Solaris Rising 2

by Ian Whates

  The quisling called Wayne, too. We had just enough time to scatter. When I was caught, I was charged with attempted assault. It would have been attempted murder had not Wayne already changed the canister that the feds found in the catapult. He’d known the original wasn’t tear gas. He’d asked me about it not to obtain information, but to see if I would lie to him.

  I might never have been caught, since even back then, SunnyJay had been that good. The cops might not have found me, except for Douglas Jaworski. They asked him if he knew of anyone, besides the organizations they were already watching, who might have planned such an attack.

  “My daughter,” he said. “Caitlin Maria Jaworski.” And gave them DNA samples, retina scans from house security, and enough personal information to find any pebble on any beach, anywhere at all.

  IF MY FATHER refused to see me, my plan would be at an end. His house, the same one I grew up in, stands under a HomeWall dome, Model D-2, the second generation of the original two-acre shield. D for Douglas. C for Caitlin.

  But when I give my name to the guard at the access, he nods. Not without bristling – almost I can see the hairs on his neck raise. But he has his orders, and after I’m retina-scanned and DNA-sampled for a positive ID, he passes me on to house security.

  They strip-search me. They run full-body metal and plastic scans. They analyze my breath and urine. When it’s clear there is no way I can harbor a weapon, they give me a soft, expensive robe and slippers, and usher me to the library.

  “Caitlin.”

  He stands by the fireplace, alone. A curt nod dismisses the bodyguard, who scowls ferociously but leaves. No way Douglas Jaworski wants the hired hand to hear his daughter’s vitriol. And I had just been rendered perfectly safe.

  He’s aged in fifteen years, even more than was evident on TV, even more than SunnyJay. But unlike that jolly criminal, this criminal has gone scrawnier, thin as shadow, shadowy as dusk. The lights are low, as if he can’t bear to see me too clearly. Some things never change.

  Thousands of times I’ve rehearsed what I would say to him. Five thousand four hundred seventy-five times, in fact: every night in prison. But now that my father is in the same room, I don’t feel like saying any of it. What would be the point?

  But it turns out he has something to say to me. “I knew you would come for me. Eventually.”

  It sets off all the old, battered, primeval rage. “You did not! You don’t know anything about me! You never took the time or effort to know!”

  “You’re wrong, Catie.”

  Not a quaver in his voice. He thinks he’s safe, that because of his crack security team and his careful planning and his fucking dome, I’m walled away from him. I reach under my robe for my thigh. The only thing that will go through state-of-the-art surveillance devices is the human body. The pocket of skin on my thigh, its thin scar indistinguishable from all the other scars I acquired in prison, opens easily if painfully. From within I pull the slim knife made of bone, not unlike what might have been used on the savannah ten thousand years ago. But much sharper.

  I have only seconds before my father, or my own motion, activates whatever defenses the room has: gas, electric shocks, something so new I haven’t even thought of it. But my father doesn’t move. Instead he says, “You’re going to kill me. But first let me explain something to you.”

  It’s a trick, of course. Keep me talking until help comes. But all at once I want to hear him, more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my entire life. An irrational desire, as strong as sex, or despair.

  “You never had a child, Catie. But if you did, and you saw that child embrace beliefs you didn’t share, immoral beliefs, you’d try to stop her. You’d lock her in her room, force her into therapy, even use mind-altering drugs, all the things I did and you resented me for. But what you were doing was immoral. I was trying to make the world safer and you were adding to its sum of violence.”

  “Safer by condemning a fifth of the population to misery!”

  “They were already miserable, and I was making it possible for the other four-fifths to raise strong and happy children who might have found ways to rescue a world descending into darkness. Mine was the moral act because it aimed at the future.”

  He believes it. The self-serving son-of-a-bitch believes it.

  “Imagine one step further, Catie. You have a child set to commit a terrible crime, in which people might die. Do you turn that child in?”

  “It was tear gas!”

  “But you didn’t know that, did you? You weren’t content with tear gas. You wanted more.”

