Noviko wasted no time. Without so much as a goodbye to her friends or family, she cashed in her indulgences with Neon Vox and demanded safe, discreet passage to PRISMA HQ. Bound by her own sense of honor, Vox did not ask questions; indulgences were indulgences. That very night, a small sloop fitted with solar sails and an auxiliary motor was moored off the perimeter of the S.S. Gitarja’s main fleet. Vox took Noviko there, helped her load up a trunk full of winter clothing and food, and bid her farewell.
And that, Noviko hoped, would be that.
Of course she sent messages home. Her husband had Trip safe and sound at their hab in the foundries of Okinawa. He was nearly five years old anyways, and an early start on the curing process of honest labor would do him good. One night, while Noviko laid on the deck of the sloop while the ship’s captain smoked nearby in the dark, she stared up at the infinite span of the Milky Way and watched meteors and satellites streak to and fro. Trip was watching the sight with her and he marveled at the beauty of a night sky without light pollution.
“Mama,” he said, as they shared senses. “You’re cold.”
“I’m alright, darling. I’ll put on a jacket soon. Are you making friends?”
“I always make friends! Everyone is my friend. The neighbor boy is named Hoju, and I taught him how to play Ninja Biscuit.”
“Of course you did, my love.”
“Are you playing a game? Is that why you’re on an adventure?”
“I am playing a game, yes – a very grown-up and complicated game, with some very grown-up and complicated people and entities.”
“Sounds fun!”
Noviko smiled, got up, and went to get her fur coat from her trunk in the tiny deckhouse. She swaddled herself in it and reached over to the captain for a puff. He passed the pipe and she had a nice, thick hit of classic tobacco. It made her cough, and she heard Trip coughing on his end, too.
“Yuck, smoking is gross,” he complained. “Don’t do that.”
“Oh, I’m sorry darling,” she smiled. “I’ll try not to.”
“I’m gonna go play, bye! Have fun with your game!”
“I’ll do my best. Kisses for you and daddy.”
The sensory-sharing shut down and she took another long puff of the pipe.
“We’re rationing,” said the captain, as he took back the pipe. “Don’t be greedy.”
“Apologies, captain. Perhaps we should do some night fishing?”
The big fellow took another long puff of his pipe and nodded. “Aye. Get the rods set up.”
And so it was more or less like that every day and every night for a week. They would spend most of the time in silence, as her captain seemed more interested in charts, satellite chatter, and gazing longingly out over the waves than anything else. They ate well, at least, catching fresh jellies and skimmer fish on their nightly casts. The onboard kitchenette was more than up to the task of handling Noviko’s needs as a home cook; she’d even brought her spice case with the nori flakes, sesames, garlic salt, and other essentials. The captain’s clean plate and grunting nods were ample enough indication of masculine gratitude for Noviko.
But every day, he seemed to put more and more distance between them. The captain did not like looking Noviko in the eyes and she sensed he was wary of her, perhaps even frightened of her, in a stoic sort of way. Out of respect, she never broached the subject. One night, however, she woke up in the little deckhouse trembling; not from the cold, for she was bundled up nicely in her cot’s sleeping bag. In fact she felt a bit sweaty and overheated. Her heart was racing, and she wondered if perhaps this was it, and she was just dying then and there.
In the dark she heard the captain sigh and turn over on his cot. “You gotta stop this shit,” he said. “I’m losing sleep.”
“I’m… I’m sorry,” she was nearly out of breath. Her throat hurt. “Was I talking in my sleep?”
“You were screaming – screaming and begging in gibberish. Not even my earplugs are blocking it out anymore, you gotta stop.”
“I… oh. I don’t remember any dreams.”
“Look… I’ll just crank up the white noise and put in the plugs. But you need help.”
“Yes… that’s why I’m on this journey.”
The captain turned on a white noise program on the deckhouse speaker, stuck waxy plugs back in his ears, and cranked the volume up to a loud, soft static. Noviko fell back asleep within moments, because despite having rested a full eight hours every night for days, she could never escape the feeling of being exhausted.
