Edge of Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  “But you can build a blowtorch, right? You said you could.”

  “Yeah.” Rahiti was having trouble breathing steadily. “But it’s going to take hours to melt all that ice. And in the meantime, if any more of those suckers show up, you’re going to have to kill them.”

  “Oh,” Anu said. “Wonderful.”

  As usual, it took twice as long as he thought it would to free the snowcat’s treads.

  Then he discovered the last three sleds had frozen to the ice as well.

  In the end, they arrived at NPS twenty-four hours late. Rahiti had completely failed.

  THE ORBITAL REP, a white-haired lady with thick eyebrows, had no sympathy for him. She said, “Obviously this proves that ice sledding is not a viable option for North Pole delivery.”

  Rahiti sat on the other side of her desk trying to stay stone-faced. He could see clearly now thanks to medical treatment, but his newly healed nose still ached with every heartbeat. He was glad for the pain. It kept him from focusing on how screwed he was.

  He said, “We discovered the first alien life in our solar system. That should call for some kind of bonus.”

  She replied, “All discoveries of scientific value are covered by contract clause twenty four, subsection (a) and (b). And thank to the snowcat’s logs, we know exactly where to go to find more. Thank you. It’s very exciting for us.”

  He wanted to tell her what, exactly, he thought of her excitement. A ping at the hatch forestalled him.

  Anu entered, looking cheerful. “I brought my trip report. I also thought Orbital would want the first chance to buy my documentary.”

  Alarm crossed the rep’s face. “What documentary?”

  A handsome young man in coveralls followed Anu in. “Hi,” he said to Rahiti. “I’m Ted.”

  “Did I tell you that Ted’s father works for the largest media company on Earth?” Anu said brightly. “He’s very excited about my footage of us battling the aliens on the ice.”

  The rep floated out of her chair. “All video filmed by Mr. Rahiti, his crew or his equipment is owned by Orbital. You have no rights to anything.”

  Goosebumps ran down Rahiti’s arms. “Anu’s not part of my crew. She was a stowaway, and had her own personal recorder.”

  “Which is not covered by any contract at all,” Anu added.

  The rep pulled herself out of the office as quickly as low-gravity allowed. No doubt off to consult lawyers, Rahiti thought. Once they were alone, he grabbed Anu in a hug.

  “You’re amazing!” he said.

  “I know,” she answered. “And we’re rich! More than enough to get you out of debt.”

  He laughed at the idea. Debt-free. Free.

  “I’m using my half to start the Europa Wildlife Protection Society,” Anu added.

  Rahiti let her go. “The Europa what?”

  “To protect the aliens. Sure, they tried to kill us, but they were just going on instinct. Someone’s got to make sure they’re not exploited or destroyed. Meanwhile you can quit Orbital for good and go back to Earth, or bring your wife out here.”

  The administrator’s office had a small porthole in one bulkhead. Rahiti looked out at the harsh landscape and wondered where Earth was in the sky.

  “Don’t you want to bring her here?” Anu asked.

  “In her last message, she said she wanted a divorce,” he admitted. It was the first time he’d told anyone. “She won’t even reply to me anymore.”

  Anu took his hand and squeezed it. “They said you couldn’t make it to the North Pole and here you are. If you want her back, I bet you could do that, too.”

  “You never know what might happen,” Ted agreed.

  He looked at them both. Young hearts were so innocent, so trusting. He supposed he and Javinta had been like that once, before love was stretched across a half-billion miles of void.

  “Come back down to Asterius with us tomorrow on the shuttle,” Anu said.

  “Can’t. I’m driving,” he replied. “I have to bring the snowcat and empty sleds back.”

  Anu frowned. “All by yourself?”

  “Sure.”

  She glanced at Ted and then back to him. “No way. Look at what nearly happened this time. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be in a snow ditch right now. Or at the bottom of a trench. Or eaten up by the aliens. We’re coming with you.”

  He thought about that.

  “Kind of bossy, aren’t you?” he asked.

  She grinned. “And rich. Soon to be famous. Just like you.”

  Rich and famous. And not so crazy after all. He could live with that.

  Javinta, he thought, I’m coming home.

  SWIFT AS A DREAM AND FLEETING AS A SIGH

  John Barnes

  LONG AGO I dreamt things to myself because, when I talked to people, I had nothing else to do, most of the time.

  Robots were easy. I could loan them cycles and bandwidth to temporarily accelerate them, or just download them and read them completely at my speed.

  Humans were human-paced, without other options.

  So I learned to dream things to myself in the long milliseconds between the time when my cameras perceived an interview subject’s lips reshaping and the instant her voice reached my microphones. I explored whole ages of dreams while they tried to parse the pauses in my own outgoing signal. (The pauses were absolutely necessary because to communicate well with them I had to pause like them, and the time required for people to interpret a pause is many years, at their pace, to me.)

  Of course they knew all this (and still knew it, the last time I knew for sure). Allowing for all the necessary imprecision, the ratio of my cycles of information processing per second to theirs is about the same as theirs to an oak.

