The Founder Effect, page 19
Mina scrolled through the Cerberus code on her tablet but couldn’t find anything obvious. If there was still some errant bit of code left from the hack, she couldn’t find it.
Maybe you don’t want to find it.
She missed her dogs. There was still a void in her heart at what they’d lost, one that shouldn’t be filled by machines.
In some ways, Cerberus was better.
Machines didn’t die. Their parts could be replaced. They didn’t go rabid because prions had eaten parts of their brains. And if they were to go “insane,” a reboot or a return to a previously saved state was a clean, easy answer.
Like the working dogs they were meant to replace, One, Two, and Three were not pets. They had a purpose and they were part of a very limited resource—one on which Antonia’s survival depended.
The colony simply wasn’t at a point where it could afford the luxury of “pets.” It was at a point where the crop failure could turn into starvation, and while she had no illusions that she was raising animals for food, she—
Somewhere on the other side of the flock, a ewe screamed. She pulled at the strap holding her shotgun to her back as she used her shepherd’s crook to part the ewes standing between her and the source of the scream.
Behind her, she could hear the distinctly heavier thuds of Three’s paws. Two was circling somewhere off on the right, by the tree line, betrayed by its reflective paint. One was off to her left by the stream, pacing up and down its length, keeping the sheep from wandering.
The screaming ewe was on its side, twitching, making that awful sound over and over again. Labor must have come on fast for her to have just laid down like that. The other ewes had backed away from the scent of blood. Had the robots allowed it, the sheep would have put even more distance between themselves and the screaming ewe.
A lamb’s toe—instead of a nose—hung out from the ewe’s birth canal. A contraction drove it out a bit more, making the ewe scream again.
Mina grabbed the leg by the joint and on the next contraction gave it a tug. A second leg came through. The lamb was halfway out when the contractions stopped. Mina reached for the knife at her thigh, cut the dead ewe open, and eased the lamb out.
She rubbed it vigorously and was rewarded with a sputtering breath. Mina kept rubbing, stimulating it to breathe. The drizzle was turning into rain, each pellet colder than the last. She slid her coat off her shoulders and wrapped the lamb into it.
The ewes were bunched up in groups, still skittish and unsettled. Mina headed uphill, careful of her footing on the muddy ground. She whistled, signaling the robots to drive the herd uphill. They didn’t have to go far to escape the scent of blood and death.
“Three, come here.”
The ewes parted for him—it.
One-handed, Mina dug through the panniers, found the lamb jacket, and wrapped it around the shivering newborn.
Wiping her brow, she looked around. There was no way she was going to find Twelve—the ewe that had lost her lamb—not with the way they were bunched up under the darkening skies.
She loosened the tent and let it drop to the ground. Then she reached for the tablet and tapped the controls, telling Three to find and bring her ewe number twelve. By the time she was done setting up the tent, Three was using its snout to gently nudge a harried looking Twelve forward.
Holding the lamb, Mina grabbed Twelve with her crook and pulled her into the tent.
Mina set the lamb down. It wobbled, still weak and cold. The ewe eyed the lamb, glaring at it suspiciously. It still smelled of death.
Mina nudged the ewe forward gently with her crook.
Patience. Give her time.
The lamb’s cry was so soft it was almost lost to the sound of rain hitting the tent. Mina held her breath.
She didn’t have a bottle or formula. There just hadn’t been enough room to pack everything she’d have had if she were back on Earth with help just a call or a quick ride away.
The lamb approached Twelve. She turned around a few times, skirting the walls of the tent.
Mina’s hands tightened on the crook.
The lamb followed Twelve. Still convinced it wasn’t hers, the ewe gave the newborn a head-butt and knocked it down. The lamb made a wounded cry, but it was already struggling to get back up, awkward in its strange wrapping.
There should still be plenty of oxytocin in Twelve’s system, driving a competing urge to mother, warring with the suspicion that something wasn’t quite right.
