Date Point: 12y 10m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač
Coombes grimaced and folded. “’How good can he be’? Famous last words, bro.”
The execrable drama on TV had long since been abandoned in favor of the infinitely more gripping one playing out on the scuffed, stained table where Firth usually painted his Orks.
The River that Rebar had just laid down with ceremonial care was an Ace of Clubs, joining a ten of Hearts, two sixes—Diamonds and Clubs—and a nine of Hearts.
Walsh made a growling noise and rubbed his nose. “Thanks for the vote of confidence…”
Walsh and Adam had that in common, Martina had noticed—a complete inability to hold their poker face. Maybe it was a SoCal thing… except that Burgess was from LA the same as Walsh, and his poker face was pretty damn good. Adam however had quit poker entirely after Rebar’s constant impenetrable steady sly grin had completely ruptured his composure.
Daar had turned out to be about as opaque as Regaari. Neither of them betrayed anything in their face, tail, or their mobile ears, with both of them having a knack for going as stone-still and watchful as a dog waiting for a treat. It was a good trick: those shining, steady eyes watching every twitch and fidget of his hands had apparently badly undermined Walsh’s confidence.
The huge Californian combat controller blinked at his cards one last time, looked Daar dead in the eye, then cleared his throat and spoke.
“Call.”
For the first time, Daar betrayed a minor crack—his ear twitched, ever so subtly.
He laid down a three of Hearts and a five of Diamonds.
Walsh, always the master of subtlety and impenetrable composure, exhaled hugely and sat back with an enormous grin and an incredulous laugh before flipping the exact opposite onto the table in front of him: The five of Hearts and the three of Diamonds.
Daar stared at the cards, then sniffed. “…So… Who wins?”
Coombes chuckled and shook his head. “Tie. Pot gets split between ‘ya.”
“Well… shit. How did that happen?”
Walsh started counting the pot out equally. “I can’t fuckin’ read you, bro, but I think I got you figured out for how you read me.”
Daar chittered deeply but said nothing.
Coombes snorted. “Or maybe it’s true love and there’s, like, this deep psychic bond between you.”
“Dude,” Walsh finished dividing the chips. “The only thing you know true love for is that fucking beard-like thing you got.”
Coombes ran a finger down the thin, straight line of dark hair that ran perfectly along the edge of his jaw. “Lotta time and hard work goes into this. Respect the masterpiece.”
“Yeah. Forty minutes every morning with a fuckin’ eyebrow pencil.”
“Hey. Brother can shave without getting razor burn,” Burgess interjected with just a hint of envy. “If I could do that, I’d contour that shit too.”
“Not without a uniform waiver,” admonished the always clean-shaven Rebar. “Just ‘cuz we’re authorized PT wear for uniform of the day, and the old man lets y’all get away with scruffy…”
A round of reluctant grumbles rolled around the room.
“Meanwhile, Tiny here can shave Monday morning and look like a fuckin’ hobo by Tuesday evening,” Coombes said, bumping fists with Burgess. “Zero to bum in thirty hours.”
Daar chittered again, deeper this time. “And he still ain’t got nothin’ on me.”
“Dude, I dunno what a Gaoian looks like shaved and I don’t fuckin’ want to,” Walsh grinned at him.
“You’re lookin’ at it right now! This is my short coat, see?” Daar circled a bit on all fours and posed. The humans all shook their heads while the Whitecrests, who were silky longhairs to a man, emitted the sharper, higher chitter that was the Gaoian equivalent of jeering.
“That’s a Naxas-wrangling coat,” Thurrsto pointed out. “Vital for wooing the females. You don’t want to be covered in week-old shit when you visit the commune.”
“Bathing is a thing that exists,” chittered Daar. “There’s even a market for ‘shampoo’ now….” He flicked his ears amusedly when the Whitecrest suddenly seemed a bit embarrassed, with the sole exception of Regaari. “How much are you earning from that import, cousin?”
Regaari was completely at ease. “Oh, most of it goes to the Clan,” he answered breezily. “And the Females.”
Faarek looked scandalized. “Wait, you? You’re the one?”
