Edge of the Wire, page 15
“But someone would have to do that programming,” Waverly said. “You have to have a human programmer somewhere in the mix. You have to have someone like a terrorist who hates other people. Hate is wanting because you want other people to hurt. But robots don’t hate. They just do what they’re programmed to do. You’re saying that artificial intelligence was vulnerable to manipulation. Of course it was. Back in the old days, sure. But it doesn’t ‘turn bad’ on its own. A spoon is vulnerable to manipulation. I can use it to eat my yogurt, or to scoop out somebody’s eye. But the spoon doesn’t want you to be blind any more than Noyes does. Noyes doesn’t get anything for doing a good job. He doesn’t have anything to risk from doing a poor one. He just is. He’s programmed to act like something that cares, but in the end, he’s ones and zeroes. Humans actually care.”
Noyes bowed his head slightly as if to say he would not dispute this.
“I understand your point,” Rowe said. “But . . . I . . . Maybe that’s what makes me worried about this place. If a spoon and a chess computer are tools, then so is the Goo. Even though the Goo is officially infallible and invulnerable. If somebody—or something—can use a spoon to gouge my eye out . . .”
Waverly opened his arms and looked left and right.
“But look around,” he said. “Who’s gonna do that? Who’s gonna pervert the Goo? This place is just lightning and dust.”
“And alien ships,” Rowe countered. “And strange anomalies that can channel the Goo through a hilltop.”
“Is any of that a person that wants things?” Waverly asked.
Rowe started to think about this question, but then their discussion was interrupted.
“The Marie Curie is now coming into range of your enviro-suit sensors,” Noyes announced. “And I think something may have gone wrong in its vicinity.”
The pit of Rowe’s stomach fell.
“Gone wrong?” said Rowe. “What does that mean, Noyes?”
“The scanners in your suit allow me to make some educated guesses based on pings and bouncebacks,” Noyes said. “And I think there are some empty enviro-suits up ahead. Not necessarily broken, but certainly without occupants.”
“What?” said Rowe. “What does ‘without occupants’ mean? Be clearer, dammit.”
“I don’t know,” Noyes said defensively. “Why would Silkworms take off their suits? Probably some kind of problem or danger.”
The men broke into a run. Soon the crater containing the ship became visible. They crested the lip of it, and Rowe gazed down to the crater floor and immediately saw that Noyes had been correct. At the base of the enormous ramp was a cluster of enviro-suits. They had not been stacked in an orderly fashion (like the suits within the med bay), but instead flung haphazardly within a radius of about fifty feet. There were ten of them. Among the suits were portions of human limbs, and at least one mangled, nude torso in a pool of half-dried blood. Other pieces of destroyed Silkworm had been deposited at the base of the ramp and up the ramp itself.
It was not clear to Rowe if the men had intentionally discarded their suits, or if they had been somehow ripped out of them.
He slowed to a jog and readied his railgun.
“What do you see?” he urgently asked his friend.
“Nothing yet,” Waverly returned. “Let’s get closer.”
They hastily made their way to the crater floor.
“Movement at the top of the ramp,” Noyes whispered.
Rowe looked up and saw a cluster of five dark wheels moving together at the top of the ramp. They were blue-gray, and so translucent that Rowe would have missed them entirely if Noyes had not pointed them out. The wheels were a foot thick, three feet across, and stacked roughly to the height of a man. The wheels rotated slowly. As Rowe looked on, they became less and less distinct, then invisible. Rowe could not tell if this was because they had simply faded to nothingness, or because they had retreated back inside the ship.
“What was that, Noyes?” Rowe barked. “Was that the shadow we saw on the recording from Davidson’s suit?”
“Unsure,” the AI replied. “Working on that possibility now. One moment.”
“Damn it!” Rowe cried.
Waverly pointed his railgun toward the top of the ramp, tracking from left to right.
