Cath

The Cradle

Freyr studied Marae as she spoke in a faint residual light. She felt sorry for the Rothian when she detected a hint of kindred sadness in that alien frame. Her read of their general body language was improving, she subconsciously noted.

“Our species are quite alike once you peel back the layers. We both crave sublimity - but no one ever stops to consider what we lose along the way.” Freyr sighed, taking another drag and looking back over Réunion.

It was late in the evening, but most of the city below them was still bathed in bright neon light. These blues and pinks rippled out across the dark stillness of the vast lake to mingle with bright pricks from yachts on the water. Though not as bright, Freyr thought she could see cars whizzing around below, by the temporary dip in glare from the structures behind them. Like some planet passing in front of a distant star.

When Marae began talking about AI, Freyr couldn’t help but take interest. The person standing next to her was the foremost authority in pure machine learning, after all. She chuckled at the joke. “No, but I can think of many times that would have come in handy.” A pang of sadness plucked at Freyr’s soul when she realised she was using past tense. Her thoughts again drifted back to the Cradle, as they had thousands of times before.

“Do you think it's unusual… how the Cradle behaves? It is millions of years old, potentially - and yet it is displaying signs I would normally associate with a nascent intelligence. Something that is still learning about its environment. As far as i can tell, it is properly powered. It is almost certainly more powerful than it lets on. The Navigator alluded to them being wounded, but a core principle of reactive synthetic architecture is that it can reconstitute. Why isn’t it using whatever initial blueprint it adhered to?” Freyr looked at Marae again, blowing out more vapour.

The Cradle

Freyr half looked round when Marae spoke, soothe stick inches from her mouth. “Oh, uhh…sure.” She took a puff, and blew a cloud of vapour over the image she now held in both hands. “Yep…That’s David my husband, and Amy my daughter. I think we’d just spent the day watching the Deng-tsai circuit back in Babylon.”

Freyr raised the two fingers clutching her soothe stick and waved them round in a circle. “Race cars, shooting around skyscrapers in the city centre. Amy loved it, wouldn’t stop talking about it. I think David secretly hated it, but enjoyed seeing us happy all the same.” She fell silent, bit her lip.

“Do you have any children, Marae?” An Institute operator padded past them on patrol, holographic sight scanning the sky above.

Halo: Aegis Team

“This plant isn’t going anywhere - they nest for life.” Tar responded to the new Infiltrator while Vael shuffled past her towards the front. She looked back towards the cave entrance, trying to remember what the interior layout was like. Nothing came to mind though, except the striking view of outside. Tar cursed herself for not paying more attention.

Then, Tar noticed their team’s Unggoy Ultra crouching down facing the wall. Lights from his suit illuminated a cluster of pinkness. “Grik, get away from the flowers!” She growled, taking a step back toward him. She stopped though, when a salvo of soft pops and poofs sounded up and down the tunnel.

Pfff
Tssssss

Pfff
Tsssss

This was accompanied by an almost indistinguishable rustling from further into the darkness. Tar breathed in, and almost immediately detected a much stronger sweet smell in the air. She thought it seemed quite delicious, like some delicacy from her childhood.

The rustling died down, replaced by a soft rumble that shook the cave very slightly. A pungent wave of treacly air wafted past them and out of the cave. As if to say ‘there is more inside!’.

Tar looked around her, and noticed that the pink flowers which dotted the vines were oozing an amber nectar, intensifying the saccharine odor. “It wants to eat us now. Good work, Grikgar.” She muttered, turning back to Vael. “I can’t say this is a good idea. Maybe even the opposite.”

Remembering what she’d been told about this ancient predator, Tar looked back at the entrance again. The Tengmaa wouldn’t seal it off, unless it sensed that their group was making a concerted effort to leave. Prey that didn’t feel trapped until it was too late was more likely to investigate further into the cave, which reduced the subsequent effort on the plant’s part.

“We could still leave, if we went slowly, one at a time, perhaps.” Tar cautioned.

The Cradle

Freyr sighed. It felt like they were getting ahead of themselves again. “Gentlemen, I don’t believe this is the forum to discuss how we’re going to do things, but rather to establish what we’re going to do.” She looked at the clock - somehow they had been talking for hours already. Freyr hadn’t gotten exactly what she wanted out of the engagement, and suspected part of the reason for that would be all the recent terror and upheaval. People still hadn’t had enough time to synthesise all the information.

“Let's leave it there for today…I think we can all agree that we’ve been through a traumatic experience. So I want people to be kind to each other, and take time out to consider what’s happened objectively.” Freyr slurped her coffee, and met the eyes of some people. You could hear a pin drop in the room.

“We may be standing on the precipice of something beyond even our wildest imaginings. So I also want you all to consider what is best for the people we serve. This is not just about scientific discovery anymore; however vast that opportunity is. Billions of lives are potentially at risk, trillions even. Untold thousands are already gone, totally invested in a saga which I fear will paint the galactic canvas for millenia. Now go, relax. We’ll regroup tomorrow.”

---

The days immediately following the meeting seemed to blur together. There was no big debriefing from the government, and indeed very little contact from the outside world. The teams worked hard to make sense of the mountain of data pulled out of the Cradle, with little else to occupy them. Their safehouse encompassed the top twelve floors of a tower on the east edge of an enormous arcology, but the Outreman scientists were forbidden from exploring the rest of it, or the city below.

With little else to occupy them, the teams worked hard to make sense of the mountain of data pulled out of the Cradle. In between sessions, Freyr paced the corridors while reading the news. She investigated every aspect of the leisure level sampling the bounty of delicacies on offer. But after less than a week, she had seen everything there was to see inside. And then she discovered OCI controlled the garden ringing this cupola they inhabited. Skopec was adamant that no one could go down there, to begin with. But after a full-on shouting match, he relented, and they got their garden.

