The Stark Divide

by J. Scott Coatsworth

  This next week promised to be a busy one, with the impending arrival of 41 Daphne, the second asteroid chosen for the project, another beast at about 174 kilometers along her longest axis. Daphne had been a nymph in Greek mythology that had been turned into a tree—an apt enough metaphor for what was to happen to the asteroid. She also had her own tiny satellite, a fleck of rock about two kilometers wide.

  He’d had a hard time swinging funding for that one, with members of the North American Union demanding an on-site inspection before forking over the money. The second and third seed worlds were now underway, and Congress was starting to squawk. They were all so shortsighted. How important was this year’s budget compared to the future of mankind?

  Recent events on Earth were his best argument.

  The seedling had all but obliterated 43 Ariadne, the asteroid where they had planted it a decade earlier, and it was time for her next meal. Colin had called in the doc to supervise the process. It was a first for AmSplor, and she had been the one who’d created the seedling, after all.

  Though at this point, he figured the worldlet was more a sapling than a seedling.

  The shuttle settled down onto the metal landing deck before him with a sharp clang, locking itself down magnetically. After a moment, the doors hissed open and Aaron Hammond stepped out, ducking to clear the top of the shuttle’s doorframe and holding a duffel bag.

  Colin suppressed a gasp. This young Hammond was the spitting image of his father. The photos sent up with his file hadn’t done the boy justice.

  He stepped forward and offered his hand. “Welcome aboard Transfer Station, Mr. Hammond.” He slapped the boy on the back. “I’m Director McAvery, and I’ve been waiting to meet you for a long time.”

  “Honored to be here, sir.” Aaron Hammond looked uncomfortable. The boy was staring at the shuttle.

  “Call me Colin.” An old woman exited the shuttle in front of him.

  The woman looked up at the two of them, and Colin realized belatedly who she was.

  Ana had aged twenty years in the last decade. She was thin, dressed all in black, with a white shawl wrapped around her shoulders. Her graying hair had been cropped short, and her mag boots looked incongruously large on her slender frame. She pulled a small hard-shell case behind her.

  “Aaron, this is Dr. Anastasia Anatov. She’s here to help us with Daphne.”

  IT WAS strange, seeing the two of them together, the captain, now station director, and Jackson’s son—so much like the last voyage of the Dressler. Ana noticed that the boy showed no surprise at her name when the director introduced her. Interesting.

  McAvery embraced her warmly. He still looked good, these ten years later. The silver hair at his temples suited him.

  “It’s good to see you, Ana.”

  She nodded. “You’ve done well here,” she managed, looking around the big open space of the hub. A crew of station workers was assembling on another platform, no doubt preparing for the arrival of the first cargo shuttle.

  “Thanks to you,” he said with an enigmatic smile. “Come with me, friends, and let me show you to your cabins.”

  They followed him to a slightly embedded circular spot in the floor of the deck. A shimmering field sprung up around them, and suddenly they were dropping through the floor.

  Startled, she grasped McAvery’s arm. He gave her a little smile. “Sorry about that. I probably should have warned you. But enjoy.”

  She guessed he liked the effect this experience had on visitors to the station.

  All around them, the universe flooded in. She pressed her hands against the transparent walls of the elevator, drinking it in like a child. It’s so beautiful.

  Young Hammond joined her.

  Forever floated so close to the station that she thought she could reach out and touch it. The seedling had consumed most of Ariadne, and very little of the original asteroid was left. Instead, the new world looked more like the stump of a tree, if tree stumps were shot through with a golden light in all the nooks and crevices. It spun about like a top.

  It reminded her of the seed as it had first expanded on that fateful day, so many years ago. The day they’d lost Jackson.

  “You knew who I was, back on the Hammond, didn’t you?” she asked Aaron without looking at him.

  Aaron gave her an unreadable stare and turned away.

  The elevator slid into place on the rim, and the protective field dropped into the floor.

  The director handed them each a small smooth white disc. “That’s your room key. Press the center once, like this.” He pressed her key, and it glowed a soft blue. “A line will light up along the wall to guide you back to your cabin.” A matching blue band appeared along the station wall, gently pulsing in one direction.

  Hammond pressed his, and a red line appeared. “I’ll let you two get settled. Ensign Hammond, meet me in my office at 1400. That’ll give you a couple hours to settle in and get cleaned up.”

  Hammond nodded and started off.

  “Doc, how about coming by around 1500? We can look at the action plan for bringing Daphne in.”

  She nodded. “When will I see her? Ariadne?”

  “We call her Forever now.” He smiled. “How about tomorrow? Hammond will be going down for his posting. Why don’t we join him? I’m due for an inspection, in any case.”

  “That sounds perfect.” The universe was playing a cosmic joke on her. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m tired from the trip.”

  “Of course. See you in a couple hours, Doc.”

  She grabbed his arm as he turned away. “Colin?” She had to say it. He deserved it.

  “Yes?”

  “I am truly grateful for this opportunity. I thought I’d never come back here after.…”

  He gave her a hug. “That was a long time ago. Let’s focus on what comes next.”

  She nodded. “Tomorrow, then.”

