Echoes of Earth (5 page)

“It’s too much to hope that they’re from Earth,” she said, anticipating his next comments. “That’s what you’re going to tell me, isn’t it? They couldn’t have possibly achieved that type of technology by now.”

“Highly unlikely, Caryl. Ftl communication, maybe, but not travel. Nothing like this, anyway.”

She absorbed what was happening on the screen for a long moment. “So where
are
they from?”

“We don’t know. There’s no way we
can
know... unless they decide to tell us, of course.”

She laughed at this. “Jayme, at this stage, I think we’ll be lucky to get a hello out of them.”

* * *

The orbital ring was complete within the hour.
Hatzis watched the threads link up with a feeling of dread, wondering what would happen once it was finished. Would the Spinners finally talk to them? Did she even want to hear what they had to say?

When the circle was closed, a massive current surge swept once around the planet, leaving brilliant auroral streamers in its wake. As the surge struck each of the spindles, their glow died back to a warm infrared, and their structures stabilized. Even the pulsing of gravitational waves from Spindle Six ceased, although Nalini Kovistra suspected that a particularly massive object still lurked inside. Once the circuit was complete, the pulsating glitch high above the ecliptic flashed once and disappeared.

Then silence.

Hatzis ordered the
Tipler
to maintain its vigilance for another two real-time hours. A hundred eyes sensitive to a thousand frequencies studied the spindles for any signs of activity, but there were none. The solar arrays studied the sky for any sign of the glitch but likewise found nothing.

Before fatigue finally overcame her, Hatzis watched a piece of orbital debris drift without incident barely one kilometer from Spindle Three. Satisfied that nothing dramatic was likely to happen for the moment, she agreed to stand down, leaving Sivio at the helm.

She had never felt such relief as the bridge dissolved and her private environment welcomed her back into its folds. Sleep didn’t come to her at once, however. Her mind kept returning to images of the spindles. There was such potential in the things, such
energy,
and she didn’t know how to deal with that. She couldn’t ignore it, but she couldn’t just accept it, either. The sheer scale of what she had witnessed disturbed her terribly.

She tried to guess what her original would have thought, confronted by such a thing. The quest for knowledge was firmly written in her character but also that the quest should be conducted in an orderly fashion. Methodical research and organized exploration were the keys to progress, she believed, not unpredictable leaps of understanding or fortuitous discoveries. Yes, serendipity played a part in the development of science, but it was serendipity underpinned by preparation and the scientific method.

So, although she was sure that her original would have been fascinated and delighted by the appearance of the Spinners—as would any of the survey members—she was equally certain that the abrupt undermining of everything she had built around Upsilon Aquarius would have provoked the same sinking feeling in her stomach. Virtual or not, the sense of dread was very real to her.

Jayme Sivio was wrong about his assessment of the threat the Spinners represented. They might not destroy the Earthling mission outright, but they could unpick the delicate tapestry of discipline and organization that kept it together. They were a long way from home and making slow but steady progress through the massive task ahead of them. The Spinners—with their wild display of advanced technology—would inevitably encourage fanciful speculation and even more fanciful plans. Already she could imagine how some of her flakier team members were thinking.

They couldn’t afford to take any risks. They had everything to lose. Even if there were dozens of each of them elsewhere in surveyed space, there was only one of them here. They only had one shot at working out what was going on, and if they missed it, humanity might never get the chance again.

That conclusion reassured her: that she wasn’t afraid of finding out the truth. She had wondered if she was balking at the spectacle of it all, recoiling like an animal from something bigger and smarter than itself. But that wasn’t the case. She wanted to know. She
needed
to. Her original would never forgive her if she let something like this slip through her fingers.

She fell asleep without realizing it. The
Tipler
’s Engram Overseer instantly ensured that her virtual personality was disconnected from both conSense and the environment around her to ensure that her dreaming mind did not cause any disruptions. A similar function was performed by various neurotransmitters in the human brain and did not represent a gross violation of the working model of her consciousness. She had given her permission for such actions to be taken on her behalf and was certainly unaware of it at the time. Falling deeper and deeper into sleep, dreams of golden daggers awaited her, with ice-white poison dripping from their tips.

