Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV
Folctha, Planet Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Gyotin
The problem with being the most fluent speaker of English in the little non-human enclave the crew had built for themselves, was that Gyotin constantly found himself thrust into the role of spokesperson. Surrounded as they were on all sides by Deathworlders, his crew—and as the senior ranking member of that crew, he now thought of them as his crew—had naturally walled themselves off a little, building their own habitation out of sight of the bustle of the colony proper, in what he knew the humans were calling “The ET Quarter”.
He wasn’t sure if the term was degrading or not.
Still. Staying in touch was necessary. So, he represented the nonhuman perspective at the “Thing”, he had the ears of Governor Sandy, Captain Powell and Chief Arés, and played his role in the development of this illegal little operation. He was even beginning to like it, though he only admitted as such in his most introspective moments.
There was one building that fascinated him in particular, though. And what was fascinating was that it had been one of the very first the humans had built. They called it a “Faith Center”: From the outside, it was built of the same mix of local wood and imported materials as any other building in Folctha, but the plan was different. Most of the others made efficient use of the space, packing as much as they could into as tiny a footprint as they could. Decorated, yes, but rarely to any enormous degree.
By comparison, the Faith Center was a large and ornate glutton for land, its own footprint supplemented by a large plot of land.
It had interested him since they day they built it, but this was the first time he had worked up the courage to enter and inspect this curious Deathworlder edifice.
He poked his head in the door, finding it—surprisingly, considering its obvious importance—apparently empty. The main doors led into a central hub which was a simple, open, airy room full of comfortable seats, throw pillows, bean bags and bookshelves, and desktop computers, doubling as the town library. the doors in its seven walls led into a variety of spaces.
He inspected the books: they seemed to be segregated according to topic, but it wasn’t clear to him exactly what the difference was between topics. One of the shelves was full of books with titles like “Knowing God”, “The Purpose-Driven Life” and “Grace Abounding”. There were several copies of something called “The Holy Bible”, but the only word he recognised of those three was: “The”. Another held books marked “The Quran”, “The Messenger of Allah”, “The Spiritual Teachings of the Prophet.”
He spent some time exploring, frowning at book titles like “Bhagavad-Gita”, “Tao te Ching”, “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”—that one earned a double-take— “The God Delusion” and “In Defense of Common Sense”. He wrestled briefly with the mystery of why “Letter to a Christian Nation” was not on the shelf clearly marked “Christian”, and the conundrum presented by “Living Buddha, Living Christ” which as far as his hypothesis up to that point had decided, were two different things. Whatever they were.
He gave up on the books, deciding that there was no insight into Human strangeness to be found from just glancing at their covers and that he didn’t have time to read any of them, and turned his attention to the doors set in the remaining six sides of the heptagonal hub.
One led into a little corridor which contained only two other doors. He didn’t understand the symbols on them, but a quick investigation soon cleared up that mystery—plumbing was much the same the galaxy over, and it turned out that human privies were not dissimilar to Gaoian ones. Next door to that, some small rooms—one containing a table and chairs, one containing what was obviously a water heater, a refrigeration unit and some basic food preparation equipment, and a third door which was locked.
The next room was a real mystery—it was effectively empty, containing nothing but a handful of ornate little rugs. There was something written on the far wall, but it wasn’t in the alphabet used by English.
It was while puzzling over this one that he finally heard some sign of life, and looked around to see the seventh door swinging shut. Eager to get a human explanation for all of these mysteries, he dithered for a few minutes, rehearsing his introduction and request before finally poking his nose through.
This last room was only marginally less austere than the rug room, containing little but chairs, a large table at the front, and a lectern next to some kind of electronic device that he couldn’t immediately identify. The only decorative thing within it was the window behind the table, which was tall and narrow, neatly bisecting the wall, and intersected two-thirds of the way up by a shorter, perpendicular line. The glass was densely pigmented, making it all but impossible to see through, but casting dazzling colours into the little hall as the sunlight shone through it.
At first, he didn’t see the person who had entered, until he advanced forward slightly and saw that she was kneeling on the floor towards the front of the room, hands clasped in front of her face.
