The discovery that our species is an outshoot of the so-called "Cro-Magnon Expansion" has prompted many creationists to shout that "Darwin was Wrong".
In reality, given the fact that the expansion was a very small episode in a succession of similar events, and left no direct proof on planet, the question that arises is "why no incongruences were spotted before".
It is a powerful interrogative, and the answer to this may be every bit as incompatible with the creation myth as the view of the evolutive process of our species that was accepted by science, before the flood of new data available on the galactic net forced its revision.
In reality, the classical view of humans as the last offspring of a long but quite linear evolutive process had already been abandoned by most anthropologist way before the "Beautiful Alien" image was ever decoded, to be replaced by a more realistic vision of a ramified tree of inter-related species, many of whom really diverged from our evolutive line to disappear and one - the Neanderthals - folded back into our line, as proved by the presence of Neanderthal genes in the European pool.
This itself had been an unhappy realization, for many Europeans, and thus had been a much contested one - as the 2% of the genetic variability proper to the continent ascending to the Neanderthals being the only notable difference between its inhabitants and the rest of the planet, many saw it as a proof of the continent's ancestors lack of moral fibre, having indulged in ante-litteram miscegenation,.
In reality, it is now believed that the Neanderthals were simply descendants of a previous expansive wave of humans, that had reached our planets about 200000 years ago. It is extremely probable that they were the descendants of a research vessel from the so-called Mesoican Culture, that stranded on our planet and chose a France region to settle because, at the time, the most comfortable. Unfortunately, the Mesoican had a tendency to underestimate radiation effects in their ships designs, and to keep crews at a bare minimum. The combination of genetic instability ad reduced variability in the initial population may account for the Neanderthals greater-than-usual deviation from the humanities average.
It is now believed that, for a combination of factors that kept it an interesting planet, our Earth has been touched by many waves of galactic drifters - the "Cro-Magnon" being just the last ones - that kept succeeding on the tempo of what is now suspected to be a cyclical variation in the entanglement rate between our space and the first-band hyperspace.
The so-called "Nu-slide" would thus be not an isolated fact - about every 100000 years the entanglement aspect changes, with trivial effects on most biological and physical processes, but powerful ones on FTL travel and on some very subtle details of how human intelligence works.
Not only can the change enable or disable cheap FTL travel, it is virtually proven that some of the inner mechanics of the human mind are contiguous to that same space-hyperspace interface, which was also used - again, implicitly, and without a conscious design choice on the part f our ancestors - by the Cro-Magnon Artificial Minds to boost their capabilities way beyond the limits of their 3D hardware.
When the connection is more favourable, part of the human mind takes residence in the hyperspace, boosting creativity and sheer, brute intelligence.
Telepathy becomes more common, and almost everybody naturally contributes to the whole species baggage of ideas, concepts and solutions - contributes to, and gains from.
Humans becomes more creative, and much more effective in their pursue of solutions to problems. More ideas flow and are developed faster and better.
In these phases, not only the access to hyperspace - and FTL - is simpler, but the humanities and their Artificial Minds are more powerful, so an age of galactic travel ensue... and someone reaches our Earth.
When the access becomes more difficult - like in the last transition - the disappearance of FTL travel is NOT its most dramatic effect, nor is it the sudden incapacity of Artificial Minds to function correctly. Both occurrences would be terrible on their own, but what makes them nearly insurmountable is the fact that the human mind, too, loses most of its abilities, as well as its direct access to most of the culture created up to that moment.
Without hyperspace, there is no more telepathy, nor galaxy-wide concept sharing, and every human is left with just the tiny shards that it can retain in its conscious mind. Unless the planet has a very numerous and enormously varied population and economy, this usually means that only a tiny and very insufficient fraction of the original culture is maintained, with effects that can be easily imagined.
About 90% of the human settlements that were stranded by the last Nu slide went extinct in one or two generations, and virtually every one of the remaining regressed to Palaeolithic levels of technology, the exceptions being enumerable on the fingers of one hand.
Hellish as it may look to the modern reader, ancient Earth was not, in facts, the worse offender when it comes to exterminate human groups stranded on its surface. It is now postulated that what kept Earth an interesting planet was the very possibility of observing variants of humanity, descended from past humans and sometimes hybridized with local species who themselves derived from even more ancient drifters - like the Neanderthal.
In other words, up until the current cycle and its reversion to a more common path of technological development and genocide of the human variants competing for space , for about two million years Earth has been an anthropologist heaven.
Unfortunately, given the aggressivity with which our branch of modern humans has adsorbed or exterminated its cousins, and the corrosiveness of globalization against tribal cultures, we can assume this to be a glory of the past.
Currently,our Earth is a run-of-the-mill human settlement, with a set of cultures that is constantly being reduced to a planetary, single one, though differences will always persist - the geographic nature of an area does have some effects on the "mood" of its inhabitants and their art, values, and beliefs.
Even if a new "change" re-established the favourable situation present at the end of the Cro-Magnon expansion, with the reappearance of cheap system-to-system shuttle services, it is unlikely that our world would get much attention, as there are no more Australopitechus or Neanderthals to motivate interstellar study expeditions, and the planet otherwise lacks any interest whatsoever as far as industrial resources go (it is estimated that the Anipos robot mining operations in the asteroids belts surpassed Earth mining outoput by a factor four, during the build-up leading to the war - that was the product of a whopping one thousand initial machines, commanded by just a hundred technicians, and moderate self-replication).
This will probably show up in the next few million years as a discontinuity in the fossil documentation.
If this cycle will end, and the current galactic civilization network will crumble too soon (in the past, the effect on human intelligence have led to galaxy-wide collapses even before widespread FTL and pan-systemic travel had managed to unify the human sphere), there will be a visible missing link between our current, Cro-Magnon derived phenotype and the one from the next colonization wave.
Currently, no such an egregious void can be found, because Earth has always been host to humans derived from a series of precedent waves, as well as visitors from the then-current one, that intermingled in the aftermaths of each "slide" episode.
This produced intermediate individuals or, even, new species, which is the reason why our extra-world origin had to be discarded until recent years - the documentation did not support what seemed an illogic ad-hoc explanation.
More relevantly, the influx of alien mutations has a great importance in the use of genetic drift to characterize human rests antiquity.
In fact, the parameters used for that operation must be thoroughly revised, as they currently tend to overstate the antiquity of most human rests.
Unfortunately, studies on how to correct these biases are in their infancy, and no clear answer can be given, beyond what can be found in surviving data from the "great centres"
that managed to whether the last slide (like the Anipos "Supreme Computer Farm").
This information would have us believe, for example, that Homo Erectus (called "The Mono-Tonal Men", for their limited vocal range ) was still inhabiting the planet, at the time of Homo Neanderthal, more than half a million years after its supposed extinction.
Its reliability, of course, is anybody's guess (adult Anipos may be pretentiously serious, but adolescent Anipos are every bit as mischievous as those of any other human species, and not above the kind of elaborated practical joke that would be adding spurious material to an ancient database) but opens the possibility for an extensive, and intriguing, re-write of our species history.
It is a good time to be an anthropologist.
Our field has never been more open to new discoveries, and seldom the importance of them has ever been so felt, inside and outside the scientific community.
It is of these days the news that the North American Evangelical Churches association has asked the Kansas Board of education to discard both creationism and the "Panspermic Theory" from their textbook, after it was revealed that most of the Genesys is likely a plagiarism from a set of 30.000 years old erotic novels for young adults (something the late FTL-era Chro-Magnons were apparently fond).
In the words of Rev. Cynthia Loudberg,
"Darwinism is pure science - it leaves the believer free to believe an ineffable God be the prime mover of the universe, hiding his hand for the sake of allowing free faith. With these revelations, the Genesys becomes the proof that we are the product of a bunch of horny teenager straying out of adult supervision at the wrong moment. God operates in mysterious ways, but I don't think it would use so embarrassing ones."
Showing posts with label The Dumbest War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Dumbest War. Show all posts
Monday, 23 January 2017
Tuesday, 29 November 2016
Nine is a famiy.
Xanthippe Xeyos arrived in her office the usual way - she flew in from the west window.
As always when it was raining along her flightpath, she was wearing her hood with rotor-glasses. No normal human would ever use something like those, but the Woman of Titanium was not really normal, wasn't she?
She had felt the presence of the intruder from half a km away - however, the building security system was also aware of this visitor, too, which meant that this girl was likely not moved by bad intentions, or completely ineffectual.
The girl - now looking at a glass close full of starships models - was a Molly, one of an unknown number of clone-sisters among whom was Xanthippe's lover, The First Molly.
- "I hope that you have no problem, finding my office, Molly."
The short woman turned around, her face flushed bright red.
Xanthippe's mind registered the dance of the muscles below the brownish skin - this was Molly, all right, as she would be if her favoured past-time was running under the Sun with weights on wrists and ankles and not lying on a sofa, reading some old book. Xanthippe felt a wave of attraction for this "improved" lookalike of her lover - whatever this girl was, she didn't let out the same subliminal, homicidal tension of some of her brethren.
- "Uh, yes. When I entered the building, some nice woman asked me if I was here to see you, and guided me to this place"
- "I suppose you only heard the voice of this woman." - on friday afternoon, Xanthippe was usually the only one to be in the office, as local Earthlings had problems getting the 25 hours a week Anipos' Legation working schedule, and many so-called entrepreneurs kept getting angry when they couldn't reach the Legation secretary/liaison officer for Earthbound affairs in old plain office hours.
Xanthippe had tried to explain - plenty of times - that Anipos Prime functioned under a strict 16 hours/week maximum allowed workload law - working more than that was considered "job hoarding", an offense punished with three months of jail for every supernumerary hour/week worked, and with the requisition of all "ill-gotten" wealth.
Of course, 16 hours/week was already more than the planet ecosystem could safely support, and should have already been reduced to 12, if not for the fear that people would turn to hobbies even more resources-wasting than work, out of sheer boredom.
That being the case, Anipos workers were encouraged to slack off as much as possible... with scarce results. "Giving you best at work" was widely considered the best remedy to depression and existential ennuis, so the Anipos tended to assault their sixteen hours jobs like they were in a marathon.
In a galaxy full of long established civilizations that had to learn that there was no practical way to relieve ecological pressures through other-worlds expansion, the Anipos' choice wasn't even the worst scenario.
They still managed to keep their 600 millions inhabitants reasonably happy and busy.
Other worlds had simply written off whole underclasses and social strata - often, several billions citizens of them - through the institution of severely demanding policies for the release of reproduction permits.
Not as much "kill the poor" as "let them die off, childless".
- "It was the building's automation control, Molly." - Xanthippe managed to keep any sarcasm out of her voice... the other Molly may be sophisticated players in "the Game", but this one was possibly made of a different material. Xanthippe shared her bed with another "different Molly", so she knew that it was entirely possible.
- "My name is Dana."
- "I thought that it was Molly, like your sisters."
- "Dana, call me Dana."
The young woman seemed distressed, in a very human way - nothing tingled on Xanthippe super-human senses.
- "So, who are you? A spy? An enforcer? An assassin? Don't tell me, an existentialist poet?"
The banterous question irritated the girl, which was fine - Xanthippe and the building still didn't perceive the host of odd forces and sensor probes that surrounded all of Molly's sisters. This one was either human, or had better self-control than any of her sisters.
- "I... this was a mistake." - And like this, she ran away - at less than 30 km/h. A speed that wasn't even worth the "paltry" adjective, for Xanthippe standards.
The Betan woman considered it for a couple of seconds, then stepped out from the window.
The black haired kid took some seconds more to come out of the Legation office building - she was fast, for a normal human, and continued half-walking, half-running, till the Legation building was well out of sight.
At which point, she bent against a wall and started crying.
- "So, you are not a poet, What do you do?"
Dana, startled, looked up, tears running her mascara and a question written in her stare - how the hell Xanthippe was there? Xanthi found her almost irresistible - a Molly with some deeper feelings? Oh, my.
- "I am much slower than your sisters, but so are you. So, who are you, and what do you do?"
- "I am an acrobat with the "Cirque Orferes""
- "Can you fly?" - the little woman shook her head - "No", while cleaning her tears with a hand, making even more of a mess of her face
- "OK, I can walk, and I'd like to walk you to The Bretwitch Canteen, two blocks from here. Would you accept to dine with me?"
The Molly looked at her, incredulous, then nodded
- "Good - and we will discuss what disturbs you so much."
The Bretwitch was a much younger institution than it stated in the logo - it started as a Kosher Deli takeaway right before the middle of 21st century, and it wasn't the best place to dine in town.
However it was affordable, the cuisine was decent and it also had a great anti-paparazzi policy.
Most of the clients were mobsters, not above disappearing the photographer that took the wrong photo. Other clients were way worse, and didn't leave corpses for the families to mourn. Arguably, Xanthippe was among said others, profile-wise, even if she did not kill people directly.
As in a badly written book, Dana's acrobat lover, a certain Simon, had fallen ill.
The illness was genetic, incurable and fatal - one of those 6000 or so ailments that were so rare that hardly anybody studied them, and virtually no money was invested in a cure. Unfortunately, a great number of these illnesses resulted from genetic mutations intervened after the lost of hyper-travel had fragmented the human Galaxy in its current form, some 50000 years before - no cures could be found on other worlds, as the rest of humanities didn't share the relevant mutations. .
Simon was the guy for whom Dana had bailed out of "The Other" organization.
- "Really? You simply took, said 'To hell with this', and walked out?" - Xanthippe was amazed - "No repercussions?".
- "I couldn't fly any more, or remember half of the days from before I left the group." - Dana looked out of the window, probably to hide the pain in her own eyes from the inquisitive alien - "It took me months, to learn how to move with only my muscles. 'It' had no reasons to kill me - I was a good example of what happened when one left its service."
So, "it" didn't broke her knees... simply because it would have been redundant.
She fixed her glare on Xanthippe, suddenly - "I think that I would have killed me, if not for Simon."
Her eyes took on a liquid light, as if she was just one step from openly crying - which she probably was.
- "And he took you as a partner in the acrobatic act, too?"
- "Turns out, the `pale shadow of what I was is still good enough to learn to walk on a rope. I am small, but strong, and my reflexes are still good."
Xanthippe didn't vouch his ideas on this last detail - the tune-ups that made Dana's brain able to perform at "hyper-high speed" were the kind of biological machinery that couldn't really be removed, at least not without converting someone into a vegetal.
As such, while her body could have been downgraded to be only human (maybe), her reflexes were still - probably - very fast, bordering on absurdly rapid.
- "Why were you in my office?"
- "I have seen a gossip article in a magazine, you with your... last lover. The first of us" - the "real" Molly... Xanthippe had realized, at the very beginning , that none of the clones realized that "her" Molly, too, was a clone - possibly, one from a `previous batch.
An unmodified one, with no cybernetic black-boxes stuffed inside, who had been allowed to grow on her own terms in an adoptive family... but the methylation markers, the telomeres shortening and other indices were there.
She was not the original Molly, either.
Most likely, the last one in a "control group" of "naturals" that had been dispersed and used - as base reference - to steer the development of the "souped-up" versions.
All of them, clones of the same girl, that likely was 11 when her material was sampled, some moment half the first quarter of the previous century.
It was, possibly, also the reason why they all had roughly the same age - the bio-techs had found no indices that they were rapid-grown in a vat.
That was a trick nobody, in the whole galaxy, had ever managed to pull satisfactorily - at least, not without extensive genetic modifications, liable to wreak systemic havocs down the poor kid.
The "Mollys" really were, all, sisters - twins.
But the "supers", for some reason, had convinced themselves that their "known" normal sister was, really, the source.
Xanthippe suspected that this shaped a lot of their existential narrative - in fact, "the Assassin" had hinted, in one of her late night incursions, about what could happen if ever Xanthippe made Molly cry.
To be honest, the Woman of Titanium slept badly for a week or so, after that... her relationship with the unsuspecting girl was a trilling, double edged challenge.
- "Do you want to meet her?"
- "No, I want to let my... former employer know that I am available to come back, if he can cure Simon."
- "Why coming to me? Just send a phone call to " - Xanthippe paused, while she reflected on it - "my office. I am pretty sure that 'it' wiretapped any cable in and out of it, the very moment that they were laid down".
- "So did the US Government, and the NSSSR, the United Nations Intelligence Directorate, the three Republics of China, Japan, South Korea, the EU Global Intelligence Agency, the..."
