Echoes of Earth

by Sean Williams

  But he had no real reason yet to be afraid for the Frank Tipler. As he and Hatzis sat in the cockpit to consider why his crewmates might not have responded to the ftl transmission, he was reminded of how his Hatzis and her team of projectors had tried to work out why Earth had fallen silent on them, years earlier. For all their deliberating, they hadn’t come anywhere close to the simple in essence (yet complicated in detail) truth of the Spike. A large part of him hoped that the silence from Adrasteia would have a similarly noncatastrophic explanation. But hope, he knew, wasn’t enough; at times it could even be a dangerous thing.

  Alander and Hatzis put aside their differences in the hour and a half leading up to their arrival. She hadn’t slept for the entire trip, as far as he knew; he had a couple of times, succumbing to mental exhaustion if not physical. They needed to be able to anticipate every possibility and prepare to deal with them all, and they wouldn’t be able to do that while in conflict. But still the tension between them was palpable, and he wasn’t sure he fully understood why, although he suspected it had something to do with both of them being incomplete. She reminded him of his original, while he possibly reminded her of the reason why she was an isolated fragment of a much greater mind. Their individual inadequacies were rubbed in their faces, albeit in very different ways.

  What would my original have done now? he wondered. But he knew that unless he was prepared to ask Hatzis, there would be no simple answer to that question. She had known his original, after all, and as such was the only continuous, external link remaining to his past. Engram memory was too unreliable and subjective, according to her. It could be changed too easily. Had his original given him an edited version of the truth that had ultimately led to his breakdown? Was what had happened to him all that different from what had happened to Cleo Samson?

  Too many questions and no one left to answer them. According to Hatzis, his original had probably been killed in the Great Subsuming of North America, taken apart and reused by a tide of nanotech transmuters along with everything else in its path. Cities, forests, mountains: nothing had been spared. For a while, observers had hoped that patterns had been retained of the people absorbed; some rampant AIs, like those in Europe and on the Moon, had at least done that much to preserve the past. But not this one. It had cut a wide swath across an entire continent and left him, like many others in the survey program, an orphan.

  And not even a truly human orphan at that. According to Hatzis, he was little more than a “shortcut that went wrong.”

  A flash of Lucia nearly blinded him as the time came for them to relocate at Upsilon Aquarius.

  Remember, this conversation is being recorded for your copies’ memories, and they’ll think they’re real enough.

  He was getting used to it. Maybe one day, if he ever found her, he could tell her himself.

  * * *

  “Oh, fuck,” were the first words Hatzis said on arriving at Upsilon Aquarius. It was so perfectly in character with her engram that for a fleeting moment he felt torn between two realities: one with the Tipler, where most of his experiences of the system originated, and the other trapped in the hole ship, forced to watch the terrible new reality unfold.

  They had relocated by the gas giant where Alander had tested Arachne for the first time. There they had conducted a quick survey of the system, using the hole ship’s precise senses to look for emissions of all kinds before scanning the visible wavelengths for images.

  But Adrasteia was silent. They detected no broadcasts on any of the UNESSPRO frequencies: no beacons, no data feeds, no narrow-band laser pipes. There were numerous flashes in a number of bands consistent with lightning, but nothing apart from that. When Alander directed the search away from the planet and its moon, looking for various probes stationed across the system, again he found nothing. The noisy crackle of the gas giants and the booming of the sun were the only obvious radio sources in the system.

  “Are you going to try to hail anyone?” she asked after a few minutes.

  He didn’t answer immediately. He just stared numbly at the images of Adrasteia that were trickling in. The cloud cover hung in tatters, replaced for the most part by a vast pall of dust. Everywhere he looked, lightning flashes indicated the immense atmospheric storms raging below. The planet’s ecosphere had been severely disrupted. Admittedly, there hadn’t been much of one to begin with, but what there had been was now in ruins. Something had pummeled the planet and pummeled it hard.