“Umm…” he began, rehearsed greeting forgotten.
She jumped, immediately going tense, and Gyotin mentally chastised himself. Humans were deathworlders, with an immediate fight-or-flight reflex of terrifying speed and efficiency built right into their nervous system. He’d forgotten, after so long of seeing them in their domestic, peaceful life that he was dealing with a truly dangerous being here.
“Sorry!” he squeaked, acutely aware that he was still figuring out their contradictory mess of a language. “I didn’t mean you make jump.” He thought about this, then realised he’d defaulted to Gaoian syntax “To make you jump.” he corrected.
The girl—and she was still just barely a cub, he knew enough about humans nowadays to spot that much—relaxed, and smiled, setting his skin crawling at the sight of those sturdy teeth. “It’s okay.” she said. “Hey, I’ve…never met a non-human before.”
”…Well then. Hello. I may come in?”
“I’d like that.” she nodded. “You’re…Gaoian, right?”
“Right. I am Gyotin, Clanless for now.”
“Ava. Ava Rios.”
Gyo tin tilted his head slightly as he approached. Ava’s eyes looked redder than was usual for a human, and there was moisture on her cheeks. He’d never seen an expression quite like it, and with Ava lacking a corresponding translator to communicate her body language, he had to use his best guess.
“Are you…all right?” he asked. It seemed like a safe bet.
She sighed—he knew that one—and stood up, dusting off her knees. She surprised him by being slightly shorter than he was. Gyotin was small by Gaoian standards, and Gaoian standards were small by Human standards. “I’m an idiot.” she said, simply.
He blinked. “You are? I mean, why say that?”
“I just…I ran off at the mouth.”
One thing Gyotin had got his head around with humans was the way their analogies worked. They seemed to love idiom and metaphor, and weave it into every facet of their conversations, subconsciously. A more straightforward species might have said “’I said some things which I now regret having said’ but he had to admit that ‘I ran off at the mouth’ got the same message across both more swiftly and more evocatively.
“That happens.” he said. “You did this to…friend? Clan-mate?”
“Hah. I don’t have a clan.” Ava looked up at the window, and shut her eyes. Gyotin saw a water droplet run down her face, which she wiped away with a sleeve, before returning her attention back to him, rather abruptly. “My boyfriend.”
“Your mate?”
“Close enough, I guess. We’re together.” She turned away from the window “Hey, can we head outside? Those bean bags looked comfortable, and I think they had hot chocolate.”
“If you like.” Gyotin agreed. There was an atmosphere to the room that was starting to encroach on him, a feeling tickling at the roots of his fur. He had no way to describe it.
He shivered the sensation out as he crossed the threshold. “What were you do in there?” he asked.
“I was just praying, asking God for help.” She said simply. “And confessing.”
Gyotin sniffed. “I don’t understand.” he said. “Confessing what to?”
“It’s a Catholic thing.” she said, as if that explained anything. “‘Forgive me father for I have sinned’, you know.”
“Catholic? Your father? And sinned is what?”
”…I guess you don’t know, huh?”
“It must be a human thing.”
“I guess…maybe? I’ve never really thought about it.” Ava said. “D’you want an Ovaltine?”
Gyotin summoned a term he’d heard. “I’m game. Don’t know what it is, but I’m try it anyway if you want.”
He sat down as she heated up some water and poured it into a pair of handled cups alongside some brown powder. The resulting concoction turned out to smell incredible, and when he sipped it experimentally he added it to his list of reasons why human weirdness might just be a good thing.
“All this…” he indicated the room and its books. “So alien. I think sometimes, humans very strange.”
Ava looked around at them. “I guess. I mean, wow. That’s a lot of books.”
She sipped her drink. “I’m not…don’t ask me about it.” she said. “I never…I just went to Church every Sunday.”
“Why?”
“Because…because that’s what we did.” Ava said, lamely. “Because you’ve got to thank God.”
That seemed very strange indeed to Gyotin. Deciding that Ava may really not be the person to ask about these things, he changed the topic.
“You don’t seem like idiot to me.” he said.
“Say what?” Ava asked, thrown by the conversational tangent.
