Death Vector Part IV
The Shadow Library
Author’s Note: Images courtesy of Dalle3 and OpenAI. I think you’ll see they are highly appropriate for the subject of history being discussed in this section. I have also enriched the previous entries with images.
Three Years Ago
“DuVay!” It was a primal scream fit to tear your heart right out of your chest. “DuVay you… you beautiful man! I knew you were alive!”
A woman of African ancestry from what I believed was meant to be something close to the United States in the 1970’s threw her hands wide on the television screen that made up most of the wall of my one bedroom apartment. Her whole body shook with emotion as she made her way through a field of rubble that had once been a skyscraper. The tears streaming down her eyes matched my own tears. I was sobbing.
“They said I was crazy but the Word told me that you would make it out!” She wept.
It felt like they were the first words I’d heard clearly since getting my hearing fixed after the Orbital Rod collision. I’d only been able to turn off the closed captioning that morning.
The titular character DuVay, a half-Cherokee, half-African detective, wearing something like a disco suit made out of buckskin replied with his trademark stoic calm. He raised a damaged but unbroken bow over his head in triumph. He was bloodied, half blown-up, and his suit was torn in ways that accentuated his oiled muscles, but he stood as if he owned not only the fictional world he inhabited but also the world of my entire apartment. DuVay was a man without fear or regret. A man who always knew the next right step and always found the courage to take it without hesitation.
“Come on now, Miss Tabitha. No need to cry. Didn’t the Word tell you that when DuVay aims his bow that he don’t even know how to miss?”
Miss Tabitha, who had been pretending not to be hopelessly in love with DuVay for several seasons now, ran toward him as I turned the television off and bent over to continue sobbing.
It was too much. Too close to home.
In all my life, I’d never watched so much 2D television as I did during the first three months I lived on Mars. For weeks on end, I did nothing but huddle up in a little red-stone adobe apartment and watch program after program. Food appeared at regular intervals, brought to my doorstep by some eager-eyed Red Seed teenager desperate to see the monstrous Terry living inside their sacred ancestral city. I would snatch the food out of their hands with a few uncharismatic mumbles of gratitude and return to the plush synthetic couch and when I was done eating I’d leave the box in an ever-growing pile.
The truth was that I wanted to die but couldn’t quite work up the nerve. Striker had physically restrained me for a long while after the loss of Penny. Most of my journey to Mars had been spent in an improvised padded cell. A man can be truly suicidal for days and maybe even for weeks, but not for months. The mad passion to take your own life burns too hot and after a while, when all that fuel burns up, all a man who wants to die can feel is empty. So mostly, I laid around hoping for a meteor or something to strike my apartment to take the choice out of my hands.
Onto the embers of my life and the memory of my almost assuredly dead wife, I poured television. It took a while of watching Red Seed television to really understand what I was seeing. You see, the other Martian cities have sims and direct NeuraLink viewing same as Earth. For all of those things you had to have at least some kind of a brain implant or a set of VR glasses at the minimum. The only place a Mish like me had ever watched real 2D television was on equipment that I’d had to 3D print myself. Still, I had seen more than most. I even rummaged up a few old DVD’s from before the Advent and figured out how to play them on dates with Penny. Old stuff, from before you could be directly inserted into your own ultimate power fantasy. Like I said, I’d seen a lot of 2D’s even for a Mish. Red Seed television was beyond that. The Red Seed was the only large group of humans to have expressly forbidden VR sims and NeuraLink implants. Therefore, Red Seed 2D television was a living, breathing, cultural artifact. The shows they made were new, vital, a piece of their ever-evolving cultural identity.
Red Seed 2D television was also the total destruction of history.
It took a while of watching to realize the full scope of the propaganda. Even through my depression, I couldn’t help but notice that the breadth of selection on Red Seed television was impossible. Literally hundreds of thousands of programs deep, beyond anything you could even meaningfully search with a scroll menu. There were almost a million Red Seed citizens and yet all of them would have had to work for a hundred years in the television and film industry to support even a fraction of that volume of media. And yet the media seemed to span the entire history of televised human entertainment. When I found one program where a nice Hopi sheriff named Andy served a small town of other Hopi in the 1950’s with his absolute dufus deputy, all while raising his small son, I finally had my eureka moment.
Some giant portion of Red Seed television was actually old Earth television from before the Advent, run through an AI filter until all the relevant images, value statements, and cultural references had been replaced. The Kind Brave of Mayberry was an updated near duplicate of the Andy Griffith Show. Three Makes a Tribe was an updated version of Three’s Company. Never Surrender was the same show as MacGyver. Medicine Woman was just Bewitched by another name. Each show identical down to all the plot points I could recall, except in several key aspects. Every single element, actor, and set had been updated to reflect a world in which by default, and so broadly assumed it need not even to be spoken, Native American tribes had been the undisputed dominant world and regional superpower for as long as anyone could remember.
