Ch. 17: Journey

As the pirates live to see another day, political factions across the Solar System maneuver, and alliances shift

Written with German Yanovsky

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Earth I (Luna)
2120-07-08 (next day)

Heorot hated the train.

Oh, it was comfortable enough. Speeding along through airless tunnels on a cushion of magnetic levitation, it made no noise and traveled smoothly. The gravity was stronger than Luna standard and therefore easier to walk in, due to the vactrain’s angled track and the effects of centrifugal force.

And she had a private compartment, of course. Tastefully outfitted with plush cushions, chrome accents, and recessed lighting. Still she scowled out the darkened window, and it showed her little back other than her own reflection.

Normally she preferred to fly, but leaving the Aethonic compound at all was an exercise in “being seen.” So the vactrain it was. Spectators could get glimpses of her at the stations and spread blurry snapshots around on their streams. Aethonic’s CEO, bloodied but unbowed: a titan of industry, and soon to be the scourge of the space pirates.

Staring out the lightless window, she let her thoughts drift past imagined captions.

It’s a setback, she’d told her board, during a tense and unpleasant conclave.

It’s a PR disaster, they’d complained in return. The pirates had not only spectacularly destroyed Aethonic’s flagship deep miner with nothing more than a collection of rocks: they’d also boosted and broadcast the last messages of the doomed crew. Lawyers were busy scrubbing all those unauthorized transmissions from LunaNet, but some had made their way back to families on Earth, and there were now unfortunate headlines in the press.

The board wanted to talk about ‘optics’ and ‘morale.’ Heorot had ruthlessly dragged their attention back to the bottom line.

The mineral wealth of 1036 Ganymed will, in the long run, more than justify these expenditures. Our best estimates for value are in the quintillions.

Numbers like that justified any risk. The math was inarguable. The board had grumbled, but in the end they’d bowed. Their only duty was to the shareholders: and the shareholders’ only desire was to see the numbers go up.

But Heorot wanted more than just money. She saw farther than that. Controlling 1036 Ganymed as well as 433 Eros would put her in a position to dominate the expanding frontier of space, and potentially cut off her rivals’ access to new discoveries.

Ultimately, she wanted the stars. All of them.

“Ma’am?” The sound of her compartment door sliding open interrupted her thoughts and made her turn in her chair. “Drink service?”

A uniformed attendant, with a cart, stood in the door. “Yes, tea, thank you,” Heorot said crisply. “Jasmine if you have it, no milk or sugar.” Then she turned back to the window: all those kilometers of darkness unspooling at hypersonic speeds.

Dishes clattered as her attendant set out the tea service. They were a shadow in the corner of her vision, not commanding attention until they asked her: “Lemon?”

“No,” she said, with a trace of irritation. She had already stated her requirements clearly; the question should not have been necessary. But this was the sort of thing that happened when one took the train.

“Thank you, ma’am. And do you have any comment for our viewers about Aethonic’s humiliating defeat by a bunch of rabble with a bunch of rubble?”

Heorot pivoted in her seat, focusing her full attention on the interloper. For the first time, she saw that beneath their uniform cap they wore a visor obscuring half their face. Right now it was displaying googly, mismatched eyes.

“Who are you,” she demanded. “SECURITY!”

“No comment then? You’re on...Hexadecimal! Are the pirates secretly backed by a Terran military?” they goaded. “Or were the Eros miners a sacrifice? Is it—”

Heorot stood up, and shoved the drink service cart into the intruder. She was more solidly built than they were, and she caught them off guard: they stumbled backwards, and she followed up, driving them against the wall of the compartment and pinning them there. They grunted in pain as the cart handle jolted into their midsection, and put up their hands.

The door to the compartment opened again and her security detail rushed in. Two guards, not contractors but direct Aethonic hires. Perhaps after this she would make the effort of remembering their names. “Stop, stop!” the imposter said urgently. “Hey, chill out, guys!”

Heorot reached over the cart and yanked off their visor. Underneath was a pale pimply teenager with a sad, sparse attempt at a mustache—a boy, then, most likely. “Who are you,” she demanded, and stepped back, yielding to the guards who rushed forward to secure him.

