Brokering Trust - Gay Edition

It stopped at the base of the landing pad, peering at him with its shining cameras, a couple of jutting antennae waving like those of a curious insect. He waited for it to make the first move.

"Doctor David O'Shea," it began in that same tinny, synthetic voice. "Allow me to extend my welcome to you. I am to be your handler during your visit. You will remain with me at all times, and you will follow any instructions that I give. If you have any questions or requirements, you are to address them to me."

"Thank you," David replied, still unsure of whether he was talking to a person or a machine. He might already look foolish to the Brokers, like a primitive trying to have a conversation with a self-driving taxi. "On behalf of the UN and its scientific community, I'd like to thank your people for affording us such a rare and valuable opportunity to share knowledge and further our relations."

He had rehearsed that line in front of a mirror several times throughout his journey, but the robot didn't seem impressed. It watched him in silence, the only indication of life coming from its sensors as they zoomed and focused.

"Please follow me," it replied after a few moments. Surmising that it was another drone, he made his way down another short ramp and set his two hard cases down in front of it. After another few moments of waiting, it seemed to understand what he expected of it, two of those flexible tentacles snaking down to grip their handles with three-fingered claws. It lifted the two cases off the ground with ease, suspending them in the air gingerly as though not quite sure what to do with them. That done, it began to march, David feeling wet earth beneath his boots as he followed beside it.

They turned left - towards the beach - walking along a muddy track that led away from the little cluster of structures. Everything seemed to be wet here. Even the robot's hull was misted with water droplets. It must be a nightmare trying to keep circuitry insulated from moisture on this planet, even above the water. In this kind of environment, rust would eat clean through most metals in a matter of years.

He raised his wrist display, wiping away some of the moisture with his glove and checking the atmospheric readout. The oxygen content was higher than on Earth, and there were large concentrations of greenhouse gasses that lent credence to his theory about the planet's high habitability, but the air was otherwise perfectly breathable. Not that he was at all inclined to raise his visor - this place gave Florida a run for its money. David was perfectly content to stay in his little air-conditioned bubble.

"How far is it, exactly?" he asked as they transitioned onto one of the roads. It was flat and straight, made from a porous material that resembled concrete, but it had the color of white plastic or resin. It seemed to extend all the way to the pale sand in the distance. "I only ask because these are new boots, in a sense," he added. "Haven't quite broken them in yet. There would be nothing more annoying than being stranded on an alien planet with blisters on your feet, right? Assuming you have feet..."

"It is not far," the robot replied.

Unsatisfied with the answer, David cleared his throat.

"I must ask - am I speaking to an autonomous machine right now, or is this unit intelligently controlled? Am I communicating with a person?"

"You are," it replied in that synthetic voice. It was indistinguishable from the one that he had heard on the ship, as though they were using the same synthesizer.

"Okay, we're making some progress," he grumbled. At least he knew that he wasn't talking to a wall now. These proxies must be controlled remotely. "What should I call you? Do you have a name?"

"Your species lacks the necessary vocal apparatus to reproduce our speech."

"That's a mouthful," he joked, but the proxy seemed to ignore him. "Sure you're not a robot?" he muttered into his helmet, choosing not to broadcast the comment via the external speakers.

David faltered as he saw one of the cargo vehicles approaching them from the opposite direction, trundling down the road on its chunky wheels at some speed. It must have been going thirty-K, at least. Its bed was loaded with a cargo container the size of a truck trailer, and like the Broker proxy, it had a front face that was covered in cameras and sensors. The proxy made no effort to get out of its way, so neither did David, the truck slowing before making a wide arc around them. As it passed by, he noted that there were alien markings on the containers - text or symbols that took the form of colored squares arranged in vertical rows. Curious.

They left the shadow of the dense canopy and made their way onto the beach, David noting that the road went all the way to the ocean, where it vanished into the surf. Were the trucks amphibious? There were transparent tubes filled with water and other enclosed pipelines that ran from the edge of the forest to the sea, too. Those might be utility lines or some element of Broker infrastructure. Perhaps they were also an amphibious species. Was he about to meet a race of giant salamanders?

