Sun-Side Regrets, Town of Cofan
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.1.25 Interstellar
Janus, Lira, Mick, and Ryler all stood as Nikandros approached. The Cult architect—a priest of the highest rank Janus knew of within the technocracy’s structure—walked over to their table.
Ryler gave up his seat without hesitating. The stiffness Janus had noticed earlier was fully there, fixing his friend’s features in place. Was that the mask, or was the part when he’d been relaxed fake?
“We didn’t invite you to join us,” Janus said, against his own best judgment.
Mick, Lira, and Ryler seemed to hold their breath.
Nikandros paused, one hand on the back of the chair. “It’s good to see you, Janus. It runs in your blood, you know? Impetuosity. Not your father, but your uncle and mother, both, and their parents before them. We traced it back fifteen generations.”
The priest talking about his family and comparing him to Uncle Ivan just pissed Janus off more. “I guess I get a pass, then. Can’t help it if it’s my nature.”
“You’re human, young man. Your nature is to change.” Nikandros sat down, threw his hood back, unclipped his black mask, and set it on the table—something Janus had demanded he do when they first met. The Cult architect appeared to be in his sixties, with short-cropped white hair, a strong nose and jaw, and hard, black eyes, although Janus thought he was probably well into his second century. “Sit.”
Mick and Lira looked at Janus, who nodded. They sat.
Ryler stood behind Nikandros, a half-step to the older priest’s left.
Nikandros placed his left hand on top of his right, on the table, and said, “How are you, Janus?”
Janus kept himself calm. If Ryler was associated with the cult that had exiled him here, Nikandros was its embodiment. Sure, he claimed it was a different faction, but Janus only had the old man’s word to go for it.
That didn’t mean he could afford to be excessively rude to him any more than he could show weakness. Nikandros could force the three of them to uproot and move with a word, maybe even a gesture.
The last time he’d spoken to Nikandros, he’d been awaiting trial. It was Nikandros who opened his eyes to the reasons for the injustices he’d suffered on Irkalla, both in ways he understood then and ways he understood later. That understanding had come at a cost. It had ignited Janus’s ambition and put him on the path to exile. The old man’s words were dangerous to those who listened to them and even more dangerous to those who didn’t.
“Did you know, when we first met, that we would end up here?” Janus asked.
“Of course not,” Nikandros said with a pitying smile. “It was only one of several possibilities, the chief of which was that you and everyone with you would die.”
Lira’s jaw bulged, but she was letting Janus lead the conversation.
Janus tried to keep calm. “Would you say you’re to blame for us being here?”
Ryler looked like he wanted to step in, but Nikandros just chuckled. “Do you want to live in a world where others are to blame for your situation, or do you want to be in control of your destiny?”
“I’m working on it. We all are.”
“Good. I leaned on the Prime Dome council in favor of sparing you because I thought you had the potential to do so. Your parents made you, your uncle trained you, Irkalla shaped you, your friends supported you, and you were bold enough to do the brave, stupid thing all on your own. It was Ryler who argued we should bring you here, but before you ‘blame’ him, the alternative was execution.”
Janus glanced at his friend, who looked conflicted but not ashamed.
Mick crossed his arms.
Nikandros turned to look at him and raised an eyebrow.
“Just because you didn’t push us into the pit doesn’t mean you didn’t watch us walk into it without warning us—or bet on us falling,” Mick said.
Nikandros turned back to Janus. “That’s a Hunter for you. Never pull their punches. And no, I didn’t warn you, although I think you made that last choice, the one to go to Prometheus Base, with your eyes wide open, didn’t you? And I absolutely benefited from your misfortune, though not as much as I would have if I’d let them kill you.”
“Let who, exactly?” Lira asked. “We didn’t get much in the way of explanations before we were stranded here.”
Nikandros nodded. “An admirable question, Lira. Knowledge is power, and wisdom is leverage, are they not?” He pulled a small black box from his left sleeve and placed it on the table before pressing a button on its side.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Janus and the others blinked as their implants were taken offline.
Nikandros cleared his throat. “I will explain this to you, not because you have a right to know, but because it may prove useful to you in the coming months to understand what we’re up against.”
Janus wanted to question the “we” in the conversation, but he knew from experience he needed to pay close attention to Nikandros’s every word, or he’d be walking into trouble blind.
“The Cult of the Survivor was created because our ancestors were persisting in petty feuds that would have killed the few of us that remained after the machines turned on us. It’s a somewhat ugly story, but suffice to say, those who didn’t agree with the new direction never reached Survivor’s Refuge.”
Janus grunted. “That doesn’t surprise me at all.”
Nikandros nodded. “The survivors were necessarily preoccupied with governance. They wanted to preserve a survivor’s drive to invent new solutions while preventing factionalism, so our ancestors opted for enterprise architecture, using reusable development programs to harden humanity against the threats posed by the rest of the galaxy.”
“Is that why they landed on Irkalla?” Janus asked. “To harden us?”
