Agnosis – Ch. 18

<– Chapter 17 / Chapter 19 –>

Thrum. Thrum. Thrum. Eeeee.

Arz. Thrum Oooo. Thrum. Eeee?

Thum. Oooo. Rringeeee?

Thrum. –ou earing me?

“Mr. Yartz!”

Thrum, thrum.

Voice.

“Are you hearing me, Mr. Yartz!”

Ray’s voice was wet, sound waves propagating over vast liquid distances. It tugged at the ear like a badly warped echo. And eventually, from the emptiness, tolling up from the depths of a long sleep: Here, captain.

Meaningless. There was no focus, no differentiation. Only oneness. Everywhere was here, every time was now. None of it mattered. Go back. Folded again into the cool and supple arms of night. Go back.

Dorian floated on a plume of cool air, bodiless, a wafting ball of cotton. A seed pod, laden with poppy beads of light. Home again, home again, home again, nod.

“Yartz!”

“Yes, captain!” Quicker this time, emergent.

Sinking, sinking. Accumulating weight, the detritus of words.

Word made flesh.

Sound had quality, an immediacy, a texture like the serrated edge of a knife. Dorian settled back into his skin with a thump and a gasp. He winced, found that he liked the feel of having his eyes squeezed shut and kept them that way. Sound clanged against his ears, the din of pots and pans, clashing cymbals.

But Ray’s voice rang though the roar of noise, abraded the air. A steel plow furrowing the fields of mind.

“Be so kind as to run a network systems diagnostic on our shipboard nodes.” Even couched in polite terms, the tone of command was clear, stern. He exuded a snarling quality that was impossible to ignore. Tense as the timer spring on a grenade. “And when you’re done with that, get Ghast on the box and tell him I want him to initiate a full network viral scan. I want him to focus particularly on degraded Corlian loops or Shroedinger husk baffling. Report any non-standard findings to me at once. And pay particular attention to the access logs!”

“I’m on it. . .will be shortly, at least.”

Even torn between here and there, the sacred and profane, Dorian understood. Ray was looking for spoof jars–little packets of disassembled viral agents left behind after a stealth program was injected into an open net in real time to overwrite local Strand nodes with (typically) malicious phenomenalist renders. The result was a hijacked network signal, an instantaneously dispersed mass-hallucination that imposed itself seamlessly on reality by corrupting an array’s signal decryption at the connex. Well placed spoof jars were the most common form of banking identity fraud on the Strand by convincing unwary patrons that a window front hack shop was actually a branch of their local credit conglomerate.

Ray’s explanation for the eruption of the ineffable into his datascape was that Dorian and Amara had jacked his network. He wasn’t prepared to believe what his eyes had seen and his ears had heard, the evidence of his own sensory input.

Dorian couldn’t blame him. He knew better than to call another kettle black. Didn’t mean he had to stand for it, though.

Groaning to himself, Dorian pried his eyes open and endeavored to orient himself. He had fallen into the captain’s chair, over the arm he had been leaning against, with his back against the seat. He had one foot up in the air and his arm wrapped around the back support. A stream of spittle ran from the corner of his mouth to his ear. He cleared his throat and hauled himself upright, wiped the line of saliva from his cheek. His body was dense, heavy as though his skin had been packed with sand bags where his muscles should have been, and he ached in that grating way peculiar to falling asleep in uncomfortable chairs. A rabbit punch to the kidneys ache.

Effectively roused, Dorian scanned the bridge. Amara first: exactly where he had left her, just a few paces away, now with her chin on her chest and her arms at her side. Soft and smooth-featured, shoulders drooped, drained. It still cost her something, transforming reality. As he gazed at her, she sucked in a deep, cleansing breath and lifted her head. She blinked, sighed, veiled her wide-eyed pleasure with a nod of satisfaction, then smiled an encouragement at Dorian. He sighed back, relieved.

Among the rest of the bridge crew, only Ray and Yartz were moving, and Yartz was only mobile to the extent that cradling his head in his hands could be classified as movement. Chambers on Comm and Yelkins, who manned the Nav boards, lolled with their heads on the backs of their chairs. Skeltz had curled up into a fetal position between his seat and the wall. He might have been whimpering. But Ray, Ray stood with his legs braced firmly on the deck and a scowl on his lips.

“Don’t forget to check the Grange nexus for foam compression curling,” Dorian said. “If you’re searching for the shards of spoof jars, that is. You might also want to take a look at your nav maps and data time stamps. Recalibrate your course plotting for lost time.”

