The Last Colony

by John Scalzi

  “Sorry, honey,” I said. “I know you and your friends are bored.”

  “No kidding,” Zoë said. “We all knew colonization was supposed to be difficult, but no one told us it was going to be boring.”

  “If you’re looking for something to do, we could start up a school,” I said.

  “We’re bored, so you suggest school?” Zoë said. “Who are you? Also, not likely, since you’ve confiscated all our PDAs. It’s going to be hard to teach us anything when we don’t have lessons.”

  “The Mennonites have books,” I said. “Old-fashioned ones. With pages and everything.”

  “I know,” Zoë said. “They’re the only ones not going completely insane with boredom, too. God, I miss my PDA.”

  “The irony must be crushing,” I said.

  “I’m going to leave you now,” Zoë said. “Before I throw a rock at you.” Despite the threat, she gave me and Savitri a quick hug before she left. Babar walked off with her; she was more fun.

  “I know how she feels,” Savitri said, as we resumed walking.

  “You want to throw a rock at me, too?” I said.

  “Sometimes,” Savitri said. “Not right now. No, about missing her PDA. I miss mine, too. Look at this.” Savitri reached into her back pants pocket and pulled out a spiral notebook, a small stack of which had been made a gift to her by Hiram Yoder and the Mennonites. “This is what I’m reduced to.”

  “Savage,” I said.

  “Joke all you want,” Savitri said, and she put the notebook back. “Going from a PDA to a notepad is hard.”

  I didn’t argue with this. Instead, we walked out the north gate of the village, where we found Jane with Hickory and Dickory, and two members of the Magellan’s security complement whom she had deputized. “Come look at this,” she said, and walked over to one of the storage containers on the perimeter.

  “What am I looking for?” I asked.

  “These,” Jane said, and pointed at the container, near the top, about three meters up.

  I squinted. “Those are scratches,” I said.

  “Yes. We’ve found them on other containers, too. And there’s more,” Jane said, and walked over to two other containers. “Something’s been digging here,” she said. “It looks like something’s been trying to dig under these containers.”

  “Good luck with that,” I said. The containers were more than two meters in width.

  “We found one hole on the other side of the perimeter that was nearly a meter in length,” Jane said. “Something’s trying to get in at night. It can’t jump over the containers, so it’s trying to go under instead. And it’s not just one. We’ve got lots of vegetation tramped down around here, and lots of different-sized paw prints on the containers. Whatever they are, they’re in a pack.”

  “Are these the big animals folks have seen in the brush?” I asked.

  Jane shrugged. “No one’s seen any of them close up, and nothing comes around here during the day. Normally, we’d post infrared cameras up at the top of the containers, but we can’t here.” Jane didn’t have to explain why; the sentry cameras, like almost every other piece of technology we owned, communicated wirelessly, and wireless was a security risk. “And whatever they are, they’re avoiding being seen by the night sentry. But the night sentry isn’t using nightscopes, either.”

  “Whatever they are, you think they’re dangerous,” I said.

  Jane nodded. “I don’t see herbivores being this dedicated to getting inside. Whatever’s out here sees us and smells us and wants to get in to see what we’re like. We need to find out what they are and how many of them there are.”

  “If they’re predators, their numbers are limited,” I said. “Too many predators will deplete the stock of prey.”

  “Yes,” Jane said. “But that still doesn’t tell us how many there are or what sort of threat they are. All we know is that they’re out here at night, and they’re big enough to almost be able to jump the containers, and smart enough to try tunneling under. We can’t let people begin to homestead until we know what sort of threat they represent.”

  “Our people are armed,” I said. Among the supplies was a store of ancient, simple rifles and non-nanobotic ammunition.

  “Our people have firearms,” Jane said. “But most of them haven’t the slightest idea how to use them. They’re going to end up shooting themselves before they shoot anything else. And it’s not only humans at risk. I’m more concerned about our livestock. We can’t really afford to lose many of them to predators. Not this early.”

  I looked out toward the brush. Between me and the tree line, one of the Mennonite men was instructing a group of other colonists on the finer points of driving an old-fashioned tractor. Farther out a couple of colonists were collecting soil so we could check its compatibility with our crops. “That’s not going to be a very popular position,” I said to Jane. “People are already complaining about being cooped up in town.”

  “It won’t take that long to find them,” Jane said. “Hickory and Dickory and I are going to take the watch tonight, up on top of the containers. Their eyesight drops down into the infrared range, so they might see them coming.”

  “And you?” I asked. Jane shrugged. After her revelation back on the Magellan about being reengineered, she’d kept mostly quiet about the full range of her abilities. But it wasn’t a stretch to assume her visual range had expanded like the rest of her abilities. “What are you going to do when you spot them?” I asked.

  “Tonight, nothing,” Jane said. “I want to get an idea of what they are and how many there are. We can decide what we’re going to do then. But until then we should make sure everyone is inside the perimeter an hour before sunset and that anyone outside the perimeter during the day has an armed guard.” She nodded to her human deputies. “These two have weapons training, and there are several others in the Magellan crew who have as well. That’s a start.”

