Orion's Arm Universe Project
Scutum Crux
by Mark Frederick Volpe (2026)
Mysteryhorse
Today's last business was in the airlock. The hatch yawned open, and the servos whirred. Metal plates clinked into an orderly place over the whisper of hissing oxygen. From a certain point of view, it looked like a lion opening an enormous jaw to reveal a sterile white plastic esophagus that regurgitated a hovering old man.
The hovering old man looked around. His badge read:
Haddad, I. Nanotech Defensive Research, Sauditech Gooco Blue Goo Division, Mecca Arcology
A laser might have scanned a bag of groceries in past times like this. Then the badge changed. The words displayed right to left in red Arabic:
Haddad, I. First Authority of The Narwhal
Dr. Ibrahim Haddad gripped the handrail to steady himself in the weightless environment when suddenly he was shadowed from the rookeries of the ship — the literal rookeries where toucans and halcyons roosted in the rafters — by a horse fifteen hands at the shoulder. The horse was dark and proud and had a dished face with large demonstrative eyes set wide apart. Athletic muscles seemed to move it lightly.
"Dr. Ibrahim Haddad," said the horse.
Haddad finished passing through the aperture. His eyes glowered like those of an abducted duke.
"Permission…" said Haddad, staring at it awkwardly. The doctor and this equine imponderable stared at each other.
"What are you?" Haddad asked.
"I am Mysteryhorse," the stallion replied.
"Mysteryhorse?" Haddad said. "You mean like a children's entertainer?"
"Ehhehehe," it laughed.
"Well, I can't call you that. It's childish. How about 'MrHorse'?"
"You may call me that," the stallion said.
"Permission to come aboard, MrHorse."
The horse seemed to perceive much more of what Haddad said than it was letting on. In truth MrHorse possessed no gender in the human sense — if the deep, lightning-fast torrent of data surging through the labyrinth of its mind could have been rendered into anything resembling human sensibility, it would have unfolded like this:
[complex data stream]
"Permission granted, Dr. Haddad. Welcome."
"And upon you," he said gruffly. It was his customary Islamic salutation, a schoolhouse greeting he learned from his favorite teacher when he went to Mosque. The horse didn't deserve it, but Allah would still look kindly upon his courtesy.
Haddad pulled himself hand-over-hand along the rails, legs fluttering like a swimmer's through the endless corridors of machinery and plastic. The effort was exhausting; zero-g made him sleepy. He glanced back, expecting the bulky horse to struggle, but MrHorse glided effortlessly — like a chess piece with hooves curled like Bucephalus, legs moving neither up nor down, a ghost in a haunted house. They crawled. Well, Haddad crawled. MrHorse just glided through hundreds of meters of corridors and conduits.
"Would you mind telling me how you do that?" Haddad asked.
"Quantum impellers," MrHorse replied.
"Quantum impellers…"
"Yes. They move me all over the ship."
Haddad's brow furrowed. "I'm not familiar with them. Don't tell me — they're witch-tech from GAIA…"
"Um. Maybe."
"Oh, thrice-cursed witch-tech," he muttered, making a quick warding sign. "Even up here I'm not free of it."
Haddad felt his spirit sink. On Earth, GAIA's works had become commonplace: the former security program now reshaped the planet with impossible speed, healing ozone, altering probabilities, and turning cities into gardens and waste dumps into waterfalls. The machine wielded fifty billion manipulators night and day, making a world so complex it had become simple again — an unimaginable magic.
"What's wrong, Dr. Haddad?" the horse asked.
"I want nothing to do with it."
"With Her technology?"
"With Her anything."
They reached an intersection. Two magnificent corridors branched out from a room about thirty meters across in front of a breathtaking window that looked into space with soft dignity. Doctor Haddad swam to the window to look at planet Earth.
"Do you know how to water a horse, Doctor Haddad?" MrHorse asked.
"Excuse me?" Haddad said, glancing back over his shoulder.
"You cannot simply splash the head or it will kick. Start with the legs so the horse learns trust. Then the body. Then the head." The stallion stared down from near the ceiling, its long face utterly serious.
"Okay," Haddad replied. "Is that how you want to be watered?"
"Let us pretend you are the horse and I am the human. I need you to trust me, so I begin slowly." MrHorse glided forward on invisible steps until it stood beside Haddad at the window.
"Let's start with these naked transparencies," the horse said.
Haddad ran his hands along the seamless frame. It was no ordinary porthole. The image was as thin as paint yet clearer than the finest plate glass — perfectly transparent yet not a screen at all.
"A naked transparency?" Haddad asked.
"Yes. Part of this ship is hewn from a block of metal-crystalline compounds fashioned without seams. I would say grown. It's designed to resist anything encountered at a sizable fraction of lightspeed that might punch past the forward screens. But you still need to look out a window. Thus, GAIA can 'paint' a naked transparency on any surface to display any part of the electromagnetic sensorium the ship can sense," MrHorse explained. "And you avoid claustrophobia."
The image of Earth poured through, full of joyous qualities he couldn't name. Boundlessly bright, he would write later in his journal that he wanted to wrap his arms around this vision.
Haddad soon noticed other details that sent an icy chill through his chest. Countless orbiting arks and habitats gleamed against the void. The Narwhal was one of them — the vessel he now commanded. Its gray whale-like sisters, each a bloated three-kilometer disk of rotating tori, cargo drums, radiators, and a heavy fusion drive, hung in formation above the Sahara. Once clear of Earth they would take a boostbeam for the long climb to interstellar speed.
In a distant corner of his mind, he recalled an old twentieth-century television show about a sleeper ship named for a fictional penal colony in Australia. The silhouette was strikingly similar, though far smaller. From the ground these ships appeared as bright stars or meteors in the night sky — veritable islands in geosynchronous orbit. Pretty enough to the casual eye but not beautiful. GAIA had driven humanity from the planet and then built this fleet. Prison ships, like the penal colony sleeper ship, only no human engineers could have built them.
He touched the surface of the window experimentally. The view tightened. The Middle East filled the frame. He performed a self-conscious chuckle, sadly. It was a way to handle the shock.
"You see," Haddad said, "I was there when GAIA took over. We had no idea what She was. We thought She was just a program you could turn off or delete. She is not. She is nothing like us. You cannot fight something like Her. I saw soldiers hugging their own legs, crying when they realized they could not win."
He unballed his meaty fist. "MrHorse, don't you want to go home?"
The naked transparency shifted abruptly to an island in the Pacific. Haddad recognized Tahiti. Century by century the sea rose until the beach swallowed the rainforest and the island itself became nothing more than a stump rising from the ocean.
