Wireless

by Charles Stross

  VOICE-OVER:

  Ocean—the final frontier. For twelve years, since the momentous day when we discovered that we had been removed to this planar world, we have been confronted by the immensity of an ocean that goes on as far as we can see. Confronted also by the prospect of the spread of Communism to uncharted new continents, we have committed ourselves to a strategy of exploration and containment.

  FILM CLIP:

  An Atlas rocket on the launchpad rises slowly, flames jetting from its tail: it surges past the gantry and disappears into the sky.

  CUT TO:

  A camera mounted in the nose, pointing back along the flank of the rocket. The ground falls behind, blurring into blue distance. Slowly, the sky behind the rocket is turning black: but the land still occupies much of the fish-eye view. The first-stage engine ring tumbles away, leaving the core engine burning with a pale blue flame: now the outline of the California coastline is recognizable. North America shrinks visibly: eventually another, strange outline swims into view, like a cipher in an alien script. The booster burns out and falls behind, and the tumbling camera catches sunlight glinting off the upper-stage Centaur rocket as its engine ignites, thrusting it higher and faster.

  VOICE-OVER:

  We cannot escape.

  CUT TO:

  A meteor streaking across the empty blue bowl of the sky; slowing, deploying parachutes.

  VOICE-OVER:

  In 1962, this rocket would have blasted a two-ton payload all the way into outer space. That was when we lived on a planet that was an oblate sphere. Life on a dinner plate seems to be different: while the gravitational attraction anywhere on the surface is a constant, we can’t get away from it. In fact, anything we fire straight up will come back down again. Not even a nuclear rocket can escape: according to JPL scientist Dan Alderson, escape from a Magellanic disk would require a speed of over one thousand six hundred miles per second. That is because this disk masses many times more than a star—in fact, it has a mass fifty thousand times greater than our own sun.

  What stops it collapsing into a sphere? Nobody knows. Physicists speculate that a fifth force that drove the early expansion of the universe—they call it “quintessence”—has been harnessed by the makers of the disk. But the blunt truth is, nobody knows for sure. Nor do we understand how we came here—how, in the blink of an eye, something beyond our comprehension peeled the Earth’s continents and oceans like a grape and plated them across this alien disk.

  CUT TO:

  A map. The continents of earth are laid out—Americas at one side, Europe and Asia and Africa to their east. Beyond the Indonesian island chain Australia and New Zealand hang lonely on the edge of an abyss of ocean.

  The map pans right: strange new continents swim into view, ragged-edged and huge. A few of them are larger than Asia and Africa combined; most of them are smaller.

  VOICE-OVER:

  Geopolitics was changed forever by the Move. While the surface topography of our continents was largely preserved, wedges of foreign material were introduced below the Mohorovicic discontinuity—below the crust—and in the deep ocean floor, to act as spacers. The distances between points separated by deep ocean were, of necessity, changed, and not in our geopolitical favor. While the tactical balance of power after the Move was much as it had been before, the great circle flight paths our strategic missiles were designed for—over the polar ice cap and down into the communist empire—were distorted and stretched, placing the enemy targets outside their range. Meanwhile, although our manned bombers could still reach Moscow with in-flight refueling, the changed map would have forced them to traverse thousands of miles of hostile airspace en route. The Move rendered most of our strategic preparations useless. If the British had been willing to stand firm, we might have prevailed—but in retrospect, what went for us also went for the Soviets, and it is hard to condemn the British for being unwilling to take the full force of the inevitable Soviet bombardment alone.

  In retrospect the only reason this was not a complete disaster for us is that the Soviets were caught in the same disarray as ourselves. But the specter of Communism now dominates Western Europe: the supposedly independent nations of the European Union are as much in thrall to Moscow as the client states of the Warsaw Pact. Only the ongoing British State of Emergency offers us any residual geopolitical traction on the red continent, and in the long term we must anticipate that the British, too, will be driven to reach an accommodation with the Soviet Union.

