Day 30

I exchanged no transmissions during my return to the dome. Most buildings had to be reconstructed rather hastily, I could tell. They were dull and straight, lacking any of the angled walls that had granted them their charm before. Any glint was gone from them, too. So were the holograms that used to dance in this shiny metropolis. The lighting had been reduced to the bare minimum necessary not to bump into a wall. For beings used to having anything instantly repaired, it must have felt like living in a bombed-down Dresden.

Speaking of Dresden, how did the Germans feel after that war? How did they feel, once they learned what they had enabled Hitler to do? How did they justify that before their kids?

How do I justify my cooperation with Sye?

Hitler came to the Germans when they were most desperate. When their economy was broken and everyone hated them. He blamed it all on the Jews and the Germans didn't even care if it was true. All they cared for was someone promising help.

Sye wasn't nearly as bad as Hitler - maybe this alien Ted Kaczynski was the hero of their own story. I could see parallels, however.

I just wanted to punch myself.

Crick and Helix occasionally came by and took checks if the terrorists had implanted anything into me. I could understand if they utterly hated me now.

As I had been informed, Sye spent their time wasting away in a cryo-prison. Their body had been frozen whilst their mind persisted in virtual reality so that they could consciously experience their imprisonment.

Would that happen to me, too? Or would they do anything worse, like torture?

I curled up in my dome and sobbed. Most of the seven days following the Sye incident had been spent sleeping.

In the time I was awake, I harmed myself so that they wouldn't do it. It was an odd habit I picked up back when people bullied me in high school. Would it deter them? No, but it made me feel better. This self-harm was how I experienced my autistic meltdowns. Any time the memory from the trauma came up, it was like an inner volcano boiling inside me. The only way I could leave off steam was by giving myself incredible pain.

I won't go into too much detail, but here is what I did.

I often picked up sharp sticks and sliced my arms and wrists open until my blood covered the sand. I didn't bleed out, thanks to the nanodocs, but it was the pain that mattered. When the sticks didn't do it, I searched for shards. Again, suicide wasn't the point. It was pain. Sometimes, I bit my flesh as well. When that wasn't enough, I butted my head against the walls of my dome as hard as I could. I did it as often as I could until I got a concussion and they had to fix me. When I didn't have the time for self-harm, I just cried day and night. The moment I regained my energy, I harmed myself again. To an outsider, this method of leaving off steam made me look like a freak, but to the Seizers, it was an odd curiosity.

Eventually, they medicated me until I stopped.

My face was so sunk in gloom, I didn't even notice Crick and Helix until they stood right before my doorstep.

"How is your state of mind?" Crick asked.

The phrasing was neutral, but I could feel from the transmission that they were anything but happy to see me.

"I'm sorry," I transmitted.

Ignoring my regrets, Helix sent another message. "How much did you know about the terrorists?"

I uncurled my body and took a seat on a rock, straightening my back as much as possible. Even in the company of aliens that understood no body language, it did no good to look like a baby.

"Back in the desert, they sent me a message," I transmitted. "They told me they wanted to free me. I saw a video clip where they put me in a vehicle. It had the symbol of a burning pyramid on it. Though, as I've learned from you, their actual symbol appears to be a spaceship."

"It is," Helix transmitted.

"So, who are they?"

"That's a long story," Helix said. "A really long story. For the record, the spaceship and the burning pyramid reference the same event. It involved hijacking a spacecraft and flying it into our arcology."

"So, you had your own 9/11?"

My translator did not convey the analogy as well as I hoped it would, as both stared at me in awkward silence.

Eventually, Crick must have caught on. "We are telling you this because the incident caused dramatic regulations on non-military spaceflight. It was why we did not have the funding for interstellar expeditions and why we could not send you home. They hoped to achieve a similar effect on AI."

"And they're damn effective," Helix said. "I don't just mean in how they're already succeeding because thanks to them, anti-technology parties are projected to win in the upcoming election. No, I mean in their methods. It's smart to use a cyborg as their double-agent in our midst. All other of their members are unmodified."

I nodded. Using a cyborg as a mole must have been like Al-Qaeda using a white terrorist to avoid suspicion. Let's cut to the chase though.

"So..." I began, "...what will happen to me?"

"What you did is inexcusable," Crick transmitted. "Normally, this should warrant the death penalty-"

"But since you helped, the judges decided that you didn't mean bad and were merely manipulated," Helix finished.

It was as if the burden of a supermassive black hole had dropped off my shoulders. I was sure there were caveats attached to this other than the fact that I was essentially doomed to remain here forever.

