Hydrogen Steel

by K. A. Bedford

  I could hardly breathe. I sat in an overly-friendly chair, clutching my head, feeling queasy. I knew everything. I had learned in a moment, what Airlie Fallow had spent years painstakingly assembling from the chaos of lies, all the while knowing that at any moment she and her family could die like so many others before her. Mrs. Mondragon and other people of this future age cared little about all this. It was as easy to look up as any other widely available knowledge.

  But people had died — had been brutally murdered — for this knowledge.

  I had been killed!

  The more I probed the knowledge Mrs. Mondragon gave me, the more I saw the extent to which the truth about Earth’s destruction had become part of the texture of human knowledge. It was ancient history now. There had been books. There had been films. For God’s sake, there was even a bloody opera about it! Kids learned about it in school, the way they’d learn about the fall of Byzantium or Rome.

  Mrs. Mondragon, when I asked her, helped me find her bathroom. As I vomited, I wept my guts out, until I thought I would pass out.

  Later, sipping another cup of tea, I felt a little better, though no less confused and shocked. Mrs. Mondragon and I were talking about it some more.

  “How can people not care about their home world’s destruction?” I said.

  “Maybe,” Mrs. Mondragon said, not looking all that bothered, “because nobody thinks much about Earth anymore. I mean, it’d be like getting all worried about the fate of the dinosaurs or some damn thing. These days everybody’s much more interested in the River. That’s where our future lies.” She said this with a certain look of excitement.

  I stared, baffled. “Excuse me? What’s the River?”

  Mrs. Mondragon arched an eyebrow. “I’ll fetch some more tea. I’ve a few things more to tell you.”

  She wasn’t kidding.

  The story went like this…

  One year before the Earth’s death, government intelligence services across the world detected an anomalous tachyon-based transmission.

  Analysis showed that the transmission had emanated from more than two hundred years in the future.

  The signal was modulated for everything from radio to holovision.

  It took more than a month for the intelligence services to admit to each other that they’d all detected the transmission. At length they did admit this, and they began to work together. At this time political leaders received their first briefings.

  The transmission was a repeating automatic warning.

  The senders were a small group of technicians who claimed to be among the last desperate survivors of the human race. They provided extensive supporting documentation in a separate channel.

  Up until this point, humanity had not detected any sign of intelligent life beyond the Home System. Now these world leaders learned that there were in fact other powers and civilizations out there, and that many had been concealing their electromagnetic emissions, to prevent “primitive” races from detecting them.

  Then came the warning from the future: soon, within the next few months, human scientists would detect the long-sought Signal, the first genuine transmission from an alien civilization.

  This signal must be ignored, the senders warned. Preferably, the message went on, the entire program dedicated to searching for extraterrestrial intelligence should be shut down.

  The senders of this message said that when their governments first detected that same Signal, they secretly tried to answer. They established contact. It turned out there was an alien vessel cruising within the Home System. These aliens, speaking reasonably coherent Earth languages derived from Earth’s centuries of EM emissions, professed that they were keen to meet humanity. It was a time of cautious celebration — and vicious secret political maneuvering. Who should be in charge of the Meeting effort? Who should be delegated to actually meet these beings?

  Carefully, the United Nations and government PR agencies across the world began preparing humanity for the news that we were indeed not alone, and that there was the possibility of a Meeting.

  However, when preparations on Earth and throughout human space were complete, when the excitement of tens of billions of human beings was at its height — the aliens struck.

  Observers in Mars orbit reported sensing a cluster of objects shooting by at relativistic velocities that, in hindsight, were probably missiles of some unthinkable type and power.

  Earth was wiped out.

  The rest of humanity lived on out among the stars, and the search for the alien world-killers began. More than nine billion people had been on Earth at the time. They had to be avenged.

  The search was thorough and far-ranging. Failing revenge, humanity at least demanded an explanation. Why had these vicious bastards destroyed Earth? Didn’t they realize we would strike back?

  The search took a long time. Exactly how the culprits were found is not important; what is important is that, in time, humanity triumphed. They found the aliens responsible. The culpable aliens would not speak to us. So we struck back, eye for an eye, world for a world.

  This, the warning technicians went on to explain, was the greatest mistake humanity had ever made.

  The aliens in question had profoundly powerful allies. Allies swept into human space, wrapped in darkness.

  This time, we would lose everything.

  Now, the message from the future said, there were only a handful of ships left looking for a new home. Alien warships patrolled what had once been human space, searching for the last stragglers. Hypertubes were gone. Time was short. There was nowhere to run. If the warships didn’t get them, lack of fuel and supplies would.

  So they decided to send a message into the past with the last of their power.

  Stop looking for extraterrestrials. Stop now! While you still can.

