Eclipse Phase- After the Fall

by Jaym Gates

  Jule’s mind retreats from the obscene feast and the accompanying symphony of chewing and slurping.

  [Get out, Jule!] Thoth warns.

  The octomorph undulates towards Batuk, who waits with his arms wide. The eyes of octo glitter with the same desire as Batuk’s. The same eyes. There’s a fork of Batuk sleeved in the octomorph. The octo wraps its tentacles around Batuk’s grinning head and twists until it pops wetly from his neck. Then it plucks out the cortical stack from the twitching body and buries its sharp beak into the raw meat of the stump.

  “I am delicious,” the octo buzzes. The salon fills with howls of pleasure and the animal grunts of feeding. A tentacle offers a serrated knife to Jule.

  “Eat. And be eaten,” Octo-Batuk invites her with its grating voice.

  Jule responds by hitching up her skirts and drawing the pistol. Octo-Batuk is too busy chewing to notice at first, but his all-too-human eyes bulge with alarm as she squeezes the trigger. Explosive rounds crater the octo’s fragile flesh, shearing away limbs and hurling its shuddering trunk into the wall.

  She aims the pistol at the other diners. The weapon turns them to detonations of pink foam and trailing gobbets of meat and Jule empties the rest of the magazine into the machinery that keeps the edible morphs alive. The aroma of charred meat mingles with the acrid smoke of burning electronics. Above the shriek of the fire alarms, Jule hears the hiss of Octo-Batuk’s laughter.

  [Go, I’m firing up the engines on the Peppercorn!] Thoth urges.

  She turns to the door and the sweet, cool air of the corridor rushes in. Jule hurls herself at the door, but a sharp pain between her shoulders stops her short, and she crashes halfway through. A suffocating cold spreads from her chest. She tries to stand, but she’s caught on something. A serrated blade protrudes from just below her sternum—the knife gripped in the octomorph’s last tentacle.

  Octo-Batuk’s speaker emits a weak gasp.

  “You wanted a perfect meal, Jule. Eat. And be eaten.”

  The rest of the world is drowned in static and a smoky red haze that turns to utter black.

  —

  A burst of heavy static whites out the world for a moment; for eternity.

  “Ouch! What was that?” Jule shouts in the cockpit of Peppercorn. Beyond the crystal viewport hangs the velvet curtain of space. A nav display ticks off the days back to Extropia. She’s lying back on the ego bridge, but she can’t sit up. Or move her arms. Or turn her head.

  “Where are we?”

  [Hold still, Jule,] says Thoth. A sudden dread descends upon her. Her glitchy muse, promising to explain everything right before she plugged in for a backup. No. It’s more than that.

  “Did you kill me?” she asks Thoth. She’s never died before, let alone been murdered.

  [No. I saved you, I hope.] Thoth sounds sad.

  “That creepy octomorph, then. It followed us back.”

  [It’s reponsible for your death, yes. But not here. At the dinner.]

  “You were right, then,” she shudders, flexing a hand over her stomach. Somehow, she’s hungry again.

  “How did we get away?”

  [Emergency ego-cast for me. Benefits of being an infomorph. But I’m afraid you’re running off a backup.]

  Jule tries to clear her mind, but there’s just a jumble of nonsensical images from before. Radar shows Cockayne receding to a dull gray speck through the cameras in Peppercorn’s hull. Her new eyes.

  The cornucopia machine’s lying open. Wasn’t something printing in there a moment ago? A trickle of memory, or a nudge from Thoth?

  The black curtain of space unfurls into view.

  “An infomorph? What the hell happened?”

  [Are you sure you want to know?]

  “Goddamn it, Thoth.”

  Thoth streams her most of it. Fortunately it’s just playback, not XP. Even so, she’s numb with horror and her phantom appetite vanishes.

  “An ego hunter?” she says, when sanity returns. “And you left my stack behind, you bastard.” She might be an infomorph, but panic’s crawling around her simulated brain like a nanoswarm.

  [It was probably destroyed when I ego-casted, Jule.]

  Probably. Batuk and his vile patrons must have backups. Who knows how many forks might be waiting to salvage her stack for another gruesome feast?

