The Immortal Game (Rook's Song) (6 page)

“I see.  So,
with my lowly chess skills, I suppose I haven’t exactly sharpened your blade.”

Rook smiles, and leans forward, starting to check the best possible approach vectors to the planet.  There
are many possible sites that Bishop indicated would serve as landing pads near the primary buried installation.  “Don’t be so hard on yourself.  You’ve got the pieces down, now you just need to learn the basics of strategy.”

“I understand strategy,”
says Bishop, running a check over the atmo scrubbers.  “I may be an engineer, but I am a warrior-engineer.”

“Exactly.  You only understand yourself as a piece.  A pawn.  Understand?  You’re a pawn, but you need to learn to be a player.”  Rook starts cycling up the engine and the rear thrusters.

“I don’t understand why we cannot play a simpler game, like this checkers game you told me about, or poker.  Are those not revered games where you come from?”

“Almost no strategy involved at all in those games, except maybe the style and rate at which y
ou place your bets in poker.  Chess is the ultimate in strategy and sharpening the mind, because all strategy is about management and placement of resources.  In checkers, all the pieces can do the same thing.  That’s not like real life.  In chess, you have six kinds of pieces: king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, and pawn.  Each of those pieces can move in only
one
fashion—a knight can
only
move in an L-shaped way, for instance, and a king can move in any direction it wants but
only
one space at a time.  That’s more like life.  A Marine is specifically trained to work with a team on the ground and enter buildings, for instance, but cannot take to the air, while an Air Force pilot dominates by air, but cannot enter a home to rescue hostages.  Those are all pieces, and a wise player knows when to use the Marines, and when to call in an airstrike.”

Bishop nods in a very human manner.  “Of course, I see your point, but when we first met, you said that this game helped you to defeat the Cerebs at the asteroid field.  And while I do see the analogy between the game you play here and the game you played with them, do you really find it all that necessary for your mind?
  You play it obsessively.”

“
It must be hard for you to grasp, because you’re programmed to remember so many protocols, but human beings…we have no implants.  Never did.  At least, not on the scale of your people or the Cerebs.  So we had to do most of our learning the old-fashioned way.  I’m sure your people discovered the connection between learning new skills, such as playing an instrument, and how it could improve your memory, stimulating neurons in new ways, opening up new avenues of thought you’d never previously explored?”  Rook taps a few keys, and brings up the holographic display of the chessboard between them.  “
This
?  This isn’t just home for me, it’s how I’ve stayed sane, and it’s how I upgrade
my
software,” he says, tapping his temple.  “Get it?”

“
Well enough,” Bishop says.  The alien runs his right hand over one of the consoles, and pulls up a holo of the Sidewinder, looking at the rates of gamma waves bouncing off their wake.  He’s done it without even tapping a switch.  Rook still hasn’t quite figured how he does that.  “But, you intrigue me.  You say that a chess player cannot get any better unless he plays against an opponent that is better than he is.”  He turns to Rook.  “My question is, now that you’ve gone up against the Cerebs and defeated them once, do you feel you’ve improved?  Have you…upgraded?”

“Well,” Rook says, activating forward thrusters, the ship lurching forward slightly.  “I won’t know until I play another game with them, now will I?”

They are both pressed slightly against their seats, and a split-second later the inertial dampers kick in.  The artificial gravity adjusts.  They make their approach to the planet.  “Alright, the capacitors are holding,” Rook says.  “Guess you were right about that electrostatic influx into the—”

Suddenly, a chime sounds.

Rook looks at his trouble-board.  “Oh…”

Bishop doesn’t have to ask what it is.  “We’ve got company.”

“Yeah, we do.”  Rook does a double check on sensors, and he wants to scream. 
How did they find us? 
Another check to make sure the readings aren’t muddled, but he knows they’re not.  Nothing is malfunctioning, and it’s not a simple misreading of a gamma burst or cosmic wave fluctuations.

Seekers have come.

Or wait…have they?  Rook looks at his sensors.  Something isn’t right, the energy signatures are too erratic, here one second and gone the next, never stabilizing.  Though he doesn’t notice it, beside him Bishop is paying close attention to what he does next.

2

As the ship begins to accelerate forward, Bishop moves a hand over the main flight control panel.  Tiny, invisible lasers lance out from his fingertips, into the panel’s LCD display lid.  Aiming these lasers at the top allows him to pick up more resonant vibrations.  Next, there is a transmitted electromagnetic pulse that
allows him to intrude on system records.  In short, he can find the keystrokes Rook has put into the computer in the past, and access encrypted files.

We wonder,
Why would he do this?

We’ve spent so much time with the Cerebrals, and with the last human, but what of this alien?  What of Bishop?  May we know him, too?  We are ghosts, and we can certainly slide into his mind and know his thoughts, just as we’ve done with others, but can we ever truly know him?

The Ianeth’s firewalls do not detect us, although they do detect a slight brainwave fluctuation, a half-second interruption in the communication between a few neurons, but then its own imtech (implant technology) creates a buffer, regulates flow and neuroplasticity, and we are integrated seamlessly.  We are part of the program now, part of the organic brain and its booster systems.

