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Part 2 . Does It Remind You Of Sex?
Superfragment3, And A Cautionary
Tale
|
O |
nce they’d gone back inside the belly of the huge triangular dropship
with Ahmed, Jenna asked:
“Where are we going now?”
Ahmed looked at her, smiled in that infuriating, all-knowing way of his,
and said:
“Allyssa. Allyssa Orbital.”
“What’s that?”
“It is an orbital station,
where we operate from. Our headquarters, if you will.”
“I want to go home. Take us
back to Earth, please…” she said, her voice cracking with fear.
“That is no longer an
option, Jenna. Due to Ordinal regulations, we aren’t allowed to take people
back to Earth who know about us. There’s only one way to go back down there,
and that’s if you have a memory wipe.”
“What the hell is a memory
wipe? Take us home!” she sobbed, suddenly distraught at the prospect of
never seeing her home, or even her world, again.
“A memory wipe is a pro and
a con, all rolled up in one. Forgive me, I’m in a quirky mood today. What
happens is that a series of nanobots are injected into your cranium, and they
then go to work, erasing and replacing the parts of your memory dealing with
anything related to the Ordinals. Other memories are implanted instead.
Sometimes people can’t cope on Allyssa or Attilla – they need to be returned to
Earth for physical or psychological reasons. The Ordinals are unfailingly
compassionate, even though it is forbidden for them to disturb Earth in it’s
current state, they have provided this method for us to return home. You see,
the Ordinals no longer have a home – their home world was destroyed by a rogue
Berserker swarm millions of Earth years ago, so they know all about
homesickness. Been wandering around the Galaxy ever since, never colonizing,
only vowing to defeat the Berserker swarm.”
“What are all these funny
people you’re talking about? Are the Ordinals aliens? Like E.T.?”
Ahmed chuckled, then said:
“It’s hard to say, Jenna.
Nobody has ever seen one in the ‘flesh’, so to speak – and it is doubtful that
anyone ever will. The Ordinals are not little green men! But their spacecraft
are very visible indeed. That first one that came to Earth was a strange one –
sixteen kilometers wide, and the whole thing is alive, in a way you
cannot even imagine, Jenna! I’ve been inside it, experienced the little bits of
it that are safe for humans to enter, and I must say, you cannot even imagine
how far ahead of us they are. Jenna, how much do you know about the ways of
ants?”
“Not much. They bug me
sometimes on picniks, that’s about it. Of course, I know a little bit about
them, they live in big bunches, stuff like that…”
“To the Ordinals, we are
far less significant than ants are to humans. And yet, humans do study ants,
sometimes in great detail. We were lucky enough to encounter a
scientifically-minded part of the Ordinal race that happened to be passing
through our corner of the Lower Leaf Cluster in this Galaxy. To them, we are a
bit like the panda bear. You know those cute creatures that they are struggling
to breed in Japan? Well, we are a bit like pandas to them.”
“So no little green guys
with big eyes are going to abduct my family?”
“Nope. Far from it. By the
way, we’ll be reaching Allyssa in about 30 minutes, so sit tight and have
another cup of coffee.”
|
T |
he Ordinals had long since left their home world, keening a sad song of
grief as they watched their home world torn to pieces by the unstoppable
ferocity of a Berserker swarm. Even now, that swarm continued its mindless
rampage across the opposite end of this Galaxy. No race had the might to stop
it – it swallowed star systems like cotton candy, converting entire stars into
new child spore-swarms to seed interstellar space with. Barely enough time had
elapsed for them to frantically launch most of their populace into space,
already boiling with the advent of the Berserker scouts, and then it was all
over. All that was left a few Earth days after the swarm breached their inner
defenses was a halo of cooling gas where their star had been, and a few wisps
of liquid nitrogen where there had been a beautiful, cold, arctic world, Home.
Trillions of Ordinal
consciousnesses had been lost when they fleed Home, both to the Swarm and the
harshness of the void between the stars. One by one, their starships fell prey
to micrometeorites, deadly bullets flying unseen between stars. By the time
they reached their destination, their numbers had been reduced to less than a
tenth of what they had previously been. Centuries had passed as they
recuperated, always monitoring the progress of the Swarm, which travelled much
slower than they did. The Swarm was not in a hurry, and only moved at a tiny
fraction of the speed of light between stars.
Now their race was divided,
scattered amongst the stars. That World Song had ended, but their technology
had progressed in the intervening time, and now many worlds joined in a new
Song, a Song tinged with sadness, for they did not want their fate befalling
countless helpless sentient species. In all of their travels across the Galaxy,
the Ordinals found life, and more often than not, intelligent life.
Originally the Ordinals had
been a very strange species, resembling tiny caterpillars more than anything
else. Living on an Arctic world where the highest temperature at noon was
virtually absolute zero, their chemistry was bizarre, yet very efficient. They
treasured coldness, for it was their lifeblood – their entire biochemistry
functioned only if they were colder than their surroundings, which was a
difficult feat to attain on an Arctic world such as theirs had been.
Despite their resemblance
to the humble Earth caterpillar, they were indeed an extremely alien species.
Their intelligence was formed from the binding together of billions of little
minds at a quantum level to form the World Song. Individuality was not
something they entirely grasped. But they did still treasure life, and nurtured
it’s growth wherever they could.
Long before they reached Earth,
the Ordinals went through a transformation, elevating to new phase of existence
– an abstracted one. One by one, the little Ordinals transferred their memories
into the Great Conductor, a virtualized network of starships spread across
space, linked by instantaneous quantum communications. Soon, what had only been
a few isolated Ship Songs merged to form the all-encompassing Universal Song.
Leaving behind their physical form entirely, the line between the Universal
Song and the Ordinals themselves became a thin one, and then one day, it
vanished entirely.
