DUALITY: The World of Lies

by Paul Barufaldi

  Ugh, there just was no getting past this with him. He even had her questioning herself! Granted, it was all pretty iffy and sounded borderline delusional, all of it except for the message coding error! She knew she wasn't imagining that, and if she could only just elaborate on it to him, he might see that she wasn't stark raving mad. The herb… he didn't understand it. It relaxed her and changed her mode of perception. Yes, in some ways it made her irrational, but what it took away in intelligence it added in extrasensory perception. Something was terribly off about this ship, and there was only one highly probable explanation for that: Ming.

  “It's the prisoner!” she declared. “He's manipulating the ship somehow. You said it yourself, Aru. He's a nascent Machine Lord in his own right, and he's found a way...”

  “There is no way, Mei, no way for him to hack the ship from the zero-com room. It's quadruple redundantly designed to block all forms of transmission, 100%. The air and the water and the wastewater all route through the analog side chambers, EMPed in a series of insulated transmission proof compartments. We've already established that his containment is effective. If not, we never would’ve seen him in the first place. He'd just be running the ship and we'd be dead or detained ourselves. He's complied with every rule I've set forth for him over this past week. We can't keep going in circles with this. The bottom line, and I want you to calm your mind and introspect on this, is that you are high, very high. We need to get you clean and thinking clearly then we can discuss this issue with the message and figure out what it really portends. I mean, if it had been just the message, Mei, but you're talking about dreams, and speaking half-coherently at best. You can see that, right?”

  “One does not preclude the other!” She was getting really upset that he wouldn't let this go. “Yes, I'm vaped out, yes! But that doesn't change anything. I'm going to check on the prisoner.”

  “No. I will see to that on my own. Then I'll take my coffee on the auxiliary bridge with you. I want you to take a sedative, Mei. If you don't agree, I'll have Kinny make sure of it. Are we clear?”

  Yeah, there was about zero chance she was going to do that, but he could go ahead and believe whatever suited him for now. “Ok, fine I'll do it,” she lied. “Reconnect on auxiliary bridge in ten then?”

  “Confirmed. And, Mei, no weapons, right?”

  “Agreed, Captain.” She smiled, then left his chamber and went straight to hers, where she had moved the analog catch to after the zero-com had been cleared for the prisoner. Full armor analog suit with space environ capabilities and thruster power: donned. EMP gun: charged, primed, and wielded. Ballistic pistols with full clips of ammo. Two: Wielded. Dagger: Wielded. Mobile resonance disrupter cannon: charged, primed, and wielded.

  Decked out like a solo space marine in an action war toody (2D), she humped all the gear with her to the auxiliary bridge and started in to interrogate Kinny about their vector and position. Kinny answered each query patiently and as though everything were in normal order. By the time Aru arrived on deck, she had the EMP gun trained on the main server bank for the aux bridge, threatening Kinny that she would destroy it and then next go on to destroy the main server banks that housed the System's core.

  “Put it down, Mei. Now!” She turned her head to see Aru aiming a tazeray at her. She knew it would incapacitate her instantly. Still forgoing his mindlink, Aru was crowned with a halo, through which he was surely instructing the security bots to come and subdue her with tranqs, and telling Kinny to stand by with the overhead cannons in the bridge. She paused and wondered how she'd gotten to this point. It was nuts. She was nuts! Threatening Kinny made absolutely no sense. Even if there were a way to destroy the highly redundant core of the ship's system, which there wasn't, they would have no way to control the vessel after that point. Had she really lost her mind? Well, yes and no! That's what he couldn't get, what he just couldn't understand. Damn him!

  “Damn you!” Her mouth echoed her mind. “Aru, you just don't understand what's going on here. The way the message code was botched, it's just not possible for them to make a mistake like that, and the ship feels wrong. And Ming, he's been different since that first day. He just squats there so oblivious to everthing when we enter...”

  “Ming has been following the rules I set down for him that day! Squatting on the far well when we enter to exchange items. No talking. No eye contact. I set those parameters Mei. He hasn't changed at all. He is simply being compliant. This ends now. Do you understa....”

