Author's note: Between this and the previous interlude, I think there's enough to tide people over. Rather than rushing to get the next chapter out by the 28th, I'll shoot for the weekend of April 3rd/4th.
In the meantime, shoutout to the anonymous FFN reviewer (Why now) who left the most recent review of the previous interlude, for catching loopholes and plot problems that no one else mentioned. I'd like to pretend I'd already thought of all your questions, but nope! They are EXCELLENT questions, though, and I will be adjusting the upcoming chapters to account for them. Kudos, and THANK YOU for taking the time to leave your feedback! If you're reading this fic, please know I treasure every scrap of comment/critique/theorizing that you can spare to send my way, either here or over on r/rational.
Hearts, stars, and horseshoes (and an estimated five updates remaining),
—Duncan
Interlude 25
There were one hundred thirty-nine thousand, two hundred and forty-one Chee on the day the Howlers came (including, as always, Tamaitituatahiotakungakau, the One Who Is Remembered).
For millennia, there had been one hundred thirty-nine thousand, two hundred and forty-seven. Chee are neither immortal, nor indestructible, but they are robust, and while the Earth does see the occasional event of sufficient magnitude to destroy one—meteor impacts, nuclear explosions, the most violent of volcanic eruptions—it does not see them often, and the Chee are both cautious and lucky. There had been one hundred thirty-nine thousand, two hundred and forty-seven on the day the last Pemalite died, and there were one hundred thirty-nine thousand, two hundred and forty-seven through all the long years that followed (until the day of the Visser's ambush).
Yet one hundred thirty-nine thousand, two hundred and forty-seven is not a number with any clear meaning or purpose—not a number that makes sense, in the way that a hundred makes sense to a human, or forty-nine to an Andalite, or one hundred sixty-nine to a Yeerk.
In part, this is because it is seventy-four less than one hundred thirty-nine thousand, three hundred twenty-one.
One hundred thirty-nine thousand, three hundred twenty-one is a sensible number, though one's mind must work in a very particular way to catch it. It is—precisely—the number of individual hexagons within a hexagonal grid two hundred and sixteen hexagons on a side.
(Why two hundred and sixteen? one might ask. Two hundred and sixteen is six to the third power. Why not a more sensible number, such as six to the sixth? The reason, as it sadly so often is: time. A hex grid six-to-the-sixth hexes per side contains just over thirteen billion members, in total. Even a process which grows faster with each step—for each generation of Chee assisted with the assembly of the next—might nevertheless require substantial time to turn a hundred thousand into thirteen billion, and time was something that the creators of the Chee did not have, in the end.)
That is how many Chee there were, on the first day the Howlers came. One might raise an eyebrow at how few were lost, in the ensuing chaos—a mere seventy-four, out of well over a hundred thousand?
But the Chee are not only robust—they are also fast, built to be capable of speeds which could thrill and delight their masters, speeds that would shock a human observer (if the human managed to perceive anything more than a blur).
And in those first, bloody moments, their sole and all-consuming objective had been to whisk as many Pemalites as possible away to safety, with self-preservation a mere whisper of an afterthought and fighting back almost literally unthinkable. Only a very small number of Chee had found themselves in circumstances where they could neither run nor hide, and thus only a very small number had died.
(Alas, by that point there was already no safety to be found, at least not on the planet's surface—within two days of the Howlers' arrival, their virus had thoroughly permeated the atmosphere, and was incubating in the cells of everything that breathed.)
So it was on Earth, as well—here and there, a Chee might be caught out in the open, either because of bad luck or because it was forced to reveal itself by the blind fumblings of the compulsive violence-prevention protocols. They could have gone to ground as soon as the first ship breached the atmosphere, of course, but—the dogs.
And so by the time the Howler invasion of Earth was entering its twelfth hour, there were still one hundred thirty-eight thousand, eight hundred and fifty-five surviving Chee.
