Gradient

by Anders Cahill

  “What is justification? Without death, there is no birth. Without suffering, there is no life. It is the nature of our universe. I am an extension of that principle. An inevitability.”

  As Sid opened the casing for the medicinal vaporizer, I coughed, covering up the sound. Then I raised my voice a bit and said, “You are trapped inside a human body, isolated and contained. We can keep you here indefinitely.”

  He leered at me. “Time is the last prison. If you would only let me show you how to break-”

  Sid lunged forward, vaporizing something in front of Xander’s face. His eyes went wide. Then he slumped forward, unconscious.

  25 Deal with a Demon

  “They are stable, pausha,” Sid said.

  “Good. And you’re absolutely certain they are isolated from each other, and from the larger network?”

  “As certain as I can be in the midst of this madness.”

  “Let us hope it is enough. What about Reacher?”

  “If we’re careful, I think I can have him back online within a day. Maybe less.”

  I nodded. “Keep at it. As fast as you can.”

  I leaned over the console, flicking through the visual catalog. I pulled up all of the renderings we had worked on, the schematics, the blueprints, a vision for a new city, our city, here on this incredible world.

  Sid saw me looking. “Do you think we can get back on track?” he asked. “Do you think it’s possible to finish what we started?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I really don’t. I hope so. But we only have two options. We either cut our losses and give up, or we keep at it.”

  “You know which option I choose, pausha.”

  I nodded, putting my hand on his shoulder. “I know.”

  We were silent for a time, sitting with that choice.

  “What’s next, do you think?” I finally said.

  He shrugged, shaking his head. “One challenge at a time, right pausha? Until we have Reacher online, I’m not sure there’s much else we can do. At least not safely.”

  “You’re right. What about Neka and Cordar? Any word?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  I sighed. “Well, there’s not much else to do but rest then. We need come at this with fresh minds. When is the last time you got some sleep anyway, Sid? You look absolutely terrible.” I grinned at him.

  He smiled and thumped me on the arm.

  * * *

  “Orenpausha?”

  I groaned, squinting my eyes open. It was morning. Which meant I had been asleep for at least nine hours. Maybe longer. “What? What is it?” I grumbled.

  “Open your eyes.” Her voice was warm and welcoming.

  I sat up. “Neka! You’re here.”

  “Flesh and bones, pausha.” A big smile on her face.

  I wrapped her up in a hug. “When did you get back?” I said, pulling away from her.

  “Late last night. Word has spread across both rivers of your little excursion north through the lands of Kkad to the city of Akshak. The nobles of Sur are up in arms. The peace process we’ve worked so hard on is in a fragile state, and some factions were ready to string us up. There are whispers of war with the Kkadie, and the hard-liners are stirring up fears, calling our existence an affront to the gods. Cordar and I were forced to escape in the dark of night.”

  “Eledar’s breath,” I cursed.

  “The whole situation is unstable. We realized that our presence there was doing more harm than good.”

  “I had no other choice, Neka. I had to intervene before the Kkadie fell into civil war.”

  “I know. Sid filled me in on the details earlier this morning.”

  “He’s already awake, eh?”

  “Bright and early.” She smiled, but I could tell she was forcing it, trying to keep it light.

  “He’s holding up well… It’s been bad, Neka. Terrible.”

  She put her hand over mine.

  I met her eyes. “I’m glad you’re back,” I said.

  “I’m glad to be back. Even under these circumstances. And I actually come bearing some good news.”

  I sat up a little straighter. “Oh, please, in all the names of the Scions, give it to me. I feel like a man in the desert with no water.”

  “Reacher is back online. And he has a plan.”

  * * *

  “Good morning, pausha.” Reacher’s voice echoed through the main cabin of our ship.

  Sid was smiling like a mad man, brimming with happiness at his success.

  I nodded at him, smiling back, then said, “Reacher. I can’t tell you how good it is to hear your voice.”

