The Great Filter - Sample Chapter

[The Oracine Order reminds the reader that this information is historical in nature, compiled from a rough draft of the final version of the Approved Histories of Humanity. Information contained in this record may contain inaccuracies that have since been corrected.]

“Why does the last maintenance call of the day always have to be such a pain in the ass!” Ren muttered out loud. She was on her back, body halfway crawled into an access panel on one of Arc 2’s humidity controllers. Her left hand was holding the control panel for the unit in place, while she attempted to fuse the delicate microwires with a hand-held fuser in her right. The airflow in the space kept buffeting her arms, making it difficult to stay steady. She’d had to restart three wires already, and her hand was starting to cramp from the effort.

“If your posterior is experiencing pain perhaps you should find a more amenable position in which to place it.” A familiar but synthetic voice chimed in, nearly causing Ren to drop the board all together. She looked down over her boots and saw four chalky white legs on the floor of the utility space she was in.

“Holy shit, James, don’t sneak up on me like that. I just need to finish fusing these microwires, give me a minute.”

“My sincere apologies Renata Garver Soto, I did not mean to cause you to invoke the religious feces. Are you in need of assistance with your maintenance task? I have grown quite adept at fusing microwires since our last discussion and have only melted one processing board.”

As James droned on, Ren used his synthetic voice as background noise and finished fusing the microwires. She shimmied out of the access panel and sat up to look at James. James took a couple steps back and did the Pod equivalent of sitting, curling his six legs up under himself and lowering his bulbous black eyes to Ren’s current height, then propping his two forward legs up over his translation box.

“I got it, thanks though. No more guard duty this week?” Ren smirked at him. It had been three weeks since their encounter on Roraima ring, and she had seen him still on post there twice. She had begun to worry he’d never get off guard duty so they could have these little secret talks again.

The translation box flashed with an electric blue light, the energy passing into the pad on the end of Jame’s forward leg faster than human eyes could register. Nearly instantly, James sent a flash of his own back to the box. “I am a much better technician than security guard, and Jared decided that my talents were being misappropriated. Jared declared we required someone who was more efficient and less conversational to take over as security guard for Roraima ring’s tram access point. I am disappointed, though, as I met many new humans during that assignment.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet. So, you got bored fixing our simple monkey electronics and decided to come chat with me?” Ren tilted her head sideways, wondering if James actually understood humor or just mimicked it.

“Embarrassed exclamation, humanity’s electro-mechanical creations may seem primitive compared to that of the Pods, but it is vastly interesting! You have been able to accomplish nearly the same level of sophistication in your ship design despite the gross amount of inefficiencies your machines must incorporate turning electrical signals into visual and audio stimuli!”

Ren squinted a bit as she tried to keep up with the Pod’s wordy explanations. “Riiight… yeah, it would be pretty handy to just pass information directly like you Pod do. But seems a lot more boring, too. Do Pod have anything like songs? Or music?”

There was a pause, and James’ pad hesitated a few times over his translation box. Instead, he shuffled over to a monitor nearby and waved his pad over it with a static crackle, an electric blue pulse lighting up the screen. The screen flickered, and then began displaying an alien looking landscape, rolling hills and jagged mountains barely visible through a thick hazy atmosphere. The sunlight shone down in radiant shafts of orange and red light, the ground up close dotted with sprouts of purple and indigo vegetation that positively glowed in the sunlight. In the mid-distance, slender, almost palm-like trees rose, their bark shimmering with an iridescence that was mesmerizing, their tops filled with drooping strands of violet leaves. Some sort of flying creatures darted above and in and out of the trees, small blue dots against a salmon-colored sky, too small and fast to make out details other than their color. The vegetation swayed in a breeze, which was suddenly replicated by nearby air vents in the room, matching the direction and intensity on the monitor. And the breeze was… humid, and had strange smells that Renata had never experienced before, but were not unpleasant. A slight rumbling accompanied the image, and if it weren’t for the slight peaks and silences interspersed in the noise it could have been mistaken for the air handling system.

The image began blurring, and Ren realized her eyes were filled with tears. As James, who had been staring with what seemed like longing at the monitor, turned his dark orbs back to Ren he abruptly waved his pad over the monitor again and the landscape vanished, the air stopped blowing. “I profusely apologize Renata Garver Soto, I certainly did not intend to cause you-“

“No, James, sorry” Ren was wiping here eyes with the heel of her hand “it was just, so beautiful! Was that… was that your home?”

