Terminus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Like them, Osia’s bond to the planarship had been forged over centuries of transplanar travel and hardship. It took effort to accuse it of betraying her. More than she had to spare at that moment.

  The conversation had gone on to other subjects, but she had since erased them from memory, just like the dream of several days ago.

  For the past several weeks, Osia had cruised southward, shadowing trade routes between China and the Philippines. The trade routes were becoming busy again. Few sailors had wanted to leave port while the bad omen of the comet hung in the sky, although sometimes their merchant masters forced them. China lusted for trade. The Yuan government devoured it. This was the first time she had paid enough attention to realize that they had purposes for it other than growing fat.

  The skies were clear and the fleets had once again set sail. At this distance, her pulse scans couldn’t resolve nonmetallic trade goods, though parts-per-trillion traces of piperine in the wind hinted at black pepper. Her scans could identify gold and silver, though. There was less than she expected. On trade routes like these, she would have assumed that China would pour precious metals into the islands to sell for spices.

  So someone back home was jealous of gold and silver going east. They had other purposes for it, even if that meant a less efficient sea trade. No doubt headed to the west, to war.

  She had cruised within one hundred and fifty miles of the old Southern Song Dynasty capital, Hangzhou. That was just close enough to bounce a pulse scan off the atmosphere and find glittering demiorganic signatures. A dozen of them.

  Now they knew about her, too. Her scan had given her away. Ways and Means had promised to hide her, gray her out from satellite data. None of them bothered to scan back.

  She had not gotten close enough to Hangzhou to take a full demographic survey. The pollution carrying on the wind gave her an idea of its population, and the scope of its industries. The latter had shrunk since her last glimpse. The population had remained level, though. There was no sign of mass conscription. The patrol junk’s captain had been more concerned about gold and goods going west than men.

  Osia sailed until she was two hundred kilometers away from anything. She had Tass fold the sails, and just let the boat drift.

  Finally, she could put it off no longer.

  It did not matter that the comet had already left the sky. Osia did not have a transmitter capable of bridging the distance between her and Ways and Means even when it passed by.

  To contact it, she had to go through its network of satellites. For the first time in years, she opened a connection.

  At once, she was awash in data, a flood of tangible abstraction. Security and identity-confirmation handshakes decrypted and blossomed through her thoughts. The network automatically shared recent news, orders, weather bulletins. The data came with a warm and strange fullness of mind more real than anyone she could have touched. It woke a part of herself she had not exercised in years.

  This was what it was like to be connected, to have the plane at her fingertips. It didn’t stop at data. Her senses expanded outward, lacing with the thousands of satellites pirouetting overhead. If she’d wanted, she could have looked anywhere, seen anything. It took some effort to resist.

  Then she found Ways and Means’ sharp-edged hull. The planarship was close enough that there was no significant light speed delay. It was so real that she might have been running her fingers along it. Every part of it was studded with sensors. It had a million eyes, and even more ears. When her senses laced with it, she felt, briefly, like she could reach anywhere, touch anything.

  The impression faded. Whenever she was connected, it was always there, low-level, intoxicating.

  After allowing time for her senses to dilate, it said, “Your security programs are several years out of date.”

  “You can’t believe anyone would or could try to impersonate me.”

  “We believe you are you. We’ve been maintaining continuous tracking since the day you arrived.”

  The amalgamate was a melding of hundreds, thousands, of minds into a single identity. It was more a colony than an individual. Yet it spoke and acted in concert, even as its thoughts pulled it in a thousand directions at once. Its multifarious nature was one of its strengths. It always approached a problem from every possible perspective.

  Even in exile, Ways and Means was still taking the effort to update its security programs. That could only mean it didn’t trust its crew. They were the only people here who could fight against it on that level. She wondered what drama she’d missed.

  Ways and Means let the data feed crest and trough, and remind her what it had been like to travel with it. It was insidious. And it was working. For a while, she couldn’t speak either. She was caught up in remembering. Such was the puissance of the amalgamates. Even when she knew how it was manipulating her, she couldn’t help but follow along.

  She said, “You’ve been hard at work down here.”

  “Yes,” it said. No denials.

  “Would you like me to outline what I’ve discovered, or would you like to confess?” A classic information-fishing technique, an attempt to get it to admit to more than she’d found. Ways and Means wouldn’t fall for it in a thousand lifetimes.

  It said, “We’d rather talk about you. We know most of what’s happening on this world. We don’t know as much about you.”

  “‘Most?’”

  “Are your constructs continuing to treat you well?”

  “They’re a suitable distraction,” she said.

  “Are they staying true to their source characters, or do their personalities need to be reset?”

  Osia did not like to think about where her constructs had come from. It was embarrassing. Ways and Means knew it. She said, “I can tweak them myself if I need to.”

  “We typically don’t send constructs on extended journeys. After thirty years, we would expect some deviation from their baseline. In so alien an environment, their programming may express itself in unintended ways.”

  “This isn’t so alien to them,” Osia said.

  “It would take days and weeks for you to recalibrate their personalities. It would take us less than a second.”