  “And no homesteading until we get a grip on these things,” I said.

  “Right,” Jane said.

  “It’ll make for a fun Council meeting,” I said.

  “I’ll break it to them,” Jane said.

  “No,” I said. “I should do it. You already have the reputation as the scary one. I don’t want you always being the one who bears the bad news.”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” Jane said.

  “I know,” I said. “It doesn’t mean you should always do it, though.”

  “Fine,” Jane said. “You can tell them that I expect we’ll know quickly enough whether these things represent a threat. That should help.”

  “We can hope,” I said.

  “Don’t we have any information on these creatures?” Manfred Trujillo asked. He and Captain Zane walked beside me now as I headed toward the village’s information center.

  “No,” I said. “We don’t even know what they look like yet. Jane’s going to find out tonight. So far the only creatures we know anything about are those rat-things at the mess hall.”

  “The fuglies,” Zane said.

  “The what?” I asked.

  “The fuglies,” Zane said. “That’s what the teenagers are calling them. Because they’re fucking ugly.”

  “Nice name,” I said. “Point is, I don’t think we can claim to have a full understanding of our biosphere from the fuglies alone.”

  “I know you see value in being cautious,” Trujillo said. “But people are getting restless. We’ve brought people to a place they know nothing about, told them they can’t ever talk to their families and friends again, and then given them nothing to do for two entire weeks. We’re in limbo. We need to get people going on the next phase of their lives, or they’re going to keep dwelling on the fact that their lives as they knew them have been entirely taken away.”

  “I know,” I said. “But you know as well as I do we’ve got nothing on this world. You two have seen the same files I have. Whoever did the so-called survey of this planet apparently didn’t bother to spend
more than ten minutes on it. We’ve got the basic biochemistry of the planet and that’s pretty much it. We’ve got almost no information on flora and fauna, or even if it breaks down into flora and fauna. We don’t know if the soil will grow our crops. We don’t know what native life we can eat or use. All information the Department of Colonization usually provides a new colony, we don’t have. We have to find all this stuff out for our own before we start, and unfortunately in that we’ve got a pretty big handicap.”

  We arrived at the information center, which was a grand name for the cargo container we’d modified for the purpose. “After you,” I said, holding the first set of doors for Trujillo and Zane. Once we were all in, I sealed the door behind me, allowing the nanobotic mesh to completely envelop the outer door, turning it a featureless black, before opening the interior door. The nanobotic mesh had been programmed to absorb and cloak electromagnetic waves of all sorts. It covered the walls, floor and ceiling of the container. It was unsettling if you thought about it; it was like being in the exact center of nothing.

  The man who had designed the mesh waited inside the center’s interior door. “Administrator Perry,” Jerry Bennett said. “Captain Zane. Mr. Trujillo. Nice to see you back in my little black box.”

  “How is the mesh holding up?” I asked.

  “Good,” Bennett said, and pointed at the ceiling. “No waves get in, no waves get out. Schrödinger would be jealous. I need more cells, though. The mesh sucks power like you wouldn’t believe. Not to mention all the rest of this equipment.” Bennett motioned to the rest of the technology in the center. Because of the mesh, it was the only place on Roanoke where there was technology that you wouldn’t find past the middle of the twentieth century on Earth, save power technology that did not run on fossil fuels.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “You’re a miracle worker, Bennett.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m just your average geek. I’ve got those soil reports you wanted.” He handed over a PDA, and I fondled it for a moment before looking at the screen. “The good news is the soil samples I’ve seen so far look good for our crops in a general sense. There’s nothing in the soil that will kill them or stunt their growth, at least chemically. Each of the samples was crawling with little critters, too.”

  “Is that a bad thing?” Trujillo asked.

  “Got me,” Bennett said. “What I know about soil management I read as I was processing these samples. My wife did a little gardening back on Phoenix and seemed to be of the opinion that having a bunch of bugs was good because they aerated the soil. Who knows, maybe she’s right.”

  “She’s right,” I said. “Having a healthy amount of biomass is usually a good thing.” Trujillo looked at me skeptically. “Hey, I farmed,” I said. “But we also don’t know how these creatures will react to our plants. We’re introducing new species into a biosphere.”

  “You’re officially beyond anything I know about the subject, so I’ll move on,” Bennett said. “You asked if there was any way for me to adapt the technology we have to switch off the wireless components. Do you want the long or short answer?”

  “Let’s start with the short answer,” I said.

  “Not really,” Bennett said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Now I need the long answer.”

  Bennett reached over and grabbed a PDA that he had earlier pried apart, lifted the top off it and handed it to me. “This PDA is a fairly standard piece of Colonial Union technology. Here you see all the components; the processor, the monitor, the data storage, the wireless transmitter that lets it talk to other PDAs and computers. Not a single one of them is physically connected to any of the other parts. Every part of this PDA connects wirelessly to every other part.”

  “Why do they do it that way?” I asked, turning the PDA over in my hands.

  “Because it’s cheap,” Bennett said. “You can make tiny data transmitters for next to nothing. It costs less than using physical materials. They don’t cost much either, but in aggregate there’s a real cost differential. So nearly every manufacturer goes that way. It’s design by accountant. The only physical connections in the PDA are from the power cell to the individual components, and again that’s because it’s cheaper to do it that way.”

