The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

  She asked the captain to loiter and record for posterity, hoping to salvage some knowledge for the future. He told her she had two hours and left her alone on the bridge to keep watch.

  The holographic scry feed depicted a Gardener vomiting blighted magic into the water supply, and Boots sank to her knees. She lay down and reoriented the projections—couldn’t bring herself to stand for this. Watching the mighty creatures trample untold knowledge in a vicious battle for extinction, the weight of her failure pressed her to the floor.

  Humanity should’ve been able to send the best and brightest into that ship, not some lone-gun operation, desperately trying to prevent the species from tipping into a chasm at the hands of a few arrogant pricks. The apparently elite crew of the Capricious still had an edge as soldiers, but they were garbage archaeologists.

  She’d fallen in love with historical scholarship by accident, trying to reconnect with any family who’d survived the Famine War. She suffered an addiction to the stories and myths she unearthed. Now, try as she might to be the hero, she was forced to watch a piece of history die by her hand.

  If there’d been one merciful soul on that ship, they would’ve handed her a bottle, so she could knock herself out of her misery.

  Instead, it was Aisha, of all people, who came and sat beside her with a blanket and a cup of tea.

  “Please leave, okay? I am, uh, just barely holding it together right now, and if you touch me—”

  The pilot lay down beside her and covered her with the fabric. “I brought a pillow, too. I know what a vigil looks like.”

  “If you touch me,” Boots warned, teeth set, “I am definitely going to start crying.”

  Aisha placed a hand on Boots’s shoulder, and Boots folded into her arms, balled up and sobbing her eyes out.

  “We blew it up,” she mumbled, pulling the blanket over her nose so her face didn’t leak all over Aisha’s stylish nightclothes. “If we hadn’t come, we could’ve properly studied it.”

  “You know why I’m here, Boots?”

  “Because I’m in the way of your chair?”

  “No. In another life, I was a scholar. I thought geology was going to lead Arca into a new age of prosperity. More fuel for everyone. More food for everyone. And to do that, I studied the hell out of some rocks. That came into play today. We used my graduate training to coordinate the cavern survey from the bridge, and I was able to reconnect with a passion I hadn’t felt in a long time.”

  “That’s great,” said Boots. “Hope you got some good recordings.”

  “It was only a slice. Aside from the feeds from the Devil and the computer’s data cube, there isn’t a good record of the Vogelstrand.”

  “That’s what I was afraid you’d say.”

  “I saw some things on those surveys I’ve never seen on other worlds, Boots. New formations, maybe put there by potent magics. It was a new frontier. So one academic to another, I feel your pain.”

  “I’ve got to make up for this somehow.”

  “You can start by laying blame at Henrick Witts’s feet. He has to die, Boots.”

  “Yeah.”

  They lay in the light of the projections, and Aisha told Boots interesting facts about rocks until calm once again blanketed her. After an hour, the ship comm chimed.

  “We need to get underway,” said Cordell.

  “Yes, sir,” said Boots. “I’ll head down and have a look at the artifacts we recovered.”

  Stopping by her room to grab Kinnard and a bottle of Flemmlian Ten, Boots arrived at the mess, where they’d arrayed their meager spoils: four little drones, pieces of fifty more, and the massive data crystal from the Vogelstrand. A tumbler secured from the cabinet, she poured herself a brimming glass. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking after the insanity of their escape, and whiskey sloshed over her fingers.

  “What about Malik’s health directive?” asked Kin from her waistband.

  Boots had taken to clipping him onto her belt when she was around the common areas of the ship, but he wasn’t allowed to hear sensitive mission intel. The crystal’s frame had no imagers, so at least they didn’t have to hide anything from his sight. It was awkwardly large, and she kept banging him into things when she turned around.

  “How did you know I was drinking whiskey?” she asked.

  “It makes a corkage noise, and you’re not a wine drinker.”

  “Things to celebrate. Things to mourn.” She took a pull of whiskey into her mouth and swished it. “Besides, you ain’t connected to the network to narc on me anymore.”

