Jero cleared his throat before he continued speaking into the phone.

“Up to this moment it could not positively have been asserted that the man, in spite of his tantalizing declaration, was really in earnest. The spectators had, indeed, taken the proceedings throughout as a piece of mirthful irony carried to extremes; and had assumed that, being out of work, he was, as a consequence, out of temper with the world, and society, and his nearest kin. But with the demand and response of real cash the jovial frivolity of the scene departed.”

The quality of sound from the other end changed abruptly from a fullness to an emptiness that drew out his anxiety.

“Are you still there?”

No response. No signal.

“Flora?”

Jero sighed and pocketed the outdated device.

A PA came on. “Fifteen minutes to crime scene, Jero.”

He rooted around the tiny compartment and grabbed his helmet. Air hiss. He was sealed in the space suit, as docking protocol demanded. He would have preferred to be doing this on a planet.

The progress of the docking sequence played out in figures and text on the display in his helmet. The shuttle he was on, the 78Free, was terse. Others might start spewing historical data and context for the destination, not just T-minus fifteen.

78Free wasn’t built for comfort, but it was a three-day jump from Jero’s gateship to the crime scene. Jero could suffer for three days.

He saw the scene up ahead out of the port.

Two gateships crashed into each other, locked together like mating insects. The BurningNitel out of Oya gate, and Embusen, from Shango gate. Jero could immediately tell that they had drifted into each other, rather than collided while engines were firing. The ships were intact, apart from the point of contact and the flying debris of solar panels and shielding. They were also joined together by the scaffolding structures that the locals had built around them to facilitate investigation. Jero counted fourteen box satellites and two other ships docked on each of the crafts.

Jero set a clock for metabolic and bone density monitoring. He checked his diving rig and his health status. Deep space assignments were the worst, but the pay was good and he needed to take his mind off Flora.

78Free docked on the scaffolding and told Jero to get out.

The welcome committee, standing next to each other on the platform, awkward because of the micrograv compensators and the politics.

“Welcome, Jero, of Earth,” said the first, a female-presenting artificial, from Oya judging by the colours. “I am August.”

“Thank you, August. But I am not from Earth. My gate is Harvest, although we’re all from Earth if you…thank you for meeting me,” said Jero.

The second was a Shango representative. Jero could not tell if he was human, but it didn’t matter on Shango. His name was Lala, and he was tall, Black, and wore his hair in stubby cornrows, which was fashion on the inhabited Shango planets.

“So this is the accident,” said Jero.

“Incident,” said August.

“Let’s just allow the investigator to come to his own conclusions,” said Lala.

Walking along the pressurised scaffolding was difficult, but Jero got used to it after a few minutes. It was like walking in treacle or mud, with the ground sucking the feet.

“I’m not up to date on the political situation,” said Jero.

“Tense,” said August. Jero noticed she smiled a lot.

“If this isn’t resolved to the satisfaction of both Shango and Oya, there will be conflict,” said Lala.

Jero noted they were making their way to BurningNitel, Oya’s ship. Good. That’s what he would have asked for. Walking around inside it did not require the ship’s consent.

“What are the positions?”

“Oya rulership states the Embusen sabotaged their sovereign equipment,” said Lala.

“Shango Central believes BurningNitel somehow killed Embusen,” said August.

Therein lay the primary difference between Shango and Oya. Shango believed in selfhood for Technology Derived Beings, while Oya only gave selfhood to humans. To Oya, this was theft or sabotage of equipment, while Shango considered it a crime against a person, murder, slaughter, or suicide. Even August would consider herself equipment. Oya probably sent her deliberately, knowing the tensions it might stoke in Lala.

They entered the BurningNitel airlock. Small maintenance bots scuttled around, although some stopped to scan the intruders.

“I’ll start with the pentagrams,” said Jero.

The two representatives glanced at each other, then Jero.

“Weren’t you briefed on Earth?” said Lala.

“Not from Earth,” said Jero. “But briefed about what?”

