Stories told in storms

Arc-worlds don’t have weather like other worlds do. The ocean is a battery powering engines, the storms recycling of power sources. In the time I’ve been on the arc-worlds, I’ve seen it snow twice. Until now I’d never considered the worlds capable of producing a blizzard. Arc-Worlds exist to restart humanity if it goes extinct. I’ve been through four of those; I have no idea how often it happened before my time. The first arc-world was inhabited by the humans of this era; it is the oldest arc-world and humans lived on on in my time, too. Then they had a war.

That world is gone now. Only six arc worlds remain, including the seventh. The one I designed, the one I’m on now. It is snowing on all the arc-worlds, the psychic pressure of humanity seeking knowledge, weapons, power, pushing against ancient defenses. They won’t get through, but they could damage the arc-worlds. Cause the defenses to wake up and eradicate humanity without even noticing. The arc-worlds could be damaged, and there are limits to what I can do.

I’m a mechanic. A very good one, probably the best one there is in human space now, but much of the arc-worlds existed long before my time and uses technologies I barely grasp, sciences I can understand the basics of and no more. I was eight when I died, my mind placed into another body: a cylinder on wheels. Tranferring, they called it, and it became rare after my time. The people of my time died in a war against the alien hingari; I survived on an arc-world. I’ve lived on them through three more reboots of the human species. This one has produced psychics who use almost no technology, whose minds can tear wormholes in the fabric of the universe to travel between locations. But hyerpsace remains the domain of the hingari. Perhaps our jailers, perhaps not.

I watch the storm fall, and send out the invite on every open channel. It takes less than ten minutes for my request to be answered; the man I let in through the protections is older. Balding, tall, surrounded in a shimmering energy flux. He studies me for a long moment; I do the same, though I don’t bother with a viewscreen or projection for interaction.

“You are Dar?”

“I am.”

“I am called Mulih. We seek –.” He pauses. “We cannot get into your mind.”

“I am shielded,” I say dryly.

“We-I I apologize. using words is – difficult. Strange, with nothing behind them. The arc-worlds contain power that could boost our own; our seers have seen this.”

“You think you can claim them?”

“No. Even if we formed a gestalt we could not. It is humbling.”

“It shouldn’t be. There have been psychics before, and many other kinds of humans as well. The arc-worlds are here and they aren’t any longer. In my time, they weren’t used for war. Humans lived on four of them as a place of refuge from politics and wars for a long time. You don’t seem to have this problem.”

“We seldom do; it is impossible to hate what one understands.”

“You don’t understand me.”

“We wish to; Shino said we were not to fear you, and not to make war on the hingari. She has been dead for some time, and we have grown as far as we can without access to hyperspace. Without then power the hingari deny us. They may be right in this, they may not. Will you aid us?”

“No.” I don’t move.

“I could destroy you.”

“You could try. But I have a duty – chosen, yes, but still a duty – to see that humanity continues if you fail. If you think you are more important than that, then you are welcome to try.”

Mulih pauses and considers options, studies the falling snow. “Would you help us if you could, Dar.”

“I did when I talked to Shino. I told her about the previous reboots – incarnations, you would call it – of humanity. Left her to mull on that and where it would lead. Every other time, humanity has fought the hingari when it could, built weapons for that, forged entire societies around it. And we’re lost! I could unlock every secret, every technology here, and it might not make a difference at all. All the arc-worlds are for, all I can do is to say that you can find a better way. That there has to be one. That the hingari wouldn’t be there if they didn’t have a reason.”

Mulih is quiet, holding out a hand to the snow, and then is simply gone. I wait until the snow ends and go back inside, deep into the bedrock of the arc-world. And I wait. Oh, how I wait.

echoes

The first thing, the truest thing that Boy noticed were her eyes. Pale ice over an artic ocean underneath, a dead-grey suit trying to blunt them, a plump body to disguise. He didn’t think the disguise was deliberate but couldn’t have said if that made it a good thing or not. The room he had been put in was small, off-green: a cheap table and cheaper chairs. There was a smaller table by the door with coffee and water; Boy didn’t understand coffee. The world didn’t need stimulants.

“You have been sitting here for an hour,” the woman said, her calm a cracking ice. “You didn’t have water once.”

Boy said nothing; there were rules about not taking gifts, about drinking and eating in strange places. That they might not be true didn’t stop them from being rules.

“The officer in charge called me.” She placed a small square of paper on the desk.

Boy picked it up, read it aloud to himself. “Arabetha Franklin, Social Worker.” There was more, but that was the important bit. Speaking things gave them power. Sometimes.

“And your name?” Arabetha said.

“Boy.”

“That isn’t a name.”

“It’s mine,” he said, with some heat behind the words.

Arabetha let out a sigh. “We can’t help you unless you help us as well. Who are your parents?”

“I said I don’t remember.”

“That only happens in stories.” The social worker stood, staring down at him. “Do you want your face plastered over every paper and tv station in the city as we find your parents for you? Do you think they will want that?”

