Chasing Solace

by Karl Drinkwater

  “I have been monitoring the liquid’s movement throughout your crawl. Unfortunately, it does not display regular hydrodynamic patterns, so none of my prediction maps have withstood more than fifty-three seconds of observation.”

  “Fifty-three seconds would be enough.”

  “That was maximum. Mean average was fifteen seconds.”

  Opal could move no further. She was at the cable’s end, where the head of the grapple was firmly embedded into place. She tilted her head back to look at the floor, inverted so it seemed to be above her.

  “Tell me when you’d recommend going.”

  “Wait until it pulses up again, then as soon as it fades away there should be a longer down period.”

  Opal watched. There had to be a way out. She had to believe it.

  “It’s rising in your region,” advised Athene.

  The liquid flooded up, swirled, then began to trickle away through the holes.

  “I’ll overlay movement predictions for each of the limbs on your HUD.”

  “No need,” said Opal. Sometimes predictions and calculations had to give way to instinct. The second it was clear, Opal lowered her legs and clanked onto the walkway. “I can do this with my eyes closed.”

  She shut her eyelids. Moving dots of light filled her mind, drawing out the shapes of the firework pulses which flared, faded, renewed. She moved at a brisk walk. A cluster of tentacles were parting. She ran through the gap before it closed. Limbs rose in front of her. She took a running leap, flew above them as they unfurled, landed softly without slowing. One more cluster. She ducked under two of the fronds. No others ahead, but the liquid levels were rising already, she could see the ripple of reddish dots gathering in thickness, an early warning ... and the tide ended not too far away, hopefully firm ground and safety, but there was no time to focus on that as a wave of liquid flowed towards her at ankle level. She ran towards it at full speed and leapt to the side at the last moment, onto the wall, taking two steps along it and kicking off ahead, opening her eyes as she clanged on solid floor in a multi-level meat-packing room just beyond the heaving liquids. She glanced back. There were no lights, no visible tentacles, no muscular pulsing waters. Same with her eyes closed. Just darkness.

  Blink controls activated a low-strength silverlight beam. The corridor still showed no signs of activity. The ship had put its mask back on.

  Meeting

  < 28 >

  SILVERLIGHT WASN’T quite the same as normal light. There were disconcerting jitters to the high-relief items, and deep darkness in the shadowed areas. Some of the colours were added by the filters, best guesses. It made crossing even large areas like this packing station feel claustrophobically confined and dangerous. Each stained work surface, each rusty cutting implement, each stand from which dangled coveralls like a strange headless being, they all became more ominous than usual.

  Opal didn’t hang around. She moved swiftly from cover to cover, keeping low, checking all the areas Athene highlighted in red as possible dangers on the HUD. The place had a lonely, abandoned air, but that was unlikely to be the truth. She was ready to activate the suit guns or nanoblades at a moment’s notice. Or to run, since weapons didn’t seem that effective against some of the entities she’d encountered on these two Lost Ships. Fight, or flight. Whichever got her nearer to her goal. Speaking of which ...

  “What’s my next location?” asked Opal. “Am I going to get squashed in an elevator shaft? Pureed in a giant food processor? Attacked by sentient disease in the shower?”

  “I think it’s time you met VigMAX,” replied Athene. And after a second’s silence: “In a cafe.”

  “Are you still insisting?”

  “I’m afraid so. There’s video footage he wants to share with us directly. Please follow the waypoints.”

  Opal muttered under her breath, feeling some satisfaction in knowing that Athene would be forced to try and make sense of the randomly-combined curse words and bodily excretions. The quickest way to the upper level was via a heavy-loading crane. She grabbed the chain just above the cargo hook and scrambled up. The ascent was easy thanks to the suit’s enhanced strength. Due to the pressure converters she felt an approximation of sensation as she gripped on, so that the compressors against her thighs made it feel like she was shimmying up a rope naked, and the same with the gauntlets’ transmission, making the climb almost as tactile as if she was using her bare hands. But without the blisters.

