I heard him before I saw him. He was a big, physical man with oddly bushy silver hair for a military man where cueball was the standard style. He had kind eyes. He looked me up and down. “Are you prepared for transfer, Ensign?”
“Yes, sir!”
“You passed. You don’t have to stand on the line like a cadet anymore. At ease, Ensign.”
I relaxed only a little.
“Citadel Station is your posting. It is a tough posting, and everyone knows it. There is still occasionally very strict rationing. The station lacks many amenities. Many cadets complain about this posting and request a transfer before they get quantum cloned. Are you going to be rushing to file a complaint after our little meeting, Ensign?”
I could do that? I didn’t even know how, and I had maybe an hour to file the forms. Still, they would only find a way to make it worse, with a punishment post, if it was even approved. It would hang over my record and prevent transcendence to new colonies. “No, sir!”
“Good soldier, then? Going in to your posting proud and strong?”
“Yes, sir!”
He nodded at me like a proud father. “Humanity thrives across the Laika because of dedicated men and women like you, Ensign. You’re ready to brave the hardships of far space to stop the enemy’s return into our heart system. I salute you.” He did, just that, on his feet and firm. Then, the commandant reached into his desk and pulled out a leather briefcase. He had it not only locked, but sealed with ‘Top Secret’ tape. “You are to take this through, and leave it sealed. After quarantine hand it to the station admiral and only the admiral. I don’t need to tell you not to open the goddamn briefcase wrapped in ‘Top Secret’ tape, do I?”
“No, sir.”
“Good man, Ensign. Get going. You need to clear medical before you can cross the ansible. If they give you any flak about the briefcase tell them to call me. Bring the briefcase back here after transfer and return it directly to me and only me.”
I saluted and left. The briefcase was heavy. It was more than paper, and seemed to rustle like a rattle if I swung it while I walked, and there might have been something liquid inside too. In the courtyards of the college, I stood out with a top secret briefcase. People stepped back and stared. It made me feel important after all my humiliations.
Across campus, to the ansible attached to the space elevator, I looked up at the distant top, where ships drift away into sky. At the tip of the elevator, a signal line reached out across space and time with quantum entanglements. The binary signals of matter itself could be used to send data and create matter out of the chaos of hydrogen gas and ions and electrons. Inside, I was prodded with shots and immunizations against the spectrum of known biota I would face on the new colony. I was even partially inoculated with some in a drink, to prepare my intestines for the impending shifts. There, on Earth, I would be flushing out the foreign bacterial gut organisms I had just been inoculated with for a few days with minor indigestion. On the station, I would be repopulating my body with wave after wave to get in line with the diet and native microscopic flora and fauna on the distant station. They pretended to ignore the briefcase, but the nursing tech kept staring at it. I held it across my chest while my body temperature was being taken. I kept hold of it while my fingernails were being scrubbed and sanitized, moving the briefcase from one hand to the other—never putting it down.
“You’re going to be overweight,” he said.
“What?”
“Your transfer weight was prearranged, and the briefcase puts you over by almost twenty-five pounds. That’s a lot of mass to account for.”
“What am I supposed to do? I have orders from the school commandant to take it with me.”
“What’s in it? Can we take out some of it?”
I pointed at the tape. “Do you have clearance for that? I don’t. Call the admiral.”
He got on the horn to his bosses. An old doctor came in and looked me up and down, looked the nursing tech up and down and nodded. “He will be fine. It happens from time to time. It is not our concern. We will call ahead and warn them of extra mass. Usually, they already know about it, unofficially.”
Without even waiting for a salute, the doctor moved me to the next room. His face was smooth and clean, but he smelled old, and he had the lightly trembling hands of extreme age. He was kind, though, and wore admiral stripes on his collar. “Try to relax,” he said. “Everything will be fine. We do this every day. We haven’t lost anyone yet. It’s safer than going to the Day of the Dead Festivals, statistically.”
The room was large with a high ceiling and had all sorts of tubes and wiring in the rafters. There were different sizes of glass funnels above, ready to descend, with rubber sealant sprayed onto them. The tanks of gas were overhead, too, nestled like eggs among the coiled tubes.
“I’m relaxed, sir,” I said. I tried not to look up again.
“Good. So, we’re going to stand you in the center of the room, right inside the yellow square painted there. A glass tube will descend. For just a moment, you’ll be in vacuum, but you’re young and strong and you can handle it. Then, the ionized gas will fill the vacuum in an instant, and the glass will come up once transfer protocols lock in. You’ll be done in less than a minute. Okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Take a deep breath and hold it on my signal. Keep your mouth closed. Best thing to do is just hold still, try to relax, and let it happen. It will be over before you even start to hurt.”
“Got it, sir.” I stood firmly in the center of the yellow square, but I looked up at the glass tube above me.
“It will hurt. The ionization process is not a pleasant one. But it will be no worse than getting a shot in the arm, except over your whole body.”
Lights went on in another room behind a glass window that was darkened before. I saw technicians there looking in, and working at terminals, securing their connections and focusing the data lines into the proper channels for my transcendence.