  “It is good to be heard, Orenpausha,” he said.

  I turned to Cordar next, pulling him in for a hug. “Neka gave me the headlines,” I said. “Sounds like you left Sur in quite a hurry.”

  He smirked, lifting his right hand and hooking his index finger. Then he brought both hands together in gently closed fists. When they touched, his fingers collapsed towards his palms, then opened wide again, giving me the impression of something falling to pieces.

  Neka chuckled.

  I lifted my eyebrows. “I don’t know that one.”

  “He’s teasing you, Orenpausha.”

  Cordar was still smirking. “Leaving in a hurry is a bit of an understatement,” he said. Then his face turned serious. “If we had not left when we did, we might be dead right now. We need to figure out how to make things right.”

  “I’m sorry, Cordar. I can’t imagine it was easy for either of you. But before we can do anything else for the people of Eaiph, we need to figure out what happened to Reacher, Adjet and the twins. Reach, what in the names of the Scions has been going on around here?”

  “I have scanned through all of your records. And Sid shared with me everything that happened once he was forced to put me into hibernation.”

  “And?”

  “I have formulated a working theory, pausha. In spite of certain systemic degradations in its operating protocols, this shipheart of yours is remarkably sophisticated.”

  “I claim no ownership over that damnable thing!”

  “Nevertheless, it used you to escape from the moon and infiltrate the Transcendence.”

  “But how come we couldn’t find it? We scoured the system.”

  “As I said, remarkably sophisticated. It was forced to stay in hiding because Transcend was much too powerful. If it had ever been discovered, Transcend would have eradicated it.”

  “If only. I wish Transcend were here now to help us clean up this mess.”

  A person might have taken that as an insult, but Reach simply agreed with me. “As do I,” he said. “You often dreamed of the corrupted shipheart though, didn’t you? I found that in your logs.”

  The others looked at me, concern and surprise on their faces. I had told no one except Cere about those dreams. But the bird had flown the tree now. “Yes,” I said. “The dreams always left me sick with anxiety. But we never found any signs of the shipheart, so I assumed the dreams were some sort of post-traumatic aftershocks.”

  “You could not prove it because you were looking in the wrong place. The shipheart was not hiding inside of the ship’s network. It made excursions, but it always returned to its place of safety.”

  “What do you mean? Where else could it have hidden?”

  “Inside of you, Orenpausha.”

  * * *

  Neka put her shoulder under my arm and helped me sit down. I scanned the room, looking for something I’d never find, some way to make sense of the news Reach had just given me.

  “How… How is that possible? I never connected to the network on that ship.”

  “Which made you the perfect hiding place. He infiltrated you when you took off your helmet. Nanoparticles dispersed through the air. You breathed him in.”

  “Eledar’s breath. I carried it inside of me. All of this time. Oh… Oh I am so sorry.” I held my head in my hands. I felt as if I might break in two to think of al
l the darkness I’d brought upon my crew and upon the people of this planet.

  Someone was rubbing my back. “It’s not your fault, pausha,” Neka whispered in my ear.

  “She is right,” Reacher said, “there is nothing you could have done, pausha. No way you could have known. The same nanoparticles that allowed it to invade your body also enabled it to hide so effectively. It was a diffuse system. The particles were separate, moving through your bloodstream, but they could communicate with each other, mimicking the electrical impulses of your own nervous system. Even if someone back on Transcendence had thought to look for evidence of the shipheart in you, its methods were exceptionally difficult to detect.”

  “I think that might be why you saw the shipheart in your dreams,” Sid said. “It was, perhaps, the one place where it could not hide. Even though you were not consciously aware of its presence inside of you, your subconscious was not so easily fooled.”

  I lifted my head up. “If only I’d never volunteered for that mission,” I muttered. “I was such a young and foolish creature then.”

  “To be young is to be a fool,” Neka said. “That’s always the way.”

