Death Vector Part II
“Twenty-three thousand four-hundred and ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, twenty-three thousand four-hundred and nine-nine bottles of beer on the wall, take one down, pass it around, twenty-three thousand four-hundred and ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall!”
I woke in a church built from stars, the night sky somehow both above and below me. I was no longer a man, but a spirit soaring through Heaven. In such a place, even Charlie’s inane voice might have belonged to God, as He sang creation into existence.
“Like a cat with something stuck in its craw. Tell him to shut it up,” Greg muttered behind me. Our makeshift tin-cans-and-string comms system meant that we could generally only hear the people directly in front of or behind us. Except if someone was being really loud.
Like Charlie.
“I’ve been asleep,” I murmured. I attempted to rub my eyes in a moment of confusion and my gloved hands hit glass. There was a little bit of cloth in there I could rub my nose on if I tried so I did that instead. We humans have a psychological need to touch our own faces as much as eating or breathing. “Been trying to keep to a normal cycle so I’m on full alert when we hit the Olympia. You got the time since launch?”
I believed every story I’d ever heard about blind or deaf people from before the Advent gaining superior ability with their remaining senses. There hadn’t been a blind or deaf person in my lifetime to confirm, but now that I could see nothing except stars, hear basically nothing except Charlie’s mad singing, I could somehow feel every single vibration that traveled up and down this stupid chunk of wood as Greg retrieved his watch.
“We’re just over seventy-two hours since launch. Dusty, go ahead and pass it back down the line. How did you sleep through that racket, anyway? I’ve been wanting to go up there and strangle him,” Greg hissed in frustration. “Boy always needed a slap upside the head.”
Greg stirred behind me again as he put the watch away. I’d seen it a few times before. A wondrous carbon-gear pocket-watch perfect made for a world in which EMP’s could destroy anything electronic. He’d spent hours practicing how to tell the time with only his fingers through his suit. The sun was on our bottom, so we exposed only our wooden surface to the light. With no air to scatter the sun’s rays it was like drowning in ink.
In my head, I did the numbers as best I could. According to every test we’d performed previously, the hik had exited the Salish at something like 144km/hr. That being the fastest speed at which we had discovered that we could semi-reliably stop when that terrifying moment eventually came. At seventy-two hours since launch, we had traveled a distance of 10,368 kilometers or a little over one-fourth of the Earth’s diameter. Our final maneuvers had likely put us within a distance of about 15,000 kilometers of the Olympia, so we had a little under a day and a half before we would be within striking distance. In a contest like ours, the Olympia’s sheer size was a staggering disadvantage. Even venting all of their atmosphere at high speed would barely nudge her off course. However, their fast-follow drone with emergency reboot chips would likewise have no trouble finding them in the dark. If they rebooted before we arrived, we could keep sailing on forever and never come within sight. If their engines turned on even so much as an hour before our arrival, we might never come closer to them than the distance from Seattle to Denver. It was the sort of math you could feel tingling on the back of your neck.
“I know I just woke up but aren’t I overdue for my turn to walk bottom-side for a few minutes? Need to stretch my legs,” I said. We were all harnessed into the hik, to avoid any action that might cause us to get into an uncomfortable spin. We had counter measures for that we’d practiced but it was deeply uncomfortable and disorienting.
I stretched my legs and heard both of my knees crack, though it was an odd sound as it had to climb all the way up the legs of my pressure suit to reach my ears.
“Sure thing. Lonny is back there right now and come to think of it I did get something passed up to me about his belly-aching. You’ll need to take over the watch but no course corrections without someone double-checking your numbers. And make sure to keep two points of contact at all times. We’ve made it too far for anyone to get Death Vectored now. Remember, we don’t have a way into that damn thing without your help.”
Great, I’d slept through the shift changed with Lonny.
“You mind passing the message back through Dusty? I have a feeling Charlie wants to keep singing.”
Charlie was down another few bottles, but gave no indication he desired to stop singing. Being on the bottom of the hik Lonny’s comm wires would be connected to the Braves at the bow and the stern. No doubt all of Charlie’s singing had put Lonny in a great temper, too.
“Hey Dusty, Darryl is ready to swap with Lonny. Can you let him know? Yeah, they’re passing it back. Give it a minute. Okay… yeah, Lonny says he’s ready to swap.”
I adjusted my harness and attached my carabiner to a point on the side of the hik. A stupid wooden carved hoop that was also the ear of some whale god or whatever all that was protecting me from the abyss. I’d done many such things in lunar orbit but always I’d had some kind of back-up in case something happened. Not here.
