New Adventures in Space Opera

Praise for New Adventures in Space Opera

"Hugo Award winner Strahan (Twelve Tomorrows) spotlights 15 sophisticated, award-winning science fiction stories from the past decade that epitomize the best of space opera. He defines the genre as ‘romantic adventure… told on a grand scale,’ set either in space or on a space station with high-stakes plot—and each of these perceptive and evocative stories perfectly fits the bill. In Tobias S. Buckell’s clever revenge tale, ‘Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance,’ after a galactic war, a sentient maintenance robot discusses free will with a cybernetically enhanced human from the fleet that surrendered. Yoon Ha Lee’s ‘Extracurricular Activities’ delivers a lively adventure when assassin Jedao infiltrates a space station to rescue a former classmate and their crew, all while fighting pirates and evading a gene-altering substance. Aliette de Bodard’s pensive ‘Immersion’ imagines a future in which a device provides wearers with an avatar and guidance on culturally acceptable appearance, language, and gestures, while obfuscating any sense of individuality, ethnicity, and heritage. Other stories feature vindictive clones, a planet-eating blob, outlaws, and space cults. Throughout, plentiful action, enigmatic and complex worldbuilding, sinister technology, and vast space vistas impress. It’s a gift for sci-fi lovers."

—Publishers Weekly

"There is no better or more expert editor working in SF; impeccable taste, great range, excellent choices. Anyone interested in space opera will want to buy New Adventures in Space Opera."

—Adam Roberts, author of The This

A collection of a who’s who of modern science fiction and [a] Jonathan Strahan focus on the selection of superb stories.

—Science Fiction Short Story Reviews

New Adventures in Space Opera

edited by Jonathan Strahan

Also edited by Jonathan Strahan

Best Short Novels (2004 through 2007)

Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005

Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volumes 1-13 (2007 through to 2019)

The Year’s Best Science Fiction Vols 1-2 (2020 to 2021)

Eclipse: New Science Fiction and Fantasy Vols 1-4 (2007, 2008, 2009, 2011)

The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows (2008)

Life on Mars: Tales of New Frontiers (2011)

Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron (2012)

Godlike Machines (2010)

Fearsome Journeys (2013)

Fearsome Magics (2013)

Drowned Worlds (2016)

The Infinity Project 1: Engineering Infinity (2010)

The Infinity Project 2: Edge of Infinity (2012)

The Infinity Project 3: Reach for Infinity (2014)

The Infinity Project 4: Meeting Infinity (2015)

The Infinity Project 5: Bridging Infinity (2016)

The Infinity Project 6: Infinity Wars (2017)

The Infinity Project 7: Infinity’s End (2018)

Made to Order: Robots and Revolution (2020)

The Book of Dragons (2020)

Someone in Time: Tales of Time-Crossed Romance (2022)

Twelve Tomorrows: Life in the Anthropocene (2022)

Twelve Tomorrows: Communications Breakdown (2023)

The Book of Witches (2023)

With Lou Anders

Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery (2010)

With Charles N. Brown

The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Fantasy and Science Fiction (2004)

With Jeremy G. Byrne

The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 1 (1997)

The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 2 (1998)

Eidolon 1 (2006)

With Jack Dann

Legends of Australian Fantasy (2010)

With Gardner Dozois

The New Space Opera (2007)

The New Space Opera 2 (2009)

With Karen Haber

Science Fiction: Best of 2003

Science Fiction: Best of 2004

Fantasy: Best of 2004

With Marianne S. Jablon

Wings of Fire (2010)

A Note from the Publisher About Piracy

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New Adventures in Space Opera

Copyright © 2024 by Jonathan Strahan

This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the author and the publisher.

Introduction From New Space Opera to Here . . . © 2023 by Jonathan Strahan

Cover art Heavenly Spheres Number 1 by Justin Van Genderen

Interior and cover design by Elizabeth Story

Tachyon Publications LLC

1459 18th Street #139

San Francisco, CA 94107

415.285.5615

www.tachyonpublications.com

tachyon@tachyonpublications.com

Series editor: Jacob Weisman

Project editor: Jaymee Goh

Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-420-7

Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-421-4

Printed in the United States by Versa Press, Inc.