Now their only purpose was
to defeat the Swarm, and make the Galaxy safe for young sophont races to reach
their full potential. In it’s maturity, the Ordinal race had found a new goal.
Not long after they became the Ordinals we know today, they encountered Earth.
During their travels
through the hauntingly empty gulfs between the stars, the Ordinals had
encountered other spacefaring species, and had formed alliances with such ones
as they could communicate with. Three principle allies had emerged during those
long years of searching for the famed Instrument, which was spoken of
throughout the Galaxy by all advanced sophonts, an Instrument that could defeat
the Swarm once and for all.
None of the names of the
species the Ordinals became allied with are translateable to any human
language. Indeed, one of these species does not even have communication in any
way resembling ours at all. However, humans soon found names for these three
primary ally species, and discovered that there were hundreds of lesser races
who shared the goal of the Ordinals too.
First to be discovered were
the Jovians. By a remarkable accident of morpholy and evolution, they were the
closest match to Home Sapiens the Ordinals have ever found, although their
physiology was…different, very different. Their home world had also been
engulfed by the Swarm, so they had a deep-seated grudge against the Berserker
Swarm. Closely resembling Neptune, their home world was on the opposite edge of
the Galaxy. Living at the bottom of a gravity well of that size meant that they
had a strange form, like a flatworm, but with a group of tentacles on their
forward edges. Possessing an astonishing technology which allowed them to
travel between stars in their CrusherShips, interstellar spacecraft that
internally mimicked the conditions of their home world, they were powerful
allies, and the Ordinals quickly befriended and shared scientific knowledge
with them. That first ship that came to Earth was indeed a CrusherShip, a
perfect sphere of compressed gravity containing a mixed “crew” of both Ordinal
and Jovians.
Although we do not still
fully understand their species, the Jovians acted as a go-between for us and
the Ordinals – the Ordinals simply do not understand humans at all, but the
Jovians were able to act as translators in a way, smoothing the process towards
enlightenment and armament.
We, humans, are in a war
zone that spans entire galaxies. The Berserkers have been busy, and they are
old, very old, and terrible for it. Onely one path remains to the
uncontaminated region of the Galaxy, where like-minded species have constructed
the Wall of Silence, the only thing in the Universe that can possibly halt the
spread of the Berserkers. Both the Ordinals and the Berserkers are closing in
on that path, attempting to occupy it and prevent movement.
It is not a path, as such.
A better way to describe it would be to say that it is a crossing point, a
twist in the fabric of space and time that allows egress to another part of the
Universe, so mind-bogglingly far away from Earth that it is better not to
consider it.
Having known for millions
of years about the existence of the Crossing Point, or The Place of Crossing
Over, as various species have called it, the Ordinals have been protecting it
fiercely. It is their last stand, and it is about to fall. Recently humanity
learnt of the destruction of the third Jovian war-convoy to try and block the
seemingly unstoppable progress of the Swarm, which has sent out a vast tentacle
flying towards the Path. Although in our perception it will still takes
centuries before the Swarm reaches the Crossing Point, the Ordinals are
assembling a last strike force, the greatest one yet, in an attempt to fend off
the vast Wall of Noise (this is the name given to the Swarm by the Ordinals)
that is headed squarely for the Crossing Point at one tenth of the speed of
light, and will reach it soon.
Not too long ago another
sophisticated race joined the struggle as a first-class ally, the Star
Dwellers. Little is known about their race compared to that of the Jovians,
except that their natural habitat is the photosphere of stars. The Ordinals
near Earth do not have too much contact with the Star Dwellers, as they are
located on the far side of our Galaxy.
Many other races have been
discovered by the Ordinals, but not very much is understood about them. Sometimes humans working with the libraries
maintained by the Ordinals have trouble even understanding the definition of
intelligent lifeforms that the Ordinals have – not even with the powerful
Artificial Intelligences possessed by the Jovians are such things possible, due
to the drastic differences between us and the Ordinals.
Right now an Ordinal ship
was approaching Earth orbit. The first interstellar traffic Allyssa had known
for weeks, the ship was highly anticipated, because it was the first
time humans would ever be visited by full-fledged members of the Ordinal
species, and not just their reflections, as had previously been the case.
Instead of sending Ordinal
minds to the distant stars and endangering themselves, the Ordinal propogated
only small, near-sentient fragments of itself to other star systems during it’s
routine exploration. Called reflections, these were not true Ordinal –
merely fragments, ghosts if you will. Possessing only a limited intellect,
these fragments discovered Earth, and called in nearby Jovians for help. It was
actually the Jovians who were responsible for the bridging of the gap between
us and the Ordinals, even though we understand them only slightly more than we
do the Ordinals.
|
O |
ut of the whirling Universal Song a new melody collapsed into a stable
waveform, intersecting in several higher dimensions with past and future
versions of itself, resonating in a unique new way. Solidified light danced
across the absolutely empty sphere inside the vast ice ship, light that seemed
to sparkle, that seemed alive somehow.
After a gentle pattern of
green and blue developed across the spinning ball of light, it began to slow
it’s rotation and became an I. Energy shrunk, fell, and was captured as a
series of electrons and neutrons, and within an instant, Heirloom was made.
Heirloom is perhaps the closest translation that can be applied to an Ordinal
which can have a name.
Heirloom was designed for
the sole purpose of living inside a Jovian AI processor mesh, of the type
currently nearly completed inside Allyssa station. One thing the Ordinal
species knew about the Jovians was their immense skill with language and mind –
they were the fire bearers of a new era of understanding in the Galaxy at
large, the catalysts of change. Their technology had allowed previously mortal
enemies to communicate with one another, to form bonds, to cease the senseless
killing which had marred the galaxy for so many years. But not even the arts of
the Jovians could halt the brutal spread of Swarm, for Swarm knew no language
and had no mind.
