Jungle colony book 2, p.111
Jungle (Colony Book 2), page 111
The image stopped, leaving his mouth open in mid-sentence. “We don’t need to see the rest of the recording,” Ikeda said, closing the video. The man’s face faded, but the pall he’d cast over the room remained. “It’s … scattered. But it confirms what Neres suspected. UNSEC left the colonists here to die. They knew.”
“And they sent us here anyway,” Kombes said, her voice stiff and tight.
Ikeda nodded. “They did.” Her eyes slid over to Anna. “You were right, Neres. That’s why the Sojourner left, why they’ve had us uploading everything to the Eye. And why all of us, either because of our dissident voices or simply our positions, wound up together.” Her eyes moved around the table. “We were expendable.”
“Have their cake and eat it too,” Morel said. “A few dissidents and unknowns disappear in an expedition gone poorly, and UNSEC is able to collect more data on an ecosystem unlike anything else.”
“But why?” Lankiss asked, her smooth brow wrinkling as she frowned. “They could just send in a heavily defended team, burn back the jungle. Why wouldn’t UNSEC just put a permanent force on the planet’s surface.”
“Because,” Wells said, her voice shaky. “They know they can’t.”
Lankiss let out a scoff. “UNSEC? I don’t know if you’ve ever seen their military power, Wells, but they’re more than capable of—”
“Taking on an entire planet?” Wells asked, her voice sharp and cutting through Lankiss’ disagreement. “A whole world, perfectly unified and in concert with itself. Where you aren’t just another species, but the only other species?” Her voice went quiet. “The germ?”
“What—?”
Anna glanced around the rest of the table, but none of the other team members looked like they knew what she was talking about. Except, she noted, Silva, who was looking at her with an expression of dumbfounded shock, almost as if he couldn’t believe what she was saying.
“What are you—?” Ikeda caught herself. “I’m sorry, Wells, but you’ve lost me. What are you talking about?”
“The XNA,” Wells said quietly. “It was something the man in the video said. About them being smart—far smarter than anyone thought. But they don’t have brain matter for that kind of intelligence. The autopsy showed that.”
“So you’re saying it’s instinctual?” Lankiss asked.
Wells shook her head and rose, tapping at her datapad. “Sort of, but no,” she said. “No, this is something … It’s … Here!” She set her datapad down atop the table, and its holographic display powering up and showing an image of … something. Anna wasn’t quite sure what.
“Silva and I both had great difficulty tracking down the XNA of the lifeforms here,” she said. “And I’ve only just recently found out why.” She looked around at the table, her eyes wide. “It’s because this XNA is more advanced than anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s not just XNA.”
“I’m still lost,” Lankiss said, looking up at Wells. Anna nodded in agreement, as did several other members of the team. “What do you mean it’s not just XNA?”
“It’s …” Wells let out a sigh, her shoulders slumping with what looked like heavy fatigue, and she tapped at her datapad, bringing up a familiar spiral structure. “This is a strand of human DNA,” she said. “Formed of four base nucleotides. We’re all familiar with it, yes?” Anna nodded along with the rest of the table.
“Adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine,” Wells said. “Those four bases make up our DNA, and the DNA of everything on our planet. It all revolves around those four. Combined together, strands of these four bases provide the building blocks of life for everything on Earth.”
“That I understand,” Lankiss said.
“Most of us do,” Wells replied. “We also know that much of the DNA we have is virtually identical. Even a different species, such as a chimp, contains large quantities of similar genetic material. This however …” she said as a tangled sprawl appeared above the datapad. Except … as Anna leaned in closer, she realized it wasn’t quite as messy as it first appeared. It was complicated, but condensed. Like a tightly-wound optical illusion.
“This,” Wells continued, “is identical.”
“What?”
“Across all samples,” she said, looking around the table. “Almost one-hundred percent. Barring what made it so difficult to process in the first place.”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at,” Ikeda said. “So everything on the planet is related?”
“No,” Wells said, shaking her head. “Not related. Identical.”
“I still don’t understand,” Lankiss replied.
“It’s complicated,” Wells said. “Very complicated. Recall the four base nucleotides?” She looked around the table, and once again the various members of the team nodded.
“Well, the XNA on this planet has twenty-four.”
“How?” The question came from Johan. “Twenty-four different—”
“I know,” Wells replied. “We’ve come across planets with six, and even one with eight, but twenty-four is … Well, it explains in part why Silva and I spent so long hunting. I don’t even recognize some of these chemicals. Neither does the system. It’s alien in ways we’ve never seen. But that’s only half of it.”
“The other half of what made it so hard,” she continued, tapping at her datapad again. “Is this.” A second image appeared by the first, almost identical to the first save that a few of the colors had shifted positions. “Most of you don’t know what you’re looking at, so I’ll explain it like this. How often does DNA change?”
“While you’re alive?” Kombes asked. “Well yes, it can degrade. But if you mean as part of the function of DNA itself, then no. Its goal is not to change. That’d be like a blueprint changing during or after the construction of a building—it would throw everything off.”
“Exactly,” Wells said. “And yet these two pictures?” She motioned at the display. “The same strand of XNA, mere seconds apart.”
