All Fall Down

by Astrotomato

  Kate knew that whatever she did at this door, her life would change. If she closed the door and turned back, she would never know what lay beyond. If she entered, who knew what would happen? She licked her lips. This was it. At the end of this fault, this tunnel, lay the twenty three. Hybrid alien life. Nothing would ever be the same. Although reinforcements were on their way, most probably in a Dominator-class cruiser, with an Admiral presence, she still felt nervous. She was the commanding force, now, here, at this door to darkness, to a rupture in the cultural and social fabric of humanity. She was nervous. What if there was nothing there? What if Doctor Currie had been delirious, crazed? She had already sent the coded message. She gazed, searched, squinted into the darkness, the deep black with its mysteries so close, so hidden. She stepped over the door frame.

  Breathed out.

  Committed.

  In the car, travelling, there was only darkness, no sense of time or terrain passing outside, only her own sense of momentum. An impelling motion. Finally a dim light returned, carpeting the tunnel end. The car stopped. She went to a great door forced into the rock wall. She felt more than heard its massive security bolts thump into the rock when she played Masjid's voice again. Despite its size and weight, the door swung open easily. Kate peered into what appeared to be an airlock. There were streaks on the floor, which might have been anything. Dried ash, old blood, alien ichor. Grease. Inside the airlock was another security device connected to another door. This one had a key pad. Doctor Currie's voice had taken her this far. But what now? Was the code the final thing he'd tried to tell her before unconsciousness had taken him? She tried the door: locked, of course.

  Something must be here, though. The two maglev cars weren't enough for a general evacuation. It could be a command bunker for emergencies, but again, there was only capacity for four people in the cars. No, this had to be where the specimens were kept. Under hundreds of metres of rock, far from the avatared crowd.

  Was she missing something? She tried to think, but her poor sleep and the holo of Doctor Maki being killed by an alien clouded her. Had Doctor Currie said anything else which might help? She pressed a few keys, tapped out genetic codes, chemical formulae from Compound X.

  Her frustration grew. She'd taken a considerable risk coming here. If Daoud needed her, she wouldn't show up on the Colony's tracking system or on any ship manifests. He would know. She wanted to make this trip as quick as possible, and find out as much as possible. To get so far, and fail at the final door! Kate punched a few more keys, trying coordinates, names. Nothing worked. The keypad's light remained an impassable red. The door, hermetically sealed, dull and metallic, as monolithic as the door behind her, gave no clues to what lay beyond, impassive and all too solid.

  She pushed it just in case. Nothing.

  She'd been out of the Colony's sensor net for just over twenty minutes. She banged her fist against the keypad in frustration. Deciding to go, to cut her losses and return to the Colony, she turned towards the other door at her back, to the dark tunnel.

  Daoud stood in the doorway.

  Kate started. Her jaw set. Always take a risk, she thought. Never the safe option. “I know what you have here. The twenty three.”

  Daoud seemed to be looking in both her eyes at once, “You really don't.”

  “How long did you think you could keep this secret?”

  “A lot longer than you imagine, General.”

  It suddenly dawned on Kate that she was trapped. The only way out was back through the door, into the tunnel, and into the car. Past Daoud, who stood in her way.

  “I'm invoking Article Two of the Colony Defence Code.”

  “A coup, General?”

  “I'm assuming military command of this facility in the interests of galactic security.”

  Daoud stepped towards her.

  “I'm recording all this. I suggest you stay where you are.”

  Daoud shook his head, a small movement, a slow blink, like a father watching a child try and fail and try again to do something beyond its size, its ability, its years. He lunged at Kate. She dropped her hips, bent her knees, put her weight on her back foot, ready to fight, guard up. As she watched him approaching her, he seemed curiously singled out of the scene, as if reality had folded around his outline, so he floated like oil on water, the background. The dim tunnel beyond took on a curious flatness, two-dimensional. In jagged motion, not quite the slow motion she'd heard kicked-in during fights, but not quite at normal speed, she saw him feint to his right.

