Amalfi Echo Read online

  “Are you going to send the jellyfish down with me too?” Tessa said.

  “Yes, although I’d like you to learn how to control them. Be a useful addition to your weapons’ kit,” Digby said. Immediately both he and Tessa looked at Marion.

  “What?” Marion said. “Am I always the killjoy here?”

  “Yeah,” Tessa said.

  “It was where Tessa was headed anyway,” Digby said. “USAFA. Jet fighters. I don’t have to help her to be an Amalfi warrior. That was always going to happen.”

  “I don’t have anything to say right now,” Marion said.

  “So it’s back to school,” Digby continued, “and this is a good time to talk about how the learning programs work.”

  At this, Tessa sat up, all bright-eyed, as though it was ‘walkies’ time.

  Digby halted, nonplussed.

  “Tessa’s already spent the zillions she’s going to win on Lotto,” Marion said.

  “Lotto?”

  “The Time Machine!” Tessa said. “The little trick with time? Hello? Hello?”

  “Hmm,” Digby said. “Sorry, no Time Machines. Never run across any in my travels which is not surprising when you consider that many species don’t have the concept, ‘Time’, so they’re not likely to be interested in developing a Time Machine.”

  “Oh, crap,” Tessa said, slouching down in her seat again. “What a rip-off.”

  “Okay,” Digby said, “what the learning programs do is alter your subjective time. That’s the time you experience rather than real time as measured by clocks. Subjective time is like when you’re watching a really exciting movie and the whole movie goes by in five minutes. Or you’re waiting in a queue and the time takes forever to go by. It’s simply this. The learning programs stretch out your subjective time so that it will seem to you that you have spent a whole day in a lesson and you’ll learn the equivalent you would have learnt in a day but when the lesson ends, in real time, only, say, 10 minutes has passed. Because it will feel like all day you’ll get hungry and you’ll need to eat because you’ll still be using up the amount of energy you would have used in a real day. This could cause problems with the ageing process so that when the lesson has finished you might find that your body has also aged a day, putting you out of sync with everyone else but there’s a counter-balancing force. This is the fact that you are now in an environment free of toxins, and this will greatly slow down the ageing process in your body. When we add in a few little critters, to repair and maintain your cells, you won’t age much at all, and so it won’t matter if your time is out of sync with the rest of us.” This wasn’t strictly true because Tessa, especially, would mature emotionally and intellectually, practically before their eyes. Digby felt it best not to dwell on this.

  Tessa sat bolt upright, “Are we going to live forever?”

  “Critters?” Marion said. “What critters?”

  Digby answered Tessa first. “Not forever but a lot longer than you do now.” Then he said, “Did I tell you about the little critters?”

  “No, you didn’t tell us about the little critters, Digby,” Marion said. “Don’t tell me you’ve got little critters crawling around inside you.”

  “Yes. I have.”

  “You said you were entirely human and now you’ve got alien critters inside you?” Marion said.

  “The critters are the product of human technology, not your human technology or even mine but still human technology. Does that make them alien? Anyway, the human body is full of little critters. What’s a few more?”

  Marion shook her head in disbelief as though trying to spill out some of the overload.

  “Let’s take a break for the rest of the day so you can think about this,” Digby said. “If you think the General Assembly is a good starting point, maybe you could start working on a presentation to them.”

  -oOo-

  The alien attack craft, piloted by Digby, touched gently down on the roof of the United Nations building, coming to rest on three liquid metal legs. To the security personnel strung out on the roof, the craft flowed down from the sky like a ball of mercury, extruding probes or weapons or fins which were absorbed and re-extruded in a way that was unsettling.

  This was not in their contract, many of them felt and resolved to hide if things should go bad. Which they did almost immediately. Marion exited the craft, accompanied by a swarm of killer jellyfish. The security personnel recognised these instantly from the drawings and sketches made from the hijacked passengers’ testimony. Most of the guards turned and fled. A couple of the more resolute ones, or perhaps they didn’t watch the news, blocked the doorway into the building from the helipad.

  Marion stopped well back from them. “Probably you won’t believe me but I don’t control these creatures. I’m going to go through that doorway and if you try to stop me they will kill you. I very much don’t want that to happen. Giving your lives here will change nothing.”

  She stepped forward. The remaining security personnel melted away.

  It was a story repeated throughout the complex as she went to the General Assembly Hall. When she got there, as she had anticipated, it had been cleared of the world’s representatives. Instead she was met by news crews. It had been Marion’s plan to occupy the General Assembly Hall, sending a message through the news crews that she wanted to meet with the Secretary General or his representatives. Unfortunately, the reporters backed her up against a wall, hemming her in, trapping her, as reporters do. Perhaps they too assumed that the jellyfish were under her control and safety lay in the live feeds that were going out to the world. This meant nothing to the jellyfish. They killed every single person within 10 metres of Marion. Shocked beyond belief she returned to the craft. Digby said nothing and Marion was unable to speak. Back on the spaceship, she created a wall around her quarters and shut herself away for the rest of the day.

