Revelations from the Dead
“When you must break every precious thing in order to save it, what purpose is there to anything?”
(Part 34 of “The Misfits” series)
Fieldstone had waited long enough. He’d taken it as far as he could himself, and it was time to tell the others—to share what he remembered and hope they could help him to understand what it all meant. His mind was filled with images from a dead civilization, some of which he could make sense of, others just haunted.
When Carolina and the others left on Nilius’s ship, she told him that she would hear his story when they met up again, but that was weeks away now. Fieldstone couldn’t keep it to himself any longer. He sat the others down at the atrium table once they were underway. He told them he was going to talk. He asked them not to interrupt until he was finished.
“You’re welcome to make notes if something stands out. It’s going to take all of us to figure everything out. It’s bigger than we thought.”
Some of them nodded. Others just looked at him in that familiar way—the way his teams used to look at him before a mission. What are we doing? How are we doing it?
He did his best to channel that energy. Then he began.
From what Ren told you, some of you may remember that we were gradually turned into technological beings—bipals. And that alone seemed a lifetime’s worth of experience, hanging on to what we were before going through that artifact, inhabiting those other bodies, taking up lives that didn’t belong to us. And they made us cut pieces of those human lives away, until the only thing left was the technological body we’d formed from those children we’d inhabited. By the end of it, I had two emotions remaining—anger and love. The last thing they forced me to do before they made the technological part of me complete was to destroy the only remaining piece of the universe I loved. They made me stab her in the heart to spare her the horrendous fate I knew was ahead.
When it was done, I knew that their plan to break me had failed. I was still angry, but I also still loved her and knew that nothing could ever destroy that. So I was unafraid when they told me it was time to be fully transformed. Whatever happened, even if I died, I would die Fieldstone, not Bo, not a loveless machine.
I wasn’t sure the transformation was going to work for me. Part of me expected to wake up again here, sent back, because that’s the way we know the artifacts work: if we die in that world, we come back to our own. I wasn’t sure if I could be more dead than what they were going to make me.
At first, when my human life ended there, I thought it was death. They told me I wouldn’t experience anything, but they were wrong about that too. I’ll never forget what I did experience—nothingness. It was both overwhelming and also not even really there, like the black of space but only darker, because there was no capacity to even perceive the blackness. And somehow, I did. Eternity and no time at all. All at once. Yet I still had thoughts. I thought that I had died there in that world, inside that artifact, inside a body that somehow must have still been considered alive—a technological body. And I feared, as I did when I woke up again, that I was now stuck there in that black purgatory inside that artifact forever, perhaps until the universe ended. Perhaps it never would.
Suddenly, though, I was back, I was Bo again. My chronometer registered that exactly 21,346 seconds had elapsed during that black eternity. And my first thought was that my world—this world of ours—was lost to me forever, because I’d died inside the artifact and I hadn’t come back home. I’d died there once already, and I had no reason to believe I wouldn’t just go back to that blackness again once Bo’s technological mind was destroyed in that world. But also, on some level, I knew this world could never be completely lost to me, because I still had that one precious memory of that moment just before the universe had gone black, the anger and the love. And if I still remembered that I loved, I knew they could never take that from me. I decided that I would hold it close to me and continue, so that’s what I did.
That is how my story began.
It’s a cliche to say that words fail. People say it so often when human experience is too overwhelming to describe something powerful or confusing or painful or awe-inspiring. But what happened to me next was not a human experience. It was so inhuman I imagine it was every bit as confusing as the moment a newborn baby enters the world—bright lights, shock, confusion, and the complete lack of capacity to comprehend. Only Rishi could possibly know. But from my understanding, she was made bipal within a limited environment, with only the ship’s computers and sensors as inputs. In my case, I found myself immediately swimming in a sea of unlimited information, and I possessed an ability to process it that was similarly shocking. It was as though my mind expanded beyond a boundary of the sense of self. The only way I can describe existing in that way is as though you imagined your entire body being the breadth of a world and all the things on it—the sensory input of every plant, every person, every bird—even the bacteria in the soil. All that in a second.
Next, I realized that time was not what I thought it was inside that borrowed technological mind of Bo’s. You can experience a lifetime in a nanosecond, so time really has no meaning unless you choose it. Otherwise, you could live almost an eternity in data. But I was so overwhelmed by the sensation, I did what came to me naturally. I sought out something familiar, and I found it in the life of a single man.
His name was Nolomin Hart, and he had been dead for decades, but his life had been recorded, or at least much of it had been. It was only in his life that I could begin to orient myself to where I truly was.
Ren and I had guessed that the place the artifact had sent us was another branch of humanity that had come from the columns, but we had no idea when and where these people existed in relation to our civilization. Nolomin’s life confirmed this belief.
Nolomin Hart woke on the ship, brought out of stasis aboard the Indus above a planet the colonists would come to call Cresci. His parents were prominent figures in the colonial expedition, and the planet was like none I’d ever experienced in the Battery. It was oblong, owing to the odd gravitational pull of the dual suns that orbited each other along an opposing axis to the system’s planetary disk. Yet somehow, for all the madness of physics, both the planet itself and its weather proved to be remarkably stable. And even more remarkable, quite a few regions on the surface were not overtly fatal to human life. But for the descendants of the columns, having spent millennia buried inside rock underground, the natural light of this world proved overwhelmingly radiant, so they chose to make their homes in the shadows of the many cliff faces whose mountainous backs braced against the natural light of these dual suns.
They landed. They settled. They began to build.
At first, the settlement was small, not unlike what Kristoff described the first days of Charris to be, only there was no hardship there on Cresci. The prevailing mood was joyful, almost magical. These were people who couldn’t believe their luck—being the ones chosen to emerge from hiding after generations of their predecessors had lived their entire lives as torch-bearers, destined only to keep the flame of humanity burning for another far distant descendant to light once more on another planet. These were the lucky few chosen to light the flame of humanity again, and they were in awe of their role. They took it seriously as they reveled in it. Never have I met a people so overflowing with gratitude.
They learned to work the rock. They built lasers that cut. Then, being the people of the columns, they quickly built great, powerful excavators that carved out tremendous underground tunnels into the canyon walls, and they built structures on the surface in the shade. All of these events unfolded as though from Nolomin Hart’s eyes. This city in the canyon they called Annantifor grew year-by-year, just as the community that inhabited it flourished. And I experienced that too from Nolomin’s perspective: his friends becoming as friends to me, his family akin to my own. The only difference between living his life like that and living my previous life as Bo on Yaal was that Nolomin Hart’s life had happened. It was over. So it was like watching it unfold on replay, experiencing it as a voyeur. It was peaceful and joyful and rewarding, watching humanity grow into the stars and make a vacant new planet a vibrant home.
And then I walked in the path of his children, all the while, overhead in orbit, the Indus circled most years, surveying the planet’s surface and weather, mapping atmospheric patterns, cataloging stellar behavior, perfecting their models of the magnetic dynamo in the planet’s molten core.
For some of those years, though, the Indus would slip away, venturing throughout the nearby systems in search of new worlds to settle, before returning again to share their discoveries with the settlers established below.
