Date Point: Opening days of the first year of Liberation. Library bunker at Old-Bent-Leg, a freeed world
Ukusevi
The schism was complete. In fact, Ukusevi’s proposed additions to the Chant had been met with acclaim from one side and outraged violence from the other that only ended when the two factions of Keepers were dragged from each others’ throats by their bodyguards and hauled away back to their libraries. Ukusevi still had Umilivi’s teeth-marks in her ear.
It was still better than she’d feared. She’d envisioned herself surrounded on all sides by anger, universally rejected and exiled to the surface. Maybe she could have sought sanctuary with the Gao, but she would have been alone, never to lay eyes on one of her kind again, so all things considered, a few bite marks and bruises were an entirely acceptable outcome. She had allies, and that was the best realistic outcome she could have hoped for.
For the first time ever, the Old-Bent-Leg archives were noisy. Those who rejected Ukusevi and her interpretation were long gone, others had arrived from other libraries and other warrens who’d heard her version of the Chant and been drawn to it. Overall, their population had actually grown, to the point where their hydroponics farms and mushroom chambers could barely support everyone.
But Ukusevi had a plan. She had no idea if it would work, and whether it did or didn’t the archives needed the aggressive sorting, storing and filing they were undergoing now. She barely had a moment to think as she supervised all the acolytes and faithful in their work. Centuries of books, papers and other material had to be prepared for transport no matter what happened.
But think she did.
She’d heard Gar-avff’s stories of other worlds out there. The old texts had much to say on the general shape of the cosmos, of the way worlds whirled around stars which in turn drifted around the great whorl. All that knowledge came from long ago, when the sky wasn’t perpetually choked with smog and the so-called Wicked People had been able to look up and see the stars at night.
That was what a world could be. What most worlds out there presumably were, given that the Hunters had not conquered them and ruined them.
And if Ukusevi’s people were not in fact Punished, but were… something else… then might it not go some way toward addressing the grave cosmic injustice of four hundred years if she and her kind got to walk under a blue sky and breathe clean air again?
Those who still thought themselves Punished could stay, as far as she was concerned. It wasn’t her place to talk them around, not when she herself had believed that same darkly comforting narrative for her whole life.
All she knew was, if there was any kind of justice in the universe, her people were long overdue to receive it. Maybe the Almighty had sent the Gao and Humans, maybe not. But if nothing else, the two alien races represented a way forward.
Her busy activity was interrupted by a tug on her sleeve: Teeisyo, whose ears perked up hopefully as she looked down at him. “Keeper? The aliens are back. There’s a new one this time!”
“A new kind of alien?” Ukusevi asked.
“No, I think he’s one of those hoomans. But bigger. Really, really big.”
“I should go see them, then. Thank you, Teeisyo.”
He bounced happily at the thanks, and vanished into the stacks to take on some chore or another. Ukusevi left instructions that if anything came up which demanded her attention then it should be left until she returned, then padded up the access tunnel to mee the aliens once again.
The boy hadn’t exaggerated. The Human sat cross-legged on the floor next to the old battered table they’d dragged up for these meetings, and he was an immense study in lean, muscular strength. He looked as if he was built to the same kind of intense craggy standards as Hoeff, and also stood about an arm’s length taller than the short, broad man. Humans were worrying, like that. Even the comparatively slim and small Hurt had felt shockingly strong and muscular when he’d hugged Ukusevi, and this newcomer made him look like a pencil.
She immediately felt more than a little unsettled by him. But it wasn’t just his sheer physicality, there was something else about him that put her off-balance, more than the others.
He was soft-spoken, though. He gave Uku a curious look as she entered, then smoothly rose to his feet and offered a rough, callused hand to shake. His grip hinted at bone-crushing power, and spoke of finely controlled strength.
“Pleased to meet you. My name’s Julian, I work for…well, I work for some important fellas who’re very interested in this case. I’m here to learn about your world and, uh, what’s been done to it. So maybe it’d help if we could talk about what things are like now, and what they were like before the, uh…”
The enormous man looked over at Garr-avf, who prompted him with “They call it the Punishment.”
“On that point,” Ukusevi gently corrected him, “there has been some discussion.”
She sat down at the table, and the aliens sat opposite her after giving each other confused glances.