  I lunge. But now I’ve waited too long, listening to his bullshit – why? Whatever defenses are built into this room will take me down before I can reach him.

  Except that they don’t.

  I cross the room. My bone knife connects with his chest. He’s not wearing body armor. No alarms sound. My knife slides in. He gasps and sags against me.

  He never even calls for help.

  His body is so light.

  I sink to my knees, my father in my arms. Blood trickles from his mouth. Still no one comes. My rage threatens to blind me. But I can speak.

  “Why?”

  “My... punishment.”

  “For the domes?”

  “For... wanting... more for you... than...”

  Than what? He can’t finish speaking. Yet he doesn’t die. His eyes, full of pain, stare at me, and what I see in them is not anger but infinite regret.

  I begin to babble crazily, hardly knowing what I’m saying. “Think of a good time! Think of when we were in the car going to school – back in the car! You’re asking me about the colors, remember? We’re in the car, it smells of aftershave and leather, we’re cozy and warm and safe... Daddy!”

  He’s gone. I sit there, waiting. After all, I knew right along that I would not survive this meeting. Either immediately or in the aftermath, it would be my death, too. I knew it – and yet now I just want a few additional moments, a few more words from him, a few seconds –

  – more.

  SHALL INHERIT

  JAMES LOVEGROVE

  Prolific author James Lovegrove’s most recent novels are Age of Aztec, latest in his bestselling Pantheon series, and Redlaw. He has written extensively for teenagers and younger children, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages and shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Society Award, and the Manchester Book Award. His “Carry The Moon In My Pocket” won the 2011 Seiun Award in Japan for Best Translated Short Story. James is a regular reviewer of fiction for the Financial Times and contributes frequently to the magazine Comic Heroes. He lives in Eastbourne with his wife, two sons and cat.

  MORNING, CLOUD CROWD! It’s Johnny Nimbus, your AI network host, comin’ atcha with a streamcast of all your views, all your news, all the time. And the big topic of discussion today is – what else? – the launches. In a few short hours the crew of the IS Pandora will be getting hoicked up to near-Earth orbit to take their places aboard the super space ark that’s going to fly them to a galaxy far, far away, never to return. The forums are open, as ever, so get commenting and communing, tweeting and browbeating, ’cause without your thoughts there’s no show and without the show where will your thoughts go?

  THE LIMO ARRIVED punctually at eight. Serene and black and unforgivably ostentatious. Everyone in the street would know who it was for, why it had come. Furtive curtains twitched. Brazen neighbours came out onto their front doorsteps and stared, arms folded.

  I went upstairs to chivvy Martin out of his room. He was on his computer, piffling about on the internet. Astronomy sites and the like, as usual. Just as though it was any other morning, in no way a special or different day.

  Special or different meant nothing to Martin.

  “Time to go,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He didn’t look round; didn’t move.

  “Now.�
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  “Okay. Coming.”

  “Really now. Not ‘soon’ now.”

  “I said okay.”

  Ten minutes later he deigned to descend. The limo driver had already put his suitcase in the boot. Martin had met the 20kg luggage allowance exactly, down to the gramme. He’d made an eclectic choice of belongings to take with him. A few of his favourite books, cherished physical copies. T-shirts with videogame characters on. A penny jar that accounted for nearly a fifth of the suitcase’s laden weight. A nightlight that he probably wouldn’t be able to plug in anywhere. A handful of Lego models and Warhammer figurines.

  He had needed some persuading to include a framed photo of us, his family, and the Good Luck card his classmates at school had signed.

  Outside, he started quizzing the limo driver about the car. Maximum speed. Fuel consumption. Brake horse power. Stopping distances. All the Top Trumps stats.

  “How should I know, son?” the driver said, despairing. “I just drive the thing.”

  THEY’RE NOT EVEN proper astronauts. What’s up with that? NASA didn’t send civilian nobodies on the Apollo missions. Armstrong and Aldrin and the others, they were test pilots, air force guys, elite. Best of the best. Trained within an inch of their lives. Now it’s a bunch of randoms? That’s what we’re manning a trillion-dollar spaceship with? Don’t make me laugh.

