Originator

by Joel Shepherd

  “Nothing I can talk about.” Sandy pushed back in her chair with exasperation. Hando looked at her with concern, worried she pushed too hard. Ibrahim just watched. “But I did come here with one thing I have been authorised to speak of.”

  “One thing,” Sandy repeated. “Better than nothing, I suppose.”

  Cai looked down in his cup. A handsome face, like all GIs were handsome. Wide features, firm. Young but not youthful. Perhaps natural mid-twenties . . . like herself. Sandy wondered how the Talee had chosen this form as their template. No shortage of human bodies floating in space during the war, well preserved. Exact features could be randomised, so he wouldn’t look exactly like someone deceased—and attract attention that way—in human company.

  “The Talee,” said Cai, with calm deliberation, “are a post-extinction-level-event species. Self-inflicted.”

  Boom. And just sat there and watched the humans all stare at each other. All except Ari, who muttered with possibly inappropriate triumph, “I fucking knew it!” And stared at Cai. “About three thousand years ago, right?”

  Cai nodded.

  “Big” didn’t describe the revelation. Humanity had waited centuries for more news on the Talee. Possibly someone already knew, possibly League already had figured it out, their space directly adjoining the Talee’s as Federation space did not. But this was the first time the Talee, even through a synthetic representative, had chosen to reveal something this large about themselves. Talee motivations had eluded scientists, strategists, sentiencemodellers, and thinkers for generations. Now, finally, came the tantalising sense of long-awaited answers slipping into place.

  “So you understand why Cresta might cause us some alarm,” said Cai.

  “How much alarm?” Ibrahim asked.

  Cai fixed him with a sombre, lidded stare. “It changes things. Not dramatically, and not quickly, as nothing changes quickly with the Talee. But you might notice, I am here. Revealing things.”

  Ibrahim nodded, as deadly serious and intent as Sandy had ever seen him. “Please, continue.”

  Cai took a breath. “It took Talee civilisation perhaps a thousand years to recover. Most of the population was dead, on most worlds. On the homeworld, none remained. Only on colonies did some survive. It was clear to surviving generations what had happened; historical memory shifts and changes but cannot be entirely erased when the ruins of old civilisation remain all around. All of the new Talee race were all too clear on what had come before and been destroyed.

  “Eventually those survivors built up their civilisation enough to reclaim their technological heritage, and then to reclaim the stars. They rejoined with other surviving Talee civilisations, on other colonies, and those moments are amongst the most powerful and emotive of all Talee history. If you can imagine.”

  “I’m not certain that we can,” Ibrahim said quietly.

  “The homeworld was resettled,” Cai continued. “Biological engineering began to try to put things back as they were, to restore ecosystems still unre-covered after all those centuries. That work continues today. Good progress has been made, but there remains more to be done. Talee have a word for the extinction-level-event, perhaps the best and most obvious translation is “catastrophe.” Catastrophe studies are prominent in Talee centres of learning. What you would call historians pore over it. Scientists examine it. Geologists look for traces in rocks, and biologists in water and plant matter. Conversation cannot avoid it. It is everywhere.”

  He looked around at them all. The humans stared back. Indeed, at times in the recent past, Sandy had wondered just how human she actually was, given that the origins of the technology that made her were in fact Talee. But now, confronted with this mesmerising horror, these multiple lost millennia, these untold billions of lives erased, an entire species’ future and present abruptly shattered and nearly lost forever . . . she had never felt more human than now. Thank God this was not her race being described. Thank God. And with that thought came fear.

  “I say this to make you understand—the Talee are concerned, now more than ever. This concern does not come from greed, or from hostile design, or from the desire to interfere for other selfish reasons in human concerns. The concern comes because we fear we may be seeing the fate that once befell ourselves now befalling you.”

  Abruptly, Ari leant forward on the table. “Can you prove that it was an uplink-related sociological dysfunction that caused your catastrophe?”

