Skyquakers

by Conway, A. J.

  ‘I’ll get him,’ he said. ‘You won’t see him, but he’ll at least see you. Pleasant dreams, Lo.’

  10

  ANALOGUES

  There was one giant on the ship whom Engineer and Vet often spoke of but no one ever saw: the captain. He was in charge of the entire operation; a first-generation star traveller with infinite wisdom, Psycho was told. But since the beginning of the conquest, he had become a recluse. Rumours of illness spread throughout the ship, and after many months of absence, it was soon declared that Engineer, his second in command, was to take charge in his place. Engineer was well-prepared to take on the role and kept the operation in motion. He was a stern leader, feared and respected equally. He and Captain were close colleagues who had travelled vast distances across the universe and had overcome many treacherous obstacles together, but time could not be wasted on empathy: there was still work to be done.

  The first order Engineer gave was the culling. According to Vet, Captain had wanted to preserve as much life as possible, but life in suspended animation was expensive to maintain and resources were already scarce enough. Species were incinerated by the millions within days of their arrival, lightening the ship’s load and fuel expenditure, as well as freeing up millions of pods in their warehouses where the remaining specimens slept in comas.

  Secondly, Engineer ordered destruction.

  Psycho first proved to be of much greater use to the giants when he informed them of possible manmade threats which their kind may have never been aware of, threats which could prove fatal once they started working with boots on the ground. Although they had carefully observed human military regimes from a distance over their years of observation, they never felt threatened by them because, firstly, human machines were tiny and insignificant, and the cloud had a nuclear arsenal large enough to exterminate them all in a few swift clicks, and secondly, humans spent so much time and effort bombing and shooting each other that they appeared too idiotic and undisciplined to ever be capable of mounting a global revolt against their coming. But that, perhaps, was classic naivety. Global catastrophes often united several powerful forces, Psycho explained, and militant groups who had been submerged or operating deep underground during the onslaught of the beams would currently be banding together to take serious action against them as they spoke. They may even rustle up some nuclear warheads of their own, enough to damage the very fragile engines of the ship and bring them all crashing down in a hellish ball of flames.

  Engineer laid down a map of the world and asked Psycho to circle where the major military points of interest were. Other than Washington D.C. and the whole of North Korea, Psycho couldn’t give much information. But he did point out two cities in Australia, Canberra and Darwin, which were noted for their military repertoires. What became of those cities was inevitable. Engineer gave the orders to torch the place and wipe out any living thing they could find, in fear that this city had the personnel and resources to plot against them. They couldn’t just vaporise the place, because the fertile soil under the city was precious and any nuclear strike would tarnish its fertility, and so ground troops had to be armed and tactics had to be drawn up. In this instance, Psycho recommended putting the transitioned humans to proper use: put some weapons in their hands, let them scour the city and smoke out the last few measly survivors hiding in the rubble. Psycho was there in Darwin when it all unfolded. He directed the humans in suits to areas where people would be hiding: shopping centres, warehouses, underground parking lots… And he showed the eyes in the sky where the navy bases were located and what a war ship looked like, so that the storm could target those threats directly. In a single day, the entire northern coastline was set ablaze as the cloud unleashed a colossal airstrike onto Darwin.

  Psycho felt very little as he watched the city burn. There was nothing much here to fuss about, nothing nostalgic. That was first day Engineer saw some brilliance in him.

  Engineer began setting up his farms about three weeks in. By this time, multiple successful specimens had been created in Vet’s laboratories and released back into the ecosystem. It was only then that Psycho realised the true brilliance of it all and saw what Vet meant by his deviation from Noah’s ark: this ship housed many millions of animals to be used in the re-establishment of the Planet, but there was something different about the animals when they were beamed back down and returned to the wild.

  Through millions upon millions of trials, Vet was able to genetically match and fuse species from Earth with biologically analogous life forms from their former planet. Why? Well, they could not live in the clouds forever; eventually they would have to establish colonies on the ground, and those colonies would need to be able to grow their own food and survive on the surface independently. Earth was the ideal blank slate in terms of heat, gravity, atmosphere and biodiversity that they had been desperately searching for, but there were still many differences in biology, sunlight, water composition, soil pH, and atmospheric gases which would not support a foreign species from another world. The fusion process produced specimens equipped to live and grow on Earth while still maintaining their original chemistry, therefore allowing their entire planet’s ecosystem to fuse with Earth’s prior to them, themselves, integrating into the food chain.

  It was an epic trial-and-error endeavour of genetic needles in a haystack, and physiology alone was often not the principal factor in determining which two species were capable of forming a hybrid analogue. Things which looked alike and were classed alike did not mean they would fuse seamlessly; sometimes the matches were in fact quite contrasting, creating colourful and unique experimental creatures. A supercomputer in Vet’s lab did most of the work, sorting through samples taken from millions of species and analysing its genetic composition for possible similarities. The computer made billions of theoretical attempts in silico every second. After it found a near-ideal match (with a theoretical success rate of at least 95%), it took several hundred actual in vivo attempts to give birth to biologically viable subjects. Hence the need for so many, Vet said. Those which were successful and produced healthy, fertile analogues were then returned to Earth via the beams to either go back into the wild or into farms to be reared.

