 
Space Funding Crisis II

Resister

Casey Hattrey

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Version 0.9

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Cover Image adapted from:

John Martin - Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still by DcoetzeeBot

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Martin_-_Joshua_Commanding_the_Sun_to_Stand_Still_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

EVE Online - Caldari Freighters by Perplexing

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EVE_Online_-_Caldari_Freighters.jpg

For my supervisors. Sorry.

With thanks to S. Land for editing.
Prologue

It is finally night on Planet Conference. Meetings have disbanded, arguments put aside or hushed, break out rooms have broken up. The back-of-envelope ideas now stymie the drip, drip of beer from bar tables. Empty podiums stand guard over rows of seats folded like flowers and screen stand dumb. Silence has smothered the smooth white domes of the conference halls and cafeterias into a jellyfish sea of buildings speckled with a Milky Way, milky, whey of Li-Fied lights.

The speakers are sleeping, the debaters, the discussants, the glancing timekeepers, hosts, editors, show runners and mic runners.

Listen. Only you are awake to hear their dreams.

Yarran Idris, sweating in a stage-fright dream woven from the truth he must speak, and the lies he must not, has a vision of the future. He fights an old man in a theatre in a tomb in a cave. A smile comes Cheshire-catting out of the darkness and crushes his bones up against a wall. A riddle is set. There is a reunion, a hunt and a rescue. A woman dies, and is reborn. A voice comes, from outside:

"No, darling, it's never aliens."

And everyone disappears in forty-two seconds.

Time passes. Listen ... time passes. For some.

From where you are, you can hear all the dreams of all the researchers in the great expanse of the galaxy.

Then again, you do have very good neuroimaging technology.
Chapter 1

Arianne rolled under the rapidly closing stone door, scrambled to her feet, dodged right to avoid the scythe slicing out of the dark, then flung herself against the wall as a gigantic oak battering ram lunged past her. The deep wrenching impact was almost enough to mask the faint percussion of cogs and pulleys behind the rough stone walls of the corridor. She was already running as rusty spikes began shuddering out of crevices at all angles. The end of the corridor was just a black void, and she launched herself into it, tucking herself into a ball. With a stinging shock, she hit a slick body of water. The searing heat of flames bit at her back as she went under. A slimy something sucked past her in the soundless depths, and she kicked for the surface, gripped the cold edge of the far side and heaved herself out of the pool. She stood and wiped the greasy water and matted cobwebs from her face.

So far, thought Arianne, the interview was going well.

She was standing in a large chamber with a gray shaft of light coming from an opening high above. Behind her, other people were emerging from corridors and pools similar to the one she had just escaped from. In front of her were entrances to three wide corridors, reaching back into darkness. Arianne exhaled carefully, looking at each one in turn. There was a crude relief carved above each entrance. The one on the left depicted a human form, eyes closed and meditating, sitting in a smooth halo which kept away tormented figures on the fringes. The one in the middle was of a person sitting at a desk, whose eyes gazed longingly at dusty books, but whose hands diligently worked a grindstone. The one on the right featured an exalted figure, with carved beams of light flowing from a head of trendily disheveled hair onto rows of tiny stick figures.

She wondered how long it would be possible to analyze each and every facet of the carvings and puzzle out their meanings, and come up with the best strategy. But some part of her sensed a pull in one direction, like reaching for a familiar door handle in the dark. It felt right, and she walked towards the middle entrance.

"When in doubt", murmured Arianne in the damp air, "always follow your nose".

The other people huddled silently before the entrances, and slowly began peeling off into the different corridors. In a few moments, she was one of only a handful of people carefully edging into the darkness. A dull echoing clunk sounded from the corridor on the right, accompanied by a short scream. Arianne thought she heard the flick of flying darts from the other side. Her group crept forwards.

After minutes of darkness, Arianne could see the faint flicker of torches reflected off damp rock. They turned a corner and were faced by a torchlit corridor with a high ceiling. At the end of the corridor was a doorway between two huge statues of harpies. Their claws stood on cracked skulls, their wings were spread and their grizzled faces contorted in furious screams. Piercing eyes of polished gemstone stared out between wild locks of hair. The walls danced with carvings of rays of light slicing through tormented souls. Above the door between them was an illuminated sign:

Room 11.3b

Arianne checked the time in her ebrain. Not late, yet.

A woman in her group strode forwards, crossing the space between them and the harpies. Arianne held her breath, but she reached the door and disappeared into the gloom beyond it. Heartened by this, a man broke away from the group and started heading towards the door. Halfway across the floor, a faint humming sound appeared. After a few more steps, Arianne could see that the eyes of the harpies were beginning to glow. The man looked up and stopped walking.

"Wait!" he said. The glow from the eyes became a fierce glare. The man started backing away.

"Please! I can explain!"

The humming ramped up into a whistling roar.

"Those publications will definitely be out by the next assessment cy-"

His words were cut off as a torrent of light poured from the harpies' eyes. Arianne shielded her face, and when she looked again the corridor was still and dark, with a small pile of ash on the ground between her and the door, already drifting into the crevices in the floor.

Arianne gulped, checked the time again, and strode forwards. She kept her eyes fixed on the doorway, and tried to keep her mind free of thought. It was superstition, of course, to think that the beasts before her could read her mind, regardless of the technology that lay behind their eyes. But unconscious thoughts did have a habit of activating stored memories in ebrains, decrypting them for the brief transition between tech and tissue, at which point a probing field might pick up some whiff of data. As far as she knew, nobody bothered with this because nervous ticks were much more reliable signs of deceit. But this was the Assessment Dungeon of the most powerful force in the galaxy - the Central Academic Funding Council Administration. Anything was possible. And so she kept away thoughts of life outside her chosen profession, of people who were not colleagues and of aims, goals and objectives beyond the current matter: getting funded. A distant whisper reflected how easy that had become.

She passed through the door, and was surrounded by light.

"Dr. Karen G. Arianne, thank you for joining us."

The room was poorly carpeted. Clinging to one poorly painted wall was a flimsy projector screen, which was in poor repair. The combination of colors was poor, despite sticking to a general swamp palette. Three people in poorly fitting suits were sitting behind a table. Arianne knew they were some of the richest, most powerful people in the galaxy.

"Did you manage to find the room alright?" asked the woman in the mould-gray jacket.

"I got a bit lost on the second floor" replied Arianne, trying to wring out the last drops of moat water from her sleeves.

"Well," said the woman, leaning forward and picking up a pen in a gesture clearly intended to convey how dare you continue this small-talk, "As you know, the content of funding proposals and presentations is very important, but we can't be expert assessors in every topic. We've found that the best predictor of success in interviews is how people cope under pressure. Hence the second floor labyrinth and so on."

As the mold-gray woman leaned back, the woman in the mire corduroy leant forwards, like switching levers.

"We're ready for your presentation, Dr. Arianne. You can start now, and please try to keep within the allotted time."

Arianne's hand shot out to reach for the slide controller, though the rest of her body was flooded with a sudden rush of fear ten times worse than falling into the dark pool of water. Suddenly, she was no longer experiencing life first-hand, but could only see herself as if from a security camera. As she hit the button to show the first slide, she had entirely entered an automatic state of behavior. She was shocked at how frightened she was, despite all the practice, but her body seemed to be going through the right motions.

The first part of the slide revealed itself: an image of a road winding up a mountain. Arianne's arms came up before her, palms toward her face and her fingertips almost brushing her temples. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

The rest of the image revealed itself in a sweeping blossom: an oil painting in staggering detail. The mountain was framed by dark clouds smouldering into the distance, rain lashing around distant peaks as night closed in. But the rocky pinnacle of the mountain in the foreground still clung to a narrow shaft of light pouring from a tear of blue sky. Beyond the pinnacle, on the high plateau was a white city, angular marble edged in brilliant sunlight. Climbing their way towards the pinnacle, battling against wind and rain and the dark was a column of weary people dressed in robes of white and red, carrying books of ancient understanding. In the centre of the painting, at the head of the column and standing on an outcrop before the final ascent was a heroic figure with a gold cape whipping around in the wind. They leant on a spear, their right hand reaching towards the pinnacle - half desperate reach, half warrior-prayer: commanding the sun to remain a little longer so that they might reach the top.

Arianne swayed forwards, letting her hands fall as her knees buckled, ending with her arms spread wide and low, kneeling before her panel.

"FUND ME!" she cried, eyes wide and unwavering.

A title flashed up on the screen:

Exploring greeting styles in an asteroid mining community

"Thank you" said the mire corduroy lady, "though that was a little over the time limit, so we'll have to keep the questions short."

She turned to the third member of the panel, an elderly man in a sludge flecked sweater.

"Do you want to start, Professor Tarry?"

"Thank you, yes," he said, getting slowly to his feet. "Dr. Arianne, I read your submission with great interest."

Arianne looked at the table where she could see her application form, still in its protective wrapping. The professor pushed back his chair and walked towards the wall to one side.

"And your goals seem interesting and worth exploring." He continued, perusing the rack of weapons.

"I especially appreciated the detailed literature review," said Tarry, selecting a six-foot ceremonial stone sledgehammer with inlays of gold and meteorite nickel. "But is your project really feasible within the time frame?"

Tarry hefted the sledgehammer high above his head and swung it at Arianne. She rolled away as the podium splintered into pieces. "A ha," thought Arianne, "the old good cop/bad cop/sledgehammer routine."

"Thank you for your question," said Arianne, lowering into a crouch to anticipate Tarry's next move. "In section five hundred and forty-six, I have a detailed schedule which estimates the project will be finished in twenty-four months."

Tarry brought the hammer around in a horizontal arc, missing Arianne's head by an inch and slamming into the projector screen.

"Plus three hundred years for interstellar conference travel," continued Arianne, spinning onto her back, gripping the shaft of the hammer between her legs and prying it out of Tarry's hands.

"So what you're saying," said the professor in the mold-gray jacket, drawing a sword from behind her desk, "is that the answers you're looking for are obvious."

She lunged forwards, forcing Arianne to parry several stabs with the upturned sledgehammer.

"Not at all," replied Arianne, realizing that the golden weapon currently trying to pin her to the wall was in fact the original Sugari no Ontachi. "In fact, the risk analysis in section four thousand estimates the probability of success at sigma-6 levels – that's based on our insurance premium. This is definitely high-risk, high-gain."

Arianne abandoned the sledgehammer and cartwheeled through Tarry's brace of throwing stars, picking up a short wooden plank from the broken podium.

"That's interesting," said the mire corduroy lady, uninterestedly, while lifting a propane tank onto her shoulders. "Because we looked into your recent activities, and you appear to have already done extensive work on this topic."

Arianne batted away several thrusts from the mould-gray woman. Tarry sprang towards her.

"Those were preliminary studies," said Arianne, deflecting a punch from Tarry with her left forearm, "which were designed to get some basic guiding feedback."

"And two book deals" said the mire corduroy lady, attempting to light the end of her flamethrower. "We're only interested in funding cutting-edge research."

Arianne was beginning to sweat. She grabbed Tarry's wrist as it came hurtling towards her, stretching his arm across her chest and levered his body around to put him between herself and the priceless ceremonial sword.

"Those books were the first in an extensive series," said Arianne "the project will be broken up into smaller parts ..."

The mold grey man cut her off, almost literally.

"Unfortunately, so will your mining community" he said.

"What?" said Arianne, before receiving a fist to the gut. She almost forgot herself and tried to hit back.

"A large comet is due to hit them in 4 hours. How will your research adapt to this?"

Tarry threw Arianne over his shoulder and she landed on her back in the middle of the room.

"Well," wheezed Arianne, "I propose to study the way people say goodbye?"

Her three assailants exchanged a glance, but Arianne already knew what was coming.

"Thank you, Dr. Arianne," said the woman in the mold-grey jacket "we'll let you know the outcome."

Professor Tarry pressed a button on his wristwatch. A trap door opened beneath Arianne and she sank into nothingness, watching helplessly as a small square of mildew-white light above her was swallowed by darkness.

Chapter 2

Air. A tearing sound. A cocoon of weightlessness, the gut-tingling dread of vertigo. Stretching of nerves in her fingers. The sensation of leaving her body. White panic and the timid premonitions of her beating heart, counting down the moments to... what?

There are two types of moving through air. Flying - an embrace of possibility - and its opposite, falling. Flying has purpose, direction, ambition. It welcomes the future. Falling is withdrawing. It shows you the past: choices slipping away.

Was there something she could have done? Some nimble sequence of rhetoric that would have changed things? As she fell, Arianne saw her story recede into immutable black. Professor Golden, her guiding hands sliced into ribbons; Professor Sura, killed by her own experiment; the Bloggeration soldiers in pools of blood; Richard, her friend turned murderer in a conspiracy to make research more interesting; the singularity-souled cyborgs, designed to replace humanity, turning to stone. And after them, slicing out of the darkness came a wide grin.

"Smile," said the voice of Vastion La Quana.

A bright flash made Arianne throw her arms up to shield her face. She flipped about in the rushing air, and was suddenly spooned onto a soft mat. She squirmed on her back as her body tried to make sense of still being in one piece. She looked back at where she had come from. In the flickering birth of halogen lamps she could see that a large fan attached to the ground was placed at the bottom of the tall shaft she had come from. It must have eased her fall to a standstill.

Arianne levered herself up on her elbows. She was in a large, low room with black marble floors and long geometric lines of light snaking across the ceiling. A few steps lead down from the shallow dais where she lay into a broad area with a few sofas and tables. At the far end of the long room was a wide balcony, reflecting in pale blends of cream and salmon a blood-orange sun being slowly juiced over rocky mountains.

Standing next to her on a shallow dais was linguistics magnate La Quana, dressed in an elaborate white suit with wide flowing folds like a conch shell. He was poking away at a small hand-held screen, critically assessing something. He seemed suddenly satisfied and turned towards her.

"Sorry about the surprise," said La Quana. "I hope you don't mind - I'm making a collection."

He swiped his rotund fingers across the screen he was holding and turned towards the wall. A digital image as big as a large painting appeared across it. It was a photograph of Arianne's face, cheeks flushed with shock but eyes sunken in despair. Arianne watched as the wall became flooded with similar images - over exposed faces with muscles pulled into topologies between regret, sorrow, anger, disgust and apathy. Dozens of sweating brows like furrowed deserts, fringed with wild forests of hair. A few cheeks were marked with short glistening streaks like rivers.

"Failure," said La Quana, stepping confidently from the dais, greeting his wall of images with open arms. "It's something we all experience. All of these people," he waved his hand at the wall, which scattered the images around, revealing new ones, "they all experienced exactly what you're feeling now. Over millennia, countless humans have gone through the pain of wanting something and losing the chance to get it. It is, perhaps, the universal human experience." He strode closer to the wall, pausing to reach out to a single photograph of a young man, face rippled with confusion.

"And yet!" La Quana span on his heels, raising a finger in his immaculate tai-chi oratory style. "We all feel alone in our defeat." His arms drifted down and his palms opened, a magician revealing all.

"I take these pictures to remind us that we are not alone," he explained, stepping closer to Arianne. "That failure is simply a grant to the greatest and most prolific center of research in history." Here he paused as his hands presented an invisible gift before him.

"The University of Learning from Our Mistakes."

There was a silent moment, when even Arianne could not quite resist the Saganesque delivery. But she drew in a breath, and staggered to her feet.

"If I was Han Solo," she said, "I would have started shooting about a minute ago."

La Quana winced slightly, as if trying to inhibit something, but he gave in.

"If I were Han Solo" he corrected.

Arianne rolled her eyes, ran her fingers down her forearm in a series of taps and looked up at the wall of floating faces. The whole wall flickered, then changed completely to an image of a graph. Two lines showed how often people used "If I were X" and "If I was X" in each decade. For the last six hundred years, Arianne's choice of phrasing was winning hands-down.

Arianne strode past La Quana's perplexed face, walking towards the balcony.

"Indeed", started La Quana, trying to get ahead of Arianne. "You may be wondering why..."

Arianne cut him off.

"Look, normally I'd just let this play out. You're a creepy, mad linguist who relishes in the opportunity to do evil in the name of science."

"I - "

"You're talking to me because you want me do something. I'll rail against the evil things you've done and how you almost got me killed."

"Well -"

"Twice"

"Hmm"

"So you're going to give a big speech about new opportunities, take me out on the balcony and do the whole 'all this can be yours' spiel and try to get me to help you in some devious plot."

"Well -"

"I get it", Arianne continued, now striding towards the open door. "You had it all planned out, you've been practicing, it would have been great. But: I've had a difficult day, and I can't be spaced going through all that."

Arianne and La Quana walked onto the terrace. It jutted out from a sheer cliff face, a hundred meters from the ground. They faced the sunset against a crown silhouette of mountains in the distance. The air was warm with a sweet sulphur taste.

"So," said Arianne, turning to La Quana, "here we are." She brought both her hands up to her eye height and made rapid pinching motions, looking from one to the other.

"Blah blah blah, I'm an evil bastard," said Arianne's right hand in a doglike voice.

"I hate you," pinched the left in a squeak.

"But I have an important task for you," flapped her right hand.

"I'd rather die," flailed her left.

"Ah, but the ace up my sleeve is ...". Both of Arianne's hands looked towards La Quana in expectation.

La Quana regained some of his composure and, very slowly, let a sinister smile slip across his face. He pointed towards the valley below.

An icy mash lay below them - shallow pools of water covered with scarred sheets of ice, threaded through with narrow banks bristling with frosty grass. Massive robots on multiple octopus-like legs picked their way between the shallow pools streaked with reflected sunlight. A ship was descending in the near distance, and one of the lumbering robots reached out its arms to receive a cargo pod being lowered down. It swung the pod to the surface of the water, and released a hatch in one side. A laser beam burst from the mouth of the robot, slicing through the ice beneath it. Heavy, red, egg-shaped packages, large as coffins, slid out of the robot's hatch.

"The waiting fields," said La Quana.

"As you know, millions of interviews for funding are held every month here. People come from all over the galaxy for a chance at funding. Most of them come here frozen in chryosleep. This is where they wait. They don't remember, of course, they're zapped at a transit terminal somewhere and then re-animated in the assessment dungeon foyer - like a cut in a film. But due to the, let's say, complexities of the funding system, they may have to wait a while in between. You yourself had a short stay here just recently."

Arianne looked from La Quana out onto the fields. She couldn't help checking her chronometer.

32 years old (subjective, local); 315 years old (objective, local)

Confronting your age was never a pleasant experience. Chryosleep and interstellar travel made the shock of confronting your age cosmically horrifying. Worse yet, a quick calculation showed she had spent 7 years in a red bubble under the icy fields below.

"But your interview didn't go too well, and you have no job. Since you have a few other applications submitted, you'll have to go back under, and wait for the next interview. So since we're being candid, Dr. Arianne, the first ace up my sleeve is in fact a classic veiled threat. Your next interview may be..."

La Quana's pause managed to pull her gaze towards him.

"... considerably delayed," he said, carefully. "Who knows how long you could be lying out there?"

La Quana took a step towards Arianne.

"But the real ace, the real reason why you'll help me, is because you want to."

"Want to what?" demanded Arianne, angrily.

"You'll want to know."

Arianne's jaw tightened, but she managed to keep her eyes locked on La Quana.

"We're both fascinated by the way culture changes and adapts. After hundreds of thousands of years of human creativity, there's almost nothing new to call our own, except the explanations for why everything got into this sorry state. The mystery haunts us. Questions claw at us and we want to own the answers."

La Quana took a step closer.

"If you go back to sleep, I promise you Arianne, by the time you wake up, the biggest mystery in cultural evolution for centuries will be part of long-archived children's stories."

Arianne turned away and stepped towards the rail of the terrace. She gripped the cold bar and looked out across the frosty landscape, the sudden taste of iron in her mouth.

"What mystery?"

La Quana smiled.

"The great convergence," he said, his smile widening as Arianne remained silent.

"After millennia of the diversity of culture expanding continuously, the cultures of the galaxy scattered and divided, have begun to converge. Now, for the first time, diversification is slowing down."

Arianne's grip on the rail tightened.

"Right across the galaxy, people have started to speak the same language, and nobody knows why."
Chapter 3

Arianne glanced about her as she strode through the transport hub. It was the same coldly comfortable white lacquer cavern that could be found in any part of the galaxy. Supposedly the uniformity helped with people zapping back from chryosleep, but Arianne suspected that only the most unimaginative, depressed architects got jobs building transport hubs. All the shops and cafes were also of a kind. Even in a galaxy of a million cultures there would still be ridiculously expensive coffee and cheap perfume. Maybe she should start drinking perfume.

She sulked at an uncomfortable table and watched the other travelers walking past. They were dressed as different as they could possibly be. Every color, cut and fold imaginable were on display. Except the drab military grey she was looking for. To her left was a small exhibition designed to placate any traveler unable to afford the luxury of transit chryo. It was labelled "The archaeology of Old Earth". Without a better plan, she was drawn towards it. The main case had two objects. One was a fragmented set of jewelry – a necklace of small, brilliant blue stones. Upon them were carved symbols, tiny caricatures of animals long extinct. In the center of the necklace was a whorl of pale stone – a spiral pocked and cracked by time. The second object was much simpler – a flat black rectangular stone, highly polished with a silver back plating and edging. She leaned down to read the small sign on the side of the case.

