Further: Beyond the Threshold

by Chris Roberson

  The future’s fantasies mocked those idle imaginings, and I resented them for it.

  I must have drifted back to sleep, but if I dreamed again, I don’t remember it. I woke, hours later, discomfited and cramped.

  When I began to move, the room was immediately bathed in light, and I climbed off the high bed and onto the floor, stretching old and reluctant muscles. Taking a few deep breaths, I stood straight, with my feet together, hands palm to palm near my chest, the first position of the Surya Namaskar. Moving ritually through each position of the yoga asana, my breath carefully regulated with pranayama exercises, I greeted the day.

  When I had finished, I bathed in the facilities provided, a tub so large I could almost have swum laps in it. A full grooming kit had been provided, and I happily scrapped the wispy whiskers from my chin with a razor and managed to trim my hair into something resembling a regulation cut. Afterward, I dried off and dressed in a simple pair of black pants and the shirt and shoes I’d worn the day before and went out into the main room to find the escort waiting for me, perched in the same position he’d occupied when I’d gone off to bed.

  “Good morning, sir,” the silver eagle said cheerfully.

  “You haven’t sat there all night, have you?”

  “Oh, no, sir.” The escort shook its beak from side to side. “I’ve spent the evening hours flying, and I must say that I find the experience of prolonged flight an extremely energizing one. But I am glad to see you awake, sir. You have a visitor waiting for you in the sitting room.”

  I glanced around the large room, replete with chairs and sofas. Wasn’t this the sitting room? How big was this house, anyway?

  “Well, lead on,” I said as the escort took wing.

  As the escort led the way to a corner of the house I’d not yet visited, I caught a strange scent in the air. It was oddly familiar, bringing to mind market stalls in the Merkato in Addis Ababa, in the shadow of the Grand Anwar Mosque. Rounding the corner into the large sitting room, I recognized the smell—tobacco smoke.

  A chimpanzee in a velvet jacket and cravat sat in a large reclining chair, a lit cigar in one hand and a martini glass in the other, his feet up. On the floor beside the chair sat a silver box about the size of a briefcase.

  “I have to hand it to you, Captain Stone,” the escort translated as the chimpanzee motioned with the glass. “I had your fabricant produce a typical Information Age intoxicant, and I must say that you ancients certainly knew how to make a cocktail.”

  “If I run into any cryogenically preserved bartenders I’ll be sure to let them know,” I said. The escort hopped from my shoulder onto the arm of a nearby couch, and I took a seat, unsure if this was the same chimpanzee I’d met earlier. “Now, um, Maruti Sun…?” I trailed off, unable to remember the rest of it.

  “Maruti Sun Ghekre,” the chimpanzee said, opening its mouth wide with lips covering top and bottom teeth, apparently a chimpanzee equivalent of a smile. “But call me Maruti, please. Maruti Sun Ghekre is my father.”

  My expression must have looked at least half as confused as I felt, as the chimpanzee quickly added, “Literally, that is. I’m the ninth to carry the name, he’s the eighth, but when people use my full name, I keep turning around expecting the old chimp to be lurking around somewhere.” He set the glass down on the chair’s arm and waved behind him absently.

  I nodded. “Ri-ight. I believe I’ve heard the sentiment expressed before.”

  “Ah, good,” Maruti said, clamping the cigar between his teeth and clapping his hands. “I hadn’t heard that the ancients were completely incapable of appreciating humor, but then, history doesn’t record every detail, does it?”

  “I suppose not.” I put my hands on my knees and leaned forward. “Now…Maruti…is there something I can do for you?”

  “Do for me?” Maruti brandished the cigar, hooting. “Do for me? I shouldn’t think so. Captain Stone, it’s more what I can do for you.” The chimpanzee reached into the pocket of his velvet jacket and withdrew a small, slender case. “I’ve brought with me the equipment I need to get you fixed up, so if you’ve had a chance to think it over, we can get started.”

  As the escort translated, the chimpanzee cast frustrated glares at the silver eagle.

