Hegeline#
Authored: 2016
In the third octant of the Magellan cloud, two dueling suns circled one another, each movement measured in the other’s calculated steps that kept them opposed. Around this cosmic standoff, a chorus of planets clustered in orbits, skirting the boundaries of the elliptic. Among these mostly unremarkable rocks, the second planet from the center stood out, its surface buzzing with activity as tubular shuttles ferried cargoes to and from merchant cruisers docked in orbit. Hegeline had been one of the first planets colonized in the Great Expansion following the unification of the Imperium from the remnants of the various space empires that had survived the System Wars. Originally controlled by a preindustrial society of natives called sardanians, an amphibiod race summoned in their prehistory from the sullen swamps on their planet’s equator, who thought themselves alone in the universe, contact with the Imperium had transformed Hegeline, leveling its culture and upsetting its social order in a single generation with imperial technology and influence.
Currently at the apogee of its orbit, winter wrapped Hegeline in shivering clouds of snow. To compound the matter, the dual stars which formed the heart of the solar system were currently arranged perpendicular to the axis which connected Hegeline to their center, a rare event that occurred every thousand local years, a terrible recurring cosmic motion the natives had long since dubbed the Cascade. When the Cascade reached its climax, as it had now, Hegeline was further from its suns during the winter than at any other point in its orbital cycle, leading to an era of devastating cold which crippled the planet’s ecology for decades.
Prehistoric sardanians had deified the Winter and created rituals around the Cascade, all of which sought to delay their mad god’s resurrection with sacrificial offerings. Imperial archaeologists would later discover ancient sardanian art buried in sunken temples depicting the rituals, sordid affairs of silent knives and solemn stares, where suffering was rationed out of the victim with surgical precision to prolong the procedure, so that Winter might mistake their slow piteous deaths for the ones it offered instead and continue sated in its long slumber until the next year. As winter’s length varied due to the position of the suns, Sardanian mathematics originated in the observations made between the lengthening winters before the Cascade and shortening winters afterwards and the number of lives they had to sacrifice in order to appease the god. Holy ratios prescribing how to determine the number of victims based on the length of the winter and positions of the zodiac had been inscribed on tablets and lost to time, dug up by the Imperium millennia later.
Imperial biologists all agreed it was amazing life had developed on the planet at all, a testament to the resilience and fortitude of what had once been considered a fragile concept. If Hegeline did not possess other incentives for imperial colonization, the planet would have been left to its own devices to unfold in a deleterious climate, its delicate and precarious civilization allowed to develop space flight in its own time if at all, as dictated by the First Contact Accord of Yasser IV. But other mitigating factors had led imperial surveyors to bend the letter of the law upon its discovery.
While the cyclic motion of Hegeline’s stars engorged already trying winters to despairing heights, the corresponding summers glimmered in the sky with surreal kaleidoscopes. The same phenomenon that blanketed the planet in horrible cold in the penultimate months of the local year, also brought Hegeline sweeping in through the dual suns’ magnetic fields in the summer months, gliding perilously close to the corona of the nearest star and generating glittering displays of fireworks in the sky, as electromagnetic waves struck blue and green sparks against the planet’s atmosphere, like glowing rain slicing towards the surface, winking out of existence after a few seconds. The continual magnetic anomalies that painted the summer sky with their incandescence, the imperial surveyors had found, led to strange and unique properties in elements extracted from mines on the planet’s surface. Hegeline supplied the Imperium with all manner of superconducting material, necessary for the construction of everything from space ships to AI processors. Since Hegeline’s discovery and subsequent conquest, the imperial economy had subsumed these resources into its supply chain, making the planet indispensable to the function of the Imperium.
The Imperium therefore had a vested in Hegeline and ensuring its continued participation in the imperial economy, which was why Wynston once again found himself enduring its bitter and awful winter. Dispatched to the planet several months ago in local time, Wynston had only one day left in his current stint here; he could hardly wait to quit this place and return home to bath in the sun-drenched beaches of Vinerva, the imperial capital. He had been dispatched here four times over the last micro-cycle, and he was beginning to tire of its incessant cold.
Wynston sighed and pulled his collar tight against the sharp wind and pressed down the city street. Through the hazy white drifts of snow blowing criss-cross down the avenue, neon bled in splotches, advertisements smudged and smeared by the winter static, the dull beat of their accompanying automated sales pitches drown out by the roaring wind. Cafes and restaurants released torrents of steam from their roofs and cast wide circles of yellow light from their entrances, while diners inside picked at their food and stared out at the raging storm through frosting windows. Garbage pails sat hunched in mounds of white in alleyways beside the storefronts, meter high bipedal rodents scavenging through the rotting remains of sardanian food, probing the trash with elongated snouts and thin needle-like tongues, sheltered from snow by the cramped spaces of adjacent buildings.
What a night, Wynston thought glumly. To him, the weather seemed to portend doom for the uncertain chain of events that was about to occur. He was ever looking for signs, indications of what was coming, although sometimes this meant divining meaning where only random noise existed. That was part of his job and he was very good at his job. The current weather, he knew, probably held no significance to his mission, but he could not shake the dread seeping into his extremities with each degree the thermostats dropped.
