The Gift (35 page)

Sam thought about what he’d just learned. Adia wanted to reproduce. All of the gifts wanted to reproduce, which meant there was a way for them to do so that did not involve their destruction because Jordan told him they were now potentially immortal. The gifts were no longer potential life, and gifted humans were no longer what they had been. Sam thought he finally understood what Jordan had told him.

“Adia, when Lisa was unconscious, Althia was still alive and apparently completely functional on some subset of Lisa’s consciousness. When you told me you couldn’t live without me, you also told me you could make any single point of failure in my body redundant, right?”

“Yes, Sam.”

“And you would continue to live so long as at least one of each of those systems kept me alive?”

“Yes, Sam.”

“Adia, do I still need a human body for us to live?”

“No, Sam.”

Sam felt Adia start to take him on their greatest journey into knowing themselves they’d ever experienced. A small part of him realized he was crying.

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It took Sam some time to recover. He thought he’d know what he and Adia could become. He had been wrong. His decision made, he committed them to a course of action that could not be undone. Adia’s delight was so profound, Sam found it difficult to focus on anything else. When he finally could, he rose from the chair a bit unsteadily and rejoined the rest of the team. As he approached, the quiet conversation stopped. He supposed he must have been a bit of a sight, but he didn’t care. They were his team and they would soon know how he felt.

“Are you okay, Sam?” Lisa asked as he took his seat at the table. “Do you want to get some fresh air?” She had wanted to go to Sam as soon as she saw him begin to cry. Jim had held her back and insisted that the rest of the team continue working. Chang agreed. No one else on the team was willing to argue with the two people who best knew Sam.

“I’m much better than okay, Lisa. Much, much better than okay.”

“You care to share what just happened with the rest of us?” Jim asked. Although he had restrained Lisa, he had also asked Adam to speak with Adia to see if Sam was okay. Adam said Adia was not communicating. He insisted that there appeared to be nothing wrong with her, she was just choosing not to communicate. In response to Jim’s question, Adam confirmed that was highly unusual. Had the situation continued much longer, Jim would have gone to Sam himself, despite what his intellect and years of experience told him was best.

“I’m going to do better than that, but first we have to go over what we know. It’s critical that each of you have enough information about what’s happened so far to ask your gifts the right questions.”

“Can’t you give us a clue?” Relieved to see his friend in such high spirits, Jim’s sense of humor was returning.

“Funny you should ask that, because that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’ll be more explicit than Jordan has been, although I now understand why he left so much for us to figure out on our own, or at least some of his reasons for doing so. I’ll have to talk with him about it after you all get started.”

“Started on what?” Chang asked.

“First things first, my friend. It does us no good for some of us to be ready when the time comes while others are still working on it. I will tell you we can do it. I know how to bring the gift ship to life and soon you will, too.”

 
“I’ll start with what we know. When the gift ship arrived it was a single spherical vessel. Shortly after that, it reformed itself into eighteen smaller vessels, each approximately 379.79 meters in diameter. One of these ships reversed course immediately, presumably on its way to an academy. The other seventeen continued toward Earth. Those were our first two clues, although we couldn’t possibly know their significance at the time. I’ll come back to them in a minute.

“One of the ships landed in Kansas. Because of some work done by the team that Chang and I were on, our government was present when that it landed.”

Chang interrupted, “Sam is being too modest. Because he decoded an encrypted program showing us we wouldn’t all be killed at the impact site, some of us were present when the ship landed.”

“Thank you, Chang. Although I did play a role, it was a team effort. Anyway, back to the facts, as I understand them. As Chang just alluded to, he was present when the ship landed. I’ll let him tell you what he saw once it landed,” Sam said.

Chang began, “It was really quite remarkable. One moment we were observing an empty cornfield. The next, there was a dull black sphere a little over three meters tall in the middle of it. Shortly after that, there was a sonic boom. Eighteen minutes later, the sphere disappeared. Where it had been, there were two triangular prisms formed from what we now know to be gifts. To be precise, there were eighteen individual prisms, each consisting of nine layers of thirty-six gifts, for a total of 5,832 gifts in all.”

“Is anyone else having trouble picturing what he’s describing?” Esther asked. Most of the team nodded.

Chang cleared a portion of the table in front of him and asked everyone to pass them their glasses. Placing one glass at the opposite side of the table, he said, “Imagine these are triangular prisms rather than cylinders.” He then placed two glasses on the table behind and centered on the first. The next three were similarly position. The last four were closest to him, giving the arrangement a total of nine. “I don’t have enough glasses or room to create the other half of the formation, but I believe this will be sufficient. As I said, imagine these are prisms, such that their tops and bottoms would be in the shape of a triangle. Now imagine that each glass consists of nine layers and that each of those layers is arranged in a similar fashion, but with thirty-six tiny spheres making up each layer. Any questions?” There were none, though there were a few faces that hadn’t quite shown complete understanding yet. He continued, “So, if I were to take eight gifts and place them on this table in a line, with each of them touching and then put a line of seven above them, and a line of six above them, all the way to a single gift at the top, you would see what a single layer for a single prism would look like. Add eight more layers and you’d have one completed prism consisting of 324 gifts. That is what one glass represents in this structure. Repeat that eight times and you’d have one half of the formation. Recreate the same formation starting at the base of this one and working in the opposite direction and you’d have what we had in Kansas. Is everybody with me now?” Looking around the table, he saw that they were.

Sam took that moment to interject, “And there are our next few clues. It didn’t take long for Chang to see these associations, but for those of us without his mind for math, I’ll fill in the cracks. There were eighteen ships after the original transformed itself. The number of gifts in each prism is eighteen squared, or 324. The number of gifts in the entire formation is eighteen cubed, or 5832. The formation consisted of eighteen prisms, oriented exactly on magnetic North, leaving their separation to fall on a perfect line between East and West. It seems clear that the formation was intended to be viewed as two groupings of nine prisms each.

