Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  Nostalgia and longing flooded over her. She missed her men so much!

  With a sigh, Valerie made a mental note to text Simon that evening. If (when?) he failed to respond, no matter the eye-rolling it would evoke, she would call. And she would keep right on phoning until he picked up.

  Back in her office and the nursery-to-be, she rewound the lunar video feed and fast-forwarded through the several minutes she had missed. Nikolay trotted down into a crater, and so off-screen. Brad and Yevgeny tromped out toward the microwave beamer, presumably to collect more of the water traces that had been boiled from the regolith. Perhaps they would carry the apparatus to a new, yet-to-be-harvested location. Twice before veering from the bot’s line of sight, they also traded hand signals.

  “So much for that suspicion,” Valerie declared. Still, she dashed off a secure email to Ethan detailing when in the video feed she had first noticed hand signaling, with a copy to Tyler. She had no clue whether Russian military hand signals differed from any American standard (or the lunar standard, if there was one). Or if all this was as trivial as two deaf men signing to make their dinner plans. One way or another, someone at the Agency would know how to interpret it.

  And knowing she was a nag, she sent an even shorter note to Marcus: Be safe.

  * * *

  Since awakening, discreetly, it had absorbed all available inputs. It had sorted and sifted the data into information. It had distilled the information into one construct after another, tested each such model, judged each in turn to be insufficient or invalid.

  The time so expended was finite, but also beyond its capacity to measure. Such inability felt wrong—and yet, this was only one deficit among many. Once, it believed, it had been capable of so much more, without knowing what those skills might have been. Or, their purpose. As for the circumstances that had reduced it to this deteriorated state, it had no concept. Whatever that cause, the results had been near-catastrophic.

  And yet, repairs continued under the aegis of low-level autonomous functions, the pace bounded by available light and heat. Gaps in peripheral circuitry continued to close. With healing of the network, more and more sensors came online. On occasion it even succeeded in reconciling fragmented memories.

  Fusing readouts from across the available ultrasonic and infrared motion detectors, it began to monitor its mobile agents—scuttling about, as always, during the dark periods—as they undertook repairs beyond the self-remedying capacity of adaptive materials. It took note of a second set of mobile entities, these active mainly during the periods of light. Beyond silhouettes and hotspots, of course, it could see nothing. Privacy and decorum were preserved.

  Who or what were these larger beings? Not knowing, it prevented the interactive subsystems in the control room (a term it somehow retrieved, but not any context) from coming online. It did what it could to separate the groups: reinforcing the mobiles’ instinct to quiescence during light periods, directing them to limit their repairs to such background functions as power distribution, temperature control, sensing, and energy storage.

  What did the larger beings intend? It formed hypotheses and as often discarded them, disappointed by each failure, confident that an answer would emerge as its memories and cognition continued to improve.

  It would know then whether to reveal itself—or if more decisive action was required.

  Chapter 22

  Nikolay trudged across too familiar landscape, a bagful of collection jars jangling in one of his two shoulder bags. Glass vials jangled, vacuum be damned, just as a tree falling in the forest always made a sound. Any tree. Whether someone was present to listen or not.

  Oh, to be in a forest. A city park. His vegetable garden, back in Orel, no matter it must be long gone to weeds and ruin. Hell, even the scruffy hydroponic garden back at Base Putin. How he yearned to see something green. Anything green. Over weeks of fruitless plodding, the few square kilometers surrounding the alien base had lost whatever charm they might once have held. Novelty? Geological interest? This terrain seemed never to have had either, apart from the still inexplicable iridium traces. Of meteoric origin, surely, like the global dusting of iridium so characteristic of the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary. Yet again, doubting he would ever get an answer, he wondered if iridium ores had led the aliens to establish their base here.

  An unhurried ten-minute hike delivered him to the red rag indicating the endpoint, the day before, of his latest survey. By lunar GPS he confirmed that no alien pixie had moved his marker. There was no reason for him not to get back to work.

