Solaris Rising 2

by Ian Whates

  Veighl herself, sitting ahead of the others, had fared slightly better whilst being just as dead. The spines of the Anchorite had pierced through the back of her chair and into her body, where what looked like a small secondary growth had exploded in her chest cavity, flinging its jutting needles in every direction and shredding her from within.

  Her face, like everything else, was covered with a rime of crystallized air, the frozen remnants of the cabin’s atmosphere that had not been allowed to vent into space. Her expression was placidly accepting, as though she had just learned a great truth. Her last breath was bristling about her nose and mouth.

  “None of this makes sense,” Osman whispered in my ear. “Captain, we have no idea how this happened or whether it’s going to happen again. We should get off this rock.”

  I looked into Veighl’s open, crusted eyes. “The problem is that we need to make sense of it.” My voice was admirably steady. “Because this is what we came to this system for.” Then, and still so very steady, “Any change from the Anchorite?”

  “Nothing measurable,” Pelovska confirmed. “Don’t touch it.”

  “No intention of doing so.” Veighl’s stare was giving me the shudders. “I’m coming back. Send to Mother for advice. No point wasting suit power and air while we twiddle our thumbs and decide what to do.” It was sound reasoning that would look good in my report.

  The drone stayed out there – we could use it to explore the interior of Veighl’s vessel now that I had the hatch open. I made my desperately careful progress back towards our vessel, eyes down at the vacuum-ravaged ground. I missed the clue myself, but Osman saw it through my cameras.

  “Hold, hold, Captain!” Just as I was about to clamber for the airlock. “Go back down. Go to the landing gear. Or I can get the drone back –”

  “No, I’m going.” I let Oregon’s gravity draw me gently back down. “What have you seen?”

  “Not sure, it’s just...”

  I had gone cold all over despite the close heat of the suit.

  There was a delicate clutching fringe of Anchorite about the nearest landing claw. Had we landed on one of the flowers? If so then we had done so with all three claws at once. Magnification showed that each had that spiky rim of crystal about it.

  “It’s started,” Osman breathed. “Get in here, Captain.”

  With shaking hands I scrambled for the airlock. Pelovska was saying something about bringing the drone back, but Osman and I were both telling her we had no time. The Anchorite, life or not, had crept up on us.

  I got through the airlock in record time and half-kicked, half-drifted into my seat. “Tell me we’re ready to go.” I was picturing the clutching claws of the Anchorite already attacking our landing gear.

  “We’re ready,” Osman confirmed.

  “Pelovska?”

  The light of her headset blinked. Her staring eyes were all too much like Veighl’s. She was in deep communion with her Expert System, lips moving silently.

  “Captain, I have a trajectory,” Osman insisted.

  “Pelovska!” I snapped.

  “Hold,” she murmured. Her unseeing gaze flickered between imaginary objects, the representations of her calculations.

  “Captain!” Osman insisted. We both felt the onrushing jaws of the Anchorite accelerating towards us impossibly from below. Millions of years of evolution were clamouring that we were under threat, and that we had to get away.

  “Go!” I told Osman, and Pelovska hit her override. He swore and fought with the controls and the Onboard, but he was locked out. For a moment Pelovska and I wrestled for mastery over the shuttle’s systems, a silent battle of keys and commands, because I knew as captain that I had seniority, and even her Expert System had to bow to my authority.

  That was how I learned that the people back home who had designed our systems had not trusted me, or any mere human being, quite that much. When the chips were down, our Onboard sided with the Expert System, and I ended up staring at the gleaming visor of Pelovska’s helmet, twisted around in my straps.

  “I need to conduct an experiment,” came her voice.

  For a moment I could not speak. Then: “Do it when we’re up.”

  “No, Captain.” Meticulously polite. “When we get to Mother you may of course have me confined to quarters for... mutiny, possibly. For now I am going to conduct an experiment.”

  I could see that Osman had undone his straps in order to go for her, but I stopped him with a gesture – at least he was still taking my orders. Pelovska’s headset light was on, gleaming from her visor, her implant computer cycling its calculations. I thought, then, that she had gone mad.

