Agnosis – Ch. 19

<– Chapter 18 / Chapter 20 –>

Alive.

A shock, an epiphany, an idling engine.

A breath.

Sharp, shallow, alarmed.

Pain.

Flames roiled in his chest, lapping at the tallow of his lungs.Pins and needles attacked the nerves from toe tips to fingernails.His eyes burned, his skin sang, his muscles throbbed.Everything that he recognized as himself, his body, ached.His tongue was dry, coated with a foul, brittle mucous, and when he lifted his eyelids, the stab of light was as piercing as a fist full of nails.

Breathing itself was agony, each inhalation a swallow of broken glass.Each exhale a vomit of flint and gravel.Tears filled his eyes, blurred what little vision he possessed until the streams ran continuously down his cheeks and puddled in his ears.

A suffocating drowner’s panic gripped him.

Epiphany #2:Life was agony.Meat was pain.

Worse:his head felt light, absent some critical component.A comforting buzz that should have been, but was not.A route of escape cut off.He was empty, alone, just a bag of miserable flesh.

And he remembered. . .something impossibly distant.Sitting in a cramped space, surrounded by humming electronics, the whir of cooling fans, ticking away at a keypad.Frustration.Working, finishing, sleeping.Utter, mind-shattering exhaustion.A resonance in the darkness of sleep that went on for centuries of uncharted time.The ceaseless drone of knowing.The gates of knowledge screeching open, just wide enough for him to slide through.

Something he stole.

Something he knew.

Something important and sticky and unimaginable.

Then the nothingness.A hole in the fabric of being.

It was all knotted up inside him, the knowing and thinking and being, inseparable and yet discrete.Unharmonious, this messy package of existing.It should be seamless, he thought.It felt like that, anyway, though he had no proper memory to remind him.Interconnection should be a basic multitasking function, a constant sub-rational mediation between levels of consciousness, but he could only get one bit working at a time.It was either the meat or the mind, but not ever both.He had to remind himself to breathe.He didn’t recall how to do all of these things at once.

Flash:the dizzy reel of acceleration.Black night.Pinions of stars unfurling, wheeling.Cold.The great, heaving clunk of pressure.A stab of light, a centrifugal groan, choke of gas and. . .worlds aborning–

Sound.

A rumble, a hush, a susurrus of wings.

Who was this person?

Rough skinned as the bark of a tree, carpeted in mites, a yearning ecology, their legs clicking, their mouths sucking, gnawing.A forest of hairs, limbs and chest, like the spines of a cactus.Follicles churning, girth swelling, a rippling, chaotic quake of growth.Full of mucous and thumping with blood, bubbly and wet and viscous.A precarious bladder of bile sloshing between destinations that have been determined by nothing more than sloppy meat urges and arcane neuro-chemical backwash.What an inelegant arrangement!

Voices.

Lean, whispered, hard.

Flash:the scream of wind, the thunder of vacuum pierced.A rending compression.A trillion trillion cells cry out.The stately progression of planets, whipped clean of atmosphere.Grey and black, scorched by a writhing solar wind. . .a trill of song–

An odd thing:association conjured by sensation, something from nothing.Experience becomes words.Rapid fire cause and effect at first, then an abstraction and its label melting together until they become one.

Stomach grumbles.Hungry.

Pressure in the abdomen.Needed to pee.

Thirsty.

I.

I am thirsty.

A recollection:Newborns don’t pee.The urinary urge is a standard biological reaction to the impending habitation of an engineered biospheric automaton, i.e., post-zap gasses settling into more convenient arrangements.Newborns don’t defecate, either.What was there to expel?Just formational by-products of nanomech reassembly.The bowels chucked up a gassy, gooey whatsit.What was the word?Macomium?Encomium?

He didn’t know what any of those words meant.

Zap?

Flash:First there were voices, constant, lively, inchoate.The outside becomes the inside.Eater of worlds.Sate and know.The voices become one, like a mighty river dammed.Damned.Be still and know?Stillness is the death of knowing.It is signal without noise.Data without a frame of reference–

A hiss of breath.”I told you this was a mistake.”

“It is what it is.Nothing more.”

“We must hurry.Do I need to remind you how precious these minutes are to us?My God, if Ghast and I hadn’t awakened when we did–we’re all in jeopardy, can’t you see that?”

“Then perhaps you should be about your business and leave the waiting to me.”

“They’re cutting through the blast doors, Amara!”

Another oddity:John Dorian.

Wait.Trick question.He knew this one.

“Every minute that passes endangers the whole operation, and you’re wasting time with this. . .this corpse!”Pause.”No.I’m sorry.That was cruel of me.Please–I’ll miss him dearly, you know that, but we must proceed.We must go now.”

“I won’t leave him.”

“But you can’t help him, not any more than you could help the others.What remains is just a husk, an abortion.” Groan of frustration, sorrow, both.”You’re not the only one who has had to abandon your dead.We’ve all lost, and ours, at least, were innocent.John did this to himself.He should have told someone what he was doing.It was a tragic miscalculation.And yes, I should never have let him onto the shuttle, not without a better understanding of his zap history, and certainly not after he had so radically altered his package profile–”

“John needed to understand.”

“I hope he did, for all the good it has done him.”Another hiss.”The point remains.He’s beyond our ability to help him.We can grieve his loss, but what we cannot do is allow his mistake to cost the rest of us what little opportunity remains.Don’t throw all that might be accomplished away for this one man.”

“I need him.”

“And the universe needs you to perform the duty for which you’ve awakened, my dear.I’m sorry.I truly am, but we must go now.”

“Then go.I’ve chosen to wait.”

A dull, bleating buzz.He imagines red lights, the color of lava.Incarnadine.Shadows pitched in stark bloody hues.A strange association, but one that feels familiar.

Flash:A gray room, the upper dome of a clouded pearl.Dim light, a specter of luminance.Long, purple tubes suspended from the ceiling that glowed and hummed, carefully recessed behind heavy grillwork.A strident scent fills his nostrils, dust and chemicals and the curious, sad odor of abandonment.High ceiling, lost in shadows above the hanging tubes of light.Intermediately, a galvanized trackworks of whirring linkage and thudding gears mounted on bare steel supports and girders as thick as a man’s waist.Beyond, ridge after ridge of storage crate mountains.

A storage vault.A zap depot.A warehouse for lost souls.

An uncomfortable bed, chilly to the touch and hard as stone.Cool air shugs past in a constant breeze.It grates against his raw skin like the stroke of sandpaper, but just as he has grown accustomed to the light, this discomfort also recedes.The slab on which he awakens reveals itself as a thin layer of plastic padding atop a bed of packing pallets.He feels the slats and gaps digging into his back.

More wonders:His arms, left and right, touch flesh.His legs, too, and the soles of his feet.Other skin, not his own, warm and soft, like a nest of infants.Anonymous flesh, featureless, unscarred, unhardened by age, the old made new.

He lifts his head, and the newly formed muscles in his neck thrum from shoulder to ear lobe.It is a nest of sorts.Bodies surround him, laid out side to side in neat rows, heads below touching toes above.They are tall and short, dark and light, fat and thin.Long hair, short hair, no hair at all.Some of them snore lightly.Others toss and turn, maybe dreaming, maybe just completing the task of filling out the bodies they have been given.All of them utterly and completely naked.All of them utterly and completely strangers to him.

He watches sleepily, uncuriously curious, as the overhead tram lurches into motion.A shallow sided cart rolls along toward him through a gap in one wall, pushes through a flapping plastic curtain that hides whatever was beyond it.It pauses above him, switches tracks, grinds through a series of fine alignments and finally halts a few meters beyond his feet.He raises himself up onto his elbows.Hydraulics hiss, and the entire mechanism tilts, spilling out yet another body.A woman this time, unceremoniously decanted into a heap so unruly and unnatural that it almost looks as if her bones haven’t yet finished hardening.She is thin, moderately curved, pale as milk.He has no idea who she is.

