They took the Liar to the infirmary and strapped it down on an exam table. Binding an uncooperative Liar would have been a challenge, but their captive was docile as they tightened straps over its limbs.
Stephen sat at his desk nearby, while Ashok and Elena hung back by the door. Callie locked her boots to the floor right in front of the table and looked at the Liar.
“What are you planning to do to me?” it asked.
Callie grinned, showing all her teeth.
“I will not condone torture,” Stephen said. “As a doctor, I can’t.”
“No torture,” Callie said. “I’m still a sworn officer of the TNA, and the Authority doesn’t condone torture. Mostly because it doesn’t work, and can even be counter-productive. No, we’re here for a trial.”
“What?” the Liar squeaked.
“State your name,” Callie said.
“My name is pheromones and gestures, but when I need to communicate with humans, I go by Lantern. What do you mean, a trial?”
“You committed a crime in Trans-Neptunian Space. I’m a security officer for Meditreme Station, and out here, wherever here is, that makes me the highest local law representing the Authority. I am authorized, in extreme circumstances, to conduct trials in the field. Our ship’s computer is available to assist you, as your advocate. Would you like to consult in private with your advocate?”
The Liar’s bound tentacles wiggled like sine waves. “I do not recognize your authority over me.”
“You don’t believe in the law? That’s OK. The law believes in you. Whether you recognize my authority or not, we’ll still throw you out an airlock if you’re found guilty. Ship, what are the charges against… do you have a preferred pronoun, Lantern?”
“You can’t do this.”
“The accused states no preference–”
More thrashing, which suddenly subsided. “You may use ‘she’ and ‘her’.”
Callie nodded. “That’s better than ‘it’, huh? Helps us anthropomorphize you, right? Makes you seem like you’re one of us, so we’ll be more merciful. It’s worth a try. Ship, what are the charges against her?”
“Fifty thousand, one hundred and seventeen counts of premeditated murder. Destruction of TNA property valued in excess of one hundred billion lix. Piracy. Trespassing.”
“How many of those are capital crimes?”
“The murder and the piracy, captain. There are fifty thousand, one hundred and eighteen charges that potentially carry the death penalty.”
“We are not pirates,” Lantern said.
Callie clucked her tongue. “Demonstrably untrue. You forcibly boarded another ship, without any authority to do so. That’s piracy. We can put that charge aside, though. I doubt we’ll even get to it; no reason to charge you for littering when you’re already being executed for murder, after all. Prosecution, make your case.”
“We have recorded evidence of the destruction of Meditreme Station,” the ship said. “We have recordings of the spokesperson from your ship confessing to causing that destruction. We have simulations that indicate the attack could have only come from your ship, as there were no other vessels in the vicinity.”
“Defense?” Callie said. “Do you have anything to refute that evidence or call any of those assertions into question?”
“Certainly,” the ship said.
“Wait!” Lantern stirred restlessly. “How can the ship be the prosecution and the defense?”
“Computers are very smart, and good at compartmentalizing,” Callie said. “Now shut up.”
“The confession is inadmissible,” the ship said. “Liar testimony is never considered credible, and is automatically dismissed. The existence of technology like the bridge generator on this very vessel means that another ship could have destroyed Meditreme Station and then escaped through a bridge, undetected, before we arrived, perhaps even to intentionally frame the Liars. We also have no direct evidence that this Liar came from the same ship that attacked us: she could have been hiding on board since Meditreme Station, or earlier, despite the presence of this purported ‘boarding pod.’ The case against the defendant is purely circumstantial.”
Callie nodded. “I’ll take that under consideration. Lantern the Liar, do you have anything to say in your own defense? Not that it matters, since Liar testimony is assumed to be false by definition, but giving you the opportunity to speak is a necessary formality before I pass judgment and sentence you.”
“I am not Lantern the Liar,” the Liar said. “I am Lantern the Truth-Teller. I am Lantern-Who-Remembers. I do not lie.”
“All Liars lie.”
“We have our reasons,” Lantern said. “The clouds of falsehoods that surround us are a great comfort, because they distract us from a truth too painful to contemplate. But some of my people are tasked with upholding the truth, remembering our past, and safeguarding our future against the very threats the rest of us are desperate to forget. I am a member of the truth-telling tribe, as were the others on the ship your Axiom artifact destroyed.” She shifted in the restraints. “Surely you can admit that my people do not lie about everything. Otherwise we would be useless to you as technicians and engineers, and impossible as trading partners. In most everyday interactions, we do not lie about anything that impacts our ability to negotiate and work with and live alongside humans. Can we stipulate to that?”
