Ghosts of Earth, Chapter 2

Sunsets in Cotanique were like bathing in orange juice. From university hill, and the scrubby red mountains draped as they were with the fraying edge of the city, the whole bay and spar were visible. The spar itself was enrobed by the red sun, a thin line in the far distance piercing through. Wreathing this torch were pearls, and peaches, and dripping pomegranates, and layers and shades of cloud growing outwards from the setting sun like hungry roots. Shafts of crepuscular brilliance drifted hazily across the town, lighting this window, or that tent, into a beacon almost matching the sun in inner fire. Towering cumulonimbus cast shadows back into the face of the city, and as the line of night approached, wind picked up. 

Lana didn’t take the rail home, not with that awkward metal cylinder sticking out of her bag. She fiddled with a long-dead cigarette absentmindedly, choosing to walk down the steep suburban path this evening, lined in blooming magnolias, and with a good view of the port. It was a pity, and a treasure, to watch the sunset. The clouds were poisonous of course. The chemical sunset of startlingly vibrant reds and pinks a reminder of the wastes beyond the mountains. When the monsoon came in the spring people turned over their catchments and stayed indoors. After monsoon though, now that was a sunset… with the long and sloping fractal lines of retreating rain clouds illuminated, and the whole city oil slick and shining like an opal. 

Soon enough she dropped into the thick of it. The night wind catching her at the edge of a final climb down alternating rope stairs and concrete switchbacks. She had come to an intricately knotted weave of canvas tents and alleys, strung throughout one of the palace ruins near the port. At the top of the climb, the last stray rays of orange light brushed her face. At the bottom, deep amongst the webbing, only the barest faint glow of the evening soaked through layers of delicately embroidered tents.

Small electric lamps were hung along the alleys, and glowed with soft amber light. After a turn or two Lana had made her way to a partially standing tower of white marble at the back of the courtyard. Like the piles of marble strewn throughout the ruins, the tower was half sinking and dotted with moss and air plants and pitcher plant vines. Many of the tent structures were anchored to it, so that it gave the impression of being caught in a spider’s web. Unlike the rest of the ruins on this side of town though, this little tower had smoke pouring from a makeshift chimney, and light spilling from the slats of a slapdash window and door. They had been lovingly hewn out of the stone and repaired over the years with wood and knotted rope. 

Lana pushed open the door and stepped in. She kicked her sandals off and tried to move silently, not wanting to alert her grandmother, Beyo. The long canister was still almost sticking out of her backpack, and she didn’t want to be doted on before she got rid of it. She could hear her, working on something in the kitchen, pounding away at something that smelled spicy and warm. 

The stairs were uneven, and original, winding around the interior of the tower as Lana climbed her way to the workshop. The steps were deeply worn in places, smooth dips in the cool marble. When Lana’s feet fit into the grooves it felt as if she had stepped here not once just now, but a thousand-thousand times. In her own life surely, now it was her brother’s space, but before it was her parent’s. And before that… generations, people that fought for their lives against the Spiders, as her family did, people before they even set foot in the bay, people unfamiliar and familiar in kind. Not a scrap of writing left behind, nothing but art and the scant stationary buildings not touched by the bombings of the early contact. Nothing left behind but her, and the stories. 

Lana made it to the landing, halfheartedly knocked, and, too quickly for the knock to have been of any use, shoved the door open and shut quickly, slipping inside.. 

“Alright you prick you owe me,” she interrupted the conversation within, “I had to walk from university hill down tonight to avoid the crowds with this pipe on my back. Worried about blowing up any second now and taking half of those Spiderbabies with me.”

“Nice to see you too,” Harkness was soldering something at a particularly disordered work desk, fumes lazily rising past him as he answered Lana without looking up. The heat of the day was still stuck in this attic, the open window and several fans weren’t quite enough and something sizzled slightly as a drop of his sweat hit the soldering iron. The cluttered room smelled of weed and burning flux. It was simultaneously stale and pungently ozonic. She was assaulted too by music, of a clattery droning kind, hovering raucously on a single note until the vibrations shook themselves apart.

“You really should have knocked beforehand though I am just this close to finishing this…” 

“But I did knock.” Lana had slung off the backpack and was lifting out the container of living material. 

“Sure, sure.” He set the soldering iron down, the part he was working on still held in a field of small armatures, some holding connected wires, other almost microscopic elements of the circuitry. “You know it’s not that dangerous I knew you’d mana–”

He was still halfway through flicking off switches when Lana interjected with a “head’s up!” and threw the container across the room. 

He fumbled frantically, “Oh but it is that–” and finally caught the container, “dangerous though. Shit, Lana! The field in there is from a battery you might have jostled a connection.” 

“I knew you’d manage. And blowing up would be the least of my worries if we lost this. Professor Amandou would be just so disappointed in me if his handiwork went to waste.” 

Lana had already sat down into the ragged couch by the door, arms crossed. “Hey Onhks, didn’t see you there, you too Sal. Smelled you though, what is it this week?”

