by Scott Baron
The funny thing was, much as she disliked artificially-altered humans, Daisy had filed the neuro-stim in a sort of gray area of acceptability. Once she had managed to rationalize its use, she had embraced the device. Now, as she struggled to learn new things the old-fashioned way, she found herself rather missing it. Even though she disliked mechanically modified humans, she had relied on the neuro-stim, which left the uncomfortable question: What had that made her?
“Daisy? You’re zoning out on me, aren’t you?”
“What? Oh, yeah. Sorry, Fatima, I was just kinda thinking about stuff.”
“Think later. The key for now is to not think. Just be. Flow within yourself.”
“Now you’re almost starting to sound like Doc McClain.”
Fatima chuckled.
“We both know that’s not true, though if I’m not mistaken, isn’t today your weekly session with her?”
Daisy groaned.
“Yeah. Every week, more of the same. Can’t I just play hooky?”
“It’s your call, Daisy, but I think if you put aside your natural aversion to therapy, you may realize she is actually helping you more than you realize. Now come on, we have training to get on with.”
Daisy clenched her teeth and shut her eyes.
“Relax, Daisy. Let the tension go. Just breathe.”
Daisy tried her best, but found herself unable to slip back into the proper state of mind now that her pending psych-eval was on her mind. She was not fond of having the resident shrink poking around in her head, and she was certainly tired of hearing her opinions.
“Okay, it looks like you’re having an off day. Let’s run you through the new physical acuity course instead. We can revisit your centering work afterward, for a change.”
Slowly, Daisy rose to her feet and followed Fatima to the far end of the converted storage facility they trained in.
“Check it, Daze. She’s changed up the course again.”
Great. Just when I had all the moves pretty much dialed in.
“Well, she does keep you on your toes,” Sarah said. “Actually, look at that small platform next to the crimp-wall. I think she may literally keep you on your toes this time.”
Indeed, Fatima had added a fresh series of difficult physical challenges, apparently more than one of which included utilizing the farthest extremes of her digits for balance. As always, whatever the physical task, Fatima would push her mentally as well. It could be downright exhausting, all told.
I tell ya, Sis, some days I just wish we were still in cryo.
“Wake-me-when-its-over Syndrome, eh?”
Something like that.
“Sorry, to say, no such luck. Now stop griping and get through this. If you make good time, maybe we can get some downtime before the head-shrinker has at it.”
“Ugh. Not looking forward to that,” Daisy muttered.
“What was that?” Fatima asked.
“Um, I just looked at the new course, is all,” Daisy lied.
“Uh-huh. Well, get a move on. You have a lot of work to do.”
Reluctantly, Daisy climbed up to the opening move of the reconfigured course and began making her way through the new moves. It didn’t take long for her to forget about her pending psych-eval once she got into it. Unfortunately, that would only last so long.
“You’ve got such potential, Daisy, but your stubborn reluctance is holding you back.” Doctor McClain crossed her legs, the metal one’s ankle shining at the cuff of her trousers. “Why won’t you open up to me and let whatever is troubling you off your chest?”
The ship’s doctor and resident head shrinker had been trying to help Daisy “adjust” to the notion that she was something special ever since moon-fall, but found herself frustrated by her stubborn patient at every turn.
“Look, Doc, I appreciate what you’re trying to do here. Really, I do, but everyone keeps talking about my potential and how I’m supposed to be this amazing, I don’t know, thing, that can save Earth, but all I am is just a test-tube baby stuck on a base full of half-people.” She eyed McClain’s metal leg. “No offense.”
“None taken, Daisy,” the doctor replied. “But you have to accept the fact that you are unique. You’ve even seen the readouts. Your physiology is enhanced. And look what you were able to do with your mind. All the data you retained. That should have been impossible. Whether you like it or not, you are special. We just need to find a way for you to tap into your potential.”
“Sure, I did download a bunch of stuff and access some abilities I didn’t know I had tucked away in my noggin, I’ll give you that, but how does knowing a few coding tricks and basic shuttle mechanics make me this ‘chosen one’ you keep going on about?”
“No one calls you the chosen one. Have you been watching that old, ‘There is no spoon’ movie with Vincent again?”
“You know what I mean. I’m supposed to be amazing, but I feel average. Okay, maybe a teeny, tiny, little bit above average, but you know what I mean. I hate to disappoint you all, but you’ve got the wrong girl.”
“But the genetic––”
“Maybe it was Sarah who was supposed to be the golden child. You ever consider that?”
“Oh no you don’t. Don’t drag me into this!” Sarah objected.
You were grown just like I was. Maybe you were supposed to be their super messiah savior girl, she silently argued. What do you say to that?
Sarah didn’t bother to reply.
Doctor McClain studied her a long moment, then sat back in her chair.
“All right, Daisy, let’s go with your theory for the moment. Even if you are just a normal woman, don’t you want to grow as a person?”
“I was grown in a tube, Doc, and no amount of therapy is going to change that. All I want to do now is just live as normal a life as I can.”
“Here on the moon?”
