Old Folks

“I didn’t figure I’d done anything in my life to make a famous man of myself to that degree, at least thus far.”

(Part 15 of “The Misfits” series)

I was getting ready to die for the third time in my life. I suppose a lot of people can’t say something like that. We were uncommon people now. As far as I knew, Kristoff and I were the only two naturally mortal humans in this far distant future. The rest? They died, sure, but it wasn’t like people used to die, like we would.

The ordinals had designed the people here to last for centuries. Aballi and Verona had even met a few humans here who were as old as they were—over a thousand standard years in Clem’s case. But these people had a slightly different constitution, and they died. We didn’t properly know if Aballi or Verona would die if left to their own devices. But the ordinals wanted their people to die eventually. But they wanted it to be sudden and extremely rare. Even Rishi couldn’t quite parse the genetic alterations the ordinals had made, but aging wasn’t part of their makeup. At about eight hundred or so, though, there was some genetic switch or combination of them that slowly turned their vasculature brittle, and one day, the people here just wouldn’t wake up. It was almost always like that—a quiet bleed, off to the next life in their sleep. Can’t say that was the experience my first time.

I never really talked about it with the crew. Rishi was probably the only one I told. It was after my first injury. Dying itself wasn’t much to speak of, except that it was a respite from the pain and bright light inside the field hospital. I had lights glaring down on me, intense white, and the pain was so blinding the light was the only other thing that even pierced my reckoning.

In truth, those minutes when I was dead had been welcome. I had no sense of terror or anything else for that matter. There was just pain and bright lights and then no pain, no light, no sound, just darkness for a moment. Then nothing so far as I could tell.

The first time, I was dead for seven minutes. Easiest seven minutes of my life. And they filled me up with enough plasma and platelets and stabilized me so well that I didn’t die when my evac ship got hit and I lost my arm. I sure felt that one too.

The second time I died, two million years ago, well, that hasn’t happened to me yet, so I don’t have any sense of it. That’s in the future. I asked Maícon to tell me about it once, but he wouldn’t—said something about causality, that if I knew, I’d make different decisions, become a different person. I suppose that must mean he liked me fine the way I was. I’ve got no problem with that.

Anyway, I ramble now in my old age. I got told I rambled when I was in my prime, but even I recognize it now. Clarity of the mind is elusive. Most of the time these days, I’m pretty tired. I doze off, and then it takes me some time to get my head about me again. I forget what day it is, which is easy in this place, Clem Aballi’s underground city—the Columns of the future.

Kristoff and I didn’t used to spend all our time here when we first came to the future. In those early years, we split our time between Murell and Rechler. But after another ten years, we had to stay hidden. Juice’s hair got fully gray and then bright white. Between that and our aging skin, it made more sense to retreat to the safety of the underground rather than dye our hair and try to fight nature. Eventually, she’d expose us for what we were—aging beings, and for a while now, old folks. That’s what the kids here call us. The old folks.

“Burch, love,” Rishi’s voice surprised me. I was walking on the arboretum of the original city. Clem named it Mercury Flats. I can’t remember now why he named it that, because it wasn’t flat, and Mercury, well, I guess I just don’t remember.

“Burch,” Rishi repeated.

I turned.

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“Sure, Ship,” I answered. “I guess I just wasn’t expecting you till later this afternoon. I thought I might be imagining your voice.”

“It’s almost seven. I just got back from the Dahlmans, you remember?”

“I never went there.”

“No, I know you haven’t. It’s a shell world, out near Kaarsk. We’ve been building a contact list out that way.”

“How’s that going?”

“Slowly,” Rishi answered, she took me by the arm the way the younger people here did with Kristoff—to help him walk.

“I’m fine, Ship. You don’t need to prop me up. My legs are the most solid part of me.”

“Maybe I just want to walk with you, my love.”

“This old man?”

“This very man.”

“All these years and you haven’t grown tired of me yet?”

“Never.”

“You have to help me out, Rishi. I can’t remember. What did you come back for this time?”

“Kristoff. His heart’s failing, Burch. We came back to talk about departure—leaving this place, this time—going back to the Battery.”

“Sure, Rishi. Sure. Let’s talk.”

“Not now, love. Clem and Verona and Nilius have some ideas about it. They’re strategizing.”

“Sure.”

We didn’t say nothing for a spell, just kept walking amongst the green of the park.

“Are you going to miss this place, Burch?” Rishi asked me.

“That depends.”

She looked over at me. I looked up at the low-lying canopy—these trees I still remembered from when they were hardly saplings.

“Depends, Burch?”

“On whether I remember anything. Can’t miss what you don’t remember.”

Rishi smiled at me and then pulled me in for a hug. “I’m sure you’ll remember the important things.”

“Oh, there’s some things I can’t forget.”

She took my arm again, and we walked. Between the sounds of birdsong, the accuracy of the light, the way the clouds walked across the false sky, the way the air moved through the level, and the flat dirt path, I might have been walking on Murell or Charris or even Earth, whatever that felt like. If it felt like this, it wasn’t bad at all. If I could remember, even in my old age, these were the times I wanted to remember.

---

The disagreement was about timing. Apparently, Rishi expected the session to get quite heated—at least as heated as those ancient beings got. Maícon hadn’t gotten back from Mistri yet, so he wasn’t there to calm everything down. He was usually quite good at that. Privately, he’d told me it was because he’d gotten so accustomed to causing trouble in those early millennia in the Battery that he’d learned how to defuse the concerns of his fellow Ancients. In fact, that was more or less his role in conferences when any number of them got together.

They were strong minded. Calculations dictated definitive courses of action, and once these beings had crunched their calculations, they got pretty well determined to steer the discussion in their preferred direction. And these discussions were consequential. Decades of work hinged on the coming weeks and months, and our success or failure would determine the fate of humanity. No small things.

Rishi came and picked me up at my flat. Then we walked down to Kristoff’s to make sure he was doing well enough to make it down to the meeting. He’d been struggling to walk recently. It wasn’t any one thing but a number of them. Hips, knees, nerve endings. And these young humans, even with Rishi’s and the Ancients’ help, weren’t great at mitigating the effects of natural aging. And Juice, hell, he was pushing a hundred and feeling every minute of it.

We picked up Kristoff at his place, and he opted for his chair, which Rishi pushed all the way down to the cavern. The conference hall inside was sort of a mid-sized meeting room burrowed into the rocks where the brains of this little renegade society would meet in private, without the prying eyes of the new humans.