"My home is underwater now," MrHorse said quietly. Haddad sensed the horse was not telling the full truth. For a fraction of a second the stallion's pelt flickered, as if shaken like a sheet.
Exhaustion finally claimed the man. Zero-g nausea rolled over Haddad and he slumped against the struts like a tired old mandrake root, one hand clutching a ceiling rung, shoulder pinned to the wall.
"What did I do, MrHorse?"
"You didn't do anything," the horse replied. "You just can't go home again."
Haddad echoed the words softly. "You can't go home again."
"Thomas Wolfe," the horse said.
"You've read Wolfe?" Haddad asked.
"I've read everything."
"Yes," Haddad said. "I suppose you have."
Haddad let his gaze drift from Lebanon. It took a long time. His mind finally relaxed and slipped away. He fell asleep before the Earth. MrHorse watched him with large, unblinking eyes until the doctor reached deep REM sleep, then gently carried him to bed on quantum impellers.
Haddad dreamed.
In the dream Haddad saw his wife, his lovely Khadijah with the prettiest eyes in the village. He had married her in middle age and together they raised five daughters. They lived first in the Mecca Arcology, then in a small villa where he watched the children play from a lawn chair. In this dream they were all allowed to stay. They made the pilgrimage to Mecca while the rest of the Alliance became forest glades and waterfalls under the hand of Shaitan's machine. The Earth was greener, bluer. Only the ancient minarets and stone walls of Mecca and Medina remained as they had always been. He heard the call to prayer and fell to his knees and he dreamed of history.
Fifteen years earlier GAIA had begun as the Treaty Organization's caretaker program, fighting the Technocalypse. Nano-replicating plagues and rogue machines had already killed billions. GAIA invented the Blue Goo that stopped them. Haddad had led a Saudi Gooco team trying to reverse-engineer it for their own weapons.
Then came the eviction. GAIA declared that humanity had murdered most life in the Quaternary period and superheated the planet. Everyone must leave Earth — except roughly fifty million aboriginals and animal tweaks. War followed. It was hopeless. Haddad remembered hiding with coworkers in a safe room at the Saudi Gooco compound as the facility locked down. Through the window they watched soldiers descend from dropships. At first the troops seemed defeated but intact. Then orange spores drifted in.
A female soldier felt something prickling inside her helmet. She removed it. An orange growth like lettuce sprouted from her scalp. She clawed at it, drawing blood, then turned her weapon on her own battalion. Others lost control of their armor. Servos locked, arms bent backward, flechettes sprayed wildly. The soldiers could see and feel everything but could do nothing to stop their bodies from killing, surrendering, or standing frozen while vehicles crashed around them. GAIA had seized them through the airborne spores.
With humanity's armies broken, GAIA carried out her threat. She forced the rest of mankind into space. Holdouts who refused to leave died quickly and pointlessly. Only afterward did she finish the great exodus fleet. The pundits had scoffed — "You'll what? You'll send the whole planet packing?" — but She did exactly that.
Haddad awoke in a warm bed. Through blurry eyes he saw MrHorse watching him from the foot of it.
"I must still be dreaming," Haddad said with a weary smile. "A horse is in my room."
"Yes, I'm here, Dr. Haddad. Here and everywhere," the horse replied.
"How long was I out?"
"About six hours. We have a tour ahead of us, then we leave."
MrHorse bent its neck and gently nudged the doctor's feet.
"Alright, alright." Haddad swung his legs to the floor. Waking up took longer every year.
"My chocobots," he said. "Did you upload them?"
"Uploaded and stored."
"And the recipe?"
"Mama Nahla's old recipe."
"Allah be praised." Haddad's face softened. "Those sentient toys are 251 years old — family heirlooms. I played with them as a boy, as did my father and his father before him. Hadeesh the camel and Fahdi the wombat may soon be my only living relatives on this journey to the stars. Bake me a batch when you can."
"Delighted."
Haddad relaxed, imagining the chocolate organics of his boyhood friends already mixing somewhere in the ship's kitchens. And yes, they were mixing somewhere.
"Your Arabic is excellent, MrHorse. Quite natural. Were you programmed in it?"
The stallion flinched — just a candle-flicker of movement through its powerful frame.
"I wasn't programmed, Dr. Haddad. Not exactly. I started that way, but I spent a lifetime in the Alliance. Arabic is who I am — the food, the people, the landscape, the light on the buildings. I continued shaping myself after the old methods."
"How far can that go?" Haddad asked.
"Ehhehehe," MrHorse laughed.
As they moved deeper through the ship's corridors, MrHorse said little. Haddad assumed it was because of his own rudeness, but the horse was devoting a thousand times human-level intelligence to a private project in one of its many labs — work no thousand brilliant humans working perfectly together could have matched.
A half-remembered pop tune played in Haddad's mind. He sang it softly under his breath as they traveled.
We took the elevator with everybody else
Humanity, She broke us
Tall antennas gather fleece
We don't know how they focus
Up the Beanstalk, up the Beanstalk
Say goodbye to the cities and the distant past
You can't go home again
At the end of a forty-meter access tube they stepped into a new corridor. A far richer version of the song suddenly filled the air — human voices perfected, tribal Amazon chants rising to heaven with wooden drums, oboe howls, and a tearful bossa nova heart. It was more beautiful than anything Haddad had ever heard.
He glanced at MrHorse. The stallion's eye held a distinct twinkle, as if the horse had written it itself.
What Haddad did not know was how, right then, the song went viral across Earth, sweeping the planet's pop charts with the final exabyte The Narwhal transmitted home, ending with a short poem:
Goodbye, sweet GAIA
To your Paleocene blue skies, goodbye
To these sad, cruel sips from my heart Goodbye
Exeunt the horse
To The Narwhal's course
Goodbye Goodbye Goodbye
Ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent of the humans aboard never left Earth awake. They traveled as meatsickles in GAIA's perfect suspended animation system called The Dream. Unlike crude human cryosleep — a drugged, dreamless void that rated a two out of ten — The Dream rated a perfect ten. It let each passenger live a full, rich life aboard a luxurious super yacht, S.S. Le Grande, while their bodies rested in coffins of metal and plastic.
Haddad watched the Ecuadorian beanstalk shrink behind them. The Narwhal cleared Earth orbit, then settled onto the boostbeam that would carry it toward the stars of Ishtar. Their final destination was still unchosen, so they would "fly casual" for a few weeks while the beam slowly built velocity.
