Godlike Machines

by Johnathan Strahan

  “They’re going to lie about Yakov.”

  “I know.”

  “When we get home, they’ll make us stick to the story.”

  “Of course.” She said this with total resignation, as if it was the least any of us could expect.

  Soon we bored of the news and the television. While Galenka was answering letters from friends and family I went back to run my own check on Yakov. To our disappointment Baikonur still had no specific recommendations beyond maintaining the present medication. I sensed that they didn’t want blood on their hands if something went wrong with him. They were happy to let us take responsibility for our ailing comrade, even if we ended up killing him.

  “Let me out, Dimitri. I’m fine now.”

  I looked at him through armored glass of the bulkhead door. Shaking my head, I felt like a doctor delivering some dreadful diagnosis.

  “You have to stay there for now. I’m sorry. But we can’t run the risk of you trying to open the hatch again.”

  “I accept that this isn’t a simulation now. I accept that we’re really in space.” His voice came through a speaker grille, tinny and distant. “You believe me, don’t you Dimitri?”

  “I’ll see you later, Yakov.”

  “At least let me talk to Baikonur.”

  I placed the palm of my hand against the glass. “Later, friend. For now, get some rest.”

  I turned away before he could answer.

  He wasn’t the only one who needed sleep. Tiredness hit me unexpectedly—it always came on hard, like a wall. I slept for two hours, dreaming of being back on Earth on a warm spring day, sitting with my wife in the park, the mission happily behind me, deemed a success by all concerned. When I woke the dream’s melancholic after-effects stayed with me, dogging my thoughts. I badly wanted to get home.

  I found Galenka in the pilot’s position.

  “We have contact,” she said, but I knew from her tone of voice that it wasn’t all good news.

  “The Progress called in?”

  “She’s stuck, Dimitri. Jammed in down there. Can’t back out, can’t go forward.”

  “Fuck.”

  What was only apparent when the Progress reached the root complex was that there was no solid surface to Shell 4; that the tangled mass of roots was, to all intents and purposes, the sphere itself. There were gaps in that tangle, too, like the interstices in a loosely bundled ball of string. Methodically and fearlessly, the Progress had set about finding a way through to whatever was underneath. On its first attempt, it had traveled no more than a third of a kilometer beneath the nominal surface before reaching a narrowing it couldn’t pass through. The second attempt, picking a different entry point, had taken it a kilometer under the surface before it met a similar impasse. With fuel now running low-just enough to get it back to the Tereshkova, with some in reserve—the Progress had opted to make one final attempt. It was then that it had got itself stuck, lodging in a part of the thicket like a bullet in gristle.

  Galenka sent commands to the Progress, to be relayed through to it when a window opened. She told it to use its manipulators to try and push itself backwards, and to wiggle its reaction thrusters in the hope that it might shake itself loose. It was the best she could do, but she wasn’t optimistic. We waited three hours, by which time Baikonur were fully appraised of the situation. Then a window opened and the Progress reported that it was still jammed tight, despite executing Galenka’s instructions.

  “Before you say I should have listened to you,” she said. “I did listen. But bringing her back in just wasn’t the right decision, given what I knew at the time.”

  “I fully concurred, Galenka. No one’s blaming you.”

  “Let’s see what Baikonur have to say when we get back, shall we?”

  “I’m sure they’ll be in a forgiving mood. The amount of data we’ve gathered ...”

  “Doesn’t begin to add up against physical samples, which we’ve now lost.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe what? I’ve tried everything in the book. I know what that Progress can do, Dimitri. It isn’t an escape artist.”

  “We do have the Soyuz,” I said.

  “We need it to take us home. Anyway, the Soyuz isn’t rigged for remote control or sampling.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of remote control. I was thinking, we fly the Soyuz all the way in. It’s the same size as the Progress, right? It has similar capabilities?”

  “Give or take.” Her tone told me she wasn’t exactly signing up for my idea with enthusiasm. “And then what?”