The only way for a
Superfragment like Heirloom to communicate with anything at all was to drop
down through several layers of intelligence, shedding it’s mind like concentric
snake skins, until it could serve as an intermediary, an interpreter of sorts,
where such things were possible.
This branch of the
Universal Song had lost a tiny fraction of itself today, and inasmuch as the
metaphor applies, it was mourning, for there was no known science that could
restore one like Heirloom to the glory of the Song.
Heirloom’s gigantic Ice
Ship, measuring seventy kilometers on it’s aft keel, decelerated into an orbit
that left it only a few hundred meters from Allyssa station just as Heirloom
was made. A massive, perfectly spherical containment field shimmered gently in
the fierce heat of Sol – Allyssa was on the sunside of Luna at this point in
her orbit. Ice Ships had been given their name because of their nature – that
which rode inside the Ice Ship on their lonely journeys between the stars
required the entire ship to be kept at absolute zero in order to survive.
Although the Ordinals had long since left the physical plane of existence
behind, their machinery had not, and theirs was a technology that had been
perfected on a world not warmed at all by a faint red star nearly a light year
away from it.
Heirloom disembarked from
the Ice Ship, simply flying straight through its hull, a tiny, perfect sphere
shining brightly in the torret of light from Sol as it leapt from its
electronic womb. The humans watching from inside Allyssa marvelled and pointed
at the spectacle before them, being lucky enough to be the first humans ever to
see an Ice Ship, the first to gaze at what at first sight appeared to be a
series of slowly moving translucent blue spheres, intersecting randomly with
each other. It would have been to their great chagrin if they had understood
then, as we do now, that the Ice Ship did not really exist in any way tangible
to humans, other than the reflection of solar energy off its planes and curves.
Heading towards an open
airlock, Heirloom did not really ponder this, for there was nothing to ponder.
An Heirloom cannot ponder, much less think aloud. It had a job to do.
|
D |
im, caustic light lapped against the top of the dome which sat astride
the top of Monochrome Beach. Generally the artificial lighting obeyed the
standard seasonal day cycle of this part of the world, at least in spirit, if
not literally.
Despite the crushing
pressure of the ocean, formidable even at this paltry depth of only 200 meters,
Colonel Walker experienced only a single atmosphere of pressure – here, on this
beach, the barometer always read the same as on any other beach in the world.
Only Eetee technology could have constructed a flat-bottomed dome that was
strong enough to maintain such a low pressure zone inside it this deep under
water. Walker knew that the only thing humans had ever made that could
compromise the integrity of that dome was a tactical nuclear warhead, in the
megaton range.
Colonel Walker found all of
that more than a little suspicious – but then, he was probably just being
pedantic and ignorant. The Ordinals were so much older than humans that it made
sense to take their advice most of the time. Not being a man given to flighty
thought, Walker had pondered the question for a very long time, and for the
moment he was resigned to chatting with their avatars when he needed to contact
them directly, which happened quite often in his line of work.
For over a decade now,
Walker had been in charge of the Genetic Science Division. He reported only to
a single superior officer, the Admiral In Chief, who was stationed in
Washington. Only a very tiny handful of New Territories commanders and other
important figures were allowed on Earth, mainly the very highest ranking ones,
in order to liase with the more important Earth governments and power
structures. Walker was one of maybe three dozen New Territories citizens
permitted to visit any place on Earth he desired, but he rarely ventured forth
onto the mainland these days, preferring to live in the habitat underneath
Monochrome Beach, where he could be closest to his favourite projects. Here he
was also safe from any conceivable war above, due to the protection afforded by
the Dome.
In an emergency, Monochrome
Beach was capable of descending to the bottom of the deepest oceans on Earth,
effectively inviolate from any weapon ever made by humans, bar one or
two that had not been officially invented yet. When it came down to the
nittygritty, this station could hide very well indeed. No other station like it
existed on Earth – only in this little construction of plasmetal and ceramic,
towering a hundred and twenty meters high from top to bottom, shaped somewhat
like an ice-cream cone, was Eetee technology officially allowed to be used.
All of his doubts and
worries faded when a small wave crested and a very tall woman emerged from it,
her long blonde hair clinging to her back and shoulders. As was customary,
Walker gazed at the ground while she completed her coughing, spitting
transformation into an air-breathing human. No Amphe enjoyed being watched as
they performed the rapid switch between water-breathing and air-breathing
states, and it was usually accompanied with a lot of harking and an activity
that closely resembled vomiting, as they evacuated liters and liters of
seawater from their lungs.
Walker knew this Amphe –
her features were very familiar. Her coughing died down to an irritated
grumble, and he stepped forward quickly, his military demeanour replaced for a
moment by an eagerness to speak with a very close friend.
“How’re you doing, Elena!”
his Midwest twang echoed.
Elena spat and then looked up and grimaced, her face showing exhaustion.
“Very…ladylike. Please
do come sit down with me over here, I brought you a towel,” Walker commented as
he guided her powerful form to one of the beach chairs he had brought with him
for this occasion.
“I’ll bet every strand
of hair on my head your tree-clambering land-lubber lady friends never had to
egest two lungfuls of salty seawater! Worst they ever had to egest was a
mouthful of salt at a time, if that!” Elena replied, her voice grating and
snapping as her vocal cords adjusted to the sudden dearth of pressure. Just
minutes ago, her entire body had been crushed in the vice-like grip of 200
atmospheres worth of crushing water.
She sat down and rocked her head back, nostrils flaring slightly.
