by David Smith
She finally fell silent as Doctor Mengele sedated her.
--------------------
Hollins sat on the end of her bed. ‘Hey Aisling, how are you feeling?’
The vivid blush to her incredibly pale cheeks let him know she was back to normal, or at least what counted as normal for a super-intelligent, marginally hyperactive Irish woman with the attention span of a flea. ‘Sorry sir, I guess I lost the plot a little there.’
‘Don’t worry about it Aisling, it’s the least of our problems.’
She blushed brighter. ‘Ah. It didn’t work then.’
The Captain looked dreadfully tired. ‘No, if anything it’s got worse. The Jekylls seem to have taken control of the auxiliary system and have opened dozens of valves.’
O’Mara nodded. ‘I’m so sorry, sir. The GECLLs are so simple I thought the idea was fool-proof . . . ‘
Hollins shook his head. ‘If there’s anything that the history of humanity has proved it’s that fool-proof ideas invariably produce a better class of fool.’
O’Mara was still dopey from the effects of the sedative, but her mind was racing. ‘They’re exhibiting a collective intelligence. They’ve got smart.’
‘How is that possible?’
O’Mara shrugged. ’Scientists have been trying to define what makes something conscious or intelligent for centuries. Generally speaking they’ve not come up with anything hard and fast. Every time someone thinks they’ve nailed it down, a new discovery throws everything up in the air and it’s back to square one. The Harvazh are a good example.’
Two of the ship’s company were the Harvazh and Harvazh Too. Both were colonies of billions of individual microscopic organisms that acted collectively giving the outward appearance of a single entity.
When they’d first joined the ship, it was only the Harvazh, but within a couple of years the colony had grown so big it had split into two entities. They could realign their form to appear as almost anything, even splitting into dozens of smaller groups when needed, but for the sake of interfacing with the much more numerous Terrans aboard the ship, both colonies had adopted outwardly human appearances. For reasons Hollins had never got to the bottom of, the older colony had taken on the form of Charlie Chaplin, while the newer colony had decided to borrow Marilyn Monroe’s features.
The oddest thing about both Harvazh colonies was not the fact they could perform tasks requiring exactly the same thought processes and intelligence as their human counterparts, but they did it while projecting the appearance and mannerisms of their long-dead icons.
Accepting that the Harvazh were billions of tiny creatures acting in concert, the Jekylls began to make more sense to him. ‘So if they are acting like the Harvazh, we need to work out what the hell they’re up to.’
O’Mara ran her fingers through her tousled mass of red hair, getting them stuck midway. As she absently tried to free the tangled digits she mused ‘If they are exhibiting some kind of sentience, it should be possible to communicate with them at a basic level. They might have thought processes that are completely different to ours, but if we assume they are sentient, we have to assume they’re doing what they’re doing for a reason.’
She jumped off the bed, her mind now completely engaged in this new mystery. As she rooted around the sick-bay looking for her uniform she talked to herself. ‘We’ll need to analyse the structures of the molecules and see how they’re acting together.’
The Science Officer was one of the most painfully shy people Hollins had ever met, but absorbed in her own thoughts she seemed to have forgotten he was there. She threw off her nightdress and ducked under the bed, completely naked, looking for her clothes and still thinking aloud.
‘I suppose we need to think in terms of how they’re sensing their surroundings and work out if we can use that to get a message to them first . . . ‘
She stood up having found a bra and a sweater.
The Captain dutifully looked to one side, carefully trying not to stare at the naked woman as she tried to untangle the bra. It had got twisted when it had been taken off and having turned one strap inside itself, then the other and found that the bra still didn’t make sense, O’Mara discarded it.
‘ . . . but we’ll need to make sure . . . mwff hht ehh say . . . ‘ she mumbled as she tugged her sweater on over her head ‘that what we say isn’t confrontational or threatening.’