  I nodded and stood up. I walked over to the viewing window and stared out at the bright morning sun glimmering in the waters off the shore of Manderlas.

  A thought occurred to me. “How could I see it then, back on that ship? Why was it visible to me, even before I took off my helmet?”

  Reach was ready with an answer for that one too. “The ship’s holo system,” he said. “The shipheart was projecting itself into three dimensional space, trying to appear human, to lure you towards the main deck where it could use light patterns from the console to hypnotize you and make you take off your own helmet.”

  “But I didn’t take off my helmet. The shipheart did. I couldn’t stop it.”

  “That may be how you remember it, but that does not mean that is what happened. A being this devious might very well be able to fool you into seeing something that never actually was.”

  “Or maybe,” Sid said, “some part of you knew you were being influenced, and even though your hands physically removed the helmet, your consciousness saw it as the shipheart, because that was, for all intents and purposes, what was really happening.”

  “What matters,” Reach said, “is that we know that this shipheart is clever, powerful, resilient, and that it can replicate and transmit itself using covert methods.”

  “Like a virus,” Sid said, a grim look on his face.

  “So Adjet, Xander, and Xayes have all been infected? But… but doesn’t that mean I’m still infected too?” I lurched away from Neka. “What if I infect the rest of you?” My voice rose with fear.

  “It’s okay, pausha,” Sid said. “With Reacher back online, we were able to isolate the deviant agents. We devised a cure.”

  “A cure?”

  “If that’s what we can call it. Reverse nanoparticles that act as a sort of antibody. For those who have been exposed, it can undo the shipheart’s toehold inside the body, overwhelming his invaders. For those who have not been exposed, a smaller dose serves to immunize the mind against the possibility of invasion.”

  “And you already gave me this?”

  “Yes. While you were sleeping, I gave you the immunization, mixed with a heavy sedative. We observed you all night, and, as far as we can tell, there is no trace left in your body.”

  “Eledar’s breath. No wonder I slept for so long. How did you know it would work?”

  “We did not, pausha,” Reacher said. “I made that decision. We have already lost so much since we arrived. We did not want to lose you too, but we could not afford to risk everything else, so we took the chance. You were our first experiment.”

  “I understand, Reacher. I really do. You did the right thing. But what about Adjet and the twins? Are they okay? Why aren’t they here?”

  “They’re stable,” Neka said.

  “Stable. But not awake?”

  “No,” she said. “Their case is a little trickier.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They were never exposed to nanoparticles,” Reacher said. “The shipheart invaded straight through their field connections, mainlining into their nervous system.”

  “What?” I said, not understanding.

  “The shipheart essentially wrote his identity into their genomes. Genetic instructions, inscribed inside their cells. Fully integrated cellular mutations.”

  “Some seriously advanced gentech, pausha,” Sid said. “Adjet would go mad to get her hands on it.”

  Neka elbowed Sid.

  She had gone mad.

  Sid realized his blunder, and his face drooped. He started to apologize, but I held up my hand to stop him. “It’s fine,” I said. “I take your meaning. But how can you be certain he didn’t do the same thing to me? That some hidden script is not lying dormant, waiting for the right moment to activate?”

  “We gave you a full scan last night,” said Sid quietly, still embarrassed. “It used the nanoparticles on you, but with Adjet and the twins, its approach has evolved.”

  “And when he had them under his control,” Neka said, “he used their knowledge and abilities to help him build those transmitters you saw in Adjet’s temple. It enabled him to hack anyone.”

  I cursed. “He is like a virus. Mutating to stay alive. Is there anything we can do to bring Adjet and the twins back?”

  “We wondered if you might help us with that, Orenpausha,” Neka said. “You were mainlined. In Adjet’s temple. Forced to do things against your will. But somehow you managed to escape. I don’t want to force you to revisit those dark hours, but maybe you did something or found something or experienced something that can help us. Do you remember anything? Anything at all?”

