Ex Lacrima Remnant

Track #43 – Reverberations

Robin inhaled. Exhaled. Sitting with her arms and legs crossed on her cot, breathing slowly. Her eyes were closed, but she was seeing everything. Memories. An endless stream of pictures, sounds, the past unfolding once again inside her brain, as a mindless playback frozen in time. Three Sol centuries worth of information, stashed in the gem encased in her forehead. That gem was Robin more than her physical body. The most religious among the elves believed that their gems contained their souls – provided souls existed in the first place. Her humans, the humans that created her species, had given up on the idea of gods and religion long before, but elves? No, despite knowing they were mere artificial creatures, they never once stopped believing in a higher plane of existence. Still, whatever afterlife her race confided in had no physical effects on the world of the living… and surely didn’t help stopping the plague, when the tenth vault was opened.

She rewound her memory again to that day, the day of what had been a millennium for the outside world, but barely two hundred years for her, thanks to her time in suspended animation. There it was, Lagash, again, towering in front of the assembled crowd, among the chants, the celebrations. The flight deck was off-limits, only accessible to the heads of state and ministers, but that wasn’t a problem: there were other elves stationed there, to record the events. Her hands trembled, a shiver rolled down her spine. Those elves were with her, now. Not in their physical form, but at least in spirit. Their gems remained with her. Always with her. Hidden under the hummingbird feathers of her bracelet. A memento she wouldn’t give up on. Her siblings. What was left of them. Some of them had been on the flight deck, when hell broke loose. The delirious last message of Anthony Yarramundi had to play in front of them, causing panic, chaos. They saw it. That message was etched in their gems, gems they ripped away from their foreheads and gave to her before she was put in cryogenic sleep. Gems that sealed their outer connectors to preserve the life experiences of their owners. Gems that now were enveloping the solid state drive that contained their essence, like amber around a dead mosquito. Her friends, her siblings entrusted her with their memories, so that someone, anyone could remember them. If it weren’t for the luck of the draw, she would have been the one to rip her gem off instead. But the burden of reminiscing, the burden of keeping the collective memory of that ancient society destroyed by the nanos, fell on her shoulders. In all those years, though, she never once considered peering into the information stored in those archives. In a way, it felt like intruding in the minds of the dead, defiling them, desecrating their sanctity.

Still, maybe, the time had come. The last message of Yarramundi was the trigger that made her waver, lose confidence in her ways. What happened, back then? Did an elf open the vault, releasing the nanoswarm? If so, why didn’t her siblings tell her about it? Why was their warning only about not opening the vault at all? Something didn’t fit, like a puzzle with missing pieces. Maybe, the elf who unleashed the apocalypse thought about what it meant for their species, if that piece of information was leaked. Persecutions. Public lynching. Cold-blooded murders. Right as it was happening to rhizomes all around New Netherlands – victims of misunderstandings and bigotry, just because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Robin glanced at her bracelet once again. Analyzing the content of those gems would have required breaking them open, violating their integrity. Doing that was a one way road, no turning back. Once cracked, the crystal contained within could be interfaced with a simple wired connection, one that was standardized by the blueprints of Lagash’s second vault. That meant that even this iteration of humanity had to have access to it, which was exactly what she observed in her days roaming the land while posing as a preacher.

Five gems. Five of her kind who self-immolated to give her a chance. Peering into their brains, into their minds, felt wrong. But there was a reason she was given their memories – to make use of them, to prevent the worst outcome again. Something she failed at miserably, now waiting for her demise on an orbital piece of space junk. A long breath. Yeah, procrastinating didn’t do her any good. She should have already accepted it centuries before, but, in a corner of her mind, she hoped, prayed she didn’t need to. She caressed the outermost gem, the smallest of them all. The youngest of them all. Her owner was on that flight deck, the day everything fell to pieces. She was the first to come out, to scream at them to run. Now, that emerald was the only evidence she ever existed. Robin glanced at its shining surface, brought it close to her eyes. If there were anything that could contain the answers she looked for, it had to be it. She considered her actions for a second longer, before placing the gem on the cot.

And smashing it open with her fist.