  “We reach the Progress, or get as close to it as we can without getting ourselves stuck. Then we EVA. It’s a micro-gravity environment so we should be able to move around without too much difficulty. It’ll be too risky to attempt to free the Progress, but there’s nothing to stop us transferring the artifacts. Plenty of room aboard the Soyuz, to bring them back to the Tereshkova.”

  She breathed heavily, as if she’d just come off the exercise cycle. “This wasn’t planned for. This wasn’t in the book. No one ever mentioned going in with the Soyuz.”

  “It was always an unstated option. Why do you think they sent us out here, Galenka? To operate the Progress in real-time? Part of the reason, certainly, but not all of it.”

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  “It was, but now we’ve got a much clearer picture of what’s inside Shell 3. We can load in the Progress’s trajectory and follow it all the way in.”

  “And if we damage the Soyuz? It’s a fiery ride home without it.”

  “Why should we? We’ll be taking excellent care of it.”

  “Because our lives will depend on it. You’ve become very courageous all of a sudden, Dimitri. Don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s not what I expected of you.”

  “I’m not trying to be anyone’s hero. My blood’s running cold at the idea of flying the Soyuz into that thing. But I happen to know the way their minds work back in Baikonur.

  They’ll have thought of the Soyuz option by now, realized that it’s feasible.”

  “They won’t force us to do it, though.”

  “No, that’s not how they operate. But if we don’t raise the possibility, if we don’t put it on the table, they’ll be very, very disappointed. More disappointed than they’ll already be at us for losing the robot.”

  I watched her reflect on what I’d said. In this instance Galenka would have no option but to admit that my grasp of Baikonur politics was superior to hers. I had been a cosmonaut for much longer and I had seen how our superiors punished failings. The best you could hope for was incarceration. The worst was returning to your office to find a loaded revolver and a bottle of vodka.

  “I hope you’re right about this, Dimitri. For both our sakes.”

  “We have no choice,” I said. “Trust me, Galenka. Nothing that happens in the Matryoshka will be as bad as what they’d do to us for failing our country.”

  An hour later we’d informed Baikonur of our decision. Two hours later we had their reply. I went to Yakov and told him what was going to happen.

  “You can let me out now,” he said, through the bulkhead window.

  “Not until we’re back.”

  “You still don’t trust me?”

  “It’s just not a risk we can afford to take.”

  “Don’t leave me alone on the Tereshkova. I’d rather go with you than stay here on my own.”

  “Not an option, I’m afraid. We need the extra space in the Soyuz. But I’m opening comms to your module. You’ll be able to talk to Baikonur, and you’ll be able to talk to us. You won’t feel out of touch.”

  “I’m all right now,” Yakov said. “Please believe me. I had a bad turn, I got confused—but everything’s all right now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  An hour after that, we were checking our suits and prepping the Soyuz for departure.

  “I need bread,” Nesha says. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “In this weat
her?”

  “I need bread. If I don’t go early, there’ll be none left.”

  I peer through the window, at the gray-white sky. “I could fetch it for you. If you gave me some money, and told me where to go.” Seeing the sceptical look on her face, I add, “I’d come back.”

  “We’ll go together. It’s good exercise for me, to get out of this place. If I didn’t have errands, I’d probably never leave the building.”

  Nesha puts on several more layers of clothes and fetches a coat for herself. None of Gennadi’s coats fit me (they’re all too tight in the sleeves) so I’m forced to make do with Doctor Kizim’s again. At least it’s dried a bit, and I have something warm on underneath it. Nesha locks her apartment, turning keys in three separate locks, then we walk slowly to the elevator, still where I left it, on the ninth floor.

  “I shouldn’t have mocked you, Dimitri Ivanov. That wasn’t called for.”

  The elevator doors close. “Mocked me?”

  “About the musical box. The thing you came to give me. Now that we’ve spoken a little more, I see that you’re not the madman I thought you might be. I should have known better.”

