Shattered Expanse

The Invisible Distance

The Human Confederation recognizes no legal distinction between the various Strains of humanity. A Greyblood citizen possesses the same rights as a Luminar, Laconid, Cydrani, Bastion, or any of the other descendants of humanity’s scattered genetic lineages.

Agent Corven Rhyse knows this better than most. He has quoted the relevant passages of Confederation law often enough . He also knows that law and experience are not always the same thing.

Corven Rhyse

Race: Human

Strain: Greyblood

Affiliation: Human Confederation

Occupation: Confederation Field Liaison / Intelligence Agent

Age: 39

Rhyse was recruited into Confederation service because of his unusual ability to move between cultures. His assignments have taken him from frontier settlements and Greyblood communities to diplomatic missions involving nearly every major Human Strain. He has worked beside soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, scientists, corporate representatives, and politicians.

Officially, his career is proof that the Confederation works. Rhyse is beginning to wonder if it proves something else.

There was no regulation preventing him from entering the diplomatic reception on Confederation Alpha. His credentials actually granted him greater access than many of the people present. Yet when Rhyse attempted to brief a Luminar delegate about a security concern, the man acknowledged the two officials standing beside him and simply continued speaking as though Rhyse were not there. Later, the delegate apologized. He genuinely had not realized Rhyse was part of the delegation.

On another assignment, a Laconid officer handed Rhyse his equipment case before a meeting and instructed him to carry it. The officer was mortified when someone explained that Rhyse was the Confederation intelligence liaison. Rhyse told him not to worry about it. He remembers both incidents perfectly. Neither man hated Greybloods. Neither deliberately insulted him. Neither violated Confederation law. That is increasingly what bothers Rhyse.

Strain: Among humanity, Strain is a scientific term: a population possessing distinct inherited genetic characteristics. Greybloods are one Strain among many. For Rhyse, the word has acquired another meaning.

Every assignment stretches him a little farther. Remain professional. Don’t assume intent. Don’t embarrass the delegation. Don’t become the angry Greyblood they already expect. Don’t make a minor incident into something larger. Don’t notice.

Rhyse has become extraordinarily good at not noticing. And he is beginning to realize how much effort that requires.

There is always another explanation. The Luminar diplomat was distracted. The Laconid officer made an understandable assumption. The security officer was simply being thorough. The administrator really did misplace his authorization. The invitation really was accidentally omitted. Perhaps every explanation is true. The cumulative weight remains.

Rhyse’s work has given him associates across the Confederation, and each represents a different part of the world he is trying to understand.

Delegate Serai Venn, a Luminar diplomat, genuinely considers Rhyse a colleague and has quietly championed his career. Yet even she sometimes speaks about Greyblood communities as something the Confederation must help, rather than people who are themselves part of the Confederation. Rhyse likes her enough that correcting her is becoming increasingly difficult.

Captain Dorian Kass, a Laconid military officer, once mistook Rhyse for support personnel. Kass apologized immediately and the two subsequently became effective partners in the field. He considers the matter settled. Rhyse doesn’t. Their friendship therefore contains an uncomfortable contradiction: Kass is living evidence that people can change, but also evidence of the assumptions that existed in the first place.

Mara Vey, a Greyblood civil-rights organizer, has known Rhyse since childhood. For years she accused him of allowing himself to become the Confederation’s “acceptable Greyblood”—the one officials could point toward whenever someone suggested inequality still existed. Rhyse used to argue with her. Now he listens. That worries him more than anything she says.

Rhyse once believed progress could be measured by distance. Get Greybloods into the academies, then into Confederation service. Earn a command and then a role in the diplomatic corp. Maybe even a role in government. Keep moving forward and eventually equality would simply become normal.

His own career seemed to demonstrate that principle. A Greyblood intelligence officer entrusted with classified operations across the Confederation would have been almost unimaginable to his grandparents. He has come extraordinarily far. And some days he feels as though he has gone nowhere.

There is no door overt prohibiting him from entering, but there is a door that seems slightly heavier when he pushes against it.

Rhyse has begun attending Greyblood political meetings when assignments permit. At first he stood in the back and listened. Then he started asking questions. Recently, he corrected a Confederation official publicly when the official dismissed a Greyblood complaint as an isolated misunderstanding. His superiors have noticed and so have the activists.

Rhyse still rejects some of their rhetoric and believes in the Confederation at it’s core. He has seen enough of the Expanse to understand what humanity might become without it. But increasingly he rejects the idea that believing in something requires pretending it has already achieved its ideals.

Rhyse isn’t certain when he became an activist – perhaps he hasn’t yet. But something in him has been pulled taut for a very long time. And every material has a point at which strain becomes deformation or fracture.

