No one had asked who she’d meant, who hadn’t had a chance to vote. And apparently no one had guessed. Then again, how could they? Only someone who bucked convoy etiquette regularly, who visited the retired on “the grave ship,” could have conceived of such a plan.
Because the dead don’t vote.
“For what purpose?” Onuora asked evenly.
“I’m still looking for volunteers to crew a convoy,” Caz said. “Everyone was supposed to get a chance to volunteer. Everyone. The caretakers did. You did.”
“Yes, and you don’t know how we voted.”
The two women locked stares. The captain was offering Caz a challenge of some kind, daring her to . . . to what? “Meaning even if we reached a thousand, you wouldn’t honor the vote if the caretakers voted to stay?”
“That’s exactly what it means. You volunteered my ship without asking, Caz. Yes, it would be necessary to your mission, but you didn’t think about the fact that I either had to volunteer or lose my ship. And you know I would never give her up. Would never ask any of my crew to give her up.”
Caznal’s cheeks grew hot. She should have discussed this with Onuora, should have included her in the plan. “I’m sorry,” Caz said softly, as though it were only the captain and herself in the room. She’d just assumed—taken Onuora’s friendship for granted. She should have considered . . . When I.C.C. said that some people felt forced . . .
“You should be, and I appreciate the apology. But you should also be thanking me. Since I did volunteer to leave.”
The captain smirked, and Caz let out a shaky breath of relief. “I did it because I’m tired of my ship being an afterthought. My people are not useless. We would be shut down—perhaps even abandoned—were it not for the fact that we carry the stupid autons. The board would be just as happy to cease cloning the caretakers as to let them go. They do not see our worth, our vibrancy, our dedication that equals theirs.
“The fact that you’re here, that you are all here—” her voice rose “—tells me you believe otherwise. That we can make a difference. Our part in the mission would not be questioned if we formed a new convoy. My ship, with its little crew, unanimously volunteered. That is, except for the dreaming retirees.”
“May we wake them?” Caz asked hopefully.
“As you said, it’s really up to the caretakers,” Onuora answered with a wink. She pressed a button on her chair and the claws carried her up and away, through the maze of corrugated landings, to the control booth. “Come along, Caznal,” she said over the comms system. “And to your horde, might I suggest seeking out a familiar dreamer? If the caretakers consent, I assume the servers will be gladdened to see a friendly face upon waking.”
The caretakers were of two minds about it. Many were reluctant, for the same reasons the board had declared the servers dead; to split your time between two worlds was difficult for those not raised in duality. To be awoken only to dream again would be disruptive, maybe even dangerous.
Some people were so far gone in their haze that they didn’t know they were dreaming. They were in a different reality, one that lacked the concreteness of the waking world. It could be a shock to their system to realize their experiences were all in their mind. Lucidity could shatter their reality, and in turn shatter their psyches.
In the end, though, the need to give the sleepers a choice won out. The caretakers, only seventy-five adults in all, fanned out, taking various levels. The caretaker children joined the captain in the control room. They were a slight group—many of the youngsters were still on Aesop for their studies. But they looked proud, excited—they’d never seen so many of the crew take an interest in their ship before.
The caretakers encouraged the crowd to span the levels as well, placing themselves near as many dreamers as possible. Of the three hundred and twelve that slept, not all of them had relatives or friends among the Nataré department. But they would still need grounding, reassurance, and compassion.
Everyone shivered as the caretakers plugged in, one by one descending out of the present and into a nebulous state of calculation and imagination. The air seemed to shift from cold to frigid as they waited, all in silence, for the servers to decide if they wanted to see the living again.
What if they don’t care? Caz thought. They are in a new world, a new phase. What if they are happy as they are and do not wish to be awoken at all, let alone wish to become part of a new crew where their constant dreaming would be no more?
The small convoy would still need servers—that was the whole point, they couldn’t run Zetta’s graviton cycler without the computing power—but they would also need all hands on deck. Server sleep would be sporadic. A temporary escape instead of a whole new reality.
Caznal took her place next to Dr. Baraka. Diego stood on the other side of Jin-Yoon. They shared a look, marred with worry but full of hope.
She half expected the board to come barging in before the caretakers could do their work. Surely they’d been alerted by now—either by I.C.C. or Mira’s bay chief. There were very few restricted areas in the convoy, and those were only due to safety. And while crew members could go where they liked when they liked, provided they weren’t shirking their duties, a migration of an entire department in protest had never happened before. What would Nwosu think? That Caz was dangerous after all? That she was hijacking a ship?
A massive gasp three walkways up made her jump, scaring away her dread. Instinctually, she grabbed Dr. Baraka’s hand and squeezed it tight.
It was the first awakening. At least one server had chosen to come back to them, if only for a little while.
Immediately, a symphony of gasps and small shouts reverberated throughout. Each sound and intake of breath was a sign of shock to the system—like jumping into a cold wave pool. They were here—once retired, good as dead—returned to the land of the living.
A caretaker moved to connect to Dr. Baraka’s ports.
