Cara came off her medical couch with a drifting grace like a plume of smoke rising from an incense burner or a strip of cloth catching an underwater current. Her smile was soft and lazy, and her cheeks were flushed and dark.
“Are you all right?” Elvi asked.
“I’m perfect,” the girl said. Across the lab, Amos was watching them with a pleasant, empty smile as the last of the contact sensors was removed from his suit.
“I’m going to need to do a little work before we debrief this time,” Elvi said.
“Whatever you need to do,” Cara said, half lost in her bliss.
Elvi opened a connection to the catalyst’s chamber. “What’s the status down there?”
“Catalyst in the box,” Fayez said, “Xan back out of the box. Everything seems very normal except that everyone we talk to from the lab sounds like they’re trying to signal that they’re being held hostage without saying it. What happened up there? Are you being held hostage?”
“Meet me in my office,” she said.
The information gathered by Tanaka hadn’t seemed strange the first time Elvi looked at it. Weird cognitive effects were where the alien technology had started back on Ilus. Before that, with the protomolecule version of Jim’s friend getting remade in his sensory cortices. Human consciousness was simple enough that the repair drones on Laconia were able to make working approximations of what some people wanted to have fixed. Xan. Amos. A sampling drone Cara had accidentally shattered once.
Only now, going back over it, did she start to see the holes.
Did you have any experiences associated with the event? Tanaka had said.
There wasn’t even a gap to think about it before the subject said, Oh yeah. Oh, hell yeah.
And there the interview ended. Instead of the primary data or the direct conversation, Tanaka had put in a short data summary: Reports dreamlike hallucinations of being another person and/or being connected to a large number of other people. Claims memory of hallucinatory experiences remains clear over time.
Over and over, all through the data, the same language came up. Instead of actual experiential reports, Tanaka and her team gave versions of their own. Elvi had been in academics long enough to recognize when someone was glossing over data and skipping straight to interpretation. It almost always meant they were avoiding something they found unpalatable.
Naomi, Jim, and Fayez floated in her private office. It didn’t leave a lot of spare room. Or maybe it was fine, but she was so accustomed to having it be just her and Cara talking after a dive that the extra bodies felt unfamiliar. Or that she was frustrated and anything would have annoyed her at the moment.
“What we know for sure,” Elvi said, “is that he wasn’t here. No images on the security cameras, even while I was talking with him. No evidence of him interacting with anything physical beyond, of course, each of our individual brains.”
“We have evidence that he did that?” Jim asked.
“We saw him,” Elvi said, and regretted her tone as Jim recoiled a little. It wasn’t his fault that he hadn’t thought all this through. She made an effort to soften her tone. “The fact that we had those experiences is evidence. If we’d been doing control imaging on someone who wasn’t altered, we’d probably be able to map it, but even absent that, we have a correlation of experience that seems pretty conclusive.”
“You all saw the same thing,” Fayez said, “so there was probably some objective reality to it, even if it’s just that you all got fucked with the same way at the same time.”
“Miller couldn’t do that,” Jim said. “Even a second person in the room killed his simulation for me.”
“Which is interesting,” Elvi said. “Duarte clearly has more resources and, for lack of a better metaphor, more computing power. Which may be part of why he’s been able to hold back the attacks.”
“What about this plan he talked about?” Naomi said.
“What about it?”
“Is it plausible?”
Elvi pressed her palm to her forehead and rubbed in a small circle. Trust the war leader to skip over all the underlying science and head straight for policy implications. “In theory? Could our species be modified into something that behaves in a fundamentally different way? Sure. Absolutely. Happens all the time.”
“Are you being sarcastic?” Naomi said.
“No. It literally happens all the time. If mitochondria and chloroplasts hadn’t set up shop inside other organisms, eukaryotic life wouldn’t exist, including all of us. Hermit crabs using discarded shells and soup cans. Acacia ants built their whole evolutionary strategy out of supporting trees. Intestinal microflora have a vast effect on cognition, emotion, metabolism. Most of the cells in your body right now aren’t human. Change out a few species of bacteria in your gut, and you’ll be a fundamentally different person. The builders, as far as we can tell, were free-floating individual organisms that networked themselves into a functional consciousness, kind of the way an octopus can be viciously intelligent without a centralized brain. With the nonlocal effects we’ve seen? Sure, why not rebuild that architecture with advanced primates?”
Elvi made herself stop. She was talking too fast and just letting whatever came to mind flow out. It was something she did when she was stressed. She stretched her hands out, feeling the pull in her tendons just to root her a little more in her body.
“So maybe he can do it,” Jim said. “Whatever exactly it is.”
“That’s what I’m missing,” Elvi said. “Whether he’s talking about a superorganism or a subsummation.”
Jim raised his hand. His expression was eloquent enough to ask the question.
“Whether,” Elvi said, “he’s talking about making us into ants or neurons. If you’re an ant, you’re still an individual, just one who’s part of a larger organization. If you’re a neuron… Neurons don’t have a sense of self.”
“I’m not a hundred percent sure that ants do either,” Fayez said.
“So you’re saying,” Naomi broke in, “that Duarte, or whatever he’s turned himself into, is at least plausibly preparing to make everyone, everywhere part of a collective consciousness with him at the center so that he can go to war against the things beyond the gates.”
Elvi gathered herself, fighting to organize her thoughts.
“Yes,” she said.
The room was quiet for a long time.
Jim broke the silence with a single, harsh laugh. “Well, I’ll be damned. He found a way to make jackbooted authoritarianism seem like the good old days. I wouldn’t have thought he could.”
“I’m going to need to get messages through to my people,” Naomi said. “Is there a way to use your repeaters without exposing you?”
“It’s spotty ever since the gates went bright,” Elvi said. “We might be better off sending through a missile with a burst on it.”
“I’d need several,” Naomi said. “This feels like an all-hands-on-deck situation, and I’ve got hands in a lot of different systems.”
“We should have a conversation with the comms officer,” Fayez said. “I’ll come with you. Make the introductions.”
“There’s a lot of clarification I need from Tanaka too,” Elvi said. “And Ochida. Shit. I can’t send this data to Ochida. I can’t send it to anyone. How can I explain Amos being in the dataset?”
“That was always going to be a problem,” Fayez said.
“I was planning to bury it. I don’t think I can.”
Jim leaned forward despite the lack of gravity. It just made him seem like he was pitched at a different angle. “Maybe we can find a way to fake it. Dry lab it, but get the same conclusion?”