by Isaac Hooke
I glanced up to meet her eyes for the first time.
She had an exquisite, chiseled face, reminding me of an ancient Greek sculpture of Athena I had once seen, though with Asian features. There was gentleness and concern written into her eyes.
“You’re so beautiful,” I said.
She smiled compassionately as she combed the matted strands of hair from my face. She truly cared about me.
“What is your password?” she said softly.
“Alejandro has his own star 5248241,” I said simply.
There was pride in her eyes, the same pride a parent feels when she witnesses her child walking for the first time, I thought. The Keeper pressed her lips together and blinked away tears.
“Thank you.” She released me and stood up. “Thank you.” She went to the entrance. “You are a hero to your race. Your courage and loyalty will be remembered for generations to come.”
She turned around, and before she left, I saw for the first time the long bar of metal grafted into her back. It ran along her neck from the base of the skull (the hair around it was shaved) and passed beneath her outfit, where I could see the bulge of the bar reach to the small of her back.
In the neck region, red droplets were scattered across the exposed surface of the metal: the glowing condensation of a Phant.
I blacked out.
I awoke, lying on a bed of some kind. The telescoping, spider-like limbs of a Weaver hovered above my pillow. The sensor light of the medical robot flashed blue.
I tried to sit up.
Tight straps bound me in place.
I resided in a crude, box-like metal compartment. Empty steel beds covered in foam mats faced me. There was no EKG. No IV tube jammed into the dorsal venous network of my hand.
This was a poor man’s Convalescence Ward.
The rotten molar in my mouth had been replaced. I glanced at the thick straps that bound my torso and arms. My hands were no longer swollen from the wrists down. There were stretch marks along the skin of my hand, and crisscross scars where the harness had dug into my wrists, but otherwise I was healed up.
Physically, at least.
I heard the distant ambiance of a ventilation fan. That could indicate any number of things, though I had a tendency to believe it meant I was on a ship. Whether that was good or bad, I didn’t know.
I glanced to my left. More empty beds.
I turned my head to the right.
Hijak lay there.
He was strapped down like me, two beds away. His face was very, very white, and his hands, like my own, had marks from previous swelling, and dark scars crisscrossing the wrists.
He was unconscious.
Hijak.
My heart went out to him. Forget our differences. Hijak was my platoon brother. My comrade-in-arms.
“Hijak,” I said. “Hijak!”
His eyelids fluttered opened, and a long moment passed before his gaze focused on me with any recognition.
“Rage,” Hijak said finally. His voice sounded raspy, like he hadn’t sipped water in days. “I thought . . . you were dead.”
“I thought I was dead, too.”
“She said . . . she said she’d killed you. And she promised my parents were next.” Hijak started weeping. “She said all the money they had wouldn’t save them. She said she’d hang them up like pigs and skin them. I had to tell her, Rage. I had to.”
The bastards. Torturing me was one thing, but torturing my platoon brother? That positively enraged me.
And yet I couldn’t shake the terrible guilt I felt.
They broke me, too.
“It’s okay now, Hijak. It’s okay.” I wanted to tell him I’d betrayed the platoon as well. And our country. But I couldn’t. I was too ashamed.
His features twisted by shame, Hijak turned away from me. I saw he had a metallic knob attached to the back of his head, just like me.
Hijak. My brother.
The door to the ward opened.
Jiāndāo stepped inside in all her dark splendor. She was wearing full makeup today, eyes outlined in dark purple, lips a pale red, forehead perfectly bronzed, cheeks rouged. The camos had been replaced with a sleeveless black dress with a low neckline that accentuated her breasts.
She had two military robots with her. They were the same as the MA (master-at-arms) robots the UC had, and looked similar to Centurions, but minus any uniforms. Their polycarbonate skins were a black tint, and around the rectangular boxes on the chests, where the brain cases resided, I saw the telltale blue droplets of Phant possession. Rifle stocks protruded from the holsters behind their heads.
“How sweet,” Jiāndāo said. “The two of you broke on the same day.”
She leaned against the wall, a panther stretching her well-used claws. Jiāndāo eyed us casually for a moment, resting the Snake comfortably in the crook of one arm.
My heart rate doubled just looking at the Snake, and I broke into a cold sweat. When I heard Hijak’s breathing quicken beside me, anger and indignation abruptly overrode any fear I felt.
No one tortures my platoon brothers.
I was ready to spring at the tormenting bitch.
Unbind me. I dare you.
Jiāndāo smiled slyly. “Don’t worry, there is no pain today. If you behave.” She glanced at the MA robots. “Prepare them.”
The robots unstrapped me and Hijak from the beds.
I tried to lunge at Jiāndāo, but the robot was quicker. It slammed me down with inhuman strength and promptly electrocuffed me.
The same thing was done to Hijak beside me. No plasticuffs for us. Only the good stuff.
I scowled at Jiāndāo the whole time, but she affected not to notice.
We were escorted into the corridor outside. This was definitely a ship of some kind. SK make, judging from the Korean-Chinese characters outside the door.
Jiāndāo confidently took the lead in her low-cut dress.
