Date Point 10y9m AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Byron Group Advanced Aircraft Assembly Facility, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Allison Buehler
A random visitor to the AAAF would have been forgiven for mistaking Doctor Clara Brown for some skinny geek who’d climbed the fence to get a look at the ship. Between her metal band T-shirts, torn jeans and huge buckle-encrusted black New Rock boots she didn’t look anything like a senior team member of a multi-billion-dollar corporate project, even when she put on her lab coat. Her glasses, piercings and pigtails weren’t exactly part of the professional corporate engineer look either.
If the random visitor had cared to look for five minutes, however, they would have seen the way she was the nexus of several ant-trails of busy men and women who came and went to get her opinion before scurrying off on errands. They would have seen that she checked, tapped on, wrote on and worked through her tablet and smartwatch almost constantly and, if they were smart, would have revised their first impression.
Allison thoroughly liked her. She knew Misfit’s systems better than Allison herself did which was hardly surprising considering that she had designed more than a few of them herself, and they had worked together closely with Clara’s father to fine-tune the control systems to the point where Misfit felt like a living boat rather than an inert apparatus. Their excursion around the solar system had felt oddly like sailing, despite the absence of surf and seagulls.
“Getting those guys from that VR game company on board for the WiTChES haptic feedback was a great idea,” she said. “It was almost like I could feel the solar wind.”
“Too bad we can’t have you hauling on ropes,” Clara smiled, tapping something thoughtfully as another crate was loaded onto the dumbwaiter and vanished up into Misfit’s body.
“Nah, I’d tire out. Besides, I never actually went sailing.” Allison shrugged.
“You should. It’s something I really miss about when we were living in New Hampshire. Dad and I had a keelboat called the Belle Starr, but we had to sell her when we moved out here, sadly. We still go out on Lake Michigan sometimes but… I dunno, it just doesn’t feel right when I can’t smell salt.”
“Mm-hmm. I think I remember you telling me about it.”
“Did I? Sorry.” Clara waggled her tablet. “Kinda distracted…Okay, that’s the last box of frozen kale…”
“Check…” Allison did her best to keep the relief out of her voice. Misfit’s food supply had been carefully thought-out to fit as much nutrition as possible into the available space without sacrificing on variety and interest. It was heavy on salmon, kale, brown rice and potatoes. There was also beef liver, garlic, plenty of onions, carrots and parsnips, celery, spinach, boxes of freeze-dried eggs, bouillon and milk powder, dried beans and lentils, dried apricots, cranberries and blueberries, Li hing mui, honey, black pepper, salt and sugar, tea and coffee, herbs and spices, one freezer full of the frozen cuts from a whole lamb, another full of a whole beef cow, half a dozen whole chickens and the cleverly-packaged ‘good bits’ of dozens more, bacon, chorizo and salumi, wheat flour, condensed soup, one enormous wheel of cheddar and another of parmesan… and the two stashes.
One stash was the emergency stash. It contained, in one crate, enough food to keep the three of them alive—not happy or thriving, but alive—for a year if they didn’t mind a diet composed mostly of baked insects supplemented by peanut butter, processed cheese and vitamin tablets with the occasional MRE thrown in for when they needed to actually do something active. The other was the luxury stash which was mostly just beer and chocolate.
Oh. And the crate with their supplements and Xiù’s Lactaid. That crate had been the first aboard, just in case the rest of the larder left them a little short somehow.
The storage rooms that had been so conspicuously empty during their jaunt around Sol were being filled pretty much from edge-to-edge and it was a little disconcerting. Allison hadn’t thought that any of them were particularly big eaters, but seeing just how much was being loaded on to serve just three people for an eighteen month mission with a resupply halfway through…
It drove home what all the ETs had always said about the human appetite. Seeing the beef alone go aboard had been an education. She was glad that the parade of food had finally reached its end.
“…aaand twenty tins of condensed mushroom soup.”
“Check.”
Clara put her tablet by her side and relaxed. “I guess that’s my job done,” she declared. “Wow.”
“Wow?”
“Well, I’ve been working so hard on making this flight happen… and then, bam! There we go, that’s the last thing I had to do.”
“Oh yeah. I know that feeling,” Allison nodded. “ Like Wile E. Coyote.”
“Huh?”
“You know, when he goes running off the cliff and he’s still trying to run in mid-air?”
“Oh! Yeah!” Clara smiled. “That’s how it feels alright.”
“So what next for you?”
“Dane and I are going on our honeymoon I guess.”
“Long overdue!” Allison raised an eyebrow.
