The Spaceship Next Door (29 page)

“Infect?”

“It’s the best word choice out of a number of bad word choices. It would be just as fair to say that one of our sentient ideas took seed in the minds of technologically advanced beings in order to advance them further, so as to accommodate the goals of the sentient idea. They thought of the idea as theirs, when it was the other way around.”

“I’m afraid to ask,” Ed said, “but what happened to that species?”

“They destroyed themselves. Technology was introduced to them at a time when they were unprepared for it. An equivalent would be handing a nuclear weapon to a caveman.”

“You destroyed a whole species to get those ships?” Annie asked.

“The death of a species was a consequence of the actions of one of my kind, yes. But entire species die all the time, often because of the poorly executed use of an idea. I find it hard to blame this entirely on the idea itself.” She turned back to Ed. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Why do you think they’re after Annie?”

“Honestly, we were
really
hoping you could answer that for us,” Annie said.

“She touched the ship,” he said.

“She… Annie, why didn’t you tell me?”

Annie laughed. “Vi, in the game of
things we should have told each other
, I’m pretty sure you’re gonna lose. I didn’t tell anybody.”

“The night it landed. The same night… oh, of course. I understand.”

“Cool, explain it to us.”

“The probes are designed to land on alien worlds and collect data, but the designers understood that some of those places may contain hostile lower life forms, so there are security countermeasures that have, what you would call an AI package.”

“Something that learns,” Ed said.

“Exactly. That package will analyze anything it considers a threat and look for ways to repel it with minimum environmental impact. The reason for this should be obvious: it can’t get a clean understanding of a place if its existence manifestly alters that place.”

“Well
that
didn’t work well, did it?” Annie said.

“Not in this instance, but in a world where the most advanced life form was a squirrel or a stegosaurus it would have been sufficient. You know this defensive program exists because you’ve seen it in use.”

“It convinced me to call my mother,” Ed said. “It was very persuasive.”

“Exactly. But a few hours after landing it would have only begun to calibrate to the environment. It would have defaulted to a generic blast of negative ideas. I’m surprised it didn’t destroy your mind completely, Annie.”

“Maybe it lowered the volume after wrecking Rick Horton.”

“He was there?”

“Yes. I was the only one to touch the ship, though.”

“That was the night your mother… that was the same night, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

“I think the reason you made it past the countermeasures was that the thoughts it gave you were ones you’d already had independently, that same evening. It was showing you the worst thing you could imagine, but you were already coping with that actually happening. If you’d been there a day later, you would never have made it that far.”

“Yay me.”

“What happened when you touched the ship?”

“It put a bunch of pictures in my head? I didn’t understand what I was… well, seeing isn’t the right word, but…”

“I understand. You reached the hull. The next logical conclusion would have been that you were a member of a higher life form, so it tried to communicate.”

“Then it shrieked at me.”

“Yes. I’m sorry, both of you, there’s no polite way to put this. Humans aren’t nearly advanced enough. It recognized this and concluded you’d breached the defense due to a programming error. Once again, I’m surprised you were able to walk away.”

“More like run, but okay. So we’re the squirrel and the stegosaurus in your eyes.”

“Not in my eyes, no. To the ship, yes.”

“Now it thinks she’s you,” Ed said. “Isn’t that right?”

“That isn’t exactly right. It’s confused.”

“Hold it, you need to back waaaay up, both of you,” Annie said. “Why is it looking for you, why does it think
I’m
you, and what is up with the zombies? Also, the ship has been here for three years. Why is this happening now?”

Violet sighed. “A lot of things went wrong here. I thought I planned for all of it, but…”

“Start with why it’s looking for you,” Ed suggested.

“I’m sort of a runaway. In the parlance of the times.”

“Oh my god, you’re hiding from your dad,” Annie said. “The abusive crazy one you told me about.”

“Yes. We don’t really have genders, and don’t require two parents. He’s the one who thought of me originally.”

