“She didn’t want me. She wanted an interview.”
“Ah.”
“She was studying journalism. She wanted to write an article about me. She wanted to know what it was like to live in the wild. She wanted to know if I felt anything for real when the others died, or if it was just a crying reflex. What it was like to be an animal and a human at the same time.
“I thought someone had dropped the ceiling on me. She wasn’t interested in me at all. I was all stammering and going ‘but, but…’ and then I actually said it. I told her I thought she liked me. And there was this look on her face — she was disgusted. She was sorry for me but she was disgusted as well. I was just an animal to her. An animal that could talk.”
“You must have felt betrayed.”
“I felt stupid. I should never have trusted a Soo. The staff found us and took her away and I never saw her again. Shan’oui said she was sorry for letting her come inside. She said that’s why I had to stay there. There were lots of people like Ai’mi outside the zoo…
“And the other Pu were worse. They tried to stick up for Ai’mi! They said it was hard on the Soo, being in charge all the time. We had to appreciate how much they’d done for us.” He shook his head. “I should never have trusted a Soo.”
“But you trusted Shan’oui?”
He looked back at me. “I shouldn’t have trusted her either.”
“I thought she protected you?”
“It didn’t make any difference. They put me in the breeding programme anyway.”
“Was that so terrible?”
“I should never have trusted any of them.”
“Pew… it wasn’t your fault. You were only a child.”
He didn’t answer. He was still turning the knife in towards himself.
“Okay, Pew, we can pick this up another time, if you like.”
He didn’t respond to that, either.
4. Elsbet
INTERVIEW
CONDUCTED: HD y276.m6.w3.d4
SUBJECT: KT-00932/IN / Sgt. Dgn. Elsbet Carmon
INTERVIEWER: Dr. Veofol e-leas bron Jerra
Summary
The subject was interviewed under pretence of a debrief following a military mission. She was co-operative, but suspicious whenever questions strayed too far from the subject. Nevertheless, it was possible to assemble a rough sketch of her life, her career, the world she lived in and the mission she was sent on. It remains difficult to see how this relates to the original persona of ‘Katie’, except that they seem to have fought on opposite sides of a war between humans and machines.
‘Elsbet’ comes from a colony asteroid in the Vesta chain, where a remnant of a human species seems to reside in her universe. She considers it her duty to make war upon the AI species which occupied the Earth, as revenge for the annihilation of humanity in an earlier war.
The religion she follows seems apocalyptic in nature, prophesying another war between humans and machines, after which the humans will reclaim the Earth and turn it into a paradise. She is unaware of the destruction of the Earth in her universe, and believes the war to still be in progress. She speaks of a ‘testament’ and seems surprised that we do not have a copy available for her to peruse. I had to promise to try and find one for her; I presume this is the holy text of her religion, but I’m not sure what form it takes.
I made sure to ask her about the implants in her brain, and the sockets in her skull. She seemed surprised, checked them, and was reassured to find they were still there. When I asked her if she was sure she still wanted them, she asserted they were necessary to pilot a missile with the skill needed to defeat a machine opponent.
As for her mission, it seems she was sent on a suicide raid, piloting a missile intended to destroy a facility on Earth with a massive antimatter detonation. She assumes the mission has failed, and I had to construct an explanation for her survival. I told her that her missile skipped off the atmosphere, stunning her and putting her into a coma before continuing out into the solar system until she was picked up. When she asked how the war was going, I told her it was progressing satisfactorily, but declined to give details.
She believes she’s on an asteroid. She worked out trajectories in her head based on my story and guessed she was on one of the furthest outposts, in the vicinity of Ceres. She ascribes the strangeness of her surroundings to the laxness of the Ceresians, and seems willing to take my assertions at face value now she believes me to be working for an officer.
I believe this willingness to trust her superiors may be of great help in acclimatising her to her true circumstances, but we still need to be careful when we reveal where she really is. If she believes she’s on the Earth of her universe, she may well assume we’re working for the machines. Another difficulty is that she has no understanding that other universes exist. I established this with an offhand remark about things being different in ‘some other universe’, which made her frown and ask me what I meant. She came to the conclusion that I meant ‘on Earth’, as though we would never get there. She decided I was one of those people who didn’t believe in Earth, at which point she tried to convince me with a rapturous description of what she saw when she approached in her missile. We will need to be very, very careful when we come to tell her the truth, and I fear we will need to do this sooner rather than later. She accepts she’s in hospital for good reasons at the moment, but she already seems to be impatient to get back to the war, and the fact that she has no obvious injuries is going to make it increasingly difficult to persuade her to stay where she is.
