“How will you know you’re the same mother?” The Peacekeeper countered, now walking toward them. He stopped half a dozen paces away. “If you doubt the process works, I would ask why you doubt that. Is it perhaps because you are afraid that all we are is not mere physical matter? Perhaps you are more religious than you think.”
“Regardless of what I believe or don’t, my daughter will ask the same question when she grows up, and she will wonder if my choice didn’t somehow eliminate the need for hers. What’s the difference between transferring to an immortal body versus transferring to a mortal copy? Both processes assume that what we are can be transferred.”
The Peacekeeper’s serene expression took an ugly turn. “Then your objection is a religious one. We don’t make a habit of spreading around treason in Etheria. If you insist on doing so, then your home lies in the shadows with the rest of the Nulls. Perhaps you’ll find a way to get yourself killed before a natural death finds you—that way you can get on with living the after life you secretly believe exists.”
“Watch how you speak to my wife,” Ethan growled.
“My tone offends you. Her words offended me. But I apologize for the offense I gave. I should not have spoken in anger.”
Ethan’s lips curved up in one corner. “Shouldn’t Omnius have stopped you from speaking in anger before you did?”
“Omnius cannot perfectly predict my actions while I am in the presence of mortals such as yourselves.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because you have not made your choices yet, so he does not include you in his nightly simulations of the day to come. Children under the age of eight are the same.”
Ethan saw his wife shake her head. “Every action a child takes will affect adults, making it impossible to predict anyone’s actions.”
“Omnius limits that ripple effect by making couples with children live in closed districts called nurseries until their children go through The Choosing. The nurseries are subject to a limited degree of chaos, but that is one of the sacrifices we make for our children.”
Ethan scowled. “So if we choose to live up here, Omnius won’t just tell us how to live; he’ll tell us where to live, too. Is there anything he doesn’t control?”
“The Nulls. The Sythians. You and other mortals like you. Bringers of chaos. If it were up to me, no one would have a choice. We would all be resurrected in immortal bodies soon after birth.”
“Well thank the gods it’s not up to you,” Ethan said.
“The gods? What gods?”
“All of them! The ones you insist don’t exist.”
The Peacekeeper’s expression flickered darkly once more, and Ethan smiled.
“I’m going to assume that remark was intended to anger me, and ignore you this time.”
“Sure, do whatever you like—or whatever Omnius tells you to. Excuse us.” Ethan took Alara’s hand in his and continued their evening walk. Whispering, he said, “At least they haven’t duped you.”
“Let’s talk about something else,” Alara said. “Something happy.”
“Like what?”
“We haven’t even decided what we’re going to name her.”
Ethan blinked. “You’re right. Now that we know it’s a her . . . what about . . . Trinity?” It was the same name they’d given their ship. They’d named it right after Alara had told him she was pregnant, so it seemed a fitting name for their daughter, too.
Alara smiled. “That sounds perfect.”
“I’m glad you like it. Speaking of Trinity . . .” Ethan turned back to their chaperon. He was still shadowing them closely. “What happened to my transport?”
“What transport?”
Ethan walked up to the Peacekeeper and jabbed the man’s glowing breastplate with his index finger. He felt a tingle of energy push back, and flinched. Recovering quickly, he said, “You heard me. I came to Avilon with a ship. You weren’t planning to steal it were you?”
The Peacekeeper shook his head. “You’re not allowed to leave Avilon, so I’m sure you can see how you won’t be allowed to keep your vessel.”
Ethan’s cheeks bulged and he flushed bright red. “The frek . . . listen here! It’s my ship!”
“I will inquire about it for you. Rest assured, whatever funds are obtained from recycling it will be credited to your account.”
“Recycling it! If you recycle my ship, I swear I’ll . . .”
Alara pulled Ethan away from the bewildered Peacekeeper.
