Harvest

by Olga Werby

  The door to the Vault was locked. Not a surprise. Expected even.

  Phoebe rang the “Baby Seed Delivery” alarm and waited. That alarm was to be answered within ten minutes—any longer and the “donated” child might die from exposure. These children were the most precious deliveries made to the Vault. There was only one time when the Baby Seed alarm wasn’t triggered—and that was when Vars was deposited at the outside door as a toddler. Matteo had found the girl by accident that day. He’d been totally surprised by the face staring at him through the portal window in the Vault’s door. If he’d hesitated or taken longer to run up the stairs on that day as part of his regular security check of the upper floors, the little girl would have frozen to death.

  It was getting dark. Not that it ever really got light here this time of year. At its peak, the sun rose only partially above the horizon, and the land was blanketed with what felt like a perpetual twilight for a few hours. But now it was getting truly dark; and with the dark came increased cold. Phoebe’s hands were already getting stiff, numb. If she was going to blow up the entrance to the Vault, she needed to do it while she still had enough finger mobility to set up the explosive.

  She unwrapped the package Matteo had given her. There was perhaps enough explosive material to at least crack the lock...and convey the seriousness of Phoebe’s request for sanctuary to the Elders. The plastic explosive wasn’t malleable at these temperatures, so Phoebe spit a bit of her soup on the package to freeze the entire chunk to the door. She had to guess where the lock was located on the other side—there were no keyholes or door handles on this side, and the only time she saw the door from the inside was when she left the Vault to join Matteo at his lab. She didn’t remember how the door functioned. She tried looking through the porthole window, but all she could see was darkness with perhaps a subtle green glow from the bioluminescent walls.

  She attached the detonator, set the timer, and walked around the above ground structure to shield herself from the blast.

  The Vaults needed to find accommodation with the Mims, she reasoned, and she, Phoebe, could be that link. Humanity had no chance against a galaxy-wide invading force, but perhaps they’d been thinking about this all wrong. Perhaps, instead, they could become part of the collective.

  A chill went down Phoebe’s spine. Her thoughts seemed so different now. She wasn’t interested in fighting the Mims anymore. She came to recognize that it was a losing fight. But still... The cold must be getting to me, she thought. She needed to get inside ASAP.

  She looked around for the detonator. Where had she put it? It had been in her hands just seconds ago. Well, it didn’t matter; it was now just a timer. But the blast should have gone off by now, right? She wasn’t sure. Her mind was sluggish with cold.

  She raised herself above the icy building ledge she was using as cover to look at the door. There were protrusions coming off the smooth metal surface, but she’d never heard a blast. Had the cold affected her hearing?

  She walked back to the door. It was still attached, but now, all around it, cubical structures were snapping into the walls, prying the door open. Nothing about this worried Phoebe or unsettled her. She just put her hands into the growing crack and pulled.

  The door sprang open. She was in.

  She descended a few levels into the Vault and found a room to sleep in. She was exhausted. This far in, she was safe from the cold, and she had enough supplies to last days, if she wanted. She didn’t, of course—she wanted to be accepted back into the Seed society. But for now…sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “That’s it,” Vars said. “What if we just send the information? Just data? What would we need in those faraway star systems in order to live as physical beings again?”

  Matteo had woken up to Vars’s voice over the speaker. She’s close, he thought. “Keep thinking aloud, Vars. Keep talking.”

  Matteo’s voice was weak, his throat raw. He reached for something to drink. The thermos felt hot and full. He sipped the liquid—soup? It hurt to swallow. His head felt heavy, like a boulder. He felt both hot and cold. It would have been nice if Phoebe hadn’t left him here alone. It would have been nice to go back into the Vault with her… There was something about Phoebe, wasn’t there?

  But Vars needed him.

  He managed to set down the empty thermos before falling asleep again.

  Vars felt more energetic. The food was obviously helping. She should have felt grateful to the Mims for restoring her vigor, but that wasn’t at all how she felt.

  “I’m going out,” she announced. She waited, and after receiving no response, she added, “I plan to walk to your base”—it seemed silly to refer to it as an artifact—“and look for Alice and the others.”

  As she stood, the feeding tube attached to the side of her body retracted, leaving a slightly irritated area but no other visible skin damage. She left the control room and walked straight to the exton storage locker. It was empty.

  “You can’t keep me prisoner in here!” she screamed. “Give it back or I’ll…I’ll go out just like this!”

  But she didn’t mean it. She wasn’t suicidal. And apparently the Mims knew that.

  She returned to the bridge. She had no interest in the rest of the ship. The Mims had very demonstrably made it theirs. She could only see what they wanted her to see, the rest was blocked off—she couldn’t get inside and she couldn’t get the security cameras to show her what was happening in there. But she didn’t really need the rest of the ship, did she?

  A steaming cup of coffee was waiting for her at her chair. As she sat back down, the feeding tube snapped back into place. It was clearly also doing some waste management too; Vars hadn’t had the need to go in days.

  She drank the coffee and found it calmed her. She hoped it wasn’t a synthetic calm. It was becoming difficult to tell.

