Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 106 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: chinese, clarkesworld, fantasy, fantasy magazine, magazine, novelette, science fiction, science fiction magazine, short stories, short story, surreal, weird
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2015-06-29T04:00:00+00:00

2. Er-jian-die

I have no past. I have no future. Only now.

I have many pasts and many futures, but as me, as this, there is only now. I am a composite. I have been cast for this occasion, for this task.

I am of the Accord.

I am assembled from the many, from the multitude. I will go back to the multitude.

I am of the Accord.

I am male, in this body. My skin is dark, my hair short, straight. I am slim and strong and fast, of course. Why would I be anything else?

I am enhanced. In many ways.

I am not alone. I will not be alone when I step out of this cabin. There are two others. Two like me, Ee and Sen. We are a team.

I step out through the cabin door, having opened it first. My others are here already. Their heads turn, we nod simultaneously. I join them at the rail.

We are high up, on the deck of a faux sailing ship that is really powered by twinned gravity-wave microgenerators below decks. Above us, sails bulge in a manner designed to appeal to the grand touristas.

We are only a few hours from port. I know this for a fact, like I know much for a fact.

I close my eyes. We close our eyes. Together.

Data flashes.

We open our eyes.

He is here, on the Lady Cecilia. The anomaly.

In a realm where everything is known to the Accord—where everything, by its nature, must be known to the Accord—he is different. He is unknown. He, by his very nature, does not conform with the rules that govern our existence, your existence, everyone’s existence.

He must be found.

He must be stopped.

He must be reabsorbed before he becomes self-propagating.

I turn. We turn. Together.

We smell him.

He has been here, on this deck, recently. He must be nearby.

We will seek him out, find him, reabsorb him, before the Lady Cecilia docks. We know this for a fact.

The Lady Cecilia docks at Penhellion, sliding smoothly into her space in the harbor.

We have not found him, the anomaly.

We have found places where he has been, places where he has spent long hours alone, no doubt doing battle with his perverse nature. They do that. They don’t understand, but they try. They are you and me, us; it is their nature.

It is their nature to hide, and to run. This one has been here, in this world called Laverne, for longer than initial data indicated. Re-run analyses give him perhaps twenty more days’ existence in which to accumulate knowledge, experience, before he was first detected.

His development is not linear. Those twenty days are days in which every aspect of his self has become exponentially more complex and data-rich.

This one is no babe in arms, then. He is a whirlwind, a destroyer of worlds.

He does not know it, of course.

Our task is to stop him from finding out.

Penhellion is a city built into a cliff. They could have built it on top of the cliff. They could have built it a few kilometers along the coast where the cliffs are not anything up to twelve hundred meters high.

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