Chapter Text
Finally, I was free.
I had suffered much along the way: a tumultuous childhood, a difficult education, and a long period of job-searching. My dedication to intellectual pursuits had gained me awards, but no steady employment, merely a string of ‘guest’ lecturer positions.
Yet now, I had finally achieved the greatest of all things:
A government-secured job with a pension.
Do not think me some traitor to the ideals of a free market. It would, admittedly, be much better to own my business, rather than serve as an employee in another – much less the Government. It is better to have a direct financial incentive to grow the corporation and thus enrich myself, the business, and civilization. To lack such a thing is to incentivize mediocrity, with employees performing only well enough to not be fired.
But ideals work best in an ideal situation. When the rubber hits the road, pragmatism triumphs over principle, and I was nothing if not pragmatic.
The simple truth is, my third life had been terrifying thus far, and I was relieved to have finally escaped the terror.
My childhood home in Outer Colonies was not just geographically distant. They were culturally, socially, and worst of all, politically distant. A pattern that has repeated throughout history, and which bodes poorly for a government’s unity.
I was born in 2492, two years before the official start of the Insurrection… at least, according to the Inner Colonies. To the Outer Colonies, the Insurrection had been ongoing for at least a decade. Resistance to the central government had increasing for years, changing from lone individual nutjobs to more organized, coordinated protests.
What was the Insurrection? Fundamentally, it was people who didn’t like other people. A tale as old as time.
To the average layperson in this advanced age, it was, perhaps, inevitable that such a conflict would occur. Outer Colony yokels were lambasted as dumb hicks by the Inner Colonies, and Inner Colony worlds were detested as nepotistic elites.
Slobs versus snobs, essentially.
But from my own perspective, both sides had forgotten their history, and were idiots for it.
They both insisted on a simplistic viewpoint that cast all Outer Colony residents as one group, and all Inner Colony residents as one group. If you asked one of them, they might say that the peoples of Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Indonesia were all the same, because they were all on Earth, and close together. A belief that is obviously foolish and incorrect, but which, like all collectivist ideology, appealed to people due to simplicity.
Factually speaking, many Insurrectionists were born and raised in the Inner Colonies, and many government’s ‘jack-booted enforcers’ were born and raised in the Outer Colonies.
I myself could be regarded as a defector who had sold her soul to the evil government because I wanted to see babies strangled in their cribs…
…rather than the actual truth, which is that academia had been a safe harbor for a child wanting to escape violence. When the universities themselves started to get bombed, the next safest place had been inside a military base as far away from the Insurrection as possible.
Granted, my desire to become a government think-tank flunky was not purely pragmatic.
I was, above all else, a rational thinker. Seeking out short-term benefits at the cost of long-term survivability was not rational. No, I had no delusions that this Insurrection would merely ‘blow over’. Violence is easy, and admitting fault is hard. The more bodies were stacked by either side, the more reasons they would have to fight.
But as I said before, this was hardly a new problem to human civilization. From tribal skirmishes to religious conquests to world wars, humanity had long feared the “other”. Differences of any kind – racial, religious, social, political – thrived on two things: distance and lack of familiarity.
The solution to such problems was very evident throughout history. How does one mix cultures without conflict? How does one end wars without weapons? The answer: reduce the distance, increase the familiarity. Talk to other cultures, reduce tensions, and seek common ground. The fastest pathway to violence was to insist that cohabitation was impossible.
The greatest advancements in peace had always come from advances in the twin fields of communications and transportation. The horse courier (or ‘Pony Express’ in American parlance) had been replaced by the telegraph, the radio, the telephone, the television, and eventually, the Internet. Travel by horse had been replaced by faster ships, trains, and eventually the airplane. Exotic locations that required months of travelling now required a day at most.
Why had the Insurrection cropped up, after three centuries of relative peace? Because people in the Outer Colonies feared the far-off overseers of Earth, separated by months of travel. Faceless and voiceless figures that they had never met, had never shared a coffee with, and had never realized were just as human as them.
The real fuel behind the Insurrection wasn’t charismatic leaders, violent deaths, or grand political ideas.
It was the vastness of space, and the slow speed of the Shaw-Fujikawa drive.
If you wanted to communicate with someone on a different world, you wrote a letter and sent it on board a ship. It might get there in as ‘little’ as a few weeks. If you wanted face-to-face communication, your only option was to go there yourself, an expensive proposition that was even slower. From the furthest colony of Harvest to the homeworld of Earth, it could take more than six months.
Distance and lack of familiarity.
