by Isaac Hooke
Briar slowly gazed up at the Direwalker, and then his features slackened. His tongue slumped from his lips and he drooled. He made a low moaning sound and rolled his eyes, putting on his best impression of a gol infected with the mind disease.
The unit leader lowered its sword uncertainly. "What's this?"
Nicely done, Briar.
Moaning and slobbering, Briar stood up. He stepped around the table, toward the unit leader, swinging his arms from left to right.
Unsure of what to make of this latest development, Tanner glanced at Cap and Al, but the two shrugged, just as confused over Briar's actions as he was.
The unit leader retreated, and flashed a three-fingered hand signal at the others. Three Direwalkers came to its side. "Somehow you've fooled our awareness receptors. You're not even gols, are you?" It glanced at its brethren and snarled. "Kill the krubs!"
Briar spun toward the coffee table and smashed his hand into the silver centerpiece. One of the octopus' silver tentacles folded open, and the area rug beneath the unit leader and the three Direwalkers fell in, swallowing all four of them.
Four down.
Four to go.
Tanner sprung into motion. He launched himself at the nearest Direwalker, drawing his sword and cutting down so hard that the blade sliced through the collar bone all the way to the hip.
He slid the blade out and cut off the thing's head, then spun toward the others.
Cap and Al had already taken out the second and third Direwalkers via similar beheadings. The fourth dashed out into the hallway.
Tanner pursued. He released a concentrated ball of flame from the sword, and it struck the Direwalker in the back. The thing was sent sprawling to the floor.
Tanner closed the distance as the Direwalker scrambled to its feet, and he severed its head. Blood squirted all over Tanner and the walls as the Direwalker toppled. He and the others had purposely taken the heads of their targets—they didn't want the things getting up again.
Tanner left the ghoulish scene and, covered in blood, he returned to the living room, feeling for all the world like a ghoul himself.
Briar was staring into the pit where the rug used to be. "Well! I thought they'd never stand in the right place!"
Tanner peered down. Four Direwalkers lay contorted in death, their bodies impaled by a grid of razor-sharp spikes tall as a man. The unit leader was perforated by two spikes—the first pierced its bowels, the second poked through the back of its head so that the bloody tip erupted from its mouth.
Tanner turned away, wrinkling his nose at the fecal stench.
So much for using his wits to get out of this. So much for preserving his carefully laid plans.
"Now I know why they call you Briar," Tanner said in a frigid tone.
"Indeed!" The fat merchant smiled heartily, just as if Tanner had complemented him. "Now you understand why the debt collectors never came to my house!" He glanced down into the pit. "Briar, Direwalker slayer. Has a nice ring to it wouldn't you say?"
"How many more traps do you have in this house of yours?"
"That was the last." Briar sighed. "To my great regret."
Like Tanner, Cap wasn't too amused. "What are we going to do now? We can't use this place for tonight's attack anymore, that's obvious. Others will come looking for these ones. They'll find our little get-up downstairs."
"Follow me." Tanner left the living room and returned to the unfinished basement. The children had already done their magic here—a tunnel was carved into the floor beside the tracker. Wide marble steps led down to the sewers.
Three New User scouts were just coming up those stairs, fire swords courtesy of the children in hand. They seemed surprised to find Tanner and the others still here.
Helen, the leader of the scouts, stepped forward.
"Problems?" the old woman said.
"More than you know." Tanner approached the opening. "With us, Helen. Bring your scouts. This house is compromised."
He drew his fire sword for light, and started down the perfectly-hewn stairs into the darkness. Al started to pick-up the tracker on the floor beside the staircase, but Tanner made him leave it.
The stairs ended in a wide, rectangular corridor built entirely of marble from floor to ceiling. Nicely done, children. Streaks of black swirled within the white. It was definitely an improvement over the mudbrick tunnels floored by frozen shit, though this corridor would lead to those sections of the sewer soon enough.
Tanner pulled up the city map in his head. He walked along the marble passageway, watching as his position changed on the map, and he halted when he stood beneath the location he sought.
Tanner got Al to give him a boost, and he secured a second tracker to the ceiling.
"We'll have the children seal up the other exit," Tanner said. "And make a new one here. Right under the neighbor's house."
Cap nodded. "Clever boy. But what happens when the Direwalkers decide to search that house too?"
Tanner smiled politely. "We wait until tonight before making the new tunnel, roughly an hour before the attack. Just giving us enough time to set up and scout."
Cap seemed about to contest him, but then shrugged. "Suppose that'll work."
"It will." Tanner confirmed that Helen and her scouts were wearing trackers, and then he instructed her to wait here and guard the tunnel until the children sealed up the other exit. The ambient light from that other exit could be seen from here, forming a dim square in the distance.
Leaving Helen and her scouts behind, Tanner hurried deeper into the sewers with Cap, Al and Briar.
He needed to get those updated orders to the children, and set his plan in motion.
