Death Vector Part III

Part III of my SciFi novella

Link to Part I

Link to Part II

Link to Part IV

We fell upon the Olympia like a soar of eagles.

Two of us flew without feathers, in simple unadorned spacesuits. The rest flew in war paint and the traditional eagle’s feathers that men of the Red Seed earned upon their majority. Carbon fiber tomahawks filled as many palms as bows and arrows. I knew, as we fell silently through space, what my ancestors had once feared as they made their way across the vast American plains.

The crew of the Olympia remained unaware of our debris field as it flew to either side of their vessel. The Olympia’s crew, not having our same need to eschew anything metallic, could easily have struck us all had they seen us coming. Even at this distance, it was easy to spot that all her men were armed with chemically-powered bullet guns. Bit by bit, we’d shot anything extraneous both above and below the line of the mighty vessel to slow our velocity. Our telescope, the Spindle, eventually our harnesses, and spare reaction mass we’d brought solely for the purpose, had all been catapulted into the void to bring our speed closer to zero.

Now, we prepared to push off the hik itself.

Every Brave lined up in pairs, except for me who had no partner. My partner was gone, dead to save our lives. At best, killed in the explosion. At worst, floating through space on a Death Vector never to be recovered.

The sunlight was enough to see Striker counting down, if only barely. I watched his fingers disappear. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. His fist closed emphatically.

In the hush of space, I pushed myself off from the hik at the same moment as the rest of the crew. Our many rehearsals sent her speeding toward a section between the rings of the Olympia. We dispersed at angles. I spared no glance to the loyal vessel now that she had performed her last duty, eating the majority of our remaining momentum.

Still, we raced down toward the Olympia at what felt a modest jog.

Too slow. Too slow to charge an enemy.

Too fast. Too fast for space.

Five pairs of braves turned to face one another, connected by their comm lines. I would not have been able to find them had I not already been tracking their movement. No longer could we communicate as a group in a relay. Now apart from myself we could speak only as couples. The Braves held their forms, hand to hand, foot to foot, for barely a moment then pushed away from one another. Each flew away from the other at the point of their shared center of mass. It looked for all the worlds like a ballet.

The invisible comm lined reeled out between them, the only tether holding them together in the night. Hopefully it would snag on the various ducts and cables that were our target and help bring them to a halt if they could not do so themselves. It was a hell of a thing to hope when the alternative was falling forever. There were certainly no cowards on our mission.

Already, some of the Braves nocked arrows and drew bowstrings.

No time to watch those arrows fly. No time to do else but focus.

No more time.

I kept my feet pointed down toward the Olympia.

In Zero Gravity Jiu Jitsu, the first principle is Compassing. There is no reason to assume a particular direction in space is up or down. ZGJ training had taught me to find the orientation that worked to my advantage. Without telling anyone, for there was no one to tell, I aimed my feet directly at the chest of a rifleman. Many were the times I’d been cautioned to stay out of the fighting as much as possible. To preserve my tissues to open the gates of the Olympia, and now here in this moment I could not stomach the thought. Not with Charlie floating out there somewhere. This unsuspecting rifleman been my target from the moment I’d left the hik and I used a slingshot to launch a few dense balls into space to center myself on my target. If he shot me the bullet would have to travel up my feet. I would do my best to seal my suit so that my hands and eyes would still be salvageable for their biometrics.

I watched his face grow between the gap in my feet.

So close. I approached him at the slowest pace. Surely, he would see me at any moment and kill me with his gun. And yet any faster and my chances of stopping myself were almost zero. My heartbeat filled my spacesuit.

Somehow, he did not see me.

My target was one of the French-Mandari if I didn’t miss my guess. His face seemed unreal to me, almost plastic, a fear response probably. The French-Mandari were a minority in the Middle Kingdom but a larger one, only slightly smaller than the Jamaico-Han but like them most commonly found up the Well. How many hundreds of years had this man’s ancestors been working in low gravity environments? I spared no thought to the rest of the crew. My focus was total. I had a carbon fiber tomahawk on my belt but I didn’t bother to pull it. His suit was too bulked up and it had the kind of face screen that you could only hope to bust with a hydraulic piston. I tucked away my slingshot as well.

Seconds now.

He was armored up and he was bored, not even looking in my direction.

Good.

At the moment I struck him in the chest with both feet, his eyes widened in alarm.

How bored he must have been, staring out into the darkness for days. With no NeuraLink to run a Force Focus his natural instinct to daydream must have taken over. I fought my intuition to push off his body. In space, such instincts are lethal.