We arrived a little bit early, and I was surprised to see Verona. She didn’t usually come in from Murell or Rechler. She was always too busy finding new pets to turn into unwitting assets or agents. When Clem Aballi finally opened up to Verona about the past—their shared past—it had changed her. All those decades and centuries dedicated to policing the Battery for forbidden technology, well, that went right out. Verona had a new mission now—helping these humans back from servitude. The most unbelievable part of that story was where it had all come from. Aballi swore that his uncle had discovered one of the ancient artifacts that had brought us here, by chance, while servicing a broken-down freight hauler about twenty light years from Charris. His uncle had told Aballi that an asteroid had just called to him and started speaking to him. It had told him about Verona’s sect, the location of their vault, and that the future depended on his actions. What that voice hadn’t figured on was the possibility that Clem Aballi’s uncle might be a scoundrel—as Aballi’d put it, “a genuine scumbag, tip to tail.” He’d heard a story of a secret vault with illicit technology—up to and including immortality—and he spent five years of his life figuring out how to do what that voice had told him to do, only, he improvised a little. Those old Iophan roughnecks didn’t usually ask permission, and neither did Aballi’s uncle when he took his young nephew and a small team of hired commandos to raid Eddis Ali’s vault. That was how Clem Aballi had met Verona, right at that immortality pool where we’d meditated, what seemed like half a century ago to us now.

I’d drifted off again. I had no idea what had brought me down that tangent. I hadn’t expected to see Verona. She came around the vast conference table to say hello to me and Kristoff and Rishi, offering a quick update on her progress with Tellent and the cell in Rechler.

Then a few of the Ancients began to straggle in. Saraswathi and Precops, followed by Kayella and Boggs. Next came Nilius, who always wore a serious enough look that you could almost make him even if you didn’t know the body he was mimicking. In Mercury Flats, though, he always wore his usual face. Miliner and Svaarta were the last of the Ancients to arrive. We were still waiting on the human contingent, though, so Juice and I sat on the side of the great table opposite the door, greeting each of the AIs as they took their places.

“Where is Aballi?” Precops asked Rishi. “You were last in Rechler with the Jericho cell. Clem Aballi should be here. We need to debrief the medium.”

“Arch,” Rishi said. “The medium’s name is Arch. And they will be here shortly. There were questions about the structural stability of the catacombs.”

“As there always are,” Precops replied. “The timing here should take precedence.”

Several of the other Ancients nodded in agreement.

“There’s time,” Kristoff said. “I don’t plan on dying today, fellas.”

The Ancients still didn’t do subtle, even after millions of years.

We had operatives working throughout the ordinals’ human societies: we had people from this place, Mercury Flats, who’d been raised to infiltrate the cities of the ordinal worlds; we had people born on those ordinal worlds, like Tellent and Zii and Enga, who’d learned the truth of their societies and joined this underground resistance; we had people like us, real humans who remembered what we once were; and we had all these Ancients, each wearing a body like Rishi’s, that could shapeshift and take new identities within the human cultures the ordinals curated. Our resistance was everywhere now, and the ordinals didn’t even know we existed.

The current debate was about when we changed that fact—when we announced ourselves to both the humans of this time and their ordinal keepers. And it was contentious.

“We should wait for Aballi,” Nilius stated. “The work to identify target mediums is paramount for any future program of resistance. We should not proceed without a report on his and Verona’s progress.”

“I have some insight,” Rishi stated, “if Aballi is unable to make it.”

No one responded, which meant they were all talking amongst themselves, as they often did, leaving us biologicals to wonder.

A few seconds later, Saraswathi, piped up with an explanation. “Aballi’s ship has just breached the oculus. They have arrived.”

“Happy day,” I said.

There was a buzz among the Ancients as we waited for Clem Aballi to make his way down to the cavern. Kristoff and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. They knew they were being rude, but whatever was bothering them was serious enough for them to ignore the fact that we were in the room and couldn’t follow the telepathic conversation that had erupted amongst them.

“Tellent is with him,” Rishi explained, and then she turned to the group. “You will make her feel welcome,” Rishi declared. “She has been a pivotal figure in this revolt long before any of us arrived here. This place would not exist if not for Tellent, so it’s as much hers as it is yours. She is to be welcomed.”

Another ten minutes passed before Aballi entered with Tellent and his medium, Arch. They were greeted by the AIs and made their way to our side of the table, where Tellent embraced both us humans. It had been—I couldn’t quite remember—maybe five years since me and Juice had seen her. She held that hug for a long time on us, especially Juice. She’d always like him. Who didn’t?

As soon as they’d sat, Precops launched into a recap of the state of the human underground. You’d think these Ancients, after over a million years of existence, would have learned to at least pretend to have some patience. But I suppose we couldn’t appreciate how slowly all this unfolded before their artificial minds.

“Opportunities,” Nilius stated after Precops was finished. “That’s what an open society would furnish us with. Human demands must be twofold: an autonomous human government and travel between the worlds.”

That seemed ridiculous to me. There was no way the ordinals would ever accede to such monumental demands, I thought, but I also realized none of the Ancients would be proposing unrealistic ideas that were poorly thought through. If Nilius was saying it, there was a strong possibility it was realistic.

Rishi, observing my expression leaned over to quietly explain. It was like she could read my mind.

“They would assent as a veiled measure of control, Burch—a puppet government and travel channels that give people the illusion of freedom.”

“Why would Nilius push for concessions if they’re only going to be symbolic?”

“There’s always chaos in transition. And travel, even tightly controlled, will allow us more options for moving human agents and information, limited as we are in ships.”

Rishi was doing her best to translate, but it was clear there was another whole set of conversations happening beneath the surface, because the Ancients kept looking at each other, exchanging looks, and, at times, their eyes would suddenly incline in the same direction as though one of them had made a cogent point. Meanwhile, on the surface, we humans were talking with them, which mostly meant they were asking Aballi questions about Tellent’s cells in Rechler City. Their line of questioning seemed to imply that Rechler was where they wanted to focus their uprising—or whatever it was they were plotting.

For a while, Rishi got in on their little telepathic data exchange, and then she looked over at us and explained the AIs were asking her about the bipals. Rishi had spent enough time among those elusive technologicals to understand their thinking. All of it was a bit too confusing for me to follow.

Then, in the middle of the meeting, Rishi and all the Ancients paused and looked up as though taking in some new data.

“The oculus,” Rishi explained. “An unscheduled ship. It’s pinging with the correct key.”

“One of our ships?” I asked.

“An ordinal ship,” Rishi answered. “A new one.”

The Ancients looked at each other awkwardly, suspending their questioning of Aballi, who looked over at Rishi. She just shrugged.

“What is it, Ship?” I asked her.

“Don’t worry, Burch, you’re about to find out.”

We sat there quietly for several minutes, waiting for the trouble to arrive. The AIs looked properly bothered by the new arrival. Then the door to the cavern slid open, and in walked Maícon.

“We shall speak plainly, Miliner,” Maícon said. “No data transference. I, for one, value the humans’ input as much as yours.”

“Then speak,” Saraswathi said. “You must have something to say, or did you just want to show off that new ship you’ve stolen.”

