Chapter 1: Chapter 1

Arthur awoke, a dull, heavy feeling in his mouth as though his tongue had doubled in size. His vision, blurry at first, was slowly focusing on the present, the ceiling tiles overlapping in his vision. There was a sense of lightness in his head as though it too light, yet heavy nonetheless.

He lifted his head from the pillow and tried moving his right arm; his wrist was strapped down to a medical cradle. He felt the straps around his chest tighten. He tried his left arm when he heard the voice of his mother.

“Artie,” Nemea Ashpelt called, her voice far, echoing in his ears.

“I’m here,” he mumbled, feeling the thickness of his tongue in his mouth, his vision swimming.

Vertigo gripped him as he tried to focus on the window to his right, his mom, her shape to his left, but his eyes, they couldn’t focus. The braces around him tightened again.

“Lean back,” she said, her voice softer now, more present. “Rest.”

He did—leaning back on the pillow behind him, he was about to close his eyes when the back of his head scratched against the pillow, and it clicked into place. He remembered why he was here, where here was.

The procedure, it was over, and the neural lattice—

“Ma?” he called, searching for her and trying to raise his arm again, to feel the incision, his arm impossibly weak. “Ma, did it take?”

“Don’t fight it, Artie,” she called, her gray-furred paw on his wrist.

He blinked, the room stopped moving for a moment, and saw her. She was sitting by his side, her dark eyes on his.

“I’m not fighting it,” he replied, and finally leaned his head back on the pillow. The braces around him loosened as the cradle leaned back, supporting him.

“Of course not, sweetie.”

She set her book down on the stainless-steel table beside her and reached for a cup with a flexible straw. Arthur flexed his own paw and felt the braces tighten again; even his own tail, plastered behind him, was immobile. There were four releases, he saw, two manual, two electronic, and he couldn’t reach any of them. She raised the cup and pulled the straw toward him.

“Small swallow,” she said.

Arthur took a sip as the surprisingly ice-cold water filled his mouth. He swallowed and took a deep breath.

“Drink,” she said.

He took a larger one, and half went down the wrong pipe. The bands cinched when he coughed, firm enough to keep his shoulders from lifting.

“They’re reactive,” a nurse said. She had appeared behind his ma. “They’re for your own good.”

Arthur stopped pulling against them. The restraint released an increment.

Nothing in the brochures had shown the restraints or the restraining cradle itself. All they had shown was the patient entering the clinic and a picture of the perfect family. They had shown the recovery suite after the patient had been washed, dressed, and placed near a window. There was a window, at least, Arthur noted. Not that he could look outside; the medical cradle was adamant in keeping him in place.

The nurse took the cup from Nemea and filled it again. “Keep him drinking every five minutes. Call if he vomits, reports a metallic taste or double vision.”

“Two ceilings,” Arthur's tongue tripped on itself, his voice still groggy.

The nurse checked his pupils with a penlight. The ceiling above him had floated to the right and settled into its proper place.

“Still two?”

“One and a half,” he replied, mumbling to himself.

“That’s improvement,” she said. The nurse tapped something into the controls of the cradle and left. The door sealed behind her with a magnetic latch.

Ma held the cup; her book stayed down on the cart.

“How long was I out?” Arthur asked.

“The surgeon finished four hours ago. You were under for ten.”

“Did it take?” he asked again.

Nemea looked at him. Her eyes were red along the lower lids; the skin below them had dark circles from a sleepless night.

“The lattice is stable. Grade I and full expected capacity. No sign of rejection.”

Arthur breathed out; it had worked. He had the neural lattice installed, and it would turn on once it started its baseline readings.

“There’s something else,” his mother continued.

She turned her wrist, and her QUIP, the device on her wrist, lit up. She had received a message, a sun cresting a ridgeline in red. A message from Red Horizon Adventuring.

“It came just a few hours ago,” she said.

“You read it?”

“I birthed you. I get to know things first.” She swept two fingers through the projection, sending it across. “There. It’s yours now.”

