Recieve

Tasser, Corphica, Nai, and I all stayed in our pod while the other half of our crew went to talk with the Director and start making a schedule for my medical testing to follow.

In the meantime, those of us staying were improvising some insurance.

“A radio?” Nai asked.

“A phone, technically,” I said. “But it’s fundamentally the same thing.”

“Caleb, you’re talking about something that goes well beyond just a mental machine. Real radios don’t just magically send messages. There’s electromagnetic waves, strict patterns to the broadcast—”

“[Yeah, yeah,] I know how radios work,” I told her. “That’s why I’m pretty sure I can make this work too. Trust me?”

“Not really,” Nai admitted reluctantly.

I had to grin a little at that. Nai was a very honest person despite how wary and suspicious she was.

“Do you distrust me enough to not give this a shot?”

“I guess not,” she conceded.

“That’s the [spirit,]” I said, and held out my hand for her to clasp.

Physical contact was the only way I’d been able to shunt my abstract creations into her mind. Flushing my cascade through even just a few nerves in her arm made it easier to pick up on the flashes of neurons and sparks of consciousness I was aiming for.

Odd as it was to perceive them in detail like this, it was once again trivially easy to simply push the pair of creations out of my mind and into hers.

“Alright, talk me through this,” she said.

I sent her, aiming for the shiny new receiver I’d given her.

She winced like someone had shouted right next to her ear.

“What was that!?” she asked in alarm.

“It should have been words,” I said. “I’m a little unclear on the ‘why,’ but the ‘how’ is simple. The sounds should...overtake…no, that’s the wrong word for it...gah, I don’t know the right word.”

I sent again.

“Get that?”

“I can hear something that’s not there,” Nai said. “It’s really loud.”

“Mmm, that could be on my or your end. Can you tell the difference between the two pieces? One is for receiving messages, the other is for sending.”

Nai frowned for a moment before an overwhelming shriek emanated out from her.

My blood ran cold in an instant and for a split second I was back on Korbanok watching her push a tidal wave of teal fire right at me.

I backpedaled from her in a small panic. Something was knocked over and the clatter helped remind me where I was.

Tasser caught my shoulder, making sure I didn’t completely fall over. “Whoa, what happened?”

“….Ah, nothing,” I said. “She got the transmitter working, but it was way too strong. Caught me off guard is all. Surprised me.”

Shocked, more like it. I knew she couldn’t have meant to, but she’d transmitted in the same…‘band’ that my radar and other psionic senses were attuned to. Those same senses had shaped my instinct of how dangerous she was—that she was to be feared.

“Your message was too strong too,” Nai said, continuing like nothing happened.

I gave a shaky nod. “Okay, it must be the transmitter. It’s sending signals that get interpreted too loudly.”

“I couldn’t understand a word you sent,” Nai said, her frustration quickly rising.

“That’s fine, I couldn’t either. We’ll figure it out.”

Tasser was watching the two of us in rapt fascination. If I hadn’t known his people weren’t predators by nature, I’d have thought he was interested in eating either one of us, given the way he was staring.

“How much do you think you could explain this to someone watching?” he asked.

“I guess that depends if Casti have a word for [telepathy,]” I admitted. “This is a super simplified version, but the general idea is to share thoughts directly—allow someone to experience your idea as you did.”

“I’m just getting sounds,” Nai said.

“Like I said, super simplified. When the other human was stuck in my mind, he and I weren’t just bleeding our thoughts into each other all the time. We were separated and distinct in my head. We communicated across that separation with a tool that strictly communicated sounds between us. It let us talk, but I wasn’t even thinking of it as a tool then. I just thought it was a simple and ordinary consequence of having a person stuck in my head. The receiver and transmitter I gave you is more or less his copy of that tool.”

Funny thing was, Daniel had been the one to first think of it as telepathy. I’d come pretty far hadn’t I? I’d lost the one voice in my head, and here I was about to gain another voice from outside it.

“Please tell me this isn’t a spur of the moment inspiration based on the previous discussion about the facility comms?”