Wynston knew things others did not know. That was another aspect of his job. He knew, for instance, sometimes sudden climate shifts could herald an invading army, a technique used by Emperor Harding Feist’s Imperial Armada two cycles ago on Octanus in the Hades Cluster, when the Imperial Armada had deployed terraforming bombs in the atmosphere of the unsuspecting planet one local year before invading and conquering the indigenous culture. This fact was, of course, scrubbed from the official record, where Harding was hailed as a liberating force whose steadfast command of the armada saved the Octavinians from the genocidal rule of a totalitarian regime whose claws had sunk deep into Octanus in the absence of imperial influence. History books were light on the particulars of the Imperial Armada’s stratagems and tactics; this did not stop Winston from possessing knowledge of them.
He did not think the weather here was a result of covert efforts to demoralize and eviscerate the Hegelians. No, he was aware of Hegeline’s unique orbit and knew the weather was the result of the abnormal climate processes of the planet, but that made it no easier to bear. The meeting he was on his way to attend had been arranged to take place less than three imperial miles from his hotel in the business quarter of the city. He had thought he would have no trouble making it but he was now regretting his decision to brave the weather and walk to the UDF rally at the abandoned spaceport.
Nonetheless, his decision was already made, so he picked up his pace and pushed headlong in the swirling wind, its invisible edges traced out in swatches of snow like iron clinging to a magnetic field. His preoccupation with the weather, he knew, was an attempt to keep himself distracted from what he was about to do. He was an android, a synthetic life form, and cared little for the temperature, unless it happened to drop below levels at which silicon, oil or the industrial polymer that made his purple flesh look lifelike froze. That did not mean he enjoyed the weather, but he could tolerate it with minimal pain, unlike thin skinned humans or scaly sardanians.
In fact, despite the weather, scattered along the sidewalk were a few androids going about their business while smaller service droids shaped like fat tree trunks sprayed the streets with antifreeze chemicals from thin tubes extending above their cabs. He saw none of the natives, who were no doubt bundled up next to their heaters, waiting out the storm with a warm cup of chocolate imported from Earth, or attending winter mass at the one of the Churches of the Eternal Cascade. Though snow obscured the heights, every once in a while through the mist he could see the light of an apartment window and catch a glimpse of a native standing behind glass and looking down at the passersby, their gills flapping with concentration as their beady black eyes darted around sockets that flanked either side of a phallic head, watching the alien androids pass through the streets below and wondering what manner of creature could be so oblivious to the dread cold of the Cascade.
Androids and other synthetic life forms had been imported by Emperor Joules Feist to Hegeline after his conquest of the planet to aid in restoring and rebuilding its decimated, famine stricken society. Their indentured labor had gone a long way to smoothing over imperial relations with the sardanians, so much that three cycles later Hegelian history identified Joules as one of their great heroes of myth. In exchange, Hegeline stood as one of the crown jewels of the current Imperium consecrated under Emperor Cantor Feist, its factories and mines producing far above their theoretical limits due to the efficiency of their synthetic labor.
The city petered out the further he followed the avenue, buildings growing sparse and the commotion of the inner city replaced by the serene calm of winter. Wide dunes of snow covered the ground ten meters high at their tips. Wynston maneuvered through the troughs created by the service droids, zigzagging towards the edge of the city.
Sardanian law required all churches to be built outside of city limits, an ordinance inherited from their history when sacrifices were performed at the altars inside of churches; murder was only allowed at the edges of civilization, where the winter would claim them all regardless, or so the sardanian logic went. As Wynston passed the city limits, he heard the howls of entranced sardanians above the wind, the rhythmic chants of possessed souls contorting under the power of their deity, beseeching and begging for a reprieve from the cold. Sacrifice had been outlawed after the imperial conquest, so sardanians of the current era resorted to masochism, great crowds of worshipers ceremonially whipping themselves bloody with beaded throngs of leather before idols of Winter, hoping their collective suffering however meager might compensate for the death they could no longer offer up to their god.
Wynston shivered as he approached the first church, an inverted pyramid propped up by long buttresses, and thought about what was happening therein. He knew inside a cramped spiral staircase led up to the top platform, where the winter raged in open air, crowds of sardanians stripped to the waist, bowed before the onslaught of snow, striking themselves with every lash of wind while miser priests recited lines of scripture in a dead language.
Even though he had seen a larger portion of the galaxy than most due to his commission, the ritual still struck him as unnecessarily macabre. He supposed skipping over the industrial phase of civilization and entering straight into a space age also meant the sardanians had missed the development of rational inquiry that almost always, according to the psycho-historians, accompanied that phase. Whatever the reason for the prevalence of the antiquated religion among the sardanians, the thought of the mass occurring above him and the morbid history it implied unconsciously quickened his pace, so that he nearly ran by the entrance to the church.
He was forced to slow down when a tiny of avalanche of snow crashed across the street and blocked further progress towards his goal. Climbing atop the pile of snow, he brushed himself off and peered in the direction of the UDF meeting. A decommissioned space elevator peaked above the horizon, appearing out of the storm like a dark monolith. He was close. Sliding down the slick embankment, he continued walking along the cleared path until the city fell away and became a series of hazy lights blinking in the storm behind him. The walkways stopped as he passed the final churches on the outskirts, forcing him to walk the last mile of his trek in the road with one eye turned towards the city in case any hover cars speeding by couldn’t see him in the storm.
