Eventually, his father had begun talking about the act as if it were possible. And that’s when Lucas knew. Even before he had overheard the conversation, he had suspected that things were in motion. Small, secretive steps. But steps nonetheless.
And now, they had reached the final lap. The finish line was in sight.
“I will neither confirm nor deny,” his father said, smiling. He walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “A proposal like that might sound a little wild, but Harris submitted her proposal for synthetic rights for the umpteenth time today and in light of that, a proposal to put a Light Wire on Desia might suddenly seem reasonable.” He closed the fridge with a can of beer in his hand and snapped the tab open.
Lucas laughed. “I take it hers got shot-down then?”
“Well, they threw her a bone,” he said. “They said they’d push it through on a planetary level on some of the Onyx planets and see how it does there.”
“Ah, so that way there’s voter competition between the blue collar workers and the synthetics?” Lucas asked, catching on. Of the Clark family’s four children, he was far-and-away the most politically savvy.
His father shot him a wink. “They won’t say it but that’s almost certainly their reasoning. I don’t think they understand what a slippery slope that is though. If goddam machines gain voting rights across the universe then our entire infrastructure is at risk. I don’t think the everyday person realizes how much of their safe and comfortable lives are upheld by our automated systems.”
“I mean, does that mean even combat synths would attain citizenship? They could be programmed to vote for anyone.”
“Pffff,” his father plopped down on the couch, loosening his tie. “I don’t think they’re even thinking about that yet. I think they’re just concerned with granting rights to Organic Synthetics.” Organic Synthetics were humans that were grown in a lab with organic material. “It’s all a voting strategy,” he said cynically. “If they can grant a bunch of people citizenship then they’ve just pulled a bunch of voters out of thin air and effectively bought their support.”
“That’s stupid,” Lucas said. He didn’t tell his father that in his opinion, the entire voting system was broken anyway. It was all one big popularity contest like at school where the best-looking and most charismatic people thrived, leaving the others to rot in isolation and ridicule. If it were up to him, he’d bring the whole system down to its knees.
Soon, it might be, said a little voice at the back of his mind.
“So when’s the day?” he asked. “When do they start building the Light Wire on Desia?” No need to let on that he knew more than he should. In reality, the facility was probably already built.
“We don’t have a firm date set,” his father said, his tongue beginning to loosen up. He looked over at Lucas. “And no, you can’t be there. I know we’ve been talking about this for a while, but it’s just not safe, let alone legal. I can’t have a minor aboard my ship in the middle of an operation.”
Lucas felt his mood dim a bit. He had wanted to be there when the Pillon System finally joined the rest of the world, but no matter. There was a Light Wire here in the capital and he had already secured that location with an internship. His face was so well-known around there that he could basically walk right in and do what he wanted.
“Hey, don’t you have Debate Club in an hour?” his dad asked.
“Ugghhhhh,” Lucas sighed loudly. “I hate Debate Club. It’s just one big group of assholes fighting over who can fart the loudest. And those farts are usually aimed right in the face of logic.”
“Hey, language,” his father snapped, a little bit of the military disciplinarian coming out. “Now why don’t you get on upstairs and get dressed. How do you think your talking points will be received if you're wearing a pair of ripped up jeans and a shirt with cartoons on it,” he said, flipping his hand at Lucas’s clothes.
“That’s the problem! It shouldn’t-”
“Go!” His father pointed up the stairs.
Without another word, Lucas pounded up the steps and down the hallway to his room. Debate Club was in an hour and it only took 45 minutes to get there and five minutes to get dressed, so he didn’t know what his dad was so concerned about. Not like he’d be welcomed in with open arms anyway, the assholes.
Lucas plopped down on his bed and then looked over at the wide-range receiver he had built sitting at the desk currently serving as his nightstand. He had modeled the receiver after the blueprints of the Light Wire he had downloaded at the library. Obviously, he couldn’t get a hold of an actual Light Core to use, but he had been building miniature Tesla coils since he was a child in Science Club, and had been able to boost the receiver’s range and capabilities almost up to that of the comm systems his dad’s SEUs used. The real break had come however, when he had found a virtual backdoor into the Light Wire after his internship had started and he was able to piggyback on its signal.
Now, to do what Lucas was planning on doing, he’d need direct access to the Light Wire. That wasn’t much of a problem but he had been hoping he could do it on Desia when it went live, if for no other reason than to see the look on his father’s face.
It was irrelevant in the end though. What would be done would be done and all that mattered was that it happened at all. Who knows, he thought, maybe he’d even be able to bring his receiver with and talk to his dad directly. He’d be changing the wavelength of the Light Wire but that shouldn’t matter. He should still be able to communicate over it. Wasn’t that the whole point?
Lucas stood up and walked around to his desk. He reached down and picked up the receiver and toggled the switch.
At first, there was nothing, as there always was. Just a light hiss of static over placid silence. He had found the signal one day while systematically going through channel-by-channel. Then, there it was.