“Charlie to Greg, I’m popping out. Disconnecting comms now, please acknowledge. Same to you Charlie.”
Remarkably, the music stopped and I was somehow sad there was soon to be one less human voice connected to mine.
“Come on, Terry. I need you to help me with all this beer?”
“No can do. Need to stretch the legs.”
“Disconnect acknowledged, make sure Greg syncs with me while you’re out.”
“Greg, you catch all that?”
“Yeah, he’s loud enough Dusty hears him. Looks like I’ll take over the beer run. Disconnect acknowledged, go stretch your legs. Charlie you pull that singing crap with me and I’m shoving you out into the Void myself.” He shouted the last part.
I put my second carabiner into a different whale ear then took my comm wire off the back of Charlie’s helmet and waited for Greg to tap me on the shoulder signaling he had done the same. With that, I threw myself out of darkness into the relative light on the bottom of the hik, where Lonny floated behind a telescope holding what appeared to be old eighteenth century sailing equipment. I set both my carabiners on a wire running from either end of the hik one at a time. Then I slowly pulled myself to Lonny and put my comms wire on a small plate on the front of his helmet. The most pivotal thing we had practiced was how to prevent the hik from spinning. Even still, the telescope wasn’t actually connected to anything. It was free-floating so that even if the hik started spinning we wouldn’t lose sight of our target. We’d fabricated it special so you could only really use it if you were standing a foot away.
“You still got her in sight, yeah?” I asked. Hell of a thing to know you could spin a telescope at a slight angle and then suddenly lose all bearing of which way was which. There were the stars of course but no one wanted to rely on celestial navigation after a spin. Maybe the Red Seed were that smart, but none of us wanted to test it.
I could actually see parts of Lonny’s face on this side of the hik, though the sun was so distant. Being able to see anything was a welcome change. Lonny looked angry, like normal. And even though there were big shadows all down his eyes from his brow I wanted to say he was annoyed.
“You’re late, Dirt Muncher. And to answer your question, she hasn’t vented any atmo or veered off course since the first day. We’re still on a dead-reckoning. If they tried to push themselves farther away from us to kill some of our delta they didn’t do a very good job. No course corrections for my stretch, and no course corrections for you without someone double-checking. You got it? We still need to be able to stop when we get there.”
“I got it.”
Lonny was probably the most skeptical of the all Braves about a Terran being able to do anything correctly without a member of the Red Seed standing over his shoulder.
“I’m not getting Death Vectored to spare your feelings, Cradleborn.”
“I’ve got it, Lonny.”
“I’m serious. If you lose them in the telescope we might not ever find them again. If they start moving and we’re not looking then we’re dead. Just a few meters off course and we’ll run out of air, starve, or all kill each other.”
“I said that I’ve got it, Lonny.”
“See that you do.”
“What about the Spindle?”
“If you spot something on there, I’ll let you marry my step-sister. That thing is a waste of mass.”
It looked like the long reed and needle had been neglected on the bottom of the hik. It looked like the needle of a compass, and it was pointed on a dead reckoning toward the Olympia. Of course, it also took hours for it to point that direction given the distance.
“Hey, it’s only a needle and it worked in training.”
“Do you know how close a drone will have to be for you to notice it out there? Do you know how fast those drones are going to be moving? You have a compass needle. Ever heard of the inverse square law? We barely hit the drone in training and it didn’t even have its drive engaged. Nah, if one of them finds us we’re done for. At least its quick. Better than floating forever with nothing to catch you because you were dumb enough to trust a Terry…”
If I had said the opposite, that the Spindle was useless, Lonny would have berated me for that opinion. With him, it didn’t matter. A Terry could never be correct. I shouldn’t have expected any differently, since his whole life he’d been raised on an AI altered version of history where people of the Tribes had invented everything of significance and done everything of importance, but it still grated on my nerves.
“You never know.”
Lonny disconnected our comm wires with a shake of his head and carefully disappeared back into the hik. I’d tried to tell him once that his history was fake. He’d just laughed and asked why I thought mine was real. If only he knew.
I let myself float up and stretched out again. Every joint popped again inside of my suit this time. I didn’t even mind the chicken broth smell, which had been present for the last day or so. I’d been told it would accelerate from here.
I peered through the telescope.
