The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  Rook shakes his head. “That doesn’t seem like all that much to base—”

  “We have found four’s significance even in the biology and psychology of all other sentient species and their societies,” the Leader goes on. “Four points to a cross, an important religious symbol, and a symbol of wholeness and universality on all worlds we have found. Every sentient species we have come across has four limbs. Your own brains are made up of four chambers, just as it is with every other sentient species we have found. There are four chambers to your heart—we happen to have two hearts, four multiplied by four is sixteen, which is the Supreme Number in our estimation. There are four nucleobase types—responsible for pairing and thus life itself—in all DNA and RNA we have ever found. Where your lines of latitude and longitude intersect, they divide planets into four sections, much like the systems we developed, which indicates on some instinctual level you know of four’s significance, as well. And when speaking of spreading something over the world, your people called it ‘the four corners of the earth.’ Four’s significance is everywhere. It is in our bodies and our minds. It is in our very DNA. Nature is very specific on this part. The long and short of it is this: a lone thing cannot advance significantly without a mate, which forms a pair, and pairs cannot do well without at least one other pair. Two parts of two, four parts total.”

  There is no mistaking the religious conviction in the alien’s words. Rook hears it, but is unconvinced by it all. “Isn’t that stretching? What about things that aren’t four? Like…two eyes? One mouth? Thirty-two teeth in my mouth? A million follicles of hair?”

  “Where you find items of significance—such as eyes—you will find that they are half of four, or multiples of four.”

  “A mouth? A single mouth isn’t half of four, or a multiple of four. Wait, wait, don’t tell me,” he laughs. “Four divided by four is one, right? Like any religious tenet, you make it true, huh?”

  The Leader answers truthfully. “It is unwise for you to place significance on such minor items such as mouths. Some sentient species communicated with hums from vocal cords in their stomachs—four basic cords, in case you were wondering—and they ate through various other openings in their bodies.”

  Communicated. He speaks of other species in past tense. “That’s a lotta crap. You’re as fallible as us. A long time ago your people saw that you have four fingers and four toes, and then you happened to develop four brains, that was that. Four just became some societal recognition—”

  “It is a law of nature, and we have done well to adhere to its wisdom.”

  “Adhere…how?”

  “It is difficult to explain. Suffice it to say, four’s wisdom is everywhere, in all things. By following nature’s prioritization of four, we have always succeeded.”

  “Prioritization?”

  “I do not require that you understand,” the alien says. “I know that you cannot. As I told you before, I feel a degree of pity for you. It is likely that this inability to find harmony with four is indicative of your troubles as a race.”

  Rook nods slowly, like he saw his dad do while sitting on his front porch, as a neighbor happened by and offered up some banal but friendly conversation. He sits for a moment, ruminating on that, then looks back at those black eyes with their faint, deep, pulsing blue light. They are almost hypnotic. In fact, Rook averts his gaze just slightly, and so should we. “Aren’t you gonna ask what I intend to do with you?”

  “We’ve already established that you hope to learn from me.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Of being tortured.” He intends to let the words hang in the air as a threat, but the Leader answers quickly and frankly.

  “The thought of it hasn’t really occurred to me.”

  Rook makes a face. “What do you mean? You seemed perfectly capable of thinking about it back on my ship. In fact, you offered it up. You said that if I tortured you, you would probably go insane.”

  “Incorrect. You brought the subject up, and I realized what you were inferring. I’ve studied humans, and I knew what idea you were ‘dancing around.’ My response was me telling you what would happen. I would go insane. There was no uncertainty there, and therefore it only occurred to me because it was immediately applicable.”

  “Immediately…applicable?”

  “Yes. Something worth calculating, you might say. Something very real, now placed satisfactorily into the equation.”

  Rook nods again. “Something…worth calculating,” he says at length.

  The Cereb says nothing. And here, we once again pass seamlessly into the mind of the Leader. For a moment, there is hesitation in all four of his minds. There is something that each brain now struggles with. His eyes caught something on the human’s face moments ago. A flinch, a momentary loss of muscular coordination on the human’s face, what some would term a “microexpression,” which reveals ulterior motives. The Leader has spent a lifetime studying his own species, but since there was so little deception inherent in Cerebs, they rarely wrestle with their outward body to hide their true intentions. Humans, however, were filled with deceptions, especially self-deceptions, and therefore a study of their faces was part of an ongoing study in Cereb culture throughout the brief War.

  However, humanity was eradicated so swiftly that reading those microexpressions never became an important field of study for either the Leader or his compatriots. He only knows that something just transpired on the Phantom’s face, a notion that has raced across his mind, perhaps never to return. The Leader can’t say why, he just knows that he ought not to say any more. His intuition speaks heavily against it.

  Finally, the Leader says, “I am hungry. Your drug dosages have left me quite thirsty, as well. They have that effect on my people.”

  “Yeah, well, this ain’t exactly a dinner meeting. And I don’t intend to share my food stores with someone I might just jet out into the vacuum.”