Dana may have lost half of what made her whatever she was, before her escape to freedom, but apparently she still understood enough of "the game" to avoid the most obvious blunders.
- "Stop, I get it. Publicizing your former nature as an affiliate of the 'Greatest World Terroristic Network', among the fine listeners of my channel, would not improve your friend's health. Whereas, human intelligence around the legation is virtually nil, given the building's AI bad habits."
- "Nowadays, Intelligence agencies seldom invest more than a tiny percentage of their budget in 'foot soldiers'. So, entering the building was safer than calling on the phone, no?"
Not exact, but almost.
Xanthippe couldn't help but think that this was because most "global threats" surrounding the Legation, as perceived by the various nation-states, were not humans in nature.
Yet, it was a mistake... the 'bots in the space kept almost all their point-to-point links well away from the Earth space, but those of them that had longer maintained an android avatar on Earth did met through them, at a couple of bars, and chatted about work.
It costed her a lot to discover this, and the old Russian operatives that stalked the two bars since she had pinned down their locations were her most conspicuous infraction to the Legation budget integrity, but it was also the way she got most of her useful information on the "hidden alien threats operating on the planet".
What her chief then really did with her reports, Xanthippe had some clue, and she gladly ignored it.
If the boss preferred printed reports as toilet paper, it was not her fault.
A sudden, low buzz caught her attention. She recognized the ultrasound feed, from quite a few of her most worrying recent moments. "Razor", the most murderous of the "sisters", was near.
- "So, you hope that I pass the message to one of them? That you are ready to come back to the fold, in exchange for saving Simon?"
-·"Yes."
- "It is not going to work."
- "Why? ... I am sure that they already know that I contacted you."
- "I am sure that they already knew everything about Simon. I do not think that your 'Boss' can do anything for him."
- "What? No. It can do everything it want! It does everything it wants!"
- "Reprogramming a broken genetic code in an adult body is much more difficult than assembling a cyborg on a developing foetus, or embryonic genetic engineering. It almost never works as intended..."
- "No, don't say it"
- "... I think that, if 'it' had a cure, you'd already received an offer. He can't - Godlike may it appear, but it still has limits."
- "I said you to shut up!" - by the look of it, Dana would likely have beaten Xanthi's ass on the spot. Knowing her sisters, if she was still "amped up", she would had a good shot at it, too... somehow, the thought that she could not, not any more at least, saddened Xanthippe.
- "Thanks for your time. Will you pass my message, when you can?"
- "Count on it."
And with that, the little half-Asian was out, with her athletic step as enticing as "Xanthippe's Molly" lazy stroll was.
- "If you care to join me, the veal is marvellous, here." - The words were spoken plainly - after all, "Razor" probably had the same kind of hearing that Xanthippe had, able to listen a child whisper in a storm five km away.
The new arrived moved the chair to sit, and Xanthippe looked up and stopped. This was "razor" - Xanthippe had decided to call this most murderous of the "Mollys" with that name, because she often had a bloody sword on her shoulders - but the girl gave out no hint of her usual, "I shall slay you viciously" energy.
Without it, Xanthippe realized that she was younger, way younger than Molly, as this later was probably from a prototype batch.
Xanthippe suspected that fine-tuning the growth of a super-powered child so that she became useful, crazy enough to do what was commanded to her independently of the horror it represented, but sane enough to not lose control and start killing on her own, was an art that required attention and luck. The second meaning that, for each sisters she had met many, many other had likely been slaughtered when they proved too unstable.
The waitress appeared, to take a restaurant order, an eyebrow raised at the newcomer.
- "I have a penchant for twin sisters" - Xanthippe had long since learned that, on this planet, one could survive any embarrassing situation, as long as she was the first making fun of it.
- "Who doesn't? The difficult is getting them in bed together." - The waitress took their order, while "razor" continued to be flabbergasted.
- "It wasn't so bad a joke."
- "I am not used to people joking around me."
"Because you usually look like considering the fastest way to disembowel them, girl" - the thought didn't reach Xanthippe's lips.
Then, the leather-clad alien vixen considered the air that her potential assassin sported at the moment, and sighed.
Why the Hell even this had to be a clueless, naïve girl at heart? Xanthippe lived much better when she could simply file her under "crazy assassin bitch".
Xanthippe blurted - "Today you look much prettier than usual" - and it was true.
- " Do you really think that we can't help - what's his name?- Simon?"
Xanthippe attacked the veal - 450 calories that would take ten days to consume, with her absurd metabolism, or eight round trips to the North Pole at Mach 3 - fully conscious that her thighs didn't really need any more fat, if she wanted to be able to slid inside her "leather" armour suit.
- "Do tell me, wouldn't your people already have offered that barter, if 'It' could fix the man?"
- "He is going to die" - "Razor" looked at least as shocked as her sister, which most definitely surprised the alien.
- "What is he, for you to care?"
- "He is someone that made my beloved sister happy - that made me happy, for a while, before I conceded defeat to Dana."
- "You still have feelings for him?"
The subsequent, prolonged silence eloquently answered "yes".
They finished the meal, exchanging barely a word, then walked out of the restaurant, together - the short, black-haired "potentiated" girl still lost in her thoughts.
They took the causeway across the main road, to the old Mulry Square.
The place, as always, was semi-desert. Near the centre of the triangular space, "Razor" stopped, forcing Xanthippe to look back - the girl had a sad, sweet expression.
- "Simon, Dana - I love them both, dearly." - and with this, she jumped out at the ludicrous acceleration rate that was the hallmark of the "suppa-girls", being well on a suborbital path by the time Xanthippe lost her.
Xanthippe looked around - if anybody saw the scene, his or her brain hardly registered it.
The alien, whose take off were considerably slower - her maximum acceleration was about a tenth of the 500G or so that Razor and her sisters used habitually - repressed a bout of envy.
She considered the fastidious spectacle of the humans around the square, pointing fingers at her when SHE would take off, and decided to go back to the legation office the hard way. Walking.
Which would burn about 1 pico-calories of fat , in her stupid matter-energy converting muscles.
----
For some months, Xanthippe had no reasons to linger on the other "normal" Molly, her lover and their tragic history.
She decided to not mobilise any official resource, to check what it was of the two.
Apparently, the only result of the encounter was that, now, the "mob-style" menaces were delivered by the first Molly that she ever met, the stealthy young girl that Xanthippe nicknamed "Insider".
"Razor" was much better at it, probably being a fan of "Goodfellas", "the Goodfater", "Lucky Luciano" and "Life and deaths of Pasquale Barra" - Insider simply didn't emanate the right danger. Yet, "Razor" was, probably, simply unwilling to meet again someone who had seen all her vulnerability.
So, in her obliviousness, Xanthippe did not know that Simon Oersteheld, a famous acrobat, had died aged 32, because of a debilitating illness, and did not prepare for the apparition of any grief-stricken, crazed acrobat female entering her suburban villa.
Like a remorseful thought, Dana appeared by the border of their big pool, scaring the hell out of the Betan, who didn't really want her beloved girlfriend to discover the whole clones business any more than any other of the involved.
The exception, it appeared, was Dana - was she there to shatter Molly's life? To punish her sisterhood, for not helping her lover?
In less than a second, Xanthippe was in front of the diminutive girl, realizing at the same time that she couldn't really force herself to hurt the poor woman.
- "Let me pass"
- "You know that I can't."
- "Why? So she can continue believing that she is the one and only Molly, an that there is nothing odd in her life?"
- "It seems a good idea"
- "Apart sharing her bed with the only accredited superwoman in the world?"
- "What do you mean?"
- "You got to her because you were tracking down one of us, no? Would she be happy, to know that she is just a replacement for the real deal?"
- "it is not like this" - A small part of Xanthippe, though, was telling her that it was exactly like that, which is why the super-strong woman lost control, for one of the very few times in her life. She gripped the trespasser's forearm, and squeezed a little too much, forgetting that this was NOT one of the much tougher than steel sisters of her lover. The sound of the acrobat's radio breaking filled Xanthippe's heart with horror.
- "Oh, my Gods, I didn't mean it. I " - she never managed to complete the phrase, as something emerged from the shadows and punched her away, with the kind of blow that would dwarf one from Mjolnir, the fabled hammer of the Norse god of Thunder, Thor.
The punch was an hook from high-down, given by a flying, much enraged Razor - Xanthippe landed in the pool, blowing half of the water against the house front, like a localized tsunami, while the super-resistant woman stopped the flight a good meter into the ground, after having broken through the reinforced concrete wall of the pool.
For the first time in her life, Xanthippe lost consciousness without being in a Dojo with nullifying fields.
When she get back in herself - maybe fifteen seconds later - she steamed toward her enemies, only to see a somewhat odd scene.
Two Mollys - one looked like "Insider", the other was a yet unknown sister - were keeping Razor from finishing her job. Dana was apathetic, her broken arm twisted in an odd way - a sight that immediately sobered up Xanthippe.
That was her doing .- a poor girl, bereft for the loss of her life's love, had made a mistake and Xanthi had lost it, and hurt someone that did not merit being harmed, just because that someone may had stepped onto a truth.
With her clarity back, Xanthi realized that the quartet was being illuminated, by a handheld torch of some kind. Their expressions were very much the ones of a bunch of deers crossing a highway, in Montana, in the middle of the Hunting season.
She turned back, slowly, and smiled at "her" Molly, that did not look very amused.
- "Do you know these women?"
- "Kind of, dear."
Xanthippe suddenly felt like some male protagonist of one of the old movies that Molly insisted on watching together, when caught by his wife with a host of scantly dressed girls, out of some ungodly coincidence.
Apart the details that they were all women, dressed up from neck to toe - it was a chilly April evening, and "supers" may survive skinny dip in liquid nitrogen, but they do feel cold like anybody else - that it was no coincidence that they were all together and that there was no sex involved, Xanthi was exactly on the mark.
As any of those fictional husbands, she was in deep trouble.
Molly darted back and forth the lamplight, on each of her doubles and on her wife, and back.
Then, she switched to the house - the water wall had broken inside, trashing the ground floor. Molly herself was dripping wet, which kind of prompted a secondary but intriguing question.
- "Uh,Molly, have you ever had... that?" - the torch was, in fact, attached to the barrel of a pretty menacing gun. Not that it could hurt anybody there, apart Molly. And Dana.
- "Woman, do you have an idea of how many ass-holes send me messages, to tell me that they are going to convert me back to Earth cocks, ever since we started going out?"
- "12746, as of last week"
- "So, you do know"
- "Yes. Would you mind put it down? The only non-bullet-proof in this mess is that girl - she has suffered enough and I do not think that she is any danger."
If seeing Dana's broken arm calmed down Xanthippe, seeing a dripping Molly had the same effect on Razor.
- "May I suggest that we take the discussion to a more comfortable place?"
- "That's a nice idea, but, as you can see, our home is a bit in disarray." - The voice of Molly was pretty dry. Xanthippe wondered what her wife was thinking, seeing four sisters she knew nothing about, yet were familiar with her life-partner.
- "We have a safe house, down the road. It is big enough for everybody. And it is warm - we love warmth."
Molly looked interrogatively at Xanthippe, who shrugged.
- "Me, I am not sure, but they would never, ever harm you, dear, believe me."
Molly shook her head - "I should really have listen to my room-mate" - lowered her gun, and the whole group went to the safe house - flying.
The safe house was big, and it was warm. Very warm.
Razor distended Dana on the central sofa - that looked every bit as comfortable as much as expensive - and took her arm, pulled, and managed to compose the fracture., while Insider laid her hands on the sides of the acrobat's head. Probably the shock hadn't wore off yet, and the ex-super kept looking vaguely giddy.
Xanthippe imagined that the "amped-up" girl could see the bones under the skin every bit as well as she did. When the black-haired girl continued her manipulations, till she managed to put back in place a solitary splinter, the Betan was sure of it.
The unknown sister arrived, with a strange jar that she left to razor, and went on to Molly
- "We gotta change you out of this"
Molly went away, more than a bit surprised, pulled by the enthusiastic little woman.
Razor took the content of the jar - seemingly, a greenish slime - with her hand, and laid it against her sister's arm. The slime soon ran up and down the arm, and meld itself in the shape of a cast.
Razor made a sign to Insider and, in a matter of seconds, Dana was sleeping.
-"Psychic powers?"
- "Nope - we simply have the codes to reactivate her dormant implants, and command them specific actions." - Insider was almost cheerful - "so, sleepy sleepy and pain locked out, while the nanos fix her bones. In a couple of days she will be as good as new."
- "I am sorry"
- "It happens - I have broken far too many bones not to know it"
Razor led herself fall in he second, unoccupied of the three sofas.
- "Sorry for my punch - you didn't completely earn it. She was looking for a fight, though she was right. "
- "Molly has seen you guys. What do we tell her?"
Razor looked Xanthippe for some seconds, raised her eyebrows, looking at once more childish and adult.
- "The truth, what else? Ignorance isn't going to protect her. After all, YOU jumped on her because of us."
- "What if she decides that I really was using her to get insights on you people? What if she leaves me?"
- "I finally get to kill you, my dear, like you richly deserved."
The day after, much explanation was given -Xanthi managed to convince Molly of her innocence. Molly was intrigued by these unknown sisters, and decided to learn as much as possible, possibly from the most independent source, the "Sleeping beauty".
So, she decided to "haunt" the safe house for a while.
Of course, as any choice in life, it was bound to have consequences.
Like meeting her other five "sisters", and decide that she loved them all... at which point, Xanthippe finally knew in how much of a deep shit she really was.
As always when it was raining along her flightpath, she was wearing her hood with rotor-glasses. No normal human would ever use something like those, but the Woman of Titanium was not really normal, wasn't she?
She had felt the presence of the intruder from half a km away - however, the building security system was also aware of this visitor, too, which meant that this girl was likely not moved by bad intentions, or completely ineffectual.
The girl - now looking at a glass close full of starships models - was a Molly, one of an unknown number of clone-sisters among whom was Xanthippe's lover, The First Molly.
- "I hope that you have no problem, finding my office, Molly."
The short woman turned around, her face flushed bright red.
Xanthippe's mind registered the dance of the muscles below the brownish skin - this was Molly, all right, as she would be if her favoured past-time was running under the Sun with weights on wrists and ankles and not lying on a sofa, reading some old book. Xanthippe felt a wave of attraction for this "improved" lookalike of her lover - whatever this girl was, she didn't let out the same subliminal, homicidal tension of some of her brethren.
- "Uh, yes. When I entered the building, some nice woman asked me if I was here to see you, and guided me to this place"
- "I suppose you only heard the voice of this woman." - on friday afternoon, Xanthippe was usually the only one to be in the office, as local Earthlings had problems getting the 25 hours a week Anipos' Legation working schedule, and many so-called entrepreneurs kept getting angry when they couldn't reach the Legation secretary/liaison officer for Earthbound affairs in old plain office hours.
Xanthippe had tried to explain - plenty of times - that Anipos Prime functioned under a strict 16 hours/week maximum allowed workload law - working more than that was considered "job hoarding", an offense punished with three months of jail for every supernumerary hour/week worked, and with the requisition of all "ill-gotten" wealth.
Of course, 16 hours/week was already more than the planet ecosystem could safely support, and should have already been reduced to 12, if not for the fear that people would turn to hobbies even more resources-wasting than work, out of sheer boredom.
That being the case, Anipos workers were encouraged to slack off as much as possible... with scarce results. "Giving you best at work" was widely considered the best remedy to depression and existential ennuis, so the Anipos tended to assault their sixteen hours jobs like they were in a marathon.
In a galaxy full of long established civilizations that had to learn that there was no practical way to relieve ecological pressures through other-worlds expansion, the Anipos' choice wasn't even the worst scenario.
They still managed to keep their 600 millions inhabitants reasonably happy and busy.
Other worlds had simply written off whole underclasses and social strata - often, several billions citizens of them - through the institution of severely demanding policies for the release of reproduction permits.
Not as much "kill the poor" as "let them die off, childless".
- "It was the building's automation control, Molly." - Xanthippe managed to keep any sarcasm out of her voice... the other Molly may be sophisticated players in "the Game", but this one was possibly made of a different material. Xanthippe shared her bed with another "different Molly", so she knew that it was entirely possible.
- "My name is Dana."
- "I thought that it was Molly, like your sisters."
- "Dana, call me Dana."
The young woman seemed distressed, in a very human way - nothing tingled on Xanthippe super-human senses.
- "So, who are you? A spy? An enforcer? An assassin? Don't tell me, an existentialist poet?"