  -oOo-

  “You haven’t asked me how I’m feeling,” Marion said. The three of them were sitting, or sprawled in Tessa’s case, on deck furniture arranged along the veranda of a quaint little cottage, perched in the leafy boughs of an enormous tree.

  “Like you said, I’m not much of a counsellor,” Digby replied. “You could access counselling resources if you wished.”

  Marion exploded. “You put them there! You knew that would happen. They had families, Digby.” She started crying again, pillowing her head in her arms on her knees. “I don’t want this. I didn’t ask for this.”

  “No way I’d go back,” Tessa said. “I wouldn’t swap this life for my old life in a million years.”

  Marion looked up and said coldly, “You want the Earth to be destroyed?”

  “Well I didn’t say it was ideal,” Tessa said.

  “Tessa,” Digby said, “find something to do.”

  Tessa went over and kissed Marion on the forehead and said, “I would be a crap counsellor too, but, you know, if you want to talk…I’ll be around.” She bounced up and headed for the outer wall, creating a spacesuit on the way and, without pausing, went through the wall to the hard vacuum outside the ship.

  It gave both Digby and Marion a jolt because she hadn’t done that before.

  Tessa floated away from the ship for a few metres, astonished at her own bravery. Or stupidity as her initial momentum carried her quickly away from the ship. Stifling the beginnings of a panic attack, she created a jet pack and, once in control, nonchalantly floated motionless high above the Earth, the ship a few reassuring metres behind her. Below, heart-stopping beautiful, the Americas were etched in blue and green.

  Inside the ship, Digby was saying to Marion, “The jellyfish saved you from a prison cell. If I had to dig you out of prison, probably a lot more people would have died. As harsh as it may seem, only a few died here and you will have sent them a message that might make your job a lot easier from now on because they will treat you with a lot more respect.”

  “Maybe it would be better if I was in a prison cell.”

  “
And then they would all definitely die. Is that what you want? To watch them die knowing you did nothing about it?”

  “It’s all been a bit much, Digby,” Marion said.

  Digby produced a green lozenge. “The ship could do much more than this.”

  “I don’t want it screwing with my mind.” She took the lozenge and pressed it to her forehead. It helped only a little. That more than anything told her that maybe she did need some serious attention. “Help,” she said to the ship. Digby and the room faded away and she drifted in a soft green light. She could hear her mother’s heartbeat and curled up in a foetal position. Time passed.

  -oOo-

  A few days later Marion sought out Digby. He was floating in a spherical room, upside down, surrounded by a myriad of crimson lines radiating out from the inside wall of the sphere and crisscrossing as they went from side to side. At least, he was floating upside down from her perspective, but when she joined him in the centre of the room, they were both the same way up. She didn’t ask what he was doing because, likely, she wouldn’t understand the explanation.

  “I don’t have the strength to do this on my own,” Marion said. “Does the ship have a learning program that will help me work with the Amalfi side of me? I don’t mean the weapons,” she added quickly, “I mean the leadership side.”

  “The ship has no Amalfi learning programs as such. Only the Amalfi weapons can teach you how to use them and the ship doesn’t have any learning programs for that. Nor does the ship have any learning programs that work directly with the Amalfi Echo. Instead the ship has learning programs which are focused on things military and other learning programs which are focused on leadership and administration. Tessa has chosen to learn things military and so that Amalfi trait helps her do this really well. Similarly with you. If you enter the leadership and administration learning programs, the Amalfi trait will ensure that you become outstanding in this field.”

  “Okay. That sounds like a plan,” Marion said.

  Digby reached out and stroked several of the crimson lines in a pattern. Rich, subtle chords of music swelled in the room and then died away. “It’s not all death machines,” he said.

  -oOo-

  Marion and Tessa entered the learning programs. For a week Digby was on his own. He worked with the surveillance data, taking the pulse of the planet.

  He found widespread sadness and some anger at the continuing toll on journalists in the front-line although reaction had been muted in the United States because none of the journalists who had died in the General Assembly Hall had been United States citizens. Nevertheless, CNN ran a major piece on American journalists who had died covering the news in hotspots around the world. Most people agreed that it was definitely preferable to watch the jellyfish on television than to be in their actual vicinity.

  A New York Times editorial suggested that President Newman, who had become a lame duck president well before current events, had only won office because of the death of Senator O’Brien, Tessa’s mother. The FBI announced it was reopening the investigation into the car accident. Digby forwarded these to Tessa.

  Countering these developments was that the D.C. District Court confirmed that the arrest warrants for Marion and Tessa would remain in place and international warrants were issued by Interpol, at the request of several nations, in respect of the deaths of the journalists.

  During the week, the ship picked up some tight beam transmissions directed at it. One was from the Shanghai Institute of Technology deploring the launching of the missile, intimating that it had been an accident, and suggesting cooperative discussions. Another was from an American organisation, Friends of Diplomacy, offering to open dialogue with sympathetic Congressional members which appeared to be genuine, although their funding originated in the military-industrial complex. Digby forwarded the ship’s digests and analyses of these and other events to Marion.

