The Filter Trap (45 page)

“You are in no danger,” a calming voice said. In her hallucination, for that surely was what this was, she turned, looking for the voice. Nobody else in any direction. Looking down she noticed she stood at the top of a massive pyramidal structure, curling away under her perch to hide all but the top under very tall trees. She estimated she must be miles above the forest floor.

“Hello?” she yelled, listening for the echo of the car. The wind whisked her voice away, the only answer coming from strange creatures flying in the distance, unlike anything she’d ever seen.

“I am here with you . . . in spirit,” the voice said.

“Am I dead?”

The voice nearly chuckled.

“No. I am here with your mind, and I am controlling your body, still in your automobile.”

“My automobile?” This dream was getting stranger and stranger; surely she was unconscious. Might as well play along since her brain was in control, which was better than a few seconds ago.

“Technically your brain is
not
in control,” the voice said. “I’m in control of it, or at least the motor functions.”

“Sure,” Natalie said, jumping up and down on her perch and wiggling her fingers and toes, feeling the wind.

She was in the car again, approaching the kilometer marker that signaled the long road to the Farm.

“What the fuck!”

“I told you. I’m in control,” the voice said. “I created a calm place so we could talk, but if you must believe this is not a dream, I will address you directly in real-time.”

“Jong-Gi?” she asked with fright, naming her closest and most ruthless competitor.

“I am none of your corporate adversaries. I am not an adversary at all. Please calm down. It may help if I mention Kam is with me, alive.”

“Where? At Nongjang? How is that possible?”

“No, deep beneath the pyramid I showed you. There isn’t a name for it in your language. We are tens of millions of kilometers from Earth.”

‘I must be losing oxygen,’ Natalie thought. ‘I always thought people asphyxiating saw bright lights, something calming, not aliens.’

“What you call God and aliens might as well be synonyms,” the voice said.

“Okay, plan B,” Natalie said out loud. “Passing out’s not gonna work, what can I do once I get inside to set off security? Think!”

“I will know what you are going to do before you do it,” the voice said. “Please calm yourself and cooperate, it will make this much easier.”

“Not listening to hallucinations!” she said. “There’s a laser detector before the clean room, surely they’re going to take me there, but they wouldn’t know about the lasers. Once they’re set off I can refuse to cooperate. Even if they shoot me they won’t get—”

Natalie’s black luxo-barge pulled up to the gate, alone.

“Where are they?” she asked out loud.

“There are no kidnappers,” the voice reiterated. “I told you I’ve been in control the entire time, since you left Suzie’s grave.”

“Suzie? Only Kam called Dad that.”

“I’ve seen Kam’s memories. I know he and your father created that nickname while they were drunk at the karaoke bar, after he explained Kyung is rarely used for boy’s names in Korea.”

“And Kam sang ‘Boy Named ‘Sue’’ to show him ‘Soo’ wasn’t manly either in America. Dad jokingly agreed to let Kam call him Suzie, but never tell anyone, not even me. But Kam did tell me, unsure whether Dad would really want him to call him that when they sobered up the next morning. Which is why
you
know, because you’re me, and I’m still going crazy talking to myself.”

She smiled. “Okay space-god, if you can read my mind, why don’t you give me the chocolate I just thought about. At least if I’m hallucinating I’d like to eat chocolate without guilt for once.”

“We can only
manipulate
existing matter. Though your car contains enough carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron and trace amounts of calcium, I’m afraid the only source of hydrogen and magnesium is your body, and we are attempting to preserve that. Further, removing the calcium and other elements from their current placement would permanently disable your car, which we need to drive you to the Farm. With more time I could have chocolate delivered to you by Chocolate Tree in Sinchon.”

“Okay, Chocolate Tree I get, I go there all the time so of course my subconscious would know that, but I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what elements make up a chocolate bar. Although, I also wouldn’t have a clue if you just made them up.”

“Can we move on?” the voice asked, and the gate to Nongjung slid open.

“It seems I don’t have a choice,” she answered, as her car drove down the curving single-lane road to NongJung.

“Human minds are open, but fragile,” the voice replied. “I would do Kam a disservice if I damaged your brain by leaving you no control. I am hoping to let you do the work yourself.”

“And what work is that?”

“Saving your species from extinction.”

Finally freed, all four of them crashed to the ground.

“The fuck was that?” Lee asked.

“I needed to probe your minds, freezing your cerebellums meant I did not need to discern bodily movement in the present with the memory of it.”

“If I had my Beretta!” Amanda bellowed.

“You would fire it off my casing, not harming me, but potentially harming the others. For this reason I froze you as well, as the probe of your memories might seem . . . unsettling for a conscious human.”

“What?” they asked in unison.

“How long were we . . . out?” Jill asked.

“Half a rotation of this planet.”

“No wonder I’m hungry,” Lee said. “You gonna feed your new lab rats eventually, or just torture us?”

“Your species still has trouble differentiating malevolence and benevolence. We will disregard your distrust, though our activities have been completely to your benefit.”

“I don’t see how starving us gets us home any better,” Amanda said. “At least the bearantulas fed us.”

“Turn around,” the voice said.

