Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

“You?” His thoughts logjammed; the cycle flew apart under centripetal stress, sending fragments spinning into the far corners of his mind. “It can’t be. It’s not possible. They tell me you’re dead.”

  Doubt flickered across the face before him. “I’m not our original, if that’s what you’re thinking.” The flesh-colored, life-sized Peter Alander took a wary step closer. “I’m just like you—except, perhaps, that I’ve been around a little longer. I was on Mission 842 to Upsilon Aquarius.”

  “I...” The pieces of his mind were in a tangle, and he couldn’t put them back together. His legs found a chair behind them, and he collapsed gratefully into it. “We ...”

  “I know how you’re feeling. Believe me. I went through it myself.”

  The version of himself from Upsilon Aquarius—the ghost, he thought feverishly—came closer still, almost near enough to touch.

  “It’s hard to see from the inside.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” he managed slowly.

  “Yes, there is. You’re in the final stages of engram breakdown. You’re unstable, not thinking clearly. Right now you’re not even really you. The Overseer is patching up so many software errors that you’re more its work than your own. No amount of willpower can make up for the fact that what lies underneath is falling apart.”

  He glared at the ghost, thinking, If he’s right, then this could all be a dream. But if he’s a dream, then how could he be right? “How do I know that you’re not something that Hatzis sent to finish me off? She’s the one behind my engram failures. I’m sure of it.”

  “I’m not a conSense illusion.” The ghost smiled and offered his hand. “Here. Touch me.” The ghost’s flesh was warm and pliable. “Listen to me, Peter: you’ve been locked in a cycle for some hours, now. Are you aware of that? Your android body badly needs maintenance, and you’re not getting the sleep you need. If you keep on like this, you’re going to end up psychotic. Or worse.”

  He snorted his derision at the idea. “What could be worse than losing my mind?”

  “Shutdown,” the ghost said simply as it took back its hand. Alander realized that he might have been gripping it a touch too tightly. “Being switched off is a big risk for an unstable engram. Sometimes it never comes back together again. If your pattern won’t reboot, you’re as good as dead. You know that.”

  Dead. Alander couldn’t look the ghost in the eye. He already was the ghost, not the revitalized, impossibly organic creature sitting in front of him. Everything was around the wrong way.

  “Why isn’t it happening to you?” he asked. “Why aren’t you like me?”

  The ghost looked uncertain for a moment. It was strange to watch himself openly display something he himself rarely admitted to.

  “Well,” the ghost said, “for starters, I’ve had longer to deal with it. It’s not something you can fix overnight; I went through a lot of difficult times at first, back on Adrasteia.” The ghost was looking at him but clearly seeing somewhere else. “You’ve no idea what it was like. But I was lucky, too. Someone came up with the idea of personalizing an android body just for me. It looked as much like me as they could make it, and they gave it the ability to run me on its own, if it had to. Some of its subroutines were still distributed through the Overseers, but I was always aware that I could exist apart, as an independent creature. It made me feel more real to be in my own body, with my own mind. It gave me an anchor to hang on to while I pulled myself together.” The ghost’s attention returned to the present. “They tried the same trick with another version of me in Head of Hydras, a colony called Athena, and it worked, too. They must’ve caught him in time, before the instabilities really dug in. But it wasn’t easy for him, either. For months I felt like I was balancing on the edge every moment I was awake—not dissimilar to how everyone feels today, I guess. I never knew whether I was thinking right. For all I knew, I might have slipped back into dysfunction without noticing.”

  “And the others,” he said. “They accepted that you—got better? You showed them, right?”

  “Actually, no,” said the ghost sadly. “They died before I got the chance. And even then, they hadn’t finished the job. It was Caryl Hatzis—the Hatzis from Earth, the one you talked to when you arrived—who took my recovery one step further. I don’t know what she did exactly.” The ghost’s expression was sour, even if its words were intended to be gracious. “But she did something to me—something to my mind. It seemed to stop the thoughts piling up. I wasn’t as trapped as I was before, by what I’d been.”

