The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  “But then, we wouldn’t’ve been human, would we?”

  “That assertion is correct,” the Leader says simply, “you would not have been human. You were following your genetic programming. Your nature, as it were. A flawed nature, which is why you failed so fantastically.”

  Rook smiles, and the Leader mimics. His first instinct is to punch the smile right off the alien’s face, but then he considers something. He feeds the forged MRE package back into the mini-fabricator, and starts playing with other dials and buttons. “Let me ask you something else. Why did you just ask me what I think your weaknesses are? Are you curious? Are you just buying time or genuinely interested?”

  “A bit of both,” the Leader admits.

  “Huh,” says Rook, mulling something over for a moment. “Because that makes me wonder, if you’re buying time, doesn’t that mean you understand something about deception?”

  “Of course, no life can form completely without an understanding of it. Life wouldn’t survive, especially intelligent life. It is as natural to survival as curiosity.” The alien adjusts himself amid its bonds, settles himself. “However, there is a time and place for deception, but it is a pollutant in all calculations. Whenever deception is added to a calculation, it causes unnecessary disharmony. It is what your researchers used to call ‘tricking the data.’ It isn’t useful, it is only harmful. Tricking the data doesn’t reveal the truth of the matter. The problem your species had was that it was too used to adding these deceptions into important decision-making moments. A people used to the language of deception are gullible. Gullible thinkers elect deceptive leaders, and deceptive leaders produce terrible results. Make no mistake, your species achieved space travel despite your many deceptions, not because of them.”

  Rook feels his hands shaking. He looks down at them, takes a breath to control the volcanic rage, and tries to continue the interrogation. “And you don’t…you don’t think that said something about our greatness? Yes, our politicians were liars. Yes, many of our people were divided along religious lines and social lines and racial lines. But we made it this far! That’s not worthy of enough respect to be left alone, to be allowed to live and carry on?”

  “Greatness and respect were never a concern. Indeed, we do respect the many qualities of mankind. Mostly we are interested in how far your species made it into the stars, despite its many flaws—it is a statistical anomaly. However, as anomalous and intriguing as it was, it could not be allowed to spread across the galaxy, consuming resources that were more fit for us.”

  “More ‘fit’ for you?” Rook chuckles incredulously. “How so?”

  “Because your species could not carry on,” the Leader says. “You were an intelligent species, but far too gregarious. You were consuming the resources that our race would eventually need, once we inevitably expanded to those regions. We expand slowly, at a measured pace, but we are quick to annihilate those we see as future problems. In human parlance, we ‘head the problem off at the pass.’ Another human axiom: ‘The best time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining, not when it’s raining.’ The sun was shining for our species, and we needed to protect ourselves from the rainstorm of Man while you were still at a controllable number. Our Calculators estimated how long it would take you to overpopulate various worlds, take the resources, and of course, how long it would be before your leadership faltered, as it invariably does.”

  “So you saw us as termites just starting to climb up the side of the big galactic house, and so you sent in the exterminators.”

  The Leader tilts his head to one side again. “That is actually an imaginative, and appropriate, analogy.”

  “What if we had been as smart as you guys?” Rook asks. “What if, I dunno, you had come upon us and we were expanding slowly, like you guys, measuring our resources with our own kind of Calculators? What would you have done?” The Cereb doesn’t move. It blinks once, twice, and doesn’t blink again. Rook smiles as realization dawns on him. “You never considered that, did you? You actually never imagined it.”

  “That is true,” the Leader says, with no signs of shame. “It has never occurred to me, because it has never been a concern.”

  “Well, try to envision it now.”

