Noumenon Infinity

It wasn’t just the cold, though. Each ship carried its own smell. Eden always smelled so green and fresh, even in its subarctic tundra biodome, and Hippocrates smelled like rubbing alcohol. Mira smelled like home, and depending on what part of Shambhala you were visiting, it could smell like a sweaty gym or a bowl of buttery popcorn.

Hvmnd smelled like something ancient. The way family heirlooms smelled. Like history and age.

“Why am I not surprised to see you here?” said a familiar voice over Caz’s shoulder.

Captain Onuora always did know how to make an entrance. Caz whirled to see great mechanical arms, like silver spider’s legs, dangling from tracts in Hvmnd’s ceiling. They clasped the captain’s wheelchair, and she controlled them deftly from a keypad on her armrest. With a few extra flicks of her wrist, Onuora bade them set the chair down next to Caz, then they folded up and away, ready for her whenever she called on them again.

Caz saluted, and Onuora answered it with a stern expression, before going into Mothering Mode, as she was inclined to do. “News travels fast—shouldn’t you be celebrating? I know you found something down there.”

Caz strode down the walkway, and the captain stayed at her side, the old-world Jamaican flag on the back of her wheelchair fluttering out behind her like a cape.

Onuora was not part of the original Noumenon crew, just as Caz wasn’t part of it. Their lines were fresh, having only been aboard a few generations. But few people of the forty-second century could trace their family history like Onuora. She took pride in her connection to Earth, whereas many of the original crew didn’t seem to care for genealogy past their original’s birth.

Earth was an abstraction in many ways, which had little bearing on their reality. But it also still mattered, if only as something that could provide grounding—perhaps literally—to the convoy’s reality.

“I will,” Caz said, “I mean, I am celebrating, and … he should know.”

The captain gave her a pitying look, shifting uncomfortably in her chair. Her achondroplasia had led to severe arthritis in her hips, as it had with the majority of those in her line. And while the seat was customized just for her—the wheels were controlled by a chip implanted in her brain, just like a prosthetic hand that could grasp or foot that could flex—and was the perfect size for her smaller frame and foreshortened limbs, it wasn’t where she spent the majority of her working hours. In fact, as often as Caz had been to Hvmnd, she rarely saw the captain in her chair. “I’ll give you your privacy, then. Come to the bridge before you leave?”

Hvmnd’s bridge was the only constant zero-g environment in the convoy, at Captain Onuora’s insistence. She preferred the freedom of movement that came with weightlessness. It eased the pressure on her aching joints, let her fly from post to post. Caznal, on the other hand, always felt like a baby animal trying to stand for the first time whenever she visited—all wobbly legs and unintended directions. She wasn’t meant to fly. But that didn’t mean she’d begrudge her friend the visit. “Thank you, Captain. I will. And I can come back tomorrow to work on your chair, if you’re available.” On their off time, they liked to experiment with smaller graviton cyclers, to see if they could invent one precise enough to make Hvmnd’s metal arms obsolete.

“Sounds like a plan,” said the captain with a smile. She swiped at a few keys, and the arms descended once more, lifting her away, back to her bridge crew.

Caz continued her walk. She knew her path well, taking walkway fourteen-A, turning at row five before sauntering down to seat eight. A technician in a sandy-colored jumpsuit checked connections on one chair over, where a Korean woman with a long pale gray braid slept—Roh Jin-Yoon the Sixteenth. Her features flexed with the occasional mental stimulus, either into a half grimace or pseudo smile.

Caznal nodded to the technician next to sleeping Jin-Yoon, who nodded back—the plugs on his dark scalp glimmering in the low light. He pulled an idle connection from where it dangled next to Jin-Yoon’s wrist and plugged it into one of his ports. Caznal immediately averted her eyes, quickly crouching down next to the unconscious man she’d come to visit.

“How are you doing?” Caz asked elderly Ivan the Fourteenth, her mentor, taking his wrinkled hand in hers. He couldn’t answer, of course, but it gave Caznal comfort to speak to him. “We went to the surface. You won’t believe what we found.” Her thumb made tiny circles over the back of his agespotted hand. “I just wanted to let you know, professor. I’ll finally get to apply what you taught me. I wish …” She glanced over her shoulder at the technician.

