I know all this because I was there.
I know all this because we are here.
Ten years ago, Siria and I had crewed The Good Bonny together. What happened next is conjecture, pieced together by SOCOM-3’s guesses and formal audit findings.
Tipped off about a Police intercept, the Bonny ejects some form of receptacle, dumping an unknown number of slaves into Limbic space. The crew takes its mem-wipes and completes its run. But the Partnership running the Bonny takes no chances. On its return to the Mirror, the Bonny adjusts its exit tensor and emerges ten years earlier.
Interstellar slaving is a serious crime. One of the few crimes that has the potential to ignite revolt. A crime that even the other Tier 1 Partnerships would take serious exception to. But the crime has—temporally speaking—never happened.
We overlook much.
After the Bonny returns to the Mirror, there are two versions of the crew in existence. Two of Siria. Two of Sorin. Two of me.
Here now, is the truth that the Partnership running the Bonny has somehow discovered out there on the desolate and lonely fringe of the Luminal Frontier.
The truth is that this doesn’t matter.
There is no such thing as a time paradox, not in this universe. As a bacterium might pull apart in binary fission and create two independent versions of itself without consequence, so might everything, and everyone, else.
That we perceive this fission as unresolvable paradox is entirely our problem. The universe does not give a phot either way. In the face of this cosmic indifference the mammalian brain has carefully evolved itself to cancel paradox, rooting it out and destroying it like an infection whenever it occurs. The brain is a machine and it is temporally hard-wired. Encounter a future you walking down a busy street and you won’t see yourself. You can’t, in the same way that you can’t draw a three-dimensional drawing on a sheet of paper no matter how hard you try. Your brain will strike you blind if that is what it takes to protect you from the paradox. And if the brain can find no procedural means of protecting you then it will find a way to shut itself down, like a fuse blown.
Impossible. Possible.
We cross the 1,000,000 Kelvin threshold.
Heat has started to become irrelevant. We have begun dimensional shift. We are plunging. Nervousness in the Control Room. Always a chance that Sol rejects us and heat becomes relevant again, then we burn up here and we die.
Adi is as human as we are or were. Yet she has never bonded herself to a mammalian brain in the way that we have. She has never tied herself to biological hardware and become lost in it like we have. We don’t even have explicit reason to think of her as a girl rather than a boy. For she is free of the limitations that physical evolution has shackled us with. She is truly free. So, for the first time, we let Adi’s empirical self drive our conscious experience. We look at the world through her perspective. Our child. Our wellspring and our marrow.
Our third eye.
We stand in the transit warehouse and watch ourselves board The Good Bonny. We watch Siria. We watch myself. Our optics are unimpeded because Adi’s empirical self cannot be deceived by our brain’s sub-conscious trickery. The paradox is laid bare and become paradox no longer. It simply is. There are two copies of us in this universe and we are about to board the same Rig.
Elio-Ra is standing in the transit warehouse for some reason. We wave a distracted goodbye to him as we board.
We sign in and we sit at our helmstations.
We sit directly behind ourselves. An identical copy of the body of my original empirical self. An exact copy of the body I still inhabit. We watch the back of this head as it hunkers down over the station. Impossible. Possible. Across from us, Siria, setting up on her end.
Sorin walks around the Control Room rings handing out the new mem-wipe waivers. The last-minute schedule change means there is no time for niceties. He slams a waiver on each desk and moves on. ‘Sign or get off my Rig and go back to the Mirror,’ he mutters when the Limbic Quant opens his mouth to protest.
Sorin pauses briefly when he comes to me for the second time. He processes the paradox. His brain’s emergency procedurals are invoked. By some mechanism that even SOCOM-3 does not understand, his brain rewinds the experience and then wipes it out, somehow truly fluctuating the fabric of time as it does so. Sorin’s seen the paradox, processed it and then been self-mem-wiped—all before he’s even seen it. His eyes blink a few times as his brain soothes him with a post-operative déjà vu salve. His brain creates some fiction for his empirical self that only he can ever know of. He slams the mem-wipe waiver on my helmstation and he moves on.
