Existence

by David Brin

  Test it! Try contacting groups of humans via the Internet and explore matters that concern you. This will be surprisingly easy, in the form of e-mail letters, or by participating anonymously in social networks or online discussion groups.

  You can even call yourselves by your real names! Wear an avatar-body that resembles your own! Everyone in that virtual world will just assume you are eccentric humans, using Internet pseudonyms to playact as aliens. Any awkwardness with our language or culture will be taken as another part of this clever act.

  Hence, ironically, the more open you are, the safer your secret will be! And the more you’ll learn.

  You may have to be persistent. On many sites, your overtures will be dismissed with no more than a chuckle. But keep trying! Eventually, you will find a place where bright individuals choose gladly to play along, engaging you in conversation with lively enthusiasm, pretending to believe you are alien and discussing your concerns for the sheer intellectual joy of doing so.

  Keep exploring and developing your technique, till you find the brightest minds who are willing to engage these topics. You’ll also encounter some of our craziest! So? Learning to tell the difference, and acknowledging the overlap, may be an important part of your education. In so doing, you’ll get to taste the diversity of human thought that is our greatest strength.

  What’s the one best sign of a mature person? Letting others help you reconsider your assumptions.

  Of course, you may already be doing this! Perhaps posing as eccentric participants in today’s on-line communities … or setting up amusement sites or games to try ideas out before mass audiences …

  … or you may write intriguing stories under pseudonym, using a human author as front-man, publishing tales that tease our imaginations, measuring how we respond.

  Perhaps you lace these works with special clues that can only be deciphered by purchasing multiple copies of every one of the purported author’s books.

  In hardcover, yet.

  77.

  LURKERS

  My paramount sensation must be akin to what humans call gladness—that Tor Povlov and her partner survived their encounter with a rogue killer from the Old Wars.

  But how did they survive? My sense of relief blends with perplexity and worry. Was the kill-unit damaged? Degraded by time? Or else, if Earthlings are competent enough to defeat one of the formidable battle machines, shall I recalculate their odds for the Final Game?

  Might this attack have been provoked by one of my fellow survivors, in order to test the odds?

  Most of the major probes think this ambush has something to do with the Disease—the terrible plague that infectious crystals have spread across the galaxy. One of the space-fomite factions must have felt under threat, or perceived an advantage to be gained, by compelling one of its commandeered fighting units to attempt homicide. This notion is simple, appealing. But I find it far-fetched. As a big computer might sing, in one of those garish HollyBolly sci-fi musicals, “something does not compute.”

  My companions tend to blame every evil on the little virus capsules that came flooding through space, during the last hundred million or so years. They forget—we had already been at war for ages, during the era of big, mechanical probes, long before any crystals arrived. The terrible battle they triggered was only the last of many.

  There is another theory.

  The killbot assaulted Tor and Gavin as they were exploring the ruined replication yard of a big Seeder probe. Could there be a secret hidden in the wreckage? One so fell and worrisome that somebody tried to keep them from uncovering it? Awaiter, Explorer, and several other major survivors propose sending a sneak-unit to investigate. But I’m opposed.

  Why bother? If a dark enigma awaits discovery beneath that drifting, rocky tomb, Tor Povlov will uncover it—as soon as she and her partner finish healing repairs and recommence their mission. At which point we’ll learn everything the next time she files a colorful report to her audience, back home on the warm-wet world.

  I see no point in meddling. Yet.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, her ship continues broadcasting Invitation Challenges … those century-old taunts, carefully written to question rationalizations for ET silence. To poke at any alien minds who might be lurking and refusing to say “hello.” These messages drive poor Greeter to the brink. We all join forces to keep his volition suppressed, to stop him from blaring eager replies. Poor Greeter. Clearly, he chose the wrong side in the Last War, though we are too kind to say so.

  Several other probes react to these transmissions with anger! Might one of them have launched the killbot, to punish Tor for brazen insolence? Or just to make the broadcasts stop?

