S. Swann - Prophets

By the grace of God, how did all this fall into my lap?

The medical officers who had been doing the analysis of Bitar’s transmission were still with him, observing the android’s statement for much the same reason.

“What do you make of it?” he asked them, still watching the hairless Mosasa’s passion play. The medical officers sat at a square table in the observation room while Hussein paced around the perimeter. In the center of the table was a holo projecting an image of the seated Mosasa and his interrogator on board the Jizan .

Lieutenant Deshem folded his hands, watching the confession, and shaking his head. “I don’t know what value I can provide. The medical team has done everything possible with a noninvasive scan to confirm that this— thing —is exactly what it says it is.”

“And everything else it’s saying?”

“Admiral, sir, this thing is a machine. All I can tell you is how well or poorly it is mimicking human responses. Unlike a human being, we have to assume that every response—voice, body language, pupil dilation—may be engineered for our benefit.”

“I understand your caution,” Admiral Hussein said. “We’re facing something that admits its own design was for the purpose of manipulating human responses. That said, if we take all those cues—voice, body language, pupil dilation—at face value, what is Mosasa telling us?”

“As if this was the interview of a human being?”

“Yes.”

Deshem nodded. “Mosasa shows signs of being dangerously psychopathic and potentially suicidal.”

“What?”

“I see no exhibition of empathy, and he—it—displays a narcissism bordering on megalomania. It is the center of its own universe, and it has rewritten its own personal narrative so that it is not just the hero, but it is God. A human being with those traits would be, at the very least, sociopathic. Combine this with a series of failures aboard the Eclipse and we have a situation where reality contradicts its personal worldview. Its self-image is incompatible with powerlessness, and that conflict is manifesting as signs of depression.”

Hussein stared into the holo and asked, “And you think Mosasa would want us to see that? Make that interpretation of his story?”

“No, I do not—which is precisely why I distrust the conclusion.”

Hussein stared into the holographic Mosasa’s eyes and felt a deep unease.

The Jizan had a fully operational medical unit that had shown him the scans of the creature sitting in this holographic interrogation room. Never mind how human Mosasa looked, or how human he behaved, there wasn’t a single biological component to the thing being interrogated on the Jizan . It didn’t matter if Hussein could recognize the pain and fear in Mosasa’s expression. It didn’t matter if he could see the loss in Mosasa’s holographic eyes. There was nothing behind them, no soul, only an imitation of life. A facade constructed solely for the purpose of deceit and manipulation.

If the Father of Lies was to attempt to create a man, Hussein suspected the result would resemble Mosasa.

The more Hussein stared at Mosasa’s expression, the more he thought Deshem had described a psych profile that perfectly fit an AI, and this AI in particular.

This is why we do not suffer such things to exist.

As the Voice caught up with the Jizan, Admiral Hussein watched the other surviving crew members being debriefed. Between the statements, and the data from the dead ship, he confirmed the Eclipse had been Mosasa’s scientific expedition toward Xi Virginis.

The Eclipse had accumulated a large amount of scientific data observing the site where Xi Virginis had been. If it was to be trusted, the star didn’t exist anymore.

Admiral Hussein thought of Admiral Bitar and the Sword ’s fleet. He supposed that the pilot of the Eclipse could have tached out before the Sword ’s arrival, but where were the technologically advanced natives of Xi Virginis that Admiral Bitar had told them about?

It would take a significant effort to completely map the Eclipse ’s transit history, but a cursory review of the logs supported the crew’s story. The Eclipse had been in transit for months. Even with the fastest standard tach-drive available, it took the Eclipse as long to make its twenty light-year hops as the Voice took to make its eighty light-year leap.

Hussein found it incredible that a civilian had been able to secure such an advanced drive system. What was more incredible was the fact when the crew of the Voice was receiving its crash training on a virgin ship Mosasa’s expedition was well underway.

It seemed unlikely that such an undertaking would have gone completely unnoticed. Hussein suspected that Caliphate intelligence discovered Mosasa’s expedition and moved up the timetable for launching the new fleets. Of course, he would have liked it if his own intelligence officers had known about that beforehand.

A cursory examination of the Eclipse ’s logs recovered names, biometric identification, and some history on all the crew members. Mosasa had split his people between a science team and a group of mercenaries from Bakunin. It seemed a lot of military talent for a scientific expedition, but that was probably par for the course on Bakunin.

The science team seemed fairly straightforward, including a linguist, a data analyst, an anthropologist, and a xenobiologist. Add to that a Paralian, who was an expert on theoretical physics and went by the alias Bill. The nature of the team pretty much demonstrated that Mosasa expected to encounter a human colony out here.

The mercenary team was interesting .

Not only had the Eclipse been sabotaged, it had harbored a Vatican spy. The presence of a Vatican agent gave weight to the idea that the Eclipse was actually the impetus that set the Voice and her sisters in motion early.

When the Eclipse ’s crew was brought on board the Voice, Admiral Hussein made it a point to meet the most diplomatically sensitive crew member first, the Paralian.

Having one of the creatures on board the Voice was troublesome, and he intended to show the creature the respect he would any diplomatic envoy. It was also a logistic issue, since the creature’s life support resided in a machine that was nearly six meters tall and five wide. There was no way it would fit in any of the human spaces in the Voice , so at the moment their alien guest resided in an unpressurized loading bay that served one of the hundred spacecraft that formed the Voice ’s battle group.

A set of engineers was scrambling to figure out what to do with Bill once the fleet had to reattach to the carrier.

It also meant that a face-to-face required an environment suit, and the only record was the low-res holo camera embedded in the chest of that suit. Out here, open to space, blocked only by a safety grille across the thirty-meter docking portal, there was none of the sophisticated monitoring equipment they had in the interrogation rooms. Not that all the physical monitoring in the world would make sense looking at Bill.

To his surprise, Bill, or, more accurately, the communications software Bill used, was as fluent in Arabic as it was in English.

Admiral Hussein questioned the creature over the comm link, watching the tentacled bullet-bodied thing for some clue to its emotional state. It was as hopeless as trying to read the mood of a jellyfish.

Even so, the history Bill provided him was congruent with the stories from the others and the Eclipse ’s logs. All had been hired by Mosasa to uncover some sort of ill-defined anomaly originating from the direction of Xi Virginis.