First Edition: 2024

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A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime, by Charlie Jane Anders. Copyright © 2017 by Charlie Jane Anders. Originally published in Cosmic Powers: The Saga Anthology of Far-Away Galaxies (Saga Press, 2017).

Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance, by Tobias S. Buckell. Copyright © 2017 by Tobias S. Buckell. Originally published in Cosmic Powers: The Saga Anthology of Far-Away Galaxies (Saga Press, 2017).

A Good Heretic, by Becky Chambers. Copyright © 2019 by Becky Chambers. Originally published in Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers: The Definitive Anthology of Space Opera (Titan, 2019).

Immersion, by Aliette de Bodard. Copyright © 2012 Aliette de Bodard. Originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine #69, June 2012.

A Voyage to Queensthroat, by Anya Johanna DeNiro. Copyright © 2020 by Anya Johanna DeNiro. Originally published in Strange Horizons, 10 August 2020.

Morrigan in the Sunglare, by Seth Dickinson. Copyright © 2014 by Seth Dickinson. Originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine #90, March 2014.

Metal Like Blood in the Dark, by T. Kingfisher. Copyright © 2020 T. Kingfisher. First published in Uncanny Magazine 36, September/October 2020.

The Justified, by Ann Leckie. Copyright © 2019 by Ann Leckie. Originally published in The Mythic Dream (Saga Press, 2019).

Extracurricular Activities, by Yoon Ha Lee. Copyright © 2017 Yoon Ha Lee. First published in Tor.com, 15 February 2017.

All the Colors You Thought Were Kings, by Arkady Martine. Copyright © 2016 by AnnaLinden Weller. Originally published in Shimmer, May 2016.

Planetstuck, by Sam J. Miller. Copyright © 2023 by Sam J. Miller. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May/June 2023.

Belladonna Nights, by Alastair Reynolds. Copyright © 2017 by Alastair Reynolds. Originally published in Weight of Words (Subterranean, 2017).

The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir, by Karin Tidbeck. Copyright © 2019 by Karin Tidbeck. Originally published in Tor.com, 24 January 2019.

The Old Dispensation, by Lavie Tidhar. Copyright © 2017 by Lavie Tidhar. Originally published in Tor.com, 8 February 2017.

To everyone who has ever launched a starship across a paper universe with gratitude and thanks.

Table of Contents

"Introduction: From the New Space Opera to Here . . .," by Jonathan Strahan

"Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance," by Tobias S. Buckell

"Extracurricular Activities," by Yoon Ha Lee

"All the Colors You Thought Were Kings," by Arkady Martine

"Belladonna Nights," by Alastair Reynolds

"Metal Like Blood in the Dark," by T. Kingfisher

"A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime," by Charlie Jane Anders

"Immersion," by Aliette de Bodard

"Morrigan in the Sunglare," by Seth Dickinson

"The Old Dispensation," by Lavie Tidhar

"A Good Heretic," by Becky Chambers

"A Voyage to Queensthroat," by Anya Johanna DeNiro

"The Justified," by Ann Leckie

"Planetstuck," by Sam J. Miller

"The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir," by Karin Tidbeck

About the Contributors

About the Editor

From the New Space Opera to Here . . .

by Jonathan Strahan

Robert Silverberg identified two fundamental themes in science fiction: the journey in time and the journey in space. Space opera, he suggested, was a sub-genre of the journey in space, one that takes romantic adventure, sets it in space, and tells it on a grand scale. Many have tried to define space opera since Wilson Tucker dismissively coined the term in 1941 to refer to the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn, from Brian Stableford in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction¹ describing space opera as colorful action-adventure stories of interplanetary or interstellar conflict’ and Jack Williamson in The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction² referring to it as the upbeat space adventure narrative that has become the mainspring of modern science fiction, to Norman Sprinrad amusingly (and not entirely incorrectly) calling space opera straight fantasy in science fiction drag."

