by Stephen Moss
Amadeu nodded emphatically to Dr. Hauptman, who could not help but laugh at his untethered enthusiasm. Shaking her head slightly, and causing the twenty or so wires springing from it to sway a little, she shrugged and brought the tip of her big, brass horn to her lips, an instrument born out of a childhood whim of a much younger Birgit, and now spurring something wholly unexpected in a strange young Portuguese boy’s imagination.
Her first few notes were a little skewed, her dry lips not forming the close bond they needed with the mouth of the instrument.
“Sorry,” she said, licking them quickly. Her next note was clear and true, her left hand tracing tiny patterns on the brass levers at the center of the instrument’s twirl of brass, and sending her notes swimming up and down the scale as she tripped through a basic piece. As she played, Amadeu pointed to the screen and John watched as the notes flared in the left side of her brain.
“Faster, Birgit, have fun with it,” said Amadeu, and John and the other two computer programmers’ eyebrows rose in surprise at the familiarity. But Birgit didn’t flinch. Straying from the simple piece she had started out with, she broke into something more elastic, moving from classical into jazz, and starting to improvise, her stream breaking into lyrical twists and turns.
The screen danced with the signals flowing from her mind, the left side vibrant as usual, but now supported and outshone by the right side as it flowed at a speed and coordination that the left side could not match. The left side just spent too much time processing its signals into interpretable language that could be shared, but the right side glided down valleys of thought and surged up intuitive avenues that the left side simply couldn’t follow.
John sat down by the computer and surreptitiously pressed his finger to the computer’s USB port under the desk, connecting himself to the machine and allowing the signal to flow into him. Powerful and pure. There was a crispness and speed that matched or even exceeded even the best of the neural links back on Mobilius, while the previous links Amadeu had worked on had been a sad approximation of the taps his generation had grown up with back home.
Certainly it would mean learning to communicate with the machine the same way that you learned to play an instrument, but maybe they could find a way around that with time. Either way, Amadeu had found the Rosetta stone. He had found a way to tap into the human mind’s creative well, and it was going to make an astronomical difference in the efficiency of the link. The splitting of the human mind down the middle was one of those foibles of evolution that had no practical application, but because it had no downsides great enough to have prompted natural selection to weed it out, it had remained.
But the Mobiliei had no such division, their brains’ many lobes were each globularly attached and acted as one, each module of the mind had evolved with a distinct purpose, and it served that purpose, be it motion, language, mathematics, lyricism, or short-and long-term memory. But the grouping in the human mind was what led to humanity’s strange separation of intuitiveness and logic. Up to now it had been a hindrance, but now they might have found a way to turn that to their advantage.
The discussion moved to next steps. To methods of interpreting this powerful signal and turning it to their ends. To ways of ‘learning’ to adapt both the mind and the machine to best take advantage of this potent discovery.
Amadeu was as quick as ever, and Birgit and John enjoyed working with him. His colleagues were clearly disgruntled at being subjugated, but the auspicious reputations of both Dr. Hauptman and Mr. Hunt kept them focused on the task at hand, and over the next hour the diverse team explored a set of methods that may take them to the next level.
Eventually Birgit and John left the young programmers to their devices. The two of them had a multitude of other less exciting, but no less important topics to discuss. But as they walked off down the corridor, Amadeu came running after them.
“Do you have time for one more question, Mr. Hunt?” Amadeu asked, and John nodded, Birgit smiling and excusing herself to return to her own laboratory at last.
“How can I help you, Amadeu?” asked John.
“Actually, I just wanted to confirm a theory I have,” said Amadeu with a penetrating stare.
They waited a moment while Amadeu scrutinized the man he knew as John Hunt, and then the young Portuguese neurologist suddenly said, with quiet curiosity, “Are you one of them?”
At Amadeu’s junior level, he had not been made privy to John’s true identity. They did not need everyone knowing that an alien assassin was wondering in their midst, no matter how benign his intentions.
