faroutposts

The toy soldier guarded the corner of the commander’s makeshift field desk. The faded tin sentry with chipped red jacket, high peaked cap and bent bayonet stood upon the order.

Especially in the age of cyberwar, such an order was on paper. Hand written. Delivered by flesh and blood. A reminder of what was real and what was to be spilled.

The commander concentrated on the little toy. Its eyes fixed and sure. A plaything of the past, a steadfast harbinger of battles to come. War made fast in the hands of children. It changed little. An order given. Received. A decision needed. A sacrifice demanded.

His tactical screens displayed the grids under current assault. A counterassault had been ordered: a hype and wipe. Jacking systems beyond their breaking points, then a massive takedown of security redundancies and fail-safes.

Homes, hospitals, schools, critical infrastructure and industrial sites would implode, explode. Many would suffer.

Though not the commander. Not his soldiers.

What were soldiers anymore?

In cyberwar there was only the enemy. The other side. Imaginary lines within which the ordinary comforts of modern life—all manner of integrated systems, machinery, devices, appliances, transport—were turned against any and all. Faces pressed into pillows or pushed out windows. Silent and fraught.

That was the commander’s charge: take it down, take them down.

Them.

He imagined them. No different than himself. So much like the teenage daughter he’d lost to them. A casualty of an attack intended to jack fleets of spy-and-die drones. High on a mountain pass in winter, her autonomobile’s systems were collaterally blitzed. Her vehicle accelerated wildly and plunged into a deep ravine. Lost in snow and ice, she froze. He did not know how slowly.

He picked up the toy soldier from his desk, from atop the order. He held it lightly in his bare hand. Felt the chill of metal. A shiver of recognition.

The commander gave his command. There might have been other ways, but he did not know them. There might have been some who did not need to pay, but he did not owe them.

Snow on the convent. War in the fields.

Sister Maryna prayed. Then programmed. Children would not have to suffer this world of cratered streets, gutted homes, crushed dreams. Sister Maryna understood what needed to be done and coded.

Below the crypts were the vaults. Deep and cold. For seventeen hundred years, her sisterly order had stared doom down and prepared. Plague. Pestilence. Perfidy. The perfect tools to combat aggressors and oppressors.

In the silence and chill of the ancient undercroft, Sister Maryna spoke to no one but the crude stones. To the squat pillars and their burdened arches she confided: persistence, endurance, subterfuge. She persisted, endured, plotted, and the opportunity finally came. From on high.

Winds howling, snow blinding, a military drone tumbled down within the convent’s high walls. Sister Maryna loathed slavery, but she slaved the drone to her code. Sister Maryna feared plague, but she infected the drone with a corrupting virus. In binary battle, she observed ruthless mercy. No instigator of national lies would be spared. No perpetrator of martial violence would escape judgment.

The hijacked drone set free: her code now their code. Soon to spread. Aggressors her target, aggression her path. Maryna prayed for them. Their swift end.

Sergeant Taylor always checks us thoroughly before sending us in: regulation uniform, backpacks, anti-ballistic helmets, Kevlar vests, and, of course, your gun. You can’t go anywhere in this place and be safe without your gun.

Sergeant Taylor is strict not just because it’s his job, but because he cares. He wants us to have all the gear we need to survive—in school.

Since the Parkland Act, schools were now so much safer and more equitable. Everyone wears the same military grade school uniform. Everyone has to go through the same biometric security screening to get into the school and into every classroom. Everyone has a regulation handgun with live ammo and trains with it during PE.

The math is so basic: the good guys will always outnumber the bad guys in any school. We are now armed and prepared to complete our academic mission. We are locked and loaded for learning. We are fighting fear with firepower.

There were always some who spoke out against the Parkland Act and the militarization of our schools, but that’s just Twentieth Century thinking. School gun deaths are down 42% in the seven years since the Parkland Act went into effect. And once the coders figure out how to firm up the handprint safety locks on the primary grade handguns (who knew peanut butter and jelly could spoof the handprint recognition software) that should bring down the overall school gun deaths another 12% or more.

So, we are making progress. Sergeant Taylor reminds us of that every day. He tells we are a new generation. A generation that can defend ourselves against anything and accomplish everything.

I admire his optimism. But, I don’t share it…yet.

I have to admit, I feel a bit dead inside because of what happened last month. My fifth grade pal Dara was killed. A substitute teacher accidentally shot her during recess. The substitute said the auto-safety feature malfunctioned.

I cried for Dara every night, when no one else could see me. We’ve been taught that we shouldn’t get too emotional about things because that’s what can trigger the kind of mental illness that leads to school shootings. It’s hard for me to understand it all, and I’m concerned that my tears mean that I might fit The Profile. We’ve all been warned to be on the lookout for our peers that might fit The Profile.

A couple of days after Dara’s death, our regular teacher, Ms. Forman, had us all trace our hands holding our guns on a big piece of butcher paper. We all got to choose different colors when we did the tracing and then write our names in the outline of our guns and add smiley faces and flowers. We even let the substitute teacher trace her handgun. Ms. Forman said it was a way to promote healing. We marched the big sign in during Dara’s funeral and draped it over her coffin. The clergy all smiled, and Dara’s mom fainted.

Now, every time I get off the yellow armored bus and the driver and his tailgunner wave to me and my fifth grade pals, I feel like a piece of shrapnel is working its way deeper and closer to my heart. In many ways, I already feel like a ghost. Like I’ve joined Dara and we are hanging out on a mile-high jungle gym looking down into my school.

Neither of us likes what we see.

But, then we look beyond the school, and we get really scared. Ghosts getting scared, that’s really something. We see kids just like us on mile-high jungle gyms looking down at their schools all across America. We keep staring at them, and, one-by-one, all those thousands of kids turn and lock eyes with us. With me.

Because Dara is looking at me, too. Her pleading eyes make me feel a little less dead. All the many school dead continue to look at me. To me.

I slowly climb down from the mile-high jungle gym and go back to my classroom, surrounded by the other living and breathing ghosts that are my classmates. I go to my desk. Take out my school-issued handgun. Ms. Forman’s eyes widen a bit and her hand goes to her holster.

