Analog SFF, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "So they don't like hydrogen sulfide any better than we do?"

  "They tolerate it better than we do, but I think they need more oxygen than they're getting out here in the open. Which probably explains why they spend most of their time under the ice where the algae generate most of their oxygen. That would also keep them away from the vents and fissures that put out most of the hydrogen sulfide."

  Liz looked down at the remaining specimens in the stainless-steel tray. “So these worms would ultimately have died."

  "Unless they could have tunneled their way back under the ice sheet. The crust is filled with tunnels, old lava tubes and cracks in the basalt. That's what makes it so brittle. My guess is that the worms tunnel around a lot."

  "So you think they would have tunneled back under the ice?"

  "Some of them might have. But they're just worms. Engineered worms, maybe. But still just worms. They, uh—” His voice suddenly halted.

  "They, uh—what?” she asked.

  He stared at her, blinked, then abruptly turned toward the cabinets at the rear of the igloo. “Food packs,” he said. “We're going to need extra food packs."

  "What are you talking about?"

  He grabbed her arm, dragging her toward the cabinets. “We have to go,” he said. “We've have to get out of here."

  "But where?” she asked. “Where are we going?"

  "Where the worms go,” he said. His eyes were bright with excitement as he pulled food packs out of the cabinets. “We're going to tunnel under the ice. We're going to follow the worms back to the source of their oxygen."

  * * * *

  Liz and Tobias spent nearly an hour exploring the small streams that flowed out from under the ice sheet before they found an ice cave large enough to crawl into. They waded back nearly a quarter mile, crawling through several submerged sections of tunnel, before they reached a large cavern. The cavern surrounded a pool of cold, clear water that had formed in a depression where the ice had gouged out the underlying rock.

  "This is as far as we go,” Tobias said. He turned slowly, shining his shoulder lights around the interior of the cavern. The concave ceiling gleamed like translucent green glass, as smooth as if it had been polished. Water seeped out from under the ice on the far side of the cavern, but there was no opening through which they could continue.

  "So, what happens now?” Liz asked.

  Tobias shrugged, thought for a moment, then abruptly snapped open his faceplate and sucked in a deep breath.

  "Wait!” she cried. “We need to check the hydrogen sulfide levels.” She peered down at her mission assistant.

  Tobias held his breath for a few seconds, then exhaled with a relieved smile. “I don't think it makes much difference at this point. We're almost out of oxygen as it is.” He sucked in another long breath, this time through his nose, sniffing as he inhaled.

  "Can you smell it?” Liz asked.

  He nodded. “Rotten eggs.” He took a couple more quick sniffs. “But not too bad."

  "Is that a scientific assessment?"

  "The nose knows,” he said, tapping the side of his nose. He glanced down at his own mission assistant. “Forty parts per million. Not exactly what you'd like, but we can survive."

  * * * *

  Unfortunately, Liz's sense of relief quickly dissipated when she discovered that she couldn't raise the Arrow on her mission assistant.

  "There's too much interference,” she said. “My assistant doesn't have enough power to reach the ship."

  "Give it some time,” Tobias said. “These ion storms never last."

  "But what if it does?” she asked. “What if they decide we're dead?"

  "Regardless, they'll come looking for our bodies,” Tobias said. “We'll reach them once they're on the surface."

  "But what if they don't?” she said. “What if they just write us off."

  Tobias's brow tightened as he considered the possibility. He thought for a moment, then gave his head a sudden shake. “No,” he said, dismissing the idea. “Not even Cantrell would do something like that."

  Exhausted by their long trudge from the igloo, Liz and Tobias turned off their lights to conserve their batteries and settled back against the wall of the cave to rest. Liz wasn't sure how long she had been sitting in the darkness when she noticed a soft blue glow in the water just beyond her feet. As she watched, a bundle of worms rose slowly toward the surface. Waves of pastel blue and green slid across its surface in a constantly changing pattern as the worms themselves glided over and under each other, their translucent wings shimmering in the pale light.

  "It's amazing how the pattern flows so smoothly from one worm to the next,” she whispered. “Do you think they're actually communicating with each other?"

  "I'm sure they're communicating,” Tobias said. “Even insects communicate. The question is why? To what purpose?"

  Within a few minutes, half-a-dozen other bundles had risen to the surface. Their light was bright enough that Liz could make out Tobias sitting next to her.

  "I wonder why these bundles are so much larger than those we saw earlier,” she said. “They're even larger than the ones I saw in the pools beside the fissure."

  "Those worms washed down from under the ice,” he said. “You may not have seen a representative sample. I wish I had my equipment. I'd like to see if there's some correlation between the introns in the separate bundles."

  "Maybe all the worms in the same bundle have the same introns,” Liz suggested. “Maybe that's what draws them together."

  "Maybe. Or maybe they all have different introns—if they have to cross-pollinate in some way."

  "But you have no idea why their introns are so different from ours?"

  He shook his head. “They probably contain some kind of information, but what it is, I have no idea."

  "Information. . . ?” she said.

  "That's really all our genes are,” he said. “A storage system for information that can be read each time our cells divide."

