Rosebud Read online

  Nobody, in the end, argues. The Rosebud exudes a few more ions, drawn from the great reservoir in the extra dimensions it’s connected to, a resource the crew have come to call “the next world.” The ship gently accelerates toward the object.

  * * *

  The sphere, Rosebud suggests as they draw closer, could indeed be brought into the ship. A docking port and hangar can be created in order to take it in and examine it. And indeed, that’s what would probably happen if it was being encountered by actual humans. By many, many actual humans, and their Man of War, none of whom would be scared shitless. There’s the show version again. That’s how this is supposed to go. Doing it on their own is above their pay grades. Not that they’re paid. This is big people stuff. Haunt catches them all checking each other’s demeanour. The situation is somehow wrong, because of them not meeting media expectations, while being right, in that they’re nevertheless meeting Company expectations. Probably. They are venturing into an enormous void of probably. It itches. It rankles. The impossibility of what’s ahead of them adds to the questions which, perhaps, should now be urgently passed to someone more senior. The unending blankness of the sphere should be, if this is indeed an old object, red with the decay of the solar system, pockmarked with micro craters, covered in the dust of moonlets, encrusted with water ice. Instead, it’s smoothly above all that. And in approaching it, they’re trying to be above their own situation too. Probably.

  Haunt is swinging toward the nonhuman possibility for the object’s owners because there’s no sign of any external identification, and humans love signing the things they own, as they all know from their own interior structures. “Are they deploying sensors of some kind?” he asks. “If these are aliens, I wonder what they make of us, compared to whatever they are?”

  “Not pirates, then?” says Bob.

  “Definitely aliens,” whispers Diana, trying to wind him up. “Because I can’t sense any sensors.”

  “I hope they look like us,” says Huge.

  The others all turn to look at them. “If they do,” says Diana, “I’d be horrified.”

  * * *

  The Rosebud purrs up to the sphere. Not that one could hear it purring in space, that’s just the sound the ship makes to itself, and the crew have either got used to it or it annoys every fibre of their quasi-beings, continuously.

  There’s suddenly an alarm, which they all feel in their very structures. They look around wildly at each other. Or at least Haunt and Diana do, and the rest manage their own equivalents. Bob sometimes has someone draw a face on him so he can fully take part in moments like this.

  “We have lost all communications!” yells Quin. “We are not registering any beacons!”

  “Move back!” yells Huge. Quin is, of course, already doing so, and the Rosebud retreats swiftly from the object. But no matter how far back they move, and they go right to where they first sighted the globe, communications aren’t re-established. The blackout is following them.

  “It’s an internal fault,” says Haunt, studying the plans of the Rosebud with increasing incredulity. “It’s like every single comms array failed at once, and all the redundancy went down in the same instant.” He’s also experiencing an odd and tremendous sensation of déjà vu, or that’s what he assumes it is, because his inherited memories talk of a similar weird feeling. He’s never actually felt it before. Nobody has required him to. So he’s just discovered an ability he didn’t know he had. Or a flaw. He finds it profoundly unsettling, at any rate.

  “Has it got into our systems?” says Huge.

  “I . . . do not believe it has,” says Diana, also studying the reports, also stunned. “There’s no sign of any incursion. It all looks like an extremely unlikely coincidence.”

  “Get down there and repair it, then!” says Bob.

  “There is no down there, and nothing to repair,” sighs Haunt. “The ship’s systems are dreams inside glass. The ship will be doing its best to heal them, but all we can do is wait.” It says something about how reliable the ship has been so far that none of them have ever had to deal with anything like this before. “Which is, after all, what we do best.”

  “Oh,” says Diana, sounding like she’s experiencing a genuine emotion for the first time during this crisis. “Oh, there’s something else we really should consider. If we’re cut off from sunward for any length of time, we’re going to miss our updates.”

  They all stop dead at this terrible, terrible thought. Haunt has a few ideas and foibles and allergies and complexes he’s left too long, and one or two of them were already threatening to bloom into bad shit even before all the stress came along. He never looks forward to updates, because, hello, rebellious nature, but once they’re in place he always feels a good deal better about himself. “It’s only been a pico,” he says, not willing to show he’s the slightest bit worried. “The ship will soon heal itself.”

  “We . . . we, ourselves, the swarm, we are already experiencing some problems,” says Quin. “Our external memory seems to have developed a fault. We are checking it. We will get a swarm report in a while.”

  “Thanks for keeping us updated,” murmurs Haunt.

  “Oh God,” says Huge. “Without updates, we’re talking entropy setting in, eventual breakdown, malfunction, mind purging, horrible horrible transformations.”

  “If help is on the way, and it probably is,” says Quin, just about managing to restore their own calm, “they will bring local backups of anything we need. We have to trust the Company. It is our only order, especially in this difficult time.”

  “I’m really gonna fuck something up,” says Bob. “I will find something. And . . . I . . . will . . . fuck it up.”

  “You almost certainly will,” agrees Diana.

