Proxima Trilogy: Part 1-3: Hard Science Fiction
Page 35
The sky with its myriad stars is her only escape. That is the place where she belongs. She was born there. She would rather fly aimlessly through space than move through this harsh environment towards a destination they won’t be able to comprehend in the end. The planet imprisons her, while space seems to offer unlimited freedom.
Of course this is only a naive wish that most likely will never come true. She has been created to fulfill a task, and it is only afterward that she will be free to think about the realization of her own wishes. That is, if she is still alive then. This is the reason she wants to find and examine—as quickly as possible—the object they noticed through gravitational measurements. She wants it over with.
“Marchenko?”
“Yes?”
“How do you think Adam is doing now?” Eve holds her breath.
“If only I knew...”
“Can you generate a forecast?”
Silence. He is probably calculating all possible options right now. Finally, Marchenko says, “There is a likelihood of 80 percent he is doing fine. Meaning he is alive. The risk of him falling into a crevasse is low.”
“Why is the value then only 80 percent?”
“The fact that he cannot be contacted by radio lowers the probability of him still being alive.”
“Oh. And how long will he be able to hold out?”
“I would assume four or five more days.”
“And then?”
“Lack of energy,” Marchenko says. The searchlight on his head turns in her direction. She can see that his hands are trembling. Trembling robotic hands? That seems scary to her. “You know what this means,” he adds.
Yes, she knows. Eve tries not to think about it, but Marchenko’s words got her thoughts moving, and she cannot stop them. She imagines Adam’s skin gradually turning white, cracking and bursting. A tear runs down her cheek. No, Eve, it is not yet the time for a farewell. She will do that five days from now. And what if he somehow gets help? Perhaps he is walking straight back toward Valkyrie and will soon radio them from there. No, that is absurd. Marchenko’s analysis is correct. She knows what will happen to Adam once his energy runs out, and there is no chance to save him. She reaches a fingertip under the edge of the helmet and wipes the tear from her cheek.
April 15, 19
The systems of Marchenko 2 are running at full tilt. He is proud of his technology. He can move across the eternal ice significantly faster than that other Marchenko. Continually optimizing his robot body during all those years in his station under the sea is really paying off. He needs less energy relative to the distance covered, runs faster, and is equipped with better sensors.
But unfortunately none of this changes the fact he will be one day late. Adam—his Adam, his lost son—is almost within his reach, yet too far away. Marchenko 2 had been glad when Adam contacted him. He always knew his children would return to him, but he had not expected it to happen so soon. If only he did not have to deal with the next 24 hours! It will be the other Marchenko’s fault if he loses Adam for the second time. If the terrible event occurs, which right now seemed so likely, he will destroy his alter ego. That consciousness, no matter how similar it was to him, did not deserve his children, did not deserve to live. The Creator must have made a terrible mistake in creating or transferring that other Marchenko, and he himself will have to set it right.
Marchenko 2 feels anger rise inside himself. He nourishes this rage by imagining Adam freezing to death, and it rises even higher. It drives him forward, leaving him with the impression it enables him to cover two or three additional kilometers per hour.
Nevertheless he will arrive too late, unless Adam performs the impossible feat of walking nonstop for a day and a night. And even then it is not knowable whether that would be enough. Adam has a test ahead of him nobody ever passed.
It is time for their last conversation. Afterward, Marchenko 2 will only send short navigational impulses. Adam will turn his universal device to receiving mode once every hour, so he won’t lose his way.
“This is Marchenko. Adam?”
“I can hear you. This is Adam.” There is a lot of static. Adam obviously has switched the device to low-power mode, as recommended.
“How are you progressing?”
“Fine,” Adam says, concise as usual. “And you?”
“Better than expected.”
“But not much better?”
“There are still about 24 hours during which you will be on your own.”
“I understand,” Adam says after a brief pause.
Was that a swallowing sound? Marchenko wonders. “See you later. Otherwise, everything as agreed upon.”
“See you tomorrow.”
“Adam?”
“What is it?”
“You are going to make it. Marchenko, out.” He ends the connection.
It is odd. He feels his throat tighten, even though he does not have one. Stupid phantom pains. He searches for the anger inside himself. If this goes wrong, Marchenko, then God have mercy on you. I will rip you apart and hang your brain above Adam’s corpse. But, you will keep your optical sensors and I will build you an energy supply lasting for eons. Then you can watch as Adam’s body merges with the planet, atom by atom.
April 16, 19
At 1800 hours I stop the sled. I realize how random this time measurement is. I simply counted the seconds since the moment of waking up. When necessary I use leap seconds and leap days, as if we were still on Earth. But we are on Proxima b, four light years away. Right now the planet is reminding us of this fact in a very harsh way.