  Aru was cut off by an emergency priority one alarm. “Shock Pods!” announced System. The shock pods in the auxiliary bridge immediately shot toward their respective locations. Naturally, they were both surprised at this sudden announcement, but their training drill instincts took over, and they both moved instantly for the approaching pods. It was already too late.

  The deck rumbled and quaked. No… not the deck. The entire ship! A sudden surge of g-force pulled them both firmly prone onto the floor and grew to such intensity that Mei could not lift her outstretched arms that were adhered to the floor. Face down she felt her body compressing and her ribs bending. Her face was pressed down so hard against the floor she could feel the strain of it on her cheekbones. Aru was in front of her trying with all his might to roll from his side onto his back, but it was futile. For eleven helpless seconds they struggled just to hold on to the living breath that was being constricted out of them.

  With abrupt relief, gravity normalized. Dizzy and reeling, they managed to sit themselves upright, choking and gasping for breath too hard to speak. Mei heard the hiss of gas as System doused them with oxygen. Her stars began to clear, and she was able to summon first a cough, then a groan.

  “Captain, Commander,” announced System. “The danger has passed.”

  “What... happened... System?” Aru spat out between heaving inhalations.

  “Forward probes were momentarily taken offline when they entered the beam of an uncharted cosmic ray and were unable to warn the Kinetic of a rogue meteor intersecting our vector at high velocity. It was diverted and fractured into three parts by ship's laser defenses. One of the fragments struck our damaged outer shield ring in the lower quadrant of section 7. That shield panel is still undergoing repairs and repositioning in the recovery maintenance work since the thermal meltdown. The mislaid panel was struck at 13 degrees by the meteorite fragment at high impact force, causing it to dislodge from its frame on the shield ring. It flipped backwards and the edge of it glanced off the inner ring, abruptly accelerating it. The panel rebounded off into space, and our nearprobes are currently recovering it. The force of that brief interaction between the layers accelerated the inner ring rotation to a rate that peaked at 43 g units. Because of the thermal damage, the automated emergency reverse thruster system took longer than it normally would to correct the rotation rate. The sudden nature of the onset and force of the incident compels me to request that both you and the Commander submit to a trauma scan. Your ocular cavities in particular may be...”

  Mei had heard enough. “System, silence!” Yes, she was blinded for a moment and her vision was still terribly blurred. But already she knew. She knew with certainty. “Aru, I can't listen to another word of this preposterous report. One highly improbable coincidence compounded upon another.”

  He had picked himself and now kindly offered her a hand, which she accepted. “Yeah Mei, I... I think you may be at least partially correct here. Despite the damage the Kinetic has been recovering from, there were enough sensors online that no object that size could have penetrated our defensive projectile grid. No. That was a direct hit if I ever felt one. Maybe even a ram. But for sure, it was no meteor, not undetected at short range and at that kind of velocity in this sparse region of the Cearulein outer heliosphere.”

  “You hear that, Kinny? The gig is up!”

  System responded. “Captain, I have neither the motive nor the capability to deceive you. I think you are still underestimating the extent our sensor arrays have been func
tionally diminished. I shall break down the series of failures that led to this incident if you will direct your attention to display.”

  “System, be silent!” Aru ordered. He looked at Mei and she handed him a ballistic pistol. “Ming!” they simultaneously declared.

  She raced ahead, with Aru on her heels, to the zero-com chamber. They opened the inner door and resealed it with all possible haste -not that it probably even mattered at this juncture. They stormed the inner chamber with weapons drawn.

  Ming, for his part, was still following the protocol set forth for his detainment: crouched at the rear of the chamber with his head down, hands exposed and open

  “Prisoner, stand!” Mei shouted. Her EMP gun was fixed to its highest setting and trained on Ming.

  Ming stood slowly, hands remaining outspread and eyes down. “Look at me!” she demanded as she approached him to about a meter, alongside Aru, who had his pistol aimed at Ming's cranium.

  Ming lifted his head. His eyes seemed hollow and vacant. “Commander, I...”

