For his part, while he was communicating with one entity, Bruce was certain he was the centre of attention for a number of other vaguely similar entities swirling around him, which felt remarkably like he was a goldfish swimming about his bowl.
He had no feeling any malice was intended, though he did detect a reluctance to interact with him directly. It was reminiscent of the way the Skidians had treated him and Sue after they had first been kidnapped and later interacted with them as they went about their business on Skid.
It appeared one of the Transcendents had been nominated to communicate with him and the others were waiting with what Bruce perceived was a familiar, detached expectation he should magically understand everything required of him. That got him thinking – were these spirit entities the ancestors of the Skidians, as they behaved the same way?
No! A different, outraged voice projected into his mind. Absolutely not!
That was a standard Skidian response suggesting he had hit on a sensitive topic, Bruce thought to himself in the part of his mind the MPU had indicated it was unable to access. Hopefully the trick would work with the Transcendents too.
When he had first interacted with Skidians he believed they knew he was somehow crucial to their long-term survival, but they didn’t, couldn’t, bring themselves to articulate this as it would be a sign of weakness or an admission they were not as clever as they thought they were. None of them wanted to appear to be too interested or too involved in anything critical to their future because it was poor form to do so. A strict adherence to social norms and expectations had all but killed their whole society off. Bruce was currently experiencing an interaction that felt quite similar.
Would it help to project myself as an image? the Transcendent suggested.
“I’m not sure, to be honest,” Bruce responded. He was more concerned with trying to understand what was going on than worrying about what the owner of the voice talking to him looked like.
He struggled to understand how one part of him could still be carrying on a one-sided and rather heated conversation with Rangi back on the farm, while here he was with this Transcendent thing.
Rangi’s voice, although clearly discernible, was fading a little, and while Bruce could hear other people speaking, he was now finding it difficult to follow the terrestrial conversation.
‘Here’ looked to be standing on a platform slap bang in the middle of the universe, which was couldn’t be possible. Bruce began to wonder how he could be doing that without a spacesuit and still be alive, when he felt an entity with a different aura, a different sense of purpose, project itself into his consciousness as the initial contact receded.
Let me, it said in an alluringly husky female voice sounding remarkably like Shelly Shaw. You can switch off the conscious feed to your physical self; it’s a lot less of a distraction that way. Here, let me show you.
Immediately Bruce felt a lot better. His connection to his perceived real, physical self receded further into the background, and the vertigo he had been experiencing disappeared so he felt much more relaxed.
Back at the farm Bruce found himself pausing in mid-sentence as the change kicked in, while he tried to calm Rangi down and set his mind at rest as to what he had been up to with his daughter. He was trying to decide how much he could and should tell the old boy to mollify him a little. Bruce decided less was more in this case, because telling him he had a space patrol ship would be like a red rag to a bull. Then, in an instant, the volume dial was turned down in his head and the background noise he had associated with the MPU was gone. This disoriented him for a moment, enough to think he might keel over.
Bruce had not been aware of it until that moment but his brain had been cluttered with other multiple conversations. A whole crowd of people had been whispering into his ear to get his attention. Then the myriad of voices had gone silent, and his head suddenly felt clearer than it had in a very long time.
“Look, I’m sorry, Mr Tauroa …” Bruce still couldn’t bring himself to call him Rangi, “… I can’t tell you what’s going on here, one because you wouldn’t believe me, and two, I’m not totally sure myself. I can assure you, though, no matter what it might look like, I haven’t done anything illegal.”
“But Bruce …” Ngaio began, until Bruce gave her a sharp glance as if to say, ‘don’t say a word’.
“I can’t tell you anything at the moment, except to say I haven’t done anything illegal,” Bruce repeated and looked to the most senior-looking policeman in the room for support. “But I will, as soon as the olds get back!” I won’t have any choice in the matter, Bruce thought glumly, as he wondered how he was going to explain to his parents why he and Sue were no longer together after all their efforts to get to America for the wedding at short notice.
Suddenly Bruce found himself standing beside the lovely Dr Shelly Shaw. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked in surprise. She was the last person he expected to see. The woman’s shape changed and morphed into a good approximation of his mother and then someone else he did not quite recognise, although she was somehow familiar, then Ngaio, and then …
“What the fuck?” He was experiencing some kind of high-speed photo montage of all the women who had had a significant impact on his life or had held some form of attraction for him. This new entity projecting into his head had also strip-mined his memories and was busily trying to create an image of the perfect woman to put him at ease or maybe impress him somehow.
“OK, you can stop now,” Bruce snapped. “I think I know what you’re trying to do and you can stop fucking around.”
The image flickered a few more times and then ceased, like a cartoon animation or someone flicking through a deck of playing cards suddenly coming to the end of the pack.
The image settled on one that almost overawed him – she was by far the most exquisite creature he had ever seen and he found himself becoming excited physically. Except he wasn’t physical, and as he reached out to touch the figure his hand passed right through her. They must both be holograms of some kind in this version of reality.