  Not all species, of course, were farmed. Many wild animals were released and left to happily repopulate on their own, in order to slowly mend the food chain which they had broken. Those deemed edible were contained in massive paddocks and monitored by giants. The beams built warehouses and iso-pneumatic living shelters for them to live and work, and within a month they had begun to inhabit the ground in very small teams. Their transitioned humans were often with them to assist as guides and as watchdogs, unfazed by the gradual shift in biology which was taking place around them. In the meetings, Psycho heard reports to Engineer and Vet that the analogues were breeding well and growing exponentially in numbers. Everyday, more than two hundred new species of hybrid were being were being added to the ever-growing biosphere that would soon become their new home.

  But of course, there was the occasional incident. Trouble was brewing in some parts of the country and farmers began reporting ‘feral’ activity. These ferals were in the form of natives. They were thieves, arsonists, anarchists, and disease-ridden wildlings working in small, organised packs. They either wanted their food or wanted them gone, and some were becoming increasingly violent and causing damage to their warehouses and their farms. The last straw came when two farmers were shot and beaten to death in their warehouse in northern New South Wales, with their entire farm set ablaze in protest of their occupation.

  Engineer had no issue in demanding their eradication, swiftly and mercilessly. Unlike the insects and fish and plants and fungi left behind, this was not a species he was willing to tolerate and would want running wild on his new planet, no matter how few in number. They were beginning to act harmoniously, just as Psycho had predicted. Believing he was capable of predicting their moves even further, Psycho was granted a position of power as the leader of a hunting
party. He and a small band of transitioned humans were given permission to do incredibly horrid acts. They were given weapons. They were told to do whatever they felt was necessary.

  Psycho did exactly that: he hunted them, he had them shot, drowned, burned, and prodded until their twitching bodies went quiet beneath his leather shoes. Sometimes they would come across a hideout containing twelve or fifteen of them; sometimes there was only a lonely pair. Sometimes there were children, too.

  When he spoke to Lo and told her of the great work he was doing, of the marvel of the new world that he was watching grow from the ashes of a failed civilisation, he was shocked by her reaction.

  ‘You really are…psychotic.’

  Pah! She did not understand. She was unable to see the benefit of his actions from her position of denial. The universe was not so dull and boring anymore; there were far greater things than them among the stars, so a few dead idiots could not deter him from his role in the new order of things. Lo would come to terms with these changes soon, and he could not wait to show her the world once it was rebuilt. He would personally give her a tour of the Planet, a reimagined planet of shared intelligence, of new beginnings. This world was created for people like Lo.

  People like us.

  As for the dead ones, they could never understand. Like these creatures in their pods or the specimens being brought to life in the laboratories, mankind was simply an analogue of something which was once interesting and once worth caring about. Now it was just an imitation of something which no longer existed.

  11

  CAPTAIN

  Vet asked him once if he knew what he was doing.

  Psycho looked up from his papers and his maps, almost insulted. He argued: of course, why would he not? The farms were growing exponentially. The hybrid seeds had bloomed well after the rainy season. The feral population was contained and—

  Engineer had perhaps become a little too overzealous, said Vet, in a tone of warning.

  Again, he felt the offence, as a son would feel over words about his father. Engineer was doing his work, work which was essential for Vet’s own species. Sure, he was a brutal commander, and Psycho was not the only one who had cowered beneath his authoritative voice or felt his hand of tyranny, but these were all essential measures to keep a large and potentially catastrophic operation from falling apart. On their distant planet, the famine was worsening; weekly the commanding officers received updates on deaths and riots breaking out as nations broke down and desperate pilgrims scurried for the last remaining resources. The atmosphere was tense aboard the cloud, especially in Engineer’s presence. It was a taxing task to maintain the momentum at which they were working, day and night; delays and mishaps only prolonged the rescue of the rest of their kind.

  Vet asked if he had ever met Captain, the Captain. But no human had ever seen him. No one had since his health had apparently begun to fail him. Despite the numerous medics on board and the vast array of advanced medical machines at their disposal, no one could stop the debilitating mental disease from metastasising within their leader. Once Captain had become too ill and incompetent to fully operate this ship, Engineer took his place at the head of the table. This change in command had dramatically altered their plans in many aspects; in particular, Engineer was ordering the culling of more and more species, too many for Vet’s liking and far more than Captain’s team originally envisioned. This did not bother Psycho until Vet shared with him a vital truth he had known for many weeks but had kept from him in fear of upsetting the native boy.

  ‘Tell me,’ Psycho said.

