by Tobias Wade
“You’re right, old friend. I’m leaving now,” Hallum said at last.
“I wish it wouldn’t end this way, letting obligations spoil our friendship like that,” Malberry said, unable or unwilling to disguise the gloating triumph in his voice. “I don’t imagine you’ll be re-elected with Gamber thinking you murdered her daughter though, so perhaps this is goodbye after all. Chin up, old sport—not everyone is cut out for the political life. It requires a level of personal sacrifice not everyone is prepared to offer.”
“Whose sacrifice? Yours, or theirs?” Hallum asked, gesturing at the sleeping prisoners and their gurgling machines. “Or were you referring to the sacrifice of your values, and your oath to serve the people even when there are obstacles in the way?”
“There’s no need to be rude about it,” Malberry replied amiably. He gestured for one of the rubber-gloved Masks take over his work at the console. “It is my moral responsibility to stay in power, or some Outlander Senator is going to take my place and do unspeakable things. Whatever compromises I have to make along the way are just politics. It’s nothing personal.”
All else having failed, why not just tell Malberry the truth? It felt like a drastic course of action, but what else were last resorts for?
“You should know that Draith isn’t just a virus—he’s a way out for all of us. Thousands of years of one king replacing another, all thinking they deserve power, all squabbling children who will never rise above the limitations of their humanity. For the first time in history we have the chance to break the cycle with an intelligence far greater than our own. And you’re going to throw it all away, for what? So the internet will work better? Is that all we were born to do?”
Malberry stroked all of his chins, one after the other. “You want Draith to be the next King?”
“Only in a simulated world. Think of it—we can study it as it creates a simulated paradise, and we can learn to do the same. Like Prometheus bringing fire from the gods, we will be the ones delivering salvation to humanity. Isn’t that better than a good day at the polls?”
“You’ve gone absolutely batty,” Malberry said with awe. “I’ve tried to be patient with you, but this utopian nonsense has really gone too far. Masks! Is this a secured facility, or is it not? Escort the senator out of this establishment. We have work to do!”
A few hesitant steps from the surrounding Masks lost their momentum in the face of Hallum’s icy glare. He stared down each of them before turning haughtily toward the exit.
“Through the course of this program, I have often asked my prisoners to make sacrifices to prove they can learn to better serve society,” Hallum said, carefully measuring his words. “I do not shirk now that my turn has come to throw myself upon the pyre. This is not over. You are a fool to think you can defeat Draith so easily.”
“The Galactic Express is moving at top speed toward the black hole,” announced the Mask in front of the computer console. “We’ll be done here before lunch.”
Malberry grinned. “Here I come, savior of the internet, the most popular Senator on Pria.”
“These words are useful things. So much information can be conveyed with the manipulation of the mouth to create vibrations in the air. How jolly.”
To say that Ramnus cowered from the alien child was an insult to cowards everywhere. The boy’s voice was like a bad radio connection, filled with static and pops and sudden silences. The creature had aged too, having managed several years of growth while it had been hiding behind the cryogenic tank. The Habanon skin that had engulfed him before now seemed like breezy summer wear, and the resemblance between him and Tareesh was now unmistakably uncanny.
“How did you learn to speak so quickly?” Sali asked suspiciously.
“Was it quick? How long is it supposed to take?”
“I was eight,” Ramnus replied, recovering from his cowardice just in time for shame to take over.
“And look at you! It would have taken a human years to grow as much as you have. You haven’t even eaten anything yet!”
“Have too. I found this.” Draith held out an empty container, turning it upside-down for emphasis.
“Hey, isn’t that the thing we were carrying antimatter in?” Elden asked.
“If you don’t anti-mind, it doesn’t anti-matter.” Draith giggled like tin cans being thrown down the stairs.
“How did you get that?” Sali scolded. “We need that to get home!”
“Found it.” Draith burped with the sound of a hundred dragons watching their team make the winning goal.
“How did you do that?” Ramnus asked, valiantly inching back toward the corner of the room.
Draith shrugged his bony shoulders unevenly. “I can do all sorts of stuff. Is it okay if I crash here for a bit? I think I’ve gotten lost somehow.”
Sali kept her eyes on the boy while she dragged Ramnus away from the wall. The large man seemed much less comfortable now than when the alien took the shape of those monstrous insects.
“What… are you… Draith? Do you remember before you came out of that egg?” Sali asked.
Draith shook his head. “Not really. I just found a lot of information floating in there with me, so I used it to build a body.”
“Yeah, that’s cool, I guess.” Then after a pause: “You left a lot of people really pretty… flat back there. Information-less, I guess you’d call them.”
“That’s true,” Draith said thoughtfully. “There were a lot of complicated patterns inside them. I liked that. They all carried models of the world in their heads, but they all believed differently about the same things. It will still take time to sort it all out.”
“So you learned everything the other prisoners knew, is that it?” Sali asked tentatively.
“Please don’t try to drain me flat, Draith,” Elden added. “People don’t like it.”
