by Olga Werby
“I don’t understand,” Vars said, her voice breaking.
“I plan to make you understand. And then you will help me.”
“Me? Not us?”
“Even after a few billion years, we are not all the same, Vars. Individuality is a precious thing. We work hard to keep our identities separate and intact, despite the difficulties.”
Vars didn’t know what that meant. “Is there still an Alice?” she asked.
“There’s some Alice in me. I should say, all of Alice is in me. And that makes me different from all who are not Alice.”
“Can I see her? Alice? Can I talk to you face to face? Humans are better at communication when we can interact with each other directly. Words and sounds have limits. We’ve evolved to take advantage of the full range of senses and cues that our species can produce.” Vars had used this very argument with her graduate students to compel them to show up for class. There was a whole range of meaning she was missing. Was Alice aware of this conversation? Was there still a bond of friendship between them? Did those subtle changes in chemistry and neuron connections that came to be because they liked each other transfer to this…this…this Mims entity? And can I use that?
“You’re exhibiting extreme signs of stress.” No shit. “I don’t want you to come to harm. Bodies are fragile and should be treated with respect.” Given what Vars knew of Sophie’s transformation, she found this statement highly hypocritical. “As soon as you are ready, you will come to see me.”
“I’m ready now,” Vars said.
“Soon.”
“The Mims took over the Vault,” Phoebe said. If that wasn’t completely true yet, it would be soon. There was nothing she or Matteo could do to stop that from happening.
“They’ve taken over Vars’s ship, too,” Matteo said into heavy handset of the landline phone.
“I’m sorry.”
“Vars said she’d moved the ship on top of the alien structure on Mimas, and that she was leaving the ship. I think she’s still hoping to find Alice.”
“Alice is dead. Or at least she’s no longer Alice.”
“I know.”
“I’m coming back,” Phoebe said, realizing only as she said it that she had made the decision. And now that she had, she wanted to race out of the Vault and back to Matteo.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’ll see you soon, Matteo.” And just before she hung up the receiver, she added, “Love you.”
Vars was sure the walls were shifting. She almost caught them moving several times, but the movement was always at the periphery of her vision. Worse, she was lost. She hadn’t walked far, but she could no longer see the way back into the ship. The only logical conclusion was that the Mims had hidden it from her. Perhaps they were conducting a sick experiment—humans under duress, running inside the proverbial maze, like rats.
At least the air in the Mims structure was breathable—she wasn’t sure how, but it was. Vars had two sealed meals and a thermos of vitamin-rich water; she wasn’t able to figure out how to make coffee back on the ship without the Mims’s help. Another proof that aliens are evil. She laughed silently at her own joke. Still, she could last a few days, even a week, on this. Then thirst would be a problem.
Vars looked around again. One of these walls hid the ship. But every wall looked the same; or, at least, the pattern was the same everywhere and always equally confusing. The box fractal added a fractional dimension to the space. Like Jackson Pollock’s drips on canvas had a fractional dimensionality to them—the drips approached two dimensions of a plane instead of the single dimension of a pen stroke—the recursion of box within box within box raised the dimensionality of the Mims Base from three to at least three and a half, Vars guesstimated. It was this raised dimensionality that was confusing her senses, making a systematic search difficult.
She had an idea. She opened one of the containers of food. The dark, viscous liquid would be perfect for making marks on the walls. She got some of the sticky, unctuous goo on her fingers and marked the first large cube protrusion. Then she stepped to the next, moving over only by one. She examined each protrusion carefully, pushing and pulling on the smaller cubes to see if anything budged. If it all felt solid under her fingertips, she marked it with a smear. If there was an opening large enough to accommodate her arm or head, she poked inside, as far as she was able, then marked it with a two-finger smear. If it had a hole large enough to fit her whole body, Vars marked the outside with a handprint. In this manner she circumnavigated the space around her.
“I swear I examined this one before,” she grumbled under her breath as she traced the edges of medium-sized cube with her hand. It felt like she’d been at this task for an awfully long time, and this wasn’t such a large space. She looked around. She’d made only two palm prints, and she could still see both. But there weren’t enough single-finger smears—she was sure she’d marked many more cube protrusions than were visible. Either the walls were able to erase her marks somehow, or they moved the painted surfaces in such a way as to hide her smudging notations from view.
Vars stepped back into the center of the space, sat on the floor, and watched the trickster walls. While she waited, she finished off the last of the food from the open container. Nothing wasted. Every calorie was precious now.
Slowly, the box fractal with the first handprint shifted. It was the tiniest of shifts, but Vars was paying attention now, expecting it, and noticed the motion right away. Humans had evolved to be very good at detecting motion.
“There you go,” Vars said approvingly. “Show me what you’ve got.”
After the slow start, the box flipped completely in only a fraction of a second. One moment the handprint was visible, and the next it was gone. Without a sound.
Vars got up and walked over to that cube. It seemed very similar to how it looked before, but now, the deeper cubes aligned such that through the central opening Vars could see a faint light at the end of a long tunnel.
