The Disk Mirror Solution (Galaxia Mortem Book 1)

by Danielle Ste. Just

  The Alpha kept his stick jammed into Bil’s back until Bil stopped screaming, stopped moving.

  Armintor’s ears rang with the echoes of screams. Air rasped against her raw throat.

  “It occurs to me,” the Alpha said, “that the experiential learners might not have absorbed this death as well as the other types. Line up here. All of you.” He drew an invisible line on the floor with his black stick.

  Trembling, Armintor formed a line with the other Betas.

  The Alpha strode up and down the line. “Which one of you wants to go first?” He stopped and stroked the cheek of an elderly woman who worked clearing tables in the dining room. “I’m doing this because I care about you.” He pressed the stick into her stomach. She screamed and collapsed to the floor.

  The Alpha bent and stared into the woman’s glazed eyes. “Everyone has something to learn, including you,” he said softly. He stroked her cheek with the stick, then stood, raising his voice. “Trying to get away with anything is a fallacy. You must work as if we are watching you every second.” The Alpha went up and down the line, gently pressing the agony stick into everyone’s stomachs, watching with a terrible, benevolent expression as they all screamed, collapsed, writhed.

  Urine trickled down Armintor’s leg when he stopped in front of her, even before he stuck the stick into her stomach.

  It was the worst ten seconds of her life. Worse than the agony of her parents’ death, than being taken from Terry’s New Earth. Every cell in her body vibrated with agony. It felt like she was being torn apart with endless variation, and yet endlessly the same.

  When the pain ceased she found herself scrabbling and drooling on the ground. The Alpha stood and watched her with his sickening benevolent expression. Armintor didn’t dare move, in case he decided to torture her again.

  The Beta to her left nudged her with his shoe. “Get back to work,” he hissed.

  Adrenaline coursed through her body. She could never do anything again to be touched with an agony stick. With trembling arms she shoved to her feet and staggered to her dishwasher.

  The Alpha followed, and came up right behind her. She felt his breath in her hair. “Now, here is a perfect example of the inability of Betas to survive on their own. This one thinks it’s appropriate to work with clean dishes when she reeks of urine.”

  Armintor turned to him. He had a healthy-looking sheen, clear brown eyes, a proud, uplifted jaw. Looking at him, she not only felt fear, but anger. How dare he be so proud of his terrible actions?

  He placed a hot, heavy hand on her shoulder. “Go to your barrack and change your clothes. Before I cease to see the benefit of being so considerate.”

  She ran through the almost empty streets to the barracks. A few Alphas look at her haste with disapproval, but none stopped her. After she changed she ran back to the restaurant. Her dishwasher wasn’t screaming; someone had emptied, filled and started it again. She glanced around but no one met her gaze. She understood. It wasn’t her they’d been protecting, but themselves.

  Chapter 5

  Variegor

  Date: 2412

  As she stood in the shower that evening, letting the sour-smelling water fall over her, Armintor heard her two stack-mates talking.

  “She’s so gross!”

  Laughter.

  “I hate her laying there over me. I feel like she’s going to die of stupidity one day, and I’ll’ve been sleeping under her corpse.”

  “Ew! Don’t say that.”

  Her stack-mates were talking about her. They were calling her, Armintor, gross and stupid. Hot, searing shame burned through her body. She dispensed a smear of soap and scrubbed it over herself, stinging her eyes and not caring. How had she let herself become so pitiful? How had she just given up? It was as if she’d crawled away from her body and expected it to continue living, breathing, succeeding, while she curled up in a corner of her own braincase.

  For over an hour she scrubbed herself in the shower. Her hair was only ear-length, but it had formed an almost comically large knot at the back of her head. She worked at it with a comb, at first patiently, then aggressively, then finally tore through it with one painful, fatalistic jerk that pulled out a large clump of strands. Dirt encrusted the space underneath her fingernails. She had no brush, so she ripped off a piece of one fingernail and used it like a trowel to obsessively pick each fingernail clean. Then she crouched and worked on her toenails.