She found her boots at the foot of the bed and plonked herself on the side of the bed to put them on. ‘I’ll get the anthropology team to work on the message while the chemists and biologists work out how we transfer meaningful information to a chunk of DNA . . . ‘
As she got up and headed to the door, still thinking about who would undertake which task, Hollins had to call her back and hand her the skirt she’d not seen on a table beside the bed.
Still naked from the waist down, the Science Officer blushed brilliant red on four cheeks and said ‘Sorry sir. I thought I’d already put that on.’
She dashed out of the Sick-bay and Hollins left it to her to work out that her skirt, though now covering her modesty, was inside out.
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Romanov stood at her console on the Main Engineering Deck with Lieutenant Johnson, Lieutenant L’Amour and Chief Deng. The lighting was stable now, but quite subdued: despite their best efforts, the Engineers had been unable to wrest control of the lighting circuits, or anything else that depended on plasma, away from the bizarre infestation in the plasma conduits.
Johnson scratched his head. ‘It’s almost like they’re running up the warp-drive ready for us to leave.’
Chief Deng checked some system parameters but didn’t look any less confused. ‘They’ve opened valves and worked out how to get the plasma for the main drive circuits flowing, but they’re not diverting it to the warp coils. They’ve also checked all the purge valves and the plasma discharge valves too. They managed to discharge some plasma while ensuring none of them left the ship. And they’re clearly focusing their attention on the starboard side of the system.’
Romanov raised an eyebrow. ‘Only the starboard side?’
Deng nodded. ‘Yep. That’s the side where the Tana warp-coils are still connected. We’ve disconnected them on the port side ready to replace them with new Fleet supplied coils. If I didn’t know better I’d say they were trying to repeat the experiment we tried when we blipped the warped warp drive and ended up in that crazy mirror universe.’
Romanov suppressed a shudder. ‘I think I’d rather blow up the ship than go back there.’
L’Amour looked both worried and curious. ‘Since they’ve taken control of the ships systems they’ve been drip feeding plasma into all the systems and building up their numbers. There are hundreds of trillions of them spread right through the ships systems now.’
Romanov had to ask the question. ‘What happens when they run out of space in the plasma conduit systems?’
L’Amour shrugged and answered honestly. ‘We have no idea’
The Engineers looked terrified. They’d seen what had happened to Crewman Duvall’s fingers.
L’Amour tried to comfort them. ‘I think they’ve gone beyond a survival need here. The GECLLs were smart enough to know how to control and bypass system valves when there were just a few billion of them. They’ve mutated and evolved at an astonishing rate, unlike anything anyone has ever seen before. There are countless trillions of them now. If the biologists are right and they have developed a workable collective sentience, they’re almost certainly way smarter than us by now. If they wanted us dead, we’d have been diamond shaped ex-crewman days ago.’
Romanov cleared her throat and took a big swig from the Vodka bottle that was her permanent companion in times of stress. ‘Strangely Lieutenant, I find that to be no comfort whatsoever. Are you scientists any closer to working out a way of communicating with these . . . things?’
Before L’Amour could answer, Captain Hollins walked onto the deck with Commander O�
�Mara in tow.
Romanov scowled at O’Mara and announced ‘There’s no improvement, sir. We’ve made numerous attempts to control various systems and it would seem that Commander O’Mara’s little friends have locked us out of pretty much everything.’
Lieutenant L’Amour gave a more pragmatic appraisal. ‘The GECLLs numbers have peaked and stabilised, and they seem to be focusing their attention on a couple of key systems. We don’t know what they’re trying to do, but I can’t see this is random. They actually seem to understand the engines and plasma systems and are actively trying to get them to run in a particular fashion.’
O’Mara couldn’t look at Romanov directly and seemed to be trying to ensure she kept the Captain between herself and the ships Engineering Officer. Peeking out from behind him she said ‘The chem guys reckon the GECLLs communicate using chemical combinations, like pheromones. We’re a way off understanding the lingo yet, but they’ve identified a couple of significant chemicals groups that seem to vary in concentration and location on a regular basis. We think the GECLLs use that like a broadcast system.’
