02: Sunset Morning Substrate

Relative morning comes, and Selene is awake to see the lights gradually brighten. Light seeps into the decor as if the Slumbering Fury is slowly waking up, but she doesn’t, hasn’t in years. Dreams are cut short each morning at round-numbered times, as if consciousness is clocking in for the day’s shift, and she finds herself staring up at the ceiling. The railings on her bed provide just enough clearance for her frame; she’s considered buying a larger bed, but there have always been more pressing uses for her scrip.

She drops down from her lofted bed, ignoring the ladder entirely. Leaning down at her desk, she hits some keys on her terminal, pulls up the security feed for the guest room. Asphodel is sleeping curled inward, entangled in blankets.

The carpet muffles Selene’s footsteps as she goes about her morning routine. The sun is still setting outside: Elysium 4’s days are sixty times longer than Earth’s. It will be thirteen more relative mornings until nightfall, and thirty more after that before the sun rises. She could move back and forth across the planet, straddling the day-night terminator line to keep her schedule in sync with the time she perceives out the window, but the thought of wasting electricity on something so trivial is embarrassing. She’s long since gotten used to mismatched exterior and interior time.

Honing her razor on a canvas strop, hands operating on practiced autopilot, Selene wonders how she must look to her new guest. She stares at her reflection. Gray eyes catch and reflect the light oddly, a cosmetic side effect of her ocular augments that leaves her eyes somewhere between human, animal, and corpse. The razor glides across nearly cyanotic skin, over high cheekbones and well-worn laugh lines from what Brutus calls her “perpetual smile.”

She wonders why Asphodel would come with someone like her so willingly — naivety? The blind trust Selene is who she says she is? Desperation? She worries her guest secretly views her as a threat. Of course, if Brutus is correct, she is and should and vice-versa. No amount of respectful hospitality can change that.

A splash of cold water to the face breaks her train of thought, and she starts brushing out her sable hair, pulling against tangles with audible tearing.

“I do not know how you manage it,” Brutus says. “You brush your hair every morning and yet it is always tangled by the next. Is it something about the way you sleep?”

“I mess it up right before bed while you’re not looking.” Her tangles are sufficiently subdued that the ripping has stopped; it’s not much longer before she sets the brush down. Her hair frames her face like wings.

“I would notice if you did that,” Brutus says. If Brutus was human, she’s sure she’d hear laughter in his voice. “You know this. You connected me to the Slumbering Fury’s camera systems yourself.”

“And that’s how I know its blind spots.” The conversation continues; they slip into an easy back and forth like two gears on an assembly line locking into place. Selene heads into the kitchen. Brutus projects his avatar sitting at the table, ankles crossed in his mournful black dress, looking nowhere in particular as he speaks. She turns on the food printer, punching in the day’s breakfast with one hand while inserting fresh ingredient canisters — yeast, rendered soy proteins, salt, oil, milled carbohydrates — with the other. The extrusion head whirs into action, laying down a spongy lattice of what will eventually be pancakes.

The stack is nearly complete when Asphodel walks in with a bright wakefulness belied by messy hair, loose pajamas — she’s rolled up the cuffs to compensate for the height difference — and a faint sickly air Selene hadn’t noticed under the fluorescent lights of the facility. Conversation stops; Selene, leaning against the wall, gives her a wave. Brutus nods politely.

“Hello Selene! Hello Brutus,” she says, sitting down across from him.

Brutus nods again. “I did not expect you to be so wakeful, given the events of yesterday.”

She shrugs airily, opening her mouth to say something and stopping herself when Selene sets a plate of freshly-printed pancakes in front of her, complete with syrup and cutlery.

“You get first stack,” she says, turning back to the printer, fingers hitting keys as she talks. “You were asleep before I could get you dinner last night.” Instructions entered, she sits at the table between Brutus, whose unseeing eyes track her movements, and Asphodel, who is beginning to cut up her breakfast. The printer whirs back to life behind her; culinary implements emerge like indecisive groundhogs from cavities they had just receded into.

The stack doesn’t last long. Asphodel’s table manners are of a caliber she’s never seen before, nearly surgical; when the pancakes are done her hands are free of syrup, a feat Selene’s never managed. “Thank you,” she says, pushing her plate away, looking a little warmer and more content.

“You want seconds?”

She demurs politely, but Selene knows hunger when she sees it. She ends up taking the finished fourth stack, leaning through Brutus’s avatar so she doesn’t have to get up, coming away with breakfast and hair standing on end from static cling.

“Have you ever examined the inside of a food printer, Asphodel?” he asks, unfazed. She shakes her head after a nearly imperceptible delay, and he continues. “They are interesting devices. The basic principle is simple to explain. All printed meals are constructed of the same base materials. The extrusion head, however, has superhuman finesse. Through careful variation of texture and usage of trace chemicals generated through similar processes to medicine synthesis, it exploits edge cases in human flavor perception and create a simulacrum of almost any dish.”

“The only good application of PsiEng,” Selene mutters through a mouthful of pancake.

