Authors: Jack McDonald Burnett
Grant, who had never met a Pelorian, thought it was clear that they were the threat. He felt bad about saying so because Conn had been fooled by them as publicly as anyone in the world, but it wasn’t Conn’s fault, he said. Her friend, Persisting, had done a great deal for her personally, and had saved both her and Grant’s own lives.
“Why haven’t they just exterminated us, then?” Conn said. “They probably could, with all the stuff they’re capable of building with those huge forgers.”
“Well, doesn’t that come next, according to your Aphelial? They live on a remote island in Russia. They give the Chinese nitrogen power in exchange for the Chinese conquering Russia. They use Russia’s nukes on America and probably China. That way, the most powerful countries in the world are all out of the way, but one of them is habitable.”
“It is strange that they only had avatars studying the United States,” Yongpo said. Conn didn’t mention her theory that there hadn’t been an avatar invasion of the US at all, that it had been a pretext for war.
Grant said, “what I want to know is: if they’re not constructs, basically big puppets, if they’re really living beings with a full consciousness, then aren’t they entitled to all the rights and dignity of any other sentient being? Any person? The Pelorians use them as tools. How is it OK to use living beings like that?”
“They upload their own consciousness into them,” Conn said. “The being deciding to use it...well, becomes what he’s using. That makes a difference, right?”
Yongpo said, “My question is, if they’re living beings, what do the Pelorians use to make them?” Conn shuddered.
Conn thought consciousness—uploaded though it might be—made the avatars free agents, with life uniquely their own. It made sense, she supposed, and it also explained the Pelorians’ reluctance to give humankind the full avatar tech, possibly fearing being judged the same way the Aphelials judged them.
“Look at it this way,” Grant said, circling back to their threat assessment. “The Pelorians asked for a meeting on the moon not thinking anyone would show up. If no one did, it would confirm that the moon isn’t currently being used, that it doesn’t belong to anybody, and they could do what they wanted with it. Whatever that is.” She posited that the Pelorians were intentionally cryptic about their invitation, making it difficult to figure out, but in a way they could say later should have been clear.
“If they supposedly studied us so carefully, you would think they would know how the US was going to react,” Conn suggested.
“Not necessarily. You were surprised that they arrested you, weren’t you? Should you have known?” Conn didn’t have an answer.
For her part, she distrusted Murrdip Hangzhii. He had killed two people with a wave of his wand and severely wounded another. And then didn’t render any aid, as was his supposed duty to travelers in distress. In fact, he treated the Saturn crew the way he did believing they were avatars. If avatars are beings entitled to rights and dignity, as the Aphelial seemed to believe, how could he discard them so callously?
Put it all together and there was just something menacing about him. He certainly seemed to have contempt for the human race.
“Maybe that’s it,” Grant said. “Maybe they don’t give a crap about us one way or another. But they aren’t actively trying to wipe us out, either. And they would stop the Pelorians from doing so if they could, not out of any concern for humanity, but because the Pelorians are these awful outlaws Mr. Murrdip made them out to be.”
Nothing was decided, and Conn wasn’t yet persuaded that she’d been so wrong about the Pelorians. She was determined to find out for herself.
Conn’s first stop back on Earth was
NewsAmerica,
where she found that Grant’s rescue was not that big a story. Even Conn’s escape from prison was somehow not enough to persuade Hayley Brigham to interview her live on the feeds. She had to settle for a second-tier personality, Ethan Wilkins, and a second-tier feed dedicated to space exploration: the first tier was taken up by the state of war with the Pelorians—and the new China-Russia war, which had officially broken out while the astronauts were traveling back to Earth. Neither side had used nukes yet, but the world was understandably holding its breath.
Nonetheless, Conn was a story, and would be a bigger one if she were arrested at the
NewsAmerica
studios. She sought a kind of asylum there. Once the federal government knew she was back on Earth, and where she was, they would come to get her. A producer, who was an admirer of Conn’s, held the feds off until the scheduled time for the interview by promising to publicize the hell out of any arrest they made on her premises. The feds stood down. They were arresting Conn in the first place because they wanted to avoid publicity for her cause.