  “Fixed up?” I asked when the escort had finished.

  “Yes. Well, I’ll install an interlink, for one. It’s a relatively simple procedure, but I’d like to do a full medical on you while I’m at it.”

  I sat back, uneasy at the mention of any “procedure.”

  “You mentioned an ‘interlink’ before, I believe,” I said, and then glanced to the escort, “and you said something about it when discussing translations. What is it, exactly?”

  “In simplest terms,” the escort answered, “an interlink is a small computer and transceiver that acts as both a communicator and a running on-site backup of the individual’s mind.”

  “Wait a second,” I said, raising my hands in an instinctive defensive posture. “Did you say backup?”

  “Of course I did,” Maruti said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “You’ve got to store it somewhere, don’t you? In anthropoids like you and me, the interlink implant is positioned just anterior of the pineal gland, in the groove between the two thalami.” The chimp reached up and tapped at the base of his skull with a hairy finger. “The thalami function as relay stations for nerve impulses carrying sensory information to the brain, right? They receive sensory inputs and inputs from other parts of the brain, and determine which of these signals goes on to the cerebral cortex. The thinking meat, in other words.”

  “And since the interlink inserts itself into the cortico-thalamo-cortical recurrent loops, intercepting and interpreting sensory input, modifying and modulating as appropriate,” the escort added, “it is capable of capturing a still image of the mind at any given moment. In the event of death, this small, dark sphere, about as far across as the tip of your little finger, can provide the template to bring them back in another body, or in virtuo.”

  “Unless the black ball can’t be retrieved,” Maruti said, scowling, “in which case the individual is just brought back using the most recent off-site backup.”

  “And this interlink thing is the reason everyone is speaking different languages?”

  “Precisely, sir,” the escort answered. “In addition, the interlink can act as a perceptual filter, blocking out damaging sensory input. In this regard, it acts a bit like antiviral software on an ancient computer, preventing ‘hacks’ from hijacking the individual’s consciousness.”

  I shook my head, uneasy. “I don’t know, guys. I understand you’re trying to help, but in my day the decision to have something implanted into your brain was nothing to enter into lightly.”

  “The interlink is quite harmless, I assure you,” the escort said. “Constructed of biologically inert materials, it can remain in the body indefinitely without causing harm.”

  I reached up and touched the back of my head, reflexively, and shivered. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon think about it a while longer.”

  The chimpanzee shrugged and knocked a long ash from his cigar. “No hair off my ass, Captain Stone,” he said, climbing to his feet. “But if you’re going to refuse basic medical treatments, you should at least find a better solution to translation, if only as a courtesy to others.” The chimpanzee finished off the last of his martini, set the glass down on a low table, and then pointed to the silver eagle with the lit end of his cigar. “Waiting around for your bird to explain to you what everyone is talking about is getting just a bit tiresome, to say the least.”

  “Ah,” the escort said, cocking its head to one side. “My apologies, sirs. I can only attribute it to my youth and inexperience, but at this long delay, a simpler solution has presented itself.”

  The escort lifted its left wing, and as I watched, a small lump swelled, about the size of my thumbnail, then distended, swelling into a vaguely mushroom-like s
hape, a small sphere at the end of a thin tether. The escort then ducked its head down, like the bird it resembled nipping at a mite under its feathers, and as the tether disintegrated, it caught the falling lump in its beak.

  The escort passed the object to me, and I held it in my hand, a small, irregularly shaped sphere.

  “If you would, sir, simply insert this into your ear canal. This plug incorporates a tiny receiver that is tied into my systems.”

  I delayed, my gaze lingering on the earplug, and then shrugged. What was the worst that could happen?

  “Does it work?” came the voice of the chimpanzee in my left ear, speaking in English, and it took me an instant to realize the sound was being narrowcast to the plug vibrating in my ear rather than issuing from the beak of the escort.

  “Yes, it seems to be, Maruti,” I said.

