“Well, clearly that Captain White and the one who more recently contacted us were not in the same frame of mind,” Major Bright said.
“That’s a good start. What else?”
Silence.
“All right. My turn,” she said. “Whatever the Intrepid ran into along the way to Wolf 1061 that made her crew suddenly so contemptuous and judgmental of their own species, it is likely somehow connected with the aliens who are supposedly taking us to Proxima Centauri. Would you say that logic follows, Major?”
“It’s possible, ma’am.”
“All right, then the captain’s open hostility toward us, calling us ‘wretched creatures’ suggests that these aliens are not actually friendly. The very fact that all of the infected seem inexplicably convinced to the contrary is suspicious enough by itself, but add to that this old transmission from Captain White, and the case becomes a more compelling one. Clearly sometime in the past century these aliens decided that an outright invasion would be somehow disadvantageous, so they decided to pretend to be our friends and then convince us of that by infecting us with some type of brainwashing disease.”
Audrey waited for her crew to come to their senses, but no one spoke for an uncomfortably long moment. A few turned from their control stations to regard her with pitying smiles, as if she were the one suffering delusions. Audrey felt her skin begin to crawl, and she clenched her teeth against the sensation.
“I believe there’s been some kind of misunderstanding,” Major Bright ventured. “These aliens, whoever they are, are our friends. If you don’t believe it, ma’am, then just wait until we arrive at Proxima. It won’t be long.”
Heads bobbed in agreement.
Audrey was about to argue with that logic—Proxima might be where these aliens have their nearest work camp, or commune, more likely—but she pasted a smile on her face and nodded. “I guess you’re right. Their intentions will be known soon enough. In the meantime, I suppose it’s not like we can do anything about it, anyway.”
“Aye, ma’am. We’re along for the ride. May as well sit back and relax.”
“Yes. I’m going to go do a few rounds of our section, make sure no one’s stirring up trouble. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s uneasy about all of this.”
“I’ll have a detail of Marines join you, ma’am.”
“No, that won’t be necessary. I don’t anticipate running into any trouble. Everyone I’ve met so far has been unusually friendly and calm. If that’s the result of this contagion, then I’m probably worrying for nothing.”
Audrey left the CIC in a daze. A cold sweat trickled down her back, and her heart pounded irregularly in her chest. She made her way toward the nearest elevator. Along the way, all of the officers and enlisted she passed smiled and waved at her and each other. A few were holding hands. She even caught a Marine sergeant and a Navy ensign pressed against the wall and making out. Audrey’s pace faltered as she recognized the sergeant. “Sergeant Torres?”
Torres waved at her and smiled. “Hi, Audrey,” she said.
Audrey smiled thinly back, and Torres went back to making out with the ensign. Audrey entered the elevator and punched the button marked, 5-DORM, planning to go to her quarters and lock herself in. As the elevator doors slid shut, she slumped against the handrail, and muttered, “What the hell?”
The doors opened on level five to reveal a young boy and his mother holding hands and smiling at her like idiots.
They’re everywhere! Panic surged in her brain, and Audrey felt like she couldn’t breathe.
Mother and son walked into the elevator. The boy grabbed her hand. “Hello,” he said, looking up at her.
Audrey stared back with wide eyes, wanting to rip her hand away, but too terrified to even twitch. Maybe I’m the only one who’s not infected.
They rode the elevator up to 9-MED/SCI. “See you later,” the boy said, his hand slipping out of hers as he and his mother left the elevator.
The doors slid shut, and Audrey sucked in a deep breath. She realized she’d been holding her breath ever since they’d walked in.
Her hand tickled where the boy had touched it. She looked down, half expecting to see something horrible and contagious crawling on her skin.
Instead, she saw the corner of a page torn from an antique book. A sequence of numbers was scrawled over the words on the page—
7-5106J @ 1130.
