The Ouroboros Wave

by Hayashi, Jyouji

  “Something’s tangled in the screw. If the load exceeds a certain level, a protection circuit cuts power to the motor. For some reason that just happened.”

  “Is it the same thing that blocked the cooling intake?” The radar showed nothing ahead of Remora—not even fish, much less a dragon.

  “Dr. Kurokawa, we still have Salmon, right?”

  “Yes, I haven’t released the cable yet.”

  “Can you walk her around the ship and see what’s out there?”

  I routed Salmon’s sensing data to their webs, so they could monitor its progress, and began to guide the robot toward the rear of the boat.

  “What the hell is that?” Everyone froze. More than half the length of Remora, from the screw forward, had disappeared down the gullet of some giant creature. “Now we know why the screw won’t turn.”

  It seemed to be the same as the creature captured by Swordfish’s radar, but not quite as large. The tail was quite a bit shorter and the body was more compressed. It reminded me of a hydra—not the nine-headed monster of Greek myth, but class Hydrozoa, family Hydridae, genus Hydra. On Earth these tiny water-dwellers had rubbery, tubular bodies they could compress or extend to swallow food larger than themselves. The thing that was busily trying to swallow Remora looked almost identical. Or maybe it was some jellyfish-like species?

  Kohara grabbed the hydrophone to alert the support team, but the creature’s body attenuated the ultrasound. Communication was now impossible. Up on the surface, they were probably already panicking.

  “Why didn’t we just send a robot in the first place and have done with it?” muttered Kohara. “Then we wouldn’t be dropping like flies.” This was directed at me. I wasn’t in a position to disagree, but for AADD the right course consisted of demonstrating to the people of Earth that we would go to any length to investigate the possibility of extraterrestrial life. And now here we were.

  “Come on, Captain,” said Kameda. “This mission is too important to leave to robots. Hey, it’s really hot. It’s forty degrees!”

  “Where’s the air conditioning?”

  “Hold on… Protection circuit again.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “We can’t vent the heat. The system won’t run above a certain temperature.”

  Just then we were all struck by more or less the same thought. The water temperature was five degrees. Why would heat be building up in the boat?

  I hurriedly switched Salmon’s sensors to infrared. The surface of the creature’s body was almost as cold as the surrounding environment. But by now the cooling water from Remora must be quite hot—which would make this coldness impossible unless the cells of the creature’s body were highly insulating. This wouldn’t be surprising if its only source of energy was heat from hydrothermal vents.

  “Maybe we should take a sample with the manipulator,” said Kameda.

  “We don’t have time to analyze it.”

  “It’s not the sample, Captain. It’s what happens when we take it. Maybe it’ll spit us out.”

  “You’re going to have a long life, Kameda.”

  “That was the general idea.”

  I wasn’t sure the creature would respond to pain by spitting us out—or if it would even experience pain at all. But we decided to try. It might give us a clue as to how to escape. And if we were destined to die, we wanted to know something about what was to kill us.

  Luckily Remora’s manipulator was mounted on the bow. It was a huge gripper, like the oversized claw of a fiddler crab, with separate, smaller arms extending to either side for precision work. Each appendage was equipped with a camera. The surface of the gripper was translucent and could emit light for illumination, eliminating the need to manipulate spotlights. The visibility outside was poor, but not so poor as to completely obscure the tip of the gripper.

  I grasped the manipulator’s joystick for the first time. Facility with the controls wasn’t as important right now as familiarity with the thing that was about to be manipulated. And if I didn’t handle this myself, I wouldn’t be doing my part to help deal with the danger.

  Remora’s pressure hull was ultrapure specialty steel, the number of openings in it kept to a minimum. The manipulator and its cameras were controlled by a computer in a separate pressure hull; a single strand of optical fiber led to where I sat. Most of the manipulator’s movements were AI-controlled, leaving only selection of objective and sequence of operations to the operator. I had a pseudosensation of touch through the glove, but no sense of force feedback.

