Chapter 2: Scientist

== Earth, Northwest Agean Sea, Sporades Ferry Line ==

Gordon Truitt was a British citizen by birth, but had been working and living in the United States for the past five years. He worked for the NSA, the American National Security Agency, which most people would have found hard to believe, if he had been at liberty to tell them about it. Gordon didn't know any secrets of course, but he had done his doctoral work in the U.S., and the NSA had become deeply interested in it, as it concerned designing intelligent search systems. He suspected that it was being used to augment the American data mining programs, some of which could be presumed to be highly illegal. Gordon suspected it, but of course, he couldn't prove a thing. Everything he did was theoretical to begin with, and as compartmentalized as they were, he never got to see any of his work put into practice. Still the pay was good — better than the offers he had gotten from the private sector coming out of university.

This trip to Greece was a long overdue vacation. The first week was already over, and it had been a hedonist's getaway among the Cyclades Islands, with most of that time spent in Mykonos and Santorini. Gordon's next stop was Skopelos and the other Sporades islands. This was a little more laid back, with more literal wildlife and less of the pub-hopping wildlife.

He had already spent a few days on Skiathos, and was taking a small ferry to Skopelos, where he would stay for the rest of his time in Greece. Six more days of low energy, low stress relaxation, then a ride back to Skiathos, to catch a flight to London. He would visit his Aunt Beatrice and Uncle Owen for a few days before heading back to work.

The ferry crowd was light, this early in the morning. Most of the vacationers would catch a fast hydrofoil ferry later in the day, but Gordon had never been a late riser, even when on vacation, and the thought of getting to the island and settled in before the tourists began to crowd the streets appealed to him. He had the New York Times open in front of him, but hadn't read much of it at all so far. This would be where his Greek memories were strongest. The trip he had taken with his parents when he was eight, and the time they spent on Skopelos were among the best memories he had of them.

"You seem lost in thought." a heavily accented female voice said beside him.

"I beg your pardon?" he replied, somewhat automatically.

"Sorry to intrude, but I saw the newspaper, and that you seemed to be staring off over it and thought I might find someone to practice my English on."

The woman was bundled up against the morning breeze, wearing a headscarf, but was probably no more than ten years older than Gordon.

"Just some old childhood memories that I will have plenty of time to relive while I am here." Gordon said, standing and holding out his hand. "Gordon."

"Antheia," she replied, giving his hand a firm shake. "You have been to Skopelos before then?"

"When I was eight." Gordon said. "I came with my parents. Do you live here?"

"No, I come in the summers to work at the Stafylos."

"At the hotel? What is it... , the Prince Stafylos?"

"Yes, that's it. Are you staying there?"

"No, I'm at the Dionyssos. What kind of work do you do, if you don't mind my asking?"

"I work in the kitchen, making pasta and soups for the tourists." Antheia answered, laughing. "What do you do?"

"I write computer search programs." Gordon said.

"Oh! Like Google?" Antheia said with some enthusiasm.

"No." Gordon said laughing in return. "Nothing so commercial or well known as that."

The conversation might have continued, and Gordon might have worried about diverting the conversation away from the current topic, even if it meant they delved into more personal areas still, but there was a sudden flicker of light, or dark, or something in the early morning sky to the south, and then the sea seemed to drop out from beneath the deck of the ship, and Antheia's hand managed to just reach out to Gordon's arm in alarm before everything went black.

== Kiris IV Orbit, Kiris Retrieval Station ==

Gordon woke, still dreaming, he was sure. Was the strange event on the ferry to Skopelos the dream, or was it this strange arrangement of forty people standing in neat rows, like tinned sardines? His vantage point at one corner of the grouping, and facing towards it gave him that perspective, for the long moment when he was fully conscious, and after he had turned his head to look around him. He stirred more fully, and while he seemed suspended and held by something invisible, found he could move, and did so, making an effort to turn his body entirely to look behind himself more completely.

