by Simon Ings
After battle with the Fleet of Honest Representation, after seven hundred seconds of sheer terror and uncertainty, and after our shared triumph in the acquisition of the greatest prize seizure in three hundred years, we cautiously approached the massive black hole that Purth-Anaget orbited. The many rotating rings, filaments, and infrastructures bounded within the fields that were the entirety of our ship, With All Sincerity, were flush with a sense of victory and bloated with the riches we had all acquired.
Give me a ship to sail and a quasar to guide it by, billions of individual citizens of all shapes, functions, and sizes cried out in joy together on the common channels. Whether fleshy forms safe below, my fellow crab-like maintenance forms on the hulls, or even the secretive navigation minds, our myriad thoughts joined in a sense of True Shared Purpose that lingered even after the necessity of the group battle-mind.
I clung to my usual position on the hull of one of the three rotating habitat rings deep inside our shields and watched the warped event horizon shift as we fell in behind the metallic world in a trailing orbit.
A sleet of debris fell toward the event horizon of Purth-Anaget’s black hole, hammering the kilometers of shields that formed an iridescent cocoon around us. The bow shock of our shields’ push through the debris field danced ahead of us, the compressed wave it created becoming a hyper-aurora of shifting colors and energies that collided and compressed before they streamed past our sides.
What a joy it was to see a world again. I was happy to be outside in the dark so that as the bow shields faded, I beheld the perpetual night face of the world: it glittered with millions of fractal habitation patterns traced out across its artificial surface.
On the hull with me, a nearby friend scuttled between airlocks in a cloud of insect-sized seeing eyes. They spotted me and tapped me with a tight-beam laser for a private ping.
“Isn’t this exciting?” they commented.
“Yes. But this will be the first time I don’t get to travel downplanet,” I beamed back.
I received a derisive snort of static on a common radio frequency from their direction. “There is nothing there that cannot be experienced right here in the Core. Waterfalls, white sand beaches, clear waters.”
“But it’s different down there,” I said. “I love visiting planets.”
“Then hurry up and let’s get ready for the turnaround so we can leave this industrial shithole of a planet behind us and find a nicer one. I hate being this close to a black hole. It fucks with time dilation, and I spend all night tasting radiation and fixing broken equipment that can’t handle energy discharges in the exajoule range. Not to mention everything damaged in the battle I have to repair.”
This was true. There was work to be done.
Safe now in trailing orbit, the many traveling worlds contained within the shields that marked the With All Sincerity’s boundaries burst into activity. Thousands of structures floating in between the rotating rings moved about, jockeying and repositioning themselves into renegotiated orbits. Flocks of transports rose into the air, wheeling about inside the shields to then stream off ahead toward Purth-Anaget. There were trillions of citizens of the Fleet of Honest Representation heading for the planet now that their fleet lay captured between our shields like insects in amber.
The enemy fleet had forced us to extend energy far, far out beyond our usual limits. Great risks had been taken. But the reward had been epic, and the encounter resolved in our favor with their capture.
Purth-Anaget’s current ruling paradigm followed the memetics of the One True Form, and so had opened their world to these refugees. But Purth-Anaget was not so wedded to the belief system as to pose any threat to mutual commerce, information exchange, or any of our own rights to self-determination.
Later we would begin stripping the captured prize ships of information, booby traps, and raw mass, with Purth-Anaget’s shipyards moving inside of our shields to help.
I leapt out into space, spinning a simple carbon nanotube of string behind me to keep myself attached to the hull. I swung wide, twisted, and landed near a dark-energy manifold bridge that had pinged me a maintenance consult request just a few minutes back.
My eyes danced with information for a picosecond. Something shifted in the shadows between the hull’s crenulations.
I jumped back. We had just fought an entire war-fleet; any number of eldritch machines could have slipped through our shields—things that snapped and clawed, ripped you apart in a femtosecond’s worth of dark energy. Seekers and destroyers.
A face appeared in the dark. Skeins of invisibility and personal shielding fell away like a pricked soap bubble to reveal a bipedal figure clinging to the hull.
“You there!” it hissed at me over a tightly contained beam of data. “I am a fully bonded Shareholder and Chief Executive with command privileges of the Anabathic Ship Helios Prime. Help me! Do not raise an alarm.”
I gaped. What was a CEO doing on our hull? Its vacuum-proof carapace had been destroyed while passing through space at high velocity, pockmarked by the violence of single atoms at indescribable speed punching through its shields. Fluids leaked out, surrounding the stowaway in a frozen mist. It must have jumped the space between ships during the battle, or maybe even after.
Protocols insisted I notify the hell out of security. But the CEO had stopped me from doing that. There was a simple hierarchy across the many ecologies of a traveling ship, and in all of them a CEO certainly trumped maintenance forms. Particularly now that we were no longer in direct conflict and the Fleet of Honest Representation had surrendered.
“Tell me: What is your name?” the CEO demanded.
