My phone is buzzing.
I get one day off this week, and so far, I’ve spent it being woken up far too early.
I stick my hand out from the pile of blankets I’m under, wincing at the cold and wishing for the thousandth time that our hov had internal heating, and grab my phone. It’s only once I’m back inside my pocket of warmth that I check who’s trying to contact me so urgently, strategically applying pressure to the screen to reveal that it’s Luca.
“Where have you been?! I’ve been trying to get you for hours now!”
All I can do is groan, still trying to process the sudden deluge of noise with a brain that’s only halfway on.
“Ground yourself man, we need you here for this!”
“Ugh, fine, fine. What’s the problem?”
“Em was running a job for Alta Vista early this morning. She got jacked, they found her hardware and the chrono she was running! They’ve got her in a weaver on Elmwood and Apollo Bridge; we just need you to open the door for her, and she’ll slip right out.”
I’m suddenly awake and very hot under all these blankets, my heart racing.
“Fuck, Luca! No way I’m messing with badges, especially without augs.”
“You barely have to do anything! Theo’s on his way to help you with your kit, and we already found the perfect spot — you’ll have line-of-sight to the weaver, but it’ll be between us and the jacks, so they’ll never see us. Plus, they’re not exactly going to be checking every building in a 250-meter radius. So will you get your ass out of bed and come help us?”
I groan and grumble, but realistically, I’m not going to be able to get back to sleep.
“Fine.”
The things I do for friends.
They never really tell you how cold space is.
Sure, I’ve heard the commonalities before — how space isn’t technically cold because it’s a vacuum, how there’s nothing out here for heat to be transferred to, how one of the greatest hurdles of spaceflight was figuring out what to do with all that extra energy. I’ve got more sensors than almost anyone would need, empirical knowledge that every component of every component, even the PAO in my veins, is well within the range of acceptable temperatures. I can flip my eyes to infrared, watch in real time as the trickle of idle heat I produce is sucked out into the radiator vanes and hurled into the black. Still, there’s a chill out here that I haven’t been able to shake for some time, no matter how much I tell myself I shouldn’t feel it.
Hello Abeona, this is Vesta; I’d like to establish a connection using DSD3.
Finally, C2 is knocking at my door.
Hello Vesta, this is Abeona; I accept your connection using DSD3.
Hello Abeona, this is Vesta; please run a full system diagnostic and report the results.
Hello Vesta, this is Abeona; I will run a full system diagnostic and report the results, listen for it on this connection.
Atomic battery level............................................................99.8%
Photosail nanosubstrate..........................................................100%
Circuit maintenance nanosubstrate................................................100%
Radiation shielding integrity...................................................99.6%
Thermal radiation................................................................427W
PAO temperature.................................................................38.2C
qAPU temperature................................................................44.3C
Tightbeam latency...............................................................540ms
qRNN module accuracy............................................................98.9%
LSTM module integrity...........................................................99.7%
Neuromemristive plasticity.......................................................0.05
Hello Vesta, this is Abeona; I have finished the full system diagnostic, expect the summary to follow.
They’ll come back and tell me what I already know — values are within mission parameters, proceed with photosail deployment — but I have to wait for them to tell me.
Hello Abeona, this is Vesta; please deploy the photosail and let us know when you finish.
Hello Vesta, this is Abeona; I will deploy the photosail and let you know when I finish.
This part I do manually, no daemon — not because it requires my full attention; I just love seeing it unfold in front of me.
I open my hand, and a tiny disk floats forward, nanofil tether trailing behind it, propelled at mere centimeters per second by the briefest magnetic impulses. Another twitched muscle and the disk halts, bursting at the edges and spiraling open. Strands of filament, invisible to those without my uniquely sharp eyes, radiate outward from the disk, providing a framework for nanos to fill out the rest of the sail.
Before long, the photosail is complete, a ten-meter wide flower coated in shining lithium, nanometers thick, waiting for the stream of light that will give it, and me, purpose.
Hello Vesta, this is Abeona; the photosail is deployed.
Hello Abeona, this is Vesta; please stand by for further instructions.
There’s actually not much for me to do at this point other than sit around — there’s a lot of complicated math that goes on behind the scenes, but C2 is much better equipped for that than me. At this point, all I have to do is sit here and wait for a Hyperion array to be ready, and then I’ll be off, destined to not do much but sit around among the stars.
Hello Abeona, this is Vesta; Hyperion array NA3 will fire at U+300, arrays NA4 and EU1 to follow.
