The Fila Epiphany

by J. J. Green

  Cariad said, “Is there anything else?” It felt like long past the time to say goodbye to the android, hopefully forever. She couldn’t wait to leave and close the door on the room of eerie mannequins.

  “Only one more thing,” said Strongquist. “I see that you’re irritated and impatient. You don’t feel any confidence in anything I have to say.”

  “You got that right.”

  “It’s regrettable, but perhaps inevitable in the circumstances. Well, in that case I’ll deactivate myself in a moment. The reactivation process is simple if you ever need our services in the future.”

  “Yes, it’s easy enough to start you all up again,” Cariad said, almost flippantly. Yet now that it came to saying goodbye to Strongquist, her emotions did a somersault. Her irritation gave way to something else. She could hardly believe it, but she felt a little sorry for the machine. After all, it was self-aware, or it seemed to be, yet it was turning off its consciousness without knowing if it would ever reawaken.

  Cariad was reminded of the moment she’d been sedated prior to her cryonic suspension for the long trip to Concordia. She’d fallen asleep not knowing if she would ever wake. If she was honest with herself, she’d been terrified. Right up to the moment the anesthetist put her under, she’d been reconsidering her decision to join the colony. In the end, it was partly the notion of how foolish she would look backing out at the last minute that had prevented her from calling the whole thing off.

  As he watched her, Strongquist suddenly looked more human than ever.

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” Cariad asked. “Turning yourself off, I mean? We might never reactivate you, you know. Especially not after everything that’s happened. I don’t think anyone will want to take the risk.”

  The Guardian gazed directly into her eyes before answering. “I have no choice in the matter. As I’ve always said, the success of the colony is prioritized in our programming. We understand that our presence at this time is detrimental, so we must deactivate. However, I would be lying if I were to say that the action carries no personal cost. I try to think of it like this: While I am shut down, I shall be in the same state as I was before I was created. It didn’t bother me then. Why should it bother me now?”

  To Cariad, Strongquist’s words sounded like mind games. “Maybe we will need you again at some point. I guess we should stop drawing this out. What was the final thing you wanted to tell me?”

  “It’s only a suggestion. There is a holo on the Mistral’s database that might help you and the other colonists, but I would advise you to watch it alone before showing the others. You may judge it to be too alarming. I wasn’t able to show it to you previously because it gives away the secret of our origins, but I’m aware you doubt the veracity of our statements regarding the conditions on Earth prior to our departure. This holo was prepared for the time when we revealed our true identity. One of our creators explains the history and reasons behind our manufacture. I’ll send it to your personal files. If you view this holo, I’m confident you’ll be assured that we were not lying when we told you that Earth is all but uninhabitable now. It’s imperative that the colonists remain on Concordia and do their best to build a thriving settlement. There’s no future for them on Earth.”

  “Okay,” said Cariad. “I’ll watch it.”

  Strongquist said, “Very well. It’s goodbye, then.” He smiled. It was a sad smile, and a rare event for the android.

  “Goodbye,” Cariad replied, then she realized he couldn’t hear her. He had already deactivated. The smile on the android’s face was frozen and would remain so until someone decided to wake him up.

  Cariad wished Strongquist had given her time to leave before he’d turned himself off. Now she was the only living thing in a room of figures like life-sized mechanical dolls whose gears had wound down.

  She quickly went out and closed the door, then pressed the key that locked it. Despite all of Strongquists’ words, she didn’t fully trust the Guardians not to reactivate themselves. As well, Natural Movement members roamed free among the colonists, and there was no telling what any of them might do. She wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them tried to reprogram the androids and turn them into killing machines. Not very “natural” killing machines, it had to be said, but the terrorists had already shown themselves capable of truly impressive feats of cognitive dissonance. Bombs were also “unnatural” but that hadn’t bothered them.

