Breaking Jaysome

1.

Sometimes is impossible to tell where truth ends and mythology begins. I am only certain of my uncertainties these days, but it began with a simple assignment. I wasn’t any kind of bounty hunter, but I did work in collections and everything was – worrisome. No one knew how long the company would keep existing. No one knew much about anything. The Sable Empire collapsing was a blip that spread far, the loss of the hyperlane system they’d made destroying intergalactic trade within moments. So I wasn’t about to say no to anything.

I was given a name, and told to find them and bring them to Earth – the first one – for a trial. I’d like to think that I knew it was a trap, but I was desperate for the work and desperation makes one nothing if not desperate. That was the start of it. I was given a budget, and weapons. The verkonis blade – worried me, since they are illegal across ever star system. But I had said yes to the assignment, and was not brave enough to say no.

Every story becomes something else in the telling. Every time I have to remind myself of what I did not know. I was told to find Jayseltosche, and nothing else. Most of the major Intelligences operated on a pangalatic level, the destruction of the hyperspace lanes crippling them as well. It was one reason I did not learn much about the target, only that I would know his age, and that he looked the way humans hadn’t looked for centuries.

I had resources, weapons, and strangely no time restriction though I took that to be more taking into account the difficulties in travel more than anything else. I was not given my own craft – nothing so grand – but booked passage on various transport vessels, space stations and colonies. The company goes under many names, so I used whatever one fit the area I was in, asked questions, continued my search. Most of the answers I discovered were worrying, even initially. Many could not believe I was looking for Jay. Some feared me for attempting the search.

I came to define Jay as a kind of terrified wonder, for that encapsulated most descriptions of him. But it did not deter me. One galaxy became two, and finally three before I began to hone in on my quarry. I learned he was sixteen and there was a small, quiet religion of jayists. I am not certain if any approached me. I learned of wars he had ended, and some claimed he had broken the Sable Emperor himself. It was hard not to believe that: many stories said he didn’t have limits and they often agreed on too many things.

The Kabados was an old pleasure vessel turned into a mining operation in the Gasthar Cluster. It was nowhere special and mostly had some small fame in that it hadn’t fallen apart centuries ago. That drew me to it in the end, and I was the only person to disembark at the station.

“Otha.” The head of security security was waiting when I exited the transit freighter.

There were stories about me, too, if I am being honest. One cannot search for so long without becoming part of the sought. The Rathkuin had given me thier blessing two hundred years into my journey. I escaped the fall of Hisseth. I had taken apart in the Tikiro wars, mostly by accident instead of design.

“I am he. You know what I seek.”

The other nodded and simply stepped aside. Which was a small relief: I am dangerous, but I have no desire to have to be dangerous and the machine-man watches me silently as I moved through the Kabados. There are many mining companies and businesses here. The company has representatives, though no one try to contact me. I asked questions, and the lack of answers is answer enough as I searched each floor.

I finally find him on the fourth level, eating at a small canteen. Humanoid, male, and sixteen. He didn’t look impressive. If anything, he seemed far less dangerous than I, but four hundred years of seeking had taught me some aspects of caution. “You are Jay.”

The automatic canteen scuttles away as he stood. Shorter than I and unafraid, head cocked slightly to one side. “That is my name. It isn’t that uncommon.”

“You are sixteen. And Jayseltosche.”

He blinked. Once. “You seem very certain of yourself.”

“I am Otha; I have been seeking you on behalf of the Hildago Company for over four hundred years.”

“Ah. I used to be easier to find.” He shrugged lightly. “I am trying to be – less of a fact, as much as I can. I am pleased to know that I have done better than I knew in this.” He smiled. The smile was wry and gentle, kind in a way that somehow hurts. He is kindness, and not simply because he could afford to be.

“I was sent here.” I got that out steadily.

“Few are. At least not to Kabados. May I ask why you are here?”

“There is a trial and you are needed for it on Earth. The first one, in the Sol system.”

“I am sorry for the time you have wasted then,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“I will not return to that world. You have spent a long time coming here, and I regret that it was for nothing.”

“I cannot return without you.”

“And I will not go.” He smiled, thin and sad, and turned away.

“I am under orders.”