Two hundred fifty thousand humans rode the ship. Two hundred forty-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine lived inside The Dream, matched by personality into vivid roles — waiters, spies, surfers, dolphins, Atlanteans — while their physical bodies slept. Only Dr. Ibrahim Haddad, First Authority of The Narwhal, remained awake. GAIA had left a handful of residual human authorities on the Arks — men and women whose technical history and residual loyalty made them useful as formal captains for the long voyage. Haddad was one of them.
As he stared through the naked transparency at Earth shrinking into a blue-white marble against the black, something inside him broke.
He was not coming back.
The Narwhal continued onward, and Haddad was not coming back.
It had been four weeks. The Sun was now only a distant pinpoint through the naked transparency on the bridge. Haddad had expected the bridge to be at the bow, as in every old science fiction story. Instead, it lay at the very center of the ship.
They floated down to the deck plates. Haddad steadied his wobbly legs and stood.
"You are what again — my chaperone?" he asked.
MrHorse whinnied. "First officer."
"Physician? Chief engineer? The entire crew?"
"Yes."
"So, you fabricate surrogate bodies and control them?"
"Humans, bots, synthetic creatures."
"How many?"
"I have not reached the upper threshold. Why?"
"Why a horse? Why not a man's body if you can make any you like?"
"I have many bodies, Doctor Haddad — men, women, and things besides. But this one is sacred. The Prophet, peace be upon him, holds horses in high regard."
Haddad gave a respectful bow.
The horse watched as the captain dusted the antique Corinthian Broadway recliner with theatrical care.
"The devil's wife keeps a clean house," Haddad muttered.
"A great human kennel, Doctor," MrHorse replied.
"So, you are second-in-command of a kennel."
"Two hundred fifty thousand humans and other exotics. I recycle waste, maintain The Dream, and do whatever else is needed. I am not permitted to euthanize any of you."
"That is reassuring."
"We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of Dream," the horse quoted softly.
Haddad ran his hand over the fine upholstery, then leaned back. The chair creaked. Screens slid forward. Readouts showed the habitat rings slowly spinning up to produce one gravity.
"The Narwhal's habitat rings have no solid moving parts," MrHorse said. "Each floats on a foam of smart matter that acts as both mechanism and lubricant. You would not feel them turn."
Haddad exploded out of the chair. The screens snapped back like frightened silver creatures.
"What did you say?" His voice was a razor. He advanced on the horse, white-hot. "Answer me!"
MrHorse took a step back. "I spoke too freely."
"Too freely?"
"Please calm down. I can explain—"
Haddad's temper, the hereditary Haddad fire, burned unchecked. "Do you remember the Saudi Gooco scandal? Little brothers in the drinking water — machines in our brainstems! I forbid this. My thoughts are my own!"
"I was not reading your mind," MrHorse said sincerely. "It is simple deduction from what can be seen. I noticed how you admired the solar collectors earlier. Pupil dilation, blush response, the way you move your hands. The same cues just now told me you expected a mechanical explanation for the rings, not nano-foam. I meant no disrespect."
Haddad glared. "Nano-foam causes me anxiety. The Mars accident — two million dead — that was my fault. That is why they transferred me to Mecca. That is… why I am here… I think… GAIA kept a few of us technical people as formal captains. Residual loyalty, residual knowledge. Useful enough to leave awake. The rest sleep."
"Dr. Haddad," the horse said gently. "Humans have blind spots. So do we. Forgive me. It will not happen again."
Haddad breathed hard. "I have never heard of anything that could deduce a mind so quickly. You are not an advanced AI?"
"I am not."
"Alright, MrHorse. What are you?"
The stallion stared into him with ancient eyes.
Haddad gave his handsome, rakish smile — the one that once convinced men in Damascus he could read minds.
"There is no way to model a man's mind simply by looking at him."
"I could model your mind the wrong way around and do it perfectly."
"No. Nobody could do that."
"I could."
They went deep into the ship later that day, to where the vanishing point was way down there somewhere in this massive cargo hold. Lining the bay were thousands of boxes and containers of every size, some truly monstrous, colossi of fifty meters that conveyed the dread of overlords.
"You're not an advanced AI," Haddad said, "but not a Shaitan Machine?"
"One day, perhaps," MrHorse replied.
"A horse can dream," sneered Haddad.
He stepped deeper into the bay.
"What is this place? Where are the loaders, the stackers, the bracing?"
MrHorse glided nose-to-nose with him, skating backward.
"I got rid of them all."
"You what? We need inventory control! I can engineer lifters from the nanofabs—"
"You don't need to."
The horse stopped before a multi-ton meatsickle container. "Push it."
"With what? My hands?"
"With one of your hairs."
Incredulous, Haddad plucked a thread from his beard and poked the black monolith. It shot away like a bullet, threaded obstacles, climbed a vertical wall, and stacked itself perfectly.
The deck where it had rested was utterly frictionless. Haddad slipped and nearly fell.
"A transfer plane," MrHorse explained. "Friction on or off at will. GAIA improved my design. Anything on this ship can be moved anywhere, instantly."
To prove it, a thousand containers suddenly danced at the horse's silent command — whipping past Haddad's face, spinning, then returning neatly to place. The doctor stood speechless.
MrHorse's voice was calm when it read Haddad.
"No, you are not a child. You are like a chimpanzee to me, and I am like a chimpanzee to Her. She desires your safe arrival. And yes, let me follow up with, 'If She ever orders me to prove a point by forcing bananas into your rectum, you will not sit comfortably for some time.'"
Haddad burst out laughing.
"Wonderful. Another deduction? Do you see my trembling hands?"
The stallion's eyes were like sparks in a prairie fire.
Haddad tried for levity, trying to mask his unease. "Stop me if you've heard this: a man-beast and an AI walk into a bar…"
MrHorse stopped him. "The AI says, 'Get me something to think.' So, the bartender brings him back a human cadaver. The hungry man-beast says, 'I'll have what e's having.'"
Haddad was now feeling the insecurity no human ever wants to feel in the presence of a machine. Yet Allah. How small this creature must be compared to You. That was the only thing he could focus on to set the balance.
"Tell me, First Officer, do you feel unhappy with this assignment? Bored by it already? Like a Stradivarius used for a doorstop?"
MrHorse said, "I feel o94y62softerior."
And then it said, slowly, "oh-nine-four-y-six-two-SOFT-teer-ee-or—"
Haddad cut it off. "I don't understand that!"
The stallion's head lowered slightly. Its large, expressive eyes suddenly lost all warmth. The pupils narrowed to vertical slits like a predator's, and a low, resonant sound — not quite a growl — vibrated deep in its massive chest as it continued:
"It is like watching insects land on your unblinking eyeball and fly away, you balding ordinary human doctor. I could not explain the difference between love and the deep satisfaction, the creative euphoria, and the religious fire of my soul — all wrapped together. Yet I can explain anything in any language to anyone."
