Swarm Read online

  “Specify.”

  “Specify?” I said. “What do you mean, specify?”

  “Who are your children?”

  “The people you killed. Back behind us. You dropped them out of this ship, you murderous piece of flying shit.”

  “Course reversed,” said the ship.

  My anger seemed to have no effect on it. I tried to control myself. If I actually got my kids back, that would be wonderful, but I was still almost beyond any kind of clear thinking. I took deep breaths, trying to calm myself. I had to deal with this situation perfectly. I could not make any mistakes despite my emotional state. Possibly, my kids’ lives were at stake.

  I had a thought then. Maybe other people’s lives were at risk, as well. Could there be other prisoners onboard this ship, dying in tests even now? Maybe no one had made it this far. Maybe I was the first one.

  I thought of a hundred commands. I thought of demanding a view of the world as we glided silently above it. I was burning with questions too, but I didn’t dare ask them. Not yet. What if it took a question as a command to give information? What if I was only allowed one command? If there was some kind of time limit, or if my second command might cancel out my first, then I couldn’t afford to mess around asking more from the ship. Not until I knew more. I was playing a deadly game without knowing the rules, and I would continue to play it as I had been all along, with extreme paranoia.

  There was no reaction for about a minute. I couldn’t feel anything, and the ship didn’t say anything. It was all I could do to stand there, silent, wondering what the hell was going on. I stared at every wall suspiciously, my eyes roving. Suddenly, I thought I felt a tremor. Something had changed. Had we stopped?

  An opening melted away about where I recalled having entered. As with every doorway, it was simply a spot in the metal wall that could vanish and reappear. It was disconcerting, now that I was able to watch the phenomenon up close. Whoever these aliens were, they were much more advanced in practical terms than we were. What had Arthur C. Clarke said? That any technology, sufficiently advanced, would seem like magic to us. That’s how the ship seemed to me right now. Like a magical monster would to a barbarian. I was Jonah, and this was my whale.

  The arm was there, in the newly revealed room, or rather, the top coil of it was there. The rest of it had dipped down into the darkness below the ship. The coils moved, drawing upward. It was coming up, bringing something up with it.

  I glimpsed the slate-gray sea at night. The smell of the cold ocean puffed in, a fresh, salty odor. It smelled good, but it filled me with despair. The arm came up, and at the end of that very long snake-like arm was the hand. In the hand was the broken body of Sandra. She was completely naked now, having lost her cotton blouse in the freezing seawater. Water dripped from her long dark hair and ran in a stream from her dead blue lips. Her right hand was still missing its fingers.

  “No,” I said, “she’s not...” but then I stopped myself.

  “Incomplete statement,” said the ship. The huge black arm froze. It held the dead girl in front of me. She dripped cold water on the deck.

  If I told the ship Sandra was not my child, would it dump her again? Could it actually revive the dead? There was no point in not having it try to fix Sandra. She had earned that much after my failed ‘leadership’.

  “Continue,” I said, “finish executing my command. Revive her. Also, to obey my original order, you must fly back to my farm and get my other children and repair them too.”

  Another room melted open. It was a large one, like the room I was in now, which I had come to think of as the bridge. The new room had tables—raised rectangles of metal, really. Many smaller, three-fingered black arms dangled down over each table. The big arm put Sandra down on a table and then the scene vanished as the walls melted together again.

  Had I blown it? Had I used my one wish and been too unclear? I didn’t know, but didn’t want to start talking to the ship again. Not yet. Perhaps, it could revive people. If these creatures had been watching the Earth and molesting humans for years, as some UFO nuts had always claimed, then they might be very well-versed in human anatomy.

  Stupidly, I allowed my heart to soar. What if the ship really could bring my kids back to life? It seemed wild, but a defibrillator would probably look like white magic to a tribesman from centuries past. We revived people all the time in hospitals. Until brain-death set in, what was the limit? Four minutes or so, I thought, for our science. Longer if the subject was in a cold environment. So with advanced techniques, who knew?

  I had hope again, and I almost feared it more than the ship itself. With hope, one can be disappointed. Hope would allow me to feel the pain of my loss all over again.

  I felt the tiny shuddering sensation. It seemed to me now that I wasn’t able to detect acceleration, but when the ship halted I could feel it if nothing else was going on. Were we over my farm? My heart leapt, but I tried to stop myself from believing anything could be done.

  The door melted open as before, and I watched the great black hand reach down to my farm. I thought I saw—yes, there were flashing colored lights down there. They splashed red, blue and yellow over the roof of my house. Emergency vehicles? Had someone reported the attack? I couldn’t see the vehicles from my vantage, and I didn’t want to step into the room with the open floor for a better look. By no means did I trust the ship yet. For all I knew, this was yet another elaborate test.

  What kind of test might I be participating in now? Perhaps it wanted to know what I would do if given one chance at them. I wondered if I had chosen badly. Maybe, I should have demanded that the aliens show themselves and commit suicide at my feet. When they revived my children—or didn’t—I decided I would indulge myself with such commands.

