Godlike Machines

by Jonathan Strahan [Editor]

  “Talk to me, Galenka.”

  “It’s all racked and sorted, Dimitri. Must be about half a ton of stuff in here already. Some of the chunks are pretty big. Still warm, too. Going to be a bitch of a job moving all of them back to the Soyuz.”

  “We’ll take what we can; that was always the idea. If nothing else we should make sure we’ve got unique samples from both Shell 1 and Shell 2.”

  “I’m going to try and bring out the first chunk. I’ll pass it through the hatch. Be ready.”

  “I’m here.”

  But as I said that, a status panel lit up on the side of my faceplate. “Comms burst from Tereshkova,” I said, as alphanumeric gibberish scrolled past. “A window must just have opened.”

  “Feeling better now?”

  “Guess it’s nice to know the windows are still behaving.”

  “I could have told you they would.” Galenka grunted with the effort of dislodging the sample she had selected. “So—any news?”

  “Nothing. Just a carrier signal, trying to establish contact with us. Means the ship’s still out there, though.”

  “I could have told you that as well.”

  It took 20 minutes to convey one sample back to the Soyuz. Doing it as a relay didn’t help-it took two of us to nurse the object between us, all the while making sure we didn’t drift away from the structure. Things got a little faster after that. We returned to the jammed Progress in good time and only took 15 minutes to get the second sample back to our ship. We now had pieces of Shell 1 and Shell 2 aboard, ready to be taken back home.

  A voice at the back of my head said that we should quit while we were ahead. We’d salvaged something from this mess-almost certainly enough to placate Baikonur. We had taken a risk and it had paid off. But there was still more than an hour remaining of the time I had allowed us. If we moved quickly and efficiently—and we were already beginning to settle into a rhythm—we could recover three or four additional samples before it was time to start our journey back. Who knew what difference five or six samples might make, compared to two?

  “Just for the record,” Galenka said, when we reached the Progress again, “I’m getting itchy feet here.”

  “We’ve still got time. Two more. Then we’ll see how we’re doing.”

  “You were a lot more jumpy until that window opened.”

  She was right. I couldn’t deny it.

  I was thinking of that when another comms burst came through. For a moment I was gladdened—just seeing the scroll of numbers and symbols, even if it meant nothing to me, made me feel closer to the Tereshkova. Home was just three shells and a sprint across vacuum away. Almost close enough to touch, like the space station that had sped across the sky over Klushino, when my father held me on his shoulders.

  “Dimitri,” crackled a voice. “Galenka. Yakov here. I hope you can hear me.”

  “What is it, friend?” I asked, hearing an edge in his voice I didn’t like.

  “You’d better listen carefully—we could get cut off at any moment. Baikonur detected a change in the Matryoshka—a big one. Shell 1 pulsations have increased in amplitude and frequency. It’s like nothing anyone’s seen since the first apparition. Whatever you two are doing in there-it’s having an effect. The thing is waking. You need to think about getting out, while the collision-avoidance algorithm will still get you through Shell 1. Those pulsations change anymore, the algorithm won’t be any use.”

  “He could be lying,” Galenka said. “Saying whatever he needs to say that get us to go back.”

  “I’m not lying. I want you to come back. And I want that Soyuz back so that at least one of us can get home.”

  “I think we’d better move,” I said.

  “The remaining samples?”

  “Leave them. Let’s just get back to the ship as quickly as possible.”

  As I spoke, the comms window blipped out. Galenka pushed away from the Progress. I levered myself onto the nearest thorn and started climbing. It was quicker now that we didn’t have to carry anything between us. I thought of the changing conditions in Shell 1 and hoped that we’d still be able to pick a path through the lethal, shifting maze of field-lines.

  We were half way to the Soyuz—I could see it overhead, tantalising near—when Galenka halted, only just below me.

  “We’re in trouble,” she said.

  “That’s why we have to keep on moving.”

  “Something’s coming up from below. We’re not going to make it, Dimitri. It’s rising too quickly.”

  I looked down and saw what she meant. We couldn’t see the Progress anymore. It was lost under a silver tide, a sea of gleaming mercury climbing slowly through the thicket, swallowing everything as it rose.

  “Climb,” I said.

  “We aren’t going to make it. It’s coming too damned fast.”

  I gritted my teeth: typical Galenka, pragmatic to the end. But even she had resumed her ascent, unable to stop her body from doing what her mind knew to be futile. She was right, too. The tide was going to envelope us long before we reached the Soyuz. But I couldn’t stop climbing either. I risked a glance down and saw the silver fluid lapping at Galenka’s heels, then surging up to swallow her lowest boot.

  “It’s got me.”

  “Keep moving.”

  She pulled the boot free, reached the next thorn, and for a moment it appeared that she might be capable of out-running the fluid. My mind raced ahead to the Soyuz, realizing that even if we got there in time, even if we got inside and sealed the hatch, we wouldn’t be able to get the ship aloft in time.

