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Authors: David Brin

Existence

BOOK: Existence
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To “Tether Joe” Carroll, who spins real space lariats …

and

“Doc” Sheldon Brown, who teaches time travelers …

 

… and Ralph Vicinanza, who helped many dreams and dreamers to thrive.

 

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Part One:
Slings and Arrows

1.
I, Amphorum

2.
Aficionado

3.
Sky Light

4.
Resurrected City

5.
Plunge

6.
Fragrance

7.
Getting Even

8.
Reflection

Part Two:
A Sea of Troubles

9.
The Favor

10.
Shoresteading

11.
Newblesse Oblige

12.
Apprenticeship

13.
Metastable

14.
Treasure

15.
Artifact

Part Three:
A Thousand Natural Shocks

16.
Kindness of Strangers

17.
More Than One

18.
Povlovers

19.
Time Capsule

20.
Pursuit

21.
The Tribe

22.
Kindred Spirits

23.
Warning

24.
The World Watches

Part Four:
Nobler in the Mind

25.
Departure

26.
Cooperation

27.
Emissary

28.
The Smart Mob

Part Five:
A Consummation Devoutly Wished …

29.
Incomprehension

30.
The Avenue Within

31.
Consensual Reality

32.
Homecoming

33.
Straight Flush

34.
Seasteading

35.
Sensing Destiny’s Call

36.
False Diamonds

37.
Archipelago

38.
Upward Path

39.
Tough Love

40.
Waiting for Guidot

41.
The Old Way

42.
A Purpose

43.
Sorry I Asked

44.
Layered Reality

45.
A Parrot Ox

46.
A Smiling Face

47.
The Infinite Chain

Part Six:
This Mortal Coil

48.
Reflex

49.
Dour Storytellers

50.
Divination

51.
Inspiration

52.
Appraisal

53.
Potemkins

54.
Dismemberment

55.
Family Reunion

56.
Eden

57.
Ishmael

58.
Desperation

59.
Jonah

60.
Shards of Space

61.
It’s a Buoy

Part Seven:
Sea of Troubles

62.
Lurkers

63.
A Crime Scene

64.
Laminations

65.
Lurkers

66.
A Price for Continuity

67.
Ancient Luminosity

68.
Lurkers

69.
A Sealed Room

70.
Lurkers

71.
Lurkers

72.
Four Species of Human

73.
Lurkers

74.
A Cause Long Lost

75.
Lurkers

76.
Timing Is Everything

77.
Lurkers

78.
X Species

79.
A Mother Lode

80.
Lurkers

81.
Explorers

82.
Melancholy Lanes

83.
Lurkers

84.
Layers Under Layers

85.
A Bestiary

86.
Lurkers

87.
Perchance to Dream

88.
Lungfish

Part Eight:
To Be …

89.
Luminous

90.
Transparency

91.
Reflectivity

92.
Opacity

93.
Aberration

94.
Refraction

95.
Reflections

96.
Focus

97.
Images

98.
Detection

99.
Appreciation

Afterword

Follow-Up Resources

Acknowledgments

Tor Books by David Brin

Copyright

 

PART ONE

SLINGS AND ARROWS

Those who ignore the mistakes of the future are bound to make them.

—Joseph Miller

 

SPECIES

what matters? do i? or
ai?
+
the question spins

+
/- as my body spins !/
+
in time to a chirping window-bird

“normal people” don’t think like this -/-/-

nor aspies -/- nor even most autistics

stop spinning!
-/- there -/- now back to the holo-screen -
>

rain smatters the clatter window —

bird is gone -/
+
hiding from falling water
+ +

like i hide from a falling civilization

what matters then?/? progress? New minds??

after
cortex
, after
libraries
, the
web
,
mesh
,
ai-grid

— what’s
next
?/!

will it offer hope/doom for foolish humanity
+
/?

for the glaring cobbly minds
+
/?

or autistic-hybrids like me
+
/?

 

1.

I, AMPHORUM

The universe had two great halves.

A hemisphere of glittering stars surrounded Gerald on the right.

Blue-brown Earth took up the other side.
Home,
after this job was done. Cleaning the mess left by another generation.

Like a fetus in its sac, Gerald floated in a crystal shell, perched at the end of a long boom, some distance from the space station
Endurance
. Buffered from its throbbing pulse, this bubble was more space than station.

Here, he could focus on signals coming from a satellite hundreds of kilometers away. A long, narrow ribbon of whirling fiber, far overhead.

The bola.
His lariat. His tool in an ongoing chore.

The bola is my arm.