“Right, you’ve got my attention now,” Bruce said. He was a little disappointed to find the woman was a hologram. He had not really expected her to be real, as they were standing in the middle of the universe, which must have been an illusion in itself. It was quite an impressive feat as he appeared to be standing on a platform in the middle of nowhere beside something that had gone to great lengths to put him at ease by assuming a human shape. Not much use in trying to pull out his smokes or asking for a drink then.
“Just who and what are you?” Bruce asked more matter of factly than he probably had any right to feel. However, if the truth was known, he had had a similar experience recently when he had found himself suddenly standing on the deck of a patrol ship. While water poured off his wet-weather gear as his three dogs tried unsuccessfully to find a way up under his Swandri, he had asked pretty much the same question to a bunch of Skidians that had included Myfair.
So, in fact, he reflected for a moment, he had more than a little recent experience in dealing with other-worldly encounters, dealing with situations which would take anyone else way out of their comfort zone.
The Transcendent seemed a little taken aback by Bruce’s response. It had expected the fleshie to be overwhelmed by the situation and anticipated having a considerable dialogue to set the creature at ease before trying to get some sense out of it and find a simple way of articulating its requirements.
I’m a Transcendent, the Transcendent repeated, in a tone clearly implying this was explanation enough.
“A what?” Bruce asked, not having the foggiest idea what this being, this supposedly super - intelligent entity, was trying to explain to him. The Transcendent’s case was already undermined by the fact Bruce had become very cynical about the self-proclaimed capabilities of any alien. His experiences with the Skidians and the on-again, off-again behaviour of the MPU left Bruce coming to the conclusion survival, let al
one technological advancement and species development in the universe, was more a matter of good luck than good planning. Despite their belief in their species superiority over mankind, Bruce was pretty sure the technological capability of the Skidians and the Transcendents was not light years in advance of mankind’s and, like an unstable piece of software, the more complex components were pretty unreliable and need constant maintenance.
“You don’t say,” he added. If the Transcendent had hoped to impress Bruce it had failed dismally. Where a less-experienced human being might have been overwhelmed by the display of technological ability, Bruce simply took it in his stride. He actually had a rough idea what a Transcendent might be, but in good old Bruce Harwood fashion he was not about to make it easy for it.
“Can you be more specific?” he asked. “I’m not entirely sure what being a Transcendent actually means.”
The Transcendent had been having a poke around Bruce’s brain for a while now and was trawling his memories at a much faster rate than any mere flesh-and-blood technology could ever hope to achieve. It now knew more about Bruce than Bruce had forgotten and, in some respects, would care to bother remembering.
The Transcendent, along with the rest of the working party convened to analyse and review both the structure of and the data contained in Bruce’s brain and comprehend what was going on under the hood, quickly found the key to explain in simple terms who they were and their expectations of him.
I’m a being of …, the Transcendent paused for a moment before continuing … Skid was our home long before the beings you know as Skidians were established there. In fact, we settled the Skidians on our home planet and the other worlds of our system and also gifted them the technology they have now enjoyed for several thousands of your years.
“What do you mean? You’re one of the original Skidians? So where did you go?”
We transcended, the Transcendent explained. This is why we call ourselves Transcendents.
“But what does that actually mean?” Bruce asked in some exasperation.
We left our physical bodies behind and …, the Transcendent paused again searching for an example the fleshie would comprehend, … I’m like a cloud software program. We worked out how to use the universe as our data storage system and found a way to upload and store ourselves and are now creatures of light and energy.
“You’re joking!” was all Bruce could think of to say because he could not fully comprehend the explanation. Then he thought about one of the other things the Transcendent had said, which he did catch in the conversation. “So who are these guys who call themselves Skidians and where did they come from? Are they like you?”
No definitely not! The Transcendent responded sharply again to any hint it was related in any way to the beings Bruce knew as Skidians – a raw emotion suggesting to Bruce the Transcendents considered the beings he knew as Skidians to be a thoroughly inferior species to themselves. Bruce had been on the receiving end of similar behaviour from the Skidians, so he recognised the snobbery and prejudice for what it was.
We developed the technology the beings you know as Skidians have enjoyed for generations and gifted it to them when we transcended. You don’t think they did it all by themselves, did you?
Which explained a lot really. Bruce kept that thought to himself, though he suspected the Transcendent would be able to see right through him.
“So who are the Skidians then?” Bruce repeated. “And where do they come from?” he added – meaning the people he had known as Skidians.
As we reached the point of collective transcendence some of us got cold feet and wanted a fall-back position, and we didn’t want our old home planet to go to waste, as nobody was staying behind. It also seemed it would be advantageous to have a decent supply of flesh-and-blood bodies to decant back into if the need arose.
“Why couldn’t you just grow some bodies and have them on standby?” Bruce asked. “Wouldn’t that have been a simpler option?”