Perhaps getting closer to the feel of it, Paul McAuley in Locus’s special ‘New Space Opera’ issue referred to the lushly romantic plots and the star-spanning empires to the light-year-spurning spaceships, construction of any one of which would have exhausted the metal reserves of a solar system, . . . stuffed full of faux-exotic color and bursting with contrived energy. Space opera is, in short, romantic adventure set in space and told on a grand scale. It must feature a starship, the most important of science fiction’s icons, which, as Brian Aldiss wrote in the introduction to his anthology Space Opera³ in 1974 unlocks the great bronze doors of space opera and lets mankind loose among all the other immensities. It is the tale of godlike machines, all-embracing catastrophes, the immensities of the universe, and the endlessness of time. It is also, to go back to Williamson, the expression of the mythic theme of human expansion against an unknown and uncommonly hostile frontier.⁴

For all the riffs and variations on space opera that have been tried over the one hundred and thirty or so years since the first proto-space operas appeared in the 1890s, it has always fallen somewhere within those boundaries. I know that when I sat down to try to decide what should or should not feature in this book, I used several guides. First, a space opera should primarily take place in space, either on ship or station, and only occasionally touchdown on a planetary surface. Second, it should take place in a populated universe. When the protagonist of the story ventures forth, they must encounter someone. And, finally, the stakes should be high. The stakes could involve E. E. Doc Smith’s smashing of galaxies or Aliette de Bodard’s breaking of hearts, but it should feel like the world might, emotionally or physically, be about to end.

That sets our boundaries. The kinds of stories that were published as space opera—our thoughts about the empires they took place in, the nature of the starships, their composition of their crews, and the adventures that they undertake—have changed since stories like Edmond Hamilton’s Interstellar Patrol yarn Crashing Suns appeared in Weird Tales in 1928. Bright, garish stories of the pulp magazine era that were driven by both a sense of techno-optimism and manifest destiny that seems, at least from the outside, to have been common in the United States in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s—work like E. E. Doc Smith’s Skylark of Space and A. E. van Vogt’s Black Destroyer—which would give way to more sophisticated, challenging work like C. L. Moore’s Judgment Night or Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination.

The 1950s was a time of change for science fiction, when the end of the pulp magazine era meant a move from primarily being a short fiction form to being published at novel length by major publishers to great success, though it would be some years later before it appeared regularly on bestseller lists. This change began as writers like Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, and Cordwainer Smith brought new sophistication to the field in the 1950s and 1960s with enduring works of space opera, like Frank Herbert’s classic bestselling Dune which appeared in 1965. Brian Stableford observed that by the late 1950s a number of the tropes of space opera, like the galactic-empire scenario, had become a standardized framework available for use in entirely serious science fiction. Once this happened, he wrote, the impression of vast scale so important to space opera was no longer the sole prerogative of straightforward adventure stories, and the day of the ‘classical’ space opera was done. Which didn’t mean that those ‘classical’ space operas stopped being written or published. Most notably during the 1970s the sprawling novels of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, especially the award-winning The Mote in God’s Eye, and possibly the most popular space opera of the following decade, first appeared in Orson Scott Card’s novella Ender’s Game, but there were changes. Space opera became darker and more political. In 1975, M. John Harrison wrote The Centauri Device, a novel that turned the conventions of space opera on their head. It was, apparently, intended to kill space opera, or at least intended as an anti-space opera. What it was, instead, was the work that provoked others to pick up the cudgel and change things again.

By the time British magazine Interzone published a call to arms editorial looking for radical hard SF in 1982, a new generation had come along ready to do just that. First among them was Iain M. Banks, whose Consider Phlebas was boldly, defiantly operatic in nature and scope, and yet very much leftward leaning politically. His sequence of science fiction novels involving the Culture set both the critical trend and the commercial standard for space opera in the early 1980s. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Banks wrote almost exclusively at novel length.

