Date Point 15y5m AV
Grand Commune of Females, Tiritya Island, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Mother-Supreme Yulna
Cimbrean was no longer a world of only one colony.
Originally, the 5-EYES nations had planned for Lucent to become a colony of the United States of America, but political necessity had made it more advisable to hand over the undeveloped world to the People’s Republic of China instead. Rather than bemoan this loss, an extensive negotiation had ensued in which Cimbrean—which was, after all, a whole planet and far more territory than the mere hundred-thousand Humans living in and around Folctha could properly exploit—was carefully divided up.
Thus had been founded the colonies of Franklin, New Botany, Nouveau Acadia and Abeltown.
Adding Tiritya Island to the list had been relatively straightforward. There was enough of Cimbrean to go around.
Tiritya was hardly a small island, either. The word “island” conjured up a mental image of a little spit of land in the lonely seas, but in practical fact a flight from one end to the other in anything that couldn’t go supersonic was likely to last an hour at least. Some of the Female presence on the island was all the way at the opposite end of the landmass, in little climate monitoring stations and observatories with crews of four or five, or in isolated farms.
Some of the Sisters had suffered terribly on Gao and while most preferred the bustling company of their own kind, a few needed quiet and isolation to heal. Which was why there was even a convent, built on a little neighboring island that was technically part of Tiritya thanks to the beaches that appeared at low tide.
The concept of a nun had been an alien one when Yulna first learned it, and it only got stranger when she considered her Sisters taking up lives of celibacy and spiritual reflection. Especially now, when the Gao needed to breed like never before. She’d never understand them… but she didn’t need to. They were Clan, and that was all that mattered. If their experiences had left them feeling unequipped to bear cubs then nobody had the right to force that responsibility on them.
Species certainly didn’t matter. Sister Shoo remained the only non-Gaoian member of the Clan, but in principle Yulna wasn’t opposed to the idea of taking in other Human women. After all, the one they already had was a treasure.
A confusing treasure, truth be told, but a treasure nonetheless. She had arrived with one of her romantic partners—her female lover, and there was confusion for an old Female to wrap her paws around—but just as she had on Gao she’d found a place for herself in the Commune as though being there was quite natural for her.
And she remained as excellent a listener as always. No sooner had the door closed and left the three of them alone in Yulna’s study than all of the stress and worries began flowing out Yulna’s mouth.
There were a lot of them. Yulna’s relationship with the male Clans, and by extension the relationship between Male and Female. Her concerns about the ongoing pandemic on Gao which just refused to go away. Supply problems, time problems, the knowledge that there were still a few holdout Clanless groups back on the homeworld who’d captured females and whom the Grand Army were yet to reach…
But Yulna tried to be practical which was why, for now, she was focusing on the problems she possibly could do something about herself.
For example: What was the female enclave on Tiritya going to be? Was it just another gilded cage, warded by benevolent aliens rather than benevolent males? Was it a pity handout that would remind them daily of a debt they’d never repay?
Or could it, perhaps, be something more?
“We need to be a productive economic power in our own right,” she explained as she prowled the room. “Our value to Gaoian males is obvious. But what value do we have to Human nations? What can we produce that you cannot provide for yourselves?” She sat back down at her desk feeling thoroughly dejected. “Your people like us, Sister. But that alone isn’t enough of a foundation. We need to have value to the human race beyond sentiment. The Great Father has already figured that out for his Clan and the others…”
“But he’s too focused on protecting the Females to think on those terms,” Shoo finished.
“Too focused on protecting them to let them grow independently you mean,” Allison commented, cutting right to the heart of it.
“Possibly,” Shoo retorted. “I don’t think Daar actually thinks that way. He’s just very…focused on the problem right in front of him.”
Allison nodded sharply. “Uh-huh. Exactly. I mean, I know Daar, he’s about the… heh, the ‘most nicest’ guy you could wanna meet. I know he’d never want to put the Females in a cage…”
“But forces of nature like him can do awe-inspiring things without ever noticing,” Yulna finished.
“That’s fair I guess. So then…what can you offer?”
