by Brian Trent
Jonas and the Folk (as they called themselves) happily dwelt in the belowground network of tunnels which dated back ten thousand years. From Stone Age tribes to the radioactive survivors of the Final War, a great many people had taken turns living in its netherworld. And while everyone in Derinkuyu would be deemed pale by topsider standards (even arkies had sun parlors to darken their skin) it was true that Jonas was paler than that, a deathly alabaster like the skin of some sickly deep-sea critter slowly dying, sinking into the polluted abyss, never to be seen or remembered.
Jonas turned away from the mirror. His robot, forever attuned to him, unfolded into his wheelchair, rolling him forward to the kitchen.
Bahara turned from the stove, offering a smile and kiss on the cheek. “Hello, sunshine.”
He glanced at her outfit. “You’re going topside?”
“I’m going to market. But for now, I have a special breakfast.”
Jonas’s voice came from both the muffling mask and the kitchen speakers: “In what way?”
She fetched the frying pan and showed him its contents.
The little boy smiled.
It was impossible to see his smile behind the breathing apparatus. Nonetheless, his eyes crinkled merrily.
“Okonomiyaki!” they said together, and laughed.
Bahara no longer cursed the gods that her son had been born only to die young. The disease that destroyed his lungs, turning the tissue pulpy and useless, was a lingering predator from another age. The weaponized residuals of yesteryear sometimes got into Derinkuyu’s drafty corridors, and while filters caught most of them, some remained wily, designed to evade detection software. Bahara used to wonder who had designed it, and what they had expected the outcome would be. The nanoweapon had set like the iridium of ancient asteroid impacts into the clay of Derinkuyu; with the patience of centuries, it ate through the volcanic ejecta of the Folk’s tunnels and then emerged, the goddamned year Jonas was born, into the air.
Adults were immune. This microscopic predator had been designed to kill children. Thirty babies in the local nursery became infected. Twenty-five of those were already dead. None was expected to survive past the earliest onset of puberty.
On his eighth birthday, Jonas had come up to Bahara and said, through a slightly smaller breathing mask, “Mother? We both know my life is a short tenure. I know this saddens you, but might we simply accept this fact? Pining over it every day cheapens the life that I do have.”
She cried then, clutching him as tightly as she dared, and agreed…moved and frightened by his bizarre intelligence. Derinkuyu’s library was extensive; while other mothers scurried to buy toys from the subterranean workshops of Plaza Square, Bahara made constant trips to Bibliotheca’s book cove. Her little boy seemed to absorb books by osmosis. So brilliant. So terrifying….
He loved okonomiyaki, though. His passion for the savory Japanese pancake transformed him into a normal child for a time; she first made it for his sixth birthday, responding to his request that his meal be “something exotic, Mother.” A web search, a few trips to the market, and some trial and error.
Jonas parked his wheelchair beside the table. “Why is today special, Mother?”
“It’s your half birthday today. Didn’t you know?”
“I didn’t realize.”
“People should celebrate half birthdays, don’t you think?”
Detaching his mask, Jonas nodded thoughtfully. His lips were like gray raisins. “I think it is a good idea. Perhaps it will be like Zeno’s paradox for us.”
She laughed, not following him. But they ate their breakfast together until she had to go. She didn’t worry much about Jonas alone; his robot was a simple AI, but it would alert her to any problem it saw, and would also contact Derinkuyu’s on-call emergency staff. They were good people, and very fond of Jonas.
She watched him eat, dipping the bites of pancake into a rich ginger sauce. “I shouldn’t be too long at the market.”
“I wish I could go with you.”
Bahara reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “You go many places more interesting than me.”
Jonas shrugged. “The places I go aren’t real.”
“But they make you happy?”
“They do.”
