Edges

Chapter 6

Urban’s ghost left Long Watch with transmission protocols set to ensure no copy would be left behind. The data that defined him passed first through a gate on Khonsu, the closest ship in the outrider fleet. From there, the ghost was relayed to Lam Lha, and then Artemis, and on up the chain until at last it reached the courser. There, it melded with the ghost Urban had left behind.

That moment did not produce a revelatory burst within his core persona; he experienced no high of enlightenment at the awareness of another life lived. Instead, the arrival of his ghost induced a sense of absentmindedness. Because its memories were already his own, receiving them was like waking from an artificial amnesia, the abrupt recovery of a history he’d always known, but had temporarily forgotten.

Two distinct timelines now accounted for his recent past: one in which he’d gone to find Clemantine and the other where he’d stayed aboard Dragon, waiting in suspense to learn if she would come.

She had come, and to his profound relief her visiting ghost had chosen to stay.

He turned to her, this version of her that had arrived through the data gate hours ago to undertake an inspection of Dragon. She’d sent subminds back to Long Watch bearing the memories of what she’d found, but she remained here, with him. The virtual environment of Dragon’s library contained them in a simulation of physical existence, so that they appeared identical to their living avatars aboard Long Watch.

Clemantine watched him curiously, sensing the difference in him brought on by the melding of timelines.

“You’re back,” she said.

“Yes.” He raised a hand, touched her cheek. The simulation conveyed a sense of gentle pressure, but not her warmth, or the faint spicy scent of her skin—a poverty of detail intrinsic to the library’s virtual world.

She kissed his hand with dry, breathless lips before smiling a sly smile. This version of her bolder and more confident, already at home here.

Her first question upon arriving had been, “Is this library a copy of the one on Null Boundary?”

“Yes,” he’d told her. “Though I’ve worked on it since. Organizing, indexing, adding new observations. And I modified the interface.”

The baseline visual architecture was deceptively simple, just a bright white path crossing a boundless, blue-gradient plain that grew darker with distance. There appeared to be nothing there, but an extra sense available to their avatars allowed them to perceive the data embedded at every point.

Clemantine had adapted easily to the new system. After she’d mastered search functions and the summoning of windows, he’d briefly introduced her to his crew of Apparatchiks, all six of them derived from his persona but diversified into distinct individuals with machinelike natures that allowed them to focus obsessively on their specialties: the Engineer, the Bio-mechanic, the Pilot, the Astronomer, the Scholar, and the Mathematician.

“It’s interesting,” she had observed, “that you utilize both a swarm of outrider ships and a swarm of personas.”

“A modular existence,” he’d agreed. “Expanded senses and an expanded intellect, all supporting my intentions.”

The Engineer was the only Apparatchik on deck now. He looked out at them from within a frameless two-dimensional window, standing with arms crossed, a flat brown background behind him. Superficially, the Engineer looked like Urban but his speech patterns, his expression, the way he carried himself, and the way he dressed—in dull brown coveralls—all distinguished him from the master copy. Within his frame he appeared at full scale, his intent gaze focused on a three-dimensional illustration of a new project, floating head-high above the library floor.

The illustration depicted a small warren of tunnels and chambers that together would suffice as a simple physical habitation where a handful of people could live. Temporary quarters, quick to grow. Clemantine had taken on the task of overseeing the design.

“I like working with the Engineer,” she mused, still eyeing Urban with that sly smile. “He’s blunt, but so calm and efficient, and he answers questions in an instant.” Her finely shaped eyebrows arched. “I wonder why you’ve always hidden this aspect of yourself?”

The Engineer snorted. “Other than my blunt speech, the qualities you’ve named are all artificial additions to my personality’s original framework.”

“Then he isn’t you?” Clemantine asked in feigned innocence.

“No more than necessary,” Urban agreed. He’d long ago grown accustomed to the incessant preening and self-regard of all the Apparatchiks, not just the Engineer, who was the most tolerable among them.

Their conceit derived from Urban’s personality, he understood that. Within the tailored personas of the Apparatchiks, conceit had become distilled and concentrated, just like the qualities that let them acquire and sustain their essential skills. Each one of them a specialist, sentient and self-aware but focused obsessively on their subjects of interest and incapable of distraction or boredom. They made for deeply irritating company but they were his crew and they supported him in his position and his ambition.

Turning to the Engineer, Clemantine spoke with exaggerated regard, “It’s clear to me now why you’re so good at what you do.”

