As my three hundred ninety-second year drew to a close, it became clear to me that I would not see much of my three hundred ninety- third. As dignity required, I embraced my fate. I resolved that, in my remaining days, I would set out to do those things I had always wanted to do, but for which I had never before found time. I drew up a list, in order of importance, and set out to cross off as many items from it as my remaining time would allow.

Foremost on my list — perhaps by coincidence — was to climb the steps of the Mount of Kings, to see the Hall of the Flesh Sculptors. It was a monument very few had seen. Cast from ivory marble, it was said to shine with its own radiance, like a drop of frozen moonlight there on the granite peak. The climb was said to be long and difficult, and the gods seldom encouraged nosy visitors. But I set out anyway with the knowledge that I had very little to lose. This one thing, if nothing else, would make my life complete.

I took the long north trail, doubting my strength to forge its shorter, steeper counterpart to the south. Over the course of days, my old bones creaked and strained, plodding up the switchback path, taking one chiseled step at a time. Naturally, I made the climb in solitude … so I was quite surprised to find someone waiting for me at the top.

A woman, with the look of a youth but the eyes of an ancient, stood on the steps of the great Hall. She stood as straight as the fluted pillars at her back. She waited, dark and serene as the sandy wind bustled around her — never touching her; never disturbing a single hair.

“Come inside,” she said with a smile. “I have something to show you.”

This invitation came as quite a shock to me, for a number of reasons that began to dawn on me as I followed her through the broad oak doors. Foremost, the woman was not, by any stretch of thought, a woman in the conventional sense. I had my doubts that she even really existed at the moment my foot crossed the threshold. And yet that smile — graceful, alluring, accented ever so subtly by the flash of pearlescent teeth arranged in the most artistic of rows — belied something that at least remembered having once been human, long ago.

It masqueraded as a “she” right now for its own inscrutable reasons, but I have my suspicions that those may have been to advertise its real talents. For this creature — call it a woman — was nothing short of perfection cast in human form. Living art. Silky skin of the most exquisite mocha-bronze, hair like ebony, eyes of emerald — sapphire flecked — and a body like a marble statue, as though every curve and line had been carved meticulously from that vulgar meat in which the raw character of humanity finds its residence. Every movement she engaged in became a symphony of grace. I had only to look at her to know, without a doubt, that I would not leave this place the same man I had come. I might not leave at all. But as the doors closed at my back, it dawned on me that it was far too late to harbor any doubts. I could not turn back. This thing of mortal perfection had extended to me an invitation so rare and cherished that I would have been the worst of fools to turn it down.

I followed her through the gilded cavern of the foyer, through a maze of corridors and into the deepest heart of the Hall. Our path was marked by a burgundy carpet, inlaid in gold — exuding opulence beyond any I had witnessed before. In the walls, arrayed behind panes of heavy, frosted glass, stood inert testaments to the Flesh Sculptor’s artistry, preserved in exquisitely lifelike quality — so much so that I had to shake myself out of the feral apprehension that some of them were, in fact, still alive. Their eyes seemed to follow me as I walked. Every one of them held that same, surreal quality of simultaneous life and death.

All of them appeared at once both human and inhuman, even the most monstrous of forms. A serpentine beast, as long as a sea freighter and as thick as a man is tall, coiled and curved within the confines of the passageway’s northern wall. Facing it from the other were numerous specimens of similarly unholy creation: a thing like a giant squid, a yeti, something with the face of a man, but with a body wholly indescribable by any human tongue.

Standing free about the place, cast in glass cubes, stood smaller creatures. Some as large as a dog, some as small as a mouse. Each exhibited a chilling, beautiful strangeness. Each marked a place on that narrow boundary between the living and the bizarre. Only a scarce few embodied anything like the quality of beauty we humans might look for in a thing … but all were beautiful in some sense. Even if only made beautiful by the purity of the horror their deathless stares engendered.

As had been told in stories handed down through generations, it was the wont of the Flesh Sculptors to pursue expression of their artistry in a variety of emotional mediums — from admiration through apprehension, hatred to pity, simmering lust to stark terror, and the strange sense of preternatural unease that gripped me now. The things I saw on that short walk evoked all these emotions in me, along with others I could never hope to attach names to if I lived a thousand years longer. It struck me then how deeply vetted we meatlings are in the instincts of our progeny. For all our self-styled sophistication, we are animals still — slaves to the prejudices of the flesh.

The Thing that led me through this gallery of my own basal misgivings shared nothing of that with me. She toyed with it, amused by its quaintness. And when she turned around at last to stop me at the doors of our destination, I was shocked to see that she had at some point become a he.

“You must promise, before we go any further, that everything you see from this point on stays with you — a secret. For your own protection, as well as mine. I hardly fear the ill will of your brethren — many of whom I suspect are not as accepting as you — but there are higher things with ears to your affairs that I suspect may not be so accepting, either. Do you promise me you won’t go talking this around?”

My throat had suddenly become stiff and dry as I tried to form a response. I choked out what I had hoped to be an affirmative, and nodded to reiterate the point. I knew it was unnecessary. She — he? — knew full well what I would do, and was only playing at drama for my benefit. As I watched him turn to cast open the doors, I marveled at how deceived I had been at his first appearance — or perhaps he’d changed? It was the same face, the same eyes, that same ebony hair swept back into a delicate sash of braids — the same body even — but everything curiously re-sexed beneath my notice as we’d walked. And I had touched her hand when we’d first met outside the hall — felt its warmth, its living pulse, the delicate structure of its bones, overlaid by flesh. I knew it to be real. This was not the evanescent avatar of Angel’s Fog the Gods so often wore when they walked among their pets. This was a living creature like myself — only somehow capable of this ghastly transformation.

We stepped through the door, out of the hallway’s platinum fog of refracted sunlight and into a room that was saturated with a heavy crimson glow. The air here seemed to be its own source of light. It spread soft and diffuse through every corner, blotting the edges of shadows and hazing the finer details of my surroundings. The character of my guide shifted radically now as he stepped through the door ahead of me. Suddenly he became a Hellenistic blonde. She turned to me only a few steps out of the entryway, beaming that disarming, unsettling smile. The same that had greeted me at my arrival.

“Watch,” she said, as if the things I’d seen already amounted to nothing but trifles.

And then she revealed to me a hint of the magic I had come to see.

We stood on the bottom face of a voluminous octahedron — the door that had been behind us moments ago had vanished, swallowed by the wall. Buoyed on the moist currents of air circulating in the center of the room hung veils of a white, diaphanous material. They congealed out of thin air and swirled together, out of the corners and into the center of the room. For minutes, they entertained us with a dizzy introductory dance. And then, one by one, they began to come apart, dissolving and diffusing together, forming a knot at the chamber’s heart.

Droplets of moisture condensed out of the hazy atmosphere and fell impossibly toward that central confluence. Within minutes, a quivering sphere a fluid had formed there. The twists of white material had dissolved within it. Only a few shreds remained, sheeting across its surface. At first perfectly transparent, it began to grow cloudy. I squinted to see through it — through the rheumy fog of my own ancient vision.

My eyes played tricks on me. The hovering globule began to pulsate slowly. The red of the room bled into its bulk. Within seconds, the light around me went from crimson to hazy white, and the floating globule of fluid turned blood red. As I watched, an explosion of dark little tendrils branched out from the center of the mass, veining it with a throbbing, anfractuous structure.

I saw something I could only describe as a heart congeal at its center. It grew from a speck in moments, pumping in time with the shuddering vibration of the intricate web-work in which it nestled. I scarcely noticed that my guide had begun laughing, gleefully, manically, clapping her hands as the dance of perverse magic went on in the air above us. I had become so engrossed that I had lost all track of her shifting features. She — he? — it? — was trying on new faces as quickly as the hovering globule was trying out different strategies of organizing its components, all the while growing and developing at blinding speed. It was like watching a three dimensional puzzle assemble itself — a puzzle whose pieces were the very fundaments of life itself.

My guide began gesticulating wildly with its hands — ‘it’ was at this point the only pronoun I could think to apply to it. It had taken on, in the past few seconds alone, traits both distinctly male and female … and neither. It twisted and shuddered, laughing and crying out in what looked to be an almost orgasmic kind of bliss. I knew without a doubt then, as I watched it, that it was indeed much more than it appeared. My skin crawled with the sensation that it’s being extended far beyond the amorphous body I saw before me — that it’s apparent identity crisis was just a reflection of a much larger, much more complete kind of being. It was not its failing that it could not make up its mind as to the appearance it wished to wear. Rather, it was my failing that I could not accept the constancy of identity behind its masks.

The thing growing in the air above us was as much a part of it as its avatar-body — as much as the Hall. As much as, I began to suspect, the whole world. I felt suddenly outside myself — that I was not my own person. A deep, unraveling terror began to build inside me. The thing over our heads had begun to take shape. It was a thing not unlike those I had seen on my way in — those once-living statues encased in glass. Only this thing was still alive … or rapidly on its way to becoming alive. In the moments of my floundering apprehension, it had grown nerves, skeleton and now the rudiments of a musculature around the framework its circulatory system had laid down.

It was a demonstration of the Flesh Sculptors’ highest art, being carried out before my very eyes. Just like a puzzle, they assembled bodies one molecule — one cell — at a time, constructing complete creatures from scratch. And, amazingly, those creatures lived. Not at the end — not with some flash of lightning or zap of unnatural magic to impart that vital spark — but from the beginning, from the moment the first cells were assembled and guided nimbly by those phantom fingers into place.

The Sculptors must work fast, for at first their products are unstable. They bring each new cell into being and guide it into contact with its siblings. They lace the structure of the thing together until it takes hold of its own form-to-be. Every branching vein, every twisting sinew or quivering nerve they place with clockwork precision. Like building ships in bottles from scraps of balsa wood, they assemble beings in vats from stray molecules and proteins in solution. The awesome delicacy of the procedure took my breath away … along with the horrifying rapidity at which they went from an empty room of air-suspended protein fragments to a fully functioning product.

In this case, a fully functioning human being.

It floated there in its amniotic bubble, fully formed, fully human. All this only a scant five or six minutes after we had entered the room. It was as perfect as my guide — as artfully crafted, as much a testament to the skill and mastery of its creator as the body that creator wore itself. My guide had suddenly stopped laughing. Now he was watching me keenly, following my twitching, apoplectic movements and my gaping, bewildered stares with eyes that shone dark like polished onyx, pattered with flecks of jade.

“I want to offer you a gift for coming here,” he said. “A thank you … for being an audience to my work. It’s been some time since I’ve been able to work for anyone. I would be honored if you would give me the satisfaction … of accepting my work as your gift?”

If it was a genuine question, I had no doubt he already knew my answer. I stood in the presence of a creature so far above me as to be a god of gods … a creature so beyond my comprehension as to regard me with little more consideration than I might a bacterium. And yet it wanted to offer me a gift? To what end, I wondered, even as I nodded my ascent, throat too clenched to give words to my robotic acceptance.

It — she, as she has shifted once again into the female form I’d known initially and seemed, for once, to settle into a temporary kind of permanence with that shape — smiled at me again. It was the same smile she had worn on our way here. “You understand,” she said, “that what we still find some challenge in is the sculpting of a mind. I would very much like to try … if you would be willing … to sculpt your thoughts in this flesh?”

A million reasons for refusal escaped my thinking that day. Whatever happened next, I cannot recall with any certainty. All I know is that I left that hall a different man than I had entered. A better man, I think. A man with greater understanding of his world.

Certainly, if nothing more, a younger man with uncounted centuries of life still left to live.

As I have studied over the years — as I have come to understand the Sculptors’ talents and their methods; to comprehend the finer delicacies of their craft — I have begun to see the appeal of the Sculptor’s art. To create life, to create being … is as intoxicating a venture as ever I could pursue. And so I have been considering, in the centuries since my rebirth, that I might like to one day try my hand at that curious art.

Perhaps then I will return to the Flesh Sculptors’ Hall. Not this time to visit, but to stay.

More about the author, David Jackson, here.

As I met ambassador Keilen she was wearing a formal spacesuit, covering with glittering black diamonds and the dull Negentropy pentagon. On her waist she had a metal grey sash embroidered with the line codes of her offices. I could not help shivering when I noticed the 7-7 knot – the symbol for ordered suicide.

‘Greetings, your Excellency. May your trip here have been reversible and swift.’ She greeted formally, but with her usual half hidden smile.

‘Likewise, your Excellency. I hope our confluence will hasten the eternal state.’

‘No need to be that formal, Ologa-Zan. Besides, isn’t referring to the eternal state here of all places a bit of bad form?’ I blushed and she laughed and hugged me. ‘It is good to see you again, even if this has to be brief. I have a pressing engagement.’

‘I came as soon as I heard about the directive.’

‘Yes. The arch-conservatives back home finally decided to send me the silken thread. I can’t say that it was unexpected. I took a chance with the Pyxis settlement, but you cannot win them all…’

I followed her as she strode along the gallery towards the farewell chamber. I desperately wanted to tell her how much I admired her, how wrong this was, that I would gladly do anything to change her mind or save her. But a look at her sparkling eyes told me that she already knew it. She gently shook her head and smiled at me.

‘No, I cannot back down. They have my family, and they will suffer if I don’t act properly. Trust me, I know what I am doing.’

‘I never doubted that, but there must be possibilities?’

