Physically, the viewing hall contained fifteen pillars of transparent crystal. They were arranged in a perfect triangle: one facing the audience, two behind it, three behind those, and so on. Lights shone on them from different angles, flickering on and off in varying hues, accompanied by three droning flutes and soft percussion. The performers would not take the stage until curtain call; in the meantime, their powerful voices filtered electronically over the hall.
Powerful amplifiers hummed underneath each pillar, evoking ideas in precisely-calculated semiotic choreography, a testament to the Velean mastery of the world beyond.
There was an inescapable element of geometry to the opera, a hallmark of an ancient form whose creators were some four thousand years distant. What they had accomplished with imagery and symbolism was perfected at last in the grip of amplifier technology. Sigrund stood there, opposite her nemesis Lochwyr. Behind her, rightmost in the row of three, stood her hope for reconciliation—all but smothered—and to her left, occupying the primary pillar, her grim determination toward the future.
It was traditional to set the chorus in the row of five—a pillar each for Honor, Sorrow, Contempt, Striving, and Contemplation—but the composer had removed the voice of Honor and moved them up to the row of four. What replaced them was decidedly nontraditional, an indistinct blur representing the historical forces that pushed the deuteragonists to this moment. Sorrow and Contempt harmonized with the privation of the lower class, the rage of the dispossessed, their voices artfully dissonant with the militaristic chant of Striving and Contemplation’s regretful descant.
There was an obvious hole in the music where Honor should have been, and to Maxwell’s ear the composer was too skilled not to have done it on purpose. Despite the pleasing demonstration of mastery, he didn’t care for it.
Maxwell’s hand found Shay’s. His new body was strong and youthful, a counterpart to Maxwell’s dignified middle age. Shay had ordered a body closer to his original ethnicity, though in all probability there was no trace of Sanek heritage in its genetics. His skin was a warm yellow—brown in the darkness of their private box—and his eyes a bright hazel, reminiscent of an eagle’s gold. His eyes were shaped with something of an eagle’s cruelty as well and they met Maxwell’s knowingly in the dark.
“Bored already, husband?” he asked softly.
“It’s too young for my taste,” Maxwell admitted. “That business with the chorus is the kind of clever adaptation dreamed up by those who think the art form is dead. The progenitors of Newehr would have looked at all this nonsense she’s doing with the back row and called it trite. She doesn’t need vocalists for the impersonal forces of history. What does she think a chorus is?”
“You refused to read the pamphlet,” Shay said, leafing through it. “How’d you guess she was a woman?”
“Newehr is traditionally composed female,” Maxwell said. “Less so these days, but the men in the genre still use female pronouns in connection with their art.”
“Hmph,” said Shay. “If I were a man, I would make them call me a man.”
“I predict that would go poorly with your audience,” Maxwell said with a smile.
“Good.” Shay stretched, catlike, golden eyes not leaving the stage. “Your people act so mighty, yet such a small thing harms them. Let them earn their crowns. Speaking of which.”
Shay had opted to leave his hair follicles active, but he’d shaved it off anyway. It was an old Sanek custom: warriors only shaved before going to battle, so that you could tell by the length of their hair how long it had been since they’d tested their bravery.
“I have been thinking about your ailing friend,” Shay said. “His propagandists frolic uncontested on the battlefield. Every day I expect from you a response, yet it does not come. You’ve picked a mighty whetstone for our pride.”
Maxwell gripped his hand fondly. “What else but titans do titans have to fear?”
“You mean to let him gather support for an audit.”
“I admit, I’m curious,” Maxwell said. “The Eifni Organization has never had an external audit before. If Drafar hadn’t calcified this way, it might never have happened. If I didn’t know better, I’d flatter myself that I was calling his bluff, but Drafar has always been inconveniently rigid.”
“Eternity is too long a time for never,” Shay said. “Is there a chance we will outlast him?”
“In a sense, we already have,” Maxwell said. “If Drafar’s already resorting to splice therapy, he would have noticed the first symptoms of pneumacalcification sometime in the last few hundred years. The fatal errors in his meditation habits could have started a thousand years earlier.”
“If he’s not going to expire in the next two months, spare me.”
Maxwell smiled. “No.”
“Then we kill him,” Shay said. “In the Archives.”
“The Archives?” Maxwell mused. “He’d be defenseless in there, but so would we.”
“Defenseless, he says,” Shay spat. “Veles has forgotten how to fight.”
Maxwell leaned back, amused. “Of course we did. We learned how to war.”
Shay whacked him with the opera pamphlet. “I will use the girl. You figure out what to do in the Archives once I get Drafar there.”
