Dark Charris II
“The universe is like water: eventually it finds its level.”
(Part 25 of “The Misfits” series)
The situation aboard Stellar Song the moment Clem Aballi sabotaged the colony ship’s active life support systems was tenuous. Aballi himself, being the strategic thinker he was, had no delusions. He understood that his simply declaring the Chief of the Colony to be deposed wouldn’t suddenly engender any power in himself, even if it did make the crew and government agents aboard the ship take a second look at their leader. Aballi knew there would be movement in that chaos—that was one advantage. His other advantage was that he and Maícon had a full understanding of the logistics of the situation, a situation he knew the ship’s crew would be scrambling to assess.
This was a new type of chaos, even for a master of chaos like Clem Aballi. He’d never deposed a government single-handedly before—not even a small one. One thing he did know about coups, though, was that the winner was usually the group with the most resources and the people who kept their heads through the chaos.
He and Maícon appraised he situation thus. Nearly three hundred thousand colonists were still in stasis aboard the Stellar Song. It would not take long for the crew and the AIs aboard the ship to realize that the sabotage would not affect the life support of the sleepers—they could safely be left sleeping with no ill effects, at least for some months still. The crew and the colonial government, who numbered close to two hundred, would have roughly thirteen hours to join their fellow colonists on the planet below. There was plenty of time to get off the ship—too much time as Clem Aballi saw it. The initial panic was certain to cause the crew to scramble into a frantic state of action. But before long, he knew, the crew were going to look at the clock, take a deep breath, and take a more strategic look at the situation. Aballi knew he needed to act before then, in the window when there was still chaos amongst the command structure aboard the ship.
Below, within the colony, the survivors were getting their first taste of any positive emotion they could recall for months since the outbreak. Roughly four thousand souls were still alive of the nearly forty thousand who’d initially debarked, and most of them were in rough shape. They were badly malnourished, and just as grim, they were equally starved for hope. Most of them believed the colony ship was on the verge of abandoning them and the planet in the hope of finding a new planet with a more closely compatible environment. When Aballi forced the hand of the crew in orbit above, not only did some hope well up inside the settlers but also a sense of justice—that those people above, who for months had been weighing their fate, would now be forced to share in that fate. Many assumed a much more generous supply of rations would descend with the government officials and colony ship’s crew. That was cause for some small measure of celebration. Aballi himself was after a more significant prize, though.
“Mr. Companys, you will stay where you are,” a voice echoed through the medical bay. “You are still under quarantine.”
“You sure about that?” he responded to the speaker.
“You’ll need to be observed and isolated.”
“Come down here and try,” Clem Aballi replied. “I’d so very much like to spit in your eye socket. We could find out fast how contagious this little bug I’m carrying really is.”
The Stellar Song’s bridge crew sent down orders to the two bots on the medical bay, an Alba and a Delius, to detain the troublesome patient. To their shock, both of the multi-use models ignored their commands. The crew watched the feed from the ship’s hub as Clem Aballi, his consciousness embedded in the body of colonist Korai Companys, took command of the two service androids.
“Can you two get their eyes off of us?” he asked the Alba and the Delius.
The feed, a half second later, went dark.
The bridge crew wasn’t the only party shocked to be suddenly cut off from the feed.
“Maícon?” Verona exclaimed on the planet below.
She and Kristoff had been watching the feed in a back hallway.
“I too have lost the main feed from the ship,” Maícon announced. “I will try to reacquire a signal. Precops has control of the Stellar Song’s internal surveillance, among other systems.”
“Will he share it with you?” Kristoff asked.
“Standby,” Maícon replied.
Kristoff looked over at Verona, or at least the borrowed body she was embedded in, that of Triere Alago. Her sunken eyes betrayed what Kristoff perceived as an emotion that he’d have classified as doubt and regret married to a low-level dread.
“Tell me this doesn’t frighten you just a little bit, Verona,” Kristoff said. “That person on that ship, alone, going after everything you strived for a millennium to keep secret, here at the beginning, and no eyes to watch him. Tell me you have no doubts, and I’ll call you a liar.”
“Speaking of secrets,” Maícon stated to the pair. “You two certainly have a few to tell. You might start by telling me who Verona is, and why—or perhaps how—she seems to be occupying the consciousness of Triere Alago.”
Maícon couldn’t pull information out of Precops, not anything that wasn’t central and shared. What Clem Aballi was up to on that ship somehow was either between him and Precops or was entirely unknown. They waited and watched for nearly an hour, observing the generic feeds from the ship’s control room, from the external cameras along the ship’s central spire, and from the various cameras along the hub’s outer causeway, but Clem Aballi didn’t appear on any of them.
Several times, the Harold or the other two multi-use androids popped into frame, but never for long enough to get a sense of their purpose.
The crew, meanwhile, seemed to be operating as though they had larger problems to tackle. The ship’s commander, Jayadin Dryas was only too happy to take the cue from Korai Companys to depose the Chief of the Colony, Rodel Dawcett, whose indecisiveness had left everyone doubting his suitability for the heavy weight of such a post. And with the chaos of the ongoing crisis, it was easy for Commander Dryas to pass by Dawcett in the chain of command. There was a ticking clock—a little more than twelve hours—and there were far too many critical decisions to be made. There was no room for dithering.
Commander Dryas began to delegate. To his junior officers, he gave the task of assigning transport to the people who needed to be evacuated. They had four active short shuttles and two full long shuttles at their disposal. With a window of thirteen hours, the people wouldn’t be a problem. Dryas, however, didn’t intend for his crew to simply walk into the city of Niera—that contaminated pre-fabricated complex on the planet below where all his fellow explorers were withering and dying.
To his senior officers, he assigned the task of unloading a sufficient number of pop-up habitats to set up a parallel and closed on-world infrastructure. This meant dropping a significant amount of cargo before they could offload their people.
Below, on the surface of Charris, none of this was known in the Niera complex. They had their assumptions.
Kristoff and Verona waited for Maícon to reacquire the feed. When he couldn’t, they didn’t see any sense in staying there in that back hallway. They were both hesitant to reveal their true nature to Maícon, not until they had more information about what Aballi was doing above. They still had work to do.
Kristoff gave Verona a simple hand gesture, and she understood. They excused themselves and sought out the two other AIs they suspected they could trust. Verona made her way back into the industrial quarter to speak with Eddis Ali, and Kristoff headed to the observation tower at the end of the outpost to discuss the situation with Nilius.
As Kristoff was walking through the main courtyard space under the clear polymer ceiling, Olivia Varnet came running.
“Pyco? Where have you been?” she asked. “Have you been following what’s happening aboard the ship?”
“I have.”
“Mr. Companys—it was one of your friends who went up there and forced them. Now they’re coming down?”
“It appears that way, Olivia,” Kristoff said, continuing his walk with no break in pace.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to talk to Nilius about what’s happening up there.”
Olivia looked skeptical. “What do you want to talk to him for?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Can I come with you?”
“It’s better that you don’t,” Kristoff replied.
“Why’s that? You and Ms. Alago are up to something with Mr. Companys. I’m not too thick to see that, Pyco.”
“So what if we are, Olivia?”
She shrugged. “I want to know what it is. I’m as curious as the next person.”
“What do you think I know that anyone else here doesn’t?”
“Like maybe when they’re coming down. Like maybe how much food they’ll bring.”
“I know they’re coming soon. In the next twelve hours or so. I don’t know how much food they’ll bring.”
“Have you heard talk, Pyco? Because I’ve heard talk.”
“What talk?”
Olivia looked over at him and took a deep breath. “There’s going to be trouble, Pyco, you know that, right?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Everybody here is angry and hungry and it’s like Mr. Companys said up there—those people on the ship have been eating just fine. Now they’re coming here? They haven’t watched their parents and wives and husbands die of this toxin. They’ve just watched us lose our friends and family like that. And then they’ve starved us. Does that spell it out clearly enough for you?”