  “No,” said Cai. “But it fits the time frame well. And let us say, multiple circumstantial evidence, which I am not at liberty to share, further supports that conclusion.”

  “Talee psychology is different,” Ari pressed. “If some of the theories are true, very different. Can you be sure that mass psychological dysfunction will result from the same technological phenomenon, whether the user of the uplinks is Talee or human?”

  Here, Sandy expected evasion. Cai’s answer stunned her. “Current Talee thinking suspects humans are less susceptible,” he said. “But I might add my own observation—Talee can be . . . how should I say? Pessimistic, about themselves, where the catastrophe is concerned. Self-confidence is lacking, and judgement may be coloured. But yes, the patterns currently observed in the League are broadly similar with what Talee researchers might expect in a Talee population . . . with obvious adjustments to baseline psychological norms.”

  “So you’re saying that while our species are not psychologically alike, our level of deviance produced by this phenomenon is approximate?”

  Cai nodded. “I believe so, yes.”

  “Right,” said Ari with hard determination. “Can you stop it?” Cai gazed at him. “In your own species, at least?”

  Here again, the evasion. “I cannot say.”

  “Cannot? You mean you aren’t allowed to, or you don’t know?”

  “Either,” said Cai.

  “That’s not good enough,” said Sandy. “You tell your friends that we’ll put up with a lot from them, partly because we have no technological choice, and partly because we’re genuinely convinced that Talee intentions are not hostile. But if the Talee can see what’s unfolding in the League right now, and have even the smallest insights to share about how it might be possible to address it, on a technological level, then they have an absolute moral obligation to share!”

  “Cassandra,” said Hando with a faint wince, “please, this is an alien species, morality as we understand it is a very human concept. . . .”

  “Talee have morality,” Cai interrupted. “Different, as you say, Assistant Director, but the concept is as fundamental to Talee as to humans. But considerations are different. Reasoning is different. Value structures, prioritisation . . . please, you must understand how difficult this is for Talee to judge. . . .”

  “Difficult for Talee?” Sandy replied. Not raising her voice, not yet. “We might be about to lose a good portion of our species. Or worse. And Talee morality says it’s difficult for Talee?”

  Cai stared at the tabletop, lips pressed thin. “Cassandra,” he said then, “this is a dangerous simplification, but I feel that I must. Talee are very hard to convince, on this matter, that they will not simply make things worse.”

  “Worse?” asked Sandy. “How could it be worse?”

  “Cassandra, when the Talee began to resettle their devastated homeworld, their researchers and scientists began to notice odd little things. Little discoveries, signs of civilisation in a different style or with the wrong timestamp. For a long time these oddities were overlooked. Understand that the catastrophe is the overarching mythology, the legend around which all Talee thought and culture is founded. To challenge the basic presumptions of that myth can be very hard, for even the most advanced mind.

  “But finally the patterns of discovery became too compelling, and researchers from various fields found too many commonalities in their own discoveries for those patterns to be ignored. They began to get together and compare notes, secretly at first, but then with greater and greater c
onfidence. Finally they presented their findings, only when they were certain that the truth could not be refuted.

  “What they found was an earlier, previous civilisation, hidden beneath the ruins of the primary, more recent ruins. A Talee civilisation, much like the one they were supposed to be studying, but different in many ways. A lower threshold of technology, belonging to an earlier era. And evidence of sudden, violent, simultaneous, thermonuclear destruction. Perhaps three thousand years before the previous near-extinction event.”

  This time no one at the table even breathed. It was too awful to contemplate. And far too frightening.

  “This previous Talee civilisation must have been aware of their catastrophe, just as this present Talee civilisation is aware of their own,” Cai continued in quiet, sombre tones. “But somehow, in the second catastrophe, with the complete elimination of life on the homeworld, all memory of the first event was lost. Talee returned to their homeworld more than a thousand years later, thinking that this was a once-and-once-only event and never again could anything like it occur. But painstaking investigation finally revealed to us the truth.

