A Learning Experience

by Christopher Nuttall

  Steve nodded in agreement. “Any other problems?”

  “Not really,” Rochester said. “There were some grumbles over restrictions on internet use at first, but we eventually overcame them once the system was properly set up. However, sooner or later, there will be a leak. Someone will say something they shouldn't on an open system.”

  Kevin thought it wouldn't matter, Steve recalled. They’d discussed the issue several times, when it became apparent that the alien database wouldn't be enough to distract everyone from demanding access to Earth’s internet. Kevin had pointed out that there was so much fantasy online that no one would believe a claim that someone was talking from the moon. If someone could claim to be a time traveller, or a man could pretend to be a teenage girl, few people would believe the truth. Besides, sooner or later, it would no longer matter.

  He leaned forward. “You have the system completely secure?”

  “Oh, yes,” Rochester assured him. “Everything going to Earth and back again goes through one of the alien systems. If someone wants to hack into our computers they won’t get any further, at least not with human-level tech. We’ve also developed a system for scanning all files for potential problems before allowing them to move through the buffers. Standard precautions, naturally, but you won’t believe just how much trouble carelessness has caused in the past.”

  Steve smiled. Two years ago, one of the kids had downloaded a pornographic video from the internet that had turned out to have a nasty virus attached. Kevin had had to fix it, while Steve delivered a sharp lecture on the dangers of downloading anything from the internet without taking proper precautions. And then they’d had to have the Talk. The thought of having to have it again with grown men was definitely cringe-worthy.

  They stopped outside another airlock. “The alien is inside,” Rochester said. “He’s been quite helpful, but he’s also quite ignorant. The sociologists think he truly has no idea of the depth of his own ignorance.”

  Steve, who had met a great many people with the same problem, nodded. “What sort of precautions have you taken against escape?”

  “The room is shielded, then held on a separate system from the rest of the colony,” Rochester said. “If the sociologists or anyone else wish to speak with him, they do so with guards monitoring everything that takes place inside the cell. He can’t take a piss without us knowing about it.”

  “Good,” Steve said.

  “He also seems to have developed something akin to Stockholm Syndrome,” Rochester added. “The sociologists think he expected to be killed as soon as he was captured, perhaps after interrogation. Instead, we’ve taken fairly good care of him. I’ve seen similar patterns among captured Iraqis and Afghanis.”

  Steve nodded. A distant cousin of his, an MP, had been charged with guarding prisoners in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. The prisoners had almost collapsed in fear when they’d been told to dig latrines, even though they were desperately necessary. It had taken some time before the MPs had realised the prisoners thought they were being asked to dig their own graves. Once the prisoners had realised they weren't going to be shot out of hand – their former leaders had told them the Americans would kill anyone they captured – they’d relaxed a great deal. Some of them had even gone on to lead successful careers in the new Iraq.

  “Monitor me,” Steve said. “I’ll call when I want out.”

  Inside, the alien’s chamber was hot and moist, as if he’d stepped right into a sauna. There was a faintly unpleasant smell, like rotting meat, in the air. The alien himself was squatting against one wall, one clawed hand tap-tapping at an Ipad and trying to play a game. It – he, Steve reminded himself – had requested access to the internet, or a terminal with a translator, but Steve hadn't been willing to allow either. But the alien was learning to read English, even if he would never be able to speak it. They just weren't designed to speak human tongues.

  “Greetings,” the alien said, through the translator. The security officers had suggested taking it away when the alien wasn't talking to anyone, but Kevin had argued against the suggestion and Steve had accepted his arguments. “Thank you for visiting me.”

  “You’re welcome,” Steve said. He found it hard to understand what the alien must be feeling – there were no other aliens in the colony – but he couldn't help feeling sorry for the creature, no matter what its superiors had intended to do. “How are you coping with living here?”

  The alien produced a spluttering noise. “I am not being hurt or killed,” he said. “But not all of your people believe what I say.”

  Steve had to smile. The sociologists Kevin had recruited were sensible people, men and women who had actually done field work rather than learning everything from politically-correct books. But, from some of their reports, even the most sensible of them had great difficulty in wrapping his head around what passed for culture among the Hordes. What sort of race could live like that, he’d asked, when there was so much potential in the galaxy?

  But being poor often leads to a stubborn pride, Steve thought. Or perhaps to a helpless despair.

  It seemed fitting, he suspected. The Horde knew, at a deep level, just how inferior they were to races that actually produced starships and weapons for themselves. They were dependent on those they considered their soft social inferiors, so dependent that a sudden withdrawal of support would leave the Hordesmen to fade away and die. But, at the same time, they did nothing to overcome their dependency. It would be a tacit admission that their lives were far from perfect.

  “You’re the first non-human they’ve spoken to,” Steve said. The alien interface had noted that there were almost ten thousand intelligent races known to exist, a number far beyond Steve’s ability to grasp emotionally. Compared to the sheer number of aliens out there, humanity’s eight billion souls weren’t even a drop in the bucket. “We have no experience with anyone outside our own race.”

