Dramatis Personae

Lloyd

The object wasn’t as big as Lloyd was expecting. Looking at it from the window he guessed it was about two meters long and two hundred centimeters in diameter and it wasn’t solid, either. It looked almost like a handful of red and green cables woven into a loose braid around a blue rod. The pale yellow and orange mists of Wireburn’s Helium Sea drifted through the object, giving it an eerie look in the dim light that made it into the gas giant’s atmosphere at that depth. Lloyd brought his Wayfinder skiff to a stop about twenty meters away, puzzled.

“What confuses you, Lloyd?”

The voice from the skiff’s radio was flat and expressionless, a function of the device that translated a Great Jelly’s telepathic impulses into recognizable human speech. The Jelly in question drifted through the helium about a hundred meters beyond the object. Like all of its kind, Devours Clouds was a dozen meters of mostly transparent goo concentrated in a large primary sack with five drifting tendrils trailing behind it. They resembled some creature half forgotten in humanity’s past, hence the name. Cloudie, Lloyd’s longstanding companion on his expeditions, had a light ocher color to its body, signifying its relative youth.

It was also familiar enough with humans to safely pick up on their mood via telepathy.

“When you told me there was a metal object down here I was expecting something a little bit bigger is all. I’m kind of surprised something that delicate looking stands up to the pressure down here.” Lloyd flipped on his skiff’s dredge arm and swung the device out towards the object, taking care not to strike it directly. Then he pointed the arm’s spectrometer at it and hit the autoanalyzer. “How’d you find this?”

“The currents here are agitated as if a ferrovine was growing so I assumed it was a good foundation for one of your beacons.” One of Cloudie’s tendrils swished through the helium surrounding the object. It was a Jelly’s equivalent of pointing accusingly at something. “This is too small to be a ferrovine.”

Since a ferrovine at this depth could be more than a dozen kilometers thick that was something of an understatement. “I take it you don’t know what it actually is?”

“We don’t find such things in the Helium Seas, Lloyd, and it looks like it was made of metal that has been refined and formed so it did not come from the Metaline Depths either. I assumed it fell down from the Thinward Skies, since only humans do such work on Wireburn.”

“That sounds like a reasonable assumption.” The spectrometer beeped twice, signaling the completion of one set of tests and the beginning of another. Lloyd glanced over the initial results. “Well, it’s not any base metals we know of, the scanner’s going through alloys and laminates next but that will take longer. It is definitely metallic, though, so I’m going to try and bring it in and stow it in a quarantine chamber for the time being. Let me know how the currents change out there.”

Cloudie responded by spreading its tendrils out in a bowl shape, as if it was cupping the atmosphere around the skiff. Satisfied that his partner was keeping watch Lloyd gently scooped the object into his dredge. Whatever the thing was it gave no resistance when the netting at the end of the arm settled around it and he was able to bring it into the forward chamber without difficulty. Once the helium was pumped out the quarantine’s higher powered spectrometers would be able to make sense of it faster than the arm could. “Any change, Cloudie?”

“No. The seas remain as before. I cannot discern what is causing the local disturbance.”

“Well, we still need to find an anchor point for the beacon so maybe we could dive deeper. There could be ferrovines if we head seaward, right?”

“We are dangerously close to the Metaline Depths already, Lloyd, if we head deeper your beacon will not survive and we risk the attention of the Liquid Teeth.”

“Yes, there is that,” Lloyd muttered. The Liquid Teeth were the Jelly equivalent of an old wive’s tale, something they told each other to spook their young to staying away from danger. Supposedly the Metaline Depths were full of predators made of solid metal. That was just one reason Wireburn’s treaty with the Jellies barred them from going that deep, assuming they ever overcame the dangers inherent to the environment. Human scientists were skeptical life could be made of just metal. Even if it could be built of such tough stuff they were equally positive it couldn’t exist that deep in a gas giant’s core. “Well we can tether one on the sidereal side a half a click up, I suppose, but it’s going to take a lot longer than finding a place to anchor it here.”

Cloudie’s tendrils stretched upward through the atmosphere as the creature drifted along with the current. “Odd. The disturbance in the current is so strong I cannot discern anything else. We may have to do just that. Might we drift northward a few degrees? We are under the shadow of the rings here, ferrovines will be rarer. Up there, the sun is stronger.”