The banterous question irritated the girl, which was fine - Xanthippe and the building still didn't perceive the host of odd forces and sensor probes that surrounded all of Molly's sisters. This one was either human, or had better self-control than any of her sisters.
- "I... this was a mistake." - And like this, she ran away - at less than 30 km/h. A speed that wasn't even worth the "paltry" adjective, for Xanthippe standards.
The Betan woman considered it for a couple of seconds, then stepped out from the window.
The black haired kid took some seconds more to come out of the Legation office building - she was fast, for a normal human, and continued half-walking, half-running, till the Legation building was well out of sight.
At which point, she bent against a wall and started crying.
- "So, you are not a poet, What do you do?"
Dana, startled, looked up, tears running her mascara and a question written in her stare - how the hell Xanthippe was there? Xanthi found her almost irresistible - a Molly with some deeper feelings? Oh, my.
- "I am much slower than your sisters, but so are you. So, who are you, and what do you do?"
- "I am an acrobat with the "Cirque Orferes""
- "Can you fly?" - the little woman shook her head - "No", while cleaning her tears with a hand, making even more of a mess of her face
- "OK, I can walk, and I'd like to walk you to The Bretwitch Canteen, two blocks from here. Would you accept to dine with me?"
The Molly looked at her, incredulous, then nodded
- "Good - and we will discuss what disturbs you so much."
The Bretwitch was a much younger institution than it stated in the logo - it started as a Kosher Deli takeaway right before the middle of 21st century, and it wasn't the best place to dine in town.
However it was affordable, the cuisine was decent and it also had a great anti-paparazzi policy.
Most of the clients were mobsters, not above disappearing the photographer that took the wrong photo. Other clients were way worse, and didn't leave corpses for the families to mourn. Arguably, Xanthippe was among said others, profile-wise, even if she did not kill people directly.
As in a badly written book, Dana's acrobat lover, a certain Simon, had fallen ill.
The illness was genetic, incurable and fatal - one of those 6000 or so ailments that were so rare that hardly anybody studied them, and virtually no money was invested in a cure. Unfortunately, a great number of these illnesses resulted from genetic mutations intervened after the lost of hyper-travel had fragmented the human Galaxy in its current form, some 50000 years before - no cures could be found on other worlds, as the rest of humanities didn't share the relevant mutations. .
Simon was the guy for whom Dana had bailed out of "The Other" organization.
- "Really? You simply took, said 'To hell with this', and walked out?" - Xanthippe was amazed - "No repercussions?".
- "I couldn't fly any more, or remember half of the days from before I left the group." - Dana looked out of the window, probably to hide the pain in her own eyes from the inquisitive alien - "It took me months, to learn how to move with only my muscles. 'It' had no reasons to kill me - I was a good example of what happened when one left its service."
So, "it" didn't broke her knees... simply because it would have been redundant.
She fixed her glare on Xanthippe, suddenly - "I think that I would have killed me, if not for Simon."
Her eyes took on a liquid light, as if she was just one step from openly crying - which she probably was.
- "And he took you as a partner in the acrobatic act, too?"
- "Turns out, the `pale shadow of what I was is still good enough to learn to walk on a rope. I am small, but strong, and my reflexes are still good."
Xanthippe didn't vouch his ideas on this last detail - the tune-ups that made Dana's brain able to perform at "hyper-high speed" were the kind of biological machinery that couldn't really be removed, at least not without converting someone into a vegetal.
As such, while her body could have been downgraded to be only human (maybe), her reflexes were still - probably - very fast, bordering on absurdly rapid.
- "Why were you in my office?"
- "I have seen a gossip article in a magazine, you with your... last lover. The first of us" - the "real" Molly... Xanthippe had realized, at the very beginning , that none of the clones realized that "her" Molly, too, was a clone - possibly, one from a `previous batch.
An unmodified one, with no cybernetic black-boxes stuffed inside, who had been allowed to grow on her own terms in an adoptive family... but the methylation markers, the telomeres shortening and other indices were there.
She was not the original Molly, either.
Most likely, the last one in a "control group" of "naturals" that had been dispersed and used - as base reference - to steer the development of the "souped-up" versions.
All of them, clones of the same girl, that likely was 11 when her material was sampled, some moment half the first quarter of the previous century.
It was, possibly, also the reason why they all had roughly the same age - the bio-techs had found no indices that they were rapid-grown in a vat.
That was a trick nobody, in the whole galaxy, had ever managed to pull satisfactorily - at least, not without extensive genetic modifications, liable to wreak systemic havocs down the poor kid.
The "Mollys" really were, all, sisters - twins.
But the "supers", for some reason, had convinced themselves that their "known" normal sister was, really, the source.
Xanthippe suspected that this shaped a lot of their existential narrative - in fact, "the Assassin" had hinted, in one of her late night incursions, about what could happen if ever Xanthippe made Molly cry.
To be honest, the Woman of Titanium slept badly for a week or so, after that... her relationship with the unsuspecting girl was a trilling, double edged challenge.
- "Do you want to meet her?"
- "No, I want to let my... former employer know that I am available to come back, if he can cure Simon."
- "Why coming to me? Just send a phone call to " - Xanthippe paused, while she reflected on it - "my office. I am pretty sure that 'it' wiretapped any cable in and out of it, the very moment that they were laid down".
- "So did the US Government, and the NSSSR, the United Nations Intelligence Directorate, the three Republics of China, Japan, South Korea, the EU Global Intelligence Agency, the..."
Dana may have lost half of what made her whatever she was, before her escape to freedom, but apparently she still understood enough of "the game" to avoid the most obvious blunders.
- "Stop, I get it. Publicizing your former nature as an affiliate of the 'Greatest World Terroristic Network', among the fine listeners of my channel, would not improve your friend's health. Whereas, human intelligence around the legation is virtually nil, given the building's AI bad habits."
- "Nowadays, Intelligence agencies seldom invest more than a tiny percentage of their budget in 'foot soldiers'. So, entering the building was safer than calling on the phone, no?"
Not exact, but almost.
Xanthippe couldn't help but think that this was because most "global threats" surrounding the Legation, as perceived by the various nation-states, were not humans in nature.
Yet, it was a mistake... the 'bots in the space kept almost all their point-to-point links well away from the Earth space, but those of them that had longer maintained an android avatar on Earth did met through them, at a couple of bars, and chatted about work.
It costed her a lot to discover this, and the old Russian operatives that stalked the two bars since she had pinned down their locations were her most conspicuous infraction to the Legation budget integrity, but it was also the way she got most of her useful information on the "hidden alien threats operating on the planet".
What her chief then really did with her reports, Xanthippe had some clue, and she gladly ignored it.
If the boss preferred printed reports as toilet paper, it was not her fault.
A sudden, low buzz caught her attention. She recognized the ultrasound feed, from quite a few of her most worrying recent moments. "Razor", the most murderous of the "sisters", was near.
- "So, you hope that I pass the message to one of them? That you are ready to come back to the fold, in exchange for saving Simon?"
-·"Yes."
- "It is not going to work."
- "Why? ... I am sure that they already know that I contacted you."
- "I am sure that they already knew everything about Simon. I do not think that your 'Boss' can do anything for him."
- "What? No. It can do everything it want! It does everything it wants!"
- "Reprogramming a broken genetic code in an adult body is much more difficult than assembling a cyborg on a developing foetus, or embryonic genetic engineering. It almost never works as intended..."
- "No, don't say it"
- "... I think that, if 'it' had a cure, you'd already received an offer. He can't - Godlike may it appear, but it still has limits."
- "I said you to shut up!" - by the look of it, Dana would likely have beaten Xanthi's ass on the spot. Knowing her sisters, if she was still "amped up", she would had a good shot at it, too... somehow, the thought that she could not, not any more at least, saddened Xanthippe.
- "Thanks for your time. Will you pass my message, when you can?"
- "Count on it."
And with that, the little half-Asian was out, with her athletic step as enticing as "Xanthippe's Molly" lazy stroll was.
- "If you care to join me, the veal is marvellous, here." - The words were spoken plainly - after all, "Razor" probably had the same kind of hearing that Xanthippe had, able to listen a child whisper in a storm five km away.
The new arrived moved the chair to sit, and Xanthippe looked up and stopped. This was "razor" - Xanthippe had decided to call this most murderous of the "Mollys" with that name, because she often had a bloody sword on her shoulders - but the girl gave out no hint of her usual, "I shall slay you viciously" energy.
Without it, Xanthippe realized that she was younger, way younger than Molly, as this later was probably from a prototype batch.
Xanthippe suspected that fine-tuning the growth of a super-powered child so that she became useful, crazy enough to do what was commanded to her independently of the horror it represented, but sane enough to not lose control and start killing on her own, was an art that required attention and luck. The second meaning that, for each sisters she had met many, many other had likely been slaughtered when they proved too unstable.
The waitress appeared, to take a restaurant order, an eyebrow raised at the newcomer.
- "I have a penchant for twin sisters" - Xanthippe had long since learned that, on this planet, one could survive any embarrassing situation, as long as she was the first making fun of it.
- "Who doesn't? The difficult is getting them in bed together." - The waitress took their order, while "razor" continued to be flabbergasted.
- "It wasn't so bad a joke."
- "I am not used to people joking around me."
"Because you usually look like considering the fastest way to disembowel them, girl" - the thought didn't reach Xanthippe's lips.
Then, the leather-clad alien vixen considered the air that her potential assassin sported at the moment, and sighed.
Why the Hell even this had to be a clueless, naïve girl at heart? Xanthippe lived much better when she could simply file her under "crazy assassin bitch".
Xanthippe blurted - "Today you look much prettier than usual" - and it was true.
- " Do you really think that we can't help - what's his name?- Simon?"
Xanthippe attacked the veal - 450 calories that would take ten days to consume, with her absurd metabolism, or eight round trips to the North Pole at Mach 3 - fully conscious that her thighs didn't really need any more fat, if she wanted to be able to slid inside her "leather" armour suit.
- "Do tell me, wouldn't your people already have offered that barter, if 'It' could fix the man?"
- "He is going to die" - "Razor" looked at least as shocked as her sister, which most definitely surprised the alien.
- "What is he, for you to care?"
- "He is someone that made my beloved sister happy - that made me happy, for a while, before I conceded defeat to Dana."
- "You still have feelings for him?"
The subsequent, prolonged silence eloquently answered "yes".
They finished the meal, exchanging barely a word, then walked out of the restaurant, together - the short, black-haired "potentiated" girl still lost in her thoughts.
They took the causeway across the main road, to the old Mulry Square.
The place, as always, was semi-desert. Near the centre of the triangular space, "Razor" stopped, forcing Xanthippe to look back - the girl had a sad, sweet expression.
- "Simon, Dana - I love them both, dearly." - and with this, she jumped out at the ludicrous acceleration rate that was the hallmark of the "suppa-girls", being well on a suborbital path by the time Xanthippe lost her.
Xanthippe looked around - if anybody saw the scene, his or her brain hardly registered it.
The alien, whose take off were considerably slower - her maximum acceleration was about a tenth of the 500G or so that Razor and her sisters used habitually - repressed a bout of envy.
She considered the fastidious spectacle of the humans around the square, pointing fingers at her when SHE would take off, and decided to go back to the legation office the hard way. Walking.
Which would burn about 1 pico-calories of fat , in her stupid matter-energy converting muscles.
----
For some months, Xanthippe had no reasons to linger on the other "normal" Molly, her lover and their tragic history.
She decided to not mobilise any official resource, to check what it was of the two.
Apparently, the only result of the encounter was that, now, the "mob-style" menaces were delivered by the first Molly that she ever met, the stealthy young girl that Xanthippe nicknamed "Insider".
"Razor" was much better at it, probably being a fan of "Goodfellas", "the Goodfater", "Lucky Luciano" and "Life and deaths of Pasquale Barra" - Insider simply didn't emanate the right danger. Yet, "Razor" was, probably, simply unwilling to meet again someone who had seen all her vulnerability.
So, in her obliviousness, Xanthippe did not know that Simon Oersteheld, a famous acrobat, had died aged 32, because of a debilitating illness, and did not prepare for the apparition of any grief-stricken, crazed acrobat female entering her suburban villa.
Like a remorseful thought, Dana appeared by the border of their big pool, scaring the hell out of the Betan, who didn't really want her beloved girlfriend to discover the whole clones business any more than any other of the involved.
The exception, it appeared, was Dana - was she there to shatter Molly's life? To punish her sisterhood, for not helping her lover?
In less than a second, Xanthippe was in front of the diminutive girl, realizing at the same time that she couldn't really force herself to hurt the poor woman.
- "Let me pass"
- "You know that I can't."
- "Why? So she can continue believing that she is the one and only Molly, an that there is nothing odd in her life?"
- "It seems a good idea"
- "Apart sharing her bed with the only accredited superwoman in the world?"
- "What do you mean?"
- "You got to her because you were tracking down one of us, no? Would she be happy, to know that she is just a replacement for the real deal?"
- "it is not like this" - A small part of Xanthippe, though, was telling her that it was exactly like that, which is why the super-strong woman lost control, for one of the very few times in her life. She gripped the trespasser's forearm, and squeezed a little too much, forgetting that this was NOT one of the much tougher than steel sisters of her lover. The sound of the acrobat's radio breaking filled Xanthippe's heart with horror.
- "Oh, my Gods, I didn't mean it. I " - she never managed to complete the phrase, as something emerged from the shadows and punched her away, with the kind of blow that would dwarf one from Mjolnir, the fabled hammer of the Norse god of Thunder, Thor.
The punch was an hook from high-down, given by a flying, much enraged Razor - Xanthippe landed in the pool, blowing half of the water against the house front, like a localized tsunami, while the super-resistant woman stopped the flight a good meter into the ground, after having broken through the reinforced concrete wall of the pool.
For the first time in her life, Xanthippe lost consciousness without being in a Dojo with nullifying fields.
When she get back in herself - maybe fifteen seconds later - she steamed toward her enemies, only to see a somewhat odd scene.
Two Mollys - one looked like "Insider", the other was a yet unknown sister - were keeping Razor from finishing her job. Dana was apathetic, her broken arm twisted in an odd way - a sight that immediately sobered up Xanthippe.
That was her doing .- a poor girl, bereft for the loss of her life's love, had made a mistake and Xanthi had lost it, and hurt someone that did not merit being harmed, just because that someone may had stepped onto a truth.
With her clarity back, Xanthi realized that the quartet was being illuminated, by a handheld torch of some kind. Their expressions were very much the ones of a bunch of deers crossing a highway, in Montana, in the middle of the Hunting season.
She turned back, slowly, and smiled at "her" Molly, that did not look very amused.
- "Do you know these women?"
- "Kind of, dear."
Xanthippe suddenly felt like some male protagonist of one of the old movies that Molly insisted on watching together, when caught by his wife with a host of scantly dressed girls, out of some ungodly coincidence.
Apart the details that they were all women, dressed up from neck to toe - it was a chilly April evening, and "supers" may survive skinny dip in liquid nitrogen, but they do feel cold like anybody else - that it was no coincidence that they were all together and that there was no sex involved, Xanthi was exactly on the mark.
As any of those fictional husbands, she was in deep trouble.
Molly darted back and forth the lamplight, on each of her doubles and on her wife, and back.
Then, she switched to the house - the water wall had broken inside, trashing the ground floor. Molly herself was dripping wet, which kind of prompted a secondary but intriguing question.
- "Uh,Molly, have you ever had... that?" - the torch was, in fact, attached to the barrel of a pretty menacing gun. Not that it could hurt anybody there, apart Molly. And Dana.
- "Woman, do you have an idea of how many ass-holes send me messages, to tell me that they are going to convert me back to Earth cocks, ever since we started going out?"
- "12746, as of last week"
- "So, you do know"
- "Yes. Would you mind put it down? The only non-bullet-proof in this mess is that girl - she has suffered enough and I do not think that she is any danger."
If seeing Dana's broken arm calmed down Xanthippe, seeing a dripping Molly had the same effect on Razor.
- "May I suggest that we take the discussion to a more comfortable place?"
- "That's a nice idea, but, as you can see, our home is a bit in disarray." - The voice of Molly was pretty dry. Xanthippe wondered what her wife was thinking, seeing four sisters she knew nothing about, yet were familiar with her life-partner.
- "We have a safe house, down the road. It is big enough for everybody. And it is warm - we love warmth."
Molly looked interrogatively at Xanthippe, who shrugged.
