by P A Vasey
She looked aghast. “You’re talking about creating a race of super-humans?”
“Not super-humans – post-humans. We would be merely upgrading what is currently flawed and reliant on slow evolution. Humanity, like all species, has evolved in order to survive. But it no longer has the luxury to wait patiently for natural selection and evolution to work their magic. We must act proactively and urgently to ensure that future members of humanity are best equipped for survival in any new environment.”
I blew out my cheeks and glanced at the holoscreen, where the silver orb of the moon hung surrounded by stars. I wondered whether humanity could in fact succeed out here, off planet. We’d been confined to our own sandbox on Earth until now, but there, in the vastness of space, what would we find?
In the dark regions of infinite potential, could humanity flourish?
THIRTY-NINE
The ship arrived at the Van De Graaff crater and gracefully descended stern first onto the lunar surface. Cain and I exited as before, the hull dissolving an aperture for us to walk through. Stillman and Hamilton had to stay behind given that the only entrance to Adam’s ‘moon-base’ was through the artificial portal, which of course would have destroyed their unprotected and fragile bodies. They weren’t happy, of course, but I gave them jobs to do, not the least of which was to check on Hubert. Cain taught them how to access the ship’s databanks and electronic communications so they could keep track of the unfolding nuclear holocaust. I also wanted to know if there were any other relatively unprotected sites we could consider raiding for the embryos. Cain had surmised that in the light of what was happening globally, there would be widespread panic and civil disorder to such an extent that guarding medical facilities would be less of a priority.
As I’d turned to leave Matt had gone to hug Colleen, and she fell into his arms, her eyes glistening. She sobbed into his chest, hands clutching at his shirt. He held her in silence, chin trembling like a small child’s, rocking her slowly as the tears soaked his shirt. I found myself oddly dispassionate. It was as if there was nothing left to say about the destruction of our world and all of our kind, nothing left but the void that enveloped my mind in swirling blackness. Their emotions drifted past me like a river flowing downstream.
Cain and I walked to the circle of stones that marked the entry to the wormhole. Cain activated it with a wave of his hand and we were again transported to the huge underground facility. I could finally see the scale of the operation Adam had set up. There were marble walls covered in electronica and plasma arrays and holograms, and along the whole length of one wall were dozens upon dozens of human-sized metallic cylinders with glass windows containing a yellowish liquid. Other walls had gleaming surfaces shining like stainless steel or silver mercury. Trays and bench tops were covered with circuit boards and assorted microchips were arranged in neat geometric rows.
Set into another wall were thousands of test tubes linked by optical fibers and illuminated by cool blue lights.
I turned to Cain, mouth open. “They’re …”
“Yes, Kate, they are for storing the embryos.”
I glared at him. “You’d already planned this, hadn’t you? You and Adam. This wasn’t some out of left field idea … you’re going to play Mommy and Daddy to the future human race.”
A wave of dizziness brought me to my knees. I steadied myself with a hand on the floor as flashes exploded before my eyes like popcorn going off in a microwave. The familiar red icons started scrolling across the bottom of my HUD again.
Cain appeared by my side and gently helped me to my feet. “Your neuronal interface is fraying. It must be re-amalgamated with your template before it is too late.”
I irritably shook him off. “You didn’t need any of us really, did you? You and Adam could have done all this yourselves. Why’d you save me? Why’d you save any of us?”
Cain gave a sigh. “Babies born from these embryos will need other humans to care for them as they mature. They will need a connection – a bridge of sorts – to help them understand where they came from, where they are going, and who they are meant to be.”
I closed my eyes, a bitter taste in my mouth. Was this why I was considered so important? To be a nanny? It would be amusing if it didn’t seem so desperate.
“Adam and I cannot do this ourselves,” Cain continued. “I am not human, and neither is Adam anymore. Once born, these babies will need you to become the proper descendants of Homo sapiens.”
I shook my head wearily. “You’ve saved four of us to nurture thousands of embryos. Don’t you think we’ll be a little short-handed?”
“We must avoid Vu-Hak infiltration, Kate. The more we bring into our ‘circle of trust’ the higher the risk. You have seen this first-hand.”
“But we’re not teachers, Cain …” I protested.
“That would not be your role. Information in the form of digital records – science, arts, economics, technology – will be downloaded directly into developing brains as the embryos mature and grow. It is when they are born that they will need help from adults who are able to help them understand what it means to be human. You will be more than mere teachers. You will become the first ‘Elders’ of the new humanity. To tell them stories about Earth, about their history, about the end of their civilization … and the beginning of a new era.”
I was about to protest further when a pressure wave blossomed behind my eyes, and the room span once more. I felt Cain’s hand on my arm and he started to walk me forward. “Let’s get you over there,” he said, pointing to an alcove in between two of the largest display screens.
He activated more lights and we shuffled into a modular corridor framed by white tubing and bulbous tiling. Large lighting panels flickered on the ceiling to reveal an antechamber that looked as antiseptic as an operating room. There was a ramp that seemed too steep for walking but Cain led the way and, assisted by the one-tenth gravity, I managed to scale it, arriving at another white-on-white doorway. It opened with a swish into a square room completely bereft of instruments, decor, or any form of adornments or equipment. Everything looked like it had been carved out of marble. In the dead center of the room, recessed into the floor, was a square hole the size of a king bed.
