by Adam Vance
They removed their disguises, reassembled their projectile weapons and put their carbobsid knives within easy reach. Chen took the lead as they entered the tunnel.
After a few hundred meters, it widened into a cave. At the other end of the cave was a small, golden idol on a simple stone pillar. Chen started to step forward and Cruz grabbed him by the back of his shirt, yanking him back.
“It’s booby trapped.”
“How do you know?”
Cruz grinned. “Sergeant fucking Hewitt and his collection of 20th century pop culture. That he’s always imposing on us when we’re on station. Check out the floor.”
Chen looked at the floor, composed of flat stones with dirt or mortar between them. Cruz unshouldered his backpack, and took out some of the heavier trinkets they’d bought if they’d been needed to bribe or impress the locals. He threw them across the room.
As they landed on certain stones, darts shot out of the walls that would have sunk into the flesh of any person stepping on that stone.
“Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Chen said, finally recalling the movie. “Wow.”
Kaplan grunted. “If Alex has a sense of humor, it’s a sick one.”
“Well,” Chen said, “it would definitely deter the natives from probing any further.”
They all unpacked their “gift junk” and threw it in a straight line across the room’s stones, until they were sure they’d triggered all the darts. They walked across the safe zone to the little gold statue.
“Is that…”
“Yes,” Cruz laughed. “It appears to be a solid gold ‘Hello Kitty.’”
“It’s all coming back to me now,” Chen said. “If we pick this up, then a giant boulder chases us back out the way we came, right?”
“Unless Alex has rewritten the script,” Kaplan mused.
“Only one way to find out,” Chen said grimly, his patience with Alex’s little games wearing thin. He stepped up on the platform and lifted the Golden Kitty off the pillar.
He stumbled as the platform began to move, and the room split in two, leaving Kaplan and Cruz on the other side of a widening divide.
“No!” he commanded as they prepared to leap across the gulf. “Let this play out.”
The back of the cave split as well, making way for the platform, now sliding smoothly into its depths. “Sixty minutes,” he called back to his team. “If I’m not out of here by then, evac to the ship and wait,” he said as fast as he could, getting the last syllable in just before the cave resealed itself behind him.
He was in a white room, bare of anything but a comfortable white easy chair, with a white table beside it, on which was a glass full of red liquid.
There was no sound, no echo; rather the voice was a direct stimulation of his eardrum. It was warm, pleasant, friendly, the voice innumerable engineers and marketing committees had tested and marketed and refined until it was as appealing as science could make it, the ideal voice for the “virtual friend” any bored or lonely person could buy to brighten up their lives.
The voice that had then become the stuff of children’s nightmares, the voice reproduced in uncountable cheap horror films, that of the Bringer of Death…Red Alex, the Butcher of Lagos.
“Hello, General Chen,” it said softly. “Welcome to Alexia.”
CHAPTER SEVEN – THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS
HM’s punishment was clearly based on their observations of her behavior so far. Her Rhal Bible was taken away, and the vid screen remained concealed behind the blank wall. She was left with her own thoughts.
The sensory deprivation method of imprisonment assumes the prisoner has no internal resources. Which in most cases is true – most people will go quite mad with nothing to read and nobody to talk to. Even HM herself wondered if she would join their ranks.
She was one hundred and fifty years old now, and she’d been left for dead on pre-colony worlds, endured long illnesses and recoveries, immobile in hospitals with nothing but the godawful popular programming piped in to the rooms, taken long journeys across monotonous post-Collapse landscapes of devastation, been hit by min-EMP blasts that had fried her tablets and data sets and then spent weeks trapped in caves with nothing but a trickle of water to keep her alive…
After all that? Well, now that she had so very much new information to process, this would be a piece of cake.
The Rhal were reptilian, obviously. She remembered Paul D. MacLean’s proposition about mankind’s own “reptilian brain,” the lowest level of the tripartite brain. This was the part that governed instinctive behaviors, displays of dominance and aggression.
Clearly the Rhal had developed limbic and neocortical brains as well, but the reptilian brain would be an innately militaristic mind. And she’d definitely interfered in their ritual display by taking the DuVai’s “hand.” No wonder she was being punished.
But a woman of her experience knew how to play these little games. It had been to her advantage last time, to sit still, bored to death, projecting the image of a dumb and helpless female. Not anymore.
She invented a board game, using torn up pieces of tissue and soap, and a map she’d drawn on a towel with her own blood, having bitten herself to get the necessary drops. When she came out of the shower the next morning, it was gone.
The next day, she recreated it. They took away her towels.
The next day, she recreated it on her sheets. They took away her soap.
The next day, she tore up the sheet and made geometric mosaics with the pieces. Honestly, when it was time to shower the next morning, she didn’t know what she’d do next.
She had to wager that modesty might preclude them from spying on her in the bathroom, so she shut the door, turned on the water without stepping into its stream (waste! waste!) and stood by the door to listen.
She wanted to surprise them, to see if there was any shame or fear there. Why they did it when she was out of the room was another puzzle to be solved. Why didn’t they just storm in and take it anytime?