My eyes were drawn to the metal bar drilled into her spine. I had thought I’d imagined the thing back in the brig, but it was very real. As were the drops of glowing red condensation scattered up and down the metal.
“You’re one of them,” I said.
She glanced askance, the hint of a smile on her lips, but she didn’t say anything.
The metal bar reminded me of the knob attached to my own brain. How far was I from a fate similar to hers?
“Where are you taking us?” I said.
“The Guide wants to see you, Floor,” she answered.
“The Guide?”
“Yes. The envoy to humanity.”
Out here the main lights were dimmed, and the emergency system provided most of the illumination. The long twin tubes of blue LEDS built into the seams between the deck, bulkhead, and overhead gave everything a skeletal, wire-frame feel. It felt a bit like I was touring the insides of a liquid-cooled computer with all those gaudy tubules.
Otherwise the corridor wasn’t so different from those found on UC starships, albeit a bit tight. The cramped metal bulkheads allowed Hijak and me just enough space to walk abreast. It was very claustrophobic. Shaw would have hated it.
There weren’t any human crew about—theoretically, they would all be at duty stations. We did squeeze past a few unfriendly looking masters-at-arms robots on patrol.
We turned past a T intersection and ascended to an upper deck. Since my Implant was active, and logged in, I brought up my HUD map. On it, the ship’s blueprint was represented by a black mass, with previously visited corridors filled out cookie-cutter style by the mapping software. Ahead of my position, the blueprint updated with each step I took. The software based the bulkhead delineations on my stereoscopic vision. When I glanced down side corridors, the software completed partial areas.
A few moments later I found myself on the bridge.
>
A man dressed in a captain’s blue-and-white uniform stood before the main view screen. He faced away from us, his hands folded behind his back.
Wait a moment. This was no man, but an Artificial. SK variant.
The High-Value Target.
I noted its feet were fully repaired and intact. On the back of its neck, above the collar, I saw the telltale condensation of alien possession. Glowing, fat, purple drops.
Purple.
A purple Phant had killed my best friend, Alejandro.
The remaining members of the bridge crew included robot guards and a handful of humans, all SK. Nearly all the humans had long metal bars embedded in the back of their skulls and spines, and just like Jiāndāo, droplets of red condensation glowed from the grotesque grafts. Only two humans seemed unmodified, one an astrogator and the other a tactical officer, judging from their duty stations. These latter two very carefully refused to meet my eyes.
“Guide,” Jiāndāo said. “I have brought them.”
The Artificial known as the Guide did not shift its attention from the view screen, which was starless and black. Darker sections painted the blackness, delineating peaks, valleys, and craters. I thought it might be a planetoid that filled the view.
I glanced at where the tactical display should have been in the center of the room, but the holographic representation of the battle space was currently inactive, and all I saw was empty glass. Who knows, maybe it wasn’t the tactical display at all—I wasn’t on a UC vessel, after all.
“Humans are such easy things to break,” the Guide abruptly said.
I exchanged a glance with Hijak. This was the envoy to humanity, and that was the first thing it had to say?
“Take something like this rock,” the Guide continued. “Floating before us in space. Inanimate. Steered by the whims of gravity. Lifeless. No sentience whatsoever. And yet it requires such a vast amount of energy to break in two.
“One-tenth of that energy is needed to break a human being. Mostly, all one needs is time. Of all the species I have had the pleasure of vanquishing, humanity has proven the easiest thus far. Both physically, and mentally.”
The Guide finally turned around. The Artificial appeared to be the spitting image of the Paramount Leader. Big lips, oily and pocked skin. Matted, balding hair. Entirely underwhelming, just like the real man. Indeed, the face was so realistic that it made me wonder if the Paramount Leader himself was an Artificial. Even the eyes were correct, with just the right amount of moisture, and that gleam of certainty all great leaders had. There was no “uncanny valley” here, that fine line between real and fake that caused repulsion in a human being if an Artificial’s face was even slightly incorrect.
“It took me the longest time to understand human vocal patterns,” the Guide continued. “Let alone speak. The engrams stored in the neural net of this Artificial helped, of course . . . the fibrillary random access memory had Korean-Chinese, English, and the more common languages of your race installed. I much prefer the original Korean-Chinese I have to admit, but English does have its charms. There are so many words for describing killing in English, just as if the language were specifically designed for the task. Slaughter. Butcher. Massacre. Assassinate. Exterminate. Slay. Raze. Destroy. Eradicate. Extinguish. And on and on. A warrior’s tongue. Still, the inflections and phonemes feel unusual to me. In any case, once I had a solid grasp on the main languages, it was relatively easy to transmit my knowledge to the Learned, such as Jiāndāo. And then interpreting your documents and machinery became so much easier.” The Guide took a step toward me. “I see the question on your face. Ask it.”
“What are you?” I said, staring at the condensation on its neck.
“Ah. You refer to my composition in this universe, as it were. A gas when exposed to the void of space. A liquid within the pressurized environment of humankind. The simple answer is I am a multi-universe entity. What you see here in this liquid state, via the photons emitted to your ocular units from the constituent atoms of my form, is but a small fraction of my entire being, which spans countless dimensions that humanity cannot begin to fathom.