  Then the fluid took more of Galenka. It lapped to her thighs, then her waist. She slowed her climb.

  “It’s pulling me back,” she said, grunting with the effort. “It’s trying to pull me in.”

  “Fight it.”

  Maybe she did—it was hard to tell, with her movements so impeded. The tide consumed her to the chest, taking her backpack, then absorbed her helmet. She had one hand raised above her head, grasping for the next thorn. The tide took it.

  “Galenka.”

  “I’m here.” She came through indistinctly, comms crackling with static. “I’m in it now. I can’t see anything. But I can still move, still breathe. It’s like being in the immersion tank.”

  “Try and keep climbing.”

  “Picking up some suit faults now. Fluid must be interfering with the electronics, with the cooling system.” She faded out, came back, voice crazed with pops and crackles and hisses. “Oh, God. It’s inside. I can feel it. It’s cold, against my skin. Rising through the suit. How the fuck did it get in?”

  She faded.

  “Galenka. Talk to me.”

  “In my helmet now. Oh, God. Oh, God. It’s still rising. I’m going to drown, Dimitri. This is not right. I did not want to fucking drown?

  “Galenka?”

  I heard a choked scream, then a gurgle. Then nothing.

  I kept climbing, while knowing it was useless. The tide reached me a few moments later. It swallowed me and then found a way into my suit, just as it had with Galenka.

  Then it found a way into my head.

  But neither of us drowned.

  There was a moment of absolute terror as it forced its way down my throat, through my eye sockets, nose and ears. The drowning reflex kicked in, and then it was over. Not terror, no panic, just blissful unconsciousness.

  Until I woke up on my back.

  The silver tide was abating. It had left our bodies, left the inside of our suits. It was draining off them in chrome rivulets, leaving them dry and undamaged. We were lying like upended turtles, something like Earth-normal gravity pinning us to the floor. It took all my effort to lever myself into a sitting position, and then to stand up, fighting the weight of my backpack as it tried to drag me down. My suit was no longer ballooning out, suggesting that we were in some kind of pressurized environment.

  I looked around, taking deep, normal breaths.

  Galenka and I had arrived
in a chamber, a huge iron-gray room with gill-like sluice vents in the side walls. The fluid was rushing out through the vents, exposing a floor of slightly twinkling black, like polished marble. Gray-blue light poured down through hexagonal grids in the arched ceiling. I wasn’t going to take any chances on it being breathable.

  I inspected the outer covering for tears or abrasions, but it looked as good as when I’d worn it.

  “Galenka,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear, Dimitri.” I heard her voice on the helmet radio, but also coming through the glass, muffled but comprehensible. “Whatever we just went through—I don’t think it hurt our suits.”

  “Do you still have air?”

  “According to the gauge, good for another six hours.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Like I’ve been scrubbed inside with caustic soda. But otherwise—I’m alright. Clear-headed, like I’ve just woken up after a really slong sleep. I actually feel better, more alert, than before we left the Soyuz.”

  “That’s how I feel,” I said. “Where do you think we are?”

  “The heart of it. The middle of the Matryoshka. Where else could we be? It must have brought us here for a reason.”

  “To analyze us. To assess the foreign objects it detected, then to work out how best to recycle or dispose of them.”

  “Maybe. But then why keep us alive? It must recognize that we’re living. It must recognize that we’re thinking beings.”

  “Always the optimist, Dimitri.”

  “Something’s happening. Look.”

  A bar of light had cut across the base of part of the wall. It was becoming taller, as if a seamless door was opening upwards. The light ramming through the widening gap was the same gray-blue that came through the ceiling. Both of us tensing, expecting to be squashed out of existence at any moment, we turned to face whatever awaited us.

  Beyond was a kind of corridor, sloping down in a gently steepening arc, so that the end was not visible except as an intensification of that silvery glow. The inwardly-sloping walls of the corridor—rising to a narrow spine of a ceiling—were dense with intricately carved details, traced in the blue-gray light.

  “I think we should walk,” Galenka said, barely raising her voice above a whisper.

  We started moving, taking stiff, slow paces in our EVA suits. We passed through the door, into the corridor. We started descending the curved ramp of the floor. Though I should have been finding it harder and harder to keep my footing, I had no sense that I was on a steepening grade. I looked at Galenka and she was still walking upright, at right angles to the surface of the floor. I paused to turn around, but already the room we had been in was angled out of view, with the door beginning to lower back down.

  “Do you hear that sound?” Galenka asked.

  I had been about to say the same thing. Over the huff and puff of our suit circulators it was not the easiest thing to make out. But there was a low droning noise, like the bass note of an organ. It was coming from all around us, from the very fabric of the Matryoshka. It sustained a note for many seconds before changing pitch. As we walked we heard a pattern of notes repeat, with subtle variations. I couldn’t piece together the tune, if indeed there was one-it was too slow, too deep for that—but I didn’t think I was hearing the random emanations of some mindless mechanical process.