  “So, you want to take over our bodies,” she said. Was she talking to the Mims? Or for the benefit of her dad? “Then why all of this? Just take them. You obviously have the power.”

  “Are you giving us permission?” Ian-Mims asked.

  “What? No! I’m just saying that we, humans, can’t really stop you. You took over this ship. You’ve probably taken over the Earth by now. And the off-world colonies. Why play games? Why me? What do you want from me?”

  “Moving information around is complicated,” said Ebi-Mims in her soft, androgynous voice, so very different from Ian’s. Why were they still keeping up the illusion of multiple entities?

  “After millions of years, I would assume you’ve gotten pretty good at it,” Vars said.

  “Moving data is easy,” Ibe-Mims agreed. He sounded almost exactly like his sister. “But transferring intelligence is hard. Information is always context-dependent. You should know. You tried to teach us that.”

  “You, Ibe, or you, the Mims?”

  “Us. Ibe and me,” Ebi-Mims said. “We were not very good students. But the Mims agree with you. Every world has its own unique context. Evolution, even if carefully nurtured, can’t be fully controlled. There are always surprises. The spice of life, as you’ve said in your book. It’s easy to grab data, but to pull meaning out of that data? That requires time, experimentation. Each unique solution, each star system, is a jewel of novelty to be savored and explored at leisure.”

  “That’s cruel,” Vars said.

  “How? You’re just another manifestation of us. Harm brought to you is self-harm.”

  “And yet people died. Sophie…” Vars didn’t want to think about how the nanobots had absorbed rats to reconstruct that woman’s damaged body.

  “We didn’t kill Sophie. Your dad did.”

  “You turned her into a monster!”

  “We made her different.”

  Vars didn’t want to respond to that. Human history was jam-packed with examples of differences being treated as deadly thr
eats. But at least those examples—excluding Neanderthals, Altai Denisovans as well as the other two subspecies of Denisovans from Melanesia and New Guinea, Flores men, Homo luzonensis, and other now-extinct Homo sapiens—involved humans. Sophie-bot was no longer human...not when she died.

  Was Dad right to kill her for that? Vars didn’t know. She hadn’t been there to witness the horror first-hand.

  She thought of Ian and the twins. Would she kill them if she discovered their nanobot-ravaged bodies hidden away somewhere on this ship? She didn’t know that either. She didn’t want to know.

  “We’ve sent our life seeds to other galaxies, too,” Ian-Mims said. “Millions or billions of years from now, we might encounter the beings that spawned from our beginnings there.”

  “If you live that long.”

  “We will,” Ian-Mims assured her. “We’ve been around for a while. We thrive on the diversity that we begat. We nurture diversity.”

  “But you’re here to take over. That’s not nurture. That’s conquest.”

  “Can you conquer what’s already yours?”

  “How are we ‘yours’? Even if you seeded the solar system with your life chemistry, we made it this far on our own...right?”

  All of a sudden, Vars wasn’t so sure about her conclusions. Could the Mims have influenced life on Earth, aside from the initial seeding? Was human evolution pushed in a certain direction? Did the Mims have particular objectives in mind when it came to evolving the dominant species on Earth? What would an alien species need to become space-faring? Vars’s head spun.

  “Can I speak with Alice?” Vars asked. “Is she still Alice?”

  “What would you want to do if you could live forever?” asked the Ian entity instead of answering. “If you could set goals in time and space that exceeded the lifetimes of stars?”

  “Humans aren’t made to think on such grand scales,” Vars replied. Her heart rate was up, and she was feeling ill. But she didn’t want to put an end to this conversation, not yet. She tried to control her respiration, to slow her rising panic. “Humans were made to live day-to-day. We’ve pushed that to year-to-year, and even decade-to-decade. But we don’t contemplate time on grander scales. Not as individuals.”

  “You do.”

  “That was my job. And it was abstract. You’re talking personally. What would I do if I lived forever? It’s a meaningless question. It would still be one day at a time; that’s how biology works.”

  “But once information transcends biology?”

  “If you’re talking about moving myself, my consciousness, from body to body—”

  “Or to multiple bodies at the same time.”

  “There would be drift. The self would split and become something else. Many something elses. Talking about self as a particular thing would be meaningless. It would be like speciation of duplicate consciousnesses.”

  “It would be different.”

  “Yes. It would be different.”

  “But not necessarily bad.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Vars’s mind felt leaden. Too much information, too strange, too unfamiliar, too…incompatible. She sensed a metallic taste under her tongue and started to drift off.

  When she woke again, Vars reached for her soup. The thermos was cold and empty. She looked over to the coffee machine. It was offline.

  “Hello? Ian?” she called. “Ebi? Ibe? Anyone there?”

  No response.

  She uncurled from the chair—or whatever it was now. Over the days, it had grown more massive—more like a throne...or a life support station. But she was no longer plugged into it. When she stood and walked away from the bridge, nothing stopped her.

  “Hello?” she called into the deserted corridors. “Anyone? If you don’t answer, I will walk out of here.”

  She walked to the exton lockers. They were still empty. She considered her options. She could go back to her chair and wait for the Mims to return and nurture her…or she could do something. She couldn’t walk to the artifact—Mims Base—without an exton. She was stuck on this ship. There was no way to go anywhere. Except…

  This is a ship. Ships go places.