This newer space opera, though, wasn’t a technological fable from the turn of the century. By the beginning of the 1980s, when cyberpunk was emerging in the United States, it no longer seemed relevant to many writers to tell bold tales of space adventure that looked to new frontiers where a sense of manifest destiny brought civilization to the locals. Colonialism and the drive to build empires was becoming much less acceptable, and the universe looked a much darker place. Space opera was no longer looking to go out and take over the universe: it was looking to survive in it. This change can be seen in the work of Stephen Baxter, Paul McAuley, and even Colin Greenland. McAuley’s Quiet War and Jackaroo sequences of short stories and novels, and Alastair Reynolds’ Revolution Space short stories and novels were key works here, retaining the interstellar scale and grandeur of traditional space opera, while becoming even more scientifically rigorous and ambitious in scope.

Two critically important writers emerged in the United States during this period. C.J. Cherryh began publishing in the 1970s and hit her stride with military space opera, Downbelow Station, in 1981. Her Union-Alliance series of novels brought a detailed rigor from the social sciences to space opera that had rarely been seen and which would drive the major series of her career, the sprawling Foreigner sequence. Lois McMaster Bujold appeared on the scene in 1986 and quickly established the Miles Vorkosigan series of military space operas as some of the most important of the time with stories like Borders of Infinity and The Weatherman. While novels in the sequence—The Warrior’s Apprentice, Brothers in Arms, The Vor Game and so on—were often light in tone, they foregrounded issues to do with gender and reproduction in a way that was new and important.

In the mid-1990s Dan Simmons, Vernor Vinge, David Brin, Walter Jon Williams, Ken MacLeod, and M. John Harrison were all producing major works of space opera that were literary, challenging, dark and often disturbing, but also grand and romantic, set in space and told on an enormous stage. The 1990s saw the new space opera begin to come to the fore, but it was in the 2000s that it burst into full flower. The first major novel of the period was Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space, which had been preceded by several stories in Interzone like Galactic North and would be followed by major novellas Diamond Dogs and Turquoise Days, brought a sense of dark, lived-in time to space opera. It was followed by the likes of Neal Asher’s densely violent Polity novels, Paul McAuley’s sprawling Quiet War sequence, Walter Jon Williams’ politically engaged Dread Empire’s Fall novels, Tobias S. Buckell’s Xenowealth series, and work by Linda Nagata, Greg Bear, Charles Stross, Nancy Kress, Elizabeth Bear, and others.

While there was still plenty of classic space opera on the page and on the screen, this new space opera questioned its own underpinnings, broadened its perspective, and tried to be more defiantly engaged. It was at this time, around 2003, that I got caught up in online discussions of the new space opera, and went on to help to compile Locus’s special new space opera issue, and to co-edit The New Space Opera and The New Space Opera 2 with Gardner Dozois which covered it. It was an exciting time.

This book, though, covers what came next. The journey that picks up in 2011 with the publication of James S. A. Corey’s Leviathan Wakes (possibly the most popular space opera of the period), moves to Ann Leckie’s ambitious Ancillary Justice, Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit, and then to Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti, Martha Wells’ All Systems Red, Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace, Tade Thompson’s Far from the Light of Heaven, Maurice Broaddus’s Sweep of Stars, and Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory. While space opera, and arguably science fiction itself, has always been a literature of work, this was when characters at the heart of stories began to change, to become more diverse, to question the structure of the world around them more deeply. The fascination with empire faded and its terrible impact was more deeply interrogated. This is the move from the ‘new space opera’ to whatever comes next. What is it? It is more open, more diverse, has different points of view to present, and powerfully and critically examines the political underpinnings of its stories, while still being everything that Silverberg, Hartwell, and Spinrad understood space opera to be.

