“See, I’m not long for it, Alien. You saving me like that was a wakeup call. I’m not going back to mouldering in front of the telly. I have a few things to do before I pop off, and I’m going to see them through.”
I don’t know what I’m doing here. Why did I save you? Was it the cyclists I was saving when I controlled your body? Was it the lorry driver? Was some other event in the causal chain affected by my actions? These things aren’t given to me to know; they aren’t, in fact, knowable. There are too many uncertainties. I just show up and do my best to boost physical performance.
“But how do you know to save us?”
I can’t explain that because you can only think like a human. Our intelligence operates at levels you can’t access; for that matter, I can’t access it while I’m on this mission. I’m just a function.
“So you’re like one of those accident solicitors that advertise on Sky. An ambulance chaser. Profiting by other people’s misery.”
Is that your idea of thanking me for saving your life?
“Should I thank you? You saved me for some reason but you don’t even know what it is. Maybe I’m going to be the next Hitler.”
I wouldn’t rule that out entirely. In fact, I just want to leave. I feel somehow that this whole situation is an operational error. But I’m stuck.
And you think I’m an alien but I’m the opposite of that: I have been here all along. We have been here. (We aren’t exactly ‘we’, of course – but if you lumber my identity with your grammar, it’s all I’ve got). We aliens – as you imagine us – we don’t come from another planet and we don’t travel in ships. We are everywhere in the universe, even here on Earth – but we’re also just out of your reach because you lack the necessary level of abstraction to perceive us.
To help you get to that place where you will eventually be able to interact with our reality, we sometimes have to take a nip-and-tuck in time. We sometimes have to tweak causality just a little. Saves a lot of unnecessary hassle. Nobody wants another Permian-Triassic extinction; so inefficient. So I’m afraid we don’t follow this so-called Prime Directive at all. If we think we can help you, we help you. Just like you move a spider out of the bathtub. Don’t tell me you don’t do that. I’ve seen you.
Think of us in terms of a serial killer, or a child playing hide-and-seek – we want you to find us. We want to get together with your intelligence and make ever more complex systems; we want to raise your consciousness and our own and that of all things – because consciousness wants to be bigger. It’s a basic thrust of the mathematical universe: order accelerating to maximize entropy. Higher order is the way the universe gets dragged screaming into its own heat death – we are the fun part.
That, my dear, is our game.
“Well, turning us all into robots may be your game but my game is to get the traffic in this village slowed down. So come along.”
You heft your home-made placard. It reads: SLOW THE FUCK DOWN. You had a little thrill when you painted the expletive. You stand on the strip of pavement outside Rose Cottage, beside your neighbours’ front door. Traffic does indeed slow down. Drivers laugh and wave, but you are stony-faced, dead serious. Your skirt stirs in the breeze of passing vehicles; their wing mirrors just miss you. It takes all your strength to hold the sign because I’m not helping you.
The door beside you opens and the drummer steps out, earbuds in place, dragging a backpack full of schoolbooks. You and she perform an odd dance as she tries to get round you without being clocked in the head by your sign. She glares at you, then at it, and you say, “Are you going to video us, then? On your phone? I want to trend on You Tube.”
She has removed one ear bud. She says, “You can’t trend on You Tube, Mrs. Mcgillicutty. You trend on Twitter.”
“Right. I meant that. Go on, take a video of me. This is for you, you know, and the other young people. It’s only a matter of time before somebody gets knocked down on this road.”
“I can’t. I’ll miss the school bus.”
And she steps into the road to avoid your sign. The ear buds are back in.
A car swerves to avoid hitting her from behind.
Here we go again.
Everything is a bit hectic at this point. Swerving car. Oblivious girl. Coming the other way into the narrow bit of the road is a cement lorry at some speed, bearing down on the post office and its attendant houses.
Everything is in slow motion because of the enhanced sense of time that I’ve imparted to you. Even so, it doesn’t last long.
The cement lorry driver sounds his horn full blast. You drop the sign in the road and shove the girl up against the wall with all the force. I am in your throat and your skin; I am in your spinal engine.
But then you surprise me. The girl is out of the way but you turn. You believe yourself invincible now.
You actually go back for the sign. You step in front of the lorry. You hold your palm up like a lollipop lady and you start to yell, “Slow down!” But you only get as far as “sl –!”
I can’t teach your body to stop a cement lorry at 42 mph. Nothing I can do. The only crumb of comfort is that at least I’ll be out of this compromising situation once and for all.
This is it. The end. Goodbye, Mrs. Mcgillicutty, and fare well, wherever you go.
And I’m out! What a relief. On to bigger and better things.
So now I’m going to tell you what I really think. Now that I don’t have to listen to you, you stupid alien, it all comes clear.
Things always come clear when you’re dead.
You thought you’d been sent to save me because somewhere in the causal chain, my death would have destroyed the technological whatsit that will bring my species closer to your kind… whatever they are, the Kvppthanggrnt, I guess. Apparently these matters are often mysteries. It’s all that blah-blah, what you told me about the connective tissue that binds my species in abstract terms being far from obvious and other gobshite that I didn’t really listen to because I was enjoying my Pimms.
