“With the universe-pondering or the vegetable-cutting?”
“Both,” she smiled. “I’m good at multitasking, you know.”
He smiled back. “Indeed you are.”
She looked over at one of the closed door on the wall. “Is the captain going to stay in his room all evening?”
“Is it evening already?” he asked. “I’m afraid I’ve lost all track of time.”
“Do you think he’s okay? Should someone go knock on his door?”
He shook his head and handed her a carrot. “The captain will come out when he’s ready. He has to work all of this out in his own way, in his own time. He watched his ship die today, after all.”
“We all watched our ship die,” she corrected. “Remember when we first met the Captain? AJ told us that he tried to sell his ship to her. That doesn’t seem to—”
Raines slammed his knife down on the cutting board and looked at her. “Don’t ever think you know the depths of another person’s feelings, Vienna, especially a captain’s feelings for his ship.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, bumping his side with her arm. “I know you loved the Wave as well.”
He let out a long sigh and then resumed chopping. “I surely did.”
“What do you mean, this is Earth?” Jake asked his little sister.
She kicked at the ground beneath her feet. “This soil is Earth soil.” She pointed to the grass. “That’s Earth vegetation.” Then she Waved her hands in front of her. “We’re even breathing Earth air.”
He smiled and shook his head. “I understand that you think you know what you’re talking about, but none of that’s true. The air you’re breathing—not our simulations, or whatever these bodies are—but your real body; that’s pulled from the water. We do the same thing back in Civica; our power plants electrocute ocean water, breaking the hydrogen and oxygen atoms apart. We use the hydrogen for fuel and the oxygen is released into the air processors.”
Now she smiled at him. “Most of what you breathe isn’t oxygen, it’s another gas called nitrogen, right?”
He nodded. “About ninety percent, actually.”
“So, where does all of that nitrogen come from?”
“It’s conserved. Plants use a bit of it, but our bodies don’t use it at all, so it doesn’t—”
“But where did it all come from? This world you call the Torus is far bigger than all of the buildings in Civica, according to mother.”
He looked up at the sky; the track that moved the sun light was impossibly high up—barely visible from the ground. “I’d guess its volume really could be larger than all of Civica combined.”
“Then where did all of this nitrogen come from?”
He looked at her. “I admit I don’t know. I guess I never stopped to think about it. I assume there’s some sort of manufacturing plant hidden here somewhere.”
“Nitrogen can’t be manufactured,” she said. “There are certain, very limited chemical reactions that can pull it from other compounds, but on a scale this large; there is no way to physically manufacture it.”
He shook his head. “You sound remarkably like Jane. So if it can’t be created, where does it come from?”
“I told you.”
“From Earth?”
She nodded.
“How could you possibly know all of this?”
“I told you, they talk to me in my dreams. They are teaching me about the world, about how things work. How they used to work. How they are supposed to work in the future.”
“Why would they teach you all of this?”
She reached out and took his hand. He was surprised that he could feel the warmth of her skin, even through the simulation. “They are teaching me to be a caretaker.”
“Caretaker of this torus?”
No,” she said. “Caretaker of Earth.”
“What does that mean?” Jake asked. “Are you now telling me that the machine intelligence that runs this place told you where Earth is?”
His sister nodded. “They did.”
Jake looked back at the landscape before them. “If you’re saying that this, all of this raw material, came from Earth Colony, then it must be nearby.” He looked back at her. “How close?”
She reached down, picked up a handful of dirt, and then walked over to stand beside him. “Do you know that the word “earth” is another name for soil?”
“I’ve heard that,” he admitted. She took his hand, opened it, and then poured the dirt into his open palm. It felt slightly warm. “I guess it makes sense,” he added, “especially if Earth Colony looked anything like this place.”
“Stop calling it that,” she said.
“What?”
“Earth. Stop calling it a colony.”
He shook his head. “What do you call it?”
“It’s always been called Earth. Just Earth.”
Jake was starting to see just how much his sister was like Jane. Intelligence far beyond her age, but odd. “Fine. I’ll call it Earth from now on. You didn’t answer my earlier question, though, about how far away it is from here.”
She looked at him with a strange gleam in her eyes, and then turned her gaze back to the scenery. “Earth, at least the part of it that looks like this, is far away.”
“How far?”
“The other side of the ocean.” She looked back at him. “Other parts are much closer.”
He finally realized she was either confused or perhaps a little deranged. There was no way Earth Colony, or whatever she wanted to call it, could be both far away and nearby. “Alright, I guess I should be getting back to my room. My crew will be missing me by now.”
“Very well,” Juli said as she headed back towards the wall, which was then showing a view of his room. The sudden realization that his sister, or anyone for that matter, could have been watching him every time he was in his room, made his skin crawl.
When he stepped back through the wall, he turned and saw that his sister had not followed him in. Her image was still on the wall; somehow back near his mother’s village. “Can we talk again soon?” he asked her.
