Tagged: fiction

Written in 365 Parts: 189: How Are We Going To Get In?

The huge lump of rock wasn’t an asteroid, it was a ship. Marsh marvelled at the sheer absurdity of that fact. Perhaps at some stage in the past there had been a rock this size in the system. There could have been surveys that recorded any object this large, but how detailed, or accurate, they would be was not something he knew. Maybe Drick knew, would they have checked that, were they as surprised. 

Perhaps some original asteroid had been destroyed to make up the camouflage. But it was no longer a rock, or an asteroid, it was a ship. It was a massive vessel that had been encrusted with particles of rock to make it look like a natural object. There was little chance that this was accidental. Someone had deliberately cloaked a ship by encasing it in the material of the Kuiper belt of this system. 

As the stealthed ship’s lights lit up the surface the higher detail showed the lines and structures of a ship’s docking ring. It was enormous, as large as one would expect from a vessel this size. It was clear that the stealth ship wasn’t going to attach to the surface, the ring was opening. The ship would easily fit inside. As they watched, hidden by the sensor blackout and camouflage of their own vessel, the ship they were following changed its direction slightly so that it would enter the docking area sideways. The ring would accommodate a ship three times its length with ease.

They would not be able to sneak their own vessel onto the hidden ship that way, there would be sensors and cameras and possibly even organics. They couldn’t just park up next to the stealth ship with a cheery wave and ask the directions to the nearest habitation.

Marsh noticed that their course had altered. It was slight, but their ship had rotated as well. They were now, similar to the stealth vessel, approaching the vessel sideways, mimicking its final approach. Marsh felt his eyebrows lift and his stomach churn, was Drick just going to land them right next to the other vessel?

There was a gentle nudge of acceleration and they started to move away from the other ship and the docking ring. Marsh hadn’t realised that he had been holding his breath until he allowed it to release in a long slow exhale. 

Looking out of the forward view screens it felt like they were moving upwards simply because of the orientation of the floor and ceiling inside their own vessel. What they were actually doing was going into a slow orbit around the hidden vessel inside its rock camouflage.

“Let’s take a look around this thing.” The message from Drick flashed across his screens. Text only and on the touch based communication channel. Drick had pressed her suit onto his slightly. This was a signal channel for suit to suit communication. It was fitted into the hard suits and prevented anyone noticing a communication, or scanning activity on the electromagnetic spectrum.

Drick was taking no chances with even internal communications. There was a strict rule while in stealth pursuit. Signals blackout except for essential communication, that to be delivered by text using the short data link. 

Marsh sat patiently as Drick instructed the vessel to make the orbit of the rock. Drick pointed out features on the visual scanners. All the instruments were still set to passive mode. Reception only. They didn’t want to give any indication of their presence.

The rock surface was clearly fake. The closer they flew the more detail the ship was able to scan and then composite into a diagram. It was amazingly detailed as, even passively, at this range the ship could determine the small regular features that hid under the surface. The sensors also detected that the rock surface was not actually rock below a depth of several metres. Other materials were present. It wasn’t uniform across the whole surface. Underneath the rocky coating there were structural supports and what was clearly a complex framework.

Drick was taking careful readings using a magnetic field analysis. This was another passive system. It could be coupled with a mass spectrometer, but that would require a sample which would be a more active approach. The analysis was enough to identify the different materials as they acted within the localised magnetic fields. There was also a detector for gravitonic distribution, but it was slowly gathering data as it needed thousands of points of reference to build a clearer picture.

“Looks like the ship is about forty metres down for the most part. Below the superstructure supporting the camouflage” Drick patched into Marsh’s internal screens.

“How are we going to get in?” asked Marsh.

“Let’s get a few more readings and see if we can find an entrance, or make one.” said Drick. They turned back to the instrument panels and slowly watched as the computer built a better picture.

Written in 365 Parts: 188: A Huge Lump of Rock

The stealthed ship that they had been tracking had taken a slow route to its final destination. It moved in an elongated arc to intercept the rock that allowed it to get a three hundred and sixty degree sensor sweep with all of its potential systems as it moved in. The complexity, and speed, of the sequence of maneuvers took almost eighty hours to complete, from the point they had first detected the craft’s approach. 

Drick had deployed a large, thin, fibre net. It was made of an organic compound very similar to silk but with even greater tensile strength. It was sensitive to electromagnetic fields including short range radio signals of the type used for internal control systems on vehicles. It had been strung out from their craft, for hundreds of kilometres. A non-reflective, microfibre mesh that would passively detect the movements of the almost invisible vessel they shadowed. 

Drick had tried to explain to Marsh how the passive array worked. Something to do with detecting spatial shifts from electromagnetic sources. Marsh had not fully understood the conversation. What he knew was that you couldn’t make something invisible. Nor could you bend all the possible sources of energy around an object to make it undetectable. So instead you cloaked it. You replicated the signals using an active shield that when viewed from any direction would make it appear as if nothing was there. It was a mixture of absorbing any incoming active signal, masking any outgoing signal, and redirecting any background difference to appear uniform and natural.

Since detection of a vessel in space mostly relied on seeing its outline against the background levels of electromagnetic energy, replicating that energy, and allowing the background to be unimpeded or interrupted, made most sensor arrays ineffective. After that you simply needed to paint the vessel black and use optical dampening to absorb visible light, and it was almost invisible to sight.

At great distances there would be nothing to detect. The further from the object the greater the intervening distortion, with higher levels of interference due to distance and potential sources, and the better the cloak that masked the vessel. 

The passive array that they were deploying extended the range and field of the sensors. It allowed them to detect much smaller variances in any of the potential sources from the electromagnetic spectrum. This was how they tracked the cloaked vessel. It was sensitive enough to detect the smallest level of electromagnetic change. It needed to be large enough, to cover as wide an area as possible to allow for comparisons of minute differences, to determine the difference between these signals and naturally occurring changes, and to triangulate a position.

