Risk
Today’s Adept workshop was cancelled. Tiv was overseeing the last of the class undergoing some of their final combat certifications.
I was driving myself up the walls in the meantime.
“[…We need more facts,]” I realized.
“[No kidding.]”
Nora and I had completely trashed Nai & Nerin’s apartment. At least, it looked that way.
Documents were strewn over the kitchen counters and table. More than a few of them had spilled down to the floor.
The filing system I used in my psionics was impeccable…as long as it stayed inside my brain. Put out on display like this, I was beginning to worry there might be something wrong with me.
“[I mean really, hard evidence wise, what do we have?]” Nora asked.
“[Hard evidence?]”
Working backwards…
A mosquito drone had been found in the vents within earshot of our abduction investigation.
The Vorak had tried to kill me on and off…except that wasn’t really hard evidence. It was a first-hand account, but that’s not the same thing.
The ships.
The ‘A’s, as Nora’s group had taken to calling them. Apollo had already been taken by the moon landing missions back on Earth. So that label had been given to Daniel’s and my ship—the missing one. They’d used the rest of the pantheon’s siblings to complete the set. The other guys’ ship was the Ares while the two girls’ ships were the Artemis and Athena.
The Vorak had those. We had no access to them.
Then…the food. I hadn’t eaten them for weeks now, thank God, but the formula had been copied from the rations that the A ships had been stocked with. Maybe that was traceable? I doubted it.
“[Crap…]” I sighed. “[Too much of this is speculation, or circumstantial.]”
There wasn’t even anything tangible proving the drone we discovered was connected to our abductors at all.
But the alternatives seemed even less feasible.
…So where did that leave us?
“[Well, I think it was big of you to admit the Vorak didn’t abduct us,]” Nora said, looking over some of my Korbanok timelining.
“[That’s one of the other reasons I think I can trust Laranta,]” I said defensively. “[She got in my face about keeping me from picking fights with them. She admitted that, with the information the Vorak had, the Coalition might have made similar mistakes.]”
“[Mmm…]” Nora hummed, unconvinced, I could tell. But she didn’t press it.
“[The more we keep having to rely on assumptions, the riskier things are going to get,]” I said.
“[But as long as we can only get circumstantial evidence, what else can we do but stress test as many circumstances as possible?]”
“[…We stay calm about it, and we go as slow as we need to. I…I think we might have to get comfortable with the idea that we aren’t going to see Earth for years,]” I said.
“[…We’ll be lucky if it’s only that long,]” she agreed darkly. “[Slow and steady, but let’s not get lazy about it. What did we actually find out at the fish factory?]”
“[That the…]” I trailed off. I’d been about to say: ‘the drone wasn’t broadcasting there’. But that wasn’t necessarily true. “[We didn’t find anything dispositive about the drone. Nothing there screamed ‘drone control’, but we also couldn’t look very closely. There could have been hidden stuff.]”
“[I don’t disagree, but if we’re going to have that mindset for every place we visit, we’re just going to be combing the whole of High Harbor one building at a time,]” Nora sighed.
“[All right…]” I huffed. “[It’s…not impossible for someone inside the Coalition to be involved: the drone was probably transmitting to somewhere on base.]”
Nora nodded.
“[We can confirm it if you get this signal sweeper working,]” she said.
I glowered without answering. It didn’t sit right with me at all. Not because I didn’t think it was possible, but because whoever it might be would implicitly be betraying Serral, Laranta, Nai, and more. People who’d helped me. Who I respected.
“[Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of using a drone though?]” Nora asked. “[The whole advantage is its small, and it can move itself. It doesn’t need a person to put it there. If the drone is just transmitting to somewhere or someone in the Coalition, doesn’t that mean they have to have some interaction with it—controlling it?]”
“[…No…]” I said slowly, trying to wrap my head around worst-case scenarios. “[No, the drone might not be remote controlled. It could be totally self-sufficient, and it might just broadcast its feeds to...something like a dead drop, to be picked up later. Or maybe even another drone—one that relays the signal further.]”
“[Which brings us back full circle to your signal sweeper,]” Nora said. “[We don’t get to confirm anything without something concrete connected to the drone.]”
“[Then ignore the drone for a second,]” I said. “[Our goal right now isn’t just the abductor. We want to find where the Vorak have your campers. What are the odds the smuggler can find something on Archo?]”