Ray flashed Dorian a withering look. “My crew is qualified to handle this operation without your help. Remember, if you will, who you’re dealing with.”

“Just making sure you’re thorough, Captain. When you’re still flailing about for excuses not to believe, I want you to be certain that I’ve been ruled out as one of the options on your short list.”

Ray stabbed a long, pale finger at Dorian, then at Amara, and snapped, “You two. In my quarters. Now.” He lashed a final glare around the bridge to make sure his orders were being carried out. “Wake up, Mr. Yartz! You have the Watch.”

Ray turned on his heel and banged through the pressure door without another word. Dorian shrugged unhappily at Amara. He had a sudden urge to apologize, though whether it was for himself or Ray’s lack of faith, he couldn’t say. It didn’t matter, really. They weren’t in a position to do anything but follow as instructed.

Yet Amara grinned at him and winked, suggesting that it was all part of her greater plan. He stared at her as she shifted around and ambled out after Ray. Dorian was thoughtful, but bizarrely untroubled by this idea.

So this was what it was like to be a True Believer™.

Fascinating.

 

Dorian entered Ray’s living quarters a few paces behind the others, and pushed the door shut behind him. The room he surveyed as he turned was both starkly decorated and alarmingly modern. Naked steel walls polished to a high gloss enclosed an uncharacteristically broad area for the interior of a starship, but it was clearly a utilitarian space. In place of prints and pictures, there were embedded monitors scrolling through screens of ship’s data. The light was glaring, white and unforgiving. To one side of the door was a recessed foyer, surrounded by quick-mount processors, feed cables and adjustable screens. In the midst of the equipment was a long, narrow table and a scattering of hard metal chairs. Nav displays, triDvid map projections and global file ports littered the table top, creating an ad-hoc conference room. Wedged into a niche at the far end was a small bar and pocket sink, with a suspended glass cabinet of vari-colored bottles and tumblers mounted above.

On the other side of the room were racks of hardshell server backup blades lining the corridor-side wall floor to ceiling. Against the far wall, there were more monitors, more ports and plugs, and the same harsh lights. Opposite Dorian, framed in the bulkhead, was a closed steel-framed door which, he presumed, opened into Ray’s personal living space. Occupying an intermediate position between the door and the far wall sat a massive burled hardwood desk, intricately carved, meticulously preserved, and piled up to the elbows with stacks of loose leaf papers.

In typical egalitarian fashion, even Ray’s private quarters were partially devoted to public service and the business of his ship.

Ray stood at the desk now, leaning forward on his fists. His shoulders were squared like a mastiff’s, lending the impression that he would snap anyone’s head off who came within range of his jaws. His visible eye was as bright as a piece of flint, and he clamped his teeth together so that his jaws bulged. His expression, however, was perfectly inscrutable. Smooth as glass.

Amara had already crossed the rubberized decking and slipped into a replica Queen Anne chair across the desk from Ray. She nestled into the tall, cushioned back with her hands folded primly in her lap, erect and alert. If she sensed any threat from Ray’s mood, or the way he had spoken to them earlier, she didn’t betray any alarm.

Dorian, on the other hand, expected the tirade to begin at any moment as he edged across the room and took his place in the matching chair at Amara’s side. Maybe some silent glowering first, followed by some uncomfortable settling in, then a simple, direct, ear-scorching explosion. Ray seemed to him, at least, to be in that frame of mind.

But when he had taken his seat, Ray nodded to himself, let his shoulders relax and took several moments to gaze solemnly over them. With surprising formality, he bowed low to Amara. Not just a gesture of respect, but an act of obeisance.

“You’ll please forgive my ignorance if I don’t know how to honor you appropriately,” he said. “I’m unfamiliar with the customs of your people.”

“Your desire to convey honor is honor enough, Captain.”

“Then please accept additional apologies for my seeming faithlessness in front of the crew on the bridge. It was not my intention to offend. I only wished them to be satisfied with conclusions they draw themselves in this matter rather than accepting my judgment as law.”

“There was no offense taken,” Amara said, smiling. “It is an admirable objective.”

Ray tilted his head toward her in acknowledgement. “Thank you. I appreciate your courtesy.” Then, to Dorian, and more briskly: “Along those lines, then, any assistance you might be able to provide in clarifying for my crew that this experience was not, in fact, a scripted render would be greatly appreciated. They should reach that conclusion on their own in time, but your willing involvement will help to allay their most troubling doubts. They’ll suspect your advice at first, but the more thoroughly you help them investigate, the more inevitable the correct conclusion will seem to them when they reach it.”