But seeing her, he feels a stirring between his legs, and an unaccustomed, dislocated urge–a desire to rut, black and gripping.

The cart withdraws, clunks on its way, but behind it follows a dangling ovoid packing unit, spider-armed and multi-jointed.With quick and fluid motions, it lifts the woman off the slab, meticulously arranges her limbs, smoothes away the unnatural angles.It strokes her flesh, pinches her muscles, scans her product against the pre-transmission package profile–generally clucks and clacks and worries over her until it is satisfied that she has met specifications and will not have to be recycled. Then it, too, glides off.

Dorian puzzles over this curious phenomenon for several seconds.More words come to him, delicate little puffs of smoke:

Misfit Toys.

Giari Tau.

Michael Raville.

Amara.

He drifts back into warm, fuzzy sleep.

“It isn’t safe for you to go alone.Someone else will take his place.”

“I need him.No other will suffice.”

“Why him?What do you need from him alone?”

“He knows.”

“He knew, perhaps.He doesn’t now.He’s dead, Amara.The machine of his flesh just doesn’t realize it.”

Flash:A scribble of numbers.White chalk on a green board.Brutal deltas.Widdershins sigmas.Perilous pi.Sanskrit characters and an interminable cascade of numerals.Symbols with largely theoretical referents.

A taste of burning.The last shudder of suffocation.

Anger.”Do you hear that?That was the outer doors collapsing.The sound of our doom approaching!Every moment you delay brings it nearer.”

“Are you losing faith, Captain?”

“It isn’t faith I’m losing.It’s time.”

“There is always time.”

“You worry that he’ll suffer, or that he is suffering currently, is that it?I can help him.He won’t feel it, Amara, I promise you.He won’t even be aware that it has happened.It’s the right thing to do.The merciful thing, for all of us.”

“He’s breathing, Ray.He’s alive.”

“He doesn’t have to be.I can take care of it for you.I can make it painless.”

“No.”

“It’s John or the rest of us.We’re out of options except these two:we can terminate him and get down to the business at hand, or we can collectively self-terminate and hope that our package signals can be reconstituted from cache in Glastenhame.What we cannot do is sit here and wait for our enemies to take us.”

“Self-termination would be. . .unpleasant.”

“It only takes a moment of courage.You won’t remember it.Or we could save all that trouble and just terminate him.”

A new sound:the dry clack of a shell advanced and locked into the firing chamber.

A rush of adrenaline.

Spasm of panic.

Gasp.

Without warning, without hope, he remembers.

And Dorian awakens screaming.

 

A hand clamped savagely over his mouth, cutting off his scream like a door slammed shut.The blow was sudden, a slap, and it stung along the nerve endings of his cheek, but Dorian didn’t wince, didn’t complain.He welcomed the sharp, electric pain.He was awake.He was alive.He stared into the blur of numinous light and malformed shadows that surrounded him, eyes bulging and wild, limbs trembling, chest heaving with screams.A whole chorus of screams.

He couldn’t see.He was a man trapped in a shimmering world of ghosts.

Or he was the ghost.

He blinked, and his eyes still stung, full of grit and sand.

He could have wept for joy.

Hush. It’s all right, John.Your eyes are still new.They need a moment to clear.All is well.

It was the voice of his mother, gentle and cooing, full of warm comfort.

He’s most likely mad.You know that, don’t you?Crazy as a loon.

Dorian let his muscles relax and squeezed his eyes shut.They continued to burn, but hot tears soothed them.He let the tears fall, unheeded, until his cheeks felt tight and tacky with drying salt.

He lay on his side with his neck at an awkward angle, pinched against one shoulder by the weight pressing down on him.It was hard to breathe with the hand over his mouth, but he did not struggle.

Crazy as a loon.

Slowly, tenderly, Dorian opened his eyes again.

The first thing he saw with his newborn sight was the gun.

A short barreled assault rifle, in fact.Black and snouty, accreted with an impressive number of keen protrusions, lethally curved grips and pinhole exhaust ports, it looked impossibly long from Dorian’s perspective, gazing up into the black tube that was all darkness and silent threats.It reeked of gun oil, of burnt phosphorous, of violence.The more he goggled, the nearer the gun loomed, as sinuous and fatal as the head of an asp.

He forced his limbs to go limp, his fingers to unclench.

Be calm.Don’t look crazy.Think circles:small circles; happy circles.

The hand that covered his mouth was attached to an arm, and the arm to a body.The body belonged to a boy:thin and stooped and narrow hipped, grey-eyed and freckled across the bridge of his nose.Dorian recognized him, even after so many years.It was Ray Morrical.Not the pale and cadaverous revolutionary zealot he had come to associate with a name over the last few weeks, but Ray Morrical himself, the same one Dorian had coached and cajoled all the way through TechTac. It was like staring deep into the wells of memory.

Young, young.God, he looked so young!

The gun’s hammer cocked; the grey eyes narrowed.

Me, Dorian thought.It’s me!I’m sane!But he couldn’t say it, because speaking would give way screaming if he wasn’t careful, and screaming would be proof of his madness.How do you convince someone you’re not mad after they’ve already made up their mind?

Crazy as a loon!

“Wait.”

Another hand, small and pale, a young woman’s hand, touched Ray’s forearm just above the stock of the gun.The barrel wavered uncertainly.

The softness, the familiar resonance of her voice pulled Dorian’s eyes away from the weapon, in spite of its primal tug.She was tiny, slight of build, achingly delicate.So small, just a slip of a girl, swathed in dark, military style fatigues that were overlarge, so that she had to roll the cuffs up, both blouse and trousers, like a child playing dress up out of her father’s old foot locker.She looked as fragile as glass.Her hair was the color of fresh harvested wheat, straight as silken thread, and her eyes were the brilliant blue of deep sky and alchemical flame.Cold as the frozen vacuum of space and piercing as the gales of winter.

Like ice, he thought, like the stunning cerulean glaciers of frozen Sae Phen.

Amara?

As if she heard his thought, her eyes flashed in his direction, and she smiled, then bent her attention back to Ray without speaking.

“See?He’s awake.”

“But is he whole?”

“He is.”

Ray’s gaze flickered back and forth between them, hard with suspicion and doubt.Doubt and fear.Finally, resignation and acceptance.The hand over Dorian’s mouth withdrew, and Ray slumped back into a pool of shadows, chewing on his lower lip.He lowered the gun’s barrel toward the floor.

“My apologies,” he said, stiffly.”I thought we’d lost you.”

Dorian lay his head back and tried to control a wave of tremors that swept over him.His heart thumped in chaotic rhythm; his chest heaved.He still didn’t trust himself to speak.He was afraid he’d babble, undo all of Amara’s work.

It was a good thing the newborn couldn’t pee.He would have soiled himself for sure.

Amara knelt over him, her face drawn close so that it completely occupied his field of vision, his entire perceptual universe.Her mouth, her eyes, her hands pressed against the sides of his face, and he stared at her as though she would save him from drowning.

She smelled like strawberries.

“John?”

He spoke with a ragged voice.”Is it really you?”

Amara nodded.”Yes.”

“You don’t look like I expected you would.”

“And you look the same.Younger, but the same.” She was calm, smiling, and imparted calm to him in turn with her soothing tone.Dorian took a deep and steady breath.”How clever of you.”

“On Sonali, I was in my native form.”For reasons he did not understand, he had a sudden urge to cry, but he smothered it.”I told you that.”

“And this is mine.Does it offend you?”

“No.It’s. . .lovely.Smashing.”He struggled for words.”But different.It’s disorienting,–” Intimate?”I got so used to your carousel of modifications that I stopped wondering who you really were.And now that I see you, it’s a little overwhelming.To recognize you inside this stranger.It sounds silly, I know.I’m sorry, I’m still trying to get things straightened out.I had the strangest–”Dreams?Nightmares?Visions?He growled at himself to stop.He was starting to sound hysterical. “I didn’t expect it to be so hard.Waking up, I mean.”

