Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

  And the Starfish front kept rolling onward, snapping at the heels of the Spinners and destroying everything touched by their gifts. The colonists on Athena were just the latest victims of the Starfish attacks.

  What made this one more unsettling for Hatzis was that she had been there only within the last few days. One of her engrams had been on the Michel Mayor and she had spent a full day with her, discussing the issues confronting the human race. To date, she had found a dozen copies of herself among the colonies. All were equally precious, although the older ones, like Gou Mang, tended to be more obsessively fragile, closer to senescence and therefore better for dangerous missions like the one to Athena. She was happy to indulge them, but at the same time unwilling to risk any part of herself. The Starfish detected every message sent via the Spinner ftl communicators; anything in the vicinity of the transmission would be destroyed if it remained behind long enough. That was how the Starfish had found Adrasteia and Sol—and Varuna and any of the others unlucky enough to test their communicators before being contacted by the survivors. It was all a matter of timing, catching the colonies post-Spinner and pre-Starfish. Until now, anyway...

  Heavy footsteps resounded along the gantry leading to the hole ship hangar. She looked up.

  “You heard?”

  “Yes.” Peter Alander strode through the hole ship’s airlock and into the cockpit without breaking stride. His was a very old genus of vat-grown body that had been standard issue on the UNESSPRO missions; more robust and slightly stockier than a natural human body, its skin had a faintly olive hue and sported no body hair at all. He inhabited his body permanently, cogitating exclusively, when required, through a series of processors installed in the body’s skull instead of operating it from remote as was originally intended. Over it he wore one of the gray habitat jumpsuits they had found on Sothis, and over that was the ever-present shimmer of the Spinner I-suit. Her eyes, modified long ago to see in a much wider spread of frequencies than many of the UNESSPRO scientific instruments, had no problem discerning it.

  She couldn’t help but think of him as the closest thing to genuinely human company she had left—although that might have simply been because she had known him longer. The first and only engram to contact Sol prior to the Starfish invasion, he had been on the verge of a complete mental breakdown when they’d met. A slight scrambling of his internal processes by a random element she had introduced—a procedure she had conducted without his knowledge—seemed to have quashed some of the more dramatic symptoms, but she could never quite tell what he was going to do next. Maybe that was why she tolerated his company over that of the other engrams.

  “What should we do?” he asked, coming to a halt before the hole ship’s wall screen as though experiencing some sort of revelation from the alien vessel. “Should we withdraw everyone from the area?”

  “Who do we have there?”

  He fell silent for a few moments as he consulted the mental checklist that he, like she, kept of every colony the survivors had contacted. His thoughts moved with glacial slowness compared to her own, but she liked to keep him feeling useful.

  “There’s the Sagan in Beta Hydras, of course.”

  She nodded; that was the latest colony they’d found, the one called Bright. Alander still tended to think in terms of missions rather than worlds named, whereas she preferred to acknowledge them by their colony name. “Then there’s the Davies in Zeta Reticuli, the Chandra- sekhar in Alpha Mensa, the Tarter in BSC8061, the Smolin in HD113283 and the Bracewell in HD203244.1 think that’s it.”

  She did her own quick mental check and nodded in agreement. The area around Athena that Alander was referring to, less than fifty light-years across, represented not quite 1.5 percent of the thirty-three million cubic light- years of space covered by the UNESSPRO survey. They’d been lucky to find so many active missions within that space. Four of the seven, including Head of Hydras, were Spinner contactees; there were others Alander hadn’t mentioned, which had already been destroyed by the Starfish.

  “I don’t think we have the resources to move all of them quickly,” she said.

  “Who says we have to move quickly?” asked Alander. “It could be days, even weeks if the Starfish are searching stars systematically.”

  “We don’t know what they’re doing, Peter. This could just have been a fluke, an unlucky accident.”

  “Don’t give me that.” His expression, when he brought it round to face her, was one of extreme skepticism. “You know what the odds against it are like.”

  She did. On an interstellar scale, solar systems were minuscule things, more scarce than fish in Earth’s long- gone deep seas: the odds of hitting one at random, let alone one of the few inhabited by humans, were vanishingly small, as pointed out ad nauseam by the mid-twenty-first century’s anti-SETI movement.

  “Then somehow we screwed up,” she said. “We let something slip. The Starfish can’t be idiots. They’ll be looking for mistakes.”

  “Exactly. And they’re listening to everything we say.”

  “There’s no evidence to suggest they’ve managed to translate our transmissions,” she shot back.

  “Maybe there is now,” he said, cheeks flushing slightly.

  “You’re arguing for evacuation?”

  “No, not until we have more data, at least. Where would we put everyone?”

  “Sothis has room.”

  “And what if the Starfish come here, Caryl? What then?” His lips tightened. “We won’t be safe anywhere.”

  “Better an acceptable risk than being dead,” she said soberly, holding his stare long enough to reinforce the challenge, then dropping her gaze.

  This was where they differed. Each of them had a clear idea of what was acceptable and what wasn’t. It was just that, at the end of the day, she thought she was right.