  CUT TO:

  A silvery delta-winged aircraft in flight. Stub wings, pointed nose, and a shortage of windows proclaim it to be an unmanned drone: a single large engine in its tail thrusts it along, exhaust nozzle glowing cherry red. Trackless wastes unwind below it as the viewpoint—a chase plane—carefully climbs over the drone to capture a clear view of the upper fuselage.

  VOICE-OVER:

  The disk is vast—so huge that it defies sanity. Some estimates give it the surface area of more than a billion Earths. Exploration by conventional means is futile: hence the deployment of the NP-101 Perse phone drone, here seen making a proving flight over landmass F-42. The NP-101 is a reconnaissance derivative of the nuclear-powered D-SLAM Pluto missile that forms the backbone of our post-Move deterrent force. It is slower than a strategic D-SLAM, but much more reliable: while D-SLAM is designed for a quick, fiery dash into Soviet territory, the NP-101 is designed to fly long-duration missions that map entire continents. On a typical deployment the NP-101 flies outward at thrice the speed of sound for nearly a month: traveling fifty thousand miles a day, it penetrates a million miles into the unknown before it turns and flies homeward. Its huge mapping cameras record two images every thousand seconds, and its sophisticated digital computer records a variety of data from its sensor suite, allowing us to build up a picture of parts of the disk that our ships would take years or decades to reach. With resolution down to the level of a single nautical mile, the NP-101 program has been a resounding success, allowing us to map whole new worlds that it would take us years to visit in person.

  At the end of its mission, the NP-101 drops its final film capsule and flies out into the middle of an uninhabited ocean, to ditch its spent nuclear reactor safely far from home.

  CUT TO:

  A bull’s-eye diagram. The center is a black circle with a star at its heart; around it is a circular platter, of roughly the same proportions as a 45 rpm single.

  VOICE-OVER:

  A rough map of the disk. Here is the area we have explored to date, using the NP-101 program.

  (A dot little larger than a sand grain lights up on the face of the single.)

  That dot of light is a million kilometers in radius—five times the distance that used to separate our old Earth from its moon. To cross the radius of the disk, an NP-101 would have to fly at Mach 3 for almost ten years. We aren’t even sure exactly where the center of that dot lies on the disk: our highest sounding rocket, the Nova-Orion block two, can barely rise two degrees above the plane of the disk before crashing back again. Here is the scope of our knowledge of our surroundings, derived from the continental-scale mapping cameras carried by Project Orion:

  (A salmon pink area almost half an inch in diameter lights up around the red sand grain on the face of the single.)

  Of course, cameras at an altitude of a hundred thousand miles can’t look down on new continents and discern signs of communist infiltration; at best they can listen for radio transmissions and perform spectroscopic analyses of the atmospheric gases above distant lands, looking for contaminants characteristic of industrial development such as chlorofluorocarbons and nitrogen oxides.

  This leaves us vulnerable to unpleasant surprises. Our long-term strategic analyses imply that we are almost certainly not alone on the disk. In addition to the communists, we must consider the possibility that whoever built this monstrous structure—clearly one of the wonders of the universe—might also live here. We must contemplate their motives for bringing us to this place. And
then there are the aboriginal cultures discovered on continents F-29 and F-364, both now placed under quarantine. If some landmasses bear aboriginal inhabitants, we may speculate that they, too, have been transported to the disk in the same manner as ourselves, for some as-yet-unknown purpose. It is possible that they are genuine stone-age dwellers—or that they are the survivors of advanced civilizations that did not survive the transition to this environment. What is the possibility that there exists on the disk one or more advanced alien civilizations that are larger and more powerful than our own? And would we recognize them as such if we saw them? How can we go about estimating the risk of our encountering hostile Little Green Men—now that other worlds are in range of even a well-equipped sailboat, much less the Savannah-class nuclear-powered exploration ships? Astronomers Carl Sagan and Daniel Drake estimate the probability as high—so high, in fact, that they believe there are several such civilizations out there.

