Delusion

((written by Stitcher, Silver Night and myself. ))

The agent currently going by the name Alain Manenault had been staring at his knees for what felt like hours. There was little else to do, when one was securely manacled to a chair, which was in turn bolted to the floor next to an equally securely anchored steel table, in a square room with only one very solid door. When finally it opened, he was grateful for the chance to raise his head even if the fatigue and lack of food made it feel leaden, twice its usual weight.

He hadn't been entirely sure who his interrogator would be. The Invelen woman, he had supposed. Or the Roth woman's grim-faced, grey-eyed bodyguard Alpassi, maybe.

What he got was a lean Civire man in comfortable white fatigues and a grey T-shirt. Full beard, shavetail haircut, blue eyes that glimmered like glacial ice even in the dim, ruddy lighting of a Minmatar station.

He went on the offensive as the door closed, a ReAw marine stood at ease to protect it.

“And just who the hell are you supposed to be?” he asked.

The Caldari man sat down opposite him, setting a slim hard-copy dossier in front of him as he did so.

“The Yulai convention forbids the cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners.” he said conversationally, by way of an answer.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I figure angry Intaki blondes aren't that unusual, but just to be safe I thought it best if somebody not directly involved in today's incident handled this interview.” he treated Menenault to a weak smile that radiated insincere concern. “You look terrible.”

“So you're the good cop then?”

“I can be whatever kind of cop you like, Agent... just for the record, what is your name?”

“Alain Manenault.”

“Your real name.”

“Alain Manenault.”

“I see.”

A note was scribbled in the margin of the dossier.

“Official record begins, twenty-three hours forty-one, fourteenth of December YC113.” the Caldari intoned solemnly. “Subject: known though unidentified FIO officer impersonating corporate personnel, responsible for security breach and hostage scenario as detailed in attached briefing files and in violation of the CONCORD Pod Pilot Act of YC one-oh-five, perpetrated against Re-Awakened Technologies Inc.”

He fixed “Alain Manenault” with a long, cool stare.

“Alain Manenault. Born on the Eleventh of September, YC seven-zero, aboard the Scope development studio at Deninard VIII, Moon one.” He recited, staring straight across the table and apparently not bothering to consult the notes. “Graduated MSc in mathematics from Caille University in YC ninety-two, winning a Bronze Guillard Prize for excellence in the field of chaos theory. Was accepted into the LeTrise graduate fast-track program and spent the next twenty-two years working for CreoDron, assigned to the Electromagnetic Physics department of their station in Aydoteaux, under Masalle Ambrette. Retired to pursue a better-paid position working for Re-Awakened Technologies Inc.”

The interrogator paused and tilted his head on one side fractionally. “Curious history for a man who would then do something so foolish as to kidnap one of his corporation's capsuleers and torture him with a shock prod in an attempt to extort information from the CEO. I would go so far as to say that it's not the history of such a man.”

When “Manenault” didn't respond, the officer merely shrugged and leaned back in his chair.

“What could you possibly hope to gain?” he asked.

“You've seen the recording.”

“Indeed I have, and it makes you look like a paranoid psychotic. One who's in denial over his good friend's dementia, it seems.”

“I knew Jorion Roth well, right up until shortly before the Debreth incident. I'd have known if he was coming unhinged. He wasn't.”

“And yet he tortured his daughters extensively. I've seen the scars myself, Agent.”

The corner of Manenault’s mouth twitched up. “The interrogator's job is to build trust. Lying isn’t a good strategy.”

“I am not lying to you, agent.”

“Invelen was. That Sansha podder with the funny callsign was.”

“Were they?”

It was a flat statement of scepticism, not a question. The agent treated it as if it were.

“They were, and you know it.”

“Do I?”

“You're going to look me in the eye and tell me the same damn thing Invelen did?”

“I know full well that you have a social adaptation chip, Agent. I know full well that it reported to you the last time I said this that there was no evidence that I might be lying, but I will repeat myself – Jorion Roth did terrible things to his own children on Debreth. I have witnessed the physical and psychological scars of that event myself.”

He sat back, leaving “Manenault” to desperately hunt his cybernetic memory for any hint of falsehood.

“Would you like some food?” He asked, pleasantly, after a slight wait.