  “You have been lucky,” the alien stated. “Open contact might well have destroyed you.”

  Steve nodded. It still might, even if humanity avoided a military invasion or becoming a protectorate of a more advanced power. The sudden discovery that there were thousands of intelligent races in the galaxy, almost all of them far more powerful than humanity, would shock the entire planet. Some would see the presence of aliens as a challenge, Steve knew, others would quail away from the stars. What was left for humanity to achieve, they’d ask, if the aliens had done it all first?

  “It might have done,” he agreed, finally. “Is there anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable?”

  The alien spluttered again. “These quarters are perfect,” he said. “You do not have to improve them for me.”

  “If you need anything, just ask,” Steve said. He glanced into the bathroom. The alien had requested a bathtub large enough for several humans to share, rather than one of the showers in the human barracks. From the reports, the sociologists were still arguing if the request constituted luxury or a simple necessity for alien life. “We are quite happy to provide.”

  “In exchange for answering questions,” the alien said. “Why are so many of your people unwilling to believe that I am telling the truth?”

  Steve hesitated, trying to put it into words. “There are some people, no matter how smart, who have a view of the universe that is focused on us,” he said. “Not just humanity, a subset of humanity. They have problems coming to terms with the fact there are groups of humans who refuse to behave as their models suggest, let alone non-human life forms such as yourself. And when theory comes up against reality, some of them even think that reality must be wrong.”

  “Like one of our Horde Commanders,” the alien said.

  “It certainly sounds that way,” Steve agreed. “Thank you for seeing me.”

  “I wish to learn more about your people,” the alien said, as Steve turned back to the airlock. “Can you not provide me with information?”

  Steve hesitated. Part of him wanted to restrict
what the alien knew, part of him suspected that if they lost Heinlein Colony, they would have lost everything. But he didn't want to provide the alien with any non-human technology. It might have an unexpected sting in the tail.

  The answer struck him a moment later and he swore, inwardly. “I’ll have you provided with a device that will provide information,” he said. There were computers for the blind, computers that read information to their users. One of them would suffice for the alien. In hindsight, they should have thought of it earlier. “It should help answer your questions.”

  He stepped back through the airlock, then waited until it closed behind him. “Have them dig up a computer for the blind,” he ordered. “But no internet access, nothing that can possibly provide a security risk.”

  “Understood,” Rochester said, gravely. “Do you wish to see the Theory Lab now?”

  Steve nodded. “Yes,” he said. He was looking forward to hearing what Keith Glass and his band of researchers had come up with to expand their operations. They’d already proposed several ideas for making more money on Earth. “It should be interesting.”

  “Very interesting,” Rochester said. “Do you realise we can make diamonds in orbit? There is an endless demand for diamonds of certain specifications and we can produce them, very cheaply. And then there’s the supplies of raw materials from the asteroids, once we start mining them. They’re even working out a Homesteading Kit for anyone who wants to set up as an asteroid miner. Once we get them out to the asteroid belt ...”

  He broke off as Steve’s communicator buzzed. “Steve, this is Mongo,” Mongo said. “You need to get back to the ship. We may have a serious problem.”

  Steve looked up at Rochester. “I’m sorry to cut this short,” he said, “but I need to go.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Rochester said. He gave Steve a smile that looked somehow inhuman on his modified face. “Give them hell.”

  Chapter Nine

  Washington DC, USA

  “That’s odd,” Jürgen Affenzeller muttered.

  It was a largely unacknowledged fact that the Department of Homeland Security kept an eye on military veterans. The rationale for the policy had never been fully codified and, indeed, had started out as a sop to political correctness. Besides, veterans were trained in using weapons, they often had experience in urban combat and they sometimes suffered from PTSD and other problems after their service. It was just common sense, the DHS had argued, to keep an eye on them.

  Jürgen had never really believe in the logic, if there was any logic in the decision. Indeed, it made much more sense, to him, to keep an eye on radical Islamic groups operating within the United States. But the simple truth was that any hint of racial profiling would cause a political shitstorm, while veterans had far fewer people willing to go to bat for them. It made little sense, but politics rarely did. Besides, he had a wife and two small daughters to feed and raising a stink about it would have cost him his job.

  He’d never seen much of anything to convince him that there was a real danger. Sure, some veterans were politically active, proud members of the Gun Community and very opposed to any threats to the Second Amendment, but few of them seemed dangerous. Indeed, veterans were often stanchly patriotic, unwilling to consider using violence against their own countrymen. Compared to some of the noises coming from radical groups – and they had expanded rapidly in the wake of the economic crisis – there was no strong reason to worry about the vets. But he didn't seem to have any choice.

  But now there was something odd flowing into the system.