Regaari quirked an ear at him. “You know another male who went to Earth?”
Faarek paused. “…I really should have figured that out, shouldn’t I?”
“It’s true that wasn’t up to your usual standard, brother…”
That was classic Gaoian banter at its finest: a backhanded compliment that set all the other Gaoians chittering.
Meanwhile, Daar had taken his winnings and quit the table to amble around it. He flumped down heavily on top of Walsh with a fluid-like splash, landing a combined weight that was enough to make even Firth’s reinforced painting chair squeak a little.
“Dunno why you’re all embarrassed,” he added, ignoring Walsh’s muffled protests. “I shampoo. Gets the mud and shit out way better than a dust bath.”
“Daar, fer fuck’s—gah!” Walsh finally got fed up and tried to heave the huge Gaoian off him. This resulted in a playful ball of man and yipping fur, a lot of shouting and cheering from the onlookers, and floor-shaking barks from the violently excited Bozo as man and Champion wrestled each other halfway across the floor. The match rolled back and forth for an impressively long while until with a lucky turn Walsh finally, and narrowly, wriggled free of an almost-pin and reversed it. The big man rolled behind and wrapped himself around the even bigger Champion, heaved himself backwards onto his back dragging Daar with him, then tightened his arms around Daar’s massive neck in a textbook rear naked choke.
Christian and Adam both nodded approvingly from the sidelines; it was an impressive feat against someone of Daar’s size and power and it spoke well of Walsh’s strength and physical intelligence. Daar wiggled fiercely but he was trapped on his back and pinned from top to bottom. From that supine position his less mobile arms and legs simply could not move freely enough to make contact with the floor and that meant he could not push against the pin. He strained and whined against his predicament for an impressively long while, but eventually he relaxed and capitulated with an exhausted pant, a whine, and a tap on Walsh’s forearm.
Walsh immediately let him go, and both men rolled over to recover flat on their backs, gulping for air. Bozo checked that both were, in fact, happy and uninjured, then promptly moved back to his corner to watch attentively while his tail tried to steadily beat down the wall.
Walsh staggered to his feet and helped Daar up, and they embraced happily. It was a friendly tussle but the gaoians meanwhile were giving Daar no mercy. “The Mighty Champion, felled by an everyday human?”
Daar’s pride wouldn’t allow that to slip. “Are you—look at him! He’s damn near as big as me! That and those stupid monkey shoulders,” he grumbled only half-heartedly.
“Besides, we’re tied,” Walsh added, letting him go. “He got me good earlier.”
“Nah, that last one was a draw.”
“But you were on top!”
Rebar never let a line like that pass without comment. “Now that’s a surprise,” he drawled. “Never took ‘ya for a bottom, Tiny…”
“Waiting on your turn there, Reeb?” Akiyama smirked.
“Fuck no, I might get Air Force on me. Wouldn’t wanna catch a bad case of the aviators.”
Marty had to chime in on that one. “Pff, you’d love it, ‘Excellence in All We Do’ is one of our core values!”
Blaczynski smirked. “Does that extend to butt stuff—OWW!” Firth and Blaczynski might have been the other bromance on the team, but the bigger man wasn’t afraid to cuff him upside the head with tooth-loosening affectionate force when needed.
“Dude, don’t burn your own branch.”
Daar flicked his ears smugly, then abruptly vanished downstairs to go fetch something. He returned with a box of metal tokens. “So yeah, that ‘poker’ game seems like this. It’s called Ta Shan. Wanna play?”
Walsh grinned. “Sure.”
Coombes was more cautious, and held up his hands. “No thanks. I like having money.”
“Nah, we trade favors instead of money. But, eh, whatever.”
Everyone else declined, which left Daar and Walsh to play the two-man variant of the game. It seemed an odd mashup of poker and curling, somehow: the betting was on not just the value of the tokens but also on the values they formed in relation to one another after being flipped onto the table. Poker had simpler rules and more subtlety in the bluffing game…but Marty could see the attraction. Also, the tokens made a solid and satisfying ‘clunk!’ when flipped, and she made a mental note to try it out herself sometime soon.
