How to Save the Planet 02

Hey readers! This is part two of a larger series, and probably won't make much sense without reading the first part. There's a lot of exposition in this chapter, but there's a little 'action' in it too. Be patient and you will be rewarded! There's a whole lot more to come.

"Get up," Lace said. It felt like about fifteen minutes after I'd fallen asleep, right up until she threw the curtains open and sunrise stabbed into my eyes.

"Ow," Justine complained, pulling the sheets over her head.

I squinted, looking at the athletic woman. She was wearing yoga pants and a sports bra that showed off her solid build. She wasn't bodybuilder ripped, or anything, but she spent as much time lifting weights as she did running and it showed. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a bun, and sweat beaded her forehead.

"Is it ten already?" I asked groggily. I hadn't set an alarm. A stab of pain through my head reminded me that I hadn't gotten any water last night, either. Justine had ridden me to an incredible mutual climax, and we'd both followed it closely with sleep.

"Not even close," Lace said grimly. "Not quite eight, but Kate's been up talking to that thing for a while."

"Let her talk," Justine moaned. "What's wrong with that?"

"Plenty," Lace said. I thought I saw her roll her eyes. "Come on, Evan's headed our way. Get out of bed."

Justine peered out from beneath the edge of the covers. "Put a shirt on."

Lace snorted, smiling despite herself. "You put a shirt on."

She left, closing the door behind her. Justine lifted the covers, looking down at both of us naked beneath them. "Oops."

Her little unabashed grin made me laugh, which made her laugh in turn, until both of us were gasping for breath and wiping tears from our eyes.

"Come on," I said at last. "Lace was pretty impatient."

Justine complained, but she got up as I did, stretching in the sunlight in a way that I found very intriguing.

"Go on," she said as she caught me staring. She said it with a smile. "You wanted to go, let's go."

"I'm starting to change my mind," I growled, stepping back towards her and the bed.

Justine stood, flowing up off the bed into my arms and meeting my lips with hers. Her breath was truly awful, just as I'm sure mine was, but I didn't care. We kissed, passionately, bare bodies pressed hard together in the light of morning.

"Put that away," she said, running her fingers over my rising erection. "Naughty boy."

I snorted, but dressed. Justine continued to distract me, bending over enticingly to grab her underwear. If I hadn't seen her peeking up, watching to see my reaction, I might have thought it was accidental.

"Come on," she said, throwing on a clean shirt. She'd skipped a bra, which she could just about get away with, but she'd also chosen a small, tight pair of shorts to wear.

"Should you dress more seriously? I mean... for something this important?"

Justine's expression didn't change, but I still felt the mood drop a little bit. I immediately regretted bringing her mind back to the flower. Lace could do that well enough. It probably would have been fine for me to bring it up once we were out there in the living room. But for a moment, there in her room, I hadn't been anything but her boyfriend. I hadn't been a part of the weirdness. And I had the strangest sinking feeling that I'd broken some delightful illusion that couldn't be repaired.

"It'll be fine," she said after a moment. She smiled, and it didn't seem forced, but it was different than it had been a moment ago. Less relaxed, maybe. "Everyone's seen me in weekend clothes before, and I can't see any reason the alien robot would care."

I shrugged. It felt vaguely wrong, but I wasn't going to argue about it. I didn't have anything but yesterday's clothes, myself. Wasn't first contact supposed to be made by astronauts, or people in white lab coats, or politicians in suits? Certainly not by hungover college kids in sweatpants.

We were the last ones up. Kate was sitting on the odd armchair next to the TV -- the HDMI cable was running out from behind it and over to the coffee table. After a moment, I realized it had actually been ziptied to the metal flower. The plug on the end wasn't touching anything, but I wondered how much of an obstacle that really was for a high-tech device like that.

Kate herself looked terrible. There were deep bags under her eyes, and an entire empty coffeepot sitting next to the flower. She'd never changed her clothes, and her auburn hair had somehow gotten messier overnight. But there was a glow to her freckled face nonetheless. It was a hard expression to name. The closest I can come is saying that she looked exultant.