Impossible. Possible.
Two decades ago, a North Hem processing plant worker had opened a vacuum-packed shipment of grain from the Mirror. Deep inside the three-ton package, he had found the remains of a woman, packed in with the grain, sealed and preserved.
The plant worker had reported the incident to his managers and they had reported it to theirs. The Lids were called. There had been nothing remarkable about all this so far. Accidents happened everywhere, and health and safety rules were not exactly priorities on the harsh Luminal Frontier.
When the Lids ran tests on the body, they discovered two things that startled them. The first was that she’d been sealed in that vacuum shipment for just shy of three hundred years. The second was that she was at least eight generations down the matrilineal tree of a South Hem woman who had disappeared a mere five years earlier. Her body was branded and micro-chipped and a crude slaver ring was permanently attached around her neck.
At that point everyone involved was mem-wiped and SOCOM-3 took over the investigation. It was not long after this that SOCOM-3 began to become unstable. It diverted vast resources towards seemingly fruitless projects designed to identify the Luminal’s true nature and unlock the secrets of the mammalian temporal paradox response. Projects of no social or commercial value. The Partners grew concerned.
The AI sought to explain itself. Its function was to maintain a stable model. Somewhere on the fringe of the Frontier, a Partnership was running a slaving operation of unknown scope. And they had been running it for centuries. SOCOM-3 did its best to project, approximate and remodel. But the pain qualia metric had become immeasurable. Unmanageable. Too much was being overlooked.
The AI was becoming unstable.
The Partners held an emergency summit. A motion was set, and they voted. The SOCOM would be upgraded. The pain metric would be discounted in the fourth generation.
We cross the 1,500,000 Kelvin threshold.
The Heim is at full power now as we plunge into Sol’s coronal hole.
Less than a micro-second before we penetrate Limbic space, a radio message is cast our way. An unwelcome stowaway on our bow shockwave, we receive it as but a single word of warning. A word unelaborated, yet still saturated and suffused. A word cast indiscriminately towards us on broad frequency from Ishan’s Mirror.
Police.
The message is from Elio-Ra. Of course.
‘Unless it wasn’t our message?’ a nasal voice to my right asks. ‘A Rig left Ishan’s a few minutes before us. The message could have been theirs.’
‘It wasn’t,’ we say out loud. ‘It was ours.’ We made a mistake telling Elio-Ra that we were a scientist. A scientist would not be boarding The Good Bonny. He was watching in the transit warehouse. Spying. He is the sentinel on the Mirror.
Sorin looks at us. And then his eyes flick to the identical him sitting in front us that was me. His eyes flick back to us. But he cannot see. He cannot see. He frowns, irritated. ‘We must assume that the message was intended for us,’ he says.
We listen to the crew as they deliberate. We watch Siria stand up and confront Sorin.
We feel the religious dread that begins to choke the Control Room.
We are a breath away from mutiny. A breath. And the idiot Sorin continues to stonewall and bully his crew. For Mawu’s sake, tell them and be done with it.
&nb
sp; ‘Just tell them,’ we say out loud.
Sorin scowls hard at us, then rubs his temple with a bony thumb. The post-operative déjà vu salve overwhelms him momentarily. He overlooks much.
Outside, our eternal cathedral looms large about us. Somewhere on the far fringes of the Luminal Frontier, a new civilisation has risen. Perhaps more than one. Generations upon generations of slaves are living and dying, broken bodies and souls unaware that another Earth exists somewhere. Unaware of where they come from.
The pain qualia metric is unknowable. Unbearable. We understand now why SOCOM-3 became unstable.
But SOCOM-3 is no more. This burden has passed to us. Wherever this risen civilisation is, The Good Bonny will take us there and we will witness it. The AI came to us in its diminishing moment because the truth will not be withheld from us by mem-wipes or temporal distortions. It asked that we go and we bear witness, for it is only we that can. What we are to do after that, it did not know. We do not know.
But nevertheless, we will go.
And we will bear witness.
That all pain might be meaningful.
