“Inspection tour,” Aiko replied.
“Invalid response.”
“I am Senior Technical Executive Aiko Lys. I have authorized access to all areas above and below the surface.”
“Invalid response. Your actions have displayed a pattern which has activated enhanced security protocols. Return to the surface immediately.”
Aiko reached a platform and swung off the rungs onto it. “Understood. I will comply.” She helped Oscar onto the platform, then urged him down the hallway beyond, lights coming on before them.
“You are not complying with instructions,” the voice insisted.
“You did not specify the path to the surface,” Aiko said, moving faster.
“Return the way you came.”
Aiko paused at a box mounted on the wall and yanked it open, pulling out heavy tools. She held on to a hammer and passed a monkey wrench to Oscar. “This way is shorter,” she said.
“Invalid response. Activating level two security protocols.”
Something hit the floor behind Oscar. He spun around, seeing something with many legs and glowing red eyes spring toward him.
He had been through this sort of thing many times in adventures on the surface, fighting virtual dangers with virtual weapons. Reflexes honed by those experiences kicked in and Oscar swung the tool he held without thinking. It slammed into the creature as it leapt at him, knocking it against the wall with a muffled metallic sound. It fell to the floor and scrabbled to get up, most of its legs limp. Repulsed by the sight, Oscar swung again and smashed the bot.
He heard a rustling noise behind them.
“Hurry!” Aiko ran down the hall, Oscar right behind, a vague darkness in the hallway revealing a growing mass of bots heading for them.
They passed a heavy door and Aiko yanked him to a stop, then pulled a device from one pocket. She slapped it on the door controls, then tapped rapidly on the device while Oscar debated with himself whether to keep running.
The door slid shut with a thunk that sounded comfortingly secure to Oscar.
“That won’t hold them forever,” Aiko said. She darted down the hall, rounded a corner—
Oscar found her paused on the edge of an abyss. “What is this?”
“It’s worse than I thought. The world has already been forced to cannibalize mass from here to feed the mass-energy conversion systems.” She pointed. “But it left a ledge to help bots get past. Come on.”
“Come on?” Oscar stared down at depths that seemed eager to drag him down.
But Aiko pulled at him, moving with dangerous haste along the narrow pathway that still existed next to one wall.
He tried not to think about what he was doing, and tried to pretend that this was just another adventure on the surface where he couldn’t really be hurt, but pretending meant thinking about that huge hole waiting to engulf them, and . . .
He stumbled onto the floor in the intact hallway beyond, breathing heavily. Looking back, Oscar stared. “Why is part of the rock moving?”
“The rock? More bots?” Aiko reached to adjust a lighting control on the wall.
A mass of brown and black bodies, scrambling toward them.
“Rats,” Aiko breathed. “That’s where they went. Run!”
Down another hall, the lights blinking out partway. But Aiko produced a hand light and they kept going until they reached a massive door. “Maximum Override Omega Nine Nine Nine Alpha!”
“Access denied,” the soft voice replied. Oscar wondered whether it was his imagination that gave that voice a smug note.
Aiko paused, angry, then smiled again. “Double Secret Maximum Override Zero Zero Zero.”
The door opened.
“How many of those overrides do you have?” Oscar asked as he helped wrestle the door closed again, sealing out the tide of rats.
“Enough,” Aiko said. “I hope.” She moved to the control panels lining three walls of the room, gazing at them with a wondering expression. “It’s been a very long time since I was here. But everything is just as it was. Perfect. Unchanging.”
“That’s good, right?” Oscar asked, his heart pounding with worry.
“Is it?” She looked at him. “What’s the difference between an eternal, unchanging heaven, and a nearly eternal, unchanging prison?”
“Ummm . . . choice?”
“Choice. Free will. We built something so perfect that it meant we never had to make a meaningful choice again.” Aiko laughed, moving to one of the panels and entering commands rapidly. “Until now.”
A red light began pulsing overhead and an alarm bellowed.
“I need you here, Oscar,” Aiko directed. “Stand right here. I have to go over there, make some more modifications, enter some more commands, and then we’ll have to confirm the sequence at the same time from both panels.”
“All right.” Oscar stood where he had been told, the panels before him flashing with streams of data and status reports. He kept seeing the word DANGER appearing, along with frequent glimpses of CRITICAL, UNSTABLE, SEVERE, and IRREVERSIBLE. “Aiko?”
“Wait.” She was working with frantic haste. “It can still be stopped.”
“But—”
“DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!” screamed the voice of the world.
“Aiko!”
“We’re ready,” Aiko said. “You see that blank spot? Yes, the clear space. Place one hand flat on that . . . yes, there! Now tap that control that’s flashing to the left of it.”
Oscar hesitated, his hand on the panel, the red light and roaring alarm filling his head. “Aiko, are you sure?” he cried.
Her head hung low for a moment, then Aiko raised it and looked at him. He flinched away from those eyes again as she answered. “Oscar, I am sure that if we do not do this, then it will all end. But if we do . . . Oscar, what would you give to experience something new? Something you’ve never seen before? That’s like nothing you’ve ever known?”