The grabber is my hand.

Magnetic is the lever that I turn.

A planet is my fulcrum.

Most days, the little chant helped Gerald to focus on his job—that of a glorified garbageman.
There are still people who envy me. Millions, down in that film of sea and cloud and shore.

Some would be looking up right now, as nightfall rushed faster than sound across teeming Sumatra. Twilight was the best time to glimpse this big old station. It made him feel connected with humanity every time
Endurance
crossed the terminator—whether dawn or dusk—knowing a few people still looked up.

Focus, Gerald. On the job.

Reaching out, extending his right arm fully along the line of his body, he tried again to adjust tension in that far-off, whirling cable, two thousand kilometers overhead, as if it were a languid extension of his own self.

And the cable replied. Feedback signals pulsed along Gerald’s neuro-sens suit … but they felt wrong.

My fault,
Gerald realized. The orders he sent to the slender satellite were too rapid, too impatient. Nearby, little Hachi complained with a screech. The other occupant of this inflated chamber wasn’t happy.

“All right.” Gerald grimaced at the little figure, wearing its own neuro-sens outfit. “Don’t get your tail in a knot. I’ll fix it.”

Sometimes a monkey has more sense than a man.

Especially a man who looks so raggedy,
Gerald thought. A chance glimpse of his reflection revealed how stained his elastic garment had become—from spilled drinks and maintenance fluids. His grizzled cheeks looked gaunt. Infested, even haunted, by bushy, unkempt eyebrows.

If I go home to Houston like this, the family won’t even let me in our house
.
Though, with all my accumulated flight pay …

Come on, focus!

Grimly, Gerald clicked down twice on his lower left premolar and three times on the right. His suit responded with another jolt of Slow Juice through a vein in his thigh. Coolness, a lassitude that should help clear thinking, spread through his body—

—and time seemed to crawl.

Feedback signals from the distant bola now had time to catch up. He felt more a
part
of the thirty kilometer strand, as it whirled ponderously in a higher orbit. Pulsing electric currents that throbbed
up there
were translated as a faint tingle
down here,
running from Gerald’s wrist, along his arm and shoulder, slanting across his back and then down to his left big toe, where they seemed to
dig
for leverage. When he pushed, the faraway cable-satellite responded, applying force against the planet’s magnetic field.

Tele-operation. In an era of ever more sophisticated artificial intelligence, some tasks still needed an old-fashioned human pilot. Even one who floated in a bubble, far below the real action.

Let’s increase the current a bit. To notch down our rate of turn.
A tingle in his toe represented several hundred amps of electricity, spewing from one end of the whirling tether, increasing magnetic drag. The great cable rotated across the stars a bit slower.

Hachi—linked-in nearby—hooted querulously from his own web of support fibers. This was better, though the capuchin still needed convincing.

“Cut me some slack,” Gerald grumbled. “I know what I’m doing.”

The computer’s dynamical model agreed with Hachi, though. It still forecast no easy grab when the tether’s tip reached its brief rendezvous with … whatever piece of space junk lay in Gerald’s sights.

Another tooth-tap command, and night closed in around him more completely, simulating what he would see if he were
up there,
hundreds of klicks higher, at the tether’s speeding tip, where stars glittered more clearly. From that greater altitude, Earth seemed a much smaller disc, filling just a quarter of the sky.

Now, everything he heard, felt or saw came from the robotic cable. His lasso. A vine to swing upon, suspended from some distant constellation.

Once an ape … always an ape.

The tether
became
Gerald’s body. An electric tingle along his spine—a sleeting breeze—was the Van Allen radiation wind, caught in magnetic belts that made a lethal sizzle of the middle-orbit heights, from nine hundred kilometers all the way out to thirty thousand or so.

The Bermuda Triangle of outer space.
No mere human could survive in that realm for more than an hour. The Apollo astronauts accumulated half of all their allotted radiation dosage during a few minutes sprinting across the belt, toward the relative calm and safety of the Moon. Expensive communications satellites suffered more damage just passing through those middle altitudes than they would in a decade, higher up in placid geosynchronous orbit.

Ever since that brief time of bold lunar missions—and the even-briefer
Zheng He
era—no astronaut had ventured beyond the radiation belt. Instead, they hunkered in safety, just above the atmosphere, while robots explored the solar system. This made Gerald the Far-Out Guy! With his bola for an arm, and the grabber for a hand, he reached beyond. Just a bit, into the maelstrom. No one else got as high.

Trawling for garbage.

“All right…,” he murmured. “Where are you…?”

BOOK: Existence
7.21Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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