Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 118

by Neil Clarke

  In retrospect, I don’t know that we ever really worked it out. Or maybe we got back on the right path, but we couldn’t erase going down all those wrong paths and that took its toll.

  26 - Hongwen should be thrilled that I finally asserted a property she can test. Yes, over a decade too late.

  27 - Trying to get this right literally drove me to tears. And some things we had to get wrong because you can only put nanodots through so much in one cycle. Hongwen was never thrilled when something deviated from the platonic ideal.

  I may have spent months, if not years, with my head nestled against Ajay’s shoulders or his hands massaging my shoulders. Ajay, as previously mentioned, never dealt with his frustrations by, say, talking to me. He always fled to the gym.

  28 - But I don’t have to admit to delay slots if I don’t want to. Just like I don’t have to admit that Ajay left. The long threatened cancelation axe fell not only on Sentry but on everyone who worked on Sentry. It’s ironic that he was the one who foresaw this while I was caught by surprise. He found another job, then moved to California before it all fell apart. I, caught off-guard by both Ajay and the cancelation, stayed with Sentry to its sputtering end.

  29 - Making delay slots work correctly might have been bearable with Ajay’s help, not to mention his strong hands, broad shoulders, and capable mind.

  30 - I never looked up Ajay in California. It wouldn’t have been that hard. This is a small field we work in. I mean, Marie and I are working at the same company again. In fact, she’s my boss’ boss.

  At first, I was too angry to look Ajay up. Now, it’d be too weird. Part of me thinks it’s better to remember him as that guy who made me want to fight for truth and justice by his side. Part of me wonders whether there was some other path I missed. In any case, even if I saw him, I haven’t walked my three rings yet. I wouldn’t know what to say to him. Oh well.

  About the Author

  John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator, and podcast narrator by night. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Boston Review, Uncanny, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Tor.com among other venues. His translations have been published or is forthcoming at Clarkesworld, The Big Book of SF, and other venues. He has narrated for podcasts such as EscapePod, PodCastle, and Lightspeed. His story “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

  Sephine and the Leviathan

  Jack Schouten

  CHAPTER 3/6: TRAJECTORY

  Entombed inside the cannibalized q-cannon, Sephine counts pebbles in her mind. She has had to wrap her filament wings around her to fit inside the narrow cylinder, and when the cannon begins its countdown, starts to rumble, claustrophobia sets in.

  She reaches sixty-seven pebbles before she feels her wings quiver sharply once, and a sharp pain in her back.

  — We have a problem, the Vierendelen sends.

  “Fix it then!” she screams aloud, though this doesn’t matter; the ship will still hear her.

  — No time, toots. Grin and bear it, and all that.

  “Toots?” is all she can manage, before there is a violent lurch and her head slams against the cool metal of the inner shuttle. She floods her brain with painkillers and becomes dizzy.

  “Is it the cannon?”

  — Cannon’s fine.

  “Ah, silver linings . . . ”

  — It’s your filament wings. I don’t think you’ll be taking them on the return trip.

  As if there was any guarantee of a return trip, she thinks.

  — They may not even last the journey up to the Leviathan. That bastard engineer made a mistake. I told him I should have supervised.

  “Forget about the wings, will I make it?”

  — Calculating, it says, and Sephine feels the ship disconnect.

  She Enlinks in the meantime and performs a quick systems check. The Vierendelen was right; her filament wings aren’t secured properly to her spinal cord and are coming loose under the building turbulence. She tentatively dilutes the painkillers from her neuroweb. Her head throbs from the knock against the shuttle wall, but the burning pain in her back is infinitely worse; it feels like her spine is being extracted from her like loose teeth, one vertebrae at a time.

  She ups the painkillers and Delinks.

  Seven seconds. Finally the Vierendelen re-establishes connection.

  — I have an idea, but you aren’t going to like it.

  “I didn’t expect to.”

