Children of the Divide

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  Jian smirked at the subtle sales pitch. Kania was pushing sixty. She’d come up through the ranks of scientists working to smooth out all the wrinkles to colonization before the Ark had made orbital insertion around their new home. She was used to having to fight for man hours, materials, lab time, even electricity for her projects. Nothing went to waste on the old Ark, and everyone had to fight for priority among the scarcity. A lot of the old guard still acted that way. Consequently, they also tended to get what they wanted.

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” one of the other representatives from the surface said, one that Jian didn’t recognize.

  “We’ve taken all necessary precautions.” Kania flipped the footage hovering above the table over to a feed from inside one of the Ark’s clean room labs. “As you can see, the sample is being held under armed guard behind fifteen centimeters of ballistic-rated glass. The joints between the panes have been ultrasonically welded to create a seamless, uninterrupted chamber. It is, for all intents and purposes, impenetrable.”

  Polly strained against its confines. In one moment, it flowed like water into all the edges and corners of the glass, probing for weaknesses. In the next, it reformed in the exact center and sent tiny spikes out into the middle of the glass panes trying to crack it. In the next, it morphed into a hammer and tried to smash it with brute force. Then, it inspected its progress, or lack thereof. Then, the process repeated. Jian cringed as he watched the little creature struggle.

  “Further,” Kania continued, “the base of the enclosure is equipped with a high-capacity discharge microwave unit. Within three milliseconds of detecting a containment breach, everything inside it will be flash heated to eight thousand Kelvin, more than hot enough to not just melt, but break the covalent bonds of any known compound and reduce it to a cloud of charged plasma. Our safety protocols are more than adequate.”

  “I don’t mean to be crass,” continued the rep, “but how the hell do you know what ‘adequate safety protocols’ are when you don’t even know how the thing moves, thinks, or where its battery is? How can you even begin to guess its capabilities?”

  “I have a pretty good idea,” Jian interrupted. “I’m the only person to see them in action. They’re maintenance and repair drones. He’s…” Jian’s tongue caught on the word “harmless” as a flash of Polly running a spike through Madeja’s eye danced across his brain. “…helpful,” he settled on instead.

  “Actually, commander,” Kania interjected before the rep could retort, “I think this would be a good point for you to take over and explain what you saw in the map room in greater detail.” The image flickered from the lab over to the cavernous spherical space he’d nearly lost himself in.

  “I’m not sure what you want me to tell,” Jian said. “I’m not a trained scientist.”

  “Perhaps not, but you are a trained pilot. Your observational skills and attention to detail are probably equal to anyone on my staff.”

  “That’s kind of you to say, director, even if I don’t know how true it is.”

  “Just walk us through the scene. Give us your impressions of what you saw, touched, and so on. I’m transferring control of the video feedback to your plant.”

  An incoming authorization alert flashed in the left side of his field of vision. Jian toggled the icon, and a small virtual control board appeared in its place. He reached out and grabbed the table with his hands as if to steady himself. “OK, here goes. We entered the room thinking it might be a natural cavern that had just been incorporated into the facility, but the perfect spherical shape made it clear it had been excavated intentionally. We soon figured out for what purpose.” He resumed the playback to the point he sat down in the awkward chair. Watching himself go back through the same motion from two days earlier was a little disorienting. “The chair pretty obviously hadn’t been designed with your average human in mind, but it quickly adjusted to fit my body type.”

  “Who, or what, did it seem designed for?” Administrator Agrawal asked.

  “That, I couldn’t say,” Jian answered. “It was just damned uncomfortable until it finished morphing, even through my vac suit.”

  “Would an Atlantian fit in it?” Chao asked.

  “Maybe? It was a little oversized for me, but it didn’t look or feel like any of the Atlantian chairs I’ve seen or sat in before. But, like I said, it quickly accommodated me, and once it did…” Jian let the footage spool out a little more until the room-sized hologram of Gaia erupted from the walls like a fireworks show, complete with “oohs” and “aaahs” from the assembled audience. “…we got quite a show. If you’re having trouble orienting yourself inside this map, realize that it’s being viewed from the perspective of someone sitting at the planet’s core looking out. That’s why everything is mirror-image.” Jian waited a beat until he saw a dawning of recognition on enough of their faces before proceeding. “Once I was settled in, then the really weird shi… stuff started to happen.”

  The image zoomed in on Shambhala, then flipped to an overhead view, just as it had done before. The same inwardly-spiraling symbols appeared, like foreign characters being sucked down a drain.

  “What are those supposed to be?” Agrawal asked.

  “I assume they’re language characters like letters or pictograms, Administrator.”

  “Obviously, but whose characters?”

  “We’ve taken a look at them already,” Devorah injected. “They don’t share any commonalities with any written Atlantian system we’ve studied. And it should go without saying that it’s not based on any known human language system.”

  “Well who does that leave?” Agrawal said.

  “Hell if I know. Please continue, commander.”

  “Thank you. If you’ll notice, it didn’t take long before the program, or whatever is in control over there, realized I was having trouble interpreting the displays and reverted to a, a learning module, or a sort of instruction manual, as far as I can tell.”

