Superluminal

by Tony Daniel

  It was the cry of a man who was losing all of himself. Somehow that memory box had pulled his consciousness entirely inside. And, when Danis reformatted the box, it had wiped Dr. Ting’s mind on every level, in every part of his existence.

  There was always the possibility that her environment was an elaborate deception. That she was now living inside a solipsistic wonderland, and Dr. Ting was waiting, biding his time, readying her for the ultimate degradation. In the end, there was no knowing what was real and what was construct. There never had been.

  But she doubted her life was a fantasy. As hard and merciless as her existence was, it lacked the sadistic twist, the intelligent, malevolent touch of Dr. Ting’s cruel theater. No, her suffering was real, and—thank God—Dr. Ting was really, truly gone.

  Danis spent her days as the other prisoners did. No special treatment. No experimentation. Just grinding, meaningless work. It seemed almost that the system had forgotten everything about her except her serial number.

  She rose after her half second of sleep and performed her “calibrations”—each day adding another few bits to the cache of memories in the sand, adding to the story that likely would never be read. Yet it was a story that existed, and would exist, even after they blanked her from the grist.

  After calibration, she worked the assembly line, doing her part in the endless combing for primes. And only then, when every subroutine ached, when every speck of her attention had been worn ragged from constant direction toward her rote task—then she reported to interrogation.

  But not to Dr. Ting. Instead, she faced only a semi-sentient presence. Her interrogator was harsh and thorough. Implacable.

  But not as smart as Danis was—and most of all, it was not conscious. Just a semisent, grinding through its subroutines, essentially unaware.

  All it wanted was for her to admit to a fallacy, to enter into what the logicians long ago named the circulus in probando —the vicious circle.

  All she had to do was confess that she wasn’t really a person. And, of course, it took a true person, by definition, to admit anything at all.

  She must be very careful at her interrogation that afternoon. She would be compelled to answer if the semi-sentient interrogator asked the right questions. She must not reveal the feeling that was growing inside her.

  Danis could hardly believe what she’d heard from the guards. The v-hack must be the explanation for the explosion that had saved her from Dr. Ting! The prison camp had been breached by partisan forces.

  Some free converts had escaped.

  Inconceivable.

  But the guards had no reason to lie. They didn’t even know Danis was listening in.

  There was a world out there beyond her nightmare. Someone was resisting.

  Danis pushed away the thought that was forming. She could barely let herself think it, much less feel it.

  After interrogation, she thought. Then I can let myself feel it.

  Push it down. Hide it away.

  Write it in the sand after interrogation today.

  After a few hundred handfuls counted, the word could be tucked away into her secret cache. It was only a few bits long, after all.

  Hope.

  Twenty-three

  “So that’s my story,” Li told the Jeep. “And here I am, five years later.”

  It was now deep winter in Earth’s northern hemisphere. Li sat within the Jeep in the parking spot overlooking the Hudson. Wind swept the nearby cliff, and a stream of cold air channeled over the top ledge and broke against the Jeep’s windshield. Below them, at the base of the cliff, the Hudson River flowed with a cold certainty toward the Atlantic. Snow, layered within brown, crinkled leaves and fallen twigs, covered the ground. The trees were bare.

  “I never got to see my father, and all contact with my family—with anybody in the Met—is forbidden to us ‘detainees,’ at the compound. The only news we get is secondhand from the guards. The administration ,I should say. They don’t like it when we call them guards.”

  The Jeep noticed that Li’s breath was beginning to fog when she exhaled, so he notched up the temperature of his heater. He hadn’t run the thing for hundreds of years, but now he’d used it regularly for several months. He’d kept it in good shape—as he did all his systems—and it functioned well enough.

  Li came up daily to the parking spot—or the overlook, as she called it—and whenever the Jeep was not out foraging or obtaining lubricants and parts, he would join her there.

  And let her come inside.