‘And how does that help us?’ growled Romanov.
O’Mara still didn’t make eye contact and felt safer addressing an answer to the Captain. ‘We think we’ve figured out a basic distress chemical, which we could use as a sort of SOS message. Maybe.’
Romanov looked mightily upset but before she could reply, Hollins suggested ‘It’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got at the moment. I’ve asked the science team to carry on decoding the chemical signals, but from what the chemists tell me this language is getting more and more complex with every passing minute.’
O’Mara nodded, and there was a note of wonder and excitement in her voice. ‘The GECLLs have found ways to assemble molecules into structures we’ve never seen or even considered. They’re creating whole new branches of chemistry right under our noses!’
Romanov still wasn’t impressed. ‘Lovely. How do we kill them?’
O’Mara looked horrified. ‘We don’t want to kill them!!’ but then ducked back behind the Captain as Romanov took a step towards her.
Romanov wasn’t interested in the potential of the infestation, only in making sure the ship was safe. ‘I don’t care if your маленькі лайки can paint the Mona Lisa, I want them out of my systems!!’
Dave held his hand up to calm the engineer ‘Yes, we understand that Olga, but fighting amongst ourselves won’t help. We must explore every avenue, and at the moment my view is that communication offers the greatest opportunity. As that’s the province of the scientists, I suggest we let them get on with it, and you concentrate your efforts on trying to regain control of the ship’s systems.’
Romanov didn’t answer, but turned back to her console.
O’Mara timidly took a place at the console next to Romanov’s and created a link to the console in the Chemistry Lab. ‘I’ve got everyone in my department analysing any chemicals in the ship’s systems that aren’t actually DNA. It’s a reasonable bet that these are communication signals of a sort.’
She popped up data on the screens above the consoles which showed a representation of the spread of the infestation through the auxiliary power system and changes in the levels of various chemicals while that happened.
O’Mara continued absent-mindedly, throwing more and more data up on the screens. ‘We’ve back-tracked through the data, as the oldest communication signals are the most basic and therefore the easiest to translate. We reckon we’ve already isolated the basic “danger” and “food” type signals, and are trying to build an algorithm the universal translator can use to extrapolate meaning from the juxtaposition of chemical concentration levels at population node points . . . ‘
Hollins looked at Romanov who shrugged back at him blankly. ‘Whoa! Slow down O’Mara. We’re not up to speed on this. You need to explain this to us like you’d explain it to your granny.’
O’Mara span around looking confused, but then the penny dropped.
‘Sorry sir. Right.’ She took a deep breath.
Gesticulating wildly, she shouted ‘THE LITTLE CREATURE THINGIES ARE TALKING WITH SMELLS AND THE SMELLS . . . ‘
Hollins looked at Romanov who shrugged blankly again. Turning back he said ‘Whoa! O’Mara, why are you shouting?’
That confused look crossed her face again as she explained ‘My granny’s as deaf as a post . . . ‘
With a sigh, Hollins tried again. ‘Aisling, we aren’t actually your granny, we just want a simplified explanation.’
O’Mara blushed as she realised she’d misunderstood the Captain’s request. ‘Ah, right. With you now, sir. It’s like this: We think that with enough data, we can use the universal translator to communicate with the GECLLs, but it’ll be largely abstract concepts as we have no common perspective with a life-form that’s just DNA.’
‘Can you do that?’ asked the Captain uncertainly.
‘Oh for sure, but it’s a matter of time. In the greater scheme of things, we humans . . . in fact all living things . . . are just colonies of individual cells, but having evolved over millions of years, our cells have become increasingly specialised and increasingly interdependent. The GECLLs have advanced as far as they have in a couple of days, so their detail communication skills are just lagging behind a bit.’
Romanov was sceptical. ‘And how long will all this take?’
O’Mara smiled brightly, completely missing the inference that they were clearly in danger. ‘Oh, I have no idea. How long’s a piece of string?’
