Harvest

by Olga Werby

  Aside from the giant circular impact scar with a central dimple, the small Saturn moon looked a lot like Earth’s moon: gray, heavily cratered, not particularly interesting. But unlike Luna, Mimas was mostly made from water ice, and below the pockmarked surface of thick dust and dirty ice, there lay an ocean. For years, there had been speculation that life could survive, even thrive, under Mimas’s frozen surface crust. And twenty years ago, a drilling probe dropped from an unmanned ship did in fact find single-celled organisms deep under the ice.

  Of course, by that time, it had been discovered that every possible solar system object that could harbor life did so. It had been the same story probe after probe: drill down, take samples, get the same type of hardy extremophile zoo. All were single-celled, and all used the same method of transforming nutrients into usable energy via cellular respiration: organic compounds plus oxygen oxidized into carbon dioxide plus water and energy. The same adenosine triphosphate molecule, ATP, had been present in every life form discovered across the solar system. This was further evidence that all life in the solar system had evolved in the same location and spread, quite early on, to every planet, moon, asteroid, and planetoid capable of supporting it. All life discovered to date had the same Last Universal Common Ancestor, LUCA, as all life on Earth. But only Earth had evolved past the single-cell stage to host life in such a wide variety.

  “It’s massive,” Vars said as the Herschel crater floated below them.

  “There! On the south slope of the central mound,” said Liut, pointing. “It’s partly in shadow now, but you can just see the glint of the Mims structure.”

  Sure enough, halfway up the bottom slope was a collection of cubes, seemingly randomly scattered. They were larger than Vars had expected, even though she’d seen dozens of images taken by the probe in orbit around Mimas.

  In the last few days, she and Ben had spent a lot of time discussing the different types of probes one might want to send to another star system. Given the vast distances, stellar exploration couldn’t proceed the same way as a planetary system survey. For one thing, communication with the home world would be so slow and cumbersome that a star probe would need to be smart enough to operate without guidance for many years, perhaps decades. And such probes would need to be cheap and redundant. The objective would be to send a lot of probes to each location, in the hope that some survived long enough to complete their mission and send back data.

  A “scout” probe was one possibility—send something small and use it as a listening post, picking up radio waves from neighboring objects and transmitting a positive signal back home via a narrow-focused beam. A “toehold” probe was another option—a medium-sized probe that could establish a communication hub as well as collect some data. Such a probe would be large enough to have resources to make decisions once it reached its destination. It might set down on a planet or put itself into orbit around one. But a larger probe would be more expensive, so one might imagine sending out a lot of scouts but only a few toeholds.

  “It’s the size of a decent Malfy!” said one of Liut’s people.

  “It’s certainly bigger than a scout,” said Ben. “Why would Mims send such an expensive ship thousands of years before humans were even detectable?”

  “You mean our radio signals?” Liut asked.

  “Yes, but also the changing composition of our atmosphere due to the Industrial Revolution. That could be detected remotely via spectroscopy.”

  “But that was still just in the last few centuries,” said Vars. “On the scale of a few thousand years, it doesn’t change the calculation much.”

  “Which means this wasn’t the first probe the Mims sent,” said Ian. It would had been just too expensive to send something this large right away without earlier smaller reconnaissance probe. “But of course we knew that already,” he added.

  “They wanted our star system,” said Evi. She’d had the bad fortune of getting stuck in the very back of the bridge, halfway into the hallway, floating by the ceiling. “Vars said that we have an unusually rich system. All these planets and moons and asteroids. Who wouldn’t want to colonize all this?”

  “That wasn’t Vars,” Trish grumbled quietly but loud enough to be heard.

  “This is a community effort,” Ian said. “We’re all here to solve the same problem.”

  Vars noted that Ian glanced at Liut as he said it. Things were still tense between the scientists and the military crew. Ian thought it was completely Liut’s fault. Regardless, they all needed more communication and sharing, less suspicion and accusations.

  “Where do you think their first probe went?” Liut asked.

  “Earth,” said Vars and Trish almost simultaneously.

  “If we were Mims,” Trish said, “we would send a probe to the most promising planet. And that would be ours.”

  “All planets in our solar system are ours,” Liut said.

  “True,” Ian agreed. “But Earth will always be our home planet.”

  “It’s the most promising to our kind of life,” Vars said. “We don’t know what Mims require yet.”

  “Maybe Mims sent their nanobots to multiple planets,” said Alice. “We know they were found on Earth, Luna, and Mars, but that could be because we brought them with us from Earth. Terry, have we gotten confirmation on whether the Luna and Mars nanobots are the same as the ones found on Earth?”

  “That information is still unavailable,” Liut replied cryptically.

  This was not the first time Alice had raised this particular question. And Liut had yet to give her a straight answer. Perhaps he truly didn’t know.

  Despite strong objections from Ian and his team, Liut insisted that they land right inside the Herschel Crater, less than two miles from the artifact.

