by Tobias Roote
As the new arrival turned to face them, they saw why - recognising a little of all of their hives in its physical make-up. Jabath noted there were two extinct hives represented in both the upper and lower arm sections of the torso. All present instinctively bristled at the evident strangeness of the individual, who was not from a single recognised hive. The truth, had they known it, would have been stranger than any of their thoughts.
Jabath scanned the visitor as surreptitiously as he could. The alien responded by turning and looking directly at him as it spoke.
“Welcome - all of you,” it said loud enough for all to hear while going on to survey each of them in turn, as if memorising their features before moving on to the next.
Jabath instinctively believed this strange entity was able to sense his every move, or was he being paranoid. Nonetheless, he must be doubly careful not to be discovered. He was the one ‘Ta not invited to this meeting and he sensed there might be good reason for that. Yet, he felt he had already been singled out, and needed to meld into the background. The data he had already managed to obtain troubled him, and if he reported it to the Crystal Queen it would earn him immense gratitude from her. That could be of great use to him in the future. He waited upon this strange being’s words, this apparition that was like them, but not like them, in that the components were Nubl-based but the similarity seemed to end there.
Jabath decided then and there that the alien was not of their own race giving him no choice, but to speak out.
“You are not Nubl - who, or what are you?” he demanded.
The being stood unworried in front of them as others besides Jabath discovered the same differences and began to murmur to each other.
“My name is Ship, and I am your enemy,” it announced.
“Really? You stand here one against twelve of the best warriors of the Nubl hives and say this? Are you committed to your own immediate destruction?” Jabath scorned the alien, too surprised at the revelation to consider its reason for being in the room.
“I represent the biological race you seek to destroy and am here to offer you a way to make amends,” Ship responded.
“You? – You represent biologicals, yet are some form of entity of artificial sentience much like us?” shouted one of the ‘Ta’s.
“Yes, I am an artificial intelligence, but not like yourselves. You are artificial clones of a biological sentience, whereas I have been developed completely from programming and artificial components. I was once a computer aboard a ship, I am now Ship - you, on the other hand, were at one time, born of a biological parents and subsequently converted into artificial form to provide you with a disease-free lifestyle, longevity and independence from planet-fall,” he explained.
The Nubl ‘Ta’s responded with laughter, feigned and nervous, they disbelieved his statement and were scathing of their unknown host’s announcements. A swell of unrest moved amongst them and Jabath could see it was becoming dangerous for this being to remain here. Nubl are not a tolerant race to accept such blasphemous statements. Many a Nubl’s arms twitched ready to form a Shonkeel and attack this outrageous intruder who spoke evil of their heritage.
“Ship is right,” a powerful new voice informed them and forced them to switch their attention to another part of the room where a another silver-bodied being stood. He had been missed because all attention was on the alien called Ship. Now everyone swung around to face this new threat. It was evidently of a completely different species to the Nubl, or the one that called itself after a ship as if it was a thing. Jabath found it all oddly disturbing, as if he recognised something of the new arrival. Its exterior was smooth and disturbingly featured as it screwed its face into different grimaces. These entities just appeared out of nowhere - what strange kind of technology did they possess?
A cold pit yawned in Jabath’s racial memories as his external senses warned him something disastrous was unfolding. He was picking up sounds and smells which could only mean one thing...
“What are you?” he demanded aggressively, his Shonkeel already forming on his arm, the serrated edges glinting maliciously in the artificial light of the underground bunker. He brandished his still forging weapon in preparation of an attack against the pestilence that stood before him.
The being just turned to him and confidently, without any sense of alarm or fear, admitted its blasphemy.
“My name is Zirkos, I am a biological sentience of the ancient race of Jenari - I am your ancestor.”
Absolute bedlam broke out.
***
After Zirkos’ declaration that he was their ancestor, he and Ship remained passive, seemingly unconcerned, as the warriors tried to rush them. The mood of the room was ugly, most of them desiring to dissect the pair there and then. However, their personal shields were impervious to the Nubl’s assaults, and their reaction fully anticipated.
The two remained patient while their adversaries went through all the possible physical responses, including escape, realising quite quickly their own exits were sealed off. With nowhere to run or hide, they began to return to applying logical thought to their situation and often looking angrily at Ship while they argued pointlessly and without direction. All deliberately ignored Zirkos, as if by pretending he wasn’t there, they could control their fury.
They had time and patience. It had taken them a long time to get to a point where they could stem the Crystal Queen’s advance, deciding to try and rally the forces against the hive queen and so stop any enlargement of the fleet threatening Earth.
This meeting was the result.
As order was slowly restored, the aliens began to take more of an interest in the hive Ta’s, but continued to watch quietly as the room settled down. Their attention seemed centred on Jabath who had remained calm and outside of any commotion as if already knowing what was occurring. Jabath thought the aliens might already know who he was, but this was just his own nervousness at work, the aliens could not possibly know he had supplanted the original ‘Ta of the Jabaa hive and assumed its appearance using inbuilt nanites.