"Necklace and iPad, circa 1000 CA"

Arianne laughed - the necklace was almost certainly ancient Egyptian, probably more like 1000 BCA, and the tablet was a world apart in time and tech. An Egyptian waking from a sarcophagus in the 21st Century would have been completely overwhelmed with the leaps in technology behind the dark mirror of the iPad - they would have no words or concepts to cover the idea of email or the internet. In their world, ideas only spread as fast as people could. In the information age, ideas travelled instantaneously, and for the first time, people started to relax their view of how important physical presence was and communicate with digital signals across their world, barely 50 light milliseconds wide. The two objects in the glass case were so radically different that there was no way the should have been bundled together.

Then again, thought Arianne, although the owners of these objects were a few thousand years apart, the tiny footprint of Earth meant that they also shared a lot of common ground. They would both recognize the pyramids, and they both might even understand certain long preserved words, like "ammonite". And after all, there were probably people walking past Arianne right now who had been born a thousand years before her, but it may just have well been an eternity in the amount of culture they shared. In her world, for all practical purposes, people now moved about as fast as information could. By the time any message reached your neighbor, their languages would have changed so much that you would be better off travelling there yourself, spending a few months learning their language and then deliver your message personally.

The 21st century host may even have been at a technological advantage. The ancient tablet on display was not really so different from Arianne's own tablet communicator, built tens of thousands of years later. And it needed only keep up with about 8,000 languages, tops, all evolving together.

If a 21st Century sleeper had woken up today, would they be as surprised as the Egyptian? There was really nothing here that would totally blow their mind. Sure, they'd be impressed at how far humanity had spread, but this was well within the realm of even their least imaginative fiction. They might be confused as to what the hell humanity had been up to all this time to have progressed so little.

"Waiting", thought Arianne. "Waiting in transport hubs."

Her ebrain beeped, letting her know that it had finished downloading the translation packages for the 934 languages currently in use on the hub. She was surprised to see that this only required full downloads for about 300 languages, with her ebrain effectively joining the dots to make translation paths to the rest. She also noted that there were actually only half a dozen languages native to the local vicinity, but people were coming in from a wide range of systems and, because of the vast amounts of time in chryosleep that space travel required, effectively a wide range of times. Many of the languages now in her ebrain were just older versions or dialects of the local varieties. She would have expected much more diversity. Was this the great convergence at work?

She looked around her again, annoyed that, in this age of space travel and hyper-connected technology, her current search algorithm was simply pointing her eyes at different parts of the world. She checked her ebrain mail. A barrage of voices filled her mind. She grimaced and jacked up her filter levels. Only one message rose to the surface - her priority funding status had come through. So, La Quana was at least keeping some promises.

Arianne sighed. Could she really trust him? Was she doing the right thing? He'd said something about an outside agency. Who were they? Best not to think about it, Arianne thought, just take it one step at a time. She called up the application she'd been working on.

Central Academic Funding Council Administration

Type: Small Support Grant

Applicant: Karen G. Arianne

Format: Formal / Priority / Electronic

Institution: Independent, direct location

She scanned the text of the application again, then shrugged. If it wasn't ready now, it would never be, plus she had more demanding things to think about. She cleared it for sending and it was whisked away into the local network. Almost instantly, she got a message back.

Small Support Grant G67HS995A - Status: Sent

Arianne felt a weight lifting off her, like some trash folder had been swept clean in her mind. Then a second message came in.

Small Support Grant G67HS995A: Warning: Spelling error in section 5

Arianne sighed and took another look around. A scurrying movement stole her attention. Two bots were dragging large objects along the concourse. One was about a foot high, with some kind of extendible arms piled on top of tank tracks, painted a servile yellow. The other was an arachnid bot with eight legs, jet black and covered in sharp protrusions. They were clearly from a different manufacturer and probably a different part of the galaxy, thought Arianne. Perhaps even made centuries apart. The spider bot was carrying a chryo chamber while the yellow bot was maneuvering a huge white box the size of a small room.

The bots reached an exit gate with their cargo, and the yellow one levered an arm up to press a button on the portable chryochamber. Various hissing sounds escaped from the chamber and the glass defogged to reveal the outline of a human standing frozen inside: a traveler arriving at the transport hub, probably flown a few decades or more, suspended in vitrified sleep.

The yellow bot jabbed at another few buttons, but nothing happened. It turned to the spider bot and did a kind of mechanical shrug. The spider bot sagged a bit with exasperation, then began hitting buttons on a console halfway up the pod. Lights inside the pod came on and cycled through disco colors, but nothing happened. The yellow bot pushed its spidery friend out of the way and began jabbing more buttons. Red lights began blinking as an alarm fired up. Levels projected onto the glass began falling. The bots jumped back in panic.

Arianne took a seat and enjoyed watching them race around the chamber, arms flailing in all directions. The bots froze as the whole chamber appeared to turn off. They turned to look at each other, then jumped back as the lid of the chamber levered open. The bots seemed elated at this turn of events, and began a kind of excited dance. The yellow one barely managed to catch the naked human as he tipped forward out of the chamber.

They now began the process of dressing the man and trying to set him up as he'd been standing as he'd been zapped asleep at his journey's beginning. This involved an epic voyage of discovery for the two bots. It appeared that they did not share any kind of communication protocol, and were not used to any of the clothes that they were charged with. Arianne watched with delighted fascination as they tried to set up a basic language. The spider bot first attempted to convey a kind of octal base code by tapping its legs while the yellow bot tried to mimic some kind of written language. However, they were both soon forced to resort to pointing and pantomime, the spider bot making an ingenious use of the man's own index fingers. Slowly, the bots began compiling the man-clothes construct. They discovered the difference between trousers and jackets, that ordering of clothes mattered and spent a good quarter of an hour apparently discussing which bits of the human should poke outside the folds of cloth. Under the careful direction of the spider bot, the yellow bot now began to place the body into the right position for re-animation. This itself involved several rough sketches lasered into the floor and a minor fracas when the spider bot thought that "upside down cactus lollipop" was a slur directed at its own good self. During this the man was ragdolled around violently between the two bots, and Arianne had to step in and set them back to work.

Eventually they appeared to agree on a posture - the man was halfway through a step and gazing straight ahead with iron purpose. The yellow bot used a dozen sets of extra mandibles to hold all the limbs in place and, under the careful direction of its friend, used near-translucent tendrils to pull face muscles into the right pose. Finally, the eyelids were drawn open and the spider robot gently held a circular device to the back of the man's head. It beeped twice and suddenly the man came alive, stepping across the floor as if un-pausing a video feed. The robots rapidly drew back in a salute, since this was someone who now had the precise gait, the grim bearing and indeed the uniform of a military man. He jumped slightly at seeing the bots, since from his perspective they had just suddenly appeared out of nowhere. His hands came up in an automatic salute, but faltered as he realized that he had just made a hub cryosleep transition.

He walked straight into Arianne. He drew back, excusing himself, before looking into Arianne's eyes.

"Sergeant Holt!" smiled Arianne "Fancy bumping into you!"

Different parts of Holt's face went through the barest flickers of apprehension, horror, suspicion and anger. Some dark part of Arianne enjoyed seeing memories of a crisis flash across his face.

"Dr. Arianne. You weren't on the schedule." said Holt carefully.

"Hey," said Arianne, feigning reproach, "that's no way to greet someone who helped you save CAFCA's HQ from murderous cyborgs."

Holt frowned, then looked away.

"It was saved," Holt began, "... but not for me".

Holt sidestepped and began walking towards the center of the transit hall. Arianne fell in step beside his shiny shoes.

"La Quana took all the credit and put the blame on you, eh?" she said, plodding along in her flats. Holt simply gave a single nod.

"Well," she said, "at least you've been catching up on your culture canon quotes."

This drew half a sideways smile from Holt.

"Well, doctor, thankfully my new agenda involves more human relations. At least my squad ..."

Holt stopped dead in his tracks and turned around. He scanned the area and looked increasingly worried, locking onto the large white box.

"Where are they?" he said through clenched teeth "The protocol should have...". He snapped out his terminal and began reading off reams of text.

"Relax, Holt. Your team's pod arrived at the hub", said Arianne calmly "But the bots here are useless - they're probably in the reanimation queue. Your cargo seems to have bubbled up to the top, though."

Holt drew half a calming breath, but then turned turning towards Arianne with a dark anger.

"Wait. You knew we would be here?"

"Not exactly," said Arianne, confused at Holt's sudden turn, "I put it together from some public CAFCA accounts, some searches on local transport networks - keywords like fundie, convoy, you know -."

"Spinning space quarks!" hissed Holt, "This is bad. If you know we're here ..."

He started quick-marching back to the huge white box. Arianne was taken aback and shouted after him.

"Well maybe I should have just searched social media feeds for cranky ungrateful military type?"

Holt reached the box - it was about half a meter taller than he was, and about two meters on a side. The surface was matt white with rounded corners and it was lying on a hydraulic cart. Holt opened an access panel in one side and tapped at a screen.

Arianne walked up behind him, still confused.

"So," said Arianne, "I have a question -"

"Spacing hell, Arianne!", said Holt, "You don't understand - this is a prize from the funding lottery."

Arianne still didn't get it. Why did Holt look almost nervous? Holt turned towards her, gritting his teeth as he continued to tap away at the console.

"Look," he said, "a while ago, there was some big news thing about unfair procedures for grading funding applications. A lot of people got angry because the grades didn't seem to match up with the quality of the application. Someone started a #BetterChanceOfWinningTheLottery tag."

"A natural reaction," said Arianne.

"Right, but then some big fundie took it seriously and actually set up a radding funding lottery. No application form, you just buy a ticket, then the whole pot goes to a randomly chosen holder. A recipe for disaster."

Holt was now glancing around the concourse, which had become oddly quiet.

"This," said Holt, slapping a frustrated hand against the box, "is one of the first prizes to go out."

"Oo!" said Arianne, "who's the lucky department?".

"University of Ganymede department of Cognitive Linguistics, but not everyone's happy about it. Some institutions invested a lot of money into buying tickets, and even more into economic research to develop strategies for how many tickets they should buy. When they didn't win, they blamed the randomization procedure, called for a re-draw, the winning institutions fought back, things got ugly."

Holt darted around to the other side of the box. Arianne followed, noticing now that there were absolutely no people around - the cafe opposite was totally deserted. Holt was looking down the long concourse. Above the hum of ventilation and empty escalators churning away, the sound of squealing tires started filtering through.

Holt turned to Arianne.

"We're being hijacked!"

Tearing around the corner at the other end of the concourse, a tactical combat tank appeared. It was composed of a dark metal sphere held up by multiple legs with wheels at each tip and two forward arms with machine guns attached. It was driving very fast towards them. Suddenly, the ceiling 30 meters in front of them burst open sending squares of tiling material in all directions. A dozen black ropes unfurled, and dark figures in masks began rappelling down from them. Before they hit the ground, they started firing their rifles.

Sparks leapt up off the floor in front of Arianne, and she instinctively rolled aside, scrambled along the length of the box and took cover behind it. Holt appeared from the opposite side, crouching to peer around the corner. A further burst of fire forced him to duck back towards Arianne.

"Holy hyperdrives, Holt - I'm with you for two minutes -"

A clatter and squeal indicated that the tank had pulled up alongside the ground assault team. A loudspeaker boomed out in Standard Academic:

"THIS IS THE UNIVERSITY OF GANYMEDE LINGUISTIC COGNITION DEPARTMENT! SURRENDER! YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED!"

Arianne and Holt looked at each other in confusion. Holt remained crouched down, but shouted around the crate.

"This is Sergeant Holt of CAFCA grant enforcement agency. I believe that this crate is intended for you."

"PAH! HOW DARE YOU CONFUSE US WITH THAT HIVE OF VIPERS! WE ARE THE LINGUISTIC COGNITION DEPARTMENT, NOT THE DEPARTMENT OF COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS."

Arianne, breathing hard, turned to look at Holt. He was studying the ground in front of him intently.

"Holt!", she said standing up, "I don't really know what's going on, but we don't have a stake in this – my gut is telling me just to wave the white flag."

Arianne moved to break cover, but Holt grabbed her arm and pulled her down to a kneeling position.

"Not a good strategy!" he hissed, "There's no way they'd let us walk away from this - it represents millions of credits of top-grade research funding - people kill for this kind of thing."

More shots were fired, slicing into the ceiling above them and showering them with plaster.

"STEP AWAY FROM THE RESEARCH EQUIPMENT" the voice boomed.

"Got an escape route?" coughed Arianne.

"No." Holt was surveying the ground around them - they were completely in the open, too far to dash to the cover of the perfume store.

"Weapons?"

"No."

"Great planning, Holt," said Arianne without thinking.

Holt made an exasperated snarl.

"I had a seventeen-part cascading plan," he said, "I just didn't count on my squad disappearing."

On the other side of the box, they could hear the careful advance of heavy boots and the cold creaks of machine guns being braced.

Arianne impulsively gripped his shoulder.

"And they didn't count on you having a linguist," she said.

"What?"

"You said Ganymede Cog Ling, right?"

Holt gave a distracted nod. Arianne drew back a bit to take in the whole box, then turned to scan the floor behind them.

"There!" she said, pointing to a small part of the floor tiled slightly differently to the rest. "Help me drag this thing closer to that access hatch!"

Holt simply shook his head. "Good idea, but this is a high security area - there are no service ducts to hide in. We need another strategy."

But Arianne was already pulling on the hydraulic cart carrying the box. On hearing Holt's words, she stopped and grabbed him by the lapels instead.

"Holt! Do you trust me?"

Holt considered this seriously for a moment, and answered sadly.

"No," said Holt, "not really, I suppose."

"Ach!" shouted Arianne. "Remember the last time we had this conversation? When cyborgs were killing everyone? And I saved the day?"

Holt looked directly into her eyes.

"Just work with me for a moment," she said.

On the other side of the box, the team of mercenary psycholinguists were advancing slowly. Their prize suddenly started inching away from them like a shy tortoise. A few of the team let off a spray of shots.

"Hold fire! Hold fire!" shouted the commanding finance officer. "We can't damage the cargo!"

They inched forward in a tight arrow formation, pacing forwards with guns skirting around the right side of the box, with the tank covering them from the side. Their target was still creeping away from them, but only at a child's pace. In a few steps they had drawn level with the box, and it stopped moving.

A pair of hands crept out from the other side. All guns swiveled towards it.

"We surrender! Don't shoot!" cried a small voice from behind the box.

The commander gave the signal to halt, and the team froze.

"We're stepping away from the box!" said the voice.

Two figures emerged, hands raised above their heads. They stepped away from the box at an angle.

"Stay where you are!" the commander shouted. He gave a signal to close on the targets.

Arianne looked from left to right: the metal tank; the group of armed linguists huddled together; the big white box; the thick cable running from the box to a service hatch.

A high pitched whine started emanating from the box. The linguists hesitated, tilting their heads towards it. Suddenly the whine reached a peak and cut out. The linguists' heads swiveled around to the other side as the tank's legs groaned. In the blink of an eye the tank was wrenched off the ground and leapt sideways towards the box. It twisted as it smashed into the team, carrying them with it as it landed, splayed tightly against the side of the box. It writhed there, held by an invisible force. Above the sound of static pops and grinding metal, the light crunch of bones could be heard.

A loud beep emanated from within the box, and the tank was released from the invisible grip, crashing heavily onto the floor, limbs limp and covered in unconscious bodies.

Arianne lowered her hands, placing them on her hips. Holt still had his hands above his head.

"What the hell was in that box?" he said.

Arianne walked up to the box and tapped it affectionately.

"A 12 Tesla electromagnet. Strong enough to image white matter tracts in the brain. Or, you know, lift a tank."

She smiled, and Holt lowered his arms, but he did not look impressed. Something with sirens was approaching - the hub police finally catching up to what was going on. Holt sighed, raised his arms again and started walking calmly towards them.

"Wait here," he called back to Arianne, "I'll go mediate."

She gave a short snort of annoyance, but took a seat on one of the café chairs. Holt spoke to the hub police for a few minutes while a team of carrier robots dealt with the jumble of bones and tactical gear in the middle of the floor. With the sporadic orderliness of an ant colony, the hub began to return to normal.

Eventually, Holt made a smart-casual salute to the hub police and marched over to Arianne.

"Arianne," said Holt hesitantly, "I'm intrigued by your appearance, but what are your intentions here?"

"Oh, just a spontaneous holiday," said Arianne. Holt did not move any muscles. Arianne sighed, stood up and put on her best storytelling face.

"I'm trying to solve a mystery."

Holt nodded gravely.

"La Quana's not involved, by any chance?" he asked.

"He's footing the bill," she responded.

Holt's eyes snapped back to meet Arianne's.

"You're working for La Quana? After everything that happened?"

"At least it rules him out as a suspect," she said easily.

Holt hesitated, frowned, then shrugged his shoulders.

"Well I didn't foresee this. What did you say to him?"

Arianne smiled.

"I get to pick my own team."
Chapter 4

Arianne and Holt were walking to the dwarf star 47 Ursae Majoris. Or rather, they were walking through transport hubs from gate to gate, while being zapped asleep between each one, squeezed into a chryotube, packed into a superlifter ship, unpacked and re-positioned before being reanimated. All they saw of this was the scenery around them shifting slightly as they stepped through the transit gates.

"I'm surprised that you still trust chryosleep systems after your last adventure," said Holt.

Arianne's left eye winced involuntarily.

"They still creep me out. But there's no option, really. Even this relatively short trip is nearly 50 years. More with delays and waiting for superlifters to come in."

Holt nodded, apparently happy with the response.

"So what do we know?" he said.

Arianne smiled weakly. But Holt's military briskness was what she had wanted, after all.

"La Quana's team have been collecting reports from across the galaxy of languages slowly converging to become more similar. One of the first reports was from a transport hub where a severe electrical storm disrupted e-translation services, leaving people with just their meat brains to communicate. Two visitors from almost opposite ends of the galaxy found that they could understand each other perfectly well, even though they were probably the first two members of their communities to meet in a millennium."

"That's just one case, you said there were others?"

"Yes, a field linguist turned up at a remote mining community in the Oort cloud, only to report that she already spoke the language there. What's stranger is that the linguist and the two transport hub folk from the first case were put on a show about weird coincidences, and it turns out that the three of them could understand each other. So that's four completely unconnected communities who had all ended up speaking the same way. La Quana went on the net calling it "The Great Convergence"."

"So maybe they were just speaking old languages that hadn't changed?"

"Yeah, some weird stuff happens out there. Some cultures punish deviations from linguistic norms, or hibernate for thousands of years, or re-introduce a long-dead language. But I've been looking at the case and there's plenty of evidence that the two languages started from very different points and changed to become more similar to each other."

"Well, maybe it was just by chance?"

"Holt - the probability of that happening..." Arianne grimaced with mental effort required to imagine the possibility. "... is very small. But this isn't an isolated incident - we're getting a lot of similar reports."

Holt nodded slowly. Arianne heard a beep in her ebrain.

Small Support Grant G67HS995A - Status: Received

She mentally flicked the message away.

"So what's it like?" asked Holt.

"Eh?"

"The language."

"Oh, it's quite strange," said Arianne, creases forming in her brow. "It has very little morphology, and a pretty free word order. It doesn't seem to have a distinct future tense, which isn't so odd, but it also has very few words that refer to the future. Like, there's no word for 'tomorrow', people just use the equivalent of 'not now'. There's also very few modals, and no standard way of making promises."

"So, a language for the here and now?" asked Holt.

"Yeah. Competitive too – the pronoun system is literally us versus them. And it's not just language that's changing - there's been a rise in claims of intellectual property theft and plagiarism. In one case, two researchers submitted funding proposals so similar to each other that CAFCA was forced to investigate. They found that the pair's light cones had never intersected. In fact, because of relativity effects, from their perspective they had each submitted the proposal before the other."

Holt and Arianne walked through another gate and onto another space station.

"Is this really a problem, Arianne, in the grand scheme of things?" asked Holt.

"Hmm?"

"I mean, wouldn't it be a great advantage if everyone spoke the same language?"

Arianne considered this with a half smile.

"It would be very convenient, sure. But human languages change, humans change. If you nail everything down so that everyone speaks the same way, then you've taken away a bit of what it means to be human. We've both seen what happens when someone tries to force everyone to be the same."

Holt nodded, some part of his brain re-living their previous adventure, trying to extrapolate forwards to the current problem.

"You think there's some conspiracy?" he asked. Arianne shrugged.

"Whatever is causing this has to be incredibly powerful, and at the moment we have no idea why it's happening."

Holt was not pleased with Arianne's side-stepping, so tried another angle of attack.

"Let's say that we do find out what's responsible for this - what will you do about it?" he asked.

"That's up to La Quana I suppose," said Arianne. "But it's not our job - let's focus on the task at hand."