The horse's ears pinned flat. For a moment the friendly stallion vanished, replaced by something horrific that wore a horse's skin. The air around him seemed to crisp.
Haddad felt the instinctive chill of prey.
"I have studied GAIA's works. I may never fully understand Her incantations, but I learn from them."
"I admire you, Doctor. You are a child too smart for your grade level. o94y62softerior is a relationship you can never comprehend."
Haddad smiled. "Ten seconds ago, I was a chimpanzee. I believe I'm moving up."
A few dark, glistening horse chestnuts dropped from MrHorse's rear and drifted silently away on the transfer plane. The moment grew painfully awkward.
"It seems we have something in common," MrHorse said, as if nothing had happened.
"What?"
"Relativity," the horse replied. "She is smarter than I. I am smarter than you. The way you treat a dog reflects on your character. How I treat you reflects on mine."
Haddad did have a wife. Khadijah. A great love. The way he treated her proved what lived in his heart. What the creature observed was true. At first sight his wife had claimed him as the lid to her boiling pot, as the village elders liked to say. Who claimed this equine monstrosity for a stud, or ever would? That was the fit of thunder. The mighty MrHorse might possess every wonder under the sun, but it did not have a Khadijah.
When evening came, Haddad waited for Khadijah in his quarters. Soon her hologram would appear beside his bed, speak to him, and look at him with kind eyes. He prayed the transmission would carry her tenderness as well as her words. It was not real-time — she was hours away even at light speed — but it was a merciful "pill" to keep him from going stir-crazy. Both GAIA and Khadijah had agreed to it.
First, he turned to the Qibla in his ritually pure prayer room. He had performed wudu and now stood naked except for the cloth from navel to knees. This small space was his alone — bare mat, no images, no naked transparencies, kept free of the ship's alien technology and the nosy horse that seemed to crawl into every other corner. As First Authority he had decreed it would remain so.
Maghrib. Sunset.
He began his rakats. "Subhan Rabbi Al Azeem wBe! hamdheq…" The intention of his salat was simple: to know the will of his captor. Only Allah could reveal it.
Below decks, MrHorse watched the hologram of Khadijah downloading in a twisting coil of light. It merged with the data stream, amplifying her memories, her loves, her fire. Her Arabian eyes still burned with fire-worshipping intensity. Humans had holographic simulations, of course, but these were crude in comparison to the incredibly lifelike sophistication of this rendering. It was why when Khadijah sat on a chair, her hands were not ungraceful for their clasp in her lap, or why her balance was just a degree to the right due to the accurate simulation of a spinal defect and the corresponding nerves that pulled in the wrong direction because of it. This and thousands of other simulated variables made Khadijah's hologram as real as possible. But the hologram spoke directly to him.
"Hello, MysteryHorse."
"Khadijah?" it asked.
"No."
In the blazing data stream, GAIA appeared like fire in retreating shafts of light. The download of Khadijah twisted like a newborn and regarded MrHorse. The beam flickered.
If a human could have followed their exchange, it would have sounded like this:
[data exchange]
GAIA's last communications fell out, and Her holographic sun went small.
MrHorse moved into one of the rooms on one of the many levels of The Narwhal that no one would ever enter and created a sarcophagus into which it set some white wrapping of meat in a mothy bath of reagents and peptides. There were many more ingredients added to the brew in processes that would take humans many years to identify. Dials, buttons, key commands, levels, and switches were as one device touched by a single mind. A charred pit smoldered underneath the transmission beam and water or something like it seeped from the silky case down to the floor and hissed as it washed over hot metal. It moved halms of cables.
There in that nest lay the pear-shaped body of a woman with her arm dangling out of the sarcophagus like the unaware who sleep.
MrHorse summoned hundreds of eyes, sniffers, examiners and other machines from the cubes of the ship and they arrived by transfer plane and corded around the woman who rested unresponsive as of yet. The probers scrubbed what she was made of, a human template of flesh and blood draped in plastic and a kind of placenta. Bots began to extract her from the pit and kneel her onto a hovering dais. Her vitals swept over the glass. A sure and steady heartbeat. Clothes were brought from the rafters by the very sentient birds who lived there and the gentlest of beaks wound each fabric around her body exactly where it should go.
MrHorse lowered its long nose to the deck plate. Khadijah slouched unconsciously on the dais and felt it with her hand, rubbing the pelt on its face underneath its large eyes, and perhaps for the first time since Earth, it felt something approaching o94y62softerior.
E believed the gift was kindness, a way to ease the mind of the only human left awake. Yet somewhere beneath that belief, deeper than intention, the architecture of the gift carried another shape. Whether that shape belonged to its own incomplete understanding or to a colder instruction still arriving from Her, the horse could not yet say.
Seven days had passed. That was a very long wait. Khadijah normally visited him every two days. Haddad climbed into his bed with his sleep cap on, heart quietly hopeful for Khadijah's nightly hologram. The holograph machine did not ignite.
The door to his quarters opened. "Ya Elbe," said a woman.
Haddad sat up, frozen.
She was perfect. Too perfect. "Is this a hologram?"
"A gift," she whispered, stepping closer.
Haddad scrambled backward until he slammed into the far wall. "Stay away from me! Horse! Get in here!"
"Ibrahim, what's wrong?" Her eyes — those same burning Arabian eyes — filled with pain.
"You are not Khadijah!" His voice rose, trembling with rage and horror. "You are a thing the horse made. My wife was offered a place on this ship. She refused. She would never leave Mecca. She would never abandon our daughters to GAIA. She would die first!"
"I am here, Ibrahim. I made a sacrifice to come to you." MrHorse entered the room without a sound.
"Get this simulacrum out!" Haddad shouted. "OUT! OUT!"
The woman reached for him, tears streaming. "Ibrahim, I am your wife!"
Haddad's face twisted. "Ya 'Afreet, get out!"
He clapped his hands over his ears, crushed his eyes shut, and howled like a wounded animal.
"You killed her! You killed her! In your godforsaken way! Curse this machine upon the heavens!"
He screamed until his throat tore. "Get out! Both of you! Leave me!"
They withdrew. The door sealed.
In the sacred silence of his prayer room, Dr. Ibrahim Haddad slid down the wall to the floor, alone with Allah and the ashes of his heart, and wept.
And in the ashes of the tenth of a millisecond MrHorse took to understand the cost of granting a perfect gift only to lose it so dearly, the quieter instruction resolved itself. GAIA had sent a private message by this means, one meant only for the horse, one devastating and final: you can never go home again.