  She’d asked about getting him a small robotic body, but Cordell had refused, strictly forbidding them from giving Kin any motor functions. “If Kin can interface with the world, he can interface with the ship,” he’d said, and Boots had to agree. On top of that, Orna reminded her that Kin’s virus would automatically attack any advanced equipment they put on him and burn it out.

  “That’s very fair, Boots,” said Kin, “and you deserve the whole bottle if you’d like it.”

  She paused before taking another sip. “You never call me Boots.”

  “I am not always myself.”

  “Kin, is your virus trying to give me a drinking problem?”

  “I’m afraid I wouldn’t want to speculate,” he replied, a phrase Boots recognized as Kin’s error message. “Boo-ts, I—Lizzie, I—Boots, I—”

  “Okay, bud.” She unclipped him from her belt and hit the mic mute button, deafening Kin to his surroundings, and she turned down his volume. “I’ll give you some time to get sorted.”

  Eventually, the virus would realize it was no good if it couldn’t talk or listen, and would give Kin his control back. It usually took about two minutes. She started to take another sip, but reconsidered and chucked the glass into the cycler. The fact that Witts’s killer virus wanted her to drink had ruined the flavor.

  Her cataloging supplies were arrayed at the table: imagers, labels, baggies, hermetic storage containers, and a wide variety of brushes and wire scrapers. At least she could do a better job cataloging these than she had preserving the Vogelstrand.

  A pleasant curiosity piqued inside her as she pulled on gloves and lifted the first drone to her eyes. Immaculate lines of ornate scrollwork encircled the little sphere: inlays of precious gems and rows of engraved glyphs. She hadn’t utterly failed to secure a piece of Originata.

  She wished they’d scored more of the little bots. Orna had smashed all of the rest to stop them from attacking her crewmates. Boots turned the little sphere over, examining the seams in its surface for any kind of purchase. The mechanists would want to take them apart for study, too.

  “Hey.” Boots looked over to find Alister standing in the doorway. “Is it lunchtime?” he asked.

  She shook her head and smiled. “Afraid not, kid. I don’t know how you can even think of eating after all that.”

  “After all what?”

  Heat prickled Boots’s cheeks. “Sorry we had to dose you.”

  Alister frowned. “Not sure what you’re talking about.”

  “When we knocked you out on the Vogelstrand,” said Boots.

  “Oh, well, I deserved it,” he said, but there was no recognition in his eyes.

  “Yeah,” said Boots. “Uh, what did the doc say when he cleared you?”

  He laughed. “‘Get back to work.’”

  “So nothing about short-term memory loss?’”

  “Nope. Hey, have you had lunch yet?” He walked past the banquet table where the bots were laid out and eyed them. “Some weird designs, huh? Why can’t Orna work on her bots at her workbench?”

  “These aren’t Orna’s,” said Boots. “They’re from the Vogelstrand, so they’re, you know, priceless artifacts.”

  He drew up short and peered down at them, obviously confused by their foreign shapes. Something like worry crept into his eyes, and for a moment, he seemed impossibly old to Boots. His memory lapses had gone on long enough, and she’d be having a word with Malik.
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  Then the worry blew away like a storm cloud, and Alister smiled. “Oh, I knew that. I just thought Orna would be coming to examine them.”

  “Alister! Where did you get to?” Jeannie rounded the corner, huffing. “Alister! Oh. Boots. I—Alister, it’s time for bed.”

  “You look like you were in a hurry,” said Boots, reclining in her chair.

  “I was coming back from the showers and I was just…” Jeannie looked to her brother. “… Just surprised that you disappeared on me. I thought you were going to bed, Alister.”

  He smacked his lips. “I’m pretty hungry.”

  “You just ate,” she said. “I’m going to walk you back to the bunks, and you’re going to take your medicine.”

  He shook his head, bewildered. “Oh. I—right. That’s right. I had that cake.”

