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Ramses and Leona were going to have to spend all of their time in the new
lab. Since the former lost his forge core, he wasn’t able to build
everything they needed in only a year. He kept a data chip on his person
too, which at least stored all of the equipment specifications, but it
couldn’t build anything, so the process was slow. There wasn’t much
waiting for them when they returned. Most of the resources available out
here had been used to excavate and habitize the celestial body itself, so
the lab would even have a place to sit. Instead of dragging him to some
central location, Pribadium opted to lock the prisoner up here, so part of
the work was dedicated to constructing that as well.
Not useful in the lab, Mateo decided to go visit the prisoner. “How are they
treating you?”
“They’re fine.” He was down, and couldn’t look Mateo in the eye. This
facility was entirely automated, so he probably hadn’t spoken to a
human-level intelligence in almost a year.
“Linwood, right?” Mateo asked. “Linwood Meyers?”
“That’s what they called me, back when they called me anything.” His
accommodations weren’t just some tiny cell with concrete walls. It was a
luxury condo, not much worse than the coin habitat. The psychological toll
of not having a choice, however, was the real problem, and there were
probably missing amenities.
“What did you have in your personal crabitat that you don’t have here?” A
crabitat was a kind of habitat that hermits lived in. Just a bit of play on
words.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I wanna help. What are you missing?”
“Well, I didn’t just sit on my ass on the beach all day,” Linwood said. “I
spent most of my time in simulations. My coin was just to keep me alive
while I did that, and the planetesimal was there for raw materials.”
“And armor.”
“And armor,” he acknowledged.
“So, they didn’t let you keep your VR setup. Do you know why not?”
“Takes power,” Linwood admitted. “There’s plenty of it here, but I wouldn’t
be able to manage it myself. They would have to let me have a dedicated bot
to do it, and that’s just giving me too much. I have a holoscreen, with
basic entertainment, but nothing immersive. And also...”
“Also what? You can tell me,” Mateo encouraged.
“I wasn’t always in sims, and even when I was, I wasn’t always alone.
There’s a reason why I built myself a staff.”
“You need companionship,” Mateo realized. “They destroyed those too? They
destroyed life?”
“They boxed their consciousnesses, and are storing them somewhere. They only
destroyed the substrates.”
“Harsh system they designed here. Why did you choose Gatewood? Why not
Proxima, or the Alpha system?”
“I wanted to be alone. Those are too heavily populated. I know it seems
ridiculous. In any case, I would be millions and millions of kilometers away
from civilization, but I want to be very isolated. I’m afraid of
people.” He gestured at his environment in general. “I was right to be.”
“Well, you’re not dead yet, which should really be your only concern.”
“I’m not entitled to life extension procedures here either. Reactive
medicine only. I will die eventually.”
Mateo nodded. “Well, that settles it. The Gatewood establishment wants us to
take you away from here, so that’s what we’ll do. You’ll get your dwarf
planet, and all the equipment you need to hermit back up, including your
staff.”
“I don’t need a dwarf planet,” Linwood said, “I’m not greedy.”
“My wife says that you can live off the in-situ resources in a dwarf planet
for around a hundred billion years or longer.”
“They’re too valuable,” Linwood contended, shaking his head. “No one would
let me keep that.”
“We can take you somewhere so far away, it won’t be another 150,000 years
before anyone can reach you. In all that time, you can burn some hydrogen
going into the intergalactic void, where you’ll never be found.”
“Well, it’s not really practical to move a dwarf planet...”
“That’s your call. Burn bright and fast, or slow and long. Either way,
you’ll have that choice, and like I said, you’ll also have tens of thousands
of years to change your mind. Change your mind a thousand times, whatever.
But the only option you won’t have is coming back to the stellar
neighborhood. At least not quickly. We can take you out, but we won’t come
back if you get bored, lonely, or homesick.”
“How do you have the power to do this? How do you have FTL?” Linwood
questioned.
“We’ll place you in stasis, and not wake you up until we’ve arrived. You
will never know how we did it.”
“Do I get to choose the direction, at least? So I at least have some idea of
where I’ve ended up.”
“You’ll be on the other side of the Zone of Avoidance. Someone else will
work out the particulars with you.”
“Not that I’m not grateful, but why would you do all this for me? I tried to
kill you when we met.”
Mateo winced. “That was a year ago. I’m over it.” Obviously, it hadn’t been
a full year for the team, but he genuinely wasn’t holding onto any grudge.
The guy was trying to protect his home, and the bullets were no match for
their armor. Not a big deal.
Linwood narrowed his eyes at him. “Are you...aliens?”
Mateo thought about this for a moment. “We’re all aliens now, aren’t we? It
used to be that there was only one dominant species. You could carry on a
conversation with another human, and that was pretty much it. Sure, you
could engage in some basic communication with your pets. Elephants buried
their dead, dolphins handed people their phones back, but by and large, it
was just us. Now, I doubt there’s an official record of how many species
there are. How could there be? You could genetically engineer yourself to be
quite literally unique, making you incompatible with anyone else. So either
alien needs to take on a new meaning, or simply be retired as a
concept. I know what you’re asking, if I came from an independent
evolutionary line, and the answer to that is no. I was born on Earth, in
Kansas. But the true spirit of your question is why should you trust
me when I’m behaving in a way that you don’t understand? In that sense, yes,
I’m an alien, because my experiences in this universe have diverged from
your own in unprecedented ways. You don’t have to understand, just accept
the gift.”
