Линда Нагата - Edges

He named these assistant personalities the Apparatchiks, an ancient term whose connotation of blind devotion to assigned duty he found amusing.

Urban had synthesized an army of Dull Intelligences too, to assist the Apparatchiks and to handle all the simple, repetitive tasks each day required—not that he experienced night and day, but he held tight to the tradition of measuring time according to the days and years of Earth though millennia had passed since any news had come from there and maybe, most likely, humanity’s birth world was gone to dust.

He’d like to know if that was true.

Urban had also created small outrider ships, based on the design of Messenger , the little ship that had taken Clemantine’s ghost back to Deception Well. He’d named his outriders after ancient gods and guiding spirits: Khonsu , Artemis , Lam Lha , Pytheas , Elepaio , and Fortuna . None were armed, but they extended the reach of his senses and his communications.

He’d grown the fleet of six from raw materials carried by the massive warship, matter originally intended for the ship’s own bio-mechanical reproduction.

For most of their existence, the outriders had run ahead of the courser in a long, staggered line, spaced ninety light-minutes apart. All were equipped with small telescopes enabling them to observe across the spectrum. Combining the data they collected gave Urban a detailed view of distant objects. And each outrider held backup copies of his library, and archived copies of his ghost.

Replication was a form of insurance. Even in the void of deep space there was a potential for collision with some bit of rubble. The courser, with all its mass, might be able to survive the huge energies of a high-speed impact, but the tiny outriders could not. Over the centuries, two of them— Khonsu and Artemis —had been destroyed.

Urban had grown new ships to replace them, giving them the same names.

He did what was needed to survive and he endured, but he did not let himself forget who and what he was. He took care to guard his core persona, that most-human version of himself. To endure the years, he modified his time sense, ensuring that neither the events of his past nor his hopes for the future ever seemed too far off as the ship coasted in a centuries-long passage through the vastness between stars.

As he finally drew near to Deception Well, he copied his core persona: one version to stay aboard the courser, another to replicate through the chain of outriders, establish communication, and eventually pass through a data gate aboard the warship stationed at the periphery of the nebula.

If all went well, these two ghosts would ultimately recombine into one. Until then, they operated independently, separated by light-hours from one another.

For the first time since he had hijacked the courser and made it his own, Urban rose to consciousness inside a physical body. His eyes snapped open. He heard the beat of his heart. Felt the touch of cool air against newly made skin and a faint electrostatic charge lofting the sparse black hair on his forearms.

He stretched the arms, legs, neck, back, even the feet of this avatar, newly grown aboard the warship, Long Watch . A fully rendered version of himself. Sleek and lean and comfortingly familiar. He curled long-fingered hands into fists, unfolded them again. Relishing the details of mass and resistance, of existence itself. So many years spent in simulated reality he’d forgotten how different it felt to be alive. How glorious. A pleasure just to breathe again, to feel the rumble of his stomach.

Hungry . Not just for food. Instinct stirred, sending blood towards his groin in an ancient tide. Desire as a homecoming rite, an affirmation of place. He’d been alone so long.

Was he still alone?

He shifted his focus outward. Found himself adrift in a zero-gravity environment, nude, confined within a transparent membrane just large enough to contain him. Strokes of light curved across the membrane’s shifting surface and across his dark-skinned body.

What was the membrane for? It might be just a gel cocoon left over from his resurrection, although in his experience those were designed to dissolve and drizzle away.

It might be meant to confine him.

Beyond the membrane, a dark undefined space.

His atrium sought a network connection. Found none. Not a surprise. Still, his isolation made him uneasy.

He peered past the cocoon. Was someone there?

Certainly there would be cameras on him, watching, evaluating. And his body would have been studied in detail as it was grown and assembled, confirming he was truly human. He expected no less.

The people of Deception Well—whoever they were in this era—were taking a chance by communicating with him at all. It was a risk on his side too. So much time had passed since he’d left the Well he could not claim to know his people anymore. His heart beat faster as he wondered: Have I made a mistake?

Aloud, he asked, “Why the darkness, the silence?”

No answer, but beyond the gel membrane darkness yielded to a barely perceptible blue light emanating from the walls of a small spherical chamber. As the light brightened, it picked out the edges and curves of a woman’s drifting figure. A familiar silhouette.

“Clemantine,” he growled in a low, victorious voice. The light became whiter, revealing the woman he’d come to find.

She had not changed, not physically. They’d been lovers once and he remembered every curve of that long, strong, well-muscled body, the feel of full breasts in his hands, the spicy scent of her skin. Her face was the same too: a broad, beautiful, balanced face with a flat nose and full lips. Serious in its expression, even now.

His heart hammered as he gazed at her; his hands shook. The joy of meeting her again almost overwhelming. He longed to reach for her, ached for her physical reality, skin to skin. He held back only because he did not see any similar joy on her face.

Instead, she looked distraught and defensive. “Who are you?” she asked. A demand phrased as a question. The chill in her words froze him.

“You know me,” he answered.

“I did once. But who are you now? Did they turn you?”

“They?” he asked. “There is no they . The Chenzeme—whatever they were—they’re gone. We found remnants. Artifacts. That’s all. But we learned. Like I told you in the radio message, we won. We learned how to beat their ships.”

“If you won, where are the others? You said ‘I’ve come home.’ Not we . What happened to them?”

The fear and suspicion in her eyes was more than he’d expected. “They stayed behind,” he told her. He made no effort to hide the bitterness these words brought him, but she was unmoved by it.

“Why?” she insisted.

He shook his head. “I’m not going to tell you that story, Clemantine. It’s in the library files that I’ve transferred over. I haven’t hidden any part of it. Not from you. Relive it there if you want to. I don’t want to. I want to talk about you. I came here to find you.”

Raising a hand, he probed at the membrane, pressing his fingers through what proved to be delicate tissue. Tore it open.

She watched him, unmoving. He didn’t doubt that she’d left instructions to disassemble them both down to their constituent atoms if something went wrong and he proved to be a Chenzeme weapon after all.

“How did you get here so soon?” he asked her. Then he held up a palm to stop her reply. “No, I already know. You were here. Do you keep an avatar aboard the second warship too? Waiting on the system’s periphery for some word from us, for someone to come back. I think you hoped it would be someone else, and not me.”