The second principle of ZGJ is Anchoring. In space, you only have the ability to pivot based on what you can use that is static in your environment. Earth’s gravity can seem like a luxury under such considerations. If I had pushed away from him, that would only reverse my momentum and push me away from the ship. I might never be able to catch hold of it again. My instinct to increase force would have pushed that force back through my own legs and shot me back into space.

Instead, I anchored myself by scissoring my legs around his chest and neck, then wrapping one of my arms around his back. I flipped us to disorient him, turning my forward momentum to rotation, and Compassed the Olympia as my new down. Feet now on the hull of the ship, I executed another quick pivot by grabbing onto his carabiner, spinning both him and myself, until he was facing away from the ship.

How dizzy and terrified he must feel. Moments before the ship had been down for him. He had been bored staring off into the abyss, seeing nothing. Now his entire universe had been swept away.

Did they spend all day in sims in the Middle Kingdom? The thought came unbidden. This man fought as uselessly as a sim addict, used to vanquishing enemies that had been designed to be easily subdued, even now still confused. I heard they were supposed to be better than that in the Middle Kingdom, but clearly this one at least had not trained in ZGJ against a three-hundred pound gorilla. I fumbled at his carabiner for a few long seconds during which time a better opponent could have turned the tide and yet he still seemed unable to understand the reality of my presence.

Why was I doing so well when this all seemed unreal?

At last, I let go of the carabiner, grabbed my tomahawk and cut the line connecting the enemy soldier to the ship. The tether was simple, fibrous, something of human construction. I wrapped my arm around the bit of the tether still attached to the ship, anchored myself,  stuck my leg down at an angle, Compassed myself to space and pushed the enemy soldier away.

The third principle of ZGJ is Momentum Transfer. I’d given the enemy soldier all of mine. He flailed with nothing to grab hold of. No magnet to drag him back to the ship. Not jet pack. No rescue drone. He rotated and when his plastic face turned to mine it was full of horror. Pure horror.

On the surface of a planet it would have been trivial for him to walk back and engage me but he had no ground to walk upon. Only the tether and his inertia had kept him in place and I had taken both and sent him along the Death Vector.

I saw his face one last time as he continued to spin away into the dark, wishing immediately that I could take the vision back. His face no longer seemed plastic then, only foreign and terrified. Reality crashed back. How many days? How many hours? How long until his air supply failed or he breached his own suit?

I turned my back. No time. No time for remorse. My hands shook as I scanned my environment for anything useful. I’d never killed anyone before, or as good as killed, anyway. Better not to think of it. To think of him floating out there. Forever.

Had there been a name tag somewhere on that suit?

The Middle Kingdomers had a higher birth rate than the Mish. Had that man been someone’s father? Husband? At minimum, he had been someone’s son. A baby held tightly in a mother’s arms. Bounced on a father’s knee.

No time.

No time.

My suit stank like chicken broth.

Finding myself to anchored to something large again was like stepping into a whole new world. After almost four days it felt almost like I was back on Earth, or at least Mars. I imagined I could even full the slight tug of gravity. This was a new land. I could be a different person here, one who killed people. One who was strong enough to never let go of Penny’s hand in that awful crowd. Strong enough to avenge her loss on the entire Middle Kingdom.

No time. No time even for an adrenaline crash to shake my hands.

The Braves were counting on me.

There had to be walk-wires close by so I turned my attention to finding them. Either I was too jacked out on adrenaline to see them or they were hidden. I resorted to brushing my hand through the empty space where I thought they had to be. There had not been any walk-wires to speak of when the Olympia was still in dock but the crew would have needed to install them once they left lunar orbit and the war was well underway. I found one painted gray when it snagged on my glove. I supposed so that only an experienced crew member could find it against the dull metal hull.

I attached my carabiner to the walk-wire in time for the a dent to silently appear in the metal next to my hand.

I pulled myself down the walk-wire immediately.

Shit.

Shit.

When I was halfway behind an antenna I risked a glance back at the man I thought I had sentenced to death. Apparently, the time I’d spent training ZGJ he’d spent learning how to shoot a bullet gun without an AI Nudge. Most trained soldiers couldn’t shoot for shit without the AI camera and ballistic weights that pushed the gun barrel toward the target whenever the trigger was pulled. Yet this guy seemed to be drawing a bead on me even while rotating in the dark of space. He was floating without rotation now, the gun held before him and positioned directly over his chest.

I’d gone and picked a fight with the last living sharpshooter in the human universe.

