The Awakening of Insects Read online

  “Good. Mark the next collector, please. I still have a mission to complete.”

  * * *

  T-5:43. Jingru had retrieved the collectors and now stood over her workbench, making minor repairs to one of them. She hadn’t encountered any more flashes while exploring; several times her HUD had alerted her to the presence of a flash several hundred metres out, but she hadn’t engaged. Central had confirmed the all-environmental research vehicle would be here in under an hour, and it’d be unsafe to investigate further without one. The vehicle, designed to weather hard vacuum, storms and lightning strikes and walk unharmed through wildfires and over volcanic terrain, had supercooled cermet armour and a Faraday mesh. Jingru was reasonably sure these features would prevent the flashes from inflicting any damage or worse, infiltrating it. The folks at Central called it a Tardigrade, owing to its incredible resilience and the multiple, stubby spike-toed legs it could extend to climb nearly-vertical surfaces that its tracks could not. It could be remote-piloted in most environments, but Earth-IX’s storms produced sufficient electromagnetic interference to make this impossible. Jingru would have to pilot it herself.

  Captain Nurul Isa, the ranking scientific officer at Central, had called to request a pre-authorisation briefing. She’d sent her the footage of her engagement with the flash, and her theory about the flashes. Her hypothesis was that the combination of the electrical activity of the storms and several of the novel compounds in the soil, which had been found in supernormal amounts in the bodies of the insects she’d sampled, had briefly created a new phenomenon heretofore unknown to human science. It didn’t entirely explain how the flash she’d encountered had seemed to know where she was, but it was certainly worth further study, she’d thought. The Captain agreed, authorized the mission and the Tardigrade, and sent a separate message to Dr Menon asking him to ride along. Dr Menon’s shuttle would be there in less than fifteen minutes.

  Jingru sighed. She shut the casing of the collector she’d been working on, sealing it shut from the elements, and placed it on a shelf. She spoke into her jawpiece. “Aimee, ping Maia.”

  “Yes, Dr Lee. One moment.”

  Her jawpiece clicked, and almost a minute passed before Maia picked up. She sounded sleepy; Jingru remembered what time it was over at Luna, and giggled. “Beb, sorry for waking you up, but it’s important.”

  Maia yawned, then said, “Nah, it’s fine. What’s up, sweetie?”

  “Remember that theory you had about the compounds? The ones the strategic resource teams found in the soil? I’m about to prove it right. We’ve got clearance from Central; there’s a Tardigrade inbound, and Dr Menon’s coming with me.”

  Maia sighed.

  “I hear a ‘but’, Jingru.”

  “…but it’s going to be dangerous. I can’t guarantee I’ll come back in one piece.”

  She paused. “I don’t know if I should go. On one hand, I’ve got a mission to complete. On the other hand, I have you, and as much as all of us have protocols in place for this exact situation I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to lose us. I can still kill the mission if I submit a risk assessment right now.”

  The line was heavy with several seconds of Maia’s breathing, before she responded.

  “Look, we’re pioneers. Scientists who’ve left the comforts of Sol to go out, on behalf of humanity, and lead the way. Sometimes it’s dangerous, sometimes it’s tough, but hey. It’s in the job description. It’s a damn sight more exciting than this bloody conference, at any rate.”

  Maia chuckled, but Jingru thought she could hear her voice catch slightly. “So get out there, sweetie, and try not to die. I love you.”

  “Love you too, beb. I’ll take care.”

  Jingru held the line for a while, then put it down.

  She could hear the shuttle landing in her front yard. She stepped out of the shed; Dr Menon was clambering out of the sleek, matte-grey shuttle, already in his full suit of field armour. He crossed the yard quickly, and she extended her hand to shake his; he instead reached out for a fist-bump, which she switched into awkwardly.

  “I got your message, and I got the Captain’s message too. No worries, mate, I’m just as excited to be here as you are.”

  “Dr Menon, please. We’re about to engage with a large number of entities that could potentially kill us. What do you have on them that I don’t yet?”

  “Glad you asked. Ariel, send the spacing analysis to Dr Lee.”

