SA: And do what? I'm Plan B. I'm fallback when the A-Team can't solve some stupid N-body problem. That's what I'm built for.
MS: We trained you for initiative. We educated you for general problem-solving. If you can't figure out how to put that skill set to productive use without leaving the solar system, then you might as well keep right on the way you're going.
Maybe try jumping out an airlock next time." SA: You know the way I am. I'd go batshit doing anything else.
MS: Then why do you keep fighting us? SA: Because the way I am didn't just happen. You made me this way.
MS: You think I have any more control over my aptitudes and desires than you do? Everyone gets—shaped, Sunday. The only difference is that most of us were shaped by blind chance. You were shaped for a purpose.
SA: Your purpose.
MS: So I guess the tumor makes a difference after all, hmm?
DEAD AIR: 2 SEC
Stem cells haven't settled yet. Keep scratching those, you'll leave scars.
SA: I want scars.
MS: Sunday—SA: Fuck you, Mamoro. It's my body, even if it isn't my life. Take it out of my damage deposit if you don't like it.
DEAD AIR: 5 SEC
MS: Try to get some rest. Kerr-Newman sims at 0845 tomorrow.
***
No reactionless drive, this close to the sun. No quantum-loop gravity, no magic wormhole. The best bootstraps fray in the presence of so much mass. So Base Camp, her tether stretched to the limit, launches a new ship for this last, climactic phase of our pilgrimage. Autonomy for the People: a shielded crystal faceted with grazing mirrors—a half-billion protective shards, concentrically layered, precisely aligned and ever-aligning to keep us safe from the photosphere.
Chito tells us we couldn't ask for a better setup, not at this point in the cycle: a stable pair of sunspots going our way and peaking at diameters just shy of fifty thousand kilometers. Chance of a mass ejection less than one percent, and even in that unlikely event the ejecta will be shooting away from us. Nothing to worry about.
Fine. Whatever's keeping us alive at an ambient five thousand degrees is already magic as far as I'm concerned; why not throw in a tsunami of radioactive plasma cresting over us at five hundred kilometers a second?
They've tied us up and abandoned us in this windowless cell, a cylinder maybe six meters across. Its curved bulkhead glows with the soft egg-shell pastel of Jesus' halo. We face outward, anchored to the backbone running along the compartment's axis: each vertebra an acceleration couch, each spiny process a stirrup or an armrest. We're restrained for our own safety and for each others'. You never know how automatons might react to autonomy. We were not promised bliss, after all. I've seen rumors—never confirmed, and notably absent from IE's orientation uploads—of early tours in which unbound clients clawed their own faces off. These days, the company chooses to err on the side of caution. We'll experience our freedom in shackles.
We've been like this for hours now. No attentive handlers hover at our sides, no vigilant machinery waits to step in if something goes wrong. Neither tech nor technicians can be trusted under the influence of six thousand filigreed Gauss. They're watching, though, from up in their shielded cockpit: under layers of mu-metal and superconductor, Faradayed up the ass, they keep an eye on us through a thread of fiberop half the width of a human hair. If things get out of control they'll slam the filters back down, turn us back into clockwork, race back here with drugs and god helmets and defibrillators.
A wide selection of prerecorded music awaits to help pass the time. Nobody's availed themselves of it. Nobody's said a word since we launched from base camp. Maybe they don't want to break the mood. Maybe they're just reviewing the mechanics of the miracle one last time, cramming for the finals because after all, the inlays that usually remember this stuff for us will be worse than useless once they open the blinds.
At least two of us are praying.
The bulkhead vanishes. A tiny multitude gasps on all sides. We are naked on a sea of fire.
Not just a sea: an endless seething expanse, the incandescent floor of all creation. Plasma fractals iterate everywhere I look, endlessly replenished by upwells from way down in the convection zone. Glowing tapestries, bigger than worlds, morph into laughing demon faces with blazing mouths and eyes. Coronal hoops, endless arcades of plasma waver and leapfrog across that roiling surface to an unimaginably distant horizon.
Somehow I'm not struck instantly blind.
Inferno below. Pitch black overhead, crowded with bright ropes and threads writhing in the darkness: sapphire, emerald, twisting braids of yellow and white. The hoops and knots of Sol's magnetic field, endlessly deformed, twisted by Coriolis and differential rotation.
It's an artifact, of course. A tactical overlay that drags invisible contours into the realm of human vision. All of reality's censored here by a complex interplay of field and filters, tungsten shielding and programmable matter. Perhaps one photon out of a trillion gets through; Hard-X, gamma, high-energy protons all get bounced at the door.
Dead ahead, a pair of tumors crawl over the horizon: dark continents on a bright burning sea. The lesser of them could swallow five Earths in its shadow. "Scylla and Charybdis," someone whispers past my shoulder. I have no idea what they're talking about.
We're headed between them.
Magnetic fields. That's what it's all about. Forget about gamma and synchrotron radiation, forget about that needle-storm of protons that would slice your insides down to slush in an instant if they ever got through the shielding (and a few of them do; there will be checkups and microsurgeries and a dozen tiny cancers removed from today's tourists, just as soon as we get home). What counts is those invisible hoops of magnetic force, reaching all the way up from the tachocline and punching through the surface of the sun. So much happens there: contours dance with contours, lines of force wrap tight around invisible spindles—reactions that boost field strength five thousandfold. And the complexity: all those tangled lines knotting and weaving just so into a pattern so intricate, so taut, that something has to break.
They say that's the only place to find free will. At the breaking point.
Any moment.
The sunspots flank us now, magnetic north magnetic south, great dark holes swallowing the light to either side. Braided arabesques arc between them, arches within arches within arches, five Jupiters high. The uppermost wobbles a little as we approach. It invaginates.
It snaps.
The cabin fills with blinding white light. We exist, in this single frozen instant, at the heart of reconnection. Electricity fills the capsule; every hair on my body snaps to attention. The discharge floods every synapse, resets every circuit, sets every clock to zero.
We are free.
Behind us, luminous contours recoil like rubber bands in our wake. Somewhere nearby people sing in tongues. Agni Falk is in Heaven, here in the pit of Helclass="underline" eyes closed, face beatific, a bead of saliva growing at the corner of her mouth. Three vertebrae to stern someone moans and thrashes against their restraints, ecstatic or merely electrocuted.
I feel nothing.
I try. I really do. I look deep inside for some spark of new insight, some difference between the Real Will I have now and the mere delusion that's afflicted every human since the model came out. How would I even know? Is there some LED in my parietal lobe, dark my whole life, that lights up when the leash comes off? Is any decision I make now more autonomous than one I might have made ten minutes ago? Am I free to go? Are we there yet?