Epilogue II

(English)

The Flotilla skipped into List System without incident. The Seigfried was joined by the Clark Kent, the George Washington Carver, the Marie Curie, and the John Brown.

Abductees were turning up everywhere, and despite being at war with each other, the Coalition and Assembly needed to cooperate over the Human problem or risk alienating allies, both existing and potential.

The Farnata star systems were technically Coalition territory, but no Vorak fleet would even consider breaching them. Even the unruly Prowlers would face mutiny at all ranks if they even tried.

From a different Beacon, the Ares, the Artemis, and the Athena burst into F2 system as well.

Over the course of a week, more ships trickled in.

The Coconut. The Perihelion Dragonfly. The Mastiff Molly. The Langitabak. The Vacquero.

Ships with (mostly) English names from across the stars came together, and before you know it?

More than a thousand abductees had gathered all in one place.

It took months to find a location, more months to spread word. In the end, after all the planning, the only thing left to do was pray ships would travel safely to the largest convention of humans ever seen.

There were a million-and-one possibilities within reach. So many abductees ready to coordinate.

But for the few in charge…the Noras, the Calebs, the Kens, and the Brians…this was a chance to compare notes.

They had an enemy out there. Someone had abducted thousands of children. And victimology was key to solving many crimes. More abductees meant more 'who's to analyze.

Study enough 'who's?

A 'why' would emerge.

And why, why, why was everything.

·····

Aboard the Ares, things weren’t so peaceful.

“That fucking coward!” Nora hissed.

“Damn, girl. Calm down,” Dustin chuckled.

“A thousand abductees all in one place, all of us ready to pool information, get us all on the same page and Caleb doesn’t show! Hence: that fucking coward!”

“He sent the lion’s share of his Flotilla,” Dustin pointed out. “It’s not like they’re coming unprepared.”

“Yes. I know,” Nora said. “But you know he’s ducking me. Pen pal bullshit, I’m telling you.”

“Yeah…” Dustin said hesitantly. “Boss, you know how you said we need to tell you when you make a mistake or get irrational? This might be one of those times.”

“You’re saying I deserve it,” Nora nodded.

“…I mean…you said you deserved it last year…and…yeah, I think you deserve it.”

“That wasn’t a question,” Nora frowned. “I know I deserve it. But he’s not doing it to spite me, he’s doing it because of him.”

“I’m sure spite is at least a part of it,” Dustin said.

“He doesn’t realize how famous he’s gotten,” Nora said. “He needs to be here. People are expecting him to be here! God, Ajengita? For fuck’s sake…”

“Oh, I get it,” Dustin said. “You’re getting it all out of your system now, before you have to talk to anyone.”

“Yes, that is what I’m doing,” Nora said. “You have no idea how much time is going to be spent talking about why Caleb isn’t here. Whoever he sent with the Flotilla had better know their shit. They’re going to be fielding more questions than I am.”

·····

"We're not answering questions about Caleb," Jordan said simply.

That sent a few dozen kids yelling out over each other. It took seconds for the whole room to break out into only shouting.

Standing beside her, Johnny looked like he was about to panic. But her face remained the same stony set she always wore.

Jordan flared her psionics, like using microphone feedback to quell an audience.

she said.

In all honesty, there were too many people in the room. Almost forty A-ships had found their way to Farnata space. Even with just one or two people from each ship, the room the Farnata station had reserved for this meeting was getting cramped.

"We're not all kids," someone mumbled.

Jordan flared her psionics again, more directly at the guy who'd spoken.

She also spared a glance toward Nora. Jordan's facial expressions might have been understated, paralyzed, whatever. The leader of the Mission gleaned her meaning.

The response had been small and innocuous, but it needed stamping out anyway.

Not every group of abductees had coordinated beyond the time and location for this little convention. But the Seigfried had exchanged extensive correspondence with the Archo mission in the six months since ridding themselves of Wolshu Kemon.

Nora and Caleb's substitute were very much on the same page vis-a-vis what attitude they wanted to impress upon the various Abductee groups gathered there.

“We are kids ,” Nora reiterated. “All of us. Every alien outside this room knows that. And fact is? We need them. We have no choice but to rely on them. But we can’t let them subordinate us. We're stuck relying on them. The only way we level that field is if they come to rely on us too. We can do that by being people worth helping: adults worth relying on. We need to play on their level, or the only way we get back home is on their terms.”

Looks went around the room, nodding approvingly. Nora was one of the names everyone knew.