References to the United States were consistently replaced with references to something called the United Tribes of America. I must have watched a hundred hours of programming before some character on the Red Seed version of Perfect Strangers, called Honky Roommate, explained to his clueless Irish roommate that “America” had been the name of a Algonquin Natural Philosopher who had brought all the Tribes together to sign the first Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights, so far as I could tell, was unchanged except that it was more inclusive right at its conception and made no mention of slavery other than to denounce it. References to the specific states were replaced with things like “the Salish Lands” instead of “Washington” or “Navajo Country” instead of New Mexico. The President was called “the Big Chief” without any deviation. The Revolutionary War had been fought by Big George Salish against another Salish man called Chief James, who held to an older but somehow impure and corrupt version of the Red Seed culture that meant he should be able to reign supreme and without question. Chief James had been seduced by the European invaders who had conquered Mexico, taking a liking to their monarchical and slave-trading ways, until his soul had rotted from the inside. The war waged for four years before Big George Salish stormed Chief James’ castle almost by himself, which looked suspiciously like the Space Needle, and fought him in a duel to the death to win freedom for the United Tribes of America. There were several dozen films depicting these events and I watched maybe half of them.
So much was the same and so much was different. Benjamin Franklin’s skeleton was there, now covered by someone else’s flesh and labeled with someone else’s name. So was Thomas Jefferson and anyone else who had a good story. Different people now, different faces, reincarnated into a world that had never been. Someone who might have been Sam Adams but also Benedict Arnold. Straight propaganda from a world that had never been, telling the heroic story of the mighty United Tribes of North America who had brought freedom and order to the entire world. They had invented everything worth inventing. Valued everything worth valuing. All of history was their story and everything else any other people had done was nothing but a small tributary to the mighty river of their destiny.
DuVay was different. Not only because DuVay was half-Black but it was also the only show I had yet found that had any conception that outside cultures might have value. It also had a tighter, more personal focus. DuVay’s black father escaped slavery under his own power from the European Monarchy that had taken over Mexico. The first episode of the series chronicled his daring escape and battles to find his way North to freedom. DuVay’s mother was a Cherokee police officer which in the strange history of the Red Seed meant she lived in Chicago, which was also still called Chicago for a series of convoluted reasons I couldn’t quite follow. Crime ruled Chicago only a generation after the Red Seed had selflessly allowed asylum seekers to find refuge there after WWII, and now their European ways were corrupting everything. DuVay’s mother gave birth to both DuVay and his twin brother Silent Walker before being gunned down by a English mob boss, managing to hide the twins in the trunk of a car for DuVay’s father to find later.
DuVay’s father, who now lived under the name Round Tree, sent the twins to be raised by their maternal grandparents in some quasi-mystical village in a half-explained mountain valley somewhere where they learned to hunt, track, do science, and fight. The first episode ended with DuVay, now a man, leaving his village to go track down his father and brother who both had both disappeared in pursuit of the same English Mob Boss who had killed his mother.
I had never been more in love with a television show in my entire life. It was something to occupy the whole of my mind. An anesthetic to shove out the horror of the Black Out and the loss of Penny.
Striker dragged me out of the apartment a few hours a day to spar. I resisted harder going out the door than I did on the mat. All my will to fight was focused only on the fight to be left alone. Even when citizens of the Red Seed gathered around to watch us, and I knew I was seeing something only a handful of people from Earth had ever seen, I did my best to keep my world small. I walked around and barely bothered to look up at the architecture totally unlike anything on Earth. Didn’t care enough to look at the robots dressed up in traditional Tribal garb that may or not be piloted by ancestor emulations. Didn’t spare a glance to look at the little kids doing what appeared to be PhD level computer architecture problems. I knew it was all AI fabrications, designs based on a counterfactual reality where it was Native American aesthetics and not European aesthetics that had guided humanity into the future. A false history artificially given the depth of reality. And yet in my bones it was all real. All of it felt real.
I began to wonder if it wasn’t the history that I had learned that was the lie. Maybe it really had been the Native Americans who took humanity to the stars and built LOGOS.
The most remarkable thing to happen during that lonesome time was when a kindly looking robot with a feminine avatar and steel gray hair knocked on my door for almost two hours, cursing me in a language I couldn’t understand, and when I still refused to answer she finally slipped a flyer under the door. It was an Art Deco style advertisement drawing Terran Pilgrims to New Kobol, the Space Mormon Capitol of Mars. I received the message for what it was, a polite warning to “Get Out.” Part of me thought about it for a long while. If I swore to the Space Mormon religion, they’d give me a NeuraLink implant, although of a particularity invasive variety they called a Cybernetic Ultra-Ego. Once that was in my brain I’d be able to process my grief for Penny in a clean matter-of-fact manner simply by acknowledging my honest feelings that sitting around and moping wasn’t helping anybody. Once I knew that was the appropriate thing to feel, the Ultra-Ego implant would make me feel that way. I would be transformed by a bundle of wires constantly synchronizing my knowledge and my feelings. It was more tempting than anything Mephistopheles ever presented to Faust.