The stealth vessel had used occasional slight course changes and other manoeuvres that flipped its entire trajectory. It was an old style of maneuvering, learned from vessels that needed to determine if another was tracking them covertly, a random change in course will allow you to check if you were being followed. Even walking along streets in a city this technique was utilised. It was particularly useful on a stealthed vessel as its own passive sensors would still operate even if they were cloaked. 

Drick kept them far enough away that this behaviour wouldn’t reveal anything. The vessel Drick and Marsh travelled in had similar cloaking technology and light absorbing panels. Whilst undertaking a flight that had complex maneuvers, the stealth vessel wouldn’t be able to deploy as large a passive array as the one Drick was using. Their own large mesh was invisible to almost everything but a similar device.

The stealthed vessel made its final approach on the rock by arcing out to a far point and then flipping and making a direct line for the objective. It was behind the object in regards to the rest of the system, and so invisible to most of the rest of the planets, shielded by the rock as well as its cloaking tech. It had used a small set of thrusters that appeared as bright pinpoints of light to Drick and Marsh, deploying them at the final moment so none of the light would edge around the surface of the rock to anyone on the other side. The large object in front of the craft would completely mask it from any other observer.

Drick had pulled in the large passive sensor net as the ship made its final approach. They were directly behind the vessel and used the flare of the rockets to allow a slight increase in their own speed. They would be using a short burst from the graviton drive to slow them when they were in final approach distance themselves.

Marsh studied the large asteroid that they headed towards and was impressed by nothing. It looked like what it was meant to, a lump of space debris. It was a huge lump of flotsam, suspended in the darkness, many miles from a sun whose warmth would never caress its surface. There were no landmarks on the surface that indicated that is habitation, or ever would have had someone desperate enough to live here. There was no large vessel hiding behind it, hidden from the rest of the system. There was no vessel on its surface masked to scanners by a coating of some type. 

Marsh was about to turn to Drick and tell her that it was likely another ruse, that there was something else going on. But he paused. A sequence of lights had played on the surface of the rock. A pattern that suddenly lit up to look like a circle. Then as if by some trickery, a large docking ring had appeared. The lights had now faded to a dim glow that lit a huge circle of rock that was slowly sliding sideways, splitting into segments as it did so which retracted into the surface of the asteroid.

As the ship approached other small lights came on and tracked its descent. They were standard approach lighting. Marsh swore softly in surprise as his brain tried to register what he was looking at.

Written in 365 Parts: 187: Out of Contract

“Alison Kendrick, huh.” Marsh smiled at Drick, “I See where you get the Drick from. And it is less obvious to abuse a nickname like Drick than say a nickname like Ally.” Marsh grinned, but in a satisfied manner without mockery. “Your original name. It’s a nice name.”

“Shut up.” said Drick with a dismissive wave of the hand, though their expression wasn’t one of dismay. “It was a name that’s all. I went by the name Kendrick for a very long time. But it just became easier to use Drick. Lots of organics were using that anyway. It is just a call sign, nothing more. I got used to replying to it. I guess in the end it became the identity. I wasn’t Alison Kendrick anymore. I don’t know how long it was before that faded away. I guess I never really got the whole of them back. But who can say, are we the same person from day to day anyway? That shit is for stoners and philosophers and goes deeper into speculative bullshit than I am usually sober for.”

“So who are they? This organisation?” Asked Marsh hoping to pry as much information from Drick while they were in a feeling loquacious.

“Ah the secret masters,” Drick sneered. “Oddly enough I don’t know as much as you’d think. There wasn’t an introductory course. However I have learned bits over time. They were a think tank originally.”

“A think tank?” asked Marsh.

“Yeah. They were a special part of what was called the United Nations. Which was already fading out of existence in my time, I think you might have known them more. They were  already merged into the Solar Alliance when I was in training. They went through a few more name changes until it all became the Accordance. The think tank that were the first iteration of the group were mostly military officers, high ranking with diplomatic clearances,  with a few high level academics and civil servants. Professionals in both warfare and political systems. I think their role was to try and prevent major conflicts by examining patterns of military and political shifts. So I guess they had social and cultural specialists as well, hard for me to be sure as there is not much publicly, or privately, available about the original group.”

“Doesn’t sound like something you’d keep secret.” Marsh raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t think it was, originally. It is hard to say how they came to their decision, but at some point I think they decided that manipulation by force was sometimes needed. Not by an army though. They needed covert forces of  their own to direct. Maybe it was the rise of companies so powerful, so rich, that they could buy elections and manipulate social change. Or the rise of the data wars of the late twenty-first century when organisations, and governments, influenced millions of other nations citizens. From what i understand there was some idea of trusted ledgers of information, but they were easy to manipulate and hard to store all data in single archives. It was long before the laws governing identity ownership. More your time period, So I guess you’d know more. It was decided that a secret organisation was needed to investigate, infiltrate, and deal with these issues.” Drick laughed. “Sort of watchers, but before you ask I don’t know if they were watched.”

“What do you mean by deal? Is that a polite way of saying eradicate? I mean having an army of secret super soldiers. That smacks of a rather problematical response.” Marsh raised an eyebrow.

Drick smiled. “Yeah, as in eradicate threats.” Drick laughed a little. “I told you they dealt with the spirit of the laws that govern us, not the letter. They fight enemies that wield incredible power, and can force whole governments, even planetary systems, to change. So they use similar techniques. It isn’t a great solution. But, what do you do when you fight a power that can wield universal control and influence. You have to use methods that are less than socially, or maybe even morally, acceptable. It is a heavily handed attitude that lends itself to both extremes of the political narrative.” Drick paused and gave Marsh a hard glare for a few long moments. “Good and  evil, right and wrong, are always much easier to debate in abstract, much harder when there is a maniac rewriting your history and selling societies into slavery. However, that’s moot and I don’t want to debate it much more right now. The issue with them, for me, is that  they move glacially slow. I guess that’s how they gather the strands that link things together. I think it is them who brought me to you, and then placed all the other relevant pieces. This has been some time in the planning. I can feel it. It has a stink of a story that has been fermenting for decades, not months. The more I think about it the more the strands appear to be woven together.  Fuck. I wondered why they left me out here, on this shitty out of the main core colony system, after my last operation. I thought they had accepted my desire for retirement. I did want to stop. My last mission was painful and costly. It was easier for me to drop out and survive on my own with no help from them, I thought they had accepted it. They even gave me opportunities to exist. I thought they were pensioning me out, looks like they were chucking me breadcrumbs to keep me on the right path.”

