Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations

by By Brian Stableford

  “I’ll talk you through it,” he assured me. “It’s all color-coded in there—but you’ll have to be very careful, You’ll need this now.” He selected out a new instrument.

  It took some time for me to figure out how to restore the scarred circuitry, but I began to see the pattern eventually, and was able to get on with it.

  “What was so disappointing about the crucial contact?” I asked.

  “Well, it turns out that the BU is just a...well, the diplomatic way of putting it is by-product...of processes ongoing in dark matter. It wasn’t purposively created at all, let alone intelligently designed.”

  “What’s the undiplomatic way of putting it?” I asked.

  “I could have used the word excreta,” he said, swiftly adding: “It’s not the sort of word I like to use, and I know that it seems even more revolting to a human than it does to a robot. Most future intelligences, mind—even those a mere few hundred million years upstream of humankind—don’t regard their excreta with the kind of disgust that we do, but that’s one of the few things robots and humans have in common. There’s no reason at all to suppose that the Hi’s are in the slightest degree disgusted by baryonic matter, or what occurs within it.”

  “On the other hand,” I said, “there’s at least a possibility that they might think of us—not just you and me, but all these other baryonic intelligences-yet-to-be—as bacteria swarming in their shit.”

  He actually winced at that—which was pretty stupid, considering that I was trying to do delicate work inside his eye-socket. No obvious damage was done, but it didn’t help the time problem. Not that time seemed to be all that much of a problem—in the two hours I’d been working on him the sky hadn’t got any darker. I couldn’t see the sun behind the clouds, but I got the impression that it hadn’t moved a millimeter—and there still hadn’t been a soul in sight, in either direction, since the instant I first saw the robot.

  “Sorry about the indelicacy,” I said. “So what message did the HI’s’ simulacra bring from the great beyond?”

  “Well, if you believe them—and I, personally, can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t—they have problems of their own. My makers’ ancestors had grown accustomed to thinking of dark time as a kind of regulating factor—something that prevents time travel from generating paradoxes and messing up the continuity of cause and effect so badly that the time-stream breaks up into an infinite rain of droplets. They’d always perceived dark matter in much the same way, as something holding galaxies together and facilitating the origin and evolution of life. The Hi’s, not unnaturally, have a very different point of view. They’d only just reached the point in their own evolution when they could begin to manipulate dark time in a manner analogous to the way my makers manipulate calendrical time— except that they don’t have any analogous hyperforce to assist their own time police in protecting them against paradoxicality. They wanted—needed, in their view—to make certain adjustments to the hyperbaryonic universe in order to secure it against transtemporal disruption.”

  Even though I didn’t know the first thing about science, I thought I could see what he was driving at—and where the argument was heading.

  “And whatever the hyperbaryonic intelligences—the Hi’s— want or need to do,” I guessed, “will have a knock-on effect on our universe—the BU, as you call it. The...by-products...will get flushed?”

  He didn’t wince that time, but I could sense the effort he had to make to hold still. “They assured my makers’ ancestors that they weren’t talking about annihilation, or even destruction,” he said, “but they weren’t talking about trivial change either. They didn’t issue any ultimata, though; they expressed a willingness to listen to our views, and suggested that some sort of cooperative endeavor might be in order.”

  I thought about that for a moment or two, then said: “The Hi’s need your help, don’t they?”

  “Opinions are divided about that, too,” the robot said, with a slight sigh. “The way the Hi’s tell it, it’s more like offering us a golden opportunity—but yes, without being unduly cynical, they probably wouldn’t be trying to sell us on the idea if they didn’t need our active input. Anyway, that’s where the system is at when I come from—the Worms and the Worldplants are trying to decide whether to do what the Hi’s want us to do.

  “Can’t you just hop into your time machines and go ask your descendants what you did?” I asked. “Or, better still, just ask the time-travelers from your own future.”

  “That’s another controversial issue,” he admitted. “Some of the makers think that the fact that they can’t move any further downstream, and can’t identify any time-travelers from the future, implies that the decision must have been made one way—others argue the opposite, or any of several other variants, including the obvious one that the time-travelers from further downstream have concealed themselves very cleverly in order to make the decision for us. The TT agenda has become really complicated of late.”

  I no longer had to ask; TT obviously stood for time travel. “Well, I said, “at least you still have the time and inclination to drop in on your remotest ancestors once in a while, to check up on the dexterity of our primal hands. How am I doing?”

  “In all honesty,” he said, “not as well as I’d hoped. I might be in real trouble here, if you can’t get it right.”

  “I’m doing my best,” I told him, a trifle testily. “I’ve got the pattern in my head—the spirit is willing but the fingers tend to fumble.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Keep trying. Take your time.”

  “So why are you here?” I asked. “If the world five billion years hence has such big decisions on its plate, why is it still sending spy-robots back to the dear old twenty-first century, which must have been very thoroughly researched by time-travelers from your distant past?”

