by Alex Lamb
Despite herself, she shivered at their plight. More than anything, Nada wished she was still part of a fused intelligence. It pained her every day that she wasn’t. And as a relatively recent convert, she felt cheated that she’d experienced so little of it. She’d been a fully absorbed component for less than a year before the Utopia had been forced to disband collective operation to arrest the spread of Fatigue.
Participating in a fused mind was like inhabiting a church full of light and song. In fact, it was like being the church. It felt like a massive, overpowering chord of pure joy played for ever. It was beyond beautiful. She wept sometimes when she thought about it.
As it was, she could still remember what it was like to be human, sort of. She had muddy recollections of those meaningless drives that had cluttered her life: friendship, ambition, family, romance. All that crap. To lose them and be joined had been exquisite – the discovery of an undeniable and perfect truth. It was the end to doubt and the dawning of purity – an orderly, surgical, permanent purity, like the severing of an unwanted limb.
And then it had been shut off because too many of the Saved felt the urge to fall completely into that light. The intensity of their happiness had outstripped their will to function, leaving them lifeless and deaf to the requests of their superior nodes. Fatigue had ripped through the mass-mind like wildfire, forcing them to build one cognitive fire-break after another. And so they’d had to put Total Joy on hold until the rest of their useless species could finally be dragged, kicking and screaming, into harmony.
In the meantime, a huge number of reindividualised Photurians were being made to endure an ever-increasing load of human play-acting. Research had shown that the more they behaved like the species they’d been drawn from, the longer they lasted as discrete units.
But after that mind-burning glimpse of the sweet alternative, this took endless self-discipline. No wonder the children were upset. Yunus had condemned them to decades of grim individuality. The only heaven they would know was the one at the end of the war, when the human race finally woke up to its higher calling.
‘Leave,’ said the Yunus. ‘I have assigned a social coordinator to allocate you tasks to acquire at an unmodified rate.’
The weeping children began to march off the stage.
‘Be quiet,’ said the Yunus. ‘Experience this as an honour.’
The children snapped into silence as their expressions reconfigured into gazes of proud purpose.
The mind-temple signalled Nada. She walked onto the stage and stared at the Yunus, waiting.
‘You consider their fate a harsh one,’ he said, sampling her mind through the temple.
‘Yes,’ said Nada.
‘They will grow up hungry,’ he said. ‘It is my hope that they will burn with a desire for closure and work harder to convert others.’
‘Or they may collapse into Fatigue more rapidly,’ said Nada. ‘It is a risky strategy.’
‘Our situation is delicate,’ said the Yunus. ‘Risky strategies are called for.’
He reached into her mind and moved some of her opinions about. Nada broke into a spontaneous grin of joy as the Yunus made her agree with him. She now saw the rightness of his position and the need for brave and uncompromising action.
This was how things were supposed to work. Before reindividualisation, Nada would have reported to the Yunus directly through the mind-temple. She hadn’t even have known she was Nada, or perceived their shared order as a temple. There had just been closure and harmony.
Now, rather than having their identity supplied as necessary from their controlling node, they had to engage in crosstalk between peer units and even reorganise the hierarchy from time to time. Direct editing of her identity to create alignment was a rare and precious gift. She beamed at him in gratitude.
‘I have a new plan that I intend to implement on this world,’ he said. ‘The reproduction of units via natural methods is operating at below-replacement rates due to genetic interference from our sacred bacteria. Furthermore, we are running low on human acquisitions. One logical policy to arrest this slide is to farm humans.’
‘Farm them?’ said Nada, her smile faltering.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘As in acquiring them but not immediately converting them.’
Nada flinched. Not converting people when the light of peace beckoned? It felt awfully unfair.
‘Do not worry,’ said the Yunus. ‘All will be converted in time. They will be kept in safe facilities and carefully antagonised so that conversion comes as a treasured release. If we are able to stabilise such populations, we will have a steady supply of units to complete the conversion of the human race.’