  “She’s taken control of the drone,” Osman reported hollowly.

  “Mother, Errant,” I called in, hoping that she was not blocking the radio as well. “I need you to countermand Pelovska’s override.” It was hopeless. There would be long minutes before Mother even heard me.

  “I will be as quick as I can,” Pelovska informed us impassively. Osman was back to his controls and I knew he would be trying to find a way past Pelovska’s lockout while she was distracted, but of course the Expert System was never distracted.

  I looked at the drone camera image. She had sent it off from Veighl’s tomb to touch down, all sprawling limbs, on Oregon’s surface.

  “Has it got to you? The Anchorite?” These words, recorded and transmitted back to Mother, would not be the proudest moment noted on my permanent record.

  Now the drone’s eye view was of the dark space above us, with the orb of Syrenka just nudging into shot, but one of our shuttle’s own cameras had acquired the drone, showing it on its back, legs drawn in like a dead beetle.

  I was waiting for Mother’s reply. They were watching everything, every moment of our mission. A quick response could lock Pelovska out and give me my ship back.

  “Ignition,” Pelovska announced, and the drone fired its thrusters.

  It should have shot off into the void, a receding pinprick of metal in seconds. Instead...

  Osman’s bark of surprise was loud in my ear. Where the drone had been was a lunging hand of Anchorite, an exuberant spray of crystal, with some small scrap of the drone cupped in its heart.

  “Do not fire our thrusters,” Pelovska informed us.

  “Errant, Mother,” came the distant voice of our surrogate home. “That’s a negative on overriding the Expert. You are instructed to follow its advice. Mother out.”

  “I have been assimilating Veighl’s data,” came Pelovska’s calm voice. “There is a flaw with her experimental method. She only tested the Anchorite’s capabilities in its native environment. It exists in vacuum, with a minimal energy input that it utilises very, very efficiently to replicate. This we knew. That does not account for the flowers.”

  “Account for them, then,” challenged Osman, still sounding shaky.

  “The Anchorite exists in microscopic quantities everywhere here, and under normal circumstances it would grow at a speed we would think of as geological, that much Veighl shows. Her mistake was to assume that, because it lives in a very low energy ecology, it is capable only of slow growth. When presented with a gift of energy, such as the heat of a debris impact, Anchorite uses that energy to grow. It uses that energy immediately to convert its surroundings, working with extreme speed and efficiency because otherwise that energy would be lost to the void. I can only conclude that it has adapted to do so, and that those fragments better able to make use of such windfalls have out-evolved their less fit siblings to give us what we now see. The Anchorite makes near-instantaneous use of whatever energy comes its way.”

  A pause.

  “Life, then,” I concluded, but Pelovska, like Veighl, would not commit.

  “If you have a self-replicating system with an imperfect replicator and limited resources, what we think of as adaptive evolution must occur. It is a logical certainty. Where you place the label of ‘life’ is more subjective. However, I believe that we wanted to depart.
”

  “The Anchorite under the landing gear,” I put to her. “Are you saying that’s just...?”

  “The friction of our landing. It isn’t going to increase measurably, if I’m right. The heat energy of the thrusters, though, would... well, you’ve seen what it would do. Although I think the sheer scale of Veighl’s monument is more to do with when the Anchorite assimilated her reactor.”

  I thought of that secondary burst that had torn open Veighl’s chest. I did not feel any better for realising that her own body heat had probably provided the fuel for it.

  “Captain, I am submitting a departure solution. The Onboard is plotting an escape trajectory. This will of necessity be a little less exact than usual.”

  I looked over what she proposed. The hurdle was not great: Oregon’s gravity, two per cent of earth’s, would not be too jealous of our departure. Still, our shuttle had a great deal of mass, and we would be fighting our own inertia.

  “Mother, Errant. Do you concur with Anna’s calculations? Errant out.” By this time I had given over any illusion that I, a poor human, was in command of the mission.

  A tense wait, the minutes dragging silently by, until the voice came to us, “Errant, Mother. Confirmed calculations and trajectory. Looks like your best chance. Mother out.” A human telling a human that one set of computers agreed with another.

