Ride the Star Wind

by Nakamura, Remy

  ‘Course, Billy’s swearing up a storm. He’ll laugh his ass off when he finally understands. I know I shouldn’t swear—I was raised better than that, more times than not—but for Billy, it’s just the right words.

  I can feel Billy eyeing the self-destruct. We’d joked about why you’d want such a damn-fool thing in a lifeboat before. ’Course, I am all over the controls, so he’s not gettin’ at that. He doesn’t understand. He figures that if he can take me out he’s spending his life for a good cause, but I cannot be diminished, and spending his life, especially for nothin’, would be such a waste.

  I don’t got a lot of mass to work with here. I’m summoning more from the between, but that’s slow work, so I’m peeling up bits of the deck and such. Adding them to my bulk.

  I’m making quite a show. Waving bits around on the console, tryin’ ta keep Billy’s eyes on me while I make a slow gambit with a tendril to get at Ern, lying half-conscious on the deck between us. Billy sees me working. I see him see that right back, and now, we’re playing tugger-war with Ern, who’s bellowing like a damn fool. Always was so dramatic. I slip him a paralytic.

  The union is going to be a lot of careful work. Ern’s got a brain bruise. I gotta get him in shape for the change. Wouldn’t be fair to half-ass the job. Boy’s brain damaged enough on his best day.

  In the moment I’m thinking that, Billy acts. He’s fast. I’m faster. But there ain’t enough of me to go around.

  The gun comes up. I harden myself up to knock the first shot aside to protect Ern and lunge, but the gun keeps coming up, and with a second hard retort, Billy’s gone.

  The dumb shit actually kacked himself. I bellow aloud and far into the ultraviolet as I surge forward to see what can be saved.

  He’s gone, dammit.

  Most of his memories are there in the bottom of his skull, but his life is gone. I carefully envelop what I can, but this is not union. It’s like slipping stills from a vid. Lost moments, stripped of their vital purpose. No organizing context. The vital continuity is just absent.

  I’m crying. Marines aren’t supposed to cry, but sometimes, we do.

  I work on both my buddies. Ern is easy to save. I repair his damage and slip inside his every synapse and fiber and lift him from his flesh and . . .

  Ooohhh . . .

  I understand.

  That’s always my favorite part.

  Two rush together and become one. Understanding dawns. Both the wonder of the whole and the amazement of each least bit.

  And I am sad again at learning of Billy’s loss. I loved him. That’s why I always played my music for him. That’s why I kept trying to shake him free of my dead weight while we fled. Trying to make sure he saved himself. Not that he’d ever abandon a bud. ’Course, I didn’t know then what I know now. Not all of me anyway.

  Each bit of me that knew Billy tells different versions of different stories from different perspectives as I savor and preserve memories delicately lifted from his ruined skull. Funny stories. Sad stories. Happy moments. I am filled with regret.

  It is all a memorial to what could have been.

  I could have been Billy forever, too, and now, he’s just snapshots and tall tales.

  But it’s a familiar loss in far too many ways. There’s joy to be had in species and cultures and universes to come.

  I piece his body together and use it to lay in a course and set the alerts. I clean up his mess and make things look right. I curl up some of my bulk in his empty skull to wait for rescue and dismiss the rest into the between.

  There’s more to be had. Billy had family and friends, and they’ll have descendants—a whole culture to join with and preserve into the infinite. A tiny bit of my bulk goes into cold sleep with Billy’s remains, falsifying life signs for the machinery, waiting for whomever finds this lifeboat, dreaming of who Billy might have been.

  Even while I sleep here, I am elsewhere. Places where I am a god or a monster, places where I am watching life begin and others where intelligent people are fading to ruin and one or two where I am actually understood.

  That’s how it’s always been. I am who I always have been but more so with each moment.

  I go in and catch up what would be lost. Rescue the obscure from final entropy. It is a joy. It is dangerous and intense and eternally amazing. I save the lost.

  I love being a marine.

  Robert White is a professional computer scientist and amateur philosopher who predates the internet. Weaned on a big box of pulp science fiction novels and a full set of Time Life science and technology books, raised by tabletop roleplaying games, and finally washed up in the fjords of flash fiction websites, he decided to try his hand at real authorship. With a firm belief that victory and defeat can not always be told apart and a strong preference for stories that refresh the soul, he’ll invite you to imagine that the stories we all know are, perhaps, hiding a different truth.