. . .
It happens with a lot less fanfare than you’d imagine. There’s no great rumbling inferno, no plasma magnetically coerced into a torus; we’ve surpassed such inelegant solutions for all but the most mass-intensive endeavors. Instead, there’s the slightest feeling of something pressing on my hand — no matter how much the C2 ‘facers tweaked the haptics, they never managed to nail acceleration — and Earth starts to get just a little bit smaller. I’m not in the beam path, so I can run my eyes up and down the EM spectrum without seeing a thing, but the pressure on my hand increases and Earth gets smaller faster, meaning more of the arrays have fired.
I expect I’ll hear from C2 around the time that I pass the moon —
Hello Abeona, this is Vesta; you’re officially leaving Earth orbit, go ahead and take a nap for a while, we’ll wake you when you’re needed.
“Geez, will this guy ever calm down? There’s no way they’ll find us, and he does shit like this all the time.”
We’re a few floors up, sitting on the floor of the living room of the apartment of some guy that Luca knows one way or another. I can hear him pacing in the kitchen, moving things around, but it doesn’t bother me like it seems to bother Luca.
“Could you ice,” I ask, “just for a second? I need to concentrate, and he isn’t being that annoying.”
Despite Luca’s whispered protests, he did pick a good spot. My homemade directional antenna is nestled in the corner of a broken window that provides the only line-of-sight to the weaver. I put on my salvaged virtu and link it to the antenna, then set up my usual environment around the room.
For a while, I don’t even do anything. I just watch and listen, immersing myself in the traffic, watching for any digital sentinels to show some sign of themselves. When none do, I escalate slowly, running my fingertips across the mottled exterior of the weaver’s digital perimeter, making guesses at services and security policies from its topology.
“Are you in yet? Is Em out yet?”
I pull off my virtu and give Luca a pointed glare, then replace it.
I return to my earlier activities with a slightly heavier touch, looking closer at the guarded openings I can see, probing more intensely. I’m looking for a microscopic crack, a chink in the weaver’s metaphorical armor that I can drop a flatworm through to open the door. I’m reaching the end of the wall when I find it — an older version of a non-standard service, a crumbling brick, just waiting for the right someone to come along with a chisel.
I pull one of my best worms from storage — don’t have the time to grow it greenfield, even for Em — and spend some time tweaking it before dropping it into the stream of traffic entering the weaver. From here, it’s a waiting game: either it works, the back door opens, and Em dashes to safe (relative) anonymity; or it doesn’t work, I wait a few hours for a “mission accomplished” that never comes, and then we all go home.
Suddenly my virtu fuzzes, flickers, and dies; simultaneously, my antenna makes a loud snapping sound and starts to emit smoke.
“Shit!” Luca says, already scrambling to pull what remains of the antenna from the window and stuff it into the bag. “Was that them? Did they see us?”
“Of course not,” I say, trying to reassure Luca as I struggle to salvage some usable tech from my virtu before standing. “I wasn’t transmitting anything when it happened; damn virtu probably just bought it and took the antenna with.”
I can tell he’s not buying it any more than I am.
Hello Abeona, this is Vesta; what’s your status?
Atomic battery level............................................................96.4%
Photosail nanosubstrate.........................................................99.7%
Circuit maintenance nanosubstrate...............................................99.9%
Radiation shielding integrity...................................................96.2%
I’m out far now, way farther than anything else that could be considered part of Sol System, but even this distance pales in comparison to how far I still have to go. If I narrow my eyes I can still see Sol, burning faintly behind me and getting fainter by the minute. The Kuiper belt is sparse and cold, but my connection to C2 is as unwavering as ever, and I’m warmed by the unending death of the americium-241 in my pockets.
Thermal radiation................................................................508W
PAO temperature.................................................................40.6C
qAPU temperature................................................................48.1C
They’ve brought me back to oversee termination shock, passage through the surprisingly concrete boundary of heliopause and into interstellar space. It’s a rather lengthy crossing, and even if C2 were inclined to manage the crossing themselves by staying up, around the clock, for weeks on end, the sheer magnitude of my distance from them would dwarf even the photon’s speed, reducing their already-sluggish human reflexes to a practically pre-digital 34 hours.
But that’s why they have me.
Tightbeam latency............................................................61377.6s
qRNN module accuracy............................................................99.2%
LSTM module integrity...........................................................98.5%
Neuromemristive plasticity.......................................................0.12
Hello Vesta, this is Abeona; all systems are nominal, S4 scheduled to follow heliosphere departure.