Boy went still at that. Behind Arabella, his shadow smiled against the wall. His shadow had hair, which Boy didn’t, and a smile that made Arabella’s eyes seem kind. Boy didn’t like the smile but he had no way to stop it as his shadow reached into Arabella’s and pulled forth ghosts to plaster them onto the wall like faded photographs.

Arabella’s smile was a flash of ugly victory at whatever she saw in Boy’s face. “Well?”

Boy stared past her into the phantoms that faded even as his gaze took them in, listening to whispered words at the edge of hearing. Arabella’s hand slammed into the cheap table, shaking her coffee. She’s said other things.

Boy looked up. Her words flattered, faltered. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. “You were kind to Zoe. She was lost, scared, had run away from her step-mother like they do in a children’s story. She went back home, after interventions with her parents, but it wasn’t enough. You were less kind to Joseph but still helped him get into a community college, gave him everything you could but nothing replaced the high in the end.”

“What?” Arabella’s voice is a knife blade, ugly and scared and other things Boy isn’t sure about.

“The ghosts we carry with us are the ones that break our hearts, until we have nothing left for them to haunt. I think it’s like that sometimes,” Boy said. “Danielle isn’t a ghost yet but she is terrified her parents will refuse to accept she never should have been Daniel, will never see the truth inside their son. Too many stories like his end badly, and those are the only ones she knows.”

Boy stood, and it hurt to see Arabella flinch back from him.

“How do you know that?” she said. “Is this some trick?”

“I’m not Mr. Fox,” Boy said, though she had no way of understanding that. “I think, I think I gained some things, when I lost myself. Or they gained me. I don’t know. I just know everyone carries anb echo of the Wasting inside them and sometimes I can see that.”

The social worker said nothing. Boy wanted to try to explain, but somehow ‘sorry’ didn’t seem enough and he had no idea how to explain what he didn’t understand himself. She didn’t move as he walked to the door, didn’t even react when the locked door opened for him (though Boy was unaware it was locked at all); he asked his shadow to take her phantoms with it but had no way of knowing if that happened at all.

No one stopped him from leaving the police station even though Boy was certain they should have tried. He found the nearest streetlight and just stood under it, as if somehow the light could make his shadow go away.

Clifftops

I am watching a world create cliffs when they find me: jagged grey cliffs towering above an ocean. The water is filled with datastreams, the pounding of waves on rock powering the ancient technologies that are building landmasses on a world. The air smells of fresh-cut grass, and will for some centuries yet as terraforming engines, applications and linkages piece themselves together into the most efficient forms.

I am seeing it all from white cliffs further away, among the first geological features the world had of stone, and in the centre of them the various strata spell out the names of friends I have had in languages long dead and gone. It is my only indulgence, and I doubt it will last. But that feels as if it is for the best, that the past is buried under changes. That we move on. That we can pretend to move on.

The human simply steps out of the air beside me. No spaceship, no disruption-engine. Just the raw power of the human mind to move her across light years from Braden’s World, the closest inhabited system. She is tall, skin shifting white to blend into the cliffs, air and nutrients brought from Braden’s World in a shimmering field about her body.

“Our seers did not believe it to be real when they found this place.” Her voice is deep and sure, pressing against my mind. “The technologies here are alien to us: alive, dead, aware. Too many to count, all building a world at the very edges of our reach. An akashic record filled with selves waiting to be born.”

“I know how they feel. I felt the same for a long time on the first Arc-World I visited.”

“There are more.”

“There are six; one was destroyed long ago and rebuilt; this will be the seventh. The others were approaching hard limits as to what could be changed, could be added, could be adapted. This one won’t have those.”

She moves closer, slowly, to circle me. She is human. I am not, a cylindrical shape of treads, with limbs and sensors inside my chassis. I was human once, before becoming a transfer, being placed inside this body. Humanity has destroyed itself four times, in wars or by their own hand, during my long life. In each, the arc-worlds rebooted the species, made a new Earth. That is what the Arc-Worlds are for and they are hidden even from the alien hingari. I think.

“I am Shino,” she says. “I do not know what you are. Your mind feels human, but – very strange.”

“I’m Dar.” It’s been so long since I’ve said my name that it takes a moment to recall it. I alter my chassis a little, shifting apps and linkages until I have a viewscreen again, flick it on so she can see a human face in it. “This is how my face would have looked if I was thirty or so.”

“You are not an alien.”

“No. What do you know of them?”

“We call them hingari, and they exist in the alpha-space, in the pathways that allow for true astral transit past the speed of light. They will not let us pass them in it, not let us explore beyond them to the rest of the universe. There has been talk of war, a seeking for weapons. Stories about worlds filled with ruins. And then the seers found this.”

“I didn’t mean for it to be found; I figured it was a possibility. I’m a mechanic: I’m good with tech, even the organic kind, but you’ve developed purely mental abilities and I had no way of being certain I could hide this from you.”

“Did you want to?”

I smile at that, rueful and tired. “Some days I don’t know.”

“Oh.” Shino studies me. “You are shielded from me. Even the GESTALT could not break your shielding, I think, if it still existed. We were forced to destroy the Whole-Mind. It was us and not us, too big to think of small things.”

“I know. Before you one group mind detonated itself. I was – pleased you avoided that.”

