Taj’s Jeep stopped fifty meters from the base of the craft. “Wait here,” Taj told Tea. To his surprise, she did as ordered.
He and Kaushal hurried toward Adventure now. What they saw was devastating—a young barefoot Hindi in what would have been normal street attire (white shirt and slacks) a generation back, with a severe head wound, as if the left half of his face had been bashed in. “Get him to the infirmary,” Kaushal ordered.
Taj shaded his eyes and looked up at the Sentry, a figure from his past, shouting, “Are there other injuries?”
To his surprise, the creature shook its head and waved its upper arms in a very humanlike set of gestures. “No!” Its voice was muffled by its suit, of course, but could easily have been any of the welcoming party.
Then the Sentry was joined on the platform by four others, all in street clothes. (Taj had expected flight suits of some kind.) A heavyset black man—likely the partner named Toutant. A teenaged girl in shorts and a loose yellow blouse—Yahvi.
A tall man who looked much as Taj once had. “Papa!” He waved. Pav! Lord, he was grown up! Handsome in spite of the day’s ordeal.
And with him, a dark-haired woman in her thirties. “It’s Rachel, hi!” For a moment, Taj felt confused . . . it was as if he were looking at Megan Stewart, Rachel’s mother . . . the same woman he had last seen, alive, on Keanu twenty years ago.
Before this thought could bedevil him further, there was a shriek from behind him—Tea. Waving her hand, moving as she had not moved in a decade, she ran toward the base of Adventure.
Rachel was hopping up and down like an excited teenager, which was what she had been during her last meeting with Tea. It was clear that she wanted to scream, and just as clear that, given the wounded man’s condition, she could not.
And so Taj Radhakrishnan was reunited with his son and introduced to his now-extended family.
There were hugs and tears all around as the Adventure crew descended. Tea and Rachel were linked so completely and for so long that an objective observer might have judged them to be a single organism. There was a special bond between the two, of course. Rachel’s mother, Megan, had been killed in 2016 in an accident that cost Zack Stewart command of the Destiny-5 lunar mission . . . which had then gone to Tea!
A year or so later, Zack Stewart began dating Tea . . . who then became a surrogate mother to fourteen-year-old Rachel. They had apparently gotten along well—it was Taj’s impression that at the time, Rachel might have had the edge in maturity.
And if so, it appeared that his granddaughter, who had been standing silently and politely for several minutes, shared her mother’s prodigal serenity. Of course, Yahvi’s silence could also be caused by sullenness—or, to be entirely fair, the stress of her recent experiences.
Rachel finally turned Tea toward Pav. “Hello, Pav,” Tea said, “it’s so nice to finally meet you.” Then she turned to Taj. “Do you tell him or do I?”
Pav looked at his father with his familiar, quizzical expression. “Tea is my wife,” Taj said.
Rachel squealed and hugged Tea again. Pav was more dutiful—understandably. “I guess, then,” he said, taking Yahvi by the hand and drawing her forward, “this is your granddaughter, of sorts.”
Now Yahvi allowed herself a smile—dazzling, shy. She looked directly at Taj. “What do you want me to call you?”
He was startled by the question—especially in the circumstances. “How about Grandfather?” he said, wondering what the other options were.
Pav hugged Yahvi, then pulled Taj into a three-way hug. It was not a gesture he would have learned in his sixteen years on Earth, but welcome nonetheless. “Can you believe we made it back?”
We Aggregates are your friends and allies! There is no reason to be afraid, or even uncomfortable!
But there are obvious differences. For one thing, we come in a greater variety of shapes and sizes, ranging from the near microscopic to Aggregates that are slightly larger and heavier than most humans.
We have families, too, though human biologists call them “formations.” And while we have ancient roots in organic life, for the past two hundred million Earth years we have been machine-based. Think of your computers as mobile units, able to combine and break into smaller entities depending on need, and you’ll have the idea.
And while individual Aggregates are usually an assembly of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of smaller, often identical units, don’t assume that we are all the same. Interaction with other beings—especially humans!—results in revised programming and behavior.
So, while you may see us marching to the same drummer, remember this: Each Aggregate may be hearing a slightly different tune!
OPENING PARAGRAPHS, MEET THE AGGREGATES ORIENTATION,
DR. WILLIAM H. “BOB” BAILEY MIDDLE SCHOOL,
LAS VEGAS, NV, 2031,
SAVED BY WHIT MURRAY
AGGREGATE CARBON-143
CONTEXT: In theory, information moved across the greater Aggregate formations at the speed of thought. An image received by a single unit in Barcelona should, in theory, have been recorded and processed by a random single unit in northern Arizona in one-tenth of a second (Earth-based Aggregates have adopted human measurements for ease of communication).
In practical terms, however, this time frequently stretched not only to one second, but often to five or even ten seconds—a thousandfold lag! Aggregate Carbon-143/A72 had experienced this so many times she could not retrieve the number (low-priority data was usually overwritten) but never failed to respond with surprise and annoyance.
Carbon-143 knew the reasons. The priority of the information, as predetermined by the dominant formation’s algorithms. Other traffic in various networks.
Then there was the final filter: Each descending sub-Aggregate within a formation designated one unit to receive, process, and forward certain types of information.
NARRATIVE: For the Aggregate formation designated Carbon A72, geographically based at Site A in northern Arizona, Free Nation U.S., unit 143 was tasked with the initial receipt of military operational data (among eleven specific types of information) and assigning its value.
One of the humans in Carbon-143’s immediate web of contacts once remarked, “Data has to climb a tree,” which, after suitable follow-up research to determine the various meanings of the term tree, Carbon-143 embraced.
At this moment, monitoring and assigning value to a certain cluster of data, Carbon-143 judged herself to be a small branch far from the main “trunk” of Aggregate Carbon.
It should not have been the case. Operational military data had, in Carbon-143’s judgment, significant value to the Aggregate.
But, likely as a result of recent determinations that physical manufacturing was failing to meet assigned quotas, her hierarchy had downgraded operational military data.
Its value must be level four of five in order to justify Carbon-143’s immediate presentation. Below four, the data would be processed and placed in the queue.
Carbon-143’s standard algorithms judged the data of 13 April 2013 1144 UDT to be level three: valuable but not critical.
But Carbon-143, performing her own content analysis, felt a need to override the algorithm and class the data as level five, for immediate relay and response.
Before taking such a dramatic step, however, she performed one additional review:
ACTION: The formation’s ability to operate in what its American hosts termed the Indian subcontinent and China had never been established to a level sufficient for operations. As a rule, the Aggregates could only conduct surveillance.