Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

  * * *

  In transit. Nothing to do now but wait. The trip is unremarkable, endured in quarter time so as not to overload the processors we have available. The hole ships make it too easy, almost boring. But at least I can say, now, that I’ve traveled faster than light. It’ll take us less time to cross the fifty-odd light years between psi Capricornus and Sirius than it would’ve to circumnavigate Inari. Amazing.

  Before we left, I got the chance to ask the Gifts about the Map Room data. Everyone else was preparing for the journey to Sothis (packing their suitcases, so to speak), newly afraid that the Starfish might drop out of the sky on us at any moment. Neil was free for a short time, and he passed on my question. It wasn’t anything too tricky, just a simple request for clarification regarding the X-ray glitches. Did the Gifts know anything about where the mistakes might have come from?

  “No,” they said. “We don’t.”

  No great surprises there. But Neil took it upon himself to pursue the matter further.

  “Could they have been deliberately planted?”

  “They could have been,” the Gifts replied.

  “What about the Yuhl?” Neil asked. “Why aren’t they in the Library?”

  “We are not familiar with that race.”

  “Why not? They were contacted by the Spinners. They must have been, or else they wouldn’t have hole ships. So why aren’t they in the Library?”

  “We are not familiar with that race,” came the flat response again.

  “If I ask you a third time, am I going to get the same answer?”

  There was a brief silence. I saw the recording, so I know it happened. I’ve never seen the Gifts hesitate before.

  “Our knowledge is obviously not complete,” the Gifts finally admitted. “We cannot explain why.”

  End of conversation. Neil has had enough experience with the alien AIs to know when to give up.

  Still, good on him. That’s hole number three. We’re no closer to knowing what the errors mean, of course, if anything, but at least they’re mounting up.

  * * *

  I thought I was ready for Sothis, but I wasn’t. It’s so crowded. Not physically, but electronically. We’re not the only colony that’s been evacuated and plugged into the network they’re building here. Where before I’d only forty-odd people to talk to, now there are over two hundred within easy reach. We’ve been thrust face-to-face with the reality of engram duplication. I have met three Caryl Hatzises so far, and two other Ali Genoveses. Four of myself have come to visit, also—virtually, that is. We have taken to wearing green name tags on our chests, not displaying our names, but rather the names of our origin colonies. It’s the only way to keep track.

  They expect thirteen colonies to join up all told. I’m not superstitious, but I find myself hoping that it’s not unlucky.

  * * *

  Still settling in. There was plenty to do when we arrived, but that’s slowing now. We’ve been playing catch-up—not just with the other missions and other versions of ourselves, but with what’s been going on in general. The other versions of myself who have been here longer are no clearer on what’s happening behind the scenes, even the ones who are survey managers. The Hatzises are a closed court. Sometimes I think they’re as bad as the Gifts.

  But we have resources here, at least. I can think as fast as I want, even if it does mean using Overseers from destroyed colonies. That’s like thinking with someone else’s dead brain cells and struck me as a bit distasteful at first. But there’s no denying the need we have for it, and it doesn’t make sense letting good hardware go to waste. In a sense, it gives us a little too much time to play with. There’s an air of expectancy through the refugee camp. The Starfish are more dangerous than ever. Giving us time to muse on that thought is not helping.

  But it has given Ali more time to visit. Although she’s still nominal SMC of our mission, now that she’s chucked our lot in with the Hatzises she’s delegated the greater part of her responsibility to them. She looks relieved about that, too. Mostly.

  “There’s been no talk of what happens after,” she complained to me yesterday. “If we survive the Starfish, I mean. Do we go back to our colonies and finish what we started, or do we stick together in one big group and try to recolonize Sol System or something?”

  “Is that what you’d like to do, Ali?”

  “I don’t know, Rob. But it’d be good to discuss our options.”

  “Perhaps they’re not even thinking about options until they’re sure we’ll have any.”

  “Perhaps. And I suppose there’s always the senescence problem. That’ll be with us, no matter what we do.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said, looking to lighten the mood a little. “I think the Vincula could have fixed the engrams back in Sol if it wanted to. It’d be like fixing a steam engine for someone from our time. But it didn’t need to. Who repairs steam engines when everyone uses fuel cells? They’d be museum pieces, not worth serious attention. So the Vincula didn’t even try.

  “Sol, on the other hand, has nothing but us. Her options are limited. She can let us fade away, which we know we’ll do in time, or she can work out how to fix us. It might not be that hard. Even if it is, she can just freeze batches of us in SSDS memory until she has the problem nutted out. All she needs is time, and she could have plenty of that.”

  “Assuming we survive the Starfish,” Ali repeated.

  “If we don’t, the point is moot.”

  “True.” After a slight pause, she asked, “Do you ever wonder how your original died?”

  “Of course.” I gave in to her gloominess. “I can’t help it. I’d always hoped to meet him again, somehow.”

  “Ever the optimist.” She smiled sadly. “I wonder what mine would have made of all this.”

