The Concordia Deception

by J. J. Green

  “Perhaps the Natural Movement paid for their silence,” said Strongquist. “Successful candidates were offered millions to sell their places, according to the records.”

  “I know, but that was strictly prohibited. The candidates had been selected with extreme care. Their genetic codes were verified before they were allowed aboard and no twins were allowed. You couldn’t get tighter security.”

  “I don’t have the answer to that,” said Strongquist. “What we do know without any doubt is that Frederick Aparicio lived and died aboard the Nova Fortuna.”

  “And he passed on the Natural Movement philosophy to a group of young Gens,” Ethan said. “Indoctrinating them from a young age. And when they grew up, they passed it on to other young children down the generations right up until Arrival Day.”

  “But I don’t see how,” Cariad said. “Maybe if the Gens lived in families, I could see it happening. Back on Earth, parents usually brought up their kids to follow their own beliefs. But the controls we put in place on reproduction prevented that. Children were brought up in small groups with caregivers, not in families.”

  “I know how they did it,” said Ethan. “This guy, Aparicio. He was a kindergarten teacher, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes,” said Strongquist. “How did you know?”

  “Because that’s Twyla’s job.”

  Chapter Thirty

  After the Guardians left, Ethan returned to the caves with Cariad on a flitter. The Guardians’ shuttle was much faster than their vehicle and by the time they arrived at the site of the disaster a stand off was already in progress.

  On one side, their backs to the cliff edge, stood assembled Gens and Woken. The two groups had banded together and were facing the small party of Guardians, who stood with their backs to Ethan and Cariad as they walked across from the parked flitter. The wind was high, gusting along gray-black clouds that threatened rain.

  Shouts could be heard from each side as they approached, but Ethan couldn’t make them out until they got nearer.

  The first voice he recognized was Strongquist’s. “I repeat, we only want to help,” the Guardian shouted.

  “Yeah, right,” a faint voice from the crowd replied. “Is that what you told Aubriot?”

  “That was an entirely different matter,” came Faina’s high, crisp voice over the noise of the wind. “Sometimes it’s necessary to remove elements that threaten the success of the colony.”

  “He isn’t an element,” replied the same voice from the Gen and Woken side. “He’s a human being.”

  “An asshole human being,” another voice said, which brought a tense burst of laughter, “but that doesn’t give you the right to knock him out.”

  “I assure you,” Strongquist said, “as soon as the colony is thriving and able to withstand the repercussions that derive from the presence of extreme personalities, we will bring Aubriot out of sedation.”

  “How nice of you,” another voice piped sarcastically. “We’ll look forward to it.” This drew some more chuckles, but the expressions of the Gens and Woken were soon hard and confrontational again.

  “This is wasting precious time,” said Faina. “There may be people trapped in the caves. We want to prevent any further structural collapse and then conduct a thorough search. Let us through immediately.”

  “For the last time,” someone shouted, “go away. Your help isn’t needed or wanted. We’ve already searched the caves thoroughly. We got everyone out. We can manage this ourselves. We will manage this ourselves. We don’t trust you and we don’t want any more of your interference. Do you understand? Leave. This is our colony. Not yours. Go back to whatever’s left of Earth, or go find another colony to poke your noses into. You’re not welcome here.”

  “Yeah,” another voice yelled. “But give us back Aubriot before you go.”

  As Ethan and Cariad arrived behind the Guardians, they stopped talking, as if wondering what to do. Ethan also wondered what he and Cariad should do next. Should they cross the space to stand with the Gens and Woken? Cariad put a hand on his arm. They both halted and waited. As far as Ethan knew the Guardians were unaware of their presence.

  He wondered how they would respond to the refusal of their offer of help. The news of Aubriot’s sedation had spread as fast as a comm. Surely they would have to give up now. The assembled Gens and Woken were too hostile and the situation too strained. They couldn’t possibly do any good by remaining.

