The Hydra Protocol
To Survive The Lurkers Among The Stars
The following is a short story I wrote as a sort of background for a character I play as part of a festival called Neotropolis. That in itself I a whole long story, but you don’t need to know anything about the festival to enjoy.
I hope that humanity will remember me as a savior, but under the circumstances I may need to satisfy myself with being remembered at all.
I have come to believe, I am sorry to say, that there may be nobody left to remember me. And even that assumes that I will ever have existed.
Perhaps I should start from the beginning.
You may be surprised to know that I was born on Earth, to a completely unremarkable middle-class family. I was an odd child, gifted yet socially isolated, but my youth was uneventful. I attained duel degrees in planetary science and xenobiology from one of the pedigreed old universities of the North American east coast, but my ambitions towards higher degrees and a career in research were sadly thwarted by a dispute with one of the school’s many ethics committees.
There followed a several-year stint aboard various commercial survey ships, in which I was engaged in routine assessments of planetary biospheres and asteroid mineral content. Needless to say, this was insufficiently stimulating for one of my talents, and so I quickly found myself in the spinward fringe, in search of less pedestrian occupation.
I soon met a captain by the name of Chainbreaker who took an instant liking to me, and so I found myself ship’s doctor aboard the Spartakos, a corvette of The Independent Fleet. The Kos business itself along the spinward fringe in a mix of exploration, security work, smuggling, and “acquisitions,” which I shall get to in a bit.
It was primarily the exploration jobs which motivated me to take the position. While of a similar nature to the work I’d done before, exploring beyond the edges of known space presented me with more adventure, and the opportunity to engage in something resembling true field research.
We charted new systems. I catalogued new species upon previously-unexplored planets. Most of all, I heard stories. Planets, and sometimes entire systems, scoured clean of life. Traces of long-vanished civilizations. Ghost ships of unknown origin, traveling at relativistic velocity out in the deep black, virtually impossible to intercept at sunlight speeds.
In time, despite my origins and an accent that never quite went away, I came to be accepted as a Belter. And I earned my name: Doctor Hydra, a moniker that would show itself to be prophetic in time. You will notice that I have not mentioned my birth name, nor the exact place of my birth. They no longer hold any meaning for me.
I suspect the Earth is on borrowed time in any case.
And now we come to my own ghost story.
A few years ago, we were conducting a routine mineral survey in an unexplored system, devoid of habitable planets, when we detected a lighter sitting upon a nearby asteroid. The odd thing is, we’d already scanned the asteroid and it most certainly had not been there just a few minutes earlier. Or so we all remembered, and our sensor logs agreed.
A few of us landed to check it out, and we found a single woman and a few survey drones, looking for all the world like we’d happened upon her in the middle of a mineral survey very much like our own. Except, no sign of her parent ship, which should have stayed nearby. Surveying the asteroid couldn’t have taken her more than a day or two.
When we approached, she attacked us with her bare hands, screaming with incoherent rage. “You killed them you bastards, you killed them all, you murderers,” that sort of thing. But killed who?
For all her rage Kydan-4 had no trouble subduing her, and we took her into custody along with her equipment and survey logs. The computers aboard her lighter, curiously, showed no record of any parent ship. And yet, it had to have gotten there somehow. A lighter can barely traverse a planetary system, and most certainly isn’t equipped with it’s own jump drive.
Due to her apparent insanity, the woman– Marianne, she was named– was placed into my care until we could drop her off at the next port of all. Once she calmed down slightly, she was able to explain her accusation: that we had attacked her parent ship, destroying it just as it attempted to make an emergency jump out-system, vaporizing it in a catastrophic drive failure.
Except, of course, no such thing had happened. Not that we were above such behavior. I should mention now that “acquisitions” is a Belter euphemism for piracy. Yes, we are pirates, at times, though less often than we used to be. Nevertheless, we had no attacked her ship.
Indeed, there was no evidence whatsoever, beyond Marianne’s own testimony, that her ship existed. Not even a hint of debris. Crash triple-checked the logs.
And yet she could describe it in such detail: every room and corridor, every decoration, even the serial number of the hull. She could name every crew member, and provide at least some detail about each person’s life history.
I searched the registries. There was no such ship.
We let Marianne off at Baptiste Station, with a few credits to get her on her feet. As pirates go, we’re far from the worst. She still cursed us for our supposed crimes.
The rest of the crew quickly put the incident behind us, but I have always been possessed of a curious mind. It is both a blessing and a curse. How had she and her equipment seemingly appeared out of nowhere, after we scanned that asteroid? Alone among our crew, I could not easily dismiss it as an equipment failure. We had more than one sensor looking that way.
And so with the help of The Moon Wizard, our hacker, I did a little digging, at every planet and station we visited. I quickly learned that her ship may not have been entirely imaginary.
