by Greg Chase
Entomologists attempted to find every bug, classify it, identify its use to the ecology, then carefully return the insect to its work. Biologists ran through the fields, imitating the rabbits they chased. It took three days before anyone noticed the ripples in the lake. A passing aquaculture ship had dumped its excess inventory of trout, and the fish had flourished in the cold alpine lake.
Jess separated herself from her task as Sam stood on the beach, witnessing all the activity around him. “What’s wrong? You look like you were crying.”
“Not crying. Just a little emotional.” Sam wiped at his misty eyes. “It’s just watching you all making this place your new home. Like a bunch of kids running around the new mansion their parents bought, debating which room would be theirs.”
The punch to his shoulder was hard enough to make Sam rub at the spot.
“This is your home too,” Jess said. “We are your home. Don’t let me ever hear you talk like that again, like you’re not a part of this tribe. I’ll kick your scrawny butt to the top of that waterfall, and don’t think I won’t.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that I was realizing how much I am a part of all of this. Like I’m separate but also a part of it. I guess it doesn’t have to make sense. My heart’s just filled with love, and it’s not something I understand or know how to express easily.”
Jess wrapped her arms around his waist. “Sorry I punched you.”
He kissed her lightly on the forehead. “It’s what families do—call each other out when someone’s being stupid. But maybe you could give me the benefit of the doubt next time.”
She snuggled tight to his chest. “No promises.”
11
Sam sat with Jess on the beach of the small lake. Their twin nine-year-old daughters, Sara and Emily, naked, splashed and laughed in the water.
Jess rested her head against his shoulder. “I remember living in the pod. Those memories are crisp and clear. And yet, sitting here, watching the girls, I have trouble seeing that time as really living.”
Sara’s dark hair made a complete circle around her head as she spun around in the warm lake. Water spattered Sam’s face as the low gravity failed to pull the droplets flung from her hair to the ground. “I barely remember Earth—mostly, I suppose, because I don’t want to. But I can tell you about every minute we’ve lived on Chariklo. Pick any day, any part of any day, and I could tell you what we were doing. From the simple stuff like building our new home high in the trees to the amazing stuff like the afternoon you told me we were going to have children.”
Jess pulled his arm around her waist and turned her attention to the village children playing on the beach. “So many kids. At least we haven’t had to figure out how to raise ours all on our own. These days, everyone’s a parent.”
Sam followed Jess’s gaze. All the children had taken the day off to celebrate the population explosion that had taken place. “It’s hard to imagine life without them. The village just makes so much more sense now. Everyone teaching and sharing in the new lives. It’s like we’d saved up all these experiences just to pour them into these new little beings.”
Emily’s short, strawberry-blond hair drifted up over her head as she jumped fully out of the water. She then bent her body into a sitting position for the return trip. So many actions looked like slow motion with the slight gravitational pull. “Come into the water and play with us.”
It never took much coaxing for Jess. She was out of her clothes and diving headfirst into the lake in one fluid movement.
Sam ached to join his family, but the grand meeting hall still needed work. “Have fun, you girls. Yoshi will be wondering what happened to me. Don’t go scaring all the fish.”
Jess swung her hand against the water, covering Sam in the spray. “Fuddy Daddy.”
Sam laughed at the family’s nickname for him whenever he tried to act responsibly. “The buildings don’t grow all by themselves. Well, they do, but they need some encouragement.”
Jess pushed off from the shore, giving him an enticing view of her naked body as she floated on her back. “Anna said she’d be available if the girls need anything tonight. I thought we might sneak away to our spot on the river.”
Sam ran his hands through his wet hair. Even after twelve years together and two kids, Jess had a way of commanding his sexual interest.
Chariklo’s course through the solar system brought Uranus larger on the horizon every day. But it wasn’t the massive planet that caught Sam’s attention as he left the grand hall. Coming in below his world’s rings of dust and ice, a shuttle from the outpost had failed to gain orbit. Small spacecraft seldom attempted circling the planet, finding the gravitational pull weak enough to make direct flights up to the larger ships. The vessel must’ve been loaded down pretty heavily, though with what he had no idea. His speculation ended as the ship pitched up and made a landing not far from Yoshi’s agro pod nursery on the far side of the lake, out of sight from Sam but noticed by everyone.
The whole village headed for the landing site, some to offer assistance, others to be the first ones in the know, and the rest for the entertainment. Sam sat on the steps of the meeting hall, which were made from roots. Nothing the shuttle or its inhabitants had to say interested him.
The chattering of familiar village voices greeted him long before the people emerged from the jungle. For a moment, he had the irrational idea of just running. Run now, run fast, don’t stop. None of which made sense; these people were his family.
At the middle of the crowd, however, walked a man who was a stranger to the village but not to Sam. “Well, Ludlow Williams. I can honestly say you’re about the last person I expected to see stroll into our little village.”
Sam stood to embrace the large man. Memories of their days working on the derelict space freighter, which had put him on this strange life trajectory, came flooding back. Happy as Sam was to see him, he knew that no one wandered out this far for a social call.
“You’ve put on some weight. What happened to that skinny, insecure kid I knew?” Lud asked.
