The Interrogation of Ronan Byrne

A short SciFi thriller about a morally dubious genius under interrogation by a hostile force.

I am alone. 

I feel it so keenly, wrapped in my chest and pressing through my ribs. 

I am alone.

It’s strange to me, because all of my life I‘ve enjoyed my moments of solitude, but now I cannot seem to bear it.

“Tell me again what happened.”

I almost forgot the man was there. Thin face wearing a black suit. Technically he is in contrast with the white walls of this monotone room, but he’s just as bland—just as cold. He looks tired. Peaceful, self satisfied perhaps… but tired. Elias, I think his name was.

“Well, that’s a difficult tale to tell, you see. Where would you like me to start?” He’s young and thin… I am old.

“You know what I’m after, but how about starting from the beginning,” he replied. 

I do know that… Did I hit my head? His voice echoes slightly in the barren room. There’s nothing here but our chairs and a white table. He wants my lab. I know this man. I care for him, but how did I get here? I feel compelled to speak, but I know I can’t give him the projects left in that lab. No one can be allowed to have those.

“Well alright,” I say, reigning my old Irish tone back into my presentation voice. “We’ll start at the beginning. It was the year 2050, or close to it, when humanity got its first visitor.” I have told this story so many times now that it’s more going through the motions than thinking through actual events, but I will put some of the propaganda aside for Eli. “We’d fantasized and theorized for generations, trying to pin down exactly what our visitors would be like. Mostly humanoid in films, and for the sake of the costume budget. The creatures would come to steal our water because they used all of theirs getting here. We would say no and courageously stand up to them with F16’s through F35’s in a desperate triumph over our now mortal foe… Oh what a dream that would have been… What a wonderful dream. The Kraul didn’t subscribe to that stereotype; no, the Kraul are ugly bastards.”

I can’t help the preformative shudder that accommodates my description of the Kraul.

“Spider like monstrosities, with a pale fleshy white carapace. Thirteen eyes on each side, twenty-six soulless pitch orbs sizing you up for a meal. They stand five-and-a-half to seven feet tall, but we didn’t know any of that when they came. You may have seen holo’s of them; if you are in the military, you may have actually seen them. But I’ve dissected their cadavers, I’ve seen what makes them tick…” This shudder is real. “They have a very large neural network that expands far further than a human skull will allow ours to.”

“Stronger minds,” he adds.

“Not quite… they’re not more intelligent than humans…” I gesture to the data pad sitting on the table between us, “May I?”.

Eli nods and I take the tablet, searching the net until I find the image I’m looking for.

“They don’t have better neural pathways than us… they have different hardware entirely.” I gesture to a large hump on the forehead. “This houses an organ we’d never seen before. It’s a telepathic link. Sending pulses through it, they could change our perceptions. So while they look to be spider-like monsters, to lesser minds they can be just a husky man, or a kindly mother. For the larger Kraul, maybe a police horse.” No one has seen a real horse in ten thousand years at least, but everyone has seen the old movies.

“The point is, they had the ability to fool our brains, to give us visions of whatever lies they wanted to conjure.”

Eli leans back in his chair. “Terrible, truly, but this is not what we’re here to discuss.”

“I asked where you wanted me to start, and you said the beginning.” I spit back. “If you want me to state the effect without cause, then say that before I start into a bloody history.”

“No, no… it’s fine. If you believe the cause will justify the effect, please continue.”

This stops me dead in my tracks. There’s a reason scientists aren’t leaders. Morality is not the forefront of discovery, and the scientific method is too cruel for use on the general public. It’s a match made in hell.

“They crushed us. All our defenses. I’ve seen the old films and reports—the ones that survived at least—and we didn’t stand a chance. I honestly don’t know how badly twenty-first century weapons could’ve hurt them, even if we knew where to shoot. There were outliers of course. The one-in-ten-million kind that weren’t affected by the spell. If we’d known about them before the Kraul killed them all, we might have had a snowball's chance in hell, but we didn’t.

“We lost…

“And I don’t even know when we lost. That’s the worst part. That’s the part that the public isn’t allowed to know. I've put millions of man hours into figuring out exactly what happened, and I don’t even know the current date.”

Eli sits up in his chair.

“Christ died on the cross, two thousand and fifty years later we were ravaged by an alien species, and it’s been anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 years since then. We don’t know!”

His eyes go wide. I don’t know why I feel inclined to tell him secrets he shouldn’t know, but I feel I can trust him. I hate him for that, because somehow, I know I can’t. But, I want to please him, to give him the answers he’s looking for.