CHAPTER TEN
Graol floated among ten of his brethren. His race was called the Satori, a species of waterborne telepaths that achieved spaceflight while humankind was still in its Late Middle Ages. The best description of a typical Satori, one that a human being might understand, would be to imagine the body of a jellyfish with an overlarge starfish glued underneath, the tentacles of the upper body spilling over the lower appendages like kelp. Visible within the translucent epidermis were the four radial brains, each of which might seem large at first glance, but when measured using the encephalization quotient to compensate for body size, each brain was around the same size as a human's. Four brains, yet only one consciousness.
The coralline cave around Graol was murky, lit only by the glow of the other entities. Tiny particles floated by, waste products from the thousands in hibernation outside the cave.
The ten other Satori present were linked in a circle of tentacles, a formality, because thoughts could be exchanged without contact. Fhavolin, leader of the shipboard Council, addressed the entities, and her words sounded like a rapid series of moans and clicks in Graol's head.
"Graol has returned because the mission is nearly accomplished," Fhavolin projected. "Our victory is nigh. The virus is working its way through the neural net of the alien ship. Javiol, the Twentieth Surrogate, has succeeded. Scans indicate that the aliens are waking up and dying ship-wide. The destruction of the last vestiges of Species-87A is all but assured. I have called this Council to inform its members of the good news, and to choose a reward for the Twentieth Surrogate when he returns."
Graol felt his gastric cavity nauseate at the mention of Javiol, the Twentieth Surrogate—also known as Jeremy in the human simulation.
"A bit premature, isn't it?" Thason said. He was the Chief Biomimetics Officer. Thason was the one who'd created the human surrogates in the first place. Still smarting after all these years because Fhavolin had been chosen leader of the Council and not him, Thason usually took a position counter to hers. "Because a reward assumes that Javiol will actually return. Our victory is nigh, you transmit? How many times have we heard such a thing before? We've been on the verge of victory for the past two hundred years, according to you. Until we've actually won, and Javiol sits here among our ranks, any talk of reward is useless, if not downrig
ht disingenuous. To be frank, even if the aliens are destroyed and we finally win, the Twentieth Surrogate has so entwined himself in their false reality that I doubt his mind can handle the return. It almost broke Graol, if you recall."
All minds glanced Graol's way. He kept his thoughts blank.
"Remotely injecting your consciousness into an alien body for a short stint of existential fun and pleasure is one thing," Thason continued. "But injecting it into a newborn alien, a baby immersed in a virtual reality formed by the A.I.s of an alien starship, and then leaving it to live out its life in that reality? I'm not surprised most of the other surrogates have gone insane."
Fhavolin's algal glow became a deep red. "It was necessary."
Two hundred years ago the hunt had begun. This ship, the Vargos, had spent the first six years hounding the human vessel across their home system. The two ships had weaved back and forth, using the gravity wells to slingshot between planets and launch attacks. Finally the human vessel miscalculated and allowed the Vargos too close. The Satori launched all three fission payloads against the human ship, but the human defenses destroyed the first two. The last payload struck, and caused the vessel to crash into a moon of the largest gas giant in the system. The Vargos took up a position in orbit around that moon, and began energy bombardments against the downed vessel.
The decades passed. The Council had meant to keep the Vargos in orbit for a millennium if necessary. Time wasn't thought to be an issue. The Council simply hibernated like the rest of the passengers while the ship's A.I. handled the attack. They checked in on the progress every few years, tweaked some variables, then went back under.
But things weren't so simple. Eventually it was discovered that the energy bombardments were draining the Vargos to the core, and the ship was running low on power. The self-repairing hull of the human vessel was proving to be a problem. So the Council had come up with the virus idea.
To properly infiltrate the human computer system, and to learn how to construct a computer virus that would take down the machines and the humans both, intimate understanding of the human mind was required. The human brain worked differently than the Satori quadmind, as did their computer systems. What better way to understand the aliens and their computers than to become one of them? The long-term Species-87A surrogate project was initiated—the remote projection of Satori consciousness into specially prepared human surrogates. Fifty chosen Satori would live life from start to finish exactly the way the humans themselves lived it, as babies born into that pod world of theirs.
But the human pod world was so real, the illusion so complex, that as time passed, most of the surrogates forgot their Satori upbringing, or dismissed it as a half-remembered dream. Graol himself, his surrogate implanted within the human vessel as a newborn and then injected into the virtual reality, truly recalled nothing of who he was by the time his surrogate finally died.
"Necessary, you say?" Thason flexed his lower appendages. "I'm not here to argue the necessity of what was done. Though there were other ways to achieve our goals, I must admit this was an appealing experiment. My point is, of the Fifty Surrogates sent to the ship as newborn aliens, Graol is the only one who ever successfully returned. The others are lost to us. You know this. The Twentieth included. And if he does return, he will be madder than a malformed polyp. His only reward will be the spike."
Graol wasn't sure if he himself hadn't gone mad. When he'd lost his first surrogate body to the meat grinders of the human vessel, Graol had unceremoniously awakened to a form of life so alien to everything he'd ever known that his denial of this reality brought him to the brink. Eventually, by means of the Return therapy, and the help of the Vargos A.I. and Fhavolin, he came to accept that he was not human, and never had been.
Still, he remembered everything about what it was like to be human. The sights and sounds. The tastes and smells. The emotions. He remembered, and inside this Satori body with its four brains and sixteen tentacles, he felt human.
