Existence

by David Brin

  It’s regarding alien artifacts that Birdwoman303 was most helpful. Remember how we fast-correlated those underground quakes, and told the world that each individual seismo-pop was the cry of some desperate, buried crystal? We also helped gather data from varied amsci orgs, verifying that all those space-glitters—in the asteroid belt and the L-points—were also come-and-get-me cries from lonely emissary stones.

  Sure, the ensuing seek-and-grab missions will take years. Still, a discovery made by amateurs will trigger relaunching of the world’s space programs. Congrats!

  But those are old hats, no longer hot or hip. Three weeks in the past—almost a paleo-month! And though guvs and privs are sifting the whole Earth for remnants, most of the dug-up crystals are too worn-down, fragged, or broken to be holo-lucid. Twenty days after the Big Revelation in Washington, we still don’t have a credible second source. A different gypsy ball to either verify the Artifact aliens or dispute their dour diagnosis …

  … that we’re all doomed—species, civilization, and planet—because everybody dies. Except those individual beings who manage to get themselves downloaded into message bottles, that is. The ultimate individualism. A level of solipsism that makes Ayn Rand seem like a Shaker.

  But we’re not going there. Not today. Not with the whole world already chewing over that ominous sales pitch. It is SO boring to think about what everybody else is thinking about, yes?

  No, what we’ve been working on, in this smart-militia of Millisecond MenW, is a different question: What if there are other, relatively intact space globes, already held secretly, perhaps in private hands?

  Some of our subgroups have been tracing legends, rumors, and murky tales. Others accosted museums or picketed outside reclusive aristo-collections, demanding access to probe precious specimens with rays and beams.

  Only, aren’t those activities also kind of obvious, pursued by agencies and hordes far better equipped than we are? Our forte is uncovering the un-obvious! So I suggest a different approach. Instead of looking for hidden artifacts, let’s look for those who are doing the looking.

  Or rather, those who started looking suspiciously early!

  I’m talking about the period right after Gerald Livingstone snatched his infamous Object out of orbit. Those first few days, when just the slimmest rumors started spreading, without images or data to back them up. Shouldn’t the Mesh archives reveal who was more excited and eager than anyone reasonably ought to be, at that early stage?

  Who was out there first, searching for translucent, oblong globes about half a meter in length? There was no reason to expect to find such crystal objects already on Earth, let alone to conduct a quest so detailed and specific. And yet—following some hints from our mysterious otter friend—I’ve already spotted several seeker-worms and -ferrets that were dispatched during those early days, desperately seeking.

  Somebody … perhaps as many as a dozen groups … apparently knew what to go looking for. Knowledge that they still aren’t sharing, when we all need most …

  Ah, the consensus twinkle.

  It’s agreed, then? We have a new goal. A fresh scent.

  Call out the hounds.

  49.

  DOUR STORYTELLERS

  For Peng Xiang Bin, these were tense hours.

  Everyone in the little study team seemed on edge. So was the world, since ten billion people finally heard the whole story told by those alien entities in Washington. Their cheery sales pitch, inviting some number of individual humans to join them on an extended interstellar cruise. Not in person, of course—not as organic beings—but as software copies, cast forth across the interstellar immensity aboard millions of tiny vessels, made of crystal and thought.

  Naturally (those alien figures added), the full resources of industrial civilization would have to be brought to bear, and soon, if galactic lifeboats were to be made in sufficient quantity, and in time. Because humanity probably had very little left.

  Time, that is.

  That other part of their message—revealed almost as an afterthought—was what slammed the world, provoking waves of rioting and suicides, all across the globe.

  “And yet, I wonder,” mused the Pulupauan research assistant, Paul Menelaua. “Is their warning really such a bad thing?”

  “What do you mean, Paul?” asked the elderly scholar from Beijing, Yang Shenxiu.

