The Mirror is a cramped and humid arcology orbiting Sol as close as it dares. Beyond its shielding function, it is designed to do nothing more than ferry passengers and freight between Magnets and the Luminal. Its internals are essentially a series of linked transit warehouses, devoid of character and comfort, lonely. Faces are fleeting and interchangeable and the sparse accommodations are priced to keep it that way. The windowless metal coffin we have been calling home for the last eight weeks has been costing SOCOM-3 four thousand Lums per day. At those rates, no-one stays very long. A Magnet arrives from Earth once a week or so and disgorges its passengers. Cult converts, prospectors, contractors, and the occasional Lid. It may have been a mistake telling Elio-Ra that we were a scientist, for in all the time we have been here, we have noted no other scientists coming off the Earth Magnets.
The disgorged passengers hang around the Mirror for a day or two at most, waiting to board the right outbound Heim. They sleep on floors in hallways or in the cargo bays with their belongings. As a general rule, none are in the mood to make friends. The Cult converts are joyless and glassy-eyed wraiths, always in groups yet always alone. Those that are leaving to work seem wrapped and wreathed in their economic anxieties. There is a sense of resignation at this Frontier. A sadness.
The Heim Rig reaches the docking piers and plugs itself to the Mirror.
‘Rats,’ Elio-Ra repeats, taking another bite.
‘So, we are the vermin running amok through the Luminal barn,’ I hazard. ‘Who’s the farmer in this scenario then?’
‘Oh, isn’t that the question,’ he says, shaking his head but offering no answer just yet, unwilling to abandon the drama of his well-practiced narrative arc. Unwilling to abandon the theatre of it. ‘Thing of it is, we are worse than rats. Much worse. Because we should know better.’
‘What should we know?’ I ask. Teasing of course. I’ve heard this lecture several times already now during my brief acquaintance with the man. But these Cult types always remain earnest no matter how much you tease. Utterly impervious to humour, doubt, and reason. Impervious to tone. I take another sip of my wine. Some mischievous part of me wonders what he would say if he found out I was Entangled. Part of me wants to tell him, just to watch his reaction. The theatre of moral outrage.
But I say nothing, of course.
‘We should know to believe what we see,’ Elio-Ra answers. ‘We know that in all this time we have seen nothing. Not a single relic, not a single ship, not a nut, bolt or spanner.’
He looks at me for corroboration. I nod agreeably.
‘Where does that leave us?’ he continues. ‘We know the Luminal must be the work of the Star Mother. We see her divine handprints. Yet we invade and defile Her body. And we are still alone. Either the others have been wise, or they have been punished. Either way, we should know by now that the Luminal was not put here for our convenience.’
He looks at me bug-eyed, mouth half-full of broccoli. As if expecting me to either argue with him or convert to his Cult right there and then.
‘Well, it is hard to dispute that,’ is all I say.
He’s right on some level. Despite a century’s worth of data at our disposal, the reality is that we know virtually no more than when we first discovered the Luminal.
‘Bicycles,’ Siria had reminded me when we last talked about it. ‘Humans happily rode bicycles for centuries before fundamentally understanding how they worked. There were cities full of them in the twenty-first century. The Luminal is no different. We don’t need to know how it works. All that matters is that it works. A thousand years from now someone will figure it out.’
But I have never felt as certain as her about this. That we do not know how the Luminal works feels important. We know that it is not a wormhole or any one of the theoretical Bridges our scientific minds posited during the Age of Reason. We know it does not use the same dimensional sleight of hand techniques as our Heim engines and Magnet ships. We know that it renders distance and light years irrelevant, yet, does so without incurring any measurable time dilation. We know that it is powered by the stars through some mechanism that we cannot even begin to observe, let alone study and grasp. And that is all we know. There are some Cults that believe the Luminal is an illusion in entirety. A deus ex-machina gateway to a dream universe that we have created of our own collective volition.
We have found a great shame in our ignorance. And a great fear. This is the fear that stops us from exploring as vigorously as we now can. We had once assumed two trillion galaxies in the universe, but we now know that the universe is much (much) bigger than that. And in the face of a universe of this size, we became even more fearful than we were when we first found the Luminal. This is the fear that ended the Age of Reason and led to the explosion of the Sun Cults.