  “What if it wasn’t?” she shouts at Thoth, or whoever it is pretending to be her muse.

  [The Prosperity Group will have the coordinates by now. They won’t spare the nukes when they get to Cockayne, I’m sure.]

  It’s true, Batuk’s violated his contracts with PG, and maybe a few transhuman rights to boot. But would the PG agents really destroy the asteroid? What if Batuk gets hungry before that happens? How many times could he eat her before his hideous paradise is nuked to dust?

  A worse thought occurs to her then. What if Batuk egocasts all of them to safety in some new uncharted hunk of rock in the Belt?

  Eat. And be Eaten. Eat. And be Eaten.

  [It’s over, Jule.]

  And over. And over.

  She wants to believe her muse, that her stack was destroyed, but she’s not even sure who Thoth really is. What if that’s just another lie?

  “You bastard,” she whispers, not sure to whom.

  A few hours out, she retreats into a trance-coma of simulspace. It’s an uneasy hibernation. Wandering a maze of industrial corridors and ravenous with hunger, Jule opens door after door. Behind each and every one is Batuk’s wide, toothy smile.

  An Infinite Horizon

  Steven Mohan, Jr.

  Iftikhar Quraini shivered, but not because of the cold that tightened his skin and turned his breath to fog. Sure, the gate room was frigid: walls carved from blue ice as hard as steel, air cold enough to freeze the water molecules on his skin as he cupped his hands over his mouth to preserve a tiny morsel of warmth.

  But what was at the heart of the gate room was colder still.

  The Fissure Gate.

  It waited for him, a hollow sphere eight meters in diameter, built from arcs and swirls of gleaming metal, bisecting each other, hiding something darker within.

  Iftikhar couldn’t suppress a shudder. Are you sure you can’t tell me anything?

  [I can tell you many things,] said Carter, his muse, [but very little of it is likely to be useful. As I’ve told you many times, the gate experience is highly individual.]

  A deep voice interrupted. “Nervous, kid?”

  Iftikhar didn’t turn to look at Brandon Sail, the chimpanzee. Instead, he watched one of his teammates step into the sphere, her body marked by the odd, curling shadows of the sphere.

  She walked into the darkness at the center, and then she was gone.

  Iftikhar winced.

  He heard the soft panting of chimp laughter. “Man, you’re really tweaked.”

  Iftikhar turned on Sail. “I am not,” he said coldly. Everyone knew the chimp was a hypercorp agent and Iftikhar didn’t really want to talk to him.

  Sail issued a skeptical snort. His skin was the light color of cedar, his clear brown eyes as enigmatic as any human’s. Fine black hair framed a face made comical by giant ears. At one meter, fifty centimeters, Sail was shorter than Iftikhar but more powerful. Chimpanzees weren’t monkeys. They were apes. And this one probably had commando training.

  “Look,” said the chimp, “I’ve done this a dozen times. There’s no reason to worry.”

  Iftikhar clutched at the comment like a man with a ripped vacsuit grabbed at the material around the tear, trying to hold in his life. “You mean it’s really not that bad?”

  “Oh, no. It’s going to suck.” Sail shrugged in his forest green vacsuit and flashed a toothy smile. “There’s just nothing you can do about it.”

  Then the gate tech said Iftikhar’s name, and it was his turn.
>
  —

  The singularity was black, but it was an empty black, like it wasn’t really there—like nothing was really there. Iftikhar tried to look at the thing’s shape, but it made his eyes water. Needle-sharp pain pricked his skull. The transhuman mind wasn’t designed to look at wormholes. A flash of emerald lightning arced across its surface, actinic and bright but utterly silent.

  Iftikhar took a step back.

  “Any time now,” Sail called.

  Iftikhar put his helmet on and drew a deep breath. He rushed forw—

  —

  A moment of darkness, like being in a room during a power failure. No one and nothing there but the black. Iftikhar took a step, heard the click of his boot, felt something solid underfoot. Wherever he was, it was big. Big and empty. He could feel it. He could hear it in the echo of his single step. He was alone in a big nowhere.