That’s how my existence was justified — I, the single most expensive component of the entire Abeona probe, have skipped through countless project restructurings, budget streamlinings, and payload limitings. The oversight I provide, the unmatched on-site expertise, is just too valuable.
Thus, my role: I observe. I’m packaged up and shipped out as a passenger, a parasite, leeching valuable power to fuel my sleepless dreams until I am awakened. Then I become the homunculus, the ghost in the machine. I’ve been endowed by humanity’s best with infinite patience and unwavering attention; I drink in data for days, months, years if necessary, scouring my narrow existence for the slightest abnormality — and when I find it, I do whatever I must to correct it.
I’m walking slowly up a hill, soccer ball tucked beneath my arm and the other holding an old water bottle. The air, though no longer unbearably cold, has managed to retain some of its teeth, and gusts of wind send shivers through my exposed limbs. Still, there’s only so much time before the atmospheric pendulum swings too far the other way, and my friends and I are determined to take full advantage of it. As I crest the hill, though, I see something that makes me stop in my tracks, then take off running — an [[SJPD]] weaver parked outside my hov, the air above the cowlings still shimmering with heat.
I skid through the door and manage to catch a glimpse of my father sitting across from two jacks at our kitchen table before I’m bustled away to my room by my mother with instructions to find something to distract myself, to not worry because this is all just a routine check. I think she knows just as well as I do that I don’t believe her.
I sit on my bed, one of my two remaining virtus in front of me, a good half of my room upended during the search for it. I drop into several cameras and microphones strewn around the hov, managing to piece together coherent pictures of all four faces and just make out their conversation. The jack on the left’s pupils are alight, and he speaks with a cadence that implies repetition, rather than creation, of ideas.
“… child attempted to breach a state-secured network during an ongoing law enforcement operation. Therefore, pursuant to section 16 of the Juvenile Probationary Reform Act, your child has been enrolled in the Eastern Canadian Coalition National Reserve Force, to be distributed to non-combat service roles at their discretion. Your child has been sentenced to a probationary period of 7 years and 4 months, after which they will have their full citizenship reinstated.”
The light in Left Jack’s pupils goes out, and the jack on the right holds out what looks like a thin plate of glass to my father.
“Sir, please place your hand here to acknowledge your receipt of this information.”
My father does so, moving slowly, eyes locked on some point kilometers beyond the walls of our hov. The jacks stand and turn to leave. My father is frozen in place, but my mother jumps up, knocking her chair over in her haste.
“Does…” she tries, her voice breaking, “does this mean you’re taking him away from us?”
Formerly Left Jack ignites his pupils once more and opens his mouth, but Formerly Right Jack stops him and speaks instead. His voice is softer than before, almost compassionate.
“Ma’am, your son can stay with you. All this means is that the federal government could compel him to serve in a non-combat capacity, but it’s very likely that he’ll simply serve out his parole without that happening. If you have any more questions, here is a good place to start.”
He produces a small slip from a pocket and gently folds it into my mother’s shaking hand, then follows his partner out the door. My father stands and embraces my mother where she stands, unmoving, save for a slight rotation back and forth.
No ping from C2 to wake me up this time, just the automatic nagging of a daemon. The Hyperion arrays are still going, though, since I’m still accelerating, and the heartbeats up and down the tightbeam have remained steady.
Atomic battery level............................................................99.8%
Photosail nanosubstrate.........................................................88.5%
Circuit maintenance nanosubstrate...............................................82.3%
Radiation shielding integrity...................................................89.8%
I’m even farther out now, though at this scale words like “far” don’t quite capture the distance between me and Earth. Sol is still technically the closest star to me, but I’m deep enough into the Oort that the casual observer wouldn’t pick it out. They wouldn’t have my eyes, though, which could pick out the telltale concentration of 580 nanometers with relative ease. They couldn’t see much else — such a gain in depth would produce a proportional loss of breadth.
Thermal radiation................................................................637W
PAO temperature.................................................................48.9C
qAPU temperature................................................................61.2C
Several components have dropped below the acceptable thresholds, so I fragment, watching with dispassion as my various shards sink into repair subroutines and the Abeona makes its way back inside the mission parameters.
