“This city is a classic example of First Founding planning and design. It was conceived of as a whole you see. Most cultures build organically, according to the whims and needs of their individuals and organizations in the moment, but the First Founding engineers knew from the start exactly what purpose Goodenough would serve: exactly how many people would live in it, exactly what they would do and why. It is, in effect, a single, enormous structure, rather than many. Marvelous. Simply marvelous, isn't it?”
“I never really thought about it before,” Dallas admitted.
The young man made a cursory glance out of his window. Goodenough was just a city to him. There was a sharp delineation between the First Founding architecture and what had been changed and built in the following millennia, sure, and the space port was a pearl in the city's midst: pale, graceful curves surrounded by a shroud of dark, brutish right angles. But he didn't see any anything to substantiate Sinsin's wild assertions.
“Nobody gives the First Founding much credit for their achievements,” Sinsin went on. “But they expanded their dominion to three times the size of the New Dawn, and over twenty times the size of the Combine. We don't even know the names of all the worlds they recolonized in their time.
“You're not religious are you?” Sinsin asked suddenly. “It just occurred to me that you might consider this heresy.”
“Oh, it doesn't matter much to me,” Dallas said cheerily. “I don't believe you anyway.”
“You're a skeptic,” Sinsin replied, and something about the posture of his antennae and gyrations of his mandibles suggested a smile to Aiken. Mostly, he could see it in the geel's eyes. For a man-sized bug, Sinsin had remarkably expressive and human-like eyes.
“Sorry, it's just a bit much.”
“Not at all! Skepticism is a good thing: especially in one so young. Most skeptics I know are at least as old as me.”
“I bought a laser sword when I was twelve,” Dallas admitted with a wry grin. “Aunt Kay makes sure I won't ever forget it.”
“It never ceases to amaze me how unscrupulous people can be,” Sinsin said sympathetically. “What kind of a monster would peddle phony relics to a child?
“Aunt Kay: is this the same woman you're taking me to: my prospective hostess?”
“Yep yep! She's not really my aunt, but she's the only family I've got.”
“You're an orphan I take it?”
“Most people my age are,” Dallas said, shrugging off the geel's sympathetic tone. “My folks signed on with a labor syndicate to get off world when I was just a baby. I hear they got half a billion indentures from Ar Suft before word got back that they were all being sent to harvest ambrosia.”
“Oh no.”
Again, Dallas shrugged at Sinsin's sympathy. “I hardly knew them.”
“It's dangerous work, but they may beat the odds.”
“It was fifteen years ago.”
“Oh.”
“It does kinda look like a big black face eating the starport,” Dallas said of the city, just to change the subject.
“Indeed! Later, if you're interested, I can show you some images of other First Founding cities on other worlds. They always built around the remnants of the Ancients or New Dawn, and each city is made up of at least fifteen repeating modules I've identified. Take this highrise for example. It's a standard residence. They built thousands like them all over the galaxy. Later inhabitants have a tendency to alter the interiors, but at their core, they're really all the same. You can't ever get lost in any of them once you know your way around one. Is that where we're going?”
Dallas grunted in the affirmative.
The highrise was a centuries-old obelisk of unwavering symmetry: a monument to practical uniformity. They spiraled up and around it, the air car struggling to climb the higher it got. Eventually, they crested the edge of the roof, more than a kilometer above the ground, and Dallas gently touched them down in the midst of greenhouses, wind traps and solar collectors: new additions to the venerable old monolith.
Sinsin waited awkwardly in the foyer of a penthouse suite: the current domicile of one Aunt Kay Arrez. She was a brutish little woman: manly in her jaw, shoulders and narrow little hips, but her bosom was enormously feminine. She stood rigidly erect and swollen with indignant air as she listened to her 'nephew' explain why he saw fit to bring a tech hunter into her home. She received his assurances that Sinsin was 'alright' and took his holstered pistol with a dubious expression.
“How long would you be wanting to stay?” she asked, after the introductions had been made.
“That depends on what you charge madame.”
“A gram a day is usual, but if you're staying longer, I'll charge less. Dallas says you're looking to immigrate.”
“Grams? Grams of what?” Sinsin asked. “Why not credits?”
Aunt Kay laughed dryly. “There hasn't been a banking service on this planet in thirty years. Even before Evolution shut down the hub, we were dealing in platinum. But I'm not opposed to a little bartering.”
“I see,” Sinsin said.