“New?” The idea was so alien. And so terrifying.
And so seductive.
How would it feel?
After so many, many years?
“The world can’t handle something new, something beyond what it was made for,” Aiko said. “All it can do is keep doing what it has been doing, even if that is failing. That’s why we have to do this.”
Oscar thought of the endless empty cities on the surface of the world, felt Aiko’s burning gaze upon him, and slowly reached to touch the flashing control.
The alarms and the flashing red light and the increasingly frantic voice of the world shut off.
A strange humming began to build around him.
“Yes!” Aiko cried exultantly, laughing as she raised her hands upward and looked at the ceiling. “Finally!”
“What—What’s going to happen?” Oscar demanded.
“The end of everything,” Aiko whispered, sounding almost delirious with joy. “And the beginning of everything.”
“You said this was about fixing the world!”
She spun to face him, her smile frightening to see. “No. I said it would fix everything. A singularity is an impossible thing. It’s impossible to break an impossible thing. Until the universe is so warped by that singularity that it becomes possible to break the unbreakable. To free everything trapped within it.”
“You said the entire universe was in that singularity,” Oscar began, fumbling with the words.
“Yes! The entire universe! And the way the universe now works, with space-time stretched to its limit and all matter and energy compressed into that small speck, there is enough potential force in the world if it converts its entire remaining mass to energy to destabilize the singularity!” Aiko rubbed one hand across her face as the humming grew slowly in intensity. “Do you know what we never learned, Oscar? We never learned why. Why did humanity and other sentient species come into existence? Why was the universe predisposed to create us? Did we have a purpose? And now we finally know, Oscar.”
She pointed outward
. “I’m sorry I misled you. There was no way to fix the world. But the world can fix everything. The universe needs a trigger to restart, and a sentient species can provide that trigger. We’re part of the cycle. In a short time, the singularity will destabilize and the universe will be reborn. That’s why we’re here, Oscar.”
“But—” Oscar looked around wildly. “I don’t want to be here when the world explodes!”
“We won’t be.” Aiko hit a control and another door slammed open. She grabbed his hand and yanked Oscar into motion as she ran down hallways that throbbed with the power of the growing vibrations. “There are still ships,” she shouted over the noise. “I made sure of that. They haven’t been used for more than a billion years, but they’ve been maintained, rebuilt, and reconstructed! We should have time to reach one and launch it!”
“Should have time?” Oscar yelled back. “You’re not sure?”
“How does it feel?” she shouted. “To not know what’s going to happen? To not know what tomorrow will hold? To not know if there will be a tomorrow? This is what being a god is about, Oscar! Not power and immortality, but the knowledge that life is precious and we face not countless predictable days but countless real choices that will allow us to decide what our tomorrows will be like!”
He had never really been scared before this.
He had never really been happy before this.
They reached a huge open area with great shapes sitting silently, waiting as they had waited for a billion years. One of the shapes glowed with light, an open hatch beckoning.
Oscar didn’t have to be pulled along anymore. He ran all out, racing Aiko to reach that hatch as the humming filled the world.
He realized that no one else except for him and Aiko could hear or feel that humming. There was no one else. The world was empty. As frightened as he was, he finally understood a little why Aiko’s eyes looked the way they did.
They leaped in, side by side. Aiko slapped a control and the hatch shut, blocking out the still-building vibrations.
By the time they reached the control deck, the ship had taken off, cleared the world, and was accelerating away at inconceivable velocity. Aiko sat down, straps automatically fastening around her. “You should do the same. These ships were designed to endure every imaginable force, but when the singularity explodes, the forces will be unimaginable.”
Oscar sat down, feeling the straps wrap about him. The view screen showed the dark mass of the world from the outside, the impossible black of the singularity beyond it, and the completely empty blackness beyond. “We might still die?”
“Maybe.” She looked at him, her eyes almost normal but filled with an unholy glee. “Maybe not. We’ll find out.”
“My choice . . . mattered,” Oscar said.
“We mattered.”
The image of the world on their view screen vanished and was replaced by a bolt of energy headed toward the singularity.
And there was light.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JACK CAMPBELL (John G. Hemry) hopes that someday he’ll be able to write space opera even half as well as Leigh Brackett did. He writes the New York Times bestselling Lost Fleet series, the Lost Stars series, and the “steampunk with dragons” series The Pillars of Reality. His most recent books are Lost Stars: Shattered Spear, Beyond the Frontier: Leviathan, and The Dragons of Dorcastle. His short fiction includes time travel, alternate history, space opera, military SF, fantasy, and humor. John is a retired US Navy officer. Being a sailor, he has been known to tell stories about Events Which Really Happened (but cannot be verified by any independent sources). This experience has served him well in writing fiction. He lives in Maryland with his indomitable wife, “S,” and three great kids (all three on the autism spectrum).
WARPED PASSAGES
KAMERON HURLEY
My mother left me for the anomaly when I was too young to see over the railing into the tangled gardens at the center of the ship but not yet old enough to climb up onto it and jump into the lake at the garden’s heart. The people of the Legion had stopped counting time back in my mother’s day, when the anomaly ripped through the fleet and halted us on our two-generation journey to a world that our prophets said would lead to our salvation. Now we were a static fleet, stuck in darkness, drifting nowhere, with uncertainty as to when and how our resources would run out. Would we starve in a generation? Two? Or would we asphyxiate first?