“Well…” Yulna picked up a cup of tea from her desk. She’d picked up the habit from Gyotin and had to admit, for situations like this it worked better than Talamay. “…In theory, we can offer anything. You never saw much of the Clan outside of the communes, Sister. Most young females take associate work with one of the male Clans for a while between cubhood and their first pregnancy.”
“I do remember!” Shoo slipped into her weirdly not-perfect Gaori. “Many of the young females spoke of the, uh, mating prospects that tended to open…”
“That perk is not available when working with Humans…” Yulna chittered. “But in theory our Sisters as they are now can integrate with the Human colonies and offer their own expertise, but that isn’t permanent value. In ten, twenty, thirty years or so that well will be dry. We need to offer something that only we can offer, now and for the future.”
She leaned back in her chair. “The problem is… I can’t think of anything. It may even be that there is nothing unique that we can offer. But what then? What will that do to the Clan’s psyche? Have we traded a gilded cage provided by the Males of our own species for another one provided by the charity of yours?”
“This island has natural resources, right?” Allison pointed out. She was using a translator rather than speaking Gaori herself. “What about minerals? Oil? Farmland?”
“Folctha has us beaten for farmland,” Yulna shook her head. “The colony’s economy is founded on it, I’ve seen the croplands for myself. Some of the fields around New Belfast stretch to the horizon!”
“…What about heirloom crops?” Allison asked.
“Or artisanal goods?” Shoo agreed.
“I don’t… explain?”
Allison scooted forward in her chair. “You have uniquely Gaoian foods, right? Nava, Naxas, all that stuff… well, out here on the island you’re probably safe from the Terran biosphere transplant. That means less pesticides, less fertilizer…hell, you could claim it’s all-natural and organic! Your Gaoian critters and plants won’t be competing with the Earthling imports and they’ll way out-compete the natives, so they’ll grow nice and big.”
“And people will buy Nava and Naxas for the novelty value,” Shoo nodded.
“They will?”
“I would,” Shoo replied fervently. “Naxas is delicious. It’s like… it’s like… it’s a meat with all the melt-in-the-mouth tenderness of lamb but all the mature, rich flavor of good mutton!”
Allison nodded fervently and indicated Shoo with her thumb. “Her Naxas curry is… hngg!”
“Then there’s cultural things. Like those workhouse dramas!”
“Those are mostly made by Clanless males, for Clanless males…” Yulna objected.
“Yulna, they’re the most popular genre of ET-made entertainment on Earth by a mile!”
“And wouldn’t they be improved with actual Females in them for a change?” Allison added. “Think about it, it’s all been males for basically every workhouse drama ever made. Would a female character add some desperately needed realism?”
Yulna considered what they were saying. Not just the specifics, but the general thrust of it. They’d correctly put their claws on the root of her problem, which was that she’d been thinking far too large-scale about how to compete with and find a niche among the other colonies as they ramped up to full-time mass production.
The idea that the Females might pursue a lower-volume, higher-value economy instead was… intriguing.
“You believe we should pursue a value proposition rather than, say, a commodity.”
“When your biggest buyers are gonna be humans?” Allison asked. “Absolutely. We are gonna snap up anything Gaoian, seriously.”
“…Honestly?”
“Honestly and truly,” Allison promised.
“Folctha has a large middle class,” Shoo elaborated. “Lots of disposable income, lots of… well… Everybody who lives there is the kind of person who would leave their homeworld and live on an alien planet just because that’s an option.”
“And are therefore more open to novel things…” Yulna duck-nodded, seeing her point.
“The whole town’s liberal as shit,” Allison grumbled. Yulna saw Shoo hide a roll of her eyes and a fond smile.
“Bad girl,” she chided gently. “You know our rules…”
“Ugh, sorry. But seriously, how do people live without their guns? I feel naked without mine!”
Yulna could see that there was a complicated knot of Human politics there she didn’t have the knowledge to untangle at that particular moment.
“So that’s your advice,” she summarized. “Focus our efforts on the small-scale creation of high-quality, high-value goods for export. Exploit our unique culture and heritage to our advantage, use this island’s isolation to avoid cross-contamination with Earthling influences and sell most of what we produce as exports.”