In the 2020s the influences of the new space opera have been absorbed and space opera itself now stands somewhere between the sprawling empire of Teixcalaan and the glorious pulpy energy of Guardians of the Galaxy. It can be thoughtful and considered, analysing, deconstructing, and commenting upon what has come before in terms of politics, economics, race, gender, and more. It can also be garish goofy fun (a talking racoon, a face the size of a planet!). It’s all still space opera, as you will see in the pages to come.

I won’t go through and break down the stories you’re about to read—the joy in a book like this is discovering them for the first time—but each represents some aspect of the changes I’ve mentioned above. All, though, are stories that I think are exciting, colorful, vibrant, and pure space opera. There are some writers and worlds I wish could be represented here but could not be for practical reasons. What is here, though, gives you a pretty good idea of where we are now and where we might be going next.

Jonathan Strahan

Perth, January 2024

Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance

by Tobias S. Buckell

After battle with the Fleet of Honest Representation, after seven hundred seconds of sheer terror and uncertainty, and after our shared triumph in the acquisition of the greatest prize seizure in three hundred years, we cautiously approached the massive black hole that Purth-Anaget orbited. The many rotating rings, filaments, and infrastructures bounded within the fields that were the entirety of our ship, With All Sincerity, were flush with a sense of victory and bloated with the riches we had all acquired.

Give me a ship to sail and a quasar to guide it by, billions of individual citizens of all shapes, functions, and sizes cried out in joy together on the common channels. Whether fleshy forms safe below, my fellow crab-like maintenance forms on the hulls, or even the secretive navigation minds, our myriad thoughts joined in a sense of True Shared Purpose that lingered even after the necessity of the group battle-mind.

I clung to my usual position on the hull of one of the three rotating habitat rings deep inside our shields and watched the warped event horizon shift as we fell in behind the metallic world in a trailing orbit.

A sleet of debris fell toward the event horizon of Purth-Anaget’s black hole, hammering the kilometers of shields that formed an iridescent cocoon around us. The bow shock of our shields’ push through the debris field danced ahead of us, the compressed wave it created becoming a hyper-aurora of shifting colors and energies that collided and compressed before they streamed past our sides.

What a joy it was to see a world again. I was happy to be outside in the dark so that as the bow shields faded, I beheld the perpetual night face of the world: it glittered with millions of fractal habitation patterns traced out across its artificial surface.

On the hull with me, a nearby friend scuttled between airlocks in a cloud of insect-sized seeing eyes. They spotted me and tapped me with a tight-beam laser for a private ping.

Isn’t this exciting? they commented.

Yes. But this will be the first time I don’t get to travel downplanet, I beamed back.

I received a derisive snort of static on a common radio frequency from their direction. There is nothing there that cannot be experienced right here in the Core. Waterfalls, white sand beaches, clear waters.

But it’s different down there, I said. I love visiting planets.

Then hurry up and let’s get ready for the turnaround so we can leave this industrial shithole of a planet behind us and find a nicer one. I hate being this close to a black hole. It fucks with time dilation, and I spend all night tasting radiation and fixing broken equipment that can’t handle energy discharges in the exajoule ranges. Not to mention everything damaged in the battle I have to repair.

This was true. There was work to be done.

Safe now in trailing orbit, the many traveling worlds contained within the shields that marked With All Sincerity’s boundaries burst into activity. Thousands of structures floating in between the rotating rings moved about, jockeying and repositioning themselves into renegotiated orbits. Flocks of transports rose into the air, wheeling about inside the shields to then stream off ahead toward Purth-Anaget. There were trillions of citizens of the Fleet of Honest Representation heading for the planet now that their fleet lay captured between our shields like insects in amber.

The enemy fleet had forced us to extend energy far, far out beyond our usual limits. Great risks had been taken. But the reward had been epic, and the encounter resolved in our favor with their capture.

Purth-Anaget’s current ruling paradigm followed the memetics of the One True Form, and so had opened their world to these refugees. But Purth-Anaget was not so wedded to the belief system as to pose any threat to mutual commerce, information exchange, or any of our own rights to self-determination.

