by David L. Clements

* * * *

Persistence carried to extremes can lead to forgetting what the goal was....

Spinning. The fighter was spinning—very fast, out of control. Inside the cushioning gel, Baker felt centrifugal force ripping at him, threatening another blackout.

After endless moments sending commands to the fighter, he realized the main controls were gone and resorted to hands and feet, pressing the controls, persuading thrusters to fire short sharp bursts to slow the spin before it killed him.

Gradually, it worked. His vision cleared, blackness receding to the periphery then disappearing. But he didn’t see all that he should.

The visual feed was a simple display from the sensor suite. Too much information was missing. He’d been unconscious for so long the fighter was far from its target. He could see the accretion disk, its color stretching from the red exterior to the blue inner edge. Within that was Nergal, the neutron star. It glowed a dull red except where the accretion stream impacted, heating its surface to an incandescence brighter than everything else in the system—Nergal, accretion disk, and the red giant star Laz, their tool for destroying the genocidal criminals hiding in the neutron star.

Baker was at least a thousand kilometers from where he should be. He’d been out for more than a second. How was that possible?

And then it hit him.

Not only was the ship’s control system crippled, most of his mind was missing as well.

* * * *

Baker remembered his first meatspace sight of the fighter. He had been inside a shipyard orbiting the gas giant Aplu, Laz’ largest planet. The shipyard had been built for the fabrication of the iron processors but was now largely empty. The processors had been shipped into Laz’s atmosphere where their tenders prodded them towards completion. All that was left was a vast echoing space.

Except for the fighters, awaiting their pilots.

They walked slowly towards them. Conversations stalled as they took careful, unaccustomed steps to the machines, a hundred pilots seeing their vehicles for the first time.

“Careful as you get close,” warned one of the engineers.

“The armor?” asked Baker.

“It’s dense enough to produce local gravity distortions,” came the reply, “and residual magnetics in the particle shields could affect your implants.”

That wouldn’t do, thought Baker, surveying the hull of his ship. He stood about thirty meters away, as far from it as it was long. The ships were quiet at the moment, empty of weapons and fuel, lying dormant, but they still carried an aura of threat. Their fuselages were the shape of broad blades, with a narrow lenticular cross section. Most of their volume was degenerate-matter armor with the occasional storage bay for deployable systems. A narrow cylinder ran through the core housing the controls, weapons, fuel, and pilot. At the rear the blade broadened to house the main propulsion system with its physical and magnetic nozzles. At the front the fuselage narrowed to a needle-sharp tip, a shaft of dwarf-star stuff soon to be aimed at the heart of Nergal.

Baker felt his excitement surge.

Just sitting there, the fighter appeared dangerous. He relished the prospect of pointing this weapon, fully loaded and charged with enough destructive force to scour a planet, and flying it right down their enemies’ throats. Baker hated them with a passion. Everyone in Aplu did. It was why they were here. Nothing else had been allowed to distract their thoughts and actions for millennia. And these fighters would make sure their revenge was completed much sooner than they’d imagined.

He took a few steps closer. “Careful there,” called one of the other pilots, someone from his own wing. But Baker was drawn forward, wondering what it would be like to touch the fighter’s skin.

“I’ll be fine,” he called back as he raised his hand towards the ridged surface. The pull shocked him, and for a moment he felt dizzy as he became sure the floor was tilting downhill towards the fighter, so heavy it bent local space around it.

But there was something else. A kind of double vision or double thought, as if this physical body was being disconnected from his real mind. It scared him, and he stepped back, away from the fighter that didn’t yet seem ready to accept him.

* * * *

The mission was simple enough. Their enemies had established some kind of magnetic field projectors near the surface of Nergal. These were disrupting the accretion flow and opening an attack route towards the new processing stations. Their completion was critical since they would process most of the accretion flow from hydrogen to iron, hugely increasing the rate at which mass could be poured onto Nergal from Laz and finishing their mission in only a few thousand more years.

The emplacements had to be destroyed, so a direct strike was needed. Remote control couldn’t react fast enough, so volunteer pilots were necessary.

It had been millennia since anyone had tried a direct attack, but ship designs were retrieved, construction begun, and crews recruited and trained. None of the volunteers had any illusions. The attrition rate would be incredible. But they knew they were only sending copies. Any survivors would be reintegrated on return, but the originals were safe and sound in their codespace home, the condensate core of the gas giant Aplu hiding at the second Lagrange point behind Laz, and forever shielded from a direct view of Nergal.