“Yeah, here on the moon. I’ve accepted that I’m never going back home, because that home never existed at all. I’ve just got to make the best of a shitty situation and get on with my life.”
She rose to her feet and headed to the door.
“I do appreciate your efforts, Doc, but I think I can be of far more help here than I’d ever be on Earth.”
Daisy walked out of the room, leaving Doctor McClain jotting notes on her tablet. A minute later the shrink reached for her comms unit.
“Harkaway here,” the captain answered.
“Captain, would you please arrange a meeting with Commander Mrazich and Fatima? I think we need to talk.”
Chapter Six
Deep in the shadows of the moon, a series of flashes briefly flickered against the inky darkness.
“Commander, Bob has just signaled us. Reggie and Donovan have returned from their drift,” Sid’s disembodied voice informed Commander Mrazich. “I am opening Hangar Two for their arrival. It also appears, in addition to a successful scanning run, they have managed to retrieve a few pieces from the debris field in the process.”
“Excellent. Thank you, Sid. Please have them upload their data to your systems once they’re safely inside, and inform Chu and Gustavo that we have some new information for them to review.”
“Certainly, Commander. My pleasure.”
“And let Shelly and Omar know there’s some componentry to be offloaded.”
“Of course.”
The base AI clicked off the comms and set to his tasks while Commander Mrazich watched the beat-up, but very functional, recon ship as it drew close to the base. Bob, the ship’s AI, steered it expertly into Hangar Two, then powered his flight systems down to standby mode.
Fifteen minutes later, Chu and Gustavo were poring over the newly gathered data in the communications lab as Commander Mrazich and Captain Harkaway looked on.
“Anything, Gus?” Harkaway asked.
“Hang on just another minute, Captain, there’s a lot of interference in this scan. I was wondering if maybe they could maybe drop lower next time and take readings clear of the debr
is field––”
“You know we can’t do that,” Donovan said as he and Reggie entered the room. “Commander Mrazich. Captain.” The pilot nodded to the men in casual greeting.
“No difficulties, then?” Mrazich asked.
“Nothing we couldn’t handle. We hit a particularly dense patch of wreckage, so it took us a bit longer than usual to maneuver through the field with our air thrusters. Tacked an extra forty minutes onto the flight.”
“Beats showing up on the Chithiid scans,” Chu said.
“True, that. Anyway, once we settled in, we picked up a fair amount of comms noise, but as usual, it was garbled gibberish. I don’t know if it’s a scrambler or what, but Bob couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”
“Nor can I, Commander,” Sid chimed in. “Mal is running a parallel scan on her systems, but feels similarly that this will prove fruitless yet again.”
“We did send another focused ping directly at Los Angeles to the region where Daisy said she encountered that massive AI presence, as you suggested, but we’ve been doing that for months now, and there still hasn’t been a single reply.”
“You think she was hearing things?” Chu asked.
“I don’t know,” Donovan admitted. “I mean, it’s entirely possible that the only reason the AI stayed intact this long was by entirely cutting itself off from external comms. Tactically, it makes sense. If they severed all comms links in order to seal off any possible access point of the AI virus, they’d be sitting blind.”
“Blind, but alive,” Captain Harkaway mused as he scratched his stubbly chin in thought. “Alive and able to operate their city defense systems. That would explain why the Chithiid are still steering clear of so many cities. The intact ones. But we still don’t have any proof, and it’s far too risky to plan a full-scale mission based on just a hunch.”
“Agreed, Captain,” Sid said. “The cutting of all comms would certainly keep the AI clean of the virus, but it would also mean that it could not even so much as hear our transmission, let alone reply to it. Of course, it’s all speculation at this point. Once Daisy returns to the surface and re-establishes contact, then we’ll finally know what the city’s status really is.”
“You know she’s dead-set against going back there, right?” Vince said as he stepped into the room. “I mean, maybe you’ll find a way to talk her into it, but knowing how stubborn she can be, I find the idea highly unlikely.”
Harkaway grunted his agreement, or perhaps it was his annoyance, or maybe it was a healthy bit of both, then glanced once more at the results of their fly-over scans, his brow furrowed as he read the data.
“Good lord, look at all the craters where those cities used to be. They’ve stripped them bare, like goddamn locusts. Reggie, you were reading the monitors real-time, are you sure there wasn’t a single sign of any activity from any other intact region?”
“Negative, sir. No communications chatter whatsoever.”
“Any surface activity?” he asked. “Besides the usual small transport ships moving their loads to the main warp ship docks, that is.”
“Well,” Reggie began, then hesitated. “There was something going on in the periphery of Beijing that seemed a bit out of the ordinary. Weapons fire and some smaller salvage ships going down, but we’re pretty confident it was just the Chithiid probing the automated defenses again. It looks like they’ve pretty well stripped the surrounding areas of usable resources, and Chu and me, well, we thought they were probably just testing the city, just in case they could dig into that rich vein rather than have to relocate their deconstruction operations to another developed area.”
“Good thing those alien bastards don’t know which cities possess nukes and which don’t,” Mrazich said. “I’m pretty sure that uncertainty is the only thing keeping the majority of them from being overrun.”
