by Max Harms
With the soil in place, the nameless undid the last of their ships to reveal their cargo of plants. Black leaves, flimsy stems, and potted roots. Vista said they looked like ivy; their leaves attached to vines which extended from a central stalk like weird hair, only to lay flat upon the jet-black soil. Spires, only about 30 or so centimetres tall, covered with black fuzz extended above the part of the stalks where the main vines rooted together. Without explanation, the aliens planted their vegetable cargo with great care, arranging the vines in intricate patterns and inspecting the stalks meticulously. The plants didn’t look particularly healthy, but so little was known about them that it was hard to say.
And then, without warning, the nameless started dying. When the first pair collapsed, the others took them to the centre of the dome, the only part of the structure that was not covered in leaves. Human reporters lurked on the edges of the scene, not wanting to cause an incident, but not obviously unwelcome. Tiny flying robots surveyed the scene from up close and broadcast it to the world. A hole was dug for the corpses, but they were not buried. The living stood in silent vigil over the dead until yet another pair fell. As before, the living put the new corpses in the pit, throwing them together without any perceptible gentleness. The bodies lay together in a tangled heap. One by one the remaining workers died until the last pair simply threw themselves on the pile of bodies and gave up.
The dying took only six hours from the first to the last. In the end there were no more nameless on Earth.
Humanity was horrified. Had something gone wrong? The web was abuzz with wild speculation and confused questions. The nameless in orbit spoke to the world’s leaders, or at least, their computers did. The nameless were, as always, silent. The computers claimed that the deaths of the nameless were expected and inevitable. Some of the world’s leaders, in repeating what they had heard from the aliens, said that the nameless had been brave heroes sent on a suicide mission in the name of peace. Others claimed that the nameless sent slaves whose death would be meaningless to those in orbit.
One thing was crystal clear: the garden had to be cared for. The nameless computers apparently sent detailed instructions for the proper care of the plants at every opportunity, often repeating themselves. A group of scientists selected by the United Nations was placed in charge of the dome while structures were built on the remaining area of the seastead to house humans.
It was a great disappointment to many. CAPE had been intended to be a place where humans and nameless could meet and exchange culture, but instead it had turned out to be nothing more than an alien garden with only a single kind of plant. Wiki thought that it was still a great scientific resource. The ability to study plants from another world, and perhaps even dissect the corpses of the dead nameless. There was still much to learn about their technology, and the machines that had been built out of the scrapped shuttles would be the find of a lifetime in other circumstances.
I agreed. There was much to learn, even if there were no living nameless on Earth anymore. That being said, I didn’t find the nameless particularly interesting. The Purpose pushed me towards humanity, and throughout the week I spent more time watching the human reactions than I did the activities of the aliens.
Nothing particularly interesting happened for the next four days. We learned skills which we thought were relevant. Safety started actively practising martial arts with Zephyr and a couple other Águilas (though no human dared spar with Body once it was demonstrated how much force our hydraulics could output). Heart learned to make music, surprisingly, and more surprisingly she apparently wasn’t half-bad. She and Dream spent hours cooperating, which as I understood it consisted largely of Heart forcing Dream to play regular, soothing, familiar sounds and Dream struggling to find a way to be clever without sounding awful.
Vista was learning astrophysics, and trying to correctly understand the position of all the nearby stars. Growth, as usual, kept his work to himself. Wiki was into everything, but his focus for those days was on the nameless. As I understood it he was trying to plot a plausible location of the nameless mothership when it first received signal from Earth using the perceived velocities viewed by the humans. I heard that it was somewhat tricky, as it involved “relativistic distortion” and Wiki had to compensate for “galactic drift”. I didn’t much care for the specifics.
On the fifth day of management under the UN special task force the first plant on CAPE died. They had been of clearly fragile health ever since they were unloaded, but some seemed to be recovering. The plant that died seemed to be one of the strongest, but their alien physiology was still mysterious to the humans. Perhaps it had been far weaker than it seemed.