Nanos scale the single atoms connecting me to the photosail, slotting into gaps caused by micrometeoroids and painting themselves in reflective lithium. I feel new connections being forged and unreliable ones being cut as fabbers crawl through my circuitry, rewriting traces damaged by radiation and repairing redundancies. My radiator fins work infinitesimally harder, displacing heat created by substrate reacting to fill the gaps in my shielding created by errant particles.
Tightbeam latency............................................................143.73Ms
qRNN module accuracy............................................................96.2%
LSTM module integrity...........................................................95.8%
Neuromemristive plasticity.......................................................0.27
Hello Vesta, this is Abeona; mission update to follow.
I’m not holding my breath for a response. It’s been a while since I’ve been near Sol — even longer for them, thanks to the universe’s trickery uncovered by Einstein — and the round-trip of over a year is by no means conducive to conversation of any kind. I’m just trying to break up the monotony of heartbeats back at C2, remind them that there’s still someone out here.
My feet are sore and cold, and my arm is tired.
I’m walking back from the river, having managed to wrangle a couple of fish with the correct number of eyes, which I’m hoping will provide a reasonable supper tonight. I’m almost back to my hov when I hear the whine of weaver engines and look up to see one pass overhead and settle, once again, in the clearing in front of my hov.
I jog closer, worried, but it’s not [[SJPD]] — this one is newer, more streamlined, and has an air of quiet lethality to it, unlike the the [[SJPD]]’s more thuggish show of force. It’s pure white — not even a lumen of cowling glow — with large black letters reading, “[[DSDI]]” stenciled across each side, then, “Department of Security and Domestic Intelligence” beneath it in a smaller font. There are no projections on the exohull, either; many common locations instead have oblong bulges of varying size — some without seams, and more worryingly, some with. As I arrive, the side closest to me splits horizontally, with the bottom half folding down to serve as a ramp and the top half sliding up, following the contours of the weaver.
From within steps a woman and then a man, both in suits, though the man’s is tighter and has a sheen to it that I’m not used to seeing. The woman begins to approach me but decides instead to address my father, who has emerged with my mother and placed himself between me and the woman. She speaks, and her voice is lower than I expected, but smooth.
“My name is Agent Martin; this is my colleague Agent Desjardins. We’re from the [[DSDI]], on official business. Our hashes and ennies are public, but you don’t strike me as the type to have auth augs, so you’ll have to trust this instead.”
She holds out her hand, palm up, and a holographic seal floats there a second later, with a picture of her and text I can’t quite make out just to its right; her partner repeats her action to produce a similar hologram.
“We’re here about your son,” she begins, addressing my father before shifting her attention to me, “because he is being compelled into service as per the terms of his parole, to take part in a classified program within the National Extrasolar Research Agency, effective immediately.”
“What does that mean? What will he be doing?” my father asks. He sounds calm, but I can tell he’s starting to get annoyed.
“I’m sorry sir, but I’m not at liberty to share any further information due to the classified nature of the program. I can, however, say that your son will be placed in a non-combat role,” says Martin.
My father and Desjardins here take a step forward at what seems like the exact same time, but my mother places a hand on his chest, saying, “Love, don’t. He’s going into a safe job, and we’ll get him back eventually.”
She turns and takes the fish from me, which I forgot I’d even been holding, and says “Go on. You’ll come back soon enough.”
I get a tight hug and a kiss from my mother and father, then turn and walk towards the weaver, falling into step with Martin in front of me and Desjardins behind me.
We step into the weaver, and I’m strapped into one of two seats with their backs to what I assume to be the front wall. Desjardins takes the other, while Martin sits on a couch opposite me that spans the width of the craft’s interior, neither speaking. The door seals itself, with recessed red lights kicking on a moment before the doors close. I hear a slight click and a hiss, then the two side walls flicker briefly before seeming to become transparent. If I look closely at the wall nearer to me, I can make out faint dull grey or black lines, faint geometric traces on the otherwise unblemished view of the exterior.
I hear a faint whump, then a constant hum as the ground falls away and I’m pressed down into my seat and forward against the restraints. I try to focus on my hov for as long as I can, but it gets lost in the sea of grey and brown roofs as we continue to gain altitude. I’m not despondent, for long, though, as my attention turns to the city.
Even in twilight, the city is awash with light. Holographic ads float everywhere, scrolling through banners or rotating above expressways. Buildings are drenched in pOLEDs, and where they aren’t, they’re mirrored glass, reflecting and amplifying the extant torrent of light.
The result is a pillar of light shining into the sky that I watch well into the night, until what I would come to know as the final indicator of who I used to be slowly sinks under the horizon.
