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| There Ain't No Justice |
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| #99 |
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- The Isolation of the Builder -
by David Artman
There are few men in the galaxy for whom life is an exhilarating
surprise, a merciful relief. One of these few was Technician Thrace Soleman
(id# Astro.A159FC6B) as his ship, the Willie Mays, reentered normal space.
Though living all his life in space --tesseracting hither and yon,
withstanding gravities from nil to seven times Sol.Earth norm-- he had
always held his breath right before breaching essential space due to an
almost unconscious foreboding that, for some reason, THIS tess --out of all
the hundreds occurring at the same moment throughout the Milky Way, out of
all the millions having occurred in the past--would go wrong.
He was, put simply, glad that sense experience had resumed; and he
exhaled noisely, a grin teasing one corner of his mouth.
Technically, from his perspective the trip had taken no time as he
was not psychically sensitive; there was no real (i.e. four dimensional)
interruption in his life. Yet, the Willie Mays had just completed an 8700
lightyear journey away from the edge of the Milky Way. Reclined on his cot,
Soleman was staring through one section of the ship's hull which had been
left transparent; it revealed nothing but a few specks of light to the
"north" of the ship and a slight glow of the Milky Way bleeding from the
down side. --So where is the rock?--
Thrace extended the foot-hand of a wiry leg towards the cot above him
and, grabbing its sideboard, swung himself into an upright position. He,
with a startled yell, kept swinging up, around and back down onto the upper
bunk. Only his mercurial flexibility and reflexes anchored his other foot
to the bunkframe, preventing him from rebounding off its netting and back
around into his cot again. His green hair swirled about his face in mockery
of Great Newton.
"Where's spin, for Its sake!" he bellowed into the intercom. He was
accustomed to three gravities of spin when in a holding pattern. --Stupid of
me, really. After all, the view outside is obviously standing still.--
There had been no reply from the pilots.
"Hai, Coordinator!" he called to the ship's supervisor, Illyana
Melder (id# Astro.A15933C4). "C'mon, Illie, we couldn't've lost you,
Vrandium-mind." The tight shades of worry began creeping onto his square,
lined face.
Coordinator Melder was reputed as having the strongest will of any
ship coordinator in the Human Stellar League. She had logged over five
hundred tesseracts and had lived at least seventeen thousand years of
subjective time during those breaches. Admittedly, at times she seemed
distant and cold to others; those among them who were pilots understood
perfectly. Nevertheless, the cyber-media had sensationalised her
achievements by nicknaming her after the hardest metal known to Third Epoch
human science; a metal which reflects all warmth cast at it.
There was still no reply.
--Oh, man, after all those years, to snap now! Of course, this is
probably the most uninvolved tess she'd ever made. Sailing one gravitational
curve would've gotten pretty damned boring, I bet. Wait a minute! I'm
already thinking in past tense, give them a chance.-- And them it was, for
no one had responded to his hail; not the coordinator, neither of the
sailors, and not the engine manager. If none of them were responding then
most likely something had gone very wrong in tess-space. They were all
psychically linked, as well as linked cybernetically with psychic circuits
to the tessdrive, prior to breaching; little problems could become quite big
with this intimacy. --But, no. Nothing could have taken them all out.--
And yet, there was no reply at all.
Anxiously, Thrace thumbed open the iris door and floated into the
corridor outside the crew's quarters. The rounded, functionally decorated
hallway ran "eastward" to the commissary and "westward" to the recreation
facilities and gymnasium. Across from Soleman were the labs, but there
would be no one in them as there were but five people, including himself, on
the ship. A short way westward, half of the hall split into a laddered chute
running vertically through the ship. Leaping up to grab a rung on the
ceiling, he pulled himself, foot over hand, towards the chute, bounding and
covering the thirty meters like a fleeing rabbit. He arced upward and yanked
himself bridge-ward, travelling so quickly that the floor-iris into the room
above barely got out of his way. He soared into the control room, bending
and flipping to grab the ceiling and absorb the shock.