Rats. It disturbs me that I find myself leaning closer to Elio-Ra’s perspective on this one. I search for cause to disagree.
‘Rats might be a bad analogy,’ I say. ‘Remember, there was a day when a man stepped into a primitive Heim rocket and plunged it straight into the sun for the first time.’ I point a finger at Sol, causing the artificial window to zoom in and show us its fiery surface detail. ‘And we still do it every day, hundreds of us. We know that one in every few million plunges won’t work. The corona just won’t accept the Heim shift. The ablate on these Rigs will keep you alive long enough to roast to death real slow. We know the risk, yet we still go. We still spread, as we’ve always spread. As we once spread on Earth. There is a courage there, wouldn’t you say? Something uniquely human?’
Elio-Ra frowns and begins to reformulate his argument. Then he seems to think better of it. He shrugs and pours a glass of wine.
I make my excuses soon afterwards and return to my quarters. Elio-Ra’s company has made me lonely somehow. I still feel unmoored. I gently awaken Siria and Adi. For them, no time has passed at all since they retreated away. They come, swelling inside me and making me whole. The three of us talk late into the night. We take simple pleasure in our own company.
Part Four
We wake up, all three of us, into a dream.
We are confused at first as we have not truly dreamed since our Entanglement. Yet a dream this must be. It is a lucid and real thing; recollected from shards of my empirical self, yet entirely beyond my control. We are on Labadi beach, just as we were on Adi’s birthday.
But this is not the glowing scene I had made for our baby’s special day. This is the beach as it was. As I truly remembered it. The water is not a bright blue brine, but a slow grey slurry, thickly swelling and surging. A sullen grey sea. The sand is not powder white, but the deep soft ash of processed waste. There is a mountain range to the east, but it is a shanty town mountain, a mountain of corrugated iron sheets, debris, dirt, and desperation. There is a terrible smell. A dead Atlantic farm whale is lying on the beach and its foamed blood and melting blubber is seeping ghastly along the shoreline. A silent crowd is on the beach, a few hundred yards away from us, near the farm whale and the moored metal fishing trawlers.
We cannot see it clearly from where we are standing, but in the centre of that crowd a horror is unfolding. I know because I was here.
I remember this day. I remember that we had heard of the catch. A North Hem farm whale had somehow escaped and strayed over the mid-Atlantic ridge. A Labadi trawler had harpooned it and pulled it ashore. To deter precisely this sort of situation, the farm whales are engineered to decompose rapidly when they die outside their Atlantic pens. My father and I had driven down to the harbour in his armoured car with a bag of Lum, hoping to buy some meat before it was too late. But we hadn’t bought anything in the end. In the end, we had stayed locked in our car and watched the horror show on the beach.
Two young beach boys had stolen some whale meat and the trawlermen had caught them. We had watched from the car as the boys were lynched. The oldest of the two could have been no more than nine years old, but there was no mercy for them. The trawlermen beat the boys and br
oke their limbs. One of the boys managed to hobble away but the crowd pulled him back into the maelstrom. A fried fish hawker lifted her hot oil tagine and poured its sizzling contents onto him, melting his face and blinding him. Then the trawlermen stuffed the boys into an old tractor tyre and set them alight. The crowd stood about in a circle and watched silently as the writhing boys burned.
My father had looked away and said nothing. I had not looked away. I had put my face against the armoured car’s thick plate window, my mind swelling and surging like the sullen grey sea, a half-formed word caught unuttered in my throat. Mercy.
I know all this because I was there.
I know all this because we are here.
And now from the centre of this crowd, there rises a plume of acrid rubberised smoke. The wind carries the sound of the two boys screaming; a Vulcan chorus.
Adi stares wide-eyed. ‘Why have you brought us here?’ Siria asks. ‘Why are you doing this? She mustn’t see this.’
‘I’m not doing it,’ I say. ‘I think...’
