Noumenon Infinity

by Marina J. Lostetter

  When the team was finally given the go-ahead to strip out of their pressure suits, Caznal’s gaze fell on her apprentice, and she knew what was wrong. The dark curls of his hair framed his tan face and swooped over his ears just so, emphasizing the strong arched slope of his nose. From this angle—with his helmet propped triumphantly under one arm, smile bright and proud—he was the spitting image of a classical statue of a Turkish youth she’d seen in the archives once, but it was his resemblance to someone else that urged her to head to Hvmnd as soon as the doctors declared them all contaminate-free.

  The pilot running unscheduled flights from Hippocrates to Hvmnd looked surprised to have a passenger, which wasn’t unusual in Caznal’s experience. Not many people made regular visits to the server ship like she did.

  The nine original convoy ships were very different in design from the three added upon Convoy Seven’s second launch, reflecting centuries upon centuries of Earth-centric design evolution. Where the original ships were, in many ways, reminiscent of a cross between zeppelins and beetles, both in their color and nature—being mostly bulbous (save Solidarity and Bottomless II, which were like floating towers) and silvery, and very utilitarian in their individual design differences—the newer ships were earthy. They were dark, and their exteriors had flows and layering that looked imperfect, more natural than designed. If the first nine were biomechanical (heavy on the mechanical), the additional three were geomechanical: they seemed to have morphology, weathering, like they were composed of stones and mud brought together by sheer gravitational adherences.

  Of course, fundamentally, they were still ships. But she’d bet her leisure rations any aliens making visual contact with Slicer, Hvmnd, and Zetta would do a double take when they realized they weren’t looking at aesthetically pleasing asteroids.

  Disembarking, she was met by one of the caretakers, Ina, who she knew best of all the server ship workers, save the captain. Though best didn’t mean well. It was difficult to truly know anyone who’d been raised on Hvmnd well.

  That was because Hvmnd occupied a strange nexus between the convoy’s morality, culture, and the need for Earth’s computing technology. Earth-proper no longer used artificial computers—a fact which nearly led to I.C.C.’s demise—and had learned to use organic power (human brains, animal brains, partial neural networks that could only loosely be called brains) to a much greater advantage. So when the convoy had relaunched, decked out with all the advancements the planet had to offer, the package had included a computing upgrade: clone lines whose sole purpose was to act as human servers.

  That didn’t sit well with the board. It might be common for people to sell years of their life away on Earth, but the convoy found it appalling.

  They’d intended to shut down that portion of Hvmnd once they were well away from Earth’s watchful eye. After all, with I.C.C. and its inorganic servers fully functional, there was no real need to revamp the original system.

  But that was before the conversion of Zetta into a graviton supercycler. Zetta had been built to store the zetta-joules of energy the convoy was expected to retrieve once they completed the Dyson Sphere around LQ Pyx. But the crew had needed it for a different purpose: to turn on the Nest. And this new purpose carried a hefty need for processing power. Power the convoy’s antiquated computing system could not provide.

  Hvmnd was required after all.

  And yet, cloning lines simply to harvest their brain power would not do.

  The server clones had to be given a chance at wakefulness, which meant they would sometimes be off-line. The convoy would either need to accept this disruption, or find a new way to fill the computing void. None of the regular crew members wished to give up portions of their lives to such a service, so where could they get perfectly good brains no one was using anymore?

  There was a reason some people called Hvmnd “the grave ship.”

  “Permission to visit?” Caznal asked.

  The caretaker bowed slightly, revealing the row of implanted connections on the top and sides of her shaved head. “Of course.” She gestured for Caz to follow her out of the bay.

  “How are your children?” Caz asked as they entered the main bay.

  “Sleeping,” Ina said simply, stopping at a row of iron black steps and indicating Caz should continue without her.