  “Talee destroyed themselves twice. The second time, in full knowledge of what had happened the first time, and all in the psychological and cultural aftermath of that first event, and all the ‘never agains’ that accompanied it. Now you know why the Talee will not talk to you, nor meet with you, nor trade with you. Talee live in constant fear of disturbance, of disequilibrium, of politics, of even emotion itself. They fear themselves, they fear others, and they fear greatly the consequences of every single action they take. They deliberate endlessly, and for the most part, do nothing. They are a people without faith in themselves, and they cannot believe that any contribution they could make to your current circumstances could possibly be an improvement. Humanity, in this current matter, is on its own.”

  “We think it’s here,” said Fleet Captain Reichardt, pointing to a spot on the holographic star chart above the table. “The Talee homeworld, C-492 on our charts. No doubt the Talee call it something more interesting.”

  The chart showed League space, a faint shade of red, and Federation space in blue. And here, several hundred light-years beyond the League’s farthest reach, a collection of stars that might stretch, if these hypothetical models were real, as far as Federation and League combined.

  “This is as far as you think Talee outposts reached in the second age?” Ari asked, pointing to the farthest expanse of that colourless territory, hovering between the projection paddles.

  “It’s all guesswork,” said Reichardt. “But given what we’re pretty sure the Talee ships can do, which is in turn based on some pretty nifty physics equations that remain purely theoretical for us but appears to be completely practical with them . . . yes. This is as far as we think they got. And now, thanks to our friend Cai, we have a timeline, and the timeline appears to match.”

  Now they were in Operations, the other most secure room in FSA HQ. About them was a semicircle of seats for interactive presentations, big screens on the wall behind, and a projection table here, in the middle. All the semicircle chairs were empty, but the seats around the projection table were full—the same people as previously but now including Reichardt and also Chief Boyle, Head of League Affairs. Still no Chief Shin. It surprised Sandy a little; Ibrahim was usually more consensual in interdepartmental matters. Matters with FedInt must be bad then.

  Reichardt was the FSA’s favourite Fleet Captain, and Sandy’s in particular. He was a Federation loyalist and a pragmatist, meaning that he’d repeatedly demonstrated a commitment to the idea of the Federation, with all its constituent parts equal, and not just some parts above the others. Given recent turmoil in Federal governance, Fleet command had found itself without Grand Council guidance, thanks to the counter-coup the FSA had pulled to dispose of the previous Council by force, after that Council had used Operation Shield to frame-and-remove the FSA’s newly acquired teeth to solve a dispute over the Federal Constitution.

  Operation Shield had been implemented with Fleet help, hardly the first time Fleet had been found meddling in Federation governance to achieve outcomes some Fleet Captains desired. Post-coup, the FSA had gone after those captains hard. Several had surrendered and were in custody. One had suicided. Others remained in service, Fleet command refusing further action, but with trials ongoing. And a few more, most embarrassingly for Fleet Command, were OWO—Operating Without Orders—with ships and crew.

  With chain of command inoperable, Reichardt had moved his carrier Mekong to immediate Callayan defensive orbit and declared himself at the FSA’s disposal until a more traditional chain of command had been reestablished. Two more carrier captains had followed suit, and a number of smaller vessels. The Federation media were calling it The Emergency, the temporary suspension of democracy in the Federation, until Ranaprasana’s Grand Committee found a mutually agreeable way to put it all back together again. Reichardt was now called by many the FSA’s pet carrier captain. Sandy knew that the opposite was true, that far from being anyone’s pet, Reichardt was probably the most free-thinking senior captain in the Fleet. Naturally Fleet had therefore not seen fit to promote him to Admiral, despite his obvious qualifications. The FSA had needed a means of enforcement against powerful Fleet Captains in their even more powerful warships, and Reichardt had volunteered himself and his carrier. He didn’t care what it cost him, he was in Fleet to do the things that needed to be done, and took all personal satisfaction from that. Unsurprisingly he and Ibrahim, while not always in agreement, got along perfectly.

