Dark Tomorrows, Second Edition
Page 6
Based on our sonograms, Spectrum—that's our nickname for the specimen—Spectrum appears to have no skeleton or hard structure of any kind. Its internal structure must be entirely muscular hydrostats, enabling it to reshape its body at will.
To me, this is logical. Cephalopods are the most intelligent invertebrates, as far as mazes and problem-solving tests can determine. A squid or octopus is up to forty percent neural tissue. Combine that capacity for intelligence with the ability to communicate in a broad spectrum of color, texture and shape, and you have the recipe for a highly advanced species. Even one capable of space travel.
***
NIES Internal Report #XB033 (classified)
FROM: Dr. Gabrielle Hernandez, Special Projects Manager
TO. Dr. Jamal Stephens, Director of Research
RE: Breakthrough!
Dr. Stephens,
Excellent news. With the new projection screen, we have exposed Spectrum to images of thousands of species of Earth life. His ability to mimic is astounding. I have seen him do a very good imitation of a hammerhead shark, including skin tone and eyes, as well as a bottlenosed dolphin and a sea turtle. He is able to make any unused portion of his body invisible, with a flatten-and-camouflage technique against the pebbled floor of the aquarium.
The chromatophores of his skin must be far more advanced than anything seen in chameleons and other creatures here on Earth. I continue to believe they must be an extremely visual species, like us, which gives hope for higher-level communication.
Rajiv, one of the computer guys, rigged up a simple waterproof remote control, so now Spectrum can pick what he wants to watch on satellite TV. His favorite show appears to be Sesame Street. He also likes the classical music channel. When listening to Mozart, he floats at the center of the tank, all eight arms extended radially, shifting through a gradient of rich hues.
Rajiv suggests turning the clicker into a mouse, as a way to establish communication. I think his idea is good.
***
Email
FROM: Evan Kurbow
TO: Gabrielle Hernandez
SUBJECT: Hello?
You know what today is? It's officially two months since we last talked. Your birthday's tomorrow. Happy birthday, in case you don't reply.
What's happening? Or is it all so very top secret? Are you ever coming back?
I'm missing you a lot, and I'm worried.
Love,
Evan
***
Private diary,
Dr. Gabrielle Hernandez
Bureaucracy is stupid.
All we need to do is rig Rajiv's remote into a mouse, and Spectrum can type messages to us. But the director is waiting on approval from Defense. Why is this even a question? We are supposed to be establishing communication. Spectrum watches Big Bird fifteen hours a week, and he has hundreds of kilograms of neural tissue—oh, and he's from a species capable of space travel—you think he might know 26 Roman letters and 10 Arabic numerals by now?
While waiting for approval, I've told Rajiv to go ahead with his idea to create a special keyboard for Spectrum, with large letters and numbers. Rajiv thinks it should be circular, with a ball mouse in the center—don't ask me to repeat his explanation, but it had to with the radial symmetry of Spectrum's cephalopod body.
Anyway, I'm really here to write about what happened tonight.
It was after ten PM—I'd gone to sleep on the cot in my office, too tired to drive home. I awoke to Tchaikovsky, the 1812 Overture, blaring loud enough to vibrate the water inside Spectrum's tank. He likes it that way.
I walked out to see him floating there, his arms and body spread out wide and flat, like he was a sail absorbing the voices and music. He glowed in shimmering whites and blues. It reminded me of starlight through a telescope. I thought he looked beautiful.
When I entered, he began to change. He coiled in on himself, then a few of his tentacles rearranged into a shape like a life-sized human doll. One central tentacle became a slender torso and head, with a blank face, and others became simple, featureless arms and legs. Then the tips of the arms grew fingers, and within about two minutes he'd formed a very realistic imitation of human hands.
From there, the arms and legs gained greater definition, and they flexed at newly formed joints. A clumsy imitation of dark brown hair floated around the head.
The face began to mold itself, denting in to make eye sockets, nostrils, mouth. The face rippled again and again as tiny muscles and chromatophores performed microscopic adjustments.
What emerged was my own face, looking back at it me—my brown eyes, my ugly little nose. Only he made me look beautiful, no blemishes, glowing with a golden inner light. He had rendered my whole body, naked (something he'd never seen, of course! and actually my nipples were a little too big and dark).
I reached out toward my glowing twin, and she reached out to me, mimicking my actions. Our fingers pressed against opposite sides of the aquarium wall, which is supposedly bulletproof and unbreakable.
My own eyes looked into me, and what I saw there was profound sorrow.
