AfterLife

by BL Craig

  “What do you mean?” asked the Captain.

  “They interviewed me for hours, before I even got my injuries treated and sewn up. They wanted to know everything about how the reanimates performed. I told them about the decision trees we developed to make them better fighters. The confiscated my copies. I explained what I thought their physical limits were. They were practically salivating at the thought of an army of obedient, merciless marines.”

  He looked around at the group. “I showed them it could be done.”

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  The meeting broke up. William made to leave with the others when Brooks put a hand on his shoulder and held him back. William flinched and turned.

  “Butcher . . . William,” Brooks said gruffly. “I’m not going to apologize for not trusting you. I had good reason to think you were a threat to the crew. This is my family. The company is not at all above placing a spy in our ranks. At a minimum, I thought you really had sacrificed all those people for your own glory. I had no reason but your word to believe otherwise.

  “Thankfully, I was wrong. I’m far happier to have you as an ally than an enemy. I am sorry for what the Navy and company did to you. I’m sorry for the hurt I caused you. But don’t think I won’t round on you again if I think you’re a threat.”

  William was not sure what exactly to say to that. “Um, ok?” he said as a question more than a response.

  “Good,” Brooks said, clapping him on the back. “I’m sure you’ve got a lot of questions, so lay ‘em on me.” The other man sat back down in the chair William had been sitting in and leaned back. William took the seat Addy had been in.

  “OK. Tell me about the underground.”

  The underground, it turned out, wasn’t so much an organized resistance as a catchall term for anyone working to undermine AfterLife or get reanimates services and items the company did not want them to have.

  “So, there isn’t an army of scrappy warriors attacking AfterLife installations and liberating drones?” William asked.

  “Not so much,” said Brooks. “It’s a lot of black market smuggling, hacking, information gathering, and such. There are groups of hardcore believers who want to take the company down and lift the veil between 1st and SecondLife, but they haven’t really gotten anywhere. AfterLife has the Elixir supply chain locked down too well. Not much good to be free if the company can just starve you to death.”

  “Have they ever done that?” William asked.

  “Yes,” he said flatly. William waited for elaboration. “There have been strikes and small rebellions,” Brooks said. “Disruptions on dead worlds are harder for them to suppress but some smaller installations have simply disappeared. People get ‘reassigned’ if they become troublesome and are never seen again.”

  William sat with that a moment before continuing. “And Tartarus?” He had recognized the name for the ancient Greek underworld abyss of suffering and torment.

  Brooks leaned back in his chair, “It’s the closest thing the resistance part of the underground has to a headquarters, and the only undead settlement not controlled by AfterLife. A survey ship found it about 200 years ago. The crew decided not to report it the company. There’s nothing in the system worth note, no planets or mineral-rich asteroids. But, there is a ruin of an alien space base, and a deactivated gate.”

  “It’s impossible to deactivate a gate,” said William. Scientists were very clear on this fact: once opened, a stable wormhole could not simply be closed. Trying to do so would certainly fail, and might cause a tremendous discharge of energy, destroying everything within several light years.

  “Yes, that is what everything we know about astrophysics would suggest,” replied Brooks. “Underground scientists have been trying to figure it out for over 200 years. They’re sure it was active once, not just built and never turned on.”

  “What’s on the other side?” asked William.

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? The base had been stripped clean when it was found—or maybe it was never finished. They’ve never found anything written or any data storage devices. We think they had four fingers, because what little there is left seems to be based on a base-eight numbering system.”

  “Octo-aliens?” William said incredulously. Then he thought again. He was pretty sure the Rannit only had four fingers on each hand.

  “Maybe, who knows? The early survey teams passed around info about Tartarus and eventually it became an off the grid black market, resistance headquarters. It’s grown over the years. Now several thousand reanimates live there full-time. They fake their deaths and hop on a survey ship, like ours, that’s headed that way. A particularly militant faction of the resistance holds sway there, but they have to play nice with us because they’re dependent on ship crews.”

  “Why doesn’t everyone run away?”

  “Tartarus depends on survey and transport ships, so we know about it, but most of the folks living on dead worlds have no idea. They can’t risk the company finding out. There’s also the matter of supply. Our scientists figured out a long time ago how to make Elixir, but it’s still difficult to get our hands on the ingredients. AfterLife has been very careful to keep the different ingredient refineries separated. The actual manufacture takes place on Elysium. We can skim off of our allotments, and a lot of folks donate Elixir they buy with sabbatical credits. But you can only give so much that way before the company will notice. Without enough Elixir, Tartarus is a death trap.”

  That explained all the empty tanks Sarah kept in Elixir storage. William had read in the manual that used Elixir was to be spaced to prevent “transfusion mistakes.” The crew must be keeping all the used Elixir for Tartarus.

  “You’ve been there?” asked William.

  “Several times,” said Brooks. “It’s not that great, but it is the place to go if you need to do serious NCM hacking or have other ‘work’ done that you don’t want the company to know about.”

  “So, are the whole crew part of the underground? Or the resistance?” William wondered if that meant he was now a part of the resistance.