“Hey, interstellar scout ships don’t build themselves…” Clara kicked the heel of her boot idly into the concrete floor, looking thoughtfully up at Misfit’s industrial lines. “…We did a good job though, right? I mean-”
“Clara, she’s amazing. I love her.”
“How does she compare to your old ship, though?”
Allison shrugged. “Sanctuary was a hell of a ship and she could move like nothing else. And sure, she was way bigger and more comfortable. But Misfit is human. She’s built for us, by us. By you. That makes her way more special.”
Clara nodded. She seemed buoyed by the reassurance, but still not entirely at ease and it wasn’t hard to guess why.
“We’ll be fine, I promise,” Allison told her. They glanced up as Misfit’s airlock cycled and disgorged the three men who had been helping load and pack the provisions, plus Julian. He gave them friendly shoulder-slaps and handshakes as they parted ways and trotted across the concrete wearing the happy perspiring smile he always wore after a session of good physical work.
“That’s the last of it, right?”
“Yuh-huh,” Allison nodded. “Xiù’s not back yet.”
“There’s no rush. We aren’t on a timetable any longer. She can take as long as she needs.”
“Well…” Clara wobbled her head. “You are on a timetable, it’s just a loose one.”
“We’ve got enough autonomy to let Xiù say goodbye to her family,” Julian replied.
“She didn’t get the chance last time,” Allison pointed out.
“I know. I know. And don’t forget, there’s whatever Kevin needed to talk about before you’re allowed to go.”
“Speak of the devil…”
It was strange how well Kevin Jenkins and Xiù got along these days, considering that the first time they met she had broken his nose. The experience seemed to have softened him and knocked some of the rust off his sense of empathy, or maybe he was just the kind of guy you had to punch sometimes to keep him on the straight and narrow. Either way while their relationship was never going to be a friendship, it was still positive. All of them knew that he’d fought their corner for months now and served as a buffer against the Group’s excesses. Allison reckoned that the fact they’d had any kind of privacy or autonomy at all since selection was probably his doing, though he had never claimed as much.
He was also the only guy in the whole Byron Group who was completely in on the real intel situation vis-a-vis the Hierarchy and the existential ’if we screw up we’re all dead’ crumbling ledge that was humanity’s real status in the galaxy. Even Moses Byron himself didn’t know the full story according to Kevin, though he’d also cautioned against writing off their billionaire patron’s ability to read between the lines. “He ain’t stupid,” had been the advice. “That man has literally sold oil to the Arabs. He knows what’s up even if he ain’t been told all the details.”
“All ready?” Clara asked as they approached. Allison noticed the hints of redness and puffiness around Xiù’s eyes and gave her a discreetly reassuring sideways hug, which was returned with a grateful squeeze.
“Nearly. Gonna hafta ask you to leave us though, doc. We got some stuff to discuss.”
“I figured.” Clara sighed, then gave all three of them big hugs. “I’ll see you guys in nine months.” she promised.
Kevin watched her go, all the way across the concrete until the door closed behind her, then pulled out an implant scanner and a data card, one of MBG’s forays into electronics that packed several terabytes of information onto something roughly the size and shape of a credit card and could communicate that data wirelessly with no battery of its own. “Heads.” he said.
They obeyed the formality without complaint, letting him ping their brains for hardware that shouldn’t be there. There was none, of course, and he sent a text message then handed over the card. “Those are your codes for the Cimbrean-Five jump beacon,” he said. “Keep that card safe. It’s got all kindsa copy-protection and lockouts on it so you can’t transfer its content to any other device, and it’ll wipe itself if you try and use it with a computer that ain’t Misfit’s brain. You lose it or wipe it, and you have to walk home the slow way.”
He handed it to Xiù. “Y’all got any questions, now’s the time to ask ‘em I guess.”
The three of them looked at each other.
“Hey, uh…” Julian unzipped his jacket pocket and handed him something quite large. “This isn’t much, but you’ve had our backs for months now so we wanted you to have something, and…”
Kevin accepted it with a blink. The gift was a palm-sized rock the rough shape and texture of an almond and the ruddy hue of a football, encased in a neat cuboid of clear resin. “…What is it?”
“Martian tephra,” Julian said.” That, my friend, is a blob of molten rock that one of the Martian volcanoes ejected fuck-knows-how-many years ago, and it musta flown a hell of a long way in the low gravity because somehow it fetched up at our landing site a thousand miles away from the nearest volcano.”
“This weighs like five pounds!”
“Yup. Reckon that little rock’s worth a couple’a million dollars if you were to sell it…” Allison grinned.