*
Kaelen’s office had twenty floating desks and no chairs. Gheresh had assured her that the Eifni Organization both possessed rolling chairs and was willing to provide them, but Logistics Division was currently tied up preparing for the SecEnf audit. The audit she’d started—well, it was questionable whether Maxwell deserved some of the blame for inducing her to go after the Spear—The Spear, the actual godflaming Spear!—anyway she felt a little awkward trying to pressure them for chairs when undoubtedly they would say this whole mess was her fault.
“This isn’t the same millet,” Gheresh said, indicating one of the tables. “I’m afraid SecEnf burned the originals. But we recovered enough of your data to set up the experiment.”
Kaelen swept her comm over them and stopped short. “They have pseudoconsciousnesses.”
“It was a gift from Maxwell’s partner,” Gheresh said in a tone of voice that said refusing the gift wasn’t an option. They offered Kaelen a sympathetic smile. “There will be other projects occupying your attention, too. You’ll have discretion on where to spend your time and energy for the first few months.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Kaelen gave them a flat stare. “Am I being tested again?”
Gheresh nodded wearily. They leaned against a nearby desk, which floated smoothly upward to meet their elbow in the most comfortable position.
“I suppose it’s time to give you the talk,”they said, looking around the room. “Some of this is supposed to remain unspoken, but the Eifni Organization was designed for people who are willing to break the rules to achieve their goals.”
“That’s stupid,” said Kaelen. “What’s the point of the rules if no one follows them?”
“I didn’t say no one follows them,” Gheresh said. “We just know when it’s okay not to. For example, when we’re onboarding someone with social legibility deficits. It’s foolish to expect you to play the game the way most Veleans would.”
“I have a comm,” Kaelen insisted. “Why does it matter if it’s my flesh brain or my etheric brain interpreting social cues?”
“Sometimes people wear a baffler,” Gheresh said, shrugging. Kaelen remembered that frantic day when she’d met Maxwell and Shay. “But at this point, we’d assign you a handler for any situation where that was relevant. You’re with Eifni now. We protect our own.”
That was, in Kaelen’s experience, one of those unwritten rules that people tended to throw out the window when the heat started rising. At least when she was the person that needed to be protected.
“So here’s the game,” said Gheresh. “Spend a week or two looking over the available projects. The system’s being monitored; we’ll see what you look at and what you apply to. Rejections don’t matter much, but if you apply to projects that obviously don’t fit your skillset, we’ll see those too. You’re free to request meetings with project teams before applying.”
“What am I being tested on?” Kaelen said, feeling more relaxed now. This felt comfortingly like the academic hierarchy.
“Combination of ambition and usefulness,” said Gheresh. “They just want to know what to do with you. If you’re passionate about a subject area, they’ll try to calculate that out and find projects for you that operate within that conceptual space.”
“Oh,” Kaelen said, directing her comm to shift through her biographical profile. “I’ve already calculated the etheric vectors for my special interests. Here.”
Gheresh beamed at her, accepting the file. “Because you were curious?”
“How did you guess?” Kaelen chuckled, starting to feel actually comfortable.
“I’ll give you access to that part of the project database, then,” said Gheresh, eyes glazing over as they navigated their comm interface. “It’ll help if you filter projects by projected in… terest.”
Kaelen’s shoulders hunched in. “Is everything alright?”
“Please do not access the project directory,” Gheresh said urgently but calmly. If Kaelen hadn’t been using an empathy augment, she would have missed the underlying panic in their voice. “I need to confirm if this is accurate.”
“Please tell me what’s going on,” Kaelen said. “Is it about my memetic research filter? They told me they were going to put me in white-rank.”
“You’ve been given absolute clearance,” Gheresh said haltingly. “I—I’m not sure I’m even allowed to supervise you now.”
Kaelen felt a pang of disappointment. She was growing to like the androgynous manager. “Is this one of those rules you’re supposed to know when to break?”
“No,” Gheresh breathed, chuckling only slightly hysterically. “I’m so sorry, Kaelen. Normally I’d avoid troubling you with this, but I’m supposed to keep you safe. This is bad. This is people-vanishing-in-the-night bad. I’m calling Maxwell right now.”
“Okay,” Kaelen said helplessly.
Afraid of accessing even unrelated features of the Eifni network, Kaelen turned around to look at the millet. They’d been set to worship a slightly different frequency. Not the one associated with her comm broadcast, like last time, but not entirely different either. Her mind seized on this detail as a way to escape from the panic, the way everything seemed to be falling apart. She set her comm to untangle the signal, trying to reproduce its component frequencies.
Eventually it succeeded: Kaelen, Eifni Organization, and arrival.
