Isaac Asimov's Aurora

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  “Later,” he snapped out loud, and left the office.

  He made his way back to the organics lab.

  An assistant led him to Jay’s private office, adjacent to his laboratory. Odd, almost plastic smells permeated the air, undercut occasionally by something more pungently organic.

  “Oh, good,” Jay said when he saw Coren. He stood and came around his desk, gesturing casually for Coren to follow.

  The lab proper was a long room divided by several worktables, each bearing a collection of devices only a few of which Coren recognized.

  “That grass has turned out to be a very interesting subject,” Jay said, leading Coren to the last worktable. “Do you know much about organic biology, horticulture, gardening . . . ?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “I would be surprised if you did. Most Terrans know next to nothing about organic anything.” He sighed wearily and tapped a screen on the table. “Here.”

  Coren stepped around the table to stand beside Jay. On the screen he saw a complex molecule, the various components color-coded in blues, reds, and bright oranges. One set, though, was a hard, metallic grey.

  “This is the chlorophyll molecule I extracted from the sample. Nor­mally, in plant cell biology, you’ll find magnesium here as a reactive ele­ment—the chloroplast, the part that contains this, is like our own hemoglobin, you know what that is? Good. Instead of iron, like we use, plants use magnesium.” Jay pointed at the gray sections. “This is where the magnesium ought to be, bonded to the nitrogen atom.”

  Coren waited. Jay seemed to be contemplating the image on the screen. “And what do we have instead?” Coren prompted.

  “Beryllium. It still promotes photosynthesis, but I’m having a hard time explaining why beryllium is here instead of just good old-fashioned Mg. There is magnesium present, but it’s bonding to a complex silicate instead of nitrogen. It’s acting as a connector, bridging between the sili­cate and the chloroplast. The silicate is causing some odd reactions in the RNA, too, which may be why there’s beryllium. If so, the RNA is acting atypically, but . . .”

  “Colloquial translation?”

  “Well, this grass is partly made of glass, to put it simply. There’s a variety of silicate compounds falling out of some of the internal interactions, but a few organic anomalies, like cyanophosphates and so forth. I can’t say that they actually do anything—it may be that this is all byproduct.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, when you see traces of peculiar inorganic ions in constructs like this, it’s usually an indication that a secondary process is at work, something external.”

  “Silicate. Glass. What might that indicate?”

  “Well . . . something we played around with a while back, but Rega canceled all the projects. I’m not sure what all the specifics were, but it had to do with terraforming.”

  Coren blinked. “As in reshaping environments?”

  “Exactly. Part of the Settler program.”

  “DyNan was involved in that?”

  “Long time ago and not very deeply. This reminded me of some of it, though. But I’m not sure yet. I wanted to show you what I had so far.”

  “What about the grass itself?”

  “Oh, it’s a variety of Terran grass . . . um . . .” He went to another screen and read briefly. “Eragrostis curvula . . . that’s the closest form I came up with. Pretty much extinct in the wild, we keep a lot of it in greenhouses and in data storage. Originally indigenous to continental Africa.”

  “Was it exported?”

  “I could find out. It’s a hardy species. It’s possible your sample is a variation redesigned for a nonTerran environment.”

  “Keep working on it, would you?” Coren asked. “I’d like to know more about it.”

  “It’s more interesting than anything else I’ve been doing lately.”

  “Which is?”

  “Nothing. I think Rega was planning to shut the department down. Six months ago the last project I had was canceled.”

  “What was it?”

  “Recombinant fluorine extraction. We were looking for a way to increase hydraulic pressure in some of our heavy lift waldoes. The idea—”

  Coren held up a hand. “Another time. Thanks.”

  Jay flashed a crooked grin. “I’m very popular at dinner parties, too, for my scintillating conversational topics.”

  Coren laughed and left the lab, more puzzled now than before he had entered.

  “Silicates,” he muttered.

  Lio Top kept offices outside the DyNan compound. Her company offices were neatly-appointed, comfortable, ideal for casual meetings, but she never, as far as Coren knew, did any work in them.

