Dark Star Calling

by Julia Keller

  Now Violet stared at him. Only one word existed amid the vast universe of words that was an appropriate response to what he’d just told her. And that was the word she uttered:

  “Impossible.”

  “Clearly not.”

  “But you sent those ashes into space.”

  “I did.”

  “So how—”

  “That’s where the transmission came from. From—best guess—a spot about a dozen light-years beyond the Milky Way galaxy. It showed up on one of the old Intercept channels. I’d repurposed that channel for my star hunt.” He shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea. The Intercept was gone. Those channels are like a bunch of old, abandoned roads that nobody uses anymore. Might as well put them to use. No more Intercept signals will be coming through them, ever again. Or so I thought.”

  Violet blinked. Suddenly, she was swimming furiously again in that overfull vat of question marks.

  “Rez,” she said. “I’m not trying to be rude here. I can see you’re upset. But I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re trying to tell me. I mean, are you saying that Rachel is alive?”

  He gave her a look of pure, Rezian disdain. “Alive? Of course not. My sister drowned a year ago on Old Earth. I made a positive ID of the body.”

  “So the signal you picked up was from…?”

  “Rachel’s chip. The chip that survived her cremation.”

  “But the signal was transmitted here. Somebody sent it. How can that be? If she’s—” Violet paused. She didn’t want to say the word. But she had no choice. “If she’s dead, then how can the record of her emotions have gotten here? Who’s experiencing the emotions? And who’s sending them? And how—”

  “I don’t know, Violet. I only know that my sister’s Intercept feed just showed up on my computer.” He jabbed an index finger toward his screen. “Take a look.”

  Violet leaned in. She and Rez had once shared a cubicle in Protocol Hall. Their job was to monitor the Intercept feeds back when the technology was still operational, when it was still a part of everyday life on New Earth.

  Thus she knew what she was looking at. A moving strip across the bottom of the screen was alight with little orange numbers. Changing by the second, the numbers seemed to zip, shimmy, and twirl, like an agitated chorus line. She knew what they were: the algorithms that constituted the heart of the Intercept as it riffled through millions of memory-images and selected the one most pungent and persuasive, finding the emotion most likely to induce a desired behavior.

  The rest of Rez’s screen was occupied by a fuzzy, grainy, pretty much indecipherable picture of … what?

  Violet leaned still closer. She couldn’t quite make it out.

  Her cheek almost bumped Rez’s shoulder. She was aware of how close to him she was right now.

  She squinted. She saw a scattering of black dots like a pointillist painting, but the overall picture was so blurry that she couldn’t figure out what she was staring at.

  And then, all at once, she did know.

  “It’s a graduation ceremony,” Violet said softly.

  “It was the day Rachel graduated from law school,” Rez clarified. “One of the best days I ever shared with her.” Violet had the unmistakable impression that a great deal of emotion was passing through her friend’s body right now, wave upon wave. “She was ten years old,” he went on in a gentle, faraway voice that was not like anything that Violet had ever heard come out of Rez before. It had pride in it, and affection, too, and something else.

  Tenderness, Violet decided to call it.

  Tenderness? From Rez?

  “Youngest graduate in the history of New Earth,” he added, “and she graduated at the top of her class. It was a beautiful spring afternoon. See? Those little black dots—those are her classmates in their black robes and mortarboards. This is Rachel’s memory of the day. We’re remembering it, right along with her. The old Intercept channel is picking up the signal from her chip.”

  Violet’s confusion was only growing.

  “But … but she’s dead, Rez,” she said. This time she said the word without hesitation. She was too flummoxed to find a more sensitive way to phrase it. “Rachel’s not alive anymore. How can she be remembering anything? I mean, remembering takes a consciousness, right? And Rachel is … well, she’s gone.”

  “You’re right. She’s gone. Gone forever.” Rez twirled his seat to face her, so fast that he almost knocked her down. His voice wasn’t mushy-soft anymore. It was strong and determined. The tears had vanished. He’d recovered his poise. “But her Intercept chip is still very much alive. And it’s trying to tell us something. Something important.”