  The Leader goes quiet for some time. This isn’t easy for him to do. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it simply never occurs to most in his species to think this way. It isn’t pertinent information, these “what if” scenarios. It is like trying to ask a member of one religion to suddenly convert to another religion instantaneously. It’s not that that person is incapable of such thought, it’s just that it’s an unusual and untrained (and alien) method of thinking. It’s alien. The mind automatically rejects it, because it is programmed with various cognitive biases, most of which are there to confirm a person’s previously held beliefs. Evolutionary processes placed them there, guaranteeing that, for the most part, a creature accepts the reality which it is given so that it can get on with its life, never questioning too much.

  It has made of the Cerebs the ultimate pragmatists.

  The Leader genuinely attempts to do what Rook has asked of him, tries to imagine what might have happened if the Cerebs had found Man as similar to themselves, and finds that, like trying to hold onto a large, slippery fish, the thought wriggles free and is gone. With the bothersome slippery fish out of the boat, the boat is back in proper order, sailing in the safety of calm and familiar waters.

  “You can’t do it, can you?” Rook marvels.

  The Leader remains silent for a moment, then admits bluntly, “I cannot.” There is no shame in his admission. There is also no reason for him to hold the information back. By the Leader’s reckoning, there is absolutely no way that the human could ever use this information to his benefit. There were no chinks in the armor to exploit here, the Cerebrals had stood by their philosophy for thousands of generations, and so far their results had proven them right.

  “You can’t even imagine what it might’ve been like,” Rook says, “because it didn’t happen that way.”

  The Leader doesn’t move. He’s waiting for the next relevant statement or question.

  Rook, for his part, is lost in his own bit of thought. He realizes that, just as the alien can’t wrap his mind around human psychology, neither can he wrap his mind around the alien’s. A gulf exists here that can probably never be crossed. The Leader can’t understand how humans could have come so far as a spacefaring race without possessing the flawless logic of Cerebs, and Rook can’t understand how Cerebs can understand the rudiments of deception and self-preservation without having a psychology or society similar to Man.

  “I feel sorry for you,” Rook says suddenly. He realizes it as he’s saying it. “What’s it like, not being able to see things the way they aren’t? It must be terrible. You live only in the certainty, and never flatter the maybe.”

  “I feel sorry for you, also,” says the Leader.

  Rook snorts. “You? Feel empathy? Please.”

  “I feel despondency over unrealized potential,” the alien clarifies. “Humanity had much potential, most of it actualized. It is unfortunate to see such folly, and the collapse it caused.”

  “Why so unfortunate?”

  “Because, like humans, we also hope to find we are not alone in the universe.”

  Rook wanted to pull his hair out at the madness of this statement. “But you did find out you weren’t alone!”

  “Wrong. We are alone.”

  “What about humanity?”

  “Humans do not count.”

  “How do we not count?!” Rook screams, rising to his feet.

  “Long did you exist on Earth with termites, but did you ever stop asking the question, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ Of course not. That’s because the termite does not count.”

  Rook stares down at him, speechless.

  The Leader shifts uncomfortably in his compristeel bonds.

  When Rook finally finds his voice again,
he says, “Termites don’t speak. They don’t have music or love or language. They don’t have a culture! They don’t have—”

  “All of these are items that you use to qualify true sentience,” the Leader says, eyes pulsing now with a vague green light. “I wonder at it, because dolphins also had a language, and even a sophisticated understanding of tones, which you might define as ‘song,’ and they were closer to sentience than termites. But if they were to spread across the galaxy, consuming resources and living beyond their means, we would have classified them as lesser-sentient, as well, and dealt with them the same. Certainly human language was more sophisticated than dolphin language, and your culture more colorful than chimpanzees, and your songwriting more intricate than birds or whales, but in the end, you were no less threatening to the integrity of the ‘galactic house,’ as you put it, than mold.”

  Rook takes a step towards his prisoner, staring down at him with supreme enmity. His breathing has become erratic. He reaches to his side, draws his sidearm, levels it at the Leader’s head. “Can mold outthink you?” he asks. “Can mold switch the air vents off, then back on, and increase the oxidizers and hydrocarbon gas levels until the air is combustible? Can mold keep a dialogue going with its enemy until an ally sneaks up behind him?”

