“Excuse me, but where are you going? I thought you'd stay over and sleep with me,” Ingrid said, as soon as she saw her lover putting on his pants and shirt.
“I'm so sorry, really. It’s just that I have to bring the Ford back to Tylor and Betty, the couple with whom I reside.”
“At one in the morning?”
“Yeah, tomorrow is Sunday and they had planned to get up early and go for a drive.”
“In this cold weather?”
“What can I say? To each his own.”
“Can't they take your car?”
“Unfortunately, it's not working. I would really like to stay here with you; but if I fall asleep, I'll never get up by six to bring their car back.”
“It sounds to me like you're making this whole thing up,” Ingrid commented brightly, without animosity.
“Oh come on! It was a wonderful evening!” he assured her, getting closer and trying to give her a little kiss to make himself more credible.
“I had a great time too.”
“I'll call you tomorrow,” he said.
“And who says that I want to be called?”
Sirio was taken aback by this. He broke into a cold sweat. He hated those types of situations: they couldn't be fixed with a gunshot or a call to a government agency, not even by that damned bureaucratic paperwork with which he was becoming adept.
“Why the long face? I was kidding!” she told him, with a resounding laugh.
The alcohol must still be affecting her, Sirio thought.
“So you must really like me,” the Swedish woman wondered aloud.
“Is this how you women test us men?”
“It's useless to try to learn a woman's secrets. That's impossible. It's not within any man's purview.”
“I enjoy impossible tasks. I always succeed.”
Ingrid didn't reply. She happily turned her back, dozing again and sliding into a dream world.
“Bye,” said Sirio, ready to leave and placing his lips on her cheek.
The woman answered, mumbling something unintelligible.
Sirio took it as a goodbye.
On the way home, driving the Ford at high speed, Sirio though about how inadequate he felt in building interpersonal relationships. He had spent forty years alone, with only flashes of friendship and love as the two exceptions to the rule: Tylor and Namiko. Two irreplaceable people, with whom he had shared a unique experience. They were bound by an inescapable destiny that had no equal.
Sirio was sure that Ingrid knew nothing about Namiko. In fact, he had been extremely reserved with her; he had never mentioned his romantic past. He wanted the entire world to be unaware that there was a human being on board the fugitive Alpha Orionis.
Tylor had told him about a newscast that mentioned the death of the only woman to have ever been on board an alien spaceship. However, since one of the six people who had reawakened the Taahrians ended up in an asylum, and a second in prison, after having been convicted as a terrorist, the death of a third hadn't aroused much interest. And, luckily for Sirio, no journalist had proved committed enough to try to speak with her purported future husband.
It was at that time, when the sky was clear, that the Great Emerald, a Terrestrial name given to the Ikalian ship in orbit, was most visible. It was the undisputed star of the entire blue sky.
God, please let Namiko be all right, was his first thought.
Who are you, really, and what do you want? was his second.
25
He had needed to flee the room.
The shock of an absurd and disconcerting truth had gripped Eldgh, forcing him to find a place where he could be alone, without being watched by Namiko or some artificially intelligent being.
The desire to seek a corner for privacy, in a spaceship with hundreds of thousands of dormant Taahrians, piqued his sense of irony.
“Why?” he asked, looking through a window with a view of hyperspace; assailed by doubts which hinted that he would have been better off remaining ignorant of this reality. The consequences of being deprived of a processor to regulate his neurotransmitters, and the anxiety of impending important decisions, was putting him through unforeseen tests, for which his ancestors hadn't thought to program him.
Most of all, his brooding showed him how unlikely it was that a chip like his should fail. Could this be just one of those infamous problems which have a one in ten million chance of occurring? After all, he and his people were representative of hundreds of thousands of individuals; and, for all he knew, those interstellar conquest voyages had been going on for who knows how long: centuries, millennia or even eons.
Then, his complex brain began to besiege him a second time. That network of mental processes threatened to take him away forever, to a unique and indecipherable existential dilemma: who was he, really? Because, although his organic body possessed a developed central nervous system, he was still constrained by a mass of interconnected bits of information, transmitted by artificial neurons. Simply put, it was possible that his mind wasn't simply the end result of a biosynthetic processor, a neural network constructed in the laboratory, programmed to be assisted by a quantum processor, or that infamous broken chip in his head. And that, at least in his mind, lauded him as an excellent model of biosynthetic automation: the next generation of C6 units. The perfect creatures to go out into the galaxy and disseminate chaos.
What type of complex plan was behind the thinking of these beings who had decided to initiate such a twisted means of conquest? Why not send the warships directly, full of drones to impose their will? Eldgh knew practically nothing about his creators; and yet, everything around him had to have been created by the mysterious puppeteers' technology. And that was enough for him to understand how easy it would be to subdue and destroy a civilization such as the Terrestrials', without having to create beings like him and spend so much damned time instilling false memories in them.
The Taahrian put his hands on his head, as if to find the calm he had once had, trying to control his mind by force of will. Reestablishing peace, he decided that it was useless to try to understand the details of something he couldn't yet comprehend.
