Second Contact

by Guerric Haché, Keezy Young

  “Because despite your remarkable prickliness, you are my friend.”

  Ada felt her throat tighten, and she looked away, trying to hide the red flashing across her face. He was being far too sincere. She preferred the mocking. Then he reached out and put an alien hand on her shoulder, and she croaked. “Gods damn it Zhilik, are you trying to make me cry? I won’t. You can’t make me.”

  He took his hand off, and the hauler continued its slow climb up the forested slopes for a long moment before Ada said anything.

  “Gods, okay, you’re my friend too Zhilik. There, I said it. Are you happy now? Do you want me to braid your fur and put flowers in it?”

  Zhilik smiled his toothy alien grin. “Please do not. Half the flowers on this planet could poison me.”

  She fidgeted on the spot a bit, remaining proud that her eyes were still dry - though it was a hollow sort of pride at this point. Still red in the face, Ada couldn’t wait to get to the mountain ruins and talk about something that involved science and the fate of civilization.

  Although it might not hurt to ask this golem a thing or two about Isavel, if she got the opportunity.

  The hauler finally reached the chilled rocky heights of the great mountain, and as it slowed to a halt Ada looked over at the giant gash that her code had torn into the mountainside. Sure enough, bits of ruin still spilled from the mountain into its open wound like severed bones and arteries; some intact hallways still lead underground into the dark. Ada hopped off the hauler, slowed time for a moment, and flexed code spindles in her hand, carefully surveying the area. She was ready to fight, but hopefully that wouldn’t be necessary.

  Sam and Tanos cautiously stepped out of the cabin to join her and Zhilik, but she shook her head at them. “Stay with the hauler.”

  Tanos raised his hands. “Oh Ada, no, please let me crawl into a creepy blood-stained ruin looking for an evil golem that may have destroyed the ancient world. I’m begging you.”

  Ada snorted and shook her head. She crouched and eased herself down the rocky tear in the mountain, almost riding a cascade of pebbles and rock shards down to the bottom. She straightened herself out, camouflaged her suit to the dull grey of the ruins, and strode into the dark. She held out a hand, palm up, and conjured a bright sigil of light that illuminated everything around her as she walked. It was chilly down here, and eerily quiet. Animals still avoided this place, it seemed.

  She walked deeper and deeper, wondering where Isavel might have sealed a golem into the ruins. Isavel wasn’t the frantic sort - she wouldn’t have stuffed the golem into the nearest closet. She was bold, confident, to the point, and had some understanding of how to influence people. If she wanted to make a statement, she would have put the golem somewhere large and open, and framed it clearly. Ada skipped any room that wasn’t large, and didn’t bother with offshoot corridors yet, heading straight down the main hall until she came across a vast, cavernous room where light only filtered in through a few cracks in the ceiling. This looked promising.

  Moments after she stepped in, a voice spoke out, warbled and electric-sounding but still distinctly female.

  “Who are you, child?”

  Ada smiled. She took a step forward, and another, remembering what Isavel had said. Venshi had lied and manipulated, and hated Ada too. Those were all traits Ada felt comfortable taking advantage of.

  “You might know me as the Dark Angel.” It was never too late to try to get people to give her a title.

  Venshi’s response was flat. “I can’t say I do, but that’s quite a title.”

  “Arbiter of the Gods?”

  The golem was silent as Ada approached. The light from Ada’s sigil slowly crept up onto a wall, illuminating Isavel’s handiwork. It was delightful, and made Ada smile. The golem’s forelimbs had indeed been melted into the walls, and it was missing legs and the lower part of its torso too. It was still partially covered in some kind of strange flesh torn away in chunks, something human-like on the surface but in damage clearly not real. Its face was strange and broken, like a human’s but without blood or bone showing in the gashes in its false flesh.

  She shook her head. “You probably just know me as Ada Liu.”

  At that, Venshi tilted her head slightly to the side. “I see. Then Isavel really has fallen into bed with the enemy.”

  Ada blinked.