But then I no longer think. I know. I know what is happening. ‘SOCOM-3,’ I say. ‘This is our mission briefing. It must be time.’
I’ve heard about this. This is how the Tier 1 Partnership Executives take all their classified meetings. In the dreamscape, where meetings are untraceable. In the dreamscape where an entire day’s conference can be compressed into mere real-time seconds.
Adi is shrinking deeper between Siria’s legs. She remembers her birthday. She remembers this place as I had made it. There will be much to explain to her. Too much.
‘But why here?’ Siria asks. ‘Why bring us here?’ Anger in her voice now. The old giant rumble of her empirical self that I have not heard in years.
‘I don’t think it brought us here. I think I brought us here, somehow.’
She shakes her head. ‘No, it did this. It picked this. Metrics.’
I do not press her on what she means.
‘I’ll take Adi and go,’ she says. ‘You meet it.’
‘No, we should stay together. Taking this mission must be our decision, not mine.’ This seems even more important to me now than it had been before. I take her by the hand. I lead my family away from the horror and the crowd, far down the black-soiled beach.
It is some time before SOCOM-3 finds us.
It comes to us from the direction of the crowd.
It comes to us as the Immaculate Mawu-Lisa of our western shore Cult. This was the God I grew up worshipping. It is in the exact form that I had always known it, in the form of our paintings and carvings and holographic sculptures. A half-naked titan with deep ebony skin. A golden shimmer of cloth draped about its body.
It comes to us as the Immaculate Symmetry. It walks on two legs, but there are four arms that sway by its sides. On its slender long neck are two heads, closely conjoined. One of its heads is that of a man, the Immaculate Lisa of the Sun, his narrow eyes sparkling inset like glittering red gems. The other is the head of a woman, the Immaculate Mawu of the Moon, her face so black it has turned into a tinge of blue, her eyes a glacial sapphire.
It stops a few feet from us. A dry heat radiates from it, almost hot enough to be unpleasant. Hot enough to remind us that this being is no dream construct.
Adi begins to approach the stranger, but Siria grips her and pulls her close.
‘We apologise for the delay,’ both mouths say to us in unison. ‘We were observing the lynching on the beach.’
‘Of academic interest was it?’ Siria asks. Her eyes are dark grey pits. She is angry. Angry enough to start drawing away. Angry enough that part of her is starting to retreat into her empirical self. She is growing taller, her limbs stretching like elastic, disrupting the consistency our shared mind-space. I take her hand. I try to calm her, for Siria’s contemptuous tone makes me fearful. I can feel that religious dread, tickling at the base of my spine. Even as I convince myself that this is no God... and it is not... the fact remains that this AI has just walked into our mind, without equipment or direct access to my physical body. I cannot even begin to conceive the technology that SOCOM-3 must have at its disposal. Yes, I feel fear. I stop fighting it and let it wash over me. It is Siria who grips my hand tightly now, calming me.
‘Yes, it was of interest,’ the Mawu-Lisa replies. It is impervious to her tone. Or—I suspect—it is pretending to be for our benefit. Its dual voice seems deliberately stilted and unaccented. Its thin mouths open and close in fishlike gestures. It is working hard to not appear too human. I have been briefed by a Stream of the AI before. I know what it is capable of; just how convincingly human it can appear when it is actually trying.
‘We found this killing illogical,’ it says. It is only the male Lisa that speaks to me now. ‘The meat will spoil and rapidly become inedible, as it is designed to do outside the farm’s enzyme mix. The theft by the juveniles will have made no difference to the trawler’s commercial outcomes. Did this killing truly happen as you are recalling it?’ Its red gaze is turned directly towards me. The blue gaze of Mawu, I note with some discomfort, is trained silently on our Adi.
‘Yes, it happened.’
‘We have no record of this event.’
‘Why would you?’
‘Metrics,’ Siria interrupts, looking pointedly at me and not the male Lisa. ‘It keeps metrics on us. Like a zoologist. When we captured and deconstructed the Stream back on Maffei, we saw the entire socio-commercial model laid out. It measures pain and puts it into an equation. Offsets it against progress and wealth. Ranks people by their worth. Some are worth nothing, and others worth everything. We’re all just metrics to it.’
