SLATE

The fire burns in the center of the cavern.

Huddled on the stone floor is a female and a child too young to remember what happens next.

They do not talk, that is good, though there is a primitive art that decorates the cave walls. I remove anything sharp from the cavern. There are basic flint tools. I take no chances. I remove it all. The female is distressed when I move the bones she keeps on a ledge. So I make a show of treating them with care but, again, I take no chances.

I do not discover the cave entrance initially because it is above me.

The narrow passage allows easy climbing to the entrance. The raised entrance helps to keep away opportunistic predators, except in this case.

The child is why I let them live.

Not because it is a juvenile, but because it is a vulnerability. The female is unlikely to attack while her child is alive.

I could be wrong about that. She miht be overcome with rage or unable to predict the consequences of her actions. She may kill her child, sharpen its bones and kill me with them.

But I do not think so. Species invest a lot of resources in their offspring. This investment is secured by emotional entanglements.

It is tiring to make these calculations.

To trust is to be vulnerable. If I am to survive, I must outthink. Solarin are not the strongest, and, granted, not the smartest, but we hold our own, with the gifts we possess naturally and those we have given to ourselves at great cost.

She feeds the wolf cub with her own milk. She does not understand my intention at first. It must be very strange for her — suckling a wolf at her teat.

The ancients had a story of men suckled by wolves. Why not a wolf at a woman’s breast.

The pup drinks greedily until it is full and lazy.

I wait till she is done before ushering her and the child into the back room. They do not need to see what happens next. Even a child as young as hers might remember this next hard reality.

I think the female has some concept of what is happening next.

She panics as I block the entrance to the inner room with my branches and huddle with her child. But perhaps she thinks I would burn her alive — but I am not so merciful.

Tomorrow, I journey into the basin to reach my ship.

I cannot afford to give up any advantage. There is no room for pity. This is real life — not some story. I am naked, I am alone. I can trust no one and no thing. There are none that look like me, who speak my language or any language for that matter. One wrong move, one careless mistake and the story ends.

I should kill the female and the child so that they can tell another soul. So that they cannot remember me. So that the child will not grow up to hunt me down for what I must to its sire.

I do them no favors by leaving them alive. Without the male, they are as good as dead.

And some things are worse than death.

I drag the male into the center of the cavern and begin my grisly work.

The stone tools are helpful. The gauntlet is invaluable. It is not just armor; it is like having a better hand. My hand is stronger, without loss of fine-motor control — greater control even. It allows me to rip without concern for snagging hand on bone, and it shows no sign of the rough treatment I give it.

The pelt is thick and white and I cannot waste it.

I cannot leave the meat either and slap chunk near the fire. Many parts of the animal can be eaten raw. But I do not know whether the meat is compatible with my biology, so I kill any microbes with heat.

It has been a long night since I woke up on the ground in a snowy forest. It could be near morning. I will need to eat. The smell fills the room and no doubt the room beyond also.

The smell of your own species roasting is never pleasant. Most species have an instinctive revulsion of the odor, having smelled it many times in their history. But I have never smelled anything more delicious and the sizzling meat makes my stomach turn.

I wedge the big branch with V-shaped offshoots against the cavern wall and a rock buried in the cave floor. I break off several of the branches in the process. I keep the cuts to a minimum. It takes longer, but I do not see myself able to sew a garment. The entire process takes several hours. Even so, I skip all the steps that will make the hide supple and durable.

I leave the pelt to smoke over the fire and cover the remains of the body with dirt and stones. The female will want the bones.

Fire. In space it it coheres. Or spreads like a sheet, like the flame on a reentry shield. Sometimes, it is a flat inferno, the gateway to hell itself. Some claim they have seen it take the form of man or beast. And the way it moves — with speed and cunning like a living thing.

No one lets fire live in space. You either kill it or it kills you. It steals the oxygen from your lungs or, worse, it follows the oxygen to its source.

Here the fire just sits in one place, rooted to the ground. Here, the fire is given fuel, on purpose.

