by Ashanti Luke
Dr. Jang was holding his chest now laughing. “What did you do?” he spat out between laughs.
“I chased him all the way home. I mean like more than half a K, waling his back with the runner the whole way. That test dummy never bothered me again.” Dr. Jang’s laughter was infectious and Cyrus was chuckling at the memory himself.
“What happened to the Tiberius?” Dr. Jang breathed out at the end of a guffaw.
“It was done for. I tried to put it back together, but it was never the same again, and my mother wouldn’t let me throw it away for a long time. Every time I saw it, it upset me, but I never cried about it again.”
“Wow, I wish I had stories like that. Most exciting thing ever happened to me was I flipped my mag-lev in a lev race once.”
“You wreck it?”
“No, that’s the thing, I had put an Interceptor drive in it. You know, like the cops have?”
“The one that give you z-axis acceleration? Aren’t those illegal?”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was it was an illegal lev race, and the people I was racing with didn’t know about the Interceptor. Thanks to the Interceptor, they couldn’t beat me over the speed humps in the ave we were doing the laps on. I had hustled them out of a keel-load of creds. I hit a refuse bin that someone had moved into a blind corner on one of the laps and lost my y-axis. Only when I flipped over, my lev just floated there upside down.”
Cyrus’s mouth was open, his face frozen in a look of confusion.
“What?” Dr. Jang was not sure what to make of the face.
“I’m trying to figure out how that’s less interesting than beating a Novitiate with a vid runner.”
“Actually it gets better. So they were about to flip their lids—and these were some pretty serious ggangpe. I mean cut off your hand and send it to your next-of-kin type guys. And they speed over to me and I’m just floating there like something out of an old time two-D sci-fi vid. So I hit the throttle and flew out of there upside down. Well, apparently, someone had called the sniffers on the comm and I fly past the speed trap upside-down with four tweaked-out mag-levs behind me. Evidently, the sniffers thought it was the race so they rounded everyone up and hauled them in.”
Now Cyrus was laughing, holding his chest. “So you got gaffled?”
“You see, that’s the thing, I had disabled the sat-link in the lev so they couldn’t track me, and I flew into the hovel district—still upside-down mind you—and hid inside a bombed out factory. I was so freaked out, I didn’t turn the lev right-side up until I got back into my own district.”
Cyrus inhaled deeply then exhaled to settle his lungs as Dr. Jang finished his story. “You sure are a wonder. How many times have you had run-ins with the magistrate?”
“None. They never catch me. My lev was too fast and had too many dirty tricks on it—shifting license code, a speedcam jammer, and I had a deck that would automatically make my lev-rec look clean if they tried to access it within a kilometer of my lev.”
“Never expected any of this from you. No offense.”
“The sniffers never did either. That was the beauty of the whole deal. I still contend, with the right set up, a Metriculant could get away with murder in the Uni.”
“Or, at the very least, vehicular manslaughter.” They both had a long laugh until the door opened and Dr. Cohn and Dr. Hassan entered, engaged in their own heated conversation.
Cyrus let his laughter subside as he collected his ephemeris and moved to his regular seat. Dr. Jang’s laughter left more quickly, and as Cyrus sat in his seat, Dr. Jang stowed his own ephemeris under the table. “You okay?” Cyrus asked, noting the change in Dr. Jang’s expression.
“Yeah, I was just thinking, the smell I’m probably going to miss most of all, is the smell of peppermint air freshener and ozone from a tweaked lev drive.”
Cyrus leaned back in his chair and grinned, “I bet. But I’m sure you won’t miss the smell of coffee and sweetbars on some angry magistrate’s breath.”
• • • • •
“Shouldn’t you be flying the ship or something?” Cyrus scoffed, trying to catch his breath.
“The ship flies on its own beta monkey, at least until we get planet-side, which is more than I can say for all the flotsam you’ve been talking.” It took Commander Azariah Uzziah longer than it should have to realize Cyrus was joking.