  “No,” he mumbled finally, without facing her. “Not yet.”

  Even with the distance between the gas giant and Adrasteia, the orbital ring and the spindles should have been visible, but they weren’t. They were nowhere to be seen. In fact, no matter how much the ship’s AI searched, it could find no evidence of anything larger than a pea in orbit around the planet. No towers. No satellites. No Frank Tipler.

  There was, however, a lot of debris smaller than a pea. If left undisturbed, Adrasteia would soon have a small ring around it—less dramatic than Saturn’s, perhaps, but of a similar composition. It was hard to tell exactly how large the particles were that comprised it, but he knew they were small.

  Dust, he thought. Ashes.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said, finally turning to her.

  “Neither can I.” Hatzis’s face was pale. “When you left, everything was all right, wasn’t it?”

  “As right as it could be.” Looking up slightly, he said, “Arachne, can you tell what happened here?”

  “I am unable to answer that, Peter.”

  “Maybe if we move closer,” he said. Hatzis didn’t argue as he directed the hole ship to bring them into orbit about Adrasteia. In a way, he had hoped she would; he was looking for an excuse not to search too closely. Although engrams had no bodies to leave behind, the thought of what else they might find scared him anyway.

  From orbit, the view was more spectacular and horrific in equal proportions, more so than he had allowed himself to believe it could be. Radar revealed terrible gashes where the orbital towers had crashed into the surface of the planet. All the ground settlements, automatic or otherwise, had been razed. Wide craters marked any concentration of technology, no matter how small. The atmosphere roiled in waves, anguished and traumatized. He wondered if any of the cyanobacteria would survive.

  Of course they would, he chided himself. On a microscopic level, little had changed, really. The extra energy in the system combined with environmental disturbance could even favor them in the long run, with increased likelihood of speciation leading to evolution and, ultimately, the creation of new life-forms. In a billion years or so, Adrasteia could be a very different place indeed.

  But what could have caused destruction on such a scale? The dust in orbit was hot, both thermal and radioactive. Nuclear weapons, maybe? Had the Vincula lied about not having ftl transportation and sent an attack fleet to Upsilon Aquarius to wipe out the uppity engrams and steal their secrets? No, it was unlikely, not in so short a space of time. He doubted the Vincula could have dealt with the gifts so casually, if at all. In just two days, everything living—or at least active—in the system had been destroyed. Everything.

  Or had it? There was nothing left that might qualify as wreckage, although isotope ratios in a handful of grains scooped up by the hole ship suggested a terrestrial origin for at least some of the debris. Whatever had happened to the gifts might not have necessarily happened to the Tipler. Caryl Hatzis, Jayme Sivio, Otto Wyra, Jene Avery, Donald Schievenin, Kingsley Oborn, Nalini Kovistra, and the rest might still be alive, somehow. But the notion was a foolish one. If the gifts had succumbed to the attack, what chance had a few dozen fake minds contained in a metal box?

  “I shouldn’t have left them,” he said as he watched the catalog of disaster scrolling down the screen.

  “Don’t be pathetic,” Hatzis said sharply.

  The rebuke surprised him, and he faced her again, frowning.

  “I’m sorry, but you’re being ridiculous if you th
ink you could have prevented this.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” he returned with equal sharpness. “What if something went wrong with the Gifts because I wasn’t here to talk to them?”

  “This wasn’t done by the Gifts, Peter.”

  “How can you know that?” He felt angry but only because he knew that what she was saying made sense. Why would they destroy themselves?

  She didn’t respond directly. “Arachne, what could have caused this?”

  “From the evidence at hand,” said the AI, “it would appear that the planet was attacked.”

  As incredible as it seemed, that rang true. But Alander’s anger was still there, so he spat it out in the most obvious response:

  “Attacked? By who? Who the fuck would want to attack a goddamn survey mission, for Christ’s sake?”

  “I am unable to answer that question.”