  “I have plenty of time.”

  “You do not have to keep going like this. You should at least come back long enough to update our backup of your memories.”

  Ways and Means kept backups of all of its crewmembers, a feat only possible for people with wholly demiorganic bodies. Another perk of the job. It had once kept backups of itself, too – all of its memories and personalities – but exile had ended that. It could no longer place them in a location it deemed secure.

  “I’ll probably end up erasing most of these years, anyway.” Just like she had erased her memories of her fugue this morning.

  “You never know when you might want them back.”

  Osia looked behind her. Coral wasn’t far, scanning the cloudy horizon with a hand over thir eyes. When Osia had been a child, before she’d had anything to do with the amalgamates, she’d fallen in love with an open-author adventure serial. It had been about an oceanographic submarine and its crew, trapped on a world during a transplanar invasion.

  It never ended – or, rather, it ended hundreds of times. The characters and central crisis were consistent from author to author, but the plot and the endings always changed. It had been a form of storytelling perfect for the Unity, and for a people always trying to wrap their imaginations around the scope of an infinite multiverse.

  In the serial, Coral and thir partner Straton had been divers. Coral had taken charge of the submarine. Ira, a violent man with no love for the Unity, turned traitor in over half of his stories – but not all. Borealis had been a trapped tourist. Tass had been an engineer and just as lost in the engine room as she was in the rigging here.

  This second exile had pushed Osia to extremes. Ways and Means had delivered the constructs, but she’d requested their personalities. She’d retreated to a tim
e before she’d joined Ways and Means. It had been mortifying to speak aloud, and it still was. And Ways and Means knew it.

  She knew what Ways and Means was up to. It was trying to make her feel younger. Vulnerable. It attacked conversations from as many different angles as it had minds.

  The flood of data was rising over her head. She was swimming upstream against her past. Already, she was having trouble managing it.

  Ways and Means had let her go, but it would never give up trying to get her back. She’d never stopped wondering why. All its crew should have been equally valuable to it. If it wanted to trick her into imagining a deeper feeling, it was doing a good job of it.

  It was an amalgamate. It was alien to her. That was why she had loved living with it. All of its powers had been on her side.

  The amalgamates were always probing, always searching for weaknesses. She would have to wrest the conversation if she intended to get anything done. She said, “I thought you had decided on a policy of noninteraction.”

  “We decided on a policy of noncolonization,” Ways and Means corrected. “Subject to humanitarian intervention – such as curing their great plague.”

  “That wasn’t quite what I remember asking for.”

  “I have never been clear on what you asked for,” it said. “Your thoughts seemed scattered.”

  Galling, but accurate. Better to say that she’d been in shock. She hadn’t sorted herself out because, when she’d asked, she hadn’t had time.

  She hadn’t asked alone. Dr Habidah Shen had, too. Osia had just made herself the most convenient target for the rest of the crew.

  Osia had taken careful recordings of the moment. She’d been tempted more than once to erase them. It had happened only an hour after Ways and Means’ exile. Everything had been in flux. Ways and Means’ mind had been blasted apart and glued back together by the transplanar creature. The planarship was scarred, crisscrossed with molten hull.

  Ways and Means typically didn’t need to interrogate anyone. This interrogation chamber it had made was freshly manufactured and flash-cooled. The curved bulkheads were bare, and still smelled of hot plastic. A table stood in the center. The room had the air of an operating theater.

  The man who was to have been interrogated was a monk, a man Habidah had rescued and brought aboard. He still wore his habit. He was here because he claimed to have had contact with another transplanar power. Ways and Means had needed to know more.

  His name was Niccoluccio Caracciola, and he had told the truth.

  The transplanar creature had planted a weapon in him. A virus he carried in his thoughts. In rooting through Niccoluccio’s memories, Ways and Means had given the virus direct access to the amalgamate’s minds.

  It might have all ended there. But lodging in Niccoluccio’s mind had changed the virus as much as Niccoluccio himself. It had wrapped around his thoughts, sluiced through him, to avoid detection. It had made him a part of itself. It controlled him, but he had influenced it.

  Without that influence, the virus would have destroyed the amalgamates. Instead, it had given them the chance to surrender. To dismantle their empire by choice and submit themselves to exile.

  When the virus had surged into Ways and Means, it had taken Niccoluccio’s mind, too. It had been too much for Niccoluccio. Fatal. A human mind was not elastic enough to expand so far, so fast. He had decohered.

  He still breathed, but he was no longer alive in any real sense.

  Ways and Means spent years afterward sorting through the thoughts and memories he had left behind in it. In the chaotic gestalt of its minds, it could never be sure what belonged to the monk and what belonged to some equally dissolute other.

  Traces of Niccoluccio flitted in Osia’s mind, too, like scattering leaves. She had tried to stop the data transfer between the creature and her amalgamate, and tapped into it. She had been rebuffed, tossed back onto the shoals of her unconsciousness. But parts of Niccoluccio had snagged on her. She couldn’t get them off.

  Uninvited memories had trilled across her senses. Hot canine breath on her neck. A shovel in her hands, blisters on her palms. A field of graves in frozen earth. The heady, clammy dizziness of medicinal bloodletting.

