by Gary Gibson
‘Believe me, it’s all quite edible,’ he said, seeing the look on Sam’s face as he regarded the bowl’s contents. ‘Not that some of it isn’t something of an acquired taste…’
Sam picked up something that looked like a squashed white tomato long past its best and smelled worse. He pressed it gingerly against his teeth before biting into it. To his surprise, it tasted better than it either smelled or looked, although perhaps not as much as he might have hoped.
It didn’t matter: he leaned forward, pulling the bowl close and hurriedly stuffing it all into his mouth. Amit watched him with bemusement, saying nothing more, until Sam finished.
‘I take it,’ asked the old man, ‘you weren’t able to print your own food?’
Sam pushed the empty bowl away, his hands shaking slightly. ‘You saw the state of our lander. Most of our stores got burned up from a fire when we landed. We had to forage and figure out what wouldn’t kill us by trial and error.’ He nodded at the bowl. ‘Thanks, by the way.’
‘Don’t mention it.’ The old man folded his hands on the table. ‘If you’ve got questions, now is as good a time as any, unless you’d rather wait until you’re feeling a little more—?’
‘No.’ Sam shook his head. ‘Now is fine.’ He nodded towards the door. ‘These buildings, the drawbridge and all the rest of it—who built it?’
‘Most of it was put in place by the first expedition. That lander down below the mesa belonged to them. They stripped it of everything they needed and moved up here.’
‘So what happened to them?’
‘They lasted a whole year. Far longer than any of the subsequent expeditions.’
‘Because they were safe up here?’
‘Because the indigenes didn’t yet have any reasons to want to kill them—although they found some soon enough.’
Amit stood again and switched on an electric kettle sitting on a counter-top. The very ordinariness of the action, so many light-years from home and lost amidst an alien wilderness, struck Sam as somehow bizarre.
‘If we’re going to talk,’ Amit continued, picking up an earthenware jar and spooning black powder from it into two mugs, ‘I have something I’ve been keeping aside for a day like this.’
Sam caught a familiar scent. ‘That can’t be coffee.’
‘The landers come with an extensive catalogue of plant strains from back home, the idea being we could alter their genes for compatibility with the local soil. Well, none of them proved compatible despite my best efforts, except for some coffee beans I grew in a hydroponics unit of my own design. Even then the results were pretty variable, but I freeze-dried some of the best and I’ve been eking it out ever since.’ He poured hot water into each mug before stirring them and handing one to Sam.
Sam sipped at the mug. It tasted like liquid gold, searing hot and infinitely precious. ‘This is incredible,’ he said at last.
‘It’s partly down to your new body,’ said Amit. ‘You remember drinking coffee, but those bones you’re wearing have experienced nothing like it. It probably tastes a lot better than it should.’
Amit slid back into his chair and faced Sam, cradling his mug in both hands. ‘Anyway, that first expedition had the same problem as all the ones that came after: they woke up with no idea how they got here, or why. The very first Amit kept records, though, which is the only reason I have any idea what happened to him and the rest of his crew.’
Sam stared at him, fascinated. ‘And?’
‘About a month in, Traynor staged a coup and took control of their lander.’
‘I found a video briefing aboard that lander where you found me, paused on a screen. I had the feeling it was meant for him.’
Amit looked at him sharply, then sipped his coffee without taking his eyes off Sam. ‘Did you watch the whole thing?’
It felt like the temperature had dropped a couple of degrees, the way the old man was looking at him. Sam tried not to show his confusion. ‘I only saw the last minute or so,’ he said carefully.
‘Why so little?’
‘A screen picked up movement outside and when I went to look, Karl tried to kill me. I never had the chance to see the rest.’
The tension appeared to go out of the old man’s shoulders. Sam had the sense something significant had happened, although he had no idea what precisely it might be.
‘I’ve seen the whole thing,’ said Amit. ‘It’s locked to Vic’s implants—you know you both have implants, right?’
Sam nodded. ‘I figured it out for myself, but Vic said nothing about having implants of his own.’
‘Well,’ said Amit, ‘I guarantee he had them, as do I. You can lock virtual interfaces so only specific individuals can see them.’
‘Are you saying he could have found out about that briefing without anyone else knowing about it?’
The old man nodded. ‘I didn’t discover it myself until long after my own expedition was wiped out, when I came back to scavenge for parts and supplies. I’d have never known about it if I didn’t have root access—part of the privilege of being the ship’s designer, you see.’
Sam wondered if his own Traynor could have discovered the same briefing aboard their own lander, locked to his implants, then remembered the ruinous state they had found the command deck in. More likely, he had first encountered the briefing on board the second lander. He wondered if the clues had been obvious, perhaps a text message or an icon hovering in the darkness of the command deck, but one that only Traynor could see.
‘From the little I heard of the briefing,’ said Sam, ‘it seems like Vic—my Vic—was meant to take over the expedition. Why? And what happened to the original crew, the ones listed on the manifest who aren’t here?’ He paused. ‘Does all of this sound familiar to you?’