“Screw you.”

“I'll take that as a no. So, to return to my original question, Agent... what did you hope to gain by assaulting our pilot?”

“I want to know what was done to Jorion, and how it can be un-done.”

“And what proof do you have that anything really was done to him?”

“Please. You don't expect me to buy Invelen's gas about a convenient degenerative condition do you?”

“Please answer my question, Agent.”

“The whole story stinks like a month-dead fedo!”

“That's a subjective valuation based on prejudice. I'm asking what proof you have. Hard evidence.”

“Why, so you can destroy it? Suppress it?”

“Just answer the question, Agent.”

“No. This is a waste of time.”

The bearded man with the blue eyes nodded. “Clearly.” he agreed. “If you actually had anything tangible to go on, you wouldn't have done something so remarkably stupid.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, kidnapping a capsuleer and torturing him with a shock stick? That takes balls that could tank a doomsday, but it's not exactly the most sensible thing I've ever seen a man do. Indeed, you blew your cover to attempt it. What did you think could possibly be worth that?”

“No comment.”

“See, I have a theory. I think you really are just working a coincidence up into a conspiracy through confirmation bias. I think that you've spent too long in a futile hunt for the evidence you need to prove that your friend didn't lose his mind naturally and you finally got desperate. You 'owe' Jorion Roth? What did he do, save your life?”

“No comment.”

“That's a 'yes' if I'm any judge. So, the guy saves your life, sadly drops out of the crazy tree and hits every branch on the way down, and you can't accept that somebody who'd do that for you would turn into the monster who nearly killed both his little girls.”

“No comment.”

“You're as delusional as he was. He saw Sansha in his daughter's brain so in he went with needles and saws and microcontrollers. You saw a monster violating your friend's mind, so in you came with a shock stick and a half-formed plan about getting a confession out of a woman who had nothing to do with it. Sad, really.”

Manenault didn't dignify this with a response beyond producing his best glare, which apparently glanced off without causing any real damage.

The man stood and picked up his dossier “Thank you, Agent whatever-your-name-is, you've been most illuminating. I'll be sure to inform your employers that we don't intend to press charges as you're clearly mentally unaccountable for your actions. End record.”

He turned to go. The door was open and he was half across the threshold when the Agent called after him.

“Why didn't you tell us about Jory?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Jorion. Why hold him at a secure facility and not tell us about his condition? Assuming it's true.”

“I believe Captain Night already gave you the reason, Agent. To quote him: “We had hoped to avoid this exact sort of situation.”

“Your corporation cracked secure FIO cyphers and code phrases and spent months impersonating an officer who had gone MIA in order to avoid inconvenience? I don't buy it.”

“Thank you, Agent Doe, this interview is over.”

“My name is Du Viers. Agent Rober Du Viers, serial 921849-Epsilon.”

“Thank you, Agent Du Viers. That will make it easier for me to contact your superiors.”

In the moment before the door slammed shut behind him, Du Viers finally noticed the gleam of metal at the nape of his interrogator's neck.

*******

“Not bad.” Amieta Invelen had been leaning against the wall outside the interview room, drinking something hot and brown out of a metal mug. Pilot Hakatain had handed his dossier to her the second he left the room, and was busily shrugging on a black sleeveless jacket.

“Rating my performance?” he asked.

“Nice working getting the name,” Invelen said. “Might be able to get a bit more out of him, if we lean a little.”

“I doubt it,” Hakatain said, taking the dossier again

“Don’t sell yourself short.”

“I’m not.” Hakatain’s voice held neither pride nor modesty. “I won’t get much more from him because he doesn’t know much more. I'm certain of that.”

“Meaning?”

“Du Viers had an intensely personal motive for coming here. He has no solid evidence to back up his accusations against Cia or this corp, and he defied orders to do it. We know for a fact that he has precisely nothing with which he might convince his superiors to launch a more serious investigation of ReAw. Taken together, that's more than enough material to discredit him and see him relegated to desk work for at least the next five years. He's defused, and hopefully so is the Roth situation for now.”

He looked sidelong at Amieta. “Of course, the bigger problem is that he's more-or-less right, isn't he?”

Amieta sipped her tea, “About what?”