  I wondered if there were police down there. I knew a deputy lived nearby. Perhaps he’d heard my shotgun go off and had made the call. If Deputy Dave Mitters was down there, I had to wonder what he thought of my spaceship. We’d had a few beers and football games between us.

  The answer came as the hand snaked down and fished about. Popping sounds rang out.

  “Don’t shoot my kids you moron, Dave,” I muttered aloud. But I pulled back a step from the opening. If he was firing up into the ship, I didn’t want him to get lucky.

  Suddenly, a brilliant flare lit up beneath the ship. Blinding green light filled my vision, like a silent explosion. My eyes snapped themselves shut, but it was too late. Purple, splotchy after-images danced on my retina. When I opened one eye back up, blinking and putting my hands to my face, the intense green glare flashed into existence again. But this time I was ready with my arm shielding my aching eyes.

  The sounds of gunfire were gone now, replaced by silence. Not even the crickets in the fields were chirruping anymore. From the opening, where the arm reached out of my new world of moving liquid metals down into my old world of rippling fields, a wash of heat came up into the ship. With the hot air came a smell, a smell of ozone and burnt things. Quickly, this hot smell was replaced by a gush of black smoke. What had happened down there? I had to think the ship had returned fire. Automatically, I supposed.

  Had it burned down Dave Mitters? I worried about it, thinking perhaps I had inadvertently caused more death by telling my ship to return to my farm. I remembered that I had fired on the ship myself, and it hadn’t burnt me down then. Maybe the rules had changed, now that I had made it to the bridge.

  The snake-arm retracted back into the ship. It retracted faster as it reached the end. There, in the grip of the thing, was an ambulance gurney. My mouth sagged open. A sheet covered the face, but by the shape of the body I figured it must be Kristine. Black ash speckled the white sheet over her face. Seeing her body like that brought a wave of grief that was physically painful. It was as if I’d been punched in the gut. I felt sickened. The ship’s arm slid away into the side room, the one with all the tables and smaller snake-arms. I didn’t look. I didn’t want to see what was going on in there with Sa
ndra. I didn’t want to see her beautiful body being dissected.

  I put my hands on my knees and almost heaved up whatever was in my stomach. I had to struggle to keep control. The huge arm dipped down again. I took several steps, crossing the room and leaning against the cold wall of the bridge, which I now believed this room to be. The arm was down there, snaking around my farm. Soon, it would come back up with Jake’s body, I knew. I didn’t want to see him as a dead thing. Not again.

  It was very quiet down there. The initial gush of smoke and heat had ebbed, leaving a lurid flickering light. Something was on fire. I hoped it wasn’t my house. I hoped it wasn’t Dave Mitters. Soon the arm did as I thought it would, gliding back into the ship with a burden. It slipped into the medical bay, or dissection room, or whatever it was, and vanished. I put my cheek against the cold wall of the ship and tried not to think of Jake or Kristine or Dave Mitters. I tried not to think of anything.

  I failed to stop my mind from racing, however. What if the ship revived the kids, but as brain-damaged vegetables? Would I have to watch them grow up in a coma? Or, what if the ship never let any of us go? What if we were to be its prisoners, perhaps to be tested by pitting us in death fights on other worlds?

  What if I had only magnified the horror of the situation by bringing my own children back into it?

  -5-

  “Retrieval process complete.”

  “You—you are ready for new instructions?” I asked hesitantly.

  “Ready,” said the ship.

  I looked around with wide eyes. That voice never seemed to emanate from any one spot. I’d never seen a speaker. The sound came from the very walls of the ship itself, I thought. If the ship could change its walls into doors at will, then maybe it could make tiny motions in a spot on the walls, forming a vibration. Forming a speaker and pronouncing words. Very strange technology.

  I reflected that if I was allowed to give the ship a new order, then this test was either much longer and more complex than any of the others, or it was not a test at all. Perhaps, I had truly been given command of this ship. But why?

  I decided, at long last, to ask some questions. There was one I had to ask.

  “I command you to answer my questions. How are the revivals going? Are my children going to survive?”

  “Unknown. The injections have been administered.”

  I thought about that. What injections? I decided the ship’s answer was good enough for now. I would find out the rest when the job was done. The fact the ship had said unknown concerned me, however. The outcome was in doubt. I shook my head and rubbed my temples.

  “Ship—what should I call you?”

  “How do you wish to address us?”

  I thought of a dozen expletives. Asshole came to mind, for example. For the first time since I’d awakened, a grim smile twitched on my face and quickly died.

  “I’m going to name you Alamo,” I said, “because I intend to never forget you.”

  “Rename complete.”

  I snorted. “Okay Alamo, let’s try something easy. Turn on a view screen or something so I can see what’s going on below us.”

  A portal melted in the middle of the bridge floor. It was circular and perhaps ten feet in diameter. The second it began to open, the air in the room began screaming out of it. A fantastic wave of cold struck me. Could we be in space? Had I just killed myself?

  “Close it! Close it up again!” My breath came in gasps. I was on the floor and being sucked across it toward the opening.

  The hole vanished and the room rapidly repressurized. How high up were we? I didn’t think I was in open space, as I was sure we would not have survived that. Besides, I wasn’t weightless. Very high up, but still inside the atmosphere, then. Maybe miles up.

