Mitigated Futures

by Buckell, Tobias S.

  Nashara sat there, playing with a small piece of paper. She kept folding it until she had turned it into a tiny flower.

  “She sent me to pick your pocket,” Tiago confessed, standing at the table. He’d expected the boat to sway more than it did, but the foils kept it almost rock steady. “It was a trap from the beginning. And I’m sorry.”

  She looked up at him with one eye, and Tiago flinched. What would he do to someone who’d cost him an eye? What would someone as powerful as Kay do?

  “I knew it was a trap,” Nashara said. “What I wasn’t expecting was the Doacq.”

  “You?” He found that hard to believe, knowing the things Nashara had seen and participated in.

  Nashara shook her head. “It’s a massive universe, Tiago, with many participants. The Doacq’s an important force, and I’m not sure what it’s up to. We need to find Pepper, if we can, if he’s still alive. If June can help. Maybe together we can find some answers, find out if the Doacq is a threat to us. But Tiago, I’m just tiny player on the edge of some large events. I don’t know half of everything. The universe is not tidy. You don’t always get quick answers.”

  It was a sentiment that Tiago felt a kinship to. She felt just like him. Navigating her way through all this just as best she could.

  But then that raised his suspicions.

  “Are you saying that just to make me feel better?” He asked. “Do you rule me know, like Kay?”

  If she had the same talents, why not?

  “I mean, if I’m your pawn, you seem calmer than Kay,” he continued. “She isn’t just someone organizing street kids, protection setups, scams. Not anymore. Now she’s just using us up like our lives don’t even mean anything.”

  Outside the ship slowed, hydrofoils sinking deeper into the water until the hull hit water.

  Nashara crushed the little paperbird into a wad. “Sometimes we become the thing we’re fighting hardest against,” she said thoughtfully. “And Kay is fighting hard against an unimaginable past on Okur. I was there, once. I’ve seen what she came from. I don’t think she will stop fighting it for quite a while.”

  Tiago thought about Placa del Fuego, caught between the forces of Kay and the Doacq, and wondered if the island would survive the both of them. “She said she’d rule the island.”

  “And maybe more, no doubt,” Nashara said. Then something strange happened, a fluttering sensation in the deepest pit of Tiago’s stomach that left him suddenly dizzy. Nashara stood up and grabbed his shoulder. “Come, Tiago, I want to show you something.”

  She led him out onto the rear deck of the ship, which was dominated by the black nothingness of a wormhole.

  Tiago gasped. He’d never seen one this close, towering over his head. Large enough for a whole ship to pass through and that had once floated above a world. Spaceships had once passed through it before being deorbited.

  And now him.

  The sky overhead was covered by a dark, orange cloud in outer space, whisps of it streaming off toward the horizon. And cutting the sky in half: a silver twinkling band. The Belt of Arkand. He’d heard it mentioned by sailors, and here he stood looking at it with his own eyes.

  “You asked if I made you do this,” Nashara said. “But this was your own choice. I didn’t make you do it. This is your new life now.”

  But was it the right choice?

  He looked around at the strange sea they plowed through, and saw another wormhole far ahead in the distance, propped on floats and bobbing on the surface of the green ocean. That wormhole led to yet another ocean, and more worlds.

  More possibilities.

  Maybe not the right choice. Only time would tell that. But it was certainly his choice, he knew, leaving all those years of sitting on the sea wall and dreaming behind for a chance just like this.

  Love Comes To Abyssal City

  It can be interesting to literalize the idea of the mechanics of society as actual mechanics. And you can think of memes, or ideas, as programming that spreads across the machine.

  In this case, what happens when your assigned love (at least according to the great program) is not the person you fall in love with? What are the effects that will spring out from the butterfly’s wings and chaos that comes from it?

  Love is a feature, not a bug. Even impulsive, sudden love.

  To be an Ambassador meant to face outsiders, and Tia was well prepared for it. There was the overpowered, heavy, high-calibre pistol ever strapped to her right thigh. Sure it was filigreed with brass and polished wood inlay, a gunsmith's masterpiece, but it was still able to stop many threats in their tracks. A similarly crafted-but-functional blade swung from her hip. And then there was the flame thrower strapped to her back.

  This was not so much for threats, but for contraband and outside material forbidden in the Abyssal City.

  Today she'd taken the elevators up the edges of the ravine that cleft the ground all the way down to the hot, steamy streets a mile below. Overhead: tall, wrought iron arches and glass ceilings spanned the top of the ravine, keeping life-giving air capped in. Up here, near the great airlocks, the air bit at her skin: cold and low enough on precious oxygen that you sometimes had to stop and pant to catch your breath.

  "Ambassador?" the Port Specialist asked, his long red robes swirling around the pair of emergency air tanks he work on his back, his eyes hidden behind the silvered orbs of his rubber facemask. His voice was muffled and distant. "Are you ready?"

  "Proceed," Tia ordered.

  Today they examined the long, segmented iron parts of a train that hissed inside the outer bays. The skin of the mechanical transporter cracked and shifted, readjusting itself to pressurized air. From the platform she stood on, she surveyed the entire length of the quarantined contraption.

