Chapter Text
“One of the great commandments of science is, ‘Mistrust arguments from authority.’ (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)”
-Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Since its inception, the Intelligentsia Guild had sequestered itself as a haven from the cutthroat landscape of IPC politics, and the Guild’s legion of scholars very much considered this a point of pride rather than a blind spot. They were devotees of knowledge, seekers of wisdom. They were impartial. The name on the grant check didn’t matter, as long as the projects got funded.
Even the Astral Ecology School—who really ought to know better than to divorce a sociological organism from its ecosystem—rarely bothered to turn their analysis to the monstrous machine funding their research.
Dr. Ratio had never ascribed to willful ignorance in any form, and so he awoke every morning to the tinny reverberations of the Interastral Peace Media broadcast playing over his smart speaker system.
One of his colleagues alleged the habit as a guilty pleasure, as though he got some sort of masochistic enjoyment from subjecting himself to canned press releases and economic projections and celebrity gossip. Ridiculous. It wasn’t like IPC news headlines made for a refreshing supplement to his daily calisthenics. He yearned for a day when he could get through breakfast without having to hear the words ‘stock market index’ or ‘quarterly profit margins.’ Still, someone had to bear the burden of correcting for institutional oversights, and the broadcasts were a useful (if tedious) insight into the Guild’s proverbial corporate overlords.
He sipped his coffee while waiting for the auto-synthesizer to finish preparing his eggs and fried rice. The broadcast had faded to little more than background noise as he shifted gears toward mentally readying himself to engage with other sapient beings.
“...retirement... Strategic Investment Department... surprising choice for a replacement...”
He pricked up his ears, shifting from passive processing to active listening. The Strategic Investment Department was the most irritating division of the IPC, in the sense that Ratio was obliged to interface with their managers on a semi-regular basis. Changes in personnel were common, but ‘surprising’ rarely meant anything good when it came to internal promotions.
“...Veteran Operations Manager Kieron was the outstanding favorite for the role,” the broadcast continued, “but Director Diamond surprised everyone today with the announcement that a largely unvetted investment representative from Sigonia would be ascending to the ranks of the Ten Stonehearts.”
Now that was concerning. Not the announcement itself, but the style of reporting. Above all else, the IPC prioritized a unified front. For an IPM broadcaster to cast doubt on the decision of a department head—of an Emanator of Qlipoth —there must truly be dissent brewing in the ranks.
But why? Young upstarts were appointed to positions of authority all the time. Normally they were framed as ‘ambitious’ or ‘promising’ or (at worst) ‘progressive.’ Never unvetted.
The broadcast shifted topics to a report on the expansion of one of Pier Point’s premier shopping centers. Ratio returned his attention to his coffee, filing the Strategic Investment Department information away for later. As long as it didn’t immediately threaten the functioning of the Intelligentsia Guild, it could wait until after breakfast.
He researched the new appointee while waiting for the Guild archivists to respond to that morning’s access requests. The official IPC news page, as expected, offered precious little in the way of useful information. It didn’t even list a name; the author exclusively referred to the man as a ‘young Sigonian investment representative.’ Sure, his given name wouldn’t matter as soon as he claimed a Cornerstone, but the omission stuck out regardless.
The whole thing reeked of old prejudices. The IPC’s historical relationship to the Sigonia System was too complicated to be summed up in a single word, and ‘paternalistic’ was one of the kinder candidates by far. Sigonia-IV had faced a second extinction event after being shepherded into IPC-sponsored ‘sovereignty,’ and the subsequent unrest had led to decades of occupation and frivolous criminalization, along with tacit endorsement of what the Candelagraphos had been fully prepared to deem human trafficking until Oswaldo Schneider had bullied them into more polite language.
As for the new Stoneheart, every other news site had just reuploaded a plain copy-paste of the IPC’s press release. No one seemed to know anything about this man except for his place of birth, which, in Ratio’s humble opinion, held approximately zero relevance to the far more pressing question of whether or not his management style was going to be a nuisance to the Guild.
Aventurine of Stratagems, the inauguration invitation declared in delicate gold calligraphy. A pretty name. Maybe a little pretentious, but, as Todd would say, those who legally change their name to ‘Veritas’ shouldn’t throw stones, Ratio.
Thankfully, the event was scheduled for a day when Ratio would already be traveling elsewhere, giving him an easy excuse to avoid dressing up in stuffy clothes and standing in a Pier Point auditorium for two hours with occasional interjections of polite applause. Yabuli would get over it.
( The IPC will be expecting a Guild representative, she complained to him later that week, to which he proposed the elegant solution of sending literally anyone else. )
Yabuli seemed to think that just because Ratio was an interdisciplinary Guild member with a wide variety of research interests, he must not ever be doing anything really important. Never mind that Ratio was still publishing regularly and presenting at conferences, or that he’d taken up the obscene task of cross-referencing research between departments to cut down on the amount of redundant work people were doing.