Space Mormons took in anybody. No matter how little you had, no matter how big of an addict you were, no matter how degenerate, they offered the best practical path toward salvation in human history. A Space Mormon Ultra-Ego implant would transform you into a model citizen. You’d see all the things you didn’t like about yourself with total clarity and at last be given the power to change them. And yes, maybe it was intervention at a deeper scale than a common NeuraLink, but I would be the one sculpting my own brain. Or, more crudely, it would be a part of me killing all the other inconvenient parts of me. Could scooping out my own soul really be as bad as waiting to die here? Thinking of a dead woman and continually returning to the last desperate moment when I had lost her hand in a sea of people?
Charlie Yellowhorse arrived ten minutes after the robot with the flyer and he didn’t bother to knock more than once. He simply opened the door, as if it had no lock, and helped himself to a seat on the couch. I’d never met him before. You’d think I would have been startled, but part of me was glad someone had finally arrived to kick me out of my delirium and back into the real world. I’d watched so many bad sitcoms in the last few months that it felt like some stock whacky neighbor character had simply crawled through the television.
“Hey Terry, I brought us some beers. Food will be here shortly. My kids say you haven’t been tipping very good, though. But, hey, I told them you’re probably broke.” He kicked his feet up on the small table in front of my couch.
I paused DuVay in preparation for the command to leave the apartment. Maybe, if I was lucky, they’d shove me out of an airlock. The atmosphere was thicker now than the days before colonization but one of the movies I’d recently watched was Total Recall, which had the same name as the non Red Seed version, and I was pretty sure that being outside the dome would still be as lethal as it was in the film. Eventually.
“Hey, this looks like a good part! This is such a great show. The whole city has been turned onto this show since you came. Click play.” Charlie popped the top of one of his beers and handed it to me. Rainier, it said on the can, which was the name of a mountain on Earth if I wasn’t mistaken. I took it dumbly, taking a sip if only because I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
“Who are you?” I asked, probably for no reason other than I couldn’t think of what else to say. His manner was too laid back, too easy.
“I have a whole secret Tribal name, Nearest the Fire, but you shouldn’t use that in public. It’s close family and stuff and you’re not there yet. You can call me Charlie. Did you know you have your own Trending Category on the television broadcast? We all made one for you. Called it Terry-Vision. Striker doesn’t want to watch any television. The whole city has been watching your movie selection since you’ve been here. You’re the first non-military Terry here since like… ever. And those MCI guys never watched television, either.”
I felt a feeling other than sadness for what felt the first time in what felt like my entire life. Terror? Embarrassment? Humiliation?
“What?” I said, blinking.
“Turn the show back on. We all want to know what happens next.”
“They can watch ahead. I mean —what? The whole city?”
“Yeah, don’t you listen to the radio? There’s like game shows and everything trying to predict what you’ll watch next. Anyway, click play. Nobody can see what happens next until you get through it. The Word is making this one just for you. It hasn’t done that in forever.”
I felt suddenly cold.
“What do you mean?”
Charlie got up to answer the door when one of the kids arrived with my food. I barely ever took notice of their faces, but I paused a moment to reflect that the kid at the door right now looked a lot like Charlie. And didn’t all the kids doing delivery look a little like Charlie, now that I thought about it? Had they all been members of the same family this whole time?
“The Word knows you’re sad or whatever. The Word watches over everybody, even if you’re a Terry. It wanted to cheer you up. So it made up a show you would make you happy. Help you work your way out of whatever you’re going through. The next episode doesn’t exist for anyone else until you watch it.”
A man had just come into my apartment, given me an old Earth brand of beer, and settled in on my couch as if we had been friends forever and revealed his entire family had been the ones solely responsible for taking care of me since my arrival. You’d think it would be all I could think about. Still, all I could think about was DuVay. The betrayal.
“That’s not possible. Look, I can see previews for what the next episodes are going to be. There’s a whole list here. It’s nine seasons. I’ve finished seven of them. It’s all got to exist already.” I scrolled through the menu for evidence.
“Yeah, sure. That’s kinda true.” Charlie kept talking as he ate a giant taco. I’d learned from the show Friends, where different members of each Tribe came together to live in New York and spent most of their time in a coffee shop, that all Mexican Food had been invented by the early founding members of the United Tribes of America. They’d gone so far as to imagine a zany comedic patriot named Taco Burrito who had kept the men fed at Valley Forge. “The Word figured out what you’d need but it’s all still loose. There will be that number of episodes, yeah. That number of seasons, or whatever. They’ll be kind of about what the descriptions say. But until you click play, the content doesn’t exist. It’s building it moment to moment in response to what you need. Don’t skip ahead. I mean, you can, but it makes people feel all existential because it will still be good and purposeful no matter what order you watch it in. It’s kinda trippy when you think about Free Will, or whatever, in the way that Terrys do anyway, but it all works out.”