  — I’m going to delay your ejection from the shuttle. Just an extra minute or so will give me time to find a temporary fix so we can keep those wings from killing you mid-flight to the Leviathan. It’s going to get hot in there though. Really hot. And my wing-tinkering’s going to hurt, but the higher we eject, the shorter the distance to the target. What do you think?

  One second.

  “Do we have a choice?”

  — None whatsoever.

  The q-cannon fires. Sephine is almost crumpled by the g-force, pressed into the floor of the shuttle as it erupts from the cannon—even the shuttle’s inches-thick shell can’t dull the noise of the blast. Sephine’s stomach pitches with the velocity, and despite herself she steals a glance through the viewing pane.

  She can see the scrubland surrounding the launchpad, smoke and fire bulging beneath and blocking it out; and the smattering of black dots that are people watching the q-cannon blast her into the sky.

  She convulses as the shuttle vibrates, battered around it like a ragdoll, and she considers tightening the embrace of her wings to cushion herself against the shuttle walls, but something tells her that would only make the wing problem worse—and the pain.

  — Done, the Vierendelen says.—That engineer. Can’t even encode failsafes in his own hardware. Too easy overriding the ejection protocols.

  “Show-off,” she manages, through chattering teeth.

  — Okay: here we go.

  The world shrinks beneath her, suddenly—ironically —unfamiliar. Soon all she can see is desert, dun mesas and bronze and swathes of bright gold. She can see a cross-hatched smudge, the half-city of New Leseum; the four towers of Pod Country; the mighty, battered hulk of the warship Vierendelen beyond, casting its long shadow over the rippling dunes.

  And she can see something else, too: the familiar, massive shadow of the Leviathan, where she is to find her brother.

  The air becomes suffocating inside the shuttle. Unable to guess the trajectory without Enlinking, she puts her trust in the Vierendelen to guide her to the Leviathan’s edge.

  Heat builds. Sweat beads on her forehead, her chest. She commits her neuroweb’s resources to lowering her body temperature, and feels icy coolant spread through her body from the nape of her neck, but it’s too slow to counter the rising heat. Her eyes seem fit to rattle from their sockets.

  Then, finally:

  — We’ve reached the original ejection point. Less than a minute to go. All right in there?

  “S-smashing.”

  — Brace yourself. This is going to hurt.

  White-hot hooks in her spine. The pain is startling. With a guttural screech Sephine gives up and Enlinks to the Vierendelen’s data corpus. She sees the shuttle in four dimensions, watches time ebb and flow like the flourish of a gymnast’s ribbon. And yet the pain permeates still, even in this new, abstract viewpoint.

  She hones in on the careening shuttle, then herself—a jittering skeleton inside—and then her spine.

  The roots of her wings are changing: the Vierendelen is adjusting the mechanisms that latch them to her spinal cord.

  — Delink! the Vierendelen screams in her head, with a far-away quality, like it’s yelling at her across a cathedral.—Delink now!

  “Can’t,” she sends. “ . . . Hurts.”

  — Grin and bear it! Do it now!

  With just under a second to ejection, she manages it.

  Back in normal-subjective spacetime, Sephine feels the wings find purchase in her spin
e, and the pain increases to the point that it becomes a hallucinogen—searing colored blades dance in her vision.

  And from somewhere far away, laced with the pain, it seems:

  — Ejecting.

  Light blossoms. Noise dies. Sephine becomes lucid. The gunmetal backdrop falls away, and she erupts from the shuttle’s exposed head streamlined and spinning slowly, high above the desert. Then a dark bowled shape fills her vision.

  The Leviathan’s iron skin is lined with slits and trenches, from which protrude clusters of black bristles, each a vicious arsenal. The Leviathan is a floating war machine.

  It’s only then that Sephine realizes how huge it is.

  — Deploy your wings. It won’t hurt anymore, I promise.

  It doesn’t.

  Her wings unfurl with delicate snapping sounds. The charged atoms in their filaments crackle as she spirals skyward. Control is as intuitive as the use of limbs—one hard push and the wings ripple and pulse and pull her higher.

  Then the Leviathan attacks.