Eventually, they arrived at their destination: Kiska Island. On that island, PRISMA HQ gleamed in the arctic sunlight. It was a low dome of crystal that refracted a rainbow of scattered light across the pale blue horizon. It was surrounded by hardy arctic vegetation and sheer rock cliffs, with the black waters of the Aleutian strait surrounding the island on all sides; in parts, those waters churned from the brine expulsion of a desalination plant submerged somewhere beneath snow and ocean. In other parts, the otherwise icy sea boiled from the facility’s heatsinks.
A perimeter of citadel rigs surrounded the island on all sides. Each one was a few miles apart, with a contingent of wake-surfing interceptors patrolling the entire circumference all day, every day. A combined force of ZON trench marines and GYOTA combat engineers took charge of security for PRISMA at this site, and it was for that reason a symbol of the Trine Accord’s dedication to corporate synergy.
The site was open to the public, of course, though there was a hitch: this island was of interest to military anthropologists for the abundance of WW2 relics in the waters and scattered throughout the island. Drone escort was necessary for tourists brave enough to make the journey. Certain restricted areas within PRISMA HQ itself were cloutwalled and accessible only to elders in good standing. Noviko was not an elder, but she did have clout. Well… a single unit of clout, one already being sliced up into micro-fragments just from her research into the history of Syndicate’s dealings with squid R&D.
Her heart did not sink or lift at the sight of the island and its sparkling dome; it sat suspended in her chest, like a levitating poker card in the hands of a stage magician. “Thank you for doing this on such short notice,” she said to the captain.
“Any friend of Neon Vox is a friend of mine,” said the captain. He was a towering man with muscled forearms that resembled hairy barrels. “And if that friend happens to pay me two year’s labor for two weeks of easy sailing, I might be inclined to go the extra klick for her.”
As they passed the southeast portion of the island, around the section called Vega Bay, they saw the rusted, ragged remains of an ancient warship sticking out of the shallow water close to the beach. The sight of it felt like a lead sinker being dropped into Noviko’s guts; it inspired a kind of grim reverence that made her feel afraid of the legacy of human existence.
Truly, we are nature’s boldest experiment.
A swarm of patrol drones hummed overhead. As they passed over, the drones vector-locked themselves to Noviko’s vessel. The drone movements perfectly mirrored the velocity of the ship and its natural rise and fall on the waves, giving them the illusion of somehow being attached to it without any visible tether. As they did this, Noviko felt that hair-raising feeling on the back of her brain that signaled a metadata snoop far deeper than the usual once-over inspection she or any other civilian might give one another on the street; this survey was implant-deep and could be felt in the central nervous system. It tickled the same genes that governed a human’s fear of snakes or dark places.
The captain seemed unconcerned. He ignored the drones, and they left within thirty seconds anyhow. He chose to admire the many floating platforms of natural sea ice drifting past them, some as big as their own boat.
“The great re-glaciation,” said the captain. “To think our ancestors were gonna burn this whole planet to the ground out of sheer, dumb greed. Not that there’s anything wrong with greed, mind – everybody deserves a little selfish hunger. But to just fill the sea with trash and cook the world for… convenience? Heh.”
“I think my sinuses may have cracked from the cold,” said Noviko, through the frosted scarf she wore wrapped around her nose and mouth. She was swaddled in a puffy arctic jacket with a sumptuous collar lining of white fur and felt quite cozy.
“Should’ve winterized your cyberware.” The man gazing over the prow of the small boat with her, though, stood out in the freezing chill with his burly arms bared, flask in hand. He snorted snot down his sinuses, hacked, and spat out over the water.
The glob of spit and mucous froze mid-flight, then exploded into shards of ice.
Noviko prayed none of the frozen snot-shards had sprayed into her clothing. “Is that how you are standing there like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like the air isn’t cold enough to kill.”
“Yeah, winterized cyberware. You gotta get a subdermal mesh installed, it can keep you toasty, plugs right into the body’s metabolism, uses supplemental batteries to keep you warm.” He grinned and patted one of the big, zipped-up bulges on his utility harness. “This’ll keep me warm for days. Plugs in and charges up in eight hours, too.”
Noviko had been considering a baseline life more and more, and the idea of someone removing all of her skin just to install an artificial mesh beneath and then slather the skin back on was a mental image she could have done without. Her smile remained polite.
