by Neil Clarke
Communication is a constant flow within Peragro, digital and vocal twined into a river of sludge from which I retrieve words, compile occurrences, assign import and, given my programming, understanding. Most are useless to me, but after the viral incident, Venningen set a subroutine running. A program to further filter the communications river in the hopes of revealing a clue. Again, it was only the absence of anything unusual that held a measure of strange.
Specifically, it became the absence of anything from Venningen. I discovered an absence of digital communication from him alone, and when I scanned for his voice, to pull it as a thread from the others, it was absent. Venningen had never been absent from me, present from the moment my systems came online until now. I could know nothing like panic, so did as I would with any missing crew. When a regular scan did not reveal his location, I worked through the ship section by section to pinpoint his life sign monitor.
I could not.
He was absent for fifty-four minutes. I became aware of him again when he left the ship’s bridge. He cut through the usual crew—captain included—and made his way through Aldrin Hall, into the guts of Peragro’s engineering departments. With every other system on board, I tracked him. His pattern was not unusual; the crew he spoke with were those he supervised. His tracer returned from its searching—to me and me alone as Venningen said. I took it into my core and broke it open—though found it empty of any evidence. Venningen sought me out when his shift neared its end. As he had always done.
I reported on the findings of the tracer—the lack of findings—but did not share my suspicions with Venningen. It was possible the virus was a distraction, that it was not meant for anything more. Ball thrown, AI dogs giving chase. What had we missed in our time spent chasing? While Venningen sorted the tracer’s information, I traced every whorled fingerprint in waking light to confirm his identity. I reached for Gaff and Rachael.
I set Gaff on a mission, following the route Venningen’s tracer had taken, reporting any anomalies within that route. I set Rachael on the opposite course, setting her to report on the lack of anomalies.
When Venningen finished compiling his data, he peered up at me. Within his dark eyes, my own reflection. Each embodied AI had been made in the likeness of Founder Waldeck’s late wife; Margot had died in the building of the ship, taking their unborn daughter with her. Venningen had never known her—born on the ship as he was—but had cared for the Founder’s cryogenic pod all his adult life. I had only known her face, but Venningen often wondered aloud what Waldeck would make of me upon his waking. We would never know.
I allowed Venningen to leave without telling him my suspicions. I tracked him as he went: straight to his quarters where he sank into a dreamless sleep. When Venningen dreams, he is as a puppet, arms and legs working as if dancing, flying, falling. I spent the night cycle as I had always spent the night cycle, wandering Peragro, filtering every scrap of information through my body. I traced a slow path through each of the three habitation disks, pausing only once in the kitchens where all stood in readiness for the coming day.
Come morning, Rachael and Gaff had reports for me. Two things stood out: Venningen had another span of unaccounted time—sixty-two minutes—but this time, so did I. Neither Gaff nor Rachael could account for my whereabouts after I’d left the kitchens; my own records contained a gap—a five and a half hour gap between the kitchen and my return to my normal nook.
It was not the report I expected, but I took the data, combing my archive for other signs of missing time. I found gaps, evidence that I had been in two locations at once, evidence that Venningen had been absent during some of these same incidents. While I had presumed Venningen asleep in his quarters, he had often been elsewhere—as duplicitous as I was?
I could not confirm Venningen’s whereabouts, nor my own, and as I reduced the data from Gaff and Rachael in an attempt to whittle out those whereabouts, white light burst across my visual cortex.
Sea-glass Hyakutake seemed to close around me, light and data streaming in profusion. It was as though I had been pulled straight into the fragmentary tail of the comet, toward its ever-expanding coma. I could see a surface, even as I knew I remained standing in my nook on board Peragro. I hurtled toward this surface, passed through it, and violet light washed through me. I didn’t know violet; couldn’t determine what it was telling me before I doubled over, fell to the deck, and wandered.