  Cariad paused outside the locked door. There was so much she had to do, yet for a moment, she couldn’t move. Although the Guardians’ interference had nearly brought the colony to its knees, their presence and the high tech they’d brought had felt like a safety net. Now, the colonists of Concordia were on their own.

  ***

  Cariad walked through the corridors of the Mistral to the bridge, where the second-in-command of the Nova Fortuna had taken control. Addleson was reclining in the captain’s chair where the Guardian Faina had once sat. Addleson was a very different character from the cold, aloof android. He was suave and convivial and had a penchant for luxury. Cariad wasn’t sure where the man’s traits had come from. They weren’t ones she had deliberately selected for among those that were genetically heritable. Perhaps they were an unforeseen expression of certain genes or were conjoined with other attributes. Though Cariad had been at the top of her field when she’d departed Earth, the discipline of genetics still held mysteries neither she nor other experts had managed to solve.

  “Cariad,” Addleson said when he noticed her enter the bridge. “Been tucking our friends in? It was way past their bed time.”

  “You can say that again,” she replied as she went over to him. “What have you found out about the Mistral?”

  “Well, first off, she seems to be pretty much an open book. We haven’t hit any security lockouts. Everything we encounter in the ship’s system opens easily, but frankly, a lot of what we’re finding is beyond our understanding. We’re reading the instructions the Guardians left behind.”

  “They left instructions?”

  “Yes. It’s all set out in English.”

  Cariad recalled how Strongquist had told her that English had evolved and the Guardian spoke a version the colonists wouldn’t understand. It looked like the Guardians had prepared well for their deactivation.

  “When do you think you’ll be able to take full control of the ship?” she asked.

  “Probably another couple of days. One thing that concerns me a little is the weapons. We don’t have anything like them aboard the Nova Fortuna. All we have on there are a handful of pulse lasers to blow apart asteroids we encountered on the voyage. If we have to use the Mistral’s weapons, I don’t think I’ll have much of a clue what I’m doing. Are we likely to need to use them? When I realized the Mistral is equipped with rail guns etcetera, I thought it seemed overkill. Did the Guardians think we might attack them when they arrived?”

  “No, they weren’t intended for us.” Cariad recalled Strongquist’s earlier divulgence that there was sentient life on nearby star systems.

  “No?” Addleson said. “Then who…? Whoa. I hope you don’t mean what I think you mean.” His customarily upbeat expression took a hit from the new information.

  “I do,” said Cariad. “So maybe you should prioritize familiarizing your crew with the scanners. We have to keep a close watch for unexpected visitors.”

  “All right. I’ll get on that.”

  “Do you have all the people you need?” Cariad asked.

  “I have enough for the moment, but don’t tell me I said that if we find ourselves under attack. Do you think it’s likely?”

  “We’ve been here for months. As we haven’t been attacked yet, I’m guessing there’s nothing nearby that wants us dead right away. And Strongquist didn’t mention anything about spotting alien starships, only that they’d seen signs of sentience. Our luck should hold out for a while, I hope.”

  “Right. Still, I’ll have someone analyze all the recent scanner r
eadings.”

  “That would be smart.”

  Addleson rubbed his hands together. “This isn’t too bad. I have a ship of my own to run, which makes a change. What’s more, the Mistral’s so up-to-date, it’s like it’s from the future. Scratch that. To us, it is from the future, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Best of all,” Addleson continued, “Geisen’s green with envy.”

  Cariad laughed. Geisen was the pilot of the Nova Fortuna, and Addleson had been bridesmaid to that bride for his entire career.

  “What are you going to do now?” Addleson asked. “Are you going to interrogate Garwin? He’s been pretty quiet in his cabin the last couple of days.”

  “I guess I should. To be honest, I don’t know what to do with him. He’s devastated by Twyla’s suicide. I feel like I should leave him alone, though I won’t of course. I have to do something about the Natural Movement and Garwin’s my only source of information at the moment.”

  “I don’t understand how he can grieve over that bitch.”