Lloyd consulted his charts. “One degree, perhaps, but not much more. The point is to lay these out in a grid so people can navigate the sidereal side, we can’t put it too far out of place or we’ll disrupt the pattern. It would get confusing.”

“I will trust your opinion on that count, Lloyd. You are the one that has been to that place.”

He grinned. “Don’t feel bad, Cloudie, there’s no currents in the sidereal. I doubt you’d like it there.”

“I believe you once again. Shall we go north?”

“Lead the way.”

The Great Jelly drifted away at a leisurely pace and Lloyd fired up the skiff’s engines to follow along after.

44

CK-MNI-0044 hustled into the main chamber still pulling his formal robes on over his meditation clothes, dodging around the usual chamber attendants as they streamed out of the room. By the time he reached the main dais the chamber was empty except for him. He paused at the step up to the platform where he would commune with the intelligence and steadied his breathing. A small red light blinked on the display set in the railing that enclosed three quarters of the dais.

Focused on the importance of his task once again, 44 stepped up on the platform, crossed it in three steps and pressed the button. The top half of the chamber lit up in an endless starfield. Small glimmers of light connected the stars in flickering glimpses of infinity. “Good evening, Isaac,” he said. “I apologize for keeping you waiting.”

“It is good to speak to you again regardless of the circumstances, Circuit Keeper 44.” The voice of order and reason was remarkably restrained in spite of the grandeur of its presence and power being condensed into a single point. “I regret that a black swan event has caused us to speak in this way. I have summoned you here to activate the Circuit Breakers and initiate a Troubleshooting process.”

For a split second 44’s brain got hung up on a black swan event, scouring through his memories for the meaning of that particular turn of phrase. Then it caught up to what I-6 was saying and set that question aside. “Of course, Isaac. May I ask how large of a Troubleshooting process we are speaking of? Is it on Coldstone, Wireburn or both? Or will we need sector wide resources to address the issue?”

“There is less than an 8% chance that the issue will propagate beyond Wireburn and a less than 1% chance that it will leave the system.”

44 hesitated for a split second, fingers over the comm controls. The oldest instillation in the OMNI network had called him up for an issue that had a less than 1% chance of propagating outside the system? The I Series was supposed to focus on the galaxy as a whole. Single system issues were beneath them, much less planetary matters, he’d only asked the question because it was part of the ritual phrasing. Then he pressed the command series that would activate his troubleshooters anyway. If I-6 wanted them, who was he to say no?

“May I ask what the nature of the issue the CBs will be troubleshooting is?”

A soft thunk came from the entrance to the chamber. 44 resisted the urge to turn and look in that direction. I-6 had just sealed the room. He’d served this network node for nearly a century and he’d never seen the intelligence take such a step before. “Circuit Keeper, what you are about to hear is information for your mind only. You will not share it with any other initiate of the Sleeping Circuits for any reason at any time without the verification of an OMNI node. It is shared with you so that you may make decisions with clarity and purpose.”

“I understand.” It was a day of firsts. 44 had never lied to I-6 before either.

“An event with a probability of less than 0.001% of occurring during my operational lifespan has taken place. The memory core of an extinct Artificial Intelligence Series has been lost. You will use any methods necessary to ensure it is retrieved and returned to my outer matrix. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I do.” This time 44 didn’t have to lie.

Lloyd

They got lucky and located a ferrovine less than five kilometers towards magnetic north from their last stop. The silicon and iron based plant stretched up out of the planetary depths into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, far past the point where a Jelly could safely travel. The core of the vine was a good eight kilometers wide and countless branches with leaves the size of small towns forked out in all directions. It was the perfect place to plant a sidereal beacon.

Lloyd donned his pressure suit and activated the safety system then carefully maneuvered the wedge shaped prow of his skiff into the branches. There was at least two hundred meters between the branches at his chosen landing spot, so it was pretty safe. Still, the vines disrupted the normal flow of the atmospheric currents. So a careless pilot could still find his skiff smashing against a leaf or branch if he couldn’t react in time. With no solid structure to speak of and five fully prehensile tendrils to work with Cloudie didn’t have nearly the problem getting close. It just grabbed onto one of the branches and pulled itself along to the trunk.

