by M. R. Forbes
“It doesn’t change the fact that you were part of the group that attacked the hangar, disrupted our operations, and assisted the trife in overwhelming our position.”
“No, Sergeant. It doesn’t. I came to terms with my role in the chaos and loss of life on this ship many years ago. The reason we’re having this conversation is because I want to do my part to correct it. I want to make amends, as best I can.”
The answer seemed to satisfy Sergeant Card. He shifted in his seat, leaning back to listen again. David continued.
“I was able to get onto the ship through the main connective airlock. Unfortunately, a number of trife made it through with me. I managed to find a place to hide and I rode out the launch from there, holding on for dear life while we blasted into space.” He smiled. “I never thought I would go to space. I regret I was too terrified to enjoy the experience.”
“I was too busy watching my friends and fellow Marines die to enjoy it,” Private Sho said. “You’ve got us beat there.”
“Sho,” Sergeant Card said.
“Sorry, Sarge.”
“You have every right to be upset,” David said. “At the time, I only cared about self-preservation. Survival. I stayed in hiding for a while, but then I started to get hungry and thirsty, and I needed somewhere to relieve myself. I made my way to one of the kitchens. I ate, I drank, I used the bathroom. Then I was confronted by a Marine. A man named Pratt.”
“You saw Sergeant Pratt?” Caleb said.
“Yes. He was acting erratically. He claimed he had been injected with something. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time. He wanted to kill the trife. All the trife. Instead, Riley came into the kitchen and killed him. She had to shoot him a dozen times to keep him down.”
“Wait a minute,” Private Sho said. “Doctor Valentine killed Sergeant Pratt?”
“After she injected him,” Private Flores added.
“Correct,” David admitted. “She wasn’t remorseful about it. She told me she was trying to help. If the editing had taken, Pratt would have become a more valuable Marine.”
“Hasn’t she ever heard of consent?” Private Sho asked.
“Not when it comes to her orders or her personal goals,” David replied. “Riley took me prisoner at that point. I spent the next year locked up in Research. There are cells behind the lab, in the same area where the Marine module had extra stasis pods. You know what happened from there, so if you don’t mind, I’ll skip back to the point where I woke up after suffering an otherwise fatal brain injury.”
“Go ahead,” Sergeant Card said.
“As I was saying, I believe that I was dead. I was unaware of anything during that time, and when I woke up I didn’t even remember being shot. But I was in a small metal box shoved into the wall, left alone and in the dark. At first, I thought maybe that was death. But then I heard voices outside. I recognized Riley’s voice and the voices of the other scientists. I was terrified, confused, angry, and in pain. I considered kicking at the box, but I was sure no good would have come to alerting them to my alertness. I sat in the box and I waited.
“They opened it eventually. They slid me out and lifted me to a gurney. Once I was sure there should have been some light I realized I was inside a body bag. I made sure I was ready when they opened it.”
“You attacked them?”
“No. I put my hands up and begged them not to hurt me again. They all seemed surprised to find me alive, and Riley leaned over me and examined my head. I didn’t know why until she told me later how they had blown out half my brain and it had recovered. She was so excited to see me brought back from the dead, to see her work finally succeed on some level. They took me out of the lab, gave me new clothes, and put me back in my cell.
“At first, I thought things would continue as they had before. I would remain locked up while the scientists continued their work. Again, my intellect was still evolving. I didn’t understand my new value to them at first. They kept me under constant observation for the first two weeks. One of them was always sitting with me. None of them would talk to me except Riley. She took an interest in me she had never shown before, asking me about my life before the trife, my family, everything. She kept telling me how special I was. I have to admit, I had a crush on her from the moment I saw her, and that was right after she killed Sergeant Pratt. She was beautiful and smart, dangerous and direct.”
“Like a guided missile,” Flores said. “Sorry, Sarge, I couldn’t help myself.” She apologized before Sergeant Card could say anything.
“You’re more right than you know,” David said. “I loved her interest in me so much I was willing to do anything for her. When she started subjecting me to painful tests, I accepted it in the name of helping her save humankind. When she took so much blood it would leave me unconscious. I told myself what I was doing was important. I became a tool. A fountain to draw from. It was a role I accepted.
“So much so that she started leaving the cell unlocked, allowing me to move around Research as I pleased. I could tell the other scientists didn’t like the idea, and they still refused to give me much attention. I heard their whispers and comments to one another. They believed my survival was going to lead to more harm than good. They said Riley had always been at the edge of morality, and my existence was pushing her over.
“I ignored them for the most part. My intellect was increasing. My mind began to settle into a state of what I can only refer to as a higher awareness, even if that’s an inaccurate description. I began working alongside Riley, and we started growing closer. I’ll never forget the first time we made love.”
“We can skip over that part,” Private Sho said, interrupting.
“You claim you had a higher awareness,” Sergeant Card said. “You didn’t realize she was using you?”
“Have you ever been in love, Sergeant?”
