Leviathan Falls

Chapter Four: Elvi

Get her out,” Elvi said. “I’m pulling the plug.”

“No,” Cara replied. The girl’s voice was still shaking, but the words were clear. “I can do this.”

Cara’s brain function showed in seven different datasets on twice that many screens. The data from the BFE—the technicians’ pet name for the Jupiter-sized block of green crystal that was the only feature of Adro system—showed beside it. Advanced pattern-matching protocols mapped the two together in six dimensions. The instability had passed in both datasets, the seizure—if that’s what it was—falling back from turbulence to a more stable flow.

All around the lab, the researchers and techs turned wide and uncertain eyes toward Elvi. She could feel the desire to keep pushing forward from her whole staff. She felt it herself. It reminded her of being the RA in her graduate dorm house and having to shut down the hall parties.

“I am the lead researcher. She is the test subject. When I say we’re pulling the plug, we’re pulling the plug.” As her team sprang to life, closing down the experiment, she turned to Cara, who was floating over the bed of imaging sensors. “Sorry. It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s that I don’t trust any of this.”

The girl with the pure black eyes nodded, but her attention was on something else. Cara’s visual and audial cortices were lit up like Paris at New Year’s, and a deep, slow pulse was passing through the girl’s postcentral gyrus that matched the energy readings coming from the BFE’s southern hemisphere. Whatever Cara was feeling just then, it was taking up more of her attention than Elvi was. She had the sense that she could scream in Cara’s ear right now and still be a tiny minority of the information flooding the girl’s brain.

Or for that matter the girl’s body, which was part of the issue. Elvi had studied somatic cognition theory, but the degree to which the BFE seemed to want to present its information to Cara’s whole nervous system—muscles and viscera included—was complicating things. She spooled back through the data as her team ran the shutdown procedures and brought Cara back to merely human reality.

The Falcon, Elvi’s private and state-sponsored science ship, was the most advanced single-function laboratory in thirteen hundred worlds. Which sounded really impressive until she remembered that most of those thirteen hundred worlds were the equivalent of 1880s European dirt farmers trying to grow enough food to not slaughter half their cattle at the start of every winter. The Falcon was the only ship that had survived the attack that killed the Typhoon and Medina Station, and the scars showed everywhere. The decking was subtly mismatched where threads of darkness that had been somehow more real than reality had ripped a third of the ship’s mass away. The power and environmental systems were all patchworks of the original and rebuilt. Her own leg had a line across it where the new skin and muscle had grown in the softball-sized scoop that had vanished in the attack. Working on the Falcon was like living inside a trauma flashback. It helped Elvi when she could focus on the data, and on the BFE, and on Cara and Xan.

Dr. Harshaan Lee, Elvi’s second lead, met her eye and nodded. He was an energetic young scientist, and she liked him. More than that, she trusted him. He knew what she wanted to do, and with a gesture, he’d offered to make sure Cara’s re-emergence from the experiment went according to protocol. She nodded back, accepting the offer.

“All right, people,” Lee said, clapping his hands together. “By the numbers and by the book.”

Elvi pulled herself through the air to the lift shaft, and aft toward the engine and the isolation chamber and Cara’s younger brother Xan.

Fayez floated against one wall, his left leg tucked behind a wall grip and his hand terminal glowing with text. Beside him, the thing they called the catalyst—the body of a woman infused with a contained but live sample of protomolecule—was strapped in its gurney. The catalyst’s sightless eyes found her, and Fayez followed its empty gaze.

“How’d he do?” Elvi asked, nodding toward the containment chamber and therefore Xan. Most of the time, the catalyst was stored there, but for the periods when they used it to activate the old, alien technologies, she put Xan in its place. The only time the young boy and the protomolecule interacted at all was during the changeover.

Fayez pulled up a screen with the security camera. Inside the isolation chamber, Xan floated. His eyes were closed and his mouth was just slightly open, like he was sleeping or drowned.

