by Alex Lamb
‘Well, I’m glad one of us is,’ said Judj. ‘I guess I’ll be worrying for you.’
‘Don’t feel obliged.’
‘Oh, please, I insist.’
She glowered at him through the camera situated above his seat. ‘You’re actually scared,’ she said. ‘I can read it off your infrared signature.’
‘Of course I’m scared!’ he snapped. ‘I hate biospheres and I loathe shuttle descents. I always have. Falling sucks. Zero-g is no fun either, but at least I’m used to it. It’s ten times worse when there’s a landscape under me, and worse still if it’s a biosphere with a fat, stupid atmosphere.’
‘Why are you here, then?’ said Ann.
‘Because someone had to play sidekick to your sullen superhero and I’m best qualified.’
‘I’m not sure how you can justify that if you don’t even like visiting biospheres.’
‘I grew up on a living world,’ said Judj. ‘A toxic one that the Photes sampled eighteen times while my family was still living there. I was only ever up in a shuttle when something truly awful was happening. And if I seem reluctant to go down there, it’s because I know exactly what an unmapped biosphere can do to a person, Photurian or otherwise.’
‘Except you have nothing to worry about,’ she insisted. ‘I’ll be getting out of the shuttle, not you.’
‘Onto an uncharted planet we’ve been led to by an unknown agency, where exactly none of the risks have been quantified.’
‘They won’t be unquantified for long. I’m going to do an atmospheric pass ten klicks up so that I can perform baseline sampling.’
‘Great, so we get some nice, aggressive air-braking, too?’ said Judj. ‘I can hardly wait.’
She watched the waves of annoyance in his blood vessels with disdain. ‘I can’t understand why someone so averse to shuttle landings volunteered for this mission.’
‘The mission profile for the Backspace Run contained no shuttle landings,’ he said. ‘What we’re doing here is off-mission, because you insisted on it.’
Ann shrugged and took them down into atmosphere. As they bounced and shook through the layers of turbulence, Judj squeezed his eyes shut and gripped the edges of his seat.
‘We’re in,’ she said when their trajectory had stabilised.
‘And still not dead. Wonders will never cease.’
Ann contained the pithy comeback that rose in her throat and turned her attention to the images piling up in the shuttle’s camera buffers. What she found there made her breath catch. The tunnels looked rotten. Those gaps she’d seen were places where the fabric of the root matrix had decomposed. Her cheeks tingled as a fresh rush of hope flooded through her.
Here was proof that the Photes could be beaten. She wouldn’t have to wander the tunnels and try to tease the makings of a weapon out of the substrate. The planet had already been exposed to one. She prayed that whatever agent had given rise to all that damage was still around.
She brought the shuttle into a stable cruise at sampling altitude and stared down at the wonderful destruction while their craft began its preliminary bioassay.
‘Well, that’s weird,’ said Judj, his voice tight.
‘Explain,’ said Ann. ‘What’re you finding?’
‘The atmospheric bacteria we’re picking up are simple.’
‘You mean foreign?’ she said hopefully. ‘Non-Photurian?’ Maybe the bioweapon she needed had just flown straight into their sampling ducts. Ann permitted herself a moment of optimism.
‘Oh, it’s Photurian, all right,’ said Judj. ‘The initial scans are detecting partial base-pair matches, but with a tiny fraction of the genetic complexity of Photurian cells.’
Ann’s mood faltered again. Phote cells didn’t mutate worth a damn. That was why the attack against her at Earth had come as so much of a surprise. So why were they doing it here?
‘How dangerous is it?’ she said. ‘Is there anything I need to worry about?’
‘Amazingly, no,’ Judj admitted. ‘In fact, the eco-type I’m seeing here should be enzyme-submissive with respect to Earth life. We’re more likely to kill it than the other way around.’
Ann peered at him while he worked. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m never sure,’ said Judj, ‘but that’s what it looks like.’ He didn’t sound happy about it.