“I mean…It’s a start?” Shoo agreed. “But Yulna, I’m really not, like, an economist or whatever. Or a market analyst or—” She paused, pulled a face at herself and slapped her forehead.
“Shoo?”
“…But we know people who are. Right?” She turned to Allison. “I bet MBG would have some ideas about what they’d like to buy…”
“Ideas? They could probably roll in here with a shopping list longer than your leg,” Allison smirked. “But they are still the biggest private-sector players in Folctha so you’re inevitably gonna do business with them someway or another.”
“Aren’t they your employer?” Yulna asked. That raised the ugly possibility of a vested interest on Allison’s part, and she at least needed a good-faith denial.
“There’s that, yeah…” Allison agreed. “But I really wouldn’t work for them if I didn’t believe in them. They’ve been good to us. If they hadn’t been, I’d’ve taken their money and walked for sure.”
Yulna believed her. Or at least she believed that Allison believed what she was saying, which was good enough.
“There are ideas in this,” she conceded at length. “We will need to consider and develop upon them…”
“Yulna… Mother… when was the last time you took a break?” Shoo asked. Yulna sighed.
“Long enough that I wish you of all people would not call me Mother,” she replied. “But the Mother-Supreme doesn’t ‘take a break.’ At least, not at times like this.”
“‘Times like this’ could last another ten years,” Shoo retorted. “Come on, Giymuy had her biscuits and she loved scandalizing her entourage. She was so much less… stiff than you are, and that’s not who I remember. I remember you sneaking seconds to Myun when Ayma couldn’t see.”
Yulna sighed and miserably lowered her paws to the desktop before resting her chin on them. There was literally nobody else in the world except perhaps Myun in front of whom she could ever have displayed such abject weariness.
“Giymuy made it look like she was born for this role,” she lamented. “She was always so… collected. So serene. I feel like I’m holding a porcelain egg and the floor is strewn with marbles.”
Shoo stood up, rounded the desk and crouched at her side to rub a hand soothingly down her back. “You aren’t Giymuy,” she said. “You don’t have to be like her.”
“You keep comparing me to her.”
Shoo paused, then nodded. “Then I’m sorry. I shouldn’t. But I bet her secret was that she probably felt the same underneath, and she took her little pleasures where she could to help balance herself.”
Yulna gave a thoughtful twitch of her ear after a long moment of thought.
“…I haven’t cooked my own dinner in years. I keep thinking ‘I’m the Mother-Supreme, I can’t just barge into the kitchen and demand access to a cutting board.’ But…I can, can’t I? I absolutely can.”
“Absolutely,” Allison piped up.
Yulna thought about it some more. There was a deeply repressed want bubbling up to the surface, one that she’d held on to for so long that it was practically a need now, and maybe it was just the little push, maybe it was just a moment that had finally arrived, but there was something she wanted to do more than anything else.
She sat up.
“…Who wants tacos?” she asked.
Date Point: 15y5m AV
Dataspace/Internet communications interchange, adjacent to Observatory Station, Neptune, Sol
Entity
The Internet was impenetrable. The Entity could, with some careful camouflage, access it, send messages, download files and in every way gain access to Humanity’s crowning communications achievement just like an ordinary user…But it could not, however, “go” there.
The operating principles were too different. In some ways they were too primitive, in other ways they were far too advanced. The Internet, at its most basic, was just a highly efficient system for conveying packages of data between devices—it couldn’t do any of the things that made Dataspace possible, permitted the existence of the Igraen hegemony, or made the Entity’s own existence possible.
A fish might as well dream of soaring as high as eagles. A human might as well fantasize about going for a clothes-free stroll on the surface of Venus.
Earth, in short, was a closed book. It was not and would never be part of the dataspace, and the border where one met the other was locked down tighter than even the most despotic iron curtain.
Earthbound text-based messages were among the least scrutinized forms of traffic, however.
The only real obstacle the Entity faced therefore was the content of its message. It knew the whom of its correspondence, but exactly what it wanted to say and how to say it were more of a problem, not least because some of its more outlandish and paranoid factions were urging it to abandon contact with Homo Sapiens entirely.
