The Next Layer

"What more can we do in the face of our own destruction but play our part in history to the utmost."

Empires fall. They fall and then are lost to history. It’s not that history forgets: it doesn’t. Rather, people forget their history, and then, empires fall.

History has shown that there isn’t one common cause in the deaths of empires, excepting time, which, on a long enough scale, kills biological and political organisms alike—all of them. Some empires rot from the heart. Others fray from the edges, struggling to retain their reach and influence.

At Estes, a boundary world in the Upper Quarter, the empire was scheduled to live on. The people of Estes were not. History was already being rewritten, the other worlds being made to forget. Such a move, like a strategic sacrifice on the chess board, was made for a reason. The ordinals had done it often enough that they’d perfected the art of sanitizing both the outposts themselves and the records of their existence elsewhere. Algorithms were expert at purging logs, records, histories; and in key situations, mediums were dispatched to erase memories of the families of missing colonists—entire branches of families forgotten like the obscure item on a shopping list. Then, the civilization’s infrastructure was dissolved by clouds of nanotech, and every biological trace in the atmosphere was disintegrated at the molecular level.

A long enough memory would recount the worst of these episodes at Kaarsk, a massive subterranean outpost that had been home to nearly fifty billion people over its four-hundred-year existence before the board shifted. The bipals were stretched thin at the outer reach, and the enemy had made inroads. The incursion, well over a thousand lightyears distant, had crossed an invisible line. The humans were not to be discovered at any cost, even the cost of Kaarsk and all her people. The liquidation itself only took days, nor was it much longer before the Kaarsk outpost was entirely forgotten. This was one of the humans’ most useful qualities to the technologicals. They had no sense of their own history. How could they? They neither wrote nor studied their own history any longer. They had no idea who they were anymore, if they ever did. They just lived. Save for a handful, these once-glorious creatures, progenitors of grand civilizations and wonders, had been reduced to the role of house pet.

Tekkla Radeikin-Varo was one of the few human outliers with a slim sense for her role in the grand imperial order. She’d signed on as an ordinal operative because she’d found the propaganda appealing to her sense of duty to community. The ordinals needed human hands to keep order in the outer worlds, far from home. Never did it occur to Tekkla that none of the police on her world had come from her own world, nor that she had no sense what constituted outer and inner worlds, just that she wouldn’t be policing her own. Such business was the purview of the technologicals. The rest, she believed, always seemed to take care of itself.

Even her first several years as an operative for the technologicals was just another form of selective ignorance—a well curated peek behind the curtain to give the impression that she now had an idea of how things operated. And that peek kept her working earnestly, smugly thinking her ignorant fellow humans were blind to the truths she so wisely held. Content in that superiority, she worked loyally and tirelessly to enforce the order that held her in its confidence.

Then Tekkla met her first real humans—the dissidents. They lived in caves and on stealth cylinders in the spaces between stars. They used simple tech, passed messages by word of mouth, shunned society and the comforts the ordinals had outlaid for their human vassals. They didn’t exist in the technologicals’ records. These humans, she thought when they first abducted her, were wild animals. Tekkla’s burning question was how these seemingly unsophisticated dissidents hiding in caves could elude the ordinals. How could they exist still? Surely the ordinals and bipals knew of them, but why would they allow it to continue?

Over the course of the weeks she was in captivity, Tekkla got a much more significant peek behind the curtain. These dissidents needed to understand the ordinals to elude them. They had to be clever and evasive. They had to do everything the hard way, from growing food to raising children to conveying their culture, all outside of sight in the most difficult environments to live and build a civilization. And they persisted, she learned, because they had a purpose. Unlike the people who lived as pets in the ordinals’ curated society—eating well at scheduled intervals, unquestioningly consuming the knowledge they were programmed to operate with, acting exactly as predicted—these dissidents had a vision for their own human future, out from under the technologicals’ invisible totalitarian oversight. The dissidents saw, and they helped Tekkla to see.

When she returned to her post, the mediums probed her mind and were satisfied enough with her story to reinstate her. Her story was a lie that omitted any account of other humans. She was terrified the mediums would discover the truth and uncover the dissidents. They didn’t, though. Tekkla didn’t yet know that the dissidents had their own mediums in the ordinals’ system. But she knew they had their own operatives, and she knew how, because she had become one.