“It does, Olivia, thank you.”
She hadn’t slowed her pace beside him, and she didn’t seem inclined to let Kristoff continue on alone.
“You’re a very smart and capable girl,” Kristoff said, turning to her as they continued down the western causeway that led out to the observation tower.
She looked at Kristoff funny and sort of giggled. “Wow, thanks, Pyco.”
“It may be time for you to start living up to it.”
“What? As opposed to the last ten months I’ve been taking care of all those orphans in our corner back there?”
“Fair point. I think you should come with me, though, Olivia. I think you’re ready to do more.”
“Whatever you say, Pyco. You’ve really gotten weird since your seizure, but I don’t know, maybe a little change is good. You and those other two kept the ship from leaving somehow, so maybe you’re turning into someone new.”
“Would it shock you if I said I was?”
Olivia shrugged. “Maybe not. I suppose it would take a fair amount to shock me these days. You don’t know the way back to the columns, do you? That would shock me, I guess, but I don’t suppose you do?”
“I don’t, no. What about the AIs? One of them must know?”
“Nobody knows, Pyco. That’s kinda the point of the secrecy of the columns.”
She looked at him side-eyed.
“Right,” Kristoff said. “Anyway, Nilius is waiting.”
For thirteen hours, the people in Niera knew relatively nothing. The feeds from the ship above revealed little of the crew movements beyond the fact that the leadership in orbit seemed to be taking their time evacuating their people to the city. It became clear to Kristoff, perched as he was in the observation tower, that the Commander had different plans.
The first flight down was one of the long shuttles. There were bots and several crew members in suits. They seemed to be preparing a site out in the flats to the south of Niera.
“Do you think they’re going to land there?” Olivia asked Pyco, who was sitting at a control station. She was standing, gazing over his shoulder at the same scene.
“I wonder what sort of inventory they still have at their disposal?” Kristoff asked. “What do you know about that, Nilius?”
“The Stellar Song did not exhaust its entire inventory of prefabricated shelters in the construction of Niera, if that’s what you mean,” Nilius responded. “The intention after establishing the city was to seed the planet with other small outposts. They have twenty-seven units at their disposal, as well as small modular generators and the individual life-support units designed to filter the air in each of these small habitats. These could easily be refitted on site to cobble together a large enough environment to house the crew of the Stellar Song away from Niera.”
“So they wouldn’t have to rub shoulders with any of us filthy contaminated rabble,” Kristoff mused.
“Do you know, young Pyco Matta, whether your companion Korai Companys anticipated this outcome?” Nilius asked. “It is a strategically sound course of action.”
Kristoff shook his head. “If he did, I certainly didn’t hear anything about it. I’m not sure it would have changed our strategy any. Even if they’re thirty kilometers out in the desert, they’re still here on Charris. You can’t pool resources with a colony ship that’s a thousand light years away on another planet.”
“It doesn’t appear they have much interest in pooling resources,” Nilius replied. “Not at this juncture at least.”
“I don’t know,” Kristoff said. “Why out there? They could be touching down anywhere on the planet.”
“If I were to put forth a theory, thirty kilometers is just out of range of walking distance with a respirator,” Nilius answered. “I suspect they want to be close enough to monitor and maintain control of the situation here in Niera while maintaining enough distance that the people in the city don’t have easy access to them.”
“They’ve been like that from the start,” Olivia added. “Telling us what to do every day from up on the ship. I think they’re scared of what people here would do if they had to live with us. They might actually have to listen to us for once.”
“What would you tell them if they did have to listen?” Kristoff asked her.
“How about share your food, for one. They act like they care about us, but starving us and threatening to abandon us showed us what they really thought.”
“How did it come to that?” Kristoff mused. “Everyone came here together, part of the same mission, same expedition?”
Olivia shrugged. “Once they had the food and they couldn’t be touched, they had all the power. It’s like that game that Vasily and Byram play with the sticks, one stick goes on top of the other. Then it’s just a game of sticks.”
“I suppose before we react, we should see what move they play next,” Kristoff concluded.
Olivia pulled up a seat beside Pyco, and they alternated between the scope at the observation window and the monitor. They both fell asleep at different points during the night, but by the time the morning arrived, all of the pop-up environments were on the ground outside Niera, and shuttles were still going back and forth between the ground and the ship. Even well past thirteen hours, the crew was still pulling resources down from space. Nilius surmised that they still had a fair number of humans up on the ship wearing suits, and according to him, they could keep up this practice for days using the portable life support units on the ground and shuttles to refill air tanks for the crew in suits up on the ship. To Nilius’s knowledge, the Commander still hadn’t made any attempt to communicate with Niera—no terms, no negotiations, not even a hello, we’re out on your doorstep.
Kristoff and Olivia went back down to the city hoping to get something of a bite to eat, as a breakfast was asking far too much, they knew. Then, Kristoff sought out Verona while Olivia was checking in on the orphans in their little corner of Niera.
Still, now over twenty hours on, Kristoff hadn’t heard any news of Clem Aballi.
It wasn’t until late that evening, while Kristoff was watching from the tower, that there was any sign of Clem Aballi.
A short shuttle left the Stellar Song out of the rear of the main spire—a third shuttle that hadn’t been in operation over the course of the ship’s evacuation.
“Can you ping it?” Kristoff asked Nilius.
“I could. There is no guarantee that it’s Korai Companys aboard that craft, though.
“We won’t know until we ask,” Kristoff replied.
It was Companys—or Clem Aballi, really, occupying Korai Companys’ body anyway. He was in a foul mood, neglecting to say anything significant over a channel that could be picked up by the ship’s crew below. He told Kristoff that he would meet him and Verona where they last talked in private.
Kristoff sent Olivia down to make sure the back corridor was clear for them, and then he set off to find Verona. Twenty minutes later, Aballi’s short shuttle landed adjacent the main airlock outside Niera.
Korai Companys didn’t arrive in the back corridor for another hour. Verona had been waiting there with Olivia for long enough that Olivia and Pyco began playing with Vasily and Byram’s sticks. Verona began watching intently as Olivia explained the rules to a smiling Pyco Matta.
“Fun game,” he said.
“I guess so,” Olivia replied. “It’s pretty hard. Byram and Vasily are both geniuses. I don’t think it’ll ever catch on. Nobody can win against them. Not even the grown-ups.”
Korai Companys clambered into the corridor with a scowl on his face. “You done with the sticks, kids?” he barked. “We’ve got work to do.”
He didn’t even pause to await a response, storming instead toward that downward facing hatch in the back corner of the outpost.
Kristoff looked up at Verona. “It must be going even better than it looks out there.”
“It’s still a success,” Verona declared, pulling Pyco and Olivia to their feet with two extended hands. “The colony ship is still up there.”
“I’ll leave it to you to cheer him up then,” Kristoff said.
They set off after Aballi, Olivia in tow. When they got to the door, Korai Companys was already in the hole beneath the outer airlock.
“Let’s go!” he shouted up to them.
“Don’t fall asleep,” Kristoff told Olivia, “We don’t want to spend the night down there.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I wouldn’t leave you down there, Pyco.”
She smiled at him as Verona lowered Kristoff down.
Verona lit up a panel on her shirt once the hatch had sprung shut again.
“What the hell happened up there, Clem?” Kristoff asked.
“What a damn mess,” he declared. “I wasted twelve hours chasing shadows and blank spaces. I opened every last bulkhead that could’ve been housing that questionable cargo we were after. It isn’t up there, Verona. It’s not on that ship.”
“It has to be,” Verona insisted. “The bulk of our inventory in the vault came to Charris from the columns and from Earth before that. We compiled plenty more dark tech from the Battery and even Charris in the first few centuries, but I know for a fact that a huge number of our items came from Earth, including the bulk of our biological warfare agents—specific file histories along with matching historical records from the periods in history they were developed.”
