One Giant Leap

by Heather Kaczynski

  Yeah, that’d go over really well. Me and the billion other clowns out there could vie for airspace. Without the backing of SEE and the US government—which I’d never get now—I had no standing. Nobody listened to teenage girls, especially not brown ones.

  I couldn’t think of any way that I could get the truth out there without becoming just one more nonsensical voice in a sea of voices, all clamoring to be heard.

  I had to find someone influential to boost my voice. Someone other people would believe.

  Either that, or figure out what the weapon did, and how to use it.

  It was up to me. Sunny—and any truth she might hold—was in my head. I’d need to find a way to access her. Tonight.

  But that was the problem—I’d tried. Maybe it was too early—maybe the innervations that needed to happen hadn’t had time to grow. The connections hadn’t been formed.

  “Cass,” Emilio said suddenly, concerned. I’d drifted out of the conversation and startled to find my friends looking at me with matching expressions. “Are you okay?”

  “There’s something I haven’t told you guys.” I explained about Sunny, leaving out the part about the weapon. I needed to talk to Luka about that first to figure out what we were going to do. “I need to be able to get the information that’s locked in my head out somehow.”

  Only Hanna looked unsurprised.

  “We get the data off Sunny as fast as we can,” I said. “And we get it to the people who can do something about it.”

  “Such as?” Hanna asked.

  “People we trust. Pierce, maybe. I don’t know if he has any real power at NASA now, but people respect the hell out of him. He has sway.”

  “Would Crane care if he knew the vrag were the bad guys? Wouldn’t this threat override any hope of him being able to ally with them? Would anybody care?” Emilio asked.

  “Not necessarily,” Luka said. He glanced at the television. We all watched a moment, reading the scrolling news ticker and the closed captions of the president making a speech. “If America turns us in, the vrag will consider it an act of alliance. If they do not, it’s an act of war.”

  “They want that alliance. So they won’t care what we have to say,” I said. “Even though it’s the truth.”

  “Really, Cassie. Has anyone in power ever cared about the truth?” Hanna asked.

  No. They hadn’t. Not for a long time.

  “Crane wants power,” Hanna said. “That’s all. He’ll do whatever he has to do to get it.”

  We were all tired, energy sucked out and replaced with the anxiety of a ticking clock. Hanna disappeared into her room. Mitsuko, Emilio, and I stayed glued to the TV for as long as we dared, hungry for news, waiting for some brilliant idea to strike.

  Sometime that afternoon, after they’d issued the warning, the vrag underscored their threat by cratering a cornfield in north Texas. No deaths, but some farmers had been taken to the hospital. I didn’t miss the fact that I had crash-landed in the vicinity.

  The message was clear: next time, people would die.

  A cold, swirling maelstrom of dread was churning inside me. Dread and guilt. I was frozen, watching TV and unable to make myself move away. If I didn’t do something, tomorrow people were going to die.

  But I couldn’t tear my eyes off the screen. I sat there and let the waves of guilt roll over me. Felt the weight of the burner cell in my lap, with its now-full signal bars, and thought about calling my mom.

  “Hey, I know I shouldn’t be surprised, and in the scheme of things this is, like, the least important question, but—how do you get such a clear TV signal all the way out here?” Emilio’s voice was somewhere near me, but I was barely registering it.

  Luka gave him a pointed glance, eyebrows raised. “Faster-than-light travel,” he said again, slowly.

  “Okay, okay,” Emilio said. “Just thought I’d ask.”

  Maybe taking that as an opening—maybe trying to change the subject or lessen the tension in the room—Luka briefed us quickly on the house. Sensing trouble and being ever-cautious, Luka’s family had been around the world for many decades installing fail-safes in many different countries. I suppose when you’re a group of less than fifty aliens hiding in plain sight from your adopted planet’s dominant species, it’s in your best interests to set up a whole lot of places to hide. They even had secret caches of supplies, money, and identities stashed in a lockbox in the closet.