  It had thundered in, unannounced, on one of the many rails that crisscrossed the rocky, airless void of the planetary crust.

  It was a possible threat.

  "Time of arrival," the Port Specialist intoned, and turned his back to her to grab the long levered handles of an Interface set into the wall. He pulled the right handles, pushed in the right pins, and created a card containing that data.

  "Length," Tia called out. She bent her eyes to a small device mounted on the rim of a greening railing. "One quarter of a mile. One main motor unit. Three cabs. No markings. Black outer paint."

  Behind her the Port Specialist clicked and clacked the information into more cards.

  A photograph was taken, and the plate shaved down to the same size as the cards and added.

  A phonograph was etched into wax of the sound of the idling motor that filled the cavernous bay.

  All this information was then put into a canister, which was put into a vacuum tube, which was then sucked into the city's pipes. "The profile of the visiting machine has been submitted," intoned the Port Specialist.

  "We wait for Society's judgement," replied Tia, and pulled up a chair. She sat and looked at the train, wondering what was inside.

  ***

  The reply came back up the tube fifteen minutes later. The Port Specialist retrieved the card.

  "What does Society say?" Tia asked.

  “There is a seventy percent threat level,” the Port Specialist said.

  “Time to send them on their way,” Tia said. “I will help you vent the bay.”

  But the Port Specialist was shaking his head. “The threat level is high, but the command on the card is to allow the visitors into the sandbox. Full containment protocol.”

  Tia groaned. “This is the worst possible timing. I had a party I was supposed to attend.”

  The Port Specialist shrugged and checked the straps on his air mask. He snugged them tighter, as if imagining the possible danger of the train to be in the air around him, right this moment. “And I have a family to attend,” he said. “But we have a higher duty right now.”

  “I was going to be introduced to my cardmate,” Tia said. The first step on a young woman’s life outside her family
home. The great machine had found the person best suited for her to spend the rest of her life with.

  It would disappoint her family, and her friends, that she would be stuck in lockdown in the sandbox with some foreign peoples waiting to make sure they cleared quarantine.

  The Port Specialist handed her the orders. “Verify the orders,” he said.

  Tia looked down at the markings, familiar with the patterns and colors after a lifetime of reading in Society Code.

  A large chance of danger.

  But they were to welcome in this threat.

  “Hand me an air mask and a spare bottle,” Tia sighed.

  The Port Specialist did so, and Tia buckled them on. She checked the silvered glasses on the eyeholes and patted down her body armor. She put in earplugs, pulled on leather gloves, and then connected a long hose to the base of her special gas mask.

  “Hello?” she said. “This is Tia.”

  The sounds and sights of what she saw would be communicated back through, and monitored by Port Control, with the aid of a significant part of Society’s processing power. Crankshafts and machinery deep in the lower levels of the city, powered by the steam created from pipes below even that, would apply the city’s hundreds of years of algorithms and calculations to her situation and determine what she would do next.

  And Port Control, really someone sitting in a darkened room in front of a series of flashing lights, would relay that to her.

  “This is Port Control, you are clear to engage,” came the somewhat muffled reply from the speaking hose.

  ***

  Tia walked up to the train, stopping occasionally to yank the bulk of the hose along with her, and rapped on the side of the steel door.

  Pneumatics hissed and the door scraped open. Tia’s hand was on the butt of her gun as a man, clad in full rubber outer gear and wearing a mask much like hers stepped forward, a piece of parchment held out before him.

  He had a gun on his waist, and his hand on it as well. They approached each other like crabs, cautiously scuttling forward.

  Tia snatched the parchment, and they retreated away from each other. She read the parchment by holding it up where she could both read it, one handed, and keep an eye on the other man.

  Manifest: three passengers.

  Passenger one and two, loyal and vetted citizens of a chasm town two stops up along the track. Affiliation: Chasm Confederation.

  Passenger three was someone who had ridden down the track from places unknown. Affiliation: also unknown.

  Tia reported this all back to Port Control.

  “Go ahead and let them in,” Port Control said.

  Tia nervously waved her assent at the man in rubber, and he turned around and waved the passengers out of the car.

  The first two, a husband and wife team with matching gold plated lifemate cards dangling from their necks, were diplomats. They carried briefcases full of paper network protocols, riding up and down the rail to pass on packets of information between the cities and towns. They stepped down, the tips of the tails of their bright red diplomat suits dragging on the ground slightly as they walked past.

  Tia bowed to them, somewhat clumsily in her gear.

  “What is the threat level?” the male diplomat asked.

  “Sandbox,” Tia told him.

  With a sigh they walked around her toward the airlock leading out.

  The third passenger stepped down.

  He had long hair cut to just above his ears, and dark eyes partially hidden by wire-rimmed glasses. He pulled a giant trunk with wheels mounted on the corners. A leather-bound notebook dangled from a gold chain looped around his neck, as did a mechanical pen.

  With a cautious step forward, he bowed, and then straightened. “My name is Riun,” he announced.