  Mei fired and held the EMP ray on him until Ming's body fell limp and collapsed onto the floor.

  Aru was surprised by her action. “Mei, what the hell?”

  She thrust the EMP gun on him. “Hold this on him,” she instructed. “That's not Ming.”

  Mei knelt over the unconscious form on the floor and drew her dagger. She grasped the arm, drew up the sleeve, and sunk her blade deep into the flesh below the inside of the elbow drawing down to the wrist. As she suspected, there was no blood. She spread the lacerated skin open like two curtains and exposed the artificial inner workings.

  “Doppleganger?” Aru asked.

  “One of our own androids, Aru, refashioned to his likeness. He escaped this room relatively soon after capture.”

  The Kinetic had twenty-three android units unprimed in storage, those of the rather androgynous sort. Neither of them cared much for android crew, preferring to allow bots fashioned to their tasks to carry out the work of the ship and to interact directly with System in omniscience mode. They had used them occasionally in the past as boarding drones and other tasks of war. So they served their purpose at times, but neither Mei nor Aru cared for the sight of them.

  “EMP it some more,” she instructed. Aru held the force of the pulse on it, as Mei used the laser rifle to first decapitate then burn into its head until its core blew out and melted.

  “Fuck, Aru. FUCK!” she cursed in frustration. “What now?”

  “I don't know... I mean, what can we even do at this point? Maybe we can get to an observation dome and try to get some bearing on our position.”

  “Yeah, ok, let's get you suited up.” Aru didn't seem to get quite why the suit was necessary, but he didn't bother to ask about it or ask why she was bringing the disrupter cannon along.

  They did not summon transport or request anything of System as they dashed along the inner ring on foot, first to her chamber where Aru suited up and she re-geared, then on into Spoke 3. Spoke 3's observation dome was, supposedly, operational now. They entered the spoke and thrust up to the side hatch entrance to the dome. The dome was positioned lateral to the spoke and should still have about a half-gravity. She wondered why System or Ming or whatever ran the ship would even bother keeping up the charade by this point, and was a bit surprised when the hatchway promptly opened at Aru's tactile entry order.

  They stepped into the small nanocarbonfiberized glass observation dome closing the hatch behind them. The ship was laterally turning. From this inner view they could not see the previously claimed outer shield ring damage, but she did see Cearulei brightly dawn over the radial horizon at the proper size and brightness for their position. She gauged the spacing and position of the Trapezium relative to Cearulei, and then back to Ignis Rubeli as it circled into view. Everything was as exactly as it should be for their position and vector heading. From the looks of things they were right where they should be on their set course.

  She commed Aru, pointing at his feet. “Gravlock and get ready.”

  Aru tried to dissuade her, even as he executed her instructions and locked his boots into the floor. “Mei, if we depressurize, we could end up stuck out here.”

  Mei scoffed. Ming had a thousand ways to kill them inside or outside the ship. She primed the disrupter cannon, aimed it at a high section of the dome, and fired. The disrupter first analyzed the materia it was being cast at, nanocarbon-fiberized glass, and calculated its resonant frequency. It then projected an expanding red plasma beam that lit a large radius of the upper viewing dome. Mei held it in place as the disrupter signal whistled into the frequency range until the layer of glass that separated them from space shattered -along with the illusion they had been held under.

  The shining fragments of the dome tumbled away into space taking with them all the air in the chamber. As the shimmering mass of it cleared, the true image of their surrounding space unveiled itself. The two surveyed their new environs as the Kinetic continued its slow lateral turn, but amid a much different star picture. Mei gasped. This was... this was simply impossible!

  Again, she spotted Cearulei, now dim and distant, and not half an arm’s length away from it was Ignis Rubeli. How was she seeing both of them that close together?! They were not just off course; they were no longer in the Taiji!

  Shafts of bright white light were breaking through the spokes from the farside of the Kinetic. “Look!” Aru commed to her, pointing first to the sphere and then up to another point in the sky that were connected by a bright blue line emanating from the sphere... a particle beam? The point in the sky was bursting outward radially in long strands of spark and light as it blew apart. The beam ceased and debris fragments from the explosion sailed over their heads. A ship! Or what was left of one. The lights and flares of weapon fire flashed at a dozen other points in the sky, and more rays discharged from the sphere.