  “It’s understandable.”

  “Did it really come from the Matryoshka?”

  “All the way back.”

  “Why did they let you keep it?”

  “Because they didn’t realize its significance. By the time we got back, I knew that we weren’t going to get an easy ride. The truth that we’d discovered-it wasn’t going to be something our political masters wanted to hear. We were all ill—the perfect excuse for incarceration in some nameless medical facility cum prison or madhouse. Yakov and Galenka were sick with radiation exposure. I was sick with the Matryoshka inside my head. None of us were going to see daylight again.”

  “I read the papers and saw the television reports. They never actually lied about what happened to you.”

  “They didn’t have to lie. As long as there was a reason not to have us out in public, they were happy.”

  The elevator completes its trundling, hesitant descent. We leave the building, venturing into the snow-covered street. I glance around, vigilant for prowling Zils and men in dark suits.

  “I kept the musical box with me all the way home. They found it, of course, but it was always presumed to be one of my personal effects-something I’d taken aboard the ship when we left. The idea that it might be an artifact—a. thing from the Matryoshka—that never crossed their minds.”

  “And you never thought to tell them?”

  “They’d have destroyed it, Nesha. So I kept it close with me, all the time I was in the facility. The only person I ever showed it to was Doctor Kizim, and I don’t think even he believed where it had come from.”

  “You must have trusted him.”

  “You had to trust someone in a place like that. Just like I’m trusting you now. The musical box is yours now. It’s a piece of the future, in your hands.”

  She removes it from her coat. Until then I have no idea that she’s brought it with her.

  “The tune it makes ...” She starts turning the little handle, the notes tinkling out. We’re in the street, but there’s no one else around to notice one old woman with a little metal box in her hands, or to question why she’s turning the handle in its side. “I think I know it. It’s something familiar, isn’t it? Something Russian?”

  “Like you always said. But please don’t play it now. It makes my head hurt.”

  She stops turning the handle and returns the musical box to her pocket. We trudge on in silence for several more streets, until we’re in sight of the shopping complex where Nesha hopes to find her bread. It looks dingy and disused, but already people are milling around outside. In their dark winter clothes, they form an amorphous, weary mass. Our premier smiles down on them from the looming side of an apartment tower, his lips moving but no sound coming out. Seagulls have pecked away at him, attracted by the flickering colors, flaking away huge pieces of his face.

  “If the musical box was in the Matryoshka, then I was right about its origin,” Nesha says. “It did come from the future after all.”

  “They never believed you. They never wanted to believe you.”

  She glances up at the birdshit-stained edifice, the premier’s moving face. “We live in a flawless collectivized utopia. But a flawless society can’t, by definition, evolve. If it proceeds from one state to another, there must have been something wrong, or sub-optimal, about it. If it gets worse, then the seeds of that worsening must have already been present. It gets better, than it has room for improvement.”

  “It all ends,” I say, keeping my voice low. “In less than a human lifetime. That’s what I learned inside the Matryoshka. That and the fact that you were right all along.”

  “The musical box won’t make any difference.”

  “Except now you know.”

  “There was never any doubt in my mind. Not even in the darkest days, when they punished me through Gennadi.” Nesha walks on a few paces. “But still. It was always only a hypothesis. To have firm proof that I was right... it does make a difference, to me.”

  “That’s all I ever wanted. I felt that we owed you that much. I’m just sorry it took me so long to reach you.”

  “You did your best, Dimitri. You got to me in the end.” Then she reaches into her pocket again and takes out the change she’s saved for the bread.

  “Clear,” I called from the porthole, as we undocked. “Five meters. Ten meters. Fifteen.” The rest of the ship came into view, silvery under its untidy-looking quilt of reflective foil. It was a bittersweet moment. I’d been looking forward to getting this view for months, but I’d always assumed it would be at mission’s end, as we were about to ride the Soyuz back into Earth’s atmosphere.

