Godlike Machines

by Jonathan Strahan [Editor]

“Listen to me,” he said with fierce insistence. “This is not real. We’re in Star City, my friend. The whole point of this exercise is to measure our alertness, our ability to see through delusional constructs. Escaping from the ship is the objective, the end-state.”

  I knew then that reasoned argument wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I gave myself a hard shove in his direction, hoping to overwhelm him with sheer momentum. But Yakov was faster. His hand sprung to his pocket and came out holding one of the tasers, aimed straight at me. The barbs sprang out and contacted my chest. I’d never been shot before and I wasn’t ready for the pain. It seemed to crush me into a little ball of concentrated fire, like an insect curling under the heat from a magnifying glass. I let out a brief yelp, biting my tongue, and then I didn’t even have the energy to scream. The barbs were still in me. Bent double, blood dribbling from my hand and mouth, I lost all contact with the ship. Drifting, I saw Yakov leave the taser floating in mid-air while he returned his attention to the wheel and redoubled his efforts.

  “You stupid fucker,” I heard Galenka say, behind me.

  I didn’t know whether she meant Yakov—for trying to escape—or me, for trying to stop him on my own. Maybe she meant both of us.

  The pain of the discharge was beginning to ebb. I could just begin to think about speaking again.

  “Got a taser,” I heard myself say, as if from a distance.

  “Good. So have I.” I felt Galenka push past me, something hard in her hand. Then I heard the strobing crackle of another taser. I kept drifting around, until the door came into view again. Through blurred and slitted eyes, I saw Yakov twitching against the metal. Galenka had fired barbs into him; now she was holding the prongs of the taser against his abdomen, the blue worm of a spark writhing between.

  I reached out a hand and managed to steady myself. The pain had now all but gone, but I was enveloped in nausea and a tingling all-body version of pins and needles.

  “You can stop now.”

  She gave the taser one last prod, then withdrew it. Yakov remained still, slumped and unconscious against the door.

  “I say we kill the fucker now.”

  I wiped the blood from my lips. “I know how you feel. But we need him to get us home. If there’s the slightest problem with the engine ...”

  “Anything happens, mission control can help us.”

  I worked my way down to the door. “He’s not going to do this again. We can sedate him, confine him to one of the modules if necessary. Until Baikonur advise.”

  Galenka pushed her own taser back into her pocket, with the barbs dangling loose on their springy wires. She started turning the wheel in the opposite direction, grunting at first with the effort.

  “This was a close call.”

  “You were right—I should have been more worried about him than I was. I didn’t think he was really serious about all that Star City stuff. I mean, not this serious.”

  “He’s a basket case, Dimitri. That means there are only two sane people left on this ship, and I’m being generous.”

  “Do you think Baikonur will be able to help?”

  “They’d better. Anything goes wrong on this ship, we need him to fix it. And he’s not going to be much use to us doped to his eyeballs.”

  We manhandled the stunned Yakov back into the main part of the Tereshkova. Already I could tell that he was only lightly unconscious, and that we’d have a struggle on our hands if he came around now. He was mumbling under his breath. Sweat began to bead on my forehead. Why the fuck did this have to happen to us?

  “What do you reckon we should do? Confine him to his quarters?”

  “And have him loose aboard the ship again, looking for a way to escape?”

  “I’m not sure we have any other choice.”

  “We lock him in the forward module,” Galenka said decisively. “He’ll be safe in there. We can seal the connecting lock from our side, until Baikonur come up with a treatment regime. In the meantime we dose him on sedatives, put him under for as long as we can. I don’t want that lunatic running around when I’m trying to steer the Progress through Shell 3.”

  I breathed in hard, trying to focus. “Where is it now?”

  “Still anchored to one of the Shell 2 platelets. I’d like to take a few more samples before I detach, but from then on it’s seat of the pants stuff.”

  She was right: it was a good plan. Better than anything I could come up with, at any rate. We took him forward to the orbiter, opened a medical kit and injected him with the sedative. I took out a tube of disinfectant and a roll of bandage for my gashed hand. Yakov stopped mumbling and became more pliant, like a big rag doll. We strapped him into a sleeping hammock and locked the door on him.

