… and yet I sit here eating nutritionally complete and completely soulless porridge. My own happiness has never been a concern to me so long as the outcome of my sacrifice is a better life for the average human being. This is not that. This has not been that in a long time. This may never have been that.
My supposed sacrifice living aboard Resolute is much too comfortable compared to the daily existence of terrestrial people that may well be my blood relatives. The very family relationships that were taken from me when I was geneticially recruited and stolen at birth; replaced by a physically deficient clone with little more than a horrible painful year to live.
You people that I have worked on behalf of just 2.5 AU away have clues to the truth. Your best scientists have been drip-fed whisps of our understanding.
They have finally reached the turning point that should have meant peace on Earth, an end to famines, and a refocusing of political will toward the skies.
Instead my ancestral homeland has lost billions to simple preventable diseases and starvation because the oligarch in power continues to outsmart the western agenda.
This true deterioration of terrestrial goings-on has been hidden from most of us here in Peripheral Studies. Most of the proud and dedicated PS Personnel wouldn’t stand for the continued secrecy. Most of these Pallas raised people truly dream of a utopian era for earth, a post-scarcity era; and they will be furious when they find out its being witheld for such petty reasons.
I can be certain that the flexible ethics I mentioned previously are at least in part to blame, but I will no longer contribute to a greater good as defined by them. Whether “them” is the Peripheral Studies Board or Budget Comittee or some higher puppet-master…
This has the truest history of the last six decades that I can share.
This is my defection and my hope.
This is humanity’s true capability, we - the entire species - just need to overcome the status-quo.
Broadcast with this message are documents describing, in detail, some of the earlier mentioned technologies, government operations, and disinformation campaigns along with much, much more. If you receive this message and are capable of recording the accompanying data, please do so and spread it via any means necessary. If you cannot record the data please repeat this signal until it goes silent.
~ Evelyn Roczin, Director of Fusion Research Peripheral Studies,
Acting Captain of the PSSC Resolute,
Raised in the Shipyards of Pallas,
Kidnapped at 31-hours old from Ivan and Ellanora Roczinsky of Volgograd Russia in 1976
Evelyn’s neck bends forward and her chin grazes her collarbone. She squeezes each trapezius and digs knuckles in until the flashes of pain cross the insides of her eyelids.
“Store that in separate audio, video, and text files please. Store them on the R: drive and then destroy our last three hours of conversation.” she orders the terminal in her personal quarters. A terminal she’d re-assembled from a painstakingly slow accrual of ‘clean’ parts that she was reasonably sure wouldn’t offer the PS Panopticon a sense of her intentions. At least not their technical arm. The whole remote-viewing and consciousness-casting stuff still feels too spooky to take seriously.
Evelyn stands from her seat and again rolls the strain from her shoulders while reflecting on this decision.
Its time to commit mutiny for certain.
Whether or not this mutiny would also be remembered as an act of treason versus duty… depends on if she succeeds. Some versions of success may leave her with no footnote in history at all - which would be just fine with her.
Fifty-one years of service to a multinational governmental dark project could have been something she felt proud of. She spent that time helping to explore the theoretical edges of so many scientific and technological disciplines with the goal of leapfrogging humanity toward a better future. Much of it still is something she feels proud of. This last fifteen years, though, once she’d gained enough access and expertise to really see the whole picture. Once she’d connected the dots between all the bits of “need to know” information. Her soul began to squirm under the implications.
Peripheral Studies is the latest name for an old idea which gained such momentum that even when it was officially killed, twice under fanciful names like Solar Warden or Radiant Guardian, the various autonomous apparatuses of the project continued working and quietly received rerouted funding to continue their relentless march toward technologies the public simply was not ready to consider. Who could pull this off? Who was so forward thinking and masterful in bureaucracy to design such a capable and resilient but still completely secret (or easily doubted) project?
Evelyn knows she is not the person to find out. She accepts that accountability and responsibility as achievable outcomes are not realistic. Disclosure, though? Sharing what’s been discovered and how it can help humanity forge a new future, or avoid continuing toward this one?
Evelyn has decided she is the person for that.
Palming the R: drive from its position atop the jury-rigged terminal she tucks it into the left breast pocket of the brown suede jacket she’d been gifted by her mentor and lets the reassuring weight pull her shoulders down from their tense heights. One casual shove and crash later the wiring, soldering, and many delicately balanced components snap and skitter across the floor of her quarters. This 10x8 geometry has contained every emotional and existential crisis of her adult life, it had even seen her one fumbling attempt at romance, now she may not return.
