by Astrotomato
In the bathroom, door quickly and quietly closed, she vomited. In the mirror under the light Huriko looked back, drool hanging from her lower lip, eyes drugged with sleep.
She spat.
A cramp gripped her abdomen, soured her pubis.
More vomit.
Water swirled around the sink, spiralling, spiralling down into a bottomless black hole.
Djembe was flicking through his datapad for the wording of the Organic Edict. He was starting to think that Huriko was not pregnant with her husband's baby, but something different. Something implanted. He glanced back at the cell and watched the night scene fade into a green and brown light.
A worm's head blindly writhed from side to side. The black soil held onto a collapsed cast. Between her fingers, soil smeared and fell back to itself. This patch of soil in the experimental farm pod could transform the planet. If her protein worked, the soil could be seeded, transformed into a hard chitin under the harsh sunlight. The protein structures could be grafted into crops, which would grow suits of bio-armour while harvesting the lethal radiation. Fall would be terraformed. Other planets would follow. Sterile environments brought to life by humanity, an invading alien life form.
Brown deformed leaves crinkled the space around her. Spastic crops frozen in spasms of failure. Huriko tried to imagine what Fall would look like if her research was successful. She was suddenly unsure if she was doing the right thing. There were no food shortages. Humanity had settled enough worlds. Fall may be sterile, but was that so bad? Maybe humanity needed barren worlds, harsh conditions, where life had to hide to survive. Where the struggle confirmed its existence. Who was she to decide what life could come into this world, this universe? Around her were the corrupted growths of such thoughts. The plants looked like they were caught in screams, agonies. If an entire ecosystem had to be bio-engineered to deploy armour all the time, wouldn't it become monstrous, hideous? What sort of defences would the lowliest worm need in such an environment, to aerate a punished soil and keep itself from burning?
Huriko walked to a banana tree, touched a leaf, watched it shatter, shard in blackness to the ground.
Perhaps it was wrong to bring life to such places.
The people in white curled over her body. She was strapped into an examination chair. Immobile. Feet in stirrups. Black darts, a nova of dark needles pinned her vision to her sleeping mind. Their faces were obscured, but she felt their voices, distorted with metallic static, terrifying.
“She's fighting it.”
“Is she aware?”
“It's the compound. It creates resistance to anaesthetic.”
“Give her five mil more.”
“Be careful, will you?”
“Can she hear us?”
“She won't remember.”
The bright lights striated into metallic white lines. A platinum waterfall.
Huriko looked up the Colony's central air shaft. Metres below huge fans whumped the air. Their siblings reciprocated in the gloom hundreds of metres above. The balconies were set back a little on each floor up, so that she could see all of the darkness capping the Colony's heart. Gantries criss-crossed the space. She had the impression that as she looked up someone was on the uppermost balcony looking down. Down at her so small. In the depths. The gloom, the grey yellow sludge light that sickened the dark cavity blurred all details above the sixth floor.
Down here was immaculate. Alone.
She just wanted to be alone.
Biology was holding less and less interest. The human body, plant physiology, soil ecology. Pre-Edict knowledge. Armoured worlds growing in spite of nature. Fall. The rumour. The myth. The broken ties. The child that grew inside her. The sickness in the pits of her body. The growth. The growths. Forbidden knowledge. Plants with insect skin. Soil that grew with hair. Fall's thirst. Its hunger. The Colony pressing down. Memories of operations. Screaming.
She slid down the balcony's barrier, slumped to the floor. Breathed through her nose. Her legs splayed.
The darkness above was empty. Silent.
The way she wanted it.
“Got everything you need, Doctor Maki?”
“I think so. Thank you, Kiran.”
“There's no return time booked. When should I bring the aircar back for you?”
“I'll call you. I have a few experiments to check at different points in the outer circle.”
“You know what time the storm front is due, right? Make sure you're back well before second sun rise.”
“Don't worry.”
“I'll be waiting for you.”
She smiled and patted the young man's arm.