“If Jorion really did have that kind of degenerative condition, it would have been simpler, cheaper and more permanent to hand him back over to the FIO and let them worry about their brain-damaged former agent. And you were... not quite telling him the whole truth and nothing but back in the hangar, weren't you?”

“He was a danger to himself and everyone else for months even before the Debreth breakdown. Hell, he thought he was someone else entirely for a while there - and the FIO was happy to let him run loose. You're assuming they wouldn't just have said 'thanks' and sent him back to 'work'. Forgive me if we didn't decide to entrust Cia and Cami's lives to their competence. We released him once he was far enough along he wouldn't be a danger even if they did.”

“Sounds plausible. But this thing's top of the range.” Verin said, tapping the “third eye” spot on his forehead where social analysis cybernetics were traditionally implanted. “You don't give me much to work with, but unlike Du Viers I'm not speculating without evidence, Commander.”

Something whined into life inside Amieta's hand, though her grip on her coffee mug remained loose and relaxed. “You're free to believe that. What's your point?” she asked.

“No point. I'm certainly not going to shed a tear knowing the bastard's been... unfortunate. Cia may not quite be a sister to me, but I sure don't have any room in me to forgive anyone who'd do that to her.” He pulled a cigar from a slim steel case in his pocket, already trimmed, lit and smoking as the device registered his hand approaching the dispenser. “And I'm definitely not about to share my speculations with her.”

“Then you’ve learned something,” Amieta said evenly. “After the last time you decided to ‘share speculations’ with Cia. Putting her through that again would be … bad.”

“Mmm. Her sister, taking her dad and going into his head with knives and needles and turning him into a Jorion Doll.” There was an edge to Hakatain's otherwise reasonable and understanding tone. He stared philosophically into the glowing mess at the end of his cigar. “That would, indeed, be bad.”

Invelen said nothing, but the mug issued a slight creak as it deformed a little in her grip.

Verin glanced down at it, then back up to her face. “I understand and agree with what you're doing. But the day's going to come eventually where the deception can't be maintained any longer. Do you suppose you'll be able to go to bed that night feeling good about yourself?”

Amieta glanced through the door's one-way glass to where Du Viers was studiously contemplating his own knees again. “The ‘deception’ is in your head, Pilot,” she said, and turned a steady gaze back to Hakatain. “And I sleep just fine.”  

Electric Myths

((written with Silver Night ))

It is a familiar discomfort, the instant before the interface overrides physical sensations of enclosed and liquid and replaces them with the familiar chill of vacuum and faint tingle of the docking clamps. Unpleasant, but necessary and tolerably brief: in the space of a breath Captain Silver Night is no longer aware of the flesh and bone body now inert inside the capsule, feeling instead the steel skin and nanite interfaces of the Electric Myth.

It has been a while since he wore this ship, or even one like it, and Captain Silver Night takes a moment to let the drake’s 14 tonnes of metal, her kilometres of wiring and thousands of control systems become familiar again.  

It only takes a moment. Information pours through the neural connections to the ship and the pod interface translates them into a form a pilot’s brain can absorb and assimilate, can assess and control. Neurons fire in response, awakening old connections, opening pathways. The Myth goes from being an old memory to a comfortable home in seconds, and seconds later is neither memory nor home but simply himself.

Then, as simply as he would raise his voice to be heard across a room, Silver opens a comm-link to Lab One, where the neuro-engineers and the medtechs are standing by.

His words are carried directly to their comms, synthesized there to audible frequencies. It is an illusion that he 'speaks', although since the commands that initiate the communication are triggered by the same neurological impulses as speech, it is in a sense an illusion Silver himself shares.  

They tell him they are ready.  

He gives the order to proceed.

Silver can tell when they initialise the link. It is, at first, one more connection among many: live, but dormant.

The camera drones show him that the medics checking that everything is in order before proceeding, moving around Dr Nolikka Toin with quiet efficiency.

Silver sees her nod in response to a question, and the word comes from the team leader: they are ready.   

