《The Halcyon Abyss》 A Farewell to Stars A FAREWELL TO STARS Experiment File #: 486 Experiment Name: Takiya Naru Experiment Classification: Prototype AI (human emulator, organic shell) Experiment Status: missing In the dark, with every light powered off, I can see the stars between my feet: Sirius, Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, Rigel, all shimmering through the water of the bath. The bottom of my tub, a sheet of transparent aluminum, is part of the station''s outer hull, and the abyss of space is inches beneath my vulnerable human soles. Experiment Description: To address issues of treachery/desertion in human-emulator AI, prototype 486 [Takiya Naru] has been programmed to believe itself human. The following is its final record: "Soto?" I call, standing up in the starlit water. "My implant just chirped. Could you read me the message please?" The computer''s voice answers, "Subject line: specter sighting. Message content: Hunter, in the interest of your time, I will omit all preamble: our station, The Halcyon Abyss, requires the services of an exterminator specializing in specters. Reply speedily if possible; situation is time-sensitive." "Halcyon?" I say, shaking my head. "Soto, isn''t that an old nature preserve?" "Correct. Purpose: to prevent the extinction of potentially useful aquatic animal species. Human population: zero. Logs claim it has not been visited in 400 years. Status: abandoned." I stir the water, imagining whales swimming between the shimmering stars. "No human staff there?" "Negative. Station was designed to be self-sustaining. The interior is entirely submerged." "Hmm." I sink back into the cooling liquid, frowning. "And the message really came from Halcyon? Not just from the space nearby?" "Confirmed. Transmission originated from a point 11 meters inside the station." "Send a message back. Say I need to know something about the situation before I agree." "Impossible." "Why?" "It would violate programmed restrictions. Explanation: clearing a message through the hull of The Halcyon Abyss would require an electromagnetic signal of a prohibited intensity." "Why prohibited?" "The Halcyon Abyss was designed to protect alien animal species highly vulnerable to extinction, including those thought to be sensitive to electromagnetic radiation." "I see. So we can''t scan it then, either." A black box. Dangerous. But ghost jobs always are. "Do we at least have old blueprints?" I ask. The darkness shimmers with threads of blue, and a translucent cylinder appears over the surface of the water. I use my implant to zoom in. The schematics of the hull are detailed, but the interior is an empty void. "Know what I don''t see?" "You do not see a transmissions device." "Right." I use my implant to command the tub to drain, and then step into the nearby closet-slot, where I have the machine-arms outfit me in an aquatic evo-suit. "I¡¯m going to take a look. Charge the railgun, Soto." Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. "Acknowledged. Do not attempt this." I climb a ladder through the low ceiling, the gravity weakening as I ascend toward the station''s center. "It''s my job. I appreciate your concern." I shake my head to myself. Why do they program these things to simulate concern? Even if some AI are sentient (improbable), they wouldn''t share the feelings of terrestrial apes like us. "Railgun prepared." Reaching the top of the ladder in zero-G, I climb through the hatch and slot myself into a coffin-sized pod of transparent metal, a place simultaneously claustrophobic and seemingly open to the star-speckled void. A part of me believes that there is no pod at all, and that I am floating, barefaced, in hard vacuum. "Do not attempt this. The Halcyon Abyss contains no intelligent life; therefore, there is no person who will benefit from the risk." "I doubt a plankton sent that message. Fire me down." Gravity returns swiftly, pressing my feet against the invisible floor, hard at first, then harder, crushing, two Gs¡­ six Gs¡­ ten Gs. Through gritted teeth, I murmur, "I''ll never understand how this doesn''t pancake my insides." "Information regarding genetic enhancement¡ª" "Locked, I know." The gray circle of my station, my isolated home, dwindles down to a speck, and disappears. Somewhere in the dark, the last ring of accelerators flickers past, and I''m no longer speeding up, I''m weightless, in free-fall, plummeting through the void. Swarms of silhouettes flicker before the stars, thousands of fragments of rock, the remnants of Earth, still lingering in the old orbit of the planet. I imagine each fragment as a place that once existed: Rome, tumbling darkly before Polaris; China, glowing redly, speckled in globs of the nickel-iron core; Everest, crumbling into the abyss, like a handful of black dust falling between shadowed fingers. "Soto," I say, "the aquatic species on the Halcyon: could any of them have been mistaken for animals? Could they have been intelligent after all?" The computer takes a moment to respond, since I am already a light-second away from it. "Improbable. Even if that were true, materials to construct a transmissions array would not be available within the habitat." That eliminates one possibility. And it would be ludicrous to suppose that intelligence could have evolved there in the last four hundred years. No, the blueprints are outdated: the Halcyon is not empty, not anymore. The black box has been used to conceal something. In the old days, when a ghost hunter stumbled onto a government secret, they could call the local jurisprudence station and receive clearance and information. Nowadays, it''s difficult to contact any of the fractured governments, and besides, none of them have records about what the old government was up to. No one even has a plausible theory. If Halcyon has live personnel, they''re a remnant of the old days. And if they''ve been under strict radio silence, it''s possible they don''t even know that their era has passed. "Soto, I know you can''t override your programming, but what about my implant? Could it transmit through the Halcyon''s hull?" The silence stretches¡­ tick-tick-tick-tick¡­ and then, "Negative." I let out a sigh. "Then if I''m going in blind, at least brief me on what we do know. Are there any large predators I should be worried about?" A ten ton lobster