Fleeting Glimpse

by David Gowey

  “Why should I trust you?” The Ark Keeper’s voice was placid as ever, but the fact that he asked this question meant that he at least entertained the possibility that Lor could be someone to trust, under the right circumstances. It could be enough.

  “Because I’m the only one here with your best interests in mind.”

  “They won’t kill me.”

  “No,” Lor replied, “but they’ll make you wish they did. Even you would be surprised at just how long they could make that feeling last.”

  “And you want to save me from all this.”

  “Out of the goodness of my heart? Not exactly. But I know what secrets you’re keeping from us and why. You don’t trust us.” Between his training and the small dose of amphetamines dispensed beforehand by his empathetic implant meant to increase his perception, he thought he saw the prisoner almost smile.

  “Would you?”

  “Kind of a silly question, isn’t it? I know myself better than you do, and so the best you’ll ever be able to do is doubt my answer pursuant to your own subjective biases. So yes, for what it’s worth, I do trust myself.” This was the beginning of the empathetic lie, to push these feelings of self-confidence from his own mind to that of the subject, who’d received his own interpreter implant not two hours ago. It always worked better the fresher the operation was, before the subject could catch on to just how thoroughly they were being manipulated; before they could discover that the communication could go two ways after all.

  To prevent this from happening, distraction was key. It wasn’t enough to simply initiate the sharing of emotions through the implant, but to build off a simple foundation with increasingly basic layers of emotional responses that elicited increasingly primal reactions. Begin with something complex like uncertainty in the sureness of the venture, then peel back the facade of hesitation to reveal the superstructure. In this case, produce the supposed source of the hesitation and sell it with all the sincerity Lor could muster.

  The lie was not a creation of his, but one he’d stolen from a former subject. She’d been a tough one, given at least preliminary training in countering auto-projection like this before their session. It was the same reason that the story was as powerful as it was.

  “I had a brother on Pordetta,” Lor said, his eyes settling on the Ark Keeper’s own. “He was a systems analyst for the Alliance Import/Export Bank, but that didn’t matter to the Thevashi fleet that glassed the whole colony from orbit.” In reality, Lor’s brother was probably sitting at home, high off his ass on E-Lux or some other medical-grade opioids as usual, but that didn’t matter. What did matter was that by producing the right emotional landscape upon which to build this small lie, not only could the prisoner believe it, but he could feel it as well, just as strongly as if they’d lived it themselves.

  It was the same mechanism that allowed Lor to believe it. He knew what it was like to lose someone—multiple someones, in fact—and experience had taught him how to bring those feelings together in the service of a single, central image. Once that was done successfully, the truth was as irrelevant as if it had never happened.

  With that much empathetic stress placed on the amygdalae, it became increasingly easier for the subject to make associative correlations to their own experiences. Loss met loss, joy met joy, and fear met fear. A skilled auto-projector could have a subject gleefully charging to their death or screaming at unfelt agonies that burned deeper than the flesh, and all it took was the proper application of leverage.

  But what Lor met now from the other end was nothing. It nagged at him like a missing tooth or a thought he’d had in the last moment of a dream but forgotten to record. Thankfully, he was beyond making simple mistakes like letting this little worry overwhelm him; too much of that and the thought could produce a feedback loop. Instead of meeting their like, emotions fed into each other across the empathetic link, intensifying the depth of feeling on both sides. It wasn’t some myth like perpetual motion, but it was very real and more than one interpreter candidate he’d known from the Corps had fallen into one. Not all of them had managed to come out, either. Lor’s own rule was to promise himself every time that this one wouldn’t be the first.

  “What does that have to do with me?” the Ark Keeper probed.

  “It has everything to do with you. Lifebanks like yours are arguably the most important planets in human space. Not just for their scientific value, but for what they represent: the human will to expand, to write its own destiny on the stars.”

  “To dominate them, more like.” A little pushback, but none that was unexpected. It meant he felt threatened, which told Lor that at least some of his techniques were working. Subjects undergoing auto-projection for the first time often put up a fight like this at the start, but it hardly ever meant they would win.

  “You’re familiar with biology. The only reason your Institute preserves these lifeforms in the banks is because they wouldn’t survive otherwise. You act as caretakers of these species, and I respect that.”