  Engineer had ordered the humans to be culled. No need to bother trying to preserve them or running their genetics through the supercomputer for possible matches, he had proclaimed; he wanted none of their kind in his new world, not after spending so many weeks hunting ferals and precariously keeping them from damaging his farms. He then watched to see if something would stir in Psycho. Vet knew of what destructive acts he had taken part in, what deeds he had done against his own for Engineer’s pleasure, but even the eradication of an entire species must cause some reaction, he thought, if only minor. Psycho was left feeling a heavy weight in his chest, a sudden sadness, but why did he care so much? He had never liked human beings. He had never felt connected to them in the same way he did to his giants, so why all this empathy? The pathos? Well, he would be alone, unable to share his utopic vision with anyone, and that, perhaps, was something he could not live with. Artists required their work to be admired, or else their pursuits were meaningless; Psycho had been working so hard to create this new world so that one day he would be adored by peers, his peers, but what equal companion would appreciate his brilliance once they were all gone? At least he still had Lo to share the truths of the universe with, but if she were to be taken from him too…

  Seeing his startled silence, Vet lowered his head and asked, did he care for her?

  Psycho spun. ‘What?’

  There was no point playing games. Vet knew he had snuck into the pods and spoken to a single native. He could only assume he had done so, under cover of darkness, because the two were familiar with one another.

  He asked again, did he care for her?

  ‘I…’ Psycho searched his soul. ‘I… do? I do.’

  Then that was all that mattered, Vet declared. One native would not be spared simply because Psycho wished it so; he had no authority on the matter.

  Only one could override Engineer’s ruling.

  Melancholy, apparently to them, was an illness like cancer. It was slow in onset and appeared more commonly in the elderly, partly due to bad genes, partly due to toxins or microbes, and partly idiopathic. It was treatable, but the body would inevitably tire and tire and rot from the inside out, until a slow and painful death fell upon the sufferer.

  For such an illness to befall the captain of the ship was tragic and curious, because the cause was entirely unknown to all but Psycho. He knew from the beginning that Captain and Baba were one and the same. Lo’s Baba. Baba’s Lo. His sickness was due to loneliness, for he longed for his human, his adored child whom he had cradled in his arms from a very young age. For a giant to have these emotions towards a species on par to a Sapiens’ Neanderthal baffled Psycho, but the biology and psychology of these beings was as complex as that of his own kind.

  He wanted to bring Captain to her for two reasons: one, because he had promised, and for some reason he could not break a promise to Lo, and two, because he knew Captain, ill or not, still held the power to change the fate of the human species on board this ship. He felt as if he was betraying Engineer by going behind his back and seeking a higher authority, and he was sure this would result in a severe punishment of some type, but it was paramount to his own work that an attempt was made to preserve the human species, to reserve a few like-minded people on this shifting sphere which he could captivate with tales of his drudgery and his vision of the future. Lo was a like-minded one. He could not imagine a future without her.

  Psycho went searching for Captain. He snuck about the cloud late at night while a storm raged. Thunder clashed and rain (waste from the reactors) poured from their floating ship and washed over the sunburnt country. It was dark and quiet within the weaving corridors of the ship’s innards. He walked among giants without even a glance, for his presence, and the presence of many suit-and-tie natives, was now as mundane as the concept of extra-terrestrial life itself. Some even nodded their heads at him as they passed, giving him blinks of greeting between the slits in their head cloths.

  With Vet’s directions, he emerged from the elevator onto the proper floor and entered a well-furnished hallway, adorned with carpet, hanging artwork and potted plants of exotic, otherworldly flora. The lighting was dim, flickering from a series of overhanging chandeliers made from some sort of cloudy golden mineral. There was a stark contrast between Captain’s idea of decorating and Engineer’s, for the latter filled his office with steel and marble and unpatterned, white surfaces, whereas t
his floor made Psycho feel as if he had stepped into a Victorian-era manor. Captain was a classicist. He seemed to enjoy the finer luxuries in life.

  At the far end of the hallway, the double doors of Captain’s room stood ominously in the darkness, silent and unguarded. He approached them. He came to the enormous arched frame, built for an eight-foot being. He pressed his ear against the cold steel, but heard nothing. He peered through the gap, but he only saw darkness.

  He turned the handle and gently pushed. Both doors swung inwards with a yawning creak, and beyond they revealed an unlit room. He stepped inside and shut the doors gently behind him. With moonlight slanting through one window, he navigated the darkness. Like Engineer’s quarters, Captain’s was large and designed with separate rooms for sleeping, study, meals and leisure, but it was a mess. Tall, red drapes from the windows had been half-torn and left strewn across the floor. The tables were tipped and the lamps had broken on the floor, shattering all light. Artwork was askew. Platters of food, uneaten, had been viciously thrown across the room, as if in mad protest. There was no one here.

  Captain’s mantelpiece was lined with curious objects which caught Psycho’s eye. There was an antique globe, rotating in a brass frame, but it was not Earth. A line of triangular medals were proudly displayed in a glass case, crediting military accomplishments in multiple fields. There was a wristwatch, made of a gold substance with a leathery band, which was an intricate, multi-layered analogue device displaying many rotating hands to measure time in multiple cosmoses.