The only solution was to allow a personality to crystallize out of its archived memories again, hand her the general thrust of its dilemma, and trust that whatever she wrote would be close enough to the Entity’s own experience while remaining comprehensible to a matterspace reader.
It remembered certain details with a clarity that the original Ava Ríos would never match. It remembered the precise position of objects in a room, it remembered which fingers people wore their rings on. It remembered, perfectly well, a set of contact details written in pen and glanced at but not consciously assimilated.
The message was a desperate long shot. But it was the best plan it had yet achieved. And so it began with six simple words.
[Darcy,]
[Please I need your help.]
Date Point 15y5m AV
The Grand Commune of Females, Tiritya Island, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Sister-Consort Naydra
The kitchens were… well, closed.
In point of fact the Grand Commune had dozens of kitchens that were active around the clock to keep all the Females and Cubs fed and happy. It was a never-ending industry nestled at the heart of Commune life. Some were larger, some smaller, a few—and in Yulna’s defense the one she’d commandeered was by far the smallest—were there to handle small bespoke meals for visiting dignitaries or the senior Mothers such as Yulna herself.
Even so, the staff had been unceremoniously turfed out and a guard-sister was standing watch on the door with her ears turned backwards to listen nervously to the peals of Human laughter and uproarious chittering that emanated from within.
She gave Naydra a respectful duck and stepped out of her way. The intricacies of how to handle the Great Father’s consort were finicky and entirely new but the general rule seemed to be to treat her as though she was equal in rank to Yulna herself, except when she wasn’t.
Naydra herself honestly had no idea how that kind of a “rule” worked, but it worked now. She patted the guard-sister on the arm and let herself in.
The kitchens were always a spicy olfactory paradise, but this one smelled… she groped for an appropriate Gaori word, gave up, and settled for Divine. The air was rich with the smell of finest prime Naxas meat, with herbs and spices, the peculiar caramelized fruity scent of Talamay that had been used for cooking and also with the potent nasal presence of two humans. It wasn’t an unpleasant scent, just…loud.
She recognised Sister Shoo, of course. The other, with the blonde hair who was so animatedly telling a story had to be her partner Allison.
“No, really! He was super nervous about it, but like… eager, too.”
Shoo was giggling fondly. “We should do that again sometime. Only this time he has to wear the cat ears, not the bow tie.”
“Why not both?”
Yulna, looking more relaxed and happy than Naydra could ever remember seeing her, chittered incredulously and took a long draught of the Talamay she’d commandeered. She didn’t seem to care that it was the cooking-grade stuff, just that there was a lot of it. “Cat ears?” she asked.
“Yeah!” Sister Shoo raised her hands and touched them to either side of her head as if miming a Gaoian’s own ears. “Miāo!”
Yulna turned to Allison for a more coherent explanation and finally noticed Naydra in the doorway. For an instant—just a flash—she looked like a cub caught doing something naughty but it was just a flash and nothing more. The next instant she jovially waved Naydra into the room.
“Naydra!” she exclaimed. “I hope they aren’t saying the Mother-Supreme has gone mad out there?”
“Ah…well, no. Not… no,” Naydra said, weaving between the counters. Most of them were strewn with cooking debris. Flour, discarded packaging, dirty cutting boards. The knives were clean, dry and stored though, which was the kind of odd detail that stood out. Of course, a good chef cared for their knives. “They…are however wondering exactly what is going on?”
“I’m cooking my own damn dinner!” Yulna announced, and raised her glass. “That’s what’s going on.”
“I… suppose you’re entitled to if you want, but—”
“Oh, sit down Naydra.” Yulna gestured to a vacant stool. Naydra blinked. This was… very unlike the Yulna she thought she knew. Yulna was straight-spoken, yes, but she usually stood quite carefully on the ceremony of their respective positions.
Now she was behaving like a gruffly good-humoured kitchen Mother, and the scar where some Corti had long ago vivisected her and removed her eyeball without anesthetic looked…weirdly natural. She had a Daar-like coarse quality for the moment.