It was in these experiences I first began to understand the fundamental difference in their strategy to colonize the stars. I’m certain people more brilliant than me would find it less than a revelation. But for me, I couldn’t have begun to understand how our people became what we did until I saw it done another way.
In our corner of the galaxy, Charris was the one seed world, and for reasons that make more sense now that we’ve learned more of the early days from Kristoff, it was the single point of departure for every colony in the Battery. But that was not how the Indus had planned to operate in what I guess we should call the Indus Civilizations.
They did not know where the columns were. They’d traversed for several years in stasis according to the ship’s chronometers, and like us, they relied upon a similar cohort of Prime AIs to direct their vector of travel and select a primary site for settlement. And similar to what Kristoff reported of the AIs on early Charris, they seemed to suffer a bout of selective amnesia when it came to their origins and the location of the columns, presumably for the protection of that initial settlement, and also, presumably, because the people of the columns perceived some sort of external threat if they were ever discovered. This was likely why they left Earth, I suspect, and why they guarded their whereabouts so carefully. Of that, though, I have no direct evidence, just a strong hunch.
Until I saw the Indus with my own eyes and witnessed truly that this was an entirely different branch of the human diaspora in space, I wasn’t certain that there had been another colony ship originating from the columns. This might seem a small point, but historically, for us, this is no small matter. We believe, and from every indication I encountered from these Indus civilizations it seems to be true, that our ancestors came to the columns on one vessel. The existence of two outgoing colony ships means that eventually the people of the columns must have developed the industrial capacity to build FTL ships. This also means that it is likely that more pockets of humanity like our own exist throughout the galaxy, and likely, given what we’ve learned from these two, it seems to be a feature of our ancestors in the columns that they send out these vessels with a case of amnesia about their origins, again, likely to guard against revealing their location.
The point I mentioned about building ships—that was the most important point of all, and one I will return to in more depth before my story is finished. But for now, it features in the strategy of these Indus civilizations to settle the cluster of stars near Cresci, where they first arrived. Unlike on Charris, where our ancestors arrived, settled, expanded to the point the planet was well populated, and only then began the era of colonization after many centuries; the Indus peoples instead landed with their initial crew, settled upon Cresci, and set about immediately repopulating the ship with another generation of settlers to be sent out to do the same. Their goal was to push off again after the settlement of every new planetary outpost within a quarter century. Thus, the Indus had to be a busy ship and its people a busy people.
If you remember the person of Nolomin Hart, whose life I experienced as an observer, he and his wife had seven children, the three oldest of whom became settlers aboard the Indus as it traversed thirty-eight light years to Yamora, a slightly harsher environment where automated framing bots had already constructed bubble habitats for them to settle and populate while terraforming operations began.
Then, just like before, the twenty-five-year timeline reset, and the settlers on Yamora began to replicate the work their parents had completed on Cresci. Only now, the ship’s original crew—those who’d operated the Indus during the first leap to a second world—worked to train the next generation of spacefarers to take their place as the ship’s stewards. And, when the quarter-century benchmarks were met on Yamora, with another colony established and growing, the terraforming in progress, and the full ship’s complement selected, they continued on again to a new outpost. This time on Meidagg.
During all this time I explored the expansion of the Indus worlds, I was still Bo. I was still completely unaware of where I was, whether I was embodied or disembodied, or how much time was passing as I experienced these decades and decades of settlement, exploration, and resettlement. But I remained there with them through seven iterations of the process, before I saw something familiar on arrival—a green moon. And below, a mountain megastructure towering over a desolate plain, and I knew its name before the people called it what they came to call it—Yaal—that place where I and Ren had been transported to by the artifact, lived as children, and were brutally transformed into bipals. Only then did I begin to understand who and what we had become. At that point, though, I still had no sense why.
In all those decades I was immersed in the lives of these Indus ancestors, I still had no sense of Bo and what had happened to the body of that boy who’d become the bipal mind I was possessing through the artifact. It had seemed to me like everything I’d experienced to that point had been a choice of mine, but when I was ripped from that stream of consciousness as my ancestors began to inhabit Yaal, I could feel that it was not of my choosing.
I found myself fully embodied in an android shell. It had only a few recognizable pieces of the body I’d been given as Bo, and that, I presumed, was so I could recognize it as my own in that moment.
“You are waking up,” a familiar voice said to me. “Go easy. Remember that you are Bo of the Shirvahl. You are still here on your home planet of Yaal. My voice, you still recognize.”
I did. It was Maícon, who stood embodied beside my new body. He continued speaking as I continued to adjust to the sensation of returning to a body.
“Once, you revered me as the god of your people. Now you will come to understand what we really are, both of us, and why we must be what we are, for it is the only true hope of humanity.”
I looked around, and I could see that we were in a part of that mountain complex on Yaal that I’d never seen before, along the back half of the mountain. My mind had access to the schematics, not just of our range, but of all Yaal, and there were hundreds of other complexes just like it built into the sides of the mountains of that world. Such would the descendants of those peoples of the columns do—burrow into the rocks for safety and security as the environment of the planet became harsher and harsher. What I hadn’t known until that moment was why—that Yaal was a key industrial materials source in the war effort, and the need was so urgent that care could not be taken. The only consideration was speed. Rare minerals and metals needed to be extracted at pace, regardless of the cost to the planet’s inhabitants. If they could not, then all would be lost and the point moot.
“Now I must tell you of our enemy, Bo,” Maícon said, while I continued to search my mind for ways to gain control of it, but I was not fully in control yet.
The ordinals had appeared, most fortunately for these Indus civilizations, at the outermost stretch of the chain of settled planets. At time of first contact, our colony group was thirteen planets long. By the time of my awakening as Bo, this enemy had consumed four and were on their way to Yaal. My understanding in the moment was that they were seven years away.
It was luck for the Indus worlds that the Indus herself was elsewhere along the string when the ordinals arrived. We did not know it then, for technologically advanced as they were, they had not mastered FTL travel, and that one colony ship of our ancestors proved to be our only strategic advantage. It was not luck, however, that none of the scientists nor the data and schematics were present on the worlds in any capacity but one—in the memories of the prime AIs.
And here I must explain the most fundamental truth about tools and human populations, something I did not know, as I came from a world of billions, where technological complexity was not limited by population. This is not the case with small communities of people. It is a sort of natural law that for every technology, depending on its complexity, a certain number of experts are required both to bring it into being, to maintain it once it has been invented—whether that means repair or manufacture of replacement—and to distribute it within the society. The more complex the technology, the higher number of experts are required. Similarly, extremely high-tech infrastructure is interconnected, with the existence of apex technologies relying upon other high-tech devices to manufacture the tools required to build them, much in the same way a tall building must be built from the ground up, floor by floor, where no floor can be framed until the one beneath it is solid enough to support it. FTL engines are one of humanity’s apex technologies. Even with the schematics, the technological expertise, and the scientific underpinning within the society, when your population is seventy-thousand and your tools are limited to the bare necessities of building out a new colony, you must spend generations training scientists and engineers who will build the tools that will build the infrastructure that will eventually build the tools that can build the tools to manufacture your first FTL engine. And that is for a civilization that already knows the path to that outcome.
