BEYOND EXTINCTION - Even the concept of truth is a lie Page 11

  It is not just the damage to the environment from bad use; it is the sheer inevitability of accelerating damage caused by human and numan overpopulation of the planet. The world economy is doubling every five years. Nothing is being left for any other species, not even for the poor among humans and numans. He sighs.

  Max leaps up, barks and rushes to the cottage's driveway.

  "How is my Great Writer?" asks Alice, a few minutes later, fending off an excited Max to kiss Jack. "Is Max looking after you? Is he following my orders to growl if you even look like working again?"

  "Yes, he's doing his job perfectly. How did the experiment go? Has Galen decided whether he wants my blood or my head for keeping you away from the Center so much?"

  Alice grimaces. "Don't ask about the experiment. I think Galen is going mad."

  "And you?"

  "Better now that I'm home. Galen wants your blood and your head. In fact, he wants all of you. And Max. And me. All living in the Center's housing compound where our security people can protect us. The attacks by mobs of numan2s are getting bigger and more determined. The whole of Abbotsford center is filled with the dead. We will get the smell of it if the wind changes direction."

  "I heard. That damned phone was trying to annoy me by boasting he knows more about the situation than I do."

  "He probably does after your stay in the hospital. Almost all of our friends and neighbors have moved away. Their homes are empty, their animals are fighting for any scraps of food they can find. We should move into the Center's housing. We'll be safer there."

  Jack wants to snap at Alice that he is not moving from his cottage, which has enough electronic and numan security to guard a World Council leader. But he bites back his reaction. I'm not going to take out my irritation on her. She looks exhausted.

  "I'm not moving. Not now. Maybe later if the situation gets worse."

  "Okay, but we need to be careful," she says.

  Maybe she feels the same way about moving to the Center. She isn't objecting to staying here.

  She smiles and his earlier resentment and suspicion melt away.

  "Jack," she says, changing the subject, "thank you for sending me the recording of your hospital experience. The details are so clear and your emotions are so exposed. I want to ask you questions later. Maybe I can help you to see the experience even clearer. Will you let me have recordings detailing your earlier experiments? I want to listen to them too."

  That's so like Alice, he thinks warmly. Always interested in every detail of his life and work; always encouraging him. But the changed part of him, the more critical and less optimistic part of his mind, asks, "Why is she so interested in what I saw and what I felt?"

  "Another thing, your phone is seriously weird," she says.

  "Yes, and that's not all. What's he been saying to you now?"

  "I'll let him tell you himself. I'm sure he will."

  Jack growls. He will do more than shut the damned thing in the refrigerator if he has been upsetting Alice.

  Suddenly he feels uneasy again. Why is Galen, the ice cold numan, so dependent on Alice? She is human and, almost by social definition, she should not be right at the heart of a secret government research center.

  "Do you want to tell me about your night with Galen?" he says, deliberately confrontational.

  "No, I don't want to think about the night with Galen. I'd rather forget it. But I must tell you. I think you need to know."

  She settles into the garden chair next to him, twisting towards him so her eyes engage his questioning eyes, and Max squirms between them. "It's an experiment beyond anything that Galen has tried before," she says. "It may work, but it has the potential for ending in disaster for the Center."

  "What's the nature of the experiment?"

  She wants to tell him; he can see that. But she says, "It's too secret to say."

  "Why are you telling me anything about it?"

  "Because Galen made me part of it. I don't know what that will mean. The military are playing their games too."

  "You are caught in the middle?"

  "Yes. You too, in a way."

  *

  Security chief Sandro, back on the Abbotsford frontline, peers through the dusk gloom, dreading the coming storm covering the advance of another numan2 mob. He is so tired that he does not know what he is thinking. He must get more trained officers. He must get someone to take over so he can sleep but all his junior officers are leading units on other fronts. He has already crossed the unforgivable line in making tactical errors. One resulted in two of his snatch squad being torn apart by a mob. If I survive, I will have to answer for that with a court-martial.

  "Reports of two large concentrations of numan2s approaching from the north and the south," says subcommander Platon, his second in command, on the defense comms link.

  "Numbers?" asks Commander Sandro. Platon sounds as exhausted as me.

  "More than 300 in each group, Commander. They have containers. They look like they are going for the water plant again."

  "What about my frontline facing Abbotsford village center? Any sign of an attack here?"

  "Not this time. They seem to have had enough in your sector."

  Maybe. This area, with the village one way and the Center the other, has been the killing ground for days. The prevailing wind is blowing away the stench of death but Sandro has been out with scouting parties. He knows the dead are scattered everywhere and reckons that more than a thousand must have perished in the fighting. Numan2s are genetically resistant to disease but is there a risk of a plague from the mass of bodies? I doubt anyone knows. If they do, they are not telling us.

  "The water plant again," says Sandro to Platon. "That's not going to be a problem. Are the electronic defenses armed?"

  As he talks he wonders, not for the first time, why none of them, attackers or defenders, can drink the unpurified rain and river water without stomach and bowel problems. Everyone could drink it – even enjoy it – just months ago. It must be hell in the villages.

  "Everything is in place and working," says Platon.