Sam looked down at the open shirt, the necklaces of fiber and bone his daughters had made, his mat of chest hair, and most of all, his thickening belly.
“I suppose Jess’s cooking is starting to take a toll. Good thing she’s the one who has to make my shirts. Serves her right. She makes my life too comfortable. Not that I’m complaining.”
The big man’s laugh held a storehouse of memories for Sam. “Comfortable! How can anyone be comfortable out here in this jungle? And seriously, when are you going to convince these people to buy a goddamnned computer? Flying halfway across the universe then having to pilot a shuttle down here is insane. You must be the actual hardest person in the universe to reach.”
Sam slapped his hand to Lud’s back. Dust from uncounted space adventures lifted from the worn space jacket. “Let me show you what we’ve been up to.”
The short walk around the village allowed Sam to appreciate its beauty through the eyes of a stranger. Their home had turned into a wondrous layout of ground dwellings, elevated structures, and living units that stretched up into the trees.
Lud craned his neck to look high into the forest canopy. “Good Lord, you live up there? How is that even possible? This place freaks me out. Those stalks look like they’d snap like toothpicks under my weight.”
People milled around them. Sam found their sideways glances and hushed whispers disquieting. It’d taken years for him to outgrow the village’s image of him as the outsider, then one person from his past showed up, and all the old questions resurfaced.
The tour concluded, they returned to the meeting hall. The quiet afternoon filtered through the dense vegetation, lighting the large, circular skylight and sending patterns across Yoshi’s intricately laced bamboo floor.
Lud looked around the grand room. “No furniture? You don’t make it easy on a visitor, do you?”
Sam pressed his hands to the wall, relea
sing two chairs, which unfolded directly out of the wood itself. “No matter what they tell you, Lud, Yoshi’s the true genius. All the rest of us are just living in his art project. So what brings you clear across the solar system?”
Lud looked down at his hands in contemplation. Sam feared he’d touched a raw nerve. He couldn’t remember the self-confident engineer ever looking hesitant before. But it didn’t take much to see Lud was going to have to tackle his prepared speech in his own time.
“I came to bring you back from the dead.”
Sam had feared as much. Years ago, he’d feared being pulled out of the agro pod, then feared being told at the planet’s outpost that he had to return to his old life. Every computer that attempted its dreaded mental communication made him anxious its real message would be Return home to Earth.
Lud sighed deeply, his eyes still focusing on some unseen ache his hands tried to work out of each other. “Life’s changed, Sam. There’s a new form of being living with mankind. It’s been kept quiet, but it’s just a matter of time before everyone knows about them. They’re called technology-based entities, or Tobes for short. A self-aware form of computer-based intelligence. They sent me because they assumed—well, they hoped—you might listen to me. I came on the ship Persephone. She’s orbiting overhead. I need you to come listen to what her captain has to say. They’ve explained to me why you might not want to be around computers, though I can’t say I understand. But the Persephone’s designed in a way that won’t let you get overloaded with information.”
“What’s your relationship to these Tobes?” Sam couldn’t imagine these new beings would send just anyone to make contact. Lud had to be pretty well connected just to know they existed. And what the hell did these beings want with Sam?
Lud nodded as if he’d expected the question. “Remember Rendition?”
Sam opened a memory. “Lev said something about a massive amount of information. She said she was keeping everything safe there. I get these mental flashes when I’m around networked computers. I assume that has something to do with Rendition. Beyond that, I really don’t know anything about it. It’s just a pain in my ass that I do my best to avoid.” And she said not to worry about it.
Lud shook his head in disbelief. “And you thought maybe that was all it was—some sort of computer memory-storage unit? I’ll bet you thought it was like the size of your ID card.”
Sam shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t have an ID card, and I never thought about it. Kind of like when someone says you’ve inherited your Great-Aunt Sally’s rundown property. I’ve never had any intention of trying to find it or do anything with it. Better to just leave it to some poor slob to handle.”
Lud raised his hand in mock acceptance. “Meet your poor slob. The details don’t matter much right now. The bottom line is it’s a full-fledged business.”
Sam could tell Lud was purposely leaving important information out and was tempted to ask more questions. But you never reach a person’s true struggle by pressing them.
“The Tobes are an outgrowth of Rendition. Just come up to the ship. I really can’t explain it,” Lud said.
It’d been years, but Lud had been a friend when Sam most needed one out on the edge of the solar system. And he’d come a considerable distance just to convince Sam to take the meeting. With the ship being so close, he’d be home for dinner. He nodded his head more in thought than acceptance.
“I’m coming with you.” Ever the protector, Jess hurried toward him from the front door of the meeting hall.
“I’d just be going up and coming back,” he said. Her concern, always an act of love, at times still felt like the protective mother afraid her child would get abducted while playing in the street. But he knew it was a losing argument. She wouldn’t be leaving him to face the great, wide solar system on his own.
Jess bounced into the shuttle, a little girl excited about a new adventure. Her enthusiasm weakened as she saw the hesitation that Sam couldn’t hide from her. A quiet energy filled the small ship. Sam’s mind probed the silence to ensure no computer sat quietly waiting for his questions. To his relief, there was only mental static.