Réunion was hot and humid, even at night, which made a nice change from the dry cool inside. A light breeze ruffled the carefully manicured shrubs and trees lining the walkway around the edge of their building. Warm rain pattered down on the concrete pathways.

Freyr stood by the parapet, looking down at the glittering lights of the city cascading towards the sea. She sucked vapour from a soothe stick and blew it out in a tight plume above her head. She took in the flat hoverbot whirred above her head, protecting her from the rain.

Eventually,Freyr reached into one pocket and retrieved a hard copy of David & Amy’s picture. She studied it hard in the half-dark, trying to memorise every detail of their faces. She had a great memory for data, but struggled with faces. And it was becoming harder to recall them without help, and she hated that.

The Cradle

They both made a lot of sense, Freyr thought, as she studied them over the rim of her cup. They hadn’t been involved with the Cradle their whole lives, and so brought a fresh perspective that the Human team evidently were lacking at present. “Hmm, yes. That does make a worrying amount of sense, chaps.” Dr Wetherall took his AR glasses off and began cleaning them on his lab coat.

“That also makes this investigation a lot more complicated.” Dr Kim cut back in. “One doesn’t simply go to Earth and start asking questions. You know how they get - we’d be locked up in some gulag before you can say ‘don’t mention the war!’. Game over for us.”

“We might have more luck with other species first. I seem to remember a widespread on this star map the Navigator showed me…” Freyr closed her eyes and pinched her cheeks together, trying to recall what she’d seen; it was still so hazy. “It was tracking its colleagues before it crashed into Rothia, but there were pieces missing…anyway, my point is the vector could include all the civilisations in our cluster, and more."

The Cradle

The rest of the conference hall hung on Vreta’s words, including Freyr, who blew softly on her second coffee of the day. When he mentioned the Institute, she glanced through the steam at the black-clad observers standing to one side of the room. She thought they were regarding the Rothian with a silent intensity, hands folded behind their backs.

There was more stunned silence when Vreta had finished, so Freyr bit her lip and jumped in. “Did the Navigator have any more information about where we can find its other colleagues? They may hold more information about the Hegemon, unless they’re in even worse condition.”

“Well hold on, my dear. Isn’t Vreta’Sori suggesting one of them is on Earth? Are you?” Dr Wetherall peered over his AR specs at Vreta. “What you say implies that Humans have somehow come to live in proximity of two alien beings from another galaxy. The odds of that seem rather far fetched, don’t you think?”

Song Reference time

It's just past 8 and I'm feeling young and reckless
The ribbon on my wrist says, "do not open before Christmas"

The Cradle

“We were trying to communicate with the object all through the recoupling. It didn’t respond…” Another researcher replied, ignoring the Rothian’s evacuation assurances. As per usual, Freyr’s eyes were darting all around the room, as they were all sat apart. A fair few sets of eyes landed back on her and Vreta, and she realised they were still waiting for a proper account of what happened inside the Cradle.

“The Navigator, as it's called, did seem more focused on internal struggles when we met it.” Freyr gestured to Vreta. “We know that the Cradle does absorb signals we point at it via the Vault, so it may just be a case of patiently waiting… Vreta’Sori, do you want to go through again what you discussed in your meeting with the entity? There may be something hidden that the wider group will pick up on.”

The Cradle

“Babylon should be evacuated.” A researcher from the sub-team tasked with learning about external influences from the object. He swivelled in his chair to address Nirann directly. “The Cradle has a historic integration with the stratum of the biosphere. We still don’t know enough about why this relationship exists - it's too dangerous to have millions of people inside.”

“That is our formal recommendation to the government. It's up to them how to proceed, as it's obviously not in our remit.” Freyr offered, then also turned to Nirann. “Locking down the Vault seems like a good move. But, that is an inflexible solution. How long would it take to reinstate automatic control if we removed it?” Freyr threw the question out to the room, and Dr Wetherall replied.

“Erm, a while? Everything is connected, so it wouldn’t be a case of flicking some switch.”

“So a problem arises if we find one of the Navigator’s colleagues and need to save them as well. Not an insurmountable problem, but one to put in the report.” Freyr kissed her teeth, weighing everything up in her head, arms crossed and brow furrowed.

Vreta’s remark silenced the room. Eventually it was Dr Kim who responded, standing up to one side of the room. “We brought it here foremost to save its life. We’re ensuring its own safety as well as ours by taking protective measures.

Halo: Aegis Team

Tar growled and turned around when she heard Vael cut through the vines. The rest of the team were framed in the dark by the cave opening behind them. Sheets of rain gyrated in the air, buffeted by howling wind. The noise from outside was deafening, but Tar still heard a gentle *puff* from nearby. “The spores released if you cut are toxic, and might grow one of these inside of you.”

As her eyes adjusted to the gloom and the fog cleared for a moment, Tar realised this cave was familiar to her. The vines and overgrowth was new, but the way the treeline of the basin below failed to hide a mountain range far in the distance - jagged basalt peaks with sloping plateaus. That was ingrained in her memory. "I have been here before, as a child!" Tar failed to completely suppress her excitement, despite the danger they were now in.

"I think this cave winds up the mountain, to a high ridge. If we want to make progress without the spectre, we could take that route. It will probably mean killing the Tengmaa bulb though - not a task I take lightly. We'll need explosives and fire." Tar noticed a bit more movement in the boughs, and imagined just how much chaos they could cause if this plant realised it was under attack. The end of a thin vine tickled along the top of her foot, and she carefully but firmly lifted her leg to step on it.