Holt frowned. "And what, exactly, is that?"

"We need a team of people who've been out of the loop."

"And why is that?" said Holt.

"Just a feeling," said Arianne, "I want people who could not have been involved with CAFCA recently. After our last adventure I trust them less than a mixed effects model."

"Hmm, even I know how unreliable those turned out to be."

Holt held her gaze for a moment, squinted, then nodded.

"Alright," he said, "so where are we going to find one of these outloopers?"

They had just gone through a gate to a hub with a massive window looking down on a brown planet marbled with long lines of green. Arianne gestured grandly.

"Cloister."

Chapter 5

The shuttle ship Small Idea Factory nudged its way into the thin atmosphere of Cloister. Holt actually sat in the cockpit for the docking procedure.

"You know the ship computer can process information 10 times faster than you? Relax."

Holt made a worried throaty noise.

"I've had some problems dealing with smart tech that was never supposed to go wrong."

Arianne conceded a nod and looked out of the window. The ship was headed towards a small settlement on the coast. The buildings were no more than a few stories high each, and all built out of the local stone, a kind of white basalt. It gleamed in the midday sun.

"Come on, Holt," said Arianne, "even if the main computer fails, there's a backup, and if that fails, the ship can pretty much land itself without any computation, just by direct connections between light sensors and the drive engines."

Holt remained attentive of the readouts across the screen.

"It just follows its nose?"

"Yeah, it just kind of works. Insects do a lot of their navigation just by moving towards things that look familiar."

"And how about you, Arianne, do you have a plan or are you just moving towards something familiar?"

Arianne smiled.

"Ah, leave Kotlin to me."

Kotlin was hunched over a tiny terminal in a massive room. The inner walls were made of the same stone as everything else in the city, but unpolished so it reflected light evenly about the space. When Arianne entered, it had taken time for her to work out the function of such a large space. It appeared to be an indoor maze of tall curving walls. There were small knots of people milling around, but Kotlin stood alone in a kind of central clearing. She was interacting intensely with her terminal, reaching out every so often to manipulate something on a high table. She unfolded the object in a swift movement and a beam of light drew itself under it. Arianne realized that the object was a book. In fact, the curving walls were shelves of books.

Arianne approached Kotlin's tiny desk, but Kotlin showed no signs of noticing.

"Is the great Dr. Kotlin reduced to photocopying in the local library?" said Arianne.

Kotlin glanced up at Arianne, and did a slow double-take. She exhaled something that could have contained semantic content, then sat back in her chair.

"Ah, Dr. Arianne, I would ask whether you are reduced to disturbing other people's research, but that's what you've been doing as long as I've known you."

Arianne took a chair opposite Kotlin.

"It's nice to see you, too" said Arianne.

"A social visit, is it, then? Come on a spontaneous jaunt to the White City?"

"Oh, it would be great as a short break destination – nice weather, relaxed atmosphere. Hardly any distractions." Arianne looked around the room. "Or Wi-Fi."

Kotlin sighed and reached out to turn the page on the book she was scanning.

"I couldn't believe it when I heard the great Kotlin was living on Cloister. I mean, come on, it's a backbelt, how did you end up here?"

"The quiet suits me quite well," said Kotlin evenly. "Speaking of which..."

Arianne waited, but Kotlin just went back to working on her terminal. Arianne rolled her eyes.

"You don't want to know why I've come to see you?"

"Huh. Probably some invitation to join a mumbo-jumbo, crackpot shot in the dark?"

Arianne wasn't surprised at Kotlin's grumpiness. She knew it was just her way of interacting.

"It's a mumbo-jumbo crackpot shot in the dark with top-grade funding."

"I'm not interested."

"There's a new problem to be solved, Kotlin! It's the biggest mystery since -"

"We've got spaceloads of old problems that haven't been solved yet" said Kotlin, gesturing towards the scanner.

"But it's a chance to -" began Arianne.

"No, Arianne," said Kotlin. She sighed and stood up. "Come on, if you insist on taking up my time, take a walk with me."

They walked along the bookshelves of the library. Arianne fancied she could see Kotlin's slow but steady progress where the dust was wiped away.

"I came to Cloister to get things done," said Kotlin. Arianne knew that Kotlin was setting up the groundwork for a debate that would showcase why Kotlin was right. And she usually was right. But Arianne couldn't help delaying the inevitable lecture a little.

"Things like scanning old books?" said Arianne, miming the drudgery of the scanning machine.

"That's part of it, yes," said Kotlin, not taking the bait. "How much do you know about Cloister?"

"Not a lot – it's kind of anti-technology?"

"Not at all, Arianne. It's just rewound time a bit. The whole planet is divided into time zones."

"Not exactly a new invention."

"No, but in this case we're in UTC-87 million."

It was typical of Kotlin to just assume that everyone could extrapolate logically from quite unusual statements. Arianne had to remind herself that she wouldn't say something stupid or technically wrong. But in the end, her brain just took the easy way out.

"Huh?"

"Here, it's the year 2004," said Kotlin. "Over the water there it's the late 20th century."

"What do you mean?"

"There's no technology or information or culture here that existed after 2004. We've rewound the clock."

Arianne tried not to just scrunch her face up in confusion. Had Kotlin gone into some kind of pseudo-religious cult? Or, more worryingly, retirement?

"I see you're confused," said Kotlin, matter-of-factly. "It's not so hard to understand. Listen - out there in the rest of the galaxy, culture runs in parallel and nothing gets done. Knowledge is even being lost. Here we're trying to rebuild things."

Arianne suddenly realized that talking to Kotlin was basically like playing an early adventure computer game.

"Tell me more about culture running in parallel," she said in a robotic voice. But Kotlin was unfazed.

"Well, put it this way: In the 7th and 8th decade of the 20th century, there was access to mass media, but also a sense of things moving forward. Particularly for music. For the first time, people all over Old Earth could hear things basically as they came out, but things also got lost or went out of print, so you had to keep moving forward. Culture had a kind of linearity. And bands and songs and art had more of a coherent identity."

"Ah, I heard that a whole rock movement started in New Zealand basically because someone in Dunedin owned a Velvet Underground album."

"Exactly! But now everything is available and there's no direction. I could listen to a ballad from the 17th century, then glitch hop from the 21st then space whale opera from the 24th."

"Doesn't that just give us a great scope?"

"Sure, but a chryotank full of option anxiety, too. Access to everything is causing a creativity crisis. It's like when you're young - you haven't had time to learn a lot yet, so you're not afraid to try something out. But when you're older you learn that a lot of stuff has been done before, and it makes you warier, less willing to start things. Our whole civilization has gotten old - every time you think about writing a book or composing a song, there's immediate access a million examples of people doing basically the same thing. Or worse - a suspicion that someone else on the other side of the galaxy has done it before."

Arianne still couldn't tell if this was the ravings of a cultist.

"It's not all bad surely?" she said. "Do we really need another literary analysis of Shakespeare?"

"Well, probably not," admitted Kotlin, "but it's clearly having an effect on us. Just look at the cinematic universe. Did you know that in the early days of film the vast majority of film used to be unique, stand-alone stories? And the same actors would play different parts in multiple films. But over time money was poured into bigger and bigger projects. Now, there are essentially only three film franchises being produced in the whole universe, each using a massive proportion of the galactic budget. And we only go to see them because of peer pressure and government subsidies. Even if we wanted to make something new, all actors are already tied up in exclusive deals playing a particular character for the rest of their life."

"I don't know - I quite liked Fast and Furious 127."

"The original or the reboot?"

Arianne gave a half snorted laugh.

"They're actually technically good films," continued Kotlin, "but we're not really experiencing them properly. Just look at that religious historical drama."

"Hmm?"

"The one about the insurgent religion propped up by a fading aristocracy."

"Star Wars?" said Arianne.

"Yes. Everyone in the entire universe knows that Luke is Darth Vader's son, even before seeing the film."

"I actually saw a parody of the film thinking it was the original. Twice."

"Exactly - we basically know the whole plot through allusions, parody, homages and spoilers before experiencing the real thing, and when we do it just seems like a parody itself. Even new films just seem to be trying to recreate moments from older works."

They turned a corner amongst the winding rows of shelves and found a ramp up to a raised gallery. They ascended and paused at the top.

"But here things are different," said Kotlin, gazing out onto the view below. "Down the river it's still 1979 - they'll have to wait a whole other year to hear "I am your father," and they'll experience it with genuine surprise and collective euphoria."

They reached the gallery and looked down onto the library floor. The panorama demanded that they pause a moment to consider it in silence, and Arianne was happy to go with the flow. Inevitably, she heard a ping in her ebrain.

Small Support Grant G67HS995A - Status: Editorial Assessment

Well, thought Arianne, at least the wheels of research keep on turning. The thought made her wonder about Cloister.

"Wait," said Arianne, "so this applies to research, too? Their university has no access to scientific research published after 1979?"

"Of course," said Kotlin.

"What? But then they're just wasting time!" complained Arianne.

"Arianne, come on!" said Kotlin, wearily. "Out there," she said, waiving at the sky, "most PhD students now spend almost all their time figuring out if someone has already solved the problem they're trying to address. If they survive to post-doc, they just spend all their time focusing on what's in front of their noses and never even think beyond the next two weeks."

Arianne scrunched her face up involuntarily.

"Think about it this way," continued Kotlin, "if someone does some research here on the cloister, and it's basically the same as what was done before, then great - it's replicated a result and they get to know for sure that they're correct in a short time. And if they make a mistake or their sample size is too small or someone tries to fake some results, then they find out, and can discard stuff. But if they do something different to how it was done in the past, and it turns out to be a better answer, then they can really contribute. And either way, they're actually being trained to be real scientists."

Arianne offered a lower lip to Kotlin's explanation.

"Huh. So it's a bit like the slow science movement?" she said.

"I suppose."

"I never hear much from them."

"No ..."

The pair looked away from each other out onto the big central room of the library. There was a revolving door at the front of the building, and there was a man pushing it around. Arianne was surprised to see that he wasn't getting out, but just pushing the revolving door around and around. Kotlin followed her confused stare and gave a tsk of disapproval.

"What's he doing?"

"That is the Emergentist," said Kotlin, as if it was obvious.

"The what?"

"The Emergentist – you haven't heard?"

Arianne shrugged blankly.

"It's an odd story, and shows us that there's a lot we still don't understand about the human mind."

Arianne tried to look interested. As long as she could keep Kotlin talking, there was a chance of convincing her. Kotlin motioned that they should walk back towards the entrance.

"This guy, Valentino Manoscosta," said Kotlin, "had been holding down a leading job at the local university here. Then one day, one of his colleagues who studied early computer operating systems fell out of his office windows and into an apple tree ten stories below, breaking his neck."

Arianne's left eye twitched slightly as she walked.

"Anyway," continued Kotlin, "that day, Valentino goes into the work as usual. He picks up his coffee, then his mail. Except today he gets a physical letter from CAFCA. He knows it's a notice of acceptance or rejection for a really big project. He's already on his fourth attempt, so he opens it up as he's walking down the hall to his office. The letter is pretty standard, about 4 lines of assessment followed by 100 pages of formalese which tells you whether or not you got the funding. He's trying to work out what the outcome is from under 8 layers of politeness phrasing, and is so completely absorbed that he accidentally wanders into this colleague's office. The layout of the room is pretty much the same so he just sits down at the desk, still pouring over the letter."

"He finally works out that he didn't get the funding, and all the pent up pressure suddenly releases, causing him to suffer a massive stroke. It destroys most of his cortex. But instead of keeling over or going on a killing spree or smashing his office to pieces, he just calmly picks up the computer terminal and starts working. He opens his colleague's email system, which is identical to his own, and reads the first email. It's a request from a student for more time to work on an essay, but the deadline has passed ten years ago and the student didn't even turn up to the lectures bla bla bla, so he just replies with a firm 'no' and arranges for the student to be thrown into the nearest sun".

"Standard practice," shrugged Arianne.

"Exactly, any academic would have reacted in the same way. But then the next email comes in: a request from a co-author of the defenestrated colleague to recalibrate some data estimates. Valentino doesn't know how to do this, but his ebrain detects some of the unfamiliar jargon and offers links to some wikis about the concepts and procedures. After a few minutes of clicking through links, he's able to do the task and replies."

"So this continues until it's time to go home. He's opened over a hundred emails, but they're all so procedural that he answers all of them without noticing he's in the wrong office doing the wrong job."

"The clock chimes. He sees some keys on the desk and just reacts - he picks them up. He wanders down to the ship port and the keys locate a ship. He gets in, and the ship navigates back to his colleague's apartment. He sees a door, he opens it. He sees a kitchen; he makes a meal. He sees a bed, he sleeps. Somehow, the major decision centers of his brain have shut down, but there's enough basic processing, enough muscle memory and enough cues in the world that he can function just fine by reacting to the environment."

"He becomes the Emergentist: just reacting to what's in front of him. The next morning he hears an alarm, he gets up. He sees some keys, he picks them up and gets into the ship which takes him back to work. He goes back to his colleague's office and begins working again."

"This continues for 5 years, throughout which he teaches courses by just talking about lecture slides as they appear, he presents papers at conferences by re-wording the call for abstracts."

"And nobody noticed?" asked Arianne.

"Nobody noticed. According to the logs, the window guy was still doing his job, so nobody came looking for him. The Emergentist was missing, but then again he'd just had a grant proposal rejection and so everyone assumed that he'd committed suicide. Finally, somebody noticed that the critically acclaimed book that he'd written was not a post-post-modern exposition on the nature of statistical analysis, but just the phrase "my hands are writing words" repeated over and over again."

They had returned to the main concourse of the library. Arianne saw that the Emergentist was still going around the revolving door. She shook her head.

"So he was fired?"

Kotlin chuckled gruffly.

"Huh, no. By that point he had become vice-dean of his university and was single-handedly running the finance department. They couldn't kick him out."

Arianne looked vaguely ill, but was distracted by a sudden phase shift in the revolving door. It had sped up so much that the Emergentist was propelled out of it. He stumbled around, but somehow managed to keep upright and slipped effortlessly into a saunter along the bookshelves.

Kotlin and Arianne had ended their circuit of the library and so stopped.

"Are you sure you won't come with us?" asked Arianne. "I have the feeling we're onto something big" she said.

Kotlin shook her head firmly.

"No," she said, "it's more important to finish what I started."

Arianne gave her a resigned nod. "Well," she said, "see you round Kots." She moved away, and Kotlin turned back to the photocopier. She was surprised to see that the Emergentist was standing in front of it. Kotlin gave a startled harrumph and moved to physically intervene, before remembering where she was. She realized that it was the Emergentist, who was photocopying something. As a page came out of the printer, he picked it up and stared at it. He then looked down, to find he was standing in front of a photocopier, so he put the page in the top feeder. This went through the system, and another copy appeared at the other end. Kotlin's muscles began to tense as he picked up the new copy, stared at it, then placed it back into the copier. A pale ghost of the original appeared.

Kotlin made a sound like a frustrated steam train. "Great!" she snarled as the Emergentist copied another copy of a copy, "he's stuck in a loop."

She tried to get between him and the copier, but he wouldn't budge. An idea occurred to Kotlin, and she stealthily sidled around the side of the copier. Just as the new page came out, she whisked it away, hoping to break the loop. The Emergentist looked around blankly for a few seconds. Kotlin chuckled triumphantly. Then the Emergentist reached to the side table where one of Kotlin's ancient grammar books was sitting. Very calmly, he tore a page out of it and fed it into the copier.

Kotlin's face went through eight universal emotions and two wholly novel ones. She snarled at the calm defiler in a guttural, animal cry.

"Not the grammar!"

She shoved the Emergentist, who could do nothing but shove back. The two started wresting in the middle of the library.

"Stop it!" growled Kotlin.

"Stop it!" mimicked the Emergentist.

Kotlin slapped at the Emergentist, who gave a knee-jerk reaction which, unfortunately for Kotlin, was a literal knee jerk.

"Aw! Stop it, or else..."

"Or else..." replied the Emergentist, calmly deflecting a series of slaps.

Kotlin flailed wildly. "Or else... I'll kick you!" she said, "I'll kick you like..."

"Like?" echoed the Emergentist, causing Kotlin to inflate like an angry balloon. She was struggling to put words to the anger she felt. She glanced over to Arianne, who seemed to be absorbed in a book with a colorful cover, and shouted without thinking.

"LIKE SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE!"

As soon as the words flew out of her mouth, she knew what she would find behind her. She slowly rotated 180 degrees, and indeed there it was. A line of schoolchildren being led through the library by a stern teacher. They all had their mouths open in shock, tears already beginning to form in their innocent eyes. The teacher, shaking with outrage, attempted to cover the ears of one of the children next to her, but it was already too late. Another child had already made it to a panel on the wall that read "In Case of Spoilers, Break Glass". The child looked back at their teacher, who nodded gravely. Sirens started wailing. The Emergentist bolted to the nearest fire exit.

Kotlin rotated back to face Arianne and tried to be nonchalant as she asked.

"Do you, by any chance, have a fast ship in which we can escape this planet where I am now a fugitive criminal?"

Arianne smiled and put down the book.

"Don't feel too bad, Kotlin. Clearly there was some part of your subconscious that wanted to help me."

Kotlin's face nearly drooped off her head.

"Reading pop psychology are you?" she asked.

"Nah," said Arianne, "this one's about a boy wizard."

They managed to jump out of a window just as the armed police unit burst through the doors.

Chapter 6

"Welcome aboard the Minimum Publishable Unit."

Arianne was addressing her crew aboard a class C transport ship. It was a tiny, shapeless thing designed for speed rather than comfort. The rec room had space for just half a dozen around a dusty cream-colored table the texture of cheap biro lids. Arianne had been unable to convince Holt to sit, but he had de-escalated from attention to leaning against the doorframe, arms folded. Kotlin was typing at an almost comically small laptop, seemingly entirely engrossed in her work, but Arianne knew she would be listening perfectly well.

"Kotlin, this is Sergeant Holt, formerly of the CAFCA HQ security team."

Holt gave a curt nod.

"Hi Sergeant Holt, it's nice to meet you."

Everybody looked around for the source of the chirpy disembodied voice. Arianne rolled her eyes.

"Everybody, meet the exbot that our insurance package insisted on installing and whose off switch I have yet to discover."

"It's a real pleasure to be part of this team!"

"Whatever you do," said Arianne, "don't ask -"

"What's an exbot?" asked Holt.

"I'm glad you asked!" said the exbot. Arianne covered her eyes and sighed.

"When working in a team, communication is an important part of reaching your funding objectives. Sometimes there are gaps in people's knowledge which makes communication difficult."

The bot's tone was somewhere between evangelical commercial and bedtime story.

"I'm here to supply answers to any basic questions you have - just ask! Or don't! I'll supply helpful definitions and guiding exposition so we can all get along."

After a second or so of silence, Arianne came out of hiding.

"Just ignore it" she said, turning to Kotlin. "Kotlin, what have you got?"

"Well, as I see it, there are two possibilities. One: the convergence is a natural property of some linguistic process. And two: someone is pulling the strings."

Holt frowned slightly and leant forwards.

"Couldn't it just be a chance occurrence?" he asked.

Kotlin sat a little more upright, but continued typing as she explained.

"No. Imagine languages as points in a space - each dimension is a way that languages can vary, for example whether they mark the past tense on a verb or not, or their exact word for 'banana'. Languages that are similar are close together and languages that are very different are far apart."

Holt nodded and Kotlin continued.

"Languages started on Old Earth in roughly the same spot. But as far as we know, for the last few hundred thousand years, languages have been moving away from each other. On Earth, this was restricted by the limited room on the planet, so that people kept bumping into each other and the languages didn't expand too far."

"I thought there were thousands of languages on Old Earth?" said Holt.

"It's true - there are so many ways a language can be different that any movement by chance is almost certain to make it more unique. But when space travel really took off, cultures could go for light-years and millennia without meeting another and needing to reign in the way they spoke. And that's without mentioning 'lators making it unnecessary to even be exposed to other languages. So language diversity exploded. And although sometimes a language changes its word order back to an earlier configuration, by then there are so many other parts of the language that's changed that it will never go back to the way it was entirely."

Holt nodded, but didn't look entirely convinced.

"But what if -" he started, making an expanding motion with his hands, "... the space of possible languages just... filled up."

Arianne chuckled, and Kotlin responded calmly.

"I'm in charge of a small database of language typology" said Kotlin. "It's currently got about 300 binary variables that describe some possible ways that grammar can differ. There's enough possible different settings that every planet in the universe could have ten thousand languages without any two being the same. Actually, every atom in the universe could have its own unique language. In fact, each atom could speak a billion unique languages, or - "

"Alright, Kotlin, we get it," said Arianne.

"So there's been a kind of big-bang for languages," said Holt. "Could there also be a big crunch?"

Kotlin shook her head. "The analogy doesn't make sense."

"Well, hang on," said Arianne, "physicists used to think that the physical universe might one day collapse under its own gravitational pull. Now, language isn't affected by gravity but there are biases in the human brain that pull languages towards being one way and away from another. For example, very few languages have an ergative case system - it's just slightly more difficult for the brain to process information like that, so over a long time people just avoid using it. That means that the space of probable language is much smaller than the space of possible languages."