Did Twelve know that her lamb was dead? Did she even understand such a concept? Mina hoped not. How terrible would it be to be self-aware enough to know that you were food, that you were destined for the slaughterhouse, that the creatures that took care of you, that you trusted every day, only did so because they needed to eat.
Twelve leaned into the corner seam, pushing its weight into it, giving the tent wall a bit of a bow. She sniffed the air again and again, with purpose this time rather than panic.
The lamb was persistent. It waddled on unsteady legs, nudged Twelve’s underside and latched on.
Twelve’s eyes went wide, but she stayed in place. The harder the lamb sucked, the more her pose softened with relief.
“Good girl,” Mina whispered. “That’s a good little mother.”
Mina stepped outside and drew the flap closed.
She looked up toward the clouds and let the rain wash her face clean.
Even with the gray of the sky above her, that psychological wound in her gut seemed lighter somehow, as if part of it had closed—or healed—a bit.
Exploration had risen to the top of Unit_BA-2-T0’s queue. It set off to collect samples and scout ahead. The first water sample it obtained showed a slight increase in alkalinity.
Unit_BA-2-T0 took additional samples from sites farther upstream. The increase remained below the threshold where it would turn the water into poison.
Cerberus assigned a higher priority to further exploration at the next cycle and recalled Unit_BA-2-T0.
Unit_BA-1-T0 had been disconnected from the system for 2.1 seconds, well outside the parameters of what would be considered normal for its proximity. Cerberus pinged Unit_BA-1-T0 with a reconnect request. It took Unit_BA-1-T0 longer to respond than it should have.
Cerberus logged the anomaly.
Another night came and went. A smile pulled at Mina’s lips. She’d pulled the lamb jacket off the newborn under Twelve’s “that is my baby” glare. Her tent would probably never smell clean again, but so be it. It had been worth it.
Mina was knee deep in the stream, struggling with the tent as it caught water and turned into a giant water bladder. Dragging the wet tent out got dirt all over it, but she managed to keep it out of the sheep droppings and get it over the drying rack she’d built out of branches. Her coat wasn’t dry yet either, but at least she’d been able to change into clean clothes.
This patch of land was almost out of clover and grasses, but she had one more thing to do: bury the dead ewe. Mina wiped her hands dry on her shirt, toweled the dirt off her bare feet, and pulled on dry socks and boots. She tapped instructions into the tablet, telling the robots to keep the herd in place until she returned.
The tablet went back into her backpack, atop the shovel and her lunch. She filled her canteen with water and placed it on her belt by her knife. Shotgun in one hand, crook in the other, she headed downhill.
Mina had always had a good sense of direction, but the dead ewe wasn’t where she’d expected. She circled back, careful of the still-soggy ground.
Sighing, she lowered the shotgun and crook to the ground. Setting the backpack down in front of her, she pulled out the tablet. This far from the herd, the device only picked up the stronger transponders from the robots, but at this range there should have been a signal from the dead ewe’s tag. She’d planned on cutting it open, checking it for obvious signs of disease and taking pictures. It would all go into the upload to be sent back to Antonia via drone.
The hairs on the back of Mina’s neck stood up in warning. She stood, dropping the tablet and going for the shotgun. Her hands were tight around it as she slowly turned.
Nothing moved. Nothing stirred. Total silence, as if someone had flipped a switch and shut off the background noise made by Cistercia’s insect- and bird-equivalents. The only sound she could still hear was that of the rain-swelled stream.
The air around Mina was unnaturally still, but her heart was pumping, and adrenaline coursed through her veins.
Like distant thunder, a rumbling rose around her. Mina looked up, searching the sky. The wet ground shook beneath her feet and gave way.
The fall knocked the breath out of her. She sucked in a pained breath an instant before the stars blooming in her vision were swallowed by darkness.