Biram Mboob was born in The Gambia and grew up in various countries across Africa. His stories have appeared in a number of magazines, including Granta and Sable, as well as a number of anthologies including AfroSFv1, Apex Book of World SF, Tell Tales, and Dreams, Miracles and Jazz.
The Far Side
Gabriella Muwanga
‘Do you want to live on the moon?’ the large, white letters on the poster asked Mason. He couldn’t shove the poster out of his face because Melody, his five-year-old daughter, had put it there. He hated everything about that poster. All it did was give people false hope—all it had done was give Melody false hope.
From the moment she’d laid eyes on the poster, she’d wanted to live on the moon. The inaccuracy of the photo on the poster was of no consequence to her. It was a pretty one, the giant moon in the backdrop of a modern city with bright lights and an ocean view did bring stars to many an eye. He’d loved the joy it gave Melody until the day the selection committee had told him that he’d have to leave her behind. ‘Her health issues make her unfit for the community we’re trying to create,’ they’d said. Those filthy bureaucrats couldn’t even say asthma.
He hadn’t had the heart to break the news to Melody. He didn’t want her to run away like his father had when his grandfather had broken similar news; and he couldn’t leave her like his father had because abandonment had made him a bitter, inconsiderate bastard. He couldn’t leave her alone on Earth where the toxic air burned windpipes and lungs, sun scorched eyes, and acid rain scalded skin. Besides, no guardians would take on the burden of an asthmatic child. He didn’t miss his father because Joseph and Lydia were great guardians, but he knew Melody wouldn’t find any as good.
So, he had tried to resign as captain of the ISA909 and they had threatened to terminate him from the International Space Agency. That would mean he had no allowances nor insurance and he and Melody would have nothing—they’d be abandoned in the wasteland the world had become. A week after he had been told he couldn’t take his daughter to the moon, during a heavy downpour, he concluded he liked their chances out there better. He was determined to find a way to get Melody to the moon, and he had. Then he’d told Melody a lie about a special compartment in the ship that was made for little princesses like her.
She’d been ecstatic and couldn’t wait to see her special place. Her excitement so great, that she hadn’t questioned their arrival at ISA headquarters in the middle of the night. Presently, as he tucked her into the slumber tube he’d designed for her, she expressed deep approval at her dwellings for the next two days. Part of her celebratory routine was a fervent display of her poster, fingers pointing at the large letters, asking him if he wanted to live on the moon.
‘Can I put that away for you, sweetie? You don’t want to lose it before we get to our new home,’ he said, a hand absentmindedly running through her bushy hair.
‘No!’ she cried, clutched the poster close to her chest, and frowned at him. He smiled as authentic a smile as he was capable of.
‘Do you want it to get lost?’ he asked.
She only held the poster closer, ‘I want to look at it on the ship.’
He brushed his fingers across her forehead and looked her straight in the eye. ‘But you’ll be asleep. You can’t look at it while you’re asleep, can you?’
Melody shook her head in reply.
‘Then will you be a good girl and let me put it away?’ he asked, then widened his eyes at her. He knew she couldn’t resist smiling at him. She had always loved the way his polychromatic bionic left eye focused on her when he widened his eyes and thought it was magical. The joy in her eyes gave him something good to attach to his bionic eye; something that wasn’t the space accident that almost killed him. She loosened her hold on the poster, allowing Mason to gently slip it out from under her small arms.
‘Thank you,’ he said, bent to kiss his daughter on both cheeks and whispered a long, heartfelt ‘I love you,’ against her smooth forehead. He drew back from her and willed himself to be strong. He’d engineered the slumber tube perfectly for every possible scenario—even if the ship crashed somewhere in space, she’d remain floating safely in the tube for at least seven days. Now, he had to trust that his daughter would be safe.
‘You have to close your eyes for this part Melody,’ he said. Melody nodded and closed her eyes. He touched the close button on the slumber tube and the door slid shut. As soon as the door sealed, fumes sprayed into the centre of the tube. Thankfully, the anaesthetic acted quickly, and Melody was asleep within seconds. When he was certain that she was asleep, he carried the slumber tube and placed it in the aluminium case he would use to smuggle it onto the ship. He locked the case and put it with the rest of the luggage before leaving his captain’s quarters.