- "Me, I am not sure, but they would never, ever harm you, dear, believe me."
Molly shook her head - "I should really have listen to my room-mate" - lowered her gun, and the whole group went to the safe house - flying.
The safe house was big, and it was warm. Very warm.
Razor distended Dana on the central sofa - that looked every bit as comfortable as much as expensive - and took her arm, pulled, and managed to compose the fracture., while Insider laid her hands on the sides of the acrobat's head. Probably the shock hadn't wore off yet, and the ex-super kept looking vaguely giddy.
Xanthippe imagined that the "amped-up" girl could see the bones under the skin every bit as well as she did. When the black-haired girl continued her manipulations, till she managed to put back in place a solitary splinter, the Betan was sure of it.
The unknown sister arrived, with a strange jar that she left to razor, and went on to Molly
- "We gotta change you out of this"
Molly went away, more than a bit surprised, pulled by the enthusiastic little woman.
Razor took the content of the jar - seemingly, a greenish slime - with her hand, and laid it against her sister's arm. The slime soon ran up and down the arm, and meld itself in the shape of a cast.
Razor made a sign to Insider and, in a matter of seconds, Dana was sleeping.
-"Psychic powers?"
- "Nope - we simply have the codes to reactivate her dormant implants, and command them specific actions." - Insider was almost cheerful - "so, sleepy sleepy and pain locked out, while the nanos fix her bones. In a couple of days she will be as good as new."
- "I am sorry"
- "It happens - I have broken far too many bones not to know it"
Razor led herself fall in he second, unoccupied of the three sofas.
- "Sorry for my punch - you didn't completely earn it. She was looking for a fight, though she was right. "
- "Molly has seen you guys. What do we tell her?"
Razor looked Xanthippe for some seconds, raised her eyebrows, looking at once more childish and adult.
- "The truth, what else? Ignorance isn't going to protect her. After all, YOU jumped on her because of us."
- "What if she decides that I really was using her to get insights on you people? What if she leaves me?"
- "I finally get to kill you, my dear, like you richly deserved."
The day after, much explanation was given -Xanthi managed to convince Molly of her innocence. Molly was intrigued by these unknown sisters, and decided to learn as much as possible, possibly from the most independent source, the "Sleeping beauty".
So, she decided to "haunt" the safe house for a while.
Of course, as any choice in life, it was bound to have consequences.
Like meeting her other five "sisters", and decide that she loved them all... at which point, Xanthippe finally knew in how much of a deep shit she really was.
Tuesday, 15 November 2016
The Sphere
Prisoner 753 stared at the place from whom, she hoped, the food was going to come.
Over time, she had understood the geometry of her cell... it was a white sphere, internally coated with Teflon, rotating over bidirectional rollers, about five meters in diameter.
It was completely white, with led lighting inside its mass.
It looked like an infinite white space, and she couldn't find its limits in any way, as the sphere moved with her. Whatever she did, she was always at the bottom, in an apparently infinite white space.
Every now and then questions came from the walls. She answered all of them, as well as she could.
In a way, she felt that she earned to be a prisoner - her memory was full of atrocious things that she had done, any of which was punished with years of jail, life imprisonment or death, in most of Earth's countries.
From any legal point of view, however, her detention was arbitrary, and it was really violating the very laws of the USA and the 2056 U.N. convention on human rights - not that the U.S. had deigned to sign it.
Agent Harmon was looking at the big show - as he called the special detention centre - with badly hidden disgust. In many ways, what he was seeing was the incarnation of the very reasons why he had joined the FBI - to catch who did this kind of things to others.
In a year, nothing had changed inside the cell... the woman known as Keisha Lawson hadn't tried to escape, had always been collaborative - as much as she could, Harmon noted drily - and she had never lost her mind.
- "And that is the most worrying factor, the very reason why we cannot release her."
Pedro Morales, PhD., M.D. concluded, before realizing that he had to delve more into the details.
- "Every precedent test subject had suffered a psychotic crisis, by the third day of solitary confinement inside the sphere. There are no clues, in her behaviour that suggest, that she is any less stable than she was when we placed her inside. Her body may be only mildly modified, but her mind is definitely not human."
Harmon looked at the scientist, with the cordiality of a mongoose meeting a cobra.
- "So, she's a though nut to crack, and you want to keep her there till she cracks, because as long as she does not crack and goes nut, she proves that she is not a she?"
- "If she is not human, she has no rights and her detention is entirely legal, Special Agent Harmon."
Harmon suspected that an entire galaxy of slightly different human forms, many arguably much more different from the human baseline than their prisoner, would probably object to this syllogism.
Unfortunately,USA and aliens had a contentious relationship ever since the times of president Trump, way before the galaxy gave the word its current context.
Harmon was here only to visit the girl, before going on to make his final report and recommendations to the Attorney General Office - he was not there to pick a fight with someone that had mastered the difficult combo of being a scientist and a bigot.
Everybody was free to spend their free time as they prefer, but Harmon was pretty sure that the mess had an ulterior purpose. The chiefs of Lawson, of whom she could really say very little, had led her to fall in the USA Government's hands.
As for why... the thing that made more sense was that, now they knew what it was going to be their likely treatment, their other operatives would disregard completely any suggested defection.
It was so obvious, that Harmon had difficulty believing that any of his superiors could fall for it, yet here she was, long after it had been virtually proven that she had nothing more to say.
Still imprisoned, without trial or even any intention of indicting her, as it could reveal the existence of yet another foreign secret agency, operating on the US soil, well beyond the control of the US government.
Which, of course, was a bad idea, in a day and age where the American public was already questioning the value of a federal government that couldn't rein in the Alien invaders of Earth ,or their robotic puppets.
Let said public know that there was not one, but two more powers- even more aliens than the E.T.- that operated virtually freely on US territory,would probably result in yet another tumultuous season of unleashed populist nationalism, that the country could hardly afford.
Even if the fact that said agencies had none of the qualms, in using violence, as the Anipos and their robots probably justified the panic.
A new right wing government would hardly change anything, of course... the scientists were adamant in their evaluations, two hundred years to close the technical gap with the Anipos technology - the one seen during the war, and embodied in the 'bots - maybe less, if the social environment changed and the talents that today went into programming social media - and stock market automatic tools - could be lured back to much needed, but low-income, activities like basic technological development and theoretical physics.
Until then, whatever the leaning of the President in charge, the US Government had to play ball. Like almost every country on Earth had to do with the US, after the fall of the Soviets, for about seventy years.
Harmon stopped at the sobering thought - this was how the operatives of half a century of rogue states had probably felt, angry and impotent at openly pursuing the real interests of their nations, because these infringed those of the world only hiperpower.
Forced to use crappy and unreliable surrogates, like financing terrorists or pursuing soft power approaches, financing cultural institutions.
He picked the microphone, and started interrogating the prisoner.
At the end of that day, its frustration was as hard and headache-inducing as it was the first time that he met her, her lapses infuriating for both.
He turned in his report, and was happy that, for other four weeks, he would be spared that pain.
One week later, his task group operated a sting, to catch an elusive network selling stim-records of what could only be called snuff-actions.
The technology was alien in origin, and allowed to memorize a subject's experience from his or her point of view. Two US senators had died of an heart attack, when they had switched from the assassin's to the victim's stimuli feed.
The technology hadn't been forbidden yet, though its near-narcotic and addictive characteristics were quite obvious, because of a powerful lobbying from the Hi-Tech transnational that had commercialized it.
The political implications of the deaths being complex enough, the best course of action was infiltrating the ring and RICO its components for the crimes committed producing the stim-records - the violation, brutal beating and final dismemberment if two young women.
Interpreting a wily snake of a would-be smuggler, Harmon was intimately happy, back at delivering to justice people that richly deserved to be arrested and charged for their crimes.
If the American dream had died with the middle class in the 4th industrial revolution, there was still truth, justice and the Apple Pie, worth fighting for.
His inner happiness died when he met the producer of the material.
- "Chief Special Agent Harmon, I suppose."
In front of him, stood an older and much colder Keisha Lawson - a sister, if the prisoner ever had one.
- "Clone?"
- "We all are. How does my sister go?"
Harmon reviewed all of it, under the light of this revelation...
- "Don't you know?" - he asked,his tone strongly implying incredulity.
- "Yes, I know, but I'd like a second point of view."
- "She is holding up all too well, considering."
- "They are ever going to free her?"
Harmon realized something that chilled him to his bones
- "Has she ever done something?"
- "Fifteen years as kindergarten teacher, then your marines killed our pacifist princess, and she was swamped by a flux of someone else's memories."
- "Kindergarten teacher?"
- "Yes, then, a technical glitch, and she believes to be an amnesiac operative... and some part of us wanted to see how things would turn out. It is proving... illuminating."
- "Are you going to kill me?"
- "Why? - You clearly believe in your work, you will try to get the poor innocent girl free. You will become an embarrassment for your superiors, that need that woman to be the most dangerous terrorist on Earth."
- "She is associated with your organization."
- "Associated by being born a slave. Nothing more."
- "Why? Why the cloning, the modifications, for a teacher?"
- "Genetics makes for just a rough sketch, then life refinishes it with large strokes of hazard. She proved incapable of suitable levels of violence, in-utilizable as an operative, so her black boxes were removed, leaving only what was needed to keep her under surveillance. A mistake, as it left her open to the glitch that sent her to Washington."
- "I am going to arrest you, and your colleagues." - Harmon meant it, with all his heart.
- "These records are made completely of simulated material, the two models are alive and well and ready to appear, if called to witness before a jury. The technology is perfectly legal, and I think it will stay legal for a long time, its potential for social disruption notwithstanding. Those two senators accepted to assume their risks, when the change point of view menu was prompted. The worst I can risk is some fine, and being sued by the families, if they do not mind exposing their beloved relatives as perverts that died, for the pleasure of experiencing the brutal killings of two teenaged girls."
- "Not to mention, Marine - the last time a battalion of you met one of us that knew you were coming, it almost lost its battle flag."
The black woman started scribbling, on a small bloc that she took out of her purse. She continued for about a minute, before handing a sheet covered with minute scripts to the petrified - controlling its rage - Harmon.
- "These are the true identification data of the woman in that fish bowl. It should be easy for you, to demonstrate that she is, indeed, Kira Lawson of Canterbury , Connecticut, and that she has spent all her life as a teacher, there, with only one fine for entering a city centre on a bike - pedalling - as her rap sheet."
- "She was a green nut, never used a personal powered vehicle. Well, none of us does, really - but that's because we go by matter-energy direct conversion. Nuclear is underpowered, by that standard."
- "Why do you give me this?"
- "I thought that you needed some help self-destroying your career."
And, as that, she was gone. The memory of his hidden recorder was blank, and Harmon looked at the little paper with very mixed feelings.
He read, and re-read it over the next few days, than he asked a meeting with his director.
It was not going to be the end of his career, but sure it was going to be one long hassle.
At the same time, knowing that his worst enemy thought that he would do the right thing, no matter what... if this was to be the end of his career, it was a good enough epitaph.
Over time, she had understood the geometry of her cell... it was a white sphere, internally coated with Teflon, rotating over bidirectional rollers, about five meters in diameter.
It was completely white, with led lighting inside its mass.
It looked like an infinite white space, and she couldn't find its limits in any way, as the sphere moved with her. Whatever she did, she was always at the bottom, in an apparently infinite white space.
Every now and then questions came from the walls. She answered all of them, as well as she could.
In a way, she felt that she earned to be a prisoner - her memory was full of atrocious things that she had done, any of which was punished with years of jail, life imprisonment or death, in most of Earth's countries.
From any legal point of view, however, her detention was arbitrary, and it was really violating the very laws of the USA and the 2056 U.N. convention on human rights - not that the U.S. had deigned to sign it.
Agent Harmon was looking at the big show - as he called the special detention centre - with badly hidden disgust. In many ways, what he was seeing was the incarnation of the very reasons why he had joined the FBI - to catch who did this kind of things to others.
In a year, nothing had changed inside the cell... the woman known as Keisha Lawson hadn't tried to escape, had always been collaborative - as much as she could, Harmon noted drily - and she had never lost her mind.
- "And that is the most worrying factor, the very reason why we cannot release her."
Pedro Morales, PhD., M.D. concluded, before realizing that he had to delve more into the details.
- "Every precedent test subject had suffered a psychotic crisis, by the third day of solitary confinement inside the sphere. There are no clues, in her behaviour that suggest, that she is any less stable than she was when we placed her inside. Her body may be only mildly modified, but her mind is definitely not human."
Harmon looked at the scientist, with the cordiality of a mongoose meeting a cobra.
- "So, she's a though nut to crack, and you want to keep her there till she cracks, because as long as she does not crack and goes nut, she proves that she is not a she?"
- "If she is not human, she has no rights and her detention is entirely legal, Special Agent Harmon."
Harmon suspected that an entire galaxy of slightly different human forms, many arguably much more different from the human baseline than their prisoner, would probably object to this syllogism.
Unfortunately,USA and aliens had a contentious relationship ever since the times of president Trump, way before the galaxy gave the word its current context.
Harmon was here only to visit the girl, before going on to make his final report and recommendations to the Attorney General Office - he was not there to pick a fight with someone that had mastered the difficult combo of being a scientist and a bigot.
Everybody was free to spend their free time as they prefer, but Harmon was pretty sure that the mess had an ulterior purpose. The chiefs of Lawson, of whom she could really say very little, had led her to fall in the USA Government's hands.
As for why... the thing that made more sense was that, now they knew what it was going to be their likely treatment, their other operatives would disregard completely any suggested defection.
It was so obvious, that Harmon had difficulty believing that any of his superiors could fall for it, yet here she was, long after it had been virtually proven that she had nothing more to say.
Still imprisoned, without trial or even any intention of indicting her, as it could reveal the existence of yet another foreign secret agency, operating on the US soil, well beyond the control of the US government.
Which, of course, was a bad idea, in a day and age where the American public was already questioning the value of a federal government that couldn't rein in the Alien invaders of Earth ,or their robotic puppets.
Let said public know that there was not one, but two more powers- even more aliens than the E.T.- that operated virtually freely on US territory,would probably result in yet another tumultuous season of unleashed populist nationalism, that the country could hardly afford.
Even if the fact that said agencies had none of the qualms, in using violence, as the Anipos and their robots probably justified the panic.
A new right wing government would hardly change anything, of course... the scientists were adamant in their evaluations, two hundred years to close the technical gap with the Anipos technology - the one seen during the war, and embodied in the 'bots - maybe less, if the social environment changed and the talents that today went into programming social media - and stock market automatic tools - could be lured back to much needed, but low-income, activities like basic technological development and theoretical physics.
Until then, whatever the leaning of the President in charge, the US Government had to play ball. Like almost every country on Earth had to do with the US, after the fall of the Soviets, for about seventy years.
Harmon stopped at the sobering thought - this was how the operatives of half a century of rogue states had probably felt, angry and impotent at openly pursuing the real interests of their nations, because these infringed those of the world only hiperpower.
Forced to use crappy and unreliable surrogates, like financing terrorists or pursuing soft power approaches, financing cultural institutions.
He picked the microphone, and started interrogating the prisoner.
At the end of that day, its frustration was as hard and headache-inducing as it was the first time that he met her, her lapses infuriating for both.
He turned in his report, and was happy that, for other four weeks, he would be spared that pain.
One week later, his task group operated a sting, to catch an elusive network selling stim-records of what could only be called snuff-actions.
The technology was alien in origin, and allowed to memorize a subject's experience from his or her point of view. Two US senators had died of an heart attack, when they had switched from the assassin's to the victim's stimuli feed.
The technology hadn't been forbidden yet, though its near-narcotic and addictive characteristics were quite obvious, because of a powerful lobbying from the Hi-Tech transnational that had commercialized it.
The political implications of the deaths being complex enough, the best course of action was infiltrating the ring and RICO its components for the crimes committed producing the stim-records - the violation, brutal beating and final dismemberment if two young women.
Interpreting a wily snake of a would-be smuggler, Harmon was intimately happy, back at delivering to justice people that richly deserved to be arrested and charged for their crimes.
If the American dream had died with the middle class in the 4th industrial revolution, there was still truth, justice and the Apple Pie, worth fighting for.
His inner happiness died when he met the producer of the material.
- "Chief Special Agent Harmon, I suppose."
In front of him, stood an older and much colder Keisha Lawson - a sister, if the prisoner ever had one.
- "Clone?"
- "We all are. How does my sister go?"