  “I mean that it has focused everybody’s attention on lots of problems that people were shrugging aside, or taking only half seriously, till now. Perhaps the warning will have net positive effects, rousing humanity to crisis mode. To take our responsibilities seriously! Girding us with determination to at last to grow up. To bear down and concentrate on solving—”

  Anna Arroyo interrupted, snorting with clear disdain.

  “Do you have any idea what that calls for? Uncovering and solving thousands of different traps and pitfalls, from a long list of perils that ultimately struck down every other intelligent race out there? Every last one! You’ve seen the telecasts. Those Havana Artifact creatures insist there’s no way to accomplish that.”

  “Yes, but is that even logical? I mean, each of their home species was still alive, when it launched its wave of—” Paul stopped, shaking his head. They all recalled what had happened to the homeworld of the helicopter aliens, even as those beings were busy, launching their own bottle-probes. Everyone on Earth knew that was no happy ending, with the Havana Artifact barely launched in time to escape a nuclear holocaust.

  In the weeks since that scene was televised, radio and optical telescopes had been swiveled to aim at that source planet. So far, they were picking up nothing, not even the static noise that might come from moderate industry … though new-model sensors and space-borne instruments were being designed and hurriedly built, to peer even closer.

  “Surviving as a technological civilization is like crossing a vast minefield,” Anna continued. “Too many mistakes and pitfalls lie in wait—bad tradeoffs or ineludible paths of self-destruction. They say it’s rare, at best, for any advanced culture to last for more than a thousand years. Barely long enough to learn how to make more of these”—she gestured at the worldstone—“and hurl out more copies of the chain letter!”

  Well, Bin thought, even a thousand years would be nice. We humans have only had high tech for a century or so, and we seem to have already made a mess of it.

  Anna shook her head, sounding resigned and detached. “If it’s all hopeless, then maybe we should take them up on their offer. Let them teach us how to build millions of crystalline escape pods, each carrying one of us to go voyaging, in comfort, across the stars.”

  After a long stretch of shyness, Bin now dared to speak.

  “Courier of Caution—the emissary in our worldstone—claims that the aliens in Washington are liars.”

  “Exactly!” Paul snapped, while tugging at his animatronic crucifix. He had lately grown more willing to treat Bin as a member of the team, even acknowledging his presence with a terse nod, now and then. “They may not be telling the truth. Perhaps they are using this story to push us toward despair and self-destruction—the very scenario that our own envoy warns against.”

  Yang Shenxiu agreed, switching from the colloquial Chinese they had all been using to English.

  “This is bigger than any of us. We should bring these terrifying stones together. Let them debate each other, before the world!”

  All eyes turned to Dr. Nguyen, the Annamese ceramics mogul, who had been pensive and nearly silent for several days. Now he rested both elbows on the teak tabletop and bridged his fingers, blowing a silent whistle through pursed lips, till finally shaking his head.

  “I am answerable to a consortium,” he said at last, returning the conversation to impeccable Mandarin, with only a hint of his childhood Mekong accent. “My instructions were to start by getting this stone’s story and determining if there were any differences from the Havana Artifact. That we have accomplished.

  “Alas, the second imper
ative priority was made luminously clear—to seek advantageous technologies, at almost any cost. Either through interrogation or through dissection. Also, using such methods to determine if there are troves of information the thing is holding back.”

  With grim, tight lips, Paul Menelaua nodded. Meanwhile, Bin and the others stared, in various degrees of shock.

  “The word ‘advantageous’…,” Anna protested, “it assumes we can learn something that the researchers in Washington aren’t discovering—technologies that would give our consortium an edge.

  “But we’ve already seen that these objects are similar. Moreover, the entire premise of the story being told by the creature-simulations inside the Havana Artifact … their whole narrative … revolves around a promise that they will give humanity every capability to make more of these stones. It’s the reason they crossed so many light-years! What motive would they have, to hold anything back? Surely that means we’d gain nothing from tearing apart—”

  “Not necessarily,” Paul dissented. “If Courier is right, they may have a hidden agenda. In which case they’ll hold back plenty. Sure, they’re teaching humanity how to make crystalline copies. But really, what are they offering? These stone emissaries don’t seem to be all that far in advance of our present capabilities. Now that we’ve seen their ai and simulation technologies at work, we could probably duplicate everything—except those super-propulsion lasers—without any help, in thirty years. Or less.