  The Ark Keeper laughed at that, more of a bark than anything.

  “I was expecting Herbert Spencer, actually.” Then he did know his biology, Lor thought. He continued.

  “Not this time. But you understand what he was getting at with the survival of the fittest. Not that the objective best survive, but that the best-suited survive. If the environment changes, then those individuals in a population which can adapt best live to make all the babies they want; those that can’t are left behind.”

  “Do you fear humanity will be left behind?” Lor had to struggle to contain the little shock he felt at that. The man was skipping ahead in the script. He pushed away the urge to react and hoped that none of that momentary worry had managed to transfer to the prisoner.

  “Only if we let it. Or rather, only if you do. It’s the League’s goal to prevent this from happening.”

  “The Human Progressive Expansion League,” the man said, drawing out the syllables like an incantation. “Nice name, but far too optimistic.” It struck him then that the other man might be hinting at some nameless threat beyond humanity’s nightmares. Perhaps if anyone was to know about it, it would be the Lennix Institute. But it was a stronger possibility that he was only bluffing, with the knowledge that he would need serious leverage to get out of this thing unscathed. Scare off his captors enough and he might be able to walk out of here by the door under his own power instead of getting tossed out an airlock under someone else’s.

  Lor decided to play his game a bit. Usually, these attempts from subjects failed to make it past well-trained interpreters, and Lor was certainly that.

  “How so?” he prodded.

  “Humanity has always operated under the assumption that it was the superior species. It was how we grew up, how we took our first steps, and even now, we fight against guerrillas because no one else to our knowledge can beat us outright. An evenly matched opponent doesn’t fight only from the shadows like the Thevashi have done. We crave a better enemy than what the universe has to offer.”

  “And who would this evenly matched opponent be?”

  “The only ones who can truly defeat us: ourselves.”

  Lor burst out laughing despite himself. It was one thing to try and trick him, what with the empathetic implants, but another to have the whole thing turn out to be some pseudo-spiritual nonsense.

  “You think I came all this way just to talk philosophy? Like there aren’t threats out there that can wipe us out in an instant? And all you can give me is some self-justifying Zen bullshit.”

  “I know what you want me for. It’s the same thing anyone has ever wanted the Institute for. You want our specimens to build a weapon.” It was true enough, Lor thought, and not particularly insightful. Anyone cynical enough could’ve jumped to the same conclusion. He could still win this thing if he was careful, and doing so was more for the subject’s sake than his own.

  “It was hard to find you, but we managed to do it, not to mention that we
’re keeping you alive. And if you want to talk about what the Thevashi will do when they find your Ark Worlds, they’ll burn them down to the core before they let you preserve anything that could be used against them.” Lor didn’t know if this was true, but what was important was that he believed it. “Is that what you want? The central work of your entire Institute destroyed by the very life it was trying to protect?”

  In his mind’s eye, Lor was back on Verina. His father had been gone half his life now in a prospecting fleet, and Dalen was already a year or two deep into addiction. Even after nearly eight decades, something about the planet was still off beyond whatever utopian dreams were sold by the terraforming crews of days gone by. The rice crops were starting to not catch anymore, and not just the black market stuff, but the Doris Industries proprietary hybrids too. Anyone with brains and means had already left the colony behind a generation ago, but pioneer spirit was harder to kill than the pioneers themselves.

  Twelve-year-old Lor had his sights set on leaving. What little DI company credit he had left over after buying dinner went into a bank he’d once heard someone call a ‘rainy day fund’. If Verina hadn’t had so many rainy days, then maybe he would’ve understood the idiom better. Either way, even at that age he knew that getting off the dying colony was worth whatever he lost in the currency exchange to do so.

  Then Tuesday came around. He remembered it was Tuesday because he’d just come back from watching his then-favorite weekly holo at a friend’s house when he discovered that all his money was gone. Thinking it was just an error with his home network or maybe just his knock-off tablet, he went to a public terminal and paid for just a minute’s worth of data use to double-check. Sure enough, the entire account had been cleared out. At least two years’ worth of surplus gone in one transaction.

  Lor had thought to call the bank with his last little bit of credit and get it all straightened out, but then remembered that he wasn’t even old enough to open an account. His brother had opened it in his name and gave Lor the password… And that’s when he knew.