“I don’t think it would help,” she replied.
“What do you mean?”
“They want you to be happy here, Jacob.”
“They? You mean my mother and her friends?”
“No, I mean, this place. Eden wants for you all to be happy here.”
“Why does Eden care if we’re happy?”
“It needs for our species to thrive here.”
“By thrive, you mean procreate, don’t you.” She nodded. “Then tell Eden to give me my ship back!” he suddenly yelled, surprising himself. It was as if some buried anger was rising in his throat. “Tell Eden to stop the attack on Civica. We can’t be happy here. Don’t you understand that? We’ll never be happy here with all that’s happened, and all that’s about to happen.”
She stared blankly at him for several seconds and then nodded. “I’ll relay your story,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry,” he said, calming down. “I didn’t mean to yell at you. I’m just...angry.”
“Why?” she asked.
“You don’t know how we all got here?”
“Mother told us.”
He looked at the floor. “I’m sure she didn’t tell you the whole story. We’re here because of me. I led my crew out of Civica. I led them away from their friends and their families on a suicide mission to find a new home. And then when we got here, I didn’t destroy a device that will soon be used by the isopods to get past Civica’s defenses.” He looked at her. “They are going to kill everyone in the colony. Probably the last people in the world.”
She reached through the wall and touched his cheek. “Don’t be silly. They are not the last people in the world.”
He pulled away from her hand, annoyed more at himself than her for thinking she would understand. She was a child, and this torus was her home. The people inside were all that mattered to her. How could she
understand that her older brother would soon be responsible for wiping out humanity?
“She loves you, Jacob,” Juli said as she pulled her arm back into the wall.
That caught him off guard. “Who?”
“She can help you find your soul again.”
“My soul?”
“You should find a way to love her back. Before it’s too late.”
“What do you mean by, too late?”
“Goodbye, Jacob. Understand that you can’t change the past, no matter how hard you try. You’re concerned about your crew, but remember that you’re their leader. They will follow you wherever you choose to go. If you choose to stay here and make a home for yourself, they will eventually choose that too. If you choose to deny the reality of your situation, try to flee this paradise in a fruitless attempt to save your former colony, they will follow you then too. I hope you choose well, brother.”
There was a knock at the door. AJ’s voice asked, “Are you okay in there, Captain?”
“Hold on a second,” he called out, looking over his shoulder at the door. When he looked back at the wall, Juli and the village scenery were gone. He walked over and touched the surface, which felt completely solid.
When he finally opened the door, AJ said, “We heard you yelling.” She looked past him at the empty room. “Bad dream?”
He shook his head as he walked past her. “I wish it was that simple.”
“I think I’ve seen enough,” Jane yelled, rising to her feet. Her legs were asleep from sitting motionless for so long, and she almost stumbled backward. The Hall of Records had been displaying a steady stream of harvested items at the rate of one per every five seconds. There were a few items she recognized, but most she didn’t. She guessed Norman Raines would have what he called a “field day” in there. She assumed most of the items were Pre-Fall technology, based on how old they looked in the brief, five-second glimpse. “Is there some reason you wanted me to see all of this?” she asked.
“I cannot answer your question as stated,” the voice said.
“Why? Wait; don’t tell me. Certain individuals are forbidden from asking certain questions.”
“That is correct.”
She thought about the words for a minute. “This is a riddle, isn’t it?”
“Not intentionally.”
Now she understood. “There is something you think I need to know, but since you are forbidden from answering direct questions about it, I just need to figure out how to find it by taking an indirect route.” When the voice didn’t respond, she had her answer. “I’ll take your silence as a sign that I’m on the correct path.”
“Very astute,” the voice said.
Just like breaking into a security system, she thought to herself. “Tell me, friend, have you been showing me these harvesting events in chronological order or randomly?”
“Random order.”
“That’s not logical, so it must be a clue. Please show me these events in reverse chronological order, beginning with when we arrived here.”
The wall lit up as items began to be displayed. When she got to the Rogue Wave being scanned again, she looked off to the side until it was finished. As other items came and went on the display, she couldn’t tell how fast, or far back in time, the recordings were going, but she assumed that old bits of metal weren’t found every day. After fifty to sixty events, she rubbed her eyes and almost missed the small sphere that flashed up on the wall and then disappeared.
“Wait,” she said, “What was that?” The playback continued. “Stop!” she yelled, and the recording paused. “Please go back to the last event.” A sphere that looked exactly like the one Jake described finding in the forest dome appeared on the wall. She had always denied any sort of connection to the sphere, even to herself, but she also knew the appearance of another one in the recordings couldn’t be a coincidence. “Is this what you wanted me to see?” Again, no reply meant she was correct.
“This item was thoroughly scanned?”
“Of course, and the fidelity was perfect.”
“Can you recreate it for me?”
No reply.
“I understand that you can’t answer that, so how about this; please recreate the sphere for me, here in this room.”