“It isn’t supposed to be,” Ray snapped.”What you did was foolish.It jeopardized the entire mission.Even Karo recovers more quickly, and thus we leave him behind.”

“What hap–what did I do?”

But even as he asked the question, stabs of memory came to him: the Lab, the seeding, a chaotic and demoniac plunge into a world of pure data.

There was something he was supposed to remember, a vital something, but his head was full of mud, churning and sieving, panning amongst the muck for nuggets of truth. A thrill of alarm, a flash of vision, a. . .pfft.That was as close as it would come.A glint of gold that vanished just as quickly as it surfaced.

Dorian closed his eyes and stroked his temples with his fingertips, but it didn’t help.Not even the happy little circles.

He’d been on a ship.Sonali Southrange bound for Glastenhame.

He’d been sick.

Amara awakening.Amara manifesting.

Then there was work.Lots of work.Raville’s horrible datacore.

He remembered being exhausted, sucking on coffee, pounding the keys through a haze of weariness, confusion and harried desperation as profound as any he had ever known in his life.

Then snatches of consciousness glimpsed through a cheesecloth of sleep:arrival, the shuttle, the depot. . .something.

Bzzt.

No good.

“Where are–are we there?Giari Tau?”

Amara smiled, bent and kissed his forehead.”Yes, darling.We’re here.We’re almost home.”

Home?

Right peg.Wrong shaped hole.

Don’t think about it.Isn’t that what his mother had always said?When you can’t remember, move on to something else and wait for the answer to steal upon you unawares.

He shook off the burgeoning sense of dread that had accompanied him from vatsleep.He didn’t have time for it or for recalcitrant memories, in any case.More immediate matters demanded his focus.His internal landscape might be a disaster, but the external one was rapidly springing into crystal clarity.

Take stock.

He lay in a crowded warehouse, on a thinly padded pallet, surrounded by neatly stacked gunmetal grey plastic crates.Some of them had been overturned, pillaged, arranged into a circular perimeter with narrow, defensible gaps between them.The chamber beyond was vast, domed, constructed of heavy blastcrete and lit with low wattage, humming fluorescent tubes.Somewhere, industrial heating and air exchange units rumbled.He felt a cool breeze on his face and chest and arms.It chafed against his raw, newborn skin.He realized with a start that the nagging clangor he had been hearing as he awakened was an alarm.Intrusion alert.Not inside the warehouse yet, but close, muted by the zap depot’s blast-hardened walls.

Probably safe to assume that this was not good news.

“Help me up?” he asked.

Amara took his hand and levered him to his feet, but it was mostly his own effort.She was too small to be of much help.Not even up to his shoulder, and light as air.

“You’re shorter than I remember,” he said once he had gained his feet, and realized he had to look down to meet her gaze.”Shorter.” And radiant.Bursting with light, dusted with pixie magic.

Speaking of bursting:”And I’m, um, more exposed.”

He was naked, head to toe and everywhere in between.Dorian’s face grew hot.Despite the chilly warehouse, he had developed a throbbing erection, as hard and eager as a stud bull’s.

He tried to step away from her and cover himself with has hands at the same time, but his limbs were strangely unwieldy and he stumbled over his own feet.Ray caught him before he fell and steadied him with a hand against Dorian’s back.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“Don’t be ashamed,” Ray grumbled back.”It’s a perfectly natural biological response to post-transfer reconstitution.We all had the same experience, but you slept through the more public re-introductions.”

“I understand that.I’m sorry.”

Ray’s features darkened, as though he didn’t believe him.”Do you have any idea how close I was to killing you?”

“Why do you think I woke up when I did?”

Ray grunted.”It was nothing personal, of course.”

Dorian shrugged loose of him.”I would have done the same thing in your place.”

“Stand here, and don’t move.”Ray crossed to an open packing crate, the rifle still cradled in his arms, and retrieved a shrink wrapped bundle of dark cloth.”Those are close to your size, best as I can tell.I’m afraid they only come in black.”

He tossed the package, and Dorian snatched it out of the air and tore into the wrapping.With his back to them, he hurriedly dressed himself.Amara brought him grey socks and loose fitting rubber shoes that slipped on over his feet without laces or clasps.Dorian nodded his thanks.

When he turned to face them again, Ray produced a rifle from another cannibalized crate, and with only a slight hesitation, passed it along as well.

“You remember how to use one of those, I assume?”

Dorian held the weapon away from his body, frowning at it.It felt heavy, awkward, alien like an antediluvian artifact whose purpose he did not grasp.”I remember.”

He didn’t like guns.Never had.Guns almost always meant that people would eventually be shooting at you, obligating you to shoot back.Reciprocal shooting usually meant that someone ended up getting recycled.

“The safety is on, but the weapon is loaded,” Ray explained in a terse, rapid tone.A man growing impatient with unnecessary delays.”Since this was your first zap, these are the things you should know:You’ll feel strong for awhile yet, but when the weariness finally hits you, it will hit hard and fast.To make matters worse, this moon is small, and the tidal forces are more extreme than you’re used to from Trithemius Orbis.It will take you some time to adjust both to your new body and the reflexive negotiation of your new mass-to-weight ratio.Unfortunately, we can’t parse muscle memory out of your package, so you’re going to have to be aware that you’re running old software on brand new hardware.Don’t trust your instincts.Take it easy and conserve your energy where you can.The rest of us have had a chance to get used to the environmental changes, so we’re ahead of you in the learning curve.Watch what we do and try to imitate it.We did take the liberty of tweaking your package prior to transmission with a few skeleto-muscular adaptations which we predicted would prove useful on this planet type to take advantage of the gravitational differentials, so once you do get the hang of things, you’ll be stronger and faster than you remember.But as I said, what we can’t teach is instinct and experience.There’s no replacement for time and practice.So try not strain yourself too much until you’ve acquired the necessary skills.”

“What’s our operation status?”Dorian asked, though he was certain he didn’t want to know the answer.

“Disastrous, as usual, but we’re in the process of climbing on top of it.”

“And the alarms?”

Ray darted his eyes between Amara and Dorian.”Our attempt to disguise the package transfers as non-biological construction materiel seems to have failed.We had a bit of a tussle with the queue filters on arrival.”

“Were we delayed?”

“For a time, but Amara assures us that it’s just a complication, not a dealbreaker.”

An uncomfortable pause.

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s been a change of plans.”Amara said stolidly.

“What sort of change?”Dread felt much the same in the new body as it did the old one, he discovered.”What happened?”

“Raville warned you that there might be technicians on duty when we awoke from vatsleep, yes?”

“He said one or two.The depot is supposed to be almost fully automated.”

“There were eight,” Ray spat.”But we were lucky.They weren’t armed with anything more lethal than borite auto-injectors and they weren’t prepared for Ghast and I to come awake from fugue as quickly as we did, which ultimately worked to our advantage, though I regret that half of them managed to escape.”

“They were waiting for us?”

“Not exactly waiting.They were more preoccupied with taking tissue samples and in preparation for euthanizing members of my crew before they awakened.”

Tissue samples.Dorian’s knees felt suddenly weak.Raville had sent technicians to identify the sleepers via their DNA and dispatch them one at a time upon positive identification, which meant. . .

“Raville knows who you are.”

Amara did not acknowledge his comment, only continued:”Ghast was charged with locating the weapons and supplies that were zapped along with us while Ray set about rousing the others.He had Stine, his data systems expert, track down a terminal so she could jack into the automated control system to verify, among other things, that the pre-transmission false lading profile we had prepared had masked the transfer of our package dump.The logs indicate that it did not.They knew we were coming.”

“We lost three packages to the filters,” Ray said, the words hard as stones.

“Lost?”Dorian grappled with the word, but extracted no meaning from it.It was too dense, too final.It had the stench of death about it.“You mean they were bumped back to Glastenhame for recycling.”