“You’ll get bored with him,” Urban assured her. He gestured at the 3-D illustration. The actual warren was already under development, its initial growth phase begun hours earlier. “Let’s see how far we’ve gotten.”

The courser was, in some sense, a living thing—or more accurately, a mosaic of diverse lifeforms woven into one monstrous bio-mechanical organism. It had the shape of a long tapered cylinder. Deep in that cylinder’s core, banks of active tissue worked to sort and store vast quantities of material that could be extracted when needed and then recombined to build nearly anything. Around the core, and comprising the bulk of the ship, was a layer of bio-mechanical tissue interleaved with Chenzeme computational strata. Another computational layer, this one composed of millions of Chenzeme philosopher cells, wrapped the outer hull.

The philosopher cells glowed with white light. Each was effectively a tiny mechanistic mind, neither conscious nor self-aware but adaptable, capable of thought, containing memory, and perpetually engaged in simultaneous machine-sharp debates that ran in currents across the cell field. The cells formed alliances and gambled opinions, the links between them made and shattered a thousand times a second as they tested the validity of ideas and intentions, and negotiated consensus. Together the philosopher cells formed the mind of the ship, an intellectual machine specialized for the ruthless pursuit and destruction of lifeforms not of their kind—except that Urban controlled them now.

He’d hijacked the ship by introducing a parasitic neural system into its structure. A molecular war had ensued as an army of Chenzeme nanomachines attempted to defend against the invasion, but the Makers Urban brought with him had proved capable of more rapid adaptation. He’d swiftly come to dominate the ship’s Chenzeme mind.

His neural system had continued to expand, growing ever more intricate over centuries, reaching everywhere within the warship. He’d tested his control under demanding circumstances and concluded it was absolute—at least under the ship’s current configuration.

The warren growing within Dragon’s bio-mechanical tissue would change things. He’d never before tried to create a human-friendly inholding. The Engineer had consulted with the Bio-mechanic and they’d agreed it could be done and that for the first time, Urban could exist as a physical avatar aboard Dragon, alongside Clemantine and those volunteers, now inbound, who would comprise the ship’s company.

Still, Urban regarded the project as an experiment, one that must advance with great care.

The illustration of the completed warren refreshed to show current progress. The first stage was complete: An enveloping barrier wall now enclosed the site. The wall’s exterior was composed of Chenzeme tissue, with a neutral layer on the inside.

A barrier was essential. If human tissue mixed with Chenzeme, an immune response would be triggered, setting off a new molecular war.

Within the safety of that enclosed space, the warren was just beginning to take shape.

“A basic habitat to start with,” Clemantine said.

Urban nodded. “I want to work out if it’s possible to design a rotating deck, to give us at least a light simulated gravity. But there’s time.”

“Time is something we have in quantity,” she agreed, her words spiced with dark humor.

“Sooth.” A vast expanse of time stretching far ahead of Dragon.

A DI whispered to him that Clemantine’s newest ghost had arrived after the hours-long transit from Long Watch. He watched her face, watched anxiety and worry take over her expression as this new ghost joined its memories to hers. She gazed at him and then looked around, her shoulders slowly relaxing as her two timelines poured into this singular moment.

“So it’s done,” she said. “And here we are.” But whether she spoke in relief or resignation, he couldn’t tell.

“You’ve been busy,” he reminded her, nodding at the projection of the growing warren.

“Yes. We’ll make this work.”

“I hope so.”

She cocked her head. “Are you still worried about our inbound company?”

“Why shouldn’t I worry? These people of the Well—”

“They’re our people,” she reminded him.

He shrugged. “Maybe once. But they’re not like us. The people I grew up with never spent time as ghosts—unless things have changed?”

“No. I think that’s still the same.”

He gestured at the projection. “The warren isn’t ready yet. Even when this first phase is done, our living space is going to be small, cramped, dull. This is all an experiment. I can’t risk expanding too quickly.”

“Understood,” she said cautiously. Then added, “This looks similar to the warren aboard Long Watch so it won’t be unfamiliar.”

“We’re only getting two from Long Watch.”

“Riffan Naja and Pasha Andern,” she reminded him.

“Right. And maybe they can handle life in the warren for a time, but there will be others. How are they going to react when they’re faced with the reality here? I don’t want them falling apart because this warren is too small and cramped, while the library overwhelms them. So I’m thinking of holding them in the archive until—”

“No, Urban.”

