Armored-ARC

by John Joseph Adams

  “Well, great.”

  “And my first name is Nadia—but if you ever call me that, I’ll put you back in rehab for good.”

  “Understood. It’s a date, then.”

  She held out her metal right hand.

  I shook it, and had my fingers painfully squeezed in return.

  “It’s a date,” she said, “if this is fighting.”

  I nodded and she let me go.

  The Outfall tour was run by a relatively human-friendly Dashizi, an alien of a species I’d never encountered before. Its name was Lna. One pendulous, segmented body hung from the intersection of its six stilt-like legs like a sausage in a cage. Sensory organs were at the bottom end of the sausage, so it had to curl up in a U-shape to look at Enforcer Ei. Ribbons in varying shades of gray adorned its legs, Roman sandal-style.

  Lna waited for the other members of our tour before giving us anything other than its name. Five had booked. Only three showed—Enforcer Ei and I, and a near-human called Thiall, whose overlarge eyes lent him a permanently quizzical expression. Lna professed himself to be disappointed at the poor turn-out but not surprised.

  “Humans evolved in the shadow of volcanoes,” the alien said. “You have a predisposition for looking down.”

  I was pretty sure he wasn’t calling us cowards, or depressives, but his expression was unreadable.

  “How long have you lived here, Lna?” I asked.

  “Three thousand of your years.”

  “And you’ve been tour guide all that time?”

  “Only on Firstdays. There is a roster.”

  Enforcer Ei nudged me. I shut up.

  “This way.”

  Lna guided us into the Outfall complex. It seemed much the same as any other, although it was perhaps a little newer-looking, showing fewer signs of wear and tear. This junction clearly hadn’t seen as much use as the others.

  At its heart rested the massive, alien disk that was the key to the Loop’s existence—a solid lump of ambiguous matter, so gray it was almost black, over a hundred meters across and five high, with one cylindrical tunnel bored in a spiraling arc from the edge to the center. Lna walked us around the disk’s circumference, pointing out markings left by previous inhabitants of the junction. Some were prayers, others curses. Many were simply names. The disk was covered in those, all painted on. The material was too tough to scratch.

  “Commemorating the beings who died here,” was the explanation Lna offered. I saw no reason to disbelieve him.

  We returned to the tunnel mouth and filed inside. The top of Enforcer Ei’s helm was tall enough to scrape the ceiling, making her stoop. Immediately I felt a weird tugging and shifting as gravitational, electric, and magnetic fields wrapped around me. The mech suit creaked, and I briefly wondered if it would survive the stresses this odd, alien space would impose upon it. But it had to, I concluded, as it had one hundred and sixty-two times before. Thus far, this was an Outfall like any other.

  Our footsteps echoed along the tunnel. The only lights came from a torch Lna carried and Enforcer Ei’s chest lamps. The forces multiplied until my head was swimming with the effort of thinking straight. I felt as though all the atoms and molecules in my body were being stirred like letters in alphabet soup.

  The tunnel ended in a blank wall.

  “This is the geometric center of the disk,” Lna said, tapping a point roughly two meters from the end of the tunnel. “Here, our journey ends.”

  Not just the journey through the disk, he meant, but around the Loop as well.

  I approached the wall and examined the tunnel’s end by the shifting light. There was more graffiti, centimeters thick by the look of it. What lay beyond it felt disconcertingly solid to my questing hands, a sure sign that something was indeed wrong. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. Normally one walked into the wormcaster transmitter disk of junction (X) and walked out the receiver of junction (X + 1) without breaking stride. The disks did all the hard work for you.

  At least they did when they worked.

  “What do the scientists say?” I asked.

  Lna folded his legs into pairs. “Many times have I walked this path,” he said. “I thought myself a scientist, once. What I considered science is a child’s perception of the universe compared to the understanding that built this.”

  “But people have tried, haven’t they?” I felt that I was speaking normally, but I could hear the echoes of my voice getting louder. “They’ve poked it, prodded it…?”

