“It’s a vessel.”
“Might be.”
“Has it opened before?”
“Not when I’ve been in here.”
“Scan it again. Maybe we can pick up something from the inside now.”
Maire watched as the neuter’s grotesquely long fingers traced over the control panel. A scan arm swung down from the ceiling, dug into the phase shield around the tiny golden vessel. The ball didn’t react to the scan; its sail still stretched out, reaching for purchase on the meager supply of photons the half-solar bombardment could offer. Its scan complete, the arm withdrew.
“Okay, I’m getting—Well, that’s different.”
“What?”
“Scan analysis usually takes a few seconds to complete, but the system’s locked up.”
“The system hasn’t had an outage in—”
“It’s back.”
The neuter activated room display, and the scan results began to stream across a virtual plane beside the vessel. Document after document, cross-referencing, linking, red-coded secret documents flashing and opening, photographs, four-dimensional re-presentations of centuries of accumulated scientific knowledge, all tore across the field of vision too fast for Maire to comprehend, such was the glut of the information ocean results on the scan query.
“It’s accessing the entire library of temporal sciences.”
“More than that…”
“Time sciences, threat science, metallurgics, genetic databases, megascale engineering, quantum—”
The image froze.
“—physics. What are we looking at?”
The neuter didn’t have an answer.
A representation of time and space: bent physics, a blinking dot linked through forty-thousand years of drift in the Seychelles, a line denoting forward travel through time traveling exponentially outward, the edge of another galaxy, another time, another blinking dot.
“Okay. Tell me if I’m reading this right.”
“Sure.”
“Either the libraries are fucked, or it’s telling us that this vessel has been sitting in the Drift since the machines appeared, and before that it traveled forward in time from a place on the other side of Black Space?”
“Um…Sounds about right.”
“How’s that possible?”
“It isn’t. It’s bent physics, time travel, deep space travel wrapped in one. This thing is ancient, but it’s from the future. Not even our future.”
“That explains the genetic patterns.”
“We’re looking at the machines’ creator. It has to be. There was nothing else in Seychelles that long ago.”
“If it’s true, this rewrites everything. We’ll finally know where the machines came from. We’ll finally be able to—”
Movement.
The solar sail retracted.
“Neuter?”
“Yeah?”
“What did threat science say about this thing?”
“No known weapons present. No toxins, minimal radiation, no—”
The phase shielding bubble around the vessel gave a last static burst and shattered to the floor, splashing across the expanse in a small wave. Maire’s boots and the neuter’s bare feet stood submerged in an inch of crystal sludge.
“Don’t move.”
Can one forget war? A succession of brittle images: a knife cutting through the flesh of a sister, calf muscle, open fire, black streaks in the sky and the scent of burning plastic. Can one forget war? Those humans, non-humans, eyeless, faceless, hordes falling, following, flying, the way she hid in the rubble, grew in the rubble, became an adult under the bloody rule of those who were not flesh, were not calf muscle, but who more resembled open fire, black streaks in the sky, the scent of burning plastic.
Maire screamed as the vessel opened, as the field of silver tore through her body, as the neuter beside her was stripped from the room, skin flayed, muscles and bone ground to dust against the wall, as she felt the same process begin within her, as silver, as silver, and then nothing.
The vessel closed.
Frozen in place, she hung next to the neuter inside the nothing. Dream, fog, without reason or movement. Her chest couldn’t move; she couldn’t inhale, but her lung bladder didn’t burn.
And where did the light come from?
All she could see, if it really was seeing and not a nameless sense, that ineffable crawl behind eyes and between times, was the neuter, its arms held before its face, mouth agape in horror of an end, frozen. Waves of
And she considered how horribly they’d always treated the slave class, the third sex (gender? or the precipitous lack thereof?). They weren’t even given clothing to hide that place between their legs where phallus or cleft appeared in the rest of the species. Realization: here in this dark, Maire was without clothing, uncovered, vulnerable, the only movement of her form her raven hair, swimming about in the nothing as if there were wind, a current, a prehensile ability to abandon her paralyzed form. It was cold, but she couldn’t feel it. Gooseflesh. Her nipples were erect on either side of the retracted cardiac shield cage, usually open to permit the free-flow of nitrogen into the inhale areas on the underside of her external ribbing, but now closed tightly around her hearts, making her chest a ridged plain crevassed by cleavage.
She thought the nameless neuter was trying to look at her, but its eyes remained clouded, fixed elsewhere.
Hundred of thousands of years of star travel and all her species had to show for it was a third division of the race, sexless, and enslavement at the silver hands of faceless machines from worlds buried deep in the Drift. The neuters weren’t treated as a part of the species. They were a workforce valuable only for their ability to withstand long flights without sterility and the occasional act of kink between non-breed partners in more-progressive joining communes.
She’d never fucked a neuter. The idea disgusted her.
But to treat them as a subspecies, to treat them as the machines treated the dominant groups of the race, to marginalize and persecute them for being breed-null…She wished she could have changed it.
With a wave of light, a tracing projection, the neuter was released from its motionless state for an instant filled with screaming, thrashing agony, and then it was gone. Maire was left alone in the nothing.
A tickle, an itching, a biting instant of pain between her eyes, and
the acrid sting of toxic oxygen, but she wasn’t choking yet, wasn’t feeling nauseous or dizzy. She reached for her cardiac plate to test the temperature of her inhale slits, but gasped and looked down: there was no plate. Her chest was smooth, unbroken by even the ridges of retracted secondary ribs.
More than just the atmosphere was wrong.
Rain outside, its tattoo on the rooftop of the building. People sitting at tables, drinking from white cups, steaming, and the scent of smoke: a person sitting at the counter inhaled a smoker, exhaled.
“Who are you?”
She started at the voice, from a young man sitting across the table from her. A sip of black liquid, napkin to the corner of lips. She reeled from the flood of new senses, alien experiences all around her, the physical changes that her body itself had gone through.
“I—” And she heard, felt the difference of her voice. She attempted to modulate the sound with her ancillary vocal cords, but she had none.
“Hmm?” He looked at her with kind, gray eyes. “Cat got your tongue? Who are you?”
“Maire.” She sat up in her chair, eyes wide, surveying the people around her. “Who are you?”
He chuckled. “The name’s Michael Balfour. I bet you’re wondering where you are.”
She nodded.
He took another sip, swallowed. Napkin. “I’ll let you in on a little secret. See all these people?”
At tables, in twos and threes: a young couple, hands held, the woman’s now displaying a silver ring on one, a black glove on the other, another at a table of books and laughter, red curls and sighs, the two at the counter talking so closely they could have been one, muddy brown and blonde intersecting in gray streaks, a white dot, a single dimple. A spattering of others, reading, watching the moving images projected on the wall, sipping, sipping.