All Fall Down (38 page)

           
“History books say it got lost in a wormhole, mapped itself into a star's heart.”

           
“Yes they do. But it's last transmission had several time stamps on it. One from about twenty years in our future. The final one, a weak SOS, from today. Somewhere out there, today, the crew of that ship from nine hundred years ago is about to die.”

           
Kate's head was full. There was too much going on to keep track. The first ship to visit a wormhole, lost in time? Alien life? It was preposterous. She started thinking it was a joke. Maybe the Cadre were testing her. Maybe this entire mission was fabricated, to see how she handled it. “Where are all these aliens?”

           
Daoud ran his hand through the holo, which had changed again to a display case showing bone shards. “Who knows?”

           
The holo changed again, to the promised foot floating in a glass tube, its four toes splayed, prehensile. And now a chair, the arm rests adorned with Krell-like hand depressions.

           
To one side of the room was a work bench. Kate walked away, took a seat there. Daoud followed, sat opposite.

           
She looked up, “And the Cadre's done nothing?”

           
“What's important is that
we
find them. That we make that choice. And that we use their technology to help us in that task.” He lifted a hand, swept it in an arc. Pods rolled back in a wave. Colours sublimated from them again, yellows and greens.

           
“There must be a reason this hasn't already happened.”

           
“Yes. The wars of the Common Quarters. The AI Singularity Event. The Flight of Qin. The struggle to re-discover knowledge after the Organic Edict. The need for peace and stability. All good reasons. All excuses for fear and inaction. The Cadre has used each one as an excuse to keep this hidden.”

           
“No. Those things crippled us, used all of our resources. They all took hundreds of years to resolve.” Kate looked at him, then turned her head and looked back at the holo and its cityscapes and alien artefacts. Colours strobed in her eyes, red, blue, green, orange, brown, white, blue, yellow, red, over and over and over. She started to get lost in the colours and there was a strange relaxation of her mind. She felt groggy, pulled towards sleep. The colour cycle was hypnotic.

           
Something welled up inside her. “What the hell is going on here?” She pushed her chair back, which clattered across the floor. She walked to the wall panel on the other side of the lab space, found the light control and thumbed it. Diffuse white light returned. The palette of the twenty three returned to making colourful edges and shadows again.

           
“You were trying to hypnotise me.”

           
Daoud just shrugged.

           
“I don't know what you're doing, but it's clearly illegal.”

           
Daoud remained seated behind the work bench, across the space. He folded his fingers on the bench.

           
“What do you think will happen if society discovers what's on the surface?”

           
“I know fucking well what would happen.” Kate kept a hand to the wall panel, “There'd be mass panic. War. There's no consequence map ever constructed that doesn't show it.”

           
“Exactly.” He laid his palms flat on the surface, “That's what happens when knowledge diffuses, leaks out, with no outlet for the shock, the violence.”

           
In the space between them, the holo continued to cycle. The gleaming cityscape was back again, but at a different point. Small ships were flying through the scene. Flowers bloomed in their wake. Gargantuan slabs of granite collapsed. Silver needles, clearly buildings hundreds of metres high teetered, toppled under the destruction, punctured the still opening petals of explosions.

           
Daoud's voice was quiet, “The full holo shows a peaceful society. On this day an alien species moves in and obliterates it. We think this footage was smuggled out by refugees. It offers a salutary lesson about waiting and seeing what happens.”

           
Kate continued to watch as a cloud of dark fuzz descended over the ruined rock and metal city. The fuzz grew closer, darker, pointed. A giant wicked spider-thing slammed into the holo camera. Kate stood back. The holo distorted, changed to the foot in the glass tube again.

           
“There is your extra terrestrial life, General.” Around her the pods had started their activity again. Several of them were ricocheting between the front energy shield and back cell wall. She eyed them nervously. “They are not so different from us. They go to war. They kill. They make surprise attacks. They exploit the weak, the unprepared. Our choice is simple. We continue being unremarkable. Settling planets, plodding along as a species, gathering achievements that distinguish us from no one. Or when the time is right we take a chance and start to become remarkable. Like you did. We prepare for war.”

           
“
Prepare
for war?”

           
“Yes. We seek contact and grow a coalition of the peaceful where there will be strength in numbers, fortitude in conviction and unity. And,” he stood, walked around the work bench and looked at the twenty three, “we break down the barriers between our species. We become more than we've dared dream.”

           
They stared at each other. Kate looked from eye to eye. Daoud's gaze was as implacable as ever. She wondered if he was mad.

           
“You're saying you want to start a war and mutate our species into this?” Kate looked at the twenty three, anger and revulsion filled her gaze. All she'd ever dreamed of, first contact, seeking alien life, all to be poisoned and perverted? She looked back at him with all the coldness of Admiral Kim's gaze, “I have a mission to run.” She moved past Daoud to the white cube's door. She looked into the gloomy cavern and tried to make out the door to the darker tunnel ahead.