  The spirals disappeared, replaced by individual symbols hovering over important buildings and landmarks in and around Shambhala, testing him. Teasing Jian to decipher their meaning.

  “I believe the facility was trying to make itself understood,” Jian said. “If I were to use any word to describe it, I’d call it accommodating. Forming itself to our needs and doing everything it could to be user friendly.”

  “Why the hell would it want to do that?” Agrawal asked. “Why would it want to help aliens exploit it to their own ends?”

  “It may not know we’re aliens,” Kania said quietly.

  “Would you care to expand on that, doctor?” Chao said.

  “Certainly. This facility has been here for a minimum of a quarter million years and is still functioning. It was obviously built with the long haul in mind. A quarter of a million years ago, there were at least three distinct hominid species wandering around the Earth, none of which came even close to sharing a language or sharing a culture. All of us sitting in this room, excuse me, in this room or on the surface, are an average of twenty centimeters taller than our Earthbound ancestors were during the Renaissance. If I were to open the museum’s copy of War and Peace in the original Russian, who among us could read Cyrillic without a translation program? Those examples are over the span of just a few centuries. Now imagine the changes we’ll go through as a technologically advanced race capable of manipulating our own DNA over the course of the next few hundred millennia? Would we recognize ourselves? Would we be able to talk to ourselves? Preparing for deep time means throwing out all of your assumptions about what it means to be human, or whoever they were, in this case.”

  “Philosophical and existential musings aside, that doesn’t really answer the central question,” Agrawal said. “Which is, what is the facility’s purpose? Who built it? Why was it built? And what is it still doing here?” She held out three fingers. “We know of only three sentient species. Ourselves, the Atlantians, and whoever threw Nibiru at Earth. We know humans didn’t build it
. Dr Kania is assuring us that the Atlantians didn’t build it. That only leaves one possibility.” She held out her index finger. “And if it was built by the enemy, then we must assume that their intentions for it were hostile.”

  “We hardly need to assume it was the same civilization,” Kania said. “Consider this. We now have two confirmed examples of Earthlike planets, Earth and Gaia. And on both, a sentient species has developed independently of one another. Moreover, before the end of Earth, we’d found fossilized Martian stromatolites, simple life in the oceans of both Enceladus and Europa, and methane-based, self-replicating molecules hiding inside protocellular membranes on Titan which couldn’t possibly have arisen from any sort of panspermia from Earth or Martian contamination. They weren’t exactly life yet, but probably would have been with another billion years to cook. Here in the Tau Ceti system, we know primitive plant life covers much of the tropical latitudes of Tau Ceti F.”

  “What about Proxima B?” Chao asked. “It’s earthlike.”

  “Yes, but its atmosphere is too thin to keep liquid water from boiling off. It was probably thicker in the past, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find fossilized early life around its equatorial terminus, but we’ve been a little too busy to go poking around there for the last couple centuries.”

  “Your point, doctor?” Agrawal said.

  “My point is we’ve found life on multiple planets and moons in the only two solar systems we’ve explored first hand. And intelligent life on both of the worlds with liquid water, thick atmospheres, and abundant solar energy powering their ecosystems. That’s a statistically significant finding. Extrapolate it out to the rest of the galaxy and that means millions if not billions of civilizations exist, right now. There is no reason to assume this facility had to be built by one of the three we have direct evidence of.”

  “I hate to quibble, but there’s a very good reason to assume it was built by the race that destroyed our homeworld. Because if we don’t, and they find out we’re here, we lose Gaia too.”

  “We’ve been closely monitoring the facility for transmissions. No radio or laser emissions. It’s dark.”

  “It’s dark to methods of communication we recognize or understand,” Agrawal said. “We’re talking about a race that manipulates black holes. Who knows what other technology they possess? Did I not read something recently about the crew experimenting with quantum entanglement communications for the Alcubierre project?”

  “We’re in the early stages,” Kania said. “And although it’s not my department, I can tell you that the entanglement is very, very sensitive. We’ve managed to keep paired particles entangled for a matter of minutes before the connection breaks. It’s incredibly tenuous, and subject to the smallest of outside influences. A stray cosmic ray, or even a neutrino can render the connection moot. Keeping an entanglement intact over the course of days or months is daunting enough. But hundreds of millennia?” Kania shook her head. “I can’t imagine any level of technology being able to automate the process on those kinds of timescales.”

  “But then why the hell did they put it there?” Agrawal turned to face Jian. “It has a map of the whole planet laid out in there. What do you suppose that’s all about?”

  “I’d rather not speculate,” Jian said, feeling the pressure.

  “Indulge us, commander.”

  Jian shrugged. “Well, they seemed to have detailed and current maps about the Atlantian villages, and especially Shambhala. I’d guess they have some sort of sensor network, either in heavily-stealthed orbital platforms we haven’t detected, or more likely buried dirtside somewhere out of sight. It’s pretty clear it’s an observation post of some kind.”

  “That proves it, then. Someone is spying on us,” Agrawal said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say ‘spying,’ exactly. Studying, maybe. We observed the Atlantians for years before making contact, after all. And our intentions weren’t hostile. Besides, why would they leave the door unlocked? If they’ve been watching us so closely, they know we came from the surface. Why let us in at all? And why try to teach me to use all the buttons and levers?”