“Well, since I can’t let my game speak for me, I guess I’ll just have to keep up the pro se flotsam.” Cyrus lifted the Kantistyka puck into the air and prepared to serve. It began to hum as it left his hand and it hovered on its own. He swung his arm, trying his best to snap his wrist and not use his shoulder as Uzziah had just instructed him, but he leaned in too much and connected with the puck in an awkward swipe.
Cyrus and Tanner were losing two to four to a solo Uzziah. And one of their two points had been because Cyrus had botched a volley so badly that the Commander stopped to see if Cyrus had injured himself.
The puck moved forward at an undesirable speed and in a direction even less desirable. Uzziah ran up to the puck and hit it back. It still moved as if it were underwater but moved too fast for either Cyrus or Tanner to get his paddle in front of it. Cyrus dove, extended his paddle, and connected with the puck. It wasn’t a graceful dive, and Cyrus bruised something in his leg when he landed, but the puck bounced up slightly then hovered and settled back to chest height. Even though Tanner was not fully acclimatized to the sport of Kantistyka, he moved with all the agility of a race-bred uberhound. Without hesitation, he sent the puck back toward Uzziah before it came back to full hover. Agile as he was, his abilities were still sophomoric, and his volley, albeit faster than Cyrus’s serve, missed its mark completely.
Commander Uzziah almost overran the puck, which was losing momentum as it reached him, but he spun his body around completely and backhanded it. The electronic puck absorbed some of the force and countered it, but the motion of the swing carried it across the centerline at a constant, and rather swift, speed. It was so swift that it sped past Cyrus and Tanner and came to an abrupt stop just outside the boundary line of the court.
Tanner retrieved the puck and reared his arm back to serve, but stopped before he swung his paddle. “You are pretty sharp. Especially considering you came out of the Hyposoma only a little while before the rest of us.”
“I hated what it felt like coming out of there. It was like someone transplanted my brain into the body of a sick and awkward thirteen year-old boy. I’ve been working out every day cycle since I got out of that jetwashed machine.” Uzziah looked like he wanted to spit, but he held it in. “Took the whole six month cycles since to gain back half of what I lost.”
“You should come to train with us in my martial arts class,” Tanner invited, relaxing his paddle. Cyrus looked at Tanner as he spoke, noticing the slight raise of his eyebrows and the little wrinkle on his forehead that formed when he was hatching some plan in chess. It usually came to naught when Tanner played against Cyrus, but Cyrus knew it was a sign that he had to be on his best game. But here, Cyrus was bewildered at what Tanner was playing at.
“Thank you for the invite, but I prefer training in solitude,” Uzziah smiled the forced smile of a man who had not been afforded many smiles in his life.
“You train in Mao do Justo?” Tanner asked.
Uzziah’s eyes widened and he lowered his paddle. He seemed more excited than surprised, but at the same time, a little hesitant. “What makes you ask that?” he asked.
“For starters, the way you stand and carry yourself says you’re not standard military. Also, the idea that you will have to spend the rest of your life with shipload of eggheads seems to be enough to unsettle you, but not enough to unnerve you. That gives me the impression you’ve been in situations like this before; situations where you have to spend a lot of time blending in with people you don’t find so stellar.” Tanner folded his arms and faced Uzziah, making eye contact across the court. “Also, this exp
edition is too important to the Uni itself, and the stat counters Earth-side would not have sent us off without a chaperone.”
Uzziah rubbed his chin. The pause was brief, but it was filled with something far more pleasant than tension, yet entirely too charged to be called ordinary. Tanner and the Commander maintained their eye contact until Cyrus broke the brief silence. “Am I missing something here?”
“The Unified Nations’ Reconnaissance and Infiltration Force trains their members in a specialized technique that takes all of the more vicious elements of Jujitsu, Muay Thai, and Krav Maga, all under the veil of Vale Tudo, and distills them into a highly efficient and deadly martial art called Mao do Justo. Apart from an obvious, and somewhat understandable, distaste for the matriculated, I am sure Commander Uzziah’s apprehension to training with us is due to the fact that he does not want to alarm anyone with his hitherto social position on Earth by exposing his highly characteristic martial training. Is that about right?”