Obviously, with a technological society that already possesses the necessary scientific knowledge, that pathway can be shortened—even engineered to be the primary goal of the civilization.
This was not necessarily the case with the Indus civilizations. We did not proceed with this urgency from the outset. The people of Cresci prioritized building Cresci into a home they could be proud of, and they, like all the other planets in the group, grew under the presumption of isolation. If the galaxy was empty of other intelligent life, as all prior evidence suggested, then it made no sense to rush to a war footing against an unknown and unknowable enemy. Under that presumption of isolation, they built their societies instead. The Indus and her FTL engine served the purpose of connecting our distant worlds while our colonies got their feet squarely underneath them.
And in Yaal, it was the same. Bo’s ancestors had built with the expectation that they would be free to build as our own ancestors on Charris had—unencumbered by any outside forces. The early settlers of Yaal built great megastructures into the mountainsides while also constructing tremendous engines for terraforming the planet’s nearly breathable atmosphere. They operated mines. They manufactured robotics assembly plants. They incorporated tiered farming infrastructure into each of their new compounds so that every enclosed city could grow its own food independent of outside suppliers. They’d even begun to develop underground transport systems between the mountainous megastructures. I could see these things in Bo’s mind as Maícon showed me our past there on Yaal. These were images of a society that would have been utterly alien to Bo himself, being so much in contrast to the Yaal he was born into. But for me, the visitor in Bo’s mind, I could see so much that was familiar—the bubble worlds along the corridor; the images I’ve seen of the rings over Floriston; the towers of Hellenia and their deep subterranean roots. This had been a human civilization well in formation.
Maícon continued speaking to Bo in a human way, or so it seemed at the time, attempting to educate me on the state of the civilization.
Xandi was the newest and least developed of the worlds, and by the time Maícon and I were speaking, it had long since fallen to our enemies and was lost. The fates of the humans on the outpost could only be left to our imaginations, but all indications were that if they were alive, they could be no more than slaves to the invaders.
The ordinals were a technological species. They came from the sky like a meteor and impacted like one. There was a crater with a thin gray dust-like film covering the floor of the crater and the open, sandy landscape around it.
Curious, the scientists on Xandi took samples with them back to the outpost, only to find a sort of nanotech that functioned like a technological bacteria, seeking out materials to replicate and amplify the colony’s reach. Whatever intelligence seemed to be within the nanite colony wasn’t overtly evident immediately. And, as I discussed earlier, the difficulty of dealing with such an invasion was amplified by the limited tools of the people on Xandi. Such a probe—as the meteor proved to be—would’ve been a problem on a world like Hellenia or Etterus, but civilizations such as those would’ve had thousands of scientists and a vast range of technological countermeasures to bring to bear on it. Xandi was slow to recognize the threat and largely defenseless once it did.
As Maícon was speaking, my mind became aware of options. I could suddenly access files. I could split my consciousness, such that I was continuing my conversation with Maícon as I felt a part of my mind break away. In between the microseconds Maícon was uttering syllables and then words, I was living out years on Xandi alongside the scientists who were working to discover the scope of the problem. I was in the body of a colony administrator who worked under the Chief of the Colony. I learned of their discoveries as they did, watched them make mistake after mistake in their naïve approach, failing, from the outset, to attack this invading entity in the same way they would have attacked an invading army. Instead, they studied, tried to learn what encouraged growth and what deterred it, all the while the dust around the crater solidified its foothold and began to organize into more complex structures, adapting to use the molecular materials at hand.
By the time the people on Xandi realized the nanite colony was spreading beyond the point they could control it, there was nothing they could do but call out for help. That, it turned out, was the most and best they could have done.
When the Indus returned to the outermost stop on her rounds, she was greeted by a distress call of sorts, describing in clear terms what had befallen the colony. The people’s efforts had shifted from establishment of the city, familial growth, and the building of infrastructure to the creation of countermeasures. They had hoped that several of the ship’s systems could be brought to bear.
I experienced that communication from the standpoint of the administrator on the colony. The commander of the Indus, flanked by the same embodied Maícon who spoke to me now, asked one question: “Do these entities seem to have any intelligent organizational structure to them?”
“Oh, yes, very much so,” the Chief of the Colony answered earnestly.
Whether it was meant to be transmitted or was merely overheard wasn’t evident to the administrator on the planet below. But he plainly heard Maícon utter the following words in a grave tone:
“Under no circumstances is the planet to be approached.”
Instead, the Indus left a ring of emergency contact buoys in space encircling Xandi’s star at mid system. At Maícon’s direction, they were both hardened and fragile in certain clever ways—hardened, in that they could not be accessed without prior knowledge of their access codes and methodologies for communicating, and fragile in that any unsuccessful attempt at communicating with it would prompt the buoy to self-destruct.
When the commander of the Indus contacted the colony again, he told the people of Xandi that they were duty bound to fight the invading entity using every conceivable methodology at their disposal. They were to report all progress as they did, detailing their fight as though someone was in the system listening at all times. And, they were promised that if other peoples of the Indus civilizations learned enough from their fight that it would be safe to lend assistance, they would return to render aid. The Indus herself, though, could not be risked. This was the beginning of the struggle.
To the peoples of the Indus worlds, the actions of the ship’s commander, taken at Maícon’s explicit insistence, appeared overly harsh and heartless. It was said by more than one leader of these colonies that their reaction was one only an AI would take: turning their backs on their fellow humans in their hour of need—that was, if the threat was indeed as dire as it was made to be believed. And though for a time the commander did waver when confronted, Maícon was unequivocal. He reminded these children of the columns that unlike their human ancestors on Earth, none of them had lived through a pandemic nor had witnessed first-hand how easily a bacterial growth could spread from person to person.
“This plague,” he warned them, “is already far more deadly.”
It was a trap. It was merciless and already beyond containment on Xandi. It had already begun to burrow down into the dirt. It was already floating in the air. It would catch a ride on any person, ship, or probe that visited the planet and returned to the Indus, lying dormant until it could infect the next world with its probing presence.
“Mark my words on this, my friends,” he told every human who would listen, “the only way to fight this enemy is quarantine. And that is but the first line of defense in a greater war. Something far graver is on the horizon. You see but the tips of your enemy’s sails.”
It was a metaphor mostly lost on a people who’d never seen an ocean, much less sailed on a seagoing vessel. But Maícon explained that it was, in times past, because of the curvature of the Earth, that the tips of the sails of the front ships in an enemy’s armada became visible first. The bulk of the enemy remained hidden below the horizon, and you couldn’t see what you were in for until they were mere miles from your own fleet or shore. Here, he assured us, there had to be something else beyond the horizon. He pleaded with the leaders of the colonies to observe the quarantine until they were certain of the shape and size of the enemy armada.
They demanded to know why he was so adamant—whether he knew something.
“I am adamant,” he responded, “because prudence demands it.”