At the appointed time, Ethan Wilkins interviewed her. Conn hadn’t restarted her medication. She didn’t have time to be sick for days. She planned by a superhuman effort to keep herself on an even keel for as long as she would need to do what she had to do. She didn’t know if she could do it—but she knew she didn’t have a choice.
She told the world she had been arrested for nothing graver than being supposedly pro-Pelorian, and had been held without charge for weeks. Wilkins was skeptical on the air. “How did you escape?”
“I can’t tell you,” Conn said. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.” Such as the warden who had essentially freed her.
Wilkins asked, “Are you aware that Warden Kohler of FCI Dublin herself disappeared shortly after you did?”
“No,” Conn said, deeply troubled.
Wilkins asked her the big question: was she pro-Pelorian? A state of war existed between the United States and the Pelorians, according to Congress and the president, and giving them aid and comfort would be treason.
Conn said, “I don’t know what to think about the Pelorians in general anymore. I know that I have a Pelorian friend, who doesn’t want war and isn’t an enemy of the United States.”
“How has he shown you he’s your friend?”
“He saved my life on the moon, and then he saved Grant Loomis’s life at an expense I literally cannot repay.” She was thinking about the destroyed spacecraft, and the eight thousand dollars she had to her name. “I’ve learned something about the value of friends since my first journey to the moon, and I value him tremendously. In fact, I need his help one more time. I hope he’ll see this, and I hope he’ll come.”
Conn arranged to continue to stay at the
NewsAmerica
studios, where it seemed she would not be arrested, promising that if her plea were answered,
NewsAmerica
would have the first interview with a Pelorian since the war had been made official.
She stayed for five full days before Persisting’s avatar contacted her by e-mail. She pleaded with him to come to the studios and be interviewed—she herself would arrange to be his interviewer. “Helping me rescue Grant is an important step in repairing Pelorian-US relations,” she told him, “as long as we play it up properly.” He reluctantly agreed to come in the next day, a Wednesday. She warned him there were federal agents at the studios, and almost certainly reading this e-mail exchange. Persisting said he had gotten quite good at avoiding authorities since he’d met Conn.
He came in the next day through the smokers’ door. He hugged Conn awkwardly, and Conn returned the gesture just as awkwardly. The producer, and Ethan Wilkins, hadn’t liked the caveat that Conn herself would interview the Pelorian, but she convinced them that was the only way he would agree to it.
“I would prefer that Mr. Wilkins interview him,” she said. “Actually, I would prefer that Hayley Brigham interview him. No offense. But this is the only way to get him in here.”
And here he was, and before long, they were on the air. And not confined to the space exploration feed anymore, either.
May 14, 2036
Conn was nervous, and she was sure it showed. She was manic, too, but hoped that would be advantageous. “Do you have any plans to attack the United States?”
“If you believe we are aggressors, at least believe that we are not foolish. We are less than a million beings, far from all of us able to fight. War with the United States would end badly for us.”
“With your advanced technology?”
“Perhaps unfortunately, there is nothing more advanced than your nuclear weapons when it comes to destruction.”
Conn thought about confronting Persisting with Murrdip Hangzhii’s accusation that Pelorians would use Russian atomic weapons against America, but she wanted him to keep answering questions, not get angry and leave. “What about avatars? Couldn’t you make as many of those as you needed to fight a war?”
“Regardless,” Persisting said, measuredly, “war with the United States would be foolish. And in any case, we value peace, and are trying to be peaceable neighbors.”
“Who are the Aphelials?”
“The Aphelials are an extraterrestrial race originating in your Mizar and Alcor star system. They have committed genocide on my people, and would eradicate us if they could.”
“Has this race followed you here?”
“I regret the possibility. They’ve been pursuing us for decades.”
“Are they a threat to humankind?”
“I don’t know.
We
don’t know. We know they are a threat to us.”