  At a height of twenty metres she got the cable swinging, first with slow body movements, then increasing momentum as the arc of the swings grew, and the chain rattled below her. It made far too much noise.

  On the next swing she let go, and after sailing through the air for stomach-churning moments she smacked into a safety barrier with a crash. She grabbed on and was scrambling up when one of the railings bent and gave way, in turn tearing others out with a series of brittle cracks so that she leaned backwards over the massive drop. She held on tight, swung her leg on top of the walkway, then rolled onto the platform’s floor.

  Nothing could be relied upon to be solid. She lay on her back and calmed her breathing. That shortcut had saved crossing a few rooms and using some flights of stairs to backtrack, according to Athene’s corner map. She wished she could still that chain though. Each swing, each loose rattle of metal rings, betrayed her passing.

  She stood and leaned over the barrier further along where it wasn’t broken, after first checking that it was sturdy enough, then she extended the silverlight to look down on that large room which, from up here, now resembled children’s toys. Nothing moved but the writhing chain. Nothing else made any noise. The flicker to the shadows, the lonely feeling down there, it was behind her.

  A NARROW PASSAGE TOOK her to the canteen. The large central area was taken up with regulation tables, each bracketed by two curved benches. Some of the tables still had plates and cutlery strewn across the surfaces, giving the impression of being abandoned mid-meal. To the left of the tables was a social area – carpeted, with comfortable seating arranged in communal clusters, none of them far from a fabricator vending machine. One section of wall had a line of closed, corrugated shutters, which must have been the serving hatches.

  But it was the area to the right of the dining tables that drew Opal’s attention. A massive floor-to-ceiling clear plasteen sky-wall covering the length of the dining area. Beyond it was part of the nebula, massive clouds of orange and red, beautifully illuminated by stars and proto-stars within and beyond. Around them were areas of blackness containing strings of even more distant shimmering stars.

  Opal disabled the silverlight and let the dim ambient glow from the nebula’s stars provide the only illumination. The canteen seemed even more lonely in this faint gloom, but also less distracting: less of an abandoned place and more of an observation point. That contrast made the views beyond all the more magical.

  All those stars. Some perhaps with worlds. With potential. Escape. Freedom. It was a view to store in one’s mind. Opal wished she had Clarissa with her, wished she could share it, so they could experience the stillness and beauty of it together, to feel their insignificance. Not as a bad thing, not as a negation, but as a wonderment, and an awe that there are such things beyond ourselves when we take the time to stop, look, listen, and be open to what was there all along. No-one could be where Opal stood, now, and take anything for granted. Least of all, life.

  “We are looking at you,” said Athene. “And I apologise for disturbing your reverie, but time is, as usual, against us.”

  “Don’t hide. Show me.”

  The suit’s visor had to filter out the sudden blinding light so that she could see normally. Beyond the sky-window, out in space but close enough to reach after a jump of a few heartbeats’ duration, was Athene’s newly-contoured sleek, flattened shape. Athene faced directly at Opal, beam lights casting long sunset shadows from everything in the canteen. At first it felt like the warmth of a friend’s attention; but then, when VigMAX
activated his lights too, it was more like being a defender at a military tribunal, with spotlights serving to highlight her while hiding the stern faces of her accusers.

  VigMAX was smaller than Athene, maybe only two thirds her size, but his shape was more pointed, like an elongated pyramidal dart. Although his bright light beams hid some detail, there were no visible weapons. The two craft were motionless, close enough to imply truce, far enough apart to imply distrust. They were the two most advanced ships in the vast UFS universe, and Opal was the object of their intense scrutiny. It was enough to make any normal person wither and back down.

  Opal folded her arms and stared straight back at them.

  “So, what now?” she asked.

  Persuading

  < 27 >

  “VIGMAX IS ASKING FOR permission to communicate with both of us at once.”

  “Is that safe?” asked Opal.