The link goes live.  For a moment, nothing -

For a moment, nothing, and then suddenly Nolikka is cold in a way she has never been cold before, a deep absolute cold that she knows immediately is both lethal and harmless. Something is keeping her still, a light restraining touch that holds her to the chair, no, that is not the chair, that is not me -

Is me -

Is not -

For a moment, nothing, and then a flash of something gone so quickly Silver has barely time to register numbers, colours. Gone, then back again, looping in strings that move so quickly he can only grasp at fragments, e(fx/pi) = cosin {y - J} ...    

Cold and empty – vast, pervasive emptiness, like nothing she has ever felt, like nothing.  Nolikka recoils. She can feel the room around her, the chair she's sitting in, hear the techs moving and the whirring of the machinery. At the same time, there is that huge silence, huge enough to absorb all of it and still be as empty as before.

Something is beeping, and someone says her name. One of the doctors. They are asking if she’s all right, if she wants to stop.

She is not all right.

She does not want to stop.

I am still here. In this chair.

It’s input. Just input.  

It’s like something vividly imagined, or half-dreamt - but it isn't my imagination, or my dreams. The cold and the emptiness begin to take on detail, and they aren't just cold and empty. First she discerns the feel of the shields - familiar and strange at the same time. They wrap around the ship, and she can feel the lights sweeping across them like a gentle, warm mist.  

Chaotic, random – a nonsense of shifting colours and swirling strings of symbols, dancing around and alongside the visual feeds from the Myth’s camera drones and those aspects of the ship’s input translated to images for the capsuleer’s convenience.

Silver instinctively damps it down to little more than a flickering pastel blur, the familiar reliable feeds from the ship coming reassuringly clear again.

Something in the pale flicker catches his attention, a repetition, no, an echo, perhaps, too dim to make out clearly. Cautiously, he allows the input feed to strengthen and brighten. There – no, there – a string that almost makes sense, looping and repeating, the equations describing …

Geometry.

At the thought, the ship’s computers respond, sorting, filtering, interpreting. The patterns in the data come clearer, their complex strings describing shapes that have no meaning to the computer but are familiar to the pilot. A chair, a room … indistinct figures moving …

Through the feed from the drones, he hears a technician asking Dr Toin if she’s all right to proceed, and at the same moment the collection of numbers that delineates one of the blurred figures grows a wreath of long, looping formulae, tinted in shades of teal and grey, rotating gently before dissolving into the background.

Now he can see whole sections of the mosaic that do not connect to the others.  At a thought, the computer isolates them for him,   brings them forward for closer study. They seem different to the others, almost tentative, thin trails of silver and grey across black emptiness. As he studies them, though, they grow in confidence, sprouting branches of equations that web together, developing tints of the palest gold. The computer can find no equivalent in its databanks, presents him with an amorphous shape that bears a passing resemblance, but only that, to a fish.

But it is not a fish. It is 14,010,000 kilograms with a volume of 252,000m3 , it is 526 m and 2812 with a recharge rate of 750 seconds.

He is looking at the Electric Myth, shimmering now with the wash of light over her shields, looking at his ship as Nolikka Toin sees it, or more precisely, looking at what she is seeing in what he sees, in the buffered transfer from the pod systems.

The drake is not an exceptionally beautiful make of battlecruiser.

Usually.

“Captain Night?” It is an illusion that she speaks quietly, a little hesitantly, an illusion that she is speaking at all, doubled as the pod interface translates input into direct activation of the auditory centres of the pilot’s brain as he floats, deaf and blind by ordinary senses, in the pod. “Can you hear me?”

“You're coming through loud and clear, Dr Toin.”

The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, and Nolikka starts to turn to find it, as she always does, a habit of the sighted she re-learned when a colleague confessed he found its absence unsettling.

The gentle tug of wires attached to her scalp and the hand of a technician on her shoulder reminds her that she is not hearing Captain Night, that he is not there.

No, she corrects herself. He is not in the room with me.

She can tell from the information pouring through the link, buffered though it is, that regardless of his physical location, Captain Night is nonetheless very much there.

And everywhere. Everywhere on the ship. Everywhere in the ship.

And she does not have to struggle, out of politeness, to pin a voice to a physical location, to turn with the mannerisms of those who see in ways she does not and cannot see in the way she can.

“I can see the ship,” she tells him. Her own voice runs in trails of translucent pearl along the lineaments of the Myth. “Does it work the other way, too?”

