Echoes of Earth

by Sean Williams

  Of course, her friends among the Gezim weren’t so understanding. Although in theory they treated all who strayed from their so-called Human Principles equally—terror tactics being ultimately worthless unless someone was at risk from them—something special was reserved for those that had once been close to them. Not that Hatzis had ever truly been one of them, but she did sympathize. She had even argued on their behalf before the Vincula, back when there had been a chance of reconciliation; and she still agreed with a lot of what they said. But there was a limit to how long and how effectively one could buck the system and remain relevant. The Gezim were an issue only because of their activism, not because of what they stood for.

  That struck her as terribly sad. There were few enough of them as it was without scaring away potential recruits. In some ways, it was one of the few jarring notes remaining to her, outside of her memories. Or so she preferred to think.

  The Discord shivered through the device known as McKirdy’s Machine on the fifteenth of July, 2163. As Hatzis understood it—and she had never paid much attention to the theory, before the Discord—the Machine was some sort of gravitational wave detector being built on the edge of the system, far away from anything it might interfere with. Since some of its components were hyper-dense, bordering on singularities, there had been an uproar when the plans had first been submitted for approval. It was a hazard to shipping, its detractors had said, likely to perturb orbits if not disintegrate without warning into a million, high-velocity fragments. Hence its location out past Pluto, near a nameless icy planetoid simply designated KLB2025R.

  Upon further research, Hatzis learned that McKirdy’s Machine was a prototype long-range communicator, employing arcane properties of space itself rather than any usual forms of mass or radiation. The math was beyond her, but she didn’t feel the need to send one of her parts off to catch up. The summary was enough. The important thing was that the Machine wasn’t supposed to work yet. Its components had only been loosely assembled and lacked both fine-tuning and testing. So the Discord was completely unexpected—a resonance through the structure that resembled a transmission, yet from no known source.

  Optimists hailed it as the first unequivocally alien signal since the Tedesco bursts of the late twenty-first century—a series of untranslated broadcasts from the region of the sky containing the constellation Sculptor that had ended as suddenly as they had begun. Skeptics thought it was simply a glitch in the design, random noise elevated anomalously to the appearance of an external signal. The Machine’s architects and engineers were sitting on the fence: They couldn’t say for certain that the signal wasn’t noise, but it resembled nothing any of the simulations had predicted. Either the simulations were wrong and the Machine didn’t work as expected, or the Discord had external origins.

  If the signal had contained any readable information or the source could have been identified, the matter might have been quickly resolved. Sadly, however, the Machine was not able to pinpoint its origins, and the data consisted of just one short stretch of undecipherable information repeated three times, with unequal gaps of time between each repetition. A different burst followed shortly thereafter, then three more transmissions came within a day, none of them repeated. The Vincula had posted the repeated stretches across the system in the hope that someone would crack it. In the day following the Discord and its successors, no one made any headway. Within two days, interest had already begun to fade. Only those peculiar obsessives to whom such problems posed direct interest gave it any further thought. Everyone else in the Vincula or the Gezim went about life as always, so full of richness and complexity that looking elsewhere for wonder was as ridiculous as begging for more freedom with which to enjoy it.

  * * *

  “Personally, I think it’s one of the colonies,” said Sel Shalhoub. Hatzis was sharing a drink with him in Echo Park, her natural body’s current location. The old-fashioned art of cocktail parties was back in vogue for a season, and she had dressed for the occasion in an open-throated outfit that cycled through the work of Vasili Kandinsky. Vibrant images trickled from her shoulders, cascaded down her waist, then disappeared with a hint of compression at her perfectly straight hem. Shalhoub was in a remote that held a striking resemblance to his official appearance, even without virtual overlays. Its tuxedo was freshly pressed, real, and therefore priceless.

  “Nonsense,” rapid-fired JORIS, a nominally (but only temporarily) male merge from Uranus Platform. He was speaking in hyperlite, the current version of accelerated slang. “Those engrams wouldn’t be advanced enough to do something like this. They wouldn’t have the sophistication required—”

  “You don’t know that,” said Shalhoub. “Who of us can say for sure what advancements they might have made?”

  “We only lost a couple of decades to the Spike,” said JORIS. “They would have been in transit almost a century. The suggestion that they could have developed beyond us is ludicrous.”

  “They may have gotten lucky,” said Hatzis.

  “You were one of them, weren’t you, Caryl?” asked Shalhoub.

  “Copies of me were sent on the original missions, yes,” she admitted. “But I personally didn’t go anywhere.”

  “Very sensible,” said JORIS flatly. “Why would you want to? Why would anyone wish to go anywhere with only half a mind? What would be the point in that? Better not to have gone at all, I say.”

  Hatzis was surprised that Shalhoub had known about her involvement in the defunct United Near-Earth Stellar Survey Program, since it was not something she advertised. Not many people remembered anything about those almost ancient missions. (Then again, very little got past him, a fact she would do well to keep in mind.) Over the years, contact had been made with some of the nearby survey systems, albeit by more mundane methods. At least two missions—Beta Hydrus and Delta Pavonis—had reported on arrival and would have received communications from Earth responding to those reports, before communications had been discontinued altogether. It wasn’t exactly a dialogue, but it was a beginning. In time, as public interest gradually revived, she thought there might be a chance to reestablish some sort of communications with those long-lost children of Earth.

