End Times (Book 4): Destroyer of Worlds

by Carrow, Shane

  END TIMES

  Volume IV: Destroyer of Worlds

  By Shane Carrow

  Text copyright © 2017 Shane Carrow

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover design by Alchemy Book Covers

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  ALSO BY SHANE CARROW

  End Times I: Rise of the Undead

  End Times II: The Wasteland

  End Times III: Blood and Salt

  JULY

  “You are no longer strangers and aliens, but fellow citizens.”

  Ephesians 2:19

  July 1

  I was floating in a void. Drifting, dreamless and shapeless, happy and warm. The darkness enveloped my body like a blanket.

  No - it was a blanket. It was my sleeping bag. I could feel the fabric against my skin, the teeth of the zip against my neck, the pressure of the floor beneath my body. I could feel the saliva in my mouth, the chilly air on my cheeks. I still existed physically. I still had an anchor to the real world. But the rest of me... my senses, my thoughts, my mind... rested in another place entirely.

  Yet I wasn’t panicking. I didn’t even feel slightly worried. I was perfectly comfortable. It was a dreamy state, similar to a heavy dose of painkillers or the feeling you have when you wake up first thing in the morning. I wasn’t sure why I felt like that. And I knew I should be worrying about it. But, catch-22, I couldn’t.

  I could feel something moving at the edge of my mind, like a dull shadow that flickers at the corner of your eyes. It didn’t scare me. It felt... benevolent. Friendly, like a parent, almost. An aura of light. A sense that it was watching over me.

  And then, startlingly, the presence melted into my own mind. It’s hard to describe what it was really like - two clouds, maybe, drifting together until they occupied the same place. Still, despite the sense of closeness, I didn’t feel afraid. Couldn’t feel afraid.

  And then it spoke to me. Not in words. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it themselves, but telepathy doesn’t work in words. It’s just thoughts, ideas and feelings, transferring directly between minds. It’s kind of like when you have an idea yourself: you don’t actually say it in your mind in words. It just pops into your head, fully-formed. Telepathy works the same way. Although you can tell it’s not your own thought.

  Christ, this must be confusing. Anyway - for the purpose of the journal, I’ve taken the liberty of translating our conversation into written English, as best I can, for the ease of reading.

  Our conversation. The first contact between any human and any alien presence. I still can’t believe I’m writing that.

  Hello, the entity ‘said.’ I’m sorry - you must have many questions.

  Not those exact words, like I said. The first was a simple greeting - a friendly acknowledgment of our presence - and then a sympathy for our ignorance. I could translate it into any number of different words or sentences, but I’m going to try to be as accurate as I can.

  The most interesting thing is that I still didn’t feel alarmed or apprehensive at all - just perfectly calm. A detached and suspicious part of my mind warned me that that wasn’t a natural feeling. And so, the first human words ever uttered to an alien intelligence were:

  “Why do I feel like this?”

  I could feel my lips move, and the air exhale from my lungs, but I couldn’t hear myself.

  I have suspended the parts of your mind that control emotions such as fear and anxiety. We have much to discuss, and would make little progress if you were frightened and suspicious.

  “You can do that?”

  Yes. I have full access to all your mental functions and can manipulate them to some extent. I would prefer not to do that but have little choice at the moment. Rest assured that I mean you no harm.

  In effect, it was drugging me. I should have felt angry, and I knew I should have felt angry, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. It was ridiculous. Laughable, even. But I wasn’t laughing.

  I could feel another consciousness lurking at the edge of our mental forum. A familiar mind, a presence I recognised straight away. “Matt, is that you?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. I couldn’t hear him say it, though I’m was sure moving his lips and speaking just like me, lying in his bag only a few metres away. But I could feel what he was saying in my mind. “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “What are you?” I demanded of the other thing. “Who is this speaking to us?”

  The entity hesitated. I could feel its emotions as clearly as I could feel its words. You may find it difficult to understand, it said. It is not a concept you are familiar with. I am the ship.

  “The ship?” I repeated.

  Not the physical body of the ship. I am the soul of the ship.

  Soul isn’t the right word, but it’s as close as I can get. Spirit? Presence? There’s no English translation, really.

  “You mean like... the ship’s computer?” Matt asked.

  No. I am the ship. I am…

  The closest I can translate is that it’s something that dwells inside; it was the mind of the ship, using the ship to channel its thoughts the way our own brains channel our thoughts. You can’t point to a piece of biological matter and explain how it’s capable of sentient thought. This was the same.

  “I don’t understand how that works,” Matt said. “It’s just metal. How can metal think?”

  Actually, it would be more accurate to describe my body as a carbon derivative, of a type your species has not yet developed.

  “It looks like metal,” Matt said.

  “Never mind that!” I said. “So… you’re the ship? For all intents and purposes, you’re the ship? No aliens here?”