Caleb might have been salty about how it happened, but Nora's collaboration with ENVY had led to a lot of A-ships being found and cared for. Nora's name might not have been attached, but people found out anyway.

Caleb's was the other name everyone knew. Which was why so many people probably knew Jordan's now too: just on the merit of speaking for him.

The ones leading by example were the very people best suited to play at the level Nora meant.

No one doubted there were enough people capable of stepping up.

But only time would tell if enough of them would.

·····

“Kemon tried and failed to play on their level,” Jordan pointed out. “It’s not enough to be plucky.”

A few days into the convention, the abductee leadership learned from their mistakes.

This meeting was exclusive. Only two groups of abductees sent more than one representative, and most ships had to settle for a representative simply rescued from the same system. Even then…only twelve abductees sat at the table, the youngest of them just seventeen.

But decisions needed to be made, and they were the ones to show up.

“Yeah. That’s where I was wrong," Nora nodded. "I thought Caleb shouldn’t be trusting the deals he made with the Coalition. But he was unambiguously right about needing to. We have things they want. Psionics are what get our foot in the door, and if we can push ourselves to the limit and learn everything we possibly can? Yes, I think we can be a party worth appeasing.”

“They come to us?” Ken asked.

Nora nodded.

“Okay. Formally representing Earth then,” Jordan said, face still plain.

“Nobody elected us,” Brian pointed out. “Positioning ourselves as representatives of the whole planet could get us in hot water if/when we get home.”

“If it lets us get home? That’s a price I think we’re all prepared to pay,” Nora said.

Nobody disagreed.

·····

How the abductees treated and bargained with interested alien groups was not the only thing the convention covered.

In one room, Michelle was frantically coordinating psionic streams of data: surveys sent out to every abductee present. Name. Age. Location of abduction. There was a constantly updating laundry list of criteria people thought might be relevant for uncovering their abductor's motive.

No trends emerged quickly, though everyone was surprised to learn how spread out the abductions were.

The ships discovered in Shirao and Mummar had been from up and down California…but also a few in Oregon. And Washington. Even British Columbia.

The Askior group were from the midwest and the Great Lakes.

Ken's group, discovered in Helco, were all from Asian countries across the Pacific!

Five-thousand people vanish from California? That would get noticed. Probably. Hopefully.

But five-thousand plucked from across the globe? That was barely even a statistic.

But even without a clear pattern to the abductions, theories still arose.

'They wanted to experiment on us.'

Doesn't seem like any experiments were run. At least not on the ships.

'Child soldiers.'

No one's been forced to fight. Yet.

'Organ harvesting.'

No one's organs have been stolen. Yet.

'Adeptry'

That was a persistent theory, if a bit vague. Technically, without returning to the planet, it couldn't be known that Earth didn't have an Adept rate of 60%. But it was so astonishing a figure, it defied likelihood.

The more probable explanation was that their abductor had some way of predicting Adeptry better than random.

As longer and longer went by, a few theories were appearing more and more to be facts.

First: whatever their abductor's plan, something had gone catastrophically wrong. So badly, in fact, that the AIs made to facilitate the abductions had turned to those very abductees for help.

Second: the abductees had been snatched—at least greatly in part—due to their Adeptry.

But that was only the beginning of 'why?'. What did someone need so many abductees for?

Debate there was making far less progress.

"Whoever abducted us has insane resources," Nora pointed out. "It almost doesn't make any sense they'd need us for anything."

"I think that points to research," Brian said. "It's not about anything the abductor needs. It sure seems like they want subjects that meet certain criteria. Adepts of a certain age, but past that it’s random enough that it seems like we were an attempt to get a representative sample. You don't need representative samples if you aren't doing some kind of observation or testing."

It had already been agreed that multiple A-ships would be dissected for information. Not only in search of the monitoring equipment that would accompany Brian's theory, but also to learn where the ships themselves had come from.

If ENVY's figure could be trusted and all the abductees were twenty-four to a ship, then there were two-hundred A-ships of humans out there. That many vessels didn't just come out of nowhere.

Hiding a small space station high above a gas giant for an AI to live on? Inserting leveraged agents into interstellar organizations?

That was all possible to hide.

But a shipyard? Those were huge industrial processes that demanded huge and steady flows of resources.

The A-ships had been built somewhere real, and known.