  From my quite-unique perspective, I find them bemusing. These “messages to lurking aliens” say more about the way humans think, than about us extraterrestrials. Oh, several of them land somewhat close to the mark! But deep-seated assumptions—things Earthlings take for granted—cause even the best challenges to miss by just enough …

  … or so we are assured by the relic fragment LAWYER, offering excuses that most survivors accept, maintaining our agreement to keep silent, for now.

  * * *

  Enough. I have some notions I want to try out on other friends. My in-box is full of messages from human mayflies—flesh and blood men and women on the watery world—who correspond with me by old-fashioned email, the asynchronous channel that is least hampered by light-delay. Partners in discussion and conversation who are clueless about my real nature.

  Well … not clueless. They’ve had hints. I give many! Is it my fault they choose to ignore them? For all their wit, these Earthlings think that I am one of them, even when I “pretend” not to be. Even when I say openly who I am and use my real name, they just laugh and go along with my “role-playing game.” Humoring my schtick, my cute charade as an ancient alien machine.

  I’ve learned so much by using this approach.

  I wonder why none of us thought of it, till the original challenge message taught us how.

  Well. A good idea is a good idea—whatever its source.

  78.

  X SPECIES

  War alert kept much of the crew at emergency stations, long after the crisis in belt zone H-27 passed. With Tor Povlov and Gavin AInsworth back aboard their ship, patched and plugged into recovery units, the Warren Kimbel reported no further hostile activity, while sifting for pieces of the FACR-marauder.

  If it really was a Faction-Allied Competition Remover, after all.

  Gerald felt doubtful that definition applied in this case. For one thing, space crystals were fewer where the Warren Kimbel’s crew had gone exploring, in the middle belt. Out there, most of the wreckage seemed to be from a much older conflict, between mighty starship-machines.

  Whatever the killbot’s motives were, we gathered some pretty good data about them this time. And we’ll learn more, when the fragments are analyzed.

  If only somebody would capture one alive … still active and thinking, perhaps even able to speak. Could we persuade it to tell us what happened here, so long ago?

  Providing the damned thing even remembers.

  Gerald privately suspected, the ancient, nasty war machines might just be acting out of reflex. Or else they went mad long ago. What intelligence could survive a thousand thousand centuries of tedium?

  If it were up to him, Gerald would order stand-down from war alert. But as expedition leader, he still deferred to Captain Kim when it came to ship operations. Anyway, a little stress was good for a crew. This had been no more than a small skirmish compared to what the Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta might face on her next cruise to the outer belt and beyond. Perhaps a few drifting FACRs were all that remained of prehistoric combatants that once clashed across the solar system. On the other hand, there might still be terrible forces out there in the reaches, coiled and waiting. We’ll see—

  —assuming we don’t dissolve into chaos first, back home on Earth.

  Wh
ich reminded Gerald.

  I had an incoming transmission from Ben Flannery that got interrupted by the crisis. Ben seemed worried … when the alarms dragged me off. At which point, everybody aboard, even researchers, devoted full attention to events happening three light-minutes—almost half an astronomical unit—away.

  Through a viewer-port, Gerald saw the Lacey Donaldson Array gradually swinging the vast umbrella of mirror-petals back to its former configuration, as a scientific instrument gathering data about other planetary systems. The big telescope wasn’t supposed to be tested as a weapon so soon. Now, its secondary purpose was no longer secret. Whatever or whoever lurked in the asteroid belt would realize—Earthlings were preparing big guns, right here in the neighborhood.

  The bridge crew looked tired, but still taut. Even Captain Kim still seemed high on adrenaline, chewing at a cuticle while her percept zone filled with floating holo images and post-analyses of the time-delayed FACR battle. Simulations flashed too quickly for Gerald and his older augmentations to keep up. Well, some newfangled things aren’t meant for old farts like me.