“Listened to some music, read a few issues of Naka and Corvalis, and went to sleep,” Fayez said. “For all the world like the preadolescent boy he appears to be.”

Elvi pulled herself to a stop at her husband’s side. The data on his hand terminal was the feed from the lab laid side by side with the monitors trained on Xan. She could tell at a glance that there wasn’t a correlation between them. Whatever Cara was going through, Xan wasn’t being subjected to it along with her. Or at least not obviously. She’d still feed everything through pattern matching.

She wasn’t conscious of sighing, but Fayez touched her arm as if she had.

“You heard about Gedara system?”

She nodded. “Lightspeed change. Dark gods banging around in the attic. Feels like that’s happening more often.”

“We’ll need more data points for a good frequency analysis,” he said. “But yeah. It does. I hate the feeling that something vast and angry is scratching at the corners of reality and looking for a way to kill me.”

“It’s only scary because it’s true.”

He ran a hand through his hair. He’d gone silver, and when they were on the float, he tended to look like something out of a children’s cartoon. Elvi’s hair was well on its way to white, but she kept it short. Mostly because she hated the compression fluid in the high-g crash couches, and it took forever to get the smell of it out of longer hair.

“You shut down early?”

“There was some instability when she synced up with the BFE.”

Now it was Fayez’s turn to sigh. “I wish they didn’t call it that. It’s a diamond, not an emerald.”

“I know. Sorry.”

“And anyway, BFD’s funnier,” he said, but there wasn’t any heat to it. Their marriage was a vast tissue of in-jokes, light comic bits, shared curiosity, and common trauma. They’d built it like a code between them over the course of decades. She knew the inflections that meant he had something that was interesting him, and how it sounded different from when he was angry about something. When he was trying to protect her and when he was struggling with something he was seeing but couldn’t understand.

“What’s on your mind?” she asked.

“You didn’t notice the sync?”

“What sync?”

Fayez pulled up the dataset again. On one side, the brain and body of a teenage girl fixed at the age when she’d died and been “repaired” by alien technology. On the other, the particle scatter and magnetic resonances of a vast crystal that—if they were lucky—held the history of a galaxy-spanning species whose tracks they were following toward extinction. She could trace the similarities with her fingers. Fayez lifted his eyebrows, waiting for her to notice something. She shook her head. He pointed to a tiny indicator on the side of the readout: IN-FRAME LIGHT DELAY CORRECTION OFFSET: -.985S.

She frowned.

“We’re point nine-eight-five light seconds from the diamond,” Fayez said. “Matching orbit around the star, neither moving toward nor away from it. The last times we tried this, Cara and the diamond were talking back and forth. Call and response. Now they’re singing in harmony. No light delay.”

Elvi felt the implications running through her mind like water spilling down a creek. They’d always known that the protomolecule was able to do strange things with locality, but they’d thought it was related to quantum entanglement of particles. Cara and the BFE hadn’t exchanged any particles that she knew of, so this pseudo-instantaneous information transfer was something new. One of the fundamental hypotheses of protomolecule technology had just taken a profound hit.

It also meant that their reaching out to the artifact had gotten it to reach back. Her experiment was working.

She’d expected success to feel less like fear.

When Elvi had started working for the Laconian Empire, it had been under duress. Winston Duarte had taken over all humanity with the speed and thoroughness of a plague. When he’d invited her to a senior position in his Science Directorate, the answer was yes. It would have been a dream job, except for the consequences of refusing it.

Then Duarte’s plan to confront the forces that killed off the civilizations that built the ring gates went wrong. Duarte was crippled by it. And Elvi’s immediate boss, Paolo Cortázar, was reduced to a thin, heme-stinking mist. Elvi, who’d wanted the job but not the employer, found herself receiving a field promotion to the head of the Laconian Science Directorate with the understanding that her primary task was to figure out how to stop the attacks that were knocking out consciousness, sometimes in single systems, sometimes all through the empire. Unless her primary task was to find a way to fix Duarte’s scrambled mind. Or maybe to prevent any more ships from vanishing in the transit between the normal universe and the weird nexus of the ring space.