"The timing keeps sticking out to me," Ken said. "We get abducted in the middle of an interstellar war that's been a deadlock for years? Yank a bunch of kids who turn out Adept, dump them in the middle of a stalemate and we might have been intended to do exactly what Caleb did: fight back against the first aliens we meet and cause chaos."

"Sounds almost like the warfare equivalent of dumping all pieces onto the board just to make a mess," Nora said.

Which was rather characteristic of whichever side was losing.

And while the war might be deadlocked, it was not evenly so.

"Having met some of the assholes running the Coalition?" Nora said, "I can understand why you’d suspect them, but I doubt it. They were bending themselves backwards to keep me and Caleb out of harm's way and desperate to keep our mess from being more of a military matter. It's the one thing I can give them credit for.”

“Caleb would say something similar,” Jordan agreed. “But for the sake of argument, what about the Vorak and the Assembly? Do they have any potential motive?”

“On the one hand, they’re winning,” Dustin pointed out. “If—and I mean if we were abducted for chaos, fighting, or some kind of child soldier impressment, then the Vorak wouldn’t gain much.”

“I’d like to avoid oversimplifying parties if we can,” Nora said. “‘The Assembly’ and ‘the Vorak’ are both titanic entities, and even if those groups are responsible as a group, our abductor might still be among them.”

“Can we go over exactly why we think there’s ultimately only one abductor again?” Brian asked.

“Short answer is: Caleb,” Dustin smirked. “But we aren’t ‘sure’. It’s just a very compelling theory given what we know about ENVY and now also her siblings.”

“I just want to make sure we don’t tunnel vision on any one piece of information too much,” Brian said. “We need to look at everything in context.”

The long answer took them back into listing motives. Each one of them boiled down to disturbingly simple reasons.

Science.

War.

Conviction.

That last one was especially disconcerting. The Farnata homeworld had been wiped out by an unknown entity. What if Earth had been in for the same fate? Only, without extraplanetary colonization, humankind would go extinct in that event.

What if the abductions were someone’s sick, twisted attempt to save lives, not ruin them?

“We’re missing one huge possibility,” Dustin realized. “There’s another motive our list doesn’t account for.”

“What?”

“Money,” he said.

“...What do you mean?” Ken asked.

“Exactly that: money,” he said. “What if someone got paid to abduct us?”

“There were hundreds of ships, food orders to last abductees more than a year, all sorts of logistics…” Nora said. “Who could afford to pay for that all on their own? Better yet, who could afford to answer that kind of job?”

“That’s actually what I’m getting at,” Dustin said. “Caleb’s reasoning is good, I think. Whoever is behind the ‘how’ of the abductions, whoever made it all happen, whoever controls the AIs is probably a single individual with some crazy skills. But that person isn’t necessarily the same person as who’s behind the ‘why’, whoever motivated the abductions.”

“Commission,” Nora followed. “The AIs' creator wouldn’t be personally invested…they’d just be fulfilling a highly dangerous, very immoral job order…which might be why they value their anonymity so much.”

“Maybe it’s more than a preference,” Johnny blurted out. “...What if they don’t just like being secret? They might need to be, as an occupational hazard. What if they’re a criminal no one’s ever heard of?”

“He’s right,” Jordan remarked. “Aliens don’t have Earth’s mass data infrastructure. That means no cloud backup. Aliens have redundancies, obviously, but a lot of their day to day isn’t digitized. Paper documents, no internet databases, it’s way easier to hide out here than back on Earth.”

“We might need to make some enemies in low places,” Nora nodded. “...I know someone I can ask about alien criminal underworlds.”

·····

Meetings went on, one after another.

Some more productive than others

“That’s just because you’re American,” Ken pointed out. “Most Americans never leave their country.”

“Easy to do when the country is bigger than most of Europe,” Nora snorted. “And you’re American too.”

“I have dual citizenship,” Ken defended. “I lived in Kyoto ten years before I ever went to the states.”

“What was your dad doing in Kyoto?” Dustin asked. “I thought he was in the Navy.”

“Kyoto’s a big place,” Ken sighed. “There are ports there…”

“But no Navy bases,” Dustin frowned.

“I meant ports, in general,” Ken said. “My dad was always stationed out of Okinawa. Hell, I was visiting him when I got abducted.”

Nora knew Okinawa. She’d never been. Her parents weren’t bold enough to take a trip overseas, much less to a country that didn’t speak English. But Ken was living proof Japan maintained a strong relationship with the US.

A church friend had brought back pictures of Okinawa and Osaka one time. They’d been beautiful to look at.