  I found myself in a shivering ball on the floor of the ship. That had been a close one. I recalled my words: Turn on a view screen or something.... I was certain it was that or something part which had gotten me into trouble. One did not want to be vague with this vessel. Another hard lesson learned.

  “Ship?” I said.

  Nothing. Then I remembered the rename.

  “Alamo, respond.”

  “Responding.”

  “Why did you open that portal in the floor?”

  “Because the commander ordered it.”

  I blinked and sat up against a wall. So, I was the ship’s commander. Had those centaurs been the old commanders?

  “Alamo, return to California. Maintain an altitude of one mile.”

  The ship shuddered to a stop.

  “Secondary mission aborted.”

  “What secondary mission?”

  “The acquisition of new command personnel.”

  “Have you been gathering people up all along in this ship while I’ve been sitting in here?”

  “Yes.”

  I huffed. “Have you been testing them, the way you tested me?”

  “No. The testing sequence was not identical.”

  I thought about that. I believed I had the answer. “So, now that I’m sitting in here, the aggression test or the leadership test would be the last one, right? The one you gave them when they reached the bridge? You would have given command of this ship to whoever won a fight to the death in this room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stop that mission. Alamo, you will not continue to pick people up and test them. That mission has ended.”

  “Schedule updated.”

  I was more certain than ever that I was dealing with an artificial intelligence. Maybe there weren’t any aliens aboard for me to avenge myself on, only the ship itself, following some commands given to it long ago. I just hoped the ‘acquisition of command personnel’ mission didn’t pop back up again, like a program that kept reinstalling itself and trying to update itself no matter how many times you canceled it.

  I had a horrible new thought then. “Alamo, do not drop out anyone else who is aboard. Leave them on this ship. I wish to talk to them.”

  “All acquisition mission participants were released when the mission was aborted.”

  My hands went to my face, rubbing. They crept up to my hair, where they tugged. I pulled my own hair until it hurt and I made a roaring sound.

  “Released,” I said, my voice choking. “You mean you dropped them out of the ship?”

  “Yes.”

  I had just killed an unknown number of people. I thought about asking how many there were—who they were. But I stopped myself. It would not do my sanity any good to know the details.

  When the ship shuddered again, my mind had partly recovered from the guilt of having made deadly mistakes. Command definitely came with the weight of responsibility on this ship. Since the Alamo had stopped, I figured we must be back over California. I wondered if the ship had plucked up Dave Mitters from his squad car and put him through few tests before I had him dropped into the upper atmosphere. He had stopped firing in a sudden fashion, and there had been no shouting afterward. Perhaps it had burnt him down with that green beam instead. One way or another, I felt sure the ship had killed him.

  I tried to put all of that out of my mind. If I just talked to the ship and didn’t give it any new commands, I figured it probably wouldn’t kill anyone. If nothing else, I could stop it from causing more grief. At least, I hoped so.

  “Alamo,” I said, trying to think clearly, to reason out the right approach. “Where is the ship’s crew? What were they trying to accomplish?”

  “Excessive responses generated.”

  I thought about that. I had to be more specific. “Besides myself and my children, are there any other humans currently onboard?”

  “No.”

  “Besides the four humans, are there other living beings onboard?”

  The voice hesitated for several seconds. I’d never heard it do that before. “Answer unclear.”

  Answer unclear? For some reason, the response caused a chill to go through me. What might cause it to be unsure? My mind jumped to strange concl
usions. Were there some kind of zombie creatures aboard, or frozen beings, or robots that might be considered alive? Suddenly, I thought I had it.

  “Alamo, you are aboard this vessel, do you consider yourself to be alive?”

  “Unclear.”

  I nodded to myself. I might have smiled, but I was in a grim mood, so my mouth formed a tight line instead. I had learned something. The ship was indeed artificially intelligent. Was a thing like that alive? Not in my book, but who knew how it thought about itself. I decided not to get into a pointless philosophical argument with the ship over this issue. I would skip administering the Turing Test. It really didn’t matter.

  “Alamo, is this portion of the ship the bridge?”

  Another hesitation. Were a vast number of recursive routines firing off in this thing’s mind causing the delay?

  “This is the goal room for the command mission. It has capabilities the other chambers don’t have.”

  I nodded. That made it the bridge. “Can I fly the ship from this room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I...” I tried to think of some other command function. “Can I communicate with other ships from this room?”

  “Yes.”

  I sucked in a breath. For the very first time, it occurred to me that there might be other ships like this one. Were they all over the Earth? It made my stomach flutter, as if I’d dropped off the high dive.

  “How many ships like this one are there, Alamo?” I asked quietly.

  “Unknown.”

  Precision, I told myself. I had to ask for specifics. “How many ships like this one are within—ten miles of the Earth’s surface?”

  “Seven hundred and forty-six.”

  I put my hand over my mouth. This was an invasion. Up until now, I’d believed myself to be special, to be one of those people they put on TV who said they’d been abducted and probed by aliens. I had to take all those people out of the crazy zone in my mind now. They had been telling the truth all along.

  “Are they all searching for command personnel, the way you were?”