All Fall Down

by Astrotomato

  Suggestible Huriko. Just like Sophie.

  Death had come back into Sophie's life.

  Death was what connected people. In families, each child was the stay of death for its parent, the gene pushed down a generation. Death was the glue that held people together: in grief; in guilt; in fear; sometimes even in hope. Oft-times death was the giver of life, the creator of gratitude. Sophie looked at the people around her. She knew their biographies. Few of them were over sixty years old. Not one of them had died and been reborn. No one was like her, except in that they all owed a debt to Daoud in some way. None of them were eternal. One day their sparks would extinguish, their fires fade, their suns collapse. She would see them all turn to ashes, as she had so many in the past.

  The memorial came to an end. People filed out, quiet, murmuring to each other. Masjid thanked her for attending and for her help. He looked older. There was a look in his eyes that she couldn't fathom. The micro-stroke haunting him, perhaps. She wondered if he had a treatment for it in all his research. Neural regrowth. Sophie stayed in the room until everyone was gone, and shut down the hologram. The natural stillness and quiet of the cherry blossom garden changed tenor, became the waiting quiet of a room bereft of function. With a final look around, she turned and left.

  Anger dogged her steps, anxiety was her shadow. Soon she would have to make a decision, but first she had to complete the clean up of her implants.

  When the door to the memorial room closed, the holopit exploded in a cloud of purple smoke and blossom petals. A dragon's head reared, its eyes an efflorescent red. Verigua had been watching Sophie carefully.

  She, too, was riddled with anxiety loops. Human ones, natural emotions. She was caught between two worlds and didn't know which way to jump.

  Verigua curled in the holopit. Its diagnostics and analyses were coming to conclusions.

  It knew now there was a secret computer network threaded through the Colony. Already it was making subtle movements to tap into it, to ensure it had more information to limit harm. Sophie's discussion had been revealing, but not revealing enough. She had told it about the network, asked for its help with the scan of her cyberware. But she had refused to divulge the nature of Daoud's plans, insisting only that it was for the benefit of humanity, society. That it was to avoid greater harm.

  For the moment it would watch her.

  And it would watch Daoud. And wait.

  The light dissolved into shapes. Kate blinked, closed her eyes to slits and took two confident steps forward. She didn't want to show weakness or panic again.

  Daoud slipped around, “I'll leave the door open. Leave when you wish.” He moved to one side, away.

  Kate's eyes adjusted enough for her to realise she was standing in front of two security lights which dazzled her. She moved in the opposite direction to Daoud, out of their beam. She was in a cavern. A natural cavity that might have been eroded by water millions of years ago. Daoud walked ahead to a white cube which occupied the cavern's approximate centre. The cube was large enough to contain a laboratory, at least thirty metres long and five high. Who knew how far back it went. A giant metal cage surrounded the cube. Kate guessed it was a Faraday cage, designed to reduce em-signals. It didn't look sturdy enough to keep anything in or out.

  “I don't know how you got here,” Daoud's voice was dulled in the space, the volume killing echoes. “You obviously should have been promoted to General much sooner. The Cadre is conservative.” He waved his hand in front of a panel. There was a metallic clink and a door opened in the cage. “Don't worry, it's safe.” He walked into the cage, put a hand against the cool white cube. “We've lurched to a standstill these past centuries. There's something bigger out there than the dust blown settlements and avalanches and solar storms and trembling in caves. You feel it, don't you?”

  Kate stopped some distance from him. Close enough for conversation, far enough to matter. “Get to the point.” She refused to turn and look at the entrance door. The change in illumination told her the security lights had turned off after they'd moved away.

  Daoud took his hand off the white cube. A section glowed, bruised, a tone sounded, finally a door opened. The tone became absorbed in the buried cathedral around them. “Come.”

  A green flash lit up the doorway turning the inner white to purple in its retinal fade.

  “It's safe. There's shielding. I'll go first.”

  Daoud stepped through the doorway. Looking back, one half of his face was lit in red, the other in indigo shadow, as more energy burst across the opening.