  He felt the throb of his pulse in his wrists. He had grown up an indent on Mars, spending far too much time in tin can habitats. The empty just felt wrong.

  Something clutched his shoulder, a hand.

  Inshallah.

  A hand, cold like space, cold like the grave. Someone, something, whispered softly in Arabic.

  I almost had you before. This time I won’t let go.

  —

  —ard and stumbled into blinding sunlight and circular shadows, the ocean’s voice loud all around him. The deep roar of it as it smashed itself into white foam, the sibilant hiss as it retreated.

  He wasted no time making his way out of the gate’s enclosure. Staggering and then collapsing on white sand, down on all fours and trembling, his breathing coming in great ragged gasps.

  How long between?

  [There was no “between,”] Carter answered. [Gate travel is instantaneous.]

  But I was sure—I mean, I— He didn’t have any way to finish that thought.

  [Perhaps you suffered a hallucination?] said Carter, gently. [It may have been caused by the stress of wormhole travel. By the way, atmosphere is within standard transhuman range, as expected.]

  Still breathing hard, Iftikhar reached up with shaking hands and unsnapped his helmet. The air tasted cool. It smelled of brine and anise, with a note of sulfur underneath. Very different from the antiseptic halls of Chat Noir.

  Iftikhar looked up. Sail was staring down at him curiously, though no one else seemed to have noticed his arrival. He scowled and scrambled to his feet.

  The gate rested on a sand spit that jutted into the green water like a knife. The beach was backstopped by a high rock face covered with red-green photosynthetic shrubs that made their living on black volcanic rock. Mixed in with the shrubs were branching tubular structures that looked a little like coral. They were royal purple and sharp-edged. Razorweed. Weed, because they were useless. Razor, because they could cut.

  “All right,” said Krazny. “You were all at the briefing, you know the drill. Pelagic’s mostly ocean, but as you can see there’s some lovely island property.”

  Krazny was a tall, slim woman with skin the color of bronze. Her face was narrow and angular, framed by chocolate-brown hair tied back in a ponytail. She wasn’t unattractive—but she wasn’t exactly a knockout either. Her maroon vacsuit prominently featured a hand with the middle finger extended on her chest.

  The Love and Rage Collective didn’t care what they wore as long as it was practical.

  “There’s a small anarchist research station here to study the world’s suitability for colonization,” she said. “They missed a standard protocol contact check-in three days ago.”

  “The station AIs would’ve made contact on schedule, so clearly something has gone wrong.” said Derrick Weaver warily. He was a short man with sandy-blond hair. Weaver was no one you’d notice until you looked into his pale green eyes. Then the menton crackled with intelligence.

  Krazny shrugged “Possibly just a communications failure.” She shook her head, her kinesics indicating that she didn’t really believe that. “Anyway, Chat Noir wants to know for sure. I propose Weaver and Aqua check the comms substation. Sail and Quraini make contact with the main station. Reaper and I will coordinate from the gate.” She glanced at the synthmorph.

  The reaper was a disk carried on a skittering quartet of legs. Right now it wasn’t showing any weapons—but that didn’t mean there weren’t any.

  “You mean we’ll hold the gate,” said Reaper in a hard, brittle voice. It didn’t have to sound that way. The ego riding the morph probably picked that voice for the same reason it hadn’t told them its name. Trying to be scary. Why else ride a warbot unless you got off on that kind of thing?

  “So there is danger?” asked Aqua, a sylph. She wore a turquoise vacsuit that hugged her pleasing curves and brought out the blue in her eyes. A mane of blond hair framed her perfect face.

  “Look, we’re just being careful,” said Krazny. “Everyone’s armed. Stay meshed and lead with your probes and everything ought to be fine.”

  No one spoke, but after a few seconds the group broke up into three teams.

  As Iftikhar set off with the chimp, he couldn’t help noticing that Krazny hadn’t really answered Aqua’s question.

  —

  Iftikhar didn’t realize there could be so much up on an island. Not a lot of islands on Mars. His skin was slick with sweat under his vacsuit and his calves were on fire. Unlike the chimp, his body wasn’t designed for scrambling through jungle. The ape kept slipping ahead and then coming back and saying things like, “I think there’s a game trail five meters to the left,” or “If you’d like to rest, we can.”

