SWNOVELS Chapter 5: Revelations
Cindy scrolled forward. That was an open door alright. The tug was still there, and, with a quick rotate left and right to look up and down the street (followed by a quick thought of “what am I doing?!? This is an image from ages ago,”) she scrolled forward and went ‘through’ the door.
The image seemed to shift around her, a bit like a cross-fade in a movie stream, and suddenly she was ‘standing’ in a featureless, grey room. The only thing in it was a plain table with a single, 2D video screen on it and a straight backed wooden chair. The screen had a small, yellow square of something that looked like a very thin fabric stuck to it, with writing on it that said, simply, “Turn me on.”
Cindy scrolled around the screen … it was all a bit like playing a video game in a funny sort of way … looking for a switch. Nothing. She tried double-tapping her PCD screen where the screen in the room was. All it did was zoom in. She zoomed back out to where she was, cocked her head slightly to one side, and looked bemused.
“Ok”, she thought, “I think I can see a pattern here.” Finding the planet in the test, finding the training facility or whatever it was, now finding this room … it all came from a sort of tug in her mind. That had to be a clue.
She cleared her mind as best as she could, and focussed on the screen. The image of it sharpened as she locked in, and then, suddenly, she could see a kind of silver glow pulsing around it, almost forming a complete ring around the edge of the screen. Almost, that is, except for a small gap at the bottom in the middle where it seemed like there was a bit of silver light about 2cm long hanging down. Cindy focussed on this gap and the hanging section – it was reminiscent of a circuit diagram for a switch just like they had covered in Fundamental Technology at school. Well, that was pretty obvious then – Cindy gathered thoughts to the front and centre of her mind, locked on the hanging silver glow, and mentally pushed up … linked … joined
The silver ring around the screen formed a complete loop, faded to nothing, and the screen blinked into life. At first, it was an image of (and by now Cindy was less surprised) that same emblem from the training facility sign and other Cindy’s uniform. It was a crest, all in gold and royal blue, with a diagonal bisection. In the top left corner it had what looked a bit like three birds of some sort but on closer inspection turned out to be very swish-looking spaceships flying in a V formation. In the bottom right it was a stylised picture of a person’s face, partly obscured by a hand as (really? thought Cindy) it raised a finger to its lips in a traditional ‘shhh’ manner. Cindy just had time to read the banner beneath the crest, which read “GCCSC”, and then underneath that, “Tacite Salute Galaxia”, before the image faded out pixel by pixel like an old fashioned slide show and left a single line of green text in the top left of the screen.
Hello Cindy.
Quickly overcoming a slight disorientation, Cindy fumbled with her PCD screen and activated the keyboard, leaving the screen in the room on Adriá centred on it.
CP: Hello … Again?
Indeed yes.
CP: Ok, so who are you? What’s going on? Why did I only get Junior Admin? What happened to the missing ten questions in the test?
She paused for a second.
CP: Is this Ms Primp?
No, Cindy, I’m not your teacher. I can’t tell you who I am yet, but I can answer your questions – to a degree – and I can explain the strange events you’ve experienced today. But when I have done so, I will need to ask you a question. And I also want to ask you a question before I start: what have you worked out so far?
Cindy thought back to the various events where it seemed like she was finding things and doing things just by thinking about them.
CP: You can read my mind, can’t you?
Think about that. Does that feel completely right?
Cindy thought, and as she thought, she knew the truth. And it was a very big truth to swallow indeed.
That’s right, Cindy, you can read mine.
CP: I don’t understand.
Let me explain, and I need to start with something that seems unrelated, so bear with me.
Unbeknownst to most, humankind is at war. Not a violent war, but an information war. At the moment we are winning, and it’s because we’re winning that this is not currently a violent war. But if the other side gets hold of the information we have, then things could potentially become much, much worse.
Our enemy is not from our galaxy. They are a life form we know as the Turgs, and they live in an adjacent galaxy.
CP: Aliens?
Yes. Aliens. There are a lot more of them than us, and they don’t like us. More accurately, they envy our galaxy. However, we have one thing they don’t. Faster-than-light travel. They are desperate to get this knowledge, and if they ever did, they would swarm into our galaxy like a plague of locusts, destroying everything in their path.
CP: Locusts?
Sorry, old Earth reference there. Nasty insects that used to destroy crops.
CP: Sorry, crops?
Oh, yes, right. Plants humans used to grow for food before we began synthesising everything and the age of the chemi-chef. Look, we’re getting a bit side-tracked here – I don’t suppose you could look that up later and let me get back to telling you about this massive threat to all of humankind from a hostile alien force?
CP: Of course, of course. Go on.
Right, where was I? That’s right – the Turgs don’t have faster-than-light travel, and we don’t want them to have it, so we do everything we can to protect this information. Meanwhile, they constantly strive to take it. This is difficult for them, because in order to steal something from here so that they can get here they need to get here first, if you follow me. However, they do have access to another resource that is faster than light.
