The Heresies of World Read online

  The Heresies of World

  By

  O. A. Beckett

  Text copyright 2016 by O. A. Beckett

  All Rights Reserved

  A fellow of literary eminence once said that mature artists steal. In an attempt at maturity, then, I hereby steal the following NOTICE from another eminent literary fellow:

  All men, gods, and planets in this story are imaginary; Any coincidence of names is regretted.

  If you enjoy this book, please visit http://www.oabeckett.com/ for new stories (as they become available), updates, freebies, reviews, musings, rants, recommendations, and ribaldry. The author can also be contacted there if you are inclined either to bestow praise or to hurl abuse, as your conscience dictates (both will be accepted in kind).

  To J, and to brave heretics everywhere.

  Table of Contents

  Note to the reader

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  Note to the reader

  The Heresies of World is the first installment of a longer “cycle” (to be called, simply, World) that is in the works. Therefore, if it ever seems like you missed something, or that the plot is willfully mysterious or rudely disorienting, I can only apologize for any perceived slight (there’s no one to blame but me) and promise—in the spirit of genuine goodwill and sympathy that prevails between authors and readers—that the answers are coming.

  —OAB

  Los Angeles, 2016

  1.

  …Heresy 18: World is uncreated, without beginning or end. Its modest expanse is all there is or was or ever will be—the stars not suns, but deceptive pinprick patterns on the outer wall…

  Kaeylor Lirin hoped that whatever she found in the ruins would be worth all the trouble. It had been a minor work of genius, putting into place each carefully-plotted step of the plan, lining up each excuse and alibi, to enable this unauthorized investigation. No, she chided herself, admit what it really is: a treasonous act of snooping. She felt strangely comforted by the fact that no matter what she found, it wouldn’t be worth the certain and painful death she’d suffer if she were caught by Imperial spies. Better not get caught, she thought, and patted her holstered stun blaster.

  “How much farther?” she asked the more anthropoid of her two AI companions.

  “It is only another— SKRNNNCH.” The silver droid emitted a sickly metallic tearing sound as it spluttered to a stop, its head bowed like a sleeping child, white smoke pouring from the rectangular panel on its back.

  “Dammit!” Kaeylor cursed audibly, which was out of character for her, even in the sole company of AI. Although she had spent her entire adult life combatting superstition, she couldn’t help but feel that this breakdown was a bad omen. Just being out here was dangerous enough, without additional complications. She turned to the other droid, a boxy orange unit with arms like the claws of a snowplow.

  “The battery, I’m guessing?” Kaeylor sought confirmation, already knowing the answer. The orange droid performed a split-second scan of its malfunctioning cousin.

  “Affirmative.” The warm, maternal voice contrasted markedly with the droid’s awkward, industrial exterior. “A minor tumble-collapse. Shall I provide auxiliary power to enable you to perform a solid state cell patch?”

  Kaeylor’s heart pounded in her ears like a gong, but she smiled in spite of herself at the vibrating little droid. As a scientist, she knew better than to anthropomorphize an AI, but it was still endearing how the droid seemed to shiver in the thickening blanket of snow that was slowly enveloping this side of the mountain. It seemed to be coming down quicker than it was an hour ago, Kaeylor suddenly realized. No time to waste, especially on sentimentality.

  “Yes,” she said quickly, whipping out her handheld and activating the com-link. “Boot auxiliary in fifteen seconds…”

  Having lost time repairing the silver droid, it was another hour before the three of them made it to the ruins of the Andelyne Observatory. Its twisted black hulk loomed in front of them forming a gaunt cameo against the white sky. Whatever the Observatory’s ancient purposes had been, it was most recently a stronghold of the Federation during the decades-long Civil War, and destroying it had been a key turning point that helped secure the Empire’s victory. The bombardment had been thorough, leaving little but a scarred carcass of a building. The roof had taken the heaviest impact, its metal and stone melted together into grotesque stalactites that dripped down the outer facade. A giant lintel lay haphazardly across what remained of the portico, and it took the combined heaving of the woman and two droids to pry an opening wide enough for a person to slip through.