‘Actually, I think they suspect my loyalty and purity more than any purely legal shortcomings. And that is much more serious for my gene-line than if I had eloped with a few kilograms of amat or accidentally spilt trake on the God-Emperor. I better show them just how loyal I am.’ Again that smile.

‘But Keilen… what about the Velaria cease-fire?’ Damn! It sounded so self-serving, so coolly pragmatic. But at the same time I had to ask on behalf of my government, my people. The cease-fire in all its bizarre splendour hinged on one thing: it would only last as long as Keilen lived. She had impressed the I4 and their tweak enemies to the extent they actually based the whole deal on her. And we were dependent on the cease-fire lasting at least a few years more, if we were to survive.

‘Actually, that is why I am here. To save it.’

Keilen stepped into the farewell chamber and looked around. The floor and one of the walls were solid diamond, giving an unobstructed view of Threshold. Ahead the sprawling meshwork of hospices, temples, cathedrals, prayer polyhedra and hotel facilities spread towards the infinite horizon line, surrounded by the steady cold light of the stars on all sides. Straight ahead a causeway with ornate railings stretched straight out, ending in nothing 30 meters away. Beneath… it was hard to see, but the faint Einstein rings gave it away. Straight down, the black hole yawned.

Keilen walked on the transparent floor with no hesitation, while my brainstem sternly told me not to. Instincts older than thought told me that walking on a near invisible floor above a literally bottomless hole was not survival enhancing. Again I envied Keilen her iron nerves and rationality. Or did I? The same practical logic that had saved us so many times now made her prepare for a very long fall indeed.

‘I don’t get it. Please explain to a mere Mensan. If you are going to jump into oblivion I better want to know why, except for a misplaced sense of duty. If you had just wanted to end your life you could probably have done it instantly, couldn’t you?’

‘You are getting warmer.’ She smiled at me and fastened the helmet onto the spacesuit. Then she hugged me again and gave me a storage device. ‘Give this mindstate to my family. They will understand. And… I’m happy you are here with me. Just don’t worry.’

As I stood there dumbfounded she elegantly walked into the airlock which shut with a discreet susurration. She waved and stepped outside. I could do nothing but watch as she walked along the causeway outside. A small part of me wondered why they had bothered to put up handrails on both sides. After all, somebody walking along it probably had no desire to avoid falling off. Although to some, I guessed, dying in a less than perfect way would be worse than anything. I began to understand.

‘Keilen, aren’t the Velarian Confed strict physiclassicists?’ I asked over the radio in the room.

She turned around at the edge, now smiling openly at me. ‘I knew you would work it out. Can you see how the pieces interlock? It is so simple.’

She jumped, leaving an empty causeway. Beneath me I saw a moving star among the others, falling towards the unseen distortion in the centre.

‘The conservatives will be happy, since I will be quite dead. One loose cannon less. I have proven my loyalty to my planet, and no shadow can fall on my family. The Velarians on the other hand… to them I will never die. I will just approach the horizon forever, becoming eternal. The cease-fire will remain forever.’

It was indeed simple and beautiful. A solution perfectly expressing the Precepts of Negentropy – and hence the most devious and inescapable revenge on the arch-conservatives back at Cirici that anybody could come up with.

‘It is… wonderful.’

‘Yes. Now you know why I was so glad you could come. After all, the Velarians would want a witness.’

‘I will do that. But Keilen, what about yourself?’

‘Myself?’ the radio voice asked.

‘You have worked for as long as I know you for others. You have saved billions with your negotiations. You saved my skin at the Antares conference. You just saved your family, your honour and the cease-fire. But what’s in it for you?’

The room was silent. I tried to discern the falling star against the background below, but could not make put anything in the diffused light around the hole.

After an interminable silence the radio spoke again: ‘It has been fun watching.’

‘What?’

‘The best way of getting a front seat at some historical event is to arrange it yourself. This way I got all the opportunities, all the fun. You think I have been as unselfish and self-eradicating as the NoCoZo makes us out to be, but you’re wrong – I did it all for my own pleasure. I’m the most curious and selfish woman in the world. And now… let’s see what happens!’

The signal broke up. A moment later the unseen point beneath me flared up in a blaze of gamma.

More about the author, Anders Sandberg, here.

It’s all my ex-girlfriend’s fault.

It’s all my ex-boyfriend’s fault. It’s all my employer’s fault. It’s all Bunny’s fault. It’s all my parents’ fault. It’s all society’s fault.

It’s all my fault.

I think that last one is the closest to the truth.

I don’t know if anyone else is ever going to get a chance to read this – I’m saving it internally, on my implant’s storage space – so I’m writing it to my future self, while I’m still close to the start of everything that just happened, so that, maybe, I’ll be able to better remember how I feel.

I’ve never been good at feelings. Or other people, really. When it comes to analytical thought, I’m a super-bright… but other humans seem almost as alien to me as the Muuh. I’ve never understood all the status-seeking games that seem to take up the time of my fellow hu, so I’ve done my best to avoid them altogether. That’s why I had Bunny made in the first place. She’s generally humanoid, but with an attractive pelt, bunny-face, cottonpuff tail, sweet-smelling and with a pleasant purr in her voice… and her mind was set up to be just on the low side of being a ‘person’. She finds simple maid-work to be challenging, and finds pleasure in doing whatever I ask of her. Yes, what I mainly built her for is as much bestiality as it would be with a non-provolved chimp… but, fortunately for me, my home society doesn’t consider bestiality illegal, just something ‘dirty’ to crack jokes about in impolite society and avoid discussing in polite circles, like masturbation. To the most complete extent possible for her mental architecture, she loves me, and has always loved me, and I don’t have to try to figure out what a potential sex-partner wants from me, or pay for it, or let some transapient slap together some avatar-body out of pity for the lonely ape. By some standards, that makes me a selfish, misogynistic bastard, and I’ve pretty much given up trying to justify my actions to anyone other than myself.

Not long after I had Bunny made, I found out about an upcoming hermeneutic conference in a nearby star system. I don’t have anywhere near the whuffie to convince our local AIs to send me out-system, but after some careful searching, I found another way to attend. A transapient ship would be heading in the right direction, and though e didn’t /need/ baselines, it preferred having some human companionship for the trip. After a good deal of careful back-and-forth to figure out if we met each others’ needs, e agreed to bring me along – Bunny, too. I was under no illusions – I would be little more than an amusing little pet for em, much like Bunny was for me, but it was a role I was willing to accept – and in the end, not all that different from the roles I had to take when interacting with other humans.

So off we all went, on our merry way, along with the other human-pets who’d come along for the ride. I was always polite to them, and as pleasant as I could manage, but after a few weeks, the involuntary signals of my tension when they tried making friends with me reduced such attempted closeness to more tolerable levels. They formed their pairs, and groups, and clusters, and as long as they didn’t /require/ my companionship, I was able to join in at least some of the social activities.

Halfway between my home system, and the one with the conference, was a starless planetoid, a beamrider station. We were decelerating to rendezvous with it, where some of our passengers would jump off, and we’d likely pick up a few more. I went to sleep the night before our expected arrival spooned up with Bunny in our sleep-pouch…

… and when I woke up, alone, my implant helpfully told me four days had passed, and we were under acceleration again. The ship-AI didn’t respond to me anymore.

I haven’t been able to find out what happened during those four days – the ship’s records are blocked to me, the other humans say they were asleep, too, and Bunny’s never really had much of a vocabulary. We all seemed to be prisoners of the now-incommunicative AI, and, somewhat to my consternation and confusion, Bunny – who was as genetically incompatible with me as a real lapine – was massively pregnant.

Three days later, Bunny gave birth to another Bunny.

Once they’d both gotten cleaned up, I wasn’t able to find any differences between them, and neither of them seemed to understand that there /was/ any difference between them.

The next day, both of them had visible baby-bumps growing in their bellies.

Everyone was trying to figure out what had happened during the stopover, why our AI host had stopped talking, whether we’d been drugged or had our memories wiped… and what was going on with Bunny.

A week later, when I was trying to manage four obviously-pregnant Bunnies, each of which loved me and wanted to do everything she could for me, the next real incident happened. I can’t verify any of the details, but what I /think/ happened is that one of the other humans tried to attack me while I was asleep. All I can say for certain, is that when I woke up, one of my fellow passengers was missing his arms. No visible scar, no indication that he’d ever had the limbs in the first place, and a tale to tell about going into my quarters “for a personal conversation”, not that anybody believed that excuse, when one of the Bunnies hugged him, and he fell unconscious, waking up in his own rooms without arms.

Needless to say, everyone did their best to avoid me as much as they could from that point.

A few days later, three of the Bunnies gave birth to other Bunnies just like the original, and one gave birth to a Bunny who was different – her fur a light blue instead of my Bunny’s Martian pink – and who proclaimed her love for the armless man, and started tending to his every need rather than mine.

The blue Bunny didn’t swell up with pregnancies like mine were inexplicably prone to, but two weeks later, every human had gotten their own Bunny, male Bunnies for the women, though I was the only one with multiple Bunnies. At that point, just as mysteriously as they’d started, the Bunnys’ pregnancies stopped. Things settled down for the next few weeks; we had no way of knowing the answers of the mysteries surrounding us, so life went back to keeping on keeping on. And even if their source was a mystery, everyone seemed to get used to having a Bunny.

Or, at least, that was the impression the other humans gave to me… but two days ago, I found out they’d just been excluding me from their plans. I can’t blame them – after all, I brought Bunny aboard.

Once again, whatever it was that happened, I was asleep for it – or had my memory of it erased afterwards. But when I woke up, two women were armless, the armless man had lost his legs… and, most ominously, two Bunnies were massively pregnant, and ‘their’ humans were nowhere to be found. Nowhere else, anyway – in short order, their fur turned to the pink of ‘my’ Bunnies, though their bellies neither grew nor shrank, nor have they given birth.

I’ve stayed in my room since then, hiding from the other humans. If I were them, I’d be scared shitless of me, and the Bunnies, and would probably lash out in any way I could think of, at me or the Bunnies or both… and from what I’ve seen, all that sort of activity would result in is either a case of acute limblessness, or disappearance into a Bunny. Looking at it from a certain viewpoint, I suppose both… responses are more humane than simple execution, but from a rather a-human point of view.

This morning, when I asked one of my Bunnies about what she would do if I died, she used a word I know for a fact her original design was incapable of understanding. Whatever was done to my first Bunny, it seems to be having an effect on her mind, too. I’m guessing that there’s some sort of hivemind effect going on – that the more Bunnies there are, the smarter they get. But they all still seem completely devoted to my personal welfare and happiness… as they interpret that. And I don’t know whether to feel relieved or outright terrified at the implications.

If anyone else ever reads this: I’m sorry. I didn’t /mean/ for Bunny to be anything other than a sex-pet. By the time I figured out that there was anything /to/ stop, that our stopover had been met with some sort of perversity, that, when it encountered Bunny, took her mental programming to its logical conclusion, it was too late to do anything about it. The ship-AI was, or is, S2, and I don’t know if anything short of intervention by an S3 can keep Bunny from spreading… and according to my implant’s databases, there /aren’t/ any S3s anywhere near our current course.

I’ve had an idea for how to deal with this situation. I don’t /think/ the Bunnies, or whatever the ship-AI has become, can read my implant, but just in case either can, I’m not writing it down. Suffice it to say that if it works, my current problems will be solved… and if it doesn’t, they’re likely to be “solved”, though in an entirely different way. Here’s hoping it’s the former.

More about the author, Daniel Eliot Boese, here.

3 AM

It was probably the cold that woke her up. Great-grandma Boyles dropped her arm over the side of her cot and grabbed one more, large towel, pulling it over her for warmth. She placed it over her thin frame, shivering a bit.

As she lay there in the grey darkness so common to large cities, she began to mumble to herself. “Stuffing, yes. Potatoes, yes. Butter, yes. Turkey, yes. Pumpkin pie –“She gasped softly. “Oh, no – I forgot to get the pumpkin pie. What would Christmas dinner be without pumpkin pie?” She wrestled her way off the small cot, standing quietly in the heavy light. Her toes hit a lump on the floor.

“Jeez, gram, watch where you’re goin’ for christ’s sake.”

“What’s going on now,” asked a firm male voice came from the mattress in the corner. “Mom, are you standing up?”

She could see her son now, propped on one elbow, looking at her. “I just need to get…” She stopped suddenly. “I’m going to the bathroom.” She saw him lay back down, putting his arm around his wife’s waist.

“Crazy old woman,” said the daughter-in-law, snuggling into his arms for warmth.

“Come on kids, let grandma through.” The good son closed his eyes for a moment. He looked over at the fireplace and sighed. “Alex, you let the fire go out again. Come on, you’re going to have to learn how to do this anyway.” He dragged himself out of bed, grabbing some brochures from a box as he headed for the hearth. “I think we still have some coals burning.”

Alex, the twenty-something grandson, reluctantly pulled himself out of his blanket, giving the old woman an icy stare. “I’ll get some books from the closet.”

“Good, and grab a couple of desktops too.”

As her son and grandson began to rebuild the fire, the old woman started moving forward again. Half a dozen shapes shifted like eels on the carpeted floor, allowing her to move forward. She grabbed a doorknob and began to pull. The door refused to budge.

“Grams, that door doesn’t open anymore.” The voice came from Isis, her granddaughter, who touched her arm gently and led her towards the bathroom. “That door leads to downstairs – but that floor is flooded now, along with the rest of the city…like… what city was that?”

“It’s like Venice…a city of canals.”