Onhkatell and Salverous were smoking out of a small clay pipe, sitting at the other end of the couch and controlling a transmitter that was playing the wavering music. Onhks kept on fiddling with the controls, apparently affecting the music in some minute way Lana couldn’t identify, and Sal looked up nodding at her, “Grew it myself, baby! Back at the farm share. Mum helped gather the seeds and we’ve been living high since the first harvest.” He broke off into giggles and looked back at the transmitter.

“Oh if you ‘baby’ me one more time,” Lana was reaching for the pipe and swatting Sal’s hand away. Onhks’, still tuning the transceiver, quoted some legal jargon sarcastically in Sal’s defense, and handed Lana the lighter remarking on her “extra-legal confiscation” playfully. 

Harkness grumbled to himself. He brought the living material over to another table, into which was built a roughshod facsimile of the nano-generator from the university. It seemed tacked together from the same parts but many of them older, customized, or of different materials: so that one could see all the seams and rivets. It seemed impossible for such an imperfect cell to hold the writhing immensity of living material inside. The fluid within pulsed with opaline light. 

He ran through his mental checklist, interacting with a slew of tactile buttons and switches attached to the table. Lana could feel herself mouthing the checklist along with Harkness under her breath. After a moment of preparation, he took a hammer to the end cap of the transport tube. Immediately immersing the inner section of the tube into the electromagnetic field of the nano-generator. The living material inside wriggled and reacted to the movement. 

Slowly, the new living material from the university traveled through the field, individual drops hanging like illuminated motes of dust as they incorporated into the main mass. It was like watching singular puffs of dandelion seed travel backwards in time to their flower. Like those first few moments after spilling a drink as the droplets bounce along in the air as if in slow motion. He and Lana both stayed still and quiet while the material traversed from one field to another. The crash of a cymbal gave them a start, and they nervously laughed at each other as the last grains of trapped potential slid down the well and into the nano-generator. 

Lana handed the pipe over to Harkness, breathing a sigh of relief, “are you getting close? How much more do you think we’ll need?” 

Harkness shrugged as he inhaled, “Honestly? More. More is always better. There’s enough in here for who knows what, but I’ll bet we’ll need more for what we’ve planned.” He gestured vaguely at the ceiling, passing the bowl back to Sal before Onhks intercepted it. 

“Think you can spare enough for a small favor?”

“Oh no, what is it this time?” Harkness chortled, Sal looked up from the transmitter and joined in his own stoned way. Onhks seemed to lose a bit of his humor. 

“She tried to touch me, Harks.” 

“What’s next, moving in with her?” a joke to which Sal immediately began wheezing uncontrollably. 

“No, ugh, you know what I mean, the spider tried to share an overlay with me. She wanted to show me what she was wearing, in abstraction.”  

“That is not digging you out of this one.” 

“No way it isn’t!” Sal crashed back into the couch, laughter turning into smokey coughs. 

Lana blushed, “I just need something that can spoof the Thread on contact, share data, even if it’s faked. This thing,” she pulled a tiny sliver ring off of her finger, “let me say her stupid name, but the Spider tried to,” she had better not say ‘grab my hand’, “local connect.”

Harkness reached over to grab the ring. It was dense, intricately detailed on the small scale, and smooth to the naked eye. “The more complicated we make this thing the more like the Thread it is, L. Are you sure you want something like that?” 

“I’m not about to lose my postdoc because some uppity spider has poor fashion sense and big mouth,” and damn it, she kind of did want to see Bay’s dress, even if it was only an abstraction in the overlay. “It’s not like I’m implanting the damn thing.” 

Onhkatell spoke up in a shockingly deep and sober sounding voice, despite his halo of weed smoke, “that would baaaaad news. Palladium is just for us. Leaking that over the Fine Webwork would be a disaster.”  

Sal nodded solemnly.

“Honestly I don’t give a shit about your podcast.” She bowed her head a little to Harkness, and could tell it was not the time to be needling him, “Okay I do care about the workshop, and the council, and you. Think you could give me something a bit better before we head into the mountains tomorrow?” 

“The radio station is just a part of the struggle,” Harkness tapped the side of his head, taking the ring back over to the work desk, “and each grain we take from our living material for personal use makes it harder to build a way out, for everyone.” 

Lana, having literally understood the same thing since she was at least 4 years old, was about to butt in, but Harkness continued, “but I’ll see what I can do. I can’t get too much more complicated without actually copying someone’s Thread implant.”

Sal got right back to laughing, and miming rude cutting gestures, while Onhks fiddled with the transmitter again, looking a bit impatient. In the end it was Sal that picked up on it first, and asked Harkness if they were going to broadcast soon. Lana took that as her queue to leave the attic. 

Down the stairs again, she went to the kitchen to help Grandma Beyo.  She was hunched above a molcajete, chili and ginger smells filling the air and pots bubbling. After startling as Lana interrupted her with a hug, they caught up together about the market, where food could be gotten today, and Grandma Beyo Xochitl’s usual gossip. 

Things weren’t going well. Another encroachment from the Wastes, killing a Ranger. More supplies being sent to the fronts. Things ever tighter at home, with the blossoming summer markets still a month away. Community gardens tried to keep up, but too few were large enough to provide the staples, which were mostly grown off-planet. Grandma Xochitl helped organize many of the farms and gardens for the unthreaded in the lower city, and was always busy cooking, or talking, or watching soaps through the Thread. 