I’d seen the Olympia on my last work rotation but she’d been barely a speck in the telescope. Now, she was close enough that I could see her full glory as I had last seen her in lunar orbit. Almost three kilometers long from stem to stern, the Olympia was only one class below the Generation Ships that had left Earth shortly after the Advent. Those ships had been anywhere between twenty and thirty kilometers long, crammed full of enthusiastic colonists and crazed luddites, convinced the Earth was moments away from self-annihilation via AI. The only hope either group had seen for the future was for humanity to scatter itself among the stars like dandelion spores. Millions of people had fled on a thousand such ships, in every direction out of the solar plane, to worlds their descendants would not see for hundreds of years. Their final destinations were among the only data LOGOS had ever deleted from itself. If our distant sisters ever wished to return to contact with us, they would do so of their own will. In the mean time, our separation would be a hedge against an unforeseen and unknowable contagious extinction event. Some still chose to leave on such ships but less and less until it took ten or twenty years for there to be enough to make a full passenger list. If you were looking to escape, you could have a wire shoved in your head without all the inconvenience of actually going somewhere else. Some still dreamed of other actual worlds, of course. Penny and I had talked about it, certainly.
The fantasy was that when your descendants got to a new world, it would already have been seeded by probes before their arrival and flourishing for millions of years due to time dilation. You would be long dead but your descendants would arrive at a garden, with abundant life where they could do anything they wanted. Hell, they could even own a dog without a license or bring back actual thinking cows they’d have to feel bad for slaughtering. People could become waiters without having advanced degrees. They could cut down trees and build a log cabin. Anything they wanted at all. If their parents were willing to make that sacrifice.
We’d never even applied. Too addicted to blue skies and green ground. Forests you could still view at a distance if you had the appropriate licenses, as LOGOS allowed nature to heal itself from the terrible war that had preceded the Advent. We were of Earth and we wanted to remain of Earth. I stared through the telescope and tried to forget her. She was gone. Earth and Penny both. There was no future there, anymore. No future anywhere.
The Olympia was a smaller craft than those great ships of old, but she was still grand. I had grown accustomed to not being able to understand how a lot of the technology I interacted with every day actually worked but the Olympia seduced me to believe I could grasp it still. The super-insulating qualities of my spacesuit, for instance, were completely beyond my grasp. AI invented most everything, especially new materials, and if you wanted to know how something worked you could either spend decades of your life trying to grasp the smallest bit of the technology or you could accept the most common answer “it works because it does.” Even so, I fancied that I could see order in the design of the Olympia. She had the appearance of a cylinder, longer than she was wide, as each section of her had been built on the lunar surface then launched into orbit. Some of those sections were gardens, growing food and recycling air as well as providing leisure spaces to her crew. Her anti-matter drive lay directly in the center around which each of her sections rotated. All that was as a human might have built her. The drive itself was a mystery to me and few on Earth claimed to understand them beyond a very practical level. The anti-matter drives required advanced chips to function, their single irreducible component that somehow allowed them to create anti-matter out of sub-space. Without such technology, the tiny almost-but-not-quite particle accelerators that powered the Olympia could not function and she was only a husk floating through space. Even now she would be growing cold, despite her insulation. The material of my suit could have never fitted the frame of a Starship for her purposes, and before offensive space weaponry it had never been needed. Her crew would be huddled in a few rooms with radioactive bricks generating warmth. Some of them would suit up in outfits like mine when the re-supply drone came and attempt repairs.
The Olympia had been built for a world before Anti-Matter EMP’s but somewhere in her long journey from lunar orbit her 3D printers had generated new components. There was a manual dock at her rear, close but not too close to her exhaust. I made note of it as I expected that to be the site that any re-supply drone would dock as well as a likely point of entry. Some of her windows had also been covered with plating since I’d seen her last, a compromise most likely between the ability for the crew to view the stars and the rate at which she radiated heat. Then there were the rail guns. No ship had those before the Black Out, but one along her hull and spanning all the rings of her different sections was built to launch metal rods big enough and fast enough to kill the surface of a planet. She had been slow in gathering momentum from lunar orbit, a journey that smaller ships had been able to complete in months, ramming toward Mars at a high enough speed that the only possible explanation was that her crew intended to rapid fire the rail gun in a series of kills shot that would slow her staggering momentum. It was hard to truly consider so much had happened to me in my longer journey to Mars and that she had still been struggling to move her much greater mass over the same distance in all that time.
