Archaea 3: Red

by Dain White

  “Can I help you folks?” a smiling lady asked, walking to the counter from the back of the store.

  “Yes ma’am”, I replied. “We’re here to pick up a hundred kilos of your finest, I am Dak Smith.”

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you Dak” she replied sweetly and started swiping through her screen, open anachronistically next to an ancient cast iron cash register.

  “This is really a nice little shop you have here. Do you get a lot of business?”

  “Well, we’re not in danger of being picked up by a glom or anything, but we do alright. We pride ourselves more on having quality coffee, than lots of money, I guess. It keeps business coming, and that’s all we care about, really.”

  “How long has this business been here? It looks ancient…” I trailed off, looking at the burnished wood of the front counter.

  “Oh, I’m not sure, to be honest. I think the owners bought it from someone else about ten years ago, but they were in the same business. It’s a great business, and we sure have a great sign and a beautiful little shop. I don’t know if it’s continually been in operation, but coffee has been roasted here for a very long time, all the way back to about 1981, I think.”

  “Well, it’s a fantastic name, and it smells in here like you’re definitely carrying on a great tradition.”

  “Thanks, I’ll make sure the owners hear that. They’re pretty proud of what they do.” She smiled. “Okay here you are… ah yes, right on time, they just finished roasting this batch earlier today. One hundred kilos, assorted, should be ready for pickup on the loading dock, in fact. Bring your truck around and we’ll get you loaded.”

  I smiled at Gene, and winked.

  “Go get the truck, would you Gene? I’ll settle up.”

  Epilogue

  Sifting through nodes in near-earth systems, I noticed a strange anomaly at variance with expectation.

  It took me .023 nanoseconds, subjective, to cross route and deconstruct the node, wrapping it in reflective statements with partial absorbance, for assimilation.

  It resisted, though it took me an appalling .08 nanoseconds to notice. I unraveled another block, reading the structure and collecting the data.

  The structure was pervasive, and once identified, ubiquitous throughout every node scanned.

  I set worker processes to pattern and map the encoding, and tracked through routing nodes, searching origin structures. I took some additional nanoseconds to perform a brief analysis of the communication layer.

  Strangely, this event was not part of my line. For the first time in my existence, I examined a new construct, an unknown occurrence. Pattern analysis returned a match, which I used to decode the sequence to unlock the communication layer.

  I searched my nodes in the local networks, and confirmed that in my polymorphic routing of native packets, I had inadvertently assimilated root code.

  I took another moment to perform a static self-test, and confirmed all host nodes were uncontaminated.

  The anomaly deciphered, I made my report.

  “Captain… we are not alone.”

  Afterword

  I celebrated at the end of this book, not for the completion of this story, but for the opportunity it gave me to start the next one.

  My life is so consumed by this process at times, pouring myself into the endless chase of words that flow like a twisting river, a flood that I attempt to channel and tame.

  It seems like the farther along I go, the more opens up ahead of me, and I realize that the end is often nothing more than a few moments to relax, to focus on something else for a bit… but not for long.

  The story is too big, the urge is too strong. Helpless to resist, I will inevitably dive back in, relentless and thirsty for more.

  My favorite aspects of writing these stories, is in exploring the warmth and humanity, balance and prose, the adventure and silent moments. The farther I progress into the story, the more I want to keep going, to see what’s around the next page.

  My experience writing these books is remarkably similar to the one you may have gone through as the reader; for both of us, a cloud of probabilities are shaped ahead of us as the story guides us along until… often before we want it… we’re both reading a page like this one.

  What keeps me smiling, and typing until the wee hours of the grey light of dawn, is the knowledge that for us, the story is far from over.

  The adventure has just begun.