"Will I get my singularity stone back?" I asked.

"This is our next point," Crick transmitted. "Your stone has displayed anomalous behavior."

I raised an eyebrow. "Define 'anomalous'. And 'behavior'."

Crick followed up with a transmission of what looked like an antenna attached to a space station. A computer screen lay in the station and showed a horizontal green line representing the influx of information with its peaks and valleys. It reminded me of one of those heart monitor screens in a hospital. No idea if it really looked that way or if this representation was merely supposed to be more palatable to my mind.

Suddenly, the peaks and valleys became more intense. The signals were clearly outside of their standard deviation now.

"What you are observing is a radio wave signal," Crick transmitted. "This signal is not meant for us. It is meant for them!"

The next transmission showed a simplified map of Shadowmoon's solar system. It was the type of depiction you saw in textbooks where planets orbited unrealistically close to one another and with sizes not to scale. Just outside the system, the map wrapped the background stars' light like a funhouse mirror to indicate a distortion.

A wormhole.

Considering the map indicated two distortions in total, I couldn't tell if this was the stargate leading to Earth or a different one. Around the wormhole flew a red dot which I could only guess was what Crick meant by "them".

Zooming closer, the transmission revealed an asteroid-sized ship.

The ship that sent me here. Starsnatcher.

"The signal's source does not lie in space," Crick transmitted.

They put their tentacle in a pouch, rummaging for the true source of the signal.

Then, they showed said source to me.

It was my singularity stone.

"The signal contains all memories you had when Cyborg gave you your stone in the virtual reality," Helix transmitted. "The aliens that brought you here now know many of our society's secrets, including our relationship to general artificial intelligence and our interior political divisions. We already suspected that they might have brought you here to spy and searched for hidden cameras. However, we only did so in the scans of your brain. The green AI you carried with you was too complex for us to analyze."

A spy. That was my purpose here. That was literally what they had captured me for! Not for research purposes or anything, just to harm a bunch of aliens I hadn't even known about.

Why did they give Iris her stone then though and what about the other two abductions?

"That doesn't make sense," I transmitted. "There are too many unanswered questions. Why not use one of their robots for spying?"

"They tried," Crick transmitted. "We shot them down. The aliens anticipated our antagonism towards technology of that kind."

"To their credit, we would have never defeated our own AI without the alien robot's help," Helix added.

An awkward silence lay in the air for a while. The serpent robot saved us?

"So, what happens now?" I asked.

"Oh, we have similar AIs we can copy from neighboring countries and moons," Helix transmitted.

"No, I meant, what happens with me?"

"You remain where you are," Crick transmitted.

"But I can help you!"

Crick sent out mindwaves in response, but I drowned them with my own ones.

"Listen to me! I've brought you in this mess, but I can also make up for it. Okay, now they know your secrets and they want to use them against you, fine. We can do the same! These aliens have captured at least two more humans besides me, I believe I already told you. If we free them, I could talk to them and learn more about the enemy. You told me the government funds military expeditions. Maybe they'll allow this mission."

I left the last part unspoken. And maybe you'll fly me back to Earth as a reward.

Even besides that, I was just plain curious about the purpose behind the other abductions and that thing with Iris.

Crick blinked, but Helix cut off their word.

"I strongly doubt they'll fund a mission," they said. "There is no immediate-"

Something blinked in Helix's pouch. That handheld computer again.

"What is it?" Crick asked. "Are they reporting about my newest research paper?"

Helix did not answer. They turned the news screen first to Crick and then to me. There was footage of what must have been a wormhole surrounded by debris. Nothing I understood without context.

"One of the few space projects we did fund was sending spaceships to guard the wormholes closest to us," Helix transmitted. "It wasn't the one through which you came. As you can see, not much is left of our guards."

"We chose to guard this wormhole as it leads to an advanced civilization, one so advanced that even ours looks like Earth next to it," Crick transmitted. "Starships from the other side present a consistent threat; they reportedly kill anything they detect. So far, however, our defense has held up. Now that the guards are gone, the peril of an alien invasion grows with every day."

Helix's computer blinked again and they got a call from the government, discussing what to do next.

I had to atone for what I did.

Preventing an alien invasion could save billions of Seizers. Of course, saving even a billion lives won't bring back those that died because of me. You can't just count all your good deeds and then subtract the bad ones.

Still, I wanted to leave the world a better place than I found it. Only then could I lie on my deathbed and look into the mirror with pride.

Looks like this adventure isn't over yet.