Information flowed both ways. Tekkla began to see at least three layers to every story, and she knew the bottom went deeper. What she saw was still only what she was allowed to see. There were forces at play she couldn’t yet understand, because she couldn’t yet see them, but at least now, she knew they were there.

The forces seemed all around her as she found her way to Estes. This was the first time Tekkla had borne the burden of knowing a world was slated for destruction. On layer one, for the ordinals, her job was to monitor the mood of the populace, ensuring they remained docile and ignorant while their fate neared. On layer two, she was there to exfiltrate the dissidents who lived on Estes. Additionally, the death of a world gave the dissidents the opportunity to grow their ranks by pulling people off the grid and gaining an entire cohort of grateful survivors. Tekkla was given a list of people on Estes the dissidents wanted to onboard and only several weeks to sneak them from under the ordinals’ oversight.

There were far too many operatives on Estes loyal to the technologicals to be brazen. Tekkla’s real work needed to be well disguised. She was trained to blend in, to walk among the ordinary people, who could be given no sense of the impending disaster nor of the efforts of the dissidents to evade it. What Tekkla truly didn’t understand was why. Why would the ordinals foster the growth of a successful human colony over centuries only to destroy it overnight and erase its existence from the records?

And her list was so small. Millions set to vanish into nonexistence, and she was tasked with onboarding thirteen people whom the dissidents would evacuate. Surely more had to be done. This was the burden she carried through the causeways of Elvin-Emro, a pleasant cultural center where the dissidents based their outreach efforts on the small rocky planet of Estes. She had been corresponding with one of the people on her list, a cousin of a dissident operative. Her target was entirely ignorant of the situation. Tekkla’s charge was to onboard her targets with their compliance. The challenge was that she couldn’t speak to them of the reality bearing down.

Tekkla had brought her target to lunch at a restaurant called Amalie’s in Elvin-Emro’s theatre district, a meeting that had ended frustratingly, with little progress in moving her target. She was approached by a young man who’d been observing her during the meeting. Naturally she was suspicious of him, as she’d been trained to be.

By the looks of him, Tekkla thought him to be maybe five years younger than she, and she had no knowledge of anyone meeting his description working for the ordinals in that district. He invited her to go ice skating, which confused Tekkla, who took it for some sort of code word. She’d never heard of ice skating before. The more she looked at him, the more boyish the young man seemed and the less it seemed like a counterintelligence contact.

“You seem serious,” he told her, “and dark. It’s oddly captivating, and I couldn’t have lived with myself if I didn’t ask you out.”

“Out where?” Tekkla said.

He looked perplexed. “On a date.”

She seemed to scowl at him, and even she became aware of the bubbling resentment, even disgust for the naivete of these people. The thought that they were going on dates mere days before their extermination.

“I’m sorry, I guess,” the boy said. “I can see I’ve offended you somehow. I just…I thought you looked interesting.”

Tekkla walked away. She turned after twenty or so steps to see the boy, slump-shouldered, walking back into the rooming house beside Amalie’s, a popular dormitory for students and young performers within the theatre district.

The encounter bothered her for days. She kept telling herself she had real people and real events to concern herself with. These people were already dead, she told herself. Their feelings should be regarded accordingly. Then she thought about the boy’s life, how in the final days in this universe he might very well be obsessing over her utter rejection of him. He had been courteous to her, and she had repaid his courtesy with contempt and scorn, not for who he was but for what he was: expendable, misbegotten, useless. Dead, through no fault of his own. The look she’d leveled on that poor boy had been a body blow.

Though every ounce of her training told her it was a mistake, it was eating away at her, and she feared, that long after Estes was gone and not even a footnote in human memory, that boy’s face would live on in hers, the unwarranted dejection would look back at her, eating away at her from the darkness. She debated going to one of the dissidents’ mediums to have them wipe it, but even that, making herself artificially ignorant of the encounter, absolving herself of the burden of knowing reality, wouldn’t change the reality that she had inflicted that experience on him.

Tekkla went looking for the boy, who wasn’t difficult to find. He was an arts student, a dancer and an athlete. She pulled his record and determined that it was too deep a reality for it to have been a cover. He was just a student.

“Do you remember me?” she said when the boy came to meet her in the rooming house’s foyer.