“The IPC needs a consultant for one of their asset recovery cases,” Yabuli said, swiping her finger upward to queue a new holographic screen alongside the half-dozen already flanking her face. They were, as usual, meeting via virtual call, with Yabuli broadcasting from her 47th-floor office suite at the IPC’s headquarters. “Some backwater planet is in arrears; they want to get a sense of the landscape before barging in. You know how it is.”
Ratio did, in fact, know how it was. He’d consulted on similar cases before, and (aside from Topaz, who usually at least had interesting questions when she solicited his advice) they invariably amounted to spoon-feeding basic cultural knowledge to high-ranking IPC officials who had apparently never heard of a digital encyclopedia.
He had just gotten back from traveling, too—a multi-legged trip with an astropolitical conference on one end and a trade summit on the other. He was quite sick of trotting out formal etiquette to appease important idiots, and upon returning planetside he had fully planned to shut himself in his study and catch up on new academic literature until someone remembered to bother him.
“It’s a paid contract,” Yabuli said. “If that helps.”
It didn’t, but ‘sorry, the thought of talking to another human being currently makes me want to gouge out my own eyes’ was unlikely to play well as an excuse, and Ratio still needed Yabuli to approve the travel expenses from his trip to the Klimt Republic.
“I’ll take a look at my schedule,” he said. “If the consultation isn’t long —”
“Perfect.” Yabuli tapped one of the holographic screens, then pecked at her keyboard. “He’ll be arriving tomorrow, 700 system time. Wear something nice, if you don’t mind?”
Ratio took umbrage with the implication that the Guild’s traditional mode of dress was insufficient for the IPC, but he’d given up arguing that point a long time ago. He made a mental note to lay out a suit tonight.
“I’ll need the case file,” he said, not bothering to maintain the pretense that the contract itself was still in any way hypothetical. “So I can review the details beforehand.”
Yabuli pursed her lips. “That information is restricted to upper management of the Strategic Investment Department. You will receive clearance eventually, but not until the contract paperwork goes through.”
“Fine. What’s the name of the planet, then?” If he couldn’t review the case file ahead of time, he could at least brush up on the planet’s history and sociopolitical landscape.
“That information is... also restricted, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sorry; I fear I’ve misunderstood you. The IPC wants me to consult on an insolvency case, but you can’t even tell me which planet it is?”
“It’s policy, Doctor. Aventurine will give you the briefing in person.”
His brain stuttered over the name. “They’re sending the new one? Already?”
She stared at him in obvious perplexity. “The inauguration was almost three fiscal quarters ago, Ratio. And it’s not as though he was entirely new to the department when he started.”
Ratio had never understood the appeal of the IPC calendar. Quarters of what, exactly? It wasn’t like putting four of them together yielded anything other than a headache. Instead of tracking time in years, you got absurd recordkeeping like “the 671st quarter of the 2115th Amber Era,” all because someone decided that Qlipoth’s hammer was a better timekeeper than the orbit of a stable astronomical body. Still, he did the local conversion in his head, and winced a bit at the reckoning of how much time had actually passed since the start of the lunar year. He had so much work to catch up on, and Yabuli was already slotting new annoyances into his schedule.
“Never mind,” he said, because he really did feel like gouging his eyes out and simply wanted this conversation to be over. “Tell him to meet me in Plenary Hall B; the audiovisual setup there is better than the alternatives.”
If Ratio had learned anything from dealing with IPC senior management, it was that they loved their little holographic arrays and 4D data matrices, and that they could never be bothered to troubleshoot their own damn technology.
Ratio, dressed in what he assumed was someone’s idea of a nice suit, paced irritably along the edge of the lecture hall stage.
He checked his phone again. 712 system time, and still no sign of Aventurine, nor any messages indicating an unavoidable delay. Unpunctual and inconsiderate, then. Already two strikes against his character, and in Ratio’s experience such people rarely surprised him on the third.
At 717 system time, just when he was about to call Yabuli and tell her that he did, in fact, have better things to do than stand in an empty lecture hall all day, the double doors at the back of the room swung open.
The IPC’s newest Stoneheart— Aventurine of Stratagems and also Being Late To Meetings Apparently —sauntered down the center aisle with the casual air of someone who did not feel particularly guilty about wasting 17 minutes of someone else’s time. His suit was understated but clearly custom-tailored, with metal collar tips and embroidered lapels that testified to his higher rank. To be fair, once you reached senior manager status, Ratio was pretty sure people just stopped telling you what you were and weren’t allowed to wear. Compared to the other Stonehearts Ratio had met, Aventurine’s ensemble was downright conservative.