  The Guardians had gone too far. Gens already hated and feared them due to their armed control, and now the Woken understood they might also be subjected to Guardian control, they detested them too. It would take drastic action to redeem themselves and earn the colonists’ forgiveness. A good first step would be to apologize. Then they should go. Even Ethan, who wasn’t any kind of politician, knew that.

  Except for the rush of the wind and the sigh of waves on the beach below, all was silent. The Gens and Woken stood defiant, their arms crossed, waiting for the Guardians to back down. The Guardians watched them, not speaking.

  The tension stretched thin and taut. There was no way the Gens or Woken were going to allow the Guardians to help. They either had to leave or force their way through.

  They made the wrong choice.

  Guardian weapons were lifted. Gasps came from the crowd of Gens and Woken.

  “This is your final warning,” said Faina. “We demand that you let us pass. We must search for trapped settlers.”

  But some Gens had thought ahead and were ready for the escalation. They stepped forward, weapons at their shoulders. Cariad grabbed Ethan’s arm. “This is insane,” she whispered. “We have to do something before someone gets hurt.”

  “Wait,” Ethan called out to the Guardians. “Let’s talk about this.”

  They swung around to him, which meant that he and Cariad were looking down the muzzles of Guardian weapons. Whether the gun-bearing Guardians intended to aim at him, Ethan didn’t know, but the threat was enough. The Gens fired. Pulses flew from their weapons, hitting Strongquist and Faina as well as the armed Guardians. The group took pulse hits on their torsos, heads, and limbs.

  None had any effect.

  Almost before the shock of this fact could register, the Guardians swung back to face the Gens who were firing on them. They returned fire, felling the weapon-bearing Gens and others in the crowd.

  “Stop,” shouted Cariad.

  Ethan ran at an armed Guardian, knocking him from his feet. Other Gens and Woken were also running over. The remaining armed Guardian began picking them off. Ethan fought with the Guardian, trying to grab his weapon. The man was exceptionally strong. As they wrestled, others were fighting around them. The Gens and Woken who had reached the Guardians were attacking the group, hitting them with their fists and tools they’d been carrying.

  Ethan was losing his battle with the Guardian. The man was just too powerful. As they tussled on the ground, the Guardian beneath Ethan, the man wrenched his weapon from Ethan’s slipping grasp and turned the muzzle to face him. Ethan managed to push it away as a pulse round flew out. He grabbed the gun again, but the man was forcing it relentlessly upward toward Ethan’s chest.

  A cry of effort sounded from above. A rifle butt pounded down onto the Guardian’s skull. The man’s skin split, revealing… Ethan sucked in a gulp of air. He let go of his hold on like the man was contaminated with poison. He leapt up and stared at the prone figure.

  Where the weapon butt had struck the Guardian’s forehead, there was no blood. And what was that under the man’s skin?

  It was Cariad who had struck him. She too was gaping at the wound she’d inflicted. Where there should have been blood, tissue, and bone, there was only a pale gray, non-organic surface. Ethan couldn’t tell if it was plastic or metal, but whatever it was, it wasn’t something that should exist inside a human being.

  What was more, the Guardian was only mildly affected by Cariad’s devastating blow. He should have been knocked out, but he only blinked a few ti
mes. He grasped his weapon close with one hand and reached up to feel the loose, skin-like material that was hanging from his head with the other.

  The sounds and sight of his surroundings had faded away. Ethan could only see the artificial interior of the Guardian’s head. Then he heard Cariad shouting. “What are you? You aren’t people. You aren’t human!”

  Around them, Gens and Woken were still fighting. Three had overwhelmed the second armed Guardian and managed to wrest her gun from her. More had targeted Strongquist and Faina. A group had lifted up Faina and were carrying her, as she writhed and struggled, toward the Guardian shuttle. The ones who had attacked Strongquist had him on the ground and were raining blows down on him.