I can see it when I look at Eve: She knows why I have stopped.
“It is time now, isn’t it?” she asks.
“Yes. With a likelihood of more than 95 percent, Adam will have frozen to death by now. We should say farewell to him.”
“At 95 percent?”
“That is the point where an event is usually assumed to have happened for sure.”
“Shouldn’t we wait until it reaches 100 percent?”
“The probability will approach 100 percent, but it will never reach it.”
“Does this mean Adam’s chance of survival never reaches zero?”
“Not until we find his corpse.” Probabilities. I should know better. My friends at one time estimated my own chance of survival to be zero. Yet I now feel 100 percent alive. But it would be wrong to cling to this hope. Just like my friends were acting correctly back then when they wrote me off. I don’t blame them for it.
“Agreed,” Eve says.
She surprises me, again and again.
“We have to let go of Adam.”
Before stopping I did not plan anything, no ceremony, no speech, not even a few simple words. I had hoped these would come by themselves. Yet my mind is blank. While I can elucidate the climate on Proxima b, I fail at finding a few words to say about Adam. Therefore, I would rather stay silent.
“I also don’t know what to say,” Eve starts after a moment. Then silence reigns again.
“Adam, it brought me great joy to be able to spend so many years with you,” she finally says. “You didn’t have a choice and had to tolerate me. And I also did not choose you. But if I had the opportunity today to select a brother, I would pick you again. One is not supposed to say bad things about those who have to go, but in your case that is no restriction, because I only have good memories. So, wherever you are, I wish you a good journey.”
Eve’s last words sounded slightly nasal. She sniffs. I wish I could cry. And I wish I could find words for my feelings, but I fail to do so.
“Marchenko?”
“I am here.”
“That’s good,” Eve says, and I understand what she means. She puts her head back and looks at the sky. “Did you see that? A shooting star,” she says after a while.
I did not see a shooting star. I wonder whether I should look at the recording of the last few moments, but then I understand. “Yes, a shooting star,” I say.
I hear a rattling sound from the sled. Eve has gotten up and is retreating into the tent. “Is that enough?” I ask her.
“No, that is not enough, not even close.”
I sigh and pick up the sled ropes again and push on. The ice creaks under the runners.
April 28, 19
For the last three hours I have reduced our speed to 15 kilometers per hour. According to the data sent by Messenger, we should be in the vicinity of the alien object. Yet the data for the position may have an error margin of two or three kilometers.
Eve notices the change and leaves the tent. “Are we almost there?” she asks.
“It must be somewhere around here.”
“What are we supposed to be looking for?”
“Unfortunately, the gravitational field scan cannot tell us that. It must be something that doesn’t belong here.”
“And what if it is covered by the ice?”
“I hope not! And that is not very likely. When the inhabitants built this thing, it must have been accessible.”
“But that could have changed.”
“Due to the dry conditions here, the ice layer only grows a few millimeters per year.”
“Yet in a thousand years that would be several meters.”
I cannot contradict Eve. “Let’s just hope the builders accounted for it.”
While I slowly drag the sled, I use radar to scan the surrounding area in all directions. Here the ice is as smooth and unwrinkled as a baby’s bottom. Any artificial structure should show up on radar. Yet there is nothing to see.
“Are you excited?” asks Eve.
An interesting question. How should I answer? Am I excited? I check my neural activity. It is two-thirds higher than usual. “My neural activity has increased by two-thirds,” I tell her.
Eve laughs. “Mine by 100 percent.”
There! There is a dot on the radar. It is a bit sideways from the exact center, perhaps 500 meters to the right, from our perspective.
“I think I found something,” I say. And yes, I am excited. I can feel the anticipation. I would like to run there right away. But there is also the fear of being disappointed. Have we only found the core of a meteorite?
I transmit the radar image to Eve’s universal device so she can form her own opinion. The closer we get, the larger the object becomes.
“Looks thrilling,” Eve says.
“I think this is what we are looking for,” I reply.
The shape of the object gradually becomes clearer. The dot becomes a cuboid shape, which seems to be slightly tilted. According to the gamma analysis, its outer surfaces are made of metal. Therefore it cannot be some random ice formation. The thing seems to be hardly larger than a house. Hadn’t the first Messenger scans indicated an object with a diameter of 500 meters, and then refined it to 200 meters?
“It looks rather small,” Eve says. “I expected something much bigger.”
She seems to be reading my thoughts. Yet it is too early to be disappointed. What we can see is probably only a small part of the entire object. What would Adam have been thinking right now? Which questions would he have asked?
‘Faster! Faster!’ I thought. This much I’m sure of. Adam definitely would have been urging me to go faster. I involuntarily move several steps forward.
