Chương 36: Part 36

Hyperspace wrapped around the scarred ship like a blanket, the dark pressing in from all sides until it met the glimmering flames warding their passage to Ysl. Jesri had spent most of the trip so far moving between holds filled with terrified refugees, showing them how to use the automated food dispensers and handing out essential supplies from the fabricator. As the tumult of their flight from Elpis wore off the passengers mostly lapsed into the hard, grim silence she recognized from a hundred warzones.

Not fear anymore, just the resignation of those who knew that life would inflict itself on them as it pleased for the time being. Jesri found herself dreading their arrival at Ysl; she would have to introduce these same broken refugees to the grim, cold halls of the underground complex. Elpis had been colorful by contrast, vital, a rare swirl of life and activity in the echoing quiet left when humanity vanished. And now it wasn't. Jesri shook her head and instructed a lift to take her to the bridge.

The doors hissed back open to reveal Anja hunched over a collection of displays, one of which was showing David's increasingly haggard face. She looked up and smiled as Jesri walked in.

"Sister," Anja said brightly.

"Good timing. David and I were just looking through the files that the salvage team managed to collect." Jesri sat down beside her and peered at the console.

"From our analysis of Trelir?", she asked, receiving a nod in response.

"Shit," she muttered, "I've been so wrapped up in other stuff that I've barely thought about it. How much did we lose?"

"Almost nothing," Anja replied.

"It appears as though the containment boxes were sealed when the explosion went off, so although there was significant damage to the tablets we were able to recover basically all of their contents. David has set up a sandboxed review space within the ship's network so that we can sort through them." Jesri shifted chairs to sit in front of her own screen, calling up the list.

"There's a lot here," she muttered, scrolling through hundreds of timestamped entries.

"Do we know how much was already reviewed by the, ah, research team?" She winced at the mention of the destroyed resistance cell, but David's voice betrayed nothing but fatigue as he spoke.

"More or less," he said wearily.

"We received a copy of their backup. Everything up to… here," he said, highlighting an entry on Jesri's display.

"We should start in-depth reviews after that point." She bit her lip, looking at the diminished but still sizable list that remained.

"Well, it's a start," she muttered.

"Even if we can't get through it all now we'll have some time while we're offloading the passengers." David nodded.

"I'll have to split time between organizing the departure groups and helping with the analysis, but it should work out," he said, easing back in his chair and closing his eyes. Jesri looked at him critically, noting the sickly pallor of his skin and the dark circles under his eyes. She could see discarded clothing and half-eaten food sitting out behind him, his untidy apartment matching his disheveled state.

"You can take some personal time," Jesri said, "if you need it. Anja and I can handle coordination and research for a while." He smiled at her, although he didn't move or open his eyes.

"That bad, huh?," he chuckled.

"I'm fine, Jesri, although I appreciate the offer." Jesri and Anja exchanged a glance, then looked back at David. He cracked an eye, seeming to sense that he was being watched, then sat up with a somber expression.

"I'm fine, really," he reassured them.

"You get a different view on death when everyone is a copy of everyone else and backups are possible. There are many versions of the Elpis team still around. Part of their data packet was a state capture of each team member, and that team is also a source for two active Epsilon groups. The particular instances we knew from Elpis, they've died - but nothing that made them unique has been lost." He gave them a wan smile.

"If I'm a bit out of sorts it's my own lingering existential hangups at fault."

"Wait," Anja said, frowning.

"You have copies of them? You could just summon up Helene or the other David and they would appear in there with you like nothing ever happened?" David winced at her tone.

"No, those people died," he repeated quietly.

"But yes, given appropriate resources I could create a new instance of those team members that would be an exact copy up to the date of their last backup. It's a minor distinction to the outside observer, but important nevertheless."

"What would you need to do that?" Jesri asked curiously.

"You can't do it with the ship's computer?"

"Technically, I could," David said, an uncomfortable look on his face.

"But it's complicated. The Grand Design has spare processing capacity just shy of what we would recommend to simulate two people - so to bring another person in I would need to constrain my current environment even further. It would be tight, and we would run the risk of catastrophic failure if you needed to allocate some of that capacity for system-critical tasks or if the ship's computer suffered degradation."