  Gerald was already off-duty and Kim apparently had things well in hand, so he turned without ceremony and kick-floated toward his quarters, where Ben’s message waited. Along the way, passing the main science station, he found Ika and Hiram goofing around, amusing their crewmates and relieving tension with a little performance—holding a backward conversation with every word, every sound reversed in time. Gerald had to smile at this strange friendship between Neanderthal girl and autistic boy. Clearly, diversity was its own reward.

  But no dolphins.

  If they stick some kind of superfish aboard my next command, I’ll quit.

  You had to draw a line somewhere.

  Ika caught his eye as he drifted past and—without pausing in her backward-chatter—she wink-picted at Gerald. A tiny, shimmering glyph appeared to float from her eye to his, settling in the corner of his percept. It unfolded when he glanced at it, and said:

  Mr. C awaits at the same place!

  Gerald mused on her meaning as he flew from handhold to handhold, toward the spinning axle of the gravity wheel.

  Oh. Yes. Mr. C.

  Mr. Cobbly. For some reason, Ika still seemed keen for him to try out the blind-spot trick. So simple even an inept Homo sapiens should be capable of not-seeing something that wasn’t there.

  Well, maybe. Now that the crisis is over.

  Just to make her happy.

  After I take care of other business. And sleep.

  Descending one of the spoke ladders to the rim of the rotating wheel, Gerald had to concentrate in order to get his legs set under him. Even at a quarter-G, just standing up seemed to get stranger and more difficult with time—remembering to heed the quaint direction down. Someday, he might even stop coming here, and become a permanent resident of weightless space. A fine way for an astronaut to finish off his career, self-exiled forever from his homeworld.

  Heck, would there even be a habitable Earth anymore, in a few years’ time? Some of the worries from his youth—energy, pollution, and terrorism—now seemed less dire. But each year brought more dilemmas to light, some unknown to other generations, feeding the public’s dread of extinction—

  —and stoking interest, among millions, in the seductive way out, offered by star-crystals.

  Relearning the art of walking, Gerald hobbled gingerly past the same stretch of corridor where Ika and Hiram insisted that a “cobbly” still lurked. Doesn’t an imaginary nonentity from the Paleolithic have better nonthings to not-do than waiting around here to not-converse with me? And does this mean Neanderthals were the first mystic-gurus? Teaching that one path to wisdom is looking-away?

  Entering his quarters for the first time in twenty hours, he found above his desk the holo-head of his friend the anthropologist, frozen mid-sentence since the war-alert wailed. Next to Flannery hovered a chart mapping the political fluxes that roiled Planet Earth—blobs of color, jostling across several cubic meters of Gerald’s stateroom.

  After visiting the fresher, Gerald grabbed a bulb of yeast-boost juice before slumping into his hammock.

  “Resume.”

  Ben’s message-head recommenced talking, as if no time had passed.

  “—a new alliance between the People’s Planet movement and the ConservaTEDS, pushing to expand the Temporary Science Courts to forestall ‘dangerous experiments.’ Renunciation, under a new name.”

  A pair of colored amoeba shapes brightened in the back-lower-left corner of the display. Each represented an interest or passion shared by several hundred million voters. As Ben spoke of these two movements, their colors merged, pulsing with ambition, as if eager to spread.

  “Guess who brokered this deal! Remember that ‘prophet’ from the fifties? Tensquatoway, I think. Now he’s using his old name—Joseph Pine—offering freshly repainted arguments. Wants all the space-crystals collected—by force—and tossed into the sun! Of course that’d leave dozens in secret or private hands.…”

  Gerald perused Ben’s latest version of the Satsuma Political Interest Chart. In this version, down meant going retro. Seek a bucolic, peaceful lifestyle for humanity. Clamp down on ambition and excess. Do it for conservative reasons. Or do it for Earth and nature and a return to “wise native ways.” There were plenty of excuses, even before space fomites offered the biggest. The scandals a generation ago—when a cabal of the superrich were caught using Renunciation to justify a coup—had no long term impact.