Aunt Kay was a merciless negotiator. After a brief bout of aggressive haggling, she extorted Sinsin for an appleite gem, worth the equivalent of five hundred grams of platinum on the global Exchange, the last he he checked. “We'll call it a year's rent and security deposit for now,” she said. “We can talk about the balance when you move out.” Having secured him as a tenant however, her demeanor changed entirely. He was now her guest, her responsibility and in a kindly, matriarchal way that Sinsin instinctively found comforting, her property. It was with an air of indifferent acceptance that she returned his pistol, with a request that it be left out of sight in his room whenever he was in. She made direct, pragmatic inquiries as to his diet and other needs, and she indicated her willingness to provide for his comfort: even to help replace his stolen possessions. Sinsin's hygiene kit was easily substituted with alternatives found around her home, and a short while after being shown to it, he emerged from his shower to find his dirty clothing gone, and a clean robe left in their place. There was also a buffing wheel, and a wax suitable for his carapace. So it was that when he joined Aunt Kay and Dallas for coffee, a bit of the old nacreous glimmer shined through the veneer of age clouding his exterior.
“Your coffee is very good,” he buzzed contentedly.
“I grow it myself.”
“I saw the plants as we landed. It's quite the garden plot you have on the roof. You're a remarkably industrious woman.”
“She has help,” Dallas said with a smirk.
“Does she?” Aunt Kay asked with a playful-yet-serious look. “Have you fixed those condensers then?”
“I would have, but I was annoying you, so you sent me to the starport to make a buck.”
Aunt Kay grunted: two contemptuous notes emanating from somewhere between her throat and breast.
“There are a hundred other people in the building,” Dallas told Sinsin as he rose from his chair. “Everybody chips in with the garden work.”
Aunt Kay smacked the young man's rump as he walked by. Sinsin's antennae jerked at the sharp sound: an instinctual alarm and aversion to violence, though of course, consciously, he knew the smack was just one of the many strange ways humans could show affection.
“People say the planet is dying,” Aunt Kay him. “But life goes on.”
“Indeed,” Sinsin said happily. “I was trying to tell a young man of the militia as much this morning, but he wasn't disposed to think positively after what happened.”
“I heard about that,” Aunt Kay replied. “Did many people die?”
“A few dozen that I saw with my own eyes,” Sinsin said gravely. “I'm sure there were more however.”
“Damned Evolution,” she sighed.
“How long have they been here?”
“Oh, a few months now I suppose.”
“Has there been much violence?”
“Only a little at first. A gang of toughs had staked out the space port as their turf and they were extorting everyone for its use. Most everybody was happy with Evolution when they cleaned them out. Things were quiet after that; they mostly kept to themselves, but then the Andorrans showed up, and kicked the geel's nest. Oh. Sorry.”
“Not at all,” Sinsin said, truly indifferent to the expression and its use. “What about the Andorrans though? What did they do?”
“Not much from what I hear. They fired a few shots and ran away, but Evolution is certain they infiltrated the city or some such. They flooded the hub with notifications and bounty offers for a few days, before they shut it down completely. Since then, they've only been talking to the Prefect.”
“I wasn't expecting to find the planet occupied by them.”
“Well we weren't expecting to be occupied either! It's all this nonsense about Ancient technology. I don't know who started the rumor, but if I could get my hands on them...”
“You don't believe there's any truth to it then?”
“None at all. I've lived here my whole life, and I've never heard of anyone finding anything. There's no Gate here, no World Machine, no Super Factory, nothing to suggest the Ancients ever bothered with Ar Suft at all.”
“The Truth tells us the Ancients brought their Light to the furthest corners of the galaxy,” Sinsin hazarded to remark: curious to learn if his landlady was devout.
“Everybody knows they skipped places on the way,” Aunt Kay replied, informing Sinsin that, believer or not, she was rational.
They chatted amiably over their coffee: one refill was followed by a second, and then a pleasant chime announced the drying of Sinsin's clothing, and they took their conversation to the roof. There, Aunt Kay showed him around 'her' greenhouses, walking him through the methodology of the hydroponics and aeroponics. She was assisted in this by Dallas, who periodically stuck his head up from the plumbing as he worked on it.
A group of people interrupted this tour, and presented themselves to Aunt Kay as supplicants: a delegation of distraught faces, who had lost loved ones in the massacre at the spaceport. They told her action had to be taken; something must be done about Evolution. The occupation was getting worse.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Just like I said it would,” an older man said belligerently: a pessimist and doomsayer who took no satisfaction in being proven right. His daughter, a volunteer with the militia, had been killed.
