Echoes of Earth

by Sean Williams

  “They won’t be able to send a reply,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter. I just want them to know and to tell them I’ll be bringing you back straightaway.”

  Her face was still for a moment, then softened. “Thank you, Peter.”

  She didn’t ask if he was going to stay when he dropped her off, and for that he was grateful. The Vincula—or what remained in its wake—would want the hole ship, but they couldn’t take it from him. They couldn’t make him stay if he didn’t want to. Maybe, he thought, he would come back to Upsilon Aquarius to see if the killers returned. He didn’t know if they would or what he would do if they did, but it was at least some sort of plan. It was better than nothing.

  The only thing of which he was completely certain was how little he would be missed.

  2.2.3

  For Hatzis, the trip back to Sol was unbearable. It wasn’t because of the destruction they’d witnessed at Upsilon Aquarius, either, although that had affected her deeply. It was Alander himself. He was like a dead thing, barely reacting to anything she said, spending most of the time in his cubicle, emerging only to pace in circles like a caged bear. After twenty hours stuck in the hole ship with him, with another twenty still to go, she felt like she was going to explode from frustration.

  She caught him standing immobile in the corridor on more than one occasion, dissociated and lost, staring blankly at the wall as though it held a window to a better world. Each time she had to snap him out of it and remind him what had happened, the shock on his face was like a fist to her stomach; then came denial, as though there was still some hope that by some freak of chance or whim his colleagues might be alive somewhere. She couldn’t understand why he found acceptance so hard; despite the lack of concrete evidence, it seemed obvious to her that the Frank Tipler had been destroyed along with the orbital ring. And it wasn’t as if any of his colleagues had been particularly close to him, apart from Cleo Samson, but she had died before he’d even left. Maybe it was that, she thought. Without the Tipler, his primary purpose was gone: He was adrift, alone.

  With this, at least, she could empathize. How frightening it still was for her to be severed from her other parts. Her mind ached to rejoin the rest of herself. The edges of her being itched for reconnection, like stumps that were beginning to heal over. Once she had been perfectly happy in such a body; now, she was a cripple learning to deal with her new handicap. There were so many things she couldn’t do anymore that finding something to distract her was becoming increasingly difficult. The hole ship wasn’t much of a conversationalist; it rebuffed all her attempts to probe the depths of its stated ignorance and otherwise piloted itself back to Sol—however it did that—in complete silence.

  “What if the Vincula isn’t there when you arrive?” Alander had asked on one of the rare occasions when he did acknowledge her. “What if the Gezim have finished it off? What then?”

  She shrugged, unwilling to get into an involved discussion on the politics of Sol System. It was bad enough that she was cut off from herself and even worse that she was stuck with someone who didn’t even use the most basic forms of nonverbal communication to facilitate understanding. The fact that he was probably trying to provoke her wasn’t helping, either.

  “We’re used to change, Peter,” she said. “Losing the Vincula will destabilize things for a while, but something new will grow out of that. Maybe something better. There’s more than one optimal point for humanity to occupy.”

  “But...” He seemed to struggle for words, as though the concept bothered him or he was irritated by her patient acceptance. “Well, what about the Frame? If you lose that, what then?”

  “The Frame was built by AIs decades ago. It was a grand venture for its time, but we weren’t its architects, and it’s not as if it was even finished. Its loss will probably affect us less than the loss of Earth, I think, and we survived that well enough.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You still haven’t told me about that, you know.”

  “About what?”

  “How you survived the Spike. Is there something you’re hiding?”

  “What makes you say that?” she asked. Then, quickly, she added, “Anyway, it’s none of your business.”

  “Of course it is. Why are you here instead of my original? What do you have that he didn’t? What makes you so damn special?” He spat the words with such venom that she was left with no doubt about what he was trying to do. He was looking for someone to attack over his situation. He couldn’t attack those who had destroyed Adrasteia, so it was her he turned on, simply because she was there.

  She considered refusing to indulge his pettiness, ignoring the question and pointing out that she was only in the hole ship with him because he had effectively kidnapped her. But that would only lead to another argument about something different. For the time being, at least, she was willing to explore things that didn’t pierce either of them quite so deeply, even if the distant memories he was evoking were far from painless.

  “Okay,” she said, leaning back in the seat. “If you really want to know. There was a rogue configuration known as Z-K, after Zhong-Kui, the Chinese god of literature and examinations. For some reason, it was stuck on the idea that humanity would die unless those few who remained after the Spike were electronically preserved. That in itself was quite reasonable; for a while it did indeed look like humanity was out of the race for good. There were only a few survivalists left, like my family, in small groups scattered across the system. Some piggybacked the AIs, bleeding off power and matter to stay alive. To the really big AIs, you see, we were little more than bugs. Some hated us; most ignored us; only a handful like Z-K tried to preserve us in a variety of ways. The trouble with Z-K was that it preferred the seal-in-amber method. Like all AIs, it had no use for the physical component of a person and absorbed it in order to replenish its own resources, but it respected the mental component; some AIs used humans, or parts of humans, like software patches, mending holes in rambling minds until they burned out and were discarded. Do a deal with Z-K, the theory went, and you would be frozen forever, safe from accident or mischief for eternity; you might not know when you were going to wake up, but at least you weren’t dead.