His QUIP chimed once from the stainless-steel table, an arm’s length away and a world out of reach, biolocked to a wrist currently strapped and immovable. They both looked at it. The bands cinched when Arthur started laughing, which made him laugh harder, which made Ma smile.

“Hold still, you lunatic,” she said, and turned her own wrist so the projection faced him, holding it steady where he could read.

He read it twice, the second time slower.

Dear Mr. Ashpelt: Red Horizon Adventuring is pleased to extend a conditional offer of candidacy for our next intake cohort. This offer is contingent upon verified stable integration and baseline readings of your neural lattice, certified by an accredited clinic, no later than the cohort convening date.

Stable. Full expected capacity. The condition was already met, four hours old, stitched under the skin at the back of his skull. As far as Arthur was concerned, the seat was his.

“Did you tell Pa?,” Arthur asked.

“I wrote him not too long ago,” Ma said. “It will reach him when it reaches him.”

When it reached him. That was how everything worked with Pa. Ma's note was already there, delivered the instant she sent it, waiting in his queue wherever the Commonwealth had him. He would read it when he could and reply when he could. When Arthur was 11, uniformed people had come to the apartment with news about his pa. Amapin Ashpelt had been a combat medic, enlisted into the Commonwealth forces. He had made a career out of it, serving for nearly twenty years when the Commonwealth forces started their war for conquest and consolidation. The planet, they had claimed, had had enough.

With nearly sixty-five billion people, poverty and hunger rampant, and rising sea levels and their associated mass migrations, the Commonwealth had said, no more. With unilateral declarations in the Senate, the planetary consolidation movement had started; a series of unrelenting and bloody wars that had drenched the planet over the last twenty years.

The wars were older than he was, and for most of his life they had been a standoff, front lines that moved on the broadcasts and nowhere else. One Planet, Made Whole. Arthur had heard it so many times the words had stopped landing.

The door latch released with a magnetic thunk, and Arthur's ears went flat before he knew why.

“¡Tigre!”

Rufo came through first, sideways, because he was carrying something with both paws and refused to turn his back on it. Sable slid in behind him, and chasing them both came the nurse, moving to intercept.

“He needs his rest,” she whisper-yelled at them. “Ten minutes. If he vomits, you leave. If he so much as looks green, you leave.”

“Understood,” Sable said, trying to manage his grin while he winked at Arthur. He came around the far side of the cradle, ears forward, and looked at him. “Ay, no. They tied you down. What did you do?”

“He bit somebody,” Rufo said.

“I’ve been a model patient,” Arthur said. His tongue was still slow and the words came out more twisted than he wanted.

“You sound borracho, hermano.”

“I was down for ten hours.”

Sable leaned in at the shaved patch behind his ear and sucked air through his teeth. “They shaved you crooked. Mira, it goes up at an angle. Like a little lightning bolt.”

“It'll grow back,” Arthur replied hopefully.

“Over a scar? Te va a quedar una raya, tigre.” He straightened up, satisfied. “Very distinguished. Girls love a raya.”

Rufo set his package on the blanket over Arthur: a matte black case, longer than a book and half as thick, with a strip along the seam and a courier tag still zip-tied to the handle.

“It cleared customs this morning,” Rufo said. “We signed for it. You’re welcome. Took two hours, tigre. Two hours of my one life.”

“So?” Sable asked. “Did it take?”

“It works,” Arthur said, unconvinced. “It’s supposed to be stable, but it hasn’t activated yet.”

After a moment of silence, Rufo howled, actually howled, and the nurse’s head snapped around from the cradle controls and squinted her eyes at him. He brought it down to a furious whisper without losing any of the joy in it. “¡Eso, tigre! I knew it. I told you. Didn’t I tell him?”

“Arthur Ashpelt,” Sable said, mock-formal, like a name being read at a ceremony. “Latticed and stable. And he still owes me forty for the ferry.”

