Dark Star Calling

by Julia Keller

  His brain.

  He scratched his chin. There was a faint thatch of stubble there. It could’ve been crusted dirt for all that Rez cared.

  He turned his attention back to the computer screen. That screen was home to a rippling hive of orange numbers that roiled against a blue-black background. If he squinted just right and engaged his imagination, he could momentarily persuade himself that he was enjoying an aerial view of an orange grove infiltrated with vermin.

  Mickey made another noise. It was quite loud. Because his body consisted of six expandable cylinders topped by a square gray metal box that squirmed with circuitry, sounds tended to expand and intensify as they branched through his layers. If that particular noise had come from a human being, it would have been immediately classified as a belch. An impressively gross one.

  Rez had no choice except to put up with it, just as he put up with the farts, wheezes, sneezes, snorts, hiccups, and sighs, not to mention the bad puns, third-rate limericks, and witless wisecracks. He needed Mickey, warts and all. He didn’t want to use a human assistant. He couldn’t run the risk of word leaking out about his search until he’d gathered all the evidence. Until he’d made an airtight case.

  And, most important, until he’d found a solution.

  Because if his suspicions were correct, his prediction would start a mass panic across the six cities of New Earth. So he needed to have a remedy, a solid plan, ready and waiting for when he made his revelation. At the same moment he announced the coming catastrophe, he would offer hope. And in this case, he knew, hope came exclusively in the shape of a star.

  That star would be a new sun, around which a new New Earth would revolve.

  “Hey, Rez,” Mickey blurted. “I just flew in from Saturn. And boy, are my arms tired!”

  Rez groaned. He grabbed the joystick and tilted his chair forward. He needed to start calling out star locations again. It was the only way to stop the AstroRob from lobbing stupid jokes: Keep the damned thing busy.

  “Star number 76.435.7867,” Rez said, focusing on the telescope’s steady harvest of data.

  “Negative.”

  “Star number 76.435.7868.”

  “Negative.”

  “Star number 76.435.7869.”

  “Negative.”

  The night wore on.

  Rez sifted through the stars.

  * * *

  Shortly before dawn, just as the sun was tipping over the far edge of New Earth’s eastern quadrant, flooding this compartment—and all of New Earth—with luscious lemony light, he saw it.

  But it wasn’t what Rez had been searching for. It was something wildly, disturbingly different.

  And it filled him with the most intense and overwhelming torrent of raw emotion he had ever felt.

  2

  The Signal

  “Hey.”

  Violet uttered her standard greeting at the same moment her head poked up through the little round porthole in the floor. The first thing she saw was the high back of the big red leather armchair that dominated this impossibly tiny space.

  “Over here,” Rez said. “Come on in.”

  She took a deep breath. With a grunt of effort, she managed to hoist herself up the rest of the way. She was able to do that—grasping the heavy iron hinge of the hatch’s open lid and using it as a fulcrum so she could swing herself up and scoot through—because she was nimble and fit. Violet’s habit was to run several miles each evening across the streets of New Earth. All of those muscles, all of that flexibility, came in handy right now as she popped up and over. Her butt landed on the cold steel floor.

  Once Violet was upright again, she dusted off her hands, squared her shoulders, and took the single forward step required to put her next to Rez’s chair. She was nineteen years old. A lot of people told her that she was attractive, but she mostly saw only the flaws: She had a narrow face, a nose that was pointy enough to annoy her, brown eyes, a small mouth that frankly looked better with a little lip gloss on it—but she rarely bothered—and short, shiny dark hair that she combed straight back from her forehead each morning because she hated dealing with her hair. She liked to launch herself headfirst into her day, with no fuss or bother or forethought.

  Sort of like the way she’d launched herself through the hatch into Rez’s lair.

  “Hey,” she repeated. “Got here as soon as I could. So what’s the emergency?” She raised her wrist, indicating the communication console strapped there and, by extension, the call he’d made to her a few minutes ago. “You sounded pretty intense. What’s going on?”