  “What? No.” She focused on the impression she wanted to give, on what she believed were Venshi’s misgivings about her. Venshi thought she was reckless, no doubt. Everyone did. “Isavel is still waging her war against me, and that’s a problem. I… managed to learn, from a spy, that you might know things about the ancients. Things about their power, and their history. Things I could use to turn this war around, and build a new world afterwards.”

  Venshi’s electric eyes looked at her, silent for a moment. “Why would I tell you anything? You can give me nothing at all.”

  “Well, I can cut you free, and help you get revenge.”

  The golem paused for another long moment before answering. “Why would you do that, when you seem to already know we are enemies?”

  “The enemy of my enemy.” It was an old saying. “Besides, I need the knowledge you have locked away in your brain. Assuming you really are an ancient.”

  “I am.” Venshi’s response was flat. “I was born thirty-six years before the Fall, I saw the corruption and alienation and abstraction of the world around me, and so I joined a movement to change the world.”

  Ada smirked. “I can sympathize. But you’ve been sitting around for a thousand years doing what, exactly?”

  “Safeguarding our legacy.”

  Ada tried to restrain her impatience. “Which is?”

  “The only ones who truly know of it are your outers, and they call it the technophage.”

  Ada froze for a moment, slowing down time, giving herself the space to think without betraying any emotion on her face. The technophage itself was Venshi’s legacy? Did that mean she had made it? Could she perhaps…. unmake it? The idea was staggering.

  It was also revealing that she didn’t know Ada knew anything about it. Good. She could work with at.

  After a moment Ada let time slip back to normal, and responded cooly. “Huh. W ho was leading this technophage… thing? ”

  “We called it the Human Protection Project. Our goal was simple - prevent civilization from spiraling out of control; reclaim human nature, our planet, everything. Technology continued to suffocate and violate what it meant to be human, more and more over the centuries. We fixed that, as much as we could.”

  “No.” Ada shook her head. “I mean who was controlling you. ”

  Venshi tilted her head. “Nobody. We developed the technophage ourselves.”

  Ada blinked. “Who was the enemy, then?”

  “What enemy?”

  “The enemy from beyond the stars.” Ada had to pretend some ignorance, but this she needed to know. “The one who used this technophage to silence Earth? That’s what the Fall was, right? Aliens attacked Earth?”

  After a moment Venshi laughed, a cruel and jaggedly electric sound that would have had no place coming from a human mouth. “Is that what you believe? That some alien force decided to put an end to humanity’s majesty by building the technophage? You are a fool, Ada. We had a partner lab in the colonies, true, and some of our breakthroughs came from them. But the technophage was developed by humans, for humans. For the good of humanity - a healing salve, not a weapon. It’s only a shame that we were not able to push it as far as we truly wanted.”

  Ada’s eyes widened and the thought, and for a moment she considered smashing Venshi to pieces right then and there. Humans had developed the technophage of their own will? Because they hated their own civilization? The thought filled her with anger, rage at the idea that some band of fools a thousand years ago decided to deny their descendants power over their own destinies by forcibly holding them down.

  She let her emotions run out in time dilation, th
en steeled herself and slipped back into real-time, clenching her fists. “Interesting. How far did you truly want to push the technophage, then?”

  Venshi’s broken face sneered. “Far enough to unmake all the horrors that science inflicted upon the human species. All these so-called gifts - haven’t you noticed how these violent gifts drive your people to war, and even your healing gifts make that violence more palatable? Deeper, more fundamental violence was done to humanity’s own blood, and your connection to the natural world around you. You are barely human, Ada Liu, even though you don’t know it yourself.”

  Ada wanted very, very badly to reach out and tear the golem apart, but she was not done here. She needed more, and she had a role to play. “Huh. So you can tell me how to become more powerful, then? So that I can defeat Isavel?”

  “How would I do that?”

  Anything would do, anything that would seem to Venshi like an opening. “I want to make a new gift, one better than all hers combined. And if you helped make the technophage, well, I imagine you could help me. In exchange for your freedom.”