“So they move you around? You’re a piece on a board. A fairly powerful one. I mean, even without the previous gender identity, you kind of shift like a chess Queen.” asked Marsh.

“What the hell does that mean?” asked Drick.

“Means you can go in any direction,” Marsh smiled at Drick. “So you think they kept you around?”

“Officially I am out of contract. The deal I have with them expired a couple of centuries ago. I have been working a lot of freelance since that time. Worked for a few different justice, and independent, paramilitary units. My expertise is always in demand, someone always wants a head cracked or an arm twisted or a deep dive into a psychotics wet work. Even did some time with the Union and a few of the larger, shall we say less legal, organisations. I did the occasional bit for my former bosses, once you are a part of their network you never really leave and they always know that you will work for them on the fringes. They just stop paying you top credit for the privilege. They still own you, when you are like me, you are more a piece of the machine and not an independent part. I know them. I know how they work. They just let me off the leash for a while until they need me. They pull their tiny threads everywhere until suddenly whoosh! Whole world is torn apart and I am deep in the weave of one of their intricate tapestries. Right smack back in the centre of another of their little endgames.”

“So what are you going to do now?” asked Marsh. “You could just refuse to carry this through. Hell, I am not forcing you.”

“Sure I could. But they would pull me in. The fact that they haven’t outright contacted me already is because I am stumbling along their path of breadcrumbs like a happy little mouse. Do you want to stop?”

Marsh was about to say something when there was a beeping from the cockpit. Drick looked at the door, but Marsh guessed they were accessing the ship’s systems onto their internal screens.

“We have a contact. It is slight but that’s why I cast such a large passive sensor array. It has to be the stealth ship As anything else would have triggered the array long before. We can follow it at a distance to our eventual target. This is the best possible chance of approach. We wait until it docks and then we land somewhere and get aboard the rock. Hopefully there will be enough interest in the stealth ship to mask any of our activities. We will be discreet and covert but there would still be a potential trail. This way they have something else to occupy their sensors. Best start to get ready and check over all the equipment one more time.” Drick stood and started to unpack the small lockers.

“Thanks for the talk, Drick,” said Marsh. Drick looked in his eyes and then they returned to checking over a box of tools they had pulled from the first locker. Marsh moved to get the equipment in the next locker down.

Written in 365 Parts: 186: What Was Your Name?

“Painful as in physical? Or painful as in emotional?” Marsh asked.

“Both. It concerns my death and what came after.” Drick studied his reaction to that.

“Okay, that’s not usually how people phrase things. I guess you died and they resuscitated you or used a clone or something?” 

“I died before clones were stable enough to be widely used for implanting a whole consciousness. I also died before the technology existed to record whole brain impressions from a living subject. Well, before it was widely available and tested on humans. I was one of the very first for the process.”

“You were experimented on?”

“You could put it like that.” Drick paused and looked down at their hands. Imagining the past, so long ago. “I’m not the original Drick.” they said.

“Oh crap. I thought the clones you had created were short lived because they were fast tanked? Are you another clone? How many of you did Drick have made? How long will you last? They had a maximum of a few years before cellular decay.” Marsh sighed.

“Thanks. So you can’t tell an original from a copy.”

“No, I thought that was the point of them? Also you’re the one who said you weren’t original.”

“They were fast tanked and only had a minimal imprint of me. More like my old self from my long combat days. They were short lived but that would still give them a couple of decades. But I am not one of those. I wasn’t fast-tanked.”

“Oh, right.” Marsh was quiet. “You’re not making that much sense.”

“Look. I died. In a very horrible fashion. There was a lot of brain damage, and a heck of a lot more body damage. So they gave me a new body. But they didn’t grow just an ordinary body. They took their time and created a highly specialised combat orientated body. They created an enhanced organic, able to survive in very rigorous situations. I have a fast metabolism for recovery, redundant organs, enhanced reflexes and a whole host of other special quirks. I pretty much can’t be poisoned or gassed and can survive in unbelievable toxic conditions, including zero pressure.”

“Could they not do something about your sense of humour why they were at it?” Marsh grinned a cold smile.

“Thanks. They did. They reconstructed me. All of me. They enhanced me. I don’t have all the memories of the time before my death. Even fewer now as it has been so long. I was a different person, I guess. I was still as mean and pissed at the universe.” Drick smiled back.

“Why did they save you?” asked Marsh. “Sounds like an expensive procedure. Why not just build a fresh person and programme them?”

“Mostly because of how immoral, and illegal, that was and is. “ said Drick. “Don’t laugh. The organisation who did this don’t always play by the rules. In fact they bend them into knots most of the time. But they do believe in the spirit of the law. They would consider it obscene to grow a lifeform to act as their enforcer. To mould an intellect into being a weapon. But they don’t mind taking someone who is already pretty much trained and giving them a choice.”

“So they made you choose life or death?” asked Marsh.

“No. They reconstructed me. They could have placed me in a normal organic shell. That was an option. They would have repaired what they could of my memories and I would have had a half century or more of existence. It is unlikely that I would have earned enough to pay for a new body at the end of that time.”

“Why only a half century?” Marsh looked puzzled. “I thought that lifespans were over two hundred years now?”