  Finally, she crept to her bunk and saw it with her newly-awakened eyes. Her bedding was filthy. Crusted bloodstains from her period, smears of dirt where she’d gone to bed with dirty feet. Hot shame again engulfed her. Shame, and anger. How had she slept on such filth? Why had she only thought she was worth that? Why had she become so helpless? Maybe the Alphas were right. She did need someone to manage her life. But at that thought, indignant rage blossomed in her chest. She didn’t need anyone to tell her what to do. She was smart. Her father had told her so. Even her mother had admitted it, once.

  As she remembered her father’s hugs, his smile, his quiet encouragement, her heart twisted in her chest. Her parents were dead. No one would ever take care of her again, or love her no matter what she did. And her grief sat ready and waiting to take her back inside its numbing embrace. It would be so easy to just climb onto her filthy bed and squeeze her eyes shut. But she forced herself to gather her bedding and bring it to the laundry pile, get new sheets and blankets, and remake her bed. There was nothing she could do about the bloodstains on the thin mattress, but she flipped it over so she wouldn’t have to see them.

  At work the next day, she felt almost insane from boredom at a job which, the day before, had been almost beyond her comprehension. Her dishwasher was a huge mecha, with padded appendages stowed at its sides while Armintor herself did the loading and stacking.

  Her supervisor, a thin, older Beta who seemed to disappear inside her coveralls, passed by. “Why am I even doing this job?” Armintor asked her. “Why can’t the mecha do it?”

  Her supervisor looked her up and down with watery, protruding eyes. “You’re finally put in a job you can manage, and it takes you a month to ask why you need to do it.” She walked away, shaking her head.

  Armintor turned back to her work. This entire job could be done by the mecha itself. Why did Alphas consider some mecha functions safe and not others? Their dishwasher in the nutrition panel at home…

  A memory of sitting at the family dining table on Terry’s New Earth engulfed her senses. She saw her father, smelled the chostim in his mug, tasted the lingering sweetness of strawberry crepes. Her father sipped from his mug, then smiled at her. His generous, loving smile.

  He was dead. Everyone she loved was dead.

  She clutched at the dishwasher, panting from the agony in her chest. “No,” she whispered. She forced herself to focus on something other than her memories. What was it that the Alphas considered unsafe about the dishwasher arms? And the answer came to her.

  It was decision-making. That was the criterion.

  The dishwasher’s washing and drying cycles were acceptable since they performed the exact same functions day after day. But a machine deciding by itself how best to scrape food and other debris, sort knives from teacups, load itself, and stack the cleaned dishes, was anathema to the Alphas and their teknophobia.

  Her entire job could be replaced by a simple program and two arms of padded metal. That was what she had become. An ancillary function of a dishwasher.

  When her shift ended, she emerged into the late afternoon, blinking. She had to do something—anything—to prevent her brain from stagnating. She headed to the Beta library. It was a small building almost exactly halfway between the restaurant she worked at and her barrack. She’d passed it every day she’d lived in Varie City, but until now it hadn’t occurred to her to enter. When she stepped inside, the books seemed to greet her with a strange, hushed gravity. She’d only seen two paper books before in her life. They’d been displayed inside a case in the s
mall museum on Terry’s New Earth. She’d visited that museum with her father.

  Armintor crowded out the pain of her memories by hurrying into the long, warm stacks of books and pulling one out at random, The Art of Computer Programming, vol. 1. She opened it to reveal pages of words. Words that she’d have to pry into her cranium one by one instead of having them data pushed into the cranial embed she should have by now. But that was impossible. As impossible as ever seeing her father again. She crowded her rising grief out by murmuring the words on the page out loud.

  In the third place, we may observe that the LTAG field, which indicates whether a node is terminal or not, is redundant, since “⌋” occurs only at the end of the forest and just preceding every downward pointing arrow.

  As the words permeated her brain, her anxiety and grief ebbed. She now had something else to concentrate on. Something outside herself, outside her present experience. Unconnected to Variegor, or Terry’s New Earth, or Armintor herself. She clutched the book to her chest.