That was the end of the direct evidence. Djembe spoke to a holicon, allowed the only remaining evidence, indirect, from another source, flow in.
In the cell Jonah swam in an ocean of dark sensor readings, camera recordings and audio logs. It washed itself free of Huriko Maki, immersed itself in Colony Pilot Kiran ha'Doek. In bar tales, mumblings and flight logs. A shallower sea.
“Well here we are Doctor Maki. I'll help you unload.”
They stood to the rear of the aircar, unloading equipment.
“What are these things, anyway?”
“Test plates of bio-engineered proteins. Extracts from human and insect DNA. We're trying to find a protective protein sequence so we can grow things on the surface.”
“Like what?”
“Crops. Trees. Forests maybe.”
Silence. An anti-grav loader moved from the aircar, unloaded, back again.
“So we could live on the surface? Like on other planets?”
“Maybe not that far. But maybe have woodland where we could be protected during single sun.”
“Is there a vote on that?”
“What do you mean?” Huriko altered the polarisation of her goggles so she could better see Kiran's wrapped face, his protected eyes.
“Well, no offence, but you're not from here. This is my home. I was born here. Me and the others, might be nice to ask us if we want our home changed like that. That's all.”
Around them, solar harvesters silently gathered energy for the experimental equipment. Covered plates were stacked, waiting for installation. Older plates rested on skeletal frames, bleached bone white. Flakes curled from their surfaces, where they weren't blistered or cracked or wizened into twisted fibres. “Is this what the future looks like, then?”
Huriko glanced over her shoulder, “This is what failure looks like.”
“So what would success look like? What will my planet become?”
She adjusted a scarf, tucked it further into the neck of her environment suit, “You know the farming pods? Imagine if we built more of them, implanted, underground. And seeded them with crops that could cope with the twin suns. And opened the pods' shields, so the crops could burst out, and start growing across the surface.”
Kiran packed empty boxes and loading equipment into the aircar. “What about water? What will they live on? And what about the storm?”
Huriko closed the aircar doors, and stepped toward the experiment. She turned back, “Life will find a way. Goodbye.” She darkened her goggles and turned back to her experiment.
The blue sun cast a dark shadow when the aircar lifted into the air.
On his way to the Colony dock, Kiran drove high over the ground, trying to imagine it covered with dark, armoured plants. More farming pods would need more scientists, more farmers, more people. In the distance, sunlight glinted off one of the mining sub-Colony structures; a ventilation housing or solar harvester. He thought of the hundreds of people out there in the sub-colonies. He knew ten of them in total. Already he couldn't keep up. As he approached the inselberg and prepared to descend, he saw from the corner of his eye another object moving in its shadow; he thought it was probably another aircar, another scientist. He looked the other way, preferring to see an empty world, a Fall he knew, where everything was out of sight.
He looked back to his holo display of the area
, where the label identifying Huriko Maki was falling away, the letters of her name fading from view.
Djembe ordered the cell to extract the last view from Kiran's aircar. It was fuzzy, out of focus and washed with sun glare. But he thought it looked familiar.
He opened another holo file, the one he'd seen last night. A rock, a valley. A dark shape rising. The visitor, the thing, the mystery.
Djembe stared at it, stared at the fuzzy object from Kiran's aircar recording.
Foreboding filled him. This was too much, too big. He was a Consequence Planner, not a murder investigator. He wasn't trained to save humanity from alien invasion. He quailed. He thought of the rules and procedures and steps he knew so well, those that gave him comfort, that made him feel safe and knowledgeable.
He was a Commander, not a General.
For the first time in his life he wasn't sure he was ready for this kind of responsibility.
Chapter 12 – Nineveh
The door remained closed, the intercom silent. Time was running out. Win turned to a computer access point in the corridor, “Verigua, it's Win. I'm at Administrator Daoud's office. There's no response. Can you locate him please?”
“Checking. His signal does not appear in the Colony.”
“This is no good. He needs to see the eclipse simulation.”
