Authors: Sean Williams,Shane Dix
“Sleep well?” she asked.
He didn’t answer, recognizing the question for what it was: a meaningless pleasantry.
“Where are we?” he asked instead. “Have we moved?”
“We’re in a system called Hipp66486,” she said. “K-type star—the sort you lot like—with a few planets. There are some G-types not far away that look almost homey.”
“What sort of planets?” he asked, feeling curiosity regarding the outside world for the first time in cycles.
“Two gas giants out deep, three regular balls close in. None inhabited.”
“Habitable, though?”
She shook her head. “One primordial, one freeze-dried, one rocky lump.”
He shifted position in a disturbingly humanlike shrug. Atonement was everywhere inside him now. He could feel its tendrils in every part of his body, spreading and curling like roots, turning back only where they encountered skin.
“Any word from Sagarsee?” he asked.
“Very little. We’re down to our last colonies. If Thor doesn’t do something fast, there’ll be none left to save.”
He straightened now, curious about the emotion evident in Yu-qiang’s tone. “You have regrets, don’t you. You wish you had stayed behind to help.”
She didn’t answer immediately. “Even if I did, I know there wouldn’t be anything I could have done.”
“Except die with them.”
She sighed. “Do you really think it’ll come to that?”
He studied her as best he could through eyes that were determined not to focus. “What if it does? Will your people resign themselves to their fate, then? No more questioning our ways and dreaming of returning home?”
“Humans don’t do resignation well,” she said, smiling faintly. “Even when they say they do, there’s always a small part of them that hopes something will come along to change their situation.” She paused thoughtfully. “I guess things would be easier if we could find the Spinner front. We’re stranded at the moment, in limbo.”
He knew that feeling well: part human, part Yuhl; caught between his old life and whatever the Praxis had in store for him.
Shifting position again, he realized that for the first time in a while he was restless, wanting to move. He was tired of being cooped up like a prisoner in a cage, a pupa in its cocoon.
He reached for Yu-qiang’s hand. Startled at first, but quickly recovering, she helped him out of the alcove and to his feet. He stood unsteadily for some time, recovering his balance and letting his muscles stretch. The scar reaching from his throat to groin was stiff and inflexible, but it had lost its terrible viciousness. Atonement’s fine tendrils tingled inside him. Their presence was not debilitating. He felt drained by their presence but was no longer in any discomfort.
“Are you okay?” asked Yu-qiang, holding him steady with one hand.
He nodded in response to her question, but his mind was focused on the new sense of urgency that was building inside him. “I think I would like to go for a walk.”
The door sighed open at his mental command, and she guided him through it. Noise and light assailed him. The everyday life of
Mantissa A
was something he had not experienced for several cycles; he’d grown unaccustomed very quickly to the never-ending bustle that filled the corridors. He moved slowly along the corridor, feeling his way more than seeing, as he adjusted to the expanded world around him. Attendants and colleagues offered greetings in his native tongue. He offered only the most cursory response—a word or two, a halting expression.
“Observation deck,” he said. His domed head felt strangely light, and he found himself leaning more heavily on Yu-qiang than he would have liked. “That way.”
Once there, Yu-qiang helped to steady him as an observatory intestine descended from the ceiling to smoothly engulf him. He welcomed the warm and familiar embrace.
The universe opened up around him, dazzling him with its beauty. The multitude of stars shone brightly; not dimmed in the clever illusion by the flare of a nearby sun. Yu-qiang had called it Hipp66486, which seemed an ugly name for something so beautiful. He imagined that he could feel that sun’s warmth on his skin, making the backs of his legs glow and his wing sheaths flex in satisfaction.
“What are you feeling?” asked the Praxis.
The mellifluous voice didn’t make him shudder as it once had. He noted, however, that the Praxis had asked him
what
he was feeling, not
how.
“I feel—” He fumbled for the human word; there was no equivalent in the language of the Yuhl. “—
homesick
.”
The Praxis didn’t comment, and for a moment Ueh thought he might have said something stupid. Certainly the yearning feeling filling him was unfamiliar and unsettling, one he had never experienced before. Was it because of his conversation with Yu-qiang? he wondered. Had she put the thought in his head?
With a noise like a soft exhalation, the engram of
Caryl/Hatzis
appeared beside him in the illusion of the universe outside. They stood together, staring at the vistas of space, basking in the light of the nearby star.
“We used to think it was lonely out here,” she said. “Now we think it’s not lonely enough.”
“Everything is relative,” he said.
“I suppose. I guess it’s going to seem lonely for you guys if the Ambivalence
has
been stopped.”
