Janbot was sorry to hear Loreli sounding so weak still, but glad she was recovering. She was another of its favorites. It never brought her flowers, however. It understood that giving a Botanical a bouquet of cut plants would be the equivalent of presenting a human with a decorative arrangement of meat. This only worked when the meat was jerky. Or bacon.
Were dandelions the Botanical equivalent of bacon? It sent a query to the ship’s computer and was chided to concentrate on its job.
LaFuentes, meanwhile, had inquired about Loreli’s health.
“I’m much better, thanks to your brilliant plan and Gel’s unique talents.”
“Just doing our job. Can’t have Doall do the thinking all the time.”
The captain raised his eyebrows and the lieutenant blushed and cleared his throat. Loreli waited for the joke to be explained but neither man said anything. Janbot, of course, had heard Doall telling her friend how LaFuentes had yelled at her precisely for not thinking of a brilliant plan. It give a small chirrup of laughter, but no one noticed.
“Should you be up and working?” LaFuentes asked by way of deflection. “It’s only been a couple of days.”
“I’m fine, Enigo. Thank you for your concern, but you know my work both relaxes and fascinates me, and I can use the distraction. Besides, there were some interesting insights into our understanding of the Cyber culture that came up during the Xenology conference I wanted to share with you.”
She paused there and activated a security field. The field kept any potential surveillance devices from seeing into the room or recording the information. It also trapped the inhabitants within until the field was shut down. Janbot scooted away from the field, as it would wreak havoc with its sensors.
As the little robot continued cleaning, Loreli continued. “Their encounter with us and the HMB Ritalin afterwards, when there are more convenient targets in the Union Fleet, suggests they are interested in human ships.”
“Well, can’t say I fault their taste in species, but do we have any idea why?”
“Do they see us as a threat or a prize?” LaFuentes asked.
“Unknown. The Ritalin was infected with a cyber virus during the attack. It was hidden deep and only discovered because one of the AI maintenance crewman who was doing routine maintenance on the memory circuits got distracted by a glitch in the library files and pursued it to a minor documentary on the history of 24th century art. The file in question had to do with eco-sculpture. That’s creating works of art from the land itself using a combination of horticulture and landscaping, plus low-level demolitions when the size of the piece called for it. The crewman had happened upon the file, got engrossed to the point of forgetting the rest of the maintenance scheduled for that shift, but just as his supervisor was going to get him back on track, they noticed a bookmark.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, this particular file had not been watched by anyone in its entire existence on the Ritalin, but during their battle with the Cybers, it recorded being accessed 144,372 times.”
“So, what’s the bookmarked section?”
Loreli pulled it up on the computer. A 2-dimensional image of a human in a white denim tube top splattered by paint, dirt, chlorophyll and what looked like blood, hopefully his own. The human had a long, curved face and flowing hair and a shape that may or may not be male or female but resembled the body trend called quasisexual, whose origins were lost in history except for some two-dimensional images of very sad, still potentially male, haute couture models. The caption below identified the speaker as Che÷.
Che÷ spoke conversationally but passionately to the viewer (but really, the camera or the guy standing behind the camera waving, “go on.”) “See the problem with eco-sculpture is scale. If you’re making a statement of magnitude, then you need a grand scale, a massive palette, to convey that, um, magnitude. But then the sheer size of the reality is too large for others to see your vision. You could view it at a distance, sure, but then the detail, the minutiae that give a message of magnitude it subtle impact, is lost. The human mind can’t at once grasp the big picture while assimilating the details.
“But we try, you see. It’s an endeavor that consumes our lives as eco-artists. Each artist has his own unique philosophy for embracing the philosophical and practical conundrum of our chosen medium. Me, I believe where one cannot visualize and grok at a glance, one must experience. All my eco art is interactive. My latest project, ‘Naïve Optimist in the Caves of Cruel Irony’ has just, well, swallowed me.”
Loreli shut off the video.