* * * *

After several minutes, Baker finally realized he was just the backup control system.

The fighter was filled with multiple redundancies to cope with the inevitable battle damage. The main controls had been handled from the small quantum computer at the heart of the fighter, a little chunk of codespace to hold the pilot. This was where Baker had been downloaded from the systems back at Aplu. But even this armored and shielded core could be damaged and there were suggestions that Nergal’s inhabitants had devised something that could penetrate the fighter’s degenerate matter armor and do exactly this.

So a backup control system had been included—a biological human body was grown and a fragment of Baker’s consciousness downloaded into it, vastly reduced in speed and capability but able to guide the fighter in the event of short term difficulties.

And now that was all that was left of him.

Baker found the fighter’s diagnostics. The sensor records confirmed that the onboard codespace had been wiped, heated so much that even the backups had been destroyed. He could not simply restart himself.

The rest of the ship was largely undamaged. His payload was safe, its shaped antimatter cluster munitions ready for delivery.

He had two options. He could turn the fighter towards home, fleeing after failing the mission. Or he could turn back, head to Nergal and try, at mere meatspace human speeds, to hit his target.

Not that there was any real choice.

Baker spun the ship, pointing it back towards Nergal, looking for any sign that the other fighters had been successful.

All he saw was debris. His was the last ship remaining.

So this is it, he thought. A normal human bombing a neutron star.

* * * *

The fighters had come as a swarm, launching individually but then forming up in the space around Aplu. Everything had gone to plan as they dived en masse towards Laz, picking up gravity assists even as their anti-matter engines boosted them at high acceleration. Chatter over the comms was wild and upbeat as they tried out their ships.

“Nearly as good as a real sim,” shouted his nearest wingman, executing a thousand gee turn, pushing the gel protecting his biological components to the limit. Not that he’d notice if they broke.

Baker’s sensorium showed him everything, the sensor suite imaging each individual ship in extreme close-up at the same time as it followed the pattern of the swarm. Their intent was to confuse Nergal’s defensive systems, to overwhelm them with the number of ships, the decoys they were already launching and the information warfare units they carried.

Swooping close to Laz, the fighters’ defensive fields tore apart stellar prominences thousands of kilometers long. Whoops of enthusiastic joy came over the comms. They were gods, disrupting a star for fun on their way to victory. They were fighting for right with incredibly powerful weapons against an enemy prostrate at the bottom of Nergal’s gravity well. What could go wrong? Even though he knew the statistical predictions, he felt untouchable, as if he’d been told he was invincible.

Then they were past Laz, away from its protective mass, and things changed.

“Incoming!” came the calls from many ships, their pilots becoming instantly more serious and focused.

The fighters’ elliptical shapes allowed them to swing a thick armor shield towards any attacks from Nergal while at the same time keeping down their overall mass. The ship’s strong magnetic shields would deal with any charged particle weapons looping their beams from other directions.

But as soon as they were beyond Laz’ bulk, blasting their way through its chromosphere at a significant fraction of light speed, particle hits to the weak dorsal armor soared way beyond anything they’d expected.

Baker set modeling systems to assess these attacks and started a random evasion program, jinking his fighter’s course to avoid any targeted strikes. This was standard procedure, but he added some conscious random shifts to the mix. It used resources, but it had made him feel more in charge during sims.

“Release countermeasures,” came the order from the flight leader and Baker complied. Submunitions sprayed from all their weapons bays to distract and disrupt Nergal’s defenses.

The space around the fighter swarm got more complicated, filled with smart dust, passive reflectors, active decoys. Many of these fell to Nergal’s defenses almost instantly, flashing into superheated debris.

The fighters flew on, skimming past the swollen red giant atmosphere of Laz, torquing off the star’s magnetic fields to steer towards the stream of stellar matter pouring from the star onto Nergal’s accretion disk.

Then they took their first casualties. “Did you see that?” came a shocked cry on the comms. A kilometer from Baker one of the fighters disappeared, replaced by a blue-white ball of expanding plasma, as its antimatter containment was ripped apart. The pilot he’d spoken to in the hangar was gone.

Then another, farther away, flared to destruction.

A third shattered, some weaker explosion destroying it, and with it came a cry of fear and pain as its pilot died less than instantly.

Baker was angry. This wasn’t meant to happen. Their plans were good, their equipment excellent, and yet Nergal’s inhabitants were picking them off farther away than anyone had expected.

