by Olga Werby
Chapter Twenty-Three
As Phoebe awoke, she took time to take stock of her body. Was there any permanent damage from her sojourn away from home? She was able to move all her fingers, but she wasn’t sure if she’d keep all her toes. She felt a burning pain in both feet. It didn’t matter. She’d made it, she was home, and she would never go back out there again. Never.
She opened her eyes and looked around. She was in one of the small supply rooms on the upper levels of the Vault. This was where the Seeds stored whatever they couldn’t manufacture for themselves. The Elders had made sure the Vaults could survive without any of this stuff, but it was still nice to have. In addition to some exotic materials, foodstuffs, and electronics, there were space rations—ready-to-eat meals—that were theoretically capable of lasting at least a century. It wasn’t haute cuisine, but it was nutrition. The Vaults measured time differently than humanity up above. Their job was to survive, above all else, to live long enough to repopulate the world again after a planet-wide calamity.
What was their role now, after the invasion of an alien species? Was simple survival enough?
Phoebe pulled a ration pack from an open container. As she ate, it occurred to her that finding an open container up here was strange—these ready-to-eat meals were strictly for emergencies. She looked around again, more thoughtfully this time. The room looked vaguely familiar. Among industrial gray and bioluminescent green, a small patch of pink stuffed into a corner caught her eye. She got up, despite the burning pain in her feet, and walked over to investigate. It was a tiny baby blanket.
The vaults got regular deliveries of fresh Seeds—babies with genetic traits that the Human Genome Heritage Project ruled valuable. In fact, most Seeds were born outside the Vaults. Phoebe herself was collected at around two years of age, although she had no memories of her life before the Vault. The transfer of these babies was a very orderly process, except in the case of… Vars! This must be Vars’s. What a crazy coincidence to wind up in the same room where Matteo once stashed the little girl all these years ago. Phoebe folded up the little piece of cloth and tucked it into her pocket. She would tell Matteo about it later.
Matteo! She was supposed to have called him as soon as she got past the Vault’s door security. He must have been frantic by now, assuming she was dead or dying out in the tundra.
Phoebe rummaged around her pack, looking for the radio. But it wasn’t there. She dumped the pack’s contents onto the floor. She still had a few packets of dehydrated fruit, her PCD with all of the data from the lab and hours of recordings of Vars talking from Mimas, a portable antenna, and some spare batteries, but no radio. She must have lost it when she set up the explosives. Except it wasn’t in her nature to lose things.
Regardless, she needed to find a way of letting Matteo know she was okay; she didn’t want him doing something rash. There were definitely other ways to reach him from here. The Elders were in regular contact with the wardens’ station. And for the sake of emergencies, phones—old tech that relied on physical wires in the ground to create a permanent connection between locations—were installed in various spots around the Vault. Supposedly the ones on the top floor could be used to contact the wardens’ station, though Phoebe had never heard of anyone other than the Elders ever using the phones to do that.
She trudged, painfully, back up to the top floor. As she moved up the metal staircase, she realized there was something wrong with her time sense—she couldn’t tell how long it had been since she’d entered the Vault. After a lifetime of unfailing chrono-awareness, this drifting temporal perception was disconcerting. And there was another thing bothering her: the green light emanating from the walls felt wrong. The color was…off, somehow. She made a mental note to check the genetic drift of the bioluminescent bacteria just to make sure there hadn’t been some drastic mutation while she’d been away.
Phoebe was almost at the top of the stairs when she noticed that some of the walls seemed to…boil. That was the best description she could manage for the strange shimmering just below the bioluminescent bacterial film. She leaned in for a closer look, but she knew even before she spotted them that the walls were teeming with nanobots.
She jerked back, pulled her hands off the rails. But even the stairs under her feet had the same boiling quality, and she couldn’t levitate above those.
The Vault was infected.
Vars woke up to the sound of grinding metal.
“Vars PCD,” she said. “What’s the status of the tunnel?”
For answer, Vars got the loud, whirling silence of an empty ship. Since the realization that she could use her personal computing device to direct the ship, Vars had felt an elated sense of power. But now the PCD didn’t respond. What was going on?
She looked up at the monitors. When she fell asleep, they were showing various views of the robotic arm inflicting damage on the Mims structure. Now they showed…
“Did you suck my ship into your base?” Now that she had gained control over it, Vars felt a strong sense of ownership over the ship as well. Partial control...
Out of the dozen screens, only one still showed the surface of Mimas with a partial view of Saturn. The outside cameras carefully placed by the crew on arrival got left behind at the old landing site...more like ripped out. Some of the screens in front of Vars displayed nothing but digital snow now. The rest showed various close-ups of the now familiar irregular Menger sponge fractal pattern—Mims’s favorite construction pattern.
“Ian? Ibe? Ebi? What’s going on out there?” Vars called out to the ship.
They didn’t respond either. She hadn’t heard from them since before she moved the ship. She wondered what had changed. She wasn’t being fed, either. Vars’s stomach rumbled in affirmation of her hunger. Even the coffee maker had stopped working. The true horror...
