The Castlebourners were mad, and they had every right to be. Dreychan didn’t
commit a cardinal sin, but he did screw up. As soon as the rest of the
council was arrested for conspiracy to commit murder, he should have
addressed the people. He knew how to do that. At any one time, they were
spread all over the world, but he had the means of contacting them
separately from all the visitors. These visitors mostly didn’t know that the
refugees were from 16,000 light years away as that went against everything
they understood about physics and space colonization. The lie that they
spread about a closer empire was weak at best, but it was the only lie they
had. At some point, the full truth about time travel was probably going to
get out to the general public, but for now, Dreychan should have used the
news bulletin protocol. But. It had only been one day, and it didn’t spell
the destruction of the whole planet, so everyone just needed to chill out.
He finally escaped the angry crowd of wannabe journalists, and ducked into
the council chambers. His speech to them wasn’t half bad, if he could be so
bold as to evaluate it himself. Perhaps they felt otherwise, or this was
just such a crazy situation that no one knew what to think, or how to react.
He took a deep breath as he leaned his head against the door, still hearing
them rabble rabble in the corridor. No one else was allowed in here. He used
to dread coming to this room, now it had become his one place of respite.
How had things changed so much in only a matter of a few days? He breathed
through the inner turmoil, and turned back around. “Who are you?”
The elderly woman wearing what appeared to be a robot costume stepped
forward, and extended a hand. “Yunil Tereth, big fan.”
“How did you get in here?” Dreychan questioned. “It’s DNA coded.”
“Twins have the same DNA. My sister was on the Council. I always could have
walked in here. I just never had the occasion.”
“Who could possibly be your twin sister?” There were some fairly old people
on the Council, but none of them quite this old. He was surprised that she
could even stand up on her own.
“Lubiti. Now, I know what you’re thinking...why don’t we have the same last
name?” She giggled. “We never really got along, so when we chose our names,
we deliberately distanced ourselves.”
“I was actually thinking...” Was it offensive to bring up her age?
She giggled again. “When I heard the news, I was in Perspectidome, where you
spend time in someone else’s proverbial shoes, to better understand what
their life would be like. This is only a temporary substrate. Thank God I
chose to make it my older self, instead of just any old lady, so my DNA
works. Pay no attention to the outfit. My character had a backstory that was
out of my control.”
“Okay. Well. You’ll forgive me if I don’t tell you anything since I can’t
really place my trust in that. When it comes to mind transfer, you can’t
trust anyone. That’s one reason why I stayed normal. I’m always me.”
Yunil nodded. “I understand. We can meet again, with me in my own body. I
decided not to take the time to transfer back before coming here now,
because my usual face is...”
“Infamous now?” he guessed.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll tell you what. I don’t know what you want, and I believe it’s best not
to say at this time. Next time I see you, I not only want you to look like
Lubiti, but I want to see you two at the same time. She’ll confirm if you’re
real or not. She’ll know if you’re just a liar in a meatsuit.”
“Fair enough,” Yunil agreed.
“I assume you have my contact card?”
“I do.”
“Send me yours so we can coordinate. I have to reach out to schedule
visitation.”
“I’ll do that.” She started tapping on her device. “Also, can I go out the
back?”
“Go ahead.” While she was leaving, Dreychan pulled out his own device. Her
contact card came through while he was navigating to Azad’s. He took a
moment to think about what he wanted to write.
Good morning, Dominus Petit, I—
“What’s up?”
Dreychan spun around to find another surprise guest. “Dominus. I was just
writing to you.”
“I know,” Azad replied. “I get an alert whenever anyone so much as opens my
card.”
“That’s...a little frightening.”
“It’s a security thing. We need to know who’s thinking about us in case it’s
an assassin, or something worse.”
“I see.”
“There is a workaround. What you do is take a photo of the card using
another device, and consult the image whenever you want. Don’t just take a
screenshot, though, because I, uh, get alerted when that happens too. This
works for anyone with a spy-ping trigger.”
“That’s good to know.”
They stood there awkwardly for a moment. “The trigger doesn’t alert
me to the reason you were looking me up, though,” Azad went on.
“Oh, right, sorry.” Dreychan gestured towards the back door. “I was just
visited by a...old woman who claimed to be Lubiti’s twin sister, but just in
a different substrate. I can’t verify that, so I need to speak with Lubiti
sooner than I expected to ask her about it. And I would like this Yunil to
be present.”
Azad narrowed his eyes at him. “You spoke with her here? Please tell me you
were stupid enough to let her in, and not that she walked in herself.”
“It was the second one.”
Azad sighed as he started tapping on his wrist device. “I’m choosing to
believe that the sister is okay, but if she breached using her shared DNA
with Lubiti, it clearly means that Lubiti could come back in as well.