Allison, apparently endlessly amused by everything, stepped aside to make room while Sister Shoo practically dragged Naydra into their little group with a gentle hand around her waist and before she knew it Yulna had pressed a glass of Talamay into Naydra’s hands.
“How long?” she asked Shoo, who glanced at her watch.
“They’re… about ready, actually. I’ll get the frying pan.”
“Mother, what—?” Naydra tried to ask, but was shushed in a matronly manner.
“You never tasted Sister Shoo’s cooking,” she said. “Drink! Relax! Tiritya’s teats girl, you look like you don’t know which end of you is your nose!”
…Girl?
Naydra wondered briefly whether or not to be offended, but there was nothing to see or smell in Yulna’s behaviour that said she was being anything other than…merry. That was the word. Merry. The Mother-Supreme pressed Shoo firmly back down onto her stool and fetched the frying pan herself, humming an old song as she did so.
“…Sister?” Needing answers, Naydra turned to Sister Shoo who smiled, leaned across and lowered her voice.
“She needs this,” she murmured. “Just… let her be Mama Yulna for a while.”
Behind her, Yulna removed a high-sided baking tray from the oven and used a slotted spoon to fish out little cubes of meat from whatever marinate they’d been cooked in. The scent was astonishing.
“So, I fry these in their own fat over a low heat for…?”
“Fifteen, twenty minutes. Just enough to crisp the outside!” Shoo replied.
“Ah! Crisp on the outside, tender and juicy on the inside!” Yulna made approving noises and hummed to herself some more as she cooked.
Bereft of any better way to cope, Naydra drank her Talamay. It had that burning, coarse edge that cheap cooking Talamay always did, but it wasn’t actually bad. Yulna noticed and gave her an approving flick of the ear.
“Cat ears?” the Mother-Supreme prompted.
“It’s… I dunno. Human weirdness I guess,” Allison said. “But we’ve got this big strong guy and then you stick something cute on him like the cat ears and…” she shrugged.
“Miāo!” Shoo giggled. She was definitely a little tipsy, Naydra decided.
“Too bad Gaoians already have the ears built in…” Allison sighed. “But I bet the bow tie would work.”
“Oh God, Daar in a bow tie!” Shoo giggled again.
“Or Regaari.”
“Nah, Regaari’s too suave. It’d actually suit him.”
“Daar would totally rock the bowtie, too. He’s playful!”
Yulna sighed as she tossed the frying pan to move the meat around. “Oh, he was playful indeed…”
“He still is!” Naydra loyally objected. “…In private.”
“That’s good.” Yulna suddenly seemed a bit less chipper. “I am glad he is still himself, somewhere.”
Shoo grabbed a sliced piece of vegetable and threw it at the Mother-Supreme.
“Bad Mama Yulna!” she chided. “You’re getting all sad again, stoppit.”
Yulna chittered, thereby turning Naydra’s world subtly upside-down. “Fine, fine. Actually, you know who I bet would wear a bow tie badly and think he wore it well? Champion Sheeyo.”
“Sheeyo, Sheeyo…” Allison scowled in recollection then snapped a finger. “The Goldpaw? The skinny one with all that jewelry braided in his fur?”
“Him, yes! Oh, it’s a handsome enough affectation but he’s so… preening.”
“We should send him a paisley cravat,” Shoo said. Clearly it was an in-joke of some kind between herself and Allison because they laughed with each other while Yulna just gave them a quizzical look then shook her head indulgently and tossed the frying pan again.
It occurred to Naydra that she was probably looking entirely gormless and lost. She took another swig of Talamay to try and regain herself a little.
“Mother—” she began.
“Naydra, please. Here and now, it’s just Yulna. Don’t tell me you never want a moment to escape from it all and just relax?”
The set of her ears was soft and kindly. “This is a safe place to do that,” she said. “Later we’ll go back out that door and I’ll be Mother-Supreme and you’ll be the Great Father’s Consort, very proper and polite. But here and now, for Fyu’s sake relax.”
She turned back to her pan. “Or don’t. Nothing is forced, here.”
