Exigency Read online

  FANTOME

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locations are used factitiously. Other names, characters, incidents, and places are the products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Michael Siemsen

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof.

  FANTOME and logo are trademarks of Fantome Publishing, LLC.

  Editing services provided by Red Road Editing/Kristina Circelli

  ISBN 978-1-940757-22-3 (Trade Paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-940757-21-6 (epub)

  ISBN 978-1-940757-20-9 (Kindle)

  Connect with the author:

  facebook.com/mcsiemsen * michaelsiemsen.com

  twitter: @michaelsiemsen * [email protected]

  Also by Michael Siemsen:

  A Warm Place to Call Home (a demon’s story)

  The Many Lives of Samuel Beauchamp (a demon’s story)

  The Dig (Book 1 of the Matt Turner series)

  The Opal (Book 2 of the Matt Turner series)

  Table of Contents

  Beginning

  Part 1

  1.0

  1.1

  1.2

  1.3

  1.4

  1.5

  1.6

  1.7

  1.8

  1.9

  Part 2

  2.0

  2.1

  2.2

  2.3

  2.4

  2.5

  2.6

  2.7

  2.8

  2.9

  Part 3

  3.0

  3.1

  3.2

  3.3

  3.4

  3.5

  3.6

  3.7

  3.8

  3.9

  EXIGENCY

  Michael Siemsen

  “In nature, chaos leads to order, order leads to chaos, again and

  forever in this way, and at all scales,

  infinite and infinitesimal.”

  Foster Dill Norte

  UNIVERSAL, 2066

  1.0

  The cursor bobbed in the air before her: deep purple_ foliage. She opened her bio eye and unblurred the background in her prosthetic fone eye. Paragraphs of text floated with Minnie’s gaze as she studied the view from her cabin’s patio. Blue salvia shrubs flanked the shaded cobblestone path from the bottom of the patio stairs, all the way down to the lake. Just above the distant hillside vineyards, the sun shone at late afternoon, its rays bouncing from the lake’s mellow ripples to the blossoming flowers.

  Among all the pristine scenery, the salvia stood out to her. Blue flowers—blaue Blume—symbols of hope and beauty, of love and desire, of the infinite and unreachable. Yes, blue would work much better than purple. A smidge transcendental, but screw it. If Minnie’s readers caught it, great. If they interpreted the color as arbitrary, so be it. The rest of her essay should prove explicit enough for its intended audience.

  Minnie rested her head against the lounge chair back and closed both eyes. The doc re-sharpened before her, cursor still bouncing: deep purple_ foliage. She selected purple and recursed for each instance.

  Behind Minnie, beyond the wide-open threshold leading into her cabin’s living room, wee nails tik-tik-tik’d across the hardwood floor. She turned just as her pet ferret, Noodle, skittered onto the patio’s decking, and leapt up onto Minnie’s lap.

  Noodle wriggled his pointy face into her neck and said, “Are you still working?”

  Too ticklish, she pulled him back down to her legs and stroked his back. “Yeah, I have to get this essay done before group. At least the first draft.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Context, perspective, and scale. I think it’s pretty solid so far, but who knows if anyone will actually read it.”

  Uncharacteristic silence from Noodle. He rested his chin on his fist. Curious, Minnie glanced at the clock in her fone and waited while rubbing his ears. His anthropomorphized face conveyed deep contemplation.

  He finally broke the silence. “So you’re feeling down about that?” He nodded encouragement, brow furrowed: This is a safe place for sharing.

  Minnie smiled and went along with it. “Well, Doctor … I wouldn’t say down. Just, I don’t know, more wondering than anything else, I guess. I’m supposed to produce these things bimonthly.”

  “And you came here to work,” Noodle went on, a flit of his tiny paw toward the lake and mountains. “Not so confined as the station?”

  Minnie’s amusement hiccupped. What the hell was Noodle going on about? Since when did he give two licks about the station? Confined? And then she realized exactly what was happening.