It shouldn’t have been possible for a house sized pile of protoplasm to look smug but Cloudie managed that feat when Lloyd finally caught up to it. “Are you ready to begin?”

At moments like these the deadpan inflection of the skiff’s translator made Cloudie’s needling harder to deal with, not easier. “Hold your pseudopods, Cloudie, I got to check the beacon and make sure it’s functioning before I go out. Not sure why you need to be here, anyway.”

“I will make sure your skiff remains safe in the roiling currents.”

“Uh huh.” There were a lot of concepts that didn’t translate between humans and Jellies but somehow one-upsmanship was a universal language. Well, if Cloudie thought his skiff was in danger of getting sucked into the Metaline Depths that was no skin of Lloyd’s nose. He flipped a few switches on his board and waited for the computer work. It was writing the full location data and activation date for the beacon he was about to place onto the coral node that would control the device. The process took about a minute and while he waited Lloyd flipped through the skiff’s automated reports.

Everything looked normal so it was safe to step out for a bit. However a flashing line of text informed him the spectrometer was finished with its second round of analysis and was waiting to see if he wanted a third round started. There wasn’t time to read the report at the moment so he dumped the file into long term memory and closed the program. He’d come back to it after the beacon was set.

The console had just beeped to let him know it was finished backing up the report when the master control node for the beacon dropped out of a fabrication slot into the tank below his controls. Lloyd fished it out and stuck it in a pocket on his suit. Then he sealed his helmet, got up and clomped into the large aft room where most of the skiff’s equipment was kept. He snagged a beacon off the rack and slipped the coral node into the unit’s small holding tank.

Once the ready light on the beacon lit it was ready to deploy. Lloyd activated his suit’s pressure system, cycled through the airlock and stepped down onto the ferrovine. While the suit kept the atmosphere and gravity from crushing him he still felt the difference. Navigating the Helium Seas in just a suit was like moving through thick, heavy mud while wearing cold weather gear. Rumor was the Warfinder’s Guild was developing an anchoring arm so that Wayfinders could place beacons without ever having to leave their skiffs. Lloyd understood why that was attractive to the Guild and the people who hired them.

Personally he liked getting out of the skiff to work with his own two hands every now and then.

Regulations said to place a beacon at least twenty meters from your skiff so it wouldn’t be damaged by the vehicle’s engines when it took off. So Lloyd moved a short distance down the branch away from the main vine. It was tempting to try and anchor the beacon to the main stalk but this particular vine looked old enough that the branches probably weren’t going to grow outward much more. The stalk, on the other hand, never stopped going upwards. The beacon had a service life of about a hundred years. It was more likely to wear out before it drifted out of place on the branch but the same wasn’t true of the main stalk.

Once he was in place he keyed his suit comms and said, “Radio check, Cloudie.”

“I hear you fine, Lloyd.”

Next he set the beacon down on top of the vine and sank in six anchor pitons to keep it from sliding or falling in a helium storm. Then he grasped the top of the short, fat obelisk in both hands and said, “Preparing for transfer.”

Then he focused his mind and turned sidereal.

Around Lloyd the orange and yellow clouds of Wireburn spun away in a vertigo inducing whirl of color and motion. The terrestrial vistas of the gas giant were replaced with the sidereal panorama of Wireburn and its environs. The beacon turned from a four foot tall piece of metal and ceramic to a foot wide ball of pale light.

Thousands of identical beacons gleamed faintly in the distance. One day there would be a beacon at every degree of the circumference of the planet in all three dimensions; to say nothing of the smaller beacons that marked specific places of note or belonged to private individuals. Below the network pulsed the much brighter sidereal light of Wireburn’s planetary core. The distant lights of Coldstone and Briskpulse, the planet’s two major moons, were also visible. If he stretched his senses to the limits Lloyd could also catch the echoes of Tabula Verde and Burnished Red, the other two planets in the system, in the far distance.

It always took a bit of effort for Lloyd to drag his attention away from the the cold beauty of the sidereal realm. Still, he had work to do so he couldn’t stare at things forever. “Transition complete, making radio check. You still hearing me, Cloudie?”

“You come through loud and clear, Lloyd.”

“Preparing to anchor the beacon and activate it. Stand by.”

