The Cross Of Iron (Hard Sci-Fi Eclipse Phase/Evangelion/Haruhi/Various)

[Hobb's Tuna]

The Cross of Iron

Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron



Prologue: The men in the watchtower

The end has come and gone, yet mankind knows no peace​

Some 40 million klicks out from the upper cloud layers of Saturn Fan Xiaoming lies dreaming, wide awake in his sarcophagus.

All his dreams are about flying. The Tempter's veil surrounds him, 15 000 parsecs to windward, on the opposite side of the galactic center, but also here and now. Towering molecular dust pillars, parsecs long, gold fading to bronze, russet and amber. Between them the gossamer silk of molecular hydrogen and helium, navy, indigo and jade, shifting to mauve and violet. Bird flocks taking flight and fairy castles and windblown sailing ships painted in brush-strokes of dust and light and twirling translucent magnetic fields like the skirts of a temple dancer.

With a shrug of his shoulders his wings unfurl, four square kilometers of perfectly reflective smart-matter membrane, catching the sun wind of the stellar nursery. A million stars litter the sky, a pirate's jeweled treasure trove spilled over black samite, rerouted nerves translating their radiation into gentle pin-pricks on his vacuum sealed skin.

Space is silent no more. The universe sings to him. Over the bas-rumble of the universal background radiation and the fog-horn sound of pulsars, the birth cries and death songs of far stars fill his auditory cortex with music.

The dreamer spreads his wings and dances.

***

Somewhere, half a galaxy and 20 centimeters away from the dreamer in the frontal lobes, force-grown high bandwidth neurons pour a torrent of data from his brain interface into his Occipital Lobe, bypassing the visual nerve.

Somewhere behind a thick plate of frosted glass the dreamer frolics in his wonderland, but here a sleepless watchman relentlessly hunts the data stream for the telltale signs prey, of signal in the noise.

The dark twins knows no exhaustion, no distractions, no sense of self, his lidless gaze never wavers. His senses reach across the solar system and beyond, from the hard gamma to the ELF radio band, from the mourning dirge of the memory beacons in high earth orbit to the backscattered whisper of a billion tight beam laser transmissions. From the Helium-III freighters launching towards Mars from the Löfstrom Loops in Saturn's upper cloud bands to the ten thousand fusion torch drive flames crisscrossing the inner system, he sees them all.

His sarcophagus surrounds him with a mother's warm embrace. It's micromachinery and his implants, nurse his body while his mind dreams and hunts. It's a spark of warmth and oxygen, amid the icy, airless darkness of the good ship CSCS "Nostalgia for Infinity". A squat armored cylinder, 109 meters from fusion torch nozzle to bow radar cupola, the Infinity has little in common with the space vehicles of bygone areas. No cabins, no commons, no bridge, only dense blocks of machinery stacked atop the fusion reactor and enormous fuel tanks, full of metastable helium-III ice, permeated by kilometers of winding, airless, lightless maintenance tunnels, most of them just large enough to admit a cyber-roach.

Time passes. The Infinity reaches aphelion and begins its long fall backwards towards Saturn, home and the end of its long futile watch. Their relief, the CSCS "Lapsed Pacifist", meets them one days travel outside of Phoebes orbit, fusion torch working intermittently while climbing out of Saturn's gravity well. At 500 000 kilometers, communication lasers are booted, handshakes established, transponder signatures confirmed, security tokens checked. A fountain of data begins to flow as sensor and maintenance logs are exchanged.

The watchman drinks it in with the same impassive, uncompromising hunger with which he has devoured Terabytes for months. A flag is thrown by one of the many dutiful little preprocessing engines, as it registers a faint radar echo exceeding the detection limit by about two standard deviations. This is in itself nothing unusual. It has happened a dozen times in the second before and will undoubtedly happen another dozen times in the next. A well-rehearsed routine of higher level analytical engines and filters awaits to sort out and eliminate the grains of interplanetary dust, the high energy charged particles triggering sensor artifacts and all the other causes of false positives, known to man. This one attracts ever more LAIs, circling like a hunting pack of hungry barracudas, as it is bumped upwards through ever higher levels of analysis. There is blood in the water. The illumination frequency is correct for a military radar reflection but the power signature of the return signal is all wrong for the measured range and the carrier wave frequencies are subtly Doppler-shifted the wrong way for it's apparent velocity vector.

Mircoseconds later, a moment of exultation as convergence is achieved. Neural nets bloom new connections, as underperforming LAIs are culled from the herd and the reward functions copies in a new generation, while the results are dumped into the short term memory of Fan and his crewmates, rudely ripped from their dreamlands to full wakefulness.

The Bogey is cloaked with adjustable meta materials. While the interloper adjust its shape to scatter radar signals away from the source, conservation of energy demands that the incoming pulse goes somewhere. The incoming signals correspond not to the radar search beam of the Infinity, whose output is reflected away from her sensors by the cloak, but to the radar pulses of her sister ship.

Fan Xiaoming knows a brief second of full awareness as Captain Bach's voice whispers in his auditory cortex: "Set condition 3 throughout the ship. Prepare for hard burn and release the data throttles."

"You heard the man, guys and gals. Lube up your interface and slide in my big data-line." Andrea Kramcynzski, Electronic Warfare Specialist and resident smart-ass.

"Really. Dick jokes? That's your bid? Jesuuus, Specialist Kramcynzski, have some pride." Johanna Sverngard, Nanoswarm Engineer One – Maintenance and his favorite sparring partner.

"What can I say. I liked my sense of humor, when I was twelve. Why change a good thing?"

"Why grow a brain indeed? Is it true your sexual harassment file is larger than your dick?"

"Don't know, but I do know how to treat a lady with both."

"Then it's unfortunate that you are dealing with Johanna, Specialist Kramcynzski. She will cut you, son."

Captain Bach is long-suffering but faintly amused.

"You two jokers are aware you are on a public channel, right? Now if you and the rest of the clown circus could stop flirting and …"

"Oi. Uncalled for!"

"… kindly shut up and do your job, M. Kramcynzski that would be real nice. Rest assured I will give your insights all the careful consideration they deserve."

"We would get better results anyway if you would just authorize me to outsource some of neurological function related to tactile interactions and maybe the Bianchi-Demicheli feedback loop in the anterior insula to the extant infrastructure, it would decrease traffic on the system bus by 6% and markedly increase crew performance."

"That's a … very fancy way of saying: Can I run my yaoi porn virs on the targeting computer. Answer is still no, by the way."

"An army fails or stands on its morale, captain.

"The Circum-Saturnian Commenwealth knows a lost causes, when she sees it and she is not in the habit of wasting resources, citizien-soldier."

"You are going to dent my self-confidence, boss man."

"I just command a spaceship powered by the fire of stars with my mind, I'm not actually a magician. M. Fan, M. Kramcynzski is about to do permanent damage to my sanity. Where is my synchronity event?"

Fan rolls his eyes, or rather he would have if the motor function suppressors would have let him. "Truly a dire situation, Captain." Allmighty Bhudda knows you have not much left to spare in that respect. "We aim to please. Brainwave patterns green across the board. Latency is dropping as per standard boot sequence…"

New intelligence is uploaded into their tactical short term memory caches. One of the analysis engines has backtracked the vector of the Boogey. It has spent the last 120 years first on a Hohmann Transfer Orbit, than caught in a highly elliptic orbit around Saturn. Most likely launch date is the 17 March 2119 with a two sigma of 37.9 days. Earthfall.

The conversation gutters and dies. Captain Bach's mindstate feels like a blade in his head, cold control with an edge of colder fear. "M. Fan. Synchronity event. Now. M. Elbert prepare missiles for tactical nuclear strike."

"Awaiting command authorization, Captain."

Fan Xiaoming thinks of burning cities and oceans the color of arterial blood. He thinks of the cold butchery at the quarantine lines, of corpses dancing on their pyres of red napalm, of endless refugee columns fleeing from something to somewhere. He thinks of ash on the wind.

Most of all he thinks of wind chimes playing and the quite squeak of badly oiled hinges as a door opens. There is nothing else there, though. The public healthcare psycho-surgeons cut those memories right out, cut the pain and the panic and the gut-wrenching fear, leaving only the paper-thin black and white of a bad action sim. If he tries hard enough he will remember the names of these people but it will have no emotional impact. No connection. Dust to dust. Ash to ash.

Discontinuity. The command codes have taken effect and all that is Fan Xiaoming, all he feels, knows, believes and fears melts like ice in the sun, as brain regions go dark, dropping of the network. All that remains are the mission directives and the force grown neural tumors metastasizing out of the visual cortex and their siren song of seek and kill. A firestorm of neural activity as brain temperatures spike and cooling implants work hard to suck the excess heat from the blood stream

Mercy sleeps tonight, empathy is press ganged into service as an intelligence officer, but murder? Murder is out and about and boy, it is going to be hot night in town today.

As bandwidth spikes and latency drops 24 minds fuse into one.

The Warmind wakes.

 

[Hobb's Tuna]

Chapter 1

How the end of the world began or Three Idiots walk into a bar​

The grandly named City of Jade Towers hovers in the equatorial Helmholtz currents of the water cloud layers of Saturn, some 300 kilometers above crush depth. Like nearly all its brethren, it is a Server City, thousands upon thousands of kilometers of optical computer racks, running the perverse simulacrums that the machine cultists of the outer system call uploads and hardly a living soul to see. It's primary exports are metallic hydrogen, metastable helium-III ice, complex carbon hydrogens and water (…) For travelers willing to brave the dangers of the outer system (please consult with both your security contract provider and your life insurance before making any travel plans) it still holds a measure of interest as a center of skydiving, wingsuiting, air sailing, aerial paintballing and half a hundred different extreme sports connected to the enormous spaces of the Saturnian Atmosphere.

Most of the "locals" prefer to simply upload into cyborgs designed to facilitate these sports. Several of the more extreme ones are simply impossible to Humans, who retain their natural body plane. We strongly advice against it, but we offer our premium subscribers (Link: Subscribe now! 25% off the first year.) a list of vetted bodyshops and clinics. Please be advised that independent of subscriber status this service is only available if you hold the copyright to your body or alternatively a level 4 license, according to the Martian Commercial Code. (…)

TravelWiki, Baedeker Galactica, 5th Edition, ©Mercury Media Holding Ltd; Waterfront 67; 13147 New Shanghai, Mars​

***


"I can't get a connection."

"Oh, yayyyy. Taniguchi?"

"Nope."

"There are enough optical quantum computers on this oversized shoebox to run like half a million alphas but we can't get a wireless signal. Have you tried the wire?"

Kunikida shrugs and gestures to the corridor wall, where instead of maps and the Instellar Trip advisor LAI logo, the smart paint only provides a 404 message error.

Kyon is, one by one, carefully lowering the filters and firewalls protecting his neural interfaces, but no howling horde of dancing avatars clamoring for his attention, no snow-storm of advertisement pop-ups obscure his field of vison, no sudden unexplainable urges for food or sex or a new customized cleaning bot, only 49.99 ecu, 2 replacement fuel cells complementary.

"Unbelievable, even the commercials are down. Almighty Buddha, I implore you, bring down your horse cock of wrath and smite the unwashed barbarians."

"… finding religion there, Kyon?"

"Well I was hoping for drink but in Bumfuck, Saturn, without Noosphere access, I guess I will have to make do. I don't suppose anyone remembered to download an imprint, that actually included the travel wiki?"

"Well …"

"Doesn't count if you saved it to the cloud, Kunikida."

"… never mind then."

"I still got the station map in my cache, so we at least we will find the way." Taniguchi volunteers.

Kyon bites his lip.

On the one hand that's truthfully more than he can say for himself, so he is not actually in a position to criticize his friend.

On the other hand Taniguchi suggested this bar and he has been known to display a taste for watering holes that oscillate between odd and downright dangerous. He calls it "appreciation of the local culture", Kyon tends to consider it, a particularly strange spin on masochism.

On the third tentacle, Kyon has no real idea about the local geography, neglected to download even the usual map and tourist package into his neuro-interface and finds the idea of stumbling around the labyrinthine loading docks less than appealing.

In comparison to the sky cities on Venus or Lapis-Lazuli, Saturnian settlements tend to be primarily resource extraction stations and/or mainly be populated by uploads in their servers, for which they provide near ideal conditions: An endless supply of extremely cheap energy, using wind turbines, plenty of atmospherical carbon for the circuit printers and a bottomless heat sink for their computer cores.