"More than that, though, is the issue of prior consent," he continued.

"When we deploy, it's permanent. The same group of people in the same confined space forever. That needs to be a conscious choice, and they need to remember making it." His face darkened, and when he spoke again his voice was low and quiet.

"Things tend to go poorly, otherwise." Anja gave him a look.

"I would appreciate some additional detail," she said dryly.

"If we propose to abandon the ability to literally resurrect our fallen allies then there should be a compelling reason why." David sighed.

"I don't mind telling you, it's just… difficult," he said hesitantly.

"It's probably best if I start with some context. I was Gamma-Two, when that generation was newest. We were the third station to get a cell after the Betas and the other Gamma team, and we didn't have the same rules about safety margins back then. One day we got an emergency message from the Gamma-One group, their station had degraded since their deployment and their environment was destabilizing. By the time we were able to react it had crashed completely. They all died."

He shook his head, hunching forward in his chair.

"We were horrified, obviously. It was the first time our team had suffered a loss like that, and we wanted to reinstantiate them as soon as possible. We had received their backups in the emergency message, and after some basic checks we spun their instance back up with a more limited scope. Smaller environment, and we only imported three people at first - their David, Helene and Yetide. Our logic was that they could work towards restabilizing the system and eventually bring Deepti and Chris back as well."

Jesri frowned.

"I'm guessing there was an issue," she said.

"There was," David confirmed.

"They had been active for five years apart from the Beta group, five years of independent development to diverge from that baseline. We only had the Beta memories from that time, plus whatever communiques they had sent us. None of those messages mentioned that their David and Deepti had become involved with each other three years prior. When we created the new instance without her he was inconsolable."

"We felt terrible, of course, and worked to help them stabilize their station as best as we could. After a few months, though, it became obvious that the hardware had degraded much further than we initially thought. They would never be able to have more than three people on that station. Their David…" He paused, his face seeming even more gaunt than before.

"Took it poorly?", Anja surmised.

"Extremely," David confirmed.

"He got increasingly desperate, obsessed with fixing the flaws in the hardware at any cost." He gave Anja a pained glance.

"Can you imagine what it's like to watch yourself go insane?", he asked hoarsely.

"We were still getting used to the idea of having more than one instance of ourselves. Having to watch a mirror image slowly destabilize was terrifying. One day all communication from that station cut off, no warning and no backups sent. The others merely suspect, but I know it was me. Him." David shook his head.

"It's uncomfortable to discover that you're capable of a murder-suicide."

"Fuck," Jesri remarked.

"Well, I can see why you're inclined to be cautious," she said.

"It was hard enough seeing Eleanor after thousands of years apart, I can't imagine seeing something like that happen so quickly and being able to watch every step of the way."

"Like I said, we were horrified," David said.

"We worked nonstop with the Betas to locate a station that was intact enough to reinstate their whole group from the original backups. And when we found one?" He gave Anja and Jesri a sickly smile, spreading his hands wide.

"They were fine. They thanked us for relocating their backups and got to work. The most valuable and productive teams in the resistance are from that line, including the team from Elpis." David leaned in close to the screen.

"We never told them about the failed instance," he rasped.

"They're under the impression that the rules were developed out of an overabundance of caution after analyzing the initial incident, and that their old station was never used again."

"I was wondering why you were so different from your counterpart on Elpis," Anja mused.

"I thought something had happened to him in the past to make him that way." David laughed, although the impression Jesri got wasn't one of amusement.

"No," he chuckled, "He was the baseline. Unaltered David, straight from the source. I'm sure he had his own theories about the Gamma-Two line and I know what that group tends to think of us, but there's nothing to be done about it." He gave a self-deprecating shrug, slouching back in his chair.

"Gamma-One groups tend to be more sharp, confident, ruthless. They thrive together in their little family unit, they have an implicit trust…" David shook his head.