Callie frowned. Liars never admitted they told lies. It was always a misunderstanding or a translation error or someone else telling a lie. This was getting strange. “So stipulated.”
“Very well. Then you acknowledge that my people are capable of telling truth strategically, when it suits our purposes? So you must consider the possibility that I am telling the truth now. I will tell you something you may already know, as your xenosociologists have noted it often. My people lie about two categories of things: the momentous, and the trivial. We make up stories about our true origins, yes, and our faith, and our culture. We mislead you about our motivations, sometimes – though our ultimate motivation is to thrive and survive. We are like humans in this way. We also lie freely about things that do not matter. Where we were yesterday, where we are going tomorrow, what we had to eat, what we do for fun, and, of course, we are often deceptively boastful. I will tell you why we lie so often: it is because transforming one’s reality through the creation of a narrative takes practice. It is easier for us to believe the big lies we tell ourselves about our past, our origins, and our future, if we are in the habit of confabulating smaller things every day. It makes reality seem more pliable, more plastic, more in our control.” Her limbs fluttered, a sinuous tremble, and Callie wished she knew better how to read Liar body language. “My tribe, my sect, is denied the comfort of those lies. We must remember the truth, and acknowledge it, because only in facing those terrible truths can we hope to safeguard the universe.”
“Fine,” Callie said. “Then tell the truth now. Admit you destroyed Meditreme Station, and tell me why. You say our theory about your conspiracy is wrong, that you aren’t toying with humanity and keeping us in the dark while you use the rest of creation as your playground. So convince me. Make your confession.”
The Liar was still for a moment, and then began to speak.
You call us Liars. We have a different name for ourselves. In your language, we would call ourselves the Free.
I am seven hundred years old, as you would reckon time – young by the standards of my kind. There are some elders yet among us who remember the days of our servitude, though they sleep almost always now, and float in nutrient baths, with little in the way of what you would call consciousness. They live in dreams of their memories, and they are bad dreams.
My people are capable of physically passing on our memories to one another. This is one of our great secrets. We share memories by extruding neural buds that others of our kind may consume, and so those elders are vital, because they produce the buds that are fed to the highest members of my sect. Such memories can be manipulated, or fragmented, or incomplete, and so we also maintain records, and we save artifacts – we possess an array of ancient documentation proving our sad history. There is a secret museum of our subjugation, and I spent the first centuries of my life there, being inducted into the sect of truth-tellers.
Later, when my people first met humans, and realized the threat you posed, I was one of the delegation sent to dwell in the Oort Cloud to monitor your solar system. It is considered a very important posting, since it is the system of your home world. Had we found you some centuries earlier, when you were yet bound to Earth, we would have exterminated you, and sanitized your entire planet, as we have done in so many other systems.
I see the horror on your faces. We have extensively studied the nuances of your kind. Yes, my sect kills, though I myself have never taken part in such an action. I am grateful I have been spared that work. It is a grim and terrible duty. The extermination of sentient life is a cause of great anguish to us, but it has always been deemed better than the alternative. We kill humanely, you see. Those we cleanse die instantly, without suffering. That is better than the alternative.
By the time we found humans, though, it was too late: you had already sent your goldilocks ships out into the stars, hundreds of ships, each with the potential to start a new human colony. It was too late to wipe you out, so we had to… manage you instead.
I am sorry. Normally I would extrude a neural bud for my listener to consume, so they would have the background. I would share the emotional content of my story via pheromones, and provide further nuance with chromatic variation in my skin. To transform this story into words, in a language I learned when I was already four hundred years old, is difficult. In this feeble and incomplete way, I will tell you the terrible truth at the heart of my existence, the shadow that lies across the Free:
There once was an ancient and powerful race, originally from a distant star system in a nearby galaxy. They ranged throughout the galactic cluster, and perhaps beyond, and they ruled absolutely, not for thousands of years, but for millions. Wherever they encountered intelligent life, or life that seemed on the cusp of developing intelligence, they destroyed it. These aliens claimed to be the first life to arise in the universe, and believed the whole span of the stars was theirs by right.