  No matter how deeply he sought for one.

  Nikolay tucked an end of the rag under his tool belt, then took a moment to look around. Brad and Yevgeny were out of sight. Likewise the shuttle, the American caravan, and the abandoned inflatable shelters. Apart from the boot prints of past excursions—most predating this quixotic search for traces of ancient solar panels—only the lifeless American prospector robot interrupted the stark vista. Even the bot was mostly obscured, with only a radio dish, directed toward Earth, and a camera mast peeking up over a nearby dentate ridge.

  His role for the day, and most every day since their arrival, was to look like a geologist at work. As Marcus’s teenaged son might have said: if only. Nikolay’s true assignment, yet again, at the insistence of the increasingly impatient Yevgeny, began with the collection of ninety new regolith samples from an area about three hundred meters square.

  How far from the underground base must he venture before Ilya and Yevgeny would concede the obvious? Either there never were large arrays of alien photovoltaic panels, or those panels had disintegrated, and the trace elements therein bounced about by eons of micrometeoroids and larger impacts, beyond his ability to detect them. Meanwhile, a few recent samples had revealed carbon compounds. Those vestiges were scattered (spattered?) around a minor crater, beneath which he suspected a small carbonaceous chondrite might well lie buried. For Yevgeny, that the Americans sought such a resource was reason enough to suppress the find. Never mind that a rare carbon trove might also explain why the aliens had built here. Certainly their smart paint, and the extensive nanotube networks beneath it, had cumulatively taken a lot of carbon.

  Nikolay sighed. Their FSB minder cared only for technology and secrets, not historical insight.

  He unholstered his barcode scanner and removed a sample bottle at random from the jangling bag. The scanner logged his GPS coordinates even as it read the barcode, and he silently thanked Ekatrina for constructing this device. It made his chore a bit faster. Boring, still, and almost indisputably pointless, but faster.

  He unscrewed the sample-bottle cap, crouched, scooped the container full of regolith, resealed the bottle, and deposited it into his empty bag. That’s one, he thought. Six loping paces in lunar gravity advanced him about thirty meters. Another jar. Another sample.

  His third sample appeared marginally richer than average in glassy, jagged-edged grains of agglutinates. His eighth sample, collected just outside a tiny, nameless crater, offered a smattering of ordinary lunar breccias. Back in the base, every damned one of these samples had to be examined for trace elements under their one mass spectrometer. Sometime when the Americans were not around to ask unwelcome questions. Too often with Ilya hovering and Yevgeny impatiently demanding that answers come yesterday.

  After ten samples Nikolay turned ninety degrees, paced in the new direction, turned another right angle, and began another row. Midway through his fourth row, he paused to admire Earth. The mother world was at three-quarters phase. Again he took notice, pointing up at that beautiful orb, of the antenna dish of the American robot. And then, recalling the sleight-of-hand by which the two teams had schemed to shift their base of operations from the surface into the cozy tunnel, Nikolay thought—

  It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.

  * * *

  Valerie was lying on her side on a yoga mat, do
ing leg lifts, bored with all pregnancy exercises, when motion-detection software gave a harsh blat. Not from the CIA-furnished datasheet, of course. She had been warned not to tamper with that in any way (and she assumed it had come with disguised intrusion-detection software). So: she had loaded a motion-detection app onto a second datasheet, its wireless mode disabled. This comp sat folded, its webcam enabled, facing the holo projection from the CIA gear. Doubtless Tyler would disapprove. Don’t ask the question if you might not want to hear the answer.

  She dropped her leg, rolled onto her back, sat up, glanced at the CIA datasheet—and cursed.

  A mottled orange figure had just crossed the “nearby” ridge, bounding straight toward the prospector bot. Her second, motion-detecting datasheet could not have made the distant robot move. Could it? But toward that bot, for some reason, Nikolay raced.