Light Cores and Tesla Arcs honed in on light spectrums that were more similar to spacial coordinates than classic radio frequencies. This allowed for both sound and matter to travel over incalculable distances VIA gates to the Void Dimension, a plane of existence where space seemed to exist but not time. In the early days when humanity was beginning to explore space, they used these coordinates to travel from Void Gate to Void Gate, allowing them access to star systems.
In those early days of exploration, they would run long sequences of coordinates, sending a ping to each one, and if they got a ping back, then that meant there was a Void Gate they could travel through.
Most of the old channels had been forgotten by now, but one day Lucas had been scanning them anyway, just to see if any strange sounds came across. He remembered the first time he heard the signal with extreme vividness. That seemingly empty airwave that shouldn’t and technically couldn’t be used to transmit sound.
He hadn’t even been able to tell when it started, so soft it had come in, but after a few minutes, it was there. Strong. Clear.
And alien.
He slowly realized that what he was listening to was music. The seemingly random notes that began to coalesce into something bigger. Something wider. Lucas had spent hours listening to the steady gulp-gulp sound of the bass, as if it was made by something swallowing. He had listened to it and understood it—understood what it meant—what it could mean. Not in words, but in his body. In his soul.
Then one day his father had come home talking about Desia and the Pillon System again and how they still couldn’t stem the tide of rhetoric being espoused by its inhabitants. That’s when a solution had clicked in Lucas’s brain.
Not a solution to the information distribution problem he had hashed over so many times with his father, but to everything. To humanity. The idea had dropped down into his mind almost as if it had been planed like a seed from some foreign hand.
The Light Wire. Connection to all of PUC controlled space. The song he had heard. The sheer scale and implications of it rattled his heart and shook his soul.
The whole world in
the palm of his hands. The PUC had thought they were creating a network of information all of these years. A safety net. A wall of security that hedged against undesirable rhetoric.
But what they had actually created was a steering wheel. And once the final piece was in place, all that was needed was for someone to reach out and grab it.
Lucas thought about planting the final Light Wire on Desia—remembered watching the idea quickly take hold in his father’s mind, transforming from his son’s idea into his own. Now it was all finally coming together, the future descending upon the present.
He could already see everyone’s faces as they realized what he had done—the looks of shock and horror when they realized that the insignificant little mote they knew as Lucas Clark was actually capable of creating quite a bit of noise. There were the larger considerations of course, like the ultimate fate of the entire known universe for example, but that was inevitable anyway. And who said you couldn’t enjoy bringing peace to all of existence?
Truth be told, he didn’t know what form it would take. Not really. All he knew was the song. The gap it would fill. The revelation of it all.
The Crimson Coronach. That’s what it was called. He wasn’t sure where that name had come from but there it was, up in his head like a drifter blowing in from the cold.
Lucas leaned back, letting the music play. It was beautiful, really. It had sounded ugly at first but it was the ugliness that he had connected with. And it wasn’t that it was convincing him to do anything really. It was more that it was just so simple and complete. And if he could only make people hear it, then they would be able to see something that only he saw. Feel something that only he felt. Soon the whole universe would know him. Know his will. His intent.
Soon, they would see what only he could see.
1
The Void Tunnel
“We’re coming up on it,” 49 said from the pilot’s seat of the Leopold. It wasn’t exactly a pilot’s “seat,” as they had had to remove the chair itself to be able to wire 49 into the bridge’s conduit system. The ship could still fly without the android plugged in the way he was, but due to the Light Core he currently housed inside of his body, he was needed for both Void navigation and their heavy weapon’s system. Both of which they were about to need.
“What’s this thing gonna look like?” Byzzie asked from the gunner’s seat. “Am I even going to be able to know what to shoot at?”
“Don’t shoot at anything yet,” 49 warned. He was steering the ship smoothly toward what looked like a giant solar storm, arcs of heat lightning cutting across the black. “There are things in there that won’t even glance at being hit by a Javelin round.” The Javelin was the ship’s heavy artillery.
“Yeah, well, I’m not taking any risks,” Captain Ritz said from the captain’s seat. “If something looks at us sideways I’m giving it a new mouth.”
“There are creatures in the Void Tunnel that—if you were to shoot them—would literally grow a new mouth,” 49 said. “And you don’t want those to have any more mouths than they already do.”
Trapped in a system with no Void Gate to travel through, the Leopold had been stranded after a botched jump almost three weeks ago. Since then, they had been lured onboard a marooned two-century-old ghost ship by a deranged AI system, fought indescribable horrors, lost their pilot, and then replaced their lost pilot with the deranged AI after defeating him and altering his bio-mechanical make-up with the Light Core. They had also hopefully changed his views on being murderous and deranged.
Byzzie wasn’t so sure however, and though she was glad she could have 49 upfront to keep an eye on, she wasn’t exactly thrilled about giving him the wheel of the ship. She looked back at Ritz and saw that the captain shared the same concern.
“Just know,” Byzzie said. “If you’re leading us into some sort of trap, I have the override controls to the ship right here in front of me. And even if we can’t escape with our lives, I can turn that Light Core in your belly into a really bright Light Core, if you catch my meaning. Then you’ll just be a smudge of golden dust on the asshole of the universe. Got it?”