  Her boots rattled the connected, corrugated catwalk as she ascended to the level above, and the fine blond hairs on the back of her neck rose with the shock of cold. It was unpleasantly chilly outside of the shuttle bay—for those that were awake, that is. Most of Hvmnd was a single bay, like Slicer, only instead of alien devices, Hvmnd stored people. Catwalks, like the one Caznal was on, snaked this way and that through the many layers of hanging chairs, which held people from all divisions, plugged in and strung up.

  It wasn’t just the cold, though. Each ship carried its own smell. Eden always smelled so green and fresh, even in its subarctic tundra biodome, and Hippocrates smelled like rubbing alcohol. Mira smelled like home, and depending on what part of Shambhala you were visiting, it could smell like a sweaty gym or a bowl of buttery popcorn.

  Hvmnd smelled like something ancient. The way family heirlooms smelled. Like history and age.

  “Why am I not surprised to see you here?” said a familiar voice over Caz’s shoulder.

  Captain Onuora always did know how to make an entrance. Caz whirled to see great mechanical arms, like silver spider’s legs, dangling from tracts in Hvmnd’s ceiling. They clasped the captain’s wheelchair, and she controlled them deftly from a keypad on her armrest. With a few extra flicks of her wrist, Onuora bade them set the chair down next to Caz, then they folded up and away, ready for her whenever she called on them again.

  Caz saluted, and Onuora answered it with a stern expression, before going into Mothering Mode, as she was inclined to do. “News travels fast—shouldn’t you be celebrating? I know you found something down there.”

  Caz strode down the walkway, and the captain stayed at her side, the old-world Jamaican flag on the back of her wheelchair fluttering out behind her like a cape.

  Onuora was not part of the original Noumenon crew, just as Caz wasn’t part of it. Their lines were fresh, having only been aboard a few generations. But few people of the forty-second century could trace their family history like Onuora. She took pride in her connection to Earth, whereas many of the original crew didn’t seem to care for genealogy past their original’s birth.

  Earth was an abstraction in many ways, which had little bearing on their reality. But it also still mattered, if only as something that could provide grounding—perhaps literally—to the convoy’s reality.

  “I will,” Caz said, “I mean, I am celebrating, and . . . he should know.”

  The captain gave her a pitying look, shifting uncomfortably in her chair. Her achondroplasia had led to severe arthritis in her hips, as it had with the majority of those in her line. And while the seat was customized just for her—the wheels were controlled by a chip implanted in her brain, just like a prosthetic hand that could grasp or foot that could flex—and was the perfect size for her smaller frame and foreshortened limbs, it wasn’t where she spent the majority of her working hours. In fact, as often as Caz had been to Hvmnd, she rarely saw the captain in her chair. “I’ll give you your privacy, then. Come to the bridge before you leave?”

  Hvmnd’s bridge was the only constant zero-g environment in the convoy, at Captain Onuora’s insistence. She preferred the freedom of movement that came with weightlessness. It eased the pressure on her aching joints, let her fly from post to post. Caznal, on the other hand, always felt like a baby animal trying to stand for the first time whenever she visited—all wobbly legs and unintended directions. She wasn’t meant to fly. But that didn’t mean she’d begrudge her friend the visit. “Thank you, Captain. I will. And I can come back tomorrow to work on your chair, if you’re available.” On their off time, they liked to experiment with smaller graviton cyclers, to see if they could in
vent one precise enough to make Hvmnd’s metal arms obsolete.

  “Sounds like a plan,” said the captain with a smile. She swiped at a few keys, and the arms descended once more, lifting her away, back to her bridge crew.

  Caz continued her walk. She knew her path well, taking walkway fourteen-A, turning at row five before sauntering down to seat eight. A technician in a sandy-colored jumpsuit checked connections on one chair over, where a Korean woman with a long pale gray braid slept—Roh Jin-Yoon the Sixteenth. Her features flexed with the occasional mental stimulus, either into a half grimace or pseudo smile.

  Caznal nodded to the technician next to sleeping Jin-Yoon, who nodded back—the plugs on his dark scalp glimmering in the low light. He pulled an idle connection from where it dangled next to Jin-Yoon’s wrist and plugged it into one of his ports. Caznal immediately averted her eyes, quickly crouching down next to the unconscious man she’d come to visit.