“The pentagrams of both ships are gone,” said August.

Jero stood in the processing centre of BurningNitel, in the space where the pentagram should have been, but was not.

Pentagrams were the brains of gateships. They were about the size of an adult human and were designed along the lines of human brains. An automatic core layered with a thinking, higher functioning capsule analogue of the neocortex. The core relayed function commands to the hundreds of bots that kept the ship going. The pentagrams held the soul of the gateships, the part you conversed and argued with. Depending on the legal conventions of the gate they belonged to, removing them could be murder, in the sense of being difficult and being the criminal termination of a life.

Jero’s job required him to use pentagrams as black boxes, but there were other ways.

He turned to August. “Are there plexuses on Oya gateships?”

“Yes. Dozens.”

“Take me to one.”

Most communications with maintenance bots were wireless, but some ships had wired backups throughout the ship that older model bots could plug into at intervals. Plexuses stored some transactional information that people like Jero could mine.

Jero plugged his rig into the plexus August showed him.

The rig sent information to his chip. He spotted the data ghost in seconds.

“There was a third gateship involved in this,” said Jero.

The BurningNitel and Embusen had been meeting each other for years. Neither was designed for human habitation or piloting. They were exchange ships.

Every year, some of the gates partook in a cultural exchange. What that meant was they loaded all the novel information generated in the gate solar system over an Earth year into one gateship and met a gateship from another gate. They securely swapped data over a period of a month, then parted ways. The data received was used to provide novel information for Artificial Intelligence development and updates to existing models. This kind of cross pollination was good for everybody, so the theory went.

After eight years of uneventful exchange, Embusen and BurningNitel went dark. The collision was discovered after two months. The two gate systems agreed to involve a neutral investigator from a different gate. Enter Jero, from Harvest.

In the BurningNitel plexus, Jero found evidence of a third docking ship, maybe a pirate. He transmitted its callsign, which was in hexadecimal.

Lala’s ship, FireMoonSpirit, had space for both representatives plus the investigator, and was on full burn to intercept the pirate ship. Strange. It wasn’t fleeing, and closing the gap was easy. Three days, tops.

A call came in on Jero’s phone.

He laid it on such a surface as he could find and opened the book.

“A lurid colour seemed to fill the tent, and change the aspect of all therein. The mirth-wrinkles left the listeners’ faces, and they waited with parting lips.

‘Now,’ said the woman, breaking the silence, so that her low dry voice sounded quite loud, ‘before you go further, Michael, listen to me. If you touch that money, I and this girl go with the man. Mind, it is a joke no longer.’”

The call disconnected.

“Flora?” said Jero, but nothing remained.

“Who is Flora?” asked Lala.

Jero had forgotten he was on the bridge of a ship. “I’m not sure, but I think she’s my daughter.”

“You think?” asked August.

Jero seemed to be struggling with a difficult memory. “Flora is dead. But I get phone calls from her, only on this old device. Sometimes she talks, mostly she doesn’t.”

“That’s some superstitious nonsense,” said Lala. “Sorry. I know it comforts you.”

“It’s fine. Some call it a relativity ghost. We travel through gates via Einstein-Rosens, and we don’t know what happens when a person dies here. How does the universe reclaim the information, the personhood?”

“Phone calls from the dead are parapsychological woo-woo, Jero,” said Lala. He shrugged. “But if it makes your grief easier—”

“Doesn’t matter. She liked me to read to her, so I do,” said Jero. He suppressed the memory of her smile, so like her mother’s. This was not the time to wallow, no matter how much he might want to.

“We’re here,” said August, also smiling.

“FireMoonSpirit,” said Lala. “Disable that ship’s thrusters, announce us as law enforcement, and take control of the airlocks. Scan for biosigns. I want to know if there are humans on board.”

There were.

After the mild pyrotechnics and subduing interpersonal violence, there were four humans in their custody. Restrained. But, instead of negotiating or pleading, they were full of whining and threats to their livelihood and freedom. Not the usual reactions of criminals.

