by M. D. Cooper
Now, the cornucopia of products available was more insulting than fascinating. He barely had enough money to buy lunch on Brilliance, let alone any of the fancy toys that Luminescent Society wasted its money on.
He pushed his dislike of Luminescent opulence out of his mind and focused on his presentation.
The platform he worked and lived on, SK87, was performing well and Luther wanted to expand it. Markus had been sent to present the plans to the assessors for approval. Convincing the Lumin oversight board that it was the right plan would not be hard; a thousand years of delegating any hard work or menial labor meant they didn’t have much experience with assessing work schedules and ROI projections.
Markus was distracted by a particularly useless Lumin specimen they passed. He couldn’t be certain if it was male or female, but its arms and legs ended in wheels and it was spinning and rolling through the corridor, giggling as it went.
“I can’t believe we work our entire lives so they can turn themselves into useless…I don’t know whats…just useless,” Simon muttered.
Markus chuckled. “It wasn’t entirely useless; I imagine you could put some sort of bucket on it and turn it into a hauler.”
“I can imagine what the yard foreman would say about that,” Simon laughed softly
“We have about three hours before our meeting,” Markus said. “I know a place near here where we can get some food and relax for a bit.”
Simon nodded his assent and Markus led him through the wide boulevards to a less trafficked area. The overt gaudiness of the station was somewhat diminished, but it was still far more opulent than SK87.
Before long they reached their destination, a small restaurant that would serve Noctus—though only with automated servitors. After the robot had brought their food, Simon spent some time eyeing it suspiciously.
“Try it,” Markus prodded him. “It’s not often you get to eat something that wasn’t grown in a vat.”
Simon looked horrified. “You mean this was alive?”
“Of course, Lumins only eat real food. No vats or mush for them.”
Simon sat staring at his food for several minutes and eventually screwed up the courage to take a bite.
“Mmmm…I didn’t know food could taste so good! How do you go back to eating the crap on the platform after this?”
“With great sadness—though sometimes the thought of eating plants and animals unnerves me,” Markus commented.
The pair enjoyed the rest of their meal in silence, looking out the portals at the star-side view of Lucent and the world of Incandus below.
“Have you ever been to a planet?” Simon asked Markus.
“No, I have to admit that the thought scares me a bit. Once you’re down there you’re stuck, and everything wants to fall on you. I think it would terrify me.”
“I’ve seen pictures,” Simon’s voice grew wistful. “Parks larger than SK87, larger than anything we’ve seen—can you imagine?”
Markus nodded. If he hadn’t seen pictures himself, he would never have imagined anything like that even existed. The Lumins lived lives the Noctus could only dream of.
A few hours later, Markus and Simon sat in one of the company’s many conference rooms, waiting for the Lumins who would review their proposal. The room was spare, but elegant in its appointment. The table was a shimmering plas and the chairs appeared to hover on invisible plinths.
Markus had never been in this particular tower before, but was unsurprised by the luxurious appointments. He kept his focus on ensuring the presentation went well. Once done they could get off Brilliance—hopefully before he went blind from all the bright lights and reflective surfaces, which were already giving him a headache.
Simon had carefully distributed hyfilm around the table for the committee to take after the meeting—the Lumins seemed to react better to physical media than pure holo presentations. He now sat fumbling with his notepad, prepared to jot down any pertinent thoughts. The device could not record here, as the Lumins disallowed Noctus to record anything in Luminescent Space; physical notes were the only way to record decisions.
It also allowed the Lumins to revert nearly any decision by simply claiming the Noctus had incorrect records.
After only several minutes of waiting, the company team filed in. There were three men and two women. Markus was surprised to see that one of the women was the Lumin he had followed off the shuttle.
“Markus, good to see you,” Yusuf, the President of Resources and Extraction, said.
He did not offer to shake hands.
“It is good to see you, sir,” Markus nodded his head in deference. He did not expect to see Yusuf here. It wasn’t a good sign—the president of R&E only made appearances to Markus’s detriment.
Yusuf did not acknowledge the gesture. “You know Thomas, Vlad and Sarah. Our newest member is Katrina; she manages transport and logistics for platform services.”
“It is good to meet you,” Markus nodded again. “I have one of my young team leads, Simon, with me. He knows the internals of our platform inside and out.”
None of the Lumins acknowledged Simon. Markus barely rated their attention and he had spent decades garnering the meager level of respect he now had.
The discussions were largely perfunctory. Most of the details of the platform’s expansion had been reviewed by the non-sentient AI Lumins employed for such tasks. It was Markus’s belief that the Lumins only brought him here to remind him who was the final authority in his life .
When they came to living quarters enhancements Yusuf scowled at the display.
“This expansion does not seem to be in proportion with the rest of the platform. It brings your living quarter allotment from 10% of platform space to 12%.”
Markus nodded. “Yes, sir, it does. 12% of platform space for living quarters is standard when platforms exceed twenty-eight cubic kilometers.”
