CHAPTER 31

ICARUS

TRUE FIRST ENCOUNTER

Icarus noticed his friend acting a little scared—Ship looked afraid.

Icarus took hold of Ship’s hand. “You seem worried.”

“They know we aren’t from around here.”

“Chill,” Icarus said. “Remember what you told me. We can’t anthropomorphize. Just follow my lead; copy them and let’s walk past.”

Icarus started to walk toward the aliens, mimicking their walking gate. It was a lazy waddle.

Icarus nodded at the three aliens as they passed. “Under his eye.”

He felt Ship’s hand squeeze hard. Icarus changed the translated meaning of his words. So, Ship heard, “Under his eye,” but the aliens heard, “Hello,” in their language. It was a reference to a show they’d both watched called The Handmaid’s Tale. He knew saying it would make Ship want to curl up in a ball with embarrassment—even though the aliens didn’t understand the reference.

“Good day for the gods to be here,” one of the aliens said.

Icarus didn’t know what to say in response to this. He didn’t have the power to slow down his playback speed to quickly review all the notes he’d taken. He said the only thing he could say while continuing to walk forward: “Yes, it is.”

One of the aliens stopped and turned toward them both. Icarus got the feeling it was inviting them to stop and face them too. The alien started to speak again, and the translator kicked in once more. “Are you hoping to be chosen by the gods?”

“I am,” Icarus said, slightly intrigued but also wanting to get out of the conversation because he was starting to show his ignorance. “We’re running late. We must be off to a meeting. Sorry.”

Icarus, still holding Ship’s hand, raced them off down the street. He hadn’t been remotely prepared for that conversation. Which god was it talking about? What did it mean by chosen?

Icarus realized he and Ship needed to get somewhere quickly and review everything they had. Icarus felt like he had done the right thing in getting out and visiting the planet. After all, if he’d known about the alien building designs, he wouldn’t have been as surprised as he was. But the time for surprises was over.

He needed to get somewhere quickly and do some digging.

“We should go back to the base,” Ship suggested.

Icarus shook his head. “Let’s find the closest thing to an alien park.”

Ship stopped walking and pulled hard on Icarus’s hand. “No, we need to go back. Our body language, our mannerisms don’t match the locals’.”

Icarus thought about this for a moment. Icarus was usually the one to be more cautious. He thought of himself as someone who liked to plan a bit before jumping fully into something. A few hundred years ago, he would have happily gone back with Ship to do more research. Icarus wondered what had changed. Maybe the years being stuck in administration on a planet had changed him, caused him to want to take a bit more risk.

He wanted to be a real explorer, like the ones in the movies, exploring the unknown. Learning on his feet, rather than having everything planned out in advance.

Yes, Ship was right, they needed to improve their algorithms for interacting with others. But they also needed to collect more data; they needed to do more people watching. What they’d captured from television was an unrealistic view of the planet. It was like learning about Earth from reality shows and basketball.

He and Ship needed to understand the real planet. The real aliens.

“What if we head to their version of a library?” Icarus asked. “I know they have reading places similar to us. They’re quiet too, so we would be left alone. We could people watch and collect more data on how these people interact with one another.”

Library was only a loose translation of what it truly was because there wasn’t really a human equivalent. It was like a mix of a museum for music and a private movie theater. It was designed for the sensor humans didn’t have.

Ship thought about this for a while. “I don’t want us to get caught.”

“Ship, I think we’ll be fine. Surely we have enough processing power between the two of us to build an updated interactions algorithm.” Icarus wasn’t sure they’d be able to do it without Lex but figured he’d propose the question to Ship and see if he could come up with a way to make it all work.

Ship scratched his chin, another human-like gesture they needed to stop doing. “If I disconnect my matrix for twenty minutes, I should be able to route enough processing power to create a new model of these aliens’ behaviors.”

It took a bit of negotiation, but eventually Icarus convinced Ship to venture farther into the city and find a library. Nearby there was a sign with directions on it. Both Icarus and Ship had advanced vision, so they could zoom in on it quite easily.

They were only several blocks away, which, if they were walking, would have taken a whole day. But using the air-canal system meant they’d be there in no time.