She had the nearly infinite resources of the empire behind her, the survival of humanity on her shoulders, and a research protocol so streamlined it would have failed out of an ethics review board from just the table of contents.

There were two levels that she had to figure out. First was the civilization that had built the protomolecule and the gates, then the forces that destroyed them. On her best days, she’d thought of herself like a medieval monk struggling to understand the saints to better see the face of God. More often, she felt like a termite trying to explain dogs to her fellow Isoptera so that they could all speculate about fusion jazz.

She understood the protomolecule engineers and what had killed them better than anyone else in all of humanity. Except, if this worked, for Cara. And Xan.

“It was like being in a dream,” Cara said, “only bigger. I don’t remember really tasting things in dreams, you know? This was tasting things and hearing things, and the shape of my body seemed like it was changing. It was… everything.”

“I didn’t feel anything,” Xan said. He sounded disappointed.

Originally, Elvi had done the debriefings with the two siblings separately, talking first to Cara and then to Xan. The idea being that by keeping them from hearing each other’s accounts she could keep them from influencing those reports, but it stressed both of them to be apart.

Now, she brought them into her private lab together, the two of them on the float while she braced herself at her desk and wrote up her notes. The décor was rich psychiatrist’s office: blond grass-colored padding on the walls, spider plants in capillary-fed niches, the low pulse of a dedicated air recycler. Everything about it was designed to say that the woman who used it was a very important person. She hated it more than a little, but she didn’t spend the energy to examine why.

“Was it different from the last time?” Elvi asked.

“There was a… stutter? Like a moment when everything fell apart, and when it came back together, everything was brighter and more immediate? That’s not the right word. There may not be a right word.”

“How did it compare to your experience of ‘the library’?” Elvi asked.

Cara went eerily still for a moment, the way she and Xan did sometimes. Elvi waited for a breath, and then Cara came back. “The library isn’t sensory at all. It’s just knowing things. But this? It isn’t the library, but it’s where the information all comes from. I’m sure about that.”

Xan made a soft noise. Cara put a hand on his arm and pulled him close to her. A primate’s instinct to comfort by cuddling unchanged by its translation across light-years of vacuum into a bubble of ceramic, steel, and carbon lace.

“Were you able to interact with it at all?”

“I think so,” Cara said. “I mean, I didn’t understand what I was doing, but I think I can figure it out. I feel fine. I’m ready to go back in.”

Elvi typed SUBJECT SHOWS STRONG DESIRE TO RETURN TO INTERFACE CONSISTENT WITH DROP IN DOPAMINE AND SEROTONIN LEVELS POST-EXPERIMENT. ADDICTIVE?

“That’s good,” she said out loud. “There are a couple recalibrations we need to make, but we should be ready for another run in a couple shifts. And I’m going to want to run a scan or two while we’re doing that. Check your baseline.”

“Okay,” Cara said, almost hiding her impatience. “Whatever you want.”

Xan fidgeted against his sister’s arm, setting both of them turning a little. “I’m hungry.”

“Go ahead,” Elvi said. “I need to write this up, but you two should eat and rest. I’ll be along in a little bit.”

Cara nodded once, gathered Xan close to her. “Thank you, Doctor.” She pushed off Elvi’s desk with one long, graceful leg. The children—or test subjects, or human-alien hybrids, or however Elvi thought of them in the moment—closed the door behind them. Elvi pressed her palms against her eyes until colors bloomed, and she let out a sigh. Her body was rattling with exhaustion and excitement and anxiety. It felt like drinking too much coffee, and she hadn’t had any at all.

