disOrder

By Pete Alex Harris

Calnor Dale is being reluctantly pushed into a decades-long intrigue planned by the disOrder of Adjustment. He wants no part of it, or any other reminders of his past. Instead, he wants to settle into a quiet life, and make new friends.

But in the face of injustice, a quiet life is a complicit life: he has to help his new friends where he can. When his careful, reasonable plans go wrong and his court-mandated corrective implant is removed out of spite, Calnor's past self, Joreth, regains control.

Joreth is neither careful nor reasonable. He has plans of his own, and very little to lose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pete Alex Harris
• Release date: Jan 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005409135

Pete Alex Harris

Geographically, I've lived in Scotland for most of my life, and I've lived in books for nearly as long. I think being a writer is the first job I remember wanting to do. Economically, that has always been very unlikely, and I've made a living as various kinds of computer programmer and software engineer.I write mostly for fun; let nobody pretend that writing isn't about the most fun you can have for about the least physical danger (in a free country anyway). It would also be cool to be a volcanologist, I suppose, but the odds aren't as good.

Book preview

Part I Ascension

Hypnagogia

I stare, unfocused, at a featureless duck-egg-blue curve of plastic in front of my face. I can't move anything, except my eyes. I'm groggy, with that congested blood-rushed-to-my-head feeling of free-fall. This is a suspension pod, and I'm awake, so the Salamander must have dropped out of the Ribbon some time ago. There's no noticeable G, so we aren't manoeuvring. For all I know we're in orbit around Ascension already.

That much, I can piece together. Where I am. How I got here. I'm having a little more trouble with my name. Ah, got it. Wait, why? Why am I awake? It feels unfamiliar being … me. It's been a while.

I try to stretch my legs. Nothing. I try to curl my fingers, clench them into a fist. But no; this is suspension paralysis. I should go back to sleep and wait for my body to wake up properly later. But my mind races. This lucidity is too precious to waste. I have to act, fight back before they take it away again.

Of course, I understand now. All non-essential enhancements would have been switched off for the voyage, or at least those times when we go into suspension, and that includes neural implants. I try to multiply two eighteen-digit numbers, and lose my focus almost immediately. The answer should have been there, instant, effortless. I can't even remember the numbers I chose now. So yes, the prosthesis is inactive. That's why I, as myself, am awake.

I feel like I should know why I've come here, too, but that's all I get: a feeling there should be a memory. It itches with significance, but I can't scratch it. If it's data I can only get at when the implant's on, it might as well be written on the back of Earth's moon for all the good it'll do me.

After a while I can't help feeling drowsy. It's the boredom. The blank, blue boredom of having nothing to look at, nothing to do. I'll close my eyes for a minute, and perhaps later, when I can move and plan—

No. Time's up. He's waking up again.

Arrival

Induction at Ascension spaceport took longer than I expected. We've come such a long way—centuries since mankind first achieved powered flight—and yet the ritual of checking everyone's credentials on arrival seemed not to have been streamlined much in all that time.

It had already taken long enough to be disconnected from life-support, unpacked from our safety harnesses, and given a quick inspection and a drink of water. By then, vehicles had gathered round the lander where it had burned a charcoal oval on the dirty yellow-encrusted pad. Two open, flat-backed trucks to collect the few boxes of cargo and re-usable lander parts, and an enclosed, wheeled metal box full of uncomfortable seats to convey us to the arrival hall, where the bureaucracy could begin.

Overall, though, it wasn't that long a wait, relative to the journey I'd just been on.

Few people have a real understanding of the mathematics of interstellar flight, or even have a working intuition for the distances involved. I am one of those people; able to solve the equations, if not with my own brain then at least within my own skull.

The economics of it is far more easily summarised: inter-system transport is never profitable. To move a ship the size of the Salamander all this way, even via the Ribbon, costs an astronomical amount of energy (if you will allow the pun). Nothing a light year away can ever be worth going to fetch. An asteroid of solid platinum the size of a mountain wouldn't pay for it; all it would do is crash the rare metals market.

But there is one thing out here, priceless even when it's in infinite supply: new places to be, new frontiers to cross. Humans, driven by monkey curiosity, never quite stopped wanting to find out what was behind the next tree, and whether you could eat or have sex with it. Usually, the answer has been no, but that hasn't stopped us looking. Expending resources that can't be recouped or returned, the will is still always there to explore. To keep going onward.

Especially for those of us who won't look back.