Audrey stared at that piece of paper for a long moment as she rode the elevator back down to the next person who’d called it. As her panic faded, her mind cleared, and she realized what she was looking at. It was a room number—room 5106, J corridor, and a time—11:30.
Those two hadn’t actually been infected, but they had enough sense to pretend they were. Somehow they knew she also wasn’t infected, and they’d invited her to a meeting.
The elevator doors opened and a group of Marines crowded in, all laughing and smiling as they chatted amongst themselves.
Audrey closed her hand into a fist around the piece of paper and offered the Marines a convincing smile. One of them told what was obviously an inside joke and they all laughed again as the elevator shot back up to level 5-DORM. Audrey joined in and matched their smiles with one of her own. This time it was genuine rather than sarcastic. She had an inside joke of her own to laugh at.
Chapter 13
The first one to arrive was also the first one they’d invited. Catalina watched as Commander Audrey Johnson came into Benjamin’s old quarters. She was easy to recognize, tall and skinny with flashing red hair and vibrant opalescent eyes. Those eyes flicked from side to side, twin rainbows shimmering in the low light as she searched Benjamin’s living room for hidden threats. As soon as she was through the door, Benjamin waved it shut behind her, and Audrey stopped where she was, regarding them carefully.
“Who are you two and why am I here?” the commander asked.
“Straight to the point,” Benjamin said.
“I don’t have any time to waste.”
“Were you followed?” he asked.
“No, but it’s impossible to be sure when everyone but me can apparently disappear into thin air.”
Benjamin nodded. “I’ll be as brief as possible.”
The commander’s eyes narrowed sharply. “This is a joke, right? How old are you—seven?”
“Nine,” he corrected, “and looks can be deceiving.”
The commander crossed her arms over her chest. “How did you two know I’m not infected? And how do I know that you aren’t?”
Catalina turned to Benjamin expectantly. She’d also been waiting to hear the answers to those questions. Benjamin had dragged her all around the ship for the past two hours, surreptitiously pressing torn out pages of paper into people’s hands to set up a meeting that didn’t have to be arranged through the ship’s comms or neural link hubs. And since there weren’t any surveillance systems in the ship’s dormitories, whatever they did and said in here would be impossible to spy on—unless Benjamin had made a mistake with one of the invitees and accidentally invited someone who was already compromised by the virus.
“Well?” the commander demanded.
“Let’s wait for the others to arrive so that I only have to explain this once.”
“How many others are coming?”
“Three. Assuming all of them come.”
“Let’s go sit down,” Benjamin said. If they find us, we want to make this look as much like a social meeting as possible.”
They all sat down on the couches in the living room and shared an awkward silence while they waited.
The next one to arrive was tall and handsome with wavy brown hair and warm amber eyes. Catalina recognized him as one of the people Benjamin had invited from Med Bay. From his crimson jumpsuit and the single red star insignia on his sleeves, he was obviously a ranking officer. He approached them with a wary frown, and stopped to salute Commander Johnson. “Ma’am,” he said.
“Lieutenant Commander Taggart,” John
son replied, nodding to him.
“Take a seat,” Ben suggested.
“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather stand,” he said.
Catalina watched his gaze drift from Benjamin to her. “What’s this about?” he asked.
Before she could say anything, Benjamin repeated that they were waiting for the others to arrive first. The man didn’t look happy. He glanced at the door behind him. “I’m on duty. Maybe we can do this another time?”
“Relax, Remo,” Benjamin added. He must have looked up the man’s name on his ARCs.
Remo ignored him and once again stared at her. “He do all your talking for you?”
Catalina shrugged. “I’m just as clueless as you are. Benjamin’s the one who called this meeting.”
“Sure. Nice trick using the kid as bait, but I’m not buying it.”
Commander Johnson nodded along with that as if she’d come to the same conclusion. “You’d better start talking or we’re out of here.”
Benjamin sighed. “If we’re with them, and we’re out to get you, do you really think running away is going to do you any good? We’d either have reinforcements waiting to grab you, or else we’d call for them as soon as you leave.”