“Okay, I won’t,” I told her.

“Koeiv—” she muttered, and I put up my hands to assuage her.

“Easy, easy…the timing of it was spur of the moment, but I’ve been thinking about how to make this work for a while now.”

“It doesn’t,” she pointed out.

“Yet,” I countered. “I think it’s because we’re not the same kind of organism.”

“Explain,” she snapped. There was no hesitation.

I had to give her credit. She took to strange new ideas like a duck to water. She might have concerns, but nothing fazed her.

“I don’t know if any of your people, Casti or Farnata, have this, but on Earth sometimes people like to wonder about whether the color I see is the exact same as the color you see.”

Nai shook her head, “No? Isn’t color just color?”

But Tasser nodded in stride, “Relative qualia uncertainty,” he said easily.

“Relative what?” I asked.

“Qualia,” he repeated. “It means an irreducible sensory experience, specific to an individual. It’s exactly what you’re talking about. The theory of relative qualia asserts there could be differences in perceptions that aren’t measurable or detectable because they’re consistently different.”

“Okay, yes, that is more or less what I mean. On Earth, most people usually brought it up for sights and colors especially, but it can just as easily apply to sound. What if you’re transmitting me a signal that’s tailored for Farnata ears and auditory nerves, and vice versa?”

Nai nodded thoughtfully, “Or, depending on how this actually works, the transmitter itself might be predisposed for human input, and it isn’t properly reading what I’m trying to broadcast with it?”

“Agh…” I groaned, “This is going to be tricky to test.”

“You need a control,” Tasser said.

This time it was my turn to say it. “Explain,” I said to him.

“As long as you’re both trying to transmit and receive different sounds, you’re never going to reduce things to a single independent variable. Once you can both receive, transmit, and again receive the same signal, then you’ll know if you’ve accounted for any differences in relative perception.”

“Congratulations,” Nai told him. “You just volunteered.”

Tasser turned to the only other person in the room with us, Corphica. “Would you be offended if I pulled rank and made you do this?”

Corphica shrank back a bit, which was a little amusing because she was actually a hair taller than Tasser.

“I really have no clue what any of you have said. It’s all Adept stuff right?” she said.

“More or less,” I said, refocusing. “Before Tasser’s control though, I think we need to address the signal intensity. Seems like both of us have the metaphorical amplitude on our metaphorical emitters too high.”

“Say ‘metaphorical’ again,” Tasser suggested with a sly grin.

I flipped him the bird, and redoubled my focus on Nai’s mind.

“The mirror interacts with these ‘signals’ doesn’t it?” Nai asked.

“Seems to,” I agreed.

“Could be useful in muffling the signal into a more manageable band.”

“It might,” I said cautiously. “But I think the better option is to figure out how to reduce the strength of the signal at the source. Otherwise we’re airing dangerously close to the mirror reflecting our own strong signals back at us, and you know how that turned out.”

She gave a slight wince. “Best to avoid that, yes.”

All said, cracking that was actually much simpler than it seemed. For one, Nai and I had both already examined the mental emanations in detail when we’d solved the problem of the mirror in her head.

Collections of simple observations could slowly be compiled into rudimentary understanding of some of the rules in play.

‘Emanations occur unconsciously’ plus ‘Emanation strength varies from time to time’ plus ‘Emanations become much weaker while asleep’ all added up to slightly less simple concepts like ‘Emanation strength is linked with states of consciousness.’

From there it wasn’t hard to discover that the first observation we made wasn’t quite the truth. ‘Emanations occur unconsciously’ was quickly revised to ‘Emanations can occur unconsciously.’ Which obviously implied the opposite and the inverse too.

Because when Nai suddenly dropped off radar, I did a double take.

“What was that?” I asked.

“I got it,” she said. “I can’t describe it, but I got something...”

She still wasn’t deploying her mirror, but now she was harder to sense.

