2015 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide Page 32

  The next morning she knew that there was still something wrong with Niv. During breakfast he sat next to one of the bots, instead of on the chair that had been assigned to him by the Randozimer. Amazingly, Mom and Dad didn’t make a fuss.

  Later, Niv refused to do his exercises for the day, and Mom and Dad let him get away with that too. Maybe I should start throwing more tantrums, Mina thought. Then she reminded herself that Niv really was a special case, and her worries for his wellbeing returned.

  Sometime in the afternoon, as Mina was being tutored on basic genetics by JJ39, she heard her mom yelling. Her mom’s voice was muffled, as though it were coming from outside.

  “No!” her mom was saying. “Niv! Stand back! Don’t do it!”

  Mina raced out of her room, down the stairs, and followed the sound outside their home’s main entrance, where Goli and Kouros stared, pale-faced, at the roof.

  Niv was standing on the edge, waving his arms as though they were wings. He had a goofy grin on his face, and he seemed completely oblivious to his parent’s cries or to how close he was to a twenty-foot drop.

  “I’ve told the bots to get up there and bring him down safely, but they don’t seem to be responding,” Kouros muttered.

  Of course not, Mina thought. Not if Niv didn’t want them to.

  “Let’s activate code yellow,” Goli said.

  “But... ” Kouros began.

  He was silenced by Goli’s eyes. “None of that will matter,” she said. “We need to save our son.”

  Mina had heard stories about code yellow. It was an emergency signal that would draw a special taskforce to your location to help with whatever the problem was. After the emergency was resolved, there would be an investigation into what had caused the crisis. If the cause was found to be parental negligence, children might temporarily be separated from their families. Or parents from their children. All the findings would be fed into the Master Randomizer, which might determine there was a better match out there. Mina shuddered at the thought.

  Goli was about to enter the code yellow command into her wrist band when the unthinkable happened.

  Niv jumped.

  Instead of falling to sure doom, Niv soared through the air, completed two somersaults, spun three hundred and sixty degrees, and landed perfectly on his feet.

  Then he bowed.

  It took Mina’ stunned brain a few instants to recognize the move. It was from the theater piece. She was sure of it. Something one of the bots had done, and which had drawn much applause from the audience.

  Mom and Dad ran over to him, crying with joy, and Mina joined them. It was only when they hugged Niv that they realized there was something odd about Niv’s clothes. They seemed to be hiding something, something inflexible and artificial.

  “What’s this?” Goli asked, and they peeled back his sleeves, and unbuttoned his shirt.

  “Looks like a new flexsuit,” Kouros said.

  He was right. Now Mina could see the suit’s servo-pads and layers. Instead of putting it over his clothes, as he usually did, Niv had dressed himself over it. And the suit was different, too. It must be the one he had been working on. It was stronger and made of more connected parts. Obviously, it had given him the ability to perform the amazing jump. It’s like an exoskeleton, Mina thought.

  Then she understood.

  “Look at the colors of his clothes, Mom.”

  Goli did, but didn’t see anything unusual. “Just plain black,” she said. “What about it?”

  “Don’t you see?” Mina said. Tears filled her eyes. It was all her fault. If she hadn’t – if she hadn’t – “He’s dressed in black, and he has his new flexsuit under his clothes. He’s pretending that it’s part of his body! He’s pretending that he’s one of the bots from the play!”

  Her parents’ eyes bored down on her.

  Before she could start her confession, Niv said, “She’s right. I want to be more like the bots.”

  All eyes, including Mina’s, now turned on him. Despite the astonishing jump he’d performed moments ago, his voice sounded confident and calm.

  More surprising than that, he made eye contact with each of them, and then smiled.

  …………………………

  Mina was grounded for the following week, spending most of the time in her room. She missed her tutor bots, her friends, and even Mom and Dad. Fortunately, once in a while, Niv would sneak in a surprise visit, cheering her up.