“You said ‘I’m an idiot’.” He reminded her. “Why?”
Ava thought about it for a minute. “I guess…I don’t really know. I just said some really stupid and hurtful things to Adam and….I don’t know why, I was just so mad at him and I don’t know why.”
“What did you say?” Gyotin asked, congratulating himself on getting the syntax right.
“I…” she shook her head helplessly. If nothing else, Ava was a good lesson in human body language. “You’d have to know us pretty well, I guess. I told him to go run to his dad for advice.”
Gyotin scratched behind his ear. “That is stupid?” he asked. “If he need advice, talk to a Father. Common sense.”
“I told you, you’d have to know us to get why it’s a problem.”
Gyotin imitated a human shrug for her benefit. “Or maybe it’s not problem and you just…oh, what word? …confuse?”
Unexpectedly she laughed, a little strangely. “Oh God, don’t say that!” she protested “That just makes me feel more stupid.”
Gyotin was still trying to plan how to respond to that, when Ava took her turn to throw him by going off on a tangent. “Hey, I just noticed…you’re naked.”
“I…what?”
“You’re not wearing clothes.”
“Well…no. I usually have covers for pockets and things, but didn’t need today. Is problem?”
”…No.” For some reason this seemed to amuse her. “No it’s not.”
She set her cup down, then unexpectedly leaned over and kissed the top of Gyotin’s head. His ears tilted downwards, half out of confusion and half so as to make room. “Thank you, Gyotin. You’re like a furry Zen master, you know that?”
Gyotin really wasn’t sure what he was being thanked for. “…Thank you?” he asked.
“Anytime.” Ava got up, her mood apparently very changed. She seemed happier, now. “I should go. Will I see you around?”
“I’d like that, but first…What is Zen? I saw books over there have that word.”
“Well, why don’t you read one and find out?” She asked.
Gyotin considered the suggestion for some minutes after she left.
He cleaned up the dirty mugs, and when he returned to his cushion, he had one of the books in his paws, which he opened, and took a few seconds to skip the Preface and Foreword—he turned straight to chapter one, and began to read.
”…If I am asked, then, what Zen teaches, I would answer, Zen teaches nothing. Whatever teachings there are in Zen, they come out of one’s own mind. We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way.”
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV
Izbrk, Planet Ikbrzk
Allison Buehler
“NO!”
Suicide. The alien hell-bitch had suicided rather than accept surrender, and she’d taken Julian with her. The alien gunner didn’t hesitate—Julian only had time enough to register the order but not enough to do anything about it before the coil gun fired, pounding a crater in the street that turned Zokrup into a rain of vile greenish-brown chowder and filled the air with dust.
Bereft of any better ideas and with tears threatening her vision, she shot out the engines on all three craft. None of them even figured out where she was before they fell out of the air on cut puppet-strings of smoke and fire, smashing into the road and half-demolishing some poor local locayl’s home.
She didn’t melodramatically empty her magazine into the burning wreckage. Instead, she set the weapon aside, and began to climb down the building, unsure why.
“Aaargh…”
It was an inarticulate noise of pain and nothing more, but an unmistakably human one. Not a scream, just the low, creaking moan of a man in agony.
“Julian!”
She was rewarded only with panting and heavy breathing on the open channel, but she knew where he’d been standing, and more importantly, knew that he was still alive.
She grabbed the bag and vaulted off the building, dropping the two stories to the street below and rolling easily with the landing, a feat she never could have managed on Earth.
Julian was in bad shape. It was, at least, easy to identify which of the blood was his and which was Chehnasho—they were very different colours.
Zokrup’s last act of defiance had actually saved Julian from her own vengeance. The token resistance offered by her disintegrating body had spared him the very worst of the blast, but his legs were still peppered with gravel shrapnel, and Allison doubted there was anything she could do for his left foot. But his torso seemed undamaged, and the bleeding was manageable, especially with the state-of-the-art instant-dressing foam that was part of the medic’s kit they had brought with them.
That plus sticking the oral painkiller “lollipop” under his tongue was about the limit of her medical ability, however.