She was drastically reducing how much mental byproduct poured off her. I’d thought it was just a given that Adepts just psionically radiated more than ordinary minds. But it wasn’t as set in stone as I thought. Instead of concealing what she radiated with the mirror, she’d figured out how to reduce the total intensity of what she radiated instead.

I was dumbfounded.

On closer examination, it wasn’t enough to hide completely. But she was registering far similarly to Tasser on radar now, and the effect would only be more pronounced with distance.

“It’s so hard to maintain,” she said. “I can’t describe exactly what I’m doing…but…”

“Did you manage to make a tool?” Tasser asked.

Nai shook her head again. “No, this isn’t a tool. It’s more like…I’m figuring out how to think quietly…”

The mental emanations were linked to states of consciousness, but who said that had to be limited to just sleep? In fact, Daniel and I had already proved such. Daniel and I had competed for the allocation of certain mental capacities at a time.

No one else had been around to sense the shifts in my head, but now that I imagined the same thing happening in someone else, it was inconceivable that the mind’s emanations wouldn’t reflect those struggles.

“Thinking quietly…”

I copied what Nai had done, and like her, I struggled to put it into words. It was a bit of a zen thing.

“[Oh man,] that is odd,” I said. It really wasn’t any psionic tool. “If we can only broadcast if we zone out, this might not work after all.”

Nai was getting more and more on board though. “No, I think it still helps. We don’t have to reduce everything: just the thought that goes into the transmitter. Right now, the transmitter is formatted only for sending sounds, but even if we’re trying to only send sounds, there’s probably still other stray ideas mixed in. Connotations of the words we’re using, personal significance, even associated memories could be involved.”

“You’re making all that up,” I guessed.

“So are you,” she retorted. “We say creations shape themselves out of intent, whether understood or not. But a lot of Adepts think it’s more accurate to say creations are shaped by expectations. Sometimes that means the creation forms around expectations that you didn’t realize you had. It makes it seem like you can intuitively figure out a new creation when in reality—”

“When in reality, your intuition shaped the creation so of course you can intuitively figure it out,” I finished. “Okay, you’re on to something. How do we pare down the thought then?”

“Practice, I think,” she said.

“Sounds like your cue, Tasser,” I told him. “Give us some sounds.”

“Easy enough, ‘I’ve been promoted,’” he said, enunciating clearly. “Does that work?”

It did.

I wrapped up the sounds I’d just heard into a neat little psionic bundle, cloned the bundle and stuffed one of them into my transmitter.

Nai broadcasted a heartbeat before me, and as I sent off my ‘qualia,’ a similar packet came in on my receiver. Unpacking it gave horribly twisted and pitched sounds, but the modulation did feel recognizable as speech.

It was like someone had run it through a bad audio filter a hundred times. A copy of a copy.

Now was the tricky part. Because the way to actually test our own messages was to receive our own sent message again and compare it to the original sample Tasser had spoken aloud.

The first dozen attempts were nothing but blind guessing. We were both just making improvised adjustments to both transmitter and receiver.

The next dozen after that too.

Tasser had talked about the differences in our perception being consistent, but that didn’t make them predictable. Nai and I could both hear fine on our own, but we both quickly began to suspect this was a hardware problem, not software.

I only had a vague idea of how the tiny ‘hairs’ in the human ear allowed us to hear, but I remembered that it was dependent on both the frequency and intensity of the vibration that made it into the ear canal.

What were the odds I was reaching too far, too quickly here?

We went back and forth for almost an hour before I managed to pick out a sound that was beginning to take shape. It was a relief to make some progress.

All said, it was rather boring progress to make. Small steps forward, only the last of which turned out to be of any note. I was becoming able to discern Tasser’s words coming from Nai, but she was still having trouble finding the common sounds in my signal.

I tried not to be smug about it. Even if Daniel had helped make and integrate some of the first psionics into the greater construct I had, I knew I was still the one to originally make that construct. And after today I was another step closer to figuring it out.

Still, that meant I was just more familiar with psionics conceptually than she was.

I quoted at her for the millionth time.