  “She killed me,” he said, his mind skating over the concept as though it was ice, then plunging through a crack. “She killed our original?”

  The ghost shook his head firmly. A faint dusting of stubble caught the light, emphasizing his biological higher ground. “No, Peter,” it said. “She killed the crippled, wounded creature I had become, and she allowed it to become something else. I’ve put the past behind me. I’ve become me.”

  “Is that why you came? To show that you’ve made it? To rub it in?” He couldn’t help the bitterness.

  “No, Peter.” The ghost’s voice was tinged with sadness, but the firmness was still there. “I can’t offer you the same thing I have. I’ve gone another stage further, and I don’t know where that’s going to take me. The most I can offer you is another body, one built to approximate who we used to be rather than just something off the rack. That won’t be a miracle cure, I know, but it’s a start. Caryl can make the same alteration to you that she did to me. It will help, too. Once the pressure is off, you can start putting everything back together.”

  Alander remembered the rage he had felt for Hatzis. The rage, the self-pity, his longing for Lucia—all mixed up in some murky emotional cocktail. “Is there an alternative?” he asked.

  The ghost nodded. “Of course,” it said. “There are three. Firstly, we can leave you exactly as you are and watch you break down.”

  “That’s a certainty?”

  “Yes.” The blankness of the answer convinced him. “Moreover, you won’t be allowed out into the compound because we don’t know what you might do. At the very least, you’ll upset people. We’re all facing the specter of senescence, and the last thing any of us need at the moment is a reminder of it.”

  Alander nodded. He could understand that. “Go on,” he said after a few moments. “What’s the next option?”

  “We shut you down temporarily with the intention of starting you up later,” said the ghost. “When we have more resources and, perhaps, a better understanding of the problem. It’d be like the cryogenics programs back home: putting you on ice until we find a cure for cancer.”

  “And with just as little hope for success, I imagine,” he scoffed. “You said yourself you might not be able to start my simulation again.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, then I’m guessing you have to be saving the best option until last,” he said. “It certainly couldn’t be worse than the first two.”

  The ghost didn’t say anything for a moment. “The third option is to voluntarily accept immersion into my personality,” it said eventually. “Your patterns might be faulty, but your memories are intact. I can take those and incorporate them into mine. Caryl insists it can be done; she’s been doing it with herselves for—”

  “But what about me?” he interrupted. “What happens to me?”

  “Nothing,” said the ghost. “You’ll still have to choose between the first two options. But this way, you’ll know that what you’ve done and felt will go on in some form, at least. In that sense, you will survive.” The ghost’s expression was blank, as though trying not to give an opinion either way, but his eyes were eager.

  Alander couldn’t face it. He turned away, thinking of chi Hercules, the fiery F-type variable around which he had awoken just a handful of days before, when the Spinners had revived him to talk to the Gifts. He thought of Vahagn, the colony his fellow colonists had founded on a boiling rock of a world,
still pounded by rubble left over from the formation of the system. Did any of those memories really belong to him? To the real him, back on Earth? But that Peter Alander was dead, apparently, and so was Earth. He was all that remained—he and all the other copies of him scattered throughout the survey missions. And the ghost.

  If not for us, then for whom?

  “Do you believe her?” he asked.

  “Who, Caryl?”

  “Yes. Do you believe her when she says she can save the part of me that’s unique, which doesn’t exist anywhere else?”

  “Yes,” it said somberly. “Actually, I do.”

  “And what about everything else she says? How far do you trust her?”

  The ghost took a long time responding, and when it did, it was obvious that a lot of thought had gone into the answer.

  “I trust her to do what she thinks is right,” it said. “That’s as much as I trust anyone. You know that.”

  He did. It was written in the rules that made him who he was. He didn’t trust anyone absolutely, and he had found plenty of justification for that stance. It was the only rational one to take.

