Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  Technically, this was a response reserved for a Rainbow Eyed one, but she was here on Solo’s orders to empower his craziness and that of his Alpha Unit cadets who relied on radically out-of-the-box thinking and fighting with untested prototypes, both of which could make them vulnerable as often as it gave them an edge. Lucky him that he had received this favor from Solo, as leasing the Blue to him seemed to be quite the package deal.

  The truth was he’d been smitten by the Blues the first time he’d encountered them. He just never dreamed…

  He felt the effects of aging wearing off as she continued to secrete saliva into him through her kisses. Amazing she could do more than even the nanotech cocktails percolating through his body could do. The effect would only last as long as the lovemaking, and then he would return to his old beat up self, still on the front lines working entirely off of the life-sustaining properties of nanites still generations well behind hers. Mother could have narrowed the gap between them, but the most advanced nanites, so far, only Cassandra and the nun could handle without going mad, and even then, only for short durations.

  It didn’t take him long to realize that Soturi was just priming him for the rambunctious roll in the hay to come.

  ***

  Skyhawk and the rest of Alpha Unit walked in on Soturi and Patent carrying on on the floor of the bridge of the Nelson Mandela.

  Reia grimaced. “Techa, it’s like watching your parents making out.”

  “For the record,” Skyhawk said, “This is way more traumatizing than anything we faced out there.”

  Walking backwards, Alpha Unit retreated to the elevator, closing their eyes until the doors closed in front of them.

  “We have nanites that can erase these memories, right?” Reia asked. When she didn’t get a response, she said again, “Right?”

  NINETY-THREE

  SPACE-TIME ALCHEMIST SHIP, VORTEX

  Theseus teleported onto The Space-Time Alchemist ship, Vortex, one of six in the collection they’d absconded with from Kang Dynasty Federation space.

  He gazed upward from the deck he was on, seemingly forever. No skyscrapers on Earth ever rose so tall. Not that he’d know, having never stepped on Earth, but he did have memory banks full of metaphors of this kind to help him communicate with humanoids that had been born on Earth.

  The creepy crawlies investigating the ship, going over it, inch by inch, caught his attention. “Are those guys on our side?”

  “Yes, Sir,” the Theta Team member replied. “Mother fabricated them to investigate The Space-Time Alchemist ships. As you know, we were bred for adaptability to alien biospheres; we aren’t exactly maximized for artificial habitats. I call them Rama Rangers. On account of Rendezvous with Rama is my favorite book from childhood, and Rangers because if sufficiently provoked, like us, they’re some seriously deadly bastards.”

  “You never had a childhood, Curtis, you were incubated like the rest of us. Those are false memories.”

  “Strange the things that keep us warm at night.” Curtis couldn’t keep his eyes off the newbies, either. They were probably giving him the creeps like they were doing to Theseus.

  Theseus had to remind himself of Theta Team’s effect on other humanoid classes. “How are they coming with the legacy tech?”

  “You might have to ask Mother that. None of us has figured out how to even communicate with the Rama Rangers. And no one wants to get too close, you know, in case we spook them as much as they spook us.”

  “What are the odds one of these Space-Time Alchemist ships will play any part in getting us clear of The Collectors’ Menagerie?”

  “Less than zero, sir. We’re talking technology possibly billions of years ahead of us. Mother will likely have to parallel array with her sister ships to have enough brain power to even scratch at the surface of the mystery. And she’s lost that ability now that she’s inside the Menagerie.”

  “In that case I’m out of here. This just became a colossal waste of my time.”

  “I heard a rumor Theta Team is being redeployed to the various planets in the Gypsy Galaxy Mother thinks us best suited for and that are most likely loaded with sentient life.”

  “I know. I’m the one she chose to deliver the news to the individual cadets. Just remember, Curtis, we’re Mother’s best guess on how to survive the biosphere and whatever lifeforms we come up against. But even with our artificial memories, all of us will be coming up against novel situations for which all the battle-tech simulations and reflexes hard-wired into our nervous systems is not going to do a damn bit of good.”

  “So stay humble, you’re saying?”

  “No,” Theseus sighed, “stay alive is what I’m saying, at least until help arrives. And don’t forget, your greatest weapon is not your assault rifle or your scientist’s toolkit of scanners and probes, it’s your autogenesis. You can take any cell from your body, anything you touch, and procure new lifeforms with it. Ones that might have some chance of broaching the gap between you and what alien life you run into if every other effort has failed.”

  Curtis snorted. “So, you’re saying, if we don’t die in the first five minutes of teleporting to the new world, our best hope is to live long enough to spawn a lifeform that will make a better impression on the enemy.”

  “You were born to die, Curtis. We all were. It’s nothing personal.”

  Curtis smiled sardonically. “You have a way with words, you know that? You should have been a poet.”

  Theseus rested his hand on Curtis’s shoulder, squeezed hard. “Against enemies too alien for us to even comprehend, against insurmountable forces and enemies that can throw universes of soldiers against us even as we rally feeble support from this galaxy and a handful of others, it is we who will make the real difference. We alone can fill the void. We are humanity’s hope now.”