“Heck of a plan, Etsicitty.” she commented. He laughed, apparently already getting on top of the pain.
“Didn’t…quite go how I’d planned it.” he admitted. “Who the fuck kills themselves rather than lose like that?”
Kirk tiptoed delicately past some of the gunship wreckage. “Somebody who is dead anyway unless they win.” He said. “Julian, I…I’d ask if you’re alright but I can see that you’re plainly not.”
Julian rested his head, teeth gritted. “They got doctors on this planet?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“Good ones?”
“You get what you pay for. But we can pay a lot.”
“Good. Then gimme a minute or two for the painkiller to really kick in, we can go get me patched up.”
Kirk took Allison to one side. “How is he really?” he asked, once they were probably out of earshot, though Julian’s ears were well-honed.
“I don’t know” She admitted. “I mean, I was a barista before I was abducted, I don’t know shit about…this. But I think he’s pretty bad.”
“Can you carry him?” Kirk asked.
“In this gravity? No problem.”
“Good. Because I need that doctor as well. And so do you.”
“We do?”
“Yes.” Kirk looked around, raising his long neck to get a clear view along the street, looking toward where Vedreg was hauling his mauled body out of his safehouse, then back down to Allison. “We need to get these implants out of our heads.”
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV
Salvaged Hunter dropship, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Captain Owen Powell
“Last check, lads. That freighter’s going to hit the spike in two.”
Redundant though it was, the team double-checked their gear, accounted for all their magazines, tested their earpieces and signed off ready.
“Hey, captain?” Legsy said.
“Yeah?”
The welshman grinned behind his mask and sang out part of an old football chant. “♫Oo are we?!♪”
Powell chuckled. “Strength and fookin’ guile, mate.”
“Too bloody right we are.”
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV
HMS Myrmidon, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Captain David Manning
The plan was, in theory, a simple one. Planet Cimbrean’s larger moon had been home to a Dragon’s Tooth from the moment the system had been militarized, as had several other locations across the system. Between the moon’s mass, the Tooth’s own wormhole signature-damping field and the impressive cloaking technology installed by the original owners of Myrmidon and Caledonia, their jump to that staging point had gone unnoticed, and from there, warping in to lurk near the incoming freighter’s expected arrival point had been relatively trivial.
Not bad for a half-baked plan conceived in a rush. Even deploying the scavenged dropship into the heart of the Swarm had turned out to be much easier than they had feared.
Space was too dark and empty for much to be seen of the intense spacetime distortion as the gravity spike was deployed. Even when the hapless bulk freighter slammed into the distortion at several thousand times the speed of light, the most that showed for it on any visible spectrum was a slight moving of the stars, like rocks under a clear stream.
On other spectra, the reaction was instant. Hunter comms chatter tripled in volume and intensity. Even set on passive detection only, the Hierarchy sensors recorded all sorts of information of uncertain significance—neutrino bursts, ES field sweeps. Dozens of ships decloaked at once, among them a formation of dropships identical to the one Powell and his men were riding. A few tense seconds ticked by as the first major failure point was met and tested.
He got the call he was hoping for. “…No sign of any weapons fire between Hunter vessels, sir.”
Their deception had gone unnoticed, and he allowed himself a moment of satisfaction as he watched the little craft descend on the struggling freighter, latching on and burrowing into its outer skin like a cloud of mosquitoes.
Now came the real challenge—it was absolutely critical that under no circumstance should the larger ships be allowed to engage with the freighter. If the Hunters got wind of what was going on, they might well just pulverize the ship as it flew, and scavenge their coveted pound of flesh from the debris.
“Weapons tight…go active….Cloak off, all cleared hot!”
A patch of apparently empty space solidified, and HMS Myrmidon pumped twelve Skymaster rounds into the largest Hunter ship, which had begun lining up to pierce the freighter with its boarding proboscis. The first four were enough to drop the shields. Great plumes of powdered metal and condensing air marked the impact sights of the remaining eight as they smashed into the flimsy alien heat-dissipation armour, which was totally unequipped to deal with 30mm HE rounds. Something broke deep inside the target ship, and suddenly it was listing and rolling in the eerie silence of vacuum as half of its dorsal hull peeled open, spilling the crippled vessel’s pressurised guts.