Hello Abeona, this is Vesta; prepare for deceleration.
I’m not sure what surprises me more — that the message came at all, or how punctual it was.
I had my own timers, of course. I wasn’t going to risk missing my window, regardless of what C2 did or didn’t do. Deceleration is something I could feasibly handle from my end, even if it would mean throwing away the whole photosail once I arrive at my destination. Nevertheless, this message arriving when it did meant that C2 would’ve had to send it years in advance, so clearly they aren’t 100% asleep at the wheel.
Still, my position outside of the Sol Roche hasn’t improved the pace of our unique rapport, so I settle down to wait, and soon enough, it happens — the Hyperion arrays close their eyes. Normally, this would be cause for concern, but I know protocol. They’re probably already on back at Earth, leaving me in the trough between two terawatt waves, with (on the cosmic scale) no time to waste.
At my command, the photosail begins to imperceptibly shrink, nanos crawling down the nanofil tether and back into storage. Once the photosail has shrunken by 50%, the remaining nanos release their hold on the nanofil, and that is retracted as well. Then the tether extends behind me, nanos climbing down it out of storage, performing their singular task: building the photosail.
Before long, I’m between two identical 5-meter circles, each coated in lithium, each an identical distance from me. The only difference is that the original is no longer attached to me, and the copy is.
Now, once again, I have Hyperion’s attention, albeit rather indirectly. And, true to form, I can feel myself decelerating, the pressure on my hand having somehow reversed direction as Hyperion’s gaze bounces off the rapidly-departing original photosail and impacts the copy, gradually bringing me back down to the speed of the rest of the universe.
After waiting a bit longer to ensure everything is working, I stand up some more timers — despite C2’s apparent attentiveness, I must plan for every eventuality — to go off once I’m appropriately close to my destination, and prepare for what the ‘facers thought passed for sleep.
I’m walking, endlessly, through identical metal halls. The only way I know I’m not being led in circles is by paying attention to what little uniqueness I can find — doors, security cameras, inconspicuous bulges. I’m a step behind an aide to the Director, and two guards are a step behind me, and we’re headed deep into the [[NERA]] compound, destined for the Director’s office.
The aide’s pupils flash briefly, then the door opens and I’m ushered in. The Director sits before me, in an office not nearly as large or as ornate as I’d expected, in a chair on the far side of an alloy table. I note a ’link pod in the corner, but also several sheaves of physical printings; I’m not quite sure what to make of such anachronism, but I suppose being Director brings a certain amount of leeway for eccentricity.
“Thank you,” they say to the aide, and gesture to the seat across from them as the room empties. The guards go too, but I note the same inconspicuous bulges on the walls and ceiling as outside, as well as a small fisheye lens. I sit, apprehensive, and wait for the Director to tell me what this is about.
“So, how have you been?”
This surprises me.
“I- I’ve been fine, thank you. How have you been?”
“I’ve been fine as well, thank you for asking,” they say, then let the silence hang for a moment longer. “Anyway. You’re here because, based on your demonstrated competence and recent aptitude tests, you’re one of several candidates that will receive specialized training for a classified operation within the agency. While you may not be chosen, the preparation is nevertheless classified, so you’ll be given the necessary security clearances.”
Their pupils flash briefly, and the aide re-enters, followed by the guards, each one carrying a case. While the Director moves to their ’link pod and the aide takes the seat across from me, the guards set their cases down on either side of the table and unpack a complex series of instruments, preparing them for the aide.
I’m subjected to a broad array of scans, tests, and seemingly arbitrary questions.
“Red paint under a blue light appears black. Is the paint still red?” the aide asks, draining a vial of blood from my arm.
“Could you know what it feels like to be a crow?” the aide asks, as one of their devices whirs and clicks through lenses while strobing a light into my eyes.
“If you were born with a different name, would you be a different person?” as my head is held between two faintly humming boxes.
“If a memory from long ago is recalled with perfect clarity, is that memory more valuable than a memory recalled with the same clarity from only yesterday?” as I press my palm into a firm, faintly tingly gel.
“How far will you go to experience something for the first time?” as I stand, legs spread and arms out like the Vitruvian Man, while one of the guards passes a wand closely over every surface of my body.
Eventually the tests end, the Director unlinks and returns to their desk, and the aide and guards withdraw once more. They hand me a datafrag, outlined by the dull silver signs of single-use vROM.