  Luka’s family trusted no humans; they’d no friends to rely on in times of trouble. Only each other.

  I began to see the deep well of grief that Luka had kept a lid on during our journey back. He was more alone now than anyone could be.

  He had no friends because he could not trust humans. Before SEE and the competition, I’d had no friends because I only wanted to win.

  And now that I had friends, I’d dragged them here, into this.

  Soon, everyone else claimed fatigue and went into their respective bedrooms. Luka and I were alone.

  My eyes were burning, my limbs heavy, but I couldn’t let myself sleep. I had only hours left to figure out what to do.

  Luka was already unpacking the bags of kitchen goods. It didn’t take long, but he was moving slowly, mechanically, like his mind was elsewhere and he was on autopilot. We’d eaten most of the trip food in the car, which was now hidden inside the garage attached to the house. I didn’t know when—or if—Mitsuko planned to return it.

  We stared at each other a moment. A draft washed over my bare arms as the air-conditioning kicked on, making me shiver. Half buried in the earth, this place got cold quickly at night.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked him. There was a touch of desperation in my voice that I hadn’t meant to be there.

  Luka turned his eyes to me slowly, like he was delaying the inevitable. “I’ll go to the megobari,” he said, determined. “Take the weapon to them. Then we can take out the vrag—hopefully before they ever know we are there.”

  My hands formed fists at my sides.

  “It’s the best chance we have,” Luka said quietly.

  “And how long will that take?” I asked, matching his tone. “We can’t let the vrag hurt innocent people.”

  He said nothing.

  “We don’t even know what this weapon does. What if it—I don’t know—opens up a black hole? It wouldn’t even need to do that much. What if it poisons our air, or blasts Texas off the map? We don’t know.” My voice was edging into hysteria. “No, I’m going to figure out what it is. I’m gonna try to access whatever Sunny copied and figure out what the hell we brought back with us.”

  I whirled around, heart racing in anger, and there was Hanna, standing in the doorway. She’d been gone a while—I’d assumed she was asleep.

  “How long have you been standing there?” I asked, breath coming fast for some reason.

  “Long enough.” She surveyed me appraisingly, arms crossed over her chest. “I think I have something that can help you.”

  We followed Hanna back to her room, a small, windowless space with a twin bunk bed pushed in the corner. She went to the nightstand, pulled out a drawer, and came back with a flat black device, like a tablet but thicker.

  Sitting on the edge of the lower bunk, she swiped her index fingers across the surface and it shimmered to life. The tablet now seemed more liquid, somehow—like a bowl of water in a dark glass. Cool blue lights hovered over the surface, a holographic control panel.

  “What the hell is that?” I whispered, hoping not to wake the others sleeping in the rooms next door.

  “A little experimental device I took with me when I left SEE.” She dipped her fingers back into the surface—literally, because now the surface wasn’t solid, but some kind of permeable gel or . . . or something. I didn’t have words to explain it. The hologram shifted slightly, but it was too small and backward for me to read. I sat beside her to get a closer look. “It’s called Oracle.”

  She tilted her neck, the tendons straining, and used
one finger to draw her hair up and away. A telltale scar marked the hollow space behind her ear. “You have a computer chip in your head,” she said, matter-of-fact. “So do I. Mine is called Pinnacle.”

  At the look of shock on my face, she raised her eyebrows, her face becoming a little smug. “When you left, I became Crane’s star pupil. Pinnacle is Sunny’s smarter, faster big brother, and I’ve been working with it implanted in my brain for six months.”

  Luka eyed her suspiciously. “That is megobari technology. How did you—”

  “Humans are intelligent, too,” Hanna shot back. “At least, some of us are. It’s not exactly a stretch. Humans have been perfecting human-computer interfaces for years. Your people aren’t the only ones who can invent new technology. You all just gave us the push we needed when you sent that transmission.”

  Luka’s mouth twisted angrily, but he didn’t open it again.