Does it work the other way?

Yes, is an honest answer, and Silver gives it.  But it is not an entirely complete answer, as the numbers and figures pouring through the link change and shift, taxing even the ship’s computer’s ability to keep up.

“I can understand a bit of what’s coming in,” he tells her. “I get an echo, too, of what you see from me. You are feeling the ship?”

“Yes.” The ship again, shifting gently in shape and perspective, with new colours twisting through it now, a faded opal, a bronze. “The shields, the … hangar? Is that the hangar?”

“Yes. Right now it is mostly just the docking clamp, and the lights coming in from outside. A little comms chatter.”

“Is that what that is? It tickles.”

“Try ignoring a priority channel for a while – it becomes an itch.”

A moment’s silence, and then: “I don’t think I can. I mean, I don’t think it cares that I am.”

“No, I suppose not.” She can sense the ship, Silver reminds himself, but the ship cannot sense her. “There aren’t any priority communications right now, anyway.”

“Can you – could you undock the ship? Is it safe?”

There hadn't been any plans to undock, but there is something in the shifting tones of the opalescent formula that wind around the ship as she speaks, and Silver finds himself saying, “Assuming that no-one has been terribly incompetent in the modifications, and I don’t see any evidence of that, it should be.”

Undocking prep has been second nature for so long that Silver finds he could not remember what it had been like the first time. Other things about that first flight, but not the exact feeling of the docking clamps release, the ship’s passage through the brief darkness of the exit, and then –

Light everywhere, or lights, too many to even imagine counting, far away and close and every distance in between, each with their own unique warmth brushing against her skin. Other things too, heavy, large, moving, everywhere around her, as far as she can see. They pull, each of them, pull her in different directions. The station right behind, and another, bigger and further away, and feeling like she might be falling into both of them. Nolikka tries to make sense of them, snatching after one and then another, near or far, she can no longer tell –

Too much, too much.

Or not enough.

She can’t tell.

“Dr Toin?” That is familiar, for all she knows she has never heard Captain Night’s voice like this before, hearing without sound. Nonetheless, she knows his voice in the middle of the chaotic strangeness, its colours steady, its contours familiar.

“Yes.”

“It helps if you address them one at a time. They fit together, but it helps to see each as a separate part, first. This was part of what they did during my training.”

She tries: she starts with the biggest, the math running interference between her and the physical reality as he explains. Piece by piece she puts things where they go: the station, the nearby planets. Then the mass behind them breaks into two, one tiny and fast and heading right at her and then gone and it all falls apart, but she can see that the computer is filtering, helping her - that Captain Night is helping her, and she begins to rebuild, to organize what's coming in into something comprehensible.  The great bulk of the planets turning their way through lazy orbits, some with moons dancing attendance as they go. Great sweeping arcs of fragmented rock. Smaller things, their geometry angular, made by people and not by millennia of natural forces. And –

“Is that the – “

3564 k 239,200 km 0.02084 l V – 19.03 z = 0.012 in red and gold and every shade between, weaving together and brightening until they all but eclipse everything else. The star.

“Can you feel the pull of it?” Silver asks.

"Yes!” And she can, he can see the gravitational fluxes weaving through the equations. “And the - that's more than light, isn't it? The rest of the spectrum, is that what it is?"

"Yes. It hits the shield like a wind," Silver brings the ship to a stop outside the station with a few thoughts, "Nothing like directed fire, of course."

"No, it doesn't - it's not unpleasant. It's like sunlight. I mean - it is sunlight." Her voice is uncertain. The mathematics in her mind are not.

"Would you like to go closer?"

Dr Toin's reply is almost shy, "Can we?"

"Of course." Silver aligned the ship, "Brace yourself. The first time in warp is ... memorable."

Nolikka feels the ship spooling up, like the echo of an adrenaline rush, and then she is – they are – falling towards the star, everything around rippling and falling apart. She tries to make it make sense, but it’s too fast.  The star grows and grows at the end of a spinning tunnel of formula she has known for a long time but only now understands as they distort and bend space around her and -

Something else.

Not as big as the star, but big.  A planet.  A planet right in their path.

