The Final Call

by Craig A. Falconer

  The Messengers stopped walking, quite abruptly.

  “Lop baan, mo san shoo,” one sang into the air, the tone rising and falling melodically exactly as Dan remembered. “Vadda lin, booh.’

  “Seeshoo, daab collo,” its partner replied.

  Dan enjoyed the sound — it was truly soothing — but it didn’t take a genius to know that the Messengers were using their vocalisations, understandable only to each other, because they wanted to discuss something without Dan hearing it.

  No more vocalisations came.

  “We confirmed previously that our Elders remain in death as they were in life, in all but their ability to guide us,” one of the Messengers said. As ever, everything they said was now heard equally clearly by both Tara and Dan. “There is a reason why we cannot take their place, and it is an important one to understand.”

  The Messengers moved to the other side of the narrow corridor, and continued only another twenty paces or so. At that point, one touched the wall in a certain spot for several seconds to bring a previously concealed doorway into view.

  Dan and Tara were far too far down the rabbit hole to turn back now and each knew it just as well as the other. They stepped forward in unison, crossing the threshold like it was nothing.

  The room they entered was very different from those before it, by simple virtue of the fact that it wasn’t a void of nothingness. Dan’s eyes took in everything, from the low chairs to the long window-like panel that ran horizontally along the far side of the room and essentially served as the upper half of its wall.

  He walked over, naturally enough, and there he saw two tall metallic pillars on the other side of the glass. Clearly man-made — or alien-made, to be more precise — the perfectly crafted grey pillars extended at least twenty metres into the air, far higher than the ceiling of the room Dan observed them from. They had a polished sheen and a very slight bezel-like groove around each of their sides, which planted a seed in Dan’s mind that they could perhaps act as screen-like displays for relaying data of some kind.

  Something about them made them seem like a lot more than mere pillars, and Dan grew surer by the second that they were powered appliances or instruments of some kind.

  He belatedly noticed that a similar room to the one he was standing in appeared directly in front of him, with one to the left and another to the right. The pillars were in a central quadrant observable from four different rooms, for one reason or another.

  Upon closer inspection, Dan saw that the pillars were connected to each other by a cable not altogether unlike that which had once been connected to his own neck. Furthermore, four other cables ran from each pillar: one entering each of the surrounding rooms.

  “So where are the Elders?” Tara asked, standing at Dan’s side having sauntered over to the window more slowly after examining everything en route. The room’s layout and furniture wasn’t quite as ‘alien’ as she may have expected, but on reflection this made a fair degree of sense given that the Messengers were bipedal humanoids of relatively similar height and weight, so it stood to reason that they would find physical comfort in similar places.

  To her question, the Messengers said nothing.

  “Are you taking us to see them next?” she pushed. “Are the Elders in another sector?”

  “Tara…” Dan said, speaking out loud and momentarily breaking his visual focus to look into her eyes, “we’re looking at them right now. I wouldn’t believe what I’m about to tell you if I wasn’t seeing this with my own eyes, but I don’t think their Elders are ‘dead’ because I don’t think they were ever really alive.”

  She gasped, stunned. “You mean…”

  “Yeah,” Dan said. “Their Elders were machines.”

  Part 8

  Turnabout

  “It is folly for a man to pray to the gods

  for that which he has the power

  to obtain by himself.”

  Epicurus

  V plus 3

  Sector One

  New Kerguelen

  “They’re like… supercomputers,” Dan said, uttering the words to Tara as both gawped at the so-called Elders in stunned realisation. “I don’t know what words we would use, maybe AI mainframe or something like that, but not Elders. When those things were operational with data scrolling or static on their surfaces, they might’ve looked more like something we’d have a reference point for, but this is just…”

  “Insane,” Tara offered, finishing the sentence with Dan’s exact thought. “And I’m guessing when the Messengers tell us these things are ‘dead’, that means it’s gonna take more than a firmware update or a call to tech support to get them back online.”

  Although he remained too shocked to laugh, Dan ran with her attempt at levity. “Yeah, something tells me we can’t just switch these things off and on to reboot them.”

  “I’ve got a reference point,” Tara said in a higher-pitched tone. “This is like if you always use GPS to find your way around, and then one day it stops working. Right? Because they got so dependent on asking these things for answers… when the answers stopped coming, they’d forgotten how to think for themselves.”

  “It’s exactly like that,” Dan sighed. “It’s exactly like that. This has always been one of the hypothetical concerns about an established technocratic society. When the tech stops working, then what? Yeah, there’s a power vacuum that causes problems like we’re seeing here… but there’s also a total helplessness and inability to make decisions that had been made by the tech. If you don’t use a muscle it wastes away — you know, atrophy — and as intelligent as these aliens obviously are, they let themselves get totally dependent.”

  Tara nodded slowly, like she largely understood. “So technocracy is like democracy but with computers in charge, basically? But the computers didn’t build themselves, so everything they know must have been programmed into them, right?”

