by Olga Werby
His words dissolved into desperate hacking, leaving him almost breathless. Vars could hear how sick her dad was, and it scared her. Or was she scared because he was talking crazy? Or because what he was saying wasn’t crazy?
In this enforced pause, while her dad was recovering his breath, Vars considered what she knew and what she’d managed to talk about on the ship’s open microphone. She’s been talking for days—when had her dad cut into her stream of consciousness? What had he heard? What had she said that was important? What had he missed? She tried to concentrate, tried to come up with a quick outline of what had happened to her since she’d left Earth—just the important bits, just the stuff that might help her dad survive back home.
Her dad started speaking again. “Our plan, Phoebe’s and mine, is to get back into the Vault. If anyone knows what’s going on in this world, in our star system, it would be the Elders. We can’t raise anyone else from here. Something is jamming us. So we were planning to go—”
“Don’t go, Daddy. Don’t leave me!” Vars spoke before she could stop herself. She didn’t want to be alone. Not again. Never again...
“—but I’ll come back. After I get Phoebe in, I’ll come back to the station. And I’ll stay with you, baby. Just keep talking, Vars. I’ll be with you. Always.”
The relief Vars felt was overwhelming. She cried. Her daddy would be with her. Somehow that made everything better. He knew she needed him, and he would stay. She sobbed, and Matteo hacked. They shared the erratic, spasmodic breathing millions of miles apart.
Chapter Nineteen
Vars fell asleep in her chair waiting for her dad to get back online. She had long ago given up on keeping up any kind of regular sleep-wake cycles; she just passed out when she couldn’t go on anymore. If she didn’t get to that degree of tiredness, she simply couldn’t sleep. Her mind churned, ruminating endlessly on her situation, on Mims, on the evolution of life in their galaxy. She needed to be completely drained of energy to get her brain to shut off.
And yet now, as much as she wished herself awake, she simply couldn’t do it. She fell asleep waiting for her dad to speak again.
“Vars?”
A woman’s voice.
Vars found it difficult to respond. “Grr. Hrrr.” She stood, shakily, to get some more coffee.
“Vars?” Phoebe, probably.
“Wait,” Vars managed, inserting her dirty cup into the slot. It was sucked in, and she heard satisfying noises of boiling water. Since the ship was kept at a slighter lower pressure than on the surface of the Earth, the boiling temperature was lower. The coffee apparatus sealed the cup and raised the pressure before heating the water. Vars liked her coffee hot, sweet, and milky…even if she usually ended up drinking it cold, bitter, and plain. The first sip mattered.
“Ahhhh!”
Vars heard herself scream. Surprised, she tried to figure out why.
“Vars! Are you okay? Speak to me!”
Must be Phoebe, Vars thought once more. She felt herself hyperventilating, heard herself making strange noises. What’s that all about?
“Vars? What’s going on? You’ve stopped transmitting for over a day. Please set up a schedule of regular updates. Matteo worries. We both worry.”
Vars finally managed to take control of her body. Sleep deprivation was a terrible thing. Her hands were shaking. Her whole arms, really. She was hugging herself, looking at the coffee machine.
“It changed,” she said, as much for her own benefit as for Phoebe’s. It was good to hear a human voice in the same room. “The coffee machine changed.”
“Vars! I will repeat your name until I get a signal back. Vars! Vars!”
“The Mims got to it,” Vars said. “I guess they thought I needed better coffee.” She started to laugh hysterically.
With a bing, a small light announced that her beverage was ready. Vars didn’t take it. She backed into her chair, lifted her feet off the floor, and wrapped her arms around her knees.
“Vars. Please speak with me.”
“I’m here,” Vars finally answered—though Phoebe wouldn’t get that response for over an hour. And she would get all of the other freaked-out utterances first. Well, there was nothing to be done about that.
Vars looked at the clock. She had slept for over twenty-six hours. No wonder Phoebe was so upset. She rewound the audio messages from Earth to the last thing she’d heard and started to play from there.