“You know, the one
thing I always miss about landlubbing in general is aroma. There’s not
much to smell underwater, not with ordinary human noses anyway. The salt in the
ocean just overwhelms normal human noses. Hell, I can even smell that you
haven’t had a bath in about eighteen hours,” she teased, eyes blinking rapidly
as they struggled to focus on the inside of the Dome.
“Well, I see you
haven’t lost any of your charm, nor your vocabulary. Welcome back,” Walker
replied, affixing her with another playful grin.
Blinking, Elena looked over
at him as he slowly rubbed her legs dry with the rough white towel he had
brought with him earlier. Walker was not a short man, coming in at over 6 feet,
but Elena dwarfed him by nearly a foot. Most Amphe were very tall and muscular.
A lifestyle led underwater, where gravity was not a concern and spines and leg
bones were not compressed downwards constantly, as they were for normal humans,
resulted in exceedingly tall Amphe-genotype people, two generations down the
line.
He liked strong girls.
Elena could easily pin him down, and underwater he was helpless against her. No
normal woman he had ever met could do things like that to him, a trained
military consort with nearly twenty years of combat experience. That was what
an adolescence spent constantly fighting against water gave you – muscles of
steel, all over. Walker brushed a hand through his curly, short brown hair and
winked at Elena again. His brain was already writing cheques that Elena’s body
most certainly could not cash, as he imagined her fully naked. Elena saw him,
and her dark eyes glimmered momentarily, then she scowled and said:
“Don’t. Even. Think.
About. It. Do you have any idea how far I swam to get here? And to top it off I
had to wear this bikini thing for the last few meters, too. Doubtlessly
I’ll have to get fully toffed up in those stupid clothes you
tree-dwellers insist on wearing all the time. Honestly.”
Getting up and rubbing the
sand off his calves, Walker held out his hand. She grabbed it and pulled hard,
too hard, and he found himself suddenly sprawled on top of her, with the beach
chair creaking alarmingly beneath their combined weight.
“Fooled ya!” she
whispered in his ear, then she sat up and said:
“Come on, let’s get out of
here before that Desgard freak sees us.”
Sand scrunched between
their toes as they walked back over the dark, volcanic sand, with Elena
chittering excitedly in that very clipped, sharp accent of hers, a legacy of a
lifetime of speaking Kii’Rnk%, the manufactured tongue of the Amphe, the
youngest and loudest language of all. Although her grammar was as perfect as
that of someone who had spoken English all their life, she tended to emphasise
her ‘k’s far too much.
*
Lounging on the large bed
in his cabin, Elena twittered sharply again, clicking through a little tune
that was unfamiliar to Walker, probably because it was entirely composed of
clicks and buzzes. Amphe were very good at lounging – it was all they seemed to
do once they got out of the water. Being 7 feet tall made for some very
advanced lounging and general prostration in most cases, and Elena was taking
full advantage of his silk sheets, rubbing her naked skin against them like a
cat. She’d shed her tiny bikini the instant he’d closed his door, causing
raised eyebrows from Walker, and a cluck from Elena, followed immediately by a
giggle.
“When did you get these
sheets? They’re incredible! I could lie here all day!” she asked when he
returned from his little kitchen with a drink in each hand. Amphe were
notoriously sensitive to the effects of alcohol, so he’d held back on the fine
wine he had in his cupboard – better to offer fruit juice, a rare delicacy for
someone like Elena, who spent most of her time in the deeper ranges where any
liquid other than salt water was unheard of.
“I got them in Tokyo.
Just before I came here, two years back, actually,” he said, handing her a
drink.
She sat up and delicately sipped at it, her face scrunching up a little
as the sharp citrus flavour invaded her nasal passages.
“Wow, this stuff is
pretty strong. Guess it’s because I haven’t drunk orange juice for a few
months, at least,” she whispered, her face suddenly downcast. One thing that
always unnerved Walker about Elena was her incredible moodiness.
“What’s wrong?” he
asked, getting onto his knees in front of her.
“You’ve had another
woman in here. I can smell her. She was on your bed,” Elena said, her voice
taking on a confrontational tone, “Maybe having a sense of smell isn’t so good
after all.”
Walker laughed and stood up.
“That would have been
my mother. She did indeed sit on my bed. As I recall, she was taking cheap
shots at me for not giving her any grandchildren. Very much into her strong
perfumes, my mother,” he said, smiling again. “Quite a connoiseur, in fact,” he
added.
Elena favoured him with a suspicious glance, then said:
“You’re lying, you
goddamn monkey!”
Moody as ever, she favoured him with a brilliant smile, as if she knew
something he didn’t.
“But even lying monkies
have their uses,” she added. “Come over here and oil me up – my skin’s already
starting to chafe from all this hot air. God, can’t you turn down your heating?
How do you people stand being dry all the time?”
“I set it to 10 degrees
Celsius just for you before we came here. I’m currently freezing my balls off
so you can be comfortable,” he replied, hugging himself and shivering.
“Oh. Well, in that
case, you can still oil me up.”
“Fine. Finish your OJ
first,” he said, getting up to light an incense stick. Although open fires and
other combustion was strictly banned in this habitat, he felt that sometimes
one just needed to pull rank.
Once he got the incense
glowing nicely, he returned to the bed, where Elena had already arranged
herself so he could oil her back. Her curious feet lay on the edge of the bed,
the only feet that had ever actually managed to reach the end of the
exceedingly large mattress. He started oiling them, gently massaging the tense
muscles. Amphe toes were much longer and thinner than human toes, and their
feet resembled hands more than anything else, hands with webbed fingers and
claws instead of fingernails.