Whatever held Gordon gave up its grip then, and he was suddenly free and walking. He saw other eyes open, and began helping get those others moving about as well. Most of them spoke English, but not all. The room was threatening to turn into a sea of babble, especially when they discovered that some unseen translator was interpreting between any two people who tried to speak but didn't share a common language. This was particularly true for some who it was determined were Africans from the Congo, who seemed to speak nothing but a couple of local dialects.

Several of the asians were Japanese, it turned out, and spoke their native tongue of course, but all of them spoke English, though a couple of them did so only with a halting, harshly accented English that was almost as hard to understand as the Japanese. There were a few who were almost that bad, with just a few words of English, but most spoke it at least haltingly. It was hard to keep sorted out.

Everyone seemed to be about his own age, and they were all fit and healthy looking, which was easy enough to see, because every one of them was completely naked.

Faced with everyone's nudity, Gordon began to exam himself. He was changed in some ways, though not greatly. The soft little belly that had been growing from too many hours at a desk was gone. So too was a small benign cyst that had developed on the knuckle of his left hand. He had been scheduled to have it looked at again while he was back in London. A small series of moles were gone as well, he realized, ones that had been there his entire life, so far as he could remember.

That was the moment that he realized he wasn't wearing his glasses. Gordon had gotten his first pair of glasses when he was five. He didn't remember life without them, and yet here he was without them, and everything was as clear as a bell.

"They fixed my eyes." He said out loud.

"They've fixed a lot of things, it seems." A voice behind him said. Gordon turned and found himself looking at a young woman his own age — but of course everyone was his own age. The woman looked familiar somehow, but Gordon wasn't sure why. Seeing his confusion, she laughed, lightly.

"Antheia, remember? Antheia Geracimos. We were speaking on the ferry just before whatever happened that has brought us here."

"Oh yes!" Gordon said. "I was thinking you looked familiar, but couldn't figure out why."

"I've been doing a little checking, and we all appear to have had our bodies restored to an age I've heard estimated as being twenty five. Some were a few years younger, some a lot of years older than that, but everyone got adjusted towards that point."

"Wow!" Gordon said, trying, but failing to keep his eyes from giving her a quick going over. "So you've gotten ten years younger, just like that!"

"You're sweet to think I had only been ten years older than you. Don't think I don't appreciate the compliment. It was closer to twenty than ten though." Antheia said, patting his arm.

There were some efforts to get the group sorted out and a head count made. His initial estimate of forty turned out to be pretty close. The count came out as thirty eight individuals. The individuals came from four different groups; one each from Greece, the U.S., Japan, and The Democratic Republic of the Congo, which had been labeled Zaire on the old globe Gordon remembered growing up with.

The groups were far more culturally diverse than the groupings suggested. Gordon himself was living proof of that, being a British national, on vacation from his job in America, and caught up in a Greek ferry.

The strangest bit of it was discovered later, when it was found that one of the Japanese tourists who had been aboard the small U.S. tour boat lived only a couple blocks away from one of the people from the Japanese houseboat that had been taken in the Sea of Japan. They did not know each other, but both had common acquaintances.

Several hours of mingling and unanswered questions later, they saw their first aliens. A door opened in a wall of the room they were in, and a dozen beings came through. Half of them were carrying what were obviously weapons. The creatures had two arms, two legs, two eyes a mouth and a nose, but were obviously not human. They reminded Gordon of badgers. They were shorter than all but the shortest of the humans, and stocky, with wider necks, but they didn't have the pronounced pointy noses that badgers did. Their faces were much flatter and more human looking.

Perhaps it was the stiff-looking hair on their heads that seemed to run down the back of their necks without thinning in any way that made him think of badgers, Gordon thought to himself.

"I am Marshall Sopon." the translators near them said, in whatever language was needed. "We are Skafti." It said, gesturing at the others with him. "This processing station will be your home for a short while before you are assigned to your benu. There are food dispensers against that back wall where the lighting is now blinking."