For all the technological innovations of the 2500’s, our relative capabilities in communication and transportation had regressed back to the metaphorical Pony Express. Entire generations had grown up on but a single world, and feared the ‘outsiders’ on other worlds, never realizing that the outsiders might think the same.
And still, people wondered how the Insurrection had started.
I had known of this problem for a long time. I had feared it, and my fears had come true – the flames of civil war rising higher and higher, until the greatest civilization that Humanity had ever seen was poised to collapse to the same illogical psychology that had doomed vastly smaller, poorer, and dumber civilizations.
Thusly, I had dedicated my life to the study of communication and transportation. I had finished Highschool at the age of twelve, my Bachelors at fourteen, and was putting the final touches on my first Doctorate on Slipspace Physics at eighteen. Along the way, I’d picked up a few lesser degrees, and focused myself purely on solving the Great Challenge of Our Time.
If our Slipspace drives were faster, if we had FTL communications, or if I could wrangle both, then the root cause of this Insurrection would wither away. Alienation would dissipate. Tourism would increase.
The UNSC would witness an economic boom not seen since the dawn of the Internet, as its people remembered that they were all human, all brothers and sisters.
I was no traitor to the principles of the free market. I still held those views strongly. But to have a free market, one must first have easy communication and transportation.
I had long dreamed of bringing about a revolution of my own. Of guaranteeing the rest of the UNSC the chance to be free and prosperous. Of a universe where luxury foods could be shipped from any world to any other. Where people could vacation without losing months in cryosleep. Where the economy grew so large that a niche hobby could have a market big enough to support its obsessive creators.
A nation so advanced that anyone could live anywhere, visit any planet, and work in any way possible.
And now, at the age of twenty-five, I’d finally get my chance.
The journey went by quickly.
It seemed that my work had attracted some very high-ranking attention. The United Nations Space Command had detached a Vancouver-class courier ship for me. The Commander aboard had offered to transport anything I needed, including furniture. I’d politely declined, of course. I was used to travelling light, and had no wish to give a bad first impression as a prima donna.
Still, a UNSC officer did not casually ‘offer’ to house excess cargo aboard a serving warship. Obviously, my employment by the UNSC was already assured. Clearly, I had it made.
Our arrival to the Epsilon Eridani II system was swift, but not entirely to my taste. Cryogenically freezing your passengers was a logical way to prevent aging out your spacefaring population, but it made interstellar travel a disorienting, confusing mess. Rushed into the cryopods, dipped into an ice-cold lake, and then pulled out like a popsicle a mere second later with several months having disappeared. Unlike the old days of travelling the oceans, it removed the possibility of gradually acclimating to the travel. Still, it was better than a bumpy train to the frontlines, and I was not ‘flying commercial’.
The distances involved in space often made visual sights bland or boring, but as we moved inwards into the system to dock at an orbital station, I watched our destination rapidly grow from a grey dot to an imposing castle, bristling with gun turrets. Its design was crisscrossed with support beams and empty spaces for docking berths, making it look like an enormous letter H, or a particularly gargantuan picket fence.
The nearby frigates were nearly five hundred meters of silvery steel. I could not help but stare at them through my cabin terminal’s display, as we passed them on their patrol. Their angular form was marred by a boxy mid-section, making it look decidedly utilitarian… if not for the sleek twin engine-booms that powered the ships. My eyes lingered as they continued on their way, and I felt, once again, a lingering pang.
As we made our final approach, I gazed at an enormous cruiser undergoing some form of servicing. It was a strange design, one that I had not seen before, and was well over a kilometer long. It was relatively ‘skinny’ at the prow, but widened outwards as the keel expanded out to the stern. It was like a mountain had been hollowed out, removed from the planet’s crust, and laid sideways.
Our deceleration was pushing g-forces against us, but I ignored it with a wealth of experience, and instead focused on zooming the courier’s cameras this way, and that, inspecting the glittering sparks that were dockworkers in EVA suits, buzzing around the cruiser like worker-bees around a hive.
This was my life now, I realized abruptly.
Ten years of rural upbringing in a family that didn’t understand how to deal with my attitude, barricading myself in self-study. Eight years of dorm housing and the halls of academia. Seven years of rented housing for guest lecturers as I crammed out two more Doctorates.
And here I was, back in the military again.
No.
I was a scientist. I was a civilian researcher who was merely being paid by the Government to pursue my research. I would create faster Shaw-Fujikawa Engines. I would advance our Artificial Intelligences. I would invent a Faster-Than-Light communications device.
I would not be condemned to the grinding wastes of the front lines. I would not be choked by the chain of military command.