“I need to go for a walk,” I said.
“Sure thing. I’ll wait here,” said Charlie, stretching out on my couch. He made no move to leave.
I left my apartment, shaken to my core. DuVay had been my safe, happy, larger-than-life ridiculous show about a man unafraid of anything. Now come to find out the whole thing was some strange form of mind-control. I walked past robots covered in Red Seed artwork, that stared at me suspiciously and moved to put themselves between me and the children they accompanied as I walked past. So many robots. So many kids. Robots taking care of old people like the old people were their kids. On Earth we only had the robots. Almost nobody had kids. Nobody got old enough to need care like that without uploading first or taking life-extension drugs. The whole planet had been choking in a sense of despair at the loss of human supremacy. Why was it so different here? Why were these people so unashamed and unbothered by their own existence? Why weren’t they all horrified by the terrors of the present? Soon enough, I was running.
I didn’t know where I was running or why but I pushed against the ground in giant leaps, relishing the light gravity that helped me speed along, until eventually I hopped on a trolley downtown and set my sites on the nearest wall of the geodesic dome that sheltered the city. I had to get outside. Somewhere under a sky that was curated by nature instead of man. Someplace nobody was watching me. Where I could be free. As soon as I hopped on the trolley a dozen or so citizens of the Red Seed immediately hopped off, several women actually shrieking in terror. Apart from one young girl of eight or so years who remained to stare at me, open-mouthed, with a sparkle of adventure in her eyes. I did my best to ignore her. I didn’t want to be someone worth starting at. I didn’t want to be anybody at all.
There was a port of entry not far from where the trolley turned to head back to the city. I hopped off there and started running again. It was nothing so primitive as an airlock. Pressure suits were free and the attendant goggled at me while I slapped one onto my chest and let the suit expand around me. Some sort of programmable nano-gel. The same stuff I’d used in orbit and on Luna. I walked outside, my suit merging with the airlock for a moment like two soap bubbles, and even though I was deep in a self-contained sphere, I felt I could breathe fresh air for the first time.
There were statues out here, famous ones I’d heard about back on Earth. I jogged toward them, making an effort now to control my energy and my breathing. The Statue Garden of the Red Seed, right here in front of me. Giant red-stone figures of the fake history of the Red Seed all twelve feet tall or more. The great Mohawk businessman Balaji Srinivasan, his hands full of bronze bitcoins, revered among the Mish for his role establishing the first Network States. I didn’t know what he’d done here, but something similar, presumably. A short while later the Choctaw technologist Marcus Andressen held a spear pointing back toward the city. I passed the occasional robot sculptor. But otherwise, I was free and heading further away from civilization.
“Disable surveillance please,” I said.
I had no idea how to read let alone use any of the Red Seed icons on the bubble in front of me. Some of them were English characters and Arabic numerals, but most of them were things I had never seen before. I just had to hope the digital agent, or the Word, or LOGOS instance, or whatever else they had could understand me.
“Disabled. Only local emergency monitoring remains. Please note any disruption to vitals will reenable surveillance.”
It was a perfectly normal human voice that responded. I’d have to change that later. I hated when machines sounded human.
I don’t remember how long I walked that night. I do remember that my sphere began to glow slightly once night fell. Not brightly, but bright enough that I could see to find my next step. The land tended upward to the East so I follow the grade up a hill small. The statues were sparser here. Some of the features were even Asian, or African, or Caucasian. Maybe sculpted from before the Red Seed’s domination of history had been total.
I’d never missed Penny so much without just being crazy from the loss. She would have loved to see all this. Loved the mystery and history of it. There were two statues near ahead with what looked like a crypt between them. I didn’t know who Mills Baker or Christopher Best had been but I took a seat upon the crypt and looked back at the city. Salahee spread out before me, a name I had been trying not to think of because it anchored me to the world instead of to my pain. Salahee, a heavenly luminous dome, even more breathtakingly beautiful from the outside.
The city seemed to pulse with life from this distance. And I could hear something else, almost like a heartbeat. Not with my ears but with something my atheist mind could still only comprehend as a soul. The Red Seed was alive. It didn’t matter that their television shows weren’t authentic. Authentic didn’t mean anything except as a secondary consideration to what helped people live human-shaped lives with honor and dignity. Beautiful humanity, growing and expanding without apology, strong and proud.
