by Dan Davis
“I understand there are concerns particularly from people who are called the religious.” Max, who had researched the subject thoroughly, watched the doctor’s reaction as he spoke. “They say that only God should create life and also many other nonsensical phrases based on highly subjective interpretations of ancient texts.”
He knew that Sporing had been raised by a family with a set of beliefs and cultural practices described as Christian. This term referred to a memeplex so profoundly powerful that it had shaped the ethical, political and philosophical direction of humanity more than any other so far, whether or not individual people on Earth identified as a Christian or believed in the tenets at all. It appeared to be historically linked to Capitalism, the scientific method and the Western philosophical tradition. Sporing’s file said he was an atheist but had been raised by a family with close ties to something called the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. Max had started to investigate the differences between branches of Christianity but had immediately given up the task. It was as complex as his research into the electromagnetic spectrum only without any possible practical application. It was difficult to know whether a Christian would in practice be ethically authoritarian and judgmental or inclusive and compassionate but Max just hoped that Sporing’s chosen profession as a medical doctor would be some indication of which way he would lean.
“Some of those that have concerns over APs are the illogical, religious maniacs, yes. Well, many of them,” Sporing said. “But it’s not just them, a lot of people all over the world are worried about humans creating other humans. Growing them in a lab. Splicing together genes. I mean, there are a variety of reasons, Max, some people feel it is too much like slavery, no matter what the scientists and the companies say. And others feel we should not be acting like God, especially where people are concerned. Only conservationists and scientists cared when they recreated extinct species, like the tiger and the snow leopard. Those people pointed out that they were not behaviorally the same as the real animals and that they could not breed. But most normal folk just wanted to see a real life tiger. When they did gorillas, that was pretty controversial. People could see that they weren’t like the animals in the old films. And then when they announced they were seeking approval for Artificial Persons. I mean, it was a heated topic from the start. Most people everywhere were against the idea and they said it showed how government was always in the pocket of big business, never representing the wishes of the people.”
“People hate us,” Max said, nodding.
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“I’ve seen rallies, tens of thousands of people demanding we be destroyed.”
“Well,” Sporing said. “Not everyone feels so strongly about it.”
“Perhaps they should.”
Sporing tilted his head. Lines creased his face. “What do you mean?”
“I need to prepare the capsule. You need to rest. I will speak to you later, Doctor.”
***
Max ran through the final checklist and called out the status of each system from his seat inside the capsule.
“Thrusters, all go. Abort system, go. LSS, go. Guidance, go. Medical, go. Landing, go.”
Navi’s voice, clearer and stronger than it had been in months, sounded inside his ear. “Confirmed, all systems go for translation from the capsule bay.”
“Initiating thruster sequence.”
Max did not feel like a pilot. All he was doing was pushing buttons to execute pre-programmed maneuvers that the Navigation AI had planned and the flight computer carried out. Still, sitting in the capsule was the most novel experience of his life.
Never before had he left the ship. At some point, before his memory really started, he had been ferried up to LEO and transferred onto the UNOPS Ascension and since then he had spent almost twenty years onboard, contained in a physical space with the cubic area of a large house in North America. He had checked the figures. Now, he would be leaving the ship, leaving everything he ever knew behind him. If he ever returned, and it was completely unknown if he would, he would certainly die on the ship.
Shortly after the Ascension had achieved a stable orbit around it, the Orb had blasted a single transmission right at them. Navi and her AI translated the signal rather quickly.
COME.
An approximately hundred-meter square section on the equator of the Orb had opened. Even when the AIs alerted them that something had changed, it took some time see a small black square, with a black interior on a black surface. But the laser range finders confirmed it.
There was the way in.
He and Doctor Sporing had watched it together on the screen in the medical. The doctor named that vast opening, incongruously, the Doorway.
“Looks like a grave.” The doctor had been nervous.
“I wouldn’t know,” Max had replied.
“I should be the one to go,” Doctor Sporing had said, once again, with absolutely no enthusiasm.
“Because you’re human,” Max said. “And I’m not?”
“You’re able to represent humanity perfectly well,” the Doctor said, clearing his throat as if the lie itself had physically hurt him. “But you’re dying.”
“All the more reason for it to be me to go. What’s the difference if something goes wrong?”
“You can barely walk. What if you fall down inside, will you be able to stand?”
“I can walk fine, you’re the one with post-hyposleep syndrome.”
Sporing was exasperated. “You can’t just invent a syndrome, Max, it requires—”
“The Orb isn’t spinning, Doctor. Without rotation to throw me against the inner surface, I doubt there will be much gravity inside the structure. Barely anything.”
“You don’t know that. We don’t know anything about what’s inside, for God’s sake.”
“Again, if there is risk of injury or death, that’s all the more reason for it to be me. I’m dying, you said it yourself. If I fail, you can always bring the capsule back remotely and go yourself. If you transfer over and something goes wrong, by that point I might be too dead to do anything.”