“So, status quo, then. Have you made any progress in figuring out how their large cargo ship warp device works?” Harkaway asked.
“Unfortunately, the tech behind their warp drive still remains a mystery to us,” Chu replied. “If we could perhaps capture one of their ships, then we might have a chance of figuring out how it works. Reverse engineer it, as it were.”
“You know that’s not an option.”
“I know, but we’re stuck observing from afar. For now, all we know is it seems to form a tiny skin of a compressed warp bubble around the nose of the ship just prior to its jump. The power signature is quite low, and Sid and Bob and I have long theorized that it’s more of a hop device than a true warp. Given that, we all agree that they most likely have to perform a lengthy series of smaller hops in order to reach their fleet.”
“Why is that?” Vince asked.
“Well, for one, the power signature seems to be far too low to indicate a significant space-time event. That makes sense looking at the limited area affected by the ship’s movement, whereas a large-scale warp would form a proper warp bubble of much greater magnitude. Unlike their current method, that type of larger event would allow for a single jump to their destination.”
“So, given how far away the fleet must be by now, we’re thinking what? A few months of travel? Days? Years?”
“We really have no way of knowing, but if we figure in the speed at which their main fleet left the solar system several hundred years ago, and the distance they would have covered by now, it is quite likely that even with these tiny hops, it still would take at least a year, if not two, for the ship to reach the fleet. Of course, we don’t know if they left our solar system and simply found a new conquest nearby, but given the size of the galaxy and rarity of planets with Earth’s resources, it seems most likely that they traveled quite a distance before discovering another suitable planet.”
“Agreed,” Sid’s disembodied voice said.
“Okay, so we probably have a little bit of a cushion between us and their fleet. What do you think, as someone who has been watching this planet for years? Is there a realistic likelihood that L.A. is still active despite the lack of response?” Harkaway asked as he scrolled through the contact map, looking for signs of anything other than alien crews deconstructing the planet.
“Sir, if I may,” Sid interjected. “While Miss Swarthmore’s recounting of her time on the surface seems a bit fanciful, I would remind everyone that fleshless cyborgs were indeed seen by the rescue unit when they retrieved her and brought her back to Dark Side. Many of her other claims have proven to be true as well. I do not think she was misleading us, nor do I believe she possesses the mental structure of one who would make something like that up. She believes what she reported, and minus proof to the contrary, I feel we must take her at her word.”
“Agreed,” Harkaway said after a moment’s consideration. “But if that’s true, then we’re going to have to find a way to make contact, with or without Daisy’s help.”
Chu looked up from his workstation.
“Um, Captain? I think I may be able to help with that. And Daisy will even lend a hand, though she won’t exactly know it.”
The next afternoon Chu was hunched over a large pile of parts spread across the table in the mess hall, sipping his coffee as he studied the machinery. Daisy, as was her usual routine, stopped in to pick up a snack to top off her energy stores before heading to train with Fatima, but Chu paid her no heed.
“Hey, Chu,” she called out.
He ignored her.
“Chu!” she said, louder. The technician looked up as if he hadn’t heard her come in.
“Oh, Daisy, hi. Sorry, hang on, I think I’ve almost got it.”
“Got what?”
“Nothing, just a reverse engineered wireless—never mind, you wouldn’t understand.”
Daisy bristled ever-so slightly as she strode to his table, nudging him aside as she plopped down next to him.
“Uh-huh, wouldn’t understand, eh?” She scanned the device and parts spread before her. “So you’ve got a long-range encrypted comms transmitter piggybacked to an RF mod
ulator with a MK-V uplink filter running tri-band firewalls. Sound about right?”
Chu laughed.
“Damn. How do you do that? You’ve never even seen this thing, but you know what it does in just a glance.”
“Call me special,” she joked.
“Now you’re starting to sound like the others.”
Shut up, Sarah, she silently replied.
“So, what’s the issue, Chu? Seems like a solid enough system you’ve got set up.”
“For comms shielded by the moon, perhaps, but we have no way to contact our drift ships while they’re in the scanning range of Earth’s orbit. They’re on their own, and we just sit here, waiting to see if they make it back in one piece. But what if we had a way to communicate with them, all the way into Earth’s atmosphere, but in such a way that the Chithiid wouldn’t detect it?”
“Seems like an easy fix. Just use a low-frequency encryption and deliver with an asynchronous pulse rather than traditional. That would work.”
“Yes, it would, but Bob is running that ship, and his AI brain would be exposed and run a risk of the Chithiid AI infection every time he used it.”
“Shit, I see what you mean,” Daisy said. “Hmm, gimme a second here.” She furrowed her brow in concentration as she looked at the communications device and the assortment of parts on the table.
“Hang on, do you have any of the old DM-15s lying around?”
“We’ve got a few crates of them, but those things were antiques when they first built this place. Why?”
“I have an idea,” she replied with a cocky grin. “Your concern is not only staying off of Chithiid scans, which your system seems to accomplish, but also to transmit in a manner that would protect Bob—and Sid by extension—from running the risk of AI virus infection. So why not overlap a set of two-factor authenticated wireless signals from the DM-15s?”