“[…I think something’ll turn up. The only question is how helpful we can make it, and how much the Coalition is going to pay for it.]”
“[Serral’s talking to Asu Tolar,]” I said. “[He was pissed off about not being warned about the factory.]”
“[Does it matter to us why?]” Nora asked. “[It’s a military. I don’t know the ranks exactly, but there’s always rank bullshit and brinksmanship. Tolar could have dragged his feet to avoid sharing information.]”
“[Serral hates that kind of pageantry,]” I recalled. “[He’s too pragmatic to have any patience for it. He’s going to ruin Asu Tolar’s life day after day until he’s satisfied.]”
“[…If Berro Jo is smuggling things for the Coalition, then he’s not just smuggling goods around Lakandt laws, he must be doing the same thing on Archo, right?]”
“[While I was visiting the Organic Authority,]” I said, “[two of their high-ranking personnel both tried breaking some pretty massive laws. I have learned that rules and rule-breaking are mostly the same out here as back home.]”
“[Pretend then, for a moment,]” she said. “[You’re a criminal on Archo. You get a call from the rak on the other end of your smuggling line. They ask you to dig into a…what? A Vorak blacksite? How would anyone go about finding out anything?]”
“[Bribe someone? It would depend entirely on what resources me and my criminal ilk have.]”
“[And which of them you’re willing to use,]” Nora said. “[But as long as it’s just the two of us talking, that’s going to be your department. I don’t have any idea what aliens are capable of.]”
“[A lot less on the computer front, and a more on most others,]” I said. “[I only heard anecdotes about it, but Casti biotech could be good enough that they could track people based on the bacteria they left behind at your ‘blacksite’.]”
“[Would criminals have access to that kind of thing?]” Nora asked.
“[…Dunno,]” I said wearily.
“[You seem kinda beat,]” she said. “[You need a break?]”
“[What I need…]” I said, “[…is a change of pace. I either wanna tear something up, or start cutting my teeth on this signal sweeper.]”
“[Well, no workshop today,]” Nora pointed out.
“[Then…]” I said.
<…That is startling…> they responded after a moment.
·····
“This isn’t actually the first time I’ve helped someone make a piece of Adept tech!” Shinshay grinned.
I still hadn’t met the engineer in the same place twice. This time they’d led us to a storage room attached to High Harbor’s main reactor complex. Pieces of equipment and junk were strewn about on one half of the room, while against the opposite wall there was a small series of workbenches and machining tools following a chaotic organization system.
I wasn’t the only person with messy organization.
“Anything like this, specifically?” I asked, cascading the piles of junk for drones or eavesdroppers. Just in case.
“Most of my work with Adepts in the past has been focused on having them better understand the properties of the materials they make, or better understanding what can be possible with conventional materials,” they said, grabbing some blueprints. “If either of you are low intricacy, you might not be able to contribute the way you might hope.”
“We’re both pretty handy,” I said. “Psionics helps. If you can help us refine a psionic blueprint of what we have in mind, then we should be able to follow the blueprint when we materialize it.”
“Interesting…interesting…That depends on what you mean by ‘Adept technology’,” Shinshay said. “There’s usually two types: tech made by Adepts, or tech that mimics Adeptry.”
“That’s possible?” I asked about the second one, surprised.
“How do you think air barrier generators work?” they asked.
“I thought it was some kind of exotic field,” I said. Like the thing Vather snuffed Nai’s flames with.
“It is, but exotic fields have to be produced by a piece of exotic matter,” Shinshay said. “Just like natural magnetic and gravitational fields don’t just occur from nowhere, neither can exotic ones. They’re both generated and oriented via a chunk of mass.”
“Vather’s field relied on that stupid little shard,” I recalled, mostly for my own benefit. But it was a good reminder.
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“Waitwait,” Nora said. “You lost me. What’s the difference between an Adept field and an exotic one?”
“The Adept field is the big one made by a star,” I said. “Exotic fields are…smaller. There’s not really a catch-all way to describe them. It depends on what the Adept made the source material to do. Here…”
I materialized two pieces of crystal, heavily cribbing what I knew about Nai’s selective solids. I could almost imagine…the hours of practice she might have put in to dial in the interaction just right…
And here I was just blatantly copying her homework. Psionics really were cheating.
