Emergence

by Nick M Lloyd

  Justio shook his head. ‘No, they don’t know. It’s all done via messaging, and I have a go-between on Gadium who scrubs my identity. They think they’re talking to an old academy buddy. I just need to keep in touch.’

  Justio sagged further. ‘I have no-one. I have nothing. I left my wife and children when I went to the galactic rim. She promised to go into stasis. She lied. I came back and they were all gone. All dead to me. I was so alone, and I knew I was breaking the law, and I tried not to do it. I tried so hard not to do it. I forbade myself. I…’ Justio’s voice tailed off.

  Aytch looked at Justio. He appeared so weak and pathetic. Not GF, just a delinquent.

  Suddenly Justio looked up, this time with defiance in his eyes. ‘I try so hard not to do it, but I need to be connected to what I lost.’

  Justio’s hands were really shaking now. ‘I set myself ultimatum after ultimatum.’

  He continued to force his words out. ‘And the stronger the ultimatum, the quicker I broke it.’

  Justio chuckled ruefully. ‘Like some sort of morality based Uncertainty Principle.’

  Aytch had had enough. ‘I can either throw you into stasis…‌or keep you around with reduced privileges.’ Aytch loomed over Justio. ‘What will it be?’

  ‘I’m a loyal subject of Gadium. I want to help here…‌I can help here.’

  ‘And your relationship with Commander Jenkins?’

  Justio looked surprised. ‘What about it?’

  He’s clueless. ‘Jenkins was arrested as a GF agent, and you have a long history with him.’

  Justio paused for a long while, apparently searching for his thoughts. ‘Look, Aytch, after the Marhok expedition I suffered what can only be described as full animustosis. Part of the rehabilitation was coaching by Jenkins.’ Another pause. ‘He took me on the Darth mission and, while there, he tutored me and helped me deal with the pain. He never mentioned GF.’

  For a few moments, Aytch tapped away on his communications tablet. Then he held it out to Justio. ‘You are now forbidden from using the QET grid. Please confirm the order.’

  Justio entered his authorisation and Aytch took back the communications tablet.

  His first instinct was to report this back to Sharnia, but she would only criticise him for being too lenient. Once Jack is secured, or maybe later.

  ‘There will be a full enquiry on our return, so I suggest you start building up some goodwill.’

  Justio, with his eyes cast downwards, set about tidying up the crew room.

  A tiny spark of pleasure built within Aytch as he watched. Justio’s subservience could work for me.

  Chapter 51

  Jack walked with Bob through to the 3rd area of the laboratory. Ashley and Willis were not doing this experiment today, and he’d left them repeating the morning’s activities with the coin boxes.

  The first thing he noticed was that the room was very dark. The second was Bob’s current demeanour. Jack stopped Bob in midstride. ‘You seem a bit on edge.’

  ‘I have to be honest, I am a little nervous. This is the part where we do the control experiment concerning fear reactions.’ Bob paused. ‘We’re going to make you think you’re going to die, while obviously not harming you in any way. I’m worried we may be pushing you a little too hard.’

  Nodding, Jack looked at the chair he was obviously going to be sitting in. It looked very sturdy, basically immovable. It was a steel construction with leather restraining straps.

  Mike arrived and helped Jack into the chair. Then Mike started firmly attaching leather straps locking his arms, legs, body and head into place. Jack felt his anxiety start to rise, he half-turned to Bob. ‘Shouldn’t you tell me what is going to happen first?’

  ‘Your uncertainty and restraint is all part of the set-up of the tests. You will consciously know you are in no danger. But we are going to convince your subconscious you may be fatally injured.’

  Jack nodded very slightly, partially through uncertainty and partially because, by now, the leather straps were severely restricting his movement.

  ‘The experiment will only take fifteen minutes. Mike and I will put recording electrodes all over your body to measure nerve impulses and then subject you to severe stress.’

  Mike fitted the patches to Jack’s skin to measure heart rate and sweat emission.

  Jack started to become aware, hyper-aware, of the leather straps restraining him. Control your breathing; this is part of the cure.

