Leviathan Falls

Chapter Thirty: Elvi

It’s all right,” Duarte said. “We’ll be safe.”

Elvi looked at the man carefully. He didn’t seem like a phantom. He was just as solid and present as everyone else on the deck. Thinner than he’d been on Laconia. A vein at his temple stood out like a bluish caterpillar just under his skin. He wasn’t wearing shoes, and his feet looked pale. She wondered, if she tossed him a hand terminal, would he be able to catch it? Interesting test, but also one that might disrupt the connection, and she wasn’t ready to do that.

“Will we be people?” Elvi said.

Duarte’s smile was almost melancholy. “We’ll be better.”

And he wasn’t there anymore. All around the deck, the technicians stared at the place where the high consul of Laconia had been with wide, frightened eyes. The silence was the hum of the air recyclers, the mutter of the instruments, and the tapping of her heartbeat in her ears. Elvi lowered her head, took in a deep breath, and barked out orders like a drill sergeant. “All right. I need all the sensor data. From the Falcon, from the BFE. The ring gate. Everything. Put it all in the system. I need to understand what just happened, and I need to do it now.”

For a long moment, no one moved. Everyone was too stunned to process simple human things like language. Lee was the first to come to himself. “Ladies and gentlemen, you heard the lead researcher. By the numbers now. This is no time to get sloppy.”

He clapped his hands, and like a spell had been broken, the technicians and science team turned to their stations with a speed and focus that seemed almost manic. Cara and Amos opened their eyes in the same moment. The smile on Cara’s lips was soft and relaxed and totally out of place in the rush and clatter. Amos scratched his head and looked around.

Jim’s face was pale. He tried a smile that didn’t quite succeed. “I guess that worked.”

“You saw him too, right? It wasn’t just me.”

“It wasn’t just you. And that is kind of weird. When it was Miller in my head, I was the only one who could see him.” He was talking fast, the words tripping over each other in the rush. “So maybe it’s the same kind of thing but with way more processing power, or it could be something else. I don’t know.”

“Hey, Doc,” Amos said, and pointed to the leads glued to his skull and chest. “Can I take these things off now?”

Instead of answering, Elvi touched Naomi’s arm and said, “I’m going to need a couple hours. Meet me in my office after that?”

Naomi nodded once, then pulled herself back out of the way as the science team uncoupled Amos and Cara from the devices. Jim followed her. Elvi drifted back, watching everything in the lab and nothing in particular. Getting a sense of gestalt. Her people were moving with precision and purpose. If there was any fear, it was covered over by professionalism and practice. That was good. It was what she needed to know. More than that, it was what she needed to cultivate in herself. She crossed her arms, took a few deep breaths, and tried to be patient until her mind found a little calm. Just as she thought she was doing well, she remembered that Winston Duarte had just popped into existence in her lab, and she had to start over.

Cara came off her medical couch with a drifting grace like a plume of smoke rising from an incense burner or a strip of cloth catching an underwater current. Her smile was soft and lazy, and her cheeks were flushed and dark.

“Are you all right?” Elvi asked.

“I’m perfect,” the girl said. Across the lab, Amos was watching them with a pleasant, empty smile as the last of the contact sensors was removed from his suit.

“I’m going to need to do a little work before we debrief this time,” Elvi said.

“Whatever you need to do,” Cara said, half lost in her bliss.

Elvi opened a connection to the catalyst’s chamber. “What’s the status down there?”

“Catalyst in the box,” Fayez said, “Xan back out of the box. Everything seems very normal except that everyone we talk to from the lab sounds like they’re trying to signal that they’re being held hostage without saying it. What happened up there? Are you being held hostage?”

“Meet me in my office,” she said.

The information gathered by Tanaka hadn’t seemed strange the first time Elvi looked at it. Weird cognitive effects were where the alien technology had started back on Ilus. Before that, with the protomolecule version of Jim’s friend getting remade in his sensory cortices. Human consciousness was simple enough that the repair drones on Laconia were able to make working approximations of what some people wanted to have fixed. Xan. Amos. A sampling drone Cara had accidentally shattered once.

Only now, going back over it, did she start to see the holes.

Did you have any experiences associated with the event? Tanaka had said.

There wasn’t even a gap to think about it before the subject said, Oh yeah. Oh, hell yeah.

And there the interview ended. Instead of the primary data or the direct conversation, Tanaka had put in a short data summary: Reports dreamlike hallucinations of being another person and/or being connected to a large number of other people. Claims memory of hallucinatory experiences remains clear over time.

Over and over, all through the data, the same language came up. Instead of actual experiential reports, Tanaka and her team gave versions of their own. Elvi had been in academics long enough to recognize when someone was glossing over data and skipping straight to interpretation. It almost always meant they were avoiding something they found unpalatable.

Naomi, Jim, and Fayez floated in her private office. It didn’t leave a lot of spare room. Or maybe it was fine, but she was so accustomed to having it be just her and Cara talking after a dive that the extra bodies felt unfamiliar. Or that she was frustrated and anything would have annoyed her at the moment.