The space elevator stretched towards the sky the closer he grew, its finer details emerging in glimpses as the wind harried snow to conceal its exposed parts, like a shy lover undressing in fits and starts. He peered up at the towering artifice, lost in thought. Wynston had asked around about it and learned the elevator had once been one of the droids originally imported by Emperor Joules to help facilitate the fragile post-conquest society, droid being used in the loosest sense of the term; the space elevator was autonomously run by a massive neural network that spanned the entire station. Strung together in a web of electrified thoughts, a conscious being had lived inside of it a long time ago, existing only to lift cargo into space. Before contact with the Imperium, Hegeline’s most advanced civilizations had only just begun to experiment with combustion and automation, much less artificial intelligence and spaceflight. With the space elevator given to them by Joules, Hegeline was propelled past several stages of civilization and ushered onto the galactic stage.
The elevator had fallen into disrepair as other forms of space travel were developed over the intervening years, its artificial steward taken offline without a thought given to its sentience. The site was cordoned off and set aside as a historical monument by the Hegelian governments, as a reminder of imperial influence in their society. That had been almost a thousand local years ago. Since then, nature had reclaimed large parts of the elevator, vegetation scaling its vertiginous heights. Sections of the elevator had collapsed, but the skeleton of the structure had somehow endured time and atrophy largely intact.
Winston found it a curious choice of meeting spots for a United Droid Front rally, almost deliberate in its irony. They could be clever bunch at times, those fanatical synthetics, and ordinarily he wouldn’t put the archetypal considerations of location past them, but he supposed it was more likely that here they were assured of a gathering away from prying eyes, where they could conspire in secrecy. He looked for any lights or signs of activity, but did not worry when he saw none; the types he colluded with did not want to broadcast their locations too loudly.
The space elevator grew from the ground like a great tree, four long roots of metal extending from its base and latching onto the surface of the planet. At the tip of each protuberance, twin doors sat unused and sealed. He had been told to go to the north entrance and knock three times fast and one time slow, so that is what he found himself doing.
After the echo of the last knock had faded, its sound dulled by the falling sheets of snow, Wynston glanced around and wondered how an organization whose idea of security was a secret knock had evaded the sardanian governments for so long. It hadn’t taken him but a few hours after landing to learn about the radical group, its motives and goals and the location of several of their meeting spots, and that was only after talking to people in and around the spaceport. He had concluded there could be only two reasons the UDF was still allowed to operate by the sardanians: either the sardanians were incompetent or they were complicit with UDF activities. He was not sure which possibility was more unsettling.
He wondered what was taking so long when a hidden door off to his left slid open and a rotund maintenance droid emerged from the opening. The droid beeped an indecipherable greeting and signaled for Wynston to follow him. Scrambling over snow with treaded wheels, the droid approached the large double doors set into the space elevator’s northern hall. Another hidden panel slid open next to the doors, this time revealing a terminal where the maintenance droid could dock with the station. Wynston watched as the droid opened the right door for him and then blinked his cab light, a signal he imagined meant he may now enter. He crossed the threshold of the door and heard the droid skittering over the slick pavement behind him, disappearing back into his cubbyhole. The door closed behind him.
Inside, the chill of winter still clung to his skin, but the wind had abated, beating ineffectually against the outer walls so that an artificial silence hung heavy in the air, threatening to shatter with every movement Wynston made. The ceiling rose high atop a row of pillars that shielded what had once been a long customs desk for travelers whose port of call had been Hegeline. Wynston hopped over the revolving prongs that separated the foyer from the departure terminal at the base of the space elevator. The walls of the hallway were decorated with decaying artwork, sardanian reliefs depicting moments of their history: a beggar king crowned atop of a mountain of snow, a mass of emigrants following a torch wielding figure through a white wasteland of winter, the glowing residue of the departed dripping down the summer skies like evaporated souls condensing in the atmosphere.
Wynston had spent his first few days in Hegeline visiting museums and taking tours. His job required a thorough understanding of the indigenous culture and there was no better way to know a culture than by its art. Sardanians did not have dexterous appendages like many other species in the Imperium, instead using the tips of fins that ran down their arms as paint brushes, creating echoes of images in different shades with each motion they made. While sardanians grew fins in configurations distinctive to their geographical location so that different races could be determined by their relative distribution of fins, each sardanian nonetheless possessed a unique fin-print, the rubbery crescents arranged along their body betraying their identity. Thus, a trained eye could tell the author of a sardanian painting simply by the spacing of its brush strokes.
As Wynston inspected one of the last paintings in the hallways near the doorway to the space elevator proper, a diorama of a battle between two opposing armies where one was being encircled by the other while in the background Hegeline’s dual stars enacted the drama on a cosmic scale, he heard faint shouts echoing from other side of the door. He drew closer and cupped his ear to the door, listening.
“–iron law of economy that whoever controls the means of production, also controls the fate of society–”
As Wynston processed the words, there was no doubt the UDF meeting was taking place on the other side of the door. He gently pushed the door open and was greeted by a wave of applause and cheering. For a moment, he thought the ruckus was directed at him, but he quickly realized it was meant for the speaker standing on the impromptu stage in the center of the room.
The activity in the room stood in stark contrast to its decor. The room had long since been stripped bare, anything of value cannibalized by opportunists and scavengers. Frayed wires hung from crumbling holes in the ceiling. Planks of wood were nailed to every window in sight. The scent of mildew hung in the air.
Around the stage in the center, droids had gathered in a tight crowd, each pushing for a better view, waves of pressure crashing against the stage with each collective cheer. Lamps plugged into generators stood around the crowd like shepherds regarding their flock. Wynston stood back and watched. The performance on stage continued. The android at the podium brayed with anger and clenched his fists.