  Bob wheeled out a second piece of apparatus. It was a large tripod, about one metre tall, with what looked like a video projector on the top of it. Bob wheeled it up to within two metres of where Jack was sitting. Bob pointed to the projector on the top of the apparatus. ‘This lens you can see is pointing at your left eye.’ He pointed around the side of the projector. ‘On the other side of the projector is another lens you can’t see, which is pointing at a screen on your right.’ Bob then took a piece of glass and slid it into place on top of the front facing lens. ‘I have now added a diffusion filter on the front lens, this renders this laser beam harmless. Try to forget it.’

  Now Bob dimmed the lights right down. ‘Okay, Jack, we have a safe word in the room, banquet. If you say the word then we will stop the test. But try to get through it.’

  Turning to the right, Jack was able to move his head just enough to see the screen Bob had mentioned on his right-hand side.

  ‘When I activate this machine, an enormously high powered laser will fire a laser beam. Either it will fire at the screen, vaporising part of it, or it will fire into your eye.’

  My eye!

  Bob came back to the tripod and fiddled with some settings. ‘There is a switching mechanism controlled by the computer within the projector. The computer randomly chooses red or blue. If it chooses red then the red light on top of the box will go and your eye will be fried. If it chooses blue then the blue light on top of the box will go and the screen gets vaporised.’

  What did he say about the filter?

  Then Bob pointed to another part of the projector. ‘However, there is also a switch to override the laser.’ Bob flicked the switch and the laser hummed for a millisecond before a large flash of heat and light appeared on the screen on Jack’s right. ‘In about one minute we will start a test in which we will fire the laser twice only. Then we’ll wait for a while and then we’ll fire a hundred times. Good luck!’

  Breathing in and out, to stay calm, Jack tried to say good luck back to Bob but the leather straps restricted him to a mumbled croak. ‘ood uck.’

  In the low light, Jack vaguely saw Mike walk up to Bob and whisper in his ear. Then Mike walked away fast, followed by Bob.

  What was that?

  Jack thought he had made out the word intruder. Jack tried to look around but he was thoroughly strapped in.

  The lights dimmed further. He had heard the word intruder. Intruder…‌what did they mean by intruder? The projector started to hum. First shot. The red light went on. The laser fired. There was a gentle flash of light in his eye, but there was no pain. A little uncomfortable but manageable.

  The projector started to hum. Second shot. The blue light went on. The laser fired. There was a flash of light and an intense burst of heat from the screen on Jack’s right. He flinched. He concentrated on his breathing. It’s okay, there’s a protective filter.

  There was a movement in the darkness at the back of the room. Jack strained to look. It seemed to come closer. There was a rustle in the dim light behind the machine. Jack called out. ‘ob? ob? ike?’

  Silence.

  Jack fought to control his breathing. It was too dark to see what was happening, but there was definite movement from near the machine. A hand seemed to loom out of the darkness behind the screen and tamper with the front diffusion lens. ‘ob? Ike?’

  Silence.

  Jack began to feel sick. Keep breathing. Bile was rising in his throat.

  The movement subsided i
nto the background. Jack strained to hear. The footsteps were now behind him.

  Someone was tightening the neck strap. Not actually cutting off the blood and air, but it made breathing a strain. He could smell a faint perfume; it hadn’t been Bob or Mike.

  The person in the darkness slipped back to the projector mechanism. Jack strained his eyes. Long hair, perfume. A woman?

  The laser began to hum. A blue light went on illuminating the side of a face. Louise Harding!

  The laser flashed and the screen on Jack’s right flashed in light and heat. For a nanosecond Jack could clearly see Harding standing there. She had the diffusion filter in her hand. She turned with a leer. ‘Justice Bullage, this is for all the old people you left to rot in their own piss and shit.’

  Jack screamed. He tried to speak. I’m sorry. But the straps distorted the sounds. ‘Orry! Orry! Ankit! Ankit!’ Louise laughed gleefully as she ran out of the room. ‘Bob’s not coming. But a red light will indicate a laser is coming to fry your brain.’