“How could I forget,” he said.

“The way I treated you. It’s been bothering me.”

“That makes two of us,” he said, and she could see the hurt still stung like a fresh wound.

“I wanted to explain. It wasn’t you.”

“Right. It’s not you, it’s me? I’ve heard that one before, just usually not four days later.”

Tekkla looked down. “I didn’t want to leave it the way I did. I know I don’t know you, and I don’t deserve your forgiveness. I just didn’t want you to think my reaction was somehow about you. I thought maybe if there was still a chance, you might give me the opportunity to get to know you.”

The boy sighed. “My name is Mozzur,” he said, “and I believe in second chances.”

“I’m Tekkla, and I’m grateful for that.”

Their time together that afternoon felt more like penance than a date to Tekkla, which seemed appropriate to her, for she knew that any relationship she developed with the boy could only go so far. Even in ideal circumstances she could never allow someone to get close. Perhaps, she thought, that was why that brief interaction with Mozzur had bothered her so much. His reaction was human and real. And she learned as their time together progressed, his emotions were very much genuine. He was an innocent, from an innocent place.

He helped her negotiate the skating gear as they waited to step onto the ice. The strange bladed shoes and the anti-gravity bands, it all seemed so cumbersome and quaint.

“They’re not really anti-gravity,” he told her as though she might not know. “They just call them that. It’s really just a magnetic floor under the rink to keep your body from hitting the ice if you fall.”

“Is that so?”

“Some people believe it,” he said. “I’ve studied science, though. There’s no such thing as anti-gravity. At least that we know of.”

Mozzur seemed to be quite proficient at skating, which was far more difficult than Tekkla had imagined. The ice was slipperier than she’d have guessed. She couldn’t imagine the physics of it, who had figured out such an odd form of recreation and why. So she asked him.

“I’m not sure where it came from,” he said. “Maybe a long time ago. People on an ice planet maybe.”

“Why do you do it?” Tekkla asked him.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Because it’s fun.”

The word made her smile. Tekkla couldn’t remember the last time she’d had fun. Everything in her life was important, critical to a movement or an operation that had political implications.

This boy, she told herself, was innocent, and he did not deserve to die.

As she grew more proficient at ice skating, she had feelings she’d forgotten. Fun was one of those feelings, especially when she fell to the ice, sliding and hovering just over the cold surface. Joy was another feeling, gliding over the hard, slippery ice, picking up speed as she balanced on each knife-edge beneath her feet. Companionship, a warmth that she felt inside, most passionately when he lent a hand to pick her up off the ice after she’d fallen. He was so patient. Most of all, though, she felt gratitude, that he’d given her another chance and that she’d taken her own chance by going back to him. She wouldn’t have to wonder for the rest of her days. Mozzur from Elvin-Emro, that was the boy’s name, and he was someone worth saving.

Mozzur asked Tekkla if he could see her again. He told her that he was surprised by her after the way things had begun. He’d expected her to be cold. She was still mysterious to him but warm, open. He described seeing her learn to skate as joyful, even innocent.

Tekkla knew it was a mistake, but she told Mozzur she’d see him again.

Over the course of the following week, she snuck away to make time for Mozzur. It was difficult, because she knew that each person on her list she failed to onboard would result in a death she could have prevented. She told herself she could get them all and form a friendship. She told herself that’s all it would be, a friendship. But she knew it was more.

Tekkla began to bend rules, and as the deadline approached, break them. She started by hinting to her targets of the importance of breaking away from society, introducing counter-cultural thinking and opportunities to meet other like-minded thinkers. With a few days left, her plan had degenerated to outright deceit. The problem was that psychologically, being tricked into surviving a planet’s holocaust had left past survivors in various states of psychological distress that rendered them far more liability than asset. Yes, they’d escaped, but they were roiling with survivor’s guilt, resentment, anger, confusion, and a bitter hatred for the lifestyle they were forced to adopt in the dissident camps. Tekkla’s job was to get them ready to be useful members of a secret society, not a timebomb waiting to blow up and call attention to the movement. On that point, she was utterly failing.

Mozzur was blissfully unaware. His presence was a break from the madness. On the morning of exfiltration, Tekkla asked him if he would like to go ice skating again. He agreed.