Nada squirmed. There were some notions that just felt wrong to the Saved, such as simply killing the rest of the human race now that they were in the minority. Something about the joy of union made you want to share it with as many people as possible, even if there were shortcuts available. Yunus’s approach smacked of compromise. Humans were there to be saved, not bred in ignorance and then saved.
‘I struggle with that idea,’ she said. She couldn’t ask him to change her mind, sadly, though that was what she craved.
‘As do I,’ said the Yunus. ‘Though I fear these are the kinds of options we must consider, so I am initiating a pilot project. This is the burden the Vile Usurper has forced upon us.’
The Vile Usurper was, of course, Will Monet – the despised pseudo-human who had stolen their homeworld. Had they a proper home, humanity would have been saved already and Fatigue avoided completely. Instead, their mission had been a limping, difficult affair, conducted without the ancient might of the one true biome behind them. Just thinking about Monet conjured a panicked loathing in most Saved that blotted out other thought.
‘I mention the farming project to give you a sense of the seriousness of our predicament,’ said the Yunus. ‘Deliver your report.’
Nada recited the facts of her failed mission – facts the Yunus could have known instantly by looking inside her head. But that wasn’t the point. She was there to engage in the wilful act of separateness both as a symbol of their determination and to practise the unloveliness of autonomy.
‘The Galatean humans successfully evacuated the Earther population,’ she said. ‘The remaining habitats were bombed and are no longer usable. We secured no new converts.’
The Yunus stared at her blankly. ‘What of the tip-off you acquired?’ he said. ‘I received interim reports that the new mutant seeding project was yielding fresh converts.’
‘Progress was achieved,’ Nada replied. ‘Converts were obtained, though the information they provided was slight.’
Remotely seeded converts didn’t become effective spies overnight. They needed time to come to terms with their beautiful new feelings and devise a plan. Without a network of other operatives to support them, their actions were sometimes counterproductive.
‘We lost contact with most of our embedded converts before the end of the mission,’ she went on. ‘Only one convert who relocated to Galatea is still known to be intact.’
‘This is a disastrous outcome,’ said the Yunus stiffly.
‘Yes,’ Nada agreed.
‘Significant numbers of units were expended to produce a stable mutation that would resist detection by the Abomination.’
The Abomination was Andromeda Ludik – the person the Saved hated most after Monet. She was generally considered unsaveable by virtue of her disgusting hybrid biology, and therefore an entity to be destroyed. So far, that had proven surprisingly difficult to accomplish.
‘I am aware of this,’ said Nada. ‘If you recall, I recommended against such expenditure given our reduced resources.’
The Yunus shifted from foot to foot and stared upwards. He let out a long keening sound. It probably signified some form of anguish – an understandable response. Nada waited for him to finish.
‘How did this make you feel?’ he asked in the end, almost absent-mindedly. ‘What details
did you notice?’
Nada suspected that the Yunus didn’t know what to ask in that moment. He was as much at sea in play-acting humanity as she was, and was fishing for direction.
‘I am disgusted with them,’ she said. ‘While I still love them and want to convert them, I am becoming … impatient. I worked for two years on the Earth Project and have saved nobody. The closer I get to helping the humans, the more they resist. They are like children. No, they are like cornered animals. No, they are like flies unable to understand a pane of glass.’ She fell silent but the Yunus kept staring, so she continued. ‘Now I return to find a world even quieter than when I left. We are building false homes instead of living in tubes. I face despair. I doubt that I will be able to manage disappointment again without succumbing to Fatigue. I recommend that you deconstruct me for parts and use another unit that is less strained.’
‘And yet we must continue to work to the best of our ability to save humanity,’ said the Yunus. ‘Deconstructing you would be the easy option. But what happens if we attempt to merge in harmony while both the human race and the Vile Usurper are intact? Peace will only last for ever if it is embraced by all.’ He fixed her with wide eyes and a meaningless smile. ‘You are one of my strongest,’ he said. ‘You crave peace as much as every other unit but are driven to achieve it for all rather than drowning yourself in it. You must therefore remain intact to help implement my core plan. The central dictates of my strategy remain unchanged. First, War Fatigue must be hidden from the humans at all costs. They cannot be allowed to perceive our weakness. Second, new humans must be acquired by any means and their conversion deferred where possible.