I was going to have a nice apartment. I was going to adopt a cat. I was going to save our civilization from the wrathful actions of paranoid dissidents and tight-fisted bureaucrats.
I looked down on the blue-green marble below me. It would be my home for the next many years of my life. It was a rugged, harsh wilderness, yet was also the beating heart of the UNSC military. It would suit me well.
“Now docking at Anchor 9,” the Commander called out over the ship’s intercom. “Welcome to Reach, Doctor Halsey.”
It seemed that the UNSC had carefully balanced their approach to hiring me. The pampering that I had received thus far had come to an abrupt end. I had been hustled from the tight spaces of Anchor 9 onto a Pelican dropship with no refinements, no luxuries, and brought down to the surface in a screaming re-entry procedure.
Logical of them. If they had kept flattering me, it would only convey that I was important, and that therefore, I could demand more of them in the upcoming negotiation. Instead, they had given me an initial wooing, and then ripped away the pretenses at the last possible chance, mere hours before I would be interviewed. The UNSC was a military organization as well as a civilian one, and this approach would remind people of it. The military does not change to fit an employee. The employee must change to fit the military.
On a normal interviewee, it would be undoubtedly effective. Unfortunately for them, I had been in the military before, in an environment of such disciplinary rigor that I was undaunted. So what if I had to sit on a cold metal seat, strapped into a harness as the dropship crashed through the atmosphere, shaking and howling the whole time? What luxury it was, to give me a harness in the first place!
I knew full well how important the UNSC’s patronage was for me. I knew deeply how many lives my work would save, if only I had their backing.
Yet now, as the Pelican opened its back hatch, spilling in cold air and revealing the gorgeous landscape… I wondered if the UNSC was just as aware of the stakes as I was. If they knew how vital I was to them.
Why else would they feel the need to temper me in this way? To remind me of their own power and might? One does not show off in front of a potential hire for the janitor’s position.
And this was definitely showing off.
Nestled in the cedar-filled valleys, watched over by snow-covered granite mountains lay my destination: the Highland Military Complex.
Dense clusters of barracks. Firing ranges. Parade grounds. Rows upon rows of airfields. Towering administrative buildings. Thick walls with missile launchers and AAA. They had created a military wonderland amongst the alpine heights. It was a vital training ground, an irreplaceable administrative center, and a natural winter resort for FLEETCOM’s admirals, all wrapped up into one present.
We came in for a landing, and jet-wash rippled across clean concrete as the Pelican touched down. A junior officer was already waiting for me as I stepped off the Pelican and set foot on the planet’s surface.
“Doctor Halsey,” he shouted over the roar of fusion-powered jet turbines. “Welcome to Reach! This way, please.”
I nodded, and stepped forward with a firm expression.
The young officer lead me inside, out of the elements, and towards an elevator. Once inside, I brushed my hair back into its regular utilitarian style in a nearby mirror. The elevator did not rise, but instead dropped. There was no instrument panel to indicate how many floors, nor where we were.
After an abnormally long wait, the doors opened, and the officer lead me out into a carefully nondescript corridor. There were no numbers or placards on the doors, no signs of life or information that could be exploited.
Finally, at the end of the corridor, the young officer stopped and gestured for me to continue onwards.
What lay beyond was an enormous amphitheater. A dozen rows of seats arced around a central stage, easily capable of seating hundreds. It contained a mere five people, four of whom were seated, and one of whom rose to greet me. The standing man wore a grey service uniform, and had two golden stars at his collar. The other four wore black service uniforms, and to my discomfort, none of them had any rank insignia at all.
“Doctor Halsey,” the gray-garbed man said, nodding respectfully as I descended the steps towards them. “Welcome. I am Vice Admiral Keeler.”
“A pleasure, Admiral,” I replied.
“As you already know, we’ve invited you here to discuss your research,” Keeler said, as he gestured for me to step up onto the stage, and returned to his own seat.
“Of course,” I replied, taking my place at the small podium. “I am at your service.”
“We are specifically interested in how your research relates to the Carver Findings,” one of the black-uniformed men said, looking at me with cold eyes and neglecting to introduce himself.
Carver Findings? What on Earth were those?
“I’m afraid that I’m not familiar with that name,” I admitted, glancing at each of the assembled men in turn.
“You shouldn’t be,” the man said. “It’s very fringe, but we here at ONI believe that Dr. Carver was quite prescient.”
My stomach tightened, and I was unable to stop my lips from pressing together in a visible sign of my discomfort.
No introductions. No rank insignia. No name cards. Reach was the largest UNSC naval base in existence, and where the Navy went, so too did their intelligence service.
