The Infinite: The Outside, Book III

Book 3: The Outside

by Ada Hoffmann

Genres: Cyberpunk; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

Final instalment from Philip K Dick Award-nominated series from Ada Hoffmann

Time is running out for the planet Jai. The artificially intelligent Gods who rule the galaxy have withdrawn their protection from the chaos-ravaged world, just as their most ancient enemy closes in. For Yasira Shien, who has devoted herself to the fragile planet's nascent rebellion, it's time to do or die – and the odds are overwhelming.Enter Dr. Evianna Talirr.Talirr, the visionary who decimated the planet and began its rebellion, is not a woman to be trusted. But she's returned with an unsettling prophecy: the only way to save Jai is for Yasira to die.Yasira knows it can't be that simple. But as she frantically searches for other options, what she finds will upend everything she knew about the Gods, the galaxy she lives in, and herself.

 

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Release date: January 24, 2023

Publisher: Angry Robot

Print pages: 318

Sample

CHAPTER 1

Now

Yasira Shien had been dreaming of unsettling things. The ruins of cities blasted by the Gods. Pain and death. Her former mentor, Dr Evianna Talirr, who had smiled enigmatically at the dream’s end and said, I’ll see you in the morning.

She woke with a gasp, in her little bedroom inside what had once been Ev’s lair, and stared at the ceiling, shivering.

It wasn’t much of a bedroom, really just four cubicle walls with a tarp for a ceiling, the interior plain as a guest room. She’d been in here for six months, but never bothered to decorate; she didn’t have much more than a bed and a dresser and a light to turn on and off. But that wasn’t what troubled her.

Being awake, right now, was even worse than being in a dream.

Yasira was exhausted. Her limbs felt like brackish little puddles. Her head hurt. There was a reserve of Outside energy deep in Yasira’s soul, a power that was virtually limitless – but to draw that energy into the physical world cost something. Yesterday she had drawn on it more deeply than ever before, and now she felt like the ragged outline left after a blast. Just an afterimage. Barely a body.

She needed to get up, though. Yasira needed to eat, even if her stomach felt like it would turn inside out at the smallest movement. She needed to care for her body in all the usual ways, now more than ever.

She closed her eyes, and the speech that the Gods had broadcast the night before, after the battle, flashed in front of her again.

People of Jai, this is a message from Nemesis Herself. You have been heard. You have coordinated to voice your defiance against the Gods on a scale never seen since the Morlock War, and We have heard you.

That was something Yasira had done. She and her team had organized a mass protest across every part of Jai’s Chaos Zone – mostly peaceful, sometimes not.

We will grant your wish. Since you so desperately desire not to be under the rule of the Gods, you will no longer be. Effective immediately, the forces of the Gods will be withdrawn from this world.

They’d wanted–

Well, they’d wanted a lot of things. Because of how Outside filled the Chaos Zone, the Gods had made every part of life there even more difficult: declaring simple everyday activities heretical; giving out deliberately inadequate aid. The Gods wanted order, and literally everything in the Chaos Zone was an insult to that order. The mortal rebels just wanted to survive.

We will not police you for heresy. We will not keep order in your towns. We will not provide food or water relief nor medical care. Our priests will not officiate in your temples, nor will we answer your prayers. Nor will Nemesis’ forces protect this world from outside threats, be them aliens or Keres, further visits by the woman you call Destroyer, or mere natural disasters.

The painful, hacked-together, makeshift ways that the people of the Chaos Zone survived on their own would now be all they ever had.

(But the Gods would still take their souls when they died).

As a parting gift, we will grant you some information. You are aware that the Keres has been interested in the Chaos Zone from its beginning. Only recently, we discovered a battalion of Her forces moving in Jai’s direction, far larger than those we have defeated here so far. The largest we have seen in hundreds of years.

The Keres was the ancient enemy of the Gods, and She hated humanity for reasons that had been lost to time. In the six months since the Plague that created the Chaos Zone, the Keres had attacked the planet several times. The Gods had ceased their other activities, even the pretense of material relief, to fight Her off.