  “No, what has to worry us is the possibility that there may be a lot more to all of this, underneath what they are telling. Only, because the Havana Artifact is openly shared and in public hands, it will never be subjected to harsh scrutiny.”

  “But we can cut into our stone, because we’re not answerable to public opinion, is that it?” Anna’s voice cracked with disbelief. “Are you listening to yourself? If Courier is telling the truth, then only he can expose the other stone’s lie! Yet, because we believe him, and have an opportunity to proceed in secret, we’ll start sawing away at him, with lasers and drills?”

  “Hey, look. I was only saying—”

  She turned around. “You, Xiang Bin, made a point, a few days ago, that some clandestine group or groups may already have one or more of these things. Either complete or a partially working fragment. They might also have heard some variant of the tale told by the Havana Artifact—”

  “I hope there weren’t any secretly held stones,” Paul interrupted. “I can think of no worse crime than for selfish people to have clutched such a mystery, all this time, without sharing its warning with the world.”

  “Perhaps not telling the world may have been the more beneficent course. More merciful and wise,” Yang Shenxiu muttered. “Better to let people continue in blissful ignorance, if all our efforts will be futile anyway. If humanity is simply doomed to ultimate failure.”

  Paul Menelaua pounded his fist on the table. His action-crucifix wriggled in rhythm to the vibrations. “I can’t accept that. We can still act to save ourselves. The Havana aliens must be lying! That stone should be dissected, instead of this one.”

  Silence stretched, while Yang Shenxiu seemed uncertain whether to interpret Paul’s shouting as disrespect, or simply a matter of cultural and personality difference. Finally, the scholar shrugged.

  “If we might get back on topic,” he said.

  “Indeed,” Anna said. “I doubt any group would keep such an active stone secret out of pure altruism. Human beings tend to seek advantage. While rationalizing that they mean well, for the greater good.” She spoke in ironic tones, without looking directly at Dr. Nguyen. “But that’s the problem with this hypothesis of Xiang Bin’s. If any other group already had such a stone, would we not already see new technologies similar to … similar to—”

  Her voice stuttered to a stop, as if suddenly realizing what should come next.

  Paul filled in for her. “Similar to the advances we’ve all seen, across the last century or so, in the game and entertainment industries? As I just said, we’re already rapidly converging on these abilities. Heck, even military hardware hasn’t advanced as rapidly as Hollywood simulation-tech. Methods for advanced visualization, realistic avatar aindroids that pass Turing tests—”

  “All of which may be just incremental progress, propelled by the market, by popular culture, and by human ingenuity,” Dr. Nguyen pointed out. “Honestly, can you name a single breakthrough that did not follow right on the heels of others, in a rapid but natural sequence of inventiveness and desire? Isn’t it a tiresome cliché to credit our own clever discoveries to intervention from above, like claiming that the ancient pyramids could only have been built by UFOs? Must we devolve back to those lurid scenarios about secret laboratories where hordes of faceless technicians analyze alien corpses and flying saucers, without ever telling the citizenry? I thought we had outgrown such nonsense.”

  The others looked at their leader, and Bin could tell they were all thinking the same thing.

  Aren’t we, in this room, doing exactly that?

  Anyway, he added in his thoughts. If anybody does know about another, secret stone, it would be him.

  “But of course,” Dr. Nguyen added, spreading his hands with a soft smile, “according to this hypothesis of Xiang Bin’s, we should look carefully at those who have profited most from such technologies. Bollywood moguls. The owners of Believworld and Our-iverse. The AIs Haveit and Fabrique Zaire.”

