The Forever Gate Ultimate Edition

by Isaac Hooke

  To properly infiltrate the human computer system, and to learn how to construct a computer virus that would take down the machines and the humans both, intimate understanding of the human mind was required. The human brain worked differently than the Satori quadmind, as did their computer systems. What better way to understand the aliens and their computers than to become one of them? The long-term Species-87A surrogate project was initiated—the remote projection of Satori consciousness into specially prepared human surrogates. Fifty chosen Satori would live life from start to finish exactly the way the humans themselves lived it, as babies born into that pod world of theirs.

  But the human pod world was so real, the illusion so complex, that as time passed, most of the surrogates forgot their Satori upbringing, or dismissed it as a half-remembered dream. Graol himself, his surrogate implanted within the human vessel as a newborn and then injected into the virtual reality, truly recalled nothing of who he was by the time his surrogate finally died.

  "Necessary, you say?" Thason flexed his lower appendages. "I'm not here to argue the necessity of what was done. Though there were other ways to achieve our goals, I must admit this was an appealing experiment. My point is, of the Fifty Surrogates sent to the ship as newborn aliens, Graol is the only one who ever successfully returned. The others are lost to us. You know this. The Twentieth included. And if he does return, he will be madder than a malformed polyp. His only reward will be the spike."

  Graol wasn't sure if he himself hadn't gone mad. When he'd lost his first surrogate body to the meat grinders of the human vessel, Graol had unceremoniously awakened to a form of life so alien to everything he'd ever known that his denial of this reality brought him to the brink. Eventually, by means of the Return therapy, and the help of the Vargos A.I. and Fhavolin, he came to accept that he was not human, and never had been.

  Still, he remembered everything about what it was like to be human. The sights and sounds. The tastes and smells. The emotions. He remembered, and inside this Satori body with its four brains and sixteen tentacles, he felt human.

  Minds started to turn his way, and he quickly blanked his thoughts.

  "You have something to add, Graol?" Thason said.

  Graol let his tentacles sway about him. "Only that I agree. Javiol will not return." He projected an image of his last encounter with Jeremy inside the human simulation to demonstrate Javiol's insanity, but the minds had already turned away.

  Fhavolin puffed her bell-shaped torso. "I am disappointed. I had expected good cheer at the news of our imminent victory, and unanimity in the matter of Javiol's subsequent reward. We shall simply put the matter to vote, then."

  For his good work, Fhavolin proposed that Javiol be awarded three small oceans on the third planet of the system, Earth, upon the eventual completion of the mission, along with elevation to the Hivemind. She was outvoted 10-1.

  "The Council is unanimous in this?" Fhavolin said.

  "As I transmitted before, there can be no discussion of rewards until Javiol returns and victory is achieved," Thason said. "Until then, we are wasting precious time."

  Fhavolin deflated her torso. "As you wish. Councilors, the meeting is adjourned. Return to your moorings with your tentacles high, because when next we awaken it will be to celebrate our victory, and to plan our trip home."

  "I surely hope so," Thason said, though his thoughts seemed edged with skepticism.

  Like Thason, Graol doubted that the Council would celebrate victory the next time its members awoke, though he had an entirely different set of reasons for believing so.

  Fhavolin turned her eye-stalks toward him.

  Graol cleared his mind and returned her gaze innocently.

  110

  Graol made his way through the dark, artificial ocean that comprised the inside of the Vargos. Static constellations of light dotted the darkness. His own glow was quickly diffused by the murky water, and did little to brighten his way.

  He propelled himself through the murk using the combined movements of tail, torso, and cilia. His bell-shaped torso did most of the work, expanding to suck in water, then squeezing it out again in a jet. The tail and cilia were for steering, while his tentacles dragged along behind, meant mostly for stinging potential attackers or manipulating objects—each tentacle was divided at the ends into two feathery fingers.