Unit_BA-2-T0’s sensors picked up the P-waves of the quake first. Unit_BA-2-T0 had been scouting the day’s route in anticipation of AdminUser_Borlaug_Normina’s return. When Unit_BA-2-T0 had been a flying drone, it had recorded similar seismic activity. Based on its previous observations, it knew what to expect. First, the heard but not felt compressions and dilations called P-waves. Then, possibly, the oscillating S-waves.
Unit_BA-2-T0 ran back to the herd. Unit_BA-3-T0 and Unit_BA-1-T0 were already moving the sheep closer together. When the sheep finally felt the ground move, they would panic and scatter.
It took Cerberus less than a second to conclude that moving the herd to the flattest piece of ground was the best course of action. It took even less time to override AdminUser_Borlaug_Normina’s order to wait for her.
Cerberus was in place—all three parts of it—when the meadow started shaking.
Had they been border collies, they would have been limited by their biological bodies. Border collies could only run so fast. Nothing had been written into Cerberus’s programming to limit them to a collie’s top speed.
As the surface waves hit, Cerberus kept the flock together by running a tight circle around it. They ran fast enough to create the illusion of a fence. A fence that also bared its teeth and snapped at the panicked ewes that tried to break ranks.
Pain yanked Mina from the depths of darkness. The tang of blood filled her mouth. She coughed, igniting a fire in her lungs. She was on the ground, propped onto her right side, up against a boulder. The tree line was fuzzy, like a smudged painting that hadn’t been allowed to dry.
She coughed into the soggy ground, spitting mud and blood onto Cistercian ground. The motion made her head spin, so she laid it back down.
TRAPPIST-2 had moved a few degrees from when she’d last looked up at the sky. She wiped at her eyes and came away with bloody fingers. There was a cut on her forehead by the feel of it, right below the hairline. And a knot of pain at the back of her skull. She must’ve hit her head when she’d fallen.
After a few minutes, she slowly rolled over. With each blink her vision became clear. What had been a smooth hillside was torn up and distorted. Some of the trees had been uprooted; others, merely displaced at odd angles.
Her herd. She needed to get back.
Still shaking, she reached inside her shirt and pulled out her whistle and was about to make the “come to me” sound but changed her mind.
She was alive. The call would bring all the robots and leave the herd unprotected. The earthquake would already have panicked the sheep, and assuming the dogs had kept the ewes together or rounded them up after scattering, calling them would undo all their work.
Robots, damn it. Not dogs.
She needed her tablet.
Pushing herself up to her elbows only made her slightly dizzy. When the spinning stopped, she pushed up to stand but her left knee gave out.
Through her soaked pants, she felt around her knee. It was swollen and off center.
Mina took a deep breath and made little anticipatory puffs. One, two, push. Stars exploded in her vision, accompanied by a curse. A whimper joined them as she pulled the scarf from around her neck and made a tight wrap around her knee.
A few feet away, her crook was sticking out of the ground at an angle. Mina dragged herself uphill, favoring her injured leg.
She grabbed her crook and used it to stand up. The pain made her lower herself back down. Wrapping her fingers around the whistle, she considered calling for help again. Instead, she tucked the whistle back inside her shirt and pushed through the pain to stand.
The stock of her shotgun was a few feet downhill from the boulder that had stopped her slide. She limped toward it, testing the solidity of the ground around her with the end of her crook. Most of the loose topsoil seemed to have been shaken loose by the landslide.
She reached down and grabbed her shotgun. It teetered on the edge of a jagged fissure that had opened up in the ground. The fissure ran along the hillside for as far as she could see. Clouds of white gas were rising from its depths, released by bursting bubbles of mud. Her backpack was down there, half-buried. Not far from it, the carcass of the dead ewe kept it company.
Mina took a deep breath. It sent her lungs into spasms. Gasping, she backed away from the sulfurous gas. She was no geologist, but she did know that there were nastier things that seeped out of the ground than those that smelled of rotten eggs.
Things that burned. Things that killed.
My flock!