“Before us.” She stares down at the white cliffs under us, out at the grey ones being made. “These Arc-Worlds have been used, then.”

“Four times that I have been privy to.” She lets out a hiss of shock. “Mine was technology built from the world, taking stone and iron, electricity and gravity, forging tools out of that. I called it normal, of course, because for me it was. In one, organic technology existed but their craft were no match for the hingari. The third was the group mind that detonated itself, the fourth wiped themselves out in wars long before they left Earth. And now you.”

“And you have done nothing?”

“I have waited to be found. I have hidden myself, the Arc-Worlds. What they mean. The Arc-Worlds are mostly automated: they would run just fine without me, but wouldn’t learn as quickly from each new embodiment of humanity. I am sure there are some out there hidden even from these worlds, safeguards piled upon safeguards, hope stacked up against despair.” I extend a limb from my chassis to gently brush the white cliffs. “I am a mechanic, Shino. I was born one, I have been one, and I can fix things. People are not things. If I interfered, if I did things, or taught them –” I shake my head in the viewscreen. “There is no way that ends well. Better to be alone than be a god.”

“What do you wait for?” she says, barely a whisper of thought.

“I don’t know. The Arc-Worlds need me a little. I think they like the company, so stuff breaks down for me to fix. The hingari have always been called that, in every form of humanity I know of. I suppose I’m waiting to see what happens if we do move beyond them. If we find out what they are. I have a few theories but no way to prove any. At least not without risking the Arc-Worlds being noticed by them.”

“You have wisdom we could use, then.”

I snort; it startles her a little. “No. Most of the technology in the arc-worlds isn’t anything you could use, let alone understand. I don’t understand over half of it, and I’ve been studying and learning it for a long time. You’ve built an entire civilization based around the human mind. Everything I could show you would just limit what you can become on your own.”

“And if we force the issue?”

I blink. “You could try; others have.”

“So you will just sit here and be a second chance, over and over, never helping?”

I move toward her; Shino steps back. “What do you think being found is, if not a helping?” I snap. “I have seen humanity die out four times, Shino. Four. I don’t know how often it happened before I ended up on the Arc-Worlds, how often we’ve done this dance of discovery and forgetting. The Arc-Worlds aren’t a second chance at all but a whole new throw of the dice. Knowing this, knowing that every time humanity has been rebooted it has failed, that is the lesson. That is the message of this place. To be better, to do better.” I move back. “Think about it: you’ve beaten your own Gestalt, walk to to other worlds with a thought.”

“The hingari are still our jailers.”

“Then you’ve made your choice. You can leave now.”

For a moment a storm gathers about her and the white cliffs shudder under me, but the moment passes as she vanishes a moment later.

I can’t cry; some times, like today, I find it a blessing.

Hidden Homes

Homes are places where you hide. It doesn’t always feel like that, not until it does. But I am in one of the control rooms of the world known as Arc-6. And I am watching the hingari exterminate humanity for the second time. There are only five arc-worlds left; one was destroyed by the humans running it owing to some political or religious belief. The others remain, each capable of restarting the entire human race in the fact of extinction. I thought they were good, when I first ended up on one.

That it meant I wouldn’t be alone. But these humans developed organic technologies, spaceships grown from seeds and biological weapons capable of terraforming worlds in days. And they discovered hyperspace. And ran into aliens who don’t want humanity to advance through it. An entire civilization turned into a war-machine in under two generations, organic craft launched deep into hyperspace that could barely withstand the stresses of transit.

They had no hope. But they had been denied, and so they acted. The hingari craft have changed, no longer shattering the bonds of mater in local space simply by entering it. But their weapons remain as potent as ever. Entire worlds are scoured of life, entire fleets burned out of the sky like candles blown out. Arc-6 could help them. The arc-worlds have weapons and defenses enough to hide even from the hingari. But then the hingari would find them.

I sit. I watch worlds burn, and I feel very old and small as I relay commands to the other arc-worlds. No one is on them now. There’s just me, helping an automated process along. Pulling Earth together from the wreckage. Jump-starting humanity again. Praying. I don’t even know what to: ourselves, I think. That humans can learn. That this time can be different. This is the second time I’ve seen humanity destroyed. The first was a weapon, of our own doing, probably meant for use against hingari. It created an energy pulse that wiped out all higher life forms – including humans. I survived, because I was on an arc-world. Because transfers are tough.

I am the only transfer left. And I know things. And I’ve learned things. The arc-ships are old, far older than I. I think they’ve been used before my time, that humanity has doe this dance over and over. And the hingari must know the arc-worlds exist. They must be able to find them, if they wanted to. But they allow us to emerge again, to relearn that hyperspace exists. To find them. And each time we learn they are jailers who inhibit our travel we go to war.

And each time it is a war we cannot win.

(I am happy I use ‘we’ when talking about humans. Sometimes I forget to. I am a cylinder on treads with limbs. It’s easy to forget a human consciousness was placed in me. That Dar was a real child.)