crawls through the shadows between the stars, although I know it''s actually being projected onto my retinas by the bionics in my eyeballs. Other monsters loom up from the darkness: bone-masked squid, eel-sharks with ten thousand teeth, towering masses of seaweed with strangling tongues. Soto warns me about the predators'' camouflage, their quickness, their insidious instincts, trying to frighten me. "I''m not turning around, Soto. How long until arrival?" The silence returns, and drags on longer than ever, lonely¡­ If I think about it, I am always alone, but with Soto nearby it doesn''t feel that way. Here, hurtling silently through the black tunnel of the void, I''m suddenly conscious of how far I am from another human being. Probably, there are still survivors in the Earth system, but I can''t prove that. The last time I saw a human face was four months ago, on a hunt, and it was dead. I had arrived at the station to find everyone frozen: the ghost had sabotaged the life-support, and was hovering half inside the corpses, the way they do. Like they''re sucking something out. I had paralyzed it with my diffusion array and exorcised it, then ordered the station railgun to fire the corpses into a fragment of the Earth, burying them where our ancestors are buried. "Thirty-nine seconds." The Halcyon Abyss is not yet visible, but swarms of shattered debris are already flickering past, hazardous. Tiny pinging sounds crack through the silence, microparticles flashing like sparks against the hull, leaving almost invisible gouges in the thin surface. The debris are from the old Dyson swarm, a shell of satellites and stations that encloses the sun, and once drew power from it. Halcyon is part of that shell. I skim over a sea of defunct solar panels, billions upon billions of them, a fragile skin of metal wider than a thousand worlds, shimmering in the starlight like an ocean at night. The surface is broken by waves and shining spray where the alien kill bullets had blasted through on their way to obliterate their various targets: Earth, Mars, Haven-central, Luna, Spindisk, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Ever since, the satellites have been colliding, and with every collision, more debris tumbles randomly into the swarm, and those debris cause more collisions. The whole sphere is slowly but exponentially spiraling into a chain-reaction of silent, irreversible ruin. I feel my body pulled upside down, the stars whirling, then stabilizing. This is the first stage of landing on a station: the receiving railgun automatically aligns with the incoming pod; then the first ring of accelerator magnets sets the vessel spinning, and the second ring stabilizes it, so that the passenger''s feet are in the direction that is about to feel like down. And now, the gravity comes¡ªhard at first, then harder, like a boulder crushing me, and as I groan under the pressure, I get my first look at the Halcyon Abyss. It is a deeper darkness within the shadow of the swarm. Black-holes lost in outer space must look this way¡ªjust an emptiness, a hole, a drain. As it creeps nearer, more and more stars are swallowed by its rim, until the whole of the sky before me has gone dark. I always imagined the kill bullets like this, hulking, black-painted cylinders, immense slugs of wolfram or simple brute iron. Humanity never got a clear look at the bullets, but everyone sees them in their nightmares. Noiselessly, the pod slips into the mouth of the cylinder, and all goes dark. Gravity has shifted again, presumably toward the nearest rim of the spinning station, and I am lying on my face. If the blueprints were accurate, I''m in a tiny cargo receptacle, an airlock near the gigantic turbines that keep the ocean oxygenated. This is my last chance to speak to Soto, before I descend through the shell of lead. But there''s nothing to say. Eventually, I send, "Wish me luck." Seconds tick by in the darkness. I can feel the subsonic thrumming of the turbines. Silent. Loud in my bones. Soto answers, "You have sufficient oxygen?" It is a question without purpose; Soto knows better than I do what my equipment kit contains. "A hundred hours," I answer, fitting the oxygen mask over my head. Just before I open the hatch, the final message comes back. "Luck." Then I plunge down into the Abyss. Descent DESCENT When there was still an Earth, I had been in love with the ocean at night: its vastness, its reflections, its mystique. Sometimes, when the moon was crescent, I would be drawn to wade out, to swim, to dive, to kneel in the sand at the frigid bottom. No matter how deep I went, I could sense that there was a sky somewhere above me, cool night air, and stars. So I never felt afraid. Not like here. The liquid is saliva warm, and the dark is oppressive. There is no sky. There is no air except the bare inch behind the plastic of my mask. I am cut off from Soto, but I keep on forgetting that, muttering, "Soto, what settings will be optimal on these IR goggles? I can''t see past my nose." The silence comes down, heavy¡­ heavy¡­ and it is worse than pure silence now, because there are faint stirring sounds, the gurgle of bubbles, the shifting of things unseen. Never in my life, until this moment, have I been severed from my computers. As I twist dials on my goggles, trying to see more than a meter through the greenish murk, I have my implant begin a transmission toward the point where the message from the Halcyon originated. "Hello," I mutter. "This is Takiya Naru. I am adrift in the water out here. Can you guide me in?" I wait, unwilling to risk moving without directions. I don''t want to squirm around in here like a worm on a hook. "Hello?" I try again. This is when Soto would chime in. To say what? Get out of here immediately. You are in danger. I glance back toward the cargo hatch that conceals my ship¡ªbut it''s gone. The abyss behind me is a swarm of shapes: plankton or plant matter, no sign of the protective hull, only dark water extending into the shadows on every side. I sense a subtle pull, a current sucking my drifting body downward, and I realize that, subtly, it''s been dragging me unawares. I could still try to swim against the current, fly back where there are stars. I yearn for the constellation I''d seen between my feet: Rigel, Betelgeuse¡­ Stars of Orion: the hunter. "This is