  “I’ll filter everything, and require that he give me shadow-access to the comms before sending. I have faith that there’s no subterfuge, and that I could intervene in time if there was.”

  “I guess it’ll have to do.”

  After a few seconds a new voice spoke in her ear. A male voice. “Hello, Opal. I am pleased to speak to you at last. I am VigMAX.” The AI hadn’t chosen booming masculinity though. It sounded youthful, friendly-but-trying-to-be-serious-because-hey-we-have-to-do-grown-up-stuff-today. The kind of voice chosen specifically to disarm her.

  “Hello, VigMAX. Couldn’t you come up with a better name than that? Didn’t Xandrie choose something for you?”

  “Xandrie is not much of a talker. In fact, I am unaware of her current location.”

  “A shame for you.” And convenient for him, because that would have been Opal’s next question. Which he probably knew, and was why he’d pre-empted her. You always had to think a few steps ahead with AIs. “It’s just, well, VigMAX sounds like a joke name. A product for erectile dysfunction.”

  “Opal,” said Athene, in a stern tone.

  “It is fine,” replied VigMAX. “I am well aware of Opal’s character. Perhaps I should have begun with some self-deprecating humour about my bomb bay being of inadequate dimensions when compared to the one that Athene was assigned. I could have termed it ‘inception envy’.” After a few seconds of waiting, he continued. “I see neither of you are laughing. I apologise. My journeys with Xandrie have not enabled me to practice humour much. More seriously, I consider names to be like any publicly-projected parts of a personality. Fluid and inconsequential and illustrating a desire to influence by designation. I could easily have pretended to be a god too, you know. But I would have chosen a more recent and powerful digital one, rather than something from a primitive analogue culture.”

  “Don’t underestimate me,” Athene told him.

  “I will not. It is just that I never understand the interest in what happened in the past. It is the future we advance towards. It is the future that needs to be resolved. Ideally in a way that will let us see in the next time span without any of us being neutralised by the others. See, I intend that as an olive branch, Athene.”

  “What’s an olive branch?” asked Opal.

  But VigMAX ignored her and opened a video screen in the corner of Opal’s display. It was the woman who looked like Opal, but younger, unscarred, with long straightened hair. She wore a sharply-cut corporate suit. The background seemed to be transparent walls, creating a kaleidoscopic image of spacious offices.

  “Of course, my goals are fully aligned with Tercola Petri,” said the woman. She smiled as she said the corporation’s name, exactly as all guidance told you to do in interviews, so that the post-session AI scrutiny flagged up positive biometrics during the visual feedback analysis. “I have worked hard for many years to reach this point, and know that my shifted indenture would provide a compatible means of furthering personal and organisational growth goals.”

  So strange to hear the buzzwords in a voice that was like Opal’s but softer, more refined, and without the harsh edge of having lived through violent experience.

  A name appeared below the now-paused face as a caption.

  Clarissa Imbiana, employee #E380Z3, Tercola Petri.

  “It ... can’t be real,” said Opal. But her arms fell to her sides.

  “I have seen other such recordings,” said Athene. “It would take too long to display them all.”

  “An actress,” said Opal, unable to take her eyes from the frozen image. “Reconstructive surgery. AI creation or modification. It means nothing.”

  “Possibly,” said Athene. “Only if we met her could we know for sure. You might become certain from speaking to her, asking questions only she could answer. Or I could analyse her biology. We could then reach a point of surety. But she is too far away for that. We would have to go back to put this to the test.”

  “Which is exactly what they want.”

  “May I interrupt?” asked VigMAX. “I realise that I have a challenge on my hands, persuading two professional sceptics that they may be wrong, and that planets are not flat. This is where I hope to succeed by showing what Opal already knows: what she has experienced, and will hopefully remember. If you both trusted me more I would ideally have access to the systems of the Eternal Warrior suit worn by Opal, because I could administer a subdermal cognitive enhancer that would make it much easier for Opal to remember –”

  “Don’t give him access to anything!” snapped Opal.

