Edges

Chapter 3

For nearly six hundred years Urban had existed as a pattern of data, an electronic ghost, a virtual entity, a complex ever-changing simulacrum of his biological self that ran on a web of computational tissue grown within the Chenzeme courser. An army of highly evolved defensive Makers guarded the perimeter of his holdings, preventing all attempts at incursion by aggressive Chenzeme nanomachines.

This ghost could imagine itself as the inhabitant of a physical body, or as pure mind, or it could adopt the senses of the courser.

Urban had secured his control over the warship by replicating his ghost over and over again and then editing and pruning each electronic avatar to create a new, machinelike personality incapable of distraction or boredom. These artificial ghosts became his staff, his crew, each designed to embrace a specific task—navigation, calculation, astronomy, library research, Chenzeme bio-mechanics, and engineering, including the propulsion and weapon systems.

He named these assistant personalities the Apparatchiks, an ancient term whose connotation of blind devotion to assigned duty he found amusing.

Urban had synthesized an army of Dull Intelligences too, to assist the Apparatchiks and to handle all the simple, repetitive tasks each day required—not that he experienced night and day, but he held tight to the tradition of measuring time according to the days and years of Earth though millennia had passed since any news had come from there and maybe, most likely, humanity’s birth world was gone to dust.

He’d like to know if that was true.

Urban had also created small outrider ships, based on the design of Messenger, the little ship that had taken Clemantine’s ghost back to Deception Well. He’d named his outriders after ancient gods and guiding spirits: Khonsu, Artemis, Lam Lha, Pytheas, Elepaio, and Fortuna. None were armed, but they extended the reach of his senses and his communications.

He’d grown the fleet of six from raw materials carried by the massive warship, matter originally intended for the ship’s own bio-mechanical reproduction.

For most of their existence, the outriders had run ahead of the courser in a long, staggered line, spaced ninety light-minutes apart. All were equipped with small telescopes enabling them to observe across the spectrum. Combining the data they collected gave Urban a detailed view of distant objects. And each outrider held backup copies of his library, and archived copies of his ghost.

Replication was a form of insurance. Even in the void of deep space there was a potential for collision with some bit of rubble. The courser, with all its mass, might be able to survive the huge energies of a high-speed impact, but the tiny outriders could not. Over the centuries, two of them—Khonsu and Artemis—had been destroyed.

Urban had grown new ships to replace them, giving them the same names.

He did what was needed to survive and he endured, but he did not let himself forget who and what he was. He took care to guard his core persona, that most-human version of himself. To endure the years, he modified his time sense, ensuring that neither the events of his past nor his hopes for the future ever seemed too far off as the ship coasted in a centuries-long passage through the vastness between stars.

As he finally drew near to Deception Well, he copied his core persona: one version to stay aboard the courser, another to replicate through the chain of outriders, establish communication, and eventually pass through a data gate aboard the warship stationed at the periphery of the nebula.

If all went well, these two ghosts would ultimately recombine into one. Until then, they operated independently, separated by light-hours from one another.

For the first time since he had hijacked the courser and made it his own, Urban rose to consciousness inside a physical body. His eyes snapped open. He heard the beat of his heart. Felt the touch of cool air against newly made skin and a faint electrostatic charge lofting the sparse black hair on his forearms.

He stretched the arms, legs, neck, back, even the feet of this avatar, newly grown aboard the warship, Long Watch. A fully rendered version of himself. Sleek and lean and comfortingly familiar. He curled long-fingered hands into fists, unfolded them again. Relishing the details of mass and resistance, of existence itself. So many years spent in simulated reality he’d forgotten how different it felt to be alive. How glorious. A pleasure just to breathe again, to feel the rumble of his stomach.

Hungry. Not just for food. Instinct stirred, sending blood towards his groin in an ancient tide. Desire as a homecoming rite, an affirmation of place. He’d been alone so long.

Was he still alone?

He shifted his focus outward. Found himself adrift in a zero-gravity environment, nude, confined within a transparent membrane just large enough to contain him. Strokes of light curved across the membrane’s shifting surface and across his dark-skinned body.

What was the membrane for? It might be just a gel cocoon left over from his resurrection, although in his experience those were designed to dissolve and drizzle away.