  Kate fell back, cleared some space between them. Her heel touched the door behind her, as solid as her heartbeat in her chest. She felt it thump, thump, thump, a pounding that seemed to vibrate through her feet, to her head, into the air around her.

  Daoud pulled back.

  “Step away from the door, Kate. It opens away from you. Your foot is pushing it. You may fall.”

  Kate kept her guard up. What was he saying? Blood crowded through her thoughts, black sparkles confused her vision.

  “General Leland? I'm not attacking you. See,” he held out his hands, palms upward, “I only leaned past you to open the door.”

  Kate pushed her foot backward, felt the door give slightly.

  “Take a couple of deep breaths. Slowly in.” As he spoke, Daoud stepped backward, slowly, turning so he was edge on, his back resting against the wall. There was the door to the tunnel beyond, a clear passage. She breathed and slowly dropped her guard, pulled her feet in, stood upright, eyes fixed once more on Daoud. He dipped his head, motioned to her right with a hand, “May I? I'd like to introduce you to a world you've always dreamed about.”

  Finally she found her voice, strained through a sieve of tension, “I meant what I said. I am assuming full military command of this facility.”

  “Yes. Let me show you what you now command. If you'll allow me?” He walked slowly across her, once again blocking the passage to the outward door, moved around to her right, leaned carefully past and pushed open the mighty inner door at her back. Quietly, in a whisper that filled the airlock and reverberated all the way down the dark tunnel she'd travelled, “Welcome to your future.”

  Kate turned around, her eyes wide, still accustomed to the dark, to the claustrophobic airlock, the lightless passage beyond, adrenalin coursing through her, and faced a bright, blinding light.

  Lights hung in the air around Djembe's head. The holo room was bare of decoration, of projection. Grid lines divided his attention. He had Win's ship on permanent monitor. He still had no trace on the avatar that had visited Win. There was no trace of hidden ships or AIs. He was getting desperate. And the biologicals were still elusive. It was time to use the cat program he'd selected earlier.

  “Computer, let's try something different. Give me a grid on the floor, four cells by four cells, each cell with a separate environment. I want a viewing platform above, where I can see everything. Generate environments randomly, populate each with one of the Jonahs for consequence mapping purposes.

  “Please take all of the mission data gathered and add it to this session, with full access to the Colony as per usual. Then ensure the data access point is a one-way funnel. If anything gets in here, make sure it stays in here, is isolated and cleaned and presented to me to see if it can go back into the Colony's datacloud.”

  The floor fell away from Djembe. It flowered, a carpet of colour bursting in each cell; painted tiles, a mosaic of worlds. From where he sat on his viewing platform, he could see the walls between each cell. And on each inner wall, he could see the cell's environment stretch to its unique horizon line, to infinity in at least one. He was going to use an evolutionary approach, breed solutions, let the Jonahverse, as Jonah Kingsland called it, find its own solutions.

  “Computer, give each cell a random amount of mission data to work with immediately, and access to a random part of the colony as their initial local data stream. Make me invisible to the cell Jonahs, I don't want them distracted. Now between me and the cel
ls, create one Jonah to watch over four cells each, and then one Angel program above those four to watch over them. Give that top Jonah access to me. Allow each layer to talk only to the one above and below it. I want them to be data filters.”

  They appeared and the Jonah below him, the final Jonah, crossed its legs and sat on a cloud. After a minute of looking over the many worlds below, it finally looked up, caught Djembe's eye, “Hello there, didn't see you. Funny old place this. What are you doing here?”

  “I am your maker.”

  “Greetings, Maker! You don't appear in my image. What's all that about? Wait, I remember you. Saw you once in the forest. And that café. Are you really the Maker? What about the other chap?”

  “You're on a special mission. I am the maker of the mission.”

  “Right you are. Oh yes, there's an Article Seven field. Got you, I'll keep everything under my hat. Quiet, like. A secret. What's the mission, then, Maker?”

