The Filter Trap (46 page)

“Haven’t seen you in a while, Nat,” he smiled. “I’m so sorry about your father.”

“I know you were close, Mr. Park. I was happy to see you at the funeral service. Sorry we didn’t have time to catch up. I found a bottle opener in his desk drawer from your deployment to Osan.”

She normally might not have chatted him up as much. Mr. Park never drank on the job but on his own time he’d probably gone on more benders with her father than either of them could remember. As far as Natalie was concerned, Mr. Park could work until he was dead to pay back her father for the liver transplant he needed five years ago. She needed to keep his old brain occupied so he wouldn’t notice she’d called the service elevator to
Absolute Zero
, which normally required a security ride-along.

Mr. Park was reminiscing about the maid-girls at Osan when the elevator doors closed. That was
definitely
a story she could live without. The thought perished quickly as the elevator plunged into the subterranean parking levels. At floor 0C Natalie punched the emergency stop and pressed the button for 0C three times. Her father thought it was cute when he picked the cadence to match her name: Na-Ta-Li, it always seemed obvious and a security risk to her. What happened next made sure that risk never materialized.

Ostensibly for safety, a soothing female voice asked, “Are you having an emergency?”

“Absolute Zero, please,” Natalie commanded.

“One moment.”

Natalie always found the eye scan creepy, and looked up at the black dot above the doors, which held a camera zooming in on her pupils. Naive Americans thought, of course, that facial recognition was invented by Facebook; this elevator had been scanning Natalie since middle-school. Not only did it check pupils and facial dimensions, but a final check for pulse measurements in the veins just below the skin on her face would rule out clever photographs or even severed heads.

The elevator smoothly unhooked from its regular track and went backwards, then down the hill a little ways like a funicular under the mountainside. Others could only feel the slight g-forces as the elevator changed direction, but Natalie had been there for the excavation and construction.

The doors swished open unveiling a laboratory as good as anything at NASA or Kam’s MIT. She’d been pleased to verify the latter first-hand, though Kam never knew.

“Hello?” she yelled down both sides of the long bright hallway.

“See, empty,” she said. “Now how am I supposed to save the human race from down here?”

The voice, silent since she stepped out of the car, still kept a strange limit on her motor skills. She’d almost tripped in front of Mr. Park, but the old pervert would have found it arousing in a way, incongruous with suspicion anyway.

“You have an emergency security patch protocol. All human software does.”

“Of course, but so what? I don’t see—”

And then she did.

“I’m assuming you’ve got something specific to say once I’ve broken several very serious laws both here and abroad?”

“The only laws you need to worry about are your laws of physics. Leave those to us.”

“Okay, God. That’s my new nickname for you by the way until I can find something more appropriate. Maybe Hal 9000?”

“If your memory of Hal 9000 is correct, we assure you we’re closer to your concept of God.”

“You keep saying we.”

“We are unanimous in our decision about what you need to do.”

Her body was taken from her again and propelled, awkwardly at first, step by step toward the security server access console at the back of the server farm. Her eyes, face, veins and this time a hand print and breath analysis granted her access to a low-ceilinged cold room with banks of black boxes humming and beeping like chattering robots.

“But there’s only one of you actually talking to me, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then for the love of, yourself I guess, could you speak in first person?”

“I will refer to myself in the singular for the remainder of our time together.”

Natalie perked up. “And how much longer is that?”

“After you send the software patch I can bring Kam and the others safely back to Earth.”

“If you can manipulate the electrical signals in my fucking brain, why can’t you just do all this yourself? You can read my mind, you know where the server farm is, and you know the security protocols.”

Natalie shrunk to the floor using the sparing control she still had over her body, believing now without a doubt that she must be going crazy.

“I had four of you to practice on, and you’re little different than any other similar sentient primate in the universe. The mechanics of controlling your cerebellum are easy. Manipulating matter at a distance is difficult, but eased somewhat by a shared locality. Therefore, I’m expending the minimum effort necessary to affect physical states on the Earth while preparing a more difficult matter manipulation where my body is. In addition, you are a native of Earth, a place I’ve never been. We do not have time to learn as I go.”

“Back up, you said a
shared locality
, what’s that?”