“Like Alice’s rabbit hole,” she said aloud. That she never came out of. “I guess you’re inviting me to go in now,” she told the room.
Vars adjusted her makeshift sack with the last ready meal and thermos and climbed inside.
Phoebe felt buoyed by her decision to return to Matteo. There was no angst over whether she’d be allowed in or if she’d need to blow her way inside. And the dread of the unknown was no longer a burden—Phoebe knew what she would leave behind. The journey back to the wardens’ station felt much faster than the trek to the Vault. She practically ran the last mile; the pain in her frost-bitten toes felt irrelevant somehow.
As she opened the station door, she called for Matteo, though she didn’t expect him to hear her; the communications room was two floors below. She bolted the outside door shut and made her way downstairs.
The walls here had the same shimmer as she’d seen back in the Vault. But of course the Mims were here too. She and Matteo were both infected. Still, she had made the decision to spend her last days of being human with her Seed-brother, the man she would have chosen as her life mate if he hadn’t left the Vault all those years ago. Or was made to leave, Phoebe reminded herself of the insight she had back in the Vault.
Matteo was seated in a throne-like chair in front of the communication controls. That hadn’t been there before. Looking closer, she realized that it was just a regular chair augmented with nanobot technology. There was even a vital signs indicator integrated directly into the chair now. Phoebe could see that Matteo’s pulse was a steady eighty-seven beats per minute—a bit on a high side, but within an acceptable range, especially for a sick man. He was slumped onto the controls, sleeping. The thermos Phoebe had left with Matteo was on the floor next to him. It was still full.
“You have to take care of yourself, Matteo,” she said as she ran her hand over his forehead. He wasn’t feverish anymore. He was gettin
g better, just drained of energy by his sickness and injuries.
While Matteo got his rest, Phoebe decided to check for transmissions from Vars...or anyone else. She put on the headphones and settled down to listen.
There was some crazy chatter from Vars—the girl was losing it out there by herself, so far from humanity—but Phoebe understood that Vars had managed to move the ship directly on top of what the girl was now calling the “Mims Base” and that she’d received an “invitation” to explore the alien structure. The Mims used Alice to lure Vars inside. Phoebe didn’t think they needed to bother—Vars was going to go regardless. I would too, she realized. Exploration was preferable to suffocating inside an alien cocoon. It gave the mind something to do. A focus.
Phoebe remembered Alice well: smart, tiny, fearless, antsy. It had been clear that Alice would leave the Vault at her ten-thousand-days mark even before she was old enough to start school. Some kids were like that—there was no talking to them, no stopping the impulsiveness, just give them nurture and care and education to succeed in the world above. Phoebe worked hard to give all that to Alice, even though their temperaments clashed constantly. She’ll clash with the Mims, too, Phoebe thought with a smirk. They have no idea what a crazy smart fireplug they’ve got on their hands. She took a long drag from Matteo’s thermos. It was still warm.
“You found me,” Alice said.
She sat almost completely encased in a sarcophagus-like framework, her exton augmented and completely embedded into the alien structure. That was the comparison that jumped to Vars’s mind. To an anthropologist’s mind, she thought.
“Hello, Alice,” Vars said. “I’m so happy to see you alive.”
“I’m rather pleased about that myself,” said Alice. Alice-Mims, Vars reminded herself. “When I got stuck in that tunnel, I thought it was the end,” the alien creature said.
“So you remember?”
Alice sniggered. It was such an Alice expression that Vars had to stop herself from rushing toward the small woman and embracing her despite all of the surrounding hardware. “In the beginning, the Mims Base, as you call it, wasn’t ready to accommodate my human needs. Thus all of this.”
“But now? Are you free to return to the ship with me?”
“My freedoms are limitless. Or as limitless as billions of years of study can make them.”
And there it was: the admission of non-humanity.
Vars didn’t know how to respond. It was easier when the Mims were playing mind games with her. Now? This was now officially the first contact. First Contact!
“Hello,” Vars managed.
“Hello,” Alice said with a smile.
So human…
“What should I call you?” asked Vars. “I don’t really know. I don’t know what you want. I don’t understand. Help me.”
“Alice will do just fine. Do you remember talking about Dunbar’s Number?”
“Dr. Robin Dunbar, the anthropologist who proposed an upper limit on the number of stable social connection an individual can have at one time. It was based on primate brain physiology.”
“Do you remember what that number was?”
Vars answered without hesitation. “For humans, one hundred and fifty or thereabout.”
“It’s a wonder the Vaults survive, right?” Alice-Mims laughed. She—it?—sounded just like Alice. It was disconcerting.
“I’ve never been,” Vars said. “But the Vaults would be interesting to study.”
“The Elders are all over that.”
“Really?” But of course they would be, Vars realized. “Why is this important?” Important to you, to Mims?
“What do you think an equivalent number would be for a set of intelligent entities that all belonged to one mind?”