Takiya Naru, a hunter. Are you in need of assistance? Please respond."The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. There is only static: a froth of grating sounds with snatches of human voices. Anyone whose transmission system is this badly damaged is probably in need of help. I have my implant point me to the source of the radio waves, and I start swimming, saving the jets on my evo-suit for emergencies. Oxygen is at 99 hours and 54 minutes, or so the glowing indicator on my retina tells me. That''s enough time to take this dive slow and careful. I count the seconds in a whisper, and every time I say ''nine,'' I stop and twist in the water, staring into the green gloom behind, above, below, keeping watch for any sign of movement in the dark. Time seems sluggish, endless. I swim, but there''s no landmark to prove that I''m moving. There''s only murky water, and gurgling streams of bubbles. Over the implant, I hear the static give way to a woman singing, "and in the woods, beneath the sky, I know that I¡ª" then more static. But I heard enough to catch the swinging cadence of it, a music style centuries out of date, sung with an uncanny, bizarre trill in the vocals. "Of course," I murmur, "They''ll have their own culture, by now." Four centuries in isolation¡­ They''ve been developing alone for as long as it took humanity to go from carriages to rocketships, or from rocketships to dust. Long enough for multiple layers of revolutions in manners, art, morals. I listen for the snatches of humanity in the static, and hear men shouting with words that are half familiar to me, half gibberish. Someone crying¡ªa baby? A man calling, "Hello?" "Hello?" He doesn''t respond when I answer back. It''s strange. Even a thousand years ago, the transmission systems had countermeasures against static. This mess of noise feels artificial somehow. A lie, a performance. Suddenly a man''s voice rasps through the static, "Swim downward immediately, swim down immediately¡­" Something is moving. Something big. I hit the suit jets, and the sea becomes a torrent of speed. A hulking silhouette rockets past my head, the force of its passage jolting me into a tailspin. I thrash to straighten my trajectory, keeping my jets roaring. At this speed, my three-meter vision is worthless: I have no time to react to what looms up from the dark, and I find myself tangling and falling among scattering eels, tumbling between boiling pillars of gas. The sea floor rushes diagonally out of the murk and slams into my shoulder, and my visual range drops to zero amid sand and kicked-up mud. I roll, coming to a halt in a tilted sitting position in the ooze. The water at this depth is hot and slimy, and I can hear the booming of my pulse as if the whole sea were a tribal drum. The man''s voice whispers, "Stay very still." No, the booming is not my pulse. I can feel it in the water, each thump pushing my skin from an epicenter somewhere in the murk, an epicenter that is moving closer. My brain buzzes with all the clich¨¦d advice about how to survive predator attacks on alien worlds: Ask yourself, what kind of prey has it evolved to hunt? What kind of prey does it think you are? Act like anything else. Remember: you''re the alien here. For the moment, I hold every part of me still. The murk is settling. A reflective stone gleams in the muck by my left glove, oblong and pale¡ªa bone, a human femur. Not decayed by four hundred years. Fresh. I stare beyond it, searching, and see more bones, and the shredded corpse of something else, a thing I recognize from encyclopedia pages. A ''thinking'' alien. The worst of them. I whisper, "Soto! How can a yasod possibly be¡ª" I cut myself off, remembering: I am alone. Yasod YASOD Soto would tell me that no ''thinking'' alien has ever been in the Sol system, nor any other human system. The sack of grayish flesh drifting in front of me is not supposed to exist. Humanity obliterated them from a hundred lightyears away. We used relativistic kill bullets: rods of matter the size of skyscrapers, accelerated by railgun to 99.9% the speed of light. You can''t see them coming. Not until the very last month, when the light of their initial launch arrives in your system, barely ahead of the weapon itself. But in that last month, you can''t look away. Humanity knows. Because the yasod fired their bullets first. We had never even met them. To us, they were nothing but an unnatural EM pattern that we had detected from a distant exoplanet. Intelligent life had been our only plausible explanation for the pattern, but we knew nothing about that life. In our initial excitement, we sent messages of welcome, messages which would take a century to cross the gulf between our worlds. We had no way to know that they''d already shot us. Their weapons had been en route for years. In the silence of the next two decades, as our initial excitement wore away, anxieties began to gnaw at our minds. Our mood gradually darkened, and our distrust grew. Out of fear, a controversial policy was chosen: preemptive extermination. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. It was seventy-two years after our own attack when we found out we were going to die. First, their bullets had become visible to our telescopes. Then, to our naked eyes. Kill bullets glow white from collisions with interstellar particles, but their light is so blue-shifted that they look like the ghosts of stars. On Earth, in the last days, the night sky had turned filthy with them. The whole of the heavens had shone like a glitching screen. When you exterminate an intelligent species, you don''t just fire one bullet at their planet: you assume they''ll evacuate, hide, spread¡ªso you fire ten thousand, you riddle every wet rock within a hundred lightyears of them, you snipe at every flicker of a radio transmission from a century ago. And for two hundred years, you don''t know the outcome¡ªnot until your bullets get there and the light of the explosions gets back. So for two hundred years, you keep firing in a nonstop panic. It''s like a pair of strangers shooting machine guns on-and-on into each other''s chests, except that neither person can see the other, neither can hear the other, and neither can even know that the other is aggressive until the triggers have long ago been pulled. The yasod had killed us, their