Cosmic Powers

by John Joseph Adams

  Fithe is resolute. “There will be blood on my hands whatever I do, old friend. If I do nothing, I’ll be responsible for total annihilation. Taking the deal is the only way to save even a few . . . and ten billion is far from being only a few. It’s the population of the Shanghai and Tampa urbmons. Humanity will be able to move on.”

  “But your conscience . . .”

  “By my math, I have a 75% chance of not even having to worry about my conscience. If I’m one of the 25% saved, then I’ll get therapy. In the meantime, the Vferm will die, their gods will no longer be a problem, and we’ll all have a chance to move on. This is the one deal we have. We don’t have time to go shopping for another one. Unless you have a practical objection.”

  Mordecai casts about for a point, any point, capable of deterring her captain from this insane course, and for long seconds, she comes up with nothing . . . but then her eyes widen, with a level of horror that has never been seen on the Faithful bridge, not even during the battle’s manifestations of flies, boils and blood. Whatever it is turns out to be more than the veteran science officer can take. She manages just two words, “the terms, . . .” before the eyes roll back in her skull, she gurgles and falls like a marionette with cut strings. A subsequent examination, in the few minutes that remain, reveals that she is not, as she appears, dead, merely unconscious, having passed out from the shock of whatever she’d been about to say.

  And if Fithe is given pause by this, he does not say so—because he is the captain, and the captain, like all leaders, has to be sure.

  “Discussion’s over,” he declares. “We’re taking the deal.”

  And less than a minute later, N’loghthl returns for his answer. . . .

  * * * *

  It is now five minutes after that.

  The home system, which had been about to know the most epic destruction it has known since the fracturing of Earth and the Moon, is now at peace. The Vferm fleet roaring past the asteroid belt, eager for the sight of the blue planet’s continents reduced to molten slag, is now just a spreading cloud of vapor, which will soon dissipate against the blackness of space. The gods striding alongside them, with their smug expressions and fistfuls of lightning bolts, even with the most powerful one, whose mien had been more than any lower sentient could behold, have similarly gone away, the supreme confidence on their noble faces faltering, to be replaced with a moment of terrible fear as they comprehended the finality of the fate they were about to know. On Earth, Man’s cities still stand, not disturbed by so much as a single rivet. All is well.

  In the command chair of the Faithful, Captain Henryk Fithe comes out of the vision he has been granted and knows that the god N’loghthl has indeed abided by the terms of his negotiation. He naturally sits shorter on his command chair than he did before, in part because he has no legs, no buttocks, no genitalia, and indeed no body at all below the second rib or so. His arms are just ineffective little things that end in nubs halfway to the elbow. He remains living, the internal mechanics of life having merely reconfigured themselves to suit his new anatomy, but in volume, he is only 25% of the man he used to be, much as the various members of the crew, and indeed the entirety of the human race, are now only 25% of what they used to be. All around him, on the bridge, the command staff cries out, coming to terms with the precise same realization. The goat, as promised, is gone, its own fate unknown, and not the most urgent thing to think about.

  Too late, Fithe understands what Mordecai had perceived: that N’loghthl had not bargained for 75% of humanity, but 75% of all human beings, a very different measurement. The god must have been very amused indeed.

  He knows that wherever people exist, they are now screaming, demanding to know why this happened to them, even perhaps wondering which dolt agreed to such terms without due diligence. He also knows that the crisis will test the species more than it has ever been tested before.

  But he is the Captain. He is the one they’ll all look to. It will be up to him to assess all factors and come up with a course of action. And in less than five seconds, he has come up with one: a first step, at least, from which all else will follow. Every journey begins with the first step.

  Insofar as he can, he starts to wriggle.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ADAM-TROY CASTRO is currently best known for his middle-grade series about the macabre adventures of a very strange, very courageous young boy named Gustav Gloom. The final volume, Gustav Gloom and the Castle of Fear, was released by Grosset and Dunlap in 2016. Adam-Troy’s short fiction has been nominated for two Hugos, three Stokers, and eight Nebulas, and has been selected for inclusion in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. His novel Emissaries from the Dead won the Philip K. Dick Award. Adam lives in Boynton Beach, FL, with his wife, Judi, and a collection of insane cats.

  JUDI B. CASTRO retired after thirty years working for the Miami-Dade Clerk of Courts, to among other things wrangle cats and an author husband. She is a well-known SF fan, who has run conventions and presided over her local fan group, the South Florida Science Fiction Society. Serving as first reader and story editor for a number of local writers, her critical input has here led to her first shared byline on a work of published fiction.

  SEVEN WONDERS OF A ONCE AND FUTURE WORLD

  CAROLINE M. YOACHIM

  The Colossus of Mars

  Mei dreamed of a new Earth. She took her telescope onto the balcony of her North Philadelphia apartment and pointed it east, at the sky above the Trenton Strait, hoping for a clear view of Mars. Tonight the light pollution from Jersey Island wasn’t as bad as usual, and she was able to make out the ice caps and dark shadow of Syrtis Major. Mei knew exactly where the science colony was, but the dome was too small to observe with her telescope.