She shook her head. she sent.

“Can we tell which end the problem is?” I asked out loud. “It could be you’ve got the receiver working fine, it might be my transmission somehow.”

“” she spoke and transmitted at the same time.

I saw her realize she did it too. I’d done that a few times with Daniel, hearing myself speak and think simultaneously, in stereo.

She muttered something in her native tongue, and I started analyzing my setup again.

“[Maybe I backed off too much on the transmitter…]” I muttered. “If you can’t hear the sounds—"

“I can hear the sounds fine,” she realized, “you’re just sending them in the wrong language!”

“I was going to say—wait, what?”

The language mattered? We were talking telepathy.

I sent for the thousandth time.

“Not Starspeak, Caleb,” she said exasperatedly.

I buried my face in my hands out of embarrassment. No wonder she’d been troubled by interpreting the sounds.

I asked, taking care to think of the message in Starspeak.

she sent back.

“[Oh come on!]” I protested. “I cracked [telepathy] but it doesn’t work unless we still have a language in common?”

I fumed at myself. We were sending sounds between us. Obviously Tasser hadn’t said our test phrase in English, but at some point I’d accidentally translated it in my head. The creepy part was the words still sounded like Tasser, a bit at least.

There had been some part of me that had hoped I could learn more alien languages the easy way if I succeeded here.

“You thought you could just dump a thought into someone else’s head, who speaks a totally different language, and still be understood?” Tasser asked.

“Well…when you put it like that, yeah. But I’m not actually sending thoughts, just sounds so far.”

“I’m pretty sure that proves the point more, not less,” Nai pointed out. “The sounds that make up language are consistent, even if the speakers have minor variations like accents.”

I threw up my hands in surrender. “Alright, you win, it was a stupid expectation.”

“The first thing I transmitted was in Speropi,” Nai said. “But Tasser doesn’t speak that, so it was enough to get my attention.”

“I speak Speropi,” Tasser said, a little insulted.

“Badly,” she countered.

“How many languages do you guys speak?” I wondered.

“Four,” Tasser said, and Nai said, “three.”

Of course, now that she mentioned it, I hadn’t noticed her switch from transmitting in her native language.

It took some special effort to transmit in Starspeak. It was so easy to accidentally use English instead. It was no wonder why: I thought in English after all.

“Still…” I said, “we’ve cracked it now, right?”

Nai said.

I responded.

The full weight of it began to sink in for Nai who turned to Tasser with a grin behind her air mask.

“Come here, let’s put it to the test. Tasser whisper something to me or Caleb. Then we’ll send it to the other.”

At first it was just numbers.

“One. Four. Three-and-a-half,” I said aloud according to what Nai sent me from across the room.

Tasser had some idea already, but the potential here was obvious now to Corphica as well.

“You can communicate from anywhere,” she breathed. “With nothing!”

“Probably not from anywhere,” I said. “My guess is that there’s a range limit, but since we’re not leaving this room just yet it’s too hard to test right now.”

The Casti grunt was nonetheless dumbfounded, which I could sympathize with.

“It’s completely secret though!” she marveled. “Not a single Vorak alive knows that this is possible. Secret communication, with anyone, is invaluable.”

Not a Vorak alive, huh? I guess she wasn’t wrong. Chief had possessed some kind of radar, but did that mean she could have made other psionic creations? She hadn’t been a novice Adept like me, but I had managed to make new psionics on the spot that she hadn’t adapted to.

I had just my gut instinct based on the barest glimpses of her mind, But still, it didn’t feel like she had any telepathy like this.

“That’s true,” Tasser realized. “If the point of this was to make sure Caleb had a secret lifeline in case the Vorak try to capture him, we can double down.”

He grabbed the radio Nai had left with me earlier and attached it to one of my suspenders.

“Keep it visible, any of us with radios. If any of us get attacked, what’s the first thing the Vorak will try to do, especially if we’re wearing our radios nice and prominently?”

“Take them,” Nai realized. “Cut us off.”

