Tinaya Leithe was reportedly on an away mission for eleven years before she
finally returned home, which is not exactly a lie; it’s just not the whole
truth. The passengers of Extremus are aware that there are some excursions
away from the ship, and that it always involves some form of time travel.
They’re aware that someone managed to go rogue decades ago, and found a
civilization millennia in the past. They don’t know who this person was, or
how many of his acolytes have infiltrated Extremus, but they know that these
people exist. They do know about Verdemus, but they don’t know that the crew
maintained a persistent connection to it for years. They also don’t know
that a permanent connection has finally been established in the form of two
new Nexa that Omega and Valencia built on either end. Given enough time,
everyone presently on board could theoretically go there. They could travel
back and forth, or abandon the grand mission altogether. Publicizing the
events surrounding the colony has been proposed as a viable option, though
some are taking it more seriously than others.
Tinaya stands at the bottom of the steps. Everyone currently in-the-know is
sitting on them, patiently awaiting the beginning of her presentation.
Culture on the Extremus is a hodge podge from all sorts of different
originating cultures. They come from Earth, Durus, Ansutah, Gatewood, and
Extremus itself. Each time their ancestors moved—or had been moved—to a
different place, they adopted new traditions and practices. One of the
customs that they picked up from their time in the Gatewood Collective is
the concept of a Devil’s Advocate debate. In a stalemate, or a state of
ethical dilemma, two opposing forces will settle their differences by
arguing each other’s positions. Tinaya believes that they should reveal the
truth about the planet to the passengers. They should lay it all out on the
table, and let the chips fall where they may. She will thusly be arguing
against that. She takes a deep breath as if she’s about to start
talking, but she doesn’t.
“Have you not prepared?” Lataran asks in a faux English accent. “She
believes in maintaining the secrecy of Verdemus, and their integration into
the Nexus network. Not only does it allow them to travel back and forth
freely, but it gives them a lifeline to anywhere else in the galaxy that has
one of their own machines. People could just go live on Earth, or Teagarden.
To her, letting anyone go would set a dangerous precedent. They could lose
everything. What they’ve built here could fall apart, and turn the whole
mission into a joke...a footnote. Thusly, when it’s her turn to speak,
she’ll be arguing in favor of transparency.
“Point of order,” Councilman Modlin argues. He’s serving as the mediator in
this debate, because he remains undecided. “The Devil will not speak until
the Angel is finished.” It is the Devil’s job to advocate for some
sort of change in the status quo, or at least a greater change. In D.A.
proceedings, there is no back and forth. Only the mediator and audience
members may ask questions, or make comments.
Lataran opens her mouth to apologize, but the rules are clear, and strict.
She’s not even allowed to do that. So she just nods, and turns back to face
her opponent.
Tinaya is grateful for the delay. She is prepared, but she’s afraid
of winning. That’s the fascinating reason for the practice. The better you
are, the more likely you are to win, which actually means that you lose.
More often than not, it manages to poke holes in everyone’s argument, and
the result ends up being the proverbial Door Number Three. It shows people
the compromise that they were unwilling to recognize before, because they’re
too far on one side of the spectrum. They can’t see it until someone forces
them as far to the opposite side as possible. But in this last second, she
has changed her mind. “I’m ready.” She clears her throat, and pulls up a
list on the smartboard. It contains all the bad things that have happened on
the ship since it launched that have been known to be caused by the Exins.
“This is what the Exin Empire has done to us. These are attacks and
sabotages carried out by agents of the enemy.” She clicks the remote.
Sub-bullets appear between the items. “These are the consequences of those
actions, rippling out from the attacks in ways that could not have been
predicted.”
