flows and layering that looked imperfect, more natural than designed. If the first nine were biomechanical (heavy on the mechanical), the additional three were geomechanical: they seemed to have morphology, weathering, like they were composed of stones and mud brought together by sheer gravitational adherences.
Of course, fundamentally, they were still ships. But she’d bet her leisure rations any aliens making visual contact with Slicer, Hvmnd, and Zetta would do a double take when they realized they weren’t looking at aesthetically pleasing asteroids.
Disembarking, she was met by one of the caretakers, Ina, who she knew best of all the server ship workers, save the captain. Though best didn’t mean well. It was difficult to truly know anyone who’d been raised on Hvmnd well.
That was because Hvmnd occupied a strange nexus between the convoy’s morality, culture, and the need for Earth’s computing technology. Earth-proper no longer used artificial computers—a fact which nearly led to I.C.C.’s demise—and had learned to use organic power (human brains, animal brains, partial neural networks that could only loosely be called brains) to a much greater advantage. So when the convoy had relaunched, decked out with all the advancements the planet had to offer, the package had included a computing upgrade: clone lines whose sole purpose was to act as human servers.
That didn’t sit well with the board. It might be common for people to sell years of their life away on Earth, but the convoy found it appalling.
They’d intended to shut down that portion of Hvmnd once they were well away from Earth’s watchful eye. After all, with I.C.C. and its inorganic servers fully functional, there was no real need to revamp the original system.
But that was before the conversion of Zetta into a graviton supercycler. Zetta had been built to store the zetta-joules of energy the convoy was expected to retrieve once they completed the Dyson Sphere around LQ Pyx. But the crew had needed it for a different purpose: to turn on the Nest. And this new purpose carried a hefty need for processing power. Power the convoy’s antiquated computing system could not provide.
Hvmnd was required after all.
And yet, cloning lines simply to harvest their brain power would not do.
The server clones had to be given a chance at wakefulness, which meant they would sometimes be off-line. The convoy would either need to accept this disruption, or find a new way to fill the computing void. None of the regular crew members wished to give up portions of their lives to such a service, so where could they get perfectly good brains no one was using anymore?
There was a reason some people called Hvmnd “the grave ship.”
“Permission to visit?” Caznal asked.
The caretaker bowed slightly, revealing the row of implanted connections on the top and sides of her shaved head. “Of course.” She gestured for Caz to follow her out of the bay.
“How are your children?” Caz asked as they entered the main bay.
“Sleeping,” Ina said simply, stopping at a row of iron black steps and indicating Caz should continue without her.
Her boots rattled the connected, corrugated catwalk as she ascended to the level above, and the fine blond hairs on the back of her neck rose with the shock of cold. It was unpleasantly chilly outside of the shuttle bay—for those that were awake, that is. Most of Hvmnd was a single bay, like Slicer, only instead of alien devices, Hvmnd stored people. Catwalks, like the one Caznal was on, snaked this way and that through the many layers of hanging chairs, which held people from all divisions, plugged in and strung up.
It wasn’t just the cold, though. Each ship carried its own smell. Eden always smelled so green and fresh, even in its subarctic tundra biodome, and Hippocrates smelled like rubbing alcohol. Mira smelled like home, and depending on what part of Shambhala you were visiting, it could smell like a sweaty gym or a bowl of buttery popcorn.
Hvmnd smelled like something ancient. The way family heirlooms smelled. Like history and age.
“Why am I not surprised to see you here?” said a familiar voice over Caz’s shoulder.
Captain Onuora always did know how to make an entrance. Caz whirled to see great mechanical arms, like silver spider’s legs, dangling from tracts in Hvmnd’s ceiling. They clasped the captain’s wheelchair, and she controlled them deftly from a keypad on her armrest. With a few extra flicks of her wrist, Onuora bade them set the chair down next to Caz, then they folded up and away, ready for her whenever she called on them again.
Caz saluted, and Onuora answered it with a stern expression, before going into Mothering Mode, as she was inclined to do. “News travels fast—shouldn’t you be celebrating? I know you found something down there.”
Caz strode down the walkway, and the captain stayed at her side, the old-world Jamaican flag on the back of her wheelchair fluttering out behind her like a cape.
Onuora was not part of the original Noumenon crew, just as Caz wasn’t part of it. Their lines were fresh, having only been aboard a few generations. But few people of the forty-second century could trace their family history like Onuora. She took pride in her connection to Earth, whereas many of the original crew didn’t seem to care for genealogy past their original’s birth.
Earth was an abstraction in many ways, which had little bearing on their reality. But it also still mattered, if only as something that could provide grounding—perhaps literally—to the convoy’s reality.
“I will,” Caz said, “I mean, I am celebrating, and … he should know.”
The captain gave her a pitying look, shifting uncomfortably in her chair. Her achondroplasia had led to severe arthritis in her hips, as it had with the majority of those in her line. And while the seat was customized just for her—the wheels were controlled by a chip implanted in her brain, just like a prosthetic hand that could grasp or foot that could flex—and was the perfect size for her smaller frame and foreshortened limbs, it wasn’t where she spent the majority of her working hours. In fact, as often as Caz had been to Hvmnd, she rarely saw the captain in her chair. “I’ll give you your privacy, then. Come to the bridge before you leave?”
Hvmnd’s bridge was the only constant zero-g environment in the convoy, at Captain Onuora’s insistence. She preferred the freedom of movement that came with weightlessness. It eased the pressure on her aching joints, let her fly from post to post. Caznal, on the other hand, always felt like a baby animal trying to stand for the first time whenever she visited—all wobbly legs and unintended directions. She wasn’t meant to fly. But that didn’t mean she’d begrudge her friend the visit. “Thank you, Captain. I will. And I can come back tomorrow to work on your chair, if you’re available.” On their off time, they liked to experiment with smaller graviton cyclers, to see if they could invent one precise enough to make Hvmnd’s metal arms obsolete.
“Sounds like a plan,” said the captain with a smile. She swiped at a few keys, and the arms descended once more, lifting her away, back to her bridge crew.
Caz continued her walk. She knew her path well, taking walkway fourteen-A, turning at row five before sauntering down to seat eight. A technician in a sandy-colored jumpsuit checked connections on one chair over, where a Korean woman with a long pale gray braid slept—Roh Jin-Yoon the Sixteenth. Her features flexed with the occasional mental stimulus, either into a half