“The barest attempt at deception succeeds due to the consumer’s willingness to believe it. It is incredible what you are capable of believing when given sufficient excuse.” He’s not looking at her, but Selene feels his eyes drilling into her all the same.

“Huh,” Asphodel says, and then, “Ah, sorry, why’re you telling me this?”

“I have been attempting to refine this recipe file over time, but I cannot taste test the results, and Selene does not have a very discerning palette. I would appreciate your thoughts.”

He hasn’t done this routine with a guest in years. Asphodel looks up, tapping her chin with the end of her fork before shrugging. “I can’t think of anything. It was pretty good.” An apologetic look. “Sorry, I know that’s not helpful.”

He gives an eyes-only smile that’d extend behind his scarf if there was anything behind his scarf, any flesh to him at all. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

Selene waves Asphodel off from helping her put the dishes away; plates, forks, and knives slide into compartments in the walls, and once the little doors close behind them, steam brushes kick into life with a sound like snow on a plate glass window.

They sit in front of the window, Brutus taking his customary position behind Selene’s chair. Reds and yellows drip down the sky like paint from splayed fingers; the purple of the night creeps upward like flame. Squinting against the disc of the sun, Selene can almost make out a few of the planet’s rocky moons.

“Hell of a view,” Selene says, and Asphodel nods.

“I haven’t seen anything like it.” She shifts in her seat, trying to get comfortable, legs tucked under her, rubbing her socks against the upholstery.

“You don’t get to watch the sunset after work?” Selene pivots her chair to face Asphodel rather than the window.

Another infinitesimal hesitation. She shakes her head. “I don’t work in that lab, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“What brought you there, then?” It’s conversational legerdemain: reaching for information without letting on why you want it. She’s out of practice but the principles should hold.

“I wanted to see my sister.”

“Your sister?”

“My older sister, Minerva. She said I needed to come see her immediately, and that she’d say why in person.” Selene notices a glint in her eyes behind the cracked glasses. It’s tears. “Do you think she’s okay?”

Selene runs through the bodies. Three with names: Stephenson, Newman, Young. Three without: the two in the viewing room and the one in the elevator. The dormitory could house six. Everybody’s accounted for, unless...

“I very much doubt she is telling the truth,” Brutus says into her ear, his avatar immobile. “In the unlikely event it is, it is unlikely Minerva Verrine still lives.”

“I can’t say for sure,” she says. “You’re the only living person I ran into in there, but she might’ve found some way to escape.”

The look on her face makes Selene wish she had more concrete good news. “Do you have a terminal I can use? She’s probably wondering where I am.” Selene doesn’t voice the question’s unspoken qualifier.

She points behind her, toward the hall. “It’s on the desk in my bedroom. Feel free to set up a guest session.”

Asphodel nods and hurries off. Before she’s even left the room, Brutus is speaking through Selene’s cochlear link. “I think it prudent to surveil her communication.”

Selene knows that if she doesn’t directly tell him not to, he will. “What’s the status on the server image?”

“It is entirely copied over; Legion is ready to retrieve at your leisure.” A tangle of lines — something between brain stem and root system, strangely familiar — unfurls itself in stark neon in front of Selene. Her augments etch the data directly into her eyes, complex patterns making her retinas itch. “In addition, I have been able to decrypt the directory mapping. I cannot yet read the files themselves, but I have some idea of the overarching structure.”

She lets her mind focus and unfocus, trying to resolve the tangle into something intelligible. After a couple of moments she realizes what it reminds her of; everything falls into place. “It’s a document mesh,” she says. Linkages between pieces of information like axons under a microscope, revisions clinging to nodes like dust.

“That is a reasonable hypothesis,” he says, pointing to isolated gnarls of data with claw-ringed fingers. “These files are far larger than the rest. I assume they are some sort of high-density video encoding, which implies they are surveillance footage. They will be slower to decrypt, but once I am able to, they are likely to provide conclusive proof of what happened and where THRONE currently resides.”

She crosses her arms. “How long do you think it will take?”

“I would estimate somewhere between twenty and thirty days.”

She shakes her head. “No, that won’t work.” She does her best to point at a central portion, trying to ignore the way the projection appears in front of her finger — it’s been years and she’s still not used to that. “This looks like a central hub of sorts, maybe some kind of index. Focusing on that will get us more info faster.”

“Are you certain? If the information we find is not useful—”

“Then we can try the video. I still think we try this first.” She leans back in her chair. “Know your enemy and all that.”

“Very well. I will keep you informed on my findings.”

She blinks and the data display is gone. “Thanks, Brutus.” She closes her eyes, imagines herself at the center of some web, spider and fly at once. She opens them again when she can hear muffled footsteps on the carpet behind her, sees Asphodel’s reflection faintly in the window. She turns around, chair swiveling on its stand. She’s wearing some of what passes for Selene’s formalwear. The button-up shirt fits her poorly, tailored for someone with broader shoulders, a flatter chest, two dozen centimeters’ extra height. The sleeves — meant for someone more sinewy — bunch up around the upper arms. Selene can see the rise and fall of her chest, the soft curve of the neck, the hint of the collarbone, and... Asphodel follows her eyeline. Her gaze snaps up.

