Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire

by Joel Shepherd

  “How close were you to the strike when it came in?” Sandy asked somberly.

  “Right under it,” said Danya. “Gunter got us in the middle stairwell, lots of concrete. A lot of people in the outer rooms got hit, though.” He found a splinter, pulled it out and put it on a plate someone had provided.

  “Serves them right,” Svetlana snorted, jumping up to sit on a bale alongside and watch. “Everyone up against the Chancelry wall are shit, running the smuggling routes, bribing all the poor folks and street kids to risk the bots for them.”

  “Svetlana,” said Danya, in a very stern, older brother voice, with a firm stare. “Not all of them are like that. And they don’t deserve to get blown up.”

  “Hmph,” said Svetlana. And changed the subject. “Does your skin work like that, Sandy? I mean, it looks a bit rubbery.” Looking at Kuza’s shrapnel-peppered back.

  “It’s not quite as permanently attached to the muscle as yours, no,” Sandy agreed, looking around for Kiet. She found him, talking to several others whom Sandy took to be his senior command group, for this unit at least. “In an injury it comes away more easily for access. You two stay here and look after Kuza. Svet why don’t you look for something to use as disinfectant? Alcohol works well. GIs can get infected just like straights.”

  “Straights?” Svetlana asked. “You call us straights?”

  “You haven’t heard that before?”

  “Maybe. Is it offensive?”

  She’d threatened to skin Hector, Sandy recalled, for using a word she didn’t like. “I don’t know. Do you find it offensive?”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Svetlana with a cocky smile, jumped off the bale and ran to look for some disinfectant.

  Sandy gave Danya a puzzled look. “Is she okay?”

  Danya nodded, attention divided as he worked. “She does this. We saw some nasty stuff from the artillery strike. Would have stayed to help, but we were with Gunter and these new GIs, and the locals didn’t want their help, so we left. Svet won’t admit when she’s upset, she says stupid stuff like ‘they had it coming,’ you know. She copes.”

  Sandy did know. “Shit,” she muttered. “I’m sorry, Danya.”

  “Why? It’s not your fault.”

  Sandy sighed, put a hand on Danya’s shoulder, and left to talk to Kiet.

  “It doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Kiet after Sandy had explained what she’d seen when she’d hacked Chancelry HQ. A number of other GIs sat and listened also, and in the warehouse, all speaking had ceased. Sandy sensed a low level network, powered off some small, portable equipment, obviously transmitting this conversation to all other GIs beneath this roof. “Our lives are cheap to them, but not that cheap. What you’re saying is that they’re making us just to kill us. To take us apart and see how we work. Why?”

  “I’m not sure.” Mustafa had betrayed her. The ISO, at odds with the League government. They’d been puzzled too. Only . . . she took a deep breath. “I have an idea.”

  All eyes fixed upon her. Kiet was the highest designation here, and he was a 41. That was about par for the course in her experience, in Dark Star. The majority here were high to mid thirty-series. They looked up to her immediately, not with trust, but with respect. Sandy wasn’t sure she liked that. It was the automatic respect that GIs paid to higher designations, like a caste system. She didn’t think she deserved more respect than anyone else by some accident of birth. It didn’t seem right. And yet it was the world that GIs were consigned to live in, because designation really did matter, and it was the reason she was immediately senior-most GI present, and all the others had to pay attention when she spoke. Unlike the old human caste systems, the synthetic human caste system was based on something real.

  It was the reason she was always uncomfortable with well-intentioned folks in Tanusha attempting to equate her own situation in society with that of racism amongst straights. Racism was bullshit, a discrimination based on something so utterly insubstantial that even the most cursory knowledge of genetics should have been enough to allow its immediate dismissal. The things that separated her and other GIs from straight humans, however, were not bullshit. Those were real. And regular humans, she couldn’t help but conclude, had some very sensible reasons to think discriminatory thoughts about her.

