[Luis Dias]

Why Admiral?

He was still recolecting his consciousness, surprised by the inconsistencies between the different signals his senses were communicating, and although he had waited for this question for ages now, he almost missed it. His eyes, perfectly assessing his physical situation were telling him he should not even be alive, not the way his body was shaped. There was no atmosphere he could sense or breathe, and yet he listened correctly. He felt warm and comfortable despite everything.

Finally his intellect kicked in. He was being treated by his rank. What does that mean?

I... I wanted to speak with you.

He gasped. He didn't even open his mouth but the words were said aloud. Then he realised he didn't actually answer the question.

I have come to propose a friendship with you.

He waited, but the silenced merely repeated the question, he still didn't answer it. Rationally he shouldn't even expect understanding of his language and meaning, but somehow he felt he was perfectly understood. Suddenly he despaired slightly. What kind of bargaining was he going to do with a species he knew nothing about? Simple equivocations kickstarted the first Great War, but now he was even blinder than the first terran ambassadors were. What is its psyche, its motivations, its feelings. Does it even have a mind like our own, is communication even possible?... Tinker with it, he remembered his father say. If you don't know how to use it, tinker with it.

I have come to propose peace, enlightment

Silence.

Humanity can be so much more, it would be a waste to erradicate it.

Silence again.

We are not some mindless zombies. We have consciousness. We feel. We live. We are. We.... love.

You want to save those you were killing.

He shook aghast with the size and deepness of the voice. He didn't know how or why he could sense this, but there it was, a blurred but intense mix of feelings that were conveyed by that sentence. Not beffudlement, not confusion out of a situation that was indeed contradictory, but mockery. Amusement. This took him by surprise. The thing had a sense of humour.

My... struggle was... necessary. I could have not come here otherwise.

Silence.

Which humanity you want to save?

I... I do not understand. What kind of choice is that?

Admiral, imagine you have two groups of ants.

[An4ximandros]

  Awesome, can we have some more, Luis? I enjoyed reading through this!

[BritishShivans]

This is interesting.

[DavetheGrave]

This may be nitpicking but, technically the Great War and the Terran-Vasudan War were two separate wars. But otherwise, very interesting. I do wonder how the Shivans obtained the knowledge of ants.

[-Norbert-]

They project their voice and feeling directly into his mind and they "hear" his answers even though he isn't actually saying them with his voice.
They must have at least partial access to his mind.

I wouldn't be surprised if they already know everything he knows and the questions are just for Bosch's "benefit". A fake interrogation to guide his thoughts into the desired direction.

[Luis Dias]

He knew it wouldn't be easy, he was just not expecting a constant riddle boiling his neurons, trying to understand the several layers of meaning and consequence of what was being proposed to him. Thoughts of cosmic proportions went through his mind. Were they discussing a form of artificial selection? For what purpose and why was this choice so apparently easily given to him, a remnant of a human being? What kind of sea was he struggling to sail here? Was the choice real, was it rethorical or was he under some kind of a probing technique?

This must be just a cruel trick. Bitterness crept in his mood. A mortal pawn mocked by gods, was he just a toy for amusement until the joke got too old? What kind of interlocutor was this, a mere sargeant, an admiral or the hive head itself? What game was he playing? His mental faculties were extremely focused at this point, taking mere fractions of seconds until reaching the only important question: What were the real consequences of his answers?

He couldn't answer it. Not with this entity. Here he was, master reader of minds, manipulator per excelence of Humans and Zods alike, completely baffled with the enigma in front (was it in front?) of him. A bell curve with fat tails at both ends surged in his mind as a visual clue of the infinite set of consequences of this conversation. Unlearn your preconceptions. There's nothing you can do other than tinker with it.

You choose between who lives and who dies, Admiral.

Was that a question, a proposal, a matter of factual observation of his past actions? The tone wouldn't tell. It kept on.

To preserve, destruction is required.

That was something the Ancients said about the Shivans.

Is that why you cleanse our systems time to time? The cyclical butchering? To preserve... what? Preserve the cosmos from what?

You ought to know the answer to that one, Admiral.

He sensed the truth behind the statement, he was after all the one who butchered millions just to get to this very spot. But the constant ambiguity was getting on his nerves, it didn't really answer the question. Damn it, he thought, I've had enough of this charade.