Cotanique, the city, the bay, the sloping headland, were all protected by a ring of mountains. Beyond their glacier capped peaks lay the rest of the world, in pieces at least: the Wastes. It covered most of the world at this point, the lighted networks of the Web cites frighteningly few and far between. Only those scant sheltered landmasses remained untouched, and Cotanique. It was a desperate struggle to beat back the annihilation beyond. 

The Xochitls were a military family, right back to Grandma’s Great Grandparents. Even now Lana had an Uncle who was a full Ranger and knew several more extended family on the front. Those ancestral relations had been young enough to struggle first against the Webwork, some of the few survivors of the slaughter. Nique nationalists and freedom fighters, the last guard of the great empire of the mountains; but at that late stage of invasion more often than not just lucky children that survived the bombings or the plagues.

For them, the end times had come and gone. And the Xochitls, with the rest of Nique refugees and the Webwork colonizers, saw their land chipped away again from the east. The enemy that had taken your home was one thing, but an enemy that wouldn’t–couldn’t–stop taking? They all fought against the Wastes. There were desperate terraforming efforts and clean ups in some spots, simply struggling to maintain ground in others. It was rough ground: dense alpine woods, glacial lakes, the high desert. These days many of those expansion efforts were slowing down, and the Rangers that watched over the reclaimed land were frequent prey. Efforts were always redoubling, and in the city they were always tightening their belts. Especially those without the Thread. 

When the Webwork paused their active genocide to band together and fight the Wastes, they nevertheless kept at it softly in the background with the Thread. It was less that not having it made you ineligible for certain jobs or roles in society, and more that the Fine Webwork barely considered unthreaded to be human. It was mandatory these days, after a slow campaign of incentives dwindling from the colonial era. To the Webwork it was seen as a gift, the great and noble offer to uplift oneself from a primitive way of life: given to unconsenting children at birth as they babbled into the sea of data. Lana thought it must be something like erasure: a total lack of privacy and self. 

She had been given the choice by her parents. Lana’s mother had removed her own when she was young. Even though her Grandma had the Thread she mostly used it out of habit to keep up her shows, or the news. It wasn’t something she had chosen. Lana’s brother was similarly unthreaded, and inherited the workshop: already using it more than a few times to help a proud Nique or disaffected Spider out of their Thread too, and into the smaller economies of underground community in Cotanique. Ever since Harkness had found the Satellite and started his radio station, more had come, and he had begun talking about the revolution again. It was true that despite the campaign of forced Thread implantation, the numbers of unthreaded only grew. But it was also true that as long as the Spiders strode freely about, the unthreaded could only exist on the periphery. Destitution leading to desperation, and the poisoned gifts of the Webwork spat back in their faces. 

Like a great worm eating itself and shitting itself back out again, she thought. 

Lana didn’t know if the revolution was here again or not, but she knew it would return one day. She hoped to see it. It was as her father had said. They spent hours together in the workshop, organizing, tinkering. Lana would write or doodle and her father would talk and build tchotchkes with hidden stores of suspended living material. They were always toys to Lana, but of course long after her parents were gone she learned that even those trinkets were part of the work. Work that was too embodied in the stories her parents told. When she was a kid, they might have been about how actions had consequences. Later it seemed they had spoken about how even little things could cause great change. Finishing her degrees, Lana thought about how their words seemed to reflect on how passions could change throughout life, faltering and growing again. It probably did mean all these things at different times, but as she crystallized into adulthood she imagined less about her parents. She knew the words for what they were: a call to rebellion. 

A single spark: a wildfire. 

A moment later, after Lana had had her fill of the friends and cousins, and the war against the Wastes, she was chopping away at seaside cactus, carefully pushing out its barbed spines and already nursing a poked thumb. Her grandmother’s eyes glazed over as she tapped into her Thread abstraction to stream a telenovela, and Lana felt like crying after the stress of the day. She refrained, bottling it up as she focused her worries into the sharp and salty flesh of the cactus, and the steam billowing about the kitchen. 

Business, she scoffed. Fucking business. 

***

Bay was surprised that Professor Amandou–Mikilay, she corrected, was such a nervous little man. Meeting him had been like meeting a celebrity, and Bay had felt gushing and embarrassed at first. He spoke in perfect tongue, but kept his Thread well under wraps. Much more suitable for Cotanique than the clicking and droning that still accompanied Bay’s words. Lana too, who had rendered her name perfectly coherently, didn’t use her Thread to communicate at all. It was attractive in a way, to mean more than one thing all the time, and choose to say only as much as one wants. Still it was nice to know what someone was feeling when speaking. In Aba, hardly anyone used spoken language. It was all the fast data exchange of the Thread, spurts of audible data, and manipulations of color and smell. Feeling the public abstraction overlay on a busy day through the myriad indentations people made in the mutual fabric of the Web.