  Aimee automatically downloaded the file from Dr Menon’s assistant-intelligence, and displayed it on Jingru’s HUD. The file was a two-dimensional, world-map style visualisation of where the flashes had been appearing over the past few weeks, with glowing orange lines connecting them. Jingru noticed the flashes had appeared in clusters that looked rather neat. Within these clusters, there was an almost-natural pattern, something that seemed just to fit.

  “Aimee, superimpose the storm patterns over this period onto the visualisation. Show me where the storms originated and the path they took, as well as the projected location of the highest number of temperature spikes using the correlation model developed previously.”

  “Yes, Dr Lee. Working … done.”

  A series of blue arrows, with a bulbous tail to indicate their origin, appeared on the visualisation, with red spots indicating where the epicentres of flash activity would be resolving briefly afterwards. Jingru gasped; there was a near-exact match, with some slight variance, between the predicted and actual epicentres. Again, the location and end-points of the storm seemed to Jingru to fit. It was uncanny. She shared the file with Dr Menon.

  “…well. That’s interesting. Why do they look so neat?”

  “I don’t know, Dr Menon, but I think it’s about time we found out. The Tardigrade I’ve requested will be equipped with an array of sensors that should, in aggregate, give us the ability to model every single process that goes on in that mess we’re about to walk into on Central’s systems. We’ll be cut off from our assistant-intelligences and all support from Central, but we’ll just have to survive until we’re out of the interference zone. Fifteen minutes, in and out.”

  “Fair play.”

  He sighed.

  “I’ve already instructed Ariel to settle my affairs in case we don’t make it. I trust you’ve done the same?”

  Jingru nodded. The Vega Protocol was still on standby. Aimee had been backed up to Central, informed that she’d be going into an interference zone, and ordered to trigger the Protocol either after 24 hours had passed or if her suit confirmed her death.

  “Right. By the way, Dr Lee, do you have any tea?”

  “It’s in the kitchen, by the bread. Please, help yourself; Maia’s bringing more back from Luna.”

  * * *

  Jingru leaned back in the pilot’s harness and felt the automated docking system engage. She shuddered as the blue liquid filled her helmet. Fighting her body’s natural instincts, she breathed in.

  Instantly, while still herself, Jingru was also the Tardigrade.

  She hadn’t done this for a while, and her body took a minute to acclimatise to the sudden change in perspective. She could see in all directions, hear every sound for kilometres around and taste the wind, temperature and a hundred other environmental metrics, but she could also feel her chest rise and fall with her breath, and her lips move as she confirmed, “Dr Menon, sync is good.”

  “Sync’s fine on my end too, Dr Lee. Ready when you are.”

  T-4:58. Jingru shifted the Tardigrade into track mode and rolled towards the location of what they’d decided to call the “flashpoint”. The Tardigrade picked up speed and raced along at over a hundred kilometres per hour; while Jingru piloted it, Dr Menon was her backup, controlling and monitoring the sensors in greater detail. The location of the flashpoint had been backed up on the Tardigrade’s internal computer systems, which not only provided mapping support but also hosted the primary copies of Aimee and Ariel. It appeared as a blue arrow in the distance, with a marker
indicating how close the Tardigrade was to it. Currently, it was 647 kilometres away; Jingru and Dr Menon would be driving straight into the storm when it hit Reserve-133, but they both knew the Tardigrade could take it.

  Jingru watched a flock of large, metallic butterflies turn sharply upwards as the Tardigrade passed beneath them in the opposite direction. Each the size of dinner plates, the butterflies were no doubt headed for the nearest cluster of vine-trees to roost in. One, a straggler hanging below the rest, failed to make the turn in time; it collided with the front of the Tardigrade, disintegrating in an instant across its rostrum. The chemical sensors picked up the iron smell of its blood and the oddly grape-scented powder on its wings as they rolled off the vehicle’s non-stick plating, and Jingru took a deep breath, drawing more air over the sensors. This was the smell of the planet. She felt sorry for the butterfly.

  * * *

  “Almost there, Dr Menon. We are exactly 1.5 kilometres to the flashpoint.”

  “Gotcha. I’m looking forward to catching these flashes in the, ahem, flesh. Get up close, figure out what they are. Thermal energy that moves. Really makes you wonder, no?”