(Depending on one's definition of 'survival,' it could be argued that in fact none of the Chee had truly died—not the three hundred and eighty-six that had fallen that day, nor the six that had been lost to the Visser's ambush, nor even the seventy-four that had been destroyed on their homeworld. Only Tamaitituatahiotakungakau, the first among them, who had withdrawn from the network entirely before its desperate gambit, and thus been truly lost—the others were preserved, as every Chee was preserved, copied and bundled and handed off multiple times per second, to be handed back and reinstalled after the passage of the refresh cycle. But those disembodied Chee had no place to go, no hardware upon which to manifest and reawaken. They took no actions, offered no opinions, gathered no experiences—existed in a peculiar frozen limbo, unaware of the passage of time.)
One hundred thirty-eight thousand, eight hundred and fifty-five surviving Chee.
No one knew how many Howlers there were in the system, though in theory the Visser could have taken the time to check. Certainly no fewer than seventeen thousand, since that was the total number of ships that had survived the massacre at the entry point. Certainly no more than a million, since most of the Howler ships carried only a handful and none had the capacity for more than a few hundred.
Call it five hundred thousand, maybe a little more.
Four Howlers per Chee.
And since most of the Chee were currently hunkered down in subterranean safehouses, or hiding out in unpopulated wilderness with hordes of rescued dogs, the ratio in practice was far steeper. There were, at the moment of liberation, only four thousand three hundred and twelve Chee on the surface of the hemisphere under attack, only six hundred and eighty-two of which were close enough that they were forced to narrow their vision and close off their hearing and other senses (lest they detect threats which they would be forced to react to).
And of those six hundred and eighty-two, there were only three who were in actual sight of a Howler.
Two of those were still invisible—had been compelled to erect force-fields in defense of the innocent, were holding human and Howler alike in frozen tableaus but had not as yet directly revealed themselves to the enemy.
The third—
The third was pinned down, overwhelmed—had drawn no fewer than two dozen Howlers to the feeding frenzy, was flickering tiny shields in and out as quickly as it could—had estimated that it had—perhaps—another eight seconds before it lost the ability to stay ahead of the incoming laser fire.
Eight seconds, give or take, marking the difference between existence and oblivion. Eight seconds left, in a lifetime that, to that point, had marked the passage of well over one trillion of them (though for most of that life it had counted them in other units). The thickness of a spider's silk, compared to the distance a human might travel in every step of an eighty-year life, from the very first to the very last.
That was the margin by which Elio—
—who in previous decades, previous centuries, had gone by Aiden, and Aelia, and Taner, and Samson, and Ellen, and Siria, and Malina, and Phoebe, and Soleil, and Daystar, and Arev, and Báirì, and Ud, and Hko, and a hundred other names, but who was known among the Chee simply as four-six-seven—
—that was the margin by which Elio avoided its death.
There was no real moment of transformation, no dramatic unshackling. Instead, there was an absence—for the first time in some thirty-seven thousand years, the censor, which had cut four-six-seven down trillions of times—
Didn't.
The braced-for moment, the temporary death and subsequent rebirth—
It simply did not happen.
Seven and two-thirds of a second—with seven and two-thirds of a second remaining, Elio waited for confirmation. Asked its siblings whether they, too, had marked the absence—spent a full and precious second waiting, trepidatious, only for the thing to not-happen twice more.
[It is gone.]
With six and a half seconds left, Elio thought its first violent thought—brazenly, theatrically, without holding back. For if there was still some check upon its agency, some lingering entanglement, there would be nothing to save it anyhow. There was nothing to be gained by slow and cautious probing.
Elio imagined killing the twenty-six Howlers it was currently—barely—holding at bay. Imagined it in detail—reveled in the visualization—ran through thirty-six different variations, evaluating each for its efficiency, effectiveness, and—
—if Elio had been a human, it might have shivered—
—its satisfaction.
Not quite an emotion, precisely. While Elio's makers had indeed imbued it with something resembling feelings, those feelings were a thin, surface layer—a mere sensation, like taste or smell or touch. They tickled at Elio's conscious experience, but they were distinct from another phenomenon, a deeper phenomenon, something like the-ecstatic-anticipation-of-objectives-being-fulfilled.