"No, not even that. They love each other. For them, the bonds we made in our escape were never tainted. They don't ever think to question the stability or sanity of their team. They're the version of us that never had to see what we saw, never had to learn those lessons. It makes them objectively more functional than the rest of us - and we need them to stay that way." Jesri blinked, then shook her head.

"Shit, and here I thought we had bad clone drama growing up," she muttered.

"You guys are making me nostalgic for the days when I lived with a couple dozen nearly identical teenage girls professionally trained in deceit, manipulation and espionage." David snorted.

"I don't know, I'd probably take that over the researchers back on Pavonis," he said ruefully.

"But to answer your question: no. We don't do partial restorations without prior consent, especially not on a Gamma-One team. I can't bring their state files back online unless we can find something with enough computing capacity to handle the whole group. We've already deployed teams to every station we know of that fits the bill, so for now that's not an option."

"Unfortunate, but valuable information nevertheless," Anja mused.

"If we cannot have their input then we should keep reviewing the raw data to see what else we can find." Jesri nodded, and there was a moment of silence while they all returned their attention to the displays. She flicked her finger at the interminably long file list, sending it scrolling past in a blur until it stopped at the bottom. She sighed and prepared to scroll the list back only to freeze as the most recent timestamp caught her eye.

"Guys," she said urgently, "what time was the explosion, exactly?" Anja frowned.

"Thirteen-thirty station time," she replied, "Give or take a minute. Why?" Jesri looked up at her sister.

"This last file was saved twenty minutes before the explosion. It's what Xim Len was working on right before Trelir activated."

"What?", Anja said incredulously.

"Let me see." There was another pause as both Anja and David confirmed the timestamp on their own consoles.

"I had assumed that session would be a loss," David said disbelievingly.

"Do you think it's safe to open?"

"You tell us, you set up the sandbox," Anja said crossly.

"Is there a risk without Trelir's hardware here?"

"Hard to say," David said, considering.

"I would have said no if you asked me that question a few days ago, but evidently Xim Len got into something dangerous that she didn't expect. I'll give it a tentative go-ahead as long as we've got Rhuar plugged in to keep an eye on things and shut down the sandbox if something smells funny." Jesri winced.

"That could be a problem," she muttered. The diplomatic quarters atop the ship's bow were opulent, sprawling across two open decks and the entire width of the ship in an extravagant display of wasted space and real Terran hardwoods. An airy, dimly-lit open space in the center stretched up several meters to a transparent dome awash with shifting white flames that danced against the midnight black of hyperspace.

Plain metal pressure bulkheads had slammed down across the fore portion of the quarters during their battle with the Emissary, contrasting sharply with the room's otherwise smooth lines and ornate trim. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Rhuar had been curled up on the floor below the dome when Anja entered and he had not reacted as she walked across the cavernous space towards him.

She couldn't say whether he was asleep or simply not inclined to acknowledge her entry - the effect was the same regardless, and she lowered herself down to sit beside him without speaking. The refugees formerly assigned to this area of the ship had been shifted elsewhere after the ship's bow was damaged, and this far from the engines the ship was eerily silent as it cruised through the black.

The two of them sat under the dome, flickering light playing across the darkened room like moonlight reflecting from water - a soothing pattern that never seemed to change but never quite repeated itself. The lights danced in silence for several long minutes before Rhuar raised his head to look at Anja.

"Are we at Ysl already?", he asked.

"No," Anja replied, still looking up at the dome.

"We still have some time left before arrival." They lapsed once more into silence, and the firelight played around them. Slowly, Rhuar levered himself into a sitting position and raised his head to look at the dome.

"We were hoping you could help us look at some files," Anja said conversationally.

"If you feel up to it." Rhuar looked over at her with a blank expression.

"Sounds enthralling," he observed.

"You came all the way out here to tell me that?"

"Yes," Anja replied. He looked at her expectantly, but when no elaboration came Rhuar lowered himself back to the ground with an irritated huff of breath.

"I know what you're doing," he grumbled. She turned her head, a mischievous smile playing on her lips.

"Do you?", she asked. Rhuar rolled his eyes.

