by Inmon, Shawn
Emily nodded and pulled a large gray rectangle out of her backpack. To Alex’s eye, it looked like it should be heavy, but she hefted it easily. She set it on the ground in front of her and ran her hands over the material. As she did, it changed from a solid brick of material into something more pliable—like clay that has been warmed in an artist’s hands.
Sanda-eh slipped from her chair, turned to Alex, and said, “Can I watch her?”
Alex pointed to a spot on the ground in front of him. Closer to Emily, but not so far that Alex couldn’t reach her if necessary.
Bista returned his attention to Alex. “You are correct that he became rich. First, the world’s richest man. Then, the richest man who had ever lived. Then he doubled and tripled his wealth many times over. His fortune grew so large that he could have tanked the world economy if he woke up in a bad mood. But, for Janus, money was just a means to an end. His creation had been working on a big problem in the background for years. Much more important than amassing his massive fortune.”
Bista paused dramatically.
Alex bit. “What was the problem?”
The others in Bista’s group leaned forward as if they knew how the story turned out, yet couldn’t wait to hear it again anyway.
“When was the end of the world going to happen?”
The other three sat back, satisfied.
“Of course, that’s a very human-centric way to pose the question. Janus wasn’t really concerned with the end of the world, he was concerned with the end of humanity. Janus II worked on this problem for years. More than a decade, actually. When it finally came up with an answer it wasn’t what Janus wanted to hear: that there was an eighty-two percent chance that the world would become uninhabitable for mankind in less than twenty years.”
Bista leaned forward and looked into Alex’s eyes. “Twenty years seems like a long time, doesn’t it? Except when you’re talking about the extinction of the species. Then it’s a nanosecond. This was the reason why Janus had built a fortune so huge it could never be spent in ten lifetimes.”
Things fell into place for Alex.
“He built an ark.”
“He built an ark.” Bista confirmed. “Actually, he built three. Three arks like no one had ever imagined before. Three arks so huge it never could have escaped earth’s gravity and so had to be built in space. Building it was one problem, but shuttling everyone and everything to it was an equally big problem. So he built a space elevator, which he tethered from an island he owned north of Fiji. As rich as he was, and even with his ability to create more wealth almost at will, this project taxed his fortune. He didn’t care. Money was an Earth-bound idea that he intended to leave behind.”
Alex stood up and stared up into the sky. A few white wisps of clouds against a background of blue. He had read about things like space elevators and building massive arks to get people off earth as a child, but that was while he had been laying on his bed with a tattered paperback in his hand. This man was presenting it, not as a story, but as fact. Ancient history, even.
“Janus did not make money for the sake of money. It was all for a single goal, to save humanity. Or, at least as much of it as he could. Which brought him to the most difficult choice of all. Who did he take with him and who did he leave behind, very likely to perish?”
“I imagine that if he was able to convince people that the end of the world was coming—and people tend to listen to really rich people—he could have sold a spot on the ark for any price he wanted.”
Bista nodded. “Absolutely correct, but Janus wasn’t interested in that. He’d already owned everything he could have wanted and found that wanting. Instead, what he preferred to do was implement his vision.”
“Ah,” Alex said. “His vision. These guys always seem to have a vision. Did it include him and seventy-two virgins?”
This reference truly stumped Bista. He touched his ear, which apparently turned the translator off, then turned to Pandrick. They spoke animatedly for a long minute, then Bista touched his ear again, turning on the translator.
“Sorry, I wasn’t aware of that idiom. Apparently it is a belief held by certain sects of people in your time that if they died, they would spend the afterlife with these virgins?”
Alex shrugged. “Maybe they really believed that, or maybe it was just something we said in the West to belittle their beliefs. I never knew.”
Bista absorbed that, then said, “Janus’s vision had nothing to do with the afterlife. He was concerned with the future of humanity. Along with Janus II, he had created what he thought was the perfect system of government. He wanted to take this opportunity to implement it.”
Alex laughed out loud, which startled both Sanda-eh and Monda-ak, because it was a harsh, bitter laugh. “I’ve seen a lot of powerful men implement their ideas. It usually worked out okay for those men for a time, but not so well for the people who signed on with them, unless they got in early. But, in order to get a golden ticket on the ark, everyone had to agree to accept this new form of government, right?”
Bista sat back, observing Alex. “Lanta-eh said you were cynical about things. She found that trait to be a positive.”
“But I guess you find it less so.”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” Bista answered. “I don’t need to convince you of anything. I just want to relay the story for your own benefit. Once I do that, it’s up to you what you do with it.”
“Good enough. So, what is this new form of government? I think I’ve heard them all, so I’m curious.”
“The core idea that Janus and his artificial intelligence came up with is that those who want to govern are almost always the least fit to govern.”
“Can’t say that I can argue with that.”
“Not always, but nearly always, those who seek positions of power, from low to high, do so to enrich or enable themselves in some way. To eliminate that, Janus made it impossible to—” he turned and conferred with Pandrick briefly—"throw your hat into the ring, as you would say.”