“You’re saying that you believe?” Dorian blinked at him, baffled.

He tried to remember clearly what he had experienced on the bridge in that calm, dead space after Amara had exposed the quae-ha-distra. He recalled the aching sense of oneness, the knowing and being known, the cool embrace of Amara’s splendid, eternal, unfathomable being. The joy of drowning in her infinite self. Another splendid taste of the world of the Exousiai.

But his mind couldn’t keep a grasp on it. The memory was too slippery, too rife with otherness for him to clutch it for long, and all that remained in its passing was just the bedrock awareness of having been transformed in ways he didn’t understand, but without knowing either how or why it had happened in the first place.

“Just like that?” he said. “You believe.”

Ray stiffened as though Dorian had offended him. “You don’t believe, I take it?”

“Of course I do. I’m slow, not stupid. What I don’t understand is how someone like you comes to believe so easily.”

“You expect me to require more evidence than the unforeseen eruption of a divine and timeless entity into my personal space? Not all of us are as stubborn or as single-minded as you are, John. We’ve been subjected to ample evidence over the last couple of weeks that there was more to Ms. Cain than was strictly discernable from traditional sensory inputs.”

“Such as?”

“The dreams were where it began. The subtle influx of an alien consciousness twisting through the landscape of our unconscious thoughts. Unbidden, we apprehended lives and worlds and vistas of potential that were not fundamentally our own. We all have dreams like that sometimes, yes? We all imagine ourselves as other folk, living different lives, but rarely is the experience so seamless that we grieve our loss when we wake.” Ray flashed his teeth playfully. “Even more rare is a shared-narrative experience. When my crew all dream the same dreams together, I should hope that I was an astute enough captain to take notice of such an aberration and spend some time wondering about its cause. Or is this explanation too abstract for your taste?”

“Necessary, but not sufficient, I’m afraid.”

“I expected as much. I won’t bore you with the related phenomena, then. The apparent thinning of the boundaries between private thought and public consciousness, for instance.”

Knowing, just as you are known. “Stipulated as fact. Move along.”

“Consider, then, that we routinely and inexplicably seem to have developed a tendency to leap several hundreds of thousands of kilometers ahead of our coordinate placements based on all known velocity-to-distance tables. Dreams are one thing. Countervening the laws of propulsion astrophysics is something else entirely.”

Ray withdrew his own chair from beneath his desk and sat down. He spoke to Dorian as though all these things should have been obvious from the start. True Believers™ were like that, Dorian supposed.

“I know you, John, and though you possess many impressive talents, a proclivity toward spontaneous trans-dimensional relocation is not one of them. Similarly, the Proletariat Horde has not previously under-reported her thrust-to-max-velocity capabilities, and while she is a gorgeously competent ship, the numbers we’re seeing are somewhat outside her scope. Outside of anyone’s scope, really. Faced with that fact, it was obvious that something has changed since we docked above Trithemius Orbis. The make-up of Misfit Toys has not, and you are a relatively known commodity. Thus, what changed had to be Amara. Factor in Raville’s ardent pursuit of her–and you, of course–and there must be something special about Amara that had hitherto remained undetected. Obvious to me, at least. I imagine our friendly police escort has had a devil of a time explaining it to their superiors. It might be illuminating to ask their opinion before we leave.”

“But what troubles you, I imagine, was my decision to force Amara–in a manner of speaking–to reveal her true self to us once we had heard Raville’s message. That was sheer pragmatism. We’re less than ten days out from the Glastenhame zap as of this morning’s calculations. Raville obviously understands how unique our passenger is, and is willing to take considerable risks to gain control over her. That is the wrong place and the wrong time to have scads of unanswered questions hanging over my head. I said it once before: As captain of this ship, it is essential that I know as much as I can be allowed to know about our mission before sticking my crew dead in the middle of Janite military jurisdiction and on the wrong side of both the police and one of the more powerful men in human space. Thus, I forced the point and asked what I needed to know. Amara gave me the answer.” He pressed his palms together in front of his nose and bowed his head in Amara’s direction. “Though once again, my dear, I beg your pardon for any inconvenience that I might have caused you.”

But Dorian shook his head. “Okay, so weird things have been happening. I’m clear on that. I understand that you’d be curious. It’s the leap from weird stuff coincides with Amara’s arrival to therefore she must be the emissary of a quasi-divine alien race that’s got me a little baffled. I mean, why not side with straightforward logic of a viral spoof until the evidence against it is incontrovertible?”