“Holy crap, guys…You call that ‘not much’?”
“It’s literally a rock I picked up off the ground,” Julian said with a self-effacing smile.
“Yeah, but what a rock and what a ground… Man…” Kevin cleared his throat. “Thank you. Really, this is… I’ll treasure it.”
Julian shook his hand, as did Allison. Xiù surprised them all by giving him a hug.
“Sorry for breaking your nose…” she said, not for the first time.
“Reckon it needed breaking,” Kevin replied, though he was obviously touched. “Look, uh… Be careful. I wanna see you all back here safe and sound and full’a stories.”
“Or at least bored and disappointed.” Allison had her private suspicion that she’d just listed the most likely outcome, despite Clara’s assurances that Misfit’s exoplanet telescope could reliably scan thousands of potential stars a second and would readily guide them toward planets with the right kind of oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. She trusted Clara, but the whole group could err a little too heavily on the side of optimism, and Clara was no exception.
“Nah,” Kevin predicted. “We learned too much from the earlier missions. You’re gonna come back with a hard drive full of useful planets, I know it.”
“See you ‘round, Kevin…” Allison offered. He smiled, turned and sauntered away with a jaunty wave over his shoulder.
“Sure. Go be legends.”
They were alone.
“…Kinda feels anticlimactic, huh?” Julian said, looking around. The hangar threw lonely tinny reflections of his words back at them. “Just like that, we’re all loaded up and ready to go.”
“I like anticlimactic,” Allison said. “This is…”
“Peaceful,” Xiù suggested.
“Yeah. We get to do things at our pace now. That’s so welcome.”
“Yeah…”
Allison watched him, feeling sly amusement creep across her face. “…Antsy to get going, Etsicitty?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“So am I.”
Xiù nodded. “That makes three of us.”
“Awesome…”
An awkward several seconds unfolded as they stood there and stared at their ship, then at each other, then at the ship again. They were all waiting for one of the others to make the first move.
“…Okay for real?” Allison said eventually, breaking the silence, “I’m fucking scared.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Mm-hmm.”
This time, they climbed the ladder.
Date Point 10y9m AV
Aldrin Avenue, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Darcy
“And by ’bupkis’ you mean…?”
“Over the last five months, Ava Ríos has sent nearly two thousand emails and text messages in professional correspondence with her colleagues and contacts, all kosher. Personal messages with her friends and family, nothing untoward. On her personal devices she plays Slow Light Online about five hours a week and Click Wizards two or three times a day for an average of about five minutes per session. Her most visited websites are Instagram, Reddit, the Cimbrean government’s health and fitness portal, Pornhub, Wikipedia and a smattering of blogs and news sites. Long story short, since leaving Egypt she has done exactly nothing with any of her devices that would be a violation of her NDA. About the worst of her sins is she doesn’t change her passwords often enough, but then again who does?”
“And the message?”
The message. Darcy had… not been pleased to be woken at three in the morning a few days earlier and summoned to Cimbrean ASAP. She had spent most of the trip grinding her teeth in fact, especially upon learning who was at the heart of the urgent call.
She had staggered through the first eight hours of the investigation in a fog of caffeine, irritation and the manic energy of the sleep-deprived before finally allowing herself to crash.
The morning had brought with it clarity and calm, along with the welcome news that whatever had happened, her professional reputation seemed likely to remain undamaged, and with Ava now quite firmly exonerated she was feeling much more positive.
”It first appeared on a human device during the colony’s FTL relay’s routine synchronization. We know which foreign relay it was uploaded to: Observatory Station, at Neptune. The station’s staff confirmed they have no humans on board right now, which means that she wasn’t where the message came from, and in fact when it was uploaded she was on live TV being watched by thousands of people.”
“So she’s in the clear.”
“Pretty much, unless you care to lean on her about why there’s a dealer in her contacts.”
Darcy scowled. “…There is, is there?”
“Probably just one of her sources. A Gaoian botanist called Yeya. CCS have had their eye on him for a while, but they haven’t been able to bring a case. She may not even know about his sideline.”
“Gaoian drug dealers…” Darcy snorted, struck as she sometimes was by the world’s ever-deepening strangeness. “Do you think she’s using?”
“Unlikely.”
“Alright, thanks. I’m happy to remove her from suspicion then. You make note of that and I’ll go give her the good news.”
”Have fun.”
Darcy hung up and thought for a minute or two, then gathered her handbag and headed inside the apartment building.
Ava had been commendably compliant with the spirit of her NDA. Darcy wasn’t exactly pleased to be dragged back into dealing with her again, but she had stuck her neck out for that young woman. Several of her colleagues would have been less than impressed if she had failed to step up and handle her own mess.
