The Best of Deep Magic- Anthology One

by Jeff Wheeler

I realised I was sobbing. My face was wet, the salt liquid gathering at the corners of my mouth. Every sensation seemed acute, as though I had to feel it all in sharp detail, goading my mind to deny its existence. Its reality.

  Toshiko was crying too. She reached to pull me into her embrace, but I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t let myself feel her warmth and essence and know she wasn’t real. I saw her putrefying remains, stark in my mind. She’d left me. She’d created a universe for me and then left me all alone in it.

  I walked away from her then. I didn’t want to hear any more. I couldn’t begin to consider what I was supposed to do now. I went back through her house and out the front door. I don’t know where I was heading. But I jolted back into my clinging harness, in the dark, metallic confines of my VR pod. The disorientation was nothing like the first time, but it still hit me with its wave of vertigo. The program had ended. She hadn’t written anything besides herself, in her home, talking to me.

  I yanked myself free of the suffocating tangle of suit and webbing and stumbled out of the unit, landing painfully on the steel floor. My tube came free again, but I felt stronger for the nutrients coursing through my bloodstream.

  I stood cautiously. The insipid light still coated the walls. The stench of decay still choked my nostrils. The closed door still occupied the wall beyond Toshiko’s unit. I couldn’t bring myself to confront her remains again ... but the door. Behind that door lay a deserted space colony. The place I’d come from.

  My knees felt weak as I approached the door. I set my shoulders and opened it. A waft of cold, stale air gusted past me. Beyond was darkness. When I stepped through, some long-abandoned power source flickered to life as my motion woke the lights.

  I wandered those corridors and chambers that still came alight as I entered them. I found grey bulkheads, and empty quarters, and the remains of a community that had grappled with survival and lost. I found dust, and debris, and chilly dampness. I found evidence of the living, and no one left alive. When I came upon a wide viewport, I stumbled in shock at the raw expanse beyond. Space travel had never frightened me before, but I wasn’t travelling now. I was stranded.

  I knew Toshiko would have exhausted every possibility over the last twenty-five years. But it was one thing to hear my fate from her simulation. Surely there were records. Computer logs, video diaries, something to confirm everything she’d told me.

  The station’s computer was easy enough to boot. Obviously the remaining solar panels were keeping some systems alive. Including your whole world, a snide voice whispered in the back of my mind. It took me a few moments to find log entries, but there were dozens of them. Some were password protected; others had public access. I scrolled back to the last cluster of entries and opened the top one.

  It showed a recording of a gaunt man, pale-faced, with sores on his forehead.

  “Magda died this afternoon. There are five of us left. Two children, three adults, and all but one of us are showing symptoms.” He coughed, a hacking wet sound that made me wince. “I’ve tried one last time to mend the communications array, but without Anwelo’s skill, we’re screwed.” A child began crying in the background. The man looked on the verge of joining in. He opened his mouth to continue, but swallowed hard and signed off instead.

  The next entry was three days later. I opened it, and a young Toshiko looked out at me. There were tears in her eyes. She held a dark-haired toddler.

  “We’re the last two,” she said. “I jettisoned Will’s body this morning. It’s just me and little Carlos.” She held the child close. He was all she had left. “I can hardly believe it, but I’m better. It’s as if I was meant to survive to help this little one. If I’d died too ...” She broke off and kissed the side of his curly head. A lump blocked my throat. That was the end of her entry.

  She’d left later accounts of the VR development: her excitement at the initial idea, programming glitches, physiological and hygiene issues, descriptions of fitting me with new suits as I grew.

  I stepped away from the computer, hit by the depth of Toshiko’s love. I wouldn’t have survived without her. I wandered away in a daze.

  * * *

  As I stood beneath the flickering light cells of a large communal chamber, gazing at abandoned furniture and discarded personal items, it assailed me. The hideous weight of a loneliness so crushing I thought I’d never be able to stand again. It bore me to the ground and I crouched, cowering like a frightened animal, my arms over my head and my breath choking out in hoarse gasps. I felt eviscerated, hollow, terrified. Out here, I was the only human. Utterly alone.