“Wouldn’t it just… be more efficient to wear a jacket?”
“You fall into these waters, you’re dead in thirty seconds. With subdermal heating, you’re dead once the battery runs out – so, in that situation, maybe an hour. And you don’t have a big jacket getting soggy and weighing you down, just to freeze into an ice coffin once you get out.”
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
“… you’re speaking from personal experience?”
The man took a swig and dragged the back of his hand across his lips. “Yes’m.”
“Then I defer to your expertise, Captain.”
He grinned, a big grin of patchy beard and coffee-stained teeth. “We dock in ten, chica suave. Get yourself correct, or customs is gonna eat you for lunch.”
“I have every right to be here, captain, same as you.”
“Heh… sure. But what’s right isn’t always what’s expedient.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Just because you have a right to something doesn’t mean you have easy access to it.”
Noviko wrinkled her little nose and bowed just enough to show she heard him. “It must be as you say, then, because recently I’ve discovered that nothing in this world is as easy or as simple as I would like it to be. I miss my home and my family; I miss my humble life.”
“Maybe if you really appreciated it, you wouldn’t be here, across the world from the people you care about.”
Noviko narrowed her eyes. “Oh, please. Tell me more about myself.”
He took a swig of his flask. “Words are words. Actions are actions.”
“I hardly have a choice in being here. I feel if I don’t march into the very heart of PRISMA and demand satisfaction, I’ll never be fit to go home.”
“What makes you unfit?”
“I have gone insane.”
He stared at her, and she got the feeling he was considering the pros and cons of throwing her overboard. “… uh. Okay. But your liq’s still good, right?”
“It’s already in your account,” she said. “Now give me a sip of that booze before I write you off as not merely rude, but inhospitable.”
“Yes’m,” he handed her the flask. She took a long drink and coughed – it tasted like burning wood and turpentine. He had a good guffaw over her watering eyes.
“Not your grandma’s rice wine, huh?”
“Whiskey,” she hissed. “I should have known.”
“I’m gonna go tool up for the resupply. Stay warm out here.”
He disappeared into the tiny ship’s deckhouse, leaving her alone at the prow. As the great dome grew closer, she saw the noontime sun disappear behind it; this final crescent slit of light over the crystal dome caused a nauseating gleam of rainbow light she had to shield her eyes from. Then it passed and they entered the harbor in the shade. Their boat bumped the dock, and the captain threw out the mooring cables to the dockworker drones.
“Welcome to Aleutia,” said the customs agent at the docks, who greeted Noviko with a culturally-considerate bow, despite the agent wearing the facial studs and neon hair of a NorMurican. “Captain Dunkin Frost and Noviko Tanaka-LaCroix,” she said with a flickering smile. “Do you consent to the formality of a guided tour and a few routine questions?”
The captain lowered the gangplank with a thud. “I’m just here to pick up supplies,” said Dunkin. “Noviko here is gonna head inside.”
Noviko started for the gangplank, but Dunkin stuck one of his arms out to prevent her from exiting just yet. Noviko saw the steam rising from the heat of his bare skin as he barred her exit. “I already paid you,” said Noviko. “Yet you block my path.”
“I need you to understand the weight of what you’re doing,” he said. “I leave you here, you gotta find your own way home.”
“She’ll be in good hands,” said the customs agent. “If she decides she wants to go home, we won’t leave her stranded.”
“Heh, sure. If she decides to leave.”
The customs agent had no response but a well-maintained smile.
“I’ll be fine,” said Noviko. “PRISMA has already stated it owes me.”
Dunkin lifted his eyebrows. “No shit? That true?”
The customs agent nodded. “It is.”
“Freaky. Well, that works for my conscience. Good luck, ma’am.”
Dunk tromped down the gangplank, the servos of his laborer’s exoskeleton whining in the frigid arctic air. Noviko came after, clinging to the guardrail with her mittens. The customs agent offered a hand and helped her step out onto the dock. The hand holding Noviko’s was warm and secure, and despite not knowing this woman at all, there was something about her absolute calm that put Noviko at ease. The agent seemed to sense this, as she stroked the back of Noviko’s mitten and walked her toward the crystal dome.