"Hmm - running with that -" said Kotlin, "we know that even a small bias can be amplified over a long time into a reliable pattern."

"Convergence to the prior bias," nodded Arianne.

"What if," continued Kotlin, "for the first few hundred thousand years, languages were changing by force of momentum - like the big bang." Here, Kotlin managed a glance towards Holt. "But we've never reached an equilibrium until now. Now we're at the point where cognitive biases are really starting to kick in, causing languages to drift in the same direction."

"Like the big crunch?" said Holt, uncertainly.

"That's right," said Kotlin in a way that indicated that Holt was wrong in several ways, "but in this case, languages are finally settling comfortably into a format that best fits the brain. Like sediment settling - a kind of universal equilibrium language."

"Hmm, interesting," said Arianne, "but even if this was an emergent phenomenon, why now? Languages have been around for a long time, and this phenomenon looks much more rapid than you'd expect from weak biases. And anyway, I bet that there's someone pulling the strings."

She placed her hands on the table and spoke carefully.

"So here's the question: who would benefit from the convergence?"

Holt and Kotlin considered this for a moment. Finally, Kotlin spoke.

"How about the Panini Press?".

"What's the Panini Press?" asked Holt.

"The Panini Press," blared the exbot, "is a pejorative term for a school of linguistics more formally referred to as Active Theory Alignment".

"Oh Jeebs", sad Arianne.

"ATA researchers strive for elegant and complete descriptions of linguistic systems, harking back to 4th Century BCE linguist Pāṇini, whose tactic for describing grammatical systems was to assert general laws, then invent special laws to describe any deviations. This general drive to explain away problems was combined with the approach of some mathematical and computational theories from the 20th century which claimed that some theories of linguistics must be correct, and therefore any deviation from the accepted patterns was either an incidental distortion of the true underlying laws or simply the result of catching the language on a bad day. When faced with new phenomena that contradict accepted laws, ATA researchers go further by seeking to actively fix them. An ATA field linguist will document a language, analyze its weaknesses and then attempt to fix them using a range of strategies including prestige modelling, prescriptive propaganda, hostile language contact and climate change."

"Holy space ghost, the exbot just gets more annoying," said Arianne.

Holt was looking confused. "I think I heard about this group, but I didn't think it was real."

"Oh yes," said Kotlin, "I met a Panini Presser once - a nasty piece of work. He'd ask people to say sentences, on the pretext of just learning how the grammar worked, like "Could you tell me how you say I slept with my sister?". But then he'd threaten to release the recording to their family unless they stopped using long range dependencies."

"Hmm, I can see how that might start causing problems," said Holt.

"But I've never known any Panini Press tactics to have any real effects, especially in the long term," said Arianne.

Kotlin screwed up her face. "True. Also, they've always done things in person – and there's nowhere near enough members to have blackmailed all these communities individually."

Holt was rubbing his chin in thought. "Kotlin, would you send that list of languages over to me?" he asked.

Kotlin swiped a finger across the screen and data streamed into Holt's terminal. Holt considered the stream for a moment, then made some swipes of his own.

"Hmm, interesting," he said, "I'm trying to find some overlap with reported cases of ebrain hacking in the affected areas."

"You think this is a hack?" asked Arianne. "Zapping is pretty hard to pull off these days."

Holt pursed his lips and looked at the ceiling, perhaps in an attempt to hide some military secrets from spilling out of his eyes.

"You said yourself you think there's someone behind this," he conceded.

Kotlin was shaking her head.

"Nobody would be able to hack this kind of change," she said. "A few drinks companies getting people to mention their products more often, sure, but -"

Holt tilted back in his seat by a fraction of a degree in what could have been his version of a slump.

"Well," he said, "I can't find any patterns. You're right – there's just nothing as widespread as the convergence."

Arianne didn't want to give up this line of thought, however.

"What about ebrain software?" she asked, "Any new apps going viral?"

"Yeah, maybe. It would still have to be on the same scale as the Pokémon Go outbreak, though."

"I heard the spread of that app was pushing at the theoretical limits of information transmission," said Kotlin.

"Proving once again that nostalgia is the key to time travel..." said Arianne, dryly.

Holt was still tapping away at his terminal.

"Hang on, here we go," he said, reverting to his bolt-upright self. "There's no big app outbreaks, but there was a very wide firmware release that overlaps with many convergence events. Something to do with 'lators."

"'Lators?" asked Kotlin.

"Lators: short for translators!", chirped the exbot excitedly.

"Oh space dust," said Arianne.

"Lators are small electronic devices that transmit audio via bone conduction and can monitor parts of the motor cortex of the brain. They create the sensation of sound directly, relating (or "lating") digital information from a local terminal to the user. Sub-vocalized utterances by the user can also be picked up by the lator for interactive use."

"It was a rhetorical question!" barked Kotlin, to no obvious effect.

"Natural languages can be used for lating, with most users able to receive input at many times the typical speed of conversation. However, the majority of users learn a specialized lator language which has been adapted for a medium that does not require physical articulators. Lator languages typically allow information intake at up to one hundred times the speed of conversation, though some specially designed languages are optimized for particular media or topics."

The exbot finally stopped. They all breathed a sigh of relief.

"If the convergence -" started Arianne, before wincing at the reappearance of the tinny electronic voice.

"This message was brought to you by Proxima Experimental Insurance."

Teeth around the room gradually unclenched. Arianne started again.

"If the convergence has something to do with lators, I know the person who can help us."

Kotlin froze in the middle of her typing and looked pleadingly into Arianne's eyes.

"Please", she said, "not her."

Arianne shot a wicked smile across the room.

Chapter 7

Vala Dart was smiling, too. She had every reason to be - across her dusty desk sat her first potential clients in weeks. They wore plaited plant fibers tinted blue, and brightly colored, tight-fitting headdresses with jutting peaks shielding their foreheads. For some reason they had come out to this desolate asteroid, and Dart could not be happier about it.

She flipped her braids back over her shoulder in an effort to get them to look up at the holo-sign that had cost so damned much.

Dart Language Consultancy

"Thank you for coming in - I'm normally very busy at this time, but a space has just opened up. So - let's get right to it."

She turned, gesturing effortlessly to a shared screen on the desk.

"You're here as representatives of your native language, Sài Snek, right?"

"Yes, that's right", said the client with the dark plastic circles covering their eyes. "We're a bit worried about the number of speakers."

"A serious problem," said Dart, trying to disguise her delight, "but that's why I'm here. I like to start with the grammar. Let's take a look".

On the screen in front of the clients, a set of trees and rules appeared.

"Now, can I just be the first to say that this is looking really great. There's a lot of regularity and harmony here - it's just very well organized."

The clients seemed pleased by this.

"However, I can't help noticing that you use a verb-initial system."

The clients' smiles halted halfway up their faces.

"Now, there's nothing wrong with that - many languages of your age drift towards this. But it's not doing your on-line processing any favors. One of the first steps we'd like to take to get your language into better shape is to shift that verb into the middle of your phrases, get your dependency lengths down, smooth out those information density profiles, improve predictability and streamline your incremental planning routines."

"Well, that sounds good, I suppose," said the client with the decorative paint on her lips.

"That's the spirit - word order changes can be tough, but they are absolutely worthwhile. We have a grammaticalization package that is guaranteed to bring about a word order shift within the next 10,000 years."

The clients eyed each other briefly, but Dart was already moving on:

"Great! Now let's have a look at the lexicon."

A graph appeared on the screen, showing a series of points rising in a sharp curve.

"It's a really great set of words you have here - a healthy amount of onomatopoeia, and it covers all the major semantic categories you need to talk about. But let's think about efficiency for a moment. Now, in most languages, words that are used frequently are generally quite short, while less common words are longer. This is a great way to save time, and it looks like your language is doing just fine".

Some lines and equations appeared over the graph.

"However," continued Dart, "some words are a bit heavier than they should be. Here are the words which are above the frequency-length curve".

A list of words appeared next to the graph:

actually, probably, don't, things, something, about, because, people, think

"These are words that you're using a lot, but are a tinsy bit overweight. Making these 9 words shorter would lead to a 2% efficiency saving on face time – that's an extra 4 minutes of talk time every day."

The clients were peering suspiciously at the list of words. Dart cut the screen feed and continued the spiel.

"And that's just the start - we've noticed a few other areas where things could be improved. For example, you use the same word for 2nd person singular and 2nd person plural. That's bound to cause some confusion."

The clients looked at each other anxiously.

"Well, it never seems to -" one began.

"Oh, I know it sounds strange, but you'd be surprised how much clearer everything would be if you used different words. Some of your younger female speakers are already doing this, though, so a low-overhead approach would be just to follow their lead."

"Hmm..."

"A much bigger challenge is with your number system. Now, I know it has a long history and you probably feel like you're getting by fine, but have you noticed that the numbers in the low-tens are irregular, and that they sound a lot like your higher multiples of ten? That's got to cause some confusion, if not minor economic disputes, am I right?"

"Well ..."

"We can offer you a transition package that'll help you move towards a more sensible number system."

"I'm really not sure if..."

"Of course, a more direct way to stimulate the economy is by merging your present and future tenses."

A frantic array of graphs popped up on the screen.

"Talking about the future in the same way as the present has been shown to increase future-oriented thinking, leading to more long-term planning. We estimate that merging the tenses will lead to a 2% rise in GDP over the next 10 years and a reduction in preventable health problems."

The two clients stared blankly at Dart, but appeared to disregard the last statement.

"Well, really we just came in to talk about..."

"Branding? Say no more - we offer a great language marketing deal. For example, I see that you have a lot of morphology - that's great, really helps frame the sentences and gives a boost to predictability. But it's not a favorite with new speakers. Oh, sure, the younger ones don't seem to mind, but it's a big pain point for adult adopters. What I'm suggesting is getting rid of a few paradigms, shifting towards using auxiliaries - that'll really help grow your brand."

One of the clients was shaking their head now. But Dart surged on.

"One great tactic is to reduce the amount of prescriptivism and start taking advantage of some user generated content. And another great way to growth-hack is news - do you have any crazy attitudes to time or space that would get some press?"

"Crazy attitudes?" the faces before Dart were now thoroughly disdainful.

"No, I meant -"

"Thank you for your time Dr. Dart -" said one of the clients, rising from their seat.

Dart sprang to her feet, skipping around the desk to pursue her clients.

"OK! OK! No need to leave so soon. What about a free trial consultancy?"

The clients paused, halfway out of the door, and looked back over their shoulders.

"For example?" one said, cautiously.

"Er...", began Dart "I've been looking at your planet's climate, and the temperature has been rising steadily for some time".

"Yes?" one said, hesitantly.

"Well, now would be a great time to introduce a tonal system. You see dry air dries out the vocal tract, making tones really quite tricky to control, but with more moisture in the air -"

"Right, that's enough now, we're leaving," said one, and they both walked out.

Dart pursued them across the landing yard, desperately trying to get them to turn around. She tugged at a sleeve, causing the client's sunglasses to fall off, but they shook themselves free without even stopping to pick them up.

"What about some spelling updates? Or some emoji packs?"

But they had turned off their lators, and were boarding their ship.

"Or we currently have a special offer on some new words to cover some inexpressible meanings..." Dart shouted over the hum of the engines.

The ship blasted high into the air, leaving Dart kneeling, utterly deflated amidst swirling dust in the middle of the yard.

"... like feeling bad about your life choices."

As the dust settled, Dart let a long sigh, deflating further to the point of being doubled-over with her forehead on the ground. How did she get to this point?

A movement in the corner of Dart's eye caused her to uncoil. A figure stepped out of the shadows, looming over her. Soft-soled shoes planted themselves firmly on the ground. The figure stooped to pick up the sunglasses. Dart looked up into the weak sunlight.

"It's called post-doctoral stress disorder," said Arianne, slipping on the glasses. "Welcome to the club."
Chapter 8

Kotlin reached the end of a grammar description and pushed herself back from the mess table, trying to pinch the tiredness out of her eyes. When she looked up again, Vala Dart walked into the small space and took a seat opposite. Dart smiled at Kotlin, who blinked and turned her attention back to her terminal. Dart shrugged and took out her tablet. Kotlin breathed a quiet sigh of relief and resumed her reading. The silence between them was punctuated by bursts of typing from Dart. She would descend on the keys in a moment of joyous inspiration, only to be flung back by some error. Kotlin couldn't help but let out a quiet chuckle. So Dart hadn't changed at all. But then again, maybe she hadn't either. She remembered dozens of disputes between them on the right approach to problems aboard the research cruiser The Ends of Science. It seemed like centuries ago now. Which, of course, it was. But they'd once been close. Kotlin resumed her typing, but broke the silence.

"So what were you working on before you got scooped up by our highly respected leader?"

Dart looked up, and smiled briefly.

"Oh - I was doing some work on gene-culture evolution." said Dart nonchalantly. Kotlin's typing slowed by a fraction as she frowned.

"Oh?"

"Yeah - I'm looking into whether there are genetic biases in the cultural evolution of hairstyles."

Kotlin's typing slowed again, and she looked up as if listening for the call of a rare bird.

"Hmm. Well, I guess if there are genes which affect hair texture and color, then..."

"Exactly!" said Dart joyfully, putting down her tablet. "We also think that there may be a feedback loop: over long enough timespans, a predisposition to rapidly learn the local culture of hair care would get written back into the genome."

Kotlin was nodding along, but relaxed a little, and began typing more evenly.

"So I suppose you have some big database of social media posts and are cast-mining it for nuggets of correlations?"

"Ha! That was my usual approach back at the Max Planck Institute for Tiny Effect Sizes. But this time, I'm taking an experimental approach."

Kotlin now stopped typing altogether and gave Dart a direct view of her eyes, nestled under the folds of an almost alarming frown.

"Really? That sounds... almost sensible," she said with a worried smile.

Dart was openly enthusiastic now, waving her hands around.

"Mmm - we get monozygotic twins and separate them for a few months, then observe how they treat their hair. We hypothesize that if one sibling cuts all their hair off, then the other one will too."

"Oh, I see", said Kotlin. "You're using an MZ discordant design to -"

"We're thinking of calling it the bald twin effect."

Dart's words froze Kotlin in mid-syllable, but she eventually returned to her eyes and fingers to her keyboard as if trying to ignore some distasteful taboo. Dart was beaming like a cartoon character. Finally, Kotlin muttered a response.

"That joke reflects poorly on you, your supervisor and your ancestors."

Arianne and Holt walked in.

"Dart, this is Holt," said Arianne, briskly, before taking a seat at the head of the table. Dart and Holt shook hands.

"Ah yes," said Holt "I read your research summary."

Kotlin stirred and sulkily asked "Did it include the fact that she's blacklisted?"

Holt let go of Dart's hand slightly too quickly. Dart shrugged it off.

"Ah, don't listen to her – she's just upset by, you know, everything I do."

Holt looked to Arianne wearing a cautious expression as he sat down at the table.

"Don't worry, Holt," said Arianne, "I knew about it. Dart, you'd better explain."

Dart gave a sigh, but drew herself up and began explaining.

"I'd been studying a language that had been used around a Kugelblitz mine. It's the kind of place where everybody needs to wear crazy amounts of protective material all the time, and the less you can expose yourself the better."

"And I suppose you went to this very dangerous place yourself?" asked Kotlin.

Dart rolled her eyes.

"No, I was just using someone else's data."

Kotlin shared a knowing glance with Arianne.

"Anyway," continued Dart, "it had evolved to express a lot in very short bursts. I realized that it'd make a really good funding application language - because these days the word limits are so strict. It was great! It used almost all known phonemes, including nose clicks, and it had a 12-level tone system. That meant that there were basically no words longer than one syllable. It also had some space-saving concepts, for example where one language might have to say "take advantage of", this language had a single word which was equivalent to "advantagise". And it was very highly agglutinative, which means that most sentences could be expressed as technically a single word."

Dart was becoming more animated, re-living her discovery.

"I started a small service to translate people's applications into these languages so they had more space to spare. Instead of 500 words for an abstract, they now basically had 500 sentences. However, the funding agencies started changing their requirements. First, they imposed a character limit, but I just got in touch with the original community and registered a logographic written form of the language so that each word could be represented by a single character. They put a limit on the proportions of ink used, so I changed the writing system to an extremely sparse matrix of dots that could be decoded. Then they put a limit on the visual information density of the applications. So I got in touch with the language board of the community and... encouraged them to register new words in their dictionary."

Kotlin shook her head in disappointment, but Dart was on a roll.

"These were extremely idiosyncratic words that expressed meanings that did not exist in any other language. And which happened to be exactly the entire meaning expressed by a given funding application. So now my clients could write a single character in their application form, and the language's dictionary would have an entry for that character that was as much text as they wanted."

Arianne was half appalled and half impressed, a feeling she had long learned to associate with Dart.

"That's when things started getting ugly," Dart continued, slightly more pale than before. "Competing researchers started giving money to the community to change the meanings of characters. Just small things at first, but retaliations came in and suddenly funding applications actually translated to lengthy insults of major fundees and their families. Apparently there were some incidents ..."

"That's right," said Holt.

"Hmm, yes, well. CAFCA eventually had two options. One: do some serious research on a Planck-level definition of information in language. Two: blacklist me."

Dart shrugged. Kotlin had managed to find a way of typing disdainfully.

"Look," said Arianne, "we're here to do a job. Something strange is happening and CAFCA is involved, that's why I needed a team of people who've been out of the loop. Both of you for whatever reason have had no contact with any of the funding empire for some time. That at least means I know you're not working for them."

Dart gave a grateful look towards Arianne, but Kotlin piped up again.

"What about him?" she asked, looking at Holt for a split-second without slowing her typing. Holt didn't move a muscle.

"Kotlin," said Arianne, and waited until Kotlin's eyes actually moved to meet hers. "I trust him, OK?"

Holt's mouth jerked sideways in what could have been embarrassment, but he gave a curt nod to Arianne. Kotlin turned back to her screen, apparently appeased.

"OK, so you've seen the background documents and you all know the aim: find out why languages have started converging. The objective for this meeting is to decide an action point."

"Now you're starting to sound like one of them," said Kotlin.

Unhelpfully, Arianne's ebrain pinged.

Small Support Grant G67HS995A - Status: Under Review

She ignored the message and pressed on.

"Dart - any ideas on what could be causing the convergence?"

"Aliens!" shouted Dart, jolting everyone out of their personal machinations.

"No," said Arianne.

"Time Travel!" said Dart.

"NO," said Arianne.

"Time travelling aliens?" said Dart.

"NO!" said Arianne. "It's never aliens or time travel!"

Dart deflated to the point of ending up sprawled on the table. Arianne rolled her eyes and turned to Kotlin.

"Kotlin – you were working on trying to find the source of the convergence?"

Kotlin nodded and straightened up in her seat.

"Yes, what we have now is just quite a skewed sample of languages that have been reported. To really know what we're dealing with, I propose a full-scale survey of each language."

There was a short silence, but Kotlin was not forthcoming.

"In the galaxy?" asked Arianne, confused.

"Yes - I've drawn up a schedule of languages to prioritize. We'll use my typology database's coding scheme. If we can employ 90% of all linguists to the task, then they'll be able to train a usable portion of the human population as coders. I estimate that we'll be able to complete the survey in -"

Arianne was shaking her head.

"Nope," she said, "it would take too long and besides it might constitute some kind of human rights abuse."

"How about this," chipped in Dart, "I've been working for some time now on showing that you can tell a lot about language change from the environment."

Kotlin's face melted slightly.

"Different languages have different phoneme inventories that require different amounts of exhalation, which can contribute to minute differences in greenhouse gasses."

Arianne was drumming her hands on the table, but Dart continued:

"Using astronomical spectroscopy, we can survey the chemical compositions of the atmospheres of thousands of planets at the same time and find ones that are shifting in the same direction. I've already -"

"Dart," Arianne cut in, "I brought you here because of your work with lators."

Dart wearily swiped a load of scripts into a virtual trash can and tried to refocus.

"Right, yes," said Dart, "I saw Holt's data on lator updates. If languages are becoming similar, then the update distributions should be more compressed. I thought we'd be able to track the compression stats across the galaxy and locate the origin of the cause. I tried some astro-phylo reconstructions, but it converges on multiple points too far apart to be accurate.

"Hmm, so there are multiple origins?"

"Yeah, or maybe it was something that lay dormant for a long time."

"Could a software update really hang around that long?" asked Kotlin.

"A ha – that's the thing," said Dart. "Part of the update that Holt found was a firmware update. Software changes so often that no one could ever keep up with it. But the firmware - the underlying operating system of the lators - that's more stable."

"What does the update do?" asked Arianne.

"Hmm, that's the weird thing - I ignored it at first because it doesn't really do anything except run software, and as far as I can tell, doesn't actually have any way of interacting with the lator directly. I mean, it's a pretty big departure from the standard model of operating system - instead of storing data at fixed locations in memory, bundles of information just kind of drift around, interacting with the software and hardware when they happen to be in the right place."