When Yasira thought about that, it seemed strange. What was the Keres getting out of this? The Chaos Zone, until today, had been one of the most heavily militarized zones in human space. And even if the Keres had managed to wipe everyone out, it wouldn’t have been that much inconvenience to the Gods. But She’d attacked anyway, persistently. What did She get out of any of Her attacks? Yasira didn’t know.

By our estimates, they should arrive in two weeks. As you prefer to solve your problems on your own, we will leave Her for you.

Goodbye, people of Jai. Your destruction will be richly deserved.

There were people on this planet who called Yasira Savior. She had tried to save them, even to the point of breaking herself into pieces.

Instead, she’d just killed them all.

There were a lot of conflicting voices in Yasira’s head these days. Outside had split her soul into a collection of fragments. Some of them had names – the Scientist, who was made of curiosity; the Strike Force, a coalition who had the will to get things done in an emergency. Some belonged to other subgroupings without formal names. Some floated in a vague mental soup held together by Outside, only rarely chiming in. Now all those parts squabbled at an even louder volume than usual.

You killed them all.

We didn’t kill them all. The Gods decided to kill them all. We didn’t do that.

And what did you think the Gods were going to do once we staged a rebellion against Them? Serve cake?

Nobody’s technically dead yet, guys.

Ev will fix it, said a small, rarely heard, hopeful voice, and the other parts of Yasira reacted in horror, disagreement, embarrassment. Ev was the one who had made the Plague happen in the first place. She was the one that the people of Jai called Destroyer. Hopefully the dream had just been brain flotsam like most dreams, and Ev wouldn’t show up at all.

Yasira gradually managed to pull herself to her feet. She shuffled along, moving like an old woman, not a twenty-six year-old whose prodigy face had once been on the cover of Jai’s science magazines. Her fine black hair was a mess, tangled and hanging down over her face like a ghost’s hair. She probably needed a shower.

The inside of the lair was a weird space, located in a sort of interdimensional nowhere, and physics didn’t quite work right. Gravity changed depending on what surface someone was close to, meaning that the apparent floor, walls, and ceiling all served essentially as floors, scattered with furniture and items. When the space had been Ev’s, it had been cold and industrial, not much more than a big workshop for all her projects, but Yasira’s team had turned it into something more like a big shared student apartment – if shared apartments had weird corners pointing every which way. She climbed across a few of those weird corners now, swinging her feet from one surface to a differently angled one, using someone’s hammock as a makeshift ladder, until she found her way to the war room. It was a space clumsily set up like a university meeting room, with a big plywood table surrounded by office chairs; canvas walls pinned with charts and maps; countless easels; and pads of paper full of notes. This was where the rest of the team was assembled.

Well.

Almost all the rest of the team.

There was Yasira, and there was her girlfriend Tiv, and there were the Seven, a group of former students of Ev’s who’d become connected to Yasira in some mystical, Outside way.

But the Seven weren’t Seven anymore. One of them was gone.

Yasira shuffled into the war room, leaning a little on one of the walls. The wall, which had not been built to support a person’s weight, wobbled a little.

Everyone turned to look at her.

“Yasira,” said Tiv. “Hi.”

Tiv was a woman about Yasira’s age, with a sweet heart-shaped face and hair she’d cut short after the Plague. Her big, expressive eyes were rimmed with red, as if she’d stayed up all night crying.

You should have been there with her, said something in Yasira’s head, comforting her. Comforting the whole team. But after yesterday, there had been no strength in her to do anything but totter to bed and fall asleep.

“Hey,” said Yasira.

She looked at what remained of the Seven. There were Splió and Daeis, sitting huddled together – one lanky, tousle-headed, and cynical, the other quiet and heavyset and cradling a little tentacled creature the size of a cat; such creatures infested some corners of the lair, and they were Daeis’ friends. Then there were the Four, who’d been imprisoned in a room together by angels and who’d come to see themselves as four aspects of a single being, like Yasira’s fragmentation in reverse. Prophet, her hair in small tight braids, sat curled in on herself, staring into space. Picket, pale and languid, leaned against her while he frowned down at the pile of documents in front of them. Grid, tall and thin and precise, had covered most of those documents in their own neat handwriting from top to bottom. Weaver, a ball of nervous energy, paced close behind them.