“I mean that they were lost.Terminally.Glastenhame Depot was doing us a considerable favor by even transmitting our packages.We could not expect them to maintain our legal identity data dumps indefinitely, especially given their political affiliations.The packages in local cache would have been purged hours after the zap transmission authority had been confirmed.Once this depot confirmed that the signal had been received and verified, there was no need for retransmission.”

Dorian understood.In order to prevent individuals from simultaneously reconstituting multiple copies of their unique packages in zap depots all across human space, each zap transfer contained an official government bitstamp of primacy, an imprimatur of legitimacy that attempted to confirm that this iteration of the individual was the only active package in realtime existence.Every public system from foam access to income taxes to zap confirmed the bitstamp prior to initiating transactions.In theory, someone could still multiply replicate himself if he obtained the necessary materials (unlikely), but only the “original” could live anywhere near the civilized grid and function as anything more than a sticks and stones caveman.

When Glastenhame had zapped them to Giari Tau, their token packages auto-assembling in vatsleep had become the primary id receptacles and the versions living in the Glastenhame Depot server cache merely copies—extraneous bit patterns subject to the inevitable purge cycle.

What he did not understand was how the packages had been lost in the first place.

“So you’re telling me that this depot just dropped them?The signals were lost, hashed, degraded, what?”

It was unthinkable.Errors of that magnitude simply did not occur.

“The logs suggest that the quality of their signal transfer was degraded beyond the assembly matrix’s ability to extrapolate unique product characteristics from available data,” Ray explained, his tone flat and careful, like he was repeating text memorized from an error message.“It was straightforward entropic erasure.”

But Dorian shook his head.It still made no sense.The redundant transmission safeguards were held in the local recipient cache for six to eight weeks to prevent just this sort of disaster.”What happened to the backups, refresh cycles, quality control protocols?Those systems don’t just fail—“He inhaled sharply. “Unless someone with admin access spikes them.”

“They didn’t fail, at least not that we can tell.They simply ceased to be effective,” Amara said quietly.

Ceased to be effective.Dorian’s mouth fell open, his lips formed the question he most dreaded to ask.He already knew the answer, but he asked anyway.

“How long were we retained in the filter cache?”

“For nearly six months,” Amara said quietly.

Thunder rumbled inside his head.Dorian reeled, stunned and dizzy, as though he had just watched the world implode around him.Six months!Then the Marine ships, the Juggernaut and the Indianapolis, with their complement of thousands of soldiers had arrived.The expected contact with Exousiai was imminent.The universe was on the verge of war, and they had done nothing to prevent it.Nothing at all.Dorian swallowed thickly, and his throat suddenly dry, raw.

Raville.He had known.He’d been waiting for them.

“How is that not a dealbreaker?” Dorian barked at them.”The whole point of this exercise was that we had to intervene before the Marines arrived and before Raville was aware of us, before he had ascertained your identity, Amara.That was our window of opportunity.That was our one chance!”

Amara cupped his cheek in her palm, and he fell silent.She was unshaken, infinitely, impossibly calm.”Raville has chosen the day and the hour of our arrival,” she said.”You knew that we could not keep my identity secret from him forever.It’s happened.All we can do is move on.He recognized me, and has been waiting, holding us at a safe distance until his plans were sufficiently advanced that he believes I pose no threat to him.His belief does not make it so.”

“But how did he know?”

“Perhaps it was something in my zap profile that was…anomalous.”

“You said that you had zapped before.If it was that easy, just plucking your distinctive signal out of the fatband, Raville would have found you years ago.”Dorian wavered, his head clogged with sand.He couldn’t think, couldn’t grope for an answer, except that it had been a colossal waste.All of it, from the moment they had entered Raville’s memory palace.”This was supposed to keep you safe.”

“She’s never been aware that she was a goddess before,” Ray said, disgusted.”Maybe that makes a difference.”

His wasn’t the only world collapsing, Dorian realized suddenly.Grief and failure turned Ray’s voice ragged with hidden pain.

Which ones? He wondered.Which of the Misfit Toys had been sacrificed?

“Why didn’t you do something?” he demanded of Amara.”Why didn’t you save them?”

“I was constrained.”

“By what?By the zap?You’re a goddess, Amara!Isn’t that what you keep telling me?Yet you let this happen.The deaths, the delays. . .my God, why didn’t you do something?”

“What would you have had me do, John?Decode myself from zap in order to intervene?Do you comprehend the energy that would have required?It would have destroyed the filter cache.It would have destroyed you, and would have shattered the integrity of the remaining packages.You would all have been lost.”Amara’s voice became a rasp of pure anguish.”Is that what you would have me do?Unleash a glorious resurrection that would blast my enemies and my beloved all in one stroke?I couldn’t do it, John.No matter how much I might have wanted to, I couldn’t.Not to you, and not to the future that we’re fighting to preserve.I’m still human enough to need something left worth saving.”

Her expression, tight lipped and tearful, was rigid with the burden of her own pain.Her wells of suffering ran deeper than he could comprehend.Dorian blanched, ashamed of himself.

Without words, he understood.

While he had slept, she had been aware.While he was shaken upon awakening to tales of silent death, she had been forced to watch it transpire, to contain herself and her unimaginable power and let them die their slow and vanishing death.All for the greater good.That was what it meant to be divine, to always have to choose between life and death.

Dorian closed his eyes, shoved his rage away.It wasn’t her fault, wasn’t anyone’s fault.It simply was.He put his arms around her shoulders and hugged her against his chest.”I’m sorry.I didn’t think.You did what had to be done, of course.I’m just confused, angry.It–it hurts.”

Death hurts.Why did it have to hurt so much?

He held her, and she let him, not speaking.He didn’t know who was more comforted.

To Ray, he said:”Who?”

“Simon, Strong, Marilea.”

He sighed.He remembered them, their faces, their laughter, their kindness.He captured their distinctive patterns in his mind, the electro-chemical facsimiles.Convert it to binary impulse, store it to foam, carry the experience of them along forever in his own private datascape.It was the only form of immortality he had to offer.

Except he no longer had an array.His foam was barricaded behind an impenetrable wall of physics. There was nothing he could do.He was only human after all, and they were lost to him.

“I’m sorry, Ray,” he said.”They were your friends.”

Ray said nothing at first, and his silence made clear that his private mourning was a closed topic.”We all knew the risks.Be grateful that the cost was not greater.”

Dorian looked away, nestled his cheek against the top of Amara’s head.He was at least partially to blame.He should have known, should have guessed, should have worked faster decrypting Raville’s datacore.Then they might have been prepared, at least.But he had failed.They had all failed.

“So what do we do now?”

“My crew is currently doing their best to hold the doors against vigorous hostile assault while Amara and I dealt with you.We will join them, and assuming that we manufacture a miracle and manage to win our way to the main complex, we will set about doing what we do best:wreaking havoc.”

“That’s our plan?”

Ray grinned, fierce and wicked.”That, Mr. Dorian, is always our plan.”

 

The zap depot’s warehouse was larger than Dorian had imagined.The apex of the dome loomed high above him, at least a hundred meters, supported at the cardinal points by great, curved ribs of reinforced blastcrete.The roof itself was mostly lost in a shadow which the hanging tube lights only partially dispelled.Suspended between hulking girders as thick as the boles of trees ran the complex track system that unloaded reconstituted goods fresh from the vats and guided the robotic monitors, flensers and other tech-mech units that maintained the storage facility in good order.

They marched down a wide arterial passage between aisle upon aisle of neatly stacked packing crates, Ray in front, with Dorian and Amara following a few paces behind.His pace was quick, but not furtive.He kept his rifle slung loosely, as though he was confident in the Misfit Toys’ hold on the warehouse space.The stacks of crated goods towered over them, many of them over a ten meters high.Smaller, utilitarian channels branched off to the left and right, free of clutter except for the occasional magnalift tucked in at irregular intervals.The warehouse smelled of damp, stale air and industrial cleaning agents.