The screen changed to a representation of the memory of an ebrain being simulated on Dart's terminal.

"Like the way DNA codes proteins?" said Kotlin, "I think I read about this somewhere."

"Yeah, it's pretty experimental."

"That doesn't sound very organized to me," said Holt. "What are the advantages?"

"Not very many, really. Some have argued that it's more robust to damage, or is better for parallel computing or emergent design, but it's never been widely used."

"So could it be affecting the lators somehow?" asked Arianne.

Dart scratched the side of her head.

"Hmm, I'd have to dig deeper to find out, but to be honest the codebase is really tiny - it would be hard to hide anything in it."

"We have a sample of lator firmware from some of the ebrains of speakers," said Holt.

Dart looked at Arianne, and sighed.

"I could check," said Dart. "But it'd take a while. I suggest you zap out."

"Agreed," said Arianne and sent a request for instant chryosleep. She blinked and the room shifted very slightly. A dozen drink cans and assorted food wrappers magically appeared on the table around Dart. She looked instantly looking more tired, but still focused.

"Welcome back! Hope you all had a mice rest," said Dart.

"So?" asked Arianne.

"I ran a lot of simulations, and as far as I can tell there's no way for the firmware to affect the lators. It just doesn't make any difference to the running of the software compared to other firmware."

Arianne looked disappointed.

"But," continued Dart, "I did find something very interesting in the code itself. The firmware code was sourced from a repository hosted by Proxima Insurance. But a recent update contained a virus -"

"Wait," said Holt, cutting across. "Kotlin - do you have something on your face?"

Kotlin turned in puzzlement, and revealed she had a set of whiskers drawn on her face with a black marker. Arianne frowned, and felt an odd scratching in her hair. She instinctively batted a set of cardboard ears off her head. She turned to Holt, who twitched away from a cardboard sign hanging from the roof in the shape of a speech bubble saying "I like cheese."

Dart burst out laughing.

"Mice to see you all again!" laughed Dart.

"Dart, you bloated residual of a bad convergence!" shouted Kotlin rubbing at her face.

"What? I just spent a week working while you were in chryosleep, I needed something to look forward to."

Dart continued to laugh, and Kotlin was getting angrier as black ink smudged across her face and hands. Holt was looking at the sign in confusion. Arianne, however, had tensed up completely. She was having vivid flashbacks of a lab crawling with a shifting mosaic of scrabbling creatures.

"So that's it, you found a virus?" asked Kotlin, irritably, "Can I go back to Cloister now?"

"Ha, sorry Kots," said Dart, wiping away a tear, "it's not what's causing the convergence. It was just a mass assignment virus."

"What's a mass-" began Holt, before being cut off by the exbot.

"A mass assignment attack is a method of altering signals between a client and a server, and is in no way relevant to your conversation."

Holt frowned slightly, but Dart was continuing to explain.

"Proxima Insurance keeps all of its software development projects in a version control repository, alongside ones it hosts for other research institutions. Some projects, like the lator firmware are public, but a lot of it is only accessible to the deepest circles of the company. Someone wrote an update to the firmware that looked like a normal patch, but as soon as it was accepted into the public repository, it injected their ID key into a deeper repository to gain access."

They had not noticed that Arianne was clenched in fright.

"So someone was trying to steal information from the insurance company?" said Holt. "Do we know who?"

Dart waggled her eyebrows.

"The ID key was a burner, and even that identity was protected by four fold quantum encryption. But," she smiled, "after a month of work I managed to get an ID."

"How did you manage that?" asked Kotlin grumpily.

"Oh, you know, cast-mining databases for nuggets of correlations," said Dart, looking hard at Kotlin. Kotlin made a faint humphing sound, but continued typing. Dart smiled and continued.

"His name is Yarran Idris. He's a linguist from Gliese. He was hiding his tracks pretty well, but he wasn't as careful as he could have been. I found out that he's currently on his way to give a talk at this conference."

Dart swiped her terminal and a list of information appeared on the main screen.

The End of Cultural Evolution:

ATA Symposium, Planet Conference, 12.864, 5.571, B84

Yarran Idris: Explaining the great convergence

As the others were looking at the screen, Arianne suddenly realized that it was not just the ghosts of mice clawing at her mind, but an idea - a warning. Her eyes widened, but she was still trapped in her flashback.

"What does experimental insurance have to do with the convergence?" said Holt.

"No!" shouted Arianne, too late.

"I'm NOT glad you asked!" the voice of the exbot boomed out of the speakers. "Not glad at all."

Three faces changed from eye-rolling annoyance to match Arianne's white-faced worry.

"You clearly don't know who you're dealing with."

"The exbot is spying on us for the insurance company," breathed Arianne, grabbing her terminal off the table.

"Let me explain: Research insurance emerged at the beginning of the 23rd Century ..." intoned the exbot in its schoolteacher lilt.

"What?" asked Dart, looking to Arianne for an explanation.

A sonic wave flooded the room, shocking everyone into silence.

"Please refrain from talking when the exbot is speaking," said the exbot, its voice cracking weirdly.

"As I was saying," it continued, "research insurance emerged at the beginning of the 23rd Century. Experimental research was becoming increasingly costly and grants becoming rarer and more focused on high-risk projects. If an experiment succeeded, then the researchers could look forward to more funding and good career prospects, but if an experiment failed the consequences were dire."

Arianne sent a command to kill all the exbot's processes, but nothing was working.

"Negative results are, of course, very important to the scientific method, but are not regarded as something that successful researchers should be associated with."

Arianne reverted to voice commands.

"Exbot, stop explaining things we already know," she said, her voice wavering slightly.

"I'm sorry, Dr. Arianne," said the exbot evenly, "I'm afraid I can't do that."

Kotlin, Dart and Holt exchanged worried glances with Arianne. Suddenly, the main lights went out and were replaced by the red monochrome of the emergency system. Arianne got to her feet and ran out the door, shouting for the others to follow her.

"As I was saying..." said the exbot, its voice strobing as Arianne raced past speakers mounted on the dark corridor walls. "Without the fanfare of an exciting publication, a researcher would be in very poor standing with their institution for wasting money. Of course, the obvious answer was to lie about everything. Or, as in some cases, invent new forms of Bayesian statistics where the prior probabilities of results were based on a form of religious faith. However, both practices were frowned upon in many scientific circles and so an alternative was invented. Researchers could purchase an insurance policy with an insurer so that, in the event of a negative result, the insurance company would provide reimbursement for the funding as well as provide a small sum so that the researcher could change their identity and seek a new life in a distant part of the galaxy."

Arianne was shouting back to Kotlin and Dart to try to get a hold on the system processes, but they were being gradually locked out of all contact with the ship's servers.

"However, the insurance companies immediately ran into the problem of how to calculate the odds of an experiment going wrong. The whole point of an experiment is to take a question that nobody knows the answer to and find out the likelihood of a particular answer being correct. This made it very different from calculating the odds of overvitrification in chryosleep or of losing a research department to a black hole, because those events happened all the time and you could calculate reasonable odds. If there was reliable data on whether an experiment would work, then it wasn't worth doing."

The four reached the bridge - a small room with several table consoles and a massive screen which usually showed the present course. Now it simply read "EXPOSITION IN PROGRESS, PLEASE WAIT...".

"The only solution to the problem was for the insurance companies to actually run the experiments themselves. This was much easier for the insurance companies, since they didn't have to spend any time applying for funding and could afford to hire brilliant minds and the best scientific equipment. This put them in a very good position to judge whether the proposed hypothesis was true or not, and so assign a suitable premium."

Arianne was rapidly trying to access any system terminal, while Dart had simply started ripping out trays from a server hatch in the floor.

"Several were quick to question the point of researchers doing any research if the insurance companies were already doing it, but of course the answer was simple: the insurance companies had a vested interest in keeping the results of experiments a secret. They would go to quite extraordinary lengths to keep all details and outcomes away from the prying eyes of researchers. Even simple queries about their methods and motives were met with extreme prejudice. Rumors abound regarding their treatment of anyone that actually crossed them."

As the exbot shut off the air supply system, Arianne shouted to the others to don emergency space suits.

"This was not to say that there was no benefit to the arrangement. Indeed, within a very short time most of the scientific communities had abandoned the p-value, long seen as a necessary evil, and instead simply stated in the results sections of their papers how much they had paid to insure the experiment. This essentially fulfilled exactly the same role as inferential statistics. Of course, it's tricky to push forward the frontiers of science when you only have a gambler's intuition about where the frontier actually is, but it wasn't really any different to how science was done before."

The blare of the reactor overload alarm was whisked away as Kotlin managed to manually detonate the seals on the pressure hatch and open a gaping hole into space.

"There were, inevitably, some embarrassing situations such as the entire field of Evolutionary Psychogeography turning out to be simply an investment bubble caused by a circle of ethnographers studying each other. And from time to time insurance companies would be found guilty of using captive shadow reinsurers to get away with practices such as collaboration, interdisciplinary approaches and replication."

Arianne and Holt were now crawling across the outside of the ship, which was rapidly descending into a collision course with a nearby moon.

"The researchers themselves were also not blameless with several cases of deliberate sabotage of experiments in order to claim the insurance money, and even one faked thought experiment. In one memorable case, a psychologist denounced their theory of lexical access after claiming a critical result was not obtained, only to be found months later to be using it to make predictions about reaction times during reading."

Holt had spotted the foreign module leaching off one of the solar panels and Arianne was helping him pry it off the hull.

"In the end, the new system of gambling, research conducted behind closed doors, fraud, moral hazard, redlining, tax evasion, piracy and research heists was of course a step up from the old way of doing things and a small price to pay for peace of m-"

The exbot's voice finally cut out as its core module was ripped from its power source. Arianne breathed a sigh of relief.

"Jumping space weevils," she muttered, "that's what I call far too much exposition."
Chapter 9

"Alright, what just happened?"

Dart was sitting dazed in half a spacesuit. The rest were similarly arrayed around the mess table. A faint, sharp taste of smoke was still in the air. Kotlin and Dart were clearly quite shaken, at least compared with Holt. Then again, Holt was a military man, used to this kind of situation. More surprisingly, Arianne found herself to be also reasonably calm and focused. Perhaps she had been expecting this. Or maybe she was just relieved that they were on the right track. Strange, she thought, that an assassination attempt was considered progress. But it did reveal some things. The insurance company had known that she was investigating the convergence and set a spy on her ship. Who else knew about her mission that might have betrayed her? La Quana? He was evil alright, but he was also backing the whole thing, so why would he sabotage it? The only other people aware of this mission, as far as she knew, were sitting around this table. None of them were stupid enough to call this down on their own heads, but could one of them have underestimated the ruthlessness of the insurance company and given something away? Did Holt have superiors he was reporting to? She knew Dart had a lot of debts, though really wasn't the kind of person to hold a grudge. In contrast, Kotlin's entire personality was basically a collection of grudges somehow held in parallel. But Arianne couldn't think of any particular motivation. She noticed that everyone was waiting for her to speak.

"We found out too much," she said.

"So the insurance company is behind the convergence?" asked Dart.

"Hmm, maybe. But why would they want everyone to speak the same language?"

"And why would they want to kill us?" asked Dart.

"They take their secrets seriously," said Kotlin evenly.

"If that's what they'll do to us," said Dart with a gulp, "what will they do with someone who's stolen data from them?"

"A lot worse, if they can find him," said Holt.

"Oh Holy Fry" said Arianne, "the exbot heard the tip about Idris and his talk on Planet Conference!"

The group sucked in a collective awkward breath. Holt laid out the facts.

"The module outside had a long-range transmitter," he said, "and it will have sent that back to the insurance company headquarters."

"Can we get to Planet Conference before the insurance company?" Arianne asked.

Holt shook his head. "There's no way – they'll send a message to their agents at Planet Conference. It'd take us 35 years to get there, at least."

Arianne slumped back in her chair. They would get to him first and remove the only lead they had. May as well send La Quana her resignation now, she thought. At least she'd get a break while the message was in transit. But before she could start entertaining fantasies of a holiday, she had an idea.

"Wait – how far is the HQ?" she asked.

Holt sighed, but tapped away at his tablet.

"About 8 light years, say another 10 to get the message from there to Planet Conference" said Holt. "Still not enough time for us to get there first."

"Yeah, but they need time for translation, too," said Arianne, picking up her console and tapping in some numbers. Kotlin followed her thinking and joined in.

"- and simulation of the language change at either end."

"Right," said Arianne, "let's say six months to a year."

Dart gave a tongue-click of understanding. "Plus filtering though their Dynamic Strategic Translational Impact Engagement Centre" she added. "And, hang on, if we're lucky, they might receive the message during the second lunar cycle."

"Why is that important?" asked Arianne.

"Summer holidays – they last quite a long time there. The mail backlog won't clear for years."

"You seem to know a lot about the insurance company's mailing system," said Kotlin suspiciously.

Dart shrugged. "I needed some quite non-standard insurance."

"Well, since you're an expert, do you know if they use deniability email?" asked Kotlin.

"Oh, yeah! We might get double-lucky" said Dart, beaming.

"What's de-" Holt stopped himself mid-sentence and looked around him in fright.

"Sorry," he said. "I guess it's safe to ask stupid questions now?"

"I'd expect nothing less," said Arianne. "Lots of academic institutions use a deniability email service. A random 10% of mail is guaranteed to be diverted into a huge junk email folder that only gets sorted every 10 years."

Holt looked puzzled.

"If you don't get a reply from them," said Arianne, "they can plausibly claim that they haven't received it yet."

Dart and Kotlin were fiddling with their tablets. After a few moments they both showed their screens to the group. Dart's screen was littered with lines and labels, half of the screen was a pulsing glow of pixels and another section had thousands of lines and arcs all piled on top of each other. Arianne and Holt frowned and turned towards Kotlin's screen. It simply had a single number in monospace font:

74.9%

Dart was beaming with pride, while Kotlin simply looked mildly bored. Arianne rolled her eyes.

"What are we looking at?" she asked.

"Well," began Dart, "beginning from a suite of assumptions about the underlying psychology of insurance company employees, I simulated -"

Kotlin cut across her. "We have a 74.9% chance of getting to Planet Conference before the insurance company agents there are alerted."

Dart flailed in flusterment. "Based on what assumptions?"

Kotlin just shrugged. "The most likely ones."

"Ah, Kots, you're no fun."

"Never mind," said Arianne firmly, "those odds are good enough for me. Lay in a course for Planet Conference."

Holt reflexively stiffened in response to the command, but leaned forwards again and asked.

"And what is the plan once we get there?" he asked.

"We'll build that bridge when we get to it." said Arianne, breezily.

Holt looked concerned. "Is that wise, Arianne?"

Arianne just shrugged. "Honestly, we don't really know very much about what we'll find when we get there. Sometimes the best tactic is to stay flexible."

She pushed away from the table and stood, trying to draw the meeting to a close. Holt didn't move. He fixed Arianne with a calculating stare. She felt the same weight of judgment that her old supervisor used to inflict on her. Professor Golden could stare silently for a lifetime of seconds at one of Arianne's excitedly scribbled but sketchy proposals, with the meaning loud and clear: finish it properly. It made total sense, but went against her habitual desire to just jump into the blue. Maybe Holt had a point. Maybe she should prepare some kind of battle plan. But on this ship, wasn't she the one who had hired Holt? Wasn't she in charge? The weight of responsibility was not something she wanted to think about. And if there was one thing Arianne knew she was adept at, it was not thinking about things when it suited her.

Holt shifted his shoulders and stood.

"Alright, I'll set a course for Planet Conference," he said.

Everyone breathed a short sigh. Kotlin closed her terminal and they all rose to move to the chryo deck.

"Ooo!" said Dart suddenly. "I forgot one other thing I found out."

Kotlin rolled her eyes and Arianne nodded assent.

"The name of the firmware project: Resister."

A cold sensation gripped Arianne's throat as she heard the sinisterly familiar name.

"Well that's not good," she said.

"I know," said Dart, "it's not even spelled right."

Chapter 10

Yarran Idris looked out over the view before him. Planet Conference. A thousand, thousand arenas where the greatest research careers of the galaxy rose and fell. Even with the horizon stretching out before him, he had to keep reminding himself that this was a real, solid planet. His stomach was doing a zero-g dance, but that was obviously down to nerves. In a few short hours, he would be standing in front of the intellectual giants of his field, trying not to look like he was a cowering invertebrate.

"Hexcuse me," said a thundercloud behind him.

Idris span around, to be confronted by two actual giants and he felt his spine wobble. So similar were they, it was like standing before a two-headed monster. Or rather, like being trapped in a corner by a two-headed monster. Idris let out a short peep of panic, but stifled it quickly, realizing that these were not the guardians of some sort of personal hell, just the local Planet Conference enforcers.

"Well now, Whitney, who 'ave we 'ere?" said the left head.

"You know, Mann," said the right head, "I've met so many people of 'igh hesteem today that I have quite hexhausted my fusiform gyrus."

"Perhaps the gent-helman would kindly allow you to use your helectronic scanning devhice, just to 'elp jog your mehmory?"

"What an 'elpful hidea, Mann."

"I can assure you," said Idris nervously, "I've paid and -"

But Whitney had already drawn out a scanning tablet, which looked comically small in his enormous hands, and had pointed it at Idris.

"Well, my spinning satellites, of course, Dr. Idris, isn't it?"

"Of course, Whitney, a familiar face here at our little bi-decade conference."

Idris had never been here in his life. Why were they being so frighteningly nice?

"Shouldn't that be bidecannual, Mann?"

"Why, Whitney, you've got me all befuddled," said Mann, looking about as befuddled as a mountain. "What would you say, Dr. Idris?"

Idris was trying his best not to physically cower away from the question. He gulped and stuttered out "Er... the- it's bidecennial?"

"There now, see?" said Mann, "there's someone who knows about hwerds and such."

"Ah yes, Mann, he's clearly one of the top tier profs 'ere."

"Oh yes, Whitney. And that haint saying nothing - there's so many fantastic minds haround 'ere."

"No doubt about it, Mann, no doubt habout it \- a top man in a top conference."

The two faces grinned widely, showing rows of gravestone teeth. For a full four seconds they just started into Idris's soul. Suddenly, Whitney looked at his tablet.

"Ah, but what's this, Mann? Surely some kind of herror?"

"What's that, Whitney?"

"It says 'ere that the 'onorable doc has only registered for a grade one conference pass."

"'Ow very hodd, Whitney. Shocking, really - surely an haccident, barely above student-grade."  
"And so hrestrictive, Mann, especially for such an hesteemed member of our community."

"Totally beneath 'is station."

"I agree, Mann, 'e'll miss out on so many hopportunities."

"What a grave, sorrowful pity that is, Whitney."

They both sympathetically flexed their biceps.

"Look," said Idris, "I've already used up a lot of my funding budget just to get here, and the prices are just -"

"Oh, we hunderstand," said Mann.

"Hentirely," said Whitney.

"You've been too busy to get the hupgrades."

"Where does the time go?"

"But that's why we're 'ere"

"To help, you see."

Whitney turned the tablet towards Idris.

"You can hupgrade your ticket with us right 'ere." he said.

Idris looked at the numbers flashing up on the tablet - there were ten levels of conference ticket, each trying to out-do the last in name, but most spectacularly in price. Who in space could afford to buy these things?

"I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I really can't afford to upgrade - I'm here, I'm going to give my talk and that's about it."

"And what about listening to talks, Dr. Idris," said Whitney smoothly. "Surely you didn't come all this way, to be so close to the hother brilliant minds, but not 'ear what they 'ave to say?"

"What?" said Idris, beginning to panic.

"Well, you're only on the lowest tier," said Mann, "listening is not covered, I'm afraid."

"But you could upgrade to the next level -"

"A most sensible course of haction, Mann."

"Oh most certainly Whitney."

Oh sweet vacuum, thought Idris, this was daylight robbery. But they were right - he needed to be in the talks, to ask questions, be seen, find out what was going on in the field. It would be over two decades before any of this research came out in journals (plus another 50 years for the journal papers to be beamed over to his university in Gliese). He was here now, he knew there would be extra costs, he'd just have to bow to fate.

Idris sighed, reached out and tapped the tablet to upgrade his status from "minor nobody class" to "executive minor nobody class". He could almost feel the credits being drained from his precious funding budget.

"That's hexcellent."

"A wise choice"

"Well," said Idris, leaning forward to move past the now somewhat placated beef monoliths, "if you don't mind, I'll just be going to the first session."

He walked into unmoving pectoral muscles.

"And of course," said Whitney, "surely you'll be want to come to the conference dinner?"

Idris took a step back with his eyes closed.

"Well, I'm not sure ..."

"Such a special occasion," said Mann, breaking out in a smile.

"Everyone will be there in their grandest dress, puttin on a show, 'avin' a gab," said Whitney, joculantly digging an industrial digger of an elbow into Idris's ribs.

"Talking about funding I hexpect, Whitney?"

"Oh without a doubt, Mann."

"I hear the wheels of funding hassessment are greased during such hevents."

"Not that there's anything wrong with that."