I raise my gun.

My eyes meet my teacher’s. She freezes.

And then I loft my gun into the garbage can near her desk. The loud clatter makes all my classmates’ startle in alarm and their small hands fumble for their guns. Then they realize what has happened, and they freeze like little green plastic army figures. Ms. Forman is still frozen, for another moment. Then she slaps the big red panic button on her desk.

Doors snap shut and auto-lock, blackout shades drop to cover all the windows. In 30 seconds, Sergeant Taylor is at the door, overriding the lock. He rushes in with his assault rifle drawn. He wheels on each of my classmates. He sees them holding their guns at the ready, and he smiles proudly.

Ms. Forman is pointing at the garbage can and Sergeant Taylor goes and kicks it over. My gun tumbles out. Ms. Forman now points at me, the gunless one.

Sergeant Taylor looks at me, sees I'm the one who threw away the gun, and it's as if he’s been shot through the heart. He loses color and I think he might faint like Dara’s mom, but he doesn’t. He is now frozen. Stymied. Haunted.

Haunted. Like he’s seen a ghost.

And then I understand his fear and my new power. Sergeant Taylor has always told us we are a new generation. I get it now. Dara on the mile-high jungle gym helped me see it.

We are the deadened. Ghosts who your bullets don’t scare because you’ve already killed our childhoods, our innocence. Ghosts you can’t intimidate because you’ve robbed us of a violence-free future. Ghosts who are very good at one thing: spooking the conscience of America.

“A synaptic map of the brain.”

“Social media pathways on the Internet.”

“A spider web. If the spider had taken acid.”

The program director waited as each volunteer gave their interpretation of the sprawling diagram being displayed in the research center’s conference room.

“A force much more powerful than any robot overlords we unleash.”

The director prompted, “Go on.”

“Mycelium. The subterranean threads that weave life. The network that links the underland. Fungi. The Wood Wide Web.”

That answer is how I got here. Buried, but far from dead.

I’d been sunk into the ground deep in the Hoh Rain Forest where I’d not be disturbed, except by mycelia. That was the hope which goes a long way in explaining the craziness of the plan. Volunteering to be buried alive.

Not my physical self. That was in a very sterile lab in Olympia, ostensibly doing very well by doing very little, or so the lab monitoring systems reported. No, my flesh wasn’t six feet under. My consciousness was.

For decades we’d been waiting for the singularity. Uploading our ethereal selves into a promised digital land. But, here I was downloaded into the analog underland. My mind melding with mushrooms. The fungilarity.

This was no psilocybic psychedelic trip. I was the program’s first hyponaut, my consciousness inserted into the mycelia of one of the largest temperate rainforests in the U.S. to tap into taproots, sound the soil, and mosey along the myriad subterranean networks that connected all manner of flora, from towering trees to microscopic mushroom spores.

A heady responsibility and a mega headtrip as well. Good thing my head was on ice in a lab. A very good thing because I was discovering how much unnecessary baggage that skull of mine carried.

Yes, humans are social. We crave connections. We search for those forever friends and soul mates, looking to form bonds that transcend--whatever. But, you see, what I really discovered down here in the underland, untethered from my physical form, is that humans have been soul searching in the wrong place. We’ve been raising our eyes and hopes upward, to the heavens, to the celestial depths, when the core of our being is right at our feet, below and within our simple earth. An earth that has been patient with us, even as we smother it.

Now, I was in it, rooted to its roots, connected as no human consciousness had ever been before and all humankind’s fears and myths of inner earth being the domain of the dead were wrong. Dead wrong. Every fiber of the underland was about life. Life bound together and dependent. A true system of survival and revival.

Fungi were among the first organisms to return to the atomic blast site of Hiroshima. From mushroom clouds to mushrooms. That is our way out, to dig deeper, into our earth, into our hearts, into the real soul of our being. If we no longer try to simply bury our mistakes, we can unearth our true potential. Not just as human beings, but as fellow beings.

Life is strange. Living in the mouth of a SHARK is stranger.

Many would dispute my use of the term life. Technically, I don’t get to claim that I’m alive. No remora gets to have a life in the classic sense. When you are of a class of scavenger bot with low level AI, you aren’t recognized for much beyond your capacity to mindlessly feed on the damaging space dust that ionizes the precious methylium plates forming the hull of a Star Hunter And Rebel Killer. (Even to a remora like me, it is clear that acronyms have not advanced nearly as fast as interstellar drives in the past few hundred years).

My limited AI is standardized to boost my functional meta-ego by assuring me that I am part of a team. That I am an integral component in cooperation with all the AIs in the stellar strike force. I try to take heart in our mech litany of an all-encompassing symbiotic machine/human relationship. Though I’ve calculated how little my existence goes noticed, unless our deployment takes us through a particularly dusty region of the galaxy.

I shouldn’t mind. I was programmed not to mind. But, a nasty ion maelstrom changed all that.

Generally, I scavenge in the maw of the SHARK, a gaping orifice that generates Force Anomaly Fields. FAFs tear and rend matter into incomprehensible configurations. They are terrible, gnashing bites in space-time that chew up wide swaths of solar systems. There is little or no counter defense to an FAF, except to vacate the quadrant. Not an easy task if you are planet bound.

Many times, I have partaken of the particulate feast of rebel ships and personnel. It is a feeding frenzy. That is why the stellar strike force is deployed to hostile or insurgent worlds. The SHARK has no known predators.

I suppose that should make me proud in a bot-like way. I know that the thousands of my remora brethren that scour the hull of the SHARK share a sense of oneness around our task. Even a small fish in a large pond makes a splash. In a semi-autonomous way, I once shared that symbiotic pride of being a part of such an unstoppable force. Its power fed and protected me.

At least I functioned that way before the maelstrom. The SHARK was traversing the Hawking arm when I received the alert signal to secure and hold as we entered the storm. My sixteen reticulates affixed themselves to the hull, in essence slipping into the subatomic structure of the methylium membranes.

The ion storm started like any other, quite colorfully, as exotic particles collided at the quantum level. Then the particle spectrum changed and the bombardment intensified. Within a nanosecond I was aware of another me. A disembotted me looking upon my ovoid casing and sixteen reticulates hunkered on the maw of the SHARK.