“What sort of proof is it that you’re looking for, John? Some things are just known. How the knowing happens can’t ever be explained. . .it can just be known, do you follow me?” Ray put up his hands in a gesture of exasperation. “I’ll put it as simply as I can: If you can show me the code architecture that is clean enough to duplicate what we have experienced, I’ll get down on my knees and worship you, for God’s sake. But you can’t. It doesn’t exist. I know Strand immersion. I know the feel of render. This was not it. Consequently, it must have been something else, and until that other thing can be adequately explained to me, I’m prone to believe what my deepest, most cherished self is telling me. Which is, as purely and simply as I can describe it, that I’ve been too far from home and seen to many miracles this morning to clap my hands over my eyes and call it wisdom. I know truth when I touch it.”

“You can only say that because you never saw her put away the curry,” Dorian answered, trying not to be defensive. “Curry confuses the issue, believe me.”

Amara laughed lightly into her hand, then said, “Don’t be too hard on him, Ray. John unfortunately had to contend with the added obstacle of knowing me prior to my awakening. He saw the trees up close as we slogged through them, rather than merely glimpsing a panorama of the forest after the fact. Your belief is more akin to faith, while John’s was hard earned. It’s the line between trust and faith.”

/&OpenSess

< Ping: John >

< What? >

< Don’t be so hard on yourself. >

< Who, me? >

< What I shared with you and what I showed the Misfit Toys were different experiences. They needed to know what they were fighting for. That isn’t what I need from you, and so your path to belief was different. >

< What exactly is it that you *do* need from me? >

< – >

< ? >

< They were provided with a vision to suit their particular talents. High level. It makes for a nice, convenient narrative. >

< Ah, you gave them the old spoonful of sugar method. . . >

< I showed them the history of Raville’s experience with the orb, and a sketch of my own human incarnation. It was enough to win their support because they, unlike you, wanted to believe in the gifts of the Exousiai in the first place. >

< Misfit Toys: Rising up against The Man (now with all-new Super-Alien Scrubbing Bubbles). >

< On a multitude of levels, yes. >

< Does it bother you to manipulate them like that? You’ve said they wanted to help all along. >

< It isn’t manipulation. One truth, many facets. Everyone approaches truth from their own perspective and takes what they need to live. >

< Did you get that out of a fortune cookie? >

< Yes, actually. But that doesn’t make it any less valid. >

< What about free will? >

< It’s an illusion founded on ignorance of the grand design. Truth means that all ends are inevitable. >

< Is that supposed to be comforting? >

< It’s supposed to be true. Whether or not you find it comforting depends on your perspective, too. >

< Gods eat too many fortune cookies, methinks. >

< Gods also don’t use p2p when they want to communicate with lowly mortals. >

< What are you saying? You’re *not* a god?!?! >

< I’m saying the human part of me has more patience with your good-natured sarcasm than the Exousian side would. I don’t think she has a sense of humor. >

< Oh, and the human side of you does? >

< – >

< So, are you just flirting with me? Or trying to keep me from feeling like a doof because it took me so long to find the bandwagon? >

< Gods don’t flirt, John. >

< I know that. Gods toy with mortals and then destroy them. On the other hand, gods also don’t use p2p, as someone recently pointed out, so I’m receiving some mixed messages. >

< – >

< I do think you’re maybe taking this god business a tad too seriously. Can we settle on something more reasonable? Something in the demi-godish range maybe? That would make me more comfortable. >

< – >

< So does this mean I’m not a doof? >

< – >

< I’d like your opinion on that. Seriously. >

< :: Connection Terminated :: >

/&EndSess

Dorian shook the signal reverb out of his skull and flapped his eyelids to clear both the p2p line and his thoughts. He didn’t know whether Ray had noticed his brief waver of attention, of if he would care even if he had. When Amara finished speaking, he took advantage of the pause to switch topics.

“Since we’re talking about trust and to get back to the topic at hand: do you really think my word is going to be enough to quell anyone’s doubts? Most of your people know that I’ve been hard at work in the Heavy Systems Tech Lab extracting Raville’s tarball. Some of them are savvy enough to figure out ways I might tunnel from a sub-datacore to the main repository and implant spoof jars at the nodes. I don’t think my word is going to count for much.”

“Some of them will continue to doubt,” Ray allowed, unperturbed. “Whether or not they choose to believe is a matter of individual conscience. I just want to give them a legitimate chance at it without being undermined by all the possible tech solutions.”