  “Lining us up,” Galenka said. She was in the command seat, wearing her EVA suit but with the helmet and gloves not yet in place.

  I felt the Soyuz wheel around me as it orientated itself towards the Matryoshka. We’d be following the Progress all the way in, relying on the same collision-avoidance algorithm that had worked so well before. I kept telling myself that there was no reason for it to stop working now, just because we were aboard, but I couldn’t quell my fears. My nerves had been frayed even when it had just been the robot at stake. I kept thinking of that American probe sliced in two, coming apart in two perfectly severed halves. How would it feel, I wondered, if we ran into one of those infinitely-sharp field lines? Would we even notice it at first? Would there even be pain, or just a sudden cold numbness from half our bodies?

  As it was, we sailed through Shell 1 and Shell 2 without incident. All the while we remained in contact with the Tereshkova, and all the while the Tereshkova remained in contact with the microsat swarm. As windows opened and closed in Shell 3, the Progress reported on its continued existence and functionality. Nothing had happened to it since our departure. It was stuck, but otherwise operational and undamaged.

  I clutched at every crumb of comfort. The Matryoshka hadn’t touched the robot. It hadn’t shown any sign of having noticed it. Didn’t that bode well for us? If it didn’t object to one foreign object, there was no reason for it to object to another, especially if we took pains not to get stuck ourselves.

  Galenka brought us to a hovering standstill above Shell 3. In the microgravity environment of the Matryoshka the Soyuz only needed to exert a whisper of thrust from its attitude motors to hold station.

  “You’d better get buckled in, Dimitri. When a window opens, I’m giving her the throttle. It’ll feel like a booster separation, only harder.”

  I made sure I was tight in my seat. “I’m ready. How long do you think?”

  “No idea. Just be ready for it when it comes.”

  The glass cockpit of the Soyuz was much more advanced than the basic frame of the ship itself, which was older than my grandmother. Before our departure, Galenka had configured the sensors and readouts to emulate the same telemetry she’d been
seeing from the Progress. Now all she had to do was watch the scrolling, chattering indications for the auguries of an opening window. She’d have no more than a second or two to assess whether it was a window she could reach in time, given the Soyuz’s capabilities. Deciding that there was nothing I could contribute to the matter, I closed my eyes and waited for the moment.

  No matter what happened now, we had made history. We were inside the Matryoshka—the first humans to have made it this far. It had taken three apparitions to achieve this feat. Once, I would have assumed that things would only go from strength to strength with each new return. By the time of the fourth apparition, surely there’d be a permanent human presence out here, following the Matryoshka throughout its orbit. Study stations, research facilities— an entire campus, floating in vacuum.

  Now I wondered if anyone would come after us. The space effort was winding down-even the Tereshkova was cobbled together from the bits of earlier, failed enterprises. It seemed to me—though I would never have voiced such a conviction publicly—that it was less important to my country what we found out here, than that we were seen to be doing something no one else could. The scientific returns were almost incidental. Next time, would anyone even bother sending out a ship?

  “Brace,” Galenka said.

  The thrust came hard, like a hoof kick to the spine. It was worst than any booster separation, stage ignition or de-orbit burn. I had experienced re-entry gee-loads that were enough to push me to the brink of unconsciousness, but those forces had built up slowly, over several minutes. This came instantly, and for a moment I felt as if no bone in my body could possibly have survived unbroken.

  Then I realized that I was all right. The engine was still burning, but at least the gee-load was a steady pressure now, like a firm hand rather than a fist.

  “We are good for insertion,” Galenka said, as if that had ever been in doubt.

  We sailed through the two closely-packed shells, into the luminous blue-green interstitial space above Shell 4. Once we were clear—with the window sealing above us—Galenka did a somersault roll to use the main engine to slow us down again. The thrust burst was longer and less brutal this time. She dropped our speed from hundreds of meters per second to what was only slightly faster than walking pace. The thicket lay ahead or below, depending on my mental orientation. We were making good time. There was no need to rush things now.