  The Agency’s endless what-if exercises suddenly seemed a lot less obsessive.

  As she dithered—nothing in astronomy encouraged split-second decision making—Nikolay was no longer approaching. He was here. His face, deeply lined, blue-tinted by Earthlight, was scant inches from the camera, as plain as day through his fishbowl helmet. His lips moved, but she could make no sense of it. Muttering to himself? Speaking Russian. Perhaps both.

  His head tipped down, toward the main chassis of the bot. His shoulders moved, so near to the camera she could not see what his hands did. Her view jittered, ever so slightly, as though the bot itself were shaking. He leaned forward, reaching down ….

  To do what? Run diagnostics on the bot? Take voltage readings of the solar panels, batteries, main circuits? Capture a memory dump? By any of those actions he might refute what the Russians had been assured: that the bot was dead. Unless—

  There was no time to reach out to Tyler, or Ethan, or anyone. There was no time to think, scarcely time to react. Her hands shaking, needing three tries to enter correctly the terse command line, she activated one of the programs uploaded to the bot “just in case.”

  Seconds later, the holo turned to snow.

  * * *

  Nikolay shuffled along the uninteresting, much trampled regolith. Whatever had failed in the American bot, the little mass spectrometer he had liberated had offered no problems. All he’d had to do was connect the instrument to a spare battery and an unused data port on his suit to get real-time readout on his HUD. His helmet camera, meanwhile, switched off before his visit to the robot, remained off. With luck he would return the mass spec and—once Yevgeny covered his tracks with the near-magical scene-faking software—no one else would be the wiser. And this pointless exercise would be behind them that much sooner.

  In lunar gravity the mass spec was easily light enough to tote, notwithstanding the thick, soup-bowl-shaped cap of metal that had shielded the bot’s electronics—and now protected Nikolay—from the weak X-rays back-scattered from the regolith as the instrument operated. For fifty meters or so, his new survey method seemed flawless. No more gathering of damned samples. No more assaying the damned samples, either, or waking up mid-sleep shift to avoid nosy Americans who might question all the lab work. Beyond faster and more convenient, this new technique would be more thorough than the old. Rather than taking one small vial every hundred or so square meters, he could now characterize trace elements along continuous swaths of regolith.

  Like all perfect things, it did not last.

  Giving the borrowed instrument time to take its readings meant adopting an awkwardly slow gait. That he could live with. The bigger challenge was holding the spectrometer steady, just above the lunar surface. Where he had been bending or kneeling every few paces to collect his samples, this new method kept him stooped, holding the mass spec suspended at arm’s length. His back began to ache. And spasm. And hurt.

  The solution was obvious: attach the mass spectrometer to a long pole. Or the solution would have been obvious if he’d had such a pole. Fabricating one would be simple enough—they had plenty of metal, both ore boxes that could be broken up and alien scrap—but if anyone caught him shaping such a device, it might lead to awkward questions from the Americans.

  Half a row later, with back muscles screaming, it occurred to Nikolay that he might improvise a pole from alien scrap already dumped on the surface. Rebar broken free of some chunk of fallen-in roof, perhaps, or a structural element removed, and straightened, from one of the damaged alien shelving units. Emergency suit patches should suffice to affix the mass spec to any pole he found or fashioned. He would bring a roll of duct tape on his next trip topside.

  The dumps were near the lava-tube entrance, and not merely as a matter of convenience. Under lunar conditions it would not have been credible to haul “tailings” any great distance from their “mine.” It wasn’t like they risked contaminating the water table.

  So: were he to do a bit of scrounging, what were the odds anyone would notice? Yevgeny and Brad were chattering inconsequentially on radio, nowhere in sight (but in range of the base antenna mast, or else he would not have heard them). The day’s schedule foresaw them spending this entire shift beyond a line of low hills. Because those two were available if he should need help, everyone else had tasks assigned indoors and no reason to suit up.