“Just until I get the ship fully modified. It’ll be easier for them. Better, if they wake to a secure, comfortable, familiar environment. And they’ll never miss the time away.” He hesitated as a DI whispered another update. “Kona’s here,” he told her.

Kona winked into existence alongside them. He glanced their way, suspiciously eyed the Engineer within his frame, and then turned a swift circle, taking in the blue gradient of an otherwise featureless environment. “Where is this?”

“Ship’s library,” Urban said.

Clemantine continued their debate. “Let them at least instantiate as ghosts,” she insisted. “Then let them choose to enter the archive if that’s what they want. Don’t treat them like toys that you can take out and play with when you get bored.”

“What’s under discussion?” Kona asked.

Clemantine summarized it. Urban, eyes narrowed, prepared his argument, sure that Kona would take her side. But he surprised them both by saying, “Urban is right. No one has been vetted for this company. There wasn’t time. It’s just whoever happened to be in the right place at the right time, in the right mood to make a life-changing decision. Some are going to wake up to what they did and wonder why. So let’s make the transition as easy as—”

“A new ghost is coming in,” Urban interrupted. “I’m shifting it to the archive.” He raised two hands to forestall Clemantine’s objection. “Where it will stay for as short a time as possible, okay?” He turned to Kona. “Could you figure out who these people are? Why they’re here? And if we want them all?”

“Link me to their bios and I’ll look, but it’s been a long time since I was active. It’s unlikely I’ll know most of them.”

“Pasha Andern did the recruiting,” Clemantine reminded them. “She’ll be able to vouch for them.”

Urban gestured at the projection of the proposed habitation. “What I really need is another engineer. Someone experienced and ambitious who can work with my engineer. I want to construct a gee deck if we can.”

Clemantine volunteered to introduce Kona to Dragon and its systems—the same tour she’d taken with Urban when her ghost first arrived to inspect the ship. Urban agreed, admiring how quickly she’d adapted.

After they left the library, the Engineer also withdrew, leaving Urban alone—but only for a moment. Two more Apparatchiks appeared—the Pilot and the Bio-mechanic—each locked in a virtual dimension contained within a frameless window.

Their uninvited appearance suggested trouble.

The Bio-mechanic wore dark green. He floated within a background of motile tissue, looking suspicious and short-tempered as he always did. He’d spent centuries delving into the structure and behavior of Dragon’s bio-mechanical tissue and devising molecular triggers to control its behavior. Over time, his own behavior had taken on a veneer of contempt and hostility, as if echoing the Chenzeme attitude. He looked at Urban and announced, “She doesn’t trust us.”

Urban cocked his head, eyes narrowed combatively, unwilling to allow the Bio-mechanic to treat Clemantine as an outsider or a threat. He said, “She wouldn’t be here if she didn’t trust me.”

The Pilot shrugged dismissively. Within the frameless rectangle of his window he was a dark, nearly featureless silhouette standing within a detailed, three dimensional star map. “She wants to trust us,” he said. “But within a simulated environment it’s hard to be sure if the maps are real, or if they’re complete.”

Urban drew back, wary now.

The Pilot continued, “She will seek to prove to herself that everything we’ve shown her is real. She will consult with Kona, compare her perceptions to his, and look for inconsistencies that might indicate the absence of some knowledge or history that’s been hidden from her.”

The Bio-mechanic summed it up: “She wants to be very sure she has not been misled.”

“I haven’t misled her,” Urban said.

The Bio-mechanic smiled coldly. “Not in any critical way.”

Urban had shown Clemantine the structure of the ship: its layers, its immense propulsion reef, its dual telescopes.

She’d questioned him on how well the ship could track activity in the region around it. He’d hidden nothing about the process, explaining, “The philosopher cells keep watch on the Near Vicinity. I can ride their senses, see what they see, but it’s a general view. Minimal magnification. Long-range sight comes through the scopes. Dragon’s instruments are good, but the seeing is exponentially better when I digitally integrate them with telescopes on the outriders. That lets me create a virtual lens light-hours in size.”

The reason for her particular interest became clear when she’d asked her next question—the question he’d dreaded. “How often have you seen other Chenzeme ships?”

Long ago, Clemantine had watched helplessly from a far orbital outpost as two Chenzeme swan bursters swept in from the void to destroy her home world of Heyertori, her family gone with it, and most of the people she’d ever known.

She hated the Chenzeme, feared any encounter with their robotic ships. Urban knew it had taken heroic courage for her to come to Dragon. He worried she would back out if she knew what was to come.