She gives the group time to read through them. She did not only create this
for illustrative purposes. Some people in the audience may need to be
reminded of the specific events, and a few, like Aristotle and Niobe,
weren’t around to see it, nor study it in school. She clicks again. “This is
what time looks like.” On the screen is the name Jeremy Bearimy in
cursive. It’s a reference to a popular TV show on Earth, which claimed this
to be the shape that time makes in the afterlife, as opposed to the
traditional linear model. It’s a joke, really, but still canonical. There
actually is a real man named Jeremy Bearimy who was given this name by a fan
of the show who found him as an infant, unwittingly playing into what would
become the boy’s unusual temporal pattern. Time doesn’t really so perfectly
look like this in the real world, but it’s a closer approximation than a
straight line. Tinaya points to the r in the surname. “If the Exins
find out about Verdemus at this point. All they’ll have to do is wait until
time gets back to here to wipe us all out. She traces the loops and curves
forward before pulling all the way back to the beginning of the name, and
starting over. All she’s really saying is that it doesn’t matter when the
Exins find out that Verdemus wasn’t destroyed. They would be able to use
this information to change the past.
“So, you’re saying that we have to keep it a secret forever,” Belahkay
figures.
“Yes,” Tinaya confirms. “When time travel is involved, there’s no getting
past it. Your past might be waiting for you in the future.” She clears her
throat again, and sets her pointer down.
“That’s it?” Councilman Modlin questions.
“That is the breadth of Lataran’s position. The only reason to keep it
secret from the passengers is that some of them may be spies, if only
unknowingly.”
Lataran perks up, and tries to argue, but she can’t. Not only is it still
not her turn, but she’s not responsible for her own position. She has to
stay on the opposite side until the debate is over. She has to pretend to be
against herself.
Spirit decides to help her out. “I think that what the Captain wishes she
could say is that it’s more nuanced than that. There’s a lot that you’re
leaving out.”
“Madam Leithe, you are failing to understand the assignment. You’re expected
to rigorously argue your opponent’s position as if it were your own. You’re
expected to act in the spirit of healthy debate, not lose on purpose to win
in the real world.”
“I’m not,” Tinaya contends. “I agree with her now.” She looks over her
shoulder at the Bearimy model. “This is all that matters. The Exins are the
greatest existential threat that we face. And they look just like us. There
is no way to know who among us would help them, and hurt us. They didn’t
infiltrate Extremus, they didn’t even infiltrate Gatewood. They infiltrated
Durus. They covertly landed on the rogue world centuries ago, bred a
secret society, the descendants of which would later travel through The
Abyss, and into Ansutah. Their descendants maintained this secret
society over the course of two thousand years before humans escaped that
universe, and came back here. Their descendants then boarded
Extremus, and now, their descendants are here. Over a hundred
generations apart, and they still act against us. That’s commitment. And
there is no competing with it. Honestly, I don’t know if we can trust the
people in this room.”
“I must say,” Arqut jumped in, “that we don’t know for sure that that’s how
the Exins ever infiltrated us. We’ve just not been able to pinpoint the
origin of the spies that we’ve discovered. That doesn’t mean they go all the
way back to the Durus days. There are and were billions of people in
Gatewood. It would not be that hard to sneak someone aboard one of the
cylinders, even only days before Extremus launched.”
“The fact is,” Tinaya stresses, “that they were here, and could
still be here, and we’ve never been able to catch them until they’ve
done something bad. No one can know about Verdemus,” she says firmly. “We
can’t even just not tell anyone about it. We have to destroy the Nexa. And
before we do...” She trails off, at first to pause for dramatic effect, but
she becomes so comfortable in the silence that she finds it hard to get out.
“Before we do...?” Niobe encourages.
“Before we do,” Tinaya repeats, “everyone here has to go back to the other
side, and stay there until death.”
They all scoff or shake their heads. “What?” Spirit asks.
Tinaya shakes right back. “We’re too dangerous. What if, say, Aristotle
meets someone special, and mumbles something about it in his sleep? What if
Lilac gets drunk, and spills the beans to a random fellow patron at the
speakeasy?” She doesn’t actually know whether there is a speakeasy. She just
assumes that drinking alcohol is around here somewhere. “We can’t. Trust.
Anyone.” She emphasizes. “There are people already on that planet. I didn’t
put them there, I didn’t authorize them, but it can’t be undone.” Actually,
it could be if they wanted it bad enough. “We’re not just protecting the
Extremus mission. We’re protecting them too.” The number of people who are a
threat to the safety and security of the planet is exactly the same as the
number of people who would be a risk if someone leaked any information. Then
again, that has always been the case. They are under constant threat.
“If we don’t trust the people on the ship to not be spies, what the hell are
we doing here? What’s the point?” Lataran blurts out.