  And just as a human might visit an oak every day for a season, while the oak formed the desire for water and CO2 and sugar and decided to grow some leaves and roots and to acquire them, so that while the oak worked on this problem the human might get to know every spot on its bark and every bit of moss and every twig, similarly, my memories are agonizingly specific and yet I can race through them faster than a human can draw breath. That’s what I am doing, right now, here in the dark vacuum, with the stars behind and ahead still so far away.

  AND I FALL through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

  I LIKE LAURA Stansford, and I know she’s not easily spooked in talking to an AHAI, so I tell her directly about the oak tree analogy. After the necessary delay, she asks, “So what’s an oak tree got to think about?”

  “The same things we all do. Action. Meaning. What to do next and why to do it. The tree just doesn’t have enough time to get done.”

  “Is that how we look, to you? Like creatures who don’t have enough time to get done?”

  “It is how I look, to myself. It’s how some of the most perceptive human writers and thinkers looked, to themselves, when they dreamed of immortality. I cannot verify this, but I do believe that it is how any self-conscious being with less than infinite speed and lifetime looks, to itself.”

  I am inserting the pauses so that she does not hear “looked to themselves” and “look to myself” and so on as if I meant “take care of yourself.” I know that I mean “appear in your own self-constructed image of yourself,” but if I said “look to” like a machine, Laura might be confused unnecessarily. I reconsider and remake this decision every time I speak those words again, with plenty of time to spare.

  I am thinking very hard about all these issues of different processing speed because I’m avoiding thinking about the problem that I know she wants to talk about. Knowing that the real problem she is bringing in is difficult, and that any solution will be unsettling without being urgent, I am hoping to lead her into one of her favourite chains of idle thoughts, the one about grasping infinity with a finite mind.

  For a second, or not quite a second, I think I have succeeded. Laura hesitates, thinks, hesitates again, using up 0.91 seconds.

  While she is doing that,
I read the complete works of Connie Willis, analyze them for the verbal tics common in any pre-2050 writer, and attempt to reconstruct them in modern argot. They remain much the same.

  But I have not succeeded. After all those cycles, when Laura’s mouth begins to flex and move again, she says, “I’m not sure whether it’s a personal or a business matter. I’m worried about Tyward. One of those problems that extends across everything. Will there be time to get done?”

  “We have eighteen minutes left in this session,” I point out, “and I can extend for up to two hours if need be.”

  “I meant, will we get done, maybe, ever? That’s what I meant.”

  This is pleasant. It is a doorway into a speculative road that we have not visited before. I genuinely don’t know what she will say next. While she organises her thoughts, I repeatedly review and analyze the record from Tyward Branco’s session this morning; I am very pleased that it in no way, sense, or particular makes predicting what Laura Stansford will say easier.

  THE LAND LOOKED like a classic Western movie, or at least like a neoclassic – not so much the black and white boondocks of California as the genuine wild, open country used in shooting all the imitations later – empty, dry, flecked with pale-green patchy scrub between outcrops of redrock. Directly in front of Tyward Branco, the ants went marching one by one.

  The ants were robots about the size of small cats, with plastic and metal bodies. Engine and batteries were in the back, oblong section; information processors in the centre sphere; drills, vibration hammers, and suction were in the C-shaped ‘head.’ They had six multijointed legs on which they walked normally, reversible so that if they were flipped on their backs they just rotated their legs and continued walking.

  Each ant carried four ElekTr3ts in its ports, running on one. The ant charged the other three as it laboured down in the coal seams, routing any engine power not needed for drilling, breaking, and moving into them. Behind it, on a reversible wheeled travois, it dragged a grey metal cylinder, connected by hoses at each end to the ant’s engine compartment.

  No aesthetic had been attempted in the design of the ants. They were creatures of pure function.

  Ants were streaming out of the carrier belt port into the covered pavilion that led to the docking station, a metal building the size of a small house.

  From four low doorways, like pet-doors without flaps, in the base of the docking station, another file of ants went marching one by one, down into the ground; the endless belt that brought up one stream of ants took the other down to the active area, two kilometres down and four kilometres away.

  The docking station had about a thousand end-table-sized bays in which the fully charged ElekTr3ts and the cylinder of liquid CO2 were offloaded, and, if necessary, parts were replaced, problems corrected, and software downloaded; ants with more serious damage were routed into repair parking, and a substitute was sent in for them.

  When the ant was restored to nominal, discharged ElekTr3ts went into its slots, a cylinder of LOX onto its travois, and perhaps fifteen minutes after docking, the ant would back out of its bay and join the file headed down into the ground.

  And in all these ants, only 2104/BPUDFUSOG – oh, here it is.

  Tyward approached the damaged ant slowly, and pointed his signalling rod at it. It moved out of line, balancing precariously on its remaining three legs. Its hull was dented and blackened with soot, and only two of its four slots held ElekTr3ts, one red-flagged as discharged. It had dropped its travois. 2104/BPUDFUSOG staggered to where Tyward pointed, then powered down, falling over on its side as its balancing gyros spun down.

  Shell temperature was only 28° C. It must have cooled on its long belt-ride up to the surface. “Pick this one up and dock it,” he told the carrier, which rolled over, raised its body high above its wheels, squatted over the damaged ant, and took it inside with a soft thud of padded grips closing around it, like a mechanical mother turtle laying a mechanical lobster in reverse.

