This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.
The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real
Previously: The former SDC detectives have pulled off a heist to retrieve Kaenamor’s lost journal. All they need to do now is get away…
Space. In transit between the Moon and Max-Earth.
2550. March (Earth time).
Any moment, Clarke’s bones would shatter. His lungs would collapse, his chest would crumble. First his heart would be crushed, which wasn’t too bad as it would save him the embarrassment of his guts being squeezed out of him, while his brain bled from his ears.
At least, that’s how it felt. The Beagle was still accelerating, the thrust pinning them to their seats and compressing their bodies. All sense of time had gone, either from the pressure or from whatever it was that Justin had injected into them. Clarke might have been in that seat for a year or a minute, he had no way of knowing. His entire universe was the curve of the seat, its padding, the straps holding him in place, the head brace that was saving him from a broken neck as the ship rocked and shuddered.
It was very different to the leisurely cruise on the way out. This time, they were running, although he didn’t know exactly why or from what. What small part of his brain still functioned wanted to ask questions, but his tongue felt huge and awkward in his mouth, and it took every effort not to swallow it. His vision was smeared, the lights of the cabin unpleasantly bright, and he wondered if it was possible to have an eyeball pop during extreme acceleration. He didn’t even groan, as to make a noise would have required more air in his lungs than he could manage, and his throat was constricted and tight.
And he thought he’d disliked space travel before.
Justin must have anticipated questions, as their voice blared out from the cabin’s speakers, barely audible above the sounds of a vehicle being pushed beyond its limits. “We are being pursued,” they said. “The Beagle is not equipped with advanced sensory equipment, so I am unable to acquire a clear reading on the ship’s identity. I would assume, given its speed, that it is a megaship, most likely Probably Better.”
The rogue AI. Shit.
“There is nowhere in the solar system that the Beagle could successfully evade it. My own ship is still many hours away and will not be able to assist in time.”
Even above all the pain and gasping for breath, Clarke felt his gut tightening, a panic rising. He’d seen the results of AIs fighting each other, back in London, years earlier. When a shard of Justin had been torn to pieces and bled out on the floor of a dirty flat in Plaistow. That had been host bodies, humanoid robot shards of the superintelligences rather than the real things. This was different, and he didn’t have a good handle on what a ‘megaship’ actually was, as they kept to themselves and were rarely seen. He wondered if humans had ever been hunted by an AI.
“I have calculated a route to Earth at the maximum burn possible while keeping you all alive. Our pursuer does not have such considerations and will therefore travel faster. As such, we will not have the usual luxury of a flip and burn to decelerate on our approach to the planet. While the Beagle’s compute power is limited, I have devised an approach trajectory that will utilise the Earth’s atmosphere as an extreme air brake.”
That sounded dangerous. Clarke wanted to ask if there was another way, any other options at all.
“This is an untested manoeuvre with the Beagle’s class of ship. I will endeavour to keep the ship intact!”
The AI sounded almost jovial. A fun experiment. Clarke had to remind himself that it was trying to save their lives. It was absurd that his life had come to this, that he was in this situation. He’d dreamt as a young man of having a heroic purpose. As a middle-aged man he’d wished for any form of purpose, heroic or not. As he’d approached retirement, he’d resigned himself to living out his days without motivation. Going through the motions, until he stopped. There was a time when retirement felt like the end: he couldn’t see past it, and had started eyeing beams in his home, testing their strength and height. Why bother carrying on? He’d never decided if it was a serious thought.
Then John Callihan had died. Had it really taken his death for Clarke to find a reason to live?
There was a jolting, horrendous slide to the side, Clarke feeling the sensation of his brain shifting inside his head.
“We are being fired upon,” said Justin. “I am making an evasive response. The Beagle is not as fast as Probably Better, but it is nevertheless a highly agile super yacht.”
The most likely scenario was that they were all going to die. Four Londoners and a Palinese princess, blown to pieces in outer space, in a dimension not their own. It wasn’t an end he’d ever imagined, or ever could have imagined. Yet every decision he’d ever made had led him to that moment.
Panels began peeling from the ceiling and walls and flying across the cabin, where he heard them crash into the back wall. A cupboard behind the bar fell open and a bottle of something fell out, its neck shattering on the worktop. Liquid sprayed across the room, spatters hitting his face. Wine. He hoped the others were faring better than him, that they hadn’t been hit by any of the debris.
He wished he could somehow shove Lola, and Nisha and Zoltan and the princess, shove them all through a portal, send them somewhere where they’d be safe, and could live quiet, long lives.
They’d all been denied that. Clarke was an old man, felt like an old man. He didn’t give two shits and a fuck what happened to him, not any more. He’d only been doing any of this, sticking with the SDC, for Callihan’s sake. He owed him that much. And then, at some point, he’d been doing it for Lola, too.
He’d not intended to make friends. It was easier to go without. But, fuck it, it was what it was.
Clenching his jaw against the pressure, feeling his jowls rippling and shaking, he stared straight ahead at the wall and focused on his breathing. In and out, slowly, painfully, each inhalation a monumental effort. His heart, which had been hammering away, slowed its pace to something more tolerable.
It wasn’t over yet. They had their own AI on their side. Justin knew what to do. There was still unfinished business, and Clarke wasn’t going to let some upstart rogue AI get in the way.
“Brace for deceleration,” Justin said, after an indeterminate passing of time. “This will be deeply unpleasant.”
There was a lurch and Clarke was thrust forward in his seat, chest and shoulders digging into the restraints. He’d have bruises, and that was only if blood wasn’t drawn. The shuddering was worse than ever, the entire ship shaking uncontrollably in every direction. He felt something crunch painfully in his mouth, and spat the tooth out to avoid swallowing it. Copper taste on his tongue.
