Pilot X

by Tom Merritt

  “When I received the information she had been made a full Ambassador, I contacted her and made communication available. I anticipated her reputation for meticulous records might require it someday.”

  “You always think ahead, Verity.”

  “Water is wet,” the ship responded.

  “Your sense of humor is coming along quite well.”

  “Was that funny?” she asked.

  “See?!”

  “The Secretary has sent a private request for a meeting in his office,” Verity said.

  “Still joking?”

  “I am not joking.”

  “He didn’t say which office?” It wasn’t like Verity not to be precise when passing along information.

  “The message lists the Secretary’s main office as the location.”

  “Oh! His real office.”

  “It would seem so.”

  “Well, this will be interesting.”

  “Ready to depart,” Verity answered.

  It was still a dirty planet, young and unorganized. Its inhabitants would not be civilized or respectable neighbors for centuries more after that. Eventually, though, they would become the most respected species in existence. Ambassador X knew this because he was one of them.

  The Secretary made his office in this space-time point because of this juxtaposition. Anyone arriving saw the planet in its ancient state. He felt the Guardians of Alenda should never forget their heritage.

  Unlike Ambassador X’s previous visit to this era, this particular arrival point was unfixed. The conditions were such that nothing visitors could do would affect any significant events. Butterflies flapped their wings in vain here. The outside winds were too strong.

  Ambassador X landed the Verity a short walk from the rough mud hut the Secretary called his real office. He resolved to be cooperative this time and hopefully put things with the Secretary back on an even keel.

  When Ambassador X arrived at the hut, he found fifty people from various species lined up in parade formation outside. The Secretary stood in front drilling them on something. It was hard to tell what. He barked unintelligible words, and the people responded in their own languages.

  A pink octopod in shiny silver laser armor stood next to a Lemring monopod attached to a wheeled motivator. Next to them was a strange-looking fishlike creature Ambassador X couldn’t place, who seemed to be riding in a Sensaurian bucket and wearing a breathing mask. A biped species wearing brown cloth with flat hair and a bushy dash of a mustache on an otherwise hairless face stood next. That one was dwarfed by a gigantic red scaly creature wrapped in what would have otherwise been a pretty green sari.

  Agent Asa was nowhere to be seen.

  “Private army?” Ambassador X inquired as he came into earshot.

  The Secretary snapped his head toward Ambassador X and grinned. “Special assignments! These fine leaders are being trained to take control of their civilizations in support of the Alendans. Some of them have tall tasks, including the unification of their worlds. But they all are masters now. We’re about to send them off to their various planets. I call them the Manic Masters!”

  “That may not sound as good out loud as it does in your head,” Ambassador X mused.

  The Secretary waved him off. “Dismissed!” he shouted to the group, and they moved off into the forest.

  “Glad you got to see them, though,” the Secretary said as he motioned Ambassador X toward the mud hut. “They’re a key to the Dimensional War. I intend to litter these crack leaders throughout space-time like mines. When the Progons or Sensaurians try to take their planets, they’ll snap like a trap!”

  “Fantastic,” Ambassador X said, following the Secretary into the hut.

  It was a little larger than Ambassador X remembered, though the interior was still rough. The Secretary hadn’t done much to spruce it up over the years. He easily could have constructed a modern technological space hidden from the natives. Instead, he lived, dressed, and smelled period-appropriate.

  “Have a seat. Apologies as usual for the lack of comforts, but—well, you know the reasons.” The Secretary looked abashed.

  Ambassador X had learned the reasons repetitively. The Secretary wanted as little pollution of the planet as possible. Not because of effects on the timeline, but the Secretary’s own ecological sensitivities. He just didn’t like the idea of the planet all mucked up before Alendans even discovered the steam engine. He also liked to feel the discomfort of his visitors. Ambassador X remembered that all too well.

  “I’ve asked you here because it’s time for you to take another difficult journey, the end of which even I can’t see. This journey is the reason I’ve had to be so hard on you sometimes. It’s the reason you were trained and became an Ambassador. It will be the hardest test you’ve ever faced, and as bad as I feel for what you’ve gone through, you could not face this next journey without having done so.”

  This was not the usual opener.

  “The Progons and the Sensaurians are on the move. Both in different eras. The effects are spread out over a vast amount of space and time.”

  “You think we would have noticed that before,” Ambassador X ventured.

  The Secretary nodded. “A few of us have. Certainly. But only in the corners. It’s like that old philosopher’s story about our home planet. If an alien landed blindfolded in the Jerendran Desert and took off his blindfold, he’d think he landed on a desert planet. If he landed in a forest, he’d think he landed on a forest planet, et cetera. We travel all through space and time, but we still only see a corner of it.”

  “So what’s this issue, then?”

  “The Dimensional War. It’s time you learned more about it. Your observations on Hermitage have probably led you to guess a lot of this. Hermitage is sort of the end of an exhaust pipe for the huge machinations that keep the war hidden. It’s the greatest war that ever existed. And yet the greatest secret ever kept. Some of our own have turned against us and threaten to undermine us from within or without. We have to be extremely careful who we trust. Our enemies, even some Alendans, mean to end the Guardians’ protection of the universe and change every unfixed point.

