by Max Barry
Maybe not. Maybe he was going to slowly run out of air here, wondering what had become of Jackson, Anders, and Beanfield. Maybe this sun would emerge from behind the cloud planet and cook him alive. Maybe the only answer was that he was an insignificant biological object in a universe of dispassionate physical laws.
He activated his recording function. It would consume a small amount of power, but he wanted to create a record. He wanted to make sure he left something behind, no matter what happened.
“This is Isiah Gilligan. I was ejected from the ship. My core has approximately a hundred twenty hours life capacity. I don’t know if the others survived. I hope they did. I’m looking forward to seeing a familiar face.”
He paused.
“We lost the ship through a combination of failures. I should have refused to prepare the AI kill switch. Jackson shouldn’t have activated it, even to save my life. We underestimated the enemy, who were getting closer to us each time, and overestimated ourselves. We overestimated the ship . . .” He hesitated. “No, that’s not right. We underestimated the ship, too. We expected it to behave like a machine, when it’s more like . . .” No one listening now, so he might as well say it. “. . . a living creature. Not in all aspects, of course, but in some ways that matter. We have to treat it as such if we’re to understand it. And I think we do need to understand it, and can’t continue to treat it like a benign black box, or some kind of benevolent deity. Surplex AI is in every Providence. There’s similar software in Freco and many other corporates. We need to improve our understanding of how it thinks, what it wants—we need to find ways to translate its versions of that into concepts we can understand. Because I don’t think there’s just one alien species out here. I think there are two.”
In the void, something winked. He squinted. A minute later, a star disappeared. This time he saw it happen. It could have been anything: spinning debris, the sun catching new objects. But when a third star winked out, he was sure: Something was out there. And getting bigger, or appearing to, because it was approaching.
He fumbled at the suit to toggle his ping. If they were close enough for him to see them, they must know he was here, but he wanted to make sure. A green beacon on his shoulder strobed energetically, singing inaudible frequencies into the night.
More stars vanished. The object had no running lights at all. They might be disabled, but something felt off. It was too large. And the wrong shape: not a simple angular jetpod, but irregular, with gaps, large ones, through which he could glimpse stars. He had the sudden thought that the ship had heard him: He had spoken against it and it had become angry, and was sloughing its way toward him, blackened and burnt but still alive, to punish him. When it drew within a few hundred yards, he could see it wasn’t one object at all, but many.
He jerked his limbs, flailing. He yelled and twisted and none of this made any difference as the salamanders came out of the dark. A blocky golem head filled his view. Its jaws opened and vomited resin across his face. His film bleated protests. He felt his limbs stiffening. He was being encased. “Damn it,” he said. “Goddamn it!” He struggled until he couldn’t any longer.
He knew the salamanders were still there from bumps and dull scraping sounds that resonated through the resin. But he couldn’t see and couldn’t move. He shouted for a while and that didn’t help, either. After enough hours of this, he slept.
* * *
—
His timer ticked over forty hours, the limit he’d set himself for rescue. Over recent hours, the bumping had grown more intense, and he’d felt the stirrings of gravity. This grew until it was stronger than any he’d ever felt. He was dragged and turned over and finally thumped against something solid.
A streak of resin was clawed from his film. In the glow of his suit light was a salamander, its face wide and white, its eyes small and dark, its lipless clown mouth stretching from one earhole to the other. He recognized it as a worker, which he’d always thought of as small, but it wasn’t: It was the size of a bear. It pawed at him, stripping away resin in hunks. A smell like cat urine crawled up his nostrils, penetrating the suit filter.
It didn’t attack and didn’t eat him. When it was done shredding resin, it simply turned and trotted away, moving on all six legs. He breathed. He was alone.
He was in a tight, cavelike space with smooth, curved walls, which he could make out even with his suit light on its lowest setting. He tried to move but found himself bonded to the wall. Not only was resin attached to his limbs and back, it also flowed smoothly into the wall with no visible join. He was welded there.
“They’ve taken me underground,” he told his recorder. This in itself was notable: Salamanders hadn’t often been observed on planets, and when they had been, they hadn’t burrowed. “From the look of the walls, they carved out these tunnels. Maybe it’s a base of some kind. I’ll record everything from now. I have”—he checked—“twenty-six hours of power. Maybe this will make its way back to Service somehow.”
He fell silent.
“I don’t know why they brought me here.” He could think of some ideas. Food. Torture. But these were products of fear, not observation. He shouldn’t waste the recorder on them. “If I can figure that out, maybe I can learn something about their motivations.”
Some time passed. After an hour or two, he heard a noise, warbled through his suit, and a salamander emerged from the tunnel. At first he thought it was the same worker, but it was slightly smaller, with wider eyes and a bluish hue to its skin. Its back was pockmarked with white ridges like scar tissue. At each end of its mouth were parts that might have been whiskers or else thin tentacles. It stopped and rose onto its hind legs. “Pak!”
“Crap,” he said, because that had scared him.
It dropped to the floor, shifted closer, and reared again. “Pak. Pak.” Its mouthparts waved.