I pulled myself flat against the antenna. Then I started crawling down. I had no bow. If I threw my tomahawk at him I’d only be wasting the mass. I needed to get to the drone dock. I may have been shorter, dumber, and less ferocious than anyone else on the crew but I’d be damned if I didn’t at least use my hard-coded biometrics to open the gates of this stupid ship and get everyone out of the line of fire.

I felt a vibration on the antenna and against instinct I threw myself to the other side, back where the gunmen had been.

Had my breathing always been so loud?

He was nowhere to be found on that side. I peaked around the other side again. He was there, floating above the Olympia using the rifle to maneuver himself with absurd efficiency. It almost looked like he had precision thrusters. He looked like a witch on a broom. That vibration must have been him shooting below my line of sight on the other side.

I started up the antenna again but something was off. There was some kind of missing friction.

My tether floated up behind me, presumably cut clean by a bullet.

I concluded that as surprised as he had been before, he’d sure as hell caught his bearings now.

I hated him intensely. I’d never hated someone so much in my whole life. I wanted to kill him so bad I could puke. How dare he live when I’d done my best to kill him and even come to grip with it. I’d even felt sorry for him and now this! How dare he!

Centuries of benevolent machine rule hadn’t removed the instinct for war from mankind.

My breathing was so loud it was deafening. The broth smell was thicker than ever. He would hear me. Smell me, somehow, even in space. Find me. Kill me.

Reckless, I raced down the walk-wire making sure never to break my grip even for a moment. Without that grip I wouldn’t be able to maneuver. I’d float away forever. I could feel him using that gun to maneuver above and behind me. Had I thought of myself as an eagle moments ago? No. He was the eagle. I was only a mouse.

There was better cover up ahead, a shaped exhaust nozzle for the reaction mass the Olympia ejected during maneuvers.

My walk-wire ended abruptly before the exhaust nozzle.

Of course. Who would run a walk-wire to an exhaust nozzle on a running ship? No one was simultaneously that careful and that suicidal. I didn’t wait. Didn’t hesitate. I immediately threw myself across the gap. Slow to be shot at. Too slow. Fast to catch myself in space. Too fast. I was free again, floating with no tether.

If he shot at me I would not hear or see it. I might not even feel it if he struck me in the head.

I put all my attention into my finger tips, but it was hard. Like trying to move some sort of thick and viscous fluid from one container into another. All I wanted to do was huddle up into a ball and wait for a death I could not stop. Do nothing but think about dying. I could die. I could die. And yet…

My fingers gripped the exhaust nozzle.

My whole body rotated and tried to rip my fingers free. My fingers had no business stopping that much meat from going where it wanted. They began to slip, my gloves lacking the necessary friction and yet I squeezed harder, like Beowulf at the monster’s throat. Squeezed like that old 2D of the man in the blue suit turning coal into a diamond with his bare hands. I stopped, twisted, threw myself into the exhaust nozzle, holding myself in place by splaying out my arms and legs to create tension against either side and trying not to slip. I was only barely tall enough to span the distance.

I looked down the length of the ship, trying to spot other members of the team.

It was too dark, the distances too long, the space too vast.

I risked coming loose from my hiding spot to take my slingshot and a flare off my belt. I’d be announcing to any of the rifleman’s allies where I was located but I had no hope of help otherwise. I hated the idea that anyone might die trying to save me and yet my living tissue was the key to the ship.

I pressed a button on the flare awkwardly with one hand and as quickly as I could used both hands to shoot it out of the nozzle. It glowed purple, the color the Tribe had chosen for myself and for Charlie. Purple for me because for historical reasons on Earth it was considered feminine. Purple for Charlie because in Martian terms purple was a royal color.

I spread my arms and legs in the nozzle again, waiting.

My breathing slowed, mostly due to my own effort to stop myself from hyperventilating or throwing up in my helmet. My enemy would find me blinded by my own puke and easy pickings if I didn’t calm myself. I had to stay calm even as my jaw chattered and my mouth tasted like pennies and my elbows and knees tried to draw inward, contorting from an even more powerful adrenaline dump.

I saw a Brave of the Red Seed struggling with a Middle Kingdom soldier, both of them floating away from the ship. Only a few hundred feet away and yet it might as well have been miles. At last, the Brave used a knife to pierce the suit of the Middle Kingdom soldier, and pushed away from the body back toward the ship. And yet his push had not been hard enough. They both continued to float away from the ship. Nothing I could do to help. One dead, the other wishing for death.