  “The humans hate us or at the very least fear us.”

  “It wouldn’t be soldiering if it wasn’t a thankless job.”

  Curtis grimaced. “For the record I never liked you.”

  Theseus smiled. “It’s a bioengineered response. We were built to like best the worlds we can gain a footing on, and the lifeforms we can forge alliances with, or the ones we ourselves spawn.”

  “Throwing galactic civilizations against other galactic civilizations, universe-scale civilizations against other universes… It’s a game for supersentients, not bioengineered humanoids who can’t even process the scale of it.”

  It was Theseus’s turn to smile sardonically. “Do you feel truly insignificant yet?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Theseus squeezed his shoulder even harder. “And yet the smallest specks of space dust collected up in your body will be the thing that spoils the best laid plans of friends and foes alike, supersentients notwithstanding. That has got to give you some sense of payback.”

  Curtis laughed. “It does, sir.”

  “Speaking for myself, it makes me hard just thinking about it.”

  Curtis confessed, “I was wondering if we were sharing a homoerotic moment.”

  “We might be if we had any idea what sex the other one was.”

  They both shared a laugh.

  “I’m glad we got a chance to have this little talk, Curtis. Truth be known, I was wondering how to ease you into this topic, and into what comes next for you.”

  Curtis gulped at the ominous turn this conversation had just taken.

  But Theseus was gone moments later, after some soulful eye gazing at one another, the same way he’d come.

  And moments after that, Curtis found himself being teleported off site.

  Mother briefed him en route.

  By the time he’d touched down, he knew everything she did about the new world that pertained to his survival.

  Everything but the sheer terror of being there.

  ***

  THE GYPSY GALAXY

  ANDAREAN WORLD KNOWN AS PROGENITOR

  Progenitor was one of thirty-six worlds orbiting twin suns. Curi
ously, they were largely water worlds, with very little land penetrating the surfaces of those oceans.

  Progenitor, as with all the Andarean worlds, had only one thing to say for itself.

  The Orchlids.

  A curious lifeform that resembled a giant lotus leaf floating on the surface. The Orchlids were living satellite antennae. They could tune in transmissions from across the heavens.

  They’d learned long ago in their history to parallel array themselves across all Andarean worlds to enhance the resolution of their hearing of the transmissions coming from the stars.

  More curious still, they specialized in the transmissions broadcasted to and fro between extremely evolved artificial intelligences. Gaia-like supersentiences, such as the one comprising Mirage, the Orchlids were deaf too. Perhaps not so surprising when you considered that the Orchlids themselves had more in common with humanoid technology than with humanoids. They were crafted out of woven strands of polymerized metals and strange materials still new to material scientists, and even to Solo aboard the Nautilus, who had already identified the strange components making up the Kang goo.

  Mother wanted a way of tapping these communications without overloading her own supersentience. She was built with a broad-based agenda, and couldn’t justify the amount of computing time toward a single purpose that would be ultimately without end, what’s more. And she could already tell the supersentiences communicating back and forth with one another were smarter than she was, because she could make no headway with the transmissions in the time she had to devote to the problem.

  That was where Curtis entered the picture.

  Leon was taking his Gypsy Galaxy, the moment he made his prison break, into the multiverse, determined to police it for any and all transgalactic civilizations that would let him, and to fight those who couldn’t get with the idea of spreading free-thinking throughout the cosmos.

  He himself had no idea, of course, if such a police force was even needed. Most of the heavens may well be enlightened already relative to Earth and to the galactic civilizations the Nautilus had encountered so far. But Mother was wary on this point. They all were, after encountering The Collectors and those Galactic Civilizations that were their prisoners.

  But she was even more concerned for Leon than herself. She knew better than he did that his growingly impressive armada was anything but. So what if he could teleport an entire galaxy—or several—right into a transgalactic civilization he meant to go to war with? Considering the handful of planets that were inhabited in each of the galaxies he oversaw, and how few of those had spaceships far less space fleets… His domain would have more inroads for the enemy to enter without anyone knowing than he could count.

  But her biggest fear was that he’d overlay the Gypsy Galaxy on a stage three transgalactic civilization. If she was right about the nature of communications across such an expanse, and its technological capabilities, they would know everything about him in an instant, and he nothing about them. The idea of intimidating a Stage 3 civilization by playing a game of When Galaxies Collide as they’d done with the Kang Dynasty Galaxy, throwing suns, worlds, and asteroids at the enemy to soften them up before charging in with one or another space fleets…

  She didn’t want to break his spirit by informing him of just how facile an idea that was. His ragtag collection of galaxies was far better equipped to play pirates at the outposts or borders of TGCs, picking off the unsuspecting space fleet.

  Intelligence was everything, even in the final days of the Milky Way Galaxy, before it morphed into the Gypsy Galaxy. This would only be truer in the days ahead.

  So, once again, this was where Curtis came in.

  His mission a simple one.