  * * *

  Violet took a second or so to let the awe wash over her. She still had a gazillion questions—give or take—for him.

  “So why is this happening?”

  “I told you,” Rez said with a flicker of impatience. He didn’t like to stop and explain things, Violet knew, and when you were as smart as Rez, you were always having to stop and explain things to people who didn’t get them quite as fast as you did. Or get them at all. “Rachel’s chip wasn’t destroyed when she was cremated. It’s out there in space. The emotions that the Intercept gathered and stored in her chip are coming through on the old channel.”

  “That’s the how. My question is, why?”

  Rez frowned. “Science doesn’t do why. The how is hard enough.”

  He could definitely be a bit of a know-it-all. But in Rez’s case, that was usually justified; he really did know it all. Or at least he knew a lot more than anyone else in Violet’s circle of friends—except for Kendall Mayhew.

  Kendall. Of course. That’s who they needed to consult.

  “We have to tell Kendall,” Violet declared. “Right away. He’ll know what to do.”

  “No.”

  “What? Come on, Rez. Kendall invented the Intercept. And he shut it down, too. If anybody can figure this thing out, it’s Kendall.”

  “No,” Rez repeated. “Point one—she was my sister. Not yours. And not Kendall’s. So it’s my decision. Point two—you promised not to talk about this unless I gave you permission. And I’m not giving you permission. We don’t tell Kendall. Not yet.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “I need to solve this for myself first. Then I’ll bring Kendall into the loop.”

  “Fine,” she said. She crossed her arms and let out a deep, frustrated breath. “So if you already knew what you were going to do—or not do, in this case—then why’d you call me in the first place? Why am I even here?”

  Rez seemed a little surprised by her question.

  “Because,” he said.

  “Because…?”

  “Because you’re my friend. And because I needed to talk about it. To—okay, to process what I was feeling. And now I have.”

  Well, what could she say? They’d been through so much together. Along with the rest of the team, they’d faced death on that stormy night back on Old Earth a year ago. So when Rez played the friendship card, Violet was pretty much obligated to let go of her resentment and to let him handle this in his own way.

  “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I’m your friend.”

  “Good.” A single nod, as if that settled things. “Now I’ve got to get back to the sky. It’s already daylight. I don’t have much time before the observatory staff starts arriving. Jerks.”

  “No kidding. Those conscientious employees, showing up on time for work—don’t you just hate that?”

  Rez ignored her sarcasm. Or maybe he hadn’t even been aware of it. When he focused on his work, the rest of the world fell away.

  He grabbed a lever and moved his chair closer to the screen. He punched a nine-number code into his console. In less than a second, Mickey was activated again. With a few clicks and a whirring sound, the AstroRob’s pincers slid into the ports on the either side of his computer; he was synching himself with the computer’s coordinates. There was a low, rising note a
s Mickey booted himself up to full power. That particular sound always reminded Violet of a cello string being tuned to match the rest of the orchestra. Her father had taught her to love classical music.

  “So what’s your next move?” she asked.

  Rez didn’t take his eyes from his computer screen as he replied, “Collate the data. Analyze the signal. Figure out where it’s coming from—who’s sending it and why. Come up with an explanation for what’s going on.”

  “Are you sure there is an explanation?”

  “There’s always an explanation. That’s called science.”

  Same old Rez, Violet thought.

  His next sentence wasn’t aimed at her. “Start another back trace on the signal origin.”

  “Roger that.” Mickey’s torso twisted as he executed a series of commands at his keyboard. He emitted a soft chuckle. “Wait. I forgot—who’s Roger?”

  Rez ignored the robot’s little witticism. “I’ll do a quick scan of the image from Rachel’s graduation day to see if there are any clues about where—”

  He stopped. He stared at Mickey.

