In that one moment – staring at each other, suspended in time – you see the guts of Galactic machines spread on the table. You see the mass of tools, the dismantled machines, and the immerser, half spread-out before them, its two halves open like a cracked egg. And you understand that they’ve been trying to open them and reverse-engineer them, and you know that they’ll never, ever succeed. Not because of the safeguards, of the Galactic encryptions to preserve their fabled intellectual property, but rather, because of something far more fundamental.
This is a Galactic toy, conceived by a Galactic mind – every layer of it, every logical connection within it exudes a mindset that might as well be alien to these girls. It takes a Galactic to believe that you can take a whole culture and reduce it to algorithms, that language and customs can be boiled to just a simple set of rules. For these girls, things are so much more complex than this, and they will never understand how an immerser works, because they can’t think like a Galactic – they’ll never ever think like that. You can’t think like a Galactic unless you’ve been born in the culture.
Or drugged yourself, senseless, into it, year after year.
You raise a hand – it feels like moving through honey. You speak – struggling to shape words through layer after layer of immerser thoughts.
‘I know about this,’ you say, and your voice comes out hoarse, and the words fall into place one by one like a laser stroke, and they feel right, in a way that nothing else has for five years. ‘Let me help you, younger sisters.’
To Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, for the conversations that inspired this.
Debtless
Chen Qiufan
China
I had the honour of being the first editor to take one of Chen Qiufan’s stories in English, though I was beaten to being the first to publish him by just a few months. ‘The Tomb’ was published in The Apex Book of World SF 2 back in 2012 and since then Stanley, as he is known, has gone on to publish numerous stories in translation, as well as the novel Waste Tide, which I was fortunate to blurb on publication. He is one of the bright young authors of Chinese science fiction, with a keen mind and a deep interest in technology – not to mention being perhaps the best-dressed science fiction writer on the planet. I got to finally meet him in Hong Kong a few years ago, and then in Beijing a while back, and I just had to have him in this anthology. ‘Debtless’ (translated by Blake Stone-Banks) is prime Chen Qiufan, a tale of debt and asteroid mining that should delight any science fiction reader.
In the history of human writing, the earliest word for ‘freedom’ is found in Sumerian, signifying freedom from debt.
Treatise of Divine Debt, 02:35
1.
The dream’s last sequence looped in my memory. A sticky black tide swept every inch of my body. Its rippling foam splintered into tiny chains that swarmed my skin, binding to blood vessels, cells, nerves, glands. The chains rubbed against each other, producing a metallic whistling. Then they began their slow elegant labor, building inside my body a kind of hell or kingdom.
‘Square Face, you dreaming again?’
I opened my eyes on Freckles. She had this concerned look in her eyes. It wasn’t the type of look her expression management module would produce. Her concern was genuine. Such a look was rare in our line of work, out here hundreds of thousands of kilometers from Earth, in cold space.
‘You catch something anomalous in my data?’ I glanced around the cramped control compartment, inhaling air drenched in sweat and chemicals. Miners were typically busy and indifferent toward each other. Our cognitive modules would pop-up passages from the Treatise of Divine Debt from time to time: Wearying debt is sinful and never complete… These flashed in our minds like commercials on a variety show. Nothing ever changed.
‘No, you were trembling like you’d been thrown into an ice cave, but your temperature was normal. Same as last time.’
‘Oh…’ I reflected. ‘Maybe I dreamed I was thrown from the cabin and then…’ I puffed my cheeks and rolled back my eyes, imitating those swollen bodies afloat in the absolute zero vacuum of space.
‘Not funny. Your turn on duty. Let me show you something.’
As she turned her head, I saw her lips bend into a wry smile. Freckles had this natural gift that no matter how bad things got she always held on to her own quiet amusement.
‘Look. Just like grazing sheep.’
The spectacle on the screen she handed me indeed resembled a flock of sheep. Only in this case, the meadow was the vast darkness of space and the sheep were C-type asteroids of various shapes and diameters. Your typical sheep was around seven meters in length and filled with water, carbon-rich compounds, iron, nickel, cobalt, and precious raw materials such as silicate residues. Depending on density, some could reach masses of up to five-hundred tons. These were heavy sheep, meandering leisurely in search of fresh grass amidst that dark meadow.
On this revolution, they might be a few months or a few years in. They were in no hurry. We were in no hurry.
Though perhaps thinking ‘no hurry’ was just my way of comforting myself. A few months back, I had found a gap in several terabytes of resource consumption data. Our water, oxygen, protein and energy were being consumed at a slightly higher rate than what in theory should have been standard. I suspected a leak in the pipeline or a loophole in the process was causing the phenomenon, but I hadn’t yet found any evidence.
I certainly wasn’t going to go outside to get to the bottom of it. The thought of that cold dark infinite universe made my stomach turn.
I tried to solve the problem mathematically, as I did