What was even more
surprising was the method that had allowed the Genetic Science Division to
arrive at this mutation. There had been no need to hand-craft the
chromosequences needed for webbed feet like this – all the scientists had
needed to do was flip a couple of proteins around, effectively switching the
mutation on. It had already been there, buried in the DNA of humanity
for untold aeons. Why, nobody knew. That same switch activated a number of
other genes, too. What people had once thought to be “garbage genes” turned out
to be a set of fully functional modifications for the human body.
Since he had begun leading
the Genetic Science Division twenty three years ago, Walker had learnt a lot of
things about human genes, strange things. Jovian AI had helped his scientists
to unravel the gene code, giving them the tools to decipher the protein
sequences, and they’d discovered that human DNA contained thousands upon
thousands of variations, different mutations that could be selected with the
flip of one or two master proteins. If performed correctly on a single ovum,
the mutation would propogate to the person’s children.
Much research had been
invested in the particular mutation that allowed people to live underwater. It
had taken the Jovian AI a very long time to figure out the Amphe mutation
sequence (more than a day, in fact), as it was one of the more complex ones,
but eventually they had found that people could be created that could live very
comfortably underwater. What was even more surprising was that only superficial
modifications occurred – nothing obvious, apart from the feet and extra webbing
on the hands. Internally, larger changes occurred. Lung tissue differed – the
alveoli of the lungs were coated with a tougher layer of mucus to allow for the
breathing of salt water, and the hairs inside the nasal passages grew longer
and thicker, to filter out unwanted particles in the water. The eyes changed
slightly, and could be focused both above water and underneath it, after a
short period of adaptation. Thicker mucus once again served to protect the
delicate surface of the eyes from the corrosive ocean.
Another striking thing
about Amphe was that they were completely hairless, apart from the hair on
their heads. Unlike humans, they had absolutely no body hair – not even the
fine, downy hair of babies. They did have a little bit of that golden hair at
birth, but they soon lost it as they matured. Only their distinctive long,
straight crown hair remained.
Elena’s feet were very
soft, like the feet of a baby. This was obviously because she rarely walked
anywhere. But the webbing between her toes was very tough, almost like plastic,
in order to form a more efficient flipper. Amphe could swim very quickly
indeed, and could even broach the surface if they really tried, somewhat like
their agile cousins, the dolphins.
Giving naked agents from
the Deep Range hot-oil massages wasn’t strictly in Colonel Walker’s job
description, but this agent merited some special attention. Born to a prominent
Induction Zone clan of Amphe in the southernmost regions of Attilla thirty
years ago, she was of the second youngest generation of Amphe. Few of the first
generation of Amphe, nearly two centuries ago in relative time, had survived
much past 50 years of age, but today’s Amphe could expect lifespans well in
excess of a century. Only a year and a half had passed since Monochrome Beach had
been constructed and the first Amphe had arrived from Attilla Station to live
on Earth. Having arrived with them, Walker was very concerned about their
well-being – the Amphe were one of his most cherished research projects.
Only a single single
Geometry Stack had found its way to Earth since humans had first begun working
with the Ordinals. Walker had viewed the educational encyclopedia entries on
Geometry Stacks once, and he knew what they looked like. A mere twenty
centimeters in radius, it was, like all things truly Ordinal, very simply
designed. The Ordinals had a love of extremely minimilastic design, and the
Geometry Stacks they had created and given to humans as gifts were no
exception. The sole purpose of a Geometry Stack was to distort time, to flatten
the curve of space/time and change the relative flow of causation. Effectively,
the created a perfect sphere of bent space/time. Space/time could be bent
either positively or negatively by the Stack, and every one of the three
Geometry Stacks owned by humans only bent it negatively, slowing down the flow
of time inside the sphere of influence of the GS unit.
Monochrome Beach was fixed
to a pace exactly 365 times faster than the outside world, so that a day on
Earth was the equivalent of a year inside Monochrome Beach. In order to prevent
the strange effects of water passing through a time distortion field from
possibly harming Monochrome Beach or giving away its position, a pushfield had
been erected, neatly enclosing the sphere of influence. Inside the pushfield,
ocean water was kept circulating slowly, and a few interfaces maintained the
temperature of the space within the pushfield. There was only one way to exit
the pushfield surrounding Monochrome Beach, a large Translator room near the
bottom of the complex.
Time lag was a complex
problem that every New Territory citizen had to deal with at one point or
another. Differing densities of space/time flux always caused confusion for
humans. At least here the rate of timeflow was constant – the Beach always
maintained an even pace inside itself, locked to exactly 365 times the timeflow
speed of Earth. The problem came when you had to move between New Territory
settlements and stations, of which there were only 3, with a new one under
construction on Mars.
Allyssa, the fastest of all
the settlements, bent the flow of time into something resembling a
higher-dimensional pretzel around itself, a term that the physicists on Allyssa
were very fond of using. So great was the time distortion around that Station
that most parts of it were accelerated over 10,000 times faster than the space
surrounding them. On Allyssa, humans had spent centuries studying
Ordinal technology, and learning from the Ordinals themselves. Even at that
cataclysmic rate of time distortion, humans still found themselves trying hard
to keep up with the Ordinals. Creatures of pure energy had little need for the
slow time-frame that the rest of the Universe was locked to.
Attilla was a slightly
different case. Arranged in concentric rings of distortion, one flux-field
overlapping another, it was a case study in confusion. By moving outwards in
the rings of Attilla, one could slow down, and eventually reach the outermost
ring, which was maintained at standard Universe time. No complex pushfields
were necessary on the Moon, but still the innermost spheres of Attilla, the
largest settlement of all, had to hover in a vacuum, isolated from the rest of
the colony, with powerful lattice nodes keeping it attached to the rest of
Attilla, for which the time difference was enormous. Nested flux-fields
multiplied the time distortion, and the centre of Attilla was in its own way a
Deep Range all by itself. Human physiology and chemistry broke down in there,
and it was a place haunted mainly by the avatars of humans and the AI consorts
of the Jovians and the Ordinals.