  “Me neither. But love’s strange. He did seem to really love her.”

  Addleson wrinkled his nose. “I’m happy to let you deal with him. I’ll stick to flying starships.”

  Cariad left the bridge. At first, she walked toward the cabin where Garwin was confined, but then she changed direction. She’d given in to her urge to postpone that difficult conversation. She needed more time to get her thoughts in order about the man. As far as she understood it, according to what Gens had told her, he’d been playing a double game for a long time. While pretending to be a placatory, appeasing spokesperson for the Gens, he had actually been organizing their dissent. The alternative Gen settlement had been his idea and he’d been instrumental in its construction and the transfer of the supplies.

  Yet Cariad also thought that despite appearances, Garwin could easily have been fully aware of Twyla’s involvement in the Natural Movement. If he was capable of such deep deception, he could even be the Natural Movement ring leader for all she knew. Perhaps he’d wanted to move all the Gens to the caves to concentrate the population and make them easier to kill. She would have to approach interviewing him very cautiously.

  Meanwhile, Strongquist’s mention of a holo made by the Guardians’ creators that explained the reasons behind their manufacture had piqued her curiosity. To the Gens, Earth was ancient history—an exotic country they would never visit, or so Ethan had explained. Perhaps it was almost a myth to them. But Cariad was deeply curious about her former home. From her perspective, she’d departed it less than three years previously. She felt a strong desire to see it in its most recent form.

  She walked to the room where Strongquist had shown her ancient holos of the original Natural Movement infiltrator, Frederick Aparicio. The room was empty, so she went inside. It took her a while to figure out how to access her personal files from the interface but eventually she managed it. A motionless holo of a young man appeared in the room’s center. It was the beginning of the recording, but Cariad hesitated before she let it play.

  It was the man’s clothes that made her pause. They were extremely worn and patched—little more than rags. Yet according to Strongquist this person had helped to build the Mistral and create the Guardians. Also, though the man was young, his face was haggard with tiredness. He didn’t look ill, however. Strongquist had said a disease had wiped out most of humanity, breaking down the last remains of civilization. The look of desperation, sorrow, and perhaps anger on the man’s face was also striking. What had happened to her home planet?

  Cariad started the holo. The man spoke, but the movement of his lips didn’t match the words she heard. His speech was being translated into English she could understand. The distraction of the effect was short-lived as she heard what he said.

  “Hello, person of the future.” The man’s tone was sarcastic. “Or are you from the past? One of the cryonically suspended ones? Congratulations on surviving your long freezing. What was it like, I wonder, going to sleep then waking up a couple of hundred years later aboard a starship? I guess I’ll never know. None of us will. To be frank, we’re screwed. We’ll never leave Earth because we gave our lives for yours.”

  Chapter Four

  On his third morning out in the wild, Ethan decided to do something he didn’t think anyone had attempted yet. He would see how high he could take the flitter. As he ate his breakfast, he looked down at the beach below. After the sluglimpet attack, he’d flown as far as he could until tiredness overcame him.

  Yet now, as he looked down, he could see what seemed to be traces of more sluglimpets in the sand. Their many legs had left long scratches all over the ground as they’d tried to reach him. Ethan doubted the creatures could have followed him after his long flight the previous night so these were new ones. He gave a shiver. If he’d tried to go on his journey without a flitter, he probably wouldn’t have survived the first night.

  As he watched, waves were washing away the sluglimpet tracks. The tide was coming in. Soon, the shore would bear no trace of the predators. Concordia was a dangerous place to live.

  Ethan finished his breakfast and brushed the crumbs out of the flitter. It was time for his experiment. He closed all the windows and set the controls to rise. Maintaining the same position, the flitter began to lift. Ethan turned on his recorder and settled back into his seat, looking all around at the view.