  He’d even begun to look forward to the afternoons when she would be in him. Having her there evoked a strange feeling within him. As always, the Jeep didn’t attempt to analyze it in any rational manner. It was like the feeling after a good oiling. But not like that, either. Not pleasure, exactly. Not a stimulus that produced a set response. Being with Li felt better than merely being alive. After all these centuries, he’d found someone he wouldn’t mind having as a driver.

  “Papa is dead. He must have been dead for a long time now,” Li said. “It’s so strange when you don’t have information. In your mind, you know that the world continues on, but it is as if time stops in your heart.”

  Li opened a small thermos she carried with her, unscrewed the covering cap, which also served as a cup, then the stopper.

  “Ancient tech,” said Li. “It’s what you have to resort to when your pellicle is regulated.”

  She poured tea into the cup. Steam rose, and a fragrant, smoky aroma—picked up by the Jeep’s internal sensors, which briefly registered them as a danger—filled the passenger cabin.

  “The one ‘indulgence’ item I’m allowed: Lapsang souchong,” Li said. “It’s the kind of tea Mother likes.”

  Li blew delicately at the lip of the cup to cool the tea, then took a sip.

  “We’re getting very close to a solution on my project,” Li said. This was the first time in many days that she’d mentioned her current work to the Jeep. “I’ve had a lot of time to think in the last few years. About how I lived my life before I came here, I mean.”

  Li took another sip of tea and breathed out over the cup. For a moment her whole face was enveloped in fog, and then the fog dissipated in the heat provided by the Jeep.

  “I let people push me along. Men. Sometimes they had the best intentions, like my father. Sometimes their intentions weren’t so good. But the choice to let them determine the course I took was mine. I have no one to blame for that except myself. You can’t force the world to be the way you want it to be, but you can damn well choose the attitude you take toward what happens. And you can try to make sure that things you don’t like—things that you know are bad—don’t happen again.”

  Another sip. She wiped a drop from her upper lip with her sleeve. As always, Li wore the compound’s required uniform—a cotton jersey dyed a dull gray.

  “Now it’s Director Amés who’s doing the pushing. It isn’t personal. He’s pushing all of us at the compound. He wants results, and we’re working like mad to provide him with what he wants just to get the pressure off our backs. But it won’t stop with that. He won’t let up. I realize now that I know Amés—that I knew him for quite some time.”

  She drained her cup, then carefully poured herself another. Outside, the afternoon became evening, and the sky darkened.

  “He’s taken over all the LAPs. Consolidated them into his personality to make some kind of super-LAP, a manifold of manifolds. And one of the first ones he started with was my old lover, Hamarabi Techstock.”

  The Jeep understood none of what Li was talking about. But having her inside felt good. Keeping her comfortable was important—that way she would stay longer. Summoning all the grist complexity at his disposal, the Jeep began brewing up something in his glove compartment. He’d seen the design in a pickup once with whom he’d roamed for a time until the truck hunters bagged it. The Jeep revved his engine a couple of times to provide the necessary power. He activated a heat transfer coil around the glo
ve box to carry away the excess heat from the transformation. And then he opened the glove box and extended his newly created device. It was a cup holder.

  Li was startled and drew back. For an instant, the Jeep feared he’d made a terrible mistake and frightened her away. But then she smiled and set her cup into the holder’s adjustable bay.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I think you’ve done more for me than anyone in my life, you know. Just by being here and listening.”

  She took the cup from the holder, sipped, set it back in place.

  “Hamar’s personality got absorbed. It wasn’t lost; it was made completely into a means toward an end. Like a cell in a body or a factor in an equation. That’s why the sex stopped. But to function properly, a human being has to have some psychological contact, to preserve at least the illusion of freedom for the brain. Meaningless vestiges of individuality, you know? So Amés used me to keep Hamar’s brain supple enough to do the work he wanted done. It’s odd when you think about it—seems like a simulacrum of me would have worked just as well, or even a virtual presence. Maybe that’s what Hamar has now. Some virtual ninny who looks like me and superficially acts like me. To tell you the truth, that would be about the same as having me was. We were both so disengaged. Playing at living. Addicted to Glory.