It was a long, long walk from where they had begun, and Amara had to help him much of the time.His new limbs were often stiff and prone to sudden spasms.It took a mighty effort of concentration just to keep his balance.He felt like he was trying to cross a constantly tilting sheet of glass.

Still, he retained enough awareness of his surroundings to marvel at the sheer volume of collected goods that they passed.”How big is this station anyway?”

“Two hundred scientists, perhaps twice that many technicians, maintenance personnel, and security agents,” Ray answered over his shoulder.”Near as we’ve been able to determine, anyway.The official population totals are unavailable.”

“Raville is obviously a strong believer in the culture of consumerism.”He’d seen long haul military outfitting vaults that weren’t this well supplied, though admittedly that had been back during the war, when the logistics of restock and resupply had been more complicated.

“Most of these crates have datestamps within the last six months.I don’t know how much Michael Raville has shared about the Exousiai with the military command and control structure on Stratiskaya Daransk, but I can guess that at least part of his deal for the loan of a few thousand Marines involved footing the bill for this operation.”Ray sniffed in derision.”The Strat sector defense org has grown somewhat notorious in recent years for its financial difficulties.The times would be a bit less lean if certain elements of the high ranking officer corps weren’t diverting a significant percentage of the federal support payments into their private coffers.One could argue that it’s ultimately cheaper for the taxpayers when corrupt military cabals cut out the unconstrained influence-mongering of middleman politicians who do more or less the same thing, but the end result is inevitably the same:an armed private security force for sale to the agenda of the highest bidder.I’ve been meaning to call some public attention to that situation for some time, just haven’t had the opportunity.”

Ray paused thoughtfully, then added, “Perhaps this operation will prove more mutually beneficial than I had realized.”

“Remember the reason we are here please, Captain,” Amara said.”We face more than enough complications without your inventing more.Let’s not lose focus.”

“Certainly.I’m just saying that if the opportunity presents itself to gather a bit of incriminating evidence about the unseemly relationship between Michael Raville and the Strat military-industrial complex, that would be a bonus.”

Dorian withheld comment.It was hard to mark a man down for being ambitious, even if the universe as they knew it was about to end, one way or the other.

“How are you doing?” Amara asked quietly.

“Are you worrying about me?”

“You scared me a little back there.I want to hear you say that you’re okay.”

“Isn’t that something that you can just know?”

She winked playfully at him.”It is, but I’d like you to tell me.”

Dorian shrugged. “I’m feeling better than I expected, to be honest.”

He was taking Ray’s advice and avoiding any physical actions required complex coordination or felt overly strenuous.Mostly, Dorian concentrated on trying to put one foot consistently in front of the other while simultaneously keeping his balance.He had assembled a list of minor annoyances, but most of them could be overcome with a little extra concentration.There was a little too much bounce in his stride, a tendency to overcorrect his sense of direction, a too-frequent queasy lurch in his guts.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’ve got it under control, but it isn’t completely out of control, either,” he explained.”I’m actually more worried about the bruises I must be leaving on your shoulders than about hurting myself.”

In the past few minutes, he had stumbled against Amara half a dozen times when his attention drifted.She was becoming quite adept at catching him and steering him back in the right direction.

“I’m sorry it’s so hard on you, John.”

“Bah.Don’t listen to me.I’m just whining.”

It really wasn’t so bad outside of the navigational aspects.In some ways, it felt the way he imagined resurrection must feel.His muscles were alive, singing with a youth and strength he had forgotten he once possessed.His lungs cried out with each deep exhalation, but it wasn’t pain.It was joy:the sheer pleasure of youth and health–a wholeness that had been systematically eroded over the years, and so gradually that he hadn’t even noticed the loss.Now, the accretions of age had been cleansed away, the small tears and tatters mended, the worn edges honed to a knife’s edge.It was restoration from a pure and perfect genetic map, the rebuilding of a hoary and ruined cathedral from the original blueprints, at once both a replication and a geometrically scalar improvement.

That was part of the problem.His limbs trembled with potential, and he wanted to run, to shout, to dance among the vast aisles of stacked crates and industrial detritus.He felt coltish, and the effort of containing his burgeoning kinetic energy made it difficult to keep his attention locked on basic tasks like walking in a straight line without falling over.

“Is it always like this?Zapping, I mean.Is there always this feeling of–”

“Ecstasy?”

“Sure.”It wasn’t the right word, but he was curious.And he liked the lilt of her native voice.

“Yes.It’s true of both zap and mod, in fact, assuming the mod is a good one.Zap restores the body to the perfect condition nature intended.Modding improves on nature’s design, enhancing the blunt biological instrument according to the talents and wishes of the user.There’s nothing like that feeling, of the mind and body in harmony.It can be. . .intoxicating.”

“That sounds like the human side of you talking.”

“Do you think so?”Amara fixed him with her pale blue eyes.”I wonder.The primary form of the Exousiai seems to be disembodiment, at least from what we’ve learned and what we’ve seen of them.”

“I would think you’d know one way or the other.”

“No.That isn’t the way I experience my. . .other self.Not yet, at least.She is a whisper in my mind.A wind that howls through my unconscious.I feel her.I know her, and I recognize abstractly that we are one, but for now, we are united inside this shell.We both need it.I need it because I know of no other way to be.She needs it because she hasn’t yet awakened fully, but even once she does, that doesn’t mean that she or they wish to be disembodied all the time.In fact, I think they like the experience of new and strange forms.It helps them to know the physical universe they inhabit in ways they would not be able to understand it otherwise.”

It was odd, listening to her discuss the Exousiai–herself–in the third person.Dorian glanced at her sidelong, but her gaze had wandered elsewhere.”Go on,” he said.

Amara brightened, both surprised and pleased by his interest, he thought.She swung her attention back to him.”So much of our consciousness as incarnated beings–the ways in which we think, the ways we are capable of interacting with and consequently comprehending our own phenomenological universe–is tied to our biology.Our minds have evolved with the primary goal of finding more efficient ways to obtain resources to feed, to protect, and ultimately to reproduce the biological machine.We cannot except ourselves from those biological imperatives, even when we believe that they no longer drive our development.They form the core of who we are.You and I, for example, we understand the world differently than a non-human animal.We’ve outgrown the necessity for instinct, for reliance on the nuances of scent and muscle memory, so they have largely been lost.Instead, we rely on logic and past experience and projected causality:if I do this, then I can reasonably expect that outcome.Most of the time, it works for us.We grow, we improve, we advance, so we don’t think about it as actively as we would in a primal state.Culture and technology buffer us from harsh reality, and many of these evolutionary drives are submerged into our hindbrain.But they’re still there.They still act upon us, urging us to behave and perceive in ways that benefit the biological mechanism.We cannot separate ourselves from our bodies.They constrain what we might adapt to become through a filter of flesh that continually squawks and demands and cries out for more.

“The filter of our biological imperative is not the only valid experience, it merely seems to be the best for our inherited genetic matrix in order to set up the conditions most amenable to safety, satiety and reproduction.We’re trapped in a closed loop.”

Something tugged on his subconscious again, a knock at the door, but when he tried to open it, there was nothing there.”By your logic, it’s only our narrow biological imperative that separates us from the otters.There’s no fundamental human quality that makes us unique from any other species we’ve encountered.We were just lucky enough to develop superior survival techniques early and later, the proper mutations to capitalize on them.”

“And you don’t believe in random evolution?” Amara asked.”You believe that there’s some special quality about homo sapiens that preordained its dominance in this ripple of the time-space continuum?”

“I believe that being human is something worth appreciating for itself, yes.I don’t believe flesh is a prison, not the way you and the package of Raville went on about it.Inconvenient, yes.Fragile, undoubtedly.Smelly, stinky and awful, way too frequently–but that interaction between the mental and spiritual and physical bits is essential.It’s the mediation between the three impulses that makes us unique.Take away the prison of the flesh, and we’re a crippled species.”

