The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Ellen Datlow ed.

  Meanwhile, on this remote base protected by half the Pacific Fleet, the two research teams that studied either the POTAs or their shells worked away to not much point. They’d gotten up softball teams that played each other on weekends, but otherwise they had no contact, and jealously guarded their theories from each other. Dice suspected each camp liked to dribble hints of far-reaching results to the other, just to keep up the buzz of envy and resentment. The supposed nerds in the silos regularly thrashed the flight-specialist fighter jocks at softball, which did little for the free and fair exchange of scientific information.

  The Pentagon didn’t much mind. The POTAs were contained and the pretense that useful work was being done could be kept up forever. It seemed unlikely that any of their deep secrets would easily be uncovered: where they came from, whether they were a failed one-off attack or a first wave, whether or not they were intelligent. Great James was a profitable boondoggle, a pump-primer for funds that could be siphoned off and used elsewhere.

  And then came the first recorded case of Great James Syndrome.

  The POTAs were kept in missile pits, and despite the five-hundred-ton concrete and steel caps, their escape-artist potential was an endless source of worry. As long as they were safely contained, it didn’t matter if anyone ever found out anything useful. But if even one escaped, everyone in the Pentagon down to the ten-man team that kept the Coke machines refilled could kiss their fat service pensions good-bye. The POTAs couldn’t be caged; they oozed between bars or mesh like tar. The missile pits were a good short-term solution, but there was a strong possibility that sooner or later one of the POTAs would squeeze through a crack or crevice. And then an NCO with too much time on his hands invented a shackle that fitted and restrained their blobby bodies.

  Corporal Flavors was a farmboy from Ohio with an education that had ended at high school and no particular aptitude for mathematics until, after a few days’ guard duty at the pits, his mind kinked in an unexpected direction and he hit on an unexpected principle of knot theory as basic as the wheel. Suddenly, commercial and military applications were back on the menu. In the army, one school of thought had it that a patent on the Flavors Lock could bring in more money than the invention of milk cartons (Corporal Flavors hadn’t even considered patenting his doohickey, and a squadron of lawyers decided that the army could lay claim to it because it was invented on army time, with army matériel). More cautious souls pointed out that it could cause major, unpredictable, seismic shifts in national security, not to mention the global economy. After all, anyone with five pieces of metal, a drill, and some wire could whip up a Flavors Lock in twenty minutes and turn an ordinary safe into Fort Knox. And while the army was trying to decide whether to patent the doohickey and declare financial independence from the federal government, or melt every known Flavors Lock and drop the corporal into the ocean, Great James was seized by an unprecedented outbreak of creativity as more and more of its personnel succumbed to Island Fever.

  Pretty soon, the Flavors Lock was just the first entry in a bulging catalog of one-off wonders, fruits of misapplied, unfathomable genius, and neat gadgets that could change the world if only someone could figure out how to duplicate them. Squads of scientists had been driven crazy, trying and failing. Senator Jubilee Bliss had a cunning plan to change all of that.

  “Poppin’ a cap in mah bitch’s head, bitch talk back—the bitch be dead!”

  The surveillance center rattled with the aggressive thump of rap music, fed through an open-air Tannoy rigged up to blast back at the small white civilian who was chanting along with the words, squirming around in his swivel chair as if competing in the Special Hip-Hop Olympics.

  When he caught sight of Dice and Haines in the doorway, between the two armed guards (one wore a homemade hat, presumably courtesy of Wing Commander Brown), the man shut off his sound system, made a devil’s-horn shape with his fingers, and said, “Whassup, mah niggas?”

  He wore a silver band tied around his forehead, but Dice assumed he wasn’t a true fan of Christian girl-rock.

  Haines made introductions. “Dr. Susal, Colonel Dice. Colonel, this is Dr. Susal from the Californian Institute for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.”

  Dr. Susal grinned more widely than seemed necessary. “Deedydoody. Scanning the deeps for ping-pings, West Coast styling.”

  Dice wondered if torturing the prisoner hadn’t been displacement activity by people who would rather have been torturing Dr. Susal. Of course, the Einstein’s ownership of a white lab coat put him in the ring as a suspect, too. Him, and a round hundred scientists and engineers.

