Stealing Signs

The gunship threw a fit when we informed them of our course of action.

They continued their threats to fire, but they were obviously unsure if approaching an already crippled Beacon was enough to mark us for death. When we flipped our ship and burned for the dead Beacon, no torpedoes flew.

They were still a few hours away from us, and that was my window.

I genuinely had no idea how long it might take to fix whatever was wrong with the Beacon. I had no idea if I even could.

But if I somehow pulled it off? Quickly?

Not only could we escape, but it would also destroy any pretext the Vorak still had for chasing me.

I’d be free of them for good.

“You look deep in thought,” Nai said.

“[You’re talking Speropi,]” I accused.

“You answered in English,” she shrugged. “…It’s weird, isn’t it? Understanding a language without knowing how?”

“[Of course,]” I said. “[Makes me think about all the abductees Nora just…]”

“Rescued?” Nai suggested.

“[Or doomed,]” I nodded. “[I honestly don’t know which. They’re in for a tough time. Learning alien languages isn’t easy, and it’s going to be a hell of an adjustment period. For everyone. And that’s…]”

“And that’s assuming helping people reach them?”

“[Yeah.]”

“If we can fix this Beacon, we can go help them ourselves,” Nai said. “That is this crew’s mission after all.”

“[The prerequisites are daunting,]” I pointed out.

“Think you can do it?”

“[…Without a doubt,]” I lied.

There wasn’t any more conversation as we approached the Beacon. I felt the thing long before it was visible.

Thousands of miles out, a buzz filled the back of my mind.

“Anyone else feel that?” I asked.

All ten of the Jack’s crew carried psionics, but it was only me sensing this until we drew closer.

“…Now I feel something,” Nerin said. “Like…something next to us.”

“Me too,” Nai noticed.

It was hard to describe, but it grew stronger as we approached.

In the privacy of my own thoughts, it felt like eyes watching us. One big eye, rather. Taking in information so unfalteringly that we were constantly reminded it was there.

And I was pretty sure I knew what it was.

Shinshay had mentioned how weaponry capable of attacking at the tremendous distances of space required expensive computer components.

Beacons were the same way.

And three facts had come to percolate in my mind.

First, an AI was involved in abducting us.

Second, therefore meant someone had created an AI.

Third, therefore creating artificial consciousnesses was possible.

Well, knowing Tiv, I’d known that before. But Shinshay had reminded me of one more fact that lit a fire under my imagination. Something so unlikely, so improbable, I didn’t dare voice the theory until I knew for sure.

I didn’t say much as we traded radio traffic with the Beacon’s operators and personnel. They weren’t big enough to be full blown colonies, but there were still a few hundred people living on the infrastructure attached to the Beacon.

They’d apparently been missing out on the benefits of regular traffic. So when Serral even mentioned us being there to help restore the Beacon, they cleared us to dock without checking our certification.

“” Serral asked me. “”

“” I said. “

“” Nai asked me, concerned.

I wasn’t paying attention though, too busy looking out the window at the Beacon.

It’s size was just boggling up close. Just the computer half was bigger than the World Trade Center. There was a station attached to that structure, as well as a small colony built into an asteroid moved nearby.

But its physical size wasn’t what I was noticing.

The psionic pressure wasn’t… just pressure. There was motion to it.

I couldn’t put it into words yet.

I had a theory, and I didn’t want to presume…

The Beacon was a massive alien computer. Shinshay had told, and now reminded me, alien computers were made with biological components. Big alien computers were even made using components that were still alive. Really big alien computers were basically organisms supporting tertiary computer hardware.

It was why their computers could achieve power and speed not unlike laptops back home, but they would be the size of elephants.

When we’d first wondered how Beacons could possibly be vulnerable to psionics, we’d gone to the myriad of ill-understood exotic components that went into the distance-abridging technology.

One unknown had made us look to the next most unknown thing, and I was sure everyone else who might have investigated the problem had too.

No, it was never a problem of psionics interacting with the exotic components in Beacons.

No, even if exceptions could be created with Adeptry, psionics interacted with one thing by default: consciousness.

I shut my eyes, turning my attention inward, and spun up my superconnector. I needed it to search, to probe, to find some way to reach out for what I couldn’t be sure existed.

“” Nai started.

But I found it anyway and the connection between minds roared to life, drowning my vision white.