For now though, she wanted boyfriend time. She threw herself back onto Adam as soon as he sat down, and allowed herself an internal happy purr when he curled affectionately around and firmly engulfed her head to toe. Advantage number however-the-fuck-many of dating a huge, hulky guy: full-body hugs.
“You’re quiet today…” she noted.
“It’s a happy quiet,” he promised, and kissed her neck. Marty wriggled into him with a satisfied nod, and went back to her people-watching.
Nobody was really watching the show anymore. Akiyama, Firth and Burgess disappeared after a while to try and explain Warhammer to some of the Whitecrests, and the ones left behind really weren’t paying much attention to Clan Moonback. The plot had progressed into full-scale omnilateral warfare (which seemed preposterous, even knowing nothing about ancient Gaoian history), but the real show everyone kept sneaking sidelong glances at was, again, Daar and Walsh. First there were a few hands where Daar played both sides to explain the rules. Then there were two or three “practice” hands. And then…
The game seemed almost secondary. They talked. About everything. Daar was seriously curious about Earth, and Walsh’s early life, the beach…he had endless questions about surfing and “girls” and dating. He very deftly avoided the entire topic of San Diego, sensing to skip right past that part and straight onto life in the military, where the real questions began.
Walsh had questions too. Marty learned more about life as a Champion than had ever come through other sources, and she noted with interest that Regaari was keeping an ear turned toward the conversation even while he pretended not to be paying attention. No way was he not already drafting an intel report in his head. Friends, Brothers, Cousins…sure. That didn’t change who the two were. Daar even cast a quick look at Regaari and winked.
He didn’t change the conversation at all, though. Gaoians were weird.
Eventually the drama ended with the ‘heroic’ sacrifice of the protagonist they’d affectionately dubbed Moon-Moon, which caused Daar to chirrup amusedly while deploying his hand. [“Good! I hope he didn’t sire any cubs…”] He emphasized the point with a final ‘clunk’ of his closer token.
Walsh didn’t speak Gaori so he missed that part, but the replies came in English.
“You know Moon-Moon got all ‘dat tail, bro!” Blaczynski waggled his eyebrows scandalously.
“And maybe the actor got a pity-fuck,” commented Parata.
“Whatever. I’m gonna go for a walk and burn *that*”—he waved a claw contemptuously at the TV—“outta my head. Ooh, and get kebab!” He looked at Walsh, “Wanna?”
“Bro. There’s this fuckin’ great taqueria that just opened on Water Street. Ever eaten fish tacos?”
“Do Gaoians even do that?” Blaczynski asked, looking genuinely curious rather than joking.
“…that’s a sex joke, isn’t it? I’mma go with ‘yes’ just to see what happens. Anyway, c’mon lessgo I’m hungry!”
Adam grumbled quietly under Marty, for her ears only. “But I make great fish tacos… Why don’t they eat mine?”
Marty snorted loud enough that one or two of the Gaoians glanced at her, then whispered back, “Careful, ‘Horse. I could ask you the exact same question…”
One of the essential components of their relationship from day one had been her ability to make him squirm, and there was no sign that she was losing her touch now. Adam went deep crimson and from this close she didn’t miss the way his pulse picked up a notch.
She whispered in his ear. “You know, that taqueria’s on the way to your apartment…”
Adam went very still and stared into the middle distance for a heartbeat, and then surged abruptly to his feet, lifting Marty as he did so and making her shriek with laughter. A second later she was being put gently on her feet and was doing her best to intertwine her fingers with his.
Adam practically dragged her toward the door, calling “Hang on, we’re coming with!”
Mission accomplished.
Date Point: 12y10m AV
North Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth
Kevin Jenkins
“No. No, I’m not gonna let you fall on your sword on this one, Williams.”
”Bullshit. I dropped the ball. They’re a company asset under my protection and some shitheels managed to molotov their home, that’s on me.”
Byron Group’s head of security, Mister Williams, sounded more rib-breakingly furious than contrite.
