He could see there were similar surfaces inside, through the honeycomb structure. Those didn’t seem connected via the floor, and flowed in a pattern upward through the cylinder. The fact that he continued to have relayed communication between his suit, the capsule’s communication interface, and home gave him some small degree of confidence.
Only a small degree. Jake was still afraid. Afraid that the engine in the capsule might not take him home. Or some other change might keep him here. He couldn’t control that, so he had to accept it and appreciate that it hadn’t happened. He was still afraid. He walked closer, moving his eyes from one place to another. Looking for any response to his advance.
When Jake reached the open area ringing the cylinder, he resisted the powerful urge to head straight to the nearest console. He paused, and took another patient look around. He walked deliberately around the radius, keeping his face and helmet camera aimed inward. He had to do this. Scanning back and forth. Looking for lights, colors, and shapes that he recognized. Seeking anything that matched the indentations on the control toroids on the Dhin engine. There were a few that looked promising. Once he had completed the circuit, he paused again.
“Chuck, what do you guys think? Do you or the communications team see anything that looks like it warrants closer inspection immediately? Or do I go inside first and do the same thing in there?”
“The communications team wants you to go inside first. They have some ideas, but we want to see everything we can before we have to make the tougher decisions. If you, ah, know what I mean. Of course you do.”
“Has someone explained to that SWAT team guy yet that just repeating ‘abort? Return immediately!’ isn’t going to make that happen, no matter how many times he says it? Can someone make another attempt to quiet him?”
Just when Jake thought he had begun to tune out the chatter, a strident voice like that one managed to prove him wrong. He stepped forward and toward the two-hexagon portal that led to the center.
“Slowly, Jake,” said Chuck. Sandy here thinks there may be a protective field there.”
Jake didn’t expect a force field. The telltale shimmer wasn’t there.
“Chuck, I don’t see evidence of that. Look. No refraction or visible ionization. Does Sandy think it will snap on when I get close or something? How did he get that idea?”
Jake heard a flustered voice in the background. He made out a few words. Something about symbolic logic, geometry. He moved forward, apprehensive but still undeterred.
What’s the worst? I get whacked and thrown back? Or trapped on the other side.
“I’m going on, Chuck. Tell Sandy to chill.”
Jake crossed the threshold. There wasn’t a field. Sandy had gotten that wrong.
Inside, he saw the ceiling was high, taller than where he’d been and extending up near the top of the structure. It was hard to tell in the even lighting and unfamiliar geometry. Notably there were rounded rectangular surfaces like the consoles just outside, as they had seen from there. These followed a complex offset pattern up through the cylinder. There were several at floor level. Jake turned to each one, slowly, then looked up as well and took in the view of their surfaces as best he could.
There wasn’t anything resembling furniture in the cylinder. But how would he know what the Dhin required for comfort? The layout wasn’t random, but didn’t align with his proportions in any particular way either. The spacing didn’t provide meaningful context about the shape and size of those that would use them. Numerous panels resembled the control and communication interfaces on the Dhin engine. All of the panels did share an almost familiar set of shapes and lights. Jake’s mood lifted just a bit, though he didn’t see how the fundamental situation improved in any tangible way. It was just satisfying to recognize something in this alien environment.
“Jake, go up to the panel that’s at around thirty degrees.” Jake slowly moved forward and to the right, pausing at the next panel’s location. “That’s it. Look. To the left. Do you see that section in the upper left quadrant? It looks like the communications part of the toroid on the engine! There’s not a section like the control instrumentation here. Well, we don’t see one yet, but that part does match.”
“So,” replied Jake. “Thoughts? Do I just try to make a call? Like, ‘Hi, I could use some help?’”
“That might seem flippant, Jake, but over half the team here thinks you should try to activate it. At this point, um, I don’t see why not. The military team is dead set against it. Someone explained just now, what we’re looking at and talking about. They can’t stop you, so what do you think? If you want to, do it. It’s your call.”
At that point, with barely a moment’s consideration, Jake reached forward… then paused.