Mass and velocity and momentum and x0_1 + v0_1*t = x0_2 + v0_2*t and everything adds up to -  

The Myth slides through the warp tunnel towards the star, the system’s third planet looming larger as their course intersects its orbit. Silver can see it looming larger in Dr Toin’s numbers, recognises the equations she is solving for time in colors shading now to vibrant orange.

“We aren’t in the same place as everything else,” he tells her. “Dr Toin? The ship is not in normal space.”

And then they are through the planet and he is getting no sense at all through the link, only fragments of numbers shorting out in a static of white.  

“Dr Toin?”

“Dr Toin? Dr Toin, can you hear me?”

The meditechs are talking to her, then to each other.  Nolikka hears them, ‘hears’, too, Captain Night’s voice –

The planet is past. People are still talking. She is still hearing them.

They are not, after all, dead.

“I’m all right,” she tells the people in the labs, her voice thin and grey to her own ears, and starts painstakingly putting the universe back into order.

“Did we go … through that planet?” she asks Captain Night through the link.

“Our route, charted in normal space, did. We didn’t, exactly.” He pauses. “It is a bit different, knowing the equations and actually experiencing it, though.”

The comm link does a good job of conveying the mild amusement in Dr Toin’s ‘voice’. “It is a bit different. Yes. Is it like that every time?”

“Yes. You get … not used to it, exactly. But it doesn’t keep quite the same impact.”

Equations describing catastrophic deceleration float past in a cluster of bubbles that give him the inexplicable impression of laughter. “I thought it would feel fast.” The dry amusement returns. “And the sun is very large.”

“Just warm, here, though” Silver reassures her. “We are not so close it is dangerous.”

Dangerous.

Captain Night explains that getting

too close to the sun would escalate the warmth into discomfort and pain, the stresses of the ship shared with the pilot.

It’s what people say, that capsuleers feel their ship, but now, feeling as if the solar wind is ruffling her hair, Nolikka thinks she may actually understand it for the first time.

Some of the information is ‘uncomfortable’, Captain Night says. Usually things you shouldn’t ignore.

Being shot, for example.

She has designed shields for a half-dozen classes of ship, thinking of the lives within the steel skin, imagining her equations wrapping protection around their fragile home, but as for the first time she feels the shield hardeners come online, Nolikka realises that for a capsuleer, they are more than an abstract security, that a shield failure would hurt even if the hull was never breached.

That is a responsibility she is not sure she wants, but the thought slips away as Captain Night demonstrates the microwarpdrive, less like running than like a dream of running.

The medics interrupt, and Nolikka realises she has been hearing the monitors beeping for several minutes now, somewhere behind the soft surf of the sun’s radiation and the echoing loops of the planets and their moons.

Time to stop, they say.

Captain Night drops them out of warp near the station, and she adjusts quickly, the equations resolving much more easily, already starting to become familiar.  One last burst of exhilarating speed as he punches the microwarpdrive on approach, and then the docking protocols take them into the welcoming embrace of the station.

Cold again, empty cold, and then someone touches a switch.

And she is –

The link goes dark, and in an instant the spinning shapes of numbers and symbols dissolve. The pearl of mathematical light representing Dr. Toin has gone silent. The Myth is familiar once more, no longer wreathed in shimmering equations, no longer mapped and charted by the shifting web of Nolikka’s perceptions.

There is the ship, the kilometres of corridors and wiring, the myriad connections and sensors and systems.

And that is all.

The link goes dark. The subtle mysteries of the Myth are closed to her once more. She is sitting in a chair in Lab One, feeling the tug against her scalp as technicians detach the equipment, hearing the pale blue rustle of their movement, feeling the walls and corners of the single room around her.

And that is all.

“Dr Toin?” Something small and solid is placed in her hand: a comm unit. “Captain Night for you, Dr Toin.”

It should not feel unfamiliar to have to lift the comm to her ear to hear him, but it does. “Captain?”

His voice, though, his voice is still familiar, and that surprises her enough to lose what he is saying for a sentence or two, until she catches the dark taupe thread of his words and understands scheduling and further testing and additional data …

Understands that he is asking her when the next test should be.

A time and date are agreed, and Silver sends the details to his schedule.

“Until next time, Dr Toin.”

“Until next time, Captain Night.”