  A heavy hand came down on my shoulder. Her metal shell quivered under the complex forces roiling around us.

  “Until the builders return,” said Lna, “or the Outfall fixes itself, we can only wait and wonder.”

  “Well, that sucks,” said Thiall, startling all of us. The near-human hadn’t spoken since giving us his name. “But it could be worse, I guess. At least it didn’t half-work.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Enforcer Ei.

  “Well, it could have dumped us in deep space, or left bits of us behind. At least we’re still here and in one piece.”

  “Some might count that as a curse,” she said, “not a blessing.”

  With heavy steps, the suit turned and began walking out of the tunnel.

  Lna uncrossed his legs and followed. “This concludes the tour,” the alien said as it ambulated after Enforcer Ei. “There is a register for visitors, if you would like to record your thoughts.…”

  “Spare me,” I told Thiall. “I need a drink.”

  “To each their own,” he said.

  I took that as a rebuff, but without rancor. I already had a drinking buddy, if I could get her down off the ledge.

  “No goodnight kiss?” I called after her before she could disappear into a crowd.

  She indicated the sky. “There’s no night, let alone a good one. No moon, no stars—no nothing.”

  “Comets I can give you.” Actually, we had those in abundance. The complex interplay of forces in the system was always throwing something icy towards one sun or other. “Probably a rainbow, if you ask nicely.”

  “I did what you wanted. I took the tour. Now you want me to be nice as well?”

  “Just one round. I’ll pay, whatever you fancy.”

  Her pace slowed. “All right. Alcohol works for me.”

  “So you are human.”

  “That’s not what I said. Alcohol disrupts Karuliesh biochemistry as well.”

  “So you’re one of two species.” I had met the Karuliesh; they resembled ambulatory prunes and smelled of vinegar. I hoped the real Nadia Ei was nothing like that. “The End of the Line?”

  “That’ll do.”

  At the bar in which we’d first met, we had several rounds, not just one. The front of her suit opened a fraction to allow her access to its inner workings, into which she trickled the drink. I watched curiously as she did so. The outer layer was just millimeters thick, and there seemed to be many more beneath it. I wondered how long it took her to get undressed.

  “Maybe Lna’s wrong,” I insisted. “What if there’s another disk, one that works, and all we have to do is find it? Or if we could reprogram the Infall to take us back to junction one-sixty-two?”

  “You think people haven’t tried?” she said. “You think you’re the only one who’s thought this way?”

  She was right. I was beginning to sound like Zuzi. But Zuzi’s relentless optimism was useless on Harvester. It was directed inward, to making the best out of a bad deal. I didn’t want that. I wanted the deck shuffled and the cards laid out all over again. Or I wanted some way to turn my shitty hand into a game-winning misére.

  “What are you afraid of?” I asked her. “That I might be making sense?”

  “I’m going to say yes in the hope it might shut you the hell up.”

  “But isn’t getting away from here something we should all be talking about?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” she said, staring down into her drink.

  “Wait,” I sai
d. “This I don’t get at all. You come here on a mission, you catch the guy, and now you can’t get home. What’s not to be pissed about?”

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t pissed.”

  “But you said—”

  “Maybe means maybe. Don’t read too much into it. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

  I supposed that was true, and forced myself to stop prying.

  “Shame you didn’t catch the guy earlier,” I said, aiming for companionability. “That way you’d have the rest of the tour to look forward to.”

  “You don’t know anything about me, soldier.”

  Her tone was hard. My plan had backfired, somehow.

  “I know you only call me ‘soldier’ when I’m getting close to something.”

  “That isn’t it at all.”

  The outer layer of her suit abruptly slid shut. She stood up.

  “Nadia, wait.…”

  She didn’t blast me into next century. She didn’t even look at me. She just kept going.

  This time I didn’t follow. I drained the rest of my drink, and hers, and went in the opposite direction.