  I moved the gripper cautiously. The creature ignored it. The cameras showed more than half the ship engulfed in a gray-white mass. As if from a great distance, I heard someone’s voice say nervously, “I’m taking a sample.”

  It occurred to me that the thing attempting to swallow Remora might be a different species from the one that had attacked Swordfish. I had a feeling the creature would not react. The gripper brushed against the creature. No reaction. I pinched a fold of tissue with the gripper. The surface rippled like jelly, but there was still no reaction.

  “Dr. Kurokawa—look at the temperature.”

  The manipulator was tipped with a simple sensor array. The temperature under the creature’s skin was close to forty degrees. I gingerly lifted a large section of tissue with the gripper. To my surprise it immediately tore away, the detached tissue quickly reforming itself into a sphere. No fluid leaked from the wound, which closed up in seconds.

  “Is this thing indestructible?” marveled Kohara.

  “Captain, it may be an alien life-form but I doubt it’s indestructible.” A theory was forming in my mind based on what we were seeing. The sphere of tissue drifted toward the manipulator like a ball in a zero-G game of water polo. I guided it into a collection cylinder on the hull with one of the smaller manipulator arms. Remora had six of these containers, each with a chamber—almost a miniature laboratory—equipped with a microscope, chemical sensors, manipulators, and other simple experimental apparatus. It was vital to ensure that no samples actually entered the ship, where the risk of contamination in either direction would be hard to control.

  I sealed the collection cylinder, evacuated the water, and moved the sample into the testing chamber. I took a slice of tissue with the manipulator and examined it carefully with the microscope.

  “Take a look, Captain. Here’s your dragon.” The monitor showed a confused jumble of cells of all sizes and shapes, some similar, some very distinctively different. Some cells were fibrous and long, others were organized into lumps of a single cell type. Everything was enveloped in some gelatinous, transparent substance, probably macromolecular.

  “I don’t see any real structure,” said Kohara.

  “It looks like chaos, but I think it’s probably an organized chaos. These are cell colonies. We may be looking at an ecosystem.”

  “An ecosystem?”

  “I won’t be able to confirm it until we return to the base and I can run these tests on better equipment, but this gel-like substance is probably an insulator. This is probably how colonies store heat from hydrothermal vents. Those vents are going to be localized, their heat a precious resource. The whole ecosystem of cell colonies would be organized around this trapped heat. The interior contains warm water. The water outside the ecosystem is close to freezing. The thermal gradient could drive cellular metabolic activity.”

  “So that’s why the piece you pulled off formed into a sphere, to retain the heat?”

  “It’s the most efficient shape for minimizing surface area relative to volume. The surface would include cells that are hypersensitive to changes in the temperature. This far from the ocean floor, waste heat from our cooling system would be a very attractive source of energy. And these cells here”—I zoomed in with the monitor—“are probably the source of this insulating substance.”

  The spherical cells on the monitor were by far the most numerous. Around three-quarters of their volume was a reservoir for that strange,
transparent slime.

  “So is this what got Swordfish?”

  “The heat from Remora’s diesel is really pretty minimal. But Swordfish used proton/antiproton annihilation as a power source. That would create a huge heat wake. I don’t think anything was actually chasing them—I think the ‘dragon’ they saw was cell colonies forming in their wake. The truth is as simple as that.”

  Kohara nodded. “And the faster they went, the more heat they put out and the faster the colonies formed behind them.”

  “Ultimately the entire ship would have been enveloped, blocking the cooling vents and bringing the ship to a halt. But without knowing what was happening, the crew would have continued applying power to try to escape. And that could have taken them below crush depth.”

  “But, Dr. Kurokawa, if you’re right, there’d have to be billions of loose cells in every cubic centimeter of Europa’s ocean. We haven’t seen any evidence of that.”

  “Swordfish and Remora both encountered waters with much higher ambient cell concentrations—and in both cases, the concentrations skyrocketed without warning. My guess is that the wall we passed through is the outer surface of the real ecosystem.”