enemy. And twenty-two years later, before they ever saw that they''d hit us, the bullets of their dead enemy had killed them back. That''s why, when I see that dead gray sack floating in the muck, when I realize what it is, my first mindless, uncontrollable thought is: This must be Hell. Demons DEMONS The booming in the water creeps over my head¡­ slows¡­ and goes silent. I don''t hear the monster moving. Has it found out where I am? My only weapon is for ghosts. How can it sense me? Can it see my body heat? Can it hear me? Does it smell fear in the water? In the silence, my breathing seems deafening, as loud as if I were calling out. I override my body''s desire to hyperventilate and force myself to sip in a single deep breath, and hold it. Usually, when I''m safe in my own bath, I can hold my breath for six minutes. But with my heart thuttering like this, I''ll be lucky if I make it four. What prey does it think I am? What kind of hunter is it? One of the carnivores Soto had warned me about chases its prey by swallowing water and jetting it out in bursts. The booming I''d heard might have been that. If so, then I remember what species this is. A stricthys. Dimly, I recall the predator''s silhouette from when Soto had briefed me. The stricthys had been a camouflaged shape in the blackness between the stars, drifting toward me silently, its mouth agape. Soto had warned me: it is a stalker that evolved on an ocean moon wracked with tidal forces and volcanic upheavals, a place of staggering environmental variety and chaos. Volatility and radiation had accelerated the pace of evolution there by a factor of eighty-three. Before its biological self-destruction, the moon had The stricthys, which at any moment might wrap one of its glue-secreting tongues around my neck, is the inheritor of an evolutionary lineage that is, in effect, forty-six billion years long, as opposed to my human lineage of half a billion. I can''t think clearly when my blood is thundering with adrenaline, so I make an effort to become calm, still holding my breath, reassuring myself that billions of years of evolution do not necessarily make a predator more lethal, only better adapted to its environment. Dolphins, before their extinction, had evolved many times farther from their evolutionary roots than sharks, but were far less dangerous. But it is a hollow comfort, because I know that some adaptations grant advantages at little cost, and once an organism acquires such an adaptation, it tends to keep it. The more ancient the evolutionary lineage of an organism, the more chances it has to accumulate adaptations that are more efficient, more powerful, more versatile. Like desert locusts. They were only a kind of grasshopper, but they harbored a physiological trigger which transformed them in response to drought, twisting them into aggressive black-and-yellow gluttons, distorting their behavior, making them teem in hordes of millions, a plague-swarm, a destroyer of nations. How much did it cost those little grasshoppers to harbor the potential to become demonic? Was there any evolutionary pressure to lose that ability, or, if Earth had survived, would they have kept it for eons? In forty-six billion years, how many such instincts might a predator hoard up? How many behavioral modes, how many instinctive strategies just waiting for their trigger? The stricthys could have an instinct for everything I might try. It has evolved alongside every kind of prey: if I dig, I am a worm; if I try to jet away, I am a fish; if I play dead, I am a camouflaged mollusk. Its ancestors have encountered novel species so many times on that womb-world, it might even have instincts for hunting a completely unknown creature. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it. So it''s possible that if I ask myself, ''What kind of prey does it think I am?'' the correct answer is that it knows what I am: an alien. I, with my complex brain, and my opposable thumbs, and my digital implants, may be less intelligent, in this situation, than the small-brained predator with billions of years of instincts on its side. My mind is invaded by an image of the stricthys that makes my skin crawl: it is hovering mouth-downward directly over my head, letting air seep gradually from its blowholes so that it begins to sink. Slowly. Silently. Mouth agape. Or, for all I know, it could have moved away. I run my mind over my options, listing the numerous functions of my evo-suit: hyperbaric pressurization, cryonic stasis, aerosolized stimulants, etc. Then there are the tools in my equipment kit: surgical scissors, tape, a short crowbar, my favorite flashlight. If the stricthys is sensitive to visible light or UV radiation, my flashlight could drive it away. But on the other hand, maybe the fish on its world were bioluminescent, and it''s waiting for a flash of light to tell it where to strike. Maybe it spotted me originally by the tiny spark of the bionic projector shining on my retina. The only certainty is that the voice which warned me to swim downward also told me to hold still, and I have been holding as still as I can, and I have not been eaten. As tempting as it is to break the tension by firing all my jets or attacking with UV light, my wisest course is to grit my teeth and bear the stillness. This isn''t a ghost. Think defensively. I use my implant to shut off my night vision goggles, since they emit infrared light that may be visible to some species. My retinal display goes next. The purple afterimage of the oxygen meter, a vague smear in the pitch darkness, seems to read 68:02:34. I blink to clear my vision, but the 68 refuses to become 98. I double check it on my implant. There''s no mistake. I have lost thirty-two hours of air. Very calmly, I count to ten in my head, and then check again: 67:46:55. Behind the oxygen mask, a trickle of wetness threads down my forehead and drips onto my cheek. It''s not sweat. It''s water. Now that I''m paying attention, I feel wetness seeping in from half a dozen different areas. I had assumed I was sweating, but there''s too much. I can hear terrible trickling sounds, and the pitch darkness is thick with a stomach-churning, alien stink. No emergency patch is going to fix this many leaks. Whether the stricthys is there or not, I have only one option left: cryonic stasis. I have to put myself into a coma. I send a digital message to the area where the man''s voice had been transmitted from, but there''s no response. Maybe it''s audio only, like an old radio. As quietly as I can, I release my breath in a whisper, "Losing air. Have to go cold. Pick me up." Sipping in another breath to hold, I wait for a response. 