  Jack almost blanked out in fear. His heart was racing. He felt the beat in his brain, as if the blood pulsing around his head would push his eyes out of their sockets. The projector started to hum. It has to be blue. Blue—A flash of light and heat from the screen. It has to be blue. Blue—A flash of light and heat from the screen. He strained against the leather straps in the chair. They were stretching a little but the leather held. He strained again.

  He knew it was only a matter of time before a red light fried him. Jack felt as if he were in a trance as the sparks and flames from the screen on his right kept flashing into his peripheral vision. The heat from the laser bursts on the screen was singeing his eyebrows.

  Please god, blue!

  Jack held onto consciousness. He strained against the leather straps in the chair, but they held him.

  After what felt like eternity, the projector stopped firing. Jack slumped back in the chair.

  Back in the control area, Mike could not believe what he was seeing. There must have been some mistake.

  Jack’s biological readouts went off the charts. His heart had been beating at well over 350 beats per minute. Impossible.

  And that level of impossibility was dwarfed by the second order impossibility showing on the laptop screen.

  Jack had somehow influenced all 100 random red/blue choices to come out as blue.

  Bob looked dumbstruck. ‘Surely, we must have made a mistake. Maybe Louise flicked the switch accidentally.’

  Louise shook her head. ‘I didn’t touch it.’

  Back on the Gadium ship, the comprehensive electronic black-out within the laboratory was continuing to make things difficult. Justio watched all the feeds for signs of the second set of tests. There was nothing yet.

  He looked over towards Aytch, sitting in his flight chair. Aytch had not moved for the last two hours. He’d not even acknowledged Justio’s existence, and he hadn’t shown the slightest bit of empathy.

  Justio had to remind himself that he wasn’t actually contacting his long lost descendants, it was just a ruse. But he also felt it would have been completely understandable if he had been. Bad laws be damned. But that’s not how he sees it.

  He’s an emotionless automaton. An empire toady.

  The misdirection he’d delivered to Aytch had been well prepared. But Justio was surprised about how little emotion he’d had to fake. He blamed Aytch. That, combined with the obvious escalations on Vantch, made him feel very unsettled.

  What is Aytch going to do about me?

  Even with the reduced bandwidth, Aytch was almost certainly going to report him. And Sharnia would make it clear what to do.

  At that moment, Aytch turned. ‘Have you accessed and decrypted all your QET messages yet? I’d like to see them all.’

  And I’d like to wipe your smug face off your head. Of course he hadn’t, he would need to do a bit of cleaning first. ‘Not yet, I was waiting until after these tests.’ He indicated the feeds coming from the NLUST campus.

  ‘Start on them now, I need to check them.’

  Justio stared intently on the screens, trying to block out Aytch.

  ‘I said, start on them now, I need to check them.’

  Justio stared intently at the screens. ‘Yeah, yeah, you need to double-check on my activity.’

  Aytch did not reply.

  What?

  Justio looked up and Aytch was walking towards the exit, at the doorway he turned. ‘Call me when we get some new data.’

  Aytch left the room.

  Then it dawned on him. Shit! I said double-check on my activity! That was the exact wording in Sharnia’s last QET. Justio quickly brought up video footage of the corridor. Aytch was marching purposefully towards the QET room.

  The decision was made in a split second. From the crew room, Justio accessed the QET grid. He sent a message to Gadium.

  Jack Bullage, Triple Alpha, becoming self-aware due to freak combination of events. Local government has discovered Jack. Despot organisation may be only weeks away. We are intervening.

  Then Justio dumped all of the remaining QET Grid bandwidth.

  They were alone.

  Aytch was suspicious. Justio was acting strangely, and Aytch needed some thinking time. He was going to start reading Justio’s messages himself. He could use SISR to decrypt them himself.

  Entering the QET room, Aytch saw a series of warning light illuminating the instrument panels. On closer inspection, he saw all of the QET bandwidth had been erased. Full decoupling from pair-mates back on Gadium. Sabotage!