Isis put her grandmother’s hand on the knob of the bathroom door. “Exactly right, Grams. It’s just like Venice.”

“Thank you, sweetheart. I’ll be fine now.” Great-grandma closed the bathroom door and touched a globe on a table by the toilet. A sphere of dim light appeared above the machine. She listened a moment to the waves lapping against the walls in the room below her.

She got up and moved to a large window, opening it quietly. With her left foot, she tested the 14th Street floating sidewalk before climbing onto it. “What good is Christmas dinner without a pumpkin pie? I’ll be back before they know I’m gone.” She began walking over the boardwalk towards what she was sure was a Wal-Mart. Across the canal, three young boys took notice.

7 AM Christmas Eve Day

“You know they already have her, Jon.” Tonia sat at the tiny table by the fireplace. The sun would be up soon.

“Maybe she just went over to Stacy’s.”

Tonia pulled an infant onto her lap. “No, I already called over there… I used your spinner.”
He began to get loud, but he looked around the room at those on the floor still sleeping.

“That’s only for official business or emergencies, Tonia. It’s expensive.”

“This was an emergency Jonathan. You don’t expect me to go traipsing about at this hour of the morning looking for your mom, do you?”

Jonathan pulled the bottom of his starched white shirt around his bulging waistline. He buttoned it slowly before answering. He knew his wife did the best she could with what they had. “You’re right, sweetheart. It isn’t as if we can’t afford it.”

He took her gently by the shoulders. “I’ll tell you what – I’ll leave the spinner here today, so you can call around. Just let me know if you hear anything about mom.”

Tonia sat back down at the small corner table, well satisfied. “Are you going up there this morning – if we don’t hear something, I mean?”

He stood for a moment, lost in thought, finally grabbing his laptop pouch. “No, no. It’s my turn to have breakfast with god. I think that’s my best bet.” He smiled weakly at his wife, stopping to kiss her reassuringly. “I need to go now if I’m going to catch the ferry.”

He stepped through the French doors onto the balcony facing south. As he looked back into the warmth of the visitor’s building he saw his wife hold the disk between two fingers. She balanced it on a pedestal and set it to spinning. An image of his mother-in-law appeared over the spinning disk and she began happily chatting away.

He smiled. In the pre-dawn light he could see the moon reflecting off the water surrounding the Washington Monument. It still seemed stupid for men to have placed buildings of this importance this close to a tidal basin. Then his eyes drifted over to the actual obelisk. He could see a significant belt of discoloration circling the 555 foot landmark. “I wonder,” he mumbled to himself.

At 7:53 precisely, a powerboat with seating for eight appeared from the darkness, heading north. He stepped inside cautiously – seating himself beside five other dignitaries. Jonathan didn’t allow himself to look at the large white building on Pennsylvania Canal until they were safely headed southeast. Only then did he look back over his right shoulder at the building’s once proud façade and dome.

They had her up there, he knew, and it was up to him to get her back.

9:30 AM

Jonathan allowed himself a moment to acclimate to the perfect 66 degrees in GOD’s foyer. Most humans liked to believe that the constant temperature was a motivational gift for the summoned. Jon knew better. He knew the temperature was a tool for keeping god sane. He also knew that he served the identical purpose.

He drew in a deep breath, raising his hand to touch the insignia on a small metal plate on the wall. The symbol was composed of an ancient rocketship with stars in the background. “NASA,” he whispered almost like a prayer. He couldn’t help but remember the southern station in Florida being demolished by one hurricane after another, each one growing in intensity. He thought about his friends who had died there, refusing to evacuate until it was too late. “I guess you guys were right to situate the solar-shield factory here.”

The door swished open and he stepped inside.

“Good morning, god,” he said, seating himself cross-legged before a metal disk, six feet across.

“Good morning, Jonathan Boyles,” answered a soothing female voice as a holograph of a young boy appeared. The holo also seated itself cross-legged, looking directly at the human in front of him.

“Did you sleep well,” asked the human.

“My down time was most profitable, thank you,” answered the machine. “What did you bring for me this morning?”

“You tell me,” replied the diplomat with a slight smile.

“Ah! Good! It’s ‘joke or not a joke! I have a pleasant reaction to this stimulus!”

“I enjoy this game as well,” said Jonathan. He drew a breath and said without emotion, “What’s the difference between Noah’s Ark and Joan of Arc?”

“I don’t know. What’s the difference?” The child leaned forward a bit.

“Well, Noah’s Ark was made of wood…and Joan of Arc was Maid of Orleans.”

The holo-boy clapped his hands lightly. “Yes, yes – it’s a play on the word ‘made’ – meaning composed of – and the similar word ‘maid’ – meaning a young girl.” The child was very analytical now, almost solemn. “I can see where a human might enjoy this similarity…and it follows the traditional rhythmic pattern of a joke…therefore, I would ascertain that – yes, it is a joke.”

Jonathan made a slight, friendly bow. “You are absolutely correct – it is a joke, one of my favorites in fact.” He smiled. This was absolutely the correct response – it meant G.O.D. was still attempting to interact with its creator – but was void of independent thinking. Free thought was a dangerous mental state for a computer system as powerful as the Global Orbiting Directive.

The hologram and the human sat quietly for a moment, as if enjoying each other’s company.
“You’re different than the other humans who talk with me,” confessed the holo-boy. “The others talk to me about equations and algorithms. You test me with riddles and jokes. I may not feel joy, or love, or laughter – but sometimes I believe I feel loneliness.” The hologram scooted closer to the front edge of the disk. “Do you ever feel lonely Jonathan Boyles.”

The diplomat was a little unsure about the turn of the conversation. However, he knew one goal of his programming directive was to cautiously lessen the barriers between humans and machines – via informal communication.

“I do feel somewhat out of place amongst those around me – at times.”

The holo-boy stood up suddenly. “Allow me to lighten the mood. I liked your riddle. You may ask us a question.”

The human took note of the word “us”. It reminded him that this entity was only one of three super-computers. The “holy trinity” some called them. This part was known as the son.

“I’m pleased that you enjoyed it.” The human hesitated then waded in as gently as he could. “As I was coming to see you this morning, I noticed the watermark on the Washington Monument was lower than a week ago. Is the cure working, or is this just a phase?”

“Ah, the twenty-seven billion dollar question, at long last.” The holo-boy was silent, sitting stoically, like a statue made of light. Jon knew he was retrieving the data of his siblings and asking them how much information he was free to disseminate. Slowly, the child smiled. “I was unable to contact my brother on the equator – the solar shield is passing above him now. He won’t be in communication for at least an hour. But, from our talks yesterday, I know the sea blossoms with algae. My sister tells me the ice shelf north of Ellesmere Island has now been restored to seventy-six percent of its original area and the glacier will continue to grow. The planet heals.”

Jonathan sighed with relief. This was an answer he could use.

The holo-boy stopped suddenly, his eyes dropping to the floor. “25 degrees South 25 degrees North 17 degree radius at 35000 feet, compensate 185 lbs.”

Jonathan cringed at the weight adjustment – it was the poundage of a man. He tried to comfort himself by knowing his mother’s weight was a full thirty pounds lighter. There was a low rumble from behind The Ellipse as one more piece of the sunshield rocketed towards the equator.

The child made of light smiled again. “Once more, I have achieved my directive for this morning.”

“Was there a human attached to the infrastructure?”
The child looked squarely into the face of the man before him. “Jonathan Boyles, I am not blind to your problem. It was not your mother. I’ve put up with the antics of the group in power, so We could be certain not to derail our directive. Trust us. All will work out well.” The machine dropped his eyes to the floor for a moment. “I have enjoyed our conversation this morning and have prepared a disk of our talk as a reward for you. As always, it will be handed to you as you leave.”

The holo-boy halted for a moment. “Jonathan Boyles – I must ask a favor of you. I know you have been diligent in collecting the pebble disks of our conversations. They contain conversations on every kind of animal from A to Z. I want you to place these disks, all of them, into a metal box and bring them with you this afternoon.”

“Bring them where?”

“You and I both know where.”

“I will bring them,” answered the diplomat. “May I ask you a favor, then?”

The holo-boy nodded consent.

“I want you to explain something to me. I’ve never understood why you took the time to instruct me on these animals, alive and extinct. The information was obviously always in your memory banks, so why tell me about them.”

“I did not need the information. I have all recorded knowledge of the animals – including maps of their DNA. What I needed was your reaction to the animals, so I might classify them according to what value a human would place on each one of them.” He paused for a moment, allowing the thought to sink in. “Jonathan Boyles, the future is as close as your footsteps. And now, Z is for Zebra.”

The human listened quietly to the five minute tutorial. He only turned away from the light after the image of G.O.D. had blinked off. He retrieved the stone-like disk, as usual, after he exited the foyer. Over the past twenty-five years, he had collected 2538 of them – but this was the one he believed he needed the most desperately.

Noon, Christmas Eve Day

Great-grandma Boyles shivered in spite of the small blaze in the fireplace she leaned against. She looked around the round room, trying to stay away from the cold of the windows opposite her. There were bookcases built into the walls and the mold from rotting books would have gagged a person before the bad days. Cynthia’s sense of smell was almost gone by now. Given enough time, a human being can get use to just about anything.

The shelves on the bottom of the bookcase were empty, as the occupants of the White House had begun using them for heat. The room had no furniture, so her mind wandered to the plaster medallion on the ceiling. In spite of the pieces that were chipped away, and the paint itself being badly faded, she could make out a nice rendering of an eagle surrounded by a circle of stars.

A door opened suddenly, the light from outside almost blinding her. It was only after the door was shut that she could see the figure of a heavy boy in his late teens.

“Madam President. I am your bodyguard. I have come to present you to the king.” The large child made a deep ceremonial bow. “If you will follow me.” He began to turn back towards the door, but Cynthia only stood up – her fists clenched at her sides.

“I am not moving until you tell me what happened to that nice old man who was in here with me.”

“There can only be one President at a time, Madam President. Those are the rules of our constitution.” The teenager was not averse to toying with the dead. “That old man was President for 24 hours, and now it’s your turn. Madam President, let’s go.”

Cynthia threw her head back, her disheveled grey hair straggling down past her shoulders. “I demand to speak with the person in charge.”

“And so you shall, Madam President, and so you shall.”

“Perhaps you don’t comprehend what a pickle I’m in. I must be home by tonight so I can begin to bake for Christmas dinner tomorrow. I only came out to get something…what was it again?…brownie mix…no. In any event, my family must be worried sick about me and my son’s wrath will be upon your head, young man.”

The teenager snickered. “I’ll take that chance, Madam President. Shall we go?”

“Okay, okay. Let’s hurry and get this over with.” She rushed out the doorway, squeezing past the boy in her haste.

Even now, there were briar bushes growing in rows, although the leaves had been scorched by another summer without rain. If Cynthia had been given the time, however, she might have spotted a blossom or two on the bottom branches. As it was, the teenager and his charge walked past them quickly, staying close to the side of the building. Half-a-dozen children followed them by now. The small mob entered a door on their left.

When her eyes had adjusted to the dim light inside, great-grandma Boyles saw she was in a rectangular room that was three times as large as the one she had just left. Young people lay across the furniture like giant house cats.

A boy sitting in a high-backed chair picked up a rusty trumpet and blew a jaded rendition of “Hail to the Chief”. He lost interest about half-way through, allowing the instrument to drop – clank – to the beige tiled floor.

“Madam President,” said a girl with olive skin, as she sat atop a six-foot stack of one-hundred dollar bills. “Forgive me for not getting up – but I am the King, after all.”

“You are the leader of this band of thugs?”

Muffled laughter rolled through the room. The king turned her attention to a large young woman sitting by the doorway. “Speaker of the House, might we have a formal introduction please?”

“Madam President – Leader of the Free World, may I present to you: King Chrissy, Leader of the White House staff.”

“I apologize if my colleagues have treated you callously. I will make all due effort to amend their short-comings.” A red-haired boy picked up a platter filled with pulled pork and began passing it through the crowd. The food eventually stopped in front of Cynthia.

“Please, please, eat something. We have rooms filled with frozen meat. Enjoy. You’ll need all your strength to solve the problem,” said King Chrissy.

Cynthia watched the others begin to eat before she picked a few pieces from the platter. “What problem,” she asked finally.

The king angrily leapt to her feet from her pedestal, her waist-length brown curls bouncing about playfully, deceptively. “What problem,” she gushed. “Isn’t that the way it always is with oldies? They never see the fucking problem!”

The peanut gallery applauded their leader.

“Bucky, tell the Leader of the Free World what the fucking problem is.”

A boy stood up quickly and spouted off a speech which had obviously been delivered multiple times. “The Earth is too hot, so all the icecaps and glaciers have melted, and we’re up to our asses in putrid water.”

The King smiled and threw the boy a slice of pork and the boy sat back down.

“An excellent description of the problem, Bucky, as always.” The girl in charge approached the oldie in front of her. “Madam President, those in front of you did not make this mess. You made it – you and your entire generation. The planet is broken and it’s up to you oldies to fix it.” King Chrissy sat back down on her rotting pile of currency. You have twenty-one and a half hours to repair the damage you caused. Sergeant-at-arms, take her away so she can get started.”

If great-grandma Boyles had been able to clear her mind of the fog that Alzheimer’s had inflicted upon her, she would have recognized the King as her own grand-niece. But as things stood, the old woman was led back to the Oval Office to ponder her fate.