When a child is gestated in the vats, their Thread is inserted immediately. The Thread is a living material, and grows along with them. Bay recalled the feeling of a baby nearby in the web, an explosive field of unbridled emotion and thought. Children were fountains of feeling, whirlpools of experience. It wasn’t until they were around 2 that one of the teachers or caregivers helped them strengthen a sense of self. Until then they splayed out, bouncing across the Web, seeing and feeling. As they aged, and Bay wasn’t so far from this process as to have forgotten the changes, their memories and impressions grew coherent. They learned to use the Thread to upload and download themselves throughout the Webwork. Borrowing the impressions of others when needed. 

These memories forever imprinted on the Web, and connected every Webwork citizen in the fabric of emergent consciousness.  It was a great hyperdimensional matrix, spread out throughout the Earth and in space nearby. A living, breathing algorithm of thought made up every small Thread reverberating larger and larger until all together they made up the whole of true humanity. The Fine Webwork. 

Bay was channeling now the mental faculties of an old Professor, several years gone but still fresh in the Thread to her. A mentor from the Aba City College Human Sciences department, who helped her with her doctorate. They had always been exacting, painfully pedantic and overcautious. Bay felt the gentle comfort of their obsessive focus on the details flow through her body, connected throughout by the minute spools of living material within her. They were going over her room. Pacing back and forth and pressing the photomap from Aba into the slightly differently shaped Cotanique dorm. It was like wearing pants that didn’t fit well, the band too tight about their waist when they sat.

She paused before the desk and started grumbling. It was carved with an abstract Nique artwork that Bay loved. A sprawling vine motif, with abstract fruit like the pods of a peaflower, and exploding floral shapes spiraling across the top. The original carving was found on a grain house from north of the city, one of the storehouses the ancient Nique used to communally store and distribute food. They didn’t have a written language, so the rich designs of abundance seemed to signify where one might go to eat. Seeing that art, on archival film at the University, was one of the first moments where she knew that the Ancient Nique would consume her. Their sense of community and connection to nature seemed palpable through the ages. As an undergrad she had flailed around with her studies, vacillating between wishing she had joined a vocational school instead, and being fascinated with constellations and stars. In the end it was the study of the Nique that grabbed her, though she still looked up at the stars any chance she got. 

Bay had carved the desk with the design herself. She had borrowed the skills of a lover at the time, a woman captivated by woodworking and trinkets. Channeling the muscle memory through her Thread she had sat for hours in front the original desk, chipping away at the imitation hardwood. The small jagged edges and still unsmoothed portions of the artwork were Bay’s favorite. They reminded her of the handmade nature of the desk, the real work that had gone into it rather than just thinking the material into shape. It might have been the only time that Bay had actually understood the ex-lover, whiling away days building calluses and ignoring messages. 

It was the little human mistakes that seemed lost in the intricate design on the desk in Cotanique. Like the living material wasn’t fully filling out. Her, or her mentor’s, displeasure bubbled up within her. It really should be etching in even the smallest details, the geometrically perfect scan of her room dorm in Aba only needing small adjustments to fit. 

She cast off the demeanor and stepped out of the room. There had to be a maintenance room around here somewhere. After finding the graffitied door, stopping a moment to decipher the layers of mural work, tags, and coverups, she was disappointed again that the door to the generator was locked with some passcode or gesture. She resolved to file a complaint to someone and took out into the warm night to find something to eat.

There was a deluge of light pollution from the city, a few stars vaguely visible, and the great engines of a vast ship nearby lighting up nearly half the sky as it sped out of near earth orbit. She faintly recognized the Pleiades, low on the horizon. Then was distracted by a cascade of luminous dots marching across the sky on their own little ellipses, each a satellite or ship going about its duty. Bay called up the names of a few as they wandered across the quad. It was nice to know that things were ticking away above it all. The enormous cities of the Webwork, reclaiming earth with the unfathomable might of logistics behind them. From the colony spindles hanging in the void to the mining installations on the moon. And it was all a grand celebration of success; freely open to explore physically, and through the transformational power of thought.

A cool breeze tried to rise from the sea. By the time it wriggled though the dense maze of the old city, the wind picked up some of the memory of the heat of the day. The result was a night wind that smelled like piss and decaying things. Muggy and ineffective; and barely any noise in the overlay. Bay lingered in the pools of light left by yellowing lamps along the edge of the quad. 

It was different here. It felt achingly lonely.

The cafeteria was more normally appointed. And quiet at this time of night. The familiar starches of rice, roots pounded or mashed, and noodles lay out at one end of the hall. The same choices of tofu, well charred cubes of meat, and strips of marinated mushroom and seitan. Where Bay got lost again was the condiments and sides. It seemed awash in choices she had never seen before, laying unassumingly aside the usual beans and greens. Colorful oils and pickled vegetables and fruit stood out to her, but after a moment she was drawn to a plate of pale green cactus. Cactus, she thought, was truly a little weird, and she piled a corner of her rice bowl with the grilled slices. She wondered if it were Nique tradition, hardy people eating hardy seaside weeds. 