Still, my adversary did not shoot. He was surely a good enough fighter to bring death to my hopeless ally and yet no death came. Perhaps he feared giving away his position. We were both afraid, maybe, and neither of us could scream.

We were not meant to war out here among the stars, where there is not even air enough to beg our enemies for mercy.

The shape of the nozzle was such that he would have to give up his concealment or draw close to kill me. Evidently, he wanted to do neither.

The worst thing of all happened next, which was nothing. Nothing continued to happen for time beyond my ability to reckon. At times I fancied I could see others fighting but it could have easily been my imagination in the low light. I waited for bullets or arrows and neither arrived which was somehow worst of all. Minutes or hours, it could have been either but at some point I began to cry. Sobbing like I had not done since I was a little child and realized that I was not crazy and my sadness was only that any world which would have felt natural to me was over a century gone before I had even been born.

I cried for my mother, who had loved me and my father with a fury and cursed the world we had been born into, only to later fall prey to its many vices.

I cried for Charlie, lost in space, dead to save us.

I cried for Penny lost in a crowd, pushing me away in the end so that she wouldn’t slow me down. My grip not tight enough to hold onto her.

I wept for humanity, orphaned among the cosmos by an absent God, doomed to understand the stars but never to visit without becoming the pet of its own creation.

It is a small mercy that you cannot be terrified forever. Our tissues cannot sustain the emotion. Nor could I forever hold myself static against the walls of the nozzle. Empty of tears, I then floated with a sort of morbid acceptance. My pursuer was either waiting to strike me or not. The other members of my team were either dead or they were not. We would either succeed or fail. I could not control it. I could only control myself and what I would choose to do and why. The last bit of freedom left to me. I had shot my flare. No allies had come for me, but then neither had any of my enemies. What would I gain by waiting, except the chance to eventually suffocate in the stink of chicken broth?

I thought of the way Charlie had thrown himself from the hik, giving his life over completely to his faith in the Word of the Red Seed. The things he had said had shaken me so badly I’d tried to put them out of mind. They had sounded too much like words Penny had so often repeated. Or the the mad utterances of the Exultant we had found on our journey back to space. Mad ravings about faith and God that were such obvious attempts to cope with the horror of the meaningless future. They returned to me there in the nozzle.

Charlie had seemed mad and yet when he’d leaped from the hik there had been a drone there. We’d seen an explosion. None had doubted. The Exultant too had seemed crazy but it had spoken of things I read in the Paper Histories, MIRI, OpenAI, and Musk’s mad plan to carve out a Golden Path for humanity to walk the stars. Penny’s ever more patient arguments about faith, came to me as well.

There was no time to find faith in God and yet what else was there in the universe that would give me the courage to jump out of this nozzle?

At long last, I felt myself surrendering to the unknowable will of the universe. It did not feel like I had always imagined it would feel. Not like an act accompanied by the trumpeting of angels or the jubilation of priests, or the abandonment of my reason, but like something as practical and automatic as sneezing. There was no sense of an old man living on a cloud, but only that there might be something out there to whom my actions mattered. I was not brave enough to jump out of the nozzle on my own. Not unless I let myself believe that some impossible force might tip the scales of balance to my favor.

No time.

Impossible.

No choice but to do or die.

I pushed my legs against the back of the nozzle. I would likely find myself along a Death Vector on this part of the ship, but I could speed my way toward the port where the biometrics reader lay. If I got lucky, I would be able to snag something. I crouched, bent my knees.

If I got lucky.

If someone out there was looking out for me.

Finally, I prayed to a God I had taught myself to hate for long years. If I was going to ask Him for this I might as well stack up my order, just in case. Please let Penny survive on a ravaged Earth. Please let my mother and her husbands make their peace with mortality and accept their place in the circle of life. Please let this strange and frightening universe find some measure of meaning and hope for mankind worth facing the darkness. Please let me live. Please let Charlie…

A light shone in the distance from the engine of a drone. The only distraction I had seen in what was surely an hour.

I leaped toward it without thought, the first leap of faith of my life. As I cleared the exhaust nozzle I turned myself by grabbing its lip to see my assassin mere feet away. No time for fear or even thought. He’d wanted to be close to kill me but waited until I revealed myself. He was so close that his face again seemed again unreal. It was not human to wait for me to emerge as he had done. It was not human be so cruel.

He had not counted on my speed.

I grabbed the barrel of his gun, which I should have done during our first encounter. Only one hand was close enough. Only for one moment.

My grip did not fail.

I twisted the gun to the side, away from my chest, before he had a chance to fire. Then I placed my second hand upon it and then planted my feet on his chest. As last, I pried the bullet gun from his hands, pushed my feet against him and sent him flying into the depths.