The clash of opposites in the room numbed his senses; it was not for
several seconds that he truly perceived the carnage.
The ceiling was mostly transparent, but let in only a milky glow,
there being no stars above it within a few million light years; this haze
blended soothingly with the bridge's lighting. The room's graceful symmetry
and efficiency starkly contrasted with the obvious tragedy that, with the
quiet, cruel air of broken assurances, had occurred here. The simple room's
metal walls held only dark panes of acrylic in various sizes: either
scanners or viewing screens. Furnishings were sparse at the moment; there
were only four couches extruding from the floor which hid a plethora of
other possible furnishings. The coordinator's couch was central, just north
of the vertical axis of the ship. South of the axis was the couch from which
the engine manager manipulated the delicately massive tesseract drive in
its starts, millisecond bursts, decade-long calibrations, and soul-wrenching
stops. Finally, to the east and west of the axis, close to the room's walls,
lay the two sailors' couches. They were the most gruesome to behold.
Three quarters of a body was reclined on each of the plastic and foam
couches. Where the remaining quarter, the heads and necks, should have been,
there were only large, brown, viscous puddles and white shards stuck into
the chairs. The globular gel smoked slightly and the charcoal smell of
burnt synthsteaks filled the room. The occupants of the other two couches
seemed whole in the dim cyan light emitted by the phosphorescent tracklights
on the walls. They were, however, sprawled like two discarded ragdolls and
their eyes were wide and burnt black, their faces frozen in agonized
caricatures of laughter.
A scream would have found its way out of Thrace's mouth had his jaw
not been reflexively clenched against the rising bile in his throat.
Instead, only a strangled grunt echoed in the silent chamber. He stared,
wide-eyed and unbelieving, instinctual fear and repulsion at the scene
causing the pores of his skin to dilate (but not to sweat, that was
engineered out of his race eons ago). Perversely, the only clear thought to
come to his mind was --Hope that doesn't get into the steering circuits; I
can't fix psywires.-- A futile hope for someone incapable of piloting
tess-space.
He was finally broken out of his shock by a soft pinging noise and a
sharp pain in his right cheek. He grabbed at the spot and found a small bit
of bone stuck there. --Shit, there's shards ricocheting all over this room.
Better get some gravity going to settle it and clean up.-- He did not
consider the irrationality of the idea of cleaning so soon after witnessing
such horror; it was something he could do in a situation over which, he was
beginning to realize, he had next to no control. He pushed off towards the
south of the room and gripped a rung embedded there. The stickiness of it
surprised him, and he fought hard not to consider the reason it was so. He
pressed his hand to the acrylic pane set in the aluminum wall... and nothing
happened. He used the arm of his jumper to wipe the pane clean and tried
again.
Still nothing happened.
Panic hit. --the systems burned im a dead man oh jenny oh it oh shit
what am i gonna do no power no food nothing dead-- It went on for some
time, waves of fear and loss, regrets, images in his mind, their contrast
fuzzed by retrospection, forgotten intentions, and confused underpinings.
His Youth and all of its freedom, irresponsibilities and passions. That
older brunette who had shown him the sweet benefits of Maturation. The years
he spent as Student, deciding on his lifework. The implant surgery to allow
him to interface with ComputerSpace, the reflex wires that gave him control
over peripheral devices. Years of study in cyber-school and space school.
His spouse and her funny laugh and arousing accent. His boy, oh, his young
Zephyr, just one standard year from Maturation and school. His friends among
the Astros as well as landborns. He thought of all of these things and
others in the few minutes he spent feverishly jamming his hand against the
palmscanner. As he slid off the crest of emotion into a trough of numb
despair, some reason returned to him and he looked at the tracklights in the
room.
