by Exurb1a
Pasternak destroyed previous trade agreements, plundered religious sites, and brought military spending to an all-time high. He had parades march in the square below in his name. He did not even attend them. He ate buttermilk curry and Polynean juice fish and cake, gorging himself, then gorging more.
I couldn't have cared less. I had a singular duty to truth.
I reminded him constantly that if he did not continue with the research, I would not continue helping him. There was another tacit threat I suppose, unspoken. He knew I could at any moment inhabit another packet and go to war with him.
I had godly foresight. He had beans.
Then, perhaps six years since I had entered Pasternak's mind, we made a breakthrough. Our high-energy experiments revealed an anomalous reading at around five churtens. In common speak that meant we may have found the point at which the four forces of physics met our mysterious fifth. (There had to be a meeting point, of course. How else would they interact?) Presumably the effect would prove itself in the shape of a force-carrying particle, the nooticle, I had christened it already in my mind.
We devoted ourselves to the quest of proving this link, and sure enough I felt Pasternak's passion grow and grow.
The problem was—if we can say there was one—that the energy threshold for proving this interaction with the fifth force was enormous. No, absurd.
By that point in history, particle colliders had grown to such energies that they needed to be built in space, sometimes in a diameter ring around their orbs. We would need one larger than the diameter of Aerth and Luna.
As the Marquis, Pasternak had infinite funds. The construction began without protest.
He was sleeping one evening and a notion occurred to me. I exited him and entered the mind of Evie's chambermaid. The woman was tending to laundry at that moment. I looked about her mind, namely for the place she kept thoughts regarding Evie.
As expected, Evie could be terse and short with her, though other times she showed immense and unexpected kindness; buying the woman new shoes and a new toga, for example. Or paying for her children to visit one of the leisure moons. These episodes were sporadic, but they indicated a soul about Evie I had assumed not there.
During this time there was little to do as we waited for the great project to reach completion. We had justified the plan to the public as a military research project, but everyone knew the Marquis had a background in nootics and suspected other motives.
I wasn't much interested in the politics of the day. I've come to find that technology and cultures change with the years, but the underlying wants and proclivities of the general public do not. If Berkhamsted were here he might not know how anything works, but he'd sure find plenty of his favourite neuroses and terrors living comfortably among the galactic population.
With little to do scientifically but wait, I left Pasternak to his power. Safe to say he was a monster. He didn't need my help anymore, nor did he want it. In the past he'd occasionally asked me to steal a secret or two from an ambassador. Now he only threatened them if they didn't comply, or more often had them publicly executed.
When two of the core worlds suggested a congressional vote to break away from the empire, he had the planets' respective armies incarcerate millions in labour camps, and riddle those who didn't wish to work with bullets and gamma blasts.
I began to feel some uncertainty.
Still, political systems are self-correcting. One day Pasternak would die and a more tolerant Marquis would take his place. The pendulum always returns in the opposite direction.
The collider was finished, finally. There was no great galactic fanfare. The public could not know of its true purpose. We had in our entourage five nootic scientists who were partially aware of our plan to prove the fifth force. Beyond that, hopefully, no one knew.
We took a small voidship to the primer chamber of the collider, Pasternak, Evie, and I. I spent the journey staring out the window and musing on just how far I'd come, wishing again that Berkhamsted were here to see all of this.
The primer chamber was a small cylindrical affair, an engineer at the controls. Back on Luna there would be a bunch of theoreticians monitoring the beam and trying to analyse the collisions in real-time.
This will sound pretentious, but I felt history's weight on my shoulders. If we were to prove the thing for certain, God only knew what would be possible then.
Evie, the Marquis, and I exchanged a glance. Then Pasternak said, “Beam emitter to five churtens.”
The engineer activated the thing. There was no sense of power in the room. Displays showed us the beam power, and indeed it was rising steadily. Two churtens. Two and a half.
What would I do when the theory was proven, I wondered. Where would I go next? Ahead again. To a civilised time.
I would go forward to see what had become of Mentalic Ontology. A glorious future waited.
Three churtens. Three and a half.
Pasternak kept his eyes on the engineer, his brow low. He was smiling with a dark and delicious anticipation.
Four point two churtens. Four point three.
The power stopped increasing.
“What's going on?” Pasternak roared.
“I'm sorry sir…” the engineer said, fumbling at the controls.
“What is it?”
“One of the field amplifiers is misaligned in the eleventh quadrant, it looks like.”
That was no great difficulty, the eleventh quadrant was just a few miles away.
Pasternak barked, “Someone get—”
“No,” Evie said. “We'll go. It'll be quicker.”
“Who?” Pasternak said.
“You and I. It'll be quicker if we fix it together. We know the machine better than anyone.”
“Lead the way.”