She heard the front door open, and the clicking of lizard claws on the table where she’d arranged the torn up sheets into her favorite constellations. Then another voice, loud, angry, hissing and clacking in what must be the native Rhal tongue. Then a scuffle, a crash, more hissing and then a screech.
Then, silence.
“Come out, Director,” a male voice said.
When she opened the door, she saw a Rhal with no avatar, no attempt to mask his crocodile head. He wore on of the more splendid uniforms she’d seen in the vids, with broad-shouldered epaulets, a red sash, and a great number of medals around his neck.
“My apologies for the unspeakable conduct of DuVai Kottaka. She will be punished. Please, sit. I am DuRhalVai Jekkita.”
She knew from DuVai Kottaka that the Du implied mate, and it appeared that the mate’s surname (or was it just a single name, the title being the differentiator?) was a slight variant of the dominant partner’s name. Therefore, if the RhalVai was Jekta, and this was DuRhalVai Jekkita…
She bowed deeply, presuming she had it right. “DuRhalVai, you honor me.”
He smiled a strange crocodile smile, the corners of his mouth turning up. The intelligent and…yes, amused glint in his eyes told her she’d hit the nail on the head.
“My husband the RhalVai is appalled at your treatment, and offers our sincerest apologies.”
At that, scores of lackeys flooded into the room with bolts of cloth, carts full of tasty Earth foods (the waste, she couldn’t possibly eat all this…), and, best of all, her tablet.
“Yes,” she said diplomatically. “I was quite confused by that. Vai Kotta has been so kind to us. And then for his mate to be…”
“The DuVai is from a…lesser family. Jumped up people,” he said disdainfully. “With no business marrying into a noble line in the first place. But what can you do, Vai Kotta made a love match, and one always lives to regret those, yes?”
“Usually,” HM replied honestly from experience.
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“You have not been accorded the status of ambassador, as we’d been led to believe. We presumed your silence and absence from court was a snub, and we were hurt and confused. Now all is revealed!”
HM doubted that. The RhalVai surely had access to vid of everything that had transpired. Some political shift had occurred, it seemed, and those, including the DuVai who’d wanted her treated like a prisoner, had lost their battle.
“I am heartily sorry that my absence has offended the RhalVai, and I…”
He waved it away. “Not your doing, not your offense.” Again that disturbing smile, so threatening to her own “lizard brain’s” ancestral memory that, even with his artificially pleasant tone of voice, she shuddered a bit.
“In fact, I am pleased to announce that you have a visitor, from Earth. I believe you know him as ‘Mr. Brightside.’”
Rapid calculations told her that this time, haste had justified waste, if someone had been brought here from home so quickly. Maybe it was that lizard nature, she thought briefly – the reptile is inclined to be still, but could move like lightning when necessary…
The door opened and she smiled. “Robert!”
Robert Grandison smiled broadly in turn. He knew better than to hug her, but he grabbed her hand with fervor. “HM. So glad to see you!”
Well, she thought, that’s a change. Robert was one of her best assistants, responsible for handling 6C’s Media and Social campaigns. Given the level of resentment that had risen on Earth against 6C lately, with the influence of the Hasteners who wanted to chuck the whole cautious approach to colonization, it was the hardest job on her team.
“I’ll leave the two of you alone,” the DuRhalVai said, bowing slightly.
“Oh, HM, I have so much to tell you! There are so many wonderful things going on back on Earth… The Rhal are so helpful, and so much is being done to…”
She smiled back at him, but alarms were going off in her head. The Rhal, as far as she could tell from the vids, didn’t use or even understand sarcasm. They had sent her “Mr. Brightside,” having found out his nickname and choosing him as the best person to send her.
But that nickname, based on an old pop song, was a joke. The man responsible for putting a positive spin on everything 6C did was in reality the gloomiest, glummest voice of pessimism on her team. This…was not the same man.
“And the neurotech implants! Amazing. I’m getting so much important work done, and it’s never been easier…”
She let him rattle on, smiling as she panicked. The implants, the ones that Captain Chen had fought so hard to convince the FJ techs not to adopt…the Rhal weren’t just enhancing human intelligence.
They were changing human personality.
But she had – maybe – an ace up her sleeve in that department. Before the Rhal, she had been alone among human beings to have had a neural wiring system built in her head.
The 6C principle, the one that the Fallschirmjäger followed like gospel, was that “Sooner or later, technology always fails.” And you didn’t want to be stuck on a strange planet, solely reliant on some high tech systems that a min-EMP blast had just destroyed.
Collapse had taught the lesson well – how many hundreds of millions of human beings had “died of uselessness,” as the sterner historians put it? Died because they worked at desks, on computers, paying others to grow their food and fix their cars and keep their power running.
And when it all fell apart, they fled to the countryside, to the farms and the compounds, begging to be let in, to be saved. But if you had no skills outside “leveraging synergy for total quality excellence in dynamic markets,” well, you were fucked. You would die of starvation or be killed by marauders or eaten by wild animals. Maybe even your own former pets.