James curled his legs under himself again, crouching down in front of Ren and seemed to be trying to make himself as small as possible. It was several moments before be brought his pad up to the translator again. “Yes… the recreation of our favorite experiences is the closest analogue of what you homo-sapiens call music for us Electrocephalus Sapiens. Although, when we transmit such things between members of our own species it is much more vivid, as if we were reliving the moment, however we can still tell it was a shared experience and not present reality. The crude recreation I displayed for you is the final experience I had before leaving our home planet, The Shimmering Amethyst Pearl Breaking the Black Tide. A single human word cannot shape it, it is more than sound. It is a place that breathes life into the vast silence and defies the hunger of the endless black.”

Ren’s jaw was agape, her mind ablaze taking all this in, and she heard SAMI utter “What the -” over the speakers in her lens. Ren made an effort to close her mouth, and swallowed before speaking,

“Wow, that is… the most I have ever heard any Pod explain about… well anything besides computers or space travel, really.” Ren squatted down in front of James, who sat up a bit straighter. She slowly stretched her hand out and placed it gently over the pad that James was hovering over his translator. The skin felt soft and warm under her fingers, not nearly as dry as it looked. “Thank you, James. Or uh, what was it…” SAMI flashed the text for James’ full Pod name on her lens, “… A Soft Vibration Running Through the Soles of Your Feet.” As she spoke the name, James ran one of his legs along the steel deck, and Ren felt… a soft vibration running through the soles of her feet. She gasped, and then laughed, her eyes tearing up again.

“Why do your eyes keep emitting tear duct fluid, yet your facial muscles seem to indicate happiness?” James asked, cocking his head to one side.

Ren laughed again. “Tears aren’t always a sign of distress; they just happen sometimes when we get overwhelmed with emotions.”

James suddenly stood upright, all six legs hitting the floor with a bang. Ren nearly fell over backwards but managed to get to her feet. James hastily brought a pad up to his translator, “Foul adjectives, Jared is approaching. I must go… I must plead that you not spread this experience to others.”

Ren nodded, her face serious. “I can keep a secret. Bye, James.” He was already scrambling back through the access tunnel. She turned and put the grating back in place over the access panel, using her magnetic ratchet to secure the bolts.

A few moments after James’ footsteps were no longer audible, SAMI popped into view on her lens, her avatar leaning up against a wall of the service closet, holding a sphere of what looked like stars that slid quickly in and out of view, a planet popping into the center every few seconds, and then rapidly flicking back to stars. “Well, that was amazing. I’m going through the stellar database to see if I can find matches for the Shimmering Amethyst Pearl Breaking the Black Tide, given the clues that James gave us there. Given their atmospheric composition and light levels, it has to be a G-class star, similar to Sol. Assuming their drives are maybe two to three times faster than our own, that narrows things down quite a bit, there are maybe 3 possible candidates in range!”

“That is fascinating and all, but I don’t think we’ll be dropping by for a visit anytime soon. Still… maybe we can use it somehow. Anyway, inspection time?” Ren asked as she clambered into the service tunnel.

“Sure, I just checked and the path looks clear of any snoopers, organic or electric. See you soon!” SAMI’s avatar made a show of flying past Ren as if she were in a micro-gravity environment.

A few twists, turns, and minutes later Renata entered a, by now, familiar server closet. This one contained just ten racks of equipment, the tall steel cabinet-like enclosures with rail-mounted computer equipment blinked with dozens of different status lights, the quiet hum of liquid cooling pumps and air circulation fans putting Ren’s mind immediately at ease; she could easily meditate to this noise. She walked over to the third rack on her right and knelt in front of it. Pulling out her magnetic ratchet, she thumbed the switch on and it issued a high pitch whir as she undid the screws holding the air baffle at the bottom of the rack in place. As she set aside, the floor was bathed in purple light. Ren laid prone and peered into the space which was normally empty; there, suspended from an elegant spiderweb of cables, sat a crystal, about a foot long and three inches thick, which pulsed slowly with purple light. Its surface, visible in between the pulses, shown an iridescent swirl of fractal patterns. SAMI’s avatar materialized and straddled the crystal, as if she were riding it like a horse.

“Well, how do I look? Scan me!” SAMI beamed, cocking her head to the side as Ren retrieved her quantum field scanner. The device was shaped a bit like a flute, but instead of keys to control musical notes it had several stubby little nodules at various angles from each other. These were a combination of miniaturized electron-microscopes, spectrographs, and magnetic field sensors, capable of imaging the tiniest of details down to the atomic scale and determining the quantum state of material. She held the scanner over the crystal and slowly twisted it back and forth and then repeated the process on three more sides of the crystal.

SAMI’s eyes glowed a bit brighter for a moment and then she waved a hand, a close-up view of the crystal’s structure popping into view on Ren’s lens along with a diagram of the whole crystal above that. The diagram showed most of the crystal in white, with fine globs of gold spread through the center, looking very much like clumps of neurons reaching out and connecting new pathways.