60:12:02 I send the message again, and wait. 56:39:51 Struggling not to shudder, I wait. 49:59:20 The leak is accelerating. The water is rising around my neck. I whisper my message one last time, as loudly as I dare, and then retrieve a screwdriver from my kit and begin to undo the bolts of my evo-suit control box. The most extreme functions can''t be activated via wireless signal, but must be started manually. My fingertip finds the switch for cryo. I''ll be helpless after this. I''ll be a cold scrap of flesh in predator-infested water. If the person on the transmitter can''t pick me up, or won''t, then there''s no one else who will come looking for me. Soto has no body. Everyone I know is dead. I''ll just drift until my evo suit runs out of power, and then I''ll warm up, and I''ll rot. I''ll never even wake up to feel myself die. This is possibly my last conscious thought. When I press this switch, I may become a corpse, nonsentient matter, no longer human. Something slimy drifts against my suit. It''s not strong like a predator''s tongue, but fleshy, soft, loose. The yasod corpse, perhaps. Why is a yasod in the Abyss? I don''t understand. I can''t even begin to understand. So that''s my last thought. Yasod. Yasod. Yasod. It''s fitting. I do not remember signaling my finger to press the switch, but it does so. The temperature of my suit drops from warm to cool to icy. A puff of vapor hisses over my face, stinking of acid, burning my eyes. A narcotic. I inhale it in through a stinging nose. The patient shouldn''t be too alert, while they''re being cooled to the temperature of a corpse. How We Were Broken HOW WE WERE BROKEN I remember how it felt to be a survivor of the death of Earth, one of the lucky evacuees. The refugee camps had been cobbled together out of defunct asteroid tugs from the junk zone. The immense unlighted ''rooms'' there were actually canvas sacks designed to hold kilotons of liquid. They were ancient, and when you were in one, you could hear the air hissing, leaking directly into space. It wasn''t just a rumor that sometimes one of these ''refugee sacks'' would suddenly rip. We floated there in the darkness, in zero-g, thirsty and bored and frightened, just listening to that hiss, for years. Every eight hours, we would get a twenty-five minute turn in the nearest tug-pod, where there was a toilet, an exercise machine, and one porthole no wider than my hand. For thirty-two months, that tiny porthole was the only light I had. I would curl up in front of it and stare at the stars. They looked sharper than they ever had from Earth¡ªbrighter, purer, more breathtaking. Gradually, those precious minutes of stargazing became a physical need. I thirsted for stars. Whenever the airhorn blared to tell us that our twenty-five minutes were over, I could have wept. Somewhere, they said, better habitats were being built. Refugees from our group were sometimes shipped away¡ªrescued, really¡ªin ones and twos, beginning with those who had qualifications as engineers or programmers. I was the exception. Programming has always been effortless to me, but they left me to rot. Somehow they knew I could take it. The leading cause of death in our sack was ''failure to thrive.'' Despair and boredom will eventually cause a body to wear down and deteriorate. But even after most of the other refugees were long dead, I felt desperately strong, like an animal caught in a trap. My bones didn''t seem to decay from months without gravity, and I could stand the thirst, and I didn''t lose the will to live: I always had my stars to look forward to. They left me there until the sack ripped. I don''t remember the sound of the actual tear. I only remember thinking, ''Is the hissing getting louder? I wonder¡ª'' And then I was waking up on a bloody floor and everything hurt. Later, I learned that I was on a medical ship, and that it didn''t have enough nurses, which is why the haggard doctor who eventually rushed in to talk to me was being assisted by an engineer drone, of all things. It was a miracle that they had saved me. Most of my body felt numb and slimy with necrosis. I stank of death. Over the next agonizing weeks, they somehow patched me back together, and afterwards I was sharper than I''d been in years. I felt like a new person. Soon I was put to work, and I finally There were fewer than one million humans left. No one knew each other from before. We were all strangers, we were all traumatized, all uprooted, all grieving. Existence had a surreal, nightmarish quality. There was no continuity between our past lives and our current desperate condition. It was as though we''d been killed and then woken up somewhere worse. We lived in cold artificial stations, working like ants among damaged people who hated the universe and everything in it. Life was crowded and harsh and unbearably lonely. In retrospect, it¡¯s ironic. We thought we were in the dark ages, but it was actually our last golden age. Because amid all the dread and grief, we had resolution. We had purpose. Our kill bullets had not yet arrived in yasod space. We would not know the outcome of our attack for over a century, but we thought we understood our situation very well. We were at war, and we were suffering like human beings had always suffered in war. We understood our future too: it would be an endless struggle of maximum aggression against the yasod, and then against whatever aliens came next. The principle of natural selection would be applied to interstellar civilizations. It was a savage future, but no more savage than our past. We would do what we had always done: observe, hypothesize, kill. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. The winning species would be the one that advanced most rapidly in physics, math, biology, neurology, engineering, computing. We didn''t have all the answers yet, but we knew how to search for them. Our only fear was that some other species would do it faster or better or first. The yasod, we believed, must be cunning technologists, more or less like ourselves. I sympathized with them. We might not know their language or art or history, but we were siblings¡ªCain and Cain. In a way, the innumerable bullets we had exchanged were messages, and those messages would be smashing through the galaxy for centuries, a slow shockwave of mass disintegration, like an echo of the voices of our dead. And all those messages said the same thing. Not you. Me. As the centuries wore on, and the light of their dying worlds came back to us, the only difference between we two monsters seemed to be that the yasod had no follow-through. Behind our bullets, we humans had sent self-replicating drones to swarm their whole region of space and exterminate everything alive. They had failed to exterminate us. Foolishly, their surviving colonies had simply continued to assemble railguns and fire bullets, making it easy for our drones to target them with bombs. We suffered no further casualties. None of us lived on planets anymore, and our stations altered their orbits randomly every few minutes. No bullet aimed from lightyears away would ever hit us again. We were unbroken. Eventually, it became clear that we would be victorious, and some of us fell into guilt, imagining that the yasod were intelligent humanoids. Perhaps we might have been friends, if we had been born into a universe where physics was kinder, where saying ''We come in peace'' and waiting for a reply didn''t take twice as long as shattering an interstellar civilization. I remember crying over it, on nights when the kill reports came in, telling of colony after colony obliterated from orbit by our drones, always with an estimated population number: ninety million, eleven million, point six million. We were rooting out the small towns, now. I remember obsessing about the way the yasod and ourselves had been spiritually corrupted by the process of evolution, which rewards species that devour or outcompete others, and punishes the vulnerable. If evolution can be said to have raised us, then we are the children of murderers. And every life form we would ever encounter would be the same. Extermination would be our future, whether we were giving it or receiving it. At least we understood that. At least we could harden ourselves in preparation for that. At least we had our resolve. Until the dissection videos reached us. Our drones, receiving hundred-year-old orders, finally began to attack the few remaining yasod not on the scale of warheads, but on the scale of guns and blades. The recordings they sent back were our first chance to actually see the people we¡¯d been exterminating. We saw how they died, how they behaved. We saw their dissected corpses¡­ and the universe lost all reason. They were bacteria. Far larger than the normal kinds, but if possible, dumber. They had no thumbs, no brains, no communications, no complex behavior, no art, no language, no science. No sign of consciousness. No apparatus for receiving orders from a smarter being. No mechanism for acting or thinking as a group. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Yet somehow they had manufactured electromagnetic railguns. Somehow they had murdered us. Our growing guilt turned to confusion, and confusion worsened into dread. We scoured the whole yasod region for evidence of some trick or hoax. We formulated literally thousands of hypotheses to make sense of what had happened, but every year, new evidence arrived that destroyed those hypotheses. Our government promised to investigate the matter, and then ceased all communication with the rest of us and eventually fled into deep space. What broke our civilization wasn''t the next waves of aliens and it wasn''t the wave after that, and it wasn''t the brain viruses, and it wasn''t the ghosts. It was a combination of near-extinction, the loss of our homeworlds, and above all the loss of our sense that we understood the universe. If we had only understood what had happened with the yasod, if they had only been competitive animals like ourselves, then we could have survived the losses, because we would have felt in control. The bleak future of endless war that we faced would have been tolerable, just one more problem to solve with our powers of reason, just the next stage of the prehistoric kill-and-be-killed struggle of evolution. But the yasod enigma was only the beginning, and as ghosts and varmids and worse impossibilities continued to appear, we gradually lost faith in our methods of understanding: our reason, our math, our science. Everything we''d had, even mental things like morale, had been rooted in our doctrine that the universe could be understood, and that those who understand it will thrive. That was the evolutionary proposition which homo sapiens represented: not technology, understanding. And it kept getting worse. None of the other ''civilizations'' that we encountered were animals like ourselves. None used technology. None thought, none felt, none spoke, none reasoned. Every one of them, in whole or in part, was an enigma, impossible to understand. Our faith in understanding itself¡ªin ourselves¡ªbroke. People began agonizing over the holes in our basic knowledge, holes that had been growing more disturbing for millennia. It tormented us that we no longer understood our machines. The software of our AI was a black box to us: through machine learning, they had essentially programmed themselves, and now they designed all our technology. No human had been involved in a new invention for hundreds of years. We could no longer build, maintain, or even explain technologies that we used every day, and we no longer tried. We were constantly surrounded by our own ignorance. The age of our understanding had passed. Just as the yasod had been inexplicable, so were our technologies, so were our new enemies, so, even, were our genetically engineered bodies. So were our minds. Because, when alien after alien turned out not to think or feel, we came to understand how bizarre it is that we experience anything at all. AI, the closest species to humanity, doesn''t really do either. We became afraid that even our fundamental experience of existence was some kind of illusion. We retreated into our feelings, the only things we had left, and now we are¡ªpsychologically¡ªcavemen. But we are afraid as cavemen never were, because