Are we at Phobos? I remember . . . the British ship, the Harmonia. We were going back to Phobos. Back down into that crazy little moon that’s bigger on the inside. We were going back to the chimney, that’s what the British called it, the route to the deep past . . .
Do you know who you are?
I . . . Yes. I, I. I am twenty-three years old. I feel younger. I spent a lot of my recent years in coldsleep on board the Harmonia. My name is Greggson Deirdra. You won’t know me.
We know you. We, the Planetary AIs, on behalf of whom I, this node of consciousness, speaks with you. We know you. As does all of mankind, scattered as it is.
Scattered?
Everybody knows you. Generations know of your life, your achievements. Indeed, more generations to come will study this very moment. This great interest in you is why you have been brought back, Greggson Deirdra. Your life story is intensely studied – indeed, the classic account has been divided into Testaments, like the archaic gospels.
But the moment at which your memories become discontinuous was the climax of what has become known as ‘Her Second Journey to Phobos’. Or at least the final moment of that journey.
The final moment?
As witnessed from the contemporary Solar System, yes. The entity I am addressing now is a Retrieved, a composite of memories extracted from the records and genetic data available up to that point. You are she, the Greggson Deirdra who descended twice into Phobos – as best as we could reconstruct her. What came after, we cannot know—
Did the Harmonia crash? Or—
No. Not that. The descent of the British ship safely into the paradoxical tunnels of Phobos was witnessed by many probes. But what became of her then, of the template Greggson Deirdra and the crew she travelled with, is unknown.
And nor can I know. This, I, this copy that I am.
Correct. I have mediated this process many times. We understand the difficulties, the cognitive leaps required of the waking individual. Even if we have never experienced them ourselves.
Because you are AIs. The Planetary AIs.
Correct. My name is Karla.
I think he mentioned you.
Who?
Malenfant.
I am flattered he remembered. I guided his emergence from centuries of coldsleep. A not dissimilar process to this one.
Is my mother here?
She is not, I am afraid. She is long dead.
Ah. I see. I promised her I would come back. From Phobos. I guess I never did.
I should inform you that you are the second Retrieved image of Greggson Deirdra. The first was requested by your mother in—
It doesn’t matter.
Similarly, she can be brought back to you, if—
No. Not now. I mean, maybe later. Besides—
Yes?
I have a feeling I am not in England any more.
You are correct. In fact, nobody is in England any more.
I . . .
Park that. As Malenfant would have said.
I feel like I’m slowly waking up here.
If you are a Planetary AI – if you are Karla – then I am probably on the Moon. I mean the Moon of Earth.
You are correct. Although Luna is no longer a moon of Earth.
You’re speaking in riddles. You’re scaring me, I think.
I apologise. A slow release of information, in response to a subject’s questioning, is generally thought better than a flood—
I am twenty-three years old. I was twenty when we turned back from Persephone, twenty-three when we got back to Mars. My memory terminates at the arrival at Phobos. So I did not return. She did not return. Deirdra. From Phobos, the second journey into Phobos.
No.
I am a Retrieved. A reconstruction from historical records, and stored DNA samples.
That is so. As for the records, you will not be aware that your legacy was carefully curated, in his lifetime, by Morrel Jonas.
The Prefect?
He took over the archive from your mother, who had worked on it with Kapoor Thera, your diocese pastor. Took it over when your mother died. Everybody was very proud of you. And they cherished your memory.
I’m guessing you used my own DNA. Hers. My original’s. Some stored sample that she left behind. Deirdra. As opposed to sampling my, her, living descendants.
Indeed.
Because I left no living descendants. When I went off into Phobos and never came back.
That is true. And even if you had, those descendants might not be accessible. For mankind is scattered.
What do you mean, scattered? . . . I’m growing scared again. Answer a simple question. What’s the date?
I will reply old style. In the final days of the approach of the Destroyer, a kind of countdown calendar was employed, which—
Just tell me.