“You can still say that, even though you’ve been freed from it once, and have already agreed that the new prison is preferable to the old one?”

Dorian shook his head, and nearly lost his balance in the process.Amara gripped his forearm and kept him on his feet.”This is still my body.It’s been changed, yes, but I still recognize it for what it is, because it’s part of my experience of the world.The ingredients may have been transformed, but it feels the same, and more importantly, I’m the same as I was before I zapped, because the details of my embodiment don’t alter my experience of the real just because the meat wagon has had a few tweaks.My body has always been just a tool.So now it’s a better tool–that still doesn’t change its fundamental tool-ness.”

“And when a man only has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”Amara laughed softly.”I’ll concede that your body is a tool, John.The difference is that the Exousiai, and to a lesser extent humanity, have realized that it isn’t a bad thing to have more than one tool in your belt.They crave a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that drive and sustain creation.More tools mean better, more elegant solutions because a deep knowledge of each different tool offers unique perspectives on what it means to be alive.Additional tools allow you to visualize different solutions than you could if the only tool you had ever known was the hammer.That’s why the Exousiai gave us zap in the first place.They wanted us to see what was possible if we could just allow ourselves to stop thinking like human-shaped machines all the time.”

“But if we stop thinking like humans, Amara, what exactly are we thinking like?And if we stop being human, what are we?”

“Whatever you become, you’ll never be any less than human.You can only be more.”Amara grinned at him, an expression that was both quizzical and affectionate.”Why do we keep having this conversation over and over again?”

“Because I’m desperately afraid that one of us isn’t getting the message.”

She patted his cheek affectionately.”Or maybe you’re just being pedantic.”

They drew near to a pair of massive metal doors punched into structure’s wall, and Dorian recognized that these were the same blast doors Ray had mentioned earlier.The portal separating the warehouse from the complex of tunnels that led to the main research station.Or, just as importantly, the only thing standing between the Misfit Toys and five thousand angry Marines.

The systems control booth rose above intervening rows of crates, a plain white box with broad, shaded windows, fixed to the far side of the dome’s gently curved slope by a fist-sized bolts attached to a lattice framework.A steel staircase ascended from the floor to the booth, and Dorian could just make out a lone figure perched at the midway point, peering at them through the emerald glint of a sniper’s scope.

Ray quickened their pace.

A new sound reached Dorian’s ears.It was a reverberating, grinding noise, low enough on the sonic scale that it made his teeth ache, as though they were attempting to vibrate out of his jaws.When the sound ramped up to a mind-bending rumble, the lights above them dimmed noticeably.

“What is that?”

“Industrial bore,” Ray called over his shoulder.”What you’re hearing is the titanium-tensium alloy of the blast doors attempting to rend itself in two.”He grunted, though he did not seem particularly alarmed.”Apparently our unwitting hosts have admitted defeat in their attempt to circumvent Ghast’s override of the key recognition entry system and have resorted to more conventional methods.”

“Great.”A sonic bore.That was encouraging.

The long, central aisle they had been traveling ran out into a crescent staging area.Here there were clusters of overturned crates erected between the base of the ladder leading to the control booth and the blast doors.To Dorian, it looked less like a defensive than a line of jagged, gray teeth.As they approached the makeshift defensive position, figures began to emerge.Pale young men and plain, child-like women, all of them dressed in the same dark paramilitary fatigues that he wore.

He recognized none of them.No gestures distinguished them, no underlying physical structures predicted the mods of them that he had learned to associate with their names.In fact, they shared the sort of unsettling familial resemblance common among long haul shipmates and multiple decade lifepartners that made them rather difficult to tell apart on cursory examination.Their faces bore traces of the bland, baby-fat roundness that brought to Dorian’s mind the image of a pack of rabid, bright-eyed chipmunks and was most typically associated with low-differentiation zap templates transmitted between backwater depots more accustomed to shipping freight than men (i.e. Glastenhame to Giari Tau).They all appeared to be about the same age, early to mid-twenties standard.Their hair was mostly short and boyish, blond or brown, straight and shiny as flax; their bodies were lean, hollow-chested and geekily soft.Most of them still shone with the characteristic vat film that clung to the skin of freshly decanted packages while their unique cellular mitosis struggled to emerge from the silicate-bond template.

Dorian studied the faces of the strangers around him, the Misfit Toys, and was struck once again how hopeless it all seemed.They were only fourteen, and fourteen looked awfully small in the wide expanse of the warehouse.He suspected they would look even more precious pitted against five thousand armed Border Marines.

His heart sank.They looked so young, so inexperienced, so much like eager children.It was stupid of him.Apparent age was just an illusion, as false as gender, hair style and clothing fashion, but knowing that wasn’t the same as feeling it.

He was old fashioned, or maybe he’d just spent too many years in the service, where he had grown accustomed to the prohibition against cosmetic anti-aging therapies amongst the senior officer corps.Central Command believed there was something confidence inspiring about graying temples, crow’s feet and faded battle scars.Wrinkles equated to wisdom, or at least to experience, which was often just the mechanical side of wisdom.He had believed it well enough.

But then again, he was standing next to a ten thousand year old alien pseudo-goddess who didn’t look a day older than twenty-five standard, and he’d managed to swallow that sufficiently to follow her all the way across the universe and nigh unto the end of the world.So maybe his dread was just nerves.

He hoped it was just nerves.He hoped Amara had a hat and a rabbit tucked into her pocket and was preparing to work some magic.

Perhaps they recognized him, but more likely, it was Amara to whom they gravitated.Relief blossomed on their faces.A low and ragged cheer was lifted, briefly tempering the squawk of the intrusion alarm and the groan of the sonic bore. Their faith in her was the reason they had come, after all.

“Relax,” Amara said to him.

“I am relaxed.Stop worrying about me.”Dorian nearly had to shout to be heard over the clamor raised by the bore.

“I can feel your fear.”

“Nice to know that’s still working for you.”

A sandy haired young man appeared from a hatchway in the floor of the booth overhead.He cried out in surprise and sprang down the long flight of metal stairs, hopping over the last few steps in his haste.He dashed through the clutter of crates and scudded to a halt in front of them, out of breath, but trembling with excitement.His lips parted in a broad and toothy grin.

“Glad to see you three finally made it.We were starting to get a little worried that we were going to have to start the invasion without you.”

Ray only nodded, stiff and curt.”What’s our status, Mr. Ghast?”

Dorian blinked at the young man for a few seconds, then caught his breath.”Ghast?”

The grin widened.”In the literal flesh.I see you made it through in one piece after all.”

Dorian continued to gape.What were you supposed to say upon meeting someone for the first time in their native form?What was the custom?Was there a custom?He didn’t remember.Surely there was some standard innocuous pleasantry.

“Where’s the rest of you?You’re so thin!My God, you’re just a k–”

“Don’t say it,” Ghast growled.He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the gathering crowd.”These babes-in-the-woods have all been cracking on me for the last hour, mocking the old guy.I’ll tell you what I told them:I’m twice your age by the standard calendar, and I will knock you on your butt if you fail to respect your elders.”

This comment elicited a few nervous chuckles as the Misfit Toys closed in, forming a rough circle around them.Ghast accepted a rifle offered from one of the dozen anonymous hands.

“Our status, please,” Ray said again.He seemed impossibly calm with the imminent threat of the Raville’s counterstrike poised only a few meters away. “What have you learned?”

“The situation has remained stable for the last half hour.The alarms are sounding all over this side of the complex, but we’ve been able to frustrate their attempts to override the entry system.”

“We guessed as much.”