  “What do you mean by ‘real’?”

  “The usual form this ecosystem takes on Europa—a gigantic balloon coated with insulating gel. The balloon’s volume increases by the cube of its radius, while the surface only increases by its square. So the bigger the better—a giant sphere is the most efficient way to exploit large amounts of trapped hydrothermal energy. Europa may harbor millions of these spherical ecosystems, hundreds or thousands of meters across. The trapped heat causes the colonies to rise. After they cool, they descend again to the seabed, to recharge around another vent or dissociate until the next thermal opportunity presents itself. That’s why we only found traces of life—until we penetrated the wall.”

  “Look, Dr. Kurokawa. I’m not arguing for the sake of arguing, but if these ecosystems form as you say, what would they be doing at these shallow depths? If the heat the cell colonies need is on the seafloor, wouldn’t venturing a hundred klicks away be suicidal? There’s no heat source this far up, unless you’re lucky enough to run into the occasional submarine.”

  “What do you mean, Cap’n? There’s a great heat source up here.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “The gateway. Energy from Kali is keeping it ice free.”

  Kameda’s horoscope had been right. Our fate was completely under the influence of Mars and Uranus after all.

  WE FINALLY BROKE FREE by venting a huge bubble of cold, compressed air from our ballast tanks. The sudden drop in temperature and the pressure of air gushing from Remora scattered the colonies into a rain of small spheres that sank out of sight.

  To avoid emitting heat and attracting other colonies, we recovered Salmon and used its power supply to creep slowly back to the gateway. Those twenty kilometers were the worst part of the mission—the heating had to be shut down and the temperature in the boat dropped close to freezing. On the way, Kameda made some tepid coffee.

  “This is great coffee, Kameda,” said the captain.

  “I didn’t know you were capable of praise, Cap’n. This is quite a discovery.”

  Back at base, we resupplied and made some hurried modifications to reduce Remora’s heat signature. After we’d retraced our steps to the colony, we quickly located Swordfish with the help of infrared sensors and established contact with her crew. Following our instructions, they shut down their power plant and blew compressed air from their tanks to free themselves from the embrace of the “dragon,” which fragmented into a number of huge spheres. We then guided Swordfish through the colony wall and safely back to the gateway. It had been four days since we had first dived into Europa’s icy waters.

  Before the day was out, AADD had announced to the solar system that there were no dragons on Europa. The captain of Swordfish told the media that the life-form they had encountered was similar to plankton. The discovery of extraterrestrial life preoccupied the media for weeks, and for weeks people on Earth were exposed to information about extraterrestrial “plankton.” Eventually, talk of intelligent life on Europa ceased.

  THREE MONTHS LATER Kohara and Kameda dropped by my lab at AADD’s Jupiter Development Center on Mars. Their rescue of Swordfish had paid dividends: their team had recently been entrusted with development of all submarines for the exploration of Europa. A base was under construction and both men were scheduled to depart soon for Jupiter. Before their departure they wanted to update themselves on my research, which was still confidential except to members of their team.

  We stood before a large monitor with a view of the lab’s giant aquarium. “We keep the light levels in the tank close to darkness to simulate conditions on Europa. Everything that goes on is monitored with night-vision cameras.”

  The monitor showed a CG-enhanced view of Salmon threading its way through a forest of gelatinous shapes anchored to the bed of the tank.

  “What are those, anemones?” asked Kameda.

  “They were cloned from that sample we took on Europa. I like to call them Hydra.”

  “But the colonies on Europa are spherical!”

  “Blame it on Salmon. Its AI is designed to learn from its environment. The cell colonies respond to changes in their environment. We wouldn’t mistake that for intelligence, but Salmon’s AI doesn’t understand that these are just colonies of different cell types. The colonies responded to Salmon’s heat emissions. The AI thought that was intelligent behavior and paid them closer attention. This cycle kept repeating until the colonies assumed the anemone shape you see here. Now there’s a stable equilibrium between the AI and the colonies.”

