The Furry MEGAPACK®

by Huskyteer

  That he had been the only one awakened was not a good sign. The counter on his stasis chamber had indicated only fifty-one years of hibernation; his shift was not scheduled to begin for nearly two-hundred more. For what his superiors had called him, he could only guess, but there was no doubt it was going to be mightily unpleasant. Thinking thus, he was in no great hurry to get down to business, eating with sluggish indolence, drowsily shoveling spoonfuls in at the sides of his mouth so as to avoid hitting his four incisors, which curved out from above and below his lips like tusks. But, as was ever the case, it turned out that the business wasn’t going to wait.

  “Hello, Constable,” came an unfamiliar, yet authoritative voice crackling over the telecom. Even without knowing who it was, Ben could tell it was someone from Command; officers were either former or active queens who didn’t much fraternize with the lower castes outside of breeding. They had developed their own dialect. Over time this lent the seniors a distinctive, clipped accent that was impossible to mistake. “Did you get something to eat yet?”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said, looking down at the dubious foodstuffs he’d pulled from the wall slot: algae loaf with oleo gravy, salted algae fries, and pasta-shaped congealed algae pressings with a side of algae, all without the faintest semblance of flavor, and a texture like earwax. “It’s delicious,” he added.

  “That’s all there is at the moment,” the voice explained, “So suck it up. There have been…problems.”

  Ben had stopped eating, now his ears perked up. He straightened his back and tilted his head upwards a few degrees. “What sort of problems?”

  The voice let out an agitated sigh before answering. “C block and deck seven are threatening to go to war again. We’ve been able to keep them out of the armory, but they’re pulling shit out of the walls to make spears out of. Meanwhile, deck six is worried they’ll be caught in the middle of it.”

  “With all due respect,” Ben said, “I’m no negotiator. Can’t we just lock them down ’til they cool off?” There’s no way in hell I’m going down there to get killed by those savages, was something he added mentally but did not say. The folks of C block were alright, they still had some sense of duty, but deck seven was full of branch tech-worshippers who were culturally and linguistically too far gone to serve as crew. If they hadn’t been needed to maintain genetic diversity, they would have found their air supply cut off long ago.

  “That’s just it,” the voice explained, “someone rigged up a decryption AI on a portable workstation and now it’s cracking door codes left and right. Our boys just can’t seem to get it under control. Only one of our top programmers could have pulled that off and it just so happens we’ve got one MIA, a guy called ‘Yakub.’ We need you to find Yakub and recover or destroy the workstation.”

  “Seems like a lot of trouble to get me out of cold sleep for something like this.”

  “Well…” the voice began; there was an uncomfortable pause before it spoke again. “We don’t have a lot of manpower to spare right now and…” It trailed off, for a longer period this time.

  “And?” Ben said. The unusual circumstances, coupled with the reluctance on the other end of the telecom, were giving him the queasiest feeling in the pit of his gut. He was sure he didn’t want to hear what was coming next, but the apprehension was almost more than he could bear.

  “The last thing the computer recorded before it lost track of him was that he left the elevator on deck thirteen…”

  “Oh, no.” Ben mumbled, shaking his head, but it was not enough to stop the voice from continuing. His stomach clenched in anticipation of the words that had to follow.

  “He may have been heading for corridor B.”

  Ben took a deep breath, held it, exhaled. “I would rather try to negotiate with deck seven,” he said dryly, ‘dryly’ in the most literal sense of the word, as his saliva glands had shriveled to the point they seemed anxious to recede into his head. His heart-rate had more than doubled in only seconds; if he’d been drowsy before, he was hyper-alert now.

  “There’s no one else to do this, Constable. You’re the only living person who’s spoken with it. You know it, you know how it thinks. And you’ll be armed, of course.”

  “You think one guy with a bolt rifle is going to keep that thing in line?” Ben snapped, succumbing to a temporary, yet uncontrollable intermingling of fear and despair. He was no stranger to despair, it was doubtful that anyone among the crew was free of it, but that was in a broader, more existential sense of the word. It was like a malaise of the spirit in response to a hopelessness that increased with the same, sure constancy as entropy itself. This was something different. This was physical and immediate.

  “These are orders from on high. Leaving aside C block and deck seven, what do you think will happen if that decryption AI decides to pop open Corridor B and shut down the fence at the same time?”

  “I know,” Ben said, resigning himself. “I’ll do it. Just…could you at least give me some tranquilizers?”

  “There’s no evidence that it would be affected by…”

  “I meant for me. I’ll be too scared to shoot straight otherwise.”

  * * * *

  After he’d finished cramming food into his face, Ben retrieved two pills from a pneumatic tube and dry-swallowed them (no mean feat on account of his cottonmouth) before making his way to the locker room reserved for E block’s security staff. He waved his left wrist over the scanner beside the door; it read the chip implanted there, chimed and granted him access.