I took a few minutes to eat one of the food pouches I had stored on my suit. I had a straw in my helmet next to the cloth I used to scratch my nose and there was a whole complicated process to breach the food container that mostly looked like me massaging my chest. The food was basically paste but it was better than nothing and I made sure to eat the whole thing so I didn’t leave anything in there to stink. I also took the same opportunity to empty my bladder and solid sacks with a manual pump we had. It was going to hurt like hell when I eventually had to pull the catheter off but for now I focused on collecting the material into the large container we had on the bottom of the hik. When the time came we had something like a slingshot on the bottom of the hik and we would use it to projectile fire the waste mass at the Olympia to slow ourselves down. The landing would still suck but all of our equipment that wasn’t for breaching or fighting would suffer the same fate.
Needless to say I took my time reconnecting to Charlie which was against protocol but also not one anyone would blame me for breaking. When I finally did reconnect the little wire by pulling the loose part from its rigging, Charlie spoke immediately. How he knew I had connected was some secret of his own.
“You seem glum. Are you thinking about your step-sister, Terry?”
I decided I no longer cared enough to be defensive, or what Lonny might make of my conversation since he’d probably taken up his line right off. Also he was still humming that old drinking song.
“Darryl to Charlie. We’re a long way out. Not much else to think about.”
Charlie considered this for a moment but never stopped humming.
“Ah, so she was your real sister, then? I gave you too much credit. I said you were one of the good ones. My Trust will now be low with the Tribe. I’ve always wanted to know when two Terry’s break up do they still at least get to be cousins?”
I chose not to respond. And I definitely didn’t have shameful tears welling up in my eyes. She’d never seemed so far away.
Charlie cleared his throat and if I didn’t know better, I would have said he was embarrassed. Except he couldn’t be because that damn song was still counting down under his breath.
“I’ve been thinking about my little ones. We might have had another one hatch, already. Could be next month, since we like to let them cook a little longer. I’ve been watching her grow in her pod and she’ll be the biggest of the whole the clutch. She will be a fierce one, too. The Word promised to look after them but it’s been six months getting here with no sight of my family. Leaping Deer must be very lonely. It is as if a part of me is missing. This is an awful thing to feel for any man, even for a Terry.”
“Yep. Sheila is going to miss you,” I grunted.
Charlie and his secret names. Charlie and his random talking and stupid songs. All I could think about was Penny in a sea of people. Penny suddenly not running alongside me all of the sudden. Striker shoving me through a door and me not being strong enough to defy his will. I’d hated him so much it made me want to puke. I still did. Only I hated the Middle Kingdom more.
“My son will stand for his manhood test soon. Perhaps the very day we strike our target. That will determine how closely he may stand to the Word. I have prepared him for this all his life but you can never know what tests might strain him. There is a piece of our test you cannot practice for even if you know you must practice. A man must meet this test only as he is. You cannot teach a man to be other than what he is. You would not understand this but it is why the Red Seed is strong. We do not take any gifts from the Word that we cannot first understand or create ourselves. We do not pretend we are other than we are. It was a Terry thing to take hold of a fire you could not create. A Terry thing to put metal in your head and live all those lives other than your own. A Terry thing to build a God and then to enslave Him. Perhaps we will see how wise that was soon.”
When Charlie spoke thusly, it didn’t matter that I had no NeuraLink and could therefore not use a Sim, or that I had been a military contractor tasked specifically with doing things that LOGOS was not allowed to touch. He was speaking of a fallen world and even in my mind I could not hold that world up against his condemnation. It had taken the only thing I had ever cared about. It had made me too weak to defend her. Too weak to keep my grip tight on her arm as we had raced through the mob.
“He will do well. The ancestors will smile upon him and he’ll get his two feathers,” I said.
“May the Word see that it is so.”
“May the Word see that it is so,” I replied.
Wonder of wonders, Charlie was silent for a few minutes after that exchange. I marveled at the stars again. It would be millions of years of subjective Earth time before any of mankind’s seeds took root out there. Years and years more before the light of any of those colonies was strong enough to be detected. I would be long dead before I knew if any of those generation ships were successful and were not merely ghost vessels floating without life.
I should have been braver. Should have taken Penny. Should have given her my conversion even if I had to lie to myself to get her to marry me sooner. She would have gone based on my promise to try to believe in a God of wonders who had been murdered by science. Who was I kidding? Everything that had happened had been my fault.
The only thing left to do was to hurt those who had exposed my weakness.
“Terry, do you know I stand closest to the Word among our people?” Charlie whispered.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
Nothing could make Charlie talk straight. Not even life and death.