  “We need answers,” he said. “Stop pussy-footing around.” Then he closed all discussion on the matter. If the scientists had any delusions that they were in charge, they didn’t any more. Vars certainly didn’t.

  Not that Vars disagreed on that point—obviously they had to find out what Mims wanted from them—she just objected to Liut’s approach. And, if she had to be honest with herself, she was scared of the prospect of being marooned on a moon of Saturn with an artifact from a potentially hostile alien civilization. For that’s what they were going to be if they landed: marooned. A slingshot maneuver around Saturn could still bring them back to Mars. If they sat down on Mimas’s surface, they had no way of getting back up, and they had enough provisions to survive for only six months. The plan had always been that they would be resupplied by other ships that would soon follow their departure. But given the situation on Earth, they had no reasonable expectation that another ship was going to show up and deliver additional fuel and supplies. Things felt grim...unless Liut was holding back information. Vars wouldn’t put it past him.

  With the crew getting ready for landing, the scientists were sent back to prepare in their own cabins. Having a bunch of people floating around the bridge, getting in the way, wasn’t wise. Ben and Vars returned to their blue-sky jam sessions in her room—there wasn’t many other ways they could contribute just yet. Evi insisted on joining them.

  “So,” Evi started. “Let’s assume the probe was sent to our star system to listen and report back when, or if, the life forms on one of the planets became intelligent enough to generate complex content and beam it out into space via electromagnetic signals. That would be 278 years ago. I’m discarding the early experiments with sending radio signals to synchronize clocks across Europe in the 1850s and the telegraph communication of the same era. I’m putting the start date at 1904, when the Eiffel Tower started to broadcast French radio service.”

  “That signal wouldn’t have been strong enough to be picked up on Mimas,” Ben said. “Although if they had listening station directly on Earth... But I get where you’re going with this, Evi. And not too long after that, the signals g
rew stronger. So let’s say 250 years ago the Mims first heard our broadcasts and figured out they were listening to another intelligence.”

  “At which point, they probably sent a message home,” Evi said. “That message takes time to get to them—depending on how far away they are. And when the Mims receive that message, they send a return message—with some instructions.”

  “They might have taken time to debate what to do,” Vars said. “But yes, a message would have to get there and back. Which would place the Mims at a maximum of 125 light-years away from us.”

  “We picked up the latest signal sent from Mimas—a lucky coincidence since we landed our life-seeking probe on that moon just two decades ago,” Ben said. “And the timing of the alien signal is very close to your dad’s discovery of nanobots all over the world.”

  “We’ve been going on the assumption of just one signal, but that’s just a guess,” Evi said. “The artifact could have been beaming information home for millennia.”

  “But still just one signal in the last twenty years,” Ben said.

  “What of fresh ice?” Vars asked. After the signal was detected, the alien artifact was finally spotted on Mimas’s surface because in was in an area of an unexpectedly high albedo. The fresh ice was far more reflective than the gray muck found everywhere else on the surface of Mimas.

  “That’s new,” Ben agreed. “But who’s to say that they needed to have their probe come out from under the ice to send data home?”

  “But there was a change,” Vars argued.

  “Yes, there was,” Evi agreed. “But do we understand it more now that we’ve talked about this endlessly?”

  “Of course it helps to talk about it,” Ben said. “We help each other understand what’s going on through these conversations.”

  “Well,” said Evi, “this time tomorrow we’ll be down there, and perhaps we’ll be able to do more than just rehash the same ideas over and over again.”

  Vars didn’t know why the exobiologist was in a particularly foul mood—but everyone was on edge. Vars was stressed too. She felt a strange mix of high anxiety and thrill of landing on a new world and coming in direct contact with another sentient species in their galaxy. Moment by moment, fear and excitement alternated as the top emotion. It was a psychological roller coaster ride...and they were not all riding in the same car...or even on the same train.

  When their small meeting broke up, Ben pulled Vars aside. “Ian injected himself with medical cyberhumatics last night,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “He was complaining about feeling useless because of his arm. Evi said something about the healing kits in the medlab. So he went and injected himself to get some use of his arm before we land. He wants to be part of the team that goes out and inspects the Mims’s artifact in person.”

  “That’s crazy,” Vars said. But it did explain why Ian looked particularly tired back on the bridge. It took energy to bond with cyberhumatics. “Does anyone else know?”

  “Just Evi,” Ben said. “She told me that Ian is starting to get some sensation back in his hand. But would you tell Alice? She should check on him—just in case he picked up an extra dose of nanobots as part of his regenerative package.” Of course, everyone on board had nanobots in their systems—no amount of blood filtration removed every single alien bot—but without the cyberhumatics sites, no one showed abnormal nanobot clustering. Not yet. Ian was a fool.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Phoebe and Matteo huddled together on the floor of the lab in a little nest of blankets and equipment covers. From their position behind the barricaded airlock door, they could watch the bio-enclosure where Sophie and the rats lived. It had been two days since Sophie had become trapped inside. By now she had grown a new arm. Well, it was really just a nanobot-constructed skeleture, but it worked, and the fingers wiggled...under Sophie’s control, hopefully.