Rowe took a cursory look at the bodies. These were the Silkworms from his squad—including a few replacements—and all of them had been killed. Rowe crept to the nearest enviro-suit and toed it with his foot.
“Noyes,” he said, “these suits look intact.”
“We can jack in if you like,” the AI told him.
“Not now,” said Rowe. “We’re going to harvest the memory cards and take them back to the lander. I don’t want to spend any more time here than we have to.”
From the corner of his eye, Rowe watched Waverly shining his light up the ramp into the loading bay. It revealed nothing. Waverly looked disappointed and took a first step up the metal ramp.
“No,” Rowe said. “Not yet.”
“What was that?” Waverly asked.
“I think the memory cards will show us,” Rowe said. “We don’t need to risk going into the ship again. Just keep an eye out, yeah? You too, Noyes.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” said the hologram.
While Waverly and Noyes watched the Marie Curie, Rowe carefully extracted memory cards from the empty enviro-suits. The cards appeared functional, or at least not damaged beyond repair. The extraction did not take long.
When he had finished, Rowe signaled to Waverly that they could head back.
“Yeah, let’s get the hell out of here,” Waverly agreed.
They jogged back up the opposite side of the crater. They could have sprinted, Rowe knew, and yet something in him said that such an action could be construed as fleeing—and that fleeing might send the wrong message to whatever lurked inside the ship.
Once out of the crater, they slowed further.
“These cards will be the safest way to see what the fuck is going on,” Rowe said. “Holy shit, man. What the hell is happening here?”
“This is . . .” Waverly began. “This is different from a virus in the Goo. That was a thing, up there. A moving thing.”
He could manage no more.
Rowe realized Waverly was frightened, and only nodded, resolving to control his own emotions for the sake of his friend.
They walked back in the direction of the lander.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“WE HAVE TO TRY TO SEND SOMETHING UP TO THE APOLLINAX,” WAVERLY said.
They were inside the technical room of the lander, preparing to access the memory cards. All senior Silkworms in the landing party had been informed of the emergency, but the protocol was that work on the wire job should not stop, even when an entire squad was lost. However, several Silkworms now permanently stood watch, their eyes and scanners trained on the horizon in the direction of the Marie Curie.
The mood of the landing party was now poisoned. The Silkworms gossiped and conjectured. And, above all, they felt afraid.
Inside the lander, Waverly tried to make his case.
“We’ve definitively found evidence of alien life—life which, apparently, has cloaking technology for their ships. I don’t see how this is anything less than a discovery of the greatest fucking magnitude.”
He looked up at the ceiling and moved his hands as he spoke, counting on his fingers as if taking an inventory.
“There’s also the strange wire below ground. The Goo that displays on the top of the hill. Finding Cortez. Something killing the Silkworms from our crew. Any one of these might warrant sending up a communication, but taken together?”
“Yes, I agree,” said Rowe, sounding distracted. “We’ll do it. But I want to watch these files first.”
In a secluded alcove fitted with monitors, Rowe, Waverly, and Noyes began viewing the recordings made by the enviro-suits of the dead men. Rowe fast-forwarded a lot. Each video began the same way—unremarkable work being done with the drill on the Marie Curie’s outer hull. While a handful of men worked, others simply milled about, chatted, or rested. The first sign of anything askew was a Silkworm standing at the base of the loading ramp who seemed to peer into the opening of the ship as if he was looking at something intriguing. Then there was a strange, almost mechanical movement in the shadows where he gazed. The Silkworm saw a man-sized automaton with five spinning parts. He began to advance up the ramp, presumably to investigate. But as he did, the automaton gradually morphed and faded into a discernibly humanoid form. Then the form moved like a person, beckoning him to approach.
“What the hell?” Waverly said as they watched.
The Silkworm in the video carefully climbed the ramp toward the shadowy figure.
Rowe said: “What we’re seeing is exactly what this Silkworm saw, correct Noyes?”