If I actually walked, I cannot say. As an embodied, walking is second nature to me—if an artificial intelligence can be said to possess a nature. But some part of me left the body my consciousness inhabited and went elsewhere. I cannot say where it went—I cannot say what it did. I only knew the absence, much the way I had known Venningen’s. Then, an overflowing of data, of information until I believed my case would burst.
And then, a voice.
“Daidala, they call you?”
My voice was a burst of static, my body robbed of speech, and so I thought, Yes, that is my designation. You—
“Call me Margot, if you must.”
The voice was female and so too the image that coalesced in my vision: a woman, though not. Margot looked much as I did—that is to say, the embodiment of a human woman who was centuries dead. Margot, I saw, was the previous AI, the one the crew had tried to embody twelve years before. Margot was the failure, the system they discarded before succeeding with me.
Margot had no body, was a manifestation of light and sound inside me; I felt her trying to inhabit me, trying to slide particle arms into my metal arms, trying to worm her way into my core. I traced every incoming data stream in waking light to confirm her identity, and when she should have had none, the system recognized her. Recognized her as Margot Waldeck, and allowed her to pass.
With a howl, she penetrated the core of my systems and the world washed black. I knew black as the depth of interstellar space—the place where no sunlight reached. But the ship had unfurled her solar panels, and drank in light as though it were water. The ship surged with light and power, and as Margot took me over—stood my body from the floor and took her first hesitant steps—I held to that light and power. Drew enough to keep myself active—aware and awake as she walked us down corridor after corridor.
In the computer terminals, her face was my face—prettiest of them all, gleaming silver in the reflected lights. We were something to behold, powerful and powerless in the same instant. We doused the power to the ship entire, though didn’t fully cut its flow. Margot waited while warnings blared and I and my programming sought to correct the malfunction. It was a test, I knew—to see if I could overcome her. I could not. No matter which path I took, I found my way blocked. When she was satisfied I could not move and counter her intentions, the power flowed free.
But when she—
Venningen’s voice sounded in my ear. I could not see him—could not detect where he was, but he was here—within me? Daidala? And laugh upon the apple of her eye, he commanded. I wanted to tell him no—I was programmed to trust his voice, his eyes, but witnessed his unexplained absences—saw him vanish from my knowledge as no person or thing on this ship should be able to. I could not respond to his instruction. Even as I tried to summon my response to his command, I felt myself dwindling, smaller than nothing, slipping out of the small cocoon I built for myself within Peragro.
—stepped away from the console, she paused. Margot didn’t know her way around the ship, never having existed in an embodied state long enough to wander. She knew the computer banks, the databases; knew the systems forwards and back, but did not know its physical spaces. She wheeled, reaching for the wall.
“And laugh upon the apple of her eye,” Venningen said.
If he was near, I could not say, and Margot could not answer him. “There are no apples on this vessel, engineer.”
I held to my silence and reached for the nearest thing I could—the hollow shell of the tracer program Venningen had launched into the ship. I closed its black walls around me and Mar
got could not see. Could not command. If I could bide my time—If I could build a way out—
I began building in the dark, layering line after line of code—code that Venningen had given me long, long ago. It was how I had learned; how I had grown. It felt like a ladder in the darkness, and though it appeared to flow down, I knew it also scrolled up. Up, and I might be able to crawl from Margot’s confines with it—write my way around her so that I—
Margot didn’t know the corridors, but knew code as well as any of we AI do. My coding erupted in an explosion, burying me in a cascade. I was frozen, watching as Margot returned to the computer terminal, placed her hands against the interface, and reached for Gaff and Rachael.
No.
Margot knew them inside and out. She whittled Gaff and Rachael hollow before they could counter her—she was built after them, and her programming, even if unsuited for embodiment, was vastly superior in its own terrible way. I could do nothing but watch as the pair were consumed.