He giggled with relief; a suppressed laugh filled with gasps and
breaks. The power was not gone. Rather, he was too excited for the security
scanner. A little measure against hijacking: the scanner would not verify
someone's scan, even if they were in the "approved" register, unless his or
her pulse rate was at a median level. This conditional kept severed hands,
frightened hands, and manic hands from being of any use for gaining entry to
the ship's computer system.
Smiling shakily, Thrace intoned his mantra for a while until he could
feel his muscles relax and his heartbeat soften and slow. He touched the
pane again and was answered by a faint click as a section of wall slid
away. In the alcove behind the panel, a coiled cord ending in a fiberoptic
male connector hung on a hook much like a pay telephone cradle. Upon
removing the cable from the cradle, a rounded chair inflated up from the
floor behind him. He dropped into it, a faint whisper reminding him that it
had a pinhole leak somewhere. He relaxed and inserted the cable's plug into
the jack behind his ear.
The stained, glowing wall before him faded to be replaced by a small
city sprawled out below him. From his "aerial" vantage he could see that
most of the ship's systems were automatically functioning and doing so quite
normally. He gave these systems -life support, reactor dampening, gene
monitoring, biot growing- only the most cursory inspection. They were
critical to his immediate survival, but not the most important functions of
the Willie Mays from Soleman's perspective. He soared above the towering
sub-directory icons, across the mainframe, until he reached a
cityblock-sized red icon, in the shape of an umbrella, vaulting an apparent
kilometer above the "ground." He landed at its base and touched it.
It ceased to be. In its place was a meter-high question mark: the
universal iconic symbol for "System not present -- Error."
"Willie!" cried Thrace; "What happened to the tess-sail manual
control system? I need spin and a tess-comm link to HSL."
A computer-imaged persona of an android in a baseball uniform
appeared before him, its hands behind its back.
"That system has been deemed useless. I was going to remove the icon,
but security monitoring on the system delayed me. Someone with a hand like
yours but not a temper like yours was repeatedly requesting access."
Thrace's head began to practice Forthanik's Ballet for 0.5 g in D
min. Somewhere above his right temple he could swear he heard a blood vessel
pop, even though that would be impossible in Compspace. "Why was the control
system deemed useless, Willie?" he asked in a trembling voice that seemed to
want to hide in his mouth, not actually ask that too-important question.
"Because the drive no longer exists, Technician Soleman."
The computer, of course, had absolutely no idea what had happened
during the tess; it was not psychic either. There were, however, a number of
cyberlectures on the subject of tesseract emergencies. In one of them,
Soleman learned that several daring experiments had been conducted during
the tessdrive's conception in the Tenth Eon, First Epoch, which involved
planned detonations of the drive during a breech and while tessing. Nothing
was ever learned: the earlier tessdrives were not sailed, but shot
"ballistically," to their destinations; most of the scientists gave up
searching the fifty lightyear test area after the first ten years of doing
so. The most widely agreed upon theory was that there was a 84.78234% chance
that the whole ship would be destroyed with it, in spite of the 400
kilometers separating the drive from the ship, and a 13.40096% chance that
the ship would never again enter 4D space. In a way, then, Thrace was lucky
to be alive. --Great, just fabulous for me.-- he had thought after learning
that gem of information. Soleman also discovered a space opera simsense
which depicted a group of colonists isolated by the unlikely loss of sanity
by all the piloting psychics of their vessel. It was typically, if not
subtly, thrilling and he could not resist making love to the (typically)
stunning heroine, as consolation, during one of her more touching strophes
of angst. He never bothered to figure out who he actually was trying to
console; what did it matter? For that few hours, they had been the only
reality, and they needed the closeness to hold back the hungry vaccuum
waiting patiently outside.