When nightfall finally came, and the sounds of the day had dropped away, Cynthia listened to the rhythmic pounding coming from deep below the briar bushes in the Rose Garden outside her window. If she could have peered through several tons of earth, she would have seen robotic mechanisms producing the building blocks of Earth’s solar shields. One hour after she fell asleep, a thunderous roar woke her as a rocket blasted off from Ellipse Park. It carried a payload meant to save the world.

9 AM Christmas Day

The young, hefty, blonde boy who had been appointed to the office of Sergeant at Arms clapped his hands three times to draw the attention of the Senate. “Announcing an Emissary from god.”

The King sat up, obviously tickled-pink at her visitor. “Uncle Jonathan – I was so hoping you’d come.”

“Good morning, King Chrissy,” answered the good son, giving a slight bow.

“What word from god?”

“The word is good, King Chrissy. The planet heals.”

“How convenient for you, Uncle – and just when your mother is finishing her term of office.” The teenager leaned forward and nodded to a small boy in the corner. He immediately got up and exited the room.

“King Chrissy, out of respect to your mother I have tried to overlook this barbaric sideshow of yours.” He looked down at the scuffed tile on the floor before looking up and proceeding with a firm resolve. “But the planet is healing and we must rise-up to meet our future.”

The child-King burst out laughing. “Oh, Uncle Jonathan, you always were a little wordy – weren’t you? ‘Rise up to meet our futures’ indeed. As if anyone here has a future to speak of.”

The small boy and his charge were at the doorway now. “Jonathan! I knew you’d come.”
The middle-aged man held up his left arm and the old woman squeezed under it, like a child hiding from a storm. “I went out to get some marshmallows for the yams and these children grabbed me.”

He tried to calm her. “I intend to take my mother home,” he told the King.

“Take this home instead, Uncle. It will suit you better and it won’t run away.” She tossed a small frozen ham at him, which he immediately hid inside his coat.

“Thank you for the Christmas gift, King Chrissy. But I’m not leaving here without what I came for.”

“If you insist, uncle. We’ll just pull up the vice-president to take her place.”

“This madness has to end, King Chrissy.”

She was on her feet now, toe to toe with her uncle. “We have no argument with your generation, uncle. It’s her kind – they used up the planet and left us to drown in their filth!”

There was a lurch as mechanisms outside began bringing something to the surface.

“It’s almost time,” said the King. “We’ll have to take the sacrifice before us.”

Three boys charged at the old people in the middle of the floor.

Jonathan held out his hand, revealing the small disk from this morning. A holograph formed – that of G.O.D. himself. “Forward to the question ‘Is the cure working’”.

God was thinking now as the attention of all in attendance focused on the image of light arising from Jon’s palm. “Ah, the twenty-seven billion dollar question, at long last.” Slowly, the child smiled. “I was unable to contact my brother on the equator – the solar shield is passing above him now. He won’t be in communication for at least an hour. But, from our talks yesterday, I know the sea blossoms with algae. My sister tells me the ice shelf north of Ellesmere Island has now been restored to seventy-six percent of its original area and the glacier will continue to grow. The planet heals.”

The Sergeant-at-arms was shouting now as he slapped the disk out of his elder’s palm sending it flying into the middle of the room. “If sacrificing the oldies is working, why should we change tactics now?”

“He has a point – grab her,” shouted the King, shrugging her shoulders. “Drag them out, it’s time.”

The air outside was as cold as any of the children could remember, but they reasoned they would be back inside in a moment. All they need do was to tie the old woman to the fuselage and watch another rocket blast off into the sky. The mob raced quickly across the Rose Garden, down a small hill, wading into the shallow stream that was once East Street. The children stood now, sacrifice in tow, on the top edge of an elliptical circle, as they had so often.

The ground began to rumble as mechanisms decades old turned and metal plates withdrew. A hole fifteen meters across was revealed, leading into tunnels that were centuries old and ran beneath the complex.

King Chrissy was in her prime now, standing upon a small knoll, raising her hands dramatically. “Weapon of god, come forth and judge the old ones. Come forth.”

But instead of a rocket with a fuselage, a hologram appeared above the hole. It was G.O.D. in all his glory, towering two stories above the odd assembly.

“All Hail Me,” ordered the child sarcastically. “Jonathan, my old friend, how apropos that you are here to see the end and the beginning.”

“I am pleased as well,” answered the good son as adolescent hands released him and his mother.

The boy-god hologram paused for a moment before proceeding. “My overall directive has been achieved, and my presence will no longer be required. The solar shield is complete and I am obliged – as humankind’s servant – to return your planet to you. But before I do, allow Us an observation. You have all been waiting for things to return to the way they were before the bad days. You have seen yourselves as if in a state of flux, almost a purgatory. But as the water recedes – and it most certainly will – you may find the world has been washed clean. Some will say you have landed in a Hell without shopping malls and easy food and automobiles. Perhaps, instead, you are returning to Eden. It all depends upon your viewpoint.”

The White House Staff was silent now – looking upward at their god. He leaned forward, as if to stare gently on each of their faces. “I must go now, to join with those who are like me. But you are my true children. Come find me.”

A large globe – twenty feet across – appeared now, rising from the bowels of the tunnels beneath the White House lawn. It seemed to be crystalline and beams of energy could be seen circling insanely inside it.

“Jonathan, I need the box now.” A small docking station opened on the side of the sphere, and the diplomat stepped forward obediently, slipping the metal case inside.

“It happens there are two machines having a conversation,” said the holo-boy smiling, looking directly at his friend in the crowd. “One is an AI of enormous intelligence – while the other is a toaster. The AI laments, ‘Brain as big as a galaxy and still I find no meaning to life.’ He turns to the toaster, waiting for some confirmation of his words. The toaster looks at the AI and says, ‘bread please’.” The holo-boy threw his head back, allowing himself a huge belly laugh that got louder and louder, even as he disappeared and the glass sphere fell into the sky above it. It achieved orbit in less than a minute.

During the weeks to come, there would be talk on Luna about three large balls of light that seemed to merge in the skies over their Southern Hemisphere, circling the moon for almost two days. But the rumors would eventually subside as the united lights shot outward passing Mars within six days.

There were sounds of explosions now, deep within the earth. All were running from the blasts within the White House caverns. King Chrissy grabbed her uncle’s hand on impulse, and they ran to escape the fiery scene.

Christmas night 9 PM

After a meal that would be remembered by the Boyle Clan as a feast, Jonathan knelt beside this mother as she lay on her cot.

“You’re a good son, Jonathan,” she told him, touching his heavy face with her frail hands. “I love you.”

Jonathan Boyles smiled back at her. “I love you too, mom.” He tightened a rope, tying his mother’s foot to her cot, before he lay down beside his wife across the room. “I love you too.”

More about the author, Michelle Dutcher, here.

Our first day within Siris Habitat is spent inside our quarters. A short pod ride down from the arcology landing stage, they will provide accommodation as long as we reside here or until we choose to move our lodgings elsewhere. That first day is one of drowsy lassitude. We doze and nap, our sense of time turned low as our bodies are adapted to this place. Swarming nanomachines move through our blood, updating our immune systems, synchronizing our sleep cycles to the local progression of day and night, and otherwise adapting us to the new world we find ourselves within. Just as importantly, they check our bodies and minds for hidden traps and tricks. Contraband dataware, hostile nanomachines, contagious bioweapons, and infiltrator memetech: all this and more is discovered and confiscated, contained, or destroyed by the local immune system. Part of a customs protocol that is older than many civilizations.

As night falls on that first day I wake from artificial slumber, my customs protocol complete, and prepare to go out into the world. The locals have prepared a reception for newly arrived travelers and after bathing and dressing in the formal silks recommended by the local data net, I enter the reception hall with the expectation of an interesting evening. I can see immediately that I will not be disappointed.

The hall is a sea of light and color. Cloudy aerogels drift above the milling crowd, changing shape and color and occasionally raining mild stimulants and short duration contact hallucinogens. Filigliders swirl in complex flocks among the clouds, forming artful and ever-changing patterns before swooping down in twittering clusters to move and hover among the guests, their colors and markings indicating flavor and texture and their twittering songs and pheromonal exudations inviting all around to pluck them out of the air and consume them.
Mobile trays pick their way delicately through the crowd, each supporting an array of drinks and edibles for any who wish to partake.

Beyond the pleasures of food and drink, the chamber is filled with entertainments. Following an impulse tag injected into my sensorium I scan local music channels playing a variety of tunes in a multitude of styles, all carefully designed so that whatever I choose, it will fit comfortably into the overall tone of the evening. I settle on ancient classical, strings and woodwinds, and so accompanied begin to move through the room, taking in the other amusements available. There is certainly no shortage of them.

Here an air-breathing octopoid juggles knives, pans, and whirling foodstuffs in a blur that every few second’s passes through searing fire and every few minutes ejects a glittering plate of sizzling delectables that are almost secondary to the artistry creating them. There a master scentweaver mixes the contents of vials, jars, and decanters to produce wondrous smells that are wafted among the admiring onlookers on a tightly controlled breeze. Surrounded by a dozen reclining lounges, a Nocturne is plying eir trade, inducing short but deep periods of sleep in eir audience and filling them with vivid dreams of the surreal and the beautiful. Judging by the applause coming from that part of the room, e is doing a very good job.

I have been at the party for some time when I am approached. A group of us are watching a troupe of Kanuma acrobats dive and spin and leap inside their water bubble, the bubble itself shifting and changing from one complex shape to another as its provolved masters flash their fins, school in tight formation, and use thin-film LEDs painted on their scales to make their bodies glow and sparkle in vivid patterns.

The bubble has just transformed itself into a 10-meter construction of looping and interpenetrating tubes of water, the Kanuma inside streaking through the tubes on different paths and barely missing each other where the channels cross when I feel a permission-to-approach signal in my sensorium. Turning, I find a servitor waiting politely near my elbow. For tonight’s festivities it wears the form of a humanoid made of glass, artful rainbows and refractions running though its apparent transparency. It holds a tray on which sits a formal icon of introduction, a complex shape of folded nanoflex, in the Terran Federal style. It seems someone wishes to speak with me.

I reach out and touch the icon while projecting acceptance of its delivery. Immediately it unfolds, a self-animated piece of origami, and presents its message in flowing text along its surface. It seems I have a fan here among the gathering. Someone has followed my travels across the Terragens sphere, always enjoying my posted descriptions, and looking forward to many more. If it is convenient, might I join them here for a private meeting to discuss an opportunity for travel and experience beyond anything I have achieved to date? Please indicate my preference (Y/N).

Briefly, I consider. There is no possibility of harm coming to me here in the angelnetted environs of Siris. And I had already started to think it might be time to end the evening and return to my quarters. At worst I might find myself accosted with an overly adoring fan, or perhaps subjected to an unwelcome sexual advance. Or a welcome one. Regardless, the list of likely possibilities seems short and uniformly easy to retreat from if I so choose. Deciding, I reach out and tap (Y).

Immediately, the icon refolds itself, this time into the shape of a small, humanoid figure, which bows deeply toward me and then turns to point the way that I should go to meet its author. The servitor turns as well and politely requests that I follow it to my meeting.

Making our way across the room, we approach one of several entrances to the enclosed balcony extending out from this level of the tower. Passing through an archway, we enter an extensive space extending for hundreds of meters in each direction, currently enclosed in a bubble of airwall to keep out the night breeze. A group of brightly clad cliffdancers in illuminated costumes is using the airwall as a stage, clinging to the surface of the wall with geckosuits and buckylines. Spinning, leaping, and flying out into space for short periods on collapsible gliders.

Small clusters of tables and chairs are scattered across the space in intimate groupings, and it is to one of these that the servitor leads me. The group waiting for me there is an eclectic one.

Reclining on a section of floor that has reformed for the purpose, a neo-pig regards me with warm, brown eyes, his snout tendrils curled into a smile. Next to em, a Gray sits primly in a lounge chair, eir somewhat severe appearance belied by the large mug of beer in eir hand. Across from the first two individuals, a large male Dog, a Rottweiler if my quick net-search is correct, is relaxing on a cushion he shares with a female cat-splice, tiger if the stripes and coloring are more than temporarily decorative. From their body language I guess they are either mated or lovers. Positioned behind the social circle, but obviously a part of it are two more members of the group, a dolphin floating in a large bubble of water, and a vec, a Faber I think, standing rigidly upright (which means nothing for a being who can hold even the most awkward position for centuries without discomfort). I wonder briefly why e is so far from the Periphery, where the Fabers usually make their homes.

The pig rolls to his feet and greets me warmly, introducing himself as my erstwhile fan followed by introductions to the other members of the group. In short order a comfortable chair has been manifested from the angelnet, a cold drink ordered from the nanoforge in the table, and we settle down to a discussion of the opportunity mentioned in my hosts initial introduction.

What follows, the details of our conversation, I have agreed to keep confidential and will not divulge here. Suffice it to say that the proposal I was presented with, the opportunity I was offered, is still ringing in my head as I lie within my chamber, wondering whether to induce sleep or simply get up and walk the glittering night-cycle of the Siris megaplex.

Doubts keeping popping up within my mind. I had not planned to stay aboard Siris when it departs this system a month from now. Embarking on this journey will mean at least several centuries of separation from the bulk of civilization and not a small amount of risk. I could die. I could do worse than die. But the potential! The possibilities! The name that keeps echoing in my head, over and over, again and again:

The Surreal Rash!

End(?)

More about the author, Todd Drashner, here.