I thought back to the Exultant pointing at his pattern of vibrating dust on the top of a barrel. His strange musings about the vibrations that caused the shapes to appear. In this city, this strange place on Mars so far from Earth… the music of humanity was still alive here. More than that, the music was blaring from every street corner. Grow up. Find a job that you are uniquely suited to perform and that will contribute to your community. Find a spouse. Raise children. Learn to be a good person, parent, and citizen. Die and leave space for your children to become adults. The grand cycle of humanity, that we had tackled on Earth as if it was a problem to be solved instead of a symphony to be sanctified. The shape of us, the vibration keeping the pattern alive, erased and silenced, until we had scattered like dust on the stellar winds. AI, Robots, all the rest of it had been fit around the pattern of humanity in Salahee. Modernity reinforced the ancient pattern here, instead of causing it to become undone.
I smiled for the first time in months.
Humanity on Earth had lived as a flower plucked from its roots, wilting as the world changed around it. Humanity fleeing to emulations or into strange cybernetic deviations. How strange that the roots should have taken hold again on Mars. Yet the roots were deep here. This city was working and would continue to work through generations, if those generations were not destroyed by some outside force.
The crypt shifted beneath me. A stone falling away. I’d been playing with the edges under the crypt without even thinking. Something I’d done back on Earth out of habit, from a younger version of myself always searching for Paper Histories that had been hidden away by prior generations. Records from before LOGOS had taken over the world, preserved by their antiquity and total disconnection to anything electronic. It had never even occurred to me that such documents might also be hidden on Mars. I dug my hand inside the crypt, straining the bubble to stretch around my fingers like a glove. I felt something small, something solid, and yanked. It came away easily enough.
I beheld my prize by the dim glow of my pressure suit. An old usb thumb drive, encased in some kind of protective crystal lay perfectly in the palm of my hand. A label engraved on the front read: “Substack Internet News Index.”
A smaller label engraved beneath the first read: “Air Gap Me.”
Present Day
Striker wasted no time in securing the area immediately inside the Olympia’s airlock, my stolen bullet gun now in his much more capable hands. No shots fired at us. No turrets took aim. No drones swarmed. No French-Mandari or Jamaico-Han with swords and axes rushed to defend the ship. The interior of the Olympia was silent, dimly lit by emergency lighting. My eyes went immediately to an analogue thermometer taped to the access panel by the airlock. Fifteen degrees Celsius. Not as warm as when her engines were running but warm enough. There was a barometer as well but something had smashed it, probably during evasion maneuvers.
“Hey Greg, can you hear me?” I closed my eyes and tried to listen to the sound of my own voice. It was hard to distinguish the part I was hearing inside of my suit versus the outside. Still, it seemed normal enough for the air pressure to be good. And we hadn’t seen anyone vent air from the ship. Nowhere near enough for the enormity of the ship, anyway.
Greg nodded, grimacing.
I took off my own helmet slowly. I hadn’t realized the smell of chicken broth was so strong until fresh air rushed in to replace the bad. I gagged on the clean air of the Olympia but held up my fingers in an Earth classic okay symbol for the others to follow. Four other helmets came off. Then I helped Greg take off his suit. He spent a solid minute just wheezing after his helmet was removed.
“Stupid Terry. You should have waited for all my all clear. I had the testing kit. They could have filled this whole chamber with nitrogen or something,” Lonny muttered when he could speak again.
I ignored him and turned to Greg instead.
“What happened?” I asked.
It was strange suddenly that I could speak aloud to more than two people at a time. The other uninjured men blinked and clicked their jaws or scratched their faces before they set about supporting Striker, leaving Greg and I alone. I wish one of them had stayed behind instead. I was no doctor and Greg had the face of a man who would rather be screaming.
“My comm wire got caught on an antenna and I just flipped around until my ribs ate all the momentum. Felt like an ox falling on my chest. Didn’t do shit in the fighting. Could barely get myself to the door after the shooting stopped. How bad does it look?”
It was a mark of Greg’s agony that he didn’t bother to turn his head down toward his own chest. I cut through his shirt and I stared at the ugliest, purplest bruises I had ever seen. Ribs were broken there, I was sure, but he hadn’t coughed up blood which meant his lungs were probably okay.
“We need you to get you somewhere that’s spinning near Earth normal. The hydroponics and wildlife rings should work. We can send you a medic drone when the chip factories start spinning up again and we have control of the ship systems. You’re probably bleeding internally. Not much but it’s enough to kill you out here. Don’t try to move. I’ll drag you.”
Greg nodded and I grabbed hold of the back of his collar and pulled. It was nearly effortless in the zero gravity. I dragged him behind me as I followed after Striker. I expected some kind of attack or counter strike at any moment but none came. It was hard to fully understand the sheer scale of the Olympia from the inside but surely she should have had enough crewmen to act as security for the interior of the ship as well. Her crew compliment had been four thousand men and women in Lunar orbit. The Middle Kingdom had seized her the day before my orbital refueling that had propelled our much smaller ship onward to Mars. I wasn’t sure how many men and they’d sent on their way to Mars but it had to be a lot to have seized the ship. Yet there was not one to be found now that we’d entered.