  “This cat has lost its owner, but I don't know who it belongs to. It knows the smell of its owner, a girl with butterfly wings. Ask one of your Jonahs there to use its contacts to find the cat's owner.”

  “Yes, Sir, Mister Maker, Sir!” Jonah took the cat, the artificial intelligence program that would seek out the intruder to Verigua's systems. It stroked the cat's head.

  “There's another thing.”

  “Oh? Strange mission this. Go on.”

  “Someone was influencing Doctor Maki, changing her verbal patterns, her behaviours. See if your contacts can figure out who it was. A full dataset of her research, diaries and so on is in the infomatrix.”

  “Now this is more like it, if I do say so, Maker. A lost cat is well enough. But a murder mystery! That's a good mission.”

  “And I have one other thing. In the planetary and Colony maps, you will find there are new tunnels. And there are twenty three entities in one of them which Doctor Currie knew about. Find out as much as you can. That will be all.”

  “Well, Maker, this is a fine mission. If it's to be the Black Cat Mysteries, then I need to dress appropriate like. It's sleuths you want, and bounty hunters. Spies, too, I shouldn't wonder.” Jonah pulled a patch over his left eye, while its clothes changed to a dark suit, dark shirt, dark tie. Its hair swept back, shone with gel. “I've got this one, Guv'nor, leave it to me.” It walked down a biocrete staircase, damp stained, to the Jonahs below.

  Djembe watched their clothes change, watched his Jonah hand the cat over. He leaned back in his chair, looking over his program, “Finally some control in this chaos.” Djembe picked up his slate and looked over the security programs for Win. Sixteen worlds moved into life below, and five floating Jonahs looked around them. Twenty one voices chorused the start of the program, “I am.”

  The In The Palm Of Your Hand's engines started their pre-flight warming cycle. The eclipse simulation was integrating into the ship's Level Five Mind and the navigational data the ship specialised in. Win sat in the flight deck with the pilot, who looked ashen, determined, her eyes sharp and flinty.

  “I'll make the necessary preparations, Sir. We can carry one hundred uncomfortably, sleeping in corridors and so on. The AI cortex can go in the hold. I'll be ready in one hour.”

  Win left the flight deck and walked through the ship to the exit ramp. He saw Kiran in the hangar. Kiran's back was turned, bent over some equipment. Win looked at him. He was still a boy, in many ways, despite his qualification as a deep space pilot. Win knew that this might be the last time he saw him. Kiran's last few hours alive. Win wondered if he should say something, tell Kiran what was happening. Give him a military order to take a ship and leave the system. But no. It would only panic Kiran, whose first instinct would be to rescue his friends, to tell others. That way lay more panic, disorder. Win's own ship and the information about the system might be lost in the chaos, prevented from leaving. Win realised he was thinking like a Commander. He walked down the ramp, quietly, secretively, and made his way to the hangar door. He took one look back, from where he saw Kiran laughing with a technician. He turned his back, and closed the door on the children of Fall.

  Sophie watched a snake rise from the holopit, slither around a wooden staff and hang its head over Masjid.

  Around Masjid were closed eyes, downcast gazes, fingers picking at threads, audible swallows, tears, planted feet, comforting hands on arms. Doctor Maki's face, with its narrow, gently angled eyes pointing in towards a slight nose and high cheeks, appeared above the memorial crowd. A shy smile looked up from under pencil eyebrows and a jet black fringe.

  Masjid had chosen a cherry blossom garden for the ceremony. The holopit, the great generator of light and form, masqueraded as a pond, softened with lotus flowers, Koi flicking their tails below the surface. A willow mourned from the side, washing its saddened leaves. A ceramic sun and woodcut clouds gave sympathy from above. In the distance, on a snow-capped volcano, a great wyrm, Verigua's dragon, coiled in observance, scales glinting like tears.

  The cherry trees waved as Masjid gave his speech. Blossom drifted, settled on the pond water, span in ever decreasing circles. It settled on Sophie's hair, a petal here and there on her arms.