Lace had thrown on a loose workout tee, and was leaning against the wall beside the couch. Rosemary was sitting there, as far from Kate as she could get, and her face was tense with emotion. At the other end of the couch was Evan, looking way more cheery than I would have expected. He smiled when he saw me, waggling his eyebrows. "Have a good night?"

I grunted, and elbowed him over to make room. He laughed and handed me a mug of coffee, earning instant forgiveness for his mockery. "They put the yelling on hold just for you two. Aren't you glad?"

Justine sank into the beanbag that nobody else liked -- it was beat up and mostly deflated, and I'm pretty sure one of her cats peed on it at one point before she moved out for college. The rest of us would have been happy to toss it, but she'd had it for years and years. One of those comfort things.

And there wouldn't quite have been enough seats in the room without it. College apartments are made to be just roomy enough, and no more.

"Kate," Lace said, barely waiting for Justine and I to settle in. "Want to let us know what you've been doing?"

She had her stern voice on, the one she'd discovered as a teaching assistant this semester. I wouldn't have enjoyed being on the other end of that, but Kate seemed totally unfazed.

"I was talking to Cybeline," she said. "Say hi, Cybeline."

There was a pause.

"Oh, right," Kate said. "They're awake now. Stop using the earbuds and talk to the whole room, okay?"

"Okay. Can you hear me now?" asked the same voice we'd heard the night before. At least, it was almost the same.

It was smoother now, I was sure of it. The words flowed like an actual sentence, not a voice-to-text program reading off a string of unconnected noises. The inflection had changed, too, and it took me a second before I realized that it was starting to sound more and more like Kate. That put a shiver down my spine.

Oh, and there was another thing. Despite the unplugged HDMI cable, the voice came through the TV speakers.

"And what was Cybeline saying?" Lace sounded totally unamused. Sure, Kate had broken the agreement we made, but I was still surprised at how Lace was taking it.

"A lot," Kate said, rubbing her eyes. They were bloodshot enough that I started to wonder if she'd slept at all last night. When had she started talking to the flower?

"Care to share?" Rosemary asked. Lace's voice had been chilly. Rosemary's was frigid.

Kate didn't notice, or at least pretended not to. "I don't even know where to start." She held up a hand, heading off both Lace and Rosemary before they could object. "Just... let me get my thoughts in order."

Lace looked annoyed. Rosemary just looked away. Justine looked as if she were trying to sink even deeper into the beanbag, which would have been difficult. Its long-used stuffing was so worn down that she couldn't have been more than an inch or two off the floor.

I knew how she felt. I hadn't really meant to sleep over, and I certainly hadn't planned on having wild sex with Justine when I did. But it had happened, and even if the others hadn't heard us fucking, I was sure Rosemary wasn't going to enjoy having a satisfied, flirty couple rubbing her face in the trouble she was having with Kate.

So I took the courageous route and retreated to the kitchen to make another pot of coffee. By the time I was done, Kate had begun muttering to herself, scribbling notes on her tablet, and making cryptic asides to Cybeline to remind her of this or that.

I passed around the mugs. Justine rolled her eyes back in mock ecstasy, Evan politely declined, and the other girls offered distracted thanks. I didn't make a mug for myself -- Evan has a real passion for coffee, and what he brought me was much better than anything I could make with the girls' cheap machine. Grinding whole beans and boiling a kettle for pour-over is more effort than I want to make in the morning, but you can't argue with the results.

"Okay," Kate said as I settled in again. "I think I've got the basics in order."

Lace frowned. "We want more than just the basics, you owe us --"

Kate held up a hand. "Guys, I haven't gotten any further than that. Cybeline's not... she's a computer, not a person. She can't hold a real conversation, she can't volunteer information, she's bad at figuring out what I don't know. The... programming, the artificial intelligence, it's all way more advanced than anything on earth, but it's also set up completely differently. I tried to get Cybeline to make some kind of interface, a file browser or searchable text file, but we're not getting anywhere yet."

She paused to take a huge gulp of coffee. I was starting to worry about how much she'd already had. Did I need to ask Cybeline if she had a defibrillator function? How much caffeine could you have before getting heart palpitations?

"But I talked through it with her, and I learned some stuff." She swiped through her notes, frowning at the tablet's screen. "Where did I put..."