  “Yes, it does. This could be an entirely new form of life. If we make it out of here, we might even publish a paper,” Jingru noted.

  The Tardigrade, in walker mode now, was galloping through the wind and rain. The lightning was intense here; bolts would strike the Tardigrade every three minutes, on average, but the vehicle’s armour easily shrugged them off. The sensors tasted like ozone, dust and high-velocity winds, as expected, but also here and there the odd whiff of iron, sulfur and pure carbon; likely, she thought, because the storm had stirred up buried minerals.

  Several flashes had appeared in close proximity to the Tardigrade, but had not approached; the flashes had either drifted away or disappeared. Jingru noted that the flashes all displayed the same initial pattern: a starting temperature of well over a hundred degrees Celsius, followed by a stable cycle that fluctuated between 50 and 70 degrees Celsius for the duration of their existence. This lasted usually about four to nine minutes, after which they faded just as quickly as they had begun. They were unaffected by the wind, and moved in the same peculiar, spiralling pattern she’d observed previously.

  “On target in five … four… three … two… folks, we have arrived at our final destination,” Dr Menon crowed. “Immersive recording is now active, all sensory data is being recorded and archived.”

  There were still almost ten minutes before the flashes were projected to appear en masse. Jingru sighed and relaxed in her seat. She tuned out the external audio, which had already been reduced to a human-tolerable level. She could see the lightning, the swirling winds and the dust they had kicked up, the sheets of warm, sweet rain, but to her there was now only silence, and the soft hum of the Tardigrade’s internal machinery.

  She’d taken Maia out in a Tardigrade before. That had been an assignment to Reserve-198, an area whose star feature was a massive, seventy-metre-deep and crystal-clear lake dotted with thousands of perfectly circular islands, each several tens of metres in length. The reserve’s environmental scientist, Dr Fukui, had requested a second opinion on her findings and Maia, on a scheduled break from her regular work, had insisted on coming along. They’d spent three days underwater, crawling and mapping the lake floor and sampling its inhabitants. Maia had been particularly intrigued by a species of four-armed mollusc that walked the lake floor in a single herd, tens of thousands of individuals strong, snatching up everything in their way. They parted in an orderly fashion as the Tardigrade crossed their path, and remained in almost-military formation even after Jingru had sampled some of their number. She wondered what Maia would have thought about being in the middle of a storm.

  Jingru felt the first flashes appear, the temperature rising in sharp bursts all around her. She switched the Tardigrade’s panoramic recording on; it would record and track not only video and audio, but also every variable it was able to detect within 500 metres, in order to facilitate accurate modelling in the future. So far the flashes were appearing in exactly the manner Aimee had predicted: the same vaguely natural pattern, a whorl whose centre they now stood in.

  She engaged her thermal overlay. The enhanced visual feeds provided by the Tardigrade enabled her to see them in greater detail than her HUD could. The flashes were swirls of reddish-orange in the false colour, writhing angrily in defiance of the wind. They held their position and watched in silence as the flashes grew in number. The storm was intensifying around them, and Jingru could feel tingling as more lightning rolled off the Tardigrade’s armour. The air took on the pungency of ozone. Dr Menon shifted instinctively in his seat as the ground in front of them cracked from a particularly strong bolt, the damp grass smoking in a spidery pattern.

  The flashes began to converge. Jingru took a deep breath as they closed in. Through the overlay, she could see their temperatures pulsing as they drifted serenely towards the Tardigrade. Some took to the air slightly, rising a couple of metres above the ground, while still others seemed to submerge themselves in the earth, leaving grass to boil in their wake. Jingru hoped the armour would hold as the flashes surrounded the Tardigrade, a bubble of scintillating light gently pressing up against its skin. She felt itchy, as if suddenly hundreds of insects had begun crawling all over her body; the Tardigrade’s external temperature was rising, although its insides remained at a comfortable 25 degrees Celsius. The flashes clambered around the Tardigrade, rolling their scorching-hot bodies over its every surface; she could no longer tell where one began and another ended, but she could feel their movements.