  “Can you use those connections to send data?” Zane said.

  “I don’t see how,” Bennett said. “I mean, sending data over a physical connection is no problem. But getting into each of these components and flashing their command core to do it that way is beyond my talents. Aside from the programming skills, there’s the fact each manufacturer locks out access to the command core. It’s proprietary data. And even if I could do all that, there’s no guarantee it would work. Among everything else, you’d be routing everything through the power cell. I’m not sure how you get that to work.”

  “So even if we turn off all the wireless transmitters, every one of these is still leaking wireless signals,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Bennett said. “Across very short distances—no more than a few centimeters—but, yeah. If you’re really looking for this sort of thing, you could detect it.”

  “There’s a certain point at which this all becomes futile,” Trujillo said. “If someone’s listening for radio signals this weak, there’s a pretty good chance they’re scanning the planet optically as well. They’re just going to see us.”

  “Hiding ourselves from sight is a difficult fix,” I said to Trujillo. “This is an easy fix. Let’s work on the easy fixes.” I turned to Bennett, and handed back his PDA. “Let me ask you something else,” I said. “Could you make wired PDAs? Ones without wireless parts or transmitters?”

  “I’m sure I could find a design for one,” Bennett said. “There are public domain blueprints. But I’m not exactly set up for manufacturing. I could go through everything we have and cobble up something. Wireless parts are the rule but there are some things that are still wired up. But we’re never going to get to a place where everyone’s walking around with a computer, much less being able to replace the onboard computers on most of the equipment we have. Honestly, outside this black box, we’re not getting out of the early twentieth century any time soon.”

  All of us digested that for a moment. “Can we at least expand this?” Zane finally asked, motioning around him.

  “I think we should,” Bennett said. “In particular I think we need to build a black box medical bay, because Dr. Tsao keeps distracting me when I’m trying to get work done.”

  “She’s hogging your equipment,” I said.

  “No, she’s just really cute,” Bennett said. “And that’s going to get me in trouble with the wife. But also, I’ve only got a couple of her diagnostic machines in here, and if we ever have a real medical problem, we’re going to want more available.”

  I nodded. We’d already had one broken arm, from a teenager climbing up on the barrier and then slipping off. He was lucky not to have broken his neck. “Do we have enough mesh?” I asked.

  “This is pretty much our entire stock,” Bennett said. “But I can program it to make some more of itself. I’d need some more raw material.”

  “I’ll have Ferro get on that,” Zane said, referring to the cargo chief. “We’ll see what we have in inventory.”

  “Every time I see him, he seems really pissed,” Bennett said.

  “Maybe it’s because he’s supposed to be at home and not here,” Zane snapped. “Maybe he doesn’t much like being kidnapped by the Colonial Union.” Two weeks had not served to make the captain any more mellow about the destruction of his ship or the stranding of his crew.

  “Sorry,” Bennett said.

  “I’m ready to go,” Zane said.

  “Two quick things,” Bennett said to me. “I’m almost done printing most of the data files you were given when we came here, so you can have those in hard copy. I can’t print the video and audio files, but I’ll run them through a processor to get you transcripts.”

  “Okay, good,” I said. “What wa
s the second thing?”

  “I went around the camp with a monitor like you asked and looked for wireless signals,” Bennett said. Trujillo raised an eyebrow at this. “The monitor is solid state,” Bennett said to him. “Doesn’t send, only receives. Anyway, I think you should know there are three wireless devices still out there. And they’re still transmitting.”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” Jann Kranjic said.

  For not the first time, I restrained the urge to punch Kranjic in the temple. “Do we really need to do this the hard way, Jann?” I said. “I’d like to pretend we’re not twelve years old and that we’re not having an ‘am to, am not’ sort of conversation.”

  “I turned over my PDA just like everyone else did,” Kranjic said, and then motioned back to Beata, who was lying on her cot, a washcloth over her eyes. Beata was apparently prone to migranes. “And Beata turned in her PDA and her camera cap. You have everything we have.”

  I glanced over at Beata. “Well, Beata?” I said.

  Beata raised the edge of her washcloth and looked over, wincing. Then she sighed and reapplied her washcloth. “Check his underwear,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Beata,” Kranjic said.

  “His underwear,” Beata said. “At least one pair has a pouch in the elastic that hides a small recorder. He’s got a pin of the Umbrian flag that’s an audio/video input. He’s probably got it on right now.”

  “You bitch,” Kranjic said, subconsciously covering his pin. “You’re fired.”

  “That’s funny,” Beata said, pressing the washcloth against her eyes. “We’re a thousand light-years from anywhere, we have no chance of ever getting back to Umbria, you spend your days reciting overblown notes into your underwear for a book you’ll never write, and I’m fired. Get a grip, Jann.”

  Kranjic stood to make a dramatic exit. “Jann,” I said, and held out my hand. Jann snatched off his pin and pressed it into my palm.

  “Want my underwear now?” He sneered.