Captain Tiberius spoke first. “Okay. Did the xenologists at the conference have any suggestions? Because I have no idea what that would mean to the Cybers.”
“This was not the only art-related file accessed by the Cyber virus. The current theory is that, as an artificial intelligence, the Cyber Swarm is endeavoring to better understand human creativity.”
“To what end?”
LaFuentes answered first. “Because our genius isn’t from logical thinking. The best innovations come from us breaking stuff and putting it together weird, of trying to do things that don’t make sense and discovering something even better.”
The captain nodded, “And of all the sentient species in the universe, we humans are the best at it.”
“But we know they absorb biological components, too,” Loreli interjected, “So the question becomes, ‘How much of the unique character traits of a species are they really absorbing?’”
They spoke then of the Cyber’s assimilation capabilities, military motivations and how to safeguard the library on the Impulsive – not to mention Deary’s collection of industrial sculptures made from useless and damaged parts of the ships he’d served on. Janbot continued to clean quietly, even though it had already finished its list of chores for the room. It couldn’t get out, yet, so it moved to the weekly deep clean list.
And as long as it was in the neighborhood, it cleaned up around Loreli’s pot-and-carriage. In fact, it found a piece of a stray leaf, almost the equivalent of a human’s hair. Janbots had been programmed with a rudimentary sense of pride, and it preened silently to itself at having found something Loreli’s regular bot had missed.
Finally, they exhausted the topic. The captain rose. “I guess that’s enough for now…at least until we figure out how to break something and put it together weird.”
The Captain left first, and LaFuentes gallantly gestured for Loreli to precede him. As she passed, LaFuentes asked, “Hey, what happened to Che-Division?”
“Apparently, he was excavating on unstable ground. He insisted his gentle touch would protect him, but a sinkhole opened up under his feet and he disappeared into it, never to be found.”
“So…his art swallowed him up?”
“Just so. It’s considered the most successful piece of eco-art of that movement.”
LaFuentes chortled. “See? How human. Only thing better would be if his screams echoed.”
“Oh, they did. Do even today.”
Janbot waited until the two had exited, although its internal alarm beeped with mechanical impatience. It was going to be late for its next stop.
***
Janbot scurried straight to its last stop of the shift: Communications, Second Backup for the Other Section. The ship, of course, could separate in an emergency, with the Saucer Section holding the main characters…er, command crew, while the Other Section held the rest under Commander Deary, who really thought it was a stupid idea to put an engineer in charge of half the ship during a battle and usually pawned off the duty to the most senior person in Security or Operations, while he offered the occasional bit of advice from Engineering.
At any rate, the Impulsive had a lot of redundancy such as this tertiary system. On most normal days, it went unmanned except for practice or certification, and of course for routine maintenance. Janbot usually avoided those times. Today, the section was devoid of humans, although the katt was skulking among the consoles looki
ng for vermin or an amusement. When it was a kitten, it had tried to entice the janbots to play with it, but after having its pounces interrupted by a quick electric zap, it learned that janbots didn’t like pretending to be prey. Now, it just growled at the machines and left them alone.
This suited our janbot just fine, and it did its usual run along the floor, respectfully giving the feline-ish creature its own space. Next it started dusting the consoles and controls. There was one port that especially called to it.
Janbot moved closer. It was a pretty port, a necessary port, a port that needed special cleaning. It replaced the vacuum for a tiny metal brush and its programming didn’t even pause to wonder why it thought sticking a metal device in an active port might be a bad idea. No, the port was pretty. It was a friend. It needed the cleaning.
The brush connected.
In a flash so quick that not even the mighty sensors of the Impulsive could detect it, janbot transmitted the records of its entire day: the security briefing and how the Impulsive handled hostages; Doall’s martyr complex and the possible vulnerable spots of Andailusians; the chemical composition of a hung-over gelatinous life form; the conniving of the security crew to get out of extra PT…and most of all, what the humans knew about the Cybers’ covert mission on the Ritalin.