  “Not exactly,” Dan said, aware that he was likely to reach the boundary of his own limited understanding of Artificial Intelligence almost as soon as he started trying to explain it. “We haven’t achieved it yet but real AI, once it’s established, learns and develops independently. It’s like when two people have a kid… they need to ‘make’ it and teach it the basics, then give it decent input as it’s growing up, but eventually it can overtake them and keep going and going. I can see why the Messengers came to see these machines as gods, but I don’t get why they called them Elders.”

  At this, Tara turned away from the window and faced the Messengers to do the obvious thing and ask them outright: “Why do you call them Elders?”

  The Messengers took several seconds before replying to consider both Tara and Dan’s inner thoughts carefully. The distinction between bona fide Elders and a sophisticated decision-making system put in place by long-gone forefathers was an alien one to the Messengers, and it was a distinction that proved as surprising to them as its absence had to Dan and Tara.

  Eventually, one of the Messengers replied, explaining that the Elders had been in place for hundreds of generations, seeded by the wisdom of the ancients, and had grown ever-wiser with time. This didn’t answer anything specifically, but at least confirmed to Dan that the Messengers did on some level understand that the Elders they had described as ‘dead’ had never truly been alive.

  Dan’s lines of understanding were blurry, though; for as great as the breakthroughs in interspecies communication had been since his earlier encounters with the Messengers, his brain and theirs were still very differently configured supercomputers in their own right, trying valiantly to find an island of common understanding amid the ocean of stars that had separated them for so long.

  As with when he had been rendered speechless by the Messengers’ almost-but-not-quite human faces during his first interaction with them, Dan once again considered that much of the difficulty he was experiencing came not because the two races were utterly different, but rather because their broad physical and mental similarities brought
the few huge differences into sharper focus than might otherwise have been the case.

  “And these ancients you speak of…” Dan said, out loud, “were they your ancestors? Or were you seeded here by another, older race? That’s important for me to understand.”

  The answer came quickly and clearly: “They were our direct ancestors, as the builders of your pyramids were yours, and they were born here as we were. Many generations ago, the wisest among them — the wisest among us — developed the Elders. More than mere repositories of knowledge, the Elders were the arbiters of all disputes and the guiding hand of all progress. An epoch of harmony endured until very recently, when the Elders ceased responding reliably and ultimately ceased responding at all.”

  Dan nodded, glad that the Messenger was being so open and even more so that it was able to explain things in a way he could understand. The mention of ancient pyramids and repositories of knowledge brought to his mind Alexandria and other libraries lost to time, where the wisdom of ages gone by had been burned to ash and returned to the ether. It was impossible not to see the similarity here, in a situation where too much knowledge and wisdom had been stored externally and not passed directly between generations. Tara’s GPS analogy rattled around alongside these thoughts, too, bringing into sharp focus the danger of depending too much on anything but internalised knowledge.

  Computers break down and books burn, he thought to himself. The safest place is within ourselves.

  Although Dan didn’t intend this as a comment to the Messengers, as a clear thought it was naturally picked up.

  “The wisdom of the Elders was far greater than any one individual could hope to possess,” came the somewhat defensive reply.

  “Who said anything about one individual?” Dan asked rhetorically. “And I’m not saying don’t write stuff down or use technology, but look at you now! You can travel the stars following the instructions the Elders gave you, fine, but now that they’re gone you can’t even patch a broken roof? That’s basically what this ‘Great Shelter’ you’re struggling with is, isn’t it… a roof? Birds can build shelters. Termites can build shelters! When you rely on a machine, you lose something innate. But that doesn’t have to be forever; the Elders are gone, but you’re still here.”

  Tara looked sideways at Dan, worried he was being too firm.

  “And you already have a council,” he continued. “What’s the deal there? Why are you making some decisions among yourselves?”

  “The council met regularly to propose questions for the Elders and to discuss the answers we received. As Interpreters, we were the go-between. That’s why when the answers stopped coming, we lost the trust of our council.”

  Dan scratched his chin. In some ways it all made sense, but in many others he couldn’t even begin to wrap his head around it. “Okay… so you need humanity’s help with your Shelter, right? The Elders would have told you what to do, but they’re gone. And since they’re gone… what’s happening, the decision of whether or not to engage with us in a full information exchange is gridlocked? Where does the Squadron fit in to this?”

  “The Squadron are our security force,” the Messenger replied. “They are the only other group on New Kerguelen with access to a craft capable of reaching Earth. You attack our lack of intergenerational teachings from a place of ignorance, for specialised skills and knowledge are passed routinely down the generations just as they are on Earth. The problem with the Great Shelter is of a kind we have never faced; it was constructed by individuals with the necessary knowledge — clearly — but no maintenance has ever been required. The skills and knowledge of construction were lost to time, I grant you that, but how many humans today possess the knowledge that brought your species to its apex position? To spark a fire from sticks and stones, to navigate by the stars alone… how many? You lean on technology just as we do! Our grave error was to consider our Elders immortal and infallible, but there is nothing we can do about that now. We called you here to help us, not to kick us when we are down.”