There were other descriptions on the map in a sort of language that Icarus didn’t understand. The script was three-dimensional, similar to braille but more detailed. He thought it might make a particularly resonant sound somehow but didn’t have time to work it out. The way the language appeared on the map led Icarus to believe that perhaps it related to the same sound he’d heard while traveling the city. Each of the locations made a different sound when he viewed the city through the magnetic and sonar-sensing organ.

It was a useful way to see the world. Icarus thought about how much of human experience was dictated by what the eyes could see. This different way of feeling was unique to Atua life. It made the world more alien than it already was.

Icarus jumped into the air canal and raced through the city. Ship followed closely behind.

Icarus guided them around the block a few times. He was getting used to the experience. It was kinda like flying. He used his wings to move from side to side in a rocking motion.

The costs involved in building something like this must have been enormous. And it was simply a part of the infrastructure of this country, a public good that everyone got to use for free.

It was like having free autonomous taxis around the whole planet—or maybe a train. Icarus decided he wanted something similar to this on his planet.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Icarus angled his wings to give him maximum lift as he exited the air canal. He was moving quickly, so he launched himself into the air, stretching his wings out wide to slide as long as possible. Once he reached the peak of his arc, he summersaulted, then positioned his body in the closest thing to a superhero pose he could muster in this alien body. He hit the ground with a thud and held it for way too long.

He was a little disappointed that Trillion wasn’t here to see that. He made the decision to send a recording of that landing to Trillion.

It was still relatively early in the morning, so there weren’t too many people about. Icarus noticed a couple of aliens sitting down at what would be considered an alien café.

The Atua didn’t really eat solid foods. Most of their diets consisted of thick gloppy soups and shakes. One of their first evolutionary advantages was fermented foods.

Fire was harnessed quite early on in human evolution. Using fire to cook food did more than make it taste better. It unlocked a lot of the nutrition and calories available within meat and grains. It meant humans didn’t need to eat as much food, and their brains could consume more energy.

The Atua hunted in the ocean and spent most of their time in coastal areas. So fire wasn’t something they’d created for a long, long time.

The Atua had another advantage. Without a moon, they didn’t have high tides. So the level of the sea was relatively stable over a long period of time. In small rock pools they learned to leave the creatures they caught for a couple of weeks.

During that time, the mix of food and seawater matured, decomposing into something more edible. Yeasts from the air landed on the food sludge, too, which added to the flavor. They developed a preference for the taste of foods and began experimenting more.

After a while they started carving food-storage containers into rocks to protect their catches from other scavengers. They learned they could speed up the fermentation process by adding in some of the soup from other well-fermented food.

They learned too that mashing up the food further and cooking it inside of warm black rocks all combined together to mean they could cook a meal inside of a few hours.

The unintended consequence of all this food experimentation was they increased the bioavailability of calories inside of the food.

And much like humans learning to cook their food with fire, the Atua’s fermentation process meant their brains had more energy to consume.

Fast-forward a few hundred years and all Atua meals were made up of liquidly glop consumed via a straw.

Icarus watched the aliens at the café. In front of each of them were between three or eight small glasses. Icarus assumed each of those glasses contained a different drink. A meal for them was probably made up of several of those drinks, all combining different flavors together. He wasn’t sure if they had a version of alcohol yet and decided to find that out later.

Ship arrived, landing next to Icarus. His landing wasn’t as impressive, but he was getting better at it all.

They walked the rest of the way to the front of the library. To enter the building, you had to hop on an escalator, and an automatic door would open when you got close enough and close again behind you. Then after some time, another automatic door on the inside would open, too. The stairs of the escalator were such that the two doors never opened at the same time. Icarus assumed this was to keep the wind and noise out.

The inside of the library continued the unique, almost organic, design aesthetic of the Atua. Stairs and columns jutted out of nowhere, some even ending randomly in places.

Icarus assumed, through the additional sense, the Atua people knew which stairs led to nowhere and which were appropriate to use.

Icarus didn’t know which direction to go; the place honestly looked like a mess. He wondered whether that was intentional or whether there was something he was missing.

He looked around the room for a sign or any markings.

“Do you know where we go?” Ship asked.

Icarus shook his head.

The problem was all the dead ends and randomness throughout the building meant nothing was clear. It was still relatively empty, so Icarus assumed they had enough time to wander around trying to find somewhere quiet.

Icarus and Ship began their random expedition to explore, meandering slowly down one of the winding paths.