  “The same as you, surely?”

  “Maybe not. She wouldn’t have stayed like she was when I left forever.”

  “She might have become like Sol, you mean?”

  “Perhaps. I don’t know if she survived the Spike, but if she did and she was here now—”

  “Would she be doing the same?”

  “As Sol, yes.” She shrugged, sending her hair swaying. I had upgraded my virtual quarters to include floor-to-ceiling windows with views of San Francisco Bay outside. Sunlight suited her skin.

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “You would have done the right thing, I’m sure.”

  She looked grateful, even though she knew I was being carefully noncommittal. “I like to think we all would,” she said.

  She stayed longer than I expected. I guess we all need a little closeness, now, when things are really getting tight. I know I’m grateful for it, if only because it takes my mind off things. It certainly makes the move to Sothis that much easier to bear. If this is to be our last stand, at least I’ll be there to see it.

  2.0.2

  Lucia Benck

  2117.4.7 Standard Mission Time

  (1 January, 2119 UT)

  The darkness surprised her: Lucia Benck knew who she was, where she was, and what had happened to her. She knew what the date should have been when the manual switch tripped her Overseer back into life. But she couldn’t see. She couldn’t feel. Had she died during her long transit through the system? Was this formless, empty nothingness Hell? Then the dusty pathways of her mothballed mind reassembled completely, and she remembered. She had programmed a discontinuity so she would know when the jump was over. It would have been all too easy to program the Overseer to suspend her operations and then revive them without any perceptible break at all, but she wanted more than that. She wanted something that would remind her, at least, of the risk she had taken. Something that would make her appreciate making it out the other side in one piece.

  Let there be light, she thought wryly. It was a cliché but what the hell. No one was there to hear it, anyway, but her.

  At the command, her conSense modules came on-line one by one, gradually building a virtual world
for her to slot into. As yet she had had no direct contact with Chung-5, since the probe was inert, apart from her and the nanofacturing plant. The latter was rebuilding her and itself at the same time from the raw materials she had stored near the core of the probe. Her clock rate was very slow to compensate for low energy reserves as it extended tendrils through the inert shield encasing the probe’s active core. She imagined molecular drill heads burrowing in and out of cracks, heading for the outside. When they reached vacuum, they would sprout roots and petals like elegant, microscopic flowers and begin to grow.

  Two days after her awakening—barely an hour her time—she received her first visuals from the outside. She saw stars and, at the sight of them, her nerves eased instantly. Chung-5 was rotating with a different period from the one she had given it before flipping the switch: slightly faster and with more of a tumbling feel. She could correct it later, once she had attitudes again. Training her miniature sensors around her, she caught sight of pi-1 Ursa Major as it rolled into view. The star was still there, apparently unchanged, but for the moment she could tell little more than that.

  Her first impulse was to check the camera to see if it had operated correctly. When she had actuators in place, she dragged the film into view. The process appeared to have worked, but she had forgotten that she would need to develop the negatives before viewing them properly. Creating a chemical bath was, temporarily, less important than getting the power on and ensuring her own safety. The pictures would have to wait. Other than that, though, everything appeared to be going well, so far. The plant was busy building all of the many components she would need to continue her mission. It would probably take weeks before she was back to full capacity, if she could ever reach that level again. Depending on how much shielding had been ablated away by her passage through pi-1 Ursa Major’s solar atmosphere, she might have to wait many years as her magnetic shielding accrued mass from interstellar dust before she could have everything she wanted. But it didn’t look as though she was going to be crippled, and that was the main thing.

  It was only while considering where she would go next that she realized she hadn’t dropped her customary souvenir on the way through the system. She’d even had a quote prepared, but the disturbing events leading up to her arrival had distracted her from routine. Only now, with time to spare, did she have the chance to remember it. Maybe, when things were back to normal, she could build something smaller and fire it back at the system; she might even be able to nudge it along with a laser for a while, to give it some extra delta-v. It might take a century or two to arrive, but at least the chain would be unbroken.

  She wondered if her other selves had stuck to the deal. UNESSPRO wouldn’t approve, of course: she was wasting resources, for one thing, as well as polluting pristine environments. She preferred to think of it as disseminating the wisdom of humanity one sound bite—or meme—at a time, while at the same time creating a legacy that she could truly call her own. If all went well, there might be tens of thousands of her word disks already scattered throughout the expanding bubble of surveyed space surrounding Sol. She didn’t need to do anything, really, while Chung-5 went about its repairs. The decision of where to go next could wait. So she kept herself in a very slow-mo state as she settled back to watch the star behind her shrink.

  There goes Jian Lao, she thought to herself. There goes Peter.

  After a while, she turned her sensors forward and pondered the stars ahead.

  Hipp40918, Hipp41308, Hipp43477, 2 Ursa Major, Muscida...

  And, farther ahead still: Bode’s Nebula, M82, NGC3077, NGC2976, IC2574...

  Then: infinity...