It might be meant to confine him.

Beyond the membrane, a dark undefined space.

His atrium sought a network connection. Found none. Not a surprise. Still, his isolation made him uneasy.

He peered past the cocoon. Was someone there?

Certainly there would be cameras on him, watching, evaluating. And his body would have been studied in detail as it was grown and assembled, confirming he was truly human. He expected no less.

The people of Deception Well—whoever they were in this era—were taking a chance by communicating with him at all. It was a risk on his side too. So much time had passed since he’d left the Well he could not claim to know his people anymore. His heart beat faster as he wondered: Have I made a mistake?

Aloud, he asked, “Why the darkness, the silence?”

No answer, but beyond the gel membrane darkness yielded to a barely perceptible blue light emanating from the walls of a small spherical chamber. As the light brightened, it picked out the edges and curves of a woman’s drifting figure. A familiar silhouette.

“Clemantine,” he growled in a low, victorious voice. The light became whiter, revealing the woman he’d come to find.

She had not changed, not physically. They’d been lovers once and he remembered every curve of that long, strong, well-muscled body, the feel of full breasts in his hands, the spicy scent of her skin. Her face was the same too: a broad, beautiful, balanced face with a flat nose and full lips. Serious in its expression, even now.

His heart hammered as he gazed at her; his hands shook. The joy of meeting her again almost overwhelming. He longed to reach for her, ached for her physical reality, skin to skin. He held back only because he did not see any similar joy on her face.

Instead, she looked distraught and defensive. “Who are you?” she asked. A demand phrased as a question. The chill in her words froze him.

“You know me,” he answered.

“I did once. But who are you now? Did they turn you?”

“They?” he asked. “There is no they. The Chenzeme—whatever they were—they’re gone. We found remnants. Artifacts. That’s all. But we learned. Like I told you in the radio message, we won. We learned how to beat their ships.”

“If you won, where are the others? You said ‘I’ve come home.’ Not we. What happened to them?”

The fear and suspicion in her eyes was more than he’d expected. “They stayed behind,” he told her. He made no effort to hide the bitterness these words brought him, but she was unmoved by it.

“Why?” she insisted.

He shook his head. “I’m not going to tell you that story, Clemantine. It’s in the library files that I’ve transferred over. I haven’t hidden any part of it. Not from you. Relive it there if you want to. I don’t want to. I want to talk about you. I came here to find you.”

Raising a hand, he probed at the membrane, pressing his fingers through what proved to be delicate tissue. Tore it open.

She watched him, unmoving. He didn’t doubt that she’d left instructions to disassemble them both down to their constituent atoms if something went wrong and he proved to be a Chenzeme weapon after all.

“How did you get here so soon?” he asked her. Then he held up a palm to stop her reply. “No, I already know. You were here. Do you keep an avatar aboard the second warship too? Waiting on the system’s periphery for some word from us, for someone to come back. I think you hoped it would be someone else, and not me.”

Her golden-brown cheeks warmed with a flush. “No. Urban…” Her eyes glistened. “I never thought to see him again. I never thought I’d see any of you. But if I’d ever considered that only one of you might make it back, I would have guessed it’d be you.” Her voice shifted, becoming low and feral: “But a Chenzeme warship, Urban. No one else—”

“That’s right,” he interrupted. “No one else dared to do it, to come all this way in a Chenzeme ship. Not even that other version of you. But here you are on a different timeline.” He reached out a hand to her. “Maybe you’ll make a different choice.”

To his surprise, she took his hand, pulled him into a tight embrace. He reciprocated, the warm scent of her an aphrodisiac exploding across his brain. He kissed her neck, her face. He remembered the pretty chains of tiny gold irises tattooed on the edges of her small ears; he found them and kissed those too. Glittering tears broke free and writhed in the cool air.

“This avatar is not really you, is it?” she asked.

“No. It is me. This is the core.” He got his hand up under her shirt, kissed the corner of her mouth. “Please,” he whispered. “Have mercy for once. It’s been a thousand years.”

Her throaty chuckle jacked him even harder than he’d been before. Unbearable.

The chamber shrank around them, squeezing out the glint of camera eyes, leaving them enclosed in a hollow just large enough to contain them. No way out. No way in.