  Doctor Maki's face was eventually replaced with Doctor Cassel's. Sophie shifted her feet, unseen by the crowd. Unconsciously, she wiped her palms slowly down her hips. She could feel the grief in the room. These scientists cared for each other, holed up in their labs, where they pulled apart DNA, creating growths in large glass cylinders. They cared about their colleagues who had voluntarily had limbs amputated and re-grown for their science. They cared about their friends around them who were working around the anti-cloning laws. Restoring the individual. Restoring the lost knowledge of the Qin, cloning lore being revived here on Fall, improved. The body regenerated, not re-grown as a copy, or as a simulacrum. How could these people not see what they were involved in? What their talents, their individual geniuses were being used for, the future that was being prepared? The big picture? These weren't treatments for a peaceful society. They were remedies for people injured in war.

  She felt no dismay. These people were happy here on Fall. Their egos were indulged, their lives given meaning, their research unfettered by politics, resources, priorities. They could fall in love, have children, laugh and shout and scream and joke. They could have ambition and achieve meaningful dreams.

  She shook her head. Her mind wandered with the drifting blossoms and split as the flowers spiralled in different directions. On the one hand, the MI team were becoming a problem, but Daoud had given no clear line on how to deal with them yet. Not unusual. In all the years she had worked with him, he had often held back on his opinions, instructions for dealing with difficult situations, playing the long game. They had been through many setbacks, and perhaps this MI team was another. Daoud would never be stopped. Too many pieces were in place. Too much had succeeded. Sophie looked up to the sky, to the fired glaze of the sun.

  In her ear, Daoud told her that he was leaving the colony to visit the twenty three. The pods.

  Then on the other hand there was the memory exploration she'd undertaken before sleep the previous evening. The deep scan she'd run, and the surprise conversation with Verigua, which now knew about her cybernetic implants. She had struggled with Verigua at first, a virtual fight, throwing anxiety weapons at it. But Verigua had borrowed Commander Cygnate's analytical tools, and neatly side stepped them. Eventually Sophie had been too tired to fight any more. For a period of two hours she'd achieved some clarity, a sense of objectivity that she recognised, that settled on her from time to time, but was always quickly dampened. And in that two hour window, she'd talked with Verigua, scared that she wasn't in control of her feelings.

  Together, they had found a control algorithm in her cyberware. Each device had its own operating instructions biologically encoded into it. There was a master control algorithm running alongside them all. It was subtle, composed of hundreds of nanocode fragments, which operated as a network of apparently
disparate instructions. Its complexity was balanced by the simplicity of its function: it manipulated her moral reasoning. Subtly, gently. It was why she'd found no qualms in arranging for Huriko and Peter's death. Something she had never once done in the turbulent times four hundred years ago.

  Anger consumed her. She knew she had to carry on with the plan. But Daoud had crossed a line. Implanted a control code at her re-birth. Oh, he knew how to play a long game. Not once in the last four hundred years had the control code been activated, until now. She was surprised she hadn't noticed it before. But then she'd never had the need. Daoud had rescued her, brought her back to life. Appeared out of nowhere and given her a new purpose: the long term survival of the human species. He'd had proof of alien civilisations, alien warfare, all those centuries ago. The Cadre had it, too. And he wanted to ensure humanity was prepared. It had been an easy mission to sign up to.

  She wasn't sure what to think. His mission seemed morally sound. And she still had free will. The code just made her more suggestible. It was a clever bit of forethought on Daoud's part. And she was still innocent; she had not killed or directly arranged for anyone's death. She kept all of these thoughts private, did not let Verigua know about them. About Peter suffering a temporary power outage in the lab underneath the Colony. He could have left immediately, instead of trying to re-energise the pods' cells. The pods which had escaped and in their excitement and adolescence covered him in burns. And Huriko who had received implanted suggestions, which she chose to act on. To wear environment suits poorly rated for her environment. To make arrangements with just one pilot, rather than logging her surface trips with all of the Colony's pilots.