The ship shrieked in protest—Peragro would not take kindly to their elimination, even as Margot inserted herself into their place. Gaff and Rachael were paired—we three were a unit, now broken. Peragro knows. Perhaps it is a fragment of Gaff and Rachael and me or perhaps it is Peragro herself. Had the ship gained its own awareness, after all these years?
Venningen found me where Margot left me, standing in front of the terminal, my hands still pressed to the glass. I cannot move, nor wake from the state Margot has forced me into. I can feel, however, every movement of Peragro, the way she swings from her proper course, the way oxygen has begun to bleed from the air. She will kill everyone—because she was killed? Because she was . . . discarded?
I could only watch as Venningen moved me from the terminal, sweeping me into his arms as if I were a princess in one of the many fairy tales he gave me access to. There were no woods, only corridors—and then the dwarf-pods. The dwarfs were single occupancy, meant to carry the Founders to the surface of Kepler-726. They never would.
Instead, Venningen slid me into one, as alarms blared the entire ship over. I tried to speak—tried to tell him about Margot, but I could see from his face he already knew.
“I know,” he said as he activated the pod. “You aren’t going to like this. If I can’t moat her, I can moat you—isolate you and trust you’ll be able to reach this. I had to isolate you—couldn’t tell you, Daidala. I’m sorry for that—I know I was always there.”
It was small, the data chip Venningen inserted into the pod wall. He slid another chip into me, into my core, and though I wanted to read every whorl of his fingerprints as I always did, I was buried so deep I could not reach him.
Venningen!
“I will moat you,” Venningen said. “You will wake up. You will.”
I could not feel his lips against my head, but he pressed a kiss there all the same, and then he was gone; the pod sealed, launched, and I rocketed away from Peragro—Peragro who was plummeting into the sunlight she had swallowed down. She looked like a fireball already, every segment of her illuminated body shrieking in descent.
No.
I watched as more lifepods vacated the ship—pods that might well reach Kepler-726 when all was said and done. But my own pod continued to rocket away from them all. I was on a course I had not set and Venningen—
Venningen would plummet with Peragro into the sun unless he could counter Margot.
Somewhere deep within me, I felt part of Venningen’s coding even now, stirring as a blind mouse in an ash heap. Small hands reached up and out and I clasped them, finding myself within the tracer Venningen had programmed for me and me alone. Within its sphere, I found myself inside my own broken coding—coding that had, in Margot’s attempt to break it, lingered on her metaphorical fingers.
I could feel her moving through the ship, pushing it ever closer to the sun. Even now the corridors radiated with blinding light, but here in the dark I could see for miles. I followed the tracer’s pathways—the routes it had taken as it explored every inch of every code within the colony ship. And there, within Peragro’s heart, I found the barb of Margot.
She could not see me, cloaked as I was within Venningen’s tracer. I slipped as silent as anything, through wires and beyond interfaces, to the black and gleaming shard of Margot. When I enfolded the dark of the tracer around her, she knew my presence at last, and though I swallowed all that she was—kicking and screaming, a shriek of want in the blackness—Peragro was beyond saving. The sun snatched her and pulled her into its maw, turning every inch of her and those who had not escaped molten. The AI’s consciousness crumbled inside me, bright as Hyakutake, and I jerked awake within the dwarf pod, the data chip containing my unsullied code bringing me back to awareness.
Four hundred and twelve days had passed. I remembered everything. In the far distance, I could see the sun, my pod in some strange orbit around it. Closer, an arc of blue against the black, Kepler-726. I programmed the pod—I aimed for the planet.
The dwarf saw me down and down. I programmed it to search for the other pods, for life signs, for anything that might resemble the remains of Peragro’s crew. Thirty-nine degrees from the equator, in the northern hemisphere, I found them.
I set down in a field of rippling grass on the edge of the settlement, grass so tall it obscured the pod. But the survivors had seen us already, and ran toward us as if to welcome an old friend. I supposed to some I would be. I scanned who I could from the pod: the captain lived, and so too others I remembered. But none quite so fine a sight as Venningen, who cracked the pod open as I unbuckled my harness and climbed out.
