by Ken MacLeod
The other five fighters hung in space alongside him. He was aware of their precise locations even before he turned his head towards them. It was an odd sensation, like the subliminal sonic cues supposedly perceptible to the blind. He guessed it had to be radar. The others looked as he presumed he did himself: humanoid, featureless, black; lithe robots each exactly fifty centimetres tall and with a mass of ten kilograms. There was nothing to distinguish one from the other—no markings, not even nameplates on foreheads—but by, he presumed, some trick of the frames’ software below conscious awareness, Carlos could tell his companions apart as readily as if they had faces.
Now that he thought about faces…
He had a moment of panic at the absence of any hint of mouth or nostrils in the blank, black, glassy faceplates. It was the same claustrophobia that had overcome him the first time the space robot simulator’s shell had clicked shut. Relief came as quickly as it had then, and more smoothly. He discovered no impulse to breathe—rather, he felt as if he’d just taken a deep breath of oxygen-rich air and had no need to breathe out. That recognition came with another. He could smell the background tang of hydrogen, the organic whiff of carbon composites, the sharp scent of steel: spectroscopy experienced as odour.
Like the others, he looked down at himself, rolling in microgravity, bending his torso, flexing his limbs and digits. His arms and hands in front of him looked as if made of obsidian. His body image hadn’t changed except for his size, which at that moment didn’t trouble him. The somatic sensation was of being inside a close-fitting, comfortable spacesuit. The simulator robot-suit had come to feel like an extension of himself as he’d got used to it, by a well-understood illusion already familiar to him from his drone-operating days. This was the same, but real. Pressing a finger of one hand to the palm of another, he felt the touch but saw no dent in the skin.
Now another new sense came into play, again experienced as a familiar, unreliable sensation: the feeling of being watched. Something or someone was pinging him. Carlos concentrated. The feeling faded. A message like a fragment of inner monologue took its place:
He tried to sub-vocalise. Carlos Carlos Carlos. Fuck, how do I do this? No, mean
He found himself responding: <?>
To which a reply came:
Carlos replied:
Then he felt as if he’d blinked, and shaken his head.
How the fuck had he done that?
A cable spooled from a hatchway next to the launch catapults towards the floating fighters. One by one they grabbed it. When the last had done so they were reeled in.
Carlos swung his feet to the floor, and his companions followed suit. Magnetic soles clicked to the deck. Standing upright brought relief and orientation. They all stood, swaying slightly. The catapults were a metre high, the scooters mounted on them four metres long, and loomed huge.
“Everyone OK?” he said. It was just like speaking over the radio inside a helmet. He knew it wasn’t. He could feel his own lips, tongue and teeth, and the movement of his jaw, but no breath.
Mumbles came back, some querulous, others euphoric.
“That’s not good enough,” Carlos said. “Report in one by one: Beauregard!”
“Here!”
“Karzan!”
“Here!”
“Chun!”
“Here!”
“Rizzi!”
“Here, skip.”
“Zeroual!”
“Here!”
The voices were distinct and recognisable. Good. About to ask if anyone was freaking out, he decided not to tempt fate. Better to reassure, and keep things positive.
“OK,” he said. “We’re undoubtedly in a bizarre situation, but we’ve all been told to expect it, we’ve all prepared for it and we’ve all trained for it. We’ll get used to it. Now, I’m going to repeat the roll-call in that radio thing, and see if we can all handle that. OK?”
“Sorry, skip,” said Chun. “What radio thing?”
They all responded, with more or less hesitation. Carlos repeated the roll-call until they were fluent.
“This is how whoever or whatever is in charge here communicates with us,” he said.
“I think they’ve all got it, skip,” said Beauregard.
Another ping, then:
Lurching, they picked their way across the deck to flimsy- looking ladders at the foot of the catapults. As he plodded stickily towards the rim of space, Carlos saw directly before him the scale of the planet and his distance from it, and had a momentary feeling of absurdity. Here he was, a robot less than twenty inches tall. His new clarity of mind cut in with a wry question: facing that enormity and complexity in front of him, and the infinity in all directions around him, would standing four times taller make him feel any more significant?
Irrationally, he knew, it would.
Carlos placed one foot on the first rung, tugged the other foot off the floor and used his hands on the subsequent rungs. He rolled at the top and moved hand over hand along a guideline to a recess in the midsection, about his own size and shape, that was more socket than cockpit. He eased his frame prone into the tobogganing position that the arrangement of grips, footrests, and headrest implicitly invited.