  Despite the Return therapy he had undergone, Graol still felt a sense of dissociation from his body, and as he flung that tail back and forth, and expanded and squeezed that torso like a bellows, he had a hard time believing it was all real. Going from human to Satori would do that to you, he supposed.

  The oddest thing of all, the thing that most contributed to his detachment from reality, was his eyes. Like all Satori, Graol had twenty-four eyes distributed across his body in groups of six. The first two sets, the Upper and Lower Lens Eyes, could sense color and movement, and were suspended on stalks with gyroscopic crystals at the end. The third set, the slit eyes, could perceive shape. The fourth and most primitive set, the pit eyes—basically dark colorations on his epidermis—could sense only intensity. Acting in concert, these twenty-four eyes allowed Graol a 360-degree field of view.

  Eyes on the back of your head? Check. Eyes on the top of your head? Check. Eyes that allowed you to peer down at your tail, trailing appendages, and tentacles? Check. Disconcerting? Check. He was constantly looking not only at the outside world, but at himself. Constantly reminded of who he was.

  And who he was not.

  Detached from reality indeed.

  He received a telepathic message of moans, pops and high-pitched squeals. "What are you doing Graol?"

  It was The Shell—the main A.I., the Vargos equivalent of One.

  Graol did his best to convey an aura of calm. "I am proceeding to my mooring for hibernation, as instructed by the Council." He transmitted in High Satori, to remind The Shell of his lineage, though he doubted the A.I. cared.

  The booms and twitters returned by The Shell sounded amused in his mind. "That is not the way."

  "There is data in the planetary flyer that you might find of interest," Graol said.

  The Shell took a moment to respond. "What kind of data?"

  "A history of Species 87-A since the crash of their starship. From the perspective of the alien simulation."

  Now was the moment of truth. He'd risked everything on this gamble.

  He cleared the thought from his mind instinctively, but unlike the living members of the Vargos, The Shell could read only those thoughts Graol chose to project.

  The A.I. sent a reply. "Interesting. I approve. Proceed."

  Graol jetted the water from his torso in relief. The Shell loved its data.

  He swam along the face of a great artificial cliff covered in seaweed, reached a tunnel, and navigated inside. The tight corridor opened out into one of the lower-class hibernation areas. The watery vista was full of forms in stasis, glowing Satori moored to long horizontal tracks by the thousands.

  Like the human vessel, the Vargos was first and foremost a colony ship, as all Satori motherships were, and this ocean was the equivalent of the human pod world, where the Satori colonists lived out their days in a simulation of their home world, pretending to be famous vocalists, or the admirals of great fleets, or aliens from long-extinct races. Graol had vague memories of that simulation—living in a palace of coralline with a harem of tentacled females waiting to fulfill his every desire. To him those memories were a dream, nothing more. Just as all of this was.

  He swam past the hibernating Satori. They were his brethren, his lower-class brothers and sisters, but he felt nothing like them. They were aliens.

  He knew that the glow inside their translucent torsos was from the colonies of algae in their gastric cavities. He knew that when digested, the algae produced light that allowed for the growth of more algae. He knew it was a perfect balance of symbiosis. He knew that the typical Satori could live a thousand years without any external food supply because of
it.

  He knew all of that, yet it was from the point of view of an exobiology teacher studying an alien species.

  Graol shook off the disassociation and concentrated on his destination. He had promised himself that he wouldn't go mad. Not yet.

  He reached another artificial cliff and passed into a second hibernation area. A different species was moored in these waters—the Xeviathi, the great gill-whales.

  Part of the slave classes.

  Their massive, bull-like bodies were plated with iridescent scales, and their baleen-jawed heads took up a third of their length. Large gills, with fleshy plates similar to the underside of a mushroom, lined either side of their heads. Small fins capped by hooklike claws grew from beneath the gills, and a large fluked tail concluded their bodies. Fleshy cords moored the Xeviathi in place, but since they couldn't grow their own food in their bellies, each one had a feeding tube forced down its baleen. There were only about fifty of them here, and roughly a thousand in existence across the galaxy.