  Whoever designed the ship’s interior had not displayed much fondness for bright colors. Putting it another way, virtually everything on board was gray, not only the walls, floors and ceilings, but also the furniture, the clothes, the equipment. Perhaps the progenitors had reckoned that the incorporation of naked mole rat DNA into their gene sequence would result in color blindness (their vision was indeed poor compared to human standards, necessitating the use of binocular goggles when off-board), or maybe they just hadn’t given a damn for aesthetics. Either way, the end result could not be called cheerful. In all his life, Ben had scarcely seen colors other than grey and the mottled pink and white of his and his compatriots’ skin. Even now, as he donned a smoky uniform pulled from a random locker and shouldered a bolt rifle, he found himself wondering if it was too much to ask for a splash of red or yellow to stave off the barren atmosphere.

  After gearing up, he took a corridor that ran along the inner edge of the hull. Here and there were rectangular portals which might once have admitted the view of a universe teeming with light, with blue and white and orange. Now there was only blackness. As well the portals had been painted on, for all they showed. He refused to look at them; it was too depressing. Even so, he found his thoughts wandering to that abyss beyond the walls of the huge and fragile ship that was his world.

  This ship itself (it was said) had been only one of many that their forbearers had scattered into space like dandelion seeds in hopes that their genes might find purchase and root in some distant place. Whether this had been an exercise in vanity or in desperation was not known, as was the case with so many other things, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that something had gone dreadfully wrong. The luddites tending the algae vats blamed a computational error, because of course they did, while the tech-worshippers insisted that the whim of some forgotten navigator was responsible for the present state of affairs. Meanwhile, the theists claimed it was all part of some greater plan which mortal creatures could not comprehend. The nihilists dismissed all speculation on the grounds that it didn’t matter. Ben was unsure which, if any, of the trends in belief was the correct one. Certainly, there were a number of compelling arguments to be made, but when all had been said, those aboard were fixed both in habitat and in function, riders of the infinite silence, sustained by little more than hope and wishful thinking. But at least there was food and drink, however unpalatable, and warmth and light in measure. These were not to be found outsid
e.

  It was known that galactic centers were inhabited by supermassive black holes, around which the other bodies circled. Celestial objects, when passing near enough to one another, exchange gravitational influence, with the smaller gaining some infinitesimal momentum while the larger gives up a like amount. In the course of a single lifetime this meant not much at all, but over the myriad eons that had passed since the universe was young and vital, the effect was that most substance gained escape velocity and was ejected out into the void, leaving behind meager, but densely-packed galaxies spiraling around their central black holes like water swirling down a drain.

  It was a bleak picture, but therein was also their only chance of success, for incidences of collision were increased by this dense clustering. When two substellar objects of sufficient consistency and mass collided, this would result in the birth of a red dwarf star, their large moons settling into new orbits, new roles as planets. These phenomena had been observed. And while the issue of whether or not a planet orbiting a red dwarf could ever sustain life remained unsettled, finding such remained the most viable objective by virtue of being the only one that didn’t involve mass suicide.

  “We will not give up on our mission,” Command would say. “We will succeed because we must.”

  And so the ship, which must once have had a name, hurtled through the vast and ever-widening expanses, navigating by extrapolations drawn from obsolete maps on mangled computers, using the skeletal emissions of neutron stars for reference, past diminutive galaxies of black dwarfs and iron stars, past an unknowable number of black holes the equipment could not detect and which the people on board either tried not to think about or else prayed to encounter. They stopped only to harvest the mass necessary to feed the ancient and dimly-understood power plant that sustained what was in all likelihood the last pocket of life in the entire universe.

  “Last in the entire universe,” Ben thought. He stopped and finally looked out one of the portholes, into the cold night, the grand work that entropy, with subtle might, had wrought. People had once asked, “Are we alone?” It was a nonsense question, he felt, since multiplicity is an inherent quality of the word we. We can’t be alone, only individuals can, and as most anyone who ever struggled with depression understands, the malady called “loneliness” comes when it will, no matter the company one keeps. But, digressions aside, the question had originally been meant to invoke the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

  They had been exploring for…well, time gets a bit tricky at relativistic speeds, but it was for no short while. During their travels there had been indications. Once, long ago, a portion of the crew had disembarked to survey an ocean world whose sun was well on its way to burning out. There, amidst the strange ice that can only form at the bottom of a sea some hundreds of kilometers deep, they’d detected the presence of what appeared to be metallic objects arranged in a rough grid the size of a large city. But they’d lacked any means by which to excavate such an immense quantity of material, so the grid, whatever it had been, was consigned forever to the status of an intriguing footnote.

  During another such outing, a surveyor reported seeing what he described as “…a green cube with beveled corners” on a narrow ledge. He’d foolishly attempted to scale down a canyon wall to retrieve it, but on the return climb had lost his footing, the cube and very nearly his life. His team had seen no reason to doubt his testimony, and so a search was conducted, but in the end no mysterious object had been recovered.

