Harvest Read online

  “And the Chinese,” said Evi. “And the Russians.”

  “And the Mayans and the Aztecs,” said Ben, happy to point out the less obvious.

  “Yes,” Vars said, putting a stop to a discussion that might become the airing of ancestral grievances. “When a technologically advanced civilization comes in contact with peoples who took a different socio-evolutionary path, those with high technology and plentiful resources tend to decimate the native peoples and their cultures.”

  “Obviously,” Ibe said in a loud whisper again. So it was him.

  “Are you trying to point out the technological differences between us and the Mims?” Ian asked.

  “Not all advanced civilizations will necessarily destroy those who are less advanced,” Ben said. “I can think of two arguments against this. One, this could be a human issue. Humans as a people could just have this nasty trait of distrusting strangers and choosing the path of war over cooperation.”

  “While that’s a valid point...” Major Liut spoke up for the first time. It seemed unusual for him to speak at all during these meetings, virtual or otherwise. “We have to assume that the aliens are hostile until proven otherwise. We can’t risk thinking this is a benevolent encounter.”

  Not for the first time, Vars noted that Liut wore a long-sleeve shirt. Everyone typically went sleeveless for easy access to their D-tats. And the ship was temperature-controlled, so he couldn’t have been chilled. Did he have his D-tats removed? If so, how did he know? She felt the hair stand on her arms and tried to remember if she saw any implants on other military personnel onboard.

  “Vars?” Ian prodded her to go on.

  “Yes, sorry,” Vars said and continued. “It’s easy to start thinking in terms of us versus them.” Scientists versus soldiers. “Humans are wired for it. But—”

  “That’s my point,” interrupted Ben. “And my second point is that there might be an evolutionary stage of development, which humans haven’t reached yet, where this kind of thinking drops away. We can’t just automatically think of the Mims as the enemy. We have to give them a chance.”

  “That might be,” Vars conceded. She certainly liked Ben’s attitude better than the major’s...or her own. “But I’d like to get back to the Tasmanians.” Ibe groaned. Vars stared him down. “By the time Tasmanians rejoined the rest of humanity, ten thousand years had passed. And we know the history of their first contact.”

  “So you are saying we have to think of the Mims as evil?” Ben said. He clearly hated the direction the discussion was turning, per Liut’s comment. Vars thought that was good—she wanted their prejudices to come out early. It would be best if everyone laid out their deepest fears. Until they had been aired publicly and in person, it would be hard to overcome them. And it wasn’t just the scientists she needed to convince, but also the military, both here on the ship and back on Earth. That would be far more difficult, especially lacking the face-to-face contact so necessary for reaching shared understandings and mutual agreements. Diplomacy was always an in-person activity. Perhaps it was good that Liut made the effort to join them, although he made reaching consensus among scientists more difficult.

  “I’m saying that ten thousand years is not such a long time,” Vars said. “At one point, the people who colonized the small islands of the South Pacific were some of the most technologically advanced people on Earth. The people who became Tasmanians were among humanity’s earliest explorers. They built boats that could cross hundreds of miles of open ocean. It would be thousands of years before Europeans could match that feat.”

  “But they did all that, and then they stopped,” Evi said. “Why would they not continue? Why not use their boats to go back and forth to the mainland? Why didn’t they keep in contact with their ancestors?”

  “All good questions,” Vars said. “They had advanced technology and used it to go where no man had gone before.” She winked at Ben—she had to use all tools available to bring cohesion to this group. “And then they threw it all away and settled down in isolation.”

  “That’s crazy,” Liut said.

  “But it happened. We may not know why Tasmanians lost their technology and their drive to explore, but we do know it did happen. Technology, once acquired, needs to be maintained. Maintenance and progress need expertise. And that, in turn, requires continuous, intergenerational knowledge transfer—an educational system. Historical events have to be evaluated not only by their place in the time flow of civilization, but also by the average lifespan of individuals and by the length of the intergenerational stretch. Humans live for close to a century now. A present-day generation is approximately thirty years. Both of these measures have been extended by a decade or more in modern times.”

  “So your theory is that Tasmanians didn’t effectively pass on the expertise and enthusiasm for exploration to the next generation after their initial settlement?” Liut asked. Vars got him to participate, to ask questions—a small win.

  “That’s one possibility,” Ian said. “Their lifespans could have suffered a decline after the initial resettlement. The first few generations could have lived just a few years longer than the intergenerational distance.” He looked to Vars for confirmation. “It’s like Tasmanians suffered through a technological Dark Age.”

  “Humans do tend to suffer those over and over again,” added Ben. “It could have easily happened to us after the Keres Triplets.”

  “The point is,” Vars said, “the Mimas artifact remained buried under the ice for many millennia before melting out of its tomb and sending a message. What might have happened to the people who sent it in all that time? We are not the same people we were two thousand years ago…or even a century ago.”

  Liut frowned. “So even if we figure out what the artifact is all about, it might not have anything to do with modern Mims or their motives right now?” he asked.

  “I want us to have multiple time perspectives,” Vars said. “There’s the here and now. But there’s also deep time.”

  “And deep space,” said Ian.