  “We’re all in the know and actively helping. The Captain doesn’t always agree with the leadership on Tartarus. We try to be helpful, trading info and transporting people when we can, fudging the Elixir logs and skimming. The biggest thing we do is deliver Elixir donated on the dead worlds to Tartarus. Other types of ships can do it, but survey ship have a lot more extra space on board and a lot more flexibility in our schedules. Who can say if a system took ten weeks to survey or twelve?”

  William pondered a moment. “So, is this one of those things where you’ll have to kill me if I don’t swear fealty?”

  “You’re already dead. Look, you want to help the people AfterLife uses and abuses, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good enough,” Brooks said with a shrug. Then his expression changed to serious. When he spoke, his words had a tentative quality. “Hey, a word of advice, William.” He took a breath. “Sarah, she’s—well, she’s just as broken as the rest of us. She hides it well, but . . . look, I know you’re all kinds of fucked up from Mirada and she’s a nurturer. Just, try not to lean on her too hard, eh? The rest of us, we’re here for you too.”

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  On the return trip, William and Sarah spent most of their spare time together. Sarah should have been chafing at Williams constant presence, but her normal instinct to push back against too much intimacy was muted. She liked having him around. Sometimes they just sat reading and doing other separate tasks quietly together.

  One afternoon, Sarah was painting William’s toenails with tiny vignettes of birds. The current one was a vibrant red Lucas’ bird, native to Babylon. She had told him some bullshit about living canvases and the natural decomposition of art interacting with biological organisms, but really, she just wanted to paint his toenails with little birds. She was pretty sure he knew it was bul
lshit when he said, “It’s a shame it’s not sandal season. Who is going to appreciate your masterful work?”

  “No, no,” she said, “that’s part of it. It poses the question of need for the viewer. Is it art if it is never seen?”

  “Uh huh,” he said with amused skepticism.

  She was also pretty sure he had let her paint dancing pandas just to please her if she asked. So now, she was finishing up the Lucas and moving on to a puffin.

  “I got to the official company history in my orientation curriculum the other day.”

  “Yeah? Anything interesting?”

  “Pretty dry, lots of ‘great man/woman’ rhetoric and mildly informational propaganda. There’s a lot of missing detail.”

  “Not really surprising. The company is very secretive.”

  “One thing they go on about but don’t really explain is the decision trees.” William understood too well the necessity of the decision trees, but he didn’t understand why they were necessary. “What is the real difference between us and the drones. Why are the decision trees necessary?”

  “I asked a psychologist colleague of mine about that once. It’s all about the emotions. Emotions allow us to put intuitive conclusions to use in order to make nearly equivalent decisions quickly. Ages ago, psychologists loved to study people with brain damage. The logic was, when a part of a person was broken it could help you figure out what that part does. So, some of them studied people with brain injuries that impact emotions. One of the big findings was that people who lost their emotions also lost the ability to make decisions. They’d just sit for hours trying to pick between two basically equivalent things. Do I wear the black socks or the grey ones? Do I use a blue pen or a green one? That sort of thing. They’d try to logic it out when most people would just grab a pen and go to work. Why did you pick the blue pen, because you like blue? Or your mom likes blue, whatever. It’s like ‘going with your gut’ helps us get through all the million decisions everyone has to make every day. Those micro emotions are giving us information all the time, like when you know something, but you don’t know why—if someone is lying to you, for instance. People with impaired emotions have trouble putting together all the little social cues to interpret behavior and act accordingly.”

  “So, the decision trees that drones use are substitutes for gut decision making,” William said.

  “Yes, they give the drones a way to navigate all the little decisions we just blow through automatically. They try to eliminate or limit ambiguity for the drones. There are no blue pens on dead worlds. Only green. Well, and red. And there are blue pens, but you don’t let the drones have them. Anyway, that’s why the end of every decision tree, when all the possible actions have been ruled out or tried and failed, is, ‘consult your high-functioning supervisor.’ That supervisor will make a decision, because they can.”

  “OK, but why not just use bots and VIs that use random selectors when options are equivalent?”

  “Bots and VIs are crap at parallel processing. They work highly serially, step by step. Even drones are much better at taking an array of data and synthesizing it. It’s what human brains are best at. The drones can analyze a situation better than any bot or VI, they just get stuck on decisions.”

  William remembered discussions from his high school days about the difference between artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual intelligence (VI). AIs could think like humans but had a very scary habit of going rogue and doing things like trying to access dangerous military weapons. AIs could take the place of drones and higher-functioning reanimates, no problem—but then what would be the use of humanity? When humans had the first encountered the Cosi, they had learned that true AIs were largely banned or heavily restricted among the other alien races.

  “So, AfterLife needs us to watch the drones, and also to do things like run a survey ship in alien territory where split second decisions can make the difference between escaping from adorable space elves and becoming part of the space elf collective.”

  “Exactly. Though I think we might have chosen wrong. Maybe we should have joined the space elf collective.”

  “Yeah, except for the part where we slowly die when we run out of Elixir.”