  “They aren’t Extra-Terrestrial Intelligences,” said the other whitecoat in the room—a slim Asian woman who had taken off her airport runway ear defenders when the rap cut out. “At least, not in any accepted sense of the term.”

  “Moira Wing,” explained Haines.

  Dice wasn’t looking at her, but at the bank of screens behind her.

  There they were.

  On twenty TVs, seen from high angles, the cloudy blurs of POTAs squatted in their pits like so many bee larvae in their cells.

  Haines was telling the room who Dice was and why he was on Great James Island. Dice jerked his attention away from the fuzzy TV pictures to the occupants of the room, cursing his sloppiness—he should have been watching Wing and Susal, looking for telltale twinges and tics when his identity was revealed.

  “Here,” said Wing. “This’ll give you a better idea.”

  She stepped over to a freestanding control panel, tapped out a code. A section of the wall rolled up. Beyond was thick, one-way leaded glass (the proverbial reflective surface in the pit) and a view down into Silo Three, current home of the alleged victim.

  Dr. Susal swiveled away, complaining. He didn’t want to look at the prisoner.

  “We had it installed so VIPs could eyeball the Prisoners,” said Wing. “It’s too dangerous to enter the pits unsupervised, and the surveillance cameras…Well, it’s like looking at the moon through fog with a Christmas cracker magnifying glass. It cost thirty million dollars to cut away a section of blastproof reinforced concrete and install it, so I hope you enjoy the view.”

  She had a definite accent, and sounded coolly amused.

  Dice stepped up to the glass. He had read the reports, seen the photographs, but this was up close and personal.

  The window was halfway up the side of the pit. Twenty feet below, the POTA, hobbled by its Flavors Lock, squatted at the bottom of the stark, floodlit pit.

  It consisted of three spheres arranged like the snowmen Dice had built as a boy—skirt, torso, head. Its skin was silk-smooth and a uniform deep, dark blue. There were tendrils, especially on the top and bottom spheres, which had once attached to the interior of their shell-ships.

  “I’ll bust a cap in its ass for you, homes,” Susal said, and scooted across the surveillance room in his swivel chair to a computer, typing in a command.

  A robot arm attached halfway up the smooth cylindrical wall of the pit came to life and extended mantis-fashion, lowering toward the POTA. Pincers tipped with ceramic and copper spikes opened wide, spanning either side of the POTA’s topmost sphere. Susal typed another command: Arcs of lightning flashed, throwing stark shadows across the pit. The POTA deformed, its head-sphere flattening to a thick disk as if ducking away from the pincers.

  Dice stepped backward, feeling as if he’d been punched in the stomach. Susal cackled. “Two thousand volts of zap and the cocksucker barely twitches.”

  “The usual reaction, nothing unexpected,” Dr. Wing said, tapping with a forefinger a computer flatscreen that displayed dozens of EEG-style lines, all spiking in various ways at the same point.

  Susal pulled down a microphone and said into it, “Oh six twenty-one oh seven, fourteen oh six, GMT. Experiment number seven eight five two one, standard demonstration run, two thousand volts, one-second duration. Standard defensive reaction, no deviation.” He tapped at the keyboard and tur
ned to face Dice as beyond the heavy glass window, the arm retracted upward. “I can pepper its hide with a heavy machine gun if you want. VIPs love that. And we’ve got a chain saw and a leather mask somewhere—could tape you an alien snuff movie, make a fortune on pirate DVD.”

  “I’ll pass,” Dice said, watching the POTA’s head-sphere slowly resume its shape. It reminded him of a tortoise cautiously reextending its head after a fright.

  “Fair enough. It don’t snuff properly anyway.”

  Dice felt nauseated and was trying not to show it. It wasn’t so much what had been done to the POTA, though that was bad enough, but the scientists’ casual brutalization of whatever it was they had hold of.

  He said, “It changed shape. Can it move around at all?”

  “Not while restrained,” Wing said. “But take off the Flavors Lock and the subject can move around very readily. They bounce by elastically deforming on their lower sphere. Remember Space Hoppers? It looks something like that.”

