The Limbic Quant beside me stands up too now, emboldened. ‘This just doesn’t make any sense,’ he says. ‘Dumping inside the Luminal? It doesn’t matter what the terms say. It’s... dangerous.’
Dangerous is the word the Quant uses. It isn’t what he means. Sinful. Sacrilegious. These are better words. Most of the crew will have grown up in one form of Sun Cult or other. Asking them to defile the Luminal was like asking an Earth old-timer to defecate on a church floor.
Sorin shakes his head. ‘Do you think this will be the first time someone’s done a dump here? Why do you think the Partners have been shelling out to install these expensive mem-wipes?’
He might be right about this, but it doesn’t alter the room’s thick mood. If anything, it makes things worse. Much worse.
This is sacrilege.
In the end, whatever the nature of the individual Cult that raised us, the Luminal is cathedral to us all. Invisible and eternal, but cathedral nonetheless. There is no stellar medium here, not an ion or atom, not a mote of dust. There is not a breath of stellar wind. The Rig’s artificial portholes can make no sense of the external environment they are meant to be reproducing, so they project nothing to us but a white canvas. This is just, and this is just as well, for Limbic space is the true nothing. The nothing of before the universe. The nothing that will come after the universe is gone. This is the very marrow of creation. This is the holiest of places. The idea of dumping our contraband here at the behest of a godless Partnership and just leaving it...
This is sin.
It crawls. I can’t help it. I left mysticism behind with my youth, but a feeling I can only think of as religious dread is crawling up my spine. Slowly it encircles each of my intervertebral discs in turn with wet and cold witch’s claws. Shivering. Tickling. Psychosomatic itching spreads up my forearms like invisible spiders. This is the numinous seizing hold of me, unbidden. A response long hardwired into me. Into us all. This is religious dread. The Control Room is thick with it. Religious dread that might just as easily turn to fury.
We are a breath away from mutiny. A breath.
‘Just tell them.’ It is that voice again, from behind me. The voice is curiously detached from the heat in the room, almost professorial in its intonation. I turn my head to see who it is, but the Limbic Quant is shuffling nervously behind me now, blocking my view.
Sorin scowls hard in the general direction of the voice, then rubs his temple with a bony thumb. He turns to Siria, as if addressing her only. ‘Our manifest is fourteen megatons of heavy mining equipment.’
‘Not the cargo down there,’ Siria says. ‘I know what is in there. I mean the cargo up there.’ Siria points upwards. Her unnaturally long and slender finger is mesmerising. Alien. Its tip touches the Control Room’s ceiling. ‘There is a false aft atop this Rig. It is hollow. It is bound to us by shock plasma coils only. It is separable. That is what you intend to jettison. That is where you are hiding the contraband.’
‘How the phot...?’
‘My people have been smuggling a lot longer than you have. This Rig’s design is not that clever. That the Lids are too stupid or corrupt to see through it doesn’t say much.’
The room is silent. Sorin takes his time, chooses his words carefully, as he should.
‘Colonists,’ he says finally. ‘There are four hundred and seventy colonists in the aft. Give or take.’
Siria laughs. Mirthless and deep.
‘Indentured colonists obviously,’ Sorin adds. ‘The thing about...’
‘Slaves,’ Siria finishes for him. ‘We’re running a Slaver. That’s why you’d rather dump the aft here than get caught.’ She walks away from Sorin and returns to her helmstation.
The Control Room is silent. Even the consoles stop blipping. Word is spreading upstairs. We’re running a Slaver and the Lids are onto us. We’re going to get caught. They’ll never believe we didn’t know. Mandatory whole life terms for the entire crew. Life terms nowhere cushy. A moon. Somewhere dark and deserted. Sorin lets us stew another few moments and then spreads his palms in a conciliatory gesture.
‘We have no choice but to follow terms,’ he says. ‘There are four hundred and seventy South Hems in the aft. They’re in shallow stasis. We cut power to the aft and separate it. They’ll never wake up. We take our mem-wipes and we plunge out. If the Lids are waiting, well then, we’ll have nothing to show them but the mining equipment rightly on our manifest. None of us will remember this conversation.’
