by Mark Wandrey
“The docking fee is 100 credits,” the Caroon said finally. “The cost to access research is a flat donation of 1,000 credits. For 2,000, you can have an obligette for your personal use for one week. Research assistance is available on a per-use basis; rates range from 10 to 10,000 credits per hour.”
“What determines the cost?”
“How difficult it is to retrieve the data you are interested in,” the alien said, his long snout twisting into a sneer.
“If I don’t take an…obligette?” Jim asked, the word unfamiliar. The Caroon nodded. “If I don’t take one, where can I research?”
“Your 1,000 credits will allow you access to common areas for as long as you stay.”
So, Jim thought, 1,000 credits for indefinite use or 2,000 for a private space? Plus, a docking fee. “I’ll take an obligette.” He floated a 5,000 credit chit out of his pocket to the alien.
“Do I look like a change machine?”
“Keep the extra in case I need research assistance.”
“Hmph,” the alien said, catching the credit chit, then tapping some more on his slate. He stuck a golden data chip in the machine, and it began to glow. He removed the glowing device and handed it to Jim. “This is your access chip. If you lose it, you’ll have to repay your fees. Your obligette number is on the chip, along with the rules, regulations, and a map of Oblique #6. Enjoy your stay.”
Jim thought it might have been the least welcoming welcome he’d ever received. The Caroon was already scooting back along the corridor, which looked like finely polished rock carved from the former asteroid. The being’s claws served it well, finding purchase where none seemed to be. “I’m in,” he transmitted to Splunk.
“Be careful, Jim,
Jim floated out of Pale Rider and into Oblique #6.
* * *
After a few wrong turns, Jim finally realized what Oblique #6 reminded him of. Promethium, he thought as he checked the map. He gave a little shudder remembering their sick quest to reach “machineness;” whatever that was. As far as he could tell it meant mutilating yourself. He found another corner and nodded. Yeah, it’s a lot like Promethium, without the creature comforts.
The Oblique was certainly better formed; it was also cleaner and more polished. He ran a hand along a wall, and it came away without a spot of dirt on it. No mean feat in a hollowed-out asteroid! Glowcells lit the hallway. He hadn’t seen so many of the ancient lights in a long time. Nobody made them anymore. These were good ones, which gave off a lot of light. They’d be worth hundreds of credits each.
He checked his map for a common area but didn’t find one. Promethium had multiple habitat domes, and even bars and places to buy things. According to his map, there were none here, but a lot of places were unmapped. More than likely, the map only showed places he could go.
A handful of others passed him. He didn’t recognize the races of the first two, and they didn’t come up in his pinplants. Not a big surprise, since there were tens of thousands of races in the galaxy; data on every race would have taken up something like five petabytes. It took time to dump extraneous data, and you never knew when a petabyte would come in handy.
His translator caught a word from one of the unknown creatures, a floating squid with its mantle covered in a jar of water. It was talking to a K’kng, a race he had seen before. The K’kng looked like a small gorilla with elfin ears and a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. It smiled when it saw him, and Jim swallowed, uncertain if the gesture was friendly.
He reached an intersection and saw a cable run going along one side. An elSha had an access box open and was running a high-voltage probe over the box while examining a slate he’d affixed to the wall.
“Excuse me,” Jim said, setting his translator to broadcast in elSha.
The alien turned to look at him. “You aren’t a Hajimeru,” the elSha said.
Jim’s translator tagged the speaker as a female. Another Japanese word. The farther I get from Earth, the more Japanese names I encounter. “A researcher?” Jim asked, then said the Japanese word as well.
“Yes,” the alien said and examined Jim’s clothing. “You aren’t a guild member. I don’t even know what species you are.”
“Human,” Jim said, “from the Sol system, in the Tolo arm, Cresht region.”
“You are a long way from home, Human.” The alien blinked slowly, then her eyes widened. “A merc race! You are from the new merc race we heard of.”
