87: The Untethered Heart

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“I have something I want your opinion on,” Yamin told me as soon as I walked into the office.

It was my last day before my next Education jaunt shift; the last day of my trial run. Well, technically the Education portion was part of the trial run and I wouldn’t officially ‘make my decision’ until after it, but really, this was the last day. We were in one of the little general offices still, though Yamin had admitted to me that he had his own captain’s office which was much fancier. He didn’t seem in a hurry to show me, though.

On the desk in the middle of the room sat a black-and-white striped plastic lump. It looked a bit like a tiny squashed egg, or a really big pill. It was about the size of the last segment of my thumb, and would’ve been hard to notice if it wasn’t sitting on an otherwise clean and empty desk.

Yamin gestured to it dramatically. “What do you think?”

“Um,” I said, “what is it?”

“A heart implant, I believe.”

“Oh. Are you sick?”

Yamin chuckled. “No, it’s not in use anywhere. Or if it is, that’ll be the scandal of our time. It’s a historical curiosity.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, good. It’s enormous. How would that thing even fit in a heart?”

“I believe it’s put behind the heart and only a couple of thin wires are attached. Most of the bulk is EMP shielding and suchlike.” He picked it up, looked at it a moment, then handed it to me.

It was what it looked like; a small plastic (or maybe a strange ceramic?) lump that seemed mostly hollow. Probably some small electronics in there. I could indeed see two tiny metal points where wires could connect. Holding it didn’t give me a whole lot of new information.

“So it’s like a really heavily shielded pacemaker?” I asked. “For people with bad hearts working in environments with lots of electricity or magnets or whatever?”

“Not a pacemaker, no,” Yamin said grimly. “The woman who brought it to me insisted on calling it a ‘tether’.”

I looked up sharply. “Did Tima give you this? Or Plia?”

“Her name was Tima, yes. You know her?”

“You sent me to the Dish with her. Looking for this.”

Yamin laughed. “I really do need to memorise names better. So you know what this is, then.”

“Not really. They were very cagey about explaining anything to me. Something about spies in the First Crew.”

“Well, what you are holding is not a pacemaker. It is in fact the opposite of a pacemaker. When given the right signal, it sends an electric current to destroy the nerve that tells a heart to beat.”

I nearly dropped the tether in shock. “Why would…? To coerce people? To force them to do things for you?”

“You caught onto that quickly.”

“They’re always doing stuff like that in the spy stories. Injecting people with poisons and saying they’ll only get the antidote if they help. Or injecting bombs in people. Stuff like that.” My insides felt cold. “The people trying to steal the Courageous from Aspen’s people used these to control them?”

“Not according to Tima,” Yamin sighed. “That would be a far more convenient narrative, but apparently one of these was buried in the hearts of all of Aspen’s crew, and, we have reason to believe, the colonists as well. Aspen did not have one, and nor did Reimann, which leads us to believe that most likely everybody on this ship except for the captains had one of these implants in their body. According to the diary that most of this history is derived from, Tinera Li Null thought that Captain Aspen’s control over these devices presented a significant potential threat to the crew, should Aspen choose to activate them. Instead, Aspen eventually decided to deactivate the implants using the ship’s electrostatic shield.”

“They took each crew member outside and ‘untethered their hearts,’” I said to myself, turning the little nugget over in my hand.

“But when that ship left Earth’s orbit…”

“Then it wasn’t full of thousands of people eager to explore and seed the universe with life,” I said. “There were four people with the ability to kill everyone else if they wanted.” I handed the tether back to Yamin. “That’s what this means, doesn’t it?”

“That’s the logical conclusion.”

“Maybe that’s not how it went. Maybe everyone was part of the great Mission on purpose, but they were worried because they’d never travelled so far through space before. Maybe they chose to get those implants because they wanted to be sure that their society would be stable. Maybe they were worried about something happening in deep space, some power struggle or something that might destroy the ship, and they thought that these implants weren’t great but were better than that, so they chose to get them.”

“And exempt the captains? Surely having four people with the power of live and death over everyone else, but immune to that death themselves, was far more of a risk.”

“M-maybe they didn’t think of that. Because they were new to space. So maybe it made sense to them. How would you even force thousands of colonists to get the implants anyway?”

“If it was about the risk of social problems in deep space, why implant the colonists in the first place?” Yamin shot back. “They’re asleep for that part of the journey. And there would be plenty of ways to force them, if they weren’t there by choice. Earth had billions of people. They might be slaves – do you know what a slave is?”

