Echoes of Earth

by Sean Williams

  Again he hesitated, then decided that, for now, this would be enough. “That’s all. You can send it now.”

  The hole ship shook around them as the message was sent. Hatzis glanced about with interest, observing the vibrations until they had faded completely. When everything settled down, she looked at the screen containing the image of the Machine, and Alander noted that its glimmering surface also seemed to be vibrating, as though resonating to the transmission the ship had just sent.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “Yes, that was very interesting. The Machine noted the transmission and decoding is under way. Your ship uses a very strong encryption and compression when sending a message. It takes us a while to tease out the information. How long, do you think, until we receive a reply?”

  “A minute or two,” he said. “There’s always someone on duty. If it’s not Caryl—your engram—then it’ll be Jayme Sivio or Jene Avery. They won’t leave me waiting.”

  She nodded. “The original Discord was very strong, although we were unable to decode it. If we can understand the reply, then that means that we at least have the ability to receive transmissions by this method, if not actually transmit them yet. That’s something, I guess.”

  She was looking up at him, a rapt expression on her face. He wondered at the difference in her and assumed that this arose because of her merging with another version of herself. The original Caryl Hatzis was different from the one stationed with the Machine, and she in turn was different from the one he had first met, in the high-g probe. The combined Hatzis, spread across the system, was a synergistic sum of all these viewpoints. He couldn’t imagine how such an intelligence must think, with all the different agendas of its component minds mixed together.

  But didn’t his spleen have a different agenda than his lungs? And he managed to keep himself together, more or less. Maybe these new forms of humans had diseases analogous to autoimmune responses, when parts of the body attacked other parts. He didn’t know and wondered if he would ever have the chance to find out.

  Several minutes passed. The expression on Hatzis’s face faded, maybe as her other’s attention drifted. She became stiffer, less comfortable. He could see it on her face.

  “What are your plans?” she asked.

  “Plans?”

  “What do you want to do next? Once contact is established between Sol and Upsilon Aquarius, where do you go from there?”

  “I guess the obvious step is to get some sort of team in to study the gifts. Our resources are severely limited, as you can imagine. We need people to assist in the research—take it over, if necessary—to ensure we’re not missing or misunderstanding anything.” He thought of the orbital towers and spindles, all the wonders that he had left behind. What else had they found in the days since he’d left? What new mysteries had they uncovered? “We’re like Neanderthals in a science museum.”

  “And you think we’ll be any better?”

  He indicated the screen. “At least you’re closer to the Spinners in terms of development.”

  “We’re still a long way away from an ftl ship this size. A thousand years, maybe more. And according to what you’ve told us, this is nothing but throwaway technology for them, according to your testimony. Our extra century’s development on yours doesn’t look like much from that perspective.”

  He stared at her. Throwaway technology? He hadn’t mentioned anything of the sort. It was true, and it was in the SSDS files, but he hadn’t handed them over yet. How could she possibly know?

  Maybe she had accessed the files through means he wasn’t aware of. Maybe she had accessed him. The thought sent a ripple of apprehension down his spine. What was he if nothing more than a mobile SSDS unit, buried in flesh? If she could access one, there was no reason she couldn’t access another.

  “You said they would reply immediately,” she said.

  “Huh? Oh, yes, I did.” He turned away. “Arachne, has there still not been any reply from Adrasteia?”

  “Nothing as yet.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “No.”

  He felt confused for a moment, dizzy. The knowledge that advice was just a minute or two away had sustained him through the mission thus far, even if he had needed to ask for it only once before. Perhaps they had been held up for some reason, or the transmission either way had failed to get through.

  “Resend that last transmission,” he said. “Try again.”

  The wait was interminable, this time. He paced the interior of the cockpit with Hatzis watching him curiously.

  Was she in his head, going through his thoughts as a programmer might scan a hard drive? He could feel nothing out of the ordinary, just a rising sense of alarm.

  No one else...

  Another ten minutes passed, and there was still no reply.

  “Should we be worried?” Hatzis asked.

  He stopped pacing and ran both hands across his scalp. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I just... don’t know.”

  “Perhaps we should return to the Frame,” she suggested, standing up in front of him. “It will be easier for me to communicate with the Vincula there.”

  “And easier for you to think?” he asked, meeting her gaze.

  “Yes,” she said awkwardly. “That, too.”

  “I don’t know,” he said again. “Maybe I should leave you here and go make sure everything’s all right. It will only take a couple of days.”

  “Don’t be hasty, Peter.” Her eyes didn’t leave his, and he received the distinct impression that she was trying to tell him something. “Go back to the Frame first. We’ll decide from there.”

  He opened his mouth to snap at her—”We’ll decide? Whose decision is it, anyway?”—but turned away instead.

  “Arachne, I want you to take us back to our previous location in the Frame.”

  The screen went blank. Once they were under way, he felt Hatzis’s hand on his shoulder. He took in a breath sharply at the sensation: It was the first genuine physical contact with another person he had ever experienced.

  “Don’t leave the ship,” she said, and he could tell that this was her speaking, her original, not the distributed, unknowable mind that called itself Caryl Hatzis. “Whatever they say—whatever I say, Peter—don’t leave the ship.”