  On her walks to and from the library and work, Armintor began to notice everything. She lived in Variegor’s only city, Varie City, perpetually warm and somewhat dusty from the surrounding agricultural fields. She dared to take a walk one evening, in the small span of daylight between the ending of her shift and sunset. An enormous complex hulked on a low ridge to the south. She grabbed the arm of a passing Beta.

  “What’s that up there?”

  The small man, so nondescript that he seemed to fade into the walkway, glanced to the south. “The university,” he said in a hesitant voice.

  “It’s so large. I didn’t think there were that many people on this planet.”

  “All the Alphas go there. Lots of offworlders, too. Anyone unable to get cranial implants.”

  “So they don’t teach by data pushing?”

  “The only university in the galaxy that doesn’t.”

  Long after the Beta had hurried away, Armintor stared up at the university. Back in pre-Blue Mist Plague times, she’d wanted to go to Charles Town University like her older brother. At the memory of his laughing face, the air froze in her lungs and her heart hammered in her chest. The need to do something—anything—to crowd out her terror and loneliness propelled Armintor to walk toward the university. She couldn’t get far, as a set of gates barricaded the walkway leading up to the ridge. Only Alphas, and those Betas who worked to clean and repair the facilities, were admitted.

  The Alphas didn’t think she was capable of learning. They didn’t think she was capable of anything. Because of some stupid plague, she was stuck here on this terrible planet. Why had the plague happened? Why hadn’t her mom found out about the plague sooner? She’d wasted time moping around the house when she was supposed to be working, and she’d let the plague happen.

  Tears streamed down Armintor’s cheeks, and she choked on her sobs. There was a university right in front of her, and she couldn’t get inside. But maybe she could get transferred there. Maybe she could clean the lecture halls and listen to the lectures. Could Betas even be transferred?

  She wiped her tears away. She didn’t have time for crying. There had to be a way to work at the university. First, she’d have to excel at her current job and become noticed. She’d have to become the best dishwasher on the planet of Variegor. And when she got to the university, she’d show them all. Somehow.

  Her days changed. She devoted herself to her work. Each dish, every glass, every fork, was placed in the cleaning trays with optimal precision. Her dishwasher barely began to beep before she had it open. Her supervisor often walked past, and Armintor was positive she’d noticed. Once she’d become just as precise as a mecha herself, everything would change.

  Chapter 6

  Bituminous Tarsi

  Date: 2422

  Redcholate skirted a defunct hook booth—door torn off, mecha missing and presumably sold for parts—and into the dremacave. The interior was almost as dark as a black hole. Which made sense. No one in a dremacave was awake, except for the entry mecha. Everyone who came into a dremacave crawled into an empty pod, jacked in, and remained there until their creds ran out. She’d had to use dremacaves when she’d first arrived on Bituminous Tarsi, but she’d never stayed more than a few hours. And she’d always brought a tube of tie-in sanitizer. Dirty jacks shivered her gibs.

  “Pod?” asked the mecha.

  She could hardly see it in the dim light. Her eyescreen couldn’t help her see in low-light situations. If she had an eyehook, she’d be able to see almost as well as in full light. But to do that, she’d have to rip out her eyecube. Well, have it ripped out by a hook mecha. And she didn’t want to do that.

  “Pod?” the mecha asked again, with the exact same inflection, tone, volume.

  “No. I want to speak to Sylvey. He’s in pod 623.” She wasn’t a forger, being just an intel broker, but she wasn’t a dilettante. She deffo had enough licks to crack a simple dremacave for its current client list.

  “Our guests cannot be disturbed unless the situation meets or exceeds the level of their wishes.”

  “Which option did he pick?”

  “In the case of the current pod 623 resident, he has selected the most restrictive interruption option. Our facility needs to be on fire, with pod 623 in danger of imminent destruction, before I am authorized to cut his connection.”

  For the briefest of millis, Redcholate considered setting fire to the ‘cave. But no. Save that for an all-else situation. She could dive back into the ‘cave’s code and sever Sylvey’s connection herself. But it’d be a big pain in the asteroid. Plus, severing someone’s connection was tantamount to a slap in the face with a wet kidney. Not the best opening gambit in a hopefully fruitful professional relationship.