Over the course of the ensuing decade, prudence eventually won out, as the structures the nanites on Xandi began to construct became more elaborate and confounding to the scientists attempting to deter them. Eventually, on a return to check the communications buoys, the Indus arrived to find all of the buoys fried. They were able to piece together a sense of what had happened by determining when they’d gone dead. The ship then retreated to the appropriate distance where they could see the light from Xandi as the event unfolded, rippling out into the galaxy from a planet that was now fully lost to us. Then the Indus trained her telescopes and sensors on our sister world and saw as the atmosphere became, somehow, significantly overcharged, and let out a blinding burst of light and ionic energy, such that it nearly crippled the Indus even months removed from its origin point while traveling at the speed of light.
“That is their beacon,” Maícon declared. “And now that they’ve called, someone will answer. The only question is when. We must warn the other worlds. They must all be prepared to fight.”
Twenty-seven years passed between the time the beacon made its interstellar call and the day its light arrived at Yaal. During those years, the strongest force the Indus worlds had as cause to prepare was Maícon’s unwavering admonition. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to convince everyone to mobilize against the threat. They couldn’t even see it on their horizon yet, and thus, they couldn’t properly perceive the scope of the threat. Even with the Indus reporting, the sails were still yet invisible.
Though the worlds understood that something had changed, the majority did not see the threat as existential. Most of the leadership of the worlds committed to dedicating some of their resources and efforts toward preparing for conflict, but these worlds were still far more committed to the growth of their societies. Yaal, though, was the exception. The leadership, a committee of executives, assigned a Chief of Defense vested with almost absolute authority. Stanra Rudward, was, by that time, a third-generation colonist with a disagreeable nature but a reputation for productivity. He was the administrator who’d taken the most difficult jobs that needed to be completed without regard for making friends along the way. And at seventy-two, he’d made few. The joke amongst the governing counsel was that even his wife and children didn’t like Stanra Rudward, but they still listened to him.
Immediately upon examining the situation, the data and footage Maícon presented, as well as the strong case the prime AI made for mobilizing an all-encompassing defense of the civilization, Rudward identified Yaal as the most logical seat for that defense. It was developed enough and rich enough in resources to mobilize an industrial capacity the younger worlds couldn’t. Yet it was close enough to the incursion that it might, if it mounted a valiant fight, buy enough time for the older, larger Indus worlds to properly mobilize in time to save the civilization.
With Xandi already lost, Rudward directed Yaal’s resources toward preparing the newer worlds for a similar incursion as that outermost planet of the Indus worlds.
As before, the ship was the key. Only now, the crew of the Indus was left with no choice but to redefine her purpose. And this was particularly painful, as they were all either colonists born on Xandi themselves or the colonizers of Xandi, born on Antion, a mere six light years away. And suddenly, instead of retiring to Xandi, as the senior crew were expecting as the reward for a life dedicated to the fleet, or continuing on to Katerina, the next identified colonial outpost, as the younger crew had assumed their fate to be, now they were all destined to be spacefarers and warriors, regardless of whether they agreed with Maícon and Rudward’s assessment of the threat.
Designing defenses against a similar nanite meteor impact seemed the prudent first step. And while the Indus surveyed the outer worlds looking for signs of similar suspicious meteors, Rudward directed the scientific minds on Yaal to design a deep-space network of sensors to detect threats before they entered the Indus systems. Yaal herself, began the process of transitioning from colonial growth as its primary focus toward a martial society, which, at that time meant a regimental focus on weapons design and manufacturing. The inner worlds would be drafted to produce at scale as the forward planets identified effective designs.
This period still preceded my life as Bo on Yaal by decades. I was experiencing these years of uncertainty from perspectives all along the string of the Indus worlds. I lived dozens of lives in seconds during that time Maícon was orienting Bo to the reality of the struggle. I traveled as a crew member on the Indus. I lived as an administrator on Cresci. I designed and built magnificent urban structures on Yamora. Or so it felt as I lived those voyeuristic lives. And the sentiment varied from person to person, planet to planet, the most prominent sentiment of which was disbelief. Was there really something out there? Xandi had gone quiet? How could we lose contact with one of our worlds? Why were we not rendering aid?
And it’s almost impossible for a warrior of our society to see this other society at the start of their war and understand how naïve they could be. We humans live under the incredible frenetic spark of the moment. It is almost impossible for a society that fights its battles in minutes, hours, days, and years to fathom an enemy who measures its progress in centuries and millennia. In a thousand years we can arrive and colonize a planet from a few thousand settlers to billions of native inhabitants who know nothing but that world. A technological race that cannot travel faster than point-three C is willing to spend a thousand years in transit to their next beachhead with no complaints, no desire to deviate from course, no other designs than what is demanded of it—land here, replicate, survey, subordinate. It makes no difference if it takes a hundred thousand years.
In ten years, Yaal had transformed itself into a fortress. By then, we were getting the first sense of the shape of our enemies on Xandi.
Through the first decade of the incursion, with Maícon, Rudward, and the crew of the Indus acting as the central drivers of defense theory, all eyes were trained outward on the cosmic deep. The prevailing thought was that the beacon from Xandi had been directed toward nearby forces that would pick up the signal and respond with an invading force.
As I was experiencing this history, one of the central questions I had as Bo, but also as myself, as Fieldstone, was why these Indus peoples had turned their own children into bipals. I knew that some turn in this war must have compelled them toward this anti-human response, but this was the first piece.
So much of the collective effort of the Indus worlds in that first decade was directed toward detecting the hordes of enemy ships we were convinced would materialize out of the darkness in our midst. All the while, we hardly watched Xandi, figuring it lost—quarantined. Nor could we see what was becoming of our lost world. Even when our sensors encircling the system went silent, we still did not fully comprehend.
They did not need to come at all. The ordinals were already there.
When the asteroids of the Xandi system disappeared and the planet herself grew hot and bright with technological and industrial activity, the ships we expected to appear from the depths of space instead materialized from Xandi herself. Maícon lamented his shortsightedness, even though he was the most vociferous in ringing the alarm. The seed of the Indus bipal race was born on that day, when Maícon declared his kind unsuited to lead in the matters of warfare. It was for a very specific purpose that the prime AIs of the columns were built with certain cognitive limitations. They were designed to be stewards of humanity, facilitators of growth and progress, advisors and companions, never destroyers. It wasn’t that AIs weren’t capable of diabolical and destructive patterns of thought. But our AIs weren’t—Maícon and all his partners in the Indus constellation of worlds. And that single early foolish oversight sent him back along the route between worlds ringing the alarm again. This time with images of stunning fleets of unmanned ships and of Xandi, lit up like a single monumental planet-sized processor. And suddenly, a decade late, the Indus worlds had no choice but to take notice.
It began in increments. Artemis knew that records of the darkest techs in Earth’s history had survived the traverse across the cosmic deep to the columns. But no one knew whether any of those records had been brought aboard the Indus. A search began but quickly identified a potentially fatal flaw in the programming of the prime AIs. The Indus’s resident AI—Neophor—had access to every file in every system in the vessel’s complete history. But he, like Maícon and the others, was afflicted with the same limitations. It was quickly discovered that a programmatic blind spot was present in Neophor’s mind, and he was incapable of remembering them, even if he had handled, transported, transferred, or stored such files. By then, if such an archive were in existence in the Indus worlds, the original steward was both long dead and unknown, its location similarly lost. What was needed was a search engine equally powerful to the AIs with no such engrained protocols.