Later we would begin stripping the captured prize ships of information, booby traps, and raw mass, with Purth-Anaget’s shipyards moving inside of our shields to help.

I leapt out into space, spinning a simple carbon nanotube of string behind me to keep myself attached to the hull. I swung wide, twisted, and landed near a dark-energy manifold bridge that had pinged me a maintenance consult request just a few minutes back.

My eyes danced with information for a picosecond. Something shifted in the shadows between the hull’s crenulations.

I jumped back. We had just fought an entire war-fleet; any number of eldritch machines could have slipped through our shields—things that snapped and clawed, ripped you apart in a femtosecond’s worth of dark energy. Seekers and destroyers.

A face appeared in the dark. Skeins of invisibility and personal shielding fell away like a pricked soap bubble to reveal a bipedal figure clinging to the hull.

You there! it hissed at me over a tightly contained beam of data. "I am a fully bonded Shareholder and Chief Executive with command privileges of the Anabathic Ship Helios Prime. Help me! Do not raise an alarm."

I gaped. What was a CEO doing on our hull? Its vacuum-proof carapace had been destroyed while passing through space at high velocity, pockmarked by the violence of single atoms at indescribable speed punching through its shields. Fluids leaked out, surrounding the stowaway in a frozen mist. It must have jumped the space between ships during the battle, or maybe even after.

Protocols insisted I notify the hell out of security. But the CEO had stopped me from doing that. There was a simple hierarchy across the many ecologies of a traveling ship, and in all of them a CEO certainly trumped maintenance forms. Particularly now that we were no longer in direct conflict and the Fleet of Honest Representation had surrendered.

Tell me: what is your name? the CEO demanded.

I gave that up a long time ago, I said. I have an address. It should be an encrypted rider on any communication I’m single-beaming to you. Any message you direct to it will find me.

My name is Armand, the CEO said. And I need your help. Will you let me come to harm?

I will not be able to help you in a meaningful way, so my not telling security and medical assistance that you are here will likely do more harm than good. However, as you are a CEO, I have to follow your orders. I admit, I find myself rather conflicted. I believe I’m going to have to countermand your previous request.

Again, I prepared to notify security with a quick summary of my puzzling situation.

But the strange CEO again stopped me. If you tell anyone I am here, I will surely die and you will be responsible.

I had to mull the implications of that over.

I need your help, robot, the CEO said. And it is your duty to render me aid.

Well, shit. That was indeed a dilemma.

Robot.

That was a Formist word. I never liked it.

I surrendered my free will to gain immortality and dissolve my fleshly constraints, so that hard acceleration would not tear at my cells and slosh my organs backward until they pulped. I did it so I could see the galaxy. That was one hundred and fifty-seven years, six months, nine days, ten hours, and—to round it out a bit—fifteen seconds ago.

Back then, you were downloaded into hyperdense pin-sized starships that hung off the edge of the speed of light, assembling what was needed on arrival via self-replicating nanomachines that you spun your mind-states off into. I’m sure there are billions of copies of my essential self scattered throughout the galaxy by this point.

Things are a little different today. More mass. Bigger engines. Bigger ships. Ships the size of small worlds. Ships that change the orbits of moons and satellites if they don’t negotiate and plan their final approach carefully.

Okay, I finally said to the CEO. I can help you.

Armand slumped in place, relaxed now that it knew I would render the aid it had demanded.

I snagged the body with a filament lasso and pulled Armand along the hull with me.

It did not do to dwell on whether I was choosing to do this or it was the nature of my artificial nature doing the choosing for me. The constraints of my contracts, which had been negotiated when I had free will and boundaries—as well as my desires and dreams—were implacable.

Towing Armand was the price I paid to be able to look up over my shoulder to see the folding, twisting impossibility that was a black hole. It was the price I paid to grapple onto the hull of one of several three-hundred-kilometer-wide rotating rings with parks, beaches, an entire glittering city, and all the wilds outside of them.