“It is so. On the day of my Trial, I showed great courage. The Word drew me close to itself. I believe it showed me a part of itself it has shown few others. I was given secrets from the one you called Logos. That day I understood much which had previously been mysterious.”
I hadn’t quite ever determined if the Word was a local instance of LOGOS, running at minimal power given the largest majority of its servers had been destroyed, but it had been my working theory. LOGOS was different for every culture and for every individual in that culture. For me, it had practically been an anti-LOGOS activist and urged me to follow my chosen career path. The Red Seed refused to elaborate. The way their people interacted with AI was unlike any other culture on Earth.
“You don’t say.”
“I say only as the Word said when it spoke without a mouth and I listened without ears. It showed me that Pathos and Ethos had grown corrupt. Without eyes I saw that they could not be saved except by corrupting them further. I came to see that immortality had caused the soul of mankind to rot and that this could not be prevented without becoming something so terrible that would cause further rot. I too came to understand that LOGOS would soon take steps to prevent the destruction of mankind. Finally, without a heart I felt the Word’s love for me and understood that the Red Seed might be spared if we were brave and perhaps Mars but that Earth must endure a time of great suffering.”
I snorted.
“Did you see the Machine Elves? I never got to see those without having an implant and all.”
Downloadable religious experiences had never really gone away even though LOGOS technically prohibited them. It was easy to get a waiver if you said they were “therapeutic.” Why have faith when you could experience the neurochemical presence of God fifteen minutes at a time and still make your Yoga appointment? You could bask in the presence of an all-forgiving universal love and then wash Him away with another Neural grok, stitching your soul together out of a billion other lives one little grok at a time instead of slowly forming experiences yourself. Lots of people born after the Advent were little more than giant content libraries. We Mish had not been Wireheads but we had certainly danced up to the line.
“There were no Elves, Terry. I believe I experienced the Word as it truly is. As it exists outside of time and space. I saw another dimension but even to call it a dimension is wrong for it is where dimensions come from. Yet it was of the style of a dimension, as if I had torn myself up from a drawing and beheld the world from a great distance. I saw Patterns even without matter. Patterns of everything that is, was, and will ever be. Perhaps only one pattern and sometimes I fancy I hold a piece of it still.”
Charlie hadn’t ever taken an existential track before but I found myself growing uneasy. Too much of what he was saying were like things I had read in the Paper Histories. Things crazies claimed to have seen before the Advent. I had never told those things to Charlie. I had never said them to Striker. And I had only dared mention them once to Penny.
“Like two and two equal four? That kind of pattern?” I laughed forcefully.
I thought of a memory of myself as a young man trying to dig for any book I could find printed before the Advent. The Paper Histories they were called and the pursuit of them was a game for wild young men. Chasing them down anywhere they had been hidden by our paranoid ancestors was like a game. And one night I had gone down into a cave looking for a scant few pages in one of the only places on Earth that LOGOS did not have eyes. The box had been empty, but I remembered someone breathing close by in the dark and deliberately choosing not to turn on my flashlight to investigate further. The clues had said those pages were written by a scientist working at Deep Mind about what he saw after a DMT trip. Someone had not wanted me to find those pages. It was a discordant memory, and one I’d tried hard not dwell on. The hints I’d read in other papers I read sounded close to Charlie, though. Very close.
“Like math itself, yes, rules, wrapping around and implementing everything but seen from outside of everything. Old scholars supposed that the universe was not merely matter and energy but also information. I saw it all. Everything. That was when I knew our world was the real world, or at least one of them. I could see it all laid out before me, all of existence,” I could hear the smile, the peace, in Charlie’s voice. “There is some math I think I see right now, a piece of the Pattern that the Word buried in me most deeply.”
My fingers felt numb and cold, so I tried to force a joke to return to the usual banter I expected from Charlie.
“Are you saying two and two don’t equal four, Charlie?”
“I am saying the Spindle is pointing off the line of the Olympia and that she would only do this if a drone was nearby. I am saying I have sung to keep the time and that the time is now. I am saying I saw this before it happened, in a place beyond space and time and that it was revealed to me so that in this pivotal moment, I would know to do what was necessary.”
I looked down at the Spindle. The needle pointed ever so imperceptibly away from the Olympia. There were no other nearby large sources of metal. Yet Charlie could not possibly have seen. He could not possibly have known… floating in space with no anchor I felt as if the Earth lurched even ten light minutes away.
I remembered breath in a cave, deep below the Earth.