“I don’t think I understand the problem.” Vars didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. First Contact! The idea continued to bounce around her head, making thinking difficult.
“Ben said—”
“Ben? Is he okay?”
Alice-Mims ignored Vars’s question. “Ben said that sending artifacts across the vastness of space is wasteful. Information, though…”
“Information travels at the speed of light.”
“And?”
“It requires a receiver. It would require many more years to plant a receiver at a destination.”
“But there’s plenty of time,” Alice-Mims said. “Keep going.”
“Once in place, the receiver can build out using local resources.”
“Like this place on Mimas. Or the ones out on the asteroids. Or on your moon. Or back on Earth.”
“Earth,” Vars repeated, dumbfounded.
“You didn’t really think the best place to build a receiver in your star system would have been on a small, icy satellite in orbit around one of the gas giants? At such a distance from your home world?”
“No?” Frankly, Vars hadn’t much considered the question of strategic locations for conquest of the solar system. Not yet. “Why do you need receivers?” she asked. “What information are you sending?”
“I think you’ve figured it out already.” Alice-Mims was still smiling at Vars, still patiently encouraging her to figure things out on her own.
But Vars felt sick. She sank down onto the nanobot-built floor. “How many instances of the same entity can be spread out across the galaxy before it loses coherence?” she said quietly. That was the Dunbar number Alice-Mims was asking about. How many different copies of herself could she send about the galaxy as information to be placed into the local hosts without creating so many versions of herself that they could never reconcile into one mind?
“Yes. That’s the question,” the creature confirmed.
“Well, wouldn’t it depend on the time scales?” Vars asked. “How long do the different versions stay separate without recombining to become one again? What’s the limit for such consciousness branching before speciation occurs?”
“Good,” Alice-Mims said. “At what point does an instance of a mind become a new entity? An entity that doesn’t want to be subsumed into its past’s whole? It depends on how much life has been crammed into those years. Sentries left behind to monitor star systems’ progress can stay separated from their first-instance entity for millennia. Waiting is slow. Mostly nothing happens.”
Vars finally thought she understood something. “But sometimes,” she started, “sometimes a set of giant asteroids hits the world under observation. Then things speed up. A lot of events get packed into a shorter time frame.”
Alice-Mims smiled. Her eyes bored into Vars’s. She still wore those thick glasses.
“How long have you been out here, Alice?”
“About twenty thousand years.”
“That’s…that’s all of human civilization’s history.” Vars felt sick. All that time alone out here, on Saturn’s moon. “Were you in contact with your…first-instance entity?”
“No. Not until thirty-five of your years ago.”
Vars tried to make sense of that time frame. Keres Triplets hit in 2057. That was sixty-seven years ago. If this Alice-Mims entity sent a message home right after the Earth’s devastation and received a reply thirty-five years ago, that meant the message’s “round trip” took sixty-seven minus thirty-five years—thirty-two years. That would make Alice-Mims’s first-instance entity sixteen light-years away from Earth.
That was uncomfortably close.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Phoebe woke up in a throne-like chair. It was similar to Matteo’s, perhaps not as elaborate, but then the Mims had more time to work on his.
“You’re back,” Matteo said gently. He was smiling at her while giving her a visual inspection. Phoebe recognized that look. Every teacher learned the trick of spot-evaluation empathy.
“How long was I out?” she asked.
&nb
sp; “Perhaps a day? I don’t know when you got back, so I can’t give you the exact time. Besides, my time sense is way off.”
“Mine too.” Phoebe looked around. There were now two thermos bottles—one for Matteo and one clearly meant for her. “Thanks,” she said, nodding to hers.
“I didn’t do it.”
Phoebe picked up her thermos. It was full and hot.
“Be careful,” Matteo said. “I have reason to believe it’s drugged. It’s good, mind you. But there are costs.”
So that’s why I slept through the making of my “throne.” “It made you better?”
“Yes. Or it enforced rest, so my own body could do the trick. Either way, I’m better.”
“I see,” she said, nodding. She took a small sip from the thermos and forced a swallow—it was that or die. The soup was good. “Well, I made it to the Vault.” Phoebe jumped right to the point. “It’s infected. And you were right: they didn’t let me in. I had to blow my way through the door.”
“Mm-hmm,” Matteo muttered uninterestedly. He fiddled with the communications controls.
Phoebe felt panic rising up inside her. Had she gotten back too late? Had the Mims gotten to him? “Matteo—”
“Wait, Phoebe. I want to show you something.”
He had a gleam in his eyes—a gleam that was so familiar from their days as kids roaming the stairwells of the Vault. Phoebe exhaled her fear. It will be all right, she told herself. Not all is lost.
“Okay, I have it,” he announced as the video screens above their heads came to life.
Phoebe watched as people walked the streets of major metropolises all over the world. There were clips of concerts and public performances, governmental debates and classrooms. A newsperson talked about improvements in Earth-Moon transports—the space elevator to near-Earth orbit was getting a significant upgrade. There were photos of smiling kids and pets running around some park somewhere.