  Without demiorganic assistance, she could not have spoken. Her demiorganics steadied her voice. They had heuristics to interpret what she had meant to say rather than what, on her own, she would have stammered.

  The acceleration holding her to the deck faltered. The planarship’s superstructure cracked and popped. Osia would have found it alarming if she hadn’t been so lost. It sounded like gunfire, kinetic missile impacts.

  Ways and Means had gated to this plane at a full g of acceleration. A sparkling cyclonic whirlwind of exhaust billowed in its wake. The first appearance of the false comet.

  The crew was shattered. The datastreams that bound them together rippled with sorrow, with panic, with denial. Bitter fury. All their disparate reasons for coming aboard had fallen apart with the death of the Unity. Now they had been trapped here with Ways and Means, on this plane.

  Unlike its crew, Ways and Means wasted no time mourning. “This plane must serve as a home while we consider our long-term path,” it said. “We must make a new context to place ourselves within.” It had already announced its plan to end the black plague below. Short leap from there to imagine what it was prepared to do to the rest of the world.

  Dr Habidah Shen had been involved with Niccoluccio. She had come with him into the interrogation chamber, and, frankly, she would have been the next to be subjected to memory rooting. Her face was bloody from a fight with Meloku, who had come to stop them, but arrived too late.

  “You’ll erase this world’s identity.” Habidah stayed by the shell of the monk. She curled his fingers in hers. “They wouldn’t want us.”

  Osia’s trauma response programs muted her instinct to lash out. Instead, she said, “They won’t be given any choice.”

  The monk said, “They can be made to be ready.”

  As much as the monk’s thoughts had bled into Ways and Means, its thoughts had flooded into him. He was not the same person. Even his face seemed different, cheeks sharper and brow flatter, a new mind wearing the old musculature.

  Habidah’s voice was hollow. “We’ll destroy those people no matter what we do.” She didn’t believe she could matter. The forces arrayed against her were too great. She was just lodging a protest.

  Meloku said, “No great loss.”

  The man who had been Niccoluccio said, “We can help. There’s so much misery below, and unnecessary suffering.”

  And there was. Osia had tasted Niccoluccio Caracciola’s thoughts. She had drunk deeply. She had not intended to, but parts of him had become her.

  His father had died of the plague. His spiritual brothers, too. His whole monastery, gone. He had walked into an icy wilderness to die. He had offered himself to a mob that would happily accept any blood offered to them. Each time, Habidah had saved him. He had suffered immensely. Though he had forgotten most of it, Osia couldn’t.

  Osia’s speech heuristics programs couldn’t decipher what she wanted to say. So much of his suffering had come from being ripped out of his old life. His monastery was gone. Thanks to Habidah, he had learned things that would keep him from ever living in one again.

  Meloku told Habidah, “You wanted to save him. To help them.”

  “Not through colonization,” Habidah said. “Just a cure. Help them and let them go.”

  “‘Catch and release,’” Meloku mocked.

  “Ethical interference,” Habidah said.

  “That has to seem small now, even to you.”

  Meloku and Habidah bounced angrily, pointlessly off each other. The monk spoke again: “We can help each other. We can cure their plague. They can give us a home.”

  Ways and Means reminded them, “The terms of our exile forbid us from expanding across the multiverse. A single plane is within our limits.”

  Osia said, “No.”
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  She’d been silent for so long that Meloku and Habidah seemed to have forgotten she was here. They looked to her. If Osia had had a pulse, it would have been pounding.

  Osia said, “Listen to his memories. These people aren’t just fighting death. They’re fighting loss. The plague doesn’t just take their lives. The survivors have had most of what they knew taken away from them.” She turned on Habidah. “Just like you took this man’s life from him when you uprooted him, and told him what you were.”

  Habidah’s hand tightened around Niccoluccio’s, but the infrared pattern of blood coursing under her skin revealed only surprise. She had not been expecting Osia to take her side. Neither had Osia. She had not felt so strongly until this past hour.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Meloku said. “They’re not the only ones who’ve been uprooted.”

  Osia said, “There are three hundred and seventy million people on the world we’re heading for, and only seven thousand of us. We’re better equipped to cope.”

  Meloku said, “Right now, they need us more than we need them.”

  “If we don’t need them, why do this?”

  Ways and Means was silent. It had never been more vulnerable, Osia realized. Or changeable. Over its lifetime in the Unity, it had become ossified. Encrusted in its beliefs. The virus had taken all of that apart. It was rebuilding itself, and in a state of neural plasticity akin to a newborn.

  Niccoluccio’s memories had shaken Osia too. Both she and Ways and Means in the process of being reborn.

  Osia said, “We can’t keep doing what we did before. We came from an empire. Even if we colonize this world, it won’t be enough. It will always seem too small.”

  If Habidah had registered Osia’s jab, she didn’t answer it. “Yes,” she said. “You’re all going to have to learn a different way of doing things.” She didn’t see herself as complicit in the Unity, though she had benefited from it all her life.