  He took the fast walkway beyond DyNan into the posh café district just north of the compound. He stepped off in a large circular space, its levels tiered and receding, giving it the look of an amphitheater. Statues alternated with holographic abstract displays around the rim of the plaza. Coren breathed in the rich mix of smells from several restaurants as he ascended stairs to the fourth tier.

  Lio Top’s office sprawled behind a transparent wall that gave her a view of the entire circle. Soft apricot-tinged light filled the low-ceilinged interior.

  “Coren, good,” she called from behind a large, glass-topped desk. She stood and came to greet him. “Thanks for coming so fast. Can I get you a drink?”

  “Sure. Nava?”

  Lio raised an eyebrow and went to her bar.

  “Your message was a bit cryptic,” Coren said. “What do I have to do with Rega’s will?”

  “As it turns out,” Lio said, pouring a tall glass of turquoise liquid, “more than I would have guessed. No living relatives anymore, he had to do something. Knowing Rega, I expected the whole thing to go to his church.”

  “It isn’t?”

  She handed him the glass. “That would be telling. You and everyone else will have to wait for the official reading, day after tomorrow. But I did have instructions outside of the will concerning you.” She returned to her desk and fetched a disk, which she pressed into his free hand. “There.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have no idea. My instructions were to, and I quote, ‘put this directly into Coren’s hand the minute you see him in the event of my demise.’ I’ve done that. I have no knowledge of its contents.”

  Coren looked over at the desk. “Shouldn’t you have kept this in a safe or something?”

  “I did, until you sent word that you were coming over. I kept it in the secure pouch you gave me. That thing is a pain to open.”

  Coren smiled appreciatively. “You’re his lawyer and you didn’t look?”

  “I’m not his primary attorney,” she protested. “I just ran his senate campaign and took care of his public relations issues. Sil Vanderbo is still principle attorney, and he’d have a nervous breakdown if he’d known about that. If I’d pried and looked at it and he had found out before I handed it over to you, he’d have had my license.”

  “I think you underestimate your position with Rega. He would never have trusted you to manage his campaign if you were just one of the stable.”

  “Oh, I don’t underestimate myself, don’t you worry about that. I think I was probably his third or fourth most trusted counsel. Pretty high up, considering he employed nearly two-hundred-fifty attorneys. But I never held any illusions about my limits, either, and as long as he kept Sil on retainer I knew I’d never get any higher up the ladder.”

  “Vanderbo approved you to manage the campaign, you know.”

  Lio looked at him, clearly surprised. “I didn’t. I suppose I should have guessed, but . . .”

  “Lio, what happened? I saw the autopsy report. After I . . . left . . . what happened?”

  Lio sat on the edge of her desk and folded her arms. “I wish I knew. He sealed himself off from everyone. I suppose it was a week or so after you—after.” She frowned. “He was very hurt by what you did.”

  “You seem to be th
e only who knows what that was.”

  “I was handling your severance. Four days into it, he changed his mind. He never explained himself. Not like it was his habit to do so, but I’d never known him to keep a disaffected employee before. If they quit or he had them dismissed, he never trusted them again. No second chances.”

  Coren slipped the disk into his pocket and sat down. “And after that?”

  “I thought it was exhaustion. He gave instructions to several depart­ment heads, gave me that disk to give to you, then locked himself in his residence. After a couple of weeks he began issuing orders again, almost always by comm. Occasionally he’d call someone to his residential office for a private meeting, but they all claimed they didn’t see him then, either: he conducted everything via intercom. I thought—we all thought—that this would be the way he’d come out of it. But then all communica­tions ceased last week. When no one heard anything for three days, Shola took it on herself to investigate. She found his body.”

  She didn’t mention that, Coren thought, covering his expression by taking a drink.

  “Did anyone else get a special disk?” he asked.

  “Can’t say. That was the one I was told to deliver. Other attorneys may have received similar instructions. I haven’t asked.”

