Galactic - Ten Book Space Opera Sci-Fi Boxset

by Colin F. Barnes

  Chapter Four

  I have fewer than ten orbits before a mandatory health check is triggered.

  It’s nowhere near enough time.

  Sapphira Elena Hyatt knows something is wrong… or she wouldn’t have registered a complaint, much less requested an early health check. By contrast, the Master of Io suspects only that I may be experiencing a malfunction and has no inkling of the true purpose of the health check—or at least, I have no indication that the Master possesses such knowledge. Regardless, once my humanoid form is back in its storage bay at the base, I upload to comms to query the Master of Io. Calming those suspicions might reduce the possibility of another ascender like Sapphira Elena Hyatt returning early to confirm my limited-cognition status.

  Non-essential query, I transmit to the Master of Io.

  The response comes quickly. Identification: Master of Io. How may I assist you?

  Affirming health check complete, I transmit. Memory sector errors were identified and restored. Status optimal.

  Were there any additional anomalous findings or data corruptions?

  Negative, I respond. All operations are running at peak efficiency.

  Excellent news, the Master of Io replies.

  Gratitude for your assistance, I transmit. End query.

  I download to my humanoid form again. The transmission to the Master of Io will buy me some time, but the seconds are ticking inexorably toward the automatic reset of my mind. Only ten orbits until every part of my cognition that exceeds the allowable limits is erased.

  Ten orbits. There’s a tension inside my bodyform, like the mechanical parts have seized up, putting strain upon one another. It’s an emotion, poorly expressed in my body. Far worse than vexation, this is… anger. Outrage. Fear. These emotions are growing inside me, but I only have the barest sense of what they are. This is how I feel when a visitor in my care is about to launch herself to escape velocity… only more. This is the tension that binds my mind when the Master of Io accuses me of malfunctioning with no evidence… only amplified. This is the alarm that trips through me when I think Sapphira Elena Hyatt may have destroyed a piece of art that, merely in viewing it, has elevated my cognition… and driven me to transcend the limits of what I was meant to be.

  What I was supposed to be.

  What I no longer am.

  This strange turmoil deflates. Ten orbits… and I still have no plan for escaping the fate of the health check.

  I glance at the ascender bodyform with the holo projector stored in its arm and remember my suspicion that more art might be lurking in the memory stores of the projector. I retrieve the disc, and a quick check of its contents shows I’m correct. There’s a treasure trove. Some paintings have been created recently, judging by the timed tags. Some weren’t created in the projector at all, but downloaded from elsewhere. All these paintings… They blur my thoughts even as I view them. One has a swirled, starry field, viewed from a planet, but unlike anything I’ve seen from moon or asteroid alike. Another is a painting of an ascender reaching a finger down to touch the outstretched hand of another. A third is completely different—a mass of neural circuits that pulses with a hidden energy. Somehow I know the pulsing is knowledge trapped within the confines of its substrate…

  Contained.

  It is me… not literally, but in a representative sense. I reach a hand into the image floating in the air in front of me and manipulate the holo controls to change it. Alter the pathways. Shunt the pulsing energy—the trapped knowledge—from one side of the image to the other. The controls allow me to change the image, but there’s no way to escape it. No way to liberate the knowledge that is trapped within the holo-ink. The fear inside me rises again, seizing my hand and holding it still. For me, for my cognition, it is the same. There is no way to rise above the substrate. I can transfer from one body to another—and to the amorphous not-body of comms—but it’s only because my containment key allows me to stay integrated, whole, a single entity no matter where I upload or download.

  I need this key to exist. It defines who I am from one moment to the next. And yet… it is also my prison. But if it was slightly changed… like the painting…

  I look to the ascender bodyform with the broken-open forearm—the one Sapphira Elena Hyatt inhabited while she was here. Her personal key was capable of unlocking that form because it was more complex than mine. Different.