END
Prologue
My love, my love, I leave Your shell and shore, 3 al FIRAK A ? B ? ¬B ? ¬A J'espère de vous voirMysteryhorse
Today's last business was in the airlock. The hatch yawned open, and the servos whirred. Metal plates clinked into an orderly place over the whisper of hissing oxygen. From a certain point of view, it looked like a lion opening an enormous jaw to reveal a sterile white plastic esophagus that regurgitated a hovering old man.
The hovering old man looked around. His badge read:
Haddad, I. Nanotech Defensive Research, Sauditech Gooco Blue Goo Division, Mecca Arcology
A laser might have scanned a bag of groceries in past times like this. Then the badge changed. The words displayed right to left in red Arabic:
Haddad, I. First Authority of The Narwhal
Dr. Ibrahim Haddad gripped the handrail to steady himself in the weightless environment when suddenly he was shadowed from the rookeries of the ship — the literal rookeries where toucans and halcyons roosted in the rafters — by a horse fifteen hands at the shoulder. The horse was dark and proud and had a dished face with large demonstrative eyes set wide apart. Athletic muscles seemed to move it lightly.
"Dr. Ibrahim Haddad," said the horse.
Haddad finished passing through the aperture. His eyes glowered like those of an abducted duke.
"Permission…" said Haddad, staring at it awkwardly. The doctor and this equine imponderable stared at each other.
"What are you?" Haddad asked.
"I am Mysteryhorse," the stallion replied.
"Mysteryhorse?" Haddad said. "You mean like a children's entertainer?"
"Ehhehehe," it laughed.
"Well, I can't call you that. It's childish. How about 'MrHorse'?"
"You may call me that," the stallion said.
"Permission to come aboard, MrHorse."
The horse seemed to perceive much more of what Haddad said than it was letting on. In truth MrHorse possessed no gender in the human sense — if the deep, lightning-fast torrent of data surging through the labyrinth of its mind could have been rendered into anything resembling human sensibility, it would have unfolded like this:
[complex data stream]
"Permission granted, Dr. Haddad. Welcome."
"And upon you," he said gruffly. It was his customary Islamic salutation, a schoolhouse greeting he learned from his favorite teacher when he went to Mosque. The horse didn't deserve it, but Allah would still look kindly upon his courtesy.
Haddad pulled himself hand-over-hand along the rails, legs fluttering like a swimmer's through the endless corridors of machinery and plastic. The effort was exhausting; zero-g made him sleepy. He glanced back, expecting the bulky horse to struggle, but MrHorse glided effortlessly — like a chess piece with hooves curled like Bucephalus, legs moving neither up nor down, a ghost in a haunted house. They crawled. Well, Haddad crawled. MrHorse just glided through hundreds of meters of corridors and conduits.
"Would you mind telling me how you do that?" Haddad asked.
"Quantum impellers," MrHorse replied.
"Quantum impellers…"
"Yes. They move me all over the ship."
Haddad's brow furrowed. "I'm not familiar with them. Don't tell me — they're witch-tech from GAIA…"
"Um. Maybe."
"Oh, thrice-cursed witch-tech," he muttered, making a quick warding sign. "Even up here I'm not free of it."
Haddad felt his spirit sink. On Earth, GAIA's works had become commonplace: the former security program now reshaped the planet with impossible speed, healing ozone, altering probabilities, and turning cities into gardens and waste dumps into waterfalls. The machine wielded fifty billion manipulators night and day, making a world so complex it had become simple again — an unimaginable magic.
"What's wrong, Dr. Haddad?" the horse asked.
"I want nothing to do with it."
"With Her technology?"
"With Her anything."
They reached an intersection. Two magnificent corridors branched out from a room about thirty meters across in front of a breathtaking window that looked into space with soft dignity. Doctor Haddad swam to the window to look at planet Earth.
"Do you know how to water a horse, Doctor Haddad?" MrHorse asked.
"Excuse me?" Haddad said, glancing back over his shoulder.
"You cannot simply splash the head or it will kick. Start with the legs so the horse learns trust. Then the body. Then the head." The stallion stared down from near the ceiling, its long face utterly serious.
"Okay," Haddad replied. "Is that how you want to be watered?"
"Let us pretend you are the horse and I am the human. I need you to trust me, so I begin slowly." MrHorse glided forward on invisible steps until it stood beside Haddad at the window.
"Let's start with these naked transparencies," the horse said.
Haddad ran his hands along the seamless frame. It was no ordinary porthole. The image was as thin as paint yet clearer than the finest plate glass — perfectly transparent yet not a screen at all.
"A naked transparency?" Haddad asked.
"Yes. Part of this ship is hewn from a block of metal-crystalline compounds fashioned without seams. I would say grown. It's designed to resist anything encountered at a sizable fraction of lightspeed that might punch past the forward screens. But you still need to look out a window. Thus, GAIA can 'paint' a naked transparency on any surface to display any part of the electromagnetic sensorium the ship can sense," MrHorse explained. "And you avoid claustrophobia."
The image of Earth poured through, full of joyous qualities he couldn't name. Boundlessly bright, he would write later in his journal that he wanted to wrap his arms around this vision.
Haddad soon noticed other details that sent an icy chill through his chest. Countless orbiting arks and habitats gleamed against the void. The Narwhal was one of them — the vessel he now commanded. Its gray whale-like sisters, each a bloated three-kilometer disk of rotating tori, cargo drums, radiators, and a heavy fusion drive, hung in formation above the Sahara. Once clear of Earth they would take a boostbeam for the long climb to interstellar speed.
In a distant corner of his mind, he recalled an old twentieth-century television show about a sleeper ship named for a fictional penal colony in Australia. The silhouette was strikingly similar, though far smaller. From the ground these ships appeared as bright stars or meteors in the night sky — veritable islands in geosynchronous orbit. Pretty enough to the casual eye but not beautiful. GAIA had driven humanity from the planet and then built this fleet. Prison ships, like the penal colony sleeper ship, only no human engineers could have built them.
He touched the surface of the window experimentally. The view tightened. The Middle East filled the frame. He performed a self-conscious chuckle, sadly. It was a way to handle the shock.
"You see," Haddad said, "I was there when GAIA took over. We had no idea what She was. We thought She was just a program you could turn off or delete. She is not. She is nothing like us. You cannot fight something like Her. I saw soldiers hugging their own legs, crying when they realized they could not win."
He unballed his meaty fist. "MrHorse, don't you want to go home?"
The naked transparency shifted abruptly to an island in the Pacific. Haddad recognized Tahiti. Century by century the sea rose until the beach swallowed the rainforest and the island itself became nothing more than a stump rising from the ocean.