Cindy guessed where this was heading.
CP: Thought?
Yes. Thought. We had started studying the potential of humankind in terms of psychic abilities hundreds of years ago, but in this area the Turgs were more advanced than us. They already knew what we were yet to learn – thought travels faster than light, and telepathy, to all intents and purposes, is instantaneous.
Over time, the Turgs have worked on finding psychic humans that they could communicate with and potentially corrupt. And they have had some successes. Their first was around thirty years ago – a man by the name of Jacob Long was offered an enormous amount of wealth – his own planet, in fact – to obtain and pass on the science behind our interstellar gateways. Fortunately for us the Turgs had very little knowledge of our society at this point and as it turned out Mr Long was a simple chemi-chef for an outer planet primary school so didn’t really have the resource to successfully obtain this information. Back then it was guarded for reasons of commerce rather than galactic security. Even so, he got close to extracting the data by taking a job at what was then Interstellar Gateway Corporation and breaking into the server room one night before he was caught by their internal security and arrested.
There followed a pattern of such failed attempts on different planets across the galaxy, a pattern which slowly came to the attention of the Galactic Central Council. It seems that psychic ability doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with good character. But, luckily, cowardice often accompanies treachery, and a number of the subjects we caught talked freely about the contact with this alien race in order to try and reduce their punishment.
We sent some probes and learned what we now know about the Turgs – there are lots of them, they’re generally not very bright, and they aren’t very pleasant.
CP: What do they look like?
Very much like a cliché alien from one of the old science fiction streams. Are you aware of a stream called ‘Doctor Who’?
CP: Oh yes, I love it. It plays on rotation on our planet all the time.
Yours too, hey? Yes, it seems to be everywhere. Anyway, the Turgs look much like one of the aliens from the earlier days of that show – all green slime and tentacles I’m afraid.
Cindy thought back to the vision of the other Cindy and realised what it was she’d been seeing in the distance. She shuddered involuntarily.
They may not be bright, but because there’s so many of them they have plenty of communicators – that’s what they call their psychics who can tap into ours. It became clear that something had to be done urgently to prevent potential catastrophe. So the Galactic Central Council formed a special body with the sole mandate to detect and intercept these infiltrations from the Turgs before they obtain our technology and use it to attack us. This was, and indeed is, the GCCSC – the Galactic Central Council Spy Corps. I believe you’ve seen our logo.
CP: Yes I have – it was on the screen here when I came in. I have to ask – someone going ‘shush’? I mean, really?!?
It was the best I could come up with. I think as a designer I make a pretty good spy.
CP: So who are you?
Let me finish the explanation and then ask you my question, and then after that, you may or may not find out.
The other thing the GCC did was to take control of the Interstellar Gateways and secure the technology away. However, the Turgs persisted, and their psychics have been getting better, as have their techniques for targeting ours. They started trying to get to people when they were younger and more impressionable so they could influence them into being very committed to the espionage. We realised we had to fight fire with fire. We needed a way to identify people with latent psychic abilities as early as we could. Standard candidates – the mildly psychic if you like – we would keep under surveillance and watch for any odd behaviour that suggested they might be being contacted by the Turgs. The very few who showed signs of exceptional potential we would look to recruit into the Corps. The problem was figuring out how to test everyone without them knowing what we were doing.
“The A&P Exam!” Cindy exclaimed, and then realised she was still sat in her house staring at her PCD screen.
CP: The A&P Exam! You rigged the exam!
We didn’t rig it. We devised it. The fact that it actually does work very well to help people into a career path was a happy accident. Its primary function is very much to identify psychic talent, and potentially new GCCSC operatives.
I know you’ve worked out where I’m going with this by now, but let me spell it out – you have the talent. There have been several tests and I’m sure you’re pretty much aware what they are – suffice to say you wouldn’t be in this room having this exchange with me if you didn’t have exceptional potential.
You need to choose whether you want to fulfil that potential. We can train you to do things you would not have even dreamed of. But it comes at a high cost. You would need to maintain a cover, and there will always be Jacintas in this world ready to run you down and there will be nothing you can do about it. There is no option of ever telling them the truth. Also, it’s very dangerous. The situation is desperate and this is unlikely to change any time soon so you will be asked to put your life on the line. Regularly.
The alternative is that you say no. We forget this conversation, you forget this planet. Steps will be taken to ensure you forget. And then the communique will be issued to your school that one of the rare errors occurred in the test and your actual stream was not Junior Admin at all.
CP: What would I get?
Legal.
So. You accept, we organise things so that you spend the next six months intensively training at the facility up the road, and you become a member of the GCCSC. We know you’re young, but this is the way it has to be. We will do our best to look after you, but I won’t downplay the danger.
Alternatively, you refuse, and this planet disappears from your PCD and you never hear of it again. And soon after you forget about it. Then you get to school tomorrow to a different and quite prestigious career.
What’s it going to be?