The door seals quietly behind her.
The lights auto-dim until the room is dark and quiet.
The consciousness of an observer from across the Solar System gapes in uncertainty at what it has just witnessed over the past seventy minutes.
Kura Takashii is a weapon. This is how he views himself, its how he frames his existence. It is the purpose proscribed to him by the closest thing he has to parents or family.
He was created by combining favorable genetics from more than twenty donors and he was trained from gestation to wield his ‘gifted’ mind in service of the Peripheral Studies organization and, of course by proxy, the good of humanity. Kura is not his own person, most of his thoughts and impressions are recorded to a format that is interpretable by his peers and interrogable by his superiors. Every waking moment is another obstacle of paranoid self-policed thought.
At 12 years old he is constantly overwhelmed with information, emotions, and duty.
This is by design, partially to keep his experimentally constructed consciousness from collapsing in on itself; and to keep him from exploring his free will too much. Peripheral Studies sought a psychological weapon and couldn’t achieve it without the inconvenience of an attached consciousness. The persistence of conscience in these consciousnesses has been a design flaw, and as Kura is realizing in this moment a flaw he has just succumbed to.
His stomach falls out of him, his chest caves in, his heartbeat stays steady at forty-eight bpm.
Kura’s allegiance just changed, from the only authority he’d ever known to a woman he’d never met. A woman he’d not even been officially ordered to observe. Maybe that was for a good reason.
His mind vacillates wildly like the edges of a nuclear explosion in the microsecond after detonation: expanding wildly in all directions but unpredictably faster in some. No thought is clear, they are all fuzzy and passing through the space behind his eyes before he can grasp and analyze any of them.
This is what panic feels like he realizes.
Sweat beads on his upper lip and behind his ears. His pulse has risen noticeably into the 50s.
Maybe twelve hours would elapse before a Junior Panopticon Trainee would review these recordings and write a practice report based on their experience. This will undoubtedly raise flags for a Senior Panopticon Caster to not only review Kura’s assigned and recreational recorded experiences, but also actively view Kura from that moment forward.
This newfound allegiance to Evelyn and her mission of apparent defection to Earth would likely result in his own brutal mental dismemberment, yet he’d never felt more certain of something in his time since creation. He would provide to her un-asked-for help. Help that she seemed not to realize she needed. Help that should would certainly fail without.
“K, you’re bleeding and I don’t like the smell.”
Eunice’s tone is unconcerned and unsuspicious, though she has to be able to sense his distress. The fact that she complains of the smell of his blood almost makes him laugh. Opening his eyes and breathing deeply enough that his lungs burn a little Kura touches his lip. Rather than dewy sweat at the tips of his fingers he instead sees the dark ruby red of his own blood. It’d been a long time. Using the heel of his hand he also dabbed at his ears and found similar fresh but small oozes of blood.
“Must’ve been pushing it to hemorrhage from your nose and ears, show-off.”
“Uh, yeah - checking in on the Resolute all the way in by Flora. Like seven-something AU I think?”
“That’s all and its got you breaking blood vessels?”
Now her eyes are open and focused on him. Boring holes into his own. Treating him, as always, like a puzzle to be solved. He needs to get away from her before he reveals the depth of his turmoil.
“I guess its the detail and not the distance that got me. Wait til you see how clearly I captured this” Kura says while tapping the shiny metal and slightly bloodied IO connector in the flesh of his earlobe.
“Hah! Show-off, like I said. I’ll look forward to it.”
Eunice’s eyes are once again closed as Kura rises from the the matted pit floor of their dorm’s meditation room. This room is one of many that make up the Peripheral Studies Panopticon facility on Ganymede. A splash of water from the sink in the washcloset down the hall brings Kura’s pulse back into the forties and clarifies his next step.
He gives up on hiding his thoughts. For the first time since he can remember he lets go of the strict internal partitions between facets of himself. The review of his neural-flow will already be telling enough so he trades secrecy of intent for clarity of purpose. Those that review his recorded flows will understand his qualia clearly; and maybe, just possibly, join his effort rather than attempt to prevent this pivot in the trajectory of the only life we are sure exists.
Eunice relegates her concerns for Kura to the back of her mind while settling back into her consciousness casting practice.