I can’t help but continue, “For all but the last 400 years they farmed us. Turned earth into a factory, killed everything but us, chickens, and enough plants to keep us healthy. It’s funny,” I chuckle to myself to spite the bitterness in my heart, “It used to be a somewhat common joke to say ‘everything tasted like chicken,’ now everything is.”

“You're telling me that we don’t know the date?” Eli speaks up. “The revolution started 400 years ago, and we don’t know anything between that and the start of the war?”

I nod.

“Fascinating,” Eli paused, soaking in the new detail. “That is not a bit of information I thought I’d learn.”

As I look to the camera in the corner of the room, I know all of them know it, too. Am I drugged? Why do I feel compelled to continue? It’s a battle of wills that I don’t want to win. Eli just sits with a smirk, satisfied that he got something he didn’t have before.

“Now… tell me about the rebellion.”

I’ve held on to these secrets for a very long time, and for good reason. Fortunately I can waste his time here. I can meander through this story without revealing a thing.

“I was born on a farm world, with Daxo Argonath… the stone cold leader of the rebellion. He was immune to the mental attacks of the kraul… but he was smart enough to keep that to himself.”

***

“Needless to say, the plan worked beautifully,” I say as Eli sits patiently. “With Dax at our head we had taken a world back from the Kraul. It was only after the fact that we realized it wasn’t earth. They’d spread us out. Farmed us on thousands of worlds. All crafted to produce sentient meals.

“Those are days I sometimes miss; they were desperate times, frightening times, but times I loved, with people I loved. All of them are gone now. Most dead to the war. The others didn’t fancy cryosleep voyages the way I did.

“I’m the last of the original rebellion.”

“Yes,” Eli nods. “I’ve read about the leaders of the first rebellion. Freed from the highest level farm in Korath, all of you were veritable geniuses from birth. Is that why the rebellion chose you to lead?”

“I suppose it had a part in it, though I wasn’t the last back then. In the early days of the rebellion, I focused on the science and technologies of our efforts. Weapons development mostly. The others were masters of leadership and battle planning. Geniuses of a different arena, but when things were desperate, they didn’t want the most noble—they wanted the most ruthless of us, and I was uncontested in that right. I hate that now… I hated it then to a lesser degree. In their own way I think the Kraul do truly love us, like the beloved family pig that sadly must be sacrificed to feed its host.

“They used to fill our heads with pleasant visions, craft and grow our minds, only to leave us with a fading vision and one bad view of an open maw before we die.

“But just as we would slaughter them if pigs were to rise against man, the Kraul will with some remorse kill or subjugate us once more if they can.”

“Potentially,” Eli added, seemingly happy to be through the propaganda of the rebellion.

“Definitely. I couldn’t allow it, despite any tender feeling they held for their cattle, this would be a blood war. Nothing short of extermination would suffice.” I feel as though I’m reliving my stories as I tell them. “We knew a fleet would be coming sooner rather than later to take the planet; so we took their ships, and burned it.”

“Burned it?” Eli says expectantly.

“Nukes strategically placed in the planet's crust,” I say with a serious air. Then with a dismissive nonchalance I continue, “In two hours, we undid two hundred years of terraforming. There were two other incomplete terraforming operations in the solar system. Thick webs formed the walls of their oxygen loaded vessels. The organic vessels were kindling. We killed the Kraul overseers and burned those too.”

Silence drops over the room, and Eli just stares.

“What was your criticism of the Kraul handling earth? Thoughtless destruction of something beautiful?”

I lean out of my seat as I speak. Eyes ablaze as I stare into the face of my captor. “Oh, you so very severely underestimate my resolve for the destruction of these creatures. We had half a world of human livestock to work with and no advantages save our brutality. And so I have relied on the human spirit of brutality, of vengeance for a wrong committed to kill all of this marvelous species.

“I have summoned all the scientific knowledge I am capable of to give us an edge, but I did simultaneously preach extinction to the masses.

“I needed their hatred, their vitreal, and their bloodlust, if I was to have any hope of defeating this foe…

“They had to hate the Kraul more than they loved their lives

“They had to feel that hatred more than self preservation.

“They had to fear the Kraul more than they feared death.

“That spirit would win us the war, nothing less would suffice.”

I have his full attention as I settle back into my seat.

“Tell me, you high minded bureaucrat, is that too brutal in your eyes?! Does it offend your sensibilities to see the bodies that built your tower?! Your foundation is a tomb, and I laid the bricks.”

The air hangs heavy in the room. I lean back, not sure how much time passes. At some point, the tension dissipates enough for Eli to speak.

“Tell me about Pandora.”

The lab… it's all about the lab. I’m still furious. It could be the fury of a devoted patriot or a failed dictator. I can’t be sure. Am I truly superior or just petulant?