Amit put his mug down, spreading his hands on the table. ‘It very much does. Now we’re getting to the heart of the matter: some of what I’m about to tell you is conjecture, and some of it I know for a fact.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘But I’ve had years—decades—to work out the details in my head.’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘The ship that brought us here is what they call a seed-ship for fairly obvious reasons. Someone installed a backdoor in its computer systems and used it to swap out some of the intended colonists for their own people.’
‘People like Vic Traynor.’
Old Amit nodded. ‘There’s no physical cargo aboard the seed-ships, only data, microscopic samples of undifferentiated embryonic tissues and self-repairing tools programmed to build more tools. That’s what makes the ships small, light and fast enough to reach the speeds necessary for an interstellar voyage. They can be course-adjusted remotely, and that’s their point of vulnerability for anyone wanting to carry out any kind of sabotage.’
‘You’re saying the ship was hacked,’ said Sam. It was horrifying to have confirmation that he was the product of nothing more than digits on some computer chip, waiting to be born as a thing that only believed itself to be someone long dead. ‘So who did it?’
Amit waved a hand, as if dismissing the question. ‘Does it even matter? Someone did it—some corporation or government—and that’s all that counts. The Initiative had dozens of subcontractors, any of which could have found some way to infiltrate their mainframes.’
‘All right,’ said Sam, massaging his forehead with a thumb and forefinger, ‘then why did they do it?’
‘You know how bad things were getting back on Earth—runaway toxic blooms, the legacy of centuries of environmental damage, and half a dozen other existential threats looming over us at any one time. Things got a lot worse after when we all last remember.’
‘How could you know that?’
‘Regular, timed data bursts were transmitted to the seed-ship long after it started its journey, carrying news from home.’ The old man paused. ‘The increasing toxicity of the oceans proved irreversible. Shortly after 2100, the data bursts stopped. For all we know, we’re the last living human beings i
n the whole damn universe.’
Sam fiddled with his mug, deeply unsettled. ‘You can’t know that.’
‘They knew it was too late,’ Amit continued. ‘And so did everyone else. Suddenly, the Initiative went from being some crackpot scheme created by a billionaire to humanity’s one last chance at survival. It’d hardly be surprising if someone decided they had a better use for Tenenbaum’s seed-ships. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a whole lot more substitutions in the mothership’s memory—maybe thousands more like Vic, ready to take over a colony meant for someone else entirely.’ He smiled grimly. ‘But they screwed up.’
Sam frowned. ‘How?’
‘Their remote reprogramming of the seed-ship’s mission parameters triggered an accidental hard reboot—and that, I believe, is why our memories got scrambled. 28th August 2050 is the same day the AI systems designed to pilot the seed-ships were first brought online, and that’s the date our memories all defaulted to.’
Sam’s knuckles grew white where they gripped his mug. ‘We’ve lost decades of our lives because of a fucking computer error?’
‘You haven’t asked me about the indigenes yet—the Howlers, as you called them. They kill us, because the first expedition tried its hardest to kill all of them. After that first Vic Traynor carried out his coup, they had an encounter with the creatures, and his response was to print weapons and kill every one of the creatures he found within a thousand square kilometres of the mesa.’
‘There’s a clearing near here,’ said Sam, ‘filled with the remains of thousands of Howlers.’
‘That was the first Vic Traynor’s doing, yes. I’ve studied the records from all the landers I found, Sam. Every time a new one comes blazing down from the skies, all the indigenes see is death flying towards them on metal wings. Men like Vic Traynor won’t share a world like this with anyone or anything else, and by now, the indigenes know it. As far as they’re concerned, it’s us or them. And who can blame them?’
Sam opened his mouth and closed it again. ‘Then we’re screwed,’ he said at last. ‘We can’t ever find a way to live here if this simply keeps repeating over and over.’
‘No,’ Amit reassured him. ‘I told you, we can break the cycle.’
‘How?’
Amit stabbed a finger towards the ceiling. ‘By flying up into orbit and making manual changes aboard the mothership that are the only way to get around the sabotage.’ He leaned towards Sam, a glint in his eyes that didn’t look entirely sane. ‘Look, if things go the way I’m hoping, there’ll still be one more lander another fifty years from now—except this time, if I get it right, the next crew will wake up with all of their memories intact, making them far better prepared to deal with the indigenes.’
‘Then why haven’t you done it already?’
Amit leaned back, his grin fading slightly. ‘Because even if I fly up there, the mothership won’t recognise my authority, and that prevents me from resetting the mission parameters.’
Sam struggled to make sense out of it all. ‘Wait a minute. You just told me you could make the changes if you flew up there, only now you’re contradicting yourself.’
‘No, I said someone could fly up there. It won’t recognise my authority,’ Amit explained, ‘but there’s one person whose authority I guarantee it will recognise.’ He extended one bony finger towards Sam. ‘The Advance Mission Commander—and if you’ve seen the original manifest, you know that’s you.’
Sam swallowed thickly. ‘Commander or not, I don’t know how to fly a damn spaceship.’
‘You don’t have to. It flies itself, same as any of the landers.’
‘I seriously doubt that.’
‘Believe me, it’s not much more than a guided missile with room for a passenger. You’d have nothing to worry about.’