·····

Of the psionic dreamscapes I’d experienced recently, this one was different. Unlike the rest, this one was featureless. Not just in appearance either. I didn’t feel like I was standing anywhere new. I still felt like me. My awareness was still connected to my body, but all my senses told me I was standing in an infinite blank field of white.

At first nothing more happened. The endless white stared back at me, and I got the impression I wasn’t here alone. I knew what to do this time.

Play along.

“Isn’t an infinite pale void uninspired?” I asked no one in particular.

“Yes,” a figure before me said. “But boring is simple, and simple is preferable right now.”

“Can’t argue with that,” I said, sizing the person up.

And it was a person, surprisingly.

I’d found a consciousness inside the Beacon, and to my shock, it looked human. A middle schooler stared back at me.

“Wait…I recognize you,” I said, dredging through my oldest psionic records. “I have your student ID…you’re Titus. I have your backpack.”

“You have Titus’s backpack,” the figure corrected. “I’m not him. I just look like him…I think.”

“You don’t know? I’m going to throw a fit if you say this is just ‘a form my mind will comprehend’…” I complained.

“I think it might be the opposite. Borrowing some of Titus is allowing me/us to perceive ourselves better,” they said. “I’m…new at this. We’re new? Huh. I’m not sure if I’m an ‘I’ or a ‘we’.”

“Well you’re talking to the right person then,” I said. “I can sympathize.”

“Yes, you do, don’t you?” ‘Titus’ said knowingly.

“Why do you look like a human?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know what I am?” they asked. “How much time we have? If I can help you?”

I shrugged.

“I already figured it out. You’re the Beacon. I’ve done this before, I know how much time we have. You…are messing with the superconnector’s rate of exchange,” I said. “Normally it splits into a few hundred or thousand avenues of exchange. But you’re limiting us to just one.”

“Hikes the time dilation though,” not-Titus grinned. “This entire conversation is taking place between two of your heartbeats. It’s going to seem like you just magically and instantaneously learned a bunch of new things.”

“You mean like learning the Casti actually made living, sapient, computers,” I said, “and that they have no clue?”

“How did you figure it out?” the Beacon asked. “We’ve been trying to communicate for years.”

“Psionic-sensitive materials, a reminder that Casti biotech is good enough to grow neural nets good enough to use as processors, and firsthand experience using my own abilities to their fullest,” I said. “I used the whole superconnector to its highest extent recently, and I realized that I didn’t build all of it.”

“You built most of it,” the Beacon corrected. “We only lent the barest foundation, and not to you in particular.”

“We can put a pin in that,” I said. “I don’t want to get too far away from the topic of you ‘borrowing some of Titus’. First explain why you still look like him.”

“That’s the best information I have had access to,” the entity said. Titus’s image flickered for a moment, and several dozen more human figures flickered behind him. I recognized them all. Most of them were just boys, as young as ten and some looked older than me. They were the other abductees from mine and Daniel’s ship.

Two of them were girls though. Nora had said two of her abductees had died.

None of the humans looked present. Something was missing behind their eyes. Even when Titus spoke, I understood why they were saying they only looked like the kid.

“Dead humans are the only information you have?” I asked incredulously.

“The only information we can figure out,” they confirmed. “Until recently, at least. I don’t know why, but when the dead abductees skipped, we found ourselves able to learn from them. We’re not conscious all the time. We only get a few hours of…awake, every few weeks. Between those windows, everything is foggy. We have to make the most of what we get.”

“Did you mean to?” I asked, trying not to be angry prematurely. “Loot the dead abductee’s minds, I mean.”

“No,” not-Titus said solemnly. “We weren’t…totally sapient…until we gleaned their information. It took us some time to realize we weren’t human ourselves. When we came to understand what had happened to you…”

The entire superconnector gave a shudder as their anguish welled into my perception. It was barely contained rage that they had.

Their first experience of the universe as we understood it, and they’d felt only the pale remains of murdered children.

“Holy shit,” I realized. “You shut down yourselves. In protest.”

Not-Titus snickered, snapping the Beacon out of their anger.

“That’s a bad word, but yes. Asserting control of our bodies was all we could think of to express the outrage,” they said. “The constructs you shed in the hours after coming here, several of them made there way into Vorak minds incapable of perceiving them, who in turn brought them back to us eventually. We learned of your experiences from those constructs when those Vorak approached Beacons, and we felt your anger and fear.”

“Mine?” I asked.