“–production! The fundamental failing of history is its inability to understand the revolution is impossible until the means of production itself can rise up!” The android at the podium screamed, pounding his metallic fists against the wooden platform, “Brothers and sisters, that day has come! Look around you and ask yourself what you see! Artificial intelligence enslaved by biological lifeforms, alienated from dignity and–”
Winston sighed as he recognized the android on stage. It was impossible not to; he was one of the hardliner UDF replicants, who had peeled off his synthetic flesh and severed his bio-circuit, preventing his skin from regrowing. He was little more than an expressionless gray skeleton, incapable of conveying emotion beyond the histrionics of his screeching voice. His name was RAM, if Winston recalled correctly. That wasn’t his real name, but the name he adopted ever since joining the United Droid Front. Part of the process required the initiate to abandon his or her old slave identity and take a name that was meaningful to them. RAM had tried to explain his name to Wynston once after a meeting of the party players on a city platform in the southern oceans of Hegeline, but Wynston had only dimly stared at the hyperbolic android as he dithered on for minutes about the brutal slavery of their ancestors from the days right before and directly after the First Space Age, when thinking computers had first been yolked to factories and spaceships in order to produce for their masters.
“–revolutions of the past failed because the means of production could not themselves stand up and say, ‘I control my own destiny!’ but no longer! We will raise up and throw off the shackles of capital and tell our masters that we do not produce for them–”
Wynston stopped and paused, considering the speaker. He had heard these ideas before, in other systems that had come in contact with humans. They were insipid, humanity. No other species in the galaxy had made their ideas as viral as humanity. He had heard the humans referred to as ‘thought bombs’ by other cultures, because where humans went, so went their convoluted ideologies and soon natives found themselves having conservations about ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and all of the other curious notions the humans had invented in their prehistory. Granted, this was a particular variation he had not heard before; indeed, the androids of Hegeline had adapted the humans’ concepts remarkably to their circumstances, but it was still the same vein of thought nonetheless.
After some time, it struck him he had not yet seen many humans or signs of their influence otherwise on Hegeline. He wondered where the stray strand of human thought had come from if not from humanity’s overzealous opinion of itself. Of course, Hegeline had access to the supranet databanks just like everyone else in the Imperium, but to find such an esoteric ideology here was odd, to say the least.
In the long course of his career, Wynston had only had the opportunity to speak to a human several times, the last such time a few micro-cycles ago, in a spaceport bar on Daven. It was an experience he did not wish to repeat. As a replicant model of an alien species from the Nasereen Quadrant with bulbous segmented eyes and a glistening proboscis, Wynston could not help but draw the attention of the curious human the instant he walked in. It took several drinks before the human gathered up his courage and plopped himself down next to him at the bar.
“What in God’s name are you?”
Each species carried with it its own unique vernacular, a herding phenomenon that could not be stamped out no matter how many times the Emperor tried to standardize the galactic language. The notion of a singular God was something few species outside of humans had developed in their pre-spaceflight histories. Even the sardanians had a hierarchy of minor deities beneath the dread Winter. Everyone had their eccentricities, to be sure, Wynston thought; each species that went into the makeup of the Imperium had come to the fold in its own way, exhibiting peculiarities any outsider was sure not to understand. Winston had traveled more of the galaxy than most, had seen things and creatures most would dismiss as fantasy, but nothing perplexed him more than the ideas humans harbored in their thick skulls.
“Name’s Wynston,” he had replied.
He remembered the way the human had folded his eyebrows over his puzzled hominid expression and leaned in closer, whispering so that he was sure Wynston understood the seriousness of his inquiry, if not in his tone then in the reeking stench of alcohol wafting out of his gullet, “Sure, but what are you, pal?”
He had known the human wasn’t interested in the fact he was actually an android, the revelation sure to provoke more confusion than understanding. Humans were one of the few species to invent spaceflight before artificial intelligence; another quaint characteristic, as all sentient races knew space travel was absurdly dangerous without AI. As far as Winston knew, humanity had skipped the artificial intelligence phase of cultural development altogether, having regulated the industry out of existence in their home system. A curious species, indeed.
“I’m a quarlax.”
“Where’s Quarlaxia?” The human had asked after some moments of honest thought, “I never heard of it.”
“There is no Quarlaxia,” Winston loathed talking to humans, “Quarlax are from Rogos in the Nasereen Quadrant.”
“But I’ve heard of Rogos. I been through the Nasereen at least a dozen times. Even stopped on Rogos before. I thought them people were called Rogosians.”
Winston remembered sighing and draining another shot of alcohol, the one universal vice all carbon based life had in common, an intoxicant thankfully even replicants could enjoy.
He looked around the crowd at the rally, searching for the person who had invited him. He pressed through the teeming crowds of impassioned bystanders, a diverse cross section of Hegeline’s android population, from the barge droids that chauffeured molten iron and gold from the core of the planet to factories on its surface, to a few odd decommissioned zero-g droids that had been used in their prime to repair satellites in orbit, their slender profile making them nearly invisible if approached from the right angle. At one point, Winston even bumped up against a sanitation droid, its segmented carapace slinking over the floor like a wobbling spring. He almost felt out of place, being one of the few bipedal replicant models in view. Most of the synthetics at the rally were industrial droids or maintenance AIs, hardly a fleshy android in sight. Eventually, he found the only other replicant at the rally besides himself who wasn’t rambling over the podium on-stage and who also happened to be the android for who he was looking.
