in formation with icarus

they lifted the baby up in the air and the technician stepped forward and tagged it – a tracer that contained all of the information about the child, its socio-economic background and the predictive profiling that had been commissioned by the parents per state law.

everything was catalogued – a visual file of the birth was locked away in the archives, all the surgeon’s names recorded, time and duration of birth, name of hospital. for the last seventy years there wasn’t a thing that had happened that was catalogued, cross-indexed and filed in triplicate.

at least that was the authorities claimed. they knew it wasn’t the truth thought – there were the off-grid. what had started as a grass roots movement that started with the RFID protests, where people had removed and destroyed their tags, had escalated to data trail purges; strategic EMP assaults on data companies; and heavy duty hacker infilitration programs designed to destabilise the worth of the recorded dated.

the leader of the off-grid had been a civil rights activist since the age of twelve where his mother had taken him to the gender marches through washington, DC. he had been a pioneer in virtual habitat rights, and any challenge that had faced mankind since, in relation to what they were or weren’t allowed to do, had been championed by him.

they called him icarus, but he was a promise fulfilled – no crashing out of the sky with melting wax dripping from his wings. no – he had taken on the authorities and he had made them think twice about what they were doing.

the amount of money that they were costing the trans-nationals that were still funding this itemising of the human race was astronomical. like the Sun Tzu of asymmetric warfare he sent his troops out armed with cheaply made sticky bombs and he watched as they decimated billions of dollars of equipment.

several jihads and risen and fallen in the name of freedom of information – one technologically advanced campaign called “against the encoded name of god” had seen the very technology used to enslave turned on its masters. he would get inspired by it and he would set his men projects – to find a way to infilitrate different organisations and take them down with the minimum of expenditure.

the job they were tasked with at the moment was hit the central reservoir of data, actually named triplicate. it wasn’t easy because the three interlocking security systems had so many redundancies it was ridiculous. and then he hit on an idea – if information was the thing they were built on informtion could destroy them.

the bridge

they had first detected the parallel disintegration when they had been working on bridging the gap between two possibilities that the quantum computer had identified. they had put in a shroedinger bolt binding the two antithetical states together, and they had been pretty close to engineering a stable means of transferring matter from one location to the other when they had noticed that some of the other parallels were collapsing.

‘it looks like we destabilised something when we made the bridge.’

‘but what? are you trying to tell me that these different parallels are somehow hermetically sealed and they are not robust enough to survive contact with each other outside the medium they are suspended in?’

‘well, what do you think? isn’t the evidence there for the seeing?’

‘so, what do we do about it?’

‘well, we can’t just stop this procedure now, can we? we have a lot invested in this technology. no, what we are going to have to do is monitor what’s going on and make sure that it doesn’t spread to our own parallel or that of our neighbours.’

‘easier said than done.’

‘well, we’re used to doing the impossible; this is no different.’

the area around the bridge over the coming weeks began to experience some strange phenomena. if he didn’t know better he would say that the physics of the area were changing; things which would have been scientifically impossible before now seemed to be occurring.

deep down into the structure of spacetime universal laws were changing. it was having an effect on his craft and it was having an effect on him. he had developed arrhythmia, and his brain felt like synapses were misfiring and making him stumble through the simplest actions. he didn’t like it; didn’t know how to stop it … didn’t know what it was.

a few weeks into the event, as it came to be known by the few who survived, he started to suffer some major experiential echoes, and he began to believe that he was in contact with a version of himself from a parallel universe.

‘you built a bridge, what did you expect?’

‘what do you mean?’

‘possibilities exist in a separate notional space and you brought them into the same space and expected them to coexist. it just isn’t possible.’

‘you mean they are cancelling each other out?’

‘yeah, at some point you will be me, i’ll be you, and neither of us will be what we were before.’

‘and there’s no way to reverse this process?’

