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There Aint No Justice 126
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| There Ain't No Justice |
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| #126 |
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- Metamorph -
Chapter 06
by Arifel
VI
`Public pay-phones must survive in a world of
unfriendly, greedy people, and a modern payphone
is as exquisitely evolved as a cactus.'
- bruce sterling, `hacker crackdown'
i made several more films. one of my friends knew someone who knew
someone else who had a contact in that shadowy world of extremely rich,
decadent people who commissioned snuff films and the like. some of
these films involved supposed aliens, all the parts of which i played.
my special effects budget was low; if i couldn't be bothered altering my
appearance to suit the part, i built mechanical shells which i could
control directly.
some of these films would have been considered decidedly nasty by other
standards. i entered a period where i gave free reign to the darkest
corners of my imagination, no restraints at all; De Sade would have been
proud. looking back, it would be hard to decide which one was the
worst, but the one i had the most fun making was a farcical history of
bestiality. it ran for fifty minutes, involved Catherine the second,
fanciful ancient Egyptian rites and an extended sequence about
Aelfthryth, the wife of English King Edgar in 965 who was reputed to
have magickally changed into equine form to romp with wild horses.
it was just after finishing this film that i discovered the appeal of
what i called limited public performance. i was in the city, waiting
for one of my contacts to show up when a team from one of those
television prank shows appeared, filming a clown walking down the street
with a fifty-dollar bill on a piece of string. a couple of Goths
detoured around this character, to avoid being filmed.
`god, that's stupid.' one of them commented. an idea came to me; i held
up an index finger in a `watch this space' gesture and followed the
clown, making rapid changes to the inside of my chest cavity. the Goths
followed me slowly, pausing when the cameraman turned to film my
reaction.
i stood there, head to one side, as if listening to a far-off sound that
only i could hear. then i held my middle, glancing down in surprise;
something fist-shaped bulged up underneath my T-shirt and exploded out
the front in a mass of blood; a chest-burster from Ridley Scott's film,
`Alien'. the tiny creature shrieked, wriggled out of my body, fell to
the ground and raced off between the legs of the cameraman. as the
sound-man fainted and dropped his furry microphone, i looked back at the
Goths and grinned, a trickle of blood running down from the corner of my
mouth.
i disguised myself as a traffic-light signal box, planted myself in the
ground alongside a real signal box and waited; eventually, a maintenance
engineer came to inspect this unplanned addition, unlocked my door and
ran off screaming at the sight of glistening red intestines and slowly
pulsing internal organs where banks of switches should have been.
i ate foliage until i'd expanded my mass sufficiently to take on the
form of a small aeroplane, a Lear Jet. i followed a 747 and pretended
to mate with it. i discarded the mass by forming hundreds of
glass-bladed knives and dropping them out of the sky on to the people in
a crowded football stadium.
there was a shop that sold alternative music recordings, T-shirts,
videos and the like; they also sold strange, gothic artwork on
commission. i grew things shaped like Gigeresque ceremonial daggers out
of polished bone and gave them to the owner. i made more films,
impossibly perverse horror and pornography, as if fascinated with the
conjugation of sex and death.
i took on a form somewhere between a gargoyle and a vampire, and
hunkered down on skyscraper ledges late at night, screaming into the
darkness.
i visited night-clubs as a vampire. i selected one person out of a crowd
at random and followed him for a month, examining every detail of his
life, every moment, no matter how banal.
i built a small nuclear fusion device, ferried it up to the dark side of
the moon, set it off.
i hid myself within a camouflage form, almost transparent, a glass
statue; i entered a geriatric hospital and killed all of the patients
with an overdose of an euphoric poison, then planted heavy wooden stakes
through each dead person's heart. i stood in the stairwell, listening
to the shouts as the nurses found the bodies, and wondered if i'd lost
touch completely. i didn't know if Lydya knew what i was doing, or if it
was being followed by the other Metamorphs. i was reasonably sure that
if they did know, i would been seen to have transgressed the Law. i
reasoned that if i was doing wrong, they would have told me.
for a few months, i got worse. then i realised what was wrong. i went
to look for Lydya.
she was out in the northern part of the pacific ocean, busily sinking
Japanese whaling ships by the simple expedient of burning holes through
their hulls with a laser. i'd rowed out to meet her from Darwin; she'd
hijacked a Caribbean pirate ship and had mounted the laser - stolen from
an American military base - on the foredeck, powered by a custom fusion
reactor. we didn't waste any time with preliminaries.
`i think we should go out and talk to those aliens.' she didn't say
anything; the whole issue had been debated on our network, back and
forth, since we'd returned with the news. i waited until it was obvious
that she wasn't going to say anything, then added: `i have a plan.'