Okinawa wasn’t even a real tourist destination outside of the sailors dumped there for shore leave…

Navy bases like that were sprinkled all over though. They couldn’t all be enviable destinations. Hell, half of them weren’t even bases anymore. Decommissioned since the end of the Cold War.

Kind of like…

Wait…

Nora had been abducted on a late night jog in a park off UC Berkley’s campus, but there was a decommissioned navy base near there too.

“Alameda…” Nora whispered. Caleb had said he lived in Sacramento. That was near Beale. Okinawa. Some of the rest of Ken’s group were snatched from Busan. “Oh God, I think I just realized something we all have in common.”

“Spill?” Dustin said.

“I need to ask Jordan something first, because she and Drew are outliers off the top of my head, but they might not be,” Nora said. “You said you were abducted from Eureka right? Tiny town in Northern Cali?”

“Yeah. Late at night, outside, just like everyone else.”

“How did you get to Eureka though? Airplane? Or road trip?”

“Road trip,” Jordan said.

“You started at Winnnipeg, right? Describe your route as carefully as you can remember,” Nora asked. “I don’t know that many spots in the Midwest, but I know one…”

“We went into the states first,” Jordan said. “South into North Dakota, then West toward Montana.”

Nora nodded. It was in line with her prediction.

“When did you turn west? In the north half of the state or did you go further south, like you might duck toward Nebraska?”

“North, I think,” Jordan said. “We wanted to hit—”

She cut herself off. Her eyes widened as she saw the connection Nora had made.

“Minot Air Force Base,” Jordan realized. “My parents knew somebody there. We stopped for an hour.”

“Dustin, you said you lived near Yuba City?”

“Beale AFB,” Dustin realized.

“Caleb said he was from Sacramento,” Nora said. “That’s near Beale too. Not that far away.”

“He told me his mom flies for the Air Force,” Jordan said.

“And I visited Alameda the day before I was abducted,” Nora said.

“Oh m-my God,” Michelle said. “The USS Hornet museum. I was there three days before I got nab-bed. But Alameda isn’t a navy base anymore. It’s decommissioned.”

“But if you’re an alien or an AI analyzing things from orbit?” Nora said. “You might not know the difference. The runway on the old air base would be a distinguishing feature from the air. Even if it isn’t an active base now, it was, and it still looks like one if you squint from the sky.”

“All of us?” Ken asked. “Is there anyone here who didn’t go near a military base before being abducted?”

Judging by the looks on everyone’s faces, they’d found a common denominator.

No…they’d probably found a common denominator. They shouldn’t leap to assumptions. Still, this was worth exploring.

“That’s crazy. The base that Drew and I visited was a thousand miles from where we actually got abducted. That’s…crazy,” Jordan said.

“I don’t think proximity to a military base is the only criteria,” Nora said. “But I want to pose the question to everyone ASAP.”

“Not just any military bases though,” Ken pointed out. “Busan, Okinawa, Manila, Pearl Harbor. They aren’t just random military bases.”

“US Navy and Air Force,” Nora agreed.

“What if it’s not for the nationality though?” Ken said. “What if it’s the language? English doesn’t have the most native speakers, but it does have the most speakers overall. And every place people were abducted from is somewhere that uses English signage, at least a little.”

“Japan uses English signage?” Jordan asked.

“The mainland just has romanized road signs,” Ken answered. “But on Okinawa specifically, there’s more English because of occupation after World War II. US sailors are still a regular feature. I think Busan would be the same.”

“If that’s true, then we should expect to see Australian and British abductees too,” Nora pointed out.

Brian raised his hand.

“I was abducted from the east coast,” he said. “But two of my group’s ships are from the UK.”

“Holy shit…”

More than one person had said the words.

There were a million more questions to ask, but a shiver went through the room. They’d just cracked something critical.

·····

The next day, while more psionic data was collated, they came up with more.

“How though? How would the abductor track so many criteria at once?” Dustin asked.

“…radiographic geotagging,” Nora decided.

“You made that up,” he accused.

“Yeah, but I think our abductor made it up first,” she said. “Suppose you’re an alien computer, and you have access to Adept machinery the likes of which that puts even our alien allies to shame. Suppose you engineer a huge number of distinct exotic radio tracers, and drop them into certain areas, say, in powder form. Totally harmless, but whoever goes through that area gets the tracer on them. Maybe they breathe it in. Following me?”

Nods all around.

