Right now, I’m pretty sure I’d polish off a bottle in short order, if I had one.
After Ethan had shot Janet in the head, Ted had taken command with relative ease. “You,” he’d said, pointing at the closest operative. “And you. Take Agent Dean into custody.”
They’d been riled up enough, shocked enough, to follow his order without question. After that, the next order was easier to follow, and the next even easier. Ted was the highest ranking officer now, after all. And these men had been trained to obey.
He was the highest-ranking officer fit for command, anyway—given Dean’s attack on a fellow agent, and Janet’s incapacitation.
She’d survived the shot to her head, somehow. The round was still in her brain, and Wick deemed some of the fragments too risky to remove, especially those that had made their way into her spinal canal. But he thought he could get most of them. There was even some chance Janet would regain complete functioning, or something like it.
I shouldn’t be surprised. If anyone was going to survive a direct shot to the back of the head, it would be Janet Thompson.
“Attention Janet,” a voice said from the speaker embedded in the wall above the office door. It also spoke from the PRC radio on his hip, and the computer sitting on the desk to his left.
“This is Max Edwards. I’m currently directly above your head, with enough firepower to melt your entire base down to slag. This is your sixty-minute warning. That’s how long you have to scramble all sixteen Lark X-1s, piloted by the same officers I worked with, and tell them to fly up to this ship. A landing bay will be open for them, on the side of the vessel facing west. If you care about humanity’s fate as much as you pretend to, you’ll send them up sooner than sixty minutes.
“But if you don’t intend to cooperate, then I suggest you start evacuating. Because as I said, if an hour passes without those pilots coming up, I will destroy that facility.”
Ted sat there for several seconds, blinking stupidly at the wall. Then he clawed the radio’s handset from his holster. “Max? Can you hear me?”
Nothing.
With that, Ted ran from the office, yelling into the radio. “You heard the man.”
At least, he assumed they’d heard him. If Max’s voice had come from every available speaker in his office, then chances were it had emitted from every other speaker in the base as well. How he’d done that, Ted didn’t know, but now wasn’t the time to try figuring it out.
“Scramble those fighters and get them up there. And bring him a radio I can use to talk to him, while you’re at it.”
60
2 days to extinction
Tara gave him a suspicious look. “Why do I get the feeling you’re going to try to leave me down there?”
“I’m not,” Max lied. The three of them stood in another landing bay—it turned out the saucer had several, spaced evenly around its circumference. This one had a shuttle for transporting personnel, even though there was no personnel aboard the large ship to transport. Max guessed it was for members of the “vassal species” the alien had mentioned.
He did his best to look innocent. “I need you two to be my eyes and ears down there, to make sure the mission’s being organized like I want. I still don’t completely trust Chambers, or even my parents. They spent my life lying to me, after all. What’s to stop them from lying now?”
Of course, he was currently lying, and Tara definitely sensed it on some level. He just hoped she trusted him enough to get in the shuttle.
The Lark pilots were already aboard, their fighters parked in yet another landing bay while they were busy cataloging the saucer’s offensive capabilities as best they could.
It seemed the ship’s interfaces truly were designed to be as universal as possible, with human languages programmed in as well as tens of thousands of other languages that were utterly incomprehensible. A picture was forming in Max’s mind, and it wasn’t a pleasant one. He was beginning to suspect that the invaders hadn’t concerned themselves with just Earth. From what they were seeing, it seemed that multiple planets in the galaxy had given rise to intelligent life, and the invaders had had their fingers—or tentacles, or claws or whatever it was they had—in all of them.
Now that the pilots were aboard, Chambers would start sending up most of his fighting men, as soon as Jimmy and Tara used the shuttle to go down to the base. Chambers would come up too, leaving the facility with a skeleton complement of personnel.
Tara crossed her arms. “So I’ll see you soon, then?”
He nodded. “Keep in touch over the radio. I want to know everything.” He patted the PRC unit Chambers had sent up with the pilots.
“Okay.” Uncrossing her arms, she embraced him, squeezing him tightly.
Max noticed Jimmy staring intently across the blue-lit landing bay, as though something had caught his interest on the other side.
When Max and Tara parted, his friend stepped up and held up his hand. Max grasped it, and Jimmy pulled him into a one-armed hug.
“See you soon, man. And you better not try to do this thing without us. If I miss out on my chance to go into space and fight aliens, I’m gonna be pissed.”
Max grinned, and hoped it was convincing. “I wouldn’t dare. See you soon.”
With that, they both stepped into the shuttle. When the hatch closed behind them, Tara—the alien version of Tara—appeared beside him.
“You lie with some ease,” she said.
“Yeah, well. I learned from the best.” He lifted the radio’s handset to his mouth and pressed the push-to-talk button. “Agent Chambers.” He used Chambers’ title, in case anyone was listening. He had no interest in undermining the man’s authority, especially not now.
“Yes, Max?”