Ann experienced a moment’s vertiginous disappointment as her new reason to live slipped a little. If the Photurian habitats had somehow devolved into a simpler type of life, then finding them subject to rot was far less surprising. But her weapon-search was still surely in with a chance. There might be something even better – a mutagen that could subvert an entire world. She still needed to know what kind of force had beaten this place.
‘Are you seeing any evidence of more than one eco-base at work?’ she asked him. ‘The evidence might be indirect.’
Judj shook his head. ‘All I’m seeing here is Photurian XNA – or Phote-derived, at least – and the epigenetic factors are all stable. No obvious prion intervention. No pseudo-viruses. If I had to guess, I’d say that the Photes won this war and then something happened after they cleaned out the opposition. Maybe millions of years later, given the habitat density.’
Ann wrestled with the unwelcome implications but found herself thinking back to all those hideous arrival broadcasts she’d listened to – all those promises of endless happiness.
‘So now we know what happens if the Photes win,’ she pointed out. ‘They can still all die anyway. That guaranteed eternity of joy they keep talking about isn’t real. That’s great.’
Judj frowned at her camera. ‘Great how?’
‘Because not one of those messages will ever be taken seriously again,’ she said. ‘That’s a start. And if rot like this can happen here, maybe we can trigger it back home.’
‘I wouldn’t be confident of that,’ said Judj.
Ann felt a flash of anger towards him. ‘What’s your problem?’ she said. ‘You’re in biodefence. Doesn’t this place at least give you a little hope?’
‘Looking at organisms I don’t understand never fills me with hope,’ said Judj. ‘Just anxiety. Back where I grew up, traces of the local biome used to get through our seals from time to time – little bitty organisms that we thought we understood. People always died. Sometimes very slowly and painfully. People I cared about. Eventually, it got so bad they shut down our lab.
‘My job, Ann, is to anticipate horror. Horror and accidents. That’s what I do. I’ve spent my entire life working with technology that shouldn’t be as smart as it is. Whatever you imagine, biology isn’t like physics. There’s a reason why you never caught up with the research on it. Physics is simple. It’s all about reducing nature. Bioscience is all about systems so tightly optimised that you’ll never figure out everything about how they work. The way you beat a foreign biosystem is by tricking it before it tricks you. If you hang around long enough to try to figure out all the different things going on inside it, it’s already too late. That means you have to use your intuition, Ann. And what it’s telling me right now is that there’s something very wrong with this planet. I just don’t know what it is yet.’
Ann shrugged his speech off. If Judj wanted to waste time seeing phantoms in his data, so be it. She concentrated on finding a suitable landing site.
She picked a section of rocky shore where one of the rot-infestations had chewed away a three-kilometre semicircle of tunnel-matrix from the coast. On one side of them lay a sluggish grey sea under a pale sky. On the other stood a curving wall of dead tunnels seven tubes deep and eighty storeys high. It looked like an enormous black, sagging honeycomb – a revolting home for enormous undead bees. Dribbles of pale, half-living mucus spilled out from the openings and collected in sticky pools among the rocks.
Ann surveyed the miserable view through the shuttle cameras and tried to focus on how uplifting it should have felt. The sight of dying Photurian habitats demanded that a song be brought to the heart. There had to b
e something useful here. She unclipped and climbed down the access tube to the airlock.
‘Please remember to use the quarantine procedures,’ Judj called after her.
When she didn’t reply, he sighed noisily and started prepping the sampling robots.
Ann let herself out onto the rocks and stood there in her ship-suit, sucking down lungfuls of the moist air. It smelled rather unexpectedly of leather, with a little salt tang thrown in. As the local microfauna reached her skin, her shadow immediately went to work. Just seconds later, data from her subminds leaked into her awareness. The news wasn’t great.
‘These cells aren’t Photurian,’ she told Judj, disappointment cracking her voice. ‘They taste Photurian, but they don’t work the same way. They’re not useful. They’re … too stupid.’
She wandered towards the slime-pools near the base of the cliff. Even as she did so, she could tell there’d be nothing she could use.