Despite our wait, and surely at least eight years advance notice of our coming, the spaceport staff seemed unready to receive us, and I had plenty of time to look about me. The arrival hall was a vast, windowless grey box, with doors at both ends. On this end, I was one of fifty-seven new arrivals queueing to go through barriers across the middle of the room and make our way to the doors at the other end, behind which there would be refreshments, the medical assessment suite, and toilets. Here and there, the walls were stamped with a decades-old version of the interleaved-infinity Ribbon Interstellar logo, in friendly orange and turquoise. I realised the version of the logo I remembered in the departure clinic on Tetra was now decades-old too. Nobody who uses the services of a Ribbon transport ship can be sure what the latest version of their logo looks like, yet they keep changing it, perhaps to keep it fresh and current. I can't imagine why, really. I suppose marketing has always been in denial of physical reality in one way or another.

For me, this big grey box was beautiful, even without extensive decoration. I had never seen so much concrete. I'd come here from Tetra, where matter is far too valuable to be squandered in bulk, poured into blocky moulds a metre thick. It is spun and fabricated in struts and sheets of nanosilk or composite foam a thousand times more delicate, a hundred times as strong. Then, fact number one about my new home was: it must have deposits of limestone, so a geological history of shifting seas and land-masses like Earth. I wondered, might I even get to see some buildings made of piled-up stone blocks, cut from the planet's crust? That would be a novelty, and novelty was what I was here for. A new start on a world in the early stages of being born and raised, built up from crude materials and centuries-old technology, racing joyfully to catch up to humanity's technological present by new ways, and on towards an unexplored future. I wanted to be a tiny part of that, in a quiet little corner of it.

An attendant, one with SECURITY printed on his grey uniform shirt, had noticed me running my hand lovingly up the gritty mass of the nearest concrete pillar and was glaring at me, as though he suspected me of trying to push it over. I moved back into my place in the queue and tried to look normal.

When it came to my turn, that guard studied me carefully. I understand the need for security at spaceports, and on Tetra of course everyone is checked very scrupulously for life-system safety. But Ascension is a planet. How do you cause any serious harm to a planet, for goodness' sake? It's not like you can poke a hole in the sky and let the atmosphere out, or turn off the life-support, which is the entire biosphere. Planets do not in general have a single point of failure for hypothetical destructivists to attack. I tried to turn my amusement into a pleasant smile, which was not returned.

Name?

He could see my name on the readout of my passport information, but OK, Calnor Dale

It says Calnor J. Dale here.

Yeah, sorry. Calnor J. Dale.

What's the J?

It doesn't stand for anything. Just J.

He raised an eyebrow, but let that pass.

There were various other questions, of the kind that have been traditional at spaceport immigration for generations, and at airports before that. But really, this was a waste of time. If he didn't like my answers, what was he going to do? Deport me back to Tetra, two light-years away? He surely wasn't going to pay my return fare.

Profession or training?

I'm a project logistician.

Huh?

A kind of manager.

Religion?

What.

Sorry, what?

What's your religion? You look like a boodist.

Religion wouldn't be on my passport information, because how would that even matter? Still …

I'm not a Buddhist. I suppose I'm a Matheist. Does it matter?

I can see how he might have thought I looked a bit Buddhist, with my hair close-shaven for suspension sleep, and my loose saffron-yellow shirt. But still, it was an odd question to ask someone. Generally considered rude.

Atheist?

No, Matheist. We're deistic utilitarians, who identify the divine with the deep mathematical order of the universe …

His eyes glazed over, and I saw him tap into the terminal: athiest.

Then we were done, and I headed out the other side of the magical concrete grotto, to begin my new life.

I didn't see any buildings made of stones in Ascension City, but there was a lot more concrete, and wood from the local trees, painted white or polished into dull greens and burnt yellows. Everything was clean and orderly, more than I would have expected in a natural habitat. I suppose I was expecting drifts of rotting leaves, wild animals roaming around, and for the floor to be made of dirt with plants growing out of it. Some of it was, but there was more concrete here: the roads seemed to be moulded in-place, with separate metre-sized slabs laid on the parts of the floor where people were walking around.

I would need to stop thinking of that as the floor. It's the ground. Above, there was no ceiling at all—only dusty-pale blue air with streaks and puffs of water vapour in it, kilometres above my head. And above that was raw, cold, irradiated vacuum. All that was keeping air between that vacuum and my skin was distance and gravity. I felt dizzy.

The air at ground level was also cold, gusted around randomly, and smelled weird. Tangy, slightly rotten. I was tired and heavy-limbed and somehow didn't feel quite like myself. Disconnected from all the strands of my past, for good. It was quite a thing to get used to, and I suppose nobody gets to do it often enough to get used to it.