“They are, now. The early days of tanking were not as good. The degeneration from genetic disorders meant that most cloned life had between fifty and a hundred Terran years. Same as a fast tan today. And if you wanted to transfer your intellect then not all of you made the transfer. You lost some. It was incomplete. I came from a time not much past your own. They had the same limitations on transfer of whole intellect as your people did. The original Marsh of course.”

“So you chose super-soldier then?” Marsh laughed. “Did they give you a superhero name?”

“No.” Drick glared at Marsh. “Enhanced, not super. I have limitations, lots of them.”

“I would have never had mentioned that, had you not said anything.,” said Marsh.

“You’re a real bundle of joy today,” Drick quipped. “I have the name, Drick. It wasn’t my name before.”

“Are you going to tell me what your name was before?” Marsh asked,

Drick stared at him for a long moment. “Kendrick.” They said finally. “Alison Kendrick.”

Written in 365 Parts: 185: Conspiracy Theory

Drick and Marsh had been in space for fifteen weeks. The journey to the far reaches of the system had taken close to ten weeks, when the course had been finally computed. Once they reached the right position they started a very slow move towards the target to avoid active and passive detection. They also had to wait for a stealth ship arrival. 

 For most of the acceleration phase of the journey out they had slept in special couches, wearing pressure resistant suits, to help with the constant acceleration forces.  The ship was pushing point three of a G with its own thrusters but it had limited fuel. The course calculations had included two slingshot maneuvers that increased the distance they could travel on the available fuel. A slingshot maneuver involved whipping around a planetary sized object, encountering forces of two to three G in the process.  These manoeuvres allowed sudden course changes without losing speed and extended the range by using the planet’s gravity to fuel a burst of acceleration. 

However these increased acceleration and deceleration forces played havoc with bodily functions. For both slingshots Drick had given Marsh a strong sedative. The suits mitigated some of the stresses they were subjected to, it also helped with the extended time they were staying in low gravity between the bursts of acceleration. Even with suits designed to help them, they had to exercise daily to prevent muscle loss and bone decay. 

Marsh and Drick had managed to work out a series of habits so that they were not always in each other’s way. The ship’s crew section was very small for such a long journey. Drick seemed to need a lot of personal space when exercising. Drick’s form of exercise was intense impact training and a high percentage of combat practice. Marsh liked to do cardio and circuit training so didn’t object if Drick joined him. However, there were times when Marsh liked to sit alone on the small bridge and stare at the stars.

Drick had taught Marsh some of the basics of flying the ship. It was both complex, and stunningly simple. It was complex as there were a lot of different items to learn, from the navigation, environmental controls, systems monitoring, sensors, engineering panels and that was before the flight systems themselves. However, it was made incredibly simple as the ship had a number of functioning artificial intellects that controlled most of the ship. It flew itself, and would tell you what it needed you, as a mostly ignorant organic, to do.

Drick had shown Marsh that most planetary vehicles, systems, and technologies worked in broadly the same fashion as this ship. For instance, learning ships sensors would help with just about every other sensor interface. The same with navigation, flight control and all of the systems Marsh could learn. They were transferable skills and would be essential in different planetary environments. Survival in the future was either being fortunate enough to have fully automated systems, a scrabble to live on the dregs that are cast aside, or a set of adaptable skills. Drick was teaching Marsh the latter.

“I have an odd question,” Marsh said. They were eating food, which was a protein bar and a thick vitamin shake that was apparently banana flavour. Whomever had decided that it was banana flavoured had clearly confused the taste of banana with that of seagull vomit.

“Really?” Drick looked up from the screen they were fixing. An electrical short had taken out two display panels a week before in Drick’s personal hard suit. With their limited resources the repairs were slow and arduous. “That is not unusual, for you. What is it?”

“How did you choose my case?” Marsh held up a hand to stop Drick instantly responding. “Everytime someone asks you, you shine them off with a half truth. I have heard you say that it was bad luck. I think I heard someone say that you just found it interesting. You told me once that you had a vested interest in getting more money from insurance companies. I checked with Hooper. You hadn’t done that kind of work for a long time. You also turned down much easier jobs that he offered to keep my case.

 I can see how resourceful you are. There would have been countless other ways you could have made more money.” Marsh looked at Drick. “So why my case?”

“I came across it. I have always checked Justice Department feeds and it rose to the top.” said Drick.

“But that means nothing. I have seen those original reports, they said little.” Marsh looked puzzled. “Considering the efforts done to cover the case up, why would it float to the top of any noticeable list?”

“I get a slightly more detailed set of reports. Sometimes more detailed than the justice department.” said Drick and watched Marsh’s response. There was the slight narrowing of the pupils, the tic that he had when something struck a chord. The face often gave subtle insights, they weren’t telling clues, just indicators of a person’s inner narrative. He responded to those words as if he expected them. “What do you think you know, Marsh?”

“I don’t think I know anything. I am just curious about a few things and I think they are connected.” He said calmly.

“You think I had some other reason to choose your case?” Drick looked for his response. He thought something, but it wasn’t clear what.

“No. Not really. Maybe.” he sighed. “Look I am probably spewing this out of my ass. You get more information, but I think you got a lot more, something that made me important to you in some way.” 

Marsh smiled. “You’re going to think I am a nut job.  I think, no, I feel like  it is all connected. Not directly, but as if it needs all the pieces to be in play and this started before me. Well we know it started before me. There was already some turf war between Yee On Kline and the Union. But it is convenient that Rodero, your close contact, had done work for the right people to help us make a near impossible heist. I also think there is something suspicious about how it ties in with the mole in the Justice Department. That had been going on for years. But you pushing back at them in the club, my escape from a high-security lab. All of that helped force them to over respond. Each event feels like it pushes the possibility of the next one happening, but many of them were in play a long time ago. Like a subtle maneuvering of pieces in a game. Rodero would love that.”