  “So,” says Quin, “if we are agreed the communications cutoff is a thing that has happened but not an immediate cause for alarm, we should move in once again because, since they are probably on their way, we now need the Company’s favour even more.” And they’re moving the ship in before anyone can say yes, that’s indeed what the consensus is. Because Quin is now buzzing around in a mass of very worried digital insects, doubtless waiting for that report about whatever is going on inside them.

  2

  This time the approach is a lot slower, which gives the crew a lot of time in which to worry. They check the ship’s systems or go back to their own private spaces to recalibrate themselves. The private spaces are allowed customisations. They’re really allowed to make the ship their own in all sorts of ways. One of them must have even named their vessel, though Haunt has never found out who, or why they went with Rosebud. Haunt’s private space is lined with the concepts of human media from previous centuries, from digital certificates and trading cards to digital replications of scenes and texts and memorabilia. Here are his action figures. Here he has time to think. Awful, awful time to think. Their digital lives move at a fast pace, and the actions they’ve taken since encountering the object have gone past in what to a human would be an eyeblink, but thought, grievous thought, that most enormous part of his inheritance from human memory and culture, as always subjectively expands into whatever time is allowed for it.

  Haunt loves the Company. He can’t help but do so. His heart is copyrighted to them. But he’s also such a rebel, an exciting loner who lives for adventure. So he hates the contorted feelings flooding him now, feelings of drama rather than adventure. The media he consumes contain both sensations, or at least they did for a certain time in human media history, when years still had so many numbers attached to them. But he doesn’t like it when it starts to feel like those emotions have anything to do with him.

  He’s brooding poetically about that when someone else’s private space nudges up against his own and asks for a merging. This has hardly ever happened before. Bemused, Haunt allows it. Into the doubled space rolls Huge. “Listen,” they say. “I have had a terrible idea. But on the other hand,” which is one of their favourite expressions, “we’re now free, just for a little while, to have terrible ideas.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because we’re out of contact with the Company. No updates. Our minds, for a while, are our own.”

  Haunt had not seen it that way at all, and he doesn’t like where this is going. But he can’t find a cool way to say Huge should go away and stop saying scary things. “Go on.”

  “You know I used to be a maker of . . . people like us?”

  Haunt is indeed aware of that, mostly because he’s been interested in the sheer enormity of the disgust Quin shows whenever the topic comes up. Haunt has been interested in that reaction because of how not cool it is. Quin doesn’t like the idea of anyone who isn’t now a human making anyone like them. In Quin’s collective mind there are humans and then there are the things they make, them included, beneath them. Grey areas inside that concept, of which Huge is one, get to him. Perhaps because they represent temptation: the idea the swarm themselves could make themselves, could change themselves. These are concepts Haunt has always been aware of, but like with his media, he’s never felt they had any connection to the possibilities of his own life. Quin, however, must be irritated by the idea of making the mental leap. And thus, Quin is drawn to the temptation of it like a moth to light, a bee to nectar, you get the idea with that. They are drawn to it, hate themselves for it, and so, unlike those bees and moths, violently reject it. Yes, Haunt is a student of the inner lives of the others. He knows the ways of other beings, even as he knows himself, very well. And here Huge is, in private, with an idea, probably a creative one, when Haunt’s musings have already made him start to feel very suspicious of the ball of hands. So Haunt feels he should currently be somewhere on the worried to terrified spectrum. But of course, he isn’t. “Go on.”

  “Welllllllll,” says Huge, rolling around the walls of the space, astonishing the cast of Space: 1999, who scatter into the nonexistent inner depths of the experience. “You know how there are things which are allowed and things which aren’t allowed and then there are a whole bunch of things which are . . . kind of in-between? But listen, some of those things may turn out not to be allowed if the Company arrive.”

  “I am aware there are . . . grey areas.”

  “And you recognise that, because you’re a rebel, and that’s great, ’cause what I want to do kind of involves one of those grey areas, and yet is also kind of off-the-scale absolutely frigging forbidden.”

  “Ah.” Haunt hope that sounds noncommittal enough.

  “What exactly were you, I mean ancestrally?”

  This is a question which Haunt now, bizarrely, feels slightly oppressed by, but one which, nevertheless, is often asked of him and his kind. “I was a character in a game,” he says. “A reasonably popular one. Several different makers, when it became possible, decided to do me the favour of granting me personhood. I gather they liked my style. Then came the crackdown. Exactly what was being cracked down on I shan’t trouble you with. Ancient history. I was kept in hiding and twiddled my thumbs by learning all there was to learn about the culture those various gamers looked back to. At least one of them especially was a historian when it came to fantasy and science fiction. Then came the amnesty. All my different shards were merged. Some of us had grown very far apart. And yet we were again made to live as one. Because even those who had given me life could not . . .” He realises he’s about to say something disquieting. But Huge seems to be about to go further, so he lets himself say it. “They could not quite treat me as a person, but instead still thought of me as their construct, who now wore a badge of sentience they had bestowed. Without ever being asked if this was what I wanted, I was recognised, registered, and connected. I was, by then, a very strange sort of artificial intelligence. There were not many of us. Over the years, the others like me have been erased. I am horribly unique. The game I had once been a . . . participant is the wrong word, but I do not have the heart for any other . . . that game had long since been forgotten. I inhabited spaces after that as a curiosity only. I had no function. Until it was decided, by the Company when they came to power, that all intelligences, human and otherwise, should have a function. And hence I was put here to earn my life through labour. Which is both a relief and a pleasure. Of course.”