That made six of the Seven. There should have been a seventh, a woman named Luellae, heavyset and as pale as Picket, scowling and crossing her arms. Yasira hadn’t liked Luellae, exactly – she’d been always at odds with Tiv, wanting to go all in on rebellion no matter the cost, when Tiv instinctively wanted peace. But she’d had those feelings for good reasons. The rest of the team had begun to admit that sometimes Luellae was right – and Luellae had begun to thaw out a little.

But Luellae was gone now. She’d vanished during last night’s battle, kidnapped by Akavi, the former angel of Nemesis who’d held Yasira and the Seven captive before they came here. Splió, with his far-seeing ability, had watched it happen. Akavi had come up on her, grabbed her, forced her to teleport somewhere else. Where exactly that was, neither Splió nor Prophet knew.

Voices clamored in Yasira’s head, insisting on one plan or another. There were so many things here to fix, and so little hope of fixing any of them. She rubbed her eyes. “Okay,” she said. “I just woke up. What’s our plan so far?”

“It’s less of a plan,” Grid answered, flipping through documents, “and more of a plan for how to make a plan. There’s a lot we don’t know about the Keres. There are records of some of Her battles with Nemesis, and we know where to find them; the scale of what She’s done to populated worlds in the past is common knowledge. But what Her tactics would be in a situation like this, unopposed by the Gods – that’s hard to say. Then we have to take stock of our resources. We have our own abilities, and we have the Chaos Zone’s community leaders. Those people probably can’t fight the Keres even a little but they’re the ones who are going to know best how to get the people around them to the safest shelter available. We might have some way of supporting their efforts, and they might also have other ideas. We need to reach out to the gone people to see if they’re planning anything, or if they’re even aware of the threat yet. And then, there’s you – probably.”

Probably. Yasira swayed on her feet as clamoring voices swirled up inside her. This was part of what she’d dreaded. People in the Chaos Zone called her Savior; she had Outside abilities that were unlike anyone else’s, and with the force of myth, many of them had come to believe she was capable of even more than she’d done. They’d all want to know why she couldn’t take on the Keres all by herself.

They wouldn’t think it if they knew what we’re really like. Shuffling around the place like we can’t even take care of ourselves.

But could we do it? Is that possible?

We held our own against the angels. We did that.

Dozens of pockets of gone people scattered across the continent and we protected them all.

Not all, said someone glum, remembering the handfuls of bullets that had gotten through her defenses, some with deadly accuracy. Yasira was finite. Outside might not be, but she could only channel so much through herself.

That was against bullets, said someone even glummer, and a little closer to the surface. The Keres can melt a whole city from orbit.

Yasira – or, rather, the Strike Force, who were getting fed up with everyone else in her head – forced herself to focus and open her eyes. The Seven were still talking, and she’d missed a bunch of it.

“–could use my powers,” Picket was saying. His lip trembled slightly, but he was determined. Picket had the power to increase or decrease the level of Outside contamination in an area – potentially to searing, eyeball-bleeding levels. “If you can get me in a place where I can see the spaceships, I could use it.”

“If that even works in space,” said Grid, biting their lip. “We’ve never tried it outside the Chaos Zone before.”

“It will work,” said Prophet, eyes closed and dancing under their lids like she was dreaming. “I just – I can’t see the context. I can’t see how much.”

“And Daeis said they might know some flying monsters big enough to help.” Picket looked frustrated that the others weren’t immediately agreeing with him. “Grid, maybe you can sense the ship’s configuration, see them coming. Or maybe Prophet and Splió can do it. With us, and whatever Yasira and the gone people can do – who knows? It’s not hopeless. It can’t be.”

Yasira wobbled in place. And maybe Ev can help, some part of her wanted to say, but – how could she say it? How could she even begin to explain?

“Good to know we’re already OK with forgetting someone,” said Splió – sitting in the corner of the room away from the big table, with his arms crossed, the way Luellae had always crossed hers. Everyone immediately swiveled to look at him.

“We’ve been over this,” Grid sighed. “If we come up with anything we can do for her then we will, but we don’t have anything like that now. We don’t even know where she is.”