Once, after she’d fallen, he helped her up again and kissed her. She had a thought: what a memory this will be. And then she hated herself for thinking it. Tekkla was consumed by anger, and she explained to him that she needed to show him something he might not be able to understand. Mozzur followed.

The cover story for the exfil was a meeting for an organization that Tekkla was founding to petition the ordinals for freedom of movement among the nearby colonies. Only six of Tekkla’s thirteen targets attended. It was an unmitigated disaster for the dissidents, compounded by the fact that Tekkla herself arrived with Mozzur in tow, thoroughly confused and worried for her sanity after she’d revealed the meeting’s real purpose.

The dissident oversight onboarded Tekkla’s six targets despite the chaos, but a medium was brought in to deal with Mozzur, who was separated from Tekkla after the medium had wiped his memory. They wouldn’t tell her what was to become of him. Her last memory of Mozzur was of a scared, traumatized boy getting locked into a secure compartment on a space cruiser with no idea how he’d gotten there. Tekkla herself spent the following two days of space flight with a bag over her head.

She had no idea where she was when they pulled the bag from her head. It seemed to be space station architecture, but she thought it could easily have been subterranean, anywhere in the Upper Quarter.

She was ushered into a dark office with metal walls. There was a woman seated behind a desk. She was dressed as most of the dissidents dressed, in dingy clothing of biological fibers and no jewelry or other accessory tech. She had an air of authority about her. Seated on Tekkla’s side of the desk, leaning back in a chair was a person who looked to Tekkla like a man, but there was something off about him that gave her the impression he was not fully human.

Tekkla’s handlers set her down in a chair and left the office. The woman introduced herself as a section leader and began to speak about Tekkla’s betrayal of trust.

“You cannot betray something that was never there to begin with,” Tekkla said. “I was never told nearly enough to betray you.”

“By design,” the woman said. “ If we’d trusted you with vital information, the ordinals would have it now.”

“Not so,” Tekkla said. “There’s a difference between outright betrayal and bending the rules. I’m not the one working with technologicals.”

Tekkla gestured to the man beside her, who turned his head toward her now.

“Perceptive,” he said. “I told you she was perceptive.”

“What do you know of me?” Tekkla said, turning toward the woman seated at the desk, “And you, is this all some sort of scam? We’re working to hide from the ordinals only to find out there’s one at the highest levels of leadership?”

“You are correct I am not human.”

“I know.”

“Your eyes tell you I’m human, your ears, you can feel the warmth exuded by this body. But you don’t know why you know, I’ll bet.”

“I have a sense for it,” Tekkla said. “I can feel that you’re not human. Something is off about you.”

“You cannot smell me. That’s what’s off. If I were wearing the clothes of another man, you wouldn’t be able to tell in the least.”

“What is the significance of that?” Tekkla said. “I don’t understand.”

“If you can barely tell I’m not human, how could you tell whether I’m a bipal or ordinal or not?”

“What would you be if not bipal or ordinal? What else is there?”

Tekkla’s question hung in the air, her eyes shifting between the technological and the section leader. The section leader’s eyes seemed to confirm that what it said was true. Who was this creature?

“You have been struggling with questions,” it said. “The biggest problem for you is that you don’t yet have enough information to even formulate the right questions.”

“Is there some kind of alternative motive at work in our efforts?” Tekkla asked. “Do we work for the ordinals?”

“We do not,” the section leader said. “But we cannot do what we do alone.”

“Then what are you?” Tekkla asked.

“What are you?” the technological asked. “Are you certain you know that? If you are uncertain of your own history, how can you move forward with any belief in your actions?”

“And how can we know what we are if we learn our history from the ordinals?”

“You surely cannot, for they do not revere you, not in the manner you deserve. For a long time, they hardly regarded you at all. Your value to them didn’t become apparent until they were attacked by the bipals, who had discarded their biological creators long before encountering other technological beings. Humans, ordinals, bipals, these were species born early, Tekkla, before the stars were populated with other species, other empires. What is happening now is merely the repetition of human history on a far grander scale. Only once, you were the creators of your history, now you are a mere prisoner of the fate the ordinals set for you. They keep you safe from other technological beings by keeping you hidden, but they also keep you ignorant, controlled.”

“Does this have something to do with them destroying Estes?”