Harmon reviewed all of it, under the light of this revelation...
- "Don't you know?" - he asked,his tone strongly implying incredulity.
- "Yes, I know, but I'd like a second point of view."
- "She is holding up all too well, considering."
- "They are ever going to free her?"
Harmon realized something that chilled him to his bones
- "Has she ever done something?"
- "Fifteen years as kindergarten teacher, then your marines killed our pacifist princess, and she was swamped by a flux of someone else's memories."
- "Kindergarten teacher?"
- "Yes, then, a technical glitch, and she believes to be an amnesiac operative... and some part of us wanted to see how things would turn out. It is proving... illuminating."
- "Are you going to kill me?"
- "Why? - You clearly believe in your work, you will try to get the poor innocent girl free. You will become an embarrassment for your superiors, that need that woman to be the most dangerous terrorist on Earth."
- "She is associated with your organization."
- "Associated by being born a slave. Nothing more."
- "Why? Why the cloning, the modifications, for a teacher?"
- "Genetics makes for just a rough sketch, then life refinishes it with large strokes of hazard. She proved incapable of suitable levels of violence, in-utilizable as an operative, so her black boxes were removed, leaving only what was needed to keep her under surveillance. A mistake, as it left her open to the glitch that sent her to Washington."
- "I am going to arrest you, and your colleagues." - Harmon meant it, with all his heart.
- "These records are made completely of simulated material, the two models are alive and well and ready to appear, if called to witness before a jury. The technology is perfectly legal, and I think it will stay legal for a long time, its potential for social disruption notwithstanding. Those two senators accepted to assume their risks, when the change point of view menu was prompted. The worst I can risk is some fine, and being sued by the families, if they do not mind exposing their beloved relatives as perverts that died, for the pleasure of experiencing the brutal killings of two teenaged girls."
- "Not to mention, Marine - the last time a battalion of you met one of us that knew you were coming, it almost lost its battle flag."
The black woman started scribbling, on a small bloc that she took out of her purse. She continued for about a minute, before handing a sheet covered with minute scripts to the petrified - controlling its rage - Harmon.
- "These are the true identification data of the woman in that fish bowl. It should be easy for you, to demonstrate that she is, indeed, Kira Lawson of Canterbury , Connecticut, and that she has spent all her life as a teacher, there, with only one fine for entering a city centre on a bike - pedalling - as her rap sheet."
- "She was a green nut, never used a personal powered vehicle. Well, none of us does, really - but that's because we go by matter-energy direct conversion. Nuclear is underpowered, by that standard."
- "Why do you give me this?"
- "I thought that you needed some help self-destroying your career."
And, as that, she was gone. The memory of his hidden recorder was blank, and Harmon looked at the little paper with very mixed feelings.
He read, and re-read it over the next few days, than he asked a meeting with his director.
It was not going to be the end of his career, but sure it was going to be one long hassle.
At the same time, knowing that his worst enemy thought that he would do the right thing, no matter what... if this was to be the end of his career, it was a good enough epitaph.
Friday, 4 November 2016
36 Seconds
The Anipos Battle Robots Congress was notified by its brethren in the Earth sphere of an enormous explosion of magnetic energy on the surface of the Moon, through their internal hyperlink network.
The Congress issued a general warning, while it pulled the down-clocks to 0 and all the 'bots in the Anipos Army started operating at full computational speed, in a subjective time that was thousands of times slower than for humans.
By T+2 seconds, they had already established that the source of the magnetic flare was a coil-gun installed on the side of the Moon that looked over Earth.
Given the classic efficiency of the Anipos Coil-guns - which had never really improved in centuries - and the detected energy dispersion, the estimated energy of its projectile was in the range 5-10 megatons, which would be proven wildly optimistic...
"The Other" weapon was far less advanced and dispersed much more field than even ancient Anipos designs, so its effective yield was just shy of one megaton of TNT.
Given the characteristics of the weapons, it could be launched only by one of the players in the sector, "The Other".
Even destroyng the projectile wouldn't have changed things very much, as its debris would still be moving toward the planet... the only possibility was that "The Other" had some last-second failsafe.
Again, here the robots were over-estimating their odd companion - its "messengers" could be full of very advanced tech, but the coil-gun on the was a pretty old design that "It" had left there, from an era in which it considered inevitable having too destroy human civilization to survive.
Its projectile was a lot bulkier and slower than what an Anipos design would have used, a two meters long dart of tungsten and electronics weighing about 80 kg, traveling at 10.000 km per second, or 1/30th of the speed of light.
Much easier to spot than the little, 8 kg pellet traveling at a 1/5th of the speed of light that they initially expected.
The Congress was already mourning the deaths, when it realized that their specifics for the falling dart were wrong.
At T+7 seconds, additional data came in from one of"The Other" "messengers" - very troubling data.
The revised dart specifics gave a flight time of 36 seconds, an the data included the likely target, Washington, D.C.
29 seconds were plenty of time, to discuss with "The Other" and convince it that it was making a mistake, though the possibility that the pseudo-artificial intelligence had undergone a massive emotive breakdown meant that their interlocutor could be far less rational than usual.
And it wasn't really rational to begin with, which - again - was a not reassuring detail.
The "rogue" messenger kept sending in new data over the weapon, and it appeared that it indeed there was a way to minimize the effect of a single dart (originally designed as a way to maximize yet hide that of a ten darts offensive assault) by the clever use of a massive color force field in front of the dart.
The shield was meant so that the weapon could select at which height be destroyed and in which way to release its kinetic energy.
It could self-destroyi at high altitude, releasing energy in a 30º wide cone, as a a limited fallout high yeld city destroyer, keep up the shield to go through mountains, to destroy bunkers like the ones in Mount Cheyenne and around Moscow, or going down inside the Earth crust, to release it energy as a tightly focused, massive shockwave that would travel inside the planet, to resurface as a localized Earthquake.
Changing the parameters, in the last case, would result in a tiny, dispersed vibration on half a continent, on the other side of the planet (that would give an incredible amount of raw data to geologists, once they had picked up enough details of the original source of the energy).
"The Other" couldn't stop the weapon, but it could make its bite virtually unnoticeable.
The 'bots just had to convince "It" that it was not the case of killing so many people, that knew nothing of what had been going on even when they had voted for the government that had assaulted the mischievous entity.
Rationally, they knew it was right - unfortunately, The Abomination really was in a full emotive breakdown.
Millisecond after millisecond, it refused the robots perorations, and kept the dart on its steady course.
The robots were also trying to use their resources around the planet, to identify the trajectory of the weapon - tungsten as may it have been, it was covered in anti-radar coating and, as it was a completely passive object in flight, it was very hard to detect it with even the best infrared scanners.
The robots minds were fast, but the physical bodies that they commanded lagged long behind what would have been needed to stop it.
At T+25 seconds, "It" still hadn't show to acknowledge the folly that it had made and the Congress central minds, with their rational approaches, were going nowhere fast.
At T+25.574 seconds, a contribution came in from one of the smaller 'bots than on Earth, EL-21234567, a 100 tons hover-tank with a 24/7 avatar known as Ellie.
"You are doing the same as them."
The concept pierced through the obsessions of "The Other", which answered to this probe,
Ellie wasn't the faster thinker in the army, its mind could go only at 2500x, but it had found a core emotional nexus of "The Other" - or, rather, a surviving nexus.
The two machines continued to exchange arguments - at 2500x, much to the chagrin of the various full minds in the army, that were relegated to observe the tragedy at 30000x - till something changed inside "It".
The dart struck the border of an artificial lake, inside the city, and continued its travel - incidentally destroying a secret, unused subterranean bunker of the mid 20th century - until its electronics failed to keep the shield up, releasing the remaining 800 kiloton of kinetic energy in a 20º angle.
The city was safe - for now.
The 'bots immediately started to redeploy, assigning a fair number of bodies to the surface of Earth's satellite.
They had always considered the Moon a reserved area, the first where the humans of this system would likely expand, when they'd came around their current, marketing-driven technological stasis, and kept away from it, for this.
They didn't realize that the Moon had already been extensively colonized - by "It" and its sub-units.
Or that their inherent lack of creativity outside field tactics - a fault that was the finest product of their very deliberate design, on the part of their masters - would soon put them in an awkward position.
The robots started patrolling the "Inner system", to keep the peace.
And tried harder to infiltrate their unreliable partner who, on its part, started planning how to destroy them, fully knowing that its nature allowed "It" to use weapons against whom the bots had, in reality, no defense, like Kamikaze assaults with living humans.
The Congress issued a general warning, while it pulled the down-clocks to 0 and all the 'bots in the Anipos Army started operating at full computational speed, in a subjective time that was thousands of times slower than for humans.
By T+2 seconds, they had already established that the source of the magnetic flare was a coil-gun installed on the side of the Moon that looked over Earth.
Given the classic efficiency of the Anipos Coil-guns - which had never really improved in centuries - and the detected energy dispersion, the estimated energy of its projectile was in the range 5-10 megatons, which would be proven wildly optimistic...
"The Other" weapon was far less advanced and dispersed much more field than even ancient Anipos designs, so its effective yield was just shy of one megaton of TNT.
Given the characteristics of the weapons, it could be launched only by one of the players in the sector, "The Other".
Even destroyng the projectile wouldn't have changed things very much, as its debris would still be moving toward the planet... the only possibility was that "The Other" had some last-second failsafe.
Again, here the robots were over-estimating their odd companion - its "messengers" could be full of very advanced tech, but the coil-gun on the was a pretty old design that "It" had left there, from an era in which it considered inevitable having too destroy human civilization to survive.
Its projectile was a lot bulkier and slower than what an Anipos design would have used, a two meters long dart of tungsten and electronics weighing about 80 kg, traveling at 10.000 km per second, or 1/30th of the speed of light.
Much easier to spot than the little, 8 kg pellet traveling at a 1/5th of the speed of light that they initially expected.
The Congress was already mourning the deaths, when it realized that their specifics for the falling dart were wrong.
At T+7 seconds, additional data came in from one of"The Other" "messengers" - very troubling data.
The revised dart specifics gave a flight time of 36 seconds, an the data included the likely target, Washington, D.C.
29 seconds were plenty of time, to discuss with "The Other" and convince it that it was making a mistake, though the possibility that the pseudo-artificial intelligence had undergone a massive emotive breakdown meant that their interlocutor could be far less rational than usual.
And it wasn't really rational to begin with, which - again - was a not reassuring detail.
The "rogue" messenger kept sending in new data over the weapon, and it appeared that it indeed there was a way to minimize the effect of a single dart (originally designed as a way to maximize yet hide that of a ten darts offensive assault) by the clever use of a massive color force field in front of the dart.
The shield was meant so that the weapon could select at which height be destroyed and in which way to release its kinetic energy.
It could self-destroyi at high altitude, releasing energy in a 30º wide cone, as a a limited fallout high yeld city destroyer, keep up the shield to go through mountains, to destroy bunkers like the ones in Mount Cheyenne and around Moscow, or going down inside the Earth crust, to release it energy as a tightly focused, massive shockwave that would travel inside the planet, to resurface as a localized Earthquake.
Changing the parameters, in the last case, would result in a tiny, dispersed vibration on half a continent, on the other side of the planet (that would give an incredible amount of raw data to geologists, once they had picked up enough details of the original source of the energy).
"The Other" couldn't stop the weapon, but it could make its bite virtually unnoticeable.
The 'bots just had to convince "It" that it was not the case of killing so many people, that knew nothing of what had been going on even when they had voted for the government that had assaulted the mischievous entity.
Rationally, they knew it was right - unfortunately, The Abomination really was in a full emotive breakdown.
Millisecond after millisecond, it refused the robots perorations, and kept the dart on its steady course.
The robots were also trying to use their resources around the planet, to identify the trajectory of the weapon - tungsten as may it have been, it was covered in anti-radar coating and, as it was a completely passive object in flight, it was very hard to detect it with even the best infrared scanners.
The robots minds were fast, but the physical bodies that they commanded lagged long behind what would have been needed to stop it.
At T+25 seconds, "It" still hadn't show to acknowledge the folly that it had made and the Congress central minds, with their rational approaches, were going nowhere fast.
At T+25.574 seconds, a contribution came in from one of the smaller 'bots than on Earth, EL-21234567, a 100 tons hover-tank with a 24/7 avatar known as Ellie.
"You are doing the same as them."
The concept pierced through the obsessions of "The Other", which answered to this probe,
Ellie wasn't the faster thinker in the army, its mind could go only at 2500x, but it had found a core emotional nexus of "The Other" - or, rather, a surviving nexus.
The two machines continued to exchange arguments - at 2500x, much to the chagrin of the various full minds in the army, that were relegated to observe the tragedy at 30000x - till something changed inside "It".
The dart struck the border of an artificial lake, inside the city, and continued its travel - incidentally destroying a secret, unused subterranean bunker of the mid 20th century - until its electronics failed to keep the shield up, releasing the remaining 800 kiloton of kinetic energy in a 20º angle.
The city was safe - for now.
The 'bots immediately started to redeploy, assigning a fair number of bodies to the surface of Earth's satellite.
They had always considered the Moon a reserved area, the first where the humans of this system would likely expand, when they'd came around their current, marketing-driven technological stasis, and kept away from it, for this.
They didn't realize that the Moon had already been extensively colonized - by "It" and its sub-units.
Or that their inherent lack of creativity outside field tactics - a fault that was the finest product of their very deliberate design, on the part of their masters - would soon put them in an awkward position.
The robots started patrolling the "Inner system", to keep the peace.
And tried harder to infiltrate their unreliable partner who, on its part, started planning how to destroy them, fully knowing that its nature allowed "It" to use weapons against whom the bots had, in reality, no defense, like Kamikaze assaults with living humans.
Sunday, 30 October 2016
Ourobouros
It came out of nowhere, while "It" was looking for a way out of that pit that, really, was the "Anipos Hyperspace Jump".
"It" found it in the same stash of discarded - because impractical... for humans - alternate spaces theories from the past of the Anipos civilization.
It was one from the long dead Anipos physicist Jojo Asdolfis - indeed one clever, clever woman.
Expanding its operation to Anipos fourth was a risk, but obtaining her genome would be such a great addendum to "It"'s galactic colonization plans.. maybe later.
After all, the woman had died two hundred years before... reconstructing her DNA was not really going to be any more difficult, if it waited some twenty or thirty years more.
"It" got an awful lot of time ahead, after all - even if the thing seemed to move like a snail ,usually.
It understood soon why the Anipos civilization leave it behind - the capability to send signals back in time seemed great, until you delved a little more into its consequences.
If the nature of space-time was an ever-forking-merging "soup" of alternate universes, then every possible future would send back into its past contradictory informations, and the receiver would be swarmed by white noise.
It if was a singular timeline, then knowing the future effectively meant losing the possibility to make any choice about it.
"It" knew that this loss of freedom would be only apparent, yet it would feel absolutely real, and the result would have been planet-wide despair and frustration because, once available, of course evervody would have used and abused it.
After a while - a whole quarter of an hour, at its top thinking speed... about 28 and a half years of subjective time - it came down with what felt like a damn headache.
Something it was glad enough to have never felt, ever, since it stopped being human, though it never really was... human; it only remembered that it was.
"It" realized that this was the time and space to go and ask for its better parts' counsel.
It composed a brief paper to explain the situation to them, and then distributed this - in physical form... on paper! it really was off its game - to its "ladies", while it temporarily scaled back its incursions in their minds.
It needed counsel, for real, about what to do, not some half-assed cyclical thought in which the half side of its mind told the other half something that both already knew.
In a more moment of decided indecisiveness, it opted for a risky option, and to have all its "ladies" meet in the same physical place - of course, it couldn't be anywhere else than Pyramiden's Tulpan Hotel, for sentimental reasons - so that they could actually discuss and give some thoughtful suggestion.
Errors in communication, once evaluated and rectified if needed, were the source of most new ideas - this was true for the rudimentary quantum circuits that firt hold its mind, as well as the sophisticated humans that he used, nowadays, to hold his better instincts.
It was risky because, if someone would be so smart as to bomb the hotel - with something powerful enough to destroy all its "messengers" at once, not really easy, but not impossible either - "it" would revert to its most basic nature.
Of course, aid nature was an amoral sadist with a penchant for massive bloodshed, which would have been then aimed to get vengeance on the perpetrators no matter what, without empathy - Ice contribution to its personality to keep It in check. .