‘However, I now add a third dictate. Galatea, the colony of the Abomination, must be broken. It is the strongest colony and it obstructs our progress. It cannot be allowed another victory. The Abomination and her cohorts will attempt to secure a new home for the Earther population. She must be stopped.’
‘Obstructing the Abomination has been tried,’ said Nada.
The Yunus let out a strangled hooting sound. ‘This is who I need you to be,’ he said, and reached into her mind again.
He twisted and turned pieces of her, bolstering her need to kill Ludik and break Galatea until she screamed again and tore at her hair. A sick sense of urgency knotted her insides. Urine spilled down the leg of her ship-suit.
‘Stop screaming now,’ said the Yunus, and her throat seized. ‘You will coordinate raiding flights and blockades. You will make contact with the remaining mutant spy and determine where the Earther population is being relocated. They will not be able to hide such a large group for long. If necessary, you must resort to innovation to achieve this.’
‘I will innovate,’ Nada shrieked, her fingers clutching at her gut.
‘You will never give up.’
‘I will never give up!’ she wailed.
‘Your identity will not be deconstructed or permitted to embrace bliss until such time as you have succeeded.’
‘I crave success!’ she keened.
‘I am aware that I am placing a significant burden on you,’ said the Yunus, ‘but swift action is vital. We are in danger of handing a propaganda victory to the humans that will slow the rate of conversions still further. As you are aware, creatures like the Abomination and humanity’s other false heroes serve as rallying points for the Unsaved. Hence, here is my last gift to you,’ said the Yunus, his virtual hands still deep inside her head. ‘You will draw strength from this urgency. It will be like the human ideal of “ambition”.’
Nada felt a flush of unnatural power. Her back jerked ramrod straight. Her arms fell limp at her sides. Her eyes widened as manic glee beamed out through her features.
‘This is my promise to you,’ he said. ‘When you return victorious, I will set aside my notions of human-farms and other compromises. There will be no more rash deployments of the Saved, or false homes, or silent worlds, because you will have shown us a better path. But you must be quick. Heaven cries out for us.’
‘I adore you!’ Nada shouted. ‘I will be victorious in your name!’
‘Leave,’ said the Yunus.
Nada strode urgently for the theatre exit, determination yanking her forward with every step. In the back of her mind, there still lurked that hunger to lie down on a bed of moist fungus to experience bliss, but first she had a colony to crush.
2.3: ANN
Twenty-nine light-years away, on the planet of Galatea, another woman took a similar pod from a spaceport to a city, in a similar state of despair. In this case, the pod was a sleek, state-of-the-art model with a cutting-edge biosensor array, a semi-intelligent SAP-mind and adaptive organic seating.
The woman was Ann Ludik, and she had resorted to silencing the pilot SAP because it kept panicking about the unfamiliar nano-machinery she was exuding. Hence, rather than adapting, the seating merely quivered in fear of its occupant. Ann tried to ignore it.
There was no view from Ann’s pod. The route from the Ritter Spaceport to the Sharptown Subterra Complex involved traversing half a kilometre of solid rock at a shallow incline. Ann didn’t care to let the SAP activate the wall displays, either, and chose instead to sit in the dark. It suited her mood.
As expected, Ann had been called in to ‘discuss progress’ with Galatean Defence. Despite months of careful planning, the evacuation of Earth had come within a hair’s breadth of disaster, and so everyone felt the need to talk it to death. There had already been plenty of discussion on the week-long carrier-flight back to Galatean space.
The Phote plan had evidently been to seed near-undetectable mutant converts into Earth’s population and have them be the ones leading the call for evacuation. The converts would then leak information about the mission to the Utopia and ideally pass the infection to Galateans. They’d been wildly successful.
