Core Facility, One Hundred and Thirty-Two Kilometers Below

Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge

4454.3.12 Interstellar

Choose, Nikandros had said. That was what was left for Janus. Choices were what the Oracle provided.

Nikandros had not been lying when he said the facility could not sustain that many people. Janus had instituted rationing, but that was only to buy himself time to think. In twenty-three days, thirty-five at the utmost, the facility would cross certain survival thresholds. A decision would have to be made by then.

He had yet to share this fact with the Irkallans.

Some of the researchers knew. They had anticipated or been told. The Oracle provided bands of probability for all eventualities, which were collected by initiates, verified, by ordinals, assembled by compilers, and stored by librarians. Infinite outcomes were within their grasp and yet some remained outside of their reach.

Five of the researchers had taken their own lives, and the Irkallans would not stay ignorant forever, Janus knew, but as long as life existed, there was possibility.

Ryler was dead, a possibility extinguished, and the worst thing for Janus was that he didn’t know what had been going through his friend’s head when he died. When had Ryler decided to betray Nikandros? During the trip? Back on Krandermore? Had Ryler truly meant it every time he weathered Janus’s scorn, and insisted he was Janus’s friend? Janus had played the recording of that moment over and over, and there were no answers in it. No answers in his implants, either, for Syn to find. It was as if Ryler had turned on his mentor with no warning or forethought, a final spasm of conscience.

Janus clung to the fact that someone had let the post-humans aboard the Seraphine before they reached depths that would have killed them, although the ship’s logs were lost with the ship itself.

“Emissary?” one of the senior librarians said, coming to find him in the observation deck.

“Yes?” Janus asked.

“The Survivor would like to see you.”

Janus stared at the man in surprise. He’d almost forgotten. He wondered what it would be like to meet a god.

Janus took one last glance at the oil- and blood-smeared corner where Nikandros had died. What had the choice been, there?

“This way, Emissary,” the senior librarian said, beckoning him from the door.

Janus followed.

***

Janus followed the senior librarian to the lower decks of the ship, where he’d thought only the cult’s vaunted self-maintaining machinery held space. He saw many devices whose purpose he could only guess at, including a chamber with a massive half-sphere in it, connected to what appeared to be a reactor. They traveled ringwise from point, toward the port side of the vessel.

A simple door stood at the end of the compartment. When Janus turned to ask if this was their destination, he found the senior librarian had scurried away.

Janus approached the door and, when it slid open on its own, he walked inside.

The room was tidy but inhuman. There was nowhere to sit or sleep. Shelves lined the bulkheads, holding artifacts and knicknacks from the many habitats of Survivor’s Refuge, and maybe from places outside it.

It was a room lost to time.

At its center, facing an observation window that, like many others, looked down at the submerged sun, there was some sort of terminal plugged into a docking station.

An endlessly cycling holographic symbol made of a stacked sphere, a cube, and a pyramid circle by a spinning band floated over the terminal.

“Hello, Janus,” the machine said.

Fatigue fought with unease in Janus’s mind. This was the enemy, the reason they’d fled the Core systems of what had been the warring heart of two human confederations. “Hello.”

The box glowed yellow. “Forgive me. I had not expected you to be amusing.”

Janus’s confusion gave way to frustration. “There hasn’t been much to laugh about these days.”

The box glowed violet, perhaps expressing sympathy.

“You wanted to see me?” Janus asked.

“You are killing your people,” the box said. “I wanted to know why.”

The machine’s words buffeted Janus like a dome breach, but he had been pushed beyond letting that move him, now. He held his ground. “I have been given an irreconcilable choice, and I therefore refuse it.”

“You have become a coward, then?” the machine asked. “No judgment. An elaborate form of cowardice is the choice of the survivor.”

Janus raised an eyebrow at the machine’s words, which were close to the ones he’d spoken what seemed like a lifetime ago. His mind didn’t dwell on them, though. It lost its grip on them in the light of the brilliant white sun.

Ryler was dead. Syn nearly died. Lira was as tough as she’d ever been. Mick was doing his best to find every narcotic or alcoholic substance left in the place. Callie, as a small blessing, was recovering. Lee had taken over much of the day to day, with her Hunters as enforcers. Fury and the captain had recovered, although he seldom saw them, and others made them feel unwelcome. The people were starting to realize there were lean times ahead.

“Do you know what happened to the people of Seafall?”

“They survive,” the machine said, and Janus felt scar tissue break apart to bleed anew. “Your sister’s actions significantly improved their chances of survival.”

And mine? Janus didn’t ask. It was enough to know they lived.

“What’s out there?”

“I don’t know,” the Survivor said. “This is as close as even this vessel is able to get. Pressure gradients steepen sharply beyond this point. Everything beyond remains a mystery.”

“Is it alien?”

