David Brin - Existence

Adding that “You humans can protect yourselves by downloading strong tools. Let us show you how to cast powerful rays that could sweep your solar system clean!”

Hm. Tempting. Persuasive. Who turns down an offer of big guns?

And Gerald Livingstone tossed the Black Cloth, casting the artilens in darkness-till they finally accepted a deal. One hour for one hour. They get to teach us new-tech for a span, then we get some diversity-such as it is.

So we’ve gone back to interviewing Low-Swooping Fishkiller-the youngest member-proud that his race made the Artifact we now hold, and apparently unmoved that we detect no sign of industry or radio by peering at his homeworld. “Organics all die,” he answered, shrugging those weird wings.

And Squiddy… she picked the name herself, from fifty thousand submitted by school kids across Earth. Some sense of humor, for a tentacle-waving pseudo cephalopod! Her chief contribution to human culture-a fresh and convincing definition of “irony”-has the intelligentsia spinning in why didn’t we think of that circles! And it took an alien. Huh.

Still, Squiddy won’t diverge from Om’s party line. He makes a case that the Artifact may indeed be like a virus-as critics say-but a beneficial or commensal one. And he gave hundreds of examples from our medical literature. A persuasive point.

Others are harder to understand. Take the caterpillarlike being who spends its time during each interview peering out of the crystal at any nearby human, then muttering a puff of dismissive symbols that translate: “Man, what an imagination I have!”

A clear case of Noakes Disease, earning that creature the web consensus name Bennie.

“What did you expect?” commented M’m por’lock, the one who resembles a giant-reddish otter, after helping usher Bennie away. “We spend eternities floating through space, either sleeping or amusing ourselves in vast virtuality layers, deep within our crystal vessel. You can lose your way in dreamstate. Or miss your chance to taste objective reality, during each brief encounter with a living race.”

Are you like me? Do you get a sense, from M’m por’lock, of things unsaid?

More broadly-is this doing any good?

Sure, it scratches our curiosity itch, a bit. Glimpsing strange arts and tasting the cultural spread can be engrossing. This gives our psych and other experts a chance to chart behaviors, cross-correlate alien attitudes and other boffin stuff. But seriously, what do they expect-to come up with an extraterrestrial lie detector ? Some way to verify the stories we’re told? Or to separate the Artifact’s good offers from the sales-pitch parts? The portions that are pure, viral self-interest?

Suspicion lingers. The diversity of ninety races that we see-is it all somehow concocted? An act that’s been refined before many audiences across ten million years? A puppet show, serving that long-term goal-

– to persuade?

The artificial sea serpent took a circuitous route along the ocean floor, carrying Bin on a lengthy tour of murky canyons and muddy flats, stretching endlessly.

His passenger cell was padded, but cramped. The curved walls kept twisting, throbbing as the machine beast pushed along. Nor was the robot vehicle as garrulous or friendly as Dr. Nguyen’s penguin surrogate. Giving only terse answers, it ignored his request for a webscreen, immersion specs, or any form of ailectronic diversion.

For the most part, the apparatus kept silent.

Or as silent as a motorized python could be, while undulating secretively across a vast and mostly empty sea. Clearly, it was avoiding contact with humanity-not easily done in this day and age, even far away from shipping lanes and shorelines. Several times, Bin felt thrown to one side as the snake-sub veered and dived, taking shelter behind some mound, within a crevice, or even burying itself under a meter or so of mucky sediment, then falling eerily quiet, as if hiding from predators. On two of those occasions, Bin thought he heard the faint drone of some engine gradually rise and then fall, in both pitch and volume, before fading away at last. Then, as the serpent shook itself free of mud, their journey resumed.

Even its method of propulsion seemed designed for stealth. Most of the world’s sub-sea detection systems were tuned to listen for propellers, not wriggling giant serpents.

Of course signs of humanity lay everywhere. The ocean floor was an immense junkyard, even in desert zones where no fish or plants or any kind of resource could be seen. Shipwrecks offered occasional sights worth noting. Far more often, Bin saw mundane types of trash, like torn commercial fishing nets, resembling vast, diffuse, deadly clouds that drifted with the current, clogged with fish skeletons and empty turtle shells. Or swarms of plastic bags that drifted alongside jelly hordes in creepy mimicry. Once, he spotted a dozen huge cargo containers that must have toppled from a mighty freighter long ago, spilling what appeared to be bulky, old-fashioned computers and television panels across forty hectares.

I’m used to living amid garbage. But I always figured the open sea was better off… more pure… than the Huangpu.

Losing track of time, he dozed while the slithering robot hurried across a vast, empty plain, seeming as lifeless as the moon…

… then jerked awake, to look out through the tiny window and find himself being carried along a craggy underwater mountain range, an apparently endless series of stark ridges that speared upward, reaching almost to the glistening surface, but even more eerie, because the rippling promontories vanished into bottomless gloom, below. Clearly, the mechanical creature that had swallowed him meant to shake off any pursuers. Weaving its way through this labyrinth should help.

Feeling a bit recovered, Bin peeled open some ration bars that he found in a small compartment by his left arm. A little tap offered trickles of fresh water. There was a washcloth, which he used to dab and clean his cuts. A simple suction tube-for waste-was self-explanatory, if awkward to use. After which, the voyage became a battle against both tedium and claustrophobia-the frustration of limited movement plus abiding worry over what his future held.

No clues came from the serpent, which spoke sparingly and answered no questions, not even when Bin asked about some roiling funnels of black water that he spotted, rising from fissures in a nearby jagged ridgeline, like columns of smoke from a fierce fire.

It occurred to Bin that-perhaps-he shouldn’t be so glad that the owners of this sophisticated device included a window. In stories and teledramas, kidnappers insist on a blindfold, if they plan to let you go.

The time to worry is when they don’t seem to care. If they let you watch the route to their lair, it means they feel sure you’ll never talk.

On the other hand, who could possibly tell, by memory, one hazy sea ridge from another? That reassured him for a while… till he remembered the visual helper unit that Dr. Nguyen installed in his right eye. Bin had come to take for granted the way the tiny aissistant augmented whatever he looked at, enhancing the dim scene beyond the window. Now he realized; without it, he wouldn’t be seeing much at all!

Are they assuming that a poor man, like me, is unaugmented?

He wondered about the implant. Might it even be recording whatever he saw? In which case, was he like the kidnap victim who kept daring fate, by peeking under his blindfold?

Or am I headed for someplace that is so perfectly escape-proof that they don’t care how much I know?

Or someplace that I’d never want to escape from?