Clemantine helped him peel off the thin layer of her clothing and then they locked together, his fingers embedded like claws in the soft wall to hold their position, her fingers hard against his back. Reminding one another of what it was to be physical beings, man and woman. To be alive.

Later, but still too soon, he told her, “I’ve got only hours before I have to go.”

He held her close, her body against his, a physical connection unbroken since they’d begun.

She leaned back in his arms and eyed him sleepily. “You have forever,” she countered. “You’re home. This avatar, anyway. This is your home.”

“No. I won’t stay.” Her body tensed in his arms, her embrace tightened as if she would hold him there. “I made that decision long ago,” he reminded her. “I’m here now for you—and to trade information. I’ve already transferred the full history of our expedition. Now I need data from Silk’s library. Everything known about the Hallowed Vasties. Their history, and current observations. I’ve got only hours to make the exchange. You’re tracking the courser so you know this is a fly-by. I wish it could be longer, but it would have taken years to dump enough velocity to achieve orbit—and if I’d tried it, this warship or the other one would have blown me up.”

“You sent the swarm ships instead,” she mused. “We thought they were some kind of weapon, plague ships maybe.”

“Just communications relays to extend my reach, give me more hours here.”

She shook her head. Sighed deeply. “Damn you, Urban. After so many centuries, to have no time. And you don’t stay, you won’t leave even a ghost. Because no version of you wants to be trapped here?”

“Sooth,” he agreed.

Bitter now: “Some things never change.”

“You know me, Clemantine. I’m in possession of an immensely fast and powerful starship. What version of me would ever give that up?”

She sighed again. “No version I know. So you’re going there? To the Hallowed Vasties?”

He nodded, wanting her to share his excitement. “Our origin lies in the Hallowed Vasties. Our beginning, our earliest days. But it’s all changed. All of it unknown now. That makes it a new frontier, an inverted frontier, because the unexplored region lies inward from the edge of settled space. I want to see what’s there, what’s left, voyage all the way to Earth if I can.”

The outward migration from Earth had unfolded over thousands of years. Robotic probes went first, exploring and mapping tens of thousands of stellar systems, looking for those with sterile worlds orbiting within habitable zones. Those worlds were re-engineered, made viable and beautiful for the people who came to possess them.

It was as if the galaxy had been given to humankind by an unknown god, theirs to nurture and to slowly fill with new generations.

Frontier populations were never great in number, but they were enough that an innate restlessness drove some portion of them onward to still newer worlds. Always, they were the individuals who made a choice to engage in life, in the reality of physical existence.

That choice served as a filter in a selection process dividing them from those who chose to stay.

And when they looked back across space and time, they wondered what they’d left behind as megastructures enclosed the stars of the earliest inhabited systems.

On the frontier, those distant star systems came to be known as the Hallowed Vasties. Frightening rumors crossed the void, describing a behavioral virus run wild, one that spurred massive population growth and an evolutionary leap to a group mind, a Communion that was more than human.

Too far away to worry about. That was the consensus on the frontier and people pushed on—until the Chenzeme warships found them.

In those tumultuous centuries as the frontier collapsed, the Hallowed Vasties too began to fail. The stars that had been hidden within cordons of matter emerged again, and no one knew why.

Urban wanted to know why. It was the goal he had set for himself: to learn what had happened to the Hallowed Vasties and what was left. If there were only remnants and ruins, he wanted to see them. If something had grown up from the ruins, he wanted to see that too. He wanted to see it all with his own eyes.

“I’ve watched the Vasties for centuries,” he told Clemantine. “Every star ever known to have been mantled by a Dyson swarm is visible again. We thought that meant failure. Civilizational collapse on a massive scale. Death. But there are signs of life. Transmission spectra confirm the presence of oxygen, water, organic molecules. I want to know what was there, what happened, and what’s come after. And I don’t want to go alone. I want you to come with me.”

She closed her eyes, giving him no answer. He nuzzled her neck. “What are you thinking?”

“The past and the future,” she whispered. “Both are so very far away. That last time I saw you—you and him—a thousand years ago. And another thousand years to Earth, even in that great beast you’ve stolen.”