  “Come on, Al,” Jeannie said, gently ushering him toward the door.

  Boots raised the bottle and offered a welcoming smile. “Jeannie! Come have a drink with me after.”

  The woman gave her an annoyed look, and Boots tried to drill her with an expression that said, I had better see you back here in ten.

  Tense minutes passed before Jeannie returned alone. She settled across from Boots with a long sigh.

  “Did you get him to bed?” asked Boots, pouring a glass for her.

  “Doctor Jan gave me some tranqs to use. We’ve been drugged too much today, but he needs rest,” she said, her tone pointed.

  “What was that?”

  “What was what?”

  Boots slid the glass across. “Don’t even start playing coy. You two get brain-drained by that ship, and your brother comes even funnier than usual. His memory lapses are getting bad, and we can all see it.”

  “He’s fine. This is normal.”

  “Normal? Look, I’ve seen a lot of brain injuries in my day and—”

  Jeannie snatched up the glass. “Yes. Normal. This is what happens when you put too much stress on him.”

  “I’ve never seen it this bad before.”

  She gulped the liquid and slammed the tumbler down, never breaking eye contact. “That’s because you don’t have to take care of him, Boots. None of you do.”

  “How did you know to come running after him?”

  “What?”

  Boots ran her finger around the lip of her glass. “When you got here, you knew something was wrong. How?”

  Jeannie looked away. “He… he gets a listless look. Can’t stop asking questions he ought to know the answers to.”

  “And you’ve been hiding it from us, keeping him in your room whenever he goes all funny.”

  “It’s not like that!”

  “We’ve all got damage. God knows I’m worse than most, but at least I know what time lunch is.”

  Jeannie’s nostrils flared. “I’ve got it under control.”

  “Yeah, until you don’t,” said Boots. “And don’t get all huffy. I’m on your side, but you need to recognize that we’re running one of the most classified, difficult operations of all time. We don’t keep secrets from one another. You get that? This could get someone killed.”

  “Come on, Boots—”

  “No. I’ve been patient with his quirks, and now I want you to tell me exactly what’s wrong with your brother.”

  “He… It’s fine… He—”

  Boots poured herself another glass and waited. She hated being the bad guy, but she’d be damned if she trusted Alister to have her back in a firefight until she understood exactly what was up with him.

  Jeannie tightly folded her hands into her lap and averted her eyes.

  “You said it was your fault before.” Boots’s voice was quiet, and she hoped, soothing.

  The look on Jeannie’s face told Boots that Jeannie wished she’d never shared that.

  “The night before the Masquerade mission, you told me it was your fault Alister was like this,” Boots said before Jeannie could try and change the subject. “Maybe you want to explain yourself?”

  Jeannie slid her empty tumbler toward Boots, who spied a tremble in her hand as she did. She then pulled a small case from her pocket and popped a few pills, washing them down with the booze, which couldn’t have been a good idea.

  The woman slumped and blew out a breath. “The chalet escape… never would’ve happened without me.”

  Boots had heard a bit about the place over their past adventures—the house on Blix where the Children of the Singularity had been engineering marks into people. Twins like Jeannie and Alister never should’ve had identical spells, which meant Witts’s experiments had met with some success.

  “It started out like a dream, what they did to us,” said Jeannie. “I woke up one day in this country boarding school, and Alister and I were told we’d just arrived from someplace distant. We knew how to speak, knew each other’s names, that we were siblings… When we asked where we came from, they’d always tell us the same thing: ‘no person truly knows where they come from.’”

  “And you bought that?” Boots laughed. “Look, I’m from Clarkesfall. I know which hospital and everything.”

  “Oh really?” asked Jeannie. “How well do you remember that day?”

  “Come off it. I was a baby.”

  “Right. And the only evidence you have that they weren’t lying about everything is an entry in a citizenship database. You assume your parents are yours. Everyone takes stuff on faith.”

  “Nothing that big.”