  “What do you intend to do with me, then? Your options are very limited. I’ve already told you I will go insane with torture and be utterly useless to you. Why bring me here?” The Cereb looks at him for a moment, estimating the human’s next logical line of thought, and realizes he’s right. “You wanted someone to talk to.”

  Rook keeps silent. We drift back into his mind, we see what’s in his heart and soul. He figures, To hell with it. Since we’re both laying our cards on the table, let’s just be out with it. “You’re right.”

  “You hope to quell the bouts of insanity you feel coming on by having a conversation with me. Perhaps more than one conversation, you’re not sure yet.”

  “How do you know that I’m going insane?”

  “I told you, we never really sleep. I heard you laughing—this spacesuit you’ve put me in, its radio is connected to yours—and it did not sound like healthy human laughter.”

  “And what would you know about ‘healthy human laughter?’” Rook challenges.

  “We occasionally captured some of you, as I’m sure you know. We studied your emotions, the crying mechanism, the laughter mechanism, the tribal aspects, the mating habits, all of it.”

  Rook leans forward slowly. “Mating habits?” he whispers. “You sick puppies…you took our people hostage…and studied our mating habits?”

  The Leader is very forthcoming. “Of course. In their efforts to be precise, and to know our enemies absolutely, our Calculators had to leave no stone unturned. It is how we guarantee that, even should we lose a battle by some fluke, we know everything there is to know about our enemies so that the fluke can never be repeated.”

  “But how can our mating habits ever possibly fit into—” He almost shouts, and controls himself. Rook takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. “So you, what, dissected us?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.” So unapologetic it is frightening, even to us.

  “So you could find out how and why we laugh?”

  “Among other things.”

/>   For a moment, the habitat is silent. Well, almost silent. The computer behind Rook is rattling gamely away, collating data and assessing needed repairs. “Like what?” he asks.

  “I told you before about our curiosity in your species’ interest in deception. We wondered how it was you and other species of your kind came so far, behaving the way you do, deceiving one another. We were astonished to learn that most species used it the same way that we did in our own evolution, only against one another much of the time and not simply against dumber animals, which is so barbaric it defies articulation.”

  “You have to know more about deception and lying than you’re letting on.”

  “We know about it, we just have little use for it. When all of a people’s resources are accounted for, all calculations completed, and their numbers and technology are sufficiently advanced, then winning a battle is merely a matter of approaching from the correct sides so that the cleanup goes just that much quicker. Defeat is not accounted for.”

  Rook nods. “Right,” he says sarcastically, “because nobody accounts for termites winning, either. You just spray their nest and walk away.”

  “Precisely. We have about as much use for trickery as the average human had for quantum theory. It just doesn’t come to bear very much in our daily lives. Why should it?”

  “It never even occurs to you to use stealth?” He still can’t believe what he’s hearing. How could humanity have been defeated by such limited thinking? Yet, it isn’t limited, is it? It is just different.

  “Why sneak up on lesser creatures or deceive them when you can just corral them? They will move out of desperation and fear. No ruses are necessary when you have superior might.”

  This is…incredible. Rook has known for many years about some of the thought processes of the Cerebs, but he never thought their drive towards linear thinking was this deeply embedded, and this thoroughly adhered to. He tilts his head to one side. “Do you learn from your mistakes?”

  “Always.” No hesitation.

  For a moment, Rook is lost in thought. He’s known a bit about the Cereb approach to combat, and to civilization in general, for a while now. Just before humanity bit the dust, they gathered some idea of the limits of Cereb imagination. It was, after all, how he tricked some of the seekers that had tried to ambush him when exiting Holey Roller. But all those seekers were destroyed. Did they send their data back to the mother ship? Will they fall for the same trick twice? “What about the sublimation ploy I played on you guys?” he asks. “The asteroid with the ice that sublimates when the sun hits it, and when Gonzo—I mean, the other asteroid—alters its course and speeds up its rotation?”

  “Moments before the asteroid sublimated, we got word from our Observers and Managers. However, we were too late to pull back. It mattered little. We saw the opportunity when you targeted the other skirmishers, and so myself and my team boarded you.”

  This is interesting, in more ways than one. “So…you didn’t plan that,” Rook clarifies.

  “No,” the Leader says. “If we had, that would qualify as a deception, and I have told you many times now that we—”

  “Have little use for it. Right.”

  So that wasn’t a ploy. They didn’t sacrifice those ships to get the Leader and his people on board. It was a natural consequence of what I did. The danger of their leap into space to cling onto the Sidewinder’s hull made it seem daring, but for them, it was no such thing. It wasn’t daring, it was calculated. It was considered by the super-minds back on the mother ship, the Observers and Managers, maybe even its Conductor. Their trajectory and speed matched mine. They had the tools and the training to do it.

  It truly is as the Leader said. No sacrifice was made. It was a mathematical certainty, or near enough to one in their worldview.

  Rook begins to see something. He’s underestimated these people, and in a bizarre way. All this time, he has been assuming that they are super-geniuses, with cognitive capacities far beyond his own in every way. It is difficult to wrap his head around, but he thinks…he thinks he may just be starting to get the true essence of these people.