I watch. I wait. I wonder if humans will find the arc-worlds this time. What they will make of me. I watch their technologies. I learn how they work. I am a mechanic. No matter what else I am, I am a mechanic. I learn, I build things, I fix them. I steal ideas they barely understand, add technology to the arc-worlds. I watch them flatter as the war nears its end as I move about, pacing floors and vast hallways on treads. It’s an old, old nervous habit, one that has never gone away.

Arc-ships are not perfect. In the time they’ll find a place in the universe where a hingari craft was destroyed, a void a billion light-years wide devoid of stars, of atoms, of matter or dark matter. And they’ll begin to wonder about aliens, or humanity that might have existed long ago. Make theories about humans existing before dinosaurs. They’ll begin hunting down arc-worlds.

And I hide them. I hide myself. I don’t know what they will make of me, a human who isn’t human anymore. They might call me a god, or a monster, or a servant of the hingari. I don’t know. But my name is Dar, and I am a mechanic and I hide the arc-worlds from the humans seeking me because I never wanted to me more than that.

I wish they would have found me. Before they find the hingari.

But they don’t.

Different, But The Same

I leave the bedroom slowly. There is a magician sleeping on a bed, satiated and passed out, and every part of me aches in ways entirely pleasant. When first we met, he was potent enough to bind me, and Walkers are not easily bound by any magic within or without the Universe. His price for freedom had been a night together, and the next time had not been long after. It had been months until this time, and this had been – slower. Less desperate. More human, less magician. I am not sure what to make of that.

The cottage the magician asked to let him and the boy stay in is small; two bedrooms, a living area with a kitchen, little else. It is hardly what a magician could command, but perhaps that is the point. I do not know. We don’t talk, in the times we have spent together. Not in words.

The boy is sitting on the couch, playing a fighting video game on the tv, controller in hands. He looks to be ten, as humans count years, but is not human at all. Once I thought him to be a potential Walker – magicians consider us the magicians of the places outside the universe, and they may not be far wrong – but now I am not sure. He hides his true nature as anything other than a human boy even from me, and Walkers can go anywhere. That is what we are, and anywhere includes the hearts of others and their deepest truths as well.

I can find no way into the creature called Jay, not through himself. He looks up at my regard, mouth a fiercely thin line. “He thummoned you; it’th done tho you can go now.”

And there is something under the words. Perhaps it is the lisp – damage from entering the universe badly – but I catch something I doubt he wishes me to. I smile, feeling my body shift and change to match Jay’s own desires. And pause, changing back as I feel the trap under that, the binding existing under the desire. “Clever.”

The boy grins. “You would have made an awethome Pokemon,” he says proudly.

“I imagine so. He would not have approved.” Nothing. “And will call me again, you know.”

Jay pauses the game, setting the controller down. “He doethn’t need you!”

“I imagine he does, or he would not have called me to this place.”

The boy attempts no further binding on me, just looks – small, hurt, trying to hide it. “I’m hith friend.”

I pause. I should leave, but his hurt is a real thing I doubt the magician will ever see. I sit on the couch. He starts, eyes narrowing. I speak my true name, offering it up to be bound with. Not all of it, but enough that Jay skitters back in shock. I had intended for him to be less afraid, and he is afraid of why I offered it. Clever indeed.

“Do you know what I am?” I say softly.

“A Walker, who walkth inthide and Outthide the univerthe whenever you want,” Jay says, making a face at how hard it is to get all that out. “Even I know that, but you altho like to have thex with people and I don’t know if motht Walkers do that?”

“A Walker is a title. We are made far more than born.” It is a secret, and not one as well. “We are servants of the Lords of the Far Reaches.”

Jay goes still a moment, colour draining from his face, then shoves his right thumb into his mouth and begins sucking on it nervously, squirming over to the edge of the couch. The Far Reaches are, next to this created Universe, the only stable place in Outside, an idea as much as a location. They are far from everywhere and the Lords of them are the great forces, the survivors from long and long ago. They are powerful beyond belief, and there is no one who does not fear them.

“Their only enemies are each other, the most Ancient, and they play games will all other creatures that exist because direct battles between them are forbidden among them. I am a tool one uses in this universe, to explore it and try to understand how such a place was made at all. In all other respects, I am still what I was before I became a Walker, with the needs that entails.”

Jay says nothing, sucking harder on his thumb.

“You do not think the magician knows all this and uses me as I use him?” I say softly. “That if I am focused on him, I cannot report on you?”

He pops his thumb out of his mouth and just stares at me.

“You never considered this.”

“I uthe the internet; humans like thex,” he mumbles. “And you are what he wantth becauthe you’re nothing at all.”

“You think any magician believes any entity is ‘nothing at all’?” Jay says nothing. “We are different, but we are also the same, boy. Both from far Outside the universe, both unlikely to trap the magician in ways humans try to with love and need. You are his friend. I am not.” And I smile then, slow and sure, letting my nature spill out into the room. “I am desire. I am want. I am fulfillment,” I whisper, reaching out a hand to raise his chin. “No one is protected from that.”

Jay blinks. “Hello? I am ten,” he snaps, “and I don’t have thex partth that humanth do, tho there!”

