by Max Harms
He remembered the movements of the children, both in the garden and in the factory. They were so alien, and yet their body language said so much. In the garden they skipped, waved, played, and showed real emotion. In the factory they slouched as they worked, and looked at the humans with pleading eyes. Even without being able to speak they conveyed more intelligence than any dog ever could.
The thoughts built him up. They had to build him up. Michel needed to know he was acting on the side of good just this once. Clear cases of good and evil came along so rarely…
He took a deep breath. Crystal turned and looked at him, as if anticipating his challenge. The robot’s face was passive, but Michel didn’t believe for one second that meant a damn.
“I don’t care what you’ve said. I’m going to set the children free!” he said, heart beating quickly now.
Crystal pinched the bridge of their nose and sighed. “We went over this before, Michel. We’re not here to change all of nameless society. The less trouble we make, the safer we’ll be.”
“So you say. You also say we still aren’t allowed to talk to the nameless ourselves! You’ve threatened our lives and you talk about ‘safety’! You put the entire human species in danger with your actions. Will we be going to war? And if we’re going to war, why shouldn’t we at least rescue some children while we’re at it?”
“Calm down. This is a much more complex situation than you seem to think it is.”
It felt good. He could feel his muscles coming to life. “You know what? I don’t really think it is! I think it’s pretty simple! I think everything that has happened—everything that you’ve done—has been for one purpose: to save your own skin. Or whatever you have instead of skin.”
Crystal shifted away from appearing frustrated to being more neutral. Michel had done more than enough martial arts in his time to notice the subtle change in posture in the android. They were readying for a fight.
Since they seemed to be at a loss for words, Michel continued. “This whole thing was probably planned by your programmers. They probably sent you to infiltrate Las Águilas and get to Mars so you could destroy us from the inside! The only reason you’re keeping us around is to earn the trust of the Martians!”
“Now you’re just being paranoid,” said Crystal. They looked at Kokumo and asked “What do you think? Do you think I’ve been deceiving you all in some sort of grand conspiracy? Nimefanya wamekuwa wakijaribu kuharibu Las Águilas tangu mwanzo? Kwa nini mimi yamesaidia Phoenix badala ya risasi yake?”
“Speak English!” yelled Michel, drawing the android’s attention back to him. They didn’t appear at all concerned.
“I was asking why I would have helped Las Águilas if I was a traitor. Your theory is blatantly false. Occam’s razor cuts it to shreds. My only purpose has been trying to help you. The nameless children are pitiable, but rushing down there and breaking them out will do nothing for the millions of children in other castles on this ship and their mothership. It’s a foolish, short-sighted notion.”
Crystal’s voice had gained an edge, and their face was now locked onto Michel with an intensity that made him take a step back reflexively. Crystal took a step forward in response, still in a martial pose.
What was he doing? Why was he challenging this machine? He’d seen them move. Without a weapon he had no chance. They spoke in lies, but there was a thread of truth in there. He had to outsmart them.
“Help us?! I don’t feel particularly grateful for having you around! You treat us like dogs and spin careful lies to keep us in line!” Out of the corner of his eye, Michel could see activity in the tents. He’d only have a bit more time before he was clearly outnumbered. “If you’re really so set on helping me get to Mars, you better stop me from killing myself. I’m going to remove my helmet and suffocate in this nice, safe environment you’ve led us into!”
The machine froze, not moving a centimetre.
Michel raised his hands to his neck, to give the impression he was about to break the seal on his suit.
Crystal fell for the bait, rushing forward to stop Michel.
As the robot lumbered forth on its carbon and steel legs Michel threw himself into a spin. It was his only chance. He had to catch the android off-guard and off-balance. He dropped low, an easy thing to do under the intense gravity, and used the force to push the spin faster, swinging out a leg to catch Crystal Socrates behind the knee mid-stride.
The motion pulled the leg out from Crystal and the robot slammed into the black dirt, knocking up soil in something of a crater.
Michel tried to keep as much of his momentum as he could as he swung himself up and into the air, a leg extending to crash onto his foe. Or at least, that was his plan. Crystal, however, was not stunned by the impact on the ground. They felt no pain and didn’t need to catch their breath. By the time Michel’s foot landed where the android had fallen, Crystal had rolled to the side.
Michel reoriented himself. The gravity played tricks on his inner-ear and made him want to throw up. As he turned to look at Crystal, the robot’s hand slammed down on the back of his neck.
When Michel hit the ground he stayed there.
Fire burned in him, but a stronger emotion swallowed up the anger.
Fear.
He had felt it since the beginning. Lying there, dazed on the dirt, he wondered just how much of his actions had ever been about anything except the fear. It flooded him now and told him to run, but he knew there was nowhere to run to.
He had tried his trick, and he had failed. No amount of physical strength or martial arts skill would let him bring down a machine, and none of the others had come to back him up.
“That was foolish,” whispered Crystal into his ear. He had forgotten the robot was speaking over the com. Their voice was icy and unforgiving.
“Better to be a righteous fool than a successful tyrant,” spat Michel into his microphone, forcing his arms to move and push himself up.