  Her eyes had adjusted to the light level. A dim glow arose from the aisles, so faint she hadn’t seen it at first. It illuminated the stacks of dark purple pods, one atop another, slotted into dingy grey racks. 8,000 pods in this one location. Pod numbers jumbled into random order. And the pods didn’t even have numbers on them. Ulto anonymity.

  Near the back of the rectangular room, a pod hissed open. In the distance, she heard the mecha’s faint voice. “Thank you for podding with us. We hope you have enjoyed your Underworld experience. Please feel encouraged to leave a review in the Meat Needs board on the sphere, or the next time you go under.”

  She heard a groan, then someone get up with a creaky sort of stuffy stiffness. Each sound echoed in the preternaturally quiet space.

  She turned to the mecha. “Well, can you tell me how much time Sylvey has left?”

  “Four hours, seventeen seconds.”

  Her OS helpfully began a countdown clock on her eyescreen that displayed in the bottom of her right eye. “I’ll be back then.”

  “Warning. The client may re-up his under time.”

  “Can you tell him he has a guest waiting?”

  “I cannot disturb this client. He has selected the most restrictive—”

  “K. I understand.”

  Four hours later, she returned. A man stumbled out the door and turned the other way as she approached. He had stooped shoulders and dust-colored hair. Even though she knew what Sylvey looked like from his bifile—and this gentleman did not resemble him in the least—she had to stop herself from calling out to him. He reached the main walkway and melted into the stream of LoRen foot traffic. She entered the ‘cave.

  “Pod?” the mecha asked.

  “No, I’m here to meet Sylvey. Pod 623. He’s due to unjack in,” she consulted the display on her OS, “fifty-three seconds.”

  “That client has departed the facility.”

  “What? Why? He still had time on the pod.”

  “This client unjacked one minute and four seconds before his time expired.”

  “Son of a hypergolic booster.” Redcholate turned and ran out the door and down to the main walkway.

  OS, trace him.

  There is no trace of Sylvey, formerly of dremacave
pod 623. CC has been jammed north and south 200 meters on this walkway.

  Of course there wasn’t any trace. Sylvey was a forger. He knew how to hide from CC. She turned left at random and pelted down the walkway, dodging the cleaning mechas, the aimless, and the unreasonably hopeful seekers that comprised mid-morning LoRen foot traffic. No sign of Sylvey. She ran forward another hundred meters, dodging other peds, then stopped, huffing for breath. She had to use some noodle grease instead of running around like an angry duck. K, so Sylvey had been under for… however much time he had creds for. What would he want to do now he’d left the ‘cave? He’d want to eat, to go pee, drink a mug of chostim. With his shab clothing and slumped shoulders, he must spend all his creds on ‘cave pods. So that meant he probs couldn’t even afford a meal in one of the cheap restaurants nearby.

  Location for the nearest COM:SAN?

  The nearest Community Obligation-free Menu: Sandwich is seventy-five meters behind you.

  Redcholate hurriedly retraced her steps. Her OS directed her to a narrow, doorless entryway. She took a deep breath, eased her shoulders, and walked down an unlit corridor. It opened up into a room without a back wall, looking out on Alessandro City’s recycling center. Crashes and crunches punctuated the dour silence inside. Long communal tables filled the room. A nutrition panel sat against an inside wall. Resisting the urge to find Sylvey first, she approached the nutrition panel and ordered a grilled tomato sandwich and a cup of chostim. The smell of chostim always made her feel a cozy nostalgia, like a warm hug.

  She gathered her wrapped sandwich and steaming plazstik cup from the panel as each emerged, and turned to look for a seat. They were all filled. Brillio excuse to eyecube everyone. Lots of people sat on the floor between the long tables, and a few leaned against the walls. She scrutinized every face. Since everyone looked pretty much the same—dingy clothing, maudlin expressions—it took her several millis to find Sylvey. He sat hunched over his meal, facing half away from her. She could barely see the curve of his right cheek.