Jabath waited as the alien’s fixed gaze forced the others to pay attention to their exchange. He realised the alien was waiting for him to make a comment or ask a question, having deemed that he was the most competent to be spokesperson for the group. He looked at the others, they also seemed happy for him to speak on their behalf. Yet not wanting to be singled out for attention in an unknown situation, Jabath was reluctant to begin negotiations.
He turned to the one called Ship. “Why do you say you are our ancestor?” he asked, studiously ignoring the biological entity, finding its presence highly distasteful. Instead he concentrated fully on the Nubl lookalike. He wondered how this exchange was going to proceed so wasn’t keen to stray from the opening subject. Yet he felt there was much to learn here if he could live long enough to benefit from it.
The silver being answered, walking directly into view, forcing Jabath to acknowledge him. The Nubl Warrior took it as a direct challenge, bristling with aggression, and met the being’s eyes which seemed to drill into him. Never having been so close to a biological threat before, he nonetheless recognised a cold intelligence and a determined expression. Jabath resolved to hear out the rest of its preposterous story, but deep inside, he also wondered at some of the physical similarities between the biological pestilence and the Nubl.
Zirkos had noticed the sleight, but was unfazed by the actions of those in front of him. He thought their attitudes were so typical of an inward-looking race, fearing difference and ignoring everything they found not to their taste. They didn’t even like the differences in each other’s hives. Yet, he was here to try and find a way of averting outright war between Nubl and Earth. Although he hadn’t been back to see what had occurred, he had all of that information already and was fully aware he didn’t have much time.
***
The Nubl from Jabaa, intrigued both Zirkos and Ship who were communicating on the implant that Zirkos had installed in his hea
d. An updated version from the original Earth model installed in their colleague Zeke Callaghan, it was now practically a biological organ in its own right. Something told Zirkos that the Nubl he was studying would be the one to take this forward, although there was something about him that Ship wasn’t very happy with.
Ship: The Nubl, Jabaa is portraying itself in a way that indicates a covert and clandestine agenda.
Zirkos: This maybe so, but out of all of these ’Ta’s, that one is the most receptive so far. It has not responded in a reactionary manner, is in control of itself and is the only one asking questions that might lead to explanations - the others are just raging, uselessly.
Ship: Progress cautiously, I am untrusting of the motives of this one most of all. I get the impression that all is not what it seems.
In fact, Ship didn’t trust any of them. Its prime directive was to protect Zirkos first, the Jenari second and through all of that, the Earth humans, because of the commitment Zirkos had made there. It remained ready to D-jump weapons to them both if necessary, whilst keeping the scanners operating above the planet on the lookout for any hive threat from space.
“I am a Jenari - I am what you term a ‘biological pestilence’, yet you too are Jenari,” Zirkos began, but was immediately drowned out in the roar of the warriors at the insult.
He waited for the noise and verbal revulsion to die down. He directed his attention to the one called Jabaal, because it seemed that there was more likelihood of reason prevailing with that one, where the others were becoming worryingly aggressive.
“SILENCE!” Jabath who was Jabaa to the group commanded the others and turned back to them, nodding slightly in acknowledgement.
The others turned as one toward Jabath, who had remained on the outer edge of their group. He noted that not one of them gave him any Nubl warning of intention to retaliate. The flutter of optics, the clacking of jaw, or the nervous frilling of their Shonkeel nanites, would tell him if he would have to fight them one, or all. He sensed nothing, but a fear that was unreasoned and built-into their cloned thinking. They would hold fast. He was safe for the moment, and by their acceptance of his command he had become their de-facto leader in this limited scenario. He need no longer fear any physical response. He had taken a measure of control, but it would only last a few minutes.
He turned back to the biological and with as much affected disdain as he could muster, commanded it.
“CONTINUE.”
Zirkos, unaccustomed to the acquiescence of Nubl so quickly, even the Frenon would argue for an extended period when reaching agreement, smiled at the Nubl warrior, ignoring its attempt to order him and gain control of the meeting. He instead, walked around them all making sure they accepted eye to eye contact with him, a biological being, before he started to explain.
“As I said, we, you Nubl and myself are biological - are both Jenari.” This time there was a stony silence.
“Your queens know this already, or would if they studied their own history. There was a time...”
...and so Zirkos explained the potted history of the Nubls’ humble biological beginnings.
The Nubl as a race were born long ago as Jenari, a biological civilisation that believed everything had a better solution in technology. They blindly developed everything they could and to such an extent that they began to only appreciate beauty in an artificially generated flower, rather than that of a naturally grown biological bloom. The sheer scale and sophistication of their technical know-how continued to separate the populace where traditionalists opposed the trends and desperately wanted to preserve what was biological.
Divisions grew between the two groups.
As the technology continued to develop at an increased pace, their obsession with artificial life advanced to pandemic proportions. Soon, the artificial sentients preferred their kind over biological friends, and family and companions were pressured into becoming artificial. It was fashionably deemed to be lower-caste to remain mortal and physically imperfect when perfection was so easily attained.