Sam fidgeted nervously with his mug. ‘All right, just for the sake of argument, say I go up there. What do I do?’
Amit reached inside his rags and took hold of a loop of wire around his neck, lifting it over his head and passing it to Sam. It had a small metal rectangle strung on it.
‘An interface card,’ the old man explained. ‘It’ll do all the work of triggering a fresh reboot and repairing the damage, but only if you’re physically present to grant the AI permission. Once you’re on board, you plug it in where the mothership tells you to. It’s that simple.’
The card was barely the size of Sam’s thumbnail. He started to pass it back over, but the old man stopped him. ‘Keep it for now. I have duplicates.’
Sam tucked it away in a pocket. ‘All right,’ he said, his heart beating in his chest like thunder. ‘So I go up, perform the reboot, then come back down. Is that it?’
Amit had a look on his face like a doctor preparing to deliver the worst possible news. ‘I won’t sugar the pill, Sam. The orbiter can only carry enough fuel and air for a one-way trip. If it carried enough for a return trip, the extra weight would keep it from ever reaching orbit.’
Sam felt the blood drain from his face. ‘Jesus, Amit…you brought me all the way here to send me on a suicide mission?’
‘Not strictly. Your data—your memories, everything that makes you, you—is still up there on the mothership. You’d live again, the same as you’ve lived a dozen times before, when the next and hopefully final lander comes down from orbit five decades from now.’
‘You can understand why I might have my doubts,’ Sam said, as levelly as he could.
The old man looked at him sharply. ‘You think I’m crazy.’
‘No, I—’
‘Don’t you think I’d make the sacrifice myself if I could? I know what I’m asking of you, but this is the only way to stop the whole fucking tragedy repeating again, and again, and again. It was sheer providence I found you when I did, and thank God for that.’
Sam’s hand strayed into his pocket, touching the cool metal of the interface card. It was hard to believe anything they were talking about could actually be real. ‘And what happens to you in the meantime?’
‘I grow old and die alone, Sam.’ His voice grew softer. ‘One day, that next expedition will find its way up here and discover my bones. I’ll leave them enough information so they understand just what happened to all of us who came before them.’
Sam tried to take hold of his unfinished coffee, but his fingers had turned numb. ‘I can’t—I don’t know. I mean, I—’
‘You need to think about this,’ said Amit, nodding. ‘Of course you do. But I hope and believe that with time you’ll come to see that this is the only way.’
‘It’s a lot to take in.’
‘There’s no rush. It’s not like we have to do this straight away. We’ve got all the time in the world.’
‘All right.’ Sam pushed himself back from the table and took a deep breath. ‘Then maybe there’s something else you could explain to me in the meantime.’
Amit looked at him and nodded.
‘Several days ago, we found a camera hidden near our lander.’ He watched Amit’s face closely. ‘Right then and there, we knew we weren’t the first to land here.’
Amit had grown quite still. ‘Perhaps your Vic Traynor put it there.’
Sam kept his gaze locked with Amit’s. ‘I know you don’t believe that. It wasn’t any of us.’
The old man laughed uneasily. ‘You’re not seriously suggesting it was me?’
‘I damn near poisoned myself to death, eating some roots we dug up. I thought I hallucinated seeing someone in the forest, but it was you I saw, wasn’t it? You told me you couldn’t reach us in time to help us because you were too far from our lander, but really, you were watching us from up here the whole time.’
Amit spluttered in a convincing show of outrage. ‘That’s ridiculous!’
‘I know you put that camera there,’ Sam continued doggedly, ‘because there’s a screen in one of these buildings showing the view of my lander from it. You could have rescued us all and brought us up here where we’d be safe, but you didn’
t. Why?’
Amit stared back at him for several seconds without moving. Then, with remarkable speed, he grabbed up his coffee mug and flung it directly at Sam’s face.
Sam flinched to the side, but not fast enough: the mug caught him on the side of his head. He reeled back, nearly toppling from his chair, and before he could regain his balance, Amit had thrown himself across the table, grabbing Sam around the throat with both hands.
Their combined weight was enough to send them both toppling onto the floor, the table crashing onto its side. Sam struggled to free the other man’s hands from around his neck, but the old man was simply too strong: Sam sensed he had seconds at most before he blacked out from lack of oxygen.
He reached out with one hand, desperate to find any kind of weapon, and his fingers found the heavy clay bowl from which he had eaten. He managed to grab hold of it, then, using all his strength, swung it around in an arc that ended with the old man’s skull.
The bowl shattered, and Amit let out a groan of pain, letting go of Sam at the same time. Sam threw his weight on top of the old man, raining punch after punch down on his head until he ceased struggling and slumped back, unconscious.
Sam stood back up, breathing hard, his senses wired to capacity. He reached up to touch his forehead and his fingers came away sticky with blood.
‘And fuck you, too,’ he muttered shakily, before going in search of something he could tie the old man up with.
28
THE CONFLAGRATION
Amit spluttered into life the second time Sam threw water in his face.
‘Good,’ said Sam. ‘You’re awake.’
He watched as Amit tried to sit up before realising he’d been bound into a chair with some power cabling Sam had found in an adjacent building.