  “Which are the same really,” Ben added.

  Vars sought Alice out in her medlab. She wanted an update on news from Earth. Alice had an encrypted communications link with the Vault’s warders’ station and thus indirectly to her dad. Vars also needed to find out if anyone else on the ship had their D-tats removed prior to the voyage. Since Alice was their medical officer, she might know the answer from a routine interaction with the crew. But if Alice knew, why wouldn’t she have told Vars about it right away? It just didn’t make sense. She trusted Alice...she had to.

  “Hey Alice, did you see Major Liut—”

  “Terry,” Alice corrected her. Like Vars, Alice never really expected to go off on interplanetary mission. Even as she had longer to prepare for this voyage, the woman was nearly as bruised-up as Vars. Vars could see a bloody gash above Alice’s right eye. Mass didn’t change in space. Vars wasn’t the only one to learn that lesson over and over and over again. “Stick with the program, Vars,” Alice said grumpily. “First names only. Team cohesion and all that.”

  Vars nodded. “Why is Terry wearing long sleeves now?”

  Alice raised an eyebrow and winced. “Are you saying…” She paused. “You think he had his D-tats removed? But why would he? He shouldn’t know about...” She didn’t finish. She didn’t know. Vars exhaled—she didn’t even know she was holding her breath.

  They looked at each other. Even before leaving Earth, they both agreed that talking openly about nanobots before it became common knowledge was not a good idea. There were cameras everywhere on the ship, even if no one was supposed to be monitoring private conversations from the bridge. There was an illusion of privacy on board, but only that. Vars moved to get closer to Alice.

  “Shouldn’t,” Vars agreed carefully. She finally managed to get around the lab equipment and get herself into a chair without ban
ging up her knees. Knees and elbows were the worst...followed by head injuries and sprained wrists from trying to grab on to the handholds in the corridors and door jams. But now Vars was close enough to Alice to speak without being overheard. “Back at EPSA Redwood Grove,” she said, “when you came to me after your surgery, I might have heard someone following us in the shadows of the trees.”

  “And you didn’t say anything at the time?” Alice said, her voice inching up. “Or later?”

  “I wasn’t sure.” Vars felt overwhelmed with information at the time...and Alice was barely conscious. Still, neither was an excuse. “I’m sorry, Alice, I should have.”

  “So now you think it was Terry?”

  “I don’t know,” Vars said quietly. “I just wonder if he removed all of his...before leaving Earth.”

  “I haven’t heard anything,” Alice said. It should have been in the medical records, but apparently not. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  “Any word from my dad?” Vars could hear anxiety in her own voice.

  “Just that they’re testing subjects from various sites. Nothing concrete yet,” Alice said.

  “Why is this not all over the news yet?” Vars fretted. “We should be working on removing all of the...from everyone on the ship.” It was hard not mentioning the nanobots or D-tats. “Even if we scheduled out the surgeries now, it would be tight. We’ll reach Mimas in just thirteen weeks.”

  “You, of all people, are jumping to conclusions?” Alice said pointedly. “We don’t know the why of anything. There might be a perfectly benign explanation, as we’ve discussed.” She gave Vars a significant look, and Vars felt her cheeks flush. “If we wanted to explore an exoplanet in another star system, we might have thought of something like...like what your father is studying...”

  “Yet you don’t believe that,” Vars said, glancing at Alice’s arms. She still wore long sleeves every day to cover up the scars.

  “No, I don’t. But it’s in my nature to think the worst. And it’s your job to make us see positive alternatives.”

  “I’m afraid my nature is similar to yours,” Vars said.

  “Either way, you’re doing a good job of opening up the field of possibilities.” Alice patted Vars on the arm. “Go work. I’ll tell you when I have something.”

  Ben poked his head into Vars’s quarters after they broke off for the day to work on problems separately. “Can I come in?”

  “Sure.” Vars moved over to sit on her bed to give Ben the only chair. The man slid into it with unexpected grace. Space experience. “What can I do for you, Ben?” she asked.

  “I just wanted to let you know that not all of us are unappreciative of the stuff you’re trying to teach us.”

  Vars smiled. “And who’s ‘we’?”

  “Well, at least Ron, Trish, and myself.”

  “The whole JPL contingent.”

  “We’ve known each other longest,” Ben said. He was fidgeting with the rim of the little desk, running his fingers up and down, tracing the edges and corners. Vars was very familiar with those—her body found a multitude of ways of exploring the corners and edges in her room.

  “Was that all you came to tell me?” Vars asked. “I mean, I’m very appreciative, but…”

  “I wanted to share some of our ideas,” Ben said, “based on the Mimas probe’s close-up views of the alien artifact.”

  “I’d love to know what you think.”

  Ben became animated, all shyness gone. “Well, first of all, we’ve assumed that the artifact was old.”

  “But you guys did the analysis of the surface, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, from orbit, obviously. The ice around the perimeter of the artifact is new.”

  “So this would indicate that this thing erupted from the crater only recently, right?”