He paused to take in his surroundings, turning to look back at the mountains that rose up behind him. They weren't the Himalayas by any means, and there was no exposed rock or snow at their peaks, but the comparatively low gravity allowed them to reach an impressive size nonetheless.

Only now that he was perpendicular to the trees did he realize that many of them were leaning in his direction, angling their fronds towards the sea. They were pointing at the star like sunflowers, but on a tidally-locked planet, the sun would always remain in the same position. Despite Trappist only reaching about sixty percent of Sol's luminosity, the plants on 1e might actually get a little more sunlight without a night cycle to worry about. As it was, the trees all looked like they had been the recent victims of a hurricane.

Movement caught his eye, one of the trees some distance away shaking as a dark shape rose from its branches. It was some kind of bird - the creature flapping powerful, feathery wings as it lifted itself into the sky, too distant for him to make out much in the way of details. It had two wings where one would have expected them to be, and two more that jutted out beneath it almost like rudders. They were smaller, perhaps legs that had been adapted to assist with flight. Without an intuitive understanding of how tall these trees were, it was hard to get an accurate gauge of its size, but he could tell that it was large just from the laborious way that it moved. The combination of the lower gravity and warm, dense air was a match made in heaven for the evolution of flight.

Too late, he remembered that the helmet he was wearing had various zoom functions, cursing under his breath as the bird vanished into the mist. It had drawn his eyes to something just as magnificent, however, and he craned his neck as he lifted his gaze to the sky. Even through the clouds, he could make out the glow of the megastructure that encircled the planet, its white hull material catching the sunlight. It was a faint, thin strand shrouded in atmospheric haze, but it was clear enough to resemble planetary rings. David had ridden plenty of tethers, but a structure of that size just boggled the mind. He was seeing something with his own eyes that had existed only in theory for centuries, and something about looking at it from the ground made its scale all the more tangible.

"Please follow me," the proxy said, snapping him out of his stupor.

"Just...looking around," he said as he returned to the robot's side. "Hey, how are you keeping that orbital structure stable? On planets with a spin, that centrifugal force can be harnessed to keep space elevators standing, but why isn't that ring collapsing under 1e's gravitational pull?"

The proxy didn't reply, David scowling behind his visor. How much of this marvelous technology did they intend to withhold from him, and where did they draw the line concerning what was considered sensitive?

"Why did you invite me here?" David asked as they made their way to the lapping surf. "I don't mean you literally - why do your superiors need my help? It has to be something relating to neural networks."

"All will be explained soon," the machine replied, David rolling his eyes.

He hesitated as they reached the shore, the waves rolling up the beach and washing over his boots. The robot marched on, so he followed, the frothy water rising to his knees. It was tangibly cool through the lining of his suit, but not enough to be uncomfortable, his insulation and heating elements maintaining a pleasant internal temperature. As much as he could rationalize that the suit would keep him safe, instinct that still lingered after millions of years spiked his blood pressure and plucked at his limbic system, insisting that he return to dry land. Ignoring the archaic impulses - and trying not to hold his breath - he marched beneath the waves.

The water level rose up above his visor, buoyancy making him move like he was in microgravity, the tide jostling him gently. He could see the shimmering reflection of the sun on the surface above him, only a couple of meters above his head, and before him was an expanse of white sand that faded into a blue haze. The water was remarkably clear, and he could see far enough to make out a forest of kelp-like water weeds. To his surprise, the browns and oranges that he had seen on land were giving way to some blues and greens here. Of course - infrared light didn't penetrate very far through water, so the deeper they went, the more the aquatic plants would resemble those of Earth in color. Below maybe forty meters, no UV light or any wavelengths above about six hundred nanometers would be usable for photosynthesis.