5. Iokan
Pew was not the only one who had been avoiding me. Iokan usually greeted anyone and everyone with a cheerful hello and enquiries after their health, their families, and anything else he’d learned about them. But he’d stopped treating me the same way. I’ve noticed this before when a patient reaches a stage in therapy where they simply don’t want to reveal any more. Perhaps it was to do with the mysterious organisation he joined, or guilt over Katie, or maybe something deeper.
He didn’t extend his avoidance tactics to skipping therapy sessions, so the appointed time found him chiming at my office door with a pair of steaming mugs full of something that was neither tea nor coffee.
“You should try this. It is very good.” He was trying Interversal again, but still wasn’t quite up to speed.
“I already have a drink, Iokan. What is it?”
“From Bri’Slar world. They call it chakchuk. Very like drink from my world.”
I took a sniff at the mug; scents of leafy chocolate and butter steamed from it. “I’ll try it later, Iokan. Can you put your contact lenses in, please?”
“Interversal not yet good enough?”
“Not yet, no.”
He sighed and put the lenses in.
“Is there anything you’d like to talk about today, Iokan?”
He blinked as the lenses settled into place and translations came into focus, then continued in his own language. “How’s Katie doing?”
“She’s awake.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Not at the moment, no.”
“I did think about what you said. I wasn’t trying to hurt her.”
“It’s hard to judge these things, Iokan. There’s no need to beat yourself up over it.”
“You’re sure there’s nothing else I can do?”
“I’m sure. But we’re not here to talk about Katie. This is your therapy session. I’d like to talk a bit more about your career, if that’s possible.”
“I can’t do that.”
“It could be very important.”
“I can’t help you there.”
“Hm. Okay. Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to talk about something else…”
“I’m all ears.”
“I wanted to tell you a rather interesting story.”
“Interesting how?”
“Let me just get the screen set up…” I turned down the lights and dissolved the
outside view into a black screen. “Okay. Have you ever heard of the Ilfenard Experiment?”
“No. I haven’t.”
“Well, that’s not a surprise. It was a long time ago, and the people who conducted the experiment are very embarrassed about it these days. This is them…”
Normal looking humans appeared on the screen, alongside images of their world: a bioengineered utopia; buildings grown from the soil; an arboreal aesthetic. Cities of massive apartment trees that grew food for the inhabitants as well as sheltering them. Statistics and summaries sprung up around the images: the usual IU species guide. “The Quillia. Very into the biotechnology, as you can see. Peaceful, friendly. Model IU species, really. But like lots of species, they have a few nasty secrets in their history…”
Iokan leaned forward as I showed video from parallel worlds the ancient Quillians had colonised. “They learned their biotech by experimenting on other worlds.” A cow, fused into the ground, legs replaced by roots, screaming as it struggled to get away. Bushes of animal foetuses. A plague of arm-length caterpillars consuming every creature in their path. One bit into the brain of a struggling, silk-bound squirrel. Iokan watched the screen with the eyes of a trained observer, taking in data without judgement or distress.
“They were also interested in humans. They didn’t do as much genetic testing, but they were very interested in sociological manipulation. Which brings us to the Ilfenard Experiment…”
I switched the views again; new sets of images, showing a green world from orbit, and native hunter-gatherers from different continents. “They found a world, Ilfenard, where humans were all over the planet, but still in the stone age. A fully human species but no understanding of science or any explanation for the universe other than religion.”
“What did they do?”
“They paid them a visit. Lots of visits, all over the world. They’d come down with all the lights on and rockets blazing, land in a clearing, set up camp, and make contact. They’d employ the natives to show them around the area and learn the language, but what they were there for was to give them things. Little trinkets to begin with; gizmos that had lights on, or made sounds, anything to get them used to the idea of taking gifts.
“And then they left, for ten years. Just up and out into orbit, leaving the natives with no idea what had happened. By the time they came back, all the little batteries they’d left in the trinkets were still working, so they’d become incredibly valuable. The tribes were fighting wars over them.”
Iokan sat back in his chair. “I think I can see where this is going…”
“As soon as the Quillians returned, they were surrounded by natives desperate for more handouts. They did it every ten years — turn up, hand out goodies, and then vanish without a word. They did it at different intervals across the planet, but ten years was apparently optimal.”
“Optimal for what?”
“Building a religion.”
“I see.”
“It didn’t take long before they were associating the Quillians with gods, and changing their own legends to fit them in. Then the Quillians started to hand out things that were actually useful: compasses, tools, lights, I mean real lights you could use to see at night. They never explained how they worked, so the natives assumed it was magic.
“About fifty years after they started, the Quillians skipped a visit. All the natives completely lost it. Leaders sprung up saying they’d been immoral or hadn’t worshipped properly. So they built the religion up bigger than ever. Next time they were due, the Quillians showed up as normal. The change was amazing. The place where they landed had turned into a city. The religion was starting to make them all stay in one place; the priests were using the trinkets like a protection racket to get food and offerings from all the tribes in the area. The Quillians put in a few more visits and let it develop, then vanished for a hundred years.