“At the same time,” Amara said, “we should be patient with those who will seek other explanations. Some will have difficulty accepting what they have learned. Humans encounter so little raw truth in their lives. It isn’t surprising that they wouldn’t know what to do with it when they do find it.”

“Indeed,” Ray agreed. “However, most initial skepticism should be allayed by Ghast’s participation in the extraction process. It would be mightily difficult to jack our network under normal circumstances. Jacking it with Ghast looking over your shoulder is nigh to impossible. He has the credibility here that your analysis alone would lack, Dorian.”

Ghast. Amara had told him to cultivate that relationship, probably for this exact circumstance.

Good thing he was a True Believer™, otherwise this mumbo-jumbo, convenient semi-coincidence business might have pissed him off. For those keeping score at home, that made it Goddess – 2, Troglodytic Human – nil.

“I have no problem offering my expertise,” he said, determined to avoid the hat trick. “I’ll do whatever Amara thinks is best.”

Ray put his hand up. “Hold on. I’m getting a ping from Yartz.” His eye fluttered for several seconds as he processed the p2p feed. When he was finished, he seemed more, rather than less disturbed. “Yartz is reporting that we seem to have made yet another unexplained spatial leap. Current projections suggest that we will have achieved a stable, geo-synchronous orbit above Glastenhame in a little over fifty-two hours shiptime.” Ray ran his hand nervously over the top of his desk, ruffling a sheaf of papers. “I don’t suppose you know anything about that?”

“Tempus fugit,” Amara said simply. “The purpose for this journey has almost been achieved.”

“We’ve lost our escort apparently.”

“They’re not lost. They ceased to be relevant, so we left them behind.”

Ray exhaled heavily, a sound like resignation. “It isn’t my place to question you, of course. But given that you have this talent for violating the laws of physics, and obviously have no compunction against using it–”

Dorian finished the thought for him. “If you can zap without a depot, why not just lift us straight to Giari Tau and save all this trouble?”

Eight days? Nine? It was the second time she had carved desperate hours away from his life because it suited her whims, putting everyone about her at risk. Was she trying to keep him blind?

“The journey itself is valuable, as we’ve already seen. We come to understandings about what we are, where the pieces fit together, how each one of us is valuable. But beside that, I ask you both to remember that the quae-ha-distra is still quickening within me. There are some things that I can do; there are others that I haven’t yet remembered. Skipping like a stone across the vastness and depth of space would still take us several months at my current rate of awakening.” Amara turned aside to Dorian and winked. “But most of all, I just don’t want to.”

“Don’t want?” Ray said, his eyes widening. His face went ashen. “But the escort, the Janites. . .the trade protocols demand–”

Dorian shook his head. “The gods have their own purposes. They’re bigger than your box.” But Ray wasn’t listening. His brow was pinched in concentration, and his lips moved in a constant, silent sub-vocalization. Scrambling to deliver orders to the crew, no doubt.

Dorian climbed to his feet. “I could have used the extra few days, Amara. You know I needed them.”

“I know you wanted them.”

“You’re going to shake his faith with a few more surprises like that. No one likes a capricious deity.”

“It’s only capricious if you don’t know what you’re doing,” she said. “Ray has just enough faith to accomplish the task that’s been given to him.”

He held her gaze for a moment. She smiled softly, full of her own wisdom, but he didn’t understand. He didn’t even know if he was supposed to.

In the end, Dorian did the only thing he could do: he went back to work.

 

He banged around the decks, cutting through service tunnels that were becoming increasingly familiar, sliding down ladders like an old pro, ticking off landmarks between his destinations to keep himself on course. Hurryhurryhurry. The demand for speed was like a hammer banging time against the drum of his skull. His vision seemed to fracture into deliberate angles, sharp as the blade of a knife in front, infinitely planed at the edges. He muttered conversion and decryption algorithm tables as he barked along, wove gossamer webs of logic, shunts of code, and sheer flights of fancy into complex triDvid mandalas, all blown away by gusts of chuddering impatience.

He felt the decks vibrating beneath his feet; heard the engines roar in one long, sustained growl. The whole ship gave a mighty lurch that almost tumbled him onto his face. And the decks, the corridors seemed to contract about him like a great diaphragm. Hard deceleration.

What did she want from him?

And was it Amara who wanted, or her darkling twin?

Dorian didn’t know how to interpret her anymore. She knew that he needed all the time left to them in order to crack Raville’s datacore. But she had chosen to thwart him, to proceed with her own divine agenda, as if it didn’t matter to her.

