I shrugged. Karen told him, “It's five hundred and fifty million years old. So if it isn't from outer space, then it's from someplace even weirder.”
He stared, mouth hanging open.
“Well?” I asked.
“Get the equipment.”
“But?”
“But yeah what you said.”
“I can keep my shares in my company?”
“Not if I die here of anticipation. Get the goddamn equipment.”
“Aye, aye, captain.”
* * * *
I held my open palm out before Daltry. All three of us were dressed in his VR suits. Daltry's was a specialty he'd rigged up: it went down only to his waist. He'd built special hand controls to simulate leg pressure and walk a robot.
Karen bent over to peer down into my palm.
“Not so close,” I told her. “Don't breath on them, you might blow one away. We'll be in big trouble trying to find it in all these pine needles.”
“Sorry,” she said. She backed off. “It's just, I can barely see them. They look like three dead fruit flies.”
I nodded. “That's about the size. Just over three millimeters long. They're heavier than flies, of course. Internal atomic power source. They can run about a week without replacement of the battery.”
I looked over at the device. We had set a dish antenna out before it, the bell aimed straight at the tiny opening on the front. “These robots should be able to transmit clearly to that antenna, at least till we're in there a few centimeters. But we can carry line in with us if we have to. We should practice on something, shouldn't we?”
“No practice,” Karen said. “I've waited long enough. We go in.”
“Right,” Daltry agreed. “This is a probe drop, not an astronaut launch. I want in there now.”
“You were supposed to be ground control.”
“The hell with that,” Daltry said. “We're all ground control. You want ground control, pull your helmet off. This is VR. Worse case scenario we lose some of your toys there.”
“Worst case scenario this thing spits out green men who eat our brains.”
“And with that, ground control is going to help you how?”
I shook my head. There was no arguing with him. We were a rogue mission anyway. Dropping more protocols could not make the mission more improvised than it already was.
“Okay, we go in. But a short dive. A few centimeters. We see what we see and then we back out, we assess, we plan our next steps.”
“Just drop the bots in the slot,” Daltry said. He pulled on his helmet. They were ungainly helmets, with bulges over the eyes and ears, and a cut that left the mouth and nose exposed. He looked like a seated insect with a human mouth.
I had air tweezers to lift the robots. I placed each individually on the rim of the small open rectangle on the Ediacarian machine. Each bot had gecko feet, carbon nonfiber tubules that could clench onto nearly any material. They held. When the three bots were lined up, I stepped back and pulled my helmet on.
In a few moments my eyes adjusted to the pale colors of the robot-eye-view, flanked by dark readouts. “Karen? Daltry?”
“Here,” Karen's voice sounded like it came from my right. Instinctively I turned my head. I saw the bug-eyed twin sensors of her own microbot avatar look back at me.
“Your software is good, Daltry,” I whispered.
“I know,” he said. His voice seemed to come from the left, and I turned and looked at his robot. The voice of course did not come from the robot, but directly over radio. But the software placed it in space so that it seemed to come from his robot. It was hard to overestimate how helpful such smooth interface features could be. Humans have a lot of hard-wired capabilities in their brains, and it was better to take advantage of those abilities instead of trying to learn to fight them. Little tricks like this—placing the other robots in sound space—could save time and energy when you wanted to find the other robot. It was far better than having to look at a three-dimensional map, for example. We already had three-dimensional maps in our head; good software exploited those maps.
The same was true for the bodies. They were roughly humanoid, and of human proportions. That was not because human form was optimal for a small bot, but rather because it meant that we needed negligible time to prepare to run a humanoid robot. Something with twelve arms would have required years of practice for competent control. Two legs, two arms, twin forward facing eyes, and you could run it in minutes.
Karen's robot lurched forward. “This is weird, controlling the legs.”
“Just walk in place till you feel comfortable with the pressure sensors,” I told her. The suits allowed control of perambulation by sensing the electrical nerve impulses to muscle control, and then interpreting them as commands. At first, you had to walk to make it work, but with practice it seemed you just had to think about walking—sending minimal efferent nerve signals to your leg muscles—and the bot would walk.
I walked my bot over and stood beside Karen's, right on the threshold of the door to the machine.
“All right,” I said. “I go first. You all follow a step behind. We stay together until we agree as a group to part. If you see something, even if you think the rest of us must have seen it, sound out. We need to be sure we're all on the same mission while in there. And remember. I've got only four of these robots. Take it easy.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Daltry said. “Let's go.
I took a step forward.
And the lights came on.
Daltry whistled. “Man, it's got power. It as old as the oceans and it's got power.”
We stood there, staring. I could hear Karen and Daltry breathing. Finally, Karen said, “It looks like a city.”
I would have said it looked like a three dimensional circuit board, but once she said it I had to agree. “It does.”
Before us a long line of lights stretched out into what, at our scale, was a distance like a city block. From this “floor” rose blocks of gold and white structures. Lines of light shot up and down their frames.
“Wait a minute,” Daltry said. “We've got signal in the low frequency bands.”