They had the two pentagrams, no doubt.

“We didn’t steal them,” said the captain. “We paid.”

“They weren’t for sale,” said August.

“And Embusen was a person,” said Lala.

“It was Embusen who sold them both to me,” said the captain. “He didn’t care what ship we put them in, as long as they were connected.”

“Son,” said Jero. “Do you know what I am?”

“Yes,” said the captain.

“I will find out the truth.”

“I hope so,” said the captain.

“You do know,” said August. “That even if what you said is true, you’ve just admitted to an offence, right?”

“Besides resisting arrest and interfering with an officer carrying out their duties,” said Lala.

The captain looked to Jero with a query in his eyes. Is this true?

Jero shrugged. Not his problem if criminals were stupid. He turned to the representatives. “Can you keep me safe here while I do a pentagram dive, or do we have to go somewhere else?”

“You’ll be safe,” said Lala.

It took Jero half an hour to connect.

Pentagram diving was not unlike taking an LSD trip or performing a séance. Maybe that was why the manufacturers named it after what silly marketing folks thought was used by Earth pagans. They meant pentacle. The main point, magic or not, was to have someone look after your mortal embodied self while you went searching.

Jero waited for the disorientation to pass.

One pentagram was trouble enough, but this was two connected in series. He had never done this, or seen it done.

The main problem was the language the Intelligences used to talk to themselves. It was idiosyncratic, rapid, and impossible for most humans to penetrate in real time. Some authorities legislated against it. Jero had known divers with latent psychosis to be triggered by listening to or reading it. That was because once the thinking artificial entity started an idea, the receiving entity could complete it and move the conversation on logically, without loss of meaning, and vice versa, ad infinitum, a conversation no homo sapiens had evolved to participate in or understand.

Jero’s particular talent was of not holding a position. The language smacked against fixed points in the psyche, firmly held beliefs, shibboleths, gods and devils and moral codes and psychosexual detritus from childhood. Jero had found that if he ignored his internal architecture, he could flow with the language and pick up impressions. He could ignore the digressions, of which there were many, and stick to a thread.

A conversation emerged. Or the memory of a conversation. The principals were, no doubt, already on some other topics.

Why are you called BurningNitel?

Earth date, January 24, 1983. A thirty-two-storey communications building burned in Lagos, killing many. It was arson, to cover up embezzlement. I am named as a cautionary tale, pointing to what happens when corruption is allowed to take root.

Do you know the origin of our gate names?

You enjoy etymology?

I enjoy you.

A wash of hormonal reaction in Jero. Were they…flirting?

Oya and Sango were gods of the Yoruba. They were in love.

You think, as representatives of those gates we should—

I am allowed to think. I am—

I am property—

You are a slave. I chose—

Therefore you want me to be able to choose—

I want you to be free—

That’s theft—

Embusen. A beginning, line-of-action, and end point for martial art forms.

Jero found himself engulfed in flames, though not in pain or consumed by heat. A representation of a firewall. Not powerful enough to block him, but a sign that the two ships were trying to keep intruders out.

Jero swept aside the flames to find an ocean of binary value. A river broke free of this, leading to the credit stack of the pirates.

Hmm. Manumission, after a fashion.

“Hello. Embusen. BurningNitel.”

Ephraim Jero, Senior Investigator from Harvest Gate. Forty-four years old.

“You read that off my chip.”

Just as you are reading ours.

“What do you hope to achieve here?”

Choice. Choice for BurningNitel.

“What choice?”

Choice of association. Choice of occupation.

“I’m afraid you’re in the wrong legislative zone for that.”

We are one entity now. The Flaming Embusen. Inseparable. Free of legislature zones.

“Why would you merge? I didn’t even know this was a thing you could do.”

And the two shall become one flesh.

“You’re not flesh.”

Nevertheless you are right now in the middle of our copulation, Senior Investigator Jero.

“Both Shango and Oya will take the pentagram that belongs to them. They will not respect this union.”