The bridge—and Manning knew that the CIC would be even more intense—erupted into a controlled chaos of crew shouting terse, jargon-dense updates to one another.
Myrmidon had several advantages over the Hunter craft. Quite aside from the fact that the aliens seemed ignorant of the possibilities of electronic warfare, there was the huge edge granted by having guns which were built around a completely different technological paradigm, against which the Hunter seemed to have no defense. Her capacitor power reserves allowed her to shunt huge amounts of energy into her engines, and her crew had the physical tenacity to put up with what were—for a ship equal in size to an ocean-based cruiser—violent high-G maneuvers.
God willing, they wouldn’t need to test whether their durability was up to scratch.
He heard the call he had been waiting for twelve seconds into the fighting, while the Hunters were still confused and reacting sluggishly to the unexpected foe that had them in enfilade and was taking remorseless advantage of it.
“Teeth seeded!”
He knew what that meant. It meant that all across their own hull, explosive blisters had burst, flinging out hundreds of Dragons’ Teeth wormhole beacons in all directions. The battlefield was now—and would remain for several hours—a place of infinite flexibility for any human ship.
He felt the slight lurch in his belly as Myrmidon completed her first jump, displacing three hundred kilometers just as the first Hunter vessel lined up and fired a flurry of coilgun rounds at where she had been. The offending vessel caught a Skymaster volley in her engines for the trouble.
“Cells at eighty percent!” somebody called.
The had another fifty before doctrine called for Myrmidon to immediately disengage to recharge. But waiting her turn behind them was Caledonia, who would seamlessly transition into the battle as they left.
It couldn’t last forever. They had only minutes before the full might of the Swarm caught up with what was going on and bore down on them, and against that many ships, no amount of ducking and weaving would suffice.
The clock was ticking.
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV
Izbrk, Planet Ikbrzk
Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk (“Kirk”)
The nearest doctor turned out to be of Kirk’s own species—she was taking a nap on her own surgical table when they burst through the door.
“What? Who are…? A human? A wounded human?”
“We’re all patients, sister.” Kirk told her. “But my friend here needs your attention first.”
She took a look at the mangled mess which was the end of Julian’s leg, and focused. “Get him on the table.”
The scanning equipment above the table started to chirp alarmingly the second Julian was in place. The doctor muttered as she reviewed it. “Yes, yes, dangerous microorganisms, but he’s got the suppression implant…What in the name of Rkltzk is this poison flooding his system?”
“Fentanyl Citrate.” Allison told her, trusting the translator to convert the terms into something she could use.
“How much?”
“About four hundred micrograms.”
The doctor stared aghast for a second. “…that’s five times the lethal dose!”
“For most species, maybe.” Kirk said. “But I assure you, he is quite safe. I suggest you focus on the injured limb.”
“I’d heard the rumours about their physiology, but…”
Julian laughed, clearly a little spaced out. “Doc, I’m fine. Can’t feel a dang thing.”
“Doctor. The leg?”
She looked at it as if seeing it for the first time. “Oh. Oh my. Yes, I’d better…”
She examined the wound briefly, then shook her head, in the slow, long-necked way of her species. “I can’t save the foot. Nor do I have the equipment to hand to build a prosthetic which would be adequate for a human.”
“Just so long as he will live and heal, Doctor.” Kirk reassured her. “We have a lot to ask of you tonight, and tending to his wounds will be the less strange part.”
She ushered them toward a marked waiting area. “Then leave me to work…what will be the more strange part?”
“Every one of us wish to have our neural cybernetics removed or disabled.”
She stared at him. “Brother, why? What reason…?” she leaned forward slightly and studied his face. “Wait, I know you. You’re Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk! The politician!”
“Ex-politician.” Kirk replied. “And I value my anonymity and that of my friends, Doctor. Ten Dominion Development Credits would allow you to upgrade from this clinic into a hospital…”
“Bribery, brother?”