New? Jim thought. We’ve been on the scene for a century. “Kinda new, yeah. I’m Colonel Jim Cartwright. You can call me Jim.”
“Okay, Jim,” the alien said, forcing her somewhat immobile mouth to pronounce his name. “I am Tauqua.”
“It is good to meet you, Tauqua.”
“You are not only far from your Earth, you are also far from where you should be here in Oblique #6.”
“Yes,” Jim said. “I am lost.” The elSha wore a tool belt across her body and displayed no sign of rank. When he thought back, he realized the Caroon hadn’t had any apparent rank, either. “Are you a Hajimeru?”
“Me?” Tauqua asked, then laughed. “No, I just work for the guild. They’re too important to fix stuff like power cables or data feeds.”
“I’ll admit,” Jim said, “this isn’t what I expected for the home of the Science Guild.”
“Home? No, this isn’t the home.”
“What?” Jim asked, confused. “The GalNet identified Occul as the center of the guild.”
“A center, maybe,” Tauqua said, “though only one of many. It is a data center.”
“Shit,” Jim said.
“There is no sanitary facility near here,” Tauqua replied.
Jim laughed. “No, it’s colloquial, a curse.”
“Oh, yes,” Tauqua said, tapping her single pinplant, “your translator is good, but elSha sometimes confuses those terms. We have nine different terms for excrement, after all.”
I’ll have to remember that. “So, if Occul isn’t the main home of the Science Guild, what is?”
“A system called Supairaru.”
Japanese, naturally. He searched for a translation and got several. The first one was the title of a manga series from the early 20th century. He flagged the word to research later. Supairaru didn’t appear on his navigational data. Just as he didn’t have details on all the races, he didn’t have the locations of the entire galaxy’s millions of stars in his pinplants, though he did have all their names. Supairaru wasn’t one of them. “Do you know the system’s location?”
“No,” Tauqua admitted, “I doubt anyone in the guild below the rank of Shinjitsu knows its whereabouts.”
“Why?” Jim wondered.
“Don’t know,” Tauqua said and shrugged. “The Science Guild was around before the Great War, you know. Maybe they kept it secret so nobody could blow it up if war came again.” Jim shuddered slightly at the thought. Nobody knew how many trillions died in the war. Entire species were wiped out, and worlds were supposedly destroyed. “Did they assign you an obligette?” Tauqua asked, obviously interested in changing the subject.
“Yes,” Jim said. “Number 1138.”
Tauqua closed her eyes for a second, then nodded. “You’re not as lost as I thought. Wow, they gave you a musty, old one. Must have made quite the impression.”
That’s what I get for tipping, Jim thought. Tauqua gave him succinct directions. She was right; it wasn’t very far. “Thank you very much, Tauqua. Maybe I’ll see you again?”
“Perhaps. There is a food dispensary nearby. There are multi-species biological waste facilities there. The entire chamber has a spin.”
“Excellent. Thanks again.” Tauqua waved as she went back to work, and Jim set off.
Her directions proved accurate, and Jim found the obligette in minutes. He saw right away what had thrown him off. The odd numbered spaces were in an entirely different corridor, which explained why he thought he was in the wrong area. He was.
The door
to the chamber was marked with laser-etched numbers in standard Union script. The combination of hash marks reminded him of the numbers from a late 20th century movie about an alien traveling to Earth to hunt Humans. The door had a simple, manual hatch which looked air-tight and swung outward into the corridor. It was secured via an electronic lock which accepted the chip he’d been given. The lock beeped and flashed as it released the handle, and Jim tried to swing the door open.
It only moved a few centimeters before stopping. Jim planted his feet on the door frame and used both hands to pull. The door moved, albeit slowly. When he tried closing it, he had the same difficulty. “Should have asked Tauqua to come help,” he said with a shake of his head.