No one was quite certain. It had driven some people mad.
But for those of us who knew nothing else, it just made life that much more worth living. Living is a gift, when you’re sure it could end at any minute. And life ended often, in the Legion. Accidents, plague, bad air, support system failures, insurrection, collisions . . . one by one, the ships of the Legion would go dark, and those of us left would cannibalize whatever remained of them.
I suppose that would drive my mother’s generation more mad than me, because I had no expectations, not like she did. In school, aboard ship, they were told they would arrive in some brave new world God had chosen for them and the prophets of New Morokov had charted. They were God’s chosen people, with a real purpose, a plan. I was just a kid with an uncertain future, drifting through the detritus of the dying.
Everything had gone wrong just halfway into the trip.
The anomaly appeared and passed through the whole fleet, like a great, many-tentacled wave of glutinous energy. It split our ship in two, cutting right through the center of the lake, slicing open the hull in every direction. That should have been the end of us and every ship in the Legion, which were all halted in the same way. We should have been jettisoned into deep space. But though the anomaly breached the hull, the anomaly itself acted as a sort of sealant. There was no breach. But the engines could no longer power us forward. We were stuck in place, having been slowed and eventually rooted to whatever these waves of foreign matter were.
From outside the ship, when I take the long trading walks between our home and those ships aligned with ours, the anomalies look like massive, irregular shimmering discs splitting through all five hundred ships of the Legion. They reflect light, and the ships, and each other, and our tools and clothing, but not our faces. You stare into the flat plain of an anomaly and it’s like watching a ghost wearing your clothes. It’s like they’re eating our souls, my mother used to say, which made her choice to throw herself into one that much stranger. Why would you feed your soul to some alien thing?
My sister Malati says the anomaly is a great manifestation of our own consciousness. Everyone has theories about what they are. All we know is that they don’t see our reflections, and that whatever steps into them never comes back out again. The scientists don’t think the anomalies are alive, and prophets agree, but the way they act, sometimes, the way they ripple when you talk to them, makes me think otherwise. I spent my childhood throwing junk into those things until my mother caught me and slapped me for being wasteful.
“We need every piece of this ship to survive,” she had said. “You don’t recycle something, and it’s lost forever. Do you understand? You risk your children’s lives. You risk our future. Waste is a terrible crime.”
I started crying when she yelled at me, because I didn’t want to be wasteful. Losing or breaking something was the worst thing anyone could do out here. It meant you would have to trade with another ship, or go on a dangerous scavenging mission to one of the derelicts at the edge of the Legion’s gravity well.
When I was old enough to stand up on the rail and jump into the lake with my friends, during the very darkest of the ship’s sleeping cycle, I was fascinated by the number of things captured in the shimmering face of the anomaly that bisected the lake. Ropes and chains and plastic tethers that had held instruments and small animals that my grandmother’s generation had cast into the thing lay scattered on the banks of the far side of the lake, or tied off to metal balustrades, a record of two generations who had tried and failed to understand the anomaly. It’s why jumping into
the lake was considered so dangerous. It was easy to float into the anomaly if you weren’t careful. And once you threw something in, you couldn’t pull it back out. Not the tethers or anything attached to them. No people, either.
There were many theories about the anomaly. Some said it was an interdimensional body, perhaps one that lived in five or six dimensions, and the half-circles of nothingness that split through our ships were simply the manifestation of it that we could perceive in our dimensions. Others thought it was a sentient thing, an unknown being. Some said it was the tears of God, who had wept when we left our home planet, and now punished our arrogance by keeping us here, bound by Her tears.
Me, I had grown up with the anomaly. It was just a part of life. It didn’t scare me until my generation hit puberty, and some of us starting giving birth to strange things.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I don’t know whose idea it was, first, to sever a ship from the anomaly and retrofit it to fly again. It was an old plan, something from my mother’s generation, before people gave up hope. Half a dozen ships tried it, cobbling together parts, selecting crews, but they failed every time. I learned about some of those attempts in school, and maybe that’s when I came up with my own plan. Maybe that’s when I realized what the problem was.
All of these people, they were trying to repair a ship and take other people with them. It was at least another generation more to the planet. Even if they got there and could mount a rescue, it would be another generation back to get us. That’s two generations more we’d have to survive out here, and the reality is, we probably weren’t going to make it that long. They’d return to a dead husk of ships, all spinning black around the great artificial sun and gravity well that held us together.
It was never the engineers who failed, in retrofitting ships to break free of the anomaly, or at least I didn’t think so then. It was the people they involved. People fought about who was going to go, who was going to come back, and the ships were sabotaged long before they could break free. The one to reach as far as the edge of the Legion, the one that got as far as the outer rim of ships, was piloted by a woman named Pavitra Narn and carried just a dozen people. They had kept the whole thing secret right up until the time they opened the fuel tanks to feed the engine.
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