Echoes of Earth (2 page)

His original would have been pleased, that was for sure. The Adrasteian cyanobacteria had never evolved into anything terribly sophisticated. There seemed to be no reason why they shouldn’t have, though; conditions here were not fundamentally dissimilar to those that existed on Earth, Mars, or Europa. Adrasteian life-forms hadn’t evolved any further, his original would have argued, because the odds were stacked so far against such a thing happening that it shouldn’t happen even once in the lifetime of the universe. In fact, life should not have evolved
at all,
even to the level of bacteria.

The fact that it had evolved suggested otherwise, unless one viewed the early universe as a massive quantum computer, a near-infinite number of parallel universes engaged in incomprehensible “computations” from the moment of its creation—smashing elements together, creating new compounds and smashing those together in turn—until something appeared that could be called
alive.
This unicellular life wasn’t conscious, but it appeared and flourished everywhere, on numerous worlds, multiplying and evolving in the strange, uncollapsed place that was the unobserved universe.

The moment consciousness occurred, though, down one of those possible reality paths, the collapse occurred. The universe, observed, could no longer nurture the conditions required to parallel-process bacteria to consciousness. Once just one being
saw,
it robbed all other life-forms of the chance to evolve. Rapid evolution stopped in its tracks, confined as the universe now was to just one track at a time. Even with a near-infinite number of stars in the universe, the odds shrank to almost zero that other conscious life-forms would emerge from primitive organisms, since it was too unlikely to happen in a single universe, and thus the majority of worlds humans surveyed would be inhabited by nothing more exciting than bacterial sludge that had evolved in the past.

The lack of complex alien life on Adrasteia seemed to support his original’s argument: that humans were the universe’s present observers, and that they would find no other intelligent life-forms anywhere, just many different types of dead-end bacteria. There would be nothing more, in fact, until humanity died out and the universe could resume its quantum computations.

But only when the results from all the survey ships arrived at Earth would enough evidence exist to judge conclusively. The
Tipler
’s data was barely on its way, having been sent five months ago, six months after their arrival. He—Peter Alander’s flawed copy—hadn’t been around to witness the discovery of the cyanobacteria; not in real time, anyway. He had been going mad in slow-mo, savoring each second of rational consciousness for far more important things, like staying alive and trying to work out what had gone wrong.

He shifted uneasily in the bath, lifting his chin to breathe through the steam. There was something niggling at the back of his mind, but his thoughts were directed so far inward that he didn’t consciously acknowledge it. How long he had been lying there, he didn’t know. It was silent and peaceful; finally, he felt warm throughout—physically satisfied, if not mentally at ease. He was used to feeling out of sorts; that, after all, defined his situation.

If not for
us
...?

The memory beat at him like a stick, relentless and painful but brittle itself, as though it could snap at any moment He was as afraid of losing it as he was of trying to own it. If he wasn’t the person in that memory, then who was he? What right did he have to the name Peter Alander? What right did he have to exist at all? Sometimes he felt like the original Alander’s hypothetical protointelligence, struggling out of the slime and just beginning to grasp consciousness when the sad news came:
Sorry, you’ve been beaten to it. There’s nothing here for you. Go back where you came from, and you’ll never know the difference.

But he couldn’t go back, and he wasn’t going to lie down and let the problem beat him, either. He was going to survive. If he wasn’t Peter Alander, then he would work out who he actually was and
be
that person. He was sure Lucia would have understood, wherever she was.

He ducked his chin under the undulating meniscus of water, intending to submerge himself completely.

It was only then that he consciously noted the smell of burning and realized that the trickling of water had ceased long ago.

1.12

Caryl Hatzis closed the line to Cleo Samson with a sense of
reluctant resignation. Reluctant because she didn’t like indulging anyone when resources were so tight, but resigned because she knew there was no point feeling any other way. Alander was a problem she had failed to deal with her way; she would therefore give him the concessions the others requested in case their method worked. If it did, she would acknowledge the small defeat and move on. And if it didn’t... well, she would have his new balls and be done with it. She was tired of wasting her time—and his—on looking for a cure that might not exist. If only someone on Earth—

No.