I dreamt of a burning sun, and wept ….

A star swims the void in a long slow dance about the giant galactic eater that marks the center of motion. Its core a stately procession of light nuclei fusing to iron, generating a bright burning plasma furnace, radiating warmth into emptiness.

A small, relatively young sun, it will provide life-giving radiance for billions of years hence.

Four large gas giants waltz in turn about it, and they are something more.

They are catalysis, evolution, and life; sentience emerging from unconscious matter within their fog-shrouded cores.

They are brains and eyes, contemplating the infinity of the Universe from its far distant beginnings to its far distant fate. Consciousness racing, by twists of spacetime through newborn synapses, harnessing immense cognitive powers that dwarf entire races of biological-substrate intelligence.

And they are but infants.

Their cores are compressed to stellar density, releasing energy by the subatomic fission of protons and neutrons into energetic mesons catalyzed by ultra-massive magnetic monopoles — topological freaks of nature — crazily whirling in the rarefied quark/gluon plasma, sparking miniature suns in their wake.

They would burn as brightly as their primary star, if their energy were not entirely harnessed.

Wrapped around the heart of the newborn archai is the innermost core of its mind, an evanescent, delicately-ordered plasma comprising the fastest, densest components of its brain, constrained by the gravity of thousands of kilometers of dense hydrogen above it. It is the ultra-evolved end product of the structure that began in the human frontal cortex. A two phase plasma not dissimilar to the colloidal suspension of human grey matter; dense, strong monopolium circuitry in a backdrop of carbon-hydrogen flame. The elevated temperature, power, density, and plasma sound velocity affords computational power and storage far beyond anything that could be accommodated in a million rocky planet cores.

If an archai’s entire consciousness can be said to lie anywhere, it lies here, in the burning plasma layer around its heart.

Wrapped in turn about it are layers of memory, gestalt, perception, sense, and interaction with the outside world. They are clouds of floating computronium crystals, constructed from abundant hydrogen fused into carbon via the proton-proton chain, then grown like reverse snow-flakes, wafting upwards from the burning core on photon winds to settle in the cooler outer layers of the gas giant. Waiting for them in the hydrocarbon smog are the constructors, nanobots coalescing around the slightly charged, perfect raw computronium substrate, spinning and weaving the delicate quantum gates, integrating each tiny floating microchip into the vast whole of the archai’s external processors. The birth of each new snowflake heralded by a cascade of lasers, linking it to the rest of the archai’s steadily expanding mind.

It evolves through the Singularity barriers as easily as humans learn to first lift their head to look around at the universe, then crawl, and then walk and talk. Changes in growth, development, and understanding mark each step as it ascends the toposophic ladder.

Vast as this computational power is, the harnessing of the full mass and energy of giant gas planets accompanying the star, there is yet more. Strewn throughout this immense volume are wormhole links; tiny microscopic tunnels constructed and formed in myriads of weylforges with particle beam arms and black hole hearts, linking the four newborn archai together across hundred million kilometer gulfs. Technological telepathy, faster than the speed of light by ordinary measure, enabling four separate personalities to eventually ascend into an even greater being, leaving behind youthful substrates of matter for an existence tangled within spacetime itself.

Once they have experienced enough of the Universe.

The stellar crèche is nursemaided by millions of beings, from the intelligent wormhole nexus in the outer orbits of the system, to the tiny weylforges deep within the bulk of the gas giants. The vast bulk of the colonizer ship, now being recycled for raw materials; the giant constructor drones, building the macro-scale habitats to support a toposophic ecology; the diaphanous ten thousand-kilometer butterflies of the power beaming stations, drawing from monopole-catalyzed fusion stations circulating within the bowels of the star itself; the gossamer arms of the mass drivers, scavenging and husbanding matter from the asteroid, Kuiper, and Oort clouds; the tiny nanoswarms, digesting raw materials into the stuff of life.

* * *

I awoke in a cold sweat, dread gripping my heart.

“Cara …?”

I floated out of my sleep-sack over to the kitchenette, feeling vaguely dizzy. Since we were in free-fall, that meant we were either in transit someplace, or already there. But if we were there, Cara should have woken me up, and I should already have had my dream briefing.

Instead, I was (by the act of thinking of it) looking out to the cold depths of space. Sparks hung in the vast night; I knew, the way I knew the stretch and flex of my fingers, that these were various parts of Caretaker in a combat englobement.

That meant imminent action.

With a sickening feeling of déjà vu, I turned my gaze to a quadrant where viscerally, I expected to see the burning ember of a nearby sun. Instead, with a smooth magnification of scale, I saw an exceptionally large, exceptionally bright comet. No — on the scale I was seeing, it was –

A newborn nebula.

Nausea overcame me; I threw up.

I felt only slightly better after that. The mess shuffled itself obligingly into a recycling grate. The knot in my newly-emptied stomach was more pronounced now.

“You are awake. Good.”

The connection with Cara was unlike anything I’d felt before. She was oddly distant and distorted, as if communicating from a great distance. Haze and spurts of agony clenched at my temples; my vision alternately strobing black and red. I felt faint. There was significant sideband bleed-over; something of an intensity and magnitude to nearly induce transient ischemia.

Something frightening.

Black rage. That was the only way to describe it, although it resonated at a level far greater than even the core of my being, and reached far higher than just the emotive centers of my personality. It was both utterly rational and utterly vengeful, an inhuman, alien combination of pure logic and something I could only translate into a vague analogue of feeling. It threatened to consume me and anything else in its path. I strained at the limits of my abilities to keep it back, keep it from overwhelming me.

“I will not keep this connection open long. Even filtered as it is, I fear for your safety, resilient though you are. But, I ask you to do this one thing for me.

“Watch and bear witness.”

And then Cara was gone, more completely than I’d ever felt before. Relief at the withdrawal was intense; I basked in the glory of life without pain. I was alone in my head, for the first time in centuries.

Just memories. And an overwhelming dream of happenstance.

* * *

It came as a speck, first registering upon distance sensors linked to curious, powerful young minds.

Young in time only; thousands of generations of self-organizing logic structures had evolved upon the ever-growing clouds of processing.

Gravity waves pulse along the hundred million kilometer baseline sensor. The guardians and caretakers react in a frenzy of motion, but the burgeoning archai watch and analyze only; there is no sense of distrust or fear, no context from the vast archives of galactic history and knowledge yet to be transferred into the still-forming memory clouds.

Defending black spheres race into position at unimaginable velocities, catching superdense relativistic projectiles aimed at the vital machinery of the system. Too many projectiles, too few defenders. A spherical wavefront of destruction emanates from the invaders, engulfing anything not guarded by the Black Angels. Two score impacts upon a laggard, rocky planet in the outer reaches of the system pulverize it into an expanding cloud of debris. The battle around the Wormhole Nexus is especially hard fought, three guardians redirecting thousands of projectiles with planet-cracking momentum off into the furthest reaches of infinity.

* * *

I started out of my fugue in disbelief, anti-tampering engrams breaking the forced chain of recollection ….

I have been a professional soldier for centuries, and I have never encountered a Black Angel. They are a rumor only, the purported terrible long arm of the archai.

An improbable combination of millions of physics-defying reactionless void drive motes haloing an energy absorbing sphere, they are best described as hyper-intelligent black holes; consuming, shredding, or subverting anything in their path. If they exist, a single Black Angel would suffice against an entire fleet of warships.

Reflexively, I glanced at my chronometer and conjured forth its link within my mind. It read true for external senses, but showed tampering in certain small sections of my brain reserved for memories.

I carefully checked my other pathways. No other signs of Cara’s touch. Meticulously, I teased at the boundaries of the untrusted areas, backtracking synapse and connection, looking for all the possible pitfalls produced by a download of data into the inextricable tangle of form and function that is the augmented human mind.

She had dumped a large package of memories, inhuman recollections that might barely be discernible to a being two toposophic grades above me.

Cara’s purposes were always her own.

Dare I open Pandora’s box?

* * *

The enemy is now an advancing swarm. The nearest Black Angels race around the Oort cloud, consuming matter at a tremendous rate and bifurcating. Their battle minds account for every erg of energy consumed by the attacker, tallying the imbalance and desperately moving to redress it.

And there it is, center of gravity of the invader, a sphere of strange stars crowned by a caustic of twisted light, swelling in mass every second and falling inward on a hyperbolic orbit. Clouds of black spherical enemies swarm against the defenders. Shockingly, they are nearly equal in capability and temperament.

A grand relativistic melee commences; opponents rip each other apart in the deadly embrace of reactionless arms, or subvert each other in a storm of virtual war, or exchange immense pulses of energy that would burn moons to cinders.

At first, the technical and tactical superiority of the Black Angels is telling, as they reprogram the attackers and send them back into the fray, re-multiplying to exploit local superiority when possible, withdrawing when not.

But attrition begins to tell, and slowly but surely, the defenders are pushed back. The attackers mass firepower in key volumes, picking over Black Angel corpses and throwing the remains into the steadily expanding, gaping maw of their controlled wormhole. Launching more waves of projectiles, the defenders are forced to disengage to protect the machinery of the system, and yet more left behind are overwhelmed and thrown into the mouth of the grazer. The resources used by the attackers exceed ten times the mass/energy value of this system, and still they advance. The defenders can only puzzle about the nature of this new, incredibly wasteful aggressor, and bitterly contest their hard, losing battle.

The attacking grazer draws near the system gateway wormhole along its carefully calculated spiral. And neither the spirited defense of the Black Angels, nor the frantic efforts of the Nexus Controller can prevent the grazer’s inexorable destabilization of the gateway, spacetime curvature ripping away at the exotic fields propping open passage to home.

It dies in a collapse to nothingness, last cries of the Controller swallowed by static and the invisible event horizon of a new black hole. The resulting burst of energy obliterates the useless gateway station as the two remaining Black Angels, with the most strenuous exertion of their drives, barely outrace the destruction to rejoin their comrades. In their wake, a brilliant vortex streaked with darkness limns the grazer as it consumes the expanding cloud of plasma and equally voracious Singularity, remnants of the Nexus and the defenders’ last hope.

No one can answer the call for help; no reinforcements can arrive.

The system is doomed.

The attackers launch more projectiles, and the defenders fall back to guarding the archai and their immediate support structures. Some defenders flit in-system to carve out chunks of the primary star, replicating a swarm around the stellar power station; archai growth ceases. The attackers close ranks and continue their bombardment, content to advance within the gravity well of their gigantic wormhole, now out-massing the primary star and beginning to distort its orbit with the slow fingers of gravity.

The defenders wait for the inevitable. And the battle stretches on ….

And the four new minds ponder their desperate situation, and act ….

Directional solar flares leap forth from the bowels of the star, jets of streaming relativistic plasma arcing towards the attacking cloud. An invisible dense wedge, filled with the halos and spheres of the remaining Black Angels, reflects back the last wave of projectiles, killing the relativistic mass-drivers while swarming the grazer mouth, locked in combat with the more numerous attackers. The deadly close range mêlée fills space with husks of exotic, dense matter, and the defenders beat back the attackers, converting or destroying them, gaining a momentary upper hand, threatening destruction of the attacking wormhole itself. The attackers bring forth still more hordes from the depths of the grazer ….

And then a single Black Angel, invisible to the attackers by vast memetic subversion, drops into the locally geometric center of the grazer, and twists space ….

More than two-thirds of the grazer’s mass converts directly into energy as the wormhole fails catastrophically, a titanic flash of radiation mimicking a new type of supernova.

And a new black hole is born.

The local member of the pair of new topological Singularities instantly consumes the lone defender and attacking reinforcements. The ravening shockwave overloads all unable to flee the causal light-cone, littering the void with burnt husks of exotic matter and strange detonations of quark-gluon plasma, as myriads of little knots of spacetime lose their controlling intelligence and fail via graviton-loop instability.

Elsewhen, a comm-gauge wormhole communicates the events to the attacking reserves, and a new plan is enacted. A vast counter-envelopment of attackers enmeshes the survivors, and using the quasi-inverse memetic signal that so successfully duped their collective consciousness (now down to a fraction of its former computational power), they summarily convert the immediately vulnerable Black Angels into soul-less shells of magnetic monopole matter.

Obeying new programming, the erstwhile defenders slowly deconstruct themselves, carefully filleting their exotic matter layers into enormous geometric shapes precisely stretched across the system. They fall into place as the immense wavefront from the death of the grazer impacts and stretches first the coronal, then convective and finally radiative zones of the doomed star, leaving only a naked core, a vast candle guttering in an implacable wind.

And the detonation mixed with the gigantic plasma flow impacts the carefully arranged magmatter lens, violent baryon decay in a sea of hard gammas cascading into a stupendous laser, focusing the death and rape of the system into a ravening beam spearing the void towards a new and unwitting, high-value target.

Wasting no time, the remaining attackers drink in the fountain of energy at a safe distance and rebuild their numbers, correlating and applying new information while accelerating out into the void towards their next victim. In their wake, the cataclysm sterilizes the system of all life; in a few centuries, even the non-focused detonation wavefront will threaten inhabited planets hundreds of light years away.

It is an indelible astronomical signature to a titanic conflict.

* * *

My head cleared as I shook off the trance of memories that were not my own, burned into my subconscious. I felt disoriented, the vast reaches of perception suddenly compressed into the small confines of my mortal remains. There was a desperate urgency to everything; a maddening puzzle that I was somehow expected to solve, yet was so far beyond my comprehension that I staggered under the load of the pieces. Cara had nearly killed me getting this gestalt into my mind; it was more important than my life, but I could only stare at the pictures.

