The Next Thing I Knew (Heavenly) (20 page)

I panicked.

I'd learned the triggers that were supposed to keep Diana's conscious mind asleep but stupidly I hadn't used them.  I had to know them.  I couldn't allow her to regain consciousness while I controlled her body.  That would be very bad.

Zhrrii and I had practiced consciousness triggers.  She told me it was like going to sleep and waking up without a clue it had happened.  Since I knew what triggers to activate, it shouldn't be hard to keep her consciousness asleep but my mind drew a blank.  She was still groggy, just on the fringe of knowing she wasn't dreaming.  I focused and threw up the walls in those places that should put her back to sleep.  She resisted.  I found a point I'd missed and blocked it too.  She winked back out again.

I warbled a sigh of relief.  Close call.  If she'd realized someone else was in charge of her body, it would not have been good.  Then I realized why she'd woken up.  I'd been so absorbed with her inner workings that I'd not realized the basic call of nature pressed hard on her bladder.  Stupid me.

I stepped into the bathroom and activated the mirror display to look at my new body. 

Damn, I'm smokin' hot.

Then I figured out how to make the solid holographic version of a Shaval toilet and relieved myself.  I had to stand in a certain spot to activate it.  A little seat formed under me, took in the waste, and vanished.  I wondered what it did with it.  Maybe vaporized it into the air.  The thought of breathing in my own pee grossed me out.

I toyed around with the holographic technology in her room, familiarizing myself with it and how her implant interfaced with my thoughts to supply tidbits of info I needed.  The implant stored tons of data, but not experience.  I could think about engineering and things that Diana didn't know how to do.  The data was there, but it was like reading an instruction manual at light speed.

Most of their technology was holographic.  Their holos could be solid like the bed or ethereal as a ghost.  Pretty nifty stuff.  That was how their clothes worked too.  I mentally upped the number of shoes I could own by a power of infinity.  Whatever you could imagine could be made.  I wondered how Shaval clothes designers made a living.  The answer sprang to mind from my implant.  Like I said, nifty stuff.

  After breathing a sigh of relief, I got back to work, this time studying Diana's relationship to the other Shaval in her committee. 

The Shaval did everything by committee.  The
Shaval Committee on Central Control
was the rough equivalent of a parliament or congress, except it was about half the size of what we'd had in the United States.  Every city and organizational unit had a CCC named after itself.  The SCCC was the central committee that all the universal bills went through for vetting.  They could return the bill for revisions if it had problems.  If it met a basic standard, it was published to the Shaval equivalent of the Internet which was available through their implants.  Each voter had one month to consider the bill and to vote on it in that time.

I wondered how they kept crazy people from submitting crap to the SCCC all the time.  It seemed like committee members would spend every minute going through a slush pile of crap a mile deep.  The implant, of course sent me the answer.  If an individual submitted two bills in a row that failed either by vote or by basic computer analysis vetting, they'd lose submission rights for a year.  Their version of a computer vetted every submission before the committee received it by using some complex algorithm I didn't want to know about.

After my brush with Shaval Politics 101, I knew we were in even more trouble than I'd thought.  I had hoped to find out who the central authority was for making stuff happen and controlling them.  A president, dictator, or some kind of royalty would have been easier to deal with.  Our team could take control of key people and change the policy toward Earth.  Make it off limits.  But since everyone got a vote and there was no one single authority everyone bowed to, there was no weak link to fix.

I thought about controlling the central committee and sending out a bill that would put Earth off limits.  Several hundred Shaval had done that very thing over the centuries.  Some bills tried to ban interference with alien life, some banned exploiting Earth by name (in the Shaval language of course) and others tried various legal maneuvers to ban the practice of classifying creatures as non-sentient.  All failed by billions of votes.  After a time, the computer automatically rejected bills with language even remotely similar and would continue to do so until a successful paradigm shift vote was taken on the matter.  It made my head spin.  I'd thought human politics were confusing.

So the matter was crystal clear if that crystal were bathing in a mud pit.  I gritted Diana's perfect teeth and dug back into the seemingly endless amount of information on Shaval politics.  Over ten thousand Earth years ago they'd had a monarchy which had been amicably dissolved and evolved into the democracy they had today.  On the one hand they seemed so very enlightened and on the other three hands crazy Medieval.  I looked through the data on Earth compiled by hundreds of committees over hundreds of years. 

The
Committee on Shaval Extraterrestrial Defensive Initiatives
had recommended immediate eradication of humans due to our rapid advances and warlike nature.  The
Committee on Intergalactic Nature Preservation
asked for Earth to be kept pristine, sans humans, of course.  The
Committee on Extraterrestrial Sentience
declared humans intelligent but non-sentient which gave the green light to the
Committee on Selective Eradication
to tell the
Committee on Eradication Implementation
to come up with a suitable method for ridding the universe of humans.  Then a
Committee on Earth Matters
was formed after the fifty plus other committees which dealt with extraterrestrial affairs reached consensus on the size and scope of that committee.

Considering that humans had bred out the first attempt at DNA poisoning, they'd likened humans to the Shaval equivalent of a cockroach.

It was ridiculous.  Especially after finding an audio file and hearing Earth pronounced as
warble, warble, chirp, trill, warble, trill
.  In their symbolic language, Sym, Earth's name literally translated into numeric coordinates based on the Shaval Known Universe or SKU.  Oh, and they used acronyms for everything.  If I'd thought acronyms in English were irritating, it was even more so translating them from Shaval spoken and Sym languages.  In other words, finding a solution meant digging through the digital equivalent of reams of information and then reams of definitions for acronyms.  I trilled in exasperation.  Coming from Diana's throat it sounded cute instead of angry.  I tried to growl, but sounded like an irritated sparrow.  My research seemed pointless.