“That’s impossible,” Kombes said, leaning forward. “You’re sure?”
“I am,” Wells replied. “I’ve had the same results thousands of times. That’s why Silva and I had so much trouble finding the XNA in the first place. Our systems were built to assume it would be static. Not changing.”
“Where do you find this?” Silva asked. “What samples?”
“That’s the other part,” Wells said, looking at him. “All of them. Every. Last. One. From a single cell all the way up to a large sample. The XNA is constantly shifting, moving … but only on part of each strand. Everything else, meanwhile, is identical.”
Anna shook her head. “You’ve lost me. So … the XNA changes, I’ve got that. But what else?”
“Only a small portion of the XNA changes,” Wells said. “The rest, the ‘blueprint,’ is exactly the same in every single creature or plant we’ve taken a sample from.”
“Impossible.” That was the Silva Anna remembered. “You must have done something wro—”
“I’ve doubled and tripled and quadrupled my checks!” Wells snapped, slamming her palm down on the tabletop. “And gone ten times beyond that! They’re the same!”
“Then you must be looking at something else,” Silva said, his own voice rising. “What you’re suggesting is—”
“Both of you, settle down!” Ikeda said, her voice cracking across the table like a whip. “Silva, your objections are noted, but Wells is an accomplished botanist. Furthermore, she’s far more willing to look outside the box, something you seem to confine yourself to. And she wasn’t alone in her research.”
“That’s true,” Morel said. “She sought my help to confirm what she was seeing.”
“Which, for those of us who aren’t scientists here,” Jake said, poking his head forward. “Is what?”
“How many different species of plant and animal have we encountered since we’ve been here?” Wells asked, looking at him.
“Well …” Jake glanced at Anna, lifting one eyebrow and giving her a little shrug of confusion. “As far as plants go, we’ve got the grass, the moss, the two kinds of trees—”
“Wrong.”
“What?”
“You’re wrong,” Wells said. “That’s what I’m getting at. They may all look different and act different, but none of them are different species. They’re all the same species. The grass, the moss … all of it. Same with the hoppers and, I expect, the other creatures that attacked you, Anna, and Kara at Livingstone. They’re all the same species.”
“That’s why they work together,” Anna said. “Acting in concert.”
“In part,” Wells said. “But how would they know? The behavior they exhibit and their lack of brain matter seemed to make that questionable. And then the video you brought back—he said that they were intelligent. Which could be instinct, but would that make sense? How would a species with instinct know how to respond to guns and barricades? They could, but the intelligence …”
“The shifting XNA?” Kombes suggested. “Changing instincts?”
Wells shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s worse. Much worse. It could be that, but the change would be much slower, and still not work after the creature was grown.” The images above the pad vanished, a short, looping animation of a single one playing as the strands shifted. “I copied some of the patterns in the shifts and put them into the computer. The result I got was nonsense … Or at least I thought so until I saw that video and heard how smart—”
“Will you just get to the point!” Silva snapped.
“Fine,” Wells said, her voice icy. “The result the computer found based on the pattern … was this.” A text file popped up in the air, the letters and sentences reversed from Anna’s perspective.
“Early quantum computing experiments?” Ikeda asked, looking up at Wells. “Are you saying—?”
“I wasn’t,” Wells said, her voice trembling slightly. “Not until I heard Anna talk about how they moved together, and we watched that video, and he said the whole planet was against them.”
Anna felt the chill spot between her shoulder blades grow cooler as she caught up with what the botanist was saying. It is … she realized with a shock. “It’s all one species,” she said, the words sliding out of her mouth. “And all one mind, isn’t it?”
“Maybe?” The brief feeling of relief Anna got at Wells’ hesitant response faded as her mind caught up with the fact that it wasn’t a no either. “It’s definitely one species, but one mind?”
Wells shook her head. “It’s almost impossible to tell without a lot more tests. Done by someone who’s field that would actually be—”
“So you don’t know at all if you’re right or wrong,” Silva interrupted.
“Silva, shut it,” Ikeda ordered. “Last warning. You can go over Wells’ findings later. If we have time to.” She turned back toward Wells. “Regardless of intelligence then, you’re certain that everything we’ve faced, everything on this planet, is the one species?”
“I am,” Wells said with a nod. “I’ve run these tests hundreds of times. It’s all the same thing. Like an ant colony … just far more advanced.”
“It makes sense.”
“What?” Wells asked, turning to look at Johan. The rest of the team followed.
“It all being one species,” Johan said, looking at them. “It makes sense. I said it when we got our first look at this place, remember? A single-biome planet doesn’t make any sense—couldn’t make any sense. There’s always a variety of species and subtypes to round things out. But a singular, hive organism … one capable of filling every single niche with variations of itself. That could do it.”
“But …” Kombes began. “How could something like that evolve in the first place?”
“I don’t know,” Johan replied. “I mean, even with the proof it’s pretty out there. Alien evolution tends to be a wacky field anyway. Maybe everything on the planet used to be a bunch of different hive minds … and this is just the last one left. Survival of the fittest on a really weird scale.”