“I thought you checked for whether this thing was transmitting radio when we set up the antenna,” I told him.
“I did.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let's pause the mission and look at these signals.”
“No way,” Karen and Daltry said simultaneously.
“It's not like we're going to just be able to decode them,” Daltry said. “We're here, the bots are set to walk, let's take a few steps.”
Reluctantly, I did not argue. We moved another centimeter inside.
“You know,” Daltry said, “I've changed my mind. Karen can't be right. This thing can't be five hundred million years old. It can't be a thousand years old. Nothing, nothing could stay like this, in working shape, for that long.”
As an engineer, I was inclined to agree. We stared at the complex structures and the traveling lights. They seemed . . . new, somehow. All the angles sharp, all the lights of equal luminosity. Matter just wasn't that resilient. Entropy always won, and won quickly.
“It's in the rock, and it's working,” Karen said.
“That's just evidence that it got into the rock somehow,” I said. “I agree with Daltry. Nothing lasts that long and keeps structural form.”
“What if they had some kind of . . . field, or something, that reduced nuclear decay?” Daltry asked.
“A kind of stasis field? An anti-entropy field. Wait a minute. Karen, put your robot in neutral and pull off your helmet.”
“Why?”
I called up and tapped at a virtual keyboard. In a few seconds I had what I needed.
“Do it. Then close the door to the device.”
She did it. Her robot stopped moving, failing to emulate the small motions of her head in the VR suit. Then, after a moment, my view went black.
“Can you hear me?” I called out loudly.
“No need to shout,” she said. Now I heard her voice only through the muffled sound that penetrated my helmet, not over radio.
“Count to ten, then open the door. Then get back into your robot.”
She did a countdown aloud. After “Zero!” my vision sputtered back as contact with the robots resumed.
“What did that accomplish?” Daltry asked.
“These bots have internal clocks.” I looked at the display. I'd synchronized and set side by side displays of the robot's clock and my suit's clock. “Twelve seconds lost.”
Daltry said in a rush, “Oh my god we have to find that thing.”
“What thing?” Karen asked.
“Daltry's right. There's some kind of stasis field, some kind of time-stopping-field, in this thing. That's how it lasted so long. When you shut the door, time stopped, or really slowed, in here.”
“Or,” Daltry said, “this thing slowed the atomic motion that your robot's clock uses to measure time.”
I nodded, making my robot's head bob. “It might just be, Karen, that you're right. That this thing is more than five hundred million years old.”
We all just breathed a moment.
“I'm scared,” I said.
“Why?” Karen asked.
“This thing can stop time, or entropy. I can't imagine how that works but I'd bet it takes a lot of energy. And all that's in here too. This thing is dangerous. We should call in the government—”
“No way,” Daltry said.
“Okay, something, someone with more resources than us. MIT.”
“Let's get in a team of choice people,” Daltry said. “People we know and trust. Get them to give us some real-time feedback.”
“You're crazy,” Karen said.
“Better than bringing in some schmucks from MIT,” Daltry said.
“You're both crazy,” she said. “This is my show. We go on. Alone.”
I took a breath. We could have this argument later. “Okay. A few more centimeters in. Then we stop, reconsider, and discuss next steps.”
Daltry's robot stepped forward. Before us the lights formed what looked almost like a boulevard, with two lanes divided in their center by a narrow trench. I walked over to this trench and reached down inside. It had an inverted T shape.
“Maybe we shouldn't go any farther in,” I said, but it was too late: Daltry and Karen were separating, wandering ahead.
We searched the space. Relative to our scale, it was like an airplane hanger. The floor, the walls, the ceiling were covered with fine lines through which lights shot and flickered. The shapes, which I couldn't help but think of now as buildings, were all geometric solids. We followed the track or trench in the floor to its end at the far wall. The track went into the wall, which was covered with a pattern of geometric shapes and dots.
“It seems almost like a puzzle,” Daltry said. He reached out.
“Don't touch it!” I told him. But he had already pressed a rhombus shape, and a portion of the wall slipped aside.
“Something's coming!” Karen shouted. A glint of gold showed in the dark space beyond the gap. Sound at our tiny scale was strange: although amplification tried to respect the scale, sounds still came as somehow thin, tiny. Something rattled noisily toward us. We backed up quickly. That was an awkward motion, one that made clear how differently the robot walked compared to human walking—the feet gripped strongly and the robots scurried back quickly, causing a disorienting visual.
Through the new opening, a blur of motion came. It was over in a second. Before us, a long row of things like boxes lined up in a neat row along the track in the center of the space. They were probably a centimeter on a side, with a centimeter separating them. It looked, I suddenly realized, like a train. A train of cubes that had move faster than the eye to stretch from this new doorway to the entrance behind us. The trench or T had indeed been a kind of track.
We waited in silence. When nothing more happened, Karen took a step toward them.
“Please,” I said, “please don't touch them.”
“No,” she said. “It's just . . . do you see motion in there?”
The boxes looked mostly opaque to me, their surface like the walls in the room: like a gold etched silicon chip. But I stepped closer and, as I watched, it did seem that, dimly visible, something twitched below the surface.
