Humans Wanted

by Vivian Caethe (ed. )

  “I had my parents. And my friends.”

  “No mates. It hurt to leave you. You know that?” Zierr reached out again, let him taste the remnants of that panic. The knowledge that she was leaving him with no one. “But you weren’t trying to find anyone else. I can’t be your savior. I can’t be your world. It’s too damn much to heap on one person. What did you tell me on our anniversary?”

  “I want you to be my everything,” they both said in unison. Him with hope, her with anger.

  “Never,” she continued, reaching for her com. “I will never be anyone’s everything. Everything is too much. You can’t expect that from me.”

  “I should have lied to you?”

  “You should have someone else to rely on if I die. Died. You know what, I’m not having this conversation again. I’m sorry I’m not comfortable with your weird social movement. Let’s call it a night.” Zierr pulled out her com-pad, checked her portion of the bill, and approved a payment transfer.

  “Of course.” Munith reached for his com as well. “Sorry. I know it’s not for everyone. I won’t bring it up again. Do you wanna split a ride back?”

  Zierr hesitated. She didn’t remotely want that, but it could head off awkwardness over the coming months to bury their differences.

  “All right.” She stood, mentally reaching for any other subject. “Hey, did you hear they’ve chosen our human? We might meet it as soon as next month.”

  “Him,” Munith corrected, following her lead. “They dislike ‘it.’ Enough so that they prefer using the term ‘they’ as a singular if you don’t know their gender.”

  “Huh, that’s bizarre.”

  “That’s not even the half of it …”

  It wasn’t until a full year after the burial that Zierr summoned up the courage to open her mother’s journal. She started at the end.

  It’s a single, endless scream. It doesn’t ever stop.

  Haven’t slept in days. The more I try to forget, the harder it gets. Should have retired years ago. Moved on. Or just not thought about it.

  NEVER THINK ABOUT IT

  Now it’s just me and God. All those little pieces. One tiny shard from each pilot. Who knew? How could I have known? Why would there be any pattern?

  Can’t stop. See the pattern everywhere. They knew. Every word meant stay away. Stay away. Don’t see. Don’t think.

  Oh God. All those little shards. I collected them. Stuck them all in my brain. Then jumble and shake and stab, stab, stab. Look there! Is that a picture? Is that a pattern? Look harder …

  Don’t look. Never look. All the pieces come together in a mosaic. It’s not madness. Not rambling. It’s a warning. Who are you?

  I can’t ever tell anyone. I am infected. If anyone else knows, they will be too. It grows in your mind. How to tell if someone can take this curse? Been waiting too long. If I tell anyone, they might tell another. Someone less equipped to handle it. It’ll spread and spread and spread until there is nothing left. No, not an option.

  We are all dust. We return. It is not our place to challenge.

  No one else knows. That’s the only saving grace. I can’t end that. Can’t end it all. This stays inside me, and me alone.

  Have to stop thinking about this. There must be a way.

  That final entry had been dated nearly eight months before The Day. The day Zierr had come home from school to find her mother in a cold bath tub. The bright pink water looked like what rose tears would look like, if roses had eyes for crying. At first she had thought it was some sort of fancy perfume. But no perfume would smell like that.

  She didn’t bother reading any other entries.

  Two days after the human’s christening ceremony, the day before the new transport’s maiden voyage, Zierr wandered the quiet ship. She stopped in the observatory, taking in the great glass dome above. Beyond it, only the roof of the massive construction hanger.

  “Ever seen a warp rift?” asked a squeaky voice. Zierr turned to regard the human, ambling up to her on his two unlikely legs.

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, one of the lucky few.” The warp was a purely psychic phenomenon, and so couldn’t be recorded or amplified by physical instruments. The only way to “see” warp space was to get close to a warp rift in person. “They say no one ever forgets their first time. I was twelve years old when I saw mine. We were on humanity’s very first colony ship. Pioneers. Runs in the family.”

  “I was young, too. My mother worked in interstellar transportation. She thought it was important I see what made galactic civilization possible.”

  Warp space couldn’t be properly conveyed by any means. One had to see it for oneself. That didn’t stop artists and directors from trying, of course. Visual portrayals showed slowly swirling blues and whites, underlit with flashes of many-hued lightnings. Musical accompaniment began gentle and wondrous, swelling slowly to stirring peaks, and was always subtly hypnotic. Tastes invariably consisted of awe and peace.

  In Zierr’s opinion, all such attempts were failures. Nothing compared to being near a rift. To see a rift was to gaze upon the face of God.

  The human looked up through the observation dome, his eyes distant, as if he could see past the hanger roof, past the atmosphere and the days of travel in space. As if warp space was just above him, and he could reach out and touch it if he chose. “When I saw it,” he said, “I knew at once that if I ever cried again, I would be crying for the perfection of the warp. It was so beautiful it hurt. There was nothing else in all creation.”

  Zierr looked up at the hanger roof. There was nothing there but steel beams and iron sheeting.