Ed laughed. “That’s your reproductive cycle?”

“It is. If one of us has an idea of a new version of ourselves, we can think that new idea into being. There’s a complexity to it that I’m failing to account for, but that’s the essence of the process. He thought of me, but as I matured I came into my own, as a fully formed being or, if we’re sticking with this wording, I became my own idea. He responded poorly, so I ran. I used the probe outpost network to explore the universe until I found this place. I sent a pulse through the network to disable all the probes in this star cluster to cover my tracks. I knew that wouldn’t dissuade him forever, because unlike humans when we say forever we mean
forever
. He’s a stubborn idea as old as eternity with no reason to stop looking.

“I knew he’d send the warships, and that someday one would land here. I just had to make sure I was prepared when that day came. You were my only mistake, Annie.”

“I don’t understand what that means.”

“Have you ever wondered why none of your friends seem to remember me?”

“Well yeah, it’s because you’re you. Socially awkward you.”

“I couldn’t let anyone retain an idea of me. It’s literally a piece of who I am. So when I was out of their sight, I was out of their minds too. If a ship landed and looked for me in the minds of other people, it wouldn’t find it. All except for you. I’ve allowed you to carry me in your head for the past six years. We’re in this mess because, as it happens, the one person in Sorrow Falls who absolutely should not have interacted directly with the spaceship is the one person who did.”

“But… why?” Annie asked.

“Because I like you? I wanted a friend. It’s why I’ve been growing old with you. I’m only
here
in the first place because this is the sort of thing I’ve learned to value: real connection with life. It’s not something that’s easy to come across, trust me. I’m older than your sun. It’s rare.”

“Oh. Well that’s sweet, Vi.”

“I mean it. I didn’t intend to get you into trouble. I’ve connected with others in the past and it was fine. Oliver, for instance. You aren’t the only human who’s retained an idea of me.”

“Super, but the ship landed on my watch. And now the world’s coming to an end because I seemed like a cool kid to hang out with. That’s a weird responsibility.”

“The world’s not coming to an end,” Ed said.

“I’m not sure that’s up to you.”

“It sounds to me like Violet has a say in it,” he said. “She isn’t interested in seeing the world end either.”

Annie looked at her friend. “I don’t know, she’s let everything else happen, hasn’t she?”

“I swear I didn’t mean to,” Violet said.

“You mentioned AI,” Ed said. “In the ship. How advanced is it?”

“More advanced than anything mankind could develop.”

“I appreciate that, but… is it advanced enough to, say, blow up a munitions depot in Delaware?”

“From the moment it landed it started burrowing into every communications network on the planet. By now I doubt there’s anywhere outside of this kitchen that isn’t being recorded somewhere inside the ship. But to answer your question, no. It’s collecting information passively, for use as necessary. And it’s looking for evidence of me. But that’s all.”

“And you know this because you have the same access to the same networks, only you aren’t passive at all about it.”

Violet looked away.

“I had to do it,” she said, technically addressing the refrigerator. “If those bombs reached Sorrow Falls the ship would have simply detonated them as soon as it recognized the threat. That would have killed half the town, and it wouldn’t have been harmed in the slightest. I did the same with the machines you planned to use to remove the ship from town. I knew it wouldn’t have allowed that. Obviously, there were more consequences attached to the problem with the explosives.”

“Jesus Christ,” Annie said. “Violet, five people died.”

“I realize that. A thousand times that many would have died otherwise.”

“I appreciate that it must have been a difficult decision.” Ed said.

“I was trying to keep everything as much the same as possible so the probe would be recalled without incident. It’s why so little has changed here, Mr. Somerville.”

Annie stood. “You know what? I need a minute. You guys keep on going, I think I’ve heard enough for a while.”

