by Olga Werby
Vars almost pinched herself to make sure she wasn’t still asleep. She wasn’t. This was all too real.
She made her way back to the bridge and transferred the feeds from all onboard and external security cameras to the main viewing wall. She saw no one, not on any of the feeds. Every single crew quarters was empty. As far as she could tell, she was the only person on board the ship.
Then she spotted movement—outside the ship. Two figures in extons were walking toward the Mims’s artifact. Ben and Trish. It had to be them.
For a split second, Vars considered running after them. But she stopped herself. Somehow, the Mims had summoned Ben, Trish, and the others. They hadn’t summoned her. If they had, she would already be walking toward the artifact, like an automaton. She was sure of that. Whatever was happening, she couldn’t stop it. Not out there. All she could do was sit, wait…and hope for a miracle.
It took two hours for Ben and Trish to get to the artifact, climb it, and lower themselves inside. Vars watched them every step of the way. Just before Ben entered, there was a moment when he turned back to look at the ship, and his hand almost went up in something like a wave…before diverting its action to a helmet adjustment. And then he followed Trish inside.
Vars was now alone.
Now what?
She considered her situation. Everyone was dead? She didn’t know. But she was still here. The Mims didn’t take her...not yet. She felt strangely numb. She was stranded here on a tiny moon of Saturn, unless help arrived. On the plus side, the ship had resources for twenty-five…which would now last her quite a long time...an ugly, selfish calculation. She might survive to be rescued. If rescue arrived. If she could manage to hold herself together until then. If the Mims let her live that long. If she wanted to live that long...
Too many ifs.
Days passed. Vars moved all her stuff onto the bridge, so she could watch the data feeds at all times. She slept there, ate there, and only left to relieve herself. She kept the communications channels open. If Earth or Luna or Mars or even Mims wanted to talk to her, she was ready. And if they didn’t...well, she talked to them anyway, keeping the mike on all the time. The possibility of contact was the only thing keeping her sane...keeping her from just walking out there into the cosmos and never coming back.
“When you’re deep in it, it’s difficult not to focus on details,” Vars said into the microphone. “It’s the forest and the trees thing. Did I already talk about this? Well, it’s important to repeat.” She was seated in the captain’s chair, wrapped in blankets, drinking coffee. She had managed to move the whole coffee station to the bridge, where it belonged, goddamn it. She took a big drag of the stuff. It was cold, but still drinkable. Her standards had long ago slipped—nothing tasted right in space. “Science and discovery have never progressed linearly through time. There have always been reversals and turnarounds and blind alleys. This is especially true when a scientific field becomes well established, respectable. Respectability comes with traditions. At best, no one likes an upstart. At worst, you get Copernicus. Well, I guess it could be a lot worse than that…”
She swallowed another cold sip. “It always starts with observations. Those observations turn into descriptions. Descriptions are fitted into a system that explains the observations. Any new observations that don’t fit the system become ignored. Belonging to a community of practitioners in a well-established science discipline is a little like having blinders on: we’re primed to see only what we expect to see, what our peers approve of us seeing. If we can’t explain something within our sanctioned scientific system, we simply drop that data point...or points, or entire data sets. That’s just the easiest, safest thing to do, career-wise.
“Think back to the environmental wars over global warming. Or the Earth being the center of the universe—that’d be Copernicus again.” She paused, trying to remember how he’d died. Was he burned at the stake? That didn’t sound right. Natural death? That felt wrong too. Vars’s mind was spinning in circles. She drank more coffee and returned to her soliloquy.
“Or the whole silly evolution debate. Or the expansion of the universe deniers. Or even the retroviruses and the memory debate—that whole thing about the Arc protein and how it started as a viral infection and then became a necessary part of brain chemistry and memory formation. Whole academic careers were ruined over that discovery. Lives are constantly destroyed over ideas that don’t fit neatly within the system of the world we’re comfortable with or were conforming to at some point in our history. It’s crazy.
“We might not do any of this consciously—in fact, most researchers would probably freak out at me even suggesting such a thing. But I’ve seen it. We’ve all seen it. How does it feel to be laughed at as you propose plate tectonics when the establishment believes in the unchanging earth theory? Poor Alfred Wegener. It probably didn’t help that he was a meteorologist infringing on the geologists’ turf. ‘Continental drift that, Mr. Wegener.’”
Vars made an obscene gesture and barked out a bitter laugh, spilling some of the coffee over her blanket. It wasn’t her first stain. Perhaps when she finally ran out of coffee, she could brew her blanket.
She contemplated the view from the ship. Saturn was always rising—Mimas was in total tidal lock to its master planet, always facing Saturn in the same orientation. But the rings, seen edge-on from Vars’s perspective, changed continuously—Saturn’s reflected light backlit the dust and ice particles making up the rings. The bigger, rotating rocks in the rings bounced light in random directions, creating a breathtaking light show. Just for me, thought Vars. There was an inexhaustible majesty to the view of Saturn, bisected by its own rings, forever breaching the rim mountains of Herschel Crater. Spectacular.