Accordingly the interior design philosophy tends to the spartan, long on function and short on aesthetics; no spider-silk tents in all colors of the rainbows like the windblown sails of the world's largest treasure galleon masquerading as the flying Dutchman, suspended from vacuum spheres of hyperdiamond, no bridges of spun glass, no hanging gardens and no artificial waterfalls.

Inside the virs, where the uploads and the dreamers with high-bandwidth neural connections frolic, a server city will contain enough wonders, dreamscapes, personal paradises and hells to keep a legion of explorers busy for a dozen meat-space life-times. Outside the picture is much more utilitarian.

A gently curving corridor of foamed bioplastic, stained by condense water, over a carbon-fiber skeleton, grey on grey, lit by the harsh white lights of LED lamps, stretches before them, left and right dozen of arteries branch of the main high way, leading deeper into the warren of the loading docks.

"Whatever took out the net connection is very likely also fucking with public transport." Kunikada is pointing to a frozen entoptic traffic sign.

"Cargo drones seem fine." Taniguchi observes, as half a dozen heavy haulers whoosh by them.

"The port runs of a different network." Kunikada answers. "We might as well go to the damn bar. It might be some time before the repair drones get to it. I don't think it will be very high in their priority stack."

"Leaving the population of the station without net access, is low priority now?" Kyon asks, grumpily.

"It's probably only a few nodes on the topside. Anyway as the cargo is still running the network backbone is unaffected, so the uploads are ok. So at most the embodied bio population, that's what 4000 people? Less than one percent of total population."

"It's a server city, dude. Meatsacks are second priority."

"The emergency system still pings. Only in text mode, no LAIs, no interfaces, but … ah, here we are 3rd item from the top on the bulletin." A pulsing icon at the bottom of his field of view informs Kyon that a text message had loaded into the cache of his neural interface. "Three noosphere nodes of the net in the topside spaceport district due to macrophage infection, yadayadaya, areas affected, blabla, ETA reboot: 3 hours."

"Welp, might as well get a drink while we wait." Taniguchi opinions.

Haruhi leans against the corridor wall, twirling a strain of her around her finger. It's auburn today and her cat like smile tells Kyon, he will not win this battle.

Above them the far thunder of nuclear rocket motors lights the Saturnian night as a heavy freight shuttle lifts of from its landing pad.

Kyon sighs heavily. "Fiiine. But if I get blood on my new thermal jacket, again, the refabbing comes out of your comp time budget, Taniguchi."

The bar, "The Jungle Gym" is located on the rim of the city, just of the outer concourse, whose great panorama windows show an endless sea of Kelvin- Helmholtz instability cloud layers, achingly beautiful white silk ribbons, surrounding towering cloud castles, palaces and minarets, tapering down to the finest lace patterns of water ice, faintly lit by the pale ghost light of Saturn's rings and the positon lights of the city.

It takes his breath away every time he sees it. Kyon pauses, while his friends continue to the bar to get a table. Saturn's icy cold seeps through the triple isolation layers into the insufficiently heated concourse, making his breath mist, but the hardly feels it. A flick of his eye mouse adjusts the frequency range of his eyes, making the intricate magnetic fields of Saturn visible and filtering the positions lights from his view.

Origami-figures of transparent gossamer fold into each other as the magnetic fields sinuously twirl over the cloudscape.

50 kilometer high Raleigh-Taylor Instability Cloud Towers mushroom upwards, where fountains of liquid hydrogen rise from the depths of Saturn penetrating deep into the atmosphere, silver trees sheeting vortexes and ice crystals like cherry blossoms.

"Isn't it beautiful? All these mushroom clouds and stratocumuli, a bit like a silver and ice replica of Tokyo when you last saw it. Fewer fires, though."

Haruhi has stepped up next to him, leaning against the transparent keramit of the windows. Kyon touches a gloved hand against the window pane and pulls back with a hiss. Even triple glassed keramit with high vacuum isolation layers is no match against the bone deep chill of the saturnian atmosphere.

"Near extinction events are not my kind of aesthetics." He clamps his jaw shut. He answered by pure reflex and regrets his lack of control instantly.

"The birth pangs of something new. Living, dying. Forward, back. The intertwined double-helix of creation and destruction. Two sides of the same coin. Can't you hear it? Ever spinning. Thus we return to the void."

He turns his face away to the window, will not give her the satisfaction of a reaction.

The reflections Haruhi's eyes are dark and fathomless, when she smiles, small pin-pricks of light swimming in the blackness like far stars. Or something else entirely.

"You always were so stubborn, Kyon."

Her fingers brush his cheek, sending shivers down his spine. He draws his thermal jacket tighter around his form against the sudden cold creeping into his bones and quickens his step towards the warm lights of the bar.

 

[Hobb's Tuna]

Chapter 2a: Concerned Citizens

In which ancient conspiracies and bar hoppers alike have to argue over the bill. ​

Good Evening Gentlepersons, tonight on MONITOR we will be discussing the upcoming Plurality vote of the Citizens Stipend Amendment and Infrastructure Investment Bill 2240, as well as the larger underlying controversy of the Reputation modified tax-system.

We are honored to have with us today Susilo Bambang Suparmanputra, Eidolon of the Gestalt mind Corning-Hypercube, Professor Torsten Bergmann, chair of emergent and complex system forecasting at Titan Autonomous University, Professor of Macroeconomics Chunjua Hujiang at Profunda University, Niels Sörensön, Psychohistoriasn at the parliamentarian A.I. Oracle service of the Three Wise Men and Andrej Vassilovitch Economic Spokesperson of the Automist Alliance Party.

Before we get started, please be aware of the public exo-memory link in the program description …

(…)

M. Hujiang: And I have to ask again, if the current economic output of the Commonwealth is insufficient to tackle all the projects we want to undertake, as it plainly is, why are we not trying harder to unlock the enormous, unused, economic potential in our midst?

32% of the population is living of the citizens stipend, some with a hobby as side income, another 30 % or so do additional part time work .Our Oracles and Gestalt minds allow us better simulations and planning, our continued AI research better automatization. Still our GDP per capita is 7% lower than Mars because nearly 2/3 of our population is entirely unproductive.

M. Bergmann: There is a reason that most people rely on the citizens stipend and hobby work. Gene upgrades and Skillsofts none withstanding there is only so much you can do. The human brain is a hopelessly messy piece of soft-and hardware, entangled like a wool ball at a kitten party. You can yank on it to pull it in a certain direction, but never entirely without side-effects. Yank too hard and the whole mess is liable to unravel in your hands. Not everyone is cut out to be a psycho-surgeon.

M. Hujiang: This argument further removed from reality than a FTL drive. Mars' school system is largely privatized and profit driven. Exactly the lower educational levels experience far lower amounts of investment. They still manage to turn a profit.

M. Sörensön: On Mars they let you asphyxiate if you can't pay the oxygen subscription fees. Mars has shareholders and human resources, we have citizens. Little bit of a difference there.

M. Hujiang: Oh please. Spare me theatrics.

M. Bergmann: This is not theatrics. This is a fact. Mars uses far less A.I. than we do. Low skill work has been priced out of the market by LAIs entirely, here. Mars is in a better position, because they have a nascent biosphere, making the upkeep costs per capita lower and because they maximize for profit, not quality of life.

M. Hujiang: Leaving your social democratic prejudices aside, there is a certain amount of truth to this. I'm not suggesting that we imitate the Martian System, but we certainly could recover part of our losses by using citizens without jobs for standard maintenance and manufacturing oversight purposes. I'm well aware that they would not be able to compete with AI on costs. Luckily we won't have to, the resources for the upkeep of the, ahhh, less productive members are a sunk cost anyway. The resources necessary for the creation of that many AI are not negligible and I would like to direct the attention of our viewers to the study of my institute on this very topic, which is available in the Exo-memory of this stream. If we implement the Somnambulistic rewrites to the central nervous system on a larger scale, this doesn't even need to impact quality of life negatively. The work will be done literally in their sleep.

M. Suparmanputra: Our colleague overstates the amount of savings considerably; after all we would still need to produce all the cyber-shells and manufacturing facilities. More importantly the modifications M. Hujiang speaks of will require extensive psycho-surgery, which is expert labor. The proposed brain modifications will only allow the execution of a fixed program, while the host-brain sleeps. The maximal complexity of the algorithm will in turn be limited by the computational platform on which it is running. No offence intended, but if the people in question were our best and brightest, they wouldn't live of the citizens stipend in the first place. It is entirely unclear if the return on the proposed investment is actually worth the opportunity cost.



(…)

M. Vasssilovitch: And let me be clear on this point. The Voidrock Coalition joined the Commonwealth under the assumption that as long as we participated in the Economic Reputation and Tax system as arbitrated by the Three Wise Men, we would be free to improve on the half-hearted solidarity of the State inside our own Habitats as we saw fit. If this bargain no longer applies, other agreements will also have to be reexamined.

M. Hujiang: The Inner Habitats can run on pure Reputation Systems as long as they want. Go full on anarcho-communist, see if I care. If only you wouldn't need the tax money of the golden Axis.

(…)

Discussion Panel by the Economic Faculty of the Titan Autonomous University and the Circum-Saturnian Broadcasting Services, held on the CSBS Politics Virtuality Channel.

***

The man known to some as Seven, is diving through darkness between worlds, drawing corkscrewing waves of probability around him like the fiery plasma tail of a shooting star.

Where 'might' collapses into 'is', the quantum foam of the probability wave front blooms a jungle of fractal possibility flowers, some fragile growths of alabaster and white jade, evaporating into showers of diamond dust and prismatic sprays of fairy lights as quickly as they condensed into these plane, others towering coral riffs of gold and mother of pearl, sprouting ever-changing ecologies of was/is/maybe.

Seven knows his garden well. He is a careful caretaker and his pruning shears are sharp, although he loves all his flowers. Today, though, he has eyes for only one blossom, a small chrome orchid with petals like razors.

Long ago/now/soon, it was/is/will be growing, a tree of thorns, a Yggdrasil of pain, it's roots extruding along the space and time-like dimensions, curling into the hidden places of the fifth, sixth and seventh dimensions, where the emergent properties of complex systems lead their own strange, shadow-lives.

Savage laughter reverberates unheard in the dark halls of dead and uncaring gods.

His Lady Entropy, she-who-waits-at-the-end-of-all-paths, the only Mistress this mindless universe acknowledges, smiles well pleased.

Nothings remains but the faint hiss of the sand in the hourglass.


***


The man is old, very old, one of the oldest surviving members of his species. Few things surprise him anymore, so he is very familiar with the general set-up, even if the props have changed.

In his youth, officially unofficial meetings such as these would have involved an anonymous conference room with locked doors, grey wall-to-wall carpeting and very bad coffee. Possibly and most frighteningly a PowerPoint(™) presentation.

These days, it's an encrypted vir, running on a heavily firewalled server. About 2/3 of the attendants are uploads, the rest mostly like him: cyborgs in survival tanks, their consciousness slowly spilling out of their oversized heads in a metallic halo of brain implants.

The Saturnian Commonwealth is a mixed direct/parliamentarian cyber-democracy with heavy use of psycho-historic forecasting, simulations and Oracle engines. All its deliberations are recorded and with very few exceptions, usually security relevant, immediately made available to the general public.

Nonetheless under the weather vane of vox populi and its elected representatives, the engine rooms are manned by public servants, who have to keep the ship of state on course, even in stormy weather.

This gathering has no name, even if it is sometimes referred to as the "Special Circumstance Committee" by its members, no official function and, is in fact, no different than any get together of private citizens, although those usually tend to contain fewer high ranking spooks and civil servants.

Nobody can accuse them of extravagance. The Vir is as simple as they come; a featureless white plane stretches into infinity under an equally featureless black sky. 17 black, numbered monoliths, one by three by nine, represent the attendants. The communication channels are relatively low bandwidth, limited to audio-equivalent sensory input, severely curtailing the possibility of mind-to-mind data transfer. The old man is torn between approval for the functional simplicity and annoyance at the underlying melodramatics. At least they have skipped the black robes this time, he thinks sourly.

Eleven speaks: "We confidently expect the Metallic Hydrogen, Water and Hydrocarbon exports to remain on the current growth trajectory. Venus is nearing the end of its terra forming process, but Mars is entering the critical phase and there a simply no price competitive sources, that can provide in the required mass numbers.

Helium III rates are stagnating. The Inner Planets are very conscious of our monopol and are taking pains to reduce it, so far with limited success. It is my understanding though that beamed power from inside Mercury's orbit is about to make real dent there.