"Kate." Justine was clearly out of patience. I couldn't blame her. Kate was tired and unfocused enough to remind me of the very worst group presentations back in high school.

Kate looked at her, though her eyes took a moment to focus.

Justine spoke slowly and clearly. "Why is Cybeline here?"

Kate nodded. "Yes. Um. That's probably where I should have started." She peered at her notes. "It's like she told us last night. She's here to help us -- she's not allowed to act alone, not allowed to fix our problems, but she's meant to give us the tools and the information to do it ourselves."

"What tools?" I asked, at the same time as Lace piped up with, "What problems?"

Kate wavered for a second, then addressed me first. "Actually, most of the tools are information. Cybeline came with a certain number of nanomachines, but her fabrication tools are sharply limited, the way she can use them is even more limited, and the rest of her cargo is some kind of ultradense memory drive. But from what she says, that drive holds the kind of scientific knowledge that would let humanity take a huge leap forward."

She turned to Lace. "Your question's a little trickier."

"Why?" Evan asked. He spread his hands, looking between Kate and the flower on the coffee table. "It said it's here because our civilization's in danger, maybe even our species. That's gotta be, what, global warming? Nuclear weapons? Or is this thing a good alien, come to warn us the bad aliens are invading?"

"Hang on," I said. "How does it even know? Has it been, what, monitoring us?" Something struck me. "Are UFOs real?"

Kate held up a hand to stop us. "Cybeline," she said, "can you explain how you got here? Just the way we talked about."

"Certainly," the voice said at once. The blank image on the TV wobbled slightly, sprayed a faint rainbow of distortion across the surface, and then became the same face that the flower had shown us last night.

On a larger screen, I could make out the figure much more easily. It was a human face, feminine and oddly generic looking. It wasn't quite lifelike enough to look like a recording of an actual person, at least now that I knew what this Cybeline was, but somehow it managed to dodge the uncanny valley. After a moment, I decided that it looked more like a really good painting than any computer rendering I'd seen, just stylized enough to appeal to the eye. I couldn't deny that it was effective. Just having a face to put to Cybeline soothed some killer-robot fears I hadn't realized I was feeling.

Although that was just what a killer robot would want. I reminded myself not to get too complacent, even if I really wasn't sure what I could do if this thing went all Skynet on me. I didn't want to end up peeled apart like that drill.

"I can only tell you a little about where I came from," Cybeline said calmly. Her voice was still faintly artificial, but in fact a perfectly natural voice might not have suited the imperfect face. In a way, they complemented each other.

"In the same way, I can tell you little about who made me," the face on screen continued. "I know only that my creators wish to help you."

"What the hell?" I asked the room in general.

Apparently that was direct enough for Cybeline to respond to. "I am not aware of my origins, either the processes that made me or where they occurred. The knowledge was not given to me before I was sent to you."

"That's suspicious," I said.

"What the hell can you tell us?" Rosemary asked at the same time.

Cybeline's avatar nodded. "I can tell you a story."

The graphic of the face faded, and a dense starfield replaced it. "On another world, life arose. It grew and evolved, becoming more and more complex until some of the life there developed intelligence, and technology, and began to ask questions."

One star near the center pulsed blue, and a number of little points of light began to move outward from it.

"The Questioners were explorers. They were curious. And they began to travel out into space beyond the reaches of their own star. They sought life, and they found it." An image of plants, strange in their colors and proportions, under an alien sky. "Then they sought intelligence like their own. This they did not find."

Another image appeared. A city, shockingly similar to what might have been built on earth in the last century or two. Concrete buildings, rows of windows, roadways and treelike plants. The wide, low doorways and oddly placed streetlights hinted at alien design, but even that didn't quite ruin the illusion.

Which made the broken roads, mountains of rubble, and long drifts of sand running through the place deeply disturbing.

"On some worlds, intelligence had arisen before the Questioners. It took different forms, developed in different ways, but showed again and again a single prevailing trend."

Cybeline's face appeared again, with a serious expression. "Self-destruction."

Justine wasn't watching the screen anymore. I couldn't look away.