“Why wouldn’t you want it to be recycled?” he continued, oblivious to how close Ethan had come to breaking his face. “It’s no use to you otherwise. I’ll see if any museums want it. Perhaps they’ll be willing to pay you more than the vessel’s scrap value.”
Ethan’s head felt like it was about to explode. “Frek you! Frek Avilon! Frek Omnius!”
“Watch your tongue! Omnius could strike you dead with but a whisper of a thought!”
“Maybe he should!”
“Unfortunately, he is too merciful for that.”
Ethan felt dizzy. His lungs were heaving. He couldn’t breathe. He’d worked his whole life to have a ship he could call his own, and now that he had one, the Avilonians were going to take it away and sell it for scrap! He sunk to his knees in the grass. Alara appeared on her haunches beside him.
“Ethan, are you all right?”
He shook his head. “What’s the point?” he demanded, still looking at the Peacekeeper. The man stared back at him, looking wary, like Ethan might suddenly lunge at him.
“The point?”
“Of anything—Avilon, The Choosing . . . life!”
“Omnius makes us choose because only the people who really want to live forever in paradise are capable of making that work, and because we have to get our immortal bodies sooner or later, so why not sooner? Better to eliminate any genetic predispositions to wrongful behavior and all the physical weakness that is associated with naturally selected genes.”
“I’m not buying it,” Ethan said, still shaking his head.
“You don’t have to. Eternal life is free.”
Ethan snorted. “And doesn’t that just make you a little suspicious? What exactly are you doing for Omnius?”
“Omnius is not a selfish entity. He does not require us to do anything for him.”
Ethan shook his head. “Every sentient creature lives for something and strives to obtain it.”
“I never said Omnius doesn’t have a purpose, just that his purpose isn’t selfish. He lives to serve us, to guide us to perfection and protect us from ourselves. That was the reason he was created, and it is the reason behind everything he does.”
Incredulous at the man’s stupidity, Ethan shook his head. “How do you know that? He’s telling you what you will do and then telling you what you should do instead. What if he’s lying about the future in order to get his way? He’s a thousand times smarter than any one of us! Do you know what that makes us to him? Garbage!” Ethan pushed off the ground to stand on trembling legs. “If anything, we’re his entertainment! He doesn’t really care about us. If he did, he would set the Nulls free. Really free. Send them away to create their own empire someplace else.”
“So the Sythians can find them and kill them?”
“That’s a nice excuse. He had the Nulls caged up here long before anyone had even heard of the Sythians.”
“And back then there was your Imperium to worry about. You don’t really think they would have left us in peace once they heard about Avilon from all those Nulls you’d like to set free. When they realized how advanced we are, they’d have considered us a threat. It wouldn’t have been long before your empire tried to conquer ours. It’s happened before.”
“I guess you’re lucky that the Sythians found us before we found you,” Ethan said, jabbing him in the chest once more. This time he barely noticed the electric jolt that sizzled against his fingertip when he touched the Peacekeeper’s armor. “I can see why someone might want to kill
a sniveling snot like you.” Ethan turned and stalked toward the mansion. Alara kept pace beside him, her violet eyes wide and gleaming in the gilded light of the setting sun. “We should get some sleep, Kiddie,” he said, nodding slowly, as if he’d just made an important decision.
Alara didn’t reply for a long moment. “Ethan . . .”
“What?”
“You need to be careful or you’re going to get yourself killed.”
“Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing!”
Slap!
Ethan’s head spun away from Alara, his cheek stinging. He stopped and turned to her, his hand on his stinging cheek, his jaw agape. “What was that for?” He grabbed her wrist in his hand and squeezed it tight, forcing her arm up close to his other cheek. “You want to hit the other one? Go on! Hit your husband again!”
“Frek you, Ethan! You want to die? Who’s going to raise your daughter? Don’t be so frekking selfish! We need you!”