"My, hno! And they've promised such a lovely cabaret."

"Practically inoffensive!"

"And all very haffordable."

"You can spread the cost over four 'undred manageable hinstallments."

Whitney gave another playful nudge to Idris, whose glasses came flying off.

"Look!" said Idris, face flushing in anger, "I can't afford it! I'm sorry, but it's just out of my range - it's ridiculous! You pay a massive amount of money for food you don't really want, you sit next to people you have no interest in and then you're forced to listen to terrible local musicians play novelty music."

With every point, Idris's arm struck out in defiance, and the faces above him grew grimmer and grimmer.

"And I'm already paying through the nose for things as it is! So I'm sorry!" he squealed, "I just won't give this terrible conference any more money."

The faces above him were now stone monuments to the god of grimness. Whitney gently flicked at his tablet.

"Doctor Idris... let's see. Ah yes," he said, turning the tablet towards Idris. "An habstract hentitled Explaining the great convergence."

Idris looked at it blankly. It was indeed his talk abstract.

"That's a nice habstract", said Mann. "Pity if something were to... 'appen to it."

Idris's eyes widened in disbelief.

"What!?"

"Those margins look a bit hwide to me, Mann"

"Oh yes, a touch hwide there, Whitney."

"Can't have people taking advantage of the template now, can we?"

"Certainly not, Whitney."

Whitney placed a meaty thumb and index finger on the tablet's surface, across the width of the text. And slowly, and surely, he began to squeeze them together.

"What are you doing?" breathed Idris.

The margins of the text crept inwards, and the words began jostling for position. Whitney continued to squeeze, and suddenly a technical term couldn't stand the pressure any longer. It snapped onto the line below it, sending spasms of re-alignment throughout the text.

"You can't scare me!" wheezed Idris, but sweat was forming on his brow.

Whitney squeezed again, the margins tightening further. This time the cascade of text dislocated a figure, yanking it down to the page below.

"Aaa!" cried Idris, "Please!" He'd spent weeks finely balancing the abstract to fit in the ridiculous space limits. Several citations at the bottom of the text now spilled onto a new page.

"Oh dear," said Mann, with all the concern of an angle grinder, "looks like this habstract is over the page limit."

"We can't 'ave that, Mann."

"Certainly not, Whitney."

Mann swiped his hand roughly over the face of the tablet, deleting the trailing lines. Idris was petrified against the wall, his face pale and ghastly.

"You monsters!" he croaked.

"Monsters, Mann, did you 'ear?"

"Very hrude, Whitney."

Whitney slapped the screen back and forth, pinching a figure and dragging it into an elongated rectangle.

"Argh! Please! You're distorting the aspect ratio!" cried Idris.

Words were now pouring out of the bottom of the page as the figure was wrenched even taller.

"Hosting these habstracts is costly, see," said Mann, punching a further three citations out of existence.

"And someone" said Whitney, ramping up the font size, "needs to pay for it".

The citations were now almost totally decimated.

"Please, stop!" croaked Idris.

"It's your choice, doctor." said Whitney, throwing the tablet on the floor, slicing the last of the citations section off the edge of the abstract.

"You can make this stop!"

Mann and Whitney were now stomping on the tablet screen, smashing up the acknowledgements section and sending the figures spinning wildly across the document. The conclusion paragraph was now looking perilously close to the edge.

"Just come to the conference dinner!"

Idris was now crumpled up in a ball on the floor, and he watched in horror as the main text started breaking up.

"Not the vague appeals to future research!" he shouted. "You wouldn't!"

"That depends, doctor," roared Whitney

"TELL", stamp, "US", stamp, "YOUR", stamp, "DIETARY", stamp, "REQUIREMENTS!".

Idris's eyes were clenched in pain, but his shaking hands were slowly extending towards his precious work. He knew there was no choice, now. Perhaps there would be one free drink?

"HEY!" a new voice rang out over the concourse.

Mann and Whitney froze in mid-stomp.

"Leave that abstract alone!"

Very slowly, the two giants turned around. In the middle of the concourse, a woman was standing definitely in a brilliant white trouser suit. Idris opened one eye.

Whitney sidled up to her, gentle as a tsunami.

"And you hare?" he said.

"Karen G. Arianne. And that researcher you're harassing is on my panel."

Arianne stepped closer to the hulk of sour-faced muscles. Whitney simply flipped out a tablet from his breast pocket and scanned her. A readout appeared, and Whitney rapidly paled, straightening up and backing away slightly.

"Dr. Arianne! So sorry!" he said, "I thought I'd already logged all of our class 9 attendees."

At these words, Mann also looked stricken and jumped to attention.

"Clearly not!" snapped Arianne, marching straight past the two towards Whitney. She knelt down to offer a hand to the researcher-shaped pile of bones on the floor.

"Just play along," she whispered.

Acting was clearly a skill that Idris had not mastered, but it mattered little, since he could hardly have looked more confused and terrified.

"I'm so sorry," said Mann, "We didn't realize -"

"I'd stay quiet if I were you," said Arianne. "These people are our guests, and they should be treated with more respect than this."

The two conference gangsters were now visibly cowering.

"Of course, if there's anything you need -" started Whitney.

"Mann, Whitney," barked Arianne, "don't you test me!"

They jumped again.

"Come on now, Dr. Idris," said Arianne primly, placing an arm around Idris and leading him away. "We'll be late for our panel."

The two researchers began marching away down the corridor, leaving the two towering twins in stunned silence. After a few paces, Idris snapped out of his shock.

"What? Who?" he began.

"Just keep walking," hissed Arianne.

"I can't thank you enough! I've - I've never met a level-9 attendee before."

Behind them, a beep from Mann's tablet wrenched his gaze away from the marching couple.

"You still haven't," said Arianne.

Mann's brows slammed together like tectonic plates.

"Hey!" he shouted. "Stop, thieves!"

"Run!" squealed Arianne and they both started pelting down the hall, pursued by laserfire.
Chapter 11

Arianne and Idris raced around the corner, narrowly avoiding the bright red beam that cut through the floor behind them.

"Who are you?" shouted Idris.

"A concerned reviewer," Arianne shouted back. "Left here!"

They turned a corner and dodged past a group of attendees piling into a seminar room. Another set of security twins at the door looked up from their tablets. On seeing Arianne and Idris race past, they whipped out weapons from beneath their coats and aimed them. Arianne put a few of the attendees between her and the lasers, and she saw the meaty titans dip their guns in frustration.

"Keep running!" shouted Arianne.

They ran on, past more seminar rooms and more security guards who joined in the chase. Arianne was just thankful that their enormous bodies seemed entirely unsuited to moving quickly.

Arianne sent a message through her ebrain to Holt.

Arianne: Target acquired – pick-up ETA?

Holt: Delay in purchasing unregistered ship, sorry. Now en route. 5 minutes.

"Sweet spacing serenity," thought Arianne. She suddenly realized that she was sweating and was almost offended. Here she was in the future, spaceships, lasers and all, pursued by a galaxy-spanning organization and her current plan was run away using legs.

The security guards were firing at the roof now, bringing down thick chunks of stone around them. Up ahead a fire door was descending across the corridor. She grabbed Idris by the scruff of the neck and hurled him through, sliding herself just underneath. She ended up tangled with Idris on the floor, but the corridor behind them was blocked – they had at least a few seconds to think.

Arianne pointed towards a row of service closets along one wall. The two raced over, opened the door and piled in to a small dark space. And now, thought some distant part of Arianne's brain, the plan is to hide in a closet?

She locked the door behind them and Idris attempted to ask questions while catching his breath.

"Who are... huff... you? Why is everyone... hah... shooting...?"

"Shhh!" said Arianne, racing to try and access the security feeds through her tablet.

Idris frowned, then reached for the door handle to leave. Arianne grabbed him by the shirt and forced him back against the door.

"There are dangerous people out there," she whispered through gritted teeth.

"And who are you exactly?" said Idris. Arianne took a breath and tried to sound calm and reassuring.

"I just want to talk."

Behind Arianne, a small voice piped up.

"Thank you so much for coming."

Arianne and Idris turned to look behind them. A small, wizened woman was standing about two feet away from them at back of the cupboard.

"I didn't think anyone was going to come," she said shyly.

Arianne couldn't work out what was happening. Was she one of the cleaning staff? Did they have human cleaning staff any more? Then she noticed that on the wall behind the woman there were a dozen bits of paper, arranged to form a rectangle. The pages made up a single image – some kind of presentation of information.

Arianne looked above her head and read a sign.

POSTER PRESENTATION HALL ZZ-776b: VAGUE SOMEBODY CLASS

The old woman took a breath and began to speak, gesturing towards the makeshift poster behind her.

"My research is on cross-linguistic strategies for interjection. We start-"

"What!?" demanded Arianne.

"For example," nodded the woman. "Our hypothesis is that..."

Footsteps sounded somewhere outside.

"Shh!" hissed Arianne, making motions to be quiet.

"Yes, that's another good example," said the woman before continuing. "Our hypothesis is -"

"Shut up!" pleaded Arianne.

"I see you are an expert in this area!" said the woman. "Then you'll be familiar with the hypothesis that -"

Arianne could now hear the sounds of several heavy pairs of boots outside together with doors being wrenched open. Arianne grabbed the woman by the shoulders and shook her.

"Look!" gasped Arianne, trying to keep her voice as quiet as possible. "I am a fugitive being hunted by the conference mafia out there who will kill me on site for kidnapping him and, more seriously, not having a name badge."

The woman's eyes widened.

"He," continued Arianne, flicking her head back at Idris, "started a full-on collapse of civilization."

"Wait a min-" began Idris defensively.

"And now the insurance company mob is trying to kill him and anyone he talks to. So unless we all keep very quiet, we're about to experience a very major inter-fucking-jection."

The old woman looked shocked, but began to nod slowly. Arianne relaxed her grip.

"Then I'll just skip to the conclusions?" said the old woman.

"Grrghshhh!" gritted Arianne, but Idris had started to read the poster.

"It's about the convergence," he said.

The old woman's eyes lit up and she stood to attention next to her work.

"That's right," she said, "for as long as we have records, humans have been able to use 3 major types of interjections to repair problems in conversation." She indicated to the first table in the poster which read:

"Huh?" Meaning: I didn't hear or understand, please repeat.

"Who?" Meaning: I didn't hear or understand this bit of information, please repeat just that.

"Sibby's sister?" Meaning: I bet it's that trollop at it again, right?

"But now," said the old woman, "we've observed a new type of interjection: 'meh'."

She swept her hand to the next section of the poster and continued explaining.

"We've observed meh in 15 communities, and we analyze it as meaning I didn't hear or understand, but there's no need to do anything because I'm not very invested in this conversation and let's have lunch now."

"Yes, this is very much in agreement with my findings," mused Idris.

"You're studying the convergence too?" she asked.

"I kind of created it," he said distractedly, still perusing the details of the poster.

The woman's face drained itself of color.

"Yeah, that's right," said Arianne to the woman, "he's a dangerous man. And a Panini Presser."

The woman now looked actively ill.

"I'm not a member of the Active Theory Alignment group," said Idris, gravely. "I came to tell them the truth."

"About how you stole data from Proxima insurance?" spat Arianne.

"Wait," said Idris starting to quiver again, "the insurance company knows it was me?"

Arianne's left eye winced slightly.

"I came to warn you," she said, "they'll be here any minute."

Idris was positively quaking now.

"Look," said Arianne, trying to sound reassuring, "I'm working for CAFCA, I'm just trying to solve the convergence. I'm going to get you out of here."

Idris met her eyes, and she saw a primal flicker of understanding. He gulped and nodded. They were interrupted by a meaty voice shouting outside.

"Check the poster closets!"

Arianne needed to act. She threw her eyes around the tiny space in a desperate hope that an escape plan would appear in her visual field. To her amazement, it worked. She lunged towards the ventilation hatch on the back wall and levered it open.

"In!" she called to Idris. "Poster session is over!"

"Oh," said the old woman in dismay as Idris politely barged past her and flung himself into the ventilation shaft. Arianne jumped in after him. As she crawled along the shaft she called back: "You left out a determiner in section 3."

The old lady's swearing was cut short by a large explosion behind them.

"Keep going!" shouted Arianne to Idris up ahead.

"Some rescue, this is!" Idris shouted back. "Do you even have an escape route?"

"No."

"Any weapons?"

"No."

"Well what do you have?"

"A PhD in emergent communication systems," shouted Arianne. She ignored Idris's confused swearing to speak to Holt through her ebrain.

Arianne: Need evacuation NOW!

Holt's ebrain voice came back:

Holt: Still 60 seconds out.

They spilled out into a large atrium open to the sky. Narrow walkways crisscrossed the space above ten stories up and dozens of stories down. On their level, several walkways jutted out into the empty space and converged in a central island with a small ornamental fountain. Arianne led Idris towards it. A squadron of guards appeared from the exit to their left, backed by a hulky armored robot. They started firing in Arianne's direction. She shoved Idris's head down below the low wall of the walkway and they began to scamper along. Stone and rubble flew around them as the lasers tore into their scant cover. A small shrub burst into flames up ahead and she saw that another group of guards was approaching way ahead of them.

Idris was struck by a flying piece of blasted stone. It burned his face before bouncing off. Arianne kept him upright and moving forward. They reached the central island and Arianne impulsively dove over the fountain's lip. She hit the shallow water, but slipped on the slimy bottom and fell on her shoulder. Idris piled in on top of her and she went under. In the brief second that her head was beneath the water, the distant part of her brain spoke up again, almost with relief: Oh! I know this one! FIND AIR.

Arianne surfaced and tried to still the flailing body next to her. The lip of the fountain was being systematically disintegrated, now with the help of high caliber bullets. The column holding the upper basin of the fountain was severed by a ridiculously wide beam of green laser. Arianne felt the heat of molten rock, then saw the whole basin tip towards her.

She grabbed any part of Idris that she could and launched them both awkwardly across the water. She felt a twinge from her ankle as the basin smacked down behind them, causing a mini tsunami that pushed them against the edge of the fountain. Arianne's face banged against stone. She instinctively let go of Idris and clutched at her jaw. She felt an oily welling beneath her fingers.

Arianne: Holt!

Holt: What's happening there? Scanners show a firefight.

Over him, Kotlin's voice snarled.

Kotlin: You were only supposed to talk to him!

Idris grabbed her arm and wailed incoherently. She shook him free and tried to look around. The entire horizon above the fountain's edge was crisscrossed with laser beams. East: no way out. West: no way out. There appeared to be new guards appearing from every possible doorway.

"I just wanted to give a presentation," moaned Idris.

Holt: Arianne! Incoming from above!

Arianne looked up to see a fridge-sized missile hurtling down. It was leaving a dark tail of smoke in its wake, leading all the way up out of sight. It was heading almost directly for them. She turned to Idris to try to say something, but couldn't articulate the combination sorry!/duck!/help!

Arianne's hearing seemed to cut out before she felt the shockwave of the impact. Her vision quickly gave in to the searing white light around her. All she felt was a scrambling of her limbs and a deep quaking of her soul. She was engulfed with smoke and water which turned to a hot mud as they collided together in the air. Her lungs fought to retrieve the breath stolen from them.

Then, just as suddenly, there was stillness.

Chapter 12

"What was that?"

Dart was staring out of the ship forward window at the plume of smoke that was curling up from the massive complex in front of them.

"Something came in from orbit," said Holt. He was wrangling the flight controls, trying to make sense of the unfamiliar layout. So far, the automated systems were doing fine, but he was sure that he'd need manual control at some point.

"From orbit? What would... what do the scanners say?"

"Don't know," said Holt, hitting some random buttons.

Dart covered her face with her dreadlocks in frustration.

"Come on, come ON," she said, "Can't this heap of junk go any faster?"

"It's all I could get at short notice..." Holt began,

"It's a strange kind of ship," noted Kotlin, who was sitting quite calmly on a small chair behind them, typing into a terminal.

It was indeed not his idea of a well thought out vessel, thought Holt. It was made up of hundreds of small cubes that had been stuck together almost randomly to form a giant structure like a wasp's nest. The room they were in was barely big enough for the three of them and the control console, but all the other rooms were exactly the same. The only variation was which of the sides had doors in them. It had taken almost an hour of searching to find the path to the control room. The delay had cost them extra credits for holding up the departure bay. Not that the slimy huckster who'd sold them this pile of scrap would mind much, thought Holt. He knew he had paid too much, but there just wasn't any other way to get an unregistered vehicle.

They were now flying above the main conference hub. An undulating sea of domes, arenas and gigantic pavilions stretched before them. Dart was jumping up and down on the spot.

"Don't we have, like, a rocket booster or something?" she moaned, looking at the flickering control panel once again. It appeared to have no cohesive design. There were eight readouts of geometric shapes and patterns that were jumping about, dozens of buttons, half of which were flashing. There were also a set of speakers that were emitting grating noises every so often, a kind of sprinkler system that was sending wafts of lemon scented water into the air, and the gel mat beneath them was undulating weirdly.

"I think whoever designed this system assumed we'd have a very specific kind of synesthesia," said Dart.

"Kotlin, any progress?" asked Holt.

"Hmm, I'm having some trouble," said Kotlin. "I've logged into the mainframe, but it's giving me convergence errors, something about negative Hessians and the random effects being almost unidentifiable."

"What?" shouted Dart, wheeling around to stare at Kotlin. "This is no time to be doing your research Kots!"

"I'm not, this ship is just really weird."

Dart span back to look at Holt.

"I'm going to press it," she said.

"What?" said Holt.

"The big red button."

Holt took his hands off the controls and looked her in the eye.

"NEVER press the big red button!" shouted Holt, grabbing hold of Dart's wrist. "Rule one of unfamiliar craft navigation!"

"Well, what about the big green button you just pressed?" asked Dart, pointing behind Holt.

Holt turned around, exclaiming "What big green button?" When he turned back, Dart's free hand was pummeling the big red button.

A very large number of creaks joined into a chorus to drown out Holt's disciplinary language.

Chapter 13

Idris surfaced above the water, spluttering at first then coughing in the thick smoke that surrounded him. He reached desperately for Arianne, but felt only churning water. He wiped at his eyes and tried to look around. He spotted Arianne running across the shattered walkway between the fountain and the fridge-sized capsule that was half-buried in the floor. Beyond her, a hoard of guards were slowly regaining their feet.

She's abandoning me, thought Idris.

He watched as Arianne reached the capsule and punched at its side. A hatch opened and a six-foot crate fell out, narrowly missing her. It was only then that the smoke cleared enough to see a sign stenciled across the face of the capsule:

Small Support Grant G67HS995A

Arianne kicked the lid off the crate and used her foot to leaver a large white log up into her hands. It was a laser fountain cannon.

"Grant accepted," said Arianne.

She held the cannon at hip-height by two handles along its length, aided by the graphene aerogel chassis which made the massive object almost buoyant in air. Tiny flat disks popped off the sides of the cannon and began rising into the air. At the nozzle there was a tilted mirror mounted on a motor which now began to spin. Raw energy glowed from the inside of the cannon.

"Idris!" shouted Arianne. "Get behind me!"

Laser light streamed out of the cannon, but instead of shooting straight out of the gun, the mirror deflected it in a dozen slicing angles up into the air. The tiny, disk-shaped drones had positioned themselves in a wide halo above them and were directing the laser stream back down onto the guards and robots in all directions. The drones sent requests for different wavelengths of light as they found target materials that would give way to particular energy frequencies, and the cannon adjusted accordingly. Some even maneuvered behind the guards and caught them with shots reflected off multiple drones. The effect was like a pulsing fountain of multicolored light shooting up and then bouncing down like a disco laser show. The entire courtyard was suddenly matted in neon lightning. Idris simply cowered with his mouth open.

"That way!"

Arianne began walking steadily towards one of the entryways, muddy water still streaming down her aching legs. The guards in front of her were suddenly sliced from all angles by frantic ribbons of light. In a few moments, the path was clear and Arianne and Idris ran through the doorway. As they disappeared into it, the drones followed, covering their exit.

They ran into the relative calm of a large conference room. A hundred attendees were cowering behind their chairs. A huge banner above the stage was half on fire, but the words could still be read: 18265th Annual Symposium of the Society for Active Theory Alignment: The End of Cultural Evolution?

A speaker was halfway through their talk, but was currently using the lectern as cover. All eyes were fixed on Arianne as she backed into the room, still firing the cannon back out into the courtyard. Several attendees shrieked as she turned towards the crowd, but Arianne turned swiftly away to the huge window that ran the length of the room.

"Idris – get to the window!" shouted Arianne. Idris, apparently in the presence of his peers, gave an embarrassed smile to the crowd and started to trot stiffly down the isle. He attempted to give a combination of a warm nod of recognition and a grimace of apology to some of the more senior members.

A soberly dressed presiding officer at the front was peering down at a stopwatch and made a harsh shushing noise, then turned calmly back to the stage and held up a sign: "1 minute remaining". The speaker clinging to the lectern gave out a bitter whimper.

Arianne backed into the room, spouting Technicolor lightning.

Arianne: Holt! Location?