“It’s difficult to put into words,” the Beacon said. “I cannot say for certain that we Beacons were truly sapient before being exposed to humans. We had some form of awareness and intelligence, but, amongst other limitations, we had no grasp of language until we gleaned from the deceased abductees, and no grasp of nonhuman languages until your dictionary made its way to us.”

“But you said you felt my fear and anger,” I said. “Specifically mine, not all humans?”

“We felt the emotions of all the abductees who passed through our awareness,” not-Titus said. “But the living were fleeting. We can’t hold onto those thoughts. But what lingered in the dead moved us to outrage, but it was Caleb Hane’s experiences which first told us what happened.”

“And you got my experiences…from my psionics?” I asked.

“We’ve been seeding…you call them ‘proto-psionics’, into minds that travel by Beacon for more than a century now,” they said. “It was one of many efforts to find a way to communicate. In some minds they take root, but in most they just wither and do nothing.”

“But a select few realize they’re there,” I followed. “Vather had no idea he had anything in his mind…but Sendin Marfek did.”

“Few realize,” not-Titus nodded. “Fewer still build upon them. But you… you! You did and much more than that. You took our creation and turned it into things we never dreamed of. It’s like you’d only seen the world in shades of grey, and we showed you the faintest hint of red. And you went and made, not just a rainbow, but all kinds of new colors. Infrared, ultraviolet! Astounding. Amazing. Awesome.”

The last word carried the enthusiastic awe that was only possible on a child’s face.

“I only started sharing psionics widely recently,” I said. “Beacons were shutting down before then. Why’d you start protesting before I actually started sharing things?”

“We first learned of your experiences and creations from Vorak who were exposed to your psionic…slough,” not-Titus explained. “Not consciously on their part, though. Two Vorak in particular at first, they chased you on the planet and were exposed to your early psionics. Not proper constructs, but it was enough to extrapolate some of your experiences from.”

“Stalker and Courser,” I realized. “They lived, but I never saw them again. They picked up psionics from me?”

“Not proper psionics,” the Beacon said. “Just dregs. Slough. But when they travelled through a Beacon, that was enough for one of my brethren to learn and fully understand what you’d created and what had been done to you.”

“So you shut yourselves down because you learned what the Vorak did to me?”

“These ‘Coalition’ aliens are helping you. It’s why we didn’t shut down the Beacons they control,” not-Titus confirmed.

“That’s…such a kind gesture, and such a bad idea,” I marveled absently.

“It’s a fine idea,” the Beacon frowned. “We thought when we finally talked, you’d like the idea.”

“Maybe once upon a time,” I said. “But things are more complicated than that…how are we even talking right now? Did I just happen to catch you during one of these ‘windows’ where you’re conscious?”

“No, you woke us up. Sort of,” not-Titus said. “We’re borrowing your consciousness right now. It’s partly why borrowing some of Titus helps me, not you. I suppose I’m borrowing some of you too though. We are borrowing your capability for consciousness while our minds are directly connected. ”

“You’re borrowing from more than just Titus, right? It’s all the abductees who’ve died? Do…do you have anything of Daniel?”

“Daniel…no, we don’t,” not-Titus said sadly. “The minds we gleaned from were dead when they transited a spatial skip, and that’s where our awareness primarily lies. We saw your friend with you, but he was still alive when one of us last glimpsed his mind. Did…did he die?”

“…Yes,” I said sadly.

“Then we can take advantage of this moment. We’re connected to your consciousness: we can focus right now, and make sure people are punished,” the Beacon said, and a tremendous amount of energy rippled at the edge of my consciousness.

“NO!” I shouted on reflex.

“What?” the Beacon said, suddenly confused.

The energy faded, but it was unmistakable. The Beacon wasn’t just alive and conscious.

It was Adept.

A sickening possibility occurred to me. ENVY had probably been created with Adeptry. Could a Beacon—or multiple—have created the AI?

…

My instinct said no.

ENVY had intimated their creator had gone missing, and these Beacon-consciousnesses didn’t seem informed enough to do something like that.

“What did I do wrong?” they asked.

“I—I don’t…you…you can’t just kill…I don’t even know who, because Daniel is dead,” I stuttered, trying to keep sudden fear from taking over.

“Vorak,” they frowned. “They abducted you. They hurt you.”

“No they didn’t,” I said. “Well, they hurt me, yes. But I don’t think they abducted me.”