He realized halfway through the second week of travel under the
Willie Mays' fusion drive that he simply did not have ten thousand years to
spare trying to get into the Milky Way's shipping lanes. For the past
sixteen days he had been idling about the recreation room, working out
occasionally on the zero gee machines to keep fit --WHY?--, experimenting
with the more esoteric selections on the ship's meal synthesizer --WHAT'S
testicles???--, scanning the documentary and technical files of the computer
--Why isn't there a passage on Growing Tesseract Drives out of Matter
Reclaimation Biots, or Genetically Breaching Essential Space?--, and
experiencing way too much simsense. On this second week, however, he awoke
on Sixday with the dire paralysis of apathy. He felt cold, in spite of the
life-support. He had been dreaming of his spouse and was hoping that the
stark ship's ceiling was the dream instead.
Jenny and he had been walking through the Yorkshire Dales on
Sol.Earth, exploring Middleheim Castle. They climbed to the top of the
southern tower and stared over the green, forested waves of the surrounding
country, devoid of any other signs of man (Sol.Earth had been discovered as
sentient and almost immediately declared a Refuge World). Holding each other
against the chill wind, whispering insued: sweet sentiments he could not now
recall, craved to recall because he wished they were true, prayed he had
broken past his unpsychic genetics, had communed with his only love one last
time.
He did not rise from his bunk for several hours, and then only to plug
into the lavatory. His blood began flowing from this activity, and other
activities began to seem appropriate. A wide grin and furrowed brow smeared
his face into a cruel visage. He had no reason to keep fit, so he threw the
zero-gee trainer through the commissary, laughing loudly, echoingly; there
were only twenty-one varieties of synthmeats from which to choose, so he
jacked into the computer and launched a File Burn program at the
synthesizer's master program (it did the best job it could defending against
its Prime Priority User's wrath). There was no one to impress with his
knowledge of Pre-Diaspora politics, so he set the technical files to
teaching the simsense's Drama sub-system how to do quadruple integrations,
thereby generating fierce trinary debates throughout the ship's Compnet.
Finally, he had experience every It-damned simsense in the entire database
and at least half of their plot variants and, quite literally, thought he
was still in simsense half of the time he was doing something else on the
ship. Earlier that week he had once tried to 'stop program run' while
sitting in the commisary, throughly bored, in front of a bowl of some horrid
concoction from the meal synth's Traditional Menu called "grits."
The next week he spent pacing the ship, staring through its now
totally transparent hull. He had felt, at first, a dizzying sensation of
shrinking when he had first cleared the hull to view his new domain. The
Milky Way was SO far away; it looked like egg on the vast pan of the
universe: an egg which he would never again taste thanks to some mysterious,
capricious whim of fate. He felt miniscule... then realized that he was. The
coffin-like atmosphere of an opaqued hull had been worse, however.
During these uneventful days he spoke to many people; only one, his
wife, ever spoke back, and that was towards the end of the week. He raged
first at Illyana for failing in her duty. --She must've zoned during the
tess and steered the sailors off the polarity-rhythm into some freaky
wavelengths, the dumb bitch with her snotty ways and her too perfect lips
and the way she insists on announcing every bloody minute for a half hour
before tessing...-- Then, of course, it was the sailors, Uthor and
something-with-a-P, who had zoned and failed to avoid some quirky
perturbation Vrandium-mind had ordered evaded. Next, Manager Hurdles (id#
Astro.A1596115) had clearly failed to keep the drive in harmony and had
fried them all in the backlash.
"And what about the fucking League with their half-assed regulations
and shoddy inspection teams?" he inquired loudly of the first bowl of food
he had synthed in four days, failing to recall the hassles that the Mays'
crew had gone through to con their way into this mission.