“…Thank you,” Naydra replied. She’d meant it to be polite, but it came out entirely heartfelt. It seemed Yulna had zeroed in on something she herself didn’t know she needed.
The two Humans beamed at each other, and Allison picked up her Talamay again.
“Anyway…” she said. “…Oh yeah! So, that thing with the bow tie and Mulan was about a week after we picked up the Huh and…I mean, I was kinda distracted at the time but looking back on it the way Lewis got his hands on that thing was just the funniest thing…”
Naydra inclined her head. “What’s a Huh?” she asked.
“That’s just it, we didn’t know at first…”
Naydra got lost in the story. A few minutes later, she was chittering so hard that it hurt her ribs, and a few minutes after that the tacos were ready. The first moment when she bit in and tasted all that delicious, fruitily-spiced tender meaty perfection underneath that exciting warm crunch completely dispelled all her confusion and doubts.
They were definitely going to do this again sometime.
Date Point: 15y5m AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Lt. Col. Owen Powell
“Come in.”
Powell had moved offices since the battle of Gao. Rear-Admiral Caruthers had requested as much, stating that he wanted to have the SOR’s CO right next door if needed, and Powell had seen no reason to refuse. “Next door” in this case was the retired Admiral Knight’s former office, and he’d always liked the view.
The fact that it came with a little more elbow room and was closer to the stairs got his vote, too.
That latter fact was definitely more convenient for Technical Sergeant Martina Arés. Powell privately thought she was a touch daft for not taking the lift, but she and her husband had a lot in common when it came to elevators: they shunned them.
Still. She had to be getting on for the point now where three flights of stairs were taking it out of her.
If they were, she was doing a good job of hiding it. She entered the room looking as crisp, smart and professional as a maternity uniform would allow and placed a thick bundle of paperwork in his in tray.
“Today’s training reports,” she explained. “I excused ‘Horse. That wrestling match took it right out of him.”
Powell issued an amused grunt and flipped open the summary. “How’s Deacon doing with the new techs?”
“Good! Just the right balance of carrot and stick. I think she enjoys training them, and all the teams are ahead of target.”
“Which means the target’s too bloody lenient,” Powell muttered. “Hargreaves?”
“Passed his exam with flying colors. Ninety-six. He’s fully qualified on the biotech systems now, and Green’s making noises about taking that qual as well.”
“Hmm.” Powell skimmed the summary and signed it. “Careful. At this rate, you’ll make yourself obsolete.”
It was a calculated joke on his part—He’d wanted to broach the subject of Arés’ future for some time. Her re-enlistment was only months away now, and if Powell was a betting man he wouldn’t have put a penny on her staying. But he needed to know.
“Yeah. Um, about my upcoming re-enlistment…”
Powell gestured to the chair opposite him. “Sit down, Arés. If you’ve got summat to say I won’t make you stand up for it.”
She sank gratefully onto it with a groan. “Thanks.”
“Go ahead,” Powell sat back and listened.
She took a deep breath. “Uh… I’ve, well… I’ve decided not to re-enlist, sir.”
Powell nodded. Expected as the news was, losing her was going to suck. “Aye. Now, keep in mind that you’re well before your retirement age so you won’t get benefits beyond being ‘Horse’s spouse…”
“We’ve taken that into account sir. But… well, we lost a lot of people on Caledonia, and…”
“Aye. I’d have to be bloody blind to not notice your growing family. An’ I imagine it won’t stop at just one…?”
She smiled. “He kicks almost as hard as his daddy,” she confided.
Powell uttered a rare laugh. “Hah! Well! I don’t envy you, then. But any road, I know better than to try an’ talk you out of it. What I was going to say is that I imagine the unit will still have frequent need of your expertise and experience, an’ I was wonderin’ if you’d factored that thought into your plans…?”
“You’d take me on as a consultant?” she asked.
“I think we’d be bloody fools not to at least offer,” Powell said drily. “You wrote half the suit procedures yourself.”
“I think I’d have to be foolish not to accept,” she replied.