Presumably, so could any other former member of the Council. Even if they’re
locked up, that is a huge security flaw that we’ll need to cover. I’m
sorry, I can’t grant visitation, to you or her sister, until we
figure this out. For all we know, this whole thing has been a plot to break
her out, and clearly, that could cause problems. I’ll call you with updates
as appropriate.”
“That makes perfect sense. Do what you gotta do, and take your time.” After
Azad disappeared, Dreychan also slipped out the back, and headed for the
senior vactrain hub, which he now had access to thanks to his higher status
on the Council. The reporters wouldn’t be able to follow him there, so it
was another source of protection from the onslaught of questions, though a
sterile and boring one. They shouldn’t be able to accost him at home either,
but perhaps that too was unsafe. There were plenty of places to sleep here.
He could apply for a temporary unit in Overdome maybe. That was so weird and
random, no one would think to look for him there. “Yunil?”
She looked up from her device. “Oh, hello again. Just waiting for my train.”
“Oh.” Super awkward.
“Oh no, what happened?”
He couldn’t say anything. If he explained what Azad just said about the
access flaw, it might give her an idea that she didn’t have before! Argh,
no! Get him out of here!
Yunil smiled knowingly. “You don’t have to tell me anything. If you’re not
busy, perhaps you can accompany me back to Perspectidome, where my real body
is waiting for me? I’m not thinking that that will be enough to get you to
trust me, but if you see the records which prove that it’s my primary, maybe
that gets us one step closer to trust.”
“I suppose I have nothing better to do.” The train zipped through the tube
before them, and the doors opened. The both of them stepped onto it, and let
it take them away. They were alone in the pod, which was good. This time was
usually busy with people coming and going, but the council shake up must
have rippled across the population, and altered other people’s personal
schedules. It wasn’t long before they were at their destination. Dreychan
looked around, confused. “We didn’t have to stop at a Conjunction. I didn’t
know that was ever a thing.”
“Don’t need one, with that handsome face of yours. You’re now not only a
senior traveler, but an executive senior traveler. Every train has
become an express train. We probably did go through a Conjunction, but we
didn’t have to stop and switch tracks. And yes, Perspectidome is relatively
close.”
The doors reopened, and let them out. They proceeded to the intake plaza,
where Yunil informed the bot that she was picking her primary substrate back
up. They processed her biometrics, and let them into the transfer room.
“This is the weird part.”
“What’s weird about it?” Dreychan asked. “Besides everything?” He knew very
little about how all this body switching stuff worked, and didn’t care to
know. She could tell him that a microscopic creature was going to crawl out
of her ear, and into the one of the body she was trying to move to, and he
would believe it, because he really just did not know.
“This body isn’t just temporary. It’s disposable, and is actually
required to be disposed of. It’s going to melt, which might be unsettling to
watch.”
Dreychan stared at her. “If you’re going to disrobe, I’m not going to be
watching anyway.”
She laughed. “No, the clothes are biosynthetic, so they’ll just melt too.”
“Still, I don’t think I’ll watch.”
“I can appreciate that.” She pointed at the side door. “My primary is in
that room. It is unclothed, but it looks nicer, and it’s not going to melt.
You can wait for me there.”
He went into the other room to find a motionless body that looked just like
Lubiti. It was floating in this big vertical tube against the wall, in some
kind of bubbly amber fluid. Within minutes, her eyes popped open. She took a
moment to get her bearings before settling into eye contact with Dreychan.
She smiled at him kindly before reaching down and turning some kind of wheel
on the floor. The fluid started to drain away. Once the tube was empty, she
slid the hatch open and climbed out.
Dreychan had noticed a towel sitting folded on the table between them. He
picked it up now, and tried to hand it to her.
She smiled wider now. “I have to wash up first. It’s basically amniotic
fluid.” She glided over to the shower, which didn’t even have a curtain. So
he wouldn’t keep staring, he went over to the machines, and started looking
at the various components, as if his observations alone would give him any
understanding of how they worked.
“It’s okay,” she said while she was still in there. “I switched on the
holo-partition.”
He looked back over, but it was a lie.
“Sorry! I’m a bit of a trickster.” Yunil did this weird hand gesture where
she tapped the tip of her own fingers with her thumb and flicked her wrist a
little. The hologram appeared now. It was rather translucent, and barely
tall enough to cover the important bits, but he didn’t want to argue
anymore, so he just kept his eyes on hers. “Don’t be so uptight. You treat
your own body as a vital part of you, but for people like me, it’s just a
husk. You don’t cry for your clipped fingernails, do you? I’ve met people
who look like rabbits, mythological creatures, and even machines. There’s a
dome here where you transfer your mind to a vehicle, and drive. It feels
like you are the vehicle, not like you’re just sitting in one.”