  My words were, I assumed, instantly translated by the chimpanzee’s interlink, and as soon as I spoke, his mouth opened in a smile. “Well, thank the demiurge for that.” Sighing, he ground out the stub of his cigar in the empty martini glass, walked over to a cube sitting on a nearby counter, and dropped the glass and stub toward it. The glass, stub, and ash all vanished in a flash of light as they reached the surface of the cube, which I realized must be another of the matter-synthesizing fabricants, the debris now converted into raw materials for future fabrication. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have other pressing matters to attend.”

  The chimpanzee turned and headed toward the door, pausing before exiting to glance back over his shoulder.

  “Oh, Captain Stone, I almost forgot…The salvage team was able to recover some of your effects from the wreckage of your craft.”

  The chimpanzee pointed to the silver box that lay beside the chair in which he’d sat.

  As I went to pick up the box, Maruti waved from the door. “I trust I’ll see you tonight on Ouroborous? I expect you’ll enjoy the surprise you’ve got in store.”

  I scarcely noticed what the chimpanzee was saying as the silver box slid open in my hands.

  TWENTY

  There’d been mass restrictions on what we could bring on board Wayfarer One, of course, but nothing like those I’d known from my days in the Orbital Patrol. But that’s only to be expected. After all, a buoy tender on a six-month tour has considerably less in the way of amenities than an interstellar vessel intended for a century-long voyage. So where I was lucky to squeeze forty kilograms of personal items when I served on board Cutter 972, on Wayfarer One I’d been able to bring along close to two hundred kilos.

  All that was left of that allowance were the three items on the bed.

  In the millennia I slumbered, anything metal, ceramic, and plastic had fared much better than those items that included organic elements, all of which had long since disintegrated, but even the strictly nonorganic had become badly pitted and decayed with age. Only these three objects had been sufficiently intact that they could be restored to pristine condition by nanoscopic repair robots.

  A lifetime of memories and all that remained were three items—an action figure, a cap gun, and a handheld.

  The action figure I’d had since I was six years old. At that age, I don’t think anything in the world was more important to me than The Adventures of Space Man. Produced in Australia but broadcast throughout the United Nations and elsewhere, it was the most popular children’s animated program of its day, and arguably one of the best ever. Or at least that’s the position I’ve been arguing since I was six. Other kids might have told you that Battlesnakes was better, but that was just a weekly series of half-hour commercials for a line of collectible robots, and anyone who preferred Maniax was just an idiot. Amelia Apatari always said that Taimi Taitto, Girl Reporter was a better program, but I know for a fact that she hardly ever watched the show as a child, preferring the original graphic albums, and that she only claimed to like the show out of a misguided sense of solidarity with the titular heroine and her faithful dog, Lumi.

  No, for me, it was Space Man, always and forever. Assisted by Space Monkey, his simian sidekick, Space Man journeyed through interplanetary space on board their ship the Space Racer in a hazily defined near future, fighting the forces of Dark Star, a multinational terrorist organization. I can still sing the full theme song word for word, both the original version and the variant used in season three, after Dark Star had been defeated and Space Man concentrated his efforts on fighting natural disasters—though, admittedly, no one else has ever seemed to be as impressed with my rendition of “Down These Space Lanes” as I’ve always been, not the least of which everyone I’ve ever crewed with.

  The action figure was manufactured in Seoul in 2142, if the maker’s mark on the sole of his left boot were any indication. It was a constant companion throughout long, hot summers and rainy springs and trips to visit relatives in distant states. It was one of the few things I took with me from my parents’ house when I moved to Ethiopia to start college, and was in my meager mass allowance when I first boarded Orbital Patrol Cutter 972. That little lump of vacuum-formed, colored plastic has survived the cold of space and the heat of explosions, firefights and fist fights, near drowning and borderline fatal dehydration, and still, I’ve never lost it. There was never a question that it wouldn’t be included in my mass allowance on board Wayfarer One, and I was glad to see him lying there on the bed, as crisp and clean as the day I bought him, ready for new adventures.