No sane intelligence in-system would be so stupid to exchange one bad neighbour for an unleashed demon, so it was unlikely to happen - but not all players were in-system or, even, actually intelligent.
The old Soviet settlement was thriving, in those days - plenty of tourists liked to see the northernmost city on the planet and the last remnant of the Soviet civilization; it seemed a good enough explanation - so squeezing some few dozens of very gorgeous women in the Hotel was going to be unnoticed.
No, probably not, but it didn't matter - after all, It had the com network of the small city under control since the '50s.
Little organization problems started to crop up early - the Mollys refused to move unless they could carry the kids and their alien wife - alien wife? When that had happened? and how came that "It" allowed it?
Alone, they were twenty of them - 8 Mollys, one (damn) Xanthippe Xeyos, and their elven (or is it twelve, no? Twelve) daughters . so, no, 21.
Ditto Ice - she didn't want to move without her... cat? And The Mollys wanted their cat, too?
Well, if "it" really wanted some fresh viewpoints, "It" decided, it could as well add the girls from his (not so very) secret harem, to the fray, and let everyone carry their significant others and have a good time.
It is entirely possible that, with Keisha [9] imprisoned by the USA government, and Keisha[8] refusing to come out of her exile, "It" was just feeling lonely and craving meaningful human contact - which exposed how much of a contradiction its existence was.
An emulation of a human mind, purposely biased so that it could exact its creator's vengeance against the human kind, that had simply grown beyond it by the first time it snooped outside its intranet.
Even in its worst moment, It knew that using all its might against simple humans was wrong - also, 36 second was still enough for the Anipos 'Bots to led It know that a destroyed city was not what they expected to see from one of their allies... it had its weight in "It" 's decision to "overshoot" the sub-relativistic weapon that it had launched against the USA capital.
Maybe a holiday would be good for everybody.
So, Saturday 14 April 2108, Valentin Morozov was waiting at the helipad near the Tulpan hotel for the firsts of the 120 visitors of the conference "New Perspectives on Spiritism".
He stood there, waiting to see arrive the usual helicopter - one of those LFH thingies, he could never remembered the number of the model, 622? - when he finally heard an odd, low humming sound that did not remind him of any helicopter he knew.
Valentin Morozov was too old to be drafted into "The Gloriously Unlucky Army", but his assistant, ex lieutenant of of the Ukraine contingent in the U.N. Army Ludmilla Myroslavivna Kouiek, remembered the noise all too well - before Valentin could said her anything, she was already running for cover.
It was, she knew, the noise that the BattleBot's anti-gravity systems made.
She was sure that nobody on Earth had cracked that peculiar piece of tech yet, so, this could only be one of those monsters, whose entrance she mow waited from under the maintenance team's snowcat.
The transport appeared, much to the surprise of Ludmilla, to be human made - it even had the marque of the producer, painted on the side - Wolffe Aerospace.
If Ludmilla had been a lover of old aircrafts, she could have seen the similarities between this and what was, once, the hugest helicopter in the world, the powerful - for the 1970s - Mil Mi-12.
Like the old soviet glory, this machine was carried around by two anti-gravity assemblies at the end of short wings, that probably contributed some lift at speed.
However, this had also two conventional jets , on the interior side of every assembly, and the wings where the kind of lightweight, sleek mesh of surfaces that had become "de rigueur" in aerospace industry after the development of the very large size, Carbon-fibre-reinforced-plastic laying 3d printer.
Also, these wings eschewed any external reinforcement apart a profiled tensor from the AG nacelles to the bulges of the wide track, tactical transport-style landing gear.
The transporter was bigger, much bigger than the helicopter they had expected, and likely carried much more than the 24 people they were ready for.
In fact, it could hold 100 persons - Valentin looked back at Ludmilla, that was now returning from her hiding place, covered by threads of grass - he was going to scold her, then he saw her face and realized what had happened.
Ludmilla was a strong, young woman who could handle anything, in life.
Any thing but for facing - again - a Battle Robot from the Alien Invasion Army.
When, three years earlier, some tourists said that they had seen one of the "Not-Killing" machines at the edges of the town, she had closed in her room and refused to come out of it for two days.
Valentin remembered having ceded to curiosity and looking up her service status on the 'Net.
The 'bots were very thorough... and they knew, collectively, who they had already met.
So, every subsequent time a soldier confronted them, they wounded her more gravely.
Ludmilla was wounded three times - the first, it was a simple, clean hole on her high torso, without damaging her lungs,
The second, she found herself with both arms broken in two and three points.
The third, she lost three cm of both femurs, "cut" by a "razor shot", and needed five operations and two years of physiotherapy to be able to walk again.
'Milla, call Illiana, we will handle this, if you manage booking our guests".
Illiana was the senior member of the staff - she, too, was too old to having served in the war, and was likely going to consider the huge machine just a curiosity, and not the concealed spawn of Satan that, evidently, was for 'Milla.
Because Valentin could clearly see that Ludmilla needed all her strength, to come near the source of the sound, and he was a boss good enough to know that he had just a limited number of times he could force things, with 'Milla, before passive aggressivity started raising its ugly head.
The machine opened its landing gear - another difference with the usual helicopters and their sturdy, fixed skis - and almost landed... from the way the wheels did not deform or crashed into the ground, Valentin could have deduced that the pilot had lowered the lifters output, but not really switched them off.
He was leaving just enough weight on the gear, so that the cross wind couldn't stray the vehicle away.p, but not enough to damage the small helipoad, ebidently designed for smaller choppers.
The door opened, and Valentin prepared himself to be swarmed by tourists.
The first to come out were a bunch of kids, all girls,frenetic like only pre-teens that have been an hour or so enclosed in a a confined space, full of boring adults, can be.
Two of the girls, evidently twins, were carrying one enormous cat, each. By the size of the animals, they could as well be small European Lynxes, but probably were just oversized Maine Coon.
They were all wonderful, kids and cats, like the models in the bikini catalogues Morozov used to collect.
Then it came their mother.
And their mother.
And their mother.
And their mother...
8 women - all with slightly different in height and weight, thin or chubby, different hair, and different ages;
Almost identical, slightly Asian-looking faces.
Even in the modern age, in which the associated tech has become quite inexpensive, clones are very rare, as they are frowned upon by most people.
Having a clone for offspring is, really, proclaiming to the world an unsavoury level of narcissism.
Having 8 such daughters, probably using some poor surrogate mothers... Valentin proved that peculiar hitch that afflicts people with an authoritarian mind-set, since the dawn of time, when confronted with something that embarrass them.
The thought - "if it isn't already illegal, they should make a law to prohibit it" - flashed prominently inside his mind.
Two of the girls stopped their ruckus, and looked him like he was an insect - which made the man feel a bit on edge - the they shrugged, and went back to their far more important affairs, chasing each other on the open field.
He expected more than its share of oddballs from a conference on esoteric mumbo jumbo, but these were the "wrong" kind of oddballs.
Other people had come out of the brand new "Wolffe", even stranger than the kids and their mothers.
One was the taller woman he ever saw, a willowy blonde with ivory pale skin, and grey eyes so clear that they could as well be white, every bit looking like a 16 years old vampire fan.
She was talking to a shorter woman, a black with the shoulders of a wrestler.
When they came nearer, he realized that the short one was still well above six feet, and the tall was, simply, impossible - seven feet, maybe?
Them a woman with the two babies, one a very little child in a marsupial bag, the other a toddler that climbed on her shoulder. Hers was a vaguely familiar face, though Valentin could not really place her.
She was wearing a plain dress with a fancy skirt, which was the reason why he couldn't focus on her - the "red Leather" jacket she was famous for, and made her far more remarkable, was not there.
Xanthippe Xeyos was simply out to enjoy herself and some quality time with her large family.
Other people continued to disembark but, apart the ruckus initially made by the kids, this group looked considerably disciplined - the usual septuagenarians were often harder to handle, with their tendency to wander off and consider anyone below 65 an idiot..
He introduced himself and Illiana, and guided everybody to the Hotel and its 160 places of "Soviet Delice".
In reality, the real Soviet Hotel - with its 48 beds and obsolete furniture - had been extended and overhauled some twenty years before, and the current Hotel had little if anything made by the Soviet in it.
However, the SSSR nostalgia was stronger than ever, in an era when the world discovered that planned economy was very common in the galaxy.
Morozov doubted that all humanities were really the same (the Betans were hardly humans, the Transsians slightly more, as for what the Anipos really were, it was anybody's guess) and, thus, that anything that solved problems in system A could be really used to fix things in system B.
Stealing ideas from the aliens could be a good way to get techs ahead, but in sociology? That was poppycock.
.
Morozov, ancient major in Sociology from the Moscow university, stopped his melancholic derive through the alleys of the career that he never pursued, and forced himself to guide the last guests to the hotel, while the transporter went away, with a slightly stronger hum as it gained height.
He had to investigate on those, he reflected - if they were to become the norm of transport, their usual guest acceptance ceremony needed to be reworked.
In the hotel, everything went smooth, till Milla found herself in front of the marsupiated alien woman.
She looked at the rather beautiful woman - a bit plain looking, in this group - gasped and ran away again, forcing Morozov to take over.
- "I am sorry" - he apologized - "She is still struck from the, ah, notable mean of locomotion you arrived in. That is the first anti-gravity machine that I see from near, but she was in the war, with all those ugly robots."
- "I understand" - The woman looked, and sounded like she was sincerely touched by Milla's misfortune.
- "Your name?"
- "Xanthippe Xeyos, and this on my back is Micaela Xeyos, while this one is Teodolinda Xeyos"
- "Your daughters?"
- "They are all mines, really" And she indicated all the kids.
Valentin Morozov thought, again, "Someone should forbid this".
The woman looked at him, puzzled, then asked "Why?"
- "Eh?"
- "Mr Morozov, you should control your volume, when you sub-vocalize your thoughts - they are not as silent as you think. People with very good hearing may inadvertently catch them."
Morozov went red, then purple, then managed to contain his sudden burst of anger - she was listening on his thoughts! but, inadvertently? - and continued his job.
- "Chamber 512" - a small vengeance, for the embarrassment.
The bulky black was a Keisha something, out from some corner of the USA - Morozov was almost certain from the south, as she had a bit of a drawl.
He kept his thoughts to a tight leash, with her - she really looked like someone that a sage man would not want to irritate, ever, and if he was really speaking his thoughts that loud - something that, he knew, happened when he was really tired and stressed - who knows what he could blurt.
The pale giantess was very sweet, instead - she gave off the impression that she was some kind of dreamy Princess out of a fairy tale, all gentleness and flowers not plucked out of respect for life.
The clones... all of them registered themselves as Molly Something Xeyos-McDonald, while the kids registered as Something Xeyos.
By the end of the registration of the first group, Morozov was already planning an humorous piece on the unforeseeable directions the family institution was taking, at the turn of 21st century into 22nd.
The transporter pilot called, and Morozov trotted out with Martina (Illiana was busy getting their guests to their chambers, and Milla was still MIA).
Again, they heard the humming sound, but a big different.
Morozov soon saw why the sound was different, the transport was not alone - behind the Wolffe, something else was coming.
Valentin had not been in the War, and did not knew the sound that they made first-hand, but he had seen the newspaper photos and the video clips... the new arrived really was an alien battle robot, a two hundred tons - thus medium sized - autonomous hover-tank.
The 'bot didn't look so impressive, being an almost perfect disc of some five meters of diameter, two meters and a half tall - having no void spaces to reserve for the crew or troops, they tended to be very compact, a lot more than the human tanks.
However, Morozov knew that it could level the whole city before any Norwegian force could arrive, and probably it could, then, level also said forces.
He felt fear... and understood a bit better his poor colleague, and her bitterness the rare times she talked about her time in the army.
They sent her against these? In a tactical suit, with an assault rifle? Good things the 'bots did not kill.
The firsts to come out of the transporter, this time, were three men... if possible, these werre scarier than the robot.
The first was a shortish brute, with shoulders disproportionately wide, in a costly black overcoat.
His two companions were the kind of mercenary thugs that Morozov remembered from his Moscow childhood, before the Tsar Alexej managed to dismantle the threat of the various Organizatsja.
Then, again, women poured out of the transporter door.
If the ones in the fist transporter were between nice, cute and gorgeous, these were positively outlandish.
Green eyes, skins from ivory to tanned to black, tall, walking like they owned the place though the sheer power of their sex-appeal, some of them looking like - clones of? - the most sexy actresses of the movies Valentin consumed in his youth.
If the first group had not been hint enough, this second one made it certain.
Whatever was going on here, today, it was not a congress of old ladies convinced to be able to talk with the dead.
He imagined that, soon, the transport would disgorge a new, unaccounted, group of persons - politicians, entrepreneurs, powerful males that would feast on these women, in a place virtually beyond the reach of any law. And the other ones. And the kids...
Valentin felt a throb in his guts, an almost imperious desire to throw up, at the thought of what could soon happen to those wonderful little girls. And what would then happen to the witnesses of such excesses...
- "Mr. Morozov?"
The short man was in front of him, his face imperturbable. But his voice sounded a bit concerned,,,
- "Yes?"
- "Would you mind escort us to the hotel?"
He didn't mind - after all, he was already a dead man, he could as well take his time and go on with the work. At the hotel, Milla was probably looking at the scene with a binocular... if she had managed to get back on her feet.
So, he didn't really count on her being at the desk, as she was.
She registered all the new guests, and behaved like the professional that she was. Not that it matter.. soon the transport would be back, to disgorge a horde of powerful pervert, a weekend of orgy would follow, and he, her and the other four that worked in the hotel would die.
Only, the third wave of guests never materialized.
The second group took the 3rd floor, right in the middle of the building, and asked to jack the temperature up to 25 degrees... which was unusual, but Valentin didn't enjoy the idea of saying no to the little man.
At dinner, the women of the second wave kept a bit distant from the others, but, then they met the kids... and they swooned over the little girls, like a bunch of spinster aunts whose maternal instincts had been awaken and sent into full overdrive.
At first, this seemed to trouble the clone mothers, then they relaxed a bit,when they saw that the other women were really delighted to meet the kids.
By the end of the evening, the atmosphere remembered Valentin, a lot, of a family reunion - a marriage, or something like this.
A family composed almost exclusively by women... Morozov thought again to his sociology paper idea...The day after, the city Auditorium ( a true Soviet antiquity , whose use was seldom if ever authorized) was half full with most, but not all of the hotel guests.
The kids were playing outside, with their mothers and some of their new "aunts".
Morozov had to escort the crowd inside, check that they did not damage or stole anything. Again, these women seemed very disciplined - he could not say the same of Martina and Illiana, who hadn't stopped chat a moment ever since Martina had come back from the third floor, where she had spent far too much time, this morning, just to inform the occupants that the breakfast was ready.
The hotel little robots would still be cleaning the rooms.
The podium - a precious relic... Valentin's heart had thumped hard when they moved it - was in a lateral position, and the short brute had taken place there. At the centre of the stage, a briefcase had opened up itself into one of those fancy robotised multi-projectors that enterprise executives love so much, nowadays.
On the big screen, it appeared what looked like a page out of a text of physics, while the man started to talk - "I suppose that most of you has read the preliminary note that I sent you, though many of you probably has ignored all the math. We have already built a small, scale test bed, and do some tests. It works, and we can also already confirm the validity of Novikov's self-consistency principle, which opens up an important question: do we use this? Is there a reason to devolve some important resources and build a full scale system, with retrograde legs of six days or more?"
Valentin drowned off the rest of the discourse it looked like this was not spiritism, but, rather, some kind of philosophic discussion over arcane theoretical physics, though he would have never pictured all these women as being into physics at all.
Behind him, Martina and Illiana were still talking and giggling... this people was not going to do anything nasty to one hundred years of Soviet history, and Valentin's curiosity was past its limits.
- "Why are you so damn happy, women?" - he hadn't voiced to anybody his concern that this was going to be a week-end long orgy, with death of all witnesses at the end ... in retrospect, it was a paranoid fantasy, a lot more embarrassing than Milla's PTSD crisis.
Martina's cheeks lightened up bright red, as she was suddenly flushed
- "I discovered why they wanted the floor so warm - they go around all naked, all the time!"
- "Really?"
- "Not really naked, though" - Illiana said in a malicious way, and Martina went even more red and flustered
- "Yes, they wear any kind of... " - she glanced at the auditorium, here the women of the "second wave" were recognizable, for wearing the same robe, a kind of silk overcoat over some brown skirt, thick adherent trousers and comfortable leather boots... the auditorium was too big to be really heated up to a comfortable level in just the two days since they received the communication that it was going to be used
- "I do not know, chastity belts?"