“I don’t cry for my nails,” Dreychan explained, “but my body is not
something I can lose. It would be more like the body loses me. We call that
death.”
“Well, that’s your first problem. You see death as inevitable. The
vonearthans see it as an anachronism.” She sighed. “I’m gonna have to walk
through the hologram to reach the towel.”
He looked away again.
“Oh my God,” she said. “It’s not me. It’s her. Do you have a thing for her?”
He took one little peek. The towel was now keeping her covered. “She was
nice to me. It’s over now.”
“I’m nice to you, and that’s not over.”
“What are you saying?”
“Drey—”
“Please don’t call me that.”
“Okay.” She didn’t see it as a big deal. “Your video was leaked, did you not
know that?” She opened a drawer, and pulled out a set of clothes, which she
set on the counter between them.
“Of me in 2.5Dome? No, I am indeed aware of that. Many of the reporters’
questions had to do with how I survived the ordeal.”
“You don’t understand. No one has ever made it through that whole
game in one go. It’s only supposed to be for people like me, for whom death
is but a temporary setback. The loudest people are mad that you didn’t make
your announcement right away, but most of us are extremely impressed, and
that is quickly overshadowing any resentment we feel about the lack of
immediate transparency. I came to you because I wanted to meet the man who
refused to die. I wanted to meet the man who my sister underestimated. You
want my body, you can have it. You want me to jump to another one, and have
that instead, just say the word.”
“That’s not what this is about for me. I don’t feel emotions for bodies. I
feel them for people. And we just met.”
“We can take it slow,” she said with a shrug as she tossed her towel into
the material reclamator, and started slipping on the outfit. “But maybe not
too slow. After all...if you’re planning on dying in less than a
century, you better get on it. You don’t have as many opportunities to find
happiness as almost everyone else in this part of the galaxy. I admire that
in people like you, but...not if you take it for granted.”
“I don’t need you to feel any particular way about me. I just want you to
tell me what you really want. And don’t say it’s just about sex. I don’t
believe that.”
“You told me you didn’t want me to tell you yet.”
“I changed my mind.”
She nodded. “I’m part of a group.”
“Oh, shit.” That word. His brain instantly associated it with other, less
innocuous ones, like rebellion, insurgency, or
traitor.
“Don’t be like that. We’re not violent. We’re connoisseurs of Earthan
history. Ya know, our ancestors were grown in test tubes by a madman, who
stole them from a ship, which originated in the Gatewood Collective, and
whose passengers were once refugees from another universe, which were the
descendants of runaways...from Earth. Yes, our peoples have a longer history
of fleeing oppression and strife than you might know. But while we don’t
call ourselves vonearthan, we are all technically sourced from there. My
group studies the homeworld, because we believe it is the absolutely most
important aspect of our lives, now that we even know it exists. I came to
you, Dreychan, because if you want to know how to formulate the new
government of Castlebourne, you have a perfectly good model to base it on.
Earth spent thousands of years trying to figure it out. Don’t reinvent the
wheel. My friends and I will show you what works. It’s been working for
centuries. That’s how they were able to build this paradise.”
“Hrockas built it to get away from Earth.”
“No, he was assigned this planet because while it is naturally barren, it’s
stable, gravitationally healthy, and the host star is relatively similar to
Sol. Its distance from the Core Worlds is the product of cosmic statistical
probability, not a design feature.”
“What are you trying to say now?” He was getting confused.
“Don’t think that you need to rebuild the Council back to how it was. You
might not even need a council. All I’m saying is get yourself
educated before you start making any decisions. I’m here to give you
whatever you need, and I don’t just mean access to my body. My brain is
pretty great too.”
Dreychan’s watch beeped, so he checked the notification. “No more express
trains for you. You’ve been locked out of government privileges. Or rather,
Lubiti was.”
Yunil rolled her eyes. “DNA locks are so stupid anyway. All I need is one
hair, and I can grow a passing clone in a matter of months without setting
off any alarm bells. It should be brainwave-locked. I know they have that
technology. You should demand it.”
Dreychan breathed deeply. “I still can’t trust you. We need to set up that
meeting with your so-called sister.”
She chuckled. “That’s not the first time she’s been called that.
I call her that. And yeah, I’m down for the meeting whenever. I
cancelled all future dome trips, so I’ll just be sitting at home whenever
you’re ready. I will be able to leave at a moment’s notice.”
“I’ll talk to my contact again,” Dreychan said. “But right now, I’m
exhausted, so I think I’m gonna go home. Maybe we don’t share a train
again?”
She shook her head. “We’re not going to the same place anyway. I live in
Underbelly.”