  “So you have personally observed that the universe is composed of atoms, that space is expanding, and time originated with a massive explosion, creating all energy in existence? That’s bigger than where I’m from, but I bet you take that scientific explanation on faith, because that’s a reasonable thing to do. I’m not criticizing you, but you obviously didn’t do all of the science yourself.”

  Boots nodded. “Fair point.”

  “My house was a beautiful estate on a wooded hill, many kilometers from our nearest neighbors. The food was good—simple, regulated to our dietary requirements. And they gave us lots of puzzles to solve, but you never knew when you were going to be tested. They’d play tricks on us—lock us in rooms, give us treats to go steal things from one another, make us find hidden objects in the ornate statues and gilding. My puzzles were tailored toward reading minds and finding secrets. It was fun at first.”

  Jeannie gave her a dark look. “I noticed that anyone who failed their tests too often was ‘sent home from school.’ I talked to the others, and they saw it happening, too. Alister didn’t believe me—said I’d made it up because I couldn’t stand to be happy. I had no memories of my past, yet I had the impression he’d always hated me.” She put her head in her hands. “Can you imagine? They could’ve programmed any memories they wanted into us, and they made us distrust one another?”

  Boots began fidgeting with one of the priceless rolling bots. Everything she’d heard about the chalet was bad.

  “I figured out that this one student, Jacob, was a plant. He was spying on me, reporting to someone I’d never met. I caught that boy, dosed him… and he became my first patient.”

  Boots narrowed her eyes. “‘Patient’?”

  “If you’re a reader, you can get at someone’s memories. If you’re good, you can extract them against people’s will.” Jeannie ruffled her hair. “If you’re really, really good, you can change them. I cracked Jacob’s mind open and made him tell them what they wanted to hear. But it… didn’t work out for him.”

  Boots swallowed a little more than she’d intended. “You what?”

  Jeannie sighed and took the bottle once more. “He climbed up the comm spire at the chalet and jumped off one morning at sunrise. I’d killed him, and in the end, the administrators had been counting on that. They told me they knew it was me.” Her green eyes locked on to Boots’s. “They’d wanted to see how far they could push me before I’d do something.”

  “And was it true? Did they want you to kill Jacob, or were they just bluffing?
”

  “Truth is relative. Did it matter? I was a success. They wanted to convince me I was their success,” she said, pausing to take a drink. “Alister and I were ‘promoted’ into their advanced school, and while I was scared, he took to it like a fish to water. They liked to make us spar, and Alister is pretty ruthless. There was a woman they used to control him—one of the instructors named Siobhán—he fell in love with her.

  “I bided my time, waiting for my opportunity to strike. I was compliant, efficient, perfect. I gathered my intelligence. I read Siobhán’s mind. Figured out that she didn’t care about Alister at all and was preparing him for their final test—a combat scenario that could’ve killed us both. And one day, I read something else from her: fear. She was afraid the cover on the chalet was blown, and they were going to move us.”

  “Look, I don’t know why you wouldn’t tell us this. Nobody on this crew would fault you for doing what you had to do to survive.”

  “Perhaps you should reserve your judgment just a little longer.” Jeannie’s eyes glistened, and she smiled.

  Boots silenced her next few words by draining her own drink.

  “I didn’t want to be alone, you understand. That’s why I did… that… to him.”

  What did you do, Jeannie?

  She smacked her lips. “I went to Alister’s room, and forced all the memories I had of Siobhán into his mind—the lies, the way she laughed at him whenever he wasn’t around, the way she’d turned him against me at every junction—the way he was just a thing to her. I gave him my anger and hatred and every other nasty thought I had about the chalet. And when I was done, he started crying, nodded once, and went to confront Siobhán in the sparring chambers.”

  Boots started to speak, but Jeannie silenced her with a palm.

  “He sliced her up, got her ID crystal, started unlocking the cages of the other experiments. She never saw it coming. The administrators made him so good at insurgency and killing, and he had an easy time destroying everything in his path.” She wiped her eyes. “He was really good at their tests.”