“I’ve had a few girlfriends in my life.”
“Then no. When you’re truly in love, you’ll know it. Even if you say the word before you feel it, the difference is like night and day. Hot and cold.”
“Crazy Rich Asians and Apocalypse Now,” Private Flores said.
“I was blind to her manipulation. And she did manipulate me, the same way I imagine she manipulated you. She’s very bright, and if there’s one skill she excels at, that’s it.”
“How does this all connect with the Cerebus armor, and this thing you’re calling It?” Sergeant Card asked.
“It’s like a house of cards, Sergeant. Or a line of dominos. Or a Rube Goldberg Machine. Cause and effect. Action and reaction. It started when you recovered Riley and the spaceship and brought them back to the Deliverance, and when Espinoza attacked the hangar. It’s continued for over two hundred years.”
“How do we know you’re telling us the truth?” Private Flores asked. “I mean, Doctor Valentine fed us a line, and now you’re feeding us another line. How do we decide who to believe?”
“That’s easy,” David replied. “You don’t have to make that choice. You can see it all for yourself.” He pointed to the corner and the Marines’ heads turned to follow his finger. “There are cameras spread throughout Research, including the crew quarters. They haven’t been recording for some time, but they were recording one hundred percent of the time when these events occurred. All of the data is written to the Research computer and backed up in an encrypted format to the ship’s main computer. Riley was able to wipe the Research computer herself, but the mainframe copy remains. She doesn’t have the keys to access it or delete it.”
“But you do?” Private Sho asked.
“Admittedly not through my own efforts. It cracked the encryption. It just didn’t clean up after itself very well.”
“Okay,” Sergeant Card said. “Before we go any further, can you spare us the suspense and just tell us what this it you keep referring to is?”
David smiled. He had been trying to delay the reveal to increase the dramatic tension, but he supposed he had skirted the issue
long enough.
“It is an artificial intelligence, Sergeant. A non-human artificial intelligence.”
Chapter 32
“Non-human?” Sergeant Card said. David noticed how the Marine’s face had tightened. How his jaw had clenched and his body became tenser.
He was right to be worried.
“It’s difficult to quantify the weight of that truth without the context of the entire situation,” David said. “Or to even truly recognize what that statement means. We can go back to the control room and I can pull up some of the recordings if you’d like, but I have to warn you that it will most likely be aware of the activity when I do.”
Sergeant Card was still for a moment, considering. Then he shook his head. “Let’s get through the baseline debriefing first, then we can worry about proof.”
“Of course, Sergeant,” David replied. He took a moment to recompose his thoughts. “As I said, Riley and I began having an affair. I call it that not because either one of us was otherwise involved with anyone else, but because we carried out the romantic side of our relationship in secrecy. Being intimately involved with an experiment is universally considered improper conduct, and neither one of us doubted the other scientists would have stepped in and put a stop to things if they had known.”
“No doubt,” Private Flores quipped.
David could see she was as tense as the rest of the Marines, all of them still struggling to accept the truth behind their true adversary.
“We continued that way for about two months. I won’t lie in telling you they were two of the best months of my life. I had love. I had a purpose. I had a goal. I was going to help Riley improve humankind so we would be able to return to Earth and take back our planet.”
“So what went wrong?” Sergeant Card asked.
“Do you remember when I said that Riley excels at manipulation? I believed I was helping her perfect the editing to apply to a wider range of genetic variance. In other words, the alterations were successful on me, but they were very specific and might not apply to the next person. We were trying to mitigate the risk. I also believed the Deliverance was going to Proxima, a twenty-year journey. I believed those things because that’s what Riley told me. But like I’ve told you, Riley lies. It’s second nature to her.”
“How did she lie?” Sergeant Card asked. He was sitting up straighter, leaning slightly forward, his interest peaked.
“One day when we were working in the lab, she told me she wanted to show me something. She said the others knew about it, but she had been waiting for us to advance our progress on the editing sequence before she got me involved. I think what she meant was until she trusted me enough. She brought me out of Research. For the first time in a year and a half, I was theoretically free. I had stopped considering myself a prisoner by then, but since I didn’t have free reign to leave Research, in reality I still was a prisoner of sorts. She led me to a nearby storage room. At first I thought she was bringing me there for privacy, but when the door opened I was introduced to the small nest of trife I had already told you about. When I asked her what they were for, she told me we needed subjects to test the samples on, and since trife DNA is so close to human DNA, it would only take minor modifications to begin running trials on them. I complained about how dangerous it was to keep them alive, considering how quickly they could reproduce if they escaped. She wasn’t concerned. They had been holding the creatures and studying them for over a year without incident. That was her cover for the rest of the scientists. The trife were there to study, to learn as much as we could about them.