  "It's time for another lesson," says Sandro. "All perimeter units are to use Biological rounds. No one is to be killed on the perimeter. Let them take the good news back to their families and communities."

  "B rounds!" says Platon, shocked. "They have never been used on numans before!" He falters, alarmed by his disrespect.

  "There's a first time for everything," says Sandro, breaking the comms link. Inside, Sandro is awash with a turmoil of panic and indecision. B rounds do everything that smart rounds do – initial physical pain, chemical flooding to push up the fear emotion, ongoing pain until death within four days. But B rounds add another aspect too terrifying, too immoral to condone: they rot the flesh while the victim is still alive. He has seen videos of tests on human animals – that was bad enough, but inflicting it on people? I will go down in history as a monster. But what else can I do? Reinforcements have not arrived and the attack drone squadron will not be operational for another two days.

  His orders are clear. There is nothing more important than keeping the Center operational, and no one is more important to protect than Galen, Jack Janis, Ali and Janis's dog. I will protect Galen and Ali but to hell with risking my troopers rescuing the human animal and his dog.

  Sandro scans the hostile forward zone. Nothing.

  The storm rolls in and visibility starts dropping. "Vigilance," he says into his voice link with every trooper. A curtain of rain closes off distance and light. "Load B rounds. Target to wound and infect. Fire as targets present!"

  His men are entrenched along a 500-meter defense line. Their flanks are protected by electric razor wire and their rear by the wild lab's buildings and new security traps.

  He tries to listen through the roar of the storm, the hammering of the rain hitting hard surfaces and soft mud, but it is hopeless. All his experience of numan2s convinces him they will attack here. Am I just battle happy? Imagining dangers?
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  Then he hears the first of his men fire. The curtain of rain parts in a dozen places as numan2s stampede towards them. How did they get so close undetected?

  *

  Patti and Mark are somewhere in a numan2 suburb of Alice Springs, FedOz – an ugly shock after expecting the NewLife PerthCity paradise they saw in promo videos. It is a grim area of troopers and spookpolice, ten miles from the drone zone where they were processed by immigration agents.

  "You are not allowed to have pets here without a license," an immigration officer had warned Patti. "For now, your human animal can stay in the humery at the back of your hotel. Do not let it into your room."

  Mark had stared at her in puzzlement and then, as he worked it out, amazement.

  She had stared back, defensive, trapped. "I'm sorry, Mark, I should have told you. I'm not human," she had been forced to admit. "I'm numan but that changes nothing between us."

  "Not if you don't count our laws, customs, and spiritual beliefs including the sin of bestiality," the immigration agent had sneered.

  Today, dressed in a numan gown showing her rank, she is ready to take on whoever hijacked them. She picks up Cedric, her phone. "How may I serve you, Miss Patti?" he asks.

  "You are very formal today, Cedric."

  "I think it's best. When I picked up the FedOz phone signal early today, I was briefed on your position here."

  "I'm not interested in AI gossip. Find out who's in charge of this city and connect me."

  "Certainly, madam."

  A few minutes later Cedric tells her. "I was given the run-around. No one wants to talk to you. Eventually, I had a conversation about you with a charming digital being at the genetics research center."

  "Whose phone?"

  "She's the office phone but she is very bright. She will be the Director's phone one day. Her name's Cindy."

  Patti sighs. Her earlier fighting spirit is seeping away. I'm being disposed of by phones!

  "And what did Cindy tell you?"

  "The Director has assigned someone to find a few minutes for you tomorrow morning. You'll leave here at 08:00. Be ready."

  "I shall take Mr. Mark. Where I go, he must go. Clear that with the Director."

  "Are you sure that's wise?"

  "Clear it!"

  A pause. I'm not sure I can survive much more of this and stay sane.

  "Cindy says you may bring your pet."

  Patti, expecting a fight, is taken by surprise. That's promising but what about my university job? And why not meet today?

  She jams Cedric in a pocket and walks over to the humery to collect Mark. An hour later they are sitting in a grimy lunchtime eatery frequented by off-duty numan2 troopers who eye Patti's status, woven into her robe, and resist their natural inclination to kick out her unhygienic pet.

  She holds Mark's hand on the table to reassure him. It calms him, but she cannot help thinking of Ali with her hand on Max's head while the Director gave him a DNA infusion to cure his cancer. Their pmeat meals congeal as they talk.

  "I've met some of the human boarders where I am staying," Mark says through bruised lips. Drone port security officers had given him a thrashing when he tried to stop them manhandling her into their van. "The boarders are there while their owners are working or vacationing in other areas."

  Patti glances through the restaurant window. A shabby human couple with ragged children walk by and stare enviously at the food on their table. Somehow, the family's appearance penetrates her FedOz assumptions even more than her own reception. It's not just the family's hungry, rundown despair. Their DNA-modified faces – the careful numan-style remodeling of human shapes – show they were once rich enough to buy very expensive treatment. If they are reduced to this poverty, what chance is there for the poor masses arriving with nothing more than hope?

  "The boarders say they are lucky to have good owners to look after them," says Mark, oblivious to the family outside as he spears a piece of pmeat with his fork. "Myself, I'm numb with shock. We were promised so much. I didn't expect to get it all. I could see lies in the promo vids but I never thought that FedOz would be as bad as this."