Why wouldn’t she want to know what was lurking in Raville’s foam? Was it because she had awakened to the extent that it was no longer necessary? And if so, why hadn’t she told him? Not just that the she knew, but what it was that was so important that they had needed it in the first place.

Or perhaps it was that having learned Raville’s secrets, she didn’t want Dorian to know. But he pushed that thought away. It had the stink of doubt, and as a newly christened True Believer, it was unbecoming.

He passed others as he sprang from deck to deck. Puggish Karo, stalking a round, muttering under his breath, stiff as a golem. Diaphanous Marilea, a shimmer of iridescent silks twisting in the breeze. The engineering geeks, Bil and Wil–maybe twins, maybe just built to look that way–lugging a battered steel chest that clanked and clattered like it was loaded with monkey wrenches. The ship had thrust itself into motion, gearing up the routine tasks of docking at a foreign port. Load the guns, test the firmware, poke the malware sniffers. Fire the tubes. Anchors aweigh!

Those who crossed his line of focus moved like automatons through the standard procedures, doing what must be done, what was always done. When he did notice them, like Karo, there was something mechanical about their actions, like they were following a script or responding to orders he did not hear. The same script and orders doled out to every spacefaring crew in human space, so that even an outside observer like Dorian, if he paused to observe them, might guess exactly what they were about just by looking at them. Karo, for example, was off to secure the galley, lock down the pots and pans. Bil and Wil would proceed down to Mechanical to watch over a board of digital readouts and status gauges marked with green, white and perilous red.

They were archetypal sailors, performing duties assigned to nautical and astronautical shipmen for thousands of years with little variation except for the buttons to be pushed, the lines to be secured, the technology to manipulate. Roles given life. Forms spawned from function, as efficient and deliberate as plugs of modular code.

They looked like they were sleepwalking, joints ajangle, servomotors wheezing, eyes dull and far away, as though their capacity for thought had been flung to the far corners of consciousness, and their bodies left to execute on auto-pilot. The meat abandoned to its own devices while the processors tried to cope with the ineffable.

Is this what it meant to be driven by the scourge of god? Spring into action, do what’s demanded, satisfy the prick of conscience. Don’t think, just do.

Be dazed. Be amazed. Carry on.

He didn’t know why this troubled him, and he didn’t have time to think about it.

Dorian burst through the hatch into the Heavy Systems Technical Lab and found Ghast still sitting in front of the monitor where he had left him an hour–no, eight days–before. Ghast glanced briefly over his shoulder, then went back to staring at the screen. His hands lay idle on the keypad in front of him, and his skin had a flaccid, pale quality to it. Dorian wormed his way through the crowded stacks of crated technical equipment and stood at his back, peering past him at the monitor.

He’d added a decent quantity of code. Some of it was obviously canned, and several chunks had so much recursive scan and keystroke cache logic to it that it had to be military in origin, but the control of flow architecture was surprisingly clever, even elegant. There were neat variable splices, trim carvings, a sharp multiple theater Stine decompilation ladder. Nice work. Not eight days worth of nice, of course, but that wasn’t Ghast’s fault.

Still, Dorian had to restrain himself from shoving him off his stool so he could start bashing at the keys himself. His fingers spasmed in anticipation. Ghast wasn’t actually doing anything at all at the moment. He hardly even acknowledged Dorian’s arrival, just gazed blandly ahead, almost as if he was trying to stare down his reflection in the monitor.

“Stuck?” Dorian asked. He put his hand on Ghast’s shoulder, and Ghast jerked like a man startled from a dead sleep. “Sorry. I thought you heard me come in.”

Ghast blinked at him for several seconds, then shook his head. “I, uh–my apologies. I was just. . .I think I lost my place in the program and was having trouble remembering what I was doing. And I got this strange ping from the bridge. . .” He squeezed his eyes shut, and opened them again, exhaling a heavy breath at the same time. He ran his hand nervously across his brow. “You want to know the truth, I think I fell asleep. I just had the weirdest–no, calling it a dream doesn’t feel right, but I don’t have another word for it. It was so vivid. So real.”

“It’s okay.”

“Is it? I mean, was it really–” Ghast lowered his eyes, unable to meet Dorian’s scrutiny.

“It is.”

“It wasn’t a dream?”

“If it was, we’ve all had the same dream.”

“And this is part of it, isn’t it? This work that you’re trying to do with the datacore?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“Amara, too? I didn’t imagine that, either?”