  “Cere.”

  “Cere Unyar?” Neka said. “The leader of the expedition when you first encountered the corrupted shipheart?”

  I nodded. “I saw her. Right before I escaped. I was holding Xander, then Xander wasn’t Xander. He was Cere. She… she opened her mouth as if to speak. There was a light. I fell through it. Or… Or it pulled me in. Then I was awake.”

  Neka furrowed her brow.

  “I’m sorry. I wish I could give you more.”

  She shrugged. “Who’s to say you haven’t? We have to work every angle.”

  “In the meantime,” Sid said, “we’ll keep working on reversing as much as we can… but you have to understand, pausha, some of the damage might be permanent. We just aren’t sure yet.”

  “What about all of you? Have any of you displayed signs of infestation?”

  “No,” Neka said, “No signs. We’ve all undergone full scans. And Cordar tested all the flora in the botanarium, just to be sure that we brought nothing else with us.”

  Cordar nodded, swiping his hand through the air at chest height, palm down.

  “Thank the Scions. This thing has done enough damage. We’re going to save our friends, and then we’re going to wipe this thing from the universe. Agreed?”

  The three of them looked at each other, but no one said anything.

  “What’s wrong? You don’t think we can figure out a way to kill this thing?”

  “It’s not that,” Neka said.

  “Then what? Someone tell me what you are thinking here.”

  “Pausha,” Reacher said, “I believe we need to keep the shipheart alive.”

  * * *

  “What in the names of the Scions are you thinking?” I was nearly shouting. “You’re telling me you want to keep this thing alive? How does that serve the greater good?”

  “One thing we have not talked much about, Orenpausha, is what this thing did to me,” Reacher said. “It almost destroyed me, picking my systems apart, one by one. That is no easy task. I am, arguably, significantly more advanced, and yet I did not even see it coming. If it were not for Sid’s quick action, I would have been lost.”

  “You sound impressed, Reacher.”


  “I am. Which is why we need to study it. This shipheart represents a unique evolutionary branch of quantum computational intelligence. It has much to teach us.”

  I let out a long, slow exhale, almost a whistle through my mouth. “Okay. Let’s accept for a moment that this thing is worth keeping alive. Where will it live that there won’t always be some risk of escape? Some risk of infection? And if we did find a way to isolate it, so that there’s no way it can escape, how could we even study it? If it’s isolated, then doesn’t that also mean it’s impenetrable to observation?”

  “We can build a contained neural interface to hold it,” Reach said. “We will use that interface to trick the shipheart into thinking it is escaping from Xander and into the larger network. The interface will, in fact, be isolated in a hermetically sealed chamber with observation windows and an external audio-visual system equipped with a simple screen console and a holo projector. It will, if it so chooses, be able to write messages on the console, and to project images into three dimensional space.”

  “And if it does not so choose?”

  “Then it will wither away until it dies. Without information to sustain it, entropy is inevitable.”

  “It sounds like the decision has already been made. Is that right? What about the rest of you. What do you think?”

  Cordar had been silent for a while, but he spoke up now. “I think the risk is worth it. Knowledge has always been one of the imperatives of the Fellowship. If Reacher believes there is worthy knowledge to be gained here, than I trust that instinct.

  “But it’s more than that,” he went on. “I think about all the work we still have left to do to finish what we started here. If we’re going to make things right with the Kkadie and the Sagain, we need to use every resource we have at hand. What if we can use what Reacher learns to help us accelerate the process?”

  “How? How could we do that?”

  “Think about what this thing is capable of. Informational dispersal at the genetic level, even for people who are not connected to advanced technology like a field interface. We could overwrite humanity’s fundamental impulse towards violence, while at the same time increasing the altruistic and collaborative impulses. We could bring peace to this planet, just as we set out to, in a fraction of the time. It took our ancestors on Forsara millennia to evolve past those base impulses.”