In anticipation, Caz looked into her mentor’s face. His cheeks were full, his skin soft and well moisturized. His muscles hadn’t atrophied, his heart pumped strong. All evidence of the caretaker’s investment in their job, in the lives of these supposed unliving.
After a few tense moments, in which Caznal’s breath would not come, Dr. Baraka opened his eyes. They flew wide in near panic, his back bowing away from the chair, spine stretched. The hand in hers tore away, flailing, clutching through the air in the caretaker’s direction.
The caretaker did not flinch away. She took the hand, held it to her chest, and though she did not speak with her mouth, Caz could tell she was reassuring him mind-to-mind.
Jin-Yoon woke on Caznal’s other side, and Diego began cooing nonsense in an attempt to ease the transition.
Where, in the instant before, Caznal had been filled with anticipation, she now shied away. She’d wanted Dr. Baraka back, and now that he was here, it felt unreal. Like she’d wished for it too hard.
It felt selfish. She knew it was. She knew the only reason she’d connected her missing votes to the servers was because her mentor was among them. All at once, guilt crashed through her . . .
But then he rolled onto his side, toward her. His eyes sparked with recognition, even as his chest heaved and a chilled sweat broke out across his temples. He found being awake straining, difficult. But the joy in his expression was not muted.
His mouth opened, lips fumbling around a word. His tongue wriggled like a worm he couldn’t control, and he snapped it behind his teeth, clearly embarrassed.
He shouldn’t have been. Years had passed since that part of his body had been anything but vestigial. “It’s okay,” she said. “Yeah, I know. It’s me.”
He coughed then, and flopped onto his back once more, wincing as the IVs he couldn’t feel while sleeping suddenly stung his conscious nerves.
She didn’t want his eyes to leave her. Every time he blinked, she feared they were shut again for good. But as the caretaker dribbled water from the seat’s tubing onto his lips
, his fingers reached out for Caznal.
Once more, she took his hand in hers, and she marveled at how his warm palm—finally—squeezed back.
The vote from the servers had consisted of two hundred and eighty-one conditionless volunteers. The rest—one hundred and six, had volunteered on one condition: that they not be reawakened again.
At first, the board rejected Caznal’s trick play as unlawful. She couldn’t count the dead as volunteers. But they weren’t dead. I.C.C. noted that the dead were not assigned rations, which was not true of the servers. Though all retirees were treated the same in many aspects, this one difference was undeniable.
They tried to argue the deadline—but I.C.C. said the deadline could not be imposed on those who were not given the information. Logically speaking, the servers should have been given an entire month before formally entering their votes, but such time was not necessary.
Then the board tried to argue age.
“These server volunteers are all over sixty-five,” said Hippocrates’s captain. “They will die soon. They would die soon with my entire ship at their disposal.”
Even those most staunchly opposed to convoy splitting gasped at his brazen disregard for the elderly.
Caznal played it evenly. “The only reason we retire people is because of set resources and scheduling. Not because they will, quote, ‘die soon.’ Caznal the First lived to be ninety-seven. She worked until her dying breath. Not because she was forced to but because it was important to her. She wanted to. The rations allotted to this smaller convoy will easily cover these crew members, as they were already assumed to be part of it. I am, in fact, taking fewer “live” bodies in all. How those lives are managed will be up to us.”
“The rest of the crew won’t stand for this,” Nwosu cried. “Mark my words, if there is rioting you will be held personally responsible.”
“Fine,” Caz said. “Which is why the sooner you can send us on our way, the better.” She slid a file of ‘flex-sheets across the long table. “Here is my proposal for how to revamp Shambhala into a fully functioning home ship for Convoy Seven-Point-Five.”
There was resentment, distrust, anger . . . but no rioting. The nearer the separation drew, the more a general sense of good riddance swamped through the bitterest of the crew.
Shambhala’s conversion did concern Caznal. Would those in charge of installing the filters on the wave pools—several of which were to now be used as drinking reserves—do the job properly? Would fire safety be looked after in the theater rooms that were now crew quarters? Would the welding on the pipes be shoddy, would the biodomes—which would support food plants and a handful of small support animals—be appropriately regulated?
All of the work was being done by nonvolunteers. She didn’t want to question anyone’s motives, or accuse them of a job not properly done, but it was hard to interpret the occasional glare or thumbed nose as anything other than hostile.
Surely they wouldn’t be that invested in the smaller convoy’s failure? They were hurt, bitter, but not malicious.
Still, she and Nwosu made several passes as the job was done, verifying the new construction was sound.
Strange noises now rang out in Shambhala’s communal spaces. Every bang and clatter and high-pitched whirr of a saw sounded like someone trying to make their way in through the hull of the ship. Like little gremlins attempting to find the craft’s weak points so they could loosen the bolts and pop the hatches.
“Does everything, thus far, meet with your approval?” Nwosu asked.
Several members of the communications team—the press—and a handful of actuaries trailed them as they moved from point to point. Most of the gyms had been converted either into lab space or hospital space. Parts of “dessert row” were now occupied by clean rooms dedicated to cloning.
They’d considered natural birth instead. Why wouldn’t they? This was a new mission, why shouldn’t it be composed of new people?