  Before Rez could reply, the AstroRob’s square head appeared over the top of his monitor. The flexible material from which his cylinders were made meant that he could grow taller on a whim, extending himself upward to his silicon heart’s content.

  “Hey, Violet,” Mickey said. His singsong tone was sly and playful. “You’ve heard of the law of gravity, right?”

  “Um, sure. I’ve heard of it.”

  “So what did we do before that law was passed?” Mickey’s guffaw tailed off into a series of high-pitched titters.

  “Good one,” she said dubiously. Back when she was maybe six years old, that joke had seemed hilarious. Now? Not so much.

  Rez had explained to her about his AstroRob’s bad habit of making terrible jokes and the reasons why he couldn’t replace him with a sedate and more somber machine. Or at least one with some better gags.

  Suddenly, with a fury that startled Violet, Rez jabbed a finger at his console, giving it a quick command. The light atop Mickey’s head went black. There was a short hum and then a small beep-beep as the AstroRob powered off.

  “Come on, Rez,” she said. “Yeah, it was a dumb joke, but it wasn’t that bad, right? I mean, you didn’t have to shut him down.” Despite everything, she liked Mickey. He was better than the vast run of other robots she had to deal with in the course of her day, the dull, plodding, polite, obedient ones. Those robots were, frankly, boring. Mickey was a lot of things, but he wasn’t boring.

  Rez didn’t reply. He bolted from the armchair and started pacing. His hands were clasped behind his back. Pacing was a challenge: The space was so small that he could only go four or five steps in one direction before he had to whirl around and go back in the other direction. And he had to hop constantly over electronic components that he’d stacked up on the floor until he found the time to install them.

  His jaw was tight. He was breathing hard. There was a faraway look in his eyes.

  “Hey,” Violet said. “Tell me what’s going on.” This behavior was totally out of character for Steve Reznik. Usually the only emotions he showed were irritation and annoyance. She, on the other hand, was known to yell at people when she got mad and even to throw in a few choice curse words if she was really upset.

  But Rez?

  No. In times of stress or high drama—and they’d had plenty of both a year ago—he just got quieter. More focused. Sometimes Violet was half convinced that Rez didn’t even have emotions—although that was impossible, of course. Everyone had emotions. If they didn’t, then the Intercept would not have been as astonishingly efficient as it was, a fantastically powerful tool that had changed New Earth and Old Earth in ways both wonderful and terrible.

  The Intercept was gone now, shut down the same way that Mickey had just been shut down—with a single bold gesture, bringing a great deal of relief and peace, as well as a tiny aftertaste of regret. Yet whenever Violet thought about emotions, she couldn’t help but think about the Intercept, too.

  Rez was still pacing. He lunged forward, came face-to-face with a wall of computers, at which point he had to whirl around and lunge in the other direction, only to come face-to-face with the opposite wall of computers—and then he did the same thing over again. And again.

  Lunge, whirl. Lunge, whirl. Lunge, whirl.

  Violet had only seen Rez this agitated and upset one other time: when she’d had to tell him about his little sister’s death.

/>   “Rez?”

  No answer. Another lunge, another whirl.

  “Come on, Rez.”

  Nothing.

  “Look,” she said. “Whatever it is, you can trust me. I promise I won’t breathe a word to anybody. Ever. Not until you say it’s okay.”

  Still nothing. Lunge, whirl.

  “Rez, please. Just tell me. I’m sure we can—”

  “It’s Rachel.” The pacing stopped.

  Violet was aware of a sort of shifting inside her body, as if some of her vital organs had spontaneously decided to trade places. The feeling was a combination of pity and sadness and—yeah, okay, even though she’d hate to admit it out loud—affection and concern for Rez. He had never really dealt with his emotions about his sister’s death. Violet knew that, and so did Shura, Tin Man, and Kendall. They’d talked about it from time to time, when Rez wasn’t around. About how he seemed to have buried his feelings about Rachel deep inside, in a place almost nobody else could reach.