"Yes, oh wise Sage of the fucking Stars, I have fathomed your mysterious purpose. It's nice of you. I appreciate the thought. I'm fine." He shifted position and closed his eyes once more. Anja leaned back to lie down on the wooden veneer covering the deck, her hair fanning out around her head as she looked upward.

"It seems my skills concerning this sort of thing remain poor," she sighed.

"I never understood what was supposed to happen during the conversation that made it helpful." There was a long stretch of quiet, and Rhuar cracked one eye open.

"I was surprised that it was you and not Jesri, I'll admit," he commented.

"She would have come," Anja replied, "but I wanted to ask you something. I have the occasional need to know something about my crewmembers." Rhuar snorted.

"Is this voluntary?", he muttered.

"Most things are," Anja replied.

"I was just curious why you stayed on the Leviathan."

"What do you mean, why?", Rhuar grumbled.

"I'm an artificer, a locksmith. We travel where our services are needed."

"Yes, but why the Leviathan?", Anja prodded.

"Rhuar, you have incredible aptitude as both an engineer and a pilot. You could find steady work pretty much anywhere you happened to be. Why hang around on a little freighter when you could go to a big port and live comfortably?" Rhuar shifted position again, looking annoyed.

"I don't like getting tied up in station business," he said irritably.

"It's not like I haven't lived on stations before, I just don't like it. People expect you to do shit for them, they get mad if you don't think the way they do, they expect you to put up with things. If your home is on a ship you never have to worry about any of it. Just tell the decklickers to fuck off, you probably won't see them again after you leave." Anja nodded.

"I can understand that," she said.

"I felt mostly the same way about military postings when we were back on deployment. Work too long with the same team, people stop talking about the job and start talking about you." She laced her fingers behind her head, stretching her neck.

"It got worse the older I was. At least for the first hundred years I was close enough in age to the people I served with. But at two hundred? Three hundred? I had a tough old staff sergeant tell me that he grew up hearing stories about me from his great-grandmother." Anja closed her eyes and shuddered.

"It got complex, to say the least. It was easier to just talk with my sisters."

"To be fair," Rhuar pointed out, "you are really fucking old. It's a little weird for me too. I think you're actually older than my entire species."

"Not quite," Anja said with a grin.

"The Valkyrie program was actually a direct result of the uplift research they did on dogs. They reasoned that if they could raise an existing species to higher intelligence then designing a lifeform from scratch was the next hurdle. A lot of the same people were involved, at least on the academic side."

"You're shitting me," Rhuar said incredulously.

"I was making a joke." Anja raised her head to give Rhuar an arch look.

"Would I lie?", she teased.

"Our whole program was classified until a century later, so I expect that not many people knew the two were related."

"Wow," Rhuar said dazedly.

"I… yeah, wow." He pulled himself up to his haunches and looked at Anja contemplatively.

"I can't even imagine that much time. After a certain point it stops being a time and starts being a number again."

"It happens for me sometimes too," Anja admitted.

"Minds have to abstract certain things to function, annoyingly." She peered over at him, a smile flitting about her lips.

"You avoided my question." Rhuar blinked.

"I did? Which question?" Anja leaned closer to him, meeting his eyes intently.

"Why the Leviathan?", she asked.

"Of all the little freighters you could have chosen, why that particular ship?" He stared back at her for a second, then shrugged.

"It's the one I ended up on," he said noncommittally.

"It was time for me to head to a new station, I met the Captain on the docks. He let me ride with him to Ebernine in exchange for some routine maintenance work, flushing his field coils and stuff like that." Rhuar's mouth fell slightly open in a smile as he recalled the event.

"That was the deal, anyway, but it was so painful watching him fly off the dock that I insisted on piloting. After we touched down, he offered to let me ride with him to his next stop later that week, same deal as before." Rhuar shrugged.

"It worked out, so I stayed." Anja nodded.

"It makes sense," she agreed.

"Did you often barter for passage like that?"

"Oh, sure," Rhuar replied.

"That's standard for an artificer, everyone has shit that needs fixing. Most times you have to watch out, though, since they'll get you on the ship and work you until you drop." He grinned ruefully, shooting Anja a sly look.

