending separation suffocated them like invisible pillows. After decades of operating together as a tight-knit team, the prospect of a long, possibly fatal mission apart hurt too keenly to be ignored.

  In order to freshen up the following morning, Mark had to resort to a fatigue-flush and the nausea that went with it. As soon as he was done retching, he dressed and held Zoe again until the room warned him about missing his departure window. He clung to her, wordless, while the room complained.

  ‘You have five minutes to leave before transfer to the briefing shuttle becomes impossible. Failure to depart at this time will constitute abandonment of your assigned mission.
If you do not wish to participate in the mission, the Fleet requires spoken acknowledgement …’

  Eventually, Zoe dragged herself from his hopeless grip. She batted his strengthless hands away and pushed him out of the suite, her eyes full of tears. She locked the door after him. Mark stood there for a full minute with his head resting on the door before the hallway started dumping warnings into his sensorium.

  He left for the shuttle in a daze and spent the next four hours trying to force discipline into his tormented head. He needed to be rational about the mission, even if he wasn’t happy with the way it had been crewed. Or how much notice he’d been given. Or the transparent ploy to separate him from his wife. Or anything else about the Academy’s shitty, underhand tactics.

  By the time the info-shielded briefing shuttle arrived to collect him from Fleet Orbital One, Mark was as ready as he would ever be. His sadness had given way to empty dislocation. Zoe had been right. While it hurt like hell to leave her, he had to make the best of the mission.

  It was the one thing they hadn’t tried. They’d bombed Phote worlds, attempted infiltrations and engaged in secret plans to poison entire planets. None of it had slowed the Photes’ advance. Now it was either risk Backspace or roll over and get ready for absorption into the grinning mass-mind that lay in wait for them. Mark knew he couldn’t let it come to that. If he abandoned his original vision, he’d just be letting himself, Zoe and everyone else down.

  The interior of the briefing shuttle was as blandly well appointed as the executive suite he’d left behind. Mark made the obligatory ablutions in the zero-gee wash-space next to the bioseal doorway and knocked back the welcome file the shuttle SAP dumped into his head.

  The mission profile unpacked before him. A new ship, the GSS Edmond Dantes, had been readied for them with full schematics available upon boarding. Mark would operate as expedition lead, as expected. The day-to-day operations and selection of research goals would be his responsibility.

  The mission’s Social Accountability Officer would, of course, retain veto rights and final authority, with the understanding that this power would be asserted only as necessary to act for the collective good of the Galatean people.

  No surprises there. Mark had known the moment Ira mentioned the mission that there would be a Social Accountability Officer in there somewhere. In his experience, on any ship other than his own, there always was one.

  The only surprising component of the plan lay in the stipulation that his expedition would begin the moment they reached the Depleted Zone and not before. Prior to that, his SAO would exercise direct authority over the proceedings and treat the flight as a standard Galatean military operation. His eyes narrowed as he ingested that detail. It smacked of further deceit. He filed it away for later thought and drifted into the main shuttle lounge.

  The central space was lined with wall-panels bearing the obligatory agitation patterns and a circle of low-gee harness-couches where four of his new crew-mates hung waiting. Ira was already there. The other familiar face belonged to Clath Ataro, the physicist sitting in his wife’s chair. She’d gained a rather dowdy cyan buzz cut since the last time he’d seen her. Her large, nervous, almond-shaped eyes oozed hope and good intent. She shot him a smile. Mark nodded back.

  His mission profile filled in the identities of the two new faces. The man in his subjective thirties with the narrow, tightly held features and the oddly plasticised hair was Judj Apis, a biosciences and security expert. He looked like the kind of guy who spied for the government even when he wasn’t being asked to. He had a résumé full of awards and decorations, but Mark was used to that. Most of the people he flew with had more accolades than sense.

  The fashionably bald girl sitting next to him with the chromatophore scalp and hard eyes was Palla Muri, his SAO. Her objective age was nineteen and her bio contained almost nothing except the words Autocratic Academy. Nothing else was necessary.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Mark woodenly, clipping himself into a free seat. ‘Is this all of us?’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Palla. ‘One more.’

  The bioseal door opened again to let Andromeda Ludik through. Mark gawped, his pulse booming in his ears. If anything, Ann was even more beautiful than the last time he’d seen her, and even more imposing. These days, Ann was over two metres tall with a perfect Amazonian physique, short, jet-black hair and the face of a warrior goddess. Her physical form had been slowly morphing to optimise her visual impact during the entire time he’d known her.

  She’d made the changes, so far as he could tell, with zero interest in her own personal appeal but meticulous attention to public relations and her effectiveness in the field. He’d been told that the mere sight of Ann in full battle rage tended to freeze even the most tightly programmed Photes into inactivity.