Whatever its story, it tasted wonderful, and not at all prickly. Bay sat down on a long and empty communal table by a window. She was rolling the cactus around the bowl and combining it methodically with different parts of her meal, getting a feel for the vibrantly tangy taste. It was enough to have her thinking of testing any pots they found for the compositional elements of cactus, seeing if she could objectively verify the connection. What a fun media tour that paper would make, “Cactile Cookery of the indigenous Nique”. She could do interviews and include a few recipes. But wait was Cactile a word? Would it be Cactus-like? Bay sincerely hoped there was a more elegant way to describe the essential cactus-ness of a thing. 

It was a bad habit, that. The more she slipped into concatenating and hyphenating words the more she would do it. Until the whole paper was one stream of consciousness milieu only mildly graspable by an adept user of their Thread. It was moments like these, lost in thought; compounding one item on another, that Bay appreciated the archaic academic rigor of just writing something down. Locking it in. Opposed to the ever shifting soup of all the feelings and momentary thoughts of the Webwork. She thought she could grow to like the quiet attitudes of the other archaeology post-doc and the professor. 

She felt someone behind her. The hair prickling on the back of her neck reacting faster even than the awareness of the Thread. It pulled immediately back into her body and she started and turned. 

“Oh, sorry. Didn’t mean to be a bother I just couldn’t help but notice…” A wiry, feminine man in an oversized t-shirt held up his tray defensively and looked at her. He had big, watery eyes that looked ever so slightly too pale. It seemed that he had made some sort of decision, and he stepped around the table and sat across from her. 

“Do you mind if I sit here? The name’s Callum.” It was instantly evident that he was a Webwork citizen to the fullest. His full name belted out of him accompanied by a rapid series of clicks as the data flowed between them, washing the air with sea spray. Bay could feel the cool pull of the ocean’s abyss, and the fresh mist on her face. She was taken aback to be interrupted, but after the cold welcome from Lana, and Professor Amandou’s nervously quiet aura, it was tremendously comforting to have an honest conversation. 

“I’m Bay,” and they shook hands. The cool blues of Callum’s name mixed hazily with the warm afternoon that poured from Bay. 

“Forgive me, it’s just,” he bit his tongue, “they do all the classes here audibly, and I’ve had my nose buried in books for the whole day. It’s so different than back home. Like everything means too much and too little at the same time.” 

“It’s hard to parse.” Bay nodded, “I’ve only just got here.” She reveled in the utter smoothness of communication, her thoughts and emotions dancing about their periphery. She could feel his mind near hers in the fabric of the Web. No wonder he had been timid at first, but known to sit down, she must have been breathing out a flood of stress cross-stitched with layers of excitement. 

“I hope you don’t mind if we stay somewhat in the realm of speech. I have an oral exam next week and I’m afraid I’ll slip back into colors or something if I don’t keep at it.” He smiled a little, but it didn’t matter, his intention to make a polite joke had lingered since the start of the sentence, and Bay had already sent the feeling of laughter out into the web with a few grinding metallic data emissions. 

“Not at all, I suppose I have to get used to it.” But the emotions had poured from her before the words, and she grew impatient waiting on that clumsy mastication to catch up. 

She and Callum talked for an hour. Lighting up the dimmed cafeteria and buzzing and chirping like mechanical squirrels. It was good to be around those that weren’t afraid to use their Thread to communicate everything, every emotion and thought. As it turned out he was from an agricultural spindle around the moon, a physicist in training and about to get his doctorate in spatial analysis. His thesis was almost inexpressible to Bay. He tried a few different ways to convey it, and the best she could describe after was a warmly pleasant feeling like folding warm laundry, hot out of the dryer. Which in itself was a memory that Bay was skeptical she had actually experienced firsthand, or just felt from someone else she had been or known. 

He seemed equally stumped when she spoke of her own degree. Bay studied the only surviving language of the Nique, their art. It was abstract and dense with symbols. She danced images into the overlay, excited to show off the delicate cleaning and scanning procedures she expected over the summer, and the possibilities of what they might find. Callum looked incredulous, and admitted that he had only chosen Cotanique because it was the first place that had taken him. 

When the question turned on her, Bay was surprisingly unprepared. At first, her body answered for her, Thread unconsciously sharing the thoughts and feelings about her carven desk. The frustration over it not being exactly as messy as she had hoped. How she worked at it herself for days. That had been an impetus for delving into their art, but for Cotanique? 

“Honestly it’s stupid.” 

“No reason could be, really, or they all are.” Callum’s emanations were still vibrant and playful. Enjoying the euphoria of curiosity that bounced between them. 

“The spar attack, in Cotanique, when they were finishing up the elevator..” Bay was hoping she wouldn’t make him clam up with the sudden mention of a heavy topic, but his immediately caring reaction was somehow more irritating. 

“I’m so sorry, did you lose someone?” 

Of course that’s what he would say. It would be the reasonable way for this origin to go. Bay felt a little embarrassed. 

“No… no, nothing bad. I just, I mean I didn’t really know that this place existed. It’s not like they teach us about it in school, no one talked about it much before, just another city. They pulled me out of class early one day. I was maybe 8?”

“Wow, yeah… I was a bit younger, four I think. But, you know, I didn’t hear about it until years later.” 