Look, what I want is a truthful relationship between our races, between our intentions, one that does not involve genocidal wars, spilling innocent blood throughout the systems we inhabit. I came here for peace, not for mind games.

Innocence is irrelevant. What should be relevant to you is that your arrival has undermined our consensus on what should be done.

There! They are plural and have diverging opinions, how about that, he thought. Politics do play a part in the Galaxy as well. That is a game he knew how to play. He sensed a crack he could try to play with.

You have a problem with our arrogance, don't you?

He ignored the silence, his confidence creeping in. Could still be an illusion.

I have a suggestion.

Please, Admiral.

Why don't you, instead of butchering mankind, make a statement to my people?

What do you think that would achieve, Admiral?

The very opposite of arrogance.

[MatthTheGeek]

Shouldn't that go in Fan Fiction instead of BP forums ?

[Luis Dias]

Shouldn't that go in Fan Fiction instead of BP forums ?

It is fundamentally related to BP. My personal vision of what Shivans "are" or how they should be portrayed is very very different from this one, which is an extremely amateurish attempt to derive shivan intentions within BPverse. I placed this here as a source of a wider discussion on the Shivans before WiH 2 arrives. The ants as obvious example (note that Ken is the one who shows Laporte the Ants. It should be obvious why the Shivans "know" about the ants. However I admit it is somewhat of a "hack" in here. I have yet to learn subtlety in writing.)

[Luis Dias]

My heart was pounding nervously and it shouldn't be. This is everyone's caricature of a paradise, to lay easy on the shadow of a tree, observing the meadow and the beautiful complex rythms of the chaotic dance of life, racing through unconsciously but inevitably without any teleological concerns. It's so cheesy and cliché but it feels so right. I breathe heavily and it feels good. Go on, take a good look. Such beauty. Like madness gone loose, symphony of endless joy oblivious and careless about its scientifically proven demise. Uh, eventually. Such a contradiction. Such stupidity, and yet without it what is it all worth? Death isn't the point, our particular madness is our salvation and I am infected throughout with it, by what lay besides me, also sitting, also observing, very conscious and aware. My own madness, my own teleology condensed in a beautiful human shape.

Yes, he concedes in his thoughts, I am part of this manic dance, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

She points above when a sudden giant metallic meteor races through the sky, Look, Artemis Station.

Hm hmm. Sigh. Not even here am I allowed to forget the war. Such amount of death, for what? A babbling incompetent confusion between ambassadors? Such anger it gives me. Beyond madness! Or just the other side of the coin to it all? Is this all this wretched galaxy has to offer, idiotic equivocations over and over followed by the butchering of flesh and blood, the constant rape of tiny specks of love? Is this just a big bad joke? What more jokes does it harbor behind the uncharted nodes, what more obscenities will this universe grant us with?

You're upset, aren't you?

I don't say anything. She continues.

I know. I feel the same. Sometimes... I just despise all this wandering, all this "exploration". Why don't we just live our lives, day and night with merry, joy, dance and music? I dream of children Ken. Holding my hands, cuddling between us. Shouldn't these be the only things of our concern? Shouldn't this right here be our want? What are we doing up there anyway?

God I love her so much. I look at where she is pointing with her brown eyes and frown. My mind reels in anguish and anxiety when I see the moon.

What is the matter?

It shouldn't be there... I... I think I shouldn't be able to see what I am seeing. I focus, try to remember but it's a blur. I feel I shouldn't see it, but am clueless why. Wait. No, I shouldn't be here, this is home... I couldn't possibly be home!

Think. This is not a dream, too many details, everything is in its right place. The meadow really feels real, the animals do not seem made up. Then finally I take a good look at Sarah. I'm old. She's older.

Sarah?

I notice I hadn't spoken before.

Oh Ken, I missed you so much!

Is this a dream? Am I dead? Is this the real paradise? Damn, it just feels so much like so.

As an answer, a familiar touch in my left shoulder. I look up and see lieutenant Sancho.

This is not a dream sir, I can tell you that much.

[QuakeIV]

Ooh, more.

[Master_of_the_blade]

This is good. I'd love to read more.

[Wobble73]

Reminds me of the Journey of the Forgotten a little! Coming on well!

[Luis Dias]

Neat trick ain’t it Jonah?

