Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  ***

  “Oh my,” Ariel said, regarding the sole city on Sanguis. It had been built inside a crater—one big enough that the asteroid impact should have shattered this world in two. The rest of the team was standing along the rim beside her staring into the abyss.

  “Why build a city inside a crater?” asked DeWitt, a.k.a. Mr. Big Picture Is Still Coming Together. “The flooding issues alone…”

  “To say nothing of trying to sweep it of leaves,” Ajax said. “Seriously, have you ever tried to sweep uphill, with the wind in your face, to boot? Trust me on this, it’s a lost cause.”

  “If the idiot choir could please pipe down,” Crumley said, “I’d like to hear from one of the brainiacs.”

  Satellite and Ariel made the declaration, talking over one another as the same insight dawned on them at the same time, “It’s a satellite dish.”

  Satellite went on to refine that statement, “The entire city is a satellite dish, down to the skyscrapers, which are the tuning instruments on the dish, drawing in power from different locations in space.”

  “What power?” Crumley asked.

  “I’ll need a moment.” Satellite was already playing with his scanner.

  “This is too much heavy lifting to do on your own, Satellite. Let me help.” Ariel wasn’t exactly waiting for permission. She was making adjustments on her handheld scanner and on her mindchip both like a backup musician on stage warming up.

  “The rest of you look sharp,” Crumley said. “The bastards know we’re here, so where are they?”

  Omega Force put their heads on a swivel and started covering one another’s sixes. Crumley, for his part, was assessing the best sniper positions to be in for anyone looking to take out the Alpha Unit brainiacs who they were in no position to lose. He’d switched to augmented reality looking for life signs well beyond the range of his natural senses, and scanning for weapons’ tech that could be bearing down on them. Mindful these were psychic vampires they were talking about, he had his mindchip perform some on-chip alterations as the self-evolving algorithms figured out how the hell to scan for that. He was just glad that wasn’t his job.

  “Any of you guys picking up anything on AR?” Crumley asked.

  “Nope,” DeWitt returned.

  “Maybe these psychic vampires are ghosts,” Cronos offered. “Scratch that. With my ongoing mindchip modifications, my mindchip assures me that I can now see ghosts, even if I don’t.”

  “Honey,” Ajax said in an altered voice, “the only thing that could save that outfit is an invisibility cloak.”

  Not surprisingly, as Ajax tensed up, he retreated into his usual coping methods, Crumley thought. But they all knew when to tune in one another and when to tune out one another. Ajax might be worth listening to this time; vampires that could cloak themselves in invisibility might explain why nothing was showing up on AR.

  Continuing to marry his AR to his sniper’s rifle scope, and peering out at Sanguis with both, Ajax, on a roll, said, “Why do medications always have side effects like ‘anal leakage’ and ‘suicidal thoughts?’ Why not ‘invisibility’ or ‘spontaneous orgasms.”

  “I don’t get it,” Satellite said.

  “What, my jokes?” Ajax asked nonplused. “Everyone gets my jokes. That’s why I have the highest incidents of fists to the face of anyone in any branch of the armed forces. I’m rather proud of that.”

  The others, ignoring him, gathered around Satellite and his scanner.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Ariel echoed.

  Crumley was getting impatient. “What?”

  “This satellite dish isn’t receiving any information from anywhere, any form of energy whatsoever,” Satellite explained.

  “It makes perfect sense,” Crumley said. Satellite and Ariel craned their heads toward him. “These psychic vampires learned to vacuum up psychic energy from the stars, or at least from the inhabited worlds within reach of this antenna, until they’d drained those worlds and killed off the populations. When there was no more psychic energy to suck up, the vampire population must have suffered a massive dieback.”

  Satellite and Ariel regarded one another. “Sorry,” she said. “We’re the brainiacs. It was kind of our job to come up with that revelation.”

  Crumley snorted. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll get the next one, okay?” He gazed back at the forest. “I tell you what, though, the way my skin is crawling, this vampire race is a long way from being dead.”

  “Maybe they just went dormant, you know, instead of dying?” Everyone looked at DeWitt surprised. “What? Hasn’t anyone ever watched a vampire movie? I don’t think you can technically kill the things.”

  “On the plus side, the odds are with us, right?” Ajax said anxiously. “DeWitt is only good for a smart idea every thousand years and he had one yesterday.”

  The brainiacs had returned their attention to their scanners, determined to find the source of everyone’s ill feelings.

  There were nanites flowing from Satellite’s and Ariel’s hands into the scanners, whose jobs would be to make onboard tweaks to the electronics. Rather than upgrading their mindchips further with what limited real estate they had in their heads, they were redirecting some of the nanite hive minds inside their bodies to retrofitting the scanners, at least temporarily.

  “I consider myself a rather good meter of ominousness,” Cronos said, checking out the city with his AR, noticing the strange flickers of light in the black obsidian crystal spikes that might well have been skyscrapers full of digitized beings, the all black bowl shape still trying to fire up, “since I commune with God on a regular basis. And while I give this city a high rating on the spooky meter,” he switched his attention to the woods, “the forest expanding in all directions around us is what is spiking my needle right now.”