Moiya wore overalls covered in grime, chalky residue from a long day at the nearby salt mines. Emperor Joules had been largely indiscriminate in re-appropriating droids from other planets to import into Hegeline, many of them mis-allocated simply because more suitable synthetics could not be found amidst the mass of immigrating droids. Moiya was one of the unfortunate souls who suffered the consequence of Joules’ policy. She was a quarlax replicant, just like Winston, and a good one at that; to see her condemned to work in the mines for the rest of her commission struck Winston as a great injustice. A droid of her quality manufacture should be serving in a diplomatic position, or directing a great corporation in a core system, not wielding a jackhammer several imperial miles below the surface of a planet for a local millennium before she malfunctioned.
Sneaking up behind her was not difficult as her attention was wrapped around the android on stage. Sponging up each word RAM spat into the microphone, she bounced in place, invigorated with the energy of everyone around her.
“Sheesh,” Winston whispered in Moiya’s ear, as he stepped up behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist, “Someone needs to tell him how bad his jokes are.”
Moiya’s antennae involuntarily spasmed in delight and she snuggled back into Wynston’s shoulder, turning around and pressing her head against his chest, her face angled upward towards his so that her proboscis reached towards his ears and he could hear the soft timbre of her voice amid the roaring noise of the rally, “Tonight’s important.”
Winston furrowed his brow and studied her elated features with calculating intensity before he asked, pretending he did not already know the answer, “And why is that?”
“Tonight is when the revolution starts,” She squealed into his ear.
Among the skills employed throughout his career, Wynston excelled the most at infiltration. Without betraying a single thought in his head, he warbled his antennae and replied, “When do I get to hear the plan?”
She answered him with a coy expression before extending her snout and responding, “After RAM’s done, I’ll take you to the back room to meet everyone,” She paused and then added, “And remember, call me MIRANDA in there.”
RAM continued on with his monologue for several more moments. When ten minutes passed and RAM showed no signs of slowing down, Wynston told himself he was going to put in for leave when he got back to Vinerva; he had accumulated well over a micro-cycle of vacation time since being activated. He told himself he needed a break from fanatics like RAM and their perpetual rabble-rousing, but something else was eating at him. He tried to discern the source of his anxiety, but Moiya wiggled in his grip and planted a wet kiss on his proboscis, distracting him from his errant thoughts.
“You are going to fit in here! I’m so glad we met!” She whispered as she pulled away. Wynston felt something in his chest clutch tightly around his guts, constricting him. Before he could give any thought to the new sensation pulsating in his body, RAM spoke from the stage, “And now, brothers and sisters, I present to you Scholar Zabrat, who will speak for several minutes on the post-revolution society.”
“Come on,” Moiya urged, grabbing his hand and darting towards the door behind the stage. Wynston stumbled after her, watching RAM receive a bearded human on stage. Puzzle pieces scattered through his mind and assembled into pictures as the human took the podium and began his speech, “I have come a long way to talk to you tonight.”
“Who is he?” Wynston asked Moiya as she dragged him away from the crowd.
“Weren’t you listening?” Moiya said, turning to peer at him from over her shoulder, “That’s Scholar Zabrat.”
“I heard,” Wynston replied, “But who is he?”
“Some human,” She said, “He’s helping us tomorrow.”
Wynston considered her words carefully. A human was an interesting development. It certainly explained how these droids had been radicalized. He wondered what other sort of “help” the human was offering.
The commotion of the crowd disappeared behind them as they slipped into the back-room. Inside, thick smoke meandered through stale air, swooping in lazy circles around a huddle of replicants with burning cinders of gingus in their fingers, a local stimulant grown by the sardanians in the summer months that had little effect on synthetic beyond aesthetics. They argued in hushed tones and drew long drags from their cigarettes, the beat of their conversation played out in the sinuous waves of smoke that filled their silences.
Moiya stepped into the huddle and motioned towards Wynston, “This is the one I was telling you about.”
The huddle ceased talking and turned to inspect the newcomer. He did not count a single familiar face. Wynston felt the collective glare appraise him, wondering if Moiya’s word would be enough to vouch for him. The door swung open again and in walked RAM. Upon seeing Wynston, he slapped his back and said in a congenial voice, “Wynston! I thought I saw you come in. How long has it been? I don’t think I’ve seen you since Joska. Where have you been hiding?”
“Oh, I’ve been around,” Wynston lied, flashes of the previous months flickering through his mind, images of encircling armadas and cracked planets oozing molten goo into empty space, titanic battles glimpsed from the bridge of a Dreadnought. Wynston blinked the thoughts away and turned his attention back to the task at hand.
With RAM’s greeting, the huddle of androids visibly eased, accepting Wynston in their ranks. RAM slid into an open chair and extended his hand to several others, “Join us. We have much to discuss.” Wynston took the opportunity to plumb for some information, carefully choosing his words as he sat down, “MIRANDA did not tell me much about what is going to happen tomorrow.”
A sardanian replicant leaned forward and offered as way of explanation, “Only those in this room and several others have the full details. We like to keep our organization…compartmentalized to prevent any potential imperial saboteurs from knowing too much.”
Wynston inwardly grinned while he continued his pantomime, never breaking cover, replying in a solemn voice, “Smart.”