Using the crook for balance, she hobbled up the hillside until she was on stable ground, then turned for the creek.
It was filled with sludge, too muddy to risk drinking. She broke open the action of her shotgun, pulled out the shells, and checked both barrels for blockage. Mud had seeped inside it.
She made it to the stream without falling, lowered the shotgun into the running water. Water poured into the action and flowed down the barrels to the muzzles. On the third check, the barrels were clear enough to risk shooting. She reloaded the shells.
She aimed the shotgun upward at an angle and fired a single shot. It wasn’t the “come to me” whistle. But maybe, just maybe, it would be interpreted as a call for help.
Thunder boomed in the distance. Cerberus’s three heads turned in unison toward the distant sound. There had been no lightning and no clouds in the sky. Cerberus didn’t recognize the sound pattern.
It ran the frequencies through its catalog for comparison and found none. The analysis of the anomaly barely taxed Cerberus’s workload as it distributed tasks required to resettle the flock among its three components.
Keeping the flock safe was Cerberus’s main priority. AdminUser_
Borlaug_Normina’s absence would be logged every five minutes until the accumulated time exceeded the comparison set. Under similar circumstances, shepherds had been recorded as being absent for as long as 4.16 days.
As night fell, the sheep grazed and drank from the muddy, swollen creek.
By the middle of the second day, the herd had consumed the edible plants in the area and Cerberus made the collective decision to move upland.
Unit_BA-1-T0 lingered at the rear, maintaining a separation that was zero point two percent below the figure considered acceptable as the maximum distance from the flock.
Mina had been following the stream uphill for hours. The water tumbling past her was still choked with mud and debris but had cleared a bit. She’d been sipping steadily from the canteen she’d filled before the quake, but it wouldn’t last.
Shifting her weight, she lowered herself onto her right knee. She scooped some water into her hands. No longer crisp and clear it smelled like mineral water, but with a nasty tang to it.
As she lowered her hands the light revealed her reflection. Her hair was matted with blood, her face covered in mud, her chin and cheek bruised.
The light caught the silver of her whistle, making it shine. Her salvation was a breath away.
She let the water slip through her fingers. No fresh water meant she had about three days. And with the darkness falling, she’d better rest up for tomorrow’s hike.
Mina moved away from the stream, into the shelter of a downed tree, propped herself up against its trunk, and laid her shotgun across her lap.
At least the sound of Cistercia’s insects and birds had returned, and if any of them had been edible, she’d have spent the energy to make a meal of them. It worked both ways, not that it meant a predator wouldn’t try to eat her. It, after all, wouldn’t know she was inedible.
That night Mina dreamt she was a cavewoman wandering the hillside, foraging for berries. Whimpers rose from a hole dug into the hill. Cautiously she approached. Within, three wolf pups, their eyes still closed, wiggled about in the dirt. She should have run. Their mother could be back at any moment. Instead, she placed them in her basket among the berries and roots she’d found and brought them back into camp to suckle at her breast.
Two-point-zero-eight days had passed since AdminUser_Borlaug_
Normina had left the flock.
Unit_BA-1-T0 was standing above the body of a dying ewe. Obedient to its programming, Unit_BA-1-T0 remained in place until the ewe’s temperature fell to ambient or a higher priority task sorted to the top of the queue.
Cerberus noted the time of death and updated the census. This was the fifth ewe to die since the quake. All five had exhibited signs of exhaustion well outside the norm. Based on the similarities Cerberus tagged four other ewes, and five of the lambs, for high-priority monitoring.
It compared the data it had on post-quake die-offs on Earth and concluded that it needed more data before making a decision with a high enough degree of confidence.
If she’d had tears, Mina would’ve shed them. This was the third ewe she’d found, left behind as the flock had moved upland.
Mina walked past it, ignoring the exhaustion that had seeped into her. She licked parched lips that hadn’t touched water for two days. The unceasing ache of her knee screamed at her as the grade increased, drowning out the ache in her arms and hands.