It was the eyes, she realized. Her own people had wide-set, wide-facing eyes. She could see a lot of the world around her, even slightly behind her. The Gao’s eyes were very forward-facing and focused, but Humans—and this Human in particular—locked both of those alarmingly white eyes on whatever they were looking at. Dead-center, straight forward, no spare attention going anywhere else. When a Human looked at her, she felt watched.
“What kind of discussion?” Julian asked.
“A schism. On the nature of the Punishment, whether it was even a Punishment at all…” she sighed. “Your peoples’ coming forced us to confront difficult questions. Garr-avf in particular–” she acknowledged the scarred, dark-furred Gao with a nod, “–Is likely to be remembered by the other side with, ah, with no real kindness.”
“You mean they think I’m the Great Deceiver, sent to deliver a sweet-sounding lie and drive you all back into wickedness,” the Gao summarized.
“Assuming that title doesn’t fall on me,” Ukusevi meant it as a dark joke, but there was honestly no humor in the situation.
Julian seemed embarrassed by that somehow, and scratched at something on the back of his head. “Oh…geez.”
Garr-avf issued a kind of reverse sniff. “That’s all you have to say?”
“Where I’m from,” Julian folded his tremendous arms in front of his chest and answered with a playfully odd sense of dignity, “That’s saying a lot.”
Ukusevi would need to ask about ‘geez’ at a later time.
“Where you’re from is weird,” Garr-avf muttered, then turned his unsettling gaze back on Ukusevi. “So I take it you’re in the faction looking for an… alternate explanation for everything.”
“I’m in the faction who refuse to deny the evidence,” Ukusevi said firmly. “You are here, the Hunters were never any kind of divine agent… whatever that means for the Almighty and for us, we’ll sort that out.”
“Yeah. That’s…not a great place to be,” the big man commented. “If I had time, I’d maybe share some stories my people have about that sort of thing. But I don’t. I need to learn about your world as it’s supposed to be, so that we have some idea of what kind of help we can offer.”
“We haven’t exactly been in a ‘great place’ for hundreds of years… The archives have a lot to say about our world before they came. There are whole tomes full of illustrations and some even contain pressed and preserved flowers, plants. I can’t tell you much about what life was like back then because it would depend on who you were and where you lived.”
Julian nodded. “We’re like that ourselves. I’m out here on an alien planet talkin’ to you through this–” he picked up the translator and wiggled it in the air. “Meanwhile there’s folks back on my home planet who still live more or less how their ancestors did a thousand years ago.”
“Then you understand how difficult it is for me to say how our world is supposed to be. I can tell you how some of it was, through the eyes of some of the people who lived in those times… but why? All that matters is that the surface is poisoned, nothing grows there, and seeing as the Almighty isn’t going to heal it, I don’t know what more you can take back to the people you work for beyond that this is a dead place.”
The big man seemed to weigh his response. “Well…there are many worlds out there. They’re all very different from each other, but there are some, uh, general themes they follow. If we know what kind of theme your world follows, we can better know how we can help.”
“What exactly do you mean when you offer to help?” Ukusevi challenged him. “Can you fix this?”
“…Not easily. Or quickly. Maybe. But even helping you means we need to know about your world. You are of this place, after all. I am of a different place and that shaped me and my people. Our air is heavier and moister, the gravity is heavier, the food is different…”
“And we are not of this place either,” Ukusevi retorted. “It was once a green, growing place. They sky and waters were clear, the animals roamed freely, the trees grew tall and thick. We evolved in a world that looks nothing like the one outside. The world we evolved for is gone, and all we have left are bare scraps. I can share those scraps with you and maybe you can make some sense out of them, but why? To what end? Will we stay here another four hundred years while you put right what the Hunters destroyed? How? How can you bring back all the things that are gone and forgotten?
“I can’t. Well…the full story is long, but let’s just say I can’t. But you are absolutely of this world, in the deep and inescapable way that everything is a part of where they are and where they came from. You can’t know any living thing unless you know the place that they came to be living in.”
“…And you can’t help us until you know us.” Ukusevi sighed, pushing down the urge to mutter a profanity. Of course things couldn’t be simple. It had been an act of pure optimism in defiance of a lifetime’s experience to hope otherwise. “And it’s possible you may never be able to know us.”