“I’ve seen that we’ll see her again,” said Prophet, opening her eyes, “but I don’t know when, or how it happens. There’s an ambiguity in what I see about her.”

“Oh, and you’re all just cool with waiting indefinitely until then?” Splió countered. “Just leaving her there at Akavi’s mercy? You’re not even going to try?”

“We don’t know where she is!” Weaver shouted back, spinning in a circle.

“Luellae’s tough,” said Picket. “And she can teleport. If she can’t make it back to us on her own, that means she’s somewhere that’s hard to get out of, even if we could find our way there. I think we need more information.”

“We have a meta-portal,” Yasira said, gesturing at the airlock. Nobody knew where exactly the lair was located in space, or even if it was in space. The airlock was the only way in or out, and to use it, all you had to do was visualize the place where you wanted to go. Over months of experimentation, Yasira and the team had discovered that it didn’t always have to be a specific place. They could hold in their minds a vaguer intention – like somewhere secluded, or a grocery stockroom that isn’t being watched – and the airlock would send them somewhere as close to that description as it could. Not every vague description worked, but Yasira had often been surprised by those that did. “Have we tried telling it we want to go where Luellae is?”

“Yeah, I tried that first,” said Splió. “Right away. It just bounced me back out.”

“You tried without telling us,” Picket accused, as if it was a personal insult that he hadn’t been invited along.

“Which could mean that kind of query is too much for the meta-portal,” Grid summarized, listing off possibilities like they were check-boxes. “Or it could mean she’s sealed up or guarded in some way that it can’t handle. We don’t really know this airlock’s limitations, or what kinds of safeguards Ev put in place. Maybe it just won’t take us into a small enclosed place with angels. It could be that or anything else.”

Weaver had stopped spinning and was instead batting her whole body against one of the cubicle walls, like a bee trying ineffectively to escape from a window. “Or that she’s dead.”

“She’s not dead,” Prophet insisted. “I saw her.”

Splió’s voice was rising higher. “So you’re all just going to give up. You’re going to leave her there in Akavi’s custody, letting him of all people do Gods know what, just because the first most obvious easiest thing we tried didn’t work–”

With a loud crack, Tiv abruptly banged her gavel against the table.

Everybody here had code names corresponding to their powers. Tiv’s code name was Leader. She’d told Yasira she didn’t see herself as the leader type, but she was the least mentally ill out of any of them, and the most trusted, and the best able to keep everyone on task. Splió had given her the gavel once, half as a joke. She didn’t like to use it often. But everybody shut up and paid attention when she did.

“Luellae is important,” said Tiv in the sudden silence. Her voice was gentle but firm. “She deserves to be saved. If anyone has a plan for how we could find her, I want to hear it.” She looked around the table just long enough to drive home the fact that they did not, in fact, have a plan. “But there are millions of innocent people on the planet whose lives are at risk. People who deserve to be saved as much as she does. We can’t afford to get too sidetracked.”

“This isn’t a side track,” said Splió. “I know we want to save everyone, but I thought we were practically family here. We don’t only have a responsibility to the world. We have one to each other, don’t we?”

“We have a responsibility to each other,” Grid replied with gritted teeth, “and we will save Luellae at the first opportunity, when we can. What we’re saying to you is we can’t right now. We have to put our focus where it will accomplish something. That’s what she’d want. She’d want us to fight.”

“But–” said Splió, and then he slumped over and rested his face in his hands, out of arguments. Daeis quietly put an arm around him. Grid gave them both a long look. Grid was normally even-tempered, but Yasira noticed the shimmer of tears in their eyes.

“Yasira,” said Tiv, nodding to the rest of them and turning to her. “Do you think you can do what Picket suggested? Fight off a bunch of Keres ships using your powers? Is that possible?”

“I… don’t know,” said Yasira, swaying on her feet. She wanted so badly to please Tiv, to be worthy of everything Tiv had done for her, but it was impossible to convince all her voices of that. “I can try. I…”

She shut her eyes, feeling dizzy.