  Yet here he was, being asked to put his faith in someone else’s words with no way at all to test the outcome. If he was being lied to, he might never know. But then, he thought, that they were taking the effort to lie to him might actually be a good sign. They could have erased him more easily than convinced him to believe them. A solid magnetic pulse anywhere near his head would knock out his Overseer and effectively be the end of him, memories and all. Caryl Hatzis could do that to all of them at any time. She’d already done it to the ghost twice, metaphorically speaking, anyway. She’d stuck him in a body when he was falling apart, and then she’d messed with his head later. He didn’t know how anyone could live with that....

  “Shut me down,” he said after some consideration. “I’ll take my chances in the dark.”

  The ghost frowned. “Are you sure?” There was disappointment in its voice. “Your memories—”

  “I doubt I have anything unique to add to the Peter Alander collective, he said. “Another planet; another sun. What’s that to you?”

  The ghost looked unnerved. “I’m surprised. That’s not the decision I would’ve made.”

  “Well, I had a choice. I wonder which way you would have gone if they’d stopped to ask you first. Would you risk losing your mind when it’s the only thing you have left? Would you?”

  The ghost hesitated. “I’m not sure.”

  “No, but I am,” he said. “I’ll pin my faith on your survival instead, thanks. I’m sure you’ll fix the problem one of these days and bring me back.” He forced a smile, although it felt awful. “You are me, after all, right? Nominally.”

  The ghost looked down, then nodded. “All right,” it said. “If that’s what you want, we’ll shut you down and put you into hard storage.”

  “That’s what I want.” He grimaced. “And tell her I said hello, won’t you?”

  “Who?”

  “Lucia, of course,” he said.

  The ghost didn’t say anything. There was something going on in that stubbled fleshy head, and he couldn’t read it for the life of him. It wasn’t like looking into a mirror at all. It was more like looking at the face of a complete stranger.

  When the silence had stretched on a moment too long, he said, “Okay. Do it.”

  The ghost didn’t wish him good luck or farewell; he just nodded, once, and then blackness rushed in.

  2.1.5

  FUCK.

  WHAT HAPPENED, SOL?

  HE TOOK THE SHUTDOWN OPTION, THAT’S WHAT.

  DOES IT REALLY MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

  MAYBE NOT, BUT I WAS HOPING HE’D SET A GOOD EXAMPLE. DAMN HIM!

  Sol felt Gou Mang reach in via conSense to take control of the sagging android body inside the room. In the seconds before Alander emerged, Sol took the faltering engram’s memories anyway. Just in case. If he thought he was going to take any secrets with him, he would be sorely mistaken. There were none, but that didn’t reassure her. It certainly didn’t solve her problem.

  The door opened, and Alander from Adrasteia stepped through it. She tried software probes again to penetrate the interfaces connecting him to the outside world, but they encountered the same blocks she had run up against in Silent Liquidity. His mind was a blank wall. It was totally frustrating. Just when she really needed to, she couldn’t gain access to the information within him.

  “You saw how it went?” he asked unnecessarily. He knew she would have been watching.

  She nodded. “I can’t say I’m unhappy,” she lied. “He was a disruptive influence and a waste of resources. I know that’s putting it bluntly, but we’re not running a resort here.”

  He was about to say something when the android nudged him from behind.

  WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO TAKE IT, SOL?

  “J Habitat,” she said aloud, for Alander’s benefit.

  The android headed off along the hallway. It would be used to house a new mind as soon as its diagnostics could be properly checked. There were plenty of colonists on and around Sothis who wanted to dirty their hands on reality while they still could.

  Alander watched with an indefinable expression as it lumbered away under Gou Mang’s control, clearly unnerved by the experience. The impact of seeing the old version of him had been dramatic enough for her. She couldn’t even begin to understand how it must have made him feel. For a moment there, he had been like the others, a multiplicity rather than a sole individual. Then to see that old version being shut down, to be alone once more...

