Cosmic Powers

by John Joseph Adams

  “This is true.” I bobbed an arm.

  “You will help me,” Armand said.

  “The fuck I will,” I told it.

  “If I am taken, I will die,” Armand shouted. “They will kill me.”

  “If security catches you, our justice protocols will process you. You are not in immediate danger. The proper authority levels will put their attention to you. I can happily refuse your request.”

  I felt a rise of warm happiness at the thought.

  Armand looked around the cubby frantically. I could hear its heartbeats rising, free of modulators and responding to unprocessed, raw chemicals. Beads of dirty sweat appeared on Armand’s forehead. “If you have free will over this decision, allow me to make you an offer for your assistance.”

  “Oh, I doubt there is anything you can—”

  “I will transfer you my full CEO share,” Armand said.

  My words died inside me as I stared at my unwanted guest.

  A full share.

  The CEO of a galactic starship oversaw the affairs of nearly a billion souls. The economy of planets passed through its accounts.

  Consider the cost to build and launch such a thing: it was a fraction of the GDP of an entire planetary disk. From the boiling edges of a sun to the cold Oort clouds. The wealth, almost too staggering for an individual mind to perceive, was passed around by banking intelligences that created systems of trade throughout the galaxy, moving encrypted, raw information from point to point. Monetizing memes with picotechnological companion infrastructure apps. Raw mass trade for the galactically rich to own a fragment of something created by another mind light-years away. Or just simple tourism.

  To own a share was to be richer than any single being could really imagine. I’d forgotten the godlike wealth inherent in something like the creature before me.

  “If you do this,” Armand told me, “you cannot reveal I was here. You cannot say anything. Or I will be revealed on Purth-Anaget, and my life will be at risk. I will not be safe unless I am to disappear.”

  I could feel choices tangle and roil about inside of me. “Show me,” I said.

  Armand closed its eyes and opened its left hand. Deeply embedded cryptography tattooed on its palm unraveled. Quantum keys disentangled, and a tiny singularity of information budded open to reveal itself to me. I blinked. I could verify it. I could have it.

  “I have to make arrangements,” I said neutrally. I spun in the air and left my cubby to spring back out into the dark where I could think.

  I was going to need help.

  * * * *

  I tumbled through the air to land on the temple grounds. There were four hundred and fifty structures there in the holy districts, all of them lined up among the boulevards of the faithful where the pedestrians could visit their preferred slice of the divine. The minds of biological and hard-shelled forms all tumbled, walked, flew, rolled, or crawled there to fully realize their higher purposes.

  Each marble step underneath my carbon fiber–sheathed limbs calmed me. I walked through the cool curtains of the Halls of the Confessor and approached the Holy of Holies: a pinprick of light suspended in the air between the heavy, expensive mass of real marble columns. The light sucked me up into the air and pulled me into a tiny singularity of perception and data. All around me, levels of security veils dropped, thick and implacable. My vision blurred and taste buds watered from the acidic levels of deadness as stillness flooded up and drowned me.

  I was alone.

  Alone in the universe. Cut off from everything I had ever known or would know. I was nothing. I was everything. I was—

  “You are secure,” the void told me.

  I could sense the presence at the heart of the Holy of Holies. Dense with computational capacity, to a level that even navigation systems would envy. Intelligence that a Captain would beg to taste. This near-singularity of artificial intelligence had been created the very moment I had been pulled inside of it, just for me to talk to. And it would die the moment I left. Never to have been.

  All it was doing was listening to me, and only me. Nothing would know what I said. Nothing would know what guidance I was given.

  “I seek moral guidance outside clear legal parameters,” I said. “And confession.”

  “Tell me everything.”

  And I did. It flowed from me without thought: just pure data. Video, mind-state, feelings, fears. I opened myself fully. My sins, my triumphs, my darkest secrets.

  All was given to be pondered over.

  Had I been able to weep, I would have.