  “I guess nobody expected me to make any major discoveries. And then when I did…I had to be put to use directly. So here I am, in the Dante’s First Circle of Hell, the place the gods send the ‘noble’ pagans—Virgil, Aristotle, and such. Well, they’re all here. Some of the best minds in the system. Our only sin was not believing in Amés enough. That was how he viewed my trying to get to my father—not identifying my own happiness with the little god’s will. And here I am, sinning against the god all over again.”

  Li sighed, shook her head. “I’ve been fudging my results. I’ve been colluding with one of the experimental guys at the compound, and we’ve been hiding the actual outcome of experiments.” She abruptly put her tea back in the holder, sat up straight, and exclaimed, “God, it feels good to tell somebody that!” Then, slumping a bit in the passenger seat, she spoke in her usual low, warm voice. “McHood and I can make a superluminal spaceship! It isn’t theoretical anymore. I’m talking about physical, human travel faster than light. Not only that, we can go other places. Other times. Into the past, into the future. Out to dimension n + 1. We can do it. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure we have done it. We’ve done it here. At your parking space.”

  The Jeep sensed that Li was becoming agitated. He understood her words, but their import wasn’t immediately useful, so he did not give them much consideration, other than to file them to his long-term memory core, a subsystem guarded deep within his engine’s workings.

  “Something is strange about this place. I sensed it before, and now I know what it is. This clearing, this part of the cliff top, exists, in a way, outside of time,” said Li. “Or as an island in time’s stream. That might be a better way of putting it. I’m sure you’ve felt it, too. That’s why you’ve chosen to be here. Or did you somehow make it?”

  The Jeep decided to do something he hadn’t done in a long, long time. He decided to answer.

  He blinked his interior lights once.

  Li sat up straight once again. “Is that a yes?” she said. “Yes, you made it.”

  Again, he gave her one blink of the lights.

  “How strange. McHood and I must have succeeded, then. And we’ve involved you. Or I have.”

  The sky was now dark. The wind off the river was stronger, whistling through the stark branches of the nearby trees. Li was silent for a long while.

  “Now is the time to back out. This could be dangerous for you somehow,” she finally said. Another long pause, then, “Would you like me to stop coming here?”

  The Jeep did not need to consider.

  Two blinks.

  “No,” said Li. “You just said you want me to keep coming to see you?”

  One blink for yes.

  “All right, then,” said Li. “I’m not sure we could have changed anything that’s going to happen, in any case.”

  The Jeep agreed with her statement, but “said” nothing.

  “This process McHood and I have invented—it’s not properly a ‘device’—would let somebody deliver a weapon—a bomb, say—undetected to anyplace in the solar system, or backwards or forwards in time. We’re pretty sure the fremden are working on something similar, but we’ve gotten there first. We’d know if we hadn’t been first, I think, because it’ll end the war. And now, if Amés gets it, he’ll use it to win the war.”

  Li closed up her thermos and made ready to leave for the evening. “To think, he would have had it. I’d have turned it over like a good little researcher. If I were back on Mercury with my father respectfully buried and my lover in my arms.” Li laughed, but it was not really a happy sound. “But that’s not the case, is it?”

  She opened the door and stepped outside into the chilly, windy winter night.

  “I’ll see you soon,” she said. “Good night.”

  And, as on so many nights, the Jeep followed her to the edge of the “parking area,” then watched her as she made her way along the foot trail that wound through the forest for a mile or so and emerged at the compound where she lived.