  — Trouble. Down to you now, evade.

  Plasma fire. The defense systems have spotted her. She evades a flurry of blue-white projectiles, looping through the sky, up and up and around, and for a fleeting moment she forgets she is under fire—she is enjoying herself.

  — No time for showing off, just get to the Leviathan!

  A plasma needle screams past her head, igniting the air in its slipstream. With all her might she pushes the wings down, sending her careening upwards, finally over the Leviathan’s rim, and she sees for the first time what lies atop the structure. It terrifies her.

  She has no time to focus—the wings feel like they’re giving up just as she penetrates the Leviathan’s defensive parameters.

  — Oh, shit.

  The wings burst into flames. She pumps them as hard can, going down now, towards the very edge of the Leviathan. She feels tongues of fire lick at her back. Each roaring push of her wings wafts smoke into her eyes and nose and her throat.

  — Almost there. Dive!

  The speed of the maneuver fans the flames roaring around her ears. Just as she feels the wings disintegrate and pain tear up and down her spine she tucks in, and for a moment she is a human fireball, shedding smoking strips of filament and fabric. Then she slams onto the ground—painkillers and inertia stabilizers coursing through her—and rolls.

  It’s over. Sephine lies awkwardly on her back. Her wings are nothing more than winter trees now: gnarled black branches loosely rooted in her spine. They whisper as they dissolve, causing her pain.

  — Well! Wasn’t so hard, was it?

  “Shit,” she breathes. Her skin burns and her clothes are ruined. There is the acrid smell of burning hair. “We made it.”

  — Good job. When you Enlinked back there I thought we were done.

  “We?” she sends. “You’ll be alright; it’s me who was almost done.”

  — Fair point.

  “Oh, and Del?”

  — Yes?

  “Never call me ‘toots’ again.”

  CHAPTER 2/6: SPITE

  Sephine is in the Vierendelen. The people of New Leseum have taken to calling it a fortress, though she disagrees. To her, it is just the Vierendelen: a kilometer-long gigaton of ruined hulls, bulkheads, and fuselage that was once a Golem-Class Leseum warship. (Although, she supposes it does look a little like a fortress, buried nose-down in the desert like this, towering over the fledgling city.)

  Sephine is Enlinked and playing Spite with the ship. She and its AI battle each other with strings of code, constructed to entangle with and destroy one another. Mutually assured destruction is impossible—each battle ends with a winner.

  “I know what you’re doing,” Sephine says, chancing a risky gambit. Against such a vastly intelligent machine as the Vierendelen, anybody would assume the game a forgone conclusion, that each game would end in a crushing defeat for her human mind—but the ship is being coy.

  Sephine’s gambit pays off, corrupting the Vierendelen’s code string and leaving it in an irreversible Spite. She’s won the game.

  — Nice move.

  “Don’t patronize me. You’re playing Rokri’s tactics.”

  — Is he that transparent?

  In real space, Sephine scowls—Enlinked, she has no face; just code. “He certainly was.”

  She Delinks, opening her eyes back in real space.

  — You’re so sure, aren’t you? the ship continues.

  “It’s been a year, Del. I know my brother. He’d be more straightforward than this. More . . . ”

  — Transparent?

  Sephine nods.

  — But you’re so keen to accept he’s dead, and now there’s just a sliver of hope and you’re all too ready to abandon it. There’s all kinds of things you’re not taking into account.

  “Hope?” she spits. “Hope? An encrypted signal we can do nothing with is not hope, Del. And it certainly isn’t from Rokri, either. It’s from the enemy, and I think you know it too.” She bites her fingernails. “He was a fool to go.”

  Dusty light cascades down into the atrium, cut by the sharp outlines of metal arcing high above: bones of the gutted ship. Sephine can hear the low thrum of esoteric machines deep within what is left of the Vierendelen’s hull. Although the ship’s AI has no centralized structure (its consciousness runs through the few substrates that still receive power from the engines), it has a tendency to manifest itself as a collared dove. At this moment, the Vierendelen is perched on a high bulkhead overlooking the atrium, mussing its iridescent wings and cooing softly.