“On new platforms that is the case, but this is an expansion of an existing platform, those concessions do not apply.” Yusuf spoke offhand as though he had given this little thought, but Markus knew the man. He was doing this on purpose to keep Markus in his place and not let him garner too much favor with his own people.
“Surely—.” Markus began, but was cut off by the wave of Yusuf’s hand.
All of the Lumins looked entirely implacable with the exception of Katrina whose lips twitched for just a moment, her expression belying a moment of consternation.
“Seriously?” Simon erupted beside Markus. “You’re going to increase our population by 120% to facilitate the additional throughput, but only increase our living space by 90%? We’re already crammed in cheek to cheek!”
“Simon!” Markus put a hand on his young companion’s shoulder in an attempt to quell his outburst.
“No, Markus, no! You’re as much a part of the problem as they are. I’ve seen it for myself, you bow and scrape and take whatever they give,” Simon stood to his full three meters as he yelled. Towering over the table, he reached into his jacket and began to pull something out.
“For the true Sirians and our independence!”
Markus fell back, aghast that Simon would do something so rash.
The Lumins looked alarmed at the outburst, with the exception of Yusuf. A smile played at the edges of his mouth and a stasis cone snapped down around Simon. A high pitched whine pierced the room and a decoupling field tore apart all matter in the cone.
The field broke Simon’s body down into a fine mist in moments. Markus listened for an explosion, or something that would indicate the young man had reached for a weapon.
Nothing.
Yusuf waved his hand and a holo appeared over the table showing Simon’s last moments in slow motion. He turned and zoomed; they could all see what he was pulling from his coat
“Hmm… a flag,” Yusuf sighed. “A lot of theatrics for a piece of cloth.” He looked to Markus. “Let’s hope your next assistant has more brains—and you have the intelligence to not make a mist
ake like that again. You run your people well. If not for that, I would kill you too.”
Markus couldn’t believe the calm in Yusuf’s voice. He had seen Lumins kill Noctus before, but never like this, never so casually.
Yusuf looked to his committee. “Unless there are any objections I approve this expansion proposal, excepting the disproportionate increase in living quarters.” He waited a moment to see if anyone spoke up; when none did, the President of Resources and Extraction stood and left the room.
Markus stood, silently watching them file out, unwilling to look at the seat where Simon should have been. Only the new woman, Katrina, looked him in the eye. Her expression showed a flash of sympathy and then she too was gone.
Markus barely noticed. The only thing on his mind was the thought of telling Simon’s mother.
He barely remembered getting back to the shuttle.
As he sat silently in his small quarters on the trip back to Sirius, a plan to started to form in Markus’s mind.
There had always been talk of rebellion among the Noctus. It had been present for his entire life, waxing and waning over the years. At present, there were more whispers in dark corners than usual, especially among the youth who had not been alive for the previous generation’s failed attempts—and the Lumins’ retribution.
The dissidents traded seditious documents and data, and held their small rallies in hidden areas of the platform. Markus had always tolerated them while ensuring they didn’t get too vocal and cause problems.
He had thought he was doing the right thing by protecting his people, keeping things in balance. But something about how casually Yusuf had killed Simon triggered a change in Markus. Maybe he had just had enough and had gone past his tipping point, but one thing was for certain: he saw things in a new light.
Markus knew why the other rebellions had failed. It was not because of lack of conviction, or even a failure to take a given platform or station.
Past rebellions had almost always succeeded at taking their initial objectives, but holding them was the problem. The Lumin space force arrived and either the rebels surrendered or were destroyed.
The way to succeed was to leave Sirius.
REVOLUTION
STELLAR DATE: 3246204 / 09.15.4175 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Mining Platform SK87
REGION: Noctilucent Space, Sirius Hegemony
Markus could still hear the sobbing cries of Simon’s mother in his ears. She had been so eager to hear how well her son had done in his new role. To go from that, to news of his callous death at the hands of the Lumins, may well be more than she could bear—especially after losing her husband in an accident several years earlier.
Markus made a note to check in on her in the days to come. The community on the platform was tight-knit and neighbors would console her and help her through this time—but it never hurt to be sure she didn’t need additional counseling.
Around him the corridors of the platform, ever bleak, seemed even more so. Endless kilometers of obedience, centuries of acquiescence.
Markus’s tall frame was hunched; his years weighed more heavily upon him than ever before. He barely noticed others as he passed them by, be they the Noctus workers—his people—or the sparse Lumin guards of the station’s garrison.
Although his frame implied defeat, his mind was churning with a fire he had not felt in many years. He had a plan and was about to take the first step in launching it.
He made his way past the platform’s two-hundred-year-old refinery—one of the areas he had proposed upgrades for that fateful day on Brilliance Station; past the bio vats in hydroponics; and into the waste reclamation area.
There was no doubt in his mind that they were meeting. He knew the players, knew how they thought, and what drove them. It drove him now as well.
