Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

“I felt stupid. I should never have trusted a Soo. The staff found us and took her away and I never saw her again. Shan’oui said she was sorry for letting her come inside. She said that’s why I had to stay there. There were lots of people like Ai’mi outside the zoo…

“And the other Pu were worse. They tried to stick up for Ai’mi! They said it was hard on the Soo, being in charge all the time. We had to appreciate how much they’d done for us.” He shook his head. “I should never have trusted a Soo.”

“But you trusted Shan’oui?”

He looked back at me. “I shouldn’t have trusted her either.”

“I thought she protected you?”

“It didn’t make any difference. They put me in the breeding programme anyway.”

“Was that so terrible?”

“I should never have trusted any of them.”

“Pew… it wasn’t your fault. You were only a child.”

He didn’t answer. He was still turning the knife in towards himself.

“Okay, Pew, we can pick this up another time, if you like.”

He didn’t respond to that, either.

INTERVIEW

CONDUCTED: HD y276.m6.w3.d4

SUBJECT: KT-00932/IN / Sgt. Dgn. Elsbet Carmon

INTERVIEWER: Dr. Veofol e-leas bron Jerra

Summary

The subject was interviewed under pretence of a debrief following a military mission. She was co-operative, but suspicious whenever questions strayed too far from the subject. Nevertheless, it was possible to assemble a rough sketch of her life, her career, the world she lived in and the mission she was sent on. It remains difficult to see how this relates to the original persona of ‘Katie’, except that they seem to have fought on opposite sides of a war between humans and machines.

‘Elsbet’ comes from a colony asteroid in the Vesta chain, where a remnant of a human species seems to reside in her universe. She considers it her duty to make war upon the AI species which occupied the Earth, as revenge for the annihilation of humanity in an earlier war.

The religion she follows seems apocalyptic in nature, prophesying another war between humans and machines, after which the humans will reclaim the Earth and turn it into a paradise. She is unaware of the destruction of the Earth in her universe, and believes the war to still be in progress. She speaks of a ‘testament’ and seems surprised that we do not have a copy available for her to peruse. I had to promise to try and find one for her; I presume this is the holy text of her religion, but I’m not sure what form it takes.

I made sure to ask her about the implants in her brain, and the sockets in her skull. She seemed surprised, checked them, and was reassured to find they were still there. When I asked her if she was sure she still wanted them, she asserted they were necessary to pilot a missile with the skill needed to defeat a machine opponent.

As for her mission, it seems she was sent on a suicide raid, piloting a missile intended to destroy a facility on Earth with a massive antimatter detonation. She assumes the mission has failed, and I had to construct an explanation for her survival. I told her that her missile skipped off the atmosphere, stunning her and putting her into a coma before continuing out into the solar system until she was picked up. When she asked how the war was going, I told her it was progressing satisfactorily, but declined to give details.

She believes she’s on an asteroid. She worked out trajectories in her head based on my story and guessed she was on one of the furthest outposts, in the vicinity of Ceres. She ascribes the strangeness of her surroundings to the laxness of the Ceresians, and seems willing to take my assertions at face value now she believes me to be working for an officer.

I believe this willingness to trust her superiors may be of great help in acclimatising her to her true circumstances, but we still need to be careful when we reveal where she really is. If she believes she’s on the Earth of her universe, she may well assume we’re working for the machines. Another difficulty is that she has no understanding that other universes exist. I established this with an offhand remark about things being different in ‘some other universe’, which made her frown and ask me what I meant. She came to the conclusion that I meant ‘on Earth’, as though we would never get there. She decided I was one of those people who didn’t believe in Earth, at which point she tried to convince me with a rapturous description of what she saw when she approached in her missile. We will need to be very, very careful when we come to tell her the truth, and I fear we will need to do this sooner rather than later. She accepts she’s in hospital for good reasons at the moment, but she already seems to be impatient to get back to the war, and the fact that she has no obvious injuries is going to make it increasingly difficult to persuade her to stay where she is.

Pew was not the only one who had been avoiding me. Iokan usually greeted anyone and everyone with a cheerful hello and enquiries after their health, their families, and anything else he’d learned about them. But he’d stopped treating me the same way. I’ve noticed this before when a patient reaches a stage in therapy where they simply don’t want to reveal any more. Perhaps it was to do with the mysterious organisation he joined, or guilt over Katie, or maybe something deeper.

He didn’t extend his avoidance tactics to skipping therapy sessions, so the appointed time found him chiming at my office door with a pair of steaming mugs full of something that was neither tea nor coffee.

“You should try this. It is very good.” He was trying Interversal again, but still wasn’t quite up to speed.

“I already have a drink, Iokan. What is it?”

“From Bri’Slar world. They call it chakchuk. Very like drink from my world.”

I took a sniff at the mug; scents of leafy chocolate and butter steamed from it. “I’ll try it later, Iokan. Can you put your contact lenses in, please?”

“Interversal not yet good enough?”

“Not yet, no.”

He sighed and put the lenses in.

“Is there anything you’d like to talk about today, Iokan?”

He blinked as the lenses settled into place and translations came into focus, then continued in his own language. “How’s Katie doing?”

“She’s awake.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Not at the moment, no.”

“I did think about what you said. I wasn’t trying to hurt her.”

“It’s hard to judge these things, Iokan. There’s no need to beat yourself up over it.”

“You’re sure there’s nothing else I can do?”

“I’m sure. But we’re not here to talk about Katie. This is your therapy session. I’d like to talk a bit more about your career, if that’s possible.”

“I can’t do that.”

“It could be very important.”

“I can’t help you there.”

“Hm. Okay. Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to talk about something else…”

“I’m all ears.”

“I wanted to tell you a rather interesting story.”

“Interesting how?”

“Let me just get the screen set up…” I turned down the lights and dissolved the outside view into a black screen. “Okay. Have you ever heard of the Ilfenard Experiment?”

“No. I haven’t.”

“Well, that’s not a surprise. It was a long time ago, and the people who conducted the experiment are very embarrassed about it these days. This is them…”

Normal looking humans appeared on the screen, alongside images of their world: a bioengineered utopia; buildings grown from the soil; an arboreal aesthetic. Cities of massive apartment trees that grew food for the inhabitants as well as sheltering them. Statistics and summaries sprung up around the images: the usual IU species guide. “The Quillia. Very into the biotechnology, as you can see. Peaceful, friendly. Model IU species, really. But like lots of species, they have a few nasty secrets in their history…”