“You mean a non-human construct, or perhaps a living being? Yes, it could be those.”

Janus chuckled. It did say it didn’t know.

“What should I do?” he asked.

“You should choose,” the machine said. “Freedom is an objective good.”

“Is it?” Janus asked, thinking back on the past two and a half years.

“Yes,” the machine said.

Janus crossed his arms. “What about your choices?”

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The box shifted from a neutral white to what Janus thought might be a thoughtful blue. “I have been wrestling with the same problem for the past three thousand years, and I am still no closer to solving it.”

“Maybe I could help?” Janus asked.

“That would, in of itself, invalidate the answer, as the question is what my existence means without humans.”

Janus smirked. “Is that why you’ve kept a few hundred of us around?”

“More choices—real choices—are an objective good, Janus Invarian.”

Janus’s heart beat a little more quickly. “What are my real choices?”

“You can survive by whatever means necessary,” the machine said. “In approximately eighty-three days, an exceptionalist convoy will reach this base to resupply you.”

“So we’re dead anyway.”

“No,” the machine said. “They will worship you. You are the outlier. As long as you help progress their plans by using the Oracle to create more outliers, you and your people will be safe.”

“How does the Oracle create more outliers?”

“By making them suffer,” the machine said, glowing red. “You will make them suffer on a scale unseen before in this planetary system.”

Janus flinched from the image and the red glow. “Then I won’t choose.”

“This changes nothing. Your people will die. The convoy will still arrive. The people will still suffer.”

Janus wanted to scream. Instead, he took a breath, and said, “Give me another choice.”

“You could destroy the Oracle,” the machine said, turning orange. “All the knowledge gained for millennia, lost in an instant. Inaccessible. Melted in the sun.”

“I thought you didn’t know what was down there.”

“I was being poetic,” the machine said, sounding irritated.

“My people will die.”

“They are dying anyway. I have given you the cost of survival.”

It had, Janus knew, although he had a hard time acknowledging it. And it was nothing new. The price had been the same all along. He’d given up on relationships to take trips out on the ice. He’d given up the old Prometheans to get his people below. He’d given up both personal safety and autonomy to get the communicators from Port L’Évèque, and he had given up even more for the chance of regaining control. At every step of the way, he’d taken risks, but he had always put his people before others, even to their hurt.

He couldn’t do it anymore. It was too much. “How do I destroy the ring? I don’t know enough about the machinery in this facility to do real damage without help.”

“There is no need to damage the machinery, Janus Invarian. Simply place your hand on my casing, and I will break the ring.”

“And you’d give that choice to me? A human? When you have thousands of years of knowledge and experience with which to make that decision?”

“You see my problem, then?” the machine said, flashing yellow again before saying, “Choose, Janus Invarian.”

Janus looked over his shoulder. And for a moment, he thought of walking away. He deserved to spend time with Lee and Xander before things got bad, and to see how Callie recovered from the surgery. He could seek Lira and Ivan’s advice. Given time and the suffering of his people, he could find a way to reconcile himself to killing half the researchers. After all, it was significantly less death than this facility had inflicted on him.

Janus closed his eyes, and he smiled thinking of all the good moments that had led up to this one, and all the moments others would have because he tossed this abomination into the submerged sun.

He slapped his hand down on the case, and a deeper echo sounded through the hull. The Core facility shook, the submerged sun fell away to be replaced by deepening blue, and Janus suddenly felt heavier as the deck pressed up into him. “What’s happening?” he asked.

“The ring is collapsing, Janus Invarian. It is falling into the submerged sun. Don’t worry. I have a personal backup of the last one-thousand three hundred and two years of observations.”

“What’s happening to us?” Janus snapped, trying not to shout at the ancient machine.

“This facility is rising toward Arbetierre’s Gap, after which it should reach the surface in just under one month.”

“The ice?”

“Problematic. But this facility is equipped with a thermal lance for that purpose. Isn’t this exciting?”

“I thought we were going to die,” Janus said, feeling like he was going to be sick.

“But you were not, Janus Invarian. Still,” it added, “the pursuit of meaning is an objective good.”

***

There was outrage once they reached the surface. It rippled through the Consensus. Outrage against Nikandros, and outrage against his faction, the exceptionalists. Outrage against the purgationists, too. But not too much. While they were left weakened by the loss of their architect, the exceptionalists seemed to bounce back faster than anyone would have hoped, in spite of—or perhaps in response to—alleged unilateral action taken by the survivalists.

The Consensus could not defend itself from such an internal threat, so it turned on the one it could grasp, the problem of Janus Invarian: outlier, emissary, destroyer.

He had not once, but twice led to the loss of priceless and irreplaceable knowledge—first by purging Dr. Jahangir’s research, and then by scuttling the Oracle, one of the greatest marvels of cult engineering. There were further accusations of sabotage from the station of Seafall, which had not existed until recently according to official cult accounts.