“Welcome home,” a deep baritone echoed through the office.
Kaelen whirled around, as did Gheresh. A man with dark, yellowish skin and golden eyes stood in the doorway, light gleaming off a bald head.
“Shay,” Gheresh said with forced cheer. “I’m so glad you’re here, there’s been a security issue.”
“You don’t have clearance,” Shay said. “Out.”
“I have received none of the prerequisite paperwork, and with the audit on its way—”
Shay did not raise his voice. “That is Logistics’s problem. Out.”
Gheresh glared at him, which seemed to win Shay’s approval—judging from his face, at least. He was still wearing the baffler, but after last time, Kaelen had been working on a proxy server to give her as much information as she could steal.
After a moment of tension, Gheresh forced a reassuring smile at Kaelen and took their leave.
“Good,” Shay said once they were alone. “Now, you were blue academic, yes?”
“Yes,” Kaelen said cautiously.
“Let’s see,” said Shay. “Conduit theory conclusively disproven for fourth-degree paracasual connections.”
Kaelen blinked. “What?!”
“Red academia, authors Tsem and Qarthai,” Shay said. “Six hundred years ago. Is why worldjump research focused on efficiency of single-degree jumps since. Try another. Green academia: exactly one stable triphase configuration for any arbitrary biphase pairing. Finding challenged for conflict with accepted theories, but no one the logical errors has detected.”
“Shit,” Kaelen breathed. “I thought the greenies were behind us.”
“They are,” Shay said dismissively. “Problem tripped them up for the last two hundred years. The white academics think it’s a paradigm problem. They’ll intervene in a decade or so.”
“That’s me now,” Kaelen said, mostly to herself. “Right? You’re not just making things up?”
“Watch your filter,” Shay said, then repeated the research findings. Kaelen focused her attention on the memetic research filter attached to her soul as it did something she’d never seen before. As Shay spoke, it output red, then green. If the filter were still restricting her to the blue research complex, she wouldn’t have been able to comprehend anything Shay had just told her.
“I made it to white academia,” Kaelen said, as if that would make it feel more real.
“Black,” Shay corrected her. “Theolytics has access to everything.”
“What? I’ve never heard of black. Why do you need a level above white academia? That’s supposed to be the integration layer for the separated research complexes.”
“Project D-938-1071,” Shay answered. “Primary author C9-57-8743,.”
Kaelen took an unconscious step back. “Gheresh said I might disappear in the night if I looked at this stuff.”
Shay rolled his eyes. “Do it, fool. I don’t need a reason to disappear you.”
Kaelen bit her lip. Her jury-rigged baffler bypass told her that Shay was being serious. With a trace of hesitation, she entered the number.
“Proposal for engrammatic delivery vector for combat-scale etheric energy surges,” she read out loud, then clapped a hand to her mouth. “You can burn out people’s souls by speaking to them?”
“The prototypes were inefficient,” Shay said. “Project needed impractically deep scans and the effective target window was too short. So no, we can’t. Project D-379-4816, primary author J6-76-2173.”
Kaelen steeled herself. “Effectiveness of ether-to-matter translation of human souls?!”
“Through common shielding patterns,” Shay finished for her. “Blood is the easiest matter cognate. Explodes the heart. Don’t worry, we only have a small stockpile. Project A-297-4018, primary author C3-93-5748.”
She closed her eyes, breathing heavily, and accessed the project description.
Considerations on establishing a containment world for the capture and utilization of oracular divinity.
Bile and anger rose in her stomach. Her eyes flew open, looking at Shay with a deep fury she’d only felt a few times in her life.
“This is sick,” she said quietly. “Eifni Org is here to help people. Not—farm them to a captured deity.”
“Of course it helps people,” said Shay. “Obviously not those ones. Do the math, stupid.”
“I—”
“Have morals on your own time,” said Shay. “Theolytics exists to think the unthinkable. If you don’t like it, play with your grasses. We fund that too.”
Shay turned, sweeping toward the door. Kaelen, speechless with fury, wrestled with herself until she was able to bark out a single question.
“Why?”
Shay stopped, looked back at her. “Why what?”
“Why me?” Kaelen asked, breathing heavily and clenching her fists. “You have my profile. You could have predicted my response to this.”
Shay’s eyes narrowed murderously.
“Because now Drafar cannot have you,” he said. “You know too much.”
He left without a goodbye.
Kaelen stood stiffly for a moment, frozen except for her heavy breathing, then reached violently for the nearest desk and hurled it into the middle of the room. Dirt and millet flew everywhere. The desk bounced once on the floor, then floated gently until it reached the optimally ergonomic position.
Kaelen screamed.