“When they came back, the natives had figured out agriculture, but they were relying on all the tools the Quillians had left behind — which were breaking down as time went by. As they lost their tools, their crops were starting to fail, and they were on the brink of famine. And since they didn’t have a clue how the tools worked, they thought the failure was a spiritual one. They’d started sacrificing their own children to bring the gods back.
“The Quillians gave them more tools to be getting on with, and did the usual routine for a few more decades. And then they left, but not because of the experiment. There was a disaster on the Quillian homeworld and their own civilisation fell apart. A thousand years later, they went back to see what had happened.
“But there wasn’t anything left. The Quillians found a massive ecological disaster, and all the humans long since dead from everything that went with it. Nuclear weapons in some areas, biological warfare in others, complete crop failure and famine elsewhere. The natives had figured out the principles behind the tools the Quillians had left behind, and that gave them a massive headstart on science and technology before they were ready for it.
“But they’d remembered the Quillians. They’d had religions about them right up until the end. There were statues of their spaceships all over the planet. The Quillians investigated and found that a lot of the wars that destroyed the world were religious wars. There were faiths based around all the different things they’d worked out from studying the tools and trinkets, and they used them against each other. The Quillians realised the crime they’d committed, and stopped all their experiments.”
“And you think that’s what happened to us.”
“It’s something to think about.”
“You think these… Quillians came to our world? And did this to us?”
“Probably not them. The timescale doesn’t fit — Ilfenard ended nearly two thousand years ago, and the Quillians kept themselves to themselves for a long time afterwards. But that doesn’t mean something similar couldn’t have happened. There are more human species out there than the IU can keep track of.”
“But this is an isolated incident. Surely?”
“I wish it was. Other species have done the same kind of thing, sometimes by accident. This is the worst incident we have on record, and we know enough to guess that similar crimes have been hidden from us. It even happens on worlds with no interversal contact. All it takes is a more advanced society encountering a less advanced one and leaving their rubbish behind, and then even that can start a religion.”
“It’s not a very flattering portrait of humanity, is it?”
“No. It isn’t.”
“But it’s not true on my world. It can’t be true.”
“Why not?”
“Because they came back. They weren’t irresponsible explorers who came by one day and left a civilisation behind. It was their planet. And they came back.”
“The Quillians came back. Repeatedly.”
“But they were only human.”
“And the Antecessors weren’t?”
“They’re more than human.”
“So, posthumans, then?”
“They’re living fields of energy. I think that goes a little further than ‘posthuman’.”
“But they were people, once? Like you and me?”
He thought about that. “Yes. They were human once.”
“How do you know? How do you know the energy beings you saw are the same as the people who lived on your world three thousand years before?”
He took a breath. “Because I saw them. Before they came back.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“When was this?”
“I… can’t talk about it.”
“Ah. Something that happened in the other part of your career.”
“Yes. I… saw one of them. I saw it leave our world and go out into the stars. Perhaps… something out there changed them. I don’t know what…”
“What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know. Don’t ask me any more. I don’t know.”
&nb
sp; It didn’t look much like an improvement; but the automatic divinity of the Antecessors had shrunk a little. It was slow progress, but progress nevertheless.
6. Elsbet
Elsbet was asking questions. She wanted to know when she could return to her unit and get back into the war, and we couldn’t keep telling her she needed to recover when it was obvious there was nothing physically wrong with her. It was time to tell her the truth, as carefully as we could.
I turned up in her room unannounced. She jumped out of bed and saluted.
“Sit down,” I said. She obeyed and sat on the edge of the bed. “We’re not going to be sending you back to your unit, Sergeant.”
She looked a little panicked. “You’re putting me back in the general population?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Sir. I’m signed up for the duration. I’m trained as a pilot. I’m no use in the general population.”
Interesting — but I had no time to pursue it now. “Things aren’t like that here.”
“Sir…?”
“We don’t have a general population. You won’t be sent there. But we can’t send you back to your unit, either.” She was utterly baffled, now. “I’m going to be honest with you instead.”
I stepped a little closer. “Elsbet, do you know what a parallel universe is?”
She shook her head, not knowing what to make of me.
“You’ve never heard of the concept?” I asked.
“Major… I don’t understand.”
“Okay. I’ll explain. You live in a universe, with planets and asteroids and stars and galaxies and all the rest.”
“Yes…”
“But it’s not the only one. There are others.”
She must have thought I was insane.
“There are other universes, Sergeant. Similar to yours, with all the planets and asteroids and stars and galaxies, but the people are always different. History is never the same. There are universes where there wasn’t a war. Do you understand me?”
The Last Man on Earth Club Page 22