“Then they are real to you.” Bahara sipped her coffee. Her boy’s online gaming habits took up the majority of his day, when he wasn’t reading. Cappadocia wasn’t formally part of Earth Republic, yet neither was it a Wasteland, and it maintained a connection to the global web. Sometimes she watched him, his hands ensconced in haptic gloves and head encased in a VR rig. It bothered her, a little. Jonas had always been linked to machines; the umbilical cord was barely snipped when he was already hooked up to respirators and his medbot (eventually christened Maximilian, a name Jonas plucked from an antebellum flatfilm featuring an imposing automaton of the same name).
At least he got to see and interact with people across the world. Unfolding digital dramas, rising kingdoms and shifting politics. Did it matter that it was fake? Did anything matter, if her little boy could experience some kind of life beyond these subterranean corridors?
The Exile.
That was the name he had chosen for himself, and his online avatar was forever garbed in a spindly, insectile mask and bodysuit, like a steampunk interpretation of a medieval plague doctor.
Bahara waited patiently for him to finish his breakfast. Then she spirited the dirty dishes into the sink, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and headed topside through the gray, clayish corridors. The Turkish underdark was lit by bioluminescent lanterns. It was a thirty-minute ascent to the heavily guarded border station, where the sun was bright, the air crisp, and the air smelled of corn, tomato vines, squash, and fertilizer.
Bahara circled the labyrinth of fruits and vegetables to find an infonode. She touched its screen.
“What’s Zeno’s Paradox?” she asked.
“Named after the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea, during the First Calendar, circa 490 BCE,” the voice explained, “Zeno’s Paradox states that to get anywhere at all, you must cross half the distance to get there.”
“Okay…”
“But to get to the halfway point, you must cross half of that distance, and so on.” Onscreen, an image appeared of a woman walking on an ever-dividing sidewalk. “Therefore, according to Zeno’s conjecture, it is impossible to truly get anywhere…though clearly we do.”
Bahara turned away from the infonode. The doctors all agreed on when Jonas would die. But if this Zeno fellow was right about space, couldn’t he be right about time? Did the fateful day ever have to come?
* * *
Jonas fitted the VR rig over his face and head, and linked to the web. His newsfeed populated with a mix of top headlines and tailored preferences.
His rig, a handsome homegrown model, included wetports. But Jonas’s fragility would never tolerate a sensorium. He did everything manually, fingers flying like hummingbirds across the keyboard. The world materialized in bite-sized portions.
The shuttle explosion on Luna was still global news. Actor Salvor Bear was dead, sans DC, and the outrage over that was fanatical; arkies were posting vitriolic diatribes against anyone and everyone. The Hollywood guild should have required Bear to get a neural backup, they insisted. How would his films be finished now? Would the guild allow a digital replacement in this case? And who was responsible for the incident? Someone had to pay for this travesty!
Jonas scrolled along the ribbon of other news, from worlds bright and deep. Consruction updates on the TNO project. Martian political unrest. Violence in the Belt. Vast new ice deposits discovered beneath the crust of Mercury and how the interplanetary market was responding to the news.
Buried at the bottom of the feed were the latest probe images beamed back from Ra System, and its most promising world: Osiris.
Jon
as straightened in his chair, and ‘stepped’ onto the planet in virtual.
No further probes would be launched from Earth; IPC policy had come down like an iron portcullis on the practice. The probes that had already been launched were the last of their kind, then. Each a lonely traveler, fired into space during the Old Calendar era and tasked with investigating the local backyard of the cosmos. Older records of nearby systems had perished in the War. Hell, even the names of those stars and their worlds had vanished. It was now up to a dying handful of probes to provide the only glimpses of the universe that would be permitted.
But what glimpses!
The nearby Ra System alone contained four worlds deemed appropriate for colonization, and at least one of those – Osiris – contained indigenous life. The probecam’s build unfolded around him.
Jonas was suddenly standing on a black shoreline hugging a blue sea. The sun was large and sapphire-bright in the sky. He turned and saw a bristling wall of peculiar trees…if ‘tree’ was the proper word. The vegetation looked knotted, gnarled, and unpleasant. Scientists were calling them fungal forests.