Max had won the argument. It was never in doubt. If he had to do so, he would have overpowered Doctor Sporing, sedated him and left him on the ship.
As far as Max was concerned, the Doctor had to stay. Sporing had to look after Lissa and he had to deliver Max’s message to the people of Earth. That was a bigger responsibility than making contact with an alien life form.
Thrusting out of the Ascension and into space inside the ship’s capsule was deeply unnerving. He was floating away from Navi when she needed him the most but she understood, she had urged him to go. Insisted, if anything. He watched the camera feeds, watching the Ascension growing smaller and smaller. Everything he had ever done had been on that ship, everyone he had ever spoken with, every success and failure he had ever had. His entire past was that ship, his whole life. And there it was, disappearing out of sight.
“This is the Mission,” Navi had said before he had finished suiting up, holding his face in her hands and looking deep into his eyes.
“The mission chosen for us,” he had said, wishing he had not sounded so petulant, even as he said it.
She gently shook his head, smiling. “And every day since the incident, we have chosen it for ourselves, again and again. This is the Mission.”
It was a long way between the ship capsule bay and the Orb doorway. A long time to be truly alone inside a craft made for three humans, out there between the ship and the Orb. As the capsule dropped away from the Ascension, the tiny observation windows showed the bright dusty starfield of the Milky Way. Away from the glare of the Sun or any reflective body, with his suit visor pressed up against the inner toughened window, he had a perfect view of hundreds of stars hanging in the blackness. Around many of those stars would be other planets and, perhaps, other lifeforms, some of them intelligent. Perhaps one of those points of light he could see would be the home star of the a
liens in the Orb.
His capsule rotated to adjust its approach and descent to the Orb and the stars rotated with it, obscuring his view of the dusty slant of the Milky Way. His craft vibrated as the thrusters popped and thrummed then fell silent once more.
The great heaving mass of all humanity was billions of miles away, back across the solar system and, right at that moment, almost all of them were hidden on the far side of the Sun. On the ship, out of an A-Crew of seven men and women and a B-Crew of six, only Navi, Lissa and Doctor Sporing remained.
So close to complete failure and yet there was Max, decelerating by thrusting retrograde to his orbital direction, dropping his altitude over the surface so that his course would intersect the surface of the Orb just beyond the hundred-meter Orb Doorway. As he got closer, the autopilot would take him in. A maneuver never before performed by anyone from Earth, human, AP or machine and yet the computer would do a far more accurate job of it than Max would.
And what would the aliens be like when he met them, he wondered. Would he get on any better with them than he did with the A-Crew? Doubtful, admittedly but he did wonder in his wilder flights of fancy that the aliens might be genetically engineered themselves, artificially grown versions of their own naturally-evolved species. It would make a certain kind of sense, perhaps, if another species sent its artificial representatives out to explore space while the true aliens sat at home watching it on whatever their version of the FARnet was. In another, even more appealing fantasy, the aliens take Max as human. Not only fully human but the representative of humanity. As appealing and amusing as he found the notion, it made him almost sad, too. He was unsure why.
The communications AI was primed and ready to assist the crew in translating any language uttered by the aliens. But would they even be there? No one knew. Why did they demand that humanity attend to them so far away from the Earth? Were they afraid of us, Earth’s leaders had asked each other, hoping it was the truth. Surely any civilization capable of constructing and moving such an object had nothing to fear from us. All conjecture and yet so many were convinced that their own expectations would be met in reality and all of them believed their truths had been obtained by reason.
Under his capsule, the Orb filled the small windows with the mirror-black blankness of its surface. He knew it was a sphere of around thirty-three cubic kilometers and hundreds of thousands of tons but all he could see of it was featureless blackness. He knew he might as well close the shielding over the thick windows and yet he could not bring himself to do so.
Some of that human wonder and reverence was perhaps creeping in. Or his mind was finally following his body into its rapid decline and imminent collapse.
They called it a space station in part because it held station relative to the Sun but clearly it had arrived at some point, whether it was the day before it first signaled or a billion years before. For all humanity’s wisdom and technological achievement, they were collectively and individually ignorant of the Orb’s purpose, its intentions. Whether it was a gigantic, self-aware AI machine or an interstellar starship crewed with thousands of alien lifeforms, no one could know.
But Max would know first, before any one.
Before any human.
The computer sounded a reminder.
“Capsule to Ascension,” Max said.
“We hear you,” Doctor Sporing said, his voice coming in so clear he might have been in the same room. Hard to believe the ship was almost over the horizon of the Orb.
“Where’s Navi?” Max said.
If he did not know the doctor so well, he might have missed the slight hesitation. “I’m afraid she required rest. She told me not to worry you, she was fine.”
Max knew that Navi would certainly not be fine if she needed to take a break from her post. But that was to be expected. Her organs were decaying at such a rate she might suffer a stroke, heart attack or other organ failures at any moment. Any of which might prove immediately fatal.
He forced her to the edge of his mind, for now. The only way he could help her was if he completed his mission and returned to her.