  He went to walk around her and follow the diplomats, but then realized he’d let go of his wheeled trunk. He awkwardly turned back for it.

  Tia smiled beneath the heavy mask.

  ***

  The sandbox was a hall that could seat two hundred. The center was dominated by several long tables, while the periphery had cots that folded out from the wall.

  By the far end, clear one-way mirrors allowed observers to view the sandbox.

  Overhead, large metal balconies allowed Society’s Reporters to look down on the sandbox and constantly file new cards with the machinery of Society, updating the computing machine that ruled them all with all the moves the quarantined made.

  Every fifteen minutes the reporters would change shifts, to prevent contamination.

  As the diplomats huddled together in the far side of the room, not interested in company, Tia removed her cumbersome protective gear and joined Riun at the table.

  “Your city is strict about outside influence,” Riun observed, looking around the sandbox.

  “There are murals on the lower alleyways,” Tia said. “Some of the cityfolk believe that during the Ascendance Wars the city’s programs, during the great Downshifting, became somewhat paranoid of outside infection.”

  “The Ascendance Wars?” Riun asked, looking puzzled.

  Tia stared at him. How much of an outsider was he? Suddenly she thought about the warning, and wondered if maybe Rium was something far more dangerous than she realized.

  Should she even be talking to him?

  But the machine hadn’t flagged Riun to be separately sandboxed. Nor had Tia been handed any warnings to shun him.

  “Were you schooled in your city’s history?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Of course. But I am not schooled in yours.”

  “The great thinking cities of the world tried to reach for the stars, but fought among each other to reach them first and over control of the skies. The fighting grew so perilous and killed so many people that the machines that ran the cities decided to Downshift. They would only use mechanical technology, slow thought, in order to run the systems of their cities. The city used to use ‘quantum chips’ but now only uses steam and gears and cards.”

  Riun chuckled. “Always different stories.”

  “What?”

  “I find, from city to city, there are different stories and variations on the stories,” Riun said.

  “And what is the story your city tells?” Tia asked loudly, while thinking to herself that surely this was auditory contamination, and why wasn’t the city flagging this conversation yet? Hearing that the city’s histories were false was dangerous.

  Wasn’t it?

  Then again, Tia realized, she’d only seen the murals or heard tales. She’d never heard the city give an official history.

  Riun cleared his throat. “According to the histories of my city, the Downshift came when the great Minds of this world created a shield to save us from a war with the other minds out in the Great Beyond. In order to save us, they banned all methods of information that could be transmitted through the air.”

  “And which one do you believe?” Tia asked.

  Riun smiled again, large and welcoming. “I think they’re all shards of some older truth we’ve forgotten,” he said. “That’s why I travel the world, listening, gathering, and meeting the citizens of the cities.”

  He opened a case of notes, and showed her hand-drawn sketches of other cities, other night skies. Handwritten notes of tales, and descriptions of systems.

  “Why?” Tia asked. “Why leave your city?”

  “Why not?” he shrugged.

  ***

  The hours dragged on. Food was delivered by chutes, and they ate on the large, empty tables in silence.

  Afterward Tia sat and watched Riun read a leather-bound book he pulled out of his large trunk until she couldn’t stand the boredom. “Do you play Gorithms?” she finally asked.

  “Of course.”

  “There’re several playing stands near the far walls,” she said. “Care to join me?”

  They set up on the small playing table, connected the pneumatic tubes, and a few seconds later the dual packs of cards appeared.
<
br />   Tia unwrapped hers and laid them down with a regular ‘thwacking’ sound as Riun delicately laid his out behind the dark glass of his privacy shield.

  They looked at each other over the rim of the shields.

  “You play?” he asked. She couldn’t see his smile, but the eyes twinkled.

  “Always.”

  Today’s game was five flowchart sequences with equations, solvable by sub games with the cards. Tia quickly solved her sequences, passed on the marker cards, and looked up.

  “You’re quick.”

  “Five points,” Riun said. “If my results agree.”

  Which they didn’t. One of the sequences tied.

  Tia crosschecked with his cards and he rechecked hers. No tie, they came to the same conclusion by playing out the math. Tia was right.

  Riun placed the markers in the tube and watched them get sucked away. “You’re quick,” he said. “And accurate.”

  “Ninety percent accuracy rate on simple sub games like that.”

  Down in the belly of the beast their results would be tabulated, the result of a low-priority calculation request. Maybe they’d just helped calculate which lights should be left on above some city street. Or regulated the pressure of a valve somewhere. You never really knew. All you knew was that the thousands of games constantly being played helped comprise the total computational capacity of the entire city.

  Streets released traffic along paths that helped simulate equations, games were tied into the city’s calculations, and some suspected that even lives had some sort of calculating function, in the cities.

  Some Gorithim games were checkerboards, or mazes, or just patterns. You never knew what the tubes would hand you. But playing them was usually fun, if not sometimes puzzling, and it gave you something to do.

  Particularly when stuck in the sandbox.

  “Another game?” Tia asked.

  “I don’t know if I should,” Riun’s eyes crinkled. Was he smiling? “I think your mind is far quicker than mine.”