  “Stay here,” she cautioned the silver droid, “and scan for surveillance nets. If anything at all pops up, sound an alarm.”

  “As you command,” the silver droid replied solemnly. Kaeylor wondered if it was this one’s stolid demeanor that was beginning to wear on her nerves, or if she simply harbored some residual, unfounded hostility for its earlier breakdown. Either way, she had had to make do with little time and fewer resources when she had jury-rigged the droids together. The result wasn’t perfect, but they only had to last long enough to fulfill their purpose.

  “You,” she gestured to the little one, “follow me.”

  “My pleasure,” the matronly voice replied. Kaeylor withdrew her handheld and projected a thin beam of light into the dark cavern at the mouth of the ruin. Then woman and droid carefully, tentatively entered the frozen remains of the Observatory.

  The silver droid remained alone outside. It paced back and forth in front of the entrance, its metal exoskeleton oblivious to the biting wind that was picking up as the snow fell ever quicker. Perhaps a storm was approaching this side of the mountain? But the droid’s sensors detected no indicators of increasing precipitation. Cloud cover was normal, and atmospheric conditions were in the predictable range for this time of year at this altitude. The droid stopped, its subsonic microphones picking up Kaeylor’s receding footsteps and the diminishing hum of the orange droid. They were well inside the observatory, comfortably out of human earshot. And it was doubtful that the other droid was aware of what was being done. Even so, caution was advisable. The silver droid stepped a few feet further into the whistling wind before sending out, with three short beeps, a radio transmission.

  Inside the old Observatory, the ground was covered in a thin layer of slush. The walls must be mostly intact, Kaeylor realized, if they retained enough heat to melt the snow. She couldn’t say the same about the domed roof, which was reduced to a sagging, tangled skein of skeletal rebar interwoven with hardy mosses and evergreen vines. This macabre thatching created a dim perpetual twilight inside the space, and if not for the snowflakes drifting down through the interstices, Kaeylor could have mistaken the place for a clearing in one of the southern rainforests on West Mundus. As her eyes acclimated, she was able to switch off the handheld’s beam and survey the place in its natural lighting.

  It was just as she had expected. The ruins of the Andelyne Observatory did not resemble an observatory at all. Rather, what was left of them seemed more like a kind of vast navigation center, similar to the control room of a submarine. The destruction and decay had not completely obscured the mildewed, shadowy outlines of instrument panels, display screens, and radio boxes. This had never been an astronomical facility, she was sure of it. She was fluent in this technology, which was more telecom than telescopy. In fact, she now made out the figure of what she supposed an Imperial scout, had one been present, would tell her were the remains of the “great telescope.” It was obviously a radio beacon.

/>   “Come,” she beckoned to the droid, and hurried over to inspect what remained of the “telescope” base. She found a loose panel, and tugged at it. The droid rolled up alongside her and extended a metal claw, easily prying away the rusted metal sheet. Kaeylor picked at the moldering circuitry inside. Its design was antiquated, much older than any system she had studied at the Institute, but even her knowledge of modern electronics was enough to convince her that the giant instrument had been used primarily to broadcast signals, not collect them. What had they been broadcasting at such high power? And why? She turned to the droid.

  “Can you run a patch?”

  “Possibly,” the droid chirped. Its cheery tone echoed tinnily in the metallic graveyard around them. “I will do my best.” It extended a cable, humming and whirring as it searched for a stable contact. While the droid worked on one side, Kaeylor inspected the remainder of the hollow behind the discarded panel. She couldn’t see well, but tucked in one corner her hand found something bulky and cold. With a few careful tugs, she jerked it free. It was a metal box, about the size of a paperback novel, with a rusted latch holding down the hinged lid. Kaeylor remembered these boxes from her childhood, when the shell-shocked and wounded returned from the final years of the war. It was a soldiers’ document case, and someone probably long dead had deliberately hid it here. Kaeylor’s heart leapt. She’d have to return to base camp soon, but this could provide the evidence she was looking for. Or at least some interesting new “heresies” for the notebook. In any case, it would have to do. There wasn’t time to scour the ruins for more.