“Well, it seems I’ve found you at last.” Aventurine scaled the steps on the side of the stage closest to Ratio, and—after doing an absurd flourish with his hat—held out his hand for a handshake. “Dr. Ratio, I presume?”
Ratio ignored the proffered hand. “You presume correctly.”
Aventurine narrowed his eyes, taking a long moment to visibly and unsubtly size Ratio up. At last, he lowered his hand, tucking it behind his back with another little flourish.
“You’re a real charmer, aren’t you?” Aventurine said dryly. “We can skip the formalities, then.”
He stepped closer, entering a pool of light cast by one of the overhead spotlights. His eyes were an absolutely lurid violet, and he had a cheshire smile to match.
“Let me be very clear,” he said. “I’m not here because I need your help to get this done. I’m here because Yabuli sold you as the best thing the Intelligentsia Guild has on offer, and I’m testing her silver bullet to see if you live up to the sales pitch. If you do, my commission bonus goes up. If you don’t, the Technology Division covers the cost of your contract. So it’s all the same to me either way.”
Ratio arched an eyebrow. “Am I supposed to be flattered or offended by that assessment?”
(Privately, he was a bit of both. As much as he had absolutely no interest in being Yabuli’s bargaining chip against the Strategic Investment Department, his ego couldn’t help but savor the consolation of apparently being her best bargaining chip.)
“You’re the genius here,” Aventurine said with a scant, simpering smirk. “I’ll leave you to work out the semantics.” He withdrew his hand from his pocket, brandishing a thumb-sized storage drive. “Now, as much as I enjoy a bit of friendly repartee, you’re not the only loose end I need to wrap up before tomorrow, so I really would like to get to the meat of this consultation sooner rather than later, if you don’t mind.”
There were really only two scenarios where Ratio bothered to self-censor his opinions on other people’s hypocrisy. The first was when he was representing the Guild on a matter he considered important—and even then, he’d been told he didn’t censor himself nearly enough.
The second scenario, rarer but more consistent in application, was when someone made him so thoroughly and incandescently angry that he knew he wouldn’t be able to control his response once he opened his mouth. And as much as he sometimes craved the satisfaction of telling someone to just fuck all the way off, such crude paroxysms did not lend themselves to the personal and professional image he sought to curate, and he cared far more about his own reputation than that of the Guild.
So instead of responding to the galling insinuation that he was the one wasting people’s time, he plucked the storage drive from Aventurine’s hand and proceeded to slot it into the media hub on the lectern. The monitor screen flickered awake, and Ratio punched in his network credentials with unnecessary but satisfying violence against the keyboard.
Just get this over with and you never have to see him again. He’ll trot back to Pier Point and claim his bet with Yabuli and you can file him away in the annals of irrelevant idiots.
An error message popped up on the monitor. He automatically ran through the back-end steps of assigning an local access key to the storage drive, because the Technology Division’s support staff still refused to believe him about it being a replicable compatibility issue.
With a soft whir, the auditorium’s multimedia system booted up, and the holographic projection rail descended from the ceiling with all of its tangled wires. It was a bulky, archaic thing, functionally outmoded by the immersive virtual reality matrices in all the other lecture halls, but it was also the only projector in the complex that didn’t immediately trigger a firewall when presented with the IPC’s proprietary encryption software.
Ratio tweaked a few of the display settings, then queued up the only file on the drive: an MZIP simply titled “presentation.” In a scattered semicircle behind him, translucent holographic screens flickered to life at roughly eye level, resizing and rearranging themselves into a glittering array of graphs, spreadsheets, and research notes hovering around a scale rendering of the Hoseo Star Map. He scanned through the displays, visually filtering out irrelevant data until he found the screen that seemed to hold the primary case file: an insolvency report attributed to the planet of Xin-41. He gestured with two fingers to make that screen larger, then scrolled through the details. The planet had a long history of on-time deposits under an accelerated payment plan. Recently they had scaled back to the minimum payment amount, and then—with no prior notice or context—had initiated a client-side termination of automatic deposits altogether. An embedded folder displayed records of almost a dozen debt collection letters over the past four quarters, sent and apparently ignored.
“Well, Doctor? What sage insight can the Intelligentsia Guild provide on this case?”
Ratio ignored the obvious sarcasm, and instead narrowed in on the scant two paragraphs of sociocultural background information at the bottom of the case file.
“Either someone is attempting to haze you,” he said, “or the person compiling this documentation neglected to perform even the bare minimum of due diligence in their research.” He tapped at the second paragraph to highlight one of the more egregious passages: The Slinkans comprise an agricultural society structured around the cultivation and export of native flora, via a complex process which they introduced to the planet upon their initial settlement circa 2113 AE. “The time frame for colonization is accurate, but almost everything else is either misleading or simply false.”