  Something was happening to the AstroRob. Mickey made a very weird noise, a noise so weird that the word weird didn’t even begin to cover it, even though it was the only word Violet could think of, because she, too, was startled.

  She had never heard anything like it before. It was loud and long and terrible. It was a cross between the grinding of teeth and the cracking of bones and the plop of a heavy object dropped in a pond, plus the sounds of a rocket engine revving up to full speed and an elephant’s bellow. It was an ear-crunching, jaw-rattling combo of a shriek and a howl and a moan, blended with a husky cough and a loud beep and a harsh hiss and a high-pitched, siren-like woo-woo-woo-woo-woo sound that seemed to zip around the room in speedy little circles.

  “What’s going on?” Violet had to yell so that Rez could hear her over Mickey’s caterwauling.

  “I don’t know.” Rez jumped up and peered over his monitor at Mickey. The AstroRob was shaking wildly. Bits of steel stripping along the edges of his cylinders were popping loose because of the massively heavy vibration. The lights along his sides blinked on and off. “Mickey!” Rez called out. “What the hell are you—”

  The robot ripped his pincers out of the computer. Dense yellow smoke erupted from the ports. His pincers were black and twisted as if they’d been melted by a tremendously high heat. The burning odor was so intense and so foul-smelling that Violet’s eyes watered.

  “Mickey,” she yelled, “are you okay?”

  The AstroRob didn’t answer. The obnoxious noise had stopped, but he was still vibrating. He flung his pincers straight up in the air, the telescoping arms locked in tight parallel formation along his torso. He looked as if he might fly apart into a million separate pieces any second.

  “Mickey?” Violet repeated.

  By now, Rez had resumed his seat and was frantically busy at his computer keyboard, running every kind of diagnostic check he could think of on the AstroRob’s mechanicals.

  “Oh no,” Rez said.

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s a virus. When Mickey accessed his computer, it got him. It rushed into his systems.”

  “Will he be okay?”

  Rez’s voice was grim. “He’s not built to withstand this kind of multipronged assault. It’s as if you or I were hit with tuberculosis, pneumonia, pancreatic cancer, spinal meningitis, a hemorrhagic stroke, a heart attack, and a bad head cold all at the same time.”

  “But you can get rid of it, right? And repair and restart him?”

  He shook his head. “This isn’t a regular virus. It’s one of the Stratton-Hemlepp Instability viruses.”

  “You mean it’s—”

  “Yeah. A jumping virus. I haven’t precisely identified which strain yet. And there are hundreds.” He continued to punch commands into his keyboard. “I think he extricated himself in time, but we won’t know for a few minutes. His circuits are still in spasm.”

  Violet’s mind was drenched by a dark wash of dread. In her computer science class in high school, the phrase Stratton-Hemlepp Instability virus was one that her teachers pronounced in hushed, fearful tones.

  As computers had grown ever more sophisticated in the latter stages of the twenty-first century, taking over bigger and bigger swaths of human endeavor, viruses, too, became more clever and diabolical. In 2252, two scientists named Melinda Stratton and Penelope Hemlepp, working in a tiny laboratory outside Paris, identified a “jumping virus”—one that could escape from the confines of written code and take on a tangible form, infecting real things and not just programs. Stratton and Hemlepp isolated several varieties of jumping viruses—one was known to grip, vine-like, the hardwired components of computer systems, and another manifested as a swarm of tiny insects that blocked the cooling vents of large energy-producing turbines, and yet another sent millions of tentacles probing like writhing snakes down the long tunnels containing essential infrastructure. The viruses could leap from machine to human and back again like some kind of evil ballerina doing a series of grand jetés across a stage.

  The most damaging of the jumping viruses, Violet knew, was the one known as Graygrunge. It was a sticky, clinging film that rapidly replicated itself, spreading out and wrapping around a computer’s circuitry, causing a wholesale destruction of data. Hemlepp had lost two fingers in her quest to isolate and identify Graygrunge. One day in the lab, it jumped from her keyboard to her hand. Had her colleague not been so quick-thinking—Stratton had raced over and used a scalpel to amputate the fingers around which Graygrunge had wrapped itself, fingers already black and dying from the lack of circulation—the virus would have spread across Hemlepp’s body in a matter of seconds, killing her.