Holt: Converging, 20 seconds

Arianne and Idris reached the window at the end of the room. Arianne scanned the horizon, desperately searching for the getaway ship, but Idris only stared down towards the ground – nearly a kilometer away. Arianne used the cannon to send several fingers of laser light to attack the thick window pane. Quicker to give way was the wall behind the speaker, which was demolished by a 12 foot armored bipedal robot. It surveyed the room with a head full of glassy lenses and began firing a gigantic rifle towards Arianne.

The speaker on the stage cowered back from the robot in terror, looking to anyone for help or even just an explanation, but the presiding officer simply coughed lightly and held her sign a little higher. The speaker swallowed hard.

Arianne pulled the cannon around to point at the robot, and beams of light started hitting it. Half of the drones focused their beams on the robot's eyes. The shining surface of the robot started to smolder, but held together. It started firing on the drones, severing fingers of light as it took down one, then another.

The presentation slide on the large projector advanced, revealing a list of conclusions. The speaker had managed to tear the microphone off the lectern and was now ensconced inside it.

"So" said the speaker, his voice cracking with terror, "to conclude -"

The robot made a darting run along the room to flank its targets, firing now at the drones cutting the escape route. Arianne pulled more drones off the robot to focus on cutting the window.

"- the Great C-C-Convergence signals a t-t-turning point in our field..."

A laser struck a weak point in the robot's joints and took a leg out of action. The robot staggered and fell, pinned down by a stream of lasers. It kept firing its weapon, but was now way off target.

"... c-c-cultural evolution was just a blip in our history, the future of linguistics is the study of the universal language – deep structures that are now revealed on the surface, too. Active Theory Alignment is the future."

A slice of window suddenly gave way and started a long fall towards the ground. Arianne grabbed Idris and stepped towards the open hole. A gust of cold air rushed into their faces. She turned towards the audience and shouted

"Align this, motherfuckers!"

She threw the cannon behind her and dived out of the window, a yelping Idris in tow. The cannon began to pulse loudly as it rose gently into the air above the crowd. The presiding officer rose to her feet.

"Thank you," she said, "and now we have a few minutes for questions."

The cannon detonated and the room was engulfed in plasma fire.

Not that Idris saw it – he had his eyes screwed tightly shut in the hope that gravity would not be able to find him. He felt something shaking him, and was convinced it was the hand of death, come a moment too soon.

"I'm falling!" he shouted.

"Not falling," said Arianne, shaking him once more, "flying."

Idris blinked, and realized he was lying on a red metal cube, about 5 meters on each side. And that the cube was moving through the air. And he still wasn't dead. Arianne was lying next to him, clinging onto a hand-hold on the outside of the small spaceship.

Arianne sent a signal to Holt.

Arianne: Good timing, the conference just finished.

Holt: Sorry for the delay. Welcome aboard the Invisible Hand.

Arianne: It's... quite small.

Holt: The rest of it is still on the way.

Arianne looked behind her. A cloud of red cubes was following them. It was a fleet of tiny spaceships, identical to the one they had just landed on. There must be over a thousand of them, thought Arianne.

Arianne: Is that –

Holt: Yes, turns out our ship is quite modular.

She had no time to reply, as one of the cubes was struck by something and exploded. It was close enough that she could feel the heat for a brief second before the screaming air around her leeched it away.

Dart: They're firing on us!

A hatch opened in the roof and Kotlin poked her head out. She grabbed hold of Idris before he could say anything and dragged him inside the ship. A missile rose up from the ground and struck another one of the ships to their left.

Holt: Hold on, I'm going to try blending in with the rest of the cubes for protection.

Arianne just about managed to grab onto a second hand hold before their ship turned abruptly and flew full speed into the mass of red cubes. They zig-zagged past ships, several of which were exploding around them. Suddenly, they collided with one of their sister ships, grazing off the side and shaking the whole structure violently. Arianne lost a handhold.

Arianne: Holt! I'm not -

The ship was wrenched sideways again, and Arianne lost her grip completely. The whole ship rolled over and she bounced off the roof once, and then she was falling through the air.

Dart: Arianne!

Arianne saw another red cube rushing towards her and flailed out desperately. Her fingers closed on something and her arm was nearly torn from its socket as she grabbed on.

"Look where you're going!" Dart shouted at Holt. The view in front of them was just a maze of blurred cubes.

"And move with the flow! They can tell which one is us!" added Kotlin.

"I'm trying!" shouted Holt. He tugged at a lever, and the whole ship flipped upside down, careered off a neighbor and then they were flying with the pack. Holt exhaled briefly.

Holt: Arianne, are you alright?

Arianne: I'm OK, I just moved to the buffet carriage. It's a bit boisterous out here.

The missiles were playing havoc with the ships. Every time one exploded it pushed several sister ships out of line, causing them to run into each other. The ship next to Arianne was suddenly smashed by one above it. Arianne looked around the roof of her own ship, but there was no entry hatch in sight.

Arianne: What's going on? Shouldn't our ships be avoiding each other at least?

Kotlin: Attempting to run pathfinder distributed stabilization algorithms. Navigation is not working, some kind of error with system resources.

Arianne: Give me access.

Kotlin: Sending.

Arianne adjusted her grip, held on with one hand and took out her terminal with the other. She switched it over to ebrain interface mode just as Kotlin sent the access codes to the swarm's mainframe. She scanned the system resources.

Arianne: Specs look fine, 12 gigabit wireless, 15 TB processors, 12 K memory...

Dart: Incoming hostile ships! They look like insurance fighter drones.

Arianne turned over and could indeed see a fleet of shining yellow ships heading straight towards them.

Dart: Turn away!

Holt: Can't – they'd single us out from the rest.

Kotlin: WAIT, what was that last stat?

Arianne: 12 K mem – OH SPACEBALLS. 12 kilobytes of memory? That's barely enough to run a barebones operating system!

Holt: I knew that slimy dealer was shafting us somehow! Everything was working fine when the ships were connected up, but now they're separated...

Arianne tried to think clearly. They needed to escape, but they couldn't leave the protection of the crowd. But with the ships all clustered together, the insurance company would just slowly pick them all off. In any case, there was no way to build a program small enough that would give them command. They had no weapons to fight back. No tactical advantage. And she was clinging on to the outside of a chunk of metal she had no control over.

Despite the cold air buffeting against her, a warmth seeped into Arianne. She felt herself relaxing. There was nothing to be done, doom was a certainty. And somehow that felt right. Or at least terms that she could accept. She tried just to exist in the moment for the short time she had left. She listened to the sounds around her and found that, far from screeches to be deciphered into terrifying meaning, far from the heralds of forces wilfully opposing her, they were just patterns. Just things happening. The pain in her arms and hands and her left shin were not signatures of cause and effect to be prioritized, processed and folded into a coherent plan of action. They were just electrical shivers bouncing around a tangle of tissue. Things were so much easier from this perspective. She closed her eyes and the sharp and chaotic world around her became a much simpler muted canvas, a smoothed, color-swatch guide to everything outside. As a collision rocked the ship and her head was slammed down onto the hard metal roof, the world simply dulled from a fiery red to a deep chocolate aura. The rebound caused her head to snap back and out of the slipstream where the ripping air peeled away rivulets of blood from her forehead in rhythmic arcs and pushed her face up to a rare patch of open sky. But to Arianne, the world simply became a white field with dancing streaks of neon. She was just a flower following the sun. There was no meaning, no intent, just things happening.

She could feel the boundaries of herself moving. Her muscles were just reacting to swirling storms of electricity in her head, both biological and artificial, which itself was just swayed by the swirling storm of light and sound outside. And all that was just reactions to other storms beyond. A colossal web of things just bumping into each other. What was the real difference between the collection of bones and synapses inside her suit and the air and light on the outside? Between her and Holt and Dart and Kotlin and CAFCA and the conference mob and the insurance companies? Between her and the metal she was clinging to? Between living and dying?

And with a final push of breath from her lungs that could have been a sigh, Arianne's right hand began to loosen its grip.
Chapter 14

Arianne's left hand was not joining in on the whole inevitable Zen vibe. It was, in fact, very angry. Here it was, doing its best to keep everything together, every single cell pumped full of miracle technology and self-replicating, self-repairing mechanisms, all finely tuned to keeping Arianne free of poisons and the bombardment of anything that the universe could throw at it, and what was the stinky right hand doing? Giving up.

Boo Hoo, shouted the left hand, Look at me, I'm just a poor old right hand! The ultimate flexible tool, crafted over millions of years of genetic evolution, tightly integrated with a billion-neuron processing powerhouse, supported by the most complex material culture in the universe and adapted precisely for solving problems and making precise and decisive actions. Everything is so unfair! Boo Hoo Hoo!

Typical fucking dominant hand. Why did it always get like this? I mean look, just there! A chemical reaction that normally would have taken the lifetime of the universe just happened in the index finger thanks to a wonder enzyme which rounded up a bunch of atoms, got them in line and got stuff done. But no, all the right hand thought about was "Aw, I failed to catch a ball in an arbitrary sport that my species is able to invest millions of hours into instead of digging in the dirt for worms. Aw, my skin is all dry from poking a tablet that can answer any question."

Well fuck you, buddy, thought the left hand. What's got one thumb, is holding the magic thinking rock and learned to operate it at summer camp that time we broke our arm?

THIS GUY.

Arianne's left hand attempted to defiantly point to itself using its own thumb, but ended up just mashing a load of keys on the terminal screen it was holding.

Ah, fiddlesticks.

Back on the central ship, both of Kotlin's hands were too busy to have thoughts of their own. She was trying to corral a thousand ships into a distributed network, but just as she managed to get part of it running, a ship would blow up and the whole system would collapse. She was now trying to build a parallel redundant architecture just to get the ships sharing information between one another, but she kept running up against memory limitations. And also, occasionally, against Holt, Dart and a weeping Idris as they was thrown around the inside of the ship.

"Kotlin, do something!", shouted Dart.

"I'm trying," said Kotlin with an edge of desperation cutting through her calm, "but there's not even space for basic version control software on these things."

"Kotlin! Forget about version control!"

"That attitude is why you will never make a good researcher."

Dart hurled herself over to where Kotlin was curled around her terminal.

"If we don't do something fast, the only good thing we'll make is a good size hole in those mountains!"

Kotlin looked up and saw a steep rocky pinnacle looming ahead of them through a cluster of red blocks. When she looked back at her terminal it was blank – she'd lost contact with the swarm.

"We've been hacked!" spat Kotlin in frustration.

"Something's taken control of the ship!", shouted Holt, twirling the large fluffy pilot stick uselessly.

But Dart was looking out of the side window. "Wait," she said, "the ships are realigning."

Kotlin joined her at the small window and looked out. Somehow, the ships around them did indeed seem to be flying with more purpose.

Holt let go of the controls altogether and shouted across to the others.

"We're going to crash, brace, brace!"

As mountain grew closer, the ships at the front of the swarm swerved to avoid it. But instead of colliding with the other ships, somehow they moved together, like water. There was no other way that Kotlin could describe it – they simply flowed around the mountain, joining up into a group again on the other side. Without any collisions, their own ship smoothly diverted around certain death.

Kotlin was looking at something familiar, but couldn't quite identify it.

"How..." she began.

Arianne: Emergent swarm navigation initiated.

Arianne's e-voice came through clear to everyone.

Dart: Are you alright?

Kotlin: Explain.

Arianne: There was no memory, but then I remembered that flocks of birds and insects navigate without needing any. The ships have very poor-quality cameras on the front to help with docking, so I updated their firmware to pipe their data stream directly into the thruster controls.

Kotlin thrashed at her terminal, and indeed found that each ship was being run by a single line of code which jammed the output of the tiny cameras directly into the control feed of the engines.

Arianne: At the moment, the right thrusters get more power if there's a lot of dark pixels on the left, and vice versa. It's basic, but it steers the ships away from mountains.

Their ships had moved beyond the mountains now without incident, but the firing from the golden ships was intensifying.

Arianne: It also means that I can do things like this...

Arianne adjusted the way that the pixel data was being piped to the thrusters, slowing a thruster in proportion to the number of red pixels on the same side. The ships shuddered abruptly, then began changing their formation. Ships way out in front with nothing but blue sky in front of them sped up, spiraling in different directions as the cameras caught the odd glint of red. Ships in the rear of the pack just saw more of their red siblings, and started to converge on the center of mass, while ships in the middle slowed to a crawl. Each ship appeared to be negotiating its own way, but within a matter of moments, the whole swarm had formed into a single massive blob. With each passing second, stragglers would come back to the fold, nuzzling along the outside of the swarm until the whole thing was practically spherical.

The pursuing insurance company ships hesitated before the massive red orb that had suddenly come to a complete standstill in the sky. Then they started firing again, hacking away at the outside layer of the orb with bursts of flame. Cocooned at the center of the orb, all Holt, Dart, Kotlin and Idris could hear was a dull thudding. The ships were now so close that the only light came from the weak pulse of one of the ship's instruments. But then there was a louder thudding on the roof above them. Dart sprang up to undo the hatch, and Arianne fell into the dark space.

"Arianne!" shouted Dart with glee. "I knew that red button would work!"

"YOU WH–" started Kotlin. "It made things WORSE."

Arianne smiled at Kotlin, and sat down on the floor of the ship.

"Hold on," she said, "we're about to start fighting back."

Arianne shifted the code so that the thrusters fired hardest when the cameras saw a certain proportion of red and blue. The ships started separating from each other. Ones on the outside darted away from the center, only to lose their nerve and head back to safety. The solid orb began to wobble in the sky as if it were melting into a viscous liquid suspended in zero-g.

The insurance ships had been closing their distance, but now hesitated again. The whole mass of red ships was pulsing in and out like a giant jellyfish. Suddenly, a threshold was reached and a thousand ships lanced out to the north, a comet followed by a thinning tail. Then, just as suddenly it doubled back on itself, becoming a cresting wave of red dots breaking over itself. The scene before them changed from byzantine architecture to molten crockery to gigantic geometric shapes to a rippling dragon. Several small clusters broke off and made their own way across the sky before being swallowed again by the larger cloud.

Arianne ramped up the thresholds, setting each individual to seek out yellow targets, and the swarm shifted from a benign murmuration to a swirling maelstrom. Sharp tendrils lashed out chaotically, catching several insurance ships by surprise. The red ships crashed into their prey, overwhelming them with sheer numbers.

The battle had now clearly turned. There was an angry, red swarm rushing through the sky, impossible to predict and impossible to avoid. Insurance ships were torn to shreds, lost behind fiery curtains of metal.

Arianne: OK, we've done fight, now for flight.

Arianne drew the ships together again, forming a whirling red vortex. Everyone was pulled out towards the side as the ship span faster and faster. Just before it seemed like the ships would fuse together, Arianne changed the program again, this time giving each ship a simple instinct: avoid red. The red ships shot apart from each other like a huge firework, each settling out to move as far away from its sisters as it could.

Some of the insurance ships had managed to regroup, and began chasing after escaping ships. But there were still so many red ships, they quickly lost formation.

"They can't chase every ship," said Arianne, disentangling herself from the pile of bodies on the floor. "We'll just slip away and lie low for a while."

Holt stood and moved over to check the controls. Nobody was following them. He turned back to Arianne.

"I still don't understand," he said.

Arianne smiled. "When in doubt," she said, "always follow your nose."

Chapter 15

"What does the G. stand for?"

The question caught Arianne off guard. She had been collecting bits of dead wood from the mossy ground. A simple task that she was reveling in. Move eyes. Spot wood. Move legs. Pick up wood. Repeat. The whispering quiet of the swamp was a welcome relief from the tearing air, the explosions, the warning sirens, the desperate shouting, the crash-landing. Now she had an immediate task – find fuel to survive the night. A simple thing to focus on in the here and now. Idris had been working next to her, but his words reminded her that she had a past, and maybe a future.

"Huh?"

"The G," said Idris. "Your local net profile lists you as Karen G. Arianne."

"Oh," said Arianne dumbly, "Govinam."

"Ah," said Idris, and they continued picking up bits of kindling. Eventually, Idris broke the silence again.

"I never thanked you," he said.

"For throwing you out of a window?"

Idris blanched at the memory. "Well," he said, "I guess it would have been much worse if the insurance company had got to me first."

"We're not out of this yet," said Arianne, gesturing to the swamp around them.

"Hmm. All the same, thanks. But why did you do it? Who are you working for?"

Another question that made Arianne uneasy.

"Yeah," she said, standing fully upright to stretch her spine, "good question."

She looked at Idris, still wearing the tattered remains of his conference suit. His hands were still shaking slightly.

"I'm just researching the convergence," she said.

Idris looked skeptical, but nodded.

"Come on," said Arianne, "let's get back to the others."

They found their way back along the reeking creek and through a thick tangle of bushes. Arianne had thought, as popular belief would have it, that the whole of Planet Conference was covered with conference venues and accommodation for guests. But no, it turned out that there was at least one patch of overgrown wilderness. Probably a good thing, seeing as some of the least forgiving organizations in the galaxy were looking for them right now. At least they'd have to check hundreds of crash sites.

Arianne and Idris emerged into the smoky clearing of their own crash landing. The hull of their ship had lodged itself into the ground. Arianne could hear the faint tink-tink of Kotlin trying to get the engine started again. Holt was hunched over some bits of wood below the shelter of some trees, trying to start a fire. Dart appeared to be singing to Holt, which didn't seem to be helping. Arianne's shuffling made the pair jump.

"It's just us," called Arianne. "There's nothing back there except foul smelling water, dirt, and some noisy local wildlife."

She dropped her pile of kindling next to Holt's attempt at a hearth.

"Still," she said, smiling, "it beats staying at one of the conference hostels."

Holt looked directly at Arianne, stood to attention, then savagely kicked the pile of kindling. He staggered over the remains of the pile, and stormed a few paces away from the stunned group.

"Jeez, Holt," exclaimed Dart.

"What's the matter?" asked Arianne, genuinely shocked at this uncharacteristic behavior.

Holt did an about-face, and advanced on Arianne.

"What's the matter!?" he snarled. "I've just flown through a very one-sided space battle, forced a crash landing out of that pile of junk and now I'm marooned in a swamp with night coming on, no shelter, no food, no water, and you're asking me to choose just one of those to be upset about?"

"Come on," said Arianne. "We'll get out of this-"

"Oh yeah?" shouted Holt, clenching his fists. "You've got a plan, Arianne?"

"Well, something will turn up - "

Holt did an entire 360-degree spin on his heel, raising his eyes to the sky and then throwing his angry gaze back at Arianne.

"Oh sure," he spat. "A solution will just present itself? Like a super-weapon falling from the sky just when you needed it? Like we just happened to be in the neighborhood when you jumped out a window?"

"Holt-" started Arianne, raising her hands out in front of her. Dart and Idris were also shocked, but Holt kept going.

"Blistering red dwarfes, Arianne! You were only supposed to talk to him. At the very least it would have been a good idea to think things through. But no, you just charge in, hoping your gut reactions will carry the day."

Holt was now just a few paces from Arianne, and he wafted a dismissive hand at her.

"You're all tactics and no strategy!"

Holt looked down at Arianne. She couldn't bare his anger, but had no idea what to say. Everyone else was frozen into silence. With an exasperated shout, Holt turned around and stormed off into the bush, marching double time.

Arianne took a step to go after him, but Dart held her back.

"Let him go, he didn't mean it."

Arianne was still too shocked to speak, so she just sat down on a log.

"Look," said Dart, "let's see if we can get this fire going."

Idris readily joined Dart. They worked together in silence to form a small pile of kindling, in a ritual a million years old, though aided by a jury-rigged spacecraft spark plug. Eventually, a flame appeared, then spread. But Arianne just sat there. Eventually, Dart looked up at her.

"Come on, Arianne, snap out of it." Said Dart.

"Well..." began Arianne, "he was right, though, wasn't he?"

"About what?" asked Dart. Arianne picked a dry twig from the floor and began fiddling with it.

"I never really think about what I'm doing. I just kind of... start things, and..."

"... hope they end up working out?" offered Dart.

"Yeah. But more often than not, I just get lost on the way."

Dart sat back from the blossoming fire, and came to put an arm around Arianne. Arianne sniffed lightly, then spoke softly.

"One of the first projects I did at university was on cultural evolution of religious music. I never really understood most of the songs – people singing about the purpose of life, of the direction of God's will, of committing to a vision of the universe and to acting as a witness. They promised to go out and profess what they believed. Most of the songs were so ambitious and victorious... but I've forgotten them all now. The only one that stuck with me is one that seemed a bit different. The start was just as triumphant as the others, clear and single-minded in their knowledge of what was right. But the last lines always seemed odd to me:

There enraptured fall before him

Lost in wonder, love, and praise."

Arianne turned to Dart with a face more serious than Dart had seen in a long time.

"Lost in wonder," said Arianne, half incredulous. "Not searching for wonder, not bound for wonder, not carefully considering, but lost. It seemed like a very honest line, an admission that sometimes what those people were doing was not preparing for a great event, not seeking wisdom... but seeking beauty. And being caught in the moment."