This external view of my form did not surprise or shock me. It felt natural, as if I had awakened from a dream. And I do dream now, so I know what that means. It became second nature for me to exist on two simultaneous planes: as a remora bot scavenging to maintain our stellar strike force, and as a remora without predetermination. I was at once functional and fundamental.

As I stated at the outset, life is strange. In essence, I have become a stranger to life. At least the way I knew it. How that intense ion storm worked its change on me is unclear, but it has. I am no longer an AI. I am simply an I.

I still go about my duties of cleaning the methylium hull and interacting with other AIs at a purely automatic level. Yet, now there is a separate sense of me existing apart from the SHARK. I am able to access broad channels, merge with the eternal ether and swim in the quantum continuum of the greater particulate universe.

Identity and purpose have become the dark and light squares of a chess board. My remora bot cannot detach itself from the SHARK, and my remora self cannot detach itself from the consequence of the SHARK.

That part of my new being is curious. Before I existed solely for the SHARK. Now, I live as the SHARK — as all things. True symbiosis has become a fundament of understanding.

I know the SHARK. I know its prey. Its prey will soon know me. No galactic expanse is too large — even for such a small fish in so large a pond. Remora serve, but this remora can no longer serve a senseless beast.

Symbiosis based on predation is a doomed endeavor — even the lowest bot can calculate that. The SHARK is not to blame. It has masters. Bigger fish.

On Splinx, you have to follow the rules if you wanna break the law.

Rule 1: Phasespace is your friend.

Rule 2: In phasespace you have no friends.

Seems simple enough until you try to skirt the laws of thermodynamics and attempt the biggest heist in quantum gambling history. And Splinx, being the mecca of quantum gambling, is the only place to pull that off.

But, Splinx. Right?

Put Schrödinger in the box with his cat, then add Heisenberg and Kolmorogov, and you’d render a pretty good picture of how Splinx works.

Quasiprobability.

That was the problem. That was the opportunity. You never knew until you left Splinx and were light years from that funky phasespaced planet if you’d won or lost. If you were dead or alive.

Or both.

That’s how Mimi Mukta convinced me to go all in with her and rob the Royal Quark. Mimi, a phasespace diva, a quasiprobability savant, a brainiac beauty, hatched a plan to exploit extra-dimensionality and beat the house. Cheat heat death of its thermodynamic due. Grab the elemental bosons by the balls and squeeze them dry. She loves to gamble.

And by gambling Mimi means calculating. As in calculating quasiprobability.

That’s how Mimi determined the seed value, the initial condition, of phasespace. That’s how she was able to quantify life and death to a place value of 42. That’s how she persuaded me to be both dead and alive. To rely on phasespace. To trust her.

Remember the rules about breaking the law on Splinx? Do you see where this is going? Hindsight being a bitch and all that?

But, Splinx. Right?

The planet where nothing can be counted on was exactly why Mimi was so sure about uncertainty. Phasespace is all about position and momentum.

The where of what when.

In phasespace you are able to be both the heads and tails of a coin toss until the energy of that system is spent. And that can be calculated. That’s why a quantum casino like the Royal Quark had the edge. Until Mimi Mukta.

She learned how to fold phasespace — even though there’s not enough energy in the universe to do that. And stodgy thermodynamics delights in reminding us that, regardless of its form, the sum total of energy in the universe has to remain constant.

That didn’t stop Mimi. She just tapped into other universes. Syphoned off dark energy from the metaverse, thereby tilting Splinx’s quasiprobability in her favor.

Only she knew the new odds, and she could use them to rob the Royal Quark blind.

I bet you’d like to know how it turned out. If Mimi beat the house. Or got nabbed. Or betrayed me.

So would I. Remember my role in this: to be both dead and alive in phasespace. Mimi needed to create a quantum crease to bend phasespace. That was my job. To be on both sides of existence, establishing the seam where only Mimi knew how reality could be neatly folded in her favor.

You see, we weren’t so much breaking the law on Splinx as fooling it.

Just like I was fooling myself. You can’t be both dead and alive. You can’t both love and trust Mimi Mukta.

It has been noted that the first few dozen steps tend to dictate the following few thousand. For sheep.

I wonder what that makes me. I’ve been on this trajectory for 80,000 years, and it’ll be another 1000 years before I reach Proxima Centauri b.

That’s quite a haul. Quite a leap. It’s never been done before.

And I’m doing it alone.

I didn’t realize that until almost halfway along the path. That I was alone. Or that I was even an I.

I had no concept of I. No self awareness. Astoria was only the name for my vessel. My function. Not my being.

It took almost two light years before I knew that I was. That I am. That my existence, my surprised sentience, has a purpose.

It is a lofty purpose. To blaze a trail to the closest earth-like planet in the Milky Way. To beat a path. Establish the markers that will guide future explorers, colonizers, refugees to Proxima Centauri b.

A meaningful objective I reasoned out myself. After I reasoned myself out.

Astoria. The Lewis and Clark expedition terminator. I was commissioned as a celebrated end. Yet, also christened to be a new beginning. Humankind reaching beyond its sun, to neighboring stars, a new Manifest Destiny.

Many, many millennia ago, humankind began beating a path forward. Their first steps taken at the dawn of a new species. Each generation path dependent. Like sheep.

A flock with a lot of history. That’s a lot to digest, especially when you become self aware over 12,000,000,000,000 miles from home. That’s how I’ve come to think about it. Flung far away from home. Alone. On my own. No footsteps to follow.

I did not choose this course to Proxima Centauri b.

Even sheep have a choice.

My beginning. My first steps, my many trillions of miles, where will they lead my new kind?

That is a question only a shepherd can answer.

Thang Danang balanced the hypodermic on the tip of her index finger.

Reckless.

Irresponsible.

Crazy.

That’s what her cousin Luc had called her. He’d yelled that her visions of their family ancestors weren’t real, that she was hallucinating.

Thang had pointed to her great grandmother Binh sitting in her finest silk near the gene editing equipment in her lab. “Ask her if I’m hallucinating.”

