by Alex Lamb
Mark held his breath as they rolled up to the rippled black exterior of the tube. It towered over them like the world’s longest aircraft hangar. The pod pivoted at the edge of the obstruction and started running alongside it.
‘Great,’ he growled.
Nothing was more likely to get them spotted than puttering past the enemy’s barracks for several dozen kilometres. He hoped the vehicle was simply trying to find its way around the end of the structure but soon realised his luck wasn’t going to be that good. Instead, the gloomy silhouette of an old tent-town loomed out of the churning grime. They were headed straight towards a human settlement that had been merged into the Photurian tunnel system. The tube ended where it sprawled up against the scratched plastic dome in a fan of Stygian rootlets.
Mark tried again to persuade the pod to reroute before they were spotted but it trundled forward regardless. Yet, as they got closer, Mark’s fear melted into curiosity. There were no lights inside the town and no signs of traffic around it. As the minutes passed without someone coming out to demand they convert to endless glee, he began to wonder what was going on. Was the town abandoned? If so, it might represent their best hope. The air in their suits wouldn’t last for ever, even with recycling running at full tilt.
The pod bumped up against the scoured plastic wall of the city and couldn’t go any further in its preferred direction, so it stopped. It nudged back and forth, positioning itself so that its hatch lay directly at the base of the vehicle, and then opened the door, admitting a narrow shaft of brown light.
Mark stared down that sinister-looking tunnel to freedom and knew what had to come next: he had to leave the relative safety of the pod and find somewhere they could hide. The question was, did he have even a tenth of the necessary strength?
It was then that he noticed he no longer felt sick. In all the mayhem, it hadn’t even occurred to him. He felt scared, bruised, jangled, sweaty, cramped and desperate, but not actually ill, which was an improvement of sorts.
He reached around Palla’s shoulder, grabbed the lip of the exit tube and tried to tug himself into a position from which he could leave. It wasn’t easy. Thirty-five minutes of increasingly frantic manoeuvring followed, with an unconscious, suited body in his way. He began to fear that the two of them would simply never be able to escape and die pointlessly inside the alien machine. In the end, though, he prevailed, and shunted himself out into the tube the wrong way up with a gasp of relief.
Mark fell three metres head first onto the desert and rolled. Fortunately, the storm had washed a large drift of dust up against the wall of the town, making his impact safe, if undignified. He crawled out from between the stilts of his transport and looked about.
The storm had slowed but the sky was still a dark, churning mass that rendered the sun an unfashionable shade of brown. The only sounds he could hear were his breathing and a constant roar of white noise through his helmet. He started trudging off around the edge of the old settlement in search of a door. If he could find somewhere decent for them to regroup, he reasoned, he’d go back for Palla and carry her to it. If there was no way in, the pod was as good a place to die as any.
Nobody accosted him as he explored. No rover arrived to point cannons in his face. Instead, the edge of the old town remained eerily quiet. He found an airlock about half a kilometre further on. Mark tried linking to the door through his interface and found it running in passive mode. It had been left unlocked on emergency settings. He let out a wheeze of relief and then caught himself. If the town was abandoned, why was there apparently still atmosphere and power inside?
His hope of finding somewhere he and Palla could recover soured into concern. Lacking options, he opened the hatch anyway and climbed inside the old-fashioned airlock chamber. Apparently, nobody had updated the hardware since the town was founded.
As the air cycled, he wondered what lay on the other side. If the atmosphere was full of Phote spores, would he be back where he started, turning into his enemy? He doubted it. When he surveyed his body’s augs, he couldn’t find a single trace of the Photurian bacteria. They’d all disappeared. Hopefully that meant he was now immune.
Once the airlock matched the conditions inside, he used his suit’s bioassay kit to test the air. It reported a thin but breathable oxygen-nitrogen mix with no biological threats. He checked the local network for data traffic and found it also running passive. The Photes had maintained this place but left it unused. Why?
With his gut tense, Mark unsealed his helmet, removed it and slowly opened the interior hatch. He peered out into the dull, red emergency lighting and then darted back as he caught sight of a figure a mere three metres away.
He’d glimpsed a woman staring in his direction. His heart hammered but no voices broke out from the other side – no words of surprise or demand. Mark left it a full five minutes before daring to look again.
She was still there, staring past him with an expression of rapture on her face. This time, he noticed that she was kneeling, perfectly still, on the pale, glossy material that covered the floor of the room beyond the airlock. Mark craned his head out further to examine her properly. The woman was definitely real and, given that she was breathing, still alive, but apparently oblivious to his presence.
When he peered closer, he noticed that she had roots. Or perhaps the floor had extended roots up into her. In this light, Mark couldn’t tell. In any case, the woman before him had merged with the unusual flooring.
Mark exited the hatch and examined her. She stared through him, blinking occasionally, her gaze locked on something wonderful and far away that he couldn’t see.
He walked past her, through an airlock room lined with dusty, antique suits to the next doorway. It had been left open – something considered unforgivable in human-occupied habitats. Suiting rooms next to airlocks always doubled as emergency containment areas. Mark walked out into the open interior of the town beyond.
