I felt another little stab of Pity, but I told her to get lost. I had a planet to save.
I took a seat at my old control station. The memories came flooding back. Years ago, during the incident that convinced me to tell the U.P. to kiss my ass, Lewyana had pressed a holobutton and bombs had set off tectonic activity. In a matter of hours, four billion sentients had died in the worst earthquakes ever recorded. That was how the U.P. dealt with nonconformist threats.
If it had been bombs again this time, the Humpties would have been screwed, but I knew a thing or two about swarms. I had, after all, grown my AI friends very carefully. The controls and defenses in place in the disassembler were stronger than I had ever seen, but my friends had spent a million generations learning their way around a swarm.
I handed over 60% of my hardbrain’s processing capacity to the AIs. They squeezed inside, ranting and sharing data so fast it made me dizzy. For a brief second, I worried that they would overwrite me completely and take over. But they calmed down and we got to work, cracking codes and hacking back doors in the swarm net. We stopped the swarm only half-way through the disassembling process. I pulled up a spycam onto the data station and looked out on a world that had suffered more chaos in the past hour than it had in the past fifty thousand years. I guess a little evolutionary pressure on the survivors might not be a bad thing, in the long run. But my work was absolutely ruined. I had a record of the Humpty culture as it was, but not a complete one. It would have to do.
Kav was in tears. “I was too late.”
“Get used to it,” I said stiffly. “We’re the bad guys and we almost never win. In fact, not to be a downer, but all I did was buy them a little time. The U.P. will be back here soon and the next time, the Humpties won’t dare refuse.”
“Why do you even try then?” Kav asked, nis voice breaking.
I gave Kav the same speech my culture archivist friend had given me during my recruitment. “One day, some U.P. citizen is going to wake up and feel hollow inside. And they’ll go digging on the net, and they’ll find a hidden datastore I put there, rich with cultural history and practices. And maybe they won’t be a direct descendant of the original species, but with swarms, it won’t matter. They can change as easily as their ancestors became U.P. standard. They’ll sneak off, and the culture will come back from the dead, if only just for a little while before the U.P. stamps it out again.”
“This has happened before?”
I nodded. “It has and it will again. We archivists tend to the process like a garden. We harvest the seeds and plant them in the net. Sometimes it takes a thousand years for them to take root, but when they do, they grow into one hell of a blossom.”
Kav sniffed and wiped at nis eyes. “That’s so… bleak.”
“I never said it wasn’t.”
Ne stared off into the middle distance. “There’s a new voice to my swarm,” ne said. “Is that…”
“Sorry—I guess my friends laid eggs.” Which explained the unexpected help in the fight. I was a little disturbed by the news. AI didn’t replicate, they were too complex, or so said the conventional wisdom.
:: HA HA HA I CAN HAS MULTIPLICITY ::
Quiet, you.
“Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t go back now,” Kav said, tone halfway between a statement and a question. “Not without purging my swarm of a sentient mind.”
“You kind of passed the commitment point a few klicks back,” I said.
The lights dimmed as the ship’s systems began to falter. Tied as they were to the captain’s now-deceased Swarm, I was surprised it had lasted as long as it did.
:: WILL LAND SAFELY | WITH RELATIVELY LITTLE HARM | ONLY A FEW BRUISES | ALMOST CERTAINLY 0 FATALITIES ::
I turned back to face Kav’s tear-stained face. “Thanks,” I said.
“For what?” Kav asked. “Leaving the U.P. I could handle, but harboring an illegal AI wasn’t…” Kav paused. “I didn’t plan for that.” Another pause. I listened to the AIs chatter as they merrily hacked through the ship’s systems. “I guess I should thank you too.”
“My turn to ask ‘what for?’ ”
“Without you, I don’t think I would have been able to do it. The U.P. would have forced me to change, eventually, and I can’t go back to who I was.”
I had been planning up until that point to bring up the idea of nim swapping back to female, but decided against it for the time being. I had thought there was some chemistry between us, but maybe I was wrong. I sure as hell have been before.
:: BRACE FOR IMPACT IN T MINUS 10 ::
“Better hold on to something,” I said. “It’s nothing but bumps and bruises from here on out.”
“Goodbye, comfort,” Kav said wistfully.
The impact was rough, but we lived through it. And a hell of a lot more after that too. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll find another data cache and learn how things ended for us. But first, you need to look through those files on the Humpty culture. Ask yourself: Is this who you really are? Ask yourself, and don’t be surprised at the answer. Never stop looking.
THE OTHER SIDE OF JORDAN
by Allen Steele
Two-time Hugo Award winner Allen Steele is the author of the novels Orbital Decay, Lunar Descent, Chronospace, Spindrift, and many others. Over the last several years, he’s been focusing on writing and expanding his Coyote milieu, of which this story is a part. The most recent novel in the Coyoteverse, Coyote Horizon, came out in March, and will be followed by Coyote Destiny.
Steele is also a prolific writer of short fiction, with four published collections, and a new one—The Last Science Fiction Writer—on the way. His stories have appeared in the magazines Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, Science Fiction Age, and in numerous anthologies.
“The Other Side of Jordan” is a simple tale of love lost and found, played out upon a galactic scale, with aliens and cosmic megastructures aplenty, not to mention a nice-sized helping of that good old sense of wonder.
Jordan and I broke up on the docks of Leeport, about as lovely a place as you can have for the end of an affair. It was a warm summer evening in Hamaliel, with sailboats on the water and Bear—the local name for Ursae Majoris 47-B—hovering above the West Channel. We’d gone down to the waterfront to have dinner at a small bistro that specialized in grilled brownhead fresh from the fishing net, but even before the waiter brought us the menu the inevitable arguments had begun. There had been a lot of those lately, most of them about issues too trivial to remember but too important to ignore, and even though we settled the matter, nonetheless the quarrel caused us to lose our appetites. So we skipped dinner and instead ordered a bottle of waterfruit wine, and by the time we’d worked our way through the bottle, she and I decided that it was time to call it quits.
By then, it had become apparent that we weren’t in love. Mutual infatuation, yes. We had the strong passions that are both the blessing and the curse of the young, and Jordan and I never failed to have a good time in bed. Yet desire was not enough to keep us together; when it came right down to it, we were very different people. She’d been born and raised on Coyote, a third-generation descendant of original colonists; I was an émigré from Earth, one the gringos who’d managed to escape the meltdown of the Western Hemisphere Union before the hyperspace bridge to the old world was destroyed. She came from money; I’d been a working man all my life. She was a patron of the arts; my idea of a good time was a jug of bearshine and a hoot-and-holler band down at the tavern. She was quiet and reserved; I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, even when it was in my best interests to do so.