  “So are these creatures actually intelligent, Dr. Kurokawa?”

  Were they? It was a simple question, after all. In pursuit of answers to such questions, I’d given up structural engineering to become a scientist studying intelligence. But during my twenty years of research, I had uncovered only progressively deeper levels of the same question—and no answers.

  “Are either of you familiar with the story of how Ouroboros, the ring around Kali, was nearly destroyed twenty-some years ago through miscommunication with an AI?”

  “I heard about it, but I don’t know the details,” said Kameda.

  “I witnessed the whole incident. It’s why I decided to devote myself to this research.”

  “So you’ve been working on this question for that long? And what conclusions have you come to?”

  “Simply put? None.” That was the best answer I could give. Given the opportunity I could talk about the subject for hours, I had that much to say. But if I had to boil everything down to a conclusion, “none” was the only answer I could give.

  Sometimes this thought crossed my mind:

  If I had to prove I was intelligent, could I do it?

  PROGRESS IN TOOL MAKING probably triggered the blossoming of human cognition. Tools can reveal that which lies beyond cognition, and tools enabled humans to discover that apparently accidental events had their proper causes.

  For example, most astronomical events—the fall of a meteor or the passing of a comet—were first believed to be omens or portents. But by calculating orbits, humankind learned to predict these events.

  As technology progressed, humanity advanced into space, growing more intelligent still. Humans cannot sense infrared radiation, much less electromagnetic or gravity waves. But they learned to build devices to detect these phenomena, and these devices expanded their cognitive capacity. They came to understand that things once thought inexplicable were inevitable.

  Thanks to superb observational technology, humanity was about to unlock the mystery behind the sudden appearance of a tiny black hole in the solar system. But not all cognitive abilities can be extended by machines. Sometimes cognition can only be expanded by the greatest mystery of all—human action.

  THE VOICE OF EINGANA

  A.D. 2163

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  NINETY ASTRONOMICAL UNITS from the Sun, space reclaims its true darkness. At three times the distance from the Sun to Uranus—twelve hours at the speed of light—sunlight attenuates to nearly one-tenth of one percent of its intensity on Earth. The Sun is still the brightest object in the heavens by far—magnitude minus seventeen, far brighter than Sirius. Still, at this distance it is just another star in the sky.

  This sun-star hung over Shocho Kanda as she stood on the hull of Shantak II. To determine her position with respect to the outer planets, the first thing she did was look for the Sun.

  First she adjusted the opacity setting of her helmet’s visor to bring the Sun’s brightness to an index value. This yielded her exact distance from the Sun. The position of Sirius or Canopus would then tell her where she was relative to the rest of the solar system. None of this was necessary, of course. The solar system was dotted with positioning satellites to guide space traffic, and these could give Shocho her position to within a few meters’ accuracy. But whenever she EVA’d, she confirmed her location herself. It was a kind of ritual. Machines can fail; that was more than reason enough.

  Even in the Sun’s dim light, the amplification circuits in Shocho’s visor let her find her way along the hull of Shantak II. The space around her was hung with mirrors tens of kilometers across, polished discs shimmering with starlight. There were more than twenty-five thousand of them in this region of space. Though invisible from where she stood, there was also a laser interferometer for measuring gravity waves, tens of kilometers long. The crew of Shantak II controlled the devices, analyzing the information they gathered and carrying out occasional repairs.

  After confirming her location, Shocho turned to the task at hand: inspecting Shantak II’s communications module. Most of the ship’s communications were laser based. The main comm unit floated above the hull, cradled in a magnetic field to isolate it from vibration. It looked like the compound eye of an insect, its small lenses tracking sun and stars to maintain its orientation. In its center was a huge optical module housing a laser transmitter. Although the unit looked like a huge eye, it functioned more as an ear and mouth.