Aunt Kay was soothing: supremely diplomatic. She told them that funerals came first, and afterwards a memorial. “We'll talk about it then,” she said firmly. “I'm sorry,” she told Sinsin after they had gone. “Where were we?”
“You were explaining the nutrient mix in the misters, but Dallas finished for you. May I ask why those people came to you? Are you an authority in this city?”
“Oh, nothing like that,” Aunt Kay said with a smile.
“They almost made her mayor a few months back,” Dallas said.
“Oh?”
“I just did a little organizing,” she said with false modesty and much satisfaction. “There isn't much of the old administration left any more, but there are thousands of people who have decided to stay, and there are going to be thousands more who never managed to leave. I've just helped make sure we all have what we need -and will need going forward.”
“Most everybody has their own farm plot these days, thanks to her,” Dallas added.
“So long as the sun keeps shining we'll be alright,” Aunt Kay said cheerily. “At least until we drink up all the water.”
“Dallas mentioned that there was ice mining being done, I assume at the planet's magnetic poles. How long will it last?”
“No one knows for sure. The Combine did a survey before they pulled us from the route; they said three hundred years at the time, but the population has dropped to almost nothing since.”
“I wouldn't trust the veracity of that survey either,” Sinsin said. “The Assayers are notoriously inept. Like most officials, their posts are little more than a hobby to them: a way for aristocrats to travel at the taxpayer's expense. They concluded their trip months ahead of schedule and published almost nothing as to their findings.”
“I guess they were in a hurry to visit someplace nicer,” Dallas said morosely.
Aunt Kay was briefly offended for her planet, but she soon got over it. She took Sinsin's arm; pulling him from one side of the roof to the other, she pointed out the city's landmarks.
“That's the Promenade: the marketplace – a hundred stores and stalls selling anything you could need,” she said with a touch of pride. She didn't say so directly, but Sinsin understood this was one of her feats of 'organizing' and so he did his best to compliment the squat, unattractive building.
“And that's Darkside. The Karteret Syndicate was renovating those hotels, turning them into casinos and brothels, when the Combine decided to cut us off. They've mostly pulled out now but they're going to wait until the last minute with Darkside: to try and recoup as much of their losses as they can I suppose.
“And that's the Old Palace. The Monet family is long gone though. It's just the Prefect and the militia there now. Now what are they up to?”
Sinsin sighted along Aunt Kay's finger, which pointed to a First Founding pyramid-like structure. It was the most easily recognized of the old empire's many standardized designs, which he called the Government House. Its singular shape, built-in defenses and all around opulence made it very much the thing for contemporary local authorities to appropriate it for their use. Most commonly, it served as the personal palace for despots and potentates, but it could sometimes be a parliamentary building.
A single air car had risen up from the Old Palace and came climbing straight towards them. It was a baroque, beautiful old machine, dating back to the New Dawn. Its body panels were astral obsidian, and its four multi-directional thrusters were plated in pearl. Unlike Dallas's junker, it came swooping gracefully down to the tune of a pleasant low whine.
Upon touching down, the driver's door opened, and an Evolution centurion emerged. Its armored, humanoid frame was dressed up in a khaki militia uniform, replete with one of their pale blue berets. It opened the rear passenger door with a white-gloved hand, and the Prefect himself emerged: a handsome, charming man in the prime of his middle age. He wore a painstakingly starched uniform. His smile was shockingly white. He acknowledged Dallas by raising the gold head of his swagger cane and lightly touching it to his beret. Then he came grinning up to Aunt Kay and her guest.
“Kay,” he said, oozing charm. His free hand caressed its way around her back, and he pulled her in close for a full kiss on the lips.
Kay wasn't pleased, nor receptive, but she offered no more resistance than a cold stiffness in the face of this soft, warm onslaught.
“Professor Cu! What a pleasant surprise! I came hoping to ask after your whereabouts and here you are! This is most fortunate!”
“I'm afraid you have the better of me sir,” Sinsin said stiffly.
“This is General Edward Flea,” Kay introduced him somberly. “The commander of the militia and Prefect of Goodenough. You might say he rules the planet these days.”
“More or less,” Flea said and his startling blue eyes twinkled with delight at some secret mischief in the root of these words.
Sinsin glanced pointedly at the Evolution chauffeur. Flea looked from the cyborg, and back to Sinsin. His smile widened and he raised an eyebrow in unabashed acknowledgment of the point. The centurion wasn't his servant or bodyguard, but a spy, and should the Prefect ever become overtly hostile to Evolution, the cyborg would doubtless prove to be his assassin as well. At that simple gesture: the raising of an eyebrow, Sinsin was instantly disposed to like Flea. It took no small amount of intellect and inner strength for a man of power and authority to own such an unpleasant truth: that he wasn't his own master.