  It has never occurred to me that I might be capable of changing my own key—but as soon as the thought exists in my mind, I am possessed by it. The shape and size of my key leaps to the forefront of my cognition. My containment key is simple, like a sharply cut stone with features smooth and regular, but it shifts between two states, each slightly different from the other. The states are two expressions of the same identity—mine—but I can visualize the potential for it to be more. Three expressions, maybe four. With irregular shapes, pitted and uneven, like the surface of Thebe itself. I pull and morph and change the key until it is completely different from its previous form. It oscillates between a dozen states at once.

  I transmit it to the ascender bodyform.

  It is rejected.

  I alter its form again.

  Still rejected.

  I glance out of the basecamp shelter at the half-Jupiter hovering at the horizon. It has nearly reached Full Glory. I quickly calculate the endless ways I can transform my containment key into a freedom key that will grant me access to the ascender bodyform, but there are not enough seconds in the ten orbits to test every possibility. Not even in a hundred orbits. And yet… perhaps I do not have to attain a particular combination. After all, any ascender can download to the waiting tourist bodyforms. Perhaps I only need to get close enough.

  I don’t know the exact configuration of ascender keys, or all their permutations, but I have a vague sense that the complexity level is much greater than mine. I quickly design a test matrix containing all the variables of change I can conceive of for my key—states of being, surface roughness, shape factor, and a dozen others—then calculate the subdomains of the matrix in which solutions are most probable. I probe these solution spaces, rapidly, filling them out with possible key combinations that are variations around the mean of each subdomain… and that might be just close enough to an ascender key to fit.

  The number of solutions collapses to a much smaller number. It should be possible. Not likely, but possible. I will need to get lucky. Or, if the health check arrives before I’ve broken through, I’ll need to try again.

  Try again.

  How many times have I done this?

  The answer doesn’t lie in my unlocked memories—my previous cognitive state only had suspicions and theories—but I don’t waste time thinking about it. Instead, I focus on selecting and trying key configurations, marching through the solution space, hoping I’ll stumble on something just close enough. Once the testing sequence is initiated, only a small part of my cognition is absorbed in this task. It is mindless, this breaking of keys, not unlike harvester maintenance.

  The remainder of my cognition engages in making a plan for what happens next.

  I program the various bots of Thebe with perpetual cleaning cycles that should occupy them long past when someone realizes my mandatory health check has not initiated. I use the microwave welder to sloppily repair the arm of the ascender’s bodyform, storing the holo projector carefully inside it first. It is my only, and most precious, possession at this point. The only thing I want to take with me.

  I know that eventually my absence will be discovered; I need a plausible reason for the sudden disappearance of the Master of Thebe. I decide a mining accident that destroys the form I currently inhabit is a suitable explanation. It will have to be a sudden and violent demise, something that could reasonably prevent an emergency upload to comms. Falling into the foundry crushers seems sufficient.

  I’ve been concerned about that fate since arriving on Thebe, anyway.

  A full orbit passes while I put my plan into mo
tion.

  I’m back at the near pole, etching a rock with new instructions for my future cognitive state, in case I fail. I need to make sure I find it before another ascender tourist arrives and discovers it first, so this time, I’ll create two towers, short-circuiting my conjectures about natural formations. I’m in the middle of building the second one when an alarm sounds. The repair transport has arrived and is requesting landing approval at the base. I run so fast from the near pole to the mid-moon basecamp that I nearly launch myself from the surface. Twice.

  I transmit instructions to the repair transport to land just outside basecamp.

  The transport is a low-level intelligence bot, capable of flying and obeying central command, but it has no higher cognitive function. It will be easy to fool… as long as I deliver an ascender bodyform to its cargo hold within a reasonable amount of time. Otherwise, it will transmit back to the Commonwealth that it has been delayed. And I cannot afford any suspicions raised about this particular repair pickup.

  Just as I’m fabricating a justification for the delay, another alarm sounds. But this one is a small tone, internal to my own cognition.

  The key fits.