A secondary tube ran the length of the primary one, and we rode a small car through it, past the early quadrants, finally reaching the eleventh. The beam was invisible but we all felt its presence. The air about it rippled slightly with electrons torn from their nuclei.
“Where is it? Where's the problem?” Pasternak said.
We leant gingerly into the beam corridor.
“There,” Evie said, pointing some kind of engineering instrument into the primary tube. “It's off by a few microns. We'll need to reset it by hand.”
“By hand?” the Marquis said.
“Someone needs to reach in and correct it.”
“Well, you seem to know what you're doing well enough. Would you care to?”
“No,” Evie said. “I think you should go in.”
An awful dread ran through Pasternak, then through me too. “No thank you,” Pasternak said.
Evie produced a heatcoil from her toga.
“If you wouldn't mind, yes please.”
Her eyes grew very dark and her face appeared animated for perhaps the first time in the entire course of our acquaintance.
I took Pasternak over. I said, “What are you doing, Evie?”
“What are you doing?” she said. “You've gone far, far too far.”
“It might be a bit easier to talk if you put down the heatcoil.”
She said nothing.
This is it, this is it, this is it, Pasternak was yelling again and again inside.
We were quiet for a while, Evie and I with our stares locked. Then I said, “Who are you?”
“A wanderer, like you. Only I have morals.”
“Really?” I said and nodded to the heatcoil.
She spat on the ground. “You are the most pathetic excuse for a creature. You've used your advantage for nothing but the furthering of your own interests.” She spat again. “You're as bad as them.”
“Who are you, Evie?”
“Get in the tube,” she said.
This is it, this is it, this is it. I tried to block Pasternak out, think clearly a second.
I attempted to leave his mind and could not. “What have you done?”
Evie smiled somewhat proudly
. “The entire structure is shielded with ithrium. As you know, it contains all fields, whether they be electromagnetic, Higgsian, or fifth. No escaping, in other words.”
“I'm sure Pasternak could see to it you get a high position in government. Or an orb to yourself. Whatever you want, he'd be willing. You just name it.”
She burst out laughing. I considered diving for the heatcoil but thought better.
“That's the last thing I'm after,” Evie said.
“Then what do you want?”
She didn't hesitate. “Years ago Minnith was a democracy. They were inventing new technologies for the empire, trading, philosophising. They were clever people. In just a single half-century they went from prospering to a slave orb, satisfying the empire's need for ore. All because of a single mad Marquis, your predecessor, granting himself more and more power. I lived within this packet while she did her time in the mines, a slave originally. We were beaten and whipped there. She grew bitter, turned on her own kind when she got a little standing. But the slave owners only owned slaves because the Marquis allowed it. A blind eye turned across the entire galaxy. You are worse than all of that. Do you have any idea how many worlds that stupid packet of yours has subjugated and ruined? Do you have any idea what kind of advantage you've given him, that feckless idiot you inhabit? And for what? To further your own stupid goals at the expense of millions, billions.”
I said, “The work we're doing, Evie, one day it will—”
She snapped, “Save it. It will live on certainly, because I'll make sure of that. You'll have no part in any of it though. Get in. Now.”
She pointed to the beam chamber. The air was distorting and crackling in the wake of godly energies.
Well? I said to Pasternak.
But he was silent in shock.
His mind was racing back through his life, through his ambitions and intended destinations. It was too much to cope with, this sudden fork.
Evie said, “One day your science will find a use, perhaps even open up the frontier of consciousness. Great thinking machines will be built, out in the black no less. It couldn't have been done without your work. But the means...the means, you bastards....”
At four point two churtens the beam would vapourise Pasternak in just under a second. It would probably vapourise me too, whatever my essence was.
Evie went to close the chamber, then paused a moment. “Did you ever stop to wonder in your arrogance if the kind of mind you are could fork off? Did you ever stop to wonder if you could spawn a little ghost of your own? Watching your evil the same way you watched Winston Earnest’s?”
I didn't say anything. I fixed her with a stare that I hoped might inspire compassion or mercy or just something.
She said, “It was during your little holiday in that philosophy professor. You didn’t even know what was happening. My theory is that Winston Earnest’s mind was uniquely unstable and so it spawned you. Your mind contained some of the same architecture, perhaps, and spawned me. I spent years watching you abuse your power in the name of some stupid righteousness. I spent years trying to find you when I somehow amassed the strength to break free. How are you any different to Winston Earnest? How are you any better? He wanted to kill for money. You've done it for ambition, for self-knowledge. God, do you know how happy I was when I found you again? That stupid advert, a little lonely squeal into the void. I'm going to exact justice, on behalf of the millions you must have killed by now.”
I said, “I understand. I understand completely. Just let’s all talk it over and you can make me see the error of my ways, okay?”
“I think this will prove a better example,” she said.
“Evie,” I yelled. “We’re unique. For all we know the split only happens a few times every million years. We’re sacred. We’re sacred.”