  “What do you think?” Sophie said over the speaker system.

  Phoebe flicked on her microphone. “Very impressive.” The newly-made arm really was amazing. It was far superior to any human-made medical cyberhumatics used to restore function in damaged limbs.

  Sophie went around her enclosure, collecting the new batch of nanobot-injected rats. She worked methodically but didn’t explain what she was doing.

  Matteo spoke softly, as if to himself. “To send a spaceship full of these things would require a society with a large enough economy to dedicate significant effort to a venture that provided no immediate rewards. That means large surpluses of intellectual and natural resources. Capital.”

  “Mathematical and computational literacy,” Phoebe added softly.

  “Desire to explore. Natural curiosity about the world.”

  “Ability to focus the energy of the entire civilization on a difficult task.”

  “Not necessarily,” Matteo said. “In the years before the Keres Triples, the British aristocracy, for instance, routinely just up and decided to find the source of the Nile or…or went on an expedition to the South Pole. The Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron patrolled the Atlantic and stopped sixteen hundred slave ships, saving one hundred and fifty thousand Africans—and that was just an act of one people: the British. They didn’t require the whole planet to get behind their endeavors. The British just passed the Slave Trade Act and devoted the resources to put it into action.”

  “Granted,” Phoebe said. “All that’s needed is desire, ability, and enough resources to pull it off.”

  They sat in silence, watching Sophie graft a rat onto her shoulder. The animal was already encased in a carapace of nanobots and “melted” into Sophie’s body with remarkable speed, adding flesh to Sophie’s new nanobot-bones.

  “Why?” Matteo gestured at Sophie’s enclosure.

  “To see that it’s possible?” Phoebe said.

  “To see for whom? Sophie or the bots?”

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?”

  After a few more minutes, the rat was completely absorbed into Sophie—ratty body, carapace, and all. It was as if the rat had never existed. Sophie flexed her new arm, wiggling her newly skinned fingers. They looked human…from this distance anyway. She picked up another rat.

  There was a low hum in the lab—the generators kicked in again. It must have gotten dark outside. During the few hours of daylight, the lab facility mostly worked on solar power; at night, the batteries discharged all the energy that they’d managed to capture, and the generators picked up the slack. This far north, there wasn’t enough daytime this time of year to subsist purely on solar.

  Phoebe shivered.

  “Cold?” They kept the temperature low, both to control the nanobot spread and to conserve energy. Without a guaranteed resupply, they had to conserve everything.

  “I’m good,” Phoebe said. Frankly, she wasn’t sure if she had shivered because of the cold or because of fear.

  They continued to watch Sophie. Every once in a while, she would turn toward the glass partition and smile at them. The freaked panic that she had shown when the nanobots first overpowered her was long gone. She was back to her usual competent, confident self. Except…different.

  “What else?” Matteo asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What else are we missing?” he said. “Why are these things here now? Why are they doing this? What’s their purpose? What are we missing?” he asked again.

  “Well, let’s start from first principles,” Phoebe said. “What do we really know that’s true?”

  “Fourteen months ago, I found the first nanobot in a water sample gathered around San Diego. The nanobots are remarkably compatible with our planet’s biologicals. They’re able to attach themselves to cells and hijack the energy structures within to power themselves up. But you know this—I’ve shown you all my work.”

  “Yes. But we’re going over i
t again. Do you have something better to do while Sophie sucks up all the rats?”

  “No, sorry. I just hate feeling so powerless…so isolated.”

  “That’s because you left the Vault system. Isolation is where I thrive.” Phoebe gently squeezed Matteo’s hand underneath the blankets, like she used to do when they were just Seedlings.

  “Thanks, Phoebe.”

  “So…” Phoebe tilted her head toward Sophie. “However creepy that is, it’s also amazing technology.”

  “Not even a gray whisker out of place,” Matteo agreed. “The bots just took the tissues from the rats and rearranged them to make a human arm. As I’ve said, they’re remarkably compatible with Earth’s biology. To an insane degree.”

  “Perhaps they’re just really good at bioengineering.”

  “No, I think it’s more than that. These bots were meant for us.”

  “You mean the mammals of Earth are their targets?”

  “Not just mammals. The first bot I found was right on the surface, attached to a phytoplankton. The diatom was generating enough energy via photosynthesis for both its own use and that of the nanobot. I went on to find protozoa, bacteria, even mycoplankton all actively supporting nanobots. The bots knew just how to interface with a variety of Earth organisms. So why would an alien civilization send nanobots to another star system and hijack the energy generation pathways from our life forms?”

  “I assume the energy vampirism is just a side effect,” Phoebe said. “Just a way of powering their little machines. The real question is what they need those machines for.”

  “But that’s just an assumption. It could be the intended effect. If you wanted to take over another star system, wouldn’t it be easier if all the life that could protest or wage war against you was conveniently removed?”

  “They’re not killing Sophie,” Phoebe pointed out.