  The Leader nods. “It was a fair ploy. Executed with a degree of intelligence and imagination, to be sure. But more of our people have died from disease last month than ever died from a human trap. Your traps were never any greater than the traps set by the Venus Flytrap, or the dams built by beavers to gather fish. All life has a level of intelligence—that’s what makes it life—but the great failure of humanity, and the proof that it is not truly self-aware, is its inability to set deception aside and work together as a cohesive unit towards a definable and reachable goal.”

  “We were working towards it!” Rook fumes. “Until we were interrupted by it! We made every sacrifice we could in order to reach peace with ourselves and—”

  “And there is another problem with your race, of course. Sacrifice. Wave after wave of your soldiers were sent on suicide missions, against odds that, did they have the minds for it, they would have known were impossible to overcome. Rather than fleeing, most of you stood and fought. Such needless sacrifice, when you might have eked out an existence on the run. You attempted War, and when that did not work, you attempted stealth, deception, and sabotage, hence the Sidewinders.”

  Rook shakes his head. “Well, maybe like you, we couldn’t imagine living on the run for the rest of our existence.”

  “Another flaw, then.”

  Rook stands there, looking down at him, mouth slightly agape and his tongue sliding over his top lip. Lost in thought for a moment, he almost never came back. “You say you don’t understand sacrifice,” he says finally. “But you’re a soldier yourself. Surely you know something about sacrifice for the sake of your people.”

  “It is not sacrifice what we do as operatives. Efficiency is key to us, and we make sure that nothing stands in the way of it.” He looks right proud when he says this next. “For instance, my people will not stop and search for me or my team, not until they find you. They may gather the dead as they go, but we are a single-minded people, and we will not allow ourselves to become distracted from our goal. To waste even a scrap of our soldiers or pilots on search and rescue before we have acquired our target would be wasteful. Eradication is the goal, and our Conductor has set his eyes on you.”

  The purpose of the comment is clear. It is a reminder from the Leader to Rook that his people are relentless, that they will never stop hunting him. As if I need a reminder.

  But Rook does not to rise to his taunt (if it is a taunt), and opts to stay on point. “What about the personal sacrifice you made leaping onto my ship?” Rook presses. “What about that kind of sacrifice?”

  “My team and I ejected from our ships. We saw an opportunity, and the field was clear of debris. We matched your speed, ejected, and, with permission from our Observers and Managers, we made to come aboard.” The alien shakes his head. “There was very little margin for error on our part. Therefore, no sacrifice required. We were virtually guaranteed success.”

  “Yet, here you are.”

  “I said there was little margin for error, not zero.”

  “So, you would never sacrifice yourself for something or someone else?”

  The Leader makes a face, as if the very thought hurts him. “Why sacrifice, when you may plan ahead, get a feel for your enemy’s technological capabilities, and allow them to make all the foolish mistakes? Such as sacrifice,” he adds.

  The cold efficiency of the philosophy is infuriating. “So what are we? If we’re smarter than termites and mold, if we’ve gone to the stars and mastered space travel, but we’re not as intelligent and wise as you people, then what are we, exactly?”

  “A fluke,” the Leader says simply. His eyes pulse again with the same blue light as before. “As random as the emergence of life itself. Mutations occur. This is natural in the evolutionary process. Most mutations fail. Some get further than others before they fail. Humanity belongs to this type.”

  Rook watches him. Then, he does something that upsets the Leader. He begins to laugh. It comes out of nowhere. None of us expect it, least of all Rook himself. He laughs long and hard, until his sides are almost splitting. Tears stream down his face. He’s nodding at the alien. He’s agreeing with him. He understands him. Everything the Leader has said has been so logical, how could one argue with it, especially in the wake of such clear results?