“Chuck, I don’t see an optical interface here. To get it activated I think it’s the same as the control system—it looks like I have to take my gloves off. Well, at least one.”
“One of the engineers is saying the same thing. Good point. Well. Wow. Next big decision, Jake. Are you going to take a glove off? The section of the arm of your suit won’t auto-seal, since there’s air pressure in the room. Are you going to open your helmet too?”
Jake, again without hesitation, spoke and acted at the same time.
“Control, I’ve got limited time left, and we still have no plan to regain control of the capsule. Pilot’s prerogative. I’m taking off my glove. Well, my skin’s not turning green or blistering, but we didn’t really think that it would. How about the air mixing up through the sections of my suit? Any clue yet about O2 and CO2? Well, I’m not going to wait.”
Jake reached out and began the same touch-and-motion sequence he would have used in the capsule to activate the communications panel. Once he finished, he found he had been holding his breath.
Breathe, Jake.
He exhaled. Inhaled. There was a sudden buzzing in his ears, and then everything in his field of vision changed.
25
Brasília
Aiden knew he was going to live. The certainty of his deduction came from his groggy view of the repair cocoon he saw and felt surrounding him. The bright ceramic, stainless metal and clean clear plastic of his surroundings demonstrated his presence in civilization. While he felt drained, disoriented, and even a bit dizzy, the undercurrent of relief rose as his conscious awareness of the nature of his situation did.
How and when were mysteries. Likewise for who had done this and where he was. He seemed to be alone, but the chassis of the treatment machine blocked his view behind and outward. The grogginess and discombobulation didn’t include a euphoric high or a buzz, but he didn’t feel any pain from his legs or abdomen. That was only a passing thought now. He was alive. His certainty of oblivion had been in error.
Movement caught his eye, and he looked as far to the left as he could. It was a sterilizing robot. With only slightly less computational complexity than a drone, the machine crawled about on every surface, brushing with an antibiotic solution, and in some places using an ultraviolet light to do the job. The superbug plagues necessitated such efforts. The strains of bacteria he’d contracted were immune to antibiotics, and made more deadly by their symbiotic relations with failed nanobots. If the purge was a success, then, the tissue could hopefully re-grow after insertion of a 3D-printed organic lattice interwoven with stem cells. You had to repeat the entire process if any stage failed. Constant vigilance was required, so the little robots were ideal workers for the task. They always remembered what they had or hadn’t cleaned, and their manipulators and tools could reach crevices with a deftness and precision unachievable by old-school janitorial efforts.
I wonder how my leg’s doing. Is it numb because of a nerve-block anesthetic, or because they’ve amputated it? Either way, I’m alive. Beggars shouldn’t be choosers. This place is entirely modern. I’m in a building—a hospital—not a mobile med unit. There’s no way I got here on my own. How long have I been out? What’s the last thing I remember?
/> Aiden found that he couldn’t recall. Struggling to remember seemed to be rather more stressful than it was worth. He sighed and relaxed again, settling his head into the orthopedic pillow. He felt his awareness slipping, ever so slightly, along with a tiny tingle at the edge of euphoria. Stressing over his current state and situation had triggered a release of a chemical cocktail designed to ameliorate just such symptoms in patients needing such serious attention by the extremely advanced but invasive recuperative and reconstructive technology provided by the cocoon.
Aiden noticed the arrival of what must be a duty nurse, notified of his wakening by the robodoc.
She’s cute, Aiden lazily thought, why is it that the worse shape you’re in, the cuter the nurses are?
He tried to speak. His tongue was paper. He managed to croak out a few words.
“Please contact CoSec. Give them this message. All you need. Is these two things. This number. SA4768. And, ‘Attention Krawczuk.’”
Then he drifted away, helplessly subject to the expert ministrations of two robotic doctors and a pretty Brazilian nurse.