“It’s all true.”

Ghast grinned self-consciously, a little foolishly, and uttered a sigh that sounded more than a bit relieved. “I thought I might be going crazy, some kind of synaptic burn or Zhen-Tan Syndrome. Visions of angels will do that to you. It’s strange, the things you find you’re willing to accept as truth when the alternative seems worse.” He hoisted himself off the stool, laughing quietly. “No. I shouldn’t say that, either. It was surprising, you know, but not shocking. Do you know what I mean? Something about her felt special from the instant she came on board, a certain ethereal quality. She has this way of making you feel like she–I don’t know, like she understands you. But I guess she does, doesn’t she? Understand us, I mean.”

Another True Believer. “That doesn’t scare you?”

“Nah. Women always think they understand men. It’s nice to have one around that actually might.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“I know that.” Ghast grew serious, his features clouded. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but I’m going to. It feels right. It feels. . .liberating. I’ve carried this huge weight with me for so long, I’ve gotten used to it, but now–now it seems so intolerable. I’ve led what you might call an interesting life, John. That’s a euphemism, you know. It means that I’ve spent a whole bunch of years getting myself into trouble and making mistakes that hurt innocent people. I was a Marine once, and I turned my back on it. I turned my back on oaths I had taken and left my honor behind as a consequence. I’m not proud of that. It shames me. I can’t hold my head up in the company of honorable men, because I’ve cut myself off from that fraternity. I chose personal gain over community. This life I live is my penance for my failures as a human being. I’ve spent years trying to unmake the mistakes of my past; years trying to live down the lie of the man I claim to be. But that doesn’t make it any less of a lie, and the illusion of honor that comes from helping people who aren’t powerful enough to help themselves is still an illusion at the end of the day.

“That girl Amara–whether girl or goddess, I don’t really care–she sees what I want to be rather than what I am. She counts my aspirations as goodness and makes me believe that one day I might just become what I hope to be. I can see how such a bone deep understanding might frighten some people, but it feels like grace to me.”

“That was your dream, then? You dreamed of grace.”

“I dreamed of the possibility of forgiveness.”

Dorian had nothing to say to that. Ghast was so achingly sincere, achingly transparent, that it would have been nothing more than cruelty to challenge him further. He’d found his reason to believe, and it was all that he needed.

After a few moments of silence, Ghast gestured toward the monitor. “Well, I’d better let you get to work. I’m afraid I didn’t get as much done as you probably wanted. I was trying to hew pretty close to the structure you’d already put into place, but I wasn’t always sure I understood where you were going.”

“You did fine, I’m sure.”

The faint praise made Ghast flush with pleasure, and he went on quickly, “I’ve got to head up to the bridge to see what Yartz is yammering on about. There was a deceleration burn a few minutes ago that I need to investigate, too. Generally get myself up to speed. I hate to leave you with so much work undone, though.”

Dorian waved him toward the door. “Go on. I’m sure Yartz will be grateful for your help.”

“Aye. I’ll check back later.”

But by the time Ghast sealed the hatch behind him, Dorian was already lost in the text.

 

He hated Michael Raville. Hated him.

Hate. Hate. Hate.

What kind of stupid keycracker switched from a perfectly serviceable, squarely scalable Dorson-Kayne Matrix to a clustered Fritzman Holistic Model in the in the middle of a storage bundle? It was Programming_by_Monkeys 101. Sure, the DKM was an ancient technique derived from an obsolete flat binary layered shell system, but it was stable and convertible with minimum read-in rejection when done through a one time load loop, but Raville was archiving his DKM’s and performing precarious on-demand FHM script conversions that scattered faulty bits from one end of the architecture to the other.

Hard to unspool a rotating tarball when the key sig file kept dropping random characters during the load phase of a procedure call.

It took time, too much time, to build a completely independent sub-microsecond skeleton dialer that attempted to continuously cram a cascading sequential key value into the lock before the security algorithms could certify the bad read and blow up the decryption. Raville’d had a hundred freaking years to blow the dreck out of his datacore, and he’d done nothing about it, just lived with crappy, kludgy code. An offense to nature, that’s what it was. A guy like that didn’t deserve to have private foam if this was how he was going to take care of it.

Dorian said these things to himself and a million likewise variations as he plodded along, scratching out code, packaging modules, testing and failing and testing again.

