Noumenon Infinity

“Why does it have to be that way?” Min-Seo asked. “I mean, yes, one convoy can only do so much. But we have twelve ships.”

“Oh, you know the answer to that,” Caz dismissed. “Those oh-so-perfect original P.U.M. mission designers decided we needed nine ships and a hundred thousand people so we don’t implode on a social level.”

“We’ve got three ships extra, then.”

“That we need for the Web.”

“Do we? Those three ships were given to us by Earth, who thought we’d come back one day carrying some crisisaverting energy motherlode. But, just like everyone knows about the secret Nataré study, everyone knows we never intend to go back. What are we going to do with a giant battery, huh? We started repurposing the ship as soon as we found an alternate use for it. If we’re going to live on these ships forever, utilizing the Web to fight our own entropy, then we don’t need Zetta. And we only need Hvmnd because of Zetta.”

Where was Min-Seo going with this? Caz raised her head, took a good long look at her daughter happily munching on Gyeongju bread like she wasn’t suggesting … whatever it was she was suggesting. Coming from a convoy member, the subtext of this conversation was practically blasphemous. “Are you saying we could—” she moved in close, looked around and kept her voice low “—split the convoy?”

Min-Seo looked her mother in the eye. Though her tone was light, she knew the gravity of simply toying with such an idea. “I bet if you ask I.C.C., we wouldn’t cross a failure threshold if one became two. It’s not like the old days, when returning to Earth was the endgame. Our societal mindset is different. More innately stable.”

“This is not a little solution to my problem,” Caz said.

“No. It’s a big solution to a problem that I don’t think you can claim as solely your own.”

“When did you get so conniving?” Caz threw her arms around her daughter, drawing her in close, jostling her plate.

“Oh, come on, Mom, don’t make me lose the last bun. And it’s not conniving. It’s rational. But, if you’re going to propose it, you have to understand what it means, for the crew, for our family. You have to know how the board will take it.”

Off the quiet beach, they were still whispering now, and for good reason. The convoy’s history of revolution and self-destruction might only have a few bullet points, but those bullets still made the memory bleed. Their society wasn’t run by authoritarianism, but nor was it a democracy. Any dissent was caught quickly, and quashed.

Proposing a split, if rejected, would mark her—and perhaps her line—forever as the woman who wanted to cut the baby in half.

“Maybe I don’t propose it,” she said. Min-Seo pulled away, a dark hesitancy on her face. “No, no,” Caz assured her, “I wouldn’t put that responsibility on a colleague. If I can’t handle the consequences, I wouldn’t ask someone else to.”

“Then how do you get the board to consider it?”

With a sly smirk, Caznal’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling.

“What?” Min-Seo asked, searching for what her mother was staring at. “I don’t get it.”

“It was your suggestion.”

“What, Mom? What did I say?”

Caznal kissed her on the forehead. “Better get back to your wives. I’ll let you know if it works.”

Caznal returned to Mira with renewed conviction. She couldn’t let the study die. There was so much to learn from the Nataré—not just about physics and the Web, but about medicine, philosophy, religion (did they have any?), recreation, on and on. Here was the chance for humans to reach outside of themselves, beyond the biology and history of their own planet. Were human universal ideals truly universal? Or were they unique to a relatively small planet on the edge of one of a billion galaxies?

That’s what they were up against: Was this a mission of discovery, or was this a mission of repair? The Nataré could bequeath multitudes of artifacts to humanity, but the convoy was obsessed with one. One artifact, one result, one purpose.

That didn’t make the board wrong. It was not wrong to have a goal, to understand the thrust of your endeavors and where they led. But she was not wrong either.

The convoy’s mission now possessed a duality—both halves worthy.

She told Diego of her plan, and after some discussion—full of smart, insightful questions that reminded her why she loved him in the first place—he gave his support.

At the next board meeting, Caznal sat quietly. She sipped her coca tea and went over the previous meeting’s minutes as though it were just another day. Another round of mundane convoy updates, another chance for Dr. Brown to complain about a maintenance robot malfunction (as she always did).

Caz allowed herself a moment to look around, though. To see the things she took for granted. Because, should her plan work, she would lose this room. There was a ding in the wall nearest her seat that had never been fixed—chair height, by the look of the horizontal scrape. It smelled different in this room. Felt special. She slid her palms under the edge of the marble tabletop, where it was rough, searching for the little carved stamp—ah, there! The roman numeral for seven, which marked the long table as part of its special set.