“Sorry, I helped myself to some of your clothes,” Asphodel says, rubbing the back of her head. “I hope you don’t mind. I didn’t want to wear pajamas all day.”

Selene waves it off; she forgets sometimes that not everyone dresses like her. “It’s fine. I should’ve figured.”

She gives a sheepish little smile and takes her seat again, swiveling around to look back out the window for a moment before saying, “How long do you plan on staying here?”

“Well, that depends. Brutus, you mind putting the tunnel map up?”

He nods, makes a gesture like spreading his hands — more for their guest’s benefit than anything else — and a star map paints itself over the window, obscuring the sunset completely. Tunnels, invisible strands thousands of light-years long and the width of planets, wind their ways between stars. They’re the arteries of interstellar communication and travel. A tunneling drive can take a spacecraft from one end of a tunnel to the other in less than a second. A journey that would take a thousand years to accomplish at humanly achievable speeds could be finished in a few seconds — as long as the tunnels are currently in the right positions for your route. They have a nasty habit of skipping out of one gravity well and into another, leaving travelers stranded and communities isolated.

The tunnels around Earth vacated the area centuries ago; they’re not predicted to return for millennia more.

“We are here,” he says, snapping Selene out of thoughts of an unknown home. He’s pointing to an isolated portion of the map, connected to the rest by a single strand. “The only tunnel in the area connects to the Persepolis Interchange.” He runs a finger up the line connected to their current position, up to a crossroads. “It will remain in the area for three days; it will not return for forty after that.”

“So we’re leaving in the next two days?” Asphodel asks, examining the map.

“I can’t. I’m still copying data over from the facility’s servers.” Selene looks over at Asphodel, arms folded. “You should be able to leave on your own, right? How’d you get here?”

She looks away, flushing slightly. “I called in a favor with a pilot I know. I don’t have a craft of my own. I’d hate to impose, but if you don’t mind—”

“You can stay here until we leave, obviously. It’s not safe to leave you in the facility.”

She blinks before a grateful smile overtakes her. “Thank you.”

Another dismissive wave. “Don’t worry about it.”

Asphodel leans forward in her chair, twisting it back and forth slightly, chewing on her thumbnail. “What’s so important here, anyway? Are you looking for that thing Minerva was studying?”

A nod. “Did she tell you anything about it?”

“A little. She said she found it in a cave not far from here while scouting. It started hanging around her camp long enough to pick up language through osmosis.”

“It learned to speak without having been taught?” Brutus asks.

“They were having conversations within weeks. You can see why they wanted to study it, right? She called it in, and they were able to send over construction drones and recruit researchers on short enough notice to make sure it was still around to trap.”

“They kidnapped it?” Selene asks.

Asphodel doesn’t respond for a moment, just gives her a look she can’t quite place, somewhere between confusion and pity. “That’s what you do when studying an animal.”

“Most animals can’t be asked questions.”

“You and Minerva would get along well. She said she couldn’t stand to watch the guards use their shock batons.” Selene doesn’t like this new air to her, this discomfiting change in tone of voice. “An animal tries to escape. You shock it.”

She imagines THRONE trying to extend itself through the bars of that pitiful little cage, malleable body tensing then falling limp at the application of excessive voltage. She feels queasy. “Can we talk about something else?”

She can’t tell if Asphodel’s smirking or if that expression’s something else entirely. “Fine.”

That night, when conversation’s stalled out and her guest’s gone to bed, Selene sits at the kitchen table, head resting on one hand, idly rubbing the scar coiled serpentine around her finger.

“The message Asphodel sent contained nothing out of the ordinary,” Brutus says. “She told her apparent sister that she was staying with an investigator named Selene Morningstar, that she was safe, and that she wanted a response as soon as possible.”

Selene responds with her eyes closed. “How’s the decryption work going?”

“Full documents will be available on your terminal, but I do not imagine you will find most of them useful unless you are curious as to THRONE’s diet.”

“Most of them?”

“A pair of edits in a document about THRONE’s psychology piqued my interest. It was a short paragraph added by one user, then deleted by another within fifteen minutes.”

This buildup can’t lead anywhere good. “What did it say?”

Brutus reads it aloud. “Responses to standard psychometric stimulus batteries are consistent with Michaels-Hallow syndrome, which would present the first case of a non-human intelligence being thus afflicted since the syndrome’s discovery fourteen years ago. It is unknown if this is the baseline state for THRONE’s species, or if it has been flash-etched at some point before recovery.”

Her chair scoots backward slightly as she sits up, eyes flying open. It’s as if a specter drove some ancient blade deep into her back. “You’re sure that decryption’s correct?”

“I am absolutely positive.” If he resents the obvious question, it doesn’t come through in his voice. Nothing ever does.

“Alright,” she says, leaning back, staring up at the ceiling. “Change of plans. Focus on user registry, then what looks most like internal mail.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” She stands up, heads for a shower before bed, a single question running through her mind: if the flash-etching theory is correct, why would someone brainwash an alien?