  The cap gun I’d acquired in my early years with the Orbital Patrol.

  Setting down the Space Man action figure, I picked the cap gun up off the bed and checked the action, gratified to see that it appeared to be in perfect working order.

  An energetic personal handgun, the Merrill 4KJ Capacitor Gun was equipped with a revolving cylinder containing ten capacitors, each about the length and diameter of my little finger. In the stock was a miniature generator with the ability to recharge the capacitors once used, but recharging took time. In pressing circumstances, the capacitors could be ejected from the chambers and already charged caps slotted into place.

  The Merrill 4KJ had two modes—beamer and needler. In beamer mode, it fired pulsed laser beams of variable intensity and duration. In needler mode, it acted as a gauss gun, accelerating slivers of metal to high speeds in the barrel. It also contained a small number of explosive flechettes that could be fired as alternative needler rounds.

  Each capacitor packed four thousand joules, roughly the amount of solar energy received from the sun at 1AU by one square meter in three seconds. Emptying a capacitor all at once in beamer mode produced roughly the same kinetic energy as a 9.33g 7.62mm NATO round, but while it had more than enough stopping power to halt a full-grown man or a feral corvid miner in its tracks, it wasn’t likely to puncture a ship’s hull and cause an explosive decompression, and so cap guns were the weapon of choice for Orbital Patrolmen and space-side Peacekeepers.

  Everyone serving in the Orbital Patrol was issued a Merrill 4KJ or an equivalent handgun from another manufacturer, but this one was mine, and had saved my life more times than I could count. Once I’d even had to rig a charged capacitor as a stand-alone explosive, but my ears still rang a month later, and it was an experience I was in no hurry to repeat. I wasn’t about to leave it behind when I was seconded to UNSA.

  I slid a cartridge out of the cylinder, checked the power gauge, saw that it was at full charge, and slotted it back into place, careful to ensure that the safety was engaged. I put the cap gun back on the bed and picked up the handheld.

  The handheld I’d bought in Vienna, just weeks before the launch of Wayfarer One. A portable computer and communications device, it fit in the palm of my hand, lightweight and durable, with more processing capacity and memory than any other handheld on the market—which meant that it was probably obsolete by the time I went down in my sleeper coffin. It had a touch-sensitive display, speakers, and audio pickup, though in those days I typically transmitted its video and audio output to a pair of glasses with a heads-up disp
lay.

  Keyed to the unique identifying number in the RFID universal chip imbedded under my right thumbnail, the handheld ideally could only be accessed by me, though clearly the Human Entelechy had moved far beyond any encryption technology available to us in the 22C, as the AIs of the Plenum had been able to get in and restore the data when they refurbished the hardware, extrapolating any lost clusters from context.

  Following is a partial list of the contents of my handheld:

  A full run of the Japanese manga Earth Force Z, vols. 1–125

  The first three seasons of the Australian adventure cartoon The Adventures of Space Man

  Sardar Pilot: A Life in Service, the biography of my maternal grandfather

  The complete works of Jeremy Stone, my paternal grandfather Termination Shock (Anders SF, 2081)

  Escape Velocity (Anders SF, 2083)

  Event Horizon (Anders SF, 2087)

  In the Country of the Blind (Anders SF, 2090)—winner, Hugo for Best Novel, 2091

  Freedom from Religion (Kalki Books, 2101)

  The Barat Scout Handbook, 2145 edition

  Student Yearbook, class of 2153, Explorers House, National Public School, Indiranagar, Bangalore

  United Nations Orbital Patrol Personnel Manual (GENIST GIM 1000.9Q)

  Audio recording of Jo Kendall’s valedictorian address, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, 2156

  Family stills and video

  And that was it. All that remained of thirty-one years of life, the only physical evidence of my existence in the 22C—a child’s toy, a weapon, and a library. I think I could have done much worse.

  TWENTY-ONE

  With Maruti gone and my possessions safely stowed away in the sleeping quarters, it was time to address the rumblings of hunger in my belly.