  The trouble was, most these days were like the merge. The engram fad had been a disaster almost from the beginning. She was somewhat surprised that any of the missions had succeeded at all. As JORIS implied, a crew made up of brain-damaged fake humans would have been worse than no crew at all. And there was no chance that any such crew could have built something like McKirdy’s Machine and sent the Discord. It simply wasn’t possible. There had to be an alternative explanation.

  “Maybe it’s aliens,” she joked.

  “I have no doubt about that.” JORIS seemed to take the suggestion seriously. “If it is a transmission, then it had to come from somewhere. And who else but aliens could have sent it?”

  “It could be an echo from the future,” Hatzis offered more seriously. “Since the Machine violates causality—”

  “It doesn’t,” said the merge. “McKirdy has proven that there is no possibility of countercontinuum information transfer.”

  “If you say so.” Hatzis shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand all this ftl stuff.”

  “So according to you, J,” said Shalhoub, “it must be aliens.”

  “Of course,” said JORIS. “I don’t see how it could possibly be anything else.”

  “So what should we do now?” Shalhoub asked. “Reply?”

  “God, no,” said the merge, reverting to oldspeak. “Why in the Frame would we do that?”

  “Curiosity, perhaps?” suggested Hatzis.

  “You wouldn’t stick your head up if you heard a gunshot, would you?”

  “A gunshot is fundamentally different from an alien species trying to communicate with us,” said Hatzis.

  “I fail to see the difference,” said the merge.

  Shalhoub laughed, but it was Hatzis who responded.

&
nbsp; “Well, for one thing, there is no evidence to suggest that these aliens—if that is indeed what they are—are in any way attempting to blow our heads off. You’re just clouding the issue with small talk.” And deliberately so, she thought. The use of such an archaic metaphor must have been aimed squarely at her, since she was the oldest person present. “For all we know, it could be a cry for help.”

  “If that’s the case, then it is intended for someone other than us, someone who has the ability to understand the message in the first place and, presumably, to do something about it.” JORIS flexed one long, honey-textured arm and performed a graceful pirouette. In the short time before the merge was facing her way again, he had become female, morphing mass away from shoulders and thighs into hips and breasts, angular facial features seeming to have melted into more gentle terrain. (Real or virtual? Hatzis couldn’t decide. Either way, it was an effective conversational gambit.) Only her voice remained unchanged, complete with its needling tone. “If someone with the ability to communicate by ftl is in trouble, I for one have no desire to offer assistance, which at best might be considered ineffectual.” Smiling, JORIS lifted her glass of liqueur in way of a toast. “Here’s to keeping our noses clean, I say.”

  “Coward.” Hatzis took a step back from the topic, realizing then that JORIS saw the discussion as nothing more than a diversionary amusement. For too many, she thought, life’s meaning lay in the interaction with others, rather than the interaction with the universe around them. She couldn’t help but feel that humanity would be better off—more vital, more driven—if there were less like JORIS to dilute what little forward impetus remained.

  But that was another argument entirely, and she refused to allow herself to be drawn into it by a merge.

  Shalhoub was watching her shrewdly over his glass, her dress reflecting in his eyes. He might not be inclined to bait her, he might even seem to be cordial and open in social situations, but she didn’t like to think what one of the Frame’s foremost Urges might do if she started mouthing off in public. His stand on eisegetes like JORIS wasn’t in the public domain. Not yet, at least.

  “... anticipated the possibilities of trade,” he was saying in his bland, steady drawl. He had taken the look of a white-haired politician, and the remote mimicked it well: tall but not too imposing, solid without being either fat or overmuscled, and pleasantly aged in a nonjowly kind of way. He had even managed the knack of appearing to be interested in anything anyone had to say. “But if what you’re saying is true, then...”

  Her attention drifted away completely, adopting the nebulous, smeary focus typical of her current, whole incarnation. The part of her that still resided in her original body didn’t have it so easy. The party may have been losing its momentum, but she couldn’t just opt out now. She needed to stay focused on why she was there in the first place.

  She put her hand on Shalhoub’s remote’s arm. “Sel,” she whispered, “when you’re done here, I’ll be in the study. There’s a simulation from Mati I think you should see.”

  “Mati?” He half-turned, conversation with the merge forgotten. “You mean, Matilda Sulich?”

  “You knew she was here,” said Hatzis, keeping her voice low. “That’s why you came, wasn’t it? That’s why everyone came.”

  His gaze flitted about the room. “So where is she? I don’t see her anywhere.”

  “She’s not stupid, Sel.” She squeezed the remote’s arm lightly. “The study; ten minutes. We’ll talk to you there—alone.”

  He nodded, permitting himself a smile at the game she was playing. “I’ll be there,” he said. “Especially if you can find me some more of this wonderful Scotch.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” She walked away, keeping her step casual and unhurried. The original Caryl Hatzis had vestiges of ambition masquerading most often as ideology that the overarching being she’d become hadn’t quite managed to completely erase. But she’d never learned to enjoy the game, to “think outside the square,” as had been the saying, once. Now that she had made the move, her heart was pounding; fear roiled her insides in ways the rest of her had mostly forgotten. There was no turning back now.