  “We're in the throes of battle!” announced Aru over the com, incredulously.

  The gray mass of a titanic cylinder covered in a grid of lights that numbered in the tens of thousands slowly lurched up and over the ship's view horizon. Emblazoned on it, in numerals the size of which dwarfed the Kinetic 100 times over, were the numbers 66 -the exiled Carousel they had fought to defeat in cruel and bloody warfare years ago. And just to drive the final point home, a blinding white disk of light followed behind it, bathing everything in its path with intense solar radiation, forcing their helm photon shields down: the white dwarf, PoleStar North.

  The Sea of Sand

  Pyre was a land of extreme scarcity on the shores of a void of utter desolation. The dry heat was brutal in his first days of camp, and every venomous thing that slithered or crawled sought shade in his belongings. He suffered two scorpion stings on the first morn alone. Gahre trekked that day not 5 kilometers into the desert and returned with a bone dry canteen and signs of heatstroke. There was simply no shade to be had that one did not carry with him. He continued on south along the curving coast of life and death, between green and sand, because he knew this was one terrain that could not be conquered by intrepid will alone. All the will in his soul would not conjure up a single drop of water out there. He would need guidance, he would need gear, and to obtain these things, he would need at least a vestige of civilization to draw from.

  Even on the living side of the void, water sources were in short supply, as was food. His rations were fully depleted. Tantalizing clumps of fruit hung from palms too high to bother scaling. Gahre gathered that since they were green and none had fallen, they were under-ripe anyway. After some trial and error, he found edible cacti fruits that, along with beetle, snake, and scorpion soups, met his minimal nutritional requirements. He had mistakenly thought his one large waterskin would be sufficient here. Gahre did not need to consume water as often as most men and mistakenly thought he would adapt quickly to the desert climes. Such was not remotely the case. His large frame, high rate of activity, and unsuitable garb all compounded upon one another to drive u
p his hydration requirements. Two waterskins a day, well over three liters, was the requisite minimum. Since he only had one skin, he was left continually foraging for this one rare supply, which wasted hours upon hours of his day.

  As difficult as survival was on the living side, doubts of his ability to survive long on the other wormed their way into his mind, gnawing away at his typically unwavering confidence. In time he came to a place where the living land also gave way to the sand in the south and a great stretch west as far as the eye could see. This at least told him where he was. The atlas showed such an area where the desert bore into the west like a great bay on the ocean. To circumvent it would require him to trek hundreds of kilometers back westward, south, and then east again. To cross this barren stretch straight south was only forty-three kilometers. Though from his previous experiment, he knew he couldn't make it nearly that far with only the one waterskin. Dismayed, he started into the western route and almost immediately came upon a semi-permanent camp. It was deserted, but had not been so for long. A caravan of perhaps two dozen people with five wagons had been here the night before. The coals of their fire were still warm. To his relief he found a well there and drank himself silly in it. Littered about were ceramic water jars that had been reinforced by a metal mesh. None were intact, and he wished he had himself a few of those right now. With three, he reckoned, he could have taken the shortcut south.

  The group that had camped there tracked south straight out into those barren lands. He set out on their trail in the hopes he might make the crossing with them and barter some food or wares. A few hours in he caught sight of the caravan yonder and approached them to hailing distance, waving his arms, anxious to befriend and trade with them. His hail was met by a volley of a dozen arrows that he narrowly dodged. One sliced through a loose flap of his cloak while others buried themselves viciously in the sand about his feet. He backed away out of their range, and they did not pursue. He wondered at the gesture though. A lone man approaches their large contingent and they feel threatened enough to loose deadly weapons? Either they were just evil in their own right, or this was a land of brigands, and they had taken him as a scout. At any rate Gahre ceased his pursuit, gathered the well-crafted arrows, and returned to the site with the well to make camp that night. The long lonely route it would be, and so be it. As far as he had already come, what sort of laughable difference did another hundred or two kilometers make?