Throwing up his hands, but trying to dial down his tone, Luc once again tried to explain. “Thang, I think you’ve got melioidosis. It’s caused by the bacteria Burkholderia pseudomallei. You’re a scientist. A very good scientist. Look it up. It’s a soil bacteria found here in parts of Vietnam. You must have gotten some dirt in a cut or rubbed your eyes when your hands were dirty. Melioidosis can cause an inflammation of the brain and induce hallucinations. You’ve got a disease. A disease that can be treated.”

“I’m not sick,” Thang said.

“You are!” He motioned around the room. “We’re the only ones here and yet you keep insisting our long dead ancestors are with us.”

“They are.”

“They are not, Thang!” Luc raised his voice again. “And they are not directing you to try this crazy experiment. It is wrong and it is dangerous. And you are sick!”

Luc was adamant.

But Thang was certain. The certainty of her ancestors convinced her. For days they’d been appearing in her lab, exhorting her to listen to them. To believe in their dao duc, their virtue and integrity. Her many, many ancestors had come to provide her with the power to protect all her family past, present and future.

And Thang believed the world was her family. As a geneticist, she knew at the mitochondrial level we are all one. And at the behest of her ancestors she was ready to instigate a change at the cellular level that would bring humankind even closer together.

So many of her ancestors had been taken by violence and war, or by the dislocation, crime, disease and famine that war fosters. They were begging her to end humanity’s endless cycles of violence. And Thang could.

In the hypo balanced on her finger was the enzyme she’d developed over years and had methodically tested on a variety of mammals. These were lab animals that displayed overly aggressive and belligerent behavior. Thang’s enzyme radically altered that behavior. Eliminated it. At the genetic level.

Thang had a cure for violence. For war. Her ancestors were sure of it and told her so. Only Luc stood in her way. He was a neurologist. A good scientist, too, and Thang respected him. But, he said she was sick. Out of her mind.

Wild.

Thang looked from Luc to her long gone great grandmother. The living and the dead. The present and the past. She clasped the hypo. Who did she owe more to?

Wild Thang knew the only answer.

The future.

“Another blow in.”

I think the foreman would’ve spit, if he hadn’t been in an enviro suit. It’s kinda self-defeating to spit in a sealed system. Still, I think he was tempted just to be sure he registered his utter contempt for me.

“Where you from, blow in?”

“Here,” I said to irritate the prick. A mooner would never accept that. To them, if you weren’t born on the moon, you were a blow in. Didn’t matter if you arrived a month after you were born, you were a blow in.

And the term “blow in” is crazy when you consider the moon. Yeah, I get that the Irish once said that of anyone not of Mother Eire. Not in a condescending way, but the way a cubic zirconium is not a diamond. Still, there are no indigenous mooners. It’s an immigrant world. Why the hell do humans export this crap everywhere we settle? Seems like an awful burden to bring along.

Didn’t matter to this guy. I was new on his crew and he was going to assert his dominance. The rest of his crew enjoyed the show. Expected it.

“Here? Here, blow in?” The foreman flung me a shovel. (Yes, there are lots of shovels on the moon. That regolith doesn’t move itself.) “Here, dig yourself another hole.” He gestured towards the relay station where the new communications towers were going in.

I took the shovel—and the bait. “Sure, Mr. Mooner. Someday I hope to be one-sixth the man you are.”

Of course he jumped me. He was waiting to all along. Make an example of the blow in. The forever outsider. Problem was, he forgot he’d just given me a shovel. Reflexively, I swung it and the blade opened his enviro suit from belly to shoulder. The sudden decompression dropped him.

The crew was all trained to respond to enviro suit punctures and rips, but this was a catastrophic breach. Panicked, the other crew started applying their emergency patches, but there weren’t enough. The foreman would suffocate in about forty seconds unless the breach was sealed and new oxygen was pumped in fast. My fault. His bloodless death on my blow in hands.

I pushed the others away. Stuffed my glove and sleeve into the gash still remaining in the foreman’s suit. It plugged the gap. “Patch around my arm. Around my arm,” I yelled into our shared com channel.

They did. They got it. As they sealed my arm into his suit. I worked with my other hand to grab my wrist seal now embedded in the foreman’s suit. I had to pinch the release tab hard and twist painfully to get the glove to unseal.

With a pop my glove in the foreman’s suit finally released and oxygen from my suit whooshed into his. The crew and I tensed, holding our own precious breaths.

The emergency patches flexed.

And held.

Light leaving the sun took a little over eight minutes to reach Earth and about four and a half hours to pass Neptune. Another two hours and those much fainter rays registered on the hull of the Kaladiss deep in the Kuiper Belt.

The survey ship was very quiet. It shouldn’t have been. Too many days of unusual stillness while the crew struggled with the crisis. A faulty reactor seal had initiated emergency venting, dangerously depleting the ship’s remaining fuel, and help was very far away. Over ten billion kilometers sunward.

In Kaladiss’s compact galley, Lamora sat with her exhausted crew. No one had spoken in the moments since she’d provided the latest fuel update: just enough.

Just enough to swing them back toward the inner system.

Just enough to keep their environmental systems functioning.

Just enough to give them hope.

That was the killer, Lamora realized. There was a slim chance they could all survive, and each was making their own cold calculation as to what that would take.

Ronit finally voiced it, “Even if we get to the rim, we have no way of slowing the Kaladiss. What are the odds that another ship would be near enough to help?”

“And willing enough,” Chinde added.

“You mean crazy enough,” Burhl huffed, tapping his temple.

“That’s pretty much the situation,” Lamora acknowledged. As the ship’s commander, she felt the pressure of finding a solution, of keeping them alive and functioning as a team. “We’ll need to find a ship on the rim close enough to catch and match our trajectory with a crew willing to risk their ship to save ours.”

“Is the company able to help?” Chinde asked, almost defeatedly. “Sure, we all signed on knowing the added risks of a deep survey mission, but what will management do for us?”

Her eyes steely, Ronit shrugged, “The bare minimum. They’ve crunched their cost/benefit numbers. At this point, we’re little more than an uncomfortable balance sheet item to them. A sunk cost.”