  “My mother lost her last mate not long before our trip to see it,” Zierr volunteered. Munith said humans liked this sort of thing. “She’d been shedding them for a while. Now, I think it was on purpose, but at the time all I knew was that my world was being stripped away one person at a time. I was too young for mates of my own, so it was just her and me, crammed in this tiny shuttle with a dozen strangers. Religious fanatics, most of them. All of us were alone, especially when we were all together. It was awful.

  “Then on the fifth day we reach the warp rift, and it just sort of blooms across your entire being, you know?” The human nodded—an agreement. “And suddenly, it didn’t matter. I knew I wasn’t alone. I would never be alone again. I would exist forever in wonder and serenity.”

  They stood in silence. Zierr studied the beams above them. The thick bolts which held them together, one physical object pushed through another, kept separate by inviolate electron shells. The concept of touch was meaningless on the subatomic scale. It was silly to still think of the pieces as “particles” at all, it was all repelling or attracting energy fields. Yet when she touched Munith with her antenna, or when she rubbed against Cherrhy, that meant something real. That existed.

  “I know that I’m still in that moment,” Zierr said. “I will be there eternally; in a single moment that encompasses all time. And yet I’m here, too. I’m not sure which me is the luckier one.”

  The human placed a hand on Zierr’s flank. She didn’t pull away. It was their way.

  “Me too. If you ever meet me there, say hello. My name is Jonathan.”

  She smiled at him. “Zierr.”

  It was eight days and four hours into their maiden voyage when the alarms erupted.

  Zierr had been floating in the pilot’s cabin, recording video for Cherrhy and Rocco back home. Cherrhy’s due date was only two weeks away. The drive this sparked in Zierr to document everything for their child was so typical as to be cliché, but she had come to accept and embrace her stereotypicallity. There was no shame in being a first-time parent.

  “You’ve been doing this for how long?” she asked Jonathan. The human sat sideways in his pilot’s seat, one arm draped over its back leisurely. The man rubbed his furry chin—called a beard, he’d told her—and furrowed his brow, his eyes searching the far corners of the room. He had a flare for the theatrical, and always
really hammed it up for the camera.

  “All my working life. So … just over eight years now.”

  “And that’s how many trips?”

  “I average ten per year. Probably eighty-ish total at this point, but I can ask the computer.”

  Zierr nodded her amazement. The best a non-human pilot had ever achieved was nine. Even the most-screened and trained started cracking at three or four. Jonathan didn’t show a single sign of dementia.

  “How do you humans do that? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  Jonathan chuckled. “Well, we don’t like to give away trade secrets, but there was an observation made by a historic human author that many people find relevant. He said, ‘The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.’” Jonathan winked at her. Zierr didn’t know what that gesture meant and was about to ask him when the scream of alarms split the cabin air.

  Jonathan spun to his controls.

  “Oh no …” he breathed. His hands flew across the control panel.

  “Jonathan?”

  He didn’t need to reply. As soon as the word left her mouth, the computer came on all coms. “Warp space surge,” it announced. “All hands to emergency safe rooms. All hands don protective gear. This is not a drill.”

  Zierr grabbed the pilot’s seat, twisting herself about and launching herself into the corridor.

  “Warp space surge incoming. Envelopment imminent.”

  Zierr could feel the warmth of acceptance washing over her. The serenity rose in her throat like gorge, warring with her blind panic. She ricocheted off a wall, then over a hatch. The camera in her hand crunched against the threshold when she flung herself through; she forgot she’d been holding it. It was a soothing sensation.

  “… protective gear. This is not a drill.” At the end of the corridor, just past a jutting bulkhead, Zierr saw the rest of the design team scrambling to secure psychic shielding over their heads. Thick-walled helmets without visors or holes for ears or antenna. She dove for them, all six limbs propelling her frantically. “Envelopment immin—”

  She smashed into the blast door as it slammed down before her. A great wail wrenched itself from her throat, terror and relief at once. She quivered for a second, saw the world swimming before her, before pushing off back the way she came. There was still hope. She might still say hello to Jonathan. He would like that.

  ?

  Her mind was fragmenting.

  He cursed when she broke into the cabin.

  “What the hell? What happened?” She couldn’t answer, but he wasn’t really talking to her. He slapped controls with one hand as he unbuckled his harness with the other. She could see it. She could see everything in the cabin. She knew what he was thinking. She knew what he was going to do in every detail and how she would react, and she saw he would save her in time, but it was already too late, because she was seeing all this. And being all this. They were touching the warp.

  Jonathan grabbed, wrestling against her twitching body with his little human limbs. They fused were he touched, for the briefest instant, for all time. He pulled psychic shielding from his protective suit, pulled emergency dampening drapes stashed against one wall. Wrapped them over her head. Hush-hush. Hush-hush. Where is that tranquilizer? This won’t hurt at all.

  She fell into omniscience as she faded to nothing.

  In the brief instant of enlightenment the universe opened itself to her.

  Imagine living on a two-dimensional plane; a single sheet of paper that extends in all directions infinitely. You have infinite space. Then someone creates a third dimension, and you realize there is another sheet of paper “above” yours. Another infinite plane that extends in all directions. And another “below” you. Three infinities! And infinitely many of them, forever, in both these new directions. Your single sheet of paper was nothing. This is infinitely more. An infinity of infinities.