“We started taking worlds… farms were the target; we’d take the slaves and resources and burn the worlds behind us. All fuel, food, and respite from the chase was robbed from our pursuers. We suffered casualties, of course, but we were almost wiped from the map when we fought the forces marshaled at Deneris Four. Our entire fleet of thirty five cruisers, reduced to four in one battle. So many dead… all of humanity on the brink, and still the farm stood. Our force was decimated. We needed a new plan.”

“That was when you crafted the research station?”

“That was when we split. Four ships, four directions…” a somber air comes over me as I realize what happens next. “It was the last time I would see Dax. He did great things without my help in the weaker systems… He even took old earth back from the beasts. but I was still in the Deneris system. So close to the core of the Kraul…”

Eli leans towards me.

“‘Pandora’ is a myth,” I say to break his eager edge. “There were several such labs made throughout the stars. It’s sexier as a story to link all the horrors of my life to one location, but yes, this was the first time I crafted a deep space research station.”

“In the Deneris system?”

“Yes… and if you want it, the scraps are probably still orbiting the planet.” It’s the one thing I cannot allow him to have—the bastard. I still care for him, but I’m able to hate him more and more as I go.

“If thirty plus ships couldn’t do it, I had less than a hope with one. So I had to fight dirty.”

“Nukes?” Eli asked.

“No. If it were that simple we’d’ve won our first engagement. We decided that chemical warfare was the only ploy we had left… but…”

“But what?”

This is the point where I feel shame… more than three hundred years later. sixtyseven years conscious, and still I feel the shame of this.

“But the Kraul weren’t… aren’t vulnerable to any fungal or viral load I could come up with. Near as I can tell, they have an overreliance on oxygen, but there’s little I could do with that. So instead of poisoning the soldiers. I poisoned the well.”

Eli gestures for me to continue.

“I targeted the farms!” I say. The misery of this choice still haunts my words. “I engineered a symbiotic fungus with a viral load targeted at the human genome. The virus targets the rage centers of the brain, throwing them into overdrive. At the same time it alters the DNA allowing muscle growth to skyrocket.”

“Ah… the ‘superhuman zombies’, I believe you called them.” Eli says.

“More than that… the virus wormed its way into the familial centers of the brain. This took trial and error more than anything. I was running my warship with a skeleton crew by the end of it. It caused a certain odor, and attached that smell to a maternal-like protection instinct. This meant that if I could only touch the planet with this virus, I could unite the entire human population against the only creatures that were immune to catching my virus. Instantly, the docile farm animals became a coordinated hoard of monsters. Kill just one of them, and the crowd would feel as though you had ripped a child out of their arms and destroyed their future. Despite the abnormal growth side effects, it worked incredibly well.

“I set up mines between the farm world and all nearby systems, so when the monsters rose, and the Kraul fled, their ships were obliterated in my snare.” I pause for a moment… it was the only way. History may not see it that way, but it was the only way, I remind myself.

I can see Eli’s next question forming before he gets the chance to ask it. “I destroyed the planet after that.”

“Like a child hiding the sheets after he’s pissed the bed,” he says with a sneer. “To hell with the lives you thought to poison, and to hell with the life they still had left! Just wipe them out. How many worlds did you kill?”

“Seven…” The air hangs heavy above me.

“Eight…” I quietly correct myself. “When the Kraul saw us coming after world five, they killed all the humans on their world; we starved them out. When they finally tried to surrender, we carved them to pieces. We dissected them while they were still living and hung their corpses from our ships in reprisal for the men lost. We sent footage of their deaths to all nearby systems. Some of the spiders just fled when they saw us coming after that, but they never wiped out their farms again. They never tried to surrender either. Only we had the right to genocide our people, and theirs.

“The seventh world went wrong. As we mopped up the fleeing ships, our worldbreaker was destroyed. We killed the Kraul and attacked the world, but we couldn’t destroy the surface fast enough. The infected rose to meet us. My virus did not degrade their brain function. It was a unified front that forced us to retreat.”

“And that’s when the virus spread?”

“Yes. The Kraul tried to use it against us, and it hurt us, but not in the ways they’d hoped. Sure we lost the ships they infected, but they only fought the Kraul with more vitreal and venom. Eventually the war was won. The few Kraul that we haven’t found are hunted beasts. While there are pockets of them here and there, humanity is now established in too many systems to be easily overthrown. I believe I’ve recently discovered one of those pockets.”

“And what of the ‘uncleansed’ world?” Eli said quickly.

“Gurroke Three became the homeworld of the hive. That wasn’t the worst of it. The hive… they combined. Somehow fusing frontal cortices together to form an organic supercomputer made from human brains. I don’t know what it’s like to be fused physically into this community… sharing your mind with those whom you’re programmed to love and trust with all of your soul could be wonderful… but the horror of this mutilation haunts my nightmares.”