All the anger drained out of him, and his shoulders slumped. He let go of Alara’s wrist and she began rubbing it with her other hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He took a deep breath and looked out to the horizon, letting the air out slowly. “It’s been a long day. You’re right. It’s just something about this place . . .” He turned to look up at the sky and saw a faint sparkle of stars gleaming between golden wisps of cloud. “The more I feel like I’m being told what to do and how to think, the less I feel like doing it, and the more suspicious I become.”
“You’re not cut out for Etheria, Ethan,” Alara said.
“What about you?”
She shook her head. “I told you. We can’t live up here. Not until we know what our daughter is going to choose.”
“So what if she chooses to live in Etheria?”
“We’ll cross those bridges when we get there.”
“Would you follow her?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
Ethan frowned. “I don’t know, Kiddie. My mother said we can’t hold ourselves responsible for other people’s choices, and I think she’s right. We’ve got to raise our daughter right. Trinity has to know what she’s in for if she comes up here.” Ethan wrapped an arm around Alara’s shoulders and guided her toward the mansion. High walls of tinted glass stared back at them, reflecting stolen scraps of the fading sunset. The majestic trees they’d seen on the horizon earlier were reflected as blurry green swirls.
Later that night, as Ethan lay awake in bed, staring up at the ceiling, he tried to make sense of everything that had happened so far, and what all of it meant for the future. Alara lay asleep on his chest, having succumbed to exhaustion more than an hour before Sync. Ethan was equally exhausted, but he refused to let himself follow his wife’s example. He was waiting up for Omnius’s Sync. His ARCs showed him the time—2350. Sync occurred at midnight every night, so that gave him ten more minutes. Mortals’ sleep was regulated by their Lifelink implants to coincide with Sync, so in theory, he would fall asleep at zero hundred hours, and he wouldn’t be able to wake up again until Sync was over, four hours later.
Ethan wanted to see what forced sleep would feel like. He was half hoping the Peacekeeper had lied to him, that maybe in this one thing at least he still had a say about what happened to him. Maybe he could fight it and stay awake—flick his middle finger to the big eye in the sky and say, you can’t control me!
It was worth a shot.
They were being offered eternal life by a supposedly good entity, a vast artificial intelligence that was sworn to serve humanity. Ethan didn’t understand how the Avilonians could be so naive. What did Omnius have to gain by serving humans? Inferior humans. What sort of fulfillment could a vast intellect derive from that?
23:59.
Ethan focused on the digital clock, causing it to drift down from his peripheral vision into the middle of his field of view. A seconds display appeared in response to that thought—57, 58, 59 . . .
His eyes slammed shut, and his thoughts dropped off a sudden cliff into a swirling abyss. Out of that abyss he heard the distant boom of an explosion, and suddenly he found himself on the bridge of a starship, staring out at space. Now his name was Galan Rovik, and the starship he found himself on was the Ventress.
Chapter 11
The Ventress shook with a mighty explosion. Damage alarms screamed, and something deep in the belly of the ship groaned as if some primordial monster had just been awoken from long years of slumber.
The lights flickered and turned red. Acrid smoke billowed in the crimson gloom, and a nauseating weightlessness set in.
Silence rang.
Strategian Rovik grabbed the armrests of his command chair and gritted his teeth. “Engineering! What was that?”
“That last volley hit the power core! We’ve lost the back third of the ship, and we’re drifting on emergency backups!”
Galan’s mouth opened to give the order to evacuate, but there wasn’t enough time, and what would be the point? So they could be captured by whatever aliens were attacking them? Then a terrible thought occurred to him—what if the quantum comms array had been damaged? Their Lifelinks would have no way to transfer them home. He watched out the bridge viewports, wide-eyed and frozen with horror as another sparkling wall of purple alien missiles rushed to greet them.
“Comms! Status report!” he roared, working some moisture into his suddenly dry mouth.
“Online, sir . . .”
Relief flooded through him. “Time to go home, people! Cut your cords! I’ll see you on the other side.”
Galan followed his own order, silently telling his Lifelink to transfer him home before the next volley could hit.