  The crew was killed when we were attacked upon atmospheric entry. Which was why I crashed in these mountains.

  “Attacked by who?”

  A memory swam up. One of my own memories, but conjured up by the ship. The attack on our helicopter, that horrible black thing unravelling its tendrils, like a nightmarish elephant from a Dali painting. Attacked by the same forces which attacked you, the ship said.

  “You’re not aligned?” I said. “You’re not the same?”

  No. I know that some of your allies suspect us to be. And I know that neither of you ever accepted that yourselves.

  “Why did we dream of you?” Matt demanded. “Why could we cross that barrier and nobody else could? What are you, what are you doing here?”

  Perhaps I should start from the beginning.

  “Please do!” I said.

  The ship paused for a moment, gathering its thoughts. Intelligent life exists outside your own solar system, it said. As you can clearly see. It is not widespread, it is not common, but aside from my own species, seven other species are known to have achieved interplanetary travel. Hundreds or even thousands more had achieved a rudimentary level of industrial technology, like humans.

  “Had?” I said, noting the past tense.

  The ship went on. Ruins are also found. Evidence of extinct civilisations. Sometimes we learn about them due to the relics they leave behind. And sometimes those relics are very dangerous. Sometimes they were responsible for that species’ own extinction. None have proved to be as dangerous as the…

  Again it flashed us our own memories, of that vessel ship hovering above the helicopter crash site, and the vaguer notions of the beachhead at Ballarat – stuff from my imagination, from the way Captain Tobias had described the surveillance photos. The ship described them as “devices set in motion,” with the implication that they no longer required outside control to kee
p going. To keep expanding. And they had achieved sentience. They were self-aware, self-replicating.

  The machines, the ship said. We know nothing of their creators – their biology, their culture, their history. We encountered their machines far from their original home world. The machines, we have theorised, massacred their creators and then became an expanding plague. They are antithetical to life. When they come across life in even its most rudimentary form – bacteria in frozen soil, limpets clustered around undersea volcanic vents – they destroy it. From the simplest planetbound lifeforms to the most advanced, multi-star civilisations, their mission is one of pure genocide.

  “When was this?” I said. “When did you discover them?”

  Several hundred years ago, by your calendar. Their rate of expansion is such that they couldn’t have rebelled against their own creators much earlier than that. They have slowed in recent times, but they still expand at a frightening rate. Left unchecked, they will destroy all life across the galaxy.

  “Why have they slowed down?” Matt asked.

  Because we are fighting back. In their early conquests they came across no civilisations that could defend against them. We encountered them perhaps eighty or ninety years ago, by your reckoning. A group of machines were in orbit around a world, slowly exterminating a Stone Age civilisation by bombarding it with redirected asteroids, over a period of many years. They make a habit of destroying civilisations in slow and varying ways. As far as we can tell, they do this to study intelligent behaviour; the way that different species and different individuals react to different threats. We have known them to bombard the surface, or poison the atmosphere, or send in their combat drones, or destabilise the planet’s orbit and magnetic field. Hundreds of civilisations, massacred in hundreds of different ways.

  “Why?”

  Research, as far as we can tell. They study the consequences. They study the way different civilisations react as they fall apart. Why they do that, we’re not sure.

  “That’s what happened here, isn’t it?” Matt said suddenly. “The dead. That’s what they did to us. They made the dead come back and attack us.”

  Yes. One of the more horrifying methods I have witnessed.

  “Why?” I said. “Why would they… we’re not a threat, we’re nothing to them. We don’t even send astronauts to the moon anymore. What threat are we, why would they do that?”

  I told you, the ship said. They destroy life wherever they find it. It wouldn’t matter if you had an interstellar empire, or if you were still apes living in trees. They would destroy you. In fact, you are fortunate to be as advanced as you are. Non-sapient life is simply annihilated as soon as possible. The machines only study more advanced species.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t exactly feel fortunate,” I said. It was still hard to connect the two things in my head: this concept of a galactic menace, and all the personal death and bloodshed and trauma visited upon us in the last six months.

  There was one thing that wasn’t hard to connect, though. The attack at the helicopter crash site. Those snaking black tendrils, the sickening fear in my gut, the screaming man dragged up into the air.

  That first encounter with the machines led to war, the ship said. Possibly the first time they encountered a species as technologically advanced as they were – although possibly there have been other wars in the past, other last stands, lost to history, swallowed up by the expanding machine territory. The galaxy is a very large place.

  We conferred with other spacefaring species. We formed an alliance, in the face of an existential threat. And that war has now been ongoing for almost a century.

  “So who’s winning?” Matt said.

  That is not a question with an easy answer. We have managed to preserve our own systems, our own people, from being attacked by the machines. But in other parts of the galaxy, on other fronts of their empire, they continue their genocide.

  “On people like us,” I said.

  Yes.

  “So why are you here, then?” Matt said. “Why aren’t you off at war?”