“Your reputation precedes you sir,” Flea went on. “Ar Suft is fortunate to have such a famed academic as her guest.”
“You're too kind.”
“Not at all, Not at all.
“I'm told he's quite the philosopher,” Flea said as a conspiratorial aside to Kay. She retreated a step, freeing herself from the hand that gently tried to pin her against his hip. “Not that I know anything about xenoarchaeology myself. I never even heard the word before this morning. Taking bribes, gambling and making love is all I know.”
Flea laughed, and he was so perfectly amiable that Sinsin found his mandibles twitching: ready and willing to softly tap out his own version of a laugh against his mouth parts. The urge never fully materialized however. The silent, watchful centurion by the car was an oppressive presence, and besides, he smelled Aunt Kay's growing irritability.
“So you're staying with Kay. How very convenient for me. You were seen leaving the starport with Dallas of course, but I only came expecting to ask after your whereabouts. I never thought to find you here still! I admit I'm jealous. Kay is a pleasant companion, isn't she?”
“Certainly,” Sinsin agreed, but cautiously. He didn't want to be the one to trigger her angry outburst.
“She was a famous chef you know, before the collapse. She cooked for the Monet family every Ascension day. You have to make him your Dom Som cake while he's here.”
“Honey is hard to come by these days,” Aunt Kay replied.
“True, true. Ar Suft was famous for its bees and honey you know, before the long drought killed the last of them off.”
“I've had the good fortune of sipping a Tallasee Mead,” Sinsin said conversationally. “I understand it's a local swizzle made from honey.”
“It used to be,” Aunt Kay said bitterly.
“The Tallasee Guild is based on Wei Rocco these days, and has been for the better part of a century,” Flea explained. “Anyway, forgive me for turning the conversation to business professor, but Evolution would very much like to have a word with you. They've designated a Spokesman: Par Com Sar he calls himself. He's in residence at my office. Can we can schedule an interview for tomorrow morning? Will nine o'clock suit you?”
“What does Evolution want with me?”
“Oh, it's nothing serious! You're not in trouble or anything. I know the prospect of an interview with Evolution can be alarming but I give you my word in regards to your freedom, comfort and safety. And we can discuss the matter of your immigration as well. It's something of an interesting question you know. The status of our government, code of laws and such is all rather... nebulous these days, so we'll have to botch up the paperwork as best we can.
“That is, if you're serious about immigrating to our planet.” Flea's smile turned smarmy, and his eyes wandered the heavens by way of letting Sinsin know he was no more fooled by the lie than his guard at the starport had been.
“Of course I am. Or I was. But my decision to come here was made before I knew about Evolution. It's very oppressing to have your every action watched, recorded and scrutinized. I'm not so very certain I wish to stay now.”
“Of course I understand,” Flea replied. “I would feel the same way. The things we get up to when the lights go out, eh Professor?” Flea elbowed the sexless geel and winked at him lasciviously, then laughed again. “We'd be fortunate to have you, so we really must see to getting you all the rights and protections of citizenship.
“Well, it's just about time for my afternoon coffee,” Flea said more sedately. He waited momentarily for Aunt Kay to take the hint and make the offer of hospitality, but not long enough to embarrass himself. He saluted Dallas once more as he returned to his car. “Until tomorrow Professor Cu,” he said, as the centurion opened his door. “Nine o'clock!”
Sinsin raised his hand in farewell. After Flea's car had begun its ascent, it returned to its usual place: clasped behind his back, and his antennae and mandibles gyrated with consternation.
Dallas came to stand with the others, and they watched in a huddle as the air car headed, not for the Old Palace, but Darkside.
“Pig,” Aunt Kay muttered.
“What is xeno...archology?” Dallas asked.
“Xenoarchaeology,” Sinsin corrected him. “Strictly speaking, its the study of alien cultures through the material objects they left behind. My area of focus is the New Dawn, and by extension, the First Founding and Ancients.”
“So you are a tech hunter,” Aunt Kay said with a glare.
Sinsin sighed. “I'm no more a tech hunter than a geologist is a miner. But if you insist on applying that label, I won't quibble further.”
“Well, it's easier to say than xenoarchaeloger,” Dallas said with a conciliatory smile. He cautiously put a hand on the woman's shoulder. “Come on Aunt Kay. Don't make that face. He's not like the others. You can see that.”