  What Pelovska, her Expert and the Onboard had proposed, I acted upon, retracting the landing gear to ninety per cent whilst Osman used some of our precious air to fill the empty airlock.

  “Deploying in one minute,” I heard myself say, bitterly aware that all the necessary information was being shared freely between computers anyway. “Twenty seconds... ten, nine...” Counting down.

  When we hit zero the shuttle retracted its claws and then extended its landing gear with considerably more force than the manual advised. For possibly the first time in human history a space vessel tried a standing jump.

  It did very little. We cleared the surface of Oregon by inches, poised momentarily over our slightly enlarged Anchorite footprints, held between the weak gravity’s pull and our own feeble push. Then the airlock opened and voided its precious cargo, and Newton’s Third stepped in and shepherded us gently away, leaving Oregon to dance off, taking Veighl’s crystal grave with it.

  All sorts of alarms were going off, because we had come away on a variant trajectory that would have run us into something in an hour or so, but a little jockeying from Osman had us back on track, and we were headed home for Mother.

  Around us, the wheeling shapes of Syrenka’s debris field danced on, heedless. The scattered flowers of Anchorite glittered like eyes as they watched us go, the almost-life within our vessel taking us away from the almost-life without.

  WHATEVER SKIN

  YOU WEAR

  EUGIE FOSTER

  Eugie Foster calls home a mildly haunted, fey-infested house in metro Atlanta that she shares with her husband, Matthew. Eugie received the 2009 Nebula Award for her novelette, “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast,” the 2011 Drabblecast People’s Choice Award for Best Story, and the 2002 Phobos Award. Her fiction has also been translated into eight languages and nominated for the Hugo and British Science Fiction Association awards. Her short story collection, Returning My Sister’s Face and Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice, has been used as a textbook at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of California-Davis. Visit her online at EugieFoster.com

  THE SIGNS INSCRIBED in paint and light at the perimeter read green space, although there is more magenta and turquoise foliage on display than green. In the not-green green space, a techno-fairy in a dress of chrome cobwebs dances beneath a fuchsia willow tree. She sways and pirouettes to a soundless melody among its candy floss tendrils. A cobalt-skinned demoness crowned by a fiery wreath admires herself in a mirror of air, flaring the skirt of her white lace pinafore around her thighs. The mirror obeys her like a well-trained dog, bounding to and fro to present whatever perspective she desires. An electric-eyed swan maiden with tribal tattoos coursing over her arms levels a Gatling blaster. A bright UNDERAGE display hovers over her head in oversized text.

  Claie doesn’t glance up from his handheld when the percussive burst smashes into him. A shield deflects the Gatling’s discharge, erupting from the tactile contacts on his wrists and flaring to envelope his two companions – a mermaid with shimmering aquamarine scales and a fox woman with golden eyes. Neither of the women react either. But when the redirected blast strikes the cobalt-skinned demoness, bouncing her several meters back, Claie turns. He gestures, adjusting the gain slider on his audio setting.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Didn’t realize the discharge had a ricochet animation.”

  The demoness floats to her feet unhurt. “No worries. Can’t expect to spend any time in a sandbox without getting bounced a couple times.” The white lace pinafore disappears, and, for a moment, she wears only a lavender bra and matching panties. The moment passes, and the demoness, now in a black leather jumpsuit with gold spikes at shoulders and knees, bends to examine a knee-spike.

  Another detonation from the Gatling throws a swath of hot pink turf into the air. This time, Claie winces at the explosion. He hurries to tap the public mute toggle on his smartdev before resuming his discussion with his companions.

  “So anyway, Buneh, did you have a chance to replicate my results and see how our prim loses its phantom indicator when another phantom overlaps it?”

  The fox woman nods, an orange tongue flicking over her muzzle. “Not sure why it’s doing that.”

  “Doesn’t happen every time,” the mermaid says. “Why’s it going wonky on some phantoms but not others?”