  “So we’re supposed to sit here and wait? Is that it?” He paced around the cockpit like a caged animal. “Caryl, one of me just died.”

  “You weren’t alone, Peter.” She felt annoyed that he was claiming the attack on the Michel Mayor as some sort of personal tragedy. “There was a Caryl Hatzis on that mission, too. As well as a Cleo Samson, a Kingsley Oborn, a Michael Turate, a—”

  “For Christ’s sake, Caryl,” he snapped. “I know that. That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “Then what are you saying, Peter?”

  “There’s more of you than there is of me,” he said. “You’re—”

  He stopped, his mouth left hanging for words that seemed to have stuck in his throat.

  Although there had been more Peter Alanders sent by UNESSPRO, the fundamental instability of his engrams had reduced their effectiveness. The Alander sent to the Head of Hydrus was so far the only other one that had survived any length of time, so in that respect, she could sympathize with him. Nevertheless, she was curious as to what he’d been about to say she was.

  “I’m what, Peter?” she said. Lucky? Ungrateful? Spoiled?

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She sighed. “Then tell me what is it you want to do about this.”

  “I don’t know.” He exhaled heavily, shrugging. “We don’t have many options.”

  “That’s been the case all along,” she pointed out.

  “So nothing’s changed. Is that what you think?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “I simply disagree that the change is as fundamental as you think.”

  He looked at her from beneath furrowed brows and shook his head. “Bullshit.”

  With that, he turned and walked from the cockpit, his footsteps booming as he crossed the gantry and headed back into the habitat. She didn’t need to hack into his senses to work out where he was going, but she did anyway.

  * * *

  The observation platform overlooked the dried-up bed of a sea that would have been roughly the size of two Pacific Oceans, before it boiled away. Sothis was a dead world that had once held life. The fierce illumination of Sirius, blazing high above on
its slow arc across the sky, had stripped the planet of its water just as significantly complex organisms had appeared. The salty crusts left behind by the oceans held the remains of numerous kinds of single-cell life-forms. According to the experts, given a less harsh climate, another billion years might well have seen creatures walking Sothis’s rocky shores.

  But those same experts who had first studied Sothis were themselves now extinct. The McKenzie Base habitats were all that remained of a senescent engram colony, sent from Earth in 2050 along with all the other UNESSPRO missions. Sirius’s close proximity to Sol meant that the David Deutsche had arrived less than sixteen years after it had left Sol. Nearly 100 years had passed since then, and the engrams who had established a base on the system’s one Earth-like world and seeded the system’s other planets with monitoring stations had all degraded.

  The only things that remained of the colony were their machines. Even the numerous artificial bodies with which they had populated the habitats had died, one by one, as the minds behind them had ceased giving them orders to eat and repair themselves.

  Engram breakdown wasn’t pretty to watch, and Hatzis had avoided studying the colony’s records too closely. She had made sure Alander had seen them, though. Engrams might have been adequate copies of the mind of a human being for short missions, but they simply weren’t adaptable enough to survive more than a few decades. They couldn’t cope with the changes that inevitably came as a by-product of life. As small errors or random mutations built up in the code that generated them, higher definitions resisted the subtle new pathways each mind wanted to follow. Instead of adapting, the engrams clung to the way they had been, to the selves they had left behind on Earth years ago. Psychosis was inevitable. If they weren’t shut down from the outside, they entered a state Hatzis had heard described as brainlock and ceased to function. When they reached that point, there was no repairing them. It was, she supposed, a sort of natural death for this particular sort of artificial mind—so the term senescence seemed particularly apt. Whether it was possible to reverse the aging process, she wasn’t sure. Alander’s continued existence suggested that maybe the randomizing was doing him good, but the experiments she was conducting with various copies of herself had yet to yield any clear-cut results.

  All she needed was time, though. Only thirteen days had passed in the real universe since the destruction of Adrasteia, but for her, thinking faster, that was the equivalent of several months. She had shown her engrams ways to cheat the processing budget on the survey missions, so they were working faster, too. Combined, her extended self was working inefficiently but exhaustively on various projects designed to ensure humanity’s long-term survival. All she had to do was live through the coming weeks by avoiding the Starfish as much as possible, and then everything would work out. She would solve the senescence problem, she was sure; then, using Spinner technology, she would unite all of her various parts and commence working on what she would ultimately become. Whatever that was...

  Alander’s eyes tracked across the dust-filled basin of the dead sea. Upraised rib cages of long-dead sea beasts, Hatzis mused, seeing what Alander saw, would have been much more evocative of the life that had died here than the occasional footprint preserved in the salt crust near the habitat’s egress airlocks. The structure was large enough to hold a community of several dozen people and boasted two shuttle landing pads and the base of what might have been, given time, an orbital tower.

  Sothis wasn’t a Spinner contactee; by the time the aliens had appeared, the very last of the colonists—Faith Jong—had been dead for almost thirty years. Hatzis remembered Jong as a petite software specialist interested in bonsai and late twentieth-century popular music. It was hard to picture her as the crazed engram that had loaded herself into the operating system of a small fusion reactor and sent the contained nova within critical in order to drive out the darkness creeping over her mind.