“Arright,” Powell nodded. “We’ll work out the details closer to time. Thanks for tellin’ me nice and early, it’ll make transitioning to a post-Jockey world that bit smoother…Though it’ll still be a bit of a bugger, mind,” he added warmly.
That got a touched smile. “…Thank you, sir.”
Powell nodded. “You’d better send a message to Colonel Miller, I suppose. Did you need anything else?”
“Not right now, sir.”
“Arright. Good evening, sergeant.”
She clambered back out of the chair and headed for the door. “Good evening, sir.”
A thought hit Powell just before she reached it. “Oh, Arés?”
She turned back with her hand on the handle. “Sir?”
“Have you settled on a name yet?”
“Uh, yeah,” she nodded. “Diego. Diego Samuel Arés.”
Powell considered it for a second. “…Good name.”
Arés smiled again. “Good evening, sir.”
“Good evening.”
She let herself out, and Powell sat back in his chair to think. All in all, the conversation had left him in a good mood.
“…Good name,” he repeated to himself, and got back to work.
Date Point: 15y5m AV
Central University, City 1, Origin, The Corti Directorate
Lor
The plan to de-implant Corti civilization had grown rapidly. Once the Directors got behind something, any self-interested Corti—a tautology—aligned with them. The Varos College had gone from obscurity to focal importance with all the breathtaking efficiency the collegiate system promised.
Then, of course, came the debates.
Implants were at the heart of everything. They were the flagship product for dozens of Corti companies, especially giants like Amnag-Dwuz and Thryd-Geftry who between them had almost as much power as the Directorate itself.
But that was just the planetary crust of the problem, so to speak. There were grumbling tectonic layers beneath which made merely scrapping the economy’s most prolific and profitable exports seem like an utterly trivial undertaking. Implants were instrumental in global, regional and civic administration. They underpinned the stock market, enabled all aspects of Corti heavy industries and manufacturing through drone interfacing, and were almost literally written into the DNA of the medical sector… which included the reproduction labs.
Corti civilization was almost—not completely, but almost —dependent on neural cybernetics in order to breed.
If Lor had been emotionally capable of sweating with dread, he would have. How close were they to the event horizon? Had they already fallen past it without noticing?
It seemed entirely plausible. Not a single one of the Directorate’s projections could be described by even the most optimistic soul as anything less than “apocalyptic.”
Banning the implants outright and shutting them all down was impossible. Quite aside from the inevitable black market problem, society would collapse within days at best. The more probable estimates said hours. The most probable estimates said the collapse would begin immediately. Forbidding the implantation of newly decanted Corti infants was a more workable solution—over the coming decades, society could be reconfigured to accommodate and rely upon them. But they might not have decades.
Releasing software updates represented a middle-ground solution, but most of the true vulnerabilities were firmware or worse—In-depth examination of the Directorate’s own removed implants had suggested security flaws at the data link layer. Subtle almost to the point of invisibility, but once the College knew what to look for the tell-tales couldn’t hide behind a veneer of legitimacy any longer.
Lor was running on stimulants. He’d suffer for them in a few days when he reached the limits of what pharmacology could achieve but in the short-term he was perfectly alert, awake and focused. Without them, he’d never have been able to make presentation after presentation to the Directors as his faculty and students brought him their findings.
Right now, he was explaining how the war effort on Gao appeared to have effected isolation of the implanted populace from the opening moves of the conflict.
“The real-time communications grid must be zero-area distortion-based. Evidence gathered by the Common Denominator says that Gao has been enshrouded in a high-powered and aggressive topology stabilization field.”
Third Director Larm seized on that as a beacon of possible hope. “I presume we have the manufacturing and scientific capability to assemble such field generators on Origin, Node, Vertex and Tangent at least?”
“We probably have the ability to assemble such a generator on all planets and most of our major space habitats, Third Director,” Lor replied. “Unfortunately, I do not think it will help.”
“Why not?”
“The Gaoian implanted population number no more than one in ten of the total population. Our implanted population is ten out of every twelve. Worse, those among our people with the knowledge and expertise to build such generators are presumably implanted at a rate approaching total. Finally, even if we could set up such generators, the overwhelming number of potential biodrones precludes locking them out. They could simply establish a communications network by some other means.”