  “It’s music,” I said. “Slowed down almost to death. But it’s still music.”

  “Look at the walls, Dimitri.”

  They were astonishing. The walls had been carved with a hypnotically detailed mazelike pattern, one that I could never quite get into focus. Edges and ridges of the pattern pushed out centimeters from the wall, into the corridor. I felt a strange impulse to reach out and touch, as if there was a magnetic attraction working on my fingers. Even as I acknowledged this impulse, Galenka—walking to my left—reached out her left hand and skirted the pattern on her side. She flinched and withdrew her gloved fingers with a gasp of something that could have been pain or astonishment or simple childlike delight.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I just got... I can’t describe it, Dimitri. It was like—everything.”

  “Everything what?”

  “Everything trying to get into my head. Everything at once. Like the whole universe gatecrashing my brain. It wasn’t unpleasant. It was just-too much.”

  I reached out my hand.

  “Be careful.”

  I touched the wall. My head began to split open with an infusion of crystalline knowledge. It was clean and brittle and virescent green, like the petal of a flower dipped in liquid nitrogen. I could feel the mental sutures straining under the pressure. I flinched back, just as Galenka had done. There could not have been more than an instant of contact, but the information that had gushed through was ringing in my skull like the after-chime of God’s own church bell.

  A window of comprehension had opened and slammed shut again. I was dizzy with what it had shown me. I already knew more about the Matryoshka than I had before. I already knew more than any other living person, with the possible exception of Galenka.

  “It’s come from the future,” I said.

  “I got that as well.”

  “They sent it here. They sent it here to carry a message to us.”

  I knew these things with an unimpeachable certainty, but I had no additional context for the knowledge. What future, by whom? From how far ahead, and to what purpose? What message? How had it arrived?

  I couldn’t stand not knowing. Now that I knew part of the truth, I needed it all.

  I reached out my hand again, caressed the wall. It hit me harder this time, but the instinct to flinch away, the instinct to close my mind, was not as strong. The crystalline rush made me gasp. There couldn’t be room in my head for all that was being pumped into it, and yet it continued without interruption. Layers of wisdom poured into me, cooling and stratifying like ancient rock. My head felt like a boulder perched on my shoulders. I laughed: it was the only possible response, other than screaming terror. The flow continued, increasing in pressure.

  This much I understood:

  The Matryoshka was a complex machine. It was layered because it had no choice but to be. Each layer was a form of armor or camouflage or passkey, evolved organically to enable it to slip through the threshing clockwork of a cosmic time machine. That time machine was older than Earth. It had been constructed by alien minds and then added to and modified by successive intelligences.

  In the future, humanity found it.

  At its ticking, whirling core was a necklace of neutron stars. It had been known since our own era that a sufficiently long, sufficiently dense, sufficiently fast-rotating cylinder had the property of twisting spacetime around itself until a path into the past became possible. Such a path—a mathematical trajectory in space, like an orbit-could take a signal or object to any previous point in time, provided it was no earlier than the moment of the time machine’s construction.

  Constructing such a machine was not child’s play.

  A single neutron star could be made to have the requisite density and spin, but it lacked the necessary axial elongation. To overcome this, the machine’s builders had approximated a cylinder by stringing 441 neutron stars together until they were almost touching, like beads on a wire. An open-ended string would have collapsed under its own appalling self-gravity, so the ends had been bent around and joined, with the entire ensemble revolving fast enough to stabilize the neutron stars against falling inward. It still wasn’t a cylinder, but locally—as far as a photon or vehicle near the necklace was concerned-it might as well have been.

  The machine had catapulted the Matryoshka into the prehuman past of our galaxy. The insertion into time-reversed flight, the passage through the various filters and barriers installed to prevent illicit use of the ancient machinery, the exit back into normal timeflow, had caused eleven additional layers of shell to be sacrificed. What we saw of the Matryoshka was just th
e scarred kernel of what had once been a much larger entity.

  But it had survived. It had come through, albeit overshooting its target era by many millions of years. Yet that had been allowed for; it was easier to leap back into the deep past and crawl forward in time than to achieve a bullseye into a relatively recent era. The emergence event was indeed the opening of a local wormhole throat, but only so that the Matryoshka (which incorporated wormhole-manipulating machinery in Shells 1 and 2) could complete the last leg of its journey.

  How far downstream had it come? A hundred years? A thousand years? Five thousand?

  I couldn’t tell. The knowledge told me everything, but not all of that wisdom was framed in terms I could readily decode. But I could sense a thread, a sense of connectedness between the era of the Matryoshka and our own. They knew a lot about us.

  Enough to know that we had made a terrible mistake.

  At last I jerked my hand away from the wall. The urge to return it was almost overwhelming, but I could only take so much in one go.