‘You want us to murder four hundred and seventy people?’ I ask. I’m startled by the sound of my own voice. Surprised that I am speaking. It’s the first time I’ve said anything since we went Limbic. The Control Room’s attention turns to me.
Sorin looks at me furiously and exhales.
‘It’s not what I want, for phot’s sake.’ He stands up at this point, steps behind his chair. ‘I’m not going to make you do anything. It is up to you. You decide. Vote on it if you want. But before you do, there is something I want you to think about very carefully.’
‘I’m sure there is,’ Siria rumbles.
Sorin ignores her. He taps his console, ensuring his voice is being broadcast Rig-wide. ‘Now as some of you may know, the Aton Cult in South Hem is going through a major fissure. Some trouble with a young prophetess. The people in our aft were captured during a particularly nasty fracas. Then they were sold by their own people. They’re pretty lucky to be alive.’
Sorin licks his lips and leans forward, fatherly, putting on as reasonable a tone of voice as he can manage. ‘Luck notwithstanding, a crime was still committed upon these folks. So, if you vote to turn in to the Lids then you won’t hear any complaints from me. Our guests upstairs will get a nice resettle somewhere safe. The Hems will keep slaughtering and enslaving each other. The Partnership running this Rig will keep taking Hems out to the Frontier, pulling in the kind of Lum that working grunts like us won’t never see in a hundred lifetimes. The Frontier clowns buying up these Hems will keep buying them. Nice profit there too. No machines to commission or maintain, no engineers to fly in. Just a few hundred slaves running on a thousand calories a day each while breeding their own free re-supply. Glory and promotion for the Lids that take us in too—don’t forget about them. Everyone glows. Except us. Because we’re the good guys, right? We take the weight for all the rotten mother-photters. We go into a deep hole somewhere and we never see Sol’s light again.’
Sorin pauses, walks to the front of his chair, sighs with feeling, then sits down. His voice reverts to its usual sneer. ‘The alternative, you phot-wits, is that we dump the cargo and take the mem-wipes and no one ever knows that any of this happened. Not the Lids, not the Hems in the aft, not even us. We take our fee and we go home.’
In the ensuing silence, Sorin allows himself a twitch of a smile, barely perceptible, but I see it. It occurs to me now that this is no spur of the moment outburst. This is a speech he has rehearsed. A speech he has given before. And it is good.
I look around the Control Room. Siria and I lock eyes. I hold her deep grey alien gaze for an unreasonably long time.
‘Who’s going to tally the vote?’ the Limbic Quant asks. He reaches for a notepad and prepares for an accounting.
Part Two
Our Aditya is two.
For her birthday, I have prepared a new landscape on the western shore. Something special. A picnic on the beach that I have pieced together from old shards of memory, my fancies as glue. This is the Labadi fishing harbour I remember from when I was a boy. The beach stretches beyond sight in both directions. Sunshine reflects blinding and bright on white powder sand and the sea is a pungent blue brine. Behind us, the beach vista crumples into a forested mountain range. A double rainbow is painted across the sky and there is a colony of impossibly iridescent gulls overhead.
‘Well done,’ Siria says. ‘This glows.’
‘This glows Daddy!’ Adi screams, running away from us, towards the shore.
Later I set up a
picnic table and unveil the cake. A two-layered sponge with a jam filling and rainbow streamers. I did not just conjure it up. I made it from scratch. I mixed the ingredients one at a time, sugar, butter, flour, and let it bake in something like real time.
‘Can you taste the difference?’ I ask.
Siria takes another mouthful and chews contemplatively. ‘I can,’ she lies, nodding with fake conviction. ‘I taste it. I can’t describe it exactly.’
I smirk at her and she smirks back.