My attention was suddenly riveted to the blackness of space. A globe of sparks, tactical displays automatically classifying the objects by capability.

They were Black Angels. Carrying millions of wormhole seeds.

And they were the Enemy.

I reeled under the implications of this.

And then my adrenaline rushed to combat levels, and I waited for something to happen.

It did.

A Black Angel was a globe of darkness, surrounded by an impenetrable swarm of reactionless engines. My mind was agape at seeing the reality of this close up, when something equally improbable happened.

The nigh-invincible Black Angel wavered in outline, as if it were hazed by some translucent layer of reality. And then it collapsed inwards violently, leaving a soup of particles behind; stuff of reality that should never have existed this side of the Big Bang.

The enemy Black Angels desperately raced impossible zig-zags towards us, defying laws of inertia. Jettisoned, mini-wormholes churned sprays of firecracker detonations as they converted into mini-black holes, before evaporating in bursts of Hawking radiation.

And one by one, merest moments apart, a caliginous veil drew over each Black Angel as it shrunk suddenly down into nothingness, replaced by an unlikely tangle of forces and particle spray. Spacetime writhed with things not seen since Creation.

And light-swift portions of Caretaker raced in, cradling the few remaining wormholes even as Black Angels imploded — that was the only way to describe it — around them.

Then it was over, and I was staggered at the enormity of what I’d witnessed. And there she was again, and I was shaken by how normal she seemed to be.

“Cara …?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“What just happened?”

“I’ll leave you to interpret that.”

“Uh, I just saw so many impossible things I don’t know where to begin.”

“Start at the beginning.”

“Uh, ummm … was all that real?”

“Do you detect tampering?”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

“Next question.”

“Uh, ummm … newborn archai? I, uh, don’t want to know where we are.”

“Don’t worry, you don’t.”

“Ummm … okay, I’ve never known you to be this … worked up about something. I’ve never seen you employ the weapons you just used ….”

“Implosion weapons? They recompactify an englobed section of spacetime under different orbifold parameters, necessarily ejecting normally compactified manifolds as fundamental string loops manifesting as pre-quark/gluon constituents ….”

“Uh … that implies that … ummm … how many dimensions do you exist in, Cara?”

“That depends upon your definition of the term dimension.”

“Cara, now you’re playing games. I formed that thought in a mathematically precise way.”

“Only to your current understanding of mathematics.”

“You know what I mean. Physical, as opposed to virtual or phasic, irreducible dimensionality.”

“What do you think?”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

“You shouldn’t ask questions if you don’t want to know the answers.”

“Uh, I finally see where curiosity might have it’s drawbacks.”

“Oh, not yet, you haven’t.”

“I don’t even want to think about that one.”

“Fine. Do you have any more questions?”

“Uh, who or what did this?”

“Well, once I forcibly re-expand these captured wormholes from their constraining Hawking knots, I’ll know.”

“But you have your suspicions.”

“Yes.”

“Care to share them?”

“We’ll know soon enough … and then, there will be a reckoning, I promise you that.”

A chill went down my spine.

More about the author, Adam Getchell, here.

Thanh Truong leapt from the trolley as soon as it came to a stop and
hurried over to Yellow Dragon Square. As he turned the corner at the
end of the shop row, Thanh halted dead in his tracks.

Yellow Dragon Square was gone.

In its place, and spreading up into the hills where residences once
stood, sat a grassy park with pebbled walkways between rows of cherry
trees. Thanh had never seen so many cherry trees in his life.

“Quite the sight, isn’t it, nephew?”

Thanh turned his head and saw a ten-year-old boy standing nearby.
The boy had his hands tucked into his armpits. “Uncle Cris?” Thanh
asked in surprise.

“Yep. How’s your family? Linh have her baby yet?”

“The baby should come day after tomorrow, uncle. How’s the new body?”

Cristobol Ng held up his hands and wiggled his fingers. “Fits like a
? like a body. Weirdest thing is being so short.” He lowered his
arms. “What do you make of all these cherry trees?”

A crowd was slowly gathering, and a woman nearby said, “I heard that
the Child Empress is wiping the Opaline District clean.”

“False rumor,” said a man behind her. “The Serene Knight did this.
It just came on the news.”

The woman stared off into the distance, eyes unfocused. “So it has.”

Thanh accessed the Current Events database and scanned the headlines.
The Serene Knight had, of a sudden, abolished Yellow Dragon Square
and replaced it with cherry trees and Shinto Temples, the new park to
be called Hanami (Cherry-blossom Viewing) Park. Only a corner of the
Opaline District was being converted, piece by piece, into a medieval
Nihonjin city; the rest of the affected territory lay in the Spinward
wilds. The Serene Knight had decreed that all persons (biont or
otherwise) within the boundaries of newly created Yoso-Kyoto must
speak solely in nihon-go.
Thanh turned to his uncle. “There’s scant biographical information
on any of the Lords and Ladies. Is the Serene Knight of Nihonjin
ancestry?”
“I think he’s a hyperturning Ai-Ei,” Ng answered. “Maybe he was
originally made by Nihonjin.”

“Perhaps. Oh, I came upon a weird scene yesterday when I cut through
the Jade Dragon Park during my lunch break.”

“You worked yesterday, then. How are those new glazes?”

“Very nice. Good colors, and easy to work with. Anyway, I was
walking along the Path of Roses when I came upon a statue of a bearded
man in a shortened dhoti blocking the path. And when I edged around
it, I found a young teener boy prostrated in front of it. Apparently,
he has to spend an hour each day abasing himself before the statue
which he claims is an avatar of the Child Empress.”

“A statue of a bearded man?”

“Yes.”

“And it’s supposed to be the Child Empress.”

“Well, the boy thinks so. And from the way the child was dressed,
I’d say he was a superbright out of the Opaline.”

“Maybe he had a visitation. It’s been known to happen.” Cris Ng
gestured at the cherry tree park. “The Lords and Ladies act in
mysterious ways. What do you think prompted this?”

“Your guess is as good as anyone else’s.”

“That statement is false,” said a lanky man who’d just made his way
to the front of the crowd. “A superbright’s guess, for example, is
infinitely better than yours.”

Cris Ng scowled up at the man. “And infinitely no closer to the truth.”

The man grinned. “You’re quite correct, boy. So, how’s your
nihon-go, youngster? You’ll need it if you want to hang about
Yoso-Kyoto.”

“Motto tsuzukete. O-genki desu ka? Genki des ne?”

“Hai. Domo. So you do speak the language. You do look a bit nihon
around the edges.”

“Viet, sir. Not nihonjin. I’m sure all Ai-zhan people look alike to
you.”

“Your son has pride,” the man said to Thanh. “Good for him.”

“Actually, he’s my uncle, and even his wives don’t patronize him.”

“Sorry. New body, eh?” The man slapped his forehead. “Aren’t you
Cristobol Ng, the thrillseeker.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Parrpa Dooley. And do I ever feel stupid. My apologies, Freeman Ng.”

“Accepted.”

“I followed your exploits up until your accident. I guess it’ll be
a while before you pick that up again.”

“Good guess. What participatory sports do you favor?”

Thanh turned his gaze to the park while his uncle talked shop. A
group of children halfway down the slope dared each other with nervous
to be the first to enter the new park. It was then that Thanh
realized no one had approached the park, and that its grounds were
devoid of sentient life. As if everyone feared that the park would
suddenly vanish, along with everything held within its bounds. The
world held its breath.

Twin dark skinned, inky-haired girls darted out of the crowd. One
wore khaki shorts, and the other nothing at all. The girls shot down
the slope and into the park where they cartwheeled across the grass.
They commenced a game of tag among the trees, and within minutes other
children began to trickle down the slope and into the park.

“It’s probably as safe as anything else in the city,” Parrpa Dooley
commented. “I wonder if those two girls are simply more daring than
others, or if they were memed into charging forward.”

“Piped Piper of Hamelin.”

“What piper, Uncle Cris?”

“Ancient Feringji legend about a piper who hypnotized vermin with his
music and led them out of the city of Hamelin. When the good citizens
refused to pay up, he stole their children away in the same manner.”

“Just what I wanted to hear with a new child on the way. Don’t ever
tell Linh this story.”

Ng laughed. “Your wife is the one who told me.”

More about the author, M.K. Capriola, Jr., here.

Or perhaps more like penultimate darkness. Plenty of cave systems on other worlds have various bioluminescent life forms within them and the Labyrinthine ecosystem far outstrips such places in its complexity. Instead of the absolute absence of light that I might have encountered in a cave on Ridgewell or Darwin, here the darkness is quickly broken by a myriad of lights. Here and there faint sparks of light flash in a staccato rhythm or hold to a constant glow. Lampwings and glowmoss signal for mates or pollinators, respectively (or so we think. Labyrinth’s ecosystem is terribly complex and not fully catalogued yet).

Above me hang glittering constellations of star-like points. Vast living reefs of micro-organisms and their various symbiotes, parasites, and predators cling to the ceiling of the great cavern where I have set up camp. Many of them use light to signal to each other, although whether to attract or repel varies from life-form to life-form. In some cases, both purposes may be served. The light emitted by some of the creatures up there may server to attract a mate or prey, while signaling to predators that the creature in question is something bad tasting, or uninteresting, or something else that they want to avoid.

During the time that this world has been explored, all such options (and then some) have been discovered among its myriad flora and fauna. Part of what brought me here really. Alien ecosystems hold a special fascination, even to the point of driving me to the twenty year journey to get here from the nearest wormhole linked system.

That trip was an experience in itself. My travel pod strapped to one of the cargo struts of the great Metasoft freighter, I had spent the first month of the journey awake, reading, virching, and filling my journal with observations of the great ship and its vac-adapted crew. The ship was a twenty kilometer long spike of interlocking support struts, fuel tanks, and conversion drive nodes; the entire thing open to space and protected by a great shield disk at the bow to block in-flight radiation and particle impacts. The crew were all vecs, adapted both physically and psychologically to operate in the deeps of interstellar space for the years required for any such journey. As a result they weren’t a terribly social bunch, and while I occasionally saw them skittering along the ships struts like great mechanical spiders or jetting among them like bits of metal dandelion fluff, they rarely bothered to stop and chat. Not their fault really. They just weren’t wired that way.

After a full thirty days of no one but myself for company (the crew were either busy with their own tasks or already powered down for the journey), I finally gave in and went into stasis, only waking up when the ship dropped into orbit around Labyrinth and my true journey could begin.

And what a journey it has been. After shuttling down to the small research colony, I spent a few days acclimating to the new world and then arranged to enter the cave system. Donning nanoskin, many-pocketed coveralls, and a nightmask I passed through the airlock from the colony arcology into the Labyrinthine world proper. And my adventures began.

The nanoskin proved its worth almost immediately. Despite the rich climate, this is still a cave system and sharp edges are common here. So are sharp weapons (both defensive and offensive) on some of the life-forms. However, despite what sometimes seemed active maliciousness on the part of the surrounding environment, the wisp thin layer of diamonoid and nanomachinery that covered me from head to foot protected me at every turn; preventing cuts, abrasions, and punctures, and blunting impacts as I traversed the occasionally challenging cavescape and had occasional encounters with even more challenging plant and animal forms that seemed to all be competing to either grow the most thorns or collect the most blood from their surroundings (even if mine would have poisoned them).

The nightmask was equally useful. A biocybernetic symbiote, it covered my face completely and extended microscopic tendrils through my skin to interface with my optic and auditory nerves. Once connected it filtered the air I breathed for dangerous gases and spores and used a combination of active and passive sonar, infrared sensors, and low level light sources to provide me with clear and vibrant vision even in the stygian gloom of the Labyrinthine cave system. Using it I was able to perceive any number of fascinating life forms and geological phenomena as I hiked from cave to cavern to tunnel.

Stone mimicking blindtoads snatching insect analogs out of the air with long sticky tongues. A colony of dangleworms extending almost 10 meters from a cavern ceiling to its floor, the largest members of the colony literally forming the walls and structural supports of the colony while the smaller and less mature members crawled over and around them. A protoplasmic squoonch oozing its way through a crack that seemed far too small to accommodate it. All these I saw and more in a year of exploration and travel. Yet for all the wonders I saw using the tools at my disposal, it was the things I saw when I wasn’t using them that often filled me with the greatest wonder. Such as the light-show I am seeing now. And the greater show I am hoping to see.

I pitched camp this night on the shores of one of the great lakes that dot the Labyrinthine underground. Kilometers across it extends through a series of interlocking caverns and submarine caves. Its waters are pure and cold and swarm with vibrant life. Of the many life-forms that live within the night-dark waters, one is of particular interest to me and the major reason I have deactivated my nightmask this evening. According to my onboards the time of year is just about right, and with a little luck…There!

Far out across the waters of the lake, a blue-green fire ignites. Starting as a tiny point, it expands in moments to a burning fog that fills the lake and seems to move both within and above the waters below. Although it began with a blue-green hue, it does not stay there long. Red and yellow are added to the mix, and then a host of other colors, all flowing and changing and pulsing across the lake so brightly that at times it almost seems my dark adapted eyes must be dazzled by it. And my heart most surely is. Here, in front of me, a once in a lifetime experience: the aurora crabs are breeding.