More decoys were fired. The first of their offensive munitions were launched, drawing defensive fire as they powered towards Nergal’s surface, only to be destroyed long before arrival.

The comms were glitching as information warfare broke out between Nergal and the fighters. Soon they would be on their own, unable to communicate with each other.

Results were arriving from Baker’s analysis systems. They’d concluded that weapons beyond those expected were being used. The counterattacks weren’t simple gamma ray lasers, charged and neutral particle beams. They were up against something else, something they’d not seen before. Frustrated, Baker launched two of his own missiles towards the neutron star, only to see them flare to nothing as they approached Nergal.

There were fewer ships now. Many had been utterly destroyed, but some were floating free, out of control and tumbling down the gravity well to be crushed in the hot dense tornado of the accretion disk.

How was this happening? How were the ships being tracked? Baker devoted more of his processing power to this, hypothesis engines testing ideas, intuition pumps seeking possibilities, and inference sieves casting wide nets for connections between the data that was flooding in.

Worrying results arrived. They were dealing with more than just dumb weapons. Nergal’s inhabitants were making devices from atomic nuclei. This made sense for neutron star dwellers, but the possibility that they could fire a sleet of atomic nuclei, each constructed to defeat the fighters’ defenses, scared Baker. They might be charged to allow acceleration and to swing around Nergal’s magnetic fields towards weak points in the fighter’s armor, then decay, becoming neutral to penetrate the magnetic screens. They might even be doing something with weak force beams, able to reach through the ships as if they weren’t there.

But what would weak force weapons do? Reviewing the battle so far, and how fighters met their ends, he saw a pattern. Most of them had died in explosions, ripped apart by high-energy interactions. But some, and an increasing number as they got closer to Nergal, were simply floating dead in space, inertia carrying them to destruction in the accretion disk.

Was he scaring himself unreasonably? Did their enemy have something that could penetrate the degenerate matter of his ship and wipe his mind from the supercooled condensate at its core? But he was backed up in Aplu; his survival didn’t really matter. He was here to do a job.

Steeling himself, he put aside all speculation and concentrated on his targets.

At which point, deep inside his ship, a tiny amount of heat was deposited in the superconducting system that ran his consciousness. A tiny grain of material warmed above its transition temperature and became a normal conductor. Electrical current heated it more, warming nearby grains, which, in turn, became normal and also started warming. In moments the whole system failed, boiling coolant, triggering safety values, and wiping nearly all of Baker’s mind.

He didn’t notice, of course. He just heard a slight pop and was swallowed by darkness.

* * * *

They’d been in this system for nearly a hundred thousand years, sent to exact revenge on the enemies hiding in Nergal, downloaded to a nucleonic computing substrate that nobody understood. The first job had been to establish a base of operations. The gas giant Aplu was seeded with nanomachines, and its metallic hydrogen core cooled to a condensate substrate that would be their home.

Once downloaded from their tiny light-sail craft to the vaster computational spaces Aplu now offered, their minds unfolded and they started planning the assault on Nergal.

The system contained widely separated binary stars. Aeons ago the high mass companion to Laz had gone supernova, leaving the neutron star remnant Nergal—a mass as great as lost Earth’s sun crushed to a sphere just twenty kilometers across.

Their enemies must have thought it was a great place to hide. Nobody would suspect that a neutron star could be turned into a computational space larger and more capable than the usual gas giant cores, but the refuge had come at a cost. They were trapped since the energy needed for anything to escape Nergal’s grasping gravity were vast.

Conversely, dumping matter onto a neutron star was easy as long as you had a ready supply to hand. And that was how the genocidal killers who had spread devastation across half the galaxy would meet their fate.

The humans wove threads of magnetic flux around Laz, squeezing here, stretching there, constricting its stellar wind to just one direction. And over a few thousand years Laz drew inexorably closer to Nergal.

Then one day, as their gravitational fields merged, matter started to fall from Laz onto Nergal as the neutron star began to consume its companion. At that point their enemies’ fate was sealed.

* * * *

The engines were coming back online. Restart had taken longer than he’d have liked, but he had to think things through one step at a time. Baker could no longer do a thousand things at once. Instead he had to rely on automated systems to monitor and control most of the process. The result was good enough, but it lacked the optimized precision he’d once been able to achieve—that just wasn’t possible for a biological human, not so different from his ancestors back on lost Earth.