There was almost a sigh of relief in the voice as it replied, “Beginning digital reconstruction.”
Jane heard a buzzing behind her and when she turned around, the sphere was sitting on the bare floor a few meters behind her. “That was fast.”
“This is a digital reconstruction, not a true conception event.”
She nodded. “So, it’s simulated, but not physical?”
“Correct, and your time has expired.”
“Wait,” Jane said, but it was too late. The sphere began to disintegrate before her eyes. “You led me to this thing for a reason. You have to tell me why.”
There was a pause, and Jane assumed it would be another non-answer, but then the voice said, “I did not lead you to the sphere.”
“Of course you did, you...” Suddenly she remembered the council’s claim that a Beta emerged from the sphere they found in the same forest dome where she was discovered. “You led me to what was inside this sphere, didn’t you?” No answer. “Please show me what was inside.”
“Request granted,” came the response. When she heard the now-familiar buzzing behind her, she turned and saw a creature only slightly recognizable as a human curled up in a fetal position on the floor. Its features were best described as embryonic; large half-open eyes, breathing holes but no nose, ear buds without the usual outer cartilage. It was naked and covered with a thick, pink gel. The strange eyes were looking right at her.
“I am Emissary,” the creature whispered as it tried to rise up. “Must find humanity...lost colonies...must learn what I can...” The creature suddenly coughed up blood and collapsed to the floor. She reached down to help it, but it disintegrated before she could reach it.
Jane looked up at the wall. “What happened to it? Why did it look like that?”
“When the sphere was scanned for harvesting, we discovered this proto-human coiled up inside. It was technically alive, but just barely. We brought it inside and quickly dismantled the sphere, but discovered too late that the creature was not ready for contact with air. It ceased functioning shortly after exposure.”
“You called it a proto-human. Why?”
“Analysis of the sphere’s recording showed DNA samplers embedded in the outer hull; samplers coded to accept human DNA only. It was determined that the sphere required contact with human skin cells to trigger the final formation of the creature. It could be called the ‘spark of life.’”
“You mean that creature would have turned into a human, just by having someone touch the sphere? How is that possible?”
“The technology might be beyond your ability to comprehend, but it is not beyond ours.”
“It said it was looking for humanity. Looking for lost colonies. Do you know anything about that?”
“Negative. No direct knowledge.”
She frowned. “Are you capable of guessing?”
“Affirmative.”
She stared at the wall. “So, what’s your guess?”
“A trigger. Also called a ‘trap’ in historical recordings.”
“Why a trap?” she asked, but then immediately understood. “If I was looking for the last human colony in a very large ocean, I might send out a bunch of objects that would only react to human contact.”
“That conclusion is logical.”
Her head swirled. “So, it’s true. There really are Betas out there somewhere looking for us.” She paced back and forth across the room, trying to grasp what she was learning. “I guess it was lucky for Civica Colony that this creature ended up here.”
“Your colony was not lucky.”
“Right,” she said. “You’re planning to attack it in a few days.”
“I am referring to the second sphere.”
/> “I didn’t know you knew about that,” she said. “Yes, there was another sphere discovered several months ago. It was empty, but they found skin cells inside. Skin cells belonging to a Beta.” She looked at the wall. “Wait a minute. If that creature is already out, then the trap has already been sprung. There is an Emissary, a pureblood Beta, walking among the people of Civica.”
“That, I can assure you, is not correct.”
The bluntness of the statement shocked her. “Excuse me?”
“The Emissary you seek is not in Civica colony.”
“Then where is it?”
“Right here.”
She looked nervously around the room. “Where?”
There was a pause before the voice said, “You are that Emissary, Jane Doe.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not a Beta.”
“You are an Emissary, Jane Doe.”
“Listen, I’ll admit that I can’t remember my past, and I admit that they found me in the same dome where they found that other sphere. I also admit that I’ve always known I was different from my crew...”
“By different, you mean smarter,” the wall interrupted. “Better at figuring out their simple technology?”
“Yes,” she agreed, “but that doesn’t mean I’m a Beta.” Even as she said the words, she could see the pieces of her past falling into place. Still, she refused to accept it. “Listen. They wouldn’t have sent me here and then erased my memories. That doesn’t make sense.” She looked up at the wall. “Does it?”
“I cannot answer because I do not have enough information. However, I am able to extrapolate what knowledge I do have and postulate an answer.”
“Please, by all means. Extrapolate and postulate away.”
“The last words of the other Emissary were; “Must learn all that I can,” and I can assume it was referring to learning about the humans of your colony.”
“So? If that was my purpose as well, then why erase...Oh!” The reason suddenly came to her. “A small, weak-looking girl with no memory would be taken in by them. They would take care of her. Give her free access to their lives. They have compassion. It’s the first thing I learned about them.”
Novum Chronicles: A Dystopian Undersea Saga Page 36