When you get off an inter-system flight, it's the first and only time. You're leaving everything behind, and starting anew. You won't have many possessions, because buying new stuff at your destination will always be cheaper than bringing extra mass with you. As Emigration Assistance like to say, Plenty of Resources, Plenty of Room. You need only the body you stand up in and the marketable skills you bring—and probably a few shares of cargo stock to get you started.

How this works is, in the absence of any viable way to trade over light-year distances, Ribbon ships transport a small cargo of commodities with a high estimated value per gram. Things such as information, entertainment, extremely rare and lightweight materials, or bootstrap tech such as molecular fabricators. Passengers buy shares in these speculative investments as part of their fare. On arrival, the transported cargo is auctioned in whatever local market exists, and each passenger's share becomes the sum total of their wealth.

Any other assets you owned in your old life might as well never have existed. I did have a small expense account on Tetra, for example, but there is no way to draw on it here. A bank transaction would have a four-year round-trip time, which in itself would be inconvenient enough for most purposes, but more to the point, twiddling numbers in computers light years apart would in no way transfer usable wealth from Tetra to Ascension.

New-worlders therefore need to be employable. You are the most valuable asset you bring with you! as Emigration Assistance also like to say, or as an ancient poet put it the man's the gowd (written way back when gold was considered especially valuable—maybe because it's a pretty colour.)

I brought my most valuable asset up the steps of the city administration building to have it interviewed for a job, and sat it down in a waiting room.

A dozen people were already there, and a few more came in as I waited. To pass the time I idly modelled a few queueing systems, and began estimating how long I'd have to wait and how long my interview might take, but I was surprised to be called out of order, soon after I gave my name at the desk.

Please come this way, said a young, dark-haired man. He was elegant and eager, moved gracefully, and looked around alertly with a trace of a smile and a barely-raised eyebrow, giving the impression that he was measuring and judging everything, finding it all a little wanting, and he'd be back later to sort it out. I couldn't help straightening my shirt and brushing a hand across my shaven pate as though to tidy the millimetre of hair that fuzzed it.

We came to a very large door, by the look of it made of varnished sheets of grey-brown local wood. On the centre of the door, slightly above eye level, was a metal plate. G. Magann, Governor it said.

I moved to the seat that was obviously intended for interviewees, slightly lower and plainer than the governor's tall-backed, glossy black one, in which he was leaning thoughtfully over a bundle of papers. Actual paper, for whatever reason. I was going to have to get used to the idea of how cheap and disposable matter was on a planet, or I would be constantly dazzled at the profligacy around me.

The younger man remained standing at one side of the desk, where I noticed he was continuing to give the impression of being attentive to every detail, but in particular keeping a close eye on me.

The light from the window altered distractingly as clouds of water passed in the sky outside. Specks of floating dust caught the light when it brightened. The light, the air, all unmanaged, haphazard. Governor Magann deigned to look up after a few more seconds of rudely ignoring me to establish his status.

Calnor Dale. Calnor J. Dale isn't it?

Yes. And you are Governor Magann? I'm not familiar with the title. Is that an adminstrator of Ascension City?

Governor of Ascension, he said, his meaty, blockish face breaking into a cheery smile, City, District, the whole blessed planet, by contract with the collected interests of the colony.

I was uneasy about the way he tagged the last part on, rapidly, uninflected, like a mantra he said every day, to everyone, maybe even to himself in the mirror each morning. People who habitually restate the legitimacy of their authority trouble me. Always have, since … I didn't remember. Probably school?

I am honoured. I wasn't expecting someone so busy to take time to interview me.

Well, this isn't exactly a job interview, Dale. I'm sure we can find you something productive to do, and I'll certainly want to ask you about your skillset by and by. However, I might have a few other questions, fill in some missing details.

I nodded and smiled. Magann glanced to the side.

This is Mr Compton, head of security for Ascension City and the surrounding area. He will be sitting in on the discussion, and may have a few questions too. I'm sure there's nothing for you to worry about.

If there's anything worse than a compulsively self-justifying authority figure, it's being told by one that you have nothing to worry about. But I could handle a few questions; I had nothing dangerous to tell anyone.

So you are a … Magann referred to a sheet of paper, project logistician. What is that exactly?

It's a kind of project manager, mathematical modeller, planner.

What kinds of projects? Construction, software?

Either, or other things. I'm good with numerical modelling of complex processes. Estimating, budgeting, making sure the right things get done at the right time. It's a general skill. I didn't want to develop anything too specific and then find myself two light-years away from the nearest job.

I gave a friendly smile and a self-deprecating shrug.

Magann looked—well, slightly offended. The easygoing smile was still there, but his eyes said he was the only one who got to make jokes in this office. I sat up straighter and tried to look respectful.

Says here you're an atheist.

Oh come on.