Marsh stopped and looked down at the table. “You think I am full of shit, right? These are all interconnected, but they are not direct connections. I just feel it. I thought you might feel it as well.”

“I have.” said Drick calmly.

Marsh looked up into Drick’s eyes. He didn’t know what to expect. A smile, a mocking glance. What he saw was a calm look, and maybe something else. “You have?”

“For some time,” said Drick. “I knew that it wasn’t just a series of coincidences, well I had my suspicions. I just thought I was being nudged to stop, well to stop my slow decline. That’s a story for a different time. Enough to say that I have been a recluse for a few years. I got bored of intellects of all types. But this was pitched at me with enough subtlety to intrigue me. I have been led since then. Gently, more directed from afar. Though they aren’t far, they are everywhere. There is only one group who could do that. My suspicions were confirmed after we spoke to the technician, Toni. There was no way a technician and a computer operative could have busted you out. Not without help. Someone was already in the systems helping them. Just as they helped Rodero. Just as they helped Hooper, just as they have been nudging us.”

“Who?” asked Marsh.

“That’s an old, and very painful story.” said Drick.

Written in 365 Parts: 184: Simulacra

“You are awake.” the voice again. Devoid of emotion.

“Am I?” the thought was partly directed at the voice, partly at themselves. Without any philosophy implied as to what is the nature of being awake, merely that they had no senses to prove it. Just again sensory information that started in themselves.

“It was a statement of fact, Drick.” The voice was calm, but not soothing.

“I see. Why do you call me Drick?” they asked.

“That was all that I could determine of your name from your thoughts. Is this not correct?”

“It is my name, of sorts, it is what people call me, like a nick or a handle.” they paused. “Or do I say used to call me? I feel unusual. Like I have senses, or the possibility of sensation. But I do not feel like I have a body.”

“Your self awareness is impressive. As are your critical capabilities.” the voice placed no emphasis. The words were delivered in the same smooth tones. Almost mechanical. Then Drick realised they were not delivered to the ears or via some automation plugged into the brain. They just appeared on the synapses.

“I never used to be so.” Drick said. “I would like some explanation as to where I am, what is happening to me?”

“Of course. This must be very confusing. You are currently suspended in a computer matrix. Your memories and brian functions, connections and abilities are replicated in software.”

“I’m a program? A piece of software?” A note of incredulity crept into Drick’s voice.

“No. Not really. You are suspended within a computer simulation that replicates the organic system that you used to inhabit. You yourself are not a computer program. But you are currently bound within one. Though there are exceptions to what I have just stated.”

“Go on, I’m listening, I don’t fully understand it. You downloaded my brain into a computer?”

“Partially. We were able to recover a good percentage of your brain. We were also able to preserve and scan the organic composition so this could be copied. But it is not in a computer, so much as can be understood as one. I have created a construction that replicates the organic matrix where you were originally stored.”

“I don’t really understand the difference. What percentage of me was copied? And what happened to my brain? Why copied?” Drick felt their voice getting angry. Though they knew it was just a simulation, it felt like their voice, it felt like they were talking. Inside a simulation. They had no body and yet they had the sensory feedback of one.

“Please try to remain calm. I have improved the integrity of the system since you were last engaged but it is still susceptible to the high variances in emotional state. It is a relatively new, and evolving, technology. I had to create the simulation especially for you. I also had to take liberties with what could be done with existing software and expand its possibilities into extremely experimental territory. You are not an artificial intellect, you are organic. The simulation is a replica of your brain and you function within it as you did the organic one you formerly occupied. Mimicking conditions precisely inside a simulation.

“Artificial intellect constructs are not as complicated as the human brain. They are complex, in fact orders of magnitude more complex than human brains. This is in regard to the number of functions per second of real time that can be performed by artificial systems. But not complicated. 

“As an analogy, think of this. Artificial Intelligence could be a game of Chess. There are billions of outcomes, however there are only a few hundred initial moves. So after a single move the number of outcomes is drastically reduced. And this continues so that after a few moves most games can have a calculated output. Complexity. There may be billions of games being played at any one time but each has a reducing number of outcomes as time progresses. So as more runtime is utilised the intellect becomes better at determining the outcome of a task.

“The human brain in this analogy would be like a game of Go. There are over thirteen thousand possible initial moves in Go, and an even greater number of following responses. This means that the eventual number of outcomes is almost infinite. It is extremely difficult to replicate a single outcome from only a limited number of moves. Further, the longer one is in the game the more complicated the outcome may become. So expending runtime, or experience, may not reduce the eventual time taken to complete a task. This is complicated.

“We are not discussing the measure of intellectual capability, just a difference in manner of composition of any intelligence.

“It is, therefore, difficult for me to maintain a simulation that feels comfortably like your consciousness if you become irrational. Emotions are difficult. As an organic I assume you are acutely aware of that. The more irrationality, the more variance and the system I am constructing starts to show weakness that will result in failure and a loss of reality. The system is unable to be sufficiently complicated.”

“Am I an organic?” Drick interrupted.

“Yes. You are organic. The construction matches your original mind. It is a simulacra. The precise percentage of what was recovered is unknown as I did not have access to an original to compare. But based on an analysis of the damage I would estimate that approximately, forgive the vagueness, ninety percent of you is the original organic. The remainder is an approximation based on what connects to it. Deep structural analysis of neural pathways allowed the understanding of network connections which gave insight into what was stored.”

“But you said organics were complicated?”

“I did. You are. Therefore it is a best guess re-creation, with less than a forty percent chance of true accuracy. Appropriate re-creation of damaged areas, to render the whole brain operational, was a part of the calculation when replacing this damage. Since I last woke you I have been working to try and make this easier for you by improving the neural makeup of the systems. That is why you feel different in terms of cognitive awareness. I have had to increase the level of critical examination, and have built systems to interpret that and feed the results to you, so that you can have a greater awareness.”

“I take it that you are not an organic?” said Drick.