She cut off the thought with a bitter effort of will. She understood herself well enough to know where it would end up. Maybe UNESSPRO
had
solved all the engram-related problems since they’d left; maybe Alander could be healed by a simple software patch; maybe there was nothing wrong with him that time alone wouldn’t heal. Whatever; a call for help would take a century to arrive, and a reply would take another century to return. The fact that nothing had come from Earth for more than a century suggested that no one would be listening anyway.

They were on their own. Either Alander would have to sort himself out, or he would be frozen and the drone he inhabited returned to normal service. She sometimes wondered if the latter would be for the best in the long run, although she had to admit that initially, the effect on morale would be severe. Some of the crew actually seemed to care what happened to poor old Peter Alander—flawed and fragile, and no use to anyone except as grunt labor. What would his original have thought? What about the program supervisors?

You fuckers,
she cursed her long-distant superiors.
I’m not an AI psychologist; 1 was never trained to deal with something like this.

As she watched Alander’s bath slowly fill, she wondered what Cleo Samson’s role in all this was. It was an open secret that she had been jealous of Alander and Benck back in entrainment; her engrain had presumably retained that emotion. So, was she looking out for someone she cared about or on the make? Hatzis would be damned if she’d give anyone access to another body, no matter how therapeutic it might be for Alander. She felt like Frankenstein enough as it was without giving the monster a bride.

And if Cleo Samson really
did
care so much, why was she reporting his latest outrage to the one person least likely to tolerate it?

“We have another glitch.” The voice of Jayme Sivio came from behind her on the bridge. Although the direction did not exist, since the space they called “the bridge” was purely virtual, she turned automatically to face him. The survey manager (military) of the
Frank Tipler,
a lanky fair man in his early forties, stood with his hands folded in front of him in an unselfconscious, at-ease stance.

“Where this time?”

He patched her into the data, surrounding her in multicolored vector diagrams. “Above the ecliptic. Here.” He indicated a point several AUs farther out than Adrasteia. A pulsing golden light hovered in empty space, a long way from anywhere. “The same spectra as the first one, but more than twice as bright”

“Do we have anything out that way?”

He shook his head. “The signal is being picked up by the solar north array. The nearest thing to it is... well, us.” He shrugged lightly. “Do you want to dispatch a probe?”

She thought about it. They had wasted a probe on the first one: the glitch had shone for less than a day, whereas the probe had taken a week to arrive. It had found no solid bodies, no dusty remnants, no ashes—nothing at all.

“It’s not pumping out anything hard?” she asked, confirming the details he had already implied.

“Nothing that could harm us.”

“And it’s not moving?”

“Not rapidly. We haven’t enough data to work out its precise trajectory.” Another shrug. “Otto and Nalini are looking at it pretty closely, just like they looked at the last one. But they’re drawing a blank.”

“I presume it’s natural.”

“As opposed to...?”

She scowled at him. “You know what I mean.”

His smile rebuked her. “If I thought it was artificial, I’d tell you.”

“Okay then, do you think it
isn’t
artificial?”

“That’s a completely different question.”

And you didn’t answer it,
Hatzis thought to herself.

“What else have we got?” she said.

“We’ve been watching it for an hour, now,” Sivio obliged. “The pulsing is regular, but not regular enough to be suspicious. If our detectors were any less sharp, we’d probably mistake it for a pulsar, if we saw it at all.”

“Maybe it’s a piece of antimatter,” she mused. “An antimatter meteor of irregular shape tumbling into the system and burning up as it hits the solar wind. The emissions change as it rotates. Could that be a possibility?”

“If it is, I’m sure Otto and Nalini are looking into it. They’re doing triple time on this.”