  A place like this lab.

  Maybe that’s what tonight was all about, Violet speculated. Maybe the loss of Rachel had finally gotten to him. Maybe it was all coming down on him now—a deluge of previously unreleased emotion, plus all the memories and regrets and questions that always go along with anything to do with family.

  No wonder he was a mess.

  “Listen, we can get you a therapist,” she said carefully. Violet wasn’t good at the whole consolation thing, and she was hopeless at hugs, but she wanted to help Rez however she could. “They’ve got a mental health kiosk over in L’Engletown where you can schedule a—”

  “NO.” His voice was like a bold jolt of thunder. He stared at her. “NO, NO, NO.”

  “I know you don’t like the idea of needing help from anybody, but sometimes just talking it out can really be—”

  “NO.”

  Violet didn’t like the way his eyes looked; the white parts were mostly pinkish red. A vein stood out on his forehead. He seemed stunned, as if he’d had a tremendous shock.

  “Rez, I just mean that—”

  “I shouldn’t have called you,” he snapped, cutting her off. “Forget it. Just go away.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. Not until you tell me what happened.”

  “I did tell you. It’s Rachel.” He dropped his eyes. His shoulders slumped. His voice was so low that Violet had to strain to hear him. “I’ve checked it again and again. I’ve gone through all the information backward and forward,” he added in a sort of running mumble. “Mickey checked and double-checked my calculations. I’ve interrogated the signal so many ways, from so many angles, but it doesn’t change. It’s still exactly what it seemed to be when it first showed up on my screen just a few minutes ago. It—it doesn’t make any sense. But it’s true. It has to be true.”

  Now he raised his head again. His cheeks were wet and shiny. His nose needed a good wipe. To her shock, Violet realized that in the last few seconds, he’d been … crying.

  Rez? CRYING?

  Violet suddenly felt as if she’d somehow landed in an alternate universe. Maybe it had happened when she’d crossed the threshold into the lab. Maybe she didn’t know her own strength. Maybe she’d overshot the mark. And maybe, she thought whimsically, she’d ended up in a whole different level of reality—a reality where Steve Reznik, the computer genius with wires and lights and switches where a heart ought to be, was somehow … crying.

  “What do you mean? What has to be true, Rez?”

  “The signal.”

  “What signal?”

  “The signal. The one I just received.” He looked straight into her eyes. He really wanted her to understand. “Violet, listen to me. I’m trying to explain it.”

  “Explain what?”

  “I’m trying to explain,” he said, pausing for several seconds to drag his sleeve across his nose to mop up the moisture, “that the sensors picked up a signal that originated very far away—at least the other side of the galaxy, and maybe a lot farther away than that.”

  “And?”

  “And it’s my sister.”

  * * *

  Violet’s brain was instantly filled with buzzing uncertainty. She was so confused that she felt as if she’d dived headfirst into a crowded vat of question marks.

  “What are you talking about, Rez?”

  He didn’t answer her. Instead he sat back down in his special chair. He spread his fingers across the tops of the armrests, grasping the red leather in a tight grip as if he needed to hang on for dear life while a ferocious wind blew right through the center of his life.

  Anything related to Rachel and Rachel’s death, Violet knew, shook Rez to his core—even though he tried very hard not to let it show.

  “The signal,” he said in an even, careful voice, “came in through the same channel I’m using to measure the light from the stars. I told you all about those measurements. And why I’m doing them. And why I’m keeping it quiet for now.”

  “Sure.”

  And so he had. He was scouring the galaxies for a special star.

  For the star.

  The one that would ensure the future of New Earth if the worst happened and its orbit continued to deteriorate.

  Rez didn’t speak for a few seconds; he seemed to be deciding on precisely the right words that would explain what was going on. Instead of just staring at him, though, Violet reviewed in her mind what he’d told her about his secret quest. And why the survival of New Earth might very well depend upon it.

