Devices
While still dark, it was not in fact nighttime like I’d thought.
We were actually in the early hours of the morning. Dyn had waited until my usual hour to wake me up. But we were a few hundred miles east of Demon’s Pit, and my sleep schedule hadn’t adjusted.
The charged cell phone I was holding made sure I was wide awake though.
“How did you get this working?” I asked.
“I experimented,” he said. “Though you were using far more energy than those devices use. There was an item amongst what you left me—the pronged device—I talked with some of the reactor engineers, and they told me it would be for regulating the current.”
Dyn nodded to a stack of plastic crates stacked next to my cot. They hadn’t been there when I fell asleep.
“That’s everything from Demon’s Pit even remotely connected to you,”
“I sure hope you brought my spare outfits…” I said.
“Bottom crate,” he confirmed. “The electronics are in the top one.”
Knowing that Dyn had gone through my stuff irked me, but since returning to Demon’s Pit was such a risk now…I suppose it beat not having my stuff at all.
“[Son of a…]” I mouthed as I opened the electronic crate.
The answer to Dyn’s success was sitting right on top.
I flashed back to the travesty of an experiment I’d tried with Tasser and Nai. We’d taken one of the phone charging cables and wired it into the power supply…but we’d ignored the adapter.
Every smartphone I’d ever seen had a charging cable with a USB connection that plugged into the wall adapter. But back home I’d plugged my phone into a laptop or car as much as I did walls. My house even had a few outlets or power strips with USB charger connections. My experiment had effectively just shoved the USB cable into the power the wall would supply.
No wonder the phone had exploded.
“Those devices require remarkably little energy. I got that one charged a few days ago,” Dyn said. “I had to do some guesswork at first, but I only had to recharge it once in that time.”
I looked at the phone’s lit up screen, it was on 89% charge.
“You figured out how to read the charge,” I guessed.
“My people might prefer base-eight,” Dyn confessed, “but it wasn’t that hard to figure out your people’s numbers from that. Anything else about it was beyond me though. I could only get it to power on.”
“This belonged to…well, a stranger,” I said grimly. “It’s practically useless without the passcode.”
“I guessed as much,”
“There would have been a phone in my room,” I said, “separate from the rest. It would have been with my personal effects rather than the rest of the tech.”
“Your effects are in the next crate,” he said.
“Can you show me how you hooked up the adapter?” I asked, digging for my own phone and charger. I could feel a tremble in my voice.
This is not what I’d expected to wake up to.
Dyn pointed out the custom plug he’d fabricated to fit North American outlets, and I connected it to the conduit running into the tent.
It was a small relief to find my phone with my other personal belongings. I’d been very territorial about the other abductees' effects the first few months. I’d always been pleasantly surprised to find no one was trying to poke at my backpack. I felt good that I wasn’t surprised now. I’d trusted Dyn with my health and life. A phone was nothing by comparison.
Except maybe I was undervaluing the device, because my hands shook as I connected phone to charging cable to adapter.
If Dyn was wrong in any way my phone might have been irreparably damaged, but I didn’t think of it.
For a minute, I thought something awful had gone wrong. Nothing happened, and I was ready to sniff for burning circuitry.
But then my phone gave a faint buzz in my hand and the black screen lit up, shining ‘1%’ in white text.
The hardest thing I did on this whole planet was forcing myself to wait until it read 5% before I tried to power it on proper.
It chirped to life, prompting me for my passcode.
To anyone else they would have been a random string of eight numbers, but tapping into that muscle memory for the first time in months nearly brought me to tears.
The phone unlocked and I was greeted by a picture of my mom and dad standing on either side of twelve-year old me, celebrating my birthday. White and green icing smudged on my cheek.
Five-thousand hours ago I’d blinked away tears in a pitch-black coffin, watching my last percentage of battery trickle away to nothing. This had been the photo I’d been staring at. My mom and dad looked so happy in it. I’d set it to be my background and the phone had died only seconds later.
“How did you do that?” Dyn asked?
…
“Caleb?”
“S-sorry,” I said, clearing my throat. “Do what?”
“Unlock the device,” he said. “You just tapped at the display.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. I’d been looking forward to this. “You guys are going to love touch screens.”