All of this made life hell
for anyone who regularly travelled between the three settlements. Apparently
the new Mars settlement was not going to be another nested flux monstrosity,
but rather a simple fixed-time distortion zone, much like the Beach. The only
way to pass between distortion fields was by using a translator – one could not
pass through the distortion field and hope to survive. Of course, people had
tried, but they had been turned into strawberry jam in the process.
Elena had arrived at the
Beach using the Translation elevator, a perfectly simple apparatus bearing a
strong resemblence to a normal Earth Elevator, that translated its contents
inside the pushfield of the Beach. She swam the rest of the way, entering by
means of one of the hundreds of public waterlocks on the outside of the Beach.
About two thirds of the population of the Beach was Amphe, with the rest
composed of normal New Territory humans, with the occasional “transplant”.
“Transplant” was a word for people who had formerly lived on Earth and had been
chosen to become a New Territories citizen, either by accident or by design.
This happened surprisingly often, often for no more compelling a reason than
that the person in question had discovered about the presence of the New
Territories. Thus, the population of transplants was composed of many
scientists and other professionals in their fields, who had somehow stumbled
across damning evidence for the existence of the New Territories.
Since most of the
population of the Beach was aquatic, not much of it was actually kept dry. Only
the top third of the Beach was pressurized, and the rest was filled with water.
All water inside the Beach was super-oxygenated and purified. The Beach still
fulfilled its original purpose of helping Amphe who were born and bred on
Attilla to acclimatize to the rigours of seawater on Earth. Arranged in decks,
with each deck containing a larger percentage of seawater to the deck above it,
new Amphe would usually spend a week or two on each deck, moving to the next
deck when they were comfortable with the one they were on. Eventually, after a
couple of months, they were ready to breathe untempered seawater, and ventured
forth. No Amphe would survive more than a few minutes if they were to
immediately make the transition from pure water to the salt of Earth’s oceans,
which was one of the biggest reasons for the existence of the Beach.
Elena coughed and sat bolt upright, eyes wide open.
“Someone’s coming,” she
said, her voice more clipped than normal.
“What? What do you mean?”
Walker asked, and then he heard the soft ding of his doorbell. The face
shown to him by the camera attached to the outside of his door was an
unfamiliar one.
“Who is this?” he asked,
not switching on the two-way video just yet.
“A friend of Elena. Tell
her to watch out for the fish that has no eyes.”
“Wh-what are you talking
about?” Walker asked, annoyed that the man, an big Amphe if he ever saw one,
would not tell him who he was.
“Goodbye, and good luck,”
the stranger said, and walked away.
“Who was that?” Elena
asked, joining him in the living room. Her skin sparkled.
“Some weirdo. Said he was
your friend. Oh, and he said, and I quote, to watch out for fish with no eyes.
Is this some sort of freakazoid friend of yours that you know?” Walker asked,
pacing the living room’s centre.
“No, I don’t know anyone
like that. How was he dressed?”
“He wasn’t.”
“Hmmm…well, that’s a
strange one. I have no idea what that means, what he said. Look, let’s forget
about it, OK? It was probably just a someone playing a practical joke on us,
and he’s probably laughing his ass off right now.”
“I don’t know. He seemed
pretty serious to me,” Walker replied, after thinking for a moment. “Now, let’s
continue that rubdown, shall we?”
Elena touched his hand, and
said “Um. I can’t stay – something’s come up. Sorry.”
*
After a hasty exit from
Walker’s cabin, Elena looked up and down the stark, curving hallway outside it,
her head flicking like a bird’s, accustomed to the resistance of water. Eyes
widening, she loped down the corridor, already feeling the sea-change coming
over her. Most of her generation could already control the sea-change, start or
stop it at will, and the latest generation of Amphe had complete control over
it.
Less than a minute later,
she blinked as the retinal scanner of the main waterlock interrogated her eyes
for her identity, and then the lock on the door went click, and she
pushed the cilia open. Designed specifically for the Beach by human engineers
in possession of exotic smart materials on Attilla, the waterlock doors were
not really doors at all. Composed of dozens of moisture-sensitive fronds, they
would slam shut if water tried to breach them from the outside, making the Beach
a much safer place for air-breathers to live. During its short history, the
Beach had been the scene of almost thirty violent breaches, as external locks
and cycling equipment occasionally failed or human error resulted in water
entering the facility. Considering the fact that most of the dry portions of
the Beach were baryostable at exactly one atmosphere, and there was about 200
atmospheres of pressure outside the thin smartmetal walls, even a single breach
had the potential to kill hundreds.
Behind her, the fronds
clasped together automatically, and she sat down on the cold blue plasmetal
floor, the toll of the sea-change almost making her fall over just as she got
comfortable. Generally, the faster the sea-change, the more adversely an Amphe
was affected by it. In order to make deep-water swimming possible, all nitrogen
was dumped from an Amphe’s body, and replaced with an ammonia compound,
depending on the pressure. Even though the process was marvellously agile,
considering the vast metabolic changes it wrought, it could still play havoc
with an Amphe’s breathing and balance. Dizziness hit Elena fiercely, and she
repeated Zen mantras over and over, as the pressure inside the chamber climbed,
rapidly equalising with the water barely a meter away from her feet.