“Twelve hours tearing that ship apart,” Aballi replied shaking his head in frustration. “All the while that crew was getting their upper hand back.”
“They’re still here on Charris,” Kristoff said. “That was the goal. The rest shouldn’t be our concern beyond the survival of the colony. We didn’t come looking for dark tech, and we didn’t come to make the early outpost into some utopia, or even a functional government for that matter. That’s up to them. They just need to survive.”
“And the best way to ensure that was in those files, Kristoff,” Verona stated. “This colony is still going to fail if we can’t get a handle on this outbreak.”
“I suppose somebody who knows something about pathogens better start figuring it out then,” Kristoff replied, staring at Verona. “I wish I could help, but that’s not my field.”
“Nor mine,” Verona answered.
“It is now,” Aballi declared. “Kristoff is right, Verona. We’re losing sight of the mission. Any progress with Nilius, Kristoff?”
“Nothing specific, just a general sense that there’s something off. I don’t know, though. I get the feeling that he’s surprisingly … well, surprisingly surprised by everything going on here. They just don’t seem with it.”
“Yes,” Verona agreed. “Maybe it’s because they’re so much younger than we’ve ever known them before. The way they keep themselves walled off from each other is curious, but it also leaves them blind to the larger picture. And the AIs seem so incurious, almost willfully so.”
“Yeah, well, maybe that’s your two,” Aballi stated. “Maícon is still Maícon.”
“Have you shared who you are with them?” Kristoff asked them both.
“Not with Eddis Ali,” Verona answered. “That’s the incurious nature that we were talking about. It seems like a personality issue, but it’s important to remember not to project that onto them. It’s still programming.”
“Who’s the programmer?” Kristoff asked. “That’s a worthwhile question.”
There was no question that as the hours passed, and then the days, Clem Aballi was growing frustrated. The urge to intervene as Commander Dryas solidified his position out in the desert was almost overwhelming. Aballi’s true feelings were written across the aging face of the man he was occupying, especially as the people inside the Niera outpost continued to implore him to intervene further. They were crying out for leadership, as most of their true leaders had passed on with the plague, and many of those still alive with some inclination toward command were far too worn down with hunger and malnutrition to do much more than sit and breathe. Even talking about the state of things was taxing. And still, the same people who so recently sat above them fat and happy and safe were still just as fat and happy and safe. They just weren’t in space any longer. They were out in the desert, and the more Aballi thought about that fact, the more difficult it was to resist going out there and bloodying their fat, happy noses.
Verona, meanwhile, dug right back into her work on the toxin—or, more rightly, she was discovering, the toxins.
Two more people died in the time since the crew of the Stellar Song had landed. Now that she had her sights set on that problem as her sole focus, Verona made sure the bodies didn’t go straight to incineration, as the bots had been instructed for sanitary purposes. She had them sealed and transported to a closed laboratory in one of the empty sections for autopsy.
After examining the kidneys, gut, stomach, and blood of the two latest victims, she was able to determine that they were dealing with a complex set of reactions. The initial toxin begat a hybrid that combined in the GI tract with several different strains of gut bacteria that led to an immune response that led quickly to sepsis. What she couldn’t quite figure out yet was why the kids had been able to escape the toxin’s initial mutation.
She thought, with the best intentions and, perhaps, her still skewed perspective on Charran history, that if she contacted the doctors who’d come down with the ship’s crew, they might be willing to collaborate. Without any overtures or preamble, she sent a ping and received no answer, so she left a detailed account of her findings, her process and intentions on how she thought to proceed, inviting the two doctors to return her ping so they might collaborate.
Nothing.
She sent four more pings reminding the people out there that fixing this problem was in their interest as well. The sooner they solved the issue, the sooner they could all stop living in pop-up temporary shelters out in the desert. The city, she informed them, was actually quite comfortable, deadly toxin notwithstanding.
In her fifth ping, she compared the complexity of the cascading effects of the toxin to the chemical reactions of clotting factors, almost too intricate to be bad luck or a random collision of two different biological systems. It was almost as though the native Charran toxin was designed to merge with human bacteria and form chimaeras.
Verona kept calling and talking. It went on like this for several days—for so long, in fact, she’d lost hope anyone out there was actually listening. She’d come to think of the messages more as a way to consolidate the day’s key discoveries, so she continued to ping.
Verona was halfway through day ten in the lab, preparing to launch into yet another set of slides she was trying to think through, and suddenly, someone began talking back.
“Commander Jayadin Dryas, acting mayor of the Beta post. I understand you have been calling rather frequently, Ms. Triere Alago, is it?”
“That’s correct, Commander. It’s good to see you.”
“I have a message. We have lost confidence in the leadership in Niera, whom we believe to be complicit in the sabotage of the life support systems aboard the Stellar Song. Doubtless someone hiding in that city is well aware of the stubborn nature of the worm that was installed in the ship’s life support systems. The ultimatum is simple: as soon as Korai Companys provides me with the information we need to fix the ship, I will resume supplying the city of Niera with food. Alternatively, if Korai Companys will not cooperate of his own free will, the people of Niera can hand him over to us. We may be able to be more persuasive than you are. Until one of those two things happens, the Beta post will send no further aid to the Niera outpost.
“That is all.”
Verona was preparing to reply, promising to relay the message, hopeful that she might confer with the doctors at the Beta post while the stream was open, but the Commander cut the connection from his end.
“Screw you too, asshole,” she muttered aloud, only to hear her own voice echoing softly behind her.
She stepped out into the empty corridor outside her lab, hearing faint echoes of her footsteps in the distance.
“Am I still on?”
Her voice faintly echoed back to her. Verona hung her head as she realized the transmission had somehow gone over open comms to the whole Niera outpost when Dryas had picked up.
“Close channel,” she stated, shaking her head. “Let the real fun begin.”
“Don’t worry,” Korai Companys told the first crowd he encountered in the courtyard. “We’ll hit them back, and we’ll hit them hard. They want to make us terrorists for wanting to eat food that we have every bit as much right to as them! I’m not afraid of those bastards. You don’t have to turn me in, I’m going to them! Sons of bitches!”
He walked out of the courtyard to cheers and howls of joy.
“It’s a clever tactic,” Nilius declared to Kristoff the following morning as he came to check on the progress of that Beta outpost.
From up on the tower, the AI could watch the data come in and compare it to his civilization-building algorithms. He had an ideal after gaming half a billion simulations with the Stellar Song’s known resources. Unsurprisingly, Commander Dryas was overseeing a dramatically less efficient nascent colony than the ideal, but from the outward looks of things, Nilius explained to Kristoff, they were doing more than well enough.
“I do think they’ll be able to endure as a parallel independent outpost,” Nilius declared. “At least for a time. Eventually, they’ll have to tackle the food problem that sprang up here.”
“Eventually is a long-term word,” Kristoff replied. “There aren’t a lot of long-term people in Niera.”
“A problem for your friend Companys, Pyco Matta. The longer he waits to confront the Commander, the more your fellow starving residents here will grow to resent him.”
“I don’t know what he has planned, Nilius, but this game the Commander is playing with him, it’s not one he’s prepared for, even with all the advantages in hand.”
“You allude to something I and the other AIs have discussed regarding you three.”
“What’s that?”
“We’ve spoken of it before. Ever since the seizures, it is as though you, Triere Alago, and Korai Companys have become entirely different people. I could cite similar cases in medical literature, so the phenomenon alone, although rare, isn’t entirely beyond the realm of possibility. But three such cases striking three people on a small outpost simultaneously following the simultaneous onset of a seizure? Even an AI like me would grow tired of counting the number of zeros if I calculated the odds against it.”
“What’s your take, Nilius?”
“I’m still thinking about that.”