Cain maneuvered me toward it, holding my hand and supporting me with an arm around my shoulders. There were a couple of steps down to the bottom of the recess, which dropped about ten feet below the floor. It resembled a dug grave waiting for a coffin, and I shook my head to dismiss the image.
“How did Adam build all this?” I said, hearing my voice creaking and rasping.
“He didn’t have to do much himself,” Cain answered. “The blueprints for the facility are all in the collective memory of the Vu-Hak. The same with the ship, if you recall. When Adam co-joined with his AI he was able to access all this and much more. He merely set the wheels in motion, so to speak, for the self-replicating mechanism to initiate. With a couple of start-up modifications, and tweaks along the way, this facility built itself in a matter of months.”
“So what exactly is this place?”
“This is the neurotransfer station. The technology is thousands of years old, dating back to when the Vu-Hak used it to download their consciousnesses. When they began their transformation from the organic to the cybernetic.”
I had a flash of deja vu. “It seems familiar.”
“It is where Adam and I removed your mind from your dying body and put it into the Electromech you now inhabit.”
Of course. “I hope there’ve been improvements since I was last here then …”
“It has been upgraded, yes,” he said, giving me an encouraging smile.
I tried one in return but my mouth would only twitch. I paused at the top, my eyes roaming the recess. I felt uneasy, apprehensive, like a diver atop a cliff. I had trouble getting down the steps so Cain gently lifted me off my feet and carried me, laying me gently on my back. The floor felt cold and hard and there was a soft vibration that I could
not localize. The air seemed charged, like electrostatic atmosphere before a storm front.
I was exhausted. If my Electromech possessed a battery indicator it’d be flashing red. I was leaking electricity, or whatever type of energy the black hole allowed to filter through. I wanted sleep, a nice warm bed and a solid night of dreams. Everything seemed to be slowing down, like walking through waist high snow or wading through mud, my thoughts melting into the hazy fuzz of cognitive decline.
Cain’s hand pressed gently on my shoulder. “Kate, have you seen the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey?”
I squinted at him, not liking what he was saying. 2001 had been one of my favorite movies as a child, and I knew just about every cool line, particularly the iconic ones spoken by HAL9000.
“You mean the bit where the supercomputer HAL becomes homicidal and tries to kill the human astronaut?” I said as calmly as I could.
Cain was smiling. “I was actually thinking of the line: ‘Dave, my mind is going, I can feel it’.”
I tried to relax. He’d clearly been reading my thoughts and monitoring the deterioration of my neurological status.
“Very funny. At a time like this you develop a sense of humor?”
“Just trying to lighten the moment.”
“Don’t,” I said, slurring. “Get on with it.”
“‘Daisy … Daisy … give me your answer, do …’”
“Shut the fuck up.”
He nodded and climbed out of the recess, disappearing out of sight. My eyes closed involuntarily, consciousness continuing to ebb, mind going into free fall, swirling into chaos, waiting for dreams to begin.
Or oblivion.
The vibration suddenly ramped up and my eyes jerked open. The walls of the recess had transformed from marble white and were now sparkling like diamond-encrusted granite. A swirling maelstrom of gases was aggregating overhead, pulsing and churning. It felt like being in a washing-machine drum, turning over and over with the laundry.
“Cain, what’s going on?” I said, trying to raise my voice above the intensifying racket.
There was no reply and as I stared into the twisting and spiraling gases, images began to coalesce. A lupine face with reptilian green orbs for eyes drifted in and out of focus, although the green points of light seemed to be unwaveringly staring at me. Pearl-white jagged teeth appeared, eerily incandescent, emitting a strange blue glow. Its body appeared, skin mostly composed of scar tissue, cerulean in color. There may have been some sort of fur there at one time, but what was left over was tufty and thin. There was little bulk, it was spindly and spidery, and there was no clue as to sex, if it was even relevant. Perhaps it was neither male nor female but hermaphrodite. It moved awkwardly and stood up on two of its limbs, bipedal-like, but cast no shadow and made no noise.
The familiar sensation returned, the elemental fear of being hunted, the crushing urge to look over my shoulder.
Cain’s voice bounced around my head, soothing and reassuring. I am reading high levels of anxiety and stress in your neuromarkers.
No shit.
Everything seemed real, not a dream or some weird side effect of the process.
I am stabilizing the connection between your bimolecular DNA and the machine’s interface.
There was something, some creature, lurking in the shadows, an evil presence no one but me could see. A monster that was going to end humanity was making itself a home inside my head. I could feel its rage and malevolence, so I imagined a door between us, and a secure room behind it, to try and keep it far away from my mind.
Kate, relax, this is an illusion.
But it remained, tearing through the mental walls of wood and plasterboard, trying to reach what was left of my sanity. I knew it was only a matter of time before it managed to break through.
The images are part of the system’s memory from a millennia ago, when the Vu-Hak last used it.
The door was starting to collapse, to crumble. And it knew it wouldn’t be long before …
Fifteen seconds … Think calming thoughts.