“You seem to have taken offense,” the Commander said, a little more stern now, but disarmed.
“Maybe to the subterfuge,” Tanner relaxed more himself, “but a man has a right to keep his past to himself until it becomes important. Besides, there is no way you could send a message to, or receive a message from, Earth as far as I am aware, which makes spying on us is out of the question. And that’s assuming I actually did buy into the false image of privacy on a craft of this importance to humanity’s future.”
Uzziah laughed. It was a short-lived laugh, but it was honest. “I knew there was something about you Tanner—it was definitely not your Kantistyka game—but if there is anything I did learn in the R.I.F., it’s to know when someone has you on their gram, and above all else, to respect it.” The Commander raised his paddle impatiently, “Now can we lay this game to rest, because Villichez wants me to go to more of his little egghead dinners, and I don’t want him giving me the stink-eye for coming in late.”
five
• • • • •
—Dada, do you ever think we’ll cross the light speed barrier thingy?
—I think one day we might, but I’m not sure how.
—Why not? What is so hard about it?
—Well, the amount of energy needed is a problem. You remember what mass is, right?
—It’s the amount of something in something. Like how many molecules something has.
—Exactly. The closer something gets to light speed, the more mass it has. And the amount of energy needed to push that thing is increased. Nothing in this universe the size of an atom or larger can move at that speed because it would have an infinite mass.
—And that would mean you would need an unlimited amount of energy to keep pushing it.
—Exactly. Out of curiosity, why do you ask?
—Well, in class today, Miss Hasabe taught us about electrons and protons and neutrons and stuff. And she sent us a page on our decks that talked about how electrons can be in two places at once if they are run through a slit. It also said that if you tried to look at either side, the electron would kind of choose that side because you looked at it. I was thinking that if electrons could be in two places at once, why couldn’t a spaceship?
—Well, unfortunately, the bigger things get, the less they follow those rules, and a spaceship is a lot bigger than an electron.
—Yeah that’s the same thing Miss Hasabe said. But then on the ride home, I was thinking, what if we could make the big thing forget it was big for long enough to send it through a special kind of slit. If we could look at it once it went through the slit, it would remember the way it was supposed to be, and also it would have to pick that side.
—You know, you may be on to something Dari. We have known for some time now that energy and matter are really just the same thing at different vibration levels.
—Strings, right Dada?
—Good, so I see you do pay attention.
—Well, honestly you’re more interesting than Miss Hasabe, but I like it when she talks about the things you talk about.
—We may not be able to make the matter forget that it is matter, but really large objects exert a kind of pressure on the universe around them, generating gravity. Near gravity, matter acts a little differently.
—So do you think, somehow if we could create pressure like that on the space around the ship, we might be able to make it do stuff it normally couldn’t do?
—Yeah, maybe. But we would somehow have to create an immense amount of gravity around the ship. We can create gravity waves, but nothing I know of can do that in this day and age.
—Well, people find new ways to do stuff all the time.
—True, but it never seems to be when you want it. But I guess if people didn’t get tired of wanting it, it would never get invented.
—Yeah, well, I think if you and I can think of it, that someone somewhere else can too, and maybe they can build it.
—I’d like to think that Dari, but sometimes I think it takes a simpler mind, not less intelligent, but less… bogged down I guess, to get it right sometimes. Between the two of us, I think we might be able to figure out anything given enough time.
—Yeah, me too… I like that idea, Dari and Dada can figure out anything given enough time.
—That does have a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
• • • • •
For the past few day cycles, the ship seemed colder than ever. Cyrus found himself on many day cycles venturing to the Activity Room just to feel the warmth of the suncasters. This odd chill had kept him curled up in his bunk, tossing and frustrated, until the notion of sleep seemed like an idle promise. He had made his way to the codex to occupy his mind and settle the thoughts that now shambled through his brain like refugees from some cold war.