“Well, what was the adage?” she said. “For every dove a bullet, no?”
“No,” I said, and nothing after that. I prepared myself for a great unbecoming.
“They won't remember you, but I will. That's what you said to Berkhamsted, no? How does it feel being on the mortal end now?”
“If you're telling the truth, we're closer to brothers. Would you end your own brother?”
She smoothed her toga and went to seal the hatch. She said, “For every dove a bullet, Earnest. All the best.”
We locked eyes. She didn't look so happy with the thing. She didn't look so sad either.
Goodbye Pasternak, I whispered. I'm sorry you never got to rule properly.
Will we dream? he said.
Sure we will. Sleep tight.
The Menagerie
He woke in a hospital of some kind, remembering nothing. A woman shone a light into his eyes and said, “Dr. Bernhardt?”
“Yes,” he said, assuming that must be his name.
“You’ve arrived safely. Can you tell me the year?”
With that a few facts came back. He said a year.
“That’s correct,” the woman said. “My name is Ria Dubois. Is there any pain?”
“No.”
“Excellent.” She put her instruments away and helped him to sit up. “You’re going to feel a little disoriented for a few days but it’ll pass.”
Bernhardt looked out the window and noticed they were underwater. He must’ve made a horrified face because the woman who called herself Ria Dubois said, “Do you know where you are?” He shook his head. “Kaisure Station. You’re here to fix our systems.”
“What systems am I here to fix?”
“This is a sentience laboratory. A few of our guests aren’t feeling well.”
Yes, he thought, looking inwardly, machine sentience. That is something I know a great deal about, I think.
A floating sphere entered the room and began to clear the floor with a beam of some kind. There was blood down there, a lot of it. Bernhardt started back.
“It’s all right,” Dubois said. “You lost a few pints, but we got some new blood back in.”
His insides turned over. He felt sick and vomited. Dubois gave him a pan for it and when he was done the sphere took the pan away.
He slept and when he woke he felt his mind was coming back. He knew a little about the place, general knowledge. The planet was called New Rosance, an extremely remote colony. There were no continents, only a single underwater research station, Kaisure.
Distantly he could hear music, Beethoven.
Dubois returned and took him out of the hospital in a wheelchair.
The corridors were gigantic and designed in the New Minimal style so popular a few centuries ago. Artispheres were everywhere, cleaning, carrying equipment, delivering packages.
“How many arties are on the station?” Bernhardt said.
“Several thousand mechanical, about twenty sentient.”
“You don’t consider them all sentient?”
“Oh you’re one of those,” Dubois muttered.
She took him all over the station. There was an arboretum full of trees and exotic flowers. There was an old-style library. There was even a luxury resort staffed with artispheres who offered massages and yoga therapy instruction.
On their way back to the hospital Bernhardt noticed stairs leading up to a level above.
“What's up there?” he said.
“Maintenance deck,” Dubois said.
“There’s only one deck above?”
“Correct.”
She led him back to the hospital, back to bed. He protested that he wasn’t so tired, but she ordered a helper sphere to administer a sleeping agent.
When he woke again the hospital clock said it was around noon, planet time.
He recalled odd details of his past, lying in bed at university on a lazy Saturday, eating soup in China. The rest though was just notions.
Stay calm, he thought. Just say calm, everything is going to get sorted.
“Dubois?” he called out.
A serving sphere came to his side bearing a note in its containment cloud.
I’m afraid I’m indisposed today. Since you and I are the only two humans on the station, the helper spheres have been instructed to cater to your whims. If you are feeling up to the task, you may visit your first patient. His name is Oscar. He is in the East Wing of the facility. Ask a sphere to guide you please.
When you are done with the session, don’t hesitate to enjoy a film or a connectome in the common lounge.
Dubois.
He checked his body mentally. A little soreness perhaps, but everything seemed fine.
He asked the sphere for porridge. The sphere brought it. He took a few spoonfuls and threw up over the blanket. The sphere cleaned all of this away, removed the bowl, then returned to project a message in the air: Please don’t eat if you aren’t feeling well.
“I’m fine,” Bernhardt said. “I’ll dress and then will you take me to see this Oscar character?”
Right away.
He found his clothes in a drawer beneath the bed.
“How did these get here?” he said to the sphere.
They were reconstructed from a wave packet sent from your original destination.
“Sorry, what was my original destination?”
I don’t have that information.
He looked for other gaps in his memory, found a fair few.
“Which university am I coming from, actually?”
I don’t have that information.
“Well what do you know about me?”
You are Isaac Bernhardt. You are here to provide a character assessment of some of the artificial denizens of Kaisure Station.
“What does the station do?”
Kaisure Station is a research centre for artificial sentience.
That didn’t sound familiar at all. “My memory is in patches, I’m sorry. Can you tell me more about how I arrived?”