There were no visible people, except Dunkin stomping toward the towers of the supply depot. Yet all around them, drones hummed in swarms, most of them smaller ZON parcel drones bringing rations and amenities to posted sailors on ships further out to the perimeter. But now and then she saw a mid-sized personnel drone meant to ferry two people from one point to another. These resembled drifting maple pods, a kind of long oval structure with the four propulsion wings at the top keeping the structure stable. And then there were VTOL drones, the heavy-duty unmanned freighters of the sky designed to transport squads of soldiers or even team up with each other to ferry cargo containers to ships and supply depots.
One of the personnel drones thrummed down onto the docks to meet them. Its pod slid open, revealing a cozy interior with two cushioned seats and a small refreshment dispenser. The agent gestured for Noviko to step inside.
Noviko hesitated. “Where are you taking me?”
“We’ve been expecting you, Noviko. I was instructed to bring you to intake.”
“… what in the world is intake?”
The agent’s smile turned a bit sad. “Are you still having visions? Bad dreams?”
“Well, yes, but… I don’t remember them if I do. I don’t know how I know I’m still having them; I just wake up exhausted and frightened and I don’t know why.”
“Your body remembers them. Your biomon readings indicate a significant uptick in muscle fascia formation, cortisol, and an unstable ratio of serotonin. Conscious memory is overrated, Noviko – the body always keeps the score. The body holds every secret.”
Noviko felt like the petals of some alien flower were opening in her mind, revealing all the forbidden gnosis of PRISMA. The inside of the personnel drone was invitingly warm. She did not want to step in. She also desperately wanted to step in.
“We have hot cocoa inside,” said the agent. “And marshmallows.”
Noviko hopped into the pod. “Why didn’t you lead with that?”
The agent sat across from the tiny table in the pod. It sealed shut around them and turned-on climate control, flooding the interior with warm air. The refreshment dispenser in the side of the pod dispensed two mugs of hot cocoa, then dropped mini marshmallows in. Lids sealed onto the hot drinks with sipping nozzles and the magnetic bottoms of the mugs clamped to the table when the clamping switch at the bottom of the handle was pressed.
“We have a lovely doctor waiting for you at intake,” said the agent, as she sipped cocoa.
Noviko slurped up a few half-soggy marshmallows. “I’m going to be okay?”
“Of course. We look after our own, and you’ve been through too much on our behalf.”
“I want so badly to believe that.”
“Mistrust of PRISMA is natural, particularly from someone raised in a GYOTA region like yourself. The Soldered Sun is a unique outlook on life that presumes a great deal of audacity and power for the human race.”
“Growing up, my father used to say ‘the function of life is to fly in the face of entropy.’”
The agent slurped her cocoa and laughed gently. “Entropy… the eternal foe of the engineering mindset. But entropy can be helpful. After all, without stopping, empty space, or natural decay, nothing functions. The religion of ‘stuff is good, non-stuff is bad’ is what created the catastrophes of the late twenty-first century.”
“Plastic.”
“Yes. Plastic and poison, things that are borderline ‘eternal,’ yet for that very reason are devastating to the natural world. That which is in line with nature does not fear death or decay. It dissolves back into the world that created it eventually.”
“And what does this metaphor have to do with my situation?”
“You have seen things you should not have seen – you are haunted by them. Your wetware is contaminated by trauma, by an overabundance of confusing facts. We would like to help you dislodge this disturbing data from your brain and place it somewhere that it cannot hurt you any longer.”
“You want to… erase my memories.”
“Not erase. Cut and paste.”
“And where will my data go?”
“To wetware clusters that can handle the job.”
Noviko felt strange. She lowered her mug and licked foamy chocolate from her lips. “What… what job, exactly?”
“Did you come here for relief, or more burdens, Noviko?”
“Relief.”
“Then it may be best not to ask questions you do not want answers to.”
Noviko absorbed this message in silence. She stared out the window at the sparkling dome scrolling beneath them. Some of the hexagons in the dome slid open from time to time for larger drones to exit or enter. It seemed they were on a similar course as the personnel drone began a gradual descent.
It is better to appreciate the labors of others.
