Chapter 7 - Silence
(in which there is a picnic, and history, and...?)
> "The past itself is not a narrative. In its entirety, it is as chaotic, uncoordinated, and complex as life. History is about making sense of that mess, finding or creating patterns and meanings and stories from the maelstrom."
> --John H. Arnold, History: A Very Short Introduction
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Its shiny metallic lips did not move as it repeated. "Are you sure this was a good idea?"
"Tsip, put down the blaster," Spots inched backwards.
Zkeh raised the foremost part of his torso, appearing as something akin to a four-armed reptilian centaur. "Identify yoursself, inorganic creature of the depthss..."
"Are you sure this was a good idea?" it smiled. Half of its face stayed limp. The rest of its body did not move.
Iraklijs awkwardly chuckled in a mixture of incredulity and nervousness. "Are you sure you're not a parrot?"
Ekut was frozen in thought. Her brain struggled to quite process the situation that unfolded in front of her. She put on her most confident expression and breathed in... "Judging by how another your kind reached into our group's brains, and how you speak English, which I somehow doubt your home culture does, and how you seem to be mocking Mr. Silis, you are probably sapient and can understand our speech. Do something if you are. Something harmless but noticeable."
It blinked. Or rather, its eyes flashed black. Then they popped out of their sockets and rolled onto the platform. It walked backwards, both fallen eyes' gazes fixed on Ekut, and tumbled off the platform with a splash, deafeningly loud thanks to the surrounding silence.
"The fuck..." Iraklijs muttered.
"Do we take that as a confirmation or no?" Spots rubbed their chin.
"It was harmless, and it was noticeable," Ekut shrugged. "But it didn't really feel sapient."
"What, you thought it would start tap dancing?" Iraklijs rolled his eyes.
Zkeh looked at him. "I kept meaning to assk, what iss it with you and joking in inappropriate timess?"
"I cope that way. Would you rather I cried? Or curled up into a fetal position?" he said, carefully picking up one of the eyes. It was like a marble, made not of glass or grooved alloy but of a rubbery and reflective resin. "I have a bad feeling-- actually, no. A good feeling about this," he caressed the eyeball's surface.
Tsip leaned in to briefly glance at the eye. "Throw it away."
"...why, it's a whole different material. It's so valuable..." Iraklijs looked into the singular dark pupil of it, which seemed to have manifested just now.
"The thing could be tracking us through the eyes. Throw it," Tsip was the only one not quietly looking directly at the eye's pupil.
"I'm fairly sure that if it wants to find us again, it could do it easily anyways," he chuckled as he kept staring. The eye stared back, and the pupil widened slightly. "Why not keep it? No loss."
Tsip kneed him in the crotch, ripped the eye from his hand, and tossed it like one would pitch a baseball. There was a splash somewhere in the distance, then another close by as the kseldani kicked the other eye off the platform.
Spots was, for once, the first to snap out of the eye's influence. "Thank you so much, Tsip. Thank thank thank you."
"Fuck this shit," Iraklijs sat down. "You know, I didn't feel any black fog this time. It has to be a different kind of mindfuckery. But I still deserved that kick for touching suspicious objects."
"I suppose that explains why Tsip was the immune one this time," Ekut rubbed her eyes. She was clearly also irritated at herself for falling into such a trap.
"I simply had no interest in the eye. Unlike any of you," Tsip said. "You are all too invested in material goods and baubles."
"But that's our mission," Iraklijs said.
Ekut sighed. "No, our mission was to go in and scout a bit before returning with better preparation, and to methodically scout the upper levels of the facility, perhaps grab a few things of note. But then you know what happened."
"Spots wonders if facility is itself sapient," the bquaa stared at the sky. The fog above seemed to ever-so-slowly coalesce into barely-perceptible swirls before becoming uniform again.
"Does it hate us then?" Iraklijs said.
"No. No no. Does an immune system hate a small clump of microbes in the bloodstream? No. No no. It has a few of its green blood cells launch their spikes at the intruders. Spikes that assimilate microbes into the body's biota. You don't even realize they exist," Spots said.
Iraklijs's eyes widened. "Is that... how your biology works? Your immune system basically brainwashes pathogens?"
"Yep yep yep. It's how Spots realized the analogy."
The human simply grunted.
Zkeh, meanwhile, paced around the platform, dejected and sulking.
Ekut looked into the distance using binoculars. None of the available wavelength filters penetrated the fog enough to determine what lay beyond. The ledge was no longer in sight, as the floe drifted away from it. "Looks like we'll just float around until this thing reaches an obstacle. It has to, soon enough."