We
can see so much!  Vision!  Incredible vision!  Through these eyes, we see strange colors, and even stranger readings of those colors.  Oscillating microwave emissions bouncing all over the cockpit, electromagnetic energies, infrared, and light control—yes, light control!  The Ianeth can absorb ambient light to enhance its—
his
—night-vision, and can then dampen it so that it isn’t blinded.  And the sounds…good God, the sounds we hear!

I
t’s all so much that we almost miss the vast network of systems that hold tight to identity, punctuated by an intense search for logic and reason.  His is a mind made for meddling, all right.  He is compelled to seek truth through deception.  That is, he seeks truth by searching for lies
first
and then weeding them out: whatever is left, he reasons, is Truth.  There are whole subroutines dedicated to this process, and it stems from…

Ohhh…now that’s interesting.  Yes.  Remarkable.  The alien circuitry mostly amplifies decision-making and the ability to seek patterns, and, since this one is (was) an engineer, his imtech was put there to help him plan and construct, while subsystems wer
e of course dedicated to combat; Bishop’s secondary and tertiary imperatives.  But that’s not what’s so remarkable.

Deeply embedded inside this alien, we find a lie.  We do not know what this lie is
yet, for it is buried deep in a hard drive—a biological one—and yet has such imperative to it that it stands above all other objectives.  This idea…it’s not just something that was programmed into him, no.  We can see that it is hardwired into him in a way that can only have come through the natural evolutionary process.  The lie is as much a part of him as the Cerebs’ predilection for the number four, or for the human need to be loved.

A mind made for meddling, indeed, but more so than we might’ve
guessed.  Now, there is even more increased blood flow to Bishop’s complex brain.  In humans, increased blood flow can indicate there is active lying taking place.  Is it the same for all sentient beings?

The lie.  It’s surfacing.  Rising from the depths and expanding across the alien’s entire brain, incorporating itself into the matrix of all decision-making processes.  But
why
?  What’s going on here that we don’t—

“Something’s fishy here,” Rook says.

At his side, Bishop glances at him. 
How much does he see?
the alien wonders.  “Fishy?”

“Yeah, uh…
hinky
.  Strange.  Ya know, weird.”

“Like what?”

Rook adjusts their pitch and yaw, and heads for a spot underneath the closest of the giant spheres floating above the eastern hemisphere.  Coasting, he puts the Sidewinder in geosynchronous orbit around the space station, hoping to hide behind it.  “I’m getting weird readings from the…”  Rook looks over his instruments again.  “That’s not right.”

“What isn’t?”
 
How much does he see?

Rook gives him a brief sidelong glance, then stares out the forward view.
  “The seekers.  They’ve disappeared from all scopes.”

“That’s interesting.” 
Does he see it?

“It’s not just interesting, it’s impossible.”

“Why impossible?” 
Can he see it?  Can he see clearly?

Rook looks at his scanners again.  “Hold on,” he says, running his fingers over the main keyboard.  He brings up several holographic command boards, sifts through them, finds the ones he’s looking for and runs a diagnostic check.  “Systems seem to be running fine.  So do the sensors, but…”  He trails off, taps a few more keys
, muttering.  “Doesn’t make sense.  Spectral analysis shows no emissions.  But the Cerebs wouldn’t have used stealth, they don’t believe in it.  It’s too beneath them, they believe their resources are always superior.”

“They adapt,” Bishop says. 
“We know that they have the ability to adapt to change.  Perhaps they’ve evolved since their encounter with you.”  He thinks,
Can he see the real enemy?

“But not that way.  They adapt by recalculating their resources, making the perfect plan of attack to account for stealthy opponents, but they only do that by leaving their opponents
no means
of stealth.  Nowhere to hide.  We know that by their tactics and by their own admission.  It would debase them to lower themselves to either human or Ianeth standards of war.  They’re calculators, not deceivers, and they’re very proud of it.”

Does he have the Sight?
Bishop thinks, watching Rook as a professor might watch a potential prize student.  “And so?”

“S
o, the sensors aren’t on the fritz and yet there’s no sign of any seekers, skirmishers, or warships.  So where the hell did the seekers go, the ones we
just
detected
?”

Bishop stands up from his seat.  “I’ll go outside and run a check on the sensor arrays.  Perhaps one of the dishes is misaligned and detected false readings in another area.”

Rook watches him go, and for a moment, we sense a great swell of disappointment inside Bishop.  The alien is letdown by the revelation.  He had hoped that Rook would prove a more worthy ally, but as it appears now, he may have to reconsider his—

When his ultra-sensitive cochlear implants pick up the faintest sound of the
particle-beam pistol charging and being aimed at his head, the alien feels…relief?  Bishop’s face rarely moves, his people’s mouths remain mostly still as the guttural noises that was their language was emitted from a large set of vocal cords deep within, and they never smiled.  However, we have a feeling that if Bishop could smile, he would right now.  “Very good, friend,” he says, turning back to Rook.  “Very good.”