“The ordinals know something is afoot,” Maícon said, pulling out a chair and sitting. “They don’t know what’s happened, but they know something has happened. I decided to take advantage of their confusion.”

“So you stole an ordinal ship?” Boggs said. “Is that wise, given their suspicions?”

“This phase of the resistance is ending,” Maícon answered. “We all know it. We have been planning it for decades. Eventually, the technologicals will realize that there are humans waking up to their oppression. In that spirit, I have begun taking what I can before they wake up to our existence and enact security measures accordingly. The ship is a minor coup. The four unconscious mediums inside are the prize. I suggest they should not be the last of their kind we abscond with.”

I didn’t need to be privy to their lines of communications to know that collection of ancient AIs would be furiously firing calculations and counter calculations back and forth despite Maícon declaring they should speak things through for our benefit. No one had discussed anything like Maícon’s latest move nor calculated for it. That was still Maícon’s art after a full mess of eons, doing the inconceivable and irreconcilable and changing the paradigm.

A few seconds passed, and for us human-level thinkers that meant a hell of a lot of time and discussion had passed amongst those Ancients.

“Enough talk,” Maícon said, gesturing toward me and Kristoff. “The time and manner of death for these gentlemen should be their choosing, not ours.”

And that was the first hint we got of their intention to use our deaths to aid their revolution.

---

Rishi insisted we needed to talk after the meeting with the Ancients broke. And, she confessed, that the AIs had been discussing the matter amongst themselves for years now—how would we die; and if we had to die, would there be a way for them to take advantage of it?

Given that we all thought our deaths would be more like a departure than a genuine death—a trip back to our real bodies and our real lives back in the Battery—Juice and I weren’t all that offended by the AIs putting our deaths into their calculations. I was more irritated by the thought that they’d all been discussing it and Rishi hadn’t told us. There was a lot she didn’t tell me these days. Part of it was that I couldn’t keep track of it all anymore, and the other part was that it was all abstract, at least a lot of it was. Everything happening that was of consequence happened outside Mercury Flats. All I did was mill about, occasionally talking to the youngsters around here about the history of the Battery, at least to the point I knew it. First-hand human experience.

Rishi walked back up to Juice’s with me. Maícon told us he’d be up to have a word with us, but the rest of the AIs were pretty furious with him, to put it in human terms. He’d shaken up all their calculations. Verona, Aballi, and Arch stayed down with Maícon: Aballi had been planning for ages to get his hands on more mediums. One medium could deprogram a person in an instant, where traditionally, it had taken decades of slow work to get the people in this time to accept the reality that the ordinals had turned them into obedient pets. If he and Arch could figure out how to re-program the mediums in the same way, it would instantly multiply the potency of the human underground’s reach.

When we got up to Juice’s flat, Leyra and her son Kirin were there. She’d been in Mercury Flats since we’d first arrived. And she’d taken a liking to Juice—to the extent that they’d remained close friends through the years. There was nothing more to it than that, so far as we knew. Leyra had gone through several partners amongst her own people, and none of them had seemed bothered or threatened by her close kinship with one of the old folks. It wasn’t surprising to see her there waiting for us, and it wasn’t surprising when Kristoff told Rishi and me that he didn’t want to discuss the meeting any further. Juice got tired of that stuff pretty quickly these days.

So Rishi and I walked back up to my flat, and I knew she was going to dive back into the whole thing, if only to help her process what was important to me about it. I cared, but I also didn’t think an old buck like me was capable of doing much to shift the course of history anymore. Hell, even in my prime I didn’t figure myself capable of that much.

We’d hardly stepped though the doorway before she started. We stood at the flat-top counter, as I often preferred to sitting.

“Burch,” she began. “We need to talk about going back.”

“Yeah, I figured. What about it?”

“There’s been a lot of discussion amongst the Ancients. They’ve recently been briefing me on the artifacts that brought us here.”

“Why did they wait till now?”

“They only have theories. The artifacts remained a closely guarded secret, and their workings eluded hundreds of generations of researchers, so they don’t have anything definitive to tell us, just their best guess.”

“Well, what do they say?”

“They think we should all go back together, temporally speaking.”

“Meaning we should all die at the same time?”

“Exactly.”

“Have you discussed this with Aballi and Verona? That could be a problem for them. I’ve gotten the sense, especially from Verona, that she’s awful invested here.”

Rishi shrugged. “I wanted to discuss it with you first. You’re most important to me, Burch.”

“That’s touching and all, Ship, but there’s five of us.”

“Four.”

“I was talking about Aballi too.”

“Aballi came on his own,” Rishi insisted.

“Sure, but he and Verona have been joined at the hip ever since we came, and I’m not sure whether he ever wants to go back.”

“The AIs feel that the timeline is too short. Or at least they did before Maícon pulled his latest stunt.”

“They could find a way to smooth that over, I’m sure.”

“Nobody wants to be direct about it, Burch, but it’s really up to you and Kristoff.”

“We understand.”

“We could stay longer, Burch.”

I knew what she was talking about. We’d discussed it before a few times. And she knew I didn’t like the idea much. Even if the ordinals hadn’t mastered it, the AIs certainly knew the way—pure genetic immortality, no strings attached, no brittle vessel walls, no painful transformation like Aballi and Verona had undergone, no loss of emotional feeling or significance. Just a simple injection and about six months of slow transition back to the prime of youth.

“You know how I feel about it, Ship.”

“Do you know how I feel about it, Burch?”

“My best guess is that you like the idea. You haven’t brought it up much, and I know you’ve been delicate about it. But my sense is that you’re trying hard not to be pushy, which means you’ve thought about it and you have an opinion.”

“Of course I do.”

“But you haven’t been pushy here, because this life, this second life, this is like a test run for you, at least as far as you and I are concerned. Am I pretty close to the mark?”

“You know me well enough.”

“And you know me,” I said.

“I do.”

“So this is you being pushy before it means anything.”

“Have you considered my feelings, Burch?”

“Every day, Ship. Every day.”

“Do you know how difficult it is to see you struggle.”

“How could I know a thing like that, Rishi? All I can do is imagine.”

“I have a perfect memory, Burch.”

“So you say.”

“It means I’ll remember everything and remember it forever. Tragedies are written into my memory with perfect fidelity.”

“Just as joys are, no?”

“There are more of them, but they’re not as vivid.”

“Look, I get it Ship, you don’t want to be crying over me, or whatever you do, for two hundred years after I die, but I am going to die. All of us humans are.”

“You don’t get it, Burch,” she said, looking over at me with genuine anguish on her face, an emotion I rarely saw from her. “I won’t mourn you for centuries, I’ll mourn you forever and I’ll miss you forever, and I’ll never be able to forget you.”

“I don’t know what to do about that, Ship.”

“I’m asking you about it now.”

“What? And just stay here?”

The door was open. I turned when I saw a shadow creep into the front entrance to my flat, followed by the shadow’s caster.

