NOTHING

I thought you knew. Frack me. I thought everyone knew. The thought slips before the number can bridle its mind.

The orb flashes gold, radiation scouring skin.

“Oh, my hearts.” The ambulator gives a horrified wobble. “You brute. Have a care. This heart is awfully sensitive.” A long finger presses into folds of perfect skin.

“Deep apologies Lord. For I am ignorant.” The number folds. “And greatly disobedient. If I have in any way…”

The Scribe licks his lips. “Oh, shush! Shush my, cupid. Think nothing of it.” His smile divides into a dozen more of equal beauty. “Oh, I loved her so dearly!” He digs into flesh, searching for the precise spot. “She was just what I needed, as though heaven itself gave her to me. I never could bear to see her hurt.”

“Think nothing, child.” His hand clinks with Jeweled chains.

Child. The number flinches. For anyone else, it is a mortal insult. But the Scribe will say anything he wishes to a number and the number cannot complain.

Perhaps in the Hemisphere, where the sun shines but does not burn — they speak of child. But not here.

The Scribe looks around the lines of bodies. “What cruel animal would punish them so?”

“My lord?” Frag. A question. The number hastens to cover his slip. “You know Lord.”

They always know.

The minds of the Echelon are engineered to carry the burden of knowing. The mind of a number is not.

“Yes, yes. But this tongue is too tender to say.” The scribe shakes his head in humility. His face moves, left and right, barely disturbing the soft outer layers of smooth gold skin.

His tongue has a thousand times the taste receptors of a number, even a high number, or prime, and a whole cabinful of new taste areas that a number could not conceive of and would have no use for. Such sensation must be torture. Foods must be meticulously prepared to meet the elevated taste, giving rise to the expression, “A chef expires before its ingredients.”

The number had never fully understood the saying, for meal tubes never expired.

“And where are they kept, these, malefactors?” He struggles with a foul taste and the number considers whether a foul taste might injure the Scribe with their acute sensitivity. “The ones who inflict this cruelty on — on their own…”

“I cannot say it.” A groan burbles in the Scribe’s throat as he wretches. The number holds a mouthful of air, a thing frowned upon. He might sell the spilled calories, perhaps to a butcher or nurse.

But the scribe stops short with a teasing wretch, forcing the contents back down.

“Not bef — not under the Eye.” He wipes the sheen from his forehead. The privilege of sweat.

A mistake — no one is before the eye. The number is not the only one who is nervous and observed.

“Always awake.” The Scribe drones, adding a flourish of dextrous fingers.

The number’s eyes fix on the flung droplets, blinking.

“Never asleep.” Its hydraulics stagger an irregular rhythm as the number marks the unforgivable delay.

But the Scribe is distracted by his own error.

“The number apologizes, my Lord.” Not worthy to see the Scribe, the number bows low facing away. “The malefactors are kept in the levels above.”

“Above. How ghastly. How cruel! You wake her!” He looks to the Hemisphere above. He may well be able to search through the prime ark's layers. “Surely, it is the parasites that should be above, and the hosts below?”

“As you say, my Lord.” The number straightens slowly. Its mind searches for handholds and grasps the Lord’s words. “It is considered a greater punishment for the…hosts to be above, and that their — rather, its parasite is below.

SLATE

“Warning. Proximity alert. Initiating emergency protocols.”

The tone is calm and lilting. It triggers knowings, that do not make sense even as such.

I hear it in the crests and falls of waveforms: the voice is not odd but even.

But not like any even I have heard. It is loose and dangling. Far from the brash alarm, it is buried in soft layers.

It is something called female. Though it seems strange that the word is rooted in another term, male.

It comes with strobing knowings: charts, anatomics, xenobiological data that break over me into scattered fragments.

But the voice smooths through the mental haze, not with sharpness but ease.

This isn’t the first time I hear it, but it is the first time it locks and seals.

I think…it has been speaking to me for some time. But the meaning is lost in the rhythmic sounds until it repeats. Then again.

Red light still searches the cockpit for the wails of the siren.