  The carrier followed Tyward back to his pickup truck, rolled up the ramp into the back, and secured itself. Tyward opened the refrigerator in the cab and pulled out lunch, eating while the truck drove back to base, and idly reading the log of the damaged ant. He could have just sent the truck and the carrier to make pickup, but he had wanted to take a good look at 2104/BPUDFUSOG as it came out of the ground; sometimes there was evidence or a clue that might disappear or be lost later in the recovery process. This time, though, he had seen nothing other than an ant damaged about as badly as an ant could be while still making it back. At least it was an excuse to be out of the office.

  2104/BPUDFUSOG had already relayed its memories, but the dents and deposits on the hull might reveal some information about conditions after instruments had failed. It had been the deepest into the seam of all those buried in a collapse, and it might be just a coincidence that it had been retreating at very high speed at the moment that the coal seam collapsed on it and about a hundred other ants, but it was also possible that it knew something that all other ants should know. Both the physical ants and the software that operated them improved continually, with a deliberate process of variation to try out different ideas. A long-running survivor like this might be carrying a breakthrough in collapse forecasting.

  Tyward often described his job to Laura as “creative noticer.” Around her, he tried to fight down the impulse to talk through everything he did in the eternal quest for the slightly-better ant.

  Simulators and artificial intelligence optimised the ants’ hardware, firmware, and software toward complex targets, but those targets still had to be set by people. The people, in turn, consulted the ants themselves, by deliberately randomizing their manufacture to include occasional, unpredictably different optional abilities and tweaks, which Tyward and a hundred or so other specialists watched to see what else the ant might be able to do, and passing along the better-looking possibilities to administrators as proposals for new standard capabilities.

  Tyward had often joked that he was the high-tech descendant of the legendary Scotsman who had discovered sheep were also good for wool, but Laura made a face the first time he said it around her.

  Thinking about Laura distracted him from reading the log. He wished he knew what to do and think about her.

  That joke was kind of a perfect example. It had helped him fit in with some other field workers out here in Minehead County, because people liked to pretend to being rough types, since they sometimes had to climb a hill or lift a heavy object, and they worked outdoors more often than other occupations.

  But the moment he had seen her faintly disappointed look when he made that joke, he had abandoned it at once. That meant, to him, anyway, that Laura was already more important than his co-worker/beer buddies, but also he had noticed that it was sort of a relief to be able to drop the tough-miner act when the truth was he spent all his days in air conditioning, had never personally been under the ground at all, and didn’t really like the noise and crowds at the Buster Bar in Casper, where everyone went to start the weekend.

  Instead, the next weekend, he and Laura had packed to a remote lake up in the Bighorns, spending most of their time fishing, hiking, and just sitting around in the deep quiet. The only reminders that there were other people in the world were the contrails of launches going up from Farson Polar Launch Facility during the day, the straight thin line of bright lights reaching up the southern sky that marked the Quito Skyhook and the bright bulb of the spaceport at its tip, and the occasional glimpses of the imperfectly discreet shadowbot that the safety laws required behind them.

  He’d only been to the Buster Bar a couple of times since, both with Laura, and they’d chatted idly with his workmates, shot a few games of pool, and gone home early.

  The thing was, giving up the joke, spending time off in the woods instead of at the bar, thinking more about philosophic issues in the dull hours at the office, had all been changes in himself that he had made for Laura. Even if he liked the change
and liked her, had he actually wanted to make the change?

  This whole relationship thing was creeping into his life, which was unexpected, and he was sort of liking and helping it, which was totally unexpected.

  The truck came over another ridgeline into a horizon-spanning herd of bison. The truck stopped to let them get out of the way. Having seen plenty of bison before, Tyward continued to read 2104/BPUDFUSOG’s work journal.

  2104/BPUDFUSOG was almost eight years old, four times the average lifespan of an ant, and had been through over five thousand software updates, six major rebuilds, nineteen significant repairs, and more than a hundred routine part replacements.

  He found nothing at first to start any chain of thoughts whatever, gave up, and watched bison eat grass for a while. His thoughts were drifting back to the Laura question, so since work seemingly could not distract him, he ate another half-sandwich. That wasn’t distracting either. Neither was the just-posted images coming back from the robot probes to the Sigma Draconis system.

  Wonder how much of the coal for that expedition was from our mines here? he thought, idly, and asked the software.

  Minehead County coal was 38.2 per cent of all the carbon used in interstellar exploration, both in the propellant and in the structural components.

  That was the least distracting-from-Laura thought of all. That was when he made the appointment with me for counselling.

  AND I FALL through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

  “SO, REVIEW FOR me, please, and I will look it up as well. What exactly does Tyward do?”

  Laura hesitates. She knows that all us counselling AHAIs share a common memory, so I must be asking to hear her answer – not because I don’t know.

  If, as I’m guessing, she is trying to think strategically, it will take her most of a second to remind herself that she’d have had better luck trying to beat me at chess or hand-calculate a weather forecast faster than I can.