·····
“Unbelievable,” Nai said, tapping at the phone. “How does it work?”
“Ask me again when I’ve had a few months to cascade the details more,” I said.
“The screen is incredible,” Nemuleki said, “I can just barely see the distinct cells, and even then I can’t really pick out a single one on its own.”
“[Pixels,]” I corrected.
Tasser, Dyn, Nemuleki, Nai, and even Corphica were all sitting in my tent looking at Earth devices.
Including mine, it left us with five smartphones and a few more than that in flip and slide phones. It was a chilling reminder that most of the other abductees had been even younger than me. Too many of the contact lists I’d seen had little more than ‘mom’ or ‘dad’.
Still, one of those smartphones wasn’t passcode locked. It was surprisingly hard to figure out who the phone belonged to. Nothing in the contact list gave a hint as to which abductee had carried it, but going by the photos they weren’t in high school yet.
I would comb through it more carefully later, so I let the aliens poke it.
Nemuleki and Corphica, struggling to operate it with their bulky fingers, had settled for looking over Dyn’s shoulder to watch.
The way Nai was sliding through my photos one by one, she seemed to be more focused on the touch screen than the actual pictures.
“You seem less than thrilled,” Tasser remarked.
“I’m…I am happy,” I said. “Seeing my folks’ faces is better than I can describe in this language. But at the same time…I am a little frustrated.”
Tasser prompted me to elaborate with just a look.
“Nai,” I held my hand out for my phone. She walked over and passed it to me. “The phone isn’t as helpful as I thought it would be.”
“You might have over-promised what it could do, but this is still a technological marvel compared to what we’re used to.”
“But I didn’t over-promise,” I said. “I just didn’t really remember how much the phone relied on being on the right planet.”
“Ah…” Tasser said. “It doesn’t have Earth infrastructure to interact with.”
“No music,” I confirmed bitterly.
“Your homeworld really had radio networks everywhere?” Corphica asked.
“We called it [wi-fi], but yes. The networks could connect to other networks, and you could retrieve information from a server in real time. It’s how I listened to music. You could even watch movies or [tv].”
“That’s incredible,” Corphica breathed.
“Then it should be possible to load data onto a device so that it’s accessible even if it wasn’t in range of a network,” Nai guessed. “…Which is why you’re pouting. You’re realizing you could have had more Earth data if you’d stored it on the device itself.”
“Yes,” I said. “That is accurate.”
I took it as a small step of personal growth that I wasn’t in a worse mood. It was out of my hands. And even if it hadn’t been, if I’d downloaded all my music back home out of fear of one day getting abducted, I’d be insane.
“That said, Nai…” I said, raising my phone. “Say [cheese].”
“‘Cheez’?” Nai asked.
I snapped a photo of the Farnata wearing a confused expression.
“How does she look, Tasser?”
My Casti friend took the phone in awe.
“That…that—that was too fast!” he protested.
Nai frowned, “What?”
“It’s done!” Tasser said, showing her the photo. “It wasn’t even a heartbeat!”
That caused more fuss.
“Caleb, how did it process that fast?” Nai asked, sounding almost worried.
“…Are you asking how it takes a picture quickly? It’s digital, not film. You guys might be using [CRT] displays, but you guys have digital pictures. I’ve seen them.”
“Systems for digital image processing require entire rooms to be filled with computer equipment,” Nemuleki said.
“This thing is totally on its own, cut off from any Earth infrastructure, and it just took a digital picture with nearly astonishing clarity in a heartbeat.” Nai added.
Tasser being the only one not freaking out over the phones was gratifying. He was the one who’d heard me talk about this stuff the longest.
My friend didn’t miss a beat when I said, “your turn. Strike a pose, Tasser.”
He threw his arms wide, and I caught the image at a fun moment with his poncho appearing to billow out behind him.
I took a few more of each alien. Part of me wanted to get some pictures of Vorak too, but that would probably be frowned upon…
Nai took some convincing, but I got some group photos too. On both phones no less.
Maybe it was selfish, but I made the group photo the background for the unlocked phone.