  “For those who had fought hard to retain their physical integrity and independence, it was a poor second best. But at least it was an option. Only the desperate booked a ride on Z-K’s supercooled asteroid.”

  She stopped to swallow. The memories were so vivid, and the emotions they evoked made her mouth dry. Alander was watching sullenly from the far side of the cockpit, listening but maybe not believing.

  “We were desperate,” she went on. “The Io station was running down, and we were too close to the inner system. My family held a scientific lease on the place, but that wasn’t worth much back then; the dangerous AIs wouldn’t have stopped to check rights before devouring us or driving us insane. We were constantly aware of that threat.” Again, she paused, but only for a moment. “My father used to be an art investor on Earth, before the Spike; he had a hard time adjusting to things in space and ultimately died in an accident outside. It was my mother who kept us alive: me, my sister, our two cousins, and my father’s father. I had all the space experience from my time in UNESSPRO, and afterward—I worked on a long-haul rig for two years before the Spike came down—but I didn’t have what it took to ride out the storm. Mother was the one. She got us off Earth before the worst hit; she negotiated with the Amercers when Earth was gone; she kept us independent during the shredding of Venus. She was brilliant at turning weakness into strength and giving us reasons to hang in there just a little bit longer, especially when things felt hopeless. It was only because of her that we survived as long as we did.

  “But it couldn’t last forever. After dad died, I... well, things were grim. We didn’t dare open up to anyone in case they fried us one way or another. We were a closed dock, except for other humans, and we had to be wary of even them, after a bioform almost took us out from th
e inside. The Frame was growing, and the construction crews were looking for raw materials all over the system. It was only a matter of time before someone took serious notice of us.

  “When it arrived, Z-K told us it had been aware of us for years. When the wrecking crews looked our way to grind us to atoms and build us into the Frame, it offered to take us aboard instead. The deal seemed reasonable: It would preserve the family forever or until such time as conditions were right for us to return, in exchange for which it would get our home, not the wreckers. It amounted to the same thing, either way—Io would still be destroyed—but at least we would live beyond that point, after a fashion.

  “Mother accepted the deal; she knew as well as we all did that there was no other chance. Even without the wreckers, the station would be lucky to remain habitable another month longer; it was wearing out that fast. She and the rest were uploaded. I...” Hatzis remembered those few moments most vividly of all: standing back as the air sizzled around her sister Eir’s body, turning bright orange as the dry-docked AI took them apart and recorded them in the process. Selie was next, her long, blond hair standing on end for a split second before disappearing forever, then Nerida. Grandpa Moss had held Mother’s hand as they went together, neither of them looking at her so she couldn’t see their tears—or perhaps the recrimination on their faces. “I didn’t trust Z-K. I saw no guarantee that it would do as it said and was afraid of having my mind sucked out and used for spare parts. So I didn’t go with the others. Instead, I took the shuttle off-rock and went away, hoping to hitch up with another refuge and earn my way in.

  “Neither Z-K nor I got very far before the wreckers moved in. They cared as much for the deal we had struck with Z-K as they did for the original lease. There was a flash fight that attracted attention from elsewhere. Suddenly, there were things all around Io, slugging it out. I was caught by one of them, sucked like a tadpole into the mouth of a whale, but not before I saw what happened to Z-K. Cornered, it had fought until the end, protecting its precious cargo. Only when the result was certain did it blow its propellant tanks and dump such a large amount of antimatter in one instant that it wiped out almost half of its opponents. How many frozen human minds it contained, I didn’t know, although it had boasted of thousands.” She shrugged. “Maybe it had told the truth, or maybe the whole thing was a plausible lie. However many there were, though, they’re definitely all dead now.”

  She glanced down at her hands. “I don’t remember much after that. I guess I was absorbed by the AI that caught me. I don’t know why else my pattern would’ve been kept. Certainly it wasn’t out of mercy. I was gone for a month, unaware of time passing, until a reconstruct called Chast woke me up. It had found my body, it said, floating in a capsule near Io. The old rock hadn’t been taken in the end; the whole thing had been for nothing. You might think that ironic; I don’t. In the history of Sol System, I guess that little encounter would probably seem tiny and insignificant to most, but I like to think it precipitated the breakdown of the alliance that built the Frame, for in the time I’d been unconscious, construction had ceased, and most of the more malevolent types had either gone elsewhere or burned out. Reconstructs like Chast were doing their best to return things to normal. Well, as normal as could be expected for an AI, at least.

  “Relatively speaking, humans were able to live in peace after that—what few of us there were left. We all have our stories. I stayed in my body, accepting mods only to increase my survival and to aid communication. Assuming this is my old body—” She turned over her hands and wondered at their survival, as she had many times in her alter life. “—then I suppose I’m very lucky.”

