Shapes formed in the static haze. A seething blue-grey mist. There was a rumbling hiss. The sound of a mistuned radio. It came in surges, like waves crashing against rocks.
‘Are you all right?’ a voice said.
The focus sharpened and they saw that’s exactly what it was. A stormy sea.
‘I think so, yes.’ Albert’s voice, so clear and uncannily close that Alkemy looked around. ‘A little light-headed, that’s all.’
‘Not surprising in the circumstances,’ the voice said. ‘That’s quite an implant you’ve received.’
The view shifted and centred on a tall, slender man in early middle age. He had a long face, dark eyes and sallow cheeks. Unremarkable except for midnight blue hair that was tied back in a ponytail. He wore a flowing brown robe and had a monitor balanced in his lap that looked remarkably like the receiver.
‘Uncle Krilen!’ Alkemy said.
Albert looked around. The room behind him might have belonged to a small, private hospital. The walls were painted pale green. A mirror on one side showed Albert seated on a reclining chair on the balcony. He wore a wad of bandages around his head.
‘Did the procedure go satisfactorily?’ he asked.
‘Flawlessly.’
The movement of Krilen’s mouth didn’t match his words. Tim guessed some sort of automatic translation was taking place. It was like watching a foreign movie that had been dubbed into English.
Albert touched a hand to his forehead. ‘When can I access the enhancements?’
‘Over the course of the next few weeks they’ll come online automatically as your brain adapts and the lace grows to form new connections. But you should be able to access some of the basic functions now.’
The view shifted back to the sea. The image held for a moment, blurred, then suddenly transformed into numbers. The waves became moving graphs of mass and volume, the rocks a grid of surfaces and angles. An overlay indicated the wave’s impact points and calculated the trajectory of every droplet, a prediction that, half a second later, was mapped and matched to reality.
He turned back to Krilen who was studying the projections on his monitor, a puzzled look on his face. ‘Sorry, I think I had this on the wrong setting. Can you repeat that please?’
Albert did so for the next wave then turned back.
Krilen frowned, got up and left the room, returning with another man dressed like a technician. A small, cheerful man with a round face, a shaved head and a tatty lab coat, its pockets bulging with tools and gadgets. He carried a clipboard and had a badge pinned to his lapel. The Eltherian script was unreadable till a translation overlay appeared: Andop Scolyfol, Theia University.
The technician checked the dressing on Albert’s forehead, fiddled with the monitor, then produced a second one and asked Albert to run through the procedure again.
Scolyfol and Krilen stood to one side, talking in low voices for five full minutes, studying and comparing the readouts. There were glances at Albert and much head shaking.
‘Is there a problem?’ Albert said.
‘Not ... a problem,’ Krilen said. ‘Just something unexpected. You shouldn’t be able to do that, you see. What you did with those waves. The computations involved are staggeringly complex. You might one day reach that level, but not within four hours of the beads being implanted. That’s barely any time for a neural lace to begin to form a network. This is quite unheard of.’
The image froze and dimmed. The static returned. After a brief interlude, a new picture formed.
They were now seated in a clean white room. An office. There were artefacts that might have been tribal artworks hanging on one wall, shelves of equipment, two cupboards, a sofa and armchairs to one side, a large white desk on the other. Behind it was a window and a nighttime view out over a vast city. Krilen was seated behind the desk.
‘You’re an oddity, Albert. Irrational, unpredictable and given to whims and fancies. Those, you might argue, are the characteristics of many of your class of synthetic, which is true, but only to a degree. You are an exception: an oddity amongst oddities. Predictably unpredictable. You’re exactly what we want.’
‘What do Marileon and Dudilo say?’
‘It was the parents’ idea. They approached me. The coincidence of the coordinates, I believe. Transpose two groups of numbers and instead of heading for their new archaeological site, you end up at our target.’
He waved a hand. The office lights dimmed and a three-dimensional projection of the Milky Way appeared above the desk in front of him. Using a series of gestures, he zoomed in on a tiny portion near the edge of one spiral arm where two regions were highlighted by red and yellow cubes.
‘Maril’s always had an interest in Thanatos affairs,’ he continued. ‘It was her speciality once, and she’s kept abreast of what little new information has come down to us over the years. It’s the time scales, you see. The Thanatos work on scales almost beyond comprehension. But I suppose when you’ve been around for ten billion years, what’s a few hundred million here or there?
‘All we know for certain is that aeons ago they annexed this portion of the galaxy.’ He gestured at the red-tinted cube. It was labelled KSX-119. ‘We also know they’ve been conducting experiments there since before we Eltherians were little more than pond slime.’