“Don’t hurt me,” he said.
“Pak pak.”
He tugged uselessly at his bonds. The salamander watched mutely. When he stopped, it shuffled closer.
“No! Go back!”
It seemed to register his intent, retreating a few steps.
“Yes! Yes. Stay there.”
It regarded him unblinkingly with pupilless eyes. After a moment, it approached again.
“No!” he said.
Again it shuffled back. A few moments passed. Its head tilted expectantly.
“Yes,” Gilly said.
Its neck arched. A sound came out of its throat. “Nok! Nok! Nok!” It bent, as if trying to coax the sound from somewhere deeper inside. “Yek! Yek!”
He stared.
“Pak pak,” said the salamander. When he didn’t respond, it moved closer.
“No!”
“Nok.” It retreated a few steps. “Yek. Yek.” And then closer again. “Nok.”
He checked that the recorder was running. “It’s talking. It’s learning to talk.” The salamander began moving again, so he said, “No!” to send it back. It was definitely testing him. Its movements were inquisitive. Almost playful. He thrust his chin toward his right arm. “Can you let me out? Take off this resin?”
Its head tilted.
“The resin. Yek?” It took some coaxing to approach him. He was refining the meaning of yek, he realized, employing it for affirmation, rather than stop or go away. But finally it reared before him. Its head lowered and it drooled a clear liquid. He felt the resin loosening, and with effort managed to pull his arm free from the wall. “Yes! Yek!”
“Yek.”
He gestured to his other arm. “Now this.” It didn’t move. “This one. Yek. Do it again.”
“Nok.”
“Yek. This one.”
“Nok.”
“Yek!” Gilly said, trying a more commanding voice. The salamander was unmoved. “It’s not stupid,” he said, for his recorder. “It doesn’t want to let
me free.” They watched each other for a few moments. He pointed to his chest. “Gilly.”
“Pak pak.”
“Gilly.” He pointed to the salamander. “Salamander.”
“Sssak. Mak mak.”
“Salamander.”
“Sak. Mak. Tar.”
“Yek!” he said. Pointing to himself: “Gilly.”
It made several abortive attempts at the noise. He watched muscle ripple beneath its skin, although its face didn’t change at all, remaining lizardlike in its lack of expression. Still, he sensed curiosity in its movements. He was dealing with an inquisitive mind, not a hostile one. “Gik. Kik. Gikky.”
“Gikky. Yek.”
It waited patiently, still as stone, not even appearing to breathe. What now? he wondered. He didn’t know what you did with an alien after the introductions. “Can you let out my other arm? This?” He pointed. “Yek?”
“Nok.”
“But you did it to this one. So now this.”
“Nok.”
“Shit!” he said. “Yek! Yek!”
“Nok Gikky.”
He was silent awhile. “Why am I still alive?”
“Gikky.”
“Yes. Gikky. Why is Gikky alive?”
“Gikky.”
“I want to know why you brought me here.”
But even as he spoke, he realized the answer. He had been absorbed by his own curiosity, thinking only of what he could learn, and forgotten that this was what they did, all the time, and had done from the beginning. From every encounter they’d ever had, the salamanders had learned something, and become more dangerous.
“Gik-ky ak-live,” it said.
* * *
—
He shut his mouth and closed his eyes and eventually the salamander left. He hung in the orange cave. His film read that fifty-nine hours had elapsed. His core could support him another twenty-two. After that, he would die. There was no question about that anymore. All that remained to be seen was how much damage he would do to his own species first.
Service hadn’t advised him on what to do if he were captured by salamanders. He couldn’t find it within himself to blame them: He was the first human being to be captured. No one had thought the salamanders did that. There was a lot that the salamanders did that no one had realized, Gilly was figuring out. Service had underestimated their complexity. Even the schema of distinct classes—soldier, worker—was wrong, or at least incomplete, since there were clearly subclasses as well, including an undiscovered one for this blue-hued creature.
He heard dragging salamander movement in the tunnel. These sounds came and went. They barked at each other, sometimes from close by, more often far away. Maybe he would be left alone until he died. He might have been flattering himself, thinking he was a vital military asset. He could be a memento: a curiosity collected from the battlefield and shoved into a drawer. Years from now, young salamanders would sniff his corpse. This was one of the creatures we fought. It used to move.
He checked his recorder. “I’ve realized the salamander may be trying to learn from me. I won’t talk to it anymore.”
He fell silent.
“I’m going to die here,” he said.
* * *
—
He couldn’t sleep: The gravity would seize his head and yank it toward the floor. He grew angry. He had nothing to think about except how he’d wound up here, and the more he did, the stupider it seemed. There were twenty-eight billion human beings and none of them had managed to get themselves bound to a wall in a salamander burrow. He mentally traced and retraced the path that had led him here, the precise steps, to establish where he went wrong. One misstep, of course, was his own dumb idea to put himself forward when Surplex asked for interested candidates in a special, secret Service project, but he was starting to think that people had taken advantage of him. People who had implied that crewing a Providence-class battleship was essentially risk-free. He specifically remembered a meeting in which a Surplex engineering lead—or maybe it had been Service—addressed a question about mission risk by saying, “Well, you might be hit by a car crossing the road tonight,” and all of them in the room admitted to the underlying point, which was that there was risk in anything and all you could do was minimize it. But Gilly was now thinking that there was an entire dimension to risk that had been seriously fucking understated, because he would happily run into traffic if it meant getting out of this dark place full of salamanders. Also, it was a double bluff: they worked it both ways, because they told the public, These brave crews risk their lives, but in private, the implication was: Not really.