  When the governments of Earth received this warning, all those years ago it had caused quite a stir. Humanity’s political leaders at the time agreed to hold a closed summit meeting, at which they would discuss what to do. It didn’t matter that they had been told what to do from the future, and it didn’t matter that the intelligence services’ technical people had shown that the accompanying documentation was almost certainly legitimate. The problem was that with so many different governments and ideologies represented, consensus was impossible. Worse, the debate was biased by existing power bloc relationships. Small, relatively helpless countries with not much clout wanted to go along with the message’s warning and shut down all programs searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. The Earth, they argued, was far too precious. And, they said, we don’t need immensely powerful enemies. On the other hand, the vast and wealthy powers of Earth and human space, recognizing that they should act responsibly and cautiously, were of the opinion that, since they had been warned about the aliens’ future hostile intentions, they could somehow make use of this information. There were complex arguments, too, about the nature of time, and whether it mattered or not what they all decided. Were they ultimately destined, regardless of what they did, to wind up in the bleak future the message-senders warned them about? Could that outcome be avoided? Who knew?

  There were other plans as well which called for shooting down the alien vessel out in the solar system before it could launch its strike. This, though, would amount to an Act of War on the part of Earth, and the aliens’ allies would presumably not be pleased.

  Still, moderates argued, some kind of consensus must be possible. The meetings went on and on, in both open sessions and closed high-level back-room meetings in which risks were weighed and deals were struck. Politicians wondered how to make the most out of the situation while also keeping the home world safe. And, naturally, there were a few people whose political calculus allowed for the loss of the home world if it meant that humanity as a whole would benefit.

  In the end the only
thing the Earth’s leaders could agree upon was to keep the whole thing quiet. The panic, they realized, would be uncontrollable.

  So they sat on it.

  And, a few weeks later, one of the few remaining extraterrestrial search teams reported finding a Signal. Analysis suggested the sender was located far out beyond the orbit of Pluto, in the Kuiper Belt.

  What to do? This question plagued governments and intelligence analysts all over again. During the original summits and hurried back room meetings the whole thing had seemed a little abstract and for some, perhaps nothing to worry about. Now, suddenly, the whole thing took on a visceral urgency. The large and powerful governments gagged the astronomers who made the discovery, and released vast amounts of misinformation into the interstellar infosphere. This campaign worked. Nobody took the astronomers seriously. Quietly, however, things were moving in the corridors of power. A ragged new consensus was forming, almost despite itself, around the controversial doctrine of “Doing Nothing.”

  Doing Nothing meant not responding to the signal. It meant pretending not to have received it, and that the announcement that we had received a signal had been in error. Oops. Mistakes happen all the time, after all. And Doing Nothing might mean that nothing would happen. With no reply to their signal, the aliens might just buzz off. If they buzzed off, none of the bad stuff would happen. Earth would survive. Humanity would continue to flourish among the stars…

  The aliens struck anyway. For no reason. They launched their attack and left. The Earth was destroyed.

  Governments elsewhere in human space acted swiftly to destroy all evidence even remotely suggesting there had been any kind of prior contact. The question: “So you could have destroyed the alien ship and yet you didn’t?” had to sink without a trace. The answer: “If we’d destroyed it, their allies would have come and wiped us out anyway…” wasn’t much comfort, so it too was buried.

  All the same, things have a way of leaking out. No security is perfect. Over time stray pieces of the story leaked out. It was during this time that the Hydrogen Metal Project was started. Its task of hiding the truth was handed over to a highly capable machine intelligence. Those claiming to know what they were talking about, who had hard evidence that the governments of Earth had just sat there and let some aliens wipe them out, were swiftly silenced using age-old methods of controlling secret information. They were intimidated, fired, threatened, and, for a handful of particularly determined whistleblowers, suffered tragically fatal “accidents”. Much of the time Hydrogen Metal took care of everything, usually through the manipulation of other organizations; when required, it handled things personally.

  The truth, then, had been circulating in human space for a long time, but nobody credible believed it — or could afford to believe it.

  Over the years, a network of conspiracy theorists like Javier and scientists like Airlie Fallow had been quietly piecing it all together. Why did they bother, if they knew that their lives would be in danger? I didn’t know for sure, but I would bet my new body that it was as simple as wanting not only to know, but to tell people the truth. They believed, like all truth seekers throughout history, that people had a right to know what happened to the Earth.

  Airlie had built the story out of the stray fragments of data she had managed to find, and she saw that it made a horrible kind of sense. Was it better to have a flourishing interstellar civilization, even though it was built on complicity in Earth’s destruction, or would it be better to have fought back against the attackers, with the possibility that we’d be destroyed for our trouble? If we’d fought back, after all, we might not now have all this. We might instead have the desperate existence of those last survivors from Earth, who’d used the last of their power to send that warning into the past. Would that be better? Would it be more “authentic”?

  So the secret about what had happened to Earth was out … and nobody gave a damn. Men and women had died in great numbers in order to find this information, and for what? Nobody cared.