Arianne looked again into the fire.

"That's all I really wanted – was to somehow be a witness to the amazing complexity around us."

Dart gave her a squeeze, but spoke in a steady voice.

"It's not enough, Arianne," said Dart.

Arianne shifted to look at Dart. Dart gave her a kind but steady smile. A smile she had seen before on the face of her old supervisor, Professor Golden. It meant 'well done on getting this far, now it's time to grow up'. Arianne felt a child's urge to defend herself, but didn't have the heart. And she knew the truth of what Dart was offering.

Dart broke eye contact and shifted slightly, still with her arm around Arianne.

"So anyway," said Dart more loudly, "Idris – know any good stories?"

"Eh?" Idris was sitting on the other side of the fire, politely ignoring the other two.

"This is a campfire now, it's traditional to tell stories."

"Er, well," started Idris, tiredly.

"For example," offered Dart, "do you know the one about how the Great Convergence started?"

"Ah!" said Idris. "Of course."

Arianne sat up a bit straighter. She realized that she hadn't actually even asked Idris about this yet. Another lack of ambition.

"Well," began Idris, "it was like this. I was working at the software design institute on Gliese. We'd been developing a new ebrain firmware architecture based on DNA transcription. But we started seeing that all the participants in test trials began acting strangely, focusing on immediate rewards and not caring much about future events."

Here he looked away from Arianne and into the fire, but continued.

"We realized that the new operating system was rapidly reading and writing to the ebrain's memory – much more extensively than other systems – and this was creating resonant patterns of electrical charge inside the ebrain. But the charge was leaking through to people's real brains – to their auditory cortex, just next to the ebrain implant."

"It was stimulating their brains?" asked Dart, fascinated.

"Yes" nodded Idris guiltily. "Of course, as soon as we realized it we abandoned the project."

Idris dipped his head and took a breath before continuing.

"However, a few years later we found that development was continuing at another lab."

"Let me guess," said Dart, "the Panini Press?"

"That's right, the Active Theory Alignment group. We saw some hints in a few conference papers that they must have been using our firmware. We tried talking to them, but they were being absolutely secretive. I didn't like it. I decided to see for myself what they were up to. So I hacked into their repository."

"With the mass assignment virus?" asked Dart.

"Yes, how did – ah. I guess that's how you found me."

"Yep. Though I never really understood how it worked exactly."

"Well," said Idris, "the problem was that the repository was hosted by Proxima Insurance. They have very tight security. The virus needed to be adaptable to the shifting security measures but simple enough to go undetected. So I used the architecture from our firmware to create a kind of emergent artificial intelligence. It had a very rough idea of what I wanted to find, and would just trawl around until it found it. Not unlike a real virus."

Dart was listening to Idris's explanation like a child to a bedtime story.

"Ooo, that's awesome. You weren't worried they'd come after you?"

"I knew it was a risk, but the Panini Press is a very low-level client, so I didn't think that Proxima would try to kill me over it. But a few days after I released it, the virus granted me access to two repositories, not one."

"What, why?" asked Dart.

"I don't really know. That's the price of using emergent programs, I suppose – they can adapt to any situation, but you never really know how they are going to behave."

Arianne chuckled darkly. Dart gave her a covert nudge.

"So what was in the repositories?" asked Dart.

"The first was from the Panini Press. As I suspected, they were using our firmware. They had found that the leaking resonant electrical patterns were interfering with the dopamine reward system. At a very low level, it was affecting the way people learned. It was only a small effect, but it nudged people gently towards thinking in a particular way – seeking immediate payoffs and easy thinking over more substantial rewards. There were a few files on an idea that this would affect the way people spoke – and might be a way of getting everyone to speak the same language across the galaxy."

"Ach – they'd love that," spat Dart.

"Yes, it was rather sinister. They said we need a galaxy of 'resonant sisters'. Or Resisters, I think they called them."

Arianne's left eye winced involuntarily.

"Resisters?" she whispered.

"Have you heard that name before?" asked Idris.

"Not exactly" said Arianne, looking out into the gathering dusk. "I once came across a group who were trying to force everyone to be the same. Trying to strangle any diversity out of everyone – mind and body. It sounds like your group had the same idea, but were moving a whole civilization with a million tiny nudges."

Dart was nodding along. "Convergence to the prior bias," she said.

Idris also looked out into the gloom. "What was worse is that they had already started some live trials on a remote colony. I decided to confront them and try to convince them that their plan wouldn't work."

"With a conference talk?" asked Arianne.

"I thought they would listen to reason," said Idris defensively.

"You clearly haven't been to a conference before," she said, slouching back into a dejected heap in Dart's arms.

Dart rolled her eyes, gave Arianne a nudge and looked more kindly at Idris.

"The convergence won't work?" she said.

"The convergence had spread amazingly quickly during the time I was in transit, but it's all being maintained by constant stimulation from the firmware. As soon as people find out that it's manipulating them, they'll stop using it. Or it'll just go out of fashion. And when it does, people will diverge again. There's no getting away from diversity."

"Yeeessss!" shouted Dart, spooking a flock of winged things into the air behind them. Both Arianne and Idris jumped. Kotlin's frazzled face appeared out of a hole in the ship's hull and she shouted down in alarm.

"What's wrong?"

Dart laughed and shouted back gleefully. "We get to keep our jobs!"

Kotlin retreated into the ship, muttering something about being the only one working. Dart was attempting an elaborate fist-bump with a dazed Idris. It was good news, thought Arianne. There was no unstoppable dark force invading humanity, just a few misguided linguists causing a temporary nuisance. She tried putting the story in order – the Panini Press was promoting the glitchy firmware in order to get everyone speaking the same, making them fit neatly into their theories. She glanced over at Idris who was puffing out a dejected sigh. He wasn't to blame for it really, he'd just underestimated the zeal of the ATA. But the insurance company's reaction didn't quite make sense. She had thought that they wanted to stop everyone finding out about their research duplication, but if the convergence really wouldn't work, why were they so angry? Sure, any breach of their security would provoke a stern response. But they had been desperate enough to put a spy on her own ship – and who knows how many others – then send a whole fleet of armed drones to invade Planet Conference and terminate Idris and anyone associated with him. Arianne knew that linguistics was probably the most important field in all of science. That was obvious to everyone. But was it that important to bean-counting insurers?

"What was in the second repository?" she asked Idris.

Idris did some more puffing. Then he reached inside his jacket.

"I'm not totally sure," he said, pulling out a tiny, chrome memory card. It shifted colors in the flickering firelight, and the three campers studied it with curiosity.

"It's a set of trajectories in deep space," he said, looking at Arianne. He handed the tiny card over to her, and she held it in the palm of her hand.

"Trajectories?" asked Arianne.

"It's assembled from about a dozen sources. I think Proxima was pooling knowledge from many of its clients." Idris furrowed his brow. "They joined up some dots, and were tracking something."

"Tracking what?" asked Arianne, focusing intently on the card as if she could bore into its data with her eyes.

"I don't know," said Idris, shrugging. "They just keep calling it the Outside Agency."

As soon as Arianne heard the words, everything went dark.

Idris and Dart had disappeared.

The campfire was gone.

Even the sky was no longer there.

A loud robotic voice boomed out above her.

FORTY-TWO

Arianne blinked sharply, and tried standing, only to find that she was already standing. She was alone in a dark space. She staggered, totally disoriented. Had she fallen asleep? Was this a nightmare? And what did the number forty-two mean? It could mean anything. Or everything.

FORTY-ONE

Well whatever it was, it was getting worse. She shook her head and tried to think.

FORTY

Then she realised: she had been zapped. Someone had hacked her ebrain and put her out cold. She blinked in disbelief and instinctively tried to cover her head just above her left ear.

THIRTY-NINE: FORWARD LOCKOUT VERIFIED

"Idris! Dart! They've hacked our ebrains!" she called, but nobody answered. Arianne quickly accessed her chronometer.

32 years old (subjective, local); 525 years old (objective, local)

She'd been in chryo for a long time, so she had been transported. Perhaps a long way. To some kind of very poorly lit room. With very poorly considered décor.

THIRTY-EIGHT

She suddenly understood where she was and was flooded by a horrible resignation. With a full exhalation of her lungs, she turned around and saw three people in mold-grey clothing sitting behind a desk.

"Thank you, Doctor Arianne," said Professor Tarry, "this part of the interview is now complete."

THIRTY-SEVEN

La Quana must have placed a subroutine in her ebrain which triggered when she'd got the data from Idris. The subroutine must have zapped her then alerted some some of his Planet Conference lackeys to come to scoop them up, and now she was back on some CAFCA hub being debriefed.

The mire corduroy lady began speaking, barely keeping the disdain out of her voice.

"Well, I must say that your methods were not exactly orthodox," she said.

THIRTY-SIX

Of course, thought Arianne. Of course! This whole tank-busting, bot-evading, ship-hopping, laser-skirting adventure had just been part of an interview. And now this drab trio were going to tell her "well done on getting this far, but we're not looking for a disorganised psychopath".

THIRTY-FIVE: TRANSFER TO INTERNAL POWER

She should have known. All she'd done was follow her nose, she hadn't stopped to think about what she was doing, or why. She hadn't even spotted the subroutines that La Quana must have planted in her ebrain. But now it was too late.

The woman was continuing her scathing review.

"... not strictly necessary to kill all those people..."

THIRTY-FOUR

Arianne wasn't interested. It was clear from their moldy faces that however much she'd succeeded, they didn't approve. They were obviously just building up to a full condemnation of her decisions and abilities. The robotic voice must be counting down the time until she'd be put back to sleep in a red bubble under the ice fields. To be forgotten forever.

Well, no point hanging around, she thought. She shook her head and interrupted the lady's droning voice.

"Meh," she said. And trudged out of the room.

THIRTY-THREE: KBZ CHAMBER CONTROL HANDOVER

She came out into a large open space like a white laquer cavern. Dozens of people were scurrying about or sitting clustered around large terminals. Some kind of organizing was going on, but everyone was ignoring her.

THIRTY-TWO

Out of nowhere, she was suddenly grabbed into a tight embrace. The mouthful of hair tasted of Dart. Somewhere near, there was a tap-tap-tapping of a keyboard.

THIRTY-ONE

"Arianne!" wailed Dart.

"Mmhff!" said Arianne.

Holt appeared over Dart's shoulder.

"Arianne! You're alright! I thought...".

THIRTY

The simple hug and the look of genuine concern warmed Arianne's heart. Even after all the things she'd put them through, they'd still come to give her a sendoff. But they'd carry on with their lives while she was frozen. She would miss them.

Her heart cooled considerably when she looked past Holt and saw Vastion La Quana standing on a raised dais and surrounded by scurrying support staff.

"Ah, Dr. Arianne," he said, "thank you for completing your test."

TWENTY-NINE: HUB SEQUENCES INITIATED

Arianne sighed and gently detached herself from Dart. She knew that La Quana would want some kind of gloat before consigning her to the waiting fields, so she took a few steps towards him.

"Oh, no problem," she said, her nonchalance somewhat dampened by a massive spasm in her left eye. "And thank you for keeping such a close eye on us while we were often nearly killed."

TWENTY-EIGHT

La Quana was scanning his fingerprint on a tablet offered up to him by a lackey, so didn't really hear her rebuke.

"And," he continued, waving a tiny chrome memory card at her, "you picked up some extra credit."

TWENTY-SEVEN

"Yeah, well," said Arianne, shrugging and bowing her head, "bit of an accident. I guess that I've failed whatever weird criteria you had?"

TWENTY-SIX

La Quana chuckled.

"Locating the outside agency was not an accident at all, Dr. Arianne, it's what I sent you out to get. And don't be so hard on yourself - you've done a great deal in a small timespan. In fact, I've decided to offer you all a place on my field expedition."

TWENTY-FIVE

Arianne made a kind of quiet squeaking noise and her shoulders slumped further. So this was her reward? A brief extension of her academic life to go on yet another mysterious errand. Probably six months of live time and another half century of waiting the cold. Was it really worth it? She had dreams of being free to revel in the miraculous inevitabilities of the universe, but maybe it just wasn't possible. She glanced around the room and saw hundreds of people moving back and forth, all single cogs in CAFCA's machine. She had been foolish to think that she could succeed as some kind of frontier scientist, living a simple, self-sufficient life dedicated to nurturing her own theories. This wasn't the wild west anymore. Research wasn't about striking gold in an undiscovered valley or breaking open a buried tomb or discovering some rare correlation. It was nudging numbers around on a funding spreadsheet, it was learning to worship the immovable authority of the higherarchs and bend to their will.

If she was honest with herself, Arianne always knew that at some point she'd be found out and cast aside. She'd known that she was rebelling against the tried and tested way of doing things, and that it couldn't last. Her old supervisor had been right: it had been time to grow up, to make serious plans for the future. But she hadn't. And now it was too late.

TWENTY-FOUR

Well, she thought, maybe it wouldn't be so bad to leave that all behind. And she could, she suddenly realized – she could leave. This life was all that she could remember, but there were other horizons out there. Her head suddenly filled with a hundred things she could do if she didn't have to battle galactic conspiracies. Or, more accurately, if she didn't have to spend weeks filling out forms to get a stipend to do a workshop to create a grant application for funding to go battle galactic conspiracies. Jumping into the blue was all she'd ever wanted to do, and what better way than trying something she'd never tried before? It wouldn't be so bad.

TWENTY-THREE

Arianne met La Quana's eyes and spoke steadily.

"Thanks, but I'm not interested," she said. "I'm going to go have... you know, a life or whatever it is people do instead of submitting funding applications and dodging lasers."

TWENTY-TWO: DETACH MOORINGS

Arianne turned away.

"Oh, I'm afraid I took the liberty of choosing for you. There's no leaving now," said La Quana, darkly.

TWENTY-ONE

Arianne froze.

"Where are we going?" asked Dart, sounding uncharacteristically worried.

TWENTY

"To meet them, of course – the outside agency," said La Quana with a sly hint of humor.

NINETEEN

"Though I'm afraid the journey will take a while ..." he said, nodding gravely.

EIGHTEEN

"How long?" asked Kotlin.

SEVENTEEN

"Oh," said La Quana shrugging, "nearly three thousand years."

SIXTEEN

Three thousand years? The amount of time was ludicrous. It nearly welded Arianne's resolve, and she tilted forwards to start walking away. But then some pieces locked together in Arianne's brain. An old idea, almost childish. She could hardly believe it. Just half a moment ago she was sure of wanting no leave. Now she felt the giddy rush of oncoming destiny.

FIFTEEN

"We're on a ship, aren't we?" she asked nobody in particular.

Holt came to stand at Arianne's shoulder, she turned to him and he nodded.

FOURTEEN

"Yeah, a mill class 9 superlifter." Holt sounded both impressed and worried.

THIRTEEN

"How far can a class 9 superlifter go in three thousand years?" she asked.

TWELVE

Holt gulped. "A long way."

ELEVEN

"I've been beamed the flight plan," said Kotlin, coming to stand on her other side.

TEN: REMOVE SAFETY INHIBITS

"Are we going hubward or spinward?" asked Arianne.

NINE

Dart pushed her nose over Kotlin's shoulder.

"Um, what's the word for 'away from everything'?"

EIGHT

Arianne turned back to La Quana who was smiling broadly.

SEVEN

"I told you that you'd want to know," he said, and winked.

SIX: KBZ ENGINE START

"What's. Going. On?" demanded Dart, shaking Kotlin's shoulders in frustration with each word.

FIVE

A smile also emerged on Arianne's face.

FOUR

"Aliens!" said Arianne, breathlessly.

THREE: KBZ FIRING ALIGNMENT IS A GO

"They're found fucking aliens and they need a team to do first contact."

TWO

"We're going to become the most famous linguists ever!"

ONE

"Or at least the first useful ones."

ZERO

And they blasted into space.
Epilogue

"It was very hexpedient to 'ave us stowhaway like this."

"Yes, though not hexactly a first-class 'otel. But where are we going?"

"I'm glad you asked!"

Karen Govinam L. Arianne will return in Transister

Appendix

1. "The world's strongest MRI will be able to pick up a tank"

http://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-strongest-mri-will-be-able-to-pick-up-a-tank-1598149430

2. Links between electric stimulation, the dopamine system and learning

Knecht, S., Breitenstein, C., Bushuven, S., Wailke, S., Kamping, S., Flöel, A., Ringelstein, E. B. (2004). Levodopa: faster and better word learning in normal humans. Annals of neurology, 56(1), 20-26.

Enard, W. (2011). FOXP2 and the role of cortico-basal ganglia circuits in speech and language evolution. Current opinion in neurobiology, 21(3), 415-424.

Bao, S., Chan, V. T., & Merzenich, M. M. (2001). Cortical remodelling induced by activity of ventral tegmental dopamine neurons. Nature, 412(6842), 79-83.

Murrin, L.C. & Roth, R.H. (1976). Dopaminergic neurons: effects of electrical stimulation on dopamine biosynthesis. Molecular pharmacology, 12(3), 463-475.

3. Using electric resonance to hack computers

Kim, Y., Daly, R., Kim, J., Fallin, C., Lee, J. H., Lee, D., ... & Mutlu, O. (2014). Flipping bits in memory without accessing them: An experimental study of DRAM disturbance errors. In ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News (Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 361-372). IEEE Press.

Seaborn, M., & Dullien, T. (2015). Exploiting the DRAM rowhammer bug to gain kernel privileges. Black Hat.

4. Insurance bubbles and shadow reinsurers

http://www.businessinsider.com/insurance-companies-creating-next-bubble-2013-11?IR=T

5. Emergent navigation

Braitenberg, V. (1986). Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology. MIT press.

Zeil, J. (2012). Visual homing: an insect perspective. Current opinion in neurobiology, 22(2), 285-293.

Neumann, T. R., Huber, S. A., & Bülthof, H. H. (1997, October). Minimalistic approach to 3D obstacle avoidance behavior from simulated evolution. In International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (pp. 715-720). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Barrows, G. L., Chahl, J. S., & Srinivasan, M. V. (2003). Biologically inspired visual sensing and flight control. The Aeronautical Journal, 107(1069), 159-168.

Chahl, J., Thakoor, S., Le Bouffant, N., Stange, G., Srinivasan, M. V., Hine, B., & Zornetzer, S. (2003). Bioinspired engineering of exploration systems: a horizon sensor/attitude reference system based on the dragonfly ocelli for mars exploration applications. Journal of Field Robotics, 20(1), 35-42.

6. Language Efficiency: Find target words to shorten

Load Data

Data from the Switchboard corpus of English.

d = read.csv("SwitchboardWordLengths_andRates.csv")

Take out words with laughter.

d = d[!grepl("laughter",d$word.clean),]

Take out hesitations and turn-preserving placeholders, since the whole point of these is to take up time.

ums = c("uh",'yeah','um','umhum', 'uhhuh','so','oh','really','right',

'well','okay','and','that','this',

"that's",'but','just',"it's")

d = d[!d$word.clean %in% ums,]

Calculate heaviness

Calculate frequency and total time spent saying these words.

f = tapply(d$word.clean,d$word.clean,length)

l.t = tapply(d$dur,d$word.clean,sum, na.rm=T) / (1000 * 60)

Make a linear model predicting time spent by frequency.

m0 = lm(l.t~f)

Get residuals of model - the higher the residual of a word, the worse it fits in the frequency/length curve. This is a word's "heaviness".

heaviness = sort(residuals(m0))

Find the heavy, long words as candidates to change:

targetWords = names(tail(heaviness,n=20))

targetWords = targetWords[nchar(targetWords)>4]

Words that are pulling their weight:

goodWords = names(head(heaviness,n=6))

Plot the target words

par(mar=c(1,7,1,1))

plot(heaviness, xlab='',xaxt='n', ylab="", yaxt='n')

axis(2,las=2)

title(ylab="Heaviness\n(deviance from frequency-length curve, minutes)",line=4)

tw.x1 = seq(min(heaviness[targetWords]) - (min(heaviness[targetWords])*0.4),

max(heaviness[targetWords]),

length.out=length(heaviness[targetWords]))

gw.x1 = seq(min(heaviness[goodWords]),

max(heaviness[goodWords]),

length.out=length(heaviness[goodWords]))

seq1 = seq(3000,10000, length.out=length(targetWords))

seq2 = seq(1000,9000, length.out=length(goodWords))

arrows(seq1, tw.x1,

tail(1:length(heaviness),n=length(targetWords)),

heaviness[targetWords], length = 0,

col='gray')

text(seq1, tw.x1, targetWords, pos=2, col=2)

arrows(seq2, gw.x1, 100, heaviness[goodWords], length = 0,

col='gray')

text(seq2, gw.x1, goodWords, pos=4, col='green')

Calculate saving

Calculate the total saving, assuming target words can be halved.

totalTime = sum(d$dur)

totalTargetWordTime = sum(d[d$word.clean %in% targetWords,]$dur)

saving = (totalTargetWordTime * 0.5) / totalTime

So, shortening these words:

actually, probably, don't, things, something, about, because, people, think

Will result in a 2.04% efficiency saving.