So he’d edited two ancient log files to conceal a few critical details of his return voyage, and he’d evaded her question, responding with a question of his own. “You looked over the library files… right?”

An ambiguous answer that had earned a sharp response: “I haven’t had time to examine everything in detail.”

But then in a softer tone she’d added, “A DI is analyzing the files, but for myself, I’ve only skimmed the summaries. I’m not sure how much I want to know about that life I never lived.”

He understood her caution. The decisions, the actions, the experiences of her other self existed now only as historical events, over and done. She could not change any of it. And still, it was history she’d lived, witnessed, endured—been responsible for—and some of it was ugly. She would have guessed that from his silence. No wonder she was afraid.

“You’re right,” he told her. “There’s no need to go back there. Better just to let it go.”

Her sharp tone returned. “You think so? Why? Did I fail along the way? Do something to regret?”

Of course she would twist his words! He had wanted to divert the conversation but not in that direction.

“No,” he said. “You did all you could. We all did. Sometimes you just can’t win. Not the whole game. Not the round that matters most. No one could have changed it, but in the end we learned to beat the Chenzeme.” A vague gesture. “Dragon is proof of that.”

“Was it worth it, then?” she asked. “Would you do it again?”

“Hell, yes, I would. You would too. We all would. What was the alternative? Hunker down at the Well for ten thousand years of cold sleep? We had our freedom at least, to change, to become what we needed to be. And we did. And you and me, we’re both still out there living some other life. A good life. It looked like it would be a good life. You can’t have everything.”

But she was still circling around her fear of the timeline she’d never lived. “It got brutal at the end, didn’t it?”

“Sooth. And I did what I had to do. It was the right thing to do, the only thing to do—but that last day will haunt me for the rest of my life.”

He knew she hadn’t accessed the privileged data cache that recorded the details of those last days because he’d assigned a DI to alert him if she did. So he’d braced himself, certain she would ask what had happened, how it had ended. But she didn’t.

Instead she had returned to the other subject he did not want to discuss. “After I left you to return to the Well, I never saw a sign of the Chenzeme. I was running dark though, and I didn’t have an array of telescopes. You’ve seen other ships, haven’t you?”

“Sure,” he’d said cautiously. Then added, “Not often.” And that was true.

To his surprise and relief, she had accepted this answer. It was what she wanted to hear. She had assumed he would go dark and keep his distance if ever he sighted another Chenzeme ship—and she had pressed the issue no further.

Now, hours later, the Bio-mechanic said, “This ship is not a closed system. Eventually someone will think to ask how resources are renewed.”

Urban shrugged.

The Bio-mechanic translated this vague response into words: “By then it will be too late. No going back.”

“It’s already too late,” the Pilot informed them. “By the time a ghost could relay back through the chain of outriders, the link to Long Watch will be lost.”

“She doesn’t want to go back,” Urban insisted. “She’s made up her mind.” Guilt tweaked his conscience. “I’ll restore the modified log files. Later.”

“Are we going to go through the Committee?” Kona asked when they were all back in the library again and Urban had introduced him to the Pilot.

The Committee was a cluster of neighboring stars easily visible in Deception Well’s night sky, where there had once been several settled worlds.

Kona added, “I’d like to know if anyone is still there.”

“I’d like to know too,” Urban said. “And if I had more resources I’d send an outrider to investigate. But I don’t want to take the courser there. Too many Chenzeme ships have visited those worlds. I’ve relived memories of it when I’ve been immersed in the hull cells’ shared thoughts. If anyone is left, they’ll stay silent. They’ll see a courser and they won’t respond except maybe to launch an automated attack. So why frighten them?”

“You’d frighten them less if you destroyed the hull cells and sculpted this ship into something human,” Clemantine pointed out. Nothing in her manner suggested this was a joke.

“I don’t want to look like something human—not while I’m still in Chenzeme space.” His attention shifted as an update reached him.

“What is it?” Clemantine asked.

“We’ve got twelve ghosts in the archive and another coming through.”

“That’s all right, isn’t it?”

“I was expecting ten or twelve.”

“Word must have spread,” Kona said. “Pasha picked up a few extra volunteers. I’m not surprised. It’s an exciting project.”

It was more than he’d expected.

The thirteenth ghost cycled into the archive. A fourteenth began to come in. He waved off the Pilot. Brought back the Engineer and the Bio-mechanic.