She wrote down the rest of her observations of Cara and Xan and attached the raw data to the report. Then it was just her summary still to go. She shifted the interface to Dictation and let herself float away from her desk. Her leg wanted her to stretch, but it also wanted to cramp. Ever since she’d regrown the hole in her thigh, it did this sometimes.

“We are seeing definite progress,” she said, and the words laid themselves out on her screen. “The triadic relationship between protomolecule catalyst, conscious subject, and the BFE—” Elvi scowled and made a clicking sound with her tongue that backed out the last two words. “—the presumed alien data core seems to be finishing what we’re calling its handshake protocol. I am concerned that the primary subject and the interface weren’t designed for each other, and the interaction between them might be—” She clicked twice again. “—has the potential to be destructive to one or both of them.”

Her office door opened, and Fayez floated in. She raised a hand, asking for silence, as he stopped himself on a handhold. She waited for the door to close before she went on.

“The next phase will be trying to confirm information we already have. Specifically, I’m going to ask the subject a set of simple questions about details from the research into artifacts and archaeology from several systems that she wouldn’t plausibly have had access to. If she can confirm information we already have, that will let us move forward with some confidence that what we get from her further on will be trustworthy. But since she was present in Cortázar’s private lab, and we don’t know what his information hygiene was with the subjects, I’m having to be very careful in choosing test questions.

“Neither subject seems to have been affected by the events in Gedara system. The staff here, myself included, haven’t had any blackouts or losses of consciousness since the all-systems attack months ago. Without knowing what constraints the enemy is working under, I can interpret the limited scope of the Gedara attack as an indication that it is still in an experimental phase, looking for interactions that will be effective in disabling us. Or that the new attacks required more effort, and the enemy doesn’t want to expand them. Or that we just don’t have enough information yet to know what we’re seeing and I’m just talking out my ass.”

She clicked her tongue to delete the sarcastic editorial at the end, and then finished the report. She started spooling through the text to look for errors and typos. Fayez shifted over to her side, watching the screen over her shoulder.

“You didn’t say, ‘And if we don’t get a handle on it soon, the bad guys will figure out how to snuff out all our minds like so many billions of candles, and the cockroaches will have to evolve enough to take over before we get an answer.’”

“Ants, I think, before the cockroaches,” Elvi said. “Predatory superorganisms. Cockroaches are just mobile food pods to them.”

“You’ve given this a lot of thought.”

She routed copies of the report to Dr. Ochida at the Science Directorate back on Laconia and privately to Admiral Anton Trejo, who was at the moment the closest thing Laconia had to a controlling intelligence for their own predatory superorganism. Somewhere on the Falcon, a tightbeam stuttered on and off, spilling light to the repeaters they’d dropped behind them on the assumption that they were still up and functioning. At the speed of light, it would take the information almost an hour to reach the ring gate, then across the cobbled-together, war-ravaged, unreliable communications network that laced the ring space, and then she didn’t know how long to reach Trejo.

She packaged another copy of the report, flagged for easy interception by the underground and addressed to Naomi Nagata. She sent it too.

“That’s going to get us in trouble someday,” Fayez said.

“We’re already in trouble.”

“Yeah, but it’s cosmic-forces-beyond-space-and-time-kill-us-all trouble. Feeding all our data to the underground is ship-security-shoots-us-for-treason trouble.”

Elvi laughed, but it was a tight, angry laugh. “What we’re doing here is bigger than politics.”

“I know,” he said. “I just keep hoping the politicians see it too.”

As if in response, her system chimed. A high-priority message from Laconia. Elvi’s eyes only.

“That’s fucking eerie,” Fayez said. “You want privacy?”

“No,” she said. “But I’d better take it anyway.”

The door closed behind him, and she started the playback. Kelly, Winston Duarte’s personal valet, leaned in toward the camera. His lips were thin and gray. Whatever it was, it looked like bad news.

“Dr. Okoye. I have been authorized by Admiral Trejo to brief you on a security matter that may touch on your work. There’s been a change in High Consul Duarte’s status…”