  It was hard, almost impossible, to move around the United States without leaving some kind of electronic trace. The DHS – and NSA and several other government organisations – monitored human traces, looking for patterns that might signify trouble. It was, in many ways, a flawed replacement for having men and women out on the beat, but it did have the advantage of causing almost no disturbance at all for the suspect to pick up on. Quite a few criminal cases had been blown, Jürgen knew, because the suspect had seen the FBI agent shadowing him and panicked.

  He looked down at the list of reports, trying to put them together into a coherent whole. His instincts told him there was a pattern, even if he couldn't see it clearly. But what did it signify?

  A large number of veterans claimed benefits of one kind or another from the government. Over the last three weeks, a surprisingly high number – over three thousand – had stopped claiming benefits. It was an odd pattern, made all the odder by the simple fact that most of those veterans seemed to have vanished. They weren't dead, as far as he could tell; they’d just dropped out of sight. And then he’d cross-referenced the data and discovered that half of the veterans in the list were crippled. They had been unable to return to a normal life.

  So where had they gone?

  A call to a handful of residence homes revealed that the men had been transferred, without notice, to another residence home in Montana. Jürgen had frowned, then checked with Montana and discovered that there was no such residence home. But when he did yet another cross-reference, it became clear that the veterans who weren't crippled had also gone to Montana. And then they’d dropped off the grid.

  He shook his head in disbelief, then started poking around the data. A man called Kevin Stuart had visited thirty of the nursing homes, then he’d been replaced by several other men ... all of whom were included on the list of disappeared veterans. And veterans weren't the only ones. Keith Glass, a writer of military science-fiction, had also vanished ... and so had a large percentage of the Space Settlement Society. Some of them were vets, others were civilians who had been very involved with NASA and civilian space programs ... there was a pattern, Jürgen was sure. But what did it all mean?

  Shaking his head, he put a brief report together and emailed it to his superior officer. Maybe there was nothing going on, maybe it was just a false alarm. But he honestly couldn't see how nearly four thousand men, some of them crippled, could fit into a relatively small ranch. They wouldn't have anything like enough water, for starters, or food ... unless they were shipping it in by the truckload. But why would anyone do that?

  Five minutes later, he received two emails in return. The first one, from his boss, ordered him to cooperate with the second email. Puzzled, he opened the second email and discovered orders to report to Fort Meade, ASAP. The NSA? It made no sense to him at all. What would a number of missing veterans have to do with the National Security Agency?

  ***

  “Thank you for coming,” the NSA agent said, when he arrived at Fort Meade. He hadn't bothered to give his name. “Your investigation has crossed paths with one of our investigations and we need to share information.”

  Jürgen kept his opinion of that to himself. The NSA wasn't known for sharing information with anyone, unless someone with real authority got behind them and pushed. It was far more likely, he knew, that they'd take what he’d found and then order him to keep his mouth shut in future. It would annoy his boss – the Department of Homeland Security desperately needed a big win, something they could use to justify their existence – but crossing the NSA was considered inadvisable. They could end his career with a word or two in the right ears.

  “For the moment, you are being seconded to my team,” the agent continued. “You’ll be given papers to sign later, but for the moment keep your mouth shut outside the team, understand?”

  “Yes,” Jürgen said, tightly. “I don’t suppose I have a choice.”

  “No,” the agent agreed. “You don’t.”

  Jürgen gritted his teeth, then followed the agent down through a series of security checks and into a SCIF facility deep under the building. It was less impressive than he’d expected, he decided, as he looked around; there was a large table, a handful of comfortable chairs and a simple projector and computer terminal. But it would be secure, he knew, as he took the seat he was offered and waited. No one outside the room would be able to eavesdrop on them, nor would any re
cording devices work within the room’s field. It was as secure as human ingenuity could make it.

  “We will be briefing a handful of very high-ranking officials on the progress of a monitoring program,” the agent added. “Say nothing until I call on you to speak, then stick to the facts alone.”

  Jürgen sighed, then pasted a blank expression on his face as the officials filed into the room and made themselves coffee before sitting down. Two of them wore military uniforms, the remainder civilian suits; he discovered, not entirely to his surprise, that he recognised a handful of the civilians. But then, the National Security Advisor was a well-known political figure. And yet ... why was he here?

  “Over the past month, there have been several investigations into odd technology appearing from overseas,” the agent said, opening the briefing. “Our investigations eventually collided with a DHS investigation, which made the entire problem considerably more worrisome.”

  He tapped a switch, activating the projector. A picture of a USB stick-like device appeared in front of them. “This, gentlemen, is a Wilhelm Tech Wireless Internet Dongle,” he said. “The devices were introduced two weeks ago in a low-key manner, mainly through internet forums and tech sites, then sold from Switzerland through mail order. On the surface, these devices are nothing more extraordinary than any other form of internet connection system. However, they have various ... attributes that made them potentially very dangerous.”