Aventurine eyed him skeptically. “Please, do elaborate.”
“To start, the Slinkans are not an ‘agricultural society.’ They are a small but highly organized ruling class. They have, historically, exerted power over the planet’s native population by restricting access to literature and core cultural touchstones, under the justification that a free marketplace of ideas would muddy the ‘intellectual purity’ they claim to champion.”
“Okay, so they’re sanctimonious bastards. Duly noted. Any theories as to why they’ve been skirting their debt payments?”
“Unclear. To my knowledge, they still have a near-undisputed monopoly on the Hoseo spice trade, a niche they carved out for themselves in the aftermath of the Borderstar Trade War. Revenue from such exports can rise and fall based on crop yield, though if they were suffering in matters of interstellar trade then I suspect your department would already be well aware of it.”
“Very insightful of you. Yes, their trading patterns have skewed conservative for the past nine quarters, which translates to...” Aventurine scrolled through one of the spreadsheets. “...about four local growing seasons on their planet. But the trading value for spices is higher than it’s been in almost a full Amber Era, and their market share is unbelievable for a planet of their size. I mean, they’re listed as a primary supplier for nine populated star systems. If they were struggling to meet demand, surely someone would have elbowed in on their turf by now.”
“Not necessarily. The hallucinogenic spice market remains prohibitively regulated, and Xin-41’s longevity can be traced to their status as the only major producer with the infrastructure and distribution network to turn a profit under the Temptra Code.”
“Temptra Code,” Aventurine repeated vaguely, flicking through screens. “Temptra Code. Right. I think there’s a copy of that in here somewhere.”
“Don’t bother,” Ratio said. “Review it in more detail on your own time; if the IPC isn’t bothering to teach its managers their own trade history, then educating you on a single regulatory document is hardly a sufficient curative for your intellectual ailments.”
“Fine. Skip to your expert analysis, then. If Xin-41 has such an easy grip on the market, why jeopardize their trade status by snubbing the IPC?”
Ratio mulled this over, piecing together past research and present data in an attempt to construct a hypothesis.
“The Slinkans’ control over the native population has always been tenuous,” he ventured cautiously. “Their wealth relies on the poverty, both financial and intellectual, of their entire agricultural class. I would recommend investigating with an eye for any signs of instability on that front.”
“Fascinating.” Aventurine’s eyes sparkled in the light of the multicolored screens. “You think the spice farmers are trying to seize the means of production?”
“A rash assessment, but not beyond the realm of possibility. Xin-41 hasn’t granted open access to the Candelagraphos since the book ban was implemented, and the Slinkans would never risk broadcasting planetside dissent to their trading partners.” Ratio sighed. He hated to set a puzzle aside once he’d picked it up, but academic integrity demanded an acceptance of unavoidable blind spots. “The whole planet is a black box right now; any predictions without firsthand observation would be mere conjecture on my part.”
Aventurine was silent for a long time, seemingly lost in thought.
“Good enough for me,” he said at last. “Pack your bags; we leave in twelve system hours.”
Ratio’s hand froze where he had been in the process of toggling through the planet’s account statements. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’ve decided to take you with me.” Aventurine reached across the lectern and plucked the storage drive from its port, tucking it back in his pocket. The computer system, distraught at an improperly ejected storage device, began flashing error messages in the periphery of Ratio’s vision. “Congratulations, Doctor, you’ve made a slightly less terrible impression than the squad of P15s the IPC was going to make me bring instead.”
“With all due respect,” Ratio said through a clenched jaw, “I agreed to meet with you and provide my professional opinion. I did not agree to any further assistance regarding off-world IPC business.”
“You might want to review your contract,” Aventurine said, with an easy smugness that evoked pure Schadenfreude. “Funny little thing called a spontaneous travel contingency clause. Up to 80 hours of on-site consulting—paid, of course—if the asset liquidation specialist deems it economically valuable.”
The flattered-to-offended pendulum of Ratio’s feelings toward Yabuli swung decidedly in the direction of active violence.
“You—I thought you didn’t need my help, ” he said, aiming for contempt but landing somewhere in the territory of bitter desperation.
“I don’t. But I’ve been itching for a good high-risk, high-reward investment, and my gut tells me you’re going to make things interesting.” Aventurine tipped his hat and hopped off the stage, landing with the smoothness of a cat. “Meet me in the west departure bay, 1950 system time. Fair warning, it’s a nine-hour spaceflight with no cabin service, so you might want to bring a snack.”
A nine-hour spaceflight. Surely that was long enough to murder someone and make it look like an accident.
Before Ratio could even think about formulating a response, the doors at the back of the auditorium swung closed, leaving him alone in the empty lecture hall as the lectern continued to flash angry warning messages in his general direction.
He pressed his hands against his eyes and groaned.
Topaz would never have done this to him.