  Hadn’t Rook’s drill sergeant told him that he could never argue with results? Hadn’t his father told him that, too, when he tried to explain why he lost the chess tournament? “But his defense was so sloppy!” he insisted in the ride home with his dad, after he suffered a quick defeat. “You saw it! Didn’t you see how he didn’t even try to develop his pieces at the start? That’s the first thing you’re supposed to do! He didn’t even try for control of the center! Everybody knows that’s the first thing you do! You have to control the central squares so you can move your pieces more easily, and cramp your opponent’s pieces! He didn’t even try for that! What was he thinking?”

  “He won, son,” his father told him. “He beat you. Accept it.”

  “But that’s not—”

  “He got inside your head, is all. He didn’t do what you expected. He declined your Queen’s Gambit, and after that he let you take a couple pieces. He wanted to see what you were thinking, get inside your head.”

  “Get inside my…?”

  “You think too much about your pieces,” his father advised. “Not enough about the person sitting across from you. You’re playing them, not their pieces.”

  “I know I’m playing a person. Who else would I be playing?”

  “Yourself,” his father replied.

  “What?”

  “You’re making the mistake of playing against yourself. You’re trying to think what you would do. You’re very smart, and a very good player, but you need to learn how others think. A good chess player thinks like his opponent.” His father cast a worrisome glance at him. “I know you like to win. It’s your nature to dig your heels in; I saw that in you when you were young. But you’ve got to…well, there was once a thinker named Sun Tzu. They teach you about him in school?” The boy shook his head. “Well, he wrote a book called The Art of War. In it, he said, ‘To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.’ It just means think about your opponent’s mindset. Where’s he coming from? What’s his method of approach?”

  “But I am thinking about my opponent’s mindset—”

  “No, you’re not. Not really. You’re looking at the board too much and thinking about what you think his next move should be. You’re not looking at your opponent. You’re not seeing his mind.”

  “My opponent didn’t even know how to properly align his—”

  “Son,” his father said flatly, after hearing this for the umpteenth time. �
��You can’t argue with results.”

  The truth was, he missed something that day. We all do it. It’s the source of flaw and fault.

  Humanity missed something, too, and it failed. It failed to defend itself. It failed to develop its pieces before moving forward. It failed to establish control over the center. Its pawns failed to defend the king, and once that happens in any game, everything else falls apart.

  A chime goes off inside the cargo bay. The Leader looks up, mildly interested. Rook looks at him. He’s finally finished laughing. “I guess you ought to be flattered. You’re the first guest to set foot on it.”

  “On what?”

  “King Henry the Eighth,” Rook says. “We’ll be docking in five minutes. Welcome to my humble abode.”

  7

  We remain with the Sidewinder for now. The Conductor and the rest of his people are still expanding their search, so they might be a while. And besides, things are developing here, in a section of the asteroid field that Rook has come to term Magnum Collectio (the Great Gathering). Here, there is a congested patch of space like none other we’ve seen yet. As ghosts, we may pass through it all, but it is no less a burden.

  The Sidewinder glides lazily through the throng of mile-wide asteroids and random pebbles. One basketball-sized hunk of rock comes hurtling towards the forward viewport, and glances off the magnetic shielding like a ricocheting bullet, and almost as fast.

  A little more than a hundred of these asteroids are baseball-sized, and are currently emitting activity at extremely low frequencies. They tickle us, even in our incorporeal state. They are more of the false asteroids made of mimetic clay, with high explosives embedded at the center: Rook has termed them the Wild Cards. Along with various sensor shrouds, exhaust-masking cryogenic coolers mounted on the sides of King Henry VIII and Queen Anne, and twelve satellites camouflaged and hidden throughout Magnum Collectio (all of which were salvaged from various wreckages taken from Shiva 154e before he had to flee), the Wild Cards form the grid that protect his home from prying eyes. His home, this enclave here, is humanity’s last refuge. It’s the only place Rook has left to go, and thus, we who still haunt him must follow.