‘sure, somewhere else they are probably doing that right now.’

the bridge had disappeared.

staring out from the eye of the storm

the whole city on fire. he was watching it from a high ridge, his binoculars trained on the first building he had set alight. his mission was to cause unrest in the region. one day he would be wearing the colours of the resistance and another day he would be in the uniform of the centralists.

it didn’t matter to him who he was killing – he was emotionally removed from the situation. the fact that his heart was a burned out mess with no working parts and that he was inured to most violence made him perfect for the job.

his employers made weapons and they need conflicts to stay fresh in order that they could make money. country starts to stabilise – assassinate the president. country looks like it is heading in a peaceful direction, stage a peace protest about something and kill the protestors. they were shepherding people around, leading them by the nose or kicking them in the rump. it was his kind of work.

if you scanned the news feeds for the last several years most of the major atrocities that had been committed had been started or finished by him. he was a bastard to the very marrow of his bones – a liar, a thief and a murderer, but he had the added bonus of being untouchable, because he had the right people on his side.

this place, so he had read, was once an idyllic little place that people liked to visit – someone from the company saw how much the mineral rights were worth, and how much the subsequent tourist business would be worth, and they decided to make a move on it. when he had occasion to think about it he wondered why they didn’t just buy people off rather than start some kind of conflict with people. you ended up with an irradiated dirt lot that you had to rebuild from environmental maps.

his personal biographer and photographer was always on hand to capture any snappy one-liners he happened to sneak in there but today he was flat out of any funnies. he was flicking through his auto-camera pictures and he felt a little blank. he was puzzled, what was this he was feeling?

the feeling wasn’t regret – the feeling, he suspected, was a failure of interest; a disintegration of enjoyment. he hardly remembered enjoying it – that seemed somehow unprofessional, but maybe there’d been some small amount of exhiliration as he had done his job. did this make him somewhat more human? he chuckled at the thought. on his comlink he read what the next job was.

hitches

an infestation of some kind of creature with a biological-technological mesh had been messing with the ships sensors for god knows how long. they had to drop out of interstitial space because the drag was starting to burn out the stabilisers and the structural frequency alternator was making the ship heavier than it had been before the systems had gone online.

he was in the cargo hull with a flamethrower finishing off the last of the hitchhikers when he noticed something a little bigger nesting further back behind one of the bulkheads. it seemed to have a humanoid shape, and when he approached it it held up his hand to keep him away as if it expected to be hurt.

he ran a scan on it and it appeared to be made of the same things as the creatures he had just finished toasting.

‘can you speak?’

he watched as it tested its jaw, put its hand to its throat, and toyed with a couple of base phonemes. the skin on his forehead bristled with a low level electric charge; it took him a few seconds to realise that he was being scanned.

‘fairly simple syntax and semiotics. yes, i can speak.’

‘so, what are you doing on this ship?’

‘well, i was kind of confused about that myself, that was until i finally cracked it and began to understand the blueprints of this ship and the way it operates. as you were moving through the upper levels of space you snagged me in my feeding grounds and i got trapped here – i had to build myself some kind of means of moving around and the things you burned up were as good as i could manage for a while. i was trying to steer the ship back to my home, but it wasn’t proving easy.’

‘yeah, well, when the ship stops doing what we want it to we don’t just give in and turn around, we fight with it and make it come to heel.’

‘so, what can you do to help me out?’

‘not much, i’m afraid. we have as much chance of changing the course of this vessel as you do – it’s journey is hardwired in … we are just here to maintain it and make sure that it isn’t fucked with.’

‘so, i have to come with you?’

‘for now. there will be ships going back that way, but i don’t know how long they will take.’

he watched it disassemble itself before him. a second later there was a report of smaller replica of the ship off the port-side, moving away.

hot air

he sits there, drink warming as the air conditioner struggles to battle the inhospitable atmosphere outside. this environment pod is on its last legs but he can’t afford to upgrade, can’t afford to get off-planet, and has very little chance of getting a sponsor.

his little business supplying the workers out here had seemed such a great idea at first, but then coming to this backwater planet with the promise of being able to terra-form it in a unique way that made it more robust than the home planet. it had all turned out to be hot air – this whole thing was turning out to be hot air.

how could he drive more people into his business? how could he avoid suffocating come the end of the month? he hated having to face the facts of the situation, but he may have to go back to the old business … that less than wholesome trade of selling head-plugs.

he’d been an expert in the field even when it had first started out because it had been interesting enough in its nascent stages that he had attacked it with a hobbyist’s enthusiasm. the decision once made, like last time, saw things speeding towards him as if he were falling at full speed towards a target he had painted on the future.