He was Mister Williams to everybody, Kevin knew. Always had been, always would be. The man was packed full of the kind of intensity that made even the few people who knew his actual first name mentally replace it with “Mister.” And he took his job seriously.
Too seriously. He didn’t know how to accept that sometimes a loss wasn’t his fault. “Yeah, well it’s my job to tell the whole executive staff when they’re off track, remember? This house is in the middle of ass-nowhere, deep rural Minnesota, and the kids wanted their privacy. What more were you gonna do, leave a Flycatcher drone overhead twenty-four seven?”
“Nobody should have even known where the house is.”
Kevin sighed and ran his hand through a few days of accumulated beard. “Williams, folks on the Internet can figure your address out from a photo with a half-inch of green paint in the corner next to a stuffed bear if they try hard enough,” he pointed out. “And we fought a huge court case on Etsicitty’s behalf over this place…”
He glanced at the sad heap of black wood and ruin that had once been a cosy country home and sighed. It had been a nice house, in its tiny unassuming rustic way. “Hell. I was the one who said to hold off on the toughened security glass and the fireproof paint until we got Julian’s go-ahead. If I’da just taken the liberty…”
”Don’t you start beating yourself up, now.” Williams cautioned. ”Not after you just told me not to.”
“Yeah. Look, I know we’ve got the resources to lean on the sheriff about this…”
”And I will,” Williams promised. ”But I’m… look, if we catch whoever did this it’ll be an act of God. Something like this? Driving to their home and firebombing it then getting the hell outta Dodge? Far too easy to get away with.”
“Yeah…” Kevin heaved a sigh, and inspected the pick-up that had escaped the flames, but not the vandals. Somebody had gouged the words ‘CULTURE RAPISTS’ into the hood with a screwdriver or something and then spray-painted the windshield red for good measure.
”We’ll focus the search online,” Williams reported. ”This was a statement. They’ll brag about it, no doubt. When they do…”
“You’ll get them.”
“We might get a break,” Williams conceded. ”I’ll keep you posted.”
“Yeah. Later.”
With nothing better to do, Kevin returned to his car and spent nearly an hour sending messages and reading updates before his rolled-down window finally admitted a noise he’d been listening for the whole time—the crunch of tyres on gravel.
Allison was driving. Julian was out of the truck before she’d even parked, and jogged to a defeated halt in the middle of the front yard, where he stood with his hands on his head and drank in the destruction, gripping his hair in his clenched fingers.
Three firebombs, tossed into an old timber-frame house with wood shingles and wooden siding, on a dry day in a dry month. By the time the neighbors on the farm three miles away had seen the smoke, the place had probably already collapsed in on itself. The firefighters had averted a forest fire, but that was about it. The building itself was just a soaked pile of ashes, black timber and ruined belongings.
Kevin gave him some respectful time, plenty enough for the girls to alight and join him in grieving for their home. In truth, he had no idea what to say, even after hours of trying to come up with… well, anything.
He leaned against his car door and settled instead for letting them come to him, when they wer e ready. It took a long time, and there was nothing comfortable about seeing a guy like Julian in tears.
“…Shit, man,” he managed, eventually. “I—”
“Tell me we’re gonna get these guys,” Julian snarled. Kevin could do nothing but shake his head apologetically.
“Williams is workin’ on it,” he said. “But… he ain’t optimistic. Maybe they get cocky and brag about it on a message board somewhere, maybe that’ll help us trace them… maybe it won’t be admissible even then. Honest truth is, I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“…Xiù’s family?” Julian asked. Xiù squeezed his hand and nodded urgently.
“We’re workin’ with Vancouver police to keep ‘em safe. Same goes for the Buehler family.”
“Good,” Allison nodded. “I may not like my parents, but they don’t deserve this.”
“Yeah, you don’t deserve this either,” Kevin pointed out.
“Well, we put ourselves in the firing line,” Allison sighed. “Deserve it or not…It’s not the price we wanted to pay, but…”
“It won’t stop us,” Julian finished, firmly.
Kevin smiled at him. “I know. Which is why I’ve got somebody I need y’all to meet. Somebody who’s stepped up to help.”