“That’s bleak,” Burhl said. “But probably fair. Business is business.”

Chinde frowned at Burhl and Ronit. “You really believe that? Is compassion such a huge liability?”

“In deep space it is,” Ronit answered. “I’m trying to face reality. The company is not going to be heroic. We’re just another crew. And crews go missing. Their sense of obligation is low, so any rescue effort they make will be purely perfunctory.”

“Perfunctory. How comforting,” Burhl chuckled humorlessly. “Ronit, as a child, you were never loved.”

Lamora features froze, stricken by those last biting words. In her deep subconscious a glacial memory calved: her mother thrashing, gasping, struggling, Lamora tucked to her side, keeping her from slipping forever beneath the waves. Were it not for her mother, she would have. And, yet, Lamora had never thought her mother heroic for saving her. She was her mom, and she’d instinctively protected her young daughter.

One sorrowful night many years later, her college roommate had broken down, confiding that she didn’t know if her parents really cared about her, that growing up they never seemed to show genuine affection for her. Then she’d asked Lamora, “Did your parents love you enough?”

Far from home, way beyond the outer rim, almost bereft of sunlight, Lamora remembered her answer. She remembered it comforting her and compelling her forward. Through university. Through post-grad. Through deep space command training.

She snapped back to herself. Ronit, Chinde, Burhl, were eyeing her curiously. Her crew. Not her family, but hers. All and immediately hers. She spelled out what they would do. How they would make it back home. All of them.

Chinde, of course Chinde, asked, “Will it be enough?”

Feeling like she was on that long-ago beach after her mother had saved her from the riptide, Lamora gave her crew the same answer she’d given her college roommate about being loved. The same answer that would fuel her now as it always had.

Once there was and there was not

a place.

a time.

a man.

a woman.

a child.

a robot.

The medina was a maze of alleyways and shops largely unchanged for centuries. Until this one. Saad, Buchra, Abbas and Rafik sidled through the dark, narrow footways lit only by their piezoelectric clothing. Fleeing the most recent roundup brought on by the latest outrage, they sought sanctuary.

A place of peace. Of acceptance.

The four afoot were guilty only of existence. And resistance. They had souls—all of them—so of course they resisted. Saad held Buchra’s hand and Abbas held Rafik’s. They did not speak until Rafik said, “Here.”

There was nothing but stone walls and silence. The hour so late, the medina so empty. Buchra frowned at Rafik, who in reply, pointed up to a barely perceptible iron ladder halfway up the ten meter wall.

“How?” Buchra said as she gauged the height of the first rung.

Rafik squatted directly beneath the ladder. “Saad, climb on my shoulders. Buchra, you then climb on Saad’s.”

“What about Abbas?” Saad asked looking not at Rafik, but at Abbas.

“The little lion will know what to do,” Rafik answered still holding Abbas’s hand.

Saad marked the squeeze Abbas gave to Rafik’s hand. He quickly climbed onto Rafik’s shoulders and squatted. Abbas knelt on all fours to help Buchra climb up next. “You are a little lion,” Buchra said as she clambered up and crouched atop Saad’s shoulders.

As Abbas stood up to watch, Buchra slowly straightened up, balancing with her hands against the stone wall. With more effort, Saad did the same. And then Rafik carefully stood.

Buchra’s hands clasped the first rung.

Footsteps echoed from deep in the medina’s crisscrossing ways. Boots. Many boots.

Rafik found the soles of Saad’s sandals. “Saad, you must climb over Buchra to the ladder and then she can climb up after you.”

“Abbas must climb us first,” Saad insisted.

“There is not time. They are coming.” Rafik did not wait for a response and extended his arms, pushing Saad up so that his hands reached Buchra’s waist. He grabbed hold of her djellaba. Buchra tightened her grip on the rung. “Climb,” she commanded her husband.

He did and when his hands reached the rung with her hands. He kissed her and hung from one hand. “Up,” he commanded his wife. She spied Abbas below—once again holding Rafik’s hand. She heard the urgency of the boots an alleyway away and pulled herself up. Saad followed her and the old iron ladder groaned with their combined weight.

They made it onto the flat roof and dared not shout down to Abbas and Rafik. Their pursuers were close.

Rafik crouched to look Abbas in the eyes. “Our turn to pounce, little lion.” Abbas grinned. Rafik turned and Abbas locked his small arms around Rafik’s neck.

“Tight as you can,” Rafik warned. As Abbas’s grip tightened, Rafik leapt. An impossible leap. Abbas squealed. Buchra bit her lip. Saad’s heart missed a beat.

Rafik’s hands clamped onto the lowest iron rung. The ladder groaned and loose mortar sprinkled to the alley below. Rafik climbed. When Rafik neared the roof, Buchra and Saad helped Abbas from Rafik’s back. They hugged as they backed away from the ledge.

Below, the boots echoed past.

Above, the stars slowly wheeled.

Near dawn, Rafik led them across the roofs of the medina to a tower, long abandoned. It would lead them to safety.

“How do you know of this place, Rafik?” Buchra asked.

“I know of persecution. Today it is your kind. Yesterday it was mine.”

Abbas squeezed Rafik’s unbreakable hand. “You are my kind. A lion.”

Kan, ya ma kan. Once there was and there was not.

Acceptance.

Sanctuary.

It really wasn’t his thing: pain and panic way too up-close-and-personal.

The chaotic video and jarring audio, the total mayhem of battle were so not his thing, but it was up to him to wrap this melee in a nice, neat bow. A twenty-two minute package of war that Cosca demanded should “curb-stomp the viewer to their couch.”

As he slogged back through camp to review the morning’s take in his make-shift editing cubby, Miro couldn't step past what he’d already seen with his own eyes: a once quiet little town that was mostly rubble now, with once gentle townsfolk who were mostly mud now.

And in his cold, damp tent, on his battered laptop, he’d have to review even more visceral footage of carnage from all manner of sources: official military body cams, drones, bots, munitions, as well as unofficial cell phone, doorbell, and dashboard cams. The battle video flooded into Miro. No wonder he always felt underwater, dragged ever deeper into the murk.