“Your relationship with Kamran Douglass necessitated sharing of your DNA, enabling a quantum bridge between matched quark states in nonlocal nucleic acid substrates.”

She wondered if the alien’s control over her body could prevent her from blushing.

“Kam and I swapped spit, yes, but it’s been too long for anything to
—
”

She stopped. They’d done more than kiss on that boat, and there was only one kind of DNA that could still be inside her.

“I find it odd how little humans know about the mechanics of their own bodies.”

The voice continued as it lifted her up and directed her toward the central control box.
She wanted to sink to the floor, take in what she’d just learned. She never wanted to be a mother, convinced she didn’t know how to handle kids nor want to spend the time.

“The life within you is one of billions, and billions of humans standing before untold trillions of trillions that may be saved by your actions.”

The alien had wholesale control of her body now, moving her hands like a marionette over the server controller keyboard while her head spun.

“To learn your encryption from the outside in, even for a highly-evolved mind like ours—like mine—having only learned your confusing obtuse English language, and now Korean, would take many days. The bearantulas may finish their work here by then. We need to outpace them, and manipulating enough matter to stop their ships would delay my own journey, which cannot happen.”

“Your journey? Are you coming to Earth? I mean, you’re already here, in my head, but I’ll keep playing along since I don’t have a choice.”

“No. I will depart for another part of the galaxy soon after I help Kam and the others return to Earth. It is imperative that I not use my . . .
abilities
in transit.”

Kam was coming back. The father of her child would return to her. Assuming this was all true she now had something to motivate her. And if it wasn’t true, she clearly couldn’t break free from whatever trick this was until she completed the bizarre mission. At the very least she could send out the security patch, get control of herself again, and take a pregnancy test. Unless . . .

“Alright, look, I don’t know what you meant by any of that, but if you want me to send out a fictitious security patch to the radio towers you gotta give me some time and get out of my head. I can’t concentrate like this, you can move my body but I can’t . . .
think
straight with you in here.”

“I’m not
in
your head. Though I can read enough of your neuron patterns to know you’re planning on activating a silent alarm, not make the patch, if I give you full control of your motor system.”

“Shit! Should have known I can’t outsmart myself.”

“If thinking about it like that will help you rationalize what you must do,” the voice said.

“So, you’ll leave me alone after I send out the patch?”

“From your perspective, yes.”

‘Either I’m crazy and I’ll be in jail tomorrow, or this is really happening and I’ll be a hero. Apparently I won’t get control of my own brain until I do this, so I might as well roll with it,’ she resigned herself.

“An even better rationalization,” the voice assured her.

Natalie started punching in her password at the console. If someone got this far into the system, through the biological safeguards outside, there wasn’t much hope in stopping them, so further security was useless. Anyone wanting to do real damage could just start unplugging the servers anyway, no code access required. Natalie was happy that at least wasn’t part of the plan. She brought up a command line interface, the direct access to the code on the servers.

“You can see what I can see right?” she asked, then hit herself. ‘Of course
I
can see what I can see,’ she thought, sticking to her belief this was some sort of hallucination, despite the voice’s best efforts to convince her otherwise.

Without waiting for the response, she donned a headset hung above the small monitor. A few years ago, privy to beta testing of virtual reality technology, she installed it in the server farm. At the time it provided a unique solution to tamp down emergencies, viewing code in a three-dimensional environment.
It also made her feel like Neo, exerting a godlike command over her own matrix; a great anti-depressant when helping to manage Dad’s estate, and Dad himself, became increasingly taxing.

She parsed the data, soaring over a virtual Earth that showed every installation of their software, the bright spots mostly in Asia. She backed up, palmed the Earth and brought up a virtual command line with her other hand. Plopping the balled-up Earth into the command box signaled to the simulation that this was a universally propagating update, sent to all online servers when she finished. She stopped a moment, realizing that it could be weeks or months before the servers outside of Korea reconnected to the Internet.

Kam appeared in front of her, startling her so much she backed away and the headset ripped off her face. She slammed into a server stack behind.

“What the fuck?”

“In your server simulation I can use a modicum of effort to create an avatar to communicate with you,” the voice explained. “I thought Kam would be best as my physical body may . . .
disturb
you.”