Phoebe never believed Matteo when he said they would be able to reach Saturn’s moon and get in touch with Vars from here. It was such a long shot. But she humored him—it was always a bad idea to take away hope—and it turned out that he had been right.
But now, it had been over twenty-six hours since the last few words arrived from Mimas. Phoebe thought Vars sounded unstable. But given what she had probably lived through—Phoebe could only imagine, based on her own experiences back at the lab—it was a miracle Matteo’s girl was talking at all. But she was the only one talking. Phoebe didn’t have Matteo’s worldly experience, yet she was pretty sure that the military team accompanying Vars and the other scientists to Saturn wouldn’t just let her ramble on like that. Which meant they were gone...or incapacitated...or at the very least no longer in control of the ship. The other scientists, too, they would have put a stop to Vars at some point. It seemed likely that Vars was alone on that ship. What did that mean? Was Vars compromised? Like Sophie? Did people die up there too?
Matteo was asleep in a sitting position on the floor of the wardens’ communications room, leaning against the back wall. He was too sick to talk with his daughter. Phoebe had given him a sedative, a multispectrum antibiotic, and a narcotic-laced cough suppressant. She wasn’t in good shape either. Her heart rate was elevated, her breathing was uneven, she felt tingling in her armpits, and her extremities were numb. Her toes were frostbitten and would require medical attention once she got back into the Vault. And she was obviously suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Her decision-making abilities were probably severely compromised. Her thinking was sluggish, to put it kindly.
But she knew she had to get some information from Vars. What was going on up there on Mimas? What had Vars learned? Anything that could help the humans down here on Earth? She recorded a short message. “Vars. This is Phoebe, your dad’s friend. Are you okay? Speak to me. What’s going on? Please give me a brief summary of what happened to your mission.” She set it on a loop and sent it out into the depths of the solar system.
When Phoebe was leaving the Vault to go work at Matteo’s lab, there was already talk of shutting the Vault off from the rest of the world for at least a decade. But after negotiating with the EPSA and world governments, the decision was made to postpone that decision until after for news from Mimas arrived. And while waiting, Phoebe and Matteo were assigned to do research on behalf of all the Vaults. Their work would contribute to making strategic judgements about humanity’s future. But now? Now, Phoebe was hoping to bargain information for her ability to be sealed in the Vault with her fellow Seeds. The more she could figure out, the better her chances were at getting back home...or so she hoped. Matteo, of course, had other plans. He just wanted to help his little girl. Phoebe had assumed he would stay with the wardens. But now? What now?
She set out to explore the wardens’ station. Like the Vaults and the lab, it was built both above and below ground—two living floors below, one above, and a data center deep in the permafrost underneath everything. Unlike the lab, the station didn’t have a hospitality section—no one was allowed inside without authorization. Even if a visitor was in distress, the wardens didn’t care. They were careful to keep their station off the maps and off the public roads. The little concrete fortress in the ice screamed of aggressive inhospitality. This was one of the reasons why Phoebe had assumed going to the wardens’ station was a hopeless endeavor. But to her surprise, her authorization codes—t
he ones she’d learned when she passed through this station on the way to Matteo’s lab, in what felt like another lifetime—still worked. That shouldn’t have happened. The codes were supposed to be changed every few days, and it had been weeks since Phoebe passed through here. Could that signal the date at which the station emptied?
For it was certainly empty. Since she and Matteo had arrived, they had found no one, not even a body, in the whole place. That alone was a very bad sign. These stations were designed for 100% occupancy at all times—they were the necessary link between humanity’s genetic backup and the world at large. The wardens served as both buffers and jailers.