Blood & Suns

Elias Hartmann

Monolith Status: Probationary Agent, Awaiting Cell Assignment

Occupation: Reich Emergency Coordination Dispatcher

Age: 34

Elias Hartmann has spent most of his adult life learning how to remain calm while other people panic. As an emergency coordination dispatcher, he sits at the center of a web of accidents, fires, industrial failures, medical emergencies, security incidents, and transportation disasters. Voices come through his headset screaming. Elias listens, asks the necessary questions, dispatches the appropriate resources, and moves on to the next call. His pulse may rise but his voice never does. It was probably one of the things that drew Monolith to him.

Elias remembers being awakened almost as a second birth. The first was the life his parents told him about. The second was the moment Monolith broke through the chemical conditioning and showed him what that life actually was.

The Schnuller had been there for as long as he could remember. Behavioral programming had been part of his education. News broadcasts he had believed were manufactured. Opinions he had thought were his own had been reinforced chemically and psychologically for years.

For several weeks afterward, Elias developed the habit of examining his memories as though they belonged to someone else. Why had he chosen emergency services? Why had he ended his relationship with Klara? Why had he never questioned his brother’s disappearance after being reassigned to an orbital labor project? Why had he always felt uncomfortable around certain subjects? Which decisions had been his?

That was the question Monolith could not answer for him. They could tell him how the conditioning worked. They could teach him how to recognize propaganda. They could break his dependency on the regime’s chemical veil. They could not give him his past back.

After his deprogramming and recruitment, Elias expected something to happen. An assignment, a target, a meeting or a weapon slipped beneath a table. Instead, Monolith told him to return to work. Maintain his routine. Speak to no one. Wait.

That was eleven weeks ago.

Every morning Elias wakes at the same time. He dresses the same way. He takes the same transit route to the emergency coordination center. He buys coffee from the same kiosk three mornings each week because buying it every morning would be a routine and never buying it would represent a change. He arrives six minutes before his shift. Never five. Never seven.

At precisely the interval Monolith instructed, he checks the designated signal. Once. He never checks twice. That has become important to him. Sometimes Elias will stand within meters of the place where the signal should appear, every part of him screaming to look again. He doesn’t. If Monolith says once, he checks once.

He has spent his whole life being told that patience is discipline. Now patience feels dangerously similar to obedience. He no longer knows where one ends and the other begins.

The worst part is knowing that somewhere around him may be the people he will eventually be expected to trust with his life. Monolith has told him nothing about his future Cell. Elias understands why. What he does not understand is how he is supposed to stop thinking about it.

The woman who sits two stations away from him has worked beside him for four years. She complains incessantly about her supervisor and quietly alters dispatch priorities when wealthy districts receive preferential treatment. Resistance sympathizer? Monolith? Or simply angry?

A transit worker Elias sees most mornings has begun nodding to him. Recognition? Surveillance? Politeness?

His neighbor recently asked why Elias had stopped watching the evening political broadcasts. An innocent question? A warning? A test?

Elias knows intellectually that most of these people are exactly what they appear to be. That knowledge has ceased to help. Every person now occupies several identities in his mind simultaneously. Citizen. Informant. Enemy. Ally. Cell. He has learned to treat all of them exactly the same.

Elias does not constantly look over his shoulder. That would attract attention. Instead, he studies reflections – transit windows, polished elevator doors, darkened display screens, or the hrome surface of the coffee dispenser in the emergency center. He never looks at an exit immediately upon entering a room. He waits for a natural moment, usually while removing his coat.

He makes eye contact. He participates in workplace conversations. He laughs at jokes about government ministries when everyone else laughs and stops laughing when everyone else stops. He complains about transit delays. He occasionally repeats harmless government slogans because never repeating them would itself be conspicuous. He still attends his mandatory civic functions. He has become remarkably skilled at appearing to be a man who has never questioned anything. That is perhaps the greatest strain of all.

For the first time in his life, Elias is awake. And every day he must pretend that he is still asleep.

Monolith specifically instructed Elias not to investigate anyone around him. He obeys the letter of that instruction. Mostly. He has begun planting harmless inconsistencies in conversations. He tells one coworker he is considering transferring to another dispatch sector. He tells another he has abandoned the idea. He mentions a nonexistent cousin in Dresden to someone else. Then he waits.

If something comes back to him, he remembers where it began. No accusation. No confrontation. Just another piece placed carefully onto an invisible board. Elias tells himself this is sensible operational awareness. Occasionally he wonders whether it is paranoia. He does not particularly trust himself to know the difference anymore.

Elias sleeps badly. Not because he fears arrest. Arrest would at least be something happening. What eats at him is anticipation. Somewhere, someone in Monolith knows his name. Someone has presumably decided what he is useful for. Perhaps they already know the other members of his Cell. Perhaps they are watching him now. Perhaps this waiting is itself a test.

Elias wants desperately to do something meaningful with the truth he has been given. Every emergency call he receives reminds him how many people remain trapped inside the system. Every government announcement sounds different now. Every smiling propaganda poster feels insulting.

Yet Monolith requires him to continue sitting behind his dispatch console and behaving as if nothing has changed. So he waits. And waits. And waits. His greatest fear is not that someone is watching him. His greatest fear is that, through some careless gesture, he will reveal that he knows someone should be.