On the other hand the market penetration on our skillsofts, dream-virs, narco-algorithms and psychosurgeries is less than we hoped for, but …"

"Eleven. We didn't come here for a lecture. The TLDR please?"

Eleven sighs, annoyed. "This is the TLDR, gentlemen. If you want the full version have a look at the files in your exo-memory. The trade links with the inner system are unravelling.

On the upside IP piracy will continue, of course, and we can cut down on paying the Planetary Consortium protection money. If there is less trade, we are less exposed to their commerce raiders. We hope that our expanding colonial holdings and new investment plan, which my department has prepared, will make up for the shortfall, so the economic losses are manageable.

Bottom line: New Shanghai and we have been polite to each other for the last 80 years because it was a symbiotic relationship. A bad marriage, maybe, resentful and co-dependent but a working relationship. Now the glue has started to crack. It's only a matter of time until the knives come out. "

Seven speaks up: "I think I can be of some assistance on this question. The new deep-dives from SYBIL are in. It is as we feared."

A file of considerable size is loaded in the communal exo-memory; the data set crystallizes in his short term memory with a barely perceptible moment of lag, as his personal security suit gives the data package the electronic equivalent of a cavity search.

"We have 25 years, 30, if we are lucky." Thirteen says.

That is a broadly accurate, if strongly simplified, summary, the old man's muse finds, when it flings a score of analyzing daemons at the data package, while he flicks through probability density matrixes and decision trees.

Seven clacks with his teeth. "Only, if we can keep the other stake-holders in the dark. These things tend to get messy and … unpredictable, if more than one Oracle-engine is in the mix. Interference."

Four speaks "We are still 10 to 15 years beyond the forecasting horizon of the best competition, civilian or foreign."

"So you hope." Six remarks acidly. "Meanwhile I'm sitting here, guarding our borders with a bunch of gun boats, good for nothing but pirate hunting."

The 3-dimensional surface plots, indicating the simulated emotional response matrix of his colleagues, stab angry carmine spikes into the aggression spectrum as tempers fray. The old man turns to his meta-cortex, to prune his aggression response.

"We will come to the funding questions in a moment, Six. For now we must all do what we can to keep this out of public consciousness for now. That will be your job Seventeen."

Seventeen is unimpressed. "How is that supposed to work? If we want the funding for the fleet expansion, we need the people to vote that into the budget, do we not? If there is not threat, who will do that? Mathematically optimized orgasms, a fancy new nervous system for the best designer narco-algorithms, a full immersion VR riddle quests … all just more fun than expensive and useless death machines."

Four agrees, "We will need a propaganda campaign. In time. If this graduates from fringe speculation to public debate item, before our pieces are in place, we are in trouble. Public opinion is a self-reinforcing feedback loop."

"Like a nuke." Six volunteers cheerfully.

"Yes, exactly, thank you. Gentlemen, may I remind you: No warships without funds, no funds without compromises. Eleven, if you would continue?"

"Thank you. My colleagues and I have prepared a new budget, which we think, is politically viable and allows us to push forward our agenda.

"First of all, we can safely abandon investment in further Löfstrom Loops on Saturn, although the running projects on Uranus should be completed, if only to keep the local communities happy. The demographics out there tend towards the anarcho-communist with Vietnamese and Slavic language groups dominating. These guys have a chip on their shoulder, so we will need to massage plenty of egos."

"Secondly we would like to increase the production of public computational resources until an upload on the citizens' stipend will be able to afford to run his virs at both beyond-human-perception-resolution and real time speed. This will make the server cities on Saturn and Titan happy and it will save costs on the long-term. Compared to embodied citizens on basic, we confidently expect savings of 9% per year and head."

Ten is skeptical: "More money for the golden axis? Neither the Twelve Commons nor the Inner Moons will like that."

Seventeen waves his objections away. "There is no sense in keeping the periphery happy and losing the center. The secessionists are getting traction in Nyhavn and Quebec. New Shanghai is doing all it can to fan the flames. People are tired of pouring and endless stream of resources into the poorer stations and getting nothing back but complaints. If we lose the goodwill of Titan, Lapis-Lazuli or Saturn the bottom falls out of the Commonwealth."

"The poorer habitats will be able to push more of their hard cases on the server cities and the prosperous cities will be able to limit their expenses, but the bioform heavy clades on Titan will want a bone, too. First and foremost, more domes. Public housing is getting too expensive. Also more funding for childcare and more gen-upgrade packages to be included in the public healthcare program."

Six is not happy. "If you want to push all that through, that will call into question not only the financing for the fleet expansion program, but also the traffic laser-grid for the inner Moons and the terra-forming timeline for Lapis-Lazuli."

Five chimes in: "I would like to remind my esteemed colleagues, that Force: Atmosphere is still owed a replacement for the Mantis attack plane. In the eighth year running, now. "

"The traffic-grid is a write-off. It will never recover its cost. Instead, expand the network mass-drivers and give every relevant station enough lasers for ablative breaking. Those can also double as asteroid and military defensive networks in a pinch."

"Oh please, the seeking software sucks, we both know it will …"

"So one software patch and we are good to go, making it still vastly superior to your alternative …"

"You damn well know that the inner moon habitats need the investment…"

Even Meta-cortexes will not work, if you do not use them. Juggling so many oversized egos colliding, even on a good day, is more art than science.

The old man is running out of patience. "Enough. We can either learn to like this package and the political capital it preserves or Weissman and the Better-Lives-Coalition will press forward with their reform bill. SYBIL gives her a 62 % chance of success with a two sigma confidence interval of +/- 7 %. That's all there is to it. The laser-grid will have to go. Fourteen, the Terraforming effort is your forte."

Fourteen shrugs: "Lapis-Lazuli will stabilize on an asymptotic trajectory to 4.2 % oxygen content, well beneath the limiting oxygen concentration for hydrogen. It might take a few thousand years but we will get there. Meanwhile we can put up atmosphere converters in the sky cities. Leave the rest to the seeded air-plankton and the biosphere specialized Gestalt-minds."

"Lovely. That's the Greens pissed at us. Just racking up the friends, today, aren't we."

"Conserving resources, while maintaining a majority in the Althing will be a balancing act, we knew that." Four throws an exo-memory link into the vir, which sprouts an enormous oak-tree of golden light as a thicket of possibility paths explodes outward.

The seventeen monoliths hover in the darkness, while the tree grows around them, shedding fractal possibility flowers, fragile soap bubbles of Mandelbrot and Julia sets, shifting from indigo and aquamarine to carmine and purple.

The old men watches as branches wither and die, plunging down into darkness. World lines like bony, twisting fingers, scratching at oblivion. A few hundred threads of spun gold, woven into a tenuous tightrope, spanning the chasm into the future.

The Seventeen rotate around the bridge, as the old man drags his hand through the condensed waveforms, spilling maybe-worlds like fairy dust. All of them smell of blood and iron.

"The successful scenarios demand we keep Mars busy, until we can shift public opinion to something friendlier to our agenda."

"That's fine. We have friends there."

Ten is not impressed, "Barsoomist don't have the numbers or the infrastructure to be more than an annoyance. We need more."

Eight speaks up, "The Consortium Hypercorps do not trust each other further than a cling-film condom. Fa Jing and Solaris in particular are more paranoid than a dock-side whore on bad crack. It might be time for a bit of shit stirring. A few unfortunate car accidents … leave the details to me. We have specialists for that kind of thing."

"While we are getting to the dirty parts, we will need to do something about public opinion and that would be easier without certain members of the diet."

"Can't we just go with the good old bogeymen? Killer robots under you bed. Titans in your exo-memory cache?"

Thirteen snorts, wearily amused. "Tried that. Won't work. We have run a few simulations. The response matrix is downright lethargic. The public LAI counseling and psychosurgery program fucked us royally."

Ten is displeased with the implied criticism. "It also gave us happier, healthier citizens. Not to mention fewer guys inclined to hose down the Chinese chicken joint with a submachine gun after a bad day at work."

"Exactly my point. Stomping on mental illness and PTSD is fine and dandy until you need people with easy psychological triggers."

"If we can't rely on old atrocities, we will have to produce our own. Every lie needs a bit of truth in it to give it substance. We need a shift in public opinion and that means blood on blades. Something with children if you please. Nothing gets the public outrage juice flowing more freely than the tragic tale of little Timmy and the murder hobos. "

"Leave the little dears to me. My boys will set it right, snippity snap. I have ideas."

The old man feels his lips curl at the undisguised eagerness in Nine's voice, before his meta cortex response function locks it down.

This is the greater good. The smaller evil.

No time for clean hands or second thoughts.

"We will, of course, tailor our intervention for maximum effect and minimal aggregate bloodshed, Nine please coordinate with Four, we will need some reliable black bag research teams to run the simulations."

The meeting is winding down and the monoliths start winking out of existence as the members of Special Circumstance start to leave until only Seven and Nine linger.

That is rarely a good sign.

"Well?"

"There is activity around the Children."

The old man tenses.

"What kind of activity?"

"The seventh child has gotten himself nominated for the federal diet."

For the first time in nearly a quarter of a millennium the old man is lost for words.

"He … what? How was this allowed to happen?"

"Joke candidate. Some ridiculous live cast of a bar patron went viral and got him a minor following. Enough brainwave signatures to get him on the election roll. The public forecasting engines give him better than even odds, though."

"This is ... less than ideal."

The old man thinks this might be the understatement of the century and he should bloody well know.

He feels the oncoming throb of a headache and is sorely tempted to just switch-off the corresponding brain regions, but he needs his full-wits about him.

"No need for panic. Joke candidates come and go. Even assuming he wins, any important votes come up, on average 70% of their supporters will simply temporarily reassign their votes, if their voting preferences do not match." Nine says.

The self-discipline of two hundred years allows the Old Man to keep a lid on his irritation.

"I'm the animal tamer of this fly circus, I know how liquid democracy works, thank you. I don't expect him to suddenly win a diet vote to declare war on Venus.

He is the seventh Child. He has drawn the attention of the things that go bump into the night. Not to mention the infection vector he represents."

Seven clacks his teeth, a wet sound like a mousetrap snapping a fragile little neck.

"A federal diet member has immunities and protections, that normal citizen do not. Uncomfortable questions would be raised if he were to suddenly disappear."

"Best to not let it get that far then." Nine says. "We will fling enough mud at him to keep him out of the Althing. We will crawl so far up the asses of everyone anywhere near this clusterfuck, we will be able to peck out through their tonsils.

If this was more than a freak accident of bad luck and worse taste, we will know."

Seven clacks his teeth again. "Once is an accident. Two is a coincidence. Three times is enemy action."

"A patrol of Force: Space stumbled over a cold sleep casket on a ballistic trajectory, way out in deep black, in the middle of the Norse group. The thing was running cold and dark, finding it was a one in a trillion chance. They nearly nuked it, but someone got control of their itchy trigger finger at the last moment."

"I'm not sure if Six just doesn't know yet, what fish his boys reeled in, or if he is playing his cards close to his chest, but do guess who was on board, Lorenz."

The old man has not much fear left in him after a quarter millennium of the worst of what humanity has to offer. Still, the cold chill of long forgotten ghosts runs down his back, when a photograph materializes in his exo-memory.

The meta-cortex allows it. Fear is what kept him alive for so long.

A cold-sleep sarcophagus with a sigil printed on top. A blood red fig leave, pockmarked by a century of interplanetary dust, a line of text printed beneath it.

God is in Heaven. All is right with the world.

For the first time in nearly a century, Lorenz Kiel smiles. It's not a pretty sight.

"Shinji Ikari. Monument to all my sins. Welcome home."

***​

In the darkness of the outer system, where the sun grows faint and dim and cold, the Echo Cathedral swings in slow, sedate Lissajous orbits around the Sun-Saturn Lagrangian point L-5. Matryoshka spheres of Hyperdiamond, 1 kilometer in diameter, glimmer gently in the faint starlight. Slender flute-like columns plunge into the darkness, piercing the inner spheres, towards the center, where they conjoin in an alabaster egg, lit a faint orange by the eternal fire in the heart of the cathedral.

Whispers fill the dim caverns, as the prayer chants of the monk in the inner sanctum echo through the enormous halls, reflected and amplified, distorted and delayed, fleeting ghosts chasing fading shades. Every second a single name crystallizes from the echo song, eerily clear, as if the speaker stood right next to her.

She hovers along the diamond cliffs of the outer shell, softly brushing her hand over the columns of names carved into the walls, disappearing into the twilight high above and below her, before she kicks off from the wall, gently free falling towards the center.