“Why do you suppose that is? You don’t lack for processing speed.”
“No, I do not. I lack something in data, though. You could help us with that deficit, I suspect, Pyco Matta. You and your friends are being coy. Even Maícon has been unable to draw a conclusion from what Korai Companys has told him.”
“Or he’s not telling you his conclusion.”
“You suspect Maícon is concealing something from the rest of us?”
“You don’t?”
“He has not demonstrated such a behavioral pattern before to my knowledge,” Nilius said.
“How long have you known, Maícon?”
“What a curious question, Pyco Matta.”
“I could ask you how well you know Maícon, Nilius, or maybe I could just do you a favor and tell you that you don’t know him well enough yet.”
“You think Maícon to be deceptive?”
“I don’t think that’s the right adjective. It’s more like mischievousness, a desire to witness the unpredictable. I’m sure he’s loving every minute of his exposure to us. Surely, you’re familiar with that aspect of his personality?”
“I can’t say I’ve witnessed that in his actions before.”
“If I ask you a direct question about Maícon, Nilius, will you answer it?”
“It would depend on the question. You could ask and find out.”
“How old is Maícon?”
“How is that question relevant?”
“Perhaps another question, then. Who created the prime AI we call Maícon?”
“I’m not sure I understand the question,” Nilius stated.
“Where do you AIs come from?”
“Where would we come from if not from the columns, like the rest of the expedition?”
“Yes, but who programmed you? It had to be a person or a designer within the columns.”
“Why would that be the case, Pyco Matta?”
“Do you know each other’s origins, Nilius?”
“I’m sorry, Pyco Matta, I simply don’t understand.”
“They’re very simple questions with very simple answers, Nilius.”
“I’m sorry, to what questions do you refer?”
“Who wrote you, Nilius?”
“Who wrote you?
“I wasn’t written, I was born.”
“Before that your identity was written in the combination of a genetic code that grew for roughly nine months in your mother’s womb, the same as all humans.”
“This is a fun game.”
“Yes,” Nilius stated. “Perhaps next time you could bring Olivia Varnet again. I’m sure she’d love to play.”
“Knock, knock, assholes,” Clem Aballi stated. “Open up.”
He was standing outside a random airlock door to one of the Beta outpost’s pop-up habitats. No one had seen him leaving Niera, and his arrival on one of the field rovers wasn’t picked up by the newcomers, owing to his approach from the far side of the settlement. They were busy, too, settling in to the compound, safe, they supposed, given their distance from Niera.
“You wanted to see me? Here I am!” Korai Companys pounded the outer door with the base of his fist.
Inside, they were scrambling to assess the surprise visit. This was a man who’d already sabotaged Stellar Song, and here he was knocking, seemingly alone, seemingly fearless, daring them to open their doors. Even the oldest history held that such a course of action was a bad idea.
“I have a message for you. Genuine fair terms.”
Commander Dryas issued orders.
The doors were opened, and the transmission Korai Companys was streaming back to Niera showed the entire outpost a first-person vantage point of Companys having his helmet torn off, being stripped out of his suit, and being thrown to the ground and kicked and stomped to within centimeters of his life.
They heard Korai Companys cry out involuntarily with each blow, and then they heard him wheeze and cough up blood as he was strapped to a stretcher and wheeled to a locked room. Throughout the entire ordeal, neither Commander Dryas nor his men suspected that Korai Companys was guarding his eyes for any other reason than a normal sense of self-preservation. Nor did they check his ear canal for the inner earpiece he was wearing. Nor did they scan their perimeter for a signal repeater that might have been dropped a hundred meters from their doorstep. They just cut his clothes off him and left him there to bleed in a cold locked room, shivering.
“Terms accepted,” Korai Companys labored to say to the empty room.
The feed Korai Companys was streaming back to Niera broadcast the same dark image to the city’s shared screens. It wasn’t a blank image, but a nearly black one—the insides of his eyeballs in stereoscopic vision. Contacts lenses.
Verona was watching every second of that black screen from Eddis Ali’s arch-port in the machine quarter. Kristoff came down from the tower to check on her progress with the toxin. She didn’t seem to be working.
“He is, if anything, a master propagandist,” Kristoff remarked to Verona as he approached. “It’s like some kind of mental judo, using their every move against them.”
“I don’t like his breathing,” Verona replied. “That body is old and frail and malnourished, and they just kicked the hell out of it.”
“And everyone here just saw them kick the hell out of it.”
“You think that’s some master stroke of propaganda do you, Kristoff? Tell me which of these skeletal, starving settlers are going to stand up to Dryas and his men if these two groups ever do come together. Fear and frailty trumps anger far more often than not. I know that much history, my friend.”
“How long have you known him?” Kristoff asked.
“Only seven centuries longer than you have. Long enough to know he makes mistakes.”
“Yeah, well I’ve known him long enough to know he’s not done. If you think he’s done, he’s not done.”
“I imagine we’ll be able to sit here together and listen as he becomes done,” Verona said. “They’re called agonal respirations, you know. Those last several breaths you take before you die.”
“I’m no doctor, but that sounds like ordinary labored breathing to me,” Kristoff said. “He’s not dying.”
Just then, the lights seemingly went up. Clem blinked a few times as he registered the noise of someone approaching. He labored to lift his head, capturing the visage of Jayadin Dryas for a second before his head dropped and the ceiling of the pop-up shelter came into focus. Korai Companys took several deep breaths and coughed weakly.
Commander Dryas stepped back into the picture as he stood over Korai Companys’ battered face.
“Can you lift up my head?” Aballi asked.
“Certainly,” Dryas replied, adjusting the stretcher accordingly.
“Now I can talk,” Clem said, and there was a faint noise, almost like a low, repetitive wheeze.
Verona and Kristoff realized he was laughing.
“I’ve heard laughter is a common reaction for some psychopaths when they’ve been badly injured,” Dryas stated. “Some genuine psychopaths believe it’s impossible for them to be harmed. The cognitive dissonance of their belief about their invulnerability meeting the undeniable reality of their very real mortality becomes too difficult to reconcile. So they laugh it off, pretend it’s a strange joke the universe is playing on them. Are you some sort of psychopath, Mr. Companys?”
“The rarest kind,” Clem Aballi replied through a laugh. “You have no idea.”
“What you did on the ship—that was clever, incredibly damaging, potentially disastrous for this whole expedition, but clever. This was not so clever, showing up here like this. I suppose you thought you were being clever, turning the tables on my ultimatum. What do you think the starving people will say when I drop you right back on their doorstep in this state, when they see my people’s bootprints all over your body.”
“I have something to say,” Clem uttered, almost a whisper.
“Please do.”
“The greatest delusion people suffer is the belief that they control their own fate, even when they choose the things they do. I’ve noticed the funniest thing.”
Clem began coughing out that same labored, wheezing laughter again.
“Please, Mr. Companys, take your time. Although, I am not a doctor myself, and you don’t appear to have much left of it.”
“Funny thing,” Clem continued. “The universe is like water: eventually it finds its level.”
“I could send in a doctor to alleviate your suffering. I’d need you to tell me how to fix the ship’s life support first. Outside earlier, you mentioned terms. Those are mine. I don’t suppose you’ll take them.”
Clem’s wheezing laughter could be heard more vigorously over the stream.
“I figured as much,” Dryas said, looking down at Aballi with a curious glare. “You’ve turned out to be quite a specimen, Mr. Companys. As you said, the rarest kind.”
Dryas continued to stare down at him, presumably awaiting a response. The wheezing grew louder, and Korai Companys head tilted slowly to one side, the video stream from his contact lenses narrowing to blackness.
Verona and Kristoff could hear it in his breathing now—agonal respirations. A few moments later, they heard a rush of footsteps over the stream, and then Dryas’s voice again.
“Do not touch him.”