  Dice was surprised Wing remembered the 1970s toy. He would have thought she was younger.

  She said, “Before the Flavors Lock, the POTAs would sometimes keep on bouncing for hours, picking up momentum, careening off all the walls…”

  “Trying to escape?”

  Wing shrugged. “The movement could be play, fury, a symphony, death throes that last a hundred years, or it could be absolutely meaningless. After one was cut up, the fragments were still able to move in synchrony. The thing I find rather disturbing is that they don’t make any noise, moving or still. In fact, they absorb sound waves, like baffles…”

  “Is why I crank up mah boom box,” explained Dr. Susal.

  “They can act individually, but if put together in a smallish space they synchronize—each moving exactly like another,” said Wing, coming to stand beside Dice. “Pick one up and toss it against a wall, and the others will go, too, like a game of Simon Says. This casts some light on what was called their ‘attack formation.’ They may not be individuals, but cells of a larger entity—in which case, it is possible that only a small part of the whole thing is in captivity.”

  “And people say they’re not aliens.”

  “Not me, Colonel Dice,” said Wing. “These are aliens, in the sense of not being like anything that’s ever been measured before. What we don’t know is where they’re from. Outer space, the deep past or the far future, some kind of parallel universe…”

  “Something way weirder than alternate histories where Spain didn’t sign the Treaty of Utrecht and everyone in America speaks Hebrew,” footnoted Susal. “It’s a definite maybe far-from-probable pinhole of possibility. Then again, the blue niggas could have come from Fairyland, Cyberspace, or Ronald McDonald’s big fat clown ass.”

  As far as Dice was concerned, the Hollow Earth and Santa’s Workshop theories were just as likely—the enemy’s point of origin was unknown, but its craft were first logged over Greenland, heading south, moving fast. Textbook UFOs, if not flying saucers.

  They did a lot of damage, but were taken down like skeet.

  Now the War Crimes Commission in the Hague and cabals of fromage-gobbling surrender monkeys in the UN were arguing that as losers in the Action, as prisoners of war, the POTAs had the right not to be treated as lab rats. It was a violation of their inalienable if nonhuman rights to be shackled witnesses while pages were torn out of Dianetics and stuffed in piss-filled buckets (where had the idea that the POTAs were Scientologists come from?) or brassieres tied around their smallest spheres or guns stuck where their earholes would have been if they had or wanted or needed ears. Or have handfuls of salt sewn into their bodies.

  Dice turned his back on the huge glass window and the big blue entity behind it, and opened his folder. As briskly as he could, he led Wing and Susal through a list of questions. Thanks to McAndrews’s report, he already knew the answers, but he’d been trained in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and paid careful attention to Wing’s and Susal’s body and eye movements, signifiers of their mental states, as they responded to his interrogation.

  Telling him that yes, the POTA in Pit Three, behind the glass, was the very same POTA that had been tortured/humiliated by monster-lover Montori and her merry crew. That the only way into the pit was via a platform and stairs halfway up the wall, or the slab of armored concrete that capped it. That hatchway could be accessed via a side corridor in the surveillance center. The other pits could be accessed only via inspection hatches sealed with locks that could be opened only by turning two different keys at the same time, plus a separate keypad-activated set of electronic bolts. The pits were connected by a system that had delivered fresh water from a central source to the sprayheads that had cooled missiles during static firing tests, but that was completely flooded and accessible only by someone wearing scuba gear.

  Dice said, “You maintain round-the-clock surveillance? This room is always manned?”

  One of the screens blinked off for a few seconds, came back on.

  “Righteous, my brutha,” said Dr. Susal, eyes wide with fake innocence.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. So, how come no one was looking when Private Montori was posing for Playmate of the Month?”

  “I’ll let my colleague, Professor Dr. Wing, take that question,” said Dr. Susal.

  Dice looked at the woman.

  “There were errors in the early days of the program,” she said in measured, controlled tones. “They will not be repeated.”

  “What kind of errors?”

  “Human errors.”

  Dr. Wing was looking at Dice with the calm, slightly bored expression of an expert poker player who could be holding a pair of deuces or a full flush.