“This piece of crystal,” I said, handing Nora the first one, “interacts normally. It’s solid see?”
She turned it over in her hand, nodding.
“So’s this one,” I said, trading with her.
“But the first one generates a field.” I gestured around a small imaginary bubble around the first crystal, setting it on the table.
“And the second crystal gains a certain property inside the field…” I had her move the second crystal inside the imaginary bubble.
It fell right through her hand and into the table below.
“…noninteraction.”
“[Oh that’s fucking spooky…]” she murmured.
“Wait, did you just get that thing stuck inside my workbench?” Shinshay asked.
“Relax,” I said. “I made the second crystal with its own exotic field.”
Specifically, I held my hand over the table and created an opposing magnetic charge in my palm.
The crystal flew up, passing right through the table into my awaiting hand.
“…If you still had your hand in the field…and the magnet inside your hand was still exerting force on the crystal…” Nora said.
“Like this?” I asked, putting my hand and the crystal inside the field again. The crystal slipped in my grip, sinking partway through my hand, intangible.
“[…So now what happens if you remove your hand from the field while it’s still overlapping with your hand?]” she asked.
I blinked.
“I…”
I didn’t know. The thought was followed by a reflex, dematerializing it all.
If that was ever the answer to an Adept question, the safest thing was to stop before something hurt you.
“Okay, exotic fields, but I feel like we got a little off track,” Nora followed. “And that’s how the colonies keep their air in?”
“The air barriers do work by creating an exotic field, but it does so by creating a certain material in the machine itself,” Shinshay said.
“I thought no one understood how to connect to the Adept field,” I said. “And I assume the machine does connect to the Adept field?”
“It does,” Shinshay confirmed. “But no one understands how people connect to the Adept field. Some Adept figured out how to make a very exotic machine with some very exotic components that could.”
“Can one of these machines make the materials you need to make more?” I asked.
“A reploid series?” Shinshay said. “It’s possible, but the cost would be unfeasibly high. Most Adept machines rely on recreating a material made by a real Adept. They can’t really make new exotic materials.”
“Reploid series?” Nora asked.
“Recursive Adept creations,” they clarified. “Anything that could create, propagate, and spread itself indefinitely. They’re very banned, right up there with orbital weaponry and bioweapons. Reploids are commonly thought to only be organic—or organic adjacent—Adeptry that becomes self-sustaining, but it could theoretically be mechanical too. In fact, Caleb’s [Doktor Doom] suspicion sounds very similar.”
“But this is all secondary, right? We’re more interested in the other kind of the Adept-tech,” I said. “We don’t want to make a device for making an exotic material.”
“Yes…yes…you want to detect some unconventional transmissions.”
“Yeah…if there’s such a thing as exotic fields, is there such a thing as exotic radiation? Signals, I mean. Any form of exotic electromagnetic radiation?”
“Well…that’s a complicated question,” Shinshay admitted. “For the most part? No. Electromagnetism is one of the fundamental interactions in nature. It requires skills the likes of which only someone like our Warlock would possess, but the greatest of Adepts can conceptualize entirely new forms of interactions that only their creations can utilize.”
“…What?” Nora asked incredulously
“That…sounds really complicated,” I agreed. “What are the odds this drone was broadcasting with something like that?”
“Low, quite low,” Shinshay said easily. “You said you recognized components of it when you cascaded it? Circuits? Microphones?”
“Yeah, I think a transmitter too, but I can’t be sure if it worked conventionally.”
“Bah…what do they teach you on Earth?” Shinshay joked. “I don’t believe this is a question of hardware. I think any antennae array is going to be capable of picking up your signal. The question is if you can make a detector to recognize its transmission amongst the rest of the radiocommunications on base.”
“So we’re bust from the start?” I complained.
“No, no…” Shinshay grinned. “For any other Adept, I might have said yes. But you have these new fancy psionics, and so I think we might be able to find a method to detect your hidden signals. Tell me, how much do you know about programming algorithms?”
One of my best friends back home had tried to explain his love of coding. It had gone over my head, but it had been fun listening to someone else be so enthusiastic about something.
“Not nearly enough,” I said. “What are you thinking?”