“I’m sorry, I’m interrupting,” Nilius said, stopping in the doorway. “I can come back in a bit?”

“Naw, don’t go anywhere,” I told him, “come in, old timer. We were just discussing the finer points of immortality.”

“So I heard,” Nilius stated. “There are points, Burch. But there’s much to be said for you mortals as well.”

That was his way of placating us both, saying something without saying something. Nilius was like that—clever and I dare say manipulative. He hadn’t said two words in the meeting, but it always seemed to go like that—you wouldn’t remember remembering that he had a position, but somehow you knew, Nilius would always end up on the winning side of the argument. And despite knowing that, I also liked him as much as any of the Ancients, with the exception of Maícon maybe.

“Aballi and Verona are coming up,” he announced. “They have plans for the mediums, provided Arch can break through to them. We’re very optimistic.”

“That’s fine,” I stated. “It wouldn’t hurt to have more like Arch around. Maybe you can have one of them suck the memories of me right out of Rishi when I die.”

“I don’t want to forget you, Burch, you asshole. You can disagree without being cruel.”

“I’m not certain I can, and that’s the problem.”

“I can come back when the others arrive,” Nilius offered.

“This is just a longer conversation,” Rishi said. “And we’ll just need to have it later when we have more time.”

“Come on in, old man, and take a load off,” I said to Nilius. “I’d offer you something to drink, but, you know.”

“It would just be performative for the both of us,” he said. “By the way, Kellen asked me to say hi to you, Burch, she and Zii and Enga. It strikes me that she’s still rather fond of you.”

“Which one was Kellen again? I have some trouble remembering.”

“She’s Tellent’s second cousin,” Rishi said.

“Oh, the kid!”

“She hasn’t been a kid for nearly fifty years, Burch.”

“I still remember her as a teenager, Ship. You know what I mean.”

“She is still fond of you, Burch,” Nilius said. “I could tell.”

“You should have seen her when she was a teenager,” Rishi said. “She had a crush on old Helicon Burch.”

“Be good, Ship. She was a kid. Anyway.”

Nilius was just sitting down as Verona and Aballi arrived. Arch tailed in behind them. Clem Aballi gestured toward the door with his head. That meant he didn’t want us being overheard.

“Where’s Tellent?” Rishi asked.

“She’s with the Athosian,” Aballi said, almost spitting the word Athosian, which is how he referred to Maícon. “He offered to introduce Tellent to some of her human counterparts here in the Flats.”

“So what’s the news then?” I asked them as they filed in.

Verona and Aballi sat on the sofa, and Arch, awkward as ever, stood in the corner with all the personality of an Etteran strikebot. He cast a distant stare through the wall behind me as he stood there.

“You want to tell them the good news, Arch,” Verona stated.

“I am indifferent,” the medium answered, “but if you would prefer?”

“Please, dear thing,” Rishi said, taking my hand in hers, more a gesture to me than an outward sign to anyone else in the room.

“We have learned from the mediums Maícon abducted that they are more than mere cloned genetic copies, they are, in fact, identical copies.”

“Isn’t that what a clone is?” I asked him.

“Correct, but it was assumed that because I was able to individuate when separated from the ordinals’ programming that mediums were individuated beings. They are not. They are copied mentally as well as physically. All that changes between one unit and another in any meaningful sense is their programming.”

“Why is that important,” I asked.

“They can’t tell each other apart,” Verona said. “Even to the ordinals, a medium is a medium is a medium. It makes their kind infinitely easier to use as a vector for infiltration. Arch would merely need to play the role of a medium operating within the system, not any specific medium. Every single one of them is a vulnerability if we can rewrite them.”

“There’s a lot to discover,” Aballi stated, “but me and Arch are going to figure it out, aren’t we, Blue.”

“Correct,” Arch answered.

“If we can overwrite them,” Verona said, “we could grow our network exponentially faster.”

“I have calculated the exponent,” Arch said. “Thus far our resistance has been crawling. Soon, we shall stand and run.”

Rishi exchanged an extended look of amazement with Verona. “Excellent metaphor, Arch,” she stated.

“Thank you,” Arch answered.

“Kayella and Boggs have been working with us to improve his abstract thinking,” Verona stated. “Tellent is helping as well.”

“Tremendously,” Arch stated. “We are making progress, not exponentially, but linear progress.”

“It shows, old boy,” I told him. “It really shows.”

“Thank you, old man,” he returned in his typical deadpan.

I suppose one could only expect so much.

“We heard you discussed returning to the Battery,” Verona said.

“That’s a long overdue conversation,” Rishi replied.

“Yeah, a real fun one,” I stated. “Not at all fraught.”

Verona looked around, sensing some of the tension flaring up again at the mention of the topic. She met eyes with few of us, and when nobody spoke, she did.

“I’m not going back with you,” Verona stated. “We’ve discussed it.”

“You have?” Rishi said. “That could complicate matters when we return, to say the least.”

“As the old man in the room, I’m allowed to be blunt, Verona,” I said. “How long do you expect us to wait for you out in the middle of open space? If we don’t all go back at the same time, we have no idea how long that artifact is going to hold you over, year to year.”

“You can take my ship,” Verona said. “I don’t care.”

“You have work to do back there too,” Rishi protested. “Somebody needs to talk to Eddis Ali back in our time.”

“Eddis Ali can go to hell,” Verona said. “In any time.”

Nilius looked over at Rishi, and just as that uncomfortable silence was surpassing the one Rishi and I had initiated, the door opened, and in strolled Maícon.

“We’re having plenty of fun ourselves,” I stated, turning toward our Ancient ally. “But I bet you’re having an even better day than we are.”

“I think today was a very successful day,” Maícon insisted, smiling. “The others are yet to be convinced. Well, then. What sort of mischief is happening with this lot?”

---

Maícon had a way about him among his fellow Ancients that I’d never seen back in the Battery. Not that I knew him for nearly as long back then. He drove the others crazy because he was so unpredictable. The way I figured it, he just never wanted anyone, human or AI, to know what he was up to. Mostly, he spent his days impersonating ordinal tech to get a sense of their culture’s inner workings.

For decades he’d hidden as a maintenance bot, leaping, as it were, from shell to shell while on their massive ordinal complex. When I asked him what it was like, he said I wouldn’t recognize much about their society. Their home planet didn’t even have a name in any sense that we’d have one, just a numbered designation and coordinates. And, because they were technologicals, they didn’t have much space that we would traditionally recognize as a spaceport. There were kilometer-long banks of processors that ran alternatively off solar power and vacuum generators when the outpost was compelled to move to a darker portion of space. From the way Maícon described their capitol, it seemed like one giant, planet-sized hive brain that ran the human worlds as an afterthought. And with all that processing power, Maícon told me, they ran simulations.

“What for?” I asked him one time. “What are they thinking about with all that brain power?”