  “The corporations here don’t have much money,” she explained. They sat on bales and crates, arranged around a common center. “Their standard of living remains high enough thanks to all the infrastructure they built when they were rich, but the crash was an economic collapse more than anything else. Running that infrastructure is expensive, especially on this world. Now they’re burning more resources to make big numbers of GIs as little more than lab rats. Like Kiet says, it doesn’t make sense. Unless someone else is paying for it.”

  Frowns from the group. A few looked at each other. “Who?” asked one.

  “Well there aren’t many options,” said Sandy. “Sure as hell it’s not the Federation. It’s so hard for even independent Feddie agents to get into League space, let alone Torahn space, something like this would take so much organisation they’d get caught. Plus the only interest a Federation biotech company might have in research here would be in shipping it back to the Federation to make money . . . so why have it all wasted by killing subjects here? And why not just do it through the usual communication ratlines back into the main League worlds? FSA knows a lot about those; it’s so much simpler than coming here.”

  “Are you saying the League government might be paying Chancelry to do experiments on GIs?” Kiet asked.

  “It would make sense, wouldn’t it?” Sandy looked around at them. One thing with GIs, it was harder to read them, as a group. They didn’t react so much, and it hid their thoughts. “League society reacted badly to the news that Recruitment had gone much further in developing GIs during the war than they’d admitted. They’re being watched. There are still places they can do research without oversight, but nothing with a full industrial infrastructure. This is the only place where GIs are made large scale, where there’s no oversight at all. They can violate synthetic rights out here and no one will know or care. And if the League foots the bill, the corporations have a much needed source of revenue.”

  Was that what the ISO really wanted to find out? Had Mustafa known all along that the League was funding GI research out here? Was the real cause of the conflict between League government and the ISO really that the government had tried to keep the ISO out of the loop? She recalled Duage’s footage—Mustafa walking unguarded to the waiting Chancelry flyer, amidst Chancelry GIs carrying the bodies of her dead friends. Was that all that had happened? Chancelry had agreed to let Mustafa and the ISO in on the deal, in exchange for calling off the attack, and sacrificing all her friends?

  “Of course,” Sandy added, “no one in the Federation has any real idea why there’s any GI industry out here in the first place. Pantala’s a heavy industry world. There’s no real advantage to building synthetic biotech out here, and we’re pretty sure there was no GI industry here during the war.”

  “There was research,” said Kiet, solemnly. “When I first arrived. Seven years ago. Big labs, very secret. They’ve been here a long time. Since Pantala was settled. I saw secret files I shouldn’t have, when I was League military. They confirmed it.”

  Sandy gazed at him. She’d not heard that before either. Kiet was only a 41-series, fairly high as GIs went, but he wouldn’t have been privy to much high intel. But then, she knew how curious GIs sometimes ran into information they weren’t supposed to. “Really?” she asked. “Why build a research lab out here?” Pantala was settled 120 years ago. GIs themselves weren’t that old, though the technology had been approaching takeoff right about then. Chancelry had had GI research labs out here during technological inception?

  The GIs looked at one another. There was no reply. Sandy recognised an uplinked conversation when she saw one, and remained silent until their discussion had ended.

&n
bsp; “Can you process VR?” Kiet asked.

  Sandy frowned. “As of very recently, yes. Only on my own matrix though, it takes a while to process a foreign system.”

  “What I’d like to show you is not a big system at all,” Kiet assured her. “Seven Tigs, no more.”

  “Why does it need to be VR?”

  Kiet smiled. “It just does. I’d take you there in person, but it’s a long way out, and we’ve no time. VR is easier. You need to see it to believe.”

  He rummaged in a kit bag, and found a booster unit and a cord. Sandy accepted it, and inserted the cord. A small unit like this was no conceivable threat; it lacked processing power, even if GIs of this lower designation did have some VR system that could overwhelm her, which she doubted. Kiet inserted also.

  It clicked, and the construct appeared before her. Sandy accessed. It didn’t look all that large, as Kiet had said. Newfound VR compatibilities kicked in, and . . .

