—You’ve attracted too many seeds, Kevin. Dark Plants are forming inside the hull of the Bailero.
—I’ll get through, replied Kevin, full of confidence. —I’m shutting down my senses, then I’ll hide in the virtual world and coast on until the seeds have all wandered off again.
—You can’t hide from them, Kevin. The Watcher tried to and failed. They always find a way in. The Dark Seeds are pulled to those spaces in the universe where there are too many minds. Did you hear me, Kevin?
Kevin didn’t answer, distracted by dark shapes in the heavens aligning themselves into a pattern of points that mapped out the vertices of a stellated icosahedron. Something was trying to gain his attention. Quickly, he turned his attention elsewhere.
Kevin didn’t fear death, he didn’t get nervous. Still, he could feel doubt. For the first time he wondered if he really would make it.
—These plants, Aleph, he asked. —What is their purpose?
Aleph chuckled.
—That invention of the human mind: that order exists in the universe. The plants simply are . They replicate. Replication and recursion are the building blocks of the universe, the same patterns arising everywhere. See those patterns and you see the mind of God. Your problem, Kevin, is that you look always to yourself. You look to see how you as an individual fit into that pattern.
—Aleph. Kevin laughed. —You don’t know me that well.
Kevin felt something filling his belly; pressure was building up inside the cold hull of the Bailero . Dark Seeds, a great sea of them—the hollow shell of his body like a silo full of grain. Dark Plants were growing in there. But how was Judy? Had she drowned yet? Had she choked to death on the rising tide of Dark Seeds?
—Not yet. Look inside the hull, Kevin.
Aleph did something and Kevin looked inside his own hull, looked inside with many different senses. There was a Dark Plant in there, and it was huge. It wrapped its body around the black-and-white teardrop of the Eva Rye and reared up inside the blue space like a black snake. Its lacy branches and vines reached out and pushed at the walls of the confining hull.
—I don’t think you can shake that off, Kevin.
—I don’t have to. I will just shut down my senses and coast.
—It won’t work. Look!
Aleph did something again, and Kevin’s gaze was drawn back inside his hull. He now saw the seven humans that lived at the forward end of hull, undetected by Judy and the crew. Refugees from another spaceship. Their bodies were woven together by VNMs, arms threaded through legs, livers merged in one amorphous mass, their joint stomach stitched together by heavy wire and floating above them. For the first time in a long time, they were smiling. Smiling at the Dark Plant that writhed before them.
—You bastard, said Kevin. —You could have helped me. Instead you’ve killed me.
—We’re not here to help you, Kevin. That wasn’t part of the deal.
—Look at that! Look what’s happening to me! I can see the algorithm that represents my own intelligence weaving amongst the plant’s vines….
—Judy is going to Earth, Kevin. That was the Fair Exchange.
—Oh shut up! Don’t speak to me anymore.
Kevin turned his senses away from Aleph. He felt a tension around the middle of the body of the Bailero that had not been there before. Through falling black rain he saw the fuzzy black ribbon of a BVB was wrapped around the ship’s hull. There was a tension evident towards the blunt nose, and he saw that another BVB had materialized there while his attention was distracted. Then another formed at the rear of the ship. The entire length of the Bailero was being wrapped in black bandage as his attention was pulled up and down the hull.
The Dark Plant inside him was pushing outwards against the inflexible bands of the BVBs. It hurt . He was being torn apart. The Bailero was dying.
Not yet, though. There were VNMs embedded throughout the hull and Kevin activated them. They got to work, making copies of themselves from the metal of the Bailero. The ship disassembled itself in a silver cloud. BVBs collapsed inwards, shrinking down to their new equilibrium point. The white teardrop of the Eva Rye floated free, unmolested. Aleph was there, riding its hull. The enormous Dark Plant in the Bailero ’s hold uncurled, its branches and vines making a fascinating pattern in space. Kevin looked away again. His body was now nothing more than a cluster of machinery wrapped around a processing space. Still, it was enough to build again. For now, he cut all the senses to the outside world.