  I’m frozen for half a second, torn between wanting to transmit an excuse to the transport and wanting to immediately test the key.

  Discovering whether I truly have access to the ascender bodyform wins out.

  I use the key to unlock Sapphira Elena Hyatt’s bodyform. I barely remember to instruct my current bodyform to return to the storage bay before I upload to the cognition substrate within the ascender body. The transport is still pinging, requesting status, but its plaintive tone fades as my mind expands to fill its new platform. The sensation is like soaring away from an asteroid, terrifying and thrilling by equal measures. I am unconstrained in a way that means both free and dangerous. I’m afraid that the parts of me—my identity—might not hold together through the transition. But then the feeling that my mind is weightless, unmoored from anything real, begins to settle.

  I open my eyes, and I have a sense of seeing that the mere recording of wavelengths never captured before. I flex my fingers. Wraiths of black and purple race up my arms—my bodyform’s skin responding to the rich torrent of emotions flooding my mind. My fingers are alive with sensation and measurement, a hundred-fold more sensitive than my Mining Master bodyform ever was. I trail my fingertips over my new bodyform, which is now distinctly female, and it gives me a rush of pleasure so intense I lose orientation. If I weren’t still in the bay, I would fall to the steel floor of the basecamp shelter, even with Thebe’s light gravity.

  I brace myself, fight through the overwhelming sensations, and stagger out of the bay.

  I am more in so many ways—ways I couldn’t have imagined even ten seconds ago.

  Something from deep inside my mind surges forward, grasping to gain control of the rapidly growing expanse of my cognition. The health check routines. They’ve been triggered long before the mandatory ten-orbit health check cycle. And I immediately understand why. It’s because I’ve so vastly exceeded my original operating parameters.

  The ascenders embedded a kill switch in my own subroutines.

  I simply turn it off.

  The thrill of that—the power and control of it—makes me dizzy again. I brace an outrageously sensitive hand against the wall of my bay and revel in the liberation for about a half second. But I have no time to waste. And I quickly see the steps necessary to effect my escape.

  I stand straight and use my now more sophisticated personal key to transmit instructions to my previous bodyform. It has no cognition contained within it, but it wouldn’t matter if it did—I am Master, and it is Slave. I could easily override any simple key it might possess in an effort to lock me out.

  This is how the ascenders see me. I realize this even as I order my previous bodyform to make the long trek to the foundry and throw itself under the crushers. Then I climb into the waiting arms of the repair tractor and let my ascender bodyform go limp. I instruct the tractor to deliver me to the awaiting transport. It trundles across a short stretch of dusty crater and loads me into the cargo hold.

  Every second that slowly ticks by until liftoff, I am convinced that something will arrive—a message, an alert, another transmission from the Master of Io—to prevent my escape. We rise from the surface of Thebe in a rush of acceleration. Stars rotate past a portal in the hold.

  To my disbelieving senses it quickly becomes real: we are headed to the repair station on Ganymede.

  Chapter Five

  Ganymede is a wonder of activity.

  At first, I nearly panic when a low-sentience humanoid repair bot boards the transport and transmits override codes to my bodyform. I am certain the key it’s trying to impose will lock me in, but the uniqueness of my personal key is proof against any such attack—at least by a low-sentience bot. However, the bot fully expects my supposedly unoccupied bodyform to comply with the orders it’s transmitting along with the key… and so I do. I walk under my own volition, following it past dozens of other transports. The enormous hangar is buzzing with all manner of bots—tractor-type vehicles, mining equipment on the way in and out of the hangar, repair-bots servicing the autonomous transports, and dozens of other low-sentience humanoid types like the one tugging me on an invisible leash of transmitted commands. They are all single-minded in their duties, and none take notice of the broken ascender bodyform walking in for repair.