The ship itself was the easiest to learn of: it had truly never existed. The serial number she gave me had never been used. The shipyard chose to skip over it after the order for the ship the number was slated for got cancelled.
The crew took longer, but I eventually found them, one at a time. They were all dead.
Oh, we hadn’t killed them. As far as I could tell, we’d never been in the same system as any of them at the same time. The engineer had died in a mining accident five years years before. The captain, a heart attack the year before. The ship’s doctor was the hardest to find; she’d been the first to die, having committed suicide in med school.
I also investigated Marianne’s history, and found no evidence that she had ever encountered any of them either. And yet somehow, she had told me about them. Everything she said about their life histories was accurate, up until the times of their death.
My own shipmates passed it off as the words of that rare sort of madwoman who does enough research to put together a semi-coherent delusion. I could also do the same, were it not for the question of how she came to be on that asteroid in the first place, or how we failed to detect her the first time.
It’s enough to get a man thinking.
Thinking about the ghost stories you hear out on the fringe. The dead planets, the mysterious ships that look nothing like anything anyone’s ever seen. The weird transmissions, the astronomical observations that just don’t make sense.
If you look hard enough, for long enough, some of them become more than just stories. I’ve seen the sensor logs on a few of them, reviewed a few signal intercepts. Even had a couple unexplained sightings of my own.
It gets a man thinking about supernovae. Specifically, the ones that shouldn’t happen. Every few decades we see a star blow up that just shouldn’t, based on where it is along the main sequence. Always well outside explored space, seen only through telescopes. Astronomers have a few theories about this, none of which I find very compelling.
And a particularly smart man like me, well, I get thinking about the jump drives. Batasi tells me they should have a failure rate of about one per ten thousand jumps, assuming they’re well-maintained, give or take a bit depending on the model. Instead the failure rate is closer to one in half a million. He admits that nobody knows why.
A lot of ships just disappear, of course. But even if you only count jumps that were observed from outside the ship, that failure rate is still one in several hundred thousand. The simulations insist it should be much higher. The companies that makes the drives can’t explain it either.
And so that gets me circling back to the ghost ships again. Some of them display tantalizing signs of technology superior to anything humans have developed. And yet none of them have ever been seen to make jumps.
Hell, most of them, like I said, are moving at pretty close to the speed of light. As if they don’t even have FTL of any kind.
Why would they do that? Why would beings so far ahead of us, resort to something out of a 20th-century sci-fi novel to get between the stars? Why do none of them seem to make jumps?
And that gets me thinking about physics. We’ve known since Einstein that traveling faster than light should be equivalent to time travel. Yet we do travel FTL, and it doesn’t allow is to travel back in time. Hell, we still haven’t entirely figured out why time only seems to move in one direction, but we know that it does.
Or at least we think we know that.
And if you’re a man of great intellectual curiosity, and admittedly more than a bit of pessimism, that could get you thinking about Marianne again. Thinking maybe she was right. Maybe we really did attack her ship and kill her friends. Maybe we destroyed that ship just as it was trying to jump away, just like she told me, and maybe that caused a catastrophic jump drive failure.
Perhaps everything happened just the way she said it did. And then, just perhaps, it un-happened.
Maybe if you push hard enough against space-time, you really can time travel. And maybe when you do that, the universe pushes back.
I’ve done a lot of thinking, and here’s where I’m at:
Theory: Catastrophic accidents involving jump drives– or any other potential FTL technology– have the potential to rewrite the timeline, such that everything and everyone near the accident ceased to exist years earlier.
Conjecture: The amount of space affected, and how far back the timeline is rewritten, is probably in some way proportional to the amount of energy involved in the jump. A sufficiently large FTL drive, causing a sufficiently energetic accident, could affect people who were nowhere near, and had nothing to do with, the jump attempt.
Theory: One or more unknown alien factions are actively hunting down and destroying technologically-advanced civilizations. They are ruthless enough, and capable enough, to destroy entire star clusters if that’ what it takes to get the job done.
Conjecture: The two may be connected. At least one of the alien groups is motivated at least in part by a desire to suppress the use of FTL technology.
Hypothesis: Some of the “ghost ships” that have been sighted are unconnected aliens who know all of this. They’re not the ones destroying civilizations– they’re hiding from the destroyers.
Hypothesis: We’ve already been noticed by these lurkers among the stars. Humanity has been transmitting signals into space for centuries now. Telescopes could detected the chemical signs of industrial civilization. We’ve seen alien ships, ergo they must have seen us.
Conjecture: A more advanced civilization may be able to detect FTL jumps at interstellar distances. We may be giving ourselves away every time we jump.
Conclusion: They’re already coming for us. Earth is doomed, as are the inner sphere worlds. Fringe colonies and even smaller outposts have the best chance; they’re smaller, give off fewer signals, and haven’t been around as long. But even they can’t last forever.