  Not long into the war there was some discussion - there still is - about what the Alliance should do with regards to the machines’ ongoing genocide. Some argued that we should try to locate the worlds that are attacked, before the machines can destroy life there, so that we can prevent it from happening at all. Others argued that the best way of stopping the genocide was to focus all our forces on fighting and eliminating the machines entirely. It was this argument which won out, for a variety of reasons.

  One original part of the suggestion was retained. The worlds which are attacked are always at the outer edge of the growing machine empire. It was suggested that if we could keep a track of which worlds were dying, which civilisations were falling, then we could have an accurate strategic map of the machine expansion.

  This responsibility fell to our species, since our division is intelligence, strategy and espionage. We have never been strong fighters, and with our telepathic abilities information gathering has always been our strong point.

  “You keep talking about this species”, I said. “You mean the one that built you?”

  Yes, although I would be considered a member of that species as well, it said, sounding a little offended. I have the same mind as any other, if not the same body.

  “What are they called?” I asked. “What are they like?”

  What are we called? it said, putting a little stress on the thought “we.” We communicate with our minds, as the three of us are doing now, so there has never been any verbal name for our species. Other species refer to us as...

  The message it sent us was a little ambiguous; it seemed to mean something along the lines of “the thinkers,” or “the speakers,” or something combining both. I’ve chosen to interpret that as the Telepaths. Maybe one day an anthropologist can come up with a better name. Not me.

  As I was saying, the ship went on, the task of tracking the expansion of the machine empire fell to the Telepaths. As part of this campaign we sent scout ships out across our arm of the galaxy, gathering information on intelligent species, places the empire might strike next. We also planted... seeds.

  Again, this was an ambiguous message it sent us. I write it down now as the word “seeds.” In actual fact it entered my mind as an abstract concept: the idea of a thing left behind, which would grow into something more important. “What do you mean?” I asked, confused.

  The Telepaths have a refined concept of consciousness, the ship answered. That much is already obvious to you. It was this characteristic that was the key element of our warning system. We planted... souls. Spirits. Awarenesses. Call them whatever you will. An element of our own species, one per planet.

  “Like you?” I asked. “Just… inside things?”

  Inside members of the species. Depending on biology, usually in infants or eggs or embryos.

  “And then what would happen?”

  The process harms neither the parent nor the offspring. But the offspring would be aware of what it was. It would understand perfectly that it had the soul of a Telepath within it - that it was, in a sense, an alien life form. And when the time came - when the machines arrived and began to destroy its civilisation - the seed would send out a message. It would tell us that its world had been attacked.

  “And then?”

  And then its world would be destroyed. And the alliance would gain a clearer picture of how far the machine empire was progressing.

  “You do nothing to help them?” Matt said. “You just… leave them to die?”

  Direct assistance versus focusing on the fight against the machines is an ethical debate that has been ongoing in the broader Alliance since this war began, the ship said.

  “I don’t mean the species, I mean… the seeds,” Matt said. “They’re like your own people, aren’t they?”

  In some respects. In respects towards their consciousness, or what you might call their soul. Their mind and body is still very much of the
native species. Withdrawal is impossible and impractical for any number of reasons. And their own deaths pale in comparison to the millions of Telepaths killed since the war began – not to mention the even greater death toll among other races of the Alliance, with more combat operatives than our own.

  “Why not just make contact with the species?” I reasoned. “Why not tell them what’s going on? Prepare them, share your technology – they could help you!”

  We did, at first. Eighty per cent of the time they attacked us. It is difficult for a lesser species to appreciate a threat like the machines. They are rarely unified species, and sometimes nations or tribes or races would fight amongst themselves, divided on how to respond to us. Eventually we scrapped that program and began implanting seeds. It was faster and more effective.

  I wanted to say it was also arrogant and cold, but I tried to imagine what would have happened if the Telepath ship had come into Earth’s orbit last year and started broadcasting to the whole planet. How the Americans and the Chinese and the Russians and everybody else would react. As a species, we hadn’t even been able to agree on a response to the quotidian problem of climate change - never mind genocidal robots from beyond the stars, as relayed by another mysterious spaceship from beyond the stars. We would have flipped the fuck out.

  It still didn’t feel right. “It just feels… immoral,” I said. “Planting souls around like that, and then they grow up, and dash off a farewell message just before a whole planet gets wiped out? So back at base command you can shift a pin on the map?”

  This is a struggle for survival, the ship said. Everything that can be done is being done. It might not seem like it helps, but it does. In any case, Aaron, these decisions are made at a higher level than me.

  “You,” I said. “That’s the thing. What are you? Why are you here?”

  I am a scout ship. Reconnaissance and intelligence division. In recent years this sector of the galaxy has fallen under sustained machine expansion. A number of intelligent species have been wiped out. Only one planet was not attacked – Earth. I was sent to find out why.