Any normal human being
would have died from a combination of nitrogen narcosis and oxygen poisoning by
this point, owing to the extremely fast rate of compression, but Elena didn’t
mind. She opened her half-lidded eyes when she heard the chime indicating the
pressure inside the waterlock was now equal to the water outside. Getting up
slowly, moving carefully, she made her way to the exit of the waterlock, a
simple hatch opening outwards, sealed onto the outside of the Beach’s hull by
both bolts and water pressure. She pulled the red RELEASE lever back
gently, careful to avoid any sudden pressure gradients making the door explode
outwards and splash the inside of the chamber with seawater. Lungs bursting
with their desire for cool seawater, she bent over to check that the lock had
indeed released properly, and an instant later she jumped and slid into the
water, hardly leaving a splash behind her.
Icy water crashed into her
lungs, and bubbles festooned her hair for several seconds as she went through
the final stage of the sea-change, her metabolism accelerating into a slightly
faster rhythm, thin membranes sliding over her eyes, shutting out the burning
water.
Now she was suspended above
the Kingdom of Darkness, an angel with flowing hair flying above the Deep
Range. Although the Beach was not above the deepest part of the Pacific, there
was a good eight kilometers between her and the seabed. Sea-senses that had
been missing from her mere moments ago flooded into her consciousness almost
painfully, delicate lines of nerves running the length of her body helping her
form a cohesive image of the pressure gradients around her. To her left there
was the comforting bulk of the Beach, displacing a monstrous amount of water.
No shoals of fish swam inside the Pushfield, but a few glimmers and echoes
betrayed to her sensitive ears the presence of a small handful of Amphe
immediately beneath her, about forty meters down. They were having a quiet
conversation.
With them floated a
machine, a segmented robot, of a type she had not seen before. Elena could hear
the harsh buzzing of its fission drive, and even from up here she could feel
the temperature gradient its cooling plates were inducing in the water. Even
though it was only a meter long, the water around it was not friendly, pressing
in and crushing its delicate components, most of which she was sure were not
intended for anything but a vacuum. Despite the pressure at these depths, it
maintained its position precisely, not moving an inch, even though there was
currently a powerful rising current of cooler water moving down past Elena and
the group beneath.
A flick of her wrists and
ankles sent her gliding down towards them, and soon she saw familiar faces, old
friends, all of them cackling along in Kii’Rnk%, their faces impassive
and calm, keeping a respectable distance away from the robot, which was
radiating so much heat that it was actually glowing, its meceram skin
glossy in this wavering light. At the surface, it probably shone like a highly
polished jewel, but the Range was not a world of bright colours. It was a world
of subtle signals and tiny noises, gentle heat gradients and the occasional
click, with almost all normal human sensation drowned out by the constantly
crushing water that towered above.
“That thing’s gonna explode
any second now, iiK%tt!” she exclaimed in her native language as she
neared the group. Most of the six she had known her entire life, and three were
from her own clan. Only one was unknown, his hair an astonishing shade of flourescent
green, lit from inside each strand by bioluminescent bacteria fed from the
roots. IiK%tt swum next to the stranger. Roughly translated, his name in
English was be “Michael”. Most of the sounds available to humans on land were
not reproducible underwater by Amphe vocal cords, so substitutes had been
developed. As such, the grammatical nature of Kii’Rnk% was very similar
to English, so similar that only a very simple AI routine was needed to convert
between the two. Air-breathing humans were called Singers by the Amphe, because
they could reproduce so many sounds. Some older Amphe simply couldn’t speak
normal English, and the oldest were not even capable of living on land. Today,
most could speak and understand both English and Kii’Rnk%, but there
were always exceptions.
“So, aren’t you going
to introduce me?” she asked Michael, just as she stopped descending, now
parallel to the rest of the ragged group of old-timers. He grinned and said:
“Elena, meet Leonei
Puchevsky. Elena, Puchevsky. Puchevsky is the fourth oldest new-genner on
Earth, and he’s come to help us with our new project!”
Elena gazed at the
man’s glittering hair, then said “Hi,
Leonei. Where are you from?”
“Attilla, Ring Three,”
he replied, after a moment’s hesitation. He frowned at her, and for a moment
she didn’t understand what was going on, until she looked down and realized
that she was still wearing her bikini. Such things were extremely unusual on
Attilla, she remembered, the equivalent of wearing a small anteater on your
shoulder to a dinner party on Earth. Courteously, she bent and removed both
halves.
“Sorry about that. I’ve
been wearing it so long I forgot it was there!”
“It isss not a problem.
Evidently you have been around the tree-climberssss and their bizarre taboos
for too long,” he replied, only half-jokingly. Amphe and humans were always
baiting and kidding around with each other, with the one side hardly ever
understanding the other these days, and the clothing taboo was a major example.
Elena blushed and said:
“What is this project of which you speak? I know it must be important when you
get a runner to come to my lover’s room with a codephrase, Michael. Spill it!”
“Leonei is from the
University of Attilla, Geomagnetic Studies Department. He and his robot are
here to study a series of gravitic anomolies that they ran across a few days
ago. Why don’t you give her a quick overview, Leonei?” Michael replied, his
easy-going voice buzzing through the warm water around them, so unusual this
far down.
“Certainly. My specialist
field is actually in Applied Artificial Intelligence, but I’m also majoring in
Geomagnetics, which is why my Prof sent me down here to check out a funny
phenomenon we’ve observed from orbit. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get very much
detail from the satellite, so the University had to send down a robot carrying
some specialized instruments, in order to investigate properly. My Prof told me
that the Ordinals are very interested in this anomoly for some unfathomable
reason, and I hadn’t yet been to the Deep Range, so I grabbed the chance!”
Elena swam closer to
the robot, peering at it, then swum back before the heat became uncomfortable.
If she had been on land, she would have wiped sweat from her brow as she
motioned at the robot and said: “You guys used a priority call-up just to get
me to come here and chat with a University student? That’s a bit fucking
impolite, don’t you think?”