  Claie taps commands into his handheld. “Devi, I isolated the error sequence. Seems to have something to do with certain architectural structures used in older sims, mostly flying buttresses. I’m sending you my results now.”

  While Claie waits for the mermaid to review his findings, the green space blanches, tinting everything from the magenta trees to the cobalt demoness (now in a high-necked evening gown) in shades of gray. The achromatic palette is short-lived. A concentric ripple of color overwrites it, spreading subdued greens, tans, and browns – flora in gauche earth tones – in its wake.

  Claie notes the change with a raised eyebrow. “Someone needs to tweak their hue overlay,” he mutters.

  Devi cocks her head, a waterfall of liquid-cyan curls spilling over her shoulders. “That’s loco –”

  Mid-syllable, Devi vanishes, as does Buneh. Simultaneously, Claie’s vision blurs.

  His head snaps up and he blinks several times, trying to recover crisp lines and hard shapes in a suddenly Monet-soft panorama. Half the people in the green space have disappeared: all the commuter avatars like Devi and Buneh. The remaining occupants mill, their surprise and confusion evident even to Claie’s watering eyes, as is the cause of their subsequent distress. They have all diminished, become less vivid, less fanciful, and, on the whole, less attractive.

  Claie inhales sharply, breath hissing through his teeth, as he takes in his own appearance. His periwinkle zoot suit is gone, leaving only the bland, beige-on-beige unisex with its embedded tactiles, the same garment – with minor variations in cut and fit – that everyone wears beneath their skins. His flesh has lightened from gold-touched bronze to pasty white, complete with annoying freckles.

  He is naked, stripped of his avatar skin, and it makes him self-conscious, embarrassed. His dismay is only marginally defused by the surety that everyone in the vicinity shares his predicament.

  What happened? Green space or not, this type of prank is deplorable, not to mention alarming. What sort of script could override so many privacy protocols – a labyrinth of passcode encryptions and DNA biometrics?

  He raises his handheld, the customary source of answers. With a grimace, he raises it higher to accommodate his uncustomarily myopic eyes.

  Whatever b
anished the commuters and skins has also crashed most of his apps. His smartdev’s display is tidy, sans the clutter of icons and text that normally litter it. The zero bars indicator is conspicuously evident.

  Claie gapes at the modest red icon. He’s only seen it in documentation wikis before. No signal means no way to rebake his skin or reestablish his conference with Buneh and Devi. It also means no way to call home. Or for anyone to call him.

  What if Shelby tries to reach him and she can’t get through? What if she checks their You OK? app and his vitals don’t register?

  Swearing, he wills the little bars to illuminate. Just one. One would be enough.

  They don’t.

  He wants to rush home, but without a connection to the network there’s no GPS to tell him where he is, no map app to get him home, no clear sight app to let him see. Without a connection to the network, his smartdev is about as useful as a pretty rock.

  Claie forces himself to take deep breaths, to calm himself. Shelby knows he’s in a meeting, and she’s considerate of his work. There’s no reason for her to call. And also, he recalls, his smartdev is a pretty rock that can keep time and record data even disconnected from LivIT.

  While the majority of his apps are remotely stored on LivIT’s servers, he has a few that can run without the network – simple ones that can function locally. He launches a stopwatch app and begins a data capture session. Ingrained coder principles. It is always easier to debug a glitch with reliable error logs.

  A smattering of echoing movements dot the region, blurry figures tapping or thumbing controls at temple or wrist. Other coders probably. There are always at least one or two at any given time in a green space.

  Letting his smartdev drop to his side, Claie presses fingertips to temples. His head aches from the unaccustomed eye strain. Still, there is an unexpected benefit to his nearsightedness. He can’t make out facial particulars beyond vague impressions of eyes, noses, and mouths. Admittedly, it feels a little head-in-sand, but not being privy to the raw details – and he knows they are raw – allows him to pretend that his own RL shortcomings and deficiencies aren’t being ogled at either. The unsavory intimacies that he can make out, the fleshy bulges and sags, the disturbing homogeneity of flesh tones, and the unsettling absence of individual aesthetics, are more than enough for his abused sensibilities to cope with.