“I gave that up a long time ago,” I said. “I have an address. It should be an encrypted rider on any communication I’m single-beaming to you. Any message you direct to it will find me.”
“My name is Armand,” the CEO said. “And I need your help. Will you let me come to harm?”
“I will not be able to help you in a meaningful way, so my not telling security and medical assistance that you are here will likely do more harm than good. However, as you are a CEO, I have to follow your orders. I admit, I find myself rather conflicted. I believe I’m going to have to countermand your previous request.”
Again, I prepared to notify security with a quick summary of my puzzling situation.
But the strange CEO again stopped me. “If you tell anyone I am here, I will surely die and you will be responsible.”
I had to mull the implications of that over.
“I need your help, robot,” the CEO said. “And it is your duty to render me aid.”
Well, shit. That was indeed a dilemma.
*
Robot.
That was a Formist word. I never liked it.
I surrendered my free will to gain immortality and dissolve my fleshly constraints, so that hard acceleration would not tear at my cells and slosh my organs backward until they pulped. I did it so I could see the galaxy. That was one hundred and fifty-seven years, six months, nine days, ten hours, and—to round it out a bit—fifteen seconds ago.
Back then, you were downloaded into hyperdense pin-sized starships that hung off the edge of the speed of light, assembling what was needed on arrival via self-replicating nanomachines that you spun your mind-states off into. I’m sure there are billions of copies of my essential self scattered throughout the galaxy by this point.
Things are a little different today. More mass. Bigger engines. Bigger ships. Ships the size of small worlds. Ships that change the orbits of moons and satellites if they don’t negotiate and plan their final approach carefully.
“Okay,” I finally said to the CEO. “I can help you.”
Armand slumped in place, relaxed now that it knew I would render the aid it had demanded.
I snagged the body with a filament lasso and pulled Armand along the hull with me.
It did not do to dwell on whether I was choosing to do this or it was the nature of my artificia
l nature doing the choosing for me. The constraints of my contracts, which had been negotiated when I had free will and boundaries—as well as my desires and dreams—were implacable.
Towing Armand was the price I paid to be able to look up over my shoulder to see the folding, twisting impossibility that was a black hole. It was the price I paid to grapple onto the hull of one of several three hundred kilometer-wide rotating rings with parks, beaches, an entire glittering city, and all the wilds outside of them.
The price I paid to sail the stars on this ship.
*
A century and a half of travel, from the perspective of my humble self, represented far more in regular time due to relativity. Hit the edge of lightspeed and a lot of things happened by the time you returned simply because thousands of years had passed.
In a century of me-time, spin-off civilizations rose and fell. A multiplicity of forms and intelligences evolved and went extinct. Each time I came to port, humanity’s descendants had reshaped worlds and systems as needed. Each place marvelous and inventive, stunning to behold.
The galaxy had bloomed from wilderness to a teeming experiment.
I’d lost free will, but I had a choice of contracts. With a century and a half of travel tucked under my shell, hailing from a well-respected explorer lineage, I’d joined the hull repair crew with a few eyes toward seeing more worlds like Purth-Anaget before my pension vested some two hundred years from now.
Armand fluttered in and out of consciousness as I stripped away the CEO’s carapace, revealing flesh and circuitry.
“This is a mess,” I said. “You’re damaged way beyond my repair. I can’t help you in your current incarnation, but I can back you up and port you over to a reserve chassis.” I hoped that would be enough and would end my obligation.
“No!” Armand’s words came firm from its charred head in soundwaves, with pain apparent across its deformed features.
“Oh, come on,” I protested. “I understand you’re a Formist, but you’re taking your belief system to a ridiculous level of commitment. Are you really going to die a final death over this?”
I’d not been in high-level diplomat circles in decades. Maybe the spread of this current meme had developed well beyond my realization. Had the followers of the One True Form been ready to lay their lives down in the battle we’d just fought with them? Like some proto-historical planetary cult?
Armand shook its head with a groan, skin flaking off in the air. “It would be an imposition to make you a party to my suicide. I apologize. I am committed to Humanity’s True Form. I was born planetary. I have a real and distinct DNA lineage that I can trace to Sol. I don’t want to die, my friend. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I want to preserve this body for many centuries to come. Exactly as it is.”
I nodded, scanning some records and brushing up on my memeology. Armand was something of a preservationist who believed that to copy its mind over to something else meant that it wasn’t the original copy. Armand would take full advantage of all technology to augment, evolve, and adapt its body internally. But Armand would forever keep its form: that of an original human. Upgrades hidden inside itself, a mix of biology and metal, computer and neural.
That, my unwanted guest believed, made it more human than I.
I personally viewed it as a bizarre flesh-costuming fetish.
“Where am I?” Armand asked. A glazed look passed across its face. The pain medications were kicking in, my sensors reported. Maybe it would pass out, and then I could gain some time to think about my predicament.
“My cubby,” I said. “I couldn’t take you anywhere security would detect you.”