Michael grinned again
and said: “Well, Elena, if you don’t want to earn a hundred thousand US dollars
for a week’s work, that’s your problem. As your friend, I felt you should have
an opportunity before any of those other young hopefuls around here get a
position on this man’s team. That sure is impolite, I agree…”
“Well, when you put it
that way, it shouldn’t be a problem for me to clear up a week in my schedule at
all. Pity, I was planning on having a bit of a break, but a hundred thou is not
to be sneezed at. Where do I sign?” she said, after favouring Michael with a
sarcastic look that suggested imminent doom.
“No…documentation will
be kept for this trip. The only records being kept here will be maintained by
Fluffy over here, my robot. He is possessed of a Stage 8 Parallel AI Core, so
he should be able to take care of all our dataprocessing needs, and then some.
In fact, he’s been recording all of what we said here,” Leonei said, waving a
hand at the robot. Somehow, even though it was only a meter long, the machine
felt heavy to her pressure-sense. It probably weighed close to a ton on
land, crammed as it was with bleeding-edge electronics. “Meet me back here in
one hour. Our Ordinal sponsors are anxious to get to the bottom of this
particular problem, and there is only one way to reach our solution, and that
is to swim straight down, for 9 kilometers, at a location about two hundred
kilometers northwest of the Beach. Please inform me within an hour if you will
or will not be able to accompany us. It’s a long dive, so I’ll understand if
you’re not prepared to do it.”
Michael looked at
Elena, then back at Leonei.
“Fuck it. I don’t have
an hour to waste, let’s go now. What do you guys say?” he asked the group, who
all smiled and nodded. One of them, a very old silvery-haired woman called
Augusta, was grinning widely. She winked at Michael and said “One dive, a
hundred thou – hell, the Ordinals must have lost one fuck of an
important object down there in the Greater Dark.” She cackled, but stopped
after she saw Leonei glaring at her. Those two aren’t going to get along
very well, thought Elena.
“Yeah. Why wait?” Elena
echoed.
Leonei looked around at
the group, sighed, and said, “All right, if you insist. Fluffy, please retrieve
our cargo container from wetlock 13A.”
Grinding through the
water like a thousand discordant knives, the segmented bulk of Fluffy the robot
spun and arced towards an open wetlock above them. The Beach was shaped like a
very fat black metal carrot, and they were underneath one of it’s lowermost
regions now, having drifted downwards slowly throughout their conversation.
Within a few minutes, Fluffy returned, his manner of movement finally becoming
clear. Twenty small, triangular meceram flippers extended from his sides, and
they slid back and forth like the cilia of a jellyfish or a bacteria, only much
faster, like the wings of a dragonfly. This method of propulsion gave Fluffy
great maneuverability underwater, and when he wanted to go really fast, his
bulging “head” contained a powerful hyper-cavitating pulse motor, capable of
pushing him through water at nearly a hundred kilometers per hour. Fluffy, despite
his extremely silly nickname, was a formidable little machine, worth millions
on the black market.
“Fluffy will be towing
our supplies behind him on a rope. There is enough to ensure that we will be
well fed for three months in an emergency,” Leonei said as Fluffly ground to a
halt before them, the terrible gnashing sound of his cilia subsiding to a dull
hum.
“Well, if worst comes
to worst, I still have my speargun,” Michael said, running his hand down a
slender tube of metal strapped onto his back.
Granny jabbed Michael
in the ribs, causing him to jerk and paddle away from her with a look of
consternation on his face, then said: “Typical man, all he’s concerned about is
his speargun. Have you brought us thermosuits, Leonei? It gets so cold at 9 klicks
down that your bones turn into icicles,” Gran said. Even though she was the
oldest in the group, she was an extremely playful person most of the time,
something which tended to contrast violently with her beautiful silver hair, so
rare for an Amphe.
“Of course. This trip
has been carefully planned.”
“Great. Let’s get
going, then,” said Gran, and the group followed her lead. Gran had been living
on the Deep Range for nearly a year now, and she knew it better than anyone.
She didn’t even need a compass to know where they were going.
“Where exactly in the
Greater Dark are we heading?” Gran asked, as they swam towards the transporter
box at the bottom of the Beach’s slender tower.
“To a place called Nebiii%k
by the people around there. Nobody ever really goes very deep when they’re in Nebiii%k,
according to some people I’ve asked. It’s a barren place, a desert, and the
fishing sucks, so few people ever go deeper there than a couple of klicks…”
Michael said. Evidently he had already debriefed Leonei extensively before
Elena arrived. Judging by her question, Gran must have arrived only minutes
before Elena herself.
After a brisk swim to the transporter box, they all crammed into it,
barely fitting. Fluffy waited his turn outside patiently. A moment after the
transporter’s door closed, Elena felt that disconcerting click sensation
that was the sole after-effect of quantum displacement, and then the lock
opened and they swum out of the box and into the clean seawater outside the
Pushfield. It was truly a tremendous thing to behold – a perfect sphere almost
four hundred meters wide, only barely visible but very obvious to an Amphe’s
senses. It created a massive disturbance around itself by displacing so much
water, and Amphe for dozens of kilometers in all directions used it as a
lighthouse, a powerful beacon to aid in travelling.
Michael hovered next to her in the water for a moment, also staring at
the unearthly bulk of the Pushfield, then said: “Quite something, isn’t it?”
“Yeah…quite something,”
she said, then turned to follow the rest of the group, who had begun swimming
behind the rapidly moving Fluffy, who had emerged towing their supplies only
seconds ago. As the transporter box and the Pushfield dwindled behind them,
Elena wondered what she was getting herself into.