Explorations: War

by Richard Fox

  Inez sat up straighter and her face got very pale.

  “—the doctors said the original tumor could have been there since he was born, but from what they can tell, it metastasized probably a few months ago.”

  We don’t know what triggers them, the doctor had said. Just luck sometimes. Known unknowns, unlike the unknown unknowns that had killed the zephies. Still deadly, though. He felt a chill.

  “Before you started working for us,” the doctor murmured.

  Jack’s jaw tightened. “Yes.”

  Shoulders relaxing, she released her armrests, and had the gall to smile. Her eyes met his and she bit it back. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Take all the time you need.”

  Nodding, he managed a thank you. Leaving, he could feel his heart beating wildly in his chest. She had been obviously relieved that Isaac had been sick before Jack had started working for Habitat One. Had she been afraid he’d give cancer to Dr. Emelia, or that Dr. Emelia had given cancer to his son?

  Ganymede

  1 YEAR, 7 MONTHS, AND 2 DAYS PRE-INVASION

  “You’re here,” said Kathleen, reaching up to take his hand. She was sitting in a chair beside Isaac’s bed. Isaac was asleep. “Yeah,” said Jack. “Why don’t you take a shower? I’ll keep watch.”

  Nodding tearfully, she stood, released his hand, and left him alone with their son. The beeping of the heart monitor seemed incredibly loud. Taking her place, Jack swallowed down a looming sense of dread.

  Isaac hadn’t been awake much the past few days. He had oxygen going in his nose, and a drip with painkillers so he didn’t feel how hungry he was, but they had nothing to restart his heart when it stopped.

  Jack stretched out his legs and bowed his head. He heard the shower turn on, and then the steady beeps of the heart monitor began to stretch further and further apart.

  “Isaac?” Jack whispered.

  The heart monitor’s beeps became a long, solid whine. Isaac’s eyes fluttered open. Face very serious, he said, “Jack, I’m dying and you have to tell the crazy bitch she’s going the wrong way.”

  It was the longest sentence Isaac had ever spoken and the words were all wrong … that wasn’t Isaac. Jack was standing before he thought about it, taking Isaac—or the not-Isaac—by the shoulders. “Who are you?” Jack demanded.

  “I’m your son,” Isaac replied, unblinking.

  “Give him back to me!” Jack shouted, releasing Isaac and stumbling backward, afraid he’d destroy the fragile shell Isaac barely lived in.

  “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Kathleen cried, running into the room, hair wet, wrapped in a towel.

  Isaac cried out and grabbed his head. “It hurts! It hurts!”

  Kathleen ran to the drip.

  A few moments later, Isaac went quiet. The heart monitor beeped fast and then slow, and then strong and steady. It didn’t stop.

  Ganymede

  1 YEAR, 6 MONTHS, AND 26 DAYS PRE-INVASION

  The doctor in the oncology department bent over the tablet on his desk.

  Kathleen and Jack, with Isaac on his lap, sat across from him.

  “I can’t explain it,” the doctor said. “The primary tumor is no longer growing. It’s allowed the nanos to start doing their job; they’ve already shrunk it considerably. I think, well, it’s early, and I don’t want to get your hopes up, but I’ll think he’ll make a full recovery.”

  He blinked up at Isaac. “You’re a very lucky young man.”

  “The sun is dying,” Isaac replied too seriously for a four-year-old, and too much like the voice from a few nights before. Jack felt his chest constrict, and squeezed him tight.

  Biting her lip, Kathleen said to the doc, “The ‘Net cast. He heard it.” Turning to Isaac, she said, “The sun’s not dying; its luminosity is decreasing.”

  Isaac scowled at her.

  “I have some reports I’d like you to fill out,” said the doctor, passing a tablet to Kathleen.

  “I’ll get him out of here,” Jack said. His chest felt too tight to breathe. As he left the office, he heard the doctor say, “You wouldn’t believe what some people would pay for this miracle.”

  Jack wasn’t sure he believed in miracles, not after the voice that had come out of Isaac’s small body.

  “You’re still my boy, aren’t you?” he whispered into Isaac’s hair.

  Isaac bonked Jack’s chin with his head. “Daddy, you’re silly.”