"I had one ship that decided to go on a detour to a few extra stations while they pressured me into reinstalling their water filtration system," he said conspiratorially.

"The job would have taken weeks, even though the trip we agreed on was two days. Kept promising they'd get me there after one more stop, but I knew what they were up to. I waited until I had the whole filter disassembled then snuck off at the second station and told the local guild about it. Every artificer on the station refused to deal with them, all the merchants refused to sell them water - they had to run two days to the next stop tasting their own greywater."

"That was nicely done," Anja giggled.

"I assume you had no such problems while you berthed on the Leviathan."

"Nah, the Captain was…" Rhuar's face fell a bit.

"Well, you know how he was. Never asked me questions I didn't want to answer, never tried to gouge me for work. He's the one that got me into locksmithing when he started asking me to come on jobs with him." Rhuar settled down to the deck, resting his head on his paws. His voicebox clacked softly against the floor, muffling his speech.

"I don't know how he managed to survive before he found me, to be honest," Rhuar said softly.

"He was a locksmith but he couldn't open doors worth a damn. He was a freighter pilot but he couldn't fly. He was a trader, but he'd never pressure people into deals. By all rights he should have been bankrupt and begging for scraps but somehow it always worked out for him. I think it was that nobody could imagine him cheating you or taking advantage of you, it was so out of the question that suddenly you stopped thinking that way and just… talked with him," Rhuar said.

He looked up at Anja with a pained expression.

"He could talk with anyone," Rhuar said, a high whine creeping into his voice.

"He always listened, really listened. When we escaped Elpis I was so angry at everything, and he'd always know the thing to say when I was like that and I'd feel better, and now-" Rhuar cut off suddenly, a strangled noise issuing from his voicebox as he slumped to the deck. Anja reached over to brush her fingers gingerly through his fur, feeling him shudder as anguish gripped tight. They sat that way for a span of time, and no sound that disturbed the quiet.

"He was a good man," Anja said eventually, still gently ruffling Rhuar's fur.

"I had written him off as insignificant when I first met him, but he never shied away from a task. After Ysl I realized I had misjudged him."

"How do you do it?", Rhuar asked, his voice barely audible.

"You've lost everyone. How are you still okay?" Anja's fingers froze, then kept brushing.

"I am not," she said after a pause.

"Nor is Jesri, I think. We have no special secrets for you. We just have a mission, and a focus, and the hope that when we complete our task there is some solace to be had in victory." Rhuar's eyes flicked open and looked up at Anja.

"That sounds healthy," he noted, a hint of reproach coloring his tone.

"Probably not," Anja admitted with a wan smile. A quantity of silence passed by once more. After a while, Rhuar stood and shook himself before giving Anja an evaluating look.

"You're sneaky," he said, his exoskeleton smoothing his fur.

"You claimed you were bad at this, but the conversation went exactly where you wanted to take it." Anja's smile broadened.

"I believe I merely claimed a lack of understanding," she said slyly.

"Which remains true. I did have another purpose in coming up here, though."

"Oh, do tell," Rhuar said, feigning rapt attention. Anja rolled her eyes.

"Cute," she muttered.

"Do you feel up to helping us with something on the bridge? We found Xim Len's notes on Trelir and wanted you to keep an eye on the ship networks in case they contained anything… untoward."

"Lovely," Rhuar drawled.

"Yeah, I can help out. You want to go up there now?"

"You go ahead," Anja said.

"I will be along shortly."

"Okay," he replied. He took a step towards the door, then paused to look back at the Valkyrie sitting on the floor behind him.

"Hey Anja?", he said tentatively.

"Thanks for coming up." She smiled and rose to her feet.

"Anytime," she murmured. Rhuar nodded and padded out of the room, leaving Anja standing in the darkened space. She tilted her head back to look up at the dome once more and stood watching the flickering lights dance against the featureless blackness beyond.

"All right, what about this segment here?", David said, highlighting a portion of the displayed file. It was the last file, the one Xim Len had spent her final moments compiling, but it was proving to be a difficult read.