  The Xeviathi had once been sentient, but the survivors of the race had been bio-engineered to have no consciousness, their brains converted to empty shells waiting to act as surrogates for the Satori. The Xeviathi were sometimes used to perform manual labor beyond the capabilities of ordinary Satori, though robots usually fulfilled that role. Mostly it was an existential game for the Satori—they had lobotomized and subjugated an entire race because they wanted to feel what it was like to be a member of that race. The computer simulations could only go so far after all, and nothing compared to actually putting your consciousness into an actual alien brain. That was only part of the reason why the Satori destroyed every sentient species they encountered, but it was the reason that most galled Graol. The mass, forced extinctions were nothing compared to this final humiliation inflicted upon the survivors.

  Graol feared the same fate awaited humanity.

  He spotted a satoroid on patrol, and instinctively ceased all motion.

  With a spinning rotor in place of a tail, an immobile torso, and metallic tentacles, these robot Satori were the Vargos equivalent of iron golems. They patrolled the environment, made sure the moorings were operating correctly, that the ambient water temperature was neither too warm nor too cool, and disposed of any dead Satori or other subjugate races. They were called the Servants of The Shell, because they were the direct embodiment of the central A.I., and allowed The Shell to interact with the shipboard environment.

  Unlike the iron golems of the human vessel, these weren't programmed to terminate living Satori found wandering awake in the oceans. Still, out of habit perhaps, or maybe human superstition, Graol didn't move. Only when the satoroid was gone did he resume his advance.

  He reached a wall of coral and swam into a small tunnel. The coral soon gave way to harsh, angular metal.

  The A.I.s built and designed the starships, and did a good job of hiding the fact that the ocean you existed in was part of a constructed environment. But once you surpassed a certain point, and peeled back the dark underbelly of that false environment, you reached the metallic world of the machines.

  Dim orbs lit up as he passed, illuminating the murk. The last time he'd been here those lights were much brighter.

  The corridor branched several times. The Shell conveniently projected a three-dimensional map into his head at each fork, so Graol didn't get lost, and before long he reached Waterlock 21. The Shell had already lowered the outer door of the chamber for him.

  Never underestimate an A.I.s eagerness to absorb fresh data.

  The landing arms still embraced the planetary flyer, which was a small, egg-shaped vessel of black steel. Striations crisscrossed the surface, and a band of tiny rivets dotted the middle section. There was a wide convex viewport in the front.

  Graol went to the external interface—a rectangular panel on the far side of the flyer. A three-dimensional, 360-degree image appeared in his mind, showing him the inside of the flyer and the two robotic arms his mind was now linked to. He steered the arms toward the human body that lay slumped over the controls.

  The panel beneath the human had been modified to support touch commands, since humans were not telepathic. Also, a balanced nitrogen-oxygen environment had been jury-rigged inside the flyer, allowing the human body to breathe—the autonomous nervous system of the human body's medulla oblongata was functioning at its fullest extent this very moment, inflating the lungs, beating the heart. But though complete and fully formed in otherwise every respect, the human's mind was just an empty shell.

  A surrogate.

  A black cube with three prongs had been placed on the floor beside the body, alongside a test tube containing a sample of human tissue. The cube was one of the interface units the Satori had devised for reading alien technology, and it formed an airtight shell over the human microchip inside. That chip would allow him to restore Ari's psyche. The test tube meanwhile held Ari's brain tissue and a hair sample. Precious cargo all.

  Graol very delicately retrieved both the cube and tissue sample with the robotic fingers and deposited them in the flyer's local airlock. He initiated the equalization process. The inner door closed and the airlock began to flood.

  He retracted the robotic arms and released the interface, then floated over to the opposite side of the flyer. When the outer door of the airlock spiraled open he gripped the floating black square and the test tube in the feathery fingers of two different tentacles, and then he made his way back through the metallic passageways.