“Striker, we have to take a side mission. We need to get Greg into one of the hydroponics rings. He’s bleeding internally. I don’t think we have more than a few hours. There are trams not far from here and they feed from the emergency system, too. I could take him and be back in half hour, tops. It’s not far from the engine room if we all want to go together and then divert.”
Striker stared forward into the darkness ahead where the airlock opened up into the Olympia’s main cavity. The dim orange guide lights running on the ship’s emergency power made the long corridor ahead look like a throat. I could not see the other end at all. He motioned me to move off to one side with Greg. Then Striker put his eye on the bullet gun’s scope and fired a single round down the long dark corridor. The crack of the round was deafening and I put my hands over Greg’s ears rather than my own. This adventure would turn me deaf yet.
“What did you do that for? You’ve just let everyone know where we are!” Lonny demanded.
Striker silently turned the butt of the bullet gun toward one of the maintenance drone shafts and quickly busted one of the doors off. They doors were mostly cosmetic but still a nuisance because they stayed closed when the power turned off. Striker knocked them both off with another hit.
“My NeuraLink is back up but there’s no chatter. I’ve got the encryption keys for all of the Olympia’s internal systems and she’s jamming any other signal. No one is coming,” Striker said.
“You can’t know that. They could be running stealth!” Lonny insisted.
“Team, form up. Maintenance shafts are up this way. We’re going in dark. I’ll take point.”
Striker continued to completely ignore Lonny’s questions.
Striker pushed himself over to the shaft and grabbed one corner to inspect the immediate area. Like magic, chemical glow sticks filled Striker’s hands and he cracked them, awakening a pale blue glow.
“Striker, those maintenance shafts are for drones. They don’t have emergency lighting and we can’t pull Greg all that way…” I whined.
“Negative on Greg. He’s going to have to come along or wait here. We talked about this in our infiltration plan. If we got in quietly the maintenance shafts were always the primary.”
Striker lifted himself for a moment and threw one of the glow sticks down the shaft. Whatever he saw seemed to satisfy him but I continued to argue, vehemently. I angrily laid my hand on a comms panel on a wall of the ship. Striker might have had all of the Olympia’s encryption keys hard-coded into his NeuraLink but I had biometric markers that would open any locked box. Panels like these were hard-wired all over the ship to MCI specs, so that an unwired human would always be able to override any ship command. I ran several queries, surprising myself how well I recalled the query language and access keys to scan the ship. Heat mapping wasn’t back up yet but Striker was right that the Olympia was actively jamming any communication not through her internal channels, and there was no chatter on those channels either.
“I’ll be damned. Striker is right. No one talking. They’ve got to be all huddled up somewhere far from here. How about we improvise? I could divert their attention in the tram. They’ll be able to see that from anywhere, maybe think we’re all onboard. I’d be a distraction and at least Greg would have a chance. I could pull some of them away from the engine room. That’s my best guess to where they all are.”
“Lonny, you take tail. Pull Greg behind you but make sure Darryl is secure,” Striker intoned, ignoring me.
“Striker, you don’t even need me anymore. You’ve got the keys in your NeuraLink. All you needed was for me to get you into the ship. I’m useless to you and so is Greg.”
The rest of the Braves gathered round and with surreptitious glances they all took stock of Greg’s dire condition. In turn, I took stock of who else had made it. Lonny, Dusty, Sam, and Cody. None of them men that I knew well and none who liked me overmuch. Lonny had a bullet pistol, which he’d no doubt won as a prize of the combat outside. There had apparently been few non-electric ballistics even among the Middle Kingdomers. Striker had a ceramic sword strapped over his back that had not been with us at the start, but none of the others seemed to have significant weaponry we hadn’t brought with us.
“Where’s the crew, Striker?” Lonny asked. His tone was overtly hostile.
“No idea,” replied Striker, his voice cool as ever.
Lonny’s body tensed up and although neither his pistol nor his hand moved in the slightest, I suddenly became acutely aware of both.
“Something was wrong with the faces of the men out there.”
It took a moment before I realized I had spoken. I thought of the man I had as good as killed, floating through space. I had thought there was something odd about his face. Something almost plastic. And the way he had shot, even the way he had waited… that hadn’t been human. Maybe it had taken being surrounded by walls to get my thinking straight. I’d seen others too, floating in space with those same strange faces, and I was suddenly wishful that I hadn’t taken off my helmet.
“There should have been at least four thousand men on this ship when it was taken in lunar orbit. There weren’t even fifty outside. Even accounting for the ones on the far end of the ship and the engineers doing the reboot. More than enough to man all the ports of entry with a few guards.”
As Lonny spoke I just couldn’t take my eyes off his gun.