  I don’t know how long I huddled there, but after a time the lights went out due to my stillness. Even then, I couldn’t bring myself to move.

  It was the thought of Gia that roused me. My wife. My wife who consisted of binary coding and artificial, programmed intelligence. A fresh sob strangled me at the thought, which was also the realisation that artificial coding was all I had in the world. It was my world. Not this cold husk of an extinct population. That complex, all-encompassing, glimmering facade was all I would ever have. I could return to it, immerse myself in it, and share my life with the people Toshiko had fabricated for me ... or I could stay here, in this cold, lifeless reality until I lost my mind to it.

  It was no decision, really. I retraced my steps to the only room I’d ever lived in and hooked myself back up. Later, I would find a way to jettison Toshiko’s body and perhaps learn how she had died. Later, I would reload the program she’d left me and ask her how to maintain my equipment and keep myself alive, as she had always done for me. I could return to the station and scour the diagnostics for something the colonists had missed. If that proved fruitless, I could consume myself with overseeing my personal reality. But now, all I wanted was my beautiful wife. She was waiting, mercifully alone, when I came around. I pulled her into our bed with me and lost myself in her sweet, tangible reality. For that moment, there was nothing else in the world.

  * * *

  It’s been years since Toshiko taught me everything I needed to know. I’ve quizzed her virtual persona on everything she could possibly impart. She helped me write the satellite program, establishing a place in my world where the colonists are thriving in their Venusian orbit, making lives and discoveries and babies. I’ve railed at her, and wept with her, and done my best to express my gratitude for everything she created for me when she was alive. There’s nothing left to ask her now; nothing else to say.

  But still. Every now and again, when I miss her the most, or need to touch the last remaining link to my physical past, I bring myself back to the metallic room and load her datacard. Her front door is always open, and she always calls,

  “Carlos? I’m out here. Come through.”

  About Eleanor R. Wood

  Eleanor R. Wood’s stories have appeared in Pseudopod, Crossed Genres, Urban Fantasy Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, and the Aurealis-nominated anthology Hear Me Roar, among other places. She writes and eats liquorice from the south coast of England, where she lives with her husband, two marvellous dogs, and enough tropical fish tanks to charge an entry fee.

  THE TARIFF

  By Allen Shoff | 6,100 words

  DIMITRIOS ELEFTHERIOU IDLY twirled a medal around his finger, disinterestedly watching the graven image of the bearded bishop spin in the microgravity. Like the illusions of a zoetrope, St. Nicholas seemed animated, appearing to extend his hand and offer anew his three bags of gold with each revolution. Dimitrios smiled thinly at this, humor dimly reflected in his dark Grecian eyes framed by sun-kissed Levantine skin—the latter a gift from his mother, God rest her soul. A nervous cough interrupted his reverie, and he turned his head to look at the timid clerk strapped in at his right.

  “A problem, Yuri?”

  The young assistant, barely twenty years of age, shook his head rapidly.

  “No, Captain Eleftheriou, none. None at all,” he quickly stuttered.

  The older man snorted aloud.

&
nbsp; “Yuri, please, Dimitrios. Call me Dimitrios. To the porters and the technicians, Captain, but you, young Yuri, are no mere hired hand—this is, after all, your father’s ship.”

  The youth forced a humorless laugh and continued to watch the lazy revolutions of the medal in the captain’s hand. Dimitrios, following his gaze, grinned and splayed the chain across his fingers, abruptly halting the necklace’s orbit.

  “Oh, this? This is what has you worried?”

  “Well, Capta— Dimitrios, sir, yes. What if you lost it?”

  The captain shrugged his broad shoulders dismissively.

  “What if I lost it? Where could it go?”

  “She’s a large ship, sir. What with free fall, I don’t think you’d ever be able to find it—”

  He trailed off, interrupted by Dimitrios’s hearty laugh. The ebullient Greek reached out and slapped the youth on the shoulder before settling back into his command chair with a well-practiced slide.

