Kas and Rhaspa soon arrived at the glass doors and exited into the tunnel where Mack was waiting for them.
'That was quick,' he said.
'No point in delaying things,' Rhaspa replied. 'Is everything prepared?'
'They're just waiting for us.'
'Then lead the way.'
Mack took Rhaspa's free arm and guided him along the corridor, nodding at Kas to follow. She trailed behind them as they headed back to the junk room.
Worm was still working tirelessly, her face still obscured by the welding mask as she made adjustments to the robot's left elbow, sending out a loud shower of sparks. Mack had to shout at her to be heard.
'Hey, kid!'
Worm turned her head to Mack and stopped welding. She lifted the mask and screwed up her face inquisitively.
'Come with us,' Mack said. 'You need to see this too.'
Worm signed something that could only have been frustration.
'You can go back to work soon, this won't take long. Come on.'
Worm huffed as she pulled off her mask. She dropped it next to the robot's feet and stomped over to join the group.
The gang of four progressed quickly back up the spiral ramp and through the tunnels. They soon arrived outside a round security door with two blue wallpads on either side of it. Mack and Rhaspa stood in front of a pad each and pressed their palms against them. The pads turned green and the security door split open.
The square room was bright and immaculate. There were no bare rock walls like the rest of the base but slick lambentile panels. Sudds, Pari and Beak were already inside waiting for them, all gathered around a large silver metallic box. It was eight-feet long, four wide and four deep, like an industrial refrigerator that had fallen on its back. The security door closed as the four new arrivals stepped inside.
'Is everybody here?' Rhaspa asked.
'We're all here,' Sudds replied. 'Though I still think this is a mistake. We can't trust her.'
'I've made my decision. She already knows too much as it is. This is the only way of convincing her.'
'Get the guns,' Mack ordered. Sudds, Pari and Beak went to the far end of the room where a table was set up with three identical rifles. They each picked one up.
'What's going on here?' Kas asked as she stepped in front of Worm.
'Don't worry, they're not for you,' Mack said.
Kas watched as the three soldiers powered the weapons up, igniting strips of blue light along their edges. She didn't recognise the models but they looked like they meant business. The soldiers spread out across the room and aimed their rifles at the large silver box.
'Ready,' Sudds said.
Mack approached the box and touched a finger to the lid. Kas saw a small keyboard display light up. He started typing in commands.
'Tell me, Kas...' Rhaspa said, 'what is your opinion of the Federation?'
'The Federation? What do you mean?'
'Do you trust them?'
'I don't know. Yes, mostly. I might not agree with everything they do, but the truth is we need them.'
'Do we? Humanity has managed perfectly well for thousands of years without them.'
'We're not living in the stone age anymore, man. Interstellar travel is here to stay. Without the Federation, space would be chaos. Just look at what's happened since Selva was destroyed.'
'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.'