  “How are you doing?” Caz asked elderly Ivan the Fourteenth, her mentor, taking his wrinkled hand in hers. He couldn’t answer, of course, but it gave Caznal comfort to speak to him. “We went to the surface. You won’t believe what we found.” Her thumb made tiny circles over the back of his age-spotted hand. “I just wanted to let you know, professor. I’ll finally get to apply what you taught me. I wish . . .” She glanced over her shoulder at the technician.

  He had his eyes rolled back in his head, his mouth moving around silent words. His position mirrored Caznal’s in many ways; he too had Jin-Yoon’s hand comfortingly in his.

  The techie came from the server lines. Deemed by Earth to have the highest capacity for processing, the people who’d been chosen as new computers for the convoy were now also the caretakers. They had their own lives—lives which Earth never thought they needed to lead—with agency over how they went about them. And still, many of them spent a good chunk of time (67.86 percent of typical waking hours on average, I.C.C. would tell you) plugged in.

  That was what Ina had meant when she said her children were sleeping.

  Sure she wasn’t being overheard—embarrassed about speaking out loud to someone in the dream state, who, by rights, she shouldn’t even be visiting, since he was legally dead and gone—Caz continued, “I wish you could be awake to see it.”

  “Caznal?”

  She jolted upright, letting go of Dr. Baraka’s hand.

  “I’m sorry,” the Inter Convoy Computer apologized, its voice emanating from a speaker mounted on the underside of the catwalk above. “It wasn’t my intention to startle you.”

  “It’s fine, I.C.C. What is it?”

  “Your husband is looking for you. I’ve patched him into the control room—Captain Onuora has allowed you to take the call there, for privacy.”

  “Thank you.” With a gentle primping of Baraka’s collar, and a quick brush of fingertips through his tussled hair, she let him be.

  A set of children rushed by as she climbed flight after flight, through the maze, to the control booth. They all sported age-appropriate connections, and still had their hair—all of it intricately weaved to show off the implants. One little girl pointed at her without a word, and the others nodded emphatically. She wondered, for a moment, if they were speaking mind-to-mind. Under convoy law, they weren’t supposed to, not unless plugged into Hvmnd’s system. The board had a long-ingrained mistrust of secret communications, born of conspiracy and mutiny.

  She thought for a moment about chiding them. Not because she begrudged them their heritage, but because it shined a light on her own faux pas. One does not visit the dead, and one does not speak mind-to-mind.

  But then the children laughed, as though she not being a caretaker was in itself a joke, and she moved on.

  At the top of the ship, a single wide door led into the control room. Inside, behind the long line of forward-tilting windows, was an equally long line of control panels, flanked itself by an equally long metal table. The room was empty, as it often was—the caretakers preferred a more hands-on approach to monitoring their charges. Only occasionally was a sentry posted up top.

  “Diego?” Caz asked, noticing the blinking light on one panel, indicating a comm line was open.

  “Where are you?” he asked. “Ivan’s here, Vega and Min-Seo, too. But no you. We can’t cut the cake until you get back.”

  “I just had a quick errand to run.”

  His pause said much. “If you’d waited a few hours I would’ve gone with you.”

  “I know. I wanted a little time to myself.”

  “Self-flagellation isn’t ‘time to yourself.’”

  Glaring, she crossed her arms and turned away from the consol. “I’m not punishing . . . I’m sharing it with him the only way I can.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “This is your day, and you should be able to celebrate it however you want.”

  “Just give me a little more time. Half an hour, tops, and I’m home.”

  “Deal. I love you.”

  She turned back around, posture softening. “Love you, too.”

  When the call ended, she slumped against the table, tracing the scratches in the surface. This table was nothing like the grand one on Mira, the long single slab of green granite that graced the situation room. That one was specially carved for the original mission, an artisan piece with only eleven brothers and sisters.

