Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  But then the sky erupted as one by one the robot battleships exploded and rained down as liquid metal. Fireballs hung in the night sky, then turned into toppling sparks that plunged to the ground. I saw a shadow and lunged with a punch powerful enough to burst through hardmetal but my fist struck thin air. I briefly marvelled, and then was filled with fear.

  The shadows drifted through the crowd and miraculously and appallingly the bodies of innocent bystanders exploded, and the bloody fragments became interwoven and conjoined, like snakes twisting in a deadly embrace.

  Shrill screams and foul swear-words and pathetic hopeless sobs filled the air as scores of human bodies agonisingly merged their flesh and bones. I felt my eyes being plucked out, and with my radar sense I could see my eyeballs being stretched into columns. By now I was also screaming. I closed down my brain circuits, and tried to self-destruct before the agony came upon me, but then… the agony came upon me.

  I was crippled and contorted but could not die.

  My clothes and my pseudo-flesh fell away from me until I was just a naked screaming metal shell.

  And then, as I staggered blindly, my radar sense showed me that my metal carcass was becoming fused with the dead body of Jaynie, poor sweet Jaynie, and her lungs were brutally sucked into my mouth and they grew like trees inside me and my metal heart was in her body and was pumping coolant fluid into her dead veins. And still I could not die. Until finally—

  THE HIVE-RATS

  A swarm of spaceships coalesced in the sky above the planet of Morpheus; they flew and flocked in the blackness of space, until finally they formed into a single perfect V.

  Each spaceship was a fighting machine of extraordinary power. There were plasma cannons. Torpedo tubes. Forcefields. Anti-matter generators. And hulls strong enough to withstand huge amounts of military punishment.

  This was the Sand-Rats’ armada. With these battleships they would wage war on the horror, the terror, the marauder that was Humanity.

  The Sand-Rats were a swift – astonishingly swift – swifter than conceivably swift – species. From the moment that the First decided upon war, barely a Morphean year had elapsed. And in this time the Rats had invented tools, and smelted iron for the first time; they had built computers, forged unbreakable metals, and invented a system of travelling through hyperspace from first principles. Their evolution from foraging semi-rodent to faster-than-light space-travelling warriors in one of the largest armadas ever known had occurred in the period between the height of Morphean winter, and the first snows of the following winter.

  Admiral Martin Monroe saw all this happen, and marvelled.

  He was, in truth, growing to admire these plucky little creatures. They didn’t look like much – they were smaller than a cat, smellier than a skunk, and uglier than all fuck.

  And these scrawny beasts hadn’t, initially, appeared to pose any kind of a threat to the Admiral and the scientific expedition he commanded when they had first arrived on Morpheus.

  In fact, many of Monroe’s men had used the Sand-Rats for target practice. These ugly-fuck creatures were so dumb they would stand up on their hind legs, whiskers twitching, and wouldn’t run even when the plasma bolts started firing. The Admiral once shot a hundred Sand-Rats in a single session, and had won first prize in the Most Alien Fucker Killing!! contest. The prize consisted of a yard of potent ale, which he consumed with ease in a single continuous swallow, and yet still remained sober enough to fly the space cruiser twice around the planet’s moon.

  Morpheus was a beautiful planet, ripe for terraforming. Instead of soil, the planet was covered by a vast variety of multi-coloured fertile sands. There were millions of species of insects, trillions of varieties of Sand-Worm and Sand-Beetles, but strangely, very few larger mammalian forms. No more than two hundred species walked the ‘earth’ of this sandy planet; and the most plentiful species of all was the Sand-Rat. There were so many of them! And they were so damned dumb!

  And then, after two years of analysis and study, the Scientists resolved that they now had a full and complete picture of this biosphere. Some carefully selected samples were to be kept for the Zoo, in time-honoured fashion: two Sand-Rats, two samples of each of the other land mammals, a sprinkling of flying insects, and far too many (in Monroe’s view) Sand-Snails and Sand-Worms and Sand-Beetles. Then Monroe gave the orders for the Four Horsemen to move into position and start terraforming.