  “Have you ever been out of atmo, Yuri? Been out in the black?”

  Yuri, averting his eyes, responded sheepishly.

  “No, Dimitrios, sir. This is the first time.”

  The captain’s eyes widened.

  “Your father is the deputy guildmaster for Saturn and her moons, and you’ve never left the surface of Titan?”

  “No.”

  Dimitrios opened his mouth as if to say something—twice—but then finally closed it and shrugged.

  “Well, then, first lesson: lost and found.”

  He held up the medal again and made a gesture as if he were tossing it, causing the youth to twitch unconsciously. Dimitrios half smiled and explained.

  “In free fall, air only moves when we move it, and we move it through the air vents. If I drop this, it’ll make its way through the ship and end up at a return. Nothing is ever lost up here, lad, just temporarily out of place.”

  He twirled the medal once more around his finger before clasping it again to his neck and dropping it under the collar of his jumpsuit. He smirked.

  “You’ll find spacers don’t have much recourse to St. Anthony, Yuri. At least where their shipboard possessions are concerned.”

  The deputy guildmaster’s son nodded thoughtfully, clearly trying to absorb as much knowledge as he could from the older spacer. Then he lay back in the chair, struggling briefly with the harness that kept his limbs from floating freely, before casting a sideways glance at the captain, trying to learn something about the man without attracting too much attention. TheDoukas had been underway for the better part of the day, but her captain had thus far eluded categorization. His mood and his manner shifted from euphoric to melancholic in an instant, his bearing from breezy to stiffly formal—yet his penetrating gaze remained unchanged. The captain’s eyes betrayed an intelligence far beyond that which was customarily displayed by a merchantman’s master—always calculating, forever analyzing, and never dulled by indecision.

  “—Yuri! You want to learn something about astrogation or not?”

  The assistant, startled, stammered an apology, unaware that he had drifted off into his thoughts, but the captain continued without pause, quizzing his young pupil.

  “We’ve arrived at the Titan-Saturn L2 EGR. Why do we care?”

  The youth thought for a moment, desperately wishing he had paid more attention in secondary.

  “Uh, EGRs are equipotential gravitational regions—calculated solutions to the n-body problem. We can ghost only from these regions; the translocation drive won’t work anywhere else.”

  Dimitrios snorted.

  “If by ‘won’t work’ you mean if we bypass the safeties and try anyway, every atom of this ship will be torn asunder , then yes, full points.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “And now, young master Yuri, are you familiar with Schliemann’s first law?”

  The guildmaster’s son was ashamed that he had to shake his head. Dimitrios considered making a remark about scholarship on Titan, but he abstained.

  “Schliemann’s first states that momentum is preserved across a translocation. Remember: the drive bridges two points in space. Our velocity and heading don’t change as we push through in that brief instant the bridge exists.”

  He pulled the console down from above him and began tapping commands into the screen.

  “The art, my boy, is getting gravity to work for us. For today’s run, we chose this particular EGR because Titan’s position takes it on a heading that will work out nicely to slingshot us into Mimir orbit with only a brief burn on the far side.”

  He looked back at the youth, who seemed to feel physical pain as he tried to work out the physics of the maneuver, and chuckled.

  “Save yourself the work, Yuri. Take a look at the astrogation computer’s plot simulation and you’ll see what we’re doing.” He tapped the microphone that clung to the side of his face.

  “Shipwide. Now hear this, now hear this: translocation maneuver in thirty seconds. Take your positions.”

  An automated klaxon wailed, and the computer began calling out the countdown. The captain adjusted the harnesses at his chest, and Yuri did the same. Dimitrios looked back at his young charge, and saw the sun-shy youth’s face blanched even paler than normal.

  “First ghost?”

  The youth nodded. The captain grinned.

  “Close your eyes. Trust me.”