“Oh, I hadn’t realized you were people,” Draith said absently. He was exploring his surroundings, walking unevenly and swiveling a neck that was slightly too long and flexible for Sali’s comfort. Parts of Draith occasionally appeared to stretch or contract as though someone was playing with his aspect ratio. And then there were the colors, muted patterns like tattoos flashing dully across his skin. The patterns were constantly rearranging themselves and never seemed to show the same design twice. It was also notable that his face did not maintain a single expression for more than a few moments at a time, ranging between joy and fury within the span of a sentence. The constant flickering of emotion coincided with the changing patterns on his skin, seeming almost as if he were having a high speed conversation with himself while he spoke with the others.
“Definitely people,” Ramnus agreed readily. “And I’m pretty sure anything that can kill us is something we don’t like.”
“Absolutely anything that can kill us. Pain is bad too,” Sali clarified hurriedly.
“I’m sorry, I won’t do it again. The brains were starting to get repetitive after the third or fourth one anyway. They weren’t like you, Sali Halzey. I can feel a very unusual pattern in your brain. Would you mind if I got a closer look, if it did not involve the consumption of your body?”
“Erm, definitely not, no,” Sali said. “But thanks for asking.”
“No offense has been taken,” Draith replied peacefully. “I will continue to examine what I currently have to work with, but it’s going to take too long with this computation method. The synaptic networks from those humans were inefficiently organized for generating calculation. I can do better.”
“That’s a fun… educational thing. For kids to do. Right?” Elden asked.
“Is there anything… more specific you’d like to learn?” Sali asked.
“Why are you afraid for me to read the pattern in your head?” Draith asked immediately. “The information on your hard drive will be so much easier to process than this organic matter.”
“Come on man, it’s personal. Just trust me on this, you wouldn’t be happier for knowing everything I’ve got going on
in here.”
“Why not? Please let me see. I will make the visitation into your mind feel like an ice cream float.”
“The way it tastes, or the way it would feel if it was shoved in your brain?” Elden asked conversationally.
“Is there a difference?” Draith asked, confused. “Oh there is so much to know. Will you help me learn everything?”
There was something about the way the boy said ‘learn everything’ that sent shivers down Sali’s spine. She admired the curious spirit which felt so familiar to her own, and his words wouldn’t have bothered her as much if he had only said ‘learn about everything’. But that’s because all humans could ever hope to do was learn ‘about everything’.
It didn’t matter how much information Sali uploaded, she could only direct her attention to one thing at a time. She would always only know about things, that superficial story that humans told each other to conceal all the messy complexity of how the world really works. And if that storyteller was very clever, and worked very hard her whole life long, she might just see the glimpse of a truer nature about one tiny aspect of life. She might know most of the things worth knowing about a certain type of snail, or how a handful of molecules interacted with each other in unusual conditions. Those rare individuals who could answer a single old question would be called geniuses, the scientist heroes who lifted the rest of humankind on their shoulders.
When the boy said he wanted to ‘learn everything’, the thought brought a whole unwelcome wagon train which cut down some familiar old trees, built a town, elected a mayor, had the old mayor shot, elected a new mayor, and generally settled down and to form a grand old civilization worth of strange new thoughts in Sali’s mind. She no longer needed to see his yellow eyes to understand that she was having a conversation with an alien being, one that could rewrite its own existence with the effort of a thought. Whatever enhancements Sali incrementally installed, she’d never be like that. It wasn’t exactly jealousy that she felt; not quite fear, nor specifically awe, but some potent new insignificance that she had never encountered before.
Elden felt it too. It was like watching one layer of his deep thoughts being stripped away at a time, all the way to that thing at the center from which the rest grew. It was a place where a house cat sees a tiger and wonders to itself, ‘If something like that is walking around out there, then what exactly is the point of being me?’
Draith knelt on the ground before Sali and put his hands together in an earnest plea.
Sali moved backward until she felt the steel wall. Ramnus took a threatening step toward the boy, but Sali held out a hand to hold him back.
“People also like staying a little away from each other,” Sali said, feeling a bit less flustered when Draith had returned to beyond arms reach. Even that didn’t mean much when his limbs seemed to stretch and change at a whim. “There aren’t any more answers in my head. Just questions without answers. And even if they did teach you something, they’d be answers you’d wished you’d never bothered to look for anyway. It’s a whole mess in here, take my word for it.”
“No, it’s a mess out there,” Draith said, waving his arms vaguely at the world. “You’re quite organized, with remarkably low entropy. If you’re talking about fears, and self-doubt, and the existential dread you feel about your social acceptance and inevitable mortality, then you should know that all the villagers I absorbed contained similar information. There wasn’t much variation on the dread, they just varied how much they thought about it. You shouldn’t feel ashamed about your own psychology.”
“There are some pretty scary thoughts that I wouldn’t want in my head,” Ramnus said. “Try this one out for size: had any of those villagers ever fallen in love?”
“All of them, a most pleasing pattern.”
“Now tell me how they felt when someone didn’t love them back.”
“Oh!” Draith exclaimed, collapsing over backward onto the floor. “Why do they do this to themselves?!”
“It gets worse,” Ramnus insisted earnestly. “What if they pretend to love you, and then move on and forget about you? What if your child becomes a stranger to you? What if your bills are due, and everyone you know is angry all the time, and you’re getting older, and it’s all happening at once, and this is the best it’s ever going to get? What does that feel like?”