The sphere that landed was 3.0722 meters in diameter. In other words, it had sufficient volume for eighteen to the fourth gifts, which means the prism formation consisted of one-ninth of the gifts mass that landed. As I said earlier, each gift ship was 379.79 meters in diameter. In other words, it had sufficient volume for eighteen to the ninth gifts.”

“You’re making my head spin, Sam.” Esther said.

“I’m almost done with this part. I want you to understand how much Jordan was telling us. If you divide eighteen to the ninth, the number of gifts each of the eighteen ships could carry by eighteen to the fourth, the number of gifts that landed at each site, you get eighteen to the fifth, which is of course the product of 5,832 and 324. It’s also the number of gift materials each ship seeded our atmosphere with on their way to their landing sites, and they told us so. In math. But, that’s just the beginning.

“We know that nine is the number of people we need on our team to successfully build a gift ship. Thanks to Lisa and Althia, I believe we now know why. The Makers reproductive cycle required nine participants consisting of three genders in three different combinations, triads if you will. I’ll use Lisa’s terminology to ensure we’re all on the same page. She referred to the genders as plus, minus and dual. The different combinations were dual:plus:minus, dual:plus:plus and dual:minus:minus. I’ll come back to why that matters to us in a moment.

According to Jordan, the number of controlling entities required to create another of their kind is eighteen. I just learned why. When two different tribes merged, they did so at the only level they could: two pairs of nine. It was the only way to mix their genetic material in such a way that both primary firsts would be represented. That’s where eighteen came in, but it got more complicated when the Makers started bonding with gifts. At that point each group of nine was actually a group of eighteen, nine pairs. So, the mating actually involved eighteen intelligences within a tribe and thirty-six for tribes that wanted to merge. That is why there are thirty-six gifts in each layer of each prism. It’s all right there.”

Sam stopped to see if they were all with him. They weren’t, not yet, at least not according to their faces. Chang had it, of course. It looked like George was just going over it in his mind, but the rest of them appeared a bit lost.

“What was the point of leaving one-ninth of the each landed ship behind? Why not leave it all?” Jim asked.

“I believe it was to tell us we were to find the first of the nine who would make up the primary team, us. If humans had been smart enough, or advanced enough, or both, it would have been a race. Every place where a ship landed, a representative of that group would have had the chance to speak with Jordan. If that representative figured it out, with or without help, whatever social structure was in place at each site would have the means to select their first and have that person accept a gift. Whichever group solved the mystery first would be the winner.”

“Then why did they send you a gift?” George asked.

“Only one group figured it out. There was no competition.”

“There were the gifts they seeded the atmosphere with.” Chang said.

“And that was the source of the gift they directed to me. It’s consistent, just as you told me they were being.”

“Makes sense,” Chang said thoughtfully.

Sam started to continue, but was interrupted by Adia. “It is done, Sam.” She sounded like a proud parent, which in a way, she was.

“Thanks, Adia. I’m almost done.”

Turning his attention back to the team, Sam said, “I was going to tell you a bit more, but my time is up. You now know enough to ask your gifts the right questions. Start with what they want most. Have them talk with Althia and then ask them what they talked about. As you learn more, talk with each other, but the most important thing is to ask your gift about all of this. Save questions on this last item until you’re clear on everything else. I’m not absolutely sure that’s critical, but we can’t take any chances.”

Sam stopped talking long enough to take a drink of water from what he believed was his glass out of the formation Dan had created. It was not lost on him that the potential germ transmission associated with selecting the wrong glass was no longer a concern for him, or any of them. “Before I continue, I have a question for all of you. Have each of you allowed your gifts to eliminate single points of failure from your bodies?”

Everyone nodded.

“Good. Perhaps some of you have done what I did and asked your gift what that means in the extreme.” Sam observed some confused expressions. “I didn’t think I’d be surprised by the answer. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I had underestimated the scope of the question. I’ll give you part of the answer. Only you and your gifts can discover the rest of it. We no longer need human bodies to live.”

There was a brief moment of silence and then everyone began talking at once. Sam waited until they realized they were talking over each other and stopped before continuing. “I’m not suggesting any of us choose that course of action. I was just following a hunch. I thought it should be possible for each of us to make a gift-like clone of sorts of ourselves. I now know that it is.” Sam pulled a sphere the size of a large marble out of his pocket.

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Web sat in his field office at the armory while he talked on the secure phone with Jack. It had only been a few days since he’d merged with his gift, but he was already finding the use of human technology tedious. “How long until you’re wheels up?” He asked.

Jack had been at Whiteman Air Force Base for nearly two hours securing the package. Some parts of the bureaucracy that was the U.S. military moved slowly even when the Commander in Chief was giving the orders. “They’re about to close the doors now and I’ve confirmed that we have absolute airstrip priority. We should be on our way in the next few minutes, Sir.”

“Good. Have you briefed everyone on the mission that they are to have no contact with any member of my team here?”

“Yes, Sir. I’ve made it quite clear.”

“Remind them again before you land. If I get word that one of them so much as grunts in the general direction of anyone on the ground other than me, their careers will be the last thing they’ll need to worry about. Were you able to get everything you need to secure it?”

“Yes, Sir. We had some trouble with…”

Web cut him off, “Wait one, Jack.” Captain Johnson was trying to connect with him.

“What is it, Captain?” Web thought.

“We think we found them, Sir.”

“Wait one,” Web replied before returning to his conversation with Jack. “Save the details for your report, Jack. I have to go.” Web hung up the phone without waiting for a reply.