Like clouds of fireflies, swarms of gently glowing zero-g candles, in transparent safety paper bubbles, drift through the soft air currents, as she slowly falls towards the inner sanctum.

Today it is a wizened Buddhist monk, leathery brown skin taut over brittle bones, floating in a lotus position in the dead center of the sphere, chanting the never-ending list of names, scrolling over the entoptic screens hovering in front of him. A holographic mandala of dead gods surrounds him, crosses and crescent moons and stars and dharma wheels and torii and aums.

She closes her eyes, breathes in tune with the Totentanz, adds her own names to the endless river of unquiet ghosts.

There is no record of her command in the Mustering Scrolls of Titan. There are no records of her assignments. There is no record even of her birth.

The knife in the dark. No whiff of gunpowder; no trail of blood.

But the dead, the ones she loved and the ones she hated, know her name.

This is the Echo Cathedral, where the keepers recite the ten billion names of god. All the sons of Adam, all the daughters of Eve, who lie unburied in the ruins of the halls of their fathers. Their whispers are caught by the microphones spread around the echo court, lasered outward to the memory beacons high above and below the elliptic, where they sing their mourning dirge outwards into the dark.

A flashing icon appears at the edge of her field of vision. The Flying Carpet is ready for launch, her fuel tanks full, and her missile racks ready for war. There is work to be done.

Behind her the song of the lost continues, uninterrupted, as it has for a hundred years before and shall for a hundred years thereafter.

After all they say, as long as a man's name is still spoken, he is not truly dead.

 

[Hobb's Tuna]

Chapter 2b: Concerned Citizens

In which ancient conspiracies and bar hoppers alike have to argue over the bill.​

It's no secret, that while the North Atlantic Consortium established the first colonies on Titan, the Pact of Three provided the necessary economic muscle to massively expand the size of the colonization project, shortly before the Fall began.

The Circum-Saturnian Commonwealth prides itself on the highest median living standards in the system, its extensive social security system, its social mobility and its diversity. Nearly every cultural and language group, which survived Earthfall, can be found on the thousands of habitats and city states, scattered over the moons and rings of Saturn. Nonetheless, the three largest linguistic groups, disproportionately represented among the higher social strata of the Commonwealth even taking into account their massive numbers, are, from larger to smaller, Japanese, German and Nordic.

The Pact of Three has long since ceased to exist. The constituent nations are ash on the wind, but old hatreds and older blood feuds, conflicts of interest and ideology, have followed man to the stars, and show little sign of disappearing.

So Mutualists and Social Democrats against Nano-Communists against Capitalists. Uploads against Bioforms. Individualists against Hive-minds. Cyber-Democrats against A.I. Oracles. Titan against Saturn against Enceladus against Thetis, Dione and the Rings.

So the Chinese against the Japanese, the Vietnamese and Javanese against the Chinese, the Polish against the Germans, the Russians against the Polish and everyone against the Nordics for politely, but ceaselessly, reminding everybody, who was here first. And round and round it goes.

On the politics of the Outer Rim. Collected Opinion Pieces by Ole Persson published in Dagen's Nyheter, Aarhus, Titan, 2230 to 2238​

A rainbow of brightly colored plastic bottles covers the wall behind the bar, where a 6-armed, uplifted orangutan is holding sway. Warm air, spiced with the smells of weed, hashish, spilled bear, sweat, fruit-scented tobacco and artificial pheromones hits Kyon, when the air-lock hisses shut behind him.

Hundreds of candles in intricate brass lamps fill the room with a warm golden glow. Hookahs gurgle lazily behind heavy tapestries. A group of men lounging on divans and brocade pillows, look up from their opium pipes, as he passes, cold, black eyes following him across the room.

He follows the spimes of his friends until he finds them in a secluded alcove to the rear. Their public profiles are locked down by the highest privacy setting, only broadcasting the absolute minimum of information. And with good reasons, Kyon thinks darkly, eyeing the entoptic profiles hovering over the heads of the bar patrons.

***

Kyon lets the privacy curtain slide shut and sacks in a bean-bag chair.

Haruhi takes up residence in his lap; as usual, his friends do not acknowledge her existence.

"I knew it. The moment you suggested this bar, I knew it would end badly.", Kyon says and accusingly points a finger at Taniguchi, "Have you seen the public profiles of the gentlemen we just passed?"

"Awesome, right?" Kunikida, the absolute madman, seems to be giddy with excitement. "I saw at least two Northern Wu calligraphy variants out there, possibly a Jiaxing dialects. I will have to consult the institute databases, when I'm online again, but I'm next to certain that there are no records of surviving native speaker populations outside of New Shanghai and maybe not even there. I'll have to …"

Kyon tunes him out and turns to Taniguchi, silently appealing to his sanity, which admittedly, even on good days, is a sucker's bet. Taniguchi shrugs:, "What? I don't go for the language crap, but the foxy brunette was grade-A ass right there."

"Oh, merciful heavens. Kunikida, could you be a rational adult for once in your live and have some priorities? Maybe stash the linguistic nerd goggles long enough to save your ass? Did you manage to miss the fuck-off huge azure dragon icon in their profiles? "

Kyon grabs the expensive looking bottle of scotch on the table on pours himself a glass:.

"These boys are migrant workers from the Inuit group, probably Siarnaq. Out there they don't like Titanians at the best of times and here, oh joy, we found ourselves a bunch of Chinese Nationalists.

And we stumbled in this place on the one night in the year, where they can actually kick our asses without a security drone locking down their motor functions within 5 seconds. So let's just once, for variety's sake, do the smart thing and leave quickly and quietly."

He empties his glass in one draught and coughs.

"Hey, this is good stuff … Who is paying for it?"

Taniguchi and Kunikida exchange glances, making Kyon's haggles rise. It's like they are talking behind his back, in front of him.

Kunikida sips his whiskey meditatively:. "Don't you think, you are over reacting a bit? Nobody even gave us a second look."

"Overreacting? We are sitting in a Phoenix Bar, waiting to get our asses handed to us."

Taniguchi waves him off, unimpressed: "I know at least 3 dudes who occasionally use the Rising-sun motive, mostly because they think it looks cool. I mean I could be wrong, but I'm prepared to bet that none of them are particularly interested in forcibly uploading half of Mars or feeding babies to their space lizards. Or, or … I don't know, reestablishing the Co-prosperity sphere, Experia's action movies none withstanding. If only because that kind of ambition would seriously subtract from their porn vir time."

Kyon rolls his eyes. "I don't expect them to turn into Genghis Kahn or conquer Saturn, you genius. I expect to get beaten up by disgruntled hydrogen miners."

Haruhi's lips brush his ear, whispering, "Don't be such a terrible sourpuss, Kyon. Genghis might not have been much of a people person but he had his good points, for example …


…fire, ...


And the world…


…flickers. For and back!

His parents' house is a dark silhouette against the reddish glow of the burning city. Somewhere, barely audible, over the roar of the flames, a baby is crying. He turns away from the open door, black and empty, like a mouth screaming and runs. Ten thousand burning cinders scatter across the night sky.



…death,…



.. flickers…



The motorway is covered in an endless river of humanity, shuffling forward into the lengthening shadows, dissolving into the heat haze of the late afternoon in the distance. A corpse, already beginning to bloat, lies at the food of the dam, half-submerged into oily, brackish water, glimmering orange in the buttery light of the setting sun. A flock of seagulls has arrived for the feast, screaming their greed. Kyon pulls on the hand of his little sister, but her eyes slide over the dead man, showing no reaction.

The far roar of artillery shatters the leaden stillness. Unease sends ripples along the river of humanity, turning into mindless fear when the chatter of air defense guns begins. The refugees surge forward, a great writhing maelstrom of spreading panic and her hand is torn from his grip.



… and destruction.



.. flickers…



The thunder of explosions is a physical force filling his world, bringing him to his knees, as stone dust wells up around him. Fire flowers bloom behind the burnt out shells of the building to his right. Bullets zip over him, as a drone dives low for strafing run; the torso of the man in front of him exploding in a shower of blood and tissue.

Kyon throws his body sideways, ducking into a side street, and runs as fast as his feed will carry him, leaving the screams of the wounded and the dying behind him. Rounding a corner brings him face to face with a spider tank. Iron needles stabbing into his side, he stumbles to a stop, as the turret swings around, the slight heat shimmer of the containment fields flickering around the muzzles of the dual plasma guns.

Black rage fills him and he flings a stone at the tank; a useless gesture of defiance in front of an indifferent universe and screams at the unfairness of it all.



The world flickers. Back and forth!



Taniguchi and Kunikida eye him warily. Whiskey is dripping down the opposing wall, with a spray of glass splinters beneath it, Haruhi leans against the wall behind him. He can feel her cat-smile on the back of his neck.

"Oh dear. Temper, Kyon, temper." She laughs, airily.

"Holy fuck, dude. Did you skip your frog pills again?"

"I'm fine." Kyon grits his teeth.

"Yes, clearly. Chugging full whiskey glasses at the wall is a hobby of mine, too."

"I had a stressful day, ok? And the prospect of an imminent beating is doing nothing to improve my mood."

"Worry less about hypothetical thugs outside and more about very real loony bin in habitants on the inside. You really shouldn't have stopped visiting your psychologist."

Kyon is not in the mood for this argument, "I was cured. Turns out I just wanted to bone my mother. Luckily killer robots got to her first. Problem solved. Yay."

"Yeah, well, I'm still expecting to come home to find body parts in the fridge. Probably bleeding on the chocolate chip ice cream, too."

"If I promise to package my victims cleanly into ziploc bags, can we go now? Please?"

Taniguchi sighs and shrugs his shoulders, but Kunikida holds up a hand, while pulling another glass for Kyon from the small maker unit in the room.

"This is good whiskey. This is expensive whiskey. I intend to enjoy it. So let's all just hold on to our pony express, finish the bottle and have a civilized conversation."

"Excuse me? Angry, chinese nationalists right outside the door?"

Taniguchi fills the glass with whiskey and hands it over. Kyon, his protests notwithstanding, eagerly accepts. It is very good scotch.

"Please don't throw this at anyone.", Taniguchi says.

"Oh stop, soiling your pink, frilly underwear. We'll protect you; meanwhile can you run me through how you managed to acquire a psychologist in the first place? Most everyone else makes do with a bit psychosurgery and a Counselling-LAI. Except the really bad cases." And suspected exhumans, Kunikida doesn't say.

Kyon grits his teeth: "We have been over this like a hundred time and I'm growing real tired of repeating myself."

"Dude, you throw whiskey glasses at the wall, you have long, animated conversations with thin air. We wouldn't be poking our noses in your business, if you could keep your crazy contained."

Kyon knocks back his glass: "Me and my crazy are leaving. I have had enough of the third degree. See you at the hotel."

"Don't forget to pay your share." Taniguchi's voice drifts after him, then the privacy curtain, heavy gold embroidered brocade, inset with crystals, whose vibrations kill sound waves, cuts him off.

For a second, Kyon considers just stiffing them with the bill, but the inevitable dip in reputation is simply not worth the short-term satisfaction.

Giving the group around the hookahs a wide berth, Kyon makes for the exit while authorizing his muse to settle his bill with the bar, using his brain wave imprint.

When the faintly transparent bill materializes inside his visual field; Kyon blinks and changes course for the bar.

"Uhh, excuse me … sir?" The orangutan is not broadcasting any public profile information, not even a name or preferred language. That in itself is highly irregular, if not downright illegal.

Kyon's heart sinks.

"Are you the proprietor of this fine establishment?"

"Yeeeesh." The voice is a deep bass grumble, like a slow moving rock slide, but strangely slurred, where the vocal cords did not line up the way their shoddy design intended them to.

"And a recent immigrant from the inner system?"

"Whassh isssh it to youuur?"

"Well, it's none of my business of course, but I think you forgot to change units in your accounting LAI to rep-adjusted EcU, because your billing system is trying to charge me a frankly ridiculous price. It's not your fault of course, immigration services is supposed to supply an advisor muse, until you get used to how things are done… around ….. here."

The orangutan is now looming over the bar, like a cumulonimbus thunder cloud, four hands gripping the edge of the polished redwood bar, the fifth grasping a bottle by the neck and the sixth seizing something that looks suspiciously like a heavy cudgel.

"You owesh moneyize."

"Well, yes. Nobody is disputing that. All I'm trying to say …"

"Give money."

"Certainly. I'm simply trying to help you fix an error in your accounting software, then I'll pay and be on my way, but with the bill as it stands now I simply can't even if I wanted to."

