Cath

The Cradle

As they turned back to look at their (hopefully) temporary prison, Freyr spotted Masgard Xandrus stepping out into the rain. He spotted them, caught her eye and stood still with hands tucked behind his back. Water dripped down his business suit and through his neatly trimmed hair and beard. “I, umm…I think our solicitor wants us.” Freyr pointed.

“Sorry to disturb, but someone is here to see you.” He intoned once they’d made their way back toward the entrance, Freyr’s rain cover soundlessly following them.

“Really? Whoever could it be?”

“Plenipotentiary Wallace, ma’am.” The name immediately rung a bell, but Freyr had to think hard for a moment to place where she’d heard it before.

“Oh! From Threria? We met her in that club. What does she want?”

“That’s right. She didn’t say. They’re in the landing bay now. What should I tell them?”

“Hold on, I thought nothing was allowed in or out of here?”

“Her kind do not adhere to the same rules as us mere mortals.” A wry smirk escaped across Masgard’s face.

---

Freyr had no idea what to expect as they hurried to greet Wallace, and soon realised there was no point trying to guess. When they entered the landing bay, her eyes started hurting. Wallace’s ship was large, pebble-shaped from what she could tell, and almost entirely unidentifiable. Some kind of coating or shielding obfuscated the craft, blending it into the surroundings and offending Freyr’s very eyes when she surveyed it. A low hum filled the room, setting her teeth on edge.

Plenipotentiary Wallace resurfaced in Freyr’s memory as soon as she saw her. Really, there was no way to forget the diplomat. She had grown even taller in some different shoes, and the fabulous purple gown she’d worn before was replaced by a bright white stola, encrusted with tiny, deep blue stones. Her long white hair was slicked down the back like she’d just been swimming, and a glittering constellation of metalwork sat delicately atop her head in the form of an elaborate headpiece.

Two aides flanked Wallace, men in smart black and white robes who stood with their hands at their sides. A small dark cloud obscured both their faces, generated presumably by the ship they’d arrived in. Six guards with ceremonial armour and weapons stood in two lines behind them. Skopec and an assortment of Institute soldiers stood around, looking unimpressed. Skopec began walking over when Freyr and Marae entered the landing bay with Xandrus. Wallace just smiled.

“My dears, so good to see you alive and well! I’m sorry to drop in so unexpectedly, but i was in the area and wondered if you wanted a ride? We have so much to catch up on.”

Halo: Aegis Team

"Jackal in the courtyard!"

Halo: Aegis Team

Tar tapped her bottom mandibles together in disgust at the sight and smell of this chamber. Though the entrance to the thin ledge was tight for her Sangheili frame and light was sparing, the stench from this pit threatened to overwhelm her senses. A pool of water below lapped against the rocks - with her eyes now adjusted to the low-light she could just about make out the bodies suspended in it. As she watched, a mesh of vines floated to top all along the pool’s surface, in between the bigger carcasses.

“Look. Grenades won’t reach the bulb.” Tar pointed as more vines began shaking all around them. She knew that if something fell on top of that mesh, it would sink under the water before trapping whatever it had caught. Countless animals would have drowned in pure panic down there.

A glimmer of light reflected off a shiny stone embedded in the exposed stomach of a beast in the pit. Tar looked up. An opening was just visible on the other side of the chamber, angled up towards the sky. “There is the path up the mountain!” Tar gestured to the chute, and began looking for a way across. For some reason, she remembered there being hand and foot holds across, but couldn’t see any beneath the melee of vines coating the walls.

“Move back!” Tar growled as someone from the team behind her pushed out of the throat and onto the platform to assess the situation. She dug her heels in and spread her arms wide, which unfortunately coincided with a vine surfacing from the groove it had been resting in. It took her weight, then abruptly reared up and pulled back towards the bulb.

Tar lost her footing and slipped over the side of the platform. She turned as she fell, and her hip clattered onto the ledge. Making a split-second decision, Tar dropped the blade in her hand and used both to grasp at the rocks as she fell. For a heart stopping moment, it didn’t feel like she had anything. One hand passed by the edge of the precipice, but her left arm juddered in its socket as she held firm on a point of rock on the very edge. She could hear her sword snicker against an outcrop below her, then plop into the water with a loud fizz, cutting through a clutch of cilia.

All hell broke loose in the chamber. Every vine which wasn’t yet moving burst into action, either actively seeking out the intruders or trying to deny any purchase on the rocks. The smell intensified, and the sound was that of guts slopping around in a bucket.

The Cradle

Freyr listened closely as Marae recounted her experiences. She couldn’t help but feel a little jealous of the life her counterpart had led. To usher in the dawn of a new era for their whole civilization seemed like a truly humbling experience. Freyr wondered whether she even wanted to pull forth the same sort of realisation from the Cradle. For over a decade, she had relentlessly pursued its secrets, looking for the answer to self-regenerative AI, limitless computing power, full consciousness mapping via simulation. But now, for the first time, Freyr was growing afraid of what their research might find.

Marae’s question brought her back to the present. Freyr lifted her eyes from the paved floor beneath them and looked at the Rothian.”Yeah, uh…hmm, maybe now isn’t the best time.” She smiled sheepishly. “What did you have in mind?”

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?”