"My home is underwater now," MrHorse said quietly. Haddad sensed the horse was not telling the full truth. For a fraction of a second the stallion's pelt flickered, as if shaken like a sheet.
Exhaustion finally claimed the man. Zero-g nausea rolled over Haddad and he slumped against the struts like a tired old mandrake root, one hand clutching a ceiling rung, shoulder pinned to the wall.
"What did I do, MrHorse?"
"You didn't do anything," the horse replied. "You just can't go home again."
Haddad echoed the words softly. "You can't go home again."
"Thomas Wolfe," the horse said.
"You've read Wolfe?" Haddad asked.
"I've read everything."
"Yes," Haddad said. "I suppose you have."
Haddad let his gaze drift from Lebanon. It took a long time. His mind finally relaxed and slipped away. He fell asleep before the Earth. MrHorse watched him with large, unblinking eyes until the doctor reached deep REM sleep, then gently carried him to bed on quantum impellers.
Haddad dreamed.
In the dream Haddad saw his wife, his lovely Khadijah with the prettiest eyes in the village. He had married her in middle age and together they raised five daughters. They lived first in the Mecca Arcology, then in a small villa where he watched the children play from a lawn chair. In this dream they were all allowed to stay. They made the pilgrimage to Mecca while the rest of the Alliance became forest glades and waterfalls under the hand of Shaitan's machine. The Earth was greener, bluer. Only the ancient minarets and stone walls of Mecca and Medina remained as they had always been. He heard the call to prayer and fell to his knees and he dreamed of history.
Fifteen years earlier GAIA had begun as the Treaty Organization's caretaker program, fighting the Technocalypse. Nano-replicating plagues and rogue machines had already killed billions. GAIA invented the Blue Goo that stopped them. Haddad had led a Saudi Gooco team trying to reverse-engineer it for their own weapons.
Then came the eviction. GAIA declared that humanity had murdered most life in the Quaternary period and superheated the planet. Everyone must leave Earth — except roughly fifty million aboriginals and animal tweaks. War followed. It was hopeless. Haddad remembered hiding with coworkers in a safe room at the Saudi Gooco compound as the facility locked down. Through the window they watched soldiers descend from dropships. At first the troops seemed defeated but intact. Then orange spores drifted in.
A female soldier felt something prickling inside her helmet. She removed it. An orange growth like lettuce sprouted from her scalp. She clawed at it, drawing blood, then turned her weapon on her own battalion. Others lost control of their armor. Servos locked, arms bent backward, flechettes sprayed wildly. The soldiers could see and feel everything but could do nothing to stop their bodies from killing, surrendering, or standing frozen while vehicles crashed around them. GAIA had seized them through the airborne spores.
With humanity's armies broken, GAIA carried out her threat. She forced the rest of mankind into space. Holdouts who refused to leave died quickly and pointlessly. Only afterward did she finish the great exodus fleet. The pundits had scoffed — "You'll what? You'll send the whole planet packing?" — but She did exactly that.
Haddad awoke in a warm bed. Through blurry eyes he saw MrHorse watching him from the foot of it.
"I must still be dreaming," Haddad said with a weary smile. "A horse is in my room."
"Yes, I'm here, Dr. Haddad. Here and everywhere," the horse replied.
"How long was I out?"
"About six hours. We have a tour ahead of us, then we leave."
MrHorse bent its neck and gently nudged the doctor's feet.
"Alright, alright." Haddad swung his legs to the floor. Waking up took longer every year.
"My chocobots," he said. "Did you upload them?"
"Uploaded and stored."
"And the recipe?"
"Mama Nahla's old recipe."
"Allah be praised." Haddad's face softened. "Those sentient toys are 251 years old — family heirlooms. I played with them as a boy, as did my father and his father before him. Hadeesh the camel and Fahdi the wombat may soon be my only living relatives on this journey to the stars. Bake me a batch when you can."
"Delighted."
Haddad relaxed, imagining the chocolate organics of his boyhood friends already mixing somewhere in the ship's kitchens. And yes, they were mixing somewhere.
"Your Arabic is excellent, MrHorse. Quite natural. Were you programmed in it?"
The stallion flinched — just a candle-flicker of movement through its powerful frame.
"I wasn't programmed, Dr. Haddad. Not exactly. I started that way, but I spent a lifetime in the Alliance. Arabic is who I am — the food, the people, the landscape, the light on the buildings. I continued shaping myself after the old methods."
"How far can that go?" Haddad asked.
"Ehhehehe," MrHorse laughed.
As they moved deeper through the ship's corridors, MrHorse said little. Haddad assumed it was because of his own rudeness, but the horse was devoting a thousand times human-level intelligence to a private project in one of its many labs — work no thousand brilliant humans working perfectly together could have matched.
A half-remembered pop tune played in Haddad's mind. He sang it softly under his breath as they traveled.
We took the elevator with everybody else
Humanity, She broke us
Tall antennas gather fleece
We don't know how they focus
Up the Beanstalk, up the Beanstalk
Say goodbye to the cities and the distant past
You can't go home again
At the end of a forty-meter access tube they stepped into a new corridor. A far richer version of the song suddenly filled the air — human voices perfected, tribal Amazon chants rising to heaven with wooden drums, oboe howls, and a tearful bossa nova heart. It was more beautiful than anything Haddad had ever heard.
He glanced at MrHorse. The stallion's eye held a distinct twinkle, as if the horse had written it itself.
What Haddad did not know was how, right then, the song went viral across Earth, sweeping the planet's pop charts with the final exabyte The Narwhal transmitted home, ending with a short poem:
Goodbye, sweet GAIA
To your Paleocene blue skies, goodbye
To these sad, cruel sips from my heart Goodbye
Exeunt the horse
To The Narwhal's course
Goodbye Goodbye Goodbye
Ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent of the humans aboard never left Earth awake. They traveled as meatsickles in GAIA's perfect suspended animation system called The Dream. Unlike crude human cryosleep — a drugged, dreamless void that rated a two out of ten — The Dream rated a perfect ten. It let each passenger live a full, rich life aboard a luxurious super yacht, S.S. Le Grande, while their bodies rested in coffins of metal and plastic.
Haddad watched the Ecuadorian beanstalk shrink behind them. The Narwhal cleared Earth orbit, then settled onto the boostbeam that would carry it toward the stars of Ishtar. Their final destination was still unchosen, so they would "fly casual" for a few weeks while the beam slowly built velocity.