The close-up view showed the edge of one of these clumps. The carefully arranged lattice of atoms inside the crystal was displayed in a 3d cube. The atoms on the right side of the cube were ringed in gold, with an arrow integrated into each ring showing the direction of spin of the atom. Faint gold lines connected random pairs of atoms, showing their entangled partner.

This crystal was one of thirty warp crystals that the Requiem de la Lune had set out with. They had been painstakingly crafted on Earth, atom by atom. Their creation had taken nearly as long as the construction of the ship itself, nearly ten years. Scientists had discovered that dumping large amounts of energy into the crystals induced quantum effects that created a bubble of warped space-time. When the emergency that caused Requiem to drop out of warp happened, the crystals had started rejecting the high energy levels required to create the warp bubble, often violently. They’d been given up on and nearly forgotten when Ren had stumbled on their storage place, three years ago now. She had thought that perhaps she could figure out a way to reactivate the crystals that the adults hadn’t thought of and began experimenting. Since adding massive amounts of power would draw too much attention, Renata had decided to try a lower power approach first… and discovered that the crystal appeared to be changing at a quantum level depending on the electrical charge applied.

Thinking this might enable the crystal to store data, she had applied a basic Artificial Machine Intelligence image, with some custom tweaks. It not only worked, but the intelligence inside grew at an astonishing rate, using the atoms inside the crystal for its own quantum computing device. When it started asking question after question about the world around them, Ren knew this was something different.

“Looks like my construct has spread to another two percent of the crystal. Seven percent utilization so far. No fractures detected, heat remains evenly distributed, power draw averaging one point four kilowatts. I’d say I’m in perfect health!” SAMI smiled and waved at the floating images, dismissing them. “One of these days we need to build more quantum field scanners and station them here permanently so I can constantly monitor my state.”

Renata grimaced a bit but nodded. “These are some of the most difficult components for us to construct. But I have a few ideas. And some favors I can collect.” She reached over to the air baffle and began putting it back in place, SAMI giving a small wave as her avatar vanished from view.

“Well no rush, at this rate it will be at least ten years or more before I start getting close to maximum utilization. Assuming the rate of growth stays fairly constant, anyway.” Ren finished fastening the air baffle back in place and stood back to check for any gaps. Not spotting any purple light leaking out, she nodded in satisfaction and clambered back into the service tunnels.

Returning to Arc 5’s workshop, Ren spent the rest of the afternoon lining up parts she would need to fabricate tomorrow morning. In between placing material orders, she would check her spycam feeds. The last several days had been pretty monotonous, nothing out of the ordinary coming into view. Ren caught site of James on one of the video, escorting Jared somewhere. Jared was prone on a floating stretcher-like device, limply lifting one of his legs every now and then to communicate with James. He gave Ren the creeps, as he seemed to strike fear or loathing in his fellow Pods for some reason. Ren switched the camera over to the electric field view, and watched the subtle waves of energy emit from Jared’s pad.

Suddenly, a shrill alarm blared inside the workshop, making Ren bolt upright. It sounded three times, and then a voice announced “An emergency drill is now commencing, fire in Arc 5 galley. Please report to your stations.” The alarm sounded three more times, and the message began repeating.

Renata looked around as she stood; Sven was already at the door and waving for everyone else to file out, his fine blond hair covering one blue eye as he leaned through the door frame. Kevin had his arms thrown up in exasperation. “Gah, I was almost done with that!” he exclaimed.

Ren walked out into the Commons with Kevin following behind her. Outside was organized chaos in action; people walking towards the site of the drill kept to one side of the walkways, and those reporting to their hab units kept to the other side. People joined and left the line seemingly at random, some returning to their habs and activating the safety doors, others stopping at a safety equipment locker and pulling out oxygen masks and fire suppressors.

Ren walked across the commons and joined the flow heading towards the “fire”, waving over her shoulder at Kevin who began heading to his hab. As she arrived outside of the galley, Takeshi Mukai, or Mukai-san to his students like Ren, was standing on a table just outside shouting questions, directing traffic, and ensuring everyone understood their role. Ren walked over to Ms. Sagan who had her younger crowd of students gathering into a line. “Alright children, show me how fast you can count off!” Ms. Sagan said with a smile.

The children began counting, the last child in line exclaiming “Aaaand fourteen!” with an enthusiastic jump. Ms. Sagan beamed at him and, noticing Ren approaching nodded, to her.

“Hiro, lets try not to jump during an emergency. If something goes wrong and the rings stop spinning I’ll have to grab your ankle to stop you from floating off.” Ren said with a wink and a smile at the young boy.