He sat at the datadeck looking for something to read. There was someone else in the codex, at one of the datadecks sheltered by a cubicle, but Cyrus took very little notice of him. Whoever it was, as far as Cyrus knew, returned the favor. Cyrus’s face was bathed in a cool green as the words scrolled by in the air in front of him. He expanded the display field to include synopses as the titles of various works of fiction scrolled by. He searched this way for about an hour, disturbed at the fact that the summaries he was reading were so trite there was an obvious pattern. After a while, he realized there was a genre feature that had locked him into the mystery genre. He used the feature to switch to science fiction and flipped through a few titles before he realized that just a minute or two of pseudoscience would frustrate him well beyond his current point, and in deciding it was not even worth the risk, he shifted to non-fiction. He selected philosophy and cycled through works until one caught his eye—The Tao de Jing, The Way of Life. The deck offered several different translations other than its original Chinese, and even five different Commonspeak translations. Cyrus selected the first Commonspeak version and sat back in his chair as the holographic monitor morphed into an image of a book and opened to the foreword written by the translator. He repeatedly touched the upper outside corner of the image and the page turned with each tap until he reached the beginning of the actual text.
Cyrus perused the lines of each verse, tapping his way through the pages. The words seemed particularly insightful, and much less pretentious than he had, in his own ignorance, expected. He tapped through to another page and verse twelve grabbed his attention and held him there transfixed in contemplation:Colors blind the eye.Sounds deafen the ear.Flavors numb the taste.Thoughts weaken the mind.Desires wither the heart.The Master observes the worldBut trusts his inner vision.He allows things to come and go.His heart is open as the sky.
Cyrus sat staring at the page, the words swirling around the ether of his mind, spiraling and winding, and as they wound, a hint of warmth sparked to life. As evanescent as it was unexpected, the ember of hope was eclipsed by the mixture of words and ideas that now clouded his thoughts. Whatever epiphany had been imminent, was now lost in an unctuous gel of frustration and doubt. Self-
accusation took the place that had been opened up for the lost revelation. He had taken his life for granted and had given it away. In return, this cold, sterile coffin was what he had received. What had been unclear to him before now rushed to the surface like pus from a previously unnoticed abscess.
As sleep was well beyond his grasp now, Cyrus attempted to center himself and continued to read. Suddenly, a biting caterwaul severed the quiet of the codex. “Miching gesheki!” Cyrus was yanked from his self-loathing by the outburst. Hairs stood at attention as gooseflesh spread across his body. He had no idea what those words meant, but they were far from exultation. As Cyrus stood, someone pounded the desktop of one of the cubicles. Cyrus moved toward the disturbance and noticed the previously quiet person who shared the codex. Whoever the scientist was, he now held his head in almost cartoonish distress as he mumbled some other guttural curse at his datadeck.
Cyrus rounded the chest-high divider that separated the cubicles from the rest of the codex. When the cubicle became visible, Cyrus noticed holographic images writhing wildly on the table top in front of the datadeck. The scientist at the cubicle, with his shoulder-length hair and onyx-set pinky ring, was now recognizable as Dr. Jang. “Are you okay?” Cyrus asked, keeping his distance to lend privacy to Dr. Jang’s work.
Dr. Jang reeled around, both startled and embarrassed. As he turned, he pressed a holographic button, freezing the writhing figures in place. The figures in Cyrus’s view were now distinguishable as armored men with spears who were riding horses in a combat formation. Cyrus could see a mixture of fatigue and anxiety in his eyes as Dr. Jang tried to form jumbled thoughts into words, “I… I…”
Cyrus smiled, “My son plays that game a lot. Conquest of the Ages, right?” The anxiety in Dr. Jang’s eyes subsided and gave way to yet more fatigue. Dr. Jang let out a sigh that turned into a chuckle as he turned and slid his chair back, revealing the frozen battlefield on the table.