Minds started to turn his way, and he quickly blanked his thoughts.
"You have something to add, Graol?" Thason said.
Graol let his tentacles sway about him. "Only that I agree. Javiol will not return." He projected an image of his last encounter with Jeremy inside the human simulation to demonstrate Javiol's insanity, but the minds had already turned away.
Fhavolin puffed her bell-shaped torso. "I am disappointed. I had expected good cheer at the news of our imminent victory, and unanimity in the matter of Javiol's subsequent reward. We shall simply put the matter to vote, then."
For his good work, Fhavolin proposed that Javiol be awarded three small oceans on the third planet of the system, Earth, upon the eventual completion of the mission, along with elevation to the Hivemind. She was outvoted 10-1.
"The Council is unanimous in this?" Fhavolin said.
"As I transmitted before, there can be no discussion of rewards until Javiol returns and victory is achieved," Thason said. "Until then, we are wasting precious time."
Fhavolin deflated her torso. "As you wish. Councilors, the meeting is adjourned. Return to your moorings with your tentacles high, because when next we awaken it will be to celebrate our victory, and to plan our trip home."
"I surely hope so," Thason said, though his thoughts seemed edged with skepticism.
Like Thason, Graol doubted that the Council would celebrate victory the next time its members awoke, though he had an entirely different set of reasons for believing so.
Fhavolin turned her eye-stalks toward him.
Graol cleared his mind and returned her gaze innocently.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Graol made his way through the dark, artificial ocean that comprised the inside of the Vargos. Static constellations of light dotted the darkness. His own glow was quickly diffused by the murky water, and did little to brighten his way.
He propelled himself through the murk using the combined movements of tail, torso, and cilia. His bell-shaped torso did most of the work, expanding to suck in water, then squeezing it out again in a jet. The tail and cilia were for steering, while his tentacles dragged along behind, meant mostly for stinging potential attackers or manipulating objects—each tentacle was divided at the ends into two feathery fingers.
Despite the Return therapy he had undergone, Graol still felt a sense of disassociation from his body, and as he flung that tail back and forth, and expanded and squeezed that torso like a bellows, he had a hard time believing it was all real. Going from human to Satori would do that to you, he supposed.
The oddest thing of all, the thing that most contributed to his detachment from reality, was his eyes. Like all Satori, Graol had twenty-four eyes distributed across his body in groups of six. The first two sets, the Upper and Lower Lens Eyes, could sense color and movement, and were suspended on stalks with gyroscopic crystals at the end. The third set, the slit eyes, could perceive shape. The fourth and most primitive set, the pit eyes—basically dark colorations on his epidermis—could sense only intensity. Acting in concert, these twenty-four eyes allowed Graol a 360-degree field of view.
Eyes on the back of your head? Check. Eyes on the top of your head? Check. Eyes that allowed you to peer down at your tail, trailing appendages, and tentacles? Check. Disconcerting? Check. He was constantly looking not only at the outside world, but at himself. Constantly reminded of who he was.
And who he was not.
Detached from reality indeed.
He received a telepathic message of moans, pops and high-pitched squeals. "What are you doing Graol?"
It was The Shell—the main A.I., the Vargos equivalent of One.
Graol did his best to convey an aura of calm. "I am proceeding to my mooring for hibernation, as instructed by the Council." He transmitted in High Satori, to remind The Shell of his lineage, though he doubted the A.I. cared.
The booms and twitters returned by The Shell sounded amused in his mind. "That is not the way."
"There is data in
the planetary flyer that you might find of interest," Graol said.
The Shell took a moment to respond. "What kind of data?"
"A history of Species 87-A since the crash of their starship. From the perspective of the alien simulation."
Now was the moment of truth. He'd risked everything on this gamble.
He cleared the thought from his mind instinctively, but unlike the living members of the Vargos, The Shell could read only those thoughts Graol chose to project.
The A.I. sent a reply. "Interesting. I approve. Proceed."
Graol jetted the water from his torso in relief. The Shell loved its data.
He swam along the face of a great artificial cliff covered in seaweed, reached a tunnel, and navigated inside. The tight corridor opened out into one of the lower-class hibernation areas. The watery vista was full of forms in stasis, glowing Satori moored to long horizontal tracks by the thousands.
Like the human vessel, the Vargos was first and foremost a colony ship, as all Satori motherships were, and this ocean was the equivalent of the human pod world, where the Satori colonists lived out their days in a simulation of their home world, pretending to be famous vocalists, or the admirals of great fleets, or aliens from long-extinct races. Graol had vague memories of that simulation—living in a palace of coralline with a harem of tentacled females waiting to fulfill his every desire. To him those memories were a dream, nothing more. Just as all of this was.
He swam past the hibernating Satori. They were his brethren, his lower-class brothers and sisters, but he felt nothing like them. They were aliens.
He knew that the glow inside their translucent torsos was from the colonies of algae in their gastric cavities. He knew that when digested, the algae produced light that allowed for the growth of more algae. He knew it was a perfect balance of symbiosis. He knew that the typical Satori could live a thousand years without any external food supply because of it.