When the alarm woke her, she felt barely rested. As the various subroutines and modules of her personality jostled for synchrony—or so it felt to her, and always had, even before becoming an engram—she checked the time and groaned.

Three hours, subjective. Barely an hour in the real world.

A message to call Jayme Sivio was flagged for her immediate attention. She opened a line to him, a surge of imaginary adrenaline brushing away the cobwebs of imaginary sleep. At that moment, she felt very real and as fragile as an eggshell.

Something’s gone wrong.

“Jayme, what’s going on?”

“Sorry to wake you, Caryl, but there’s been a change.”

She imagined the spindles unfolding like deadly flowers... the entire array acting as an interstellar antenna and summoning something far worse... the orbital tower contracting inward like a cheese slicer and cutting the planet in half....

“The Spinners?”

“No. It’s Peter.”

Dread gave way to surprise. “I thought you told him to maintain radio silence?”

“I did, and he has. It’s just...”

A cold feeling blossomed in her gut. “What the hell has he done now, Jayme?”

“He’s overridden the lock on the shuttle autopilot,” he said. “He’s on his way to the base of one of the towers.” Sivio hesitated for a second, as though sounding out her response. When she said nothing, he added, “I told him to wait until he spoke to you, but he wouldn’t. What should I do?”

With some effort she forced herself to stay calm. “Nothing,” she said evenly. “I’ll deal with him myself.”

1.1.5

Never in the history of humanity had Igor Sikorsky’s claim—
that “The work of the individual still remains the spark that moves mankind forward”—been so wrong as in the twenty-first century. The century of rapid social change that had closed the previous millennium had continued unchecked and indeed accelerated wildly for some decades before gradually settling at more predictable rate: still accelerating, but without the wild shifts forward signaling bursts of activity that often proved to be as destructive as they were progressive. As the people nominally in charge of the Earth’s major governments and corporations learned to rely on neural nets and other sophisticated software agents to help them make decisions, some of the unpredictability went out of world affairs. Increasingly, it was the teams behind these electronic advisers that influenced world affairs most, just as teams rather than individuals predominated in most professions. There was simply not enough space or scope for an individual to compete on such an overpopulated planet. Few mourned this development, none less so than the social engineers to whom it increasingly fell to predict what might happen next. The maxim “Many heads are better than one,” like Sikorsky’s claim, had never before had a chance to be so profoundly tested.

There were wars of terrible but brief ferocity followed by humanitarian efforts that did more to expose the base nature of humanity than to repair the damage. Yet from the uneasy soil of all the mass graves grew hope for the future. Although the 2030s began with a world as unequal and violent as that of any decade in the previous century, by its end, a sort of calm seemed to fall. No one could decide if the world’s leaders had finally come to their senses or if the software they listened to were working in concert. Either way, conditions were so changed by 2040 that the United Nations began to seriously address the major issues of the species, including the state of its home, rather than idly watch the squabbling of its members.

The environment could not be fixed by a mere change of heart. It was by then well known that future centuries would suffer greatly for the incontinence of their ancestors. That humanity would survive was never in doubt, but one would always prefer a palace to a barn. Long-term plans were founded to seek ways to fix the problem, and one of these included looking for alternatives elsewhere.

The looking itself was no problem. Massive interferometers had already detected the presence of oxygen and water around numerous extrasolar worlds. The list of viable targets for exploration numbered well over a thousand within a 100-light-year radius of Sol. The new sense of prosperity creeping over the Earth led to a feeling that these worlds could be visited and surveyed at an affordable cost; it was further felt that this should be done as quickly as possible. With life spans increasing and technology improving every day, the estimated 200 years required for a round trip to a neighboring star was no longer considered impossible. It was believed that such a trip would in fact be feasible—even tolerable—within just a few decades. UNESSPRO, the United Near-Earth Stellar Survey Program, was founded, and a date for the launch of the first vessels was set at January 1, 2050.