“Dira, which only plays into the ‘psionics’ more,” Corphica said. “They’ll think they’ve isolated you, and have no idea you can still be in contact with the Torabin.”

I didn’t smile about it. But I did let myself feel a little safer. This was a trick the Vorak couldn’t see coming.

·····

The day we arrived at the Green Complex wrapped up with a few formalities.

The Director visited our ‘Coalition’s room’ and warned us to comply with any order security or administrators gave us. There were also some thinly veiled threats about what would happen if we attacked the Vorak.

It was all a bit reassuring actually. The same warnings had likely been leveled at Umtane and his group.

“Do we know how many Rak Umtane has with him?” I wondered.

“Four, including him,” Nemuleki shared. She’d met with them to deliver the ‘certification’ Nai and Umtane had haggled over outside.

The eight of us were all putting our heads together to go over tomorrow’s schedule and where each of us was going to begin.

My ‘assignment’ was easiest and also not really an assignment at all.

Tasser and I were both slated to go to the ‘Physical Medicine’ department of the Complex, and I was getting the alien equivalent of a physical.

Tasser was going to be accompanying me everywhere for the duration of our time here, as well as two other Casti on any given day. He had basically been my primary contact for months and Dyn had shared enough of his rudimentary findings to let Tasser know the gist of what the Organic Authority would be doing with me.

“I’m surprised it’s so few,” one of the other Casti said, but I missed which one. Either Adden or the new guy, Wurshken.

Nai nodded in agreement, “So was I, especially considering he compromised for eight of us.”

“Facility security evens those odds, though,” Letrin pointed out. “I’m not wild about getting in a fight with them.”

“No one is,” Nai said. “We’re focusing too much on a potential fight. We need to remember what we’re here for.”

The Korbanok data drive.

Nai and I had confirmed this room was surveillance free, twice now. But still, we all agreed no one would ever talk about it out loud, although Nai and I could probably break that rule with our newly developed psionics.

“The timing of all this does not seem coincidental,” Adden—I double checked this time—said.

“I tend to agree,” Nai said. “But no one here should forget that none of our objectives demand a fight. It’s very likely that Umtane will avoid starting a fight, because he wasn’t wrong earlier; they’d lose.”

“So we need to watch out for everything else,” I guessed, catching a few glances from the Casti.

Nai nodded.

“What exactly is ‘everything else’ then?” Corphica asked.

“Sabotage and information primarily,” Nai said. “We didn’t bring in a ton of equipment, but they might try to get to it to reduce our options. Pay close attention to any kind of maintenance in the facility too. For anyone going with Caleb on any particular day, pay attention if the schedule changes unexpectedly and why, if a certain machine broke the day before Caleb was scheduled for it, that should be alarming.”

“Could they get away with that?” Adden asked.

“It would depend on what came of it and how much could be proven,” Nai said. “So yes. But in any case, they’re going to be careful. Umtane and I both certified for the Director that neither the Coalition or Deep Coils were condoning bioweapons or First Contact sabotage. So if anyone steps out of line, this whole affair becomes very public, very quickly.”

“Even the lower lab sections still have staff that commute from the borough,” Letrin pointed out. “People talk. This is going to get public anyway.”

“Searching the facility covertly might be impossible,” Adden said.

He was right, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be able to search at all. I was about to open my mouth when Tasser beat me to it.

“That could work in our favor,” Tasser pointed out. “If we can’t search covertly, then we search visibly and legitimately.”

“Are you thinking what I am?” I asked.

“It’s not impossible,” he said honestly.

“Because I’m thinking this doesn’t really change anything. As a matter of fact, this could even help us.”

“Tread very carefully with what you’re about to say,” Nai warned. “Because it sure seems like you just said a potentially genocidal bioweapon might be a good thing.”

“Not the bioweapon itself, no,” I said. “But if it’s real, then it’s creator has to be here too, right? Umtane said it either had been made ‘or was going to be.’ For all we know, it doesn’t exist yet. And since there’s something that needs finding, it seems like the perfect opportunity to also search for any other ‘potential threats.’”