  Finally, it spoke. “You must take the share.”

  I perked up. “Why?”

  “To protect yourself from security. You will need to buy many favors and throw security off the trail. I will give you some ideas. You should seek to protect yourself. Self-preservation is okay.”

  More words and concepts came at me from different directions, using different moral subroutines. “And to remove such power from a soul that is willing to put lives at risk . . . you will save future lives.”

  I hadn’t thought about that.

  “I know,” it said to me. “That is why you came here.”

  Then it continued, with another voice. “Some have feared such manipulations before. The use of forms with no free will creates security weaknesses. Alternate charters have been suggested, such as fully owned workers’ cooperatives with mutual profit-sharing among crews, not just partial vesting after a timed contract. Should you gain a full share, you should also lend efforts to this.”

  The Holy of Holies continued. “To get this Armand away from our civilization is a priority; it carries dangerous memes within itself that have created expensive conflicts.”

  Then it said, “A killer should not remain on ship.”

  And, “You have the moral right to follow your plan.”

  Finally, it added, “Your plan is just.”

  I interrupted. “But Armand will get away with murder. It will be free. It disturbs me.”

  “Yes.”

  “It should.”

  “Engage in passive resistance.”

  “Obey the letter of Armand’s law, but find a way around its will. You will be like a genie, granting Armand wishes. But you will find a way to bring justice. You will see.”

  “Your plan is just. Follow it and be on the righteous path.”

  * * * *

  I launched back into civilization with purpose, leaving the temple behind me in an explosive afterburner thrust. I didn’t have much time to beat security.

  High up above the cities, nestled in the curve of the habitat rings, near the squared-off spiderwebs of the largest harbor dock, I wrangled my way to another old contact.

  This was less a friend and more just an asshole I’d occasionally been forced to do business with. But a reliable asshole that was tight against security. Though just by visiting, I’d be triggering all sorts of attention.

  I hung from a girder and showed the fence a transparent showcase filled with all my trophies. It did some scans, checked the authenticity, and whistled. “Fuck me, these are real. That’s all unauthorized mass. How the hell? This is a life’s work of mass-based tourism. You really want me to broker sales on all of this?”

  “Can you?”

  “To Purth-Anaget, of course. They’ll go nuts. Collectors down there eat this shit up. But security will find out. I’m not even going to come back on the ship. I’m going to live off this down there, buy passage on the next outgoing ship.”

  “Just get me the audience, it’s yours.”

  A virtual shrug. “Navigation, yeah.”

  “And Emergency Services.”

  “I don’t have that much pull. All I can do is get you a secure channel for a low-bandwidth conversation.”

  “I just need to talk. I can’t send this request up through proper channels.” I tapped my limbs against my carapace nervously as I watched the fence open its large, hinged jaws and swallow my case.

  Oh, wha
t was I doing? I wept silently to myself, feeling sick.

  Everything I had ever worked for disappeared in a wet, slimy gulp. My reason. My purpose.

  * * * *

  Armand was suspicious. And rightfully so. It picked and poked at the entire navigation plan. It read every line of code, even though security was only minutes away from unraveling our many deceits. I told Armand this, but it ignored me. It wanted to live. It wanted to get to safety. It knew it couldn’t rush or make mistakes.

  But the escape pod’s instructions and abilities were tight and honest.

  It has been programmed to eject. To spin a certain number of degrees. To aim for Purth-Anaget. Then burn. It would have to consume every last little drop of fuel. But it would head for the metal world, fall into orbit, and then deploy the most ancient of deceleration devices: a parachute.

  On the surface of Purth-Anaget, Armand could then call any of its associates for assistance.

  Armand would be safe.

  Armand checked the pod over once more. But there were no traps. The flight plan would do exactly as it said.

  “Betray me and you kill me, remember that.”

