Orphans of Earth (24 page)

2.0.2
Lucia Benck

2117.4.7 Standard Mission Time

(1 January, 2119 UT)

The darkness surprised her: Lucia Benck knew who she
was, where she was, and what had happened to her. She knew what the date should have been when the manual switch tripped her Overseer back into life. But she couldn’t see. She couldn’t feel. Had she died during her long transit through the system? Was this formless, empty nothingness Hell? Then the dusty pathways of her mothballed mind reassembled completely, and she remembered. She had programmed a discontinuity so she would
know
when the jump was over. It would have been all too easy to program the Overseer to suspend her operations and then revive them without any perceptible break at all, but she wanted more than that. She wanted something that would remind her, at least, of the risk she had taken. Something that would make her appreciate making it out the other side in one piece.

Let there be light,
she thought wryly. It was a cliché but what the hell. No one was there to hear it, anyway, but her.

At the command, her conSense modules came on-line one by one, gradually building a virtual world for her to slot into. As yet she had had no direct contact with
Chung-5,
since the probe was inert, apart from her and the nanofacturing plant. The latter was rebuilding her and itself at the same time from the raw materials she had stored near the core of the probe. Her clock rate was very slow to compensate for low energy reserves as it extended tendrils through the inert shield encasing the probe’s active core. She imagined molecular drill heads burrowing in and out of cracks, heading for the outside. When they reached vacuum, they would sprout roots and petals like elegant, microscopic flowers and begin to grow.

Two days after her awakening—barely an hour her time—she received her first visuals from the outside. She saw stars and, at the sight of them, her nerves eased instantly.
Chung-5
was rotating with a different period from the one she had given it before flipping the switch: slightly faster and with more of a tumbling feel. She could correct it later, once she had attitudes again. Training her miniature sensors around her, she caught sight of pi-1 Ursa Major as it rolled into view. The star was still there, apparently unchanged, but for the moment she could tell little more than that.

Her first impulse was to check the camera to see if it had operated correctly. When she had actuators in place, she dragged the film into view. The process appeared to have worked, but she had forgotten that she would need to develop the negatives before viewing them properly. Creating a chemical bath was, temporarily, less important than getting the power on and ensuring her own safety. The pictures would have to wait. Other than that, though, everything appeared to be going well, so far. The plant was busy building all of the many components she would need to continue her mission. It would probably take weeks before she was back to full capacity, if she could ever reach that level again. Depending on how much shielding had been ablated away by her passage through pi-1 Ursa Major’s solar atmosphere, she might have to wait many years as her magnetic shielding accrued mass from interstellar dust before she could have everything she wanted. But it didn’t look as though she was going to be crippled, and that was the main thing.

It was only while considering where she would go next that she realized she hadn’t dropped her customary souvenir on the way through the system. She’d even had a quote prepared, but the disturbing events leading up to her arrival had distracted her from routine. Only now, with time to spare, did she have the chance to remember it. Maybe, when things were back to normal, she could build something smaller and fire it back at the system; she might even be able to nudge it along with a laser for a while, to give it some extra delta-v. It might take a century or two to arrive, but at least the chain would be unbroken.

She wondered if her other selves had stuck to the deal. UNESSPRO wouldn’t approve, of course: she was wasting resources, for one thing, as well as polluting pristine environments. She preferred to think of it as disseminating the wisdom of humanity one sound bite—or meme—at a time, while at the same time creating a legacy that she could truly call her own. If all went well, there might be tens of thousands of her word disks already scattered throughout the expanding bubble of surveyed space surrounding Sol. She didn’t need to do anything, really, while
Chung-5
went about its repairs. The decision of where to go next could wait. So she kept herself in a very slow-mo state as she settled back to watch the star behind her shrink.

There goes Jian Lao
, she thought to herself.
There goes Peter.

After a while, she turned her sensors forward and pondered the stars ahead.

Hipp40918, Hipp41308, Hipp43477, 2 Ursa Major, Muscida...

And, farther ahead still:
Bode’s Nebula, M82, NGC3077, NGC2976, IC2574...

Then:
infinity...

She shivered—or, at least, her virtual body shivered. Normally, the thought of flying forever filled her with a powerful sense of wonder. This time, though, there was an uneasy edge to it, as if that sense of wonder had been corrupted by something else. She didn’t know what it was, either. All she did know was that there was something dogging at her, something that left her feeling oddly anxious.

A moment later, however, it passed, and she was left wondering whether she hadn’t simply imagined the whole thing. The sense of wonder was as pure and powerful as it had ever been at any point in her light-years of traveling. If there was one thing she was sure of after twenty subjective years, it was that she would never regret her decision to join UNESSPRO, to explore the universe. It was who she was; it defined her. As Peter had said, she was a tourist through and through.

Sometimes it struck her as strange that it
had
been twenty years. She hadn’t changed at all. Her memories, her sense of self were as strong as ever. Even though in the past she had regarded the boffins at UNESSPRO as penny-pinching, shortsighted, and complacent, there could be no denying that they did a good job when they put their mind to it. She was proof of that. As were all the other engrams.

To hell with the memes I’m leaving behind
, she thought to the universe at large.
The way I’m feeling, I reckon I can outlast the lot of you
.

The probe alerted her with a fair imitation of a cake timer when the photos were ready. She woke herself out of her deep-time thoughts and brought herself back to the present.

There were seventy-three pictures in all, and she turned her cameras on each of them with a fair degree of nervousness. What if there was nothing to see? What if the entire exercise had been a complete waste of time?