  “For what it’s worth,” I.C.C. said. “I wish the same. For Doctor Baraka, I mean.”

  “Were you eavesdropping?”

  “When do I not?”

  “Fair point,” she conceded.

  She meant to clam up, then. To go back to the professor’s side. But the conflicting feelings—the excitement, the doubt, the sadness and rage—all came gushing forth. Here, in this quiet space, with only the Inter Convoy Computer to hear her, she let loose. “But it’s not fair. They couldn’t give him six months. Six months. Just so he could see where his life’s work was leading. And they wouldn’t let me . . .”

  “I processed your request to wake him,” it said sympathetically. “I know.”

  “I mean, I get it. I know why it’s law. Those put under should never be woken again. Retirement is retirement, and whether the retiree travels to Hippocrates or Hvmnd, they both have to be treated the same: gone.” She clutched the edge of the long table, her knuckles whitening as her fingers curled into talons against the smooth surface.

  “I understand that as well, though I don’t necessarily agree.”

  She was surprised. “No?”

  “Human morality has always been hazy to me. It shifts with the circumstances. Typically, checks and balances are applied, positives and negatives weighed against one another. But not all positives and negatives carry equal measures, as it should be. I do not wish to indicate I believe the board’s thinking incorrect. It is simply different from my own.

  “Originally, human servers were believed to be fundamentally immoral, while scheduling end-of-life procedures was not. But when the need for human processing became apparent, the board concluded the two things equal. Now, retirement still equates to passing, but it also signals a transition into a new kind of service. And, just like death, the transition is believed only to be moral if it is final. No teasing retirees with glimpses of their old lives—such an outing is thought to be cruel and unnecessary.”

  “And, typically, I would agree,” Caz said. Her face felt hot, her eyes puffy. She didn’t want to cry today. Not when it was supposed to be her day of discovery, of triumph. “But in special cases, like with Doctor Baraka, it’s crueler to keep him under.”

  “If he were retired in the traditional manner he would not be present for such an event. He would be deceased,” I.C.C. said. “Which is, of course, the board’s logic: a retiree’s time aboard the convoy has ended, one way or another. That is why he cannot be awakened, that is why we cannot convey information about the outside world to him, even in a dream. And yet, this logic is faulty. Obviously so.

  “To deprive one of a deeply
personal experience for consistency’s sake does not feel like a moral move to me. But I also understand what kind of gray area such exceptions would create. Should everyone be reawakened for the birthing of a grandchild? For new progress made in their field of expertise? For loved ones’ marriages?”

  “I don’t know.” Her vision started to blur slightly, her eyes watering. “I just know that Doctor Baraka should be here.” She inhaled a shaky breath. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Stop crying.

  “You see,” I.C.C. said with a curious tone. “Hazy. Malleable. A plastic morality.”

  “It’s the only kind worth having,” she said, not sure she believed it.

  I.C.C. did not hedge on the point. “I agree. One cannot function in absolutes—empathy sees to that. But so does narcissism. They are two sides of the same human capacity.”

  “You think utter selfishness and utter caring spring from the same plasticity?”

  “I believe so, yes. But it’s important to note I said narcissism, which is a different kind of selfishness, born out of self-love, quite different than the selfishness exhibited by animals who have not yet become self-aware.”

  Caz rubbed at her face. She felt her equilibrium returning, the sudden swell subsiding. “Why are we philosophizing about morality right now? I need to get home.”

  “Edging the discussion toward the intellectual and away from the personal has consistently helped clones in your line maintain their composure. I would have tried a different tactic with other crew members. Is it helping?”

  A little laugh escaped her. “You are a wonder, I.C.C. Yes. Thank you.”

  They worked for nine months excavating Crater Sixty-four and scouring the rest of the planemo’s surface. The entire convoy’s manpower was thrown behind the project, accomplishing in less than a year what it might have taken the Nataré team decades to accomplish alone. They scouted several other spots across the globe—places with anomalous geology—but nowhere else did they find evidence of alien inhabitation.