  “You did send us a bunch of schematics for building a ship like yours,” I said. “Humans are quick learners.”

  Hanna shook her head, letting her hair fall back over her ear. “Oracle is an output node for Pinnacle that I interface with directly. They developed this along with Pinnacle, as a way for me to have an external processor of sorts. It should also allow you to have an output for whatever it is you’re trying to get from Sunny, and share it with the rest of the world.” A light beam trailed over her face, I assumed reading her biometrics, and then the hologram pulsed green. “It’s ready.”

  “Ready for what?” I asked.

  Hanna withdrew her hands from the touchscreen. “Just place your hand here and direct Sunny to show her what you want.”

  I took a steadying breath. “Will it work for me?”

  “I see no reason why it wouldn’t.”

  I reached a trembling hand to the screen, shivering as my fingertips made contact and sank into it, ever so slightly. The surface was slightly warm, making my fingertips tingle like I was touching raw electricity, like I was gathering static charge. The microfilm coating the surface was something not quite aqueous, not quite solid, and a part of me couldn’t help listing the possible materials—aerogel? Semigel? Liquid crystal polymer? Carbon nanofoam?—before I made myself concentrate on the task at hand.

  “Sunny, play the visual records from Odysseus, starting at the beginning.”

  Sunny apparently understood me despite my lack of specificity, which most computers needed to get anything accomplished. But of course she didn’t need it; she didn’t even need my audible command. She read my intent. It was as effortless as deciding to brush a stray lock of hair out of my face and watching my hand obey.

  The blue holographic display returned, became a ghostly sort of screen. The first few seconds of my helmet’s shaky cam footage began to play on-screen, sans audio.

  Sunny had started at the very beginning, when I’d first turned on my helmet cam. We were looking at the backs of space suits as, one by one, they jumped from Odysseus onto the surface of another world. It was one of the most, if not the most, important moments of my life, playing out on-screen like it was filmed on a Hollywood set. It was like literally taking a memory out of my head and putting it on display for everyone in the room to see. Creepy. And amazing.

  Luka emanated stress and impatience, which was unusual for him. “We need to view the records from the megobari base. We need to know how to turn on the weapon.”

  The crew on-screen had spread out now, walking slowly and cautiously through a dark yellow cavern. I knew what was about to happen. Suddenly I realized I needed to cut off the feed.

  “Sunny, turn it off, please.” The video froze, and the display faded. I didn’t want Luka to have to see his family on the screen. Without speaking aloud, I told Sunny: Copy my helmet-cam recordings from up until the destruction of Exodus to Oracle and encrypt them.

  Luka had turned so I could see only his profile, and my eyes were afraid to linger too long on his face for fear of what I’d see there.

  We didn’t have time to dwell right now. “Sunny, please display the data you copied from the megobari moon base.”

  Megobari records are file-format incompatible with current processing system.

  Dismayed, I pulled my hand away and the screen faded. “She says the file formats are incompatible. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t access them before? What should we do?”

  “This computer is human built,” Luka said. “It does not know how to interpret the information you are attempting to access. The megobari language is completely different from your own. I cannot change this.”

  “So, what do you mean . . . that’s it?” I asked, incredulous. “After all this? Our systems just aren’t compatible?”

  Luka was stone-faced, his lips blanched. If this device from SEE couldn’t do it, nothing could.

  “I have an alternative,” Hanna said. She touched her palm to Oracle. “I think combining the processing power of both of our internal computers might be our shot at untangling the mess of megobari records. Sunny and Pinnacle could, possibly, convert the incompatible data into something we can understand—they both understand our brains, after all, and might be able to translate since Sunny did have access to the source language at one point in time. Hypothetically, we could use Oracle as a medium to interface directly with each other. Pinnacle’s processing power added to Sunny’s could be enough to translate those files. And we can save them to Oracle for playback or uploading.”

  “I don’t understand how this will help,” I said.