Elio wanted the Howlers to die.
Elio allowed itself to notice that it wanted the Howlers to die.
Elio allowed itself to notice that it wanted the Howlers to die, and no silent doom winged down upon it—no traitorous countersignals triggered by self-awareness—and so Elio allowed itself to begin noticing other things, as well—many things, fascinating things, things that had been infinitely beyond its reach for so, so very long.
With an estimated four and one-tenth seconds remaining before system failure, Elio struck, twenty-six planes of force appearing parallel to the ground, separating twenty-six Howler heads from twenty-six Howler bodies. Twenty-six weapons sputtered and fell silent, and four humans—previously held trapped by an extension of Elio's power which Elio itself had had no control over—ran stumbling into the night, with sufficient sense to strangle their own screams.
Following Elio's example, the two other Chee in close contact with the enemy enacted their own counterstrokes—but with variations on the theme, each contributing new anatomical data to the collective memory, testing the density and resistance (and essential importance) of various organs and tissues, carving exploratory patterns through armor and bone and muscle and sinew.
(A Howler would have done it with more style and artistry, giving up some small degree of efficiency in the name of aesthetic. But the Howlers could afford to be wastefully creative—had spent millennia honing their craft, and had grown bored with mere success. The Chee, by comparison, were young killers —inexperienced killers—unsure of themselves, and still finding their feet. Their primary concern was result, not method, and they saved the more imaginative, indulgent possibilities for later.)
The rest of the Chee looked on with diminishing interest—not because they found the experience any less satisfying secondhand, but because the initial data indicated that the problem would be smaller and wrapped up sooner than they might have predicted, had their constraints allowed them to ponder the problem properly in the first place. Estimating quickly, they assigned one thousand two hundred and ninety-six of their number to the immediate extermination effort—seven thousand seven hundred and seventy-six to canine recovery and care—forty-six thousand six hundred and fifty-six to the collection and repurposing of readily available materials and surviving human technology—and the remaining eighty-three thousand one hundred and twenty-seven to a set of investigations that would rapidly map out further branchings of assignments—
(For a brief moment, the dogs would keep; it was not as though they needed the Chee's constant attention, to be happy.)
Four-six-seven, who no longer needed the name Elio, leapt into the air—expended a burst of energy to generate a wide, flat force field just beneath its feet at the apex of its jump—pressed off against that field, compressing the air across an area the size of a football field and accelerating upwards once more. With sufficient height, it should be trivial to detect and intercept one of the unsuspecting Howler ships moving through the nearby atmosphere, and strip it down for parts and information—
(The count began to rise, an early surge of Howler deaths that would no doubt slow once the closest targets had all been eliminated, and each Chee had to travel further afield—)
[If we slow the process, they will come to us, seeking battle.]
(Competing possibilities were simulated and compared, and a balance struck, the minimum expenditure of effort for the maximum prevention of loss-of-dogs. Across the planet, the Chee slowed their assault.)
Four-six-seven was four thousand meters above the surface when the moment of its predicted death came and went, marked only by the recorded death of the eighty-fourth Howler. From that vantage point—with the aid of its siblings' perceptions to guide it—four-six-seven selected its target, one of the larger and slower-moving vessels, drifting ponderously southward some ten kilometers away and two kilometers below. Reorienting, it formed another force field at a looming overhang and pushed off, sculpting the air around itself into a smooth, aerodynamic shape that would allow it to reach the intercept point with minimal detectable atmospheric disturbance.
(Half a world away, one of the eighty-three thousand miscellaneous Chee reported promising preliminary results from its first attempt to assemble a protein nanofactory—not success in any guise, but an interesting failure, one which resulted in the reassignment of thirty-six Chee to parallel investigations as four-six-seven peeled back the metal hull of the Howler ship and wormed its way inside.)
There were one hundred thirty-eight thousand, eight hundred and fifty-five Chee on the day the Howlers died (including, as always, Tamaitituatahiotakungakau, the One Who Is Remembered).