The Office of Naval Intelligence. Such a simple name for such a vast and powerful organization. ONI was the boogeyman of the Insurrection, and Innie propaganda was quick to label them as the worst moral abusers of a decaying system.
A thought flashed through my head. The Commander of the courier ship had offered to take everything I needed, including furniture. I had believed the UNSC was trying to appeal to me. But now it occurred to me that I had no lingering ties to the outside world. After all, my housing had been provided by the Universities I worked for. My family was long dead. What if it had not been the UNSC’s kindness, but ONI’s desire to remove any sign that I had ever existed?
I realized, abruptly, that if the UNSC wanted me to disappear, I would never leave this room.
No! I scolded myself, taking care not to give any sign of my inner turmoil. No, the UNSC was not that kind of government. ONI may hypothetically be as dirty as any intelligence organization, but they were held in check by laws, regulations, and their overseers in the regular Navy.
“You will find on the podium an abstract of the Carver Findings,” the ONI officer continued. “Please, take a minute and read it through. You won’t need more than a basic grounding to understand how your research is related.”
I smiled thinly, and nodded to the man, noting how Vice Admiral Keeler stayed silent through that entire exchange. Was Keeler in charge of this interview? Was the ONI officer? Perhaps one of the others, none of whom had spoken?
Lingering worries were unimportant, I reminded myself. This was my chance to make a difference in the world, and I refused to allow human hesitations to ruin it.
I looked down at the podium’s holographic screen, and began to read.
Less than a minute later, I wanted to curse, and damn my composure in front of the officers.
The Carver Findings. What a ridiculous name for this… pseudo-scientific claptrap!
A nihilistic one-way rachet to oblivion, with the only escape route being horrific and immoral actions. Clearly, the product of a fool too obsessed with their own glory or too deluded to realize how their depression had tainted their work.
This was not scientific research. It was garbage. It belonged in a scandal-rag, not here, in a room dedicated to briefing High Command.
I wanted to look up from the page that held my gaze and ask how on earth my research could possibly be related to this abomination of science, when it hit me.
Of course my research was related.
No, more than that: my research was the obvious solution.
The ‘Carver Findings’ – as if this was fact, some discovery of a natural law of physics, or some lost archaeologic treasure – was the life’s work of an Elias Carver, a dual PhD in Political Science and Sociology. He’d published it in 2491, just a year before my birth, and he’d spent the rest of his life trying to convince the UNSC of his work’s importance… up until his suicide in 2509, just eight years ago.
The abstract briefing on the Findings was clearly intended for internal use by the Office of Naval Intelligence, and included a high certainty assumption that Carver’s suicide was caused by his guilt over failing to stop the prediction from coming true.
Yes, that’s right. His prediction.
The Carver Findings, boiled down to simplicity, was a prediction that the protests in the Outer Colonies would soon intensify, and that a firm use of authoritarian military force was the only way to prevent a vast and destructive civil war.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it.
Carver hadn’t merely predicated this belief based on a socio-political analysis of the past, and speculating a potential future scenario. Instead, Carver had written a prediction algorithm, and insisted that his algorithm proved – proved! – that said civil war was completely inevitable.
The only solution, according to Carver’s model, was a strict and firm hand. The United Nations Space Command should immediately usurp all colonial legislatures and governors, replace them with trustworthy military officers, create permanent military garrisons, and declare martial law.
On every Outer Colony world.
The more rebellious the world, the more brutal the proposed response. Suspension of rights would start with habeas corpus and private ownership of weaponry, quickly progress into freedom of travel, and in the worst cases, allow outright summary execution based on mere suspicion of collaboration with rebels.
If I had not been standing in front of a very serious Vice Admiral, then I would have been convinced that this ‘theory’ was Insurrectionist propaganda. Another use of the ever-common scare tactic of fabricating lies about your enemy’s proposed policies and tactics to make them look like monsters.
The biggest flaw in this supposed work of science was the claim of inevitability. The claim that without oppression, the resistance would only grow. As if oppression was not the most vigorous fuel to throw on the fires of rebellion.
Which is where my research came in.
The Outer Colonies were not universally rebellious. Even the most rebellious colony likely had less than ten percent political support for the Insurrection. The actual die-hards who signed up to bomb cafes and take hostages were undoubtedly even less than that.
But neither were the Colonies universally condemning the Insurrectionists. Most people were not Innies or UNSC patriots. They were worried, fearful, and unaware.
