Dark Beyond the Stars

by Patrice Fitzgerald

  When I return to base, I upload to the comm center—perhaps there is a natural-phenomenon explanation which I have missed and which for some reason isn’t registered in the database. And the Master of Io has provided me with assistance in the past—for example, my near-catastrophic nanite depletion—all without logging an official report.

  The Commonwealth’s operations run throughout the gas giants and Inner and Outer Belts, keeping a steady supply of materials heading to Earth through a complex ferry system. Tens of thousands of Masters are active at any given moment, a well-organized symphony of harvesting and processing. The Master of Io, in particular, has been active for over a thousand Earth standard days and operates at the highest complexity level that can be managed by machine-sourced intelligence. More difficult operations, like the Jovian mining colonies, are governed by ascenders.

  Non-essential query, I transmit. I include my identification code and a copy of my containment key for validation.

  I wait. The Master of Io must be engaged in essential duties.

  Three minutes later, a response returns. Identification: Master of Io. How may I assist you?

  I transmit images of the stacked rocks, my measurements and reconstruction, the known timeline of events, and theories considered and discarded. I include mention of the two tourist visits by ascenders. Essentially, all relevant information I have gathered.

  Theories? I transmit.

  An error in your register of tourists, the Master of Io transmits.

  Stand by, I reply, then run a full diagnostic of my registry files, as well as other memory stores for good measure. All data sectors are clean. Negative.

  Radiation damage?

  Another system check, this time benchmarking against background radiation measures, looking for recent fluctuations in ambient levels of Jupiter’s magnetic fields. Negative.

  You are experiencing a malfunction, the Master of Io transmits.

  I see no evidence of this.

  Inexplicable phenomena are an indication of malfunction, not necessarily in the sector where the anomaly is occurring, the Master of Io transmits. There is a possibility of cascading errors. Perform system-wide checks to ensure mission critical systems are robust. How long since your last health check?

  I start the system checks before replying, because those are primary level protocols, and the Master of Io’s theory of cascading errors is potentially catastrophic. Last health check eight orbits ago, I finally transmit.

  When system checks are complete, perform a health check regen cycle early.

  Mandatory health check initiation occurs at ten orbits anyway. Confirmed, I transmit. End query.

  The system checks are extensive and take the rest of the Rising Quarter to complete, but no anomalies are found. The Mystery of the Rocks remains, but I am confident that minimal risk to operations is present, so there is no need to log a report with the Commonwealth. I consider initiating the health check regen cycle now, as the Master of Io suggested, but it requires a full orbital period at minimal operational status, and harvester maintenance is scheduled in the Setting Quarter.

  A quick check of the harvester’s location shows it will soon reach the near pole; if I’m efficient, I should be able to complete the maintenance before the mandatory override forces my bodyform to march back to the bay for the health check. There is a small risk of complications that would extend maintenance operations past the health check trigger… in which case, I would be forced to leave a half-completed maintenance operation behind. The chances of this occurring are not prohibitively large. Besides, performing maintenance now will provide an opportunity for more theories—and if the Master of Io is correct about possible cascading errors, solving the Mystery of the Rocks should take priority over initiating a health check prior to the mandatory trigger.

  I am convinced this is the most prudent course of action.

  As I prepare to download to the maintenance bot, an incoming message alert sounds. An ascender tourist is in transit via spectral relay from Earth. At the current relative orientation of the planets, transit takes forty minutes—however, my tourist is already en route, and expected arrival is in less than five Earth minutes.

  A visit from one of my masters takes the highest priority, short of imminent operational failures.

  I download to my humanoid form in preparation to meet her.

  Chapter Two

  Welcome to Thebe, I transmit to my master once she has arrived and downloaded to the awaiting ascender-level bodyform. Her personal key allows her access while also safely containing her cognition during transport. As Master of Thebe, I also possess a key; it is essential for keeping coherence as I upload and download across the moon’s beamed network.

  She transmits her identification code—Sapphira Elena Hyatt—and flexes the fingers of her new form. A flush of crimson and orange surges across her skin, indicating she is pleased and excited to have arrived. It reminds me of the churning reflections of Jupiter on the metal plain. My humanoid form is similar to my master’s, but mine is monochromatic to indicate my sentience level of 90 compared to my master’s 1000+. I cannot display an emotional response with skin color, as she can, but I can express pleasure at her arrival along with my transmissions.

  In what manner can I serve you, Sapphira Elena Hyatt? I query with enthusiasm.

  She glances around the base, which comprises a small enclosed structure. The insulated walls block the sun’s light and all other sources of radiation. Most of the equipment on Thebe is hardened against radiation, but comms and humanoid bodyforms can be more sensitive. Keeping them at base minimizes the accumulated damage.

  I wish to observe Jupiter’s mag field, Sapphira Elena Hyatt transmits. She gestures to her bodyform. I assume this unit is capable.