‘That’s what I expected,’ said Judj.
‘Why?’ said Ann, annoyed. ‘Explain it to me.’
‘You actually want to know?’ said Judj. ‘Basically, Phote cells contain highly compressed information in a way that natural organisms don’t. They’re like your smart-cells in that they’re tiny processors, but they’re far more complex. Your cells can do maths and dump out nanofactured compounds, but theirs are crammed full of information, most of which has nothing to do with how to run a working cell.’
‘So what’s it for?’ She poked her fingers into the unremarkable filth. It felt warm and had the texture of snot. The stuff was almost as attractive as vomit. Her smart-cells responded to it with indifference.
‘It enables them to break down other life forms for molecular homologisation,’ said Judj. ‘And yet more stuff to help them to aggregate into reasoning clusters. Phote cells have a ton of extra baggage to handle their inter-cell cooperation protocol. So far as we can tell, that protocol operates pretty much the same way at every level of biological organisation, whether you’re talking about cell clusters, or organs, or entire hosts. That’s what makes Photurians not strictly biological. If you want to be accurate about it, you might think of them as a standards-based life form because the messages that define them can be pushed by pheromones, nerves or data-packets. Their protocol doesn’t care. But in any case, it looks like their XNA-code broke down here. This life is built out of random bits of message left over from the decay of all that compressed data. It’s related, but it’s not really the same kind of life at all. It’s very primitive – almost primordial. Except I’ve seen this kind of thing before. I’m sure of it. I just can’t remember where.’
He stumbled over his explanation, sounding nervous and distracted. But then again, when did he ever not? Ann watched his lumbering robots wander out onto the rocks to dip electronic tongues in the slime.
‘So that’s what I’m tasting?’ said Ann as she wiped her hands on her ship-suit. ‘Phote scramble? Just a physical echo?’
‘Right,’ said Judj. ‘But the big question is how that happened. Snakepit was stable for millions of years before we came along. That biosphere was immune to change, so far as we can tell. The Phote Protocol removes mutations through collective action. Otherwise there’s no way the damned thing could work.’
‘Maybe this place got fried during the fighting,’ Ann speculated. ‘Perhaps the radiation bursts were sufficient to destabilise the ecosystem.’
‘Impossible,’ said Judj. ‘We’ve seen what happens to Phote cells under excessive radiation – they mutually self-correct or break up.’
‘Self-correct how?’ said Ann. ‘There must be some mechanism.’
‘Sure,’ said Judj, ‘but nobody’s ever been able to figure out what it is. Wait. Oh God. I know where I saw this.’
Ann waited for him to continue. ‘Go on?’
‘They did these experiments on rats once, back in the early days of Phote research. They took spores from surface attacks and used them to infect lab animals so they could figure out how seeded infections worked. The rats got stronger and smarter for a few weeks, then they sickened and died. It was a milestone result. It proved that the intelligence of a host species actually plays a role in the operation of the Phote cellular matrix.’
Ann shook her head. That was the kind of crazy result that showed up all over the place in Phote research. None of it made any sense.
‘How can that be right?’ said Ann. ‘Snakepit didn’t have any intelligent life before we arrived, but it was built entirely out of Phote cells.’
‘The tunnel substrate itself was a semi-intelligent computing platform,’ said Judj. ‘Probably specifically designed for global stability. For all we know, this planet had the same set-up – a kind of shared quiescent supermind. But I haven’t even got to the weird part yet. When they isolated the rats, they died from nerve disorders. When they left them together, though, they glued themselves into little stars before they died. Their skulls actually fused like a Siamese-twin separation in reverse. Their brains started leaking together.’
‘That’s disgusting,’ said Ann.
‘In every case, they found the same kind of genetic damage in the Phote cells that took over. It looked exactly like this, as if the cellular OS had just started overwriting its boot sector with crazy. I didn’t spot the similarity at first because the effect was really mild compared to this. I guess this is what it looks like if you leave that rewrite process running for a few million years.’