  — Sephine. If this message, signal—whatever—if it is from Rokri, then wouldn’t he want a reply?

  “You said yourself, we have no decryption software capable of sending a message back.”

  — Correct. But I wasn’t just thinking of sending a message.

  Just the thought opens a pit in her stomach. She knows what the ship means: go up there. Go to the Leviathan and search for him.

  “It’s not as simple as that.”

  — Getting him up there was.

  “It was suicide, and selfish,” she snaps. “We needed him. I needed him.” Sephine wanders over to a rockery on the far side of the atrium. A stream gurgles gently into a clear pond, where lilies reach through the surface. Mechanical fish flit amongst their roots.

  Sephine sits down and takes a handful of pebbles, tossing them absent-mindedly into the pool. The fish dart away.

  A low rumble goes through the ground. The lilies stir.

  — Fissure bombs in the Farside Basin. I’d better check it out.

  “The attacks are getting closer,” Sephine says darkly.

  — Not if I have anything to do with it. And I always have something to do with it.

  Sephine imagines the ship winking at her.

  — Hive minds are as easy to fool as human ones. Catch up later. And think about it.

  Then she feels the disconnectedness as the Vierendelen severs its connection with her neuroweb. The collared dove effervesces from existence.

  Sephine is alone with her thoughts and grateful for it, but she’s incapable of staying idle for long. She scatters another handful of pebbles over the pond, sits down on the gravel, and Enlinks.

  The ship’s data corpus presents her with a wireframe view of the gutted hull, where bulkheads and metal ribs and drooping, limb-thick wires dangle together in four dimensions. She withdraws from this and views the Vierendelen in its entirety.

  Tracker drones pour from the ship in droves. She adopts the viewpoint of one of the rugged little machines as it speeds across the desert to a deep crater about fifty kilometers away.

  The bladeships of the Fractured are peppering the Farside Basin with bombs. Scavenger craft swoop into the fray, grabbers swinging from their hulls to pluck huge rocks left by the explosions. The ships contain no biological life-forms, and nobody has any idea why the Fractured harvest bedrock like this.

  This is the closest attack
to the city in months. If the Fractured decided to invade, New Leseum would be dust in minutes. The people have a militia but are armed with nothing more than splinter-rifles and fists, protected by antique exoskels found in what was left of the Vierendelen’s armories. In the event of an attack, they may be able to cannibalize some weapons from the ship itself—put up a little fight—but there aren’t any guarantees.

  In any case, the Fractured never seem to be interested. Perhaps they have no appetite for easy game—

  “ . . . Oh.”

  An idea strikes her like a needlehead.

  She abandons the tracker drones, pulls her view back to the city, and delves into the Vierendelen’s storage substrates.

  She extracts memories. They appear to her as a compartmentalized ocean of data-packets.

  She accesses the message received from the Leviathan a week earlier: a convoluted jumble of code, encrypted and inaccessible without figuring out how to untie the chaos and lay the information streams into straight lines.

  And as she examines it again, there is suddenly a way, a technique to unlocking the message. All knots are untied in different ways—some require no more than a pull. Others demand multitasking and organization, planning and backtracking: a strategy.

  And she recognizes the strategy.

  It’s a Spite algorithm.

  Her heart beats a tattoo in her chest. Could it be this simple?

  She puts the message itself to one side, and brings up the most recent memory in the Vierendelen’s library: their game of Spite.

  She deconstructs it.

  Each strand of unique code in a game of Spite is the result of an algorithm, a protocol of unique characters that must be disrupted in order to win. The algorithm with which the ship used against her—as Sephine guessed earlier—is identical to that which Rokri used to play.

  Sephine inputs the algorithm as a passcode for the message.

  And the knot responds. Data twitches, rearranges itself, and the message is laid out flat.

  That means one thing: Rokri is alive.

  Sephine Delinks and runs from the atrium, to find the Makers.