  Faith Jong’s memorial was a crater two kilometers wide on the far side of the planet. Thankfully, the explosion hadn’t harmed the main installation, which now served as the counterintelligence base for the remains of humanity. It combined Spinner and human technology, the latter a mix of 2050 and 2150, depending on what resources were available at any given time. It orbited a star that wasn’t typical for human habitation and sat slightly ahead and to one side of the projected Spinner advance. It had a population of two, but if circumstances had their way, that figure would rise considerably.

  “I know you’re watching me,” said Alander.

  Close, she thought. Through his senses she could see not only the view but hear the whisper of the wind brushing outside of the habitat, feel the cool smoothness of the nanofactured metal rail Alander was holding with both hands, smell the dusty air that had circulated the lifeless habitat for three decades before their arrival, and taste the saliva in his mouth. She couldn’t see him, but she could experience him a thousand times better from the inside. She could even read his thoughts if she wanted to. Only the fact that such familiarity would ruin what little companionship he offered stopped her from doing so. And the fear that his resistance to her plans would turn out to be built on sand. She needed a devil’s advocate as much as she needed her other selves.

  “Perhaps this does change everything,” she said, placing her voice as a whisper into his ear, “but at the same time, it changes nothing.”

  “Of course it does,” he said. “It changes the way we feel about things, Caryl.”

  “Peter, until this happened, our greatest fear was that someone would make a mistake. Just one transmission from the wrong place would bring the Starfish down on us. But if the message from Athena is right, then we could be damned either way now. It’s out of our hands. There’s no point in running anywhere, because nowhere is safe.”

  “There’s no sense digging in too deeply, though,” he said less stridently than before. “We need to be flexible, to be able to move fast if we need to.”

  “Oh, I agree,” she said. “And I’ll draw up contingency plans while you’re gone.”

  That surprised him. “You’re not coming?”

  She shook her head—unnecessarily, she realized, as he couldn’t see her anyway. “No,” she said. “I think it’s best that one of us stays here to coordinate things. When Thor comes with the hole ship, she can go with you instead. That’ll save you dropping her off on the way.”

  She felt his brow crease into a frown. “And Thor is...?”

  “HD92719.” She indulged the question, even though she was sure Alander knew very well which system the Thor colony was in. Given the number of different versions of her she had to deal with, she had adopted the posthuman custom of calling them by the places they had come from. To the others, she was Sol, the sole original human remaining in the universe.

  “Will you work with her?” she asked.

  “Will she be up to it?”

  “Of course she will, Peter,” she said tiredly, thinking, She’ll be a damn sight more stable than you. “And she has her own body, so you won’t have to deal with conSense.”

  She waited while he mulled it over. The question of what the colony of Thor would do without its hole ship was begging. Would he bring it up? she wondered. She would hate to have a dead colony on her conscience, if the Starfish came calling on them, but Thor was far away from Athena, and the work she hoped to do was important enough to justify the risk. And with Alander gone, she would have full access to the hole ship Arachne. It would obey her orders, unlike the Gifts, and there were plenty of versions of her out there that needed to be contacted, Spinners and Starfish notwithstanding.

  From her higher processing rate, he seemed to take forever to think it over. He stood watching the view, one hand toying with the pendant he wore around his android body’s neck. It consisted of a simple disk made of densely packed carbon, one side reflective, the other carved with barely a dozen words. It read:

  LUCIA CAROLE BENCK

  2130.05.17

  “Bli
ss was it in that dawn to be alive.”

  (WORDSWORTH)

  Alander had found it orbiting 53 Aquarius, an empty solar system between his home colony, Adrasteia, and Sol. He carried it with him out of loyalty to Lucia’s memory, she supposed, although his hope of ever seeing her again must be dwindling. She had yet to reach any of her target systems, out of all the solo missions she had been on.

  Or perhaps, she thought, the slow turning of the disk in his fingers was a gentle reminder of mortality.

  Eventually, he grunted his consent. “Whatever,” he said. “You’re getting hard to tell apart, so I guess it makes no real difference to me who comes along.”

  He let go of the rail and stalked off through the habitat, perhaps assuming that this would put him beyond her observational range. It didn’t, of course, but she chose not to go with him.

  Returning to herself, to her self-imposed isolation in the hole ship Arachne, she looked down at her hands, where they lay folded in her lap. They were flesh and blood, or the closest thing to it that had survived the Spike in Sol system; they weren’t composed of cells grown in a soup and assembled en masse, differentiating as they went. She was human.

  That set her apart from all the others. She felt it keenly. As much as she played it down when she encouraged them to work together, the truth was impossible to ignore: she was the product of 150 years of experience and biological technology a century in advance of anything UNESSPRO had had. She simply wasn’t the same as them.

  But Alander had the gall to suggest that he couldn’t tell them apart...?

  She smiled. Ah, she thought, realizing: An insult. That was good. He wouldn’t normally resort to personal attacks when he couldn’t get what he wanted. The fact that he had this time suggested she must have been getting to him. Was it the argument, she wondered, or the randomizing of his thoughts she had introduced? Either way, it was an interesting development.