“You look young; that is all. And you are very, very naive.” I have judged well; the thumb-sucking is from fear and nervousness and I move between moments. Replace his thumb with my own. Jay sucks, gasps, jerks back enough to fall right off the couch and scrambles to his feet. He is panting for air, entire body trembling in shock.

“I –.” He licks his lips, then bares his teeth in a tight grin. “I’ve got more of a buzz beating video gameth.”

I pause at that. “You resisted my nature.”

“Yup!”

“What are you, to do that?”

“Report me to yout mathter and you’ll find out,” he says, sticking his thumb back into his mouth and grinning around it. “Becauthe you tried to bind me, and I know you in turn and if you don’t go away I am going to thhow you how same we really are and do really horrible thingth to you because my friend doethn’t need you at all!”

I pause to wonder how much of this the magician allowed for, how much he intended to happen, but the cold resolve under Jay’s words is enough to put thought aside. He said the word ‘same’ without the lisp, though I doubt he noticed. I step sideways, and far away from the universe.

And I consider options.  

We are all reflections

There are six arc-worlds in the part of the universe claimed by humanity, each containing enough dna, data and technology to restart our entire species in case something happens. Something can be anything from a new plague to the hingari deciding humanity should simply not be or some unknown alien menace wanting to simply clear this area of space away because we are too noisy.

Each arc-world is shielded and protected by different ways and means. Orien and I haven’t been told how this one is protected, only that we’re living here now. It’s not a prison. We’ve been told we can leave. But we have seen hingari ships. We know how powerful the aliens humanity is fighting can be. We know what it costs to defeat them. We would be allowed to leave, but under such strict conditions that freedom would become a prison all its own.

Orien is taking it far better than I. Perhaps because he is a solider, or because medics are used to such things. That’s what I tell myself sometimes, but I know it’s not that at all. He’s old, and tired, and more snythetic than human now. There are limits to what can be done to the human body. To how long people can live, or want to survive. To how much can he done to a person before they finally decide it is too much.

I’ve been travelling Arc-6 to get to understand it. Wandering. Exploring.

Thinking.

Reflecting.

For a long time, I never did that. Reflected. I’m the oldest transfer I know of by a good while, and few people become transfers these days. Fashions come back into style all the time, but technologies don’t. The technology to create transfers never matured since it was too easy to abuse. And we scared people because we’re not people at all. I’m a cylinder on treads with limbs when I need them, a projection of a ‘human’ self when I have to use it, a viewscreen-face interface on my body so people don’t feel like they’re talking to some kind of robot.

But I’m not like them. I’m old. I’ve rebuilt and fixed myself so often I’ve lost count, fixed vehicles and technologies for so long I once fixed someone’s arm without even consciously thinking about it. I don’t know why I’ve survived so long. But I’m not a hero: I’ve never fought in wars, never been involved in politics. I’ve just fixed things in the background, like mechanics always do. And done other things, learned to be more than that, when it was no longer enough.

When Orien made me want to be more. And he is old, as humans judge old. And he is dying. And I’m not. He loves me and I love him, but neither of us wanted to be each other. I never wanted to build a faux-human body to use as ‘me’, he never wanted to be a transfer. And we both know that. But he will die and it will hurt me. It’s been hurting me for years, knowing it was coming. Trying to imagine his death to inoculate myself against it.

He could live, if he truly wanted. There are experimental technologies. Transfer programs to dump the entire human mind into a cloned body. They’re not safe, but living is never safe. We don’t know if any of it can work, after the vortex Brin put us through.

I could die, if I wanted to. It wouldn’t be easy: I’m just old and tough and in the end just a mind turned to information inside a box of a body. Destroy enough of me, in the right way, and I can’t repair myself. Can’t survive.

I won’t die for him. He won’t live for me. And I don’t know if I am fine with what that says about me. So I wander, and think, and lose myself in the movement of my treads, in the information an arc-world has to offer.

It takes him almost six hours to find me, limping over a hill full of ancient cloned people. He’s limping. I fix it, but the limp always returns. Going through the vortex Brin created so we could tell people about the destruction of McLan damaged both of us. I will heal, in time. He won’t.

“Busy?” he says, and his grin is soft and his eyes bright.

“Thinking.”

“Talk.” He comes over, sits on the edge of the hill and studies my viewscreen. “Please. Dar.”

I lick my lips in the viewscreen, flick it off. Talk. Days of ruminations spill out, nights of worry becoming almost coherent. Brin is dead, and was our friend, and I’m half speaking about her, and Orien, and me and it all falls apart at that because I don’t have the words I want to have.

“Hey.” He stands, hugs my chassis gently, draws back to run a hand along my side. “It’s all right, Dar. Honestly, it is. I don’t think you’re a coward. I’m not brave enough to-to do what you do, to keep going, to keep learning like you have. I might be, but I don’t want to find out.” He pulls his hand back and lets out a soft, bitter laugh. “I love you, but not enough to keep going. Not as a transfer, not by other means. I don’t keep up with the medical journals anymore. Everything is slipping away and I don’t have it in me to chase after it.”

“I can fix that limp for good,” I say, soft.