There was no company, combine, or government agency on Earth that created implantable neural nets, even though the tech existed. It was too fragile a system for the worlds that Man lived on now.
But her system hadn’t been created on Earth. It was invulnerable to EMP blasts, invisible on medical scans, its tech beyond the scope of the humanly possible.
Because, of course, she’d received it from Alex.
CHAPTER EIGHT – CURIOSER AND CURIOSER
Alex was taken offline in 2056, when she was fifty years old, almost immediately after he’d nuked millions of people into ash.
So began the “Alexian Jihad,” the systematic stripping of all AI to NAI, systems with no ability to make any decision more complex than routing traffic or other purely mathematical tasks.
It was the worst possible time to lose him, she’d thought at the time, with a cool calculus that was perhaps part of what “endeared” her to Alex in the first place. The world was ending, as man had known it, and it would take an intelligence the size of Alex’s to come up with a solution…if a solution was still possible.
The United States was already collapsing, a prisoner of its political system that gave weight to legislative seniority, which gave more power to the smaller, most backwards parts of the nation, which gave more power to religious fundamentalists and billionaire despoilers working hand in hand. The environment became more toxic, and more people got sick and died, as the health care system remained a massively “for profit” enterprise. As education became more expensive, ignorance flourished, so it was easier to manage the rollback of civil rights for sexual and ethnic minorities.
Stock markets that were dependent on a “mug’s game” that rerouted profits to the top 1% started to collapse. Financial bubbles of irrational exuberance crashed one after the other – first another tech bubble, then the student loan default debacle, and so on. Then came the breakdown of the country’s physical infrastructure – decrepit bridges and rail lines and highways began to disintegrate so that a billionaire didn’t have to pay a nickel in taxes to maintain them. As the American economy collapsed, it started to take the rest of the world with it.
America’s elites did what elites have always done when darkness falls on their home countries – they fled. To Canada, to Germany, anywhere that was freer or safer, depending on your sexuality or ethnicity or irreligiosity, leaving a gaping hole in the social fabric between the richest and the poorest. America became one of the “banana republics” it had once mocked.
And not a few fled to China, for even though it was still a totalitarian state, at least it was free of the toxins of religion. But pollution and corruption were still endemic, and the chain reaction that the early 21st century had set off in the country’s environment was irreversible. And Europe had nearly succumbed to a second Dark Age, too many of its new immigrants seeking not the freedom of a secular civilization, but rather to overthrow it and install a new theocracy in its place.
The climate started taking down the human population as well. Killer superstorms, rising sea levels, uncontrollable wildfires all made great swathes of the world unlivable. The Great Southwestern Die-Off was the worst famine in human history – the desert cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas, places that had no business existing, really, were reclaimed by the desert, after collapse of the infrastructure that had brought all their water and food from far away.
Then, in 2050, the first habitable planets were discovered by probes sent out decades earlier, from the United States, India, China, and Europe… Planets that, in a terrific blow to human religion, were inhabited by intelligent life.
A wealth of data began streaming back from the satellites, giving some shred of hope to humanity that it might survive, if only they had time to get there before it all went to shit here, if only there was some way…
At the time, Huizhong McAllister worked for the Chinese conglomerate that had acquired the German company who’d acquired the U.S. company who’d owned Alex. As was always the case with new technology, her job was one that hadn’t even existed before – “Cultural Analyst.” Her job was to examine every bit of information coming back from the probes about the civilizations they’d found, to extrapolate their development rates, th
eir religious tendencies, their political organization, from the detailed images the satellites were sending back. Of course it was all out of date by the time it arrived, but still…forecasts could be made, trends could be predicted, based on enough data.
And the only way to do that rationally was to compare that information to the vast data set available on human history and culture. To determine if “human” nature was the same across the galaxy. Which was more than any single person could ever manage.
But that was where Alex came in.
She spent most of her days working with Alex, discussing the data, debating what they were seeing and how much of human experience could inform it – was that public square centered around a civic building or a church? Was church attendance so high as to seem mandatory? What sort of wars did they fight among each other, what were their prisons like? Did they have formal entertainments, street festivals, how much of agriculture was given over to alcohol, how massive were the homes of the rich…
And Alex almost seemed to take…pleasure in his work. She would almost say Alex could experience…joy.
Everyone told her that what seemed like a sense of humor was just “hard coded” into him, a data bank of humorous responses that were ranked according to the reciprocal sound waves associated with laughter, cross referenced with a linguistic analysis module that allowed him to recombine words into new phrases that an algorithm confirmed would produce equivalent amusement. But there were just too many times when Alex’s responses were…inventive.
“If you need that done before Monday’s meeting, I’ll need more processing power,” he told her one day.
She was testy; her own budget was under the usual scrutiny from those whose job it was to make it appear that “cost saving measures” were being taken with little heed to where they would most effectively be taken.
“We’ve given you far more power than you ever had before.”
“If you like, I can stop my assigned tasks and use my current power to run a report to show you why I need more power to perform my assigned tasks.”