Captain Nwosu kept picking absently at a divot in front of him—an unconscious habit Caznal had never noted before. So many memories here. So many important decisions made for so many people, both by this crew and by all the mission’s crews.

And now, perhaps, time for one more.

“Are we ready to begin?” Straifer asked the room, standing at the head of the table. The low rumble of pleasant conversation faded away, as the department heads, captains, and elected representatives settled in for another round of Enacting-Your-Civil-Duty. “We have three new proposals to review and vote on—”

“Excuse me, First Officer Straifer,” said I.C.C., prompting a wave of chins shooting in the ceiling’s direction. “But I have a proposal to submit as well. Please forgive me for the late notice. I realize it is highly irregular to submit during a meeting.”

Like a physical manifestation of a self-propagating wave, Caznal’s gaze darted to Nwosu, and all eyes around her followed.

Nwosu cleared his throat. “It’s highly irregular for the ships’ computer to submit a proposal at all,” he said, a half joke colored by his clear discomfort.

The room was so quiet, Caznal could hear the atmosphere circulators chugging away. She tried to temper her excitement, to maintain her poker face. It wouldn’t do to give away the game just yet.

“I’m sorry, I.C.C.,” Nwosu said, regaining some of his stolen composure. “But the agenda for this meeting has been finalized. If you wish to submit, you’ll need to follow the procedure and—”

The situation room erupted, opinions boiling over like lava, burning wherever they fell.

“Are you kidding?”

“This is I.C.C. we’re talking about—”

“We can’t let the computer make suggestions—”

“It’s made them before.”

“But never formally.”

“Why is that a problem, exactly?”

“People!” Nwosu said. He barely raised his voice, as though that would encourage people to order. “People. Everyone! Hold on. Wait. Hold on.”

Pavon jumped to her feet, curly hair flying. “Everyone shut up!”

Caznal was only a little surprised when the room complied.

“Captain,” Pavon said evenly. “You have the floor.”

“Thank you. As I was saying, we have procedures for a reason—to avoid exactly this kind of chaos.”

“But it’s human procedure,” said Dr. Nakamura. “It doesn’t apply to I.C.C. I think we should hear what it has to say now.”

“We should put it to a vote,” said Captain Onuora.

Nwosu gave a reluctant sigh. “All those who wish to hear from I.C.C. now?” he asked.

The shouts of “Aye” were deafening. They clearly had it.

“I.C.C., you may proceed. What does your proposal cover?”

“The creation of two convoys out of our existing one.”

If the silence had been deafening before, this was the utter absence of sound. The air lay dead. Caz looked from side to side, making sure her colleagues hadn’t died of shock. It seemed the sentence contained so foreign a concept, they could hardly process it.

I.C.C. clearly took the lack of interjection as a signal to continue. “I do not make this proposal casually, but I fear we may be at the beginning of a societal impasse.”

That’s an interesting way to put it, Caz thought. The dumbfounded silence hadn’t diminished. On the contrary, it seemed to be burgeoning. She could see words beginning at the back of Nwosu’s throat, but he swallowed them down. Beside Caz, Onuora sat up straighter, arms tucked against her sides, tight—a wound coil ready to spring. At what, Caz couldn’t guess.

Out of everyone in the room, only she and Pavon seemed to be taking the AI’s words in stride. Pavon’s clone line had a long history of siding with the AI—Caznal found that interesting. Perhaps Margarita would back her.

“The current mission was launched with a dual purpose,” I.C.C. continued. “Some have taken that duality to heart, while others believe one a side mission. The unofficial standing of that ‘side mission’ has further fueled the intellectual divide. But only now is the division beginning to show itself. It has been an undercurrent for over fifty years, but not until the last board meeting was it given voice.”

Onuora turned in her wheelchair, and Caz could feel a pointed gaze boring into her profile.

“I’ve run behavioral projections,” I.C.C. said, “and the results indicate this could be a turning point. Chances of societal disruption are high, threats to crew member safety are currently steady, but I fear an increase soon. Overall, chance of mission failure has increased by point-two-seven percent.”

Caznal’s stoicism cracked, her eyes widening. This was not what they’d talked about. The computer was supposed to be outlining the scientific merits of two convoys, why focusing on reverse engineering and alien instruction simultaneously was likely to see the construction project finished sooner than if they spurned one for the other.

The Web—I.C.C. was supposed to be focusing on the megastructure. If the damn board was so in love with the thing, she was going to give it to them.

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