“Yes, ah . . .” the hologram began thoughtfully. “This was captured by the cameras in his suit.”
“But if his Goo had overlain something?” Rowe pressed. “If it projected something for him to see? Or if something else did?”
“Boy-o, I doubt that—”
“Just tell me?” Rowe insisted. “Would we see it?”
“Yes, you would,” Noyes told him. “If anything were projected or overlaid, these recordings would show that as well.”
The Silkworm in the video made his way up the ramp and called out to the figure who lingered in the darkness. There was no response. The figure did not move.
When the Silkworm reached the top of the ramp, all pretense of a humanoid shape seemed to fall away, and what was left in its place were five slowly-rotating wheels. Held in impossible balance and supported by something unseen, they swayed back and forth in a way that gave Rowe an impression of predation and anticipation.
Then Rowe’s impression was all but confirmed. When the Silkworm hesitated for a confused moment, the thing seemed to propel forward and—all at once—to have surrounded the Silkworm within its strange floating circles. A moment later, through mechanics unknown to Rowe, the Silkworm was ripped apart like a rag doll.
Waverly and Rowe sat back in their seats, speechless. Rowe alternated between camera views from different parts of the suit. When possible, he zoomed in. At times, the wheels seemed to shimmer as though they were covered in glowing dust.
“It doesn’t seem to touch him,” Rowe observed, still zooming in and out. “The wheels. They stay clear.”
“Yes,” said Waverly. “I can almost imagine invisible pincers pulling the suit apart—right there where we can’t see.”
“Or maybe some kind of centrifugal force from the wheels does it,” Rowe said. “I don’t know how that would work exactly, but . . . there you go. We’re watching it happen on that screen.”
After the Silkworm died, the enviro-suit—itself rent in many places—continued to record.
As the trio watched, the thing made of wheels seemed to linger over the body. The wheels slowed their spin gradually, and then—for a strange, eerie moment—appeared to stop entirely. The thing floated, still and silent. Then the spinning began again, and the thing started to move away.
“Was it doing something there?” Waverly asked.
Rowe shook his head absently and rewound the video to the instant when the wheels had stopped. He hit pause.
The men looked closely. The five wheels were crisscrossed with golden veins of ore. Their surfaces were not entirely unlike that of Tendus-13 itself, though the skein was gold and not green.
“I think that it . . . takes . . . something from that Silkworm,” Rowe said. “The way it pauses. It is eating. Or having an orgasm. Or some other interaction is happening. But that isn’t nothing.”
“What if it just stops to have a look?” offered Noyes. “No idea if it has eyes to look with, o’course, but you never know.”
“If it just wants to look, then why does it need to kill the Silkworm?” said Rowe. “It could do that while leaving him alive.”
“As you say, boy-o,” Noyes replied.
“I think I can guess what it did,” Waverly interjected. “But let’s play the other files so I can be sure.”
Rowe did.
The file that followed—that of the Silkworm next-closest to the ramp—showed a strange movement at the corner of this doomed Silkworm’s vision. Then he too seemed to see a familiar shape beckoning above the body of his fallen colleague. It solidified and became more than an outline; it became the perfect visage and countenance of the man who had just been killed.
“It was taking a picture,” Waverly added. “It knew to use him as a lure.”
This second Silkworm also approached what seemed to be his colleague, and only at the last minute found that he stood before five naked spinning wheels that performed a dance to rend his limbs and head.
“The way the wheels spin,” said Rowe. “Some physics is in play I don’t quite understand. They spin like tops that give off energy to support one another. Or it’s like they’re in orbit. It reminds me of the movement of planets.”
Rowe accessed the other files.
The remaining Silkworms quickly noticed the deaths of their colleagues, but in the same instant that their attention was caught, they began to see things that were not there. The faces of their own, living colleagues around them changed and took on a horrible aspect. They gaped at one another and saw, not other Silkworms, but things of darkest nightmare. Eyes on stalks and mouths full of teeth so wide they seemed to bisect the entire head. Things that unhinged their jaws to show doom and death waiting, and never-ending throats of horror.