`let's hear it, then.' i climbed over cables and pieces of discarded
equipment, reached out and drew her to me. where our skin touched (she
was wearing a purple-and-green wetsuit), tendrils writhed out, data
lines spread and touched, swapping information far faster than we could
have spoken it.
i proposed either building our own copy of the American space shuttle or
hiring a real one, flying it out to near where the aliens were and
opening discussion with them from the point of view of a `primitive'
race. i didn't know if the aliens would be able to tell that we weren't
human, even if we used out best disguises, so as a backup i intended to
have a second group of Metamorphs pretending to be Moridani, in a larger
space-craft, as advanced as we could make it. i felt that this kind of
misdirection would work; pretending that they'd need a ship to get
around in. if the situation between the first ship and the aliens got
uncomfortable, we could have the second ship come in and destroy any
evidence. i agreed that no matter what we did, we'd attract the
attention of this NoSanNoOs that Saranaxio-Feylen-Nadawi-Kenak had
mentioned. i felt confident that we could eliminate the ships in the
asteroid belt; i didn't know if we could stop them signalling to their
waiting companions elsewhere.
`if we simply sit around here doing nothing, they'll come, eventually.
if we go out to meet them, they'll come sooner. but if we go out, we'll
learn something about them.' she thought this over.
`i've been thinking about going out and looking for the Moridani. or
anyone who's not with the NoSanNoOs. there can't be just one race
opposed to them.'
`well. do you think we should do this before or after dealing with the
presence in our system?'
`my plan is open-ended. no idea how long searching the entire galaxy
will take. your plan at least can be staged and organised.'
`and we can use the fake Moridani ship to go looking afterwards.' she
smiled.
`i'll put the word out on the net.' i held her closer, rested my chin
on her shoulder.
`can i ask you an, uh, awkward question?' she laughed silently. `do you
have functioning genitalia at the moment?'
`give me a few minutes.'
we were ushered into the office of the head of the National Aeronautic
and Space Administration, a grizzled old man by the name of Benton.
Lydya was dressed severely, businesswoman style, wearing mirrorshades. i
was dressed similarly suit-fashion. we appeared to be in our
mid-thirties. he looked about to waffle, so i cut him short and said,
`we'd like to rent a shuttle for a private mission.' he sat down,
blinked. he decided to be as blunt with us as we were being with him.
`there is a waiting period, you know - quite a few missions queued up
and already paid for...' i smiled.
`we can pay any price you'd care to name. we can even supply engineers,
equipment, materials, to build another shuttle if necessary. we could
simply have built our own, but it would take too long. i'm sure that
for sufficient remuneration, one of the missions ahead of us could be
moved back.' he sat back, elbows on the arms of his chair, fingers
steepled together, eyebrows beetled.
`this isn't some kind of joke, is it?' i handed over our credit
balance. he glanced at it; his eyebrows did a little dance.
`i know you don't like strange people driving your shuttles, so we can
pay for the services of a pilot and co-pilot, but i'm afraid we must
insist that the rest of the crew be made up of our people.' i handed
over a schedule, sixty pages of detailed notes, plans and time-lines.
`we're ready to go right now. all we need is your assent.' i was
prepared to bring in presidential influence if necessary, but the credit
balance had hypnotised him. he forced his eyes up from the (even to me)
impressive figure and smiled weakly.
`when would you like to leave?'
there were six of us; NASA pilot Alex Stewart, copilot Marianne
Martindale and navigator Shelby Stevens were the human component of the
crew. Lydya and i had combined mass and information to make a third
body, packed with nanotech weaponry and mass-destruction devices that
could be assembled and used within seconds, stored in a male human form
that we referred to, jocularly, as `Killer Kadugan'. we then reverted
to as human a form as possible while still being Metamorphs. it would
take almost a minute to undo in case of an emergency, but a high-
resolution scan of our bodies would show us to be superficially human.
Killer Kadugan was only human on the outside, and only barely that; his
body was almost two and a half metres tall and muscled like a
body-builder who'd been brought up on steroids. he didn't say much. i
occasionally caught some interesting looks from Stevens and Martindale
in Kadugan's direction.
the launch was uneventful. it was somehow more exciting than the
flights i'd made on my own; possibly due to the build-up of suspense
before the launch, or the (admittedly remote) possibility of the whole
thing blowing up on the pad. once we'd made orbit, we sent Kadugan back
to check the payload (extra fuel and some `prototype' life-support
gear), and then we faked an accident.
`Uh, Huey's got an interrupt.' muttered Martindale. `Huey' was one of
the three computers that ran the shuttle (which we'd renamed `Hot Needle
of Enquiry' without bothering to inform Larry Niven). this fault was
something which Lydya had forced, microscopic feelers extended from her
hand into the machinery, shorting out vital components.