The creature pointed, and all eyes turned to see the blinking lights, and the wall beneath it as indicated.

"There will be some adjustments possible to the food dispensers over time, but for now you will have to make do with food offerings that have been determined to be physiologically and nutritionally compatible for your species." The Marshal said, bringing our attention back to him. "There are waste cells - facilities for the processing of bodily waste, as well as refresher cells - body cleaning stations, through that doorway."

The alien pointed again, and where he pointed, they saw a wide, arching doorway that hadn't been there before.

With those words, and while focus was directed at the new doorway, the Marshal and his entourage left them alone once again. There was a burst of activity as groups of people were quickly drawn to the newly presented facilities.

Gordon was as curious as the next person, but not fond of crowds, so he didn't move when the crowd surged away. Instead, he walked over to a corner and sat, leaning back against the wall, and closed his eyes. He considered what he knew. He was no longer on Earth. He was under the control of some aliens who called themselves 'Skafti'. They had technology far in advance of what he knew of on Earth. They had modified each and every person in the room to an approximate 25 years of age, and left them in perfect health, including obvious things like fixing bad vision and removing moles and cysts. This presumed the ability to fix far more serious ills.

Gordon began counting in Lucas primes, a self-calming technique that he equated with counting sheep at bedtime. If he couldn't get at least thirty numbers into the sequence, he knew he was too stressed. Today he seemed to stumble trying to get past 3010349. He sighed and opened his eyes. That wasn't working. The crowd continued to swirl at the opposite end of the room. He closed his eyes again and tried to pick up the mental thread of his current pet project, what he thought of as potentially the core of the next generation of data search and retrieval tools that he was working on in his spare time. It was primarily a mathematics problem, and a coding problem secondarily.

The levels of focus and concentration required to get his head around the project just wasn't there. His stomach grumbled a little and he took that as a sign and got up from his spot in the corner and began walking over towards the knot of people at the food dispensers. One of the Japanese men was standing, with a look of frustration, holding a small bowl of something. As Gordon got closer, he realized it was rice, raw, uncooked rice.

"I asked for rice." the man said with a wry frown. "I got exactly what I asked for."

"Maybe we need to do some troubleshooting on this whole process." Gordon said. "Has anyone gotten any further than your request?"

"Not before I got pushed back away from the dispenser."

People were meeting with varying degrees of success, mostly the successes involved uncooked, untreated ingredients such as fruits and vegetables. Some of those were happily being consumed, and in fact someone had asked for fifty ripe bananas and fifty ripe oranges and was happily passing them out amongst the crowd.

The distraction of that let Gordon get to a dispenser with his Japanese partner right behind him.

"service or query?" came a calm voice.

"Query." Gordon said.

"Query mode active." it answered.

"Do you understand the quantity 'one cup'?" Gordon paused and then emphasized the measure.

"Yes." came the answer.

"Do you understand the term 'cooking pot'?"

"Yes."

"Do you understand the concept 'boiling water'?" he asked next.

"Yes." came the immediate response.

"Can you accept new definitions?" Gordon asked.

"Yes." the voice answered. "Prepared to receive new definition."

Gordon began describing the process of boiling rice, giving the ages old formula of 2 cups of water for every cup of rice and a container capable of holding twice as much water as the total amount of rice and water. It was one of the few things he could do in a knowledgeable way in the kitchen, to be honest.

"End definition." he said when he had made it through all the steps.

"Please identify this definition." the voice said.

"Boiled rice." Gordon said.

"Definition accepted." the voice said, and then after a pause, "Service or query?"

"Service please." Gordon said.

"Attending."

"May I have two cups of boiled rice please?"

"Processing." came the now familiar voice. A moment later, there was a pleasant ringing sound, and a bowl appeared on the counter in front of him, and in the bowl was what appeared to be cooked rice, still steaming hot.

"Want to share?" Gordon asked Ken. The two of them dug into the rice happily.