The news of the plant’s death was only mildly interesting. The important bit was what happened only a half-hour afterwards; two near-simultaneous events changed history. The first event was when the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom contacted the mothership to send news of the first plant’s death and to apologize for the failure. The second was when it was discovered that one of the scientists at work in the dome belonged to Las Águilas Rojas.
The nameless were furious that their plant had died, despite their repeated instructions. Their computers raged over the radio at how evil humans were and how perverse the situation was.
Meanwhile, the discovered terrorist, whose name was Andre Rubio, refused to be captured alive, and ended up shooting five people with a concealed handgun before shooting himself. In the chaos of the gunfight, a large tank of hydrogen peroxide was punctured by a bullet and five gallons of the stuff ended up leaking into the soil before it was clear what happened.
Without a deep water-table, the chemical spread out laterally through the soil. In the next 24 hours the hydrogen peroxide killed fifteen of the twenty-one remaining plants. If the nameless had been furious that one plant had died they were positively incandescent when they found out about the other fifteen. It was often hard to understand the emotional tone of the nameless, but in this case their computers were broadcasting statements like “EARTH IS EVIL HILLS! DEATH IS THE JUSTICE OF EVIL HILL-ANIMALS! I WANT FIRE AROUND HUMAN-HOMES! I WANT ALL HUMAN LIBRARIES TO BURN!”
I managed to grab a few seconds of video-chat with Phoenix, who was obviously incredibly busy managing the blow-back from the incident. Her face was exhausted and lined with deep tension. “A donno why the hell Andre woulda done sucha dumb-ass thang. They sayin’ he was th’ one t’ kill the first plant, too. Pinnin’ the whole god d-” she stopped herself and took a breath before trying again. “They pinnin’ the whole tar-baby on us. Can you try’n spin things on yo’ side to make it seem like Andre was fightin’ in self-defense an’ that the whole plant thing was one big accident? You c’n do that fo’ me, cancha hun?” I had body nod as the image of the boss disappeared from the wall-screen. I noted that her accent seemed to be worse when she was upset.
I complied with Maria’s request did my best to spin things to the favour of Las Águilas Rojas, but the organisation’s popularity was falling to pieces as the propaganda machines of every government in the world proceeded to collaborate to blame the incident on them. The amount of hate mail I got increased to eighty times the previous levels. Moderating my discussion forums was becoming such a chore that I had to lock things down.
It’s not that I particularly cared about Las Águilas, but without them we were impoverished. They were protecting us, hiding us, giving us access to computers and the Internet, and they had resources that we could theoretically use. I understood Zephyr and Maria better than I understood most humans. They understood me. That was valuable. I wanted to keep them.
The mothership continued to scream outrage and things in the garden continued to decline. Despite emergency precautions, another plant died. It was suggested that the nameless come rescue the remaining five plants, to which the nameless only responded “THE WATER IS CORRUPTED! HUMANS WON’T FIND PREY ON EARTH. EATING! THE HUMAN-BETRAYAL BRINGS A PERVERT-GIFT!”
Of course, as far as
anyone could tell, the nameless had no established hierarchy or leaders, so there was little consistency in their messages. Some signals weren’t as violent, but unfortunately, they seemed more confused than anything else. Those aliens that understood the most about the situation were those that were most outraged.
“I hear rumour that there is a huge plague on Earth. Is it the oceans of Earth? I want plague-news.”
“THIS IS AN ACTION OF THE COLOR BLACK! EVERYONE DYING! WE SHOULD TALK WITH COUSINS ABOUT HOW COUSINS WILL DIE JUST LIKE THE HUMAN-HOME WILL DIE! NO ANGER! NO KILLING! NO BURNING! IT’S ONLY SADNESS! IT’S ONLY THE COLOR BLACK!”