“It is a great beast,” he agreed. “And I’ve named it after a great beast. I call it Dragon. And time doesn’t matter to us. So what if it takes a thousand years to reach the Hallowed Vasties? If the time drags, we sleep.”

“How peacefully can we sleep aboard a Chenzeme courser?” she asked him.

He told her, “Don’t think of it that way. It’s a hybrid ship. Its neural structure is heavily modified. It’s under my control. And I want you with me again. You. After all those years we spent together, you are part of me… and I am so hungry for human company. Don’t abandon me again.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I think that other version of me made a smart choice to stay behind.”

“No. I think she regrets her choice. Because you’re her. You’re the same. You haven’t changed. You don’t have another life, do you? No new lover, no children. All you’ve done is wait. You’ve skipped over these years, passed them in cold sleep, waiting for us to come back.”

“I needed to know,” she said defensively. “But you—you seem the same too. That’s on purpose, isn’t it? You want me to believe you’re still that same smart-ass pirate, but Urban, you can’t be. Not if you’ve grafted yourself on to that alien killing machine.”

A tremor of guilt. A shrug. A confession: “This is me. My human core. I keep this persona because I want to remember who I am and what matters. But I’m not alone. I remade myself multiple times. My Apparatchiks are highly edited, each with a different technical skill. They’re based on me, but they’re not me anymore. Some of them are insufferable and sometimes we argue among ourselves, but no mutiny so far.”

“All ghosts?”

“Yes.”

“And what is it like to be the master of an alien killing machine?”

He tapped his chest and told her the blunt truth: “For me, this version of me, it’s fucking miserable. Soul-annihilating loneliness. Out there, coasting in the void between stars, awake and aware and so far from anywhere or anything, any human thing, knowing with utter certainty that I’m alone and not even the mind of the Unknown God could find me. It’s terrifying.”

“That’s not a very persuasive argument if you’re trying to convince me to come with you.”

“I need you.”

“I don’t want to live as a ghost.”

“We don’t have to. It’s a big ship. There’s room. There are resources. We can be physical when we want it—and god, I want it. I want you. And when time becomes unbearable we can retreat into cold sleep to speed the transit, like we did before. Think about it. Please.”

“I am thinking about it,” she admitted. She stroked his arm, his cheek, considering what he’d offered. “An inverted frontier?”

“Yes. That’s how I think of it.”

“I like that.”

Curiosity was awake within her—an almost forgotten feeling. And he was right that she had no attachments, no obligations of honor. She’d spent three-quarters of a millennium asleep, waiting for some word.

She told him, “It was unbearable not knowing what had happened out there. I would have turned around and gone back after you, but I was afraid that no matter how long I looked, I would never find a sign of you. That seemed the likeliest outcome.”

“This time we’ll be together. No doubt about what happens. We’ll know.”

She nodded her tentative agreement. “I want to send a ghost to your ship, now, to verify what you’re telling me.”

“Due diligence,” he agreed. “You’ve got the address.”

She shifted her focus inward, using her atrium to create the ghost, and then she sent it on its way. If this turned out to be a trap, the ghost could dissolve itself. If it didn’t return, she would know.

“It’s a long round trip,” he warned her.

“I can wait.”

“I want you to go over the library files too,” he said. “Make sure they’re legitimate, consistent, human.”

“I’ve got a DI working on it,” she assured him.

He nodded shortly, then confessed, “I’ve sequestered some of the data. Nothing critical. Just some of the raw details. Things too personal to share in full—mostly at the end. That cache is open to you, but no one else.”

“All right.” Her voice, suddenly hoarse. She feared what she might find when she accessed that privileged data. It might be enough for her—it might be best—to know in only a general way what had happened.

She allowed herself one question: “We lost him in the end, didn’t we?”

“Yes.”

A soft sigh. She had always known it.

“Nineteen hours,” Urban warned, “before we lose data coherence.”

“Okay.”

Time enough. If he was lying, if this was subterfuge, if his apparent sincerity was a false front for a Chenzeme weapon, the history he carried would surely reveal it.

He must have guessed her thoughts, because he looked at her with that pirate half-smile of his, so familiar, taunting her away from melancholy, and he asked, “You still don’t trust me, do you?”

She replied very seriously, “In the madness of these hours I don’t trust myself.”