One human, two Farnata, and three Casti just barely fit in frame. The focus wasn’t quite right on the Casti faces, and the light in the tent was too dim. But I knew it would be a picture I loved for the rest of my life.
Looking at photos and taking new ones had been a great way to start the morning. But there was business to attend to, namely, getting me off this planet.
“Alright, alright,” I said. “I’ve shown you mine, now you guys gotta show me how you build a spaceship.”
“Sure,” Tasser said. “It should be finished in a few hours. There’s not too much else to do anyway.”
“Technically it’s classified military technology,” Nai pointed out.
“I’m classified too, aren’t I?” I retorted.
“Sort of? You’re in a pretty big grey area,” she said. “Since, you know, you’re also public knowledge.”
“I’ve been wondering about that: how fast is word of me going to spread?”
“No clue. We can figure it out more when we’re in a region with better transmission windows.”
“…Isn’t that going to be on another planet?”
“That certainly would make it a different region, wouldn’t it?”
“Atthia,” I accused.
She gave a conceding nod as we made our way into the tunnel connecting my tent to the launch building.
Nai pushed through a set of double doors into an underground cargo…hangar. Underground isn’t where I’d expect to find a hangar, but it was hard not to call it exactly that with the half-assembled rocket sitting in the middle of it.
More than twenty Casti were diligently welding together metal beams that were as long as houses.
The beams in question were being made in the same hangar too. There was a machine the size of a small school bus off to the side of the spaceship skeleton. It whirred and rumbled and from one end of it emerged a new piece of the spaceship.
“The Prowlers are going to regret leaving that here,” Tasser mused.
“What is it?”
“A complex fabricator,” he answered. “You know the small fabricator Dyn used back at Demon’s Pit?”
I nodded.
“Same principle, but that one was only capable of working with a thin selection of organic molecules. This one is not limited.”
“So it can work with more materials?”
“It can work with any material,” Nai corrected. “As long as you provide it the raw elements necessary, and instructions how to put them together, it can make anything.”
“Wait, does that mean you could feed it Adept-made substances?”
“Potentially,” Nai confirmed. “It depends entirely on what you want to make.”
“We had…” I started, unsure how to describe 3-D printers, “…some machines back home that could dispense certain materials to make things. But they had to use a special liquid plastic that solidified as it was dispensed…I take it this something different?”
“Yes. It’s a Vorak technology that can apply arbitrary forces in a properly sealed environment.”
“Fabrication by machine [telekinesis?]” I asked incredulously.
Nai and Tasser both looked at me funny.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
“Usually when you interject English, we can sometimes still figure out what you mean, but you lost me,” Tasser said.
“Arbitrary force,” I said, “that means force that’s just applied seemingly by nothing right? Like gravity or magnets?”
Nai nodded. “Advanced fabricators like this one can even modulate chemistry too. You can stick rusty metal in one end, and have high quality steel and oxygen come out the other.”
“And the steel can be in whatever shape you want,” I realized. “I’m beginning to see how you could make a spaceship in just a few days.”
“The hard part is assembling the thing,” Tasser agreed. “But with this many hands, we’ll be done by tonight.”
“There were not this many Casti here when I fell asleep,” I frowned. We’d come here with just seventeen heads. Eighteen if you counted Itun, but he was a prisoner.
“You thought I came here alone?” Dyn asked.
“No, you said Ase Serral was here too…”
“And about sixty more Coalition heads,” Nai added. “You’re not going off this planet alone.”
“Indeed not,” the Ase himself said, having snuck up behind us.
I jumped in surprise and so did Nemuleki and Dyn. Only Nai hadn’t.
“Your cascade is cheating,” I complained.
“So is your radar,” she replied easily.
At that reminder, I flicked it on. No one needed to know I kept forgetting to activate it in the morning. Surely there was a way to have it boot up on its own in response to me waking up…
“How much do you already know about your departure?” Ase Serral asked me.
“It’s time sensitive, and we’re trying to get me to Paris. That’s about it.”
Serral beckoned me to follow. “Warlock, see what construction and assembly you can speed up here. Rahi with me.”
“What about me, Ase? ” Dyn asked.
“I don’t care currently,” he said.
Dyn wasn’t flapped at the rude dismissal.