‘So we have our answer,’ said Ann. ‘This world’s global mind must have shut down, either by choice or because it was murdered. It stopped mediating that self-repair process. Which means that if there’s a weapon here, it’s more likely to be high-level software than wetware.’
Judj paused to digest the idea. ‘Very plausible,’ he said. ‘But that’s not a happy answer. You’re talking about a memetic weapon powerful enough to kill an entire world. Some kind of mind-bomb. That’s a very different kind of threat. I can’t imagine how you’d build such a thing, let alone safely use it.’
Ann thought hard. She needed a different angle – one that would reveal what the planet’s higher-level functions had once been like. But she wasn’t going to find it in this muck.
‘My robots are locating plenty of organisms that feed off the tunnel wall-matrix,’ Judj offered. ‘They’re digesting the biopolymer directly. That’s something we could weaponise. Maybe that’s your win. I really think we should get out of here now.’
Ann couldn’t share his enthusiasm. The microbes he’d found were also breathing a nice thick atmosphere and had no Phote cells to compete with. They’d probably last mere minutes as part of a weapon drop. She made up her mind and marched back to the ship. She tucked herself into the airlock, shut the outer door behind her and took them back aloft.
‘Hey!’ said Judj. ‘What are you doing? My samplebots are still down there. Wait, are you flying this thing from the airlock?’
‘You said not to mess with the quarantine protocols,’ said Ann. ‘And besides, this site isn’t good enough. We need more data. We passed over a defensive node a few minutes back. I want to take a closer look.’
‘Ann, that’s crazy!’ said Judj. ‘They’re weapons factories. If any part of this planet is still potentially dangerous, it’s a node.’
‘That’s why we’re going,’ she said. ‘We need access to the high-level software this world was using, just like you said. I can’t learn anything useful from a pile of slime.’
‘So you’re planning to poke around in a half-living arsenal on the off-chance you can find something that’s still deadly? Do I need to remind you that those things are full of nuclear reactors? Ann, please be sensible. We’ve learned plenty. It’s time to let the machines take over.’
While Judj complained, Ann flew the shuttle back to the node she’d seen. As it slid over the horizon, it occurred to her just what an utterly inadequate term ‘node’ was. Only someone looking at a world from an orbital telescope could have come up w
ith a description so dry and meaningless. In reality, they were talking about a hollow bioengineered structure shaped like a starfish and the size of a shield volcano. Defensive nodes could grow warp-enabled drones like fruit and shoot them into orbit. In them lay the power to subdue entire star systems.
As they closed on it, Ann got a sense of just how huge the thing was. This one was riddled with holes and surrounded by lakes of varicoloured mucus. It was a rotting carcass the size of a mountain with a cluster of grey clouds hanging over its umber peak. Ann didn’t believe for a moment that it was still dangerous, though hopefully it would prove useful.
She found a flattish piece of ground near the node’s enormous mottled flank and landed the shuttle. Up close, the node’s wall was covered with veins and nodules, all in ugly shades of grey and brown. A fifty-metre fissure in the side where the skin had split like an overripe pomegranate offered a way in.
‘Come on, Ann,’ said Judj. ‘You have to know this is a terrible idea. Someone drew us to this place. They had an ulterior motive. And your reaction to that is to walk into the scariest thing you can find?’
‘Correct,’ said Ann.
‘Jesus. I mean, what if you’re even right and it doesn’t bite? Some of those drone isotopes stay toxic for millennia. No human has ever set foot inside one of these damned things and lived.’
‘That’s why we’re here,’ said Ann. ‘Now’s our chance. We may not get another.’
She could feel her excitement returning. She shared his concerns, of course. Under normal conditions, defensive nodes were death traps. In the course of her entire career, she’d never tried to approach one. And even if she came across the hypothesised mind-weapon, would she even recognise it? It might kill her before she knew what she was looking at. But therein lay the appeal of the adventure.
‘At least let me send some surveybots in first,’ Judj urged.