“Well there’s been some theories floating around about what could be possible if our computers were a little better,” Shinshay said. “Not a hot discussion, mind you, but that’s half the reason I was so interested to work with you in the first place: new hardware. But one of the theories is about making a piece of software capable of becoming more accurate without being explicitly programmed to do so. I think psionics can accomplish this.”
“[Machine learning,]” Nora recognized. “You’re talking about mechanized learning.”
“Mmm, now that’s a good term for it…” Shinshay grinned.
·····
That evening my brain was on fire.
Shinshay was a monster. A clinical, relentless machine grinding forward with no mercy for anyone. Not even themselves.
Fourteen different antennae, nine different conceptual models to detect the cacophony of signals we could pick up, and no less than thirty different filter configurations so we could sift between all those overlapping signals.
Experiment after experiment had taken a toll on me, and I’d finally had to call it quits when I started bleeding from my nose. My head was pounding, I’d never pushed my psionics so far in one sitting.
“[You…are going to have to pick up some of the slack next time,]” I said to Nora.
“[I mean…I’ll try, but you’re the one with the superconstruct. I don’t know how much contribution I’ll wind up being.]”
My original creation. Daniel’s Phantom.
It was insane. Today it had spun up more than it ever had before. Even when I’d accidentally connected Nai’s mind and mine, it hadn’t done what it did today.
For the first time in months, I’d learned something about what it was intended for. It had processing power like…like nothing. There wasn’t even a comparison. Normal computer processing was measured in gigahertz, how many times per second the computer could do ‘one’ function.
The superconstruct didn’t work that way. It was fluid, continuous. It didn’t do a certain number of discrete functions per second. It did everything, all at once, spread out over however much time made the process bearable.
What was it for? What kind of information was it anticipating to work that way? What could possibly demand that kind of load? Trying to force it toward working like a normal computer was like trying to make an SR-71 operate like the Wright Flyer.
What on God’s green Earth had I been trying to do when I first made it? What could have possibly inspired me to put that kind of madness inside my own head?
“[I’m coming at it from the above,]” I said. “[I’m having to wrestle the superconstruct down to the level of what Shinshay has in mind. You can do the opposite. Start building from the ground up.]”
“[That metaphor probably sounded better in your head,]” Nora chided me with a smirk.
“[Shut up…]” I muttered, wincing as I materialized an icepack for my head. “[Shut up and let me die.]”
“[Nai says she’ll be home in a second,]” Nora said. “[You could always have her try to kill you.]”
I’d deactivated every piece of psionics I could in my head following our series of experiments. Nora must have been chatting with Nai while she returned to our apartment.
“[You mean try to kill me again?]” I asked. “[Because depending on how you count the ‘thrown through a wall’ incident, she’s maybe tried twice.]”
“Rude,” Nai pouted, walking through the door. “I had good reasons that first time.”
“[Ehh.]” I said lamely, collapsing into a chair, nursing my pounding head.
“[What the shit?]” Nora frowned.
Was there something? Her tone didn’t sound like it was that bad.
“[I…tried to shoot Nai. She responded…you know, like Nai,]” I explained. “[Did I skip that part?]”
“I responded like anyone would…” she objected.
“[Holy shit, both you shut up!]” Nora hissed. “[What is wrong with you? You two aren’t speaking the same language!]”
“[Well…]” I started, forcing myself to sit up in the chair. “[I…mean…]”
I had been speaking English. She’d been speaking…Starspeak, right?
“[Say something in English,]” Nora told me. “[See if she understands what you said.]”
“[…Crapcrapcrap…]” I muttered. I didn’t have the energy for this right now. “[What color is my hair?]”
Nai’s eyes widened as it sunk in for her to.
“Brown,” she replied. The answer to the question was ordinary. But she’d understood the question anyway.
Her face went slack, and I felt the superconstruct in my head twitch, even deactivated. A similar look crossed my own face.
“[Just…just double confirm this,]” I said, trying to keep myself calm. I had to slow down, make sure I really was speaking English, and that Nai was somehow understanding it. “[Nora, you say something, see if she understands you too.]”
“[Yeah! Okay, um…raise your right hand and make something in your left.]”
Nai did.
“What. Is. Happening?” she asked gravely.
I just screamed.
I couldn’t take more of this. New dangerous crap at every turn. No answers.
This was just a very bad day.