But that would mean we would have to rely on technology we could no longer have day-to-day control over, and what would happen if the technology failed? Our experience with computers sophisticated enough to regulate the required systems was sometimes a less than happy one. No matter how robust the programming or the self-management systems we developed and enhanced, they sometimes go off the rails. Our experience is that while you can have a machine, a very sophisticated computer, running most things on your planet, the real work of government is best left to flesh-and-blood entities. With this in mind we had no trust in the machinery we left behind to keep us a decent store of bodies, and none of us wanted to stay behind, so we hit upon the idea of importing the beings you know as Skidians instead.
None of us were going to stay behind and do anything as mundane as tend to machines once we transcended, and if we had to come back to fleshie bodies we wanted to have fun! The transcendent paused for a moment without elaborating on their interpretation of fun, leaving that to Bruce’s imagination. Besides, if we had to come back we wanted decent bodies, not some artificial construct.
“You’re a fucken snob!” Bruce exclaimed. “You’re some kind of super being dispersed in the cloud, but you still have basic flesh-and-blood emotions. At the end of the day you’re just a snob,” Bruce repeated and laughed at the very thought of it. “So do you look anything like the Skidians in real life then?”
No, the Transcendent admitted. Our former physical selves were nowhere near as robust as the fleshies we imported. After generations of development and augmentation, our bodies had evolved to be reliant on all kinds of technology, besides we had never been as physically developed as your own species.
“What do you mean ‘my species’?” And then the penny dropped.
When we discovered your ancestors soon after we started to explore this part of the galaxy, we decided to assist your technological development to prepare you for first contact with us.
“In other words you bred us to provide bodies for you and gave us some toys to play with?” When he stopped to think about it, it was not a real surprise to him the aliens he knew as Skidians, an alien race from the other side of the galaxy, were in fact as human as he was.
Not at all; all we did was help kick-start some technological development that otherwise would have taken you much longer to achieve and helped you along the road to developing a society based on improved technology. In the greater scheme of things, we only developed the ability to transcend, and hence the need for fleshies, in the last few thousand of your years, not too long after we discovered faster-than-light interplanetary travel.
Bruce considered the Transcendent’s explanation. It was not the wildest yarn he had ever heard and there was a kind of weird logic to it all. “That was a lot of spares you had. There were about 600 million of them at some stage,” Bruce suggested, remembering the statistic from some time in the past.
There are, or were, only a few tens of millions of us that required this final fall-back option – most of us are content with our new form and are prepared to face any dangers the wider universe might hold, in our transcendent form, the Transcendent explained.
We did plan for multiple redundancy. However, once the fleshies were released on Skid they had virtually unlimited resources at their disposal, and they reproduced faster and in far greater numbers than we needed. In the end we had to add contraceptives to their food supplies and set up artificial breeding programmes to control the population. But even then the Skidians somehow managed to subvert or influence these programmes and managed to pump out more bodies than were required to keep the population in a steady state.
“So if you guys had transcended, who was running the place and keeping an eye on things?” Bruce asked, pretty sure he knew the answer.
There is an oversight committee which unfortunately hasn’t met for 500-odd of your years, the transcendent admitted. Everything has been left to the MPU to deal with. The MPU was meant to be the day-to-day solution, even to the extent we actual
ly trained up Skidian technicians to do the fiddly bits to the MPU’s programming after we transcended so they believed they had actually developed the MPU as a component of our conditioning programme.
“What do you mean conditioning programme?”
We wanted the Skidians to believe they were responsible for the greatness of Skid, even though they had nothing to do with any of the technological developments. We wanted them to believe they were the most powerful and sophisticated beings in the universe so maybe they would behave that way.
“Well that worked pretty well and explains a lot, because that’s what the Skidians believed, but they were bloody well capable of nothing themselves. Except a few of them like Myfair who seem to have some technological ability,” Bruce replied. “But why would you want that?”
Look at it from their perspective – and ours. There was no way we wanted them coming to look for us, or transcending themselves, as we initially thought the resources we were using were finite and we didn’t want to have to share them with a less sophisticated race that didn’t understand the need for conservation. They were colonists, after all – which is why they bred so fast – they were expanding their population to fit the apparent unlimited resources at their disposal after the very limited ones of their terrestrial homes. And of course more of them lived much longer as well. This was something else we weren’t aware of in the early days. Over time we realised we had worried about all these matters unnecessarily. The resources available to us are, to all intents and purposes, infinite. But we still didn’t want the fleshies working out that their only real purpose in life was to provide us with a warm body to decant back into if we needed to. We wanted them to have a sense of history and purpose. The Transcendent elaborated further. We also needed a small cadre of fleshies who we could use as a physical resource on occasion. The MPU and the service units on Skid and elsewhere are great tools but you can’t go past a fleshie for some tasks, which is why we have fleshies like your friends Myfair and Leaf roaming our part of the universe doing odd jobs for us.
The Lifeboat Page 29