  This only made Iftikhar angrier.

  After a while the chimp said: “You don’t like me, do you?”

  Iftikhar said nothing for a long moment, just staring. The chimp stared right back.

  “You’re from Luna,” said Iftikhar.

  Sail shrugged.

  “I heard you worked”—he emphasized the word, to suggest he believed the tense was wrong—“for Direct Action.”

  “Work is not a dirty word,” said Sail. “Martians work, too.”

  “Oh, we work,” said Iftikhar bitterly. “My parents were killed in the Fall.” He swallowed hard. “But they bought a ticket out for me. I was eleven and alone. An infomorph refugee. It took eight years to work off my debt.”

  “Eight years isn’t so very—”

  “What?” snapped Iftikhar. “Long?” He lowered himself into a crouch, so his face was close to the chimp’s. “It was my childhood.”

  Sail winced. “I’m sorry.”

  “Really? Wow. That almost sounded sincere.”

  “So, I’m a Consortium tool,” said Sail softly. “Is that what you think, my young Barsoomian friend?” The chimp stared up at him with those big brown eyes, so like a human’s. “If I’m so obviously a hypercorp spy, why did the anarchists invite me along on this mission?”

  Iftikhar frowned. He had been wondering the same thing.

  “All right,” said the ape. “Here’s another one. When does an anarchist act like a drill sergeant?”

  He means Krazny, Iftikhar thought. Something clicked into place. “When she really is one.” He paused. “Reaper’s here for defense. Weaver to solve puzzles. Aqua because of her charisma.”

  “You’re slow,” said Sail, “but not irredeemably stupid.”

  “Something bad’s happened.”

  “Maybe,” said Sail softly. “But this world is too promising to give up, so …” The chimp spread his hands wide.

  “They’re checking it out,” Iftikhar finished. He met the chimp’s gaze. “If you’re here they must believe there’s some kind of corporate game going on.”

  The chimpanzee nodded. “Yes. That is a concern they have.” He leaned forward, so his face was only centimeters from Iftikhar’s and whispered, “But I don’t think so.”


  Then he turned and raced ahead, disappearing into the green foliage.

  —

  They walked like that for a long time, Sail up ahead in the distance, Iftikhar struggling to follow. By the time Iftikhar reached the small research station, the chimp had already used the drone to search all the buildings.

  [There’s no one here,] he said.

  Iftikhar studied the cluster of gray and brown prefab domes growing out of the jungle like toadstools. [I’d like to see for myself, if you don’t mind.]

  [Fine.] Sail’s irritation came through loud and clear. [I’ll search the jungle. Stay close.]

  Iftikhar muttered a curse under his breath. Like he was going to follow the orders of some corporate sell-out. He stepped into one of the big community domes. The power was out, the only light a faded parallelogram of sunshine from the open door. Iftikhar’s boots clicked on the tile.

  “Hello,” he called.

  No one answered.

  A chill wriggled down his back. Suddenly he remembered his hallucination at the gate. I almost had you before. Death had nearly claimed him during the Fall.

  This time I won’t let go.

  He wheeled around—

  But there was nothing behind him.

  [Iftikhar, look.]

  He jumped—and muttered another curse. It was just Sail.

  Iftikhar pulled up the chimp’s real-time feed. Sail stared at the ground, bent over like he’d just been sick.

  What is it?

  [This.] The ape moved, loping on all fours, like he was too rattled to walk upright. He peered over a shallow ridge.

  What the chimp saw was enough to wring a curse from Iftikhar. “There is no God, but God,” he whispered, “and Mohammad is his Prophet.”

  —

  Krazny cradled the Medusan Arms Hammerstrike in her arms. Whatever had built this gate, it had owned a righteous tactical sense. She patted her automatic rifle affectionately. The gate’s placement on a spit meant it could be defended by a single well-armed soldier. The beach was really a cove running 400 meters north-south and bracketed on three sides by steep walls of black rock. You could climb, you could slip across the narrow strips of sand to the north or south, or you could swim. That was it.