  He turned and stared at her, wanting to ask her what she meant while the brief moment that she was out of contact with the rest of herself lasted. But he didn’t have enough time. Behind her, the screen cleared; the hole ship had arrived.

  A cold feeling rose steadily in his chest as she took her hand off his shoulder and stepped away from him.

  2.1.6

  Hatzis was silent. Rage blossomed in her like a solar flare when Alander’s bizarre means of transportation returned to the Frame. Everything seemed to be spinning: the hole ship, the habitat where her original had met his engram, the plots and counterplots drawing in around her, and her mind, trying to fathom what was going on as much as what might happen next.

  The trouble was, she didn’t know who she was most angry at: the Vincula, the Gezim, or herself.

  “The little bitch,” snarled Jetz, cutting loose with some retro-invective of his own. “Did you tell her to warn him?”

  “Of course not,” she said, not hiding the frost in her voice.

  “But you allowed her to.”

  “She was out of contact! I had no control over her.”

  “Ten seconds of freedom, and she goes out of control. Is that what you’re expecting me to believe?” The contempt in his eyes, expression, and every other nonvocal means of communicating was suffocating. “I’ve always said you kept her on too long a leash.”

  “Fuck you, Laurie. Fuck you and the Vincula. You have no right to tell me how to manage my affairs.”

  “That’s just it,” Jetz snarled. “You aren’t managing your affairs at all!”

  The worst thing about it was that she couldn’t really argue the point. Her original’s tactic had been both inspired and intensely
inconvenient. Why she had done it, the greater Hatzis could see; her original made no bones about hiding her deep-seated feelings about the Vincula and its all-pervasion through the system. Yet when she had regained contact with her original and what had happened spilled out, she made no attempt to administer discipline or inhibit any further such actions. Her original was part of her, and functionally lobotomizing that part would make her less... her.

  But it hadn’t made things easier at all.

  The Gezim plex were on their way, creeping all too rapidly inward from the edges of the Frame. They looked like a bizarre army of mutant nematodes: millions of many-limbed, shape-shifting worms using the struts and intersections of the structure as anchor points to accelerate themselves further toward their target. And the inevitable response was building. It had been a long time since a war had been fought in Sol over an object in just one physical location, but the Vincula wasn’t toothless. Old engines were stirring, shrugging off their peacetime uses and remembering why they had been made. All over the Frame, especially wherever the Shell Proper provided peak resources, clusters of spikes grew, tides of nanocombatants spread in sweeping shadows, odd energies gathered.

  Meanwhile, Peter Alander, handicapped more by the limitations of his body than any additional dysfunction, was staring at her original with a look of growing realization.

  “We have to get in there,” said Jetz, metaphorically slapping a fist into his palm. All pretense at humanity was fading; he was no longer trying to hide the corposant behind the corpse. He was an Urge. He was the carrot that moved the donkey forward—or the stick, when he needed to be. He was a vastly complex being with almost a hundred component minds and a temper to match hers.

  But he wasn’t the only Urge.

  “Sel,” she said, turning to Shalhoub who had been lurking in the background, watching the entire affair and radiating something approximating satisfaction. Maybe he would still listen to her. “Give us more time, please. If we move now, we’ll only confirm my original’s suspicions.”

  Shalhoub looked on calmly. “She brought it on herself, Caryl,” he said. “I agree with Laurie: It’s now or never. We don’t have a choice.”

  A murmur of agreement rippled through those in attendance. Hatzis was appalled see to just how many of them were watching: Lowell Correll, Rob Singh, Kathryn Nygard, Betty van Tran... Now more than ever she really was at the center of things.

  “We have decided,” said Jetz. “So be it.”

  “Matilda!” She used a private path through the data maze within and surrounding the Frame to call her friend. If it wasn’t too late, she might at least be able to make someone see reason.

  “Hello, Caryl. Sticking around to watch the show? Should be spectacular.”

  “You don’t have to do this, Matilda.”

  “Oh, but I do. I don’t consent to what the Vincula is doing. I never have before, and this time it’s substantially worse. To allow it to proceed would be wrong, Caryl. Complacency is complicity.”

  “But if you—”

  “But nothing, Caryl! This technology is far too important to sweep under the rug, and that’s exactly what the Urges would have us do. And why? So they can think about it. But we haven’t got time to think about it. We’re rotting here—all of us—in the galaxy’s largest open grave. I don’t know about you, but I need to get out. I need to move—now. It’s our chance to act, Caryl.”

  The tone of Sulich’s voice told her that the time for negotiation and playful activism was gone.

  “But with the Gezim?” she asked feebly.

  “They’re as good a tool as any.”

  “They’re going to lose!”

  “What can I say?” said Sulich, shrugging. “We like a challenge.”

  She killed the line.

  As Hatzis watched the spreading tide of combat plexes and nanotech response, she couldn’t quell a rising sense of panic that was independent of her povs, that was from her. It was like the Spike all over again.