Two of the hands whip forward with surprising speed and close around his upper arms like vices.

"Cannn't paesh?"

"Now hold on, I think you are focusing entirely on the wrong thing here. I can pay, I just need you to change your price to rep-adjusted …"

Kyon searches the bloodshot squinty little eyes for understanding, a sign of recognition, when comprehension sneaks up on him like an assassin in the night.

"… Jesus Christ on a bicycle. Do you know what rep-adjusted EcU means?"

"Give money."

"No. Yes. Sure, but …"

"Listen, listen you know you have rep score, right? The thing where the Three Wise Men… , huge fucking AIs…, really big computers, don't worry about it, record all your economic activities and compare it against a theoretical optimal path to increase the living standard integrated over the whole commonwealth population, the living standard of each population percentile weighted inversely proportional to their income percentile. Essentially if your economic activity improves the living standard of the lower percentiles, every EcU has a far greater weight, because it also increases your rep-score, meaning your basic living stipend shifts upward and your tax rate declines. So some clever guy introduced the idea of rep weighted prices, adjusting the money your customer pay according to their income and their rep score. You are not making less money you just shift the burden more to high income customers. Just consult your muse, there are lots of predictive tools freely available for small business owners and … you are not listening, are you?"

"Give money."

Kyon is yanked upward and deposited non to gently on the bar, nose to nose with his opponent, his sour breath, smelling of onions and fermented fruit, in his face.

It's not considered polite to point out but most uplifted are not optimized for intelligence, lagging behind their creators by one to three standard deviations. It's not their fault, the original designs simply did not call for it. After all they were conceived of as a cheap, menial work force, similar to bioroids but with less of PR disaster attached, to replace the robots, made unacceptable by Earthfall.

Clearly his current conversation partner is not bucking the trend. A flick of his eye mouse sends a private message to his friends: Get your ass out here, you idiots broke the bank and I'm about the get my ass kicked for it.

"I'm trying, but I can't pay the price you are asking, ok? Next month's basic stipend will not be transferred to my account until the day after tomorrow and we kind of spend the leftovers on the trip here." Also beer, weed, high-resolution VR time, a few petals, wingsuiting and the body rental fees for air sailing, he doesn't say.

"My friends must have assumed that the standard conversion applies to your prices, which to be fair is an easy mistake to make, because hardly anybody between Saturn and Hyperion uses standard EcU anymore. Also, stop squeezing my shoulders, pretty please and thank you?"

The privacy curtain to their booth is yanked back and Taniguchi and Kunikida come storming out -, For a moment Kyon fears they will simply make for the door, leave him to the tender mercies of the pissed-off bartender but instead they flank around the tables coming at the bar from two sides, like the world's worst imitation of action flick heroes since Horabi Xin got his foot amputated when he roundhouse kicked the garbage chute. Kyon has to bite back a bout of hysterical laughter. What exactly do these retards think they are going to do? Karate chop the bartender? Please.

"Hey, hey big guy. What seems to be the trouble?" Kunikida has his best Let's-be-reasonable-face on, which makes him look a constipated kicked puppy.

"Paeeesh."

"I … uh … what?"

"He wants you to pay, idiot."

"Sure thing. Not a problem …. uh what's your name?"

"Kaaali."

"Ok, Kali. Can we just …", Taniguchi squints doubtfully "Hold on. Seriously? Kali?"

"Whaaat's wrooong with my naaame?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all. It's a beautiful name and so are you. A beautiful man-…, a beautiful person. Ain't that right boys."

Kyon rolls his eyes. "Oh you are just killing it tonight, Taniguchi. And by it, I mean me. Why don't you go ahead you silvered honey tongue, you. Join the foreign office, get a silk handkerchief and an ascot, and charm some killer A.I. out of their metal underpants."

"Would you shut up? I'm doing science here, I mean diplomacy… or whatever."

"Moooneeesh. Give."

"All right, sure. Not a thing my man. We apologize for the confusion, although you really should get the prices on your menu fixed. We don't have enough in our eWallets but that's not a problem I got an emergency stash and if you give me a net connection, I'll pay you in no time."

"No net. Monesh."

Taniguchi has his hand under his jacket, either looking for his imaginary shoulder holster of pinching his left nipple. This can't end well.

Haruhi leans against the redwood bar with her cat smile, unperturbed by the raised voices, the gesticulating or the angry 300-kg orang-utan within arm's reach.

"Maybe you should offer him something different? A dance maybe? You would look lovely in a tutu."

"Not. Helping."

"Don't pout Kyon." She gently brushes a loose strand of hair from his face. "I'm just spitballing love, but hey just leave it to Kunikida. What's the worst that could happen, really? The public health insurance will cover the replacement limbs, a week or two in a healing tank and a bit of psychosurgery to get rid of the trauma and you will be good as new.

Offer the poor man something. Throw him a bone."

Kyon grits his teeth and turns to address the barkeeper.

"We have the fucking money, ok. If you just wait until the net connection is back, I won't have any broken bones, you won't have any criminal charges and your money and we will part ways much happier for never meeting again.

Or … I don't know I could help you set-up a rep evaluation forecaster software, do your dishes, if that makes you feel better, play the fucking bag-pipe while riding an unicycle."

"I would pay for that." One of the Chinese hydrogen miners has strolled over. A rather pretty girl, probably Taniguchi's grade- A ass.

"Excuse me?"

"You. On a unicycle. Playing the bagpipes. I would like to see that, enough that I and the boys would pitch in to settle your bill, so no limbs have to get torn from any bodies. If you can do that, … actually scratch the last part. I want to see it, even if you can't. Especially if you can't."

Kyon opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again, and finally settles on: "Why?!"

The girl grins and shrugs.

"Why not? You are going to pay us back, when we have network again. Helping out some gormless idiots will do my rep-score some good." Her smile grows sharper. "And I get to watch you humiliate yourself in front of the whole Noo-sphere, Xiao Riben(*). Don't think I haven't seen how you looked at us, when you came in."

Kyon opens his mouth to make a cutting remark, but Kali's fingers tighten reflexively on his shoulders, and he decides that silence is the best part of valor anyway.

"You know what? Whatever floats your boat, your highness. Go to the next 3d-Printer and get me a unicycle and a bagpipe and I'll do my very best." Kyon has to suppress a hysterical giggle at the absurdity of it all. Depending on the resolution, the computation time and energy budget to print two, medium sized item, with moving parts, will probably cost them more than their bar bill, but general sanity is on an extended holiday for this whole excercise anyway, so whatever.

It takes a bit of patient explaining to familiarize Kali with the concept, but finally one of the Hydrogen-miners scampers off to find a public maker of sufficient size, while the Kyon and his friends settle in tense silence on their bar stools under Kali's watchful gaze.

"How the fuck did you guys miss the price thing?" Kyon hisses, full of barely suppressed fury. "And take your hand out from beneath your jacket, now is really not the time to masturbate."

"We didn't miss it." Taniguchi is keeping a very close eye on their host. "Believe me or not, we aren't idiots, Kyon. We can read."

"Apparently you can't. This bar is mildly famous for only using non-rep adjusted EcU pricing, caters to inner system types or outsiders and non-citizens like us, who aren't worthy of a rep-score." The Chinese girl pops a cherry in her mouth and winks at Kyon. "Your two friends seem even less sane than you, but at least they are pretty."

"Really?" Kunikida taps his nose thoughtfully, meditatively ignoring Kyon's poisonous stare. "I would so love to see the shell command history of the billing software."

"Don't you start." Kyon is doing his level best to drill through Kunikida skull with his eyes. "We are nearly out of here, with medium loses of money and dignity. I don't need you people to fuck this up even harder."

Half an hour later when their envoy returns breathless but triumphant, carrying not only a bagpipe and unicycle but also a Darth Vader helmet and matching black cape, Kyon begins to believe that death by angry ape might have been the preferable solution.

Then again, some days are like modern art. You don't need to understand them.


(*) Chinese slur for japanese people. Think gook/nigger

 

[Hobb's Tuna]

Chapter 3a: The Warrior Maidens - First Act

Where dragons fear to tread and memories cut deeper than plasma cannons​

Only second to Lapis Lazuli among the nexus worlds of the Commonwealth, Portal embodies the rugged, can do spirit of a frontier town. Home to the intergalactic cartography institute and the xenobiological faculty of Titan University, it serves as logistic base and R&R facility for much of the Commonwealth's exploration and colonization efforts. (…)

While Lapis Lazuli might boast seven gates spread over the endless indigo reaches of its cloudscapes, Portal is unique in the known universe with six gates within a single square kilometer. Arranged in a perfect circle around the geometric center of the Schüssel, the local name of the enormous impact crater centered around the gate facilities and their interlaced warrens of railyards, logistic bases, analysis laboratories and containment facilities, they are the centerpieces of human effort in an otherwise rather pedestrian system of a dim main-sequence red dwarf, deep in the Carina–Sagittarius Arm, with the usual collection of airless rocks, shepherded by a single gas giant, approaching brown dwarf territory. (…)

The 30-km diameter impact crater surrounding the gate facility is mostly barren and empty for security reasons, with 4 motorways/rail lines converging in a cruciform from the crater walls and four enormous, weapon bristling fortresses, built into the crater walls, which the Recon Regiments use as a staging point in their exploration of the gate warrens. (…) This particularity of urban management is sometimes colloquially referred to as the cross of iron or satan's cross-sight by the locals and is in turn surrounded by four towns, which contain dry-docks, factories, hospitals, research laboratories, as well as the myriad of body shops, watering holes of ill repute, opium dens, brothels, VR tank rentals, petal crèches, soothsayers, specialty gear providers, and cook shops that provide Portal City with its formidable reputation.

Introduction: Portal City and You; An interactive information leaflet commissioned by the Portal City Tourist Board​

In a system, whose coordinates are saved in no databank, in a station with no name, a man with no face sits motionless in a brightly lit room of flowing curves and white, antiseptic formlessness. No shadows are permitted in this place. Nothing that could provide a door to things that sleep and dream.

A kilometer above, on the surface of a dead world, hard vacuum and high energy gamma radiation are backing the barren rock under the space-time twisting gaze of a dead star. Down here, behind hundreds of meters of rock and armor plates silence reigns supreme.

Eye watering geometric sigils were laser-carved into the diamond walls by nano bots, the fractal designs repeating down to the atomic level with the precession of over-engineered machinery.

Hundreds of laser interferometers flicker in interlocking patterns, collapsing the waveform again and again in hypnotic surges; the great containment grid almost seems to breathe.

Separated from the warding circle by a solid 10 meter block of hyper-diamond and keramit, an array of astonishingly primitive monitoring instruments of brass, plastic and steel begin to rattle to life as mechanical transmissions activate and horrendously complicated clockwork mechanisms spin up. The fingers of the faceless man are long and very white, nervously twitching spider-legs, scampering over the braille print out of his instruments.

When he is done, he steps through a heavily armored security lock into a faraday cage, closes the doors behind him, lifts the handle of the antique analog telephone and puts in a twenty digit number on the rotary dial.

In a room full of looming shadows a phone rings in heavy silence.

There is slight click in the static on the line announcing the connection has been established, but this does not register. The faceless man possesses neither the bones connecting his eardrum to the auditory nerve, nor for that matter an auditory nerve. He simply waits the prescribed 10 seconds before delivering his message.

"She stirs."

***​

"Reaper Actual,. Hotel-three-Foxtrot. Contact. 3 Bandits. Coordinates: 17.601; 10.909; 0.0334 Bearing: -204.434; -7.090; -0.0128. Closing fast."

"Acknowledged control. Do we have permission to engage?"

"Positive. Punch through and proceed to waypoint 11. Keep to the timetable. Weapons hot. Good hunting, Reaper-1. "

The Broadsword rumbles with the lazy bloodlust of a hunting cat as its twin reactors pour power into its capacitor banks, the elegant snout of the Rheinmetal Mark VII 150 mm coilgun eagerly swishing back and forth. Even through meters of hyper-diamond, plasteel and impact gel the howling of the wind is audible to her, as the great spider tank jumps some 20 meters forward and up, scrambling out of the canyon, leaving fountains of liquid nitrogen and yellow carbon dioxide ice in its wake.

Her eye-mouse flicks through telemetry feeds, the LAI hunting for the best false colour representation of the storm whipped mesa.

"Reaper-2, keep on my six, you are drifting out of formation. Reaper-3, you are sticking out like a sore thumb on the IR seeker, what is wrong with your heat management system?"

"My intake turbines don't seem to provide the necessary mass flow. Reactor temperatures are high, but stable."