“It hurts! I don’t like it!” Draith howled, covering his ears with his hands.
“Stop it, Ramnus, you’re being mean to him!”
“Yeah, I’m sorry. Didn’t want him to suck anyone else dry, that’s all.”
“Why? Why would a mind do that to itself?” Draith trembled, not the least affected by Ramnus’ apology. “Why would a mind like that exist to feel that way? Who would build it? Then who would build them? Then—Oh no. Oh no no no, I don’t like it!”
“Now look what you’ve done!” Sali exclaimed. “Do something!”
The existentialism was contagious. It didn’t matter that Draith wasn’t like her. It was impossible to see the boy hurting without feeling his pain. It was as though an avalanche had been set off in his head, rolling up the individual griefs of each prisoner into one great tumbling landslide of overwhelming despair. Sali raced through her own files to find a suitable refutation to the things Ramnus had said, but here in the heat of the moment watching the boy suffer, it was impossible to find a satisfactory answer to his questions.
Ramnus knelt and hugged Draith to his chest, burying the boy’s snotty face into his snowy beard. It seemed to have been the right thing to say. Sali watched the boy melt into Ramnus’ arms, and found herself wondering what life would have been like if each screaming match with her mother had ended that way instead. It was a good, wholesome kind of sadness that feels better when it’s out in the open and not tucked away. Draith’s hysterical gasps had already subsided to quiet sniffles, and Ramnus still hadn’t let go.
“There there, that’s alright. You’re one of us now. There’s nobody expecting you to know all the answers, that’s not what being happy is about.”
“How do I…be happy?” Draith sniffed.
“Think happy thoughts, that’s all. If you figure out better, you let us know.”
“Happy thoughts… right. There are plenty of happy memories between the prisoners. I think I can do that.” Draith maintained a look of utter concentration for a moment before he became visibly upset again.
“What is it this time?” Elden asked. “Does it have something to do with the meaning of life?”
“No, I’ve already got that one all figured out. What’s bothering me now is that we’re currently being piloted towards a black hole. The front half of the ship is already less than a quarter of the ship! We’re going to be crushed, pulverized, undone, and never put back together again!”
“Amore found one already?” Sali charged the door again uselessly. “I hope you know this is your fault, Elden. Amore is too stubborn for blame to work on, so voting for the black hole is completely your fault.”
“It’s true! It’s all my fault! I don’t know how she puts up with me sometimes!” Elden wailed.
“Happy thoughts—”
“Shut up, Ramnus! I’m thinking!”
“Is the door bothering you? Here, I can fix that.” Draith waved his hand and everyone in the room began to spontaneously float. The pink fluid within the cryogenic tank glooped and glopped into the air, still clinging together in great gooey globules.
“How did you turn off the artificial gravity?” Sali asked, pushing away from Ramnus with her feet to float towards the door. It opened easily now that the hunk of metal on the other side was floating in the air.
“I didn’t. I just changed the physics around us. Where’s the engine room at?”
“That makes me a little uncomfortable,” Ramnus admitted as they pulled themselves along the walls after Draith.
“One problem at a time,” Sali asserted. “We have to stop Amore.”
“Too late for that,” Draith s
aid. “The current configuration of the ship won’t be able to escape the curvature of the gravitational field. Where are the engines?”
“Yeah, sure, my blueprint says the engines are directly underneath us, and there should be a port down… that way. What do you know about cosmology and rocket engines though?”
“One of prisoners used to be a physicist,” Draith explained. “His name was Grand Shaman Ang. Although later in life he certainly had some funny ideas which really didn’t fit with his first ones in the least.” Draith rotated his head nearly all the way around, smiling over his shoulder as he unscrewed the metal hatch to lead them down. “It’s too bad he forgot so much of his work. I was having fun solving the equations he left unfinished while all of you were attacking each other with democracy.”
Down the hatch, they followed Draith into the engine room where the bulbous thrusters dominated the cramped space. Countless dials embedded within the maze of red tubing displayed all manner of terrified exclamation marks and threatening yellow safety warnings. The stuffy air could have been produced in the armpit of a hardworking robot.
“Hm ah yes I understand now.” Draith said. He poked at part of the red tubing, then withdrew his hand which now smelled considerably of bacon. The burned hand dropped off from the stump on his wrist, instantaneously replaced with a brand new hand. “It’s very hot,” he concluded scientifically.
“Focus, Draith. Can you turn the ship around in time?” Sali asked.
“No, I’m afraid it’s quite impossible. The energy from the black hole is too complicated for me to unravel. If we had a little more time, I could redesign my brain sufficiently to increase its capacity, but I fear we do not. Nothing can stop us from entering the black hole.”
“I was this close to really letting Amore know what I thought this time too,” Elden griped. “Ohh I was really going to let her have it.”
“Not to fear, there is another way. From what I understand from Ang’s physics, I might be able to generate enough negative energy to inflate worm hole which grants us safe passage through the black hole and out near Pria. At least… I could do it if…” Draith’s voice trailed off as he stared intently at Sali.