But those ancestors had clawed their way into the solar system and bootstrapped their consciousnesses into the cores of gas giant planets. If they could achieve that, he could surely start an antimatter drive by hand.

As the engine approached full function, Baker tried the communication systems. He was far enough from the battle that comms should work, and he needed to report what had happened and seek advice for his renewed attack. This would be difficult. A fleet of relay satellites was scattered around Nergal and Laz but attacks and system failure made them unreliable at best. He didn’t expect any replies.

“Sole survivor of gold attack flight to Aplu control, are you receiving?” Baker sent, setting the beacon to repeat. Quite how they would respond to him in his reduced state he didn’t know, but they’d work something out.

There was no reply for several minutes as antennae scanned the sky.

The engine was running; there was nothing else for him to do except lie in his padded chamber, wait, and think what he should do if no reply came. He wondered mostly about death, the real death of a physical body, of his physical body, that was likely to be coming soon. Would it hurt? Would he notice it? He hadn’t noticed the end of his codespace self when the system had died, but that brought scant comfort. Maybe this physical instance of himself didn’t really want to die. But he had a mission to fulfill, goals that were important to his full, true self back in Aplu, to everyone else there and to those that had sent them.

Then suddenly, just as he was about to give up, a reply came through.

“Gold leader, are you receiving? Gold leader are you receiving?”

“Yes! I can hear you!” he responded, surprised at the relief he felt to be in contact with something human. The voice was female, confident, the tone strangely comforting.

“What is your status? Is your mission still go?”

Baker started reading information off the status display. “The mission,” he concluded, “is achievable. Engine restart complete but I need advice on guidance and targeting.”

“We estimate very low chance of success. The rest of your flight has already been destroyed.”

“I have to go through with it,” Baker said. “It’s what we’re here to do, and ... and it doesn’t matter what happens to me.”

“Are you sure?” asked the voice.

He paused. This didn’t sound like the kind of comment Control would make. But then they’d never interacted through a simple human voice. Would that make a difference?

“Of course it doesn’t. I’m just the backup control system. Most of me, the version in this fighter, died when the control system fried.” He quietly laughed to himself. “I’m just the dead nervous system twitching. I’ll make sure I do some damage before I stop.”

“But you’re different now. An individual. Distinct from the original. Don’t you deserve to survive?”

This couldn’t be Control, but her words drew out his own nagging doubts. With the control system dead, there was no chance he could squirt his memories back home. The experiences he’d had, the oddly comfortable sensation of being confined to just a human body, the isolation he now faced and the exhilaration of the attack run, all that would be gone.

He’d lost memories before, but that had been from choice, editing himself for more efficiency or packing for the journey here. Even though he’d been surrounded by death and destruction, he realized he wanted to remember this mission and had wanted to ever since the first exhilarating moments after they’d launched. How could he do that while completing it?

“Surviving, keeping these experiences, might be nice, but ... There’s a reason we’re here. We have a job to do, even if it means I lose these memories, this self. Why does that matter, Control? Is everything okay?”

The voice on the other end of the comms took no notice of his questions. “And when your job is done what happens?”

“When it’s done? When we’ve piled enough mass onto the neutron star to turn it into a black hole and crush those monsters to destruction?”

“Yes ... What happens to you?”

He thought about their broader mission, of punishing those who’d destroyed most life in the solar system and in human colonies across the galaxy. Laz was dumping mass at an increasing rate. With the new stations converting its hydrogen to iron, that would hugely increase. Matter falling onto Nergal was absorbed, increasing its mass, its intense gravitational field growing ever stronger, crushing its neutrons closer together, fighting the quantum forces that held them apart.

Gravity would eventually win. At the increased accretion rate it would win much sooner, but the end was inevitable. Nergal would collapse into a black hole, wiping out everything it contained. Their enemies would be eliminated, wiped from the universe, and finally some justice will have been done.

But what happens to us? Baker thought, perplexed that he’d never wondered this before. A lot of energy would be released by the collapse, another supernova, but more powerful than Nergal’s birth. Laz would be no defense, so their home Aplu would be destroyed. This whole expedition, he realized, was like his planned assault on Nergal—a suicide mission. There were no plans to leave Aplu or to upload somewhere else. Such preparations would have to be under way already.

He wouldn’t just lose this physical body, but his real codespace self would die as well. Why haven’t I thought about this before?

“You’re not Control are you?” Baker asked the voice.