  . . . she stood in a vast chamber. It was natural, smooth hewn yellow rock. Local Pantala sandstone, she supposed. There had been oceans on Pantala once, long ago. Now, only the sandstone and limestone remained. The curving walls made a perfect sphere, as though carved by some laser geometry. Except that the chamber’s perfect sides were broken by natural fissures, like any cave system, breaking the curves with crevasses, and rough slices.

  In the middle, enormous, was a statue. It was a hand, carved of rock, at least ten meters tall. Its fingertip nearly touched the cavern’s ceiling, frozen in some evocative pose, like the hand gestures of classical Indian dance. Sandy wondered what this hand might signify. And why it looked like no human hand at all.

  “Looks odd, doesn’t it?” said Kiet. Sandy looked at him. As she did so, the construct blurred, then resolved with a new layer of additions—sleeping bags, equipment crates, tents, cooking supplies. A camp, settled upon the sandy floor. Fissures leading from the chamber made huge corridors, sand ploughed by many recent footsteps. Sunlight fell through several fissures that exposed the chamber to the ceiling, making stripes of bright and dark.

  “This is your camp?” Sandy asked.

  “Yes,” said Kiet. “These caves go a long way.”

  “How far from Droze?”

  “Can’t say, sorry. We agreed not to tell anyone not in the group. As military we had access to some survey maps left behind by Fleet before they left. Stuff Fleet never shared with the corporations.”

  Sandy frowned. “The corporations have mining operations all over Pantala. Surely they’ve surveyed the whole thing?”

  “Actually no,” said Kiet, walking slowly around the giant stone hand, gazing upward. “The corporations found their major mineral deposits and that was enough for them. They’ve everything they need right there, more than they could mine in hundreds of years. Fleet controlled all space lanes, did a lot of the corporations’ surveying work for them. And this landscape, it’s just so metallic, there are zones here in some weather where your basic compass won’t work, the coms are all static, and radar surveys just return a big mass of blobs. Lots of magnetic interference.”

  “So Fleet kept these caves a secret,” said Sandy. Beams of sunlight through the overhead crevasses crept slowly along one wall, making brilliant yellow where they struck. “Why?”

  “Oh, there are other caves like this,” Kiet admitted. “The corporations found a few of those. Fleet just kept the best charts, and from those charts we were able to find a few telltales that led us here. One of the caves the corporations will have a real hard time finding.”

  Sandy nodded, looking up at the hand. Elongated, and so slim it looked like it might have an extra knuckle in there somewhere. She wondered what the sculptor was trying to say.

  “So who carved this?” she asked.

  “No idea. Long dead. Look at this.” Kiet pointed upward. Sunlight reached a carved fingertip. The fingertip was inset with reflectors of some kind, maybe fibreoptics, inlaid through the stone. Beams of light refracted in all directions, spearing the chamber with golden rays.

  “Wow,” said Sandy. The effect was extraordinary. “I’ve never seen that before.” Long dead, Kiet said. But Pantala had only been settled for 120 years. Long dead? “How long dead?”

  “We dated the molecular residue left by the tools used to carve it,” said Kiet. “It makes some telltale residues from friction with the rock that degrade at a steady rate. It’s nearly as reliable as carbon dating. Our results say nearly two thousand years.”

  Sandy stared. No. It could only mean one thing, but there were some truths a brain just struggled to immediately accept, no matter how obvious.

  “That’s just after the fall of the Roman Empire,” she whispered. “Humans were fourteen hundred years from powered flight, let alone FTL space travel.”

  “Yeah,” Kiet agreed, with a lower-des GI’s laconic acceptance of amazing things.

  “And that’s not some kind of avant-garde version of a human hand, is it?”

  “Not unless they were visiting us and taking samples,” said Kiet. “But look, it’s so precise. Artistic realism, I think.”