  A YEAR EARLIER, someone from the government had come round to interview us. We weren’t sure why at the time. Claire and I thought maybe it was a benefit-fraud investigation. We’d done something wrong, claimed money we weren’t entitled to, ticked an incorrect box on the disability living allowance form, something of that sort.

  Why an infraction like that should have seemed important to anyone, given what else was going on in the world, I didn’t know. But it was the government. Rules were still rules, even as civilisation inched inexorably towards the precipice.

  The woman conducting the interview, Maggie, tried to put us at our ease. “It’s just a formality,” she insisted, “an assessment, nothing more. You don’t have anything to be anxious about.”

  “Don’t have anything to –?” I exclaimed. I may have sounded a little hysterical. It wouldn’t surprise me if I had. “Have you been reading the headlines?”

  “I mean this,” Maggie said patiently, giving the edge of her electronic clipboard a tap with the stylus. “I was talking about this. Not the Incident.”

  A true professional. Everyone else was calling it Armageddon. Apocalypse. The End Of Days. The Slow Extinction. The Terminal Fuck-up. Only a public sector employee could calmly refer to it by its official designation, the Incident, and not add an eye roll or an ironic grimace.

  “Martin, you see,” she went on, “is a very interesting young man. He has certain... qualities. I need to know as much as I can about him. Whatever you can tell me, anything at all, will be very helpful.”

  What was there to say? What, that she couldn’t already have known? Asperger’s syndrome. High-functioning autism. Near the upper end of the spectrum. Incredibly smart. Incredibly unemotional. Like a robot in many ways. His brain working at unimaginable speeds. His heart aloof, unknowable. Impenetrable.

  That was Martin.

  IN OTHER WORDS, they’ve selected the geeks. The nerds. The boffins. Not the prime physical specimens. The trolls who live in their parents’ basements. The screen jockeys with the spaghetti limbs and cathode tans. The boys who could never get the girls, the girls who repel the boys. Total space cadets. The future of the human race is in their baby-soft hands. Pardon me while I puke. Why not football players? Farmers? Construction workers? Carpenters? Cops? People with some experience of life. Tough, physical people who know what pain and hard work is. It wasn’t accountants or – or – or shut-ins who colonised the American West, was it? It was pioneers, outdoorsmen, cattle ranchers, rugged frontier folk. This is a disaster in the making. This has EPIC FAIL written all over it. As if we haven’t screwed up badly enough already, we’ve got to go for the double.

  THE LIMO CRUISED towards Heathrow. It felt, weirdly, like going on holiday. Me, Claire, Martin and his sister Jenny, all in one car, heading for the airport. Incongruously normal. A trip to Spain, maybe, or Greece. Except there was no sense of urgency or expectation, no fear that we might arrive late and miss the plane.

  The roads were more or less empty. People didn’t travel much these days. Didn’t go anywhere. Would rather stay at home. In the first few months after the Incident, everyone went everywhere. Governments poured money into subsidising aviation fuel, airlines dropped their seat prices to rock bottom, and we all become globetrotters and jetsetters. Crossing those must-see destinations off our bucket lists. The Taj Mahal. Ayers Rock. The Great Wall. The Pyramids. But then, in time, the novelty wore off. That weird sense of exhilaration died. Dull mundanity set in again. We turned into hermits, favouring the familiar over the strange, the known over the unknown, friends over foreigners, people over places.

  Conversation in the limo was stilted. Claire kept trying not to cry. She had vowed not to make a scene, for Martin’s sake. Outpourings of sadness or affection made him uncomfortable. He would actively squirm.

  Finally, to combat the awkward silence, Jenny switched on the in-car TV. A news channel came up. There it was, a satellite shot of the Incident site. Facts and figures scrolled along the bottom. Width of site: now standing at 798.7 miles in diameter. Expansion rate: constant at a mile a day. Estimated number of ecophages: almost uncountable – a sextillion and rising.