Phoebe had no love for the sadistic rituals of the wardens’ sect. And a sect it was. It took fanatical zealotry to leave an infant at the doors to the Vaults, in the freezing cold, to die or to be saved by the Seeds on guard duty. It was a miracle that Matteo discovered Vars before she died of exposure. And those Seeds who tried to escape their Vaults before their ten thousandth day? Phoebe felt a shudder run down her body. She hadn’t even gotten to see the bodies. It was like those Seeds had never existed. Even as Phoebe loved her life in the Vault and desperately wanted to get back in, she’d always felt the Vault system was a barbaric solution to preserving human diversity. Australian Vault, and Sophie in particular, were pushing for wider dispersal of human Seeds across the solar system and beyond. In many ways the idea made sense...or as much sense as the Vaults. The mental image of Sophie with rat extensions made Phoebe physically wince. She knew she would never get over that... But she shook herself off and continued—that was what Seeds were trained to do.
Phoebe proceeded methodically through the wardens’ station, starting with the living quarters. Whatever had happened here, it was an orderly evacuation. All the beds were freshly made, although most of the personal belongings remained. The kitchen was shut down, but there was still plenty of food in the pantries—canned and frozen stuffs and the ubiquitous ready-to-eat meals. Earlier, she’d checked the garage section up on top and had found no transport vehicles—the wardens must have left in those. She herself had originally been transported from here to the lab via a drone-copter that was to return back to the station once dropping her off. But it, too, was nowhere to be found.
And despite the apparent orderliness of the wardens’ departure, they had left no logs, no messages for future wardens. No explanations. In the Vaults’ history, no wardens’ station had ever been left empty. Both the stations and the Vaults had protocols for natural and man-made disasters—a nuclear war, another catastrophic asteroid impact, a gigantic solar flare, some environmental disaster of global proportions. After all, that was why they existed. The Vaults, Phoebe knew, could go on lockdown for decades, even centuries. She wasn’t as clear as to what the wardens’ station emergency protocol was, but she felt certain that leaving the station unattended and accessible to unauthorized visitors was definitely not it.
There was also good news here, however—while there was no sign of human life, there was also no sign of nanobot structures. No fractal cubes, no strange tissues that could have been a reorganized body of a dead warden. Nothing. It was clean. She was clean—she and Matteo scrubbed their blood the night before they left the lab. Which meant there was no reason not to let her go back home into the Vault.
Phoebe felt a palpable relief. She was homesick. She wanted to go back deep underground, to her bed, to her students, to her work, to her lab…
She considered trying to call up the Vault’s Elders. Elder Alaba would want to talk to her. Debrief her. She felt ambivalent about what she should tell him. If she was honest about what had happened to Sophie, they would probably think it was too dangerous to let her back in. But they would ask about Sophie. Sophie was a Seed, just like Phoebe. The Vaults cared about what happened to their own.
“Phoebe? I hope you’re still there.”
The voice came over the main speakers. Phoebe rushed back in the main communications room, the heart of the wardens’ station. Matteo was still asleep in the corner. His breath was raspy and irregular. Pneumonia.
“I’m here,” Phoebe replied out of habit.
“I don’t know why they didn’t take me,” Vars continued. “They took everyone else. Alice first. We were all D-tats-free. I never even got mine installed. The rest had theirs removed either before we left Earth or during the flight. But I guess you know that. Alice thought Liut was spying on us back on Earth. I think he was crazy…well, perhaps just paranoid. But then, there was a lot to be paranoid about, right?”
Vars laughed, and Phoebe heard the full depth of the girl’s psychosis in that outburst. But then Phoebe felt a bit on the crazy side herself. Who was she to judge?
“We tried to do blood cleansing, but… I don’t know when, but we stopped. I stopped. I’m all alone—what’s the point? I have enough supplies to last several years, if I conserve. I’m the only consumer, after all. Everyone else left to go into the Mims’s artifact. Well, I think that’s where everyone went. I watched Ben and Trish walk there. The others…all I know for sure is that they’re no longer on the ship. Haven’t been for days…weeks?”
There was a long pause.
“Keep talking, Vars. You’re doing great,” Phoebe said. “Just keep telling your story. What happened to you? I’m listening. And we’re here, Vars. You’re not alone. Isolated, but not alone. Okay? Keep talking. Just keep talking.”