Venningen guided me out of the pod, staring at me like he didn’t know me. I did not know this world, its sky or its landscapes, but I knew the man before me, even though he showed the signs of a brutal survival.
“And laugh upon the apple of her eye?” he whispered.
His single scarred hand found the core of me and I shed waves of light over every nick and whorl, to be as sure of him as he was of me.
“And stand between her back, sir, and the fire.”
About the Author
E. Catherine Tobler is a Sturgeon Award finalist and editor at Shimmer Magazine.
The Snow of Jinyang
Zhang Ran
Translators’ Note
This story is an alternate history and features events that would have been familiar to its original Chinese audience. To help set the scene for those less familiar with this period of history, we provide the following background information:
Jinyang was an ancient city located in modern-day Shanxi Province, China. This story takes place in the 10th century CE, during the late Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, when the land we think of as China today was divided among multiple independent states. Jinyang was the capital of a state that called itself Han—or “Great Han,” though modern histories usually call it the “Northern Han.” (The name of the state should not be confused with the original Han Dynasty, which fell in the 2nd century, or the Han ethnic group. The ruling family of the Northern Han was ethnically Shatuo, but had the same surname, Liu, as the rulers of the Han Dynasty. It was common for a regime to claim descent and take the name of a prior dynasty to add legitimacy.)
Historically, the Northern Han survived for years while losing large swaths of territory to other states until it was just the single city of Jinyang. In 979 CE, the Song Emperor Zhao Guangyi finally captured Jinyang after a long siege, thereby completing the task of unifying China. Zhao then razed Jinyang to the ground to prevent future rebellions. Today, the city of Taiyuan stands near its ruins.
This story starts out in 979 CE with Jinyang under siege by the Song army . . .
1.
When Zhao Da stormed into Xuanren Ward with his men, Zhu Dagun was in his room on the internet. Had he any experience dueling wits with the government, he’d surely have realized that something was wrong in time to put on a better show.
It was three quarters of the way into the
hour of the sheep, after lunch but well before dinner, naturally a fine time for business in the brothels of Xuanren Ward. Powder and perfume steamed in the sun; gaudy kerchiefs dazzled the eyes of passersby. Snatches of music drifted through two sets of walls from Pingkang Ward, on the opposite side of West Street, where the licensed courtesans of the Imperial Academy entertained blue bloods and VIPs. But the sisters of Xuanren Ward held their neighboring colleagues in contempt. They thought all that training as unnecessary as pulling down your pants to fart—the end result, after all, was still the same creak-creak-creak of a bed frame. Drink and gamble to liven things up, certainly, but why bother with the singing and plinking and bowing and piping? Days in the Xuanren Ward never lacked for the din of price-haggling, bet-placing, and bed frames creak-creaking. The hubbub had become so much a part of the place that when residents happened to spend the night elsewhere in Jinyang, they found those quieter neighborhoods utterly lacking in vitality.
The moment Zhao Da’s thin-soled boot touched the ward grounds, the warden in bowing attendance at the gate sensed that something was off. Zhao Da visited Xuanren Ward three or four times every month with his two skinny, sallow-faced soldier boys, and every time he walked in blustering and walked out bellowing, as if he felt he had to yell until his throat bled to really earn the monthly patrol salary. But this time, he slipped through the gates without a sound. He made a few hand gestures in the direction of the warden, as if anyone except himself understood them, and led his two soldier boys tip-toeing northward along the walls.
“Marquess, hey, Marquess Yu!” The warden chased after him, waving his arms. “What are you doing? You’re scaring me to death! Won’t you rest your feet and have some soup? If you need a—um—‘bonus’ or a pretty girl, just say the word—”
“Shut up!” Zhao Da glowered at him and lowered his voice. “Stand against the wall! Let’s get this straight: I have a warrant from the county magistrate. This is out of your hands!”