He scanned the sky, searching for the planets she had mentioned. He found them easily enough: five bright points standing out from the starscape. He zoomed in on each in turn. They were exactly as Yu-qiang had described. Not one of them was habitable, but they weren’t without promise.
The promise of what?
he wondered. Had he been swept up in the human ideal of a home?
“I have commandeered you a hole ship,” said the Praxis. “It is ready to leave whenever you are, Ueh.”
The suggestion that he might need a hole ship startled him—no less because he realized only then that he
did
want to leave
Mantissa A.
Getting out of the niche wasn’t enough; that wasn’t from where his restlessness stemmed. He wanted room to breathe, to
be
—and the Praxis seemed to know this.
“The third planet,” Ueh said, indicating a primordial world in the view below him, gray green in color from the vantage point of space. Its hot, turbulent atmosphere was inhospitable but well within the tolerances of an I-suit. “That’s where I’m going.”
Yu-qiang stared at him in astonishment. “You can’t be serious, Ueh. You can barely walk, and you want to go exploring?”
“You can come with me, if you wish.”
“Of course I’m coming. I wouldn’t let you go wandering off on your own—not in your condition. But I still think you’re crazy to be attempting this right now.”
He slipped out of the simulation, sagging as his full weight returned. Yu-qiang was there to support him, though. Then, following his directions, she helped him to nearest docking point
“What if the rest of the Yuhl leave you behind?” she asked as they walked.
“They won’t.”
“They’ll be off the moment they find the Spinner front, Ueh. You know that.”
“They won’t,” he insisted with growing urgency.
“Crazy,” she muttered again as they continual along the narrow corridors, attracting puzzled looks wherever they went.
Inside him, Ueh could feel Atonement shift restlessly with every step he took. It could feel its impending freedom, he was sure.
2.3
THE LAW OF HYBRIDS
2160.10.1 Standard Mission Time
(5 September 2163 UT)
2.3.1
“Hello, Peter. Can you hear me?”
“Lucia?” At first, the image of Peter Alander from Athena—as she remembered him, not the new, bearded, more youthful creature fashioned by the alien called the Praxis—appeared perfectly firm in conSense. Lucia had found him in the files of frozen memory that Peter had called the Graveyard. He had been designated by mission number only—512—and came complete with a detailed case history of early senescence onset and brainlock. The clarity of his image made a lie of the diagnosis.
“Is that really you?” he asked her, eyes widening.
“Yes, Peter.” Her heart warmed at the sight of him and of his obvious delight in seeing her. She reached out in the virtual space to take his hands, her flesh touching his with all apparent solidity. His skin was as warm as his gaze.
Then his smile slipped and he looked down at their linked hands. “I don’t feel real,” he said, puzzled. “I feel like a fake.”
“You’re not a fake, Peter, You’re the real thing.”
“You said I’d feel that way before we left, that
all
the engrams would think they were real. What if I’m just a fake programmed to lie to itself?”
That’s exactly what we are,
Lucia wanted to respond, but she refrained, knowing it was the wrong thing for him to hear right now.
“Peter,” she cooed, gently squeezing his hands. “None of this is important. You are who you are, not what you’re made of. Intelligence and personality transcend the hardware. You can be yourself.”
“That’s all well and fine, Lucia—but who
am
I?” His gaze skated over hers, filled with desperation. “And come to that, who are
you
? How can I know for sure that—”
“Peter, stop and think
who’s
asking that question!”
His image began to shake, as though he was trembling. The image flickered like a television transmission under poor conditions. Static snapped across his features. He stretched, twisted, juddered.
“L-Luc-cia!”
The despairing cry fragmented, cut short on the final vowel.
Then his image froze altogether, and she was forced to shut him down. Peter Alander 512 joined 154 from Thor, 44 from Geb, 919 from Ilmarinen and 755 from Rama. She had more than a dozen left to test and she wasn’t sure if she had the stomach for it. Nevertheless, she knew she had to go on, if only to remain focused on the job at hand.
She needed him as badly as the survivors needed her.
The mission supervisors of Demeter and Zemyna, the two colonies under imminent threat from the Starfish, had finally bowed to public pressure and allowed their nonessential crew to leave in advance of the inevitable attack. With Thor’s plea to the Starfish unanswered, there was no concrete reason to hope that the alien advance had been in any way slowed. Given the choice between pretending, in accordance with programming, that everything was going to be just as it had always been, and taking sensible precautions, a large amount of data and personnel were evacuated to Sagarsee. Lucia helped in those efforts, both as transport and facilitator. She could move larger amounts of mass more quickly than the hole ships, and that left them free for scouting and other tasks. The sight of the tame Spindle also proved to be reassuring, as though the Spinners themselves were complicit in humanity’s attempts to survive.