Romanov turned to Hollins. ‘Captain, I don’t think we have time for this. I suggest we try to isolate the main hull, shift all the crew up there, then flood every system in the engineering hull with acid.’
Hollins took a deep breath. Much as he had faith in his Science Officer, he couldn’t afford to risk waiting for her to reach the end of a piece of string. ‘I’m inclined to agree with you. How long will it take to make enough acid?’
O’Mara was horrified. ‘But the GECLLs!! They’re sentient! We can’t just go and kill them off!!’
Hollins sighed. ‘I don’t want to either, Aisling, but if it’s us or them, I’m afraid I don’t have a choice. It’ll take time to prepare the acid so that’s all the time you have to come up with some way to open dialogue.’
‘But sir!’ wailed O’Mara.
‘I’m sorry Aisling, I can’t risk the ship and the entire crew on the off chance . . . ‘
He was cut short by flashing red-alert lights and wailing klaxons.
Romanov span and checked her console. ‘They’re moving!’
‘Who is??’ asked Hollins.
‘The Jekylls. All of them.’
‘WHAT???’
Lieutenant Johnson was at another console and shouted ‘Plasma valves MD1, 5, 6 and 7 opening, Lots of other plasma valves opening up too . . . purge system, plasma venting system, drive system, auxiliaries . . . everything on the Starboard side warp-drive system is going live.’
‘What the hell are they up to?’ muttered Romanov.
‘Warp-coils coming on line . . . they’re activating the Tana warp-coils too!’ groaned Johnson.
‘Oh shit!’ muttered Romanov ‘If they activate one engine the unbalanced warp-field will tear the ship to pieces!’
‘Commander, something is happening to the plasma flows in the warp coils . . . some of the flows are pulsating.’
‘How is that possible?’
‘They’re operating the flow valves faster than . . . um . . . faster than it should be possible to do? And the nacelle plasma vents have opened!’
Romanov paused and in a flurry of stabs at her console, wiped O’Mara’s data from one of the screens above her console and replaced it with readings from the ships sensors.
‘Ну я трахкав!’ she muttered.
Hollins was staring at the data on the screen but wasn’t sure what was going on. ‘Is that some kind of wormhole forming ahead of the nacelle?’
/> Romanov was staring open mouthed. ‘I believe so sir. The Jekylls seem to have found a way to create a tiny off-set warp-field and have used plasma to turn that into a wormhole.’
‘They’re leaving!’ gasped O’Mara.
‘What??’
‘The GECLLs! They’re exiting the ship’s plasma conduits via the purge system.’
She pulled up an external camera view.
Ahead of the huge white engine nacelle that housed the ship’s starboard warp-drive coils, a strange fold in space had appeared. It looked for all the world as if the view in front of the engine had been printed on a sheet of rubber, which had then been pinched and twisted into a point. The light from the stars beyond it swirled and spiralled towards a growing black hole at the pinch-point that was more nothing than emptiness. A stream of gently glowing nebulous matter could be seen floating away from the ship and spiralling down towards this tiny swirling black hole.
‘Well I’m buggered!’ she muttered. ‘They’ve actually found a way to create a wormhole to another part of the universe.’
‘Where??’ whispered the Captain.
‘No idea. Could be anywhere. Might not even be this universe’ mused O’Mara.
As suddenly as it had started, it was over.
The main lights returned to their normal brightness and alert lights and klaxons fell silent. On the view-screen, the last of the wispy material spiralled through the black vortex which snapped shut behind it.
Romanov and Johnson were both frantically checking their systems. Within seconds, Romanov was able to report ‘We seem to be intact sir, no damage to any systems.’
In the quiet that had followed the alarms everyone heard Johnson swear quietly before adding ‘Better than that, Captain, it appears that every plasma conduit on the ship was been lined with a perfect layer of flexible diamond. The systems haven’t been in that good a condition since the ship was built, and possibly not even then.’