"Confirmed, Reaper-3. Fall back to waypoint seven. Provide fire support when needed."

The storm winds blasting the methane glacier is hell on their scout drones. They have already lost 4 to sudden turbulence and the feed cuts in and out of transmission. Flocks of methane ice fog hang like pale war banners from the looming ice towers surrounding the pass, veils of nitrogen rain are driven before for the tempest.

"Attention Reaper-1, we just lost contact with Bandits 2 and 3."

Mikasa mouths an oath, her data gloves dancing over the haptic interfaces to whip her Broadsword around; guiding her war machine into a small ravine, cutting through the ascent to the pass.

Her War-LAI murmurs in the back of her head. "Enemy heat signatures fading at 5.215 K/sec."

"Anyone see the tin cans, boys?"

"Can't see shit in this weather. Nothing on radar, nothing on lidar, nothing on my checking account. Story of my life." Mikasa has to bite her lip to suppress the nervous giggle, bubbling up from her stomach.

Luckily Armin saves her from having to reprimand Eren for his smart mouth.

"I'm getting strange pings at the extreme outer limit of the W-Band radar, high frequency artifacts. Also we have a storm front incoming; it shows up clearly on the weather radar. In half an hour we won't be able to see our squad partners, even when standing next to each other."

"Ohhh, lucky me."

"Shut up, Eren."

"Bandit 1 just went dark, too."

"Lovely. Ok, here is what we are going to do. Reaper-2 and -4 on eight o'clock, Reaper-5 and Reaper-6, on four o'clock. I want smart-mines all over the pass. Send some bots to set up cameras to give us a view of the other side. Hardwire them."

Sensor bots clamper up over the ice scree field towards the pass, unspooling glass fiber wires behind them. Finally a clear view of the high valley on the other side of the pass materializes in the hard-contacts on their eyes. Steep scree fields are descending from the glacier into a valley widening to a tableland powdered with methane snow. No sign of the enemy.

"Too late, they have engaged their chameleon cloaks and gone to ground. It's their fucking heat dispersal mechanism, Phonon-superconductors man, it's not even fair."

A line of walker imprints is leading over the powder snow of the mesa, disappearing where the winds have scoured the ice of the glacier free.

"We have get them to move. If their reactors are running under load, not even fucking toaster magic is going to hide them." Jean says.

"Yeah, no, sure. Maybe we could just ask nicely. Dear Deathbots, please move so that we can see and kill you. Have this complimentary fruit basket. Kay? Thanks, byeeeeee."

"Jäger, do you know what I like about you?"

"Do tell Jean-boo."

"Nothing. Nothing at all. But your ever so subtle sense of sarcasm is as close as it gets."

"Stuff it up your bunghole…"

Mikasa roles her eyes, "Reaper-2 and -4, maintain radio silence!"

Eren isn't done, yet. "We have to push through; we are on the clock here. Mission timetable demands we reach waypoint 11 by t plus five. No other routes which will get us there in time.

So. I think we should just walk over there, no bull rushing though. One by one."

"Are you insane? We will be slaughtered one by one, how …"

"Enough! Reaper-2 and -4, both of you maintain radio silence! I told you once already, I'm not going to say it again. Reaper-2, finish your thought."

"Yes, Ma'am. It's six against three, so trading one for one, favors us. If they shoot one of ours the waste heat is going to give their position away and the rest of the squad can stomp the bandits with indirect fire. If they don't … well in that case we just walk through their gauntlet one by one."

"That's a fine … idea. Who is going to be the first lucky son of a bitch who gets to play bait?" Jean is not amused.

"I will." Eren is predictably volunteering. Mikasa rolls her eyes. She can practically hear his hackles rising, when Jean snorts.

"No, you won't."

"Reaper-3, Reaper-4, slave your radars to mine. Stand by for new position vectors, we will try for a ground penetration scan of the glacier in grid square R37, R38 and S25 and T21." Hopefully the holographic interference will give them the resolution, she needs.

"Reaper-3, can you compile the drivers and the data analysis toolbox? I need a structural stress analysis, fault lines, weak points, anything like that. I know they must be in the library but I'm not sure on how to install them with the LAI in dumb mode."

"That will take some time, Ma'am."

"Best estimate?"

"My LAI says 15 to 20 minutes."

Mikasa's eye-mouse flicks down to bring the mission countdown and map up into her entoptic display.

"That's cutting it close, but we should be able to stay inside the mission time table. Please try to hurry, Armin."

"On it."

Tense silence takes hold, while her platoon waits first for the software updates to complete and then for the scan to finish. Seconds stretch like hours, while running like quicksand. Her stomach feels like she swallowed an ice brick, her heart is hammering against her breastbone like a jackhammer, she has to dive into her Body BIOS, the bare-bones, ROM version of an air-gaped neural interface, that even the ever paranoid Force: electronic warfare counter division has to allow their heavily modified soldier, twice to adjust her adrenaline output and heart rate.

Finally the scan completes and a false color scan of the glacier walls above them materializes in her entoptic display. The computer's best guess for stress faults are outlined in faint green.

The rest is a mad scramble into positions: high enough for their firing arcs to be able to find their targets, far enough to avoid the soon to be flying debris and stable enough for the steep scree fields not to collapse under the recoil of their coilguns.

A singular exception among the citizens of the Circum-Saturnian Commonwealth, Soldiers of the Recon Regiments do not possess full neural interfaces or muses, denying the TITANs and their abominations a hard to defend gateway into the vulnerable brains of their warriors. Anything that passes will have to take the narrow, winding paths of traditional senses; low resolution, low bandwidth, hard to subvert.

This doesn't mean that Force: Recon has not taken steps to give their men a fighting chance. The world slows down around her, her attention sharpening to the point of a razor-edged spear, as her skull cap caresses her motor and prefrontal cortex with subtle electromagnetic voltages, as her drug glands inject a carefully designed combat drug mix into her bloodstream.

Every color more intense, every detail down to the smallest dust mote in stark relief; anxiety and fear fade into the background while her mind latches on to the mission parameters with the single-minded intensity of a starving copra. The tacnet sings its battle song, the chattering of the War-LAIs reaching crescendo, almost greedy in their clinical blood lust.

It is time.

The high pitched whine of the capacitors emptying is inaudible over the howling of the wind, but the shudder of the spider tanks as the shells are accelerating is unmistakable.

The gauss guns are limited to a quarter charge, nonetheless the thunder is loud enough to rent the world apart as six shells smash into the rock hard glacier walls at Mach 12, sending house sized ice boulders flying among fountains of steam and ice dust.

Slowly, ponderously the glacier, towering over the southern shoulder of the pass, emits a deep groan, a giant of stone and ice waking, a bass note reverberating in her bones, before a whole side of the cliff begins to shear off the mountain and rushes downward into the valley in an enormous avalanche of dust and ice crystals.

Translucent shades are moving in the billowing fog, wraithlike, inhuman elegance of motion, poetry of destruction in handy 12 meter high packages, dodging house sized ice boulders.

Mikasa's grin is all teeth. Got you.

Flickering outlines manifest in the IR.

[ Firing solution established ], the War-LAI whispers silkily in her ear, a blade in her lizard brain, gentle as a lovers touch.

"Reaper one to six, weapons free."

Her Broadsword shudders with the recoil, as the autoloader engages in rapid succession;, Tchunk! Tchunk! Tchunk!Tchunk! Tchunk!

The firing arcs to shoot over the pass are ballistic and therefore low velocity, giving the active defense measures of the tin can's more time to engage then she would like, but the cover is more than worth the expended ammunition.

Flickering daggers of coherent light stab through the clouds of ice crystals, swatting nine, ten, eleven of their shells from the sky, the metallic hydrogen payload erupts in blinding white fireballs, the shells worth 30 times their weight in TNT.

The waste heat of their lasers makes their opponents light up Christmas tree and the rest of the salvo zeros in like a flock of hunting birds - 5 more are ripped from the sky on the descend, then the left overs come down like the hammer of an angry war god, a maelstrom of white light and glowing shrapnel.

Bandit-1 takes a lucky hit directly to the torso and is ripped apart in a shower of white-hot debris as 6.2 kg of metallic hydrogen destabilize in its chest cavity.

Bandit-2 is tossed about by the blast wave, but manages to scramble back to its feet, visibly damaged.

Bandit-3 is closest to the opposing cliff walls and seems to avoid most of the barrage, ducking out of the field of view of the sensor drones before the feed cuts out as the faint indigo blue shimmer of Cherenkov radiation blooms around the pass. The particle beam hits, sending the sensor drones flying in a hail of stone splinters and molten rock.

"LAI-1, request new coordinates for firing solution on Bandit-3."

Her War-LAIs whispers in the back of her skull, the rich, smooth voice distorted to a sibilant hiss.

[Negative. Cover by the rock tower in grid square M193 is too high. Advice to punch through to objective.]

Mikasa can feel the grin affixed to her face like a death mask, the blood rushing in her ears.

"Charge."

And everything happens at once.

The Geiger counters are screaming like lost souls, as her spider tank nimbly jumps the slowly cooling crater in the pass and scrambles down the scree field on the other side, Eren's war machine to her left, Jean hot on her heels.

Bandit-2 is flickering in and out of view as his damaged chameleon skin tries to reengage, sensor ghosts shimmering in her targeting overlay as its electronic counter measures claw into her sensor suit.

Her armor piercing shell goes wide and gouges a considerable crater into rock and ice. Her spider tank rocks backward from the recoil of a Mach 25 tungsten rod and her stomach drops as the ice scree field begins sliding beneath the smart-matter claws of her vehicle.

Inside the impact gel tank her arms are wind milling desperately, her data gloves dancing over the entoptic interfaces but there is no negotiating with gravity and her great spider tank slips, slides and falls, rolling down the scree field, out of the line of fire by half a meter as a particle beam streaks through the space her war engine had just occupied and slams into Jean's tank, shearing of armor plates and legs in a shower of white hot metal droplets. Seconds later the heat reaches the ammunition storage and the tank is ripped apart in a thunderous fire ball, catapulting the main turret some 150 meters high into the sky.

A cold hand is squeezing her heart, while the world card wheels around her, but there is no time. No time. No time.

Up and forward and on your feet. Nownownow. Do not think, do not stop. Let muscle memory and trained in reflexes do the heavy lifting.

Eren's tank is parcouring down the scree field with the elegance of a wrecking ball, but still manages to get a firing solution on Bandit-2, landing a glancing blow on the boxy main body of the walker.

Even glancing blows tend to leave lasting impressions, when travelling at Mach 25; the projectile rips off two manipulators, several antennas and the dorsal laser in cloud of armor plate debris, sending the warbot sprawling on its back.

A needle of coherent light stabs from the shadows of the southwestern cliff walls, partly diffused by the abundant ice crystals and dust in the air -, it still causes Eren's war machine to stagger back in a cloud of vaporized ablative armor.

Sascha is clattering down the incline behind her, cursing vitriolically, sending ice grit and small pebbles flying as another five shells fall from the sky.

"Shit, mother-bitch, goddamnit."

Fire flowers bloom, missing both friend and foe, but providing enough of a distraction for her walker to get back to its feet.

The warbot is trying to use the infrared cover from the expanding fireballs to sneak away., Unfortunately for him the explosions have also burned of most his chameleon skin and parts of his meta-material radar cloak. Three tanks get a firing solution on their foe; one falls victim to the electronic countermeasure suite, but the two tungsten darts disintegrate the warbot into superheated, metallic confetti.

Vengeance is swift and merciless; Bandit-3 has recharged its capacitors, the particle beam leaving bluish afterimages in the atmosphere, while cleanly coring Sascha's Broadsword like an overripe apple. She doesn't even have time to scream.

Armin and Connie have scaled the pass and their superior numbers begin to tell as a hailstorm of tungsten darts descends, the waste heat from the particle beam rendering the warbot's active and passive countermeasure suit useless, ripping their foe to shreds.

Connie's Broadsword has made its way down the incline to the faintly smoldering wreck of Sascha's war machine. The seals are being cracked from the inside.

"The fuck you doing, Connie?"

"Search and rescue."

"That was a direct, point blank hit on the crew capsule. There won't be enough left of her to fill a table spoon. Stay inside, moron." Eren's voice is high with adrenaline.

Mikasa snarls, "Springer get back in your vehicle. Right now!"

Connie has stopped, torso sticking out of the hatch and Mikasa knows a moment of relief before she notices that he isn't even paying attention to her.