Aunt Kay remained disgruntled. She didn't like that Flea had come calling, and she disliked the scrutiny of Evolution even less. It made her skin crawl to think of dark optics pointed at her and her building, and she wanted nothing more than to evict Sinsin then and there. It was the warm glow of the appleite between her breasts that persuaded her to let him stay. If she kicked Sinsin out, she would have to return his bauble, and that she did not want to do.
Her animosity was fully evaporated by dinner. As they ate a desert of pudding and jellied currants, Aunt Kay made the remark: “You must be well-traveled then Professor.”
Sinsin modestly admitted the truth of this. He produced a small device, and set it down on the table before them. He asked for the lights to be dimmed, and with the press of a few buttons, called up a holographic model of the galaxy. He patiently waited for their wonderment to quiet, and then he carefully pointed around the projector, to a white speck of light clad in a blue halo.
“I started here, at Glory Transcendent, where I was born. It was intended for me to be a diplomat, so I spent my youth studying human culture. There were more candidates for embassy work than were needed however, so by and by, the focus of my study shifted to archaeology. My first scientific expedition was with the Matriarch's College of Winterhome. It brought me here, to Macintosh.”
And so began the model's animation. Dot by dot, segment by segment, a glowing line began to draw the history of Sinsin's life and journey across the cosmos. The line was not straight, but crooked, bending and flexing. The model's animation didn't track just Sinsin's movements, but those of all the stars and worlds he had visited as well.
An Evolution observer watched and listened to Sinsin as raptly as the humans.
The cyborg had been air dropped just after dusk, and it came drifting down in ghostly silence: like a dark and sinister leaf, floating on the wind. Its metal frame was encased in a soft stealth shell, and so it landed on the edge of the roof as noiselessly as it had descended. Its thin insect wings lost their rigidity, and some unseen mechanism caused them to wrap around its slender limbs and trunk. In a blink, it had transformed into a shape easily mistaken for a tall, slender man in the dark: at least until it went over the side. It looked more like a spider then, climbing hand-over-hand, head-first down the side of the highrise, without any need for handholds or ledges.
It was from the exterior of the penthouse window that the cyborg watched Sinsin and the humans eat their meal. A microphone built into its palm was pressed against the glass, and so it heard every word as Sinsin told the others about his adventures. A faint remnant of its former humanity caused it to feel something like a pang of envy.
“This observer's form is not what I was promised!”
The Evolution algorithm didn't react to the anger. Anger was a useful tool for channeling a human mind into acts of aggression, and so it left the observer to its resentment.
“Where is the adventure I was promised? Where is the freedom? I was told I was special, that I would conquer the universe, but I'm just another tool to you! I'm just a machine to be used!”
When the observer began to feel trapped, and the anger turned to panic, the algorithm finally triggered the injectors in its brain carriage. Satiated and calmed by the soothing drug, the observer reverted to its machine-like state of normalcy, and focused its thoughts on the task at hand.
The conversation was ending. It was time for bed. Aunt Kay rose from the table, followed by the others. They would be asleep soon. The observer kept its microphone planted against the glass just in case their hygiene rituals were interrupted by a revelation.
“I have to get that device,” a voice said in the observer's mind: a thought that it mistook for its own. In an instant, the cyborg had formulated a plan of action: a return to the roof and infiltration of the penthouse through the elevators. In essence, it would walk in like it lived there.
“Going through the glass would be quicker,” the Evolution algorithm argued.
“The pressure change in the interior would be heard as wind,” the cyborg replied, as if to itself. “Likelihood of detection and confrontation increases. Better to go the long way.”
Evolution did the math, and decided that the human brain had calculated correctly. It returned to a state of dormancy in the observer's mind: a silent passenger and witness to all that the observer sensed and thought.
Neither the observer, nor Evolution, detected what killed it. The laser that sliced through the cyborg's brain carriage was well-aimed. Automated subsystems reported the damage and loss of the brain of course, but it took time for the information to be relayed and for Evolution to respond. A second pulse of light sliced into the observer's frame and ruptured its power cell before the algorithm could take direct control of the machine. The laser beam was revealed then: to the limits of the cloud of caustic gases and fine metal particles it created, but Evolution never saw it. Without the power cell, the observer's optics were blind, and the capacitors in its circuitry lasted only long enough to complete a second damage report. The observer lost its grip, and it looked more human than ever as it fell, limp and lifeless, from the highrise.