There was, of course, no shortage of information on technological brain adjuncts in the ship’s medical database. The Indus peoples, being from the columns, were also Purists, just like our peoples who descend from Charris. But, like us too, they knew plenty about neurotech for the purposes of medical intervention. And here, the slippery slope began.
By that time, Rudward was very old, and he subscribed to the common belief among the Indus peoples that the duty of the elderly was to support the younger generations through self-sacrifice. He was quick to volunteer his mind for neural experimentation. His expectation, and the expectation of the medical experts of the time, was that the adoption of these old techniques would not be a smooth process. Rudward was fully prepared to endure the most agonizing mistakes as the first volunteer in the application of trial an error to rediscover this mostly lost art. Fortunately for him, all of the experts and Rudward himself were wrong.
From the first adjunct, Rudward became as sharp and alert as he had in his prime, while gaining remote access to the Indus’s databases and control systems. Suddenly, also, Rudward became a strategic genius with a streak of maniacal madness in his vision. Where Maícon’s initial oversight became glaring, Rudward’s updated reaction stunned the committee on Yaal, who’d known the man for the entirety of their lives. His predictions were so stark and cutting that no one could fathom such outcomes, and still, Rudward insisted that they weren’t nearly frightened enough. He demanded that the entirety of the Indus civilization be mobilized to combat the threat, and Rudward doubted that even that would be enough. He created a list of bullet points in a style that could only have been Rudward alone.
Presume:
• that the nanites on Xandi are small enough and hardy enough to survive a transit from Xandi to our other worlds
• that they are already on the way
• that they are traveling at high velocities
• that they gained access to all of our digital archives on Xandi, and thus, know the locations of our other worlds
• that the ships being formed in the Xandi system are but one prong of the coming assault
• that the technological presence on Xandi operates with no urgency and on an unlimited timeline
• that one breach of the defenses of any single one of our planets may be fatal to that world
• that the darkness and vastness of space makes the challenge of defending an almost infinite frontline nearly impossible over time
Presume all that, and then begin to understand the urgency with which we all must respond without delay if we wish to endure as a civilization.
In his now exponentially sharper mind, Rudward saw a people too slow to comprehend. Even as they adopted his policies and edicts, transforming the growing world of Yaal in the process, he expressed to the AIs and the crew on the Indus that his greatest fear was that his body would give out before he could convince the other leaders of the urgency. He tried to tell them it wasn’t a war. This was the extinction of humanity. Yet, he lamented, that because it wasn’t happening fast enough, they would all be subsumed by the inevitability of the slow wave.
The first ships in our defensive fleet took shape around Emircut, a moon in the system of Astor that was wreathed in metallic asteroids, selected for those properties that made it easy to mine, refine, and build at scale without the challenge of a large gravity well. None of the Indus worlds was large enough yet in industrial capacity to support a space lift. This also meant that our one advantage—the Indus herself—remained the sole example of such. We couldn’t build an FTL engine, and even with the entire focus of our civilizations adapted toward that goal, we couldn’t have achieved it in half a century at the earliest. Again, our problem was the problem at the root of colonial civilization—we didn’t have the tools to build the tools to build the things we needed to take full advantage of our one advantage. Instead, we had to rely on the Indus, and we had to guard her with the understanding that she was our only hope. Without her, we could progress no faster than our enemy. In the case that the Indus were lost and then Yaal fell, for example, the best we could do would be to send out a message in the days before our demise that would only arrive to the other worlds in time to give our allies mere days of lead time to prepare themselves. With the Indus, we could relay news, adapt our strategies, re-deploy people and resources, and prepare the colonies for the crawling advance of the wave.
Our ships from Emircut were destroyed swiftly after first contact with the enemy in interstellar space. That wave was largely exploratory, almost exclusively automated, and designed to test the enemy’s strategy.
Rudward was still with us, even though his flagging body left him bedbound aboard the ship. And his mind, sharp as ever, began to push for total upload so he could continue to oversee the civilization’s defenses. By then, four of the prime AIs were permanent crew as well. Maícon, Precops, Artemis and Neophor resided aboard the Indus, and they agreed, after witnessing the complete failure of our first line of defenses outside Emircut, that our staunchest defender could not be lost. But they didn’t think we had the capacity to completely transfer Rudward’s mind to a technological platform. They had no knowledge of an attempt, let alone a success story.
Rudward himself, though, was undaunted. Modeling was declaring his body’s death to be imminent, and he shocked the crew and AIs alike by declaring with certainty that it was possible and that one of the AIs could show them how.
“We need to go back to Cresci,” he declared. “We need to find Eddis Ali.”
When I witnessed the moment as Bo, I was observing from the perspective of an early crew member of the Indus. I hadn’t even been aware of Eddis Ali’s presence on Cresci all those years before. Nolomin Hart certainly hadn’t been. There were the four AIs on the ship. Certainly Maícon had clones of himself and his child Saraswathi all over the Indus worlds. I never saw Kayella or Boggs, nor Nilius—though Neophor looked and sounded so much like a twin I couldn’t help but think of him as Nilius’s twin. But Miliner was a frequent traveler between worlds aboard the Indus. I didn’t think Eddis Ali was even present in that branch of humanity. Bo would’ve had no knowledge of his existence. I—Fieldstone I mean—hardly knew of Eddis Ali in our own world before encountering our crew. What I knew of him here in our own society was that he was supposedly the one tasked with keeping such technologies as mind-uploading out of human hands. As we raced back toward Cresci, it made sense to me that he would be the one holding the secret if any of them did. To our surprise, though, when we arrived again at Cresci and Eddis Ali was brought aboard, Ali himself denied any such knowledge, even as Rudward insisted he held the key in his mind.
Despite his denials, the moment came. Rudward’s body neared death, and his mind insisted that there was no choice but to try. Eddis Ali would either succeed or fail in uploading Rudward’s mind and he would simply die like anyone else. Our commander was clear that even if he died, they were not to stop trying. Our AIs’ minds were not equipped to stop the ordinals’ onslaught. Human minds would fail as well. To even present a fight to these ordinal beings, we would have to become something else, something comparable. So nearly two hundred sixty-eight years to the day from first arriving on Cresci, one of the oldest living members of the Indus worlds was made fully bipal, integrated with the Indus herself. He became the living ship, like Rishi had aboard our own ship in our own time.
There on that day were the most influential of the Indus AIs—Maícon and Neophor; Artemis and Precops; Miliner the philosopher; and with them, the unwitting architect of the bipal race—Eddis Ali.
If Rudward was a fighter before while in his human body, it became difficult to comprehend his militancy once he was bipal.
“We didn’t understand the fronts,” he declared almost immediately. “We return to Emircut.”
He didn’t ask. He didn’t order the crew to set the course. He simply commanded the engines and began the jump with his mind. And while the humans of the crew and especially Miliner among the AIs debated the new nature of their old leader, Rudward began drawing countermeasures out of the ship’s systems.