“What we know for sure,” Elvi said, “is that he wasn’t here. No images on the security cameras, even while I was talking with him. No evidence of him interacting with anything physical beyond, of course, each of our individual brains.”

“We have evidence that he did that?” Jim asked.

“We saw him,” Elvi said, and regretted her tone as Jim recoiled a little. It wasn’t his fault that he hadn’t thought all this through. She made an effort to soften her tone. “The fact that we had those experiences is evidence. If we’d been doing control imaging on someone who wasn’t altered, we’d probably be able to map it, but even absent that, we have a correlation of experience that seems pretty conclusive.”

“You all saw the same thing,” Fayez said, “so there was probably some objective reality to it, even if it’s just that you all got fucked with the same way at the same time.”

“Miller couldn’t do that,” Jim said. “Even a second person in the room killed his simulation for me.”

“Which is interesting,” Elvi said. “Duarte clearly has more resources and, for lack of a better metaphor, more computing power. Which may be part of why he’s been able to hold back the attacks.”

“What about this plan he talked about?” Naomi said.

“What about it?”

“Is it plausible?”

Elvi pressed her palm to her forehead and rubbed in a small circle. Trust the war leader to skip over all the underlying science and head straight for policy implications. “In theory? Could our species be modified into something that behaves in a fundamentally different way? Sure. Absolutely. Happens all the time.”

“Are you being sarcastic?” Naomi said.

“No. It literally happens all the time. If mitochondria and chloroplasts hadn’t set up shop inside other organisms, eukaryotic life wouldn’t exist, including all of us. Hermit crabs using discarded shells and soup cans. Acacia ants built their whole evolutionary strategy out of supporting trees. Intestinal microflora have a vast effect on cognition, emotion, metabolism. Most of the cells in your body right now aren’t human. Change out a few species of bacteria in your gut, and you’ll be a fundamentally different person. The builders, as far as we can tell, were free-floating individual organisms that networked themselves into a functional consciousness, kind of the way an octopus can be viciously intelligent without a centralized brain. With the nonlocal effects we’ve seen? Sure, why not rebuild that architecture with advanced primates?”

Elvi made herself stop. She was talking too fast and just letting whatever came to mind flow out. It was something she did when she was stressed. She stretched her hands out, feeling the pull in her tendons just to root her a little more in her body.

“So maybe he can do it,” Jim said. “Whatever exactly it is.”

“That’s what I’m missing,” Elvi said. “Whether he’s talking about a superorganism or a subsummation.”

Jim raised his hand. His expression was eloquent enough to ask the question.

“Whether,” Elvi said, “he’s talking about making us into ants or neurons. If you’re an ant, you’re still an individual, just one who’s part of a larger organization. If you’re a neuron… Neurons don’t have a sense of self.”

“I’m not a hundred percent sure that ants do either,” Fayez said.

“So you’re saying,” Naomi broke in, “that Duarte, or whatever he’s turned himself into, is at least plausibly preparing to make everyone, everywhere part of a collective consciousness with him at the center so that he can go to war against the things beyond the gates.”

Elvi gathered herself, fighting to organize her thoughts.

“Yes,” she said.

The room was quiet for a long time.

Jim broke the silence with a single, harsh laugh. “Well, I’ll be damned. He found a way to make jackbooted authoritarianism seem like the good old days. I wouldn’t have thought he could.”

“I’m going to need to get messages through to my people,” Naomi said. “Is there a way to use your repeaters without exposing you?”

“It’s spotty ever since the gates went bright,” Elvi said. “We might be better off sending through a missile with a burst on it.”

“I’d need several,” Naomi said. “This feels like an all-hands-on-deck situation, and I’ve got hands in a lot of different systems.”

“We should have a conversation with the comms officer,” Fayez said. “I’ll come with you. Make the introductions.”

“There’s a lot of clarification I need from Tanaka too,” Elvi said. “And Ochida. Shit. I can’t send this data to Ochida. I can’t send it to anyone. How can I explain Amos being in the dataset?”

“That was always going to be a problem,” Fayez said.

“I was planning to bury it. I don’t think I can.”

Jim leaned forward despite the lack of gravity. It just made him seem like he was pitched at a different angle. “Maybe we can find a way to fake it. Dry lab it, but get the same conclusion?”

Layers of complexity and danger unfurled in Elvi’s mind. And she hadn’t done the interview with Cara yet. There was so much to do, and the only mark of how much time she had to do it was when her time ran out.

“Let me see what I can do,” she said.