           
Daoud's voice was at her back, “This will come to us eventually. When the time comes, Kate, perhaps it's as simple as not standing in the way. You could give society this knowledge. Be proactive, General. Give them an outlet for their shock.”

           
She turned, “You do want to start a war with them, don't you?”

           
“Call it a pre-emptive strike. Shock the people, channel their fear and anger into focused violence. They will sicken themselves. Then we sue for peace. It will all be over with in a year or two.”

           
“You're mad. No sane person could endorse deliberately starting a war.”

           
“You can't stop me. It's already too late.”

           
“We'll see.” She left the cube and returned to the subterranean dark.

Djembe looked over the sixteen cells he'd created to run scenarios, consequence maps in Jonah's style. Investigations into the intrusion on Win's ship.

           
In one of the sixteen cells a Jonah closed its mouth after the words “I am.” A bar appeared, a place for the Colonists to socialise. Here the cell's Jonah would explore the consequences of leaking news about alien life.

           
Within seconds it had the personality profiles of all the Colonists, their personal logs and avatars. Djembe's instructions allowed non-Jonah holos in this space, and now many of them were drinking in the bar; some were already drunk. One was singing an Old Earth country song, “We'll sweep out the ashes in the morning”. Its male eyes were closed and it swayed the beer in its hand. The other avatars were cheering it along.

           
Wiping a glass with a white cloth, Jonah stood at the bar, contemplating the gossip it had. It spoke to a customer: a woman avatar wearing a blue dress, hair like caramel, sipping wine.

           
“So, you want to hear the latest?”

           
The woman avatar put its wine down, placed two fingers on the glass base, pursed its lips, like a woman from an old two-D entertainment, “Sure”.

           
Jonah looked around, craned its neck in, lowered its voice, offered the titbit, “We have a visitor.” It looked to the ceiling, quick, then round the bar to make sure no one was listening in, “A non-terrestrial visitor.” It returned to wiping the glass.

           
Stirring the wine by shuffling the glass base on the bar, the woman avatar appeared to consider the words, “An offworlder, you mean?” It reached for its purse.

           
A shrug of the shoulders, a cock of the head, “'Non-terrestrial' in the ancient sense of the term.” It gave the woman avatar a significant look.

           
The avatar sat up on its stool, fingers now on the edge of the bar, blue nail polish gleaming darkly. “An alien? Here?” it said, voice loud with shock. Its lip gloss shone under the dim bar lights.

           
Avatars looked around. Drinks paused, tipped, sloshed inside their glasses, not reaching mouths. The singer stuttered to an awkward pause.

           
“Now, Janey, don't get all jumpy on me.”

           
“Hey, Barman. D'you say what it said you sayed?”

           
“That right, Barkeep? 'There a real live alien up top?”

           
The woman avatar, Janey, picked up its purse, reached in, powdered its face slowly, deliberately, snapped the compact mirror shut in her purse. It took a final sip of its wine, and spoke to Jonah, though its words were intended for a broader audience, “That ain't no way to break news like that, and you know it. I'm walking out of here now. Keep my tab open. I reckon in time we'll get to see if I have to pay it. I'm walking out, and you'll excuse me if I'm not seen for a while. I have some family to talk to, some plans to make.” It turned, swept the floor with its eyes, “Gentlemen. Ladies.” When the door closed on its back, a stunned silence rang around the room. There was a great clatter of chairs scraping backward, glasses slamming onto tables, footsteps clodding against the floor.

           
Before a minute of mission time had elapsed, Jonah was standing at an empty bar, “Easiest consequence map ever.” It looked up through the bar roof to its Jonah Angel. “I have a mission update for you.”

Djembe looked up from his datapad. There was panic in a cell. Yes, he thought, of course. There was always panic. He returned to his datapad, watched icons march like toy soldiers across the display. He had finally designed new security protocols. He applied them to the recording of the avatar invader to Win's ship. The security baked the invader's coded body, tore it apart, left it as so much digital ash and dust. Djembe nodded with satisfaction.

           
Finally he was coming to terms with the mission and had some real control and something to do.

           
He looked back at the cells and watched their progress with the data.

Chapter 11 – The Tale of Huriko Maki

In another of the cells Djembe had created, the logs and diaries and recordings from Huriko Maki filtered in. The Jonah's creation words rang into the cell.

           
“I am.”

           
Djembe looked down at this one, and over the course of the next few minutes became more attentive as it jumped from evidence source to evidence source, creating a dream-like, stilted story of Doctor Maki's final few months. The holo recreation looked so real that for the duration Djembe stopped thinking of the holo person as “it” and thought of it as a woman, a her, a she. He watched Doctor Maki's story play out in metaphor and snatches of recordings.