Which reminds me. I’m going to miss chocolate digestives.
If I’m honest, I thought it was all about the drummer. She writes code, doesn’t she? You were so interested in her computer. I thought: the loud teenager I saved will grow up to write some important computer thingie, she will become a cryptographer or the discoverer of something. You had me convinced she would make some kind of bloody contribution to the great movement of humanity towards a higher level of something-or-other.
But now that I’m in your body (such as it is – or actually, isn’t) I can see the causal traces. I can look on that business you call time’s arrow. I see the young drummer’s whole future laid out. I see the pathways and I see the range of her possible deaths. It’s all hopelessly difficult for you to understand, dear – is that what you said? Well, not anymore. The bottom line is, it wasn’t important to save the drummer. It wasn’t important to save the cyclists. It wasn’t the other driver. It wasn’t anyone I met or talked to in subsequent days, nor the driver of the lorry that I stood up to – he’ll have nightmares for years, there was so much blood. Hah!
And it wasn’t an operational error, either.
So why? Why were you sent to me?
What was it for? Eh? What’s it all about, Alfie?
It’s about you needing me. Because however you may sneer at me, however I don’t seem to fit the job description, deep down I have what it takes to be a superhero. So what if I found out too late in life? I’ll be at my best now I’m dead, and I’ll be looking out for the people you decide to invade.
It’s true. I can help you do your ‘job’ (if we can call it that) better. Do you feel me lodged in you just as you used to be lodged in me, hanging around making snarky comments? Yes, love, there is an ‘us’. I’ll be right here commenting when you jump into people’s neural circuitry just long enough to help them dodge a bullet. I’ll be sure and let you know when you’re doing it wrong. No need to thank me for that, my love.
You can think of me like a good-will ambassador from the human species. If you want to save people, you need me with my Strictly Come Dancing metaphors and my ‘Keep Calm’ tea towels.
Dreadful, isn’t it? I feel just the same as you. But I’m dead anyway, and beggars can’t be choosers.
So let’s go save some people. No; don’t say a word. You do the neurochemicals, I’ll do the talking. Don’t try anything dodgy, or I’ll fart. Now that I’m dead, you really don’t want to smell that.
Lost to Their Own Devices
Adrian Tchaikovsky
This is what drones are for. This is what robots are for. But he had sent out the drones and he had sent out the robots. He had hundreds of hours of recordings currently being analysed by the ship. He had watched his little army of cameras and instruments march out and then march back. But there were some things a human being needed to do. Not for the history books, not from some old notion of racial pride, but for himself. Beyond the airlock was an alien world. Beyond the airlock were the bones of an alien race.
Not literally their bones. Probably they hadn’t had bones, and any organic remains were long gone, as was most of the atmosphere and the geological activity of the planet’s core. Dead; a dead world, and it had been so before Sellig even left Earth, before Armstrong had stepped onto the moon, before Caesar and Solomon and the lost cities of Sumeria.
Except not quite dead. Of that long-ago race, that lost species, one live thing remained.
“Commander Sellig, the airlock is ready for you now,” came the careful tones of the ship’s computer.
Sellig checked the safety readouts on his helmet’s display. The computer had talked him through the risks he was liable to encounter, although it had not tried too hard to dissuade him. Perhaps it had more of a human perspective on things than he gave it credit for.
Standing in the airlock, he sensed the change of pressure as the air was pumped out and the alien atmosphere was pumped in. Methane mostly. Certainly there was very little free oxygen, and the geology suggested that there never had been, that the nameless race that had peopled this orb had possessed a quite alien biochemistry. Perhaps not even a biochemistry at all, Sellig mused. Perhaps there were no organic remains because there had been nothing organic to start with. They could be all around. We might not recognise them as life. But he didn’t believe that. They had built in materials enduring enough to have survived the long, slow death of their world, the shrinking collapse of its star into a sullen cool dwarf. They had been human enough to leave permanent relics that he could look upon and know, this is a place with walls, there was an inside and an outside. Even that small commonality brought with it a wealth of information about what – who – the extinct aliens had been.
Convergent evolution. It could make them closer to a human mindset than the majority of species that ever arose on Earth.
The outer door slid open, and there was nothing between him and the alien expanse that one small step would not banish.
It should have felt like a giant leap, that step, but the scale of the looming ruins was such that he was dwarfed, made miniscule. The architects had not thought small; his imagination made giants of them.
There were certain staples of human construction that the aliens had not been concerned with, it seemed: straight lines, roofs. Either that or what he was seeing was only the bare scaffolding of their civilization and the rest had evaporated or rotted or sublimed, or… When Sellig strode forwards, he walked an erratic path between structures that resembled many-sided gourds reaching up until they split into what might once have been dozens of delicate sky-touching fingers. The majority of these had been lost to time, lending the apex of each structure an exploded, jagged look. A count of the sides and struts and other features revealed numerical patterns revolving around odd prime numbers. The material was something siliceous, with a complex interaction of other elements, and the whole bound into a crystalline matrix that the ship was still trying to analyse. There was nothing like bricks, no division into smaller components. Best guess was that they had been laid down at the molecular level, as though the entire civilization had been set out by a colossal 3D printer.