He had his eyes rolled back in his head, his mouth moving around silent words. His position mirrored Caznal’s in many ways; he too had Jin-Yoon’s hand comfortingly in his.

The techie came from the server lines. Deemed by Earth to have the highest capacity for processing, the people who’d been chosen as new computers for the convoy were now also the caretakers. They had their own lives—lives which Earth never thought they needed to lead—with agency over how they went about them. And still, many of them spent a good chunk of time (67.86 percent of typical waking hours on average, I.C.C. would tell you) plugged in.

That was what Ina had meant when she said her children were sleeping.

Sure she wasn’t being overheard—embarrassed about speaking out loud to someone in the dream state, who, by rights, she shouldn’t even be visiting, since he was legally dead and gone—Caz continued, “I wish you could be awake to see it.”

“Caznal?”

She jolted upright, letting go of Dr. Baraka’s hand.

“I’m sorry,” the Inter Convoy Computer apologized, its voice emanating from a speaker mounted on the underside of the catwalk above. “It wasn’t my intention to startle you.”

“It’s fine, I.C.C. What is it?”

“Your husband is looking for you. I’ve patched him into the control room—Captain Onuora has allowed you to take the call there, for privacy.”

“Thank you.” With a gentle primping of Baraka’s collar, and a quick brush of fingertips through his tussled hair, she let him be.

A set of children rushed by as she climbed flight after flight, through the maze, to the control booth. They all sported age-appropriate connections, and still had their hair—all of it intricately weaved to show off the implants. One little girl pointed at her without a word, and the others nodded emphatically. She wondered, for a moment, if they were speaking mind-to-mind. Under convoy law, they weren’t supposed to, not unless plugged into Hvmnd’s system. The board had a long-ingrained mistrust of secret communications, born of conspiracy and mutiny.

She thought for a moment about chiding them. Not because she begrudged them their heritage, but because it shined a light on her own faux pas. One does not visit the dead, and one does not speak mind-to-mind.

But then the children laughed, as though she not being a caretaker was in itself a joke, and she moved on.

At the top of the ship, a single wide door led into the control room. Inside, behind the long line of forward-tilting windows, was an equally long line of control panels, flanked itself by an equally long metal table. The room was empty, as it often was—the caretakers preferred a more hands-on approach to monitoring their charges. Only occasionally was a sentry posted up top.

“Diego?” Caz asked, noticing the blinking light on one panel, indicating a comm line was open.

“Where are you?” he asked. “Ivan’s here, Vega and MinSeo, too. But no you. We can’t cut the cake until you get back.”

“I just had a quick errand to run.”

His pause said much. “If you’d waited a few hours I would’ve gone with you.”

“I know. I wanted a little time to myself.”

“Self-flagellation isn’t ‘time to yourself.’”

Glaring, she crossed her arms and turned away from the consol. “I’m not punishing … I’m sharing it with him the only way I can.”

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “This is your day, and you should be able to celebrate it however you want.”

“Just give me a little more time. Half an hour, tops, and I’m home.”

“Deal. I love you.”

She turned back around, posture softening. “Love you, too.”

When the call ended, she slumped against the table, tracing the scratches in the surface. This table was nothing like the grand one on Mira, the long single slab of green granite that graced the situation room. That one was specially carved for the original mission, an artisan piece with only eleven brothers and sisters.

“For what it’s worth,” I.C.C. said. “I wish the same. For Doctor Baraka, I mean.”

“Were you eavesdropping?”

“When do I not?”

“Fair point,” she conceded.

She meant to clam up, then. To go back to the professor’s side. But the conflicting feelings—the excitement, the doubt, the sadness and rage—all came gushing forth. Here, in this quiet space, with only the Inter Convoy Computer to hear her, she let loose. “But it’s not fair. They couldn’t give him six months. Six months. Just so he could see where his life’s work was leading. And they wouldn’t let me …”

“I processed your request to wake him,” it said sympathetically. “I know.”

“I mean, I get it. I know why it’s law. Those put under should never be woken again. Retirement is retirement, and whether the retiree travels to Hippocrates or Hvmnd, they both have to be treated the same: gone.” She clutched the edge of the long table, her knuckles whitening as her fingers curled into talons against the smooth surface.

“I understand that as well, though I don’t necessarily agree.”

She was surprised. “No?”