Extinction Level Event (The Consilience War Book 2)

by Ben Sheffield

There was a clean formica countertop. No gratuitous LEDs and holographs. She scratched the paneling under the countertop and was surprised to discover that it was real wood.

  This was an old building, in a city where even new buildings were senselessly torn down.

  The woman had black hair, and an oval shaped face. Her clothing was indistinct and shape-obscuring – put a balaclava on her head and it would be impossible to identify her at all. She sat at the opposite side of the table, and unclipped a notebook. A pen was poised over the paper.

  “I listened to you.”

  “You’re not supposed to. Isn’t there such thing as client confidentiality, even with a robot?”

  “Sydney’s now a one-party consent city for that type of thing. In any case, you’re very interesting to us.”

  Us? What have I gotten myself into here?

  She cast eyes around the building. Looking for wires, looking for peeping toms. The woman laughed. “Stop it. You’re making me nervous. In any case, these dreams you’ve been having…did you know that I have now spoken to several Solar Arm personnel, all of whom have had similar dreams?”

  “Is that so?”

  “One man recalls standing on the planet’s surface. Another man recalls the glowing spheres containing people. We’ve got second opinions, and third opinions, and then some.”

  Rose shook her head. “You don’t know the full story. I’m having space-out episodes, where I relive what happened there. And I think I’m becoming dangerous. Actually, I know I am. My girlfriend just threw me out of my apartment because I got carried away in a game we were playing. Something’s happening to me.”

  “No, something has happened. Past tense. Now you’re picking up the pieces. Let me get to the point: Black Shift put false memories in your head.”

  Rose realized she had no right to cast doubt on anyone’s sanity after the evening she had, but that brought her up short. “Why would they?”

  “Isn’t that the question?”

  The woman stood up, gesturing a stack of paper on a smaller desk. Her work.

  Rose looked at them and couldn’t read the writing. They seemed to be written in a strange cypher – little arches and squiggles tauntingly danced out of her brain’s reach.

  “Through a contact in the government, our group has discovered that they are maintaining extremely close tabs on Caitanya-9 veterans. They know everything about you. Name, rank, serial number, preferred variety of flower. They’re closely monitoring all these vets. And let’s just say that you don’t see spotlights all over something unless there’s a show.”

  “This is the furthest they’ve ever deployed soldiers,” Rose said. “Maybe they just want to test how well the Black Shift thingummy works at those distances.”

  “Or they could be testing the implantation of false memories.”

  Rose idly touched a piece of paper. She suddenly felt strangely unwilling to accept this. “Maybe the truth is that I’m crazy. That we’re all crazy.”

  The woman took lipstick out of her purse, and started applying it, somehow talking continuously the entire time. Rose was reminded of an old schoolmate who had the annoying ability to breathe and talk at the same time. No reprieve from the onslaught of words.

  “You went to a clinic, hoping for a diagnosis. You got a basic one: you’re crazy. No, of course they won’t treat you. They want you to stay insane forever. It suits them. So long as you’re crazy, everything you see and perceive can be reconciled as a circus funhouse mirror. You can’t bring legal testimony against anyone, especially not them. If you have any other memories emerge – things such as, say, a superbad breach of the Solar Arm Constitution that Black Shift is committing, then that’s just one more scrap of crazy for the trash heap. Yes, you’ve given them everything they want by describing yourself as insane. The only piece of the puzzle left is for them to medicate your behavior away, and how could you refuse? They hold the key back to sanity…well, sanity on their terms.”

  The woman kept on talking, completely unaware that Rose had picked up a pen and had started tracing things on the paper.

  Meaningless shapes at first. But all too soon, they became three words.

  “But here’s what they don’t realise,” the woman said. “You can be insane, even when the thing you’re insane about is a rational thing. A clinically depressed person will be in a state of anhedonia, unable to experience any sensation beyond a chilly grey. But just because they’re clinically depressed doesn’t mean that their mother didn’t just die, or that they didn’t get fired, or that they can’t make a rational case that they should slash their wrists. It is non-exclusive. You can be depressed and have something to be depressed about at the same time.”