  Despite the Shanghai message, the Chinese were considering a full-scale nuclear strike. At this point they saw a window of opportunity where they believed that Security Council members, and the United States in particular, would rather that the ship was destroyed than risk the technology being made available to everyone. That window would swiftly close if the Americans managed to play the Marion and Tessa card to their advantage. Staying their hand was that influential members of the Chinese leadership were opposed to a strike and the military chiefs feared losing their nuclear arsenal to the ship, giving the Americans the upper hand once again. Not to mention the possibility that failure might result in the ship raining death and destruction down on them.

  Digby decided to take no chances with this. While the ship could deal with a full nuclear strike, there would be no catching and parking, and he would indeed rain death and destruction down on them, which would not be helpful to Marion’s cause. He sent a gremlin into the Chinese nuclear command and control systems, forcing the Chinese to devote all of their time and resources trying to regain control of their systems, an effort in which they were entirely unsuccessful. And they did not blame the Americans for the gremlin.

  None of this occupied Digby for very long. He spent much of the week writing music.

  -oOo-

  At the end of the week, Marion and Tessa popped in for a visit. The three of them had lunch together somewhere nice. An Indonesian gamelan played on a raised dais. Marion gestured at the musicians with her fork. “The ship creates real objects, right?”

  Digby answered the unspoken question. “These are real people, yes.”

  “Living, breathing, real human beings?”

  “Which are destroyed when they are no longer required,” Digby said.

  “That would be, ‘killed’, you mean,” Marion said.

  “Memo,” Tessa said. “Don’t take up a career as an object on Digby’s ship.”

  “But what are they thinking and feeling?” Marion said, on the verge of losing her appetite at the implications of this.

  “This is a copy of an actual performance that took place in Indonesia,” Digby said.

  “So we couldn’t have a conversation with them,” Marion said, relieved. “Like a video, only with real people.”

  “It’s nothing like a video. You could talk to them, if you wanted. Although they are copies, these are still real people and this is a real concert,” Digby said. “Probably, they wouldn’t thank you for interrupting their performance.”

  “That means they do get killed,” Tessa said.

  Marion had a disturbing thought. “That means you could make a copy of me in your quarters if you wanted and I wouldn’t even know.”

  “He could do anything he wanted to you,” said Tessa. “That’s kinda creepy.”

  “Yes I could but I wouldn’t,” Digby said. “Anyway, what would be the point? It would still be you and you would behave no differently from the person in front of me.”

  “Yeah, like, run screaming from the room,” Tessa said.

  “I can see you’re both still determined to cast me in the role of ogre,” Digby said mildly. He changed the subject and asked Tessa, “How’s school?”

  It worked. Tessa really wanted to talk about all the amazing and interesting things she was doing, including, “The Amalfi pistol is armed and I’ve been on the range for the last two months. Like I thought, it’ll take out a tank or a small building and even a big ship like a missile cruiser, if you punch a few holes along the waterline. That doesn’t mean you could take out a missile cruiser because you’d have to get real close and they would probably object to that.”

  “It’s been three months for me in subjective time,” Marion said. “Mostly topic introductions. Has given me some ideas about getting the message out. I’ve decided to spend another subjective nine months so I can get a better handle on the topics. That’ll still only be three weeks in real time. That data you’ve been feeding me adds up to a stand-off. Another three weeks isn’t going to make any difference.” She turned to another topic. “I’ve asked the ship to set up a coupl
e of websites, one for me and one for Tessa, also Twitter accounts and some other social media. My studies have suggested that there is a significant chunk of the population who could be brought on side if we were able to communicate directly with them through social networks they are comfortable with. Tessa, especially, may be able to generate a large fan base in an age group which want to believe in her and are waiting for a sign—.”

  “My own website!” Clearly that was okay with Tessa. Her Twitter account had fallen into disuse because she had been cut off from her networks when her parents had died. Tessa had never been able to find out what had happened to her parents’ estate so she had very little money of her own. None of the foster parents would pay for Internet access or devices so she had been scrounging for crumbs of Internet access in the underground.

  “The websites are, marion.com and tessa.com.” Marion subjected Digby to a quizzical expression. “We could also have digby.com…?”

  Digby did not even bother to rise to the bait.

  The three of them chatted idly, finished lunch, and Marion had some time alone with Tessa before she went back to her quarters and her studies. She did her best to blot out bad thoughts about the real human beings who had lived briefly and then died so that they could have music for lunch.

  Alone with Digby, Tessa created Arlington cemetery about them. “I really want to visit my parents before I have to go back to school. I wasn’t allowed to hardly at all when I was in foster care.”

  “Now?” Digby said.

  “Whenever.”

  Digby created the mercury alien attack craft. This time Tessa was allowed to sit up front except that there weren’t any windows although Digby had arranged human seats.

  “No eyes,” Digby explained. “They used a type of radar to construct a view of their environment.”

  Before they exited the sphere ship, Digby had a word about the jellyfish. “This is the last time I want them running on automatic, for you anyway.” He had arranged for Tessa’s next set of studies to include adding the jellyfish to her weapons’ kit.

  While they were talking about weapons and seeing as how Marion was not around…