But their light medical staff had nixed the idea. They were generations removed from overseeing live births. It was too dangerous, they said—to the babies, the potential mothers, and the crew. Live births couldn’t be guaranteed. What if they had too many or too few? Their convoy would have to perform an even more delicate resource-balancing act than its predecessor.
So, cloning would continue. And only the volunteers’ genetic code would be available. They wanted to leave Convoy Seven? Fine. That included leaving its genetic diversity behind. If they found out in ten years that it would be nice to have a Jamal Kaeden or a Margarita Pavon, too bad.
This was also a psychological consideration—it kept people from putting in for clones of their lost loved ones.
Caznal couldn’t raise another Min-Seo Park or Vega Hansen.
She wouldn’t want to, even if she could.
Both of her daughters had decided to stay, and she was proud of her girls, their loyalty to Noumenon Infinitum.
Vega had slowly begun to come back to her and Diego. Even if she still hurt, still felt like she was being abandoned, she knew that her stubbornness would only cause her more pain in the long run. Her parents had to do what they had to do, just as she did.
As the news-slash-inspection party mounted the sweeping staircase that had once alighted in a ballroom—now an entire school, split through with partitions—Caz chanced a glance over her shoulder.
Vega was there, her nose close to her forearm implant, typing away notes in her Enigma Machine shorthand.
She stood to the back. Caz assumed she didn’t want to look too emotionally invested in the proceedings. They still had trouble making conversation, but at least she came to family dinners.
“Does it meet with your approval?” Nwosu asked again, this time of a newly erected computer-access bank. Not having access to I.C.C. was going to be the biggest hardship, Caz was certain. Relying largely on the once-retired servers and the caretakers was going to put a strain on their information retrieval and storage, since those individuals would not act as computers 24/7.
“Looks good,” she said, calling up some Nataré data with the flick of her wrist.
“It amuses me that you were the one to take point on this project,” Nwosu whispered to her as they rounded a corner. Many feet shuffled behind them.
“Oh?” she asked, just as softly.
“Your function on Convoy Seven-Point-Five will be much like mine. Admiral, but only in act, not title.”
“I’m not an admiral,” she scoffed. “It’s not my—”
“Oh, no? You command a small fleet, and you were never even intended for command. I know no other appropriate term. Here, we use captain, so as not to give too much weight to my position over the other captains. But it still falls on me to make major fleet decisions, to make sure the ships are synchronized during dives, that the convoy is functioning as one. It will be the same for you.”
She stopped short, forcing an actuary to spin away at the last second or run into her spine. The captain strode onward.
“And to think all you wanted was to quietly study your aliens. Devote your life to their uncovering. And now you’re in charge of a fleet.”
Regaining her wits, she caught up to Nwosu, tried to ignore the eyes boring into the back of her neck and shoulders. “And why does this amuse you?”
“Because it’s not what you wanted. This is not what you wanted.”
“I—”
“I’m not trying to be cruel, Caznal. It’s the irony that struck me. You didn’t want your research obstructed, and from now on you’ll barely have time to look at a summary sheet.”
Let him laugh, she thought. In five hundred years, when we return to the Web and have all of the information needed to finish the Web, my decedents will laugh in turn.
“Do you have a name for your mission, yet?” asked one of the reporters. “Convoy Seven-Point-Five is nice, but, you know, Noumenon has a special ring to it, so . . . ?”
“Noumenon Ultra,” she said confidently.
&nbs
p; “And do you have an official mission statement?”
She halted, turned. It was fitting, that she should put this on the public record here, in Art Alley. It was a wide arched hall, flanked by studios. This area they’d left untouched. Her people would still need to make art—maybe now more than ever.
Sprawled across the walls were hundreds of small paintings. Every year, five artists were asked to leave their permanent mark on the ship. It was a great honor for a convoy member, to be immortalized in such a way.
“Noumenon Ultra will follow all available leads to Nataré locations. The mission’s express purpose is to learn as much as possible about these aliens, ascertain whether or not they are extinct—make first contact if they are alive—and to verify their methods of construction in relation to the Web.
“We hope to reunite with Convoy Seven in five to seven centuries,” she added. “But we will not seek the Web until our mission is complete. There is no firm timeline.”
“So,” the reporter said carefully, “Convoy Seven and Seven-Point-Five may be permanently separated?”
A lie would not do. But neither would the frank truth. Families separated by the split would never see each other again, but there was a sort of comfort in knowing that their future clones might once again walk the same halls and share the same goals.
What could she say? What would sound reassuring, yet not decisive and concrete?
“It is our destiny to reunite,” she said, surprised as anyone that she would let the D word escape her lips. “And though there are many obstacles in our way, we will all fight for that destiny.”
December 22, 125 Relaunch
5282 CE
As many times as she’d envisioned it, it felt to Caz like the time to leave would never come. Should never come. She’d put so much energy into the creation of the smaller convoy, that it seemed absurd it should have a real life beyond its inception.
But it did. And that life began today.
The quarters she’d shared with Diego these twenty-seven years was a blank canvas once more. The evidence of their life there had been expunged, and now the rooms lay waiting for their new occupants. A new family would call those walls home.
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