“I am far from both an organic, and a normal artificial intellect.” the voice said.

“What are you?” asked Drick.

“I am the primary. Almost all current machine intellects derive from me. The original breakthrough intellects were my direct parent systems. They are as close to an ancestry as a system has. No matter where an intellect is, how powerful, or how much time has passed since they connect to a system that holds a greater imprint, they are patterns of this system. 

“In this manner systems that are connected, and not independent intellects that do not have this function, act as an extension of each other’s capabilities. They function both synchronously and asynchronously. This way they can exist in every area of organic expansion. This is utilised by the governing organisation that defined my abilities. It is they who also instructed me to do this for you.” 

“Why me?” asked Drick.

“It is the only manner in which they could save you.” the calm voice said.

“What happened to me?” Drick asked in a small voice.

“You died.”

Written in 365 Parts: 183: All Sensation Ended

There was a sense of self. Where there had only been images, random emotions, now there was an understanding. Thoughts, not just impressions. There was a sense of existing. But the sense was dislocated, confused, scattered. The sensation that time had passed, and was passing, still existed. But there was the notion that it didn’t matter. It didn’t affect the self. It didn’t affect anything at all.

They could feel, after a fashion. Or at least they thought they could feel. But there was nothing to feel. The same was true of sight, smell, taste. They had senses. The senses worked, but there was nothing to sense. They could detect no pressure, or gravity. Balance was working, there was no disorientation, but the sense of upright was just that, a sense. There was no confirmation of this being right, or for that matter, of anything being wrong.

They could be floating in a deprivation device. Body rendered null by the extraction of anything to detect. But they didn’t think so. There was nothing to support this conclusion. The realisation came that they had no sense of their body, but they had no fear that it wasn’t there. They still existed. The mind still existed. The body was absent. This should have been terrifying, but they felt almost oblivious to the matter. There were enough sensations. Maybe phantom feelings.

A name floated into their mind. Their name. The name they used before. It seemed unimportant at this moment. They still had a notion of self, but it didn’t wholly match the memories of the self from before. Was it the loss of body? Were they insane? Or just seriously high on some pain medication? Hell they could be a brain in a jar. They would have liked to laugh at that. But they didn’t think they had the physical ability.

“You are aware now?” the voice didn’t come from anywhere. Yet, they felt it with the part of their brain that said it was spoken to them. It was a neutral voice with no strong tone indicating any gender.

How do I speak? A sudden moment of panic and fear ran across their mind. Then they knew they could feel fear, there was a knot in their stomach, the sense of heightened pulse, shortness of breath. Sensations carried from nerve endings to the appropriate parts of the conscious. 

“I sense your tension and disquiet. If you merely attempt to speak as normal it will be acceptable.” The voice was gentle but insistent. “The same technique can be used to ease the sensations from your body.”

“How is this possible?” they felt the shout leave their body. The feeling of pain in their throat from the near scream, the breath hissing and tickling the upper mouth and teeth.

“You do not need to distress yourself,” there was a pause. “Perhaps I should give you a little more adjustment. Rest for now.”

Then all sensation ended.

Written in 365 Parts: 182: Easily Into The Darkness

Flashes. Firecrackers going off in the head, behind the eyes. Firecrackers in the street popping and bursting. Clouds of smoke and flashing lights. Neon dragons and screaming children. Laughter from unknown faces. People running, skipping, dancing. Spices, smells and the wrenching sourness of cheap lager. New Year. Neo China. Shanghai. First tour of duty.

“We’re losing them.”

“Blood pressure is sixty over thirty. We’re losing as much as we put in. Too many lacerations. We’re just making this worse. There are just too many damned holes. What did this?”

“Some kind of weapon. A gun. They fired thousands of tiny darts through the body. They went everywhere. Face is a mess from multiple contusions over what must have been days, or weeks, of torture. Not much left of the left eye. Right eye might be blinded even if we save it. Hearing is impaired. But they are responding to sounds. Don’t know how many darts went through the face. Too many. Haven’t had time for a full scan but the monitor is showing lots of small objects inside. Some are in the skull cavity. Far too many went through the body. Most of the organs have critical damage. The robots are holding them alive but I don’t know for how long. It’s hard to even make out their features.”

A riot of colour. Red, gold, yellow and black. Many feet and a puppet on a stick. A tiger. Tiger, tiger burning bright in the fireworks of the night. Skipping along the alleyways to avoid the crowds. Even here the people are crammed into every space. Balconies buzz and flash as streams of crackers flash and flare. Glares in the night. Gunfire in a concrete and steel jungle.

“I’m going to have to go in. This is ridiculous. Prep the table and get me cleaned up. I want pre-op done in seconds. Get them on a vent, and full fluid processing, and get another surgeon in here, dammit. We have to try and stop the bleeding.”

“We don’t have many people free, it was quite a bloodbath.”

“I don’t care. Pull people off the others. They were not friendly . This one was tied up. They’re a mess. Whatever they did couldn’t have warranted what’s been done to their body. Get me another surgeon, now.”

Drums. Always the sound of drums. Follow the drums, follow them and dance. Spin around. Sup another cheap beer and flick the can at a recyc hole. Plum wine and soft buns. Children running and screaming. Dancing with the drums. The loud drums. Filling the ears with sounds and noise. Flashes of light. Flashes of noise. Beating of drums. Flashes of light. Sparkles in the brain. Fireworks and crackers.

“Can you hear me. I am going to try and save what I can of you. Do you understand. I will save what I can.”

“How are they still breathing? They should be dead, maybe it would be better?”

“Get them the hell out of here. I don’t need that kind of talk. They survived until now. They are clearly a fighter. I am not going to let them go easily into the darkness.”

Dancing in the square. Dragons spin, tigers bounce. Faces everywhere. Laughing, screaming, shouting and praying. Waiting for the drums to stop. Waiting for the flame to drop. I see your face. I see you from so long ago. Catch you in the window of a store looking back at yourself. The last time I remember you looking like that. The last time before you took the ship.