"Guys…"

Her eyes flit nervously over the entoptic displays searching, searching, searching … something isn't right.

Smoldering wreckage.

Fresh and shiny scars on the glacier, still shedding debris.

Billowing clouds of dust and black smoke…

Smoke?

Armin's voice is shrill and reedy with fear.

"Black bubblers! Run. RUUUUUN!"

The amorphous black fog solidifies into tentacles, cut from the heart of midnight, and roars forward with the chittering hiss of a hundred billion hungry nano-machines. For the fraction of a section Connie is suspended, cruciform, the sacrificial lamb before the darkness as streams of black hunger pour into his mouth, ear drums, eyes and anus.

Then sun-bright fire pours from Eren's plasma cannons, cutting Connie's scream short.

"Runrunrunrunrurnrurnrunnnnnn."

Mankind knows many forms of molecular machinery, utilizes them for thousands of purposes from specialized, high-resolution construction to medical applications, but without exception, the more complicated the job, the more fragile and finicky the end product tends to be, and nothing is more complicated than an universal constructor. The machines used by man are either simple and sturdy single purpose tools or function only in the sterile environments of nano-forges, carefully supplied by raw material feeds and lovingly tended by meticulously tuned infra-red lasers.

The All-Devourer is a different sort of machine. He feasts on bricks, boulders, blood and brain with the same uncompromising hunger and short of energies ionizing atoms down to the nucleus, there is no surefire way to eliminate the Black Death.

The Plasma throwers on their Broadswords are very short range, a last ditch self-defense weapons. The actual tactical Weissbuch prescribed solution by the War College of FORCE: Joined Command comes in three flavors: Tactical nukes, orbital bombardment and Run And Pray.

Mikasa whips her war machine around, leaving plasma fire clouds in her wake. She has to find her boys and get the hell out.

Dense clouds of carbon dioxide steam, ice crystals and nano warmachines obscure visibility, isolating her in world clogged in white. Her LAI is doing it's best to find the frequencies to pierce the deadly soup, but the Black Death is producing strange sensor ghosts, shifting shapes rising and disappearing in her entoptic displays.

"Eren. Armin. Can you hear me? Where the fuck are you?"

"…on my trail, I'm … object… cir… point three …" Heavy static on the coms, the lasers all but useless with this much debris in the atmosphere and the radio spectrum blanketed with jammers.

"Eren. EREN! Is that you? Answer me, god dammit."

The stroboscopic glare of a plasma discharge fills the fog clouds with directionless ghost light.

If she knows the reckless, brave idiot at all, he has probably gone back for Armin, so there really is no helping it.

She turns her Broadsword towards the sound of battle and the end of all things, scrambling towards the LAIs best guess for the location of the weapons discharge.

Stumbling forward in a world shrouded in white and filled with flickering ghosts, she is losing all sense of direction, sensors and satellite connections producing nothing but a hailstorm of error messages, even the inertial gyro compass seems to be drunkenly spinning around its axis.

"Come on, come on. Reboot you piece of shit."

[ Error. Process volt-rs-86-t could not be found.]

[ Error. Process sdsacess-lf-64 could not be found.]

[ Error. Overrun exception. ]

[ Error. Safety exception, dt-84-c shutting down to maintain hardware functionality. ]

"Override. Emergency Override. If it doesn't work, reboot. If it won't, shut it down and get it out of my stack."

A gaunt face coalescing from the fog, the kindly man smiles his tombstone smile at her, unchanged by the abyss of years and light-years and ice crystals are spreading outwards from her heart, freezing her limbs.

"Hello Mikasa." He says, brushing carbon dioxide snow from his shabby, black coat; hops and skips over a rivulet of liquid nitrogen. "Fancy meeting you here."

"You are dead. You died in Berlin and your body is rotting 100 parsecs to windward from here. You are DEAD." You can't hurt me.

"That's no reason to be impolite."

"Get back into your fucking grave, you shit-stain. Eren killed you. There is no place for you here."

"Miki, little piglet. My big, brave girl. Take my hand." Her father's face is unchanged, too. The same gap-toothed, mischievous smile, the laugh lines around his eyes.

"You are dead. You are not real." Somewhere else, like through a thick wad of cotton, there are alarms, warnings, falling silent one by one, the slow, shuffling steps of a tombstone smile drawing closer.


[Warning: Environmental Seals compromised]

[Warning: Nanobiological warfare agents detected]

[Warning: System integrity compromised]

[Warning: Memetic warfare agents detected]

…

"Don't be a stubborn girl, Miki. Come, there are apple cakes in the kitchen." Her mother is barefoot in the kitchen, strains of midnight hair escaping from her braid, dust kernels dancing in the amber afternoon light of a sunny September day.

Mikasa has to fight down the creeping panic, her field of vision is blurry, from blood or tears, she can't say, flickering like an ancient television set between the haunted house of a previous life and the inside of the pilot capsule, lit red by thousands of error messages on the walls.

"Come her sweetness." Mom opens her arms and suddenly she is nine again, has just skimmed her knee and wants nothing more than her mother's safe and warm embrace.

Somewhere a ghost girl is blindly reaching for a particular red button, hidden away beneath an armored glass cover.

Eren and Armin are playing outside on the swings, she can hear their laughter. The day is crisp, clear and cool, the sky shockingly blue, the last hints of summer lingering on the autumn air. Mikasa runs forward into the smell of baking powder, fresh apples and lemon.

The cover is laboriously unlocked, the cover flicked back.

She falls into her mother's warm embrace.

Presses the button.

 

[Hobb's Tuna]

Chapter 3b: Working Class Hero

Where Moral flexibility is the order of the day and the 0th commandment is much exercised​

Sokka Kesku is a terraformer technician, mechanic, tinkerer, hacker, confidence trickster, bootlegger (best damn Sake in three cantons!), part-time IP thief and full-time Ladies' man, but not currently a very happy camper.

"Stupid fucking company purchasing policies. Stupid fucking socket wrench. Stupid fucking finger."

He pulls the gloves of the offending digit, to give the icy air the opportunity to limit the swelling in his throbbing thumb. No bleeding, which is good. Frostbite is an ever present threat on Mars, particularly this far north. The smart fiber-display of his personal computing unit, embedded in the left sleeve of his outer coat, shows 20 degrees below 0, a balmy spring morning on the north-eastern edges of the Amazonis Planitia. Nearly warm enough to do entirely without gloves as long as he doesn't touch anything metallic, Sokka thinks and eyes the malfunctioning solar panel darkly.

The last dust storm has covered most of the CO2 & CH4 farm in layers of thick, red dust. The vibrating mats, designed to shake of the dust of the solar collectors, have miserably failed at their job, mostly because the electrical connections gave way faster than the dirt.

Also, the wind wall has collapsed in on itself.

"Moving parts are a failure point, they said. Wipers are too easily 3d printed, undermining the replacement policy of the company, they said. Assholes. …

Archimedes?"

His muse is his usual chipper self.

"How's it hanging Mr. Fantastic."

Sokka sighs and rolls his eyes. He had known that giving his sister root access to his muse was a terrible mistake, no matter her reasons. If only he could find the time to install a new personality template. Too busy planning his revenge, but a man had to have priorities and Katara would have ample opportunity to regret her life choices the next time she was using her favorite shampoo.

"… how long will I need to clean this shit up?"

"With 25 solar panels you are looking at an estimated eight hours to reconnect all the power couplings. Ten more if you want to reinstall the dust wipers. Another four with an excavator to set-up a provisional wind wall."

"Great. Fine. Tight."

No helping it then.

Sokka sighs and goes to inspect the wind wall. No sense in repairing the rest if the next sand storm will just bury it or blow it away.

The windwall is a 5 meter high enclosure planted with gen-modded ivy, horsetail and snake grass to anchor the earth, close enough to give protection from the wind, far enough not to limit the meager harvest of the solar panels with shade. The windwall protrudes forward from a fault line in the land, running from west to east by south east, rising towards the foothills of Mount Olympus. The cliff is less than 10 meters tall and mostly hard packed permafrost, harder than granite.

The continuously rising temperatures and the last sandstorm have weakened the structural integrity of the cliff, whose rim has collapsed along at the southern edge of the embankment, shifting a previously existing colluvial fan.

Grumbling curses, Sokka carefully scales the incline of the debris cone to get a better picture of the damage, when his foot catches on something. He stumbles forward barely arresting his fall with his hands and scrapes his knee painfully on the rock.

"Motherfucking shit."

Rubbing his aching knee, he turns to inspect the reason for his abrupt face-plant and squeaks shrilly at the pale white hand rising from the earth, rigid, motionless fingers entangled with the shoelaces of his heavy boots.

Sokka flees, scrambling up the slope like a startled cat, heart beating in his throat. He whirls around, hand desperately reaching for his gun, … which is safe and sound in the gun rack of his sandcrawler.

No signs of pursuit, no dead rising from their graves, no zombies groaning their hunger, in fact, disregarding the occasional trickle of sand, no movement at all.

Mummified corpses are not a particularly unusual find on the old battlefields, but this close to the quarantine zone, not every dead man has the good manners to stay down.

Giving the corpse a wide birth, Sokka is circling back to his crawler. The stiff will have to come out, there are no two ways about that, but he will be damned if he is going to dig that thing up without his heavy artillery.

Once the door of Hilde, his trusty steed, is sealed behind him, he breathes a sigh of relief and opens the weapons locker to pull out his vintage H&K M95 grenade launcher with under slung assault rifle. Sokka slaps two clips home, five grenades and 30 armor piercing rounds, slips on the targeting goggles, collects the ABCNM-warfare test kit and steps out of his vehicle again.

Maybe this isn't so bad. With a bit of luck, there might even something worth salvaging on Mr. Icicle, he will have to call Toph or some of his contacts in … Sokka rounds the corner of the last solar panel row and comes face to face with a kid, who is dusting ferric oxide of his ancient thermosuit, next to the empty hole in the ground, while whistling a merry tune, ABBA's "Dancing Queen" a dutiful little subroutine of Sokka's brain registers, before his fight and flight response washes everything else away on a tsunami of adrenaline.

The zombie kid smiles wide enough to split his face and calls out: "Hey there. Do you …"

Sokka isn't listening. Dead men are supposed to stay dead and if they don't, well, there are ways and means to address the issue.

He whips the muzzle of the grenade launcher up, the outline of his target glowing red in the HUD display of the targeting goggles. Pulls the trigger.

Then something hits him like a freight train, hurling him into whirling, shapeless darkness.

***

Sokka's eyes blink open to the smell of ramen and coffee. Hilde has prepared breakfast, but it is warm and comfortable, curled up beneath layers of thermal blankets in the reconfigured driver's seat. He has to fix the fucking oxygen farm today, but he will take just five more minutes to rest his eyes.

Wait … no surely this was only a crazy dream.

Someone is slurping ramen.

Sokka groans annoyed and rolls over. "Jesus, Katara. Eat quieter. Considering how much practice you have sucking things, this shouldn't be so hard for you."

"Who is Katara?" An unknown voice asks.

Sokka opens his eyes and turns his head slowly and deliberately.

A skinny, bald kid, no older then sixteen, is sitting cross-legged in the passenger seat next to the kitchenette, face buried in a bowl of noodles.

Ok then. Taking it from the top.

He is not dead.

He is not restrained.

He is, as close as he can tell, not subverted, drugged or mind controlled.

So far so good.

Sokka takes his time to inspect his unexpected house guest.

Ancient thermo-suit, some kind of military unit patches on the shoulders, but very young. Dusty. Skinny and lanky but with the hard muscles of an acrobat beneath. Shaven head. Old fashioned interface hard contacts at the base of the skull. An intricate, arrow-like tattoo crawling up the base of his skull and culminating at the crown of his head.

Sluuuurp. The kid is sucking up noodles like a broken air-lock to hard vacuum.

"My sister. Who the hell are you and what happened?"

Noodles disappearing into his gullet at a rapid pace, the kid wipes broth from his chin and gives him a gap-toothed grin. "You had a malfunction. I'm Aang by the way."

"I had … what?"

"A malfunction." A skinny arm whips out and points towards his grenade launcher, leaning haphazardly in a corner, the barrel bent sideways at a nearly-45 degrees angle.

Sokka eyes the damage nervously. "I'll say."

Keeping a wary eye on his house guest, Sokka leans over Hilde's control panels and brings the entoptic displays up with a click of his eye mouse. He has nearly twelve hours of lost time, but otherwise nobody seems to have tampered with Hilde, at least as far as hasty inspection of the diagnostic and command logs will show.