  “Ambassador X.” He stood. “It’s a war only you can prevent or end. I’m sorry.”

  The Secretary was not joking. He used Ambassador X’s correct title. For the first time in their relationship, the Secretary seemed to be dealing straight. Ambassador X bowed his head. Any remaining annoyance with the Secretary fled.

  “What do I do?”

  “You start with another mission of peace. A real mission of peace, not a gesture. A much greater demonstration than before. This time you will not just be a messenger. First I’m sending you to the Progons. After that to the Sensaurians. This time you won’t ask. You must rearrange their motivations in such a way to limit the war to a more conventional size and save the universe.”

  “And if I fail? Do I fail?”

  “Even I don’t know if you do. It’s that obscured. But if you do, you’ll have another option. A horrible one, but an option nonetheless. You’ll learn it in time.”

  Ambassador X got up to leave.

  “Oh, one more thing,” the Secretary said. “Two more, actually. Hold on to the Verity tightly. You’re a Pilot at heart. Don’t forget that.”

  Ambassador X nodded. “And the other?”

  “Don’t trust the Vice Counsel’s plan. That’s all I can say. All I need say, I think. Good luck, Ambassador X.”

  Luck. It was a word the Secretary never used. It was frightening that he did so now.

  Before Ambassador X was even through the door, Verity had plotted coordinates to the Progon homeworld of Tiel.

  “The assignment came in as you were speaking with the Secretary,” she said.

  “From where?”

  “From Agent Asa.”

  “I didn’t see her there.”

  “She wasn’t. She stopped by here and delivered them personally.”

  “Don’t tell me
you have her on your contact list too?”

  “No. But she had emergency protocols. I could not deny her access. She left you a message.”

  “Oh?”

  “She said to tell you ‘thanks for the ride.’ She said you’d know what it meant soon.”

  “Lovely. Anything else?”

  “She delivered these supplementary mission instructions.”

  A briefing on both the Progon and Sensaurian assignments was included. He was to proceed to Tiel and take residence as a diplomat. He was being assigned to a sensitive time point after a thousand-year peace. The previous Ambassador hadn’t lasted long and was now in the hospital. He’d have to read more about that later.

  His main assignment was to not go insane but to lead the Progons to think he was. Progons of this era isolated diplomats and wore them down until they were dying to leave. They would either crack and provide Progons with valuable intelligence or rush negotiations in order to have an excuse to leave for their homeworld.

  Ambassador X was chosen because of his mental stability shown in the secret training session with the Secretary. He needed to outlast the Progons at their own game, then sue for lasting peace.

  “Well,” he sighed. “Time to go play chess with the machines.”

  “Departing to Tiel now.”

  MISSION TO TIEL

  Tiel appeared to be on fire. That was normal. On many planets, vegetation blended together to make land appear green. On Tiel, individual fires blended together to make land appear orange. Gas fields and generators burned across much of Tiel in a massive conflagration. They powered the great machines in which the Progons lived.

  This was one of the many reasons Alendans worked hard never to get assigned to Tiel. There were few places on the planet that weren’t deadly to Alendans, and fewer people to spend your time with in the nondeadly sections. Not to mention the Progons were sworn enemies of Alenda throughout most of time and space.

  Ambassador X had been assigned as a diplomat in a relatively calm stretch, in order to get the Progons in a more cooperative era. He was only the second Alendan to serve as diplomat in more than a thousand years at this point. The first had lasted a week before having to be committed. Ambassador X was fairly certain it was a faked mental illness. And he thoroughly understood.

  It was all the same to the Progons. The individual water sacks called Alendans barely registered to a race made of electricity. If a single Alendan ever physically assaulted a Progon, it might break a circuit and electrocute the Alendan in the process. Also, Progons could use their timecoms to communicate through time, so they knew what happened and would happen at least as much as the time-traveling Alendans did. In fact, they knew some things much quicker because they only had to ask their far-flung machines what was going on. Alendans had to travel in space as well as time.

  That didn’t mean there weren’t gaps in their knowledge. No race could be at all points in space-time. So there were always mysteries. And this stretch of Progon time was a mystery to the Alendans. To be fair, this stretch of Alendan history was also unknown to the Progons. They had carefully arranged to stay out of each other’s way for one thousand years. Ambassador X did not love the idea of disturbing that quiet period. For one, the Progons could call ahead to their future selves and find out what he did before he knew he would do it. He hated that about them. For another it meant he was the one to break the fragile peace that led to the greatest war in history. A war that Alendan High Command now knew raged in all manner of previously unknown stretches of history.

  It had happened, was happening, and would happen in many regions of space-time. Ambassador X’s mission was to mitigate it and find out why it happened at all.

  Ambassador X’s only protection was the Verity. Within it, the Progons could not see him. The Verity’s encapsulated singularity gave him a vast ship’s interior, lush with rooms, swimming pools, theaters, and anything else one could think of. It also existed outside of normal space-time, giving him a shield against attempts to see the parts of his future or past that existed within the influence of the singularity.