  Dalen could only ever be at one of two places anymore, and both were easy enough to find. As it turned out, he was at the first one. Twelve-year-old Lor didn’t know how much a gram of E-Lux cost, but he could only assume by the way his brother was sprawled out on the floor with pinpoint pupils and shallow breathing that his meager child’s savings had been sufficient. The choice to call emergency services instead of just walk home in anger and let Dalen live or die with the consequences of his own decisions was the hardest one he had ever made.

  But all the Ark Keeper had to feel from that was the sense of waste, of mindless lust for destruction that could only view something beautiful with a solipsistic fascination to see what it would look like if it broke.

  It was then that he caught the tiniest fraction of a crack in the prisoner’s facade. Something like fear spilled through as if it were light, unsure if it should be a particle or wave, and Lor began to feel a new confidence.

  “Do you know the Lennix Institute’s motto?”

  “Not off the top of my head, no.”

  “Against the deluge,” he said. “It reminds us that catastrophe is always imminent, no matter what form that catastrophe takes. We protect life from itself. which is the only force within time that can ever truly extinguish it.”

  “And what about time?” Lor asked. “Can even the Ark Worlds hold out forever? All we’re asking for is that you let us help you protect them.” The prisoner laughed again, and there was a predatory anger there.

  “Do you think the lifebanks only protect their specimens?” The atom-wide crack in the subject’s mental block widened, and what lay behind it was blackness, abyssal and hungry. As the simple words sunk deeper into his consciousness, something shapeless but there reared up in the back of his mind as in response. Lor felt to recoil from it physically. It was then he realized that he wasn’t just sensing the Ark Keeper’s thoughts; the man was projecting back at him. The striking sincerity of the other man’s words brought with it the dread that it was all real and if Lor wasn’t careful, even he would believe that he’d seen whatever it was too. He had to act quickly.

  “Pride won’t keep the Thevashi from assuming that you’re holding something back. Something meant to kill the-”

  “You don’t get it. What’s in there is meant to kill all of us.” The words and I’ve seen it hung there just out of reach, but Lor felt them as strongly as if they’d been tattooed to his body.

  The shapeless thing wriggled in darkness, lashing itself upward into his awareness until it took on a familiar enough shape.

  Lor was a boy, even younger than when he’d first learned to hate someone you were supposed to love, when he first came to know fear. One of Verina’s big equatorial storms had whipped itself into the largest anyone had seen in two generations. The holos came in from the coast like the waves themselves, and Lor looked up from his toys just in time to see one of them towering above, a diluvian behemoth. He was no longer in his family’s run-down company apartment, but in the path of an ancient terror and sure to die. That night, and for uncounted nights since, he had slept with the knowledge that it would be coming for him in his little bed. It left him only after years, until this moment.

  The tsunami that welled up inside left him dwarfed against its enormity, bearing down on him to finish the haunting of his dreams. No escape. No escape. All other thoughts left him but the futility of it all, of running from mankind’s one truly primeval doom. When he realized he was shaking he saw the Ark Keeper as across a yawning gulf. His face was wreathed in coiling darkness, which shot tendrils across the chasm between them to drag Lor forever away from the saving light.

  Primal despair gripped him and he couldn’t tell anymore if his screams were real or if they were only in his mind. It crushed the air from his lungs, and the room around him spun, while the Ark Keeper sat perfectly still amidst it all. His eyes fell on the prisoner’s lips, which split in a wide smile. The black that poured out from it rose up before him, swelling and swelling until it threatened to kill what little light remained in his world of water and shadow. His hands clutched around him wildly and found his chair; the only tangible thing left in all the universe.

  Lor rose under the weight of a thousand oceans, took the chair in shaking hands, and raised it above him as if it was the whole world. The tendrils of death from the Ark Keeper’s inky mouth caressed him closer and deeper into their embrace. He brought the metal down on the prisoner’s head with enough force to make the very tempest fall to its knees.

  Again.

  Again.

  Again.

  The darkness and the waves were gone as quickly as they had come, and only when he heard the shouting from the other side of the door did Lor realize that it was the Ark Keeper who had beaten him.