Lucia wasn’t so naive as to believe that. The Spinners had given her one more tool on a whim. It could have been a random act of charity or offered in accordance with an unknown agenda. Either way, she didn’t feel terribly reassured.
Sagarsee’s resources were soon stretching. In the six years since the
Frank Drake’s
arrival, the young colony had built a number of bases on the ground as well as the beginnings of an orbital installation. All were part of a scientific infrastructure, not a holiday resort. Disgruntled engrams were forced to share processing power with many more than the system had been designed for, necessitating simplified conSense environments or frequent slow-mos. From the virtual halls of BSC5148, Lucia detected rumblings of discontent as limited resources were gobbled up by the pressing situation. Fovea tracking and high-level planning took up great chunks of the operating capacity.
Lucia found time around her twin roles as ferry pilot and symbol of the resistance to address her own needs. Operating at extreme fast speeds, she rummaged through the Graveyard, looking for signs of hope.
“Hello, Peter. Can you hear me?”
“Lucia? Is that really you?” Peter Alander 400 from Eos looked exactly the same as the others and would, no doubt, respond to the same stimuli in exactly the same way.
“I
think
I’m me,” she said. “I feel like I’m Lucia Benck. I look like her, and I act like her. Does that make me her, do you think?”
He frowned, coming closer, almost warily, to study her face. In the virtual environment, his skin was a beautiful human color; his eyes were impossibly clear.
“You’re an engram,” he said. “You’re an engram like me.”
“Yes, Peter, I am.” There was no point skirting the issue. She didn’t have time for the embodiment therapy that Peter from Adrasteia had gone through. She needed to find a quick and effective way to keep him talking to her. “You and me, we’re just pretending to be human, even though we’re not really. We both have shortcuts in our personalities that cause us problems. You don’t feel like yourself, but I need you to keep me here. It’s either that, or I run. Do you understand, Peter? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Tourist and truth seeker,” he said, referring as he often did to their last conversation on Earth—or rather the last conversation on record between their originals before their engrams were activated and launched into space. She, too, remembered it well.
“The truth seekers are supposed to ride on the impetus of the tourists,” she said. “But it’s the other way around now. Without you, Peter, I’m going to break down. You have to help me.”
His face threatened to collapse into the now-familiar mask of confusion and existential angst. “I remember—” He faltered, recovered. “I remember the Gifts, the Spinners...”
She clutched on that detail. “That’s right! You were woken up when the Spinners arrived on Eos. They brought you back to talk to the Gifts.”
“I—I—” He gripped her hand and held it tight. “They said you hadn’t made it. You weren’t there.”
“But I’m here now, Peter. I came back for you.”
A small lie, but she hoped it would bolster his self-esteem.
That wasn’t the problem, though. She understood it as soon as his face fell. The
esteem
he felt for himself was irrelevant when he had no clear sense of
self
at all.
“But who
are
you?” he asked. “Who am
I
? If we’re not us, then—”
“We
are
us, Peter. You’re Peter, and I’m Lucia. We were together, and part of me wants us to be together again. I can’t run anymore; I can’t leave these people behind. You have to be my anchor.”
His image twisted, snapped back into shape. “I can’t tell—who—I—”
“Peter, no!”
But it was no use. He froze like a statue in midsentence. His face became flat and inanimate, a cardboard cutout of a once-living man. All of the subtle processes that made him who he was seized up in midbeat, and he was gone.
She dismissed him despairingly, wishing she could swear like Caryl Hatzis. She wanted to scream into the void and curse UNESSPRO and all the engram engineers who were responsible for what had become of herself and all the others. How could they have designed the engrams so effectively for the short term, and yet screwed up so badly for the long term? She wondered, if they had known they were building people who would ultimately be the last humans alive, whether the designers would have been so careless?
She turned from the thought. It was pointless wasting time on speculation. She had half a relative hour to kill before arriving back at Sagarsee, so she decided to try one more. Calling up the engram from mission 17, to chi Hercules, she prepared herself for yet another emotional roller coaster ride.
“Lucia?” Peter’s engram said upon seeing her.
“Yes, it’s me.” She couldn’t hide the weariness in her voice. “And you’re you. I should have that inscribed on tablets and hung about our necks.”
“I wasn’t expecting you to be here when I woke up.” He looked around at the neutral environment she had conjured for his reactivation. “I wasn’t expecting to wake up at all, in fact. I chose the dark.”
His image flickered but didn’t freeze.