  The beach was soon a strip of gray between two blankets, one blue, one green. All around, the sky was clear and the sun hung suspended just above the horizon. According to the flitter’s control panel the outside temperature was dropping quickly, and Ethan began to feel it as cold air filtered inside the vehicle. He wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and wondered how high the flitter would go. Would it rise into space if he let it?

  Clouds became visible at the ocean’s edge, then Ethan realized the clouds were hanging over land. He could see the continent that lay to the east. He remembered from lessons at school that Concordia had one large continent, two smaller ones, and an archipelago of large and small islands in a string across the largest ocean, which Ethan was looking out over. He wondered if what he was seeing wasn’t a continent after all but one of the larger islands.

  The flitter rose higher still. Ethan turned his attention inland. The first feature he noticed was a mountain range that ran down the continent. Then as he went higher, he saw a river beyond it. The river seemed to begin in the range’s foothills then grew wider and wider until it flowed out of sight.

  Ethan was getting very cold. His breath was fogging and fine water droplets were appearing on the inside of the flitter’s windows. He also felt light-headed. Of course, he realized, the flitter wasn’t airtight like a starship. He was running out of oxygen. It was time to return to the beach. He set the controls to take the flitter down. He’d only been up at a high elevation for a few minutes but it wasn’t safe to remain there for long. Going into space wasn’t an option after all, which was no bad thing. He’d spent most of his life out in the black but now he preferred the wide spaces and sweet-smelling air of Concordia.

  When he’d returned to the surface, Ethan decided it was time to leave the beach and head into the interior. If he stuck to the coast, he might only see the same landscape and wildlife all the way around the continent, but venturing into the heart of the land would lead him to something different. He also wanted to try to escape the horrible sluglimpets. Perhaps there was a region they didn’t inhabit.

  He set a course for the mountains. As he flew, he turned on his recorder and began a report on the sluglimpet attack the previous evening. He described how the pulse fire from his weapon had barely deterred the creature and that it was only physically pushing it off the vehicle that had saved him. He paused as he remembered how the sluglimpets were not so easy to remove when they were stuck to a living being. Ethan opened a window and examined the side of the flitter the sluglimpet had clung on to. The paint was entirely eaten away and the metal under
neath it was seared, as if the vehicle had been on fire.

  Ethan continued speaking into the recorder: “The sluglimpets are a menace. As long as they exist, life is going to be hard for us on this continent. A fast adult can outrun them, but they move quietly and can easily sneak up on people. Once a sluglimpet catches you, the fittest person doesn’t stand a chance. If you’re attacked in an enclosed space, it might not be possible to escape.

  “Outside the electric fences, no one will be able to go out after dark or leave doors or windows open if there are sluglimpets in the area. Even inside the fences we aren’t completely safe. During the First Night Attack the creatures climbed the fence over the dead bodies of others. It’s lucky for us the sluglimpets aren’t intelligent or it might be nearly impossible for us to settle the planet. We would have to go to war with them.”

  Ethan hesitated before he went on, “I hate the sluglimpets. They killed two people who were very close to me. Yet on the other hand, the animals were only acting on instinct. They live by eating other animals, and we’re just food to them. While a part of me wants to see them all exterminated, another side of me thinks that would be wrong. Concordia was their planet before it was ours. We’re the interlopers. And though I was horrified by what they did, what Cariad and I did to them was horrible too. We burned them alive. It was what we had to do, but that doesn’t seem to make it right. I guess we have to accept that colonizing this planet is an aggressive act. We’re taking what isn’t ours so we can live. We shouldn’t kid ourselves about that.”

  Turning off the recorder, Ethan focused on the landscape ahead. He’d set the flitter’s elevation to one hundred and fifty meters and the mountains were slowly drawing nearer. Maybe the different landscape would be free of the sluglimpets. He still had a long way to go to find out. According to the flitter’s interface he wouldn’t arrive until nightfall, even though the vehicle was flying at its top speed. To help pass the time, Ethan watched and recorded the view of the ground below.