  “But I imagine Vanderbo did.”

  “He wouldn’t be worth his reputation if he hadn’t. I doubt he’ll tell you anything, though.”

  Coren shrugged. “Depending on what this contains, I may or may not ask him.” He finished his drink and stood. “Did you ever trace the blackmail?”

  “The threat that made him withdraw from the race? No. He found it on his desk one day, already delivered, with no record of who brought it or where it had come from.”

  “Someone had to have delivered it.”

  “Surveillance showed nothing.” She slid off the desk to her feet. “Of course, if he had ever allowed for real surveillance . . .”

  “He wouldn’t have been Rega then.”

  “I suppose not. But he might be alive now.”

  Coren went to his private office, on the fourth floor of an older building in the Infant District near the Southwest Corridor of D.C.

  The first surprise Coren found on the disk was that it contained a full holographic recording. Rega Looms, tall and almost austerely thin, bloomed before his desk.

  “Coren.”

  Coren glanced down at the desktop. A request for confirmation showed on the monitor attached to the reader.

  “Yes, Rega,” he said.

  The disk, through the AI in the desktop, identified his voice, and the recording proceeded.

  “I owe explanations,” the image of Rega continued. “To whom, I’m not sure. Perhaps to Nyom, but it’s too late for that. I doubt she would ever have listened anyway. So I’ll make them to you and trust that you will know what to do with them.

  “Twenty-five years ago—a little more than that, really—I had a son, a fact you discovered, much to my dismay. You’re very good at what you do, Coren. Sometimes I wish you weren’t so good, but that skill has been useful to me and it would be incredibly dangerous to me were it employed by my competitors. I’ve never questioned your methods or cen­sured you in any way, though I’m sure you think I would if I knew what you did to serve my will. I find it safer to keep you in my employ, despite any possible ethical conflicts, than to let someone else use those same skills. My thinking may be faulty and my ethics dubious in this instance, but I’m following instinct rather than principle.

  “In any event, I had a son. Once. Within six months of his birth he began developing a series of illnesses. I thought, as did the first cadre of doctors who looked at him, that he suffered some immunological dysfunc­tion, making him unusually susceptible. This proved not to be the case.

  “Long ago, Earth was host to what I, through my church, call ‘abomi­nations.’ Every era has a list of things too frightening to contemplate and too difficult to control that it labels ‘abomination’ and summarily tries to purge from its present and all future generations. Difficult as it may be to grasp this, at one time nuclear energy was such a thing. Not without rea­son—it took a long time to learn to use it properly and control it safely—but for a time it was scorned and almost abolished. Polymerase gene therapy was another such thing, with its promise of extended life. Go back far enough and the very thoughts people had could be abomina­tions. Logic once threatened our humanity, evolution threatened our morality, and scientific positivism threatened our pride. Each in their turn was called an abomination and we tried to purge ourselves of the mon­sters before they changed us forever.

  “We failed. When the life-imitating artifacts we created to save us from lives of toil became abominations, we tried once more to rid ourselves of them, and once again we failed. But this time with a difference.

  “There are no robots on Earth anymore. Not the way there once were. We have machines that do work, yes, but we do not have machines that think for us, act independently on our behalf, and threaten to supplant our decision-making freedom of choice by their mock-compassionate intervention. The robot as heir to humankind no longer strides among us. We abolished it.

  “But humans are not rid of them. Humans took them to space where they proliferate in such abundance that one day they will likely return. Perhaps we’ll find then that we were as foolish to fear them as we were to fear vaccinations or invasive surgery or secularism. Perhaps.