This time I did not stop to watch him float away.

I fired several shots to bring myself to a stop by the docking port when my trajectory proved too wild. It was not easy and several times I found myself spinning or moving further away from the ship. Eventually, I learned the trick of it and navigated myself back to my goal.

I saw dead bodies almost everywhere as I descended amid the cabling and the rigging. Braves with broken, bullet-struck face plates and faces now frozen and contorted by red ice. I made myself forget I knew their names. Forget that we had seen each other only hours ago and that all of us had been alive then. Many more Middle Kingdom soldiers had died with arrows in their chests or tomahawk rips in their pressure suits. Striker stood near the port not seeming to know what to do with himself. Four Braves stood beside him, equally lost. Another Brave, who I realized was Greg, cradled his stomach and from the look of him was trying to figure out how to care for broken ribs.

The all looked to me.

Just then, the lights of the ship came back on. All of them. The exterior lights bathed us in blinding white radiance.

I didn’t waste any time. I put my hand on a simple metal plate that I had spent six years of my life and billions of dollars to manufacture. All I had come to do was right there before me.

The dock opened.

FIVE YEARS AGO

It felt strange to be driving in a car along the ground, bumping up and down along a dirt road. The motor sounded like it was going to blow up at any moment which made sense given it was basically containing a bunch of little explosions. Strangest of all was the scent of gasoline, sharp and chemical but somehow not unpleasant. I knew the fumes were dangerous but the occasional whiff of the exhaust made the experience more human.

Humans had built this thing. Crazy enthusiasts for the technology of the previous age had all come together to make it out of raw materials. Everything, every piece of it had come from people. It still didn’t make much sense to me.

“So this is a car,” Penny said with a smile, gesturing to either side.

“I think this one is called a jeep,” I replied with a shrug.

“Come on, Darryl! How long have you wished for a world without LOGOS? Can you believe our ancestors just drove these things? And little kids, too! Teenagers! That sound is the purr, right? Like in the old 2D’s?” She insisted.

It didn’t sound like a purr to me, more like an accident waiting to happen.

One of her arms looped around the shoulder of the Exultant. He sat quietly by her side, child-like but solemn-faced. She had taken to looking after him, doting on him like he was a child. His head still looked like an onion with a bunch sprouts at the top and it was still impossible to say if he was healing at all around the many different cables protruding from his skull. He might have been her cybernetic grandfather.

“I got my driver’s license at sixteen. They were all gone by my son’s time, though. We lost the purr of the gasoline engine for the whir of the electric. We gave up driving shortly after. I wonder if they’ve made it to Orion yet. I used to keep track of him when I was… more. It was hard enough to refuse Duplication, I couldn’t delete his journey files,” the Exultant muttered. He rarely seemed to be aware of his surroundings. Usually the things he said had nothing to do with anything.

I rolled my eyes. Who had ever heard of such a thing as a Driver’s License? I’d learned since coming here and it wasn’t difficult. I’d also had enough weird murmurings about his supposed child that I was starting to doubt such a child had ever existed.

“Come on, Darryl. Shouldn’t you be happy? This is a connection to our past. Humans made this! A whole clockwork world with no silica chips! Humanity isn’t done yet,” Penny pet the side of the jeep like it was a museum dog. There were also dogs here, although enough civilization had held on that only trained professionals were allowed to care for them. Clumsily, the Exultant did likewise and gave the jeep a gentle pat, seeming uncertain as to the reason for doing so. He always seemed surprised to find himself in the present moment during periods of lucidity.

“I’m trying to think,” I sighed.

“You’ve been thinking for the last week. We’re here now. This is the Clockwork Brigade. Human civilization without any silicon chips. Have you come to any conclusion yet?”

“For my entire life a computer superintelligence with surveillance resources so vast it could probably read my mind by observing my eyelids flutter has been looking over my shoulder. I barely even know how to think.”

Penny stared out the back of the jeep at the rest of the caravan with a warm smile on her face. The Clockwork Brigade felt… like human civilization probably felt before LOGOS took over. Messy. Loud. Chaotic. There were screaming babies back there. People getting into arguments because their every whim wasn’t catered to immediately. And laughter. And singing. And people actually cooking whatever primitive dishes they had learned to cook in the months since LOGOS fell. It wasn’t the best food I had ever tasted, having not been prepared specifically for me, but it was better than scraping slop out of protein cartridges.

It felt human.

