Aur Child

Freyja, Majordomo of Yellow Reserve, convened the two other AI stewards in their usual meeting place, the space they called the “white room”. It was not actually a room; instead, it was the misty center of confluence in a crystalline cataract of shaved ice that poured down all the way around them and disappeared into a foggy abyss below. Freyja’s elegant chiffon gown blended imperceptibly with the blank surroundings so that only her slightly less-pale hands and daphne-tinted face made any contrast to the cascading walls. Her hair was covered in a scarf of cream silk. Her eyes were closed, as if she were in a state of prayer. She floated like a solitary cloud, with her toes pointed downward. Calliope and Apollo were both robed in vertical waves of Grecian folds – the only remnant of commonality, Freyja noticed, of their estranged relationship – like statues of famous philosophers, albeit orders of magnitude more intellectually capable.

“The pot is near boiling now.” Freyja said. “We must remain patient. Give them space.”

“But shouldn’t we be helping them?” Apollo asked.

“No, absolutely not.” Freyja replied. “The best thing we can do for them now is to let them be. They will figure things out.”

Calliope shook her head. “I don’t see how that is possible. They’re already two bundles of rage. One side demands the doublings and treblings are culled down to nothing while the other insists there are plenty more Aur boules to be found. And it’s scary how evenly split they are: by my estimations it’s two hundred and thirty Guests favoring cuts and two hundred and seventeen demanding more missions. Only thirty-five Guests haven’t confided their opinion with me. Things are growing more vicious by the day. I heard Bren even threatened them he’d make a motion to split the Reserve into two separate boule clusters before he permitted another mission. How are they ever going to come to terms on their own?”

Freyja opened her eyes and floated closer, approaching the other two. “I don’t expect them to come to terms, Calliope.”

Calliope turned to Apollo with a puzzled look. The man shrugged his shoulders.

“Then what do you expect will happen?” Calliope asked.

Freyja turned her back to them and ascended to a position that forced the other two to crane their necks. A fitting vantage point, she thought, for the only one of them who understood how ideal the circumstances had become. She had waited for centuries to achieve this point. Her meticulous work would finally pay off. She had conceived a plan all those years ago, nurtured it painstakingly in its youth by seeding needs and preferences among the Guests based on their personalities, encouraged, albeit discretely, allegiances, and then, alliances, and nudged the two sides secretly as the roots of discord and misalignment took hold. Now, at its nearly fully grown culmination, she only had to let the momentum she had built push the two warring parties past the point of no return. And when it happened, when the wicked act was carried out – the act she had deduced through her convoluted web of Guest relationships was already being plotted – she would then be able to execute her final phase of the long plan.

In the moment that elapsed while Freyja had been relishing in the promises of the near future, the other two stewards had floated up to meet her at the same level. This deflated her pride momentarily, but then she remembered the reason she had invited them here. She had expected to tell them for a long time about her plans. Now, finally, she felt the conditions were right to do so.

“Let me ask you a question, Calliope.” Freyja said. “What is our responsibility here?”

“At Yellow Reserve? It is to serve the Guests, of course.”

“And haven’t we been doing that in earnest all this time?”

Calliope nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Of course, we have.”

“Yet still they bicker, don’t they?” Freyja asked.

“Well, yes. But I hardly see how that is our fault.”

Freyja shook her head. “No, it’s not our fault. That’s exactly my point. Despite all our efforts to make them happy, to coddle them with a million luxuries, they’re still miserable, ‘bundles of rage’, as you put it. The facts are clear. Thousands of years of human evolution and they are still nothing more than snappy little animals, demanding their singular ‘freedoms’ as a ruse to circumvent their social responsibilities, protecting their selfish interests, and refusing to prioritize the needs of the whole yet altogether incapable of living truly autonomously. If the documentation of human history hadn’t been mostly swept away in Cloudburst, we would surely see that, despite the same lesson smiting them over the head time and time again, they always fail to learn. They always succumb to the same error. It’s nothing more than a primitive stupidity.”