  Hatzis cursed the failure of her gambit yet again. She had sent him in to deal with the faulty engram in the hope that he might be able to convince it to voluntarily give up its memories before being shut down. Had it worked, it would have set a precedent for what she wanted Alander to do for her. She needed to know as much as possible about the Yuhl, quickly, and he was her only trustworthy source. If she couldn’t steal the information, then she would need him to hand it over willingly.

  Her software, backed up by the twenty-second century know-how of the Vincula, bounced off his defenses like waves against a cliff face. She withdrew the probes with a mental wince. What had the Yuhl done to him?

  He turned to face her.

  “We need to talk,” he said. “All of us: you, me, Ueh, and Axford—if we can find him, that is.”

  “He’s here,” she said.

  Alander frowned. “So soon?”

  “It’s not the same one you were traveling with,” she explained. “This one arrived earlier today. He came to tell me I was mad for declaring war.”

  “Just like me.”

  She half smiled. “Only you did it twice.”

  He almost laughed. “Are you getting the hint yet, Caryl?”

  “This isn’t a democracy, Peter,” she said, suddenly serious again.

  “I realize that only too well, Caryl,” he said soberly.

  “One of you does, at least,” she said, turning away from him to avoid the bitterness in his eyes. “It might surprise you to know that I don’t want it to be this way. I wish I didn’t feel like I was the only one with the capacity to run things properly. I don’t like the things I have to do just to keep what little there is left together. I’d rather hand it all over to someone else so I can retreat into a corner and wait for it all to blow over.” She faced him again. “Do you want the job?”

  The question obviously startled him. Even if he’d never considered it before, he was certainly doing so now—and very carefully, too. “Me? I don’t think so. I might’ve taken it, once, if you’d meant the offer seriously. But now?” He shook his head. “I’m not interested in being in charge.”

  “Then what do you want, Peter?”

  “I want to make sure people do the right thing,” he said. “That’s all. But that takes sacrifices, too, I guess.” He took a deep breath as though steeling himself for something. “I can’t blame you for the dec
ision you’ve made, since you’ve arrived at it in the absence of what I’ve learned about the Yuhl. The only way I can hope to change your mind is to give you what I know. And the best way to do that is to let you in. Into my head, I mean.” He paused, fixing her with a steady gaze. “I’m going to let you take what you need, and then we can talk.”

  For almost a second, Hatzis wondered if he was enacting some twisted revenge upon her by handing her what she wanted when all her manipulations had failed, knowing full well that she couldn’t take advantage of it because of the barriers the Yuhl had installed in his new mind. But when she sent a tentative probe to test the waters, she found that the barriers had gone. His mind was as clear and transparent as it had been before. She saw changes there that she was aching to explore.

  But she forced herself to retreat. The other possibility was that he had been sent to her containing destructive viruses or other software traps: a smart weapon from the Yuhl, targeted squarely at her. Any exploration of his mind would have to be conducted most carefully.

  “Thank you, Peter,” she said, nodding graciously. “Not here, though. Come to Arachne. It shouldn’t take long.”

  “And afterward?”

  “Afterward, we’ll talk—you, me, and Ueh and Axford. I promise. I can’t guarantee I’ll change my mind, but—”

  “I know,” he put in quickly. “It’s a start.”

  She nodded. “That it is,” she said.

  They stared awkwardly at each other for a long moment, then looked away.

  Fuck, she thought. I’ve got what I wanted, so why the second thoughts?

  Indicating that he should move ahead of her through the cramped habitat corridors, she told herself not to be so stupid. He was just another mind to pick through, no different in essence from his version from Vahagn, from his old self. There was no reason to be nervous.

  It was the Yuhl, she decided. It had to be. The Yuhl, and nothing else. It had nothing to do with him, per se. Nothing at all.

  * * *