They seem to grow bored now and move off a distance to touch each other, encompass each other in their long, skeletal arms, locking in full embrace. Sensory communication? Or simply overly affectionate? She had never been able to establish whether they possessed a true, structured language system. But they did seem to be communicating with each other.
She watches them now. She wishes for communication, the right kind, the soft kind, gentle and soothing, hands moving, skin on skin, motion and rhythm….
She closes her eyes, but cannot picture it. Not anymore. She opens her eyes, disheartened.
A group of youths have shaped a giant maroon-coloured leaf into a bowl, and catch the water dripping off the trees in the humidity. They hand it back and forth between one another. She knew that if she drank some, it would taste sweet.
“Just where the hell have you been?”
Karlyn tries several routes in order to reach the main template without success, the nanopolice bounce back at her without any reasonable explanation. Her frustration mounts.
“I’ve been busy,” she says and sighs, looking up at the towering structure before her.
“Busy,” he mumbles. Then says: “Well, about an hour ago I started receiving a strange pulsing over Beta channel. Thing just came back online. All of a sudden. Just like that!”
“I know. I’m looking right at it.”
“Looking at what?”
“The habitat. It’s up and running. Although she’s deformed somewhat.”
“Are you shitting me?”
She adjusts her biolastic suit’s camera eye. “See that?”
He whistles.
“Try boosting the bandwidth,” she says. “You should be getting a pulsing sound. I’m attempting to hack into the nodules. So far, no luck.”
Cruz is stunned; she knows this because for the first time since she could remember he has little or nothing to say.
“Damn it! Damn it, damn it, damn it all!” she shrieks.
“What now?”
“The buffers on the grid just melted,” she huffs, millifibers untwisting, silicrobes breaking apart and floating away. “There’s no way to tell if the coding sequence has been affected unless we activate it.”
“Gee, do you think?” Cruz remarks. “I’ve been saying that the moment Beta went down. And that hiccup earlier? I’ve traced the source and it’s not in the system. It’s from outside.”
She scoffs. “Nothing can get in from outside! That’s what the filters are for.”
“It can if its own coding comes across as a latent paragene, waiting for instructions,” he says flatly. “One of the most extreme probabilities, which is probably why we—why you—missed it.”
Here we go! She puts her fists up and bangs her own helmet several times. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! It was such a remote danger she’d never had the biofilters check for such a problem.
You’ve been waiting for something like this to happen. Haven’t you? she thought. Little man.
“So what’s that, like, a point-two percent probability?” She sits back on her thighs.
“Something like that,” says Cruz. “Well, it gets better. Every time we booted up to restart, the induction flow flushed the system, and the resulting surge multiplied the paragenes by a factor of three.”
“So we inadvertently caused the codes to multiply,” she says lamely. “Certainly explains a few things, anyway.”
“Like?”
“Platforms themselves are sentient. We know that Beta was contaminated during primary build-up to sentience after landing. While I was poking around in the matrix, I could have….well….I thought….”
“You thought what?”
“Well, I could have sworn the thing giggled!”
“Uh-huh,” says Cruz. “Well in the meantime we need to figure out what exactly is in those pseudo-paragenes. And Karlyn….”
Her skin flushes cold, knowingly. “What?”
“We’ll have to destroy the stock. I’ll need that signature, Karlyn.”
She shakes slightly. “I don’t concur.”
“You called a third-party inquest. It’s no longer your decision.”
Her heart sinks into her stomach. She sees another error made.
You give that little bitch a good one last night? Made it special, so to finish what you started? Trying to go all the way up the ranks, Cruz? Need me out of the way, first? My vote, which always counts against you? You emptied my life, my career. You want my committee seat empty, too? This might do it for you. Glad I could help.
“You hear? It’s not your decision.”
She stares at her idle hands, at her trembling fingers, impassively, trapped. Her voice wanders absently from her lips: “I wonder whose, then?”
She watches the little creatures spin around and begin dipping into the forest, disappearing one by one. She watches them go. The solemn one sits for a moment before getting up. It turns to face her and, before vanishing into the dense growth, sticks its tongue out.
And now a word from our sponsors….
The aboriginals are busy gathering water and food, the soft fruits that hang low on the dripping trees. They pass the water bowls and food back down a line toward the larger group that lay huddled with the coming darkness under an umbrella tree, touching each others’ faces softly while working. The solemn one sits off a ways by the nodules where she had been working for some time, like a solitary watchman.
Cruz has had no luck deciphering any biosequencing the paragenes might contain. The elusive alien life codes that they harbour remain shrouded in confusion. And with the stock’s authenticity in question, the committee has made its decision.
“That’s funny. My interface is having trouble linking with Beta,” Cruz says. “I can’t hear her biorhythms.”
“Oh?” she whispers to herself.
“Have you downloaded the toxin into the Platform?”
“Yes,” she lies. “Yes, I have.”
The mouldings have burst into small flower-trees; nodules nested carefully among the large pink petals, waiting for the final coding sequence that would let them begin their new life.
At least they’d have a fair chance, fairer than any stellar dweller could hope, of that she is certain. Roots. Roots from which to grow….
The bug’s primer chimes, signalling the craft’s readiness for launch. She waits at the hatch, her eyes swallowing the final picture as hard as they could. Gripping the interface controls around her helmet she logs on and links to Beta’s digilandscape. The induction flow appears stable, despite the strange whooping sound it makes. The program buoy holds.
This will be her last action as a farmer. With a strange calmness, she keys in the final coding sequence from her wrist pad. She strains to hear the biomatrix flutter and hum in her earpiece. At first the algorithms scatter, then twirl like a cyclone. Piece by piece they fall into place, creating a new, yet familiar landscape.
With the system fully automated, she disengages the link.
“I can’t get a reading,” Cruz says. “Termination complete?”
“Oh yes,” she says. “Yes it is.”
Over the distance the solemn one’s voice booms a deep-throated tune, thick in the air. This is the first time she’s ever heard anything like this spring forth from their alien mouths. She finds something alluring about the song, something rich with deep, yet obscured meaning. She thinks to hit the recorder, but for no reason known to her she doesn’t move. Maybe it doesn’t seem important in the greater scheme of things.
I wish you well. Whoever you are. Whoever, whatever you might become. You, who are rooted and set in your lives to come….
She palms the wall panel. The hatch closes like a flower at sunset. She returns her suit and equipment to the locker, folding it neatly, placing the devices correctly in their holding slots, directly beneath that fully loaded pulse gun. She strokes its transparent sheath; a finger tracing the weapon’s every curve, eyes locked on the trigger. She grips the gun’s handle firmly…