  Under Venusian Skies

  Ingrid Garcia

  Illustrated by Dave Felton

  —outside-in—

  While his body soars through a surreal, white-pink sky, Baretta’s mind keeps drifting. His hyper-gossamer wings gleam a static purple, his stun exoskeleton is charging up fast. Under his wings, the broccoli-like expansions of the Fractal Forest glow a defying green. As if the hectic flora isn’t giving him enough headaches already, reports have come in about aggressive seeds floating around.

  The seeds are damaging the organic sensors that keep track of the new forest’s development. While being seeded by humans, the Fractal Forest has been living a life of its own. In clear skies—there seem to be fewer sulfuric acid clouds, of late—Keeper Baretta has been dispatched to inspect the situation. Close by, his partner Vanessa glides in a figure-eight holding pattern, charging her stun capacitors.

  “It’s been crazy here,” Vanessa says in the staccato Venusian lingo, “ever since the Bimini impact.”

  “A coup,” Baretta says in the same, almost infrasonic voice, “it tripled our amount of water.”

  “Yeah, but we’re not really keeping the explosion of life around it in check.”

  “Well,” Baretta muses, “I’m not sure if we should.”

  Vanessa signals that her batteries and capacitors are fully charged. Baretta’s are at 89%, his computer implants error-free and ready. Screwfly it, he thinks, this should do.

  Vanessa acknowledges his engage code, and they dive into the Fractal Forest.

  * * *

  Graphene-spun, hyper-gossamer wings shape-shifting from flight to fight mode start a trajectory-perfect descent into a bio-fractalscape that would have weirded out Benoît Mandelbrot himself. Life on Venus has been kick-started at an altitude of fifty kilometers, where the pressure is Earth-normal. Genetically engineered, hygroscopic sponges imbued with improved photosynthesis floated around the planet on a seek-and-create mission. They evolved from small archipelagos of floating sponges, photosynthesizing the basics in miniature, into the highly advanced flora Baretta and Vanessa witness today.

  Fractal tendrils extending into both the solar wind and cosmic radiation signifying the relentless competition. Heat from the nearby Sun, cosmic rays from far-off, long-ago supernovas not deflected by the planet’s negligible magnetic field power a frantic change behavior. Everything is in flux. Nothing remains the same.

  Imagine a coral reef cuttlefish, continuously mimicking its environment as it moves from hard to soft to brain coral, over sand, over rocks, over mud. Always adapting its shape and colors to its environment, becoming well-nigh invisible. Then imagine the LSD-reverse situation, two human bats-out-of-hell moving through an environment that, like a massive school of intertwined, fractal-freak, color-mad, shape-shifting octopi continuously adapt and reach out to their environment—a manic cosmic cocktail of high-energy particle bombardments, irradiating solar microwaves and the odd, souped-up solar flare.

  Since energy is abundant, the fast and the furious outcompete the lush and the lethargic. Constant c
hange is here to stay, croons the New World Man, and the Fractal Forest embodies the lyrics. Shifting patterns spike the fractalscape as multi-hued, fragile-looking yet razor-sharp flowers bloom in the celestial radiation soup. Caught in the crossfire of a burning, passionate sun and a cold, glaring universe, the transplanted life squirms, squeezes and squeaks, but survives, and strives to thrive.

  Like flies diving into a cosmic soup that’s constantly developing new ingredients. Out of control, Baretta thinks. No, denying the very concept of control itself. Yet, as they get closer, variations appear. Several areas are unmoving, bleached, wrinkled or a dry, sickly yellow, like a badly polarized white, starkly contrasting the eruption of colors around them. Baretta points some of those out to Vanessa. She acknowledges them but gestures that they should get to the last remaining biosensors first.

  Baretta curses his curiosity. Only twenty-four biosensors left, out of the several thousand—and counting—that monitored this fast-growing forest.

  Gleaming, metallic blue trapezoidal shapes criss-cross the area in what seems to be a semi-random pattern. Neither Baretta nor Vanessa have seen these seed-like lifeforms before. Quickly, they decide to let Vanessa gather as many of the remaining organic sensors as possible while Baretta checks out the cobalt seedpods.