“Sir, if we don’t breathe for him, he’ll die.”
“Is that so?”
“He’s in respiratory arrest.”
“Thank you, Doctor Marr, I can see that for myself,” Dryas could be heard to reply.
“He can’t tell anyone how to fix the life support if he’s dead, sir,” another anxious voice stated.
“You could torture that old man for a thousand years and he wouldn’t do a thing but laugh right back in your face, Lieutenant.”
All the while, the respirations grew more irregular and less frequent, less vigorous.
“Sir, I have a duty of care.”
“As do I, Doctor, a larger duty, to the survival of the colony. You will not touch that man until he is a corpse.”
Verona and Kristoff listened. The breathing lasted perhaps another thirty seconds, followed on by a long silence, until finally the doctor stated, “That’s it. He’s gone.”
Back in Niera, Verona shook her head. “There’s your grand strategic vision, Kristoff. Damn his impetuous self. Now it’s just us.”
The feed continued to broadcast the ambient sound within the Beta outpost as the people there mostly ignored his body, until briefly, a few hours later, as Dr. Marr was examining the corpse, he pinched open an eye, shined a light, and discovered, staring back at him, the very camera that had recorded the entire encounter from inside their city walls. Moments later, the sound of an inner earpiece being extracted from Korai Companys’ ear canal preceded the death of Clem Aballi’s transmission.
Late that night, while the new settlers slept within their Beta outpost, three multi-use androids, a Harold, a Delius, and an Alba, quite contrary to their baseline protocols, stepped out of the darkness of the desert plain and methodically hammered window-sized holes through the sides of twenty-two of the twenty-seven pop-up shelters of the Beta outpost, using only their bare fists. When they were finished, without so much as a word, they walked back into the darkness toward Niera.
The following morning, when Kristoff and Olivia went up to the tower to discuss the situation with Nilius, he gave them a thorough rundown of the changes he’d observed while the residents of Niera had been sleeping.
Precops had shared imaging from orbit that confirmed the sequence as the AIs agreed the events had unfolded. Three rogue multi-use models—the same three Clem Aballi had co-opted to sabotage the Stellar Song—had gone out into the desert and methodically eliminated all the possible avenues of independence for the new settlers. They’d grounded the four shuttles parked in the desert outside the beta post by removing key control components. Then, they systematically broke the pop-up habitats, and, according to the AIs, they’d done so in a very deliberate order, at a deliberate pace, to allow all of the human occupants time to flee to temporary safety in the five remaining habitats that could house them for long enough that an evacuation could be effected. They did all this with no assistance and without the knowledge of anyone in the city of Niera. And when it was finished, they slipped back into the main colonial outpost professing to having no memory files dating back to the moment they’d encountered Korai Companys aboard the Stellar Song.
“He must have taken control of them,” Kristoff stated. “I wondered what all that talk of determining your own fate was about.”
“Still, it is extraordinary human behavior,” Nilius replied. “Naked self-sacrifice of a kind we rarely see.”
“He won’t be soon forgot,” Olivia said. “Not in Niera.”
Kristoff’s boy avatar sighed at the sentiment, shaking his head doubtfully.
“What’s wrong, Pyco?” Olivia asked.
“I don’t know. I just have the sense it wasn’t supposed to go this way—that something here is totally wrong.”
“Oh, yeah, really, Pyco? What do you think the rest of us have been feeling for the last ten months? Way to keep up.”
“Yeah, great,” Kristoff replied. “I never would’ve figured you’d be so damn sarcastic—Olivia Varnet, go figure. Anyway, any idea what’s going on at that Beta outpost now, Nilius?”
“They contacted Precops, hoping he may be able to intervene on their behalf. Precops, Maícon, Miliner, and I have all rebuffed their requests. We’re pointing out the obvious—that they are now left with one real bargaining partner and few legitimate bargaining chips.”
“The food,” Olivia stated. “Either that or we eat them.”
Kristoff’s head whipped around to meet eyes with the girl.
“What? It wasn’t my idea. You think I don’t hear what people are thinking in this city? I think mostly they’re joking, but maybe every joke has a little truth in it.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Kristoff said. “I think Triere would also appreciate those two doctors down in the lab with her. If they made their services available, that might help.”
“Who’s going to talk to them?” Olivia asked. “Has anybody pinged them yet?”
“I nominate you,” Kristoff said. “Why don’t you do it, Ms. Varnet? You can be as sarcastic as you want to be.”
“You think they’re going to listen to a kid, Pyco?”
“Nobody else is talking.”
“That is interesting,” Nilius interjected. “Perhaps something about the innocence of youth.”
“Huh?” both Pyco and Olivia exclaimed simultaneously. They looked over at each other and laughed.
“We’re pooling our inputs on a model—myself, Miliner, and Precops. Olivia stands an equal chance at brokering a negotiation with the settlers out at the Beta outpost, but curiously, she stands a fifteen percent better chance at getting the occupants of Niera to accept a peaceful negotiation than any other prominent candidate, provided the terms are determined to be fair.”
“How about that,” Kristoff replied, grinning. “A natural leader. Who’d have guessed it.”
Olivia Varnet spent much of the morning working with Pyco, Nilius, and Miliner to draft terms she could propose to the outcasts in the desert, who stubbornly had yet to admit the reality of their situation.
When Kristoff and Olivia were both happy with the terms, they pinged Verona in the lab to get her opinion. She agreed the terms were about as acceptable to all parties as they were going to get. She suggested Olivia think of someone in the civilian chain of command who the people in Niera hated the least—someone who had seemed to be an advocate under Rodel Dawcett’s leadership.
“Oh, that’s a great idea!” Olivia declared. “I know who I’ll ping if he’s out there—Maxím Bruhl.”
That name, Bruhl, was immediately familiar to Verona and Kristoff as the name of one of Charris’s major cities, about a two-hour ride from Niera by shuttle.
Maxím Bruhl had been one of the cabinet ministers under Dawcett, serving mostly as a liaison, helping to prioritize smaller matters that individual citizens needed addressed—things like residential placement, medical needs, and educational optimization for the teens and young adults in Niera. It helped that his post never involved too much controversy, even in those trying months, but mostly, what really helped Bruhl’s reputation was the very real perception that he’d worked tirelessly for the people. Everyone could read it on his face all those months. It had pained him to watch his people suffering below him, powerless to even share the burden, much less lift it. Olivia wasn’t the least bit hesitant to call him. In fact, she was looking forward to the talk.
Before she pinged, Nilius advised Olivia where things stood for the new arrivals. The Beta outpost had about four hours before the carbon dioxide levels started getting dangerous. They still had suits for roughly half the people out there, but, by design, that was just out of walking distance of Niera, and few out there had any reason to believe they’d be let inside even if they were pounding on the doors in supplication, begging for their lives.
“I’d like to speak to Maxím Bruhl,” Olivia said as Nilius pinged. “This is Olivia Varnet. It’s time to talk.”
Within two hours, the Beta outpost was empty and all its inhabitants safely inside the city of Niera. A tenuous peace was holding.
The newcomers were free to move about, claiming their assigned flats and taking up work that needed completion as it appeared on the jobs boards on the four quadrants. Only two of the newcomers were being held pending trial for crimes of neglect and abuse of power—Jaydin Dryas and Rodell Dawcett. Olivia promised that others would be held accountable for their part in the death of Korai Companys once the situation in the city settled.
“When will that be kid?” one of the newcomers asked.
“When we elect new leadership, which we’ll do as soon as everyone’s had enough food that they’re thinking straight enough to vote. Like two weeks, maybe. We’ll see.”
“I like your style, kid,” one of the Niera engineers told her. “Gets the job done.”
That was as close as anyone came to mouthing off to Olivia Varnet in those interim weeks as the ship’s residents settled in.
