by Dave Stone
In any event, the thing we’re calling the Artefact was discovered some time during our planet’s history by one of these Factions, here in its chamber on Earth. Ever since then it’s been guarded and protected, kept in reserve for some grand strategic move or other a couple of thousand years down the line—so far as here and now we reckon time.
But why, and more importantly, how is it here? Is it, as one particular Faction believes, a gift from some ancient alien culture? Or an ancient alien culture in its entirety as another believes?
Or is it, in the end, nothing more nor less difficult and complicated than a Ship? The space-going equivalent of an aircraft carrier, from what I’m told, designated by a name that comes out in the translation as Hammer of God or some such.
The reason why it projects such a sense of Otherness, the reason why so many can’t see it for what it is, is simply that it’s discontinuous with the here and now of our world. It has no place here, no common terms of reference.
Imagine if Neanderthal man were to come across an F1–11 fighter plane that had somehow been dropped in through a hole in space/time. Somebody might learn that if you stick a finger in the electrics, you get a nasty shock. Somebody might accidentally switch on the comms and get an earful of static. That’s about the extent of what anyone would learn—and that’s the equivalent of what human beings, here and now, have managed to achieve by a process of back-engineering.
The thing about that, though, is that by just generally decking around, we came to the notice of its owners. Somebody heard us babbling into the radio, as it were.
And so this new Faction made contact. Datanets had nervous breakdowns, the heads of scores of sensitives around the world literally exploding, the whole bit. It was chaos for a while, before the Faction caught on to what was happening and ramped their processes down.
Anyhow. Contact was eventually achieved, and a deal brokered. The new Faction are to get their Hammer of God back and we, well we get our hands on some a simplified extraterrestrial craft that we can actually understand and reverse engineer. Just as the technology recovered from the Roswell craft led to the invention of microwave ovens, e-mail and pay-per-view porn, these new discoveries will lead to hundreds more breakthroughs. Teleportation. Time travel. Perpetual motion machines. You name it, we could have it.
And the best thing is that they think we’re doing them a favour. They haven’t got a clue that we don’t know the first thing about how to extract the Artefact’s secrets and its very presence here is beginning to throw things way out of kilter. Do you think it’s a coincidence that the land for hundreds of miles around here is so dry that even cacti have difficulty growing? So we’re going to exchange this unknowable heap of junk for an alien museum piece that was obsolete before Cain even threw Abel a funny look.
To do that, though, they need the damn thing up and running. Maintenance and activation sequences have to be carried out—bit of a tricky thing to do if you happen to be an entity that can’t access the world in any truly physical sense without bursting the whole thing like a soap bubble. And doubly problematic if you then have to rely on a bunch of overgrown monkeys who see the thing as any and all manner of other weird things, if they can even see it at all.
The solution, in the end, was to engineer some overgrown monkeys who could see the thing for what it was—and this is where the operation directly concerns you. A routine gene-examination of your body, after you got yourself shot up in New Mexico, threw up a whole bunch of flags.
There are standing orders to bring in anyone showing signs of being legacy offspring from the old Janus Programmes, because the modifications to their junk DNA already put them halfway down the road. There was only an off-chance possibility that you might be viable, but the opportunity was too good to miss. That’s why we patched you up.
The Faction worked with GenTech in tweaking a whole bunch of back-engineered Zarathustra processes to produce the Loup. We heaved in a lot of other stuff, of course, but the main thing—the important thing—is that you can see the Hammer of God for what it is and, to some extent, manipulate its systems. Your mind and body have been retuned to have an affinity with it on several quite profoundly fundamental levels.
You’re not buying this, are you, Eddie? It’s written all over your face. Okay, try this one: what if this new alien Faction isn’t a new Faction? What if it’s just a different aspect of one of the already existing Factions and it’s been fighting against the other Factions out in space? What if it’s been fighting them since the dawn of time, is still fighting them now and will, in all likelihood, be fighting them for eternity?
What if this ship isn’t here by accident? What if the Faction has been using this planet as storage depot for the last however many years and now they need the Artefact to wage a war a million billion light years away? What if there aren’t thousands of different Factions but just four? What if what we think are different Factions are just aspects of these four?
Do you buy that? Well do you, Eddie? Would you give me a dollar for that? No. I didn’t think you would.
The upshot is, you took one look at something that drives almost any other human into the bughatch, in any number of ways, and just went, “Oh, yeah, that’s a Ship. “You got the right stuff, Eddie boy. Congratulations.
Or maybe everything I’ve just told you has been another huge lie just to keep you off balance and under control. Either way, I wouldn’t let it bother you. All that matters in the here and now is that there’s a job that needs doing and you’re the only person who can do it for us.
Don’t get too far up yourself though. In the end you’re still not much more than a chimp whose been trained to use a spanner. Now, if we’ve all finished sucking one another’s dicks, let’s get to work.
22.