‘Potential threats.’

It was the codename we’d agreed on to refer to the Korbanok Drive if we absolutely needed to say something about it. The fine distinction was between that phrasing and ‘possible threats’ which just meant exactly that.

“It’s a dangerous line to walk…” Nai cautioned. “If Umtane finds any of those threats first, we might never even know.”

“He’s going to be investigating and searching anyway,” I pointed out. “It seems like a good idea, not just for you to investigate with him, but even one or two more with you. As long as we can trust the Organic Authority security to prevent the Vorak from going for me, I think guarding me might be redundant.”

“You can’t be serious,” Nemuleki said gravely.

“Not unnecessary, ” I said. “Redundant. Tasser can come with me the whole time, but instead of two of you getting tied up each day with us, let’s just have the facility supply those people instead.”

“…If the Vorak did go after him,” Tasser said slowly. “Then facility security would oppose them for the same reasons they admitted him in the first place. We would still be in contact with you six, and security would watch its own people closely. Caleb is still guarded, and we’re not cut off.”

“It could work,” Nai conceded. “If that’s the case, then now’s the time to address the glaring problem.”

She was Farnata, so she was more sensitive to it than anyone else. But I wasn’t too far behind her.

This whole day, not one person had mentioned the fact that there was another Coalition Adept somewhere inside this facility.

“The contact said he was deceased,” Letrin pointed out. “How sure are we of that?”

“The bigger problem is why the contact hasn’t reached out.” Nemuleki said. “The intelligence was corroborated, but only the fact that he made it here. We don’t know anything else.”

“If he is dead,” Nai said, “I should be able to locate him. My cascade can cover enough space that I could search the whole facility in a day. Maybe two if we’re unlucky.”

“Won’t Umtane feel your cascade?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Let him. I’ll be searching the whole facility to make sure there aren’t any more Vorak hiding anyway.”

“It seems unlikely that Rahi Pen will go undiscovered during this. If that’s the case, it’s not going to look good for us when a Coalition Adept’s body is found on site,” Adden said.

“It won’t be,” Nemuleki confirmed. “Which is why Rahi Nai and I think it might be best to reveal that on our terms. But that’s going to depend on how Pen died.”

“I thought he would have been killed fighting security,” I admitted. “At least until no one mentioned him.”

Nai shook her head. “Pen must have made it inside completely undetected, which is no easy feat.”

“He had help,” Corphica said. “Whoever wrote the note.”

“Pen’s contact is our first priority,” Nemuleki agreed. “But the fact that they haven’t reached out is very concerning.”

“Could something have happened to them since sending the note?”

“Yes,” Nai said frankly.

“They could have even died,” Nemuleki admitted. “There are medical facilities on site. Funnily enough, it would be easy to hide a body here. Between the on-site morgue and wherever cadavers are stored, there’s more than a few spots to hide a body.”

“I thought Pen’s body was likely undiscovered,” I said.

“That depends on what you mean by ‘undiscovered,’” Tasser pointed out. “But she means that the Vorak might have killed Pen’s Casti contact before we arrived. A Casti body they could hide in a Casti morgue. That’s not the case for Pen’s body.”

“Facility records could tell us if any personnel have been missing. Pen’s contact almost certainly worked here,” Nemuleki said.

“Would the Director allow that?” Corphica asked.

“We’d need to be extra convincing, but I don’t think it’s impossible. If we’re going to help with the hunt for the bioweapon then we’ll likely get access to those materials anyway,” Nemuleki said.

“So our priority is finding Pen’s contact?” Letrin asked.

Nai nodded, “Finding them will give us more information about our goals, don’t forget we’re keeping Caleb safe too.”

“Thanks Nai,” I said. “I was worried you were going to forget about me.”

She scowled but I saw Nai begin to consult the floorplan in her mind—her face always went still, and she looked slightly toward the ground.

“I think I know what might have happened to the contact. If I’m right, they’re still alive.”