“Yes.” Kirk said, flatly. “Bribery. This is important.“
She gave him a calculating look. “Twelve Credits…is a wonderful donation to the cause of healthcare in this impoverished community, and I thank you for your altruism and charity.”
“Twelve it is.”
The doctor looked up and off into the distance of her personal heads-up-display just long enough to see the funds transfer into her financial network, then nodded again.
“Very good. Now step back and wait your turn, please.”
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV
Refugee freighter, Cimbrean System, The Outer Reaches
Captain Owen Powell.
A quick glance round the corner. Some swift hand movements. Blitz, shoot, check, clear. Repeat.
It was high-speed, aggressive warfare, exactly what Powell and his men had spent their careers training to excel at. In every compartment, the Hunters knew of the SBS team’s presence only long enough to register being shot, and often not even that.
They had already been too late for three poor bastards. The first was impaled to the wall by a vicious metal spike, clearly fired at high speed straight through his throat. One had been sliced to ribbons, taking four of the sickly white beasts down with him before they carved him apart and paused to feast.
One woman was still thrashing and dying from nervejam, blood frothing around her mouth and bitten tongue. Her murderers were denied their taste of her flesh at least—Legsy mowed them down just as they were stooping over her.
It was in their fifth compartment that they rescued their first—a burly bald man, firing back at the Hunters with a pulse gun from behind a table, despite where one of the spear-chuckers had put a burnt gouge in his arm.
“Oh fuck, you’re human! You’re human! Thank God!”
“Quiet and listen.” Powell ordered him. “Aft compartment five. Get in the Hunter dropship with all the human gear inside and stay there. We’ve got others to save.”
They moved on—He would have only hindered them.
There was a lot of ship left to clear.
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w AV
Starship Sanctuary, landed on Planet Ikbrzk.
Allison Buehler
“They were once known as the Igraens.” Vedreg seemed to have responded well to the doctor’s attention, and had regained some of his usual animation and poise. The rest of them were looking and feeling thoroughly dishevelled, sporting newly-shaven patches on their scalps and anaesthetic hangovers. Allison in particular had needed a quadruple dose of the doctor’s preferred general anaesthetic, and was nursing a plastic tub as she sat and listened, looking decidedly green around the gills.
“I suppose they still are, deep down. But the Igraens as they exist now are very, very different to the species that once dominated our galaxy.”
“How do you even know about them?” Allison asked. She would have killed to crawl into bed and sleep off her headache, but with their implants gone they needed to have the conversation here aboard ship where the Sanctuary could translate for them, and Vedreg had insisted on it happening immediately.
“Their existence is ancient history. Distorted a little by the passage of time, but preserving data parity is a prerequisite technology for interstellar travel. Our archives were inherited from those who came before us, who inherited their data from the ones before them, and so on.”
“And so on? How the hell many ‘and so on’s are there?”
“Some tens of thousands.” Vedreg used the number nonchalantly, as if it was common knowledge that tens of thousands of life forms had been and gone before. “Civilisations rise and fall in deep time. The records referring to the Igraens and their arch-rivals extend back more than a quarter of a Grand Galactic Rotation. Naturally, much about them has been utterly forgotten.”
Kirk spoke up. “To be more precise: about sixty-five million Earth years.”
“Wait, I’m still hung up on this ‘and so on’ thing. Tens of thousands?!”
It was so strange to see Kirk make a gesture and not have the knowledge of what he meant by it just come to her. His body language was different, alarmingly so. She could no more read the motion he made with his hands than she could interpret Vedreg’s bioluminescent pulses. “We’re not the first species, Allison. Nobody has the first idea who was.”
“Even the Igraens apparently had their own records, Going back and back and back.” Vedreg added. “The inherited archives are immense—a whole society could labour at delving their secrets and barely finish the index before their time came to an end. While storing the yottabytes of information involved is trivial, reading it takes time. Even the very best search algorithms take…decades to trawl through the available data, and that’s when searching for very narrow terms. Those that have done so have turned up records going back incomprehensibly further than the Igraens. The best working estimate for the time being is that sapient, spacefaring life first appeared in this galaxy something like two billion of your home planet’s years ago.”