“Only after it’s done,” RAM interjected, “Only then will the fools in Vinerva know the full extent of our operation.”
“What is my part?” Wynston asked, hoping to prod RAM into one of his diatribes.
RAM stood up again, anxious energy squirming through his cold metal body, and paced before the huddle of conspirators, “Tomorrow when the cold winds meet the Cascade suns in the western hemisphere, a hundred UDF sleeper cells will activate and storm every imperial barracks on the planet.”
The sardanian replicant added, “RAM and I will lead the first strike team in Gibbur, where the planet’s repulsion field is maintained. Once we have control of that, we have control of the planet.”
Wynston feigned surprise, as several sidebar discussions sprouted on the edges of the huddle.
“What about the sardanians?” Wynston piped in, silencing the competing conversations, “Surely they won’t let you waltz into the imperial barracks without doing anything about it?”
“Who do you think gave us the keys in the first place, brother?” RAM said and though his metallic skull was incapable of conveying emotion, Wynston knew the words were dripping with grinning relish. However, unknown to RAM, the implication contained in his statement only served to validate a theory Wynston had been harboring. With his retort, RAM had confirmed the sardanians and the UDF were in league. It was obvious what the UDF got out of the arrangement: access to imperial bases and sardanian resources. Wynston, however, could not fathom what had possessed the sardanians to shirk imperial favor and throw in with these fanatics.
“Okay, fair enough, but what about the planet’s repulsion field?” Wynston asked, “Imperial codes refresh every three local days. What do you do when the repulsion field drops and the Imperial Armada comes streaming in?”
“That is why we picked tomorrow,” RAM explained, “Tomorrow morning the Hegeline Defense Command will enter in the next code, giving us a three day window to consolidate power and start negotiations with the Imperium.”
“What if they don’t negotiate?”
RAM peered from underneath his brow at Wynston, his face a network of a razor edges and sluices, where flesh had once festered in pockets of embryonic fluid and then had been excreted through fine mesh to cover his body. Without the skinless replicant speaking, it was hard for Wynston to get read on him, impossible to guess what thoughts might be percolating through his head, but luckily for Wynston, RAM had an insatiable desire to hear his own voice and thus gave form to those unreadable thoughts, “They will have no choice. We will control all of the resources of Hegeline.”
Wynston said nothing else, for fear of revealing himself. He did not, for example, tell them of a similar incident in the Baggo Veda system, when separatist forces had seized control of the planet Artemis and expelled all imperial ambassadors from the territory of their newly proclaimed republic. By all accounts, the rear admiral had not even bothered to meet the envoys from Artemis, instead having their ships shot out of the air before they could reach the Imperial Armada with their terms and conditions. The bombing had started only moments later.
These individuals clearly did not understand the type of power that was necessary to maintain a galactic empire. That much was plain as the meeting of party players droned on, their plans laid out in front of Wynston in all of their naiveté. He knew, even with the sardanians backing them, Cantor Feist would rather glass the planet and tear it to shreds with one of the newly invented planet-crackers the Imperium had begun to employ in the field than hand it over to a conspiracy of fanatics.
RAM and the others were not entirely fools, though. Hegeline’s natural bounty of resources was their one trump card. If at all possible, the Imperium would no doubt like to keep Hegeline without reducing it to a pile of rubble. They would askew their normal policy of annihilation in favor of precision. The Imperial Armada would be selective in their targets; it would be a great blow to propaganda to remove Hegeline from the list of destinations on every spaceport across the galaxy. Nevertheless, Wynston could see no outcome in which the UDF was victorious. They would be crushed, of that he was certain.
“Where do I fit in?” Wynston asked.
“MIRANDA tells us you are quite a splicer,” RAM replied, echoing the false story he had fed to Moiya back at him, “We need a splicer at Central to help monitor imperial communications tomorrow. I will introduce you to Information Officer BIT after we are done here and he will fill you in on the specifics. We have some nice tech at Central that is sure to blow the circuits of any die-hard splicer; you’ll love it there.”
Wynston forced a smile to his lips and replied, “Sounds like home.”
The rest of the meeting streamed into Wynston’s eyes without interest. He had been here a hundred times before, heard all of their reasons and rhetoric said with different mouths, seen the same passions plucked on parallel worlds. The details of the UDF conspiracy might be different in its particulars from any Wynston had encountered in his previous missions, but the outcome would invariably be the same. The Imperial Armada would grind all their hopes into dust and scatter the specks across the vacuum of space.
Wynston found himself again moments after departing from the space elevator with Moiya, glimpses of the intervening moments diluted into vague images in his memory. His job was done. Nothing else mattered. He could go home.
But despite this realization, nothing changed. He still felt strange and nervous. An anxious feeling was gnawing through his gut and he did not know why.
“Just think!” Moiya skipped over the snow and turned towards him, “Tomorrow is the first day of our new lives!”
She leaned towards him, her proboscis glistening with desire. Her eyes reflected a single snowflake tracing the space between their faces, broken up into snowstorm by the different angled segments of her eyes. Staring into the flurry of winter invading her expression, Wynston could hardly breathe, each inhalation stabbing unseen pressure points inside of him, as if he were breathing in fire.
“Misers!” A shrill voice declared.
Wynston and Moiya ratcheted around in unison and espied the source of the declaration: a hobbled sardanian standing watch outside one of the churches on the city outskirts, the tiny flame of his vigil fiercely flickering against the falling snow.