“Can I suggest we find Sophie Argus? She may have a way of contacting him. She also has full operational management duties. She can start an evacuation procedure for us.”
“Fine. Where is she?”
“Checking. Ah. That may also be a problem.”
“Is she outside the Colony, too?”
“No, she appears to be in several places in the Colony. Her comms device says she's in the bio-labs. But I, er, tagged her earlier at the memorial, and it says she's in the hangar.”
Win looked up and down the corridor. He didn't have time to ask Verigua why Sophie had two locations. The curving sound of doors swished around the corridor walls. He heard the voices of administrative staff and for a moment couldn't tell if they were moving closer or further away. The voices disappeared behind a further swish. “You know, there's a game I play with my son: hide and seek. We run around the orchard at home, changing hiding places, trying to creep back to base to win. Not long ago Hong-xian realised he could always win as the seeker if he just stayed at the base, hidden, and leapt out when the hider crept up. A very efficient solution for a seven year old.”
Win started walking towards the lift, “I'm going to see Djembe. Start preparations for disengaging your cortex, Verigua. We're evacuating. When I'm with Djembe I'll send out a request to Sophie to visit us. I'm not playing her games.”
Djembe reviewed the other cells, and rewound some of their unfolding consequences, to catch up on anything else he might have missed. If he was going to face the truth of this place, he may as well see it all.
In one of the cells was Djembe's seeker program, the black cat. The strange plays which he had seen in the bar and with Huriko were mirrored, and then became stranger still, in this cell. It grabbed his attention immediately.
Down in the cell, the cat was curled in Jonah's lap. It twitched an ear. Jonah sat on a chair in a library without walls. A forest of flowers, pink soap suds falling from jet black leaves, frothed around the library and fell away as thicket into the desert. In the distance the smudge that floated on heat haze was the inselberg. In the sky hung the Jonah Angel, represented as a dark prism.
A dust devil sputtered along the baked desert floor. It careened into the thicket, through the matrix of wood, ruffled the petals. Jonah looked up. The variegated wall puffed, trembled. Jonah stroked the cat sleeping in its lap. The flowers settled. Small petals drifted to the floor.
Jonah looked around. The library was made of leather-bound books, periodicals, battered paperbacks, a rainbow of spines and pictograms and fonts and characters. It was occasional tables with lamps with green shades. Stripped wooden floors. An archaic computer terminal.
Jonah watched the flowers, which were still again.
The suns rode high, smears of light.
The cat opened an eye, stared up at Jonah. A paw shifted, stretched the leg behind it.
Out in the flowers something rustled.
Jonah looked at the cat.
The cat looked at Jonah.
A petal drifted on air movements. The green roof of the sky watched blindly.
A giggle; hushed.
Jonah snapped its head around. A hanging comb of stamens bobbed.
The cat stretched its four legs, pushing them into Jonah's stomach. It yawned, sharp teeth revealed.
Behind Jonah a book thumped to the floor. Jonah sat straight in the high backed chair, unable to look around. Sharp black leaves rattled in the flora.
The cat rose to a seated position. It licked a paw. Its ears gave the lie, moving like radar dishes.
Jonah peered into the thicket. At the roots, the wooden floor was subsumed into shadowed dust and sand. Gnarls obscured the view beyond a metre. Flowers and leaves obscured everything above it.
The cat jumped to the floor. Jonah's program was startled and stood, pushing back the chair. Jonah ran a self-diagnostic. There was an anxiety loop. A fault in the deterministic expectation and the internal clock program.
The cat watched Jonah pick up the book and place it back in the book case. It strolled around the small library, sniffing table legs, stretching its back against book shelves, rubbing its cheeks on chairs. It avoided the thicket as if it didn't exist.
Jonah watched the cat, saw nano code shed in its wake, staining the library. It watched the cat pounce on a petal. Up above it all, Djembe watched the scene through Jonah's eyes, and saw the petal change hue, become patterned with a delicate fractal. The cat sauntered away, nonchalant.