  A jet black stain on the ocean, like an immense ink blot. Widening. Encroaching. Spreading outwards and downwards ravenously, insatiably. A tumour on the planet, metastasising like mad.

  The story switched to the trial of the eco-terrorist group responsible. For weeks the hearings had dragged on, bogged down in legal technicalities and fine print. The International Court was deliberating whether to prosecute the ten men and women for crimes against humanity, genocide, mass murder, or simply for industrial sabotage and destruction of property. Since nobody had died yet as a direct consequence of the Incident, it was all a bit moot. Besides, what punishment was there that could possibly fit the crime? Meanwhile, outside the Peace Palace in the Hague, thousands of protestors were baying for the culprits’ heads. Placards read HANG THEM ALL and JUSTICE FOR HUMANITY.

  Martin appeared oblivious. He sat with his head canted against the window, gazing out. Perhaps he was counting lampposts. Or establishing the limo’s speed from the rate at which the road markings flickered by. Or logging the number of windows in every house we passed so as to be able to produce an average at the end of the journey. Any of those.

  THAT LAST CONTRIBUTOR, what bullshit. Who better to go than some of the brightest among us? We don’t need jocks up there, we need brainiacs. What they don’t have in terms of survival skills, they’ll pick up from Pandora’s tutorial programmes. They’ll arrive at the other end ready and capable to colonise their new home. Plus – and this is true because I read it in the New Scientist – people with autistic tendencies are ideal for space flight, especially one that’s going to last a decade and a half. They cope better with boredom. They can amuse themselves for long periods. They’re less likely to suffer claustrophobia or mental breakdown. Think of it this way. They’re homo sapiens to us Neanderthals. The way forward. The next step. Evolution has given them to us, and now we need them. So let’s use them.

  I REMEMBER WHEN it first sank in – the news that the march of the von Neumann replicators could not be retarded or contained. They would just keep copying themselves, turning everything they touched into more of the same, for ever and ever.

  It was supposed to be safe. The perfect way to clean up an oil spill. The BP supertanker Tony Hayward foundered in a mid-Atlantic storm, her hull was breached, her cargo began to leak out, and a plane was despatched to lob a canister of dedicated ecophages into the water. The nanotech machines were designed to eat crude oil, multiply, and then, when their work was done, disinteg
rate harmlessly, converting back into carbon and hydrogen. There would be no slick, no cordoned-off black beaches, no fish floating belly up, no seabirds tarred as well as feathered.

  Only, someone had contaminated the replicators with a code virus that was triggered the moment they were activated. The automatic shutoff did not kick in. An oil-only diet would not suffice. The replicators had been transformed from short-lived, self-destructing monovores into relentlessly self-perpetuating omnivores.

  Earth Abides, the extremist eco-activist group, proudly claimed responsibility on their website. Some guff about rampant fossil fuel usage. Pollution. Proving a point. Striking a blow.

  More like scoring an own goal.

  And we hoped, oh God we hoped, that the pundits’ direst prophecies would not come true. That someone would be able to put an end to it. That what human ingenuity had set in motion, human ingenuity would halt.

  But time went by, the nanomachine cluster kept expanding, and everyone’s best efforts were in vain.

  Even detonating a low-yield nuke at the site made no difference. The von Neumann replicators sucked up that thermal energy and thrived, like manmade molecular-scale cockroaches.

  Slowly it dawned on us. This was Twilight Time. The nanomachines would not give up. They would eat on, reproduce wildly, until there was no Earth left, only them. A planet-sized ball of twinkling blackness, floating in space, adrift, lifeless. Nothing but that.

  Accepting fate – a fait accompli – the governments of the world got together, pooled resources, and commissioned the building of Pandora. The International Spaceship Pandora. Furnished with nuclear pulse propulsion engines. Able to achieve something akin to light speed. Pointed at Gliese 581g, an extrasolar planet just inside the Goldilocks zone of a red dwarf star. A new Earth, habitable, with landmasses, oceans, atmosphere.