  Dice said, “People got access to one of your prisoners and spent a lot of time doing weird stuff to it. Specifically, to the Prisoner on the other side of this sheet of glass. Did someone fall asleep? Were they absent from their station?”

  “Sometimes people get distracted,” Dr. Wing said.

  “Or they were bribed. Or they were in on the deal. I’d like to take a look at your duty sheets.”

  “You’re welcome to interview the guards, of course. Unfortunately, several have succumbed to Island Fever since the…incident. You’ll have to work hard to get sense out of them.”

  Wing’s expression didn’t change, but her steady gaze, never looking up or to the side, suggested to Dice that she was lying or stonewalling rather than drawing upon her memory. Hook her up to a lie detector? No, she was the ultra-controlled type who could claim to have shot Lincoln, Kennedy, and J. R. Ewing without making the pens twitch. Dr. Susal was a better bet, if he could get past the man’s shuck and jive.

  Dice stepped up to the little man and said, “You keep video cameras permanently trained on the Prisoners and on the entrances to their pits.”

  “Twenty-four seven,” Dr. Susal said.

  “So why is there no video record of the little party that Private Montori and her associates had themselves in the pit?”

  “We fucked up, my man,” Dr. Susal said.

  “A glitch,” Dr. Wing said.

  “According to Captain McAndrews’s report, someone switched off the cameras,” Dice said. “Who has access to the controls?”

  “I’m the man, man,” Dr. Susal said. “So is my bitch.”

  “No one else?”

  “Anyone who can fuck with my computers,” Dr. Susal said. “You know why we don’t have Internet access on this rock anymore?”

  Dice knew. In the past month, Great James had become the major source of computer viruses, worms, and Internet spam. One particular spam message, the so-called Illuminatus Penis Extension Offer, had driven more than eight thousand recipients into apparently permanent psychosis.

  “I believe that he knows the veiled import of your question,” said Dr. Wing.

  “Of course he knows. He’s the Man. The Man always knows. Hey, take a lookee here,” Dr. Susal said, spinning around in his chair and scooting it across the floor to a b
ank of monitors labeled INTERNAL SECURITY. “It’s the big white chief, come to preach at us poor bone-chewin’ natives.”

  “Senator Bliss,” Sergeant Haines said. “He demanded a full tour of the facility.”

  “Hail to the Chief,” sang Dr. Susal, “he’s the Chief, he needs some hail-iiing…Hail to the Chief, he’s a hail-worthy kind of guy-yyyy.”

  “You’re quite welcome to stay,” Dr. Wing told Dice. “I understand that Senator Bliss has stirringly controversial views vis-à-vis our large blue friends.”

  “I’ve already heard them,” Dice said, and turned for the door.

  Too late. Senator Bliss strolled into the surveillance room ahead of his posse of black-suited aides and Colonel Stock. The base commander had acquired a silver armband. Rose-of-Mary stuck to him like a shadow, elfin in a desert sand camo jumpsuit and a black beret with a diamond cross pinned to its peak, her fierce gaze sweeping past Dice and locking onto the POTA.

  “Mercy me,” she said, her strong, clear voice echoing around the vault of the observation room. “There’s no mistaking that monstrous…thing for anything but the handiwork of the Great Satan. Colonel, are you quite sure we’re safe?”

  “I give you my word,” Colonel Stock said indulgently.

  “One of my charities cares for orphans whose parents were horribly slaughtered by the enemy,” Rose-of-Mary said. “They are brought up as good Christian soldiers—they look so sweet in their little uniforms. When I was invited here, I prayed with them, Colonel, on national TV, and pledged to make sure that these filthy things will answer in full for their wickedness. I have brought a vial—”

  “Hush, dear,” Senator Bliss said. “I want to have a word with Colonel Dice.”

  “Yes, Daddy,” Rose-of-Mary said meekly.

  Bliss, two hundred and fifty pounds of political muscle in his two-thousand-dollar gray silk suit, dazzled Dice with his dentistry. “Let me speak plainly, Colonel. I believe you are grossly exceeding your authority by being here. If you have clearance for this facility, you’d better show it to me right now. Colonel Stock, did you give Colonel Dice clearance?”