The surface cracked, split, thrashed in a shower of glass-like fragments. Revealing a smaller crystal, one with two connectors peeking out of its core. Robin caressed it, closed it in her hand, felt her eyes getting wet. Remora. Her youngest sister. Always laughing. Always shining. Always happy about her role as a repository of knowledge. That crystal was all what was left of her. A crystal she wished to preserve forever, frozen in time to that day. Robin sighed. Her promise, the promise she made to herself, was now as shattered as the gem laying between her fingers. Yet, she knew that it was what she needed to do. She touched the connectors, pinched the short cables leaning out of them, pulled them. The wires looked as thin as nylon, almost transparent in the lights of her room. All she needed to do was connect them to the two jacks at the base of her neck, hidden under har hair. That would have triggered the mingling, letting her scan the memories of Remora as if they were hers. Without another thought, she tapped her plugs, wired the crystal to them. Before connecting that to a human computer, she wanted to see with her eyes what Remora saw. Possibly, redacting the fragments humans weren’t supposed to see. Her crushes. Her hopes. Her dreams. That was a private part of her that couldn’t just be given away. Robin smirked, almost wryly. It took her two centuries to win her hesitation.

Now it was time to get to work.

And find the ‘truth’ she so much held dear.

A ‘truth’ she always had at her disposal, yet one that she wasn’t ready to look for.

Not until that night.

**

Mimi and knowledge of artificial intelligence occupied two disjoint Venn diagrams without any overlap whatsoever. Same with Mimi and chemistry, Mimi and philosophy, Mimi and environmental sciences. Most of her early life was spent around music, art, mechanics, weapon design, software development and gushing over her crush of the week. So, she didn’t have the faintest idea of how and what a nanoswarm was supposed to look or sound like. Yet, that wasn’t a reason not to be curious. That huge perv, Graham Zonta, had left a note in the data dump – ‘find out how they talk to each other’. The geezer was convinced that the nanos (whatever they actually were) had to be able to exchange limited amounts of data, to avoid cannibalism. The easiest way to implement that would have probably been electromagnetic signals. That was a classic – every part of the swarm could have worked like a mini-radio, sending a callsign to every other unit, maybe through an encrypted channel. There was also a chance they had to be able to keep a constant communication stream with Lagash, to understand what to destroy, what not to touch... and when to stop. So far, they seemed to be hellbent in burning down everything except solid ground, but it had to be more refined than that – otherwise, they would have eaten the seedship too. On that, she had to agree with Zonta – there had to be something else at play. While Mimi had some expertise in radios and electromagnetic emitters, the fine details were out of her depth. If anything, her aunt would have felt at home, browsing through that gigantic mass of sensor data. It was the kind of stuff that made her excited.

Mimi gritted her teeth. No mourning. Not now. Don’t think about aunt Caro. Think about the swarm.

The pictures recorded by the cameras Zonta set up gave her mind the respite she needed. They were crystal clear, shot at high frequency, with several hundreds of frames per each second of footage. It was impressive to see how fast one meter per second actually was. Grass turning to ash, trees being eaten alive under her eyes. Zonta must have been in awe, in his last moments. Awe or fear, maybe. Being familiar with his public behavior, arousal wasn’t out of the question either. Still, the video was impressive and the audio recordings were crisp. Shame for his blabbering voiceover, polluting the recording with his last will. Fortunately, since he used several mics, removing it from the signals seemed feasible. It still deleted some data on the frequencies that might have been useful, but the moments of silence were probably long enough to get something out of it – provided the swarm emitted any sounds whatsoever. Machines of that size were barely able to work as mini-loudspeakers, let alone microphones, but there was always a chance that it wasn’t the case. After all, those nanos were tech that felt alien to even the best minds on Lagash. The current iteration of humanity never managed to build something comparable. In part because it didn’t have enough time. In part because it was idly waiting the seedship vaults to give away that tech for free. From that point of view, vaults had been quite detrimental to human development – so many projects and promising tech shot down because ‘it might be hidden inside the next vault’. That’s why so many hoped the tenth vault to be a dud – so that tech could finally evolve at its own pace, without having to be drip-fed by a bunch of long dead ancestors. Those musings, albeit intellectually stimulating, weren’t doing Mimi any favor nor speeding up the analysis of the data. So, she returned to her programs, to the cleaning of those audio tracks, trying to remove every trace of Zonta’s voice and amplifying all other noises, as insignificant as they were. When correctly channeled and modulated, sound could break things, make objects explode. So, excluding it a priori was wrong, despite the abysmally small chance of it being relevant. She finished cleaning the tracks, started playing them back again from the beginning. Far noises of crumbling buildings. Screams. Sounds of steps. The background seemed to contain everything and anything, in the audible range. A meow. That had to be an unfortunate cat. Mimi couldn’t help but sigh. That poor animal didn’t even know what struck it. She hoped it didn’t feel pain, if anything. That made her wonder what a cat would think of that phenomenon, of that wave turning everything into an ashen wasteland. What did that look like, for a creature with such a different perspective on the world?

Other sounds assaulted her mind, closer and closer to the microphones. Cracks. Concrete being dug out, metal bending and being eaten. Then, just ten seconds of rustling noises, much like a quiet storm going over the desert. Till nothing was left but silence.