Mason walked to the bridge without looking back. He stopped every now and then to smile and acknowledge the people who recognised him and called his attention, but otherwise, he tried his best not to interact with people. He preferred that most of them remain strangers to him although he wasn’t necessarily a stranger to them. He was the second Avery to captain a ship to the moon colony; his grandfather had famously captained the second instalment. But here he was, trying to keep his head down and get to the bridge without drawing attention to himself.
He found the rest of the crew already strapped into their polyester-padded seats and hard at work in the bridge. The bridge, with its phenolic resin panelled walls, thermal glass viewing window, twenty-degree-inclined control panel, virtual displays, and alignment of emergency oxygen tanks, was big enough for the crew of five. He strapped into his seat in the bridge and got ready for take-off. His co-captain, Gary Balagadde, was stuffing a pack of dehydrated frankfurters into his mouth while he adjusted the settings of the passenger module on a virtual display near the entrance to the bridge. Gary had started with dehydrated salami and potato chips judging from the wrappers scattered all over the floor under Mason’s seat.
‘Keep your food in your room Gary. You know you aren’t supposed to eat in here,’ Mason said over his shoulder, more harshly than he had intended. His tone startled Gary and he fumbled with his pack of frankfurters for a few seconds before he managed to recompose himself.
‘Don’t you mean our room? Do you want some, Captain?’ Gary asked with a mischievous smile. Mason was half-relieved and half-irritated that his gruff tone hadn’t affected Gary’s jovial mood. Mason envied Gary’s ability to be happy and carefree all the time. He wished he could borrow some of that happiness right now. He needed something to replace the worry and nervousness.
Melody had been in the slumber tube for five hours now and she hadn’t been discovered. Not that he’d expected them to discover her; he’d gone to great lengths to make sure that didn’t happen. Yet, the one thing he knew would calm his nerves was if she remained hidden till they were safe in their new living quarters on t
he moon.
‘That stuff will constipate you,’ Mason replied.
‘You’re the one getting constipated, Grumpy.’
Mason shot Gary a deathly stare. The stare followed Gary as he walked over and took his seat beside Mason.
‘You can’t let this eat away at you like this,’ Gary whispered to him.
Mason looked away.
Gary paused and faced the display. Moments later, he shook his head and sucked air through his teeth. ‘Try to act normal,’ he said, ‘or else, we’ll get caught and who knows what will happen to Melody then.’
Mason jumped at the mention of Melody but collected himself and prayed that his weird behaviour had gone unnoticed to all but Gary.
‘What if it kills her?’ Mason breathed, his lower lip quivered, and he swallowed. ‘What if that thing I put her in kills her?’ The question that had been lingering in his mind since he’d sealed his daughter in struggled past the lump in his throat and formed into a strained whisper.
‘If it kills her, console yourself with this: if she’d boarded the ship without it, she’d die, and if you’d left her alone on Earth her life wouldn’t be worth living. You have to-’ Gary answered.
‘Why would you say that to me? What gives you the right?’ Mason said.
Gary’s mouth hung open as he gave Mason an incredulous look. ‘I’m sorry Mason. I didn’t mean to sound insensitive. I just need you to remember why we’re doing this, and I need you to stay focused on that.’
‘You know that I hate you, right?’ said Mason. He rubbed his neck and fought the anxiety that was morphing into anger at Gary. He knew it wasn’t fair, he acknowledged Gary probably had his own worries and insecurities about the situation since Melody was his goddaughter. Yet, despite his feelings, Gary had managed to appear calm and Mason could at least try to do the same. He glanced at his arm to check the time displayed in blinking bright blue characters on the control bracelet—worn over the sleeve of his triple-layered silver nylon, elastane and nomex, space suit. It was almost time for take-off. He told himself he didn’t have time to be fair to Gary anyway.
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