“I do not care.”

“Orders are bindings, and after this one I would be nothing if I broke them. No matter how foolish I was to accept them, they are part of me.”

He slowed, but did not stop.

“I can take you back. I have a verkonis blade.”

Jay stopped at that. “My back is to you; you could use it.”

“I was fool enough to accept this assignment. I am not fool enough to wound you.”

That won a soft, surprised laugh. He turned back, stared up at me. “I like you. But there are things I cannot do, not for likes or even love.”

“You are needed! They have turned the world into a safari park. They have remade continents, the moon, the star –.”

“And this trial is part of that?”

“No. It’s a ruse. I’ve been searching for you long enough to have worked that out. The company is worried about what is being done to that world, a worry that goes beyond profit margins and investments. I do not not know why, Jay. I only know that they invested centuries and a lot of resources into my finding you. And I doubt I am the only one who was sent.”

“You were not.” Nothing more.

“Please. Whatever is going on, whatever is happening. The Company is terrified. And they weren’t terrified even when the hyperlanes fell. Earth is – there is something in it. Something not to be used. And this safari is a cover for trying to use it. I’ve worked that out.”

“And yet you still came. And thought I would come.”

“I don’t know why you won’t.” I had the verkonis blade. I had enough nanotechnology in me to destroy the entire Kabados station. “I can’t force you to come. I can’t bribe you, I can’t – I can only follow you. Until you change your mind.”

“I will not.” His voice was soft, implacable.

“But if they use the energy they find there? The power they are seeking?”

“They cannot.”

“And you are certain of this?” It was dangerous, this, but I had no other weapon except hope.

“I am.”

And everything I had was nothing next to the certainty in Jay’s voice.

“They say you broke the Sable Emperor. Destroyed the hyperspace lanes.” Rumours, nothing more, but I had been certain of less during my seeking of him. Jay did not move. Stared at me in a waiting silence. “It has destroyed the entire intergalactic economy.”

“I am aware of this.”

“I imagine the alternative was worse?”

“It was.” He did not move. He could move between moments. Be across the galaxy in a heartbeat. He did not move. There was no expression to his face at all.

“And if you do nothing about Earth? If you let the safari – if you let the people behind them do whatever they want to that world, what happens?”

“Otha.” Nothing more, but there is a note of warning in that.

I pressed on. If I stopped, I would never have this courage again. “They know there is power there. And they are desperate enough to seek it because the destruction of the hyperlane system has forced them down that path. If not them, someone else will manage this. I cannot stop them. The Company cannot stop them. You can.”

“No.” And he was gone, vanishing between moments to another part of the universe. Not Earth. I was certain of that much, and as certain that I would never find him again.

I reported in. I do it every so often, they don’t forget to send payments to me.

And I am ordered to Earth. To find out what I can.

Again, I am told nothing more. But this time I worry it is because even the Company does not know what is being attempted on that world. Or what might be found if those behind the safari dig deep enough into the world.

I am given the name of those behind the safari.

I will not survive this.

I do not refuse the orders.

2.

The chief danger of a famous place is not the danger of it, but the degree in which it can only disappoint you. Earth is old, mostly a curiosity to humanity now after centuries spent away. It is barely part of its own galactic Hub, a place even history has all but considered unimportant to the present. That the company known only as Tril would turn the world into a safari seemed odd but the universe is full of odd things. Our company was hired to underwrite, and at some point someone in Hildago began to wonder what Tril was a front for.

And so I was sent to find Jay, who is not human at all but spent time on earth long ago. I was given weapons and lies to aid a quest of centuries, but I used neither. He refused to come. So I journey alone to earth, moving from space yacht to space yacht. The collapse of the hyperlane system and the Sable Emperor has broken intergalactic travel for a time, but eventually trade will recover. And people always need insurance, so Hildago will remain.

It does mean that Tril has seed a marked decrease in tourists in the last few years and they were barely turning anything like a profit earlier. But that was never their motive.

I have a verkonis blade in my possession, a weapon illegal on any hyperspace flight, capable of cutting through dimensions as easily as matter. I have technology in my body that has kept me alive and safe for centuries. None of that means anything. The Tril are not some human group. They were never human ago.