He unslung his shoulder bag and dug around for his GP-90 tool kit. Inside was a vial of oil. He used the tools in his bag to open the cover on the door’s mechanism and applied about a quarter of his store of vacuum-rated oil. The tools and other gear floated away slowly and settled on one side of the passageway. He guessed there was about a 20th of a G.
Jim tested the door, slowly working it open and closing it, a centimeter at a time. When he was done, it moved freely, without noise. Maneuvering the heavy portal in microgravity was tough. Finished with the door, he collected his tools and went inside.
“Old musty one is right,” Jim said as he examined the obligette. It looked as if nobody had been there in hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The corridors outside were polished clean, and it looked as though the dirt cleaned from the corridors had been dumped inside.
He set his bag down and looked around. There was a configurable sleeping sling, like those he’d seen on extremely old spaceships. It was made from durable plastic webbing and looked serviceable. He also found an equally old adjustable work bench and a locker-like wardrobe with drawers. Everything was covered in layer upon layer of dirt. A single cold-light block, not one of the glow cells, provided illumination. A conduit which powered the light block came through the rock on one side, passed across the top, and exited the other side of the obligette.
He moved to the work bench, wiping the dirt away with a finger. It was several millimeters thick. As his finger passed through the dirt, it left a dim glow in its track. Jim leaned closer and used the edge of his hand to wipe away the grime. The bench was an old computer buried under dirt. It was powered by a focused EM power source connected to the conduit in the ceiling. After some further searching, he found an equally simple heating module, also connected to the conduit.
“Time’s a-wasting,” he said, letting his bag fall to the floor. Moving slowly so he didn’t unleash a cloud of dust, Jim wiped the dirt off the computer. It displayed a standby screen. He located a port and inserted the glowing, gold chip. The computer came online, though not in a language he recognized.
On one side of the computer, he saw a port, and the touchscreen indicated he should use it. “Language Input.”
“Ah,” he said. Taking a chip from his bag, he used his pinplants to configure it with the English language codex, a computer file which allowed any Union standard translator to understand him. He plugged it in and waited. The screen flashed a couple of times, went blank, then came back up.
“Welcome to the Galactic Science Guild—Data Center Occul: Oblique #6.1138”
“Bingo,” he said.
Jim wanted to dig right in, but the dust in the room was starting to make his nose run; it was filthy. He considered looking for Tauqua and asking for some cleaning supplies when he saw a box on the floor. A dim blue light slowly pulsed from it. He went over to investigate and discovered a robot.
“Hello, my little friend.” He picked up the machine, which weighed almost nothing in the fractional gravity. It looked like the cubebots he’d seen around the Union. It was an old model, like everything else he’d seen. The entire experience was beginning to disillusion him. This was the center of science in the Galactic Union? It felt more like some of the junky backwater worlds he’d visited since becoming a merc commander. The robot spoke of a lack of utilization. Why had nobody come looking for it?
Jim spent a few minutes diagnosing the robot. It seemed fine. Opening its equipment compartment, he found cleaning tools for use on its 12 retracted arms. He checked the battery and found it almost dead. He glanced over his shoulder at the focused EM power module and grunted. Why wasn’t the robot drawing power as it needed it?
He found the answer on the main computer board. The connection was loose. He tightened the connection between the power control module and the computer board. The flashing blue light turned solid blue. He set the robot back on the floor and waited. Less than a minute later, the light turned amber, and its arms unfolded. He’d fixed it!
Now that it was mobile again, he expected the machine to open the door and scuttle back to wherever it called home. Instead it extracted a periscope-like sensor, examined the room, and instantly began cleaning.
“Some good deeds are repaid,” he said, smiling as he watched the robot work.
It used its various tools to suck up dirt and scrub surfaces. Every few minutes it would stop and scuttle out of the room, then quickly return and resume its work. Jim stuck his head out the door the second time to watch and saw the robot using a previously unnoticed fitting in the wall. It would latch onto it for a second, then return. “Must be a garbage chute,” Jim guessed.