The Atua didn’t do straight lines. So after a good while of walking, they began to understand just how hard this process was going to be.

It occurred to Icarus to try his other sense, the one that was unique to the Atua people. It didn’t come naturally to him. Using his eyes was still his primary way to see the world. He made the decision to change that; if he wanted to truly embrace this alien world, he needed to begin thinking like them.

Icarus closed his eyes and began scanning the world. The view of everything changed completely. His sense of direction immediately improved. Winding columns that obstructed his view faded. Stairs that led to nowhere again disappeared.

Icarus found it hard to describe. Somehow, he just knew where to go. It was as if each floor resonated with a different kind of music, and pathways to each played notes relevant to each floor.

Not only that, but he knew which floors were busy with people. The rooms spoke back to him. The thirteenth floor was empty. And he heard which path to follow to find his way there.

“Use the echolocation,” Icarus said to Ship as he began walking toward one of the walls.

All his human sensors were telling him there was nothing in that direction. But the music was pointing him there.

“Do you know how this works?” Ship asked him.

Icarus had no clue. He guessed it had something to do with the way the objects flexed and changed magnetic fields, and that, combined with the way different materials reflected, absorbed, or changed sound waves, created the experience.

There just wasn’t an equivalent to what he was experiencing to a human mind. It was like describing color to a species without eyes. Icarus wondered how he could describe the beauty that was color to someone who had no concept of the thing.

He wondered how he would explain color to someone who only experienced the world through touch. Was it even possible to explain how an object can be completely transformed through a coat of paint? How would someone explain that, even though something felt exactly the same, it looked completely different because of the different wavelengths of light reflecting off the surface?

Icarus decided it was an impossible task. And so explaining what he was experiencing right now was impossible for another human to comprehend without experiencing it.

Icarus decided then and there to figure out how to re-create this experience with Trillion, Atlas, and Angelique. He wanted them to understand this.

“I don’t understand how this is so beautiful,” Icarus said as a panel in front of the wall slid open.

“I’m struggling to understand how they made this,” Ship said. “The only way to describe this is seeing the world in a previously unknown way. Have you ever looked at something in ultraviolet? Have you ever looked at a flower using that wavelength? That’s the closest analogy I can think of.”

“Music,” Icarus said. “That’s the best way to describe it.”

Ship nodded. “You’re right; it’s like an orchestra is playing on each floor, and I can tell which way to go to reach any of the floors because individual instruments are clearly audible in each path.”

“The only thing that breaks that analogy is I can somehow take in all the music at once. It doesn’t sound noisy.”

“That’s where it’s similar to eyesight. I can see everything at once and focus on different things.” Icarus walked into the open door and was quickly whisked upstairs by a gust of wind.

Icarus was pushed out onto the thirteenth floor gently.

Icarus mused that these aliens didn’t have the same superstitions about a thirteenth floor that humans did.

Ship slid next to him as both surveyed the area.

An alien approached them both from the rear. “If you’re here for the new nuctchutuk, we don’t have it yet. But we have some of the older stuff.”

Icarus heard the translator struggle with one of the words. He didn’t want to make it obvious. “We’re here for the older stuff.”

The Atua made a look that Icarus assumed meant surprise. “Which one were you thinking of? We have everything from the last three-eighteen-one years.”

Again, Icarus assumed the translator was literally translating the numbers. They probably made more sense to the locals than to his human ears. He wondered what he was getting himself into. He could feel Ship screaming at him to end the conversation. He decided to go with the flow. “What do you recommend?”

The alien’s neck moved around in circles, and its hands kind of jiggled. Icarus didn’t know what the sign meant.

“I have the perfect one for you both,” the alien said.

The alien guided them into a small round room. The room was a similar technology to the hapticgraphic projectors, only the materials were different. There were several types of materials in this hapticgraphic-projector-based room, each creating a different resonant sound.

“Come see me after if you want to play anything else,” the alien said before closing the door.

Icarus and Ship were locked in a room, and the door closed behind them. Then some sort of movie began to play. But unlike a movie Icarus was used to, the whole room changed shape. It not only changed the music or sounds, but it also changed the magnetic resonance of the place.

Icarus wished he understood the meanings of all the changes in magnetic resonance. His only reprieve was there were subtitles. Icarus assumed this was for people who might have a disability. They had a very good understanding of the written language of these aliens from the TV subtitles.