  “Self-inflicted E.L.E. has been a theory in Fleet for a while,” Reichardt continued, “but I don’t think it’s ever been a favourite theory. Having it confirmed changes the picture quite a bit. Certainly it explains Pantala, the old Talee stations there, where League picked up their biological replication technology. Small outposts like that could have abandoned as soon as it started and headed home. Records that the outpost ever existed were then probably lost.”

  “And League has found several more of these outposts,” Ibrahim added. Ari gave Ibrahim a particularly long and hard look. He’d phrased it as a statement, not a question. So he’d known for a while, probably in that secret file every new FSA Director got immediately upon appointment and was then forbidden to share with anyone else.

  “Yes,” said Reichardt. Fleet, of course, was an information world unto itself. Like a secret society, sharing with almost no one. All that time out in the cold convinced them that no one else understood these matters like Fleet did or could be trusted with the knowledge. True or not, the belief had spawned a dangerous elitism. “We think at least two. Though we’re unclear on what if any technology was harvested at these points. Pantala appears to be the primary source of GI technology.”

  “We’re looking at a very wide area of space,” said Hando, gazing at the projection. Holographic light gleamed off his bald head. “Talee were probably even more advanced at their second E.L.E. than we are now. So they’d have mining colonies, exploration colonies, research outposts. They’d be scattered all over, even more than we are. Yet still the E.L.E. managed to kill most of them, nearly all of them.”

  Ibrahim frowned. “Explain.”

  “No no no, he’s right,” said Ari with more typically Ari-animation. “There are projection studies done to simulate a mass-extinction war between League and Federation, a mass V-strike conflict. It’s pretty horrific stuff, but though most of the major worlds get wiped out, there’s always small colonies and outposts surviving, too far off the beaten track for anyone to bother destroying.

  “Then you run the simulation forward . . . you think about it, it only takes a few of those survivors to rebuild a civilisation. They have the technology, or at least the records to rebuild most of the tech that’s been lost, they live in space so they wait until the worlds that have been hit recover habitable climates . . . some of them never do, but most are okay within a few decades, maybe longer, the bigger
ones anyway. Civilisation’s massively reduced in scale, but the technological level remains the same . . . all that remains is to build scale back up; reproduction technology makes that pretty easy, cloning, birth tanks, no need to wait for women to get pregnant, you could double a population in size every few years if you wanted. Do that often enough, it doesn’t take too long in the scheme of things to turn a few hundred thousand people into tens of millions, and tens of millions into hundreds and even billions.”

  “Recent experience tells me,” Sandy said drily, “that childcare for all those kids would be more of a problem than you make out.”

  Laughter around the table. It was more of a humorous reaction than Sandy had expected or intended. Confronting this kind of problem for real, and not merely in the hypothetical, was stressful. People needed to laugh.

  “Sure,” said Ari, smile fading. “Great big mess, of course. But the point is that recovery happens quite fast, all things considered. But Cai said the Talee took a thousand years.” He looked around the table, watching that sink in.

  “So they lost all their technology,” Ibrahim murmured. “That implies the destruction was systemic.”

  “Worse than systemic,” Ari said. “Genocidal.” Deathly silence. The air felt very cold, all previous humour forgotten. “They didn’t just try to win a conflict. They . . . whatever constitutes a ‘side’ for the Talee, racial, religious, ideological, I doubt Cai will enlighten us . . . they tried to exterminate each other, right down to the last individual, to the last functioning microcircuit. Every outpost, every mining colony.”

  “Technology survived on Pantala,” Hando countered. “For League to find.”

  “Pantala shouldn’t have habitable atmosphere anyway,” Ari replied, “there’s so little vegetation. Federation’s never had a chance to study it, what if it used to be more habitable? What if the Talee never left? What if it got hit, maybe not a V-strike, maybe biological, chemical . . . who knows what other advanced nastiness the Talee have? All traces of life gone, including much of the native stuff, but the old habitations remain?”