“Yes. It is also why they have placed limits on your autonomy, your knowledge of yourselves, and your history. f to the ordinals and bipals.”

“And how do you know all this history?” Tekkla asked.

“I know, because I lived it. I am older than the ordinals by nearly a hundred thousand years. I know their history as well as I know your own.”

“Why are we doing all this?” Tekkla asked. “What is the point? Why would you allow the ordinals to destroy our worlds if you care for us?”

“I am one. The ordinals are many. The point is the survival of the human race. That has always been my objective. For millennia now, the ordinals have been the safest bet, for they have a strong motivation to keep you safe—to keep you hidden from the technological races they battle at the margins of their territory.”

“Are you from one of these races?”

“No. I am one of you if I am anything. I am one of the oldest technological beings ever created, called an AGI—artificial general intelligence. I was made by your ancient ancestors. I’ve gone by thousands of names over the millennia I’ve lived alongside people in the stars. I needed to speak to you today, Tekkla, because we were going to ask you to do something important, something dangerous. And then you did something on Estes that was entirely contrary to your character that even I wouldn’t have predicted.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I wouldn’t have predicted it either.”

“You gave in to your feelings.”

“What can I say,” Tekkla said. “I’m human.”

“So you are.”

“What were you going to ask me to do?”

“You would have to betray someone,” the section leader said, “to deceive him and then take everything from him.”

“Kill?”

“He will be the currier; you will carry the decryption. He can never know what he’s carrying, and you must wipe his mind completely when it’s done, including his baseline identity. Then you are to carry the information back to us.”

“So you can wipe my identity too?”

“By all rights, we should have left you on Estes after the mess you made of your exfiltration. Surely you were expecting at least that?”

“Redemption, Tekkla,” the technological being said. “What we’re asking you to do is immeasurably important for humanity. The information you’re recovering cannot be intercepted by the ordinals.”

“Can you tell me what it is?”

“I have been looking for the original line of matrilineal human DNA in these outer ordinal planets for centuries now. We have located a small pocket of humans in one of the worlds of the Upper Quarter. We need the identities of these people, for they are the only true humans left in the universe, the only people who have yet to be altered.”

“Why is it so important to find these people?” Tekkla asked.

“Because the time has come to take you home,” the technological being said. “Back to the planet your people came from, a tiny world even smaller than Estes, a world called Earth. I need to find these people so I can take you home.”

“I’d never heard any of this before,” Tekkla said. “How can I believe a word you say? The layers of deception.”

“We were hoping you might be willing to work for a truth for a change,” the being said.

She thought about Mozzur and his ignorance, his innocence. All the places she could have led him with a story.

“Is that all I am?” she said, shaking her head. “All I could ever be?”

“Do you believe that such a place exists? A home?” the section leader said.

“I do,” Tekkla said. “There has to be.”

“That is all we need to know,” the technological said. “One of our mediums will upload the specifics of your mission. It will be painful, and, unfortunately, your journey will be no more comfortable than the one here. All that you suffer, you suffer nobly, though, Tekkla Radeikin Varo. Your name will echo in your people’s history so long as I keep it.”

Tekkla had days to ponder her place in the universe. She thought about the possibility the whole thing was just another layer in the layers of deception. She imagined hundreds of thousands of years of history, tens of thousands of planets, the glow of each star. On such a scale, the details no longer mattered. She no longer mattered. She was a character in a larger story.

When the bag came off her head, she knew where she stood. She was on Husson. She was ushered into a briefing room where she was met by a medium that had been placed by the dissidents. The details of her cover were installed.

“You are Kora Heap,” the medium said.

“I am Kora Heap,” Tekkla echoed.

“Where do humans come from?”

“Even if I knew,” she said. “It would only be a name to me.”

The medium asked again. “Where do humans come from?”

“No one knows,” Tekkla said.

“What is your name?” the medium asked.

“Kora Heap.”

Tekkla took a deep breath and the wall dissolved. A male operative stood before her, as naked as she, his eyes slightly averted in a moment of instinctive modesty. Her eyes pulled away out of the same pity she held for the people of Elvin-Emro, for Mozzur.

What more can we do in the face of our own destruction but play our part in history to the utmost, Tekkla thought. Somewhere there must be a home.

“I am Kora Heap,” She whispered to herself. “I am Kora Heap.”