  The boy shut his eyes tightly and gripped the arms of his chair with an uncharacteristically ferocious strength. A low whine, almost imperceptible at first, began to build throughout the compartment. Outside, in the void, the radiators abruptly glowed a dull red, dissipating the waste heat as the reactor pumped more and more reactants into the sun-hot fusion chamber. The wire-thin superconducting coils encircling the Doukas began to vibrate as the current increased, fields growing stronger and stronger, enwrapping the vessel in a frighteningly powerful electromagnetic display. Few on board could have explained how exactly the drive worked; even fewer of those millions who lived in Terra’s scattered colonies understood the mathematics necessary to allow this travesty of relativity. And yet, inside, the roiling crescendo of sound, so loud as to be almost deafening, reached its peak, and the computer performed the final half billion calculations necessary to precisely fix the point of arrival. The drive activated.

  CRACK

  To the hypothetical observer orbiting Titan, it all happened too quickly to perceive: in an instant, the nascent bridge swallowed the Doukas and vanished just as quickly, leaving nothing but a ghostly afterimage of the vessel burned on the retinas. Near the L4 Lagrange point of Mimir and Alpha Centauri B, the Doukas appeared just as suddenly, the crackling energy in the coils entirely spent. Panel radiators extended all along the ship’s spine, liquid lithium within already heated to near boiling. The reactor’s fire slowly died down to manageable levels.

  Inside, Yuri sat blinking, head lolling as he tried to comprehend the sensations assaulting his mind. His hands seemed delayed as he moved them, and his thoughts felt sluggish and unrefined, like those immediately after waking. Dimitrios too, veteran traveler that he was, waited several moments to get his bearings before again taking to the shipwide circuit.

  “Now hear this, now hear this: acceleration maneuver in thirty seconds, maintain your positions.”

  While Yuri continued to shake his head to clear the fog, he and the captain felt themselves thrown back against their chairs as the engines ignited, their harnesses tightening for safety. The acceleration far exceeded the leisurely burn from Titan; this time, the men felt their weight double as the thrust from the engine clawed at their cheeks and their eyes, pulling their skin taut and blurring their vision.

  The Doukas was an old ship, to be sure—a long, narrow, almost skeletal, titanium frame, capped at the bow by a cluster of habitable compartments, and at the stern by a massive filigree of superconducting wire. The rings of wire formed an invisible but potent magnetic nozzle, directing the torrent of plasma blasted out by the sunlight heat o
f the fusion reactor. The blade shield protecting the wire coils, an exotic combination of graphite for heat resistance and tungsten for strength, glowed so brightly as to give the vessels both their distinctive look and their obvious name: torches. Although her discolored spine and pockmarked Whipple shielding betrayed her ripe old age, the Doukas could move. Her owner had made sure of that.

  As she burned hard for orbit, the captain rapidly scanned the system for any sign of other vessels. Yuri looked concerned, and spoke through gritted teeth as he felt his lungs struggle to process enough air.

  “Dimitrios, sir, what if the Republic sees us? We’ve got to be giving away our position, burning like this.”

  The captain took the time to turn to the youth and grunt out a laugh before looking back at the board.

  “Your old man really told you nothing of the spacer life, did he, Yuri? Second lesson: stealth in space is a myth.”

  His fingers flashed over the panel, tapping buttons and tracing over the sensor data, looking for any incongruities that might reveal the presence of a hostile vessel. He continued.

  “What’s the background radiation of the universe—its temperature? Do you know?”

  “No,” heaved Yuri.

  “We’re talking under three kelvins. Even if we shut off every system and froze to death, the crew modules would still be at several hundred kelvins, and would be for months, until we slowly reached equilibrium with the surrounding space. Our radiators are above a thousand kelvins, and our engine’s plume is—well, unfathomably hot. We’re bright as a sun, Yuri, and there’s no way to hide that, not from the cheapest of sensors on the rattiest of freighters.”

  He looked almost philosophical for a moment, even as the brutal pummeling of acceleration continued.

  “The smallest ship is visible the moment she ghosts in system, so it’s never a question of hiding. It’s a question of running.”

  The console beeped an ugly warning tone, and Captain Eleftheriou winced.

  “What’s that?” gasped the young trainee, cheeks vibrating as the old ship rattled.