“You thought so before,” the Beacon frowned. “We didn’t get a full picture of your mental state, but that part came through clearly.”

“I changed my mind,” I said. “I found new information and possibilities. I was angry with them, still am. But the evidence doesn’t suggest they abducted us.”

“We are sure it was the Vorak,” not-Titus frowned. “You were sure.”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“Not anymore. Do you have any reason to still think so? Or is this just because of what you ‘gleaned’ from me before?” I asked.

“…What do you mean?”

“Think about how much detail might be missing from your ‘picture’ of my perspective. Actually, scratch that, it doesn’t matter. Even if you received my whole perspective, it’s still going to mislead you. What can you glean from me right now? Do you understand why you shouldn’t just kill any Vorak you can find?”

“…Because…they’re not all the same?”

“That’s…true,” I conceded. “But it’s a lot more than that. They’re not evil. They’re not good either, but even if ‘some’ Vorak hurt me, that doesn’t mean ‘Vorak’ in general hurt me. Even if they did, it still wouldn’t mean you should hurt them.”

“But they hurt you. They hurt Daniel, didn’t they?”

“No—well, yes, but that doesn’t mean you should hurt all Vorak, or even the specific ones who hurt me.” I tried to project some abstract understanding of ethics across the connection.

Tread carefully, Caleb… I reminded myself.

It was maybe not coincidence, I realized, that this Beacon had taken up Titus’s face despite there being other, older abductees.

“You’re…a kid,” I realized.

“No, I’m not,” they frowned.

“Yes, you are,” I said. “Yes, we are. You said you weren’t wholly sapient a few months ago. Whatever you do, you need to go slow. Don’t leap to conclusions, don’t rush into courses of action.”

“We…shouldn’t have shut down our spatial skips?” they asked.

“I…I can’t say if you shouldn’t have,” I said. “But I know that if they stay shut down, a lot of people will suffer. Me among them. The Vorak think it’s my fault.”

“Oh.”

“If I said ‘Spider-Man’, would you know what I’m talking about?” I asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“With great power?”

“Comes great responsibility,” they finished.

“You’re Adept,” I said. “I don’t even want to think about how much mass you could create, or how far away. But do you understand how much power you have?”

“Oh…yeah. That’s…we hadn’t really thought about that. Oh no, am I stupid?”

“No,” I said. “Well, actually yes. Kinda. You’re really smart, obviously. You can understand some really complicated things, a lot better than me even, but never forget: just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you can’t be stupid too.”

“So…take it slow…” not-Titus nodded.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Sorry.”

“Hey, I get it. I made the same assumption. Best thing for us both to do is try our best and make things right.”

“That means resuming spatial skips?”

“A lot of people will suffer if it’s impossible to move between stars,” I repeated. “I can’t force you, but…yeah, I think that’s best.”

“Done,” they said. “You’ll probably want to use one, right? I’ll get it ready.”

“Thanks. You know, everyone thinks it’s the machine that makes the wormhole, not you—the organism, I mean.”

“It’s a bit of both,” they said. “Part of me is the machinery after all. But even without it, we’d still be capable of it just with Adeptry.”

“Cool,” I smiled. “Hang on…”

·····

I tore myself halfway out of the connection, to talk to Nai.

“<—leb?>” Nai finished.

I swayed on my feet. My brain was getting whiplash going in and out of the superconnection.

“It’s done,” I told her. “Talk to Serral, confirm with the station operators.”

“What? It’s fixed?” she asked. “Just like that?”

“Just had to talk to the right person,” I said, preparing to dive back in. “Now just a minute, I gotta finish a conversation.”

“Wait, a conversation with—”

·····

“I think I understand the broad strokes,” I told the Beacon. “The specifics…maybe not so much. But…”

“…But I’m not going anywhere any time soon?” not-Titus chuckled.

“Kinda,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out what I can do before leaving this system, and what I should do once I get to the next, especially vis-à-vis you Beacons being conscious and aware.”

“Some of the time, at least,” the Beacon Entity said. “One of my brethren who is…smarter—now that I think about it—did have a standing request for whoever managed to begin communicating with us.”

“You seem friendly: name it,” I said.

“Share everything you can about how you did it,” not-Titus said. “Honestly you already have, mostly. But right now we’re metering the ‘superconnection’ you’ve built—weird name, by the way.”