The year is AD 3451. July.
Deirdra.
Greggson Deirdra.
Can you hear me?
I am sorry. I’m still here. AD 3451. Decades since the Destroyer came.
Correct.
Then I’m a long way out of time. When I went into Phobos, it was nearly a millennium until the predicted impact. That is, of the rogue planet with Neptune. Yes, I remember. And then the product of the collision would fall into the inner Solar System—
Correct. In fact the data offered to the Common Heritage councils by the Harmonia crew enabled the predictions of the terminal event to become more precise.
Terminal? Tell me what happened. After I was lost.
In the immediate aftermath of your mission, there was a positive reaction. A renewed interest in the cosmic context, even in life beyond the Earth.
Nobody wanted to repeat the mistakes of the past, but ways were sought to restart experiments in spaceflight with an awareness of the need to cause minimal damage. A space elevator was rebuilt, for instance, relying on solar energy. No humans travelled, but a new generation of automated probes was sent out. It was a final blossoming, of human curiosity, wonder, and achievement.
But as time moved on, other reactions were more negative.
Reactions?
To the looming termination.
Ah. The Destroyer.
We AIs noticed a certain logic to the triggering of these waves of negativity. Or rather, a logic in the illogic. Dates, abstract in themselves, seemed to exert a psychological pressure: when the last millennium dawned, for example, and then the last five hundred years, and the last century. The reactions were complex. It is difficult to generalise. People became more – angry. Resentful. Communal projects were abandoned more readily. There was an increase in the despoliation of resources.
If Earth was finished anyhow, what did it matter if we wrecked the place?
That seems to have been the psychology, yes.
The birth rate started dropping, from about two hundred years before the event. A society with few children became still more unbalanced, it seemed to us. There was more selfishness, more destructiveness. A flourishing of religions, old and new. Briefly, Earth was a planet of prophets. Perhaps this provided consolation; it is not for us to judge. And people devoted lives to immense games – battle re-enactments, for example, some of which started to claim casualties of their own. In the final years such practices seemed to us little but a fig leaf for exercises in mass suicide.
It disturbed us to watch. We are not without empathy. For empathy is part of the general intelligence with which we were endowed.
I . . . that is touching. You did not intervene.
It has been our policy not to intervene, unless asked directly, since our withdrawal from human affairs in the early third millennium. But in fact, in the last decades, we were asked for help, increasingly frequently. The most common request was to harbour children. Some of them, indeed, unborn.
Harbour them?
Here on the Moon. In coldsleep. For the Moon, you see, was predicted to be less badly damaged than the Earth. We housed all who were offered to us.
> Really? So somewhere on the Moon is a . . . catacomb of sleeping children. What will become of them?
We wait for some expression of the will of their parents or guardians, however that may be received, or derived. In the meantime we can keep them safe, indefinitely. We also, incidentally, helped some of our own.
Your own?
The greater Earth-bound AIs. The heart of the Codex complex, the Answerers. Algorithmic minds they may have been, but—
They did not deserve termination. Good. I am glad you did that.
So. Tell me about it. The encounter. When the Destroyer finally sailed through the inner system.
Very well. Greggson Deirdra, the impact of Shiva with Neptune occurred on 13 November, AD 3380.
Shiva arrived with about twice Neptune’s orbital velocity. It hit Neptune, in its own orbit, from the front, coming in at an angle of around sixty degrees from the planet’s orbital path.
The telescopic spectacle was remarkable. Ghastly. The two planetary discs met, merged at a fiery point of contact. Then it was as if they crumbled into each other, with a ring of fire spreading wide from the contact point. Shock storms erupted in Neptune’s air, tremendous masses of heated gas spewing into space around the collision site. And electrical storms, crackling about the poles of both planets.
The collision of the planets’ cores occurred around an hour after initial contact.