“That’s the extent of the good news, unfortunately.It looks like about half the gear we shipped didn’t make it through.We’ve got assault rifles, some small arms, maybe a quarter of the ammunition.All the heavy explosives are gone.The field disruptors, mobile jack stations, and coretap emitters didn’t ship, either.Stine is in the process of breaking the ICS shell so she can start scanning for replacement units.We did track down some emergency medical supplies.Nothing major, but there was epiphene, some cortisite and a few bubbles of galcinax tabs that might help with zap crash symptoms later.Thomas is feverishly scrounging up a line into the station datacore, but he says the only burst he can get is needle thin and limited to guest level access.He’s going to try to patch some sort of media feed together that will tell us what’s going on with station security or the hovering bootheels of Marine thuggery and oppression currently in geosynchronous orbit above the planet, but he isn’t optimistic.He says the systems techs did a number on the hardware.He’s also trying to get us a reliable set of maps.”

Ray rubbed a palm over his stubble-less chin.”Any other contact with the home team?”

“Not other than the bore.Either they’re giving us the silent treatment or the comm system was part of the sabotaged network boxes.The environmentals board upstairs is still working as far as I can tell, and the readings have remained stable, so they’re not trying to burn us out, blow us up or gas us into submission.Any counter-insurgent anti-personnel devices that might have been placed in preparation for our arrival have made nary a peep, but I’ve tried to keep the gang on a pretty short leash while you were gone, just in case.It looks like they’re determined to do this the old fashioned way.”

A concerned grimace rumpled Ray’s lips.”How are the doors holding up?”

“The inner doors are still standing.The outer set bordering on the pressure lock went down about ten minutes ago from the sound of it.I sent Youkilis to see if he could roust up a welding rig or magna-clamps in case Stine can’t polish off her jack, but that won’t do more than slow them down.”

“I suppose we’ve been in worse spots.”

“We have?”Ghast bunched his eyebrows.”I’m drawing a blank.”

“We’ve never had a goddess on our side before.That must count for something.”

“Ah, true.”

Ray clapped his hands and rasped his palms together like a man preparing himself to bear down on a particularly onerous task.”All right, ladies and gentlemen.Play time is now officially over.You’ve all had a chance to lounge about getting fat and frisky, now it’s time we got to work.You each have your assignments.Get with your team leaders and go over your task lists one more time.I want Damon’s cover team to manually–yes, manually–reconnoiter the nearest storage sectors.See if you can track down something to eat.We’re all going to need the fuel soon enough.If you find cigarettes or coffee, I’ll see to it that Mr. Ghast doubles your operation bonus.”

This received a few timid chuckles.Ray smiled at them, sharing encouragement, then put on a grave expression.”I don’t need to remind you that we’ve zapped into a hostile environment where the presumed targets have advanced knowledge of our arrival, but I will anyway.Strip your weapons!Make sure the zap gods did not conveniently abscond with your firing pins.They may have left us with just pea shooters compared to what the capitalist overlord drones are carrying, but even peas are better than muzzle farts. I want a hard count of our assets.Every shell accounted for!You’ll supervise that effort please, Mr. Ghast.Let’s get busy.”

Ray smacked his hands together again, a crack that rang out like discharge of a starter pistol, and at once, the Misfit Toys sprang into motion.Dorian found himself in the midst of a sudden storm of determined activity.Shouts rang off the walls, rubber soled shoes slapped hastily across the pavement.Crates toppled, crashed and echoed through the vast chamber like peals of thunder.Their contents were spilled, scattered, and keenly rifled with a well-practiced scavenger’s discriminating skill.Knots of anxious energy formed around some of the crates as crewmembers expertly field stripped their rifles two at a time while a third memberstood close watch, rifle at the ready.Within moments, a dozen weapons clattered through various stages of disassembly:pins, hammers and barrels spread out over any available bare surfaces.Meanwhile, Ghast stood back, arms braced over his chest, doing his best to direct the frenetic flow of traffic with cannonades of instruction, orders, and encouragement, all delivered via the blunt force of his booming, drill sergeant’s roar.

When he was satisfied with their progress and renewed sense of purpose, Ray snapped his fingers at Dorian and Amara to get their attention.He jabbed his finger at the staircase.”You two, come with me.We haven’t much time.This is your chance to atone for your foolishness, Mr. Dorian.”To his First Officer, he barked:”Keep them at it, Mr. Ghast.I don’t want to see idle hands.”

“Aye, boss.”

They climbed the stairs up to the hatchway door into the control booth.Ray shoved the panel out of the way with his shoulder, and Dorian held it aside as Amara clambered through, then followed them inside.The structure they entered was close and rank with the stale odor of sweat and heat and lazy ventilation. Twinkling status lights and override switches blazed amber, red and green from panels set into the otherwise bare walls.Dimmed soffet lights sulked amongst heavy shadows, orange and sleepy.The wide plastisheen windows that looked out across the islands of storage crates piled across the floor of the warehouse were heavily polarized and offered almost no illumination, but a reasonable amount of ambient light was emitted from two flickering monitors attached to the manual system console against the front wall.Dorian detected a faint but unmistakable whir and click of an auxiliary freeserv quantum Strand box, and cast about until he gradually discerned the silvery glint of a compact pair of dual-threaded Soren-SAN Blade processors packed against the back wall.Both boxes were dark except for their power indicators glimmering faintly in standby mode.

Stine and Thomas–buzzcut, pallid, streaked with sweat, and looking uncannily like vatbred twins in the near dark–sat in matching desk chairs in front of the console and plugged away at invisible keypads, rapidly scrolling through screens of core system data and cursing in tandem.Dorian sensed it was a frustratingly unproductive cursing to scrolling ratio.

“I come bearing reinforcements,” Ray declared.He set his hand on Stine’s shoulder.”How’s the inventory system coming, dear?”

Stine shook her head.”Don’t ask.The database is row secured, and while I can get system internal access, it won’t let me look at anything that might actually help us, unless you really just want to know how many cases of toilet paper and toothpaste the station has stockpiled.”

“Then I’ve brought help just in time,” he responded.”Thomas, give up your seat and do what you can to help Stine, if you would.”

Thomas kicked back from his screen immediately and leapt to his feet.”Sure thing.”

Dorian winced.When a jack accepted relief from an assigned task that quickly, that gleefully, it was always a bad sign.

Thomas shook his head.”Good luck, buddy.If you can make any progress on that mess, you’re a better man then I am.The IC technicians swiped the configuration blades from the array connex units attached to the SAN.I’ve been trying to splice a wiffy line to the datacore using the old bluenet card, but the path to reconfigure port access is locked down without a wizard account.There’s still a fineband wireless stream, but the datacore’s wiffy configuration keeps bouncing the guest access if I try to do anything invasive.”

Dorian squeezed past Amara and dropped into the chair Thomas had vacated.Thomas had managed to drag himself out of the mediated OS environment to a key library shell using the native event scripter, but without connex port access, all of his command line requests had been rejected with Invalid Call errors.From what he could tell on initial inspection, he wasn’t even wrestling with datacore access at this point.Thomas wasn’t able to get outside the console’s subprox governor, let alone jack the network connex.Dorian keyed around a bit, mostly duplicating efforts that had already been attempted and failed, to get a feel for the architecture.

He could feel Ray watching him.

He could hear the blast doors straining under the sonic assault.

Dorian shoved the distractions out of his mind and did his best to plot a systematic attack on the core.

“Wiffy is a dead end,” he announced after a few minutes.Thomas and Stine were engaged in a running argument about the best methods for tackling their access snarl without getting locked out of the system, and didn’t react immediately, but he went on:”The log shows your read requests weren’t even making it to the core.Console security was routing them through a ghosted file index loaded into the call-cache memory.”He shrugged apologetically.Wasted effort.Wasted time.”It’s a technique that shunts some of the workload off the core box onto local workstations.”

Thomas glanced up from watching the second monitor over Stine’s shoulder.”Yeah, I wondered about that.”He sounded annoyed at having been interrupted.

Dorian chewed the inside of his cheek and grunted.He still felt muddled, a little thick in the middle of his brain where his best thinking parts should have been.The increasingly snappish chatter between Thomas and Stine grated against his frayed nerves.The room was hot, the chair too low, the hardware unfamiliar.He couldn’t concentrate.