  Zierr saw the fourth dimension open this way, saw the entire universe was but one small slice in a greater space. Had she been capable of breathing, she would have lost the ability out of sheer awe. Then she realized this super-universe was but a single slit among the five true dimensions of space. All of which expanded one final time into the six Real Dimensions.

  The six Real Dimensions were populated by beings she could only “see” in the most abstract sense of the word. They were beyond understanding, beyond imagining. They consisted of force and will, of desire and knowledge. Everything they thought or did, every manifestation and action, radiated vast waves of psychic force.

  These psychic waves went unnoticed by the beings, but they interacted with each other. They formed peaks and troughs, standing waves and evolving interference patterns. The sheer uncounted trillions of them that propagated every second through all six dimensions of space created a tapestry of interference of greater complexity than all the order and chaos in Zierr’s simple universe summed across all its billions of years. They took shapes, grew into arrangements that oscillated, or replicated, or spun off repeating gliding patterns that traveled for years before breaking apart on shoals of psychic chaos.

  Zierr saw her universe in one such evolving interference pattern. Everything that existed, everything she’d ever said, or done, or felt, was a tremor in this field. A fluctuation in the Six Dimensions wrote out her entire past. Her entire future as well. The universe existed as a single wave in that pattern, stable for moments before it would be wiped away. Every moment of every being in her universe across all time was a momentary phenomenon arising from interfering psychic waves.

  Her universe’s tiny three-dimensional sliver was only one point among the endless combinations. Adjacent to her along three other axes were infinite versions of herself, instantiating every permutation of her life. Every permutation of every person’s life across every possible universe. Most of the universes were vast expanses of lifeless space. If she thought the sight of every combination of possible lives of all beings was terrifying, it was nothing compared to the innumerable wastelands of universes that lay entirely empty.

  In the fraction of a second between when she fully entered and comprehended warp space, and when the tranquilizers stripped this infinitesimal mind of consciousness, Zierr knew what it was to be nothing.

  She came to at Jonathan’s knees. He cradled her head as best he could, stroking her muzzle. She realized she was in one of the realities where he’d secured her limbs in soft restraints. For a long while she couldn’t speak—but instead she spoke immediately.

  “Why have you restrained me?” she asked, knowing he would answer “So you don’t hurt yourself.”

  “So you don’t hurt yourself,” he answered.

  “But why? Why bother? Because you already know you will? Because you don’t want to fight?” Oh, so this was the inquisitive reality. This would be tedious.

  “Because you deserve a chance,” he said. “You have two wonderful mates and a baby on the way. You have a whole life ahead of you.”

  “Everyone has a whole life ahead of them, and behind them. And infinite other lives. None of them are real.” She craned her head to look up at him. She placed an antenna against him, but he only tasted of salt. All humans only ever tasted of some variety of salt. “You aren’t real. I’m not real. How many years, how many decades, how many centuries, are you willing to play out this farce?”

  “It’s not that big a deal. I have a family, I have friends who love me.”

  “But it’s not real. You saw it. I saw you see it. You did see it, didn’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then how? How do you stand it? How do you go on, knowing that nothing matters?”

  Jonathan shrugged. “I just don’t think about that.”

  Zierr’s mind reeled. He just didn’t think about it? How was that possible?

  They have the most shattered minds of any species …

  They shouldn’t be able to function, but here they are …

  …
the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

  What an unlikely gift. In a mad world, only the insane could thrive.

  “That’s not possible,” Zierr said. “Not for me. Let me free.”

  “Hush, it’ll be okay. You can make a full recovery. Don’t worry, Zierr. We’ll help you. The recovery team will be here soon.”

  The recovery team. More ripples in six dimensional space. When they saw, they’d understand. They’d let her leave this absurd existence.

  Some remnant of her conscience screamed how wrong that would be. Oh … Zierr remembered her mother’s final entry now. She couldn’t tell them. Couldn’t tell any non-human. Any sane being who believed her, who thought about it too much … they would end up like her.

  She carried a memetic genophage within her. From today on she must guard her every thought and every word. None of this could ever get out. Could she hold it for the rest of her life?

  Probably. Almost assuredly.

  In the face of her species’ extinction, almost assuredly wasn’t good enough.

  Or was it? If she slipped, what difference would it ultimately make? What did it matter if a few interference patterns disrupted a little early? If the fluctuation in the Six Dimensions that were Cherrhy and Rocco collapsed? Nothing meant anything anyway.

  … and that was how it began. She had to act now. Had to stop this while she could still remember what it meant to care about stupid, futile ripples.

  She understood now the popped airlocks. The shards thrust into veins. The transports turned into charnel houses, walls scrawled with stick-figure art painted in blood. They were the acts of heroes, determined to stop a genocide. As soon as she could, she would join them.

  She felt the ship shudder as a rescue shuttle clamped onto an airlock. Her eyes rolled up in her head and took in the smiling, gentle face of Jonathan. The human. Those blessed, insane wretches. They could function in warp space. As long as they kept their mouths shut, one day, they just might save this universe. This one and every other.