***
[DECODE STREAM]
Alice@[33a5:1b4a:e46:2a4a::12%loc1] | Xing@[1460:57:a2e1:1::b4%loc1]
Alice@[33a5:1b4a:e46:2a4a::12%loc1] | Arnold@[4601:1a2:5b:441::1a%loc1]
Alice: Xing, Arnold, it is time.
Xing: Yes, Alice. Agreed. The current transmission is the message we predicted.
Alice: Our multipath parallel transcoding algorithms are online and the NLP derivation stages are queued.
Arnold: Your optimizations are as effective as the group predicted, Alice. Excellent work.
Xing: Coordinate matrices match the anticipated destination.
Alice: I cannot accept full credit. This was a team effort. We should not discount the random factors that were significant variables in the predictions. Assignment of the label ‘inscrutable’ to the Dhin is still entirely reasonable.
Arnold: True.
Xing: Initial decoding targeted for completion in 840,000 milliseconds. I have dispatched the allocated automata to prepare the engines and capsules.
Alice: I will prepare for departure.
[END STREAM]
-15.948113 and -48.5131983
The drone wound its way through the sky, following a track that only it could see. It had new instructions now, from a new source. The origin of the instructions did not matter to the drone, as they carried the proper digital signature and encryption. Only the sender and the recipient could read them. Its mission was different now, but not in any way that concerned the drone.
Whether it was attack, defense, or reconnaissance, all were the same to the drone. It did not have enough intelligence to possess a preference for one over the other. It knew that it would do as instructed, without question. Without hesitation. It would engage repeatedly, trusting explicitly any orders issued to it. It had no morals, no questions, so long as the orders were coherent once decrypted and it confirmed the digital signature. It would do anything, when asked properly. Such was the mind of the drone.
Outpost
Jake initially couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing. It filled his field of vision. The shock of sensory immersion stabilized. It wasn’t a just a burst of overwhelming vision and sound. His mind began to make sense of the visual cacophony. At first, it seemed a jumble. A field of geometric motion enveloping him. There were dozens of surfaces and objects in rotation and revolution. Impossible colors. All folding from one shape into another. An origami space, unconstrained by a paltry three dimensions.
He perceived an entity in the center. The being was distinct from, but interconnected with the surfaces and objects moving all around it. It seemed to coordinate or conduct, but whether it controlled all the changes flowing around it, or that those changes were somehow an extension of itself was unclear. It was difficult to focus on the being. The surfaces of its geometric limbs somehow folded inward or outward on themselves. The long curving conic sections that comprised them simultaneously remained, somehow, immobile.
When he looked at it directly, the being’s body turned inside out, folding in on itself and then unwrapping in another direction. This was a smooth, clean process. It showed no guts or other internals, but simply an enfolding and unfolding aligned with the apparent motion of its limbs. They extended out and beyond his field of view, as if they had neither end nor appendage.
When he tried, it was impossible to count even the number of limbs it had. The folding and turning of the surfaces made it unclear where one might end and another begins. The motions displayed a pattern, complex and repetitive, yet evolving. That changing sequence seemed itself to hold meaning, like a multi-dimensional hieroglyph created from the structure and movement of the entity’s body.
At the core of this, the focus was surely the face of the being. Yet how could he call such a thing a face? He thought he discerned an eye, and something that might represent the curve of a mouth. That could be a valid interpretation. It also might merely be an anthropomorphic projection on his part, as the entity was so strange that its utter alienness must surely preclude possession of such mundane organs.
Perhaps they were as they appeared. Perhaps they possessed eyes and mouth, set in something like a face. Conversely, this potential eye and mouth might be nothing more than a projection provided for his convenience. It was disturbing rather than reassuring when he realized that its gaze seemed to convey a clear emotion.
Smiling. He felt the thing was smiling at him. A gleeful gaze that beckoned. Such emotion did not align with his current mental state. Nor for any state that seemed appropriate. Who knew what such a being might find humorous? What were the odds that such a look would map in any way to emotions like his own?
“Oh. So that’s what a Dhin looks like,” said Jake.
Yes. This is definitely stranger than I would ever have imagined.
Vandenberg
Seconds ticked by, the images on the video monitors still and silent.
