First Contact - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 1

by Ian Creasey

  Nor did it mean that nothing had gotten out. But if any humans had gotten sick, I was sure the general or Dr. Britt would have mentioned it.

  None have gotten sick – yet.

  That thought chilled me. HIV had demonstrated how killers could have multi-year incubation periods. Nearly thirty years of secret confinement of the Eridani was looking smarter and smarter.

  But how long would it last?

  I was bleary-eyed and barely caffeine-functional when I met Britt and the team the next morning in the war room. Most of them looked similarly worse for wear. We discussed the database and some of the potential variables I thought we should track. Guessing the biological parameters was generally straightforward. The big unknowns were usually environmental – it was almost impossible to track every nuance of diet or social contact. Still, we brainstormed wildly and added even the craziest ideas to the whiteboard, if not to the database itself.

  “The real problem,” I mused after a couple of hours, “is that we don’t know the incubation time. There’s too much of a range for potential exposure.”

  “It’s only a few days from first symptoms to death, generally,” Britt said.

  “True. But how long between infection and first symptoms?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “It’s too bad that the timeline from symptoms to death is so quick and consistent,” I said. “We could use some variability.”

  “Why is that?” one of the techs asked.

  “Because the progression of the disease is almost certainly not linear,” I said. “It’ll be exponential or quadratic or something like that. If we had more variability in its progression, we might be able to back the function out through statistical means.”

  “What about the ones in cryo?” one of the scientists – Dr. Johnson, if I remember his name correctly – said.

  I looked at Britt for an explanation.

  “They still have the cryo chambers they used to get here,” he said. “The first ones to fall sick, they popped into those, until they ran out of chambers.”

  I frowned. “How could they run out?”

  “They reproduce fast,” Britt said. “There’s five times as many of them now as made the trip.”

  I gulped. Quintupled in thirty years?

  “The Eridani have the exact times when they were frozen,” Johnson said. “Maybe we could figure out how sick they were at the time. That’d give us some statistics on its progression.”

  “But do we know how close they were to dying?” I asked. “If we don’t know exactly how far along they were, it doesn’t tell us anything.”

  Johnson shrugged. “We might. The Eridani seemed to think they knew how close they were when they were picking candidates for freezing.”

  I turned to Britt. He slowly nodded as he stared into space.

  “I think,” I said, “it’s time for you to teach me how to use that communication equipment.”

  His eyes met mine, and he nodded again.

  The communications room turned out to be more boring than I’d expected. Two computer consoles sat below a glass wall that looked into “Eridani space,” as Britt called their compound. We’d type our words, and the computers would translate them into a pattern of lights on the Eridani displays. Their responses would come back on our screens.

  “Just like online chat,” Britt said, “except a more limited vocabulary and no emoticons.”

  I nodded. It made sense that emotional content would be completely lost in translation. I was more surprised about the vocabulary limits. Apparently abstract concepts and their associated terms were still difficult to translate even after decades of communication. Simple verbs, nouns, and scientific concepts were much easier. Still, before I hit send, the computer would highlight in red any words or expressions not in its dictionary, so I’d have a chance to rephrase things.

  Britt explained the icons on the desktop and a few other key commands. He’d be at the terminal next to me if I needed help.

  I wasn’t worried about the controls. My heart was beating too hard to really care about anything but what it would be like when the aliens entered the room. I finally had to force myself to sit back and relax. Then the far door in their side of the room opened.

  They were stunning.

  The two aliens appeared more fragile than I’d expected. They stutter-walked across the room like punch-drunk sailors trying to avoid a face plant. I couldn’t avoid holding my breath until they sagged onto their stools opposite us. Then the one across from me held up his hand, fingers apart, and waved.

  My hand crept up, and I waved back.

  Britt started typing. The Eridani tilted his head toward his screen and then did something I couldn’t quite see with his own hands. And so the conversation began.

  Britt introduced me to the Eridani as a specialist in disease transmission. The leader of the colony, called White by my team, sat to the right of Fire, the closest thing to a med tech the aliens had left. White said (typed? waved his fingers?) that they’d had a good night because they’d only lost two more Eridani. Britt expressed “shared negative value by humans,” which White followed with “Understood.” Then we were off into technical topics.

  I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly they picked up what we were suggesting. Fire confirmed that they could indeed track the progression of the disease quite well once someone was sick. There was a biological marker that translated as “internal cell sores,” which increased in a sick person until biological failure occurred. It wasn’t the cause, though, as the internal cell sores were common to all Eridani and had been considered harmless for generations.

  “They’re like intestinal bacteria for us,” Britt said. “Harmless as a rule. And unrelated to their immune system. We haven’t been able to spot a causal relationship between them and the epidemic. They appear to just be a symptom.”

  “They’re still a useful symptom,” I said.

  I turned back to the console and explained the statistics I wanted to compute to the Eridani. The console translated the math surprisingly well. Of course, Britt had them repeat our request back to make sure they’d understood.