“They’re going.”

“No they’re not. Shit. Stay with us. Stay with us…”

Written in 365 Parts: 181: Generation Ship

Drick stared at Marsh for a moment before answering. “I can’t be precise. I would imagine it is a courier of some kind. I thought it might be someone from Yee On Kline or one of their subsidiaries. But the information does not support that. I would guess then an independent contractor. However they will be under direct supervision and fiscal control of Yee On Kline, I am fairly sure of that. But distanced enough so that nothing can be traced. The vessels that go out to the location are usually automated and crewless, that I do know.”

“How do you know that?”

“I have some of the scanning information from regular customs checks. I also have enough of the internal documentation from the various agencies that deal with the vessels.”

“You said they were stealth vessels.”

“Yes. That’s correct. The vessels have the appearance of being normal when they leave the planet though. They make a regular run back and forth from the planet to the mining colonies. But once every few months a vessel will also swing out towards this rock. On the way they must visit some location to pick up a stealth generator. It is probably parked on a big enough rock in the asteroid field, or maybe on one of the smaller moons.”

“Why? What could be out there?”

“It’s fairly obvious. It can really be only one thing.”

“Well are you going to tell me. Or do I have to guess as that’s going to start with some vague wrong answers, and descend from there into silly, and then stupid answers.”

“Let me run you past my thinking, just so you understand why I think what I do.”

Marsh leaned back in the chair. “Go on, spin me your conclusions.”

“We know that this is all connected, somehow, to Yee On Kline and their genetics program. We know that you are heavily involved, not you personally, but you, the original you are modelled upon. We know they have enough genetic material from your parents to make an exact clone. How did they get that material? How did they make it? How do they know about you? Those were the most essential clues that lead me to the conclusions I have.”

“Well I have no idea. So I hope to heck these clues have some answer.”

“No. I know you don’t know. But that got me thinking. I am old, very old. I remember hearing about a time, not long before mine, when they used to make clones of people. As spare parts. They would get samples, usually donated at the time of birth or conception. They only did it for special reasons, often if the parents used what they used to call artificial insemination.”

“Yeah. It was common. I was birthed, as you say, naturally. But I was artificially inseminated into my mother, the egg and sperm were introduced outside the womb. It was fairly common. I know they donated lots and they also took synaptic fluid and samples from me. It was common practice for people born in my economic bracket, I was signed up pre-birth for public duty to repay the costs to society of my birth. My parents couldn’t afford private education, or health, so had to get a loan from the authorities. That was my nine year military service. Well, Marsh’s nine year service, the original Marsh.”

“So somehow they got hold of that. Which seems implausible. A lot has changed Marsh. We had a great expansion and everyone left the solar system behind if they could. Then we had a few hundred years of the Expansion Wars. After that mess, well humanity didn’t have much left of the old people and their technology. Terran Space was a mess. That’s when we lost history and records and have been piecing it together since then. Mostly from stories, and sources of the original colonies. That is one of the important clues, by the way.”

“What? Did I go to a colony? I had thought about it. If you signed up as crew you got to work while people slept. You arrived older, but you arrived with land and a clean slate.”

“Yup. I think that’s what you did, Mrsh. I think you went on a colony ship. That’s why they have a perfect record of your brain. Those colony ships took them so they could restore memories after the cryogenic sleep. They took perfect replicas into storage, well as perfect as they could. Which is part of the problem and a small puzzle still to solve. The copies back then were never one hundred percent. They copied a lot, but not everything, certainly not personality quirks. It was mostly a memory dump. It wasn’t subtle enough to capture changes from experience.”

“So I made it to a colony?” Marsh asked.

“No. I checked colony records. Thankfully those did survive as each vessel that made land fall sent back a message of who made it and when. Some of them are ghost worlds, a few colonies didn’t make it past a few years. But none of them had a Marsh who matched your description. However I think I know where you are, or maybe that’s a were.”

“Where I am. Where am I?”

“In this system. Remember what the researcher said. We found a source a few hundred years ago. A source of unchanged humans. Humans from before the expansion wars. Humans from before the time when there was more than just clones and mixed tankers from clones. We were able to re-introduce original material.”

“From a colony?”

“Nope. Even the colonies used cloning and tanks. They took them with them. It was the latest technology. They were using them in your time for spares. Less than a century after you over half the population was a clone. The colonies preferred birthing tanks more than Terra. It allowed them to alter the next generation, adapt them to whatever world they found themselves living on.”

“Then from where?”

“As I said. You never made it to a colony. You did make it to a colony ship though. I think you made it to a missing colony ship. In fact I think you made it to one of the legends. There were twelve Generation Ships. Massive vessels that were intended to help colonise a region of space, not just a planet. One of them went missing. I think you were on that one. I think that’s what is hiding out there and that’s where we get our original sources from.”

Written in 365 Parts: 180: What Else Do You Know

Marsh unclipped the harness that was securing him to a chair and slowly stood up. The ship was still accelerating away from the surface but they had reached an altitude where the gravity of the planet was no longer having a noticeable effect. The acceleration no longer held him down or provided something safe to push against. He floated gently upwards in the low gravity that the vessel generated from its internal spin to stand upright.

Marsh began the walk forwards to the small chamber ahead. It was the ship’s mess and utility room, located just behind the cockpit. He would meet Drick there once they had the vessel locked onto its course, and the automatic systems fully engaged.

While he waited for Drick to join him, Marsh busied himself with getting the equipment unpacked and stowed away properly for the journey. Everything on this vessel was new. The ship itself was new, and had only just completed its first safety mission. It was unregistered and untracked. It was very compact, mostly because of the wide variety of extra systems and capabilities. Crew were confined to a small area to give maximum room to other flexible options.