The cabin was getting warmer.
“We are skimming the atmosphere,” Justin announced. “I am adjusting our speed and trajectory to avoid reaching inadvertent escape velocity. The turbulence is being caused by our interaction with the Earth’s atmosphere, which is simultaneously applying extreme deceleration. We will need to complete multiple orbits to reduce speed sufficiently. The atmospheric interference should prevent Probably Better from being able to close its pursuit distance.”
Clarke was shunted one way and then another, his weight continuously shifting in the seat, the pain of the acceleration replaced with a new form of torture. His body felt as if he’d been in a car crash, and had then had to go several rounds with a heavyweight. He didn’t know if he’d be able to even walk once they were down.
“Once we have slowed sufficiently I will perform an emergency landing in Addis Ababa, as near to the portal station as possible. Once we are clear of ionisation I will contact the local authorities to clear the surrounding streets and evacuate the station.”
Back through the portal, then. A return to Mid-Earth. Clarke found himself grinning in spite of the pain. Mid-Earth would be a welcome relief.
They didn’t have any damned spaceships there.
Meanwhile.
Here’s a thing I wasn’t expecting yesterday:
Apparently I’m on the ‘Rising in Fiction’ leaderboard, a new thing Substack have implemented to help readers find new writers. It’s a useful thing (I’m going to put some time aside to check out the other writers on the list), though I am rather conflicted to hear that it’s based on paid subscriptions.
There’s two problems with this that I can see, especially for fiction:
Lots of great writers publish their work for free. They may not even have paid subscriptions as an option. They could have an avid and rapidly growing readership, but presumably wouldn’t show up anywhere on this list. That seems silly.
While I’m very happy with how this newsletter is going, and immensely grateful to all of you for being subscribers, let’s also be realistic: right now, I’m not going to be quitting the day job any time soon. Having income from paid subs is an incredible thing, but it covers costs and maybe some groceries. That I’m at #31 on the leaderboard (update: I seem to have risen to #18 at the time of writing, for unknown reasons) can probably be taken as a general indicator that fiction writers are overall not making much money on Substack. For the overall health of the ecosystem, I’d expect myself to be lower down the list.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s really exciting to be on a list. I just want more of us to be on it. :)
Everyone freaked out this week about OpenAI’s latest shiny thing, which seems to be following the Trump administration’s example of not giving a shit about existing laws. Where ChatGPT previously had some rails to stop it producing blatantly copyright-infringing material, that’s no longer the case — hence all the ‘Studio Ghibli’-style slop that has appeared. Erik Hoel covers it here:
I find it all quite grim, but I also don’t entirely understand the hysteria. A ChatGPT-generated image might look superficially like a Ghibli project, but it isn’t actually a Ghibli project.
As Tyler Durden once said, sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
Classic Studio Ghibli movies are not defined by their aesthetic style. It’s an important element, sure. But it’s the combination of hundreds of other factors that make for a great movie. Any animation studio could ape Ghibli’s look if they wanted to, but there’s no point: it’s just playing dress-up.
Elsewhere, Joseph Gordon-Levitt has appeared on Substack, and had what I thought was a decent take on tech firms and AI:
Right, enough of that. Bleurgh.
Author notes
Here’s what happens in today’s chapter:
Clarke sits in a chair.
That’s pretty much it. The mischievous part of me liked the idea of doing an epic space chase/battle, but doing it entirely from the point of view of a passenger stuck inside one of the ships, who has very little experience of space travel and no control over the situation.
I mean, that’s the experience of flying in a plane for most of us, right? We can’t fly a plane, we’re not piloting the thing. We sit in a chair and trust that the pilot, the maintenance staff at the airport, the factory that built the plane, all know what they’re doing.
The flight in this particular chapter is especially uncomfortable, of course: imagine the worst turbulence you’ve had in an airplane and multiply it by a factor of 10, then think of a fairground ride you’ve been on that accelerated or decelerated uncomfortably and extend that brief experience to hours. That’s what the SDC crew and Yana are going through.
Another reason for doing it this way is that space combat is a visual thing. It’s great in movies and on TV. Less effective in comics, I’d argue, and in prose. In the hands of a talented writer anything is possible, of course. But also: Triverse isn’t a Star Wars-style setup. We’re not talking the Millennium Falcon cartwheeling through asteroids, or WW2-style dogfighting. The Beagle and Probably Better will be so far apart that they can’t see each other with the naked (human) eye. The visual drama is fairly minimal when you opt for a more realistic form of space combat.
What we do get is a chance to get into Clarke’s brain. He’s got no other choice: it’s not like he’s got somewhere else to be. The lack of actual action or movement in the scene — given that he’s strapped into a seat, I can’t even do my usual thing of having a character walk around within the scene — is made up for by emphasising the impact on Clarke’s body. The staging of the scene is within his body as it’s bashed and crushed, rathe than within the space of the ship’s cabin. That was interesting to play with.
Next week, things get really bad.
"Deeply unpleasant". Justin has a keen sense of understatement there.
I know it's cliche at this point, but "Extreme Air Brake" would be a cool band name.
And of course IF they land safely and IF the journal survives the landing and IF they make it back to Mid-Earth, then whoever's left has to get back into the Kingdom from which they were effectively exiled and attempt a spell that even Kaenamor left uncompleted.
...
Which is a lot. No pressure, guys!
I'm really worried about Clarke too. IT occurs to me that this inside-his-head moment is just the kind one might expect of someone who's not going to make it, and...oh boy.
I liked Clarke's helplessness. I thought him feeling the maneuvers without actually seeing what was happening did more to convey the range of the engagement than anything else.