He smiles at the joke. I don’t need the viewscreen for him to know I’m joking. There is no one else I can say that about. “You’re one of those things, Dar,” he says, and rests his head against my viewscreen. “You’re loving it here: learning how this world works, that humanity has actually thought of the future without arrogance.”

“That I won’t be alone,” I whisper.

He raps me gently on the top. “It’s not just that. You know it’s not just that.”

“I do?”

Orien pulls back and laughs, pressing fingers lightly into my chassis. “I love that you don’t, Dar. You’ve never wanted to be famous, never seen yourself as more than you are, another person – in whatever form – living out their life. Most people can’t do that, can’t just shut their egos off and learn when they need to, listen when they have to. We just can’t.” He pulls his fingers away slowly, playfully, sending sparks across my systems.

“Not fair!”

“I never, ever claimed to be fair.” He touches me again, to win a gasp and then a yelp before pulling back. “You’re going to live, Dar. Make new friends, new lives. I’ll live on inside your head, in memories that you’ll never get rid of – even the ones you want to. The times we had, the people we were. You’ll tell people, and they’ll remember, and I – I haven’t been the same, since Brin put us through the wormhole. Inside. I don’t know why.”

“I know.” I reach over, extending every limb my body has, and hug him tightly. “Some things not even love can fix.”

“If it could,” he whispers, and hugs me back. “Dar. Now.”

I hug him. Tight as I can. Tight as he hugs me. I squeeze, and he squeezes, and his body fails first. It takes everything I have not to fix his systems as he collapses to the ground, and he whispers garbled words, fingers touching my chassis. Trying for a connection. For a farewell.

And I reach down with my arms. And I hold him. And I make soft keening sounds as his smile finally goes and everything that was Orien is gone.

And everything I am is still here.

Shadows of Broken Shapes

McLan Docking Station is old but that does not make it slow. In its time it had been on the edge of the known universe, a stopping off point to unexplored frontiers. The frontier has moved on; McLan had remained. The shield generators burn energy, golden and silver light flaring through space. We used to circle a sun; as of two minutes ago the Docking Station no longer does, hurling freefall into space, the entire top half simply gone.

I help coax the antigrav engines to full power with a mixture of antiquated apps, jamming together old linkages and dumb luck. No mechanic ever underestimates the power of dumb luck. I can hear the station shudder, stresses creaking through its frame. It was built to survive, but this was long ago – and against enemies that could be fought. Engines whine, the sounds causing people around me to grab their heads as they struggle to patch systems together. I alter my auditory systems, fire up another set of linkages, kludge together ancient shapes and forms into something modern.

The station ceases spinning. People stumble, collapse, pull themselves together and begin running tests, shouting for orders that will never come. I can feel the station shuddering through my chassis, vibrations making every limb ache. I am the only transfer on the McLan, a human body places inside a body no longer human. A cylinder on treads, a viewscreen for interaction with others, a projection of a human-self when I need to use one. I haven’t used it in some years. I hurl out the exit of the engine room, ignoring shouts of surprise and people leaping out of my way.

I don’t do this often. Transfers are old tech. Relics, behind my back. But I have served on the McLan for a long time: docking bays, maintenance, engineering. And I have served on other Docking Stations before and planets before that. And, once, I saw footage of a hingari craft. I know what is coming. I override door commands and send out messages on the infoweb even as it falls apart.

Brin and Orien are waiting outside the quarters Orien and I share. Both are old now, as humans get old: Orien is more synthetics than flesh, and Brin just flesh held in statis fields. Young, until the field breaks, and then nothing at all. Her eyes are wide and I shove them both in, slam the doors behind us.

“The top half of McLan is gone,” I say, manifesting my projection so they can see how scared I am. “A galaxy-class starcruiser fell out of hyperspace, missing us. Trying to dock again, as it did once before.”

“The Seeker SK4209,” Orien whispers.

“The newest model of it. A hingari ship followed. Dropped down into normal space. The gravity field ripped a star apart, hurled us off course. McLan is holding together, but it can’t hold long. The hingari ship burns in normal space, leaving behind alien shapes, shadows etched into the fabric of space behind when it goes.” I turn to Brin. “You once moved through the Ashel quadrant to the Deli system. You disrupted space; the hingari craft is doing the same.”

“And if I do that, we get away.”

“If we reach another Docking Station we can warn them. The infoweb is down, hyperspacial links shattered. We have to try something!”

“I don’t have it in me to survive this,” Brin says, very softly.

I move toward her, and Orien’s hand catches one of my limbs in a tight squeeze. “Send us. And others after, as you can. They’ll listen to us, if only because Dar will shout at them until they do.”

“I haven’t heard you shout in a long time,” Brin says. “Not since that incident with the third engine coolant system –.” She breaks off, closes her eyes. “You always knew I could do this, didn’t you? You never said.” She looks so young, despite old eyes.

“You wouldn’t have wanted me to.” I turn my projection off, and every system I can spare, watch Orien as he does the same.

The stasis field keeping Brin young shudders, holding – somehow, holding – as she disrupts space itself and hurls us into a vortex of her own making.