  “We still think so. But—” He turned to the screen on Vars’s wall and manipulated his D-tats. Having those is incredibly convenient, Vars thought. “See here?” He pointed to a bright patch on the photo. “This image was taken when the probe just got into orbit around Mimas. And this one,” he pulled up another image and overlaid it on top, “was taken a few hours ago.”

  Vars looked. The images didn’t match. It wasn’t just the shadows, which were different—it was the shape of the artifact and the size of the “fresh” ice around it. “Did more of it come out?” she asked.

  Ben pointed to other details. “This section over here? It has moved to the other side. And this thing?” He was drawing with his fingers directly on the image, leaving traces for Vars to keep track of all he was showing her. “We think it twisted, and now part of the structure is under the ice again.”

  “You’re saying it’s changing? Moving its bits around?”

  “More than that. This whole part? The one that looks like some kind of broken crystal? It’s completely new. It’s like it grew from nothing.”

  “Or from the materials available on the surface,” Vars said. She heard the awe in her own voice. She had been preparing herself for examining an ancient artifact, an old machine. One that did manage to send out some message, but a message from the past. What Ben was showing her was something very different. She shivered. “Do you think it’s getting instructions for transmutation of its features?” she asked.

  “We haven’t intercepted anything, but we don’t know what to think yet.”

  “Does Ian know about this?”

  “Of course,” Ben said. “But we’re worried about making this public—sending it back home or even showing this to Major Liut—before we can frame it as something less threatening than it seems at first blush.”

  “You don’t want Major Liut to jump to conclusions.” Vars noted that Ben called him Major Liut, too. There was no doubt about the existence of a split between the civilian and military personnel on board. It was dangerous. And if they were being monitored as Alice believed...

  “When you talked about war…” Ben didn’t finish, but Vars knew what he meant. There was a future path where they could really blow this first contact. It would be all too easy to get frightened, to make decisions based on fear, to take a wrong guess. One miscalculation could lead them to an unwinnable war.

  “Thank you for sharing this with me,” Vars said. She turned her attention back to the screen. “If you don’t mind, can you zoom in on the new section?”

  Ben rotated the image and zoomed in on the newer fragment of the artifact. It looked like a series of Rubik’s Cubes with the center piece taken out of each face. There were hundreds of these at different sizes, stacked together.

  “It’s like a fractal,” Ben said. “It repeats at every scale of magnification.”

  “And you guys have no idea what that could be for?”

  “None.” Ben sat back and watched as the image slowly rotated, showing off various views and sections of the artifact. Vars noted that he was rubbing his D-tats. In fact, they looked very red and irritated.

  “Can I take a look at your arm, Ben?” Vars asked, keeping her voice level and hands steady.

  “Oh, you mean this?” Ben held up his left arm. Red lines radiated away from the cyberhumatics. “It’s nothing.”

  “Did you show it to medical?” Vars asked. In addition to Alice, onboard AI kept track of all of their health.

  Ben shook his head. “But everyone is having the same problem. It’s just something about being in space.”

  “Everyone?” Vars felt terror grip her body. It took a lot of effort not to show her panic.

  “Well, Ron and Trish both complained. And I’ve seen Ian scratch his until I thought he would pull the whole thing out. He couldn’t use the D-tats on his left arm for a few days. And Evi mentioned something, too, now that I think about it. Huh.” Ben finally looked concerned.

  “Do you mind coming with me to see Alice?” Vars asked.

  She didn�
��t wait for Ben to say yes. She just dragged him behind her. It was time they stopped playing games and pulled this nonsense out of the whole crew.

  Chapter Nine

  The quarantine order came the day Matteo discovered three of his research assistants dead in the lab—three out of his team of six to date; half of his people gone in one blow. Actually, it was Sophie who found them first. They lay on the floor, their bodies threaded with thousands of filaments that weaved a complicated web, attaching the fingers of one to the eyes of another, linking heads and legs together, binding bodies and hair and nails. It was difficult to see where one individual stopped and another began.

  Even now, an hour later, Sophie was still barely keeping her hysteria at bay. The dead researchers had all come from her vault in Australia, so she knew them well. All Seeds from the same vault knew each other well.

  “These webs are made of human tissue,” Phoebe said from behind a microscope. “But the bots obviously built them. Their bodies…they’re just teeming with bots.”

  Like Sophie and Matteo, Phoebe was wearing a hazmat suit, with warm clothes underneath. In order to depress nanobot activity in the lab, Matteo had lowered the temperature in the whole facility to almost twenty below.

  “Should we try to separate them?” Sophie asked. “It feels wrong to just…to just stuff them in a freezer like this.”

  “No,” Matteo said. “There’s too much risk. I’m sorry, Sophie.” He felt bad about it, but their situation was dire as it was, and he couldn’t add to the risk. And there might come a time when they would need to dissect the bodies of the dead researchers to learn nanobots’ plans for the modifications they inflicted on those bodies...just not now....not when everything was so raw. Matteo shook his head and added, “We’ll just have to try to disinfect this facility as best as we can, so we can continue working.”

  “Continue working? You can’t expect us to continue after this!” Sophie screamed. Earlier, she tried using her kill switch to turn off the cyberhumatics in her body, but absolutely nothing happened. She had Phoebe try to access the switch remotely, still nothing.