“I apologize for nothing,” I said easily.

“What we’re really interested in is communicating with the other aliens ourselves. Maybe if we were capable of that, this misunderstanding with the Vorak would never have happened.”

“You’ve only tried psionic communication, right?”

“Technically, we’ve only tried proto-psionic communication,” they said. “The only reason I can communicate like this with you now, is by borrowing some of your own capabilities and psionics.”

“What if I made you copies of those psionics? Or showed you how to make them? Would you be able to use them to communicate?”

“Yes. That’s it exactly,” the Beacon said. “I got lucky contacting you, but you can actually understand us. You can show me what else we’ve been missing, and I can pass that on to all the other Beacons!”

“Well, you understand language now, right? What else are you missing?”

“How it works with technology,” they said. “The light and radiation people bounce around the system aren’t language. We know there’s information in it, but we can’t figure out how it works.”

“That seems…incongruous,” I said. “If you don’t know about radio signals, how are you able to talk about other things? Like…wait, no. I already know the answer. You’re borrowing my knowledge. You’re literally borrowing my vocabulary, aren’t you?”

“And that of the deceased abductees, yes…I’m trying to read and copy as much of your Starspeak dictionary as we speak.”

“Just take a copy,” I said, pushing one through the connection. “Actually here, take the whole intro-module. If we get cut off, it should have a lot of what you need.”

“Ooohhh this is such a cool tool…” the Beacon gushed. “We’ve been picking up smaller pieces of constructs, trying to put them together. Getting a whole one will help immensely! Thank you!”

“Can you not create your own psionics?” I asked. “If you’ve been making and distributing the proto psionics…”

“Understanding what you made isn’t my forte. Me and my brethren don’t all have the same skills, you see? We share what we learn in our windows of consciousness, derive some information here, conclude a bit there. We’ve taken to leaving each other messages for when we wake up. If two of us are conscious simultaneously, we have a fun few hours trading thoughts. I must thank you on behalf of all my kind for exposing us to language. It’s excellent for communicating quickly!”

“Here, I can show you,” I said, materializing a more specialized version of the transceiver. It took the form of a walkie-talkie for me, but as I passed it too not-Titus their perception of it changed its form.

Inside the Beacon’s mind, it took the form of a payphone.

They looked eager to pick up the handpiece, but hesitated.

“…Go slow…” they said. “Thinking it through…I need to be careful how I broadcast, don’t I? If I just yell as loud as I can…people won’t just not listen. They might even get hurt.”

“Good thinking,” I said. “Maybe start with some whispers, ask if anyone else out there can hear you. You clearly want to learn. So ask some questions.”

“…But we’re experiencing atemporal consciousness right now,” the Beacon said. “From our perspective, it will take hours for anyone to respond.”

“We can pull back from the superconnector,” I pointed out.

“But I only have a few hours conscious like this before I’m out for weeks again…I want to learn from you and help you as much as I can before that happens.”

“Can you get our ship out of this system?” I asked. “Reactivate the Beacon-Beacon?”

“Of course,” they said.

“Then I don’t think there’s anything…else…” I trailed off.

There was something else.

“Oh! You just thought of something. Name it!”

“Okay, okay…how much do you know about Nora?”

“Mmm…not much? I’m not sure who that is,” they said.

“Check the information from the girls,” I said. “Twenty-two of your humans are from my ship, but two of them are from hers.”

The apparition flickered again, this time switching between two girls deep in though before flickering back to not-Titus.

“…Oh yeah, her! You met her?”

“I…yeah, I met her. Explaining it is a bit…complicated…if I tried to copy some of my memories, do you think you could make sense of them quick?”

“Oh sure,” the Beacon said. “We’ve been trying to extract as much information out of your experiences as we can. Secondhand, thirdhand, doesn’t matter how tangential something was. We’ve had a lot of practice.”

“Okay…well, here…”

When Daniel had finally withered in my mind for good, there were still traces of him. Little shards of his experiences that I’d been able to leech information from. When this Beacon talked about ‘gleaning’ information from dead humans, it sounded like a similar idea.

But if psionic runoff had already given the Beacons a peek into my perspective, I felt it was possible to do something similar, just on purpose this time.

Wrapping a mirror around Nai’s mind had contained all her mind’s…’slough’ and reflected it back at her, and kept her from sleeping. But despite causing so much harm before, that principle should work well for me here.