  For the longest time post-Earth humanity had always looked back, trying to remake their culture in Earth’s image, unable to put the past behind them once and for all, and move on into the uncertain future. The trauma of the world’s destruction had echoed through the souls of every man, woman and child. As a species we had suffered from something like post-traumatic stress disorder, always remembering that which we lost. I remembered Gideon telling me about his acquisition of a yellow 1967 Volkswagen Beetle — in good running order — and that he had sold it at auction for a fortune — because it was a piece of our heritage; it was priceless.

  One good thing had come out of the darkness: people were finally galvanized about the uncertain future. The River beckoned.

  The River. “It’s a kind of galactic transit network,” Mrs. Mondragon had explained when I’d asked.

  “It’s a what?” I nearly choked in surprise.

  Mrs. Mondragon took pity on me and tried to explain. “It all started years ago, during the darkest years following the collapse of civilization.”

  Mrs. Mondragon continued. “One day a strange man appeared on Mars, at the headquarters of an organization once known as the United Humanitas. He said he was an ambassador from an adjacent universe known as the “Unseen Realm”, if you can believe that. Apparently, the alien civilization in this “Realm” wanted to establish contact with humanity, and this strange man, who said he was ‘a man and not a man, and a god and not a god’ was to be their ‘Bridge’ across which they would be able to interact with humanity, and vice versa.” She took a long sip of her tea and looked thoughtful. “And of course, this ‘Bridge’ fellow, brought a gift along with him, as a sign of good faith.”

  “The gift, it was the River, right?” I said.

  Mrs. Mondragon nodded, and I could see she was still astonished about the whole thing, even though it had all happened many years ago, when she was just a kid.

  “And there was another bit of strange business. Just before the age of darkness began, all the old hypertubes started disappearing.”

  I had to bite my tongue to keep from blurting, “Yes, I remember it well!” Instead I nodded politely.

  She went on. “It turns out these aliens from the Unseen Realm had been ‘cleaning up’ the hypertubes.”

  I didn’t like the sound of this. “Cleaning up?”

  “How shall I put this?” she said, looking like she could not quite decide to be horrified or wryly amused, “Hypertubes, were these aliens’, um, waste products. So to speak.”

  I stared for a long moment, astonished. “The tubes were hyperdimensional alien shit?”

  She nodded. “Apparently. The Unseen Realm aliens knew that we’d been using their,” she paused to clear her throat, “‘waste products’ to facilitate our entire civilization, and they wanted to give us access to the River by way of compensation. It was all this Bridge fellow’s idea, apparently,” she said, looking just as astonished.

  “So where is this Bridge guy now? Is he still around?”

  “He’s here on Mars, helping the Humanitas work out how to deal with the Unseen Realm.”

  I thought about this for a while. Mrs. Mondragon fetched more tea. I needed it. “What are the Silent making of all this?” I said.

  Mrs. Mondragon rolled her eyes. “Don’t get me started on them. They’re only going along with giving us River access on the condition that they monitor everything we do with it. Bad enough we can only explore a tiny fraction of what’s out there.”

  I thought about Otaru out far beyond the edge of human space, encountering weird alien information diseases. And I remembered him telling Gideon and me that they wouldn’t give humanity the displacement drive because we weren’t prepared for what we’d find: everything.

  But now, with the Reconstruction of human space civilization proceeding apace, the River would provide fast access to
the worlds and systems of human space. It was as though humanity had grown out of the nursery and was starting live in the rest of the house.

  “Where will you go now, Inspector?” Mrs. Mondragon asked, while quietly stroking the arm of her chair.

  I hadn’t thought about it. I’d never imagined reaching the end of this case. It had been all I could do simply to survive, but now, the future lay before me.

  “I don’t know…” I said.

  Three weeks after my conversation with Mrs. Mondragon I was back in Winter City on Ganymede, homeless, broke and utterly confused. The Serendipity habitat no longer existed; it had gone bust long ago. Winter City had also not fared well during the Dark Years and was now undergoing extensive reconstruction. There was no trace of the old Winter City Police Service. These days there was a privately-funded civilian militia in which all citizens had to participate. It was an extreme measure brought about during the darkness that might or might not survive in the new era. Would Ganymede remain the capital of human space? Nobody knew. Debate was alive and deafening. Now humanity, in all its modes and strains, had options. Everything was up for grabs.

  I didn’t know what to do. I was no longer even a citizen. Long ago I had been declared legally dead, so even if I wanted a job I couldn’t get one. Getting my citizenship restored would cost money that I didn’t have. Some things, then, remained the same.

  I still had the ghost of Otaru in my head. Most of the time he slept or meditated in his garden.

  Just as nobody gave a damn about the big secret about Earth, nobody now gave a damn about my own sinister secret, that I was some kind of android. I wasn’t even sure if that was really true anyway. Hydrogen Steel had messed with my head, mixing its lies in with the memories I’d been given. I began to wonder if even that doctor at Amundsen Station hospital, Dr. Panassos, who had told me that he had found proof that I was indeed an android, had either been compromised, or if he’d been given false data. If Hydrogen Steel could slip lies into my head, who knows what else it could have done?