Whalefall Prologue

The posthuman coreship tunnelled its ineffable way through space, unconcerned with – perhaps even unconscious of – the lesser intelligences it disturbed in its wake.

Andrik the Scab likewise didn’t care about the unknowable motivations of the posthuman civilisations that controlled the middle third of the galaxy. All he knew was that their garbage could make him rich.

So the Scab haunted the spiderline, the impossibly-stable line of flux that the posties had spun out from their domain to beyond the galactic rim. His lumpy little scow was called Porphyria’s Lover after a poem he had read once, and was so encrusted with specialised lances and scaffold that it had somehow transcended ugliness to become something that, when viewed by sane humans, offended the very soul.

Right now, Porphyria was vibrating at an increasingly fevered pitch as the coreship approached. The Scab clanked a couple of his upper manipulators together in anticipation.

Coreships flitted back and forth from the core to the rim just under the skin of normal space. You could see them pass, if you had the right kind of eyes – and if you had the right kind of scaffold and a couple of lances to give the thing a tickle, a particularly skilful operator could dip into the cloud of debris that followed the coreship in its wake and, with luck on their side, flick a few tasty bits and pieces into real space.

The Scab had a vague sense that the artefacts he extracted from the coreship’s passing were the postie analogue of whatever nastiness came out of a human starship when the captain ordered the waste tanks purged. Not that this made them any less valuable. And of course there was never anything ORGANIC – the posties were well beyond that. But the Scab could be guaranteed at least half a dozen... objects of... well, concepts like “size” and “shape” didn’t really apply to postie tech, but Porphyria had a dark matter specimen bottle (that had cost the Scab a pretty penny, but it was an investment, yes, yes) which kept these objects and their output of exotic particles nicely contained. Yes, yes.

The Scab salivated with excitement as the big red clock in the middle of his UI counted down the last couple of hundred seconds. The spiderline was thrumming now, energies that the Scab didn’t bother to pretend to understand racing up and down. He didn’t know how the posties had spun the spiderline, didn’t know how the coreships travelled on it, and had never once in his megaseconds of wake-dipping even wondered what a coreship actually looked like.

All he knew was that this stuff made him rich. Or would make him rich. This was his fifteenth dip, and if he got anything out of it, his seventh successful. Each successful dip had been worth millions.

Of course, he had to sell the artefacts through a fence, who took a hefty cut. Then there was fuel and maintenance on Porphyria. Then licensing, Fast STC network access, Q access, food and life support and an infuriatingly-long list of other essentials, but everything left over was pure profit.

Andrik the Scab had his life planned out, yes yes. This dip, then two more, he’d have enough meat on his bones to buy a nice little hab in Tank City and a fat enough Q profile to bliss himself out on erotic lucids for at least a gigasecond. Maybe a gig and a half.

Cackling, the Scab checked his mounting points and gimbals and flexed all five of his manipulators. Ironically enough, for someone who dealt in postie artefacts, he was more or less posthuman himself. Oh there was a core of meat, down there under the bottom layers of macaroni, somewhere. A heart, a shrivelled old pair of lungs, various glands and things. His brain was shielded in some kind of carbon-rich super-ceramic, and that in turn was encased in titanium. The brain and the glands were what gave the Scab polity rights and, more importantly, personal sovereignty – without them he’d be reclassified as an industrial AI, put to work shunting habs in Tank City and he’d lose his right to vote. Not that he ever voted.

The spiderline hummed, shimmied, twisted and untwisted in impossible geometries. Was here, and at the same time not here. The Scab focused on the red clock, let the red clock bathe him in portentous anticipation, let his macaroni dose his precious glands with all the good chemicals that made him SHARP and totally WITH IT, yes yes.

The coreship approached, racing down the spiderline on its unknowable mission, filled with intelligences that – despite the amazing feats of cosmological engineering they’d achieved in the galactic core – still owed their ancestry to a tiny little blue dot of a planet so far from here.

Or maybe not filled with anything. Maybe it wasn’t even a ship at all. Nobody knew, and Andrik the Scab certainly didn’t care. Or so he kept telling himself.

Then, always so quickly, so suddenly, the numbers on the red clock read zero. The coreship was here. Space-time heaved and bucked as it passed and Andrik the Scab LUNGED forward, manipulators slaved to Porphyria’s lances and scaffolding. His macaroni-enhanced consciousness utterly focused on dipping into the coreship’s wake and pulling out something, ANYTHING.

And then, at least for every human living in this part of the galaxy, life changed forever.

---

The Scab first became aware of the discontinuity in his personal flow of time when he realised his UI was rebooting. It was weird – one moment he was nuggeting-in on the coreship’s wake, feeling around for something really chunky and then the next there was the Plato logo filling his entire visual field, with the little spiralling seashell thing underneath that meant his UI was rebooting.

The Scab couldn’t remember the last time his UI rebooted. At least not in the last 30 megs. He took stock. All his parts still seemed to be attached, and Porphyria wasn’t injecting him with adrenalin which is what she would be doing if the ship was on fire or venting gas or something.

Scabs like Andrik relied heavily on macaroni augmentation to survive out in the never-never, and depending on their level of commitment could have as many as a hundred distinctly separate processors running on their various parts, all with their own firmware and update schedules. Andrik the Scab was a bit of a Plato brand loyalist so all his stuff was more-or-less co-ordinated. The extra cost generally paid for itself in increased up time and he just didn’t get his kicks jailbreaking macaroni firmware like some of his... well, he didn’t really have FRIENDS as such. People he knew. On the Q at least.