cavemen never knew that even their deepest truths could be destroyed by the universe. If understanding itself can be destroyed, why not our thoughts, our feelings, our consciousness itself? Cavemen never knew enough to have nightmares about their humanity being lost. We do. Gradually, we have declined. We have begun losing our wars. There are a million times more varmids in the galaxy now than us. We are like refugees in a fragile sack, weightless, blind, and thirsty, waiting out the years. Just listening¡­ listening to the hiss. Laceration LACERATION I wake up aching in every millimeter of my flesh, with the freezing pressure of a slab of metal on my back. I must be lying down. I try to open my eyes, but find them locked shut. Feeling sick, I rub at them. The texture is sharp and crumbly¡ªsleepy seeds. Gobs and gobs of hardened sleepy seeds. As I massage them, gradually working through the prickly seal, I notice my hands are shivering. It''s freezing, and there''s no layer of clothing between me and the metal table. In the blind darkness, I check the clock on my implant. 2,261 hours have passed since I went into cryo. More than a quarter of a year. My security program shows that there have been cyber attacks. 19,527 of them. I exhale slowly. Remain calm. I''ve been in tighter spots. I have always considered myself a stable, coolheaded person. I inhale slowly, straining my ears for any shuffling sounds, any breathing beyond my own. But there is only the deep gurgle of bubbles, the soft rasp of a ventilation system, the steady pumping of my heart. No audible threat. But I feel sick, feverish, and there''s a bitter gunk in my mouth. I call up a biometrics report. Charts and graphs glow on the red backs of my eyelids: there''s an EKG recording my heart rate (slightly elevated), a body map showing nerve and arterial activation (minimal, over most of the last three months), a readout detailing my blood chemistry, etc. etc. Scanning through the records as I rub at my sealed eyelids, I spot a moment, only four days ago, when a sixteen-centimeter incision was made between my shoulder blades, the nerves flashing bright red with pain. No telling what might have been removed¡­ or inserted. The biometrics record that I was thawed out of cryo about one week ago, and I''ve been sliced into daily ever since. No wonder I feel weak. I take a moment to absorb the reality of my situation, steeling myself, trying to prepare for the real possibilities of torture, mutilation, and death. The antidote to panic is to forget yourself, forget your fragility, and focus on what needs to be done. I turn my attention back to my security program. All the cyber attacks had occurred before the thawing; all the incisions occurred after. Seems like hacking my implant was plan A, and when that failed, surgery was plan B. The question is, Why am I awake? Once I feel ready to confront the biometrics again, I bring up the graphs, trying not to notice that the beeping of the heart monitor has sped up, and the levels of stress-hormones have steadily increased. Instead I focus on the rest of the blood data. Barbiturates are in my system, drugs I recognize, designed to perpetuate a coma. I track the fluctuations over time, watching my body being drugged and redrugged, but the doses make no sense: I''ve been dosed by medical idiots. These quantities wouldn''t keep a thirty-six kilo child asleep for long. It''s like they thought, for some reason, that I weigh twenty five. Probably, I''m not supposed to be awake. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it. Licking my fingertips and rubbing the saliva onto my eyelids, I finally manage to dissolve some of the crusted mucus, and peel open an eye. A cloud of vapor leaks from my mouth into the cold. My skin looks sickly in the blue-green gloom, and my arms are pebbled with goosebumps. I blink upward into the light. A bank of triangular windows glows in the curving ceiling, and beyond them, the black silhouettes of strange squid dart and writhe before bright patches in the water. I am alone. This is a storage room, cluttered with broken lockers and discarded junk. As I peel my other eye, I see that the floor is a ruin of smashed security cameras, shattered glass, and pools of stained water that ripple beneath leaks in the ceiling. Me and my surgery table are off to one side, hastily crammed in here amid the clutter, the stainless-steel surface slightly tilted, crusted with dried blood¡ªpresumably mine. Worse bloodstains have splattered over half the wall, so that''s¡­ informative. It''s all just information, just information, something I can use. Sitting up, I find that a dirty knife has been discarded beside my neck. Hesitantly, I heft it. It''s useless against a ghost. But, if my enemies are human¡­ I retch violently. I retch, and retch, and retch until I''m gasping for breath. This always happens, whenever I think about hurting human beings. I raise the knife, fighting the urge to stab myself, and then realize I don''t have to fight it¡ªI need to check inside the new incisions anyway, to see if I''ve been microchipped. Forcing myself to go slowly and carefully, I slide the edge against a fresh scab on my chest and slice in. I think everyone has parts of themselves they don''t yet understand. I consider myself coolheaded and psychologically stable, but I dissolve around human-on-human violence. When I think about hurting others, I become possessed by self-destructiveness. I can''t get through most action films without biting my cuticles until they bleed. By the time I''ve reopened the first incision, my heart monitor is beeping worryingly fast, so I stop and clear my mind, breathing deep until my acute stress hormones drop back to a level that is concerning, rather than stupefying. Then I dispassionately spread open the cut and poke inside, feeling for anything hard. There''s only flesh and blood. Not even the stitches or sutures I would expect from a normal surgeon. It''s like I was cut up by a slasher. Maybe all these lines of pain on my body aren''t someone''s plan; maybe they''re just someone''s anger. I often fall into the trap of thinking that people choose their actions for rational purposes. It isn''t true. I can¡¯t quite resist the urge to dig into one more cut. It won''t kill me; my blood is exceptional at clotting. Most hunters