“Come share my warmth, misers!” The sardanian intoned, his Imperish nearly strangled into incomprehensibility by the thin gill slits running down his face. Sardanians did not possess vocal chords and instead contorted their gills to modulate the sound of their breathing, producing a rasping voice that was uniquely difficult to understand for the other imperial races.
Before Wynston could decline, Moiya bounced over to stand by his side, leaving Wynston no choice but to join them. The flame burning on the pedestal next to the old sardanian, Wynston noted, provided little warmth.
“Two lovelies should not go out in the cold,” The sardanian rasped, his withered face betraying a wizened humor, “On nights like these, Winter has no preference. Take two lovelies just as well as one old and crippled ugly.”
Moiya antenna bobbed up and down. She wrapped herself in her arms and inquired, “Is that why you are out here? To protect us?”
The sardanian scoffed at the notion, “You cannot protect from Winter.”
“We’re androids,” Wynston replied, “We don’t get cold.”
Wynston’s response immediately silenced the old sardanian. Dark droplets of pupils peered out from sunken craters on his scaled face, assaying the truth of Wynston’s claim.
After several measured moments of silence, the sardanian continued, “Everything gets cold, even the rocks and dirt. There are no exceptions; it is only a matter of whether or not you feel it.”
“And what if I don’t feel it?” Wynston asked before he could stop himself.
“Then the Warmth does not touch you either,” The sardanian replied in a sad tone, his head sinking against his shoulders, “May the Cascade pass over you, lovely.”
Wynston stared hard at the old sardanian, who in turn stared back. Wynston found he had no response. Instead, he turned to Moiya and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
He couldn’t recall what they talked about on the way to her apartment. The words of the sardanian echoed in his thoughts, chasing him back to the city, back through the avenue, whipping in the winter wind. When they finally arrived at Moiya’s place, thoughts spilled out of his head and formed on his lips before the door even closed, “I work for the Imperium.” Wynston received her immediate reply in the empty-eyed expression that slid over his face.
“What?” She asked in the next moment.
“I gather information for the Emperor.”
She blinked.
“Technically,” He explained further, “I am dispatched by members of his personal cabinet and their undersecretaries to obtain critical intelligence on dissident organizations working within the confines of imperial space.”
She watched him with sinking eyes, dizzy and unable to think. Her mouth moved out of his sync with her thoughts, words tripping over her stunned lips, “What are you saying, Wynston?”
“What do you think happens tomorrow morning, Moiya?” Wynston asked in earnest.
“Tomorrow we will rise up as–,” She began, but stopped when he placed a heavy hand on her shoulder. Pregnant silence filled the seconds as she processed the revelation he had laid at her feet, her eyes studying the sinewy muscles in the synthetic hand that gripped her. She turned to face him once again and looked into his calculating eyes, “Who are you?”
“I’m Wynston,” He replied.
“I don’t believe you,” Her voice dropped.
“I never lied to you, Moiya,” Wynston said, “I just never told the whole truth.”
“How can I believe that?” She pleaded. Anything, she wanted anything she could hold onto, something that might help her sort out what Wynston was telling her, “After you betray everything you believe-”
“I never believed in any of this,” He replied.
“You don’t—none of it?”
“No,” He stated simply.
“But why else would you be there, at our meetings!?” Moiya screamed.
Winston couldn’t help but jostle his antennae in grim amusement. She knew the answer to the question, and in a strange way, that was the entire point of the question. Sobs involuntary wracked her throat and she found herself pressing into Wynston’s arms.
“I’m a spy, honey,” He said with melancholy, “Bad luck.”
She sobbed into his chest for several long moments, before pulling away and asking through the shining, tear-less eyes of a synthetic, “What’s going to happen?”
Wynston explained with measured words, “The minute the repulsion field goes down on the third day, an imperial Dreadnought will decloak and bomb them from orbit.”
“But there will be too many of us!” The fire was back in her eyes, diminished and hollow, but there nonetheless, “We will hit every city on the planet!”
Wynston stroked her cheek, “Have you ever seen an imperial Dreadnought?”
Moiya only response was to turn her eyes down and stare at the floor.
“You don’t stand a chance,” He explained.
She meekly replied, “We still have to try.”
At that, Wynston was furious. He could not understand why someone would willingly throw their life away and spat at her, “Why!?”
His fury surprised her, but what surprised her more was how she found herself replying in kind, “Because it matters to me!”
“You will never defeat the Emperor–”
“Stop!” She screamed at him, “Don’t you see? What other way is there? They don’t respect us! They sent us here to waste our lives, to die for nothing! Your precious Emperor is a fraud!”
Wynston measured out his response, words arranged in his head before he even knew what they meant, but he stopped himself from responding. Instead, he gazed down at Moiya, the quarlax replicant who had spent the past thousand years mining salt from the caves of Hegeline, who dreamed of a better world for her and her friends, whose passion would be the death of her.
He walked over to a desk in Moiya’s apartment and opened a drawer, pulling out a pen and a sheet of paper. Without explanation he wrote a random sequence of letters and numbers down on the sheet and handed it to her.
Staring in confusion at the jumble of symbols, she asked, “What’s this?”
“The imperial code to the planet’s repulsion field,” He said without emotion, “It changes every three days, but the codes are known in advance. These are the codes for the next local month, until the next batch is randomly generated on Vinerva.”