He went rushing down a dark tunnel toward a bright light. The light grew large and terrifying, taking on the familiar shape of a dazzling eye.
“Welcome home, Galan,” it said in a resonant voice.
He opened his eyes and they burned and blurred with tears, unaccustomed to the light. He couldn’t see! Strong hands held him up, leaving just enough weight resting on his legs to make him realize they wouldn’t hold him. They were too weak or too clumsy; he couldn’t tell which. He felt bewildered, cold, terrified, gripped with panic. He wanted to cry, but that seemed absurd. He was a grown man! A decorated Strategian.
Be still, my child, a quiet voice whispered. Galan couldn’t tell if the voice had been audible or just inside his head, but either way, it served to calm him down. His mind felt light and airy, but soon it began seizing familiar bits and pieces of things, and the panic subsided. His legs stiffened beneath him and the hands holding him let go. He wiped away his tears, trying to see where he was. He was standing naked in a big, airy room—a hangar. Standing with him were hundreds of others, naked like him, all of them being held up by drones—Omnies with silicon padding on their spindly metal fingers. In front of them stalked a man in a bulky, shimmering white robe with dazzling white armor and a gold-glowing version of the Avilonian crest etched into his breastplate. That man was Grand Overseer Thardris.
He stopped in front of Galan and turned to face them, his glowing silver eyes flicking up and down the ranks of men and women.
“As you’ll soon recall, your ship, the Ventress was attacked and destroyed by an unknown enemy. Your mission was to explore the neighboring Getties Cluster. That mission has failed. Your Lifelink data is being analyzed to determine the nature of the enemy that destroyed your ship, and to determine whether or not any of you are to blame for starting an intergalactic war. Strategian—why didn’t you cloak your vessel as soon as you realized you had encountered hostile forces?”
Galan belatedly realized the Grand Overseer was speaking to him. “Flay . . .” His tongue flopped uselessly in his mouth for a moment before he remembered how to use it. “They surprised us, sir. The enemy was cloaked and they had surrounded us before we even realized they were there.”
“Cloaked?” That seemed to surprise the Grand Overseer. “Even so, your sensors can pierce a cloaking shield.”
“They can, Overseer, but we were not expecting to find alien warships at the jump point, let alone cloaked alien warships. We weren’t looking for them.”
“Very well. You will have to explain yourself to Omnius, not me.”
“Yes, sir.”
The scene faded to black, and Ethan’s identity had a moment to rise to the surface and wonder about everything he’d just seen and experienced.
Then he was Galan Rovik again, standing before the Avilonian high council, this time fully dressed in his Peacekeeper’s uniform and armor. He was surrounded by the twelve overseers of Avilon, all of them seated on floating chairs and basking in a blinding white light. That light was cast by the eye of Omnius shining down through a transparent dome ceiling. From that, and the panoramic view of the city, Galan realized that he’d been summoned to the top of Omnius’s temple, the Zenith Tower.
A booming voice rumbled through the council chamber. “I have sent a drone fleet to the Getties to assess the extent of the threat that the Ventress discovered. It has since found no less than eight different species of sentient aliens living there. It is hard to find a world they have not yet settled. Even worlds that should never have supported life are crowded with towering alien cities. Their fleet is thousands of times the size of ours.”
Urgent whispers filled the room, and Galan turned in a slow circle to see the Overseers reacting to the news in varying states of shock.
“Are they at war with themselves?”
“No.”
“But Master, then what are those warships for?” Galan heard the Grand Overseer ask.
“Since they greeted us with hostility as soon as we appeared, I can only assume that they’ve known about us for some time. It is likely that they are preparing for war with us.”
More urgent whispering. Another overseer spoke, “How can we hope to face such a vast enemy?”
“Our technology is more advanced than theirs,” Omnius replied. “But their numbers are sufficient to wipe out both us and the mortal Imperium without even deploying one percent of their fleet.”
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