Echogenesis

by Gary Gibson

  Amit, who looked like he was on the verge of passing out from fear, nodded. ‘I…I was going to tell you,’ he stuttered.

  ‘Then why didn’t you?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Because I needed to be sure,’ said Amit. ‘About how we got here, and why.’

  ‘So you do know something,’ said Jess, her hand squeezing Amit’s shoulder until he winced from the pain.

  ‘Possibly,’ said Amit, his voice trembling.

  ‘You don’t sound sure,’ said Sam.

  ‘I’m not,’ Amit admitted. ‘Not yet. Not quite.’

  ‘So what do you know?’ asked Traynor.

  ‘I…’ Amit swallowed hard before he replied. ‘I think I may have helped design this ship.’

  7

  THE COMMAND DECK

  Traynor stared at him with a bug-eyed expression. ‘Designed it?’

  ‘Please,’ said Amit, his voice shaking. ‘I swear I will explain everything if you let me go! I know you don’t believe me, but it was simply my intention to explore the ship and find out as much as I could before I told any of you I’d found a way inside.’

  ‘My ass,’ Wardell shouted from somewhere near the top of the ramp. ‘The little shit was getting ready to fly this thing out of here without us! Why the hell else would he be skulking around like this? We ought to—!’

  ‘Shut up,’ Traynor snapped, and Wardell fell immediately silent. Sam once again did not fail to note the significance of Wardell’s immediate obedience.

  ‘Let’s take a look around before we draw any conclusions,’ said Sam, stepping into the corridor and pulling Amit after him.

  * * *

  The door remained open behind them. The corridor was cramped, barely large enough for Amit and Sam to stand side by side.

  ‘Sam.’ Ethan stepped up to the open door, looking worried. ‘I swear, you shouldn’t be walking around like this after what you’ve been through.’

  ‘Thanks for the advice,’ Sam grunted, taking hold of a rung and ignoring the look on Ethan’s face. There was no way in hell he was letting Traynor take a look around inside before he did.

  Somehow, he managed to haul himself halfway up the shaft, even though it felt ten times harder than it should have. He worked his way up slowly, rung by rung, despite the wild beating of his heart and the increasingly acid taste in the back of his throat.

  So far as he could see, the shaft ran the entire way to the top of the lander. Apart from rungs, there was also a deep vertical groove in the shaft’s wall, the purpose of which wasn’t immediately obvious. He soon emerged into another corridor, running fore and aft, and moved out of the way so Amit could join him. Traynor followed moments later, and then Jess, the both of them looking around.

  This corridor was as cramped and utilitarian as the one on the lowest deck. Sam headed aft, passing open bays and peering inside each one, the others bringing up the rear.

  ‘You see this?’ Jess exclaimed with excitement, pointing inside a bay. ‘That’s an industrial-sized fabricator. Jesus…we can print cars, planes, houses, any damn thing we want with this!’

  ‘How about guns?’ asked Traynor.

  ‘Hell, yes, guns,’ said Jess, nodding fervently. ‘Also engine parts, medical supplies…the list is endless.’

  ‘What about food?’ asked Sam. ‘Can we print anything edible?’

  ‘Well?’ asked Jess, staring hard at Amit. ‘You figure that out, at least?’

  Amit nodded, his back pressed up against a bulkhead, as if he could somehow ghost through it to safety. ‘I did find a manifest detailing freeze-dried powdered micronutrients stored onboard the lander for the express purpose of being assembled into food using the printer. Unfortunately, the damage from the crash landing was…extensive.’

  Jess blinked. ‘You’re telling me it all burned up?’

  Amit nodded. ‘I believe so, yes. Our only chance is to find something outside the lander we can eat.’ He glanced at Sam. ‘Assuming what we find doesn’t poison us, that is.’

  ‘So basically,’ said Traynor, ‘we’re just as fucked as we were before we got in here.’

  ‘It’s a working fabricator, at least,’ said Sam, grabbing Amit by the shoulder and pushing him back towards the shaft. ‘Let’s take a look around the rest of the ship.’