  Jack almost cried with relief. Again. Feeling breathless, he carried Isaac over to a single window out of the flow of hospital foot traffic. The terrace it overlooked had real fruit trees, and …

  “Piggies!” Isaac exclaimed at some pigs snuffling around the tree trunks.

  “Pork chops,” Jack corrected.

  Isaac didn’t laugh, or appear to have gotten the joke at all. Which was a relief. “Yeah, you’re my boy,” Jack said. “Glad to have you back.”

  “Birds!” shouted Jack, pointing at some sparrows flying by.

  Jack chuckled, sure this was his son, Captain Distraction.

  A soft whir beside them made Jack look down. An elderly woman, a hundred years old if she was a day, was navigating toward them in a hover chair. She wore a hospital gown and slippers. “Isaac’s better,” she said, parking beside them and peering up.

  “Almost!” said Isaac cheerfully.

  “Do I know you, ma’am?” Jack asked.

  “I wasn’t sure if I could save him.” She cackled softly. “My first attempts at such things were … unfortunate.” Her brow furrowed. “You’re going the wrong way. The Oort Rift, tell the crazy bitch to go there.”

  Jack felt his heart rate pick up. The words … the inflection … it was exactly like he’d heard from Isaac the other night.

  Isaac hopped in his arms. “She said a bad word!”

  “What do you want?” Jack asked, stepping back.

  The old woman looked up at him with wet rheumy eyes, and said, “I’m dying and I want humanity to live.”

  He heard fast footsteps, and looked back toward the hallway. A nurse was running toward the woman. “Who put you here?” she asked the woman in the chair.

  The old woman just looked out the window. Jack’s mind was swimming with the maintenance worker, the drunk, Isaac, and the old woman’s words. And Singh and Dr. Emelia’s, too.

  The nurse hurriedly steered the woman away.

  In his arms, Isaac nodded sagely. “Even the sun dies.”

  Ganymede

  1 YEAR, 6 MONTHS, AND 23 DAYS PRE-INVASION

  “I have something unusual to report, Doctor—”

  “How many times do I have to ask you to call me Emelia?” said Dr. Emelia, smiling and taking a sip of her coffee.

  Jack took a deep breath. He’d almost requested a meeting with Dr. Inez this morning, but then he’d remembered the way she’d probed him about Isaac’s illness, how she’d been afraid, but unwilling to tell him why, and she’d fired Singh.

  There was the chance he was crazy, but the coincidences were too much, and he guessed, if he was honest with himself, he was glad he spoke up about the zephies, even if it had never helped. So he was speaking up again.

  “Have you ever considered going to the Oort Rift?” Jack asked. He looked past her nervously. Janice had just stepped briefly from the room.

  “The Oort Rift …” Dr. Emelia set her cup down slowly. “No.”

  “Oh,” said Jack.

  “Why do you ask?” said Dr. Emelia, tracing the handle of her mug with her eyes.

  Jack cleared his throat. “I keep hearing that I … we … might be going the wrong way, and that I should tell you that we should go to the Oort Rift.”

  A clock chimed in the hall. Jack waited for the familiar tick of Dr. Emelia’s head that was the warning for an episode. Instead, she stayed very still, like she did when she was reciting formulas. “Are you hearing voices, Jack?” she whispered.

  Jack shifted in his seat. She’d figured it out fast. “Something like that,” he admitt
ed, not sure if he was glad she hadn’t just told him he was crazy and called for Janice.

  She let out a breath and looked up at him, lips parted. “It hasn’t driven you crazy like us.”

  “Us?”

  Dr. Emelia looked nervously over her shoulder, and then back at him. “All the people who’ve had their heads invaded by it. It didn’t understand our language, so it came into our heads, and messed us up.” She tapped her temple, and her voice became slightly desperate. “Doesn’t its voice knocking around in there get all mixed up in everything else going on?”

  Jack swallowed. “It’s been using other people to talk to me.” He didn’t add, dead people and sick people.

  “Lucky.” Tapping her fingers on the table, Dr. Emelia looked down at her mug. “I know I should just be grateful. I have a really mild case—she, it, he let me go sooner, I think. And at least I didn’t get set on fire and had my face melted off.”

  Jack almost choked on his coffee. “What? Those rumors are true?”