“Though we are not dissimilar from most life in the universe. Humans themselves are multi-universe entities. Your physical bodies comprise merely a tenth of your actual forms, but you don’t even realize it: humanity has a way of blinding itself to the truth, relegating it to the level of an inconvenient headache. In any case, your species has developed a theory of matter called dark fluid. Tell me, have you heard of it?”
“No.”
“I have,” Hijak said quietly.
The Guide’s eyebrows shot up. “Do tell.”
Hijak gave me a hesitant look. “Dark fluid hypothesizes that the fabric of spacetime acts as a fluid. It coagulates, compresses, expands, and flows just like any other fluid, and when the fluid of spacetime contacts matter, it slows down and coagulates around it, amplifying the forces of gravity near it. The effect is only noticeable when you look at obscenely large masses, like galaxies—spacetime collects around those masses, and helps hold them together. But in places where there’s hardly any matter, like the voids between the galactic superclusters, the dark fluid of spacetime relaxes, and starts stretching away from itself, becoming a repulsive force. Imagine three rocks representing galaxies in a shallow vat of molasses. The syrup—the dark fluid of spacetime—collects around the rocks, and in between them it stretches thin. That’s dark fluid in a nutshell. The theory supersedes the theories of dark matter and dark energy, making them irrelevant.”
“Bravo,” the Artificial clapped mockingly. “Well done. Dyson Xang, is it? You have a keen mind. You will make a fine host. In any case, the space between Slipstreams is dark fluid. And that, in essence, is what we are.”
“Your race exists in the space between Slipstreams?” I said.
The Artificial smiled patiently. “No. We are the space between Slipstreams.”
I didn’t fully understand, however, if I ever got home, maybe this tidbit might help the fleet scientists get a better handle on what we were dealing with.
“What about her?” I nodded at Jiāndāo. “She is human? Or alien?”
“Both. The physical part is human. The cognizant part is not. Somewhat similar to myself.”
My eyes drifted to the metal bar grafted onto Jiāndāo’s spine. “So she’s a slave then. Her human part.”
“A slave?” The Guide rapped its thumb against its chest. “Worse than a slave, I would say. After installing the necessary biomechatronic grafts to provide integration with the nervous system, the host body is ours to do with entirely as we please. Without the grafts, the bodies of most species in this universe incinerate on contact.
“When integrated via the graft, the host is still alive, though not in command of its mind and body. Its consciousness has effectively been replaced. It cannot think, nor move of its own accord. It is an experience similar to one of your fully immersive vids. Life plays before the eyes of the host, but the host itself is a spectator, nothing more.
“After the integration, we have access to some memories, but mostly it is a fragmented jumble. That’s where the embedded IDs found in human beings come in quite handy. Your IDs store visual and auditory data from your Implants and external aReals in a fashion readily understandable by us, allowing us to retrieve the data at our leisure once we are in control of your bodies. Which is why we prefer to break a human before integrating him or her.
“By integrating with the members of a species, we can better understand how to vanquish them. But there is also a wonderful side benefit. As you may have noticed, we do not possess bodies of our own in this universe. It is a sublime thing to experience a species from their point of view. The galaxy is so much more vivid, and interactive, when you have a vessel capable of touch, of emotion, of taste.”
“Except you’re a robot,” I said.
; “This is merely one of my hosts,” the Guide said.
“Why have you come?” I wondered how much more I could ask this “Guide,” and why it was willing to entertain my questions in the first place. I had to remind myself that it had an entirely different way of thinking. Maybe some alien code of honor required the Guide to brag about the capabilities of its race and reveal its intentions to every lifeform it planned to kill or integrate, I don’t know. But as long as the Guide was receptive to my questions, I was going to keep asking them. “Why do you attack our worlds?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” the Guide said. “Geronium. We feed upon it, and use it to power the great industry of our ships. Those entities you call Burrowers are engineered from the biomatter of this universe, yet exist partially in our own. We call them the Great Formers, and they have one specific purpose in mind: transform the crusts of planets into Geronium.”
“Don’t you have enough planets to transform in your own region of space?”
“The transformative process requires a planet populated by sentient lifeforms, as the multi-universe fields produced by such organisms are a major part of the process. These fields linger some Stanyears after a population has been terminated, and the Burrowers use them to process the crust into Geronium. In essence, the Burrowers digest what humanity would call the lingering ‘souls.’
“When a suitable planet or moon is chosen for harvesting, a compatible species must first be assigned to the planet and bred. Terraforming or bioengineering is almost always involved, because while some species are better suited to certain planets than others, there is usually some disqualifying factor. Atmospheric pressure is too high, temperature is too low, gaseous ratios are off, and so forth. The process of terraforming and populating can take centuries. So, when we find a race that has done the hard work of colonizing planets for us, we are exhilarated. There is no better find. Of course we’re going to come. Of course we’re going to conquer. Thanks to humanity, we will have this whole region producing Geronium in under ten years. That will give us enough stores to last the next twenty thousand years, if you include the cache on our side of the galaxy.