  But Cariad’s shouts penetrated the perceptions of the fighters and as her words were heard and understood, the violence quickly ceased. Woken and Gens alike got up and backed away from their victims, eyeing them warily. Faina was lowered—almost dropped—to the ground. Strongquist rose to his feet, looking none the worse for his ordeal, though his expression was grave.

  “I always knew there was something wrong about you,” said Cariad, her voice trembling.

  Ethan said, “What are you? And why are you here? You lied to us. You’ve lied to us all along.”

  “We’re here to help you,” Strongquist replied. “That’s always been our intention. Yes, at times we’ve been forced to lie, but that was only when we had to, when telling you the truth would have been dangerous to you.”

  “Answer the question,” Ethan demanded. “What the hell are you?”

  “They must be some kind of android,” said Cariad. “That was why the pulse rounds had no effect on them.”

  “Yes,” said Faina. “We are what you would call androids. We are complex machines designed to look human.”

  “Designed to fool us,” Ethan spat.

  “Designed to help you,” said Strongquist.

  “You call this help?” a voice asked incredulously.

  “However,” Faina went on, “in a sense we are human. Our consciousness is an amalgamation of data from thousands of stored human minds. In the last years of human civilization, the remaining survivors uploaded their minds to storage systems. The technology to upload distinct personalities had never been perfected, but the information from thousands of memories and facets of personality is sufficient to form a new, human-like mind.”

  The Guardian who had been struck by Cariad got to his feet, holding his torn skin to his forehead. Without any communication taking place between them, he and the other armed Guardian left, heading toward their shuttle.

  “The last days of human civilization?” Cariad echoed.

  “Yes,” said Strongquist. “I am afraid to say that was one of the points on which we weren’t entirely honest. We judged that to reveal the actual state of humankind would be too shocking and would exert too much pressure on the settlers when the colony was in a fragile state. Also, we couldn’t reveal the truth without raising questions among you about our identity. Now that our true natures have been inadvertently revealed, we have decided to follow through with an accurate and complete explanation of why we’re here.”

  The remaining Gens and Woken who hadn’t taken part in the fight had walked over from the cliff top. They crowded around, leaning in and remaining silent as they listened to the Guardian’s words.

  Strongquist went on, “We’ve only withheld information on certain things. Everything we told you about the finding of archaeological evidence that revealed the Natural Movement plot to sabotage the colony is true. And we did come after you in the Mistral to avert the plot’s success.”

  He looked at Faina as if listening to her, then turned again to the crowd. “I will begin with what we know about the collapse of civilization. After the departure of the Nova Fortuna, environmental degradation and resource depletion increased. This was despite the fact that the Natural Movement’s philosophy, intended to prevent these things, had predominated. As far as we can tell, research on how to solve the problems had entirely ceased. The difficulties worsened until the physical and societal infrastructures that supported civilization began to break down.

  “When fledgling colonies on Mars and the outer moons could no longer be supported with resources from Earth, the colonists who could return did so. Urban centers began to lose their populations as people returned to the land to find and grow their own food. Economies wavered as credit systems disintegrated and people returned to cash and barter economies.

  “At that point, human society might have continued at subsistence level or it might have continued to gradually decline. We will never know, because a new, deadly mutation of the flu virus appeared. A pandemic traversed the globe. Its passage was slower than it would have been in the days of massive movements of people, but it was inexorable nonetheless. A few scientists remained who had studied epidemiology in secret, wary of public disapproval, but they lacked the know how and technology to create a vaccine in time to halt the epidemic’s progress.”

  “Toward the end, those who foresaw the destiny of humankind remembered the attempts of earlier scientists to upload their minds to data banks and live on as digital information. The funding for the research had ceased decades previously. It had not been thought natural or fitting to seek to live beyond the natural human lifespan. Thus the technology had never been developed to its full potential, but some saw it as a chance to live on, in a small way. Even if they would not exist as full, complete personalities, a part of them would continue as long as the machines storing their data still functioned.