  She shivered—or, at least, her virtual body shivered. Normally, the thought of flying forever filled her with a powerful sense of wonder. This time, though, there was an uneasy edge to it, as if that sense of wonder had been corrupted by something else. She didn’t know what it was, either. All she did know was that there was something dogging at her, something that left her feeling oddly anxious.

  A moment later, however, it passed, and she was left wondering whether she hadn’t simply imagined the whole thing. The sense of wonder was as pure and powerful as it had ever been at any point in her light-years of traveling. If there was one thing she was sure of after twenty subjective years, it was that she would never regret her decision to join UNESSPRO, to explore the universe. It was who she was; it defined her. As Peter had said, she was a tourist through and through.

  Sometimes it struck her as strange that it had been twenty years. She hadn’t changed at all. Her memories, her sense of self were as strong as ever. Even though in the past she had regarded the boffins at UNESSPRO as penny-pinching, shortsighted, and complacent, there could be no denying that they did a good job when they put their mind to it. She was proof of that. As were all the other engrams.

  To hell with the memes I’m leaving behind, she thought to the universe at large. The way I’m feeling, I reckon I can outlast the lot of you.

  The probe alerted her with a fair imitation of a cake timer when the photos were ready. She woke herself out of her deep-time thoughts and brought herself back to the present.

  There were seventy-three pictures in all, and she turned her cameras on each of them with a fair degree of nervousness. What if there was nothing to see? What if the entire exercise had been a complete waste of time?

  Plates one through twenty chronicled her approach to the system. The tumble of the probe along with its motion through space rendered many of the details as little more than streaks, but some had come out quite clearly. The gas giants were in the right places, and neither of them changed dramatically as she streaked toward them. She glimpsed rings, satellites, atmospheric storms: details she would have loved to have studied further had the opportunity not been over three quarter trillion kilometers behind her.

  The next thirty plates concentrated on the inner system, Jian Lao in particular. The world was as blue as she had dreamed, with a crystal clarity to its cloud systems and landmasses that reminded her of Earth. It had three small moons. It was easy to add them to her dream of her and Peter, surveying the paradise they claimed together, in the back of her mind.

  None of the first fifty plates showed anything out of the ordinary. No odd streaks or flashes; no unexpected blobs. No Andrei Linde, either. In fact, there was no evidence that anyone had ever even been in the system—which was impossible, because she had seen it arrive.

  The remainder of the plates had been taken as she left the system. The images of pi-1 Ursa Major’s planets and primary shrank steadily as they receded from her, and they told her little that she didn’t already know. The last one had been taken only a day before her awakening and showed exactly the same view she had herself seen upon burrowing out of her cocoon.

  Nothing. They told her nothing. With a sinking heart, she knew that her misgivings had been fully realized: it had all been a waste of time.

  She couldn’t believe it. There had to be something going on. She couldn’t have imagined the whole thing. The flashes she had seen must have been immensely powerful for her dishes to pick them up. They must have left some sort of record, if only on the atmosphere of Jian Lao. If a natural phenomenon had caused them—like a comet strike—it must have been so large as to nearly crack the planet in two!

  But it didn’t matter what logic dictated. The fact was, there was nothing. The motion-streaked images were blurry but not so ambiguous as to hide the evidence of a catastrophe on that scale. She checked every image minutely, hunting for the slightest unaccounted-for photon. She plotted the trajectories of every major body in the system to make sure that what she saw really was natural. She even ran them forward and backward across her vision like a brief time-lapse movie.

  And that, in the end, was how she noticed it. As the probe had tumbled its way through the system, the shutter on its mechanical camera had clicked open once every ten hours or so. The mechanism had been as simple as she could devise, given her self-imposed lim
itations on technology and emissions. If there really had been nothing in the system but herself, then the metronomic click of the camera would have been the only regular sound, ticking like a very slow clock.

  When she riffled through the photos, however, she noticed that there was a discontinuity. The smooth progression jumped just before the probe flashed past the fourth terrestrial planet. It was slight, just one frame, barely enough to be noticeable, and for a long while she couldn’t decide whether or not she had simply imagined it. It was only after she had double-checked the probe’s trajectory and replotted the various points at which the camera should have fired that she was able to dispel her doubts.

  There was no question about it: there was a plate missing. Not unexposed, either, but actually missing—as though it had never existed. The plates formed a clear, uninterrupted sequence, so it didn’t make sense that the shutter should fail to open at that moment and no other. And it hadn’t become jammed in the camera mechanism, otherwise all the photographs after it would have failed or emerged damaged.

  She could think of only one explanation for the loss, and that was that the plate had been stolen.

  A cold feeling washed through her at the thought, as though her virtual world in the heart of the probe had somehow been invaded by the iciness of space. If someone had stolen the plate, there was only one way they could have gone about it. They must have scanned the probe and realized what the camera was for; they must have snipped out the plate and covered up the loss so that, barring a close inspection, it wouldn’t be noticed. For the plate to be stolen, she knew, the probe must have been physically infiltrated.