What he had to do now was take action, undertake a course that would liberate his fellows from their subspace chains.
I'll retrieve you from your cryogenic slumber and from the twisted mess of neural processors; and together, we'll discover where the truth lies
It will be a great reawakening; the beginning of a new existence!
Namiko only managed to stay by herself for a few moments before fleeing the room, like Eldgh. She got as far away as possible, going to an as yet unexplored area. She chose a direction; and, after navigating endless passages, admiring enormous rooms, and using the turbo lifts, found herself in a ten meter long corridor, wide enough to comfortably accommodate a Taahrian. Halfway down, Namiko passed another identical corridor. Both gave the impression of finishing somewhere in a cosmic void. She approached cautiously; and, nearing the end of the passage, realized that the only barrier between her and hyperspace was an invisible force field. As the Betelgeuse traveled at a speed faster than light, the panorama visible outside didn't look very different from that of a spaceship that wasn't moving. Their hyperspace jump bore absolutely no resemblance to that seen in the movies, in which the stars would begin to move away increasingly faster before their eyes. This was because, although not a physicist, she nonetheless had a good scientific background; and she reasoned that the stars visible in the cosmos were too far apart for a viewer to appreciate the changes in distance over such a short period of time. To observe a phenomenon such as that seen in Star Wars, one would have to move at a speed of several light years per second; and, although the Alpha Orionis was capable of interstellar travel, it was tens of thousands of times slower than that.
She was probably inside a small outcropping on the ship, of whose function she had been unaware, if she had ever known it had one. Throwing a glance at the end of the other corridor, th
e space outside appeared completely distorted, as if she was looking through a lens that changed shapes. That was because, the First Officer had told her, looking toward the bow or stern of the ship, as opposed to other areas, one could observe space being "folded" by the ship's thrusters. In fact, it wasn't so much the Betelgeuse moving through space, as space moving around the vessel, leaving the latter in a sort of bubble, incorrectly translated into human languages as hyperspace. At that moment, Namiko not only recalled the Taahrian word to describe this particular situation, but also the fact that, contrary to what happened with subspace messages, the bubble wasn't located in a different level of the continuum.
After the distraction caused by that unusual panorama was over, Namiko was no longer able to divert her mind from thoughts laden with loneliness and despair. In fact, she couldn't stand the pain she felt from the loss of her family and the one great love of her life: Sirio.
With him, she had begun to feel and appreciate a magic that had been unexpectedly taken away. Moreover, as technology-minded and well taken care of as she had been, by a being as considerate as Eldgh, on that ship, nothing and no one was human in any way. From a certain point of view, she should be grateful to have even awakened on that deserted spaceship. In all likelihood, she reasoned, she could be worse off, and life would be far more surreal, living with thousands of Taahrians, who, in addition, would be discovering that they were anything but sentient beings. Finally, very soon, the Alpha Orionis would arrive at its destination, presenting itself to an unsuspecting civilization, which was about to suffer the Terrestrials' misfortunes. At present, it was only an unconfirmed hypothesis, but logic hadn't presented any other solutions.
If the prospect of never seeing the Earth again was disturbing, not knowing what would happen when the dormant Taahrians awakened now threatened to drown her in an overflowing sea of panic.
“I don't want to help annihilate an entire race,” she whimpered, placing her hand on the corridor wall.
“Mom, dad...” she said, sliding to the ground.
“Sirio,” she uttered last, before breaking into a liberating cry.
26
“Well,” said Tylor, just returning home from work. “How did it go with Ingrid?”
“Fine,” Sirio responded concisely and distracted.
“That's it?”
“What more do you want?”
“You tell me. You’ve been so wrapped up that we haven't spoken for days. You even swiped the Ford!”
Moving closer to his friend, Tylor understood the reason for the other's absence. There was a tablet in his hands, and one could easily see the Sjunish's form on its screen.
Not only would it have been stupid to criticize Sirio for his anxiety, but it would be tantamount to blaming him for not staying away from news of certain events. There wasn't a single web page that didn’t contain at least a vague reference to the Ikalians. That poor man, Tylor thought. He's the victim in something worldwide that's impossible to escape.
“Do you really think she's all right?” Sirio whispered softly.
It wasn't difficult for Tylor to guess the subject of that sentence.
“I've been thinking about her lately, and not just because I care about you; but because Namiko is like a sister to me,” he replied, careful to use the present tense so as not to foster the inevitable thoughts of an irreplaceable past.
“And what conclusions have you reached?”
“That the Taahrian technology brought her back some time ago, good as new, thanks to Eldgh's intelligence and noble spirit; and she's doing great, much better than we are. Trust me!”
The pieces of the puzzle in Tylor's mind had actually come together very differently, but that didn't really matter: the priority was to be supportive.
“I want to believe you,” Sirio said. “Your shoulders support a head that's almost never wrong. In any case, I was thinking about what you said the other day.”