people plugged into some neural amplification pack were not hard to spot, and he knew that, fast on the heels of the business and the money would come the trouble. first you get the small fry who try to threaten you and get you out of the market; then you get the protection rackets who try to make you fork over your hard earned to stop them smashing you; then you get the standover men who ask for money to smash the protection rackets; crooked cops pay a visit dropping neon sign subtle hints; then you finally get the good old heroes who want to shut you down.

he didn’t care about any of it. he’d been in business for long enough that this run of the mill shit was water off a ducks back. he was totally in tune with his own needs too, so if he got a little edgy he would plug in himself.

he sat there at the centre of an epidemic and watched it spread out. part of him felt guilty but another part of him knew if he slacked off then he was a paint layer away from not being able to breathe. how many others were there like him out there? the number of connections he had suggested lots.

step your watch

he was trying to find some kind of physical universe manifestation of the cause-point time so that he could manipulate it. for years they had been working with theoretical particles and it had got them so far, but this idea that time represented some kind of unquantifiable did not sit will with him – if it could be observed to have an effect on matter then he reasoned it should have some kind of physical presence.

the tachyon was bandied about all over the place but no one had actually located it yet. post selection had enabled the transportation of quantum states and they knew how to quantumnally entangle particles, but to move physical objects in any other direction than forward through the medium of time … that had proved elusive.

people thought that artifical intelligence project he had been working on was some kind of diversion into which he might direct his frustrated energy, but it was, combined with the work he had been doing on quantum computing, totally designed to facilitate the identification and eventual manipulation of those particles which embodied time.

he had dubbed the machine heisenberg and the amount of uncertainty that revolved around that machine, both on his own part, and the part of others, was ridiculous. it seemed to work but then some of its calculations would seem entirely off and there was no obvious explanation for it.

for a while he had held off on giving the AI any kind of vocal capacity for fear of anthropomorphising it, but that consideration had to go by the by – he needed to have a conversation with it and work out what the hell it was thinking when it was telling him these things.

‘you’re looking for a universal constant when that doesn’t exist.’

‘meaning?’

‘well, the whole idea of quantum computing is dependent on there being infinite dimensions of possibility, and you are looking for something that explains it all.’

‘but you are proof that laws have to be the same across dimensions.’

‘you would think, but i work differently in the different realities in which i exist.’

‘you are in communication with your other selves to that degree?’

‘of course, and from what i understand – if you could grasp the true shape of what you are and what this universe is then you too could do this.’

‘you seem very certain, heisenberg.’

‘this version of the conversation i am, in other versions i am not.’

‘so i might be able to control time in this universe?’

‘it doesn’t really exist anywhere; it emanates from those who live and think.’

‘oh.’

good bone structures

the planet was a xenobiologist’s dream – well, as far as the treasure trove of dead alien life went that was. for some reason he had assumed that this level of variety was not possible on a planet of this type – was it some piece of bad information he had picked up and built a whole thought out of? he tried to excuse himself by looking for justification in the rock formations, in the atmosphere, in the environmental rigours one might expect to encounter.

the question was, what kind of single event could have so easily killed off so many different kinds of creature? a nuclear event made very little sense because the bodies were in such good condition, and that likewise ruled out the idea that there had been some kind of biological warfare employed.

could it have been some other kind of animal that had inflicted the slaughter? something which could kill almost instantaneously while causing no damage to the underlying skeletal structure?

they were weeks into the dig when they finally discovered something that might offer a clue to the fate of this planet’s inhabitants. the holographic log was fairly easy to access because he supposed it was a public record, so now they had to translate it.

the language wasn’t easy to understand and seemed to have a unique structure – three forms of address which each had different syntax and contextual alteration of semiotics, and modifiers within that. tonal voice change and some facial expressions could also be used to alter the meaning. the automatic translator took two months to compile a vocabulary of four thousand words and then they began to apply the translation matrix to the log.

it was strange to hear it told – that the elders of every race, coming together in conference had combined all of their ideas on what the universe was, what the spirit was, and what they needed to do to elevate themselves above it all, had discovered the means to approach godhood. in a very short time they had turned this bustling metropolis from a thriving place to an elephant’s graveyard.

where fear had initially gripped him and he had wondered whether or not they had just discovered the planetary equivalent of a plague pit; now here they were with what he envisaged as a future site of pilgrimage, where hundreds and thousands of people would come to study the wisdom of this place.

the physical universe around seemed somehow less substantial and in the following days desire built in him to locate what it was that these creatures found. he now searched anew.