She groaned. As expected, the audible range didn’t carry any of the answers she was looking for, yielding nothing except white noise. She launched a spectrum analyzer, one program that was installed by default on military computers. The version she had access to was fairly old and not half as feature-complete as the cracked copy aunt Caro had in her store.

Shit. Her again. Everything kept reminding Mimi of the old hag. It was a losing battle. She shook her head, fighting off her tears. Aunt Caro would have scolded her for being too soft, maybe offered her some weed to calm down. Whatever, that was a lost fight. Better go back to the data. Yes. The spectrum analyzer. Infrasounds. Ultrasounds. The two ends of the spectrum, away from audible frequencies.

She gasped for air, as the pictures materialized on her digital retina, as the plot of the sound patters opened before her eyes.

It was there, right under her sightless gaze.

An isolated peak, in the far ultrasounds, way outside of what a normal human could hear. Too sharp to be random. Too sharp to be natural. Almost confined to a single frequency, with very little bandwidth. Something that was as weird as it could get. Either it was a faulty microphone, a post-processing mistake or it had to mean something – anything. She recalled the original file, the one with Zonta’s voice on it. His words meant nothing on those frequencies, so filtering it out made no sense. If anything, she could now exclude post-processing shenanigans. Same peak. Same general shape. Same position. That could still be the product of a defective mic, though. But, as luck wanted, Zonta installed not one but five mics around his resting place. Mimi eagerly opened all of the files, run them through the spectrum analyzer too.

Disappointment struck her, right as the second sample didn’t turn out to have any such peak. So, it truly was a mechanical error of the device. Well, unless…

Her mood warmed up once more, as the third sample took front and center. Again the same peak. Again in the same position. Maybe, just maybe, the second track was recorded with a crappy mic, one that wasn’t sensitive to high frequency sounds. It wasn’t unbelievable: Zonta had to make do with whatever was around the precinct, so the quality of the instruments he fielded might have varied wildly. Yet, seeing the same pattern even just twice was enough to elevate it above a simple statistical oddity. Unless, of course, the mics were of the same model. In that case, the peak might have been something connected with that brand of instruments and not a real effect. Mimi recalled the metadata of the two recordings with the clear ultrasound anomaly. She almost bit her tongue, yelled a loud ‘fuck’.

Of course, same detector model. Of frickin’ course.

She would have liked to bang her head against the keyboard, that dumb old physical keyboard that she was given access to. She let her head slump on the desk, her cheek pressed against the dry plastic. Breath in. Breath out. It was fine. It was fine. There were still two mics to check, it was too soon to be disappointed. Nevertheless, she decided to keep her hopes to a record low, to avoid overhyping her findings. Two out of three tracks had the signal, but they were literally the same type of device. She lazily checked the metadata of the remaining recordings, just to be sure it was even worth opening them. To her surprise, they came from two different devices. One was the same as that which caught the second track – the one that didn’t contain the peak. The other came from a completely different brand of mics. She decided to skip the former and focused on the outlier.

She gulped down a lump of saliva. She had no rights to be that scared or that filled with expectations, but it was hard not to feel like being on the verge of something. She opened the last file, ran it through the spectrum analyzer, waited with bated breath, and…

“Oh. My. Short. House. Plant. Goddess.”

She checked on her jacks, just to be sure the data stream wasn’t deceiving her.

But the image didn’t change.

The peak.

Was there.

Right before her eyes.

Sure, it wasn’t as sharp or high as in the other two recordings, but it was there, crystal clear.

It couldn’t be a coincidence. That inaudible sound meant something, had to mean something. A rush of adrenaline filled her veins, made her grin from ear to ear. She slammed her hand on the table, almost tumbled down from her chair, regaining her balance at the last second.

That could still be a fluke. A nothing burger. It wasn’t enough to draw conclusions. She needed confirmation, some sort – any sort of confirmation. Her computer didn’t have comnet access (thanks, gramps Geiger), so good luck finding a high res video of the vault opening. But, maybe, there was someone else who could confirm or deny her suppositions. Someone that might have been involved, that could held the key to the mystery.

That ‘someone’ was the reason why aunt Caro died.

That ‘someone’ was sitting in her room, trying to avoid Mimi for the best part of their imprisonment on that orbital waste of money.

That ‘someone’ was nothing less than the woman who claimed she had been there, when the vault was opened one thousand years before.

Mimi’s hand went for the computer tower, unplugged her neck jacks one by one, disconnecting from the machine, turning her eyes blind again.

That ‘someone’ was going to get a visit from her, right there, right now.

And she’d better still be awake, because Mimi was going to kick her out of her bed if she weren’t.

With or without her consent.