Even if Vars wouldn’t get Phoebe’s encouragement until hours from now, Phoebe knew it would help. Vars needed to know that someone was there with her. Phoebe had a similar need. She wasn’t sure she would have been able to cope without the knowledge that the Vault was within walking distance.
“We’ve never figured out why,” Vars said finally. “Why? Why are they here? What do they want? But they’ve been here a long time. Thousands of years at least. This is not a probe just recently sent to investigate our star system. They’ve been watching us. Waiting. Multiplying, building structures—on Mimas, obviously, but I bet there are more of these artifacts all over our solar system. They had so much time, why not put down roots?”
“Why not?” echoed Phoebe.
“Ben and Trish thought that our whole galaxy might be teeming with Mims. Well, that’s what I think they thought...that’s how I remember it.”
“Panspermia on a massive scale.” Phoebe nodded. “Sophie thought so too.”
“Perhaps they aren’t dead,” Vars said suddenly.
Phoebe’s mind conjured up the gray arm swarming with nanobots. “It doesn’t matter,” she murmured.
“I’ve been thinking about going out there. Walking to the structure. I would like to look for the others. I would like to know for sure, you know?”
“Don’t do it, Vars. Let it go. Stay safe in the ship. Learn. Send back information.” Phoebe couldn’t help but reply. For Vars, it would be a strange collection of utterances, but for Phoebe, it was all very much in the now...almost a conversation.
“Ben said that all the nanobots were of a kind. We didn’t bring them here from Earth. We found them here. They were here already.”
Vars took a deep breath…or was it a sob? It was hard to tell over the speaker. Keep it together, Vars, thought Phoebe.
“The ones blessed with the best initial conditions win,” Vars said, switching to a new topic. The girl’s mind seemed to jump a lot. But was Phoebe in any better shape? She didn’t think so. “It’s not how smart you are or how inventive,” Vars went on. “It’s what you have to work with. Mims must have had an amazing run of luck. In a universe with billions and billions of galaxies, it’s not even unlikely that some species beats the odds somewhere, right? The Mims won the cosmic lottery. A multiplanet star system, rich in natural resources. A nice, stable star. Just the right galactic neighborhood—far from explosive activity but close to other rich star systems. And perhaps most importantly, they were the first.”
“What? I’m not following.” Phoebe spoke even though she knew she couldn’t really divert Vars’s narrative, not for some time. And by then, Vars wouldn’t even know what Phoebe was referring to. Phoebe would just have to do her best to understand Vars’s meaning. I wish I had read her book. She had always meant to…eventually. It was just that eventually was never now. And now it was too late.
“—millennia upon millennia of luck,” Vars was saying. “Luck builds luck. Those civilizations that started lucky just got luckier and luckier as time went on. Humans have a bad habit of not ascribing positive attributes to luck. The lucky ones are not deemed lucky, they are seen as smarter and prettier and…and…”
“What are you talking about, Vars? What luck?”
“Those who were born earlier and born into the right set of circumstances, they always win. On Earth, for instance, in the last two hundred years, luck meant being born on the North American continent, away from the aftereffects of the worst of the Triplets impact. It meant being born into a well-to-do family with deep resources and plenty of education. It meant being born healthy. It helped to be born beautiful. If you’re born lucky, then you’re beginning your race in life that much farther past the starting line. This is true for individuals, for civilizations, even for species. Now that humans have established themselves as dominant, what chance do dolphins have? But it’s more than that. The same principle applies even on a larger scale, on a galactic scale. And for Mims, Mims’s luck gave them extra time and resources. Mims were here first. Perhaps they were even the very first in our galaxy.”
“Are you saying the nanobot-makers are the oldest intelligent species in our galaxy?”
“They were certainly earlier than us. We’re rich with possibilities, too. We have a star system that’s full of potential. But we weren’t first. We were born a few billion years too late. The Mims had already established themselves, long before. They had already seeded the whole galaxy with life compatible with their own. Everywhere they visit, it’s all the same—”