‘Experiments? Doing what?’
‘Searching for the essence of the Old Ones. The beings that occupied our galaxy when it was in its infancy, then vanished. Now they appear to have found it. Or at least something that’s excited a great deal of interest.’
‘Sentient creatures?’
‘Well obviously. Solar systems coalesce into suns and planets. Planets with liquid water form life, and eventually that life becomes intelligent. It’s almost inevitable. But there’s something different about this lot. Something special. What do you make of this?’
The projection transformed into a spiky wave.
‘A first primitive radio transmission.’
‘And this?’
The waveform shrank to one side and a scatter static appeared beside it.
‘The signature of a thermonuclear explosion.’
‘Precisely. And what space of time would you say separates these two events?’
‘In our own case — and we are exceptional — it was half a millennia. Five hundred years.’
‘Would you believe that in this case it’s less than fifty?’
‘What?’
Krilen nodded. ‘Perhaps now you see why they’ve excited the Thanatos’s interest — and ours. If they can go from radio to atomic bombs in just fifty years, in a hundred they could have interstellar travel. What then becomes of us?’ He waved a hand and the galactic atlas reappeared, focussed on the red and yellow cubes.
‘From our perspective, this has occurred in the worst possible location. That system is a mere fifty light-years away. What happens if they do develop interstellar travel? What happens if the Thanatos decide to give them more room to play in? More uninterrupted space uncontaminated by outside influences?’ He widened two fingers and the red box engulfed the yellow. ‘What will become of us?’
‘They wouldn’t. Surely?’
‘Have you heard of the Erynitis artefact?’ Albert shook his head. ‘No, of course you haven’t. It’s still highly classified. And the reason it’s classified is that if the Thanatos know that we know ... well, it could make things difficult.
‘The Erynitis were a thirty million year old civilisation. They occupied more than four hundred systems. The Thanatos ... tolerated them. At least until a consul made an inappropriate remark to His Darkness. Then the Thanatos wiped them out. Condemned and methodically exterminated them from every system they occupied. More than seven hundred planets. Half a trillion beings. We wouldn’t have known they’d ever existed if it hadn’t been for the artefact. A piece of space junk buried in an asteroid that turned out to be an archive and encyclopedia of their species.’
‘Wiped them out?’ Albert looked shocked.
After a moment’s thought, he leaned forward and brushed the image of the galaxy aside, returning to the earlier projection. ‘What’s happened since this?’ He pointed to the nuclear scatter. ‘We must have been inundated by signals after that.’
Krilen shook his head. ‘That was one of the last things we received. The Thanatos have thrown a Dyson sphere around the entire system. An electromagnetic shield that lets signals in but blocks anything coming out.’
‘A shield the diameter of a solar system? Impressive.’ Calculations flew across the bottom of the screen as Albert worked out the energy that would require.
‘You see what we’re up against?’ Krilen said. ‘At the moment that sphere only blocks signals. We can still get a ship in and out. But once whatever occupies this system starts shuttling between planets, you can guarantee it’ll be upgraded. That’s why we must act quickly. We need reliable intelligence. We need to know what’s going on in there.’
‘I understand that, and I’m happy to take on the job, but how do the children fit in? You say they’re to know nothing of the mission?’
‘Certainly not. They’re your cover, Albert. Innocence is their shield — and yours. We can harden your systems, add probe traps and self-deletion circuits, but wetware brains don’t work like that. The Thanatos would discover all they know in a matter of hours, but if all they know is that their eccentric syntho misprogrammed the flight computer ... well ... we’d have more chance of recovering you if anything went wrong. And we must recover you. Once you’re inside that sphere, all communication with us will be blocked.’
‘I understand. And I now understand why you hinted my implant was a failure. Why you asked me to act more and more eccentrically in public.’
‘I’ve kept you a secret because your surgery was remarkably effective,’ Krilen said. ‘You’re our biggest success to date, Albert. Our biggest success by far. In fact, you’re the most powerful thinking machine we’ve ever produced. The depth of your perception and insights have been evident from the outset. And they continue to grow. Do you know what your official classification is? Weapon of War. Or at least it would be if the Military Council got hold of you. They’d want to dissect you and see exactly what went so right this time. Or plug you into one of their command centres and have you run battle simulations.
‘I also kept you secret to see how you develop. Now the possibility of this mission has come up, I think you’re the syntho for the job. It could be dangerous, and will almost certainly require a great deal of resourcefulness. Should I risk one of our greatest assets on such a mission?
‘In truth, I have little choice. The future of our civilisation may depend on what you find out there.’