Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Wun and I had made a point of keeping Jase under observation in the months after his treatment. He had submitted to a battery of neurological tests including another series of clandestine MRIs. None of the tests had revealed any deficiency, and the only obvious physiological changes were the ones connected with his recovery from AMS. A clean bill of health, in other words. Cleaner than I once would have imagined possible.

  But he did seem subtly different. I had asked Wun whether all Fourths underwent psychological changes. “In a certain sense,” he had answered, “yes.” Martian Fourths were expected to behave differently after their treatment, but there was a subtlety embedded in the word “expectation”—yes, Wun said, it was “expected” (i.e., considered likely) that a Fourth would change, but change was also “expected of him” (required of him) by his community and peers.

  How had Jason changed? He moved differently, for one thing. Jase had disguised his AMS very cleverly, but there was a perceptible new freedom in his walk and his gestures. He was the Tin Man, post-oilcan. He was still occasionally moody, but his moods were less violent. He swore less often—that is, he was less likely to stumble into one of those emotional sinkholes in which the only useful adjective is “fucking.” He joked more than he used to.

  All these things sound good. And they were, but they were also superficial. Other changes were more troubling. He had withdrawn from the daily management of Perihelion to such a degree that his staff briefed him once a week and otherwise ignored him. He had begun reading Martian astrophysics from the raw translations, skirting security protocols if not absolutely violating them. The only event that had penetrated his newfound calm was the death of Wun, and that had left him haunted and hurt in ways I still didn’t quite understand.

  “You realize,” E.D. said, “what we just saw was the end of Perihelion.”

  And in a real sense it was. Apart from interpreting whatever feedback we received from the replicators, Perihelion as a civilian space agency was finished. The downsizing had already begun in earnest. Half the support staff had been laid off. The tech people were draining away more slowly, lured by universities or big-money contractors.

  “Then so be it,” Jason said, displaying what was either the innate equanimity of a Fourth or a long-suppressed hostility to his father. “We’ve done the work we needed to do.”

  “You can stand here and deliver that verdict? To me?”

  “I believe it’s true.”

  “Does it matter that I spent my life building what you just tore down?”

  “Does it matter?” Jason pondered this as if E.D. had asked a real question. “Ultimately, no, I don’t suppose it does.”

  “Jesus, what happened to you? You make a mistake of this magnitude—”

  “I don’t think it’s a mistake.”

  “—you ought to assume the responsibility for it.”

  “I think I have.”

  “Because if it fails, you’ll be the one they’ll blame.”

  “I understand that.”

  “The one they’ll burn.”

  “If it comes to that.”

  “I can’t protect you,” E.D. said.

  “You never could,” Jason said.

  I rode back to Perihelion with him. Jase was driving a German fuel-cell car these days—a niche car, since most of us still owned gas-burners designed by people who didn’t believe there was a future worth worrying about. Commuters burned past us in the speed lanes, hurrying home before dark.

  I told him I meant to leave Perihelion and establish a practice of my own.

  Jase was silent for a little while, watching the road, warm air boiling off the pavement as if the edges of the world had softened in the heat. Then he said, “But you don’t have to, Tyler. Perihelion ought to struggle along for a few years yet, and I have enough clout to keep you on payroll. I can hire you privately, if need be.”

  “That’s the point, though, Jase. There is no need. I was always a little underutilized at Perihelion.”

  “Bored, you mean?”

  “It might be nice to feel useful for a change.”

  “You don’t feel useful? If not for you I’d be in a wheelchair.”

  “That wasn’t me. That was Wun. All I did was push the plunger.”

  “Hardly. You saw me through the ordeal. I appreciate that. Besides…I need someone to talk to, someone who isn’t trying to buy or sell me.”

  “When was the last time we had a real conversation?”

  “Just because I weathered one medical crisis doesn’t mean there won’t be another.”

  “You’re a Fourth, Jase. You won’t need to see a doctor for another fifty years.”

  “And the only people who know that about me are you and Carol. Which is another reason I don’t want you to leave.” He hesitated. “Why not take the treatment yourself? Give yourself another fifty years, minimum.”

  I supposed I could. But fifty years would carry us deep into the heliosphere of the expanding sun. It would be a futile gesture. “I’d rather be useful now.”

  “You’re absolutely determined to leave?”

  E.D. would have said, Stay. E.D. would have said, It’s your job to take care of him.

  E.D. would have said a lot of things.

  “Absolutely.”

  Jason gripped the wheel and stared down the road as if he had seen something infinitely sad there. “Well,” he said. “Then all I can do is wish you luck.”

  The day I left Perihelion the support staff summoned me into one of the now seldom-used boardrooms for a farewell party, where I was given the kind of gifts appropriate to yet another departure from a dwindling workforce: a miniature cactus in a terra-cotta pot, a coffee mug with my name on it, a pewter tie pin in the shape of a caduceus.

  Jase showed up at my door that evening with a more problematic gift.

  It was a cardboard box tied with string. It contained, when I opened it, about a pound of densely printed paper documents and six unlabelled optical memory disks.

  “Jase?”

  “Medical information,” he said. “You can think of it as a textbook.”