She started with Tanaka, recording and rerecording her requests for clarification, always sure that she’d gotten every hint and nuance of the Roci’s presence out of the message and then second-guessing herself, deleting, and starting again. By the time she queued the message, her eyes were starting to blur with fatigue. It wasn’t the first time she’d gone through that. Next was a list of requests for Ochida and the other teams. She could front-burner the scans of Cara’s brain. If they could figure out what the signal carrier was between her and the BFE, maybe it would give them a way to interfere. And the quiet that came after Duarte undid the dutchman event? It wouldn’t seem strange at all for her to want follow-up reports on that. She wished that Tanaka had been a better field researcher. Or better at finding Duarte.

A soft knock interrupted her. When she cycled the door, Amos floated in the hall. He had his old flight suit and an apologetic smile.

“Hey, Doc. You got a minute? Or is this a bad time?”

Elvi shook her head, trying to clear it. The fatigue was just the unpleasant parts of being drunk. “Come in. I’m sorry. I thought I’d be debriefing you and Cara, but… I wanted to get these requests out and going before anything else.”

Amos pulled himself in and closed the door behind him. “It’s not a problem. I just needed to bend your ear for a minute.”

“About the experiment?”

“Sort of, yeah,” Amos said. “I just wanted to let you know this is all done now.”

Elvi shut down her display. The big man’s eyes were the same utter black as Cara’s and Xan’s. She was used to the look. His smile was amiable and maybe a little embarrassed. His tone of voice was conversational and calm. She didn’t know what made the chill run down her back.

“All what?”

“This. The things you’re doing with Sparkles and Little Man. They’re over now. We’re gonna need to pack this up and move on,” he said, and shrugged. When she didn’t reply, he looked away. “When you started before, I was sort of in on it. Impressions. Nothing you’d take in front of the judge, right? It’s why we had to come out. Needed to be here. Do it myself. That way I’d understand. So here we are, and I did the thing, and I get it now. So now I can tell you it’s over. It stops now.”

“You object to the experiment.”

“Sure.”

“I understand,” Elvi said, crossing her arms. Her comms announced a new message in her queue. She didn’t look to see what it was. “You aren’t the only one with reservations. I’m not going to lie about that.”

“Okay.”

“But the stakes are too high. Cara and Xan… and you? You’re the access we have to the information in that artifact. You’re the only ones who can get there.”

“That’s true,” Amos said, then frowned. “I mean, Duarte. But I don’t think he’s exactly in our assets column.”

“If there is any chance at all that we can fix this whole thing with the information that’s in there? I can’t stop.”

“You don’t have to. I’m here. You don’t have to stop it, because I’m stopping it for all of us.”

“If I have to compromise her… if I lose her? Sacrifice her? And what we get back is that everyone else everywhere gets to live—”

Amos raised a hand, palm out, like he was gentling an animal. “Doc. I get it. You’re a good person, and I like you. I trust you. I see that you’re not getting off on this. That’s why we’re not having the other version of this conversation. But it’s done. I’ve known a lot of people who had reasons that this time was different. That this once, it was okay. Maybe the kid’s bad and you’re really helping them. Or they’re into it, and so there’s no harm. And Sparkles is into this. We both know that, right?”

“We do.”

“So there’s all kinds of stories about making this okay. I’m not here to tell stories. I’m just letting you know.”

The ship seemed oddly loud. Elvi felt the thud of her heartbeat in her throat, heard it in her ears. She was suddenly profoundly tired, or suddenly aware that she’d been tired for what felt like forever.

“And if we all die because we didn’t push a little harder?”

“That’ll suck,” Amos agreed. “I’m not a philosophy guy. I’m not trying to bust your balls or figure out, you know, everything. But this is pretty simple. I came to see what you and Sparkles were doing. I’ve seen it. It needs to stop, so we’re gonna stop. That’s it. We’re good.”

He went still the same way Cara did. Inhumanly still. Then, a moment later, he tried a little smile. Elvi had spent a fair percentage of her life thinking about taxonomy. About where a species began and where it ended. She realized that she didn’t know what she was looking at.

“Okay,” she said. “We’re good.”

“Great,” Amos—the thing that had been Amos—said. He pulled himself to the doorway, opened it, gave her a little thumbs-up sign, and was gone. The door cycled closed behind him.

Her comms chimed again, reminding her of the new message or messages. She didn’t open the queue. She let herself float for a few minutes, feeling something more than weariness bloom in her gut and her chest. She turned off the lights, pulled herself out to the corridor and away down it. She passed a group of her crew, and they all nodded to her as she passed. It was like being in a dream. Or dissociated.

Fayez was in their cabin when she got there. He looked over from whatever he’d been reading on his hand terminal, and some quip or comment died unspoken on his lips. She cleaned her teeth, washed her face, changed into fresh clothes to sleep in. Her husband watched and tried to act like he didn’t. He knew something had changed, even if he didn’t know what. She was right there with him.

“You… ah… You all right, sweetie?” he asked as she strapped herself in for the night.

“I am,” she said.

As she closed her eyes, the feeling in her chest and belly grew, swelling out and washing through her. She finally recognized it. She had wanted it to be relief, but it wasn’t that.

It was her body telling her that she’d just stared death in the eye. It was fear.