Iraklijs' stomach rumbled. "I'm hungry and thirsty, and things seem to have cooled off. Why not have a lunch break here? Perhaps a picnic, so to say," he knelt and took off Zkeh's backpack, then reached into it and unfolded a small cloth, checkered red and white.
The rations were very different from the proper food that was eaten in the rover just a few hours ago. Wrapped in shiny aluminum were bricks of colorful, striped substance that felt oily to the touch upon being taken out, but quickly solidified in the frigid environment. They were all the same for each species, both internally and externally, and differed only in flavor. These were MultiSpecies-Compatible Portable Meals, optimized for use with the enzymes for easy logistics. The satla made a killing out of royalties on the patent, which they licensed to all sorts of civilizations.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
"Oh, thosse thingss..." Zkeh's mood certainly did not improve.
"Would you rather eat something fancy and then starve?" Iraklijs said as he took out a multithermos from his own pack, flipped a switch, and poured some tea into a covered, self-heating cup. The hot tea billowed out a fountain of condensation in the frigid air.
They all set their oxygen masks to the ingestion mode, which allowed passage of food and drink at the cost of making breathing uncomfortable.
"I ssupposse we cannot be picky..." the chohjozra was the first to bite into the brick. After feeling the chunk with his long tongue for a moment, he swallowed. "...I forgot how tassty thosse thingss are, actually..."
Iraklijs sniffed the ration through. He hadn't tried them in a while either. It smelled the same way bread tasted (not smelled), with an equally powerful tinge of highly processed meat... dog food? Gulping, he took a bite and let it melt in his mouth. It tasted like what its smell suggested, and had the texture of ice cream, if ice cream was lukewarm. Many fluid-filled bubbles popped as he chewed, their viscous contents having a metallic aftertaste.
Trying not to gag, he washed the ration down with the tea. Normal, mundane, human tea, the leaves of which he bought all the way back at the habitat of Ember-1. Probably of a genemodded tea strain optimized for hydroponics, but it felt exactly like proper food instead of whatever that was. And that was what mattered.
Despite the simplicity of the meals, the group's nerves were calmed. The horror seemed to transition into a kind of mundanity.
"It's a shame the Deep Tide fuckers managed to steal that omniflavoring machine that Lyiue lended to the bquaa station back there. Ugh," Iraklijs sighed.
"Was the kin's fault, we admitted," Spots said. "We - Spots and Blup - argued with Tekatl. Tekatl was convinced. Spots' and Blup's people after all. Not letting borrow... bad."
"Blup is nice," Iraklijs said. "They seemed all too tight-lipped by your species' standards though. I asked what inspired them to join COMA and they just shook their head then slithered away."
Spots tapped their chin. "It's the hive's secret. We don't tell to dryskins. Blup tells us. Could turn out bad, Blup says."
Tsip put down their ration. "I wasn't there for the raid. Or the stuff after it. What is the matter with the Deep Tide. Aren't the cetaceans on your side, human. Why do they hate you. I have no idea about human history."
"Do you want the long story or the short one?"
Tsip thought for a moment. "Long. What else is there to do."
"You asked for long, so prepare for long," Iraklijs flicked a switch to return his mask to the breathing mode, then took a moment to compose himself. "So over most of the 2170s, humanity, then under the United Nations of Earth instead of the Fed, was gradually becoming culturally corrupt. We were getting complacent, and more importantly we elected Cefero Cascos in 2176. Sleazy-ass guy, and an idiot. He rolled back genemod rights, especially in the frontier, started flirting with megacorporations, made human-supremacist comments, and finally started strangling the non-core worlds with extreme taxes and tariffs. December 2180. Two weeks before the election. A Felid-genemod wannabe revolutionary pops a cap in Cefero's head during a speech on live TV. Can't say he didn't deserve it, especially with that haircut," Iraklijs chuckled with some irony.
"His vice president, who was even more reactionary, assumes control and the elections are postponed. He then gets impeached as evidence showed up that he was a sex trafficker. The whole civ loses its collective shit and the central government runs around like a headless chicken. January 2181, multiple frontier core worlds announce the formation of the Alliance for a Better Humanity, colloquially known as the Rebel Alliance. Within the month, it splits into the Autonomists, who wanted to reform the UN into a less centralized state, and the Separatists, who wanted to make their sectors or planets fully sovereign. Some Separatists, but not all, begin shooting at both the Autonomists and the UN. February, the Canid population in the southeast of the UN rebels, and that whole military district... which was majority Canid, you know? I told you Cefero was an idiot... it mutinies under the leadership of the strongman Sieng Redclaw, forming the Black Fang Republic. March, the True-Human Organization, the same guys Cefero flirted with, similarly rebels in the east and forms the Human Republic, which then proceeds to murder everyone who was a genemod, alien, cyborg, or 'deviant' within its borders, and struggles to hold on to its lands as partisans, mostly Felids and baseliner allies, run amok. Meanwhile, at roughly the same time, the two-century-old Rationalist movement has a schism. Around half embrace human-supremacist ideals, and split off to form the State of Reason under the Movement for Human Advancement. Despite being cyborgs they cast their lot with the THO for pragmatic reasons, because the cyborgs of TRAPPIST denounced them and sided with Terra-- and the BFR, seeing that the THO accepted, did the same..." Iraklijs then took a very deep breath.