My name is Otha, and I am human and I will die soon. Because Tril are seeking ancient energies buried deep in earth. Energies that have allowed the world to exist this long, have kept the solar system in a queer stasis. The Tril are hingari, and with such weapons – I do not know what will happen. All I know is the hingari are shape-changers and skin-shifters, and there was a war against them centuries ago. There are worlds and star systems that have never recovered from it.

How do you defeat an enemy who can look like anyone? You kill everyone. Worlds burned, star systems became clouds of debris and over four galaxies were decimated in the war. What the hingari wanted, I do not know. All I know is that they lose, and fled, and hid. And now are seeking weapons.

‘Investigate this, Otha’, I am told. My first order since I sought Jay and he refused to return to Earth. I do not know what my employers expected: Jayseltosche has power we cannot touch, and all I could do was ask.

This is all I think of, in variant strains of worry, before I reach the Sol system. Earth is a safari world, tourist class. I land without fuss, finding myself in a small spaceport. There are humans here, of course. For the work, and nostalgia, and history. But also the hingari, and I have no idea how to tell which is which. I am to meet a representative from Hildago, but I have landed two continents away from them. I cannot trust what they are.

I do not know why Hildago told me hingari were here at all.

I ignored guides and other offers, procured a small hovercar and drove out into the vast Serengeti fields of the northern half of the world. Both northern continents are grasslands and hills, the southern ones deserts, swamps, mountains. It takes little time to discover the world wasn’t like this at all while humanity was here, but the Tril company wished to capture ‘something mythic’. Nothing more. I suspected that was Jay, if anything, but words were hardly proof.

I let two days pass. Ate Food. Charged the car – I was told it is something quaint, to remind us of the past – and drove down old roads and through countries and continents forgotten to history. I found myself wondering at how little I knew about the past of this world. How little Tril had to offer, or the Hubs had as data this far from civilization. The hingari might have taken over the world of our birth like a parasite, but a proper one: one not discovered by the host at all.

And we had allowed this to happen. It had been over two hundred hears before anyone at Hildago had looked into Tril in depth. I had no idea when my employers had learned Tril was hingari. I suspected they did not care. Insurance is famous for that, as a rule. But even so, I drove. Along roads, past others. Finally coming to a place not on the casual maps, where I got out.

I spent centuries hunting down Jay, and I learned many tricks and techniques in that time. I begin to scan the area around me, slowly broadening it out to compass the entire world. Searching for anything anomalous, trusting my instincts as much as the technology within.

It occurred almost too late to me that there were places that were nothing save birthing pools for monsters.

I spun at movement behind me, froze. Jay smiled. He looked the same: sixteen, pale, his smile not an impossible wonder. Perhaps because of this world, and his desire to not be here.

I spoke his name, moved toward him. Recalled, too late, that I didn’t know he was sixteen the way I should have. I activated my personal protections, but the hingari moved even faster than I could think. I felt things break deep inside me, an inhuman weight pressing down. Tendrils dug into the earth and my poor flesh.

“You,” the hingari hissed, breath reeking of desperation and anger. “Why are you here?”

‘To find you,’ I almost say, but my employers knew the hingari were here.

I have lived longer than many, and I have seen many things others have not. “I was sent here to die,” I say finally, getting the words out against the pain pressing into my flesh.

“Ah. That I can help with,” and the hingari laughed a shrill, alien sound that wasn’t part of the natural order of created things.

The thought was absurd. But it would not leave me.

Even if it was my last.

3.

Otha is a sad name. My parents told me that once, when I complained about some ill which had befallen me. I had been named after some infamous colonist, though they never told me the details: only that fact as though it were an explanation. It explained nothing then, but perhaps it meant more a sad death. Dying on a world I’ve never been to before, for reasons I will never know.

I am, in small ways, dangerous. That was nothing next to the hingari shifting form and features above me, weight pressing down into my body. I can feel bones breaking faster than my body can repair itself. My personal protective systems sputtered to life but the hingari were a byword for death and despair for centuries for good reasons. Life never flashes before your eyes in moments like this: I have worked in insurance long enough to learn that. Important moments do.