  As the voice droned on, Rose’s hand moved faster and faster, like a ship approaching escape velocity. Words screeched and clamoured from the page now.

  THE EXPERIMENT ENDS THE ENDS EXPERIMENT THE EXPERIMENT ENDS EXPERIMENT ENDS THE END THE END

  “During the second World War, a mental hospital was bombed during the London blitz. Inside were many schizophrenics, and other people prone to imagining things. As the doodlebugs turned buildings to rubble all around them, do you know what the hospital said? That it was a psychotic episode. That was a clever way of keeping them calm, and calm was a good thing in that situation, I suppose. But in what sense were they really crazy there? Ultimately, in that case, they weren’t. The things they were seeing were reality, the map perfectly fit the territory. But they wouldn’t have been controllable if they’d known that.”

  ENDSPIRIMENTENDSPIRIMENTENDSPIRIMENT

  “Sanity’s a meaningless word. Who’s sanity? Sometimes the world is crazy, and if you insist on shutting your eyes for fear of seeing correctly, then it’s...”

  Rose’s pen had reached the end of the paper. As soon as it touched the wooden desk, it was like a circuit had been broken, and she was back in the present.

  “So what are you doing about it?” Rose said.

  The woman leaned in. “You’ll notice that I haven’t told you my name. And you can probably guess that if anyone asks if we’ve met each other, I’ll deny we ever did. Get the picture?”

  Rose nodded.

  “We want to take the craziness in your head and use it against the Solar Arm. That’s it in a nutshell. They’re fucking with things they have no business fucking with, and it will cost them. I’ll see to it. Will you see to it?”

  Rose found herself nodding furiously, half aware of what she was agreeing to.

  The woman laid out plans, and strategies. Nitrogen bombs to cut off the power grid. Sabotage to snarl up the Solar Arm’s communication lines. Conspiracies to infiltrate, to destroy, to eviscerate the Solar Arm so quickly and so rapidly that its secrets would spill out to the world, shocking Terrus into a populist uprising.

  Rose felt emotions warring for her heart. The lure of danger. The ambrosia of secret knowledge. And the fact that here was someone who believed, who didn’t think of her as a menace or a problem.

  “Can you keep a secret, Rose?”

  “Oh, definitely.”

  “Suppose you’re in a room with bars over the walls. You’re disoriented, segregated. Weeks since you saw your friends. Secret stays in your mouth, right?”

  Rose made a zipping gesture across her lips.

  "You just got an electrified billyclub upside the head, and they've told you there's plenty more where that came from. What do you do?"

  "Obfuscate. Lead them in circles. Tell them wrong things and let them waste as much time as possible.” She said.

  “Yeah, see, you’ve got training that’s kicking in. What specialized combat skills do you have?”

  “Boot camp on Mars. Ninth in a class of forty. My rifle ranking was an A minus, meaning I can be expected to hit a 20-centimeter stationary target 80% of the time from 200 meters away. I can drive a tank and ATV. I’m handy with electronics.”

  “You’re perfect.”

  Rose felt elation. The second personal
ity was finally being acknowledged.

  She found herself saying yes to everything the strange woman said, yes to arson, yes to terrorism, yes to things that shocked even her.

  “Very well,” the woman said. “I can see you’re very enthusiastic to get started. Just stay seated. I’ll be back.”

  She left the room, shutting the door behind her, leaving Rose alone.

  She’d come in to ask for a place to spend the night, but excitement had banished most of her exhaustion. The well-ordered city did not allow for insanity, and confusion, and to finally find a place where those traits were celebrated was like finding the perfect lock for a key.

  She imagined taking the blue Danube glass and slicing letters into Yves’ back. She had no doubt that soon there would be better knives, better backs, and far more time in which to write.

  Footsteps outside the door, and then it crashed open.

  A man entered the room, wearing a Solar Arm Constabulary uniform. He had the massive blue cylinder of a sonic cannon in his arms.