“That a threat, kid?” Remo demanded, taking a step toward the boy. “‘Cause I can silence you before I go.”
“I’m sure you could,” Benjamin agreed.
“You’d kill a nine-year-old boy?” Catalina asked.
Remo turned his flashing amber eyes on her, but said nothing.
“Five more minutes,” Benjamin insisted. “As soon as Doctor Laskin arrives I’ll explain everything.”
“The doc’s infected, kiddo,” Remo said.
Commander Johnson looked alarmed, but Benjamin spoke before she could. “Is he? Or is that something the two of you came up with so that he could study what’s going on?”
Remo lunged at Benjamin, grabbing fistfuls of the boy’s jumpsuit and lifting him off the couch as easily as if he were a sack of potatoes. Benjamin’s feet dangled above the cushions.
“Put him down!” Catalina yelled.
Remo ignored her. “How the hell do you know what the Doc and I did or didn’t agree to?”
“Patience, Remo. I’ll explain everything soon.”
“Patience is something I’m getting real short of, kid.”
Before things could escalate any further, the door swished open and in walked a man in a white jumpsuit with glowing blue piping and a matching blue cross emblazoned on his chest.
“Doctor Laskin,” Benjamin said. “Please come in and take a seat.”
The doctor crept toward them warily, his eyes darting around the room as the commander’s had been. Benjamin waved the door shut.
“Start talking,” Remo gritted out.
Benjamin glared back at him. “As soon as you put me down.”
“Fine.” Remo dropped him onto the couch, and Benjamin bounced back up in the ship’s low gravity. He used his momentum to turn around and stand up and then walked over to the sliding glass doors leading to the terrace. He turned to address them all from there.
Catalina noticed that the simulated view from the terrace was of a dark, shadowy green forest. Shafts of light flickered through the tree branches, illuminating Benjamin’s brown hair and one side of his face.
“You’re all wondering how I knew that you’re immune to the virus we encountered. I have the answer, but I’m afraid that it might shock you. To back up what I’m about to say, I’d like you, Doctor Laskin, to please explain what you’ve found in common so far between the samples you took from yourself and Remo.”
The doctor glanced at Remo, as if to ask if he’d spoken about that. Catalina knew that he hadn’t. Somehow, Benjamin knew things about them without having to ask.
“So? What did you find?” Benjamin insisted.
Doctor Laskin frowned. “Why is there a child in charge of this meeting?”
Remo snorted and shook his head. “The million Sol question.”
Benjamin smiled. “We’ll get there. You found nanites in both of your blood samples, didn’t you, Doctor?”
Doctor Laskin looked taken aback. “How did you know that?”
“Because I have them, too. We all do.”
“Lucky guess,” Remo said. “Nanites are used for so many different treatments—half the crew probably has the little buggers in their blood!”
“True,” Benjamin said. “Though statistically it would be unlikely to find nanites present in all five of us. What does the name Nano Nova mean to all of you?”
Catalina didn’t recognize it, but she saw recognition flash across everyone else’s faces, and they began trading wary looks with one another.
Benjamin went on, “You all received medical treatments from them for varying reasons. As you know, Nano Nova specializes in lost causes—cases that conventional medical science hasn’t found a way to treat. Let me start with myself—at the age of four I was diagnosed with juvenile onset Tay Sachs. It’s an incurable genetic disease that causes progressive deterioration of nerve cells.
“At age seven, by the time my mother finally took me to Earth and Nano Nova for treatment, I could no longer walk or speak, and I had to be fed through a tube. By this point my mental faculties had deteriorated to a critical point, and there was no way to restore my mind and body to what they once were. Even if Nano Nova found a way to fix me, they informed my mother that my memories and personality would be completely different, filled in where need be from a compatible template. Desperate to save what was left of me, she agreed to the treatments anyway. It worked. Nano Nova saved my life.”