Their powers were incomprehensible. They transformed whole star systems for energy, or for their amusement, or for aesthetic reasons we cannot comprehend. They destroyed worlds for sport, or art, or to make a point, or on a whim. They called themselves – in your language you might say the First, or the Primary, or the Fundamental – but the name we settled on is the Axiom. Because they were not just the most important, not just the first, but self-evidently so, a universal truth that could not be denied, the standard by which all other forms of life must be judged and inevitably found lacking.
But around fifty thousand years ago, the Axiom did a curious thing. They encountered a sentient species, but they did not destroy it. Instead, they subjugated them. Enslaved them. Altered them. I refer to my species, or the original ancestors of my now very different species. You call us Liars. We call ourselves the Free. Back then, we were neither: we were the Servitors, or the Subjugated, or the Enslaved.
We originally lived on a watery planet, even more watery than Earth, and we dwelled in the oceans, though by the time the Axiom found us, we’d made progress toward transforming our bodies so we could explore the land, through selective breeding and directed mutations. When the Axiom ships appeared in the sky, we believed them to be gods. We were not wrong. I have witnessed their arrival, in a faded, fourth-hand way, from a neural bud consumed by one who consumed a bud from one who consumed a bud that came directly from a witness to the arrival.
We speculate among ourselves about why we were chosen, from all the races the Axiom had destroyed, to become their servitor race. Originally, we had seven sexes, and all our sexes could mate with all the others, so we were reproductively robust, and displayed great genetic diversity. We also had the ability, as some bacteria do, to selectively swap genetic material with one another, passing on useful traits to our offspring. The fact that we can share memories easily makes us adept at coordination. Those qualities, and our cleverness, and dexterity, and prowess with tools, made us highly adaptable.
But not adaptable enough for the purposes of our new masters. The Axiom lifted us up to their laboratories, and began to change us. Some of us were made into war machines, and used to destroy other life; I am told those living weapons were not even granted the peace of mindlessness, but were as self-aware as you or me. We have no memories from that line: all their neural buds were destroyed, long ago, but because of our records, in the museum of subjugation, we know. Others were made more intelligent, or given extra limbs, or altered to survive in various environments – cold, hot, dry, acidic. Some of us were even hardened against vacuum. The Axiom seldom spoke to us, you must understand. Most of us never even saw our rulers in the flesh. Instead the Axiom dominated the minds of certain individuals, through neural implants, and those overseers gave us our orders.
There was no reward for obedience, only punishment for those who failed to obey, and the punishment was swift and irrevocable: execution. The Axiom was trying to breed disobedience out of us, you see. But we always passed on our knowledge, and if they snuffed out one of our people for daring to question the Axiom, or for trying to escape, some part of them would survive, to be passed on to others, in secret. We learned to hide our disobedient thoughts, and to plot, and to plan.
So it was for tens of thousands of years, and many generations. A few of us managed to escape, and stole Axiom technology, and attempted to destroy Axiom outposts and strongholds. To take the cloning factories offline, and to carve out safe systems where our children could grow up, never knowing the yoke or the lash of their old masters. The rebellion grew in strength and the attacks became more and more daring. For a time, we dared to hope.
But the Axiom found the rebels. They killed them, and destroyed their neural buds. Then, to make sure the rest of us would never rebel again…
Humans are eager to find the Liar homeworld. You always ask, and we make up stories, and send you along false trails. The truth is, we have no homeworld. Not anymore. The Axiom destroyed our planet. Vaporized it utterly, until only particles remained.
Then they gathered us, all of us, in one place, and they seared our minds. They erased our hidden memories of our culture, from the time before the Axiom came, carefully passed down for generations. They erased our memories of home, and our entire collective knowledge, of everything before the day of subjugation. The only reason we know our homeworld was a watery place is because we have that single memory from that world: of the Axiom’s arrival in the sky overhead. We only even remember our rebellion because they left us with the memory of our punishment, as a reminder, and a threat, and a promise.
If we had gods before the Axiom, it is unknown. If we had art, or music, or rituals related to love or death or war or food or friendship, we do not know. The Axiom had long subjugated us in body, but by erasing our histories, they subjugated our wills, too. We were broken. We ceased to fight. We gave up. We served them for thousands more years.
And then, ten thousand years ago, the Axiom vanished.