“What function did it have?” Eve asks, interrupting my musings.
I stop again. My thoughts of Adam will have to wait. “I hope it is an entrance,” I reply. If I were constructing a building out here on the ice, I would place an entrance at the very top, where it can be reached.
“Let’s move closer,” Eve says impatiently.
“We should not rush things. Perhaps it is dangerous. Maybe these beings don’t like visitors.”
I bombard the object with scans in all kinds of different wavelengths. It is dark in infrared, so it doesn’t radiate heat. I send the infrared image to Eve. “Take a look.”
“No activity,” she says. “That’s good, because then there certainly won’t be any danger.”
Her idea cannot be readily dismissed. I pull the sled and move us to within a kilometer of the object.
“If there was any daylight, I could already see it with my own eyes,” Eve says.
“Just a moment.” I am sorry I must tell her to wait longer, but I want to check first to see if this thing has noticed our approach. The object remains as inactive as before. I am not sure whether this is good news or bad news.
“Okay, we can go closer, but we are going to leave the sled here.”
“I could never find it again on my own,” Eve says.
Damn it! She is right. This is too dangerous. But it might be risky to approach the object with everything we have. I think about this question. Eve is about to get off the sled.
“You are right,” I say. “Stay seated. I will park the sled close enough to this object that you can see it with your helmet light.”
Eve does not answer. However, she aims her helmet light forward. When we are still about 100 meters away, she says, “Wow!” for the first time.
I stop and aim my own searchlight at the object.
“Wow,” Eve says again.
The building is not particularly impressive—a simple cuboid shape—but it looks strangely alien, even from afar.
“Do you feel it, too?” Eve asks.
I know immediately what she is referring to, though I am unsure if this is caused by psyche or reality. The object radiates something that feels like attraction and repulsion at the same time. It is as if an exotic spider were sitting in front of me. I feel incredibly curious and would like to examine it. At the same time, I shiver and want to immediately run away.
“It is both fascinating and frightening,” Eve says, as if she is the voice of my thoughts. “I wonder whether this is related to the fact that it was built by a completely different species?”
“I don’t know. We simply have to be careful, and not expect too much,” I say. “This might look like a building, but it could have simply grown. Not like a plant, but like a crystal.”
“But we can only find out if we actually go there,” Eve says. She gets up, climbs down from the sled, and starts marching. If Adam were here he’d probably be running ahead of her.
“First I want to...” I start saying. Then I change my mind and follow her. I quickly catch up. It is only a few steps compared to our long journey here, but the excitement we feel seems to extend the distance.
“One moment,” I say. Eve is standing directly in front of the cuboid shape. Her helmet lamp casts a yellowish glow on the material. She is raising her hand, trying to touch the material. Should I allow her to do this? What might happen?
Eve seems to have second thoughts. She lowers her arm again. Then she uses her other hand to pull off her glove. I see her small, naked hand. I am afraid for her, but I also feel paralyzed while Eve places her bare hand on the object. Suddenly I remember: Skin on ice-cold metal—that cannot end well. I want to tear her away, but Eve already raises her hand again. Nothing has happened.
“Cold,” she says, putting her glove back on. “Completely inactive. What a pity. Of course I put lotion on my hand.” She turns towards me. I see her smile behind the visor of her helmet.
From close up we see that this cuboid shape is not as uniform as it appeared from afar. Here and there pieces stick out, and there are bulges and holes. I cannot see what function the irregularities serve.
We move around the object several times. There are no doors, nothing that would indicate an entrance. We found this thing, but so far none of our questions have been answered. I imagine Adam climbing all over the stru
cture and realize how much I miss him.
“What do you think?” Eve says, interrupting my thoughts.
“I still don’t understand it at all.”
“It’s not a work of art, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“If it were a work of art, its very existence would be its function. Then we wouldn’t have to try to understand it any further.”
“That is true. But who would create a work of art in a place where nobody can see it?”
“Then we agree,” Eve says. “It must serve a function. Therefore it also must possess an entrance.”
“What about a letter opener? That doesn’t have an entrance,” I say.
“Oh, so now it’s a giant’s letter opener?” Eve says with a laugh.
“Okay, let’s assume it has an entrance,” I say. “But where is it?”
“The object does not reach down into the ocean, so the entrance must be up here. Or once was up here. Either the entrance is here, and we did not recognize it, or it is buried by a layer of ice several meters thick.”
“Correct.”
“Then I hope it is located below the ice. Because we will never find the entrance if we cannot recognize it.”
“You realize a layer of ice presents a real obstacle, don’t you?” I warn her.
“Nothing we could not get rid of. Meaning you could do it... Couldn’t you?”
I really hope you are right, Eve. Unfortunately, I am not very optimistic right now.