  We are not alone. We can only speculate about why we might have been brought here by the abductors, but we can be certain that it is only a matter of time before we encounter an advanced alien civilization that may well be hostile to us. This briefing film will now continue with an overview of our strategic preparations for first contact, and the scenarios within which we envisage this contingency arising, with specific reference to the Soviet Union as an example of an unfriendly ideological superpower . . .

  TENURE TRACK

  After two weeks, Maddy is sure she’s going mad.

  She and Bob have been assigned a small prefabricated house (not much more than a shack, although it has electricity and running water) on the edge of town. He’s been drafted into residential works, put to work erecting more buildings: and this is the nearest thing to a success they’ve had, because after a carefully controlled protest his status has been corrected, from just another set of unskilled hands to trainee surveyor. A promotion of which he is terribly proud, evidently taking it as confirmation that they’ve made the right move by coming here.

  Maddy, meanwhile, has a harder time finding work. The district hospital is fully staffed. They don’t need her, won’t need her until the next shipload of settlers arrives, unless she wants to pack up her bags and go tramping around isolated ranch settlements in the outback. In a year’s time the governor has decreed they’ll establish another town-scale settlement, inland near the mining encampments on the edge of the Hoover Desert. Then they’ll need medics to staff the new hospital: but for now, she’s a spare wheel. Because Maddy is a city girl by upbringing and disposition, and not inclined to take a job hiking around the bush if she can avoid it.

  She spends the first week and then much of the second mooching around town, trying to find out what she can do. She’s not the only young woman in this predicament. While there’s officially no unemployment, and the colony’s dirigiste administration finds plenty of hard work for idle hands, there’s also a lack of openings for ambulance crew, or indeed much of anything else she can do. Career-wise it’s like a trip into the 1950s. Young, female, and ambitious? Lots of occupations simply don’t exist out here on the fringe, and many others are closed or inaccessible. Everywhere she looks she sees mothers shepherding implausibly large flocks of toddlers, their guardians pinch-faced from worry and exhaustion. Bob wants kids, although Maddy’s not ready for that yet. But the alternatives on offer are limited.

  Eventually Maddy takes to going through the “help wanted” ads on the bulletin board outside city hall. Some of them are legit: and at least a few are downright peculiar. One catches her eye: field assistant wanted for biological research.

  I wonder? she thinks, and goes in search of a door to bang on.

  When she finds the door—raw wood, just beginning to bleach in the strong colonial sunlight—and bangs on it, John Martin opens it and blinks quizzically into the light. “Hello?” he asks.

  “You were advertising for a field assistant?” She stares at him. He’s the entomologist, right? She remembers his hands on the telescope on the deck of the ship. The voyage itself is already taking on the false patina of romance in her memories compared to the dusty present it has delivered her to.

  “I was? Oh—yes, yes. Do come in.” He backs into the house—another of these identikit shacks, colonial, family, for the use of—and offers her a seat in what used to be the living room. It’s almost completely filled by a worktable and a desk and a tall wooden chest of sample drawers. There’s an odd, musty smell, like old cobwebs and leaky demijohns of formalin. John shuffles around his den, vaguely disordered by the unexpected shock of company. There’s something touchingly cute about him, like the subjects of his studies, Maddy thinks. “Sorry about the mess, I don’t get many visitors. So, um, do you have any relevant experience?”

  She doesn’t hesitate: “None whatsoever, but I’d like to learn.” She leans forward. “I qualified as a paramedic before we left. At college I was studying biology, but I had to drop out midway through my second year: I was thinking about going to medical school later, but I guess that’s not going to happen here. Anyway, the hospital here has no vacancies, so I need to find something else to do. What exactly does a field assistant get up to?”