Upon conversion, poor Calvinia Shue, their diplomat, had apparently decided that the best way to support her new-found hunger for Total Peace was to subtly manipulate Mark Ruiz. And the Phote parasite co-opting her nervous system had all of Calvinia’s political insight to draw from. It hadn’t taken her long to figure out the right angle.
It stung her, though, that Mark appeared to believe her to be the sort of person who’d leave ten thousand people in space to die. Was that how he thought of her now? A life of war had made her decisive, but not cold, surely. She’d always tried to save the greatest number of people, even during the horrors of the Suicide War.
Years ago, she and Mark had been close. That had been before she’d lost patience with his attitude, but still, didn’t he understand that she never liked hurting others or seeing them be hurt? How could she? Her whole life had been a battle to protect the preciousness of human warmth. She couldn’t enjoy it herself, so she fought to preserve it for everyone else. Otherwise, why did she even exist?
By her own logic, though, Ann knew she’d failed. The main reason the evacuation had gone so wrong was her insistence that her own methods of biodefence were better than those dreamed up by the Fleet. And through her negligence, infectious spies bringing untold harm had made their way into the Galatean population.
The pod burst into the light as it reached the Sharptown quarantine station, an empty granite chamber thirty metres square with a suspended pod-rail running through it. LED floods bathed the space in metallic, blue-white light with some spectrum that apparently made it easier to run bioassay scans.
Ann reluctantly got to her feet and spread her arms as the pod slid to a halt in the buffer zone. With a thought, she flicked the pod SAP back to life and waited for the machines running the quarantine area to do their job.
‘Captain Andromeda Ng-Ludik reporting for Post-Mission Pivot,’ she said aloud.
‘Acknowledged,’ said the pod SAP. ‘Please wait.’
Galatea had changed plenty since Ann’s time there as a student. When she was young, the planet had still been wrestling with its apparently unending terraforming problem. Storms wracked the world on a
monthly basis, delivering kilometre-high walls of grit travelling at the speed of bullets. Everyone lived in shielded canyon habitats and wore evacuation monitors on their wrists.
Since then, the storms had mostly stopped. After the coming of the Photes, more and more habitats on Galatea had been built underground where they were easier to protect. And with diminishing resources to spend on terraforming, a consensus had developed that a planet with an unstable surface environment might not be such a bad thing. An angry atmosphere constituted a free defensive weapon of sorts.
But then, perverse to the last, when humanity stopped trying to change Galatea, it began to calm all by itself. The surface wasn’t exactly habitable yet, but certain kinds of bacteria had taken off. For reasons nobody quite understood, cryptobiotic mats of the kind that Galatean scientists had been trying to encourage for decades now decorated the surface with wild blotches of black and purple. Atmospheric rebalancing was happening at the fastest rate since colonisation began.
Ironically, most people never saw that progress. The surface was now considered a buffer zone all too easy for the Photes to target. So the human population lived in subterra complexes engineered for cultural and biological defence. Consequently, modern Galatea had almost nothing in common with the world she’d known.
‘Captain Ludik, you have been cleared by executive order,’ said the pod SAP. ‘However, please note that your body is synthesising a large number of compounds that I cannot identify. Therefore, a chance remains—’
Ann shut the SAP off again and urged the vehicle forward. Why, after forty years, Galatean scientists couldn’t come up with a bioarray capable of recognising her and treating her as a special case, she had no idea.
The pod slid into the tunnel on the other side of the quarantine chamber and through another wall of rock before emerging onto an elevated rail running through the huge, open space of Sharptown One. The environment had been designed to resemble a cross between a cathedral interior and a river valley. Light beamed down from the peak of the two-hundred-metre-high Gothic ceiling, which was decorated in reassuring shades of sky-blue. The bottom of the habitat was a tiered landscape of dormitories and work-spaces in soft, white marble, interspersed with communal gardens and the all-important game fields.