“In other words, containing the situation as the Humans and Gaoians were able to do is not feasible,” First Director Shanl concluded.
“That is correct, First Director.”
Shanl gave the data in front of her some pensive consideration.
“…We must conclude that our prognosis is…hopeless,” she said.
“I fear so, First Director,” Lor agreed again.
Shanl nodded. She blinked a couple of times—a display of intense emotion, by Silver banner standards—then turned to the Directors.
“Alternatives?”
One of the Fifth Directors—Atrish—raised her hand. “We may need to consider an Ark.”
“Explain.”
“The Humans have a parable about a world-ending flood because one of their tribal war deities felt the need to purge the world of degeneracy. To that end, all life worth saving was housed aboard an oceangoing vessel. Once the flood waters had destroyed all non-sanctioned life, the world was repopulated from this Ark.”
The Directorate inclined their heads in various directions as they considered the merits of that suggestion. None expressed shock or dismay, nor moral outrage. None of them had the capacity.
“Permit total collapse and then restore from a prepared seed population…” Shanl mused. “Viable. It would reduce our species to a minor galactic power but if the alternative is extinction…”
“This Nofl’s comments on Corti physiology are intriguing also,” Second Director Larfu commented. “As he points out, Humans and Gaoians both prove that there is no particular reason why we should have sacrificed our physical talents. It seems perfectly possible to have both, and why disdain an asset?”
“You bring this up because you believe a true retrograde in our society is necessary.”
“Inevitable, perhaps,” Lor commented.
“If so,” Larfu continued, “Then our ‘Ark’ should furnish its occupants with as many opportunities to succeed as possible.”
Shanl stared at him. “We are contemplating a complete re-engineering of our species. That will likely entail intuitive aspects of our psychology as well.” To a Silver banner, the concept of emotion was too tainted to directly state.
“If necessary.”
“One wonders,” Third Director Blernd interjected, “whether an intuitive sense of personal purity might not have prevented this entire scenario.”
He became the center of attention. Such a sentiment brushed perilously close to the line of open unorthodoxy.
“You mean disgust,” Third Director Freth clarified.
“There are things we find distasteful even now,” Blernd observed. “It seems needlessly paradoxical to feel disgusted by the mere concept of disgust.”
“And if we had perhaps retained similar… selectiveness… in our attitude toward physical augmentation then, as the Third Director says, this situation need never have arisen,” Lor agreed.
“Can such selectiveness be engineered?” Second Director Morln asked.
“Sensitivity to it can be engineered. It is likely that the specific stimuli to be selected against must be taught.”
Freth cleared his throat. “Disgust is heavily entangled with other intuitive impulses,” he pointe d out. “Hence why we have been unable to completely eradicate it even among the Silver banner caste. It runs deep, gets everywhere. It is… messy.”
“Messy or not, if it is a necessary function…” Larfu thought, then nodded sharply. “Yes. It seems to me that the Third Director is correct.”
“A picture is emerging that I do not much like,” Morln said. “A focus on physical prowess and strong intuitive psychology? This is not merely a retrograde, it is a rejection of the guiding principles set by thousands of preceding Directorates.”
“And of the standards we each met in arriving at our current stations,” one of the Fourth Directors agreed.
Lor felt it necessary to interject. “Forgive me, Directors, but if one of my students continued to prefer their hypothesis in the face of experimental evidence which disproved it, I would be forced to fail them.”
He stood up a little straighter. “That is where we are. We have been testing a hypothesis concerning social models and the long-term viability of certain policies. We have now discovered a crucial data point which discredits the hypothesis. Shall we continue the experiment now that the hypothesis is disproven, or shall we take the scientifically correct course by generating a new hypothesis to be tested by a new experiment?”
Contemplative silence greeted his rhetorical question. Shanl broke it.
“Well said,” she agreed.
“Thank you, First Director.”
Larfu glanced at the First Director, then nodded and sat forward. He opened a new file in the space before them, and gave it a name: “PROJECT NEW EXPERIMENT”
“Very well, then,” he said. “Let us design our Ark.”