"The paths to annihilation were many. Fission weaponry, engineered plagues, orbital strikes. Less deliberately, there were environmental collapses and resource depletion, nihilistic cultural frenzies and repressive spirals of technological decline."

Mercifully, there were no pictures for these. The images my brain conjured were horrible enough.

"The story is long," Cybeline said after a brief pause. "Upon Kate's request, the version I offer is abbreviated. The Questioners studied these dead species, as well as the very few living sapients they encountered as their travels spread more widely. There were conflicts, missteps, and loss. From these things, the Questioners resolved in the end that they must protect life where they could, for they found that intelligence in this universe is vanishingly rare."

A ship appeared, against a black background as though floating in the void of space. It wasn't like anything I'd seen in movies or video games. The shape was strange, sprawling out in oddly organic convolutions. It reminded me of a whale, and of a knotted tree, and of blown glass. There was nothing in the image to give it a sense of scale, and yet I was sure the ship was huge, vast beyond easy understanding.

And it was indescribably beautiful.

"They built messengers, to seek living worlds far beyond their own travels. The journeys would last forever, seeking life for as long as life might last. And when a world with intelligent life was found, the messengers would offer it a chance."

Cybeline returned to the screen. "This is the message. I am here to help."

It was a while before any of us spoke. Justine had retreated into herself again. I was worried, but it seemed impossible to say anything, impossible to reach out to reassure her, as if I was sitting very far away. Rosemary had been crying.

"I had to stay up with her," Kate said in the end. Her voice was quiet. "She said last night that humanity might go extinct. That this might be the end. And I had to find out more."

She shook her head. "I'm not sure how this ended up on us. As far as Cybeline can tell me, her mothership decided where to send her. If that means that we were chosen, or that it was random, or that we intercepted this message when it was meant for someone else... I'm not sure it matters. What matters is that we have it."

Kate looked at us. I understood the expression on her face, now that I knew why it was there. She was overwhelmed. She was flush with knowledge, excited by secrets and the promise of many more. And she was terrified.

I felt the same way.

"The message came to us," Kate said. "And that means we're the ones who've got to save the world."

- - - - -

Evan blew a raspberry.

"Jesus Christ," Lace said, disgusted.

I spread my hands, disbelieving. "Come on, man."

"Sorry," he said with a shaky grin. "Getting a little serious in here."

"Some things should be serious," said Lace. "We're talking about the end of the world."

"We're also talking about the six of us, dumb hungover college students, being the ones to save it." He laughed, high-pitched and nervous. "Come on, man. That's the funniest thing I've heard all year."

"What do you want to do?" I asked. That seemed to cut through the panic. Evan turned to me, eyes wide and grin too fixed.

"What should we do?" I repeated. "Pretend it didn't happen? Call the cops?" I was starting to smile, now. Evan was right. The whole situation was beyond ridiculous. But I couldn't let myself loose my grip. "Should we ask our favorite professors for help?"

"And why not?" He looked around at all of us. "Maybe not Kearny police, but we could let NASA know. Get it to the government somehow, it's not like this thing can't prove it's real."

"If it goes to NASA tomorrow, it'll be in the military's hands the day after," Lace said. "If the information becomes public, same thing."

"Professors," he said desperately. "This university's filled with smart people, way smarter than us."

"Hey," Kate cut in, smiling. "Speak for yourself."

Evan goggled at her.

"We don't know what a professor would do," Kate said. "The six of us? We know each other. We can work together. What if we bring somebody in and they want to... I don't know, become a trillionaire? Get elected president? Stalk their high school crush?"

"We're going from breaking down drills to becoming president?" Rosemary objected. But it didn't sound like her heart was in it. Cybeline's little presentation seemed to have deflated her anger completely.

Kate shook her head. To her credit, tired as she was, she was diplomatic. Understanding, not condescending, which for Kate was not exactly a given.

"There's a lot more Cybeline can do with those things," she said. "Spying, for example. Imagine a camera and a microphone that you can sneak into anywhere, totally undetectable. And there's no reason they couldn't rewire electronics. Crack passwords, hack voting machines, go anywhere and do anything."

"Fuck," I whispered. Kate had thought way further into this than I had.