“What exactly was that?”
“The Ikalians have fed us a load of crap! You said it just like that; I remember well. What did you mean?”
“I thought you understood...”
“Explain it to me.”
“Maybe things aren't as they seem.”
“Which things?”
“The Taahrians departed, leaving us with a good impression. Then, these Ikalians arrive, accusing them of genocide and blaspheming an entire group of people, who can't even respond because they're gone. Who's to say that the Ikalians aren't taking advantage of the others' departure for their own ends?”
“No one, even if...” Sirio stopped himself without finishing the thought.
“Even if?”
“Even if I don't know what to think any more.”
“Or maybe you think too much.”
“Perhaps, but that's inevitable. Ikalians and Taahrians, it's been right in front of us: they're not just a topic for the mass media and the matter at hand for heads of government, but they're on everyone's lips. And, no matter where I try to hide, I'll always be able to see the Great Emerald in the sky, or the faint remnant of the Betelgeuse supernova.”
“They're not visible in the sky this evening,” Tylor pointed out, for no apparent reason except to break the silence.
“Yeah. It's this kind of solitude that often makes me fall back into thinking about certain things. Even after having had a wonderful evening with Ingrid, my thinking inevitably degenerates into the usual anguish.”
Tylor was awaiting the arrival of Betty, who would be coming home any minute. Incredibly, there was no need for her to intervene as Sirio himself regained some feeble enthusiasm: “Have you seen the Ikalians' self-assembling nano-buildings? They're phenomenal!”
His friend was dumbfounded for a moment.
“What's wrong? You don't want to talk about that?”
“I thought that you... well, with the Ikalians and all...”
“Don't worry. I actually enjoy hearing your enthusiasm for this technology that must've affected you enormously. It’s not only amazing, but it's one of the things that will change our society the most!”
Tylor thought about this for a moment. Then, when he was convinced that his friend wasn't crazy, he began talking a mile a minute, like an avalanche which takes out everything in its path.
“You have to understand, Sirio, that this kind of technology isn't just something that can excite experts in the field, giving them an incredible ability to manipulate matter at an atomic level; but it's a science that will profoundly change the way that we live, both from a socio-economic point of view that…”
Sirio had stopped listening almost immediately. It was enough to hear at least one living being's enthusiasm. It broke through all of his anguish. After his mind's ability to transcend negative feelings had being unblocked, he found something else to dwell upon in his own head. It came to him right away: Ingrid. He was actually the one who had mentioned her a few minutes before. For the first time that day, he was convinced of how much he was truly attracted to her. He had promised the Swedish woman that he'd call her in the morning, but still hadn't done so.
Coming back to reality a moment later, he saw Tylor out of breath, suffocating and almost choking on the thousands of words which were all tangled and pushing to break free.
After the Australian nanotech avalanche was over, he called Ingrid, as he had promised.
Ingrid Olsson was an irresistible woman!
27
After two weeks, the picture was practically complete. By modulating the incoming waves from Ikali, Eldgh and Namiko, with the help of the C6 units, were able to broaden their rudimentary interception network to a recipient radius of approximately one thousand light years. During this time, they realized that the subspace channels were being used to communicate between the twenty two worlds of the Ikalian Empire, as well as the Alpha Orionis and the Earth. Unfortunately for them, it was
impossible to capture signals whose destination was inside the Ikalian Expansion Command Center, because the local communications network didn't utilize subspace. In any case, having spent hundreds of hours eavesdropping was enough to give them a basic sense of the puppeteers.
The Japanese woman and the First Officer discovered their name, home planet, the extent of their empire, past and future projects, and above all, the fate of Blue C and their plans to subjugate it.
Every day during those two weeks, they became increasingly more aware of the situation, and Eldgh's and Namiko's faces reacted to even more horror, to the point of changing their features.
If the former was conflicted about confirmation of being a clone with ninety nine percent of the Ikalian genetic code and a processor in his brain, the latter felt anguish for the fate of the Earth.
“Our worst fears have been confirmed,” said the First Officer.
“But at least,” Namiko replied with satisfaction, “we haven't run into any anti-interception systems.”
“I'm certain that the Ikalians, due to their arrogance, used an elementary cryptography system. They're too sure that no one and nothing else can communicate at different levels of the continuum.”
“Right, among other things, every single AI on board the ship has proved itself capable of decrypting all of the Ikalian signals.”
“Even the greatest empires, though they believe themselves to be infinitely superior, have holes in their system and are brought down by superficial things.”
“Maybe you're right, Edlgh; but it seems absurd that there's no failsafe in the system that intervenes when a neural processor fails.”
“What do you mean?” asked the Taahrian, surprised by his Terrestrial friend's reasoning.
“Being an engineer, I would've envisioned the possibility that something could go wrong and done something to remedy that. During the design phase, there's a risk that you've failed to cover all possibilities, but it's usually something so marginal and rare as to be virtually unimaginable. That doesn't seem to be the case with the possible failure of a chip in one of the Taahrian's heads.”