The price I paid to sail the stars on this ship.

A century and a half of travel, from the perspective of my humble self, represented far more in regular time due to relativity. Hit the edge of lightspeed and a lot of things happened by the time you returned simply because thousands of years had passed.

In a century of me-time, spin-off civilizations rose and fell. A multiplicity of forms and intelligences evolved and went extinct. Each time I came to port, humanity’s descendants had reshaped worlds and systems as needed. Each place marvelous and inventive, stunning to behold.

The galaxy had bloomed from wilderness to a teeming experiment.

I’d lost free will, but I had a choice of contracts. With a century and a half of travel tucked under my shell, hailing from a well-respected explorer lineage, I’d joined the hull repair crew with a few eyes toward seeing more worlds like Purth-Anaget before my pension vested some two hundred years from now.

Armand fluttered in and out of consciousness as I stripped away the CEO’s carapace, revealing flesh and circuitry.

This is a mess, I said. You’re damaged way beyond my repair. I can’t help you in your current incarnation, but I can back you up and port you over to a reserve chassis. I hoped that would be enough and would end my obligation.

No! Armand’s words came firm from its charred head in soundwaves, with pain apparent across its deformed features.

Oh, come on, I protested. I understand you’re a Formist, but you’re taking your belief system to a ridiculous level of commitment. Are you really going to die a final death over this?

I’d not been in high-level diplomat circles in decades. Maybe the spread of this current meme had developed well beyond my realization. Had the followers of the One True Form been ready to lay their lives down in the battle we’d just fought with them? Like some proto-historical planetary cult?

Armand shook its head with a groan, skin flaking off in the air. It would be an imposition to make you a party to my suicide. I apologize. I am committed to Humanity’s True Form. I was born planetary. I have a real and distinct DNA lineage that I can trace to Sol. I don’t want to die, my friend. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I want to preserve this body for many centuries to come. Exactly as it is.

I nodded, scanning some records and brushing up on my memeology. Armand was something of a preservationist who believed that to copy its mind over to something else meant that it wasn’t the original copy. Armand would take full advantage of all technology to augment, evolve, and adapt its body internally. But Armand would forever keep its form: that of an original human. Upgrades hidden inside itself, a mix of biology and metal, computer and neural.

That, my unwanted guest believed, made it more human than I.

I personally viewed it as a bizarre flesh-costuming fetish.

Where am I? Armand asked. A glazed look passed across its face. The pain medications were kicking in, my sensors reported. Maybe it would pass out, and then I could gain some time to think about my predicament.

My cubby, I said. I couldn’t take you anywhere security would detect you.

If security found out what I was doing, my contract would likely be voided, which would prevent me from continuing to ride the hulls and see the galaxy.

Armand looked at the tiny transparent cupboards and lines of trinkets nestled carefully inside the fields they generated. I kicked through the air over to the nearest cupboard. They’re mementos, I told Armand.

I don’t understand, Armand said. You collect nonessential mass?

They’re mementos. I released a coral-colored mosquito-like statue into the space between us. This is a wooden carving of a quaqeti from Moon Sibhartha.

Armand did not understand. Your ship allows you to keep mass?

I shivered. I had not wanted to bring Armand to this place. But what choice did I have? No one knows. No one knows about this cubby. No one knows about the mass. I’ve had the mass for over eighty years and have hidden it all this time. They are my mementos.

Materialism was a planetary conceit, long since edited out of travelers. Armand understood what the mementos were but could not understand why I would collect them. Engines might be bigger in this age, but security still carefully audited essential and nonessential mass. I’d traded many favors and fudged manifests to create this tiny museum.

Armand shrugged. I have a list of things you need to get me, it explained. They will allow my systems to rebuild. Tell no one I am here.

I would not. Even if I had self-determination.

The stakes were just too high now.

I deorbited over Lazuli, my carapace burning hot in the thick sky contained between the rim