Doctor Schmidt did not reply for a moment, absorbed entirely by his study of this fascinating lifeform. Although Foxx could not see it there below him, she knew from a sensor scan of the cubicle that a tiny sheet of residual heat from biological processes covered the entire floor of the unit.
‘It’s biological, I think,’ Schmidt replied, ‘and probably capable of infiltrating any life form at the cellular level.’
Foxx shivered visibly as she looked at the floor of the unit, which would have appeared entirely normal to her had she walked inside. The entity had colored itself to match the existing deck floor, like some kind of strange chameleon.
‘This isn’t what I expected first contact to be like,’ she admitted.
Schmidt walked out of the quarantine unit, his hands behind his back and a smile glowing on his face.
‘Most people don’t,’ he agreed. ‘They expect great beasties with evil fangs and tentacles, or emotionless machines with a thirst for human destruction, but the truth is that most advanced and spacefaring species that are able to cross entire galaxies would look nothing like what we expect them to, simply because of the time it takes to evolve to the point where galactic travel is possible.’
Foxx knew from school that it had taken intelligent human life around four and a half billion years to appear on Earth, and that had occurred in a relatively stable solar system in a sedate corner of the Milky Way galaxy’s Orion Arm. Much of the rest of the galaxy was a turbulent milieu of gravitational waves compressing spiral arms into dense clouds of violent star birth, or superheated to millions of degrees in the galaxy’s dark heart, wherein ruled the gargantuan supermassive black hole Sagittarius A.
Life could not realistically be expected to emerge in these dense, hot, radiation–bathed furnaces, and so mankind looked to similar areas of the galaxy for signs of life around yellow spectral stars like the sun, or long–lived red and brown dwarf star systems, or in globular clusters where millions of suns would fill the sky in a dazzling halo of stars orbited by planetary systems rich in the heavy metals necessary for life.
‘So you’re sayin’ that the thing in there must be old,’ Vasquez said, ‘old enough to have evolved beyond human form and into something else?’
Schmidt nodded.
‘Who knows what this life form may once have looked like, but it has clearly progressed to a state that we no longer recognize immediately as life. We’re detecting heat from it and it clearly does indeed have a biological component to it, but right now it’s confined to this cubicle. My team will be here momentarily and we’ll move a sample to my laboratory for closer study.’
Betty peered at the floor of the unit. ‘Will it know what you’ve done?’
‘Undoubtedly,’ Schmidt chirped. ‘If it’s smart enough to alter its shape to impersonate an Ayleean warrior, it’s more than smart enough to monitor what we’re doing.’
Foxx thought for a moment as Schmidt’s team arrived. ‘It spoke,’ she said. ‘The Ayleean this thing impersonated, it spoke in English.’
Schmidt nodded.
‘It can learn incredibly quickly,’ he replied, ‘which means we must too if we’re to understand it. If it were not for the sound proofing around that cubicle it would probably be listening to us right now.’
Foxx watched as Schmidt’s team punctured the cubicle with a small machine designed to coordinate its actions with the field generators of the quarantine unit, gaining access where other forms of material could not. Moments later, it burrowed down into the floor of the cubicle and to her amazement she watched it scoop up a visible section of that floor, revealing the original one beneath it.
The material was pulled back inside the machine into a smaller, equally powerful quarantine container and the machine’s probe retracted.
‘Be quick now,’ Schmidt hurried his team along. ‘I’ll be waiting in the laboratory.’
Foxx and Vasquez followed the team as Schmidt’s projection disappeared, and they ran through to the laboratories as the team placed the machine inside a second quarantine unit, this one a meter square and filled with a menagerie of robotic arms, tools and scopes.
Schmidt stood over the quarantine unit and watched as the machine regurgitated the sample into the unit and then backed out. Its surface was swept by a small scanner as it passed through, Foxx figuring that the scanner searched for any signs of remaining contamination by whatever the sample was made from. A small green light illuminated on the edge of the machine and Schmidt
humphed
in delight.
‘Good, that’s the first thing we’ve learned for sure today – whatever it is cannot pass through hard–light structures such as these quarantine units, I’m sure you’ll be relieved to know.’