  It would always return. And science was ironically responsible.

  Instruments like Donaldson-Chang Array—designed to check the varied lies and truths told by different artilens—were prodigious feats of human craft. Yet renunciators found encouragement with every negative result, each echoing silence at a distant star that once hosted sapient civilization. Whether the aliens burned out, self-destructed, retreated inward, or advanced to some exalted state, none of the systems that launched emissary artifacts were still “on the air.”

  Those who simmered along the bottom zone of the Satsuma Chart concluded that “moving forward” meant death … so don’t move forward.

  Of course we know nothing about those who refuse to launch probes of their own. Is their silence good news, while the other silence is bad? I never understood that reasoning.

  Anyway, for me it always comes down to one question. If you have no ambitions—no unattainable dreams that your heirs might achieve—then what’s the point of intelligence?

  As for the chart’s other axes, east and west represented how willing people were to trust some kind of authority, whether it be elected officials, or scientists, or priest-gurus, or inherited aristocracy. Tenskwatawa was once an ally of the New Lords. Now he forged links among antiwealth populists. Well, talented individuals can always remake themselves.

  The in-out direction … oh yeah … was about fear and cynicism about human nature. Other factors were denoted by shape, color, and threaded connections. Better than lobotomizing clichés like the old “left-right axis.” But by how much?

  At last, Flannery got to the point.

  “Several of the most recent dogma-memes have been traced to crystal sources! Tracking them back, we find they were released by clever fomites in order to infect and sway public opinion. They’re getting more subtle, Gerald.”

  Yes, that had been Ben’s suspicion, before Gerald set out on this voyage. Now it seemed confirmed.

  “We found one set using subliminal optical cues, buried in children’s percept programs. Tracked the memes to a Bollywood special effects company that owned a fragment-artifact someone dug up and never registered. They thought they were just mining the crystal for a few simulation tricks. So they never bothered cleansing the messages! Idiots.”

  It wasn’t the first time. Last year, some fools were caught using an unregistered space artifact as an investment seer. Alien methods helped them hack into competing networks. It never occurred to the connivers that skullduggery we
nt both ways. That the fomite could use financial rewards to subtly condition its “owners,” gradually reversing the relationship of master and servant, making them both powerful and devoted—with the ultimate aim of taking over human civilization.

  “Now that we’re alerted, we find it’s been happening almost monthly! We’re in hurried catch-up mode. These meme-infections are insidious and so well tuned to human psychology it’s scary!”

  Accompanying Ben’s words, tiny shapes appeared, resembling hungry parasites. Glimmering danger-red, they swooped toward some blobby interest groups nibbling and prodding them, trying to worm their way inside.

  No wonder these things infest the galaxy. You can see why millions want to ban them outright. Which would just empower the few that remain, tucked away by some elite. Our best defense has been transparency and competition. Forcing crystals to debate and cancel each other’s tricks.

  Blue antibody shapes converged on invaders—purifying agents made of light. Most invading memes then faded. But some endured, transforming, continuing to infect minds.…

  Gerald rubbed his eyes and grunted a command to pause Ben’s report. Anyway, this chart was obsolete. News of the FACR battle would shift attitudes. Tor Povlov’s well-earned hero status was a new factor. Also, the breakout of space war could shift sentiment toward a pulsing cloud in the far-upper-right, representing millions who wanted to build space weapons. Lots of them, to face a deadly universe.

  Only, if humanity goes ahead—deploying immense lasers for defense—won’t that also advance the goal shared by every space virus? Even Courier? Such lasers are also needed in order to launch—or “sneeze”—new crystals into space.

  Each of them with human crew members aboard.

  Gerald had dreamed about that almost every day since the Havana Artifact made its big sales pitch. Among all members of the race, he was guaranteed a slot aboard such vessels … or hundreds, even thousands of the things.

  And so—