"Wish I'd have thought to ask for some melted butter." Gordon said. This made Ken groan out loud, and Gordon quickly asked him what was wrong.

"I was just considering what it would take to go through the process you just did to get the food dispenser to understand how to make soy sauce."

"Ouch!" Gordon said sympathetically. "Do you think anyone in your group knows the process well enough? It's made from soy beans, right?"

"It is. Fermented soy beans, and its one of those things that is very important to my culture's cuisine." Ken said. "I'm sure we will spend some time working with the food dispenser to make some. At least now we know it is possible."

Gordon's demonstration of defining boiled rice created quite a stir, and small groups of people began making efforts to reproduce cooked foods of various types.

Once he'd eaten, Gordon decided it was time to investigate the Skafti 'waste cells'. He excused himself from Ken, and walked to the back wall and through the archway.

So far the Skafti living arrangements, at least those they had been given, displayed a lack of concern for personal privacy compared to what Gordon was used to. The waste cells at least had doors. The area he entered was empty, until he closed the door behind him. As soon as the door closed however, some unseen system went into action, and out of the floor came what seemed to be approximately usable as a toilet. A little lower and wider than he was used to, but it was close enough.

The lower, wider seats, it became apparent as Gordon finished, facilitated a 'bidet' kind of cleaning system, but something as beyond that as this toilet had been beyond the ones he was used to on Earth. He was dry and clean when he stood up, despite having felt the cleaning system 'wash' across his backside.

That was going to be easy to adjust to, he decided as he stood and opened the door. No odors lingered, either. Maybe that would change as their bodies began processing solid foods again.

The refresher stations were basically public showers. Nozzles shot high pressure water from multiple locations, and there seemed to be some sort of sonic component. Gordon could feel a low vibration move across his body as the spray did, and again, when he was done, his skin was dry. He reached up and felt a slight dampness in his hair.

Most of those in the group managed to adjust to their nudity pretty quickly. It helped that they all possessed young, perfectly fit bodies now. You could tell the ones who still hadn't adjusted pretty easily. Their eyes couldn't seem to stay in one place, and they sat awkwardly, and covered themselves, or tried, when they moved about.

Gordon was back in his corner, eyes closed, his mind wrapped up in his project. He had asked himself why he bothered, when it was so obviously useless now, but had decided that this was knowledge for knowledge's sake. He didn't need a paycheck or a product at the end of the process for it to be enjoyable.

A sudden swell in the noise level brought him out of his own thoughts, and he opened his eyes to see what the commotion was about. The entire group seemed to be knotted around the wall opposite the food dispensers. He got up from his corner and began walking in that direction, when he spotted Antheia, carrying a couple pieces of cloth.

"What is it Antheia?" he asked. "What are we getting now?"

"Clothes!" Antheia said, excitedly. She chose then to stop, right in front of him, letting him watch her slide into a pair of form fitting shorts, and then she slid into something that was something of a cross between a sports bra and a tube top. Watching her put that on was the nicest thing that had happened to him since he'd been here, Gordon thought to himself.

"The men are just getting the shorts, but the women get the tops too." she said.

It hadn't taken long to get to the wall. There were eight stations, outlined by a glowing seam in the wall, and you just walked up to it, and if you hadn't gotten anything yet, a drawer popped open and the clothes were there to take. With eight drawers at a time dispensing the items, there were few people still waiting by the time he got there, and Gordon soon had his own shorts, retrieved from one of the drawers, and was wearing them in short order.

The issuing of the clothes, as minimal as they were, was the last exciting thing to happen for a long time. Well, except for the arrival of their exercise instructor, but it was just a hologram, and it led everyone in a series of calisthenics and stretching exercises every morning. A few people tried to sit out and ignore the exercise sessions, but when the food dispensers refused them service for 'noncompliance with the fitness program', they changed their tune pretty quickly.