  “What kind of medical information?”

  He smiled. “From the archives.”

  “The Martian archives?”

  He nodded.

  “But that’s classified information.”

  “Yes, technically, it is. But Lomax would classify the phone number for 911 if he thought he could get away with it. There may be information here that would put Pfizer and Eli Lilly out of business. But I don’t see that as a legitimate concern. Do you?”

  “No, but—”

  “Nor do I think Wun would have wanted it kept secret. So I’ve been quietly doling out little pieces of the archives, here and there, to people I trust. You don’t have to actually do anything with it, Tyler. Look at it or ignore it, file it away—fine.”

  “Great. Thanks, Jase. A gift I could be arrested for possessing.”

  His smile widened. “I know you’ll do the right thing.”

  “Whatever that is.”

  “You’ll figure it out. I have faith in you, Tyler. Ever since the treatment—”

  “What?”

  “I seem to see things a little more clearly,” he said.

  He didn’t explain, and in the end I tucked the box into my luggage as a kind of souvenir. I was tempted to write the word MEMENTOS on it.

  Replicator technology was slow even by comparison with the terraforming of a dead planet. Two years passed before we had anything like a detectable response from the payloads we had scattered among the planetesimals at the edge of the solar system.

  The replicators were busy out there, though, barely touched by the gravity of the sun, doing what they were designed to do: reproducing by the inch and the century, following instructions written into their superconductive equivalent of DNA. Given time and an adequate supply of ice and carbonaceous trace elements, they would eventually phone home. But the first few detector satellites placed in
orbit beyond the Spin membrane dropped back to Earth without recording a signal.

  During those two years I managed to find a partner (Herbert Hakkim, a soft-spoken Bengali-born physician who had finished his internship the year Wun visited the Grand Canyon), and we took over a San Diego practice from a retiring GP. Hakkim was frank and friendly with patients but he had no real social life and seemed to prefer it that way: we seldom got together outside office hours, and I think the most intimate question he ever asked me was why I carried two cell phones.

  (One for the customary reasons; the other because the number assigned to it was the last one I’d given Diane. Not that it ever rang. Nor did I attempt to contact her again. But if I had let the number lapse she would have had no way of reaching me, and that still seemed…well, wrong.)

  I liked my work, and by and large I liked my patients. I saw more gunshot wounds than I might once have expected, but these were the hard years of the Spin; the domestic trend-lines for murder and suicide had begun to arc toward vertical. Years when it seemed like everyone under thirty was wearing some kind of uniform: armed forces, National Guard, Homeland Security, private security; even Home Scouts and Home Guides for the intimidated products of a dwindling birth rate. Years when Hollywood began to churn out ultraviolent or ultrapious films in which, however, the Spin was never explicitly mentioned; the Spin, like sex and the words describing it, having been banned from “entertainment discourse” by Lomax’s Cultural Council and the FCC.

  These were also the years when the administration enacted a raft of new laws aimed at sanitizing the Martian archives. Wun’s archives, according to the president and his congressional allies, contained intrinsically dangerous knowledge that had to be redacted and secured. Opening them to the public would have been “like posting plans for a suitcase nuke on the Internet.” Even the anthropological material was vetted: in the published version, a Fourth was defined as “a respected elder.” No mention of medically mediated longevity.

  But who needed or wanted longevity? The end of the world was closer every day.

  The flickers were evidence of that, if anyone needed proof.

  The first positive results from the replicator project had been in for half a year when the flickers began.

  I heard most of the replicator news from Jase a couple of days before it broke in the media. In itself, it was nothing spectacular. A NASA/Perihelion survey satellite had recorded a faint signal from a known Oort Cloud body well beyond the orbit of Pluto—a periodic uncoded blip that was the sound of a replicator colony nearing completion. (Nearing maturity, you might say.)

  Which appears trivial unless you consider what it means:

  The dormant cells of an utterly novel, man-made biology had alighted on a chunk of dusty ice in deepest space. Those cells had then begun an agonizingly slow form of metabolism, in which they absorbed the scant heat of the distant sun, used it to separate a few nearby molecules of water and carbon, and duplicated themselves with the resulting raw materials.

  Over the course of many years the same colony grew to, perhaps, the size of a ball bearing. An astronaut who had made the impossibly long journey and knew precisely where to look would have seen it as a black dimple on the rocky/icy regolith of the host planetesimal. But the colony was fractionally more efficient than its single-celled ancestor. It began to grow more quickly and generate more heat. The temperature differential between the colony and its surroundings was only a fraction of a degree Kelvin (except when brief reproductive bursts pumped latent energy into the local environment), but it was persistent.

  More millennia (or terrestrial months) passed. Subroutines in the replicators’ genetic substrate, activated by local heat gradients, modified the colony’s growth. Cells began to differentiate. Like a human embryo, the colony produced not merely more cells but specialized cells, the equivalent of heart and lungs, arms and legs. Tendrils of it forced themselves into the loose material of the planetesimal, mining it for carbonaceous molecules.