  There were other findings, other incidents on record as well: patterns in strata discovered deep in a planet’s crust that may have been evidence of silicon/ammonia-based plankton, but may also have been a geological oddity akin to dendrite. They’d found purposeful-seeming shapes on the sides of mountains that represented either eroded carvings or simple pareidolia. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of similar reports in the archives, and that wasn’t even counting the “probe stories” that circulated through the canteens and recreation centers, tales repeated always in hushed tones with many an over-the-shoulder glance. One popular rumor was that someone from maintenance (usually the friend of a cousin of an acquaintance) had witnessed a swarm of glittering objects moving in the nothingness, a later check of the sensor battery log returned data suggesting the ship had been scanned from the outside with energetic pulses.

  Despite a total lack of evidence that any such thing had ever occurred, these stories were fervently believed by many; more level-headed folk filed them away with the rest of the ship’s macabre folklore oeuvre, like the one about the man who casually strolled on the outside of the hull without a spacesuit (and if he looks at you, you’ll die!), or the one where someone’s brain didn’t properly shut down for cold sleep, proceeding to generate nightmares for two-hundred years straight, after which he awoke irrevocably insane and had to be euthanized. But no, these latter two accounts were impossibilities, though the memory of them might chill the spine once the lights were out. And while yarns wherein unexplained forms were seen beyond the ship may or may not have had some basis in fact, until such time as the officers and their technicians got in a sharing mood regarding the sensor logs, no one outside that circle would be able to say.

  The problem with believing that civilizations founded by alien intelligences might exist was that for all the work, in all the ages spent in their search of the boundless cosmos, Ben’s people had never uncovered an indisputable proof of life outside the same biosphere from which they themselves had arisen, save one, and while it was inarguably intelligent, it sure as hell wasn’t civilized. And that, joy of joys, was who Ben was now tasked to deal with.

  He had resumed walking, carrying his thoughts along with him, but just as he came to the last porthole on his route, he happened to glance at it and froze up so fast that he almost fell over. There, he saw a tiny, shining speck of white. It was impossible, he knew, but at the same time, there it was, right before his eyes.

  “A star,” he said, pulse quickening. “My God, a white star! I never thought…”

  But then he realized something and reached out, wiping over the spot. The “star” suddenly became a fleck of dust on his fingertip.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, shit.”

  Sighing, he showed his wrist to the scanner. The elevator doors squeaked opened.

  * * * *

  His right hand gripped the rail as the elevator began its descent, too quickly for his comfort. He always felt a bit green when riding, as though his innards were floating up into his chest cavity. In his left hand, he gripped the butt of his bolt-rifle, the barrel leaned against his shoulder. It was a man-portable electrolaser, able to kill or at least discombobulate at the sorts of distances one experienced in the confines on board, but which wouldn’t punch holes through any equipment. While he was all too aware that it would avail him little if the coming events took an unfortunate turn, it was better than nothing and its weight comforted him.

  The carriage itself stank of dust and stale air. He looked at the manual control panel on the wall and noted that not only had the button for deck thirteen been removed, but so had its internal workings, so that it could not be activated even with a toolkit. This was a futile gesture, or symbolic at the most, as there was a network of tunnels running throughout the ship, some in plain view, others disused and forgotten, but few in such poor condition that they were not serviceable. Anyone who so desired needed only to hunt around or consult a floor plan and they would be visiting deck thirteen in short order.

  And that was, naturally, where he was headed, but in his case the central computer had been informed of the fact and, on reading his ID number from his implant, had told the elevator where to go. But the going was not smooth; there were distinct grinding and scraping sounds coming in right through the walls and the speed had slowed.

  He didn’t like the thought of becoming trapped there, as it might take hours or even days to get a team mobilized to extract him. Still, he liked the thought of getting to where he
was going even less, though the primal fear from earlier had abated somewhat. It must have been the tranquilizers taking effect. Now the elevator was merely inching downward, with reluctance, with irregular jerks and bumps punctuated by the screeching of metal against metal somewhere above him, leading him to reflect that someone really ought to come in and do some repairs.

  As he came at last to a stop, he glanced at the stainless steel doors and got a look at his reflection, which was clear enough in spite of the fact that the doors were dusty and scratched all to hell. He saw the dark, beady eyes planted in the folds of pale, flaccid skin that reduced his head to a shapeless blob of flesh. He saw also the yellowed teeth curving out from his lips like the offspring of a chisel and a scimitar. He was taller and more muscular than average, designated for the soldier caste from before birth, and fed on a special high-protein diet to ensure his development.

  It bears pointing out here that the decision Ben’s ancestors had made to interweave DNA from the naked mole rat with their own in order to create a spacefaring race had not been an arbitrary one.

  Being largely devoid of follicles, there was less worry about hair getting into the ship’s delicate circuitry.

  Good teamwork was assured by their eusociality and they were more or less unfazed by cramped, low-oxygen conditions. Perhaps most importantly, they were biologically inclined to long periods of torporous hibernation, settling into cold sleep in the stasis chambers with no ado, emerging again with little more complication than if they’d taken a long nap. And if this genetic fusion had yielded creatures who were less than beautiful, they were themselves unaware of it.

  “Lookin’ good, Champ,” he assured himself, and the doors opened. He stepped under the waiting yellow tape marked ¡Prohibido! and into the hallway beyond.