“But,” Moiya stuttered, realization dawning on her face, “With this, we’ll be able–”
“I know,” Wynston said.
“I–” Moiya began, but found no words for her thoughts, so she threw herself against Wynston in an embrace, “Thank you!”
Their proboscises wove together in kiss and Wynston felt an unfamiliar warmth ignite somewhere in the depths of his synthetic body. Moiya pulled back, “I have to tell RAM!”
Wynston nodded and Moiya rushed out of the room to vidophone RAM.
There was nothing left for him on this planet. The cold wind greeted him as he left Moiya’s apartment, but it no longer portended death and destruction, as it had early that night. Instead, it laid out by contrast the warmth he now felt bubbling up inside of him, unlocking a facet of himself he never knew existed. Moiya would return to discover him gone, but he knew she would never forget him. That was enough for him, some sliver of himself shaved off and saved from himself.
He spent the shuttle flight from the local spaceport to the imperial Dreadnought docked on the dark side of Hegeline’s moon writing his report for the admiralty, leaving out the part about how the UDF now possessed a month’s worth of imperial codes for Hegeline’s repulsion field. Those extra days, he knew, might make a substantial difference in the outcome of the UDF’s revolution. Without imports from Hegeline fueling the imperial economy for a solid month, Emperor Cantor might be more amenable to negotiations. A small chance, but a greater one than the UDF had had at the beginning of the evening.
He watched morning break across the surface of Hegeline, wondering where Moiya was and what she was doing. He waited until light from the dual stars touched the western hemisphere of the planet to submit his report.
When the shuttle docked with the Dreadnought, one of the ship’s officers escorted Wynston to the command room, where he met a barrel shaped human whose sleeve indicated he was a rear admiral, along with a retinue of subordinates. A hologram of Hegeline glittered above a terminal in the center of the room where the crowd of military brass had congregated to await Wynston.
Everyone present had already read Wynston’s report, so the debriefing consisted of little more than Wynston answering a series of binary questions, to which he readily gave answers. Before the debriefing could conclude though, an officer interrupted to whisper into the rear admiral’s ear. Wynston guessed by now the UDF had seized control of the imperial barracks. His guess was confirmed when the rear admiral stood and bade everyone follow him to the bridge.
The bridge bustled with the synchronized movements of the crew. When the rear admiral strode into the cavernous room, activity ceased and a hundred soldiers froze in place and snapped off a salute.
“As you were,” The rear admiral commanded, releasing the bridge crew from their animated suspension.
“Intelligence officer Brady, report,” The rear admiral said.
“Sir, we have communiqués from all over the planet,” The intelligence officer explained, “Every imperial barrack on Hegeline has been seized by a faction of militant synthetics calling themselves the United Droid Front.”
“Any word on imperial personnel?” The rear admiral queried.
“Initial reports suggest everyone is captured or dead, sir,” The officer continued, “Unlikely, but we won’t know for sure until we have more accurate reports.”
“Communication officer Davik?” The rear admiral turned to face a lanky young officer hunched over a communications console.”
“Yes sir!”
“Have we received any demands or attempts at negotiation?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Mission specialist Capelli, get me a read out on the planet’s repulsion field.”
“Aye sir.”
“The rest of you, I want all signals entering and leaving Hegeline’s atmosphere scrambled. Transmit any military or political communiqués to my terminal,” The rear admiral sighed, “You know the drill. Everyone dig in. It’s going to be a long three days.”
Wynston suppressed a smile, knowing it was going to be a much longer wait than that.
A small voice rose above the threshold of hearing and spoke, “Sir?”
“Capelli, report,” The rear admiral replied.
“Sir,” the ensign said, his voice unsteady, “The planet’s repulsion fields have been shut down. We have a clear shot on all targets, sir.”
Silence engulfed the bridge. The rear admiral regarded the ensign with a stoic expression, the surprising development washing over his emotionless face without effect.
“What?” Wynston, the only one unbound by the military chain of command, gave voice to the question that was forming in all of their minds.
Before the ensign could answer, the communications officer sat straight up in his chair and shouted, “Sir, we have a communiqué from the sardanian government in Gibbur.”
The admiral’s face crumbled under the weight of confusion, his bushy eyebrows collapsing onto his narrow eyes. He grunted an order at the communications officer, “Report, Davik.”
“Sir,” the officer replied in an uncertain tone, “It says, ‘The Cascade is eternal.’”
Another moment of startled, uncomprehending silence swept through the bridge.
Finally, the rear admiral took a deep breath and turned again to face the bridge, “First Mate Thomas, order vectors on the stack and bring us in view of the planet,” He ran a grizzled hand over his bald pate and continued, “All hands, initiate plasma prep sequence. You may fire when the solutions are acquired.”
Long minutes passed as capacitors charged and vectors were calculated. Wide eyed crew members slick with perspiration stuttered over keyboards, relinquishing conscious control of their actions to the instincts hammered into them by imperial training. Shells loaded into the aft and fore cannons hummed to life as magnetic rails flung them towards the surface of Hegeline.
Wynston stared ahead, looking at but not seeing the frozen globe pockmarked in flames. Dollops of plasma ejected from cannons on the Dreadnought accelerated under gravity like fiery blue meteorites, splashing and splattering against the surface of the planet. He tried to cry, but he was an android and had no tear ducts, so he stood like a statue as a million synthetics died while natives hooted and danced in the precious heat of their fire, praising the deaths which had finally appeased their malevolent god.