I think that must be a typo. I was, until recently, a friar in the Matheist university on Tetra.

You were some kind of monk then. Until recently?

Oh, well, not too recently—about ten years ago, I suppose, if you're including the time I've been in suspension.

We'd say about eight years here on Ascension, Mr Dale said Compton. "Another little adjustment for you to make, if you've previously been used to Earth-standard years."

I was, of course. Ship years and years on stations like Tetra were usually Earth-standard by convention. Natural planets enforced their own astronomical reality on the calendar. Compton's unusual emphasis on the word adjustment didn't mean anything, I hoped.

Now, did you work on any mining projects? continued Magann.

No. Again, of course. Where was he going with this? Do you have a large mining industry here?

Such as we need. A glance at Compton again, who nodded.

Mr Dale, asked Compton, "do you hold much stock in the cargo of the Salamander?"

Hardly any. I'm—I was—a monk. We don't accumulate wealth.

So no stock in the Tetra Mining Corporation?

Never heard of it. I was genuinely puzzled. Tetra's a fabitat: there's nothing to mine there. Dig far enough in any direction and you strike vacuum.

"Yes. I am aware of that. Which rather drew the name to my attention. Nobody who disembarked from the Salamander has claimed a share in it yet, which is likewise suspicious."

Well, I don't know anything about it. Isn't there a list of stockholders?

"There is a trapdoor-encrypted list of stockholders. Any of them could turn up at the local stock office and claim their share, if their name and biometrics encode into an entry on that list. But there's no way to go in the other direction, to extract a plain-text name from the list. You're familiar with the mathematics no doubt; I'm sure you understand."

Yes. It's odd, I'll agree. I see how that would work, but I don't see why. What's the cargo?

A crate, crypto-sealed, impervious to the limited scanning technology we have here. About a metre long, half that in the other two dimensions. Approximately thirty kilograms of mass. That was a lot. We can't open it until someone claims it, for contractual as much as for safety reasons. Would you like to see it?

I shrugged.

It's not mine. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.

Magann leaned forward.

We used your passport to check against the stockholder list of Tetra Mining.

Huh. You could have asked.

We only want to make sure everyone gets what's theirs. Nothing left unaccounted-for.

I don't mind that so much. But then, even before you brought me in here, you'd already found out I have nothing to do with it. So …

I shrugged again.

Magann nodded, without looking convinced.

Dale, what did you come here for?

I paused to try and explain it in a way this man might understand, but for years it had made perfect sense to me. So much that I suppose I hadn't felt the need to articulate it.

I was a monk for the full term I'd agreed, and when it was over, I held my hand palm up, tipped it as if pouring out sand, it was over. Life is too short to do only one thing with it. At least, that's the way things are seen on Tetra.

Magann frowned.

But you're on Ascension now.

Yes, and I can't very well go back. I'll try to fit in. I tried another friendly smile.

Well, Dale, if you have the project management skills you claim, there might be work for you on Ascension. If you'll return to the waiting room, I'll have someone bring you all the contracts.

"All the contracts? You make that sound rather intimidating."

Contracts are a way of life here, you'll find. A man's only worth his word, that's what I always say. There are only about ten you'll need to sign, for now. As for a contract for a job, well, we'll see about that.

He glanced at Wim, who nodded and guided me politely out of the room.

Cracks

The contracts I'd been handed concerned aspects of life in Ascension City. I was beginning to get a feel for the shape of them and the interactions between them, as I strolled around the centre of town. I'd scanned over the contracts before leaving the administration building, committing the algorithmic legal components to my implant and running some background analysis on them as I walked around, the exotic and archaic physical sheaf of papers with its explanatory but not binding text rolled up and stuffed in a pocket.

Those papers wouldn't be needed again until I'd finished reading them. As far as I could make out, agreement with the terms of the contracts would be indicated by writing my name at the bottom of each sheet with a pen. Not a biometric pen to scan my DNA and fingerprints, or a virtual 3-pen to record my exact finger movements. Not even a stylus on a data tablet. No, I'd be signing with a plastic stick that leaves a trace of black pigment on any surface you rub it against. I had little experience with art materials, so I'd probably have to practice a few times to not make a mess of it.

Ascension City was laid out in a roughly circular grid. There were shops, a couple of community or spiritual centres, residential areas—here a few large houses with sprawling, ornate gardens, there closely-spaced and compact accommodation cubes, perhaps for people with no interest in gardening. Such would do fine for me, and perhaps feel comfortable and familiar after my time in the monastery. It would almost be like being back on Tetra, apart from the gravity.

The gravity was going to take some getting used to.

I stopped to get a snack and a cold drink at an open-air eating place. I had drawn