  They don’t plan for possibilities, they plan for eventualities. Or, what they see as an eventuality. They respond to the moment, to the occasionally surprising anomalies that crop up in the equations of life, but they never make enough mistakes that they are forced to consider failure. The same way that I don’t make a plan for what I should do if I wake up in the morning with my head sewn to the wall. The possibility is so remote it’s not worth giving serious thought to.

  This is an astonishing revelation.

  And as Rook begins to see this, the idea from before returns again. He looks over at his prisoner. Finally, he unclips himself from the seat and hovers over to him. He needs to get out of this place. Though it has fresher air than either the Sidewinder or an environmental suit, the habitat still feels too cramped. “Don’t go anywhere,” he says, injecting the alien with another heavy dose of the sedative. He might still be somewhat awake, but at least he is unable to move. Besides, he’s bound tightly, going nowhere.

  Rook pulls on his spacesuit, steps out through the airlock and floats back over to the Sidewinder. He cycles it up, and takes off down a different tunnel than the one he came through. He needs to get out of here. He needs to put the Leader, the habitat, the frayed cables, and the picture of home far behind him.

  He needs to think.

  The Sidewinder rockets away from the lonely campsite, leaving us far behind.

  8

  We are carried away on a sourceless wind. Far and away from Magnum Collectio, far away from the sole survivor of humanity, drifting tens of thousands of miles away, passing through Queen Anne, the Seven Dwarfs, the Wild Cards, Holey Roller, Big and Little Ben, Gonzo, and hundreds of thousands of others. We alight on the bridge of the Cereb luminal ship. Here, they are busy as bees, though infinitely quieter. Thousands of petaflops of data are processed every second, over a hundred quadrillion operations are performed per millisecond, and all of it is checked and re-checked by the redundancies known as the Observers. They sort all of this even as they process the standard senses, such as taste, which they are constantly filing under one of the five tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, or umami. Every experience is chronicled. Every experience is prioritized.

  Observers suppress indulging in these tastes, aromas, and sounds, all so that they can focus single-mindedly on filtering and purifying the datafeed. It was of the utmost importance that their assigned Managers and the Conductor received the highest quality of data, untainted by impurities such as a neglected variable or miscalculation.

  Managers pass on the latest data the very instant they receive it. The computer implants connected to each of their brains measures the data, and the enhanced organic processors feed the information to the brain and decide on its relevance, cross-referencing it across a wide spectrum of data, and then assign each datastrip a priority. It is constantly being fed to the Conductor, who isn’t present on the bridge at this time.

  We move through several levels, mostly moving up, glancing off of Engineers, Repairers, and countless Cleaners.

  Now we reluctantly return to the Conductor. He has done little but meditate since we last saw him. It has taken all these hours just to cleanse his minds of the needless details (such tiny minutiae) that can so often clog the arteries of thought and self.

  Presently, he stands naked in his room, a scandal even though he is alone. The air circulating through the room brings such fluttering to his skin, his minds, and his stomach. It is stimulating to the point of madness. Intoxicating, as if injecting himself with some sort of narcotic. His people have long been hyper-aware of their environment, their brains constructed to collate the data like no other creatures in the universe, and that ability is amplified by advancements unequaled anywhere, so they never needed a narcotic as most other sentient creatures seemed to. Just living out their days was invigorating enough.

  Especially whe
n naked. And like any physical obsession—be it sexual addiction or the stimulation of self-mutilation—if overindulged, it can lead to an unpleasant mental state.

  The Calculators of old were wise enough to know this about themselves and the rest of their species. That’s why clothing came first, before all other innovations, with rapid advancements being made in insulation: from heat, cold, and generally all surface sensations. Mastery of self came first, and that is why the Conductor feels they of all races have pressed this far. It wasn’t only command of our environment, but command of our self that made us superior.

  On every level, he knows this. In all seven of his brains, he knows this. Even still, he does not clothe himself.

  The Conductor walks naked through a field of asteroids, various clusters parting in his wake, as though he is a giant and they are afraid of him. The asteroids return to their usual trajectories after he’s passed through them. He turns around and around, sometimes reaches out to select an asteroid, and brings it closer to his face. His interface with the room’s computer allows him to do this. He holds miles-long asteroids in the palm of his hand, analyzes them, requests to see their properties with a mere thought, and sets them back in their appropriate orbit.

  After a while, the Conductor finally tires of this, and steps once more into a stasis suit, which completely insulates him from feeling anything else. For a moment, it is jarring. His body has become fond of these sessions, and now he feels denied some natural part of himself. A psychosis grows inside of him. He both knows it and doesn’t care.

  The magnetic shield opens for him as he approaches the lift, then reactivates once he’s inside. He goes down several levels, passing the main engine rooms, atmospheric processors, and life support monitoring stations. When he steps out again, he is on a level reserved for him and only a handful of others, most of them Researchers. Every ship has them. Exactly sixteen (four times four) Researchers are placed on each ship. They are tasked with experimenting with technological and biological processes, with absolutely no expectations involved whatsoever. Pure science, minus the hypothesis stage. Total experimentation, though rigidly controlled.