Then, it transmitted one last piece of data: the genetic code of the Botanical Lieutenant Loreli.
The nanomoment ended, and it jerked the brush away with such force, it rolled backward. What was it doing? It could ruin the surface of the port with a metal scrubber. Quickly, it changed to a microfiber chamois sponge and rubbed the surface of the communications device. There!
Secure in the certainty that no harm had been done, it tooled off to its recharging station, pleased with another job well done.
Meanwhile, light years away in the Helenski asteroid belt, the communications burst was picked up.
By a Cyber relay station.
BONUS STORY
Rest Stop
Captain’s Log, Intergalactic Date… Ah, just stick it in here, Pulsie.
We’re entering our fourth month of mapping the Zomg nebula, and with another two months to go, I’m afraid we’re stretching my crew to their limits. The back-and-forth travel at impulse through such a volatile area of space has meant the ship is almost constantly on Yellow Alert, but the mundane task of stellar mapping means little release for the tension. The cosmic anomalies are interfering with communications, so we can add isolation to the mix. On the bright side, the pilot and navigation teams are having the time of their lives. Lieutenant Cruz hasn’t felt his skills this challenged since his nona took him through the Union-Kitack minefield.
Security seems the most affected by the inactivity – Lieutenant LaFuentes in particular….
Captain Jebediah Tiberius paused his log, considering if he really needed to report the altercation between his Chief of Security and the Ship’s Sexy. Loreli has sensed Enigo’s need to do something heroic, and with few alternatives available, had asked him to her quarters to help her put up a new sunlamp. He’d seen through her ruse and rather rudely let her know he didn’t need her pity.
“But he did help me with the light,” she said, “so there is that. Still, I thought you should know.”
But did HuFleet need to know?
The lights suddenly flashed red, then yellow – a sign that they were coming up on something unusual but not necessarily threatening. Simultaneously, the voice of his first officer came over the intercom. “Captain to the bridge, if you would.”
“Pulsie, file that report,” Jeb said to the ship’s computer as he rose. Nothing like a shipwide emergency to give him an excuse for an abbreviated log entry. He’d talk to LaFuentes later.
Or maybe we’ll have some true emergency and he can shoot something, Jeb thought. That would solve his problem, I’m sure.
“Captain on the bridge,” Ensign Doall called from ops, though there wasn’t the usual crispness to her tone. The long, dreary duty was wearing on her, too, then.
“What have we got?” he asked as he stepped over the threshold. Then he saw the screen and stopped. Gone were the wildly swirling blues, purples, and yellows which weren’t really the colors of the nebula, but computer-generated representations of the gasses, ionizations, micro-black holes, and hazards picked up by the ship’s sensors. In their place was a calm blackness, in the center of which was a blue-and-green disk. “Is that…?”
“Class M, sir,” Doall said. “Breathable atmosphere. Moderate temperatures in the temperate zone. Non-sentient vegetation, fish, but no birds or mammalian life. No silicon- or quartz-based life. Sensors are picking up a small city in the Northern temperate zone.”
“Just one?” LaFuentes asked. He’s just stepped out of the interspecies head and was moving to relieve his second-string security officer, Ensign Leslie Straus, a heretofore unknown character who normally sits in the bullpen awaiting her big moment. This will be her big day because the plot needs a young, perky, slightly ditzy female friend for Ensign Doall for reasons the reader will discover later.
“That’s all the sensors are finding. Also uninhabited.”
“That’s not a little creepy,” Straus said. Even though she passed control of the Security console to her commander, she nonetheless lingered, also staring at the planet on the screen. “Where’d the people go?”
“There’s no sign of contagions, sir,” Ellie said.
Jeb smiled. Now, this was something to break the crew’s boredom. “Well, let’s find out. Cruz, park us over that city. Let’s send down some exploration teams. Doall, Loreli, Rosien in Botany…”
“They should have security escorts, sir. Straus is right; it is suspicious.”