Captain Jonah, commander of the former NTF Iceni corvette, brilliant tactician, great chessplayer, pretty cheerful character in his own flamboyant manner, there he was standed uptight with a bored deadpan face, absolutely uninspired by this terran landscape. Doesn’t surprise me. Born in a moon colony in the Polaris system, he never really understood Earth people’s nostalgia for these ultra-organic scenarios, their brightness and oversaturated colors, filled with germs and allergic toxins he would add with civilized disgust.

More like a nightmare to me, sir.

For the time we had to explore this place and to try to see its limits and boundaries, Jonah was the only one who didn’t bother to check any more of it. Found a clear spot over a couple of rocks and decided this is where he should stay and sort this miracle out with his own mind.

Don’t be so hard on yourself John. Take a deep breath!

Jonah clearly hated whenever she misnamed him like that, those two were always teasing each other. Malana’s voice was certain and strong...but only to those who didn’t know her for how long as I did. I could see she was in fact in a controlled state of panic, if such an oxymoron can make any sense. The whole crew was slightly frantic. Our minds were stretching to their limits in order to cope with all this and yet, I was proud of all of them. They were behaving in the most compostured fashion. The clean dark blue uniforms probably helped.

Yes well... frantic, and from the very start of the revolution back in Polaris. After all, this was the very culmination of our efforts and sacrifices, of blood and spirit, we went through such an enormous painful voyage and yet when we apparently reach the end of our journey, we are greeted with more mystifications and problems to wrap our heads around.

We better get used to this, I have a feeling this is just going to get weirder and weirder.

We still decided to try to sort it out, if only for the sake of our sanity. We all sit on the grass, forming a circle that included Jonah’s rock.

First of all I should tell you how proud I am as your commander-in-chief. You all left your dreams and homes behind for this hail mary journey that would most probably have failed miserably, leaving only a trail of bloodshed and tears on our backs, our names marked with infamy for the rest of history. You knew the risks, you knew the odds. You knew the tolls we would have to face and ignore. And you executed bravely and decisively with all your hearts. You were tireless, focused, brilliant, all alongside the horrors we faced and managed.

I couldn’t possibly ask for any of that, and yet you did so without missing a beat. I am deeply honored to be in your company today.

The crew was fixated on my eyes. Most of them knew how masterfully I could manipulate people with propaganda and charisma, these were some of the brightest people I’ve ever met, but they ate the praise with gusto, for they not only really deserved it, they needed it.

However, we have not finished our mission. Not yet. Remember, our mission is to make contact with the Shivans and attempt negociating an alliance with them. We always knew what Khonsu and the Security Council would not even dare to contemplate, that the Shivans were orders of magnitude bigger in scope and power than both our races combined, that if we stood a chance in the dark game of evolution we would have to risk it with them.

We have achieved contact, the next step is to start a meaningful dialogue with them. It is clear we are out of immediate danger, for if they wanted us dead we would have long been by now. Apart from that however, we find ourselves in this ambiguous tactical position, one where the field is not even real, our eyes blinded to the physical truth beyond this dreamscape. And we still do not know our host’s intentions. Analysis? Schiller.

He was caught by surprise.

Yes... ah, well we could try to settle what we do know. Well, we know uh… this world is not real, all this is virtual, that means our physical bodies must be somehow tampered with. Also, the sheer processing power for this simulation is astounding. I can pick a flower like this… and smash it with my fingers, its sap flows correctly… I mean, I can imagine this is not merely for our eyes’ sake, real quantum physics are probably… very likely being modeled here in a sandbox!

Schiller was the science officer and the former head of the ETAK project. Brilliant physicist and engineer, terrible at understanding that not many of us are well versed in quantum shenanigans. He got it by our looks though.

What I mean to say is, if we added all the computers back in our systems, we would probably still fail to achieve this little acomplishment…

... that is only here to entertain us guests. I finished.

Precisely... and then there’s the matter of your wife, admiral.

I have pondered about her too. Go on.

I am yet to be convinced she is not a fake. Three possibilities: either she is part of this simulated edifice, as a kind of environmental product derived from your memories, without clear purpose or intent by the shivans for her to exist; or she is the very channel the Shivans use to get to us, either to monitor us, study us or … communicate with us.

The third?   My tone denounced my distate for those two options, although they were obvious and I had faced them myself before.

She might be the real deal. In which case…

Yes?