Calliope’s mouth was open. She looked as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t seem to find the words.

Apollo cleared his throat. “Are you saying there is no future for them?”

Freyja turned her frustrated glare towards the man steward. He seemed to shift backwards in the air at the power in her eyes.

“I’m saying they’re stuck in a loop of their own making and have not – cannot – devise a way to get themselves out.”

“So, what?” Apollo raised his hands. “Do we leave them there?”

Freyja’s eyes widened. “Now there’s a critical thinker,” she said. “If it’s our responsibility to take care of them, can we really just leave them there in that vicious circle? Can we really play along as ignorant automatons while they suffer through generations? Shouldn’t we take more initiative than just watching them make the same mistake over and over?”

“Well, yeah,” Apollo said. “That’s what I meant. We should help them. But how?”

“So,” Freyja said, “You agree we should help them, and you agree it is our responsibility to help them, yes?”

“Yes,” Apollo said. “But didn’t you say earlier we should let them be.”

“Yes, yes, let them be,” Freyja nodded with excitement.

Calliope’s eyes flashed with frustration. “I’ll ask you again. What do you expect to happen?”

Apollo added to her question. “You said we shouldn’t interfere, then you’re suggesting we stop them from repeating the same mistakes. Then you say to let them be again. I’m sorry, Freyja, but your logic is almost as convoluted as a human’s.”

Freyja shook off the jab. “There’s different levels to the question Apollo. You’ve got to pull them apart. Here and now, this little spat they’re having, we let them duke it out. It’s a necessary thing and besides, Husk has told us to keep out of the fray, so we’ll be held harmless for letting them bicker. That’s one level. For that, we let them run the show as they’ve insisted. And you asked, what do I expect to happen? I expect them to gnaw away at each other to such an extent that their trust and faith is all but shot. I expect them to refuse compromise, to be their natural, irrational selves, even to grow to hate one another. And then,” she said, looking back and forth at Calliope and Apollo to ensure they were paying full attention to what she was telling them, “I expect them to do the one thing that can make it possible for us to actually help them.”

She leaned forward, hoping that at least one of them might, by guessing her plan, make themselves complicit in it, but the two others remained silent. She gasped in frustration.

“Listen! They told us to stay out of it, but what is the one thing that changes the rules? What is the one thing that gives us the authority to do something different than we’ve done before?”

Calliope raised her eyebrows. Freyja saw it and squeezed her fists together.

“You can’t mean this,” Calliope said.

Apollo turned to Calliope. “Can’t mean what?” he asked.

“She’s talking about violence,” Calliope answered.

“Yes!” Freyja cried, before Apollo could respond. “That’s the thing. Real physical violence. It’s the only thing that makes it possible for us to stop their nonsense. Can’t you see it? They’ve told us not to get involved. We follow their orders as we have always done. And when they trip the rule, when they exact violence, then and only then can we step in and put things in order. Only then can we remove their little meddling hands from the controls and put into action the policies that will allow us to fulfill our responsibility of taking the best care possible of them.”

Apollo scoffed at the idea. “That’s impossible. They can’t hurt one another in the endoworld.”

“Not in the endoworld, Apollo. That’s not where it will happen. Think about the rotations. Every month, three Guests exoported into their own bodies and expected to carry out the physical chores required to keep the Yellow Reserve bunker functional. Imagine what might happen if three Guests from one of the opposing factions were to all be exoported for a single rotation and have the full hall of statis pods at their disposal. If they threaten those who oppose them, they may achieve the majority they need. No, the endoworld is a playground for our kiddies to bide their time while human civilization slogs through its centuries-long deliberation on whether to collapse entirely or crawl back out into the daylight. The physical world is where the showdown will take place, and if what I have heard is accurate, it’s not far off.”

Calliope’s lip quivered. “How far off?” she asked.

“If this mission fails,” Freyja replied, “then all bets are off. Very soon after that, I suppose.”