  At this moment, the Sand-Rats staged their counterattack. They had cunningly, and in Monroe’s view rather sneakily, burrowed under the hardglass dome of Monroe City. And thus one morning, a trillion Sand-Rats were inside the city, eating all the humans. It was a rout. The Sand-Rats had no weapons, they had no forcefields. But they could gnaw through body armour and they each had the capacity to eat a hundred humans or more and yet not become bloated.

  Monroe had launched his Soldiers against them, wearing full body armour and firing One Suns and plasma guns and explosive-shell cannons. But in the end, the Sand-Rats ate them all.

  Monroe was not afraid of dying. He had spent his entire life longing for a Glorious death. But, he had to concede, the moment when the Sand-Rats burrowed up his arsehole and began to eat him alive was a bleak one.

  After hours of agonising pain, Monroe had died. But several hours later, he realised he was somehow still alive. His mind had been subsumed into a larger mind. And it was then that Monroe made three discoveries about the Sand-Rats.

  1) They were intelligent.

  2) Their intelligence took the form of a Hive-Mind. They were Hive-Rats, not Sand-Rats at all.

  3) There were five Minds in each Hive; and only one Hive on the entire planet.

  That’s why the Sand-Rats didn’t fear death. They weren’t individual creatures, they were cells of a larger, much larger, planet-wide entity. Killing a Sand-Rat was like clipping off a fingernail.

  But now there were six Minds: for Monroe had been absorbed into the Hive-Mind, and found himself compelled to act as advisor to the ensemble of alien intellects.

  Monroe quickly deduced that one of the Minds was the original Sand-Rat. And this, he learned, was called by the other minds “The First.”

  And the other Minds, he gleaned, all belonged to species eaten and destroyed by the Sand-Rats. One mind from each exterminated species had been kept, and served as slave and advisor in the Hive-Rat gestalt intelligence.

  All this was shocking enough. But Monroe then discovered, after a year inside the alien Hive-Mind, an even more terrifying fact:

  4) The Sand-Rats existed in six dimensions. They inhabited, of course, three spatial dimensions. But they were also able to span three dimensions of time.

  And these three temporal dimensions were:

  “Normal” time. In other words, real time – time as humans perceived it.

  Slow time. The Hive-Rats, Monroe learned from his fellow Minds, once defeated a rival predator species by slowing down time so much that a billion “real” years elapsed in what, for the Hive-Rats, was less than half an hour. By this point, the savage, remorseless, totally-unbeatable-in-combat predator species had become extinct. All of which constituted another victory for the Hive-Rats!

  And, then, most chillingly of all from Monroe’s point of view, there was:

  Fast time.

  This was the secret weapon that had allowed the Sand-Rats to destroy the humans on Morpheus. For every time a Sand-Rat was killed, the Hive-Rat entity entered a state of fast time. And a thousand more Rats were conceived, and, after months of gestation, were born, and over the course of ten to fifteen years grew through adolescence into maturity, and then for several decades more were trained in fighting skills, and were taught about the tactics and weapons of the humans and – a blink of an eye later, in “real” time – resumed the battle against their human enemy.

  Thus, the death of each Sand-Rat generated, from the perspective of human time, the magical materialisation of a thousand more, an instant later.

  It was the most
terrifying war Monroe had ever fought. The enemy died – and then were reborn, a thousandfold. Savage creatures materialised constantly out of nowhere. And when the Sand-Rats moved, they blurred the air itself.

  Monroe’s Soldiers had fought the most deadly aliens in the universe, and had triumphed, again and again. But against the Sand-Rats, they stood no chance. For these aliens, Monroe now knew, had time on their side.

  Naturally, after making these four shocking discoveries, Monroe had tried to learn more about the creature’s strange temporal gift, in order to find a way to thwart it.