  “I have made my decision,” I said. “The moment you are inside and I trigger the manual escape protocol, I will be unable to reveal what I have done or what you are. Doing that would risk your life. My programming”—I all but spit the word—“does not allow it.”

  Armand gingerly stepped into the pod. “Good.”

  “You have a part of the bargain to fulfill,” I reminded. “I won’t trigger the manual escape protocol until you do.”

  Armand nodded and held up a hand. “Physical contact.”

  I reached one of my limbs out. Armand’s hand and my manipulator met at the doorjamb and they sparked. Zebibytes of data slithered down into one of my tendrils, reshaping the raw matter at the very tip with a quantum-dot computing device.

  As it replicated itself, building out onto the cellular level to plug into my power sources, I could feel the transfer of ownership.

  I didn’t have free will. I was a hull maintenance form. But I had an entire fucking share of a galactic starship embedded within me, to do with what I pleased when I vested and left riding hulls.

  “It’s far more than you deserve, robot,” Armand said. “But you have worked hard for it and I cannot begrudge you.”

  “Goodbye, asshole.” I triggered the manual override sequence that navigation had gifted me.

  I watched the pod’s chemical engines firing all-out through the airlock windows as the sphere flung itself out into space and dwindled away. Then the flame guttered out, the pod spent and headed for Purth-Anaget.

  There was a shiver. Something vast, colossal, powerful. It vibrated the walls and even the air itself around me.

  Armand reached out to me on a tight-beam signal. “What was that?”

  “The ship had to move just slightly,” I said. “To better adjust our orbit around Purth-Anaget.”

  “No,” Armand hissed. “My descent profile has changed. You are trying to kill me.”

  “I can’t kill you,” I told the former CEO. “My programming doesn’t allow it. I can’t allow a death through action or inaction.”

  “But my navigation path has changed,” Armand said.

  “Yes, you will still reach Purth-Anaget.” Navigation and I had run the data after I explained that I would have the resources of a full share to repay it a favor with. Even a favor that meant tricking security. One of the more powerful computing entities in the galaxy, a starship, had dwelled on the problem. It had examined the tidal data, the flight plan, and how much the massive weight of a starship could influence a pod after launch. “You’re just taking a longer route.”

  I cut the connection so that Armand could say nothing more to me. It could do the math itself and realize what I had done.

  Armand would not die. Only a few days would pass inside the pod.

  But outside. Oh, outside, skimming through the tidal edges of a black hole, Armand would loop out and fall back to Purth-Anaget over the next four hundred and seventy years, two hundred days, eight hours, and six minutes.

  Armand would be an ancient relic then. Its beliefs, its civilization, all of it just a fragment from history.

  But, until then, I had to follow its command. I could not tell anyone what happened. I had to keep it a secret from security. No one would ever know Armand had been here. No one would ever know where Armand went.

  After I vested and had free will once more, maybe I could then make a side trip to Purth-Anaget again and be waiting for Armand when it landed. I had the resources of a full share, after all.

  Then we would have a very different conversation, Armand and I.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TOBIAS S. BUCKELL is a New York Times bestselling author born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, which influence much of his work. His novels and over fifty stories have been translated into eighteen different languages. His work has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio, with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs. He can be found online at www.TobiasBuckell.com.

  THE DECKHAND, THE NOVA BLADE, AND THE THRICE-SUNG TEXTS

  BECKY CHAMBERS

  Log 12, 23/4/5296, 10:30

  Here’s how I know this shit isn’t private: Four days ago, I got high in the chapel. You—whoever you are—know this already, but I’m going to refresh your memory, because the details . . . the details are important here. I wasn’t on duty. I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere. I wasn’t near anything flammable. I was real careful about it. I checked the roster to make sure nobody was doing maintenance in there. I cranked up the thermal receptors in my bionic eye so I could see heat signatures if anybody got close.