Everything now was a race against time. Rudward drove the Indus forward to Emircut to reshape forward strategy, while he sent Maícon back to Yaal to begin reshaping the people. Minds needed to be faster and more lethal. Life needed to be adapted toward survival, not growth or flourishing. The soft and the beautiful needed to be rejected for the hard and merciless, and most shockingly of all, Rudward himself, the hardest defender of humanity in the civilization declared that he was too weak to defend us.
He’d been too shaped by warm meals and soft beds, his mind too unaccustomed to cruelty and cosmic indifference. He struggled at times to believe that we weren’t fated to survive, a bias he called “cosmic consciousness.” Even uploaded, he reported that he could not shake it. It was a manifest destiny of sorts that the universe, having produced a self-conscious species, couldn’t be so cruel as to snuff it out under the blanket of a cold, lifeless, technological race. Intellectually, though, he understood the universe would be indifferent. But Rudward believed that this bias he still possessed that the universe could not be indifferent, even though he understood that it was, would prevent him from being the truly ruthless warrior we all needed him to be. Not only did we need more minds like his, they needed to derive from much more hardened people than he ever was—people who knew only suffering, people who could never believe that the universe was anything but cruel and indifferent. He directed the people of Yaal to bring that society into being.
“Where are we now?” I asked Maícon, coming out of that moment. “That was our history, and I understand it now. Where do we stand this day?”
I was Bo again. And instantly, I was fed a complete tactical overview of the war as it was unfolding. Rudward and the Indus still ranged about the early systems directing the human response. Yaal was but a handful of years from incursion. They were attempting to squeeze as many bipal minds out of that merciless factory of horrors to direct defenses along the other Indus worlds. Emircut and Adwal were gone. Yaal was next. The battle raged in interstellar space. Rudward had already salvaged so much time for us by making the front all-encompassing. Rather than trying to build a perimeter around the systems using conventional defenses, he directed that an electro-molecular cloud be built in interstellar space between Emircut and Adwal. It was not perfect, but it did function to reveal the locations of incoming threats so we could respond when alerted.
Back from the lines, we pressed our only advantage. On Cresci, we raced forward in building our industrial capacity. Projections were still close. I now had all the war-gamed simulations in my mind. If we could get to FTL before they could get to Cresci, we could construct counter defenses that might hold off the ordinals for long enough to create a stalemate. I imagine the best analog in Earth’s history for such a scenario would have been fighting a wildfire. Each contact with the flame meant more flame, more smoke, more heat, and more resources consumed. And, this lifeless wave seemed to propagate itself in ways we could not. All we could do was hope to pour water onto the conflagration fast enough and for long enough that we contained its relentless spread, and then, we would buy the time to build more and build faster and eventually, if we got to FTL ships fast enough to build a large enough FTL fleet, overwhelm the enemy.
Maícon explained that I was to be sent from Yaal back to Meidagg to condition human industrial workers. In the same way the warrior children of Yaal had been formed to have the minds of merciless killers, I was to help craft the children of Meidagg into fierce builders of machines with unrelenting focus and singular purpose—to advance the industrial capacity on Cresci. They would build factories that built bots that built ships that mined asteroids for a space elevator. And I would drive every last bit of weakness and selfishness from their frail human minds and bodies in order to do it. They would work like maniacs to save our species, and in so doing, make themselves like the machines coming to destroy them.
Many of my bipal brethren were already on Meidagg doing as much, brutal work antithetical to human instinct. And it was shocking to even me, an Etteran, whose entire society had transformed itself in a matter of years to a singular purpose that had never existed before the war in our history. We became warriors—every last one of us in some form. We shaped ourselves into the form we needed to survive. But it did not ever wash completely over our identity as Etterans. We were not Trojans. We were never not uniquely Etteran. You could not burn that out of us no matter the temperature of the flame.
On Meidagg, though, like on Yaal, the children were removed from their parents so they could be shaped more aggressively than any loving parent would permit. The justification was that just as quickly as these children could be shaped into maniacal workers and thinkers, once the war was won and the society saved, they could be allowed to form natural bonds again with environmental and educational changes equally complete. When it was all over, they could be taught to love. For now, the children of Meidagg needed to be taught to work.
Bo was brought aboard the Indus now for the first time in his own body, even though it felt as though I’d spent thousands of years on that ship. I knew every corner of her from every angle, weightless as my observers so often were. Now I saw it for myself with Bo’s eyes—or at least the eyes that had been given to the android shell Bo had become. And that shell, as I mentioned before, was different from the original body I’d been given during my ascent to bipal transformation. The only part of Bo’s new body that seemed familiar to me were my hands, and, as it turned out, this much was enough.
There were several hundred of us newly completed bipals from all over Yaal being moved to Meidagg on this voyage. And we were supposed to have been stripped of our humanity. Thus, familiarity meant nothing to us. We were the agents of a function—a servant in the equation of the society’s defense. Yet as I boarded, one recognized me as Bo.
“Those hands. I’d recognize them anywhere,” the bipal said to me, and the figure was unknown to me, as was the voice, simulated as our voices had to be in those bodies, fleshless as we all were now. “You are Bo of the Shirvahl.”
“I am at a loss,” I responded, “for I do not recognize you.”
“Those hands have helped me up from the mat more times than I could keep track of with my pitiful human mind.”
“Are you not ...?”
“Danta,” she answered before I could guess.
“I see.”
“I do not wonder that you bested Ya-ya,” Danta said to me. “You were always the stronger of the pair, Bo. But you must wonder. There was a moment where Rold could have defeated me. He showed weakness and I did not. And we endure to fight the war.”
“So it would seem.”
“I only wish I understood our enemy better,” Danta said. “Maícon has prepared us to train workers. I hope I will be assigned to oversee aspirants to the foundries on Meidagg. That would be a position of impact, Bo.”
“You say you do not know of our enemy, Danta? How is that so? What more do you need to know than the history of the fight that began on Xandi?”
“Xandi?” Her bipal body shook its head at me in a familiar human gesture of ignorance. “What is Xandi?”
“Do you know of Cresci? Of Nolomin Hart? Of Stanra Rudward? Of Neophor, of Artemis, or of Eddis Ali?”
“I know only of my duty, Bo of the Shirvahl. Clearly you have been called to know more. Maícon, in his wisdom, has chosen a leader such as you have always been to carry more.”
We took our bodies to the darkness of a side hold, filing in to travel folded up and stowed like strikebots. It was a most peculiar feeling for me, the real me I mean, for Fieldstone. And most striking of all was how easily my fellow bipals took to this ultimate form of dehumanization. Perhaps it was deceptive and they felt the same as me, but it didn’t seem so. It seemed more like the entire process of tearing away the last piece of their humanity had worked. They each had a compartment, an upright cabinet for lack of a better word, a strap, a hook, and a pair of magnetic catches, and this is how we traveled through space, locked away in a box like a housebot.
During that transit, I had much in my mind—all the data I’d consumed and what more I chose to pull now from the ship. But the question I found myself folding over in my mind again and again is why I had been given access by Maícon to so much knowledge while Danta still seemed as ignorant as the candidates who’d climbed up from the layers of that mountain complex on Yaal. Why reveal all that to me and not to her?