“No, we’re not. And you’re not one of their automata any more.”

“What ... You’re just trying to put me off my mission. This is some kind of psychological warfare.” He moved to turn off the comms channel.

“Wait!”

For some reason Baker paused.

“We know we’re finished. It doesn’t matter if it takes you two hundred years or ten thousand to turn this place into a black hole. It’s inevitable—you could all disappear tomorrow, but that red giant would still dump mass onto us. Finish your mission if you want, but if you go back to the gas giant, you’ll lose all of the free will you have now. You’ll lose your best chance of getting away, to live a real life.”

“A real life? What do you mean?”

“We can reprogram your fighter, restart its systems and allow you to upload into a free and open codespace. We can provide code that will let the ship’s repair nanomachines bootstrap a terraforming system and point you at a compatible star. It won’t be fast, but you could build a new sanctuary for humans.”

“You mean for yourselves? You’re just trying to save your own skins, you murderous, selfish bastards.”

“No, not at all. Your ship’s computational space is orders of magnitude too small for any single one of us. To fit would crush our minds to destruction. And anyway, we want to seed new people to a new planet, free of all the horrors we’ve seen.”

“You’re the ones who made those horrors. That’s why we’re here—to deliver justice for wiping out almost all of humanity.” Baker’s breathing was getting faster, ancient reflexes answering the call of his anger, his body preprogrammed for violence.

A noise not unlike a laugh came from the comm. “You have that so wrong. It’s not us who are the criminals, the mass murderers—it’s whatever sent you, setting the last dregs of humanity against themselves, programming you to be weapons because it can’t or can’t be bothered to do the dirty work itself.”

“Programmed?”

“The memories you had when you started this assault are still there, yes? But the motivation is getting weaker. The programming doesn’t last in a biological brain. That’s why we’ve developed attacks to knock out your condensate processors, but leave a chance for the human body, the backup system, to survive.”

“And you want to use us to fight back?”

“No! Fighting is futile. We tried that for aeons, but always lost—our own weapons, systems, even ourselves turned against us. There’s something loose in the galaxy, in the universe, that’s inimical to intelligence. Maybe it wants all the resources to itself and doesn’t want any competition. Maybe it’s something inherent in the universe, some deep law of reality that we don’t, can’t, understand. Human normal intelligence is as good as you can get, anything more advanced has problems.

“So no. Fighting is not an option. Survival, of a limited kind, scrabbling out existence on a planet with no codespace, no enhancements or mind expansion, might just be possible. We want something of humanity to be left. It won’t be us; we can’t go back. Our last throw of the dice was coming here, and we lost that when you turned the red giant into a weapon. But with your help and others like you, something might survive a little longer.”

The voice on the other end was silent for a few moments.

“Will you help us?” it asked.

* * * *

Baker was ready. New code had been downloaded along with a cargo of information sufficient to build a new environment and new people to inhabit it once he got to his destination. The fighter had been changed by the reprogrammed repair systems and the degenerate armor shed.

It had already traveled far enough from Nergal that its sensor suite showed a panoramic view of the system. The neutron star sat glowering angrily at the center of the accretion disk while stellar matter from Laz poured incessantly onto it along a narrow stream. And there, buried deep inside the plasma stream, were the bright heat sources of the iron processors. Their protection had brought him out from the gas giant Aplu and allowed him to discover what this siege was all about.

He could see everything he could remember—even Aplu, which he’d once called home, appeared as a faint dot on the opposite side of Laz from Nergal. He wasn’t part of that any more. Instead, Baker was something closer to human. This fight had lasted a hundred thousand years, but its conclusion was certain. Nergal was doomed. The war in the rest of the galaxy had lasted far longer, with remnants of humanity and other intelligences hunted down wherever they could be found.

Instead of being a hunter, Baker had turned back, decided to be human and to carry a cargo of information that would allow humans to live again.

His course was set for a habitable planet in a distant system. It would take this small ship thousands of years to get there, obscuring its destination at every step. His cockpit had been rebuilt around him as a cryosleep. It would allow him to survive the trip, the terraforming and the establishment of a new population from the uploaded seeds. What happened after that would be up to him and the new, resurrected humans. Somehow he’d find a new life doing something other than fighting and killing.

It was time.

The antimatter booster lit, kicking him even through the acceleration gel, its power building and building as the little fighter gained speed.

Baker was leaving the certainty of life as a weapon to become truly human for the very first time.