It was just aimless caterwauling, mostly. (Mostly.) Too many things to do, too little time to do them in. He fashioned latticeworks of symbol transformation, value-recog self-organizing dimensional element tables, gearwise arrays of floating data packets that handed off values fist-to-palm like the buckets on a water wheel. Everything that should have been easy was a disaster. Everything that should have been brain-meltingly difficult was simply and intractably unfathomable. He couldn’t tell if Raville was a genius or an idiot, and being unable to decide made it that much harder.

And once he had the tarball unspooled, the real work had just begun.

Because Ghast had been right. No matter how carefully he parsed the data, he wasn’t going to be able to dump the full datacore into his foam. There wasn’t time to convert it, read it and process it in any useful way. He had to choose what seemed important, sight unseen, which meant designing a logic that would mimic the choices he would have made himself in realtime analysis. Look for density. Look for timestamping. Look away from anything that resembled the code he had already seen, the orb and the oracle and the faux-Sonali.

Karo brought him coffee, always huffing and puffing, red-faced and anxious, but never complaining. Ghast checked over his progress at four hour intervals, but rarely did more than shake his head and look daunted. Ray pinged him twice to warn him of imminent decel burns, because the electrical system sometimes went cranky and the auxiliary data environments had been known to spontaneously fail as a result. (Save your work!) Even Amara stopped by once to watch and smile and coo lovely somethings in his ear that didn’t really hear and wouldn’t have remembered anyway, though he thought she might have been cheering him on the way parents shout encouragement to their kid in tee-ball, hollering for them to do their best but not really expecting them to do anything but fail.

And all the while, Dorian felt their slow, irrevocable approach to the planet through the soles of his feet and the rumble in his guts as gravity shifted, as the clatter of activity trundled up and down the deck outside his door, as the pressure building inside his skull increased. He hunched his shoulders. He hammered at keys. He cursed and grunted and howled. He sat and sweated and stank.

And he kept at it.

He built a mostly intuitive seeder index while the light thrusters maneuvered the Proletariat Horde into alignment along the docking chute.

He carved out a dazzling value-integrity array as the stabilizer clamps latched on and the decontam spiders clicked and hosed their way across the outer hull.

While the Port Authority agent was accepting his gratuitous bribe, Dorian was hyperloading raw, semi-normalized data into the seenop compatible spew.

And finally, finally, when Ghast came to inform him that the operation crew was assembling for disembarkation, Dorian–his head full of sawdust and cobwebs, his entire body as numb and dead as a block of wood–clicked the last key, executed the latest iteration of his code, and held up three fingers.

“Three hours,” he said. “Keep me out of the vats for three hours. Someone may have to carry me.”

“Carry you?” Ghast had left his cudgels behind and squeezed himself into a nondescript gray shipsuit, so obviously new it was still creased from its packaging folds. He looked almost respectable, which was all the evidence Dorian needed to prove to himself that he had truly run out of time. “What are you–”

“I’ve got to shut down while I seed the data from my foam to the mem extensors. I’m uploading the batch file even as we speak.”

“No, no. You’ve got to hold it together, Chief. The PA guys are going to swear you’re carrying a data viral if they can’t rouse you. They’re not going to let you within ten kilometers of the zap queue.” Dorian slumped forward, nodding off. Ghast gave a yelp, and Dorian jerked himself awake, but only with great effort. “Come on, Chief. This isn’t a good–crap! Have you run this plan past Ray?”

“Too late. Be creative.” A pit yawned at his feet, a beckoning emptiness. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

“I don’t think we have–”

“Three hours,” Dorian repeated dully. His voice sounded hollow, his vision blurred. His head buzzed, a pleasant, monotonous drone deep inside his skull, like a nest of hornets. “Or I won’t have a chance of understanding any of it before it’s too late.”

“Understand what? John! What about your package preparation? What about your–”

“It’s all in my profile.” He would have tapped at his temple if his arms weren’t so heavy. “Standard load. Customization details and package .src files are straightforward enough that they shouldn’t have any questions. If there are any concerns about the package, tell them that the mem extensors are synaptic carvings and not cortical scarring. I do not want them patched under any circumstances. Most important: they need to take a realtime snapshot of the synaptic map before I go and add it to the package bitstream, otherwise I’ll lose all the seeds I’m about to plant, okay?”

Ghast chewed his lip, looking uneasy. Or was it just his stiff new clothes that made him look unsure of himself?

“It’ll be fine. I used to manage packages for a living, remember? I know how to prep a file for a zap depot.”

Dorian closed his eyes before Ghast could protest further and let the combination of exhaustion and imminent knowledge sweep him away.

<– Chapter 17 / Chapter 19 –>