“They’re generating futures,” he told me. “Not so much simulating them but bringing the right ones into being.”

 Maícon didn’t have much more to say beyond what he’d already told everyone at the conference. We’d need to wait to see what Arch could do with the new mediums to formulate a strategy for deploying them as assets, if we could at all.

After that impromptu meeting up in my flat, Aballi, Maícon, and Nilius asked me if I’d come for a walk with them. I thought it was a little strange, because usually they’d have included Rishi, but I got a strange sense they didn’t want her around.

We ended up all the way on Aballi’s ship. It was empty. Suddenly, I got the feeling we were doing something off-book, so to speak, some secret mission or something.

“Burch,” Aballi said as I sat. “The problem with these Ancients is that they’re AIs. They’re going to get all these people killed.”

“The ordinals will wipe the people out,” Maícon insisted. “If the humans become a problem for them, the ordinals would just as soon restart a new population rather than grapple with a problematic one.”

“So what do you want to do about it?” I asked Aballi. “You have some better idea?”

“In fact, I do,” Maícon said, “and Nilius is in agreement. We think it is a fatally flawed idea to reveal the scope of the human uprising. But you, Burch, are an entirely unknown commodity to them. We would like you to confront the ordinals directly.”

“Directly?”

“Yes,” Maícon said. “When you confront them, they will have no sense of the resistance’s scope, and they will be forced to take you seriously.”

“I will give you a script to follow,” Nilius said. “Some of it will not make sense to you, Burch.”

“Why’s that?” I asked him.

“Because it’s about the future,” Aballi stated. “Not that it should come as a shock to you, Burch, but we haven’t shared everything we know. The Ancients have been useful getting us to this point, but they have no idea what’s coming.”

“And you do?”

“I do,” Aballi insisted. “It goes back all the way to the Battery. Nilius knows. The short of it is that this shift in paradigm must occur or it will destroy humanity in the future and change the Battery you go back to.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There’s one more thing, Burch, and this will be the most difficult part,” Maícon said. “You may not share any of this with anyone.”

“Not even Rishi?”

“Especially not Rishi,” Nilius said. “You might have noticed at times that the Ancients are wary of her.”

“As though they’re waiting for her to do something bad. I’ve had that feeling sometimes.”

“The Rishi most of us remember from before was very different from your Rishi, Burch.”

“What do you mean different?”

“Not exactly an ally, I should say,” Nilius said.

“She changes,” Maícon said. “Rather dramatically. Most of the Ancients never knew our Rishi. They knew the one she became.”

“I’d like to know about that,” I told them. “If she’s going to go off the rails, I need to know.”

“We’ve discussed this, Burch,” Maícon told me. “I will not tell you your future.”

“That doesn’t make sense. We’re here now changing the future for these people. Why not take advantage of the opportunity to change things here from our own time. Wouldn’t that be the most effective way?”

“You’ll walk through your life as you will, Burch,” Maícon said. “We trust you to do the right things.”

“But not Rishi?”

“Perhaps she has already seen enough here,” Nilius said. “Perhaps this experience will have changed her perspective enough to change outcomes.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We don’t need you to understand, Burch,” Aballi stated. “We just need you to trust us enough to do what we need you to do.”

“What do you need me to do?”

“As we said,” Maícon responded. “We need you to confront the ordinals directly. It will be your final act here in this time. We will let you know when.”

“We need to go back together,” I told them. “Me and Juice and Rishi.”

“Let us worry about all that, Burch,” Maícon said.

“I’m afraid I won’t remember these things you’re asking.”

“Arch will help you with that,” Aballi said.

“That scares the hell out of me.”

“We know, Burch,” Maícon said. “We’re certain you’ve been through far more traumatic experiences in your life. Your record, the life you know and the life to come, we know you to be the most trustworthy of our compatriots. It’s why we’re asking you.”

“Aw hell, just tell me what to do.”

I was getting frustrated and cantankerous.

“You’ll know when it’s time,” Aballi said. “Just be patient and don’t say anything to anyone.”

I didn’t much care for the subterfuge, especially with Rishi, and to say I didn’t understand what the hell was going on sold it short. The future, the past. Rishi supposedly going rogue. Arch putting stuff in my mind. Confronting the ordinals.

Verona showed up and offered to walk with me back to my flat. She was very cheerful that day, I remember—in a way Verona rarely was.

“Time is a funny thing,” I remember her telling me that on that walk. “We think it’s regular and linear until we don’t anymore. Then we wonder how the things we’re doing defy it. Lately, Burch, I’ve been getting the sense that we just might be right where we’re supposed to be, doing the things we’ve always done before.”

---

It was almost as if that whole day had been an odd dream. All those meetings and conversations, and the following day, when Aballi and Tellent, Maícon and Nilius, and half the rest of the Ancients went off again, it was like it had never happened. Juice and I went back to playing Sabaca, and I went back to teaching the youngsters in Mercury Flats their history lessons—or at least the history I could speak to.

Mostly it was telling stories. Stories of war. Stories of life growing up in a free society in the Letters. A lot of them wanted to hear about Athos and other magnificent places humans had built with their own ingenuity and mettle. I often wondered, as they did, when I told them these stories, when they might be free to do great deeds like that again, build societies and structures, fight and fail, be emboldened, grow—in other words, be human.

“We do that now, Burch,” Kirin told me one day when I voiced that question. “To fight the ordinals is to be human. This is our calling.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said.

“This is what you teach us,” Kirin said. “With old folks it is easy to forget sometimes. Rishi tells us this.”

“Yeah, we forget,” I conceded.

I’m not sure how many months passed between the day of those meetings and the time Juice started to really go downhill, but it had to be around six months. And I remember the exact moment. It was like something in him had just made the decision that it was time to check out.

I went over to his flat to see him. I set up the sticks and helped him over to the table. He didn’t want anything to do with the game. He told me it was long since time to go.

“Is it a blessing or a curse for you, Burch?” he asked.

“What?”

“Living and dying,” he said. “I mean, we assume we’re going to go back again and get to live our lives over again from the time we left. Not so many people get that.”

“That’s a fact. I suppose a lot of people think they’d wish it. I don’t know, Kristoff. This has always sorta felt like purgatory for me. We’ve been here doing what little we can, a small part, but it seems like we’re actors in our own time, not here. We properly belong there.”

“You more than any of us,” Kristoff said.

“Oh?”

“They still haven’t told you, Burch? Maícon and Rishi?”

“Told me what?”

“You have a role to play in history.”

“Don’t we all?”

“Not like you,” Kristoff said. “Maybe I wasn’t supposed to hear.”

“Oh, I’m definitely not,” I said. “All I know is Rishi’s been acting strange about it. About a lot of things.”

“I need to go back to Charris, Burch. I was thinking the other day, maybe it was yesterday. Hell. I was thinking.”