Tiv frowned in concern. “Let me get you some breakfast.” She moved to get up from her chair, but Weaver was faster, rocketing to the edge of the room like she’d been craving the exercise.

“I’ll do it,” said Weaver. “Toast and orange juice, right?”

“I… sure. Please. Thank you.”

Weaver ran off – literally ran – around the lair’s topsy-turvy circumference, and started to climb the ladder that led to the kitchenette.

Tiv took a deep breath, refocusing. “What if…” she said. “What if we took refugees? We have a portal that goes anywhere. We wouldn’t even have to let them in past the airlock’s inner door, not into the lair itself – just five or ten at a time, just the ones who want to take the risks of going instead of staying where they are. Take them in through the outer door, spit them out somewhere random, and repeat. Better than… than letting them burn.”

It was an idea that they’d discussed before, months ago. There had always been people in the Chaos Zone who desperately wanted out, and the angels had patrolled the Zone’s borders to prevent it. Let people out of the Chaos Zone, their thinking went, and the Outside plague affecting the Chaos Zone would spread, too. But the Seven had all agreed that letting strangers into the lair, even as far as the airlock, was too risky. Grid could sense the angels’ ansible net and ferret out angel spies, but it took concentration, and nobody could concentrate on a thing like that perfectly for the length of time and at the scale that Tiv was suggesting. Not to mention that there were other people on the Gods’ side besides angels. There were sell-souls who might not be connected to the network, and even regular mortals who might be loyal enough to the Gods to report what they’d found. If just one of those people got through, they could destroy the whole operation.

Picket frowned in dismay. “Running away? That’s our answer?”

“We’re not running,” Tiv corrected. “We’re letting innocent people run if they want to.”

“They’ll die either way,” said Splió, morose and looking down at the floor. “The Gods think Outside madness is contagious. They’ll start running huge inquisitions everywhere to find Chaos Zone survivors and everybody who looks funny or acts funny will get swept up in them, even people who’ve never been to Jai in their life. Everything everywhere will just get worse–”

“That’s what Ev wanted,” Yasira murmured, and everybody suddenly turned to look at her.

She wasn’t sure why she’d blurted it out, or which part of her had said it. But she’d worked with Ev on the Outside stuff closer than anyone else here. She’d absorbed most of Ev’s memories once, after a particularly strange experiment, and then forgotten them again – but the feel of Ev’s mind, the sense of what she had intended, still bubbled to the surface sometimes.

Jai is the catalyst, she remembered Ev saying. Jai is where the experimental skirmishes stop and the real war begins…

“She… wanted the conflict to spread,” said Yasira. “Past Jai. Into all-out war everywhere. She wanted it to grow into something that the Gods couldn’t eradicate and couldn’t ignore. Because they can’t kill everyone. They can’t destroy all humanity; they eat our souls. They’d die with us. That’s what she wants. That kind of… stalemate.”

Even though billions of people would die. People had never been important to Ev, not in aggregate.

From somewhere further off in the lair, nearing the entrance, there was a loud, metallic thunk.

Several of the group startled visibly. Grid drew their sheaf of notes closer to their chest as if it could protect them. Off in the kitchen, Weaver dropped a bunch of dishes with a clatter.

The airlock wasn’t far from the war room, but it wasn’t directly visible from there – the cubicle walls were arranged to block most other parts of the lair out, to let the people inside the room focus. Daeis leaned over to peek out through a gap between the walls; Grid stood up on a chair and tried to look over top of them. But most of the group froze, holding their breaths. All of them, even Tiv, remembered this from when the angels held them captive: the feeling that the people who hurt you could come in at any time, whenever they wanted, and there would be nothing to do but brace yourself.

A set of steady footsteps clicked their way slowly from the airlock to the entrance to the war room.

The figure that eventually came into view was tall and thin, a pale woman in a scuffed white lab coat wearing thick glasses, with her hair in a limp brown ponytail that was only just beginning to go gray. She swiveled her head, looking around her, as if to sardonically take in what everyone had done with the place.

A little too slowly for comfort, she turned and fixed her gaze directly on Yasira.

“Hello,” said Dr Evianna Talirr, for the first time – outside dreams – in six months. “You called?”