  The Orchlids were starving. They fed like Venus fly traps on Earth. And they’d consumed all the biomass their worlds had to offer. It might very well be why Mother couldn’t decode the messages they were still picking up on. The Orchlids themselves, perhaps once capable of translating these signals on the fly and making sense of them, were likely delirious from starvation, no longer able to make sense of anything.

  So not only was Curtis on this planet alone, marooned from his own kind.

  He was here to be food.

  And it would do no good to be eaten once.

  That would barely suffice one Orchlid, far less a planet full of them, far less all thirty-six Andarean worlds.

  He had to use his capacity for autogenesis to cast his seeds far and wide, to mature his spawn at an unbelievable rate, to feed the Orchlids on this world and the others. And that, of course, would mean that his spawn would have to be modified to be caught up in the atmospheric currents, be driven high into the stratosphere and beyond, and then like sperm swimming toward countless ova, swim upstream of the gravity wells of each world toward the other “ova” or Andarean worlds.

  Curtis started by converting the skin cells on his epidermis to stem cells, and then setting them adrift on the ocean to polymerize the water. The hydrocarbons, which could be derived from the H20 molecules and the chemical wastes of digestion coming from the Orchlids was the most abundant resource to feed on. Since he didn’t yet know how much of the ocean’s water the Orchlids needed for themselves, he made sure to polymerize just enough to create the feedstock his stem cells needed. These polymerized packets would become the placentas for his children to take form in.

  His children would have his memories, know everything he knew, for it was unclear how much of that would one day come in handy.

  Looking forward to the pain of a slow, tortuous death, being consumed alive in the beds of the Venus flytraps would be their birthright. Not only would they have to be conscious through it all, they would have to record and study their experiments, being fed on by the Orchlids, track every movement of their bodies’ cells into the Orchlids, see how they mated with the physiologies of the Orchlids and how that mating affected their consciousness. Each cell would be its own spy heading into enemy territory and their mission was to know more about the Orchlids than the Orchlids knew about themselves by the time digestion was complete.

  Only in such a manner could Curtis and his progeny come to understand the nature of how the Orchlids worked their magic. Curtis’s progeny in turn would transmit everything they’d learned to the next generation on line, taking shape in the placentas drifting in the ocean.

  For however many generations it took, the day would come when the children Curtis had spawned would have the same ability as the Orchlids, to pick up transmissions to and from artificial supersentient lifeforms. They would be able to shapeshift into them. They would be able to transmit their intel to Mother having made sense of it for her.

  Even more to the point, should the Andarean worlds and their suns need to be relocated to spy on other transmissions better, they could be, without endangering the Orchlids who could not live outside of the constraints set by their particular swatch of the heavens. For the hybrid lifeforms would have inherited Theta Team’s adaptabilities to new worlds, even as those new worlds morphed under the biophysics and chemistries conforming to the new sectors of the multiverse to where they were being transported.

  And if the planets and the entire solar system were destroyed, once discovered by the enemy, it wouldn’t matter. Mother would have all she needed to recreate the Andrean worlds, if not directly, then through her Planet Eaters.

  But the real sticking point was that at no point could the agony of being slowly eaten alive ever be dialed down as part of the co-evolution of lifeforms. For it appeared that above all else, the Orchlids were sadists who thrived on the suffering of those they fed on as much as on their biomass.

  That, in fact, was what most interested Mother in the Orchlids. Surely, such a creature would be far more dialed into the suffering of the cosmos than into the Shangri-Las out there. Surely, they were looking to feed further on the psychic pain coming from the heavens if only to compensate for the lack of food stuffs on their own worlds.

  Curtis was assig
ned to test out that theory through any number of means. First and foremost by evolving his capacity to feel pain from one generation to the next, to endure ever more exquisite torture without succumbing. To see if that boosted the power of the Orchlids or not.

  Did restricting the diet of the Orchlids, giving them just enough to keep them alive but hungry, allow them to reach further into the stars to better attune to psychic pain coming from even further away? Or did allowing them to gorge themselves boost their powers?

  Curtis and his offspring would have to dial up the sheer terror they felt over what lay ahead for them, not just their capacity for suffering. As surely those the Orchlids had fed on must have endured such sensations.

  It was a hell of a fate he’d inherited. But if Curtis succeeded at his mission, Leon would have the tuning fork he required to resonate to just those locations in the heavens where he was most needed to put an end to the suffering.

  Just not Curtis’s.

  Talk about taking a bullet for someone.

  He was never prouder to be a Theta Team member, or more terrified, than he was right now.

  Within weeks his spawn was already drifting up from the oceans heading for far away Andarean worlds. And the ones biodifferentiated enough to stay behind were becoming floating placentas filled with little Curtises, respectful of their role as feedstock in a very bizarre food chain.

  Mother, who didn’t function in linear time, was already preparing Leon for the next stage of his morphogenesis into supreme commander of all Special Forces units across the heavens, even as she worked to secure his escape from The Collectors.

  In a similar vein, Curtis respected that the mission he was on might not pay dividends for a long time to come. It all depended on how fast Leon progressed in the linear time of humanoids, as to when he’d catch up to the value of Curtis’s mission.

  For Curtis, there was little to do now really but await the growing terror that was his.