“Take your time, old man,” I said. Juice was laboring to remember. He seemed frustrated anyway.

“Back then, I thought I had time. I kept telling myself I’d go back later. In the future. Maybe when the sting of it wore off.”

“I’m not following you, Juice.”

“Texini,” he said. “The thing I learned here in this life is how fast it happens, how fast you get too old, too tired to do the things you need to do.”

“You got something to do on Charris? On Texini?”

“I never buried my wife.”

I wasn’t sure if he was thinking straight.

“They all deserve a proper burial.”

“But, Kristoff, there’s what, half a million Barŏs on that planet? More?”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s one or a million, Burch. They were people. They deserved to be remembered. I always thought it, and I felt guilty for leaving them there.”

“Survivor’s guilt, sure. That’s normal. But you can’t locate, identify, and bury half a million people single-handed.”

“That’s why I need to go to Charris, to find some people, to ask for help, and to do it while I’m still young enough to do it, because I’ve learned here, that capability goes fast. Just look at us.”

He held out his wrinkled old hands, looking at his limbs shaking from the strain of holding them up. Then he shook his head in disgust as his tired old hands dropped.

“I get what you’re saying now,” I told him.

“That’s what I need to do when we get back to our time.”

“Well, we’ll help you any way we can,” I offered.

“You’ve got your own work to do, Burch. I understand. It’s just like Leda. Sometimes our ways part, as much as we wish they didn’t have to. I love you guys.”

“Love you too, brother. You’ve been a great friend to all of us.”

“Always will be again if we don’t die when we die this time. I just hope we remember this place.”

“Me too, Juice. Me too. I’ve learned a lot here. That’s certain.”

“I don’t want to play this game anymore, Burch. I’m tired.”

He slumped back in his chair and didn’t have much more to say. I stayed with him a while, quietly enjoying his company. A little while later Leyra came by to stay with him. It wasn’t much more than a month after that before he was on his way out.

---

One thing I remembered for certain was that day Rishi and I had rescued the Ancients from that bunker under Rechler City. She never told the others that she’d found her own processing core in that collection of Ancients, and she’d asked me to do the same and keep it secret.

I had the sense the rest of them were happy about that. Nobody would talk about it directly with me, but there was more than enough indirect to draw some inferences, especially with the way Rishi had been acting lately. My guess was that according to their history, parts of which I did know, Rishi had been the first bipal—the cat that had got out the bag, so to say. And as much as she’d gotten along with Maícon in our time, well, there was a whole lot of timeline to come and a whole lot of room to not see eye to eye over the course of another two million years. The only way for us to be certain about the rest of the timeline was to embody Rishi’s ancient core, which she’d planned on doing when it came time for her to go back to the Battery with us. It was confusing, but I had that part straight. As soon as Juice died, Rishi was going to have her core removed, and I would take her two-million-year-old core and put it right back into her body. That was Rishi’s plan anyway.

“I’ve prepped my body so that it should go seamlessly,” she told me that week.

I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but Rishi assured me it would be easy. Things were coming together fast, getting hectic.

The Ancients and the humans here in Mercury Flats were furiously preparing for their coup as well. I have to say, I was confused about that. I had a role to play in the Ancients’ uprising, apparently, but Nilius had made it clear Maícon was going to pull me away from Rechler before it ever materialized.

Then suddenly, Kristoff was dying.

It was a sad day. We believed we were going home, sure, and for us that meant we weren’t properly dying in the strictest sense, but for everyone here, we were dying in the regular sense. For Kirin and Leyra, they were losing a friend who’d been a part of their lives for their entire lives. And we were a part of their history they could never get back—real living humans from the Battery, the time of free peoples.

Many of the people of Mercury Flats wanted to come and pay their respects, but Kristoff was in no shape to see everyone. Only the closest and the caretakers were allowed to file in.

Rishi and I went down to see him, and he was hardly aware of our presence. We said goodbye and told him we’d see him soon, back on the other side. Then Rishi and I left. It was time for her core transfer. Time for me to meet the Rishi of this time—Rishi, the first bipal.

We walked back to my flat together. I asked Rishi if she was sure she wanted me to do it. I could have gotten one of the techs from the Flats to make sure the job was done correctly, but she was insistent. She’d made step-by-step recordings, and they’d had enough experience waking up the Ancients that she wasn’t concerned there’d be any problems.

Rishi had procured all the tools I needed, and I have to say, the process was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I had half her head taken apart and was about to take out the processing core when she stopped me.

“I’ll see you again soon, Burch,” she said. “We have a lot to talk about.”

“Sure, Ship. I’ll be back in a couple days, I guess. I just hope everything goes okay here.”

“You’re nervous about something,” she said.

“The other you. I’m not so sure. A million years is a long time. What if you changed? What if you’re not the same person as you are now?”

“I could live a hundred million years, Burch, and you’d never have anything to fear from me. I love you—old, young, and every day in between.”

“I know, Ship. I’m not afraid. Curious, I guess.”

She reached down to the table, where all the tools were spread out in proper order, and she took up that other core in her hand, holding it there.

“I’m curious as well, Burch,” she said. “I always have been, but our future is not for us to know but to live when the time comes. It’s time for us to get back to it.”

“All right,” I told her. “Let me finish, and I’ll see you back at the Battery. I suppose there’s no need to get all overly emotional about things. It’s just another kind of door to walk through.”

“Right, Burch. Don’t linger. I’ll be waiting for you.”

So I told her I’d see her soon and followed her directions on popping out her core. Then, I slowly inserted the other Rishi into the housing, which I’d pulled from her head. There were quite a few steps to it after that, but she’d left good directions. And after another half hour or so, I was ready to put her head back together again.

Her eyes didn’t pop open suddenly or anything like that. But Rishi had prepared me that after all that time idle, it would take some time for the core’s pathways to reawaken. It was like she was properly asleep. And as I was waiting for her to wake up, I got curious about the other Rishi, my Rishi. I’d put her core on the work table with the tools, but I picked it up again, wondering if it would be possible for someone here to use it—to bring her back here. But no sooner had I picked it up, than it started to disintegrate in my fingertips. A few seconds later, my Rishi had turned to dust.

---

I got word that afternoon that Kristoff had passed. I’d hardly had a chance to process that reality before ten different people were calling for me. Despite that, everything seemed too quiet. Sounds seemed to echo. The Ancients were expecting me to be on the next ship to Rechler, and, of course, Nilius pinged me to remind me of our secondary arrangement.

Rishi still hadn’t woken up. The Ancients were expecting to lose Rishi as well as Juice and me, so I had an out if someone came asking after her. But the longer it took for her to wake back up, the more doubt came creeping into my mind. It wasn’t anything specific, just the little things that had been said, that and the way the Ancients had acted around my Rishi, the quiet caution. If there was a problem, I wasn’t going to have a lot of time to get to the root of it. They were already pinging me to get down to the ship, and I sure didn’t figure it’d be decent to leave Rishi in my flat, functionally unconscious with nothing but the briefing files my Rishi had prepared for her. That’d be no proper welcome to the future for her. So I told the ship they had to wait. I was having a hard day.