“Well I wanted to know about it after all that, and the adults always got angry when I brought it up.” Bay made a sighing sound, emanating nostalgia into their abstraction with a wash of warmth, “I found out about the physical libraries and learned to read. There wasn’t much there either. But I read the fictionalizations, and compilations of oral histories, and loved the jewelry at museums. It was the first time I had heard about the Nique.” 

She trailed off. The pour of emotions, colors, and thoughts calmed, tangling and untangling in a sparkling data mist around them. They mused together about the strange unlikely things that change each life. With Callum likening her story to the time he had a particularly bad vegetable stir fry, and resolved to leave farming for good. She didn’t feel entirely satisfied by that, but it was late, and it was something to have talked with another ardent citizen. 

She wished she had gotten to know Lana with the same openness, feeling out of her depth in the presence of such a sullen woman. It was bad enough that Professor Amandou was so stodgy, but Bay had studied under “text and tongue” professors before. She at least wanted to make one good friend out of her fellow researchers. Lana’s quietude was equal parts elegant, professional, and frustrating. Especially since she was a Nique descendant.

Despite the hollowness, she was buzzing with data from the conversation, and from the stress of travel and settling in. When Bay left the cafeteria she was a brilliant little bird, flitting from light to light across the quad. 

 ***

In the heart of asteroid Le Calliou, the small meeting room seemed unerringly claustrophobic. Down to the minute details: the almost tinfoil chairs that despite their lightness seemed constructed to be uncomfortable, the dustless rounded corners of the room, the equally spotless brushed aluminum table, Hecate was looking anywhere but the eyes of her opposites. In one chair, backed into the corner and watching both of them, Authority Gower sat, elbows on knees eagerly. The Wildcat, a perfectly boring looking woman with drab features, blandly middle age with an attractive and fiercely aquiline nose, stood across from Hecate in a dull grey slick suit. She tapped her fingers, uncrossed her arms, and turned first to Gower. 

“Could you give us a moment in private please, Sibling Gower?” 

Gower sat up straight, “It’s my role as Port Authority to represent my workers in any discussions regarding the Union.” 

“Acting Port Authority Gower we’re not entering any contract discussions at this stage, your role as arbitrator,” she gave such weight to the corrections that Hecate began to see a little of the frigid viciousness she had heard about in Wildcats, “is unnecessary in this discussion.” 

“But–I… don’t. I have a right to be involved in the welfare of my Sibling Workers.” Despite his protestations he was already standing up. 

She drove in the point, like a huntress singling out prey, “Simply eavesdropping isn’t within your purview, Sibling Gower. The Union regards the contents of this communique classified information, we’re here to speak with OCO Hecate for the time being.” 

By this time Authority Gower had his hands up, and was backing out of the room. Hecate wondered about the talking-to they were clearly going to receive, but maybe it was a mercy that Gower wasn’t going to be there to poke at them along the way. Gower stammered for a moment more, but the door closed with a soft hiss and click. 

It was just Hecate and the Wildcat. 

“It was a teensy bit of a lie, that one,” the Wildcat had pulled a chair up, and leaned onto the table, procuring a small silver tube from a pocket on her sleeve. 

Hecate wished they had gotten a caf, just to have something to have brought with them to fidget with. They should have at least asked Tam for another water. The table was empty apart from the silver tube, barely the size a pencil, sitting in the center. They couldn’t clear their throat enough to talk, and instead made a croaking sound which was supposed to resemble the word, “what?”.

“I am actually here about a contract. OCO Hecate my name is Her Eyes Bright and Gleaming, you may call me Sibling Bright, I’m an operative within Wildcat, and we have something to talk about.” 

“I swear I tried to save him, I swear I did, I wouldn’t want anyone to go through what he did, what we did, just because I’m the one that–” now that Hecate’s voice was clear they were babbling, they didn’t want to get into this again, not another person cleaning up after them, not another person digging into what they had tried to bury again and again. 

But Sibling Bright cut them off, “That’s why we’re here, I mean, part of why we’re here to speak with you. But not the whole of it. I’m going to show you the way of things.” 

She gestured to the silver tube on the table, and it seemed to drain away into the air. 

Living material? Hecate caught on their breath and they drew in, Living material just for a display. As the grainy fuzz of grey slowly filled the air between them, a detailed orbital map of the Earth-Moon system, the Fine Shell of the Webwork, appeared.

The Wildcat went on. “No doubt you are familiar with our prohibited volume. The protected space of the Webwork. We’ve been at it with the Web for over a hundred years now. Preventing expansion where we could, making inroads where we might. It’s been stagnant for almost that long, Hecate. You hear the news. Always the back and forth, the Webwork avoiding overextension, us scraping by on what we make in the belt, and beyond. Some in Wildcat are terribly bored of this back and forth, and failure after failure in the Research Priories, terribly bored.” 

Hecate flushed with anger for a moment. This woman clearly knew more than what she let on. How belittling, all the work they’ve put in, all the time they’d watched the failures happen in person, to people, that they knew and loved. They were about to say “fuck it” and tell this pretentious Sibling to shove her boredom up her ass: we all have to find ways to cope with loss, with loss of family, the loss of Earth. 