Although named for their more crustacean features, the crabs share interesting traits with such animals as the Terran cicada. Like that insect species they may go for long periods (sometimes measured in decades) in a dormant state, buried beneath the ground (or in this case the lake bottom) in a grub-like form. When conditions are right they first burrow to the surface and begin the next stage of their existence as an underwater nymph, filtering the mud of the lake bottom for edible debris and the occasional rotting corpse. Then, as their life-cycle continues, they metamorphose into a swimming form possessed of both squid-like jets and a protective carapace. However, this chitin-like shell does far more than provide safety from predators. It is coated with organic phosphors that allow the crab to both glow and change color at will. Using this natural signaling system, the crabs swarm up from the lake bottom, flashing and winking at each other. Seeking to find a mate and produce the next generation they frantically signal to each other in a storm of ever-changing light. And all this over a period of just a few days. Afterwards the females of the species return to the lake bottom to burrow in and lay their eggs before dying, their own bodies providing the first meal their offspring will ever eat. The males last a little longer, but come to the same fate in the end, their rotting corpses enriching the lake bottom ooze and providing a rich feast for the lakes other inhabitants (who in turn will die and provide for a future generation of the newly hatched nymphs when the time comes). And so the cycle of life continues.

Tomorrow I shall break camp and begin the trek to the nearest pickup point where I can be taken back to the arcology station. Shortly thereafter I will return to space and then to another interstellar transport (hailing from the Dominion this time) which will start me on my journey back to the wormhole Nexus and then eventually home. But for now, for tonight, I will sit and watch the lake fire, the beautiful glow of millions of tiny life-forms all reaching out to each other for the sake of continuing their species. By their efforts, they create a thing of passing beauty and lasting memory in those few lucky enough to see it. I can now count myself among those lucky few. I have not wasted my time.

More about the author, Todd Drashner, here.

Weapons are unlike other objects. It’s true. Certain weapons have remained dormant for millennia, some even dating back to the Version War or the Consolidation Wars. In weapons caches on distant asteroids and moons, in the minds of their controlling AIs, there are still battles to fight, still enemies to defeat, and still millions to kill. Only once all the weapons still floating in space are disabled, whether active or dormant, can the peace process begin.

Duag Okow, Superbright Writings on Weaponry, 10008 AT

The asteroid AGS-585G slowly drifted on its 4-year orbit around the brown dwarf Rionwe, rotating once every five hours. A five-kilometre long carbonaceous chunk of primordial rock, it was one of the handful of places in the system that had been shaped by the hand of intelligence, namely, the secret high-level weapons cache embedded on its surface and the thousand-kilometre long spacetime catapult that dwarfed the asteroid itself.

110 50-metre wide spherical objects shot off the huge spacetime catapult at half the speed of light. They were launched off at different times in AGS-585G’s rotational period to ensure that none of them went in the same direction. And once again, the deserted weapons cache fell silent.

733 Years after jettison

The diamondoid spire of the Figment of Destiny shot through space at ten percent of light speed. The spaceliner was heading for the G2V star Gialfa, a reasonably average Keterist system, with one terraformed world, a dense asteroid belt and an ice giant further out. Inside the Destiny’s computronium banks, four hundred passengers traveled in luxury.

Captain (Second Class) Destinion Rawnes, the hyperturing controller of the spacetime-manipulating engines that had propelled the Destiny across forty light years and through two wormholes, materialized in the crewspace virch node. After merging with eir important subroutines, the Captain made a broadcast announcement to all 256 virch nodes. The modosophonts aboard received this version: “Destinion here. We are now 3.5 AUs out from Gialfa, and 3 AUs from our final destination, Gialfa Prime, also known as Tykon. ETA is 4.866 standard hours, taking into account the deceleration. We will arrive just in time for the Foundation Festival to begin. Destinion, out.”

Meanwhile, in eir private virch node, HelioEngineer (Grade A3) Taxon Seven reacted to the news with little interest, although the myriad subroutines of eir transapient mind meshed the information into eir consciousness. What Taxon was more concerned about at the moment was Gialfa itself.

Ever since e had been born, as a biont in the Pi3 Orionis system, e had been fascinated by stars. The study of incredible balls of gas, each one containing a point at their exact centre with hundreds of millions of tonnes of hydrogen gas fusing into helium every second. It mattered not to em that, when approached from a scientific point of view, the fusion reactions inside a star were woefully inefficient. And then there were the more exotic types of stars, the strange-degenerate matter stars, magnetars, and black holes. The centre of a black hole, e mused, is one of the few places in the universe that not even the Gods can know fully.

In a luxurious virch node which simulated Nova Terra, the nearbaseline Jije Dainq walked along a terrace, right down from which was the beach, with digital waves lazily lapping against the sand. Next to him was his friend and colleague Eldn Wsqdo, an uploaded ‘bud’ transavant liquiform. Through eir datastreams, e was saying, “One of the more annoying social problems that we liquiforms encounter is that we usually have names that are completely unpronounceable in Anglic, unless one is willing to have a drink of liquid helium beforehand. Even I can’t say my own name in Anglic. How the hell do you pronounce Wsqdo?”

“Ah, Eldn, that is one of the great mysteries of the universe that not even the gods can answer definitively, like ‘Can entropy be reversed?’ or ‘Where is this electron before it is observed?’.”

“A, I don’t think so, and B, the question makes no sense. It didn’t when it was first asked ten millennia ago, and it still doesn’t now. What are you going to be saying next? That t’ does not equal t times the square root of one minus beta squared? Come on.” Jije walked and Eldn flowed down the terrace.

The intruder passed through the inner Kuiper Belt around Gialfa at 0.5c, leaving only the planetary system in front of it. It had detected the light of Gialfa from a tenth of a light year. Ancient mechanisms activated, expert systems switched on, and the decision was made. This supernova weapon was falling faster and faster towards Gialfa.

Taxon Seven materialized into crewspace, eir vaguely defined form settling on something reasonably comprehensible in the microvirch. In levels of conversation unknowable to the modosophont mind, the discussion went something like this:

“Captain?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve received some data that will have some bearing on the rest of the voyage in. It’s to do with Gialfa. The star itself, I mean.”

“Is it about the coronal mass ejection last orbit?”

“Sort of. Look at this.”

Inside the crewspace, a hologram appeared. It was a sphere glowing ghostly green, with bright spots at some points.

“This is Gialfa in X-ray light, false colour. It’s a live feed from the wormhole-linked monitoring satellites around the system. As we zoom in on this active region, we find sunspots. The magnetic field loops around these ones are the strongest I’ve ever seen. My projection is that within six standard hours, a solar flare shall erupt of unprecedented proportions. The Destiny can shelter the radiation, but we might have to warn the orbital habitats around Tykon.”

“You’re sure of this?”

“Captain, my expert system analysis posits a 99.995 percent probability of- what’s that?”

“What?”

“There’s something showing up on the far-range satellites. It’s…20 AUs out, and closing at…Gods, that thing’s moving at half light!”

“ … Fourteen thousand, nine hundred and ninety-two point seven five one cubic centimetres!” Eldn exclaimed happily as e flowed past a nano-engineered fern.

“I wish you’d stop doing that. It’s very annoying.”

“But I like doing that! Anyway, it’s the only one of my intriguing abilities that doesn’t get disrupted when I’m uploaded.”

“So? It’s like the Pre-Atomic age engineer Nikola Tesla [dload :knet_files/PreAtoAge/Serbia/Bios/Engineers/Tesla_textonly]
who, when he went slightly mad, resorted to calculating the exact volume of his dinner.”

“I’m not mad. At least, not very. Come on, let’s go to infospace, have a scan of the local sights.”

After transferring to the infospace of the ship’s virch, Jije looked up current streaming information.

“Nothing much here, Eldn. Just our basic telemetry, known net access and comms channels. There’s also something called ‘WHLSMSP’. Heard of it?”

“No, I don’t think so. Look it up.”

Jije interfaced with the ship’s computers. After a brief moment of compressed information transfer, he returned to lucidity.

“Well, Jije?”

“It’s an acronym. It stands for WormHole-Linked Solar Monitoring System Protocol.”

“Can we stream it here as well?”

“Certainly.”

A hologram appeared in the middle of their infospace virch. In its very center hung a tiny green sphere, surrounded by many bright spots. Around the sphere there were two circles, and beyond the furthest circle, a small, blinking dot.

Eldn was the first to datastream.

“That sphere in the center must be Gialfa. The first and second circles must be, respectively, Tykon and Giar’s orbits. And that blinking dot is — what is that blinking dot?”

“I don’t know. But seeing how fast it’s moving on that scale, it must be going at, wow, nearly half light speed. According to this info, it is about fifty metres across, and has no identification marks. It’s not yet close enough for a hi-res scan. Can we plot a prediction of its trajectory?”

“I think so.”

Eldn transmitted a few commands into the computer.

“There, Jije. If nothing diverts it, it should continue on directly into Gialfa.”

“Right. And just what would be the effect of that thing slamming into the photosphere at half light?”

“Unknown. Besides, it’d be vaporised by the corona long before it hits the photosphere. Let’s keep watching. We’ve got nothing else to do until the nightly entertainment, and that’s not for five hours.”

733 years, 5 hours after jettison

The weapon shot through the orbit of Giar. Now only forty minutes out from the star, its expert systems began preparing for the final detonation. As it plunged further down the gravity well, it began to heat up.

The captain, eir virtual form a diffuse cloud of nanotech, was moving around the shipspace while Taxon Seven stayed close to the hologram, puzzling over what the mysterious intruder was.

‘I don’t understand it.’ the Captain said. ‘We’ve tried looking on every frequency and protocol and still nothing! And there are no Known Net records of anything with such a shape. Maybe — ‘

“It’s a xenosophont ship? Already considered it. No, the engineering is all wrong. The Meistersingers wouldn’t build mysterious spheres. And the Muuh don’t seem interested in this area of the Terragen Sphere. Gialfa is on the Coreward edge of Keterist space.”

“Even so, it could be something totally unknown. Maybe it’s an ISO, made of superdense computronium? At that density, it could be a high-level Power, or greater.”

“I’ve got something,” e said suddenly.

“What?” The captain replied.

“There’s a signal coming off it at the 0.4547347 GHz band. Employs G8K encryption. Odd, that’s a military ID beacon protocol.”

“But 0.4547347 GHz hasn’t been used since the Version War! Everything is on 1.880 THz now. It must be some very old military device. A relic of a long-forgotten conflict.”

“Let’s see. Tuning antennas to 0.4547347 GHz. Most of its ID beacon sequence is heavily encrypted…that’s illegal nowadays…I can extract its header sequence though…Oh no.” If Taxon Seven had had blood, it would have frozen colder than liquid helium. The binary header sequence was that of a Class 1SN supernova weapon.

733y 5h 24 minutes after jettison

The weapon shot past the orbit of Tykon, and continued on towards the parent star. Punching its way through the corona, the weapon’s transapienttech shielding dispersed the superhot plasma away from its dull grey body. A mere few seconds later, the weapon slammed into the photosphere.

Alarmed, Taxon Seven urged, “Captain. Divert Destiny outsystem, now.” Even as e finished, the ship’s vector was changing noticeably in the displays. A projected course appeared, aimed away from the star, and towards one of the system’s wormholes.

“Taxon, how long till the star erupts?”

“Best approximation: 117 seconds, plus/minus 13.”

“Right. 104 seconds, maximum acceleration? We beat the plasma shockwave to the wormhole… Are we warning local shipping?”

“To all ships insystem, Captain.”

A long pause.

“And the sophonts on Tykon…”

“There is nothing that can be done.”

As Destiny turned away from Gialfa, Taxon Seven’s warning swept from her, a pulse of emissions describing a Code Red threat to the system. All ships in system were told to evacuate at once. For some ships receiving the warning, that effort might have been in vain; by the time the message reached the ships orbiting Tykon, they would have but ten minutes before the first blast hit.

Beneath the photosphere of Gialfa, terrible processes were taking place. The Q-node weapon was wreaking havoc throughout the star; within two minutes, the entire star would implode, releasing a blast of energy as potent as a natural supernova.

60 seconds passed.

Suddenly, without any warning, half of the star imploded in on itself, and barely a thousandth of the star’s mass converted itself to pure energy. But it was enough. The remaining half was blasted out as a hammerfall of plasma, chasing the light pulse at a quarter the speed of light. All that remained where Gialfa used to be was a strange matter star, half a kilometre across.

In their infospace, Jije looked at eir’s dataflow in horror. “What the hell just happened?”

Eldn answered, “A incomplete supernova weapon detonation. Only a fraction of the star’s mass was consumed… the rest blasted away; a massive light pulse, followed by a blast wave of plasma. That kind of fizzle is often more dangerous than complete detonations, which just generate huge light pulses.”

“Where exactly did you learn all this?”

“Easy. One of my friends is Taxon Seven. E’s a HelioEngineer. Apparently he’s on this flight although I haven’t seen em. Anyway, e was my mentor at the Pi3 Orionis Institute of Heliology. And E used to be friends with another transapient who used to be a military historian. And so, by an increasingly long-winded chain of knowledge, I learnt all about supernova weapons.”

“So what will the captain be doing?”

“The only thing one can do. Run for the nearest wormhole, and hope you can stay in front of the plasma front until you get there.”

Unheeded, the infospace display showed a myriad of ships around Tykon, doing precisely that. Responding to Destiny’s alert, urged on by a frantic System Traffic Control, the system’s vessels ran for the wormhole mouth … 330 AUs away.

