The Immortal Game (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  “That’s why you chose it, I get that. But what about these stations?” he says, pointing to the orbs floating a hundred kilometers off. “Wouldn’t that make this planet more detectable?”

  “These stations were built elsewhere, and brought in as a response to intelligence reports we received suggesting the Cerebs might have discovered this place. We brought in the defense stations half constructed, hoping to complete their development here. But the Cerebs were pushing too far, too fast, and we decided to abandon this place entirely before any such major effort could get underway. Their engines were working then, and probably still work, probably even the energy shields if they weren’t used too much. But the weapons were never installed. They’re just floating, empty husks.”

  A chime goes off. The Sidewinder’s fabricators have finished transforming another barrel of deuterium into pycnodeuterium. Rook taps a few keys, gives the ship his authorization codes to begin the necessary steps to safely mix the new pycno with what was left inside the fuel tanks. It forces him to look at the fuel levels again, so depressingly low. “Are there any dangerous security measures we ought to be aware of before we make our approach?”

  “I told you, the defense stations aren’t working,” Bishop says, perhaps a little tersely.

  “I know that, but what about down on the planet itself? Any sort of robot security forces, energy fields, ground-to-air defense turrets?”

  “None.”

  “Are you positive?”

  “I was one of the last of my people to leave Kali,” he says, adopting Rook’s nickname for the planet. “There were no dangerous security systems I ever helped to implement, merely a few security doors made of dense yet flexible materials, much like your compristeel. The only thing we need worry about is getting trapped in certain areas where the doors might seal around us, or in collapsed tunnels—we left this planet over a thousand years ago. But, we have plasma cutters, so if we get trapped we ought to be able to get out of most situations.”

  Rook nods, and looks back at the 3D representation of Kali’s surface. She is a terrestrial planet, consisting of minerals containing lots of oxygen and silicon, metals, and other typical components of rock. A great deal of it is covered in tholeiitic basalt, a magma series of igneous rock. There has clearly been extensive volcanism here for tens of thousands of years; the sulfur in the atmosphere attests to continuous volcanic eruptions.

  As close to a survivable hell as one can get.

  One very interesting feature of Kali is the extensive plain throughout most of what Rook has declared, for the purposes of ease, the “eastern” hemisphere, which are unusually flat and broken by only the occasional dunes made of dark-brown and gray soil. This is in contrast to the “western” hemisphere, which is pocked by craters miles wide. The fact that one side of the planet has been left so clean and pristine, while the other side has seen such wicked scaring, points to a sudden pummeling by asteroids that probably happened all within one week some hundred thousand years ago. This, according to the ship’s AI estimates.

  The eastern hemisphere has only 106 active volcanoes, whereas the western hemisphere has more than three thousand. Bishop said that the theory was the asteroid bombardment thousands of years ago had been so intense that it caused great turmoil and wracked both the atmosphere and the surface. There is a line of these volcanoes extending across an entire continent about the size of Australia, which Rook has labeled Pangea. These volcanoes must erupt quite often, because the greatest concentration of storm clouds is in that region, indicating that they influence the weather greatly. In fact, one of his drones caught images of purple lightning lancing out from the top of the largest volcano and shooting into the clouds. Rook calls this volcano Thor’s Anvil.

  During the eighty hours he and Bishop have been orbiting this world and scanning it for signs of life or traps, Rook has followed some of the storm systems, making sure that the ship’s AI dedicated an entire program to keeping up with it. Once, all Sidewinders had to know all about the weather of a world, so as to advise their pilots on how to fly through the atmospheres. Rook is glad to find this weather-mapping system is still operational, and that he still remembers how to use it—it’s been a while since he’s had to map a terrestrial world.