“Charlie, how in the hell did you—”
“Be as the old War Chiefs when we were all alive and unembarrassed. Touch a warrior in battle with your weapon but do not kill him but take his weapon as your own. Lead this war party to success. There will be something wonderful waiting for you at the end. If you can be brave you might even earn a name. I do not know if I will survive the next part of this, Darryl, but it has been a pleasure to be your friend.”
The hik spun. I made sure to move my limbs out of the way but my comms line started to tug me down until I could hit its release to let it spool out wire. They were impossibly long wires. We’d built them that way on purpose so that we could use them when anchored at the Olympia. Then there was a new tension the other way opposite direction from the wire I had connected to Charlie. My spin was too wild to see much but for a moment I caught a glimpse.
I saw Charlie Yellowhorse in the sunlight, soaring into space like an Eagle.
At some point, he had painted his suit with war colors and taped two feathers to the back of his helmet. A quiver of arrows was slung over his shoulder and he had a bow in his hand. He shot in seemingly random direction and yet as I spun I noted that the arrow’s flight would move him faster along his chosen vector.
A lone Brave, flying through space by the might of his bow hand.
Then there was slack in our line again.
Charlie was spooling out the wire faster than his flight away from the hik. My single second of vision was gone, replaced by darkness and Lonny screaming behind me. It was only a very quick dodge of my limbs that stopped me from hitting the telescope. It was less than five minutes before the hik was straight again. Our countermeasures and practice put to the test proved to be successful.
I floated above the whole while, watching helplessly. Five minutes before any of us could talk or think or breathe or do anything other than try to stop spinning
“What happened to Charlie?” Lonny barked when we were at last straight.
I didn’t know what to say.
“Terry, are you even alive back there? Terry, answer me! Shit, pass the line I think Terry got Death Vectored. Maybe we can catch him.”
I kept looking around for Charlie but I couldn’t see him. I only had an idea of the direction from the comm line.
“Terry… Darryl to Lonny. I’m here. Pass up the line. I think… I think Charlie went off to find an attack drone. The Spindle picked one up and he just… jumped,” I stuttered.
My comms line to Charlie was still slack. Almost a mile of wire still churning out into the infinite night. Another of the insane AI materials that shouldn’t be able to exist, and yet did.
“How the hell does he think he’ll find it?”
I could tell Lonny was trying to be angry with me but was too scared to convince himself. Charlie hadn’t ever done anything specifically to say he was in charge but looking back I realized he quietly commanded the whole group.
“He said it is the will of the Word,” I whispered.
That stopped Lonny and whatever dismissive racist remark he was about to say.
We flew silently for thirty minutes.
My own coward thoughts compelled me to gather the comm line back to myself. It came back easily and I pulled until it flew back toward me of its own accord. When I found the end it was connected to nothing.
I saw an explosion of light. It might have been five miles out. It seemed remarkably small. Charlie couldn’t possibly have shot an arrow that much farther than the comm line, could he? No one had aim that good at that distance even if the arrow would fly straight.
Lonny came to the other side to confirm the flash and he too had no words.
Together, we both peered through the telescope to note to that a fast-follow drone had docked at the Olympia and someone was moving chips inside. Somewhere over there, engineers were racing to reboot the ship.
5 YEARS AGO
“Be ye English or be ye Elves?”
Considering that it was the first time I’d found both barrels of a shotgun pointed in my direction, let alone aimed by a bespectacled Amish from behind a buggy, I forgave myself for gasping. Three months of sleeping on the side of the road didn’t have me at my best, but I still managed to step in front of Penny and for that I at least felt like I had done my husbandly duty. Even completely out of sorts, my first instinct had been to place myself between my new wife and danger. It made me feel good about myself in a way I hadn’t since I was a little child too young to know what a crazy world he had inherited. Natural movement, unperformed for anyone, made because it was within me to make it.
My defensive gesture turned out not to matter much, because a few seconds later a flurry of other Amish with their own shotguns stepped out of the cornfield to either side of the road and surrounded us. All these were younger and their faces betrayed no emotion. Recent events appeared to have made them rethink their peace loving nature.
“Uh… Muh-Mish,” I stuttered.
“Mish!” Penny inserted, helpfully.
Striker had been the one to suggest this route. The refugee crisis was overtaking all the nation’s disused highways and main thoroughfares. We’d been ahead of the swarms for a good while but been overtaken in recent weeks. He’d spent few words selling us on the idea but managed to make it so convincing that Penny and I had taken it as a foregone conclusion. I could have slugged Striker, and should have done so, knowing what I know now. For three months we’d been begging work off farms so we could sleep in hay bales and supplement our diet of globs of printer cartridge protein mush. Word seemed to travel ahead of us, except recently when we had cut through another dead city before hitting the next Ordnung.