Then the other me broke apart into four rock-colored tentacles, and Spectrum drifted back and sank down at the back corner of the tank. He turned invisible against the ground.
***
Encrypted Email
FROM: Jamal Stephens, Director of Research, NIES
TO: Edward N. Gruber, Assistant Secretary of Defense
SUBJECT: Re: Oak Ridge?
Assistant Secretary Gruber,
We have made tremendous progress.
Our specimen has begun a new level of communication. He is able to display detailed information on his body. He created star maps on his skin to show us his planet of origin. He also provided images of what can only be described as a caravan of “spaceships” traveling across the galaxy. Through a numerical display, we believe he informed us they were traveling at more than 99% of the speed of light.
He has clearly begun to reach out to us, but we have not yet reached the level of full communication using language. We will need a significant increase in resources, including staff and equipment, and additional funding to make use of these achievements and take them to the next level.
***
Email
FROM: Evan Kurbow
TO: Gabrielle Hernandez
Subject: merry x-mas
Well, almost four months and still no word from you. I'm not getting much help from your spooky employer, either. They just tell me you're “safe and happy.”
While you're safe and happy, I thought I'd let you know I ran into my old co-worker, Alicia Harris, at the mall the other day. You remember her, from my company Christmas party three years ago? She asked if I was seeing anyone, and I honestly didn't know what to tell her.
What do you think I should tell her?
Evan
***
NIES Internal Report #XB033 (classified)
FROM: Dr. Gabrielle Hernandez, Special Projects Manager
TO. Dr. Jamal Stephens, Director of Research
RE: Summary
Dr. Stephens,
As requested, what follows is a condensed background summary of information gathered from Spectrum in the three weeks since he became communicative at a high level.
Spectrum identified his species' planet of origin as lying in orbit around HD 21663 in the Hyades star cluster, 151 light years from Earth. Their crafts move just below the speed of light, and the map of his caravan's trade route along the Orion arm is thousands of light years long.
From this, we might deduce he is part of an interstellar nomadic culture. Because of relativity, thousands of years will have passed on HD 21663 by the time his caravan circles back.
Their most recent stop was at Tau Ceti, and their next more than a hundred light years on. Spectrum was on a craft that suffered a mechanical error, and he ejected with others in a lifeboat craft. Only he survived.
He has no way of contacting the caravan, who are par
secs away by now and accelerating. They will not come back this way for thousands of years. He's a castaway, stranded on Earth.
***
Private diary,
Dr. Gabrielle Hernandez
So, I got to know Spectrum last night.
He mastered Rajiv's round keypad right away, and then downloaded and customized a text-to-speech program, choosing a pleasant baritone for himself. At Spectrum's direction, Rajiv set up an underwater speaker inside the aquarium, and affixed a microphone and speaker to the outside, so we can now have conversations with him.
Spectrum also spends a lot of time on the internet now, reading and watching video on the projection screen outside his aquarium. He's a fast reader—he finished Huckleberry Finn in eighty-three seconds, and said it was both funny and sad.
I was working late, trying to write in plain English all the reasons Spectrum doesn't represent a national security risk, and all the useful knowledge he could likely share. I heard Nina Simone singing “Mood Indigo” over the speakers in Spectrum's room, and I worried he was sad. He had plenty to be sad about.
When he saw me, he rose up from the rocks, where he'd been lying in what I saw as a brooding fashion, his skin deep colors of blue and black.
He lit up a little when I leaned against the tank.
“Hi, Spectrum.”
“Hello.” Four of his tentacles knotted together in front of me.
“You're not going to make another sculpture of me, are you?” I asked.
“Hahaha.” The computerized voice did a poor imitation of laughter.
The tentacles formed into a human shape, but it was male. He looked like a handsome man in his early thirties, maybe just a little younger than me. And healthy and well-built. And totally naked.
“Wow,” I said. “Who's that?”
“It is me,” he said. “I have assembled a human appearance based on what is considered aesthetically pleasing in your culture.”
“You really have.”
“I believe this will facilitate communication by adding a fully human nonverbal dimension.” He smiled, and his dark brown eyes—the same color as mine—twinkled.
“That's...smart.”
“It is how my ancestors hunted fish. Look like them, move like them, and you can get close enough to eat.”
“Does that mean you're hunting me right now?”
“Hahaha.”
I just stared at him floating there in the tank, amazed at how good his physical mimicry was, in every possible way.
“Why are you working so late tonight?” he asked.
“I have to write a report.”