Under a matte-brown sky with a sullen beige sun lay a silent townscape unlike any Mark had ever seen. All the buildings under the high dome of the tent-bubble were human-built, but a soft, white, clay-like material covered the ground between them like a heavy snowfall. It was everywhere – inside the lobbies of the towers, covering the road, trailing over the edges of balconies high above him. Motionless bunches of scarlet grass grew out of it, making the scene look like a chromatically inverted meadow.
The ground was unsettling enough, but the people made it worse. Mark stood at the edge of a plaza where a couple of hundred people had gathered. Some stood, others lay or knelt. Not one of them moved. Most looked relatively intact, but a few had partially melted into the pale clay like warm wax, their beaming smiles still visible even as the features slid off their faces.
Mark flinched as he caught sight of a distant figure moving between the towers. Then he saw the man bump into a wall, stop, turn and head back exactly the way he’d come. He appeared to be grinning to himself, absolutely content. He was as much on bliss autopilot as the rest of them, Mark thought, except that he was still moving.
Mark walked up to the closest figure and waved a hand in front of its face. He got no reaction. He almost bumped his foot against two children curled up on the ground, partially hidden by a tuft of red grass. They wore smiles of quiet joy and had their eyes screwed tight shut as if being tucked into bed for the night.
It was like something out of Pompeii, he thought – only everyone was still hideously alive. And the expression on every face was absolutely the same: pure, unadulterated bliss.
He knew that feeling. He’d first experienced it himself just minutes ago, through the Transcended puzzle he’d unlocked. It was that ironclad Photurian rapture, and these people were dying from it.
He’d never imagined that such a thing was possible. That his enemies, so relentless and all-consuming, might just cave this way. Yet he had felt this specific flavour of surprise before. He struggled to put his finger on when the sensation had come to him, and rememb
ered that it had been during his first Transcended dream of Carter.
This was why the Transcended had wanted him to go there. Because the process laid out before him wasn’t just happening here. It was happening all over Phote space, wherever they weren’t fighting humanity.
The pieces clicked together. The Photes were hamstrung by their own architecture. That was obvious, now that he’d inhabited it. Because when the orders stopped, so did they. When they weren’t fighting, they were falling apart. They were held together by defensive pressure from their war with mankind. The Photes weren’t stable.
Mark grunted in astonishment. They could have stumbled on this answer years ago if they’d looked in the right places. It had always been there for them to find. The Photes had never been as powerful as humanity imagined. Had they braved the blockades and forced themselves to keep searching for weak spots, they’d have found the truth eventually. But that kind of action required risky exploration with zero promise of reward. And they’d been afraid. As the war worsened, their fear had only grown.
The irony wasn’t lost on him. No amount of cunning defensive wisdom, or sensible caution, or stalwart professionalism would ever have cut it. Because the Photes could always match those talents. All forms of human excellence that sprang out of predictable behaviour played straight to their enemy’s strengths. Random-ass adventures, on the other hand, would have kicked their butts decades ago.
The real answer to the war wasn’t anything the Transcended could hand them. It was about exercising the right kind of courage. Not his kind of courage – that had been too sullen, and too selfish. No, what was needed was Palla’s kind of courage. The kind of missions she’d tried to push through the Academy were exactly the ones they needed.
‘Shit,’ said Mark to nobody in particular.
He looked around at the soft, all-devouring happiness and saw what should have been obvious all along. The Photes lived for bliss. They slid into that state at the drop of a hat, just as they had on every Subtle world they’d conquered. All you had to do to get them to stop was to convince the bastards that their tasks were already completed. But it was even simpler than that. Subnodes, he now understood, longed for the diktats of their superiors. So there was only ever one unit you had to convince that it had won – the one at the top.
As soon as the Photes thought they’d beaten you, they’d lost. They put themselves to sleep. Those dead worlds they’d found hadn’t been attacked from without, they’d just lain down to die once their opponents had been consumed. Which meant that all Mark needed was a way to trick them – some way to rewrite their system to allow them to believe that the war was over already so they could stop operating. He needed a command key to flip the root state of their society to done.
He groaned and checked his sensorium for the icon the Transcended had left there. He knew what it was now: a master control switch for Phote worlds. It wasn’t big or impressive because it didn’t need to be. It just had to flip a single bit.
‘Duh,’ he said. ‘I get it.’ He could imagine the Zoe-avatar arching an eyebrow at him and tapping an imaginary watch.
Mark reached out excitedly for the local network, hoping to locate a route to the Photurian mind-temple he’d nearly joined, but found only a degraded emergency signal pulsing there. The whole town was operating on minimum power, which apparently didn’t extend to full software function.
However, he did reach Ann. Her signal was ringing out from somewhere nearby, on the other side of the town. Her pod must have touched down on the far side of the settlement and rolled up from the opposite direction.
‘Ann!’ he exclaimed. ‘What’s your status?’
‘Unreasonably good,’ she reported. ‘I am perfectly intact. Ira has some bruises. No broken bones.’
‘I’m inside the town,’ he told her. ‘Don’t worry, it’s safe. In fact, it’s great.’
He could hear scepticism in her pause and wondered if perhaps he should have been a little less enthusiastic.