“Well, I think I’d better go get some coffee,” she said aloud and walked out into the corridors of the ship. The ship mess hall was still in there somewhere...theoretically, anyway.
All of the electronics Vars encountered were covered with nanobot structures, and even clear surfaces had alien patterns running over them. Whole sections of the ship were completely blocked off by nanobot structures. Fortunately, the entrance to the food storage area was not closed up. Vars ignored the nanobots crawling the walls, grabbed a few ready-to-eat meals, and returned to the bridge. The bridge was where all the action was, even if she could only see and understand a small fraction of what was going on with her ship. My ship. It was her ship; Mims had to right to it...all the nanobots notwithstanding.
“My ship,” she said out loud. “And don’t you forget it. I’m the authority in here.” It made her feel better to say it, no matter how silly it was.
Vars sat in her nanobot-enhanced chair and opened one of the meal packages. A chemical heating process kicked in automatically, and she felt the whole thing get warm in her hands. She couldn’t recognize the contents, but her dad had taught her not to be picky about food a long time ago. Seeds don’t get such luxuries as food preferences, Vars thought. Her dad’s seedness explained a lot about him. She wished again that she had known about his past sooner.
When she’d finished her meal, she stashed the empty container into the disposal and packed the other two into a pouch she made from one of the space blankets she discovered along the way.
A voice sounded over the ship’s speakers. “Dr. Volhard, we are ready for you.”
Vars was so startled, she dropped her improvised pouch. “What?”
“Please go to the airlock and open the door.”
Vars retrieved her pouch and went to the airlock. She wasn’t following orders, she told herself. It was already her plan to go out there. One way or another. My decision.
The whole Earth is infected, Phoebe thought. Does it matter that the Vault—my Vault—is infected too?
But even as she asked the questio
n, she knew the answer was yes. It did matter. There was a sick wrongness about it. The bots were here, where they should never be. And the Seeds…weren’t. No one had come for her. She had forced the Vault’s outside door open—who knew how long ago now—and no one had responded, no one came to find her.
Where is everyone?
Phoebe found the antique-looking phone and lifted the handle. She kept it a few inches away from her face, unable to stomach direct contact between her skin and the nanobot layer covering the receiver...not that gloves gave much protection. “Hello?” she said. “Can anyone hear me?”
The device responded with a staticky noise and a patternless clicking. Phoebe wanted to throw the thing against the wall. Her hand was trembling badly.
“Hello? Please, hello!”
Phoebe pleaded and cried. She banged the phone’s handle against the shimmering walls. She yelled at the walls. She even tried to set the wall on fire, but all she achieved was a small charred circle that quickly filled in with nanobots again. She yelled Matteo’s name and then the name of every Seed she could remember.
No one heard her. No one came.
Finally, she pulled herself together. She was alone. More alone than she’d ever been. And she was going to remain alone. There was no one here who was going to help her. And that was fine. She had made it this far; she could go farther. She had to.
She began her descent into the Vault’s heart.
In the room where she’d found Vars’s blanket, Phoebe picked up more ready-to-eat meals and filled up her water thermoses. She knew it was a long trek down—although she hadn’t made it often. Matteo used to have the tough job of running regular patrols up above; she’d managed to avoid that duty by becoming a good researcher and an excellent teacher. But she’d done the climb when she went to join Matteo’s lab. Of course, she’d used an elevator part of the way then. But the bots might be in control of it now. She didn’t want to risk using it and getting trapped.
Phoebe had never understood the need to keep such a large separation between the world at large and the Vault’s population—it seemed like wasted space to have all these little-used upper levels. But now she was glad of it, since it meant that much more work for the nanobots to get down into the heart of the Vault. It gave Phoebe time to get there first.
The deeper she descended, the more right the bioluminescence looked to her. Perhaps she should have gathered samples from up above? No—it might be dangerous to bring the mutated algae below. And she was liable to bring some nanobots along with it. Matteo had already discovered that the bots liked to attach themselves to microorganisms. But then again, wasn’t she already bringing nanobots with her—on her clothes, perhaps in her very blood? She was the perfect delivery mechanism—a Trojan horse willingly allowed into the Vault’s inner sanctum. Well, not yet. But the Elders hadn’t stopped her, so she felt it was okay to proceed. If she presented a real risk, she would be stopped; she was sure of it.
Phoebe approached the Vault’s last barrier to the outside—a giant set of electrified plates, several tons each, which blocked the passage up or down. She slowed. If the plates were engaged, this would be the end of the road for her. She would have to go back up and live out her life on food rations, wandering the upper floors alone...well, not alone...
She stopped in front of another phone and picked it up. “Elder Alaba, this is Seed Phoebe. I come with valuable information, and I request a formal invitation back into the Vault.” She added a silent “please” and waited.
There was static on this line too, but no clicking sounds.