  Much as she loved to study Mars, it could never be her new Earth. It lacked sufficient mass to be a good candidate for terraforming. The initial tests of the auto-terraforming protocol were proceeding nicely inside the science colony dome, but Mars couldn’t hold on to an atmosphere long enough for a planetwide attempt. The only suitable planets were in other solar systems, thousands of years away at best. Time had become the enemy of humankind. There had to be a faster way to reach the stars—a tesseract, a warp drive, a wormhole—some sort of shortcut to make the timescales manageable.

  She conducted small-scale experiments, but they always failed. She could not move even a single atom faster than light or outside of time. An array of monitors filled the wall behind Mei’s desk, displaying results from her current run on the particle accelerator, with dozens of tables and graphs that updated in real time. Dots traversed across the graphs, leaving straight trails behind them, like a seismograph on a still day or a patient who had flatlined. She turned to go back to her telescope, but something moved in the corner of her eye. One of the graphs showed a small spike. Her current project was an attempt to send an electron out of known time, and—

  “Why are you tugging at the fabric of the universe, Prime?”

  “My name is Mei.” Her voice was calm, but her mind was racing. The entity she spoke with was not attached to any physical form, nor could she have said where the words came from.

  “You may call me Achron. This must be the first time we meet, for you.”

  Mei noted the emphasis on the last two words. “And not for you?”

  “Imagine yourself as a snake, with your past selves stretched out behind you, and your future selves extending forward. My existence is like that snake but vaster. I am coiled around the universe, with past and present and future all integrated into a single consciousness. I am beyond time.”

  The conversation made sense in the way that dreams often do. Mei had so many questions she wanted to ask, academic queries on everything from philosophy to physics, but she started with the question that was closest to her heart. “Can you take me with you, outside of time? I am looking for a way to travel to distant worlds.”

  “Your physical being I could take, but your mind—you did/will expl
ain it to me, that the stream of your consciousness is tied to the progression of time. Can you store your mind in a little black cube?”

  “No.”

  “It must be difficult to experience time. We are always together, but sometimes for you, we are not.”

  Mei waited for Achron to say more, but that was the end of the conversation. After a few hours staring at the night sky, she went to bed.

  Days passed, then months, then years. Mei continued her experiments with time, but nothing worked, and Achron did not return, no matter what she tried.

  A team of researchers in Colorado successfully stored a human consciousness inside a computer for seventy-two hours. The computer had been connected to a variety of external sensors, and the woman had communicated with the outside world via words on a monitor. The woman’s consciousness was then successfully returned to her body.

  News reports showed pictures of the computer. It was a black cube.

  Achron did not return. Mei began to doubt, despite the true prediction. She focused all her research efforts on trying to replicate the experiment that had summoned Achron to begin with, her experiment to send a single electron outside of time.

  “It is a good thing, for you, that Feynman is/was wrong. Think what might have happened if there was only one electron and you sent it outside of time.”

  “My experiments still aren’t working.” It was hard to get funding, and she was losing the respect of her colleagues. Years of failed research were destroying her career, but she couldn’t quit, because she knew Achron existed. That alone was proof that there were wonders in the world beyond anything humankind had experienced so far.

  “They do and don’t work. It is difficult to explain to someone as entrenched in time as you. I am/have done something that will help you make the time bubbles. Then you did/will make stasis machines and travel between the stars.”

  “How will I know when it is ready?”

  “Was it not always ready and forever will be? Your reliance on time is difficult. I will make you a sign, a marker to indicate when the bubbles appear on your timeline. A little thing for only you to find.”

  “What if I don’t recognize it?” Mei asked, but the voice had gone. She tried to get on with her experiments, but she didn’t know whether the failures were due to her technique or because it simply wasn’t time yet. She slept through the hot summer days and stared out through her telescope at the night sky.

  Then one night she saw her sign. Carved into Mars at such a scale that she could see it through the tiny telescope in her living room was the serpentine form of Achron, coiled around a human figure that bore her face.

  She took her research to a team of engineers. They could not help but recognize her face as the one carved into Mars. They built her a stasis pod.

  Then they built a hundred thousand more.

  * * * *

  The Lighthouse of Europa

  Mei stood at the base of the Lighthouse of Europa, in the heart of Gbadamosi. The city was named for the senior engineer who had developed the drilling equipment that created the huge cavern beneath Europa’s thick icy shell. Ajala, like so many of Mei’s friends, had uploaded to a consciousness cube and set off an interstellar adventure.

  The time had come for Mei to choose.

  Not whether or not to go—she was old, but she had not lost her youthful dreams of new human worlds scattered across the galaxy. The hard choice was which ship, which method, which destination. The stasis pods that she had worked so hard to develop had become but one of many options as body fabrication technologies made rapid advancements.