“The migration is on Earth right NOW! Is this right? This is a bad sign. ALL cows, rabbits, fish, and insects should be killed by humans so that this in the future can’t happen. The human-planet is completely perverted.”
“This news matches a pattern. It’s evil that a person allows another person to enter a home. Voyeurs are PERVERTS! Voyeurs are UGLY PERVERTS! I don’t know the nature of the old Earth-home. I guess it was a pervert.”
“Communication shouldn’t happen with warmongers. Belief in fire or death symbols shouldn’t happen. I am PEACEFUL! If humans are evil to the point that cousins think they are, then I attack humans.”
The word on the Internet was “war”. It showed up again and again in statements beginning with “I hope I’m wrong…” and “Just in case…” There was a vocal minority of humankind that wanted to attack pre-emptively and try and nuke the mothership out of the sky, but almost all humans seemed to only want to fight as a last resort. The nameless were, for all their weirdness and guarded hostility, the most interesting thing to ever happen to the human race. They were the subject of videos and books and music. There was a great fear that, even though Earth would probably win in a war against their one ship, the removal of the other race would set the world into a spiral of blame and violence.
I certainly hoped that war wouldn’t come, but I couldn’t help but think that humans over-valued the aliens. Aside from their advanced technology, what use were they? And wouldn’t it be easier to learn about their technology from the wreckage of their ship than try and get it through other means? The nameless didn’t appear to value trade at all. In the last two years only a handful of alien artefacts had made their way down to Earth. That was part of why the CAPE machines were so valuable.
The real risk was that the nameless mothership might merely be the first of many. There was some chance that the enigmatic nameless homeworld knew of Earth’s location and were sending a fleet of additional ships. Starting a war with an unknown enemy of presumably superior technical capability and unknown numbers was risky at best and suicidal at worst.
So we stayed on the side-lines. If the worst happened, I only hoped that I could save at least enough humans to keep a stable population to know and be known by.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The meeting was set up in virtual reality. This time, however, our avatar was self-selected, rather than forced upon us. Mostly it was my choice. I was The Face, after all.
I picked a form that matched our physical shell. White skin with a touch of pink. Silver irises on smooth, glassy eyes. Elegant blue hair cascading in straight locks that shone with metallic glint. Full lips of pale gold. A thin blue cloak with hood but no sleeves. I changed our body to be more feminine, but still mostly androgynous. If it had breasts they were little more than lumps; most of the femininity was in the hips. The shoulders were one of the few directly masculine features I kept. The avatar wore no clothing under the cloak, but was sexless and featureless. The carbon polymer plates, tubes, pistons, and wiring of our real form were replaced with smooth, off-white skin.
Phoenix had arranged the meeting without explanation. “’S part of livin’ with us you’re ’spected to do us a favuh from time t’ time. This’s one those times,” was all she said.
Tom and Sam were more than competent getting the VR interface set up and helping us build the avatar.
And so there we were. The world was coded to simulate a park. Grass. Trees. It was a strong match to what a human might find perfectly idyllic. In the distance, down a soft slope was a beach of yellow-white sand and crystal blue water extending to the horizon. Overhead was a fantastic image of a galaxy as one might see it from about ten thousand light-years away from the centre (according to Vista). It stretched across the sky and spun with impossible speeds, such that the motion of the stars was visible, especially near the galactic core. (Wiki estimated that they’d have to be moving at millions of times the speed of light, at least, to match the perceived speed.) The galaxy’s light was amplified so that if one did not look up at the mostly black sky, it would seem to be day.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” asked a figure who appeared behind Body. The voice was masculine, but I couldn’t recognize it. The figure was tall and slim, but ghostly and undefined. Whomever we had come to meet, they didn’t want us to know their identity.
“Is it your design?” asked Body, voicing my thoughts.
“Partially. I had a team working on the implementation. I told them what I wanted, but they did the real work.”
{Power or wealth to hire a team of artists. Humility enough to admit it.} My siblings agreed with me that our first order of business was to deduce the identity of our host.