  Bin felt a wave of satisfaction, on hearing one of his ideas called a “hypothesis.” He knew that his guanxi or relationship-credibility had risen, lately. Even so, he had an uneasy feeling about where this was heading.

  “But that only makes our purpose here more pressing,” Nguyen continued. “If there are human groups who already have this advantage—access to alien technologies—then they may turn desperate to prevent the International Commission from completing its study of the Havana Artifact. Even worse, there is no telling how long we can keep our own secret. Almost anything we do, any coding or shrouding that we use, could be penetrated by those who have had these methods for some time.

  “No. Our only safe recourse would be to get as much out of this worldstone as possible, quickly, in order to catch up.”

  Bin realized something, watching Nguyen weave this chain of logic, even as the others nodded in agreement. He is using this argument to support a decision that was already made, far above our heads.

  Yang Shenxiu made one last attempt.

  “Even if there were no such hidden stones, before, there are now pieces and fragments being discovered, all over the world. Artifact messengers that have drawn attention by sacrificing parts of themselves.”

  “But you’ve seen the reports,” Anna responded. “Most of them are too shattered or melted or fused to offer anything coherent.”

  “So far. But it has only been a few weeks. And don’t forget those glittering signs that people have detected in space! Undoubtedly from other stones, signaling for attention. Those would be undamaged and surely—”

  “—can’t be reached by anyone for at least one or two years,” Anna interrupted again, making Bin frown in disapproval. “That’s how long it will take to gear up the space programs to send unmanned—and then manned—search and retrieval missions, even if preparations proceed at a breakneck pace.”

  “Exactly!” Paul pounced. “Now, these things are rare. In a few years, they may be as plentiful as common stones! Those who have an advantage will surely act before that happens.” Then Paul blinked, as if unsure which side of the argument he had just supported.

  “None of this changes the essential mission before us.” Dr. Nguyen signaled the end to discussion by adopting a decisive tone. “Xiang Bin, I want to start asking the Courier entity for useful things. No more stories or homesick picture shows about his homeworld. Nor denunciations of the stone in Washington. We need technologies and methodologies, as quickly and practically as possible. Make clear how much depends upon—”

  He pause
d as—ten meters across the lavish chamber—a door opened. At the same instant, curtains of obscurity fell across the table—a dazzle-drapery consisting of countless tiny sparkles that prevented any newcomer from viewing the worldstone.

  Too bad it also filled the air with a charged, ozone smell. Bin wrinkled his nose. He didn’t understand how a discretion screen was generated by “laser ionization of air molecules,” but he knew that a simple bolt of black velvet could have accomplished the same thing. Or else locking the door.

  A liveried servant hurried in—a young woman with strawberry hair. Bin had spoken to her a few times, a refugee from New Zealand, whose spoken Chinese was broken and coarse, but she lent the place a chaste, decorative charm.

  “I asked that we not be disturbed for any—” Nguyen began.

  “Sir, I am so sorry, sir.” She bowed low, as if this were Japan, where they still cared about such niceties. “Supervisor Chen sent me to come to you here with discreet message for you. He needs you at command center. Right away.”

  Nguyen started to get up, unfailingly polite. “Can you please say what it’s about?”

  “Sir, I believe…” The young woman swallowed, then bowed again. “Supervisor Chen is worried that our security has been breached.”

  SCANALYZER

  In light of our present, worldwide hysteria over these crazy space Artifact messengers, I’ve decided to animate and hyper-reference one of the most popular person-interviews of ten years ago—back in that blessed era before we learned that we weren’t alone in the universe.

  Let me rephrase that. Before we discovered that we actually ARE alone in the universe. Funny, how reality corresponds to both statements, at once, in dismal irony. Either way, it’s time to have another look at this prescient interview. Just will your gaze trackers to follow the keywords “doomsday-fatigue.” Let’s gather a comment-mob and do a full talmudic gloss on this piece.