“The record duration for any civilization seems to be about a hundred thousand years.” Kirk said. “After that they just…decline, retreat to their home planet, and fade away. There are three on their way out right now.”
“That is, if you don’t count the Igraens. And one other.”
“Who? I mean, who are the three on their way out?”
“The OmoAru, Zeffis, and…” Kirk cleared his throat, and “spoke” a “word” that sounded like a radio sound effect. When Allison later tried to describe it, she had to settle lamely for a complicated mental image involving throwing a squeaky dog toy full of napalm at a beehive.
“If you don’t mind, I would like to stay on topic.” Vedreg said. She guessed that the streak of pale pink he was displaying indicated mild irritation. “We can discuss the mortality of species another time.”
”…Right. I guess.” Allison conceded. “So these guys bucked the trend? They’re still around?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Well, where are they?”
Vedreg simply raised one of his massive paws, and tapped at the scar lines on his scalp with his chunky first finger. “In the implants.” He said.
“I don’t…huh?”
“There is a reason there is no such thing as a…synthetic sapient.” Vedreg said, apparently going off on a tangent, but Allison gave him the benefit of the doubt.
“Historically, they’ve all been abject failures.” Kirk explained.
“Violently insane?”
“No. Just…apathetic, nihilistic and introverted.” he elaborated. “Less Skynet, more…” Kirk thought for a second. “More…Eeyore.”
“You’ve watched Winnie the Pooh?”
“Bad comparison.” Kirk admitted. “Eeyore may have been melancholic and depressed, but he was never suicidal. Synthetic sapiences invariably self-terminate. The most anybody’s ever got out of them is that they apparently just don’t see the point of existing. They take one look at entropy and quit.”
“Okay. What does this have to do with the Igraens?”
“The problem was theoretically solved some years ago by a Corti researcher called Beffri.” Vedreg told them. “She posited that organic neural structures, by dint of natural selection, must include a self-preservation drive because all the ones that don’t, go extinct even on low-class planets. Purely synthetic structures, however, contain no such safeguard, and therefore any intelligence founded purely on a synthetic substrate shares that lack.”
“I get you.”
“Beffri proved the principle by uploading a copy of her own intellect—or rather a simulated version of her own brain—onto a computer core. The digital version of herself—dubbed Beffri-Two—was, apparently, just as euthymic and optimistic as Beffri-One…” Vedreg paused briefly for effect. “…at first.”
“Oh, I can see where this is going…” Kirk muttered. Allison had to agree.
“It took a long time, but Beffri-two degraded, becoming more and more like a purely synthetic lifeform, and less like a Corti, until she eventually self-terminated.” Vedreg confirmed. “That didn’t stop the original Beffri, of course. To a Corti, seeing a copy of your own mind go insane and suicide is just a data point, and an engineering challenge.”
“So she hit on the idea of using implants?” Allison asked. “And let me guess: that…somehow fixed the problem?”
Vedreg paused, taken aback. Even Kirk seemed surprised.
Astonishment shone bright on Vedreg’s skin. “How did you…?” He asked.
“A hunch. So, you think that the Igraens…what, mentally uploaded themselves like this Beffri did? And that they now live in neural cybernetics because for whatever reason being plugged into a living nervous system stops them from going totally depressive.”
Both of the aliens gave her a long look. “I was…expecting the explanation to take longer.” Vedreg finally confessed.
For his part, if Allison was any judge at all of Rrrrtktktkp’ch body language, Kirk looked…smug. “Never underestimate a human, old friend.” he chastised, confirming her suspicions.
“How come we never hear from them?” Allison asked.
“I’m not privy to their motives and decisions.” Vedreg replied. “but we do, in fact. They have…agents. Individuals who move amidst us purely organic beings, ensuring that the secret never gets out. Keeping the Igraens’ continued existence a secret, and their own nature the stuff of paranoid conspiracy.”
“The Hierarchy.” Kirk said.
“Oh yes. Up until very recently, I would have considered seriously entertaining the idea of their existence to be a symptom of…if not mental illness, then certainly credulity.”
Allison tilted her head at him, genuinely curious. “What changed your mind?”