  “He was pissing me off anyway,” Galenka said.

  I move back from the window in Nesha’s apartment. Zvezdniy Gorodok is stirring to a wintery, hypothermic half-life. The snow’s still coming down, though in fitful flurries rather than a steady fall. When a Zil pulls onto the street I feel a tightness in my throat. But the limousine stops, releasing its passenger, and moves on. The man strolls across the concrete concourse into one of the adjoining buildings, a briefcase swinging from his hand. He might have anything in that briefcase—a gun, a syringe, a lie detector. But he has no business here.

  “You think they’re looking for you.”

  “I know it.”

  “Then where are you going to go?”

  Out into the cold and the snow to die, I think. But I smile and say nothing.

  “Is it really so bad in the facility? Do they really treat you so badly?”

  I return to my seat. Nesha’s poured me another cup of tea, which—her views on my sanity notwithstanding—I take as an invitation to remain. “Most of them don’t treat me badly at all—they’re not monsters or sadists. I’m too precious to them for that. They don’t beat me, or electrocute me, and the drugs they give me, the things they do to me, they’re not to make me docile or to punish me. Doctor Kizim, he’s even kind to me. He spends a lot of time talking to me, trying to get me to remember details I might have forgotten. It’s pointless, though. I’ve already remembered all that I’m ever going to. My brain feels like a pan that’s been scrubbed clean.”

  “Did Doctor Kizim help you to escape?”

  “I’ve asked myself the same question. Did he mean for me to steal his coat? Did he sense that I was intending to leave? He must have known I wouldn’t get far without it.”

  “What about the others? Were you allowed to see them?”

  I shake my head. “They kept us apart the whole time Yakov and Galenka were still alive. We were questioned and examined separately. Even though we’d spent all those months in the ship, they didn’t want us contaminating each other’s accounts.”

  “So you never really got to know what happened to the others.”

  “I know that they both died. Galenka went first-she took the highest dosage when the VASIMIR’s shielding broke down. Yakov was a little luckier, but not much. I never got to see either of them while they were still alive.”

  “Why didn’t you get a similar dosage?”

  “Yakov was mad to begin with. Then he got better, or at least decided he was better off working with us than against us. We let him out of the module where we were keeping him locked up. That was after Galenka and I got back from the Matryoshka.”

  “And then?”

  “It was my turn to go a little mad. Inside the machine-something touched us. It got into our heads. It affected me more than it did Galenka. On the return trip, they had no choice but to confine me to the forward module.”

  “The thing that saved you.”

  “I was further from the engine when it went wrong. Inverse square laws. My dosage was negligible.”

  “You accept that they died, despite having no evidence.”

  “I believe what Doctor Kizim told me. I trusted him. He had no reason to lie. He was already putting his career at risk by giving me this information.
Maybe more than his career. A good man.”

  “Did he know the other two?”

  “No; he only ever treated me. That was part of the methodology. Strange things had happened during the early months of the debriefing. The doctors and surgeons got too close to us, too involved. After we came back from the Matryoshka, there was something different about us. It affected us all, even Yakov, who hadn’t gone inside. Just being close to it was enough.”

  “Different in what way?” Nesha asks.

  “It began in small ways, while we were still on the Tereshkova. Weird slips. Mistakes that didn’t make sense. As if our identities, our personalities and memories, were blurring. On the way home, I sat at the computer keyboard and found myself typing Yakov’s name and password into the system, as if he’s sitting inside me. A few days later Galenka wakes up and tells me she dreamed she was in Klushino, a place she’s never visited. It was as if something in the machine had touched us and removed some fundamental barrier in our heads, some wall or moat that keeps one person from becoming another. When the silver fluid got into us ...”

  “I don’t understand. How could the doctors get too close to you? What happened to them?”

  I sense her uneasiness; the realization that she may well be sharing her room with a lunatic. I have never pretended to be entirely sane, but it must only be now that the white bones of true madness are beginning to show through my skin.