Ed’s instinct was to tell her she should stay put, because zombies. But he believed Violet when she said they couldn’t find Annie as long as she stayed near the house, for the same reason no GPS signal could find the house and people had been mis-drawing maps of the area for two hundred years.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I just need some air. This is… sorry, I mean, it’s cool, she’s an alien terrorist and her whole family is reanimated dead people, and I just need a minute with all of that. Before the next crazy thing comes up.”

“Yeah, of course. Just don’t go far.”

“Nope.”

Annie left without even looking at Violet.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right, she’s… I feel terrible, she is literally the last person on this planet I meant to harm.”

He decided to take that in the spirit in which it was intended, but his first thought was she didn’t give a damn about him or anyone else, zombies or otherwise.

“I didn’t forget about you,” he realized. “That was intentional, I take it.”

“It was. You dropped Annie off; I had to make sure you remembered where and with whom. I can’t say I was surprised you figured this out. You came to Sorrow Falls looking for me at the outset, whether you realized it at first or not.”

“Why did it take three years?” he asked. “For the ship to kick all this in?”

“The ship should have taken off shortly after arriving and failing to detect my presence in or around where the first probe landed. It didn’t leave, I now know, because of Annie’s interaction. That initiated a secondary program. As I said, it’s been collecting information, and learning, and performing a risk assessment.”

“Funny, that’s why I’m here.”

“That was the easy part. It probably finished within a few weeks. It wasn’t that which took so long.”

“What did?”

Violet looked over her shoulder at Todd. Then she raised her left arm. Todd raised his left arm as well. She lowered hers, he lowered his. Her right arm went up, and so did his. It was like a puppet routine.

“The ship had to learn how to make zombies?”

“It’s only a matter of electrical systems and frequencies. It took me a couple of years to make a basic version that’s like the ones wandering around town now. It was a century before they were advanced enough to fool a person, and even with that I’ve been relying on some of the equipment in the capsule in the basement. These guys wouldn’t fool anyone outside of its signal reach. Finding people to use is also a challenge. For me, I mean. You have to find someone whose nervous system is still intact and with no missing body parts.”

“But who’s already dead, right? That appears to be a distinction lost on the spaceship.”

“Yes, I never tried this on a living person, but I have a lot more respect for humans than any of the programming in Shippie would. You’re all lower life forms, and it’s using you to perform a search.”

“Three years to learn how to make a zombie, then.”

“No, even then, it probably had that figured out in less than three years. After that it was merely on standby.”

“I’m going to hate myself for asking, but standby for what?”

“For his arrival.”

“Your father.”

“My creator. When I said I wasn’t the only one of my kind here any more, this is what I meant. The probe would have finished its review of the life forms on the planet and sent its report. I doubt that report stated anything so unsubtle as ‘your daughter is here’, but it would have included enough interesting things to warrant a visit. I suspect it was only after his arrival that the data from Annie’s mind was analyzed in enough detail to identify
me
within it.”

“All right. Now we’re caught up and I need to know how we can fix this. Do you have any idea how we can break this connection the ship has with the people without also killing them? The last time anyone tried to wake up a sleepwalking zombie, the man died of a brain aneurysm, so I’m looking for a better solution than that.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Somerville. I’m afraid even if I gave myself over to him, he’d see no reason to spare anyone. And I don’t mean anyone in Sorrow Falls, I mean anyone at all. Old ideas can be vengeful and unforgiving. With him… you have to appreciate that the longer an idea is isolated, the more inflexible it becomes.”

“Isolated how?”

“Ideas are meant to live inside minds. More than that, we’re meant to interact with those minds. It’s how we evolve, and grow, and adapt to whatever present we’re engaging. I was a very different kind of idea when I came here than I am now, because of that interaction. If he does find me, he will barely recognize me. I’m not so certain he’ll be happy with whom I’ve become. And inside that ship, he has the capability of destroying the world. He may do exactly that, just out of spite.”

“Well then, we need to come up with a plan to nullify that ship.”

E
d and Violet
emerged from the kitchen about twenty minutes later, having formulated something—if not a plan, at least a way to get to one.