“Hold still, Ensign,” he said, speaking calmly. “On my count, take a deep breath. Three . . . two . . . one . . . Hold.”
Air held still inside my lungs. The glass came down from above surprisingly quickly, but not so fast that I couldn’t jump out from under it if I had the nerve. It separated me from the room, and the vacuum seal hissed. I couldn’t hear anything, then. The air filled with a blue gas that emerged in spots and lines like a grid of flowers in the air itself. It was dazzling and sudden, like getting punched and seeing lights. The gas filled out the air, and swirled and then I was through. In fact, I had been through for a few moments already, and the gas was actually an optical illusion of my body and brain trying to process the sudden shifts in my vision and orientation.
The glass came up and I was born here, on the Citadel.
The moment I had seen gas, I was already here, and the images in my retinas of the place I had been is proof to me that it was real. Once upon a time, there was a place called Earth, and a young cadet named Ronaldo Aldo who had lived at sea with his mother and father, until he went to War College in the ancient Mexican city, and he stepped into a glass tube that quantum cloned him, creating me.
I was born, then, and I was reborn with all the sins still in my heart, my failure with Shui Mien, with my terrible pride.
* * *
The room I entered was darkly lit, gunmetal gray, and loud. The station is always spinning to maintain gravity, and I actually stumbled and had to catch myself when I attempted to move a little, in the suddenly changed g-forces. I was alone in the room; there wasn’t even a chair.
“Ensign . . . Where’s the personnel file, Tyrell? Okay . . . Ensign . . . Aldo. Ronaldo Aldo. That’s right, I hope?”
The memory of my first words, and my mother is the military, and I cry out for her. “Reporting for duty, sir!”
“I’m Captain Oyede Obasanjo. I’m the ExO. A full briefing will be on your tablet.” Captain Obasanjo managed all ansible transfers, and he had allocated the hy
drogen and helium and carbonaceous resources from storage that had been re-formed into my self. “Welcome to the Citadel. You are in quarantine for forty-eight hours. I have other transfers to make this cycle, so I need you to step aside and let me get the rest of the stuff into the room.”
I stumbled across the room, and lost my grip on the briefcase. I left it where it fell against the wall. The floor was slightly curved. Every floor would be, here. I leaned back and clutched the top secret briefcase close. An even larger glass tube descended from the ceiling, and after the hiss of a vacuum seal, a huge slab of stone appeared. It made no sense to me, at first, because the angle that I saw was undecorated. On the sides, it had crosses carved into the rock. It was an altar table for the monastery, from Earth, and blessed by the pope. It was an antique, as well, from an old monastery in the deserts of central Africa.
“Ensign,” said the voice from the intercom, “can you help me and move the altarpiece out of the way of the cylinders? We can’t go in there and break your quarantine to move it ourselves.”
I stood and leaned over to the altar, which was half a meter thick and three meters wide of solid stone. The edges were smooth and damp with moisture from the sudden shift in humidity from wherever it was to where it is now. I pressed my fingers down and attempted to push. It was far, far too much for one man to lift. I looked around me toward the cameras and shook my head. “Can you hear me, sir?” I said. “I don’t know why you think I can move that.” I leaned back against a wall.
There was silence for a little while.
Then it came on again. “You’re not even going to try?” said a new voice.
“I’m sure you are aware how much that weighs, sir. I can’t even push it over.”
“See if you can roll it, Ensign. Man up. Hoo-rah.”
I pushed and pushed, assuming I was both the victim of a terrible prank, and being commanded to do so by an officer of rank. I pushed like I was a raw recruit, squirming through basic. I broke a deep sweat and ached and stopped, leaning against the altar like the wall that it was.
“How did you plan on getting this thing out of the room, at all? Do you have anything that can lift it that’s small enough to get through the door?”
The intercom buzzed on, again, and it was a grizzly, old man speaking. “Okay, we’re going to need to move you, Ensign. We’ve got a room prepped for you down the hall outside. I’ve hung a tablet from the door for you, and there’s some rations in there. We’re going to send scrubbers through as soon as you’re in, so stay inside.”
“Yes, sir!”
“I mean it, Ensign. We’re breaching protocol just to get you out of the room. We’re falling behind on our transports, and Obasanjo needs the room clear. When you’re in the room, you don’t leave the room until we come and clear you.”
“Yes, sir!”
I was ecstatic to leave the room. No one had arranged a restroom, in here, that I could see. I saw no sign of a doorway, and waited for one to be revealed to me by my benefactor in the other room.
I waited.
“Hello?” I said. “Where’s the door?”
A different voice came on the intercom. “Hold up, Ensign. NetSec is working around the protocol breach.”
I sat back down after a few minutes. I closed my eyes and wondered what they were doing, but I couldn’t picture it. I had no context for this situation. I was supposed to remain here for forty-eight hours, before being transferred to a medical facility for isolated observation while the biota inside of me and the biota that had developed in the station interacted. I was very likely to become ill. Very occasionally, these illnesses could be serious. I also had a good chance of carrying something across that might infect the crew. Quarantine, then, until my biota could stabilize, was the law of quantum transfer.