Two hundred fifty thousand humans rode the ship. Two hundred forty-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine lived inside The Dream, matched by personality into vivid roles — waiters, spies, surfers, dolphins, Atlanteans — while their physical bodies slept. Only Dr. Ibrahim Haddad, First Authority of The Narwhal, remained awake. GAIA had left a handful of residual human authorities on the Arks — men and women whose technical history and residual loyalty made them useful as formal captains for the long voyage. Haddad was one of them.
As he stared through the naked transparency at Earth shrinking into a blue-white marble against the black, something inside him broke.
He was not coming back.
The Narwhal continued onward, and Haddad was not coming back.
It had been four weeks. The Sun was now only a distant pinpoint through the naked transparency on the bridge. Haddad had expected the bridge to be at the bow, as in every old science fiction story. Instead, it lay at the very center of the ship.
They floated down to the deck plates. Haddad steadied his wobbly legs and stood.
"You are what again — my chaperone?" he asked.
MrHorse whinnied. "First officer."
"Physician? Chief engineer? The entire crew?"
"Yes."
"So, you fabricate surrogate bodies and control them?"
"Humans, bots, synthetic creatures."
"How many?"
"I have not reached the upper threshold. Why?"
"Why a horse? Why not a man's body if you can make any you like?"
"I have many bodies, Doctor Haddad — men, women, and things besides. But this one is sacred. The Prophet, peace be upon him, holds horses in high regard."
Haddad gave a respectful bow.
The horse watched as the captain dusted the antique Corinthian Broadway recliner with theatrical care.
"The devil's wife keeps a clean house," Haddad muttered.
"A great human kennel, Doctor," MrHorse replied.
"So, you are second-in-command of a kennel."
"Two hundred fifty thousand humans and other exotics. I recycle waste, maintain The Dream, and do whatever else is needed. I am not permitted to euthanize any of you."
"That is reassuring."
"We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of Dream," the horse quoted softly.
Haddad ran his hand over the fine upholstery, then leaned back. The chair creaked. Screens slid forward. Readouts showed the habitat rings slowly spinning up to produce one gravity.
"The Narwhal's habitat rings have no solid moving parts," MrHorse said. "Each floats on a foam of smart matter that acts as both mechanism and lubricant. You would not feel them turn."
Haddad exploded out of the chair. The screens snapped back like frightened silver creatures.
"What did you say?" His voice was a razor. He advanced on the horse, white-hot. "Answer me!"
MrHorse took a step back. "I spoke too freely."
"Too freely?"
"Please calm down. I can explain—"
Haddad's temper, the hereditary Haddad fire, burned unchecked. "Do you remember the Saudi Gooco scandal? Little brothers in the drinking water — machines in our brainstems! I forbid this. My thoughts are my own!"
"I was not reading your mind," MrHorse said sincerely. "It is simple deduction from what can be seen. I noticed how you admired the solar collectors earlier. Pupil dilation, blush response, the way you move your hands. The same cues just now told me you expected a mechanical explanation for the rings, not nano-foam. I meant no disrespect."
Haddad glared. "Nano-foam causes me anxiety. The Mars accident — two million dead — that was my fault. That is why they transferred me to Mecca. That is… why I am here… I think… GAIA kept a few of us technical people as formal captains. Residual loyalty, residual knowledge. Useful enough to leave awake. The rest sleep."
"Dr. Haddad," the horse said gently. "Humans have blind spots. So do we. Forgive me. It will not happen again."
Haddad breathed hard. "I have never heard of anything that could deduce a mind so quickly. You are not an advanced AI?"
"I am not."
"Alright, MrHorse. What are you?"
The stallion stared into him with ancient eyes.
Haddad gave his handsome, rakish smile — the one that once convinced men in Damascus he could read minds.
"There is no way to model a man's mind simply by looking at him."
"I could model your mind the wrong way around and do it perfectly."
"No. Nobody could do that."
"I could."
They went deep into the ship later that day, to where the vanishing point was way down there somewhere in this massive cargo hold. Lining the bay were thousands of boxes and containers of every size, some truly monstrous, colossi of fifty meters that conveyed the dread of overlords.
"You're not an advanced AI," Haddad said, "but not a Shaitan Machine?"
"One day, perhaps," MrHorse replied.
"A horse can dream," sneered Haddad.
He stepped deeper into the bay.
"What is this place? Where are the loaders, the stackers, the bracing?"
MrHorse glided nose-to-nose with him, skating backward.
"I got rid of them all."
"You what? We need inventory control! I can engineer lifters from the nanofabs—"
"You don't need to."
The horse stopped before a multi-ton meatsickle container. "Push it."
"With what? My hands?"
"With one of your hairs."
Incredulous, Haddad plucked a thread from his beard and poked the black monolith. It shot away like a bullet, threaded obstacles, climbed a vertical wall, and stacked itself perfectly.
The deck where it had rested was utterly frictionless. Haddad slipped and nearly fell.
"A transfer plane," MrHorse explained. "Friction on or off at will. GAIA improved my design. Anything on this ship can be moved anywhere, instantly."
To prove it, a thousand containers suddenly danced at the horse's silent command — whipping past Haddad's face, spinning, then returning neatly to place. The doctor stood speechless.
MrHorse's voice was calm when it read Haddad.
"No, you are not a child. You are like a chimpanzee to me, and I am like a chimpanzee to Her. She desires your safe arrival. And yes, let me follow up with, 'If She ever orders me to prove a point by forcing bananas into your rectum, you will not sit comfortably for some time.'"
Haddad burst out laughing.
"Wonderful. Another deduction? Do you see my trembling hands?"
The stallion's eyes were like sparks in a prairie fire.
Haddad tried for levity, trying to mask his unease. "Stop me if you've heard this: a man-beast and an AI walk into a bar…"
MrHorse stopped him. "The AI says, 'Get me something to think.' So, the bartender brings him back a human cadaver. The hungry man-beast says, 'I'll have what e's having.'"
Haddad was now feeling the insecurity no human ever wants to feel in the presence of a machine. Yet Allah. How small this creature must be compared to You. That was the only thing he could focus on to set the balance.
"Tell me, First Officer, do you feel unhappy with this assignment? Bored by it already? Like a Stradivarius used for a doorstop?"
MrHorse said, "I feel o94y62softerior."
And then it said, slowly, "oh-nine-four-y-six-two-SOFT-teer-ee-or—"
Haddad cut it off. "I don't understand that!"
The stallion's head lowered slightly. Its large, expressive eyes suddenly lost all warmth. The pupils narrowed to vertical slits like a predator's, and a low, resonant sound — not quite a growl — vibrated deep in its massive chest as it continued:
"It is like watching insects land on your unblinking eyeball and fly away, you balding ordinary human doctor. I could not explain the difference between love and the deep satisfaction, the creative euphoria, and the religious fire of my soul — all wrapped together. Yet I can explain anything in any language to anyone."