The road was still beneath his feet, the white, glossy material snaking off into the distance. How it wasn't covered in silt and colonized by sea life searching for a hard surface, he had no idea. As they walked deeper - David bounding along like he was walking on Luna - the kelp forest began to enclose them. The stalks were as tall as trees, waving gently in the waves, reaching towards shallower water in search of light. They had mustard-colored leaves, growing dense enough that they blocked the sun, limiting visibility and creating dappled pools of light on the ground. There were smaller grasses clinging to the sediment, creating a lush, thick carpet like a meadow.

David lurched as a little fish darted out from between two nearby stalks, its colorful scales glinting in the light shafts before it vanished again. A few more followed - a whole school of them racing through the kelp, pausing to take cover within their shadowy leaves. He managed to get a better look at one of them as it peeked out at him. It had no fins and no tail, only a single skirt-like frill that ran down its tapering length. The frill created a mesmerizing wave pattern to propel it through the water, David admiring its tropical coloration of orange and blue stripes as it flitted away.

Surrounded by so much strange beauty, his anxiety about being so deep below the waves began to fade, academic curiosity distracting him from the sound of his own labored breathing inside his helmet.

As they made their way along the road, he spotted yet another animal - some kind of crustacean lazily walking through the sea grass on a set of long, spindly legs. There was no better way to describe it than as a crab, the creature bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Earth animal. It was picking through the detritus with a pair of dexterous claws as it searched for food. Like the fish, its rounded carapace was colored primarily orange with some hints of brown, likely to camouflage it.

Before long, they came upon another strange sight. The grass and kelp began to give way to more rocky terrain that rose up from the sediment, the boulders and outcrops covered with corals and sponges. Their shapes and colors were uncountable, David's head on a swivel as he followed his robotic handler between the formations. Some were shaped like fans or sails that grew a good two meters in height, colored a vibrant blood red with violet fringes, vein-like structures crisscrossing their surfaces. Some almost looked like brains or honeycombs covered in complex grooves, while others reached up with spindly arms, branching out in fractal patterns. There were great shelves in azure blue that clung to the vertical sides of the rock faces almost like mushrooms. He could see trees with thick, trunk-like stalks that formed parasols high above him, and bowl-shaped growths that were filled with little waving tentacles reminiscent of sea anemones.

The only constant was that every available surface had been colonized, down to the smallest pebble, tube-shaped sponges and filter feeders clustering wherever there was space. There was more animal life here, too - shoals of almost obnoxiously colorful fish moving through the open water. More were hiding in the safe nooks and crannies afforded by the sprawling reef, crabs and shrimps crawling across the corals. It was like an undersea botanical garden.

Indifferent to his wonder, his companion marched on, scarcely giving him a few moments to stop and admire the scenery. The road wound between the reefs, still paradoxically clean of the life that surrounded it. Perhaps the material was treated with some kind of chemical to prevent the polyps from taking root, or maybe there was some mechanical aspect of its construction that made it undesirable.

As they rounded a bend, David stopped in his tracks. Not ten meters away, sifting through the sediment between two mounds of corals, was an animal. It was a crustacean - larger than any that he had encountered so far at about the size of a sheep. It resembled a lobster with no tail, its back covered in a hard, segmented shell that gave it a hunched appearance. Instead of the spindly legs that he would have expected, it had thicker, trunk-like limbs to support what must be some considerable weight. They were positioned beneath it, more like a land animal than the splayed legs of an arthropod, with maybe eight or ten on each side. It had a long, tapered head like a shrimp, clusters of antennae and what might be feeding tendrils sifting through the silt and throwing up clouds of dust into the water. Its complex compound eyes were mounted on stalks, reminding him of a hermit crab, waving back and forth as it scanned its surroundings. There were small corals and carpets of furry algae growing on its back, forming a camouflaging carpet.

"It is not dangerous," his ward said, as though the sight should be as mundane to him as a cow grazing in a field.

"What the hell is that?" he demanded, watching the walking reef march along.