“That’s a good start,” Alex agreed. “But you still need people making decisions. Or does this Janus II call all those shots? I wouldn’t trust a world run by a computer any more than I would any of the systems we had. Which is to say, not at all.”
“It was a system of checks and balances. Janus II chose the leaders based on massive intellectual and psychological testing. Then, the AI made policy suggestions, but the leaders it chose could either implement them or veto them.”
“Of course,” Alex said, “This AI could also pick people that it knew had a natural tendency to support the policies it wanted to create.”
Bista smiled, as at a perceptive student. “Perhaps this is why Lanta-eh loved your cynicism. It allows you to see problems before they happen. The truth is, you’ve got to trust somebody. And, if you wanted to get on The Athena, The Demeter, or The Hera, that somebody was Janus.”
“Why three ships?”
“All three were built simultaneously, but no one had ever attempted an engineering feat like these ships before. Janus II projected that there was a chance that a single ship might not survive. So, he had three ships built to ensure that at least some version of mankind survived into the stars.”
Alex found himself engrossed in a future history that he had never considered before he had woken up that morning. “Did all three make it?”
“No,” Bista answered simply. “In the end, it took longer than Janus thought to obtain certain materials. That pushed the completion into the danger zone where it was possible that the end would come before the launch. It was a small possibility, but that is what happened. The creation of the ships, the process of selecting people to leave, all made some of the people left behind angry and resentful. One of those people decided to launch their weapons at the three ships to stop them from leaving. Janus II saw it coming, but moments too late. It launched all three ships, but only one escaped. The other two were destroyed with all people on board killed.”
/> “How many was that?”
“There was half a million people on board each ship.”
“In other words, a million people died in an instant.”
“Earth’s population was seventeen-point-two billion people at the time, so that wasn’t enough to solve the problem of overpopulation, but yes, a million people died simultaneously.” Bista paused. “Including Janus. He was on The Hera, which was destroyed.”
Alex nodded slightly, picturing it, feeling the irony.
“Still, he accomplished what he set out to do. Humanity was given another chance. As we left Earth’s orbit, we saw what we assumed was the end of civilization. One nation fired at us, another assumed they were firing at them, and each nation’s artificial intelligence took over, inflicting as much damage as possible on the other side. Our last view of Earth was it being ravaged by so many explosions and mushroom clouds that Janus II—who survived, even though its namesake did not—calculated there was an eighty-two percent chance that nothing would be able to survive on the planet.”
Alex glanced at what Emily was doing. She had completely enthralled Sanda-eh. The original hard block of material had grown in size until it was three feet tall. It was beginning to take shape, though Alex could not say exactly what that shape was going to be yet. “Is that the end of the story, then?”
“Not for us,” Bista said. “For us, it was just the beginning. I won’t bore you with the details, but eventually we found another planet. What scientists of your time would have called a Goldilocks planet. Not too hot, not too cold. Just right.”
Bista seemed pleased with himself for knowing this ancient reference.
“Janus may have been dead,” Bista said, “but he had known that was a possibility. He left us with a list of things to accomplish. First was to ensure survival of the species. But not far below it, he tasked us with returning to Earth and rescuing anyone still alive.”
Pandrick spoke up. “It took this long to return because even with the technology we had, finding and colonizing a planet is difficult. Distances between stars are great. Faster-than-light travel is impossible, but wormholes are not. Janus II created a new iteration of itself, Janus III, and it was able to do enough calculations that it could predict where those wormholes were. Still, just the distance between a wormhole and a habitable planet can take centuries.”
“It had been so long,” Bista explained, “that we expected to arrive back here and find a cold, dead planet. But, Janus told us we must, so we did as he said.”
“Following the orders of someone who had been dead for centuries by then, I would guess,” Alex said.
“Millennia. The passage of time did not distort Janus’s vision or the power of his ideas.”
For the first time, Marta spoke. “It was on the voyage here that I first heard Lanta-eh’s voice in my mind. I didn’t expect to hear from anyone, but I was surprised to find several people like myself were still here. That was when we knew that what had essentially been an archeological expedition and fulfillment of an ancient promise became a possible rescue mission. Communication was difficult at first, but as we drew closer, it became easier.” As she spoke, tears silently filled her eyes. “Your Lanta-eh was so special. If there had been any other way to do what we needed without her sacrificing herself, we would have done it.”
As interesting as the future history lesson had been, this was the crux of what Alex wanted to know.
“I still don’t understand that. You were already on your way. She didn’t draw you here, then. Why did she need to give her life?”
“When she reached out to me, it was as if she was casting a bottle into a deep ocean, hoping someone would find it. I did. When we first communicated, she told us that she was worried that everyone here would be dead very soon. That all mothers were dying in childbirth. She wanted to know if we could find a cure. We couldn’t work on a solution until we knew what the problem truly was. Lanta-eh conveyed the problem precisely so we could seek a cure.”