Behind them lay four dark blocks on the floor.

Jill picked one up. “My god, it’s . . . chocolate,” she said, sniffing it. “But, how?”

“I speak in your mind by manipulating electrical signals in your brains. Those signals are made by electrons, a larger instance of the fundamentals of matter, which are all manipulatable by frequency. At least that’s as far as I can simplify it, the math is very difficult for primitive brains to understand.”

“Yeah, but to combine atoms into new elements and move them through space,” Kam started, “is, it’s just that . . .”

“Let me guess,” Lee quipped, “even
your
primitive brain can’t understand. My stomach understands chocolate so I’m gonna go with it.”

They all hurriedly consumed the chocolate.

“This tastes familiar,” Kam said.

“It is Natalie’s favorite,” the voice said.

“Who’s Natalie?” Lee asked.

“She shares a love-bond with Kam, as such it was easiest for me to contact her on Earth,” the voice answered.

Jill crossed her arms and frowned at Kam. “A ‘love-bond?’ You’re sleeping with MIT’s biggest donor’s daughter?”

“Don’t lecture me about ethics. You slept with Allan when he was your doctoral examination chair. I can’t imagine how else you’d get a PhD with a thesis examining movement of dark matter for signs of intelligence. Did he even read it?”

A moment of uncomfortable silence passed, then Lee spoke up. “Like
Allan
Allan? The Doc?”

Kam hung his head. “Yes, I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” Jill said. “We loved each other. You wouldn’t understand.”

Kam looked up. “Did Allan? I understand what it’s like
not
to be loved by you.”

Jill sighed. “You were too young. I needed stability, Kam. You’ve held this against me for a decade, but what would I have done when you went off to MIT? Should I have abandoned SETI, left my passion behind to be a kept older woman of the linguistic wunderkind? You’d have slept with your first student trying to keep her grades up.”

“I’m not Allan!” Kam protested.

“Look, I’m a butch lesbian who does pushups and yells for a living,” Lee said, exasperated. “We’re all walking clichés except for the major, here, so can we just move on?”

“Believe me, Jill has no trouble moving on,” Kam said under his breath.

“Says the guy pining for a beanpole that shits money. At least I’ve got curves!”

“How would I know?” Kam retorted.

“Wait,” Lee said, shaking her head. “Ignoring that you might have just said some extremely racist shit, Jill, you mean we gotta listen to all this even though you two never slept together?”

Lee turned to Kam. “Have you slept with
anybody
?”

“The lieutenant is right!” Amanda roared. “Stop your bickering. We need to work as a team to get out of here, unless that
thing
is going to zap us home. And if we keep bickering it might freeze us again.”

“Your altercations are giving us new insights into your culture,” the voice said. “Though we are starting to understand that doing so causes psychological harm for those involved.”

“Well, since you started this,” Kam said, “why don’t you tell us what you’re doing with Natalie back on Earth, and how that gets us out of here.”

“We have decided to give your species a choice. First we needed to let your people know that you’re coming back with tools to neutralize the bearantula threat, and also not to harm the ship we will build together.”

“Well that’s a lot to chew on,” Amanda said.

“Sounds good to me,” Lee added. “Keep talking Space Cow.”

“Natalie Cho, because of her affection for Kam, had the strongest desire to believe my communication with her was real. She also kept fragments of Kam’s DNA, and Kam had hers, which allowed me to bridge the quantum gap between their bodies. While you were
frozen
I was not only probing your minds, but I was speaking to hers as well.”

“Hold on, are you saying we’re easier to manipulate because we love?” Amanda asked.

“Hold on, are you saying they slept together?” Jill asked.

“I still struggle with your human euphemisms, the two shared DNA, and there are many ways for most species to do so. Love is a delusion your brains place on top of evolutionary choices. Humans love attributes in another human that have benefit for themselves. Love is selfish and beneficial to society at the same time. Other animals on your planet eat their young. Because Kam loves Natalie, he had more information about her than any other on Earth. This made finding her thought pattern much easier, their DNA sharing made communicating with her much easier. It became what your species calls a ‘win-win’ for our problem.”

Kam put his hand up. “Excuse me?”

“Yeah, you’re in love, hotshot,” Lee said. “Hits you like a ton of bricks, don’t it?”

“So you chose her because I love her . . . and she loves me?” Kam asked, hoping for a specific answer.

“That, and Natalie Cho has a security backdoor encryption key to the majority of the radio software in Asia.”

“Only known humans a few hours and this guy’s already cracking jokes,” Lee chortled. “You’re alright, Space Cow, we just need to work on your timing.”

“Lieutenant, this alien thing is manipulating us!” Amanda warned.

“As long as it keeps manipulating chocolate into my mouth I’m fine with that. A few beers would be nice too.”

“My ability to transform matter is limited,” the voice said. “It is much easier for me to speak with the others than it is to form words in your minds or fuse elements together to make sustenance for you.”

“Why’s that?” Lee asked. “It didn’t seem too hard for the tall ones to talk to us like that.”

“They are closer to you biologically. Talking to you in this way is like . . . like you talking to a dog.”

Amanda fumed.

