Six weeks pass before we are released by the United Free. At no time do they suggest we are prisoners or hostages of any kind. We’re treated with respect, fed well, given additional medical treatment, and allowed access to a gym and a weight room. Of course we’re also kept in isolation and only allowed to see outsiders when we go for medical treatment or questioning.
What I do is dangerous, Paper Osamu tells me.
At first I think she means being a soldier.
She doesn’t. She means all that glitching dimensions with the kyp, reading events ahead of them happening, and stealing information from all available sources. It’s dangerous, quite possibly illegal. And apparently there’s a really good chance that it will kill me.
I’m not to do it while I’m aboard her ship.
All in all I’m interviewed five times. Always by Paper Osamu, although the audience changes. Her ship is somewhere unspecified, but obviously out of our own system.
Everything is so quiet I begin to believe we’ve slipped through one of those rips in space Haze talks about. When I suggest this to Ms. Osamu, she smiles kindly and talks about self-canceling sound and acoustic engineering. This is the point I decide not to try any of my other theories out on her.
She gives Haze access to the library.
After a few days, at his suggestion, I’m also offered access.
There are ten to the power of twenty-four living stars, beyond counting in any real sense. Dead stars can be the size of small cities or five times bigger than Fort Karbonne’s sun. The energy from a single photon released at the center of a star takes a million years to reach that star’s surface. A number of stars are actually older than the universe, which suggests levels of complexity not yet understood.
Haze loves it, but then he’s rapidly developing into a two-braid. At the end of the day I’m still a fighting machine. All the same, some of the things I learn are interesting, and a few are even useful.
Enlightened technology is illegal within areas claimed by the U/Free, but only because the U/Free regard it as crude and unstable. Personality uploading is perfectly legal for U/Free citizens, as is melding with a hive mind, provided such melding is consensual. Bodily augmentation, either viral or surgical, is commonplace. But nonregulated technology is to be regarded as inherently unsafe, hence the ban.
On instinct, I look up OctoV.
Renegade hive mind, now self-assimilated, reads the entry. OctoV was Uplifted but is now separate. The Id to their Ego. The entry makes it clear that the Free regard this as a bad thing.
That evening I’m visited by Paper Osamu. She’s neatly dressed and intensely professional. If I would like to ask for asylum from the Free she feels certain it would be granted.
I am, apparently, more than I appear. Also, greater than the sum of my parts. Just listening to this adds to my headache. The idea of exile becomes less attractive when I ask about the Aux.
“Define aux. ”
“My fighting group…Shil, Haze, Neen, Franc, and Rachel. We come as a unit.”
Something tells me Paper Osamu is wondering whether offering me asylum is a good idea. Not that she need worry; I refuse as soon as I realize asylum means leaving the others behind.
I ask to see them.
Ms. Osamu tells me this is not possible.
All of us, what remains of the army…we’re kept separate by rank, corps, and gender, apparently because Paper Osamu believes our social and sexual models of interpersonal relationships are unfair, and does not wish to implicate herself by encouraging hierarchical models while we remain in her care.
Haze says she’s a prude, and her announcement that postsexuality is an ideal just means she’s so bored by fucking she doesn’t want anyone else to enjoy themselves, either. The blush as Haze says this tells me things have gone further between him and Rachel than any of us guessed.
The morning after I’m offered asylum, Paper Osamu wakes me at dawn to tell me to collect my belongings; all of us are being returned to Octovian care. Almost inevitably we’re arrested for treason, desertion, and cowardice the moment we step aboard General Jaxx’s mother ship.