HAWK

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: AWAKENING (4/5)

'Selva... yes. A terrible tragedy. What if I told you Selva's destruction was not accidental, but a deliberate attack intended to cripple our solar system.'

'Oh yeah? An attack by who?'

Rhaspa looked directly at Kas as he replied. 'The Federation.'

The upper half of the silver box suddenly lifted and began sliding across, revealing a pool of white smoke within. Kas glanced at Sudds and saw him eagerly caressing the trigger of his rifle.

Once the box had finished opening, Kas struggled to see anything through the smoke. Worm lifted herself onto her tiptoes to try and get a better view. When the smoke started to clear, Kas's breath caught in her throat.

The alien was seven-feet long from head-to-toe and very slender. Its perfect golden skin glistened in the light and cast a warm glow on the faces of its observers.

'Ever seen a Kikoan alien before?' Mack asked.

Kas shook her head. While she'd never seen one in person, it seemed like only a few days since she'd spoken to one in the mirror of her SD pod in Artis.

'Few have,' Rhaspa said. 'They don't like to leave their home system and they like visitors even less. The few they have let in haven't been allowed to visit any of their worlds. Isn't that curious? It would be like me inviting you into my home, only to make you stand in the hall. It makes you wonder, what do we really know about them? They come to our home and observe us, analyse us... but we have no idea if they really are who they say they are.'

'Who else would they be?' Kas asked.

Rhaspa smiled. 'Now that's the question that landed me here. We've had this alien for over twenty years. It hasn't rotted, it hasn't decomposed, it hasn't changed in any way. How do you suppose that's possible?'

Kas shrugged. 'Why don't you just cut it open and find out?'

'Why, what an excellent idea. Captain?'

Kas turned to Captain Mack who was now wearing surgical gloves and wielding a scalpel. He leaned over the alien and touched the tip of the blade to its chest and drew a long line down the centre of the body to its navel, splitting its perfect golden skin open with ease. He then cut another two lines from the chest to each of the shoulders, creating a large Y-shaped incision. Kas watched transfixed as he peeled back the three leaves of skin covering its torso. Where she would have expected to see some form of muscle or bone, there was instead a second skin of what looked like silver nanomesh. Without pausing to inspect it, Mack touched his scalpel to the alien's chest again and carefully cut another Y in the silver material. He pocketed the knife and dug his gloved fingers into the alien's exposed chest. The silver material folded back like cloth, exposing the alien's innards. Kas stepped closer and swore.

The alien had no organs or organic tissue - no blood, no guts. Instead, there was a shiny black body within that looked like it was made of glass. Mack pressed the scalpel into it and the glass reacted like water. He traced it back and forth like he was trying to stir it before withdrawing the blade, leaving no trace of a cut behind.

'What am I looking at?' Kas asked.

'Pretty strange, huh?' Mack replied.

'Why do I get the impression this isn't the first time you've cut it open?'

'Because it's not. We've cut it open plenty of times, but check this out.' Mack folded the silver material back into its former position. Kas was startled to see it stitching itself back together.

'Is it alive?'

'We prefer to think of it as hibernating. It feeds off light. All light. This box is designed to keep it in a dark vacuum. We can take it out for twenty minutes or so, but much longer than that and you'd see its limbs start to twitch. We only let that happen once.'

'What happened then?'

'We shot it with one of these guns. They're EMP rifles.'

'EMP... electromagnetic pulse?'

'Exactly. This thing converts light into energy like nothing you've ever seen.'

'Amazing. I've never seen an organism like it.'

'It's no organism,' Rhaspa said. 'That black substance is the exact same substance found inside X1 computers.'

The room went extremely quiet while Kas took that in, though Worm let out a little gasp, apparently understanding the significance before Kas did.

'What does that mean?' Kas asked.

'It means it's not real,' Mack replied. 'It means this thing isn't biological. It's a computer, just like an X1, except this X1 is pretending to be something else.'

'But why? Why would the Federation create an X1 copy of themselves?'

'They haven't,' Rhaspa said. 'The Federation doesn't have any other physical form. This is it.'

'What the hell are you talking about?'

'I'm talking about AI. The Federation is an AI.'