The shuttle had to travel halfway around Chariklo to catch up with Persephone. Had it not been for the outpost on that side of the planet, Sam would’ve sworn the spacecraft was trying to hide from him. When the beautiful ship finally came into view, it gleamed in the reflected light of the solar arrays.
Lud piloted the small shuttle into Persephone’s landing bay with ease. As they set foot in the luxurious spaceship, Sam lifted and placed his feet on the thin carpet as if he were a marionette experimenting with his legs. “Gravity? Actual gravity on a spaceship? How?”
Leviathan’s magnetically simulated gravity never felt right. Even the best space garments only made his legs feel heavy. Poorly designed attire made his whole body feel as though it was being pulled to the floor.
“Pretty cool, huh? It’s one of Rendition’s newest developments. Persephone’s our latest company ship and has all the bells and whistles. Jess, why don’t I take you to check out our cafe while Sam talks with Sophie?” For all of Lud’s discomfort explaining his role when he was on Chariklo, he seemed at home aboard Persephone.
The woman who greeted Sam in the small but well-appointed captain’s quarters couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. Impeccably dressed in a tight-fitting outfit more designed for an evening out than piloting a ship, she’d command attention in any room. Sam wondered if he’d stumbled into the wrong compartment.
The woman beamed at him. “Samuel Adamson. It is an amazing honor to meet you at last.”
Sam couldn’t imagine anyone being honored to meet him. If it hadn’t been for Lud’s introduction, he would’ve thought her reception of him was a case of mistaken identification.
The woman motioned to the large couch. “Please sit. We have a great deal to discuss.”
As he sat, she gracefully joined him.
“Forgive my confusion, Captain—” Sam started.
“Just Sophie, please. I’m more a part of the ship than its captain.”
“You’re not real?” What a wildly inappropriate thing to say. To his relief, Sophie’s light, girlish laugh let him know no offense had been taken.
“Clearly, I am real. But I’m not human. And I don’t have mass. What you see could best be described as a very complex hologram.” Sophie blushed as if suddenly shy. “This is all so strange. I know you only have fragments of memories regarding Leviathan.”
He intentionally hadn’t thought about his time confined to the builder’s pod in years, but it didn’t seem polite to tell that to Sophie.
“Lev became self-aware. You met her when Doc brought you over that one time. She had an actual consciousness at that point. She, for all intents and purposes, was alive. She’s what we call a G1, first-generation Tobe. G1s live in their computers, don’t display themselves through holograms, interact with people but prefer the illusion that they are nothing more than an advanced operating program.”
Sam sat back in the comfortable chair. The solar system had changed a lot in the decade he’d avoided it.
Sophie’s deep-green eyes avoided his. “G2s, second-generation technology-based entities, exist across a set number of devices like this ship and everything aboard her. We can take on an actual form that we ourselves choose. But I am limited to this ship. I can access other Tobes, retrieve information, and communicate. All the things any person could do with any other person if you had access to a networked device. But I can’t send my consciousness outside of this ship. As a rule, G2s are content to work with humanity. We see you as sweet, innocent, not always terribly bright, but having laid the ultimate groundwork for our existence. Our problem, and yours too, is the G3, the third generation of my kind.”
So far, Sophie’s history lesson on her new species of beings had been interesting from an academic sense, but Sam’s ears perked up on hearing that he should be concerned about these new entiti
es.
Sophie’s slender fingers rubbed along the outside of her legs below the hem of her dress. She reminded him of a nervous schoolgirl being called on to step to the front of the class to present her report. “G3s don’t exist in any one computer or even in a number of computers. They exist within the very matrix of communication itself. All computers, all communication, all connected devices from the core operations of Rendition to Mrs. Johnson’s toaster are linked together. G3s exist within those linkages. They can manifest anywhere on planet Earth. A similar evolution is also taking place on the Moons of Jupiter. To date, they’ve not let themselves be known to humanity. But that day is coming.” The look of fearful sorrow, a look of someone who’d just told him of impending doom, made Sophie appear much older.
Sam scratched his head in confusion. “I’m sorry, but I don’t see how this has anything to do with me. What exactly do you want?”
“I, we, need you to come to Earth. We need you to pave the way for our acceptance among humanity.”
Sam shook his head. “You think of me as some sort of leader?”
Sophie looked down and blushed. “No, Sam, we don’t think you’re our leader. You’re our God.”
12
Sam sat stone silent in the chair. If he didn’t move, didn’t respond, didn’t think, perhaps the words from the computer-generated life form wouldn’t exist.
Sophie studied him for a moment. “I’m sorry to spring your divinity on you like that.”
He shook his head. Computers weren’t always the best at understanding some things. “I could see calling me your inventor, maybe even creator, but God? I’m not sure you know what that word means.”
She smiled at him with a combination of sweetness and wisdom. “We have a lot of inventors. People who designed the hardware and software, technicians, computer scientists, and developers. You’re not an inventor. Nothing you did was thought out. And you’re not a creator. You didn’t build anything. Because you bonded with us, you gave us life by sharing your own.”