  “Unable because you don’t know, or unable because you’re not allowed?”

  “There is not enough evidence at hand to identify the perpetrator.”

  “But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have suspicions. In all of the data recorded on other species, isn’t there anything that might give us a clue as to who could have done this?”

  “I’m sorry, Peter, but there is nothing in the memory that I have been allocated.”

  “Great,” he said, falling back heavily onto the couch.

  Hatzis stepped forward. “Can you at least tell us when it happened, Arachne?”

  “Approximately two days ago.”

  “Just after I left,” Alander said with a further sinking feeling.

  Hatzis looked down at him. “Didn’t the towers have any defenses?”

  Alander remembered a probe straying too close and being destroyed. “Some, yes.”

  “Arachne, could the Gifts have fought off an attack?”

  “They would have mounted resistance,” said the AI.

  “Then whoever did this must have had a technology that was even superior to the Spinners.”

  “Not necessarily,” Alander said. “Only superior to the technology the Spinners gave us. The towers were nothing to them but trinkets, remember?”

  “What if the towers had been about to fall into enemy hands?” she asked. “Is it possible they would have self-destructed?”

  Alander had already seen the hole in that argument. “And taken out every long-range satellite in the system? No, this was systematic. Someone came here and wiped out every sign of life—human or Spinner.”

  A strange look passed over Hatzis’s face. “And then what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, where did they go from here?”

  He shrugged. “How the fuck should I know?”

  “And why did they come here in the first place? Out of all the other systems in the region, what led them to Upsilon Aquarius?”

  “Christ, Caryl, I don’t know! Your guess is as good as mine. If we had more data, maybe we could work out what happened to them, but all we have is...” He indicated the screen, feeling nothing but a suffocating sense of futility. “What’s the point? We’re never going to know who did this. It’s just... done... and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  Hatzis came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Peter. I don’t mean to be insensitive. I’m just trying to figure it out, that’s all.”

  He wasn’t mollified by her efforts at reconciliation. “We have no evidence.”

  “We have what we can see,” she said. “It has the precision of a military strike. Whoever it was left nothing behind. They were thorough and didn’t care about environmental damage. That tells us something, doesn’t it? If the Gifts are beneficial pacifists, then whoever did this must be something else entirely.”

  “Listen, Caryl,” he said tiredly. “The truth is, we don’t really know anything. For all we know, maybe the skeptics on the Tipler were right. Maybe the Spinners never did mean us well, and the gifts were nothing more than a trap.”

  “A trap? What sort of trap?”

  He laughed humorlessly. “I don’t know, Caryl. I just don’t know anymore. Don’t know anything anymore. A week ago I—”

  “A search of the system has revealed an anomalous artifact orbiting the sun,” interrupted the hole ship.

  Alander sat forward with a start. “What? What sort of artifact?” He felt his stomach tighten nervously. Could it be them? Was it possible they had survived?

  A white blob, distinct from the starry background, appeared on the screen.

  “Its precise nature is unknown at this stage,” said the AI. “I have determined that it has a roughly four-day orbit that doesn’t match that of any of your survey satellites.”

  He felt his hopes sink as quickly as they had surfaced. “So it isn’t the Tipler?”

  “No,” the hole ship replied bluntly.

  “Where is it?” Hatzis’s question was answered by a new image showing a map of the system.

  An arrow pointed at the far side. “It is electromagnetically inert and quite small, but it does have a high albedo. Until now, it was occluded by the solar disk.”

  “Do you think we were supposed to detect it?” she asked.

  “I am unable to answer that question.”

  Alander rolled his eyes; he was growing rapidly tired of hearing that phrase. Whatever was going on, it was certainly pushing the boundaries of Arachne’s understanding.

  “So what do we do?” she asked. “Do we take a look?”

  He shrugged hopelessly. “This could be a trap, too.”

  “Well, if it is, at least we’ll die in the knowledge that we learned one truth.”