John looked at him, curious as to how to respond.
Amadeu did so for him, “Over the last hour, I referred to the alien … I mean Mobiliei technology, as yours twice, Mr. Hunt, and I noticed that neither you nor Dr. Hauptman corrected me.”
John smiled. The boy was smart, but surely that was a tenuous starting point from which to leap to the conclusion that Amadeu had come to. But that was the whole point, wasn’t it. That single piece of the puzzle was just the boy’s logical brain confirming something that his extraordinarily capable intuitive brain had surmised from a thousand seemingly innocent hints and clues. Intuition. It was what separated humans from Mobiliei. It was why humans seemed so obsessed with seeming irrelevancies. It was why they took so much more pleasure from art and literature and music than his own culture did.
Of course, it was also why they were so obsessed with superstition, their pervasive organized religions being the greatest incarnation of that particular foible. But as ignorance diminished, so would the sway of such beliefs, as it had in his own culture.
But that did not address how John should handle the boy’s question.
He stared at the boy, and Amadeu’s expectant expression seemed to deflate as he started to worry about what his mouth had spurted without his mind’s approval. Sensing the boy’s apprehension, John smiled.
“Amadeu, I think you had better come with me,” said John, starting toward Birgit’s lab. It was still early and, unlike Amadeu’s rudely awoken cohorts, the rest of Birgit’s team had yet to arrive.
“Birgit?” said John as he walked into her space. “It appears we have a new recruit to our inner circle, as it were. Young Amadeu has had a busy morning, and it appears he has figured out something else from our already productive conversation.”
Birgit looked passed John to the student standing in her doorway and was reminded of his frail frame standing in just that spot only a few hours beforehand. She frowned at him a little, and then waved him in, asking him to close the door behind him. And, in a hidden and highly secret man-made cave, a long forgotten military facility from the Second World War, deep under the Yatsugatake Mountains of Japan, a German scientist and an alien agent told a young, Portuguese neurolinguist into their circle.
Chapter 18: City Counciling
On a dark night in the small city of Johnstown, a group gathered in anger. Shouts ran rampant through city hall as the mayor tried to wrestle words with the crowd. But they would not be calmed. Federal, state, and even local taxes were going up again, and they weren’t going to stand for it.
“Mayor Karmen, this is too much, surely you can see that?” said a woman’s voice from the crowd.
On some level, Paul Karmen recognized the woman’s voice, but he was too harried to place it. They were angry, and it seemed like he did not have a friend amongst them. These were his people, heck, many of them were related to him. But this was out of control.
“Now, of course I see that this is a lot to ask. The last few months have been tough on us all, and I know it seems like the world’s going to hell in a handbasket, but people, I don’t know what you want me to do about it. There’s wars going on, and we have a responsibility as Americans to do our part.”
The room did not like that, but the voices quelled to a dull rumble until another familiar voice spoke up. This one Paul did recognize, and Al Schneyer raised his powerful voice as he spoke. The man was i
n his fifties, the veteran of many a town hall meeting, his large frame delivering an appropriately powerful opinion that always seemed to be at odds with Paul’s, but which was always couched in the nicest of terms. Al was a farmer turned businessman, who had seen a great deal of expansion over the last ten years as he had turned his family farm into a corn-growing concern. But as the Schneyers had enveloped their neighbors’ farmland, they had also taken on airs. Tonight Schneyer wore his somewhat trademark suit that was a little small for him, but apparently expensive, and he was clearly freshly shaven, one of the few there who was, including the mayor.
“Now, now, folks, the mayor’s right. We’re Americans and we have a duty to pay our fair share,” said Al in a deep bass.
And here we go, thought Paul, “Of course we should support our troops during a war, and where the government is involved in supporting the folks in Palestine and finding these damn terrorists that’ve been tearing up things back home, we have a duty to back them up.” The room nodded and commented their assent to this, but he wasn’t done. Oh crap, thought Paul. “Of course, if they were actually out looking for these damn terrorists that’d be another story. But have they found them? No, they haven’t. Three months of attacks and murders—sickening murders, devil’s work—and not one culprit caught, not one arrest in all this time.”