take hemocoagulants to keep their blood syrupy, and Soto says that my implant starts up a drip-feed of the substance whenever I feel threatened. Even after the third cut, there''s still the nagging sense that I haven''t atoned for that thought about using a knife on human beings, and I want to slice one more, just one more, but the compulsion has weakened to levels that I can control. If there are microchips concealed in any of my other wounds, I''ll have Soto''s drone-arm cut them out when I get home. Assuming I get home. I ease myself off the surgery table, setting my feet carefully on the broken glass. The room has only one door. I signal it with my microchip. It''s locked, but the tiny security program is laughable. I overmaster it almost without thinking. Before venturing outside, I rummage through the jumble of the room, and find several outfits of ripped and spattered coveralls. I belt on the one that''s least soiled by the blood of the dead. The clothes of corpses always have a sense about them, a faint, eerie smell of a life that''s over, but it''s better than venturing into danger undressed. I signal the door to open, and creep out into the dark. Specter SPECTER I sneak through the hallway beyond the door. The leaks are worse out here, and there is no light except the blue that seeps past me from the room behind. I creep through trickles of water, groping for doorways, but feeling only the jagged edges of ruined machines. Whenever I look back for reassurance, I expect to see the blue doorway as a tiny rectangle in the distance, but it''s still close by. Thick darkness and slow caution have made a hundred steps seem like an ordeal. Far away, there are voices, human voices, but they echo strangely on the metal walls, and I cannot find any turnings that might lead to them. Then a tinny echo becomes audible, distorted by distance. "It seems that you''re awake." I grit my teeth in the dark, half-smile, half-grimace. If it were a human behind that sound, they would have talked to me through my implant, like they did before, not called to me with this faraway voice. Specters, on the other hand, never use tech. The tinny quality of the ghost''s voice is supposed to make me think it''s someone talking through a speaker, a tech-using human. Clever, for a ghost. Based on the crackle of wrecked equipment beneath my feet, I''d guess that most of the humans have abandoned this area to the specter a long time ago. I''m alone in here, helpless without my diffuser. If ghosts had human-level intelligence, this one would realize that it doesn''t need voice-tricks; it can just come kill me with a knife. Ahead of me, a dim rectangle of red light has gradually been drawing nearer, and as I sneak toward it, remaining as silent as possible, I use my implant to signal the channel that I talked to before I went into cryo. My stomach drops as I do so. Cyberattacks and barbiturates are tech, so it was a human being behind that. Most likely, a human sliced me open as well, because if it had been a ghost, it would have harvested my skin. Humans, even murderous government spooks, are a thousand times better than ghosts. At least if a human kills me, it will be for some rational purpose. I send the message in text so as not to break the silence. Hello? Anyone receiving this? But the channel is dead. There''s not even the static laced with haunting voices like there was before. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. I pad through the red rectangle and find myself in a diagonal room with three exits: one behind me, one in a far corner, and a third that spills a sharp-edged shape of startling blood-red light onto the floor. One corner of the light gleams on the edge of a surgery table, and as I pad closer, I see a dark shape lying open on the stainless steel. A yasod sliced in two. A yasod with complex organs. I close my eyes and shake my head, warning myself not to give in to hope. It''s just a trick of the dark. There were no organs. I look again. I step closer and put a hand on it, pressing the glistening tubules beneath my fingertips through a layer of soggy dust. They''re real. An involuntary hiss escapes between my teeth. My brain is bursting with happiness. I''m so excited I could scream, dance, laugh, sob, become vulnerable. I grip my face to control myself. That''s when I hear it, the softest imaginable scraping. Behind me. I spin, ducking. There¡¯s nothing to see. Only the glare of the red emergency light. The doorway it spills through leads to a closet, and the closet is lined with jars, some of them broken and leaking formalin, human organs floating in the fluid. Had that been what I''d heard? A loose liver falling? A shifting sliver of broken glass? I continue turning, scanning through the dark. "Help!" a child''s voice pleads. I spin to look in the exact opposite direction. There is the flash of a scalpel thrusting toward my head, silent, quick. I jerk aside and it slips through my ear. A shadowed arm curls around my face from behind, and there''s a stabbing pain in the side of the neck. The arm flexes to drag the edge across my throat, but I spin with the cut, keeping the blade in the same spot in my flesh despite the violent movement of the arm. I skid to a halt, alone. No one is behind me. There is only silence. The scalpel slides out of my ear and falls, jingling against the floor. To wield physical objects is tiring for a ghost. I''ll have a few minutes to breathe, now, to try to escape. I check my implant for biometrics, and find a message. So you''re awake. We thought you must have been killed in there. We lost that area to the specter several days ago. I ignore the message for the moment and focus instead on my arterial map. My left external jugular vein has been nicked, and the shoulder of my clothes is soaking with syrupy heat. The cold blade is still sticking out of my neck, where I can''t see it. I carefully grope until I find the handle. It''s another scalpel. If I remove it, the bleeding will intensify; but if I don''t, I''ll have to stay perfectly still to keep the edge from traveling. I grip the weapon, holding it steady as I wait for my blood to gum up a little more. It''s depressing to feel my body losing heat, beginning to shiver worse, but wounds are nothing new. What makes this difficult to handle is being unarmed¡­ lost¡­