  He wasn’t like the old Niv, distant and unreadable. Ever since the jump he’d continued to change. He was becoming more expressive, articulate, and in general better at interacting with Mina, and, she guessed, everyone else. And his obsession with bots – his wish to behave like them, his pretending that he was one – continued unabated as well. Mina didn’t mind it. She thought it was weird, sure, that Niv would want to spend hours sitting inanimate in one location, or performing boring, repetitive tasks over and over. But it was his choice, and whenever he told her what he was up to, he seemed to be happy.

  Apparently, the same couldn’t be said of their parents. One day Niv marched into Mina’s room, severe worry lines etched into his forehead.

  “That’s it!” he said. “They’re so freaked out that they’ve scheduled me for a psych eval. Yesterday I was out in the back garden, walking back and forth with the bot who was mowing the lawn, and Dad just stood there the whole time, studying me like I was some kind of insect. I’m sure that’s when he decided.”

  “Uh... how long did you walk along with the bot?”

  Niv narrowed his eyes. “Not that long. Maybe an hour or two. And I wasn’t just walking with it. I was making the same noise and movements it was making.”

  O-kay, thought Nina, that’s normal. But she didn’t say anything.

  “That’s not the point,” Niv complained, waving his hands in the air. “Didn’t you hear me? They’ve scheduled me for a psych eval!”

  “I’m sorry,” Mina said. A psych eval would go into Niv’s permanent medical records, and it meant a yearly check-up for the next ten years. Also, Mina had heard the test could hurt. In some cases it could even make you pass out. She said, “Is there any way to get you out of it?” Her mind started racing, coming up with plans.

  “No.” Niv sighed. “But thanks for the thought.”

  “If you need me, I’ll be right here,” Mina said.

  The next morning a white-haired psych engineer and his team of diagnostic bots arrived and subjected Niv to a battery of questions and tests. Mina knew because she had placed her millimetric recorder in Niv’s study, where the testing was underway, and she used it spy in on the proceedings from her room.

  Mina could tell that the psych engineer was confused by what he discovered. Several times he paused to repeat a question or rescan his readings. He had a befuddled look on his face. Finally, when he announced that the tests were done several hours later, a family meeting was called. Mina was given permission, after some pleading, to join in.

  “It’s quite remarkable,” the psych engineer said. “My tests show that Niv’s desire to emulate bot behavior really doesn’t have anything to do with the bots themselves, and everything to do with repetition and predictability.”

  “Repetition and predictability?” asked Kouros.

  “To use a metaphor, Niv’s brain perceives his life as an ever-changing sea of unpredictability. It has been looking for a safe place, a refuge island that will provide stability amid the turmoil, regularity and order among the changes. The bot theater piece so engrossed him that he’s imprinted on that, in a manner of speaking. Bots always perform the same tasks. Their world, unlike ours, is boring – orderly and predictable. They’re not subject to the variations that Randomizers assign us. That’s why Niv wants to be more like them. And the game of pretend is what’s allowed him to come out of his shell and begin to integrate his emotions and thoughts into a single sense of self. His lower brain development is amazing.”

  Mom said, “So what’s the treatm
ent? He can’t continue to pretend he’s a bot the rest of his life.”

  “The cure may be simple indeed. I recommend that Niv no longer be subject to the Randomizer. In fact, you should create a set schedule for him that repeats every single day. Eventually you can wean him off of it, but for now it will provide the sense of structure that his brain needs in order to let go of the bot fantasies. How does that sound, Niv?”

  Mina could barely contain her joy at the news. Niv’s eyes widened with enthusiasm. “When can I start?”

  Mom and Dad looked at one another. “We’ll do that,” Mom said. “Thank you for your help.”

  The engineer prepared to leave, but Mina stood in his way. “I have another question,” she said. “Could the Randomizer have been the cause of Niv’s condition in the first place? And what about other kids like him?”

  The engineer’s face turned cherry red. “Ah, yes, well,” he said. “Those are, um, excellent questions. More research is called for, of course. But, based on what I’ve seen so far, there is a chance that you’re right, young lady.”