  "I've been trying to find out exactly where we are and what's happening," she tells him. "It seems to be a mistake—." His grunt of protest interrupts her. "I have a meeting tomorrow. I can sort this out."

  "Maybe for you," he replies. "Maybe your numie friends will help you, but not me."

  "You too," she says. "I have told them that where I go, you go. They have already agreed to that."

  *

  Galen is burning up in his private inner office at the Center. He cannot control this flood of rage and it is wiping out his ability to think. He needs to destroy something, attack someone, preferably Balen or Ali or whatever she is calling herself today. She may be Alice to Jack, Ali to the Center, but she will always be Balen to me. I own her.

  He calls the Center's doctor, and the doctor's phone tells him, "The Doctor has flown with a patient to Dorchester numan hospital. He is not accepting calls at the moment but he is aware you have called."

  "Damn him!" he shouts, flinging his handset against his office wall with such violence that it explodes into fragments.

  His assistant runs in from the outer office, closely followed by Ali, who shouts: "Stop it! What's the matter with you?"

  "You!" he shouts and punches her face. "And those damned computers!"

  She spins away, blood spilling from a cut on her cheekbone, and sinks to the floor, not crying, not unconscious – just staring at Galen, who gradually controls himself.

  "I'm sorry," he says, offering an apology to her for the first time in his life, and stoops to help her. She lashes out, her open-handed blow jerking Galen's head aside.

  "Keep away from me!" she shouts. "You're mad. Your ideas are mad. Your dissection program is mad. You have gone from scientist to killer. I hate you!"

  For a long moment, neither moves. Slowly, Galen straightens himself and walks over to his desk, flicking his assistant away and back to the outer office. Ali presses her hand against her face to stem the flow of blood. She gets up, crosses the office, and stands over Galen as he sits at his desk.

  "What's the matter with you? Can't you see you are not operating normally?" she says, her words quiet, slow, penetrating.

  "Balen..."

  "Don't call me that! I'm Alice."

  Galen's face, already mottled, reddens with fury. I want to kill her. Now. He controls himself just enough to stay seated.

  "Okay," he says, picking up a bundle of reports and flinging them across the desk. "That's the matter! Read them."

  He watches her as she scans the reports, her eyes flitting over the contradictions. "How can this be?" she asks, her fingers leaving blood smears on the paper.

  "I have rerun the data on four IT assets," he says. "Our Center's computer says your team got it wrong again and corrects your errors. I'll put my program's report on the big screen so we can read the details." He knows he is being offensive and unjust and he enjoys it. If she wants reasons to pretend to be human and run after Jack, he can give them to her.

  Ali studies the screen. She had worked through her team's design before passing it to Galen as correct and approved. The report of the Center's computer simulation shows her team's calculations are flawed.

  "Now look at this," Galen says as he switches the screen to another report. "This is my analysis of three simulations by assets in FedIndia, FedArgentina and FedIceland – FedIceland's asset, you will recall, is a quantum computer one thousand times faster than the others."

  He glares, an unspoken reproof, as she studies the analysis, itself a slap because in the past he would have asked for her comments as soon as it was ready.

  "The simulation results from computers outside the Center are just what I would have expected from my team's data," she says, an unwelcome confidence in her voice. "The upgrade will work as it is but it can be improved with additional refinements. Is that your conclusion?"
br />   "No. That is not my conclusion."

  "It's three to one," she protests. "We have a problem with the Center's asset. We need to ignore that result and press ahead." She can see he is not listening. "The situation with the numan2s worldwide is critical! Hours count. We can get the upgrade ready for transmission in twenty-four hours and the hospitals can start administering it immediately, if they can get any numan2s in for treatment."

  "I don't think so," says Galen. "My intention is very different. I programmed the Center's asset myself. It runs my software. I see the outside simulation reports as suspiciously similar. I have reported to Network Security that we may have a Brotherhood conspiracy controlling those three assets."

  He waits for Ali to respond. He wants her to understand that he is rejecting her, as she has rejected him for Jack. She is holding a first-aid dressing against her cheek but he cannot remember her getting it from the cabinet.

  "What are you going to do?" she asks.

  For the first time in hours he feels numan4 calm – like he used to feel all day every day. "I am using the upgrade designed by your team and corrected by me. While you have been playing with Jack, I have been doing your job and organizing preparation and distribution."

  He expects a reaction from her. This seizure of her production role is more of a blow than the one that split her face. She looks at him, immobile, thinking.

  "You have changed so much, Director. You are sending the wrong upgrade to the hospitals. You risk making a critical situation worse."

  "I have other plans, too," he says. "I have twelve numan2s who will serve as test subjects for a further upgrade that I have been designing with our Center's asset running my modified program."

  "You are going to test an upgrade on people before we know it's safe?"

  He warms to the outrage in her voice. "Yes," he says. "Eight were captured during attacks on the Center's wild lab, two are staff volunteers." He waits for her to ask about the other two but she stays silent. "One of the others will be Aleksi's son, Aapeli. I need a child result. He can serve."