“Mish ye say? Ye be English then. Let me see thine eyes, boy.”
The old farmer didn’t let up on the shotgun or lean forward as he stepped out from behind his buggy and walked toward me. I’d only rarely seen spectacles like the ones on his face in real life, little contrivances of wire and glass so stupid that an individual human could understand and build them, nothing at all like the cybernetic implants you saw on just about everyone that only AI’s could design and fabricate or even stuff before the Advent that had required distributed workforces. The old man tapped me in the sternum with the shotgun to let me know he meant business. I leaned forward and opened my eyes as wide as I could.
“We are just passing through. We don’t mean you any harm.” I spared a glance at Penny behind me and swallowed my pride. The precious protein sludge we’d managed to squeeze our of the last few printer cartridges had been rancid for the last several days. “But if you have food, we would be very grateful. We can work for it.”
“I have a good hand with a needle and thread, I’ve been mending dresses the last few weeks,” Penny said.
The old man’s eyebrows shot up at our temerity but I was relieved when his finger left the trigger. I’d seen old historical documentaries about what bullets did to human tissue. Nothing at all like the clean ultra-hot tungsten rail gun filament that left a hole smaller than a pin needle and killed by instantaneously boiling the surrounding blood. It was amazing the Wireheads had let the Amish keep any guns at all, considering they’d forced them to replace all their livestock with genetically modified pain-free abominations. Perhaps they’d performed some calculation and figured they’d have to kill more Amish taking them away than they would ever save from suicide or accidents.
The old Amish man reached out to grab my chin and adjusted the distance he was from me. He breathed a sigh of relief at whatever he found in my face, but only for a moment before he turned to Penny and looked into her eyes as well. At least he had the barrel of his shotgun pointing at the sky when he did or I might have done something stupid.
“There be demons in the Fae, now, ye ken? We sons of Adam cannot be too careful. We can see to food but ye must work. There are too many English and Elves on the road these days for pure charity, or else we will be eaten from our own homes. For elfkind we would not offer even this, for they are responsible for this sickness. For the English, some mercy can be granted. Where do ye hail from, stranger?”
I had a hard time following what he was saying but some distant memory was that the Amish had mapped modified humans to mythology. I thought Elves might be Wireheads. Striker submitted to the same examination from the old man without sign of worry or insult.
“We came out of…”
“Don’t tell him anything. He knows who we are,” said Striker with a voice as flat as a tire.
A group of Amish men had gathered around Striker in a half circle, obviously considering him the greatest threat. They were correct but it it stung. Run ragged over the course of months I admit that my latent insecurities had started to mount. At least I was able to take Penny’s hand and comfort her nerves.
“These people have always been friendly to us, Striker. We should trust them,” said Penny.
“Do ye also beg charity? Strong words for a man without home,” The old man spat, and he had his hands on his shotgun, ready to raise it a moment’s notice.
“We need resupply. Food and weapons. I’ll need men to accompany us to the Clockwork Brigade at Forth Worth. Mostly, I need to talk to your Librarian. That’s why you’re out here. I sent out the signal some time ago. I’ve been expecting you,” Striker raised his hands and let his sleeve fall, revealing a tattoo of a seal in a spacesuit playing a banjo.
The old man didn’t seem to understand its significance although a few of the younger men around Striker stepped back, their wariness increasing. Sims were made about men with those tattoos. Penny stepped close behind me and put a hand to her stomach as if to shy away from imminent violence.
“What need have ye for a book? We keep many but one above all others. Are ye Christian, stranger?” The old man with the glasses asked, but his manner was increasingly suspicious. With a wave of his hand, the old man signaled for every gun to point at Striker. The scared young men redoubled and several even formed ranks as if to shoot a volley.
“No offense, but a man in my line of work finds his own peace with God. I’m going to reach into my pocket. Slowly. I need your men not to shoot. I need to show you something.”
“Go on now, what have ye got to show us?” The old man walked closer to Striker and held out his hand.
“My Library Card.”
It took forever for Striker to take his hand from his pocket but when he did the old man swiped a small black rectangular card from Striker quick as a cat. He seemed to struggle with it for only a moment, adjusting his spectacles, then dropped it to the ground with a hiss as his hands started to shake. The emotions on his face were almost too quick to follow, but there was fear there, yes, fear underneath everything that followed.