  “There’s always more to learn,” he assured me. “This is a fascinating era: the first brief flowering of intelligence.”

  “How brief?” I asked, sharply, wondering whether the effects of the millennium bug might be worse than anyone had anticipated.”

  “Don’t worry, Janine,” he said. “You’ll have time to grow up, and do whatever you want with your life. The Crash won’t begin until you’re quite old, by your standards. The one thing that can be said for clathrate-release as a means of extinction is that it’s very quick.”

  “How do you know my name?” I demanded.

  “Didn’t you tell me, Miss? Did I forget to introduce myself, too? I’m so sorry. I don’t actually have a name, but you can call me Steve.”

  “That doesn’t actually answer my question,” I pointed out. “You were waiting for me, weren’t you—for me, I mean, not just any passing stranger. You already knew who I was. You’ve been watching me in the course of your research—and you’re going to carry on doing it, aren’t you? You already know about my future, don’t you?”

  “I’ve seen a little of it,” he confessed. “Yes, I was looking for you, because I had some reason to believe that you’d be more likely to help me than most of your kind, and that your helping me wouldn’t create any causative ripples powerful enough to attract the time police or bring down the wrath of dark time. Please don’t ask me what that reason is, because I can’t tell you. Memory wipes are far from infallible, and there are certain items of information I daren’t risk. Chatting about far-future possibilities is one thing; giving relevant life-chance information is another. Don’t worry is about as far as I can go. I’m sorry. I think you’ve almost got it. Careful, now....”

  He had to pause the conversation again to give me more detailed instructions. The next ten minutes tested my good eyesight, my steady hand and my patience to the full.

  “Okay,” he said, eventually. “I think that’s solved the problem. Hold on.”

  He put his eye back in, blinked a few times, and then took out a little mirror so that he could study his iris carefully. “Great,” he said. “That should do the trick. Thank you very
much.”

  He turned away, as if to go into the bushes hedging the road

  “Hang on,” I said. “Is that all I get—thank you very much.”

  “I can’t give you anything else,” he said. “Ripples of causality, remember? Time police, wrath of dark time, etcetera. When I told you not to worry, because you’d have time to grow up and live your life to the full, I only meant that your civilization won’t collapse for another sixty years or so, and that I’ve caught a few glimpses of your future self while pottering around in the temporal neighborhood. I might be the only one here who’s in danger of being disintegrated into my component atoms, but that doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be consequences for you.”

  “So you can’t take me for a little ride in your time machine? Not far—Tudor England may be...a glimpse of Shakespeare at work, or Henry VIII screwing one of his six wives?”

  He was free to wince now, and took full advantage. “No,” he said, shortly.

  “Okay,” I said. “No gifts, no trips in time, no hints about key decisions in my future career—but you said yourself that chat about the distant future is safe enough. At least tell me what the hyper-baryonic intelligences want to do with the material universe, and what kind of help they need from baryonic time-travelers.”

  “It’s rather complicated,” he said, sternly, as if to advise me not to worry my pretty little non-scientific head about it. “What it comes down to, though, is that they want to do some sort of time-stream-spanning matter-exchange, converting a lot of dark matter into baryonic matter and vice versa, not just downstream of the contact point but upstream too. In effect, they want to modify the evolution of the galaxy—not so greatly, though, that it can’t comfortably contain the entire historical sequence of our systemic life. So they say, at least. According to them, most conscious entities won’t even notice the exchange, and those who do will be able to benefit from it. As I said before, they present it as a golden opportunity, not just for my makers but everyone else—but they would, wouldn’t they? If they need our help, that is.”

  “If they want to make more baryonic matter” I said, “why don’t they just fill in some of the gaps between the galaxies? There’s a lot of unused space out there. If they have to maintain the proportion of the different sorts of matter, though, I suppose they’d have to obliterate the galaxies if they did that—and if they do need our help....”

  “They say that they want to keep everything in place,” the robot said. “Dark matter is locally concentrated too, and the Hi’s that have made contact are from our own cluster—they’re in contact with others, apparently, but their transgalactic conversations make our interstellar ones seem lightning fast. What they seem to have in mind is a process of galactic metamorphosis, extending across time from BB to OP. That’s Big Bang and Omega Point, if you hadn’t realized.”

  I hadn’t, but I didn’t make any comment.

  “My makers’ ancestors once called a convocation of all the time machines downstream of the solar metamorphosis in order to move the Earth and formulate the Pearly Ring,” Steve the robot continued, “but this would be a bigger job, and a more delicate one, rebuilding the connections between our present and the very remote past, modifying all points in between. The Hi’s say that it could be a big improvement, if we all play our cards right. There’s a lot of talk of sewing the cosmic strings into a hypercosmic web, building empires in the cosmic dust and binding all the intelligences that ever lived into an eternal ecstatic hypostatic hypertime, but that may be just sales patter, all high-flown rhetoric and empty promises. The way I see it, if they don’t need our help, they must need our capitulation— and by ours I mean everyone’s, from the source of the time-stream to its outflow into whatever great ocean of fulfillment or chaos ultimately awaits us. At any rate, my makers aren’t so sure. I honestly don’t know what they’ll do.”