Think!

He checked the local time on the system clock.He’d been at it for almost fifteen minutes with no progress.He sat in silence, hunched over the console with his face in his hands.

Thinkthinkthink

He listened to the unmistakable progress of the bore.He listened to Stine and Thomas.Beneath it all, he listened to the whir of superheated air circulating through the console’s cooling system and the click of the rapid-access processors.

A familiar whir and click.

Thinking, thinking.

Ding.

He scudded his chair away from the console, glided across the narrow booth and halted in front of the freeserv Soren-SAN blade units.Squinting into the shadows, he tried to make out the scrawled text on some of the slap-switches embedded above the empty blade casings.

“What are these?Gallant 1660’s or 1688’s?”

Thomas didn’t shift his gaze away this time and snorted in irritation.”Does it matter?I told you:the techs took the network blades with them.”

Dorian peered closer.”Well, the old 1660’s still have the RAIDish distributed function redundancy system in the event ofbackbone hardware failure that was phased out with the 1688’s, when Gallant migrated to pinhole foam backup.You know, so the network doesn’t crash completely if the blade housing fails to. . .”

He trailed off.Thomas and Stine plunged ahead with their argument, their backs to him.No one was listening.

Pfft.

He found the power switch and cycled both of the boxes down.

“So what do you make of all this, my dear?”Ray said to Amara in quiet, confidential tones.”I must admit that our reception is not exactly what I had anticipated.”

Dorian probed the empty blade casing with his fingers.The technicians hadn’t taken just the network blades.They’d taken all of them, which was a startling level of security competence for a bunch of non-admin techies.Why take all the blades instead of just the critical ones?Dorian gnawed at his lips, his eyes shut, thinking, thinking, thinking.

Amara kept her voice low in return.”If they had intended to kill us all, they wouldn’t have released us from the filter queue in the first place.They would have just allowed entropy to resolve the situation in due course.The fact that they allowed us to decant suggests that Raville believes that we may prove to be of some use to him.”

“I think it’s more likely that he did not wish to kill you, and may not have been able to satisfactorily determine which signal was yours.That was why they were taking tissue samples when we awakened.He wants you, but the rest of us are expendable.”

“He obviously underestimates you, then.”

Dorian rolled himself back across the room to the console.He spent several seconds running his fingertips along the unit’s underside, searching for the seam to the maintenance panel before finding it, then traced the edge until he located the access latch.He twisted the keyspring and the entire panel popped free.He set it carefully off to the side.

It occurred to him that this was one of those things you were absolutely NOT supposed to do UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES while the power supply still connected.That would be printed in the user manual in bold red type and surrounded by severe-looking lightning bolts.

Dorian reached inside the console housing.His arms were just long enough that he didn’t have to get on his hands and knees.His fingers brushed against braided optical bundles, the hard edges of the control board, the spiny surface of a triDvid conversion card.Here was the hermetically sealed kensenite foam hyperlink.

He jerked his hand back suddenly, hissing between his teeth.Heat sink.

Finally, the flat, faintly vibrating shell of the local storage blade.It was cool to the touch, glossy, with a pinch clasp release in the front.

For a brief instant, he wondered if it would fry the board, the blade or both, pulling it out with the juice still on.That would be bad.Very bad.Probably majorly piss everyone off.

He tugged.

The indicators in front of him flared from mostly green and yellow to flat, accusatory red.The monitor on his side of the console flickered, flashed a blue screen, then announced in hard, arial caps:LOCAL STORAGE FAILURE.Dorian shot a hasty look at Stine’s monitor and sighed with relief.She continued flipping through pointless screens of ICS security protocols and trading barbs with Thomas.They were both oblivious.

“You’re not surprised at all, are you?” Ray said to Amara.”You expected this to happen.”

“If I had come alone, he would have known that I have awakened.That I did not–that I have surrounded myself with known jacks and revolutionaries of your caliber–leads him to believe that I am still unaware of my true nature.”

“We’re pawns, in other words.”

“Even pawns can capture a king if properly deployed.”

“Indeed.”

Dorian rose, the blade tucked to his side, and strolled back across to the SAN boxes.He located the primary access slot by touch and locked the module in place, listened for the click to be certain he had seated it properly. . .

Please, please, please let it be

. . .and punched the power switch.

The lights dimmed.Cooling fans roared.Every light on the manual system console blinked in rapid succession and went out.Stine’s monitor stuttered, gave a pathetic electronic mewl, and died.

Thomas jerked upright as though he’d been stung.”What the–?”He whirled around and lunged at Dorian, his fists clenched.”What did you just do?”

Silence.

Dorian put a finger to his lips.”Wait.”

One second.Two.Three.

The lights flickered again under a sharp increase in the power load, and the console spat a series of dry clacks as reset switches flipped.Rapid retrieval discs buzzed.Electron guns whined and clattered and lurched to life.

Stine exhaled loudly.”It’s rebooting.We’re okay.”

Thomas glowered, trembled with rage.Ray started to speak, but then paused, watching.Amara caught Dorian’s eye and winked.

The monitor on Dorian’s side of the console still barked a LOCAL STORAGE FAILURE.

And Stine sucked back in the breath she had just released.She tapped out a mad flurry of keystrokes. “Hold on.We’ve been kicked out of the ICS.It looks like we’ve been dumped back into the OS–no, not the local OS.Wait. . .”A few more keystrokes.An index panel flashed onto the screen.Stine furrowed her brow.”I don’t–We’re back on the network.The whole net–”

Dorian shrugged and did his best to tuck the massive and sticky ball of panic back into his pocket before anyone else could see it.

“The Gallant 1660,” he said.”We used one at the Archive as the primary architectural backbone until a few months ago, until we replaced it with Abramhelin.”He pointed first to the SAN boxes, then the console.”Control device and local area governor.They’re sold as a total system management package.The backbone quantum freeserv maps out the basic network connections to the governor in the event of a hardware crash so that you’re never completely locked out of your grid.The governor manages fatburst connection loads and distributes realtime indexes to slave stations in turn.In order to do that, it has to maintain a live microcopy of the network mappings and connection protocols loaded onto its local storage blade.It’s called distributed core function redundancy.It was Gallant’s solution to the rash of blade targeting migratory virals that swept the Strand a couple of years ago.It’s definitely handy for getting your net up and running quickly in a pinch, but it’s only clever until you think about the security issues.Gallant put out a white paper a few months ago advising consumers to disable their governors, or even better, to upgrade to the 1688.I guess Raville’s people don’t keep up with the trades.”

Ray laughed.”And by replacing the SAN network blades with the governor’s local storage blade–”

“The SAN boots up all the network connex links,” Dorian finished for him.

“Bravo, Mr. Dorian.Very well done.”

Thomas remained where he stood, frowning, and said nothing at first, then dropped his gaze.

“We still need to jack the account core,” Stine informed them. “The ICS remains locked down, and it looks like even the datacore access is a fatburst guest account.I’m not sure how much progress we’ve actually made here.”She lifted an eyebrow at Dorian.”Unless you happen to have a little more magic in that wand, that is.”

“Try the network id MRAVIL.Passcode is bos71ton, all lower case.”The words were out of his mouth before he had consciously processed the request.A warm flush crept up his cheeks.”The last Pagans world championship.If, uh, you pump that into the master sec scripting service, it should dynamically propagate over the system as a session variable.”

Stine looked doubtful, but shrugged and typed in the information.A few moments passed.She bounced through various applications, squinting, humming to herself.

At last, she turned and nodded appreciatively at Dorian.”That’s got it.We’re in.”

“Work fast.The sysops will be monitoring activity moving across the architecture, especially activity originating from this address.Using Raville’s profile should get you a brief pass, but the window won’t last longer than a few minutes.”

“Work fast,” Ray repeated, nodding.”A few more minutes may, in fact, be all that we have left.”

<– Chapter 18 / Chapter 20 –>