It was a good place to meet, security patrols rarely came down to reclamation. The smell was enough to keep even the most brutish of them from making much more than a cursory examination every few weeks.
Markus, on the other hand, knew every corridor, every hatch, portal and conduit on the platform. Even without intel from people loyal to him he knew where this meeting would be held.
The door was unmarked; there was nothing to separate it from any other hatch in reclamation. It was a thick, gray plas, but through it he could hear the sound of voices raised in anger.
Markus took a deep breath and steeled himself for the storm he was about to endure.
He opened the door.
The first thing he noticed was that the room had many more occupants than he would have expected. Over forty men and women stood amongst the tanks and pipes, expressions ranging from rage to sorrow drawn across their faces.
The second was the figure of Sarah standing on a large vat, yelling at the crowd, whipping them into a frenzy.
“You see how they so callously kill one of our best sons, in cold blood, with no regard for us. We are worse than slaves; we are the children of slaves, and the parents of slaves. We raise new slaves and secure generations of our children as thralls of the shorts.”
The crowd replied with groans and cheers at the appropriate times, but perhaps not as enthusiastically as Sarah had hoped. After being pushed down for so long it was hard to even know what standing should feel like.
Markus had always liked Sarah, even though he knew she despised him. She saw him as nothing more than a puppet of their masters. Little did she know how often he had worked tirelessly to protect his people from far worse than they knew.
He knew that she felt, very keenly, for her friends and family, the people of the platform; she wanted more for them, but her pain manifested as anger and she was toxic to those around her. Because of this, her meetings were usually attended by only a dozen, at best.
“You!” She spotted Markus and leveled an accusing finger at him. “You have some gall coming here after what you did.”
There were nods and murmurs from the crowd as she spoke. The stares of his people bore into him, and he had to force his shame down, lest it make him turn and flee.
Sarah continued with her barrage before he was able to formulate a response.
“How long did it take to wash Simon’s blood off your hands? How much did you have to bow and scrape for their forgiveness after his death? After you stood by and watched them murder him?”
Several others called out, their anger a palpable thing to Markus. He didn’t expect them to be so visceral and a kernel of fear began to form in the pit of his stomach.
He held up his hands, his expression mirroring the sadness that filled him.
“I am at your mercy,” he said just loudly enough to be heard across the space.
The room fell silent at his words. They were so ready for his anger to meet theirs, to give them a reason to hate and harm.
“Is that all you have to say for yourself?” Timmur, a tug operator called out. “Simon’s father was a friend of mine, is this the respect you pay him, getting his son killed?”
“It is not all I have to say for myself,” Markus replied, his voice gaining strength. “I have been wrong all of these years. I have tried to find the perfect compromise between us and the shorts. I thought…I thought that if I could keep us under the radar, I could make a better place for us.
“I was wrong.”
No one spoke, even Sarah, usually ready to call out a biting retort to any statement, wore a shocked expression.
A voice broke the silence, Markus couldn’t see who spoke, but the words reverberated through the chamber.
“What will you do?”
“I have a plan to save us, to save each and every one of us,” Markus replied. “I plan to make your children’s children never know the yoke of slavery.”
Sarah’s eyes were bright as she asked, “do you plan revolution? Are we going to overthrow the Lumins?
Markus shook his head. “No, we are going to do what our ancestors did when they came here. Cross between the stars in search of
a new home.”
PLANS
STELLAR DATE: 3246713 / 02.05.4177 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Mining Platform SK87
REGION: Noctilucent Space, Sirian Hegemony
“Tell him to put it where I said,” Markus all but yelled into the comm. “If he puts it there, how will we mount the new set of batteries next month?”
The platform administrator was silent for a moment.
“Good, make sure he does it then.”
Markus switched off the comm and looked back at Luther. “Sorry about that, there’s a lot of wrangling to do.”
The overseer steepled his fingers, looking over the tips at his administrator. “Will there be a problem completing on schedule? There is a lot riding on this for me.”
Markus knew that all too well. Not only because Luther reminded him of it almost daily, but because he understood how political capital was spent in Luminescent Society.
Despite not attending the meeting that infamous day on Brilliance Station, Luther had laid a much of the groundwork for the station’s upgrades. He was a lazy ass, but he was a lazy ass with connections.
It could be worse, Markus mused, he could have an overseer who was a micromanager. At least Luther couldn’t be bothered to actually check up on any details. So long as the quotas were met and profits were where they should be he was happy.
“We’re on schedule and we haven’t missed any deliverables during the buildout,” Markus replied. “If we keep it up we’ll set a new record for efficiency during a platform upgrade.”
Luther smiled. Markus knew the man loved to brag about successes when his district quorum assembled. Successes that Markus and his people bled to earn for the useless Lumins.
“Very well. I’m returning to Luminescent Space tomorrow, but Steven will be remaining behind to ensure that things keep moving smoothly,” Luther said as he stood. “Be sure to keep him apprised of your progress.”
