B. Larson - Swarm

But I had failed Sandra. I hadn’t figured out the test. I should have known by all logic that we were facing death as we exited that last room. She had distracted me with her beauty and her nakedness. Just finding another human in this place had changed all the rules. I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but it had. I’d dropped my guard, and so had she. We thought we could beat the place as a team, that we were stronger together.

But the ship had had other plans. My black hatred for this monstrous machine was deeper than ever. I dearly hoped I would be given a chance to throttle the evil minds that had devised this place and these cruel tests.

The ship remained silent, and the doors remained closed. I sat in my cube, uncaring. Was it giving me some grief-time? Was it programmed to allow for recovery after the worst shocks? It had done that before, I realized. It had waited until I had bandaged my wounds after fighting the centaurs. It had given Sandra and I time enough to talk and team up.

I thought about the centaurs. I had begun to suspect that they were not behind all this. Some other creature was. Something else had set this up. I could not see how all of this made sense if the crew would endanger themselves. Perhaps the centaurs were only trained dogs. Or perhaps they were captives from their own world, like I was. For all I knew, the second one was the relative of the first, and I was the evil ape-creature that had cruelly killed them with insane bloodlust, from their point of view.

I felt sick. For the first time, my resolve was weakening.

“The subject will submit to interrogation,” said the voice, speaking up again at last. It said these words exactly as it had said them before. That got me thinking, hazily. Repeating oneself exactly, that was the kind of thing computers did. Being a computer scientist by training, I sensed I might be dealing with an artificial intelligence. This was not encouraging. Computers weren’t known for their mercy.

I scowled at the floor. Soon, as I said nothing, it began to heat up.

“As I said before, I’ll answer questions only if you will let me ask some of my own.”

There was a pause, then: “Tenacity demonstrated.”

A door opened. I heaved a sigh and struggled to my feet. How many of these tests were there?

I cautiously stepped forward. The next room wasn’t a cubical. It was larger and rectangular with a domed ceiling. I suspected every inch of it. I walked cautiously around this new cage, prepared to leap away from any threat.

“All tests complete. You have been selected for advancement.”

“Wonderful,” I said.

“You may now command us.”

I paused. Another test?

“Command you?”

“Yes.”

It was talking back. We were in a new room, but I had been fooled before. I thought about it. What if I only got to give one command? What if that was the test, to figure out what I would do in this situation? What did I want? Until now, there had been nothing resembling conversation with these monsters. I hated to admit it, but this change gave me hope. Somewhere deep down I believed it was all another test, however. The floor might vanish at any second.

I thought about asking it to let me go. That seemed simple enough. I’d have to be careful, or it might just dump me out a mile high over a rocky mountain range or the Antarctic. Each time I looked down, it seemed like the ship was over a different spot.

I wondered then how long I had to think it over before it considered me a loser. Perhaps I needed to give it a command. Anything, just to make it happy. But what should I tell it to do?

Then I had it. Why not go for broke?

“I command you to go back and pick up my children and revive them,” I said. It was crazy, but who knew what their tech was capable of? Maybe, just maybe, there was a thread of mercy in these beings, or at least some strange concept of honor amongst them. Maybe they gave every contest winner a single wish, a prize for having won through to the end. I tried not to let my hopes rise, but I couldn’t help it.

“Specify.”

“Specify?” I said. “What do you mean, specify? ”

“Who are your children?”

“The people you killed. Back behind us. You dropped them out of this ship, you murderous piece of flying shit.”

“Course reversed,” said the ship.

My anger seemed to have no effect on it. I tried to control myself. If I actually got my kids back, that would be wonderful, but I was still almost beyond any kind of clear thinking. I took deep breaths, trying to calm myself. I had to deal with this situation perfectly. I could not make any mistakes despite my emotional state. Possibly, my kids’ lives were at stake.

I had a thought then. Maybe other people’s lives were at risk, as well. Could there be other prisoners onboard this ship, dying in tests even now? Maybe no one had made it this far. Maybe I was the first one.

I thought of a hundred commands. I thought of demanding a view of the world as we glided silently above it. I was burning with questions too, but I didn’t dare ask them. Not yet. What if it took a question as a command to give information? What if I was only allowed one command? If there was some kind of time limit, or if my second command might cancel out my first, then I couldn’t afford to mess around asking more from the ship. Not until I knew more. I was playing a deadly game without knowing the rules, and I would continue to play it as I had been all along, with extreme paranoia.

There was no reaction for about a minute. I couldn’t feel anything, and the ship didn’t say anything. It was all I could do to stand there, silent, wondering what the hell was going on. I stared at every wall suspiciously, my eyes roving. Suddenly, I thought I felt a tremor. Something had changed. Had we stopped?

An opening melted away about where I recalled having entered. As with every doorway, it was simply a spot in the metal wall that could vanish and reappear. It was disconcerting, now that I was able to watch the phenomenon up close. Whoever these aliens were, they were much more advanced in practical terms than we were. What had Arthur C. Clarke said? That any technology, sufficiently advanced, would seem like magic to us. That’s how the ship seemed to me right now. Like a magical monster would to a barbarian. I was Jonah, and this was my whale.

The arm was there, in the newly revealed room, or rather, the top coil of it was there. The rest of it had dipped down into the darkness below the ship. The coils moved, drawing upward. It was coming up, bringing something up with it.

I glimpsed the slate-gray sea at night. The smell of the cold ocean puffed in, a fresh, salty odor. It smelled good, but it filled me with despair. The arm came up, and at the end of that very long snake-like arm was the hand. In the hand was the broken body of Sandra. She was completely naked now, having lost her cotton blouse in the freezing seawater. Water dripped from her long dark hair and ran in a stream from her dead blue lips. Her right hand was still missing its fingers.

“No,” I said, “she’s not…” but then I stopped myself.

“Incomplete statement,” said the ship. The huge black arm froze. It held the dead girl in front of me. She dripped cold water on the deck.

If I told the ship Sandra was not my child, would it dump her again? Could it actually revive the dead? There was no point in not having it try to fix Sandra. She had earned that much after my failed ‘leadership’.

“Continue,” I said, “finish executing my command. Revive her. Also, to obey my original order, you must fly back to my farm and get my other children and repair them too.”

Another room melted open. It was a large one, like the room I was in now, which I had come to think of as the bridge. The new room had tables-raised rectangles of metal, really. Many smaller, three-fingered black arms dangled down over each table. The big arm put Sandra down on a table and then the scene vanished as the walls melted together again.