The Apparatchiks did not have access to Urban’s thoughts and memories but they were derived from him, knew him well, and generally intuited what he was thinking. “You want to know how many individuals the new habitat can support,” the Bio-mechanic said before Urban could present the problem.

“The warren is designed for a population of fifteen,” the Engineer reported.

But the fifteenth ghost was now arriving. Add Urban, Clemantine, and Kona to that count, and the capacity of the warren was already exceeded.

It was far too late to send a stop order. Light-hours separated Dragon from Khonsu, the trailing ship in the outrider fleet.

“You could close the data gate,” the Bio-mechanic suggested.

“No!” Clemantine snapped. “This is not just random data. We’re talking about people. They could be expecting to meet friends, family. We’re not going to erase them.”

“Closing the gate is not an option,” Urban conceded though he felt hollow as he said it, caught up in chaos, no longer in control.

With so many new people, everything would change.

He opened a window above the boundless blue plain of the library. Contained within its perimeter was a chart listing names and brief bios of each newly arrived ghost.

He watched in horrified fascination as the chart expanded to include sixteen, eighteen, twenty ghosts, the number continuing to climb.

Privately, he messaged the Engineer: *Is there a limit on how many fully realized ghosts the library can support?

*Yes, of course. Resolution is presently set to an efficient margin but as the number of simultaneous users grows, it will begin to drop.

Urban wasn’t willing to endure the sensory deprivation of a low-res interface. *We need to expand capacity.

*Yes.

Clemantine had summoned a three-dimensional schematic of Dragon’s structure. “This is a huge ship,” she was saying. “Far larger than Null Boundary. It should be able to support large numbers—”

Urban stopped her. “No. You have to remember, Dragon is a hybrid ship.” He reached into the projection. A thin gray filament embedded within the ship’s tissue brightened at his touch. The silvery glow rapidly expanded, illuminating the structure of a branching network, the filaments densest beneath the hull cells, though they left no part of the ship untouched.

“You see this? This is my neural system. I inhabit it continuously. I’m there now. This is the bridge that translates between my mind and the Chenzeme mind. A neural bridge. It’s how I monitor the ship, and guide the thoughts and temper of the philosopher cells. But from the Chenzeme perspective, this bridge is still all alien tissue. Not integrated. Something to be purged from the ship’s body, if possible.

“That first day, those first minutes when I breached the courser’s defenses, there was a hot war on the molecular scale. My Makers evolved to meet the threat. I won, but it was close.” His gaze shifted to acknowledge the Bio-mechanic. “There have been a few more skirmishes since then.”

“You’re still here,” Kona said warily. “So you won those skirmishes. You’re in control.”

“That’s what you said,” Clemantine reminded him.

“I am in control.”

“Thanks to my constant vigilance,” the Bio-mechanic amended.

Twenty-five ghosts.

“I’m in control,” Urban repeated, “but I never let myself forget there’s a quiet war ongoing at molecular scale across every square micron of the boundary between my neural bridge and the Chenzeme zones. Right now, the situation around the warren is stable. But if we push deeper, radically expand the surface area of our safe zones, the existing balance could be overthrown.”

The Engineer expanded on this, saying, “Our challenge isn’t just about the volume we inhabit. It’s also the resources we require, the heat we produce.”

Thirty.

“So we take it slowly,” Clemantine said. “Expand carefully.”

“Always,” the Engineer agreed.

“Most of our people will choose cold sleep anyway,” Kona said. “They understand it. When we first came to Deception Well, all but a handful of us were in cold sleep.”

“And when we reach the Hallowed Vasties?” Urban asked.

“Even then,” Kona said, “centuries between star systems.”

“Centuries between now and then to make this an entirely human ship,” Clemantine added.

Urban’s gaze shot to the Bio-mechanic. The Apparatchik loomed dark, menacing, within the confining boundary of his window. Before he could speak, before he could object to this call to wipe out centuries of his work, Urban silenced him with a look. Not now.

*Not ever, the Bio-mechanic said, speaking through Urban’s atrium.

*Agreed.

Clemantine wanted to believe it was possible to remake the ship, and on a theoretical level it might be, but Urban would never consent to it. The hull cells were in some sense sentient and together they contained tangled memories accumulated over millions of years—an overwhelming sweep of time that he’d hardly begun to understand.

But this wasn’t the moment to explain that to her.

“We’ll take it slowly,” he agreed.

Thirty-five.

“And find me that engineer.”