  As she passed the drinks cabinet, she leaned over and removed a bottle of the Scotch Shalhoub liked so much.

  It was an excellent copy of aged Glenfiddich, its replication accurate down to the individual molecules. What he didn’t know was that some of those complex and very large flavor molecules had been altered to react with the otherwise harmless bacteria living in his remote’s gut. And by the time he realized that something was wrong, it would be too late.

  * * *

  Hatzis lunged to catch the remote as it fell, but her response was too slow, and it hit the floor with a sickening thud, barely missing the edge of the desk.

  “That was a bit close, Caryl.” The voice of Matilda Sulich came from out of nowhere, emanating from a point somewhere above Hatzis’s head. It was the voice of a woman who had once been physically very large, and she retained much of that subtle resonance in her new form. “Literally cracking open his skull wouldn’t have done us any good at all.”

  Hatzis ignored the jibe; there wasn’t time for small talk. “Two minutes,” she said, rounding the desk and straightening Shalhoub’s remote lying on the floor. “That’s all we’ve got.”

  “I’m aware of the time restriction,” Sulich returned soberly. “Do you have the lace?”

  Hatzis didn’t reply. She was already reaching into her hemline for the silken web masquerading as cotton. It squirmed in her fingers as she tugged it free. Colored lines and glowing points danced across her vision as the lace’s instruction manual showed her how to position it over the remote’s head. It was harder than she’d imagined it would be. The living, semisentient machine woven into the threads wouldn’t distinguish between her or the remote until she had targeted the remote’s modified genome. It wrapped itself around her fingertips like overcooked vermicelli, then sprang free when she gave the command.

  The living cobwebs spread across Shalhoub’s lined face and settled in. Within seconds, the web was invisible, sinking between the cells of the dermis and deeper into the flesh surrounding his skull.

  She squatted on her haunches. “He’s going to notice it.”

  “Not in time.”

  She checked again. One minute fifty had already passed; half a minute to go. The seconds were flying by too fast, she thought. There wasn’t going to be time to—

  “Got it!” Sulich’s triumphant whisper brought Hatzis forward on her knees. “Your most concerned expression, please, dear.”

  Hatzis frowned and held her breath. If Sulich had done her job right, she had pinpointed the locations in the remote’s artificial brain where Sel Shalhoub’s resident memory was stored. It was frozen in limbo for the moment, and therefore unreadable, but it would become active again once the body recovered from its sudden breakdown and the greater Shalhoub regained contact with it. There would be a moment—fleetingly brief—in which those memories would be vulnerable. Ordinarily, they wouldn’t be. Ordinarily, the security provided by the Vincula for its Urges would be sufficient to keep any intrusion at bay. But not this time; not with the neural lace working for them.

  She started when his eyes suddenly opened, then cursed herself for acting so suspiciously. She put as much sincerity in her voice as she could. “Sel? Can you hear me? Are you all right?”

  He didn’t move, except to frown. “Caryl? What happened?”

  Keep him talking, not thinking, while the rest of him catches up, she told herself. “I don’t know. One moment you were drinking, the next...” She shrugged.

  A smile broke out across his face. “I see,” he said, laughing. “Congratulations, Caryl. You got me.”

  It died abruptly before her eyes, security catching up to the situation hot on Shalhoub’s heels. The remote’s brain was fried by a blast of internal electricity, making its nostrils smoke and its hair jump. A smell like crushed ants issued from it
as a massive release of apoptosis-inducing chemicals spread through its tissues. Cells committed suicide instantly in their billions, including the all-important neurons in its brain.

  “Fuck!” She backed away from the malodorous corpse. “Did you get it?”

  “Some,” said Sulich. “But not all.”

  “Was it enough though?”

  “Give me a moment,” she said calmly.

  Despite her impatience, Hatzis didn’t push the matter. Sulich sounded quietly pleased, and that was a good sign. Hatzis had no doubt that, had they failed, as they had twice before on other targets, Sulich would have been quick to point it out. Getting top-strata information out of the Vincula wasn’t easy, and security was tough if caught in midattack. While there was still a chance the breach could be sealed, the Vincula fought back with all the violence and temerity of antibodies attacking a virus. On their previous attempts, she and Sulich had been lucky to get away unscathed.

  At least she didn’t have to worry about security reprisals. Remotes like Shalhoub’s were cheap, throwaway components; the Urges probably went through dozens every year. And information was leaky stuff; despite every effort to contain it, with or without help, it invariably got out. The Vincula was resigned to a certain amount of loss each year. The trick was to make sure the right data slipped out at the right time.

  She forced herself to try to relax and not concentrate on the possible consequences of what she had just done. Even if they had been caught in the attempt and had their bodies or patterns scrambled, it would have meant as little to them as the stunt did to the Vincula. But Hatzis was superstitious about losing her original body; it had sentimental significance, if nothing else. The irony that it was the part of her most likely to take part in something like this wasn’t lost on her.