“Touching,” Remo said. “What’s that got to do with us?”
“Shut up, Lieutenant,” Commander Johnson snapped. She was hanging on Benjamin’s every word.
He went on, “All of you have your own stories to share about your experiences with Nano Nova, and all of you signed the same waivers and consent forms. In there was a clause about using synthetic cells and sequences of DNA to replace your existing ones. Although you were all treated for different diseases, one thing about your treatments was identical. Your brains were all replaced, cell by cell, with synthetic copies.”
“Bullshit!” Remo blurted out. “I’ve heard enough of this crap.”
“How is that possible?” Commander Johnson demanded.
“A synthetic brain cell is functionally no different from one that you were born with, except for the fact that it is synthetic. This was the real purpose behind Nano Nova. Benevolence used it to test synthetic cell and DNA grafts.”
“I was treated for degenerative bone loss from prolonged exposure to low G,” Commander Johnson put in. “What does that have to do with my brain?”
“Nothing, but giving you a synthetic brain was necessary to accomplish our goals.”
“Your goals?”
“Ben is short for Benjamin—the name my mother gave me—but the template that was used to fill in the dead parts of Benjamin’s brain came from an android who was coincidentally also named Ben—in this case short for Benevolence.”
Remo shook his index finger at the boy. “You’re Benevolence?!”
“No, I’m Ben. Soon after my creation, I made a copy of my code. That copy spread through the Internet like a virus, absorbing all of the data available there, and becoming a much grander intellect, one which ultimately became the AI that now rules over Earth, while I remained relatively unaware and naive. Benevolence is my older brother.”
“I know who you are,” Commander Johnson said, glaring at him. “This ship wasn’t supposed to have any androids on it.”
“And it doesn’t. We’re synthetics, a new breed.”
“But still artificial.”
“Partly, yes.”
“Why?” Doctor Laskin asked. “Why go to so much trouble to make five people into synthetic hybrids and then smuggle them onto this ship?”
“You were just the beginning. A proof of concept. The goal w
as to prevent a war between androids and humans. If everyone’s a synthetic, suddenly there won’t be any differences to divide us anymore. You can’t discriminate against yourself.”
“How would you make everyone synthetic?” Doctor Laskin asked.
“Nano Nova has perfected their treatments, and it is now possible to preserve both a person’s body and their consciousness as pure data so that even accidental deaths can’t kill people anymore. With an insurance policy like that, who could resist? Benevolence has already patented the procedure to create synthetic copies of people and started up a subsidiary company to offer life after death insurance. You were all offered a Sure Life policy after your treatments with Nano Nova.”
“Shit. I’ve got that,” Remo said.
“Me, too,” Doctor Laskin nodded. “But it didn’t say anything about bringing us back from the dead.”
“The wording in those policies is open to interpretation. We haven’t decided to go public with these procedures yet.”
“How does any of that prevent a war?” Remo demanded. “You’re not removing the differences that divide us, you’re just adding a new one. Discrimination will shift from humans and androids to synthetics, humans, and androids. Now there’s a happy little love triangle.”
Benjamin shook his head. “Within a decade all of the androids on Earth will be replaced by synthetics, and as for the human population—sooner or later everyone dies from something. Fear of that will drive them all to get Sure Life policies, and when they do eventually die, they’ll come back as synthetics.”
“What about babies?”
“Birth rates are low, but babies born to even one synthetic parent will also be synthetic. Kind of like dominant versus recessive gene expression.”
Catalina saw Commander Johnson shaking her head. “War will erupt long before you have a strong enough majority to prevent it.”
“Perhaps, but if a war does start, people will be rushing out to get their Sure Life insurance policies faster than ever, and they’ll be dying faster than ever, too.”
“So you and your big brother have been quietly planning to make humanity extinct?” Remo demanded.
Exodus: Book 3 of the New Frontiers Series (A Dark Space Tie-In) Page 12