“No,” Nikandros said. “They landed on Krandermore to harden us. Irkalla has a separate purpose, but we’ll get to that. What you need to understand is that the Cult is not a monolithic entity but rather a framework that is constantly changing and evolving, just like the people we protect.”
“Protect us?” Mick asked. “Irkalla tried to kill all of us from the day we were born.”
“You were never supposed to leave the domes,” Nikandros said. “We gave you technology to keep you safe, isolated, and sedentary.”
Janus was still processing the priest’s first revelation. Forget Nikandros’s nonsense about the Cult and its supposed protection. Krandermore had been the first world the fleet of refugees seeded—that matched up with what he’d learned in the past year. Although the Krandermorans had lost most of their early history, it extended farther back than Irkalla’s had, meaning they’d reached Survivor’s Refuge hundreds of years before he’d been taught they had.
Lira leaned forward with her elbows on the table. “Which part of your framework killed my mother?”
“The Compartmentalists,” Nikandros said, raising two fingers. “There are two primary schools of thought that hold sway in the Cult’s architecture today. The Comps, who currently hold the majority, believe that humans progress through specialization. It’s what we call a waterfall approach. I don’t disagree that our talents and education make us more effective at certain types of work and less at others, but they take it to an extreme. If it was up to them, we’d live in strict caste-based societies, and each of us would be deployed to solve the challenges of survival as ad hoc teams, stacked like building blocks.”
“And what’s your view, then?” Mick asked. “Everyone gets a free house on a garden world?”
Nikandros smiled. “Our view is that human beings change, Mick, as I said earlier. We think that people under stress adapt to their environments and that some people, like you, can even thrive in that state of change. Our ideal is a cross-functional team centered around a remarkable individual. We think these outliers should be enabled and supported because they’ll lead the rest of us out of this stage of evolution into something new. We are the shepherds of the singularity. We call ourselves the Exceptionalists.”
Janus had kept quiet and listened because few people outside of the Cult got to peek at its inner workings, but all of this sounded like a high-minded theological theory when people were dying of hunger and exposure. “This is all fascinating, but I don’t see what it has to do with us.”
Nikandros smiled patiently. “I’m getting to that. You see, the Cult started in the IT department of the convoy that brought us here—the S-6, I believe it was called—so a building block approach, complete with risk management and mitigation, was ingrained in its leadership. Krandermore was settled first as a pilot, and those lessons were applied to other worlds in this planetary system. You’ve already experienced some of the differences in Krandermoran biology, and the same can be said of the other habitats. They needed a control, a population whose genetic makeup and culture would stay relatively static over the centuries.”
“Irkalla,” Janus breathed.
“Yes,” Nikandros said. “Little cities under glass domes, humans living in a controlled environment, shielded against radiation, rigorously controlled. You were supposed to be the perfect seed vault for the rest of us.”
Janus shuddered. How many times had he seen Cult wayfinders walking among them, collecting data, altering the course of events in ways overt and subtle according to an agenda they kept to themselves?
Of course, it had been an experiment.
Of course, Irkalla was the control.
He almost laughed. During the last Trials, on Irkalla, he’d revealed as much to a team from a settlement called Survivor’s Grace. They’d been furious, thinking their dome was a control for the others, not knowing how far the joke ran. It turned out the joke was on all of them. “But then my parents rediscovered ion propulsion, and they were going to share it with the rest of the experimental subjects. We were going to break out and ruin things.”
“So the compartmentalists killed them,” Nikandros said.
Janus looked at Ryler, and his friend nodded.
That was what it had all been about.
They were lab rats.
They’d crawled into the light.
The Cult had squashed them.
Janus had spent half his life getting squashed as an outsider in Prime Dome, and this was the same, only on a larger scale. He’d thought his family was suffering. His entire people had been shoved out of the airlock, and it was heartbreakingly funny to him, so he laughed.
“Janus, what’s wrong?” Lira asked, concerned.
Janus looked at her and remembered how she’d treated him when they’d first met and the years after that. She’d stepped on him every chance she’d gotten. And she’d had reasons. Her mother had died, died in the same place at the same time as his parents, but she’d blamed him. And she’d had power. And it had been hard to forgive her for that for a while, but he’d gotten past it, even if it still stung him sometimes. And the funny thing was, they’d both been the same, ants under a magnifying lens while the Cult played God.
When he’d cursed the Void or trembled in fear of it, it had been the Cult stealing his air.
It was enough to make most people feel small and hopeless, but Janus was a Promethean, born to steal fire from the gods. If he was at a disadvantage now, it was only because he lacked information, and that was something he could change.
He looked at Nikandros now, and while the architect was trying to convince him there were two kinds of cultists, he wasn’t buying it.
Nikandros had power.
Nikandros would use it to his own benefit and let them hang if it suited him.
Janus’s eyes flicked to Ryler, and he thought there might be some remnant of their friendship left there, but he was also well aware his “friend” had been spying on him and his family since they were children.
“What do you want?” Janus finally asked.