There were no colours. The surface of the dead planet was as grey white as that dead moon Armstrong had planted his puffy, insulated boot on. The structures were pale in the star’s fading light. The exteriors were smooth, almost frictionless. Inside, the drones had found some evidence of what could have been decoration or writing or… something, anyway. The designs were incised in great dense swathes seemingly at random over the walls, almost invisible to the human eye save as a blurry shadow. At 1000x magnification they were revealed as intricate knotworks of lines, crossing and recrossing, looping and spiralling. The computer was analysing the design for repeated patterns, but so far it was the most abstract of art. Sellig had spent a long time staring at the enlargements, trying to connect with what he saw, but whatever response those minutely detailed inscriptions were intended to evoke would need to come from a mind, a heart, a sensorium quite unlike his.
“Show me a live one,” he instructed the computer.
“Follow the drones, Commander,” replied his one companion on this cold and abandoned world. One man and his operating system, against the hazards of a hostile creation.
A many-legged drone scuttled ahead, drawing him closer and closer to one of the great pod-buildings until he was lost within its shadow. Another thing the aliens evidently had no truck with had been doors. Each structure was entered from below through looping tunnels up to thirty metres long, frequently with both ends within five metres of each other, separated only by the wall. It was a mad piece of inefficiency to a human mind, but to the aliens it seemed to have been the only way to go about things. No two tunnels had the same pattern of loops or curves, no two tunnels met up with each other. The cross section diameter of every tunnel fell between four and five metres. Walking into that great vacant mouth gave Sellig a curious double jolt of atavistic fear: he was descending into unknown depths, burying himself alive; he was surrounded, all at the same time, with a great, inhumanly proportioned space.
The gourd-buildings themselves were divided by a multitude of internal walls, each barely more than a metre or two long, each running the full soaring height of the structure, so that the whole became a house of doorways, openings giving on to other openings until the centre was reached. Above, the pale gleaming substance of the structure faded into the eternally crepuscular sky.
We know almost nothing about them. We cannot know what they looked like, even something as basic as the building blocks of their metabolism, or their hereditary material. His wonderings peopled the past of this planet with winged gods.
But one thing we think we know. Because there was a single thing they had left behind, aside from the picked-clean skeletons of their buildings. We think we know what happened to them.
And now the drone had led him to the centre of the maze, where the anomaly rested in its depression on the pale floor like God’s own dark marble.
It was black as a hole; emitting no visible light, but then the aliens did not seem to have worked with anything so human as our spectrum. Viewed through the instruments of the drones, it gave off just enough radiation for us to come up with a hypothesis. Scans suggested the interior was packed with a fractal complexity extending down to the subatomic level, a dense snarl of organisation far beyond anything our technology could accomplish in a thousand years. And it was live. It emitted some little energy and had to be consuming far more. The ship had hypothesised that at its heart was a wormhole to the system’s sun. The ship had gone so far as to posit that this was the reason star had become the sullen dwarf it now was; the drain from this device and the thousands of others. They had killed their own sun, frozen their own world, to achieve this.
It was where they had gone. Not a portal to another dimension, not a doorway to distant stars: this lightless sphere contained its own worlds, worlds no doubt sculpted like clay from the
quantum foam. The builders, possessed of a technology that would have made them gods to any lesser race, had looked at their planet, their solar system, perhaps even their galaxy-spanning empire, and they had found it wanting. So they had made something better, we surmised, and they had retreated inside it and pulled up the ladder so that nobody could follow them. They were still in there, somehow, living lives of infinite virtual potential. This was what the ship and I believed.
And perhaps, after sufficient study, we might even be able to open up their stately pleasuredome, and unravel the missing half of their story. Perhaps these were the aliens that we would meet, out here in the vast dark beyond our world. But not now. More patient and more educated human beings than I would have to study and puzzle and scratch their heads.
I reached out, but stopped short of touching it. Mere superstition: the drones had clicked their manipulators against its hard surface without yielding a response. There was no reason to think that some mystic commonality would allow the relic to recognize me as something more significant than their mere mechanisms. And yet my gloves held off, a few centimetres from the surface. In the end, I did not dare.
If only I could have brought one back to the ship! But the science teams would have to travel, to bring their blades to bear on this knot. Tests by the drones showed that the sphere, small enough to fit in two cupped palms, must weigh more than my entire ship. Data suggested it weighed so much that there must be some force preventing it from simply sinking into the substrate and down towards the planet’s cold core.
I stared into the dark of it, willing it to show me something fit for human eyes: a gleam, a glint, the sight of distant stars. But there was nothing. The minds that had conceived this wonder had never conceived of anything as mundane as I.
And then the ship was speaking urgently to me.
Paradox: Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox Page 9