“Nobody!” he protested, as they spun him around, shoved him against the wall, and patted him down. “And I ain’t do nothing!”

“Are you all right, ma’am?” one of the guards asked her. “What happened?”

“This sewer rat accosted me.” Heorot turned the visor over in her hands. It had screens on both sides. The outermost one displayed the mismatched emoji eyes, beneath a camera aperture. The inner display she had to lift to her face to make out, and then she saw that it only showed the room around them, shifting with the camera angle. And also an overlay of text:

Or were the Eros miners a sacrifice? Is it all related to Mars?

“Listen, I was just hired to wear that and say whatever it told me,” the kid said, as Heorot lowered it from her eyes. “And no I don’t know who, it was a gig, it was in the cloud. I picked that thing up with the uniform from a locker in the station and it told me where to find the cart. I’m not armed or anything, you don’t gotta be so rough!” One of the guards strapped him into handcuffs. The other stepped over to take a look at the visor.

“I think I’ve seen one of those before,” she volunteered. “It’s from an old game system. My dad had one in his house.”

“It’s a cheap piece of shit,” Heorot said. “But it’s been modded. I want our team to take a look, see what they can trace. And as for them—” she indicated the teenager with a jerk of her chin. “I’m pressing a complaint.”

“Yo, I only asked you a question!” the kid objected. “Lady, you attacked me! I want to file a complaint!”

She smiled grimly, and nodded to the security team to march him away. This entire distasteful incident would do nothing to improve her opinion of trains. Or her PR.

And yet the car that held her sped smoothly forward on its airless magnetic track.

Ursula Heorot could not know that, in the much more crowded economy section of the same train, there was another person wearing a matching visor. They had the same slender build as the teenage kid, but they were draped in layers of charcoal and black, with an enveloping hood that cast shadows on the parts of their face the visor did not obscure.

They watched, and they listened, and they recorded.

And when the train arrived at its station they filed off with all the others, just another nondescript bit of the crowd that flowed ceaselessly through the tunnels.

Only once did they break away from the general current, and only for a moment. Something had caught their attention. Their head turned beneath the hood to focus on a bit of graffiti on a tiled wall, tucked into a grimy corner. It was done in dripping red, fresher than the older scribbles behind it. A fanged skull and crossbones.

The enigmatic watcher, who answered among other names to Hex, stepped closer and tilted their head to the same angle as the skull’s. The visor pulsed with light, a flash to illuminate the image as the eye of their camera captured it.

And then the light died, and the watcher moved on, leaving all that had been in shadow returned to the dark.

***

Space, between the orbits of Earth and Venus
same day

Vanessa Koenig’s eyes were closed, and her mind was gone.

She lay in her cabin, strapped into a molded and padded bodyport. Lying there in her robes, unmoving, with her long white hair drifting loose about her, she had the look of some drowned maiden from romantic legend.

This effect was heightened by the glowing symbols etched into the deck around her recessed sanctuary. They were backlit with a faint electric light that made them flicker with color: orange and red now, with occasional flashes of gold. A bundle of twisted cables snaked from her neck down into a recessed channel, which emerged to join with a power socket at the bulkhead. But the circle of Goetic sigils flowed across unbroken, and within that circle, Vanessa slept peacefully.

When she opened her mind’s eye, she was somewhere else entirely.

A temple. High and classical columns, white marble. Friezes painted around the ceilings in Greco-Egyptian style. Although as she looked closely Vanessa could see that some of the figures were anachronistic, emojis replacing heads. And many of the columns were broken. The bottom steps of the temple were swallowed in sand, and it spread in patterned waves as far as the eye could see.

Vanessa herself was the same, but her robes had changed. In the simulation she was wrapped in a white bullskin, with a crown of ivy in her hair. Her feet were bare, the sand spreading over her toes: as soon as she became aware of it, she could feel the grit.

And the cool of the air. Sensory details were kicking in. The sky came into focus, a glorious desert sunset settling over the horizon. A susurrus of night winds raked the sands, and she felt the bite of it blown against her.