The storms, in all of their fractal complexity, raged on the surface of the gas giant, easily seen at this distance and with no atmosphere to obscure the details. Vars loved the beautiful swirls that changed slowly over time and as Mimas followed its orbit about Saturn. Within the storms, there was an almost constant staccato of lightning strikes. Each flash highlighted the deeper structures inside the raging clouds.
Vars had watched the celestial show continuously...almost every waking moment since moving onto the bridge. It was awe-inspiring every time she looked up. And it took away some of her loneliness and fear somehow—it was hard to focus on self-pity in the face of the glory of the universe revealed out of her window...at least that’s what Vars kept telling herself.
“Hmm, what was I talking about? Oh yes—the beautiful diversity of life on our home world.” She paused to visualize herself as a girl walking on a beach with her dad. All that life hidden behind every grain of sand. And what a life it was. Even at those tiny scales, life was teeming with energy. So much of it. At all levels of observation. Another fractal complexity…
“But what if we were unique?” she mused into the microphone. “I know, I know—we aren’t supposed to think of our world as unique. The universe doesn’t revolve around us—poor Copernicus again. There are billions of planets in our galaxy alone. It’s the height of presumption to think of ourselves as special. But allow me a bit of hubris here. What if we were? What if we had more than everyone else? More diversity? More unique evolutionary solutions? Ben’s work on biomimetics… What if mass extinctions, which jump-started evolution over and over on Earth, were not a common universal phenomenon at all?
“Mims reached their technological potential well ahead of us—by billions of years, maybe. That could only be if life on their world didn’t get periodically whipped out, requiring a do-over…and over, and over, and over. Could this mean that Earth, as a result, has more? More of everything? Is this why Mims want us? Is this why? I’m asking you, Mims. What do you want?”
Vars stopped when she realized she was screaming. She hadn’t intended to raise her voice. She took another sip of coffee. It was now ice-cold.
She suddenly r
emembered talking about God with her dad. Why had the idea of a deity come up over and over during human evolution? Wouldn’t some Homo sapiens tribes have gone a different way? Evolving into humanists, for example? But no—every single human population from the dawn of time had believed in something bigger than itself. Anthropologists even used ritualized burials as a way to mark the transition from animal to human. Not that it was a valid marker—even animals interned their dead sometimes, and they certainly mourned their loved ones—but something about the ritualization of death suggested a stark divide between the lower- and higher-order beings. And it was this incessant pattern of deification and believing in life after death that formed the cornerstone of all religions. That’s what her dad had said, anyway. He also said that Seeds studied religion as a tool to manipulate the political narrative of the world beyond the Vaults.
“Did you plant the god instinct in us and other animals?” Vars asked, looking out at the Mims’s artifact. It had grown. And she’d noticed that it periodically vented some gas. Saturn’s light occasionally caught the plumes coming off the top of the structure. Like right now. What were they venting? Human remains? The plumes reminded Vars of a crematorium chimney for some perverted reason. She shook away the imagery.
Vars no longer even considered going out there to the artifact. She had considered it—quite a lot, actually. She wanted to look for the others. For Alice. For Ben. For Trish. For all of them. But she didn’t have the training to be out there alone. She could barely get around the ship without serious injury. And what would I do if I made it all the way out there, anyway? Stand at the base of the artifact and shout out names?
“Alice?” Vars said quietly. “Are you still there somewhere? Alice?”
She must have slept. There was a theory that said dreaming was the brain’s attempt to train for disaster—in the safety of a dream. It was a learning though previsualization kind of argument. Vars dreamt of her dad. She hoped he was okay. She hoped that the radio silence from Earth was just some strange technical failure, perhaps a bad nanobot-human technology interaction. A hitch in broadcasting. Perhaps the problem was even here, on Mimas. Didn’t Liut say something about interference caused by Saturn? Yes, it could be that.
“Vars.”
A single failure here, on their ship, was much more likely than a total equipment failure on Earth, Luna, Mars, and all of the rest of solar system-wide communication satellites. That was just too improbable...
“Vars.”
But it could be something more sinister. It certainly felt like it. If she were taking over another star system, she would disable communications first. That’s what humans did when they tried to wage war against each other—they cut off the flow of information, kept the enemy in the dark, took away situational awareness.
“Vars.”
It was an effective tactic. Humans were inherently social animals and didn’t function well in isolation. Even Vars. If this experience had taught her one thing, it was that she didn’t function well alone—despite all those years believing herself a loner. She laughed bitterly at her lack of self-awareness. People were always delusional about their own capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses.
“Vars?”
She looked outside once more. The Mims’s artifact had stopped venting, and she could see the sky-encompassing vastness of Saturn without that obstruction. And the rings again. The tumbling rocks and dust would be here long after—
“Vars!”
“What?” Vars said in a small voice. She was hoarse from screaming earlier.
“Vars!” It was a man’s voice. Scraggly, sick-sounding. “Vars? Is that you? Vars!”
The voice alternated between using Vars’s name as a question and a call. Or perhaps a prayer.
“This is Dr. Varsaad Volhard,” Vars said. “Who are you?”