The way I see it, humanity has three options:
First, we follow the example of those ghost ships. Move as much of the human race as we can onto ark ships, voyaging between the stars at slower-than-light speeds. Spend most of our time in interstellar space, only making quick runs into solar systems to gather energy and materials. Become the galactic version of post-apocalyptic scavenger nomads.
Second, we can regress to a less technologically-advanced stage of development, sufficient to avoid attracting the ire of the exterminators. Certain neo-primitives already wish to do this for unrelated reasons, but for most people this option will be a non-starter. It also may not work. The hunters may not be mollified, and eventually people will forget why we made the choice we made, and we’ll be right back in the same situation– except they’ll probably know where to find us.
Third, we fight back. We claim humanity’s rightful place among the stars.
We’ll probably have to go with some combination of the first and third options. Currently, humanity is unprepared, and unequipped, for either. We know virtually nothing of the enemy, but I can say with confidence that we lack the technology to evade them, let alone defeat them.
It gets a man thinking that maybe it’s not enough to be a man anymore. Oh, we have our cybernetics, our gene-mods, our nanoware. Yet still we cling to our humanity, and humanity simply did not evolve to face this challenge. We’re not equipped to fight a war on a galactic scale, to think in terms of thousands, millions, perhaps even billions of years.
It has me thinking that the only way to save humanity is to render it obsolete.
I believe I’ve developed a way to begin that process. A first step for humanity along the ladder of transcendence. I’m working on a serum.
It is no easy thing to rebuild a mind. Our brains resist change, and for good reason: without stability, we would have no consistent sense of self. Evolution has given us a clear idea of who we are, at the cost of making us so hidebound that even modest efforts towards self-improvement require years of grueling work.
I’ve found a better way, but it is not pleasant.
For a few minutes around the moment of death, the brain enters a state of dramatically heightened neuroplasticity. The brain releases DMT, a potent but short-acting psychedelic, and neurons frantically rewire themselves in a final, usually futile spurt of growth.
We’ve never figured out what purpose, if any, this serves. I think that was the wrong question all along. We should have been asking what purpose it can serve.
This short-lived state of accelerated change could be quite useful, if only people could live to benefit from it.
I’m working on a serum. It has many ingredients, but they broadly fall into three categories, to accomplish three goals.
First, there’s the preservative component. Coagulants to stop bleeding, respirocytes to keep the body oxygenated, short-acting chemical preservatives to stave off decomposition and genetic breakdown for a few precious minutes. I hope to extend this to several hours, at least.
Second, there’s the transformative component. Psychedelics to magnify the already-heightened state of enhance neuroplasticity experienced at the time of death. Nanites to enhance intelligence, memory, self-control, reaction time, endurance, neuromuscular conductance, and a whole host of other attributes, through both genetic modification and more direct forms of tinkering.
Third, there’s the restorative component. Nanites and growth hormones to repair damaged tissue. Universal stem cells to replace that tissue that is behind repair. Still more nannies to deliver crucial nutrient to the body, more efficiently than natural blood ever could. And finally, stimulants to kick-start body and mind, effectively bringing the dead back to life.
Death is no longer the end, but a bold new beginning.
Results have been promising so far. The subjects can come back from most forms of death, though the destruction of the majority of the brain or heart, or substantial severing of the head, are obviously beyond the ability of my serum to fix. Resurrected monkeys display enhanced intelligence, strength, attentiveness, patience, and reaction time.
Personality drift is substantial, though often for the better. I’m working on that part.
Of course monkey research can only take you so far. This is meant to work on humans, after all.
What must come next would never pass a review board, even if I were an accredited researcher. All but the worst corporate researchers would be sickened by the thought. Hell, it even makes me blanche.
You’d have to be crazy to volunteer to be the first person to do this, and I need mentally healthy subjects. Informed consent will not be possible. Not with my limited means, and the need to keep this project secret until my work is complete.
To butcher an old cliche, you can’t make an omelette without killing a few people.
They will call me a mad scientist– I can tell that Chainbreaker already thinks that, and he has no idea what I’m planning. Under the circumstances, I suppose I may need to satisfy myself with being called a scientist at all.
For humanity to have a future beyond the next century or two, it has to be done, no matter how sickening it may be. I need human subjects.
This is where it pays to work aboard a pirate ship.
Postscript: Dr. Hydra was arrested for bioterrorism and sentenced to trial by combat at the hands of the Correctional Entertainment Corporation. The CEC also took ownership of his invention, which they began testing on combatants under the brand name NeoLife.
Following his performance in Season 1 of Neo Gladiators, Dr. Hydra was pardoned conditional on continuing to work for CEC on continued development of NeoLife. As of the pre-season for Season 2 of Neo Gladiators, NeoLife is in beta phase and very near to a commercial rollout.