  “Hands out! Down on the floor!”

  Before she had a chance to comply, the sonic cannon was fired.

  She was flung to the ground, spinning across the room on a riptide of noise. Her head rang, and she hardly felt a thing as it crashed into the wall. She tried to get up, and fell. Tried to remain conscious, and almost failed at that, too.

  She stared upwards, her vision a blur. The guy was directly over her, and his mouth was moving. Who knew, perhaps there were even sounds coming out of his mouth.

  Finally, the ringing in her ears quietened.

  “…at which point you will receive a lawyer. Be aware that the you have not yet been convicted of a crime. Have you understood your rights as I have read them to you?”

  “You idiot, you fired a sonic cannon at her,” the woman had re-entered the room at some point. She shook her head in disapproval. “Now maybe you can read her the rights.”

  The man glared at her. “We need to move quickly. Get her on the next thorium shuttle to Selene. Our employer needs to ask some questions.”

  Selene? “Our employer”? “W…what’s going on?” She choked, horrified by the liquid slurry coming out of her mouth.

  “You’re under arrest,” the man said. “The charge is treason. And given that I’ve heard you announce your plans to commit a range of terrorist acts, we can make that charge as sticky as you want.”

  He hauled Rose upright, on feet that felt like rubber. She felt stupid. Conned. For a second she wanted to ask if she could change into better clothes, but the impulse mercifully passed.

  As she was escorted from the room, she reflected on how obvious a setup this all was. Terrorist cells didn’t fish for recruits openly on public streets. The papers on the desk weren’t written in code. It was just random nonsense, to make it look like work was done here.

  “Sorry, Rose,” the woman said, shaking her head. “Turns out that in the real world, who’s sane and who’s crazy doesn’t matter. All that matters are who has the gun and who doesn’t.”

  Prisons Beneath the Atrium – Selene – August 2nd 2142 0600 hours

  She asked to make a call, and her request was denied. She was booked at the nearest police station, hustled by tube to the nearest spaceport, hustled into the nearest shuttle, and which then hustled her to the moon.

  She could hardly believe it. She was strapped in on a short-range Adagio transport, and subjected to liftoff. She was so tired that she actually managed a few hours of sleep as the floorboards roared and vibrated with Mach-30 speeds.

  Mercifully, her brain was still scrambled by the sonic cannon. That and nothing else kept her from panic.

  The charge was treason. A crime defined and enforced by the state. But the man had clearly mentioned an employer – private sector terminology. A slip of the tongue, perhaps.

  It wasn’t her first time on Selene, but it was her first time in lithostatic handcuffs. As she landed on the partly terraformed world and was taken to the Atrium, she saw it all through a whole new set of eyes. It was a defensive stronghold without parallel, capable of keeping people out and keeping other people in.

  She stood before the Atrium, the seat of power for the Solar Arm. And wondered just what the hell was going on.

  Why am I here? Why not a detention center on Terrus?

  White moonstone was carved with laser precision into everything ophidian, reptilian, and entomological. Snakes with granitic scales slithered up marble columns, their hissing tongues frozen immortally in stone. Tardigrades reared like stone bears, a thousand times life size – the microbial organisms could survive perpetually in a vacuum, and were a popular symbol among the dwellers of this airless world.

  She was escorted up the stairs of the main building, the man very gentle now that she had nowhere to run. Then she descended down a narrow series of catacomb. Her anxiety increased with each level they descended.

  Finally, in chilly cold room lit by blue lights, she was made to sit at a bench. It took a little while to realise she was in a cell. The combined latrine and sonic exfoliator helped it sink in. So did the bars.

  “Can I say something?” she asked the guard.

  He grunted a single vowel. Not even a word.

  “I’m being detained illegally. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Grunt.

  “I have committed no crimes. And nobody’s letting me speak to any of my friends.”

  Another grunt.

  “I’m not a terrorist. Ask anyone who knows me. Ask Yves Gullveig, my partner.”