Mission time elapsed. Jonah checked its mission program. Real time minutes had gone by and it had not yet found the cat's owner. The cat seemed content. In the sky was fixed the jewel of the Jonah Angel: a higher, evolved layer in the AI substrate of constantly evolving intelligence algorithms. To grow more useful and acquire tools, skills, abilities was the purpose of the Jonah. To act on behalf of the Maker and serve the function of the AI, the OverMind. The jewel glittered, flashing into a tesseract, which meant another cell must be reporting, successful, useful. A quicker, more efficient program. A better Jonah elsewhere.
Jonah grabbed handfuls of its hair, turned slowly on the spot.
The cat sat on a table, staring, blinking slowly, and watched this anxious slow motion ballet.
In the thicket, hidden by flowers, children chuckled.
Jonah rooted, watched with wild eyes, followed the sound.
The suns beat down. One dipped to the horizon. The black leaves shone. The change in light made the flowers glow. Whispers and scrambling sounds ruffled the air.
The cat sauntered back. Jonah followed its gaze. A butterfly's shadow sailed across the library's wooden knots and boards. Jonah looked up after the shadow maker, saw its iridescence splash into the petals, heard it land, heard it laugh. Jonah sat again. “I'm useless. What should I do? There isn't enough data.” There were no other Jonahs to talk to. The Maker's cat was no help; there was a communications filter through the overseeing Jonah Angel.
Jonah walked around the small library of two parallel book cases, green lamps and floral walls. Books towered on either side. There was a scuffing, a patter against the wooden floor. Sets of feet. A book thumped to the floor. A table or chair leg scraped an attention. Jonah put its face to the book-hole on the shelf, saw a child's foot disappear into shaking, shining tumbles of flowers.
Curious, it walked out from the book cases. The cat was coiled. Its back hair stood on end, popping mathematical symbols into the air. Nano code blossomed on the floor; a path into branches and stems. The intruder had walked through the cat's spray, left foot prints. The spring was unsprung. The cat bounded into the petalled jungle.
Jonah looked from the cat to the thick
et to its own body soft in its human shape. Its mission code flooded its program. Expectation equations changed their values. The mission clock grew larger, microseconds laying sediments of anxiety, coaling into panic.
Jonah ran.
The thicket cut at its program. Tore at its protective code, its clothes.
In response, its body grew sharp edges to the hands, arms, knees. A leathery covering thickened its face. It cut into the flowers, through the woody stems, chasing the cat, following the code-stained footsteps, seeking the butterfly child.
Cracks and swishes and crunches and the muffled plod of feet on sand and the flurries of flowers thrown into the air and the whip of stalks and chatter of crinkly leaves told the story of their wake, the child, the cat, the Jonah.
They crashed and ran and cut and leapt over tangled roots. A confusion of jagged black flew in Jonah's face, the softer sine wave amongst it the cat, moving as fluid before its feet. Always just ahead was the clear bell-like laughter of a child; of children.
Shadows danced all around. Mirrored scales of colour flashed to the sides, keeping track, pacing the chase. A puffing line of pink and black traced the pursuit from the air.
Ahead the laughter grew louder. One voice joined by another, then another, another, another, another, another, another, another, another, another. The colours flashing to the sides streaked ahead, stretched to neon lines seen even through the dark boiling rose of atomic pattern in front of Jonah's eyes.
Jonah ran thrashing its arms, slicing, chopping, pruning the way.
Until it stopped and there was no resistance and only a dream-like horizon line and Jonah lurched and tumbled and pinwheeled and clumsied to a halt. It was in the desert. Away to the right was the inselberg, hazy. To the other side, the air was rent, twisted into a tunnel, which from the side had no depth. A funnel through cyberspace.
Jonah looked for the cat, and saw it in the arms of a child who wore a blue and white dress, which contrasted with the rainbow butterfly wings growing from its back. The child's wings fluttered lazily. Arraigned in a semi-circle were twenty two other children in similar blocks of colour, their giant butterfly wings reflecting the suns.