Noviko used her best, most genial tone. “Who built this vast dome beneath us? It’s quite marvelous.”
“It wasn’t built. It was grown.”
“… I see.”
“PRISMA believes it is important that humans and their artifacts eventually learn to be grown, rather than constructed. She believes that one day, nothing shall be divorced from their sense of belonging to nature; undoing the sense of alienation that harms so many humans, even today, is erroneous common sense. We all grew from this world. We, and by extension all that we do, are all natural, for good or ill.”
Noviko listened, as best she could, and it sounded very much like the Daoist line of thought regarding consciousness and cosmology; a common, ecological outlook on the psychology of human existence itself. That was fine. But one part of the agent’s statement made Noviko confused. “You said ‘she’ in regard to PRISMA. Isn’t it a corporation?”
“It is. But to those of us who work closely with the central decision-making apparatus, we consider PRISMA to be a ‘she’ like a ship – a conceptual ship, of course, not a literal one.”
“Uh… huh. Why?”
“Because like a ship, she contains us.”
The personnel drone drifted down, down, down into the dome structure. Darkness surrounded them and Noviko could no longer see outside the window. What few rays of winter light remained vanished as the hangar door above them slid shut. And then, thousands of tiny lights lit up in patterns all throughout the hangar chamber. These patterns denoted the existence of doorways, walking paths, windows, and other guidance essentials.
The pod slid open, and the agent stepped out. She offered her hand to Noviko, and Noviko felt far too scared of the woman to be rude. She took the hand and was led out along a glowing pathway toward a distant door lit up by pink neon light.
“You’ll be alright,” said the agent as they walked. “Things are the way they are in PRISMA HQ for a reason. It’s better to lean into the fear.”
“Oh,” said Noviko, with a little involuntary tremor of fright in her voice. “Lean into the fear, yes. That sounds so very reassuring, you really are excellent at whatever your job is. I believe the captain said you were a ‘customs agent’ of some kind?”
“I most certainly am,” said the customs agent. “I’ve already taken a full inventory of your psychology and biomon. Do you have any outstanding issues, aside from your nightmares and visions, to declare? The more you can tell us, the easier the intake process will be.”
“I desperately miss my life and my family,” said Noviko.
“You say that, yet everything about your internal processes and external body language suggests a confused sincerity.”
“I am so tired of people questioning my love for my husband and son.”
“It’s not us questioning it,” said the agent, whose smile finally died. “It’s you.”
Noviko wanted to slap the agent straight across the face. She felt the anger lance down into her fingers. But she knew, she knew from the way the agent looked at her in that moment, that the agent knew of this urge, could sense the rise in adrenaline and heart rate, could sense the narrowing of the pupils and the puff of anguished breath.
It is better to appreciate the labors of others, said Noviko’s mother in her thoughts. That’s how you must think, or you will make a fool of yourself, because you are as vain, proud, hungry, and beautiful as your mother, Noviko Tanaka.
“Listen to your mother,” said the agent, in a way that was both quiet and violating. “She was a great psychopunk. And she did good work seeding your consciousness with wisdom, however much you fight to stamp out the sprouts.”
Noviko had intrusive thoughts; slapping, biting, pulling hair, shouting, the usual. Something inside of her had unraveled. This level of intrusive goading was not something she was prepared to handle. That is why the intrusive thoughts won, and she whipped her hand back to slap her palm across the agent’s face with a mighty DAP.
The regret was instantaneous. Noviko took her hands to her lips and covered her mouth, her eyes went wide with horror, and she waited for the security drones to zap her unconscious for her to be dragged to an EED conversation pod. The agent took the slap across the cheek, and it had left a mild, pink mark. The agent’s smile returned.
“Feel better?” Asked the agent, with the same infuriating gentleness as before.
“Please forgive me,” Noviko bowed, feeling flushed and humiliated by her own impetuousness. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“I deserved it. It’s good to see you still have your dignity. Shall we?”
The agent gestured back to the lit path. Noviko looked back over her shoulder and saw the personnel drone, still open and inviting. She could have run back toward it, demanded passage home, and been done with this whole depraved adventure. But she didn’t.
She chose to go forward, to go to the top of the mountain. To intake.