Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

It was a strangely calming revelation to know that his suspension capsule must be failing at some deep, mechanical level, and that he was lost inside his own mind. He tried to imagine himself fighting with the sleeping-chamber, crawling up the steep incline of ice and medication so as to wake up, beating on the unyielding inside of the coffin, buried alive within a ship-shaped monument to mankind’s absurd refusal to give up.

None of it got the adrenaline going. His mind stubbornly refused to leave that makeshift cell in the shuttle bay, as he worked slowly through the files he had been left with. And of course it was a dream, because they were more of the same: more information about Guyen’s machine, the upload facility the man had wrenched whole from the abandoned terraform station. Holsten was dreaming an administrative purgatory for himself.

Days went by, or at least he ate and slept and they slopped out his pail. He had no sense of anything functional happening outside the cage. He could not see what these people were for , save living day to day and forcing him to translate, and producing more of themselves. They seemed a weirdly orphan population: like lice infesting the ark ship, that the Gil might any moment purge from its interiors. They must have begun life as cargo, but how long ago? How many generations?

They continued to regard him with that curious reverence, as though they had caged a demigod. It was only when they came to shave his head that he fully understood that. They, none of them, seemed to cut their hair, but it was important to them that his scalp was cropped back to fuzz. It was a sign of his status, his difference. He was a man of an earlier time, one of the originals.

As is Vrie Guyen . The unhappy thought finally dispelled his somewhat fond thought that this might all be some hibernation nightmare. Wading his way through tangled philosophical treatises concerning the implications of the upload process, he had a window into Guyen’s tightly clenched, control-hungry mind. He began to assemble the sketchiest possible picture of what might be going on; of what might have gone wrong , therefore.

Then one day they opened his cage, a handful of robed figures, and led him out. He was not finished on his current project, and there was a tension about his keepers that was new. His mind immediately boiled with all manner of potential fates they could be intending for him.

They moved him out of the hangar and into the corridors of the Gilgamesh , still not speaking. They seemed to lack the show of reverence in which they had previously held him, which he reckoned could not bode well.

Then he saw the first bodies: a man and a woman collapsed in their path like string-cut marionettes, the textured flooring sticky with a slick of blood. They had been hacked at with knives, or at least that was Holsten’s impression. He was hurried on past them, his escorts – captors – paying no obvious heed to the dead. He tried to question them, but they just hauled him along quicker.

He considered struggling, shouting, protesting, but he was scared. They were all solidly made people, bigger than most of the grey ship-lice he had observed so far. They had knives in their belts, and one had a long plastic rod with a blade melted into the end: these were the ancient tools of the hunter-gatherers remade from components torn from a spaceship.

It had all been handled so swiftly and confidently that only right at the end did he realize that he had been kidnapped: wrested from one faction by another. At once, everything became worse than he had thought. The Gilgamesh was not just crawling with crazy descendants of awoken cargo, but they had already begun fighting each other. It was the curse of the Old Empire, that division of man against man that was the continual brake on human progress.

He was hustled past sentries and guards, or so he took them to be: men and women, some in shipsuits, some in makeshift robes, others in piecemeal home-made armour, as though at any moment someone would be arriving to judge the world’s least impressive costume competition. It should have been ridiculous. It should have been pathetic. But, looking into their eyes, Holsten was chilled by their steely purpose.

They brought him into one of the ship’s workshop rooms, housing a score of terminals, half of them dead, the rest flickering fitfully. There were people working on them – real technical work befitting real civilized people – and it looked to Holsten as though they were fighting for control, engaged in some colossal virtual battle on an invisible plane.

At the far end of the room was a woman with short-cut hair, a little older than Holsten. She wore a shipsuit that had been fitted out with plastic scales and plates, like somebody’s joke idea of a warrior queen, if only she had not looked so very serious. There was a ragged, healed scar about her chin, and a long pistol was thrust through her belt, the first modern weapon Holsten had seen.

‘Hello, Holsten,’ she said, and his interpretation of what he was seeing suddenly flipped like a card turning over.

‘Lain?’ he demanded.

‘Now you’ve got that look on your face,’ she observed, after giving him enough time to get over his surprise. ‘That one that’s sort of “I have no idea what’s going on”, and frankly I can’t seriously believe that. You’re supposed to be the smart guy, after all. So how about you tell me what you know, Holsten.’ She sounded partly like the woman Holsten remembered, but only if that woman had been living hard and rough for some time.

He gave the request due consideration. A lot of him genuinely wanted to disavow any knowledge, but she was right: that would be self-serving mendacity. I’m just a poor academic doing what I’m told. I’m not responsible. He was beginning to think that he was indeed, in part, responsible. Responsible for whatever was happening now.

‘Guyen’s taken over,’ he hazarded.

‘Guyen’s the commander. He’s already, what, over . Come on, Holsten.’

‘He’s woken up a whole load of cargo.’ Holsten glanced at Lain’s villainous-looking crew. Some of them he thought he recognized as her engineers. Others could well be more of the same cargo that Guyen had apparently now pressed into service. ‘I’d guess he started on that a while ago – looks like they’re maybe two, three generations down the line? Is that even possible?’

‘People are good at making more people,’ Lain confirmed. ‘Fuckwit never thought that one through, or maybe he did. They’re like a cult he’s got. They know fuck all but what he’s told them, yeah? Any of the originals from cargo who might have argued, they’re long gone. These skinny little creeps were basically raised on stories of Guyen. I’ve heard some of them talking, and they’re fucked up, seriously. He’s their saviour. Every time he went back into suspension, they had a legend about his return. It’s all kinds of messianic shit with them.’ She spat disgustedly. ‘So tell me for why, Holsten.’

‘He had me working on the upload facility taken from the station.’ A little of the academic crept back into Holsten’s unsteady tones. ‘There was always a suggestion that the ancients had found out how to store their minds electronically, but the EMP phase of their war must have wiped the caches out, or at least we never found any of them. It’s not clear what they actually used it for, though. There’s very little that’s even peripheral reference. It didn’t seem to be a standard immortality trick—’

‘Spare us!’ Lain broke in. ‘So, yes, Guyen wants to live forever.’

Holsten nodded. ‘I take it you’re not in favour.’

‘Holsten: it’s Guyen. Forever. Guyen forever. Two words that do not sit well together.’