Jonas hit audio, and the press release played around him:
OSIRIS’S LIFE KEEPS GETTING STRANGER
Floating sea-flowers that open only at night. Armored burrowing creatures that carve out ‘dry caves’ in the ocean bed. Crystalline flowers that grow in the shadow of active volcanoes. Only in sci-fi has anyone seen imaginative wonders like these…until DARWIN-14 took up residence in Osiris’s gravity-well and began its investigation into a world unlike any other…observing safely and without fear of contaminating the local ecosystem.
Jonas let the press release finish, and then he ‘walked’ to the ocean, gazing out at the odd plants that arose from the water itself. Osiris had a single ocean – wrapping like a blue serpent around the world’s equator.
Would future colonists ever build villages on both sides of these shores?
He noted, too, the release’s shrewd inclusion of the word ‘contamination’. That was certainly a valid consideration. Maybe the most reasonable way of exploring the universe was this way, from afar and through reconstructed environments where no Terran disease could gain a foothold on alien beachheads.
But that altruistic consideration was not the reason behind the ban.
Jonas nodded grimly, squinting in the blue sunlight.
It was terror.
Pure, raw, terror.
Jonas had sat in virtual recreations of the day the law was passed in the IPC Congress, when Senator Bror Amerigo delivered the speech that influenced the decision.
“Mankind must move out to the stars? Why? Spare the comparisons to Earthly history and how Neolithic man migrated from shore to shore! Our ascent on this world is owed to bloodlust. We fitted flint to sticks and threw spears into beasts; we plucked out their tendons for bowstrings; we tore off their skins and tailored them for our bodies; we reshaped the land and tamed the planet.
“We won on this world. Through bloodlust.
“On alien worlds, others will have won. Through bloodlust.
“Shall we expose ourselves to these others? For what purpose? That they might be benevolent? Ah! Well, they might not! Who among us has the right to gamble the fate of our entire species on some sad dream of galactic brotherhood?
“But they can help us, you say! Sure! If that is their nature to help! If their own religion and politics is kin to help! If they have somehow learned to control the predatory instincts which surely propelled them to the top of their worlds! If they see us as more than an amoeba or virus or rat! If, if, if!
“And while you juggle your Ifs like a whimsical child, consider what we know. We don’t need any help. War, hunger, imperialism, disease, death…we have solved these problems on our own. What possible benefit could come from inviting others into the house that we managed to put back together?
“Oh, you say! They might be friendly, they might be playful, they might give us backstage passes to their concerts!
“I say they will be different, they will have risen to success through violence, they will possess their own values and beliefs. Should we gamble that such values include humanism? Humanism? Why should we go poking into alien caves and wake sleeping beasts? What if they follow the footprints of probes back here?
“Our age has recognized that blind impulsiveness has been the enemy, and that just because we can do something, we should ask what benefit will come of doing it. I say we leave the far shores alone, and I urge the rest of you to consider the wisdom in this necessary act of self-preservation for our entire species.”
Jonas sighed, coughed in his mask, shrugged his tiny shoulders. Were the politicians right? Did they know more than they were letting on? Was it the universe that was truly hostile, or the terrestrial species that contemplated it?
For the hundredth time, he contemplated drafting a letter to the Republic. They’d never read it, of course. Even if he sent it to every news agency throughout Sol, the ramblings of an Outland child would be relegated to slush piles, consigned to digital fires. They had no reason to listen to his input…or to his own discoveries.
He didn’t know if there were hostile species throughout the universe. Perhaps all that had evolved on other worlds were the alien analogs to flora and fauna, bacteria and prions. Perhaps there were no threats out there.
But there was a threat right here, on Earth.
How could he convince anyone that he had discovered a real, nonhuman intelligence lurking right in the digital backyard of cyberspace?