“Even if it doesn’t work out, the exposure you’ll get is priceless,” a Surplex manager had told him, when Gilly discovered just how intensive the candidate process was, how it required him to live in the arctic wastes for a year, embedded with the military. “The access you’ll get working that closely with Service, the managers you’ll meet, Surplex will place a real premium on. Freco will, too. Whether you actually want to go out on a ship or not, by the end of this, you’ll be highly sought-after.” Yeah. He’d be sought after, all right. He would never be found, was the problem.
He wanted to know why they were at war. Not in generalities. Those had been good enough for him before, but not anymore. He wanted to be in a room with the person who’d made the decision, who’d said, Go, and explore whether there had been other options. Because there was dissent. There were protests. There were people who said contractors like Surplex had tentacles all through Service, and manipulated public sentiment in favor of the war, the purpose of which had shifted somehow from driving salamanders back from human territory to absolutely exterminating them as a species, and was that strictly necessary? Was forging into VZ actually the same war that everyone had agreed to after Coral Beach? Because back then, there hadn’t been corporate AI pouring itself into battleships along with 22 percent of global GDP and making decisions that were literally too sophisticated to question. That part seemed dubious to him now. It felt really dubious.
He knew what was happening. He was inventing a comforting fiction in which it was okay to talk to the salamander because he didn’t owe the human race anything. Still, these thoughts grew in his head until he was furious. Everyone but him was home and safe and happy.
He cried a little.
When his core reached sixteen hours remaining, he decided to shut it off. It would stop feeding him oxygen, he would grow dizzy and pass out, and that would be that. It was terrifying, but he couldn’t stand waiting around to find out whether he was going to betray his own species.
There was probably no teaching unit on dealing with capture because it was too horrifying to contemplate.
He gave himself an hour to think about it. Then he dipped into his filters and dialed them down to zero.
After a minute, his eyes began to sting. This wasn’t an effect he’d expected. He squeezed them shut, but the pain intensified. Something burned in his nostrils. “Ack,” he said. As soon as he opened his mouth, someone rammed a flaming fist in there. His tongue sizzled; he heard it. He yelped and brought up the filters and choked and spat until the pain subsided.
When he could speak, he said, “The atmosphere contains a chemical that produces acid on contact with moisture. Sulfur trioxide, perhaps.”
His core readout continued to tick. In fifteen hours, he wouldn’t asphyxiate. He would dissolve.
* * *
—
The blue salamander returned. It perched on its back legs like a dog and watched him.
“Go away,” he said.
Its head tilted. “Gikky.”
He didn’t respond.
“Gikky. Pak pak.”
“Gilly doesn’t want to pak pak. No pak pak from Gilly.”
“Yek,” said the salamander.
“No.”
> “Yek.”
It rose. He flinched, but there was nowhere to go. The stench of cat urine intensified. The salamander’s head bobbed. Its jaws cracked open. A noise grew in its throat. He felt the stirrings of a force.
“Fuck!” he said. “Okay! Yek!”
The salamander dropped to the floor. “Pak pak.”
“Yes.”
It lowered its head. “Mak. Tak.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Mak-tak,” said the salamander. It took two steps forward and lowered its head again. “Gikky.”
“You’re Mak Tak? That’s your name?”
“Mak. Tak.”
“I’m going to call you Martin, because it sounds less like someone throwing up.”
“Mak. Tak.”
“Yes. Yek. Hello, Martin.”
“Hek. Hek.”
“Don’t bother learning hello. You won’t need that.”
The salamander fell silent for a few moments. “Pak pak.” When he didn’t respond, it grew agitated, stepping to the left. “Pak pak.”
“There’s nothing to talk about. You killed my ship.”
“Kik. Sssik.”
“Yes. You know the ship, right?” He used his fist to mimic it flying, opening his fingers to represent the explosion. “Gilly’s ship.”
“Gikky sik.”
“Yes.”
“Kik.”
“Yes.”
“Mak-tak kik Gikky sik.”
It was the longest sentence he’d heard from the creature. And it was correct. Martin had killed Gilly’s ship. He stared at it. Its eyes were black and unblinking. It had no expressions; none he could discern. “What are we doing here, Martin?”
“Pak pak.”
“Talking. Yes. But why? What do you want to learn?”
“Gikky kik Mak-tak.”
“Gilly kill Martin?” He felt confused. “No. Gilly not kill Martin.”
“Yek.”
“No. Nok.”
“Sik,” it said. “Gikky sik kik Mak-tak.”