"But that's not all. The war rages for another 2 years. I'm gonna gloss over that. In 2183, much of the uplifted cetacean population of the ocean-world Raindrop was swept up by ultranationalist rhetoric against the land-dwellers. Even more extreme than the ty-uc-kch, and at least those have the excuse of being aliens and not having to thank us for existing... anyways, they formed the 'Deep Tide'. It's even less coherent than the THO, and has a might-makes-right society like the Abyssals. However... remember the BFR's 'alliance' with the supremacists? They refused to participate in the genocide, and overall barely helped with the war effort. They did avoid suspicion, however, by making up excuses about engaging with other enemies. So at the Mongolian colony world of New Khovd, they deployed to fight the UN's forces alongside the Organization's largest army. They stayed awake, guarding the THO's soldiers as they slept in their tents. But then a direct order from Sieng came, and they complied," Iraklijs then covered his mouth and laughed in a mocking way.
"The UN's army arrived to see the Canids partying amid looted camps, with the nearby lifeless lake red with blood and black with charred corpses. There were no POWs to take; as Sieng later bragged, he ordered that no quarter be given. The BFR proceeded to peace out with the UN, while the Human Republic collapsed with most of its army gone and its 'trusted' 'ally' rubbing the backstab in its face. The MfHA and Deep Tide panicked but tried to hold out, and somewhat succeeded, at the same time enacting their contingency plans, which the THO did not have," Iraklijs paused and stretched.
"This proved right, because with the rout of the separatists in the north and west, combined with major Autonomist victories, the latter essentially won the war on New Year 2184. The UN rebranded into the Terran Federation, enacted decentralization and post-species-state policies, and... began the Scouring of the Traitors. The last few holdouts of the THO were wiped out or forced to flee, and the combined Terran and Canid forces began closing in on the MfHA and Tide when... both of them packed up in an orderly manner and also made a break for it, uniting with the fleeing THO. 'It' being the general direction of the nearest alien civilization that might take them in. What followed is... a story for another day, but the gist of it is that the THO and MfHA ended up under the Dal-Ghar Empire, on the desert planet of Bnykaal-hyl-kaah, while the Deep Tide ended up under the protection of their Abyssal idols, right in the middle of the Oval. They have a truly alien society, frankly of all the transhumans only Yig is weirder, and those folks at least aren't murderous, most of the time. They basically act as a pirate cartel under Abyssal protection. Basically the entire Oval except the fringes is targeted. They take loot, they take slaves. Pray they don't take you alive," he finished his rambling monologue and rubbed his face under the wrapped scarf.
Tsip tilted their head. "I understood."
Zkeh hissed. "How did you even manage to process that waterfall of wordss?"
The kseldani leaned back and flopped their two antennas back and forth. "When your mind is empty, you can process a lot all at once. You should try it someday."
Another hiss, this time louder. "No thankss."
The bquaa, on the other hand, was coiled into a tight spiral. They looked bored during Iraklijs' improptu lecture. "Spots knew. Well, Spots didn't know, Spots looked into the database."
Iraklijs sighed. "I could have looked it up on my archive of the important parts of the Net, or asked the pseudosoph in my pad, and then showed it that way to Tsip... but I'm a romantic. That's how it was done for thousands of years, telling stories around a campfire. Minus the campfire, here."
Altair's familiar chime echoed from a pocket. "Or one could have asked me!"
"Well, you were recharging. Anyways, you missed a lot, Altair. We should be in calmer waters now," Iraklijs said, then looked into the distance. "Literally. Or I guess calmer nanites."
"Look!" Spots yelled and pointed the other way. "Waterfall!"
Iraklijs felt he died inside a little. He turned and saw that it was no waterfall they were about to fall off of, like something out of an antique movie, but rather a ledge, much like the one they recently rappeled from. However, the flow, instead of being sideways to the cliff, seemed to go directly towards it and down some unseen gutter.
And the current seemed to accelerate here; the subtle howl of the speed-wind alerted the explorers to the imminent danger.