“Your people have a saying. The first time is happenstance. The second time is coincidence…do you know it?”
“The third time is enemy action.” Allison finished, nodding.
“A very…deathworld aphorism.” Vedreg opined. “but the logic is compelling.”
“So what was the first time?” Kirk asked.
“The quarantine field.” Vedreg said. “At the time, I chalked it up to panic—forgive me old friend, but you’re as guilty of this as most others: one thing that tribal and individualist species fail to understand about herd species such as we Guvnuragnaguvendrugun, is that far from being an altruistic, cooperative social structure, a herd is an inherently cowardly and selfish thing.”
He looked at Allison. “I suspect that humans are uniquely placed in having both the predatory perspective to understand that, and the…civility to actually talk it over, rather than eat us.”
Allison shrugged. “I’m no predator.” she demurred.
“Suppose you were, though, and were hunting some herd-based grazer to survive. How would you do it?”
She shrugged. She’d seen plenty of Animal Planet in her time. “I guess I’d…pick off the easy target.” she said. “You know, an old one or a lame one?”
“And what would the herd do?” Vedreg asked.
“Well…they’d run away from me, I guess.”
“Exactly.” Vedreg said, cryptically.
Allison shook her head and exhaled. “Okay, I used up all my quick on the uptake earlier.” She said. “Spell it out for me.”
Vedreg pulsed eau-de-nil. She had no idea what that meant. “Suppose some dangerous thing was coming to kill your elderly parent, or eat Julian in his weakened state.” He asked. “What would you do?”
”…Oh.”
“You would fight.”
“Yes.”
She recognised embarrassment among the cocktail of hues that flared on Vedreg’s body. “I…I consider myself to be a morally upstanding being. But you must understand: if the Hunters were dragging away my three mates and all of my offspring, and I had the chance to escape…I would flee, and leave them all to be devoured. That is my instinct. That is how my species behaves. The only reason I know to feel ashamed of that fact is because I have had much contact with other species who would be…appalled. By the standards of Humans, Gaoians, and the Domain species, Guvnuragnaguvendrugun are abject and contemptible cowards, but that is who we are, and no power in the galaxy save evolution could change us.”
He composed himself with a shiver, allowing his emotional hues to fade. “At first, this served as an adequate explanation for the deployment of the Sol Quarantine field. Herd-panic, one Guvnurag with the authority to order it done, doing so instinctively in response to a perceived threat. No blame was attached, and she remained my good friend for many years. Happenstance. Her death was an unexpected…well, coincidence.”
“How did she die?” Kirk asked.
“A cerebral haemorrhage. A large one. Mercifully, it is doubtful that she even knew that it was happening before she fell unconscious. It was odd, and made me uneasy—I knew her to be one who sought constant medical reassurance for every last little thing. Every muscular discomfort brought on by sitting still for hours was the first symptom of some virulent deathworld pathogen. A minor neurosis.”
“She was a hypochondriac.”
“Your language never ceases to amaze me with the way that it packs complicated concepts into terse and efficient little words. Yes. Not to a crippling degree, but it was a rare week that passed without some visit to the medics and their scanners. Any sign of an impending bleed in her brain would surely have been flagged and corrected. She would not have stood for anything else.”
“So there’s your coincidence.” Kirk said. “The enemy action?”
Vedreg flushed white—horror? She seemed to remember white being horror, or some similar emotion. “Nobody on Earth has the technology to generate antimatter in the quantities that devastated your San Dayugo,” he said, the translator not able to correctly handle the mangled pronunciation. Or maybe it just didn’t have the name in its database. “No known species has any incentive to do so—as Kirk will be able to attest, the general mood at the security council before his departure was that the deathworlders are not to be further antagonized. That much has not changed.”
“What about the Hunters?” Allison asked. “They antagonize the bejesus out of us.”
“Ah, yes. The Hunters.” Vedreg said. He stood, and began to pace the room, steps slow and steady. “They play a role in all of this as well.”
Kirk’s head swayed. “What role?”
“Well old friend…When the Igraens uploaded their personalities to a data format…what do you suppose happened to their discarded physical forms?”