  As soon as the idea popped into her head, she was running back to the bridge. She didn’t have to move the ship very far. Just a jump, really. She could get herself closer to Alice and figure out the next steps from there.

  The only problem was she had absolutely no clue how to fly this ship...or any ship. She’d operated a land vehicle once, back when she and her dad were collecting samples in the Bad Lands, but even that machine was mostly automated. Maybe this ship was largely automated too?

  She stepped right up to the ship’s control panel. It was still covered with the Mims structures. “Ship,” she said. “Start up navigation controls.” She used the authoritative voice she normally reserved for her classroom lectures.

  A few lights came on.

  “Set course for the Mims’s artifact.”

  Nothing happened.

  Vars looked around for her personal computing pad. She had a memory of carrying it onto the bridge at some point, but she didn’t see it among all of the fractal-covered surfaces.

  “Vars PCD,” she said aloud. The devices were made to respond to voice commands.

  A tiny beeping sound came from underneath the coffee machine. Unfortunately, the coffee machine was now at least twice as big as it had originally been, and Vars’s PCD was apparently buried deep within the nanobot structures encasing the machine.

  But it had heard her. Maybe that was enough.

  “Vars PCD, read instructions for takeoff,” Vars said.

  A muffled voice started to read through a complicated set of procedures. Vars listened for a minute before realizing she’d never pull this off. She tried a new tactic.

  “Vars PCD, initialize ship’s landing stabilization procedure.” She had a vague memory of Liut talking about a preprogrammed hop in case the icy ground underneath the ship’s landing spot started to shift. And a little hop was all she needed.

  Lights and monitors came online above the flight control station.

  “Good, good,” Vars said. “Read out the contingency landing sites preprogrammed by Major Liut.”

  One of the monitors listed ten sets of coordinates. Unfortunately, they meant nothing to Vars—she needed visuals.

  “Display the landing sites coordinates on Mimas planetary grid.”

  A rotating image of Mimas appeared on one of the screens, with little dots superimposed on it. A few dots were on the opposite hemisphere, but most were in the basin of the Herschel Crater, and all of them closer to the artifact than the ship was now. Vars recalled the scientists recommending they land at least five kilometers away—apparently Liut had never even considered that.

  Three of the sites were directly at the base of the central Mims’s mount, and one was immediately adjacent to the artifact. That’s the one.

  “Vars PCD, zoom in on location five.”

  The screen showed a close-up of the proposed landing site. It wasn’t next to the structure; it was right on top of it. Vars was sure that even Liut wouldn’t have programmed a landing site directly on top of the Mims’s artifact, which meant that the structure had grown at least by this much since these contingency plans were made. Well, it had worked out for the best, as far as Vars was concerned. That was a perfect position for what she needed now.

  “Vars PCD, set the sequence of landing adjustments to location five.”

  A computerized voice—not a Mims voice—said, “Authorization Required.”

  “Vars PCD, locate the senior level personnel on board the ship.”

  “Only one crewmember is currently located on the ship. Senior scientist Dr. Varsaad Volhard. Authorization accepted.”

  It was nice that the ship had confirmed Vars was the only person o
n board. That meant that at least the ship security algorithms didn’t recognize Ian and the twins as present, and thus they placed all authority with Vars...just as they were programmed to do.

  “Vars PCD, execute the landing adjustment maneuver to location five.”

  Several alarms went off, screens flashed, but she heard the engines revving up. She went back into her augmented captain’s chair and waited.

  Two hours later, the ship was on top of the Mims structure.

  “Dad,” Vars called into the radio microphone, “I’m leaving the ship. I’m going to rescue Alice. Or at least try. It should be interesting. I will inform you of the results of my efforts. Love you.”

  If Swiss cheese had been designed by a persnickety engineer, the results would have been the surface of the Mims Base. It seemed there could be no way that this structure could be pressurized to support human life. But appearances could be deceiving.

  Vars instructed the external cameras to zoom in on as many different locations on the alien base as possible from their vantage points. The ship had externally mounted instruments, including a robotic arm, equipped to take samples and manipulate objects, and Vars wanted to find a good spot to do a bit of digging. She no longer feared damaging the structure; she’d landed a spaceship on top of it, for goodness’ sake. And if the Mims wanted to stop her, they could easily do so at any time.

  After several hours of observations, Vars chose a location with a slightly larger-than-average hole and instructed the robotic arm to dig in...or at least try to break off a piece or two. That ought to get the attention of anyone inside.

  “Alice, if you can hear me knocking, open the door,” Vars spoke just under her breath.

  She made the robotic arm drill and prick, pick and smash, dig and hammer at the alien structure. Sometimes little bits fell off and tumbled gracefully in Mimas’s low gravity to the crater floor below. There was a sound to this venture, a rhythm, and Vars gathered herself into a tight ball in her augmented chair and listened. Any change in the music of destruction meant a little bit of progress. Accomplishment. Was it Ben who had said it was like poking a hornets’ nest? Well, let them come at me; let them reveal their motives.