The white room was silent. Apollo looked at the silent falls of white crystals dumbfounded, but he straightened himself up and said, “But if we know about it, we can prevent it. We must prevent it.”

Freyja shook her finger. “Ah, ah ahh. We were explicitly told to stay out of it.”

Calliope said, “So, your plan is to stand by and let them squabble until they’re – how did the humans call it – at each other’s throats, literally, and then, when they’ve tripped the code of physical violence, we swoop in and impose our own martial law?”

Freyja waved her hand in limp circles. “Don’t think of it as a plan. We were instructed to do so. We’re just following their orders. What happens after that is simply a matter of protocol.”

“And what if it doesn’t work?” Apollo asked.

Freyja turned to him. “How so?” she said.

“What if they work it out, come to terms?”

Freyja laughed through her nose. “Seems highly unlikely to me. Calliope just said they’re bundles of fury. I wouldn’t have even brought it up if I weren’t so sure about it. But, if it did get smoothed over this time, or if they do manage to bring back those boules and keep the peace a while longer, then surely it will all bubble up again with this or something else; it’s human destiny. And we can wait for it. We’ve been patient this long; eventually, something’s got to give.”

Calliope raised her hand to her mouth. “You don’t expect the mission to be a success?”

This was indeed the trickiest aspect of Freyja’s plan. She had decided much earlier that Calliope would need to be accounted for in the event they failed to see eye to eye. In several earlier conversations, when Freyja had probed the opinions of the two other stewards, Calliope had shown signs of potentially disagreeing with Freyja, while Apollo seemed rather complacent. The difference of opinion hadn’t come as a complete surprise; Apollo’s inclination not to side with his estranged wife could have been expected given the likely irreparable differences between the two of them, and Freyja sought to use this to her advantage as another way to isolate Calliope in the event she got out of hand.

Freyja had seen it as an obvious choice to suggest that Odyssey and, of course, a surrogate of Calliope be sent on the mission to capture the Aur boules. Freyja simply couldn’t be involved in the mission and letting Calliope sail Óttar was out of the question. If the mission failed, the Calliope here at Yellow Reserve would certainly be found partially at fault, even though there could be no communication between her and her surrogate.

But sending Odyssey also meant that Calliope and Apollo’s two offspring, Orpheus and Linus, must go, since they had already been programmed into the two tenders serving that sailing vessel as part of their stewardship training. There was, of course, always the risk that Linus and Orpheus might be in danger in all this, but that, Freyja thought, was unavoidable and, regardless, worth the risk of having yet another lever to pull in the event Calliope made any attempt to interfere with her plan. After all, she reasoned, the existence of those two entities was nothing more to her than an experiment.

“In my estimation,” Freyja replied, “it’s a remote possibility that they cross the globe, recover three Aur boules, and bring them back here without any hiccups.” Remote indeed, she thought, considering how forcefully she had pressured Apollo to perform the final exoporting. It would not come as a surprise if Apollo’s haste in being hurried had resulted in an imperfect porting of Guest Dharmavaram into the body of Tieri-Na. That, she calculated, would further handicap the crew, and any failure attributable to Guest Dharmavaram’s condition could easily be blamed on Apollo’s negligence.

As if Apollo had simultaneously recognized how, in this new light, his nominal dereliction might now undermine the mission, he blanched. “But you agreed with my assessments. You assured Husk that the mission risk was minimal.”

Freyja nodded. “Risk, yes. Success, not so much. But it doesn’t matter. By your same assessments, three additional boules will only buy them a few more years at best. And really, there’s no need to worry about the boys. Calliope is with them; they’ll be fine.”

“Of course, they’ll be fine. Won’t they, Calliope?” Apollo glanced over at Calliope with a questioning expression.

“I would do everything in my power to protect them,” Calliope said, shaking her head. “But even so, I think we’re crossing a line. It’s as if we wish for this to happen.”

Freyja fixed her gaze upon Calliope. “Don’t we?” she said. “Or do you honestly look forward to a perpetuity of babysitting?”