  They began to iridesce, then. Jingru noticed a slight ringing, despite having muted the audio feeds. The temperatures were now oscillating out of their previous ranges; the flashes were dipping below 50 degrees, hitting subzero temperatures and bouncing right back up to boiling in the space of less than a second. It was as if a rapidly shifting, opalescent cloud had surrounded the Tardigrade. Jingru tried to cut the thermal overlay to dispel the visualisations, but the Tardigrade wasn’t responding. She opened her mouth to call out to Dr Menon, but her lips only twitched in spasmodic intervals. She struggled to squeeze thoughts together, unable to feel anything but a deadened panic. In the seat next to her, Dr Menon had gone entirely still, the only indication that he was still alive being the green light on his helmet.

  The iridescence peaked. Jingru managed to force a crackling grunt out, and then her mind faded into the light.

  * * *

  Blue.

  Jingru opened her eyes to find herself underwater. Dr Menon was floating beside her, seemingly naked. Her eyes travelled downwards, but she did not find what she had expected; every detail of his body had been rendered out and replaced with a velvet-like, mahogany bodysuit the same colour as his skin. She looked down at her own and discovered the same suit, this time in her distinctly lighter skin tone. She vaguely wondered if she could breathe, before exhaling a mouthful of sweet glacial water and realising she had been doing it all along.

  “Where are we, Dr Menon?” The words came out less as sound, more as echoes; her voice was as clear in her head as if she had spoken on land, but her ears perceived a dampened bubbling. Dr Menon, nevertheless, responded; the words seemed to enter her mind directly.

  “You’ll see. Try to move.”

  Jingru tried to lift a hand, and then a leg. Both resisted the movement, remaining in place as if tethered by invisible straps. She tried to lean forward, and only got so far before something tugged at her chest. Seat-belts, she realised. This, whatever it was, was still the Tardigrade.

  Below them, she could hear a rumbling. A herd of molluscs, the same species she had seen in the lake of Reserve-198, was on the move. Her perspective was forcibly rotated; they were now parallel with the lake bed, watching the four-armed creatures stomp towards their destination.

  From up here, the herd looked uncanny. As she tried to figure out why, a grid suddenly appeared in her f
ield of vision. It tracked the movements of the herd, each member fitting perfectly into a single square. Here, she could track the movements of each individual; occasionally members would swap places in the file, creating a small, shifting section of orderly, leg-width movement which reshuffled parts of the herd while keeping its shape. Then, there was a flash in the distance, and the herd stopped. From the direction of the flash, a cascade of shuffling spread throughout the entire herd, and it rotated. Two flashes appeared above the herd and lingered in a holding pattern, temperatures spiking occasionally. These spikes corresponded with spikes in the distant flash.

  When the herd had finished rearranging itself, the flashes above it all disappeared. A final spike from the flash in the distance, and the herd began to move again, in its new direction. An image, unbidden, appeared in her mind—a complex series of lines and nodes across a grid, the pattern of the cascade. She felt it etch itself into her memory. The grid burned with a bright, opalescent pattern, her body jerked upright, and the scene, again, changed.

  Now, they were exposed in the middle of a storm. It wasn’t the one they were in; it was somewhere else, another Reserve, or perhaps another time. She, again, was anchored to her place, her head the only part she could move. There was sand, nothing but glittering sand, into the distance. The storm threw up lines of sparkling dust, and the rain simply percolated through ground to its destination. Three flashes appeared: one in the distance, spiking repeatedly, and two others drifting in contraposition to the spiralling winds. Jingru could see the grid again, except it was more of a mesh this time, outlined in stark black contrast to the shining sand. It followed the whirling of the storm, the patterns of the wind made visible in black lines, and the new image of a spiral funnel sucked the previous image of the grid into itself, curved it in three dimensions across its webbed surface.

  Jingru thought the result looked like planets, or molecules, or perhaps both. She didn’t know what to make of it. It resembled an old vase that had been colonised by brightly-coloured spiders, their webs vibrating at odd intervals and setting the entire structure awobble. The funnel burned itself into her vision, rotating swiftly. Jingru noticed a thin, grey grid crossing the centre of the visualisation, and that the nodes were bobbing in a pattern around each … coordinate? Yes, she thought, they must be coordinates, in three dimensions, and then her body jerked once more and now—