  But the alien mind known as the Second did not understand the origin or nature of the First’s ability to manipulate time. And the Third was equally baffled. And the Fifth didn’t even seem to understand the question.

  The Fourth, however, being a superintelligent being, did understand how the Sand-Rats were able to manipulate time. However, annoyingly, he/she explained it all in terms so complicated that Monroe could not begin to fathom his/her gist.

  The First, of course, did not readily answer personal questions, or yield confidential information about itself. That was why it was the First.

  So Monroe was forced to accept that the First had a power beyond all comprehension. It awed him, and terrified him.

  For, soon after the Hive-Rats’ victory against the humans, Monroe had looked up at the stars in the sky, and found they had moved.

  By a tiny amount, admittedly; but for a space admiral, the difference was shocking. And the landscape of Morpheus had altered – not vastly, but significantly, and Monroe was trained in spotting such details. New forests had grown. Cliffs had become eroded. Rivers had changed course. And the wrecked human dome had merged into the sands, and become almost invisible.

  It was clear that hundreds of years had elapsed – maybe as much as half a millennium – in the “real” world, during the course of that (subjectively speaking) longish pause of four or five minutes.

  And then, a few moments later, Monroe began to fear that his vision was playing tricks on him.

  For he saw the animals that were running so wildly on the yellow and purple and pink sands start to slow down, and slow down, and s l o w d o w n until they were entirely motionless. Clouds remained frozen in the sky; birds were caught in mid-sweep. It was as if time had stood still.

  And that was because the Sand-Rats had in fact made time stand still.

  This had been when Monroe discovered about “fast time.”

  And it was during this period of fast time that the Hive Mind had applied its collective intellect to the problem of how to defeat and destroy the rest of the human race.

  The Sand-Rats already knew that humans had extraordinary powers. They could fly. They could make fire emerge from tubes. They apparently had flown from the stars to reach this planet. They had extraordinary devices that could kill, shine light beams, and dig holes, and they could alter space with some kind of invisible barrier effect.

  All of this was initially quite baffling to the First which was, when all was said and done, just a rat.

  It evoked awe and wonder from the Second, who belonged to a feline warrior/predator species with limited technology, and who marvelled at the ingenuity of these now-dead humans.

  It intrigued the Third, who like the humans belonged to a biped species, though one possessed of four arms, and not a paltry two. The Third felt envious, for these alien creatures had a civilisation so far beyond her own!

  And it mystified and pleased the Fifth, though she was, in truth, often and very easily mystified and pleased.

  The Fourth, however, was a scientific genius, and he/she relished the challenge ahead of him/her: to replicate the accomplishments and discoveries of human science in order to vanquish the entire human empire. And he/she was aided in this goal by his/her unfettered access to all the knowledge acquired by Monroe in the course of his long life as a spaceship captain and latterly, admiral.

  And thus, as time stood very nearly still, the Hive-Rat (or rather, one of the Hive-Rat Minds, namely the Fourth) was able to devote tens of thousands of years (in subjective Hive-Rat time) to mastering classical physics and quantum physics and relativity and cute-o.

  The Fourth then applied these concepts to the practical task of building space battleships, taking advantage of the formidable engineering skills of the Third, whose humanoid species had been on the verge of flying into space before being consumed by the Hive-Rats.

  Once the planning stage was complete, the trillions of Hive-Rat bodies on Morpheus applied themselves to the task of mining and smelting ore, weaving hardmetal, and building weapons and space ships. The mineral resources of the planet were pillaged; in six months (“normal” time) entire mountain ranges across all the continents of the planet vanished, leaving behind barren craters and vast hordes of baffled goat-like and cow-like creatures that could not comprehend how they had so abruptly lost their pastures.

  And thus, one Morphean year after the First had emerged from its long mull and declared War, the armada set sail into space.

  Its mission: to eradicate humanity from the universe.