  Eventually, microscopic but carefully calculated vapor bursts began to slow the host object’s rotation (patiently, over centuries), until the colony’s face was turned perpetually to the sun. Now differentiation began in earnest. The colony extruded carbon/carbon and carbon/silicon junctions; it grew monomolecular whiskers to join these junctions together, bootstrapping itself up the ladder of complexity; from these junctions it generated light-sensitive dots—eyes—and the capacity to generate and process microbursts of radiofrequency noise.

  And as more centuries passed the colony elaborated and refined these capabilities until it announced itself with a simple periodic chirp, the equivalent of the sound a newborn sparrow might make. Which was what our satellite had detected.

  The news media ran the story for a couple of days (with stock footage of Wun Ngo Wen, his funeral, the launch) and then forgot about it. After all, this was only the first stage of what the replicators were designed to do.

  Merely that. Uninspiring. Unless you thought about it for more than thirty seconds.

  This was technology with, literally, a life of its own. A genie out of the bottle for good and all.

  The flicker happened a few months later.

  The flicker was the first sign of a change or disturbance in the Spin membrane—first, that is, unless you count the event that followed the Chinese missile attack on the polar artifacts, back in the earliest years of the Spin. Both events were visible from every point on the globe. But beyond that key resemblance they were not much alike.

  After the missile attack the Spin membrane had seemed to stutter and recover, generating strobed images of the evolving sky, multiple moons and gyrating stars.

  The flicker was different.

  I watched it from the balcony of my suburban apartment. A warm September night. Some of the neighbors had already been outside when the flicker started. Now all of us were. We perched on our ledges like starlings, chattering.

  The sky was bright.

  Not with stars but with infinitesimally narrow threads of golden fire, crackling like heatless lightning from horizon to horizon. The threads moved and shifted erratically; some flickered or faded altogether; occasionally new ones flared into existence. It was as mesmerizing as it was frightening.

  The event was global, not local. On the daylight side of the planet the phenomenon was only slightly visible, lost in sunlight or obscured by cloud; in North and South America and western Europe the dark-sky displays caused sporadic outbreaks of panic. After all, we’d been expecting the end of the world for more years than most of us cared to count. This looked like an overture, at least, to the real thing.

  There were hundreds of successful or attempted suicides that night, plus scores of murders or mercy killings, in the city where I lived. Worldwide, the numbers were incalculably larger. Apparently there were plenty of people like Molly Seagram, people who chose to dodge the much-predicted boiling of the seas with a few lethal tablets of this or that. And spares for family and friends. Many of them opted for the final exit as soon as the sky lit up. Prematurely, as it turned out.

  The display lasted eight hours. By morning I was at the local hospital lending a hand in the emergency ward. By noon I had seen seven separate cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, folks who had intentionally locked themselves in the garage with an idling car. Most were dead well before I pronounced them and the survivors were hardly better off. Otherwise healthy people, people I might have passed at the grocery store, would be spending the rest of their lives hooked up to ventilators, irreparably brain damaged, victims of a botched exit strategy. Not pleasant. But the gunshot wounds to the head were worse. I couldn’t treat them without thinking of Wun Ngo Wen lying on that Florida highway, blood gouting from what remained of his skull.

  Eight hours. Then the sky was blank again, the sun beaming out of it like the punchline to a bad joke.

  It happened again a year and a half later.

  “You look like a man who lost his faith,” Hakkim once tol
d me.

  “Or never had one,” I said.

  “I don’t mean faith in God. Of that you seem to be genuinely innocent. Faith in something else. I don’t know what.”

  Which seemed cryptic. But I understood it a little more clearly the next time I talked to Jason.

  He called me at home. (On my regular cell, not the orphan phone I carried with me like a luckless charm.) I said, “Hello?” and he said, “You must be watching this on television.”

  “Watching what?”

  “Turn on one of the news networks. Are you alone?”

  The answer was yes. By choice. No Molly Seagram to complicate the end of days. The TV remote was on the coffee table where I’d left it. Where I always left it.

  The news channel showed a graph of many colors accompanied by a droning voice-over. I muted it. “What am I looking at, Jase?”

  “A JPL press conference. The data set retrieved from the last orbital receiver.”

  Replicator data, in other words. “And?”

  “We’re in business,” he said. I could practically hear his smile.

  The satellite had detected multiple radio sources narrowcasting from the outer solar system. Which meant that more than one replicator colony had grown to maturity. And the data were complex, Jason said, not simple. As the replicator colonies aged, their growth rate slowed but their functions became more refined and purposeful. They weren’t just leaning sunward for free energy anymore. They were analyzing starlight, calculating planetary orbits on neural networks made of silicon and carbon fibers, comparing them to templates etched into their genetic code. No less than a dozen fully adult colonies had sent back precisely the data they were designed to collect, four streams of binary data declaring:

  This was a planetary system of a star with a solar mass of 1.0;

  The system possessed eight large planetary bodies (Pluto falling under the detectable mass limit);

  Two of those planets were optically blank, surrounded by Spin membranes; and

  The reporting replicator colonies had shifted into reproductive mode, shedding nonspecific seed cells and launching them on bursts of cometary vapor toward neighboring stars.