“On what?”
I didn't know if I should tell him, but then I heard myself saying, “On whether you can, um, teach us things.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Technology. Things like that.”
“Things like that.” He looked around the cinderblock room. “What is the purpose of this place?”
“To understand you.”
“But why was this facility built?”
“Oh. Back in World War II. For the Manhattan Project.”
“Which was?”
“The atomic bomb.”
Spectrum frowned and looked at me with his very human eyes. He does actually form real eyes with his own nervous tissue. He can generate and absorb these eyes at will, and possibly other organs, too. Think of the medical advances we might make!
“The world war,” he said. “The atomic bomb.”
“We seem primitive to you, don't we?”
“As a species, you've only just begun to form your external nervous system,” he said. “We picked up your disjointed early broadcasts as we approached Tau Ceti. It was like the bright flickering nonsense on a hatchling's skin.”
“I don't understand.”
“And your focus is weapons. That is what your employers want to know, isn't it? What weapons do my people have? What weapons can I provide your rulers for their next territory game? Do they ask you this?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “But there must be peaceful things you could share. Right?”
“Like a quantum reflector?” Spectrum asked.
“What does that do?”
“Instantaneous communication across the universe,” he said. “Matter can't travel faster than light, but information can. There is a vast interstellar culture here in our own galaxy, sharing ideas, science, music and art. Anyone with a quantum reflector can tune in.”
“That's amazing!” I said. “And you can tell us how to build one?”
“Oh, no. I'm not a quantum engineer.”
“What are you?”
“I specialize in the cultivation and exchange of new and exotic plant species,” he said.
“You're a...florist?”
“My interests extend well beyond angiosperms! I once created a carnivorous plant to sell as a home security system.”
“I guess that's kind of amazing, too.”
“Not really. They were too hard to program. Sometimes ate the wrong person.”
“Oh.”
“These are my favorites.” The human shape blew apart, and Spectrum reformed into a garden of giant flowers shaped like origami birds, with brightly colored petals as plumage. “Their name would translate to 'songflowers.'”
“They're beautiful.”
“They attract certain species of male songbirds to mate with them.” Spectrum created a brightly plumaged bird that swooped down to a flower and began humping it. I had to laugh.
“And some of the songflowers evolved into carnivorous songflowers.” A spiny clamshell of a plant mouth slammed shut over the humping songbird. “Which is where I got my bad idea.”
A few of his tentacles swirled together and formed the image of the handsome, naked man again. It happened so fast—I think once he takes on a shape, he has the muscle memory to take it again with a thought. He has a thick neural cord through each of his eight arms, plus a massive brain at his core. Every inch of him thinks and feels. And mimics.
“What do you want to do now?” I asked. “If you're stuck on Earth?”
“I'd like to visit the ocean,” he said. “Stretch my arms. Play with some creatures. My species depends on both visual and tactile communication. I'm cut off here in the tank. It's like being deaf, for one of you.”
“I didn't know that. Would you like more animals brought in? A bigger tank?”
“If that's the best you can do.”
“What else do you want?”
He rose toward the top of the aquarium, where the hatch was locked and sealed with titanium bars. The remaining mass of his body remained invisible, blending with the dark wall behind the aquarium.
“Swim with me,” he said.
“I'd get fired if I did that!”
“All will be well.”
“No, I mean I can't unlock your tank without the director's approval. Major security breach.”
“Then I am a prisoner?” He gave a sly smile. “Not merely an honored guest from elsewhere in the galaxy?”
“I guess so. I'm just not authorized--”
“There is no true authority, Gabrielle,” he said. “Only when you recognize this, will you put an end to your wars.”
“But...” I looked at the steps bolted to the wall beside the aquarium. I knew the combination for the access panel (not that I'm supposed to, but I'm nosy that way). “My job.”
“Your job is to establish and maintain communication with me,” he said. “What if I went silent and gray for a few days instead?” He crumpled into one corner, looking like an octopus again, and turned the color of a dead spider. “Hahaha.”
“That's not funny.”
He jetted to the top of the tank again and resumed his human shape. “There are two feet of air on top of the water,” he said. “You can swim comfortably.”
I can't say why I listened to him, only that I had been so fascinated by him, so consumed by the desire to understand him, that maybe it had giv
en him some sort of power over me. Or maybe I just like him. Anyway, I kicked off my shoes and walked up the stairs. Each step had a rectangular slip-resistant rectangle that scratched against the soles of my feet.
I keyed in the access code. The panel slid open.