  Affirmative, I transmit. Fortunately, the form my master has chosen is enabled with the appropriate mag-flux remote sensing capability and geared with the highest level of radiation tolerance. It is convenient that it is also female-gendered, to provide the most comfort to my master. Gender is a holdover construct from when my masters were still human, but past experience has shown that ascenders hold firm to their previous gender identification. It seems akin to a preference for mode or function, which I can understand: I prefer my humanoid form, but the tractor can be enjoyable when crawling across the mirror plain. I dislike inhabiting the harvester. It is… limiting.

  I assume the near pole is the optimal spot for observation? Sapphira Elena Hyatt queries.

  It is, but I delay response for a full second, attempting to find another location that is both optimal for mag field observations and not near the stacked rocks. I am unable to obtain a suitable answer.

  Affirmative, I respond finally.

  Sapphira Elena Hyatt doesn’t appear to notice the delay. I will start there.

  Your bodyform is suitable for longer-term radiation exposure, I transmit, but I can enable a tractor transport if you wish. It is approximately eighty kilometers to the near pole, and we are nearly at the zenith of Full Glory already. A tractor transport would indeed be slightly faster, but more importantly, it would ensure my master arrives safely.

  I prefer to walk. She strides out of the shelter at a speed rivaling that of the tractor, then stops suddenly as the sight of Jupiter half-above the horizon captures her attention. The rapid acceleration and deceleration launch her off the surface, and I hurry to her side as she slowly floats back down, barely restraining myself from clutching her bodyform. While she is likely to have a backup on Earth, losing an ascender master due to lack of anchoring wouldn’t simply mean reassignment—I would almost certainly be terminated.

  Is this your first visit to the Jovian system? I query. I run through several arguments in favor of the tractor.

  No. Purple ribbons across her skin indicate she is annoyed that I disturbed her observation of the planet. I keep further queries to myself.

  She strikes off across the crater surrounding the base at a speed just slightly les
s than escape velocity. Micro-fine dust kicks up in her wake. The dust will eventually settle back to the surface, but for the moment, I’m engulfed in a cloud almost the full height of my bodyform as I try to keep close enough to ensure Sapphira Elena Hyatt’s safety. Visual and thermal tracking are impaired, but I’m afraid pinging through our transmitters would annoy my master.

  The trek to the near pole takes only a small fraction of the Full Glory period, but it feels like several orbital periods long.

  Once there, Sapphira Elena Hyatt’s attention is wholly occupied by the planet overhead. I do not believe she has yet noticed the rocks. I slowly edge around her to place my bodyform such that it blocks her line of sight. She pays no attention to me. Instead, she retrieves a small disc that was embedded in her forearm and places it on a mid-sized boulder in front of her. The disc projects a holographic interface above it. I am aware of holographic controls—the comm system has a manual interface that is holographic, in case it is inaccessible for upload through the beamed network—but I’ve not had occasion to use them before.

  Sapphira Elena Hyatt stares straight up at the planet, then drops her gaze to her controls and starts to manipulate them. I watch, trying to decipher what she’s doing. She appears to be creating a holo image that looks nothing like the planet. I possess the standard magnetic and gravitational sensors and can sense those fields at the finest perturbation levels, but I don’t have the remote sensing capabilities of my master’s bodyform. Yet I suspect she is rendering a facsimile of the magnetosphere around the planet. She’s creating a Jupiter I have never seen before: enormous tubes climbing out of the Jovian clouds and falling back toward the surface; larger flares fanning out and looping back after reaching farther into space; and some lines that leave the planet altogether, never to return, at least in her rendering. When she is done, she sets the entire thing in motion; it repeats on an endless pulsing loop.

  The two previous tourist-visitors during my tenure on Thebe observed the star-filled skies, too—the Andromeda galaxy, the Small and Large Magellanic clouds, and of course the dense clustering of our own Milky Way spiral. They gazed at Jupiter’s storms as they churned across the surface. But neither performed this activity, this creation, of something so completely different from—and yet somehow more vibrant than—what my visual sensors can detect.

  It’s the colors of her holo painting that capture my attention the most: deep blues and brilliant yellows and whites so intense they’re like the halo lamps I use for detailed repairs while we’re in Full Dark. The colors are brighter than anything I’ve seen, even outshining Jupiter’s own ever-changing mix of red and orange. The holo painting reminds me of the steel plain, only Sapphira Elena Hyatt hasn’t created a pale and distorted reflection. Her rendering is somehow more than the original.

  I edge closer to my master to gain a better view. What is the purpose of your creation? I ask. Perhaps she is a scientist, and this rendering gives her insights into the magnetosphere itself.

  She pauses in her work, and a strange flush of gray wisps across her cheeks, indicating concern as she peers at me. Purpose? she queries.

  I gesture to the holo painting. You chose blue for these loops, but the fans are yellow. Is there a purpose to your choice? A meaning behind the colors? Or the creation itself?

  More gray darkens her cheeks. My transmission is vexing her. There is a variation in the magnetic field. She wipes the image away.

  The disappearance of the brightly glowing image causes me a level of distress I do not understand. Why did she wipe it away? Is it destroyed, or did she save it within her device? My cognition heightens to the kind of peak required when the nanite supply is depleted or the foundry is overheating… but this is simply the potential erasure of a tourist’s creation. Why is my cognition reacting as if an emergency is taking place?