  "I guess I never thought of it like that. When I was gathering the worms, I just grabbed the ones I could reach. Like you said, maybe they weren't representative. Maybe that's why the bundles rejected them."

  "Say that again,” he said.

  "Say what?"

  "How you just gathered the ones you could reach."

  "I just gathered the ones I could reach,” she repeated. “Maybe they weren't representative."

  "Again,” he said.

  She repeated the phrase several more times, but rather than listening to her, Tobias’ attention was focused on the bundles of worms in front of them.

  "That bundle right there,” he said, pointing at the nearest bundle. “Keep repeating the same phrase and watch how the waves of light move across its surface."

  She repeated the phrase again, watching the colors flow from one worm to the next. As the wave moved, it shifted from green to yellow to blue, reversing direction in time with her words.

  "That's what I saw down in the fissure,” she said. The colors appeared to deepen with the rising excitement in her voice. “They're responding to what I'm saying, aren't they? They're mimicking the cadence of my voice."

  "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it,” Tobias said. “But you're right. That's exactly what they're doing."

  Over the next two days, Liz repeatedly tried to raise the ship to no avail.

  "Anybody, we're still alive,” she kept repeating into her mission assistant. “If you can hear me, please answer. We're under the ice. Anybody, please . . ."

  "It'll be all right,” Tobias reassured her. “We'll get through."

  "But the mining ships should be here by now,” she said. “What if they. . . ?"

  She couldn't bring herself to say, “What if they start cutting away the core while we're still here?” But she could see from the worried expression in Tobias's eyes that he knew exactly what she was thinking.

  * * * *

  In between her attempts to contact th
e ship, Liz tried to focus her attention on the worms.

  "They have to be intelligent,” she said. “I mean look at the way they're responding to our voices."

  Tobias’ features were lined in shadow as he peered into the pale blue glow emanating from the water. “I don't know,” he said, shaking his head. “What we're seeing could be nothing more than an artifact of the way we're interacting with them."

  "But they're responding to our voices,” she said.

  "True,” he said. “But computers respond to external stimuli. We can program them to tell us when the air quality is failing, when the temperature is rising . . . all sorts of things. They can even do it with a voice that sounds human. That makes it easy to think of them as intelligent. But what appears as intelligence is really just an artifact of how we've programmed them."

  Liz climbed to her feet, peering down into the water beside Tobias. Despite his reservations, she couldn't help feeling that the bundles—or colonies, as she'd come to think of them—were self-aware. She'd even assigned some of them names. She called the largest bundle Glimmer, because it seemed to glimmer with intelligence when it responded to her voice. The one she called Neon, on the other hand, seemed to become increasingly excited the longer she spoke to it, flashing more and more erratically, while Limelight seemed simply to enjoy flashing long displays that appeared to be more in response to its own feelings than anything she was saying.

  She also noticed that the bundles seemed to talk to each other, as though the patterns of light were a language that they used to communicate among themselves.

  "I'll admit their behavior looks intelligent,” Tobias conceded. “But the worms I dissected back in the igloo simply didn't have the large nerve bundles you'd expect with higher intelligence."

  "Maybe it isn't the worms themselves that are intelligent,” she said. “Maybe it's the colonies. Maybe the individual worms are more like the neurons in our brains. They don't retain much knowledge themselves, but as groups they form the patterns we associate with intelligence and self-awareness."

  "It's a possibility,” he said. “But if we assume the colonies are like human brains, we have to ask how they maintain their intelligence over time."

  "Over time?"

  Tobias knelt, studying a group of worms clustered in front of him. “Unlike the neurons in our brains, the worms in any given bundle come and go. They aren't always the same worms. With the way the bundles shrink and grow, they may actually be composed of entirely different worms from one day to the next—even though they seem to maintain the personalities you've identified."

  Liz frowned. Not only was Tobias right, she'd also noticed that when the colonies shrank past a certain point, they lost their personalities completely. That, she now realized, had been the problem with the worms she'd brought back to the igloo. They hadn't formed colonies large enough to respond to anything in their environment, much less her voice.

  "So,” Tobias continued, “if the unique personalities disappear entirely when the worms scatter, what's the thing we're really interacting with? Especially, what is it if it comes back into existence with an entirely different mix of worms supporting it?"

  Liz's brow tightened. “I'm not sure what you're getting at."

  "Personality,” he explained. “Identity. It shouldn't exist independently of the physical entity that supports it. My identity is an emergent property of the impulses moving along my neurons. It doesn't exist in some mind-space off on its own. But with the worms, it looks like it does. So the question is, what is the thing we're talking to? Where does it go if an entirely different group of worms can call it back again?"

  Liz started to speak, then looked off across the water. She didn't have an answer to Tobias's question. In fact, she wasn't sure she even understood it.

  * * * *

  In between her conversations with Tobias about the worms, Liz continued trying to raise the Arrow.

  "Anyone, if you can hear me, please answer. We're alive down here. We need a shuttle.” As she repeated the same message over and over, she could hear the growing desperation in her voice, but she could do nothing to control it. “Please . . .” she pleaded. “Please, don't leave us here . . ."