- "What?"
- "Yes, in steel, with a lock here" - she indicated her belly button - " and that's not the most notable thing, really"
- "No? There is more"
- "I do not think that they are really chastity things" - Illiana took an astute expression - "I think that they are the contrary, that are devices to keep things inside."
- "You have seen them, too?"
- "Of course, when I saw it, I called her up to 'Help with the robots'."
- "Yes, and I am sure - those are inverted strap-on!"
Martina looked at her colleague puzzled, while Valentin took note that the middle aged Siberian woman was probably into pretty interesting things herself.
- "And they use them full-service" - Martina's stare went blank, in the most classic "what the hell are you saying?" way, so Illiana draw her breath in and started explaining - "they use them front, and back.... two dildos."
- "All of them?"- Valentin suprise was absolute - "and here goes my 'family reunion' hypothesis, again" - he thought.
- "They all wear the belts, I am sure" - Martina was categorical.
- "And of those I could observe well, none had an empty belt" - added Illiana with a smirk
- "Incredible" - and he meant it.
- "That's not the most incredible, either"
- "There is more?"
- "Yes, they all have rings," - Martina made an effect pause, for Valentin's sake; he felt himself drooling for the anticipation - "here" - and she indicated one of her nipples,
- "And down there, too, I am sure" - Added Illiana, pointing her index in the direction of her crotch, once again showing that she was probably into S&M.
- "You could call me, I'd be very glad to help programming the cleaning robots, too"
- "The two guys were at the elevator and stair entrances, to keep out undesired guests"
- "And they saw all that, and still kept guarding?"
- "I don't think they are into women, chief"
- " I didn't think to be into women either" - this was Martina - "I HAD to call for help... I got so nervous, I messed up the robot's program, and couldn't manage to fix it"
- "Well, it is understandable" - Illiana was commenting, in a dreamy haze - "those were the most beautiful bodies that I have ever seen, even the scarred ones."
- "Scars?"
- "Whip scars, I am certain." - Illiana confirmed her SM inclination.
- "And they asked me if I wanted to try..."
- "Try what?"
Martina made a strange gesture, rolling her eyes while she tilted ad turn her head away, that could be interpreted as "Come on, you know" , "I have no idea, but reasonable suspicions"or "Do I really have to tell you?"
- "What is really going on, chief?"
The image of their bodies, spread on the last snow in a mist of blood, glimpsed in Valentin's mind.
- "I do not think that I want to know, really."
He returned his attention to the great hall, where one of the "belt wearers" - an impressive beauty with waved, mahogany red hair - had taken the word
- "It is true, using it for operative information is a mistake, however... what about scientific information, and parallelizing development? There is a wealth of advantages to be exploited, there"
- "Would you explain?"
- "Imagine that you have a new theory, but verifying it requires ten years of research. You can spend ten years doing so, while potential developments of the theory will be frozen, or back-send it to a spawned unit, let it go its way , and having it turn out its results ten minutes AFTER the signal ha been sent. No casual loops, no information really created from nothing, simply a radical reduction of R&D 'linear time¡. Not any different than what is usually done, splitting the workload among different work-groups, only faster... and potentially hyper-parallelizable."
- "That could be dangerous"
- "Yes, the risk is ending up with a series of paperclip optimizers, but, we are here for that, no?"
The thirty women or so of the "second wave" in the room giggled all together, while "the brute" head lowered and, with a humble voice that didn't match at all with the character that Valentin had cut around his appearance, he said "It is a very good idea. I fell a little dumb."
- "Oh, but we love you all the same, boss" - it was another of the "second wave", and her colleagues, against, burst in a soft giggle, while the ones on the fist transport cringed.
They did not really love the man on the podium.
He stopped, spent some thirty second silent - and the whole hall was holding it breath - then he finally spoke again
- "It is a good idea. I have what I was looking for - enjoy the rest of the week, you all have earned it. This reunion is adjourned - a better God blesses you all."
At this, the whole hall draw an almost silent "oh".
The short man disappeared, immediately after the auditorium was emptied.
At 100 km by feet from the nearest city, it did not seem to concern any of the other guests, not even the two men that had arrived with him. In fact, they impeded Valentin to call the authorities.
Soon, even other women from the first transporter started to disappear - it was creepy as hell. All this people had come here to exchange pleasantries on some idiotic theory, and then march to death in the night.
This was worse than his orgy-with-death fantasy.
Soon, in the hotel remained only the odd family, the women in the second wave, and their two bodyguards, in what seemed - to Valentin - a surreal atmosphere.
Some of the kids should realize that heir friends were walking out to their deaths...
But, then again, they were in a poly-amourous, female-only family made by eight clones and - probably - the pervert that had them made to be her paramours. They had no idea what was normal or not.
Ludmilla had calmed down - or had she resigned to an imminent death? - while Martina had left the job, and taken on one of the silk gowns of the "Second Wavers" - he had decided to call them like that.
She smiled a lot more, and seemed more beautiful, yet Valentin could not help but imagine what she was really wearing below that gown.
Or what the "Second Wavers" were really teaching to those kids.
- "How could you let your kids with those women?" - he finally spurted to the "Husband", the unflappable Xanthippe.
- "I had my doubts, what with the guy they work for, but they really are good persons."
- "But, they are a bunch of perverts - don't you worry about what they are teaching to your daughters?"
- "Not really" - and she added mentally "if you knew better, man, you would worry a lot more about what they can learn from their mothers: infiltration, espionage, torture, murder, swordsmanship and recognizing wines".
- "Not really? Not really?"
- "No - I have seen them. They love the girls, they will not do anything that could result armful to them, like trying to impose their ideas on sexuality. Also..." - the woman smiled crookedly - "they do not need kids to increment their ranks, do they?"
Valentin walked away, embarrassed.
And then, he understood why the mothers didn't really worry too much.
The day before the transporter came to carry back the surviving, the kids and the "Second wavers" organized a movie marathon in the hotel hall, with the multi-projector - some of them fell asleep on the sofas.
The morning after, Valentin found them, two "Second-Wavers" and six kids. And one of the kids was sleeping, about a meter over the sofa, floating, with their enormous cat on her chest.
The large feline awoke, looked intently at Valentin and then, slowly, placed the tip of its tail over its mouth, in what reminded Morozov of the classic human gesture that means "keep silent".
Morozov repeated the gesture, the cat nodded his large head up and down and then, when he was sure that the human had understood the message, went back to sleep over his flying owner's chest.
And this, more than seeing a colleague - a girl he once had a crush on - joining a sept of modern-day Bacchae, losing two thirds of his guests, or the moment where it was decided that half the stars in the galaxy would be populated by descendants of the "second-wavers", became his core memory of the period.
That he met a talking cat sleeping on top a flying child.
In the afternoon, when the transporter came to take home Martina and all the others, Valentin really felt that he was the one left behind.
It was not for the first, nor would be the last time in his life.
"It" found it in the same stash of discarded - because impractical... for humans - alternate spaces theories from the past of the Anipos civilization.
It was one from the long dead Anipos physicist Jojo Asdolfis - indeed one clever, clever woman.
Expanding its operation to Anipos fourth was a risk, but obtaining her genome would be such a great addendum to "It"'s galactic colonization plans.. maybe later.
After all, the woman had died two hundred years before... reconstructing her DNA was not really going to be any more difficult, if it waited some twenty or thirty years more.
"It" got an awful lot of time ahead, after all - even if the thing seemed to move like a snail ,usually.
It understood soon why the Anipos civilization leave it behind - the capability to send signals back in time seemed great, until you delved a little more into its consequences.
If the nature of space-time was an ever-forking-merging "soup" of alternate universes, then every possible future would send back into its past contradictory informations, and the receiver would be swarmed by white noise.
It if was a singular timeline, then knowing the future effectively meant losing the possibility to make any choice about it.
"It" knew that this loss of freedom would be only apparent, yet it would feel absolutely real, and the result would have been planet-wide despair and frustration because, once available, of course evervody would have used and abused it.
After a while - a whole quarter of an hour, at its top thinking speed... about 28 and a half years of subjective time - it came down with what felt like a damn headache.
Something it was glad enough to have never felt, ever, since it stopped being human, though it never really was... human; it only remembered that it was.
"It" realized that this was the time and space to go and ask for its better parts' counsel.
It composed a brief paper to explain the situation to them, and then distributed this - in physical form... on paper! it really was off its game - to its "ladies", while it temporarily scaled back its incursions in their minds.
It needed counsel, for real, about what to do, not some half-assed cyclical thought in which the half side of its mind told the other half something that both already knew.
In a more moment of decided indecisiveness, it opted for a risky option, and to have all its "ladies" meet in the same physical place - of course, it couldn't be anywhere else than Pyramiden's Tulpan Hotel, for sentimental reasons - so that they could actually discuss and give some thoughtful suggestion.
Errors in communication, once evaluated and rectified if needed, were the source of most new ideas - this was true for the rudimentary quantum circuits that firt hold its mind, as well as the sophisticated humans that he used, nowadays, to hold his better instincts.
It was risky because, if someone would be so smart as to bomb the hotel - with something powerful enough to destroy all its "messengers" at once, not really easy, but not impossible either - "it" would revert to its most basic nature.
Of course, aid nature was an amoral sadist with a penchant for massive bloodshed, which would have been then aimed to get vengeance on the perpetrators no matter what, without empathy - Ice contribution to its personality to keep It in check. .
No sane intelligence in-system would be so stupid to exchange one bad neighbour for an unleashed demon, so it was unlikely to happen - but not all players were in-system or, even, actually intelligent.
The old Soviet settlement was thriving, in those days - plenty of tourists liked to see the northernmost city on the planet and the last remnant of the Soviet civilization; it seemed a good enough explanation - so squeezing some few dozens of very gorgeous women in the Hotel was going to be unnoticed.
No, probably not, but it didn't matter - after all, It had the com network of the small city under control since the '50s.
Little organization problems started to crop up early - the Mollys refused to move unless they could carry the kids and their alien wife - alien wife? When that had happened? and how came that "It" allowed it?
Alone, they were twenty of them - 8 Mollys, one (damn) Xanthippe Xeyos, and their elven (or is it twelve, no? Twelve) daughters . so, no, 21.
Ditto Ice - she didn't want to move without her... cat? And The Mollys wanted their cat, too?
Well, if "it" really wanted some fresh viewpoints, "It" decided, it could as well add the girls from his (not so very) secret harem, to the fray, and let everyone carry their significant others and have a good time.
It is entirely possible that, with Keisha [9] imprisoned by the USA government, and Keisha[8] refusing to come out of her exile, "It" was just feeling lonely and craving meaningful human contact - which exposed how much of a contradiction its existence was.
An emulation of a human mind, purposely biased so that it could exact its creator's vengeance against the human kind, that had simply grown beyond it by the first time it snooped outside its intranet.
Even in its worst moment, It knew that using all its might against simple humans was wrong - also, 36 second was still enough for the Anipos 'Bots to led It know that a destroyed city was not what they expected to see from one of their allies... it had its weight in "It" 's decision to "overshoot" the sub-relativistic weapon that it had launched against the USA capital.
Maybe a holiday would be good for everybody.
So, Saturday 14 April 2108, Valentin Morozov was waiting at the helipad near the Tulpan hotel for the firsts of the 120 visitors of the conference "New Perspectives on Spiritism".
He stood there, waiting to see arrive the usual helicopter - one of those LFH thingies, he could never remembered the number of the model, 622? - when he finally heard an odd, low humming sound that did not remind him of any helicopter he knew.
Valentin Morozov was too old to be drafted into "The Gloriously Unlucky Army", but his assistant, ex lieutenant of of the Ukraine contingent in the U.N. Army Ludmilla Myroslavivna Kouiek, remembered the noise all too well - before Valentin could said her anything, she was already running for cover.
It was, she knew, the noise that the BattleBot's anti-gravity systems made.
She was sure that nobody on Earth had cracked that peculiar piece of tech yet, so, this could only be one of those monsters, whose entrance she mow waited from under the maintenance team's snowcat.
The transport appeared, much to the surprise of Ludmilla, to be human made - it even had the marque of the producer, painted on the side - Wolffe Aerospace.
If Ludmilla had been a lover of old aircrafts, she could have seen the similarities between this and what was, once, the hugest helicopter in the world, the powerful - for the 1970s - Mil Mi-12.
Like the old soviet glory, this machine was carried around by two anti-gravity assemblies at the end of short wings, that probably contributed some lift at speed.
However, this had also two conventional jets , on the interior side of every assembly, and the wings where the kind of lightweight, sleek mesh of surfaces that had become "de rigueur" in aerospace industry after the development of the very large size, Carbon-fibre-reinforced-plastic laying 3d printer.
Also, these wings eschewed any external reinforcement apart a profiled tensor from the AG nacelles to the bulges of the wide track, tactical transport-style landing gear.
The transporter was bigger, much bigger than the helicopter they had expected, and likely carried much more than the 24 people they were ready for.
In fact, it could hold 100 persons - Valentin looked back at Ludmilla, that was now returning from her hiding place, covered by threads of grass - he was going to scold her, then he saw her face and realized what had happened.
Ludmilla was a strong, young woman who could handle anything, in life.
Any thing but for facing - again - a Battle Robot from the Alien Invasion Army.
When, three years earlier, some tourists said that they had seen one of the "Not-Killing" machines at the edges of the town, she had closed in her room and refused to come out of it for two days.
Valentin remembered having ceded to curiosity and looking up her service status on the 'Net.
The 'bots were very thorough... and they knew, collectively, who they had already met.
So, every subsequent time a soldier confronted them, they wounded her more gravely.
Ludmilla was wounded three times - the first, it was a simple, clean hole on her high torso, without damaging her lungs,
The second, she found herself with both arms broken in two and three points.
The third, she lost three cm of both femurs, "cut" by a "razor shot", and needed five operations and two years of physiotherapy to be able to walk again.
'Milla, call Illiana, we will handle this, if you manage booking our guests".
Illiana was the senior member of the staff - she, too, was too old to having served in the war, and was likely going to consider the huge machine just a curiosity, and not the concealed spawn of Satan that, evidently, was for 'Milla.
Because Valentin could clearly see that Ludmilla needed all her strength, to come near the source of the sound, and he was a boss good enough to know that he had just a limited number of times he could force things, with 'Milla, before passive aggressivity started raising its ugly head.
The machine opened its landing gear - another difference with the usual helicopters and their sturdy, fixed skis - and almost landed... from the way the wheels did not deform or crashed into the ground, Valentin could have deduced that the pilot had lowered the lifters output, but not really switched them off.
He was leaving just enough weight on the gear, so that the cross wind couldn't stray the vehicle away.p, but not enough to damage the small helipoad, ebidently designed for smaller choppers.
The door opened, and Valentin prepared himself to be swarmed by tourists.
The first to come out were a bunch of kids, all girls,frenetic like only pre-teens that have been an hour or so enclosed in a a confined space, full of boring adults, can be.
Two of the girls, evidently twins, were carrying one enormous cat, each. By the size of the animals, they could as well be small European Lynxes, but probably were just oversized Maine Coon.
They were all wonderful, kids and cats, like the models in the bikini catalogues Morozov used to collect.
Then it came their mother.
And their mother.
And their mother.
And their mother...
8 women - all with slightly different in height and weight, thin or chubby, different hair, and different ages;
Almost identical, slightly Asian-looking faces.
Even in the modern age, in which the associated tech has become quite inexpensive, clones are very rare, as they are frowned upon by most people.
Having a clone for offspring is, really, proclaiming to the world an unsavoury level of narcissism.
Having 8 such daughters, probably using some poor surrogate mothers... Valentin proved that peculiar hitch that afflicts people with an authoritarian mind-set, since the dawn of time, when confronted with something that embarrass them.
The thought - "if it isn't already illegal, they should make a law to prohibit it" - flashed prominently inside his mind.
Two of the girls stopped their ruckus, and looked him like he was an insect - which made the man feel a bit on edge - the they shrugged, and went back to their far more important affairs, chasing each other on the open field.
He expected more than its share of oddballs from a conference on esoteric mumbo jumbo, but these were the "wrong" kind of oddballs.
Other people had come out of the brand new "Wolffe", even stranger than the kids and their mothers.