She cautiously put the headset back on. He was still there, an awkward blank stare smeared on his normally expressive face.

“Well if I have to hallucinate before I go to jail, at least I’ll get to ‘see’ you one last time.”

She reached out a long arm and caressed his face. He didn’t react except to open his mouth and speak, not with his own voice, but with the deep ethereal voice haunting her since the graveyard.

“What we are about to do is complex, but completely within your scope of abilities. I will guide you along, but prefer you execute as there may be liabilities in your primitive code I do not yet grasp.”

“
My
code is hardly primitive,” she defended herself, having a hard time reconciling the insult coming from Kam’s lips.

“From your perspective, you are correct.” Kam—it—said.

She enlarged the command line until they could both step into the black doorway.

“So what is actually in this patch you need to run?” she asked. “You know it won’t get to all the servers, right?”

“It doesn’t have to,” Kam said. “The code will run a signal to all connected radios. That signal will open the human minds in range to suggestion. They will use their own radios to rebroadcast the signal farther, until it reaches every radio relay in operation.”

“Wait,” she stopped. “Your plan is to hypnotize the human race to repeat your signal like hosts of some virus? You don’t see anything wrong with using us like that?”

“Your own brain releases hormones to ‘hypnotize’ you to manually reproduce to keep your species going, despite the fact you no longer need to. Real bacteria and viruses already live in and on your body, affecting your mood, digestion, etc.”

“I never knew I was such a nihilist,” she quipped. “So you use me to use everybody to use everybody else, then what?”

“By our calculations the cascade will take just over two days to cover the globe. At that time the second part of the code will execute, and the stations previously turned on by the first message will relay it to the leaders of your planet, and anyone else listening.”

“Which is what?”

“The most important choice your species will ever face.”

The crunching and scraping ground to a halt, then the wall parted again.

The humans walked through a gap that continued to the cavern floor. On the other side stood a strange but impressive machine. It looked more like a tunnel borer than a spaceship, probably because it had to embody that role before it could take on the next.

There were strange objects concealed under carefully crumpled and fused metal. Though none of the humans had true engineering training, they understood the contraption used a different set of rules than anything built on Earth.

The only familiar shape was a flimsy-looking crane with a lever balanced vertically on the side of the towering object.

“Looks like a death trap,” Amanda said under her breath.

“You’re already trapped,” Lee reminded her. “Without Mr. Tardigrade we’d be dead.”

“
Mr. Tardigrade
,” Jill repeated. “I wonder what its real name is.”

“We will share with you soon enough,” the voice thundered in their minds. “Step into the elevator.”

Kam shrugged and stepped onto the open, flat metal plate held up by four metal bars culminating in a single harness seven feet above. The others cautiously followed.

As soon as the last stepped up, the elevator moved vertically along the ship’s surface. The humans were surprised at the lack of shaking. A human open-air elevator like this with no guide-rails would be notoriously dangerous. The humans were clearly safe if they didn’t jump to their deaths as the crane reeled in the spool of metal above them, climbing hundreds of feet.

The elevator stopped not halfway up the side of the skyscraper-challenging construction. An opening, the only part yet to be sealed by Mr. Tardigrade, beckoned them. Bright light spilled from inside, temporarily blinding them.

As their eyes adjusted they stepped through and examined the interior of the strange craft. No controls, no markings, just white walls, floors and a ceiling that seemed to pour light from everywhere. Blue circles appeared at even intervals around a central column. Under the circles, chairs, previously camouflaged in white, turned blue.

“Wow,” Amanda said, “you don’t have to treat us like children.”

“So say your own children, do they not?”

“Wouldn’t know,” she grumbled, climbing into one of the chairs.

As they sat, the chairs molded to their proportions and turned white again.

“I’d ask him to make us some new clothes, but I’m afraid what y’all smell like after three days in these things,” Lee said, as the dirty, wet clothes supplied by the tall ones melted into her seat.

The seats sunk into the floor, with the humans facing nearly vertical as the door on the far side of the room sealed itself and disappeared.

“Uh!” Amanda uttered, as their body cladding finally melted away, temporarily exposing their bodies.

“Don’t worry, Major,” Lee quipped. “I won’t peek.”