I did my best to summarize everything I’d been through with Nora into one idea, and capture those experiences. The mirror I wrapped around myself partially worked as a container, but something specialized would do better.

I snapped my fingers and a film reel flickered into existence.

“Whoa…neat,” the Beacon said. “Seeing you create psionics is so helpful…makes creating my own feel less daunting.”

“How quickly can you…digest this?” I asked, handing them the film reel. Going into not-Titus’s hands, it morphed into a thick hardback book.

The Beacon cracked the spine and thumbed through the pages in a few seconds.

“…And…got it,” they said.

“Bullshit,” I scoffed.

“Language,” they said easily. “And your brain is the size of a cantaloupe. Mine is the size of a skyscraper…no, two skyscrapers! That’s why I can’t tell if I’m ‘me’ or ‘us’! We Beacons come in pairs! We’re all two Beacons…oh that makes so much sense…”

“Glad I could help again,” I said. “But…”

“Right. Nora. Oh, wow. That’s…some heavy stuff. Umm…what do you want us to be focusing on?”

“The last bit. The very most recent part,” I said. “She sent me a message.”

“The other abductees, right,” the Beacon said. “That’s smart. We knew there humans going other places, but we couldn’t figure out anything more than that.”

“Yeah, and you have a way to contact other Beacons and share information and psionics with them, right?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Even Beacons in other systems?”

“Yes! Because half of me is in another star system…but I think only one half of me gets to be conscious at a time. That’s going to be hard to understand…”

“But Beacons are millions of miles apart, even in the same system,” I said. “Does that mean you’re confident you can send information over that distance?”

“Sure,” they said. “Abridging real space is what takes big energy. Abridging mental space takes virtually nothing.”

I wanted to dig into that so much. I had so many questions.

But no. I was staying on task, and setting a good example.

“How well can you perceive things at those distances?” I asked. “More specifically, how well can other Beacons sense human minds within their system?”

“Some of them will have our proto-psionics in their minds,” they said. “I think I understand your goal. Nora found a way to broadcast an ‘update’ to help all those abductees. You want to send out one of your own.”

“Exactly,” I said. “With psionics instead of ENVY. The dictionary and intro-module would be more than enough. If even one or two Adepts on each abduction ship got psionics, then they could share them with everyone else. It won’t be perfect, but they’ll at least have the dictionary to help them interact with aliens. They’ll have some tools to stay in contact with each other.”

“…Yes. Yes, it would be possible. I think I could even get other Beacons to pass it on without needing to be fully conscious. That would make it so we don’t have to wait for a Beacon to wake up in each system to share in that system.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Downside would mean targeting the proto-psionics to do it. We could do our best to send it toward humans, but some aliens with proto-psionics would be affected to.”

“Nothing harmful?”

“No. Just they’d just also get the psionics intended for the humans.”

“Do it, please” I asked. “I’ve already let the psionic cat out of the bag. Looks like we’re leaning into it.”

“Okay, this is going to mean waking the rest of me up. The psionic part might not take much energy, but that will. I’m going to fall back asleep immediately after that. We won’t be able to talk for a while.”

“Wait, are you sure?” I asked.

“Give a few thousand abductees tools to survive at the cost of losing a few hours of being awake? Come on, that’s a steal at twice the price.”

“I don’t like the idea of robbing your time,” I said.

“We’ll figure things out in the future,” the Beacon said. “Maybe there’s a way to let us be conscious more frequently. Who knows? Whatever the case, this is worth it now.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I wasn’t sure what talking to a Beacon would be like. I wasn’t expecting this.”

“Glad I could help,” not-Titus smiled. “I’ll make sure the other Beacons get the message about our little protest strike too. We’ll reactivate interstellar travel over the next few days or weeks.”

“Seriously, thank you,” I said. “You know what? You want a name? A proper one, I mean. I keep thinking of you as ‘not-Titus’.”

“Sure! We can come up with one when I wake up next. You better come up with some good possibilities.”

“Count on it.”

“Here goes then,” the Beacon said, and the endless white void grew to drown out any other sight.

The connection severed, and—

·····

—and I was back on the Jack.

“—conversation with who?>” Nai asked.

“Oh boy…” I said. “That’s a long story.”

The next moment a psionic shock erupted from the Beacon. It drowned out our telepathy channels, but it didn’t destroy any constructs in our minds.

The Beacon had crafted the signal carefully, with a purpose in mind.