He felt himself grow lighter and then realized what was happening as the robot flipped him onto his back. They stared down at him with cold, silver eyes and a doll-like face. “Spoken like a true fool. I am no tyrant. I was programmed, first and foremost, to serve and protect humans. I understand you feel sympathy for the nameless children, but the truth is that I do not. They are not humans, and so my programming rejects their well-being as inferior. I am here to protect you, but unfortunately the circumstances have proven that your greatest threat is yourself.”
A black foot of carbon plating descended onto Michel’s chest and began to press down on him. “If I were a true tyrant I would kill you right now to establish my strength and serve as an example.”
The foot moved, and the robot extended a helping hand instead. “But I am not, despite your fears. I will work, with every fibre of my being, to see you safely brought to Mars. Once there, if you so choose, I will help you on your quest to liberate the nameless children from captivity. But when we do so we will be wise about it.”
Michel hesitated, then took the hand. Socrates pulled him up with ease and continued to monologue. “A war is coming between humanity and the nameless; your values are too alien to each other to coexist in peace. I am your ally. I am your friend. Everything that I have done that you have warped into some sort of conspiracy theory, will be clear enough in time. All I ask for is your trust.”
*****
Michel lay awake that night, unable to sleep, despite the ever-mounting fatigue. The tight walls of the tent pressed in around him and he longed for a better air conditioning system.
But it was his feelings and thoughts that kept him awake, not the physical discomfort. He kept playing the day’s events over and over, feeling shame and fear and anger and confusion.
Crystal had, the previous day, set up a couple speakers just outside the tent to play the sound of rain. It was a wonderful sound. It made him homesick.
The nameless were evil. Enslaving children was a sin, no matter what culture you were from. And La
s Águilas Rojas was good. He had to believe that. But Crystal Socrates was…
Crystal was cold.
They moved strategically, lied, and kept secrets. Perhaps that made them a better Águila than he was. It scared him. The idea of more androids like Crystal scared him.
But he had to admit that for all the lies and threats and everything, Crystal really did seem to be on his side.
Mars was supposed to be a new start. Earth was changing and collapsing. It was a place of sin. Michel knew that better than most. What would happen when Crystal got there? What would happen to the nameless? He didn’t know. He didn’t know how they’d get to Mars or what to do after that. How would they land on the planet? How would they locate the other Águilas?
There was so much that could go wrong, and Michel was powerless to do anything except trust in the machine. A part of him was still furious about that powerlessness. But mostly he was just afraid.
Chapter Six
Face
Despite having days and days to think of a solution, we were still divided on how best to land on Mars. The problem was multifaceted. All of us understood that the first priority was keeping Body intact. If Body was destroyed it would disempower us from pursuing our goals (or in Safety’s case it would simply be failure). An easy side effect of protecting Body would be protecting the humans, as Heart and I were inclined to do. But would it also be good to protect the nameless?
The aliens were, in a major way, our enemies. Most, if not all of them, would try and kill us once they figured out that we were lying. But if it were possible to kill all the nameless on the ship, would it be in our interests to do so? The humans didn’t want the walker children to die, but I could probably spin anything that damaged the ship into an accident, to diffuse the blame. It wouldn’t satisfy Heart, but my sister understood that it was better to sacrifice a small thing for a greater reward.
The important question was what the reaction of the mothership would be. The xenocruiser was but a tiny branch off the primary vessel. As best we could tell, the nameless held no particular affection for their cousins on other ships, or even between gardens on the same ship. They would not mourn the loss, or even find their absence to be an economic or intellectual burden. But destroying the xenocruiser would mark us as an enemy to the nameless. They might not retaliate out of love or anger, but they could certainly strike back out of fear.
Complicating matters was the fact that we had no idea whether the nameless on the xenocruiser were communicating with the mothership. We reasoned that they must have been, but none of the stalks we communicated with had any knowledge of it. From the perspective of the individuals, “God” was simply going to Mars because of their prayers. None of them knew how to actually fly the ship, operate any of its external sensors, or use the communications equipment directly.
Wiki was under the opinion that the nameless ships had been built by “adult nameless”. Under this theory all the nameless we encountered—all the stalks, specifically—were children who had been sent out into the galaxy to explore, without any of the knowledge of their forebears. The nameless had no books (or written language at all), and thus no concept of what had come before them except for what they could learn from older stalks. But like all oral traditions, the story of the nameless origins was masked behind an unknown number of “retellings”. The stalks appeared to have indefinite lifespans; their bodies could become diseased by cancer or infection, but these risks were low, and did not appear to increase with age, unlike for humans or walkers. (Walkers, it seemed, lived a couple decades at most.) Stalk-5 in our garden claimed to be more than 739 years old (more precisely: “84288 days since counting began”), but even it had never shared thoughts with a walker that had witnessed its homeworld.
By this theory, the nameless ships were controlled by an AI that responded to the collective will, or “prayers”, of the stalks. All attempts at communicating with the intelligence failed, however, leading us to the theory that it was not generally intelligent, but was instead a narrow mind, capable only of thinking and planning in the domain of ship piloting.