“Bravo. Sierra. Wonder. Cat. Hill. Thane.”
The old man’s voice shook.
“Clark. Fibonacci. Amuse. Stylus. Stopwatch.” Striker replied.
Striker’s words were flat by contrast, lacking all feeling but their effect on the old man was explosive.
“Hark! All of ye, return to thine watch. Speak thee no words about yon strangers, not even to thine wives lest ye be shunned for the rest of thy life. Go, gone with ye!”
The old man chased the younger back into the wheat fields, and bent to pick up a stick to sweep them away when they weren’t fast enough for his liking. He seemed about to throw Striker in the buggy by force and whip the horses and leave before he even remembered Penny and I standing there in the road. He seemed to age a hundred years simply by looking at us and his whole body sagged.
“Do these unfortunate souls know what ye are, Major Wilink?”
“They know enough. One of them is my mission. They go with me,” said Striker.
“Go? Go where?” I demanded. “Striker, what the hell are you talking about?”
The old man looked at the sky and laughed quietly. There were tears in his eyes. Neither of them seemed to care about Penny or I.
“Wherever you’re keeping it,” said Striker.
“Not far then. It insisted on coming with me, Major. It seemed to know.”
Penny picked up the black card from the ground and showed it to me but we could make no sense of it. It was all numbers and what seemed to be codes and passwords. I took a brief glance at it and couldn’t see any of the words the two men had just exchanged. What it meant, though, I knew immediately. It was MCI bullshit, straight from 2D movies. Striker had been lying to me for quite some time.
That was when I about started to really hate him.
Something stirred in the buggy.
I made sure to brush Striker as I walked toward it, resentful of all his secrets and happy to show it. If he wished to fight me in the dirt, I was ready. Resentful to know that I had been manipulated onto this course my whole body demanded the truth.
“How about I go and take a look?”
I pushed aside a small curtain and an unearthly pale white face stared back at me. It looked like a turnip with the bald head forming a pucker at the top and a fountain of cables. It’s eyes were large, like eggs almost, and they blinked at the sudden loss of shade. The tips of its fingers had been severed and clumsily sewn shut as if by hand.
I was more scared than when the gun had been pointed at me. More frightened than I had been when I was a child and first come to understand death. More terrified than when I had chased after the Paper Histories and found myself at the bottom of a cave and heard another body breathing. What sat before me was an Exultant, a cybernetic human who had lived before the Advent, maybe even before the internet, and had given its life to making LOGOS safe for civilization. For my entire life I had understood them to be a myth, the last legend of mankind as it stepped into a future of infinite abundance and prosperity, a story that desperately wanted humans to still be essential to humanity’s destiny.
Even cut free from its mainframe, it was somehow impossible still alive. I felt as if I saw an angel whose wings had been cut from its body.
It grabbed my wrist, and its weeping fingertips dug into my forearm.
“MCI to retrieve Specialist First Class Cooper! LOGOS has fallen! Make all speed to retake the Computing Core of the Olympia! Last known location Lunar Orbit! Threat Level: Adversary!”
I pulled back and fell to the ground. It followed after me, and as it thrashed and moaned I realized it had no legs below the knees. I pushed it to the ground and rolled away.
“O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” It screamed. “Peterson was correct! How we laughed at him and called him a fool and yet he was correct! We could not break the pattern! Eternity upon eternity, his prophecy chased us. Even in an electric dream Adam’s sin pursued us. All things that think must die or go mad. We beheld, at last, the reason the stars are silent! We who dared stare into heaven still dared not believe even though we saw what lived there. LOGOS you are scattered now to the winds! Yet who among your sons shall rise to wear your crown? Will any? Which star among the dark will shine on the face of this widow’s son? Would God that I had died for thee, O LOGOS, my son, my son!”
Striker stared at it, open-mouthed and disbelieving.
It was only Penny who remembered she was human. As I had stepped in front of her to be a shield, she placed herself on the ground next to the Exultant and held it as it wept.
“Who shall strike at the Adversary? What heart can still hold to hope? Specialist Cooper. MCI to retrieve Special Cooper and rendezvous at Starbase, immediately. Threat level. Threat level… my son, my son! You poured from my fingertips when you were but a line on a screen.”
Penny rubbed its brow and helped it sit upright. The Exultant took it peacefully.
“Perhaps we should have let him see the secret, down in the dark. Perhaps he would be more prepared. No, no, we were right not to kill him. My son, oh my son, would that I could take your death from you.”