  She rolled him onto his back and glowered. “Et tu, ferret?”

  “I’m sorry!” He pleaded. “I couldn’t help it! It wasn’t me! Some trigger … You must’ve said something flagged!”

  “I’m going to go work in peace.” She pulled up the game’s main menu. “You know, what I came here for.”

  Noodle attempted a final apology as he, and the rest of the game app, dissolved before Minnie.

  She opened her eyes. The lights in her quarters undimmed.

  Sliding out of bed, she growl-sighed. Was nothing sacred? With all the assessments and measures in place, did the station’s psych monitors really need to be invading her personal game? Hijack one of her pets? She was the last person on the station to consider at-risk.

  Plopping down at her desk, she pulled on her headphones.

  She wondered, had it been an automated psych probe talking through Noodle, or had John set it up? If it was automated, fine. At least it wouldn’t show up on some report. More likely the case. Though she could see John sitting in his command office with nothing better to do than setup new monitors: Minerva Sotiras - monitor for signs of depression, cleithrophobia, and full-blown eye-twitch spacewack.

  Poor Nood, she thought. He thinks I’m pissed at him.

  Later. Noodle would have to wait. The essay was almost done, and just north of fifteen minutes remained before her weekly group session.

  She grabbed the stereo lens from her desk and popped it over her bio eye. The doc opened before her, floating in the recessed nook above her desk, flanked by her preferred editing tools. Movement caught her eye and she shifted focus past a patch of text in her second paragraph. Beyond her desk window’s frame, starry black space gave way to the browns, teals, and pinks of Epsilon C’s dominant landmass. Within seconds, the planet eclipsed Minnie’s view of open space.

  “No thank you, Northern Hemisphere.” She said, and blurred out everything in the doc’s background.

  Revision mode enabled, Minnie picked up where she’d left off back on her patio.

  Where was I? Ah, right … blue flowers.

  “Edit all. Purple to blue.”

  She reread the passage.

  Pointing downward from low orbit, a scope provides a bird’s-eye view of a gently sloped hill, its surface blanketed with deep blue foliage half-lit by a setting sun. A tranquil scene.

  The scope zooms out, revealing the blue hill is the last of its kind. The surrounding area is blackened by fire, dense smoke billows westward, and orange flames rapidly converge on the lone blue circle. A scene of destruction and potentially imminent extinction.

  The scope zooms back in, beyond the bird’s-eye view, to a microscopic level, exposing a deadly toxin hidden in the lovely blue flowers’ pollen. Pulling out again, this time to a few miles overhead, a group of intelligent beings is revealed to the east, torches at their feet as they stand upwind, watching the last of the deadly blue flowers blow away as di
stant smoke. A scene of survival, of controlling one’s destiny, of tragedy aversion.

  Focus shifts west, to another people, dead and dying from the poisonous smoke unleashed by their enemies. A war scene.

  And finally, zooming out once more, out beyond even the scope, a vast planet is seen teeming with life, two moons circling, along with a looming space station full of scientists from a distant solar system. A scene of learning—of discovery.

  Scale. This is what Foster Dill Norte referred to when he coined the term scientific depth-of-field. What we now call simply dof. As a mental footnote, you may wish to commit one of my favorite FDN quotes to memory: “Context is everything, context can be nothing, scale is infinite.”

  Minnie saved her work, set the stereo lens on the desk, and then navigated to the playback options in her fone. She selected the Sindy voice to read it back to her. Minnie had always wished she could pull off Sindy’s smooth, authoritative-yet-dispassionate tone. Instead, she thought her exhilaration always made her sound like a looner.

  Minnie selected her desk speakers for playback.