  “I knew it! I knew it!” Mina cried out. “We’ll all be happier without the Randomizer!”

  “It would be premature for everyone to abandon it completely,” the engineer chided. “But perhaps your parents may want to... relax its enforcement somewhat, as they see fit, of course. Think of it as a lot more wildcard days.”

  Then he and his bots left.

  Mina gave Niv a quick kiss on the cheek and bolted up the stairs.

  Niv knocked on her door a moment later. “Why the rush?” he asked.

  “I’m going to take another look at Saldom’s theorem of self-determination,” Mina said. “Maybe I can figure out what’s wrong with it.” She thought about Niv’s skills with programming bots, the way his mind craved order and logic. He was two years younger, and she was much better at math, but it was worth a shot. “Wanna help?” she asked.

  “I’d love to,” he said, sitting down beside her.

  Jigsaw

  Douglas Smith

  Douglas Smith is an award-winning Canadian author whose work has appeared in thirty countries and twenty-five languages. His fiction includes the urban fantasy novel, The Wolf at the End of the World, and the collections Chimerascope, Impossibilia, and La Danse des Esprits. His non-fiction guide for writers, Playing the Short Game: How to Market & Sell Short Fiction, has just been released. Douglas is a three-time winner of Canada’s Aurora Award, and has been a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award, CBC’s Bookies Award, Canada’s juried Sunburst Award, and France’s juried Prix Masterton and Prix Bob Morane. His website is www.smithwriter.com and he tweets at twitter.com/smithwritr.

  Still in shock, Cassie Morant slumped in the cockpit of the empty hopper, staring at the two viewplates before her.

  In one, the planet Griphus, a blue, green and brown marble wrapped in belts of cloud, grew smaller. Except for the shape of its land masses, it could have been Earth.

  But it wasn’t. Griphus was an alien world, light-years from Sol System.

  A world where nineteen of her shipmates were going to die.

  And one of them was Davey.

  On the other viewplate, the segmented, tubular hull of the orbiting Earth wormship, the Johannes Kepler, grew larger. Cassie tapped a command, and the ship’s vector appeared, confirming her fears.

  The ship’s orbit was still decaying. She opened a comm-link.

  “Hopper Two to the Kepler,” she said. “Requesting docking clearance.”

  Silence. Then a male voice crackled over the speaker, echoing cold and metallic in the empty shuttle. “Acknowledged, Hopper Two. You are clear to dock, Segment Beta Four, Port Nine.”

  Cassie didn’t recognize the voice, but that wasn’t surprising. The Kepler held the population of a small city, and Cassie was something of a loner. But she had no trouble identifying the gruff rumble she heard next.

  “Pilot of hopper, identify yourself. This is Captain Theodor.”

  Cassie took a breath. “Sir, this is Dr. Cassandra Morant, team geologist.”

  Pause. “Where’s team leader Stockard?” Theodor asked.

  Davey. “Sir, the rest of the surface team was captured by the indigenous tribe inhabiting the extraction site. The team is...” Cassie stopped, her throat constricting.

  “Morant?”

  She swallowed. “They’re to be executed at sunrise.”

  Another pause.

  “Did you get the berkelium?” Theodor finally asked.

  Cassie fought her anger. Theodor wasn’t being heartless. The team below was secondary to the thousands on the ship.

  “Just a core sample, sir,” she said. “But it confirms that the deposit’s there.”

  Theodor swore. “Dr. Morant, our orbit decays in under twenty hours. Report immediately after docking to brief the command team.” Theodor cut the link.

  Cassie stared at the huge wormship, suddenly hating it, hating its strangeness. Humans would never build something like that.

  Consisting of hundreds of torus rings strung along a central axis like donuts on a stick, the ship resembled a giant metallic worm. A dozen rings near the middle were slowly rotating, providing the few inhabited sections with an artificial gravity. The thousands of humans on the ship barely filled a fraction of it.

  “This wasn’t meant for us,” she whispered. “We shouldn’t be here.”