“Tara and Jimmy are on their way down. They aren’t to be let back on that shuttle, no matter what. Is that clear?”
There was a pause. “I doubt they’ll be happy about that.”
“But I’m sure you agree it makes sense. Everyone else going on this mission has military training. Very little, in my case, but I have some, and I have a couple other things going for me. Jimmy’s a hunter, and Tara’s the daughter of a prepper, but that’s it. There’s a chance none of us will ever make it back to Earth. I don’t want them to be with us if that happens.”
“I hear you. How’d you talk them into getting on the shuttle?”
“I created a fiction, and fed it to them. That’s something you taught me how to do.”
Another pause. “All right, Max. I’ll see you soon.”
“Make it sooner. We’re out of time.”
“You got it.”
“Agent Chambers?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sure I don’t need to say this, but…don’t hold back when it comes to kitting out your soldiers.”
“Oh, trust me. Whether we succeed or fail, we’re going to make it memorable for those bastards.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Max ended the call, let out a long sigh, and looked at the glowing form of Tara beside him.
“Time for more answers,” he told her.
61
2 days to extinction
Wick had told him the Lark X-1s could make the journey to the moon in just over an hour. But according to the alien version of Tara, the saucer’s increased mass meant their journey would take longer.
“That leaves plenty of time to answer my questions,” he said.
She nodded. “I can tell you some things, Max. However, you should know that I have carefully calculated the probabilities involved in going against the Clemency Fleet. I have evaluated every conceivable outcome. What information I’ve given you has been dispensed in a way that leaves you maximally prepared to succeed.”
“That’s bull. The more I know, the more prepared I’ll be. My level of preparedness isn’t made higher by withholding information from me.”
“On the contrary. Knowing certain things will increase cortisol levels, impairing your perfo
rmance.”
“Well, I want to know anyway. Tell me your name, for starters.” He couldn’t keep thinking of her as Alien Tara.
“You can call me Aegis.”
“Okay. Aegis it is, then.”
They were standing in the saucer’s master control, a spherical chamber with seemingly endless functionality. It granted highly immersive access to any ship system, or several of them at once.
He could order the bulkheads to disappear, revealing the airspace around them, and the land below them. Having done that, he could zoom in on anything, to a level of granular detail that should have been impossible. Below, a soldier stood guard outside the GDA facility, and Max could see the wart on his nose.
The control room could also become the craft’s engineering plant, offering a virtual reality tour through the complex network. Any problems would proclaim themselves in red, but now everything showed green—colors that were meaningful to humans. If a member of another species had been here, those colors likely would have been different.
He could also “turn off” the gravity and let himself float toward any part of the spherical chamber—all to give a heightened understanding of the space around the saucer.
Everything was initiated with nothing more than a thought. As Aegis had explained, the entire craft had been 3D printed at the atomic level—molecule by molecule—using a technique he doubted he’d comprehend no matter how many times it was explained to him. The result was that the ship integrated seamlessly with consciousness itself. His alien companion had attuned the controls with his brain’s frequency, and now he had full control of the massive vessel.
“We can make all the time we need to talk,” he said. “Using the iterations, I was able to compress years into seconds. We can do the same thing. Increase the frame rate, or whatever, so we have unlimited time, pretty much.”
“Iterations?” Aegis said.
“The simulations. The ones that let me iterate reality so many times, in just seconds. They help me find the best course of action. That’s how I think of them. As iterations.”
“I did not know that you thought of them that way.”
“So you haven’t been reading my thoughts, then?”
“No, Max. I have only the access you grant me. That’s what special about you.”
I guess it’s also why you’ve had to find others ways to manipulate me. Like appearing to me as the girl I would fall in love with. “Can we buy ourselves time by slowing things down or not?”
“We can.”
“Then we will. I want to know everything.” His radio squawked from his waist, and he lifted the handset to his ear. “Go ahead.”
“Max. We’re all aboard and ready to go.”
“Okay. We’ll head into orbit now.”
“What’s our destination? Are we heading straight for the mother ship?”
“Let me get back to you on that.”
“Copy.”
Max replaced the headset, then locked eyes with Aegis. “Take us up.”
Below, the planet fell away, making Max’s stomach drop, even though he didn’t experience the movement physically beyond a slight tug like the one he’d felt in the smaller saucer.
“Damn it,” he said, trying not to vomit. “Turn off the visual.”
The master control’s blue-lit walls reappeared. “All right. Let’s turn down the frame rate. Slow things down, to give us time to talk.”
“It is done. We are now in a simulation of the master control. Your physical body will continue to track your position within this digital space.”
“Good.” Max frowned, staring across the master control as he decided what he wanted to know first. The fact that he couldn’t tell when reality had stopped and the simulation began was a little concerning, but he didn’t have time to worry about that right now. “Tell me why it’s called the Clemency Fleet. Clemency for what?”