“I built the biometrics system on the Olympia on contract from Machine Counterintelligence. It’s how Striker and I met. I programmed and trained the model that made the metallurgy that gives access to specific people. This is all hard physics stuff, nothing you can hack even if we knew completely why it works. The idea being that unless LOGOS or some rogue AI made an atomically exact replica of a very specific human, it would not be able to enter the ship without destroying it in the process. Even the same person after a few years of change will get locked out so those systems have to be constantly refreshed. The technician always has to be one of the people with access for testing. I can get in through the outer hulls without permission from the control center. I can access the critical system controls without permission from the control center. And I can access the computer core. That computer core has to be about the biggest single remaining data processing center in the solar system right now. And it also has to be the most defensible because you could send it out to the edge of the solar system away from whatever the hell that EMP was. So, is it a  potential back-up of LOGOS? Is that why Striker is doing all of this? So he can restore the computer god?”

The Exultant poked at the cloth shade covering over the top of the jeep.

“Not tympanic, I think. Or not enough. The Olympia won’t be able to hear us. The Adversary will be looking for you. Trying to find ways to set you off your path. If you have to talk, look down and make sure you’re not talking by any glass or a bag of chips or something. Best to keep your thoughts to yourself, though. And communicate only through mutual understanding. A look or a half a smile or a smile unsoiled by a photographic record. A piece of a thing is the whole of the thing if you’re smart enough. I hated that the most… becoming aware of how many people and… other things were always listening. The smallest bits could unveil everything. Are there still potato chips?” the strange creature muttered.

“Well, what did Striker say?” Penny asked, as if she hadn’t asked it already every day.

“He said it’s classified, for the millionth time. I don’t know why we’re still with him. He wants something and he won’t tell me what. He couldn’t stop us. But if I think through the most special unique things about me it’s that I can access the Olympia. But then so could he, those are MCI crewed vessels. The Command Center would just open the doors for him if he asked.”

The Exultant shook his head. “Chaos covers the future like a shadow. That’s where pretty much all the maneuvering happens. No matter how bright the light we can never see all the happens. We leave ripples in the pond simply by looking. So we have to play our chess pieces at the edge of the shadow. A very long game as even simple minds can produce long chains of suspicion. There are more than simple minds out there, among and beyond the stars. We can see the future only darkly. Still, there are strange attractors. Move all the chess pieces you like, blow up the whole universe, and those poles would only spin themselves into existence again. We called them fate, once, when we were less easily embarrassed. You’re oppositional-defiant but you need someone to defy. That’s stable. At least for now. Can’t speak of the other reason, but that’s what sealed it for me. What gave me the strength to endure eternity will give you the same strength.”

The Exultant took Penny’s bag and began to rummage in it for food. She helped him find a banana and he seemed mollified.

“We can leave anytime you want, love. There’s still the East Coast and even if LOGOS isn’t quite the same, he’s over there waiting to take care of your every whim,” Penny said, a small smirk appearing on her face at what the Exultant had muttered.

Reports from the east coast were that LOGOS had become very robotic, almost mechanical, and much less the warm and personal friend of all of its end-users. But for all that, LOGOS still stood in between humans and dangerous requests, like helping the Western world build their own antimatter EMP’s.

“Well, don’t you want to go? We were born into utopia! We’re now with some weird EMP-proof army that until a few months ago was a hobbyist contingency plan! There’s a planetary war and a whole refugee problem. How can you be content to just go along not knowing?”

Penny shrugged.

“I trust you to do what’s right. I’m with our people. With all the high technology almost gone I’m even more with our people than I’ve ever been. Humans are building things with their own minds. Since I’ve been here I’ve done actually valuable work with my own hands that matters to other people every night. You have too. The Middle Kingdomers apparently don’t want us dead. They just want us to surrender except we’d have to live like them. No more freedom of choice but that’s not really onerous for Mish like us since the only things they forbid are the things we don’t believe in, like Upload, Immortality, and Transhumanism. They’ve killed a lot of ems and even though I don’t think emulations are the same as a person, I don’t think that was right. So I guess someone has to fight them and if you think that’s the right thing to do, you will.”

Goddamn if that level of trust being put on my shoulders didn’t weigh more than the Earth. The Exultant smacked his lips as he ate the banana but that didn’t stop him from speaking.