Ava had insisted on staying at her adoptive family’s apartment until the investigation was complete, despite Darcy’s reassurances that it was unnecessary. Darcy was quietly grateful—she was entirely certain that the girl was too constructively self-centered to even think of doing something stupid, but having her under the watchful eye of Chief Arés was a useful way to smooth some ruffled feathers.
Gabriel Arés had plainly chosen the building for its disability access, which included a large and comfortable elevator directly opposite the front doors. She checked herself in its wide mirrors on the way up, massaging ruefully at the ever-deepening lines around her eyes and mouth, and neatened up her suit.
Appropriately neat, she rang the doorbell rather than knocking as was the Cimbrean custom. There was an answering call and thumping from inside, and after a half-minute Ava opened the door looking the complete opposite of her usual clean and groomed self in sweats, a T-shirt, no bra and no makeup. Darcy didn’t envy her the pain that would come when she finally took her hair down out of its impromptu lazy bun and reintroduced it to a brush, either.
“…Darcy!”
“Hello Ava. May I come in?”
Ava stepped aside and gestured to the nice Cimbrean Nutwood dining table and chair set, where she sat down, warily. “I, uh… Sure! I’m sorry you had to-”
Darcy settled opposite her. “You’re in the clear,” she said without preamble.
“Oh thank God…” Ava sagged then sat back and covered her face, stress visibly flooding out of her. When she lowered her hands again she looked exhausted. “…Thank you. I’m so sorry about all this, I don’t have any idea what-”
She trailed off as Darcy raised her hand a reassuring inch off the tabletop. “I won’t lie, I wasn’t thrilled to be woken up at three in the morning, flown halfway across North America and sent over here,” she said, “and I just know my in tray will be a jungle when I’m finally back in Chicago…But we’re happy there was no wrongdoing on your part: You have nothing to apologize to me for.”
“…Can you tell me what happened?”
Darcy cleared her throat. To her knowledge, a situation like this was completely unheard-of, and it posed new and challenging questions about need-to-know, not to mention the security and soundness of every intel asset ever. “I don’t know,” she replied truthfully. “We’ve not really decided what happened yet, nor how much you need to know about…”
Ava blinked slowly at her. “…I read the message, you know.”
Darcy nodded sympathetically. “And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you to please be discreet about its…”
“Discreet?!” Ava’s jaw dropped. “Oh, I’ll be discreet, sure, but there’s someone or something out there that claims to be a… a copy of me,” her voice crawled with nausea “…and I don’t have need-to-know?”
“That’s not what I mean. We haven’t verified that-”
“It has my memories, Darcy!”
It was the first time Darcy had seen her so fired up. In all their previous interactions, Ava had been quiet, deferential and nervous. Now she was up, she was animated and she was interrupting.
Worse, she was crying. “They wrote about… things I’ve never told anybody. Feelings I’ve never shared, memories that I… That are way too…” She trailed off and took a shuddering breath. “They know things that only I knew.”
Darcy cleared her throat. She’d read the message too. It had been intensely and painfully personal. “I know you feel violated-”
“I feel raped.” Ava corrected her. She slumped back in her chair and wrestled her face into something resembling a miserable kind of composure. “I don’t give a fuck about, about the Hierarchy, or the Cabal, or what-the-fuck-ever. I’m done. I want out. But for fuck sake are you going to look me in the eye and tell me that I don’t have need-to-know on my own soul?”
“Would it help you?”
“It’s not about helping me. If… if there’s even an ounce of truth to what they said, then I need to know, Darcy. I have to.”
Darcy held eye contact as she thought long and hard, before finally taking off her glasses to clean them. “…During the after-action cleanup of Operation EMPTY BELL, the intel team recovered a… device from the top drawer of Six’s desk,” she said. “SCERF are still picking it over, but according to them it’s a scanner of some kind. A very sensitive one, plugged into a tiny but mighty quantum computing core.”
Ava said nothing: she watched, and listened.
“We… don’t know what it was for. But I have my suspicions.”
“They were physical once. Like us,” Ava said. “And now they’re not.”
“Yes.”
“Could it be a… some kind of a brain digitizing thingy?”
“…It could be, yes.”
“So he could have copied me.”
Darcy sighed and steepled her fingers together. She touched them to her nose as she drew a thoughtful breath, and rubbed her palms. “Professionally? Officially? We don’t know and we’re keeping an open mind. But… yes. If what you say about your memories is true then that seems plausible.”