“People love dogs,” Lee whispered. “Be glad he didn’t call us roaches.”

“One question,” Jill said. “Are you taking us dogs home to run and play . . . or to the vet to get us fixed?”

“If I understand your reference, neither. I will explain more on the way, but we must get moving before the bearantulas find the slaves and torture them about why they sent you here. Please move to the far side of the cavern.”

They looked in every direction.

“Where is that?” Amanda asked.

“Walk two hundred paces back the way you came.”

They did so, unsure what to expect.

“I still don’t believe we’re talking to that gray thing in the can,” Amanda said.

“Even if not, it can hear you,” Lee said.

“And if you have a better idea to get out of here we’re all ears,” Jill added.

“Look!” Kam said, turning around as they reached the wall.

Objects in the storehouse moved slowly at first, swirling outward until a wall of containers, metal struts, and shelves formed a circular wall with the humans just beyond the outer edge. They strained to see, but the wall became thicker with every container fitted into place. A 360 degree game of Tetris unfolded just a few feet away, and they couldn’t see it.

As if the Tardigrade heard them, a shaft of light splintered through nearby and widened into an aperture. They crept forward and peered through.

On the other side of the wall more objects moved, this time assembling something very large, stretching to the ceiling of the room, now illuminated hundreds of feet above them.

“Ever read Jules Verne?” Lee asked.

“It’s going to drill . . . up?” Amanda guessed incredulously.

“Technically gravity decreases vertically at a rate much faster than we’re used to since the planet is much smaller,” Jill said.

“Oh, so more like The Martian, then,” Lee said.

Jill nodded. “’Cept we gotta get through a mile of rock first.”

Clear enough, a drill tip resembling the great tunnel diggers on Earth formed from molten metal high above them. This was what lit the cavern so well, enabling them to see the entirety of the transformation beyond the barrier.

Under the building-sized drill bit a swirl of spaces came together. Elements came apart and fused together again in flashes of light.

“Alchemy,” Jill said.

“What?” Amanda asked.

“We’re in the hands of a wizard,” she laughed. “Alchemy was the medieval study of turning base metals to gold. This thing is going beyond that and back again.”

“But in order to keep us safe, or build another cage?” Amanda asked rhetorically, then noticed her ring was shrinking.

“No!” she shouted and ran toward the light as the metal of her ring slipped in a sparkling silken strand beyond the barrier. The others rushed to hold her and keep her from climbing through to certain death. She struggled and grabbed at the sinuous line of silver, wrapping her hands with what used to wrap her finger.

“Must need platinum,” Kam said.

“Grandpa said it was cheap silver,” Amanda said through tears. “A ten cent souvenir hawked to GIs in
Myeongdong.”

“Then why are you crying, Major?” Lee asked.

“I shouldn’t believe it, but I do. This ring got my father through Korea and my dad through Vietnam. It got me out of too many close calls in Iraq to recount. And now, everything that’s happened since the Event. I know it’s stupid to think it means anything. I know . . .”

She stiffened suddenly. “I know now it really is important. This thing needs it to bring us home. Maybe it’s the only platinum in this place. Maybe it’s more than good luck. This ring couldn’t be used to hurt us, it just couldn’t.”

Amanda wiggled her fingers and let the thin strings escape her grasp, drifting off and up through the hole in the barrier before blending in with the blurring atoms on the other side.

They watched in silence. Girders bent, softer pliable substances molded to supports and disappeared behind a metal mesh, which moisture wicked to. The moisture hardened to ice in sheets five meters thick before encapsulating in more metal.

“Water tower?” Amanda asked.

“Radiation shield,” Kam said. “Ever been in a nuclear power plant?”

“Looks like a lot,” Lee said. “The ISS walls aren’t that thick.”

“Power plant was right,” Jill said, slapping Kam on the arm. “It’s going to boil before we get too high up, then we can use that reaction for thrust to get outside the atmosphere, when it’ll freeze again and be our shield. Not a bad plan, really.”

“Except that doesn’t get us up to the thin air in the first place,” Kam countered. “Or moving very fast through space once we get there.”

The light in warehouse got brighter. The crack in the wall closed with a snap, stopping any further speculation, but answering one final question.

“If you could move atoms around at will, what would you do for power?” Kam said.

“Fission!” Jill exclaimed.
“Major, it’s not the platinum in your ring, it’s the trace particles, the
atoms
, of Uranium! It’s a good thing that ring
was
cheap, and mined out before they made sure all the trace amounts of fissile material were removed. That tardigrade is
building a Clark & Sheldon engine and needed nanoparticles of fuel.”

“In English for the grunts, please,” Lee stated.

“Her ring is going to be the fuel that will propel us home at five percent the speed of light.”

“We’ll be home in two hours!”
Kam said.

“No wonder he wanted to phone ahead to your girlfriend,” Lee said.

Chapter 9

Natalie working overtime on some secret project on a drizzly Sunday was nothing new for Mr. Park, the same security guard at the front desk that served with her father in the war. Mr. Park had lied about his age, but it would be hard for him to do that now after fifty years working the evening shift in a facility in a privately owned mountain forest nobody knew about.