“Oh, no, that we can do. It’s just easier if we have your home to compare you to.” Julian shuffled closer and those disconcertingly focused eyes seemed to lock on to Ukusevi even harder as he angled his head forward. “But the question is… what kind of help are you after? Food? Medicine? Those seem obvious…”
Well. Here was the big moment. Here was the chance to leap forward into the unknown. Ukusevi had done it so much in the last little while that she wondered if she’d start growing used to it eventually. So she mustered up all the will she had and did her best to match the Human’s unsettlingly direct gaze.
“I would like to meet with your leaders,” she said. “I think the time has come for us to leave our world.”
Date Point: 17y3m3w AV
The abyssal ocean, Europa, 6th moon of Jupiter, Sol
Injunctor
The Injunctor attempted to contact the nearest relay again, and failed again.
Its limited intelligence was not capable of frustration, nor boredom. It had attempted to contact the relay 1,048,576 times since it had arrived, and encountered 1,048,576 failures. This strongly implied that the relay was permanently offline, presumably destroyed.
The Sol system would not enter the effective radius of another relay for more than a thousandth of a galactic rotation.
Its contingency in such situations was clear: activate its controlling Agent and receive instruction.
The most recent instructions it had received from its controlling Agent had mandated a period of hibernation. That hibernation period was over. It was to proceed to the third planetary body of the system, activate its location and abduction protocols, and wait for a suitable sophont.
The ice moon it had buried itself in was conveniently warm, thanks to the tidal action of its massive parent. Deep under the ice, an ocean of liquid water fell comfortably inside the temperature range that the Injunctor could endure without needing to expend power on thermal regulation. It was, by its own standards, quite comfortable.
Burrowing upwards to the surface required a lot of energy, focused through the dorsal shielding, to melt upwards through a fault line in the endless ice sheet, but the Injunctor had plenty to spare. It took a moment to recharge on the surface, activated its superluminal drive on the lowest possible energy, and coasted inwards toward the star as quietly as it could manage.
There were several major geopolitical landmasses to consider. Anonymity was important, but in this case the Agent had also made additional stipulations. It considered the mission parameters its Agent had logged, and selected an appropriate region.
Three solar days after it began its location protocol, the Injunctor found a suitable candidate: A human male, in ideal health, and an outlier on several physiological metrics. That would normally contra-indicate an abduction, but the controlling Agent had specified its own requirements for its biodrone host.
The candidate was piloting a vehicle through the middle of a large open expanse of arable soil, dragging some kind of machine through the earth to break it up. The Injunctor shadowed the vehicle for nearly an eighth of the diurnal cycle before the vehicle paused and its pilot alighted to relieve himself of accumulated waste liquid.
Abduction was anomalous in several respects. The candidate host proved capable of great resistance both to forcefield restraint and chemical sedation, which required the Injunctor to maximize both. Normalization would have proven fatal to the candidate, given its deviation, but normalization was not part of the protocol in this case. Instead the candidate’s already formidable biology was enhanced with the full suite of augmentations at the Injunctor’s disposal.
The personality suppression and biodroning process was also anomalous, and required additional implantation. That would also normally be contra-indicated and the candidate host terminated immediately, but the controlling Agent was looking for a specific type of host, and this fit within the parameters.
With the process complete, all that remained was loading the Agent into his new body.
The entity known variously as Six or Cynosure blinked and opened his eyes. He sat up, inspected his new arms and legs, and prodded curiously at the tattoo he found just below the right elbow. Then, with a shrug, he hopped up to his feet and looked around the Injunctor’s interior.
“Location?”
The Injunctor informed him that he was on Earth, and highlighted his precise geographical position.
“…Kansas. Hmm.” He tilted his head and accessed the biodrone’s memories. “…Yes. Global situation update?”
The Injunctor provided that too. It also noted that its Agent’s body was somewhat dehydrated, and delivered an appropriate measure of water, which Cynosure picked up and sipped absently as his new eyes skipped over the information.
The Injunctor was too simple to understand his reaction. It did not know whether it was the totality of what it had presented or some minor detail which prompted the Agent’s response. It simply watched and waited impassively for instructions as Cynosure’s expression darkened, as he set the drink aside, and as he used his new body’s innate stress-expression mechanisms.
“Well… fuck.”