Ocean's Echo (The Resolution Universe)

by Everina Maxwell

Readers were scattered and rare. Most reading didn’t actually tell you that much about what someone was thinking. Tennal, like any reader, could focus on someone and read them on a shallow level whenever he wanted, though he would only pick up a vague outline of their feelings and intentions, and if he left his mind open for too long it gave him a headache. Even that shallow reading was illegal, but it could be useful if you were discreet about it. Readers who could go deep, beyond surface emotions, were even more of an anomaly—so much so that many people didn’t believe they existed.

Writing was the informal term for the way architects bent your mind into compliance.

Being written by an architect felt like unshielding your eyes in front of a furnace. A bright mental light flooded Tennal’s eyes, his whole brain, a dazzle that shoved out every other thought.

Soothers didn’t interfere with your thinking, only provided a mild buzz that took the edge off the world.

Orshan’s three precious planets shimmered in the air, magnified many times but still the size of marbles: Orshan Two, covered with sprawling megacities; Orshan Three, green and rural; and Orshan Central, where Tennal stood now in Exana’s spring evening. Not far beyond their orbit was the great bulk of the galactic link—disturbed space that funneled ships to unimaginably far destinations. Their gateway to the rest of the universe.

Syncing was the last resort to neutralize a strong reader who had gone rogue. Tennal had never read up on the details, because why think about the worst-case scenario, but he knew the basics. An architect could link their mind irrevocably with a reader’s. Once they’d done that to you, that was it: no more defenses, not even your own natural walls. The architect could write you as easily as lifting a finger. You’d lost. That was why the army took rogue readers. They couldn’t cause trouble after that.

Surit was totally focused on him. Behind that focus, Tennal didn’t sense caution, or bafflement, or anything Tennal usually engendered. Instead there was a single glimpse of clockwork arranging itself around Tennal’s quick-fire ideas, of a vast, immovable will bending itself to a purpose. Something that never let itself be stopped. Something that could meet Tennal and not be knocked off course.

“Remnants,” he said. There was a murmur of interest around the room. “The lost technology of something that was alive before we were even plankton in the sea. Those of you with neuromodifications, this is what made you who you are—or, for the kiddies here, your parents. This is what we’re looking for.” Surit frowned, taken aback. That might explain the secrecy around the mission.

Surit’s throat went dry. He recognized that station. The silhouette was burned in his memory from the time he’d spent obsessing over old newslogs. It was the research laboratory where they’d made the original architects. They hadn’t stopped there: just a couple of years later, during the reader rebellion, that laboratory had made the war machines that mass-produced architects, modifying the brains of tens of thousands of soldiers.

It was just the sea he swam in—sight, sound, occasional waves of emotion.

“Aren’t you a pilot specialist?” “No,” Surit said, puzzled. Any soldier could be taught the basics of piloting, but the specialists—the ones with years of training—were the smooth, highly educated types who had joined the Note at the fleet rendezvous and now sat on the bridge of the mothership, ready to guide the whole fleet through chaotic space.

The duty captain frowned. “You must be. Readers are only recruited for pilot specialists.” “No,” Surit said.

“Then why did they pick you?” the duty captain asked, nonplussed. “What was the plan there?” Surit opened his mouth then realized, for the first time in years, he didn’t have a reply.

Surit worked in a universe of fixed possibilities. Tennal was a chaos event. Surit was drawn to it like a gravity well.

Orshan’s scientists had dug a set of remnants out of deep space to make the original architects and readers. It had taken years of research and meticulously built technology. The effect of the remnants had made Marit, they had made thousands of other architects, and a generation later, through inheritance, they had made Tennal and Surit.

Surit was a war baby, an old slang term for babies born from soldiers freezing their genetic material just before a big campaign, for their partners or families to raise their child if something went wrong.

Brainwashing. It had been a fear, back in the early days of modification, before everyone had known exactly what architects and readers could do and that architect commands were obvious and temporary. The idea of architect commands and compulsions with no limit was terrifying.

Surit was right; surely a normal sync couldn’t be like this. The conscripted readers might not have a choice, but the military’s architects would never have agreed to being stretched across two bodies for the rest of their life. Of course, a normal sync wasn’t supposed to have both sides throw themselves at each other with everything they had. Surit and Tennal must have done it wrong. It was supposed to be a measured process where the architect took control. Whatever this was, it wasn’t one of them taking control.

In Surit’s head was the same storm as in Tennal’s, but the way Surit parsed it was different. Tennal had a sudden, lurching glimpse of an endless, ceaseless ocean and a rocky coast and knew this was how Surit experienced their joined minds. The ocean in Surit’s head was unnaturally quiet. It drained itself away onto the land, lay stagnant in pools, sank into the sand. It was drying up.

Tennal was dissolving into the sync with Surit and neither of them could stop it. And worse—ten minutes after the breathing incident, Surit had written Tennal. He had overridden Tennal’s will because Oma had put a compulsion on him.

He thought about how the universe was mostly nothing but humans made up stories about the things that were there and pretended they were more important than the crushing weight of the nothing.

Tennal took a deep breath. “I don’t know anything about remnants, except that they were made by weird aliens who don’t seem to be around anymore, and the Resolution prefers to keep them in a freezer. But is it possible the remnants they used for the experiments are … the body of something?”

His reader powers must be the same thing: a sliver of a dead alien. And they were a part of him as much as his arms or his legs.

But the remnants are something’s body. Can’t you feel it? They’re the remains of something dead. Something that didn’t see the universe like humans do. And we took a shadow of a shadow of what they could do, and we split it in half, and we gave it to ourselves. We hacked our powers together out of the bones of dead aliens.”