After our picnic, Adi runs away from us again towards the shore, shrieking. We watch her from the picnic table as she splashes in surf. I make two beach boys for her to play with. She joins them as they roll huge tractor tyres along the sand. She runs with them towards the bobbing moored pirogues. She copies them as they pick up discarded pieces of the day’s catch and fling them skyward, delighting the gulls who pluck tasty morsels from the air and cry and caw over the din of surf, which pounds and pounds the shore, a coastal heartbeat. Soon it is dusk and the bright sky dims and then catches its celestial fires. The two boys set the rubber tyres alight and pile them up in a bonfire which they set about and sing. Our Adi joins them. Siria and I sit at the picnic table, listening to the children’s chorus and breathing in the sweetly acrid perfume that now infuses the evening breeze.
#
You are Entanglement’s child.
When the first of us was born, Earth’s population had long surpassed its sustainable limits. For a fleeting moment, Entanglement emerged as one practical option for those who had both the mental disposition for it and no realistic prospects on the Luminal Frontier. Two minds could share one body. Two minds could live out two lives while incurring the biological overhead and expense of one. If they carefully coordinated time-dilate travel and medicals, then two minds might even barely notice the difference.
The technology was viable though rudimentary in some respects. Our understanding of mind was nowhere near complete, but it was complete enough for this purpose. The Tier One Partnerships had spent two generations competing to build a faster than light propulsion engine. They had all failed. But in the process of failing, they had strayed far enough into the ethereal to begin forging a vague understanding of the place where human consciousness is born. The place we call, the wellspring. From here came a broad theoretical understanding of the mechanism by which consciousness reached across spooky chasms and bonded itself with our brains. From there, a practical understanding of how this bonding could be re-routed and re-mapped. We didn’t understand everything, but we understood enough to make our Entanglement technology work.
There was a loud moral outrage to begin with. And then a more muted and calculated Corporate outrage. The Partnerships soon independently reached the same conclusions. Every socio-commercial model they ran yielded the same result. The long-term outcomes of widespread human Entanglement would very likely be unprofitable and would be inherently unpredictable. So, they banded together, took action, and laws were passed.
But in that shrinking grey window of legal ambiguity we did it. Partly because we were like-minded good friends. Partly because we shared a curious moral obligation, a sense that it was a sane and good thing to do.
Or call it penance.
For we were both blacklisted. We could no longer find Transport work with any Tiered Partnership, either on Earth or on the Luminal Frontier. We must have committed some grievous offence. Something terrible. Something that had been mem-wiped from us at the time. The reason itself no longer mattered. We were two destitute Transport Engineers, unsuccessfully attempting to scrape a living on Earth. Siria’s homeworld had been absorbed by a larger and much stranger Cult and she was entirely estranged from her people. She refused to speak to them, let alone return there. The strain of basic survival soon became unbearable to us. This was all still a few years before SOCOM-3 sought us out and offered us our present employment. We had few options. We were exhausted. Drained. One day we boarded a Magnet to an unlicensed off-world clinic and we did it.
We chose my body in the end. A decision driven by harsh economics, not patriarchy or aesthetics. The additional cost and complication of maintaining a Frontier body on Earth meant that Siria’s body was a much more limiting option.
Very little could have prepared us for what came next. There was no instruction manual given to us, no-one we could talk to for guidance. We experimented. We spent time on our own at first, in our empirical selves, alternating our conscious control of what was formerly my body... and what was now, to both our eyes, just biological hardware.
We made the journey to Siria’s homeworld in the Maffei to return her body to her people. She watched her own funeral. In their new tradition, the Cult priests placed her body into a funeral disc. Then, in a hideously expensive ceremony, they spun it into the heart of their system’s star. She watched all this with a detachment that no longer surprised either of us. It was a body. Hardware. We flew away the next day. She would never return to her people. Home was a place that we would make inside us now.
We gradually abandoned our mind-alternation cycles and began to spend more time in co-consciousness. Increasingly we abandoned our empirical selves and our limiting single points of view. We grew addicted to facing life together. Existence was more vivid. We viewed the world with four pairs of eyes instead of two. We were not seeing more, or in more detail. We were just seeing differently. We found a universal symmetry that we had never known before. We found it easier to solve complex problems. People found it harder to lie to us. We excelled at whatever scarce work we put our hands to. This we assume was the reason that SOCOM-3 eventually contacted us and offered us employment.