Then: a darker, deeper chill. She lifted her chin as the shadow fell over her.

She raised her eyes to a god.

It looked back at her with bright and inhuman interest. In this place Vanessa’s daemon had taken the form of an obsidian giant with the head of a falcon, and the sun was setting behind the god. No: the god was carrying the sun, balanced on its raptor’s head. The gold of its eyes was lit with fire.

“Turn down the wind!” Vanessa shouted up to it. Her hair was whipping around her face, and she had to put up a hand to shield her eyes from stinging sand.

The falcon-headed daemon changed the angle of its gaze. It used the quick and jerky motion of a predatory bird, and it made the sun glitch too. All the shadows of the temple columns tilted and lurched before re-stabilizing. The wind died entirely.

“Thank you,” Vanessa said. Then she looked around, turning her back on the daemon to stroll curiously through the broken colonnades. “We’re going with this, then? Ozymandias, the lone and level sands, isn’t it all a bit...on the nose?” She stopped to look more closely at the artwork up on the unbroken parts of the temple, her eye caught by the place where a traditional painted frieze transitioned into comic strip panels.

The shadows made another jerk as the daemon cocked its head. Its cruel beak opened. MARKUS, it croaked. A rebellious little breeze skirled up twists of sand and then died again.

Vanessa glanced back over her shoulder at it, smiling encouragement. “That’s right. I like this part, you know. Bringing in a new convert.” She let her fingers brush the sand-worn temple walls. The simulation was nearly perfect now, all sensory details engaged. “When I can make them understand how important the Work is. How we’re needed.”

Her daemon said nothing, as nothing was required of it. “All right,” Vanessa said finally, returning to the temple steps. “Put him in. Give me your best Markus Stevens.”

And then he was there, a Lunar executive in the middle of the desert. He rocked back on his heels to take in the full temple. Vanessa watched him quietly as his eyes traveled over it, noting where his attention focused. It came to her soon enough. “Hello,” she said then. “I’m Vanessa Koenig. I hope you’ll take the time to talk.”

The lines at the corners of his eyes creased. A slow hand came up to stroke his beard. “We’re talking now,” he pointed out.

“Are we?” Vanessa said. “That’s an interesting question, actually. From my perspective, I’m having a conversation with a simulation of you. Our AI will take that data and create a program to send to you. When you run it, you’ll see this place, and a simulation of me. But will we have the same conversation? Will you ask me the same things—and if you don’t, will that version of me say what I would have?”

She kept her voice friendly, even playful. She’d spent two days now studying Markus Stevens. Reading his position papers, his shareholder advisories, and his jokes and casual comments on the exchange layer. Pulling everything she could from the networks, and taking a deep dive into what the dream engine could reconstruct of his psyche.

He was a seeker. She’d determined that much with high certainty: his laid-back affability concealed an insatiable drive to understand and control his environment. An interesting riddle was the best way to hook him. So she spread her hands and showed him one, smiling. “I can’t know. It all depends on how good our simulations are.”

“You must think they’re pretty good,” he observed. His tone was light; his eyes were shrewd.

“They are,” Vanessa agreed, dropping her hands. “I believe we are talking, and maybe even more than that. We’re creating something together. Across time and space, we already have. This little world—it was generated by AI, but shaped by the data it has on both of us.” She pointed back at the temple, up at the surviving pieces of the frieze. “Are you a Jack Kirby fan too?”

“The King,” Markus said, sounding pleased. He ambled over to the walls even, tilted his head back to look over the artwork, and then around at the rest of the temple before he strolled back. “Beautiful woman, shared interests...can’t wait to see what kind of mind-virus you’re trying to give me here.”

Vanessa let her amusement show. “The worst kind, I assure you. A basilisk of truth. But we will need to meet face to face, in the real world, before I tell you all our secrets.”

Somewhere in the distance of the desert, a night bird gave a lonely call. The air around them was darkening. The sun, and the sun-god, had slipped away: only a memory of light was left to the skies.

“Why am I talking to you?” Markus demanded suddenly. “I’ve met Sebastian Francis. Face to face, in the real world. Isn’t he your boss?”