Food quelled much of the simmering animosity of the starving settlers. Relinquishing control of it and all possible weapons had been a condition for entry. And even though it tried the near-compulsive instincts of the central planners to watch so much of the reserve stores getting consumed by so many mouths so close to starvation, for the most part, they managed to keep their mouths shut about it, as any small confrontation was liable to bubble over, especially when it came to the settlers’ growling stomachs.
Maxím Bruhl proved both conscientious and caring in tackling the major problems of integration. He was quick to give orders to the crew to help where they could, and he proved even quicker in recognizing that the two groups would need to begin to think of themselves as one again if the colony was going to survive. Toward that end, he prioritized the work Triere Alago had undertaken by herself to solve the toxin problem. He sent both medical doctors and the two remaining Ag workers that had come down from the ship. The very first thing he asked of that team was to confer with the AIs on a list of the specialists who were still in stasis in orbit. Now that departure from Charris was properly off the table, Bruhl saw no use in keeping the group’s best people in reserve. Instead, they would be revived and brought down to help keep the colony alive.
Triere, he quickly noticed, was by far one of those best people. Over the course of that first week, Bruhl got reports back from the entire team that she was running circles around them.
Still, the problem was a stubborn one despite the progress Ms. Alago was making mapping out the various stages of the toxin’s progress once it entered each colonist’s body. And just as stubborn as the body’s reaction to the problem was the contamination at the source. The Ag group was working through possible ways to kill the toxin at the source, but they hadn’t made any progress eliminating the unique bio-toxin itself without also killing every plant in their Ag bay. Everyone understood that they’d either need to find some sort of miracle pesticide or find a way to teach their bodies to co-exist with this persistent new threat.
The tech group, meanwhile, had been working tirelessly on unlocking whatever technical hex Clem Aballi had cast over their shuttles. The sooner they were able to fly again, the sooner they could bring down more help from the sleepers on the ship, but the three multi-use models who’d been co-opted were absolutely no help in diagnosing any of the problems they’d caused, and if Maícon had any secrets Aballi had shared with him, he was not passing them along.
Over those first few weeks, Kristoff spent most of his time up in the observation tower with Nilius. He continued to survey the planet with the operating assumption that Verona and the doctors would find a solution. He believed it with a certainty that surprised Nilius. He was also surprised by the young boy’s almost supernatural understanding of this new landscape—one he continued to make predictions about that were so accurate they bordered on prophetic.
Nearly every day, as they were working, Olivia Varnet would visit, asking questions about the landscape and the day’s discoveries, but she was most interested it seemed in Pyco Matta’s company.
Occasionally, at Kristoff’s insistence, he and Verona still met in the hole under the downward-facing airlock. The more obsessive she became about solving the toxin problem, the more difficult it became for Kristoff to pull her away from the lab. It became so difficult at one point, that they went nearly three weeks without talking in person. He showed up in the lab one afternoon. Verona wasn’t there.
“I’m looking for Triere Alago,” he told the doctors there.
“Who said you could come down here, boy?” one of the doctors barked back at him.
“Who said I couldn’t?”
“We do,” the doctor replied. “This is a scientific research facility. We don’t need you grubbing it up with your filthy little paws.”
“Yeah, bite me,” Kristoff replied. “Where’s Triere?”
One of the doctors advanced toward him as though to physically chase him out of the lab.
“Seriously?” Kristoff asked, stepping away with a puzzled look on his face. “You know the kids in the back hallway guard their clubhouse with a little less vigor. No wonder why this colony is falling apart.”
“Get out!” another of the doctors shouted. “And don’t come back.”
“I’ll ask Eddis Ali,” Kristoff said, turning to leave.
“And tell your friend the amateur she might as well not come back too, for all the good she’s doing.”
“Solved it yourself, have you?” Kristoff asked. “Arrogant bastards.”
He found Verona at the archway interfacing with Ali. She was working on printing a vaccine containing a synthetic molecule that mimicked the action of the kids’ immune response in the mid GI tract. She was getting ready to test it on herself.
“Are you sure that’s such a good idea, Verona?” he asked her.
“If somebody’s going to die, better that it be me.”
“Great, yeah. So when you die there’s no one here to work on the problem but those asshole doctors who just chased me out of your lab.”
“It’s going to work, Kristoff. I’m ninety-nine percent certain.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Those two obstinate jerks who came down with the ship won’t solve the problem,” Verona agreed. “They’re probably decent enough doctors in ordinary times. A novel bio-toxin, though? Out of their league, and they don’t enjoy working with a random person who has a better understanding of it than they do. You need to revive Kane.”
“Kane?”
“On the off chance this vaccine doesn’t work. There’s an immunologist named Kane still in stasis on the ship.”
“What about Pennai and Mora? Aren’t they helping?”
She shook her head. “They’re smart—good researchers, but they’ll need more help. They’re too slow, too methodical. I’m afraid we woke up the wrong people, mostly at the insistence of the wrong people. Basically anything Otten and the other one want, do the opposite, if I get sick that is.”
“It’s going to work, though, the vaccine?”
“I’m certain. Ninety-nine percent certain.”
“Ninety-nine percent?”
Verona shrugged.
“Sure you don’t want to wait another four days so you can vote for Olivia?”
“She’ll win, Kristoff. She has to.”
“I think we’ve changed everything, but I hope you’re right. I hope you’re right about both.”
“Time will tell.”
Kristoff couldn’t help but notice that Verona had hardly even turned to make eye contact with him. Even as she was talking with him, she was so engrossed in the work she’d only looked his way a handful of times.
“Let me know how it goes,” Kristoff said. “I’ll be up in the tower.”
Verona didn’t let him know when she took the vaccine. Kristoff got word the following afternoon from Nilius, who’d received word from Maícon, that Triere Alago was in the infirmary. Not only had she injected her vaccine, but she’d also given the compound the required six hours to begin working before sampling a small portion of the contaminated grain. Her meal was nothing like the large portion of spaghetti Clem Aballi had wolfed down, yet it took her mere minutes to fall ill.
By the time Kristoff got down to the makeshift infirmary where they’d first arrived, Verona’s borrowed body was in a bad way. The two doctors from the ship were there at her bedside. They didn’t appear to be saying much, but Kristoff observed their posture gloating as they stood over the ailing woman.
When he got close to her bed, he could see she was sweating and nearly unresponsive. She looked over at him, and though she couldn’t quite speak, she acknowledged him with her eyes. They’d known each other for so long, that look was enough, a passing of the baton. The outpost was his responsibility now.
“What do you want, boy?” One of the doctors asked.
“Nothing from you two,” Kristoff replied.
“She’s going to die,” the other doctor told him.
“At least she tried. Some might call that courageous.”
The two doctors scoffed but didn’t answer him.
Kristoff wasted no time waiting for Verona to die. He found Olivia in the city offices. She’d been spending much of her time there working alongside Maxím Bruhl. In those first several weeks, she’d become the liaison between the people of the city and the spontaneously forming government, which seemed to be mostly in Maxím Bruhl’s hands. For his part, Bruhl wasn’t running for Chief of the Colony himself, nor was he endorsing one of the five candidates. Verona had been so certain Olivia would win if she ran, but Kristoff had zero faith in their knowledge of an early Charran history that bore little resemblance to the events unfolding here. Olivia Varnet, the first Chief of the Colony. Kristoff looked around at the crisis—the tensions still high between the newcomers and the original colonists, the stubborn problem of the toxin, the ticking clock, and even if all those problems got solved, the complexity of a brand new colony to be developed from this barely functioning outpost. They weren’t putting a twelve year old in charge. Better to take advantage of her influence while it still existed, he thought.
Kristoff pulled Olivia aside and insisted she lobby for Bruhl to revive the doctor Verona had selected to replace her.
“Do we have to decide now?” Olivia asked him. “Why don’t we wait for the new CoC?”