Think calming thoughts … was that him trying to be funny again?
I took a deep breath and concentrated. The horrific image of the Vu-Hak pixelated out and morphed into the fading watery light of a beautiful evening and a cloudless, sunsetting sky. I visualized an old abandoned church on a hill, all Gothic grey stone and centuries of decay.
Kate … you should be good now.
Up in the rafters, I pictured the Vu-Hak clinging to the shadows. Adorned with lichen, it was a grotesque caricature all bulging eyes and over-sized ears and a grin evoking notions of sadistic pleasure. However, it now simply reminded me of a stone gargoyle, dead and ancient, and nothing to fear.
Powering down.
The images vanished and the vibration ceased and everything went quiet. There was a residual aroma of something sweet and fishy, like burned electrical circuits. There were no red icons or any danger lights in my HUD so I sat up and to my relief there was no dizziness or fogginess anymore either. I got to my feet and peered over the lip of the recess. Cain had his back to me in the corner of the room facing a wall display that was glowing with holographic pictures and symbols.
“Hey,” I said.
He turned and beckoned me over, so I climbed out of the recess and joined him at the console. Already my balance and strength were returning, and I no longer felt seasick or like I had a hangover.
“How are you feeling?” he said.
“Better,” I replied. “Definitely an improvement.”
“I’m afraid it won’t be permanent. The human brain is just not sufficiently complex enough for neurologic matching to be accurate. However, you have motor control back, and some abilities such as basic telepathic communication and remote interfacing and manipulation of electronic circuits.”
“How long before the degradation becomes apparent again?”
He paused. “It may not be possible to keep doing this, Kate.”
“Let’s hope we can wrap this up quickly then,” I said, trying to put on a brave face.
“Indeed. Time may not be on our side. Look …”
FORTY
Cain pointed at the screen, and the images scrolling past were apocalyptic. Cities in ruin, burning, and thick black clouds settling over annihilated downtown areas. Once recognizable buildings, monuments and parks reduced to charred skeletons. Fire damage was tremendous, and the effect of the conflagration had profoundly altered the appearance of the cities, leaving the central parts flattened and bare except for scattered lumps of reinforced concrete, steel frames and pieces of twisted sheet metal. Anything organic was reduced to ash and charcoal. Smoke hung in a haze that partially obscured the blood-red sun. Even the oceans gave the impression of having stilled. Like semi-stagnant pools of death and decay, the waves had receded and lapped sorrowfully along the shorelines. The skies were barren, no birds flew and all the while an oppressive heat haze shimmered like the breath of hell.
“Is that New York?” I said as an image of what looked like Central Park flashed up.
He froze the picture, and we both stared in silence. The city was barely recognizable. Almost without exception, masonry buildings of either brick or stone on the island of Manhattan were so severely damaged so that most were flattened or reduced to rubble. All of the bridges were destroyed; spans had been shoved off their piers and cast into the river below by the force of the blast. Fires were burning furiously in every street on every corner of the island. Central Park was a blackened, carbonized patch of dirt.
“Two ICBM strikes only,” said Cain with a lowering of his head. “The blasts caused high winds as air was drawn in toward the center of the detonation, creating a fire storm. The wind velocity in the city had been less than five miles per hour before the bombing, but the nuclear wind attained a velocity of one hundred miles per hour. Within a radius of twenty miles from ground zero almost everyone died instantaneously.”
I stared at the picture, dumbstruck. Almost
all buildings were completely destroyed and fires were ripping through the remains. Trees had been uprooted or withered by the heat. Black stains could be seen everywhere, tear drops of cauterized carbon … all that remained of the people of that great city.
“Turn it off,” I said.
The picture went dark as the hologram involuted and dissipated. I leaned on the console, my hands bunched into fists, head down, eyes closed.
“It’s war,” I said.
“And they have already won,” Cain replied quietly.
But burning rage was hissing through my body like lava looking for a volcano’s spout. Unbridled fury swept through me in ferocious waves and I produced a scream from deep within which felt like my soul had unleashed a demon.
Cain looked at me with eyebrows raised. “Kate, are you alright …?”
“No I’m not. I will never be alright. Not anymore.” I turned to him, eyes blazing. “It’s time we stopped running. This …” I pointed to the screen, now dark “… this … is justification for us to exterminate these murderous bastards.”
He slowly shook his head. “Kate, the Earth is dying. We can only try and survive.”
“No! We need to do more than survive. It’s time we stood up and hit back. We can’t rest until they’re beaten – and I don’t mean just beaten down. I mean dead. Extinct. We need to destroy them. I don’t much care how it happens, I don’t need them to suffer, I just need their cold green eyes extinguished from our fucking galaxy!”
I realized I sounded unhinged, but I didn’t care. I didn’t fear death anymore – I feared not succeeding. I’d let my daughter down, and I’d had to live with that. The future of the human race was on my shoulders now, and I wasn’t going to shirk that responsibility. I wasn’t going to fail again.
But Cain was apparently not on board. “So, is the elimination of the Vu-Hak from the universe our final goal? Do two ‘wrongs’ make a ‘right’?”