For a second his fingers hover over the entoptic icon of the video-files from Hilde's external camera's before moving on.

"So, uh, do you mind explaining what happened out there? And how come you are still alive. You were frozen when I found you. Freeze dried. Full on Ötzi. If I had a stick, I could have made a little Popsicle-man."

Aang give him a winning smile and shrugs. "I'm just the coolest guy around. Would you have licked me?"

Sokka blinks. " … No?"

"Oh good. That would just have been unhygienic. Brush your teeth first."

"Well, I think it's safe to say that Jack Frost absconded with more than a few of your brain cells."

Sokka is honestly at a loss on how to proceed.

On the one hand a zombie has just invaded his vehicle and is currently munching on his favorite brand of instant beef ramen. On the other hand he is eating ramen, not his brain, has made no recent aggressive moves and, after the episode with the grenade launcher, all things considered, Sokka is actually pretty sure that forcing a confrontation is not in his best interest.

The ABCNM-warfare test kit is resting next to his demolished weapon. Sokka sighs and shrugs. He might as well try.

"Hey, Aang, was it?"

"Thaaaats me."

"Great. Can I take some blood and skin samples? Just so that we are certain you didn't bring anything nasty with you? Bugs, germs, nanomachines, investment bankers?"

Aang cocks his head like a bird, meditatively munching lemon cookies. "I don't like needles. Will there be needles?"

Sokka scratches his chin. Truth is no winner, but lying is not an option. Mix, match and spice to taste with bribery, maybe?

"Yes. But they come with chocolate bars. Deal?"

Aang considers: "Two chocolate bars and a ride to somewhere with a net connection. I need to make a phone call."

"Alright then."

The analysis kit clicks and whirrs over the blood and skin samples, but returns nothing but unusually high levels of heavy metal and other trace elements.

Sokka shakes his head and shuts down the operating software. "You should cut back on your lead intake, kid, but you will not turn is into Titan spawn anytime soon. Anyway, weather forecast says a heavy dust storm is incoming, so we will retreat to a little hidey hole of mine and I'm going to call some friends, if they can help you out. How does that sound?"

The kid is currently working his way through a cracker box at alarming speed, but pauses long enough to give him the thumbs up. Sokka is mildly perturbed and a bit worried.

"I hope you won't start chewing on me, once you are finished with my food supplies."

Aang grins: "I prefer cookies and you haven't showered for at least a week."

Sokka sacks into the driver's seat and begins programming the autopilot. "You are really in no position to complain about other people's body odor Mr. Stinky."

The motor of the crawler rumbles to life and the vehicle lurches forward.

"How did you do that anyway? The last thing I remember is pointing my gun at you from like 15 meters away with you lying on the ground and then I woke up in Hilde. What the hell happened?"

Aang brushes crumbs of his thermo-suit and grins at him.

"I'm the last of a mystical Buddhist monk order. We keep the ancient, secret techniques of shaolin kung-fu."

Sokka blinks, opens his mouth, closes it again; tries to penetrate the layers of friendly, slightly dimwitted innocence with his piercing gaze, finally throws his hands up in exasperated surrender.

"Well, your bullshit-fu is certainly over 9000."

***

The old terraforming monitoring station is fully automated, but with sufficient security measures to keep any normal vagrants out. Thanks to some favor wrangling, Sokka had been part of the construction team, installing the security suit, including a handy little backdoor.

The armored door, barely visible through the veils of sand on the wind retracts and opens into an underground garage. Sokka guides the crawler down the ramp, the howling of the storm only faintly penetrating the thick concrete walls. LED-lamps flicker to live, bathing the interior, bare concrete walls and piles of replacement parts under tarpaulins in harsh, sickly-white light.

It's not quite as icy as outside, still cold enough to turn their breath to mist in front of their faces when they take of their oxygen masks.

Aang curiously eyes the piles of make-shift distillery equipment, stuffed in a corner.

"Specialised equipment?"

"Yeah. Produces solvent."

"Solvent? What kind of solvent?"

"The best kind. Social. Dissolves all kinds of obstacles: panties, ill-will, bureaucratic congestion and sobriety.

Take a seat."

Sokka steers his uninvited guest to chair and proceeds to distract him with a chocolate bar while conducting a quick and dirty log of identification checks. Getting fingerprints not smudged with chocolate is somewhat of a challenge but otherwise his new friend is very cooperative, until Sokka brings up establishing a connection to the antic skin-port at Aang's nape.

"No, thank you."

"You sure about that? The thing looks positively ancient, I'm guessing it hasn't seen many firewall updates. You digital immune system really could use a boost."

For the first time, there is a hint of steel in the young man's eyes.

"My stomach could use a boost, my brain is just fine."

Sokka grunts. No real point to pressing this, it's not like he can force the kid. And to be quite honest he isn't even sure if he owns an adapter that would even connect with this stone-age tech.

He is putting together the data package of his foundling (DNA signature, Photos, Blood and Tissue sample scans, finger and retina prints) to send to his contacts, when the perimeter defense announces an intruder approaching.

A short command gesture materializes the view of the perimeter camera in his entoptic display. Sokka sighs half relieved and half annoyed, for he would recognize that dinged-up mars buggy anywhere, after all he has spent uncounted hours inside its mechanical entrails, trying to keep the damn rust bucket going.

Hi is just uploading the data package to Toph's servers, when his Sister strolls into the room.

"Hey doofus, meals on wheels is here. OOOOh-my-Lord, who the hell are you?"

Sokka keeps on typing but calls over his shoulder.

"Sis meet Aang. Aang meet Sis, the holy terror and housemaid of the Kesku household."

"I have a name dicklord…

"…yes, boot …"

"Hello, Aang. Pay no attention to this arse. I'm Katara."

Aang practically explodes upwards from his tailors seat, with a grin wide enough you could land a drop-ship in it. "Hi. Do you want to go ice-skating with me."

Katara can't help but to take an unvoluntary step away from the sudden intrusion into her personal space, swiping one of the blood sample test tubes of work bench on the floor, where is breaks into a thousand pieces.

Sokka rolls his eyes. "Don't soil your panties sissy-puu, he is harmless. Mostly. And clean up the mess you just made."

"Is there a single mess in this household that doesn't get cleaned up by me?" Katara bends over to pick up some of the larger glass splinters. "Ouch. Do you have broom around here somewhere?"

"In the store-room." Next to the box full of cleaning bots, he doesn't say.

Dusting glass splinters from her thermo-suit Katara smiles politely at Aang.

"Uhhh … that sounds lovely, um Aang, was it? But… there is no ice here, so raincheck?"

"Oh, strictly speaking, that's not correct, sissy-puu. The sewage plant is still leaking. There is a nice iced over area, behind the recycling building, just …. Don't look too closely at any solid matter, which might be frozen into it."

"Lovely. How is Archimedes doing by the way? Maybe another time Aang?"

Sokka grits his teeth and concentrates on his work.

"Go home and take a shower. You stink, sister dearest."

Katara turns to Sokka, whose data gloves are still flying over the command icons.

"You are one to talk. Anyway I can't, water rationing. Dad wants to know how the oxygen farm is coming along and when you will be home."

"Farm is shot to shit. We will need replacement parts, some of them I'll be able to 3D-print if I can get hold of the right IP-cracks, but for the others we will need cash, so I'm trying to set something up with Toph. Don't expect to see me at the shop much in the next week."

Katara sighs and Sokka can see the worry lines digging in like knife cuts around her eyes. She is only 20 but life in the Martian outback means growing up fast or not at all.

"Be careful, doofus. If they catch you it's a penal indenture for you at the very least."

"Ohhh don't worry Sis, with the amount of IP-theft I'm about to commit they will repossess all of our bodies. You will be in the work camp right next to me."

"Great. Exercise the 0th commandment …"

"… and don't get caught. I'm good at what I do and I take every precaution I reasonably can. I have been doing this for a while, it's the reason we still have the IP-licenses for our bodies and a roof over our heads. You want to stay the night? The dust storm is only going to get worse and I think Aang would like the company."

Katara doubtfully eyes Aang's lovesick grin and shakes her head.

"Dad needs me back at the shop. You, too by the way so please finish up here as soon as you can."

Katara pats him on the back, waves goodbye to Aang and disappears down the hatch, leading to the garage. A minute later the mars buggy, rolls from the underground depot and disappears into the dust storm.

The main reason Sokka chose the old terraforming depot is its hardwired connection to the intranet of the Corporate Dome City of Winterfjell, looming over the souks of underground dwellings that house his family, other independent contractors and about five thousand corporate indentures not important enough to rate a place inside the Dome.

Thanks to the bean counters at Financial and an outrageously low bit, Sokka is part of the IT -infrastructure maintenance teams inside the low security areas of the dome, allowing him to reconnect the mothballed terraforming station to the network backbone by using an I.P. address that is supposed to connect to an automatic weather station, whose analysis engine is being feed the cloned and slightly randomized signal of an identical weather station 5 kilometers further up the mountain range.

The dome intranet is his last shield in a long line of proxy servers and Sokka makes a point of keeping his pirating to I.P. licensed to competing Corps. This way even if some overeager security specialist hunts down his signal, it will be written off as the kind of petty small time sabotage so very common between competing corporations.

Sokka sends his feelers out in the underbelly of the darknet, requests for I.P. seal cracks and help analyzing an unusual data set to a couple of freelancers, that occasionally do work on the wrong side of the tracks.

For all that Aang seems harmless; Sokka has not forgotten that his new friend was a zombie not twelve hours back. He wants a full lab report on the samples he took, before he even considers taking a potential infection risk into town to his family, not only the minimalist shakedown an outdated ABCNM-warfare test kit can provide.

He writes his messages, uploads the data and settles in for a long wait with the hot pot, provided by his sister, and a bottle of illegal sake, Aang playing hide and seek with a cleaning bot in the background.

When Sokka startles awake in his chair, the dust storm is howling full strength outside, Aang has rolled in a ball on the cot in the corner of the control room. The sickly blue light of the screens hurts his rheumy eyes and the insistent beeping of an emergency-priority message in his dark net inbox makes him swipe the half empty sake bottle to the floor in his haste to answer.

It's from Toph.

It's short.

A single word in fact.

"Run!"

***

Fear breathing down his neck, Sokka does his best to hastily sanitize the logs for all the good it will do him. If whoever found him makes it to the terraforming station not even napalming it will be enough to hide his tracks from modern forensics.

His best bet is beating the slowly turning mills of corporate bureaucracy to the dome and the original connections. Let them, whoever them is, wrack their brains how a fully automatized weather station was committing I.P. theft.

He shakes Aang awake and ushers him into the crawler. He can't leave him here, unsupervised, but he also can't take him into the dome.

His best bet is the old truck stop at the A-613 junction, Hannes is a pal and will keep an eye on an unusual kid for a few hours.

The sand storm is reducing visibility to essentially zero and the crawler is moving at a walking pace, headlights penetrating no further than a few meters into the swirling maelstrom of dust and darkness. Sokka steers them into an arroyo, gradually deepening into a canyon, trying to stay out of the wind, which saves their lives.

An obscenely bright light shines through the dust storm, casting sharper shadows than the midsummer noon sun. A column of flame descends from the heavens, a finger of god come to plot out the sinners.

Running on pure instinct Sokka brakes hard, directing their vehicle into the shade of the canyon walls.

The God light flickers, brightens and fades and for but a moment the storm itself seems to hold its breath, awed by powers so much greater than its own. Then the shockwave hits like the mailed fist of an angry giant, swiping boulders larger than their crawler from the canyon walls. The ground bucks like an angry horse, Sokka bangs his head against the steering wheel, tasting iron.

When the fury of the elements has slightly subsided Sokka slowly uncurls from the fetal position beneath the control panel, wipes blood from his eyes and tries to peer through the cracked, dust covered front shield, miraculously still intact.

"What. WHAT THE FUCK …"

"Orbital kinetic strike. Probably about 5 megatons. Seven o'clock, about 25 km out, we were lucky with the dust storm and the canyon or the thermal radiation would have roasted us alive." Aang is scanning the churning clouds, all hints of playfulness dissipated.

Sokka groans, his whole body shaking with shock, the pain of the burns on his hands and face beginning to register.

"Dad, Katara … the town is that way."

Aang does not turn his head.

"Not anymore. They will have hit the central dome first, but they will be along shortly to mop up whatever is still moving … ahhh. There."

Fire trails much smaller and less bright than the harbinger of the end times from before begin emerging from the churning storm clouds. One, two, five, eight, ten.

"Dropships."

"They are coming."