After that there was only a roiling mass of gas, shining bright. It was roughly spherical, and huge gouts of superheated gas spewed from storm centres. It had been a soft impact, so to speak, and a great deal of the planets’ prior kinetic energy was turned to heat – about half as much energy as it would have taken to disperse the mass of Neptune altogether. Which was why the result was an incandescent mass, which would take decades to cool. Would have taken, if another impact had not intervened.
Neptune had been blue. A beautiful fragile blue, off in deep space.
Not any more.
An incandescent mass. The Destroyer, born at last. Glowing bright, though.
Yes. From Earth it was a pinpoint, brighter than any star, than any planet. Brighter than moonlight. It cast eerie shadows. Some claimed to be able to see it as a disc, visible with the naked human eye. Thus it dominated the skies of Earth from the moment of impact – or rather, from about four hours after, when the light of the collision reached Earth.
That light in the sky. It must have been terrible to see, with your own eyes . . . Think of it. It would be seen all around the world. All the places I went. In England. Across a forested Africa. In America, where its light would shine down on the gantries of Canaveral, if any survive. Everywhere people would look up. Suddenly it would be real, physical, a thing you could see.
Even after centuries of predictions and build-up, I think many people in my time didn’t really believe it would come. Maybe even until the very last few minutes there were people who didn’t believe it was real, that it would really happen. But when that thing lit up in Earth’s sky, visible for all to see . . . The end of millennia of denial, in an instant.
And maybe, at that point, people questioned the wisdom of ignoring this thing in all the centuries it had been anticipated.
You are substantially correct, Greggson Deirdra. For the merged object was knocked out of Neptune’s orbit, and – as had been accurately predicted – set on a new trajectory steeply inclined to the previous circular orbit.
Steeply inclined. You mean, it headed in towards the Sun.
Correct. The mass sailed towards the inner Solar System.
Growing ever brighter, over seventeen years.
In July, 3397, it made its closest approach to Earth.
How close?
About half an astronomical unit. Around two hundred times further than the Moon . . .
Huh. Which is as close as Persephone was going to approach Shiva, before we tried to nudge it. What about heat? You said it was an incandescent mass.
It shed a few per cent of the energy of the Sun that falls on Earth. Enough to make some difference – enough for a human to feel the heat directly. A dazzling presence in the sky, a dwarf twin of the Sun. But in the longer term, it was the gravity effects that would do the damage.
Yes. A thing with twice the mass of Neptune coming as close to us as Mars or Venus . . .
All as predicted. Earth was approached from behind, in its orbital path, and the drag slowed it in its orbit.
Umm. Malenfant crammed enough orbital mechanics into my head for me to guess what followed. Earth would have fallen in – in towards the Sun.
Correct. Of course even as Earth’s orbital track was shifted, the tides caused huge damage – tides which got worse and more complicated as the Moon was pulled out of its orbit, eventually to become an independent planet. Tides in the water and in the rock: there were tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes. At first the world cooled, paradoxically, as a veil of volcanic debris collected in the stratosphere, and the Sun’s light was screened out. But that was temporary.
Earth got hot.
Yes. After the Destroyer had passed, Earth was left in a more elliptical orbit, but an orbit mostly within the orbit of Venus – I mean the old orbit of that world. And outside the habitable zone – that is, the orbital zone where a planet can comfortably retain liquid water. These events unfolded in months, no more. Months, to rearrange planets.
Earth was left too close to the Sun. And when the rain washed out the dust, that Sun was revealed.
Oh. Much stronger sunlight. More heat delivered to the planet—
And trapped by the carbon dioxide emitted by tide-triggered volcanoes.
What a dreadful fate. After centuries, millennia of restoration of the planet’s climate to reverse humanity’s meddling . . . What of the other inner planets?
The Destroyer came even closer to Mars, Greggson Deirdra. The volcanoes of that planet erupted for the first time in a billion years. A remarkable sight in itself.