  THE COP

  Version 44

  I was lost in deductive process as my spaceship glided into orbit around Belladonna.

  It was a small dry planet, with red-tinged soil and large areas of yellow savannah. The freshwater lakes zigzagged a blue warmth into the dry land mass. There were no seas, as such.

  I reviewed my database: I’d been to this planet four times before. The third time, about a hundred years ago, I had successfully eliminated the gang bosses and departed alive. The fourth time, however, my previous Version had been thwarted and assassinated before the completion of his mission.

  Fortunately, my previous Version – Version 43 – had downloaded his mind into a databird two hours before his rendezvous with the robot battleships, following standard field protocol in such circumstances. So I knew everything that he knew about the case, and the witnesses he had interviewed, and his various hypotheses.

  Strangely, however, I had no visual record of what had happened in the minutes just before the death of Version 43. Normally, all data from a Cop’s eye cameras were automatically backed up on the home planet computer. But the wireless transmissions on the planet had ceased for a period of twenty-five minutes before, during and after the assassination. And all the local news reports of the death of Version 43 and sundry innocent bystanders seemed guarded, and confusingly expressed.

  I decided that this aspect of the mystery would soon unravel. More worryingly, however, upon reviewing my predecessor’s investigation into the original serial killing case, I came to a dark conclusion:

  Version 43 had been defective.

  He had been slow-witted and incompetent, he had perpetrated a unjustifiable and unnecessary death-whilst-resisting-arrest on a local gangster, he had failed to follow basic clues, and he had been duped by an obviously duplicitous female witness.

  This woman – Jaynie Hooper – who had also been killed with Version 43 by the unknown assassins – was in my opinion almost certainly a liar. She was a prostitute, with a history of mental instability, who had been working for one of the major pimps on the planet – Sandro Barumi, an employee of brothel-queen Kim Ji. Barumi, according to copious data available on this matter, had been in dispute with the Mayor, who was refusing to accept bribes to allow Barumi to expand his business into snuff and alien-rape movies.

  So, I hypothesised, Barumi had framed the Mayor, by paying Jaynie to make a false allegation of rape. Then, following through the logic of this postulation, Barumi paid some assassins to murder Jaynie’s sister, in a mass slaughter that was guaranteed to draw the attention of the Galactic Police. And, furthermore, so the hypothesis extrapolated, he had paid a bribe to Police Sergeant Aretha Jones to drop a broad hint to Version 43 about how to run his investigation.

  Version 43, with unpardonable gullibility, had believed every word of this elaborate hoax.

  And at that p
oint, once all the evidence against the Mayor had been transmitted via the beaconband to Earth, the dishonest witness Jaynie Hooper was assassinated, and Version 43 killed along with her.

  A perfect frame! The evidence against the Mayor was on file, and the only person who could contradict the evidence, namely Jaynie, was now dead.

  Any ordinary investigator would have been utterly fooled by the brilliance of this fit-up, and would therefore have ordered the Mayor to be arrested for rape and multiple murders, including the killing of a Galactic Cop. And this of course would have left Barumi free to pursue his criminal agenda.

  However I was no ordinary investigator. I had assimilated all the available data with exceptional thoroughness, which included studying the biographies of every citizen in Lawless City, watching every second of TV coverage of the Mayor and his political career, and analysing and pattern-processing every crime in the city, major or minor, reported or informally alleged, for the past 100 years. Out of this wealth of information I had formulated no less than 42,037 hypotheses, involving 42,337 perpetrators. I had then performed plausibility analyses on each hypothesis, and performed mock-trials of the twelve most likely suspects using avatars in a virtual courtroom to test the evidence to the uttermost degree. Until, finally, I had arrived at my preferred, and almost certainly correct (93.45 per cent likelihood) solution.

  I had, in short, solved the entire case, before even landing on the planet.

  I experienced a brief burst of an emotion that felt familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite put a name to it.