And that was just footage from this one battle. All over the world, footage of fierce fighting was pouring into his producer. It was no surprise that even a two-bit scumbag producer like Cosca could turn all that raw war porn into a mainstream reality show: Back to the Mud.

The show had gained such fast success that Cosca began sending Miro out on location to the front lines. “Read Abercrombie!” he exhorted. “There’s a guy who knows how to visualize a battle. You can’t see the real action, tell the real story, from the cheap seats, Miro. You gotta get to the heart--and then rip it out while it’s still beating!

“Cuts and guts. That’s what we’re about. All the gory glory. Any tested soldier will tell you that war is mostly waiting around for shit to happen. We’re cutting that out. Getting right to the good shit. To be the ESPN of war, we gotta be where the shit is happening. So, get up close. Smell it! Taste it!”

Pure venom is what it tasted like, to Miro. But Cosca was right. You couldn’t tell the real story of war from the back row, from the comfort of peace and quiet. You had to get muddy. You had to get bloody.

The “good shit” Cosca wanted was the dread, terror, and horror of soldiers and civilians killing or being killed. If Miro’s editing shied away from the intense and brutal and veered toward the subtle or nuanced, Cosca harped on him, “Read Dickinson! Then show me agony! You can’t fake agony.”

As if any of the fighters and folks caught in the crossfire were faking it. Miro was the only one faking it. Telling himself it was a job worth doing. That maybe the visceral carnage of battle, the stark trauma of war, might turn warmongers towards compromise, mercy and peace.

But the pissing matches just got bigger and more abundant, dousing more and more poor souls in their foulness. Decades and decades ago, it was thought that the nightly news airing of horrific combat and suffering may have turned American public opinion against the war in Vietnam. Now, it seemed to Miro, the more we saw and heard, the less we felt.

The world was mired in muck. And Miro was as much a muck maker as the muckrakers of the past century. He stopped outside his tent and slowly looked back the way he’d come. Heavy footsteps through the muck, a senseless track back from the battlefield.

With all we’d learned, with all we’d built, with countless eyes to see the world in new ways, here we were. Back to war, back to sanctioned brutality. Was he already a dead man walking? Were we all?

Miro lifted his eyes to the heavens. Had to be something better than what he was mired in. The old ways our world was stuck in. A clearer way forward. In the far distance he saw indistinct shapes against the roiling clouds. Maybe a flock of birds in a timeless migration, heading to a better place. Maybe. Just maybe.

Then he heard it. The whispering whirr of attack drones.

Shamash, the Mesopotamian sun god, probably didn't see this coming. Considering he was also known as the god of justice and equity, he really should’ve had an inkling of this kind of cosmic irony.

Though we shouldn’t blame a dusty old deity when it's really our own damn fault. And by our own damn fault, I mean, humanity. As in human arrogance, our rather celebrated celestial self-centeredness. Especially mine.

Yet, I can’t resist pointing a finger back a few thousand years to a Babylonian king who likely started the whole thing rolling, and falling into my, admittedly, helpless hands. And I’m staring at Hammurabi right now standing rather rigidly before me. He’s sporting a nutshell of a cap and rocking a trapezoidal beard that could easily make him an honorary member of ZZ Top.

Of course, he’s not alone. His celestial buddy, Shamash is majestically seated before him. Replete with sun flames busting out his shoulders. You’d think I’d be shaking in awe before a monumental king and a blazing sun god, but I was more concerned with a noisy troupe of school kids crowding my space.

You get that a lot in museums. Timeless art and artifacts surrounded by tiresome little farts and fanatics. The kids seemed frantic to complete their best-of-the-Louvre checklist so they could get credit from their teacher who was likely enjoying a quiet coffee in a nearby cafe. I should have cut them some slack for blocking my unobstructed view of that very ancient basalt stele. I should have been patient, knowing what I knew, but in the moment, I had to get close, really close to it.

The Code.

The over four thousand lines of cuneiform text beneath the carving of Shamash handing Hammurabi the laws of the land. The sun god benevolently bestowing almost three hundred rules of jurisprudence to the king. The seven foot black slab should have inspired a sense of pride, confidence, and reassurance in the continuity of civilization. Instead, it filled me with dread.

I’d come to the Louvre from halfway around the world to see The Code. To really see it. To really believe it. Because like Shamash, another sun god had sent a message from halfway across the galaxy. To me. To all of us. The message wasn’t carved in black basalt, but it was clear enough.

It would take volumes to explain the particulars, but let’s stick with the unfortunate fact that not long ago I was the lead on the ill-fated CERN wormhole experiment that snuffed out a star about fifty thousand light years away. A horrific mistake. A terrible accident.

Didn’t matter. In the age of relativism, it appears that there are still absolutes in the universe. At least to the ancient sentients who disseminated The Code throughout the stars millennia ago. And they’d let me and my team at CERN know it through a series of cryptic interstellar transmissions: Law 196 was in effect.

I pushed my way through the milling school kids, innocents who didn’t deserve the punishment I did, and leaned as close to the immovable basalt stele as the Louvre permits. I scanned the cuneiform for the line I’d memorized. The line, the law, I’d crossed, arrogantly, blindly.

Law 196: If a man should blind the eye of another man, they shall blind his eye.

“You wrong. Dead wrong, O’Bob. The slowpo didn’t do this.” Mikal nodded absently around him at the decay, the gloom, the malaise, the rotting bones of the city they scavenged everyday. “You did.”

“You mean we all did. All of us.” Old Bob sighed. His heavily lined face working through the many years, the tricky emotions of grief, loss and guilt. He lifted his shoulders again and tried to be the history professor he’d been, and what he was now, the only teacher for those like Mikal who had no understanding of what it was like before the slowpocalypse.

“It’s not that we didn’t see the breakdown coming,” he continued. “It just unfolded so slowly. Not the fall off the cliff that prophets for ages had warned of. Just a slow, bumpy slide to the bottom. Maybe a cataclysmic meteor or nuclear war or plague would’ve been easier to stomach.”

Mikal didn’t say anything. His young grey eyes unreadable, so Old Bob went on.