The posture was already familiar from the amusement hall scooter simulator. What happened next was not. He was plugged in, literally. He had a feeling of power, literally. Everything clicked into place, metaphorically. Carlos could feel the connections between his frame and the machine, switches closing one by one, power surges, system checks, instrument readings becoming sense impressions, gas jets or rocket firings muscle impulses, maths intuitive. He hadn’t felt this engaged with a machine since he’d had the spike in his head.
The catapults shot them all into space like spat pips.
They fell away from the station, too fascinated by what was in front of them to look back. The superhabitable exoplanet SH-0 hung before them in full view, three-quarters in cloud-turbulent day, a quarter in volcano-pricked night. The exoplanet weighed in at four Earth masses. In gaps between the clouds on the visual spectrum, and through them in other wavelengths, Carlos saw a fractured jigsaw of minor and major continents strewn across a ragged lace of oceans and seas, gulfs and sounds. Each landmass had its own signature combination of desert and forest, plain and range. A deeper gaze brought out the underlying crazy paving of numerous continental plates. Their regions of collision and separation, and the zones of subduction and spreading, glowed on the far infrared like a complex, twisted mesh of hot wires.
It was a view Carlos felt he could fall into. On his present trajectory, he would. With a convulsive wrench of attention and a brief burn of the jets, he brought himself to a halt relative to the station. The others had the same response, with a few tenths-of-a-second’s delay.
Forward thrust was still like a downward press, retro still a forward shove, attitude still twists and turns of the head and torso. After days riding the simulators the manoeuvres were all reflex to the fighters. With a deft dance of jets, they countered their outward motion and turned around 180 degrees to take up close formation a thousand metres from the station. Looking back at it now for the first time, Carlos found it almost as fascinating a sight as the planet had been a moment earlier.
The station was, as far as he knew, the centre, the focus and origin of all the human-derived machinery in the system. Somewhere in it, or perhaps distributed throughout, must be the Direction’s AI: the local relay of Earth’s government. With no meaningful communication possible across twenty
-five light years, it had to be autonomous, implementing decisions made centuries earlier by or on behalf of some representative assembly of humanity, gathered on the shore of Manhattan island. Despite all wary doubt, the thought struck awe.
Not quite as awe-inspiring, but almost as remarkable, was the extent to which the Direction’s functions were outsourced. The station was a city in its own right, a Manhattan without people but buzzing with commerce.
In a stable orbital position around SH-0, the structure was a rough torus about a thousand metres in diameter, sprouting offshoots in all directions. Irregular, jointed, modular, bristling with aerials and sensors and solar panels, it looked like a something a monstrous bird had woven from twisted thorny twigs, interlaced with bits of broken branches, and decorated with shiny scraps of foil and chips of broken glass.
Which probably wasn’t far from the truth. From what Carlos (flawlessly, now) recalled from discussions and speculations about starwisp interstellar settlement mission profiles, the first steps on arrival were to snuggle close to any suitably rich array of resources, and cannibalise what was left of the probe and its shields into swarms of smaller machines all the way down to nanobots. These would bootstrap asteroid and cometary material into construction machines to extract and deliver resources to larger constructions such as this. The whole process could be done without awakening or evoking any intelligence more advanced than an ants’ nest. That the outcome looked instinctual seemed apt. Around the torus and on it, likewise insectile-small spacecraft—some moving, others tethered—hung or clung as if drawn to its warmth.
Like the planet and moons, the station made sense to his augmented sight, each part tagged with company logos and drawing its own train of meaning. As he scanned the tangled mass Carlos descried, with an eerie analogue of a shiver, the small rugged module within which ran—on computations still beyond his comprehension—the simulation he’d lived in for the past weeks. Like several adjacent structures, including the hangar portal from which he’d just emerged, the module displayed the company logo of Locke Provisos: a stylised portrayal of the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. The module had its own cluster of fuel tanks and fusion pods and battery of instruments and thrusters, and was therefore presumably capable of independent manoeuvring if it were to sever its connections to the rest of the station.
According to the specs, which Carlos could call up at will, it also had machinery to process external resources and build more machinery to… etc. The specs went on and on, in a dizzying downward proliferation. If necessary the module could become a settlement mission in its own right. That module was one of hundreds like it, among thousands unlike it. He could see what Nicole had meant by massive redundancy. If the station came under threat of asteroid collision, exosolar flare, other astrophysical catastrophe or (unthinkable as it might be) attack, one possible and obvious response would be to scatter its components as widely as possible. Some at least of the multiple copies of the stored settlers, and no doubt of much else in the mission’s software and hardware, would survive anything short of a nearby gamma-ray burst.