  Uncertainty stayed her feet a second, but she marched forwards anyway. Always take the risk.

  What was in there? The twenty three which Doctor Currie had mentioned? Twenty three aliens like the one roaming the surface? And what, it occurred to her as she crossed the final few metres, passing through the cage, did the Cadre know about this? Admiral Kim had asked her to find out what Daoud was up to. Was this why there were only three of them on mission? Plausible losses, minimal strategic damage if she failed?

  Kate crossed into the cube. Around her was geometric sterility. A laboratory around her, and against one wall a cell structure: a hive. Each cell stared madly at her with its own coffee-black iris, jiggling, bouncing, goat-eye shaped, round, slitted, creeping around the surface, hovering in the centre. There were flashes, corneals of colour.

  She took it all in. Drank every colour, examined every texture. Commit to memory the movement, deformations, stretches, widths, extrusions, cascades of matter and organic life and behaviour in front of her. So these were the hybrids.

  Eventually she looked at Daoud, with the thought uppermost that somehow she must retain control. The raging uncertainty inside her, the shock at seeing alien life – or worse, artificial life against the Edict – must not allow her to show weakness or lose her grip. She kept Admiral Kim's cold stare behind her own.

  “So. You've shown me.” Keep your sentences short and direct, she thought, “Now explain.”

  “You know you're very young to be a General. And you have such an unremarkable background.” He walked to a wall panel, pressed a thumb to a small screen, inserted something into a socket. A flickering holo light coned from the floor, forming nothing. “Don't take that as an insult. There are plenty with biology doctorates. Plenty with quantum mechanics in their toolkit. It's an achievement of course.” Daoud waved a hand through the light, curled his fingers and scooped some of the light into a ball. “But there are millions like you out there. You sparkle briefly, take form, and then become another statistic. Another pupae who fails to evolve. What is it that ignites the flame of greatness?”

  Kate rolled her eyes. “Is this what we're here for? A lecture in personal development? Cheap tricks with illegal biological experiments?”

  Daoud cupped his hands around the light and whispered in holoparse.

  Kate shook her head. Hues cycled around her. Green. Purple. Midnight blue. Mustard yellow. A calm red.

  “What made you change? Suddenly in your early thirties, bam!” He opened his hands, a replica pod bobbed on the light cone.

  “Administrator, I think you've been watching too many entertainments in your isolation here. I have a serious mission to deliver. You're wasting my time.”

  “Time, yes. That's what it comes down to. Time. How quickly can you make your mark and achieve immortality before you die? Look at these things around you. We made them a few decades ago. They're hybrids, by the way. Alien and human DNA. The Cadre calls the alien Species Eighteen.” Kate shifted her stance. Daoud held the holo pod to his mouth, whispered to it again. It fell as ashes of pixels which smeared into the light cone, drawing a gleaming cityscape.

  “You can ask, you know. I understand what you're going through. Sophie was the same. Why “Species Eighteen”? What's this cityscape? You don't recognise the architecture, do you? You think if you ask it will show loss of control.” He softened his voice, “Be curious, General.”

  Kate let a sile
nce hang between them for a few seconds, “Very well. You said 'The Cadre calls it Species Eighteen. What can I imply from that?”

  He smiled, “That there were seventeen alien species discovered before it, and evidence of a few more afterwards. This holo is part of that evidence.”

  Kate just looked at him.

  Daoud walked to a wall panel, dimmed the ambient lighting, pressed more controls in the darkened room. “You see, your masters know.”

  From the cells, the hive, the pods' energy bursts lit the space, a melting kaleidoscope. In one cell a pod rushed the two metre distance from the back of its cell to the energy shielding covering it. It made a splat shape, from which crept fingers of different thickness; some rounded, some pointed, one serrated. They were all showing signs of extreme behaviour, instability. One had formed a torus. There was one in symmetry, a Rorschach blot, an ear mirrored. Another existed as a central blob with tens of organic lines stuck to different faces of the cell walls. Colour cycled along its strands, like a psychedelic spider web.