  She had all but given up hope, convinced that the mining ships were going to begin cutting away the core at any moment, when a voice finally broke through the static.

  "This is the Arrow . . . Can you hear us?"

  "We hear you!” she shouted back. “We're under the ice. Don't leave us here! Please, don't leave us!"

  "We hear you,” the voice called back. “We know you're there."

  "I don't believe it,” Tobias said, coming to listen in over her shoulder.

  "Don't give up. . . .” the voice called. “The ships are on the way."

  As it turned out, however, the ships were still forty-eight hours away. When Cantrell thought Liz and Tobias were dead, he'd ordered the ships to reduce speed—to save on fuel expense—which meant that Liz and Tobias would be trapped under the ice for another two days.

  "Why doesn't that surprise me?” Tobias said after they'd broken off contact. He frowned, shaking his head. “That man would sell his . . .” He paused, looking at Liz, who was kneeling beside the pool. “What are you doing?"

  "Look at the way the colonies are all crowding toward our side of the pool,” she said, glancing back at him over her shoulder. “It's almost like they realize we're getting ready to leave, like they don't want us to go."

  Tobias sighed. “I don't know. That's pretty hard to swallow."

  "But look at the colors,” she said. “They're so pale, so sad.” Especially Glimmer, she thought, who had worked his way toward the front of the group.

  Tobias grimaced. “Maybe they're a little paler . . .” he began, then his brow tightened and he leaned forward, studying the patterns of light sliding across the Glimmer's surface. “Keep talking. I want to record this."

  As Liz spoke, he held out his forearm, using the analog interface built into his mission assistant to record both her voice and Glimmer's responses.

  "What are you looking for?” she asked.

  Tobias grimaced. “I'm not sure, but I think Glimmer's mimicking more than just the cadence of your voice. It's almost like he's capturing the shape of the individual words. With the colors, I mean. It's like he's giving us back a visual analog of the sound."

  As Liz continued to talk, she saw that all the bundles were now mimicking her voice. All, that is, except Glimmer, who had stopped mimicking her and was now repeating back a distinct pattern of his own.

  "Do you think he's trying to tell us something?” she asked.

  Tobias shook his head. “I don't know, but there's definitely a correlation between the patterns of light and specific words . . . like he's repeating back something he heard earlier."

  They watched the waves moving across the screen on Tobias's mission assistant as he continued to record more data.

  "There, I think we've got it,” he said.

  He pressed a virtual button at the bottom of his screen, instructing the program to play back the results of its correlation. The voice that came from the assistant's speaker was flat, a monotone without emotion or intonation, but there was no mistaking the words.

  "Don't leave us . . .” the voice droned. “Please, don't leave us . . ."

  Liz blinked, glancing up at Tobias. “That's what I kept saying when I was trying to reach the Arrow. You don't think. . . ?"

  "I don't know . . .” Tobias looked from his assistant to the worms and back again. “They've been watching us for nearly two days. I suppose they could have realized you were trying to reach someone."

  "That's it,” Liz said excitedly. “The return call from the Arrow—that would have confirmed what I was saying, what the words meant."

  Tobias sucked in a breath. “I guess they could have picked out a phrase or two, maybe figured out . . .” He shook his head, struggling to come to terms with the idea.

  As they listened,
the monotone emanating from Tobias's assistant began to modulate. Additional waves joined the first single line undulating across the screen. Liz realized she was hearing multiple voices, but it wasn't until she looked up and saw the same pattern of light flowing across all the bundles in the cavern that she realized all the worms were now broadcasting exactly the same message.

  "Don't leave us . . .” the combined voices repeated. “Please, don't leave us . . ."

  "I'm so relieved to see that you're all right,” Advocate Lassiter said when he met Liz in the Arrow's shuttle bay. He scurried up to her, his purple robe swirling around his oversized belly. “You gave us quite a scare, young lady.” He thrust a pudgy arm around her shoulder. “Quite a scare, indeed."

  "Cost us a shuttle, is what she did,” Superintendent Cantrell grumbled. He scratched the whiskers bristling from his chin. “It's beyond me why you and that quack doctor had to go mucking around with all those worms in the first place."

  "Yes, but that's all behind us now, isn't it?” Advocate Lassiter said. He smiled brightly, turning Liz toward the exit. “Now the superintendent can get on with the business of mining, and we can get you back to the Fleet where you belong."

  "Actually, we can't,” Liz said. “Not just yet."

  "What do you mean, not just yet?” Superintendent Cantrell said. He squinted suspiciously down at her.

  Liz smiled—rather pleasantly, she thought. Then she turned, gesturing toward the ramp that led down from the shuttle's cargo bay, where, at that moment, Tobias just happened to be wheeling out a large transparent tank with Glimmer inside.

  * * * *

  "Intelligent worms?” Cantrell snorted. “You've got to be kidding me."

  They were again seated in the conference room, where Liz had just demonstrated Glimmer's responses to her spoken words. The worms that composed his bundle were now swimming freely in the large transparent tank sitting just beyond the far end of the table.