In which case this is a lot more worrying than I thought.

[QuakeIV]

Cool.

Also, since my nitpicking cores are at full power right now;
they ate the praise with gusto, for they not only really deserved it, they needed it.

Might sound better if you cut out really.  Also you misspelled negotiate as negociate in one part.

[Luis Dias]

Pick away, my writing skills fare somewhere in high school levels but the last thing I want is to acquire a sense of embarrassment. I really do want to get better at this, and the only way I know of is practicing . I keep deleting pages and pages of this stuff only to try again and again. Then I post them and a day after I read them back again and I facepalm at the effort... well, more practice is needed!

[Luis Dias]

Ever heard of Nagari?

Shivers went down my spine when Schiller said that word, or at least my spine’s virtual counterpart. Of course I did hear about this Vasudan mirror project of our own ETAK, but the usual mystics they pride themselves to be, they had to insist on an organic development of shivan communication technology. Go figure.

There was a catch though. I thought it was technology that their project was focused on. Schiller was hinting this could be a mistake, that out of some hubris and schadenfreud he had put aside the rumours he got as deliberate attempts of excusing the lack of progress on the part of the Vasudans, as means to hide the simple fact that they were badly late at this particular technological race. But what if they are true? The rumours were simple yet their consequences could radically change the chessboard, its rules, the game itself. Project Nagari was not about the construction of a mirror ETAK technology, it was rather about the observation of this phenomenon inside existing human and vasudan beings!

You mean… Lieutenant Malala’s eyes were wide open.

I mean exactly what I said!

The consequences of this new insight were very troubling and worrying. And given what we have been observing the past week we have spent here… if we can call it a “week” in here, we might be forced to upgrade its rumour condition to a very probable hypothesis. Take Sarah. Not only she arbitrarily appears out of nowhere, sometimes behaving as if within a dream, and other times, more lucidly, willingly admits she’s actually sleeping and having a dream with me on it. She has difficulties in even acknowledging my crew mates’ existence. Some others, mostly absolutely unaware and blind to our presence appear in this virtual world mumbling the most arbitrary concerns, quickly disappearing a little short after.

No matter how weird and strange these phenomena were, there seems to be some spatial logic to it. The spatial coordinates of this virtual world seem to be correlated with a sort of lucidity and consciousness of our particular condition, reasons why still ellude us completely. The farther away from our local clearing, the more random and crazy these phenomena are. In order to confirm this thesis, I sent captain Warszawski 10 miles to the east, following the river bank and to the top of a small cleared hill, and he reported back a sight that would only be relatable to quantum physicists: far away, people appeared and disappeared within mere seconds, sketching a random noise, ”christmas lights going on and off maddeningly” as he put it. They were blinking in and out of this consciousness network. Closely around us the events were much less strange.

That is, until it appeared right on top of us, without notice. A giant metallic hull darkening the whole sky and creating a windstorm that blew our hats off. It was as if someone had clicked an off switch to the Sun above us. Everyone was startled and confused, were the Shivans back? Were they finally coming to communicate with us directly at last after all this time? Or were they going to kill us, finish some kind of weird experiment?

What the hell??

It’s as large as a destroyer! Why did they bring this monstruosity right on top of us?, shouted one of my crew, I couldn’t even tell who was saying what, focused I was on keeping my equilibrium intact. But it was no shivan destroyer. Looking up I immediately recognized the belly of this ship as if it was my own, a fact that shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, I was the one who built it.

[General Battuta]

This is fantastic. Challenging and surreal. You're right that your writing isn't completely solid on a technical level, but you're also right that the best thing to do is just power through it. My read of what's going on (and I might be an idiot) is that we're seeing the experiences of the Iceni crew integrated into the Ken anima.

It's striking how chilling some of this imagery is, like a simple riverbank - it's so far from what we're used to in FreeSpace that it creates a kind of textual alienation just by being familiar.

[InsaneBaron]

Really enjoying this Luis, very creative speculation! Can't wait to see what comes next...

[Luis Dias]

The wind subsided to a small breeze, no longer concealing the noise of a shuttle, parked right near our group that until this point remained unnoticed by anyone. My eyes were fixed on the side door of the small craft and wondered what it would reveal once opened. Holograms and photos of Shivan specimen were not classified but this was a whole different thing, if we were about to actually see one just several feet of us. My heartrate was climbing to nerve-wrecking levels.