  New Earth had been created a decade ago as a replacement for Old Earth, because by the twenty-third century, the original planet was in ruins. Old Earth’s rivers and oceans were poisoned, its soil was contaminated by radioactivity left over from the reckless torrent of bombs, and its landscapes were scraped raw and left to fester. Birds had been erased from its skies. Animal life had dwindled to a few skeletal, desperate species that scavenged for scraps. A few people remained behind on Old Earth, but most of the population had been transported to New Earth.

  New Earth was a second chance for humanity. Its orbit was sustained by a system of magnets, wind turbines, and cold fusion. It was a beautiful tabula rasa, a blank canvas upon which a new generation—the generation of Violet and Rez and their friends—was writing its own destiny, creating a future as fresh and clear and promising as a sunrise on New Earth. It wouldn’t be defined by the selfish, self-destructive generations that had preceded it back on Old Earth.

  Lately, though, during his duties as NESA director, Rez had noticed a troubling trend: New Earth’s orbit might be gradually but steadily failing. Which meant that, one day, it would tumble out of the sky, plummeting to Old Earth. The end of New Earth would mean the death of millions of people.

  The scenario was so catastrophic that at first Rez couldn’t believe his own calculations. He had measured again and again. Checked and double-checked and triple-checked. He ran simulations and projections. Once, in frustration, he even banged his fist on the side of his computer as if to joggle it back to its senses. In a film from the mid-twentieth century, he’d seen somebody do that to a primitive device called a TV set when the picture got fuzzy.

  Rez did all that because it seemed impossible to him that nobody else had figured this out. Nobody else saw it coming.

  But it was true. He was New Earth’s Paul Revere.

  New Earth was such a great success—its creation had saved an entire planet, after all—that nobody questioned anymore the spectacular technology that had enabled it. They had all grown a little lazy, he suspected, and a little complacent. No other scientist had noticed the terrible fate that lay hidden in the numbers—a future that didn’t change, no matter how many times Rez banged his fist on the side of his computer.

  I mean, I know I’m brilliant and all, he’d told Violet, but I’m not the only brilliant guy who ever lived. Somebody else sees this too, right?

  Finally, Rez had come around to believing his own calculations. He wasn’t ready to share wh
at he knew until he had a solution—but was ready to work.

  So at night, Rez combed the skies, quietly but steadfastly, looking for a star. A star that resembled the Earth’s sun. A star that would likely have an Earth-like planet orbiting it. Assisted by Mickey, he investigated the light coming from tens of thousands of stars, star by star, to see if the star’s light was broken—if, that is, its light wobbled. The wobble would mean that the star was being tugged by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet.

  Such a planet might someday be their new home.

  “Okay,” Violet said, “so I know you spend every spare minute in here measuring starlight. But what does that have to do with Rachel?”

  “Rachel had a chip.”

  “Of course Rachel had a chip.” Violet was impatient, and it showed in her voice. Everyone had an Intercept chip. Until two years ago, the law on both New and Old Earth had mandated the insertion of a tiny receptor in every citizen. Through it, the Intercept could access a person’s feelings, first snatching them up and archiving them, and then, if the individual needed to be controlled, sending them back again. The memory of an emotional event—the loss of a parent or a friend, a moment of pain or terror or humiliation—could incapacitate even the strongest personality.

  “Right,” Rez said. “And when somebody’s cremated, the chip stays intact. Same with a replacement hip or knee or arm or leg. Or artificial heart.”

  Violet nodded. She also winced a bit and wondered why Rez wasn’t wincing, too. Why discuss this? She didn’t like to think of Rachel that way—as a small, lifeless body, as a bundle of organs and assorted parts, summarily reduced to ash. It was too gruesome. Too sad.

  “I still don’t see—”

  “That,” Rez said, interrupting her, “was the signal we picked up this morning while analyzing the starlight. It was a transmission. From Rachel’s chip.”