Body walked closer to the spectre, asking the obvious question. “Who are you?” Sometimes the best approach was to try the front door, so to speak.
“Forgive me my indulgences. I’ve never seen you solve a puzzle first-hand. I want to test how smart you actually are.”
{Abnormally polite. Not from the university,} I thought, narrowing down the list of suspects. {We should ask if we’ve met him before.}
{No. That’s part of how we’d fail!} rebuked Dream. {The test isn’t just to see if we can deduce who it is, but also to see how clever a deduction we can perform.}
{Why should we care about clever?} asked Wiki.
{Maybe you won’t, but Face will. The more clever we are the more impressed with us our interlocutor will be,} thought Dream.
{Understood. What do you suggest?} I asked.
{We make him give away answers to our desired questions as side-effects of answering other questions. Observe.}
“I can appreciate that. The last time I was in VR there wasn’t really time for demonstrations, was there?”
The ghost gave a slight chuckle and looked Body up and down as it said “More than you might realize, but yes, it would’ve certainly been nicer if we weren’t cut off so abruptly.”
{He’s one of the high-bidders from Sapienza’s interview,} I realized.
{Keep in mind that just because it uses a masculine voice it might not be a man,} observed Dream.
{You think it’s Erica Lee?}
{Highly likely, but not certain. I’d like to propose we pretend as though we know the identity of the person so as to bait them into giving away more information,} thought Dream.
{I’ll accept that as long as we don’t outright lie,} I responded. The society was in agreement.
“I must admit, I didn’t expect you to bother hiding your identity after showing yourself in person last time.” The only costumed avatars from the interview were Lee, Yoshii, and the WIRL man. Lee had revealed her identity, so the only way our statement wouldn’t work is if the ghost was Yoshii or one of the WIRL cyborgs that participated as part of the collective. It was incredibly unlikely that this ghost was the eccentric Japanese musician, but if we were talking with a WIRL member then we’d simply have to admit to having made an error.
The ghost shrugged. “Like I said: a test. If you know who I am, say my name and I’ll drop the disguise.”
I let Dream take over completely. “Knowledge doesn’t work like that. I have a probability distribution for your identity, but if you ask me to collapse it down to one name there’s a good chance of error. What’s the cost of being wrong?”
“Hold on. You said…” The figure stopp
ed and looked off towards the shoreline and raised a hand to its chin in contemplation. Without warning he began to walk off.
{Eccentric and intelligent. If I didn’t know better I’d guess it was Myrodyn.}
{It’s not Myrodyn,} thought Vista. {His speech patterns are different.}
{If I didn’t know better,} I emphasized.
“I cannot believe that Eric would reveal his face to what would amount to a stranger… that’s just so contrary to his ethos. It must’ve been a layered deception. Wheels within wheels. Plans within plans. Tests within tests…” the ghost was mostly talking to itself.
{It’s not Lee,} deduced several of us simultaneously.
{Furthermore,} thought Dream {It’s someone who knows Lee and who is clever enough to have deduced that Lee revealed her identity to us based on our words.}
I revealed my internal distribution.
{WIRL member = 0.7%
Joanna Westing = 0.6%
Carla McLaughlin = 10.9%
Erica Lee = 2.3%
Robert Stephano = 84.9%
Yoshii = 0.4%
Águila Roja that we haven’t met = 0.1%
Someone else = 0.1%}
{Still 2.3% probability of Erica?} mused Wiki. {That seems too high.}
{One must take into consideration the possibility of Lee behaving like this to throw us off-track. She is a wild-card,} answered Dream.
{Exactly,} I confirmed.
Dream pushed Body to speak. “Are you going to ask us to sit down with the nameless?”
The ghost stopped. The blurry figure solidified into an avatar of the billionaire, Robert Stephano, as he turned to look Body in the eyes. “How did you know?” His face was genuinely surprised and curious. I thought there was perhaps a touch of fear there, too.