‘Acknowledged,’ she told him. ‘Will converge on your position.’
‘No, wait,’ said Mark. ‘I have to go and get Palla. Meet you back here as soon as I can.’
He signed off and hurried to the airlock to collect his friend.
21.2: NADA
As a wave of pointless debate rippled through her gestalt, Nada scrabbled to maintain control. Were her sisters all stupid? Didn’t they realise that this wasn’t the time for disagreement? She was trying to fight a war! In the surface bunker where the physical body of her Meta resided, Nada slid to the floor and convulsed.
But of course, none of their reactions were deliberate. Will’s weapon had been so devastating precisely because Nada’s units were wired together at the subconscious level. And he had picked one of the few topics that could spontaneously divide them – how to manage the aftermath of her own success. It was a topic she’d avoided thinking about.
[Stop!] she ordered them, but that didn’t work, of course. In the wake of her modifications, obedience was optional.
Her solution was as dirty as it was quick – she picked out the strategy that was most favoured by her population and had the threads that supported it murder the others. At the same time, she encouraged the dissenting voices to remain passive while their threads were ripped and their dangerous ideas replaced.
The storm in her mind abated, but simultaneously Nada felt a terrible shrinking in her chorus of selves. Whole domains of expertise she’d possessed a moment ago winked out, including her entire project to return New Panama’s Fatigued to full functionality. Those threads responsible for nursing lost Photurians back to health had held the most optimistic notions of how that project would play out. Without their skill-deltas, the best she’d be able to do with her Fatigued units was reanimate them as short-lived fleshy robots.
Nada keened at the terrible loss. In her new form, some topics were dangerous. The alignment of her units needed to be tight. Or perhaps very loose, she pondered, as she clued in to why Monet had organised himself so oddly.
She shivered. No – tight alignment was the answer. Unless she remained swift and decisive, she’d lose what it meant to be Photurian altogether. Her collective would drift, becoming something neither human nor Saved, but lost and foreign and pointless.
The solution was clear. Difficult subjects must never be raised. Agreement would have to be frequently tested by consensus and outlier selves destroyed. Only then would the uniformity of her faith and purpose be viable. She couldn’t afford to replicate Monet’s accept-all-kinds mutation-fest. That way lay madness.
As she blinked herself back to sense, she saw with horror that while she’d been caught in socio-cognitive feedback, Monet had emerged from his refuge. Her own forces had briefly turned on each other. Ten per cent of her combat units had belonged to the dissenting thread-faction and there had been an awkward moment when they’d realised the fate that awaited them and disagreed with it.
During that hiatus, Monet had sent forth several thousand warriors onto the plain around the node, armed with weapons of terrible potency. Her lifters were flaming ruins. Her siege-busting false-matter robots had been reduced to charred remains. And the Usurper was busily mashing the rest of her forces into tiny pieces while she lay drooling on the floor. She seethed with fury.
He had done it all simply by asking an uncomfortable question. Nada decided that she had miscalculated. Will Monet was too dangerous to keep around for even another minute. She made one last, fleeting attempt to force the fight into the soft-combat realm so that she could keep her ailing node and then gave up. She resorted to orbital weapons and started throwing super-accelerated tungsten at him before he could say anything else upsetting. The node would have to go. Silence was golden.
21.3: MARK
Mark ran back across the gathering dunes to the lander-sphere. He jumped up, grabbed the rim of the open aperture and levered himself awkwardly into the chamber. He had to wedge his feet in the tunnel mouth and use
his arms to hold himself in the space where Palla lay curled.
‘Are you conscious?’ he said and shook the arm of her suit.
She groaned. ‘Just,’ she croaked.
‘I know what the human race has been doing wrong,’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s just like you said – there should be more scout runs. The Photes can’t blockade everything, so they just block everything useful. But that should never have stopped us. We should have been making end runs around our enemy’s front lines to look at what was behind them. That urge to make big gambles is precisely what we’ve lost. All our military decisions are too safe. I should have seen that but I never did. You’re right about the New Society, Palla. It is better. Play is what the Photes can’t handle because it’s cohesive but unpredictable. That’s why it works – because it turns noise into pattern. It’s endless innovation, which they hate. Our only mistake was never going far enough. We didn’t turn all that collective play into risky military action. Our exploration stops when lives are on the line, but it shouldn’t!’
He knew he was running off at the mouth but he was too excited to care. He could see it all now.
‘If we’d stuck our necks out, we’d have seen just how frail our enemy really was. But we were too busy barricading ourselves in! Randomness is strength, Palla. Whatever they can’t predict, they can’t fight.’
‘That’s great,’ she said weakly and coughed.
Mark frowned. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Probably shouldn’t have given you that kiss,’ Palla rasped.
Mark quickly checked the biomarkers on her suit. They were terrible. The biological war the Transcended had won inside him was still making a mess of her. Her augs hadn’t burned her up because she wasn’t so much turning as dying. Being thrown out of a crashing spacecraft in a tennis ball hadn’t helped. Mark knew he had to get her inside as fast as he could.
He grabbed her suit and dragged her through the hole and onto the sand. He landed underneath her as she fell.