The doors didn’t open though. It lay bare silent, waiting.

Should we...? Jonah is equally weirded out. My eyes make a quick inclined movement towards Gihri, the weapons officer, her legs momentarily unwilling to obey my command. Her eyes show no fear, but a slight hesitation is less forgiving. She walks, slowly, towards the door, all of us fixed on her path.

She gets to the door and her hands reach the panel beside it. It seems to be concrete, real… or at least as real as we can call ourselves at the moment. Her head moves and so does the door. We don’t dare a word. She enters the ship and looks around, and by her body language, it does seem empty. She raises her left arm with her closed fist, one, two seconds, opens it and invites us to the ship. No Shivans there. We hurry up and we all enter the ship.

WHooooosh... skunk! The door closes behind us surprisingly.

What the bl….

No time for swearing. The engines kickstart furiously and the exhaustor pipes blast a heated plasma of ion particles to the ground. Everybody hang to something near them.

This is it, gentlemen... Did I say that smoothly enough? Or was I shouting? The red carpet is here… let’s do this with dignity!

The shuttle’s autopilot flies gracefully around the bottom of the ship towards its fighterbay. I go to the cockpit and sit on the pilot’s seat, looking at every detail. It’s all there. My senses and intuitions try to find any gap between this construct and reality as I recall it. I can even feel the artificial intelligence’s chosen path of flight and I recognise it instantly as our own. It feels home alright. And at last we were up from the ground again.

It’s good as new, sir.

Bradley was inside the pilot’s cabin looking to the broadside of the Iceni, the metal hull shining as if just got out of maintenance, unmarked by maxim or prometheus gunnery as the original should be. Well, at least if we hadn’t detonated it.

It’s not ours, remember where we are.

Why all this trouble, I thought. For all the possible constructs and protocols these beings could create in order to harbor us in, why pick something that we called our home for the past two years now? We are being well treated beyond belief.

We are being manipulated. I decide that paranoia is a better surviving mechanism.

The crew was watching through the door of the cabin to the pilot’s cockpit, while the fighterbay loomed larger.

The lights are on, it is powered up. said Bradley.

The autopilot didn’t create more surprises. It landed smoothly as it always did in the cold surface of the Iceni’s main fighterbay, but something happened. Not on the outside, but on my psyche. I felt a buzz, a tingling sensation and dizziness. In a flash I could almost hear the entire crew inside my head. I would have subscribed this feeling to some reactive emotion on my part, except that all of the crew was clearly experiencing the same pain. It subsided quickly, and the door opened up.

What the hell was that.

I walked outside the shuttle. The wind was stronger up here, and the floor was buzzing exactly as it should whenever the ship was hovering a gravity well like Earth and the force fields were properly disconnected whenever inside an atmosphere. We formed a line, Gihri up front, Jonah at the rear and directed ourselves towards the bridge.

It’s the obvious way, let’s go.

The ship was conveying everything perfectly. All the machinery sounds, the corridor lights, even the interior atmosphere had the right humidity and density I was so familiar with. It smelled home. Again, instead of being a source of ease it unnerved me. This ship was dead, and yet here we were, walking inside it, with no one else around us, not a forgotten bag in the ground, nothing that would expose any human life having ever resided here before. I tried to suss out this emotion. It was as if we were inside one of the oldest ships in the universe that just got out of its construction site. This both was the Iceni and it very much wasn’t.

The bridge was just ahead. I almost see and smell the blood splattered all around these corridors when we were forcefully, quickly carried away to the shivan transport. A sharp reminder of the excess, the arbitrary cruelty of any shivan act. But this is so different. Shivans have always been so barbaric, so simple. And now this affirmation of manipulative abilities beyond my imagination... this presented me with an entirely different species at hand. How much of this is even … how could I deal with this? Tinker...

What did you say sir?

I looked. Open the door, Malala.

Here we go…

She entered the password to the bridge’s room. The door opened and we could see the night sky behind the bridge’s windshields.

We are in space? But … I didn’t feel a thin…

Everyone stopped their eyes at the center of the bridge. There was someone there. A person. A human. He lifted from the chair and spoke:

Hello there, my dear crew. It’s high time we meet! We have a long journey ahead of us and a lot to talk about!

[QuakeIV]

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