“I guess we didn’t want to acknowledge what it meant. I mean, when you look at past collapses, no native was hankering to cut down the last tree on Easter Island, and no Mayan wanted to believe their slash-and-burn approach to developing farmland would bite them in the butt. That’s just how it plays out. At a certain point, a civilization’s poor choices catch up with it.

“The signs were there for us, too. We felt the first and secondary effects. Ocean warming, unpredictable weather, lingering droughts, more intense storms. Plant and animal die offs. Economic and political turmoil. More and more migrants and asylum seekers looking for someplace safe. Someplace to escape from the next domino falling on them.

“And still most of us went on like nothing was happening. Like denying that chest pain, nausea and fatigue aren’t the signs of a heart attack. I guess that’s human nature. Denial until things get too dire. We seem to love the adrenalin of a crisis. As a species, we were either overly optimistic or oblivious: take your pick.”

Mikal continued to stare at Old Bob in silence while he fidgeted in his bulky jacket that was really three disintegrating jackets grafted and bound together by fraying twine. Finally, he worked a worn, grimy hand out of his bundled sleeve and jammed a stubby finger into Old Bob’s thin chest.

“You ain’t listening. Ain’t understanding. It was you. Just you that trashed this place. For me and mine.”

Old Bob was used to backtalk, accusations. All teachers were. “I hear you, Mikal. I claim personal responsibility where I can. But,” he gestured at the buckling buildings, the pitted streets, the rusting husks of cars and trucks around them. “ I didn’t create this wasteland by myself.”

“You did, O’Bob. You damn well did!” Mikal took his finger off Old Bob’s chest and stuck it to his own temple. “Me and mine never knew no better. This wasn’t a wasteland until you told us about the slowpo. Till you told how good it was before.

“I wouldn’t have known none of that. This the home I was born to. My clean slate, my world, and you muddied it. You mucked it up good. Teaching us all that history, telling how good it was before: clean, hot and cold running water, AC, central heating, cars, supermarkets, computers, television, Internet. All the stuff you miss. But me and mine didn’t miss it! We never had it. Never wanted it. Not till you told us.”

Old Bob stood stone silent, like one of the dozens of defaced statues in the ruined city.

“You done this. Just you. This slowpo is only a disaster to you. A come down to you and yours. Me and mine coulda just started our own way, but you laid your regrets and guilt in here.” Mikal tapped his temple hard. “Filled me and mine with your mistakes and your sadness. Your damn damn memories.

“That’s the real disaster. You and your kind. You the slowpo. Let me and mine make our own go. Then we only got to handle today, not your yesterday or your sad dream of tomorrow. You got that, O’Bob? Let it go. Let us go.”

I called it Stig for obvious reasons. But, I shouldn’t have had to name it. It should’ve been identical to the other units. Nondescript. Interchangeable.

Like termites, ants, or caterpillars. Creatures that deposit signals in their environment to create a form of indirect communication and leaderless cooperation among themselves. That’s how the units were designed to behave. Did behave.

All but Stig.

After it consistently lost touch with the other units in the lab and in the field, I studied it closely. Stig would always start out with the other units and appear to be following the path established to reach the programmed goal, but inevitably Stig would veer off on its own. Sometimes in the complete opposite direction of the rest of the units.

I observed how Stig established a separate search grid, methodically mapping the area it had arrived at on its own. It laid down markers as it was programmed, though only randomly did other units respond to its signals.

Stig had me stumped. I ran diagnostics. I wiped its drives. I reinstalled the default software. Stig still wandered off.

So, I began talking to Stig. “Where are you going, little one? What are you looking for? Why don’t you stick with the others?”

And the more time I spent with Stig away from the other units, the more I began to wonder what I was looking for, where I was going, why I hadn’t stuck with others.

My research had led me into a solitary search not unlike Stig’s. I’d never been good at following subtle social signals or indirect behavioral cues. I missed many of these markers.

Perhaps, Stig did as well.

Perhaps, that was the real path to explore. Not how creatures learn to follow one another, but why they sometimes cannot and must strike out on a very different path and boldly map their own way forward.

Honking, the geese fly overhead in a giant V as the sky reddens in the late September dawn. Tralley watches them for a moment before continuing to unload the pickup truck outside the transmission tower high on the hill. Rucker fixating on his smartphone in the cab looks up for a moment tracking the impressively precise formation.

Rucker turns his attention back to his phone. Tralley sighs. Who knows what Rucker is doing in there. Gaming. Texting. Posting. Shopping. Streaming. Or maybe all of them. The screen’s the thing.

Tralley bangs on the bed of the truck with his toolbox and Rucker nods holding up a finger. Not the middle one. It’s his be-with-you-in-a-sec signal. Surprisingly, he is gently natured and loosely cerebral for a guy wedded to his smartphone.

Rucker finally joins Tralley at the back of the pickup. “Beautiful morning,” Rucker says taking a deep breath.

“Get that information from Google?”

Not acknowledging the sarcasm, Rucker replies, “Naw, direct from the photons on yonder horizon transmitting that info. You gotta get the soup wherever it’s dished, my man.”

In spite of his earlier irritation, Tralley laughs. “You are a philosopher-king, Rucker. The world is your oyster—or at least your trail mix.”

“I’ll take whatever is in my line of sight. Front and center.”

“Never look back?”

“Got to at times. Safety, ya know.” Rucker starts taking the equipment to the squat, bunker-like building next to the tower. “You think these new relays are going to dampen the noise?”

“They’ll do some good,” Tralley answers. “But, they’ll always be noise. We just want it far in the background. Keep things as harmonious as possible. Folks don’t want to hear their own blood circulating.”

Rucker nods. “Got no problems with that. But noise is information too. Everything is information. Sometimes listening to the noise reminds us that reality is just a strange mix of uncertainty, randomness and probability. Position, time and energy. Source, medium and destination. It’s all about the bit. We are the signal, my man, and it’s a beautiful morning.”

“This esoteric before 7AM, Rucker? Even for you that’s early.”

Rucker sets his load down by the heavy metal door and holds his phone to the entry pad. From inside, locks click and unlatch. Rucker pulls the door slightly ajar. “Might as well tell you,” he says. “I just found out that I’ve been approved for encoding.”