The room rallied behind him. Paul went to speak, but as he opened his mouth, Al boomed out again, smiting Paul’s response before it had started, “And what about that war spending? Where are our dollars going? To the Middle East, to help the folks dyin’ a thousand deaths from the plague ripping apart those poor countries? No, their goin’ to shit is where they’re goin’!”
The room broke into angry talk at this last point, and Paul called out for order. “Please, ladies and gentlemen. Please.” But his voice was lost in the confused shouts and rants filling the room. His eyes met Al’s, who looked back at him with the immovability of the self-righteous, and Paul wanted to punch him right in his smug little face. Lowering his head awhile, Paul wondered why he had taken this job at all.
“Everyone, please!” shouted Paul in a rare moment of exasperation, his outburst knocking the wind out of the room. “No one is more frustrated than I by the horrific attacks across our country.” Paul felt the pang of his own loss in the last few months, and his voice wavered a moment.
The room was momentarily silent. “I just fail to see what all this shouting is going to do about it. We sent a letter to Congressman Hartley, we know other towns, cities, and concerned citizens have done it too. God knows we already didn’t vote for the man sitting in the Oval Office, and I’m pretty sure none of us will next time either.” A murmur broke through at that comment, and Paul worried he was going down the wrong track. Finishing with marked conviction, he said, “But while he’s in office, he is still our president, and what he says goes … that’s it, folks. We can send another letter to Congress, but bar that, this town isn’t about to start acting like a bunch of liberal whiners.”
The room fell silent again, and it seemed for a moment that Paul had assuaged further dissent. He dared not look at Al Schneyer. He didn’t want to encourage him further. But he heard the man clear his throat, saw with the corner of his eye that the burly man was glancing around for support, and Paul’s shoulders sagged.
But as Al went to speak further, to hit home his point about refusing to pay this last property tax increase as so many had proposed earlier that day, the room started to twitch. A part of their brains was telling them something was wrong. A smell. Smoke.
They saw the smoke before they saw the flames. The vents in the ceiling started belching it even as the first licks of orange started to appear outside the windows of the big hall. A single shout catalyzed the room’s impending panic, and the mob reacted. Moving as a mass to the double doors at the back of the room, they already felt the heat starting to emanate from the walls. But something was blocking the main doors. They rattled and banged on them, anger and fear rising in intensity, but the doors would not budge. Turning at first in drabs, and then as a whole, the mob started to move to the smaller side exit at the front of the hall, to the left of the now-deserted dais.
Having come down from the stage, the mayor was one of the first to get to the other exit. It too, seemed to be blocked, but it could be opened enough to allow one person at a time to break free. Stepping to one side, Paul tried to urge the women out first, herding people and trying to stop the mad crush to the door. It was hard. People at the back were desperately pushing forward, and the volume of shouting and screaming was drowning all reasonable calls for calm.
The shouting was cut through by the crack of a gun. Then another. Crack, Crack. Through the windows they could see that the flames were not as bad on this side of the building as the other. But they could also see the first of the people that were running free of the fire.
Crack, another fell, her head blown open as she sprinted from the burning building. She joined the several bodies that had already fallen. But the people close to the door could not see through the window to what was happening to their friends and loved ones outside, and they kept pouring out through it.
Crack, crack, crack. They fell with brutal efficiency, one after another. No one was getting more than a few meters from the door. As the group near the window started to back away in horror, the pressure at the front relieved until a woman trying to escape had barely gotten a step before she saw the bodies in front of her. She stepped back instinctively toward the doorway and as the shot hit her, she was blown back into the man behind her, her blood splashing over him as he caught her and stumbled back into the hall.