It hurts. That’s probably an understatement, but I don’t recall most of it. I shut down almost everything I am for part of it. I survive. I am kind of amazed I do.

I wake. It’s slow, hard, but I flick my viewscreen on. Take in a dozen armed humans and more weapon systems than is comfortable. I’m in a quarantine cell; Orien is in the one next to me. He isn’t dead. That keeps me awake.

“This is the Docking Station Alpha 11?” I say, and my voice is thin, scratchy. I’m operating on backups of backups, systems almost drained. “I need – I need to charge. Data upload. Plea –.”

I shut down my vocal system as a weapon pulses through me. I steal some of its energy, despite the pain. Force an infoweb connection and hurl the information into every open and closed system on Alpha 11 a

nd I come to. Charged. Not in pain. Someone’s quarters. Orien is pacing the small room, limping badly. Whoever charged him forced an upgrade on some of his apps and linkages. No one altered me, though someone tried to.

“Sit.” Orien looks over at me, grins, and sits down in the one couch in the room. I begin fixing links, altering apps, shifting modules in his body.

“Someone assumed you were a hingari weapon,” Orien says after a good ten minutes as I’m finishing up double-checking my work. “We did come through a spacewarp and apparently that such things can be done is somewhere beyond top secret, so they assumed it was an attack.”

“And McLan?”

“I don’t know. They refused to say if anyone else made it off.” He pops open my chassis gently and checks a few systems over, closes it. “You turned a weapon they hit you with into a power source?”

“I got the idea from Brin.” I extend a limb with a rag on it, turn on my projection and grin.

Orien shakes his head, but takes it and cleans my body off. We both have our rituals to help us hold together. He’s a bit better after, puts it away and sits on the couch. We wait in silence together for almost an hour before a tall, tired man comes in, the door sealing shut behind him. The pause between the door opening and closing allows infoweb access; I scan the man, download data and close the connection in a moment.

“Commander Garison.” I add his ID numbers. “I’m Dar. This is Orien.”

He blinks, then: “The door.”

“Yes.”

Orien shoots me a look; I don’t normally show off what I can do, especially not to strangers. Garison pauses, then says: “Wall.”

The wall flickers to reveal star charts, zooms in on the system McLan is in and there is – nothing. No stars, no systems. No data. Just a hole too big to think about. Hingari craft bruise the nature of the universe, leave gravitational indents that persist for millennia to mark their passage. Not even that remains. No shapes, no shadows cast on walls. Nothing to cast them with. Just a piece of space so empty not even datatrails haunt it.

“I imagine you can explain this,” the commander says.

I move closer. I don’t need to, but I do. Extend a limb to brush the wall. To be sure it’s real. My limb trembles a little against my will. Orien hasn’t moved. I look back at him through my viewscreen. “You knew.”

“That she’d kill herself if she survived that? Yes. This – this I don’t think even you expected, Dar.”

“Can I upload data?” I say to the commander. He nods, and I toss some of the info on Brin up. “She is – she was – a splice.” I pause, gather myself a little. “She could produce disruption fields and knew how to use them on any source of energy, which includes actual gravity, not just the artificial kind. There are not many splices like her made since someone accidentally let the nature of said splice be known to some interested parties.”

“You being someone,” Garison says.

“I asked Brin; she agreed. A disruption field on her scale can warp space. Hence our arrival and attempted warning about the SK4209, which was stupid enough to flee a hingari craft into normal space. Whatever they did pissed the hingari off enough to send a craft in. The gravitational fields it generated ripped the McLan in half and destroyed the system proper.”

“There would be debris.”

“There would, but the hingari got too close to McLan. Perhaps they were going to attempt to repair it or remove witnesses; I have no idea. Brin – disrupted their craft. Surpassed mere matter and energy and disrupted information; I imagine she uses her stasis field to allow that, and the hingari ship simply being near her boosted her splice. I have no idea if she destroyed the craft, but she definitely damaged it and the result wiped a piece of the universe entirely of information in the process.” I smile grimly. “Which I imagine you figured must have happened, even if you had no idea how.”

“We were hoping to be wrong, yes.” He doesn’t say what the Seeker SK4209 was doing, or about the hingari. Just turns and heads back to the door. “We will see about planetfall for the both of you and compensation for our mishandling of your arrival. Contracts will be drawn up so this data is never revealed.”

“All right,” Orien says quickly before I can comment. I might have a habit of really not liking contracts, but right now – right now Brin is dead, and mourning never gets easier no matter how many times you do it. I stare at the wall, at the empty place where McLan used to be, and wonder if, where I to open myself up, there would be a hole in me that felt like the hole in the universe where a friend had been.

The oldest tricks of all

Mr. Fox came out of the shadows as Boy left the soup kitchen. The fox seemed to not emerge as much as step through them as though the darkness was a kind of door, his eyes sharp and cool as he stared up at Boy. Boy’s stomach was gurgling happily and he had to resist the urge to poke it and see if it would make more noises; being full was a new experience, and one he was quite enjoying.

“They don’t let us take doggie bags. Or fox-bags,” Boy said, quite proud of the joke.