She nodded. The same variable-clock facility that had allowed her crew to slow their thoughts to a near standstill during the journey out also gave them the capacity to speed up their thoughts when required. For every one of her minutes, her two astrophysicists would be experiencing three, near the upper limit of engram processing speed.

“I keep hoping you’ll tell me it’s a signal from Earth,” she confessed. “Something ftl that isn’t coming through properly, or something we don’t understand. They’ve had a lot of time to advance, after all. Their technology could be very different now.”

“Undoubtedly,” said Sivio. The last signal from Earth had been broadcast while the
Tipler
was in transit, dated 2062.3.3 Mission Time; it had warned them that there might be a break in transmission, but there was nothing to suggest that the break might last more than a hundred years. Such a break could have been the result of something as simple as a misaligned transmitter, but it could also have been something as severe as the collapse of civilization in Sol System. From Upsilon Aquarius, there was no way to tell.

Few doubted that contact would be regained.
When
was the issue. And
how.

Hatzis sighed and brought her attention back to the bridge. Although a fake, it was convincingly solid to all her senses. She seemed to be in a large room highly reminiscent of the fictional starships found in late-twentieth/early-twenty-first-century science fiction: a semicircular wall contained a large screen; several duty stations lay scattered around a central chair; a rail at the back segregated visitors from active crew. Sivio was even in some sort of uniform, although she didn’t recognize it.

Playacting,
she thought.
We’re kids at heart, even now.

The illusion was comforting and necessary but still that: an illusion. The
Frank Tipler
, orbiting around Adrasteia’s equator twice every one of the planet’s short days, was in actuality little more than a box with few moving parts and no empty spaces to speak of. Designed to travel the void between stars and set up shop when it arrived, the ten-meter-square structure was the embodiment of practicality. Its nanofacturing plants had built several hundred satellites in the year they had been in orbit; it had put them down on the ground and given them one reusable shuttle; it had even grown a half-dozen bodies into which those willing could temporarily inhabit the surface for work purposes. But it was limited and vulnerable, and the people it contained needed to be reminded of that fact every now and again. Including herself.

“How did you say we picked this up, Jayme?”

“On the solar north array. We haven’t had a match from anything else yet, but we’re hopeful.”

“So, same as last time,” she said. “One glitch, one sensor, no confirmation. If it is real, it’s either so faint we were lucky to pick it up at all, or we screwed up by not being quick enough off the mark to get it looked at from something else. But if it’s just a glitch—which is the way I’m leaning right now—then we need to find the fault. The last thing we need is crappy data.”

“I agree.” Sivio looked serious for the first time. She knew he was glad that she had assumed command of the survey mission once it had arrived at Upsilon Aquarius. She also knew that he had definite opinions on how it should be ran, opinions she valued, especially when they concurred with her own.

“Any recommendations?”

“I think we should wait,” he said. “And monitor everything.”

A slight narrowing of echoes indicated that he had chosen to make the remark privately, along a security channel only the two survey managers could access.

“Do you think this could be sabotage of some kind?” she asked via the same route.

“It’s a possibility,” he said. “Directed or otherwise. Maybe something installed in the software before we left. It could be a remnant of an old test routine gone haywire, perhaps. Who knows? We’ve had destructive mutations come out of the genetic algorithms before, although nothing so subtle or convincing as this. If that’s what it is, we’ll break it soon enough.”

She wanted to be reassured by his confidence. “And if it isn’t?”

“Then chances are we’ll learn something new.” His smile was wide and genuine. “That’s what we’re here for, after all.”

She nodded halfheartedly. Sabotage had been a possibility in everyone’s minds prior to departure. Although they had no way of knowing what had happened to ail the other survey missions, theirs had gone without a major hitch thus far, and she planned to keep it that way. But the fear kept her awake some nights, and there had been rumors.

“This couldn’t be the work of our supposed plant, could it?”

“The company spy?” He came down the bridge toward her. “I can’t believe you’d really worry about something like that, Caryl.”