The Coalition commander brought Tasser, Nemuleki, and me to the room he’d taken over for an office.
He did not offer us seats.
“In the travesty of an ‘education’ that Tasser provided,” he began, “did you get to the geography of the local star system?”
I bit off a question about still calling it ‘geography’. This wasn’t the moment for translation jokes.
“We’re on Yawhere, one of the two colonized inner planets. We want to get to Paris, the gas giant further out.”
“More specifically, its moons,” Serral said. “But we can’t fly directly there. This launch facility is…”
“A travesty?” I suggested.
“…Yes,” Ase Serral said. “We’re forced to launch for Archo first.”
I glanced at Tasser for help.
He simply pointed upward. “The big rock in the sky.”
“Wait, Korbanok?” I asked.
“What? No, the big rock,” he said. “Korbanok is just an asteroid the Vorak moved into orbit.”
Oh. Archo. The moon circling this planet.
I had known that. Tasser had told me that worlds like Yawhere made for better colonies because of their moons. It was easier to launch more places from a lower gravity environment like a moon.
I wasn’t totally sure why that was true because we still had to launch from this gravity to get to the moon, but there was probably some reliable math to it.
“The moon,” I said slowly, beginning to grasp why Ase Serral was holding this discussion himself. “The moon which the Vorak control…that moon.”
“Yes,” Serral grimaced. “An arrangement was reached with the Red Sails. We’re going to be landing three craft of Coalition personnel at a civilian landing point near Cirinsko—one of the mid-sized colony complexes.”
“We?” I asked. “You’re coming too?”
“Four fifths of Coalition personnel present are launching,” he confirmed. “The withdrawal we negotiated was the Coalition would withdraw from Demon’s Pit in exchange for safe passage for all withdrawing personnel to Paris.”
“You’re abandoning Demon’s Pit altogether? Isn’t it…important?”
“Yes, we are, and yes, it is,” Serral said. “If nothing goes wrong, we’ll transfer to proper craft and continue on to Lakandt. Altogether, it should prove a routine voyage.”
“It sounds like you could drive a truck through that ‘if’,” I remarked.
For once my translated idiom seemed to land.
“I am…plagued with doubts about the Red Sails,” Serral admitted. “The negotiations I was privy to were odd, to say the least. We received certified assurances from the Red Sails leadership, but…”
“…You think it’s a trap.”
“It obviously could be,” he agreed. “But ignoring whether it is or isn’t for now, the question is whether it’s safe for you here even now.”
I shared a knowing look with Tasser.
“We’ve been down this road,” I said. “And the Vorak haven’t gotten any nicer.”
“It’s not that simple, Caleb,” Nemuleki pointed out. “The Prowlers aren’t the same entity as the Red Sails. The Red Sails gave Demon’s Pit a wide berth once there was some dialogue.”
I shook my head. “How many Prowlers can there be in this star system?” I asked. “You said they weren’t here in full, the ones here are on loan helping out the Red Sails since they lost teeth when Korbanok got raided.”
“The Prowlers' reputation would make convenient cover to hide behind,” Serral admitted. “We don’t have much choice, so assume we’ll proceed for now. Later today Tasser, take him to get fitted for a suit. I want redundancies for when things go wrong.”
“A void suit?” I asked, using their terminology. “Am I going to spacewalk?”
I’d been excited to start the question, but halfway through some dread had crept in too.
“Hopefully not,” Serral answered. “But equipment like that is the kind of thing you don’t gamble on.”
“Better to have and not need than the reverse?”
The Ase gave a click for yes.
“At our current pace, we should be launching a bit less than two days from now. Tasser, you make sure Caleb is ready to launch. Nemuleki, I’ll need you later this afternoon to cover contingencies if… when this all goes wrong.”
“Yes Ase,” she replied.
“Last order of business for now,” Serralinitus said. “Nai tells me you were instrumental in finding our Korbanok data.”
“He was,” Tasser confirmed. “We wouldn’t have found it otherwise.”
“Well you were promised access to the data,” Serralinitus said, “only trouble is the drives aren’t readable separately. We transmitted the data from the one you found to Lakandt, but it will be some time before you actually get to look at it. I apologize. We’ll have arrived on Paris’ moons by the time the data is decoded.”