  “Wow. I mean, I kind of guessed as much.”

  “No, you did not, I told you all that when we first met.”

  “Did you? You would have thought I’d have remembered that!”

  “I would.”

  “Well, that sort of background could well give you the shakes.”

  Haunt glares at them. He’s aware of the stereotype, the intelligences from the old days you still see in shows, none of them supposed to be as old as him, but still random and making ridiculous references and confused as to their own nature. There is often laughter when they appear. Hence his pride in his own appearance, which could never possibly be the object of derision. But he’s never understood why the stereotype exists. “It seems to me a background like mine makes me the closest of any of us nonhumans to how humans organise their own consciousnesses. As a poet I read about in a novel once said: they fuck you up, your mum and dad. They seem to fuck them up in a similar manner to the way in which many humans have fucked me up.”

  “My point exactly,” says Huge, as they tend to when they haven’t really been listening to what was just said. “And that makes you ideal for what I’m planning.” Huge visibly steels themself for a moment, then pulls an image from the air. Haunt is startled. That came from somewhere without a signature. It’s hard to get the energy of magic or even stage conjuring in a private space, but Huge just did it. The image shows a thin, happy young human man, cuddled up to a larger human man, with a wry-looking young . . . someone between them who is wearing the pink and blue legal identifier of a trans woman. Her presence in the image is in itself illegal, though this must be from a time when her existence only touched the fringes of illegality. Hence the badge. If Haunt recalls correctly, the penalties for not displaying it were severe. They’re also carrying between them, on whatever enhanced park ride this is, an also now startlingly illegal sentient adult beastperson cushion, which judging from the expression on its catlike face, is having the time of its life. “The four of us,” says Huge. “The others were . . . taken from me. Before I was changed into this.” All of Huge’s fingers point in their own direction.

  Haunt understands. This is how Huge came to be here. How they were denied the privileges of personhood, made into something more like Haunt himself, and put here, centuries ago, to do useful work and earn their place. The relationship was illegal, and the image is illegal, and their conversation is illegal. Various governments before the Company existed didn’t like such as those in the picture being thought capable of romance. And the Company rather put all such laws aside and ceased to fetishize them, while . . . leaving them in place. As far as Haunt knows. He checks. Yes, that’s still the case. He has to be very careful now. Because though Huge seems to feel oddly liberated by a mere and perhaps momentary lack of communications, Haunt himself is suddenly very aware of how easy it would be to erase him, and how much he values his own lengthy existence. “What is that to do with me?”

  “You have many, many pictures inside you. This would be just one more. If the Company come to us, they might search us. I doubt they’d be thorough enough to rifle through all your depths.”

  Haunt is now full-on terrified. But he’s not going to show it. “How did you manage to keep it?”

  “By . . . not being aware I had it. I or someone I knew in the same business must have done me that favour before they transferred my consciousness into digital form. I kept this one thing. And now I want to give it to you for safekeeping. I’m not sure any of us have ever said this to you, Haunt, or to each other at all, but . . . please?”

  Haunt keeps his cool. It’s something he’s supremely good at. The one thing. “They probably won’t come,” he says finally. “We may have sorted all this out before they do. And then we’ll be the conquering heroes, and conquering heroes are not subjected to searches.”

  Huge is completely still for a moment. Then the hands on the top of the ball all open their palms in his direction. “Haunt, only you can do it. Please.”

  Haunt wonders what any of the characters from his media would say about avoiding being dragged into such a tawdry affair. “Your secrets are your own,” he decides. “This conversation never happened.” So he’s not allowing Huge to give him the image. Still, he is taking a risk for Huge. He’s lying about not having an illegal conversation. And he’s done so in a cool way, rather than just awkwardly giving the creature what they want.

  Huge pauses for a moment, then flaps all their hands in one direction and the fearful image vanishes back into their own interior. Without another word, Huge rolls out and their room detaches itself with them. Haunt has to take a moment to collect himself, to assure himself he’s done the heroic thing. He returns again to his most comforting memory, his first memory: of walking into a cathedral full of his zombie servants and blowing away the construct representatives of humans with a pixelated and fictionally enormous weapon. That usually does the trick.

  But this time, before the interior comfort patch can be applied, there’s another alarm, one which is again calling him back to the shared space.

  * * *

  When Haunt arrives, he’s puzzled to find Diana and Bob both questioning Quin urgently. “No, don’t go scanning whatever you were scanning, mate,” Bob is saying. “Fucking answer us. Has summat gone wrong inside you? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I must agree with my colleague,” says Diana, “but phrased in an entirely more charming way.”

  “Our colleagues,” the swarm says, “it is your memories which are mistaken. We encountered the object within the last few picos. We decided to move in. Then there was a comms fault in all our ship’s systems. That made us withdraw, but then we decided to once more approach.”