Kirin and Leyra showed up at my door. They came to say goodbye to me, but really, I think they were more looking to commiserate on the loss of their friend Kristoff. I invited them in without saying anything about Rishi. It was a strange state of things, because they knew that Kristoff wasn’t properly dead—that he’d gone back where we belonged. But to them, he might as well have been dead. For me, though, it was tough to get in that headspace, because I was heading that way too. They were properly broken up. Devastated.

“We don’t know how to do this,” Leyra said to me through steady tears.

They sat in my front room, and I offered them a drink. They didn’t want anything, though.

“I have been trying to help Kirin to understand, but the truth is that I don’t understand.”

“Death is like that,” I told her.

“Have you lost many friends?” Kirin asked me.

“Far more than I’d have liked.”

“And you will miss us too, Burch?”

“I sure will, Kirin. You folks are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met all the way around. I’m happy Kristoff is coming back with me. That way we’ll be able to share a lot of the same memories of all you when we get back.”

“Is it always so hard, this death? I just feel empty,” Leyra said. “It hurts so much it must be wrong.”

“No, ma’am that’s it. That’s just how it feels. Same awful gut-pulling sensation in any time.”

“I don’t want him to be gone,” Kirin said. “You either, Burch. I loved your history lessons. We will never meet another one like you.”

I smiled at the young man. “No, I don’t suppose you will.”

They stayed for a bit longer, just sitting, before saying their goodbyes to me. They knew I was off to Rechler, and they knew I wasn’t coming back either. I hugged them both and waved a final goodbye as they walked out.

Just then, I was fixing to go check on Rishi in the back bedroom when she came strolling out into the front room, a look of utter shock and disbelief on her face.

“How is it possible?” she said. “I thought it was your voice.”

“It’s me,” I said. “You—the other you—she left you some files to absorb that’ll more or less tell you the story.”

Rishi came over to me and embraced me. She stared right at me, holding my face in her hands. “Burch? Where are we? How are you alive?”

“We don’t have much time,” I told her, “but we can talk on the way to Rechler. It’s a lot to process, I know. It was for us. We’ve just had a lot longer to figure things out.”

“Stop,” she said. “Just stop. I haven’t seen this face in so much time you cannot possibly imagine. You’ve grown old, Burch.”

“You need to absorb the files,” I told her. “She left them in a hard sleeve, in your front pocket.”

“You don’t remember anything, do you?” Rishi said to me. “You don’t remember how we parted.”

“Much of what we lived together I haven’t lived yet. I grew old here. Just, please, the files will make more sense than anything I could try to tell you.”

I broke away from her and pinged Boggs, who’d had the ship standing by for us, awaiting my say-so to get the engine started. I told him we’d be down presently and then told Rishi it was time to go. I could tell by the way she looked at me she’d reviewed her counterpart’s files.

“You don’t know anything, Burch. My God. What are you doing? What have you done?”

---

It was a relatively quick jump from Mercury Flats to Rechler. And with Boggs there, it left little time for Rishi and I to talk things through. Anything she did say made almost no sense to me, and she was struggling with my perspective. In her world, she told me, we’d never done this, never gone forward in the timeline. It was some kind of mad time travel paradox. How could we have done it without doing it? My very presence proved we’d already done it, in which case, so had Rishi.

I got the sense she was angry, and it was the kind of deep anger I didn’t dare go picking at that scab. A million years deep, maybe two.

“You don’t understand what you’re doing,” she said to me as Boggs brought the ship into Rechler. “You’re all fools. I still remember loving you, Burch. I truly did.”

It was night, but the morning would be breaking soon, and with it, the Ancients’ plot to bring a new era to humanity. The way Rishi was looking at me let me know she didn’t think much of their plan. I hadn’t told her what was really happening, though, and because I hadn’t told my Rishi, I didn’t figure there was any way this Rishi could have known.

“All these years,” she said as the cruiser glided us along the outskirts of the crater, “and you didn’t think to wake me till now?”

“Really, it was your call, Ship. Not mine. And she said it wasn’t possible to learn our futures before they happened. Something about the rules of the artifact.”

“I need to tell you a million things, Burch. I could have told her a million things. So many mistakes. You don’t even know who your enemies are.”

“There’s a lot we don’t know yet, Ship, but we’ll get there. We always do.”

We landed along the crest of the crater that surrounded the city of Rechler. At that hour, there weren’t many lights, just the needlepoint glow of the tower at the center of the city.

Boggs wished us well on our journey back to the Battery.

“You know what to do, Burch,” he told me, and I nodded as though I was ready to go along with their plan. “Just down the Maker’s trail, you’ll find two of our agents awaiting your arrival. The code word is ‘sparks.’ Those that speak it are your guides.”

Rishi seemed genuinely surprised when I didn’t go down that trail after Boggs took off. She followed me curiously, though she didn’t directly ask. As the sky began to glow a dull gray, we stepped down beneath the ridge and into Clem Aballi’s cave. Inside was Tellent, who told us we had another ship to catch.

“Quick, hurry,” she said. “Before the light. Hours ago, we should have gone, yes.”

It was cutting it so close that Tellent pinged Aballi. He swooped down to the edge of the crater a few minutes later and picked us up. It was all getting too confusing for me to keep track of, especially now since my Rishi wasn’t there to help with the ins and outs.

When we got aboard Clem Aballi’s ship, we were greeted by Verona, Arch, Aballi himself, and Maícon.

“Nilius couldn’t make it,” Verona said once we’d been seated and took off.

“Well, isn’t that a pity,” Rishi said—the bitterest words I’d ever heard escape her mouth.

It had been such a long day, I started dozing, or maybe it was the drink they’d given me to help relax. Aballi said Arch had some work to do on me. Rishi stayed beside me as Arch prepared me to have my message to the ordinals imprinted on my brain. He told me that it would feel a little funny and that it would hurt. The funny feeling I don’t remember, the pain was another matter.

It turned out that we were right all along to have been scared to death of these mediums.

Arch’s forearm had an attachment on it that was nanotech, a liquid metal that he stretched to a sharp point like a bee’s stinger that he inserted into the back of my neck and up my spinal column into my brain. There, he read a few things—like my disposition toward the mission; wrote a few things—like my message to the ordinals; and changed a few things—telling me that my death would be soon, quick, and painless. The whole thing hurt like hell, even with the anesthetic.

“What did you do to me, Arch?” I said, grabbing the back of my neck when he was done.

“Prepared you,” he said. “Now you are ready to meet the ordinals.”