  “But the man-shaped mechanism wasn’t the only manifestation of that abomination that we failed to be rid of. Along with the technology to build such a machine came ancillary technologies that gave us the basis for an economy of abundance which we did embrace without regard to the consequences. You cannot build a machine that acts like a brain unless you can build molecular components that imitate life processes. And we did indeed build such machines—tiny components, artificial germs, self-replicating and adaptive in their own clever ways. Nanotech. Go to any home kitchen and draw a meal at the common trough and you see a prim­itive form of it at work, breaking down one kind of molecule and turning it into another and manufacturing food. A lot of our clothing is ‘assem­bled’ this way, and we even have cultures that clean, though now they’re used exclusively in environments where a high order of sanitation is absolutely necessary. Once anyone could acquire a culture of these little cleansing machines to flense the dirt from their floors and walls and fur­niture. We built tiny machines for medical purposes, devices that could reestablish the homeostatic base of a body, ‘resetting’ it, as it were, to a condition prior to whatever disease it suffered.

  “And there’s where it all began to go wrong. Sometimes they caused breakdowns rather than repairing them. The adaptive capacities of these little machines surprised us, nearly overwhelmed us. They caused plagues. We don’t talk about them much anymore, but a thousand years or more ago there were terrible diseases flourishing on the Earth, caused by nanotech cultures that had—as they used to say with characteristic understatement—‘gotten away from us.’ ”

  Rega paused, his gaze seeming to look inward. He shuddered and refocussed on where he thought Coren would be, which appeared to be about ten centimeters in front of where Coren actually was.

  “Humans got rid of them. It took centuries. We had to build more of the same machines to do it, to hunt down the destructive little things. For many groups, it was taking too long. The reaction on the part of others was far too violent. We had hyperdrive then, all to ourselves, and people fled. The war continued, a hysterical cycle of development and destruc­tion, pocket revolutions, ideological battles fought with budgets as well as guns. How, we asked, do we get rid of the bad and save the good? The answer was clear, but few at first willingly embraced it. The problem was in the definitions—what is Good? In time, we realized that the good we wished to preserve was ephemeral, illusory. There was no good. There was only convenience.

  “Once we understood, it took only a few centuries to win. Once we understood,
there was no compromise. It all went. We got rid of all of it. Space travel as well as nanohomeopathic medicine, imitation intelli­gences as well as information viruses, robots as well as life extension. You can’t have any of it and be free of the bad. All of it undermined us, threatened us, made us lesser, weaker, more dependent, inhuman. A little over two hundred years ago the last positronic manufacturer on Earth closed down. Shortly after that, when the original Spacetown was shut down, the last positronic robot was destroyed. We had won.”

  He smiled grimly. “So we thought. My son was the victim of a residue. An ancient parasitic infection of nanotech. We never knew where it came from—it could have been in the soil somewhere, in a carpet we bought, passed from another infant in the hospital, waiting dormant in some food—we never knew. But the little abominations set up residence in his lymphatic and limbic systems and began to alter his immune responses and change his internal structure. ‘It happens,’ the doctors told us, ‘maybe one in ten million, one in twenty million, sometimes more often, sometimes less often. Not often enough for them to get a solid criteria, sound etiology, dependable vectors . . .’ They didn’t know. It happens. It hap­pened to Jerem. He was being killed by artificial machines that once may have been designed to do just the opposite, but by then had altered or combined with other machines like them to become pathological. They could not cure him without making it worse—in other words, without killing him faster than the disease would.

  “And we could not keep him. The infectiousness of the disease was as unknown as any other factor. Every case was slightly different, unique in some property that made the entire medical process powerless. We had to surrender him to a quarantined death.

  “In my desperation, I began flailing about for answers, and in so doing got myself involved in enterprises I never would have considered otherwise. One of them was Nova Levis.

  “I told you that I had named the lab. I took that name from a colony my church had settled on. We wanted a place where we could build an alternatively-tooled culture without interference or temptation from this one. Like other ideas, it seemed sound at the time, but it necessitated vio­lating one of our principle objections, which concerned space travel. Eventually, the Church of Organic Sapiens repudiated the colony. But we had this research lab, then—or I did—which was violating the rest of my principles and doing fundamental research in high level prosthetics. I wanted to cure my son. I wanted them to find a way to make him whole. I didn’t care that it cost me my credibility with myself. I wanted life for my son.