  But maybe this was one of the lesser viruses. There was always a chance.

  “I kind of wish he’d tell a stupid knock-knock joke,” Violet murmured, while Rez worked relentlessly at his keyboard. “Just to let us know it’s still him in there.”

  Mickey was shivering even more intensely now. His arms were still paralyzed. A gelatinous dribble of rusty-red drool yo-yoed down two of his cylinders. Violet knew it was just a liquefaction of the solvent used to lubricate his chassis, escaping from a shaken-apart seam, but she couldn’t help but think of it as drool.

  “You’ve got to stop the virus, Rez,” she said. “You’ve got to save him.”

  Despite all of Rez’s complaints, he was, Violet knew, secretly fond of Mickey. And terrified that his robot was toast.

  “I’m trying to get a fix on what kind of jumping virus it is,” Rez replied, talking fast and typing even faster. “So I can unleash targeted deflection codes.”

  His fingers seemed to merge with his keyboard as he blasted through the emergency protocols. Rez’s forehead was tilted so close to the screen that Violet half wondered if he intended to ram his way right through it. That way, he could dive in and grasp the virus by its roots and destroy it with a wild, take-that-you-bastard yank.

  “It’s spreading too fast,” he muttered a few seconds later. “It went from the computer to Mickey himself, and now it’s flooding the main circuits, because Mickey had total access to the observatory’s systems. I’ve got a real fight on my hands just trying to keep it isolated here in the observatory. If it leaps into the computers handling environmental controls—things like atmosphere and water filtration and orbit maintenance—we’re basically screwed.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “No. Wait—yes. Yes, there is. When I initiate the tracker protocol, I need you to watch the screen. Find the third number from the left in the fifth line from the bottom. It’ll pop up on my screen in about seven seconds. I need to monitor the deflection codes and can’t keep a close eye on the screen.”

  “Got it.”

  His fingers flew even faster across the keyboard. Numbers tumbled across the screen. “Protocol initiated.”

  The moment the numb
ers stopped spinning, Violet spotted the third one from the left in the fifth row from the bottom.

  “Seventeen,” she called out.

  Rez’s face clouded over. “Damn,” he said softly.

  “So that’s bad?”

  “That’s bad.” He swallowed hard. “It means the virus is heading for the old tunnels. The ones that used to start out under Protocol Hall. And from there, it’s a straight shot into the operational core of New Earth.”

  Violet took a deep breath. She didn’t know much about computers, but she knew about optimism and how it could help things.

  “Well, look on the bright side,” she said. “At least it’s not Graygrunge.”

  Rez’s fingers paused over the keyboard. He looked up at her. His eyes were filled with the bright fever of focused intensity.

  And they were filled with something else, too, an emotion she wasn’t used to seeing there:

  Fear.

  “Thing is, Violet, I’m between 96.8 and 97.4 percent certain that that’s exactly what it is.”

  3

  Graygrunge

  The tunnels.

  Violet shuddered anew each time the words formed in her mind. She and Rez had arrived here mere seconds ago, and she was already creeped out.

  If anybody ever needed raw material for a nightmare, this would be a great place to start, she thought grimly. The tunnels.

  She’d been in this dank, dark, and altogether unpleasant place before. She knew what it looked like and felt like. But knowing those things didn’t make the ick factor any less intense. If anything, it worked in the other direction—because she knew that as bad as it was in the beginning, it was only going to get worse.

  A lot worse.

  “Rez?” she whispered.

  “Yeah. What?”

  “Nothing.”

  She’d just wanted to hear his voice, to reassure herself that the hunched-over shape that moved a few steps ahead of her was really Rez and not, say, some ghostly hump of something-or-other that was going to turn around any second and devour her.