The sad truth is that an appreciable fraction of humanity can be convinced of pretty much anything if they’re approached in the right way. You can’t fix this by making humanity less naïve or more skeptical, because you can’t fundamentally change human psychology. Collectivist philosophies have tried for centuries to achieve that, with everything from bribery to genocide, and it simply doesn’t work.
What you can fix is their specific knowledge of a situation. Not via lectures or education, because that is so easily propaganda. But via transportation and communication.
Fear of the faceless people on another planet is remedied by increasing transportation to that planet. Allowing businesses to trade between those planets more easily. Allowing regular people to visit and see that other people are just like them. Allowing growth that binds communities together, making it harder for those communities to despise and attack each other.
Lies are so easily spread when communication is limited, intentionally or unintentionally. This is the most sacred task of journalists – and, of course, one of the reasons why they are both so feared and so coveted by liars. Propaganda is nothing more than a corruption of that sacred task. Whoever controls a limited source of communication has power over ‘the truth’. But when communication is increased, then that control becomes worthless.
Would my research stop the current Insurrection?
Yes, it would. Not instantly, but methodically. More notably, permanently.
Any political movement is essentially a fire. That fire might linger for years, decades, even centuries by carefully managing how much fuel you feed it. Oppression is more fuel to that fire, as obviously no one likes to be oppressed. More grievances that can be weaponized by propagandists.
The only way to fight a fire is to starve it of fuel. The last embers of the Insurrection might fight on till their deaths, but they would have no more supplies coming from smugglers, no more recruits from angry victims, no more intelligence leaked from sympathetic insiders.
“Fascinating,” I said, looking up from the holo-screen. “While, of course, I cannot verify the legitimacy of Dr. Carver’s mathematical model, I can certainly believe it from my own personal experience of growing up in the Outer Colonies.”
Utter lies, of course. Still, one does not tell a prospective employer that they are an idiot for believing in pseudoscience.
“I also see how my own research ties into this dilemma,” I continued, making sure to meet everyone’s eyes individually. “If I might briefly explain my own work, I can explain how funding it would-”
“Thank you, Doctor Halsey,” Vice Admiral Keeler interrupted. “We’ve already reviewed your work, and we agree with you wholeheartedly.”
I blinked, and despite my best effort, was unable to completely hide my surprise.
“Oh!” I replied, instinctively. “Thank you.”
“We’ve already started on your project,” Keller continued. “You will have a dedicated compound here inside the Highland Military Complex, with several facilities. Funding will be approved by ONI oversight, but will be extensive. Obviously, we are very interested in your success.”
I worked my jaw, clamping it shut lest it fall open. I was a professional, and if the UNSC wanted to spend generously on my behalf, this could only be a positive! I would not gape like some shocked student.
“A military staff has already been assembled,” the ONI spook added, nodding solemnly to me. “You’ll have roughly a hundred personnel within your project. We’ve also gathered together the co-authors from your paper, and the necessary scientific support staff for yourself and them. You will, of course, direct the project as its head.”
Co-authors? I opened my mouth for a moment to ask, then reflexively closed it again.
I had not co-written any of my research papers. Works cited, yes. Building on other people’s work, naturally. That was the nature of scientific authorship. But I’d never had a single co-author on any of my papers. Every single one had been solely written by myself.
What the hell?
“We’ll have your contract delivered to you shortly, not that there’s any concern about you,” Keeler said, smiling in a strange way. “You’ll soon learn that the paper-pushers love to dot all their i’s.”
“Yes, well, bureaucrats will be bureaucrats,” I managed to reply, still frantically trying to figure out which paper they could possibly be referring to.
“Indeed,” Keeler agreed, as he stood up, the ONI officers promptly following him. “Thank you, Doctor Halsey. Your work here will ensure the future of our species.”
The ONI officers started filing out, up the stairs, as Keeler approached the stage and stuck out his hand. Muscle memory alone guided my hand into his – my higher brain functions certainly weren’t up to the task, as focused as they were on the vital task of discerning which paper, precisely, had landed me the offer of a lifetime.
“Don’t worry about the initial stages,” Keeler said, shaking my hand firmly. “We’ve already gathered the test subjects.”
Test subjects? I thought to myself, eyes widening involuntarily.
My mind recoiled from the concept, and instead reminded me of something Keeler had said earlier.
Co-authors. He had mentioned co-authors. I'd never co-authored a paper.
Well, not a serious paper… but that one was a joke. We were drunk. Laughing about what we'd do with unlimited funding. Like wasting government money on a frivolous super-soldier project with every possible bell-and-whistle imaginable.
My blood ran cold. Oh. Oh no.