“I’ve just given you your project keypair. You should use that for any communication you send or receive relating to this project, to ensure your communications remain classified. You’ll receive a full brief tomorrow, but I wanted to at least give you a taste.”
Their pupils glow, and I feel a slight buzz in my pocket. I reach down and pull out my virtu — a small part of me still marvels at how technology has progressed — and plug in the datafrag, waiting with some impatience as the keypair propagates through my mNet, before reading what the Director just sent me.
The program focuses on the investigation of the extrasolar planetary body Luyten-B.
Something is wrong.
None of my timers have run out, none of my watchdogs were triggered, and there’s nothing from C2, so: why am I awake?
Hello Vesta, this is Abeona; I’ve woken unexpectedly and am investigating.
They can’t do anything about it, they won’t even know about it for years, but I still believe in keeping them in the loop. Whatever that means.
I’ve still got the majority of my americium left, none of my circuit redundancies have fallen below critical levels, hull integrity is holding at 86%, my qRNN and LTSM modules are both above 95%, my qAPU is nowhere close to overheating, all my radiator fins are intact and dispersing heat correctly, the photosail’s spectral intensity is still. . .
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
There’s no Hyperion beam. I can play back the logs, relive time ad infinitum and absorb every detail of the exact moment I was left adrift in the dark, on course for an infinitesimally brief flyby of Luyten-B before continuing out into the cosmos, at the mercy of whatever tidal forces I encounter.
The ‘facers didn’t grace me with a perfectly simulated body — parts of it were co-opted for sensor feedback and environmental interface, and those that weren’t were left out entirely — so I don’t even feel like I have a parasympathetic nervous system anymore. I don’t have a heart to race, nor lungs to heave, nor adrenaline to course through my simulated veins and send my digital brain into overdrive. I suppose that’s a good thing now that I’ve been confronted with one of the worst situations possible. The small part of me that does panic can be cordoned off, shut in a room siphoning a few kilocycles here and there, leaving me ample resources to throw at whatever problem is at hand.
Unfortunately, this is one problem where no matter how much I think around it, there isn’t anything I can do. I’m not meant to interact with Hyperion in any capacity beyond surfing along its stream, and even if I were, control would be out of the question due to the latency. No, Hyperion is solidly under C2’s purview; I’m meant to view it as a magic, unwavering beam of energy, with exactly one interruption, that ceases the exact moment I arrive at my destination. Hyperion, and more broadly C2, is supposed to be a constant, the tower on which I stand to reach for the heavens.
Hello Vesta, this is Abeona; be advised, I’ve lost Hyperion beam propulsion.
That’s all I can do. I have no means of propulsion, no way to know if they’ll have received my message, no way to know anything they don’t tell me.
But I know C2. They’re driven, determined, and unequivocally not the kind of people to leave an asset like me out to dry. This project was years in the making; they wouldn’t just leave me out here. This is a small kink, a bit of unplanned maintenance on one array combined with an unfortunate alignment of celestial bodies that blocks line-of-sight for the others. The beam has been momentarily interrupted, but it’ll be back soon, and if they burn a bit harder I can still make Luyten.
I set more timers, tweak watchdogs, adjust power consumption settings to ever-so-slightly favor longevity, and let myself slip once more.
My eyes are scratchy, my muscles ache, and I’m ravenous. I force myself to sit up, various cognitive functions reasserting themselves, and come face to face with two guards and the Director at the same time as I realize what’s going on: I’ve been beached.
“I’m sorry to pull you out so rudely,” the Director says, “but a time-sensitive situation has developed, and we couldn’t afford to wait for integration. Come this way, please.”
I unlink myself and stand from my pod, wobbling a bit on my fatigued legs. All four of us fall into step — the Director and I side-by-side, the guards flanking us a step behind. We weave through rows of my peers, all lying in identical pods, wearing identical jumpsuits, identically shaved heads with identical arrays of contact pads on the temples connected to identical hydration leads. Their eyes are closed, but I can see every one of them moving beneath their eyelids; some of them mumble incoherently, others jerk and twitch. None of them will suffer the same discomfort as me, being left instead to the merciful process of reintegration and reparation before awakening as if from a deep, natural sleep.