“You know who else has a lattice?” Rufo counted on his claws. “Nobody. My shift manager, no. His manager, no. The man who owns the ferries, the actual boats, no. Nobody can afford a lattice.”

“The regional director came to school that one time,” Sable said. “She had one. She also had two bodyguards and a boat with a roof.”

“Exactly. Her. And now him.” Rufo pointed both paws at Arthur, at all of him, the bands and the tubes and the boy strapped inside. “Him.”

“You’ve got an ARCS now, hermano.” Sable said it grandly, in his brochure voice, but his ears had gone still. “You’re going to the stars.”

And there it was, under the clowning, the fact none of the three of them was going to say out loud in this room. In the fall, if Trimount was still taking students before the city finished emptying itself, Rufo and Sable would register there and spend four years earning a degree. Arthur would check into Red Horizon’s office instead.

The three of them had grown up on the same neighborhood and had attended the same schools, and four hours ago one of them would lead a different life. They knew it. He knew it. They had come here to be glad for him anyway, and they were doing a good job of it, and he loved them in a way he had no plans to mention.

“Can you read minds now?” Rufo asked, leaning over the rail. “Think of a number. Wait. What am I thinking?”

“That’s not what it does,” Sable said.

“You don’t know what it does.”

Arthur was laughing again, and it hurt, and he did not want it to stop.

He looked at the case, then at his ma, who was watching him.

“Do not open it,” she said, before he found any words. “Red Horizon takes its own baseline reading when you check in. You can't connect anything to the lattice before their instruments take a look. It has to stay sealed until you are standing in their office.”

“Ma. What is it?”

“What we could afford.”

Three words, said the way she announced dinner. Arthur lay very still under the reactive bands and let the words go through him.

The lattice alone had cost what should have been their next home. The city was being abandoned. The seawalls had held the water back for decades, and they were giving out section by section, and the Commonwealth had wars to fund and people to move; it was not going to rebuild them. The evacuation notices had gone up district by district all spring, and everyone with the means was buying ground uphill and inland. The money for that ground had sat in one account his whole life. It had paid for the neural lattice.

The lattice was the socket. On its own it handled baselines and calibration, two units of capacity waiting on something to fill them. Companies loaned a recruit his first implant and owned the debt of it for years. Ma had bought his outright.

"You didn't need to do that," Arthur said.

The implant hadn’t been part of the plan. The heat came up his neck before he found any words for it.

And there was no money left. He had seen the account the night the surgery had been prepaid. She had reached past that to buy the one thing Red Horizon would have handed him for nothing. She had bought his first module outright, so that when it entered his lattice, that first unit of capacity would belong to him rather than the company's. She had done it sealed, sight unseen, before he was awake to argue.

He wanted to ask her with what. He wanted to yell it in front of the nurse, in front of his friends: with what, Ma? The cradle must have read his pulse and tightened against him, and he lay there pinned by a machine, too weak to sit up and be properly angry, while she waited him out.

He couldn't stay angry at her for two reasons. The first was obvious, what Red Horizon promised: a starship ship off planet, a combat contract and work that paid. The other was the money she had spent, the new housing she would never buy now. Ma, I won’t let you down. He kept that to himself.

The pressure started behind his right eye then, a slow bright wedge of it, the headache the discharge papers had a whole paragraph about. He grinned anyway.

Text lit the lower left of his vision, following his eyes wherever he put them.

>>> Initializing
>>> Searching...
>>> Searching...
>>> QUIP Found...
>>> Synchronizing...

[Adaptive Recursive Cognitive Scaffold (A.R.C.S) - Initialized]

Neural Integration Grade: I

Stable capacity: 2 units

Utilized capacity: 0 units

Available capacity: 2 units

Passive calibration underway

“It’s on,” Arthur said, to nobody in particular.

On the stainless-steel table beside his ma, his QUIP shook itself awake, buzzing against the metal. It projected the caller's name above the band for all to see, hanging in the air between them.

Pearl.