95: Hummers

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A month or so after Sema left us, Yamin started concentrating more on my general education. I wasn’t doing Education jaunts any more, so he compensated by having me spend time with various professionals and academics to learn more about the world. Math, engineering, physics, history, biology… it was usually just me and the teacher, but sometimes there was another one or two of the apprentices there.

After a lesson with an Arborean immigrant biologist, who explained biological symbiosis to Huspi and me in great detail up in the citrus forest of the treegrave, I broached the awkward topic that had been on the edge of my mind for months.

“So,” I said to Huspi as we drift-walked towards the elevator back down to the ring, “you’re a hummer?”

Ke raised an eyebrow. “Do you start all your conversations like that?”

“N-no, I just – ”

Ke was grinning. “Yes, I’m a hummer.”

“Oh. Have we – ?”

“Yes, we’ve had hummer captains in the past. We don’t spend all of our time wandering about the ship with our sight obscured, saying vague ominous things.”

“Are you – ?”

“No, I’m not interested in becoming a captain. I’m going into flight administration.”

“Working with the engines, then?”

He laughed. “I suppose it is a very stereotypical hummer sort of job.”

The elevator door closed behind us, and we were silent for a few moments while we adjusted to the descent.

“My sister is religious,” I said. “Not a hummer, though. She’s involved with something called the Smallest Possible Loop?”

“Oh,” Huspi said with sudden, shocking derision. “The loopies.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Do the hummers and the… loopies… not like each other?”

Ke shrugged vaguely. “I’m sure your sister is great.”

“Not the question I asked.”

Ke sighed. “We have certain irreconcilable philosophical differences. The loopies aren’t bad; they’re not a threat to anyone and they[re no doing anything wrong. I just think they’re, well, you know. Idiots.”

“Oh,” I said. “Is that all.”

“Believe me, so far as religious disagreements go, that’s nothing. The problem with the loopies isn’t that they’re harmful, it’s just… well, most of reality is an illusion, right? And their answer to that isn’t to try to look deeper or acknowledge that, it’s to create more illusion. They want to mess around on the surface of reality to hide a fear of what’s beneath, or maybe the fear that nothing is beneath. It’s like we have this big mystery of existence that it’s our duty and purpose to unravel, and they’re decorating its surface as much as possible and calling that the whole point of living. It’s childish, and it’s a major distraction from the real work of evolving as a people.”

“I have no idea what any of that means.”

“Yeah,” Huspi said. “I know. I’m bad at explaining.”

“What do you believe?” I asked. “I know it’s something to do with listening to the engines and hearing the ship talk to you?”

“Not the ship, not exactly. It’s not like the Courageous is conscious in any way except that it has a treegrave, and anyone can talk to that. The engines are a tool; it’s… I’m not good at explaining that, either. I can show you, if you want.”

I took a step back, which put me against the wall of the elevator. “What?”

Ke lifted kes hands. “I’m not trying to convert you or anything. Just if you’re curious, it’s easier to show than to explain, and you’re younger than fourteen so I can’t take you to a group meditation. If you don’t want to, that’s fine. Mana refused as well, when it came up.”

“Have you showed the other apprentices?”

“Yeah. I show anyone who asks, if they want to come.”

Well, Mana might be scared, but I wasn’t. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

I had to admit, I wasn’t exactly sure what the ‘it’ was. But we arranged a time when we would both be off-shift and not sleeping, and met down on the lowest floor of the ring, the industrial level. Huspi showed up in multi-layered dark wraps covering most of kes body and with gauze over kes eyes, and grinned at my surprise. “It’s easier if people know why we’re there without stopping to ask,” ke explained.

I’d never spent very much time down on the industrial level. I didn’t have reason to go down there very often, and most of the warehouses and big machines were behind locked doors, for safety reasons. Huspi clearly had some kind of security clearance, because ke got us through a small, plain door with a keycard and lead me into a very low, very narrow corridor. The lights in the ceiling were very faint, and didn’t reveal any doors, though there were some panels on the walls here and there, held on by latches that didn’t look too hard to open.

“It’s a service tunnel,” Huspi explained as we started walking. “The sound is usually better in places like this because there’s less soundproofing.”

Behind those panels were probably really important things, then; pipes and wiring and other things crucial to the ship. Things that engineers would maintain from in here. I didn’t like that; I didn’t like how easy it was to get in. What if someone dangerous came in here to damage the ship?

Then I noticed the very faint glint off a camera lens above us, and relaxed. If anything suspicious happened in here, the treegrave would report it.

The service corridor wasn’t very long, and there weren’t any turns or forks. That made sense, since we were basically inside the outer wall, with the hull on one side and the back wall of outer rooms on the other. Huspi had said that the soundproofing was worse in here, but I couldn’t here anything. Ke seemed to, though. Turning kes head this way and that and taking uncertain steps forward.

“Here,” ke finally said, about a third of the way down the short corridor. “This is one of the best spots in the ship to hear it.”

“The engines?”

“Yes.” Ke guided me to sit down in a very specific spot against the outer wall that looked just like the rest of the wall, and then stood back. “Don’t be too disappointed if nothing happens,” ke said. “Sometimes that’s just how it is.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Rest your head against the wall, and just wait and listen. Listen to the ship.”

I rested my head back against the wall. I couldn’t hear anything except our breathing. Huspi sat against the wall further down the corridor, not looking like ke was listening for anything, more like ke was just sitting down to wait. Nothing happened, and kes head eventually angled away from me; ke wasn’t watching me.