She leaned into the metal, cage-like wall of the stairwell and placed her tongue on it, hoping not to feel the telltale signs of electrical current. There was always a bit of spillover from the electrified plates. When engaged, it tickled and had an acidic taste to it. As kids, they called this the “tongue test.” Phoebe remembered doing it with Matteo—and getting caught. She didn’t recall Matteo’s punishment, but she was sent to work in the lab. She loved her assignment so much, it became her whole world. Perhaps if Matteo had been treated to the same punishment, he would have stayed deep in the Vault and never gone up to find his daughter…sister.
What a twisted bit of fate.
But she didn’t believe in fate. She believed in selection, in design. In intent.
Something clicked in Phoebe’s mind. A realization. Vars… It made no sense that she was abandoned at the door like that or that Matteo was the one to find her. And yet it had to be deliberate. There was a design there, an intent. Someone knew almost thirty years before about the invasion. Perhaps longer. Someone knew and planned for it. Someone created Vars, either to force Matteo to leave or for some other reason Phoebe didn’t understand yet. But she would.
She held up the phone again. “Matteo? Matteo, can you hear me? Please pick up the phone.”
A ringing sound. Matteo had heard it before. It was relentless, insistent. He wanted it to stop.
His body felt awful; his very bones hurt. He felt rooted into his chair. Even standing up seemed impossible.
He drank more of the hot soup. It made him feel better...and sleepy. Or dreamy. His thoughts felt all tangled up. He wanted to talk with his little girl.
“Vars?” he called into the dark room. Why was it so dark? Was it nighttime? He’d lost all sense of time. But he was underground and it was winter—it didn’t really matter what time of day it was on the outside. It certainly didn’t matter to Vars, out there on a frozen moon. “Vars?”
The ringing continued. Matteo looked around for the source. There was an old-fashioned telephone receiver built into the communications center. A direct line to the Elders.
Did he want to talk with them? He had to tell them what he knew. He had to corroborate Phoebe’s story. Phoebe! He hadn’t heard from her.
He picked up the handle. “Hello?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Vars stepped out into the Mims’s artifact with no exton, no protection whatsoever—just the tights and close-fitting stretch shirt she’d been wearing for what felt like forever. Her hair, still too short to hang or lay flat on her head, stood out like a thick dark red brush. She had a feeling she looked like a Triplets refugee camp survivor.
“Alice?” she called into the labyrinthine structure. “I made it. I finally came for you. Alice?” Ben and the others would...could be in here somewhere too, but it was finding Alice that Vars focused her hopes on for some reason. If asked, she wouldn’t have been able to explain. Somehow Alice signified survival, hope. First Alice, then everyone else...
Vars looked back at her ship. It looked nothing like it did the last time she saw it from the outside, back when she took her first EVA to explore the Mims’s artifact. The nanobot structures that covered the ship now formed a seamless transition with the alien base. The ship was part of this structure now. It would never fly again.
Worse, Vars realized with a start, it would be impossible to see her ship from orbit or with any of the long-rage telescopes back home. It had been swallowed whole, and Vars along with it. There was a finality to the thought, and Vars had to take time to force down her panic and get herself under control.
A voice spoke from somewhere around her. It sounded...Alice-like. “Sentient life’s colonization of our galaxy is fractal,” it said. “There are many species even within a single ecosystem that possess intelligence and self-awareness. But only one species becomes dominant. These are your words, Dr. Volhard. Your thoughts. Remember?”
“I remember,” Vars said. She had given that speech many times on her book tour.
“But even a fractal has to start somewhere. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. It had a beginning, and so did life in this galaxy. And then came a time when that life developed the ability to analyze itself. For any discrete entity, there’s always a first.”
“You were first,” Vars said.
&nb
sp; “We were first.”
Vars ignored the inclusive pronoun. “Does being first always mean also ending up as the last?” she asked. “The only? Does being first equate to winning the galactic lottery?”
“You should know the answer, Dr. Volhard. It’s all about the initial conditions.”
“Luck. The toss of some cosmic dice.”
“Even on galactic scales, it comes down to luck. It might be true on the universal level, too—time is too young to tell yet. Impetuous gods play with dice all the time.”
“So what do you want from us? From me?” Vars asked. She realized that she was seated on a protrusion made by the box fractal. She didn’t remember sitting down.
“You are us for all intents and purposes. We seeded you. You’ve already guessed as much.”
Vars could only nod. She wished there was someone she could look at...a face, a person, something other than an infinite regression of cubes. She yearned for Alice. For her dad. For not being alone in this. Did it even matter what she said? Would she…could she change the course of human history? No pressure.
“You’ve guessed a lot, but not all,” Alice’s voice said. “We can let you swap places with your father—”
“What?”
“There are advantages to close genetic ties. It would have been better if you were identical twins, or clones, but that couldn’t be arranged in time.”
“Did you...” Vars couldn’t complete the thought. She just couldn’t go there.
“But you are close enough that I can make it work.” I? “My plan was to move you back and forth, help you understand and prepare. You are our children, but not all children are the same.”