  At the end of it, White asked, “Anything more?”

  An amusing thought hit me, and I quickly typed back. “When does the cavalry arrive?”

  The idiom flashed red – not in the database. So I rewrote it. “When do more doctors arrive?”

  My screen lit up. “Twenty years. Or never.”

  I blinked and turned to Britt.

  “The second colony ship is already on its way,” he said, “but when the disease struck, they sent a message telling it to divert to another star unless they got a second message saying the disease had been overcome.”

  “You’ll have to tell me more about that later,” I said.

  Britt nodded, and then told the aliens we were done. Again open-mouthed, I watched them skitter-walk their way out of the room.

  We worked on the database some more the rest of the day, but it was routine, and I didn’t put too much thought into it. We were really just pushing information bits around as we waited for the Eridani. When one of the techs yawned, I called a break and told everyone we’d pick up in the morning.

  “I don’t suppose there’s a bar here,” I said to Britt as the others filed out.

  He smiled. “Actually there is, but they’re closed at this hour. But if you want one, I know where I can get a couple of beers, and we can go up to the observation deck for a while.”

  I nodded and went to grab my coat.

  It was freezing on the observation deck, but I didn’t care. Britt and I sat with our backs against a railing and drank. We didn’t talk for a long time, just staring at the night sky.

  “So what’s this with the next ship?” I finally asked.

  He sighed. “It’s in route, but Earth isn’t the only planet it can reach. So if there’s a plague here ...”

  “They’ll save themselves and leave the ones here to die.
”

  “That summarizes it pretty well.”

  I took another swig of beer and contemplated the stars. I was sure Britt could point out Eridani if I asked, but I didn’t feel much like asking.

  “Seems like an awfully long way to come to die,” I finally said.

  “It’s a risk,” Britt said, “but they think it was worth it.”

  “Why?”

  “Many reasons. At least that’s what they’ve told us. Some are running away from bad situations. Some are seeking profits here. Others ...” He shrugged. “They’re as varied as our ancestors’ reasons were when they came here, across the ocean.”

  I shook my head. “Not my ancestors. At least not all of them. I’m eighth-generation Algonquian, through my father’s side.”

  “You know what I mean, though.”

  “True.”

  “So here they are, the first Eridani colony. They’re kind of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown rolled into one.”

  “Except Jamestown wasn’t the first colony. Roanoke was.”

  “Wasn’t that …?”

  “Yeah,” I said grimly. “The colony that didn’t survive.”

  Britt bit his lip, then raised his beer in a toast. “Here’s to not becoming Roanoke, Nevada.”

  “I’ll drink to that. Hell, I’ll drink to anything right now.”

  We clinked bottles and drank deep. Then we just sat quietly, each lost in our own thoughts.

  The next day we met with the Eridani again. My heart again skipped a beat when they entered the communication room. They were still magnificently beautiful, but this second time lacked the novel wonder of the time before. We skimmed through the greetings and got straight to the technical heart of the discussion.

  The Eridani had nailed the timeline. The internal cell sores increased exponentially over time, with a fit correlation of 86 percent. Fire estimated that initial infection occurred about one to three weeks before first symptoms appeared. He (she? I’d never been told their gender) had even gone one step further and identified the likely first infection time for every sick Eridani, alive or dead. He’d transmit the file as soon as we wanted.

  “I want it now,” I typed. “This is good work. Very fast.”

  Fire signaled back. “Slow not choice. Fire infected.”

  Britt sucked in his breath. We both stared at the aliens.

  “Fire will go to cryofreeze,” White signaled. “We wake if need more.”

  “Is that a good idea?” I asked Britt.

  He slowly shook his head. “But they have no choice, do they?”

  Fire waved his fingers. The screen lit up. “You save my children. My children’s children. My children’s children’s children. All good then.”

  I looked him in the eye, as best I could, and nodded. I could only hope he understood the implied promise.

  Back in our war room, a couple of the scientists crunched the new data from the Eridani and formatted it for our database. Johnson and Britt scribbled ideas on the whiteboard about the first case’s possible exposures now that we knew when he’d been infected. I clutched my coffee and watched silently. I couldn’t help thinking about what Fire had said.

  Four generations in thirty years. All alive.

  Of course, it was possible that they’d flown with multiple generations all in cryofreeze. But if their population was already five times the number of freezers, a whole lot of them had to have been born here.

  What was the exponential run-out on that?

  I kicked some numbers around in my head. Standard doubling at one percent growth per year took 72 years … doubling a little over twice in thirty years ….

  I paused. The growth wasn’t spectacular numbers-wise, but it was still fast for living organisms more complex than bacteria. Especially considering the older generations still seemed to be alive.

  These are very strange creatures …

  My musings were interrupted by a loud “Ha!”from one of the techs as he stared at his computer screen.

  “It’s in the food!” he said. “Their fucking food!”

  We all clustered around and strained to look over his shoulder.