  A butterfly net would come in handy, Baretta thinks, but he only has a few sample canisters. On top of that, the deep blue seedpods move swiftly in the high winds, easily evading his efforts at capture. But his skills improve with effort, and after a number of near-misses, he finally manages to trap one.

  This changes the behavior of the other seedpods. At first, they were, if not outright ignoring him, avoiding him. Now, they seem to notice him and to attack him as one.

  This both baffles and amuses Baretta, who nonchalantly swats the first one away with a quick swipe of his free hand. Strangely, it stings a little. He didn’t expect to feel anything at all through his tough flexi-harness. More are coming in, but he moves upward out of this fractal branch.

  The cobalt seedpods follow him and a few crash into his feet, legs, and lower back. The sting in his hand gets worse. It begins to burn. It hurts so bad he can’t suppress a scream.

  “What’s wrong?” Vanessa asks. “Are you alright?”

  “One of those seedpod things stung me,” he says, “and somehow got through my armor.”

  “That’s crazy. I’m on my way.” She has already picked up the remaining biosensors and just finished taking a sample of the strangely decaying, bleached-white fractal bushes nearby. With a swift turn, she heads in his direction.

  As she gets close, more of his screams pierce the radio waves. “What the hell? They’re getting through my leg armor, too!”

  Vanessa fires a broad volley of stun grenades into the cobalt seedpod cloud. This slows them down, and Baretta starts up his auxiliary jet and rockets away. Vanessa follows as she hears his agonized cries. She’s already called in emergency help.

  When she catches up, she sees several holes in the harness around his feet, legs, and lower back. They look etched out by acid. Instinctively, she douses him with her drinking water. It seems to offer relief.

  Thankfully, their harnesses aren’t pressure suits; the atmospheric pressure at this altitude is close to Earth normal. Their armor protects against CO2 poisoning, the inadvertent passage through a sulfuric acid cloud, the improbable—but not impossible—strike by high-altitude lightning, and the unexpected things the fast-evolving Fractal Forest might throw at them.

  After all the stings have been doused, Baretta feels much better. He insists he’s fine and can get back home on his own, but Vanessa won’t have any of it. She signals for the emergency vessel to hurry up.

  It arrives a mere five seconds after Baretta has passed out.

  —inside-out—

  . . . inside the huge, floating halls of Seed City, Quadrant 4, Baretta’s a caged animal. He does not belong here . . .

  . . . a twenty-four hour cycle is just too short, as the high winds blow them around Venus in ninety-six. The bio-rhythm tries to adapt but is not helped by the forced Earth-normal schedule . . .

  . . . no rest behind a cappuccino. A dapple-skinned kid bothers him, rekindling memories of his old Trojan Bubble project. “Lateral thinking that should be applied here.” Boy, that bubble imploded . . .

  . . . it set back the Outer Cool to its sedate, conservative ways. And the Inner Hotspot seems frozen in a phase-transition, a paradigm lost . . .

  . . . but who is poisoning the Fractal Forest? Eco-fanatics from Keep Venus Pristine? Industrial conglomerates staking claims? Renegade scientists unleashing untested triple-helical molecules . . .

  . . . chomping down asparagus, black beans, and onions like mad, he’s hot here, cold there, and uncertain everywhere in between. Why all this sulfur-rich food? What’s happening . . .

  . . . a paragon of paranoia: intrusive spyware, combative botware, uroboric wormware. I spy the spy spying with my third eye . . .

  . . . a master plan by a cabal of corporations, megalomaniacal government schemes, surreptitious infiltration by secret services, an evolutionary cul-de-sac . . .

  . . . certainty in the sea of doubt. Evidence in the ocean of supposition. Order in the chaotic fractal cloud. Chaos in the order of superposition . . .

  Pow—more heat than light

  Energy spiraling up

  A triple helix

  . . . hot on the trail. Burning suspicion. Fierce conviction. Feverish mind. Feverish body. Fever. Fever, retriever, fever, deceiver, fever—in the true believer. Burning, churning, learning, yearning until the world becomes one big entropic blur . . .