  Presently, he glances at his micropad, to scan his to-do list, when something interrupts him. A slight spike in the deep-field readers—the Sidewinder’s computers are programmed to cast a wide and continuous “net” of scans into the dark depths all around it, what are termed the deep fields. Currently, it sees nothing beyond Kali at all, except for one very strange gravitic distortion. It’s a small star—perhaps the last star on the fringes of the galaxy, one that scans show is running out of hydrogen to convert into helium. Its helium core causes it to expand as it cools. It’s dying. But the strange reading beyond it…

  “S’funny,” he says.

  Bishop looks at him sharply. “What is it?”

  “A powerful gravitic distortion, some far-flung object…not a black hole, but something warping spacetime. About four-point-six light-years…that way.” He points beyond Kali, then looks at Bishop. “Mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  Rook watches the alien for a moment, trying to read an unreadable face, then scans further down his to-do list, when he discovers Bishop hasn’t made his move yet. “By the way,” he says, “it’s still on you.”

  “What?” Bishop looks where Rook is pointing, at his micropad’s screen, at the chessboard. “Oh,” he says, and quickly pulls up the program on his own micropad, considers his pieces for less than three seconds, and just moves a pawn to B4. “Is that sufficient?”

  Rook snorts. “Ya know, if you really don’t want to play, you don’t have to.”

  “You spoke of this word—camaraderie?—and said it is required where you come from if proper bonding is to occur. My people have—had—similar customs.”

  “Yeah, but…friends don’t really force friends to do things they don’t wanna do.”

  “They don’t? Strange. That does not seem like friendship to me. A true ally will always push you to do things you don’t want to do, to try harder, to make you stronger. That is our way, in any case.”

  “Yes, well, I mean…yeah, friends do that, but what I mean is we don’t force each other to play games when we don’t—ya know what, just forget it.”

  “I am determined to learn the game of chess,” Bishop says. “I can see it was important to your race.”

  “Not to my race, just to me and certain others.” Rook sighs, and taps a few keys to rotate the 3D topographical map. He looks at Thor’s Anvil, marvels at its great size, and wonders fleetingly at how it can have remained that tall with so many constant eruptions. The only logical explanation is that the tectonic plates are still pushing the mountains up, up, up, like how the Grand Tetons were formed on Earth. Earth…chess…both bring back memories…

  Before he knows it, Rook is back home, back on the farm. There is the house his dad built, not with bots as had become trendy, but with his own hands. During his younger life, Rook’s father had been an electrician, plumber, painter, and carpenter. He had the skills necessary to design and build their home to his wife’s specifications, and he had. Two stories tall, white and pristine when he was growing up. Of course, that white paint was chipping badly by the time he went off to ASCA. His father’s left knee had given him so many problems, and the arthritis in his hands meant he couldn’t do as much. That’s why leaving the farm for the Academy had been…

  Rook turns his thoughts away from that, and instead looks past the white house, at the verdant green fields that stretched out as far as the eye could see. In the spring, when the fields were at their greenest and the wind came in strong, it looked like a sea of green, undulating water, with its own tide coming in and out.

  Then, there he is, standing on the front porch, telling his mother goodbye. Eyes swimming in tears, she held her arms out. “It’s all right, Ma,” he told her, takin
g her in his arms.

  “I used to hold you while you cried,” she said, sniffling. “Now look how big you are, and now I’m crying and you’re holding me. It’s not supposed to be this way. A mother holds her child, not the other way around.”

  “I told ya, it’s all right,” he said to her. “I got this.”

  In his mind’s eye, Rook makes a different decision, decides to remain where he is, takes up the farm and dies with his parents when the Cerebs come. Then, he fantasizes that the Cerebs never came, and that he got to work the farm until his father went into peaceful retirement—or, let’s be honest, semi-retirement, since the man no doubt worked until his death.

  Until his death, Rook thinks. What was that like? How did it happen? Did they witness the blooming orange when the Cerebs set fire to the atmosphere? Or were they asleep when it happened? Did they go quickly, or did they choke on the inescapable smoke that filled the air all over the planet? Did they get to an underground shelter somewhere, one of the ones the government set up in the cities? And if they did, how long did they last? How long before the Cerebs came in and exterminated them all? Did Dad hold Mom in his arms? Did Mom die first? How did it happen? How?