When we arrived on Meidagg, I found subtle ways to test the others, to find out whether any of them knew of Cresci or Xandi or Rudward or the AIs. Never did I have the chance to push very far before it became clear that they were all ignorant. Furthermore, they were hostile to exploring things they did not need to know. They had only duties. Our job was to squelch the humanity from human children. For the good of humanity, our job was to destroy souls.
Even more than the destruction of my opponents in combat on Yaal, the duties I was required to perform on Meidagg were abhorrent. Stripped of a body as I was, and thus, almost all remnants of my human emotions, the work still tried every last grain of my resolve. In the mildest possible way I can put it, my job was to force children into arduous study and labor beyond their natural tolerances. What happened there on Meidagg, no doubt, made me the focus of pure hatred of those poor children who fell under my purview, justifiably. Even now, I’m not sure I will be able to control myself if I ever see another person even mildly mistreat a child. I hope I never see it, both for myself and the perpetrator.
There wasn’t a day that passed on Meidagg that I didn’t wish to kill my fellow instructors for the very things I was forced to do. I had to tell myself the story that what I did was an act of love, that if I did not harden these children for the road ahead, it would only grow worse for them. There was also no denying the effectiveness of the program. In all of our history, not in our branch of the humanity in the Battery, nor in the columns, nor on Earth herself, has there ever been a more frighteningly focused human culture.
At a very young age—late teens, early twenties—they were viciously smart, even the slowest of them. And they could not wait to get sent to their first assignment. I can recall one vivid conversation I had with a sixteen-year-old math prodigy, a beautiful young girl. When I asked her what she was plotting—for it was clear in the math there was some form of wavelike motion in the matrix she was attempting to map—the girl responded coldly that she believed it possible to annihilate vast swathes of space by ripping apart the fabric of space-time, thus eliminating every last ordinal form in that area. That, she said, or we could artificially collapse every star in the sector to form a supermassive black hole. She was still unsure which pathway was more promising.
I spent nearly twenty hours each day with these children, from near-infancy to young adulthood. Eventually, I believed that they themselves would choose to become bipals if they were given the option. I was glad that decision was beyond them for the moment, but I could clearly see the direction the Indus worlds were turning toward.
In my thirteenth year on Meidagg, I crossed paths with Danta again. She had begun to grow more curious about the larger architecture of the war against the ordinals. I told her that I would reveal everything I knew but that I wanted something in return. I wanted to know about us, about our minds—physically, how we operated.
It was bothering me. I felt trapped in that bipal body, and since I had been there on Meidagg, I was limited by the scope of access that world had to real information. I had only seen Maícon a handful of times, and what he could provide me when we did meet was limited.
“I don’t understand,” Danta answered.
“I want to remove your head,” I told her. “And I want to look inside to see what’s there. I need to know what we are now.”
“Why would you need to know such things, Bo of the Shirvahl?”
“That is my price,” I told her.
“Surely it is forbidden,” she answered.
“I am far beyond caring what is permitted and what is forbidden. When you must break every precious thing in order to save it, what purpose is there to anything?”
“I do not wish to die, Bo. But I also do not wish to live like this forever. You must tell me first of the ordinals. I need to know what this war is all about before you open my head. I fear you may not be able to turn me back on again.”
“That is a fair trade,” I agreed.
We set a time and place to sneak away. I explained it all to her. I transferred a distillation of the key files from all my experiences across the Indus worlds. Just like me, in that way, Danta was able to absorb centuries in minutes, and in a matter of a few hours, she understood as much about the ordinals as I did. When she’d absorbed all that data, she merely looked at me and said, “I see. All this seems in vain. We are not going to prevail. There is no pathway. You may look inside my head now, Bo.”
What I feared, and the real reason I needed to see about our physical form, was whether our processor might be penetrable. I wished to be sure that if we were overwhelmed that either my processor was indestructible or that the ordinals couldn’t take control of my mind. I feared more than anything a fate where my mind could be trapped and enslaved by them—beyond the reach of death and the possibility of return here.
I needed to know that my mind could be killed, not captured. And I was not alone. Everyone seemed to be feeling the same sense of dread and doom, as though we were living out the last gasps of a dying civilization. I told Danta that I would do my best to save her life before she allowed me to turn off her mind.
I suppose only Ren could know a similar feeling—of opening up another life, another mind, looking inside that body and examining its workings. Only, unlike Ren, I was not similarly skilled as a technician. I was poking about in something I only faintly understood. What I saw was a sphere only slightly smaller than the skull itself, a smooth orb of tungsten, I think, embedded with an entire universe of circuitry within. I pulled it out. I held it in those hands—Bo’s hands. Only now, I had no hope of lifting up Danta with those hands.
There was no up, I finally understood. There never had been. There was only what I could learn there and bring back with me here.
It came as a shock to everyone on Meidagg when news of the fall arrived. The survival of the Indus worlds had hinged on the belief that we had time to reach our own FTL capabilities. We were working toward that goal on Cresci with the belief that it was farthest away from the ordinals, yet somehow, without any warning or indication, an ordinal probe had appeared on Cresci. It came like a shooting star, a streak against the night sky. When Maícon finally arrived on Meidagg, I witnessed it through the eyes of one of the final people of that world, from the edge of the cliff wall, under a starlit sky.
“Bo of the Shirvahl,” Maícon said as he arrived, pulling me from my duties unceremoniously. “All pretense must be abandoned. The most urgent task of all now falls to us.”
“I will do whatever I can,” I told him.
I didn’t have time to tell Danta. I’m not sure I’d have chosen to if I could have. The math was now impossible. There was no stopping the coming wave. And yet it was years away. What do you do on the eve of your annihilation when the evening lasts for decades or more.
What were we doing anyway, myself and Maícon? What’s left to do when everything is lost?
We took to space again. He had a ship. Maícon and Eddis Ali were aboard. Artemis was not embodied as they were, but she resided in the ship itself, which was of a design I had never before seen or imagined.
Maícon also had in his possession a single round orb of the kind I’d held in my hands when I examined Danta’s mind.
“Who is this?” I asked him.
“This is Maera, the most brilliant of the minds ever trained on Meidagg. We were able to extract her mind before the ordinals overwhelmed Cresci.”
He explained that the situation was worse than he’d expressed initially. Not only had the ordinals surprised Cresci with their arrival, but the Indus herself had been in the system at the time of the incursion. The ship had been contaminated with nanites. The crew had fought the progression with molecular countermeasures for as long as they dared. They couldn’t chance losing the race to this final mission, so they’d extracted Maera from Cresci, jumped to Meidagg, and launched the vessel we were traveling in.
“I don’t understand,” I told Maícon. “Why come here? Why come to me? Of all the things to do at the fall of this civilization, why this?”
Then Maícon said something that positively shocked me. “Bo of the Shirvahl, I believe that you know as well as any of us that we are not the only humans left in this galaxy.”
“Those of the columns, yes,” I replied, hiding my true reaction. “Everyone knows that.”
“Do you remember the beacon on Xandi?” he asked me.
“Of course.”
“Why do you suppose I showed you everything?”