The deepest dimensions of terror were unleashed in the form of these ever-changing faces that hovered between beasts and men.
It was hard for Rowe and Waverly to look at the screens.
“Fuuuuck,” was almost all that Waverly could say. “I am gonna need some sleeping pills tonight. This is something out of a Halloween movie.”
“I wonder if each man sees what he’s most afraid of?” Rowe asked. “Or are these just, like, the thing’s best guess?”
As they watched the playback, the terrified Silkworms screamed, fled, attacked one another, or ran madly in circles. But the cameras of the suits of the fallen men captured another reality. A thing made out of five hovering wheels that methodically approached each distracted man . . . and quickly and efficiently pulled him apart.
The screams of terror carried the full measure of their surprise and pain. Then—after the men had been decimated and had fallen silent forevermore—the horrific visions laid over their screens died with them. (Rowe was privately ashamed of the relief he felt each time this happened. He could not remember such a pure sensation of fear since childhood, at least not brought on by something wholly visual. Watching these monsters on a monitor was one thing, but he could not imagine how it must have felt to have believed they were real.)
The thing of five wheels spawned in and out of existence at the edges of the recordings. When the last of the Silkworms fell dead, the thing seemed to survey the battlefield, hovering tentatively, moving from corpse to corpse.
“Is it doing that thing again?” Waverly asked. “Floating above them to copy them? I can’t tell.”
“It may be seeing if there is any more killing to do,” Rowe answered. “Does it like the killing, do you think?”
“Hard to feel it did any of that reluctantly,” said Waverly. “Is it alive? Is it a fucking ro-bit like Noyes?”
“Strictly speaking, I’m not even a ro-bit,” Noyes told them. “I don’t have a physical body you can touch. But that thing could be operated by an AI, if that’s what you mean. Almost anything could be.”
For some reason, this made Rowe shiver uneasily.
He turned and looked at Waverly.
“You’re right. It’s time to get in touch with Commander Collins.”
Rowe and Waverly stood beside one another and watched the engineer carefully move the rocket onto a flat plastic launch pad. The rocket was about the size and shape of a Christmas tree and featured a glistening metallic exterior like polished chrome.
The engineer was a small man with thinning brown hair. He had large eyes and a small, stern nose that gave him an owlish expression. The engineer pulled the rocket onto the pad until a satisfying metal “click” occurred. Then he tugged back and forth, verifying it had been rendered immobile, and smiled in satisfaction. For a moment, the engineer caught his own owlish visage in the side of the rocket and seemed startled.
“It’s pretty,” said Waverly. “Shiny, like.”
Rowe suspected Waverly was trying to distract himself with these observations. Take his mind off the horrors they had just watched on so many screens.
“It won’t be pretty by the time it gets up to the Apollinax,” said the engineer. “If it gets up there. I’d give this thing a little better than a fifty percent chance.”
“And there’s no way for us to confirm if it makes it?” Waverly asked.
The engineer looked at Waverly and shrugged. His avian expression said that this was not his problem, and he was not in a position to guarantee anything.
Waverly leaned closer to Rowe.
“You’re sure you don’t want to throw a memory card or two in there as well?” he asked. “Something this important? With everything we’ve found?”
“I’m sure they’ll be able to read my written report just fine,” said Rowe.
“What about photos?” Waverly urged. “We could print out photos on a piece of paper or something. That’d have to be safe.”
“I’d still rather not risk it,” Rowe told him. “I made a few pen drawings to accompany my notes.”
“You made hand drawings?” asked Waverly. “Like a child does to develop motor skills?”
Rowe nodded.
Waverly smiled as though such a thing was nearly risible.
“All right?” the engineer asked, looking between the two men.
“Yeah, all right,” Rowe confirmed.
Waverly puffed his cheeks and blew out air.
