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By Root 1126 0

flesh when Curious Yellow first appears. The MASucker is a lumbering starship, effectively a mobile cylinder habitat, powered by plasma piped from the interior of a distant A0 supergiant via T-gate. It wallows along at low relativistic speeds between brown dwarf star systems, which in this part of the galaxy are spaced less than a parsec apart. During the multigigasecond intervals between close encounters, the crew retreats into template-frozen backup, reincarnating from the ship’s assemblers whenever things get interesting. The ship is largely self-sufficient and self-maintaining (apart from its stellar tap, and a tightly firewalled T-gate to the premises of the research institute that created it centuries ago). Its internal systems are entirely offnet from the polity at large because it’s designed for a mission duration of up to a terasecond, and it was envisaged from the start that civilization would probably collapse at least once within the working life of the ship. That’s why I’ve come out here in person to interview Vecken, the ship’s Kapitan, who lived shortly after the cognitive dictatorship and may have recollections of some of the survivors.

Now here’s a curious thing: I can’t remember their faces. I remember that Lauro, Iambic-18, and Neual were not simply important to me, not just lovers, but in a very real way defined who I was. A large chunk of my sense of identity was configured around this key idea that I wasn’t solitary: that I was part of a group, that we’d collectively adjusted our neuroendocrinology so that just being around the others gave us a mild endorphin rush—what used to be a haphazard process called “falling in love”—and we’d focused on complementary interests and skills and vocations. It wasn’t so much a family as a superorganism, and it was a fulfilling, blissful state of affairs. I think I may have had a lonely earlier life, but I don’t remember much of that because I guess it paled into insignificance in comparison.

But I can’t remember their faces, and even now—a lifetime after the grief has ebbed—that bugs me.

Neual was quick with hands and feet, taking slyly sarcastic delight in winding me up. Lauro had perfect manners but lost it when making love with us. Iambic-18 was a radical xenomorph, sometimes manifesting in more than one body at the same time when the fancy took it. Our children . . .

Are all dead, and it is unquestionably my fault. The nature of Curious Yellow is that it propagates stealthily between A-gates, creating a peer-to-peer network that exchanges stegged instructions using people as data packets. If you have the misfortune to be infected, it installs its kernel in your netlink, and when you check into an A-gate for backup or transport—which proceeds through your netlink—CY is the first thing to hit the gate’s memory buffer. A-gate control nodes are supposedly designed so that they can’t execute data, but whoever invented CY obviously found a design flaw in the standard architecture. People who have been disassembled and reassembled by the infected gates infect fresh A-gates as they travel. CY uses people as a disease vector.

The original CY infection that hit the Republic of Is installed a payload that was designed to redact historical information surrounding some event—I’m not sure what, but I suspect it’s an aftershock left by the destruction of one of the old cognitive dictatorships—by editing people as they passed through infected gates. But it only activated once the infection had spread across the entire network. So Curious Yellow appeared everywhere with shocking abruptness, after spreading silently for hundreds of megasecs.

In my memory-dream, I am taking tea in the bridge of the Grateful for Duration, which in that time takes the form of a temple to a lake kami from old Nippon. I’m sitting cross-legged opposite Septima (the ship’s curator) and waiting for Kapitan Vecken to arrive. As I spool through some questions I stored offline, my netlink hiccups. There’s a cache-coherency error, it seems—the ship’s T-gate has just shut down.

“Is something going on?