  “What difference would it make to us?” I asked. “I mean human beings, not you and me.”

  “In all probability, nothing perceptible to your senses or your science,” he said, as if that somehow amounted to good news. “You’re fairly primitive, after all, even if you do have glimmerings of intelligence and purpose.”

  “It couldn’t save us from imminent extinction, then?”

  “Of course not. The evolutionary sequence will remain virtually untouched; the alterations will work at a much subtler level—or so the Hi’s say. The Ultimate Worms and Worldplants are by no means united in believing them, and their own hyperphysicists aren’t much help, because they have no idea what the Hi’s might or might not be able to do with and within dark matter, or how much trouble they might be in if they did nothing at all, or how much trouble we might eventually be in, whatever might be done or not done.”

  “I suppose it comes down to a matter of trust,” I said, after thinking it over. “I was tempted to run like hell when I first saw you, you know, in case you were a rapist or an exhibitionist, but I thought better of it.”

  He winced again at the word rapist. I have to confess that I took a certain satisfaction in being able to make him do that, even though he wasn’t really a male of the merely human species.

  I’d followed him through the hedge while we were still talking, although I’d collected a few scratches doing it. He stopped suddenly, and leaned forward as if to look at something hovering in mid-air that was too tiny for me to see. Suddenly, his time machine wasn’t invisible any more. He was right; it did look a little more like a car than a ship, although it bore as much resemblance to the average Ford or BMW as a wheelbarrow does to a bulldozer. I regretted not being able to take a ride in it. He sighed with relief when the door swung open in response to a quick squint.

  “Goodbye, Janine,” he said, “and good luck.”

  “You too,” I said. “I hope your shoddy workmanship holds up at least as well as mine—and if your makers should ever happen to ask you for the human position on the transtemporal-galactic-metamorphosis thing, tell them to remember the most useful item of advice to be formulated in the course of the entire twentieth century.”

  I could tell by the way he looked at me that he was expecting to have to wince again, but he gave in anyway. “Which is?” he asked.

  “Shit happens,” I replied.

  He winced on cue, as if he were suffering from some kind of crazy phobia—and then he got into his driving-seat, closed the door behind him, and vanished.

  I hadn’t noticed that the air had been utterly still, but I felt the wind that reasserted its force in the wake of his departure. I heard voices coming from the path as other walkers resumed their progress along it.

  I was quite a way from home, so I had plenty of time to mull over what I’d learned while I waited for the memory-wipe to kick in—which must have happened, eventually, because I know that I didn’t remember anything out of the ordinary having happened by the time I got home. I don’t think I’d ever have remembered it if I hadn’t started coming to AlAbAn, but I think I’ve got it all back now—including the second thoughts I had while I was walking home.

  While I’d actually been talking to the robot he’d seemed very plausible, but once he was gone I was surprised by my own complacency, and how matter-of-factly I’d dealt with it. He must, I thought, have done something undetectable to put me at my ease, which had not only stopped me from being frightened or overwhelmed by the enormity of what was happening, but had also given me a very relaxed attitude to what he’d told me. Once he was gone, I began to wonder whether it might have been a pack of lies—and even whether he might never have been in need of repair at all. After all, I didn’t really have a clue what I’d been doing, or how—the only thing I could be sure of was that he hadn’t been able to do it himself. Maybe, I thought, I’d actually been disabling some kind of slave-circuit, setting him free from the command of his masters—which might, of course, have been a good thing to do, although it might conceivably have freed him to wreak untold havoc and evil in the past and future alike.


  I couldn’t help remembering that story that people are so fond of citing, about the time-traveler who steps on a butterfly way back in the Cretaceous, and comes back to find his own time changed for the worse. Maybe I thought, the same principle applies to helpful actions as to destructive ones. Maybe, even if I had just made some tiny repair, what I’d done might echo down the ages, causing all sorts of unexpected ripples of causality, without any guarantee that my altruism would be replicated in good results. Maybe, I thought, my tiny good deed might be the source of vast misfortunes, because the universe doesn’t bother to balance its moral account-books, or simply doesn’t care.

  Maybe, I thought, the essential generosity of my gesture would be just as likely to bring down the wrath of dark time as some mean trick would have done—and not only to bring that wrath down on me, or Steve the robot, but on the whole world that will be hanging in the balance when the hyperbaryonic intelligences need the help of an armada of time machines and the capitulation of every intelligent entity that ever live or ever will live, to swap the galaxy’s existing baryonic matter for a whole new crock of excreta—a job that must mean more, even to vast intelligences like them, than fiddling with the processing capacity of their sewage-farm. Was it possible, I wondered—was it even conceivable?—that what I had done might somehow influence the decision that the baryonic beings of the future solar system had to make?