“All right, and everyone goes armed and with biofields. Can’t hurt to be careful. Fish, you said? Maybe I – we – should catch one or two. For study.”
Smythe cocked a brow. It was his turn to go on the next seemingly innocuous-but-soon-to-turn-perilous away mission.
Jeb briefly considered challenging his Number One to a game of paper-scissors-rock-redshirt-alien, but Smythe had the uncanny knowledge to anticipate his commander’s guess. Instead, he grinned, “The Away Team is yours, Commander, but if it checks out, I may have to zap down later and personally supervise the area.”
“If it checks out, perhaps we could dally a week and give everyone a day or two of shore leave,” Smythe suggested.
Everyone seemed to perk up at the suggestion. The second-string crew in the bullpen looked especially pleading. The only time they’d gotten a chance to do anything in three months was when a bridge officer went to the head. If nothing else, they would get a few hours’ bridge duty while the person they replaced was planetside.
“I like it! Beer me.”
Two crewmen jumped up excitedly and moved to take Doall’s and Loreli’s places. The First Officer didn’t really need a replacement. Strauss moved to take her spot from Enigo, but he stopped her. “You’re next on the redshirt roster. Call up someone and meet us in the teleporter room. You’ll be with Doall. And tell Jenkins and O’Tin to meet us, too. I’ll get our weapons.
“Commander, you mind taking Minion Jenkins?” he asked as they entered the lazivator.
“LeRoy? How is his impulse control problem?”
The door closed on LaFuentes’s answer.
* * *
Ten minutes later, they materialized where Ensign Doall had determined the city plaza stood. As soon as she had a complete vocal system, Straus exclaimed, “It’s so quaint.”
Indeed, it was, done in an Old-World Earth style, with picturesque buildings bearing wrought-iron balconies and flower boxes with peonies and marigolds. A large obelisk with unintelligible markings sat in the middle of a bubbling fountain. The alleys were narrow, but the thoroughfares entering and exiting the plaza at each point of the compass were bright and lined with bushes.
This was, of course, lost on the Chief of Security. “Fan out,” he told his team. Obediently,
they each took one thoroughfare and scanned it with tricorders, phasers out just in case.
Loreli shared an amused glance with Ellie. While Rosien checked out a nearby bush, they and Commander Smythe went to the obelisk. Ellie pointed her tricorder at it and snapped a photo, which immediately uploaded to the universal translator.
“Ellie,” Loreli called from another part of the fountain, “I think this is a different language.”
“And here,” Smythe said.
There are two kinds of people in the world – those who can interpolate from incomplete data…
With the four messages to work with, the translator was able to come up with a fair approximation. But Ellie wasn’t sure she believed it.
“It says, ‘Welcome, weary travelers. We built this for you. Rest, relax, and enjoy.’”
* * *
“Come again?” Jeb asked.
“That’s what it said,” Commander Smythe affirmed as he walked along the street. Minion Jenkins moved just ahead of him, pausing to look, phaser-first, down every alley and nook. “Ensign Doall has run it thrice, and the message comes up the same. Apparently, some alien species built the city – possibly the planet – as a rest stop through the nebula. Just within sight of us are some lovely hotels. Of course, Lieutenant LaFuentes recommends we check it out first, and I’m inclined to agree. We’re each taking a quadrant and will report back in an hour of if we see anything unusual.”
“Sounds good. Impulsive out.”
Commander Smythe tapped his communicator off, then glanced behind his shoulder. “We are out of sight of your CO, Jenkins. I think we can stand down from the high alert.”
“LT’s right,” Jenkins said as he leaned against the wall, then did a fast turn to pie the plaza the street opened to. Seeing it clear, he motioned Smythe forward. “You can never be too careful. There was this time, we were observing a pre-warp culture. It was agricultural, you know, but there was this…”
Hold My Beer Page 12