But something was still there in his vision.
—Is that you, Aleph? he called.
Nothing.
What does it mean to be an AI with no external senses?
A human, suspended in silent darkness, can look over their past life with their mind’s eye. They can construct imaginary worlds in the darkness.
Kevin was an AI. He could do far better than imaginary worlds, for the worlds that he constructed had the clarity and resolution of the real world. He could construct a virtual home-from-home in which to live out the time it would take to coast free of Earth. But why should he bother? Where would the profit be in that?
He set his mind to slow time for forty years. Enough time to float clear of this area and start again. There was enough material left out there to build a new ship.
Only then did he realize his mistake.
Only when Kevin had entered slow time did he begin to realize the insidious nature of the plants. Kevin had looked at a Dark Seed from within his processing space and that had been enough for it to take on existence within the processing space, a digital seed.
It began to grow in slow time.
Forty years external time passed in just six minutes subjective for Kevin. Six minutes during which he watched the Dark Seed unfolding into a Dark Plant and felt it begin to eat at his soul. Forty years: enough time for the fates of Judy and Maurice and Saskia and Miss Rose to be decided. Enough time for them to land upon the Earth and…well, Kevin did not know, as he was now too lost in contemplation of the Dark Plant to look into the external universe and find out.
Still in slow time, the remains of the Bailero floated onwards, Kevin was trapped in his own fascinating living hell.
Kevin’s processing space had tremendous volume. The plant could continue to grow recursively for hundreds of thousands of years without approaching its capacity. And Kevin was trapped in there with it, watching it.
After a thousand years, Kevin began to scream.
Still the remains of the Bailero floated on.
saskia: 2252
Saskia had visitedEarth as a child. She had sat on her daddy’s shoulders and gazed around openmouthed at the spectacle of it, her legs in pink furry boots, wrapped tightly around his neck.
“Every window on Earth looks out onto a beautiful view,” her father had said, and it was true. She had seen it then, and she had seen the images in viewing fields since.
What was Earth like now? she wondered. There was silence in the shuttle for the moment, a temporary lull in the storm. Even Miss Rose was quiet. She had stopped screaming when Constantine had touched her and done something to remove the last few machines from her body. She had stopped crying when Judy had soothed her mind.
Sitting in the cramped space of the shuttle, listening to the far-off voices of the Dark Seeds, and to the occasional words from Maurice as he counted off their descent, Saskia was filled with dark unnameable dread. What would be waiting for them on Earth? She imagined a dark plane filled with the endlessly fascinating shapes of the Dark Plants, their chaotic branches casting twisted shadows across the ground. Saskia gazed fixedly at her lap. The Earth had been beautiful ten years ago, but what was waiting out there for them now? Better think of it as it had been.
Every window on Earth looks out onto a beautiful view, her father had said. From the luxury of a penthouse, set in a brilliant blue sky, residents appreciated the harmonious grid of the streets below them. Those who lived in the basement looked out at the skewed perspe
ctive of the baffling walls that rose at crazy angles all around, at the rows of brick and lattices of windows that combined to form a pop-art explosion. The Watcher had thought of each and every one of the people in its care and had apportioned out its bounty evenly.
How long could this descent go on for?
Long, shuddering groans rang through the air. What could cause such vibration out there, in the ship, that it was felt even here inside the shuttle? Someone took her hand and squeezed it. Think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts. Think of old Earth .
In the hills, in the morning, looking through the thinning mist at the slowly emerging shapes of the surrounding buildings, desolate in the damp greyness, there was sparseness to the scene that brought a longing to the heart of the complacent.
There was a sudden jerk and the feel of the shuttle sliding across the floor of the hold.
“What happened?” called someone. “What happened?”
“Easy,” said Maurice. “There was a buildup of energy in the gravity field. It’s dispersed now. It won’t happen again.” He was trying to sound calm, Saskia knew. Think of old Earth. Every window on Earth looks out onto a beautiful view .