  It became obvious how extensive the damage was once they reached the next highest deck. Several bays had collapsed inwards, crushing equipment and other supplies. The bulkheads and entrance-ways were blackened and warped, and a terrible stink of melted plastic filled the air. They came across the remains of a medical bay, and the twisted wreckage of a construction robot that must have got caught in the conflagration.

  The third deck was hardly any better. At one point they encountered a construction robot travelling down the shaft, carried on a tiny steel platform that extended out from the groove in the shaft’s wall.

  The fourth and uppermost deck, however, appeared to have escaped the worst of the conflagration. Much of it was taken up by a single command space ringed with screens, consoles, seating and numerous interfaces.

  Not that it had escaped entirely unscathed, however; several screens had toppled from their mounts and lay shattered on the deck. Similarly, a few of the consoles had come loose from their housings and lay in pieces. Loose wiring spat sparks against the metal decking, and a bulkhead had a wide crack running through its plastic surfacing.

  Despite this damage, a number of virtual panels and controls shimmered into existence the moment Sam entered the command space. Others flickered spasmodically, then died.

  A hard landing, indeed.

  Sam stepped towards a virtual panel that appeared fully functional, brushing its surface with his fingertips. It flashed red, much like the one next to the cargo bay door.

  Traynor entered and watched Sam moving his hands in the air. ‘You see something?’

  ‘There are AR interfaces all around us,’ said Sam. ‘How about you—do you see anything?’

  Traynor shook his head. ‘Nope.’ He looked over at Jess. ‘You?’

  Jess shook her head.

  ‘But you can, right?’ Sam asked Amit, who nodded. ‘So why only the two of us?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Amit. ‘Once I found my way inside, I discovered the virtual interfaces gave me root access to the lander’s primary computer systems.’ He swallowed. ‘I…locked everyone else out of those systems, thinking that meant no one else would see any of the virtual interfaces. Clearly, I was wrong.’

  ‘You still haven’t explained why the hell you kept all this to yourself,’ said Traynor. ‘When did you figure out you could get inside?’

  ‘I was the first to awaken,’ Amit explained. ‘I had a few hours to explore on my own, and when I first set eyes on the lander, I realised…’ his voice trailed off. ‘This may take some explaining.’

  ‘Then maybe you’d better start at the beginning,’ suggested Jess.

  Amit let himself sink into a chair. ‘It’s true that I kept some things back from you,’ he said. ‘I needed time to study the lander’s workings and try to work out exactly how we came to be here. I…suspected I might in some way be responsible, even though I was unable to remember anything, and to be honest I was afraid of how you all might react once you found that out.’

  Jess moved in front of him. ‘So do you or don’t you know why we’re here?’

  Amit looked pained. ‘I believe I have worked out enough to at least make some educated guesses.’ He smoothed his hands over the thighs of his jumpsuit, then folded his hands together as if begging them not to beat the crap out of him.

  ‘At the point that I last remember,’ Amit continued, ‘the point we all last remember, I had already been working on prototypes of this very craft for several years. Although I must stress that, at that time, they were still little more than computer models.’ He looked around nervously. ‘I was the project’s chief designer, you see.’

  The rest of them exchanged glances.

  ‘Have
you heard,’ Amit continued, ‘of a man named Martin Tenenbaum?’

  * * *

  They had all heard of Martin Tenenbaum, of course. The entire world had heard of Martin Tenenbaum.

  When, in 2030, the invitation to a new life had arrived at the cramped Bangalore apartment Amit Subarash shared with his grandparents, it came in the form of a simple letter.

  It wasn’t a golden ticket, and it was delivered by drone rather than by an owl. But for all that, Tenenbaum’s name, printed in a cursive font on rich cream paper, was magical enough: it was an invitation to speak face-to-face with Tenenbaum himself, under conditions of strict secrecy, at an undisclosed location. A car would be sent for Amit the next morning.

  That Amit, then nothing more than a simple postgraduate student, might refuse such an invitation was so far beyond contemplation as to be ridiculous.