  Dr. Emelia met his eyes. “She, it, he is sorry. It meant well, but I think the difference in power and scale … Well, the best laid plans of mice and men, and all that.”

  Jack leaned back in his chair, remembering the old woman saying her first attempts had been “unfortunate.”

  Leaning in conspiratorially, Dr. Emelia whispered, “Don’t let Dr. Inez know. She’ll think you’re crazy.” Jack nodded, remembering Singh.

  Janice re-entered the room. Dr. Emelia picked up her mug and said, “I will consider it.” Narrowing her eyes, she sipped her coffee while Janice made small talk and Jack tried to tell himself that he’d done the right thing, when, out of nowhere, Dr. Emelia said, “Janice, I’m cold. Would you get me a sweater?”

  “Of course,” said Janice, and left the room.

  As soon as she was out of earshot, Dr. Emelia whispered, “Tell our friend that I have considered the Oort Rift and I still think an artificially-generated wormhole to the TRAPPIST-1 system is viable and makes more sense.”

  “Who is our friend?” Jack asked. “Some sort of alien … parasite?”

  She snorted. “We’re more the parasites.” Tilting her head, Dr. Emelia looked at him sympathetically. “Oh, Jack, didn’t it tell you?”

  Jack shook his head.

  Putting her frail, age-spotted hand on top of his, Dr. Emelia looked deep into his eyes and said, “Yes, it’s an alien of a sort I would suppose … but it’s our son, Jack.”

  Janice chose that moment to re-enter the room. “I’ll get the meds,” the nurse said, spinning around.

  “Not now, Janice!” said Dr. Emelia, springing from her chair. She pointed a finger at Jack. “You know what to do.”

  “But not how to do it,” Jack said.

  “How have you done it before?” Dr. Emelia asked just before Janice stuck her with a med-stick.

  Ganymede

  1 YEAR, 6 MONTHS, AND 22 DAYS PRE-INVASION

  Kathleen’s holographic image blinked at Jack. She’d returned to work part time, and was was taking a break from her shift. “Didn’t your Aunt Sally beat you with a wooden spoon?”

  “It only happened twice,” Jack said.

  “And then your mother never let you near her again,” said Kathleen. “But you’re going to visit your aunt now because …?”

  “She’s almost a vegetable, close to death, and I feel guilty?” Jack responded.

  “And you’re taking Isaac with you?” Kathleen asked.

  “She’s harmless,” said Jack, and then remembered the person—thing—he was trying to summon wasn’t harmless. It had possibly set people on fire and driven them insane. He looked at Isaac in the backseat of the hover. He was playing with some toy dinosaurs that Jack had bought in exchange for quiet.

  “We’ll talk about this later.” Kathleen shook her head and flickered away.

  “Raarrrr!” said Isaac, siccing the tyrannosaurus on the stegosaurus, and probably simulating the talk Jack was going to face later.

  He took a deep breath, not really sure what he was doing here. He was curious, he told himself. Unnerved too, but he trusted the crazy scientist more than the sane doctor in charge of her.

  He glanced back at his son, remembering the words of the person-thing at the hospital. “I wasn’t sure if I could save him …” But she, it, had. It hadn’t tried to speak to him through Isaac again, either.

  “I want humanity to live,” the old woman had said.

  Jack let out a breath.

  A few minutes later, he and Jack were in Aunt Sally’s room. She was sitting on her bed, staring at a picture on the wall, but she turned, looked at Jack, and then her eyes dropped to Isaac and his dinosaurs.

  “I always hated dinosaurs,” she muttered in a venomous voice.

  Isaac sniffed.

  “Maybe we’ll be going,” Jack said. That was Aunt Sally, and he wasn’t sure he liked her more than the thing. Putting his hand on Isaac’s shoulder, he prepared to steer him to the door.

  “Stupid, stupid things. Dumber than asteroids and asteroids are unbelievably dumb, Jack,” she continued.

  Jack paused.

  “Asteroid killed the dinosaurs!” said Isaac.

  Aunt Sally’s wrinkled visage broke into a smile. “About the only thing they’ve ever did right. Your rats took over after that—well, something like rats, it was a marsupial critter, a thousand times more interesting.”

  “It’s you again?” Jack asked.