  Time enough later to face her demons.

  AARON FOLLOWED the red line down the runway to his quarters. The glowing band ended at a doorway with a red flash that outlined the portal. He pressed the key again, and the doorway slid open to reveal a small cabin with a bed, a tiny bathroom with sink, toilet, and shower, and a desk, all in white.

  A small viewport showed the stars outside.

  He dropped his duffel bag on the desk and splashed water on his face in the small sink, looking himself over in the mirror. He smelled of sweat, a product of the stress he’d put himself under.

  He would shower later. Right now he had a lot to do in very little time.

  Aaron shucked off his boots and lay down on the small cot, placing one hand on his chest and the other on the wall of his room, and closed his eyes.

  He slowed his breathing, counting his breaths until he was almost asleep, feeling a welcome lethargy take over his body. Then he sought the portal.

  Every system had one—a virtual door he’d learned how to access that would let him in. His father had unknowingly given him a gift, the product of a black-market wetware upgrade he’d had long before Aaron was born, passed on through Jackson’s altered genes. He had the ability to directly interface with artificial minds, on a level one step removed from a dream.

  His mother had told him about it, in a way. He’d always had exceptionally vivid dreams, and one day Glory had sat him down to tell him about his father’s legacy. When Jackson Hammond had been a teenager, he’d applied a wetware upgrade to his own mind to enhance his engineering abilities, and had apparently gifted a version of it to his offspring.

  Aaron had discovered, over time, that the gift also gave him a link to any of the artificial minds that controlled much of Earth’s commerce—and that he could use it to find out things no one else could. He’d practiced this over and over with the low-grade servitors that ran the Hammond household—finding out things like where his brother hid his stash of ChocoBlasts and once discovering more than he wanted to know about his mother’s sex life.

  Now he hoped to employ it
to try to find out more about what had really happened to his father.

  In the darkness behind his eyelids, a shape began to form—a spoked ring that mirrored the shape of the station, filled with light—pulsing, coursing, speeding light that represented all the activity of the station-mind. It was much bigger than a servitor-mind, but the principles would be the same. He just had to find a way in and then master the flow.

  It grew larger and larger. Soon it was a small world in and of itself, and he was standing on its surface, surrounded by bundles of cable carrying data back and forth around the ship. They all gathered together in a tight cluster at one end, where the station-mind collected and parsed all the data.

  He clambered along the wheel, looking for an ingress, some weak spot where he could enter the flow. The wheel below him thrummed with energy and power.

  His instincts led him down a pulsing yellow cable as thick as his waist. Where it plunged into the wheel, he found his opening, a dark hole around the cable wider than he was.

  He pushed his virtual hand inside through the resistance, feeling a tingle that went all the way up his arm.

  Soon he was embedded up to his shoulder, and with his other hand, he pulled the rest of his body through the opening, transferring his consciousness down the hole and into the station’s data stream.

  Chapter Three: Data Core

  COLIN SAT behind his desk, reviewing the data on Daphne’s approach. The asteroid had been harvested from her orbit more than a year ago, attitude jets attached to slowly steer her into place for next week’s action.

  He pulled up a three-dimensional image of the approaching asteroid. She looked like a lumpy black potato as she tumbled slowly through space. The strategically placed jets had reduced the spin to nearly nothing and were slowly bleeding her velocity to match that of Ariadne.

  The image derezzed momentarily before taking on full solidity again. “Ronan, what was that?” he asked the station-mind.

  “I’m sorry, sir. There was a momentary disruption of my primary data stream. The cause is unclear.”

  Sunspots, McAvery thought. Or? All the ghosts of the Dressler seemed to be coming home to roost this week. “All right, let me know if you find anything.”

  “Affirmative, Director.”

  He didn’t consider himself superstitious, but the incident with the Dressler had taught him to pay attention when little things started going wrong. Little things could quickly become big things out here. “Ronan, how’s Daphne doing?”

  “She’s on schedule, Director. I’ve taken control of the asteroid’s attitude jets from the auto-guide now. She should be in position in about ninety hours.”

  “Understood. Is McAvery Port ready for us tomorrow?”

  “Yes, sir. They are expecting you. The shuttle departs at 0600 hours.”

  “Thank you, Ronan.” His door chimed. “Open,” he called, and Captain Trip Tanner stepped in.

  “Hello, sailor,” Colin said with a grin and hugged his better half.

  ANA FOUND her way to her own cabin and opened the door with the key she’d been given. She stepped inside and stopped dead in her tracks.

  Colin had left her a gift.

  The room was wide, maybe five times bigger than the small cell where she had stayed as a prisoner for almost ten years.

  It was the floor that gave her chills.

  It was transparent, and Forever spun slowly by under her feet in all of its radiant glory. It was overwhelming. She was a little woozy.

  “Station-mind?” she called.

  “Ronan at your service, Dr. Anatov,” a rich, warm male voice replied.

  “Ronan, is it possible to hide the view?”

  Immediately the window fogged over, becoming a white floor.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Doctor.”