  And yet the letter raised a simple question: what did a man richer than Croesus, and whose vast fortune lay in medical software and hardware, possibly want with an impoverished Indian student struggling to complete his doctorate in applied nuclear physics?

  The next morning, a driverless Mercedes arrived outside the Bangalore apartment despite the frequently voiced concerns of his alarmed grandparents and delivered Amit to the nearest airport. Bewildered, he boarded a private jet that quickly boosted to hypersonic speeds, dropping to a landing on the outskirts of Seattle three hours and thirty-five minutes later. Another twenty minutes passed inside a second limousine before Amit found himself facing Martin Tenenbaum across a desk laden with bagels and coffee, the Space Needle visible through a window behind him.

  At some point, the following conversation had veered away from the relative merits and demerits of the University of Bangalore’s high-energy research department and towards deep-space exploration. Each year was hotter than the last, Tenenbaum explained, and the resulting global food and water shortages of the last few decades had proven catastrophic. Multiple toxic algal blooms were affecting all the major oceans and had triggered irreversible marine extinctions that threatened the long-term survival of the human race. Given such threats, suggested Tenenbaum, didn’t it seem obvious that humanity needed to reach out to the stars so that it might ensure its survival?

  Any trip to the stars, however, was likely to take centuries, if not millennia, even with the benefit of the powerful new fusion drives then under development. Any crew would need to haul along enough food, fuel, air and water to keep both themselves and their descendants alive long enough to reach their destination. The costs were punitive, the technology still underdeveloped, and the human costs appalling. How, then, to achieve the universal dream of stepping onto the surface of a planet orbiting another star within one’s lifetime?

  It was then that Tenenbaum turned his back on Amit and showed the young student the barely visible scar lines radiating outwards from the point where his vertebral column met the base of his skull. The device, once implanted, and called a cerebral tap, collected memories from the deep tissues of the brain. Over time, it would construct a complete facsimile of the original person’s mind given a sufficiently powerful substrate.

  Cloning technology had advanced hugely in the last few decades, and before very long, Tenenbaum continued, it would be possible to equip an interstellar craft with frozen embryonic tissues which, on arrival at a destination system, could be force-grown to adulthood within a few months and invested with the memories of the original person. It was the perfect solution to many of the anticipated problems with deep-space exploration, even if some of the science involved tended, for the moment, towards the speculative rather than practical.

  All such a ship needed was adequate shielding, fuel to reach its destination, artificial wombs to preserve, grow and nurture the embryos, and a low-level AI system to run it all.

  But why me? Amit had asked when the other man finally paused.

  Tenenbaum responded by conjuring up a holo-display of one of Amit’s industrial designs, filched, somehow, from the University of Bangalore’s mainframes: a highly micro-miniaturised fusion drive, smaller by several factors than anything else currently under development, and the subject of his unfinished doctorate.

  Build this for me, Tenenbaum told Amit, and we can travel to the stars.

  And the money to do so, of course, proved to be unlimited.

  Ten years passed, by which time Amit had become head of Tenenbaum’s R&D propulsion research division. The first interstellar probes, barely larger than a clenched fist and equipped with Amit’s high-yield micro-miniaturised fusion thrusters, were already on their way to Proxima Centauri, Tau Ceti and dozens of other closely neighbouring star systems. They were an armada, part of what Tenenbaum called his Starship Initiative, printed in their hundreds and fired into the void at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light.

  Only a few were likely to survive the rigours of deep space, but once these few reached their destinations, they would hunt out habitable worlds and transmit back information if any such were found. Then, the plan went, larger craft already underway would be diverted towards those target systems, their crew little more than minuscule tissue samples waiting to be born under the light of a different star.

  * * *

  Amit paused in his story, and Sam heard the muttered, distant voices of the others milling about the lower decks. He half-unconsciously reached one hand to the back of his neck, wondering if he could feel a slight bump there, something that might indicate the presence of a cortical tap. He couldn’t be sure either way.