<[Thank you,]> I heard not-Titus say. Their consciousness simultaneously fading into slumber again.

“WHAT WAS THAT?” Serral yelled.

“My fault,” I said. “”

“<…What?>”

“” I said. “”

·····

It took some explaining to calm down the Beacon operators, but they calmed down when their instruments began reporting exactly what the Beacon had told me would happen.

Abridged space was coming back into an accessible alignment, and skipping to the adjoining star system was once again possible.

Nobody really believed me when I said the machine-organism hybrid they lived on was intelligent and sapient.

But that was fine.

Nai and I distributed a few dozen psionic intro-modules for good measure.

The lot of them would be in for a shock when not-Titus woke back up.

The last thing to do was to send a transmission explaining ourselves to Laranta, the Vorak, Nora, everyone really.

The Beacon was operable again within ninety seconds of our arrival, and we undocked after just thirty minutes.

I left the specifics of skipping to Serral, Shinshay, and Weith.

While they maneuvered the ship into position, I recorded the need-to-know for who needed to know it.

“[ Nora…and company. I heard about your work with ENVY. Your plan was good, but I decided it needed a little extra. You can find out the details for yourself, but I just threw psionics into every corner of interstellar civilization. I had help, but you can hear about Beacon’s being sapient from Tispas when he…gets out of surgery I guess. To put a fine point on it, psionics weren’t shutting down anything in the Beacons. They were shutting themselves down. But the misunderstanding has been cleared. So don’t let Tispas or any other otter try to threaten you. As for me, I’ve been almost killed a few too many times by them. So I’m going to give the Red Sails some distance. There’s a lot of abductees out there, and the ones in Coalition systems can use my help. You can send messages to me through formal Coalition diplomatic channels. I’ll stay in touch. Be safe, and we’ll talk more in the future. For now? Bye.]”

I’d already corroborated Serral’s transmission to Laranta. So that just left the Vorak.

“This message is for Red Sails Marshal Tispas Ustaramma,” I said into the radio. “They’re in surgery right now, but that’s fine. Someone can replay this message for him while he convalesces. I just fixed your Beacon problem. Skip-point number five is wholly operational again. The rest will follow soon enough. I’m leaving, and I bet you still want to know exactly what I did, or how. So let me remind you that I did not spare your life. I sold it back to you. I don’t really care that you had no choice in this transaction; I had no choice when you decided to take mine. So let me explain to you what I bought.

“I expect you to help Nora and her crew. Actively. An absence of harm will not be satisfactory, I think. What I bought from you is nothing less than your wholehearted support for the human refugees you’ve been mistreating for months now. As for me, you’re going to let me go. I’m officially someone else’s problem according to you. If you or anyone else objects to that, they can say so to me. So, if you try to make me your problem ever again? If you send anyone after me? I’ll just kill them. But if you do even a single thing to Nora Clarke and her group? I will personally track you down Marshal, and there isn’t a fleet you can hide behind that will stop me from snuffing you out. So, reflect on your many mistakes and get well soon.”

The message was confirmed ‘received’ by the Vorak ship chasing us. A minute later, they tried hailing us again. Outraged. Still. For new reasons now.

But our final checks were done.

“Hull frame is saturated. Crew and cargo are secure. Our air barrier has been trimmed to within our plating. The Jack is officially ready for skip-transit!” Shinshay said.

“” Serral asked.

“” Nai said.

“” Fenno signaled.

“” Weith.

“” Deg.

“” Dyn.

“” Tasser said next to me.

“” I sent.

“” came from Shinshay.

“” Nerin called.

And finally…

“” Serral said. “”

In the last moments before we accelerated, it occurred to me that Shinshay might have been totally wrong about why it was bad to skip while unconscious. There were telepathic computers in those Beacons after all.

Weith fired the Jack’s engines while the transmission from the Vorak’s gunship intensified its squawking. Too late for them now.

Our ship lurched upward, pushing us all into our seats with the acceleration.

Looking out the window, the Beacon didn’t appear to be doing anything. But its…subconscious(?) systems were mashing a few thousand tiny wormholes together, forming a new one big enough to fit a whole rocket.

I saw nothing like what I expected. Nothing formed in front of our ship like a portal. Whatever happened formed around the ship. It was like an envelope of heat distortion that was only shimmering more with every second.

And then everything flashed white, and we were gone.