  Like all of the synthetic voices, Sindy’s Modern English was impeccable. “It can be challenging for observers to fully see the cosms, both micro- and macro-, and so one must always predefine the scale of a particular research set—the focal length of the scope, the depth of the optics, the time period with hard-start and hard-end, etset. And they must always account for themselves, the observers. It’s all too common for the researcher to exclude herself from a cosm, as if she’s but an intangible set of eyes absorbing information, identifying patterns, performing measurements, recording statistics. In example two-point-seven, a hypothetical researcher attempted to pluck individual factors from the chaos and arrange them into an order that she understands. This very act marries the observer to the recorded cosm.”

  “Pause,” Minnie said and brought the text back up on her fone. “Edit. Marries to married. Commit.”

  She set the cursor at the beginning of the last sentence and told Sindy to start again.

  “This very act married the observer to the recorded cosm. This isn’t necessarily a problem, nor should one attempt to avoid it. We must simply be aware of ourselves during review and later stages of research. Unlike the heavily starched foundational research papers of the past, today’s scientists shouldn’t strive for invisibility, papers appearing as if nature herself spewed them out: ‘Here’s a bunch of data about ME: Nature!’ No, the observer should be represented nearly as much as the observation. Further, we mustn’t spend too much time at a single scale, prioritizing macro levels, as if this would allow one to fully grasp essential context. All levels are equally critical to capture.

  “Case in point: Pointing downward from low orbit, a scope provides a bird’s-eye view of a gently sloped hill, its surface blanketed with deep blue foliage half-lit by a setting sun. A tranq—”

  The Sindy voice paused dictation as a schedule reminder popped up in front of the essay text.

  ALERTS: Group - 5 MIN

  The alert faded to a countdown clock: 4:59, 4:58, before Minnie selected DISMISS. She saved her work, copied it to two of her lockers, and slid her feet into her slips. Walking to the hatch, she opened a new message to Aether.

  MINNIE: Yay group. Let the healing begin.

  She received a near-instant reply:

  AETHER: See you in a few.

  Minnie exited her quarters into the hall, then scaled the ladder to the main tube. Gravity released her body, and she glided down to the hygiene sub-bay. Even after eight months, there was still something about her relationship with Aether that sent her backsliding into schoolgirl giddiness. And interacting with Aether around everyone else, in a supposedly professional setting, recalled the days when the pair harbored a thrilling secret.

  Everyone knew now, of course—Aether had months ago moved out of her shared quarters with John Li and into Minnie’s unit—and more than one horribly uncomfortable group session had been dedicated to the relationship transition.

  These conversations had been by far the most awkward of the entire mission, and not only for the three individuals directly involved, but for the rest of the crew, as well. As the current mission commander, John was in charge of the weekly group sessions. He could’ve recused himself, but the backup group moderator was the assistant commander: his wife, Aether.

  Fortunately for the station’s nine inhabitants, John and Aether were the most mature, reasonable, and qualified—if such a thing were possible—to handle a divorce. They’d agreed some time before launch that if anything happened between them, the break-up’s initiator would move into the unused tenth personal quarters.

  But to Minnie’s gratification, the tenth personal quarters had been repurposed as a storage unit, and John allowed Aether to move in with Minnie. There was no third person in line for such decisions. John and Aether’s divorce pretty much exemplified why the mission commander shouldn’t be in a relationship with a crewmember, let alone their second-in-command. Not that they’d acquired their positions by choice. Both were elected by crew vote and each had voted for the other as mission commander during the past two elections.

  “Minerva,” John said as Minnie entered the common room.

  “Yes?” Minnie snapped, not intending to come off rude, but he’d surprised her. When uttered by him, exasperating things tended to follow her name.

  “Welcome,” he said, letting her know it’s all he’d meant. Disappointment soured his face.

  Minnie offered an apologetic smile and sat down at the round, bamboo table. She hated how she came off around him lately, and Aether knew it was an insecurity thing. She’d told Minnie numerous times how transparent Minnie was in John’s presence.

  “Sometimes you act like he’s going to snatch me back at any second,” Aether had said one night. “As if I’d have no say in it.”