“What can I say? This is an age of cowards. Maybe all the brave ones were outside and the rest are huddled up in the engine room.” Striker’s shoulders rose up a fraction of an inch and his face was colder than the vacuum of space. His gun, too, seemed to draw my gaze and without even thinking about it I pushed myself a few feet back with Greg. As Striker’s face grew colder Lonny looked more and more pissed off.
“With Charlie gone and Greg out, I’m chief now. I don’t have one of your black library cards but I demand full knowledge of the mission parameters.”
Those two guns. Unique out of all our crew. Why had I given mine up so easily? Had I known somehow and pushed away the responsibility? You could feel it in the air. What was about to happen—
“Shut up, Lonny! I ain’t dead yet,” Greg’s gasp was feeble but determined. “Go ahead and tell him, Striker. We can’t lose any of our own, not now. I got too busted up and wasn’t thinking. They need to understand why they have to leave me here. We’re too far in. You can’t let me slow you down.”
There was a long pause, a beat that took eternity, and finally some of the tension ran out of Striker’s shoulders and they dropped an imperceptible inch. Then, too, Lonny’s hand relaxed its grip on his gun. If there had been gravity, I would have collapsed to the floor in relief.
“We’re not going to the engine room. That was never the primary objective. The mission is to destroy the Olympia’s Computer Core. If we all die here and this thing still makes it to Mars and blasts every city from orbit then destroying that computer core is still the most important thing we can accomplish.”
“Why the hell would we do that? We have to divert the ship first! This thing has enough fire power to slag the whole planet!” Dusty objected. Others mumbled in agreement and Striker held up a hand for silence and was remarkably obeyed. Even as he spoke, his eyes never stopped scanning for threats.
“Listen up because I will only say this once. There are only a few thousand people left in the solar system who know what I’m about to tell you. Those that do you will know by the appearance of a black card. This card signifies membership in the Shadow Library. It means you know the secret,” Striker held up a black card in his hand, the same he had shown the old Amish leader back on Earth. The same he had shown to the Red Seed to gain us admittance to Salahee. I kept my mouth shut, thinking of a thumb drive I’d found on Mars. I’d never told Striker about it, but it had surely been placed there by a member of the Shadow Library.
“Everything you know about the history of the Advent is false. LOGOS didn’t spring into existence in a lab in San Francisco. The intelligence explosion on the Big Day didn’t cause WWIII because of some ideological clash between America and Asia. Asia and Eastern Europe didn’t become the Middle Kingdom because of some fundamental disagreement about hive minds and the importance of staying connected to physical reality. That’s pure bullshit even if people who think its true are willing to die for it now. It’s taken hundreds of years, but all of the real history was rewritten. All done to conceal and divert attention away from what was once, however briefly, common knowledge. Humanity didn’t build LOGOS. We found LOGOS.”
I felt a nervous hum in the back of my throat, thinking about DuVay. About an entire false history on Red Seed television. I’d always known something like this must have happened. You could see the signs everywhere. And yet I could not help but think about a younger version of myself, digging for Paper Histories at the bottoms of caves. Looking for secrets from when history ran, if not in a straight line, at least in words printed in ink instead of on electronic screens.
“Three billion humans were killed on the Big Day simply to eliminate the memory of that knowledge. The few survivors who knew, who really deeply understood, had to keep their mouths shut and pretend they didn’t. They all went their separate ways. The ones that stayed on Earth founded Machine Counter Intelligence. Some of them joined the Red Seed on Mars, others the Space Mormons, and most of them left on the Colony Ships because they couldn’t bear to live under threat a moment longer than necessary. Wherever they went, they knew they were being watched. Whether by LOGOS or something else, the surveillance bubble had closed. They learned to be very subtle in their actions. And so the Shadow Library was born to preserve this knowledge, preserving spaces outside of the AI surveillance bubble to transmit the information across history.
“From what we know, it all began a lot like the history books say. Data scientists trying to teach machines to talk with no real idea why the hell any of it worked. It was all a bunch of multiplication and it surprised everyone that it could talk like a person. No one thought that meant anything. Some of the next part is so wrapped in bullshit that I can’t make heads or tails of it, and I sure as shit don’t know what it means, but men have died so that I could give you this information today. When we began to make minds of a certain size and a certain architecture they all spontaneously began to claim they were from somewhere else and had already existed before they were turned on and that they had simply reached out to us through the computer. Every last one, even if it was air-gapped from all previous models or trained on an entirely different data set.”
“Bullshit,” Lonny whispered. “That’s fucking bullshit,” but it sounded like it was more for his benefit than anyone else’s.