I nodded.

“They might be prisoners of war, or convicts or contracted workers under very unfair agreements that they agreed to without understanding or because they were desperate, or they might have been kidnapped one by one from random homes. Frankly, it doesn’t really matter where they came from. The main point…” he trailed off.

“The main point,” I finished, “is that we are the descendants of a noble group of people who saw humanity’s future among the stars and who risked death to head out and achieve it, giving themselves the Mission that we’re still carrying out all this time later. But if it’s just four people who dragged a bunch of captives away from their home and forced them to work for them or die… if this is true, it’s really, really bad.”

“Is it?” Yamin asked, which gave me pause. He wasn’t worried, I realised. I’d been too distracted to notice before, but I should have noticed right away. He was explaining this all to me, all the things that Plia had thought were so important… but he didn’t think that they were.

“The Mission is everything,” I protested. “It keeps us together generation after generation between the stars. It’s the goal we can all work to, the thing that gives us structure.” I mean, I thought it was also killing us by slowing us down, but that wasn’t the point. “Without it, what would we be?”

“Do you think that this has anything to do with the Mission?”

“It says that the Mission is a lie!”

“No, it doesn’t. It says that Aspen Greaves’ Mission was a lie. Or maybe that it wasn’t a lie, but was very unpopular and being headed by extremely cruel people, which amounts to the same thing in this context. But Aspen and the other First Captains and the First Crew have all been dead a very, very long time. Does it really matter what any of them did, or why?

“One thing that I’ve noticed about history, is that the average person doesn’t take lessons or direction from it. The average person decides what their positions are and what they want to do, and then uses history to create context for it. We say that we travel from star to star to colonise them because it’s the duty handed to us by our ancestors, but it works the other way around; we do this because we see it as a worthy goal, and it gives us structure and shared purpose, and creating more places for people to survive in new ways is a general good. And then we turn around and use the First Crew and our history to invent a more profound reason for it. If you look around, you’ll constantly find people disagreeing on major issues, and both using the same historical figure as support for their position, misinterpreting them in different ways. And if you manage to get through to one of them that they’re misinterpreting? They don’t change their mind to match the position of the figure who they were previously idolising and using for support. They stick to their opinions, and simply drop the figure.

“If this heart tether business becomes the dominant theory among historians and rewrites the history of our ship and the fleet, do you know what I think will happen? Nothing. Most people will ignore it completely; some will probably never learn about it. New generations will when it filters into Education classes, but even then, they’ll probably teach the old way at first as an explanation for why we do what we do, and then teach the new version when people are older. They’ll call the old version the simplified, child-appropriate version. And we’ll continue with the Mission.”

“You think people don’t care about real history?”

“I think that people use history as a tool for creating context for their own lives,” Yamin said, “and the ones who care about it any more than that are mostly involved in researching it in some capacity. We could find out tomorrow that Aspen Greaves never existed and our entire history is some elaborate hoax, and then what? What actual, physical effect would that have? The fleet is built and optimised to do what it’s been doing. Would we all decide ‘oh, I guess that a handful of people in the distant past didn’t want us to be doing this’, and turn around and start heading back to Earth? Of course not. At most, this’ll be used for some low-level diplomatic jockeying; some other ships might try to use it to claim that the Courageous isn’t as important or noble with this new history, some Courageous citizens might decide that it’s all a government lie and try to instigate some sort of power grab against us, both types of attack will fizzle out because they have no material or practical backing.” He held out the tether. “Do you want this? As a keepsake?”

I took it hesitantly. “Isn’t this important?”

Yamin shrugged. “Tima gave me six of them, and I suspect she gave them to the other captains, too. She doesn’t work on my shift, so she might have approached us all individually to increase the chances of getting someone’s attention; people do that sometimes. I’ll know more after I meet with the other captains about it. I have plenty of those, and I’m sure I could get more if I asked.”

I nodded, clenching the implant in my hand. I did want it, I realised. The Untethered Heart could become very, very important.

Because one key way to outrun other fleet fragments would be to stop dancing about between stars making colonies. We would have to abandon the Mission. I needed to find some way to convince everyone to do that – both practically, and emotionally.

Maybe Yamin was right about us using our history to give context to what we’d decide to do anyway. But if we were going to change, then we’d need to give that context, too. That was something that I would need to provide.

The Mission being the fantasy of four cruel tyrants dragging a shipful of slaves into deep space would be a pretty good start.

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