Fringe.BB20 was the first Grade G congelement to be spotted escaping
Mother Milky's possessive pull. Until then, only the occasional
Sol.Mercury-sized mother lodes were intercepted in the really cold depths of
space to be reclaimed by humanity. This body they had been going to
intercept would have fetched them at least 20,000 stresshours apiece for
only three months of crystal harvesting with the massive robotic drills and
the microscopic biots. Then a small fusion-fission charge to send it back
to the galaxy to be retrieved in a millennium or so, and the crew would have
tessed back, retired, and done some pleasure touring of their workplace, the
Milky Way. --All that privilege: up in smoke. IT-DAMNED,
BEAST-BRAINED....-- Several long-haul teams had bid for the mission and the
qualifying criteria had been intense. The Willie Mays Mining Cooperative was
so very, damned lucky it was driving Thrace very, damned mad.
Then came the Solution. It took only a few feverish, ecstatic seconds
to conceive and fifty-six days to effect. It was, after all, an ambitious
project--if "ambitious" can describe the dreams of a doomed man.
The first thing Technician Thrace had to accomplish was to negotiate
peace in Compspace between the Technosupremacists and the Aesthetics
Liberation Faction, who had escalated the conflict he had initiated in his
malicious, feeble vengeance a week earlier. The technical files had achieved
the upper-hand with their knowledge of the Compnet's systems, but the
Dramatic files were passionately holding their own. He felt like a fool when
he jacked in as a peace-keeping force. He spent several days untangling the
various attack programs binding the two systems and disarming databombs.
Fortunately, with peace declared, the two file systems were more than
willing to provide what help they could in this task.
The next month was spent designing and building a robot which would
automatically build and install additional memory to the computer. He also
redesigned the food synthesizer. He cleared the majority of its database,
leaving only the core formulas for synthesizing what he called the "Tree of
Life Elixir," a serum of fundamental proteins, enzymes, carbohydrates, and
polyunsaturated fats. Then, Soleman modified the dispenser so that the bland
syrup would be slowly and steadily drip-fed through a catheter. --Perfect!
With the germ and biot banks to draw on, and their synthing capabilities,
there should be about a hundred years of this stuff... more than enough,
most likely--
The final two weeks were spent almost entirely in Compspace. He
toured every alley and sewer, each database and slave node, wreaking
nothingness on every inessential system. --Lighting... Let there be NO light!
That's good. Fusion drive: slow burn; open all accesses to reserves. Should
be a few thousand years of operation. Climate control: bridge only; seal
remainder of ship. Laser distress beacon: ah, what the Hole, On. All this
simsense shit: GET THEE BEHIND ME! Ooh, that's very good. Auxiliary file
systems: Good night, sweet prints. All except computer maintenance files for
the robot.--
Then, finally, it was finished, and with the end of frenetic activity
returned morose passivity. Thrace sat on the bridge, reconsidering. There
was a slim chance that the inevitable search team would stumble upon him
before the ten year MIA period was over (tradition, from the early days of
"spit-tessing"). 8700 lightyears is not all that much. --Shit.--
He spoke a soft prayer of farewell to whomever happened to be
listening. The catheter went into his arm with a slightly painful jab, and
Thrace sniggered over the irony that his last real sensation was one of
pain. The eight weeks of isolation had inured him to stimuli, but somehow
this faint prick seemed to wash swells of tension and melancholy up his arm
and through his floating body. He thought once more of Jennifer and Zephyr
and hoped they would have fun with his insurance/pension. Concluding with a
particularly blurry-eyed sentiment of Love, he wished Homo Stellari a
fruitful being. Then Technician Thrace Soleman jacked into Compspace.
It was dark, quiet, odorless, empty. The systems which were to be
saved --life support, Tree of Life, the robotic chipper, fundamentals-- hid
themselves behind a masking program so sophisticated even its designer stood
little chance of unveiling its secret wards. All extraneous systems were
not. It was a Void... save for the One, Thrace. The One floated without
buoyant support, perceived Nothing, felt the effluent of thirty-nine
Standard Years of emotion swirling inside. The extensive memory crystals
were limited (but growing) yet infinite, lacking a measure save the One.
And cloistering, so crowded with nothing but the One. And piss-boring,
lonesome. The One meditated a moment, reached out...
And It spoke a Word.
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