“How do you control your avatars? Is my friend Persisting on Wrangel Island or the moon or somewhere, talking to me through this avatar?”
“No, Conn. As you recently learned, we upload copies of our consciousness into so-called avatars. Named by you, I don’t know if you remember.” Conn did. “We were reluctant to share the technology with you. We have, nonetheless, shared a great deal of technology with you.”
“We’ll get to that in a minute. You and your avatar aren’t the same being, are you?”
“Two completely different beings.”
“Isn’t that immoral?”
Persisting was obviously uncomfortable with the line of questioning. “We do not replace a consciousness with our own,” he said carefully. “We simply create and animate a new
us
. I am Persisting. Created by Persisting. I have never been anyone else.”
Conn continued, “What happens when you’re done with an avatar? How do you retire it, so to speak?”
“Painlessly,” an irritated Persisting said.
“There’s some kind of off switch in the palm of their hands, right?”
“I am uncomfortable talking about that for security reasons, Conn.”
“You’ve shared at least some of the technology with us, as you’ve said. Didn’t you share that part?”
“Your military would produce avatars to do its fighting. Every day, on the moon, we would brace for an invasion by avatars in pressure fields. The technology we gave you, used against us.”
“But you don’t really think we humans can send a lot of people to the moon, do you? You were surprised we even showed up at the Apollo 15 site. You probably didn’t know we’d been to the moon until the moon shower.”
“We knew the moon wasn’t off-limits to you, if you put your mind to it. And we know that your people have produced drastically new technologies to fight wars with for a hundred and fifty years. Do you suppose maybe that has been your military’s plan all along? Develop new technology, new products, new things to sell? New weapons, to use in new wars?”
“But you’ve done everything you can not to be perceived as a threat. You want to be perceived as a friend to humankind.”
“Perhaps we’ve done that to buy time to make enough machines and avatars to fight with. But perhaps we’ve done it because we are not a threat.”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“I’m surprised to hear it coming from you, but yes. That is the question.”
“Why here? Why Earth, why the moon?”
“Our home orbits an old, very metal-poor star. When the Aphelials first became interested in us, we learned quickly how to extract metals from rocky ground, even hard-to-find metals. When we fled, we were looking for someplace barren, metal-rich and unused, preferably near a habitable planet. Our race has located and settled in four such places since first fleeing the Aphelials. This is the fifth.”
“You’re mining the moon for metal you can use to make machines of war.”
“Of defense.”
“Do Aphelials and humans share a common ancestor?”
Persisting looked at her, and she was worried she’d lost him. “There was a library aboard the spacecraft you lent me,” she lied. “I read it there. Do they?”
“That is a theory,” Persisting said. “You are both bilaterally symmetrical.”
“Both humanoid, in fact.”
“You were attacked by one on Tethys, I understand.”
“An Aphelial killed two of my friends and seriously wounded another, destroyed two spacecraft, and nearly killed me.”
“Then you know them for what they are. They are no friends of yours.”
Conn recognized the line: Murrdip Hangzhii had said it about the Pelorians. “Persisting, were we ever meant to figure out how to travel along the fifth dimension? Or did you set us up to fail?”
“Conn...”
“You made China invade Russia in exchange for nitrogen power, didn’t you?”
Persisting said nothing. Instead, he rose.
“And once Russia is yours, you’re going to use their nukes against us.”
Persisting stepped away from the chair.
That was when someone walked into the room with a gun.
May 14, 2036
It was Glenn Bowman himself.
“Stop where you are, abomination,” he spat. “You can stay right here with your good friend and co-conspirator Conn Garrow.” Conn rose from her chair. “You’re here to make war on us, to annihilate us! Don’t come any closer,” he said to an assistant producer, who was creeping toward him.
“You call me an abomination,” Persisting said, “but I am alive. A living being.”
“Why do you think I want to shoot you?”
“Mr. Bowman,” Conn said, “these avatars, they
are
alive. They’re created by the Pelorians and get their consciousness from them, but then they’re living things. You don’t want to kill somebody live on the feeds.”