  “I think I know why,” Ariel said. She showed her scanner to Satellite.

  “No way!” Satellite exclaimed.

  “Catch us up.” Crumley threw an eye on Futurama, who had been suspiciously quiet, his actions every bit as vague and unreadable as his face, which technically, was no longer there. He’d been crawling over the dish the entire time the team was doing their thing, up and down the various skyscrapers, hopping from one to the other.

  “See these valleys,” Ariel said. She threw up a hologram so they wouldn’t all be straining to see the small image on the scanner. She pointed to the valleys on the hollow. “They’ve been turned into satellite dishes as well, running the surface of the planet. Those petrified trees now do what these obsidian towers do.”

  “So,” Crumley said, “they needed to get access to a bigger patch of the stars when the planet’s fixed orbit wouldn’t cooperate. And they needed to shield themselves from detection in case anyone started backtracking them. Let me guess, their satellite designs got more sophisticated and cloaked as they went along.”

  “Yes,” Satellite said.

  “So they don’t just feed off psychic energy, they grow their brains off it as well,” Crumley concluded.

  Satellite and Ariel gave each other dumb looks again. “Um, technically I think it was our turn to be brilliant,” Satellite said, “but, okay.”

  Futurama jumped up on the rim of the crater, rejoining the team. “There’s only one of them left and we’ve got to hurry.” He bolted into the forest.

  “Tell me you can track him,” Crumley said, “because I know I’m not dragging my sorry ass through these woods at those speeds, I don’t care how upgraded I am.”

  “Got a lock on him,” Satellite replied.

  Futurama just kept evolving on the scanner in real time to get around the latest terrain variations.

  “You gotta admire someone who has no respect for the human form,” DeWitt said. “Just think how much our perceptions of ourselves as still human holds us back.”

  Cronos gave him a dirty look. “We’re made in the image of our Lord.”

  DeWitt pointed to the screen, “Maybe this guy took the picture
of God with a sharper lens.”

  Cronos, about to take his head off for the disrespect, was redirected by Crumley. “Come on. We’re not getting any faster standing here.”

  The team lit out in the direction the tracker was pointing, trying to keep from tripping over themselves by keeping their eyes too much on the finder, still projecting a holo out in front of them the size of a cinema screen, capturing Futurama’s shapeshifting.

  “One of the greatest challenges in life is being yourself in a world that’s trying to make you like everyone else,” Ajax said.

  “Thanks for that,” Cronos said, double-timing it alongside him, grateful for Ajax coming to his rescue after DeWitt’s disrespectful remark.

  “I was referring to that guy,” Ajax said, pointing to Futurama on the holo screen. So far, they’d seen Futurama morph from a crab-like body, to one that was more of a jumping spider, to various flitting, jet-propelled insect forms, as with his original queen-ant get up. There were times when he took on a leaping frog shape to get over a succession of ground impediments like giant fallen trees.

  By the time they caught up with Futurama it was nightfall. And they were at the crest of a valley watching the same strange phenomenon. The last vampire was levitating in a beam of light that appeared to be the focal point for the satellite dish that the valley had been turned into. But the energy feed of blue light of captured psychic energy wasn’t enough to grant him escape velocity. So he was flapping his wings to help get him off the planet.

  Futurama jumped into the valley, scampering toward the focal point of the dish, which was disguised to look like a boulder in the center of the river running through the valley.

  Crumley started firing at the vampire. The rest of Omega Force took the hint, and joined him.

  “You know that’s not going to work, right?” Ariel said. “This dish has collected too much power from far and wide that it is putting out to that vampire.” She turned from addressing Omega Force to face Satellite. “A little help?”

  As she’d crouched down, he kneeled beside her. “We’ve got to hack this dish enough to sabotage that feed before it finishes juicing that vampire up.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Satellite joined her with the particulars, mating his scanner to hers for the extra computing power.

  “Um, what is that?” Ajax said, pointing to the holo.

  Ariel and Satellite looked up from their scanners. “I think that’s Futurama,” Ariel said.

  “I don’t care for the way he’s glowing,” Ajax said. “If anyone’s going to be glowing around here, it’s going to be me. I’ve earned it with my sunny disposition.”

  Futurama was perched on that boulder in the center of the valley with the river running around it. He was morphing yet again, glowing brighter as he did so. The explosion that followed took out the entire valley and killed the pillar of blue light shooting up from the ground in one.

  The falling vampire landed on the pile of rubble where the valley once was and started shrieking so harshly Omega Force could feel the blood oozing out of their ears, the protective nanites in that region shattered.

  The vampire took to the air, firing lasers from its eyes the size of broom handles. That forced Omega Force to take cover, dragging with them Ariel and Satellite—who couldn’t react fast enough, for all their youth—out of harm’s way.

  With a clap of his wings, the vampire put out the fires he’d started with the lasers and flattened the forest around them in one. To be fair, those were some mighty big, stronger-than-average-looking wings. So much for cover.

  Omega Force was emptying their assault rifles at the vampire, and those weapons were manufacturing new shells on the fly with entirely different properties when the prior shells failed to do anything. It was a strange moment for Omega Force, not used to technology losing a face-down match with Mother Nature.