The sight sent the remaining thirty people in the hall into a mad frenzy. Paul stared in horror at the man clutching the woman … her face gone … her head punctured and run through. Another man made a mad dash for the door and Paul reached out for him but he was too late. The shooter allowed the man to get a few steps then dropped the sprinting man as he leaped over another body. Spinning him in midair as his head was stopped dead by the bullet. The man fell like a rag doll to the paving stones outside the hall and lay there limp, unmoving.
Paul stared at the man’s body from the doorway in astonishment. Behind him the room had gone mad. People were shattering windows on the far side of the hall, but the fire was fully fledged there, clearly deliberately set to herd people out onto the killing field that was this lone exit. The broken windows only let the flames leap inward, and Paul felt the heat behind him increase.
Suddenly a chair came flying through the window to Paul’s right, soaring through the air in a cloud of shattered glass to land on the pavement amongst the bodies. A man followed behind it and the crack of the gun came clear again. Paul saw the muzzle flash down the street. Staring at it, a part of him said run. But where to? The rest of the people in the hall began to climb out the shattered window, driven to primal insanity by the flames on the other side of the building. Paul watched as the muzzle flashed once, twice, crack, crack, dropping them as they climbed out, a gruesome pile of bodies draped over the window’s sill and over each other. As he stared at the flashes in the darkness, Paul saw its source start to move. Slowly. Deliberately, it started to come closer.
Inexorably the flashes stepped toward the hall, their vicious crack sounding amongst the din of the fire and screams. Regular. The thump of a heartbeat that was silencing the hearts and shouts of the crazed people climbing out of the only window not ablaze. And as it approached, Paul saw a figure resolve behind the flash. Black as the darkness it was stepping out of. Blacker even than the night sky above them.
Without thought, Paul stepped forward, out of the doorway, peering into the night to see what thing could be doing this. What shadow was wielding that gun. But as he stepped forward, none of the shots were for him. They flew past him into the last of the terrified people weeping as they tried to clamber over their dead husbands and wives.
As he stepped slowly from the building, Paul saw the b
lack figure step into the dim light of a streetlamp. Her lithe figure walked with grace, an assault rifle braced at her shoulder, firing with calm ease. With a start, Paul realized that the figure was not even looking at the building as she slayed the last of the town’s people.
She was staring at him. He froze in the focus of her black stare, suddenly aware that he was shaking. She lowered her rifle at last. No more screams came from the hall. Only the sound of the fire devouring it. Without warning, his fear boiled up in him, and suddenly he was running, sprinting away from her. He didn’t see where he was going, his legs grabbed at the asphalt with abandon as he felt the full weight of his impending death clawing at him for the first time. The fist that suddenly grabbed his calf was like iron. Cold and hard, it clamped on to him and stopped him dead, his leg dislocating as he was hauled bodily backward and up, his face barely missing the tarmac was wrenched upside down.
He cried in pain as his weight swung from his dislocated leg. It took him a moment to realize he was upside down. Hanging from his ankle. He drew his attention from the pain in his hip, like drawing iron from a magnet, and focused his eyes. He saw her feet first. Planted firmly in front of his face as she stood holding him by his ankle like nothing more than a sack of potatoes. He felt her stoop, and with her free hand, grab him by the neck. She pulled his face to hers and held him there, grasped by one bruised ankle and his neck. He felt like a doll. Like paper in her hands. He realized that his hundred-eighty-pound frame was nothing to her, that he was but a joke, and he saw mockery in her black eyes.
When she eventually spoke, it was with incongruous gentility, her soft, almost sultry voice at horrific odds with the way she had handily slaughtered half the town. “Paul Karmen. Hello. My name is Princess Lamati. I want you to remember my name. It is very important that you remember it, and tell it to the people who are going to come and ‘rescue’ you. I am Princess Lamati of the Hamprect Empire, and I am here to eradicate you. All of you. But that can wait. First I have a message for an old friend of yours. In fact, I believe you somehow managed to get her to go to the prom with you, a long, long time ago.”