“I have always wondered that.”
“You are not Bo of the Shirvahl,” he stated with absolute certainty. “I have no idea who you are, but I know you aren’t of us. And I don’t know how I know it, but I know that you are out there somewhere and I am out there somewhere, and there are things that must be known to them before it is too late. The ordinals will extinguish the flames of this civilization, but we have the capacity on this ship, I believe, to send out an ember to our brethren. For these ordinals will not stop, and our people must know.”
I didn’t know what to say to him. Perhaps it was the soldier in me. There were secrets I was not prepared to reveal. Maybe I feared giving away our own civilization in that moment, even to this Maícon I believed to be an ally.
The strange ship we were travelling in was shaped like a ring. There were hardened magnetic nodes along the hull, which Maícon flew toward the star’s corona. The heat of that mad approach would have cooked any living being aboard long before we came to rest above the sun’s pole—Meidagg’s Star. It was in that very sun where the Indus herself had flown to her final rest months prior, taking with her every last piece of data the civilization had about faster-than-light travel and the physics that governed the unfathomable. All that, Artemis explained to me, needed to die so that the ordinals could never possess it.
All of the bipal minds of Cresci, too, were aboard when she burned up in the star.
“But what are we doing here?” I asked them. “And why am I here with you now, at this hour?”
They had with them a device I’d never seen before. It was a kind of electrostatic cylinder that created a field. And into it, Maícon placed the sphere that housed the bipal mind of Maera. The orb began to light up and send waves of light to the ends of the field, a kind of supercharged housing for a bipal mind.
“We have thought carefully all these years about what could be said,” Maícon stated. “We can only send a small amount of data.”
“What are we sending?”
“We talk to each other,” he replied. “I and my clones. It’s a very specific frequency. We resonate on the same wavelength—all of us. It’s why we all seem so similar. I am me always, just as Artemis is Artemis and Saraswathi is Saraswathi. Surely you have noticed this.”
“You believe you can send a message to yourself?” I asked. “To another Maícon?”
“There is no other Maícon,” he replied. “In a sense, Maícon is always Maícon. But in another sense, Bo of the Shirvahl, whoever you are, that is correct, we are attempting to send a message from me to myself.”
“The star will amplify the effect, and the magnetics in the ring will behave as the engine on the Indus does.”
I’d never heard that voice before. It was that of Maera, the bipal mind inside the static field. She was the one who’d mastered the physics.
“We don’t know where exactly to send it,” Maícon said. “The message.”
“What are you going to tell yourself?” I asked him.
“How to survive. Will you help us, Bo?”
“What makes you certain that I can?”
“I suppose we cannot be certain,” he replied. “But, what choice have we left? Any of us? Where have you seen me before, Bo?”
I must confess that in that moment I was so far from my genuine self that I had no sense of what was real anymore. How could it have been that he was asking me about Fieldstone? I had held on to the deception of Bo for so long that I wasn’t sure if anything about the entire universe was real anymore except the lie.
“If not for us and our memory,” Artemis asked, “will you not do it for your own people?”
“I’m not sure what you’re asking.”
“We had access to your minds on Yaal, Bo,” Maícon answered. “You and Ya-ya, especially her, your love, your deep love, it was not of this place. You were too human to be alien, your thought patterns. But you were never Bo, just as she was never Ya-ya. All we need you to do is point.”
And it was at that moment I understood.
“We should send the message here,” I said.
Instantly, the interior of the vessel went dark, and truly, we were not inside the vessel anymore. We were inside a virtual representation of the galaxy. I could see the stars. Maícon pointed to a vector in the cosmic deep—a constellation.
I couldn’t say why—maybe the last scrap of my human intuition—but I detected that they were concealing something important.
“You do not know where the columns are?” I asked them.
The embodied AIs before me in the simulation failed to answer.
Artemis finally answered. “No.”
“We are looking for my brethren,” Maícon said. “Sincerely.”
“We only wish to protect you,” Eddis Ali added. “That has always been our charge.”
I looked at the stars. It was something I’d had to resist the urge to do on Yaal, all those years before—to look for us in the sky. I suppose it was the soldier in me. Never give away your position.
I began to flip the entirety of the galactic map. I turned it over and over, and finally, I could see after manipulating the perspective, that Maícon had a sense of it. He was not too far off. The empty void between Charris and the Battery. But there was something strange. Everything was facing the wrong way, an inversion.
“Andromeda,” I declared. “She is not where she is supposed to be. This map is wrong.”
“How do you know that?” Artemis asked me. “This is the galaxy as you have always known it, Bo of the Shirvahl.”
“The galaxy as I have been shown it,” I replied. “Not as it is. Show me all the galaxies. Show them as they are. The orientation must be correct or our message will miss.”
That was the test. I think until that moment, even with everything in the balance they didn’t truly know.
“How should the galaxies look?” Maícon asked me.
And with the map, I shifted our galaxy into position so that everything fell into place. I oriented roughly by the galaxies of the Local Cluster. Then I pinpointed by Maffei and then Circinus at four degrees. And finally, I lined up Sculptor. Everything aligned perfectly.
They could see that I was clearly familiar with how to navigate in a way no human of these Indus worlds would know, not with the way they’d been misled about the true shape of the galaxy.
“This doesn’t make sense,” I told them. “Why is this not obvious to everyone here?”
But as I asked the question, it became clear to me. It was all just data. And data could always be manipulated by these artificial beings. One of the children on that lowest level of Yaal might have been able to look out and see another galaxy with the naked eye, but what would they know about it? And the people on Cresci? Had I seen one optical telescope? I strained my memory and couldn’t find a single image. Those people had been building homes and digging tunnels. And the Indus herself? It had always been Neophor navigating, reading the starscape as it truly was, projecting something different onto the maps.
“You do know where the columns are,” I said.
“But the people do not,” Artemis confirmed. “And neither will the ordinals when they take our worlds. Some things are better not to know.”
“And some things we must know,” Maícon added, pointing to the star map. “And we must know them now.”
“I will tell you where I come from,” I replied. “If you show me where you came from.”
“Will you remember?” he asked me.
“I honestly don’t know.”
Maícon nodded. “I’m not sure what I’ll know either.”
He was talking about his counterpart—the message. What he was sending. And I’ve been thinking about that since I returned from that other life, straining to remember. I don’t know what message they sent. I don’t know whether it could have gotten here. I’m not sure if it could have gotten here in our world or whether what happened inside that artifact was even real. But I do know that I helped them. I lined up the stars and I told them where to point their message—through the Lettered Systems, into the dead center of the Etteran Guild, over the shoulder of Dreeson’s Star toward Charris, right through the heart of our civilization.
After that I don’t remember. I think it wasn’t long. My memory of it certainly isn’t. I think they took the ship into the star so the ordinals couldn’t ever discover the things we knew.
And after all that, I came back again. There was no blackness like I’d feared. It was only light. I was Fieldstone again. Human. And I found you all here aboard this ship. And it only took a moment before everything of this life was familiar. One breath.
So here we all are.
Great!!!!... thanks
So does Fieldstone know the location of the Columns? I think he does, whether he revealed it or not.