  Sandy put her hands in her hair and gazed up at the blazing fingertip. She wanted to laugh, but the impulse was lost. It had been common speculation for ages—synthetic biology of the kind that created herself was so advanced. Yes, it had sprung out of a field of League technology that had been evolving before the League had even officially declared itself a separate entity, but there’d been a number of huge leaps in understanding that a lot of very smart people, Federation and League, who were not directly involved in the field, had struggled to understand.

  Of course, speculating that the technology had actually received a kickstart from elsewhere was sacrilege with the League, who preached faith in human comprehension and rationality, and scorned such talk as superstitious anti-progress. When the first micro-circuits had been developed in the 20th century, they’d said, some unsophisticated fools who didn’t understand basic science or engineering had presumed that it must be aliens, that human beings couldn’t possibly have thought up these things by themselves. And to transpose that argument onto the 26th century, and to propose that human science alone was insufficient to allow for the mapping of human brain function onto synthetic systems to allow for the replication of human sentience on pseudo-biological materials that were not organic, but behaved just like they were, only different . . .

  Well. The riddle answered itself, when you looked at it like that. Confronted with this.

  “Research labs,” she breathed. “This is why you found research labs on Pantala, isn’t it?”

  Kiet nodded. “Chancelry were the primary sponsor of the first New Torah expeditions anyway,” he reminded her. “On the condition of first crack at commercial rights.”

  Sandy gasped, recalling that information. Chancelry Corporation hadn’t just exploited Pantala’s resources, they’d settled them. They’d mounted the first expeditions, and made the first footprints on these sands. The first human footprints. “Talee,” she said. “They came here and found Talee settlements.”

  And this before her, self-evidently, was a Talee hand. Reaching toward the sunlight, and dispensing warm glow to all surrounding.

  “Presumably they found stuff more high tech than just a statue?” she asked, circling to view from another angle.

  Kiet shrugged. “No one knows. I don’t know that even most of Chancelry knows, just the top few executives. But what we do know is Chancelry came here first, made a few small outposts, and stayed for a while. 120 years ago.”

  “But there was no viable reason to stay here,” Sandy breathed, recalling FSA intel files on New Torahn history. “It’s hard to live here, so settlements aren’t self-sustaining without some core economic resource, and the only resources are for heavy mining, for which you need to export because there’s no domestic population base. And exports are so damn expensive from here because of the distances, it’s only the war that made arms exports viable. So why else would the
y stay? And why would Chancelry start getting rich around that time?”

  It all fit. Exploratory ventures like Chancelry Corporation had hoped to find systems worth settling. Pantala wasn’t. But on it, they’d found something far more valuable than real estate.

  “But they never expanded into actual production,” Sandy wondered aloud. It felt incredibly odd, to be discussing the secrets of her own origin in this location, with another GI. Perhaps like some people felt travelling to holy places. A strange sense of belonging, and of things in the higher cosmic order clicking into place.

  “No but they get intellectual property,” Kiet reminded her. “That’s the real money. Chancelry wasn’t a very big corporation when they came out here, just an exploratory venture put together by some speculators back League-side. If they hadn’t found something in the Torah Systems, they might have gone bust.”

  “So they licence their IP and get a royalty,” said Sandy. “Assuming they found some kind of lab. A high tech settlement. Hell, maybe they just found data records. That could have taken a while to put together. What little I do know of the Talee from the FSA is that they’re plenty more advanced than us. And that they’ve got a bunch of settlements on the far edge of League space which were apparently abandoned.”

  “In Fleet we called them ‘no-see-ums,’” said Kiet. “After those no-see-um bugs. We’d get some radio traffic every now and then, spacers would report it, say it was the spookiest thing to be on the bridge, get traffic maybe a few hours old, but the Talee themselves had gone, or were lying silent somewhere once they saw us jump in. Not real sociable.”

  “Yeah, I remember.” Her old friend Captain Teig had told her once of an encounter far closer than that, where the damn thing kept following her right across one system, just on the edge of range, like some shadow that vanished every time you turned to look. Longest three days of her life, Teig had said. Not the worst, and possibly the most exciting, but definitely the longest. “No reported hostilities, though.”