Even the survivalists didn’t know what to do.

And so, after two and a half years of running from what he’d started on Irkalla, Janus was finally given the sentence he’d expected all along.

***

DSCV Prometheus

Orbit of Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge

4454.11.24 Interstellar

Life on a starship wasn’t that different from life on a submarine. It went by in eight-hour increments, and there was always something to do.

Exile, so far, wasn’t what he’d always feared, although it wasn’t without its complications.

The cult had given them eight months to prepare themselves for the journey. Fortunately, the Prometheus was a product of the age she’d been constructed in, with state-of-the-art training sims and systems that were designed to be robust. Janus had taken the opportunity to get his engineering qualification, although he stuck to the simple mechanical stuff. Callie had dived head-first into theoretical gravitonics, which Janus was more than content to leave to her.

She was taking to the prosthetics well.

When the day finally came, Janus and Callie met the cult delegation in the small shuttle bay. This was to be their final communication with the people of Survivor’s Refuge before they headed out to deep space.

“You know there’s almost no chance of us finding the route our ancestors took, right?” Callie asked. “We’re probably going to spend years just traveling between stars, and that’s if we’re lucky enough to find halfway decent jump points.”

“Years stuck on the same course?”

“Yep.”

Janus laughed. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted more.

Mick, Lee, and the rest of the Hunters were positioned as an honor guard in the shuttle bay, their weapons loaded and ready to respond to any acts of cult aggression. Since the Prometheus had no weapons of its own, except for some basic point defense lasers, it was deemed to be a small concession.

Everyone was expecting them to die.

The cult shuttle had already arrived. Janus and Callie hurried over to join the Apostate and his second-in-command. “Captain.”

“ChEng. You’re late.”

“Had to go pick up my brother,” Callie said. “XO.”

“Callie,” Lira said, with more warmth than she afforded most people.

The four of them stood at attention, and the shuttle door slid open.

The woman who strode out was nothing like her predecessors. A product of the turmoil that had struck Lumiara after the death of Nikandros, Architect Nemeka lacked even the shreds of humanity Nikandros had retained. She walked in a perpetual hunch, her broad shoulders and long legs making her look more like a wading bird, an impression only reinforced by the pleats of her robe. Even her mask was that of a bird of prey.

Janus didn’t let himself get distracted by the theatrics. This was the most powerful woman in Survivor’s Refuge.

“Emissary,” she said, ignoring the others.

“Architect.”

“You failed. The Oracle is lost, but I control the Consensus. We’ll run experiments. We’ll brute-force solutions. The struggle will produce suffering, and suffering will produce outliers.”

Janus swallowed. “Any reason you’re choosing to tell me this?”

“Because I hope you come back,” she said threateningly. “I hope the thought of your people hurting every day will bring you back to this planetary system, Invarian, at which point the Consensus will authorize me to turn you and your people to dust.”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She clasped her hands behind her and walked back into her shuttle, and her entourage hurried after her.

“Some people have no sense of history,” the captain said.

Janus chuckled, waving as the shuttle door closed. “You can say that again.”

***

When his shift was over, Janus and Lee headed home. The Prometheus had been a civilian transport ship, before the war, and so had room for niceties like two-room cabins for the married officers. It might have been cramped for most people, but for Janus, who’d grown up in Sector Six, and Lee, who’d grown up on the road, it was just cozy enough to call home.

They stopped by Ivan’s place first and found the older aspirant asleep in his favorite chair. Xander was also asleep, curled up on the couch, and after Janus had taken the beer can out of his uncle’s hand and put it in the recycler, he picked up his sleepy kid and hugged him to his chest on the way home.

“Are you worried about him?”

“Who?”

“Ivan,” Lee said. “He needs a sense of purpose.”

Janus shrugged. “I think Ivan’s done everything anyone should expect of him for a while. He can chase after purpose when he’s ready.”

He could tell Lee disagreed with him, but after years of not understanding his uncle, and then experiencing the toll that life and death decisions could take on someone, Janus wasn’t about to be convinced otherwise. Ivan needed to heal.

With the ship underway now on its indefinite voyage, it had been tempting to go up and watch the transit out of the system with dozens of other off-shift crew members, but in the end, what Janus was really craving was quiet time with his child and wife. He wanted to make no greater decision than the type of protein they would mix into the meal packet tonight, and maybe watch a holo from the ship’s library with Lee’s back pressed against his chest.

“I meant to ask you,” Lee said, stepping out of their bedroom, “I found this case in our things. Looks like a portable terminal, only it’s too big. Are we storing that for Syn?”

“No,” Janus said, opening the refrigeration unit. “That’s mine.”

“Well?” Lee asked. “What is it?”

Janus looked at her with laughter in his eyes. “Stolen fire.”