Then I found the weakness.

I laughed and clapped all four hands in glee at the discovery.  It was so simple and right in front of my eyes the entire time.  Well, most of the time.  The SKU (Shaval Known Universe) was kept in the CD (Central Database) on Zalista.  Multiple copies propagated to thousands of different locations like planets and bases, but the CD was considered the authority.  Once a change was made, it would trickle out to the other cloned databases located on Shaval controlled territories.  If we simply erased data about Earth from the SKU in the CD then the SCCC and every other acronym the Shaval could throw at us wouldn't matter.  We could make pretend Earth never existed and the Shaval in all their terrible awesomeness might never find us again.

The kicker, of course, was finding the right people who could change the SKU.  That meant a field trip to Zalista landed on the agenda.  I dug around in the implant for information about the SKU.  The advantage of the Shaval democracy was that nothing was top secret or hidden.  Freedom of information was top priority amongst citizens and since no committee held broad or absolute power, it was nearly impossible to keep anything a secret.  On the other hand, things could take forever to progress.  If the Shaval weren't such monsters I would marvel at their wonderfully open form of government.  It didn't translate.  How could such a seemingly perfect society have no regard for any other intelligent life?

They didn't even have religion bogging them down.  No superstitions frightened them into taking up torches and pitchforks against monsters.  They were logical but still colored by emotion.  They were more kind to dumb animals than to intelligent species.  Or maybe they had contempt for species with potential that hadn't risen to their level.  Maybe they simply wanted to win.  It made me feel ill, like finding out the perfect couple next door are brutal assassins and hate dogs.

I eventually found the names of those Shaval who controlled the
Committee on Central Database Updates
.  Another committee controlled the information for the SKU, but after studying the duties of that committee, I knew the update committee was the right one.  All 13 members had to agree on changes and updates.  Each would provide an individual random encryption key that was used by the database administrator to update specific items.  The administrator himself had no access to the data without those encryptions keys.  Every major section of the database had a controlling committee that would submit their own token symbols to the database update committee.

I studied the flow of data until my brain ached.  Unless I was terribly mistaken, which was a frequent enough occurrence, we needed to control the database update committee and one of the database administrators.  We would issue a maintenance command and use that to remove information about Earth.  We weren't without hackers in our midst.  A couple in Alpha were really good.  But this was alien technology.  We'd have better luck assimilating a Shaval hacker if such a being existed.  With the total freedom of access to information they enjoyed, there might not be Shaval malcontents lurking behind holographic keyboards, drinking Shaval soft drinks, and munching on Cheezy Poofs.

The hologram console lit up, bathing Diana's room with reddish light.  The symbol for "emergency" flashed.  I answered without thinking.  Azriel shrieked something about insanity and disconnected.  I used Diana's magical clothes wand and materialized a simple green gown to preserve her modesty.  I opened the portal to the hallway and rushed down it.  Other Shaval emerged from their room, eyes bleary and confused.  Azriel shouted again, motioning us outside.  I followed.

Missy's host, Cassiel, was struggling with Chris's chubby host, Gabriel. Cassiel was yelling that he knew what was causing the dreams, and pointing in the direction of the Rrilk cube.  He had something in his hand that looked like a black pen, similar to the silver one I'd used to make clothes for Diana.  Gabriel was trying to grab it from him.  My implant spat out an answer to my subconscious query.  The black pen was a weapon.  A remarkably deadly one.  Diana's knowledge of Cassiel was limited, but she knew he was not irrational.  None of them would touch a weapon unless the guardian, i.e. Azriel, told them it was necessary.

My heart thumped.  I focused with my ghost eyes, looked around, and saw Anil and other alpha team members standing there.  Chris wasn't present.  Anil gazed at me.

"You in there Lucy?"

I nodded.  It might look crazy to the other Shaval if I spoke to thin air.

"Chris is in Gabriel.  Something went wrong.  Missy lost consciousness during the merge and when she came to, Cassiel was running for a weapon, saying he knew why he was having strange dreams."

I couldn't speak to Anil, not there.  He could understand me if I spoke in Shaval, but the other Shaval were too close now.  I saw a lone figure watching from behind Anil and the others.  It was Harb.  He looked amused.  I wanted to scream at him, tell him to get off his ass and do something.  But I couldn't leave Diana without her waking up and wondering just what the hell she was doing outside with her hair looking such a mess.

Cassiel broke free of Gabriel's grip and stomped toward the Rrilk cube.  The other Shaval followed, too confused to know which course of action to take.  I wished I had a weapon.  My implant told me where to get one in the ship.  I raced back inside and pulled a black pen device from a rack.  It really was no larger than a ballpoint pen to Diana's large hands.  To human hands it might be the size of a drumstick--the musical kind, not the tasty chicken part.  I caught up with the others as they entered the cube's cryo-chamber.

What was he doing?

He activated a retrieval unit.  The robotic arm grabbed a container and placed it on the floor.  I realized with a shock what it was.  It was the container with our bodies in it.

"The beings here are not completely dead," Cassiel said.  "The dreams we have, they are caused by the quantum energy imprints of these beings.  They are trying to take over our bodies."

My mouth dropped.  I looked at Anil.  "How do you know this?" I asked.

"One of them confided in me and told me their plan.  She said she didn't agree with it and told me everything of their plot.  At first I thought insanity or sickness was infecting me, but she convinced me otherwise."

"This is not logical," I said.  "What is in the container?"

"Their bodies."

"I recommend he be evaluated," I said.  "These beings are dead.  Are you suggesting they exist in some afterlife?  Preposterous."  I tried to used Diana's somewhat haughty tone to my advantage.  The others seemed to be leaning my way.