  It had only been a couple hundred years, but many of the earliest ships to depart had already stopped transmitting back to the lighthouse. There was no way to know whether they had met some ill fate or forgotten or had simply lost interest. She wished there was a way to split her consciousness so that she could go on several ships at once, but a mind could only be coaxed to move from neurons to electronics and back again; there wasn’t a way to generate multiple copies.

  Mei narrowed the many options down to two choices. If she wanted to keep her body, she could travel on the Existential Tattoo to 59 Virginis. If she was willing to take whatever body the ship could construct for her when they arrived at their destination, she could take Kyo-Jitsu to Beta Hydri.

  Her body was almost entirely replacement parts, vat-grown organs, synthetic nerves, durable artificial skin. Yet there was something decidedly different about replacing a part here and there, as opposed to the entire body, all in a single go. She felt a strange ownership of this collection of foreign parts, perhaps because she could incorporate each one into her sense of self before acquiring the next. There was a continuity there, like the ships of ancient philosophy that were replaced board by board. But what was the point of transporting a body that wasn’t really hers, simply because she wore it now?

  She would take the Kyo-Jitsu and leave her body behind. There was only one thing she wanted to do first. She would go to the top of the Lighthouse.

  * * * *

  The Lighthouse of Europa was the tallest structure ever built by humans, if you counted the roughly two-thirds of the structure that was underneath the surface of Europa’s icy shell. The five kilometers of the Lighthouse that were beneath the ice were mostly a glorified elevator tube, opening out into the communications center in the cavernous city of Gbadamosi. Above the ice, the tower of the lighthouse extended a couple kilometers upward.

  There was an enclosed observation deck at the top of the tower, popular with Europan colonists up until the magnetic shielding failed, nearly a century ago. Workers, heavily suited to protect against the high levels of radiation, used the observation deck as a resting place during their long work shifts repairing the communications equipment. They gawked at Mei, and several tried to warn her of the radiation danger. Even in her largely artificial body, several hours in the tower would likely prove fatal.

  But Mei was abandoning her body, and she wanted one last glimpse of the solar system before she did it. The sun was smaller here, of course, but still surprisingly bright. She was probably damaging her eyes, staring at it, but what did it matter? This was her last day with eyes. Earth wouldn’t be visible for a few more hours, but through one of the observation deck’s many telescopes, she saw the thin crescent of Mars. She couldn’t make out the Colossus Achron had created for her—that was meant to be viewed from Earth, not Europa.

  “Is this the next time we meet?” Mei asked, her voice strange and hollow in the vast metal chamber of the observation deck.

  There was no answer.

  She tore herself away from the telescope and stood at the viewport. She wanted to remember this, no matter how she changed and how much time had passed. To see the Sun with human eyes and remember the planet of her childhood. When her mind went into the cube, she would be linked to shared sensors. She would get visual and auditory input, and she would even have senses that were not part of her current experience. But it would not be the same as feeling the cold glass of the viewport beneath her fingertips and looking out at the vast expanse of space.

  * * * *

  The technician who would move Mei’s mind into the cube was young. Painfully young, to Mei’s old eyes. “Did you just arrive from Earth?”

  “I was born here,” the tech answered.

  Mei smiled sadly. There must be hundreds of humans now, perhaps thousands, who had never known Earth. Someday, the ones who didn’t know would outnumber those who did. She wondered if she would still exist to see it.

  She waited patiently as the tech prepared her for the transfer. She closed her eyes for the last time . . .

  . . . and was flooded with input from her sensors. It took her eight tenths of a second to reorient, but her mind raced so fast that a second stretched on like several days. This was a normal part of the transition. Neural impulses were inherently slower than electricity. She integrated the new senses, working systematically to make sense of her surroun
dings. There were sensors throughout the city, and she had access to all of them.

  In a transfer clinic near the base of the Lighthouse, a young technician stood beside Mei’s body, barely even beginning to run the diagnostics to confirm that the transition had been successful. The body on the table was Mei, but her new identity was something more than that, and something less. She took a new designation, to mark the change. She would call her disembodied self Prime. Perhaps that would help Achron find her, sometime in the enormous vastness of the future.

  Prime confirmed her spot on the Kyo-Jitsu directly with the ship’s AI, and was welcomed into the collective consciousness of the other passengers already onboard. The ship sensors showed her a view not unlike what Mei had seen from the observation deck of the lighthouse, but the visual data was enriched with spectral analyses and orbital projections.

  Mei would have tried to remember this moment, this view of the solar system she would soon leave behind. Prime already found it strange to know that there had been a time when she couldn’t remember every detail of every moment.

  * * * *

  The Hanging Gardens of Beta Hydri

  Somewhere on the long trip to Beta Hydri, Prime absorbed the other passengers and the ship’s AI. The Kyo-Jitsu was her body, and she was eager for a break from the vast emptiness of open space. She was pleased to sense a ship already in the system, and sent it the standard greeting protocol, established back on Europa thousands of years ago. The first sign of a problem was the Santiago’s response: “Welcome to the game. Will you be playing reds or blues?”