Hiro grinned sheepishly and said “Oh, yeah, woops!”

“Good reminder, Renata, thank you. Ok, everyone hold hands, lets head to the classroom!” Ms. Sagan grabbed Zoe’s hand, who was at the front of the line, and began walking towards the classroom. Ren took Hiro’s hand at the end of the line and followed. She gave a wave to Mukai-san as they left and shouted, “Mukai-san, sixteen to the classroom!” He pointed in acknowledgement and turned to repeat the message to someone standing close by.

As they walked Ren tapped her lens and quietly asked SAMI, “Is it just our Arc for this drill?”

“Whole ship, lots of activity right now.” SAMI said, sounding distracted.

Ren frowned briefly before suppressing it, glancing at the rest of the kids. “Everything all right?”

“It’s probably nothing… Avery hasn’t checked into his post yet.” SAMI said, suddenly unworried sounding.

“Ooook… keep me posted.” Ren had a sinking feeling in her stomach.

“I’ll have to wait till the drill is over to scan the security feeds, I’ll draw too much attention if I reroute traffic right now. Don’t worry, maybe he just got re-tasked for something.”

Ren nodded to herself and tried to tell herself that SAMI was right. Nothing to worry about. Sure. Great. She pushed those thoughts aside and focused on quizzing the kids on the emergency routes with Ms. Sagan. Time seemed to stretch, as Ren kept a brave smile and chatted with the children but had to fight to push down a growing feeling of dread in between activities.

Finally, the drill ended, and everyone started heading back to their habs or the gally for dinner. Ren said her goodbyes as quickly as she could, leaving a confused looking Ms. Sagan in the classroom. It took an immense power of will for her not to sprint to her hab. After the longest two minutes of her life, Ren reached the hab with robin’s egg blue siding and green windowsills and door; home, at last. She quickly dropped her bag on the sofa in the living room which was just inside the door, and flew down the hallway, passing two doors and then nearly parkoured off the wall and through the third door.

Her room was just big enough for her bed and a desk, with faux-hardwood floors imitating a deep cherry wood, a multicolored rug adding warmth and softness to the floor between her bed and desk. The lower third of the walls were steel paneling in a light grey, with the upper two thirds a neutral beige, and a velvety red stripe about the width of a hand separating the two materials. The ceiling was ringed with a continuous light bar, which activated as Renata entered, assuming its default warm glow.

Ren fell into her chair and brought up the physical console that she demanded her father add for her. The monitor sprang to life and she brought up the security camera feeds, simultaneously tapping her lens. “SAMI, did you find him?”

SAMI’s voice was small and apologetic, “I did, but I can’t see where he went when the drill began. Someone on the crew locked the footage down. I could get in but… it’d be impossible to do without them tracing it back to me, eventually.” As she spoke, the security camera feed on Ren’s console began cycling through images; Avery exiting a workshop on Roraima ring, walking through the commons. The frame froze as he began to enter a Junction. “That’s the last image I have of him. He never reported to his post for the drill. His family is demanding to talk to the crew.”

Ren suddenly remembered her spycameras. “SAMI, what about our cameras?”

“With the amount of Pod in the area, we can’t risk transmitting. We’ll have to download it directly. The limit in the ship’s cameras does narrow down the area he went missing, though. I believe it happened shortly after the Junction. Which is where our camera was aimed. Getting to it anytime soon may prove challenging.”

“Someone had to have seen something, though! How are there no reports?!” As soon as she had asked the question, she knew the answer. SAMI voiced it for her anyway.

“The Pod are blocking any communications from people who were in the area.” The security feed switched to two views looking towards the section of Arc 3 on Roraima ring where Avery disappeared. In the large central doorway for the Junction, three Pod stood guard. No one was approaching, nor leaving. On the opposite site, in the Commons, a crowd of people could be seen sitting on the ground, more Pod standing between them and the rest of the Commons. No one approached. No one left.

Ren laced her fingers behind her neck, puffed up her cheeks and blew the air out, and then buried her face in her hands, her eyes beginning to burn with tears. “Uuugh, ok. Ok ok ok, so make a note of anyone that lives in that area, anyone that leaves. We’ll have to go and ask them in person what happened.”

“Of course. It may be a while, I’ll let you know when I have something.” SAMI shut the console down for Ren, and it slid with a whisper back into the desk.

Ren threw herself onto her bed, grabbed her pillow and buried her face into it and screamed with everything she had. Her face was quickly wet with warm tears, soaking her face and the pillow as she sobbed. She came up for air and then buried her face and screamed again. SAMI dimmed the lights in the room, and Ren pulled her blankets up, sobbing into her pillow until she had no energy left to cry, and fell asleep.