by Tim Pratt
“How can I trust that advice?”
Sebastien sighed. “Because if I gave you bad advice, the worst possible advice, murderous destructive device, you could leave the Dream and kill me. I’m cured, but even if I weren’t – even if the worst version of me you can imagine is the one sitting before you – does that version strike you as suicidal?”
“No,” Callie admitted. “Self-preservation seemed pretty high up on your hierarchy of needs.”
“Precisely. I don’t want to be devoured by the swarm, captain. I want to get out of here, and live a life, and achieve things. Whether I’m ‘good’ or ‘evil’ doesn’t even matter – in either case, it’s in my best interest to help you, and I think I can be trusted to act in that interest.”
Callie swiveled in her chair. “What do you think, Elena?”
She shrugged. “At some point, you have to trust.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
Callie hated this whole plan, but it was the only Plan B they’d come up with. She didn’t even like going into the Hypnos, because it seemed like such a self-indulgent waste of time, and now she had to go into an alien virtual reality? What would it even be like in there? Could the Axiom smell geometry? Taste magnetism? Was she going to have seizures when she looked at their mood lighting? Lantern assured her that her mind would process the sensorium on whatever level it safely could – that human brains were excellent at extracting useful things from torrents of data and ignoring everything else, and that the Hypnos headsets had safeguards in place, too. Even if she didn’t perceive things exactly as the Axiom in the Dream did, she should at least be able to navigate the place.
The thought of going with Sebastien in her head, whispering in her mind’s ear… Ugh. The idea made her feel like she was coated with a thin layer of slime, but on the inside.
Still. Needs must. It would be good to get something useful out of Sebastien’s messed-up brain.
The gyroscopic shape of the Dream engine loomed up in the viewscreens. Was the partial outer ring half as big again already? What new imaginary continents or planets or galaxies were the Axiom creating in there, that they needed so much processing power?
“Send the code,” she said.
“Sending,” Janice said.
The records in the Liar base had included a frequency and a number string that would apparently make the terror drones stand down. There was no answering code – no acknowledgment at all – and they weren’t sure whether to expect one. They sent the canoe ahead first, uncrewed except for Shall’s repair drone squatting on top. The asteroids failed to crack open and disgorge glowing death spiders from outer space. That was a good sign.
They called the canoe back, and this time Ashok, Lantern, Stephen, and Callie boarded it – with Shall’s vastly larger and more useful military drone on top. That body had been scavenged from the depths of the pirate base in a broken and ruined state, and subsequently repaired and augmented. There wasn’t a better war machine in this system… except for the terror drones, and whatever else might be lurking in the hub of the Dream. They had a few Hypnos headsets, a toolbox the size of a steamer trunk, and Ashok had cables and connectors of various sorts looped around himself, along with a portable fabricator strapped on like a backpack, in case he had to custom-make hardware to fit the Axiom connections.
They said their farewells, and launched. The canoe moved slowly, and all of them hunched their shoulders and tensed up as they passed the nearest terror drone asteroid – because what if it only attacked vessels with killable human flesh on board? But their alarm code worked, and the space rock in space didn’t disgorge its dark heart.
Callie piloted the canoe toward the central sphere, choosing a moment when the slowly turning rings opened a nice wide gap. Getting clipped by a few thousand tons of dreaming crystals moving at unspeakable velocities wouldn’t do the canoe any good, and it would be a stupid way to die, when they’d survived so much.
From a distance, the moon-sized sphere at the center had looked like a solid ball of silver, but up close it was filigreed all over with lines in sinuous patterns, some faintly glowing, some dark.
“Here goes.” Lantern transmitted another code taken from the elder’s files – one rather cryptically titled “Request an Audience.” What if the station refused their request? What if an Axiom woke up and opened the door, pissed off at the interruption? Callie sort of wanted to see one in the flesh – to kill one in the flesh, even – but another part of her hoped that she never would.
The sphere rippled, and an opening just big enough to accommodate the canoe appeared before them – not like a door opening, but like a whirlpool forming in a puddle of quicksilver. There was no landing assistance, no tractor beams, no runway lights, so Callie guided the canoe in by hand, exterior lights shining into the sphere’s black interior.
Here we go, she thought. Into the moment before the dream.
Chapter 24
The hangar bay inside – if that’s what it was, and not a ballroom or an unoccupied torture chamber – was vast and empty, and the canoe settled down on the floor gently. There was gravity inside, though considerably less than a full G, Callie judged. The door behind them rippled and closed, and lights came on – but not from lamps or bulbs or banks of LEDs. Callie peered out the viewscreen. “The light is coming from clouds. Glowing bright white. Like swarms of high-wattage fireflies.”
“Utility fog,” Ashok said. “Am jealous.”
Callie had the canoe’s sensors sample the air, and it wasn’t remotely breathable by humans… except, a few seconds later, it was – in fact, it was identical to the atmosphere inside the canoe, down to the last part per million. “How did they alter the composition of the air so quickly?” she demanded.
“More swarms,” Lantern said. “Flying around, eating molecules of one gas and pooping out molecules of a different one. How… hospitable.”