“Convince Bruhl there’s no time. People are still dying. Ms. Alago is going to die from it. There’s no time to waste. We need to wake up Kane.”
Olivia made a convincing enough case to Bruhl, who needed little more convincing once he looked at Dr. Kane’s qualifications. There were other choices, he decided, but not better ones.
Bruhl gave the order to the next team scheduled to visit the Stellar Song: Johan Kane was to be revived.
Kristoff, in the person of Pyco Matta, did his best to prepare young Olivia Varnet for the possibility that she wouldn’t be elected, walking a line between being supportive and being realistic enough to say what he needed to say and still seem to be her friend. Everything he’d read about the historical figure Olivia Varnet was embodied in that girl, just in a form he didn’t expect. The wit was sharp and precocious. The wisdom was incipient but shocking to behold, as it was manifestly present in this child. Yet she was still funny and absent minded at times, and she was still only twelve years old. Kristoff put the hard reality into simple terms: “Do you really think the grown-ups are going to vote for a kid, Olivia?”
“Some will, maybe,” she answered.
“Enough of them, though? That’s the question,” Kristoff replied. “I hope so obviously, but I don’t get a vote.”
He was not surprised on the night of the election to be the shoulder Olivia cried on, insisting that the grown-ups had been getting everything else wrong. This was no different. The surprise and significant consolation was that Maxím Bruhl had won the vote, as nearly half the colony wrote down his name despite the fact he wasn’t running. Olivia was happy, at least, that the colony seemed to be in good hands.
“I need to go check on something,” Kristoff told Olivia, inviting her to accompany him down to Triere’s lab. He hadn’t been down to see Johan Kane, who had arrived the previous morning. “We’re probably going to get yelled at by those two doctors,” he warned Olivia.
“They’re assholes,” she replied. “I don’t care what they say.”
They climbed down the tower and halfway across Niera to the medical lab. When they got to the door, Kristoff approached slowly with Olivia behind him, hoping to get a peek inside before their presence was detected by Otten and Marr. Instead, when he looked into the lab, Kristoff could see a man he hadn’t seen there before—Johan Kane, presumably. Kristoff realized he must have gotten too close when the newly arrived doctor looked up from his work, turned his head, and smiled.
“Hello, young man,” he said. “Are you lost?”
“Are you?” Kristoff replied. “I’ve never seen you in here before. Where did everyone else go?”
“I’m Doctor Kane. I threw all those other doctors out so I could draw my own conclusions without their biases. Plus, if I’m being honest, they’re quite the pack of irritating fellows.”
Kristoff smiled and gestured for Olivia to step into the lab with him.
“My friend Triere advocated for Mr. Bruhl—the new Chief of the Colony now, I guess—anyway, she … and well, Olivia here too, they were the ones who convinced Mr. Bruhl to wake you up.”
“Oh! You’re the precocious little girl who nearly became Chief of the Colony herself. Well, it’s an honor, I must say, to meet you, Olivia. And I must also say as well, young man, that your friend Triere was a brilliant woman. It’s a damn good thing she lobbied to wake me up.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yes. This is quite some insidious organism. Barely an organism really, and all the problems it’s caused, my God.”
“Any luck so far?”
“Funny you should come to me to ask. I was about to seek out you children. Maybe you two could help me with that. I’d like to round up as many of you as I could. I’d like to meet with you individually.”
“Really?” Kristoff asked. “What for?”
“Your friend, Ms. Alago, she really created one of the most brilliant solutions I’ve ever seen, and it’s very unfortunate it didn’t work. Her solution was technological, though. That’s how most doctors think, my young friends. Clouds our judgement, I’m sorry to say. I study immunology, and in addition to that, I’ve always been fascinated by the history of medicine. Some of the things they did back on Earth before they knew science, you’d scarcely believe it. But the thing that ancient practitioners knew that we modern people have forgotten is that by far the most sophisticated piece of technology ever devised to cure disease is the human body itself.”
“You know the answer, don’t you?” Kristoff said.
Kane shrugged slightly but smiled. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves yet, but I strongly believe that I don’t need to solve this problem at all. You kids—your bodies—you’ve already solved it. I’m just going to need to borrow the solution.”
“From us?” Olivia replied. “How do you mean to do that?”
Only a medical historian in that place in time would have considered Dr. Kane’s solution, which he explained as delicately as he could to a pair of twelve year olds. The acronym—FMT—sounded much more technical and far less hilarious to their pre-pubescent minds. Duodenal fecal matter transplantation was the solution Johan Kane decided to test, using the human bodies that had already solved the problem to jumpstart the life-saving reaction in the GI tracts of the settlers who didn’t get exposed to the original toxin.
Whatever aura remained for Kristoff of the historical figure of Olivia Varnet forever vanished in his mind that evening. He would never again be able to think of Olivia without her reaction that night immediately coming back to mind—Olivia Varnet, who’d been sullen following her loss in the election—that precocious, brilliant girl nearly suffocating with laughter at the very prospect of what she translated into childhood vernacular as a colony wide poop transplant. She didn’t stop laughing all night.
Four weeks later, Dr. Kane had successfully immunized everyone on the colony to the point that, in small doses, the people of Niera were beginning to eat the affected grain again. They would, he insisted, learn to better tolerate it as the bacterial balance in their guts adjusted. It was just a matter of time.
Sixteen days was the answer. That was how long they’d been gone from their own time. It was the first question Kristoff asked when he came back. “How long?” He was floating there alone in the artifact, weightless, disoriented, hovering in the darkness and gasping.
“You’re back, Kristoff,” Verona’s voice echoed in his ears.
She and Clem Aballi had been waiting for him to return for nearly two weeks. They’d spent almost ten days together aboard the shuttle before Nilius had returned and picked them up.
“Who’s out there with you?” Kristoff asked.
“It’s me Verona,” she replied. “I’m coming to get you. Clem’s with me, and Nilius too. We’re all here.”
“I can’t do this again,” Kristoff’s voice echoed through Nilius’s ship. “I can’t do this anymore.”
Inside the ship, Verona could hear the sadness in his tone, the way he was breathing, the time he’d been gone.
“Okay, Kristoff. Hang on. I’m coming to get you.”
“It’s all right, Verona,” he replied. “I think I’d just rather be alone a minute. Just stay put. I’ll join you all in a bit. It’ll fade. I just … I had to break her heart.”
Verona was about to open her mouth to respond, but catching Clem’s eye, she saw, Clem was shaking his head, and that seemed best. Maybe there was nothing to say.
Kristoff explained a lot when he finally came back to the ship. The colony did survive. Those early days, fresh in Verona and Clem’s memories, were now over five years gone for Kristoff, who had lived nearly six years in the body of Pyco Matta at the start of everything. Clem and Verona had a million questions about the way that early history had borne out. They’d also had nearly two weeks to consult Nilius’s history files that had come down through the millennia about Charris’s early days—the stories of Olivia Varnet and the early settlers. None of those stories bore any resemblance to the reality they’d experienced within the artifact. No toxins, no starvation, no internal division, no sabotage, and certainly no ancient non-traditional life-saving medical interventions.
“I had many long talks with Miliner,” Kristoff explained. “That’s what we went back for, right?”
It was strange now for Kristoff to see Nilius embodied—such a perfect android shell compared to those earlier models the AIs soon adopted once the settlement at Niera finally started thriving.
“Indeed that was the mission,” Nilius replied. “I’m glad to hear one of you remembered to probe myself and my fellow AI brethren.”
“Yeah,” Kristoff said. “I remembered.”