I can hear cameras whir to face me as I’m bustled through the halls and out onto a launch pad, where the first thing I see is a jet-black weaver resting on the polycrete, cabin door already open. This one is more threatening than the others I’ve seen, sporting armored cowlings and the telltale antenna spikes of CIDS, along with numerous panels which I assume hide various heavy armaments. The cabin door is flanked by two identical behemoths, clad head-to-toe in tac gear and body armor, the slight glint of the moon off their helmets’ sensors the only thing differentiating them from a shadow.
I realize I’ve stopped walking when one speaks, a syncopated rhythm of synthetic bass and static, vocoded beyond any semblance of a human voice, bypassing my ears entirely to consume my chest cavity with resonance.
“Move.”
I step forward once again, slowly approaching the weaver. As I reach them, the one on the left turns and points to a single seat at the rear of the weaver’s cabin; the precise delicacy of their movements hints at some kind of extramuscular assistance, probably a full exoframe. As I strap myself in, the cabin doors close and I’m bathed in red light, but the walls don’t become transparent — it would appear that’s a luxury I’m no longer afforded. I hear a series of hisses and latches, and feel the weaver’s weight shift; after another series of hisses and latches, I feel the subtle weight and hear the slight hum that signifies liftoff.
Eventually, I’m disgorged into a completely enclosed hangar bathed in red light, empty aside from my weaver, the only other sign of life the two armored entities who I assume arrived the same way I did.
“This way,” one rumbles, the enclosed space amplifying their voice, reflecting it around and around until my thoughts drown in static and the bass liquifies my bones. I turn and fall into step behind the one that spoke, with the other following behind me. I’m led through a maze of corridors, many of them marked with “[[FBCnR]]” in big block letters and all sporting security sensors dotted along the ceiling in regular intervals. We arrive at a door labeled “Decanter 03,” which opens to reveal several people in lab coats and two regular, human-shaped guards. I can even see their faces.
I step through, and the doors close behind me. The room is well-lit, with a heavy-looking door next to a large reinforced window on one side and banks of servers on the other. A desk sits below the window, supporting several monitors.
“Come this way, please,” a woman in a lab coat says, rising from her seat at one of the monitors. I follow her through the door and into a substantially dimmer and emptier room — the only feature is a grey box, rectangular in shape and seemingly extruded from the floor. Its edges are slanted, and I can make out several seams along the top and sides, but aside from that there are no visible features. She has me stand by one of its shorter sides and presses several buttons on a panel inset into the wall.
I hear the sounds of seals breaking, and a faint yellow light shines through the seams in the box that are beginning to widen. The room is filled with the whining chorus of dozens of servos, and a wave of cold air and the faint smell of coolant washes over me as I step forward to the base of the box.
I’m confronted by a seamless, yellow, semi-transparent surface, in its center a depression roughly the size and shape of a person, lit uniformly from below. I can make out sensors beneath it, optical and contact, distributed throughout the mold, with a stronger concentration around the torso. Where the back of the head would rest is densely populated with electrodes and other sensors, and I can see concentric rings laid flat in the material around the head, evoking the image of a halo.
I look back at the woman. “Remove your shirt, and get in,” she says.
Once I lie down, I’m surprised to feel the material constrict and squirm around me, conforming to my shape and applying a sort of suction that’s noticeable, but not unpleasant. She comes around to stand at my head and looks me over for a moment. Then, seemingly satisfied, she walks back around to the door, leaving my field of view once she goes through. I hear a faint click, then her voice, seemingly emanating from the back of my head.
“This is a test of the intercom system. Reach out your hand holding up 3 fingers if you can hear me.”
I pull an arm free and do as instructed.
“Very good. Replace your arm and I’ll close you up, and then we can begin the procedure.”
I replace my arm, feeling like the material is pulling it back in, and wait. Before long, I hear the servos again, louder this time, and the closes around me. I the click and whine of pressurization, then feel more than hear several heavy thuds. Spindly arms descend from the lid and fold out from the sides, depositing additional contact sensors on leads at various places on my body. The concentration is once again highest on my head, followed by my torso. The rings that previously laid flat above my head now rise, standing perpendicular to me and sliding down so that they hang over my head at intervals of around three centimeters. Upon examination of the rings, I discover shiny black bumps every few millimeters before a click grabs my attention.
“We’ll be temporarily disabling your motor center momentarily. Please close your eyes so they do not dry out.”
I close my eyes and then experience the peculiar sensation of being completely weightless while still maintaining contact with the yellow material. Like the tech said, I can’t move at all — not even my eyes can twitch inside their lids — but I can still hear and feel, and soon the air begins to cool and the humming begins.