  On second thought, maybe don’t ask Yves. Jesus.

  The man didn’t even grunt. His silence suggested that she’d used up his quota of meaningless vocal sounds and would have to wait until tomorrow, when he would grunt anew.

  “Listen, I actually thought it was a performance art thing,” Rose lied, desperately. “Someone pressed a piece of paper into my hand, told me to meet me here, and did you know that performance troupes sometimes use the industrial area? Yeah, it’s true. I just assumed it was all some role playing thing, and that I had a role to play.”

  Sudden laughter echoed from down the hall. “Ha, ha, ha!”

  It was anti-laughter, made without the slightest impartation of humor.

  When the man entered, Rose had an immediate visceral reaction. He was so thin, so bony, so devoid of any type of color. He wore a neatly pressed uniform that looked like a sail on his scrawny body. His skin had the exact same texture as the pockmarked lunar regolith.

  I don’t know if this is what a torturer looks. But at least it’s a non-torturer’s idea of what a torturer looks like.

  “You’re a funny girl, Rose Rohilian.”

  He knows my full name. I didn’t tell him my full name. Shit. He’s a creep with access to a database.

  “Do you really believe that you being here has anything to do with you being a traitor?” The guy turned to the guard. “Please leave. You’re ruining the wonderful party vibes.”

  The guard left, shooting a glance of pure dislike that the man didn’t see.

  “So why am I here?” Rose asked.

  “Because of your memories. Memories we need to possess. There are only a couple of living people in the entire Solar Arm that know what happened on Caitanya-9, and I’ve got one of them sitting here in this very cell. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  He shot out a bony hand in a handshake, which Rose didn’t accept. He put it away, his smile now a sneer.

  “My name is Gatag Wilseth. And I will be asking you some questions.”

  Then he lifted a briefcase from his side, and laid it flat on the table.

  Click. Click.

  The briefcase unlatched, revealing things Rose couldn’t bear to look at. Shiny things.

  “I want a lawyer,” her voice had grown a thin fungus layer of fear. A shiver. A twitch.

  “I can’t imagine what you’d want one of those for.”

  She looked around the cell. It was primi
tive. No high tech particle suspension beams here. She saw a narrow slit in the walls to her left and right, with each one leading to an identical cell. No doubt each of those led to an identical cell, and on and on, cells all the way to the end of the universe.

  Each slit was covered with soundproof glass.

  She felt like a product in a factory. A very busy factory. And nobody knows or cares when a single product falls to the floor, misplaced or destroyed.

  “This is a matter of high security,” Wilseth said. “Without spoiling the game, we wish to know some additional…color elements about Caitanya-9 that weren’t in the official report. And these memories popping into your head are exactly what we’re looking for. A little spice in the salad.”

  Who spices a salad? The absurdity and horror of the situation was making her head spin. “I don’t know anything. I swear. Most of my memories are just being on board the ship, like everyone says I was. Occasionally I get memories of…other things, but they’re just flashes.” She laughed suddenly, a harsh bray. “What are you thinking? That I found Aladdin’s cave down there?”

  “Well, I have all the time in the world to motivate you to discover new memories,” Wilseth said. “I will arrange for your room-mate Ms Gullveig to be contacted. Is there a message you wish passed through to her?”

  Knowing they’ll doctor anything I’ll say… ”Sorry.”

  “Sorry’s good. Absolves many sins. I have to leave now, Rose, but I can’t wait to talk to you more.”

  Wilseth turned around, and the cell door closed. Electric currents sizzled to life, locking the door.

  She sat down, wishing she’d never had anything to do with Black Shift.

  The Atrium – Selene – August 2nd 2142 - 0800 hours

  Sarkoth Amnon received a call from Gatag Wilseth.

  “Good news. One of your little fishing expeditions paid off. We’ve captured a Caitanya vet whose memories are resurfacing.”

  “Thank you. Where is she?”

  “The detention center on the 17th floor. Cell 23E.”

  “What’s our pretext for holding her?”