Андреа Хёст - The Starfighter Invitation

"It’s not shattered? No lunar ring?" I stared out at the distant glinting line, not certain whether I felt relieved or cheated.

[[Thriving sub-surface cities.]]

"Any other lies you’re going to admit to?" I asked, unsure what to make of this answer, true or not.

[[We made the other Types up. Except the Ah Ma Ani, but they are not a base Type, just a hybrid.]]

"I’m sure you had a good reason for that," I said, blankly, then frowned. "Does The Synergis have a parable of the Cycog who cried wolf?"

Dio’s laugh was oddly muted. [[Or teased their Bio too much? But no, we are moving past the game. I am glad we managed to run a System Challenge before the shutdown—I enjoyed watching that.]]

Dio had lied so freely and openly that I always assumed te was teasing at first. But this didn’t seem the sort of thing te would joke about.

"You—you’re shutting down Dream Speed ?"

[[There is no way to continue. The window of opportunity is almost closed.]]

A sensation of freefall is dizzying before a space vista. "Is this a time travel thing?"

[[It has always, fundamentally, been a time travel thing. And of being out of time.]]

"Dio, there’s only so many vague dark statements I can take. Why are you telling me this? What’s about to happen?"

[[Type Zero.]]

"Zero? Are they the ones belonging to The Wreck? Waging interstellar war, and you have an experimental ship needing a pilot to fight off their armada?"

[[No. No war. No starfighters.]] All vestige of teasing humour had drained from Dio’s multi-layered voice, leaving it measured, sad, and infinitely kind. [[An orbital bombardment. You have a decision, but you cannot stop the fall.]]

I held onto the armrests of my chair as if they were all that kept me from spinning off into the universe. "Tell me properly, Dio."

[[We have not found their origin planet,]] Dio replied, drifting a couple of inches, but then seeming to fix to the curve of the viewport: one star among many. [[We speculate that they may be intergalactic, have travelled from outside Helannan, but there is no evidence. You are the third sapient species they turn their attention to. The method is the same each time: they locate sapients, observe, and then Skip multiple stellar objects into the planetary atmosphere.]]

Meteors. Asteroids? I’d read enough about Tunguska to immediately picture flattened cities.

[[After the impact, they leave until the planet stabilises. For Earth, they do not return for something in the order of thirty years. And then they collect the survivors.]]

"How…" My throat had locked with impossibility, and I could barely get the word out. "How many?"

[[Type Zero displays considerable expertise in bombardment, using large numbers of relatively small objects targeted at high population areas and seismic weak points. There is immediate, mass-scale death, and multiple volcanic events leading to an ash cloud. Extended winter follows. By the time the hunting starts, there are less than a million of your species left.]]

Dio paused, then went on briskly. [[They reduce the population further, divide the survivors amongst themselves, and move on, leaving one to seek out any who escaped the initial capture. And then they repeat themselves, locating a further three planets supporting sapients. One, they destroy completely, although it is unclear if this is a deliberate act, or a miscalculation.

[[They are still almost a complete mystery to us, for they do not communicate verbally, or retain any kind of written or computerised records. Their expertise with lan far outstrips that achieved by The Synergis, and includes domination of other Bios after a conversion process that leaves them with direct control. The control transmits to offspring, and so freedom was only achieved by eradicating Type Zero completely.]]

I was beyond processing, head whirling with a prospective itinerary of bombardment, death, slavery. But an image emerged. "You showed us. In that mosaic."

[[Yes, a truth misinterpreted. Veronec came to awareness during the subjugation of Type Five, and that process was complete before te could find some way to affect the world around ter. But the final image of The Heart of Mars series shows the result: control severed after the removal of all of the hidden Type Zero. There were only a few dozen, but it took many years to achieve, and Veronec did not see that moment. Te had divided long before, after the death of the Bios te originally came to know.]]

"And it’s always been about time travel because Veronec developed on a world controlled by Type Zero."

[[That is the fact that frames our actions.]]

There was no Starfighter Invitation. The Cycogs had not set up Dream Speed to recruit a defence force. They wouldn’t stop any attack on Earth, wouldn’t interfere in something that led, eventually, to their own genesis.

"But why are you here at all?" I whispered. "Just to watch?"

[[To some extent. We have been collecting historical and genetic information, since the vast majority of Earth’s species and cultural heritage is lost during the bombardment. But Dream Speed itself is, as has been frequently speculated, a combination of recruitment program and tutorial, for we are looking for a solution to a problem that, well, we don’t know if it truly exists.]]

I wanted to scream at Dio to get to the point, but doubted anger would produce anything but a delay. Scrubbing at my eyes, I tried to focus, and found my face was wet: I’d been crying without even noticing.

[[In the past decade there have been incidents,]] Dio continued. [[Trusted Bios behaving in destructive ways. Which is not entirely new behaviour, since anyone’s mind may fall into distortion, given sufficient stresses. But the Quadrant Administrators noticed a pattern, a tendency for these incidents to cost us some of our most promising lan talents.]]

"Do you—" My voice wavered, but I pushed through because I had recovered enough to realise that this was perhaps not simply an explanation, but another test. "I guess you think maybe you missed some of the Type Zero?"

[[We are loathe to officially admit to it. They are the terror that forever lurks in nightmare, for all we were convinced we had destroyed them completely. Our current theory is that more have come from outside our galaxy to prevent our expansion. And our Bios are incapable of resisting them.]]

"They reduced the population almost completely to guarantee that everyone that remained, and all their descendants, would have this…control mechanism installed? You don’t have any lan-users that you can fundamentally trust?"

Dio changed colour briefly. [[None. It has been suggested that we simply uplift one of the near-sapient species and focus our development efforts on a Type that is not tainted by this lan modification. But tinkering with species in this way is both uncomfortably reminiscent of Type Zero’s behaviour—a thing we resile from—and also does not address the problem of billions of Bios vulnerable to control. Most of us are, generally or specifically, attached to our Bios. We don’t want to replace them. So we are attempting an inoculation.]]

"You—you think that Bios from now could mix with your current population and, what, have children without the weakness?"

[[Although that would be useful, and we have some hopes for that eventuality, it would be too slow. What we want is your immunity, hidden by the guise of ordinary Enclavers, present in our population centres. Not as enforcers or investigators—we can use Constructs to police events with high lan concentration—but to be the wild card factor. To be the Bio that does not obey the hidden puppet master. To stand out simply by not following. That, we think, may give us vital warning, and allow us to trace the nexus of control without fear of ships becoming stranded. And so we have risked this project, to locate Bios we think suitable. You’re a borderline candidate, Taia.]]