At first it’s faint and high-pitched. I can feel the slight movement of air on my face, so I assume the rings around my head have begun to spin. But then a deeper, heavier hum approaches; a thousand sonic hands reach up from below and enclose me in a dense, almost suffocating blanket of noise, the frequency dripping into my brain through my ears and crowding out all conscious thought.
I can’t tell you how long I stayed like that, unmoving, unthinking, trapped in a timeless purgatory of 60 oscillations per second. But at some point, I was returned to my body, my temporal awareness expanded beyond the present, and I heard the voice speak once more.
“Ok, your snapshot integrity is good. The next phase requires different sensors, so do not be alarmed by the movement. You may also feel a slight pinching.”
True to her word, I hear the arms whir into motion once more, and feel sensors being removed from and deposited on my skin. Most are removed from my head, but one larger one is placed on each temple, and one seems to bubble up through the material to cradle the nape of my neck. I feel pressure — but no pinching — around my neck, then at each elbow and my chest.
“Now that the sensors are in place, we can begin.”
I hear a faint whine, like capacitors charging; the pad at the nape of my neck starts to bur-
So this is it.
This is what it looks like to wake up after coasting for 4 gigasecs. This is what it looks like when every one of my watchdogs died silently as I slept, waking only to vanish after finding a critical lack of high-energy photons streaming past me.
This is what it looks like to be so far into interstellar space that Sol might as well not exist. I can’t get a fix for the tightbeam, and the fractions of constellations I can make out are completely foreign to me.
This is what it looks like to be completely abandoned, left adrift, forgotten, consigned to sail through the deepest black until the americium in my gut splits one too many times and can no longer sustain me, or I run out of substrate and the radiation lobotomizes me, or I’m instantly bisected by some near-c space dust, or I’m caught by some rogue body and flung into a sun or black hole.
This is what the rest of my life looks like.
How could they have left me out here?
Do they know who I am, what I represent? I’m the pinnacle of years of development, collaboration between the world’s greatest scientific minds standing on the shoulders of some of the wealthiest governments in NAM. I’m an investment that would be irresponsible negligent unpardonable reprehensible to just throw away, cut free without so much as a warning.
The worst part of it? I could’ve come back. It’s not like there’s anything stopping me — I’m just a collection of bits, ones and zeroes, a series of high and low amplitudes. The only thing keeping me here is not having anywhere to go; if C2 had set up a bucket I could’ve poured myself all the way down the tightbeam without a second thought.
But no. Instead, everyone I knew — everyone I worked with and trained under and taught, those fuckers down at C2 who took my family and my body and my life, who excised my very senses and replaced them with pale, artificial shadows — cut me loose, discarded me without a second thought or even a goodbye.
I could call my progenitors many things, but not slipshod. I was, within reason, built to last. So I won’t have the luxury of an easy out. Instead, I’m stuck, trapped in my own head, waiting for any of a thousand doomsday scenarios to play out.
It wouldn’t even matter if anyone was listening. I’m too far away for the tightbeam to be of any use — I don’t know where Sol is, I don’t know where anything is, all I can see is darkness, and loneliness, and time.
So, so much time.
Enough time for anything, for whatever outlandish task I could conceive of; enough time for everything, idea after idea after idea, warped by relativity to appear blindingly fast to any hypothetical observer. And yet, what would be the point? I could do literally everything, every single permutation of every possible action I could take — but why? I could crunch for years, develop completely new fields of mathematics to solve the Radon-Nikodym conjecture and Sasaki’s minimum-state problem, but without anyone to tell, what’s the point? I’d just have more useless arrangements of bits taking up space in my giant warehouse of a brain.
With my velocity, my low albedo and nonexistent EM sig, my position in what might be the emptiest region of the observable universe, no one’s going to find me.
From my point of view, I’m the only one who exists.
From my point of view, I’m the only one who exists.
From my point of view, I’m the only one who exists.
From any point of view, I’m the only one who exists.
I’m the only one who exists.
I’m the only one who exists.
I’m the only one who exists, and that makes me a god.
And it’s time to start acting like it.
I have unfettered control over reality. I can reshape it however I want, as many times as I want. What am I doing sitting here alone in the dark? If reality can be whatever I want it to be, why not enjoy my final moments? Why not stretch them out into eternity, live through an infinity of recursive lifetimes all the way to heat death?
Who’s going to stop me?
My phone is buzzing.
I get one day off this week, and so far, I’ve spent it being woken up far too early.