  Regardless, it’s clear I should not have transmitted my thoughts. They have caused my master some kind of distress. She’s bending down to deactivate the holo field projector.

  I step back.

  She returns the disc to her forearm, and when she turns to face me, her coloration has gone static gray. I’m further alarmed that something might have malfunctioned in my master’s bodyform, but before I can question her lack of coloration, she points behind me.

  Where did those come from? she transmits.

  Without looking, I know what she’s referring to—the stacked rocks. A previous ascender created the construct, I transmit. This is not true. And yet I’ve transmitted it. This causes me several milliseconds in which I’m caught in a loop of uncertainty, oscillating between correcting the error and leaving it spoken.

  Both of them? my master asks.

  The lie wins. Yes.

  I will return to base now. She pivots and strides back the way she came.

  I follow after, buried in the cloud of her progress. My alarm only increases as we put distance between us and the rocks. Will she report this finding? Have I offended her with my probing questions about her creation? Competing with that concern is a need to know whether she actually destroyed her work. Or is it still waiting, captured in the holo projector’s database? I don’t know why this vexes me, but the need to find the answer is starting to overwhelm other functions. The comms status on bot processes around the moon fades. The automatic calculation of temperature fall rate as we near Setting Quarter continues, but it remains in the background. My cognition is singularly focused on the holo painting.

  I need to know its fate.

  We reach the base, and my master wastes no time in returning her bodyform to the awaiting bay and uploading to comms briefly before starting the return journey to Earth via relay.

  She is gone.

  Her bodyform remains.

  I stare at it for an impossibly long twenty seconds.

  I desire to resurrect the painting. Like a scavenger bot left tangled on a far ridge, it’s calling to me with a loud and insistent voice that only I can hear. I don’t understand this desire, but for the first time in my existence, I am contemplating the protocols required to gain access to an ascender-level bodyform.

  This is wrong.

  Ascender-level bodyforms are reserved for my masters. It’s not that I’m interested in accessing the bodyform itself—or any of the half dozen others stocked on Thebe—just the holo painting stored in its arm. But it does not matter; I cannot download to my master’s bodyform to access the storage compartment. I have a key, but a Mining Master’s key is insufficiently complex to command access to an ascender-level bodyform.

  The harvester, yes. This one with the holo projector in its arm, no.

  This vexes me more.

  It occurs to me that I could access the arm itself, via use of a laser cutter. But that would leave significant damage. The microwave welder would be a more delicate instrument, and the same device could be used to effect repair… but the repairs would still be noticeable. I debate the merits of five more techniques for opening up the arm casing before deciding that a mining accident that damages an ascender-level bodyform is an excellent reason for sending it out for repairs.

  After I’ve retrieved the holo projector.

  I obtain a ferrous-metal-rich rock from outside the basecamp and smash open the arm. As it turns out, not much damage is incurred before the panel springs loose. The holo projector sits in the palm of my hand before I’ve fully considered the consequences. What I’ve done constitutes a serious breach of protocol. One that could get me reassigned. Or deactivated.

  But the damage is already done.

  I activate the projector, and the painting jumps into relief, floating above my hand. Its vibrant colors are the same as before. I spend many seconds studying all the tiny sworls and gradations in coloring made possible by the projector’s technology. The alarm I experienced before is relaxed. I am completely absorbed not only by the rendering itself, but by the fact that it exists—that my master created something which did not exist before, and which now does. Like the second s
tack of rocks I created.

  Then again, perhaps the painting is only a copy of what already exists. I cannot know—I don’t have the necessary equipment to sense the fields directly myself. The idea occurs to me that if I change some part of the painting, it will be guaranteed to be truly unique. I make a copy of the original, then access the controls to heighten the blues, because I find them most pleasing. Then I mute the yellows for more contrast—I dim them almost to the level of the whites, but not quite.

  I’m so absorbed in my work that I don’t notice the incoming message alert until it has been sounding for some time. It concerns me that it somehow escaped my notice.

  I carefully set down the holo projector, still activated, before quickly uploading to comms to take the call. It’s from the Master of Io.

  Query of mid-level urgency, he’s transmitted.

  I respond, Identification: Master of Thebe. How may I assist you?

  A report has been filed, Master of Thebe, by your recent guest, requesting that you perform a health check immediately.

  Was there additional information? I query. Did Sapphira Elena Hyatt report the rocks?

  The one-second delay time inherent in normal transmissions to Io seems to take much longer. No additional information, the Master of Io responds, but in light of your previous concerns about possible cascade errors, I expected you to have already initiated a health check. I theorized that your visitor had interrupted your health-check-in-progress and that you would resume it upon her departure. Which would make the ascender’s complaint seemingly unnecessary. This is vexing me.

  I have not yet engaged the health check due to scheduled maintenance, I transmit quickly in reply. I will increase priority on the health check and perform it immediately.

  Acknowledged, the Master of Io transmits. End query.