If security found out what I was doing, my contract would likely be voided, which would prevent me from continuing to ride the hulls and see the galaxy.
Armand looked at the tiny transparent cupboards and lines of trinkets nestled carefully inside the fields they generated. I kicked through the air over to the nearest cupboard. “They’re mementos,” I told Armand.
“I don’t understand,” Armand said. “You collect nonessential mass?”
“They’re mementos.” I released a coral-colored mosquito-like statue into the space between us. “This is a wooden carving of a quaqeti from Moon Sibhartha.”
Armand did not understand. “Your ship allows you to keep mass?”
I shivered. I had not wanted to bring Armand to this place. But what choice did I have? “No one knows. No one knows about this cubby. No one knows about the mass. I’ve had the mass for over eighty years and have hidden it all this time. They are my mementos.”
Materialism was a planetary conceit, long since edited out of travelers. Armand understood what the mementos were but could not understand why I would collect them. Engines might be bigger in this age, but security still carefully audited essential and nonessential mass. I’d traded many favors and fudged manifests to create this tiny museum.
Armand shrugged. “I have a list of things you need to get me,” it explained. “They will allow my systems to rebuild. Tell no one I am here.”
I would not. Even if I had self-determination.
The stakes were just too high now.
*
I deorbited over Lazuli, my carapace burning hot in the thick sky contained between the rim walls of the great tertiary habitat ring. I enjoyed seeing the rivers, oceans, and great forests of the continent from above as I fell toward the ground in a fireball of reentry. It was faster, and a hell of a lot more fun, than going from subway to subway through the hull and then making my way along the surface.
Twice I adjusted my flight path to avoid great transparent cities floating in the upper sky, where they arbitraged the difference in gravity to create sugar-spun filament infrastructure.
I unfolded wings that I usually used to recharge myself near the compact sun in the middle of our ship and spiraled my way slowly down into Lazuli, my hindbrain communicating with traffic control to let me merge with the hundreds of vehicles flitting between Lazuli’s spires.
After kissing ground at 45th and Starway, I scuttled among the thousands of pedestrians toward my destination a few stories deep under a memorial park. Five-story-high vertical farms sank deep toward the hull there, and semiautonomous drones with spidery legs crawled up and down the green, misted columns under precisely tuned spectrum lights.
The independent doctor-practitioner I’d come to see lived inside one of the towers with a stunning view of exotic orchids and vertical fields of lavender. It crawled down out of its ceiling perch, tubes and high-bandwidth optical nerves draped carefully around its hundreds of insectile limbs.
“Hello,” it said. “It’s been thirty years, hasn’t it? What a pleasure. Have you come to collect the favor you’re owed?”
I spread my heavy, primary arms wide. “I apologize. I should have visited for other reasons; it is rude. But I am here for the favor.”
A ship was an organism, an economy, a world unto itself. Occasionally, things needed to be accomplished outside of official networks.
“Let me take a closer look at my privacy protocols,” it said. “Allow me a moment, and do not be alarmed by any motion.”
Vines shifted and clambered up the walls. Thorns blossomed around us. Thick bark dripped sap down the walls until the entire room around us glistened in fresh amber.
I flipped through a few different spectrums to accommodate for the loss of light.
“Understand, security will see this negative space and become… interested,” the doctor-practitioner said to me somberly. “But you can now ask me what you could not send a message for.”
I gave it the list Armand had demanded.
The doctor-practitioner shifted back. “I can give you all that feed material. The stem cells, that’s easy. The picotechnology—it’s registered. I can get it to you, but security will figure out you have unauthorized, unregulated picotech. Can you handle that attention?”
“Yes. Can you?”
“I will be fine.�
�� Several of the thin arms rummaged around the many cubbyholes inside the room, filling a tiny case with biohazard vials.
“Thank you,” I said, with genuine gratefulness. “May I ask you a question, one that you can’t look up but can use your private internal memory for?”
“Yes.”
I could not risk looking up anything. Security algorithms would put two and two together. “Does the biological name Armand mean anything to you? A CEO-level person? From the Fleet of Honest Representation?”
The doctor-practitioner remained quiet for a moment before answering. “Yes. I have heard it. Armand was the CEO of one of the Anabathic warships captured in the battle and removed from active management after surrender. There was a hostile takeover of the management. Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Are you here under free will?”
I spread my primary arms again. “It’s a Core Laws issue.”
“So, no. Someone will be harmed if you do not do this?”
I nodded. “Yes. My duty is clear. And I have to ask you to keep your privacy, or there is potential for harm. I have no other option.”
“I will respect that. I am sorry you are in this position. You know there are places to go for guidance.”
“It has not gotten to that level of concern,” I told it. “Are you still, then, able to help me?”
One of the spindly arms handed me the cooled bio-safe case. “Yes. Here is everything you need. Please do consider visiting in your physical form more often than once every few decades. I enjoy entertaining, as my current vocation means I am unable to leave this room.”