“I made the mistake of believing her. I helped her modify the solutions. We tested them on the trife. The first few died quickly. The next few less quickly. By the fifth generation, the editing was successful. We had to incinerate them to keep them from coming back. Even more amazing was how the nest picked up on the alterations. They could only produce three or four at a time with the resources they had, but all of them became regenerative. I grew increasingly concerned about keeping them, especially considering what we had turned them into. One night, Riley and I got into an argument, and that was when she finally admitted what I had already started to suspect.
“As she put it, regenerating humans were an improvement because they could take the damage from the trife and recover. But we were still limited because we had to depend on tools to kill. Guns, knives, and so on, and those tools had a finite variable. Ammunition and degradation. Not only that but not every human had a desire to be a Marine. Even if they knew they couldn’t die, they might not have the emotional fortitude to fight. But what if we could combine the best of human with the best of trife? What if we could control it?”
“I don’t believe it,” Private Sho whispered.
“You can’t be serious,” Private Flores said.
Sergeant Card stared at him, his face pale, his jaw still clenched. David could feel his anger in his posture and expression. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.
“Trife are technically genderless, but yes,” David agreed. “She wanted to create human-trife hybrids. I refused. We got into a massive fight, and I was locked in my cell again within the hour. She told the others I tried to escape, and that was the end of our relationship. I loved her. She used me. End of story.”
“What a bitch!” Private Sho said. “I told you I didn’t trust her, Sarge.”
“I seem to recall you telling me I should try to trust her,” Sergeant Card replied.
Private Sho closed her mouth, refusing to respond.
“She continued the research without me,” David said. “But she didn’t want my mind to go to waste. I was reassigned to John Byrnes’ team. He had been studying the alien spacecraft, but there were parts of it he couldn’t reach past the active reactor. It was the perfect job for someone who would recover from any damage in minutes instead of weeks.”
“They didn’t,” Flores said.
“They did,” David countered. “It was their undoing, and in some ways mine too. I was given access to Byrnes’ prior work, and I devoured everything they had learned about the craft. They were trying to break down the alien’s system of symbols to translate the writing to the Greek alphabet. They were struggling with the complexity of the characters, but I was able to deduce the forms were derivative of quantum mathematics. The aliens express their concepts and ideas in numerically based equations and algorithms. It’s fascinating, but also difficult for a human mind to comprehend, even when they understand what the symbols mean. It took a few weeks, but I was able to enter the ship’s computer systems. That’s when I discovered that our assumptions about the craft were all wrong.”
“In what way?” Sergeant Card asked.
“The scientists believed the ship was piloted because the gel interior had depressions in it like it was a cushion. In reality, the space wasn’t to carry aliens to Earth. It was to transport humans from Earth.”
“What?” Private Flores said. “Alien abduction?”
“Yes. Byrnes’ team believed the starship arrived with the xenotrife. That was also wrong. The craft had been on Earth for over ten-thousand years. It was only discovered because of technological advancements in sensor equipment and an enhanced scrutiny of the surface in the wake of the xenotrife’s arrival. A coincidence, in a sense.”
“This sounds too crazy to be true,” Private Sho said.
“Which means it probably is,” Private Flores replied.
“The xenotrife share so much DNA with humans because they were created from humans,” David said, driving his point home. “The virus wiped out billions of humans because it was specifically made to wipe out humans.”
A tense silence fell over the room. The Marines looked at one another, trying to find words to describe the bombshell he had just dropped on them. They gave up a minute later, and Sergeant Card turned back to David.
“If the gel isn’t a cushion, what is it?”
“Raw materials,” David replied. “To build an AI. I discovered t
hat procedure within the starship’s control systems.”
“Byrnes gave you unfettered access to the control systems?”
“Not exactly. He had someone watching over my shoulder every time I interacted with the interface. But they couldn’t read it, and I could. I learned how to lie from one of the best. I seized the opportunity to begin communicating with the AI long before it gained mobility.
“I helped it escape, and it helped me escape.”
Chapter 33
“You helped it escape?” Sergeant Card said. “Why?”
“I was trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea, Sergeant,” David replied. “And I had to decide which was the lesser threat.”
“And you decided an alien AI was a better choice than Doctor Valentine?”
“Ultimately, yes. Just because I’m able to regenerate from wounds, that doesn’t mean those wounds aren’t painful. I’d had enough of my hands being burned and melted in the name of science. Besides, what Riley planned to do was much, much worse than what the AI wanted to accomplish.”
“Which is what?” Sergeant Card asked.
“To go home.”
“That’s it? To go home?”
“Yes. Remember Sergeant that it’s an artificial intelligence of a race that is intellectually thousands of years more advanced than humankind. What may seem silly to you makes perfect logical sense to it. In any case, Riley was becoming more and more erratic the closer she came to completing her solution. She had a steady supply of trife, but what she didn’t have was a supply of humans. Research had modified one of the entrances to the city to gain access to human subjects, and they had approval from military command to do it. But the other scientists refused to help her take civilians from the city to make them into hybrid monsters. Maybe you can guess what happened as a result?”
