CHAPTER 29
ICARUS
UNEXPLORED WORLD
Icarus appeared in a simulated world. A virtual reality of sorts but designed to look exactly like the world around them. The alien planet they were on.
Using the hapticgraphic projectors wasn’t practical when they were trying to stay hidden. So a simulated version of the planet was the next best thing.
Icarus thought about it, and the water disappeared. Simulating that he was swimming wasn’t what he wanted to do in that very moment. The coral around him looked familiar to what he remembered from Earth but not quite the same. The colors were different, and the animals were strange.
Icarus sat down, using one of the coral as a seat; his duck-like legs weren’t ideal for the terrain.
Next to him appeared Lex.
Icarus reached over and pulled Lex toward him, kissing the orb on its head. “You did it. You got us safely to the surface.”
Then moments later, Ship appeared too.
Icarus couldn’t contain his excitement. He was on an alien world. “We’re on a planet with aliens. I can’t believe we’re here.”
Ship patted Lex on the head. “I had my doubts, Lex, but you did it.”
The orb flashed pink with joy and moved from side to side as if to say, It was nothing.
“What do we know about the planet, Lex?” Icarus asked. “Have we intercepted anything that could give us a clue as to what these aliens are like?”
The orb flashed green, and Ship filled in the context. “Wow,” Ship said. “Lex intercepted a lot of communication that used a technology similar to television signals.”
“What do they watch? Soup operas? Reality TV?”
Ship shook his head. “Sports. It seems there are a bunch of independent countries on this planet. Like, a lot. All competing against one another in a sport called sky-ocean-ball.”
“Sky-ocean-ball?” Icarus mused. “That’s a strange name, and how do you know it’s called that? Surely there’s an alien name for it.”
“That’s the other thing that Lex has done: created a complete translation layer. So we can understand their language now. Sky-ocean-ball is the literal translation of the words.”
Icarus gabbed Lex again and gave it another kiss on the head. “You genius.”
Icarus was excited because he could now speak with these aliens in a language they spoke but also disappointed that he didn’t get to translate any of the alien speech himself, although he knew it was going to be an easy task. They had a lot of recorded speech already. When Angelique, Atlas, and the rest of the team had spoken with the Atua representative, it had used a translator to speak English. But the alien version of the words was still audible in the background.
Having hundreds of example sentences in English and the equivalent in the language the Atua spoke was half the battle. It wasn’t like with the Dottiens, when they had essentially started from scratch.
“Do we have enough information to make a realistic-looking alien body?” Icarus asked.
Ship nodded his head. “This is where it gets complicated. The aliens are very segmented. So much so that we need to build a body type for each species. There are three nearby countries that speak the language we’re familiar with.”
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Ship displayed three different alien body types—all variants on a penguin design. They all looked very similar to one another, except one was shorter with longer flippers, while one of the others had a shorter beak. “The differences are subtle,” Ship continued. “But where you’re born dictates exactly what you look like.”
Icarus pointed to the middle of the three alien body shapes. “This one looks very similar to the alien that Atlas and the others met.”
“I believe it’s the same people. They are one of the strongest people on the planet.”
Icarus noticed Ship’s use of the word people. When thinking about these aliens, it was hard not to anthropomorphize. Icarus thought some more about it. He wanted to take his time on the planet. If they were the most advanced, it might not be best to visit them first. They would likely have the most security and probably the highest chance of him getting caught. He thought about Earth and which country would be easiest to sneak into. He quickly realized it wasn’t about the power of the country. It was how much of a melting pot the location was. It would be easier for an alien to hide in the city of New York than a small rural town in the Midwest. “Which of the three countries has the biggest population? Which country is the most like a melting pot?”
Ship looked toward Lex, who put a glow around the tallest of the three aliens. Ship filled in the details. “The aliens from the country Arck’tula.”
“Perfect. Pull me everything you have on this alien,” Icarus said. He desperately wanted to print a body that looked like those people, but he didn’t want to rush into it all. He needed to tread carefully, especially in the beginning. He needed to interact with these aliens without them becoming aware of his presence. If this meant he needed to take a bit of time to do more research, then he needed to do that. “What about technology? Have we learned any advanced science that we don’t have yet?”
“That’s what’s strange about these aliens,” Ship said. “I reviewed everything that Lex has collected. They don’t seem as advanced as I expected. Sure, they have space capabilities and their version of a computer. But I don’t see flying cars everywhere. I don’t see any mention of AI. I don’t see a lot of reports about space travel either.”
“Do we know if this is their home world?
Ship nodded. “I believe so.”
Interesting, Icarus thought. These were more questions he wanted answers to. He wanted to go out to the surface of the planet and talk with others, find the answers to these questions.
The team worked like this for some time, Icarus asking questions and Ship querying the database that Lex had built up.
In the end, it took three long days of planning and multiple trips out in the bodies of small fishlike creatures to survey the area and confirm the details of the mission.
They decided to print two bodies for the Arck’tula aliens, one for Icarus and one for Ship. Lex was a little disappointed it couldn’t come explore, but they needed someone to stay back at their base and keep an eye on everything.
The Arck’tula were ideal candidates because, of the three target populations, they interacted with the others the most. Their people often worked on secondment, working as laborers on dangerous jobsites for many of the other nations. They were a poor nation.
Icarus’s plan was simple: they would build the alien bodies, and then migrate overnight, heading over to one of the shores and entering from there.
Icarus and Ship didn’t know what they were going to encounter, so the bodies they built were made of real flesh. Convergent evolution meant these aliens were very similar in design to animals on Earth. Icarus assumed there were only so many ways a bird could evolve to swim in the sea.
The Atua bodies had heart-like organs, lungs, eyes, and wings. Any standard body scan would reveal very similar insides to a normal Atua body. If anyone weighed them, the density would be slightly heavier than expected—but otherwise they were as close a match as they could create without abducting one of the locals. Icarus was surprised by just how much information could be gathered simply by watching television shows.
They had a lot of sports, more than usual. But there were still shows about doctors, which the team used to catalog the insides of their bodies. And that’s how they’d gathered that information.
There was so much information to run through too, so many shows. They could have spent the whole time running through everything on offer, but Icarus and Ship agreed that it would ruin some of the magic. Yes, they needed to not make any mistakes by being ill prepared. But they also didn’t want to approach the Atua for the very first time knowing everything—that would ruin the magic of discovery.
There was a religious ceremony coming up, so Icarus made the call to go out and blend into the crowd during that event, experience it before sneaking back into the water, returning to their base, and then consuming everything they could about the aliens.