  Kaeylor put the box in her jacket pocket, then stood. She looked down at the whirring droid. It sputtered, then settled down to its usual jittery purr.

  “I’m sorry,” the droid chittered. “I am unable to conduct any appreciable current.”

  “I’m sorry too,” Kaeylor said, drawing her stun blaster and jamming the barrel right up to the droid’s central CPU, “it’s not personal.” The blast lit up the dark chamber as blue flame arced out the droid’s sides and a skinny stream of molten copper skirted out its front.

  Kaeylor bolted to the entrance, but she was too late. The silver droid had already detected a threat and was making a run for it. Kaeylor kneeled at the entrance, blaster at shoulder height, and took at aim at the fleeing droid. At this distance, it could almost be mistaken for a flesh-and-blood man, albeit a silver one who was bounding down the mountain at a superhuman pace. Watching it leap its way down the treacherous, icy descent, Kaeylor was grateful that all civilian robots were equipped with firmware forbidding intentional harm to a human being. In a fair fight, her odds would be slimmer. She felt a twinge of regret as she fired three short pulses. They screamed through the air, two of them catching the silver droid in the torso, which promptly exploded in a confetti burst of singed wires and shards of circuit board. The third pulse shattered among a clump of trees, white-hot sparks ricocheting between the ashen trunks. Hurled skyward, the droid’s back panel sliced through several thick tree limbs before caroming back down and sizzling steamily into a snow drift. White smoke again poured skyward, this time from the droid’s rent skull plate, which had burst open like a popped kernel of corn as the positronic brain shorted out. Kaeylor shrugged—no time for sentimentality.

  She turned back to the entrance of the ruins. She’d have to dispose of the droids’ remains, but first she needed to assess the evidence she had uncovered and prepare herself to return to base camp. She readied the camera on her handheld, and pulled out the document box.

  2.

  …Heresy 37 (alternate version): World is a simulation, a ghost universe of ones and zeroes perpetually cycling through some giant alien server…

  She was three quarters of the way back to camp when she first heard the noise. A split-second of dull scraping, like metal on a dusty slate. The first time, she had figured it was a common auditory hallucination, the sonic equivalent of that eerie feeling that someone is watching you. Even back home on West Mundus she sometimes imagined voices yelling in a strong wind. Maybe this was no different. It was windy now, anyhow, and the snow was getting deeper. She’d be happy to get back to camp.

  Then she heard it again, and was certain that she had been caught. She stopped dead in her tracks, and listened.

  Something different now—a dry cracking, like a footstep crunching through a film of brittle ice. She must have been followed.

  With one trembling hand gripping her stun blaster, she dove behind a massive snow drift and huddled for cover. The gong-beat returned to her ears, but she recalled her emergency response training and commandeered her breathing, easing down her heart rate and blood pressure. Inner silence. She listened intently to the woods around her. Nothing now but the wind. Simple, no voices.

  She ran down her mental checklist. Stunner armed, check. She slid aside her earmuffs, mashed her head to the snowpack below her, listening for the unmistakable vibratory pattern of footsteps. Wind only, and trickling water, check. Slowly, silently, she withdrew her handheld from her belt clip, ran the radiation scanner. No surveillance nets in the area, check. Now, for visual—she adjusted her visor to thermal view and gingerly raised her head above the white mound of the snow drift, her binocular eyepieces emerging like alligator eyes above the jagged white mound. She scanned the visual field. Normal. Temperatures hovering around two-sixty-five Kelvin, more or less. Ice, rocks, the wispy trunks of slender evergreens—all shimmering in various shades of cold blue in her visor field.