  She had the golem’s attention. Venshi seemed either dumbstruck or pensive for a long moment, and Ada started to get impatient. She had to let the golem come to her own conclusions, though, if she was going to be able to trick her into giving away her secrets.

  “I will help you.” When she finally spoke, Venshi’s voice grated electric. “I will help you create a new gift, one that will do anything you desire.”

  Ada smiled. She couldn’t know exactly what the golem was thinking, of course, but between Venshi and Isavel, Ada knew exactly who she trusted more. “How does the technophage work?”

  “Free me, and I will tell you.”

  “Come on - I need to know if I even have the facilities to do what you’re promising. Is it complicated?”

  “Somewhat, but the equipment required is not. All you need is code, and you seem to have plenty of that.”

  “Code?” Ada frowned. “How does that help us?”

  “Code can be used to change any of the gifts. We will take the technophage in you and transform it into something powerful, something that will bring an end to your enemies.”

  Ada chuckled. “Oh, wait. You don’t know, do you? I’m immune to the technophage.”

  Venshi suddenly snarled. “What?! That’s impossible.”

  “Well I looked into my own blood, and it wasn’t there. Not like it is in anyone else’s. I guess that’s a problem.”

  Venshi was silent. “In that case, we will have to modify another gift. You have another gift, one your people knows nothing about, called an immunosupplement. It must be quite powerful already, to ward off the technophage. We should start there.”

  The word kicked around in Ada’s mind for a few moments before falling into place, finding and enriching memories of what Cherry had told her about the gifts in her blood. That was it. That was the key. She smiled. “Oh, that’s what that one does? I remember that, but the word meant nothing to me.”

  Venshi tilted her shattered visage. “You knew a great deal of this already, I see. You are deceptive, Ada Liu. Who told you about the technophage?”

  “Well, you, among others.” Ada grinned enthusiastically, and reached up to pat the golem’s face. It even felt like human skin. “From the mouth of someone who worked on the technophage, I know that the immunosupplements in my blood are probably what makes me immune. And I know that I can use code to modify that gift, or any other. Now I have a nice, solid footing on the path towards eliminating the technophage entirely.”

  Venshi jerked against the prison of her limbs, roaring at Ada, cold light building up in the back of her skull as the code there coursed with energy. “You cannot destroy it! It is the only thing protecting humanity from the horrors of the ancient world!”

  Ada smiled broadly. “Also, the fact that someone in the colonies helped you is pretty fascinating. I’ll have to pass that on to the outers before they leave. On a ship. From the colonies. That’s coming to get them, right now.”

  “The colonies? ”

  Venshi stared at Ada in silence for a moment before apparently regaining her composure.

  “I imagine you will be leaving with them - I should hope so, for our sake. But you must not allow any other humans to travel with them.” Venshi sounded stern, and Ada’s smiled vanished. “If humans leave Earth, they could use colonial technology to recreate ancient civilization on Earth, and destroy everything our ancestors tried so hard to accomplish.”

  Something about the sudden claim didn’t sound right, though. Ada took a step closer, close enough that she could see darkly faint lines of code underlying Venshi’s broken skin. The code that made the golem what it was, a human mind without a human body.

  The entire golem ran on code, code that could store a human mind and let it live beyond the body’s death. A smile started growing on her face. “I guess I won’t bring anyone, then.” She met the golem’s grotesquely human eyes. “That would be pointless, wouldn’t it? I mean, with the technophage in them, they wouldn’t be able to do much anyway - I imagine reading is an important skill in the colonies.”

  Ada thought back to all the records and archives she had seen, all the details of how the Fall had happened and how the technophage had spread. She bared her teeth at the golem.

  “At least until some hapless infected human visits them, gives them the technophage, and wipes out the rest of human civilization, like you failed to do a thousand years ago. Is that right, Venshi?”

  “We obliterated human civilization from the colonies already. Our partners saw to that. You won’t find what you’re looking for.”