She waited. From Mimas, it would take approximately eighty minutes for her signal to reach Earth or Luna. To Mars it was closer to sixty-five. Double that for there and back. In just over two hours, she would know where the message was coming from. Of course, it could have been sent from a rescue ship on its way to Saturn, but Vars didn’t even allow herself to think that. That was simply too much to hope for. Too big of a letdown when it turned out not to be the case.
She reached out and turned off her microphone. She wasn’t sure why all of a sudden the idea of someone listening to her half-delusional rants made her nervous.
She had a couple of hours to get herself more presentable—to eat, to get dressed, to take a shower…not necessarily in that order. She didn’t remember the last time she’d made herself go through a personal grooming regimen. Now she hustled. Two hours wasn’t such a long time if one didn’t touch a hairbrush for days…or had it been weeks? She wasn’t sure, and that made her even more unsettled.
The woman looking back at her from the mirror was a total stranger. Skin gray. Eyes sunken. Skeletal. Hair sticking out in matted clumps. There was no point in a brush; she decided to just cut it all off. It would be easier to take care of. There was no reason to be vain.
With her head shaved, she looked even less like herself. More like her dad really…she just needed a beard. She heard herself laugh and didn’t like it. More coffee. She needed a jolt of stimulants.
She was back in her chair on the bridge with ten minutes to spare…if the message was coming from somewhere other than Earth.
One hundred and fifteen minutes since her transmission.
One hundred and seventeen.
One hundred and nineteen and a half.
Vars watched the seconds indicator sweep through. Her clock was set to analog mode—her dad’s favorite. But…Liut had it set to military time. Hadn’t he? Yes…she was sure of it. When did she change the setting?
One hundred and twenty-seven. That didn’t necessarily rule out Mars yet. Replies took time.
One hundred and sixty-seven. Not Mars? And obviously not a rescue ship either. Unless they were worried about her ramblings. Or perhaps they needed more time to compose their message?
One hundred and sixty-nine. No one said that replies had to be made instantaneously upon receipt of a message, right? They didn’t know—couldn’t know—how much Vars needed them…
One hundred and seventy-two minutes.
“Vars? Baby? It’s me, your dad.”
“Dad!” Vars half-screamed, half-cried, and rushed to open her mike again. “Dad!” He would get this in eighty-plus minutes.
“We’re at the wardens’ station, Phoebe and I. I’ve never told you about her, but she was my Seed-sister. She saw you when you first arrived at our Vault. But that’s not really important now.” There was a sound like a sob or a big exhale, followed by a nasty cough. Vars dug her fingernails into her arms—her dad had to be okay. Had to.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “Phoebe doesn’t want me to shut off the mike even for a second—took a while to get everything connected and decrypted—doesn’t want me messing with it. The wardens’ stations are built like secure military centers. Everything at the highest level. Everything…” Another bark-like laugh and a coughing fit. “But there’s no one here, so we had to figure it all out ourselves. Oh, Phoebe says hi.”
“Hi,” said Vars in a small voice. “Hi, Phoebe. Hi, Dad. I love you…”
“Phoebe got the audio working a while back, but our outgoing feed gave her trouble. While she was at it, we listened to you. Vars…oh, Vars, what’s going on up there? And where’s Alice? Where’s everyone? I’m so worried about you.” A pause, but no coughing fit this time. “Well, Phoebe and I figured out a few things. This is not a secure connection, but we decided it doesn’t matter. Not anymore, right?”
“Why, Daddy? What happened to you?” Vars couldn’t help but talk back, even though there was no synchronicity to this conversation, even if he would only hear her words way over an hour later, out of context. It d
idn’t matter. She felt like touching the speakers, hugging them.
She listened to her dad describe the horror of his experiences at the lab and the crossing of the frozen landscape from Finland into northern Norway. His was a harder journey, she thought.
“The main thing, Vars, is to figure out what these aliens want.”
“Mims. We call them Mims, Dad.”
“Phoebe and I think they seeded our solar system with life. Or we might have been starting up on our own, but these guys overwrote it with their own chemistry. That’s why all of the examples of life we’ve been finding everywhere we go in the solar system are related. It’s all the same stuff!”
“We thought so too, Dad,” Vars said, but it was nice to hear their suspicions confirmed.
“A whole galaxy full of compatible chemistry, tailor-made life,” her dad continued. “Depending on how much of a head start they had, it’s conceivable that every last planet and moon that could possibly support their kind of life…already does.”
“It’s our kind of life, too,” Vars added quietly.
“But why send a body when just information would do?”
“What?” Vars sat up a bit straighter.
“Phoebe had this crazy idea that these nanobot masters don’t just want our world, they want us. As in our bodies. As in… I’m so glad you didn’t have to see what happened to Sophie.”
Another bout of coughing, then: “Imagine moving only information about the galaxy. Want to visit some cool spot in the outer rim? Just send a copy of yourself that way. In ten, twenty, a hundred years—what does it really matter?—you arrive at your desired destination, and take over a body that was raised just for you. You look around, live life for a while, and when you’re ready to leave—or when the body you’re using wears out—you just send the data back. Phoebe thinks that death for such creatures would be a meaningless concept. They are the masters of our galaxy, Vars. They’ve been everywhere, lived millions of lives…”