`take him off-line.' ordered Stewart. as she did so, `Louie' failed
also; before anyone could do anything, the engines had fired up, retros
firing (it seemed) at random, the ship rotating end-over-end briefly
before the main engines kicked in. there was confusion, shouts, pieces
of debris floating around in our faces; by the time they managed to shut
the engines down, we were on our way to the asteroid belt.
we'd had to fiddle the engines' design before we left, otherwise we'd
never have made it. as it was, we spent an interesting two months in
that shuttle (it was lucky that we'd had that protoype life-support gear
on board) with the NASA people without letting on who we were, although
the two women somehow managed to find time alone with Kadugan, and
Stewart was giving Lydya those kinds of looks for the last week of the
flight before we got within visual range of the alien craft.
just before we reached that point, i casually glanced out one of the
ports and noticed a faintly blinking signal off to one side. that was
the Fake Moridani ship, ready to step in if they got the signal from us.
the aliens, when we reached them, were entirely passive. no external
signals that the humans could detect; nothing that we could see with any
of our own passive senses. they might as well have been abandoned. we
clumsily steered the shuttle through their midst, shining lights on
them, wondering if we dared to go out and try to knock chunks off them
with a mining hammer. we let the NASA people zap one of the arrow-head-
shaped ships with a beefed-up message laser; nothing happened. we were
about to give up and head back home when the fourteen arrow-ships
suddenly moved to surround us, a loose sphere formation, all pointing
inwards. from what i could sense passively, they used a variant of the
reactionless drive for close-range manouvering.
we sat like that for a few hours before one of them decided to shoot the
rear end of the shuttle off with some kind of beam weapon. we barely
managed to keep the cabin pressurised; Martindale was frantically
signalling our distress when the arrow-ships spun away from us,
seemingly simultaneously (although playing it back slower, i could see
each ship, one after the other, being hit by streams of almost-light-
speed particles from the fake Moridani cruiser). they'd decided to hit
them as hard as possible. Lydya and i started receiving messages from
the Metamorphs on board the cruiser. they'd blocked the pumpkin-shaped
ship, which had started sending oddly-coded signals just as the
arrow-ships had surrounded us. once the arrows had been disabled, the
cruiser flashed up to us and surgically disabled the pumpkin-ship with
thin streams of high-speed dust.
the NASA crew were almost frantic by now; we'd given up any pretense at
being human (Lydya had dissolved from the waist down and was repairing
the back of the ship, and i'd forced my hand through the side of the
hull in order to get a better link to the other Metamorphs). when we
were sure they were safe, we sent them back to earth with Kadugan and
floated over to the pumpkin ship.
it was an odd design; nested toroidal sections around the main drive,
which was a deceptively complex subspace gradient effector (it worked by
pushing the ship out of real space; the further up the subspacial
gradient it went, the faster it could appear to move through real
space). the design betrayed thousands of years of improvements.
there was a space about the size of a football field at the centre of
the ship that we couldn't see into; we had to enter the craft (through
the hull, which was a lot stronger than it had any right to be - ceramic
metal reinforced at the atomic level) and then kick our way through to
the inner section. none of the sections were pressurised, although i
did detect traces of nitrogen and oxygen here and there.
the inner section was empty except for a box the size of a bus, made of
the same substance as the ship's hull; featureless except for a symbol
painted (well, not so much `painted' as `atoms altered to reflect light
differently') on the side - the dark-red circle with the segmented
circle around it. suspicions confirmed. while our companions in the
cruiser examined the humanoid bodies in the arrow ships - close enough
to human normal so that they'd pass for human under a casual inspection
- Lydya and i circled the box, looking for a way in, or a port, or
something to give away its function.
`it's the source of the signals which we're blocking,' the net reported.
`they're being sent - or trying to be sent - along the (folded-space)
concept. if this is as advanced as their technology gets, then we won't
have any problem dealing with them.' we decided to tow the thing back
to a temporary research facility established on Phobos, which we
believed was sufficiently far enough away from Earth to be safe.
however, when we moved the pumpkin-ship, the signals stopped. the faint
traces of EM energy which we'd sensed inside the box stopped, also. it
appeared to be dead. Lydya kicked it.
`it's crude, i know, but the only thing left to do is break it open and
study the pieces.' i regarded it, rubbing my chin (my recent stubble
breaking off in the vacuum).
`i think we'd be better off just dropping it into the sun.'
`Luddite.'
it was just as well we didn't. after a month of intense research, we
established that the box was some kind of crystalline array designed to
shunt subatomic particles around like a three-dimensional multiple state
machine; the most complex computer i'd ever seen. it was dead, of
course, and there wasn't any way of telling what had been stored in it,
but we all agreed that it would easily have had the capacity for
sentience. there was some simple interfacing machinery at one end of the
box, very much like the keyboard and monitor of a standard personal
computer in that they would allow the machine to communicate with the
outside world. it had chosen not to.
i began to think that we didn't have a good enough grasp on this
problem, and that Lydya had been right; we needed a second opinion. it
didn't take me long to decide to go with them when they took the cruiser
and headed off for the centre of the galaxy. we didn't know if what we
were looking for was there, but it was as good a place to start as any.
hopefully, we'd find someone to ask along the way.
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