  “See!” he said. “The first infections were the farmers, and then some of the food service workers. We couldn’t see this correlation with first symptoms, but infection dates did it!”

  Britt pointed to the correlation coefficients. “Those are really high.”

  I nodded. “Definitely not random.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense,” one of the scientists said.

  I turned to him. “Why?”

  “Because not all of them get sick,” he said. “If it’s their food, it should act like a poison, not a disease.”

  “And some of the ones who did get sick were eating ships stores,” Britt added.

  “What?” I said.

  “Before the doctors died, two of them thought it might be the food. They switched to some old stored food they had, but still developed symptoms.”

  “They could’ve already been infected,” I said. “Or the food could just be a non-causal cofactor.”

  “Their diet’s certainly different now,” one of the scientists said. “They don’t have the biodiversity here that they were used to back at home.”

  “Maybe we can correlate what type of food,” one of the techs said.

  I raised my hand to pause the nascent brainstorming.

  “Let’s be a little more organized about this,” I said. “Britt – you form a team to see if you can establish the type of food, food source, whether it’s raw or processed, and so on. See what correlations you can find. Johnson and I will focus on vector analysis from the farmers and food service workers. Maybe it’s not the food, but something they caught and passed on. Meanwhile, the bio boys can poke into how the food itself could be killing the Eridani. This isn’t their planet. Maybe it mutated. Maybe it picked up a parasite. Something.”

  I paused and looked at the cluster around me. I could already see the mental gears whirring.

  “We’ll meet back here in eight hours and go over what each group’s come up with,” I said. “The correlation’s great, but correlations don’t kill people. They just point the way to the real killer.”

  The earlier euphoria was replaced with grim expressions all around. We dispersed into our ad hoc work teams, and I headed for an open computer. Only part of me was happy about the breakthrough.

  Eight hours later, I was mentally exhausted. Johnson learned quickly and turned out to be very sharp, which made our work more of a brain hurricane than a brainstorm. We flew through the math and the propagation maps, identifying anomalies and exceptions and resolving over two-thirds of them. Johnson kept a list of dead ends as well, which was a godsend when my tired mind tried to retread old paths.

  The other teams looked similarly wiped out when we reconvened. I silently wondered how many had skipped eating or drinking, as we looked like we’d been through a minor war zone. A successful one, though, given the small smiles of satisfaction here and there.

  I motioned to Britt to go first.

  “There’s an infection correlation of 0.54 to mostly raw food diets, but only 0.22 when it’s mostly a processed food diet,” he said. “The reason the farmers were hit first is they sometimes eat from the fields as they work. They have a higher raw food percentage than the others.”

  Britt’s expression turned from triumphant to serious.

  “Food type does not appear to matter,” he said. “There’s a strong correlation with Earth-grown food, but we can’t explain the Eridani who died eating ship stores.”

  “The Earth-grown correlation makes sense,” one of the biologists said. “We think the mechanism might be through heavy-metal absorption. They’re not adapted for our high metal concentrations, since their native soil doesn’t have much for their plants to absorb. That’d also explain why processing the food reduces the death rate. It bleaches out the iron and other trace minerals.”

  “But it still doesn’t
explain why the doctors were among the first to get sick,” Britt said.

  “No,” I said, “but I have a hypothesis about that. What if the agent is not the minerals themselves, but something the minerals do to their natural bacteria, or whatever those internal cell sores are? Because Johnson and I are showing a weak but statistically significant contact correlation.”

  “What?” one of the techs asked.

  “Contact between aliens,” I said. “The ones who were around the infected farmers got sick sooner. The correlation isn’t strong, but it’s there.”

  “So,” Britt said, “One of their natural and otherwise benign parasites mutates and discovers it likes iron or something. More iron means more parasite, until there’s enough bad parasite to kill the person.”

  I nodded. “It would explain why the doctors got sick even if they didn’t eat the food. They received enough parasites from their patients even without ingesting high amounts of the problem mineral.”

  “It can’t be the internal cell sores,” said a biologist. “We’ve investigated those in depth. The internal cell sores don’t kill the Eridani.”

  “But their population still explodes when they get sick,” Johnson said. “Well above normal levels.”

  A mischievous thought entered my head. “Normal levels for whom? Would the internal cell sores consider their old population the normal level, or the new one?”

  “Well,” Britt said, “Normally, their immune system keeps the internal cell sores under control …” He grinned as the realization hit him.

  “Exactly,” I said. “And that immune system is either failing or busy fighting the real disease. Until the cell sores population is large enough to be a corollary symptom. That’s why it’s a marker.”

  The room fell silent as that conclusion settled in.

  The moment was broken by one of the biologists. “If it’s heavy metals, we can do chromatography tests on blood and tissue samples. That’ll narrow down the possible parasites.”

  “We can also tell them to stop eating raw food right away,” Britt said. “It won’t stop the disease, but it could slow down the deaths.”

  I nodded. “It’ll buy us time, which we desperately need.”