A brief burn accelerated them to ten metres per second. They free-fell towards the torus, correcting marginally for the few metres of rotation its leisurely spin had taken their goal in the meantime.
<“Enough and as good left over,”> replied Beauregard, to Carlos’s surprise at his erudition.
Beauregard’s bark of laughter came through on the voice channel. “Ha! One for over a beer in the Touch, I reckon.”
“If you’re buying,” said Rizzi.
Carlos left part of his mind to process the banter, and with the rest made better use of the long seconds to survey his wider surroundings. He swung his sight this way and that, adjusting contrast and wavelength, taking things in. The bulk of the Galaxy was over his left shoulder. No constellations were familiar—not that he’d ever been much of a sky-watcher anyway—but the more prominent stars came with names or code numbers. He could even identify with their aid Earth’s own Sun, a tiny labelled dot in a spray-burst stipple of stars. Earth itself, of course, was completely beyond resolution even for the most augmented sight. But the thought that it was there right now, twenty-five light years away in real space, brought a strange pang of reassurance and homesickness.
The ringed terrestrial exoplanet H-0—whose terraformed future version they’d ostensibly inhabited in the sim—was in reality just under a hundred million kilometres away, and as easily visible as Earth was not. It too was a strange and disorienting thing to look at: Carlos found his mind flicking back and forth between that minute disk bisected by the barely visible line of the edge-on ring, and his memories of being in the sim and looking up at the sky—including looking up in the night and seeing the very region of sky in which he now really was. At some incorrigible level of the mind, it was impossible not to imagine that he had been looking up at here from there: from the actual surface of the actual H-0. But of course he hadn’t. He’d been a flicker of electronic data inside a much closer object, the Locke Provisos module of the station. The thought made him slightly dizzy. He turned his attention sharply back to his surroundings.
By far the most prominent object, apart from the exosun and the nearby SH-0, was the far off gas giant G-0. Several times the mass of Jupiter, and with a higher albedo, it blazed to his left. Its ring system was just visible to the naked eye from H-0, at least in the sim. From here and with enhanced vision even the rings’ divisions and the giant planet’s shadow on them could be distinguished. Along the same plane lay a glitter of moons: the numbers attached to G ran into hundreds.
The station occluded more and more of his view. The narrow horizontal black rectangle gaped. By now the manoeuvre was routine and almost automatic: push hands out in front to decelerate, roll as if in a mid-air somersault to go feet first, push again, gentle on the soles to counter that…
Grapples like sea anemone tentacles caught him and did the rest. All the others made it back, with one minor misjudgement or other to correct. Karzan’s scooter scraped its landing gear on the docking port.
Spidery robots hurried up, bearing long tubes. They swarmed over the scooters, mounting the tubes to the mid-sections. Carlos sensed new powers slotting into place. The catapults were swivelling, their aim shifting.
Everyone laughed. Carlos knew how Rizzi felt. He felt it himself, a slight disappointment and frustration that they weren’t going back right away. He didn’t want to let the feeling grow.
he said.
The robot spiders scuttled away. The catapults stopped moving, then hurled the team into space—not like pips this time, but like bullets. From the surface nearby a tug sprang after them, to match velocity and trajectory with a rapid-fire rattle of course corrections. It extended robotic arms to the scooters and swept them to its side, holding them close. Another boost took the tug and them into the
long free-fall topple of a transfer orbit. Behind them the station dwindled. Ahead, SH-17 loomed.
As if it had overheard, the tug picked that moment to relay a message to them all:
Carlos had no time to complete his query.
Sleep mode was not like sleep. If he’d had eyes, it would have been a blink.
He came out of that momentary flicker of darkness in close orbit around SH-17.
The scooters dropped away from the tug. The pocked surface hurtled towards them and past them. Carlos felt the twitch of an impulse to push, to twist, but nothing happened. Or, rather, it all happened without him. The scooter was making its own decisions. He was just along for the ride. It was as terrifying as being a pillion passenger on a stunt motorbike—though perhaps less so, he thought, than making the decisions and performing the stunts himself. His input channels rang with the voices and messages of his comrades making the same discovery, with more or less acceptance.