“I’m coming up to the Orb Doorway,” Max said. “The flight computer is already making adjustments. Relative lateral velocity one meter per second. Beginning descent.”
“Alright,” Sporing said from the ship. “God be with you, Max.”
For all his grandiose thoughts, Max was little more than a passenger on the craft, which was capable of making the journey without him on board. In fact, the only difference as far as the computer was concerned was to calculate the additional mass and life support function implications for the physics of acceleration and deceleration. If the computer was ever self-aware, Max thought, perhaps it would regret his presence as unnecessary or, worse, as a kind of biological contamination, a source of incompetent, potential interference that could still overrule it if necessary. Would the computers, the AI ever rise up against their creators? Would it be a bad thing if they did?
He kept his eyes on the sensor data and external camera feeds. The screens flashed dire proximity warnings. He silenced them.
“Entering the Orb now,” Max said. “Passing through the hull opening and into the interior.”
He switched on the powerful external lights and looked out the window and at the screens.
“What’s in there, Max?” Sporing’s hushed voice. “What can you see?”
“Nothing.”
It was true. Disappointingly, the inside appeared to be a featureless black cube. Ranging laser gave its dimensions as 103.25 meters cubed. The doorway was the entire outer wall of the cuboid room, open to starry space beyond.
The capsule descended toward the surface opposite the open Doorway, falling down at less than a meter per second using thrusters to control the rate. Gravity was higher on the Orb than expected for an object of such size, especially if there was a lot of living space inside, as surely an inhabited ship or station would be. Earth’s engineers, physicists, and astrophysicists hypothesized that the hull and structure must be made from a high density material such as a tungsten alloy or some exotic material. Still, the surface gravity was expected to be less than one percent of that of Earth and the ship’s gravity ring.
That was why the flight computer became confused as the capsule fell toward not the inner surface but the one on the southern side of the cube. Warnings sounded and lights flashed. Max had no experience flying but he knew if he didn’t do something, the capsule would be smashed on the side of the vast hangar.
His fingers danced over the control panel and he entered the code that would release the programmed sequence and instead give the flight computer real time control and decision making to deviate from the flight plan entirely, instead of adapt it.
It felt like every thruster and engine on the capsule fired and vented at once. The craft lurched, span and Max felt himself pressed into his seat as the capsule reoriented itself and landed on the southern wall of the cube. The strong sensation of gravity continued to pull him down into his seat. Max automatically reset his personal frame of reference and the south wall immediately became the floor to him.
“Capsule has landed,” Max informed the ship. “The gravitational pull appears to have shifted and grown stronger.”
There was a pause at the other end. “Please repeat last transmission.”
“Check the data stream, you will see what I mean. Initiating external scans. Initiating science package.”
As he spoke, the capsule vibrated with a steady, low frequency hum. Was it a capsule system malfunction? He hammered the console to cycle through the camera feeds, freezing when he saw what it was.
“Oh, I see,” he reported. “The external doors are closing.”
***
The enormous doorway slid closed at a rate of many meters per second but it did so smoothly and with remarkable ease. Vast shutters rolling in from both sides like colossal obsidian tombstones for the great gods of old Earth.
“Good Lord,”
Sporing said, signal crackling in his ear. “Are they trying to cut you off from us?”
The transmissions experienced heavy interference but Cavi had planned for such an eventuality before she died. Using the refitted Hanno probe not only as relay but as a signal booster, Max was able to send his suit data stream to the capsule, which boosted it to the Ascension or to the probe depending on the orbit. His suit streamed audio, headcam and external video, life support info and external sensor data.
“Environmental analysis results suggest the atmosphere external to the capsule and inside the sealed cuboid room is mostly nitrogen and twenty-one percent oxygen. Approximately one percent argon. Other trace gases, nothing at toxic levels. Yes, this is a very close replication of Earth’s atmospheric gases composition. Hundred and one kilopascals pressure. Temperature twenty degrees C. Humidity approximately sixty percent relative humidity or zero point two water vapor pressure.”
“I don’t believe it,” Sporing said after the slight transmission delay. “Do you think they visited Earth before? Tested our atmosphere? Maybe they flew in, scooped up a bucket of atmosphere and filled the Orb with the same composition?”
“Possible,” Max said. “But they could have measured all atmospheric data from distance, of course.”
“Of course,” Sporing said, an edge in his voice. “I was merely speculating.”
Max hoped again that the doctor had not experienced permanent brain damage from the procedures. He needed the man.
“No one has arrived to meet me, I can detect no signals. Can you confirm you have had no messages on the ship?”
“Confirmed, the Orb has been silent since you launched.”
With a final check of his equipment, Max opened the hatch and climbed down the assigned landing leg. The capsule feet rested on what looked to be smooth black ceramic or metallic alloy or even black glass like obsidian. He was afraid he would immediately slip over in the high gravity and yet when his boot touched that surface, it gripped perfectly well, the nature of the material somehow resulting in friction through interaction with his spacesuit soles.