Eventually, a door attempted to open. The door creaked out from the sealed room, where it was a seamless piece of wall. It slid open from the center, but made terrible groaning noises in its servometrics and smelled of smoke.
Over the intercom, Obasanjo gave his orders. “Push it the rest of the way. We had to disable part of the system. I’ll need you to shove the door closed on the other side, okay?”
The door was stiff, but easier to move than a stone altar. I grabbed the briefcase and pushed through the hole. I was able to shove it closed manually with just one hand on the other side. The hallways, here, curved gently up. We lived inside an eggshell, spinning to make gravity with centripetal force. We always walk uphill, on the stations. Gravity changes subtly with the level we walk on. The lower levels would be heavier than the upper levels. Both the top and bottom were used for storage, but I wasn’t completely clear on that, at the time. When I was sitting in the quarantine chamber, the tablet was preloaded with forms I needed to work through. Until I filed as an official quantum clone with central processing, I didn’t officially exist. I was just an accumulation of spent resources—mostly water—in a distant system, and a record of ansible usage at a very high rate. The world did not know me or my name or who I came from until I plugged it into the boxes on the form.
The room was clearly for storage. Shelves were stacked with cardboard boxes of cleaning supplies. A cot had been set up for me, and I sat on it uncomfortably. I had so many forms to file. I had to request a new soldier ID number, a new government identity tag, and forms to distinguish my banking in the massive financial network separated from the Ronaldo Aldo in the solar system, so far away.
Outside, the hallway filled with sound. Scrubbers blasted through, fumigating as they went, clearing out as much biota as they could with heat and bleach. I felt the extreme heat of the water emanating through to my side of the wall. Down at the bottom of the doorway, which was supposed to be a clean vacuum seal, a little bit of the steaming bleach leaked through. I snapped a photo of it with the tablet and saved it for maintenance.
I wrote my original self a note, too.
Dear Ronaldo Aldo Number One,
I have arrived safely. It’s very strange, so far, and I don’t know what to think about the place, and I am still in quarantine, but on the whole, I have decided to be hopeful. I hope you and I both keep in touch and consider each other like brothers, for we are closer than brothers, while also much farther apart.
Sincerely,
Ronaldo Aldo the Second
When it came time to find food, I looked around and saw nothing obvious. The packaged items were labeled in a Cyrillic alphabet, and appeared to be varieties of cleansing products dated as if they were antique heirlooms, not viable supplies. I scanned them for any Mandarin or Japanese letters. I could recognize what kind of product they were, if I could recognize the language. Finding none, I continued to search through the boxes.
My sin, upon arrival, was probably pride. I was too proud to pick up the tablet and ask for help. I was too proud to admit that I had no clue what I was doing there, and needed guidance. It took me a long time to find food, and it was not the food that was intended for me, which was placed under the cot just out of sight, thoughtlessly. I reached into old storage and found hard food bars, like sea tack made out of amaranth seeds and red dates. It had the mineral-taste of too many vitamins and it was not meant to be eaten dry, but I did my best.
When I couldn’t stomach any more of it, I went back to my cot and finally noticed the lunch box underneath the cot. Inside, it had the food I was supposed to be eating, with a rich slurry of biota that would populate my intestines. I waited a bit before attempting to drink it. My belly ached from the expanding tack. When the pain subsided, I choked down the disgusting slurry, and nibbled on the food as I could. There was a restroom facility inside the room, according to my tablet, but it was hidden behind boxes that needed to be moved, and I had no time for that. Fortunately a bag was provided for emergencies in my little lunch box. On the cot, after being successfully sick into the proper receptacle, I leaned back and attempted to finish all the forms. I had opened a retirement account through the military service, and refi
led my pilot’s license. I had to recertify in training modules, and start over with zero hours, but it was good to know exactly what I would be doing first upon clearance. I also had to familiarize myself with the astral navigation maps that would fill most of my time at a listening post. I was the one who did the most listening.
The scrubbers passed through the hall outside, again, spraying a warm goo that I knew was biotic.
Life on a station was a carefully managed yogurt. Six full-time technical specialists are dedicated to monitoring the evolution of biotics, and quelling anything truly harmful. The quartermaster nominally oversaw their actions, but the tech sergeant ran the show, and the post required advanced degrees and training just to show up on day one. For all the difficulty and training, it was odd that they had no prestige or pull on the station. They could not access the outside universe. They were too high-risk to transfer out, with all the biota during their career. For this reason, even though they are highly trained and very skilled, they are rarely promoted up to officers, and then never promoted off-station through the ansible. They retire planetside, and remain in quarantine for a while when they do. During my career, the first Tech Sergeant Hwong died of cancer not long after my arrival, and Sergeant Adebayo Anderson was promoted up to full tech sergeant until she took over the whole quartermaster crew. I had little interaction with Hwong, and was surprised at news of his passing. Mrs. Anderson and I, however, had much interaction, particularly after her husband was retired from service. But I shall save our sins for another page. At the time, we hadn’t even met. Let us remain, at present, with my early days.
I heard the work crew come back through, after the goop was splattered everywhere, scrubbing with brooms and mops.
The Fortress at the End of Time Page 2