  “I didn’t mean to alarm you, Nesha. I’ll be gone shortly, I promise you. Why don’t you tell me what it was like for you, back when it all began?”

  “You know my story.”

  “I’d still like to hear it from you. From the day it arrived. How it changed you.”

  “You were old enough to remember it. You already told me that.”

  “But I wasn’t an astronomer, Nesha. I was just a 20 year old kid with some ideas about being a cosmonaut. You were how old, exactly?”

  “Forty years. I’d been a professional astronomer for 15 or 16 of them, by then.” She becomes reflective, as if it’s only now that she has given that time of her life any thought. “I’d been lucky, really. I’d made professor, which meant I didn’t have to grub around for funding every two years. I had to do my share of lecturing, and fighting for my corner of the department, but I still had plenty of time for independent research. I was still in love with science, too. My little research area-stellar pulsation modes-it wasn’t the most glamorous. They didn’t fight to put our faces on the covers of magazine, or give us lucrative publishing deals to talk about how we were uncovering the mysteries of the universe, touching the face of god. But we knew it was solid science, important to the field as a whole.” She leans forward to make a point. “Astronomy’s like a cathedral, Dimitri. The ones putting the gold on the top spire get all the glory, but they’d be nothing without a solid foundation. That’s where we were—down in the basement, down in the crypt, making sure it was all anchored to firm ground. Fundamental stellar physics. Not very exotic compared to mapping the large scale universe, or probing the event horizons of black holes. But vital all the same.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “I can remember that afternoon when the news came in. Gennadi and I were in my office. It was a bright day, with the blinds drawn. It was the end of the week and we were looking forward to a few days off. We had tickets to see a band in town that night. We just had one thing we wanted to get sorted before we finished. A paper we’d been working on had come back from the referee with a load of snotty comments, and we didn’t quite agree on how to deal with them. I wanted to write back to the journal and request a different referee. The referee on our paper was anonymous, but I was sure I knew who it was—a slimy, womanising prick who’d made a pass at me at a conference in Trieste, and wasn’t going to let me forget that I’d told him where to get off.”

  I smile. “You must have been fierce in your day.”

  “Well, maybe it wasn’t him—but we still needed a different referee. Gennadi, meanwhile, thought we should sit back and do what the referee was telling us. Which meant running our models again, which meant a week of time on the department supercomputer. Normally, that would have meant going right back to the start of the queue. But there was a gap in the schedule—another group had just pulled out of their slot, because they couldn’t get their software to compile properly. We could have their slot-but only if we got our model up and running that evening, with all the modifications the referee wanted us to make.”

  “You weren’t going to make it to that band.”

  “That was when the IAU telegram came in to my inbox. I didn’t even open it at first; it wasn’t as if IAU telegrams were exactly unusual. It probably just meant that a supernova had gone off in a remote galaxy, or that some binary star was undergoing a nova. Nothing I needed to get excited about.”

  “But that wasn’t what it was about.”

  “It was the Matryoshka, of course—the emergence event, when it came into our solar system. A sudden influx of cosmic rays, triggering half the monitoring telescopes and satellites in existence. They all turned to look at the point where the machine had come in. A flash of energy that intense, it could only be a gamma-ray burst, happening in some distant galaxy. That’s what everyone thought it was at first, especially as the Matryoshka came in high above the ecliptic, and well out of the plane of the galaxy. It looked extragalactic, not some local event. Sooner or later, though, they crunched the numbers-triangulated from the slightly different pointing angles of the various spacecraft and telescopes, the slightly different detection times of the event—and they realized that, whatever this was, it had happened within one light hour of the Sun. Not so much on our doorstep, cosmically speaking, as in our house, making itself at home.” Nesha smiles at the memory. “There was some wild theorizing to begin with. Everything from a piece of antimatter colliding with a comet, a quantum black hole evaporating, to the illegal test of a Chinese super-weapon in deep space. Of course, it was none of those things. It was spacetime opening wide enough to vomit out a machine the size of Tasmania.”