  Now she could see the rest of the room without distraction. There was a wide bed covered by a heavy, colorful blanket, obviously brought up from Earth; a large oak desk and chair; a wooden armoire; and a small bathroom with shower, sink, and toilet. It was likely one of the suites reserved for visiting dignitaries.

  She lifted her bag onto the desk and opened it to pull out a paper diary. She’d taken up the habit during her imprisonment and found it helped center her mind and thoughts.

  She sat down at the desk and began to write.

  DATA PACKETS flashed back and forth at the speed of light, tagged in different colors by priority and type. It was like being in the middle of a busy highway, cars speeding past on all sides, the wind of their passage whipping Aaron back and forth, each wearing off some of his substance, until he felt spread as thin as a wraith.

  He closed his eyes and centered himself, drawing upon some of the meditation exercises he’d learned from the mesh, blocking from his mind the incessant, damaging traffic.

  Little by little, he flowed back together, regaining solidity. When he was whole again, he opened his eyes.

  The traffic still slipped past him, but more slowly now, and he could look at each packet and determine its contents. Here, in yellow, was a semi-urgent message from the Hammond about a resupply issue.

  Next was a streak of green—a standard operating instruction from the station-mind to one of the data sensors out on the rim.

  Racing the other direction was a blue snippet tagged for memory storage.

  Bingo.

  He chased after it, dodging traffic coming the other way. This was as much a matter of feel and finesse as anything. The blue streak slipped into a crystalline matrix, shaped to his mind’s eye like a glowing blue sphere. He put his hands on the sphere. Inside here, maybe, was what he was looking for.

  He pushed himself inside, and the sphere flashed orange.

  COLIN STEPPED out of the dry shower, the stimulating wave of charged particles leaving his skin feeling clean and refreshed. Trip sat on his bed, flipping through something on his pad. He looked up as Colin approached, grinning. “I love homecomings.”

  “Me too.” Colin pulled on his clothes, stepping back into his AmSplor uniform. “Permission to board, Captain?”

  Trip laughed, patting the bed.

  He grabbed his own pad and climbed onto the bed next to Trip.

  It was 1310—just under an hour until Aaron Hammond would arrive at his office. He checked his messages.

  Something from his chief of staff about the water supply, another from AmSplor’s offices on Frontier about an upcoming shipment.

  The lights flickered.

  “Ronan, report.” Colin was on his feet in an instant. He’d been so careful to avoid a repeat of the Dressler incident. God help us if it’s happening again….

  “There’s a disturbance in the memory core. I’m checking on it.”

  He felt Trip’s hand on his arm. “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” He was more worried than he wanted to let on.

  “It’s just a faulty light.”

  Colin shook his head. “That’s what I thought last time, and I was dead wrong.”

  THE LIGHTS flickered.

  Ana closed the diary, put it away in her bag, and stood, looking around the room. For all its size, she suddenly felt closed in, trapped, like she had felt in prison. “Ronan,” she said, trying to keep the edge of panic from her voice.

  “Yes, Dr. Anatov.”

  “Please show me the outside again.”

  The floor below her cleared, and the room darkened. She stood in the middle of a sea of stars as Forever spun into view before her.

  She would never tire of looking at it. It was, in a real way, her progeny—she who had never had a child—and her father’s ultimate legacy as well.

  Tomorrow she would see what she had wrought up close.

  The image went fuzzy, then sharpened again. “Ronan, is there a problem?” she asked.

  “Memory core issue, Doctor. Nothing to worry about.”

  She grimaced.

  If she knew Colin, the poor director was having an unfortunate
flashback too.

  AARON RAN through the memory core, pursued by red scouts sent by the station-mind. They were much faster and more agile than servitor-mind scouts, and he was having a hard time keeping ahead of them. He imagined himself breathing heavily, his virtual muscles tiring.

  He shook his virtual head. That was the wrong way to go about it.

  Instead, he was a cheetah.

  Aaron veered down another passageway, bits of data casting an eerie blue glow across his path.

  There was nothing for him here—nothing to do with his father’s death. He’d ascertained that much before the chase had begun. He had been so hopeful. Now he just needed a moment to make good on his escape.

  He grabbed at a stack of data, scattering it behind him like so many glowing ones and zeroes. He hoped it wasn’t anything important.

  Everything shifted around him, floors becoming walls, ceilings spiraling to become floors. The station-mind was trying to block his path. He was suddenly at the bottom of a deep pit, the walls alternating blue and orange around him.

  He’d trained for this. He shifted his form, becoming a smooth silver sphere, and shot up through the vertical conduit.

  Portals slammed shut behind him one by one, but they were too slow to catch him.

  He visualized the outer reaches of the system as a bright light and shot toward it, evading every obstacle the station-mind sought to put before him, zipping left and right and sometimes in a direction that didn’t exist in the real world.

  At last he escaped from the memory core.

  He centered his mind and shot off like a ray of light down the path that had brought him into the station data stream. In a millisecond, he had left the scouts and the network behind, exiting through the flaw where he had entered, what seemed like hours before.

  Aaron woke in his bed, soaked with sweat, in the small cabin he’d been assigned.

  He glanced at his watch—just thirty minutes before his meeting with the director.