Plates one through twenty chronicled her approach to the system. The tumble of the probe along with its motion through space rendered many of the details as little more than streaks, but some had come out quite clearly. The gas giants were in the right places, and neither of them changed dramatically as she streaked toward them. She glimpsed rings, satellites, atmospheric storms: details she would have loved to have studied further had the opportunity not been over three quarter trillion kilometers behind her.

The next thirty plates concentrated on the inner system, Jian Lao in particular. The world was as blue as she had dreamed, with a crystal clarity to its cloud systems and landmasses that reminded her of Earth. It had three small moons. It was easy to add them to her dream of her and Peter, surveying the paradise they claimed together, in the back of her mind.

None of the first fifty plates showed anything out of the ordinary. No odd streaks or flashes; no unexpected blobs. No
Andrei Linde,
either. In fact, there was no evidence that anyone had ever even been in the system—which was impossible, because she had seen it arrive.

The remainder of the plates had been taken as she left the system. The images of pi-1 Ursa Major’s planets and primary shrank steadily as they receded from her, and they told her little that she didn’t already know. The last one had been taken only a day before her awakening and showed exactly the same view she had herself seen upon burrowing out of her cocoon.

Nothing. They told her nothing. With a sinking heart, she knew that her misgivings had been fully realized: it had all been a waste of time.

She couldn’t believe it. There
had
to be something going on. She couldn’t have imagined the whole thing. The flashes she had seen must have been immensely powerful for her dishes to pick them up. They must have left some sort of record, if only on the atmosphere of Jian Lao. If a natural phenomenon had caused them—like a comet strike—it must have been so large as to nearly crack the planet in two!

But it didn’t matter what logic dictated. The fact was, there was nothing. The motion-streaked images were blurry but not so ambiguous as to hide the evidence of a catastrophe on that scale. She checked every image minutely, hunting for the slightest unaccounted-for photon. She plotted the trajectories of every major body in the system to make sure that what she saw really was natural. She even ran them forward and backward across her vision like a brief time-lapse movie.

And that, in the end, was how she noticed it. As the probe had tumbled its way through the system, the shutter on its mechanical camera had clicked open once every ten hours or so. The mechanism had been as simple as she could devise, given her self-imposed limitations on technology and emissions. If there really had been nothing in the system but herself, then the metronomic click of the camera would have been the only regular sound, ticking like a very slow clock.

When she riffled through the photos, however, she noticed that there was a discontinuity. The smooth progression jumped just before the probe flashed past the fourth terrestrial planet. It was slight, just one frame, barely enough to be noticeable, and for a long while she couldn’t decide whether or not she had simply imagined it. It was only after she had double-checked the probe’s trajectory and replotted the various points at which the camera should have fired that she was able to dispel her doubts.

There was no question about it: there was a plate missing. Not unexposed, either, but actually
missing
—as though it had never existed. The plates formed a clear, uninterrupted sequence, so it didn’t make sense that the shutter should fail to open at that moment and no other. And it hadn’t become jammed in the camera mechanism, otherwise all the photographs after it would have failed or emerged damaged.

She could think of only one explanation for the loss, and that was that the plate had been stolen.

A cold feeling washed through her at the thought, as though her virtual world in the heart of the probe had somehow been invaded by the iciness of space. If someone
had
stolen the plate, there was only one way they could have gone about it. They must have scanned the probe and realized what the camera was for; they must have snipped out the plate and covered up the loss so that, barring a close inspection, it wouldn’t be noticed. For the plate to be stolen, she knew, the probe must have been physically infiltrated.

She tried shaking the idea from her mind, telling herself that she was making a mountain out of a molehill. But she couldn’t stop following the thought through. Had whoever was responsible for this known that she was inside the probe, in a state of suspended process, waiting to look at the plates when she awoke? Or had they simply thought the probe a simple, mechanical artifact flung from a distant star?

No. The latter didn’t make sense, because if that were the case, then why remove just one plate and then send the probe on its way again?

All of this paled into insignificance compared to the one troubling thought that continued to niggle at the back of her mind: this had to have been done by something other than human. There was no sign of the
Linde
in any of the surviving photos, and no evidence that humans had been to the system, advanced or otherwise. The theft had to have been performed by aliens.

And this unsettling notion, assuming it was correct, gave rise to an even more troubling thought: from her trajectory, could these aliens have then guessed where she came from? Could they have traced her origins back to Earth? What would they do if they did?

The awful uncertainty of her situation galled her. The whole point of going into deep storage and waiting out the trip past Jian Lao had been to gain hard data on what was going on. But in the end it had done the exact opposite. If something had approached the tumbling probe and been caught on film, then she would have preferred that either the film had been left intact or that she had been destroyed outright.

But in a way she could understand why these aliens had gone to the lengths they had. If they didn’t want to be found, then destroying a probe that might be intermittently reporting back home would be the worst thing they could do. Destroying it would only draw attention to them, whereas the ambiguous concealment of data might simply be ignored.

A large part of her was wishing she had never analyzed the data in the first place. It would certainly have been easier that way. After all, in the end there was nothing she could do about it, whatever she found. It wasn’t as if she could turn the probe around and go back to reprimand the aliens. If they wanted anonymity and had been prepared to destroy the
Linde
to achieve it, then they’d have no hesitation in swatting her like an irritating bug. She couldn’t even call Earth to let them know what she might have stumbled upon, for her transmitter wasn’t powerful enough, and the time lag made the gesture pointless. She was truly alone.

For the first time, as she coasted through space at a substantial percentage of the speed of light, she regretted her decision to remain alone. She needed someone to talk to—someone to offer another opinion, someone off whom she could bounce ideas and thoughts. Even someone just to shout at would have been good.