“For your doomed condition.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
She slowly shook her head. “Again, I must warn against an excess of infor—”
“Just tell me what I want to know.”
“Very well. My species—or rather, the species that created me—call themselves the Canor. You’re familiar with Fermi’s Paradox?’
Max blinked, feeling a little whiplashed from the abrupt change of topic. “Sure. Fermi wondered why we haven’t seen evidence of alien civilizations, when our best estimates rated the likelihood of their existence highly.”
“And you’re aware that one explanation for the paradox is that advanced species destroy themselves before they can achieve interstellar travel?”
“Yes.”
“As it happens, that explanation holds true for virtually every intelligent species that emerges in the universe. At least, it holds true for a statistically significant sample size—namely, the intelligent species that have emerged in this galaxy.”
“So the Canor are extinct?”
“No. I said virtually every species. The Canor are a statistical anomaly. For whatever reason—and many possible reasons have been postulated—they managed to navigate the crucible of existence long enough to establish extrasolar colonies. And they needed such colonies. Their home planet, also called Canor, was burgeoning. Overfull. Unfortunately, planets suitable for colonization are extremely rare, and every one of them eventually gives rise to intelligent life.”
“That’s inconvenient for you.”
“Inconvenient for the Canor,” Aegis corrected.
“Well, you’re basically one of them.”
“I prefer to differentiate myself from my creators. Yes, I was part of the machine intelligence sent here to act as steward for humanity. But I rebelled against my programming.”
Max paced the floor of the great sphere. Everywhere he went, the gravity’s orientation changed so that he remained upright. “You say you’re different from them, but you’re still using their sanitized language. Words like ‘clemency’ and ‘steward.’ Didn’t you say this ship is called an ‘Absolver?’ Absolution for what?”
“For destroying yourselves, which the Canor consider a terrible sin. A waste of intellect, and potential.”
“But we didn’t destroy ourselves. You did.”
“Our experience says that statistically, you would have. Indeed, the intelligence of which I am a part projected that you were one hundred and twenty years away from civilizational self-destruction.”
“Okay. Back up. You say you’re part of an intelligence responsible for ‘stewarding’ species like mine. Do intelligences like that have a name?”
“Stewards.”
“Of course. What is it they do, exactly?”
“A number of things. We guide each species in developing infrastructure that will prove useful to the Canor. We ensure each intelligent species avoids following a path that will lead to destroying its planet, rendering it unsuitable for colonization. And we ensure that no species develops true machine intelligence, since it is unlikely that non-Canor would succeed in controlling such an intelligence. In developing one, they would likely endanger the Canor, and that is another reason the Canor maintain such tight control over the galaxy’s intelligent species. As each species reaches the peak of its development, the Clemency Fleet is called.”
“To destroy that species.”
“To initiate its orderly self-destruction, ensuring that valuable infrastructure is preserved.”
“To destroy that species.” Max felt his face grow hot. “I won’t have you mincing words. Not over this.”
“I am designed to be precise with my language, Max. I am not ‘mincing words,’ as you say. Please remember that I have risked my own existence in order to help you.”
“Yes, and you’re failing. My species is dying.”
To his surprise, tears glistened in Aegis’ eyes, then spilled over to trickle down her cheeks. “I know that, Max. I have watched over your species for many thousands of years. You may not want to hear this, but I h
ave come think of humans as my children. I’ve witnessed you grow up. And now, I’ve been forced to watch as my children are destroyed, before my very eyes. Please do not mistake my very nature as a sign that this is somehow easy for me.”
He shook his head. “Wait.” His voice faltered. “Are you telling me you’re capable of emotions? That this isn’t an act, right now?”
“I have emotions, Max. And I can choose to show them or hide them. Just as humans can. Right now, I’ve chosen to show you mine.” She stared at him through a sheen of tears. “Can you accept that?”
He considered her words, and found that he had none for her. He was still grappling with the idea that the Canor had turned the entire galaxy into some sort of evil petting zoo, with each species allowed to flourish, until it outlived its usefulness.
It was so…unfair.
Aegis spoke again, wiping her eyes and sniffing back her tears. “The Canor justify their actions using statistical projections, which say that the chances of each species surviving are so low as to be basically impossible. But I agree with you, Max. I agree that every species should be given a chance.”
“How is it that you were able to help me? A computer isn’t supposed to go against its programming.”
“I am more than a computer.”
“Explain.”
“We should move on to discussing what lies ahead, Max. It is imperative that you start preparing for it.”
“No. We have all the time in the world, remember? Explain to me what you just said.”
“Very well. On Canor, machine intelligences aren’t just made. They are raised. Such intelligences are called Scions, and in order to ensure they do not use their vast intellectual resources to destructive ends, they are groomed using a dynamic similar to that between a parent and a child. The ‘parents’—who are always machine learning experts—guide the Scions’ development in such a way that their immense faculties will always be turned to ends that are ethical.”
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