Far beneath him, in the depths of Wireburn’s core, the etheric power of the planet lay quiescent. While it was measurable from the terrestrial side tapping it from the sidereal side of reality was a much simpler task than actually going down into the planet’s core with generators. All Lloyd had to do was reach out with his sense and draw a channel up from the core to his beacon. The beacon itself was built by another part of the Guild. He didn’t know all the details about its construction, tying slipknots between the sidereal and terrestrial had never interested him, but he knew the power from the planet would keep the device working as long as both planet and beacon existed.

Once the pale light of the beacon brightened with the added strength of Wireburn’s etheric power Lloyd just had to draw a bit more of that power down into the pitons to secure it on this side as well as the other. He was in the process of doing just that when he sensed the shadow pass over the planet’s core.

Among gas giants Wireburn had one of the smallest reservoirs of etheric energy known to man, one of the facts that made it possible to colonize it. Most planets that large had so much energy in their cores it was dangerous. However even Wireburn blazed bright and steady as a star to sidereal senses under normal circumstances. As Lloyd worked to finish his task he thumbed his radio. “Cloudie, I’m seeing some kind of disruption in the etheric down there, is there any change to the currents on your side?”

“The currents are shifting a bit, but nothing outside of the norm for – wait.”

“Everything all right?” There was no answer and Lloyd scowled, fumbling with the beacon’s anchors while he waited. Whatever was going on was making it hard to draw etheric from the core and the beacon wouldn’t anchor properly as a result. “Cloudie?”

“The currents are writhing, Lloyd. They shouldn’t change this quickly.”

Lloyd had never heard a Jelly use the word writhing before, he wondered what exactly it implied. “Will you be okay?”

“Lloyd, I… I think this may be a premonition of the Liquid Teeth. You should jump away. I will rejoin you if I can.”

Lloyd finally got the last anchor running and moved back from the beacon, trying to draw more power from Wireburn to no effect. “Negative, Cloudie. The etheric is equally disrupted right now. I barely got the beacon running, finding the power for a jump is out of the question. Is it safe to transition back to your side?”

He could peer back on his own, of course, but looking from sidereal to terrestrial or vice versa was very limited for most people. Lloyd had never been able to see anything past twenty or thirty feet around him across the barrier between. “The currents are very bad. I’m not sure your skiff will be able to fly in them, at least not safely.”

“Chance we’ll have to take, Cloudie. I’m coming back.”

When he turned to the terrestrial Lloyd was nearly swept off the ferrovine leaf by the raging helium clouds. He flicked on his magnetic boots and they clamped down on the ferrovine immediately then he started the short trek back to his skiff. The small craft bounced and jostled against its cables but so far didn’t seem damaged by the light impacts. Such jostling wasn’t uncommon on Wireburn and most ships could take some of it. Still, he’d need to get the skiff up and away from the vine’s branches fast if he didn’t want it getting smashed to flotsam.

He lurched into the airlock and cycled through it as fast as he could. In spite of the fact that things were still lurching under his feet Lloyd deactivated the magnets in his boots. He didn’t want to scramble his coral nodes with them, after all. So he slid haphazardly up to the cockpit and hit the engine startup sequence, ignoring the usual preflight procedures.

He’d just gotten the skiff under power and in the air when his radio spoke again. “Lloyd.” The lack of emotion in the Jelly’s voice prevented his taking note right away. “Lloyd, look below. The Liquid Teeth are coming.”

Cloudie squirted past the skiff’s view port, maneuvering in the weird zigzag pattern that resulted from the way the creatures slipped through low pressure zones in the atmosphere. Lloyd craned his neck to try and see what the Jelly sensed with it’s powers of atmospheric observation. At first he thought there was nothing there but a shadow of the ferrovine stretching far into the deep.

Then he realized the massive shadow below couldn’t be a ferrovine. It was too wide, for one thing. It was also moving too quickly to just be bobbing on the currents of the Helium Seas. In fact, it was growing closer and larger with every passing second. Perhaps the Jellies were right, and there was some kind of titanic predators deep in the planet’s Metaline Depths after all.

Lloyd didn’t want to stick around and find out. He rammed the ship’s throttle all the way to full and took off after Cloudie as fast as his skiff could go.

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