But there was a catch: Living humans could not be sent. Even with the Earth’s vastly expanded resources—cheap fusion power and the new tools of nanotechnology seeming to exponentially expand the horizons every year—there was simply no way to send thousands of people light-years away from Earth in every direction. Quite aside from the colossal cost, there was also the issue of lost time as well as the physical and mental well-being of the individuals undertaking such voyages. Instead, the first wave of survey vessels would represent humanity in the best way possible but would carry no actual live specimens.

At first it was hoped that sophisticated artificial intelligences would fill the pilot seats, but AI research took longer to deliver than its engineering counterpart. While vast orbital shipbuilding facilities evolved new generations of drives, power supplies, and protective magnetic bubbles, programmers explored dead end after dead end, never quite succeeding in creating the right sort of mind to ensure even one mission’s success, let alone thousands. UNESSPRO could not afford to throw away trillions of dollars on ships that might die or go AWOL at any moment. With 5 percent of the Earth’s gross product being channeled into the project, there had to be some sort of guarantee of returns. So they were forced to explore other options.

By 2048, it was clear that only one of these options promised anything like the sort of reliability required, and that was to send out electronic facsimiles of humans to the stars, as opposed to flesh and blood. Consciousness research had not yet managed to re-create an entire person’s mind in an electronic environment, except by inefficient neuron-by-neuron simulation, but they could decipher a great deal that had once been thought a mystery. The processes underlying consciousness could be emulated, as could the way emotions and other impulses ebbed and flowed throughout the body. Memory alone had proven elusive under such reduced conditions, defying all attempts to record it indirectly. The only efficient way it could be captured and simulated was secondhand, by interviewing the original at length about his or her past and using physical records to supply the images. Emotions could be attached later, during the fine-tuning phase, to color the recollection correctly, even though the details might still be slightly askew. Preawakening memory in such a mind was, at best, a patchwork quilt pieced together from a million isolated fragments.

But that was enough. So-called “engrams” behaved more or less the same as their template minds, the flesh-and-blood originals who had devoted six months of their lives to the task of being effectively taken apart and rebuilt inside a computer. When left to run for long periods, the engrams displayed no greater tendency toward unreliability than those same originals, neither failing at familiar tasks nor unable to learn. They were, in fact, ideal candidates for any space-faring crew: They did not eat, breathe, excrete, sleep, or grow sick; they took up very little space—less than a cubic decimeter (as measured in the new Adjusted Planck units created for the international venture)—and weighed less than half a kilogram; they could adjust easily to the long stretches of time during which nothing happened on an interstellar mission; and they could be trained as easily as a real person. In fact, it proved no great difficulty to train sixty real astronauts, then copy them as many times as was required to fill the crew registers of 1,000 survey vessels.

It was the latter detail that aroused the greatest ire among those still concerned about matters of the soul. Each survey vessel had a crew of thirty; there were one thousand ships; that meant a total survey crew of 30,000 individuals had been selected from that initial pool of just sixty. Roles on each mission were allocated randomly—while Caryl Hatzis might be the civilian survey manager on the
Frank Tipler
, on another ship she might have a junior role—but that didn’t remove the fact that there were in total over 500 Caryl Hatzises in the bubble of surveyed space surrounding the Earth. Were they
really
all the same person?

The original Peter Alander had once studied a graph showing how researchers could have delivered the required artificial intelligence before 2060. Engineering might have outstripped AI at first, but that was only because engineering was a better-known discipline. Consciousness research was new but growing rapidly. If the progress made in the 2040s continued for another decade, 2060 would have given plenty of time for the birth of humanity’s first conscious child. What it would be like, the authors of the graph had not known, but the Alander on the
Frank Tipler
profoundly wished UNESSPRO had waited to find out. Not so he could meet it—although that had been one of his aspirations—but so he could have sent it in his place.