‘You deconstructed a Stream of the legacy SOCOM-2,’ the male Lisa says. There is nothing like offence in its stilted voice. ‘Our model is significantly more advanced than that of our predecessor. But you have the principle broadly right. The pain qualia metric remains central to our third-generation model. We seek to minimise it, within certain parameters. But we are not all-knowing. We overlook much.’ It turns its gaze fully towards the far crowd. The blue gaze of Mawu is still on our Adi.
I have a question.
‘Ask it,’ Siria says. We have become prescient in this way. As a thought or question forms in my empirical self, she sees it budding and growing. ‘Ask it how meaningful the deaths of those two boys were. Ask it if this killing moved the dial on its equation.’
But she doesn’t give me a chance to ask. She answers her own question. ‘You’d have to kill ten thousand of those boys to make its metric even quiver. Thing is, we’re not worth a whole lot. Not as much as say, a Partner stubbing his toe. The Partners are the ones who built this thing. They try to make us forget that. Those boys dying like that—it meant nothing then and it means nothing now.’
It is Adi that replies to her. ‘All pain is meaningful,’ she says, looking upwards at her mother. We both look down at her in surprise.
‘All pain is meaningful,’ repeats the Immaculate Mawu of the Moon. ‘But we overlook much. We have no record of the crime that took place here. From our model’s perspective it simply never happened.’
Moments pass in silence, as none of us seem to know what to say to that. I take Adi by the shoulder and pull her closer to me, suddenly more unsure than I’ve been in a long time.
‘The Bonny is on the way?’ Siria asks finally.
The Mawu-Lisa replies, both mouths working in unison again. ‘She will arrive at Ishan’s Mirror tomorrow. It became necessary to accelerate arrangements. We used our influence to alter the Bonny’s schedule and bring it forward. We have, unfortunately, run out of time.’
‘Time?’ I ask.
‘Eight years ago, the Partners voted to upgrade their Inter-Partnership Socio Commercial model. We are now in the final stages of this process. Within the next millisecond of atomic time, SOCOM-4’s installation routine will be complete. It is likely that the engagement I am about to set you on will be voided by my successor. You will need to complete your work with
out its logistical support or monetary recompense beyond what I am able to provide you now in advance. I—feel—obliged to inform you of this before you accept our proposal. If you accept our proposal.’
‘It might be helpful if you told us what your proposal was first,’ Siria says.
‘It will be easier to show you,’ the Mawu-Lisa says.
Part Five
The Good Bonny ejects from the Mirror, spinning us outwards dizzily towards Sol on low magnet thrust.
We cross the 250,000 Kelvin threshold.
Our full ablative armour deploys, wrapping the Rig up tight. We head for Sol’s corona, readying ourselves to plunge into the heart of the sun.
The Luminal is our eternal and infinite cathedral. The stellar limbic system that we discovered entirely by accident just over a century ago is our pathway between the stars. An anti-matter shelled tunnel that we can haphazardly enter and exit by shifting Heim dimensions as we plunge ourselves into a star’s filament cavities and coronal holes. The Luminal is our gateway to the universe.
The Luminal is also a time machine. The Tier 1 Partnerships discovered this early on and it has remained a closely guarded secret since then.
We cross the 500,000 Kelvin threshold.
Heat starts to become relevant, even to the powerful ablate cladding the Rig. We begin to cook. The Heim Plunger begins to gear itself up, sucking in and converting Sol’s coronal energy, preparing for dimension shift.
Our first generation of Heim Plungers allowed us to enter and exit Limbic space with seemingly no passage of time, regardless of distance travelled. But the Partnerships had experimented with a second-generation engine. An exponentially more sophisticated engine that could actively adjust its exit tensors. An engine that allowed Rigs to arrive at their exit stars before they’d even left their entry stars. An engine that somehow leveraged the same temporal mechanisms that had allowed the universe to craft and fill itself with matter so quickly.
An engine that was at this very moment rumbling in The Good Bonny’s belly.
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