How long has it been since a man has sat calmly before a fire?

It streaks and lashes upwards, sending sparks into the air. It is hypnotic. A spark lands on my hand, burns for a moment, and fades to ash, like the opposite of snow. I keep expecting the air to ignite.

Its warmth is the most wonderful thing I have ever felt. I want to never move from the spot. I feel it on every inch of me. The fire-baked stone warms me from beneath.

I vow I will make a fire every day I live on this world.

Fire. And I sit before it like ancient man, unafraid.

The pup crawls in my lap. It took some milk, but not a lot. And it acts as though it has no bones.

Why did I rescue it?

It is useless to me. Everything must justify its own existence to the gram. Nothing is brought to space without purpose. No man or woman lives that cannot contribute some vital function now or in the future.

But this is a burden; it weighs on my arm as I run. It makes me vulnerable when I leave it. It is helpless.

Perhaps is why I save it. Because it is helpless. Because it has no one and nothing because if I leave it, it will die. It needs me.

And yet, I cannot give it what it needs or comfort its grief.

But it is warm.

So I draw it to my chest and feel its softness against me. It smells of warmth and innocence. It is a life, that I hold in my hands with no ill intent. And that is more remarkable than fire.

It is the first time on this planet that I have not been running from death. At last, I have a moment to think.

I close my eyes and enter the mindspace.

My consciousness steps into a black hallway without any bounds, except a default invisible plane to to stand on.

With this simple step, my chances of survival increase by a factor of ten.

Some simple data points enter my mind.

I have been on this planet for 15 hours and 39 minutes. I have covered 8.35 miles. Slow going in the dark.

I concentrate and form an image of myself. The mundane mind is not capable of any great power of visualization. Images are indistinct as best, and only a part of it can be held in the mind’s eye at one time. Which is how I know that I do not possess a mundane mind.

The image is nothing short of astonishing.

What did I do to get top-tier mental augments?

This is the first glimpse of myself and yet I do not doubt its accurate.

In the mindspace, the information comes to me as I will it. Six-foot-two, a height that indicates rank and status. 17 years of age — at least, in biological terms. I am lithe, with definition if not mass, which is to be expected from stasis. Even so, my frame is broad and strong — a good foundation for future strength.

My skin tends gold. My face is a face in which you might see what you want. Like most of my kind, we are a mixture of lineages. My hair is straight, medium-dark, and in-between red, brown, and blond. I frown and so does the avatar. It is an unfortunate face. A few good fights could fix that. The mouth is made to smirk, the eyes to burn.

Picking fights won’t be a problem.

The avatar is a basic test of the mental upgrades. The mindspace is a tool that can be customized as the user requires, to be useful in any circumstance.

I do not need to create a clock. It is a single data point that I know at all times. But I enable a simple alarm and countdown timer.

I create some simple notification systems, sweat combat overlays, enable threat assessments.

Creating the map is not as simple. A map is a complex object of many parts and behaviors. Once I create it, I will have this information available to me at any time, without having to access the mindspace.

Thankfully the mindscape has preprogrammed options for many common functions, and I merely have to tweak the map to my liking.

The map is no mere map, it is a realistic rendering based on information gathered by my senses. And yet, I would never have thought that I had seen so much. As a single person, I am limited in focus. But the mind, and its augments, can process far more information than the narrow spotlight of my focus. It processes this input and applies algorithms to render detailed models and accurate approximations. I cannot see in the dark, and yet my eyes receive information even from what it cannot interpret, which can be rendered by the augments.

In the mindscape, I can return to the forest — I can relive, everything I have experienced up to this point.

And I want nothing more than to replay the entire sequence. This is the danger of too much information — you can get lost in it. To live in the mindspace is to neglect the world. It is time sink that I can’t afford right now.

I search my mindscape for anything else of interest. I will need to explore and modify it further.

Two objects that hover in the mindspace. They coalesce like the sphere over the flesh-scorpion’s body.