  “You have that look about you,” says Bishop.

  Suddenly, he’s slammed back into the present, and takes a deep, sobering breath. “What look?”

  “I’ve dedicated a file to getting to know you, and I know that look.”

  “A file?”

  “To learn more about a subject, whether it be an animate or inanimate object, my people create—created—a system of adapting quickly. I have dedicated subroutines, and subroutines within subroutines, where I allot the necessary resources to the development of such programs. Then, I make it a point to gather information necessary to learn to extrapolate and predict what the subject will do next.” He shrugs, something he learned to do early on to communicate with Rook, no doubt. “In short, it’s enhanced pattern recognition, and I now recognize a face you make when you are reflecting, looking back, reminiscing, experiencing nostalgia—”

  “Got it, got it,” Rook says, waving a hand and tossing his micropad up onto the control board. Rook leans back in his chair. “It’s just…you took me back there, talking about the importance of chess, ya know?”

  The alien doesn’t move, but still somehow imparts puzzlement. “No.”

  He chuckles. “Well, chess was somethin’ my dad and I shared a passion for. I played it a lot, went to tournaments, thought about it all the time. I took it very seriously. I read all the major books. The Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings, edited by Serbian chess Grandmaster Aleksandar Matanović himself, as well as the Encyclopaedia of Chess Endings, the Chess Informant, all the great tomes and magazines and websites. I played against computers so often I didn’t really collect that many friends.” He looks at Bishop, and smiles. “Which made me a good fit for this kind of work, ya know—being alone, working out problems on my own, spending long stints of time in space with nobody to talk to.”

  “But you still went insane.” The Ianeth is blunt, and Rook takes no offense. After knowing Bishop only a few days, Rook shared with him what his life was like in the months and years leading up to the encounter with the Cerebs in the asteroid field he called Magnum Collectio.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I did go insane, didn’t I? Heh. I guess even the most lonesome of us requires socializing with our own kind from time to time.”

  “But you continued playing this game. Chess.”

  “Had to. Needed something familiar besides just music and old memories.”

  Bishop taps a few keys on his micropad, calls up some diagnostics screens. “I am sure your chess skills have improved since you’ve had so much time to play.” Perhaps that was meant to be some alien version of a silver lining, like, hey, don’t sweat all those dead countrymen, at least you got some sweet alone time with your favorite hobby?

  Rook taps a key, adjusting the pycno mixtures. “Not really. A chess player never really gets any better unless he plays someone better than him, and often.” He looks out the forward view, at Kali, at the planet angrily running away from some unknown and dark event. Rook empathizes. “A mind needs an opponent as much as it needs friends. It needs a problem to solve, or else it becomes stagnant and unimaginative. An opponent is a whetstone to a blade. It sharpens you.”

  “I see. So, with my lowly chess skills, I suppose I haven’t exactly sharpened your blade.”

  Rook smiles, and leans forward, starting to check the best possible approach vectors to the planet. There are many possible sites that Bishop indicated would serve as landing pads near the primary buried installation. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’ve got the pieces down, now you just need to learn the basics of strategy.”

  “I understand strategy,” says Bishop, running a check over the atmo scrubbers. “I may be an engineer, but I am a warrior-engineer.”

  “Exactly. You only understand yourself as a piece. A pawn. Understand? You’re a pawn, but you need to learn to be a player.” Rook starts cycling up the engine and the rear thrusters.

  “I don’t understand why we cannot play a simpler game, like this checkers game you told me about, or poker. Are those not revered games where you come from?”