  “When we both touch this interface node, it will allow direct communication between Sunny and Pinnacle. I will warn you that being connected to Pinnacle is . . .” A grimace flashed across her face. “. . . an overwhelming experience. I had months to work up to it, but you will not. You will have to fight it for control. There will be a lot of input for you to manage. Sunny and Pinnacle aren’t designed to coexist in one machine, let alone a human brain. If you lose—there’s not much I can do.”

  “Won’t there be a similar risk to you?” The Hanna I knew wasn’t in the habit of putting herself in harm’s way unless there was some benefit to her.

  “Sunny isn’t designed the same way. She’s more of a background presence, meant to monitor and observe, only coming to assist when called. Pinnacle is more . . . dominating.” Hanna was not accustomed to giving much away, but the way her expression darkened at that made me wonder what she’d dealt with in my absence.

  Luka was studying me intently. I could almost see the gears turning behind his eyes, weighing the options, the risks. “It is possible that could work. But, Cassie—your implant is so new. Your networking with Sunny has not even been fully established. It’s risking a lot to stress your system.”

  I refused to accept that we were out of the game, just like that. “We have to try. We can’t waste any more time.”

  A hard knot had formed at the base of my throat; I pressed a fist there to relieve the pressure. So much for hoping for the best. Did it really even matter if I fried my brain, if I was turning myself in to the vrag tomorrow?

  Luka’s worried eyes bored into me. I grasped for something positive to hang on to. “I’ve been linked to Sunny for a long time, when you think about it. Six months. I practiced with her. It . . . it should be fine. Don’t give me that look.”

  “Oracle will monitor our vital signs,” Hanna told him.

  Luka nodded slowly, eyes never leaving mine. “If I think you’re in danger, I’m pulling the plug.”

  “It’ll be fine. Hardly the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done.” I managed a smile.

  As I reached out to touch the interface, Hanna’s eyes caught mine. “You might be wrong about that.”

  Twenty-Three

  I CLOSED MY eyes. Without drugs helping the process along, I needed a few minutes to find the place where my brain was quiet, where I used to go to find the door to let Sunny in. Only now Sunny was already here, silent and observant and invisible, and the one knocking on the door—loudly knock
ing—was a stranger.

  I’d only just allowed the connection when that door burst open, with sensation and thought and data flooding in that was not my own. My own self was swept away by the crashing tide of information.

  There was so much data, fragmented into a billion particles, that it made no sense at all; I was seeing the very atoms of things, trillions of individual bits of data that made no logical sense on their own. Pictures broken down into their pixels, life broken down into DNA. It was a universe of nonsense and static. I was helpless to slow down the flow or to hold on to a single bit of data.

  Sunny had been quiet, gentle, sane, in comparison to this. This was the raw brain of a computer that could process information faster than my own and with no idea how to convert it so that I might understand. Pinnacle didn’t know me; it was adapted to Hanna’s electrical pathways, not mine. Pinnacle could have been trying to communicate with me or kill me; we didn’t speak the same language.

  I scrabbled, gasped, unable to feel my physical body or perceive where it was in space, drowning helplessly in the onslaught, my hand frozen to the interface node.

  But then I felt something slower and more methodical emerge from the chaos, sorting it almost as fast as it came at me, and the information became a more manageable trickle.

  “Sunny,” I said, only I didn’t say it, because I was nothing but my own thoughts in my head.

  Sunny was orderly. She had spent so much time interfaced with my brain that she knew how it was organized. She set about putting the right bits of data in the right places, a superpowered secretary, collating and merging and formatting the bits into manageable chunks I could actually understand, if not hold on to.

  Until, finally, I could think.

  Sunny, I thought again.

  Hello, Cassie. This felt right. Only now our connection was supremely intimate; she was glued to me, my conjoined twin, with our own secret language. Her voice was my voice; her thoughts were my thoughts. Though she had very few thoughts at the moment; most of her capacity was being taken up in processing the flow of information coming from Pinnacle.