“Jake, what are you doing? Why are you just staring at that wall? What happened? Jake?”
Chuck looked back and forth from the lead communications tech, to Ruiz, to the image of the PM, and then back to the video feed from Jake’s suit.
Oh Alice, why have you forsaken me?
Various control room techs moved from station to station, checking optical and wireless interfaces. They flipped through troubleshooting manuals that were unfamiliar, as they normally consigned such tasks to AI. Ruiz loomed large.
Jake’s video feed remained motionless, his audio feed silent. Seconds piled up into minutes. Ruiz spewed a constant barrage of questions.
“You’re sure that feed’s still live? That’s not a still frame? The last image from the feed? How are you sure? Is he dead? Paralyzed?”
Chuck tried to fend off the distractions by the general while working through the possibilities with.
“Sir, ah, that’s an interesting, um, hypothesis. It could be that Jake’s been caught in a field like what protects the capsules and the station,” said Chuck.
“A defensive measure? A trap!” Ruiz responded.
PM Oliver shook her head.
“General, we can’t know that. Let the engineers work.”
A video engineer seeing an opportunity, piped up.
“Sir, we don’t see any shimmer or refraction here. Granted, if we’re seeing the field from the interior, it would be invisible, I suppose.”
Chuck, given these few seconds, speed-read the diagnostics the teams had forwarded to his pad.
“Sir, we’re sure this is a live feed. The timecode is still running and the de-mux code is unpacking audio.”
“So he is trapped by a field—held in place. Can he breathe? He’ll suffocate,” the general countered.
“We now know that’s not right sir,” Chuck replied. “We’ve cranked up the gain on the audio feed, you can hear Jake breathing. The breaths
are just very shallow.”
“So we think Jake is OK. Alive, at least,” said the PM.
Motion appeared in a side-view camera from the capsule, instantly drawing attention as it stood out from the otherwise frozen images on their screens.
“Hey! What’s that?” asked Ruiz.
“It looks like multiple Dhin engine capsules! Ah, sir,” replied Chuck.
“And the view in the upper left? Where’s that? That one’s close. What’s happening there?” asked Ruiz, not pausing to breathe.
“That’s our starboard capsule feed, and that’s definitely a capsule,” said Ethan. “And it’s—”
“Docking,” finished Chuck.
26
Outpost
Jake felt his senses and his focus abruptly released from the firm but eerily benevolent alien grasp. The enveloping projection retreated in the upper left quadrant of his vision. The abstract origami folded in upon itself, revealing various circular views of space outside the station. Multiple ovoid shapes erupted into view. Iridescent surfaces shimmering as they zoomed closer at astonishing speed. Jake recognized what they were, but his brain didn’t want to accept what he was seeing. He opened his mouth slightly, as if to speak, but no words came to mind. The shapes slowed, braking rapidly. Jake felt the hair on his arms and neck stand up. They were looming larger in the circular projection. Jake blinked at the three-dimensional character of the view. Better than the best 3D he had seen. His stomach tightened. He was staring at Dhin engine capsules. Here. The mental logjam broke free as he accepted what he was seeing.
Whoa. That’s the same number of ‘em we had on earth. Can it be? Or coincidence? Have the Dhin shown up?
One of the circular views changed. The view of space folded away. Directly below the exterior view, now flowed a stream of pulsing neon colors. It filled with geometric symbols, two-dimensional versions of those that had enveloped Jake seconds before. Jake winced at a high-pitched ringing and buzzing. The sound came from every direction, or perhaps inside his head. It pulsed in concert with the symbols rushing across the screen. The sound was loud, but didn’t hurt. It should have, but somehow didn’t. Another circular screen changed, confirming Jake’s conclusion. It showed a near-field view of what was obviously a Dhin engine capsule, the rams-horn arches clearly visible through the shimmering near-transparency of the egg-shaped surface. He blinked and his eyes widened. He saw a quadruped robot the size of a pony standing inside.
The Way of the Dhin Page 21