  * * *

  Baretta awakes in a hospital bed. He’s sweating like a pig, babbling like a madman and crying like a baby. As realization dawns, he shuts up and blinks the tears from his eyes. The nurse next to him bears a striking resemblance to Vanessa. She’s not wearing a uniform. OK, it is Vanessa, wiping the sweat from his brow.

  “How are you?” She asks. “Feeling a bit better now?”

  “But I was busy getting to the bottom of it,” Baretta has trouble letting go, “I . . .”

  “What bottom?” Vanessa looks worried, “you’ve been delirious for days. With periods of sleepwalking fugues where we lost you.”

  “Delirious? Fever?” He’s slowly coming to his senses. “But how?”

  “The cobalt insectoids that bit you,” she says, “used a nasty combination of aqua regis and a virus we haven’t been able to nail down yet. I suffered the same fever—”

  “King’s water?” Baretta is flabbergasted. “So that’s how they got through my armor.” As the rest of her words filter through. “You had a fever, too?”

  “Not as bad as you,” she says, “and you’ll feel better soon. Much better. But we’re in quarantine until they found out why.”

  “Crazy insectoids,” Baretta wonders, “how could they evolve such targeted, specific stuff so fast?”

  “Even crazier,” Vanessa lifts her index finger, “just think about it. They’re fauna, not flora.”

  —paradigm-shift—

  Swooping over the Fractal Forest, Baretta feels it has changed. Not in its usual, frantically evolving ways but qualitatively changed. He feels it in his bones, in his stun skeleton, a faint buzz, like the onset of an announcement. Not just the outside world but his inner self, as well. The hiss of a channel about to open up, the hum at the start of a tune. Vanessa was right, he feels better than ever, vibrant, energetic, more aware.

  It makes no sense. Probably the after-effects of his fever. Vanessa’s with him. They’re useless in quarantine and expendable here. The new titanium-doped biosensors need to be field tested, together with the new exosuits.

  The whole scene is still an explosion of biological Turing machines turned Mandelbrot, changes sweeping the fractalscape in hypnotizing patterns, branches upon branches upon branches until it seems they go on well into the quantum level, yet . . .

  It’s like t
here’s order in chaos, Baretta thinks, a method to the madness.

  So far, they haven’t encountered any of the cobalt-blue insectoids. Which makes sense: as the prey is consumed, the predator dies off. At least in a normal biosphere. Baretta’s not so sure if the Fractal Forest plays by the same rules. For all intents and purposes, it’s evolving into a very lean-and-mean survival machine. One that’s quickly growing out of its creators’ control.

  “You OK?” Vanessa says in the deep, Venusian voice. “You seem even more lost in thought than usual.”

  “I’m fine. It just feels a bit different”—a reluctant pause—“and too quiet.”

  “Never thought anybody would say that of this place,” Vanessa says, amused, “but I know what you mean.”

  Out of the myriad of fractal iterations, a swarm of trapezoidal, kite-like beings rises up to meet them. Their long and short sides flutter in a blur. Like butterflies, their path up close seems random, but over the long run, they are definitely moving in a certain direction. Towards Vanessa and Baretta.

  These trapezoidal insectoids look white-but-not-quite-white—not colorless, not the merging of all colors, but strangely, the potential, the promise of more colors. It hurts to look at them, yet it’s almost impossible to look away, as if something deep within compels Baretta to keep staring at them. Despite the irritation. Despite the itch. Despite the pain.

  “My eyes are starting to hurt,” he says, “what about yours?”

  “Same,” Vanessa says, “but for the life of me, I just can’t look away. I must keep watching. As if it will lead . . . ”

  “To a new way of seeing.” Baretta finishes.

  They can’t speak anymore. The pain overrides everything. The closer the trapezoidal insectoids come, the more their bleached whiteness cuts through their senses, opening up something new. It hurts. The backs of their eyes feel as if they’re bombarded with millions of tiny laser beams, torn apart by an army of nano-razors.

  The whiteness becomes overpowering, a whiteout that washes all away. A fierce brightness burning the backs of their skulls. For countless moments, they float, unseeing. Then the intense pain recedes, and vision returns—slowly, foggy and somewhat off-kilter. The Fractal Forest becomes its multihued self, no, it seems to become more than its multihued self. It’s sharper, better defined, almost supersaturated.