  Enforcer Ei didn’t show at the dojo for a week, which was fine with me. I had other sparring partners I’d been neglecting, and was pleased to see that working with her had increased my strength and agility, putting me at the top ranking of my fellow corpses. That was new, and not unpleasant.

  The buzz was just beginning to pale when she returned, offering neither explanation nor apology for her absence, and I figured she owed me nothing of the sort. She barely said a word, except to accept or reject challenges, as the mood took her. I wasn’t her primary sparring partner anymore, although we did fight a few times. It felt awkward, like some vital rhythm was missing, one we’d danced to so effortlessly before.

  This went on for a couple of months, circling each other, never quite colliding, except physically in the arena. I hitched up with Zuzi again and met some other people through her. Harvester’s population lacked nothing when it came to interesting and unique types. Only gradually did the familiarity start to eat at me in that regard, too. We were all refugees, castaways on an unknown shore. Every story ended the same.

  Four months after I arrived at Harvester, the Authorities declared a junction-wide celebration of mourning. At first I thought it was some alien thing—I had, as yet, failed to determine who or what the Authorities actually were—but Zuzi, always more integrated than I was, explained that the celebration was for everyone. Any race, culture, or creed could participate. Unlike the scrawls I’d seen all over Outfall, this wasn’t just for the people who’d died here; it was to commemorate the ones we’d left behind, too.

  And it was simple enough. Every physically bound entity processed past the tunnel leading out of Infall. At the opening they spoke the name of the person they were mourning. A small tribute could be offered. Anyone who arrived through the Infall during the procession was declared a Hero for the day and feted by all. The ceremony concluded with a pageant and lots of drinking.

  Zuzi thought it sounded wonderful, of course, and talked me into participating.

  “Whose name will you say?” I asked her over dinner the night before. We were, by that time, sharing an apartment, and sleeping regularly in the same bed.

  “I don’t think I’ll do that part,” she said. “There isn’t anyone I feel sad about.”

  “You mean you don’t miss anyone?”

  “I guess that is what I mean. Grief is a negative emotion, isn’t it?”

  I stared into her smiling eyes, and saw in them a truth I think I’d known from the beginning.

  “You wouldn’t miss me if I was gone,” I said. “You’d be just as happy as you are now, and just as happy again when the next person moved in. It’s all the same to you.”

  “It’s not all the same,” she said. “There are shades of happiness. The way I am with you is different to how I am with someone else. It must be, of course, or I would get terribly bored.”

  She held my hands over the table, and I smiled at her. There was no point pushing it. I knew from experience that she was incapable of having a two-sided argument.

  We joined the throng the next day, spruced up like Harvester’s finest out to welcome a queen. The mood was a happy one, mixed with an undercurrent of loss. Music was somber as often as it was danceable. Seeing a familiar silver helm standing high above the crowd, I pulled ahead of Zuzi. I felt more comfortable on my own, with the crowd surging and retreating around me. It reminded me of the day I’d left to join the Loop, of the farewell thrown by my higher self. He had been there in dozens of bodies, and I had felt embraced physically as well as mentally. Little did I know that the only way I would ever feel anything like that again would be in the company of strangers, all of whom carried their own burdens.

  I caught up with Nadia Ei on the approach to Infall. If she noticed me, she didn’t say anything, and I didn’t force the issue. The silver skin of her armor reflected my face back at me as she approached the entrance. I silently rehearsed what I was going to say when the opportunity came to do what we were all there to do.

  She turned, dropped to one knee, and bowed her head.

  “Grae Bilwis,” she said.

  She straightened, stood, moved on.

  Then it was my turn to look down the disk’s long, curving tunnel. A dead-end—but a functioning one, since already that day two Heroes had arrived—it had none of the graffiti and all of the mystery of Outfall. I found it easy to imagine that the words we said would ricochet down a long tunnel of space-time back to the places and people we’d left behind. Maybe they’d make a difference to someone.