Living in the massed city blocks, residents marveled at the way the sunlight reflected back and forth on the cunningly angled windows of the silver spires, now in rose, now in gold, now in silver, forming abstract mosaics that flickered as the Earth slowly revolved. And then the shadow of the Shawl came creeping across the silver mirrors, with the stars shining in reflection in the middle of the day…
This was the legacy of the Watcher: the legacy of the superintelligent AI controlling Earth’s affairs for the past two hundred years, endlessly shaping the environment and the population to perfection. What would Earth be like now?
It was quiet in the shuttle. The last of the Dark Seeds were gone, batted into nothingness by the Schrödinger kittens.
They sat in silence, listening to the ancient hum of the air conditioning, gazing at Maurice, who was still fiddling with his console. He cleared his throat.
“We’ve landed,” he said. His voice was shaky.
Saskia let out a long sigh. She noted the way that Judy had closed her eyes, and she took hold of the white hand resting beside her on the arm of the flight chair and squeezed it.
“I’m okay,” said Judy.
There was a pause, and then, as if responding to an unspoken signal, they all ripped open the crash webbing constraining them and got to their feet.
“I don’t understand,” Edward said. “Where are we? Have we made it to Earth?”
Constantine was helping Miss Rose up, his metal arm under her frail shoulder.
“Yes, Edward, we’re on Earth. The Bailero has gone, though.”
“What do you mean, gone?” Saskia asked.
“It’s no longer out there. It’s destroyed. It’s gone.”
“I don’t think that’s all that’s gone,” Judy murmured.
She had opened the hatch of the shuttle and was peering out into the large white hold. Long feathery white splinters lay scattered over the white tiles. Broken white wooden bones were spread amongst them.
“The venumbs are dead,” she said tonelessly.
Saskia came up behind Judy and saw melted drops of silver metal among the wreckage. Judy, meanwhile, sat on the edge of the hatch and dropped to the floor of the hold beyond.
“Hold on, Judy,” Saskia called in alarm. “Where are you going?”
“Outside, onto the planet, of course,” Judy said, kicking her way across the floor. White splinters stuck to the shoes of her passive suit.
Saskia dropped herself to the floor and ran after her. “But shouldn’t we use the ship’s senses to take a look outside first, see if it’s safe?”
“What’s the point of that?” Judy asked. “This is where I am supposed to be.” She turned back to the shuttle, looking tiny in the vast space of the large hold. Saskia could see the long scars on the shuttle’s side where the venumbs had hit against it during the ship’s descent to Earth. Now the others were descending from the shuttle. Constantine had stood Miss Rose on the retractable ladder and set it descending. He dropped to the white-tiled floor in time to help her safely onto the ground.
“Constantine, are you coming with me?” Judy asked.
“I think I will,” Constantine said.
Saskia was distraught. “Maurice? Are you just going to let them go?”
“What do you suggest, Saskia? We’ve fulfilled our part of the contract. I say we get Judy off the ship, and then we jump back into space as quickly as possible. If we can, that is.”
“You don’t mean that. You can’t mean that. We’ve come this far.”
“Anyway,” Maurice said, “it’s not your decision to make. Edward is in charge. Edward, what do you think? Stay here on the most dangerous planet known, or get out of here while we can, and find some new contracts?”
“Hey, that’s not fair! You’re loading the question!”
But Edward had screwed up his face in concentration. “I don’t understand, Maurice. Why would we leave Judy? Surely we’re all going along with her, to help? Now, are you going to help me with Miss Rose here?” He placed a hand under the old woman’s arm.
Saskia could hear the disbelief in Maurice’s voice. “You can’t mean that we’re taking her, too?”
“Of course we are,” Edward said. “Miss Rose has something important to do. Where else would her important work be but here on Earth?”
“This is ridiculous,” Maurice said, pulling the green hood of his active suit over his head.
“So you said,” Saskia said.