“I
can’t
peek,” Kam said, his head prevented from moving by some unknown force. He’d tried, realizing his chance to see Jill after all these years might happen in the most unusual circumstance imaginable.

As soon as they were stripped they were covered again when white strips of material akin to body-sized rice noodles descended from the ceiling. Upon contact the strips cooled and conformed. The humans felt clean, but also temporarily asphyxiated and blind.

Their blindness cured in an instant, the black of their eyelids replaced by open space, an expanse of stars near no system. Perhaps the asphyxiation was due more to the feeling of floating in open space without a spacesuit than the alien rice noodles oozing into their mouths and down into their lungs, trickling into every alveoli. Breathing, as they knew it, ceased as the noodles transferred dioxide, in amounts small enough not to overwhelm the brain, directly to their lung tissue.

Their attention, however, remained on the object looming before them against the endless pinhole of deep space. The same school bus-sized container hovered, unmoving, as in the warehouse outside the ship.

“You have acclimated well to your pressure encapsulations.”

“Oh, is that what you call it? We call it waterboarding back home,” Lee quipped.

“We apologize for the unusual sensation, but it is much safer to travel in a vacuum this way than in space suits in a pressurized cabin-as your own history of space exploration will verify,” it said as the container rotated ninety degrees.

Facing the clear capsule the humans saw the Tardigrade creature, no longer a lifeless lump of elephant skin. It, too, wrapped itself in a white womb.

“This is how I appear, loaded in the central column you four now circle in the compressed cabin. However, since we are meeting in the mind, and you all are unencumbered, I will share with you my true form as well.”

The capsule disappeared, and the white wrapping faded quickly. Underneath the unfolded elephant skin the crumpled flesh ballooned to a stretched tube of slightly green-gray flesh. At equidistant points on the sides small arms with three digits opened. In what might be called a palm, an inset, reddish eye peered back. Other dots appeared at regular intervals along the tubular body and at either end. They would have looked like liver spots if the moving hands facing the humans hadn’t “blinked.”

Amanda flashed back to her childhood; the thing looked like a cartoon Dumbo with its head removed.

“The elephants on your planet, as many other things, are smarter than you think,” the voice stated. “Your species may one day learn to view other animals not on the appearance of the flesh, but of the mind. If you survive.”

Although in its true form, no part of the creature moved as it spoke.

“Orifices are liabilities in space,” the voice explained. “Though our cousins on your planet still have them, we evolved more suitably.”

“How do you eat?” Jill asked.

“They’re finally opening up the floor and you wanna know how they eat!” Lee asked, flabbergasted. “Even a non-PhD can tell, dude. Look at his skin. His
green
skin.”

“But, chlorophyll would only be half the equation in space, you still need to breathe, and we already verified there’s no mouth, even if there was carbon dioxide floating around up here.”

“Lee is correct. Our skin is not for use in space. The form I am showing you is how I appear in an atmosphere, on a planet.”

“Of course,” Jill said. “You maximize energy, then curl up for space, just like your Earth cousins.”

“Not exactly. We have time, we will explain all to you.”

“How much time?” Amanda wondered. “When are we going to leave the planet?”

“We already have.”

“What!” the humans asked in unison.

“We are already in space, on our way to Earth.”

“But, how?”

“Your primitive brains believe nothing happens to you unless your senses report it directly. I have distracted your minds here, the sensation of tunneling through the surface of the planet and escaping the planet’s gravity was not important. Though, you did guess correctly at the nature of the escape apparatus, Doctor Tarmor.”

Jill smiled.

“What of the tall ones, what will happen?”

“If they persist in pacifism the young ones will be taken by the bearantulas, as before.”

“And you’re going to help us stop them?”

“We’re going to give you a choice. What you do is up to you.”

“You keep saying we’ll have a big grand choice, but not what that choice is between,” Amanda said.

“We will tell you once you’re educated. An uneducated choice in this matter is unwise.”

“Okay then, take us to school, Mr. Watermelon. What are you waiting for?” Lee asked.

“We were waiting until we’d escaped the planet and our trajectory set. Now that this has happened we can focus our energy on showing you what we know.”

“Are the tall ones okay?” Lee asked.