But Bright had moved on, sitting back again from her lean on the table and crossing her arms again, “But it’s not us that have made the first move.” Her eyebrows raised, daring Hecate to quip back. 

Predictably, Hecate’s thoughts derailed. They managed another unintelligible “what”-like sound, and the Wildcat had made her point. This was big. Why the hell was this being brought to me? 

She zoomed into the physical image between them. At this scale, with one silver arc of earth taking up a corner of the table, and the tall space lift, the spar, a pinprick on the rugged coast of one of the continents, many of the earth satellite orbitals were in full view. Craft were whizzing around their sections of space, crossing and meeting, but most of all, amassing. There was a tremendous flurry of activity surrounding the spar. Many large and, already at this scale, uncomfortably membraneous, transport ships seemed to park around the spar, and crawl out into the wider area outside of the orbitals. 

“There is unprecedented activity occurring around their primary spaceport. Civilian and Military–”

“Like there’s a difference,” scoffed Hecate, captivated despite the boring woman’s dry delivery. 

“To them, there is a difference, and it matters in this case. You see these ships?” She pointed at the vast transport vessels. “These are primarily civilian, hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, all civilian. Not a trace of warship posturing, except for a slight increased presence around our nominal borders. Drones going missing from time to time. And of course, here.” 

She spun the display, zooming out and in again to refocus on a far geostationary orbit where a horrific splotch of flesh seemed to be daubed across the void. It felt violating to look at. A ship larger than anything Hecate had seen before, more comparable to a habitat, but warped into a grotesque charade. It aped a freight vessel, with a bulbous mid-section and an outsized engine area taking up almost the entire latter half of the ship. At least, that’s what Hecate thought it might be. It was hard to tell with Spiders, their chitinous craft were hexelated with protuberances that seemed unnecessary, only to play some mysteriously essential part in the whole. 

“This is a Keter class vessel, Hecate. And they’re bringing people there from the spar.” 

Keter class, this time it was Hecate’s turn to raise their eyebrows. The largest and most robust ship designation possible. Keter class vessels were only just starting to become feasible for the Union to build, and even then there were worries about propulsion. The research team they had been stationed with was one of the casualties along the way of making these behemoths possible. Fast, self-contained, suitable for indefinitely long journeys through space, in theory. It must have been obvious that their head was spinning. 

“We can only call them what they seem to be. But they are at least as large as our Keter class projects, maybe larger, and besides the in-system antimatter drives it seems they’ve been fitted with something big.” 

The view zoomed in again, showing the bright back of the pustuled ship. There at the immense back of the craft was a complex series of folding shapes, sickeningly detailed fractal spirals interrupted with jagging bifurcations and growths. An engine of otherworldly violence. 

What that must do to space itself. 

Hecate found a great yawning pit in her stomach then. A sudden headache coming pounding in with shocking grief. They suspected why Wildcat had wanted them, and it was vile, unconscionable. A feeling dripping down as if slowly, inevitably filling her field of view with blood, with fire, with… nothing. The ship was wrong. 

“Most of our in-system operatives have been removed from duty.” 

A euphemism, surely. 

She went on, “We aren’t able to send the larger drones in to clean up, Webwork spots them from a hundred million kilometers away and doesn’t feel the way we do about taking them out. No hesitation. We need someone who can slip into the Fine Shell, lay the groundwork for a closer reconnaissance detail, and get out. We need to know what it is they know, and why we don’t. Why are they gathering like this? What are they doing with this, frankly, Ark-like ship?”

The loaded language weighed on Hecate like acceleration. They asked the question that spilled down their spine, shuddering, “and why me? Why come out to L4 just to lay this at my feet? I’m just an OCO, Sibling. I’m just trying to calm down… -to watch the port.” The latter clarification was added hastily, without any indication that Hecate actually believed it. But their voice cracked anyway. Their fingers tapped out increasingly erratic rhythms.

“You were the only one to make it out of Helicor–”

“It was pure luck, just dumb luck, and sacrifice after sacrifice for nothing.” They were too fast, the words tumbled out. Hecate’s living hand instinctively reached for their left shoulder, where the stub of an arm melded with the network of wires and struts that fed sensation back and forth into the prosthetic, “I couldn’t possibly…”

“I have no doubt that it was a unique circumstance” There was genuine care in her eyes now, “but similarly we trust that you are too, unique.” 

The Wildcat stood, gesturing to the corner of the room. And suddenly there it was, behind her, a small grey ball around a quarter of a meter in diameter. Blinking with light, covered in various antennae and sensors so as to look almost like a miniature Le Calliou. It must have been there the whole time, cloaked. 

Hecate was aghast, heart racing and stood too, all color draining from their already pale skin, “You can’t do that to me. You know my history. You know what he did for me and you bring me his ghost? What the fuck, Wildcat–Sibling Bright, what the fuck do you expect me to say?” They were absolutely over it now, all this intelligence, the little glowing field on table with its bright lines for each orbital. A distraction. Just a tool to keep them from sniffing out the drone in the corner too early. Keep them from re-living the disaster they only barely escaped from, and nearly wished they hadn’t. 