“The Devil will wait her turn,” Councilman Modlin declares.
“No, it doesn’t matter. I switched sides too. “Tinaya, these people need to
know that there’s a choice now. None of us was around when Extremus was
first being conceived.” We didn’t choose to go on the mission, but we have a
choice now. I’m going to stay as this is my home, but we can’t speak for
everyone else. There is a movement,” she admits. “It’s small, but growing.
Some people do want to leave. They want to live on a planet. They’re angry
that we left Verdemus in our rearview mirror. Some even think that we should
turn around. Now that we have a way to go back without turning the
whole ship around, don’t we have an obligation to present it as an option?
Don’t we owe those people that much?”
“Where does it end?” Tinaya asks. “Do we place a cap on the number of
emigrants? What if everyone chooses to leave? What if they change their
minds?”
“I’ve thought of that. Everyone will have maybe a week to make their
decision, and submit their application for resettlement. After that, there
are no take-backs, and no late additions. You go, and you stay gone, and you
can only travel to Verdemus. We’ll lock the computers out of all
other destinations.”
“Wait, let me get this straight,” Tinaya begins, realizing that this Devil’s
Advocate debate has officially gone off the rails. “You want to tell them
the truth about Verdemus, but lie about the Nexa’s true limitations?”
“They’re apparently called Mark III Nexa.” Lantern uses airquotes. “Yes, we
could argue that they can’t be on the full network; that they can only go to
each other. That way, everyone stays out of the Goldilocks Corridor, and
even the stellar neighborhood. I’m advocating for transparency, not one
hundred percent transparency. There is a line, I believe in lines.”
Tinaya sighs, and steps over to the wall. There aren’t very many viewports
on this vessel. Most of them are viewscreens, and even then, there’s usually
nothing to see that isn’t fake. Their ancestors could look out a window to
see Gatewood, and their descendants will hopefully one day look out to see
the Extremus planet. But for now, it’s nothing but the doppler glow, and
that’s blinding unless the glass is heavily tinted. That’s what this
viewport does; show what it really looks like outside the ship as it’s
traveling at the highest fraction of lightspeed at an extreme dimness. She
turns the tint down just a little bit to make it a little bit brighter.
Lataran stands up, and approaches—not her opponent—but her friend. She
places a hand on Tinaya’s back. “Word will get out. We may both be dead by
then, but people will learn what we did. Do you want them to think that we
didn’t trust them, or that we believed in them? Would you rather force
everyone to stay on a mission that no one cares about anymore than let
everyone leave, and just accept that as our fate? Our parents’ parents
wanted us to get to the other side of the galaxy. That was their dream. And
it’s still mine, even though I won’t be alive to see it. It’s not
necessarily anyone else’s though. And I want them to be happy too.”
“I think we both well know that you can be alive to see it if you so wish.”
Lataran nods. “Yes. But it’s still up to us to keep this thing moving, and
when we’re gone, regardless of how we answer The Question, we’ll have to
hope that our children will keep it going for even longer. But if they
don’t—” She reaches up to turn Tinaya’s chin away from the window. “If they
don’t, Tinaya...then that will be okay too. It will not be a dishonor to our
ancestors. It’s up to us to choose our own fate, and if our grandparents
loved and love us as much as they should, they’ll understand.” She looks
through the viewport now. “We don’t even know where we’re going. Maybe we
were always on our way to Verdemus.”
Tinaya smiles softly at her best friend. “They were right to choose you as
Captain. You were made for this job. You remind me of Halan Yenant.”
“I should be so lucky,” Lataran replies. She looks over at the crowd, who
all suddenly start to pretend that they’re not watching them. Omega probably
has an implant that allows him to hear their whispers. “Don’t be so quick to
count yourself out as a good Captain too. You’re not dead yet.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Lataran gives her a hug, then releases. “Come on. This debate is over, but
we need to come to a consensus. It’s not just about convincing each other.
Everyone has a say. I’m sure Vaska will have a lot to say when she
comes back from the planet.”
They return to the group, and keep talking it through. They eventually come
to decide on partial transparency, but determining exactly what that entails
warrants much more discussion. And some outside help.