The tubular passages running through the Ship were far more brightly lit than the last time Eddie Kalish had been here. Electrical activity crackled and seethed along the walls, which had themselves taken on a glowing and translucent aspect, complicated forms like multicoloured oils mixed with water spiralling lazily within them.
For hours Eddie and Trix Desoto worked their way through the Ship, following a schematic that had been, apparently, downloaded by the Faction into the GenTech datanet in a kind of abreactive cybernetic fit that had cut services to three entire GenTech-owned compound-blocks for a month.
They worked to a step-pattern so that Trix was always working on a node while Eddie worked on another nearby. The work itself, it seemed to Eddie, was remarkably simple; he would simply place his fingers on a node and sense a change in the energy flows within, redirect them by a repositioning of his fingers until he felt inside himself that their configuration was correct. Presumably this knowledge had been implanted on some subconscious level via the Loup.
He was reminded of the time back in the hospital room of the Factory, where he had accessed the datanet without ever quite knowing how he was doing it.
Their tandem path took them through spaces that might or might not have been living-quarters, command centres, chambers that appeared to be armament-depositories or hangars for small craft that were, he supposed, the extraterrestrial equivalent of tactical fighters. All the while, the throbbing sense of power accumulating inside the Ship grew stronger.
This reminded Eddie, despite himself, of what was actually feeding it.
“What’s it eating?” he asked Trix. “Neuropeptides or something? And thank you, Mister the Loup, for throwing up the word neuropeptides when I don’t know what the hell it actually means. What I mean is, if it’s eating stuff you find in the brains then why can’t GenTech just synthesise it or something?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” said Trix. “The Ship isn’t digesting the… material as nutrients.”
The material, Eddie thought. She’s acting like she just doesn’t care, but she’s putting up another front. Like she tried to turn it into a joke before. Why didn’t I notice that before?
“The Ship’s liq
uefying and extruding the material,” Trix Desoto was saying. “Patching it into her own neurotecture. I gather that she operates by way of an interconnected complex of microtubular filaments, operating on the quantum level, hooking into the very fabric of space/time. Drawing power from the fundamental wave-form resonance of the universe itself.
“We got the model from a basic template that the Faction encoded into a clone-host—that old guy I was transporting when we first met, yeah? The parameters were quite clear. And the only real source for those particular microtubular constructs, here and now on Earth, is the human brain.”
“Yeah, but if you got it from a clone-host, whatever the hell that is, then you can clone a—“
“Doesn’t work,” said Trix Desoto. “A clone we’re capable of producing unassisted, under the current state of the art, by its very nature never makes synaptic links or achieves consciousness. Has to be a brain from someone conscious and alive—or at least who was.”
“All the same,” Eddie said. “It all still seems a bit—“
“I know what you mean,” said Trix. “Fundamental lack of connection with other human beings is one thing, but I still think it’s a little bit off.”
Eddie couldn’t work out for the life of him if she had meant that as a joke or not. It would open up a number of not entirely comforting questions either way.
He realised that Trix Desoto had said something else.
“What?” he asked her. “What did you say?”
“I said that, on the other hand, what’s the alternative? The destruction of the universe? Or at least, the destruction of that bit of it with Earth and all the human beings on it?”
Eddie Kalish pondered that for a moment.
“I’m going to ask you what you said again,” he said at last. “But, you know, I mean it in a slightly different way.”
“We don’t get the Ship up and running,” said Trix Desoto, “then the Faction who wants it is just going to lean in—from wherever it is they lean from—and simply grab it. You think the world’s showing cracks now, just you wait until the Hammer of God starts shaking it up like a snow globe. Didn’t the Head get around to telling you that?”
“Not as such, no,” said Eddie. “And on the whole I’m somewhat glad it didn’t.”
They continued on through the Ship, reconfiguring the nodes, Trix still lugging whatever it was that was in her case. The corridors branched and interconnected in any number of ways, but they followed the schematics on a rough trajectory spiralling to the centre.
They were getting quite close. It was hot and the Ship was pounding around him and Eddie’s skin tingled. He felt muscle-masses shifting around under it. Up ahead, Trix Desoto’s form seemed slightly more bulky, her gait more loping.
He hurried forward to catch her up, laid a hand on her shoulder. She swung round, snarling, for a moment her eyes blazing. Then she visibly caught herself.
“I think the Ship’s triggering the Loup,” he told her, taking a somewhat hurried step back. “Even through the Leash. Maybe I need a booster shot or—“
“An imposed reversion would probably kill you at this point,” Trix Desoto said. “It’s the other way around. The Loup’s cutting in, despite the Leash, this near to the core, to compensate for an increase in upsilonic radiation. My advice is just to go along with it and—“
And it was at this point that the explosive charges detonated outside and things went, even more than usual, totally to hell.
23.
It might have been wondered, by those in a position to wonder, why the various GenTech technicians and operatives were going along with something like the Brain Train. They did not, after all, have the Alienation Syndrome shared by Eddie Kalish and Trix Desoto, and so presumably cared about their fellow human beings and what happened to them—at least so much as human beings generally do.