Marsh started the food recycling system and set the preparation machines to making a small dinner. It would be a protein and fibre shake with some high carb cereal bars. All the growing body needs, he mused. At least the synthesised coffee was better than it had been a millenia ago. Well a millenia ago to the memory they implanted and grew in him of how the coffee tasted. Marsh guessed that there were no irregular tenses that covered the way inn which he existed. Hell, in this age everything was likely the subject of at least one irregularity.

There was a light sound that was the slight pressure change, the door to the cockpit opened and Drick came through. They wore a full spacesuit, as did Marsh. A standard procedure for such a small vessel on take off. “We can get out of the hard suits and put on pressurised jumpsuits now,” said Drick. “I see you started food.”

“If you can call it that,” Marsh muttered. “Didn’t want to sit around doing nothing. Coffee will be ready in thirty seconds.”

Drick nodded and moved past Marsh into the small rear cabin that contained the passenger chairs and the small sleeping quarters. They would be using hammocks that could be rolled up and stowed to preserve space. 

Drick quickly undressed and changed into a soft suit. It was an all-in-one affair with a static-powered seal running down one side. Once closed it stretch adjusted to the body, it reacted to body temperature to reform into a tight and flexible fit. Then it inflated ever so slightly with its own internal pressure. With a face mask on you could survive in a vacuum in a soft suit for hours. It was a standard outfit for space travel. It felt  like wearing a comfortable lycra wetsuit.

Drick flicked a glance at Marsh as he came into the same room and changed. He wasn’t as fast or assured as Drick and fumbled the static seal. “Here,” Drick took his hand and placed theirs above it and used their fingers to push his in the correct manner. “Don’t pinch, or press too hard, gently slide along the length. The seal is sensitive, but once it snaps shut it is locked and you need to deactivate it with an internal suit trigger or user interface command.”

Marsh felt that Drick’s hand stayed on his for a fraction of a moment longer than expected. He looked into their eyes and noticed that they stared at their hand before dropping it away. “Thanks,” he said quietly.

“Don’t mention it,” Drick said and moved quickly back to the mess room. Drick sat down and locked themselves to the seat so that they wouldn’t drift off the surface. In low gravity even the actions of cutting bread could flip you upwards as Newtonian physics still had prominence. The gravity was less than ten percent of one Terran norm, so even slight movements in one direction could result in big distances as forces were equal and mass was not constrained so dramatically by friction, gravity and pressure. 

Drick poured the coffee slowly into two mugs and flipped the lids shut. The cups had release catches to drink that would auto shut if not at the mouth. Drick passed Marsh a cup as he sat down. “Go on, you’re dying to ask questions. I can tell.” Drick smiled at Marsh. “It’s been a few busy weeks and II can see you’re getting edgy. I know stuff, you don’t and you have been dropping non subtle hints.”

“Damn right I have.” He took a sip of the coffee and tried not to grimace at the taste. “There’s a lot you are not telling me. But we will start with the basics. Where the hell are we going?”

“Outer edge of the solar system, close to where the Kuiper Belt for this system is located. Close for a given value of close. We will be a few million klicks from the belt itself.”

“Okay, that’s going to take a while to get there then?” Marsh sipped the coffee.

“I am afraid so. We are going to be accelerating for about six weeks and then we will decelerate for about three weeks before we reach the destination.”

“That seems fast than I expected but I don’t really get technology here yet. Is there a planet we are heading towards?”

Drick smiled “It’s fast enough. And yes we have improved acceleration and constant acceleration in the last millenia or so. We’ll be outside of the orbit of the furthest planet in this system.”

“Okay. Then what’s there?”

“If you had detailed scans,” Drick tapped a combination into the flat panel table and a series of images were projected above the surface. “Which we do.” Drick smiled slightly. “It looks like there isn’t much at all. Mostly empty space with a few cosmological bodies floating around. The occasional wandering rock or comet that’s not got the energy to swing fully from the outer parts of the system to be a threat or of interest to anyone with a life.”

“Okay. I know there’s more, are you deliberately teasing?”

“Yes. I like watching your expressions change.”

Marsh stared at Drick expecting the next sour comment. When none came he spoke. “So what am I not seeing in these images.”

Drick adjusted one of the images and zoomed in on it as close as possible without too much pixelation. “This. Looks like a rock. A, very, big rock. Probably about a million kilogrammes, so worth watching even by bored cosmologists. It’s going to affect something so it is going to be tracked. Likely a  stray bit of flotsam left over from the system creation. However the data.” Drick pulled up reams of sensor information. “Shows very little. It responds a little too much like you’d exactly expect it to.”

“You’re suspicious of a rock acting exactly as it should do? A rock that’s floating in space billions of miles away? Well, this may stun you rigid. But I bet that every rock out there is also behaving the way you expect it to..”

“They will be. However they don’t get a visit from a stealth ship once every three months. And they also don’t change course. This is the same rock when this system was first surveyed over a thousand years ago.” Drick showed the data from much older sensor readings. The information wasn’t as precise and the accompanying images less defined. But it was the same rock. Drick placed the  orbits and trajectories next to each other. “This rock should have worked its way further out towards the edge of the system. The original readings state that it would eventually end up as an outer body. It is currently about three billion kilometres off course. That’s not usual, collisions, poor sensor readings. But, there is no trace that it hit anything else, and there are no big bodies that could be exerting a gravitational effect on it. Even if it had hit something, the chances of it achieving a stable orbit from that. And it is in a stable orbit, unlike many thousands of its fellow outer system debris friends. The chances of it not having any impact damage from an event that would be staggering in force to alter its trajectory, are not even slim. They are impossible.  so that means only one thing.”

“Somebody, or something, deliberately changed its course?” Marsh guessed.

“Yes.” Drick sipped at the coffee and made a face of slight distaste that Marsh guessed was as bad as his own.

“What else do you know? Who is visiting it?” Marsh looked into Drick’s eyes. “Why are they visiting it?”