  “Now it’s my turn to speculate?” Agrawal said. “Because it’s a honeypot trap, tempting us with a few trinkets of technology, but in the end it’s just a way to study us even more closely. Assess our cognitive abilities based on how fast we learn. Determine how much of a threat we are. Hell, for all we know, there are facilities like this sprinkled around inhabited planets throughout the galaxy, waiting for eons until some pond scum finally pulls itself up by its bootstraps and develops a space program. Then whoever left it here knows a new light is shining in the cosmos and it’s time to throw a black hole in their general direction. Problem solved.”

  Agrawal stood up from her chair. “It’s my speculation that this facility is the Nibiru race’s version of the Early Warning network we’re constructing on Varr as we speak. A means of identifying potential threats so they can take action. And we’ve just let them know they need to come back to finish the job. Our first priority should be destroying the facility as soon as possible before it communicates any more intel on us.”

  Devorah perked up “And how do you propose we do that, nuke it? The Atlantians will never agree to it. It took the better part of eighteen months to convince them to let us gently mine the surface for Helium-3.”

  “Sometimes it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.”

  “Didn’t you just say, ‘We would not presume to take unilateral action’?” Jian said with a sharpened tongue.

  “I think what we’ve heard here changes the equation a bit, don’t you?”

  “Are you sure your judgment isn’t being clouded by the fact your city was just hit by a terrorist attack, Administrator?”

  “Are you sure yours isn’t from losing your shuttle, commander?”

  The muscles in Jian’s neck stiffened at the barb, but he saw the trap his father had warned him about. “Touche.”

  “We’re getting off topic.” Chao’s voice was stern. “We’re not here to discuss a course of action, not until we’ve collected all the facts of the matter. Now, Dr Kania, how likely do you think Administrator Agrawal’s scenario is”

  Kania shifted uncomfortably against the seat restraints at her shoulders. “It is… possible. The discovery of the Atlantians certainly put a stake through the heart of the old Fermi Paradox, but it left another giant question in its wake. If intelligent life in the cosmos is so common, which we can now say with some degree of confidence that it must be, then why hadn’t we heard from anyone or seen any evidence of it?

  “Before Gaia, there was a theory called the ‘Great Filter,’ which posited that somewhere along the development of life, a huge barrier to advancement stopped the vast majority of species from advancing to the point of interstellar travel or communications. Some thought this filter was evolutionary, that life itself was very difficult to get going. Or that the transition from simple, single-cellular life to complex multicellular forms was the stumbling block, or moving from complex life to true intelligence. With two examples of species that have passed these barriers less than thirteen light years apart, we know none of them could be this hypothetical filter, and that it must lay ahead of us in our development.”

  She looked around. The room’s occupants sat in rapt attention.

  “Which is where we get to the scary bit. Some suggested that the filter wasn’t any natural process or limitation. Some thought that most technologically advanced civilizations reached a point where they could no longer control or contain the power of their tech and invariably destroyed themselves as we nearly did half a dozen times in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But others proposed a super-predator civilization that hunted down and destroyed emerging civilizations as soon as it became aware of their existence. The timing of the attack on Earth would… lend credibility to this hypothesis.”

  “How so?” Chao asked.

  “Well, think about it. The Indust
rial Revolution really ramped up in the early eighteen hundreds. That was probably the first time a distant observer could have figured out we had reached a new level of development, based on the sudden and drastic changes to our atmosphere. A hundred years later and we’re sending out our first artificial radio signals. A few decades after that and we’re detonating nuclear bombs. Then we’re landing on the moon, developing super computers, mapping the human genome, all in rapid succession. Our pace of technological progression became exponential. We only had a brief slowdown in the middle of the twenty-first century while we dealt with converting our global infrastructure away from fossil fuels. It’s conceivable this super-predator predicted we were only a few centuries, perhaps even a few decades away from becoming a significant threat, and took action as soon as we turned the corner. It may be a pattern it’s seen repeated dozen, hundreds, or thousands of times.”

  “That sounds reasonable,” Chao said, “But it brings up two questions, at least for me. One, Nibiru came in fast for a celestial object, but not nearly so fast as one would expect an advanced race to be able to travel. It was barely doing one and a half percent light speed. The Ark easily outran it. If this was a galaxy-spanning super-predator, why not react to the threat more quickly?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps it was a limitation on the black hole technology itself. It was a very massive object, after all, nearly two thirds of a solar mass. Getting anything of that size up to even a single percent of lightspeed is a massive expenditure of energy that would require a Kardashev Type II civilization at the least.”

  “But doesn’t that also mean they must have been right in our back yard, astronomically speaking?” Jian said. “Even assuming they fired Nibiru off right at the first sign of industrialization as you suggested, that’s four centuries from launch to impact. At one and a half percent lightspeed, that puts the point of origin within six lightyears of Earth. How the hell could we not have seen them? There’s almost nothing inside of six lightyears of Earth, certainly not any planets with Type II civilizations just lying about.”