Ava deflated. Her hands came up and rubbed her brow as she shook her head. “Joder todo sobre mi vida…” she whispered.
Darcy could hardly blame her. “Look…” she said. “If you need to talk to somebody about this, I can arrange-”
“No. Just… just leave me alone. Just go. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I pray to God we never see each other again. Please.”
“Ava, I read the message too. If what it said is true…”
Ava looked away.
“Please,” she said, quietly. “Just… Just leave me alone. I want to forget all this. I want it all to go away.”
“And I’m offering to help,” Darcy told her. “I get it, I wouldn’t want to talk to me either. But you need to talk to somebody, and there are people right here on Cimbrean who could be helpful…”
“You get it? Do you?” Ava shook her head. “Okay. Do you know why I don’t want to talk to you?”
“…Tell me.”
Ava sighed. “…You’re everything I wish I could be,” she said. “You’re not the problem, you’re the solution. You’re in charge, you’re involved. You’re fighting. Me? …I’m just a burden. I drag people down, I hurt them, and I get them killed. You’re a success and I’m…” She shook her head. “I’m a complete fuckup. And the worst part is I’m too much of a fucking coward to just kill myself so they can stop wasting-”
“Stop.” Darcy said. It was a soft word, but she poured every drop of command she had into it, and it worked—Ava’s self-hating tirade came to an abrupt halt. “That’s not cowardice, Ava. Taking your own life would the worst burden you could possibly lay on them. I know right now, you’re in a place so deep and so dark that you can’t see the light, but I promise, I promise you the light is there. And there are people who care about you and who want to help you find it. Please.”
“…Why do you care?” Ava asked. It wasn’t a sullen accusation, but a genuine query.
The honest answer was ’There but for the grace of God…’ but there was no way to say as much. It was too much, too intimate, too blunt. Saying so out loud could potentially ruin the rapport she’d worked hard to build with Ava, and that was far too valuable a thing to throw away on sentiment.
She elected instead for a more roundabout answer. “…When Six was captured years ago, the results of his interrogation came straight to me. Then as now, I was the one in charge of hunting down the Hierarchy on Earth. The assault on their safehouse in San Diego was… the president may have authorized it, but it was on my advice.”
Ava blinked at her, and Darcy straightened her glasses before forcing herself to look the younger woman in the eye. “I made the call that got your parents, your friends, your entire city and millions more besides, killed. And I blame myself for every single one.”
Ava seemed to be bereft of ideas for how to respond to that. She just gawped at Darcy, who cleared her throat. It was the first time she’d ever had the chance to apologize to a survivor of her mistake, and while she’d always hoped it would be cathartic, the moment now that it had arrived was… nauseous. “I’m so sorry,” she added quietly, and swallowed down the lump in her throat. “I… should have been better.”
“You…?” That lone word seemed to exhaust Ava’s faculties for discussion and her hand fluttered around as if hoping to alight on something intelligent to say.
Darcy just nodded.
Ava stared at her for a long silent time punctuated only by the hum of the refrigerator, the ticking of the wall clock, and the distant thump of somebody in another apartment moving around.
Finally, at long last, she bothered to wipe the tears off her face. “…Back in Egypt, you told me that if the safe-house hadn’t been destroyed, we might already all be dead,” she said. “Do you really believe that?”
“If I didn’t… I don’t think I could live with myself,” Darcy answered, honestly.
“And you… talked to people?”
“I did. I didn’t want to, but I did… and it helped.”
“I…” Ava stared through the table then shut her eyes, gulped and nodded. “…Fine. I’ll… talk to somebody. I’ll talk to Dad.”
Darcy heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”
She decided not to comment on the fact that Ava’s expression had more than a hint of gratitude in it too.
Ava for her part got up and padded through barefoot into the kitchen. “Coffee?”
“No, thank you.” Darcy stood up. “If you think you’ll be okay, I have quite a lot of work to do. This… incident is going to lead to some interesting places.”
“If…” Ava paused, holding a mug. “If there IS a copy of me out there…”
“Then we’ll have to figure out what to do about it as we go,” Darcy told her. “This is unprecedented territory we’re in, Ava. I don’t think anybody knows how to proceed.”
“…Just… do for her.. Or, uh, it… Do what you did for me, okay? I don’t think I could handle meeting…”
“I understand.” Darcy paused at the door. “Good luck, Ava. I hope if we ever meet again it’s outside of a professional context.”
“Yeah. I… thank you, Darcy. For everything.”
Darcy nodded and let herself out. Finding herself alone in the hallway outside she took a moment to express her emotions where nobody could see them, then pulled herself together.