“I can be patient,” I said evenly.
“There is consolation I can offer,” Serral said. “The Prowlers didn’t have time to abandon this place properly. We got more than a few of their computers, and they had files about you too. Would you like to look?”
“You have to ask?” I grinned.
·····
Four of us gathered around the boxes of files. The same ones who’d run away from the Vorak hunting us across mountains.
Tasser was scrolling through video feeds of my escape from Korbanok in reverse. The computer module was like a small refrigerator, but the screen was the size of a book.
“Oh wow,” Tasser said, “you really tried to shoot Nai, didn’t you?”
Grainy footage of me aiming the pistol played. On the screen I tried to pull the trigger, but no shot went off.
“Rewind a bit further, you can see me take it from the rak,” I said. “Daniel was actually the one doing the Adeptry then. I didn’t figure it out until later.”
“What Adeptry?” Nai asked while Tasser wound back the tape.
“Look, Daniel materialized a speck in the gun’s mechanism to jam it. I took it, but I think it broke in the process.”
Nai’s eyes narrowed at the screen, watching the events carefully.
She had Tasser rewind to watch the moment where I took the gun twice before she burst out laughing.
“Care to share with the rest of the class?” I asked.
“You didn’t jam the gun,” Nai laughed, fighting off tears. “The rak didn’t turn off the safety! And neither did you!”
“But Daniel made a speck in the workings…” I protested.
“You didn’t jam the gun,” she chuckled. “You would be aiming blind, and unless you were unintuitively lucky, you wouldn’t jam anything. No, watch the rak who draws on you. They don’t flick the safety off!”
I didn’t technically know how to operate the Vorak gun, but watching the moment she indicated, the Vorak didn’t appear to take any action aside from aiming the gun.
“Would they also have to load a round into the chamber first?” I asked. I hadn’t held the weapon in months, but looking at it, the structure of the gun was vaguely parallel to an Earth semi-automatic pistol.
“Very good eye, Caleb,” Nai grinned, a little too strongly. “Neither they nor you were shooting anyone with that thing.”
Ah, that was why she had such a strong reaction. “You tried to kill me,” I recalled. “Only you were never in any danger in the first place.”
“I didn’t know that then,” she said, struggling to find the line between amusement, horror, and relief.
“Well I forgive your blatant assault on my person and wellbeing,” I said mockingly.
I was grateful that Tasser skipped over the portion of the footage where I ducked inside the makeshift morgue the Vorak had set up. Those were not sights I needed to relive.
That saw me more focused on the paper documents the Prowlers had been provided about me.
“I have to say, I’m really disappointed in the Prowlers’ intelligence folks,” I said. “These reports are all speculation. And they’re so dry…”
“Dry?” Nemuleki asked.
“Devoid of proverbial water, or any other invigorating substance,” I answered. “They’re boring.”
“Would you prefer the Vorak have a strong grasp of what you were capable of?” Tasser asked.
He had a point.
“Besides, Vorak militaries tend to have a preference for extremely detailed reports. You have to appreciate attention to detail,” Tasser said.
“Well I’d appreciate things a lot more if Vorak didn’t know ahead of time that I ‘materialized a small blinding explosion’,” I read, “ ‘the size and intensity of which suggest Adept practice and likely a limitation in magnitude.’ They think I had practice with Adeptry then?”
“Improvising combustion like you did is quite atypical,” Nai pointed out. “You learned things out of order. Most Adepts only make simple shapes or plain trinkets for the first year or so. Although…”
She got a contemplative look. “The first Adept survived,” she decided. “The one you pinned to the tree, Tasser. What did you two call them?”
“[Stalker,]” Tasser supplied.
“Are you kidding?” I asked Nai. “They were stuck to a tree when it went down a waterfall. That would kill anyone, augmentations or not.”
“Then who survived to tell the Prowlers about your flashbang?”
“[Trapper,]” I answered quickly. “I blinded them too.”
All three of my alien friends looked surprised at that.
“Caleb…” Tasser said slowly, “[Trapper] is dead…you threw him out a building.”
“It was like three stories, tops,” I said.