"They graze in the silt," the tinny voice replied. It was coming through his helmet - he realized. The proxy had tapped into his suit's radio. "They feed only on microorganisms."

Knowing that he wasn't going to get a more satisfying answer, he moved on. The geography of this place was becoming clearer now. After leaving the island, they had entered a lagoon, and they were now coming upon a barrier reef that separated it from the ocean proper. It formed a small, shallow expanse of water where photosynthesis was still a very viable source of energy, and life abounded.

Finally, the end of the road came into view. The terrain ahead rose up almost like a small seamount, David spotting structures nestled in the corals and rocks. They were buildings not unlike the ones that he had seen on the island above, most shaped like domes that were linked by transparent tubes. There were a handful of towers rising from the clusters, reaching to the surface some ten meters above, where their disk-like upper levels breached the water. They might be observation decks for the inhabitants or maybe a place where boats could dock - if the Brokers used boats. There were maybe a dozen structures, giving the impression of a small settlement akin to an underwater village.

Unlike the road, the corals and sponges had been allowed to take root here, the buildings doubling as natural habitats. Some were so covered that they were practically swallowed by the ever-expanding reefs, schools of tropical fish swimming past their porthole-like windows.

The road led to what almost looked like a warehouse - a square structure with rounded corners that seemed to extend deeper into the seamount. There was a large door on its facade that was clean of corals, suggesting that it would open up for the trucks. As they approached, he saw the shadow of something pass through one of the glass tubes that linked the dome-shaped buildings above, cursing to himself as it slid out of view again. Something was swimming around inside those structures...

The door slid open at their approach, splitting into two halves, revealing a parking garage for trucks. The road continued through the middle of the building, terminating in yet another door, the space to either side of it packed with more of the drone vehicles. A shallow ramp on the right side of the room led to a raised platform, and a little further behind it was a door large enough for the hulking proxy.

It led him inside, the door sliding open with a whoosh, closing behind them again as they stepped through. Just like the interior of the cigar vessel, the walls were a matte white, the corners of the room rounded to give it a soft look. Light emanated from all around him, and the water was clear enough that he could see as well as if he was standing on the shore. There was a window that looked out on the trucks in the garage, a few computers mounted on consoles beneath it.

It was the first time that he had seen a Broker computer, and he made a beeline for it before his ward could object. They were touch panels - as there were no visible buttons or interface devices - more of those square symbols displayed on them. It must indeed be their alphabet. They had different colors, and there were complex symbols contained within the squares, David watching curiously as some of them merged to form new characters. There was some kind of graphical interface, too, a stylized representation of one of the trucks standing out to him. Like humans, they must be visual creatures.

"Please do not touch that," the proxy said, David turning to see the robot backing up against one of the walls. There were a couple more of the machines nestled in skeletal cradles, apparently inactive. They looked like charging stations.

The proxy set down David's cases on the floor, then a similar cradle made from a hexagonal lattice structure closed around its chassis to hold it upright, the lenses on its front face ceasing their incessant movement. The damned thing had switched off, its arms going limp. Was this as far as it was intending to take him?

Before he could voice his complaint, the proxy's matte white hull began to split open. It swung ajar like a clamshell, exposing a padded compartment within, something wet and lustrous slithering around inside it.

Struck by a sudden wave of fear, David took a few steps back, his eyes unable to make sense of what he was seeing. It looked like a nest of eels, coiling and winding as they spilled forth from within the confines of the compartment, reaching down towards the floor. They were a rich burgundy in color at their tapered tips, shifting into a lighter rust-red along their length, slightly mottled in appearance. They had an almost speckled texture, glistening in the diffuse light as though covered in tiny scales.

Only when he noticed the bright blue suckers was his mind able to form a picture of what he was looking at. They were tentacles, maybe a dozen of them piling onto the floor like spilled spaghetti, the main body of the creature following behind it. The alien stood upright, using the mass of tentacles as legs, the rubbery limbs joining to its comparatively narrow torso to form a kind of skirt.