Burning Paradise

For ten years the hypercolony has been using borrowed human technology and unwitting human collaboration to construct its means of reproduction on the surface of the Earth. This is the culmination of the hypercolony’s reproductive strategy. Any threat to the reproductive mechanism it has constructed is an existential threat to the hypercolony itself. That’s why the Correspondence Society was targeted seven years ago—to protect the hypercolony’s means of reproduction, which would have been threatened by premature disclosure.

It was a sinfully bloodless way to describe serial acts of murder, Nerissa thought. But, of course, the sim had long since ceased appealing for sympathy. And it claimed not to be the responsible party.

Snow began to fall from the cloud-heavy sky, gusting through the leafless branches of the trees. A few small flakes collected on the sim’s face and melted into droplets, pink with dried blood. The creature’s voice was hoarse. It paused to drink once more from the water bottle.

When it spoke again, Nerissa had to lean closer to hear it.

The hypercolony evolved to live in the vacuum of space, but so did many other organisms. The hypercolony was already infected with a parasite when it arrived in this solar system, or became infected soon thereafter. The parasite lay dormant and undetected for centuries. Once the process of reproduction began, the parasite was activated.

The parasite is analogous to a virus: it can reproduce itself only by commandeering the reproductive mechanism of another organism. For more than a year now it has been exploiting the hypercolony’s resources for its own purposes. The mechanism by which the hypercolony reproduces itself has been hijacked. The facility that was meant to deliver the hypercolony’s seed organisms to nearby stars has been doing something very different—creating and launching new viral packets to follow and infect the hypercolony’s vulnerable offspring.

In one of Ethan’s books there was a similar story, which Nerissa had found horrifying. Carpenter ants in Thailand were susceptible to infection by a certain fungus. The fungal threads germinated and grew in the ant’s body, and as they infiltrated the infected ant’s brain it would begin to climb obsessively—madly—to the highest leaf on the highest limb it could reach. There it died, creating for the fungal growth now sprouting from the ant’s corpse a launching pad from which its spores would be distributed over as broad an area as possible. Some few of those spores might then germinate inside another carpenter ant, which in its fatal madness would climb to the highest leaf on the highest limb it could reach…

But the hypercolony isn’t dead, nor is it entirely defenseless. Its final strategy is to destroy the reproductive mechanism it created, in order to deny its use to the parasitic entity and to protect its own potential offspring. And it wants to manipulate what remains of the Correspondence Society into collaborating with it in that effort.

Well, why not? From the human point of view, the “reproductive mechanism” (if such a thing actually existed) was little more than a debilitating tumor. It deserved to be destroyed, no matter which side of this celestial feeding frenzy it served.

The dying sim shivered. Its shiver became something like a convulsion. The water bottle dropped from its right hand, while its left clenched empty air. It coughed a spray of red and ochre phlegm into the nearby leaves and freshly fallen snow.

“Excuse me,” it said.

Excuse me. If you have any questions, you should ask them while there’s time.

Nerissa had only one question—was Cassie one of those people supposedly being exploited by the hypercolony?—but Ethan stepped in front of her, bending on one knee to address the sim. He looked like he was praying to it, Nerissa thought. Or proposing marriage. “The mechanism that manipulates radio signals, does the hypercolony control that or do you?”

You meaning the parasite, the virus.

“I do,” the sim whispered.

(But there is no I, Nerissa reminded herself. No mind. Just process.)

“So the hypercolony can’t use that tool anymore. But both entities are able to produce and control simulacra?”

“Yes.”

“How are they created? How were you created?”

“I was born to a human mother.”

No, Nerissa thought. That can’t be right.

“The reproductive mechanism, will you tell us where it is?”

“No.”

“Because you want to protect it?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re implying we should want to protect it.”

“Yes.”

“Why would we do that?”

“Its destruction would be disastrous for humanity. Not just because of the temporary loss of global communication, though that would be catastrophic in itself. The boundaries that have been placed on human behavior would be breached. Conflicts could escalate out of control. You know what warfare meant a hundred years ago. Consider what it would mean now, if it were allowed to happen again.”

“I find that unconvincing,” Ethan said.

“I don’t expect to convince you. But I hope you’ll at least consider what’s at stake. More specifically, it’s entirely likely that people you care about will be killed unless you intervene.”

“What people?”

The eyeless simulacrum turned its head toward Nerissa. “Cassie. And Thomas. And many others.”

“Do you mean what they’re doing is dangerous? Or do you mean you’ll kill them if you have the chance?”

“Both.”

“Then why in God’s name should we help you?”

“I’m not asking you to help me. If you choose to protect your civilization in general or your loved ones in particular, my interests will also be served.”

“Then tell us where Thomas and Cassie are—can you do that?”

“I don’t know where they are, but I believe they’re looking for Werner Beck.”

Nerissa couldn’t restrain herself any longer. “How do you know that? What do you know about Cassie and Thomas, and what do you know about Werner Beck?”

But that was a question the sim refused to answer.

It died as they watched.

Its human parts died first. Nerissa supposed the creature’s heart simply stopped beating, exhausted by fever and infection. It exhaled for the last time, its stinking breath a cloud of moisture quickly carried away by the breeze. Then the internal parts of it lost all cohesion. The body went slack and began to leak green fluid from its many wounds.

Nerissa helped Ethan cover the remains of the simulacrum with a blanket of fallen leaves—not to protect the creature, and much less out of any misplaced respect for it, but because it would be an unpleasant and dangerous discovery for any hiker or local child who happened to stumble across it.

Animals would get at the remains, no doubt. The bones would be scattered. By winter’s end only ants and beetles would have any interest in what was left. The sim’s corpse might help feed a few insect colonies deep in the pine duff and rotting logs of the forest, an irony Nerissa found unamusing. There is grandeur in this view of life. Well, no, she thought. Not much.

“So we have to find Werner Beck,” she said when they were back in the car. The snowfall had grown more intense and the road was a pale, curtained obscurity. “I assume you know how to do that?”

“He’s in Missouri, according to his letter.”

The letter Ethan had collected from his mailbox as they fled the farm house. “Did he have anything else useful to say?”

“You can read what he wrote when we find a place to stop.”

“All that stuff the sim said. What do you think? You believe any of it?”

Ethan shrugged. “Some of it might have been true. Some of it sounded plausible, at least.”

There was a quotation Nerissa recalled, something from a Greek philosopher named Xenophanes. Ethan used to admire the way she could dredge up fragments of poetry and prose from her catch-all memory. But it wasn’t a talent, it was a freak of nature. Her own tawdry little magic trick. “And even if by chance he were to utter the perfect truth, he would himself not know it, for all is but a woven web of guesses.”