  “So why try to goad me into bringing infected humans with me?”

  The golem lunged forward so hard that one of its arms cracked. “ You will destroy everything! You are an ignorant fool, a shameful subhuman castoff -”

  Ada slowed down time to a crawl. With Venshi’s face so close to her own, she could see enormous amounts of code, in overlapping layers, embedded in every internal surface of the golem’s metal body. It was all there for the taking. Ada smiled, let time move normally again, and stepped back.

  “- machine, you are nothing more than -”

  Ada held up both hands towards Venshi and grinned. “Venshi, can you feel pain?”

  Venshi paused. “You cannot torture me.”

  “Oh. That’s a bit disappointing.” Ada sighed happily. “But I think that also makes what I’m about to do so much more okay.”

  Ada squeezed time to a slow crawl and lashed out, a million tiny spindles of black interweaving and coursing through the air towards the golem like lightning. They reached out to the limbs first, each one tracing tiny force sigils in the air that cracked and snapped both of Venshi’s shoulders off. Even as the golem’s torso began its slow descent towards the ground, Ada’s dark code swarmed the body, snapping a levitation sigil into place underneath her all while slowly starting to strip away the false flesh and clothes that coated the golem’s body.

  Venshi’s expression was ever fixed, but all of a sudden Ada could hear her voice, bizarrely distorted but growing quicker and quicker until it was intelligible.

  “How are you doing this?!” Venshi demanded. “Humans cannot speed up their minds like this! You are a monster, Ada! Do you have any idea what you are becoming? ”

  Ada couldn’t respond, her own mouth limited by the sluggish pace of the real world, but she dug her tendrils of code into Venshi’s throat and tore out the little machine that gave her voice. The golem fell silent as she continued shredding its exterior, each scrap flung away from the husk, floating through the air slow as leaves across pond water.

  With her code all around the creature now, she started the real work. The spindles dug in, pressing, etching into the air around the code that made the golem work. It was all in the head - of course it would be. She peeled through each layer, replicating it exactly in a floating structure of her own, connecting her replica with the
original, keeping it continuously whole to preserve Venshi’s mind. The reddish orbs that hid behind Venshi’s false fleshy eyes continued to watch her as she stole everything the golem was, tearing the patterns out piece by piece and packaging it in a bundle apart from a body at all. The copied code floated next to Venshi, the technological skeleton of a human consciousness, the most complex arrangement of sigils and code Ada had ever seen.

  The process took what felt like hours, but when Ada was finally done ripping out every piece of the golem’s inner workings, the final shreds of her artificial skin were just settling down on the ground. Ada was tired, exhausted even, but any anger she might have felt had long since given way to meticulous curiosity and studiousness. And then, finally, her dark spindles of code scoured the last of Venshi’s skull and found no new code to be had.

  She let time slide back to its normal speed, and Venshi’s armless torso fell to the ground, the levitation sigil quickly wearing off without any kind of power source. It lay amidst the scattered bits of its disguise, skinned alive. The golem’s head turned, staring at Ada from the flickering red orbs in its metallic skull.

  She looked over and kicked at the voice box.

  “I’m glad we had this talk, Venshi. I can really start working on the technophage, now, and I know not to let any humans get on those ships - hell, this might even be a good reason to stop the outers from going entirely. And best of all -”

  She reached over to the floating tangle of code that was not only a copy of Venshi’s mind, but also everything needed to make a golem of her own.

  “- I now have the means to make golems! Or, you know, other things. More interesting things. More dangerous things.”

  Venshi’s head shook, as though in disapproval. With no arms, no legs, no voice, and no face, there was little left for the golem to do.

  Ada crouched down on the ground, staring into the eyes of one of the architects of the Fall, one of the miserable humans who had tried to end civilization itself, who had created the world of darkness and superstition that Ada had grown up in. She was angry, and she knew she was right to be, but a part of her was also… amused. Triumphant. Today, a thousand years’ worth of lies and deception came toppling down.