  With all the cunning and strength garnered in over 150 years of software warfare, the Vincula attacked the hole ship, intending to wrest control from the alien AI and “liberate” the data contained within. Viruses of every known configuration sought to worm their way into the unknown interface, first by passive audio channels—the ship had to be listening by some means in order to hear Alander’s instructions—and then via contact nanoprobes fired at the hull. Hatzis’s original became an unknowing colluder, her very body broadcasting viruses as fast as it could make or relay them. As the Vincula’s only access point in the craft itself, she played a key role in the assault.

  This displeased the greater Hatzis enough to pass on the details to Sulich. Sel Shalhoub was a hypocrite if he thought that this attack on one of her povs was justified, when her attack on his wasn’t.

  The Gezim’s response was immediate. Plex dissolved in a hundred locations across the Frame, releasing agents that attacked the struts and girders of the massive construct, eating into it like acid. Hatzis watched, horrified, as holes appeared in the scaffolding. She couldn’t tell what was happening to the missing mass at first; the Frame material was designed to be chemically neutral, so, without wholesale transmutation—likely to be out of the reach of such quick-working agents—there was no way it could be used as explosives or fuel. But she hadn’t counted on the ingenuity of the Gezim, long used to working with meager resources. When large chunks of the Frame, freed by the mass-eating agents, began moving of their own accord, she would have liked to get a closer look to see what was actually going on.

  But at that moment, the Vincula’s attack on the hole ship failed. All transmissions from the interior of the cockpit abruptly ceased, and she lost contact with her original. It had somehow sealed itself up, preventing any form of intrusion. Maybe they had hit a vulnerable point, she thought. Then again, maybe they had simply annoyed it. Either way, it had cut them off before they’d had chance to do any real damage. Any damage at all, perhaps.

  She watched as the exterior of the ship suddenly changed. The black cockpit dived into the white core, whose surface began to undulate, as though it were a membrane resonating to some unheard tone. Peaks started to form across its rippling skin, until they stood out sharply from the rest of it, like spikes. These spikes—a warning if she had ever seen one—rotated around the sphere every second or so, almost challenging anyone to approach.

  A shudder rolled through the outer Frame, transmitted to its heart as a deep vibration. She directed her attention back to the Gezim attack. Approximately 1 percent of the Frame had been broken up by the acidlike agents. Many of these fragments were now on collision courses with the rest of the Frame. If they weren’t stopped, they would cause more damage, potentially letting loose more fragments to cause more damage. The shrapnel would spread, leaving a growing wound behind it. Maybe it would tear the Frame apart, the Shell Proper at its heart with it.

  But how were they doing it? The simplicity of the plan surprised her, when she worked it out. The material of the Frame was chemically inert, but not mechanically inert. The agents had fashioned tightly wound springs, levers, and counterweights that nudged the fragments they had freed into slightly different orbits, orbits that would bring them into collision with other sections of the Frame. They were using the Frame’s own mass against it in a way the Vincula clearly hadn’t anticipated, judging by the confusion of its response.

  Instead of attacking the agents themselves, as the Vincula countermeasures had initially concentrated their efforts, they needed to do something about the fragments. Thousands of tuglike effectors were belatedly swinging into action from all across the structure, converging on the fragments in order to nudge them into safer orbits. Many of these tugs were themselves attacked, their sensors, guidance systems, or thrusters altered in ways to make their motions chaotic. The damage spread to 3 percent of the total area of the Frame.

  This didn’t sound like much, but Hatzis wondered how much damage the structure could s
ustain before it became unstable. Even without any effort from the Gezim, internal stresses and tides could take a small nick and widen it until the Frame was torn in two. She imagined the network of girders adrift in the sky, ripping into pieces as the vast structure was pulled from its orbit, spiraling helplessly into the sun. Perhaps she was overdramatizing the situation, though; maybe the scenario wouldn’t be so grim. The Frame might simply tear into a number of sections, each establishing its own orbit to form a sort of artificial asteroid belt around the sun. But that wasn’t the point.

  The destruction of the Frame would be a major blow to the Vincula’s confidence, one she doubted it could survive. And whether the Gezim could step in to fill the breach was unknowable at this point (although with Alander’s gifts and the promise of human expansion, it was certainly a possibility).

  She cursed Alander’s reappearance and the conflict it had catalyzed. It was possible that in time, things would have come to this anyway, but not so soon, and definitely not so abruptly. Maybe even not at all. Hatzis believed that even in a resistant society, there were ways to achieve necessary change; and in her opinion, war wasn’t one of them.

  At least the two sides had started talking, she noted.

  While the hole ship continued to bristle menacingly at its attackers, the Vincula and the Gezim had opened communications and were firing the first shots in a verbal dialogue that could last days.

  “They’re engrams!” protested Sel Shalhoub, his tone exasperated.

  “We don’t care what they are.” Katica Ertl, nominal representative of the Gezim, was defiant but trying to be reasonable. “They’ve brought us a working star drive, and an instantaneous communication system that—”

  “The latter hasn’t been conclusively demonstrated,” Shalhoub cut in.

  “But the former has,” said Ertl. “And that alone is worth taking them seriously, surely?”