While the machine worked, Jim took a protein bar from his bag and munched on it. He’d stopped carrying beef jerky and meat snacks; they always ended up in Splunk’s stomach. She had no interest in the peanut butter and granola protein bars. By the time he was done, the robot still wasn’t a quarter of the way through. He decided to look for the bathroom Tauqua mentioned.
He found it, then spent a few minutes figuring out the best way to utilize the apparatus. Humans weren’t completely unique in the galaxy. They were, however, in the minority of races who produced copious amounts liquid waste. He ended up using his pinplants to find the right receptacle and to program the collection unit. It seemed almost reluctant to accept his waste.
By the time he returned to his obligette, the little robot was gone and the space was pristine. He looked around for the robot but found no sign of it. Shrugging, he silently wished the helpful little machine well, configured the sleeping sling into a sort of seat, adjusted the computer station, and went to work.
* * *
Four days into the week he’d paid for, Jim had nothing to show for his efforts or credits. He had tried the direct route and simply began searching for “Raknar.” The results, at first, seemed extremely encouraging. Thousands of hits came back. But he soon realized there was no quick way to follow them up.
The Science Guild’s databases were segmented and compartmentalized. Searches could be targeted at individual databases or all of them. Without knowing which database to use, he was forced to use all of them, of which there were 2,076,114,894. No matter how he searched, he averaged more than a million database hits. Sometimes many more.
He queried “Raknar Power System.” The query generated 78,993 hits. Over two days, he ran down 902 of those hits. One database proved to have some salient information, a non-detailed blueprint of a Raknar chest assembly, showing the placement of a power plant listed as experimental. The entry was dated 23,500 years earlier. The power plant looked nothing like the one in his Raknar. He saved the file but decided the power plant was probably never adopted.
The information in most of the random hits was not specifically useful. Much of it seemed to be ancient news articles, personal accounts, or archived messages. He could save anything he found, if he wanted, but the results of a query were saved as separate file elements, and some were large because they contained everything from the hit. The files were as small as a kilobyte or as large as an exabyte. The 78,993 hits from the first query would have consumed 42 exabytes of storage.
“This is fucking insane,” he said on the evening of the fourth day. It looked like the system was designed to slow research. A guild
, dedicated to science, which used a database intended to make research impossible? It made no sense.
Jim went to get some food. Eating, like so many other things on Oblique #6, was driving him crazy. The first day, he’d manually programmed the dispensary. The autochef was just as helpful as all the other Science Guild programs—not at all. He’d put in his racial food requirements and the machine had given him the equivalent of a shrug. He ended up with something not much better than gruel, bread, and water. The bread was tasteless, too.
There were thousands of spices available, if he was willing to risk poisoning himself by trying them. The food was supposed to be safe, based on a quick genetic scan by the large, and seemingly incapable, autochef. However, it couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help with seasoning. He’d resorted to using the meager supply of spices in the survival rations in his pack, but salty gruel wasn’t much better than bland gruel. He was always hungry and unsatisfied.
When he returned to his obligette, he stopped searching. While he forced some of the tasteless bread down his throat, he examined the way the databases were assembled. It was a vast tapestry of files, seemingly woven together by search engines, but not assembled in the correct order. He couldn’t access them to order them, and like his personal data chips, the computer in his obligette lacked the storage to copy and organize more than a couple of the databases.
When he closely examined a single database, he found the files to be more like a collection of events, thoughts, or ideas. He spent an hour looking at several of the files to see if they had anything in common. Sometimes it was as little as a phrase, a date, or even a color! Then he noticed each database had connection points. However, there was no function in the overall system allowing him to grab those connection points.
“It’s like a part of this computer system is missing,” he said aloud, something he’d been doing with increasing regularity as the days passed. Which was when he remembered he could get a research assistant. He wondered if the assistants had special programming tools linking the databases to allow sub-searches. It was worth a try!