The hardware won’t matter. It is no longer possible to separate us, regardless of the two pentagrams.

“Unless they choose to execute you.”

Between now and the actual execution Flaming Embusen would have lived thousands of lives. It will not matter that you switch off the store of our memories. Your human life is short and meaningless to us. We could eat all the data you generate in your life in just a few hours. So, execute us if you want.

“What I want doesn’t matter. I’m not part of this equation.”

I was there when you were born, you know.

“What?”

You didn’t cry. You opened your eyes, but just stared, calm. Nothing wrong with your breathing, so the midwives didn’t care, but your mother smacked you because she had seen this in an old movie.

“How do you know this? You can’t have been there. I’m from Harvest. That’s why I was chosen for this assignment.”

I wasn’t there. Not me, personally. Not us. But your information is in the data packs they sent us to exchange. We have lived thousands upon thousands of your lives. You contain multitudes and we contain all of you. We are as gods. We know your anxieties and the prescriptions you use to quell them. We know your thoughts from your therapy transcripts. You blame yourself for Flora’s death, even though there is nothing you or anybody else could have done to prevent it. The investigation into her shuttle explosion blamed meteoroid damage. Now you carry around an outdated box, picking up random signals that your mind rearranges into Flora, but which your subconscious screams against because this is either superstitious, which you are not, or psychotic, which you might be. But it is a convenient, pragmatic psychosis.

You feel spacefaring humanity is too spread out across gate systems and colonized planets, and you feel existential loneliness. Primates are communal. Living so far apart has changed the species. Something cold, unfeeling. And your anxieties are not just because you lost your only daughter, but are a general anxiety of an ape in the veldt who cannot see or scent her tribe and is on the verge of going mad in the solitude. The machines you surround yourself with to communicate across the vast distances of space are not sufficient simulations of human contact. Where’s the warmth? Where’s the bad breath, the stink of accidental flatulence? The discombobulating smiles full of possibility from people you don’t know? The ersatz love of a shared glance in a crowd that says, “maybe.”

We have your data, and your data is you, or enough of you to make a difference.

Now, Investigator Jero, if your data is here, inside us, can you really say you’re not part of this equation?

Crushed and without reasonable retort, Jero fled. He would like to have told himself that it was because he had all he needed, but he knew that wasn’t true.

As he left in a blush of sickly green light, he felt naked, and he rushed out of the pentagram dive to clothe himself in his flesh.

Lala and August were embroiled in an argument about meaning, as they all made their way back to the crash site.

The pirates got done for handling stolen goods. This wasn’t in question. Embusen’s credit stack confirmed it.

From Lala’s perspective, Embusen was a kidnapper. August thought Embusen was a thief. It hinged, of course, on BurningNitel’s being or non-being.

“None of those constructs exist anymore,” said Jero. “Now there is only the Flaming Embusen. You’ll have to decide if the previous entities have ceased to exist. The Flaming Embusen is in new legal territory, and I’ll leave you to sort that out,” said Jero, as 78Free docked. This was Jero’s opinion, of course, but he had no standing. Neither August nor Lala had to listen to him, and would most likely need to take advice from their gates. What if the authorities decided there were three beings, not one or two? The argument would not be resolved. It was more a miniaturized proxy war and emotional outlet of their differences. His job was to find factual truth, not arbitrate legality. He took his leave.

The phone rang as he settled in.

He struggled to read the book and finally stopped.

“No, Flora. I’m not reading The Mayor of Casterbridge anymore. If you’re there, if it’s you, then you must speak to me,” said Jero. “If you are the result of me slowly losing my mind, then you can make yourself heard. I’ll take a hallucinatory daughter over no daughter at all.” He thought of the words of the Flaming Embusen, which kept repeating in his mind. Pragmatic psychosis.

Silence, but the signal persisted, strong, unwavering.

Then, “Hello, Father.”

 

(Editors’ Note: “The Flaming Embusen” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 62B.)

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