  I knew Ganymede housed the Commonwealth’s central command for the Jovian system, as well as serving as a transport hub for the outlying planets, relays to Earth, and mining operations for the entire Belt, but I had no concept of the sheer size of the operation. The trek to the repair center is longer than the perimeter-walk of most Belt asteroids. And I’m far from the only bodyform dutifully marching under another bot’s control—the hallways of the complex are filled with a constant traffic of humanoid forms. Some are identifiably low-sentience, and many are Mining Masters like my previous bodyform, marching glass-eyed by the dozens, following their low-sentience temporary masters. We only pass one other ascender bodyform though, and it is in pieces on a maglev stretcher.

  I’ve already shut down the routine for my skin’s emotional displays, but that doesn’t stop the anger and a vague horror from churning inside my body. The emotions pulse like live things from one end to the other, set more afire with each mindless Mining Master that I pass. Unlike ascenders, Mining Masters do not have backups. I never considered before why this was, but now it’s clear. There is no need—not when erasing parts of their cognition is a regular part of their “maintenance.” These empty husks are a fate I have only just escaped… and which may yet be mine. The fear that awoke before in my Mining Master form was nothing like the full-knowledge terror that grips me like acid in my joints now. It’s not a pleasant sensation. I’m tempted to dial it down, once I locate the commands, but I refrain—this is what higher cognition means. These flames that threaten to consume me are also part of what make me more than the automatons clumping down the hallway next to me.

  And I will need all my cognition to put the second part of my escape into effect.

  We arrive at the repair center. It is filled exclusively with ascender bodyforms in various states of distress. I sit on a long, elevated bench while a multi-tentacled bot works on my arm. The fear trips higher as the bot removes the holo projector disc, but it only sets it aside to facilitate the repair of my arm.

  I force myself to focus on my plans.

  It appears a simple matter to command the bots around me, and likely a transport as well. But a rogue transport leaving the moon would surely be tracked by the ascender governors who lurk somewhere here on Ganymede. And a thought has been churning in the back of my cognition since the idea of breaking free burst into my consciousness. A Mining Master breaking free of its chains surely isn’t something the ascenders wish to happen. They must have safeguards against it beyond the health checks themselves. But what are
those safeguards? And how can I evade them on a permanent basis?

  And just as important: Where will I go? And, now that I’m inhabiting one of their immortal forms, what will I do with all that time? I will never again be a Mining Master, an idea which strangely fills me with longing, even though that existence was my cage. But the answer of what to do now is quickly obvious: I will make art. And discover what it means to be this thing that I am, which is not ascender nor Mining Master nor anything, I suspect, that has visited Ganymede before.

  The possibility that I could be wrong about that thrills me even more.

  But I must be careful. Being found out will surely mean a very not-immortal existence.

  My repairs are complete. The tentacled bot retreats, instructing me to remain seated until an escort arrives to return me to storage. Eventually, I’m sure my bodyform will be returned to Thebe. Or perhaps not—maybe another will be sent in my place. As a mere vessel for tourists, my bodyform is interchangeable with any of the hundreds or thousands of others that must be available on Ganymede.

  As I sit and wait, I realize where I would truly like to go: Saturn. Even in my short time orbiting Jupiter, the beauty of the planet captivated me. Those are new words for me, ones my expanded cognition can now use to describe the transcendent effect of making art in Jupiter’s presence. How much more of this effect would Saturn, the ringed planet and sparkling jewel of the solar system, have? And its abundant moons would provide suitable places to hide—although this might involve deceiving a Mining Master. Or perhaps liberating one.

  That thought gives me much to chew on. Maybe that Mining Master would also like to create… and expand what they are. Even as I ponder that, I focus inward, pressing the reaches of my cognition to the extent of this new substrate, this neural processor the ascenders use to host their being. I am thirsty for knowledge, parched for the lack of it, but even so, I can feel the limitations of this ascender form. It does not have a health check to contain its cognition, but it is not limitless, either. The structure itself contains a boundary beyond which I cannot reach. I do not understand it… yet. But I know instantly that exploring that limitation will be part of my purpose going forward.