Schmidt accessed a remotely controlled microscope and trained it upon the sample, which for now had remained in its form as a section of the quarantine unit’s floor, as though a piece of deck tiling had been chipped off. The doctor leaned close to the scope and observed the sample only for a few moments before he stood back and rested his chin on one hand, supported by his other arm as a deep frown creased his holographic blue features.
‘What?’ Vasquez asked.
Schmidt raised an eyebrow as though he’d already forgotten the detectives were there.
‘Interesting,’ he said in reply. ‘The organism is indeed biological, but only partly.’
‘Partly?’ Foxx echoed.
‘Yes, it appears to consist mostly of quasi–biological components. Spectroscopy reveals them to consist mostly of titanium and certain alloys. In effect, this is neither a creature nor a machine, but something of both.’
‘It’s a cyborg?’ Foxx asked.
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Schmidt nodded. ‘But it is constructed on a nanometer scale, many thousands of them in this one small sample. I believe that this is the first known discovery of a genuine extra–terrestrial artificial superintelligence.’
‘A what now?’ Admiral Marshall asked as he strode into the laboratory.
‘An artificial superintelligence,’ Schmidt repeated as he stepped away from the quarantine tub so that Marshall could look at the slab of what looked like nothing more than floor tiling inside. ‘Scientists and even philosophers have long contended that any space faring species that was able to visit us here on Earth would be so far advanced that we might not even recognize it for what it is. Many also contend that we would not encounter biological species at all, but machines.’
‘You’re kidding?’ Foxx said. ‘You’re telling me our fridges will inherit the universe?’
‘It’s already happening,’ Schmidt pointed out. ‘Intelligent implants beneath our skins and in our skulls, bio–enhancement, brain impulse therapy, and human beings have been using prosthetic limbs to replace those lost due to injury or illness for hundreds of years. That natural progression from enhancements to permanent improvement, projected well into the future, will inevitably create a race of humans more machine than people, and the constant miniaturization of that technology will inevitably make that race ever smaller and more efficient. Look at me, for instance – as a Holosap I’m really just an entire dead person inside a quantum chip.’
Betty moved forward and peered in at the sample before them.
‘This doesn’t look all that smart to me,’ she said.
Schmidt nodded.
‘I suspect that like the neurons in a human mind or the termites in a mound, an individual unit of this organism is not especially intelligent or capable of what we would consider coherent thought. It is when they come together in sufficient numbers that cognition, although likely very different from our own, sparks into life and awareness. The organism in the main quarantine cubicle will be aware that a sample of its being has been taken, but this much smaller sample will no longer be aware of what or where it is.’
‘That’s weird,’ Vasquez uttered.
‘That’s useful,’ the admiral countered as he stood up from examining the sample. ‘It means that if we blow it to pieces, it can’t coordinate itself.’
‘True,’ Schmidt said, ‘but like any evolutionary species it will have developed defense mechanisms for just such an eventuality. Like a flock of birds it will rejoin itself, perhaps quickly.’
Marshall thought for a moment.
‘You say they’re real small. Do they have any motor function, the ability to move under their own steam?’
Schmidt looked again into the scope, this time relaying the images within onto a holo–screen nearby. Foxx turned and saw what looked like a soup of cells moving about, as though she were watching tiny bugs in the deep ocean densely packed and probing each other.
‘No,’ Schmidt said, ‘they have no visible means of propulsion.’
Marshall folded his arms. ‘So they can’t easily move about in zero gravity. How would they move in an atmospheric environment?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Schmidt replied, ‘but if I were to hazard a guess I would say that they simply occupy other hosts.’
‘Occupy?’ Foxx asked with another shiver. ‘You mean infect?’
‘Yes,’ Schmidt confirmed. ‘They appear in many respects to have evolved to become a parasite, or so their behavior leads me to believe. We can assume that this species is many thousands of years more advanced than our own. When humans experienced the Industrial Revolution they were only a couple hundred years from radio, fifty more to computers, ten more to landing on the moon and so on. The growth was trimetric and now we’re a space faring species with a strong line in technological implants. True artificial intelligence is already within our capabilities as we’ve seen before, and the rise of
Holo sapiens
shows that our squidgy human brains and our bodies, vulnerable to injury and disease, are already outdated by the technology we’ve introduced. This organism we’ve discovered probably represents where we’ll be in a few thousand years.’