“I’m going to keep my suit on anyway, in case they decide to change the air back to toxic soup.” She tried hailing the White Raven, without success. “Just like the last time we visited the Axiom – I can’t get an outside line.”
“Hmm,” Ashok said. “Clearly the interior of this sphere can communicate just fine with things outside – the processor rings and the main body of the swarm are controlled from in here. Maybe if we figured out that frequency we could communicate…”
“Maybe, but we anticipated being cut off,” Callie said. “Remedying that would be nice, but it’s way down on the priority list.”
“I know. I can’t help thinking, cap. My brain just does it, is all, whether I want it to or not.”
“No use sitting in here. Let’s do what we came for.” Callie ordered a last check of gear and suits, then opened the airlock. They stepped out into the hangar – and the illuminated swarms flew down to eye level and lined up at precise intervals, creating a curving path into the darkness. “Is it worse to follow the path, or stray from it?” Callie said.
“We requested an audience,” Lantern said. “Let’s see where they take us.”
Shall clumped up behind them, his tank-sized drone body bristling with weaponry and manipulators and sensors. He had a local version of his consciousness loaded, since they’d anticipated losing connection with the ship, which meant he was stupider than usual, but still so much smarter than most humans that no one would be able to tell the difference. “There are many rooms and corridors all around us,” he said. “Some of them are changing, and reconfiguring, as the matter rearranges itself.”
“The walls are made of the swarm?” Callie said.
“Some of them appear to be.”
“So we could just, what, get sealed into a room and left to starve forever?”
“I doubt they’d leave us to starve,” Lantern said. “If they decided not to let us leave, the swarm would just convert us into more of itself.”
“Shall we go?” Sebastien sounded entirely too eager, which made Callie sure he was planning something. She couldn�
�t even tell if she was being fair or unfair any more… but he still had his drones, buzzing along and keeping an eye on him, remotely controlled by the splinter of Shall inside the war-drone. His intentions didn’t matter, as long as he was being closely watched.
They followed the glowing swarms into the darkness. After they passed a cloud, it would go dark, and then another would light up farther ahead, and so it went for dozens of iterations, until they reached a wall – which conveniently melted open to reveal a door big enough for them to pass through, war-drone and all. Clearly the swarm was unconcerned about their firepower. Why not? The swarm was the ultimate apex predator. It could eat anything, and nothing could eat it.
The corridor they entered gently wavered through slow s-curves. The walls and ceiling were gently curved, and all the same color as the great rings, silvery white. Were they walking on computronium? Probably. Why waste valuable space on inert matter when you could use those corridors to help run your galactic genocide simulator, or whatever the Axiom was doing in the Dream.
Lantern had explained that the Axiom had factions, with different goals and methods, sometimes mutually exclusive ones, but it was still bizarre for Callie, seeing how different this place was from the twisty anthill tunnel aesthetic of the last such station they’d explored. The Dream engine was actually pretty, in a simple, clean, elegant way, while the other facility had seemed designed to disorient and distress. That had been a factory station made to create two things, though: ships, and obedient Liar slaves. The goals of this place were very different, and that might account for the differences.
Or maybe she should stop trying to understand the mindset of sadistic alien demigods entirely.
They emerged from the corridor into a room shaped like a cylinder stood on end. There was no discernible ceiling, just overhead space that extended up farther than Callie could see. It was like being at the bottom of a well. The floor here was different, made of lightly pitted stone or metal, and even in the dimness, she could tell the walls weren’t smooth. Were they surrounded by tiers, or galleries, or shelves, stretching up and up? There were no more glowing swarms showing them the way.
“We’re in the center of the sphere now,” Shall said. “The matter here is cold, dead, and more stable – I think this is the core of the station.”
“The Axiom wouldn’t want to sleep in a place composed of programmable matter,” Sebastien said. “They’d want something more stable – something that would last for millennia, even in the case of disabling radiation or system failures. The heart of the heart of the station is stone.”
“How do you know?” Callie said.
Sebastien shrugged, the motion barely visible in his environment suit. “It’s how I would do it.” He pointed behind them, toward the door they’d passed through. “Look, the swarm isn’t even coming in here – the glowing clouds stopped at the entrance. There’s probably a safeguard, to keep them from coming in here, where they might disassemble vital things – like the bodies of the sleeping Axiom. They are an immensely paranoid people.” He paused. “I know. I was for a while there, too.”
Callie grunted and walked forward. In the very center of the hub, there was a strange object – roughly the size and shape of a bathtub, but made of some stiff brown material, leathery and fibrous – it looked almost like a split seed-pod. There were greasy-looking black cables inside, with sharp silver spines protruding from the ends. Those reminded her of the claws of the brain-spiders that had changed Sebastien, digging into his brain and stimulating certain areas while destroying others, and injecting nanites to do the fine work.
“This setup is meant for my people.” Lantern approached the pod tentatively, prodding at it with a pseudopod. “I’ve seen these sort of connections before – they’re meant for deep immersive learning, mainly. They hook into our nervous system.”