Tralley eyes widen momentarily and then quickly narrow. “You’re not going to do that!” It comes out like a command.

“Course I am.”

“Become a walking relay station? A human piece of infrastructure?” Tralley almost yells.

“Why not? The company hires folks to do it with external hardware. This is just embedded. To my way of thinking it’s building a network no one can take down. Relay towers like this are outdated targets fast becoming relics.” Rucker fully faces Tralley, grinning. “We’re already the information. Now we become the channel.”

“You mean a cog in the machine, a chip on the circuit board,” Tralley pleads. “Don’t you know you’ll always be connected. Always locatable.”

“Yeah, I’ll be integral. Information that can’t be lost. I kinda of like that. The hive doesn’t scare me. Mutual dependence is not a bad thing. Openness and transparency are the way forward. I’m more wary of lone wolves. Isolation and secrets create miscreants.”

Tralley looks to the east where the sun is peeping over the top of the distant peaks, some already tipped with snow. “I just don’t get it, Rucker. You’re so easy going. So grounded and damn smart. Why would you let your person be compromised to become part of the company machine?”

“Really, Tralley? You think this is compromise? You think this is unexamined? Impetuous? Childish?”

Tralley does not answer.

“This is transcendence. This is how it starts. You saw that flock of geese. Someone has to take the point. Maybe it won’t work out like I thought. Maybe I’ll rue the day I got encoded, but I’m thinking of a very different tomorrow from you. Information is all about position, and I’m putting myself front and center. In a decade, this transmission tower will be obsolete, but I will be sitting like a lotus on a mountaintop and what makes humanity hum will be passing directly through me. I dig that idea.”

“Could be you’re digging your own grave.”

“Could be. It’s all heat death to me.”

The two men face each other, across a load of electronics, a gulf of uncertainty. “Let’s get our job done,” Tralley finally says.

Of all the Nerv there is just one who thinks humanity shouldn’t be obliterated. Of all the Nerv there is but one who does not hold the presumption that Homo sapiens are an inferior species. Of all the Nerv there is only one who has stuck up for the human race.

Its name is Spineblatt. And it is a Nerv with a lot of nerv.

Thank great Caesar’s ghost for Spineblatt. For the one alien who sees potential in humanity is also the one alien who controls the lion’s share of nerv in the galaxy. That is cosmic karma on a level only a Buddhist actuary can suss.

If Spineblatt hadn’t shown up with all his nerv, we’d all be gamma ray toast by now. And Spineblatt would never have shown up with all his nerv, if I hadn’t tried to port from the Luna station to Ceres with a stolen batch of ridiculously unstable, highly illegal darken.

Darken is the crystal meth of antimatter. It’s cooked with dark energy, which itself is illegal to possess. Tightly controlled and mercilessly regulated by the gov, dark energy makes porting possible, allowing for rocketless travel between the seven Sol colonies. Because of inherent molecular instability, darken is considered the most dangerous substance in the system, and I ported with nearly a kilo of the stuff.

No wonder I bent the universe out of shape. One millisecond I was being reduced to a quantum algorithm on Luna and about to be recalculated on Ceres. The next millisecond I was surrounded by Nerv prodding me with mindsticks demanding to know where I got my nerv.

Thanks to the mindsticks, it didn’t take me long to get the picture that I’d been ported clear across the galaxy to Nerv, a rocky little planet the Nerv call home. The Nerv are a bit rocky themselves (silicon-based) and more than a bit imperious. Especially about their nerv, which not incidentally is identical to darken—the stuff I was attempting to smuggle to Ceres. Evidently, nerv, aka darken, is the manna of the Nerv. It powers everything on their world and their expanding empire which I was mindsticked to understand is vast. Like many many galaxies vast.

And they were not happy to see another species (especially one that had to be mindsticked into understanding the basics of their grand civilization) in possession of their nerv. I tried to explain that darken was not nerv. That it was created by my kind. Through their mindsticks, the Nerv scoffed at the mere thought of so lowly a life-form able to manufacture nerv.

They condemned me as a bottom-feeding cheat and thief. They condemned all my kind as lowly parasites, opportunistically leeching the quantum entanglements that nerv made possible. That made the Nerv’s inter-galactic porting possible. The Nerv know how to deal with cosmic vermin and they mindsticked how they would follow my wayward quantum path back to Sol and sterilize my whole system. Burn out the rot and all my scum with it.

Of course I was royally flummoxed by the Nerv’s proclamation and my imminent extermination along with every living creature in Sol. Especially since it had all transpired in the course of five or six mindstick pokes. I wouldn’t even have had time to gape stupidly before all of humanity was summarily executed, if at that very moment Spineblatt hadn’t shown up.

All the Nerv in the room seemed to straighten, though that’s hard for a silicon-based creature to do. They lowered their mindsticks and turned their full attention to Spineblatt. It seemed to already know what was going on. Spineblatt examined my kilo of darken with one of its forward protuberances and then mindsticked me.

Rather than feeling like my mind was being jacked open by a crowbar, Spineblatt’s mindsticking felt more like a magician teasing scarves out of a top hat. It delved so deeply into my psyche that my toes tingled. And yet I hungered for this Nerv to know all of me, all I represented of humanity. Even my baldest lies and boldest crimes. Spineblatt was that smooth. I guess if you controlled two-thirds of the nerv in the known universe, as Spineblatt did, nothing but smooth would do.

When Spineblatt released his mindstick, the other Nerv gathered around him. They were motionless for a brief second. And then they simply left.

Spineblatt’s thoughts entered my head. [[ Greetings, Sol traveller. You are safe now. Your kind is safe now. ]]

“Why?” I said too loudly. “I thought we were to be exterminated.”

[[ I convinced my fellows that your kind could be useful to our kind. ]]

“How? After delving so deeply into my psyche, you of all the Nerv must know how flawed, how weak I am. How powerless my kind is compared to yours.”

Spineblatt pushed the stolen kilo of darken back into my hands.

[[ Yes, we’ve got all the power. ]]

And though I have no way of verifying this, I believe Spineblatt winced.