“The point is,” he said. “That could explain why there’s just the jungle everywhere: It beat out everything else. And then settled into a peaceful stability.”
“And then we landed, or the colonists from Livingstone, and messed it all up.” Ikeda nodded. “And so it does what it’s done before—defend itself from an invasive species.”
“But across a whole planet?” Morel asked.
“Maybe don’t think of it as a planet,” Johan said, looking at Morel. “Think of it as … a body. Right? One big organism made up of hundreds of smaller systems, like cells.”
“Which makes us what?” Morel replied. “Microbes?”
“Maybe?” Johan shrugged. “Kind of? That might be how the planet sees us, but as tough as humans are, we might be more like mites. Or an invasive species, like rats.”
Rats. A chill crawled down Anna’s spine. Where was I last talking about rats? Why is that making me feel tense—well, more tense than before?
“But that might be why UNSEC hasn’t landed anyone here since,” Johan continued. “Or maybe they have. More expeditions like us. Or what … crud, whoever said it? About an armed response. It’d be like going up against an entire world of immune response. We’ve already seen—or some of us have—how this place is reacting to a few of us, and in just a few months. We don’t know if that’s just because we didn’t bother it initially, or what, but you’d have to spend a tremendous amount of resources to try and hold a world like this back. Or build something specialized—really specialized.”
“But why send us?” Morel asked. “More data?”
“That would be my guess.” The answer came from Lankiss. “Unfortunately, as fascinating as this all is to hear about, there’s one other thing we need to worry about, aside from the grim spectacle of having an immuno-army of some alien origin descend upon us for trespassing on its system.”
“Wells, if you could sit down,” Ikeda said. The botanist nodded and pulled her datapad back, shutting it off. “Lankiss has something she needs to tell us.
“With everything else going on, I would almost be tempted to leave it,” Lankiss said as she began manipulating the table’s controls, the projector in the center coming to life once more. “But there’s nothing to be gained by ignoring additional bad news.”
“I’ll be to the point,” she said. “And not just because my data is much more direct. This—” A three-dimensional, ragged cone appeared in the center of the table, slightly transparent, “—is one of the mountains ringing the equator of this world, as of a scan taken just over a week ago. And this …” A new image of a very similar cone appeared atop it, overlapping in many areas but noticeably taller.
“This,” Lankiss continued, “is the same mountain as of yesterday. And this—” Portions of both images began to glow, including a ring around the top of each mountain. “A thermal scan. Chemical—” Several areas above the mountains lit up, small text blocks marking them. “And last but not least, seismic. Though these last ones are uncertain.” Multiple yellow zones lit up around the base and across the side of both mountains. “Each of these occurrences is repeating for each and every mountain in the equator chain. I’ve double-checked the numbers, and confirmed them this morning before the current surge began and we lost contact with the Eye.”
She looked up at the rest of the table, her expression stern. “These are precursors to volcanic eruptions. Soon—and how soon I can’t say with certainty, but at least within the next few weeks—the belt of this world will erupt in a cacophony of fire and magma that will reach orbit—and very likely throw this world into an ice age that will last decades, if not centuries.”
“Mierda,” Anna said, glancing at Ikeda’s solemn expression. So that was what was bothering her earlier, she thought. Before we even got back. She opened her mouth, but Jake beat her to the punch.
“Can this habitat survive something like that?” he asked, leaning forward, his eyes darting between Ikeda, Kombes, and Lankiss.
“Well …” Lankiss began. Ikeda finished for her.
“Theoretically, yes,” she said. “We’re some distance from the actual eruption, so the blast front might not be a problem.” There was a stress to the word “might” which didn’t slip past Anna’s notice. Nor, from the look of the rest of the table, had it slipped past anyone else.
“But even if it isn’t, there will be a lot more to worry about,” the commander continued. “Earthquakes and aftershocks. Rubble and debris crashing down on top of us. The hab is tough … but it’s not that tough. Even then, if we don’t fall prey to what will likely be continent-shaking earthquakes, or the debris from the blast, there will still be the smoke and ash to consider. The hab can become partially self-sufficient, but not forever. An ash fall or enough debris would, over a period of time, become detrimental to our survival.”
“Not to mention it could bury us,” Lankiss added. “Which would simply seal us in a tomb.”
“Yes,” Ikeda said. “It could. But even if it didn’t, simply blocking off any of the external vents could be harmful in the long run to the functional capabilities of the hab.”
“It could stop the surges,” Wells said. “An eruption of that size would certainly devastate the local ecology. We could transmit again. Call for help.”
“Through the resulting debris field?” Johan countered. “Not to be a downer, but while our communications array is advanced, the eruption might stop the surge, but even that’s assuming that the natural magnetosphere of the planet isn’t mostly to blame. Either way, the debris and rubble an eruption of that size puts out is probably going to prevent anything we send from reaching orbit anyway.”
“Besides,” he continued, shrugging. “I hate to say it, but how do we know this isn’t a regular occurrence of some kind? The life here, if it’s really as advanced as we think it is, could be ready for it.” He let out a short scoff. “It could even be causing it.”