A few days after the issuing of clothes, the group woke up with new members. Nine more people, all from a bus that had been near Bergen, Norway. The new people were shocked of course, and in a daze for a while. Like Gordon's ferry, the bus had contained a mix of locals and tourists, but the bus had not been part of an established tour, so there were only a couple of tourists aboard.

People quickly organized themselves to help the newcomers get adjusted, including getting them outfitted with clothes. Gordon and Antheia took charge of getting people adjusted to using the food dispensers.

Gordon had discovered that someone had managed to get very good scrambled eggs programmed into the food dispenser, as well as bacon, so between those items and the rice he had programmed for Ken, he was happy most of the time. Fred Delgado and Sammy Cruz, a couple of the younger men from the American tour boat, had spent almost every waking hour at the dispensers, programming in their favorites. They were younger originally anyway, now they were all the same age, physically. One of the women who knew them had insisted that they not try to replicate some of the food too exactly.

"No Big Macs!" She said. "Program in a good cheeseburger, made from good, fresh materials!"

Mostly they seemed intent on recreating a lot of food from southern Texas, enchiladas, tacos, a lot of barbecued meats, and something called chicken fried steak which Gordon decided he liked. They may not have had a broad cuisine to work with, but they were tireless, and what they managed to inveigle the food dispensers to produce was all good food.

Getting the newcomers adjusted was far easier than it had been for them, and a few folks tried teasing them about that a little, but the newness and shock needed to wear off a little before they'd see the humor in it, Gordon thought.

They had just settled back into a routine when it was interrupted. The Skafti weren't back, this time it was a group of medical people, odd looking creatures with lots of bright blue eyes and tentacles around their mouths. Penod, their race was called. They all got examined, Gordon's mind flashed on some old apocryphal stories of alien abductions and the 'probing' the victims had been subjected to. Supermarket tabloid stuff, at best, he thought, and nothing like these exams. They were done standing, and without actual physical contact. The biggest news from the exams was that there was one more person likely to join them, once he had finished his treatment.

Things went back to normal after the medical exams, and things moved along for weeks without change, until another disturbance arose. A new arrival, a man named Ed Bell, caused quite a stir. He had apparently been the captain of the tour boat in southern Texas, and he no longer looked anything like he had on Earth.

"Hi there!" Gordon said, holding his hand out for a shake. "I'm Gordon Truitt. We had heard there was one more person undergoing treatment. It looks like we're all here at last."

Gordon had been nearest the door when he came through, and had been the first to greet him, but after a handshake and smile from the new man, he was quickly pushed aside by the others from his crew, once he'd identified himself.

Gordon heard from others later, after things had settled down once again, that Ed Bell had been an older man, in bad shape and with some serious health problems. The Skafti, or the Penod medical techs, had basically rebuilt him, from 'optimized human genetic code'.

He certainly looked optimized, and Kristy, the young woman who had insisted that Sammy and Fred not rebuild the Big Mac, was soon attached to him at the hip. Gordon didn't think Ed realized it, but she was definitely sending out 'taken' signals. Gordon wouldn't have spotted it so quickly if he hadn't been standing next to Antheia and heard her snort, then snicker while looking at the two Americans.

"I guess she's staking her claim." Gordon said.

Antheia pulled Gordon around so the two of them were facing each other, a few feet apart and looked him straight in the eye.

"There are others here who might talk about staking claims and what that might mean."

"I'm not sure I'm ready to stake a claim, or have one staked, Antheia." Gordon said. "I can safely say there is no one here that has more of my interest than you. We just don't know enough about what is going on yet to make such things practical."

"I agree." Antheia said, stepping in and raising herself up on her toes to kiss him briefly, right on the lips. The soft warmth of those lips had just enough time to fully register on Gordon's senses, and then were gone. "A wish to avoid making decisions without all the information doesn't preclude a little friendly exploration of the possibilities though, does it?"

"No." Gordon said, suddenly sporting a stupid grin. "No it doesn't."