  “Almost no strategy involved at all in those games, except maybe the style and rate at which you place your bets in poker. Chess is the ultimate in strategy and sharpening the mind, because all strategy is about management and placement of resources. In checkers, all the pieces can do the same thing. That’s not like real life. In chess, you have six kinds of pieces: king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, and pawn. Each of those pieces can move in only one fashion—a knight can only move in an L-shaped way, for instance, and a king can move in any direction it wants but only one space at a time. That’s more like life. A Marine is specifically trained to work with a team on the ground and enter buildings, for instance, but cannot take to the air, while an Air Force pilot dominates by air, but cannot enter a home to rescue hostages. Those are all pieces, and a wise player knows when to use the Marines, and when to call in an airstrike.”

  Bishop nods in a very human manner. “Of course, I see your point, but when we first met, you said that this game helped you to defeat the Cerebs at the asteroid field. And while I do see the analogy between the game you play here and the game you played with them, do you really find it all that necessary for your mind? You play it obsessively.”

  “It must be hard for you to grasp, because you’re programmed to remember so many protocols, but human beings…we have no implants. Never did. At least, not on the scale of your people or the Cerebs. So we had to do most of our learning the old-fashioned way. I’m sure your people discovered the connection between learning new skills, such as playing an instrument, and how it could improve your memory, stimulating neurons in new ways, opening up new avenues of thought you’d never previously explored?” Rook taps a few keys, and brings up the holographic display of the chessboard between them. “This? This isn’t just home for me, it’s how I’ve stayed sane, and it’s how I upgrade my software,” he says, tapping his temple. “Get it?”

  “Well enough,” Bishop says. The alien runs his right hand over one of the consoles, and pulls up a holo of the Sidewinder, looking at the rates of gamma waves bouncing off their wake. He’s done it without even tapping a switch. Rook still hasn’t quite figured how he does that. “But, you intrigue me. You say that a chess player cannot get any better unless he plays against an opponent that is better than he is.” He turns to Rook. “My question is, now that you’ve gone up against the Cerebs and defeated them once, do you feel you’ve improved? Have you…upgraded?”

  “Well,” Rook says, activating forward thrusters, the ship lurching forward slightly. “I won’t know until I play another game with them, now will I?”

  They are both pressed slightly against their seats, and a split-second later the inertial dampers kick in. The artificial gravity adjusts. They make their app
roach to the planet. “Alright, the capacitors are holding,” Rook says. “Guess you were right about that electrostatic influx into the—”

  Suddenly, a chime sounds.

  Rook looks at his trouble-board. “Oh…”

  Bishop doesn’t have to ask what it is. “We’ve got company.”

  “Yeah, we do.” Rook does a double check on sensors, and he wants to scream. How did they find us? Another check to make sure the readings aren’t muddled, but he knows they’re not. Nothing is malfunctioning, and it’s not a simple misreading of a gamma burst or cosmic wave fluctuations.

  Seekers have come.

  Or wait…have they? Rook looks at his sensors. Something isn’t right, the energy signatures are too erratic, here one second and gone the next, never stabilizing. Though he doesn’t notice it, beside him Bishop is paying close attention to what he does next.

  2

  As the ship begins to accelerate forward, Bishop moves a hand over the main flight control panel. Tiny, invisible lasers lance out from his fingertips, into the panel’s LCD display lid. Aiming these lasers at the top allows him to pick up more resonant vibrations. Next, there is a transmitted electromagnetic pulse that allows him to intrude on system records. In short, he can find the keystrokes Rook has put into the computer in the past, and access encrypted files.

  We wonder, Why would he do this?

  We’ve spent so much time with the Cerebrals, and with the last human, but what of this alien? What of Bishop? May we know him, too? We are ghosts, and we can certainly slide into his mind and know his thoughts, just as we’ve done with others, but can we ever truly know him?

  The Ianeth’s firewalls do not detect us, although they do detect a slight brainwave fluctuation, a half-second interruption in the communication between a few neurons, but then its own imtech (implant technology) creates a buffer, regulates flow and neuroplasticity, and we are integrated seamlessly. We are part of the program now, part of the organic brain and its booster systems.