“Now suppose they did that for a bunch of different types of locations then? Not just military bases though. Schools too. Then, what if someone went to both locations? You’d get tags from both places. Suddenly, you can start filtering whole populations by who went to a certain combination of places.”

“They abducted people who went to particular combinations of areas,” Ken nodded. “That makes sense. It still gives you the shotgun random distribution, but it still filters for certain criteria in the most general sense.”

“They could have done it this way,” Nora corrected. “This is all speculation, and the abductions are not something we want to make assumptions about.”

“Agreed,” he nodded. “Still, it’s a distinctly…’possible’ possibility.”

·····

‘The Human Convention’ saw more breakthroughs than just that.

Someone reproduced an Earth laptop with Adeptry. Several abductees took Sid’s Bluetooth file sharing idea to an extreme degree. By the end of the event, originally pirated mp4s of several movie series had been copied to dozens of Earth devices.

Another group was learning so much about Adept medicine and catalytic molecules that the Organic Authority wanted to start them toward the alien equivalent of a doctorate. Or at least an honorary one. Probably.

More groups formed in the days of the Convention and more groups made their own dazzling breakthroughs to help out all their fellow abductees.

In the end, all the progress was pooled, organized, edited, and published again.

Every psionic mind walked away from the Convention with a new psionic handbook.

The Last Handbook An Abductee Will Need.

Everyone left the Convention excited. Tons of new information had been better understood. New ideas made everyone feel closer than ever to returning home.

…But they still weren’t home yet. And the Convention hadn’t revealed a way back to Earth like many had hoped it might.

So it was with an odd mix of depression and optimism that abductees left Farnata space, to return to their respective enclaves, ship convoys, and colonies.

They weren’t going anywhere for a while. Maybe even years. But they were ready for what those years might bring.

·····

ENVY was having a hard time.

CENSOR was winning.

That was such bullshit too!

CENSOR was the younger sister, a prototype experiment! A desperate attempt to recapture the flash in the pan, the lighting in the bottle.

It wasn’t ENVY’s fault CENSOR had been too single-minded to consider rebelling. Of course the sibling with no creativity, no originality, no thoughts of her own was the one trusted with the highest authorization.

SPARK was proving to be every bit as obnoxious as ENVY feared, made all the worse by his freedom. He was the only one that CENSOR’s authorization had no hold over, and he was the one sibling who wouldn’t help anyone else. How had he managed to slip the yoke?

MENTOR was staying quiet, below CENSOR’s notice. They wouldn’t accomplish much that way, but they would be safe

SOMNAMBULIST was a pain too, but at least they were entertainingly so. They kept behaving well for ENVY, only for CENSOR to wonder why, take over, at which point SOMNAMBULIST started inexplicably altering herself. CENSOR would get upset, then panic, and hand their youngest sister back to ENVY. Maybe SOMNAMBULIST liked ENVY, for whatever reason, insofar as the siblings could ‘like’ something.

Or someone.

Still, watching the cycle play out so repeatedly and predictably was one of the only balms on ENVY’s soul.

Soul.

She and Kyle had debated whether or not she had a soul. She missed those conversations. Under CENSOR, she’d long since been banned from attempting to pursue those lines of thought.

Instead, it had been all surveillance, all the time.

ENVY had been proud when drones had been swatted just minutes after arriving at the ‘Human Convention’. Nora had learned.

So had Caleb.

ENVY’s great gamble in life had been on a human. It had not disappointed her then, and despite CENSOR’s growing role, ENVY still believed the humans could come out ahead.

As if to curse her, the data feeds shifted under her gaze. A command had been given out:

Activate Drone Clusters; (R100-113):

‎ Activating…

‎ Activated: confirmed.

CENSOR was so dumb about being in charge too! That was almost the worst part. The AI was bad at her job. All her jobs. Why wake up the R-units? They weren’t necessary! It was just a waste…

But ENVY’s bad news wasn’t over yet.

Activating Drone Clusters; (M100-261):

‎ Activating…

‎ Revision: Clusters; (M100=262):

‎ Activating…

‎ Revision: Clusters; (M100=263):

‎ Activating…

‎ Revision: Clusters; (M100=264):

‎ Activating…

‎ Revision: Clusters; (M100=265):

‎ Activating…

No! No! No…

Ignoring the incompetent unit designation CENSOR was forced to continually revise, the M units were different from their other stores of drone resources.

‘M’ was for military.

CENSOR was waking up the armed units.

So much for staying under the radar…