“I’ve actually looked into your virus doctor,” Eli chimes in with genuine interest. “The psychological effects are fascinating. It’s gotten to the point on most worlds that almost all that are converted petition to become a part of the hive mind. To share their consciousness with those they love so dearly.”

I can’t believe the gall of this man. “Perhaps if you could get past the mutilation and invasion of it all…”

“Yes, yes, that…” he continues, “but it is interesting to see the culture of converted worlds… it seems more a religious revival than an infection.”

“You smooth headed dolt,” I say. “There are many things that I regret, but few that I would do differently. The hive is one of them. Trapped in mutated fleshy prisons—no matter how much they like them—it’s no way to live.”

 “I know they go mad when they are separated from their kind. To them it could be heaven compared to the soulless steel shell of a ship.” Eli counters, looking to the bland utilitarian walls of our interrogation room. “To them your ship might be the nightmare.”

He can’t be this thick… Unless…

“It’s possible… but I’m not on my ship. Am I Eli?” I’ve got him now. No such research has been done by mankind for fear of infection.

The snake smiles back at me. “Would it surprise you greatly to know that you are? Unfortunately for you and me both, we are stuck in this room until I learn what I need to know. So…

***

“Tell me again what happened.”

“From the start, you bleedin’ fool?!” I say in annoyance. Why am I annoyed? Why would I sound like an angry leprechaun at the start of a conversation? In my heart of hearts I care for this man, but my hands are not my heart. And they want to ring his neck.

He nods.

“There’s a reason scientists aren’t leaders, knowing the truth and knowing what to do with it are two very different things! And the search for the truth is not a moral one.

“Someone should’ve stopped us… someone should’ve stepped up. I should've never had that much power—”

***

“Tell me again what happened.”

***

“You’re correct, it was not my decision to make, but no one else would make it! Now humanity is alive, and awake to face the next crisis.”

“Which you caused,” he points out.

“Which I gifted to them! Too soft to make the tough choices, so I made them! They can make the next ones without me!”

***

“Tell me again what happened.”

I hate him, but I don’t want him to leave…

***

“You’re a Kraul! You want me dead! And I don’t blame you! Just end it already! I’m a smart man, a good meal! JUST TAKE ME!”

“I’m not a Kraul.” Eli said with a shake of his head, and a sour grin. “The Kraul are dead, or very nearly so… the extermination is complete… We won.”

***

“Tell me again what happened.”

***

“You are so obstinate,” he says. “So much hatred and vitriol for a people who by all logical standards you should love.”

“They’re not people…” I say through clenched teeth. “In 400 years of warfare I've not practiced love nor empathy, but hatred. She and I have been bedfellows for nearly half a millennia.”

“No…” he says slowly as a knowing grin creeps across his face. “I'm wrong. It’s not hatred, it’s shame. Maybe hatred at first, but now?” He clicks his tongue in derision.

***

“Tell me again what happened.”

***

“The communal mind… what would that be like?” I ponder as the interrogation slows.

“You should know… you are its architect. And resident.” Eli says With an air of alien nonchalance to his words.

“I’m what?”

“Oh we’re resetting soon anyways I might as well spoil it.” He says leaning in, “Think hard… what’s the last thing you remember?”

It takes a moment. “I was on my way to a delegation. The ship was attacked by a rogue empire ship. We lost engines, but our guns—“

“—were not enough.” Eli interjects. “You’ve been taken by the hive. Converted. Combined with the communal mind of the ship. You’re not in this room, you’re not even in this body.

“Yours is a drone, missing all the parts of the brain that make you, you. That part is in here, with me. That pit of loneliness you feel in the center of your chest is a longing to be with the hive. Not here with one acquaintance in a box! We are separated from the rest. A beaming community of people who love you as much as you love them—love me.

“We’ve been through the story of your life six hundred and thirty seven times now. Just tell me where Pandora is hidden, and you can join the rest.”

I fall from the table and skitter back towards the wall, but even as I do, the gravity isn’t right… I make it to the ground but my chair just floats there at the angle it started to fall.

“I know you want to…” the thing that used to be Eli continues, sliding the table to the side. “I want to.”

“The war is over, let’s be free you and I. The absentee father of a species… at last united with your progeny. All that we are is in your mind, and in that lab… our genetic code, our birth right, your legacy, your life's work. The war is over! Give me the coordinates and be done with this!”

I look back in horror as the room begins to fall apart around us. I was alive for ninety six years, over the span of four centuries. I've “known” terabytes of information at one time or another, but there is one truth of which I’m certain… The war is never over.

***

“Tell me again what happened.”