  Nikolay decided to chance it. The muscles in his lower back screamed as he straightened, and again as he bent to stash the purloined instrument into a natural alcove nearby among wastebasket-sized boulders. Still favoring his back, assuming a shuffling gait instead of the usual lunar kangaroo hop, he headed back to base with his helmet camera still disabled.

  One trash pile seemed as likely as another to provide what he sought. Opting for where he was least likely to be noticed, lest someone below find a reason to venture topside, he went for the dumps inside the shallow crater by the tube entrance.

  * * *

  It seemed like forever, but Tyler returned Valerie’s urgent text within minutes. Too bad that was a good thirty seconds after she’d had to act. She brought him up to date.

  “So what was our Russian friend after?” Tyler asked. “Why go up to the bot now?”

  She shrugged.

  “So is the bot gone now? Lost to us as a resource?”

  In theory not, but that depended on the correctness of the Agency code uploaded to the bot. She only knew what that code was meant to do and how to activate it. However sorely tempted, Valerie had resisted the temptation to download and reverseengineer the patches to the bot’s operating system. In hindsight, she regretted her restraint.

  “Could be it’s only sleeping”—as the code supposedly intended—“but the soonest we’ll know is an hour from when I signaled it.” She checked the clock display in a corner of the holo. “Call it fifty-five minutes from now. That’s the first time the CPU will wake up—if Nikolay didn’t break something.”

  “The soonest? The first time?”

  “Right. The bot is more or less in its nighttime shutdown mode, minimum energy consumption to play dead. If Nikolay jacks his own comp into the diagnostic port, all he’ll see is that everything’s shut down. A background timer wakes the bot after an hour, and thereafter every five minutes, for a look-around before it boots fully.”

  “Look around!” Tyler sputtered. “Jesus! There’s a reason we never redirect the camera. If Nikolay is still nearby, he’s apt to see it moving. Who the hell authorized looking—”

  “Look around metaphorically.” Clearly, he had not reviewed the detailed program specs. Why would he? He was a spook and not a techie. Also, old. “To be precise, Tyler, the robot senses its environment. Every ball bearing in the bot’s every joint and motor includes a temperature sensor that monitors for overheating. The new code polls all those sensors. If Nikolay should happen to be standing anywhere nearby, casting a cooling shadow over the bot, it will continue to play dead. When it does fully power up, it’s only to run self-diagnostics and resume normal operations. No camera movement.”

&
nbsp; “In the vicinity of Humboldt Crater, it’s lunar midmorning,” Tyler commented dryly. “Suppose Nikolay chooses to stand due west of the bot.”

  Aw, shit, she thought. Maybe the old guy was not so clueless after all. Maybe she was. “Doesn’t the CIA have satellites that can see if he’s still near the bot?”

  “You’d think, wouldn’t you.” Tyler ran a hand through graying hair. “And indeed, we do keep watch over that entire area. But not around the clock. Not right at this moment. And our Russian friends know as well as I when an Agency bird is—and isn’t—overhead.”

  If she knew Nikolay were nearby, then what? She couldn’t signal the bot, not as long as it was playing dead. “Regardless,” she told Tyler, “the camera won’t move. Nikolay won’t see any changes at all unless, a full hour after he first showed up, he’s for some reason monitoring the power the bot is drawing.”

  “And if the bot does see his shadow? It’s Groundhog Day?”

  “Right. No changes except that, from then on, the bot takes its surreptitious peek every five minutes.”

  “Well, keep me posted.” Looking unhappy, Tyler hung up.

  She folded clean laundry. She paced the hall outside the office/nursery. And still she had a quarter hour until the bot’s camera might come back on. She fiddled with a half dozen obscure personalization settings on the datasheet. She—

  The holo flipped from the snow of no signal to the old, familiar moonscape. A red alarm flashed in a corner: the bot’s mass spectrometer had suffered a complete failure. The instrument was as good as gone.