“God that is frightening,” I whispered.
I looked up the row. “These things are aimed at the door,” I said. “We're getting out of here, now. We're going to close the door. And we're going to think this through.”
For once, they didn't argue with me.
* * * *
I was disoriented when I pulled the helmet off. It seemed I was still in the VR. Then I realized the sun had set and it was dark in the tent. We'd spent so much time that day preparing the suits that our short hour in the device had taken us to sundown. Karen closed the door of the device. As my eyes adjusted, I took the rest of the suit off, and then pushed outside the tent.
The sky was still blue, but darkening. The forest was full of shadow, the sun far behind a hill—mountain?—to our west.
“It's starting to get cold,” I said to Karen as she came to my side.
“Don't complain,” she said. “You should see this place in black fly season. I'll start a fire.”
“Isn't that my job?” I asked.
“Get real.”
* * * *
We roasted hot dogs on sticks. Daltry was appalled. We discovered he was a food snob of a ferocity rare, perhaps unique, to a coder. He hadn't eaten a hot dog—"nor processed food"—since he was a teen. Karen laughed at him and handed him a tube of mustard and a bun. Daltry rolled his chair so close to the fire that moisture steamed out of the damp wheels. Then he dutifully impaled his hot dog on a stripped stick, and thrust it into the flames.
I tried to get them to talk about the radio signals coming from the device, but they weren't interested. None of us had the skills really to analyze the output. And they were mesmerized now by the romance of exploring the machine. Staring at the signal seemed so pedestrian in comparison. “We can do that later,” Karen said.
“Alright,” I said. “Let's talk about the real issue. I think we need to go to the UN. We could drive there tomorrow. This is too big for just the three of us. This thing is old. It's extraterrestrial or extrasomething. And it's functional.”
Karen and Daltry stared at me.
Finally, Karen's eyes slipped to Daltry. She gave him a pleading look. After a pause, Daltry said to her, “So tell me about this pre-Cambrian.”
I had forgotten this about her. She had this way of winning loyalty—almost a sense of conspiratorial familiarity—from people she'd only just met. It had made me jealous, and eventually furious, when we were lovers. She could always make me feel the outsider, the one left out.
“Pre-pre-cambrian,” she said. “Ediacarian.”
“Right.”
“Well. Some paleontologists think it was an Eden. No predators had evolved yet. Just colony organisms. The oceans would have been full of colony organisms, different filter feeders floating about, with a few creeping alone the shallows as slow as slime mold.”
“So our machine arrives, and things are a bit boring, and so it decides to wait for some intelligence to show up.”
“We can't assume that,” I said.
“And,” Karen said, “it may have been on Earth a billion years already. I can only promise you the rock it's in is five hundred and fifty, maybe five hundred and sixty, million years old. I can't say how old that thing is.”
“So what do you think it was meant to do?” Daltry demanded, squirting mustard on his hot dog. He bit into it with gusto. I resisted teasing him about it.
They talked through it for hours, even though there was really nothing to be said. We could infer nothing about the device's true age, its purpose, its origin. Daltry and Karen almost shouted at each other about whether it was a crashed probe or whether it had held—still held, K
aren wondered—tiny organisms. Karen wondered if it had even seeded Earth; “We might be its children,” she said. Daltry laughed at both those possibilities, and explained that organisms were primitive “version 1.0 hardware,” doomed to stay on their planets.
“Space exploration belongs to software, woman.”
Finally Daltry wheeled off to the tent that he and I were going to share. It was big, a four man, so that he could wheel inside and park his chair. Karen had a single tube tent set up near it.
Karen put her tablet computer on her knees and began typing.
“What are you writing?”
“Just notes.” She smiled. “We're immortal now, you know. We're the first explorers of the Ediacarian machine.”
“Taking notes for the ages?” It came out more sarcastic than I meant it, but Karen did not rise to taking offense. Instead, she shrugged, still typing. “Better to form good habits from the beginning. I imagine I'll spend the rest of my life studying this thing.”
That seemed delusional to me. I imagined that any day now this thing was going to be taken away from us by the federal government, if not New York State. It was on public land, after all. Instead of saying that, though, I just frowned.
Karen glanced up, and took that as a sign I was unhappy she was writing instead of talking to me. She set the tablet aside.
“So, you glad I brought you in on this?”
I nodded. “Perhaps. Partially. Yes. As odd as it sounds, I may even be glad that I was fired. Otherwise I never would have come up here. But I'm upset you two won't talk through the social implications of this—our responsibilities.”
“We can learn a bit more before we have to settle anything. We know nothing yet. Come on, Worry, you know how this goes. No one in the world is going to know more about this machine than you and I and Daltry do. This is totally new here. So they'll take it away from us and then they'll stumble around. So why shouldn't we get to do the stumbling?”
I sipped at the tea we'd made. It was hard to deny that she was right about that. What bothered me was not some fear that we were not best suited to the task, but the idea that we were attempting to seize responsibility for something so important to the whole human race.
Analog SFF, March 2012 Page 3