One reason, of course, was that it is very hard to overestimate what people will do as part of the drudging and day-to-day business of participating in atrocity.
And then there are those who simply have a propensity for cruelty and violence—indeed, the Brain Train’s security force, the outriders and those who handled the weapons systems, were of just that sort. Violent men, and for that matter women, who didn’t care who they might end up fighting just so long as they fought.
Just the sort of people you needed, in fact, out on the dangerous and somewhat crazy blacktops of America.
As for the technicians themselves, most of them didn’t call the Brain Train by that name, and probably didn’t even know it. In the time-honoured commercial tradition of the left hand not knowing what the right was doing, most of them thought that they were delivering components for a new supercomputer-system—components which had to be kept in refrigerated canisters on account of their extreme delicacy.
Those who knew the actual nature of the Brain Train’s cargo thought that they were still components for a new supercomputer-system—but they were clone-brains, grown whole in the GenTech skeining vats. One or two might have had their suspicions—in the same way that an employee in a Mister Meaty burger bar might have suspicions as to precisely what goes into the burgers—but not to the point where they might investigate, due to the horrible possibility that their suspicions might be confirmed.
Besides, it wasn’t their job. Let someone else get into trouble and take the heat for it if they wanted.
In short, while they might be living under a certain element of corporate-drone denial, the GenTech Brain Train technical crew were not particularly bad or callous people.
As such, it could be argued that they did not deserve what would happen to them when as squad of US troops from the Base approached them, as they were going about their business, brought up their MultiFunction rifles and began to slaughter them out of hand.
For a while it was bloody. Then the Brain Train’s own security forces woke up to what was happening, weighed in on the side of GenTech and things got bloodier still.
Outside, from outside the Ship, there was a heavy concussion. The ship lurched.
Somewhere in the back of Eddie’s head, a gentle murmuring of which he had been barely aware other than that it was vaguely comforting, suddenly became the shriek of fingernails on slate.
It was the Ship, he realised. Up until now the Ship had just been murmuring about how happy it was to be here and alive and waking up—and now it was squealing in alarm.
“That came from outside!” Trix Desoto snapped. “That was an attack! Go and see what’s happening.”
Eddie Kalish was of the profound opinion that, if something were attacking, the least safest place to be would be outside the protection afforded by a Hammer of God.
“What about the activation?” he said. “We can’t just—“
“I can take care of the rest of the nodes,” Trix Desoto said. “There’s only a few left.” She hefted the case she was carrying meaningfully. “And plus I’m the only one who knows what to do with the… final component. I’m the only one who can get it done.”
“I don’t suppose you could give me a quick run down, then?” Eddie asked. “I mean listen, I’m really not trying to be the rat here—all right, who am I kidding, course I’m being a cowardly little rat. But the fact remains that you’re the lethal one. You’ve got the Loup under control. Whatever’s out there, you’re the one who can flip out and waste it, while I—“
“Trust me, wouldn’t work,” said Trix Desoto. “There’s no time to explain it but just trust me but there’s no way it would work. I wish to God, quite frankly, that there was someone else who could go out there and watch my back, but you’re the only one I’ve got. Just get out there and do it, okay?”
Eddie Kalish took of the larger tubes and just trusted that it would lead to a sphincter-hatch that would let him out of the Ship.
Some large part of him, of course, hoped that it would just lead to a dead end, giving him the excuse to just blunder about and get confused and not have to go out in the end at a
ll.
In the event, though, the tube led him straight to a hatch in a matter of minutes, bang on order. Just his luck.
He wondered, briefly, if he should stroke the wall in the same way that Trix Desoto had done, but the hatch simply dilated in front of him. He would never be sure if the Ship itself was trying to be helpful—or if it simply wanted to be rid of him.
The air outside was hazed with smoke. Eddie stuck his head out of the hatch, hauled it back and examined the image imprinted on his retinas. Nothing moving out there. Nothing alive.
Cautiously, he clambered down from the hatch, went into a crouch and scanned his surroundings through the haze. Now that he was through the hatch he became of a loud, low rumbling emanating from the Ship itself. Whatever provided its motive force was obviously on line.
The cavern was a mess. The servomechanisms that had been busily shucking human heads were a tangled, burning wreckage—the source of the smoke. There was the smell of charred flesh from the piles of discarded empty heads.
Somebody had dropped a quantity of hi-ex down the main elevator shaft and taken the various head-processing units out. Eddie wondered if the idea had been to disrupt the Ship’s replenishment, before remembering that part of the operation had been almost done in any case before he and Trix had entered to reconfigure the nodes. Whoever had done this would have known that, or simply didn’t care.
In any case, here and now, there didn’t seem to be any immediate threat. He turned back, intending to return to Trix Desoto and tell her as much, and found that the hatch had contracted shut.