“We are listening.”
“We gave you all those new concepts. There must be things you know that we don’t.”
A brief silence, the equivalent of who knew how much thought. “Some of our concepts might cause you dislocation.” A pause. “But in the long run, you will be much better off. The scars will heal. You will rebuild. The chances of your destroying yourselves are well within the limits of acceptability.”
“Destroying ourselves?” For a second, Lizzie couldn’t breathe. It had taken hours for the city/entity to come to terms with the alien concepts she’d dumped upon it. Human beings thought and lived at a much slower rate than it did. How long would those hours translate into human time? Months? Years? Centuries? It had spoken of scars and rebuilding. That didn’t sound good at all.
Then the robofish accelerated, so quickly that Lizzie almost lost her grip. The dark waters were whirling around her, and unseen flecks of frozen material were bouncing from her helmet. She laughed wildly. Suddenly she felt great!
“Bring it on,” she said. “I’ll take everything you’ve got.”
It was going to be one hell of a ride.
THREE BODIES AT MITANNI
SETH DICKINSON
Seth Dickinson is the author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant and its forthcoming sequel, The Monster Baru Cormorant. He studied racial bias in police shootings, wrote much of the lore for Bungie Studios’ Destiny, and helped write and design the open-source space opera Blue Planet. If he were an animal, he would be a cockatoo.
We were prepared to end the worlds we found. We were prepared to hurt each other to do it.
I thought Jotunheim would be the nadir, the worst of all possible worlds, the closest we ever came to giving the kill order. I thought that Anyahera’s plea, and her silent solitary pain when we voted against her, two to one, would be the closest we ever came to losing her—a zero-sum choice between her conviction and the rules of our mission:
Locate the seedship colonies, the frozen progeny scattered by a younger and more desperate Earth. Study these new humanities. And in the most extreme situations: remove existential threats to mankind.
Jotunheim was a horror written in silicon and plasmid, a doomed atrocity. But it would never survive to be an existential threat to humanity. I’m sorry, I told Anyahera. It would be a mercy. I know. I want to end it too. But it is not our place—
She turned away from me, and I remember thinking: it will never be worse than this. We will never come closer.
And then we found Mitanni.
Lachesis woke us from stable storage as we fell toward periapsis. The ship had a mind of her own, architecturally human but synthetic in derivation, wise and compassionate and beautiful but, in the end, limited to merely operational thoughts.
She had not come so far (five worlds, five separate stars) so very fast (four hundred years of flight) by wasting mass on the organic. We left our flesh at home and rode Lachesis’s doped metallic hydrogen mainframe starward. She dreamed the three of us, Anyahera and Thienne and I, nested in the ranges of her mind. And in containing us, I think she knew us, as much as her architecture permitted.
When she pulled me up from storage, I thought she was Anyahera, a wraith of motion and appetite, flame and butter, and I reached for her, thinking she had asked to rouse me, as conciliation.
“We’re here, Shinobu,” Lachesis said, taking my hand. “The last seedship colony. Mitanni.”
The pang of hurt and disappointment I felt was not an omen. “The ship?” I asked, by ritual. If we had a captain, it was me. “Any trouble during the flight?”
“I’m fine,” Lachesis said. She filled the empty metaphor around me with bamboo panels and rice paper, the whispered suggestion of warm spring rain. Reached down to help me out of my hammock. “But something’s wrong with this one.”
I found my slippers. “Wrong how?”
“Not like Jotunheim. Not like anything we’ve seen on the previous colonies.” She offered me a robe, bowing fractionally. “The other two are waiting.”
We gathered in a common space to review what we knew. Thienne smiled up from her couch, her skin and face and build all dark and precise as I remembered them from Lagos and the flesh. No volatility to Thienne; no care for the wild or theatrical. Just careful, purposeful action, like the machines and technologies she specialized in.
And a glint of something in her smile, in the speed with which she looked back to her work. She’d found some new gristle to work at, some enigma that rewarded obsession.
She’d voted against Anyahera’s kill request back at Jotunheim, but of course Anyahera had forgiven her. They had always been opposites, always known and loved the certainty of the space between them. It kept them safe from each other, gave room to retreat and advance.
In the vote at Jotunheim, I’d been the contested ground between them. I’d voted with Thienne: no kill.
“Welcome back, Shinobu,” Anyahera said. She wore a severely cut suit, double-breasted, fit for cold and business. It might have been something from her mother’s Moscow wardrobe. Her mother had hated me.
Subjectively, I’d seen her less than an hour ago, but the power of her presence struck me with the charge of decades. I lifted a hand, suddenly unsure what to say. I’d known and loved her for years. At Jotunheim I had seen parts of her I had never loved or known at all.
She considered me, eyes distant, icy. Her father was Maori, her mother Russian. She was only herself, but she had her mother’s eyes and her mother’s way of using them in anger. “You look… indecisive.”
I wondered if she meant my robe or my body, as severe and androgynous as the cut of her suit. It was an angry thing to say, an ugly thing, beneath her. It carried the suggestion that I was unfinished. She knew how much that hurt.
I’d wounded her at Jotunheim. Now she reached for the weapons she had left.
“I’ve decided on this,” I said, meaning my body, hoping to disengage. But the pain of it made me offer something, conciliatory: “Would you like me some other way?”
“Whatever you prefer. Take your time about it.” She made a notation on some invisible piece of work, a violent slash. “Wouldn’t want to do anything hasty.”
I almost lashed out.
Thienne glanced at me, then back to her work: an instant of apology, or warning, or reproach. “Let’s start,” she said. “We have a lot to cover.”
I took my couch, the third point of the triangle. Anyahera looked up again. Her eyes didn’t go to Thienne, and so I knew, even before she spoke, that this was something they had already argued over.
“The colony on Mitanni is a Duong-Watts malignant,” she said. “We have to destroy it.”
I knew what a Duong-Watts malignant was because “Duong-Watts malignant” was a punch line, a joke, a class of human civilization that we had all gamed out in training. An edge case so theoretically improbable it might as well be irrelevant. Duong Phireak’s predictions of a universe overrun by his namesake had not, so far, panned out.
Jotunheim was not far enough behind us, and I was not strong enough a person, to do anything but push back. “I don’t think you can know that yet,” I said. “I don’t think we have enough—”