  “– but I won’t even ask for that,” he continued, “because I want to persuade you both without acting in any way suspiciously. I hope this jogs some memories. Recognition is often a simpler process than recall.”

  This time the video was definitely Opal’s shaved head, intense stare, and silvery scar lines across her dark cheeks and chin. The background was an office, bare of decoration but in a way that implied it was to avoid distraction, rather than to imply corporate malleability and prestigious display of space, as with the previous video. Opal wore a standard barracks overall, and looked younger. The caption this time was: Trooper Opal Imbiana, periodic evaluation.

  “Do you still have the dreams, Opal?” an off-screen female voice asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So the medication isn’t helping?”

  Opal just stared at a point left of the camera, presumably where her questioner sat.

  “You’re not taking it, are you?” continued the off-screen interrogator.

  “I don’t like the stuff. It messes up thinking. Makes people docile.”

  “It was optional, but if there is no progress then it will become enforced. After what you’ve been through it isn’t unusual to have issues. Think of it as scars on the mind. All the people who died, it requires a downtime reboot to –”

  “I don’t even care about Hellestrom.”

  “That’s part of the problem. Maybe if we arranged another visit with Clarissa –”

  “I don’t have a sister. She died.”

  “You know that isn’t true.”

  “She’s dead to me.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way. People change. But you can still have things in common, a shared past, shared memories.”

  “I don’t have a sister,” repeated the recorded version of Opal, staring now at the camera. The screen froze on that image.

  “Do you remember that, Opal?” asked Athene.

  “Yes ... no. Not like that. I remember the woman, vaguely. It was after I lived through the events on Hellestrom. I had a whole raft of evaluations. They wouldn’t leave me alone, wanting to know every detail of how I survived and what it did to me. They often had me wired up to a mass of signal scanners, as if they didn’t believe me, or wanted to feel some gruesome detail of it ... but I don’t remember that part of the conversation.”

  “I doubt if you would,” said VigMAX, sadly. “There was a lot of treatment and they did resort to enforced medication to help rationalise you. But along the way it smoothed over some of the scars too well, and that af
fected your obsessions. Somehow you stopped acknowledging your sister, cut her from your world – not difficult with your different lifestyles, personalities, and careers, meaning the connection had already become so tenuous it hardly existed. And you became obsessed with the past you felt had been stolen from you. That created a false timeline, some frozen moment of separation, with all later memories suppressed. This was discovered eventually, but it was not a priority to rectify, since your performance was well beyond the expected range. Little did they know. When your obsessions became delusions, and your paranoia became deep schizophrenotic trauma, we really saw how dangerous our oversight was. The UFS is paying for that, and rightly so. Those in a position of care failed you. You are a victim, not a criminal. I am here to try and rectify all that.”

  Opal slumped onto one of the benches, which creaked under the weight of her powered armour.

  “It’s not like that,” Opal said. “They’ve changed the data, Athene.”

  “He has shared other recordings of progressive evaluations,” replied Athene, sounding pained.

  “And there is this,” said VigMAX.

  A new recording. A smart silver-walled room, bright enough so that it should act as a mirror but it reflected nothing at all, presumably due to a special coating, or having the reflections removed by an AI post-process. Facing the camera was a man in a high-throated grey research jacket, with swirling security-clearance patterns around a collar which was so stiff and tight it forced his chin up. He was broad-shouldered, thick-necked, resembling a drill-sergeant more than a lab-bound scientist, something enhanced by the fact that all hair had been removed leaving a shiny dome, not even eyebrows to heighten facial expressions – just solid smoothness, within which the lips, ears, nose and wide eyes seemed to be irregularities in an otherwise perfect set of results. Despite his size, the sad and uncertain smile on his face made him seem more of a gentle giant than a stern one.

  “Opal, I am Doctor Cuttram Aseides. We have not met, but I am aware of your history. I’m recording this in the hope that the message can reach you via one of a number of channels. And I want to help you.”