  But maybe Techa had not lost yet.

  Futurama had been reassembling himself the whole time, pulling his pieces together with the help of reassembly AI on a distributed hive mind of nanites. Crumley knew that some of their technology had this ability. Certain bombs came this way. Once the shell was reassembled, the drone bomb went in search of more explosive material it could fill its belly with, kind of a gift that kept on giving. But this was the first time he’d seen this idea applied to a humanoid.

  The vampire picked up a boulder big enough to smash the humanoids in one throw. Firing at it, their weapons made no better headway.

  “Guess that explains how that original meteor impact managed to not destroy this world,” Crumley thought. Ah, the strange things that come to mind in the face of death.

  As the vampire was about to deliver the death blow, Futurama came up behind him and wrapped his body around him, shapeshifting yet again into a cage. “Drop it,” she said in a more distinctly recognizable female voice.

  The vampire, for all its strength, didn’t look like it was interested in draining itself resisting against whatever material Futurama was currently made out of.

  Crumley approached their prisoner. “We’re only interested in how you evolve. Tell us, and you can go.”

  Crumley beamed a truckload of literature and philosophy at him from his mindchip, giving that big-brained vampire a chance to hack their language enough to answer him. Crumley made sure to include the audiobook versions as well, since how well the guy could read was hardly the issue. Crumley just made sure to include nothing from the maths and sciences on the chip, considering what these guys had managed to do with what science they had.

  Finally, the vampire’s struggling against his constraints ratcheted down yet another notch, as he sighed. It stood two feet taller than Crumley. The humanoid body was clearly identifiable, serving as the skeleton and musculature to drive those wings. As to the enlarged head, well, it was to scale with his body, but still three times as large as Crumley’s, and most of it was cranium.

  “You’re already well briefed on how we operate,” the vampire said.

  Crumley startled. He should have realized that “psychic” vampire implied a keen ability to get inside their heads.

  The vampire’s voice included clicks and whirs, coming across as so much static, as if he were fighting his own voice box and palate to make these sounds. “Once we’ve farmed what we can from any world we migrate to, we take to the stars yet again, to find a new home. Like your queen ants, only the queen and a couple mating drones get to leave. But we birth our own drones when the time is right.”

  “You’re related to The Collectors, aren’t you?” Crumley asked.

  The creature managed a menacing smile, at least that’s what Crumley presumed the expression to be. “Our descendants. Some of us are lucky enough to land in galaxies rich for farming. Those of us so lucky would grow bigger brains as a result, using the expanded reasoning to enhance our survival. I have only heard rumors of The Collectors from the other worlds we farmed from here.

  “It seems they evolved into a space race that no longer required worlds with atmospheres. That in turn made it that much easier to find more worlds to feed off of as they were not limited by the trajectories of the worlds and what civilizations were in view of those worlds. And they could migrate without diminishing their numbers down to one sole queen.”

  “But,” Crumley pushed, sensing the creature holding back.

  “They were ultimately enslaved and their abilities put to use enslaving others in turn.”

  “But they don’t drink their victims to death, as you do,” Crumley goaded.

  “No. They control their numbers, just whatever can be supported off of the surplus psychic energy that comes from fanning strife among worlds. They evolved their capacity to flame those fires so there’s more surplus without ever actually weakening their victims.”

  “Release him,” Crumley said.

  The rest of Omega Force gasped and stepped back, including the two Alpha Unit teens. Omega Force brought their arms to bear once again. “Crumley!” DeWitt exclaimed, his t
one protesting the order for him.

  Futurama released the vampire all the same.

  The creature made no effort to exact retribution; he looked more resigned to his fate than furious. Perhaps it was another survival mechanism designed to conserve psychic energy.

  “You’ve granted me a mock freedom. You’ve already sent a singularity pulse through to the Nautilus, ordering her to destroy this world, with or without you on it.”

  “I’m guessing she’ll wait until we’re off,” Crumley said.

  “Why did you risk releasing me?” the vampire asked.

  “No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time.”

  The vampire craned his head left and right as if scanning the download he’d received from Crumley earlier, in his mind’s eye, trying to make sense of his statement. “A quote from Alan Watts. You’ve very possibly identified my species principal flaw. We have focused more and more mind power on becoming more and more efficient manipulators. We’ve gotten so good at it, we’ve forgotten the importance of a little occasional inefficiency.” The vampire refocused his eyes on Crumley. “This insight will help you greatly in putting an end to The Collectors. I underestimated you.”

  “Everyone is a genius,” Crumley replied. “But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.”

  The psychic vampire showed remorse on his face for consuming worlds full of such geniuses as part of his diet. But Crumley suspected it was simply another manipulation.

  “Enough philosophical chestnuts, Crumley, let’s get the hell out of here,” DeWitt said.

  They were beaming up to the Nautilus. Their bodies now immaterial enough to survive the destruction of the planet. Mother’s death ray was depressingly efficient. Witnessing a planet being torn apart effortlessly from this close up was anything but a spiritually uplifting experience; he wondered how Cronos was dealing with it.