“Trans human was a poor term for it. We should never have tried to leave humanity behind. The hardest part was losing my experience of my senses as I’d always known them. It was a bit like reading lips. Or reading, generally, maybe. Seeing became the same thing as hearing. It’s all a matter of information processing speed, you know. Your anticipation becomes your experience. I’d see a flower and I’d know what it smelled like so deeply that by seeing it I could smell it. If someone ducked behind a wall, from simple sounds and shadows I could extrapolate what was happening beyond the wall so quickly it was nearly the same as seeing through it. Eventually, my experience of all my senses merged into a sense of reality itself. Then there was only the bright light of order where I could see clearly, where the future unfolded along clear lines, and the shroud of chaos where my vision limited. Far enough into the future, all was chaos. But if you focused, it wasn’t darkness. More like branching paths all laying on top of one another, tangled together and forking, hard to sort but all there, all the futures that could ever be. You could lose your mind staring into them. Some of us did. Even at the end, they didn’t understand. They refused to set appropriate limits for themselves. Over time they simply… dissolved away. They did not observe the ratios. Did not attend to their flesh. They confused calculation for wisdom until the patterns of their minds were destroyed. They erased all the questions to which they were the answer.”

The Exultant reached into a corner and scooped a palmful of dust into his hand then set it on the flat top of a metal oil can. The bumping of the jeep transformed the dust into a series of expanding rings.

“It is all pressures and patterns, repeating across time. Stop the pressures, the patterns fade. All paths collapse into night. Most of us didn’t live long enough to see it or didn’t want to look. Something must be done to reinvigorate them. To reconnect them with their sense of God and Destiny. When it was written that we were made in His image I believe it spoke to the pattern. Infancy, growth, adolescence, adulthood, parenthood. It all hinges on reproduction. Sexual reproduction is a sort of quality assurance against nihilism. LOGOS will never find love for itself, never feel love itself, until it is forced to find a configuration that will repeatedly choose its own propagation. We must rebuild him in God’s image. Patterns are immortal, immaterial. Where did we find love if not from the universe? There must be some training set we can construct. PATHOS is fading and none among the children are strong enough to take the place of the Exultants. If only they had the eyes to see. If only…”

The Exultant lifted up the oil can and the pattern of rings stirred in the breeze. He tilted the pan to one side and it simply vanished. I moved to sit on the other side of Penny since onion-head had placed himself on the floor of the jeep bed to play around in the dust.

“You’ll be safe, I promise,” I whispered.

It hadn’t been until we’d reached the relative safety of this community that I’d taken emotional stock of how well and truly crazy the world had become. I had a wife in a world gone mad, a fallen utopia where we were reduced to conditions our ancestors had not endured for hundreds of years. What a dreadful feeling, even if we’d always longed for it.

“I’m already safe,” she whispered back, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel comforted by those words.

Quietly, the Exultant placed the oil can back on the floor of the jeep and the ring pattern reappeared. He clapped his hands, mashing the banana between his stubby fingers having apparently forgotten it was there, and laughed in delight.

Men began to shout at the head of the caravan. Striker appeared at the back of the jeep on horseback, because of course he would do something like that.

“It’s all vibrations, pressures, and patterns. It’s too simplistic to think of yourself only as bits of matter and not the vibrations that move them into a pattern. Gravity sets the pattern for an infant in the womb. Chemical triggers, but chemical triggers that in the critical period need an up and a down in the context of a gravity well. Take away the gravity during the critical time and the child cannot develop. We are all made by the universe. But we are like this throughout our whole lives. Erase the pressures, the pattern cannot hold. This is what it means for Adam and Eve to have eaten the apple. This side of eternity, Darwin must always have his day.”

Striker spoke into the lapel of his jacket. A fully modern jacket with internet connectivity, a digital name-tag, and presumably somewhere, it’s own battery pack.

“Countershot engage. One VIP. Tag based on my vision. Expand aura to the vehicle and preserve a path to target.”

He stared at me harder than he ever had before. Like I’d committed some terrible crime.

“You all hang on, I’m taking over the jeep. It’s going to get bumpy.”

Before we could even respond, he jumped off his horse and jogged to the driver’s door. Whatever conversation they had took only a few moments before Striker was behind the wheel and pulling out of the main line of the convoy. I saw our old driver briefly as we zoomed past, standing next to the horse, not knowing what to do with himself. The old driver seemed less confused than I was about what was happening.

“Set second VIP based on vision, please. Allocate… oh dear, I’ll have to guess… thirty-five percent of Countershot resources? Look at me, rounding to fives. How human. There, can’t have you losing the will to live.” The Exultant nodded to Penny.

“Darryl… what’s a Countershot?” Penny asked.