The
human is looking at him intensely, with something between anger and fear.  The pistol in a tight tactical grip, and it is trained on Bishop’s head.  In these tight confines, we can be sure that Rook does not feel like that is far enough from the powerful alien.  “What did you do?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”
the alien counters.  “Take me through it.”

Rook
snorts.  “What the hell is this?”

“Just take me through what you just discovered.”

The human glances around the room, suspecting a trap, perhaps many of them, then looks back at Bishop mistrustfully.  “I just ran a keystroke and command recall of the ship’s entire system.  The ship’s AI said that there was a backfeed of energy off our own exhaust—one of the sensors was realigned to detect the energy off our own wake.”  Bishop remains still, says nothing.  “There never were any seekers, you forged that energy signature just now, had us detecting our own exhaust.”  Bishop says nothing.  “What the hell is this?  You’re sabotaging
me
now?  What are you?”  Bishop says nothing.  “Are you working for the Cerebs?  Why would you do that?”  Bishop says nothing.  “Answer me.”  Bishop says nothing.  “
Answer me!
”

Finally, the alien resigns himself to doing something rather uncomfortable.  “I want you to know that what
I am about to tell you is very difficult for me.  It would be difficult for any of my people.”  Rook remains still, watching him carefully.  “You’re right, I did forge the energy signature to fool you into thinking we had incoming seekers.”

Rook winces, shakes his head in befuddlement. 
“Why?”

“Because I have to see if you possess the Sight.”

“What the hell is the Sight?”

“How to explain it?”  Bishop looks away from Rook for a moment, running through what he’s learned about the human species by accessing the Sidewinder’s archives—the music, the art, the
culture, all of it informing him on how to approach this matter delicately.  “My people believe in duty above all things.  We believe in strengthening our people, and our own empire, but to do that we must continually train ourselves to beware the agents of deceit.  We seek the truth of the universe by applying the Sight—the ability to see lies is the ability to see the truth.”

“You better start makin’ sense, pal—”

“According to your ship’s databanks, on your planet, your governments employed certain computer experts, called ‘white-hat’ hackers, to continually try to hack into the government’s own systems to expose weaknesses, yes?”

Rook
looks around the cockpit, still anticipating a trap, using his own saboteur’s eyes for something he’s missed.  He nods slowly.  “Sure, I guess.”

“As an engineer, I am in great part a scientist.  A proper scientis
t, as your people eventually discovered, is one who seeks to weed out every falsehood in order to uncover the truth,
not
to determine what the truth is first and then spend the rest of one’s life trying to prove their preconceived notions.  In order to do this well, we have to apply certain tests, and weigh the results.  We call this application the Sight.  Often, certain members of our society would attempt to overthrow the government, if only to see if it could be done, to expose the weaknesses, you see.  They were considered patriots, and revered even by the governments they attempted to overthrow.”  He adds, “That is
our
chess game.  It’s how we keep our minds sharp.”

“You’re still not making any
sense.  Why would you do this to me if—”

“I did
it to see if you possess the Sight, because you are a
friend
.  An ally.  Understand?  A worthwhile friend is someone who has the Sight, while anyone
without
the Sight is not worth one’s time”

“You were…
testing me?”

“Yes.  As I have done these last weeks.  As I will continue to do, as long as we are together.  I will be a good friend, and search for any weaknesses in you, be they physical or mental.  I will lie to you, sometimes often, sometimes not for weeks on end.  I will attempt to lull you into a sense of complacency, and feed you disinformation.
”  Rook’s face turns to one of confusion, then disgust, and finally rage.  “Do not look so astonished, this is our way.”

“Your
way
?”  He looks ready to breathe fire.  “I could
kill
you for that!  You had me thinking we had seekers right on our—”

“But you figured it out.  You remained calm, and you applied the Sight.
  Thus, you were able to identify the deception.  More importantly, you identified the source—me—as unlikely as that should seem.”

Rook blinks a few times, mouth hanging open.  Eventually, he finds words. 
“You said…you said you’re going to keep lying to me, keep deceiving me and trying to sabotage me and my ship?”

“That’s what friends are for, to make you stronger.”

“This is what you do to your
friends
?  You willfully lie to them and try to dismantle their lives—”

“We do.  And at least we’re honest about it. 
This process of social interaction long ago integrated itself into our society as a kind of social pact.  It’s how we operate.  Only by exposing the weakness of a friend, or an enemy, or an empire, can we make ourselves stronger, more perfect.  It hones us, and makes sure that we never lose focus of the Sight.  The Sight must be applied in all things.”

Rook keeps the weapon trained on the alien.  “How…how do I know that you’re not lying to me right now?” he says.  “How do I know this isn’t some kind of…of…Cereb deception?  What if they’ve programmed you, like a sleeper agent?”

“You don’t know, but by asking that question you are already practicing the Sight, and I both commend you and bask in the glory of your application of it.”

“
This is insane.”  Rook blinks disbelievingly, as if by doing so he may wake from a dream.  “If…if this is true, then why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I told you, it is difficult for my people to discuss.”