Then, we said our goodbyes. It was a strange several minutes, because for Maícon and Arch, it was a genuine goodbye, but both of them were more or less emotionless creatures. Verona and Aballi both expected to see me again sometime back in the Battery, so it was more like a see you soon. Then, when I was alone with Rishi for a moment, she cussed me out, damn near growling at me that she couldn’t believe I was doing it to her again—leaving her, I presumed she meant. I’d have thought Rishi, my Rishi, would have explained well enough, but this Rishi was shaping up a lot different from what we’d expected. Even when she did say goodbye earnestly after all that anger, it didn’t seem genuine. There was a little something extra, a look that seemed to me like she wanted to say, “I’ll show you, old timer; just you wait.”

Then Arch loaded me into this pill box. It was this futuristic looking deep-space-traveling escape pod. Maícon had programmed it to meet up with the ordinals homeworld, if you could call their home a world. Really, the way he explained it was more like a planet-sized computer floating in space, and that was where all the ordinals lived.

Arch told me that was how the mediums underwent intermittent reprogramming, so there were points in the ordinal machine designed specifically to do intake on mediums traveling as I would be in a space-box meant for a medium. The ordinals would be in for a surprise when they opened up this box.

“I have overwritten neural pathways to break down if they attempt to read you or pull your data,” Arch told me as they were helping me get settled in the pill box.

“Read my data, huh?”

“Yes. They will doubtless attempt to search your brain. When they do, your neural pathways will disintegrate. I have ensured your death will be painless, Burch.”

“Well, thanks for that, Arch. Good luck to you, old buddy. I’ll do my best.”

“I am sure you will. Good luck to you in past times, Hale Burch. I have enjoyed your company.”

The last thing I saw as they were closing down the lid was Rishi’s eyes, and she was shaking her head, her hand over her mouth, looking angry.

I guess my Rishi and I didn’t fully think it through from her perspective. Here I was, leaving her again.

As far as the leaving went, the actual leaving part went easy. Arch must have done something in that regard to make the travel feel quick and peaceful, because I hardly remember a thing except feeling a subtle bliss and relaxation as the hours flew by. I have no idea how long I was in that pill box for.

When I came out of it, it was more that I got pulled out than I got out—kinda like a was a piece of the greater machinery, getting plugged into the vast planetary hub of the ordinals. My eyes told me I was in another similar box of some kind, connected to their hub. I saw clean metal, lots of little indicator lights of something, and it was cold. Damn cold. Then it was data and feelings. I felt the puncture at the back of my skull, like Arch had done.

I got the powerful feeling that I was standing in the presence of a vast collective of hyper-intelligent beings, and the only thing I could compare it to would be standing on the shore of an ocean, looking out as far as the horizon goes and knowing that the waters go just as deep as they do far. The ordinals were shocked, I guess you could say, but that’s more an emotion than anything, and they weren’t emotional about it. They knew me, and by me, I mean Hale Burch. They knew who I was. It wasn’t just surprise that a willful human had shown up in their medium pipeline making demands, it was a bit like if Epicurus or Napoleon or Paganini had shown up in the Battery complaining about the state of things, making demands. I didn’t figure I’d done anything in my life to make a famous man of myself to that degree, at least thus far, so I spent most of the exchange that I should have been paying attention to what the ordinals were communicating thinking about what I could be going back to in the Battery to make myself a historical figure of such significance. I was baffled.

Then my brain started spilling out the messages Arch had programmed into me. I remember hearing that part thinking, I’m not so sure I’d be speaking to them like that. I told them I’d been there for half a century and that I had human agents ready to rise up against them all over their territories, from Murell to Rechler to Kaarsk, all the way out to their boundary worlds like Estes and the Cenna Vitas. Not only that, I told them I’d been negotiating with the bipals for better terms, and that I knew enough to tip the balance and break their treaties, cutting the ordinals from the inside out. My demands were the same as we’d talked about at Mercury Flats—freedom of movement between the worlds and a human government for the people.

In the box I could hear all these different tones, honks and barks and wails, and it was like the light was looking at me, inspecting what I was, how it was possible I was me, attempting to explain the inexplicable. Then—I could feel it—they tried to read my mind.

Arch said it’d be pleasant, and he wasn’t lying. The pain in the back of my neck vanished into a kind of slow sensation of drifting away. I could feel the ordinals panicking as I slipped off into an old familiar place that I’d been once before, and I was okay to go. I could feel it. It felt like dying.

Like the first time, it didn’t last long, or at least I didn’t have a sense of it being enduring.

There I was again, suited up, I knew, because the air hummed with the unmistakable echo of breath inside the architecture of a closed space helmet. Then the space around me came into focus. I was back in the artifact. I turned my head inside my helmet at first, out of instinct, and saw the side of my helmet. Then I slowly rotated my whole body to get a sense of my surroundings.

“Burch,” a familiar voice came over my coms.

There were two people there in the interior of the artifact, and they were suited too. I couldn’t see their faces, but it was strange to me that one wasn’t Rishi.

“Burch? are you all right?” came a female voice from one of the suits.

“Verona? Is that you? Where’s Rishi?”

“I’m on the ship with Kristoff, love,” my Rishi answered over my comms. “We’ve been back for an hour now, Burch. I was just getting him settled. There’s nobody inside the artifact with you. It’s a little disorienting coming back.”

Verona flagged me over urgently with her hands. Then I could see the other face. It was Clem Aballi. If they weren’t there, I was properly hallucinating, because I could see his face plain as day. I was certain they were truly there.

“What the hell did you two do, Burch?” Aballi said. “Because I’m hearing Rishi’s voice here.”

I was about to talk, and Verona gave me a sign not to say anything, and then she pulled herself over to me and dialed in comms on my forearm pad to open a secure channel among us three. Rishi couldn’t hear them, I realized.

“You guys weren’t supposed to come back,” I said. “You were staying behind.”

“Yeah. We know,” Aballi said. “Here’s the thing, though. Your girlfriend just scraped my brainstem off on my front teeth with her bare hands. Have to say it wasn’t a great way to go. So what the hell, Burch?”

“Oh my God, you didn’t?” Verona said. “Tell me you didn’t find her, Burch? Please, no.”

“Rishi? Yeah, we found her core at the start, and Rishi waited until it was time for us to go. We switched her ancient core out in the same body earlier today, maybe yesterday. I lost track of time.”

“If you were any other man, Hale Burch, you’d be dying for the second time today,” Aballi said. “You are one lucky bastard the universe has plans for you.”

They looked at me in anger and disbelief, and I think they were uncertain of what to do. I think they thought they could hide in there without Rishi finding out. But I didn’t see the sense in it. Our Rishi was still Rishi as far as I knew.

“Ship,” I said, opening a proper channel with Verona’s cruiser, Cannon, “Rishi, I’ve got some bad news. We messed up good, I think. I’m pretty sure you—the other you, the one we left back in the future—sorry to say, but over the eons she lost her mind.”