  “Get sore feet.” He grins lopsidedly. “Did you do any lab time? Fieldwork?” Maddy nods hesitantly so he drags her meager college experiences out of her before he continues. “I’ve got a whole continent to explore and only one set of hands: we’re spread thin out here. Luckily NSF budgeted to hire me an assistant. The assistant’s job is to be my Man Friday; to help me cart equipment about, take samples, help with basic lab work—very basic—and so on. Oh, and if they’re interested in entomology, botany, or anything else remotely relevant, that’s a plus. There aren’t many unemployed life sciences people around here, funnily enough: have you had any chemistry?”

  “Some,” Maddy says cautiously; “I’m no biochemist.” She glances round the crowded office curiously. “What are you meant to be doing?”

  He sighs. “A primary survey of an entire continent. Nobody, but nobody, even bothered looking into the local insect ecology here. There’re virtually no vertebrates, birds, lizards, what have you—but back home there are more species of beetle than everything else put together, and this place is no different. Did you know nobody has even sampled the outback fifty miles inland of here? We’re doing nothing but throwing up shacks along the coastline and opencast quarries a few miles inland. There could be anything in the interior, absolutely anything.” When he gets excited he starts gesticulating, Maddy notices, waving his hands around enthusiastically. She nods and smiles, trying to encourage him.

  “A lot of what I’m doing is the sort of thing they were doing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Take samples, draw them, log their habitat and dietary habits, see if I can figure out their life cycle, try and work out who’s kissing cousins with what. Build a family tree. Oh, I also need to do the same with the vegetation, you know? And they want me to keep close watch on the other disks around Lucifer. ‘Keep an eye out for signs of sapience,’ whatever that means: I figure there’s a bunch of leftovers in the astronomical community who feel downright insulted that whoever built this disk and brought us here didn’t land on the White House lawn and introduce themselves. I’d better tell you right now, there’s enough work here to occupy an army of zoologists and botanists for a century; you can get started on a PhD right here and now if you want. I’m only here for five years, but my successor should be okay about taking on an experienced RA . . . The hard bit is going to be maintaining focus. Uh, I can sort you out a subsistence grant from the governor-general’s discretionary fund and get NSF to reimburse him, but it won’t be huge. Would twenty Truman dollars a week be enough?”

  Maddy thinks for a moment. Truman dollars—the local scrip—aren’t worth a whole lot, but there’s not much to spend them on. And Rob’s earning for both of them anyway. And a PhD . . .

  That could be my ticket back to civilization, couldn’t it? “I guess so,” she says, feel
ing a sense of vast relief: so there’s something she’s useful for besides raising the next generation, after all. She tries to set aside the visions of herself, distinguished and not too much older, gratefully accepting a professor’s chair at an Ivy League university. “When do I start?”

  ON THE BEACH

  Misha’s first impressions of the disturbingly familiar alien continent are of an oppressively humid heat and the stench of decaying jellyfish.

  The

  Sergei Korolev floats at anchor in the river estuary, a huge streamlined visitor from another world. Stubby fins stick out near the waterline, like a seaplane with clipped wings: gigantic Kuznetsov atomic turbines in pods ride on booms to either side of its high-ridged back, either side of the launch/recovery catapults for its parasite MiG fighter-bombers, aft of the broad curve of the ekranoplan’s bridge. Near the waterline, a boat bay is open: a naval spetsnaz team is busy loading their kit into the landing craft that will ferry them to the small camp on the beach. Misha, who stands just above the waterline, turns away from the giant ground-effect ship and watches his commander, who is staring inland with a faint expression of worry. “Those trees—awfully close, aren’t they?” Gagarin says, with the carefully studied stupidity that saw him through the first dangerous years after his patron Khrushchev’s fall.

  “That is indeed what Captain Kirov is taking care of,” replies Gorodin, playing his role of foil to the colonel-general’s sardonic humor. And indeed, shadowy figures in olive green battle dress are stalking in and out of the trees, carefully laying trip wires and screamers in an arc around the beachhead. He glances to the left, where a couple of sailors with assault rifles stand guard, eyes scanning the jungle. “I wouldn’t worry unduly, sir.”