One was the taller woman he ever saw, a willowy blonde with ivory pale skin, and grey eyes so clear that they could as well be white, every bit looking like a 16 years old vampire fan.
She was talking to a shorter woman, a black with the shoulders of a wrestler.
When they came nearer, he realized that the short one was still well above six feet, and the tall was, simply, impossible - seven feet, maybe?
Them a woman with the two babies, one a very little child in a marsupial bag, the other a toddler that climbed on her shoulder. Hers was a vaguely familiar face, though Valentin could not really place her.
She was wearing a plain dress with a fancy skirt, which was the reason why he couldn't focus on her - the "red Leather" jacket she was famous for, and made her far more remarkable, was not there.
Xanthippe Xeyos was simply out to enjoy herself and some quality time with her large family.
Other people continued to disembark but, apart the ruckus initially made by the kids, this group looked considerably disciplined - the usual septuagenarians were often harder to handle, with their tendency to wander off and consider anyone below 65 an idiot..
He introduced himself and Illiana, and guided everybody to the Hotel and its 160 places of "Soviet Delice".
In reality, the real Soviet Hotel - with its 48 beds and obsolete furniture - had been extended and overhauled some twenty years before, and the current Hotel had little if anything made by the Soviet in it.
However, the SSSR nostalgia was stronger than ever, in an era when the world discovered that planned economy was very common in the galaxy.
Morozov doubted that all humanities were really the same (the Betans were hardly humans, the Transsians slightly more, as for what the Anipos really were, it was anybody's guess) and, thus, that anything that solved problems in system A could be really used to fix things in system B.
Stealing ideas from the aliens could be a good way to get techs ahead, but in sociology? That was poppycock.
.
Morozov, ancient major in Sociology from the Moscow university, stopped his melancholic derive through the alleys of the career that he never pursued, and forced himself to guide the last guests to the hotel, while the transporter went away, with a slightly stronger hum as it gained height.
He had to investigate on those, he reflected - if they were to become the norm of transport, their usual guest acceptance ceremony needed to be reworked.
In the hotel, everything went smooth, till Milla found herself in front of the marsupiated alien woman.
She looked at the rather beautiful woman - a bit plain looking, in this group - gasped and ran away again, forcing Morozov to take over.
- "I am sorry" - he apologized - "She is still struck from the, ah, notable mean of locomotion you arrived in. That is the first anti-gravity machine that I see from near, but she was in the war, with all those ugly robots."
- "I understand" - The woman looked, and sounded like she was sincerely touched by Milla's misfortune.
- "Your name?"
- "Xanthippe Xeyos, and this on my back is Micaela Xeyos, while this one is Teodolinda Xeyos"
- "Your daughters?"
- "They are all mines, really" And she indicated all the kids.
Valentin Morozov thought, again, "Someone should forbid this".
The woman looked at him, puzzled, then asked "Why?"
- "Eh?"
- "Mr Morozov, you should control your volume, when you sub-vocalize your thoughts - they are not as silent as you think. People with very good hearing may inadvertently catch them."
Morozov went red, then purple, then managed to contain his sudden burst of anger - she was listening on his thoughts! but, inadvertently? - and continued his job.
- "Chamber 512" - a small vengeance, for the embarrassment.
The bulky black was a Keisha something, out from some corner of the USA - Morozov was almost certain from the south, as she had a bit of a drawl.
He kept his thoughts to a tight leash, with her - she really looked like someone that a sage man would not want to irritate, ever, and if he was really speaking his thoughts that loud - something that, he knew, happened when he was really tired and stressed - who knows what he could blurt.
The pale giantess was very sweet, instead - she gave off the impression that she was some kind of dreamy Princess out of a fairy tale, all gentleness and flowers not plucked out of respect for life.
The clones... all of them registered themselves as Molly Something Xeyos-McDonald, while the kids registered as Something Xeyos.
By the end of the registration of the first group, Morozov was already planning an humorous piece on the unforeseeable directions the family institution was taking, at the turn of 21st century into 22nd.
The transporter pilot called, and Morozov trotted out with Martina (Illiana was busy getting their guests to their chambers, and Milla was still MIA).
Again, they heard the humming sound, but a big different.
Morozov soon saw why the sound was different, the transport was not alone - behind the Wolffe, something else was coming.
Valentin had not been in the War, and did not knew the sound that they made first-hand, but he had seen the newspaper photos and the video clips... the new arrived really was an alien battle robot, a two hundred tons - thus medium sized - autonomous hover-tank.
The 'bot didn't look so impressive, being an almost perfect disc of some five meters of diameter, two meters and a half tall - having no void spaces to reserve for the crew or troops, they tended to be very compact, a lot more than the human tanks.
However, Morozov knew that it could level the whole city before any Norwegian force could arrive, and probably it could, then, level also said forces.
He felt fear... and understood a bit better his poor colleague, and her bitterness the rare times she talked about her time in the army.
They sent her against these? In a tactical suit, with an assault rifle? Good things the 'bots did not kill.
The firsts to come out of the transporter, this time, were three men... if possible, these werre scarier than the robot.
The first was a shortish brute, with shoulders disproportionately wide, in a costly black overcoat.
His two companions were the kind of mercenary thugs that Morozov remembered from his Moscow childhood, before the Tsar Alexej managed to dismantle the threat of the various Organizatsja.
Then, again, women poured out of the transporter door.
If the ones in the fist transporter were between nice, cute and gorgeous, these were positively outlandish.
Green eyes, skins from ivory to tanned to black, tall, walking like they owned the place though the sheer power of their sex-appeal, some of them looking like - clones of? - the most sexy actresses of the movies Valentin consumed in his youth.
If the first group had not been hint enough, this second one made it certain.
Whatever was going on here, today, it was not a congress of old ladies convinced to be able to talk with the dead.
He imagined that, soon, the transport would disgorge a new, unaccounted, group of persons - politicians, entrepreneurs, powerful males that would feast on these women, in a place virtually beyond the reach of any law. And the other ones. And the kids...
Valentin felt a throb in his guts, an almost imperious desire to throw up, at the thought of what could soon happen to those wonderful little girls. And what would then happen to the witnesses of such excesses...
- "Mr. Morozov?"
The short man was in front of him, his face imperturbable. But his voice sounded a bit concerned,,,
- "Yes?"
- "Would you mind escort us to the hotel?"
He didn't mind - after all, he was already a dead man, he could as well take his time and go on with the work. At the hotel, Milla was probably looking at the scene with a binocular... if she had managed to get back on her feet.
So, he didn't really count on her being at the desk, as she was.
She registered all the new guests, and behaved like the professional that she was. Not that it matter.. soon the transport would be back, to disgorge a horde of powerful pervert, a weekend of orgy would follow, and he, her and the other four that worked in the hotel would die.
Only, the third wave of guests never materialized.
The second group took the 3rd floor, right in the middle of the building, and asked to jack the temperature up to 25 degrees... which was unusual, but Valentin didn't enjoy the idea of saying no to the little man.
At dinner, the women of the second wave kept a bit distant from the others, but, then they met the kids... and they swooned over the little girls, like a bunch of spinster aunts whose maternal instincts had been awaken and sent into full overdrive.
At first, this seemed to trouble the clone mothers, then they relaxed a bit,when they saw that the other women were really delighted to meet the kids.
By the end of the evening, the atmosphere remembered Valentin, a lot, of a family reunion - a marriage, or something like this.
A family composed almost exclusively by women... Morozov thought again to his sociology paper idea...The day after, the city Auditorium ( a true Soviet antiquity , whose use was seldom if ever authorized) was half full with most, but not all of the hotel guests.
The kids were playing outside, with their mothers and some of their new "aunts".
Morozov had to escort the crowd inside, check that they did not damage or stole anything. Again, these women seemed very disciplined - he could not say the same of Martina and Illiana, who hadn't stopped chat a moment ever since Martina had come back from the third floor, where she had spent far too much time, this morning, just to inform the occupants that the breakfast was ready.
The hotel little robots would still be cleaning the rooms.
The podium - a precious relic... Valentin's heart had thumped hard when they moved it - was in a lateral position, and the short brute had taken place there. At the centre of the stage, a briefcase had opened up itself into one of those fancy robotised multi-projectors that enterprise executives love so much, nowadays.
On the big screen, it appeared what looked like a page out of a text of physics, while the man started to talk - "I suppose that most of you has read the preliminary note that I sent you, though many of you probably has ignored all the math. We have already built a small, scale test bed, and do some tests. It works, and we can also already confirm the validity of Novikov's self-consistency principle, which opens up an important question: do we use this? Is there a reason to devolve some important resources and build a full scale system, with retrograde legs of six days or more?"
Valentin drowned off the rest of the discourse it looked like this was not spiritism, but, rather, some kind of philosophic discussion over arcane theoretical physics, though he would have never pictured all these women as being into physics at all.
Behind him, Martina and Illiana were still talking and giggling... this people was not going to do anything nasty to one hundred years of Soviet history, and Valentin's curiosity was past its limits.
- "Why are you so damn happy, women?" - he hadn't voiced to anybody his concern that this was going to be a week-end long orgy, with death of all witnesses at the end ... in retrospect, it was a paranoid fantasy, a lot more embarrassing than Milla's PTSD crisis.
Martina's cheeks lightened up bright red, as she was suddenly flushed
- "I discovered why they wanted the floor so warm - they go around all naked, all the time!"
- "Really?"
- "Not really naked, though" - Illiana said in a malicious way, and Martina went even more red and flustered
- "Yes, they wear any kind of... " - she glanced at the auditorium, here the women of the "second wave" were recognizable, for wearing the same robe, a kind of silk overcoat over some brown skirt, thick adherent trousers and comfortable leather boots... the auditorium was too big to be really heated up to a comfortable level in just the two days since they received the communication that it was going to be used
- "I do not know, chastity belts?"
- "What?"
- "Yes, in steel, with a lock here" - she indicated her belly button - " and that's not the most notable thing, really"
- "No? There is more"
- "I do not think that they are really chastity things" - Illiana took an astute expression - "I think that they are the contrary, that are devices to keep things inside."
- "You have seen them, too?"
- "Of course, when I saw it, I called her up to 'Help with the robots'."
- "Yes, and I am sure - those are inverted strap-on!"
Martina looked at her colleague puzzled, while Valentin took note that the middle aged Siberian woman was probably into pretty interesting things herself.
- "And they use them full-service" - Martina's stare went blank, in the most classic "what the hell are you saying?" way, so Illiana draw her breath in and started explaining - "they use them front, and back.... two dildos."
- "All of them?"- Valentin suprise was absolute - "and here goes my 'family reunion' hypothesis, again" - he thought.
- "They all wear the belts, I am sure" - Martina was categorical.
- "And of those I could observe well, none had an empty belt" - added Illiana with a smirk
- "Incredible" - and he meant it.
- "That's not the most incredible, either"
- "There is more?"
- "Yes, they all have rings," - Martina made an effect pause, for Valentin's sake; he felt himself drooling for the anticipation - "here" - and she indicated one of her nipples,
- "And down there, too, I am sure" - Added Illiana, pointing her index in the direction of her crotch, once again showing that she was probably into S&M.
- "You could call me, I'd be very glad to help programming the cleaning robots, too"
- "The two guys were at the elevator and stair entrances, to keep out undesired guests"
- "And they saw all that, and still kept guarding?"
- "I don't think they are into women, chief"
- " I didn't think to be into women either" - this was Martina - "I HAD to call for help... I got so nervous, I messed up the robot's program, and couldn't manage to fix it"
- "Well, it is understandable" - Illiana was commenting, in a dreamy haze - "those were the most beautiful bodies that I have ever seen, even the scarred ones."
- "Scars?"
- "Whip scars, I am certain." - Illiana confirmed her SM inclination.
- "And they asked me if I wanted to try..."
- "Try what?"
Martina made a strange gesture, rolling her eyes while she tilted ad turn her head away, that could be interpreted as "Come on, you know" , "I have no idea, but reasonable suspicions"or "Do I really have to tell you?"
- "What is really going on, chief?"
The image of their bodies, spread on the last snow in a mist of blood, glimpsed in Valentin's mind.
- "I do not think that I want to know, really."
He returned his attention to the great hall, where one of the "belt wearers" - an impressive beauty with waved, mahogany red hair - had taken the word
- "It is true, using it for operative information is a mistake, however... what about scientific information, and parallelizing development? There is a wealth of advantages to be exploited, there"
- "Would you explain?"
- "Imagine that you have a new theory, but verifying it requires ten years of research. You can spend ten years doing so, while potential developments of the theory will be frozen, or back-send it to a spawned unit, let it go its way , and having it turn out its results ten minutes AFTER the signal ha been sent. No casual loops, no information really created from nothing, simply a radical reduction of R&D 'linear time¡. Not any different than what is usually done, splitting the workload among different work-groups, only faster... and potentially hyper-parallelizable."
- "That could be dangerous"
- "Yes, the risk is ending up with a series of paperclip optimizers, but, we are here for that, no?"
The thirty women or so of the "second wave" in the room giggled all together, while "the brute" head lowered and, with a humble voice that didn't match at all with the character that Valentin had cut around his appearance, he said "It is a very good idea. I fell a little dumb."
- "Oh, but we love you all the same, boss" - it was another of the "second wave", and her colleagues, against, burst in a soft giggle, while the ones on the fist transport cringed.
They did not really love the man on the podium.
He stopped, spent some thirty second silent - and the whole hall was holding it breath - then he finally spoke again
- "It is a good idea. I have what I was looking for - enjoy the rest of the week, you all have earned it. This reunion is adjourned - a better God blesses you all."
At this, the whole hall draw an almost silent "oh".
The short man disappeared, immediately after the auditorium was emptied.
At 100 km by feet from the nearest city, it did not seem to concern any of the other guests, not even the two men that had arrived with him. In fact, they impeded Valentin to call the authorities.
Soon, even other women from the first transporter started to disappear - it was creepy as hell. All this people had come here to exchange pleasantries on some idiotic theory, and then march to death in the night.
This was worse than his orgy-with-death fantasy.
Soon, in the hotel remained only the odd family, the women in the second wave, and their two bodyguards, in what seemed - to Valentin - a surreal atmosphere.
Some of the kids should realize that heir friends were walking out to their deaths...
But, then again, they were in a poly-amourous, female-only family made by eight clones and - probably - the pervert that had them made to be her paramours. They had no idea what was normal or not.
Ludmilla had calmed down - or had she resigned to an imminent death? - while Martina had left the job, and taken on one of the silk gowns of the "Second Wavers" - he had decided to call them like that.
She smiled a lot more, and seemed more beautiful, yet Valentin could not help but imagine what she was really wearing below that gown.
Or what the "Second Wavers" were really teaching to those kids.
- "How could you let your kids with those women?" - he finally spurted to the "Husband", the unflappable Xanthippe.
- "I had my doubts, what with the guy they work for, but they really are good persons."
- "But, they are a bunch of perverts - don't you worry about what they are teaching to your daughters?"
- "Not really" - and she added mentally "if you knew better, man, you would worry a lot more about what they can learn from their mothers: infiltration, espionage, torture, murder, swordsmanship and recognizing wines".
- "Not really? Not really?"
- "No - I have seen them. They love the girls, they will not do anything that could result armful to them, like trying to impose their ideas on sexuality. Also..." - the woman smiled crookedly - "they do not need kids to increment their ranks, do they?"
Valentin walked away, embarrassed.
And then, he understood why the mothers didn't really worry too much.
The day before the transporter came to carry back the surviving, the kids and the "Second wavers" organized a movie marathon in the hotel hall, with the multi-projector - some of them fell asleep on the sofas.
The morning after, Valentin found them, two "Second-Wavers" and six kids. And one of the kids was sleeping, about a meter over the sofa, floating, with their enormous cat on her chest.
The large feline awoke, looked intently at Valentin and then, slowly, placed the tip of its tail over its mouth, in what reminded Morozov of the classic human gesture that means "keep silent".
Morozov repeated the gesture, the cat nodded his large head up and down and then, when he was sure that the human had understood the message, went back to sleep over his flying owner's chest.
And this, more than seeing a colleague - a girl he once had a crush on - joining a sept of modern-day Bacchae, losing two thirds of his guests, or the moment where it was decided that half the stars in the galaxy would be populated by descendants of the "second-wavers", became his core memory of the period.
That he met a talking cat sleeping on top a flying child.
In the afternoon, when the transporter came to take home Martina and all the others, Valentin really felt that he was the one left behind.
It was not for the first, nor would be the last time in his life.
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