Betty screwed up her nose in distaste. ‘We’ll pass on that.’
‘So what’s it doing here, and why did it attack that Ayleean ship and take down the crew?’ Marshall asked. ‘If this thing is so damned clever, why did it attack us?’
Schmidt sighed as he replied, looking at the sample in the cubicle and the holo–screen display.
‘We are unlikely ever to understand its motivations,’ he said simply. ‘This organism represents a species that has evolved entirely to become a synthetic being with very little biological material remaining. That’s why the life sensors in the escape capsule didn’t detect it – the genetic material remaining was both different in structure to ours and in such small quantities that it didn’t register. Who could possibly understand what motivations a species like this might possess? We can’t even understand what it’s thinking, or whether it actually thinks at all.’
‘It thinks enough to impersonate Ayleeans and commit murder,’ Marshall shot back. ‘That makes it an enemy until we know better. Keep working on it.’
Schmidt was about to do just that when a sudden thought hit Foxx.
‘You say that this thing can get inside us, inside anything, right?’
‘Yes,’ Schmidt replied.
‘And your team opened the capsules inside the quarantine unit?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did the team members walk out again?’
Schmidt stared at her for a long moment, and then he realized what she meant.
‘They could already be loose in the ship,’ Schmidt said to the admiral.
***
XXIX
‘Take him down!’
Nathan yelled the warning as the bulky looking inmate thumped down from the vent onto the deck of the watch tower.
Xavier leaped forward and without hesitation he rammed the tip of a crackling plasma baton into the inmate’s belly. The con cried out in pain and his limbs twitched and shuddered as he folded over the charge and collapsed onto the deck, quivering in jerking spasms as a second con plunged out of the duct and crashed down on top of the first.
Nathan rushed in and slammed his own baton down onto the man’s lower back, aiming for his kidney. The charge bolted through the inmate’s body and he let out a roar of pain and surprise as he jerked his left arm around.
‘Blade!’
Nathan heard Allen’s warning and stepped back as he blocked the con’s blow with his left arm, the jagged tip of a steel shank stopping an inch away from his flank. The inmate toppled as his body succumbed to the electrical charge forking through his limbs and he collapsed on top of his fellow con.
‘We’ve gotta get out of here!’ Xavier yelled.
Nathan could hear the scurrying of more cons through the duct above them, and then another fell through the open grill and landed on top of the first two but this time with cat–like agility and grace. He leaped off the two fallen cons and brandished a blade that he kept close to his thigh in a one–handed grip, the mark of a man who knew how to handle himself. His shaved head was lined with ragged scars, a patch over one eye where an illegal implant of some kind had been surgically removed.
Nathan gave ground as the con edged forward, his eye switching between Nathan and Xavier as he moved the blade out in front of him a little.
‘Only a matter of time, boys,’ he snarled.
The con stepped lightly forward and the blade flashed back handed at Nathan, the glittering tip seeking to unzip his throat. Nathan stepped to the left and then forward, the blade whispering through the air past his face as he jabbed the plasma baton up under the inmate’s armpit.
The man screamed as the charge roared through him, Nathan easily blocking the return blow as it flailed wildly. The knifeman tumbled to his knees and Nathan drove his boot down hard into the man’s crumpled legs, smashing down on his ankle to the sound of splintering bone and more cries of pain.
Nathan stepped back and caught Xavier’s surprised expression.
‘Rough childhood,’ he said by way of an explanation.
Two more cons dropped through the grill in quick succession, both of them armed. This time they stepped quickly forward, blocking Nathan’s and Xavier’s access to the duct and allowing two more cons to drop in behind and join them. Behind the growing wall of cons, those that Nathan and Xavier had hit first with the sticks began to drag themselves to their feet again, fury in their expressions as they grasped for their fallen weapons.