I was almost waiting for one when the hingari moves from me. Lifted, flung through the air. Another hingari? I pulled myself to my feet. Everything hurt, even the parts of me I’d been told would never hurt again. Spending four centuries looking for Jayseltosche had meant making myself able to survive many things. Some – even I – might have argued I was not human any longer. But returning to the homeworld I only vaguely knew of had stirred a kind of longing in me regadless, or at least I imagined it had.

The longing was long with every other thought when I realized Jay was standing behind me. The hingari was in the air, spasming through a million forms and shapes in an effort to avoid whatever hold Jay had on it. I met Jay only the once, when he refused to return to earth. He was still sixteen, but there was no gentle sadness to him. Just something old and implacable wearing human skin.

“I made a choice once to never come back to Earth.” Jay did not move, but the hingari writhed and screamed with a dozen voices from at least twenty mouths. “I have no desire to be here again, but you pretended to be me. There are less than a hundred hingari in the universe now: you should be working on growing, not – whatever this is.”

The Hingari shifted into one humanoid form, a mouth of sharp teeth and burning eyes focused downward. “Some things are more important than survival. We do not expect you to understand.”

The hingari hit the ground. Jay strolled over, almost casual, except his expression was too distant and empty. There was a thin smile on his face I didn’t want to see remain. “You have some small idea of what I am, Ydurthkjul of the hingari. Do not pretend it is more than that. Explain your actions here,” and the last words were not raised, but the force of them drove me back to my knees when they were not directed at me at all.

The hingari made low, whining noises for a few moments that almost engendered pity in me.

“You do not want me to ask again,” Jay said calmly.

“You can hurt me. But we are larger,” the hingari hissed, voice a broken chorus. “We have –.”

“Of course you set a trap.” Jay did not sound worried. He did not sound not-worried. Merely resigned. “But you set a trap for Jayseltosche, and not for Jay.”

“There is a difference?” The hingari asked.

“All the difference that ever was.” And Jay did not move but something left him. Or returned. I did not know what it was, only that he seemed younger for a moment. Only they he stepped away from the hingari and let out a soft noise.

“No! That was our power! We had claimed –.”

Jay turned his head slowly, and the hingari fell silent at the look in his eyes. I had never seen such a stare before, and I hold no desire to ever see it again. “Power? You thought this was power? I am almost tempted to see what would happen... but no. I have not had the luxury of adventures involving oopses or accidents in longer than you could understand.

“A very long time ago, I gave a friend a gift. Because I was eleven I gave her a piece of jaysome. A slice of the innocent wonder that I was placed inside her. And it remained here, you understand, long after I left. There are things that cannot…” His voice caught. He looked so human for a moment that it scared me more than anything else. “There are things one cannot reclaim once they are lost. Memories one dares not touch again.”

I did not move. The hingari was frozen. I am not certain I could have moved had I wished to. This had moved far beyond wanting.

Jay laughed. It was somehow free and sad both. “I meet myself in the past sometimes. But even so, you understand, I forget. Until now. Jaysome,” he added, a word and exhalation of breath at once. And then: “I won’t meet me from the past again, I think. The wound to me would be too great.”

“I don’t understand.” Because I didn’t. Because it was too big.

And Jay smiled.

The pain was gone. I was wounded still. But they was no pain. I had nothing in me to describe the smile with. I burst into tears that had nothing of pain within them.

I could not sense the hingari after. I believe it ran away, or was allowed to escape.

“This world has too many memories for me to stay here even now, Otha,” Jay said slowly. “I could take you elsewhere if that is your wish?”

I shook my head. I would be content here, for a time. I didn’t speak aloud. I wasn’t ready for speech yet.

Jay nodded and waved. The gesture had no threat behind it. Something caught in my throat, despite the fact that nothing could have. I have very good systems that keep my body working. Yet even so.

“You are seventeen.”

“I am.” Jay’s voice was a gentleness no one deserved to hear.

I could find no other words. He vanished then, between moments. And I was left along on Earth. I walked slowly. In no direction, without any aim for the first time in centuries. I felt my sorrow leave me; I am not certain yet what has replaced it.

There are journeys one should never make. And perhaps, just perhaps, they are the most important ones of all.