  “There is that,” she said, adding little shiny black dot eyes on the puffin.

  He was silent for a moment, his expression far off.

  “Hey Sarah,” he said. The tone of his voice caught her attention, and she dearly hoped he was not about to proclaim his deep and abiding love for her.

  “Yes,” she said poorly covering her anxiety.

  “I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me.” He paused. “Let me know if I start feeling like a vampire sucker fish. I don’t want to be that guy.” He made a wide-eyed disgusted face with fish lips.

  She laughed a little too loud in relief. “No worries. I will let you know.”

  “The look on your face!” he chortled.

  “What?”

  “You thought I was going to declare my undying love, and you were trying to calculate a speedy retreat!”

  “I do have a bug down in the lab that liquifies all manner of suckerfish, and obnoxious boys, from the inside out.”

  He put his hands up in surrender. “I promise not to incur your wrath, oh queen of the suckerfish slaying bugs.”

  “I’ll hold you to that.”

  “Shit,” she said, realizing she had spilled the little jar of black lacquer all over the towel she had under his feet.” She began mopping it up furiously.

  “Seriously,” he said in a light tone, “I think you’re the bees knees, Sarah. You’re my best good friend in all the undead universe. I haven’t had a real friend in a long time. I’m not going to start writing moony poetry or do anything to stupid. I’m still pretty hung up on the love of my life. But,” he said diving forward, deftly scooping the bundle of towel and spilled paint onto the floor and leaning in close. “I am definitely going to make out with you every chance I get.”

  “Hmm,” she said, sliding her arms around his neck. “That I can handle.”

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  When the Tilly dropped out of FTL at the designated point, they saw that the space around Mirada was bristling with ships. The Navy had pulled in every ship it could spare. The Tilly and its shiny new exoskeleton constructor ship was hovering well out of Mirada space, to avoid any accidents. William could sense the tension in the Captain’s pose ease as she let out a held breath. They had all feared dropping back into a system under siege, too late to give warning.

  “Nguyen,” said the Captain, “signal traffic and send a tight beam of our full report to Perlin on Mirada Station. Sorry, nix that, just send the signal to traffic. Let them know we’re operating on limited comms.” John had used the communications gear on Rover 2 to replace the communications array destroyed in the ambush, but it was severely limited.

  William watched the traffic around the planet. The fleet seemed to have hunkered down in a defensive position, and even at this distance the mine field could be distinguished as a grey haze in front of the gate. The Navy must have added a ludicrous amount of munitions while they were scouting.

  “Captain, I have a message from Mirada Station,” Alex reported. The administrator must have responded immediately, given the 5 second one-way delay in light speed communications.

  “Perlin must have had some one watching this spot. Play the message.”

  Perlin’s face appeared on the display. “Captain Diaz, good to see you back. You appear to have brought us a large present,” amusement tinged his otherwise indifferent sounding voice. “Please stand by for instructions.”

  The next few hours proved to be a lot of hurry up and wait. The Navy did not want the Tilly closer in system with the constructor ship attached. They also would not let any AfterLife ships from Mirada approach until they had searched both ships. AfterLife did not want Navy personnel on board a survey vessel full of atypes. The crippled comms on the T
illy did not help the situation.

  After hours of stand still, the Captain sent some probe bots out with cutting torches to make a hole in the cradle. They undocked and the Tilly glided out of the cradle. The Navy ships that had been hovering at a distance immediately moved in aggressively. “Mr. Butcher, please jump us to the far side of Mirada station, at a safe distance from that traffic.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  The Navy commanders would not be happy, but it would be hours before they could catch up with the Tilly, at which point, the ship could jump again, if they really wanted to be assholes about it.

  They dropped out of slipstream well out of traffic.

  “Nguyen, please signal administrator Perlin of our new position.”

  After a few minutes the Administrator’s voice came over the com.

  “Please jump to the designated coordinates as soon as your drives are able and join us on station. Admiral Shen wants to meet with you.”

  “Well, that’s either really good or really bad,” said the Captain. “Haruna, how long do you need to charge the capacitors for a jump to Mirada Station from here?” the Captain asked over ship comms.

  “45 minutes according to specs, but I could shave it down to 20 if you need.”

  “Keep on spec. No need to let Perlin know about your improvements.”

  “Captain,” asked William said from his chair at the helm, “Admiral Shen is human Navy, living? Does Perlin really mean for you to meet with her? I thought they keep us away from 1st Lifers.”

  “The four-stars know about us, Butcher. AfterLife keeps plenty of secrets close to the vest, but the naval brass know that there are more of us than the company usually lets on. They also know that we’re just as functional as they are.”

  The Captain thought for a moment. “Alex, as soon as you can get contact with our friend, arrange a rendezvous. Brooks and Clarke, you know what to do. Start your extraction as soon as Butcher and I leave with Perlin. Butcher, come with me. Nguyen, send those news rundowns you’ve been collecting from the feeds to me please.” They had all been scanning the AfterLife and planetary news feeds that trickled in via the crippled comms while they waited inside the cradle.