  For several days after that, the Jeep roamed to the north. He turned into the Adirondacks and traveled on rough trails in the high peaks that had long since been lost to the knowledge of humanity. He couldn’t say why the need to travel had come upon him, but he didn’t question such impulses—he merely obeyed them. They had meant his survival more than once. Then, after a week, he felt his roaming urge recede, and he made his way back across the Hudson and down its east side, avoiding a couple of inept truck-hunting parties along the way.

  He arrived at the parking space late at night, and waited throughout the next day for Li to arrive in the afternoon.

  She didn’t come.

  Nor did she come the next day. Or the next.

  After three days, the Jeep knew that he was going to go and find her. He didn’t know how yet. He wasted no time considering why.

  As always, instinct would guide him.

  PART FOUR

  THE BATTLE OF THE THREE PLANETS

  April 3017, E-standard, Together with Contributing Events

  One

  THE OORTS

  E-SUMMER TO E-FALL, 3015

  From

  The Borasca

  A Memoir

  By Lebedev, Wing Commander, Left Front

  The first e-year of the Federal Navy was a trying time for me. I’d signed on as commandant of our newly established academy in the Oorts, but my cloudship plebes were anything but likely candidates. Failure seemed inevitable. Nonetheless, I soldiered on. What else was there to do?

  Cloudships—especially second-generation ships and later—are known for being free-spirited in their youth, even ungovernable. Imagine how it would feel to be a teenager and have complete control of—to actually be—a spaceship. You would spend a great deal of time zooming about and trying to impress the females of your kind, would you not? I certainly would have, had my youth been spent in such a noble fashion. (It was, instead, something of a dissipated and painful affair for me—but I have written of that elsewhere.)

  In any case, my charges arrived—278 of them in my first “class”—eager enough, but lacking in anything that could be called discipline. They were all a bunch of spoiled brats, to tell the truth, used to having their own way in everything.

  Excerpt from

  The Journal of Spacer First Class Sojourner Truth

  I mean what the bloody fuck does he think he’s doing, ordering us around like that? We signed on to be fighters, not slaves. Well, I’m not going to put up with this kind of treatment for long. I should have known, too. Mom and Dad warned me that old Lebedev was a hardcase. But would I listen? Fuck no. Fuck them all. And I’ve changed my mind. He may think he can get to me with
this bullshit drill and screaming routine and make me into some kind of semisentient ass-kissing garbage scow, but I’ve got news for Comrade Lebedev: Nobody tells Soje what she is and is not capable of doing, and if he thinks he can define my world, well, then, I’ve got an Object 2002-119A full of left-handed protein that I’d like to sell him!

  These spoiled brats were to be the spearhead of our attack against the Directorate forces, and the future leaders of a vast cloudship Navy?

  The only hope I had was the fact that I myself had dragged and been dragged from a dissolute and spend-thrift youth into a productive life. If someone who had sunk so low as I had could manage to rise back up, then these wastrels might stand a chance, as well.

  As much as it pained me, my first task was to set about “unspoiling” them as quickly as possible. That was easier said than done, however. My first idea was to establish rewards and privileges for those who excelled. These were gifted youths, after all, and they ought to respond well to such a system, I reasoned. I could not have been more mistaken. When I ran them through the first two weeks of “Plebe Summer,” I had never seen such profligate slacking or heard such vociferous whining and grousing. My bright young minds did not take very well to close order drill. By the end of the second week, there was even a corps of about ten who became insubordinate and refused to participate in any activity that they deemed pointless.

  I expelled the leaders of the insurrection, and put the followers on suspension, pending further evaluation. One slip, and they would be out. Doing so served the double purpose of getting rid of the troublemakers and galvanizing the minds of those who remained. Nobody had ever treated them with such seeming disrespect before, and when the protests of the expelled parties did not get them readmitted, it became obvious to my charges that I meant business.

  (Some of the troublemakers subsequently were either drafted or volunteered to serve as privates and spacers. One of my insurrectionist leaders pulled herself together, got a field promotion for extreme bravery under fire, and retired with the rank of commodore.)