  Time seemed to slow.

  Turning sharply, Aytch ran out of the room and charged back up the corridor. The blast doors in the middle section of the main corridor were closed. He went to the door panel, but the instruments were overridden.

  He was trapped in the aft section of the ship with just the QET Grid and the stasis machines.

  Justio’s voice was projected into the corridor. ‘I have made an executive decision. We’re going for a Full Emergence. Be reasonable and put yourself into stasis for six hundred years. I will revive you when we get back to Gadium.’

  Raging, Aytch struck the blast doors. ‘You sabotaged the QET Grid! You’ve been a GF agent all along!’ The door was immovable and Aytch slumped down on the floor next to it. If I go into stasis he’ll kill me.

  After 10 minutes of self-pity Aytch resolved to escape. There was an override panel on the wall. He tried the electronic code, tried a number of combinations, but the doors would not open. Aytch focused all his consciousness on the panel, a Single Instance State Reduction probability attack. Surely I can use SISR to randomly find the right combination?

  It didn’t work. The blast doors remained resolutely shut.

  Justio must be observing somehow and stopping me from taking control.

  He needed to force the doors open. He wouldn’t budge.

  Justio won’t weld them shut as he’ll need the stasis tubes for his return journey.

  Turning away, Aytch walked back towards to the stasis area.

  Justio’s voice came over a loudspeaker. ‘I give you my word. I will not harm you in any way, assuming you don’t try to stop me.’

  ‘Traitor.’

  ‘History will decide that. I say freedom fighter.’

  Back in the crew room, Justio looked around and reflected on his options. He didn’t have any. It was clear what he had to do.

  The first step was allowing the humans to discover Triple Alphas. The second step would be well-meaning, but ineffective, controls of the proliferation of Triple Alphas. There were overwhelmingly high odds that plenty of Alphas existed on Earth. It wouldn’t take much to get them fighting. And then, of course, he would run…‌leaving Earth and forcing any incoming mission to assume they’d left in shame.

  Must still keep alien intervention a secret.

  Although Justio wanted to see Gadium mismanagement of Earth, he didn’t want to con
sign 1,000 generations of humans to early graves. And any incoming mission would be forced to grow-out the knowledge of aliens in advance of a fully controlled Emergence.

  Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that anyway, as the GF would have political ascendency and the missions would stop.

  Justio looked back to the screens. Aytch was prowling the corridor. He’d do all he could to avoid killing Aytch. But it depended on Aytch’s good behaviour.

  He continued to scan the feeds. In the university campus, it was quiet. The team had still not left the shielded laboratory.

  Chapter 52

  The lights went on and Jack opened his eyes

  Mike and Bob were standing in front of him. He couldn’t even gather his thoughts; they were muddled and chaotic. His head felt like spaghetti. And there was pain: his arms, his neck, and his legs. Where he’d strained in terror against the bonds.

  His heart was racing, and his mouth was dry. Confusion. Louise Harding?

  Bob stepped forward. ‘Well done, the test was a great success. We’ll explain everything once you have had a chance to calm down.’

  Bob took off the main leather strap restricting Jack’s head. The pain in his neck started to ease. And the confusion began to evaporate, to be replaced with rage. Harding?

  Jack stared at each of them in turn. Step one, get free. ‘Untie me now!’

  Jack noticed a silent exchange of glances between Bob and Mike. Step one, get free. He forced himself to appear relaxed, even though his heart was racing. ‘I’ll hear your side of the story, but please untie me.’

  Stepping up to the chair, Mike untied the rest of the leather straps. As the electrode patches and leather straps came off Jack methodically rubbed life back into his face, shoulders and arms. There was blood where the leather straps had dug in so deeply they’d broken the skin. He rubbed his wrists; the bleeding seemed to have stopped.

  He looked at Bob and Mike in turn silently for a long while. ‘You nearly killed me…‌I understand the laser was harmless—just a trick—but my heart…‌it nearly burst out of my chest.’