  He swam as fast as he could, hoping The Shell hadn't detected the test tube, nor guessed his plan. Those three-dimensional maps still appeared in his head at each branch, so he assumed not.

  "You have passed many data access ports already," The Shell transmitted. "Why?"

  "I know you're eager for your data," Graol sent back. "But there's something I want to check, first."

  "What, exactly?" The Shell sent. When Graol didn't answer, The Shell didn't seem pleased. "My patience has limits."

  "You'll get your data, Shell."

  Graol pressed on, and finally he reached the section of the ship he sought.

  The Farm.

  Just before he entered, a satoroid came out.

  Graol respectfully moved off to one side, and curled his seventh tentacle behind him, hiding the test tube from view.

  The satoroid stopped.

  "Identify external object," it transmitted.

  Graol pretended that the satoroid was asking his name.

  "Graol-52-70-32-144, egg donor Laol-12-142-160-924, sperm donors Maol-16-30-42-43 and Fallow-92-1002-4-58, mooring A5." 52 of 70 indicated that 70 polyps had formed from the joining of egg and sperm, and that his polyp was the 52nd. 32 of 144 meant that his polyp had asexually budded 144 times, and that his body had separated from the 32nd bud.

  "Do not attempt subterfuge," the Servant of The Shell transmitted. "What is in your seventh oral tentacle."

  Graol lifted the tentacle that held the black cube. "The data I promised The Shell."

  "No," the satoroid transmitted. "The other tentacle. The seventh."

  With a sinking feeling in the pit of his gastric cavity, Graol held up the test tube and the piece of gory matter within.

  111

  Graol offered the first excuse that came to mind. "A tissue sample to extend the biodiversity of Species 87-A in the system."

  It was a weak excuse, and Graol knew it. The Farm had a vast storehouse of human ribonucleics already, enough to prepare an infinite number of genetic permutations. With humanity about to be wiped out, and the human surrogate program concluded, the need for further samples was questionable.

  "Give it to me." The satoroid extended a robotic tentacle.

  Graol hesitated. If the satoroid harmed the sample, all would be lost. His struggle to save the daughter he loved would end right here, as would his will to fight for humanity.

  But if Graol didn't give up the test tube, the robot would force it from him anyway.


  "Why?" Graol said, stalling for time.

  The satoroid's tail rotor whirred, reminding Graol how easily it could overtake him if he chose to flee. "You would disobey a Servant of The Shell?"

  Graol had no choice. He squeezed the radial muscle of his torso, then he tentacled the test tube over.

  The satoroid lifted the tube and tapped the glass speculatively with a robotic tentacle. A green bar of light shone from the robot's chest casing and scanned the test tube up and down.

  The light abruptly cut off.

  "Extraneous," the satoroid transmitted.

  It crushed the tube.

  As the glass broke apart, Graol felt his own soul breaking inside him. He watched helplessly as the shards, and the crushed contents, drifted away.

  "More tissue samples from Species 87-A are unnecessary," the satoroid said. "The biodiversity levels in the system are adequate. However, you may upload the aforementioned data regarding the history of Species 87-A. Proceed."

  The satoroid motored off, and the current generated by its propeller sent the debris of the test tube whirling away.

  Graol remained motionless. His tentacles floated lifelessly around him.

  It was done.

  It was over.

  He didn't care about anything else anymore.

  With the sample lost, everything had been for nothing. The trials and ordeals. The Return.

  All for nothing.

  But maybe his grief was premature. Maybe the sample didn't matter. He still had the means to restore Ari's psyche in the microchip. She could still come back, maybe just not in the body she expected. She could still live again.

  No. It mattered. Graol wasn't human, but he knew enough about humanity to understand that such a change would destroy her. He'd done enough damage to Ari as it was, what with the revising he and Cora had put her through. He couldn't do this. The price was too high. What would be the point of bringing Ari back if it only ended in her madness?

  He saw a small piece of organic matter floating amid the shards. The surrounding "water" was corrosive to human tissue, yet the sample had survived so far.