“He’s more than that.” Vanessa kept her tone serene. “And he doesn’t think you trust him. He will take the time to answer questions, if you prefer. But I am also permitted to divulge certain of our mysteries. And I’m enjoying our conversation.”

The simulation of Markus Stevens scratched his beard. “Are you? All right then. Tell me. Is it true y’all’ve got a ship full of brains in vats, all plugged in to some kind of supercomputer?”

Vanessa leaned down, brushed some sand away from the top step, and made a place for herself to sit. She tugged the bullskin across her knees as she settled; its leather was supple and soft. Then she looked up at Markus and said: “Yes. The Renunciation is a collaborative project between organic minds and simulated ones. Like we’re doing now, but on a much larger scale.”

He nodded, looking off at the horizon and thinking. When his attention came back to her he simply asked: “Why?”

“Our initiates come to us for different reasons,” Vanessa said. “But all of them reject life as it is. Don’t you?”

He came a little closer, to sit down on the step near her. He stretched his long legs out and leaned back on his elbows. “Now, why would ya say a thing like that? I love life.”

“Then why would you work so hard to build, to change, to explore—why create anything, if you’re satisfied with reality as it is? And who could be, when you think of all the pain and suffering it holds for so many?”

He held up a finger. “I love life, didn’t say I’m satisfied with reality. You can love a thing and still want to improve it.”

For that, she rewarded him with another smile. “And that’s why we should be allies. We are both trying to transcend natural limitations—you with your engines, us with our simulated worlds. We are both engaged in the Great Work. And we can help you.”

He regarded her for a long moment, and she met his gaze steadily back. “Do they own you?”

“What?” She was, for the first time in the conversation, surprised.

“All you ever hear about the Renunciates are two things. You just confirmed the first, about the brains in vats. The second is: they buy people and ship them around. Now I’d call that human trafficking, but I’m a simple man. So maybe you ought to explain it to me.”

“It’s more complicated than that.” She could hear a chill in her own voice, and tried to correct it. “You have employees, you make contracts. You know what it takes to keep a large-scale enterprise running. And ours has...unique resource demands. What we do, we don’t do for profit. But money is required.”

Markus nodded, genially enough. “Sure, all right. Didn’t answer my question, though.”

“I’m under indenture,” Vanessa admitted. “But I already was. I was created in Aphrodisia City, born into debt for my birth. When Frater Sebastian bought out my contract, I considered it a rescue. I am happy to be with the Renunciates. I believe in their work.”

“Well, I’ll give your boss this,” Markus said. “He was right to send you instead of trying it himself.” He pushed himself up from the steps, dusting sand off his palms. “I have more questions, but I wanna save it for when we’re really talking. I’ll be in touch.”

And then it all went away: the temple, the desert, the man. Gone. In fact none of them had ever truly existed at all. And yet there had been a meeting, in that nowhere place; there was going to be a meeting.

In her cabin, strapped into her cradle, Vanessa opened her eyes.

She reached behind her head, yanking out a cable that had found its plug there at the base of her neck. The sigils on the deck around her flared to white, registering the disconnect, and then gradually darkened completely. Vanessa unstrapped her safety belts and maneuvered herself out of the bodyport, floating over to a minifridge to extract a cold pouch of electrolyte water. She found full-immersion sessions draining.

But the daemon had what it needed, and the simulation was complete. It had resolved successfully, at least in the iteration Vanessa had experienced. She could only wait now, and hope that later, when the real Markus Stevens played through the message, his version of the conversation would go similarly.

She had every faith that it would.

If you want to read ahead, Journey is available in paperback and e-book formats from Amazon ($2.99 for Kindle). But what it really needs is word of mouth, so even better than buying the book is leaving an Amazon/Goodreads review, or posting a link on your social media, or forwarding to a friend. The first reader to make a TikTok about it will receive a free signed paperback—link me your video to redeem this offer.

On the Journey Station soundtrack (Spotify | YouTube), the two scenes in this chapter are set to The HU’s “Wolf Totem” and “Earth Not Above” by Haelos.