“This is where you go for an audience,” Callie said. “Huh. You plug in here, and what? You appear in the Dream, and some Axiom asks what you want and why you’re bothering them?”
“Probably not an actual Axiom. An automated system, maybe. The Axiom only bothered to interact with their servants directly for purposes of punishment… or entertainment.”
Callie considered. “Still, I’d rather not show up in a place where visitors are expected, if there’s another way. Shall, shine a light around, would you?”
The war-drone was equipped with spotlights capable of everything from gentle illumination to searing brightness, and he extended an array of arms to light the way. Callie walked alongside him, guiding him toward a side wall.
Her impression of the space was correct. The perimeter wall was made of oversized shelves, each level about four meters high, rising up, and up, and up… Every shelf held a dozen or so pods, generously spaced apart, like the one in the center of the room… except three times as big. The Axiom were not small creatures. Callie tried to count the shelves and gave up after ten – Shall’s lights didn’t reach the ceiling, and the shelves disappeared in the gloom. “There could be, what, hundreds of Axiom here?”
“Most of the pods are open and empty, though,” Lantern said. “I think this place was built with more capacity than they needed.”
Shall deployed a hover-drone from his back, and it did a quick circuit, rising up the cylindrical space and scanning the shelves, one by one. The drone buzzed back down, and Shall said, “There are hundreds and hundreds of pods, but only forty-seven are occupied, as far as I can tell – at least, that many are closed, and giving off heat signatures.”
“It’s so demoralizing when you invite people to a party and they don’t show up,” Callie said.
“The Axiom were in disarray by the end of their active period,” Lantern said. “They made war among themselves. It’s possible that a score of ships were meant to converge here, and only one or two made it, with the rest lost in skirmishes with other factions.”
Forty or fifty Axiom. She could exterminate that many of them, personally. What percentage of their total numbers was that? A surprisingly large one, if Lantern’s estimates were correct. “How are they protected? There’s no swarm in here, and the pods seem totally undefended.”
“They aren’t,” Sebastien said.
“Agreed,” Lantern said. “There are certainly defenses we can’t see. Even allies didn’t trust one another. Treachery was their religion.”
Callie peered into the nearest open, unattended pod, on the ground-level shelf. “Then for now, we’ll settle for using one of these, assuming they’re plugged into the Dream? Presumably they were fully set up with the expectation of having inhabitants.”
“There’s one way to find out,” Ashok said cheerfully. He leaned over a pod and pulled out a cable, taking a look at the end. “Oh, yeah, I’ve got this. Lantern, this, uh, well, spike is meant for the visual center, right? That’s what this little squiggle at the base means?”
The Liar clambered up onto the pod and took a look. “Yes, and this one is auditory, and this one – that’s for the electromagnetic sense, so we can do without that…”
“Or we could cross-patch it with one of the other cables, so Callie could, I don’t know, smell oranges in the presence of a magnetic field, or whatever.”
“Synesthesia might be distracting, though,” Lantern said.
Callie left them to their work (and easy camaraderie), and stood beside Shall. Her footsteps echoed hugely in the cavernous space. “This place is like a tomb full of things that don’t know they’re supposed to be dead.” She put a hand on the side of Shall’s body. “Watch over them.”
“Them, and you,” Shall said.
“What about me?” Sebastien strolled over to join them, pretending to ignore Callie’s glare.
“Oh, definitely,” Shall said. “I’ll cherish and protect you, like you’re my own sweet baby child.”
“I want you to scan these pods, occupied and otherwise, and figure out what kind of defenses they have,” Callie said. “Passive scans only, though, to st
art. We don’t want one of the sleeping monsters to wake up and take an interest in current events. I’m worried enough about entering the Dream through an unused pod. What if all the Axiom get a message flashing ‘Welcome new user’ or something when we go in, and decide to throw me a welcoming party?”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Sebastien said. “You don’t understand the Axiom. They aren’t social creatures, in the way humans are. Their interests in others are limited to domination. They might ally with one another, but only to further their own agendas, and even then, it’s only a matter of time before they betray one another. Even their factions were cobbled together out of convenience and necessity. No one is going to greet a newcomer, though they might note your arrival – and they’ll certainly take an interest in you if you get in their way, or if they think you can help them further their goal.”
Callie shook her head. “How did creatures who can’t cooperate for more than five minutes without trying to murder each other create an empire that spans a galaxy?”
“They’re smarter than we are,” Sebastien shrugged. “So much smarter. The Axiom are better than us, in almost every way – except for that inability to cooperate.”
“And the sadism. And the lack of empathy. And the slave-holding.”
“Yes, of course, that goes without saying.”
“It would make me feel better if you said it anyway.”
Sebastien ghosted her a smile. “Your preference is noted. The Axiom were ultimately smart enough to realize their limitations, too, and so the factions were born, working toward their various long-term goals, cooperating to achieve greater things than they could do alone. This… is one of the more benign factions, I would imagine. The Dream is probably a test kitchen to try out plans to transcend the end of the universe, instead of just enacting the plans in the real world, regardless of the damage that might cause. These Dreamers must have been rather philosophical Axiom, by the standards of their race.”