“Hecate, meet telecommunications drone designation Complex System 14-B. Complex, do you mind informing them of your character and role here?”

The drone rose, wafting lazily over to the table. As it neared the spectral image dissipated around it, leaving it’s hull cast in strange shadows. It looked exactly like him. 

“Good to meet you, Hecate. Complex 14-B at your service.” It seemed to tip forward so as to bow, “I was built to work out the detailed hypergeometry of space folding calculations, and identify emissions of such dangerous work. And of course, to transmit data over large distances with as great efficiency as can be mustered, thin beam, you see, low attenuation. As you may have gathered, I am also quite good at hiding as a result of my skillset.” It made almost to chuckle, flickering a little column of light above its upper hull.  

“This is the same model designation, the same outfit, as, as…” they trailed off, finally looking the Wildcat Directly in the eyes, “This is cruel, Sibling Bright. I am not well equipped for this mission, and I refuse. It’s final.” They made for the door. 

“Your prior experience with Complex Systems Drones and Hypergeometry installations is why we came here Hecate. You think, out of the millions of eligible workers we came to bargain with you because of some special skillset? Some superhuman work ethic?” 

Her hands flailed dismissively. The remarks stung. Sibling Bright was doing it again: zeroing in for the kill. 

“You are the only human alive to have experienced a Manifold Failure. You know what’s at stake. And even then you tried to give yourself up to protect a drone, a chunk of metal, Hecate. Even I can’t understand your motivations, but I can recognize where we need that tenacity. It is imperative to the survival of the Union that we know and understand the character of this Spider ballooning event, and we know what’s going to happen when they fire those engines, if indeed it’s what we are afraid of. Imagine, the Webwork with functioning Manifold technology, before us.” She shook her head, “This drone contains the last vestiges of information from our closest go yet. It knows what we’re here to do, and keeping it alive, protected, and in place to gather intelligence is paramount to the continuation of the Union.” 

The drone butted in, “meaning, if I may add, I am built on the remains of emission shells from around Helicor. I am at least as up to date with the surrounding events as you, and sympathize to the extent I am able with your hesitance. If I am brought within sufficient distance to the Keter class vessel, I will be able to analyze its emissions and transmit the data.” 

Hecate was caught, slowly settling back into the chair, her words vacantly trailing off, “Of course. You built this from his bones. That’s why it was me. Sibling Bright, I don’t… I can’t…”

“We know it’s only been a year, Hecate. But we can’t wait on this. We need someone in the Fine Shell now. Earth evacuations, if that is what they are, aren’t wide-scale yet. Just a few hundred thousand here and there. But even then, they are working on another Keter. A second one, Hecate, and just as big. We don’t know why.” 

Hecate’s silence must have been taken for affirmation.

“We’ll outfit you with a stealth vessel, Snow-class, up to spec with as much Living Material as we can spare. Your task will be to monitor the situation visually from as close to near Earth orbit as you can get, see if you can’t slip Complex into an advantageous position near the Spar or the ship in full stealth. You cannot compromise the safety of Complex 14-B, it is essential for this operation that it remains in place streaming back data. This operation is the highest possible classification level, and you’ll be authorized to use unrestricted force in the discharge of your protection and monitoring detail. You will be deep into enemy space, and the priority is the transmission of the data. With God’s grace, you will work for the good of the whole Union.”

Another euphemism, Hecate knew. Bright seemed to wait a moment to make the underlying meaning grow more clear, until it was unbearable. Their sweater was stifling. 

“Naturally, you’ll have to leave with me immediately, to stage at the L2 Orbital on the Wildcat Distributed Hub.” 

The thought of Tam learning any of this, suddenly stuck out in Hecate’s mind. At least he wasn’t here to learn about the Webwork potentially possessing Hypergeometry tech. The system would be chaos in a week. 

The problem churned in their brain, tugging this way and that. This way: trauma and loss; that way: the terrible implication of the Webwork unchained from the limitations of standard physics, or running from a threat of which the Union was unaware. They rubbed the joint where their flesh became metal. None of it had been their choice, not at the time and not now. It was always about the Union, the workers, their survival. They couldn’t let themself waste away drifting, not when they could use some part of them to help. Even if it was the parts that hurt. Especially if it were only their pain, only Hecate and the memories of the Research Priory Helicor, that could change the trajectory of the war. For a moment,Hecate was proud of that ache. 

It was something of Tam’s ideological optimism that escaped from their thoughts as their brain pounded. They recalled the 4 tenants of the Union. When you had nothing else, at least you had the S’s: 

Survive, 

Save,

Succeed,

Serve.

If Hecate was caught, just like Helicor: stuck looking every day at the ghost of one they’d lost, they were at least going to make the best of it. Fuck “for All, for God”: they would survive, and maybe do a little saving along the way. They leaned forward onto the table. 

“Do I at least have time for a drink first?” 

Half predicted, half feared, feeling a familiar echo in the grey metal, Hecate’s choice was cemented by the Complex Systems drone as it chimed in with another chuckle, bobbing merrily in the air, “Oh my, I have a feeling we’ll get along splendidly.”