Infohazard: Ceres

The casino floated three kilometers off the main corridor of Ceres Station like a tumor of neon and desperate hope. Inside, the air tasted of recycled everything—oxygen, water, the dreams of miners who’d come to piss away their earnings on the spin of a wheel or the turn of a card.

Xh’ratt sat at the blackjack table, his chitinous fingers drumming patterns that looked nervous but weren’t. Everything about Xh’ratt was a performance. The slight tilt of his oblong head. The way his mouth-parts clicked when he won (frequently) and when he lost (strategically, just enough to keep the pit boss from sniffing around with his little algorithms and his smaller mind).

The other players were standard Belt flotsam. A prospector named Delgado with hands like granite and thoughts like mud. Two corporate auditors from the inner system, their minds clean and empty as swept floors—what I’d give for an expense account that means I can lose and call it research. And then there was the woman.

She wore a gray suit that had seen better stations. Her face was the kind you forgot while you were still looking at it. But her mind—

Xh’ratt couldn’t read it.

This had never happened before.

He’d been working the Belt casinos for three standard years, ever since the failed uprising on his homeworld had made him persona non grata in seven systems. His people’s telepathy was considered a mutation by the Concordat, a deviation from the approved template of sentient life. So he’d fled to the ass-end of human space, where nobody cared what you were as long as you had credit to lose.

The dealer—human, probably cloned, definitely bored—dealt another round. Xh’ratt glanced at Delgado’s cards through Delgado’s eyes: fifteen showing, queen in the hole. The auditors had garbage. He didn’t need telepathy for that; their tells were archaeological.

But the woman—

“Hit me,” she said.

Her voice was rust and cigarettes that hadn’t been invented yet. The dealer flipped her a three. She had seventeen showing now.

Xh’ratt probed harder, sending his consciousness like fingers through smoke, trying to find the edges of her mind. Nothing. Not walls—he’d felt those before, the crude blocks that humans built when they’d had military conditioning or expensive therapy. This was different. It was like her mind existed in a different frequency, a wavelength his telepathy couldn’t reach.

Or didn’t want to reach.

“Your play, friend,” the dealer said to him. Mechanical voice. Mechanical smile.

Xh’ratt looked at his cards. Eleven showing. He knew the dealer had nineteen—he’d plucked it from the dealer’s minimal consciousness like fruit from a low branch. “Double down,” he said.

The woman turned to look at him for the first time.

Her eyes were the wrong color. Not wrong like heterochromatic. Wrong like the spectrum you’re seeing isn’t the one that’s there.

“You’re very lucky tonight,” she said.

“Luck is just probability wearing a party hat,” Xh’ratt replied, quoting something he’d heard in a bar once. The phrase had stuck to his brain like grease.

“Is that what you think you’re doing? Reading probability?”

The table went quiet in the way that space goes quiet when there’s a hull breach three sections over and everyone’s checking their seals. Delgado looked between them like a spectator at some sport he didn’t understand. The auditors were already calculating whether to cash out.

Xh’ratt’s ace-high was turning to ash in his throat-sacs.

“I think,” he said carefully, “that I’m playing cards.”

“You’re harvesting,” the woman said. “Gleaning thoughts like wheat. Very efficient. Very illegal, even out here. But you knew that.”

The pit boss materialized from nowhere—they always did, didn’t they? But the woman held up one hand, and the pit boss stopped mid-step. Just stopped, like someone had pressed pause on his personal reality.

Oh.

Oh no.

“I’m not here to arrest you,” the woman said. She stood up, and reality bent slightly around her, like heat shimmer over Venusian soil. “I’m here because you stumbled into something you shouldn’t have seen. Two weeks ago. Table seven. You read a man’s mind.”

Xh’ratt remembered. An engineer, drunk, losing badly. Xh’ratt had skimmed his surface thoughts and found—

Found what?

The memory was there and then it wasn’t, like trying to hold water in your fists.

“He was thinking about numbers,” Xh’ratt said slowly. “Coordinates, maybe? I didn’t—I don’t remember.”

“Good,” the woman said. “The forgetting is working. You were exposed to an infohazard, friend. A concept that eats brains. We’ve been cleaning up after this particular leak for six months.”

She wasn’t a woman. Of course she wasn’t. Xh’ratt could see it now—the way the space around her refused to fully commit to her being there. She was something else, something wearing a woman-suit, something that had learned to walk on two legs as a courtesy to the locals.

“What are you?” he asked.

“I’m a consequence,” she said. “What’s going to happen now is you’re going to forget this conversation. You’re going to forget you ever read that engineer’s mind. And you’re going to take your winnings—minus tonight’s haul—and find a new casino. Maybe a new asteroid. Somewhere without military contractors drinking away their guilt.”

“And if I don’t?”

The thing that looked like a woman smiled. It was not a comforting expression.

“Then the infohazard finishes what it started. The coordinates you read? They’re instructions. A pattern. Right now they’re sleeping in your telepathic cortex like a virus in amber. But if you try to remember—if you try to access them—they’ll wake up. And they’ll use your telepathy to propagate. Every mind you touch after that becomes another carrier. It’s very elegant. Very old. Very much not something you want to activate.”

The casino hummed around them. Somewhere a slot machine paid out in a cascade of false hope. Somewhere someone was deciding whether to hit on sixteen.

“I don’t want to forget,” Xh’ratt said, and realized it was true. He’d spent his whole life remembering—hoarding thoughts and memories like treasures stolen from other people’s heads. The idea of having something taken from him was obscene.

“Nobody ever does,” the thing said, not unkindly. “But forgetting is a gift sometimes. Trust me. I’m very old, and I’ve forgotten more wonders and horrors than your species has ever named.”

She reached out and touched his temple with one gray-suited finger.

The world—

—hiccupped.

Xh’ratt blinked. He was sitting at a blackjack table on Ceres Station. He’d been on a cold streak all night, losing just enough to be frustrating but not enough to quit. The smart thing would be to cash out. Maybe find a different game. Maybe a different casino altogether.

Yeah. Different casino. Fresh start.

He gathered his meager chips and stood. As he walked toward the cashier, he passed a woman in a gray suit heading for the exit. She looked familiar somehow—maybe someone he’d passed in the corridor earlier. Maybe someone he’d seen in a dream.

She nodded to him as they passed.

He forgot her before he reached the cage.

Outside, the Belt turned eternal in the void, and in the casino, the cards continued their shuffle, their deal, their eternal false promise of meaning in the random. And in the spaces between probability and memory, things older than fear ensured that some secrets stayed forgotten, some coordinates remained unspoken, and some games, once interrupted, never resumed.

The dealer called for new players.

Someone sat down.

The cards fell where they always fell: exactly where they were supposed to, until they didn’t.