  Across the command deck, he saw Jess doing the same.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ asked Traynor. ‘This happened, what, ten years ago? I remember seeing something about it on the news. Most of those probes are still on their way. It’s going to be decades or even centuries before they reach their destinations, so it still doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘That’s not what Amit’s saying,’ said Sam. ‘He means that all of that time has already passed. We’re already a long way into the future, regardless of what our memories tell us.’

  Amit nodded. ‘Tau Ceti, to take an example, is twelve light-years from Earth—meaning that even at a fifth of the speed of light, it would still take a probe decades to reach it, and decades more before a signal could be sent back. Even if a ship such as the one that presumably brought us here was already underway, it would still take many more decades or, more likely, centuries before it could divert here—wherever here is. How long I can’t say, not without knowing where we are relative to our home solar system.’

  Traynor looked appalled. ‘Then how long has it been since…since I last remember?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Amit. ‘As I said, it depends just how many light-years from home we are. I’m hoping to find out after further investigation.’

  Amit still looked terrified, even as he explained all this. Sam hardly begrudged him: there were more than enough of them to form a good-sized lynching party if they decided he was to blame for their circumstances.

  ‘I didn’t sign on for some fucking interstellar voyage,’ said Jess, her voice rising. ‘So why the fuck don’t I know about any of this? How come I don’t remember anything after two days ago?’

  ‘Again, I don’t know.’ Amit pressed himself deeper into his seat as Jess towered over him, her fists bunched at her sides.

  ‘Bullshit,’ she spat, leaning down until she was almost nose-to-nose with Amit. ‘I think there’s something else you’re not telling us.’

  ‘Jess—’ Sam warned her.

  She lunged forward, grabbing Amit by the neck. Sam responded by grabbing hold of Jess and trying to pull her away from Amit, and she elbowed him hard in the chest. Sam staggered back, colliding with a console behind him.

  ‘Jess!’ Traynor shouted. ‘Stand down. That’s an order!’

  She turned to stare at both of them, nostrils flaring, Amit still struggling in her grasp. Then she let go of him and Amit collapsed to the deck next to his chair, coughing and wheezing.
<
br />   ‘Something went wrong,’ Amit gasped, one hand pressed to his throat. ‘A computer error, perhaps. I need to contact the mothership and find out what went wrong.’

  Sam looked at him. ‘So there really is a mothership?’

  ‘Of course there is,’ Amit gasped. ‘That’s what I’ve been doing up here—trying to communicate with it.’ He shook his head, then coughed again. ‘But…something’s not working. I can’t get it to respond.’

  ‘All right,’ said Traynor, staring at Amit like he was on the wrong end of a microscope, ‘here’s another question. How was Tenenbaum able to record our memories the way you say he did? Because I can tell you for a fact I never had one of these cortical taps.’

  ‘Most likely,’ said Amit, ‘you had one installed in the years after you last remember.’

  ‘Do we still have one?’ asked Sam. ‘In these bodies, I mean?’

  ‘Most likely,’ Amit agreed.

  ‘I can’t feel anything, though.’

  ‘Neither are you consciously aware of the implants that have allowed you to interact with the lander’s virtual displays,’ Amit reminded him. ‘I can only assume cortical tap design has improved considerably since we last remember.’

  Since we last remember. ‘So to be absolutely clear,’ asked Sam, ‘you’re saying we’re missing all of our memories after 28th of August 2050?’

  Amit nodded. ‘That’s my conjecture, yes.’

  ‘Just how much of our memories?’ Sam continued, something cold pooling deep in his gut. ‘Are we talking days, months, years or what?’

  ‘I’m truly sorry, but I simply don’t know,’ said Amit. ‘I was trying to work that out when…’ he glanced at Jess, then ducked his head down. ‘But my guess would be that we’ve lost many years of our lives.’ He licked his lips, then looked around at them all. ‘Most likely decades.’

  8

  THE TRUCK

  ‘All right,’ asked Traynor, ‘how far can we trust what he’s saying?’