it refused to answer meant yes.
“So, the creators of the Nanos are biological. They come from a gas giant like Jupiter, in a star system outside of our own. I’m really starting to get somewhere.”
The ship stayed quiet. I was beginning to understand the Alamo. My statement had been analyzed, and it had decided no action was necessary. I hadn’t asked a question. I hadn’t given an order. From its point of view, there was nothing to do.
I sat down and typed out an email to the Pentagon people. If the Macros showed up right now and I was summoned up to fight them and the Alamo was destroyed, I wanted this information to be transmitted to those who might find it useful.
“Okay, Alamo, we can discuss your mission, can’t we?”
“You are command personnel.”
“Yes. And what is your current mission?”
“To obey command personnel.”
“What was your mission before the current one?”
“To locate and gather command personnel.”
“Exactly. And what was your mission before you were to locate and gather command personnel?”
“To gather information on biotic species.”
Ah, I thought. Very interesting. The ship was a science vessel, an explorer, before it was sent on this mission to find people to staff it. But why? Why didn’t these aliens just man the ships themselves? As I thought about it I came up with some simple reasons. If they were far away, the space flights might take too long. Maybe the oceans between the stars were so vast, even for the creatures that created the Nanos, that they couldn’t cross them. Or maybe they just didn’t want to spend their lifetimes in a ship. I’m sure that when Earth eventually sent out her first exploratory ships to other star systems they would be robotic.
I thought it might be more than that, however. This was a war. The Macros had been showing up in waves themselves. They had to be coming from somewhere. So why had the creators of the Nanos sent hundreds of their lightly-armed science vessels to Earth without sending some of their own people to man them?
I thought about what kind of life might exist on a world like Jupiter. Heavy gravity. Radiation. Harsh gasses creating an atmosphere thousands of times thicker than ours.
“Alamo,” I said, pausing to carefully phrase my question, “your creators can’t leave the gravity well of their planet, can they?”
“I am not permitted to describe my creators.”
“Ah,” I said aloud. That was a surprise. They could leave their gravity well. That wasn’t what had stopped them. I had thought maybe the pull of their world was so great that it had left them with no choice but to send up tiny robots to do their space exploration for them.
I thought about gas giants. What kind of creature on Earth had any kind of similar environment? Perhaps a deep-sea creature? Something from the cold, dark depths? What were they like? Then, I thought I had it.
“Your creators can’t survive outside the gravity well of their planet, can they, Alamo?”
“I am not permitted to describe my creators.”
I laughed aloud. There it was, a clear yes answer to a negative question. They were something like deep- sea fish. If you pulled them up into space, they popped. They could not tolerate weightlessness. They were accustomed to a crushing gravitational pull. Maybe their internal organs couldn’t operate without gravity. Decompression could be controlled, but the suddenness of a launching spaceship might be deadly to them. They probably would explode. That’s why they’d sent the Nanos out here to explore for them. Because they couldn’t do it themselves and survive.
What a great curiosity they must have! I imagined the frustration of an intelligent, technological race, stuck down upon a gas giant with an impenetrable atmosphere. They had probably never known what was up there, beyond their dense skies. They would have never known there were stars and other worlds. They’d probably barely understood they were circling a sun. The atmosphere of such planets was so dense. No technology I knew of would be able to gaze up through it.
In fact, the more I thought about it, the more these answers the Alamo had given me made sense. Nothing aboard the Alamo was built for a sighted creature. What use would a window be on the surface of a gas giant? On Jupiter, there would be little light or visibility. It would be like living in a permanent, thick fog, or at the bottom of an oceanic trench. On Earth, the creatures we’d found in such environments were quite blind. So, the beings that had built this ship hadn’t built windows or view screens into it. Such equipment would never have occurred to them. Still, they had to have some way of sensing a three-dimensional environment. The Nano ship certainly did. Maybe they used sonar, like bats or dolphins. Or perhaps they used a radiation sensor, such as the heat-sensing organs of snakes.
Sandra showed up sometime during the following minutes as I pondered the strange beings who had built the Nanos. I sat there, staring at my computer and periodically marveling at the walls around me. Somehow, knowing just a little about the aliens that had built the ship made it seem all the more impressive. I saw their ship in a new light. I hated them less too, for having indirectly killed my kids. Maybe they had sent out these ships with the best of intentions, but the robotic nanites had executed their programming in a typically merciless way.
“You’re awake,” she said, giving me a light kiss.
I blinked, staring at nothing. In my mind, I saw creatures on dark, clouded worlds. Were they floating gas- bags? Or maybe dense flatworms that crawled upon the surface?
“Hmph,” said Sandra, miffed.
“Sorry,” I said.
“What has you so entranced?”
“You do.”
“Liar.”
I told her about the talks I’d had with the Alamo. I described the method I’d used to trick information out of the ship by asking questions it hadn’t been programmed to refuse. She seemed alarmed that I would discuss my trickery so openly while the ship was listening.
“I assure you, it won’t matter. This ship isn’t a person. It is an artificial intelligence. And it isn’t really that bright. It can do what it can do, but it isn’t a fast learner.”
“I’ll take your word for it. But it had better not be plotting to dump us out for espionage or something.”
I described the beings who had built the Alamo, and she was as intrigued as I was about them.
“They live under crushing gravity?” she asked. “How can they survive? What do they eat?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t think anything could live on such worlds. But we have discovered life in nooks and crannies around Earth where no one expected to find anything.”
“They are afraid of the Macros,” she said, with sudden conviction.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because they’ve worked hard to hide their homeworld from everyone. And they sent out these ships to find people to help them fight. They must have surveyed a lot of worlds, and when they ran into the Macros, they changed the mission to one of marshaling armies with their science vessels. Maybe, back home, they are secretly building battle fleets now.”
I thought about that. “You have a good point. If they had known about the Macros when they launched these ships, they would have built warships and sent them instead. What we are sitting in is a converted science vessel. That’s why it takes twenty of them to face a single Macro ship.”
“What should we call them?” she asked.
“Who?”
“These people who created the Nanos. You figured out they exist. You get to name them.”
I chuckled. “Well…” I said, thinking about names describing worm-like blind things. None of them were attractive or catchy. “I’ll call them the Blues.”
“Are they blue?”
“No.”
“Why that then?”
I told her about the blue men in my dream, and how they had inspired me to hack the ship’s defenses and trick it into talking about the subject.