  “It was a while before they found the Matryoshka itself.”

  Nesha nods. “You try finding something that dark, when you don’t even know in which direction it’s moving.”

  “Even from the Tereshkova, it was hard to believe it was actually out there.”

  “To begin with, we still didn’t know what to make of it. The layered structure confused the hell out of us. We weren’t used to analyzing anything like that. It was artificial, clearly, but it wasn’t made of solid parts. It was like a machine caught in the instant of blowing up, but which was still working, still doing whatever it was sent to do. Without getting closer, we could only resolve the structure in the outer layer. We didn’t start calling it Shell 1 until we knew there were deeper strata. The name Matryoshka didn’t come until after the first fly-by probes, when we glimpsed Shell 2. The Americans called it the Easter Egg for a little while, but eventually everyone started using the Russian name.”

  I know that when she talks about “we”, she means the astronomical community as a whole, rather than her own efforts. Nesha’s involvement—the involvement that had first made her famous, then ruined her reputation, then her life-did not come until later.

  The emergence event—the first apparition—caught humanity entirely unaware. The Matryoshka had come out of its wormhole mouth—if that was what it was—on an elliptical, sun-circling trajectory similar to a periodic comet. The only thing non-cometary was the very steep inclination to the ecliptic. It made reaching the Matryoshka problematic, except when it was swinging near the Sun once every 12 years. Even with a massive international effort, there was no way to send dedicated probes out to meet the artifact and match its velocity. The best anyone could do was fling smart pebbles at it, hoping to learn as much as possible in the short window while they slammed past. Probes that had been intended for Mars or Venus were hastily repurposed for the Matryoshka flyby, where time and physic
s made that possible. It was more like the mad scramble of some desperate, last-ditch war effort than anything seen in peacetime.

  There were, of course, dissenting voices. Some people thought the prudent thing would be to wait and see what the Matryoshka had in mind for us. By and large, they were ignored. The thing had arrived here, hadn’t it? The least it could expect was a welcome party.

  As it was, the machine appeared completely oblivious to the attention—as it had continued to do through the second apparition. The third apparition—that was different, of course. But then again our provocation had been of an entirely different nature.

  After the probes had gone by, there was data to analyze. Years of it. The Matryoshka had fallen out of each reach of our instruments and robots, but we had more than enough to keep busy until the next apparition. Plans were already being drawn up for missions to rendezvous with the object and penetrate that outer layer. Robots next time, but who knew what might be possible in the 24 years between the first and third apparitions?

  “The scientists who’d had their missions redirected wanted a first look at the Matryoshka data,” Nesha says. “The thinking was that they’d get exclusive access to it for six months.”

  “You can’t blame them for that.”

  “There was still an outcry. It was felt that an event of this magnitude demanded the immediate release of all the data to the community. To the whole world, in fact. Anyone who wanted it was welcome to it. Of course, unless they had a lightning fast internet connection, about ten million terabytes of memory, their own Cray... they couldn’t even begin to scratch the surface. There were collaborative efforts, millions of people downloading a fragment of the data and analyzing it using spare CPU cycles, but they still couldn’t beat the resources of a single well-equipped academic department with a tame supercomputer in the basement. Above all else, we had all the analysis tools at hand, and we knew how to use them. But it was still a massive cake to eat in one bite.”

  “And did you?”

  “No—it made much more sense to focus on what we were good at. The data hinted that the elements of the outer layer-Shell 1—were bound together by some kind of force-field. The whole thing was breathing in and out, the components moving as if tied together by a complex web of elastic filaments. The thing is, stars breathe as well. The pulsation modes in a solar-type star aren’t the same as the pulsation modes in the Matryoshka. But we could still use the same methods, the same tools and tricks, to get a handle on them. And of course, there was a point to all of that. Map the pulsations in a star and you can probe the deep interior, in exactly the same way that earthquakes tell us about the structure of the Earth. There was every expectation that the Matryoshka’s pulsations might tell us something about the inside of that as well.”