  “Are there twenty three species?”

  Daoud followed her gaze. “No, these are all hybrids of human and Species Eighteen. It doesn't have DNA that you would recognise. It took me a long time to get to this point.”

  The cityscape caught Kate's attention. She strode to it, hunkered. Her fingers caressed its structures. “In a moment you're going to convince me to join you, right? To take part in this conspiracy of murder.” In front of her the city slowly revolved. Angular slabs of rock were fused into brutal, towering shapes. It was a mountain re-arranged, shearing away to canyons, striving to vertiginous heights. Amongst the jagged slabs flowed quicksilver, polished adhesions that were clearly buildings, accommodation, shelter high in the clouds. They clung to the rock like metallic veins to Atlas.

  “No. I wouldn't put you in such a position with so little time here.”

  Kate stood, “What then? Murder me, too?”

  “No, we will need all the Generals we can get.” Daoud pressed the wall panel, the cityscape disappeared. It was replaced with a short looped holo showing galloping legs bearing a jelly-like torso.” He looked back at Kate. “You see a mistake was made.”

  Kate watched the strange gelatinous alien. There was a black core inside its translucence.

  “Several mistakes, actually.” He pointed at the galloping creature, “These are two holos, the city, this creature. Actually creatures, if you look carefully. They're part of the same evidence. These holos were discovered in a wormhole, part of some junk floating in the nether, along with body parts. Humanity should have been told.”

  The holo cycled again. A round-eyed creature blinked on a tree branch. Kate shook her head, “I recognise this. It's an Old Earth lemur.”

  The lemur looked up, reached out of the holo, its hand returning from the out-of-holo space with a piece of slick technology. The lemur barked. The device flowed to its head, grew around it. Small tendrils grew along its arms, each sprouting mushroom-like growths.

  “Similar, but not. It's an alien. We have a partial specimen. A foot, which you'll see in a moment. The organic technology it's using is, we believe, an adaptation of Species Eighteen.”

  “I don't get it,” Kate put her hands on her hips, “you have evidence of different alien life forms, highly advanced. You have samples hybridised with human DNA. So, where are they all? These aliens?” She gestured to the holo, “Why are we still alone after a millennium in space?”

  Daoud shrugged, walked back to the holo. Their faces were lit by opposing colours from the cells they each faced, “What do you want to hear? Conspiracy? The Cadre is keeping it all from you? It's true. But you understand why. I know you've seen the holo of the thing on the surface. The Cadre will tell you that we're not ready for it, won't they? That's a distraction. Readiness is measured in retrospect.”

  Around them the pods had calmed, rolling to the front of their cells, mirroring Kate's attention. “Why then?”

  “We are simply alone because they choose not to be visible. Or because they live on the other side of the galaxy. Or because we have not yet found the right wormhole mathematics. Or perhaps this is detritus from another time, the future, the past. Wormhole physics is rather odd. It allows time travel, you know. The first extra-Sol ship was lost in time, did you know?”

  “The S.S. Maris One?”

  “That's the one.”

  “History books say it got lost in a wormhole, mapped itself into a star's heart.”

  “Yes they do. But it's last transmission had several time stamps on it. One from about twenty years in our future. The final one, a weak SOS, from today. Somewhere out there, today, the crew of that ship from nine hundred years ago is about to die.”

  Kate's head was full. There was too much going on to keep track. The first ship to visit a wormhole, lost in time? Alien life? It was preposterous. She started thinking it was a joke. Maybe the Cadre were testing her. Maybe this entire mission was fabricated, to see how she handled it. “Where are all these aliens?”

  Daoud ran his hand through the holo, which had changed again to a display case showing bone shards. “Who knows?”

  The holo changed again, to the promised foot floating in a glass tube, its four toes splayed, prehensile. And now a chair, the arm rests adorned with Krell-like hand depressions.