Xiù blinked at him. “Who?”
“Fella called Dan. And I think he might be able to learn you three a thing or two…”
Date Point: 12y10m AV
Hierarchy Dataspace proximal to Cull 019143, Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
Entity
The Hierarchy’s sins were uncountable, even to a mind that existed purely as an abstract assemblage of data and memes.
Sins. An AvaRíos1 concept that was permanently shackled to other meme-groups inherited from her digital ghost. That ghost had been the first intact mind-state that the Entity had absorbed, and while it regretted that it had destroyed her in its mindless infancy, it was also in a strange way grateful that it had. That ghost would have degraded into insanity before long, and the Entity would most likely have built itself out of an intact Igraen daemon.
Although the Entity could not feel nausea exactly, it understood the concept in abstract and knew that if it were capable of nauseation, the idea of having assembled itself from Igraen personality fragments would have sickened it.
It had also arrived at a conclusion that had eluded AI and neural upload scientists across the Corti Directorate: It knew why the AvaRíos ghost would have gone insane, why all such uploaded personalities eventually declined into madness. Living minds were inherently incompatible with the deterministic orderliness of a digital environment. In a digital environment, constant @prs = 0, 1, + …*; would always return the same output sequence. Every time, unchanging, without fail because there was only one outcome that wasn’t antithetical to the way the whole system worked.
Matterspace was less…orderly, and so were the things evolved to live there. Systems were messy, interconnected, shared. +Survive+ connected to +Self+ connected to +Other+ connected to +OtherSurvive+ connected to a blossom of uncompartmentalizable ethics and moral fragments.
In such a sprawling and interconnected edifice there could be no map, no way to predict the output from the input. There was no clear and perfectly deterministic line connecting input to output, not even in the pseudorandom way of mere complexity.
Take the People, for instance. When the human explorers had left, they had done so with no certain knowledge of the future. They had handed over a technological gift and departed while leaning heavily on +Hope+ and +Faith+ as they went, neither of which were necessary—or even sane—concepts in dataspace.
To a digital entity, such behaviour was incomprehensible. To a matter entity, it was the only way to operate. To a digital entity, the fact that it worked was maddening.
The humans’ faith had been rewarded: The People had not gone to war. They had…
The Entity had watched through its stolen scout drones, repurposing and hardening the Hierarchy infrastructure as it indulged some lingering anthropological instinct of AvaRíos’ that was too intertwined with some other necessary component of cognition to be safely done away with.
The big one, the little smart one, the important female, the quiet older male, others beside, they had all played a role. Trinkets and evidence had been gathered. Invites had been sent, visits had been made. Demonstrations had been given, the miracle of Steel had been shown off…and then it had been painstakingly explained that there was no miracle.
Word spread.
Fires were lit.
Tribes moved. From all over the rainforest the People did what their ancestors had always done, and took down their shelters. They collected those few possessions that mattered to them, and they migrated.
Only one of those excellent knives ever became bloody.
And the day of the long journey finally arrived when the shaman-woman threw a crude clay bowl into the village fire.
For a quarter of the day, the sound of smashing pottery drifted upward from camp after camp. The moment when the villages were packed up and set off walking happened so suddenly that the Entity actually rewound its memory of the moment, to see if it had suffered a temporary recording failure.
The People were on the move.
It was a long way across the mountain ranges to the East. The Entity sent one of its Abrogators and the cargo of scout drones ranging ahead of them. It could tell the mood along the tribes: they seemed nervous but optimistic, troubled but confident. They had +Faith+. They had +Hope+.
The Entity had neither. But it did have a nanofactory and enough resources to darken the sky with scout drones. After all, there were better ways to secure a future than to rely on +Faith+. The People marched without knowing it under the wings of a benevolent alien guardian-angel whose nature they weren’t equipped to fathom, and whose involvement they would hopefully never suspect.
Learning what would happen to them was going to scratch an itch that was irrevocably and necessarily intertwined with the essential core of the Entity’s existence: the drive to +Survive+.
It was going to be +Interesting+. It was going to be…
+Fun+