“Their fate is their own. They were given the same choice you will have soon.”

“Then they must have chosen wrong,” Amanda stated.

“Sometimes there is no right choice,” the Tardigrade corrected her, and did not wait for any other comments or questions before continuing.

“Our species evolved on a very early planet, soon after the suspected birth of the universe. Your scientists are close, but not quite right about that date. Needless to say, we evolved to sentience on a single planet in the first billion years. Our planet had a very thin atmosphere because it was small, even smaller than the one we just left. Because of this, animals evolved to live a life of constant flight. The air was filled with wonderful things, big and small, all connected, as in your biosphere, but there were no deep oceans to house things as large as whales.

“For we were the whales of the sky, over time evolving to reproduce higher and higher in the atmosphere. Unlike your ancestors, we developed intelligence by avoiding predators in the clouds. Our rudimentary hands evolved only to hold onto each other or smaller organisms. The longer we could hold out for food, the longer we lived, thus we evolved very long life cycles at higher altitudes, eventually entering space to hide and reproduce.

“It was at that point that we developed superior communication skills and lost all orifices but one, the guiding jet. We evolved to no longer eat other organisms, but create our food by absorbing solar radiation, hydrogen and oxygen through our skin. In space we balloon to the size you see me now, filling with hydrogen from the upper atmosphere and storing for the long haul.

“We cast ourselves in every direction, spawning throughout the infant universe as it expanded. On some worlds, like yours, mutations disabled us and stranded us to evolve to a form more suitable for that planet, but a sad loss to the continuum of minds the rest enjoy. For we do not communicate with the now microscopic tardigrades of Earth. Nearly four billion years ago, a member of us landed on your blue planet to absorb plentiful hydrogen. An accident forced it down to the surface, where its offspring were unable to escape your gravity.

“It is worth noting that our species has always been sexually advantageous. That is to say, when there are more of us, we use male and female reproductive systems as you do for variation in the genetic code. Often this is only warranted after the first or second new brood on a new planet. A tardigrade will never leave for space without eggs, but the first generation of children may choose to remain female and lay a successive generation without the male’s genetic variation.

“Four billion years of successive offspring on your planet took us downward in size and scope until we became microscopic. It is by this token that we survived your global extinctions. Had we remained the size you see us now, we would have been easy prey for the dinosaurs, although, truth be told, some of them are distant cousins.

“Your planet’s history is late though, and what is most important to you now lies further backwards in time, for your species is only the latest to evolve sentience in a long line. Only a few hundred million years after we began spawning across the stars, cataloging and sharing our knowledge of the universe, we found another intelligent species. With this first species of sentience other than our own, we made a grave mistake.

“By sharing our knowledge of the universe, physics, chemistry and dimensional manipulation, we fast-forwarded their development. In human terms we took them from Renaissance to the 25th century in a span of a few decades. In doing so, we enabled them to make what they considered a grand breakthrough in science, but what the rest of the universe has suffered for ever since.

“Your planet was moved by this species, or rather, the remains of this species. Nearly twelve billion years ago the first of what your species calls a
singularity
was born. With it, the species we helped was able to become nearly immortal and leave the confines of its planetary home. While our species fostered a great understanding and appreciation of the universe, the remnants of its immobility fostered a tremendous fear in it. Protecting resources became paramount to extending life.

“With true understanding of matter and time comes instantaneous communication across the stars, due to what you perceive as quantum entanglement. The species we helped evolve came to use this to constrain the natural evolution of the universe, perhaps balancing for our own meddling.

“Most intelligent species naturally wipe themselves out, unable to reconcile competition for resources and latent emotional urges. Harnessing the atom is often the harbinger of extinction—the filter—if a species can survive that long. After billions of years of observation it is apparent that this affects nearly 88% of all intelligent species that develop manufacturing capabilities. The period in which they will perish is within one century of understanding radio waves, which is universally the first scientific step to investigating radiation and atomic structure of the elements.

“Because of the fear the first superintelligence carries, let’s call them the Elders. Any other intelligence surviving the atomic phase of development had to be quarantined by the Elders, as you have been, or destroyed. In fact, virtually all of the remaining intelligent life in the universe, other than ourselves, exists only in these quarantine zones created by the Elders.”