  However, it wasn’t her looks that had Mark staring. It was the fact that she was there at all. Certainly she had mission relevance. She’d worked with Will and been the recipient of his molecular technology, but she was also Galatea’s top weapon and an icon to boot. Regardless of any failures on her part, she still single-handedly constituted a significant share of the colony’s remaining military might.

  He glanced at Ira’s impassive face and then back to Ann. You didn’t put all your failing, high-profile military heroes on the same ship for small reasons. They weren’t just getting him out of the way. Whatever logic had brought them here had to be a lot darker than that. Mark’s sense that there was something deeply wrong with his dream mission increased another notch.

  Ann drifted over and clipped herself in without making eye contact with anyone. Mark watched her as the silence dragged. They’d barely spoken since the Earth evacuation – just a few bitter exchanges in which Ann had managed to pack a great deal of implied menace.

  ‘Great to be here,’ said Ann, without an ounce of emotional inflection in her voice. ‘Shall we get going?’

  Palla nodded and gestured at the ceiling cameras. The shuttle undocked and headed out to high orbit where their ship waited. The gees gently shunted everyone back into their seats.

  ‘Welcome, everyone,’ said Palla Muri as soon as the wall-panels displayed the safe to talk icon. ‘As your shadows will already have told you, I’m Palla, your new best buddy and fearless leader, at least in the political sense. Mark here is leading the cool sciencey bit, but we’ll get to that later. There’s nothing to see in my bio unless you’re running Habanero-level encryption, so let me tell you a bit about who you’re dealing with. I flunked out of the Academy about two years ago for making unnecessarily combative decisions – or so my peers decided, anyway – and was sidelined into ship-level leadership.’

  Mark’s eyebrows crept upwards. That was a lot of specialisation in one so young. For all her faults, Palla had to be good. She apparently knew it.

  ‘I’ve been working on counter-raids ever since. I have thirty-seven Phote gunship kills and five own-goals. Which I think makes me a perfect fit for this mission.’

  Mark’s eyes opened wider. That was an astonishing level of effectiveness for such a short career, but it also spoke of a trigger-happy zeal that made his own wobbly record look tame. Own-goals was Fleet slang for destroying a ship in your own raiding squad. Usually one own-goal earned you a caution. Two got you kicked out of the Fleet. Three warranted either storage or mandatory suicide. Clearly, Palla was as much of a special case as the rest of them.

  ‘Needless to say, as your fun-loving SAO, I have all the ship’s overrides and I get to detonate the ship any time I see fit. So be nice to me, because your lives are in my hands.’

  She smiled and winked at Mark. He blinked back in confusion.

  ‘I’m also trained to do every job on this ship to a basic level of competence. So when not issuing unwelcome diktats, I’ll be filling in with whatever grunt-work is necessary. You’ve all had more time in specialised roles than me, so tell me what to do and I’ll wash your digital dishes. My psych evaluation, which most of you aren’t allowe
d to see, is full of peachy little warning flags, mostly about anger issues and whatever. But I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. So long as none of you pisses me off.’

  She shot them a conspiratorial smile, as if to say, You’ve pissed me off already, but I don’t mind.

  Mark’s back tightened as he listened. Palla’s breezy, subversive tone was pure New Society – the kind of kid who’d play tag with you right up until they were ordered to stab you in the back.

  ‘My sub is Ira here, who I think used to be the president or something, back when we still had dumb shit like that. He’s also our psych specialist, so he does get to look at my flags. Lucky boy – right, Ira?’

  Ira regarded her with empty eyes and nodded.

  ‘How the mighty have fallen, eh, Ira? The president of everything is now a fricking support officer. How’s that working out for you?’

  Ira gazed at her and shrugged.

  ‘You can tell me,’ she said. ‘We’re all friends here, right? It’s not like anybody here is going to call you a failure to your face. Despite all those lives you wasted.’

  Ira didn’t so much as blink. Mark, however, lost patience. Ira had been like an uncle to him and he’d never seen the man do anything but his best.

  ‘Is this really necessary?’ he said.

  They were supposed to be having a mission briefing. Even for a military culture that had practically enshrined informality, Palla’s behaviour was out of line.

  ‘You’re so right,’ said Palla with an undaunted smile. ‘We can chit-chat later.’ She pointed at him. ‘And this, of course, is the famous Captain Ruiz,’ she said, ‘our pilot and expedition lead. He’s studied the Depleted Zone for years and, out of all of us, he’s the only one who’s been inside it before. It wasn’t great, apparently. He tried to rescue his half-mum and got stuck there for weeks while all his passengers nearly died. Mind you,’ she said, looking him up and down, ‘the prospect of being stuck in a ship with Captain Mark and nothing to do all day doesn’t sound so bad to me.’