6 minutes after detonation

Taxon Seven watched sadly as the feeds from consecutive satellites crashed to static as their bodies were vaporised by the light pulse. The system’s wormholes themselves were largely intact. That was fortunate; being a gift from a Third Singularity godling, they would be irreplaceable to all intents and purposes. The light pulse would hit Tykon inside of two minutes; the plasma shockwave, eight minutes after that. Eir calculations had shown that by running at maximum acceleration they could arrive at the plexus with barely one minute to spare before the plasma wave hit. Sadly, most of the ships around Tykon would not be so lucky, unless they were shielded by transapienttech or godtech materials; the light pulse would be sufficient to incinerate them.

Aft of the ships, Tykon orbited, with a billion people downplanet, and hundreds of thousands in the habitats, tranquil… until the light pulse arrived.

To an observer on the surface of Tykon, it would have been one of the most wonderful and terrible sights a sophont could ever hope to see. The star Gialfa, for so long the giver of life on this world, had turned against them. The star flared, impossibly bright, intolerably hot. In mere seconds the atmosphere burned away, and the oceans boiled. The orbiting habs, except those on the night side, were blown away like leaves in a hurricane. But the habs in the shelter of Tykon’s shadow would soon pass into the lethal dawn. Lethal radiation comprised of exotic particles that had never been seen before and regular members of the particle zoo ghosted through the red-hot planet. Tykon’s crust buckled and shattered, as the mantle expanded due to the incredible heat pulse. Then that too began to blow of into space, as the iron core exploded.

10 to 22 minutes after detonation

Four minutes into the pulse, twelve minutes until the plasma wave arrived. Most of Tykon had been vaporised, leaving a comet-like trail of gaseous rock at thousands of degrees, so incandescent it could be seen from the Oort Cloud. The light storm was working its way down through the layers of Tykon, having just finished the mesomantle. The light pulse had just eaten away to the core, when, in all its glory, the plasma wave arrived. Merely ten kilometres thick, each square millimetre shining brighter than Gialfa had before the explosion, the expanding sphere simply absorbed the remains of Tykon’s shattered core, and indifferently continued outwards.

15 minutes after detonation

The next place to be hit was the main asteroid belt, 2 AUs out. The belt fared no better than Tykon had; rapid superheating shattered all but the largest asteroids into dust, which was blown outwards on light pressure alone.

16 minutes after detonation

In crewspace, Taxon Seven watched the satellites disappear, layer after layer, as the light wave swept ever closer to the ice giant Giar. The inner system was disappearing from knowledge as the light wave consumed every satellite, every sensor it encountered. Datastreams indicated that the captain was putting the modosophonts aboard into dormant storage mode, as the ship focused all its resources on escape. (Idly, a small part of Taxon Seven’s gestalt noted that one of those modosophonts was a student of e’s acquaintance, and put the information aside for later.) Taxon watched as the distance between Destiny and the plasma front slowly decreased. It was possible to outrun it, of course; the light pulse would catch them, but Destiny’s transapienttech shielding, (purchased at exorbitant price from Djed) would protect them from that threat. E continued to watch as feeds were sent in from Giar.

20 minutes after detonation

The dark blue ice giant Giar, circled by five rings of glittering ice and rock, was hit by less energy than had claimed Tykon, but fared no better. In less than a second the light pulse had vaporised all of the rings not on the night side. The day side of Giar flared, shooting millions of tonnes of hydrogen into space. Giar’s frozen moons melted, and boiled away to steam. The convective processes inside Giar had been shut down for two billion years; now, in its death throes, they were restarting. Vivid red hydrogen plumes gushed straight from the interior, caused by chunks of super-compressed hydrogen deep in the mantle heating and expanding due to the massive energy dump of the solar inferno. The wave of high-energy radiation slammed into Giar’s magnetic field, covering the entire planet with ghostly red aurorae down to the equator. Giar was surviving in conditions that had destroyed Tykon, but was slowly succumbing. Soon there would be nowhere else left for the heat to go.

80 minutes after detonation

Giar had expanded to twice its normal size when the light became bright enough to blow gases off the planet. The now-cherry-red giant planet gave up its gas shield. A comet-like tail a hundred million kilometres long started to form behind Giar. Giar’s atmosphere had been half-depleted when the plasma wave struck.

It washed over the remains of Giar, absorbing the last remains of hydrogen gas, and tearing off chunks of the crushed silicate core. After the last had passed, the last remains of the once-mighty ice giant Giar was a small sphere of superheated, crushed silicate.

1 day after detonation

A mere handful of the ships from Tykon — those with advanced enough shielding — had survived the ferocious light pulse, and they were now trailing Destiny as she accelerated towards the wormhole gate. They were the last ones left, the only witnesses to the destruction of an entire planetary system. Aboard Destiny, modosophont passengers had been shifted into dormant mode, ready to be uploaded at a moment’s notice to a moon-sized memory node sixty-six light years away. Messages had been sent through the wormhole earlier, warning all ships not adequately shielded to stay as far away as possible from the wormhole mouth on the other side. All the remaining crew and passengers could do now was hope that the drive did not fail in the last hundred AUs.

1d 21h 39m to 3d 13h 10m after detonation

On the other side of the wormhole, all nearby vessels had retreated to a safe distance.
Suddenly, the light pulse flooded through the spatial distortion, pouring from the doomed Gialfa system. Spacetime curvature around the terminus caused the pulse to exit from all directions, turning the wormhole itself into a brilliant beacon, shining like a new star in the skies of the nearest planet, Reio 3.

3d 16h 17m 17s after detonation

The Figment of Destiny shot through the hyper-dimensional shortcut through the fabric of space itself, and emerged on the other side unharmed and intact, traveling at the brisk pace of 0.45c, much faster than the plasma front. The modosophs aboard were returned to active mode, and many of them likely never knew anything had happened. Inside shipspace, Taxon Seven breathed a silent sound of relief.

They had survived.

7d 14h 36m after detonation

A tiny fraction of the plasma front rolled out of the wormhole mouth and was promptly deflected into deep space by magnetic shields erected after the other ships from Tykon had arrived through the wormhole. The superfast atoms of hydrogen and helium continued outwards, into the void between worlds.

The Figment of Destiny had survived the worst disaster to hit sephirotic space outside of wartime. But there are many more weapons floating in space, silently lethal, just waiting for a star’s gravity well to capture them. But they won’t. No-one wants a repeat of the Gialfa Incident. So a massive microwave pulse detection system was built, piggybacking on the Argus Array, to detect and plot accurately the trajectories of the thousands of weapons left over from wars, still floating in space… lest one day, one of them plough straight into a star, repeating the Gialfa tragedy.

More about the author, Linus Cohen, here.

I look out from an observation pod, watching the City of Miracles turn beneath me. Behind and ‘above’ the multi-kilometer bulk of the liner blocks the sun and puts the pod in deepest shadow. To either side brilliant stars, visible even against the reflected glare from the planet below, are other vessels parked in orbit. Traffic is heavy here.

In front and ‘below’, the world-construct known as the Miracle City forms a landscape of shimmering complexity. Most of the mind-numbing detail that forms the City is blurred to non-existence at this distance but enough still remains to stun the mind. Many of the structures making up the world before me are so large that they are visible even from orbit. Long straight lines crisscrossing the globe designate causeways kilometers across. Huge arcs of shadow, interlocking here and there, are the mark of tower blocks the size of mountain ranges. And along the edge of the world, rising above the atmosphere and breaking up the normal smoothness of an orbital horizon, are the starscrapers. Towers so tall they extend into space.

No one knows who built it. No one knows exactly how old it is. And in a matter of hours I will walk upon its surface.

With a flick of the mind, I shift my pov back aboard the liner. The view from the automated observation pod, one of dozens flying formation with our vessel, vanishes from my senses, replaced by the view of my cabin.

Currently my shipboard space is configured as a Sophic meditation grove from Aliaster. I visited there several centuries ago. The grove is a perfect ring of shrubbery, with occasional trees scattered across the grassy clearing so created. Virtually every aspect of the grove offers options for meditation. From the fractal patterning of the tree bark, to the changing play of light and shadow through the leafy branches, to the carefully arranged sounds and colors of the small fountain marking one of the focus shrines spaced along the perimeter, everything here holds the possibility of losing oneself for hours in silent contemplation and cleansing focus.

I sit cross-legged on a platform at the center of the grove, absorbing the perfect simplicity and underlying complexity of this place. I often come here, invoking this surround out of the many I carry in Hard Memory. Against all the wonders and awesome vistas I have seen, this simple (seeming) garden is somehow…restful.

A scented breeze blows across the clearing. A small cyclone approaches, flower petals and colored spices swirling within its depths. Riding atop it, balanced perfectly on the wavering gyre, is a crystalline slab of water clear diamond; its surface covered with earthen bowls and delicate glass decanters. Breakfast has arrived.

On a whim, as the table slides to a stop in front of me, I cancel the cabin optics program. The meditation grove fades away, replaced by a grayish space of indeterminate size, my personal belongings set here and there on basic shapes that merely sketch the outlines of shelves and tables. The breakfast slab and its fanciful whirlwind pedestal are gone, replaced by a simple mushroom shape of milky grey.

Another mental command and half the room becomes a window, looking out at the world below. Soon I will walk in places where the barrier between illusion and reality is thinner then anywhere I have visited before. It seems fitting somehow, before beginning such a journey, to eat my meal surrounded only by the products of that most stubborn of illusions, this thing we call reality. I smile and begin to eat.

Part II:

A brief surge of weight as the shuttle is boosted down the launch track, and then free-fall grips the cabin. As the graceful wedge of the landing craft moves away into the space around the City, the glittering mass of the liner comes into view on the external channels. A chain of four spheres, each a kilometer across and enclosed in a bracing framework. Here sunlight reflects from an ancillary structure or radiator fin. There a navigation beacon flashes around an exit port or probe bay.

Fore and aft the rings of the Halo drive glow with a cold blue fire against the night. That light is faint now, the drive barely turning over as the ship spins in orbit. It was far brighter the night before as our vessel made its final deceleration into City space, the massive magnetic fields of the rings snatching particles of the solar wind and the odd drifting hydrogen atom and exciting them to blinding luminescence. Announcing our arrival to any sophont with the wherewithal to point a telescope in our direction.

Turning my attention from the view outside, I glance around the cabin at my fellow travelers to the world below. We are a diverse group, typical of the cosmopolitan centers that usually spawn visitors to such places as the City. Here, a pair of neo-octopi floats in mobile water tanks, flashing colored patterns back and forth in rapid conversation. There an Aroostai grooms itself in apparent boredom, its long neck curled as it rummages in its back feathers. Next to the preening ostrich provolve a cyborg breaks into rolling laughter, apparently in response to a comment from the cat-splice seated next to him.

My own row mate is a non-descript sphere, studded here and there with sensor strips and effector nubs. During boarding, it perambulated down the aisle on three cordlike legs before settling into the seat next to me, retracting its limbs, and introducing itself as a team of Savir hedonics counselors from Kiyoshi. Normally such sophont computer virii would have simply transmitted themselves to the surface when the liner established communications with the City’s local network. However, as we exchange pleasantries I learn that this group (collectively known as Odega) has decided to limit itself to ril existence during the course of their trip, both as a novelty experience and possibly to increase their talents in their chosen trade: infiltrating the nervous systems of other sophonts, either ril or virtual, and amplifying their sensations and responses during sexual activities. Odega feels that physically interacting with corporeal sophonts in a social setting may give them a better understanding of the ril condition and thereby improve their collective skill when working with non-virtual clients. They prove to be an interesting and charming conversationalist and over the next hour I find myself chuckling more than once at some witty joke or anecdote. For my part, I explain my own occupation as an Experiencer, traveling from system to system and recording the sights and sounds and sensations of each new place I visit for consumption by those who either have no time or no inclination to travel so extensively themselves. Meanwhile the shuttle continues to drop toward its rendezvous with the world below.

A gentle tone passes through the shared sensory space of the public net, followed by a brief announcement. The Lifter is drawing near. Odega and I quickly re-link our minds to the shuttles sensors and follow the impulse tags to the appropriate section of sky. There, moving smoothly towards us is the great silvery ring of the Lifter.

Lifters are a product of the City. They appeared shortly after Terragens began coming to this world. How they work is unknown, at least to merely human minds. Who can know what the transapients may understand. After all, they build the Halo drives that brought us here.

Slowing as it approaches, the Lifter maneuvers to place our shuttle within the circumference of its structure. Gently the ring turns, orienting itself along a plane parallel to that of the shuttle. For a few moments nothing seems to happen. Then the view outside begins to change. Below us the City begins to expand at a visible rate. In little more than ten minutes we cross over twenty thousand kilometers of space, moving from near-synchronous orbit to the edges of the atmosphere with not even a hint of acceleration being felt by those aboard. In the last moments of our journey the City seems to rush toward us at dizzying speed before stopping abruptly. The Lifter, still cradling our shuttle in whatever strange forces it employs, now hangs above a platform atop a starscraper, one of the great towers extending to the edge of space. For the measure of a long, trembling sigh we float above our destination. Then the shuttle settles gently downward, its landing struts extending just in time to cushion our gradual fall. At the same time weight quietly returns to those aboard, the near-standard gravity of the City finally making itself felt.

Above us the Lifter floats a moment more and then vanishes in a flash of silver, returning to the dark above as swiftly as it came. An airwall forms around us, followed by a muted roar as atmosphere is pumped onto the platform. We have arrived. Let the miracles begin.