But someone was.

The corridor, suddenly, felt even smaller; the faint light above was too bright and too dark at the same time. Too much light made too much shadow, and I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel them watching me, just standing there right around the corner, except there were no corners, hiding in the shadows that weren’t really there. I closed my eyes tight, as if making sure that I couldn’t see them meant that they couldn’t see me, but that didn’t work. My heart was racing; it was getting hard to breathe. I forced my eyes open and saw immediately that closing them had been a mistake, because the watcher had gotten close, very close, and their face was looming right over me, two huge eyes and a flat nose and a lipless mouth full of uneven teeth and two hands that were reaching out closer and closer to me but somehow never touching even though they were

I was jerked to the side, pulled down the corridor, and as the angle changed I realised that the face had just been a collection of random shadows. I scrambled to my feet and Huspi lead be further away.

“It’s okay,” ke said. “It’s okay. You’re safe.”

“What was that?”

“What did you see?”

“Something you should’ve warned me about!”

“I’m sorry. You’re right, I should’ve warned you. But it’s better if you don’t know what to expect.”

“Oh, it’s better, is it? That was better?”

“Preconceptions can affect the observation, or make it fail. What did you see?”

“It was looking at me.” I took some deep, slow breaths, trying to slow my heart. “Why was it looking at me?”

Huspi hesitated. “We don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“We’re not even sure if there is anything looking. It’s possible that something might be happening that’s beyond our comprehension, and observation is just the closest way our brains can conceptualise it.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, it’s like… okay, so brains aren’t designed to experience reality, right? That’s not what they’re for. Do you know about evolution?”

“Vaguely.”

“Okay, so you know that the basic building blocks that make us ‘us’, all the parts that happened before genetic engineering, were done by trial and error, and the ‘error’ part was pretty tautological. Any change that decreased its own ability to persist tended to die out, any chance that increased its own ability to persist tended to persist. On average. So while we feel like conscious beings that live in the real world, our minds weren’t built to experience reality, They were built to keep the bodies they’re in alive, and help those bodies make more bodies with brains in them. Whether something we see or think or understand is accurate doesn’t matter.”

“I think experiencing real things is pretty helpful to staying alive,” I said, not sure where this was going.

“A lot of the time, yes; it can help us make better and more reliable decisions. But not always. Sometimes it’s better to make fast decisions, or safer decisions; sometimes it’s better to have a brain that thinks a random fold in fabric is a face a hundred times in a row than one that’s more accurate but might miss the wrong face. Sometimes being wrong makes better decisions, or safer decisions, or decisions that aren’t quite as good but are good enough and are made faster and with less energy. We can mostly assume that what we see and understand is close enough to reality to get by, but we have no way of knowing how much of reality we just didn’t evolve to notice in the first place. Our brains are full of all kinds of filters that probably protected us a long time ago, but now that we live in safe, advanced communities, we don’t need them. But we’re part of who we are. They’re not easy to turn off.”

“And that’s what that was?” I asked. “turning off a filter?”

“There are some sound frequencies that change the way people think, that show us things that we don’t normally see. There are drugs and light patterns and other things that can do it too, but the sounds, the song of the engines, are the safest starting place. It differs from person to person, but exposing most people to the sound makes them aware of others – other beings watching us, beings that we can’t usually see.”

“They’re terrifying,” I said.

“That’s the usual consensus, yes. But that’s just an illusion; they might be overwhelming in some way that our brains are trying to conceptualise, but can’t. They’re not actually dangerous.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Because if they wanted to kill us, we’d be dead.”

I laughed at that. I laughed and I couldn’t stop.

“We should get out of here,” Huspi suggested. “The hummer outfit helps, but security gets nervous if people hang around in the tunnels for too long.”

Out in the normal light of the ship, I calmed down a lot, and felt a little silly. I was too old to be scared by spooky stories. So the hummers had found ways to make people’s minds play tricks on them; so what? I knew that there were drugs that could make people see things that weren’t there. And I’d seen scary faces and heard scary noises in the dark before, as a little kid; those things were normal. It didn’t make them real. I mean, even nightmares were seeing things that weren’t there. The being in the corridor had felt real, but…

“I have dreams, sometimes,” I found myself telling Huspi as we headed for a ramp up to the next level.

“Oh?”

“In the dreams, I’m in a viewport, looking out into space. I’m talking to the ship, or maybe I’m a part of the ship? Or I’m talking to the universe, or I’m a part of the universe. I don’t know. But it tells me – or I learn – about the future. About bad things. I talked to a counsellor, and he said it was just anxiety. Because we’re going to be building a colony and all.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. But the dreams don’t feel… normal. And that in the corridor didn’t feel normal.”

Huspi nodded.

“What do you think?” I pressed.

“Well, I’m neither a priest nor a psychiatrist.”

“But what do you think?”

“I think it doesn’t matter. If your dreams tell you that something’s wrong because you know in your heart that something is wrong, or if they tell you that something’s wrong because you’re perceiving an outside force that knows it… the end result is still that something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

“Neither of those is what the counsellor said. You don’t think it’s anxiety.”

Huspi shook kes head. “I don’t know you very well, but I’ve noticed that you’re very perceptive. And your dreams are right. Something is wrong, and we’re right to be scared about the future.”

Did Huspi get it? Did ke understand the danger around us, understand that we needed to outrun the fleet?

I tried to subtly needle kem for more details, but apart from saying goodbye to me at the ramp, ke wouldn’t say another word.

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