  “Most of those wishing to upload their minds’ data were scientists. Despite the prohibitions on research and experimentation, some had continued their work in hiding, teaching and passing on what they knew to others. People who heard of the scheme to save something of human consciousness traveled down empty, pot-holed roads for weeks to reach the site. They removed forbidden renewable energy devices from storage and set them up. When their time came, they uploaded their minds. It was the last gasp of humankind.”

  “Everyone’s dead?” gasped Cariad. “All of humanity has been wiped out?”

  “Not all,” Strongquist replied. “Some people remain, representatives of the tiny fragment of the population who is naturally immune to the virus. This is why you cannot return to Earth. You do not have any immunity. If you go back, you will all die.”

  Strongquist paused. No one spoke. The Guardian hadn’t yet told them the entire story. He hadn’t explained how he and the other Guardians had been created and sent out to the colony, but what he had told them was so momentous, it was taking time to digest. The assembled Gens and Woken remained still, as if the news had robbed them of movement. Ethan himself could hardly believe it, and not only because it was almost too amazing to believe. The Guardians had lied to them before. They had lied to them all along in fact. Who was to say they weren’t lying now?

  Then a movement he saw from the corner of his eye attracted his attention. He turned to see what it was. Someone was walking toward the group, coming from the plain beyond the hills that led down the as-yet-unexplored coast. The person was walking along the cliff edge. Ethan’s heart lurched. He thought he recognized the figure, but he didn’t dare believe he was right.

  His legs weren’t listening to the disbelief of his mind. Before he knew it, he was running. He sped over the ground toward the person approaching them. Yet he’d crossed half the distance to the woman before he could allow himself to believe what he saw. “Cherry,” he yelled. “Cherry!”

  Cherry raised a weary hand and halted, waiting for him to reach her. When he did, he scooped her up, her feet dangling, and hugged her to his chest, reassuring himself that she was real.

  “Yow,” she exclaimed. “Glad to see you too, Ethan, but you’re crushing me.”

  He set her down carefully. She had a large graze running across her face and her clothes were torn, but she seemed okay.

  “What happened to you?” Ethan asked. “I thou
ght you were dead. I was sure you were dead!”

  “I thought so too,” said Cherry. “I thought exactly that all the way down from the cave. I thought it when I hit the water, and I thought it the whole time I was trying to get to the surface. The falling water kept pushing me down. That was the only way I knew which way was up. But I got out from under it in the end, and when I made it up to the light, a storage box was floating on the surface. A sealed one. I grabbed it and held onto it for dear life. I didn’t know what else to do. I got carried away from the cliffs by the current, a long way along the coast, but then the waves pushed me to the shore. I arrived at a beach kilometers away.”

  “You’ve been walking back all this time?” Ethan asked.

  “Yes, and I’m freezing,” Cherry said.

  Ethan immediately pulled off his shirt and put it over her. The hem hung down around her knees. By this time, Cariad and some others had arrived, including Strongquist.

  “Let’s get you something to eat,” said Ethan. “You must be exhausted. Here, I’ll carry you.”

  “It’s okay,” Cherry said. “I can walk a bit farther.”

  “Please come to our shuttle,” urged Strongquist. “We have medical facilities aboard.”

  “No,” said Cariad. “Don’t. Ethan and I will take you to the settlement hospital on a flitter.”

  Cherry hesitated.

  “You seem in good health despite your ordeal,” said Strongquist. “I’m sure that the treatment you receive at the hospital will be perfectly adequate for your needs.”

  At last, thought Ethan. The Guardian seemed to have begun to understand how severely they had breached the colonists’ trust.

  Ethan put an arm around Cherry and began to guide her to where he and Cariad had left the flitter. Faina ran up carrying a blanket of thin material. She wrapped it around Cherry, saying, “This will conserve your body heat. I have some oral rehydration solution and nutritional supplements too.” She handed the packages to Cariad, who broke one open to give to Cherry.