  Humans had just begun to explore their solar system when Max Bremer and his crew had found the wormships, three of them, outside the orbit of Pluto.

  Abandoned? Lost? Or left to be found?

  Found by the ever curious, barely-out-of-the-trees man-apes of Earth. Found with charted wormholes in Sol System. Found with still-only-partly translated, we-think-this-button-does-this libraries and databases, and we-can’t-fix-it-so-it-better-never-break technology. Incredibly ancient, yet perfectly functioning Wormer technology.

  Wormers. The inevitable name given to Earth’s unknown alien benefactors.

  Five years later, humanity was here, exploring the stars, riding like toddlers on the shoulders of the Wormers.

  But Cassie no longer wanted to be here. She wished she were back on Earth, safely cocooned in her apartment with Vivaldi playing, lost in one of her jigsaw puzzles.

  She shifted uncomfortably in the hopper seat. Like every Wormer chair, like the ship itself, it almost fit a human. But not quite.

  It was like forcing a piece to fit in a jigsaw – it was always a cheat, and in the end, the picture was wrong. Humans didn’t belong here. They had forced themselves into a place in the universe where they didn’t fit. They had cheated—and they’d been caught.

  And now they were being punished.

  They faced a puzzle that threatened the entire ship. She’d had a chance to solve it on the planet.

  And she’d failed.

  Cassie hugged herself, trying to think. She was good at puzzles, but this one had a piece missing. She thought back over events since they’d arrived through the wormhole four days ago. The answer had to be there...

  …………………………

  Four days ago, Cassie had sat in her quarters on the Kepler, hunched over a jigsaw puzzle covering her desk. The desk, like anything Wormer, favored unbroken flowing contours, the seat sweeping up to chair back wrapping around to desk surface. Viewplates on the curved walls showed telescopic shots of Griphus. The walls and ceiling glowed softly.

  Lieutenant David Stockard, Davey to Cassie, lay on her bunk watching her.

  “Don’t you get tired of jigsaws?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “They relax me. It’s my form of meditation. Besides, I’m doing my homework.”

  Davey rolled off the bunk. She watched him walk over, wondering again what had brought them together. If she could call what they had being “together” – sometimes friendship, sometimes romance, sometimes not talking to each other.

  They seemed a case study in “opposites attract.” She was a scientist, and Dave
y was military. She was dark, short and slim, while he was fair, tall and broad. She preferred spending her time quietly, reading, listening to classical music and doing jigsaw puzzles. Davey always had to be active.

  But the biggest difference lay in their attitudes to the Wormers. Davey fervently believed that the alien ships were meant to be found by humans, that the Universe wanted them to explore the stars.

  To Cassie, the Universe wasn’t telling them everything it knew. She felt that they didn’t understand Wormer technology enough to be risking thousands of lives.

  He looked at the puzzle. “Homework?”

  “I printed a Mercator projection of topographic scans of Griphus onto plas-per, and the computer cut it into a jigsaw.”

  The puzzle showed the planet’s two major continents, which Dr. Xu, head geologist and Cassie’s supervisor, had dubbed Manus and Pugnus. Hand and fist. The western continent, Pugnus, resembled a clenched fist and forearm, punching across an ocean at Manus, which resembled an open hand, fingers and thumb curled ready to catch the fist. Colored dots, each numbered, speckled the map.

  “What are the dots?” Davey asked.

  “Our shopping list. Deposits of rare minerals. That is, if you believe Wormer archives and Wormer scanners.”

  “Cassie, let’s not start,” Davey said.

  “Davey, these ships are at least ten thousand years old.”

  “With self-healing nanotech-” Davey replied.

  “That we don’t understand.”

  “Cassie...” Davey sighed.

  She glared, then folded her arms. “Fine.”

  Davey checked the time on his per-comm unit. “Speaking of homework, Trask wants surface team rescue procedures by oh-eight-hundred. Gotta go.” He kissed Cassie and left.

  Cassie bit back a comment that this was a scientific, not a military, expedition. The likely need for Trask’s “procedures” was low in her opinion.