Her curiosity snagged upon his words. “The dark? What do you mean by that?”
“He gave me a choice, and that’s the one I took. I told him to say hello to you from me.”
“Told who?”
Peter’s image flickered again. “The other me; the one at Sothis.”
Lucia thought quickly, not knowing where this conversation was going. It was different from the others. She’d been to Sothis; it was a smoking ruin, thanks to the Starfish. This version of Peter must have been there prior to the attack. And for him to have spoken to another version of himself there, there must have been another version working at the time. The logic was as inescapable as it was exciting.
“He called me a cripple, a wounded creature. He told me it wasn’t Caryl’s fault. He told me—”
“Which one was he?” she asked. “Where was he from?”
“Upsilon Aquarius,” he replied. “He said—” The flickering was more persistent, the third time, but he returned and remained stable for longer. “He said I might not come back, but I chose to be shut down anyway. It was better than the alternative.”
“What alternative?” Her excitement had abated on learning that the one this Peter had spoken to was the same one who had rejected her; nevertheless, she was still interested in what had happened.
“To join with him, to become—something else.” Peter grimaced. “I may be sick, but I know who I am. Who I
was
,” he corrected. “Who I’m
supposed
to be.”
“He wanted you to merge with him?” The idea was strange, more the sort of thing she might have expected of the original Caryl Hatzis, judging by what she’d heard from Rob Singh.
“Yes, but he’d changed. He wasn’t me anymore. How could I not be who I am? That would be suicide.”
She thought this through, wondering if she’d found the key to keeping Peter animated. By threatening to take away his fragile sense of self entirely, the other Peter had managed to make this one cling more tightly to it. But was it stable, or just a temporary fix?
The only way to find out was to keep him talking.
“You don’t have to choose the dark anymore, Peter. I can keep you running as long as you want.”
He shook his head. “I’ll only start looping, and I don’t want to go through that again. I’ll end up shutting down altogether.”
“But I—” She stopped, unwilling to admit her vulnerability to him. He was more his old self than any of the others had been. His confident, almost arrogant sense of his own lightness made her afraid to look
wrong
. “We need you.”
“I can’t make a difference, Lucia. You’re up to your eyeballs with alien AIs and worse. What can I do about them?” He snorted as if in amusement. “Christ, according to me, they shouldn’t even exist in the first place!”
That’s right,
she thought, remembering how Peter had famously announced to the scientific community in the 2010s that humanity should be alone in the universe, if certain quantum mechanical assumptions held true. That the UNESSPRO missions had initially found only single-celled and other equally primitive life-forms had initially borne his opinion out. But now...
“The Spinners must have come as a shock,” she said.
He bristled slightly at that. “They don’t prove my theory wrong, if that’s what you’re implying. They could be non-conscious AIs. If they perform no truly observational act, and if their makers died out before complex life on Earth evolved, it could all still be just as I said,”
“What about the Starfish?” she said. “Or the Yuhl? Or the Praxis?”
“The Starfish could be AIs, too. As for the others, I don’t know anything about them.”
“They’re flesh and blood. I’ve seen them.”
He faltered only for a moment. “There are possible explanations. If the Spinners and the Starfish are universe-hopping, looking for intelligent life in each, they could be picking up passengers as they go. The Yuhl could be from a completely different continuum than ours; their evolution would have had no effect on the way we evolved.”
“That’s one possible explanation,” said Lucia. “But not a very likely one. I think you’re clutching at straws here, Peter.”
“Is it any more unlikely than this entire situation?” He seemed very much alive and stable in the grip of an intellectual debate. “And I can think of a second explanation, if the first isn’t good enough for you. The Spinners and Starfish could be riding a reverse time flow from the future, bringing conscious aliens back with them. Have we ever spoken to them, interacted with them face-to-face?” When she shook her head, he seized that admission as proof. “That would be because our notions of causality are fundamentally different. We may not be
able
to interact, except via intermediaries, because their arrow of time is opposite to ours. We’re riding a wave of expansion out from the big bang, while they’re coasting inward to the big crunch. If they evolved in the future, they would, again, have had no influence on our own evolution.”
She thought about this for a moment. “Actually, that’s quite an interesting theory,” she said, meaning it. “But does it help us at all? Can it keep us alive any longer?”
He shrugged. “That’s up to you. Understanding the problem is just the first step.”
“Which is why we need you, Peter, to take the next step. You have to stay with us.”
With me,
she added silently. “Can’t you at least try it?”
His stare tightened, and he seemed to stick for a second, as though tripping over his thoughts.
“I chose the dark,” he said. “It was the only choice I could make.”