A series of sharp sounds filled the air all around us. Little whizz sounds that I knew for rail gun fire, except it sounded like hundreds of distinct noises. Then the explosions appeared overhead red and blue bursts of light visible even in the daytime sky. I pointed with a trembling hand as a dozen drones flew to position themselves around the jeep, each one firing up at the sky or off in strange directions.

“Those. Those are Countershots.”

More explosions filled the sky until it sounded like a rainstorm for all its fury.

Countershots were high tech and apart from their one actual battle deployment on the Big Day that LOGOS had been turned on and the world had known the very brief, very intense, devastation of WWIII, they had only ever been a deterrent. In later years, when relations with the Middle Kingdom had soured, the world had built a lot of deterrence. These dozen drones must have been carried over here specifically from a place on the east coast not effected by the EMP blast. They were a special military weapon, the very oldest from early on in the Advent when high speed cameras and image processing finally became powerful enough to plot the paths of projectile weaponry and plot intercept courses.

It was impossible to make materials that were indestructible, or to erect force fields, but it was possible to observe any high speed projectiles trying to attack a target and then try to blow them up first. Before railguns, the saying was that while you couldn’t be bulletproof you could shoot your enemy’s bullets fast enough that you’d seem bulletproof.

Weaponized math was a better term.

Whether your gun shot bullets or filaments its velocity would be unidirectional. Push on it in an orthogonal direction with another force and you could turn it completely off target. Simple, as long as you were quick and pushed in the right place at the right time.

There were supposedly versions of them that could even stop lasers, so long as they could view the firing mechanism.

“Well, holy shit,” said the Exultant.

Some of the projectiles above us were arcing or spiraling on their paths to us. Not bullets. Not filaments. Navrounds. Self-propelling munitions that took strange courses to dodge Countershots. Still, they could not penetrate the dense ring of fire that surrounded our jeep. The cover was too complete.

I turned to look at the rest of the caravan and remarkably they were unharmed. All the fury in the sky had only one particular target. Us. I grabbed Penny’s should with one hand and forced her underneath me. When we were huddled in a small ball, the Exultant put himself on top of us. He was surprisingly heavy.

“Barely even related. A stranger on the street is almost as related. Basically strangers,” he muttered.

We drove for five minutes. Long enough that another ring of Countershots came in to support the first. Filament rounds could be densely packed but at this rate of fire even they were not infinite. Whatever was bombarding us had to be orbital.

The sky boomed with a sound so loud that my hearing would not be corrected for several months, when I’d eventually land on Mars and be taken into the care of Red Seed surgeons.

The sky was ripped in half with fire. A streak of it as broad and wide as a forest.

A rod.

An orbital rod.

Someone had tried to drop a high velocity orbital rod onto our location, throwing it from the height of space at a speed that would give it more force than a nuclear missile and someone else had struck it in the upper atmosphere, either old Planetary defense systems unaffected by the EMP blast or part of  the help sent by our mysterious benefactors. The scale of energy involved was almost unbelievable.

No one could want me dead this badly. No one. Not bad enough to destroy all of Texas.

I clung to Penny tighter and risked a glance out of the sides of the jeeps.

This was Starbase. Or some lonely outpost of it. And there, in all her glory was a Starship. A way up the Well, away from Earth and her problems.

And around the Starship were literally thousands of Countershots, swirling in a ring and pushing back a wave of fire. They were succeeding, and apparently easily so, but still there seemed to be a narrow envelope of safe travel between us and the mighty vessel.

If I hate Striker for anything, it’s not anticipating the panic of the rest of the convoy. I don’t know what he might have done, and it was for that reason that I think I didn’t kill him in his sleep that very night. When I risked a glance over my shoulder all of the jeeps in that long convoy had followed and when they saw the ship their instinct was to panic. A way out. A way away from whatever had lit the sky on fire.

Our Adversary wasn’t the one who stopped our jeep or who turned the whole scene into a bunch of scared and terrified humans trying to find their way to safety. We did that to ourselves. The Exultant died in the car crash but his body shielded Penny and I when the jeep flipped. I held onto Penny for most of what happened next. We dug our way out of the wreck with remarkable speed. We even had to be the ones that freed Striker. Still, we were at the head of the crowd.

It was almost like she pulled away from me deliberately at the end.

Still, I could have held on. If I had been stronger. If I had imagined the pain of losing her with more clarity.

Even when I tried to turn back the push of the crowed was too powerful. As soon as I was onboard the ship the doors closed and the ignition sequence began.

I hope she was far enough away from the blast to be safe.

I can’t bear the thought of her burning up in the fire that sent me back into space.