“For the 11th time, I-” the android raised his hands and made a pair of quotation marks with his metallic fingers, “-‘got it.’”
Byzzie looked back toward the viewport of the ship. “I don’t think you’re using those right.”
“I’m trying to use them to navigate through a wormhole in space,” he explained.
“I was talking about the quot-”
“Shove a cork in it, Byzzie,” Ritz said irritably. “This is our only way back and I don’t want the ship to crash and explode because you were too busy fighting with the nav-system.”
Byzzie ground her teeth and looked at 49 who threw her a wry smile, causing her to grind them even harder. She didn’t like that he was playing games with her.
“Again,” Byzzie said, trying to keep her voice serene, “what exactly is this thing going to look like?”
“It’s going to look like you’re flying through a storm,” 49 said. “Then it’s going to look like—well, you’ll see.”
Byzzie pursed her lips and shot a glance back at the captain, who was willfully ignoring her. “You’re lucky this bucket doesn’t have an eject-button, buddy,” she muttered to herself. 49 didn’t answer but she thought she may have caught him smirking.
The ship jostled and rocked as they entered the storm. The viewport became obscured and they soon had to switch to instrumental navigation. Another flash of lightning cracked the sky in front of them.
“It feels like this thing is going to come apart,” Byzzie yelled over the racket. “Are you sure we can handle it?”
“I am not,” 49 said, increasing his volume. “I barely made it through with the Mary when I got excommunicated from the Void. So who knows what it looks like at this point.” Mary’s Burden had been the ghost ship they found the android on.
“Focus,” Ritz yelled, stretching out the word. “I’m not seeing barriers on the imaging screen but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. Plus, I imagine getting hit by one of those lightning strikes wouldn’t end very well for us.”
They careened through the storm, avoiding the rough patches as best they could. At one point, a fork of lightning streaked so close to the window that they were all temporarily blinded, a white fuzz hanging in their vision as an electrical buzz permeated the whole bridge.
Another fork flared farther off. It wasn’t close enough to harm them but what it illuminated was.
“Holy shit,” Ritz yelled. “What is that?” A giant whale-like shape loomed in the murk, its enormous silhouette outlined by the lightning.
“Don’t worry,” 49 said. “It’s just here to feed off of the storm. There are some creatures that live off of direct energy alone.”
“Yeah, I’m more worried about running into it,” Byzzie said. “Anyone got eyes on it?” She searched for the massive shape which had once again been obscured by the darkness.
“My instruments are picking it up,” 49 replied. “It’s off to the right, moving left at a 314-degree angle.” He tapped at the keyboard. “Banking right and down.”
The ship veered down and though they couldn't see it, Byzzie thought she could feel an eerie crackle pass over her head as they descended. The nose of the Leopold leveled out again and continued on through the storm.
They picked up two more of the creatures on their sensors, catching a glimpse of one of them, and 49 gave them a wide berth as he pushed forward. A few more lightning strikes crashed and then all at once, the rumbling in the ship ceased as the space in front of them cleared and opened up to reveal a dense purple-tinged expanse of things so bizarre that they defied everything and anything Byzzie had ever experienced in her time aboard spacecraft.
Giant globules of magenta liquid pulsed, separated, and merged together in front of them. Off to the sides were huge lily pad-like structures that a menagerie of bizarre and impossible creatures occupied. One of the
m looked vaguely cat-like with a heavy mane of translucent bristles while another moved like some combination between an octopus and a tree-frog, alternating between hopping and swimming.
“What is this place?” Byzzie said with amazement. She could feel her jaw hanging open but didn’t care.
“Whenever a tunnel is bored out of or into the Void,” 49 explained, “it creates a unique environment populated by any number of non-atmospheric dependent life-forms. Occasionally, a tunnel like this one will open up and energy from the Void will transform whatever particles get caught inside into-” he gestured at the viewport “-something like this.”
“Are you saying that you didn’t create this tunnel?” Ritz asked.
The android shook his head. “When I was jettisoned out of the Void, I fell into a slipstream that led me here. Some openings into the Void are clean and neat like that of the Void Gates, while others are more like gradual transitions like these.”
“What causes them?” Byzzie asked, her attention focused on what she had thought was some sort of large stalk-like plant but which ended up sprouting fins out of its side and swimming away like a long, skinny fish.
“No one knows for sure. But almost everything you see here was created at the time of the Dislocation.” The Dislocation was a massive cosmic event that had suddenly and inexplicably scattered humanity across the universe, resulting in countless deaths and—apparently—tears in the fabric of space and time that took the form of Void Gates and Tunnels.
Suddenly, the ship rocked and halted its progression onward.
“What the fuck was that?” Ritz said, freezing in place.
Both 49 and Byzzie hurriedly scrolled and tapped through their counsels, trying to discern the problem. Finally, Byzzie pulled up a view screen from a camera mounted on the back of the ship. “That doesn’t look good,” she said.
Shattered Light Page 2