  Dan’s expression changed in an instant with this reply. A wave of guilt hit him; when the Messengers saved Earth on Contact Day, they had said nothing of the political shambles and ideological infighting that had led to the collapse of humanity’s own efforts to divert Il Diavolo’s course. They had come to help, and help they did — without judgement.

  “I want to address your council now,” Dan said, stepping away from the window and gently touching Tara’s shoulder to simultaneously tell her everything was okay and to encourage her to come along. “My mind is never going to be clearer about all of this than it is right now, and it’s time to look forward, not back. I want to help you. Humanity wants to help you. Any kind of information exchange will be welcomed and something like the Shelter is, with respect, probably a fairly basic thing for our best minds to assist you with.”

  “No disrespect taken,” one of the Messengers replied. “The benefit of an information exchange is that one party can assist in what is easy for them when the other party experiences difficulty with the same task or issue. We have methods of utilising energy that could transform life on your planet and eliminate a great deal of unnecessary suffering. The Elders urged against sharing anything of that nature, but they also would have urged against our calling you here. It is time to look forward, as you say, but first the council must be convinced of both our trustworthiness and your willingness to assist with our pressing problem regarding the Great Shelter. Success will lead to the Squadron retreating from Earth and ending their communications with the worst of your kind, allowing normality to return.”

  This part struck Dan as a stretch — that normality would return as soon as the aliens were gone and Jack was dealt with — but de-escalation would be a step in the right direction. And with powerful fingers on dangerous buttons while spaceships cast shadows over several cities, the urgency was as real for Earth as it was for New Kerguelen.

  Dan and Tara followed the Messengers back out of the windowed room and into the corridor, where they proceeded for several minutes without passing another being. It was impossible not to wonder how big New Kerguelen was and where its tens of thousands of inhabitants were hiding, but Dan tried to focus his mind. Precisely what he had to achieve in his upcoming discussion with a potentially hostile council of extraterrestrials was less clear than had ever been the case before stepping into any other difficult meeting or interview, and the stakes had never been higher.

  The Messengers stopped abruptly and one touched yet another unmarked area of the wall. Could they see things he couldn’t, Dan wondered, or did they remember every single location like squirrels digging up their buried acorns?

  “The council are gathered for our arrival,” one of the Messengers said, standing beside the newly revealed doorway. It had a panel that would evidently slide to the side, not too unlike the door of the mothership’s elevator.

  “All we need to do is convince them humanity is their friend and that they should forget about the Elders they’ve pretty much worshipped for thousands of years,” Dan said, forcing a light-hearted tone in an effort to calm Tara’s nerves, which had very understandably become evident in her tense expression and shaking legs.

  “Exactly,” she said. “So easy, even you can do it!”

  Dan laughed, caught fully off-guard by her own jovial reply.

  “I want to see your game face, Dan McCarthy,” she then said, suddenly serious as she uncannily mimicked her sister’s voice and cadence.

  As the door panel slid open and with his foot preparing to step across the threshold, Dan looked in her eyes. “Ready?”

  “Of course I’m ready,” Tara replied with a contagious degree of confidence. “We didn’t come all this way for the weather and we didn’t come for the view. We came here to do this, Dan, so let’s get it goddamn done.”

  V plus 4

  Council Office

  New Kerguelen

  With focus in his eyes if not quite a spring in his step, Dan McCarthy
walked into what was easily the most ornate room he had seen on New Kerguelen so far. There were no windows, with the four walls instead positively covered in decorative shapes and swirls in several pastel colours.

  The art, if that was what it was, truly looked like nothing Dan had seen before; the best he could do was liken it to a curious cross between floral wallpaper and tribal tattoos.

  What truly caught his eye, however, was the group of seven extraterrestrial beings sitting around a circular glass table on low glass stools.

  All turned to see him and each wore a differently coloured tunic, seeming to indicate the specialised group they represented. Dan saw a sky-blue tunic as worn by the Squadron, but there was no Messenger-white to be seen.

  As soon as he wondered about this, he heard the simple and unfortunate explanation that the representative from the Interpreter grouping to which they belonged had been suspended following the Elders’ ‘deaths’. As the Messengers had told Dan before, they were blamed for this catastrophic event having failed to see any signs of a problem until it was too late; until the Elders had become so unresponsive that they couldn’t offer any advice on how to help them recover full function.

  Dan asked quickly about the nature of the groupings and received a reply built around the term ‘hereditary path’ and the point that everyone on New Kerguelen was born into one of eight specialisations and was raised from birth in accordance with its specific needs. This system had been put in place by the Elders long ago, the Messenger said, but long after the passing of the forefathers who created them.