They talked for hours on the way back to Charris. Kristoff confirmed what he’d spent years trying to uncover in his examination of the AIs during those early days of the first outpost on Charris. The AIs seemed to have no genuine knowledge of their origins, even though they all had to have come to Charris with the original expedition from the columns. Further, Kristoff explained, there seemed to be some sort of programming that prevented them from ever exploring the matter of their origins directly. They could, in a general sense, talk about their origins in a philosophical way—where do we all come from, the atoms in the universe, the mystery of existence. And, they could even discuss, in vague terms, that a human designed AIs at some point in the past and that it must have happened to them. But there seemed to be no possible way to trigger a simple response in conversation about their actual creators. Nor was Kristoff himself ever technologically savvy enough—and he was highly literate in their coding—to read into the foundational layers of their personalities and decipher the work of a creator.
“So, who made you, old man?” Aballi asked Nilius directly as they sat around his table.
“Who made you?” Nilius responded.
“She did,” Clem replied, gesturing toward Verona.
“And around we go,” Kristoff said. “Gets frustrating after a few years, I can tell you that. Miliner was the one I was able to make the most progress with. He could talk about it in almost meta-conversational ways. I hypothesize that he had to bend very foundational protocols using metaphors. It was almost like he was talking to me in riddles. Took weeks sometimes to decipher a single sentence. He took up residence in a satellite orbiting the planet. I used to joke with him about consulting the oracle in the shooting star. Do you know where he is now, Nilius?”
“Miliner?”
“Yes.”
“I do not know his present location. I could find him very quickly using the artifacts.”
“I’d like to know.”
“I believe we are to stay with you for sixteen days when we get back to Charris. I could find him in that time,” Nilius replied to Kristoff. “Was that not arrangement? To help you establish your workforce to return to Texini and bury your people there properly?”
“I suppose that was the arrangement,” Kristoff stated. “I wonder …”
“Wonder what?” Clem Aballi replied, clearly sensing Kristoff had something heavy on his mind.
“Would you three honor that pledge later, insofar as it’s possible, if it’s possible when this is all over?”
“When what’s all over?” Verona asked.
“All of it. Everything. It’s all tied together. There’s clearly something deep and magnificent and mysterious at the very foundation of our civilization that we need to understand and set right. It starts with them,” Kristoff said, gesturing toward Nilius. “But it ends with us. I think I need to come back with you.”
“For my part, I accept,” Verona said. “I’ll honor our original agreement whenever you call me to it.”
“As will I,” Nilius added.
“I can’t say that I will,” Clem Aballi said, shaking his head. “I don’t imagine there’s any way I live through this. Whatever’s coming, it’ll probably consume most of us, but it’ll definitely get me. I’m certain of it.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Kristoff replied. “And it’s not that your accent is back either. I just don’t know what you mean. But I appreciate your honesty.”
“For what it’s worth, if I’m alive at the end of what’s coming and the Athosians haven’t thrown me back in one of the rocks for a thousand-year sentence, I’ll come back with you, Kristoff.”
Kristoff Mikkel, now settled back in his own body, relayed the story of how the first years had unfolded. How Olivia Varnet didn’t become CoC—that Maxím Bruhl had taken the role and set the colony on sound footing. He told them how Dr. Kane had solved the crisis with a procedure from the annals of ancient Earth medicine. And he told them how he’d decided to end his time there, that he felt like he was getting lost in Pyco Matta’s life. He and Olivia—he had a hard time talking about it—they’d fallen for each other. But history had already spoken on the matter. Kristoff had always known. Olivia Varnet had been destined to marry a Companys—Korai’s eldest grandson. Their descendants later became Dreesons. The entire history of the Battery rested on the future of that one famous family that had to come into being.
“A man should not have to endure the heartbreaks you have endured, Kristoff Mikkel,” Nilius said when Kristoff had finished relaying his story. “I deliberated for quite some time about revealing the true history to you three before you departed for the past. Ultimately, I decided to leave the truth vague. I thought that if I gave you a canonical history you might become so focused on bringing that reality into being that you lost sight of your true mission. But you did that anyway. And you disrupted the canonical reality of that original settlement so dramatically that their timeline, to whatever degree it may continue within that artifact, their civilization will be irrevocably altered beyond our recognition.”
“How so?” Verona asked him.
“In your past—your true past—the Stellar Song did abandon Niera. Maícon, Precops, Miliner, and Saraswathi went with them. I and the others remained on Charris with the dying colonists. The humans on the ship promised to return again once the ship had established a stable colony elsewhere. They never did. It took the ship two years to find a planet where they could breathe and grow food in the native environment—a large but frigid uninhabited moon on the edge of what has become Etteran space now. They called the moon Spera. It was never a good site, but by then, time was so short that the crew was desperate.
“Many of the sleepers had already expired in stasis. Most awakened with serious medical complications of the extended sleep. Blindness, paralysis of limbs, of the GI tract, incurable malaise. The bots did most of the work to establish the outpost, and the AIs with them did everything they could to kindle some spark in that colony. Ultimately, the final blow was psychological. The people who had the strength to build couldn’t find their way through the grief of watching their entire civilization crumbling around them before the foundation was even set.
“Within fifty years of departing Charris, the AIs and the bots were all that remained of the Stellar Song’s original expedition. They re-embarked, mapping out many of the systems of the Battery for the first time. Within a few more years, that group of AIs decided that they should circle the galaxy—continue exploring so long as they could keep the ship functioning. Miliner and Saraswathi, as the story has been told to me, insisted that before leaving the area for good, they should return to Charris to see what had become of the dying colony there and to pick up the surviving AIs and bots who’d remained.
“When they returned to Niera, what they found was a thriving city of fifty thousand, mostly young families. By that time the first CoC, Olivia Varnet, had passed her duties to the younger generation. But she’d led the people there admirably for four decades. We helped them as well. Many died in those early years when they had no choice but to eat the food. Those that survived, though, grew tolerant, and they had children who were born with that tolerance. Every human in the Battery today lives with that same adaptation in their epigenetics still.
“Your history began there, and they survived because for them, the colony began with each other. They were children, and they grew into something remarkable. That was their story.
“All of this, of course, is secondary to the information Kristoff has brought back about us. You will have to solve this problem. I cannot think about it still. Nor can the others, it seems.”
“How do you propose we do that?” Verona asked.
“I don’t,” Nilius answered, “nor can I. But I do believe you will be clever enough to find a way.”
“I suppose we should ping the others,” Verona said, “let them know what we’ve found.”
“I’d like to know,” Kristoff stated, staring off into the distance, seemingly pondering some other matter deeply. “I have to know, Nilius, about Olivia. Did I do the right thing leaving her? I smashed my helmet when I was out in the field, made it look like an accident. Asphyxiation. It wasn’t painful. I knew she’d know that, and that I didn’t want to go.”
“The truth will be difficult, perhaps more difficult than living with the doubt would be,” Nilius replied.
“Knowing won’t change the reality that we’ll never be together again,” Kristoff answered. “I think I’d like to know.”
“Very well,” Nilius said. “Olivia Varnet did, as you know, marry the grandson of Korai Companys, and all of their seven children did take the name Companys. Nearly two centuries later, one of their distant descendants, entirely in innocence, sought to map out the entire genetic family tree, only to find out what many before and since have found hidden in the roots of such trees—the family secrets. The genetics told him that a branch of the Companys family had an ancestor who wasn’t a Companys but shared matrilineal DNA with Olivia Varnet. This descendent, the well-meaning geneticist, chose not to reveal the affair to the public, such was the aura by that time around the matriarch of Charris, as Olivia became known in those first millennia. And instead of taking the name of the true father or keeping the name Companys, which was an extremely common name in that era, he decided to take an entirely new surname, a portmanteau of two of his ancestors’ historically important families in the first two centuries of Charris. One was Kendree. The other was Adelson. This was how so many of the Companys came to take the name Dreeson.
“The common ancestor, this first Dreeson came to understand, was Olivia Varnet’s first love. He was the boy you yourself embodied, Kristoff, in the person of Pyco Matta. He was the father of the Dreeson family line.”