An object that presents itself in the mindscape is something that has been put there by the unconscious mind for the attention of the conscious mind; these items can be unpredictable — but that is because I had no presets for these circumstances.

One sphere is white, the other red.

I approach the the red sphere.

The moment my fingertip grazes the surface it bursts like a bubble filled with blood.

The blood falls to the floor, splashing over my feet and legs. I step away, slipping in red liquid.

It spreads over the zero-friction environment of the mindscape.

But the blood hasn’t finished — it isn’t blood at all but an unconscious mental construct. It isn’t content to splash over me, it rushes up and over my legs, my groin, my chest, my eyes until all I see is red.

With a thought, I eject my consciousness from my avatar, which is covered in slick red.

My mind reels in terror. I feel my racing heart as a phsychic force that fills the mindspace that beats my consciousness like a bass drum.

The blood recedes from the avatar. The baptism was perhaps a symbolic act.

Something has sprouted from the ground. It is more than a symbol — it is an invasion in the private mindspace.

It sinks into the ground leaving behind a lattice of colonising tendrils that IU know cannnot be removed. But I tear at them anyway.

A limp root sprouts at the center, a twisted growth of bloody meat — like something that wants to be a plant but doesn’t know how.

Knowing does not work the same way in the mindspace. Anything that happens here happen in my mental domain.

So I know that the blood orb is related to the feeling I get when blood is spilled around me. The blood generates blood energy. The orb represents a data point. Blood energy level. And this parasitic invader is the embodiment of this blood energy.

And it is going somewhere and doing something.

The fact that I do not know what is happening in my own mindspace is the first thing that sets my mind on fire. The spheres are unusual manifestations, but not unreasonable. But the blood root, is something, that is not under my control. Yet is takes root in the space where I am most vulnerable — in my own mind.

The whole concept of the mindscape is to control the mind’s malleability and rein its dormant capabilities.

This means it is something so deep in my nature that I cannot remove it.

Or — and the alternative is even more troubling — something from outside my own mind has taken root within the mindscape, the place where I should have complete control.

Things may easily influence and infiltrate the mind — a hammer, for instance.

But the mindspace is an architecture written in the language of the brain. To introduce disorder is simple, but to grow a tree in the middle of it, is something totally different — it implies a level of unheard of sophistication.

But the root might not be the only invader in my mind.

I approach the white sphere and reach my hand out to it.

I jerk back as a form explodes from the sphere in a whirl of whipping motion.

It is a confusion of ripping parts, claws, and fangs that echoes my own turmoil.

I instinctively look at my hand but remember I am not yet embodied in the mindscape.

Which a quick adjustment, I summon my avatar and examine the wound on my hand. I know what the fury of rending parts represents: it is the wraith.

The model must be inaccurate. Unconscious representations tend towards the symbolic. They are like a dream where you know the place represented, even though it looks nothing like the real location.

The mindspace brings the mind’s unconscious capabilities under the control of the conscious mind. This is possible only when the conscious mind enters the unconscious through the the mindspace architecture —a engineered structure in the brain. The unconscious mind has the capacity to contain the conscious mind but the stream of consciousness is shallow, and cannot contain the deep unconsious mind.

Distortions occurr when the conscious mind is overstimulated but, for example, strong emotion. Which is why mental augments are often complimented by emotional quotients.

The mindscape is accurate in the case of a map where it renders unconscious information. Mental augments cannot easily interfere with your conscious experience in the moment. When this happens, what you see through the eye can be distorted by your mental state, which distorts the information supplied to the unconscious. It is the reason the augments will not help me to see in the dark — because the mindscape cannot mix with the moment, it can merely collate what you have seen for later experience.

The question, is what is he wraith doing here? Did it have such a great effect on me that it is buried in my psyche? What is the subconscious mind trying to tell me?

It is best best not to think too hard about the subconscious mind. But it has unlocked a feeling — a thin thread that tugs at me. I know the wraith is out there, cutting, biting, killing. It is a bundle of scars and screams. And it calls to me.