The wide distaste for biological forms grew over time into an abhorrence of all life that wasn’t artificially created. When the world in which they had made their own became overcrowded because artificial beings never died, they introduced designer viruses to eradicate whole sections of the biologically sentient population to create more space for their own kind.
There was war. The only way the biological Jenari could continue to survive was by leaving their homes and travelling to far flung galaxies in an attempt to restart their society. These exoduses were largely ignored until a space-faring faction of artificial Jenari came across a colony of biological Jenari and wanted the planet for themselves. They eliminated every single one of them and took the planet for their own.
Time passed and eventually as they grew too large and diversified to continue on the same world, war broke out between all of the dissenting artificial groups and the Hive Wars began.
Centuries passed while the wars continued. The evolution of the different factions of artificial lifeforms became concentrated into tribes of differing attributes. The tribes became centred on their leaders and evolved a hierarchy that promoted subservience. To help each faction grow and replace those killed in the Hive Wars, the ability to reproduce clones was introduced, but only for those deemed worthy.
After a further extended period of time, many centuries more, the leaders became queens and took the ability to clone away from their councillors retaining it only for themselves. In this way they ensured that they could not be overthrown by large numbers of cloned offspring not loyal to them.
Fast forward a further fifteen thousand years and the tribes evolved into warring nations spread across the depths of space. With little in common between them, their artificial sentience now evolved separately to the extent they deemed each hive to be almost incompatible. The one thing they kept true to was the eradication of biological sentience wherever it was discovered. At some point in the past they became known as the NUBL.
“This is what you are. This is what I am - the biological product of a colony that the Nubl found, but never eradicated completely.
You hunted us down - all of us. It became a new diversion from killing each other which continued to develop over the centuries into a widespread indiscriminate erasure of biological sentience wherever you discovered it, whether it was of Jenari origin, or not.
So, you are here today - in this underground bunker, and I can tell you now, that once again your kind are about to wipe out more of your ancestors, and for no other reason than your queen’s cannot abide to be reminded of their origins. Let me remind you again - you were ALL once biologicals - you were - you still are, Jenari.”
The Nubl didn’t react, the order from Jabath still holding them and keeping them silent. However, under the surface they were now seething with hostility, acutely aware there was nothing they could do to this biological being that stood brazenly in front of them and told them their way of life was wrong. So, they remained sullen, unwilling to accept what had just been explained to them, blindly unprepared to accede their whole way of life was a lie. Their beliefs had been ingrained into their culture over millennia, it was not for a mere biological to tell them they were no better than the pestilence they sought to eradicate.
Jabath though, was more receptive. Perhaps because he was forced into behaving out of character to represent Jabaa in this meeting, giving him the opportunity to remain detached from the issue. Regardless, he thought about what Zirkos had said. He wasn’t sure if it made sense or not, but why would the creature lie. These biological descendants of the Jenari had wiped out the queen’s fleet in the recent engagement, so it wasn’t because they were afraid of the Nubl. Was there more to this than he knew. Was his queen hiding the full history of their race?
He could tell the others were strongly opposed. The rumblings began and quickly climbed in volume. The subtle clacking of jaws was gaining ascendancy amongst them. They weren’t hap
py with the biologicals explanation and as he watched, the friction increased.
Jabath wondered if he should step in as the de-facto leader, or hold back and see what happened. He looked at the aliens, they seemed disappointed and largely unconcerned. A bad feeling accompanied his thoughts. He felt he was seeing a lost opportunity slip through his fingers. However, there was little he could do now except maintain his pretence as the Jabaa ‘Ta.
- 13 -
Pod Returns
There were currently three hundred and forty thousand devices being managed by Arty’s sub-processors, many were simple audio pick-ups, but a large portion were updated versions of Pod’s cloaked drones actively monitoring communications across Earth. Now, they were ubiquitous wherever humans went in space. Including, and Pennington would be apoplectic if he knew, the inner sanctums of Beta Station. Arty didn’t for one nanosecond consider what he was doing was wrong. He had a simple mandate to monitor the humans and protect them from harm. It was Pod’s instruction when she pulled him out of Zeke’s ship, upgraded his systems and told him to play nice with the new toys.
Unbeknown to Osbourne and Pennington, Arty had already uncovered and dealt with numerous threats to humans, by stamping out the frequent insurrections that would arise due to the breakdown in Earth’s infrastructure. Arty had a simple algorithm he used: if the extrapolation of a threat resulted in failure of the overall plan to protect humanity, it was dealt with by him without mentioning anything to Osbourne or Pod. If the threat was unlikely to lead to failure of his directives, he left it to Pennington’s law enforcement to deal with. Arty always used his AI constructs to resolve issues, but was increasingly thinking that there was a need to look longer term.
His threat indicator was always updating and adding new data. Currently, he believed that, regardless of what humanity and his AI family did, in the end Earth would not survive the onslaught from the Nubl hordes. There were simply too many of the enemy and were equally capable of the destruction of a city, or a human ship.