Free Lost in Transmission by Wil McCarthy

Conrad said. “Escort him to storage, please. We'll worry about treatment options sometime in the future. Meanwhile, just get him out of here.”
    Ho pursed his lips, studying Louis for a long moment. “What did he do, sir?”
    “It doesn't matter.”
    “It does if we want valid security and psych statistics. Did he damage equipment?”
    “No,” Conrad said. “He threw a punch.”
    Ho considered that. His eyes settled on Robert, noting the gut-pained kink in his stance. “Assaulting an officer. Out here that's a flogging offense.”
    “Only if I say so,” Conrad corrected. “Or Xmary does. There are extenuating circumstances, and in my opinion Mr. McGee here is not fully responsible for his actions. Do you want him flogged, Astrogation?”
    “No, I forgive him,” Robert said.
    Conrad nodded. “Right. Louis? Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
    “I want to go home. I didn't want to be here, I was never part of the revolt. I was just, you know, there at the time. Can you fax me home, sir? Please?”
    “Oh, for crying . . . Louis, you work in the inventory. You know as well as I do that we haven't got the data rate to transmit a person. Take some mental notes, if you like, and we'll mail them back for appendment to your archive. Do you want to be locally erased?”
    “No!”
    “Then you're pretty much stuck here, right? Ho, just take him.”
    “With pleasure, sir.” Ho grabbed Louis' arm and roughly hauled him toward the ladder.
    “Gently, Security,” Conrad warned. He knew Ho from their pirate days, and trusted him about as well as he trusted a starving dog. Security was a real interesting job choice for him, the result not of a vote but of a writ issued by King Bascal shortly after his coronation. “Ho likes responsibility,” Bascal had said at the time. “It's good for him, and that's good for us. You want him idle instead? You want him tuning the engines?”
    But as Ho and Louis ascended the ladder together—not stopping at the nearest fax machine but continuing all the way to the top—Conrad heard the echoes of Louis' yelping and squawking for a long time, and knew that Ho would gladly break an arm or two if the opportunity arose.
    “Jesus Christ and all the little gods,” he said to Robert. “I need to get my ass into storage pretty quick here. Maybe I should punch you myself.”

chapter five
    through every waking moment
    Time? Any physicist will tell you it's just another dimension, not so different from space, and its relentless forward movement is an illusion imposed by conscious minds rather than an inherent property of the universe itself. Remove consciousness and time does not pass, does not have any dynamic properties at all. It simply
is
.
    The first thing Conrad saw when he stepped out of the fax machine was Bascal's face. Or something like it, anyway. The king looked different: at once chubbier and more gaunt, his skin looser. There were even strands of gray in his hair, and in his beard. But his eyes were the thing that really stood out. They had a milky, unfocused look to them.
    “Bascal?”
    The careworn face lit up with a smile. “Ah, Conrad. So glad to hear your voice again. It has
been . . . too long.”
    Conrad felt a cold shiver. “What year is it?”
    “Well, let's see.” Bascal's smile collapsed into a frown of concentration. “We did the first correction burn at one year, and the second burn at ten years, and that was thirty years ago. So we're forty years into the journey. Yeah, forty.”
    “And nobody thought to wake me before now?” Conrad didn't know whether to feel relieved or insulted.
    “Yes, well, we would have,” Bascal said. “You're due next in the rotation, I believe. Xmary will sit out the next burn, but that's not for a while yet. That's not why I brought you out.”
    Well, that sounded encouraging. Conrad cast a look around him, scanning for signs of trouble. They were at the forward inventory, on deck fourteen, twelve levels aft of the