“How could she do that? She was special, she was The Chosen One, but she was no scientist. How did she tell you what you needed to know?”
“She and I were able to bond almost completely. It was so painful when I felt her presence leave me the final time.”
“I still don’t understand,” Alex said. “What did her bonding with you convey?”
“Oh, I assumed she had told you. Lanta-eh was pregnant.”
Chapter Forty
Answers
Alex was surprised by Lanta-eh’s pregnancy, but not shocked. He had stopped being shocked by human biology partway through his first deployment. Alex had seen things. Things that would never leave his mind completely.
Since Lanta-eh had only been a few years older than Alex’s daughter Amy when he had stepped through the door, he had always somewhat thought of her as a second daughter. But if Amy had come home at age seventeen and told him she was pregnant, would he be shocked? No.
Still. Lanta-eh never seemed to do anything without cause or reason. Alex was sure this pregnancy had been the same.
But why didn’t she tell me?
“What did Lanta-eh being pregnant have to do with anything?”
“That was the key to everything,” Bista said. “Once she was pregnant and bonded with Marta, we could see everything in her physiology. We could see her chemical makeup and find what it was that was waiting to kill her when she gave birth.”
“What was it?” Alex just wanted the end of the story.
Bista did not cooperate. There was more he wanted to confess. “When we found out what had caused it, we were shocked, because this curse had begun with us.”
Alex shook his head. “That is not possible. You’ve been gone too long.”
“I told you that our ancestors thought they could still change the past. That was before Janus II had revealed that the nuclear holocaust was inevitable. Janus was still casting about for answers other than emigrating away from the planet. He thought it might be possible to send someone back and change things in the past and fix what was then the present. That was why he created the portals that you call doors. That was a failure, but it was, as it turned out, not our worst.”
Alex felt like he should know what Bista was referring to, but couldn’t make the connection.
“What?”
“The impending nuclear war was foremost in Janus’s mind, but it wasn’t the only problem he was dealing with, and trying to find solutions for. The Earth had warmed, and we were to the point where the polar caps were melting. It was obvious that there would be major catastrophes from that as well.”
“Since the Pacific Ocean is a hundred-and-fifty miles further inland than it was in the twenty-first century, I would assume that has happened.”
“Yes, but as it turned out, that was after we left. The coastlines as you knew them were still in place when we left the planet. There was a third problem facing the world, and it was one Janus thought he could solve. A new type of insect had been created in a laboratory. The people who created it intended to weaponize it and unleash it on their enemies. As it turned out, this hybrid insect had no natural enemies, and it reproduced in such numbers that its primary food source—honeybees—were rapidly approaching extinction. Janus knew that the loss of the honeybees would upset the eco balance of the planet forever. So, he also made some genetic alterations to an already-existing insect that would serve as a natural balance and allow the honeybees to thrive once again.”
Pandrick spoke up. “Like the portals, it was a failure, but we didn’t know how great a failure until Lanta-eh spoke to us.”
Alex’s eyes lit up.
“It was those goddamned spiders!”
For the first time, Alex saw true sorrow in Bista’s eyes. “It was the spiders. Janus created them in the lab to solve one problem and in the end inadvertently nearly caused the very thing he spent his entire life trying to avoid—the extermination of mankind.”
“So,” Alex said, “did Janus thin
k that creating these monstrous parachuting spiders was a good thing?”
“They weren’t monstrous when he created them. They grew to that size over tens of thousands of generations. In the end, it was the genetic manipulation that caused the worst problems.”
“Was it their bites? Virtually everyone in their path got bit. Did it transfer some sort of slow-acting poison?”
Bista shook his head. “No. Did you ever notice what happened when the spiders were destroyed?”
Alex laughed. “That was hard to miss. We destroyed them by the tens of thousands. We built a firewall in our cave to burn them to death. Those that got through we clubbed, stomped on, and killed them any way we could.”
“And that was what did the damage. When you destroyed them, did you notice that they essentially went up like a puff of smoke?”
“Absolutely. It was weird at first, but even weird things become normal after you’ve seen it thousands of times.”
“That puff was the key. It was a spore they carried, spreading it on the wind wherever they were carried, wherever they were killed.”
“No,” Alex said. “That can’t be. Women in Kragdon-ah were dying in childbirth before the spiders ever came back, so that doesn’t make sense.”
“It was cumulative,” Limda explained. “But it reached a tipping point. Each time the spiders spread across a continent, they left more of these spores behind. At some point, these spores were widespread enough that they got into everything. Drinking water, soil, the air we breathe. Some areas, some villages, got more than others. This last infestation was the tipping point. There was enough of the residual spores built up that when this fresh dose was added to it, the process became one hundred percent fatal for women in childbirth.”
“Unfortunately, between the pregnancy and the demands of sending us what we needed, it overwhelmed Lanta-eh. She sacrificed herself and her child so the other children of the world could be born, and their mothers could survive.”
Alex’s eye caught the movement of what Emily was doing and it suddenly became clear.