  She didn’t smile, but the attempt at a joke was as welcome as it was surprising.

  “I don’t think we have many options, Peter. Do you?”

  Instead of replying, he arranged for the hole ship to make a short jump to the object’s orbit: not right on top of it, but a hundred kilometers away.

  As the screen went blank, Hatzis asked, “Do you still think it’s your fault, Peter?”

  He shook his head, expressing a certainty he wasn’t sure he felt. “There’s nothing I could’ve done. But I wish I had been here when it happened. I feel like I abandoned them.”

  “If you had been here, you’d be dead now, too,” she said. “At least you’re alive.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t feel grateful for that,” he said. “Right now, I just feel terribly guilty. I mean, what right—?”

  “We’ve arrived,” she said, cutting him off and nodding at the screen.

  The image displayed a roughly spherical object two meters across, cut in facets like a mirror ball, but instead of reflective panes in each facet there were only circular holes leading to its interior. The outside appeared to be made of an odd mixture of black and white materials, as though two dyes had mixed ineffectively in the molding of it, while the inside held a crystalline structure Alander couldn’t make out clearly.

  “Quartz,” declared the hole ship upon examining it. “The object is inert.”

  “Has it ever been active?” Hatzis asked.

  “No,” replied the AI. “Every indication is that it has never been intended to function.”

  “What’s it for then? Does your database contain anything on such an object?”

  “No, Caryl.”

  “It’s a marker of some kind,” Alander said, watching the object rotate on the screen before him, glinting strongly in the sunlight. The mixture of black, white, and reflective crystal made his eyes water.

  “A death marker?” Hatzis sounded skeptical. “ ‘We came and we destroyed’? That kind of thing?” She shook her head. “I don’t buy it, Peter. I mean, what would be the point?”

  “I have no idea,” he said. “And I daresay we’ll remain clueless until we know who actually put the damned thing here in the first place.”

  She began to stalk the cockpit interior. “None of this makes sense!” Her arms swung as though wanting to
strike out. “Who does something like this? And why here? The Gifts have as good as said that there are aggressive races out there—somewhere—but how would they know to come here? What singled Adrasteia out from the rest? It was in the middle of nowhere, a small and insignificant colony. It wasn’t a threat to anyone.”

  “Not yet, anyway.” She was making Alander feel tired, walking so quickly. “Given the technology we were given access to, though, maybe we could have become a threat”

  She stopped, staring at the image on the screen. “You think this might be a warning?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it’s nothing more than the alien equivalent of a headstone.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, either. Why go around destroying civilizations, then honoring them with a grave?”

  “Christ, I don’t know, Caryl.” He was suddenly angry at her for forcing him to defend what had been little more than a throwaway notion. “Perhaps we should hunt the flickers down and ask them personally.”

  The sarcasm fell flat.

  “I just want to go home,” she said.

  Home. The word stabbed at an emptiness inside of him, and for the first time he realized how much of an orphan he really was. The Tipler, the closest thing to a home he’d ever had, outside his original’s memories, was gone. Where else did he have to go to? Sol and its post-Spike menagerie?

  The truth was settling heavily upon him, like a thick cloak. They were dead, all of them: Otto Wyra and his obsessive pursuit of knowledge; long-faced Donald Schievenin; temperate Jayme Sivio, the one who had kept them alive during the long journey out; the engram Caryl Hatzis, who had always been there, even when he had hated her for it. Every single one of them was gone. The mission to Upsilon Aquarius had failed.

  And there was nothing he could do about it.

  His expression must have revealed more of his thoughts than he had intended, because at that moment, Hatzis spoke softly.

  “I’m sorry, Peter.”

  “Don’t be,” he said. “Whatever happened here, it’s not your fault.” Turning back to face the enigmatic object on the screen, he took a deep breath. “Arachne, I want to send a message to Earth, telling them what we’ve found. That Machine of yours should pick it up okay, shouldn’t it, Caryl?”