  “Lucky?” His glare was stronger than ever. “You lost your family, your friends, everyone you ever knew—”

  “Don’t preach to me, Peter.” She could match his anger, if she would let herself, and she was sorely tempted.

  He straightened. “What did you gain from living?”

  “Everything.” And nothing, she added to herself. “I’m different from how I used to be, but that’s all right. Change is natural; it happens to us all. If we don’t change, we die.” She shrugged lightly and softened her tone. That’s what’s wrong with engrams: You can’t change. You’re dead on the inside.”

  He shook his head slowly. “And how does that make you feel, Caryl?”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “How does it make you feel to know that the dead have more humanity in them than all of the Vincula and the Gezim put together?”

  She smiled at this, but she felt no humor.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You might think I’m only passing on received wisdom, but the figures are convincing. There are no functional engrams remaining in Sol System. The only ones left are those sent out in the survey program. But for the light-speed lags, giving those on the longer missions an extra lease on life, there might not be any left at all.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, as though warring with himself, then said, “But we’re not talking about me, are we? We’re talking about you.”

  “Actually, we were talking about the Vincula and what it would mean if it was gone when we got back.” She forced herself to talk lightly, as though the thought didn’t concern her at all.

  “What if you’re not there?” he asked.

  “I’ll deal with that if I have to.”

  “Just all a part of living, huh?” he said.

  “Exactly,” she said, finally unable to resist. “But at least it is living.”

  He stalked off and sealed himself inside his cubicle for another long period. When next he showed his face, she resolved to make no attempt at reconciliation, even though his aggressive attitude seemed to have abated.

  “How long?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “How long did they last?”

  “Who?”

  “The engrams,” he said.

  She shrugged. ‘Twenty years, thirty years, perhaps, in real time; no slow-mo. Some rare ones—who survived both the Spike and their own internal problems—even saw the turn of the century. But there are no documented cases of survival longer than that.”

  “Twenty, thirty years,” he said, as though hearing a death sentence. “Funny, I thought we’d live forever. We all did.”

  “Not like this, no. In fact, the chances are, the crew of the Frank Tipler wouldn’t have lasted much longer than they did, anyway. But there are ways around it. When we get back to Sol, the Vincula would offer you an upgrade to something more flexible, I’m sure.”

  “Like you offered me before? Kill me and let my old self take over?”

  “No, although you do raise an interesting point, there. Fixing your specific problem is a simple matter of reconnecting your world lines, making the thread of your consciousness consistent. But that’s the very problem with engrams: You’re too consistent, so reconnection might actually work against you in the long run. Fascinating.”

  She meant it, but he took it as some sort of joke. “Is that all I am to you, then? An experiment?”

  “Not at all. What you choose to do—accept my offer, explore options with the Vincula, or just carry on your own way—makes no difference to me. To tell you the truth, Peter, you’re just a situation I’ll be glad to put behind me.”

  “Well, it won’t be for much longer, I hope.”

  She forced a smile and said, “Either way.”

  2.2.4

  When she came to, she was lying on the floor with Alander standing over her. He looked angry, panicked, and he was shouting at her.

  “Hail them, for fuck’s sake! Do something! Anything!”

  She grappled with the words, trying to make sense out of what he was asking her to do, but it was difficult when so many thoughts were surging and crashing through her head.

  He leaned over toward her then, his face twisted in a way she couldn’t read. She flinched as his hands reached out for her, fearing he was attacking her. Then she realized he wa
sn’t attacking her but was trying to help her up.

  “Get us out of here!” he called out close to her face.

  “I... can’t,” she said numbly, not comprehending what it was he was asking of her.

  Behind him, looming large on the screen, she caught a glimpse of something bright and blue rushing toward them. Then, at the same instant that the image on the screen disappeared, her mind cleared, and she remembered.

  They had been in the cockpit, preparing for their arrival in Sol System. They were to relocate in a position roughly where Venus might once have been, having agreed to check first on the situation between the Vincula and the Gezim before moving in too close, and she had been staring at the screen in anticipation. She was eager for their journey to be at an end, finally. After a few days cooped up with Alander, the cockpit had started to feel like a coffin.

  When the hole ship had announced their imminent return to Sol, she had felt a wave of relief wash through her. She had stood there beside Alander, staring expectantly at the screen and barely thinking, listening intently for those first words from herself, eager to be reconnected and become whole once again.

  But instead of the warm embrace of her other parts to welcome her home, she found her mind suddenly dipped into what felt like a steaming cauldron of panic. Furious and conflicting emotions warred with chaotic, fragmentary thoughts so intense that she had screamed and blacked out.

  “Caryl?” Alander was still shouting, despite the quiet that had settled around them in the cockpit as well as in her head. Then she realized: He hadn’t been yelling at her to get them out of there, but to the hole ship. They were jumping to another location.

  “I’m in trouble,” she said, trying her best to explain what had happened. “I’m breaking up... In pain... Everything’s falling to pieces. I see fire; I’m burning. Someone’s hurting me!”