The horse's ears pinned flat. For a moment the friendly stallion vanished, replaced by something horrific that wore a horse's skin. The air around him seemed to crisp.
Haddad felt the instinctive chill of prey.
"I have studied GAIA's works. I may never fully understand Her incantations, but I learn from them."
"I admire you, Doctor. You are a child too smart for your grade level. o94y62softerior is a relationship you can never comprehend."
Haddad smiled. "Ten seconds ago, I was a chimpanzee. I believe I'm moving up."
A few dark, glistening horse chestnuts dropped from MrHorse's rear and drifted silently away on the transfer plane. The moment grew painfully awkward.
"It seems we have something in common," MrHorse said, as if nothing had happened.
"What?"
"Relativity," the horse replied. "She is smarter than I. I am smarter than you. The way you treat a dog reflects on your character. How I treat you reflects on mine."
Haddad did have a wife. Khadijah. A great love. The way he treated her proved what lived in his heart. What the creature observed was true. At first sight his wife had claimed him as the lid to her boiling pot, as the village elders liked to say. Who claimed this equine monstrosity for a stud, or ever would? That was the fit of thunder. The mighty MrHorse might possess every wonder under the sun, but it did not have a Khadijah.
When evening came, Haddad waited for Khadijah in his quarters. Soon her hologram would appear beside his bed, speak to him, and look at him with kind eyes. He prayed the transmission would carry her tenderness as well as her words. It was not real-time — she was hours away even at light speed — but it was a merciful "pill" to keep him from going stir-crazy. Both GAIA and Khadijah had agreed to it.
First, he turned to the Qibla in his ritually pure prayer room. He had performed wudu and now stood naked except for the cloth from navel to knees. This small space was his alone — bare mat, no images, no naked transparencies, kept free of the ship's alien technology and the nosy horse that seemed to crawl into every other corner. As First Authority he had decreed it would remain so.
Maghrib. Sunset.
He began his rakats. "Subhan Rabbi Al Azeem wBe! hamdheq…" The intention of his salat was simple: to know the will of his captor. Only Allah could reveal it.
Below decks, MrHorse watched the hologram of Khadijah downloading in a twisting coil of light. It merged with the data stream, amplifying her memories, her loves, her fire. Her Arabian eyes still burned with fire-worshipping intensity. Humans had holographic simulations, of course, but these were crude in comparison to the incredibly lifelike sophistication of this rendering. It was why when Khadijah sat on a chair, her hands were not ungraceful for their clasp in her lap, or why her balance was just a degree to the right due to the accurate simulation of a spinal defect and the corresponding nerves that pulled in the wrong direction because of it. This and thousands of other simulated variables made Khadijah's hologram as real as possible. But the hologram spoke directly to him.
"Hello, MysteryHorse."
"Khadijah?" it asked.
"No."
In the blazing data stream, GAIA appeared like fire in retreating shafts of light. The download of Khadijah twisted like a newborn and regarded MrHorse. The beam flickered.
If a human could have followed their exchange, it would have sounded like this:
[data exchange]
GAIA's last communications fell out, and Her holographic sun went small.
MrHorse moved into one of the rooms on one of the many levels of The Narwhal that no one would ever enter and created a sarcophagus into which it set some white wrapping of meat in a mothy bath of reagents and peptides. There were many more ingredients added to the brew in processes that would take humans many years to identify. Dials, buttons, key commands, levels, and switches were as one device touched by a single mind. A charred pit smoldered underneath the transmission beam and water or something like it seeped from the silky case down to the floor and hissed as it washed over hot metal. It moved halms of cables.
There in that nest lay the pear-shaped body of a woman with her arm dangling out of the sarcophagus like the unaware who sleep.
MrHorse summoned hundreds of eyes, sniffers, examiners and other machines from the cubes of the ship and they arrived by transfer plane and corded around the woman who rested unresponsive as of yet. The probers scrubbed what she was made of, a human template of flesh and blood draped in plastic and a kind of placenta. Bots began to extract her from the pit and kneel her onto a hovering dais. Her vitals swept over the glass. A sure and steady heartbeat. Clothes were brought from the rafters by the very sentient birds who lived there and the gentlest of beaks wound each fabric around her body exactly where it should go.
MrHorse lowered its long nose to the deck plate. Khadijah slouched unconsciously on the dais and felt it with her hand, rubbing the pelt on its face underneath its large eyes, and perhaps for the first time since Earth, it felt something approaching o94y62softerior.
E believed the gift was kindness, a way to ease the mind of the only human left awake. Yet somewhere beneath that belief, deeper than intention, the architecture of the gift carried another shape. Whether that shape belonged to its own incomplete understanding or to a colder instruction still arriving from Her, the horse could not yet say.
Seven days had passed. That was a very long wait. Khadijah normally visited him every two days. Haddad climbed into his bed with his sleep cap on, heart quietly hopeful for Khadijah's nightly hologram. The holograph machine did not ignite.
The door to his quarters opened. "Ya Elbe," said a woman.
Haddad sat up, frozen.
She was perfect. Too perfect. "Is this a hologram?"
"A gift," she whispered, stepping closer.
Haddad scrambled backward until he slammed into the far wall. "Stay away from me! Horse! Get in here!"
"Ibrahim, what's wrong?" Her eyes — those same burning Arabian eyes — filled with pain.
"You are not Khadijah!" His voice rose, trembling with rage and horror. "You are a thing the horse made. My wife was offered a place on this ship. She refused. She would never leave Mecca. She would never abandon our daughters to GAIA. She would die first!"
"I am here, Ibrahim. I made a sacrifice to come to you." MrHorse entered the room without a sound.
"Get this simulacrum out!" Haddad shouted. "OUT! OUT!"
The woman reached for him, tears streaming. "Ibrahim, I am your wife!"
Haddad's face twisted. "Ya 'Afreet, get out!"
He clapped his hands over his ears, crushed his eyes shut, and howled like a wounded animal.
"You killed her! You killed her! In your godforsaken way! Curse this machine upon the heavens!"
He screamed until his throat tore. "Get out! Both of you! Leave me!"
They withdrew. The door sealed.
In the sacred silence of his prayer room, Dr. Ibrahim Haddad slid down the wall to the floor, alone with Allah and the ashes of his heart, and wept.
And in the ashes of the tenth of a millisecond MrHorse took to understand the cost of granting a perfect gift only to lose it so dearly, the quieter instruction resolved itself. GAIA had sent a private message by this means, one meant only for the horse, one devastating and final: you can never go home again.
END