“Four stories,” Tasser corrected. “The security room was on the top floor.”
“Yeah but I threw him out of the third story window,” I countered.
“Caleb, that’s more than enough to kill a Vorak,” Nemuleki said. “Their bones aren’t suited for withstanding falls.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. In no small part because I still remember helping Tasser away from that particular fight.
We’d hurried away despite a temporary win, because I remembered thinking to myself that ‘we weren’t that lucky’, that there was no way the Vorak would stay down long.
Had I really killed them?
“Caleb,” Nai offered me a folder.
Within it was a ‘combat summary’. Still photos of a frail looking Vorak and a blurry human were accompanied by captions describing each event.
‘Subject contends in close quarters, and shows vertical mobility.’
‘Subject climbed the exterior of the structure, possibly augmented.’
‘Subject displays threateningly fast reflexes and dense physique. Has the reach of a Farnata but the power and density of a Vorak. Extremely dangerous. Close quarters confrontation inadvisable without more data.’
“These have video notations attached to them,” I realized.
Tasser returned to the computer console and started looking through the files.
“Start with 3701,” I suggested, reading the report.
“3701,” Tasser repeated, thumbing down through the list to the correct file.
Once again grainy video sprang to life. Instead of me alone though, it was a black and white surveillance image of the four of us entering a snowy gated area before disappearing into the closest structure.
The video cut to a new perspective, this time in color. The four of us making our way through the mining facility. Taking turns staying awake. A rumble on the screen from an explosion. The four of us scrambling into action.
There weren’t any cameras that covered the underground area I fell into. But cameras overlooking the building tracked Tasser supporting Nai when she collapsed, Nemuleki breaking off toward the vehicle garage.
I watched events play out as I’d experienced them until the footage showed me climbing the building. In retrospect it was obvious my hands were augmented. The mountainside had been frigid, but I’d climbed with bare hands.
Trapper confronted me, trying to shoot me with its crossbow, I ducked out of camera range…
The footage cut to an exterior camera once again and for a few long seconds there was nothing. Then a Vorak crashed through one of the windows and plummeted headfirst through the tin roof of the vehicle garage.
It was not so hard to think they had died, seeing it from that angle…
But the footage didn’t stop there.
A camera angle from the interior of the garage showed a blurry shape plunge through the roof into the floor.
Trapper gave a weak half-motion like they were about to rise to their feet, but then retched and slumped. A dark puddle pooled on the ground in front of their face.
And it still didn’t end.
The footage cut forward, to hours later when three Vorak I recognized all entered the garage, finding the blood remains of Trapper.
One nursed an arm wound where Tasser’s rifle had pinned it to a tree. Another was flanked by a pair of animals. And the third I recognized as the late Sendin Marfek. Chief.
Even just a few weeks ago, I would not have been able to make sense of the scene in lieu of audio.
But I had spent quite some time around Vorak recently. They weren’t so alien as before. Looking at the footage now, it wasn’t so impossible to imagine what my hunters were thinking.
Stalker and Courser were hurt, but it was Chief who mourned. She shook with anger, trying to hide it from the other two. I could imagine what it would be like to sense her psionically, to feel the intensity up close.
My hand reached out to slam the button to stop the recording, but Nai moved a moment sooner, pressing it before I could break the machine.
“Take a minute,” she suggested.
I was of two minds watching Chief show sadness for Trapper.
My own anger welled up too. I wanted to be indignant that they would dare to show sympathy for one another when they’d so casually tried to murder me, the lone survivor of dozens of murdered children.
But the shock of the Vorak’s death surprised me too. It was too easy to remember how impossible victory had felt then. Even escaping had been a hard-fought prize.
It chilled me to the bone learning that Vorak had died.
I’d killed him and not thought a second thing about it.
I knew why I’d done it, and I accepted that I couldn’t have known they died then.
But just like watching Sendin Marfek die, I felt my insides twist into knots.
I’d just learned something about myself. I must have learned it months ago, but it only truly came into focus now, when I was confronted with the consequences of events long past.
I hated to kill people.
It made me feel weak, but I refused to feel otherwise. Not if it meant liking how it felt to watch a life end.
Never.