  Nodding, Aunt Sally said, “Your son.”

  Jack tilted his head. What had Dr. Emelia said? It didn’t understand language.

  He had lots of questions for it, but fell back on his mission’s purpose instead. “I told Dr. Emelia what you said, and she told me to tell you that a wormhole generator is viable and that TRAPPIST-1 is more suitable.”

  Aunt Sally frowned. “It is not more suitable. The star in that system is a xenophobic asshole.”

  “She said a bad word again!” Isaac cried.

  Aunt Sally blinked. “This body has a predisposition toward that word.”

  “Yeah,” said Jack, rubbing his forehead, remembering the real Aunt Sally.

  Dipping her chin, she continued in clipped tones, “The stars in the cluster at the end of the Oort Rift wormhole want humans to move there. Yes, the planets around those stars are dumb icy balls of rock and nothing like Earth.” She let out a deep breath. “But we’re sitting on a dumb ass ball of ice, Jack, and we’re doing fine.”

  “Ooooooo,” said Isaac, eyes wide. “She said dumb ass.”

  Scowling, Aunt Sally said, “You can make it work if the stars are in alignment.”

  Jack’s brow furrowed. “Make what work?”

  Aunt Sally looked down at Isaac, now sitting on the floor, playing with his toys. “I remember being in his head … this conversation will scare him …”

  Jack’s fingers twitched at his side. Definitely not Aunt Sally in there.

  Her brow wrinkled even more, and she said, “Isaac, the sanitary cubicle in the corner has unlimited water. Why don’t you make a lake in the sink for your dinosaurs?”

  “Really?” He looked between Jack and Aunt Sally.

  “Go on,” said Jack, jerking his thumb in the direction of the cubicle.

  As soon as the water turned on, Aunt Sally, or whoever, turned to him.

  “They’re killing me, Jack, and you and I don’t have time for this. They’re sending ships and I have to get your delightfully parasitic, violent, creative, crazy race out of this solar system before they arrive.”

  Jack’s skin prickled. “Why do you want to help us?”

  “I don’t know why … revenge maybe? To piss off the stars that are killing me.” The last sounded a lot like the real Aunt Sally.

  She sighed. “Also, I do like humans. You’re the most interesting thing to happen to me since …” She blinked. “I have a lot of trouble with your time scales, but I believe humans believe I’m four point five billion years old,” she muttered. “No id
ea if it’s right. I could spend a quarter rotation just studying your mathematics and all your different languages …” She smiled, swallowed, and picked at her bedding, not looking at all like someone or something that would set humans on fire and drive them insane. “But that is not to be.”

  Jack tilted his head, all the information swirling around in a vast cloud of known unknowns.

  She looked back up at him and smiled bitterly. “This body says that expression means that you don’t know what the fuck—”

  … and there was Aunt Sally’s language again.

  “—I’m talking about.” She took a deep breath, and spoke very slowly. “Some of the stars are at war with humans, Jack, but I’m on your side. So are the stars at the end of the Oort Rift. They can hide you long enough for humans to become strong and take on their leader.”

  Jack narrowed his eyes. “I still don’t know who you are.”

  “I’m your son, Jack. How many bloody times do I have to explain that?”

  Jack stared at her, feeling like the gears upstairs were overheating. Her talk of stars killing one another, and planets as living beings, slowly docked with the space station in his brain. “You’re not my son … you mean you’re my sun, like Sol, like at the center of the solar system?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Finally. Even Isaac got that.”

  Jack didn’t so much sit in a chair, as fall into it. He rubbed his temples. “Who else knows about this … and is sane?” Was he sane? He was doubtful.

  She swallowed. “I think a few humans on Earth and Mars know … there are other classified materials that the FCF has. I’m fairly certain they’ve put my dimming together with other intel. I’d hoped they’d come forward to the public sooner … but they haven’t.” Aunt Sally’s voice trembled. “The founders know that something is wrong, and that they need to revive the orbiting habitats. They don’t know everything, though. I tried to reach out to a few directly, but one committed suicide, and the other went mad.”

  For some reason, Jack vividly recalled the zephie screams at that moment.

  “I realized I had to communicate in a more roundabout way,” Aunt Sally continued. “I wish I could speak to the crazy bitch directly—”