  It was the only way he could do this job.

  He floated around Tiel for two more orbits before finally answering the relentless, mindless request for identification from the Tiel capital.

  “Ambassador X of Alenda requesting diplomatic courtesies and permission to land in the capital.”

  “Permission granted,” the voice spoke through static. It wasn’t a Progon. It was just a machine. Ambassador X might never interact with an actual Progon during his entire time on the planet. The machines were why the Progons were thought of as a race of robots. The Progons themselves were much more insidious than robots. They had feelings and art and culture of a sort. But each individual was an electrical circuit. Their beliefs were so alien it was almost impossible for a waterbag like Ambassador X to grasp them. That alone wouldn’t have been so bad if the Progons were not also convinced that they alone had a pure and dominant culture and all other beings should be subservient, like their machines.

  “If only the robots really did rise up against their masters, ever,” mused Ambassador X. Then he took the Verity out of orbit and headed down to the surface to begin his mission.

  EMBASSY

  The Verity descended toward a stretch of identical, evenly spaced one-story metal buildings. The Progons famously built down not up, so buildings generally looked alike from the air. Building down led them to more efficient material conversion or some such thing. The Progons were always about efficiency. Ambassador X’s approved approach vector led him to one particular building that slowly opened to reveal a hangar. Besides the standard spaceport landing equipment, the hangar was empty except for a lone figure.

  The Verity touched down, and before Ambassador X could finish a landing checklist, a warning bell sounded. “External lockdown applied, all systems suspended,” the ship told him. Not surprising, but disconcerting. It was the space-travel equivalent of spooky castle doors shutting behind you and locking.

  The Progons sent a bipedal robot to meet him. That was an unusual sign of deference. Progon machines came in all kinds of form factors, but few were bipedal. It wasn’t a necessary form for almost anything they did. The Progons generally didn’t care about making visitors feel at home either, so it felt like they were trying to flatter him.

  “Ambassador X, welcome to Tiel,” said the robot. It was likely an automaton, not an inhabited machine, but Ambassador X wondered. The Progons preferred to stay in large structures, communing with each other in their electron-fast existence, rather than dealing with the slowness of machines and the tedium of speaking aloud like an animal.

  Progons could inhabit their robots and automata whenever they wanted, and it was difficult to tell when they did. A Progon was undetectable without an oscilloscope. Beings of pure electricity could only move through conducting materials but could do that almost invisibly. You could theoretically have a conversation with a machine on Progon and, in the course of the conversation, talk to the robot mind as well as several different individual Progons, and you’d never know.

  Although Progons claimed they never did this and preferred to let their robots be robots.

  “Thank you,” Ambassador X ventured to the automaton/possible-but-unlikely Progon. “What may I call you?”

  “Assistant,” said the robot in a not unpleasant tone. Progons. They had names. Their robots had names. But they just sucked at translation. “Assistant, er, 5.” The robot seemed to make it up on the spot. “If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you to your quarters.”

  They left the hangar by a metal walkway that led directly to other square metal buildings. The Progons did like their right angles. Here and there in the distance, other automata went about their business, but Ambassador X didn’t see another soul. Of course the Progons could have flitted into and out of the robot and even the buildings around him without his ever knowing.

  There were other Ambassadors from other civil
izations on the planet as well. Some four hundred and fifty-three thousand of them. Each one was kept apart from the others, equally spaced across the planet, to prevent them from composing a threat or hatching a conspiracy.

  It was a type of psychological warfare. Ambassadors on Tiel did not commune with their own kind and only had automata to speak with. It drove some mad. The previous Ambassador hadn’t gone mad, just requested an urgent transfer for “family reasons.” At least that’s what the Alendans told the Progons.

  The robot opened a sliding door at the end of one gangway and motioned Ambassador X to enter. Inside was what appeared to be a one-story flat. If there were lower stories, there was no obvious way of entering them. The quarters were sufficient. On the left was a circular mat that likely served as a bed. Ambassador X knew it was meant to serve a multitude of species, hence the shape and odd texture.

  On the right was a small table that served as a desk and eating area with a chair and a few outlets for connectivity and such. Along the back wall was the kitchen. Large cabinets were set in the wall next to a mounted food-preparation machine. A sink of sorts, at least something that looked like it, dispensed water. A lower wide bowl was set off on its own with a closable divider, meant for bathing or possibly excretion or, knowing the Progons, both.

  The robot opened the cabinets to reveal stacks of identical bars wrapped in white paper. One side of the cabinet was refrigerated.

  “We have provided Alendan foods for your preparation. Stocks will be replenished automatically. Should you require other foods, please make your request through the diplomatic channel you were assigned.”

  In other words, you can fill out some paperwork, but don’t expect anything but these bars. The robot moved to the sliding door.

  “These buttons control the door. If you need to leave, please alert us to your planned movements through your assigned diplomatic channel. You are expected out for exercise between the fourth and sixth hours.”