  “Alex Lombard,” I said. Although I strained to hear an echo, there was nothing.

  Grae Bilwis.

  The name rang a bell.

  In post-mourning celebration mode, Harvester was consumed by fireworks, acrobats, and drunks. I wasn’t much interested in any of them. Seeing Nadia Ei had put me in a contemplative mood, and I didn’t have the energy to shuck it off.

  Zuzi would be with her friends, expecting me to join her, I supposed, but not relying on it. There might be other corpses there, unless they were feeling the same way I was. Just thinking about my higher self brought back the sense of isolation that, on joining the Loop had been so novel and thrilling, but here on Harvester bled like an open wound. On other days I might have called my fellow corpses friends and a comfort. That day, the loss we all shared was a wedge between us, driving us into isolation and resentment.

  I roamed, staring at the clouds the Authorities had thrown up to block out the suns, the laser-painted stars on their undersides. Sublight shuttles occasionally left Harvester with one destination in mind: the edge of the planetary nebula, where light-echoes faded and the universe reappeared. It wouldn’t be hard to book a coldseat on one of those, wait out the millennia in the hope of things changing. It would certainly be a new experience, inasmuch as it was an experience at all.…

  But Grae Bilwis nagged at me. Who was this person Nadia Ei mourned, and where had I heard the name before?

  I found a quiet pocket in a green zone and logged into Harvester’s infocore. I didn’t know the precise spelling, and the search engines weren’t optimized for human vocalizations. It took me a surprising amount of time to find the record, and in the end I kicked myself for not looking in the news feeds first. That’s where I’d stumbled across it the first time, while looking up Enforcer Ei herself.

  Grae Bilwis was the man Enforcer Ei had been chasing through the Loop. He had been an officer in the Earth Justice Enforcement Agency, just like her. He’d sneaked into Harvester by means that were still unknown. She’d caught him, killed him, and handed his body over to the Authorities.

  And now here she was, publically mourning him. Why?

  Something parted the ferny fronds to my right. A shadow fell across me. By the size of it, there was only one person it could have belonged to.

  “I’ve been researching, too,”
she said. “Guess what I found.”

  Clearly she’d been following my search via some means available to her. I couldn’t read her mood, not from the way the suit was standing. I didn’t get up. If she was going to kill me, I had as much chance of stopping her lying down as I did on my feet.

  “Tell me about him, first,” I said. “Was he crooked? Or were you the crooked one, and he was blackmailing you?”

  “Are they the best theories you’ve come up with?”

  “Well, I haven’t had long to think about it. I only just found out he still matters.”

  “He doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Of course he does. He’s the reason you’re here. It’s his fault. You’re allowed to blame him if it’ll help you move on.”

  “There’s nowhere to move on to.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  I stopped talking—not just because of the fists, suddenly clenched, that could have turned me to paste in an instant. There was such pain in her voice. For the first time, she sounded how I felt.

  “What were you researching?” I asked her.

  Her fists unclenched. “Outfall.”

  Now I sat up. “Tell me what you found.”

  “The disk has been under observation for half of Harvester’s recorded history. It’s been studied by people a whole lot more motivated than tour guides—the machine intelligences, for one, and they’ve got the patience of saints. What’s more, all the data is publically available. It makes for pretty dense reading. I’ve been wading through it for weeks, trying to find a hole. Most of it I don’t understand, but everyone’s come to the same diagnosis.”

  “The disk is stuffed.”

  “Not quite. The disk is definitely doing something—we felt it when we were in there—but exactly what, no one knows. If we did know, maybe we could fix it. All we can say is that it’s not working properly, because we’re still here.”

  I rubbed my temples. “Everyone really thinks that?”

  “Well, apart from the cranks and weirdoes, half of whom think this is a kind of punishment sent by the Builders. The other half claim to actually be the Builders, but why they’re caught in their own trap is never adequately explained.”