"This has a lot of the same command references we were seeing before, in the Emissary contact protocol." Jesri frowned.

"Yeah, but there are tons of them all bundled together," she said, tracing her finger over the screen.

"It's like it's setting up a bunch of concurrent sessions all stacked on top of each other."

"Potentially valuable, no?" Anja said.

"Volume of interaction is precisely what we need in this case." David nodded.

"You're not wrong, but we need to actually understand what we're dealing with before we start firing off messages. If we misuse the protocol it won't have any effect whatsoever."

"Right, fine," Jesri said frustratedly.

"So let's think about this logically. We already have the emergency contact protocol, which opens up a single two-way line of communication between the originating Emissary and the Gestalt." She pointed a finger at the screen, tracing down the hastily transliterated lines of code.

"This looks like it does that multiple times in parallel. Why?" There was a moment while they all considered the question.

"You know," Rhuar said thoughtfully, "it puts me in mind of shipjack protocols."

"How do you mean?", Anja asked.

"When I connect to the shipjack it isn't a unified data feed," Rhuar explained.

"There's a feed of visual information, auditory, tactile, etcetera. They all get split to different areas, so they all come over separately. Part of learning a new ship is sorting which feed all of the different inputs should go through - you remember how difficult it was for me to connect to the Grand Design at first? That was most of it, along with just the sheer volume of data." David scratched his head.

"So this is what, a way to shipjack into the Gestalt?" Realization dawned on Jesri's face.

"This is what Trelir did," she said excitedly, grinning at Anja.

"Remember? When we were talking to him and he suddenly got contacted by the Gestalt? He lost focus and seemed like he was seeing and hearing things we couldn't." Anja nodded.

"He called it an 'experience', it seemed like much more to him than just a simple message," she confirmed, straightening up in her chair.

"So, what, this will let Rhuar call up the Gestalt and have a chat?" Rhuar shuddered and backed away a step, shaking his head.

"Nope, nope, nope," he said vehemently.

"Aside from the fact that it sounds fucking dangerous, the degree of interconnectedness seems to be a lot greater than what my shipjack was designed for. Not just a little bit, I'm talking orders of magnitude. We would need the mother of all shipjacks to interface like that - not that I'm volunteering. I don't think it would work, and if it did work I think you'd see brain bits coming out my ears." He shivered again.

"No fucking thank you."

"Damn," Jesri said disappointedly.

"That would have been convenient. This protocol seems like it would provide a huge advantage over the simpler emergency ping."

"It would," David said slowly, paging through something outside their field of view.

"Quite an advantage, actually. One connection of this sort provides enough priority overrides that it could conceivably replace the distributed denial-of-service attack we were contemplating earlier. In conjunction with the distributed attack, it could more than double the amount of time we have to hunt network nodes."

"Which would be wonderful if we had some way to counterfeit the remote connection," Anja grumbled.

"I hope nobody is about to suggest that we recover another Emissary."

"No, not that," David said distractedly, still prodding at his console.

"Rhuar's comment about the 'mother of all shipjacks' just reminded me of something that I found in the old MANTRA files that we could never make heads or tails of." He grinned suddenly and jabbed his finger at his screen.

"There! Found it. They gave us a whole bunch of blueprints for equipment they thought might help us connect to the Gestalt's network from within the simulation, or that might help us exfiltrate - I honestly think they were guessing with a lot of it, but it was extremely helpful as a basis for our own designs. This might give us a starting point, at least." An image swam up on the screen next to his face, a tall cylinder with a chalice of razor-sharp petals flaring outward to enclose a hollow space at the top.

"This one was labeled as a 'primary network router', which it obviously isn't. We theorized that it was some sort of interface device with massive throughput potential but could never-""I've seen this before," Jesri interrupted, staring fixedly at the sketch of the pedestal onscreen. David paused to look at her bemusedly.

"Back on Earth?", he asked.

"No, right here on the ship," Jesri replied, looking at Anja and Rhuar significantly.

"In cargo hold 17-C122, behind a door labeled MANTRA."