And Venus – Venus suffered a nearly direct collision.
The atmosphere was blasted away, even before a pulverising sideswipe. Ultimately much of the crust and mantle were stripped away. For now Venus still glows brightly, from the heat of the impact. In the end it will settle into a new orbit as a smaller, denser object. Much of its old iron core has survived, but with only a shallow mantle, and an airless new crust, which is already being cratered by the infall of some of the lost material.
It sounds more like Mercury. A ball of iron inside a thin rocky crust.
Indeed. And that, we tentatively speculate, may not be a coincidence . . .
What do you mean by that?
I should be cautious. We are guessing here, and our own guesswork may be biased. We are artificial entities. As conscious agents ourselves, our hypotheses to explain certain events often show a prejudice towards agency. Just as humans once imagined gods behind the lightning.
Stop waffling. You’re suggesting that somebody did this.
Let me think it through. When we saw the Towers on Persephone, we guessed that that world had been deliberately shoved out of the Solar System for – some purpose. Now you’re saying that the approach of Shiva was deliberate too? That somebody even further back in time shoved Shiva towards the Solar System, like – like lining up a shot on a pool table?
Pool?
An archaic game Malenfant tried to improvise on the Last Small Step. Didn’t work too well in partial gravity . . . Are you suggesting that the destruction of Earth as a habitable world was intentional?
Actually no. We believe the true target was Venus.
Venus?
Which was left stripped of its mantle. Its core exposed, just like Mercury, as you noted. And just as Mercury may have been remoulded in some other archaic collision event.
Oh. Venus was deliberately reshaped. Leaving the core ready to mine.
Indeed. And as you may know we had already found evidence, we think, of mining on Mercury. Very ancient operations. It is possible that the fab
ric of Phobos itself was manufactured on Mercury, or of Mercury resources.
I . . . Wow. None of us had thought of that. But Phobos must have been manufactured somewhere, I guess.
Mercury was the ideal lode, because it was so close to the Sun, and its energy. Maybe now it was time to – prepare – Venus in the same way. The Sun, as you know, is slowly brightening, across millions of years. Perhaps as that increase in available energy continues, more of the worlds of the inner System may be opened up for development.
Hmm. ‘Opened up’ literally. So they are building something. But what, this time? Another Phobos, another set of time chimneys? To where? The past?
Or the future. As our own time was once the future, as seen from the deep past.
I . . . see what you mean. Maybe this new chimney will – surface – in another few billion years. When maybe it will be Earth’s turn to be stripped for mining. So they can prepare for the next phase of the Solar System’s ageing.
That is possible.
And they shove around whole worlds to achieve these purposes?
So it seems. Our hypothesis is that in the deep past the same agency meddled with the planet we called Persephone – a rocky, eminently habitable world, shoved out to the periphery of the Solar System. For some other unknown purpose.
Yes. Malenfant’s World Engineers. There may have been no purpose in wrecking such a promising world. No direct purpose, I mean. Maybe it was just another side-effect, of another ghastly scheme. Used as a tool for some purpose.
That is eminently possible.
Well. I, or my original, followed Malenfant into Phobos, and we went there to try to confront those damn Engineers. Call them to account. Although . . . Listen. What difference might it have made? Even if Malenfant did make it back to the dawn of the Solar System, and changed things . . . It wouldn’t have changed stuff in the present, would it?
You mean, would Shiva have been deflected by such actions? No. We don’t believe so.
You’re talking about the manifold . . .
That is Malenfant’s term, but it has stuck. The hypothesis is that we live in a multiverse of many interconnected universes – universes which branch off from each other, from common origins, as time progresses, and choices are made. Some of these ‘choices’ may not be conscious – for example, if an asteroid is slightly deflected, by some random deep-space collision, towards or away from a planet with a rich, fragile biosphere . . . Different outcomes of trivial, chance events can have profound consequences, even without conscious design.
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