This mental blathering was a normal symptom of a full consciousness-loss and reboot which was exactly the kind of thing that heavy investment (both financial and physical) in macaroni was supposed to avoid. The Scab didn’t sleep, for instance, he merely scheduled brief moments where he’d lose focus and daydream for a kilosecond or so while his brain was flushed of fatigue poisons and his short term memories properly filed away. There was a monthly subscription fee. Sort of like insurance.

The UI reappeared. The Scab blinked up the clock. He’d been out for 13,432.85 seconds. It was the longest period of unconsciousness he’d experienced in over a gigasecond. His glands made it feel like his heart was lurching around in its non-reactive polymer sheath. He fancied he heard its nutrient bath sloshing.

Something had gone wrong. Something had gone wrong with the dip. As the Scab got his mind back in some kind of order he calmed down a little. Think about what you’re doing, he told himself. You’re dipping on a postie coreship. There are never any certainties when you mess around with postie stuff. Hell, he himself had seen ships spaghettified by tacking too close to a spiderline node trying to scoop up a tankful of exotics. So something had happened, something he’d dug out of the wake was just a little more... bizarro than usual. Maybe he’d copped a faceful of postie exhaust, or maybe he’d even been hit by a countermeasure of some kind!

The Scab’s heart leapt in an entirely different way at this thought. Getting zapped by a postie doodad might have messed up Porphyria in ways he hadn’t yet diagnosed but it would count as contact, as a kind of interaction, and there would be residue, evidence. He could sell that kind of info to the only people in the galaxy prepared to get even crazier-close to the posties than a Scab – scientists!

Chuckling to himself, Andrik the Scab reactivated all Porphyria’s external cameras to see what he could see.

The view nearly broke his mind.

It wasn’t that what he saw was terrifying, or that the light itself burned his various optical sensors. It was that the view outside the ship split his mind right down the middle. He knew that what he saw was impossible, incomprehensible, unknowable, and yet at the same time Andrik the Scab knew exactly what he was looking at.

A posthuman coreship, torn from the spiderline back into real space, shattered, wrecked and scattered against the stars.

Don’t ask me to describe it, the Scab told himself. There was nothing in those alien geometries for a human mind to get an initial purchase on. How far was it from Porphyria? Impossible to say just by looking – he’d have to use radar. How big was it? Unknowable. What colour was it? A... sort of grey? No wait, blue. Or red, red sometimes with hints of green and... no.

Details were even harder. It was like one of those optical illusions like the silhouette of the dancer who spins one way, but if you concentrate really hard she starts spinning the other. This was like that except it kept changing even without any conscious effort.

Fractal, the Scab suddenly thought. I don’t even know what that means but it seems... it’s like if I keep looking at it, expecting my mind to resolve the patterns made by photons hitting my retina, the shape of it, the SENSE of it keeps changing.

It was longer than it was wide, he could tell that for sure. It also appeared to be totally still. Tentatively, Andrik the Scab blinked open several of the more commonly used radio and grav channels. The radio was silent but the grav -

DRAGON IN THE VOID DRAGON IN THE VOID WE ARE WE WERE AWAKE AWAKE DRAGON IN THE VOID AWAKE AWARE WE ARE DRAGON IN THE VOID DRAGON IN THE V

Andrik the Scab blinked off the grav, mind reeling at the intensity of the message. The whole ship seemed to still be echoing with it.

He paused for a hundred seconds or so, thinking over his options. At his heart, Andrik the Scab was a pragmatist. There was no way something like this hadn’t sent some kind of ripple across most of the Bad Edge. There would be Galafed sabots out here within megaseconds. And he had no idea how the Nostragali would respond. Violently, no doubt.

Andrik the Scab squared what remained of his jaw. He sent power to his manipulators, slaved them to the big arms on the outer hull of Porphyria. He would grab what he could, turn and burn, and be Fast before they figured out he’d ever been here. Maybe there was some way to tell he’d crashed the coreship but he doubted it. He doubted that, in their thirst for postie plunder, they’d even care.

Porphyria surged forward at half a gee, which would bring him to the first object that was returning a solid radar signature in less than a kilosecond. There was... stuff scattered all over space. Some of it hanging there, some of it turning, some of it seeming to shimmer, as if rapidly dropping in and out of real space. The Scab made a mental note to avoid those objects. Nobody knew if hyperspace existed, but nearly everybody suspected the posties used it, and absolutely everybody agreed that messing with hyperspace if it did exist would be bad for anyone who still had a biology.

Porphyria’s Lover deltaveed to frame in a chunk of postie stuff about a third the size of the Scab’s ship herself. Andrik was trying not to salivate. Figuratively, of course. He had no idea what he was looking at, also of course, but it was white and he could see pipes and bluish struts coming out of a central mass. It looked almost like something humans could build, a chunk of an experimental tokamak reactor perhaps, although that would be older than old-school as far as the posties were concerned. He could see a faint grid on the white mass, not square but some kind of a squashed-looking pentagon which managed to tessellate perfectly in a way he wasn’t sure was normally possible in this reality.

From what the Scab decided arbitrarily to call the top of the chunk of stuff, there protruded a silver hoop. It looked so much like a handle, he decided he’d attach the big arm to it, then pull up close to the chunk and lash it to Porphyria with his very expensive picocomposite tethers.

Worth it, Andrik the Scab thought, worth every penny, those tethers.

Slowly, carefully, using Porphyria’s props like an extension of his own proprioceptive system, Andrik the Scab reached out for the silver handle, determined to make this one mysterious piece of posthuman technology, at least, his.

As the big arm made contact with the silver hoop, he had time to think “yes yes!” before the chunk, Porphyria’s Lover, and Andrik the Scab himself were converted to pure energy, and lit up the Bad Edge like a dying star.