Those possibilities remained only that, possible, while everyone got back to being busy doing nothing. That lasted for a couple of weeks, and then finally one day the 'something' that everyone had been waiting for arrived. A group of Skafti came into our room, and they were sorted into seven groups. Gordon was a little unhappy to see himself separated from Antheia, but had little time to ponder that, as the Skafti at the head of their group spoke.

"Hello. My name is Porog. Today you will be taken to the learning center. You will receive a language implant and a personal translator while you are there. Some initial evaluations will take place during this time. The results of these evaluations will determine your initial placement within the beheri."

The translator got everything but the last word. Someone asked what it meant, and Porog said all questions would be answered at a later time. Other groups must have had questions as well. The sound level in the room rose sharply, as dozens of voices grew louder, demanding answers. It might have gotten ugly, except for Ed Bell's level head. He managed to get everyone focused on the realities of the situation, and eased back off the mob mentality that had threatened to loose itself upon the Skafti in the room.

Once calm had been restored, they were led, by groups, to another area, Gordon assumed it was one of the learning centers they had been told about, and assigned to a clear, liquid-filled column that had two metal tubes running on each side of it and directed to stand with their backs against. Gordon felt nothing, but there must've been a sleep field, or something else involved, because seconds later the world went black.

I dreamt I was floating, and it wasn't a dream. The world was dark, but I was the world. I saw the Project in front of my eyes, roiling and writhing like a snake. Except this snake was not smoothly bending, but stiffly, harshly jointed, and each of its billion joints was a blur of fractal feynman diagrams wrapped in hypnotically coiled pseudo-infinite chains of reducing algorithms. I chased the snake, like the hounds to the fox, and it danced madly in front of me, seductive, insane and as much mine as my name. I stopped my chase, and let the world that was no world wrap around me, and the snake kept on slithering away until it ran into me on the other side of reality, where we both exploded in a blaze of light.

"Oh my!" Gordon said out loud as my eyes opened. "Tehe'nu!"

"Tehe'nu em bai!" said a voice nearby. Gordon focused his eyes and saw a Skafti. He realized then that he had said the equivalent of, 'Our Spirits!' in Skafti, and the Skafti in front of him had replied, 'Our spirits guide us!'.

Gordon had just held his first conversation in the Skafti language, and had done it using conversational Skafti!

Everyone in the room looked a little pale in the face. Gordon assumed he did as well. As they were led back to the common room, he wondered what each of the others might have seen during the time they had been under. In the common room, they saw the same look on the faces of those other groups.

Ed Bell and two others were the first names called, once they were back, and the three of them were escorted out of the room by a uniformed Skafti, though, to be honest, everything they wore looked like a uniform to Gordon.

His name was called in the second group, along with three others, none of which he knew. Antheia was not one of them. He squeezed her hand and smiled as he joined the other three.

"I am Classifier Seventh Trinimak," the Skafti who had called them up said, once they were gathered. "Please follow me."

The Skafti led them down a hallway that ran at right angles to what Gordon recognized as the corridors they had traveled previously, and they were soon at a balcony sort of arrangement, an overlook that stood above a huge open deck, on which a dizzying variety of space craft sat, there was constant motion in the area below as ships landed, took off, and were loaded or unloaded. There was writing on the far wall, in Skafti, that said 'Shuttle Bay C-3'.

Rather than make their way down to that deck, the five of them entered a small, elevator like pod at the edge of their overlook, and they ran, on a wire it appeared, across the upper half of the bay to another overlook just inside the outer wall of the shuttle bay. Here the group was led by Trinimak onto a small flat platform that began moving them down a long, curving corridor, the outside wall of which had a long series of windows or ports, and through which they could see the stars.

"I don't recognize any constellations." a woman said, one of the Norwegians, Gordon thought.

"I shouldn't expect we would," Gordon said. "unless this massive facility is orbiting around our sun. That seems unlikely."

That got a laugh from all three of the others, mostly a laugh of relief, as the tension of the moment was broken.