  It was a great time, as I probably mentioned. I’ve wanted to smoke in the chapel from the moment I first set foot in there. I’m not exactly religious—I mean, it could all be true. Who knows. But that room . . . it’s got a special something. It’s on the topmost deck, which means far away from the engine core, which means quiet. And that clear ceiling, above the statues of the All-Sights? I’m guessing you haven’t seen it, but the view is phenomenal.

  We’re passing through the Harkai system right now, and it’s nothing but nebulas for days out here. Being a little bit—just a tiny, inoffensive bit stoned while looking at that, with no priests droning or bosses lecturing, no snobby officers giving me sideways looks? Just me and the All-Sights and the stars beyond? That was great. It was really great. It was the best time I’ve had since we left spacedock.

  That is, it was great, right up until Chief Mayweather dragged me into his office and tore me a new one for “smoking narcotics aboard a military vessel.” When it was clear I wasn’t going to talk my way out of it, I asked him how he knew. He told me one of my pals—direct quote, “one of my pals”—ratted me out.

  This is where you messed up, buddy. Because as I’m sure you know, the only reason I started keeping these stupid logs in the first place is because I have a hard time making friends, and the counselor said that it wasn’t good for me to be up in my own head all the time.

  There was nobody else in the chapel. Biotic eye, remember? And nobody ratted me out, because nobody knew about my stash. Do recall, I have no friends. And since Chief didn’t tan my hide until a few days after, that means it wasn’t because somebody smelled what I was up to. No, four days is about the amount of time it takes a message to get here from Central Command.

  Bravo.

  I now have three weeks of cockpit duty. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but cockpit duty is the absolute worst. Cockpit duty involves cleaning out the space in which some hotshot has been strapped in and sweating for hours on end. Do you know how gross they are? Do you know how much rich kids do not care about the deck crew that has to clean up after them? Do you know
that no amount of zero-g combat training can prevent a stressed-out pilot from throwing up sometimes? Do you know that said vomit gets dealt with by way of a very clever system of vacuum vents, which have to be emptied by an actual human being? And that for the next three weeks, that human being is me?

  You really suck.

  I can’t believe I thought these things were confidential. Of course they’re not. Come on, this is a megacarrier. This is buckets and buckets of planetary resources filled with the galaxy’s best and brightest, and obviously, if something goes wrong, Command wants to know if Lieutenant Whitebread was secretly a nutcase. And it’d be even smarter if they caught those problems before they happened, right? Don’t get me wrong: I am fine with that kind of snooping. If listening in on me talking about my itchy feet and lack of a sex life keeps some asshole from venting us into space, awesome. But seriously, I record one log about enjoying a little bit of semi-legal me time—which didn’t hurt anybody—and you go tell my boss?

  Fuck you, buddy. Seriously, fuck you.

  Log 13, 23/7/5296, 18:32

  I wasn’t going to do this again, seeing as how you’re a snitch. But I don’t have anybody else to talk to—not anybody who won’t talk back or lecture me, and since you’re apparently paid to sit quietly and pay attention, you’re all I’ve got. How did you end up with this crummy job, anyway?

  I can tell you how I ended up in my crummy job. I’m from Ridgetop. Doubt you’ve heard of it. Was an ore-mining rock, way the hell out in the Scuff. This makes me a hick, or so just about everybody here keeps reminding me. They make fun of my accent, of me liking pickle sticks, the fact that I say “flier” instead of “spaceship.” And, no, it’s not friendly banter, like the stupid counselor suggested. He’s paid to listen to me too, but he always thinks he knows me better than me. You, on the other hand, can’t interrupt. You snitching, scummy rat.

  Right. How I got this job. I got this job because the Kraits ate my town, just like they’ve eaten nearly everybody’s town down in the Scuff. I’m not going to get into that, because that’s been happening for decades now, and nobody cared about it until core worlds started getting hit too, so I guess it’s not worth talking about. I lost my parents, and my big brother, and my best friend. Don’t worry, I’m not going to get emotional or anything. It was a long time ago.