Chapter Eighteen
Athenian Landing
Gethin gripped the armrest until his fingernails turned white as the transport dropped from the clouds and banked, beginning its descent to Athens. He strained against his seat belt and touched the cool window where his reflection appeared, the manifestation of a dead man returning from Hades to visit his favorite Earthly haunts. The dazzling lights of the Apollonian Ring came into view like a glittering scimitar on the black horizon.
Celeste’s jaw dropped at the luminous view. “What the hell is that?”
“The Apollonian Ring,” Gethin said, and seeing her expression, added, “It circles the entire Mediterranean Sea. Greece, western Turkey, Persia, Egypt, New Carthage, Spain, southern France, and Rome are each provinces in its oval concourse.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“Yes.”
They landed on a high airstrip and disembarked into a colonnaded shuttleport. Rain assailed the high glasstic ceiling, drawing oddly comforting patterns. Gethin breathed fragrant air into his nostrils, thinking of the last time he had been here.
Ten years ago. He had ordered a small lunch and three glasses of wine from the bar before hopping the space elevator for Mars.
“Luxury suites?” Jack asked doubtfully, when the hotel reservations arrived simultaneously to all their nanonics. “We’re staying in the Poseidon Luxury Suites?”
Gethin shrugged. “Why not? IPC dime.”
They followed the shuttleport concourse to the arcology by way of an enclosed skyway, and from there into a hilly, grassy landscape. Flowering trellises brought splashes of pink, purple, and red to the manicured wilderness.
A scantily clad Cassandra intercepted them, making straight for Jack. Before he could react, she had grabbed both of his hands.
“Hold fast,” she purred. She was a lovely figure, and her tunica left little to the imagination. Her hair writhed like an upturned nest of vipers. “You’ve nothing to fear from me.”
Jack frowned, staring down at her. “You try interfacing with me and your circuits will fry. Fair warning, sister.”
The Cassandra laughed musically. “I have no intention of hacking you. Here.” And she kissed him on the cheek.
When she pulled away, the others could see that her purple lipstick had left a faintly shimmering
imprint on his cheek.
“I’ve just marked you,” she said happily. “The Lupercalia Festival tomorrow. Find me…or I’ll find you.”
She melted into the crowd. Jack tried rubbing the lipstick off.
“Forget it,” Keiko said scornfully. “It’ll come off in a few hours.”
“Welcome to Athens,” Gethin added.
Once the shining citadel of western civilization in the age of Pericles, Athens was center stage again. The cornerstone of the Republic, life in all its painful glory: a kaleidoscope of orgy and learning, sex and study, consummate hedonism and intellectual pursuits.
Celeste rotated in place, taking the view in. “I have a question.”
“Your arcology pass works here,” Keiko said.
The Wastelander looked at her. “That wasn’t my question. Why would the leader of a Stillness cell speak Latin to me?”
Gethin had been considering that. “Old Calendar religions spoke it. The Stillness ideology attempts to imitate ancient sermons.”
“Is that what your arky dossiers say?” she countered. “Because I’ve actually interacted with Stillness, and those folks aren’t exactly polyglots. They also shun all types of implanted tech, so they wouldn’t have nanonic translators, either.”
Jack shrugged. “Maybe it’s as simple as baffling and dazzling their listeners. Word of the divine, that sort of thing.”
“Even if that’s true,” Celeste protested, “why would he say it to me? He spat it in a fit of absolute rage. Why?”
Keiko exhaled sharply, anxious to get moving. “He was a fanatic. Who knows what he was thinking?”
They pressed deeper into the main arcology, falling into pairs by gender. A series of lifts lay ahead, granting quick, vertical access to the arcology’s floors.
Jack plucked a fig from a roadside tree and chewed it. To Gethin, he said, “So about Apophis. I followed your advice.”
“Did you?”
“A United States Army secretary leaves a voicemail to her commanding officer only seconds before the base is destroyed by a nuclear blast. The voicemail is just three words: ‘It was Apophis.’ She dies, along with a million other people, so the comment goes unexplained. Analysts figure she is being metaphorical, sort of like Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad-Gita.”