The mental haze returns. The light isn’t helping my concentration. I’ve mangled the back wall of the cabin — smashed it into shrap. It did not belong here. The old world and new do not mix. A boil on perfect skin. One less last thing.

Yet I feel it’s broken pieces in scattered feelings.

Smashing the light would be a great deal easier than the heavy siren. But I have no heart or pity for it and owe it no kindness.

My head still pounds, every bit as red as the light. Every muscle in my emaciated body pulls at cross purposes, like convergent fault lines. But the ruins of a smote enemy give a cold strength, allowing me to trap thoughts and hang them together.

A sheen of black crunk and a fire suppressor is the clothing I wear.

You might say the suppressor is for modesty.

You might not.

I notice there is metal burrowing into my sternum like a flesh crab. It has smooth segments in a rough triangle and is hot from the storm in my chest.

It dribbles black slag from torn wires. And dark flow from the veins of my inner arms.

And for a moment I reel under the thought that my blood is black.

But no. Red. I see red too.

“Com — puter?”

There is an overlong pause but that may be the weight of my expectation which slows time.

But there is a reply — I don’t just imagine it.

“I’m listening, Jack.” The voice says.

Jack. Jack? A strange denominator. But it does not feel right. But why would it? Why would I have a name?

It’s been alone too long, developed a personality disorder — the disorder of having one.

It is known to happen.

Melodic and distant, with an edge of deep-mind madness. A voice at home in a luxury cruiser and the moon-touched who move in them.

I am not one of those, I think.

No name, no fancy ship. Though, I’d sooner steal a ship than a name.

And why not steal it? If a bot can make up a name, why can I not make up a crime?

“Could you turn off the lights please?”

“Of course, Jack,” she says. “Alarm deactivated.”

The light fades as an artifact of vision, and not dying light.

It had been that simple all along, hadn’t it?

All it took was a calm word, not a blunt instrument. Not the erasure of an ancient artifact.

What ship didn’t have a voice interface? But thought comes easier now that I’ve gained some bandwidth and I reck I’ve run out of excuses for acting thoughtless.

“Computer, report. What in the everblack frag is going on, she-thing?”

I bring the sentence to a rough landing, ignoring the flaring gutter mods. It does not read as an insult. Just mangled usage.

My legs are heavy cinderblocks slagged together with bricks for joints and rusted screws for tendons.

I barely notice the static tingle entering the omnisphere, a control zone that exploits physics, virtual environments, and AI-assisted brain functions to create lightning reactions or “phasing”.

A hand on the omnichair is the reward of precious few steps. Not the smartest move for a chair prefixed with “Omni”, but my leaden limbs anchor me, and the chair does not penalize.

It is made to adapt to lightning maneuvers in the slipstream. Assisting the human body to survive sudden G-forces that cannot be filtered with field tech.

“Yes.” The she pauses thoughtfully. “You have been woken from stasis due to an unanticipated anomaly in space-time.” It is distant, and outward, as though talking to stars. “We have entered the gravitational field of a planetary body. Thrust and phasing core are unavailable. The ship will impact the planet's surface in…twenty-eight minutes.

I let out a tired breath. Time, but for what?

She — just she, the mods correct — reads my thoughts.

“But, Jack, you will lose consciousness due to the pressure of reentry in three minutes and…28 seconds.”

The pauses are for my benefit, not any inherent difficulty of calculation.

The words hits me harder than the lash of sound that fragged me awake.

Three minutes and…twelve seconds to live. To feel. To be. Ten. Nine. Eight.

Life is brief and brutal, but death is worse. At least, to the living. And I don’t want to die.

I breathe through the cement that settles on me.

But I didn’t come for the stability of the chair. There are no windows on a spaceship. Too small to be useful, or big enough to be a structural liability. The sphere renders environments in three dimensions at a level that exceeds human vision and reality itself.

“Show me.”

The sphere slams on, flipping the omnichair to face “down”, as much as that word applies in space. The world spins, resolving with tingling motes as it tilts to me.

Suddenly, I am oriented to the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Yes, it is the right word.