“I accept the gift.”
“Great! In the meantime, as it will take another year at least before we can
leave, I’ll speak with Pribadium about better arrangements. I get that she
might not what to build you a master escape artist who can get you out of
here, but you deserve companionship. That is a basic human right. Or
whatever you identify as, if not human.”
“I would appreciate your assistance. That’s quite magnanimous of you.”
Mateo returned with a tight nod, and then left the visitors area.
Pribadium was standing just outside the door. “Making promises that you are
not authorized to keep?” she asked.
Mateo looked back into the little prison where Linwood probably heard that.
He closed the door behind him now. “All he wants is his favorite
entertainment, which keeps him occupied in there, and some companionship,
which keeps him from going insane. This doesn’t have to be punishment, which
is what prisons were back in the dark ages of the 21st century. You’re just
trying to keep him from roaming free, so what exactly is the problem?”
“The problem is optics,” Pribadium said. “We can’t have people thinking that
our response to illegal possession is getting whatever they need to live
comfortably anyway.”
“No one is coming all the way out here, stealing an entire icy body, making
it a home, hoping that you will give them a different home. They’re
not unhoused. They just want to leave wherever they already were before. You
cannot provide them with anything that they couldn’t get on their own
somewhere else without all the headache of dealing with your rules, and the
risk of being locked up like this.”
She shook her head. “I’m not trying to torture the guy, but I have to draw
lines somewhere. You’re right, this won’t inspire a bunch of people to come
here with the hopes that I will give them free room and boarding, but
they might risk stealing material because they know that getting caught
isn’t a big deal. We’ll give them whatever they need until we can get rid of
them, and they’ll be fine.”
Mateo sighed. “Those cameras in there. Are they for security, or a reality
show?”
“Huh?” She was confused about the sudden shift in the topic, and the topic
itself.
“Is it to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself or break out, or is his life
being broadcast for people’s entertainment?”
“They’re just for security, of course, I’m not a monster.”
Mateo nodded. That wasn’t what he was thinking. He knew what the answer was,
but getting her to vocalize the answer was necessary for him to prove his
point. Or rather, it was better that she walked the path with him, instead
of him just jumping there. “We are taking him clear across to the other side
of the galaxy. Who the hell cares about the optics? You don’t have to tell
them about it. Like I said, the VR keeps him inside. He’s not making phone
calls or anything.”
Now Pribadium sighed. “I appreciate your point of view. It’s just not as
easy as you say. You have no idea the kind of pressure I’m under, running an
entire solar system of resources. I am being scrutinized by everyone; not
just the other core worlds, but everyone, because this is where
everyone comes to get their shit. Even if it’s a state-sanctioned
colonial mission, we’re only six light years away, so Earth usually chooses
to come here for their resources too. We’re the biggest store in the
universe. Practically a monopoly.”
“I know what it’s like to be scrutinized,” Mateo argued. “It wasn’t
technically an entire star system, but there were billions of people
who were looking to me for guidance in their everyday lives. And that’s
people, not assets. I didn’t have the benefit of much established
institutionalism. They expected me to help come up with the new
laws. That’s why I was there.”
She put her tail between her legs. “I kind of forgot about that part of your
life. Running Dardius must not have been easy.”
“It wasn’t, but it was rewarding, and everything was so much easier when we
were able to be generous and hospitable to people, rather than restrictive.
I know, you have your laws, and I respect that. Just don’t become a tyrant.
Not only is that bad for people, but it’s bad for you. It doesn’t ever end
well.”
“I appreciate your advice.”
Mateo smiled awkwardly. “I’m not trying to mansplain your job to you. I
apologize if I strayed in that direction.”
“It’s okay. Mansplaining isn’t much of a thing anymore as gender isn’t as
important as it was in your time.”
“Right.” They stood there in silence for a bit. “It’s been a long time, and
I don’t feel like we ever knew each other all that well, but would you be
amenable to a hug?”
“I would like that.”
They hugged.
“Do you know how it’s going in the lab?” Mateo asked once they released.
“I never gave you an answer on whether I was gonna give the guy VR and his
companions back.”
He turned his chin up thoughtfully. “I know you’ll do the right thing.
You’re not a monster, right?”
She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “The lab people are fine. I offered
my assistance, but he, uh...”
“Doesn’t know you,” Mateo finished, knowing full well that it wasn’t what
she was going to say.
“Yes, let’s go with that.”
“Does he think that we’ll be ready to go by the end of the day next year?”
“I would assume so. I also offered to make his lab better during his
interim year, but he declined. I think he’s treating this as quite
temporary, so he’s limiting his projects to only what he needs to get you
guys out of here. You should know, though, that you are welcome to stay. I
do have some leeway. I can essentially put you on the payroll without
actually giving you any jobs, which would allow you to live here. Plus, not
existing for most of the year works in our favor. For the optics.”
“That’s very kind of you, but it looks like you have everything well in
hand, and we typically try to go where we’re needed.”
“I understand. I just want to make sure that our relationship remains
healthy.”
“We’ll always be friends,” he promised. After a proper beat, he continued,
“I’m gonna go check on my wife.”
“Which one?” she asked after he had already passed her. “You dog,” she
joked.
He looked back with a wide smile. “Why, you wanna split me into thirds?”
She shrugged. “I’ll consider it.” It almost didn’t sound like a joke.