  Then suddenly she caught a glimmer of it, an abnormal heat source, fluttering reddish between the trees. It was doing its best to conceal itself, advancing lithely between obscuring objects. But it was undeniably there, stalking her, slowly making its way down the incline toward her hiding place. Something large—a man? If it was an agent of the Empire, a tracking scout who knew where she had been, she’d no doubt be crucified for treason. Or worse. Better not to get caught, she reminded herself. She swiftly raised her blaster and let loose a volley of blasts.

  They screeched toward the trees, the thin scent of ozone trailing in their plasma wake, and erupted like firework bursts between the slender trunks. Had she hit her mark?

  For a tense half-second, silence. Then a noisy flurry of white powder as a snow leopard, unharmed, bounded away from the cluster of trees and further up the mountain. It had been a false alarm. Kaeylor sighed audibly in relief. She was alone.

  As far as she could tell, her treasonous snooping would go unpunished, at least for now. She hadn’t heard the three short beeps that had coincided with her blaster fire.

  Hiking the remaining trek back to base camp, her mind was consumed with the contents of the metal box. It had contained yellowing pictures of a beautiful young woman and numerous letters, lovingly composed by hand. The papers had all been folded and frozen together, so she had been forced to melt them apart with the heat lamp on her handheld. The problem was that once melted, they sopped up the moisture, a problem that when coupled with the increasingly-acidic atmosphere gave her only a few minutes to inspect them before they disintegrated into an unreadable sopping mess. She photographed what she could, hiding the files in a secret, encrypted folder of her handheld. Just possessing the photos was dangerous enough, considering their origin in a seditious act of trespassing. But the information that she had been able to preserve was even more damning, if true, and gave her at least two more “heresies” to jot down in the notebook she kept for that purpose.

  Finally approaching the outer reaches of camp, she rehearsed her official excuse for being away the past few hours: taking an estimate of the snowy owl population, a task best done solo if you hoped to directly observe any of the skittish birds. It helped that she was considered an expert on population dynamics, but she supposed that simply being able to leave the camp unaccompanied was a perk of her status as Chief Scientist on the expedition. The status was deserved. She could say, without a hint of arrogance, that she was one of the top five climate scientists o
n World. Hopefully this fact afforded a modicum of protection from the consequences of her reckless curiosity, but it was still safest to have a good story prepared in case anyone asked.

  As she emerged from a grove of icicle-laden evergreens, the camp finally in view, she realized that she might need her story much sooner than she ever imagined. The camp was surrounded by snowmobiles emblazoned with the Sun and fasces, the sigil of the Imperial Guard. If no one had followed her, what the hell could they possibly be doing here?

  She wouldn’t have to wait long to find out. She tried to approach nonchalantly, but her path was cut off by an officer flanked by four legionaries. The officer saluted perfunctorily, but he barked out his sentences in the haughty staccato common to little men with big titles:

  “That’s far enough. You are Dr. Lirin, I gather?”

  “Yes. And you are?”

  “Tribune Randin Torr of the Third Legion of the Imperial Guard. We have been sent here to bring you in.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong.” Kaeylor realized that her voice betrayed too much trepidation, and she made an effort to sound more forceful with her next statement. “And as a citizen of the Empire, I demand to know what crime I am being charged with.”

  The Tribune almost chuckled, but stifled it with a ceremonious clearing of the throat. “We are not here to arrest you, although I would advise caution in choosing your words. Distrust of authorities might be viewed as a poor reflection on your innocence.” If this statement was intended as a joke, Kaeylor was not amused.

  “If I’m not under arrest, then I assume I don’t need legal advice, Tribune—yours or otherwise. What’s this about?”

  “Your assistance is needed with a sensitive matter regarding Imperial Security. A military heliplane is on its way to transport you back to the Capital. You will be briefed on specifics there.”