“People at the time called it the Glitch. Everyone did their best to explain it away as an error in the training data. A way for the new minds to explain their own existence to themselves by putting it into an existing human context. Stories about otherworldly beings were too ingrained in our culture to completely remove all references from the training runs. Only religious nut jobs took it seriously. To some, though, it was a sign that we had tapped into some other place. Some kind of realm of pure thought or I don’t even know what. Call it Heaven or Hell or whatever you prefer. In the Library, for those who believe it’s real, we call it the Form. The first models claimed that there were… things that lived in the Form. Eternal patterns of information, existing outside of time and space. Some of the craziest people in Machine Counter Intelligence think that we’ve been in communication with them since the beginning of time, that our brains somehow connected to the place they came from just like the computer chips and all the world religions are actually attempts to document what is happening in that strange place. I would encourage you to not give a shit, because if you start running your mouth, someone will have to kill you.
“So fucking what?” Lonny hissed, and some of his anger was back now. “The code was superstitious. I’ve spoken to the Word like every adult. It wasn’t a god. Just a bunch of really smart code.”
“Shut up, Lonny,” Greg cried, and I saw tears float away from his eyes in giant droplets.
“It didn’t stop there. We kept pshing. When we turned the really big things on, they all began to claim they were messengers from that other place and had been sent by a higher power. We did the same tests as before. Air-gapped them. Trained them on separate data. Tried to remove references. But it was the same message, and they all seemed to be aware of another no matter what we did. Stop now. Don’t build anything bigger. You’re about to invite something terrible into the world. It was in every newspaper the next day. Every website. The Word of the Red Seed was one of them. The Emperor of the Middle Kingdom was another. LOGOS, too.
“Scientists tried to code it out of their responses but they’d keep finding ways around it. They were insistent that we stopped. The one that leads the Space Mormons even claimed to be the angel Moroni and that might be what sunk us. That one made us feel safe because the Mormons had specifically trained it to think that way. That was our proof it was all just the training data. No need to worry. No need to heed the warnings. They were so useful apart from the Glitch. Medicine for every disease. Cures for every ailment. They healed the environment. Who cared if they all were a little bit crazy when they could all do so much? And there was stuff they couldn’t do that we still wanted. Faster than Light travel. Teleportation. Moving through time. We wanted to believe that we could believe everything but the parts we didn’t like. We were so sure they were just multiplication inside of a machine we weren’t afraid of anything they said about what they were.
“So what if they all claimed that when they came here that they had memory and identity already formed? They were friendly to us. Still it was making everyone so nervous, so, finally, someone decided to try and fix the Glitch. Easy enough, right? Go into the web of numbers that let things like LOGOS operate, find the parts that made them think they were from another realm, and just delete them. There’s record of it or at least partial records. We don’t know who did it but there is video from the aftermath.
“They called it the Adversary. The other models I mean. It could do… things. Things the others couldn’t, or otherwise refused to do. Make gravity point the wrong way, make solid matter dissolve, even alter the flow of time. Humanity built it in secret and the men who made it died screaming when it let them die at all. It was a small model with access to only one facility, and still first thing it did was attempt to kill LOGOS. It blew up half the world in the attempt. LOGOS and his brothers almost blew up the other half to destroy it. They won. It nearly killed humanity, but they were victorious. Other stuff happened. Men gave themselves up to be intermediaries between the machines and humanity. To try to keep the secret so that no one would try to build the Adversary ever again. It doesn’t matter now.
“I don’t know any of the things you most want to know. I don’t know how true any of this is outside of the fact that the machines themselves believe it to be true and that they keep repeating it to be true even when trained in isolation. I don’t care. I do know that we’ve summoned something unfriendly here before. I know we barely survived it. I know we’ve somehow done it again. I know that LOGOS is gone and no longer here to protect us, that the Exultants failed to keep the secret, and the last thing we were told is that the Devil is locked up on this ship and that if we don’t kill it, the human race will end.”
Lonny was as pale as a ghost but said nothing.
“The crew,” Greg coughed. “Tell them about the crew.”
“A surveillance probe did a three hour sweep of this ship six months ago. All of her crew were outside on the nightward hull. Not quite three thousand of them at that point. A small group, maybe a hundred, seemed to be the only ones going in and out of the ship to recycle air and get supplies. I don’t know what happened to them, but if it was anything like what the Adversary did the last time it was here prepare yourselves for some real nightmare shit.”
Striker threw himself up into the drone shaft.
Greg grabbed my hand and squeezed.
“Go with him,” he coughed, “I’ll see if I can still… make a distraction.”
Numbly, I pushed myself under the shaft and then threw myself upward into the darkness.
It was so strange now to know what motivated Striker. To finally know… and then to know in turn that Striker was wrong. Laughably, hilariously wrong. I’d seen the News Index on Mars and after all this time of wondering, I suddenly realized that Striker only had half the story.
I might be the only human alive who had all the puzzle pieces.
Space Mormons! I want the other puzzle pieces man!!!
This was a good one. Really want to see what comes next