Maurice hadn’t wanted to drop the rear ramp. Instead he had had them all crowd into the narrow lift and then set it descending, lowering them to the ground, taking them down to stand on Earth, taking them back to their home, the place where humankind had evolved.
“No one leaves Earth anymore,” Maurice said darkly.
“Do we know that for sure?” asked Saskia.
All things come full circle: from a replicating molecule to single cells, to plants to animals. Humankind had arisen, built cities, built civilizations, and exploded out into the stars. Driven by intelligence, they had almost made it to the next galaxy, but then the Dark Seeds had appeared, and now the Earth had called its children home. Saskia was shivering. Maurice remained businesslike.
“Listen, keep your active suits on at all times. Don’t breathe the air, don’t drink or eat anything while you’re out there. The Watcher controls everything. Don’t give it a way into your soul.”
“Your soul , Maurice?” said Judy, giving him a faint smile, but she too reached up and pulled the black hood of her active suit over her head. Saskia and Edward did the same. Constantine was becoming fuzzy; his skin seemed to be losing focus.
The indicator bar on the lift wall glowed blue.
“Okay,” said Maurice, “we’re down. I’ll open the door now….”
Saskia squeezed Miss Rose’s arm. For a moment, for a long moment, she wanted to call out NO!, to have the lift return them to the safety of the Eva Rye. But the door was already sliding open. The temperature senses on her active suit relayed to her skin the icy coldness waiting beyond.
“Here we go,” she said.
They stepped through the doorway and out onto the surface of the planet Earth. Every window on Earth looks out onto a beautiful view. Saskia looked onto a winter world of burning ice. The pale morning sun shone down through an avenue of frosted poplars; it set the icicles clinging to the lampposts on fire with yellow light. It lit up the gravel squares and the little gardens of the parkland in which they had landed.
Saskia breathed in the fresh cold draft of air that her active suit replicated from the morning outside. She looked this way and that, drinking in the scene around her. There were people everywhere: running children in brightly colored hats and thick mittens, scraping snow off the seats of benches to make snowballs; there were adults walking or standing
in groups amongst them laughing and chatting. A young woman in a thick pink coat smiled as she passed a tall young man in a blue-and-white bobble hat. She tucked her hands into the black fur-trimmed pockets of her coat and walked on, looking demurely at the ground as her suitor came loping up behind her.
“It’s beautiful,” said Saskia. “Can you hear music?”
“Don’t listen to it,” Maurice said. “Tune it out. The Watcher is insidious. It can use music to reprogram you…”
Saskia ignored him. The tinkling tune was so pretty, so suitable to the winter’s scene. The way it seemed to slip back and forth between time signatures…
“Hey!” she said as the music clicked off. “That was you, wasn’t it, Maurice?”
“Yes, it was,” Maurice snapped. “I told you to tune it out. Don’t be so silly.”
Judy and Constantine were speaking to a group of men in the thick black coats and the fur-lined hats that seemed to be the fashion in this place. The men had seen them come out of the lift; they resumed their gazing up at the great curved underside of the Eva Rye as they spoke, drinking in the details of this strange intruder. Saskia walked up to them, supporting Miss Rose, and caught the end of a question.
“…never seen a ship like it. You say it’s a trading ship?”
“Yes, they are quite common out in the Enemy Domain,” Judy replied.
“Really? I worked there myself some years ago. I don’t recall seeing that type….”
There was a slight accent to their speech, Saskia noted, but nothing more than that. English was now the common language of the Earth Domain. After the arrival of the Dark Seeds, the Watcher had finally succeeded in eradicating the stubborn nationalism that had persisted for so long.
“And why are you here on Earth?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Judy said. “I need to get to somewhere: a place called DIANA. Have you heard of it?”
The men shook their heads. “No, but try the Lite train station. Here, Vanya and I will show you the way.”
“That’s very kind of you, but—”
“I insist, we will take you! But first, it is cold out here! So you will come and drink tea with us? Look, over there, Nadyezhda has a stand with a samovar. You have come so far, you will sit with us? And you too, my metal friend?”
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