“We enter the boundary of the upper atmosphere. You will experience…kinetic forces, Jack. Please, be secure.”

But I can’t help myself. I need to be closer. I slip from the chair, floating in the grav nexus, as I feel the first tremors of atmosphere.

I have to touch it. To feel it’s real.

Am I still in the coffin, wires jumping my brain?

Is this the flood of chemicals to ease death? Am I already gone?

I run a hand over the surface of the planet feeling the sematic feedback.

I am a god that trails his hand over a lush forest and feels the wet of bending trees, the cold of white ice…snow. There was a time, long ago, when the sapient did not feel pictures. They would never know what it feels like, to grasp handfuls of trees as the world turns.

It isn’t real. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Nothing but this.

Desolate planets have a grandeur to them, even barren and scarred as they are. It is a beauty best admired from afar.

This is nothing like that.

The world spins to verdant green, scoops of gold sand. I lift my hand over blue oceans that make me shiver with just the thought of touching wet. A finger trails a snaking river to an azure lake.

Free-flowing water; great pools of it. I cannot conceive it.

So much water that an ark could not drink it all in a thousand years.

My hand shakes but that may be because the ship is shaking.

Cold pushes over my cheeks.

My hand slams through the rendering, feeling the sharp brain pain that is the punishment of transgressing the sematic boundary, pain commensurate with the waves spreading over the surface of the world.

Pain shatters the illusion and the dream.

“No.” I rip my head away. Unable to look. “It can’t. It isn’t.”

I barely notice as I drift back towards the chair.

“There, Jack.” The cool voice says. “It’s okay.”

The denomination does not grow on me. It jars me each time she says it.

And yet the words from a circuit are somehow comforting.

After a thousand years abandoned between barren worlds and burning stars, nothing is more sure than this. The optimism of habitable planets was a fraudulent science and a fault hope. Or perhaps we just couldn’t find them, scattered and distant as we are.

This planet is a cruel hope.

The psychosis is well known. It was known before sapiens left their home planet, a mythic paradise, but it has never been more acute than now — whenever now is.

The mind fixates on a candidate planet. They traverse vast interstellar distances, seeing generations born and die. Over time, they develop quasi-religious beliefs, superstitions, and rituals. Their Archons become prophets, models become scripture. Blind conviction and not a little mania set them down on hostile worlds.

It can happen in a generation, to a single sapien. But more often the madness is a contagion that grips the entire ship.

It is not hard to understand why.

The alternative is to wander the wet void, worn down by time, choosing who will wake, who will die. And never finding a planet a hundredth as promising as this — this fantasy world.

It’s called the longing and it seizes my chest even as the safety harness tightens around me.

I close my eyes. The vision threatens to consume me, and I must think.

What if?

What if it isn’t a dream?

It wouldn’t be the first time the clarion echoed with a mad dream.

The solarin is bound by oaths and more oaths, as all the spores of earth, to their embattled species — to the crushed remnant.

I do not need to search for it. The third thing hard-coded into the ship is at my right hand.

The shell lifts before I even realize what I’m doing.

I stare down at the naked red button.

“For Sol.” I invoke the first sun as I crush the button with my fist. “And solarin.”

The clarion will send a signal to a network of self-replicating drones that train in stealth and evasion. A confirmation beyond the wails of my enemy.

Data from the ship’s sensors will encrypt with the transmission, and whoever was left, would make up their mind.

If I am to die, no one will find out I did so with hope.

Would it be too much, to be buried in dirt? I would not have hoped for as much. Or — in water. Bury me in a lake, cover me in blue.

But not alone.

“Computer,” I say lazily. “Do you have a name?”

The G-forces push on me, rocking me in the soft cradle of the omnichair.

Her voice is a lullaby tucking my mind into warm blankets. “I am not like you, Jack, of flesh. I am a hundred names and not one that you could speak.” The voice is sad. “You could never contain my names. Nor could you speak even one.”

“Com-Computer.” I slur as my eyes close.

“Yes, Jack?”

“Do — do I have one?”