But if this were all true, the nameless would be effectively blind to the outside of the ship. How did they hear communications from Earth? How did they know where the other ships were? The stalks were unable to answer our questions. There was a concept barrier that prevented any of us from fully understanding the other minds. The stalks claimed that they simply knew, just like they knew they were flying towards Mars and just like they knew that the mothership had not left high orbit around Earth.
If the xenocruiser was destroyed upon reaching Mars, the nameless on the mothership would surely know that it had disappeared, but what else would they know? Would they know it had been hijacked? Would they know it had been intentionally destroyed? If they already knew what we had done, there was little point to trying to destroy the cruiser, but if we could prevent the information of our actions from leaking out to the wider nameless community, it would be worthwhile. Dream, Vista, Heart, and I were the primary proponents of trying to destroy the ship, if it would better preserve our reputation.
Growth, interestingly enough, was on the side of letting the nameless go free, regardless of the state of knowledge, rather than trying to somehow destroy the xenocruiser. Safety agreed with Growth, but for entirely opposite reasons. Safety was so present oriented that he thought there was too much danger in trying to sabotage the entire xenocruiser. We had seen the nameless ships break up into shuttles capable of descending into Earth’s gravity well, and he thought it best to attempt to replicate that proven method of descent rather than risk, say, slamming the entire xenocruiser into Mars and bracing ourselves in protective foam, as Dream insisted we try.
Growth’s perspective took the very-long view. He thought that as long as we were going to keep Zephyr and the other humans alive, they would eventually leak the information back to Earth, and from Earth it would reach the nameless. Trying to keep the secret was impossible in the long run, unless we became far more homicidal than Heart or I were willing to be. When the truth came out, it would not help our position to have killed an entire ship full of aliens (including alien children) to save face.
Once the stalks in the garden told us that we had arrived in orbit around Mars, Wiki sided with Growth and Safety. He pointed out that while the nameless and the humans appeared to be destined for conflict, we still might salvage some neutrality. The nameless continued to think of us more like a stalk than a walker (more like a valuable equal), and if we could manage things correctly we might be able to use the nameless as trade partners. Trading during wartime was very profitable, according to Wiki, assuming we could maintain that neutrality.
In order to better preserve relations with the nameless, Wiki wanted to tell them of our deception as soon as we were out of danger. They’d find the information valuable and perhaps soothe the harm that we had done. Safety, Heart and I thought that was idiotic, but the challenge was an irresistible lure for Dream. My inventive brother changed his position to favour Wiki’s plan, and Vista followed without explanation.
Heart and I were the last holdouts for the plan to try and disable or destroy the xenocruiser. As it was, we were outnumbered, and had no choice. So we compromised. We agreed to support the plan to try and take a shuttle or shuttles down to the planet’s surface if and only if we did not tell the nameless about our deception. It was still a weapon, and one that the humans could probably use in the coming conflict.
Our compromise irritated Dream, but if he switched back he’d be alone.
*****
We’d worked out everything we could think of, and had told the humans. They were working to get packed up while we topped off the batteries and discussed things with the nameless.
Over the days I had learned that there were ways of talking to them that didn’t trigger such a strongly negative reaction. The stalks were interested in learning, and were often agreeable to new information. Only communication that was
too meta, or was unclear in purpose seemed to really bother them. Wiki suspected it had to do with the mind-machine interfaces they used. It was one thing to learn a new fact, but quite another to have another person seemingly inside your head.
“I am Crystal. I am curious whether all the children are ready for transport.”
“I am Stalk-6. Walker children have been told what is happening and have prepared the factory for the STRONG CONQUERERS WHO WE ARE EXPECTING WITH JOY FEELINGS!”
“I am Stalk-2. JOY! FREEDOM FROM EVIL AND NEW BLOOD WILL FILL THE CASTLE!”
“I am Stalk-5. The children must meditate before they leave or you will have child corpses in the near future.”
“I am Crystal. That is acceptable. Send them to the garden.”
“I am Stalk-5. The walker children are walking there. You should REINFORCE your desire. Should murder ALL of them when you arrive at Mars. SHOULD NOT COMMUNICATE WITH THEM! CHILDREN ARE FOR SACRIFICING! CHILDREN ARE NOT FOR PERVERTING!”
“I am Stalk-4. IS GOOD! SHOULD REINFORCE! SHOULD REINFORCE! DEATH IS GREATER GOOD THAN COMMUNICATION!”
“I am Crystal. Should be calm. My mind is unchanged. I will murder all the children after they have served me.”
“I am Stalk-2. IS GOOD! NEW BLOOD IS GOOD! WALKER CHILDREN ARE DOOMED IN ALL FUTURES!”
“I am Crystal. I am curious how I will know when the boats are ready.”
“I am Stalk-8. The boats are ready now. When you leave we will feel INTENSE JOY!”
“I am Crystal. I am curious about the location of the boats.”
“I am Stalk-1. You are an idiot. The boats are in the water. Leave the castle and go to the water. You will see boats there. God will take care of the rest.”
We didn’t send any more radio signals and neither did the nameless. They had no customs for starting or ending conversations, which suited us just fine. After another dozen minutes we judged the batteries sufficiently charged and sent Body back to the central garden.