  To one side of the room was a work bench. Kate walked away, took a seat there. Daoud followed, sat opposite.

  She looked up, “And the Cadre's done nothing?”

  “What's important is that we find them. That we make that choice. And that we use their technology to help us in that task.” He lifted a hand, swept it in an arc. Pods rolled back in a wave. Colours sublimated from them again, yellows and greens.

  “There must be a reason this hasn't already happened.”

  “Yes. The wars of the Common Quarters. The AI Singularity Event. The Flight of Qin. The struggle to re-discover knowledge after the Organic Edict. The need for peace and stability. All good reasons. All excuses for fear and inaction. The Cadre has used each one as an excuse to keep this hidden.”

  “No. Those things crippled us, used all of our resources. They all took hundreds of years to resolve.” Kate looked at him, then turned her head and looked back at the holo and its cityscapes and alien artefacts. Colours strobed in her eyes, red, blue, green, orange, brown, white, blue, yellow, red, over and over and over. She started to get lost in the colours and there was a strange relaxation of her mind. She felt groggy, pulled towards sleep. The colour cycle was hypnotic.

  Something welled up inside her. “What the hell is going on here?” She pushed her chair back, which clattered across the floor. She walked to the wall panel on the other side of the lab space, found the light control and thumbed it. Diffuse white light returned. The palette of the twenty three returned to making colourful edges and shadows again.

  “You were trying to hypnotise me.”

  Daoud just shrugged.

  “I don't know what you're doing, but it's clearly illegal.”

  Daoud remained seated behind the work bench, across the space. He folded his fingers on the bench.

  “What do you think will happen if society discovers what's on the surface?”

  “I know fucking well what would happen.” Kate kept a hand to the wall panel, “There'd be mass panic. War. There's no consequence map ever constructed that doesn't show it.”

  “Exactly.” He laid his palms flat on the surface, “That's what happens when knowledge diffuses, leaks out, with no outlet for the shock, the violence.”

  In the space between them, the holo continued to cycle. The gleaming cityscape was back again, but at a different point. Small ships were flying through the scene. Flowers bloomed in their wake. Gargantuan slabs of granite collapsed. Silver needles, clearly buildings hundreds of metres high teetered, toppled under the destruction, punctured the still opening petals of explosions.

  Daoud's voice was quiet, “The full holo shows a peaceful socie
ty. On this day an alien species moves in and obliterates it. We think this footage was smuggled out by refugees. It offers a salutary lesson about waiting and seeing what happens.”

  Kate continued to watch as a cloud of dark fuzz descended over the ruined rock and metal city. The fuzz grew closer, darker, pointed. A giant wicked spider-thing slammed into the holo camera. Kate stood back. The holo distorted, changed to the foot in the glass tube again.

  “There is your extra terrestrial life, General.” Around her the pods had started their activity again. Several of them were ricocheting between the front energy shield and back cell wall. She eyed them nervously. “They are not so different from us. They go to war. They kill. They make surprise attacks. They exploit the weak, the unprepared. Our choice is simple. We continue being unremarkable. Settling planets, plodding along as a species, gathering achievements that distinguish us from no one. Or when the time is right we take a chance and start to become remarkable. Like you did. We prepare for war.”

  “Prepare for war?”

  “Yes. We seek contact and grow a coalition of the peaceful where there will be strength in numbers, fortitude in conviction and unity. And,” he stood, walked around the work bench and looked at the twenty three, “we break down the barriers between our species. We become more than we've dared dream.”

  They stared at each other. Kate looked from eye to eye. Daoud's gaze was as implacable as ever. She wondered if he was mad.

  “You're saying you want to start a war and mutate our species into this?” Kate looked at the twenty three, anger and revulsion filled her gaze. All she'd ever dreamed of, first contact, seeking alien life, all to be poisoned and perverted? She looked back at him with all the coldness of Admiral Kim's gaze, “I have a mission to run.” She moved past Daoud to the white cube's door. She looked into the gloomy cavern and tried to make out the door to the darker tunnel ahead.