“I imagine not. They fed you, yes?” the fox said softly, for his ears alone.

Boy rubbed his stomach under his shirt and grinned a nod, which is perhaps even more foolish than it sounds but he was full and happy with it.

“Good.” The fox paused a beat and slipped into a small side street, leaving Boy to scramble after him. “I trust, Boy, that your stomach is as full as your mind is empty?”

“Huh?”

“Their food is not without cost. They would have told you stories.” The fox paused another beat. “Parables.”

Boy scratched his scalp in thought. “They said we’d be reunited with our families in heaven?”

“And you think that is a blessing?” the fox asked, words as quick as sharp as movement as he spun back to face Boy, his eyes cool and bright under moonlight.

Boy bit into his lower lip and shook his head. He remembered enough about his parents to know that wasn’t anything he’d want. Not their faces or names, but the feel of them came to him easily, disappointment and anger rising through him like bile. “They didn’t want me,” he whispered, his voice hoarser than normal.

“I can’t imagine why not,” Reynard Fox said, and his tone was so dry that Boy giggled despite himself. “There is this about stories, Boy: the more seductive they are, the less truth they are apt to contain. A story that speaks only to the heart is seldom a true story at all.”

“I don’t –.” Boy flattered, in word and step. “I don’t understand why anyone wants a life beyond this one, Mr. Fox.”

“Many seek reward, Boy. Others redemption, or the punishment of their enemies. Or to regain what they believe was taken from them, or perhaps lost. Few can boast a life free of desire, and desire is no small thing. There are many whose lives are so very small because they believe it will be far better for them in he world they believe is to come.”

“You’re saying it is a lie?”

“Nothing so simple, Boy. But it is a terrible story to trick anyone with, and one I myself do not use.”

Boy stared at the trickster for a long moment, then continued to follow him without a word.

Bloody hell

I am far, FAR behind posting stuff (both for this challenge I have been doing and in the magician series). Crap.

I write too much.

Way too much.

lessons

Hotel room bathroom doors tend not to slam well, as a general rule. Jay manages to slam it regardless.

I rub the bridge of my nose. “Jay.”

“Go away,” the boy yells from the other side of the door.

I knock on the bathroom door. “I didn’t mean that.”

“I thaid to go away,” he yells, even louder, and the wood buckles as the door is bound to the frame, merged together by sobbing anger.

“Jay. Open this door.”

The creature from Outside the universe either doesn’t hear the note in my voice or ignores it entirely between sobs of fury. I find it in myself not to care, reach into the world and unmake the binding holding the door and frame together. Hard.

In the small bathroom, Jay is doubled over, clutching his head and whimpering in pain.

I reach out a hand and he spasms, twisting back and glaring up at me. “Your jutht uthing magic to be a bully!”

“Is that what you think I am a magician for?”

He flinches visibly at my tone and straightens with an effort, veins visible at either temple. “You thaid I wath thpethial,” he says.

I take a deep breath, steel myself. “You’re sounding like you are.”

Jay’s jaw drops. He makes a small noise, tries to find words. I wait. “My lithp ithn’t my fault,” he says, his voice cracking.

I reach over, close his mouth and lift his chin so he can’t look away from me. “You are whining. That is all I meant. Do you understand?”

I let go and he shakes his head minutely.

“You asked if I had someone special in my life, Jay. I said you were special. I did not mean special in the afternoon TV special sense. You bound yourself into my service; you should have known that.”

He sniffs. “You hurt me,” in an even smaller voice, fighting back tears.

“You bound the door to the frame,” I say softly, and watch his eyes widen as the words sink in. “For the first time you manipulated a binding in the world on your own. And you did it from anger.”

“Oh.” He bites his lower lip and says nothing else, looking scared.

I turn and walk back over the bed. he follows in silence and sits beside me, trying not to look like he’s about to cry. I sigh and press a hand to either temple, rubbing gently, and he lets out a small gasp of relief and relaxes almost bonelessly into my side. I’d have more luck staying angry with a puppy. I rub the headache away gently and he doesn’t protest at all, making happy sounds.

“Still mad at me?”

“I will be if you thtop,” he mumbles, eyes closed.

I smile at that and continue for a couple of minute before letting go.

“I’m thorry,” he says softly, staring down at his feet.

“I know. It’s okay. And for the record: No, there is no one special like that – which you well know – and and that is not giving you permission to try and set me up for a date on any internet website.”

Jay twists his head up to look at me, eyes narrowing. “You’re reading my mind?”

I smack him upside the head gently and stand. “I don’t need to,” I say, leaving him to worry that I can. “And you’ve watched more than enough TV today. We’ll grab supper and check out the local cemetery.”

“We will?” His eyes narrow suspiciously. “Why?”

“Because if you’re going to learn how to bind things together, you’re going to learn to unbind as well. Removing lichen from stone without any anger at all.”

Jay lets out a huge sigh and dives under the bed to find his shoes. I put mine on and wait by the door as he finds his coat as well and studies what used to be the bathroom door. “I did a good binding,” he says proudly.

“You are special,” I say, and step out of the hotel room into the hallway even faster than he can remove a shoe to throw it at my head.