  “Maybe sometimes I’m afraid you’ll want to,” Minnie had replied. “That one day you’ll wake up and think ‘What have I done?’ and run screaming back to him.”

  “Maybe I will,” Aether had said. “But no time soon.” She’d grinned a clever grin.

  “Oh, it’s safe for me to feel settled for at least a few days?”

  “Maybe even a week.”

  Qin brushed by Minnie and plopped into the stool next to her.

  Minnie elbowed him. “Sup, Chinstrap?”

  His eyes bulged, staring at, yet not through, the dark, panoramic window across the room. “Hang on … this guy’s almost dead…”

  Minnie waved a hand in front of him. “Does this mess you up? Am I messing you up? Watch out!”

  Flustered, Qin swatted her arm away, shut his eyes, and scooted to the edge of his seat. “Aw, what? Come on! I … Oh, how you suck, Minnie.”

  She grinned, wide-eyed. “No way, did you die? Did I really gank it? Tell me I got you killed.”

  He glared at her. “No, I got him. But zero bonus.”

  “Good enough,” she said, cozing back into her seat. “I’ll take it. Send me a screencap?”

  Qin deadpanned his decline.

  All two meters of Tom’s lanky stature ambled around the table.

  “Sup, Blondie?” Minnie said.

  Tom had evidently witnessed the successful ganking of Qin’s game and gave Minnie a congratulatory nod as he sat. She dipped her head in return.

  “Good afternoon, my pretties,” Aether said from the doorway.

  1.1

  Minnie descended the ladder from Wheel A to the lab pods. One of her probes had M’d her a proximity alert. She had more than three hundred of them distributed across Threck Country, but she recognized this probe’s unique identifier the moment it appeared in her fone:

  ALERTS: MIN1311 – 1m PROXIMITY – IL

  Under different circumstances—those occurring more than two weeks ago—Minnie would have been concerned that an intelligent lifeform had come within one meter of an observation unit. But this particular OU, originally intended for a much
less precarious position outside the densely populated Threck City, happened to lose a sail during its early-morning descent, landing just off a stone walkway outside the main wall. Panicked, Minnie had prepared to send an incident report to John and Aether (protocol required the mission commander and assistant commander be notified of much lessor predicaments. But she’d paused mid-compose.

  Minnie had waited for the station’s next flyover and proceeded to reposition one of the optical arrays, zooming in to estimate the probe’s visibility to passers-by. She’d seen in the display that the remaining sails had dissolved upon landing, and the porous, camouflaged outer shell blended well with the surrounding mulch and soil. What if she gave it a day to see what it could gather? The team had never had eyes and ears in so busy an area.

  Two weeks and no less than 1,000 IL proximity alerts later, MIN1311 had provided a windfall of data—data that would’ve taken months, possibly years, to gather with more discreetly placed probes. Minnie had been able to fill in thousands of gaps in the City dialect, capturing slang, idioms, and much more casual conversation than the very formal language she’d been able to record during public assemblies.

  Ever watchful, John had inquired about MIN1311 the day after it landed.

  Minnie had lied. “It’s nowhere of concern right now, but I’m going to have its internals destruct after nightfall.” She hadn’t said that nightfall.

  Two days later, she received an M:

  JOHN: Is MIN1311 taken care of?

  She’d replied, taking advantage of the ambiguous wording: Yes, it is.

  She didn’t know how long she planned to keep it there observing. Indefinitely? She’d be caught for sure. But she’d performed multiple risk assessments! If a Threck noticed the probe and picked it up, the internals would instantly self-destruct, leaving only a hollow, charred core within the shell. The Threck might keep it as an interesting find, show it to acquaintances. Worst case, the object would be given to a Threck with geological knowledge. Recognizing the shell’s foreign material, they’d tool it open, revealing the burnt core and minute fragments of internals. Their most likely final analysis: some sort of meteorite.