Then, after eight years of co-consciousness, something new happened. Something we are not aware of anyone else having ever done before. We gave birth to a child. We made you. An entirely new person. Our third self. You have been conceived and brought forth entirely in the confines of our inner gestalt. But you are no less human than we are or were.
You are.
From now on, if we hope and fear and fight, then it is only for you. Our child. Our wellspring and our marrow.
Part Three
We have now spent eight weeks on Ishan’s Mirror, waiting for The Good Bonny to show. There is a sixty-day break clause in the engagement contract that we agreed with SOCOM-3 before we left Earth. If the Bonny doesn’t arrive tomorrow, we will be paid an inconvenience fee and then board the next home-bound Magnet.
We have mixed feelings. Had we completed it, the mission hazard fee would have been two hundred and fifty thousand Lum. The most substantial amount of money we would have ever made. It would have opened new possibilities for us. New possibilities for Adi. But an outsized fee usually means outsized danger. We imagine that SOCOM-3 will have computed this fee by running our personal risk appetite through an infinitely nuanced behavioural model. The cash figure is perfectly tuned to trigger these wild thoughts and desires in us. A penny less and we may have refused to come.
We do not have adequate clearance for SOCOM-3 to tell us what the brief is. Not until the Bonny shows and the mission is confirmed. So, we wait.
Siria’s empirical self is suspicious, more so than mine. Her people had hijacked a SOCOM-2 Stream once and reverse engineered it. Whatever it was they had found had left her deeply mistrustful of AIs in general.
‘Which is exactly why it’s so slow,’ Elio-Ra says.
‘What’s slow now?’ I ask. I had stopped listening to him momentarily. Elio-Ra arrived on an inbound Magnet several weeks ago. He is from a small Cult that is trying to keep a rotating representative on the Mirror at all times. I do not know the Cult, but it must be fabulously wealthy. I am alone with him. Adi does not like the new stranger and will not be in the same room as him. She will not explain why. She has shrunk away and Siria has retreated with her. For the first time in a few weeks, I am my empirical self. It took a few minutes to adequately stretch out into my mind, and I am still feeling a bit odd... a bit... unmoored
somehow.
Elio-Ra and I are sat in the canteen, finishing up our meal. For all the Mirror’s faults, the one thing I cannot criticise is its food. Living at the Frontier’s main gateway has precious few advantages, but by phot, this is truly one of them. Tonight, we dine on ribeye steaks from cows pastured somewhere in the Andromeda, vegetables from the Larger Magellanic. A startling red wine from phot knows where. With no expensive Magnet freight cost or time dilation to contend with, our meal is as fresh as I’ve ever had and costs a fraction of the price we’d have paid on Earth.
‘The colonisation,’ he explains. ‘That’s why it is slow. A hundred years! Where are we? A few miserable farms and mines. We could have achieved all this in the Milky Way. We didn’t need the Luminal to do this. We’d have been more successful if we spread out the way we originally planned to, the way we were originally meant to. Magnet Arks spilling out of the solar system like bees, carrying thousands at a time. Moving slower than c would have given us time to develop a true spacefaring culture. A culture that would stand the test of time.’ He prods a head of broccoli unenthusiastically. ‘Instead we have vegetables. When you get back to Earth, go to a farm and watch the rats. Watch a rat enter a new barn. Watch how long they spend sniffing the place out. Petrified. They know—know—they aren’t meant to be there. And they know what’s to come when they are discovered.’
The canteen’s windows overlook the docking piers. The view is simulated of course as we are in reality behind the gargantuan ablative mirror shield that allows us to remain in such close orbit to Sol. But the simulation is near enough perfect that no human eyes could ever tell the difference.
Elio-Ra pauses the discussion while we watch a Heim Rig arrive. It is still like magic, the way it materialises out of Limbic space, dull pinpricks coalescing on Sol’s corona and becoming colossal man-made form. We watch the Heim begin to sizzle and cook ever so slightly during the second that it takes to deploy its full ablative armour. Then solar sails spread like dragon-fly wings and the Rig begins its home stretch run towards us.
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