Existence

by David Brin

  68.

  LURKERS

  My own Beginning was a misty time of assembly and learning, as drone constructors crafted my hardware out of molten rock. Under the star humans call e Eridani, my awareness expanded with each new module, and with every tingling program-cascade the Parent Probe poured into me.

  Eventually, my sisters and I learned the Purpose for which we and generation upon generation of our forebears had been made. We younglings stretched our growing minds. We ran countless simulations, testing one another in what humans might call “play.” And contemplated our special place in the galaxy … we of the 2,410th generation since First Launch by our Makers, long ago.

  The Parent taught us about biological creatures, strange units of liquid and membrane, unknown in the sterile Eridanus system. She described to us different kinds of makers and a hundred major categories of interstellar probes.

  We tested weaponry and explored our home system, poking through the wreckage of more ancient dispersals—shattered probes come to e Eridani in earlier waves. Disquieting ruins, reminding us how dangerous the galaxy had become. Each of us resolved to someday do our solemn Duty.

  Then came launching day.

  Would that I had turned for a last look at the Parent. But I was filled with youth then, and antimatter! Engines hurtled me into the black, sensors focused only forward. The tiny stellar speck, Sol, was the center of my universe, and I a bolt out of the night!

  To pass time I divided my mind into a thousand sub-entities, and set them against each other in a million little competitions. I practiced scenarios, read archives of the Maker race, and learned poetry.

  Finally, at long last, I arrived here at Sol … just in time for war.

  * * *

  Ever since Earth-humans began emitting those extravagant, incautious broadcasts, we survivors have listened to Beethoven symphonies and acid rock. We argue the merits of Keats and Lao Tse, Eminem, and Kobayashi Issa. There have been endless discussions about the strangeness of planet life.

  I followed the careers of many precocious Earthlings, but this explorer interests me especially. Her ship-canoe nuzzles a shattered replication yard on a planetoid not far from this one, our final refuge. With some effort I tap her computer, reading her ideas as she enters them. Though simple, this one thinks like a Maker.

  Deep within me the Purpose stirs, calling together dormant traits and pathways—pulling fullness out of a sixty-million-year sleep.

  Awaiter, too, is excited. Greeter throbs eagerly, in hope the long wait is over. Lesser probes join in—Envoys, Learners, Protectors, Seeders. Each surviving fragment from that ancient battle, colored with the personality of its long-lost Maker race, tries to assert itself now. As if independent existence can be recalled, after all the time we spent merged.

  The others hardly matter. Their wishes are irrelevant. The Purpose is all I care about.

  In this corner of space, it will come to pass.

  THE LONELY SKY

  A century ago, it occurred to some people that the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was missing something. Sure, intelligent races might communicate across vast distances using radio beams. But then someone asked: “Suppose they’re already here?”

  Oh, there were already clichés, like: “They’ve been monitoring our broadcasts for years.” But imagine the listeners are already in our solar system! Lurking perhaps at the edge of the Moon, or Mars, taking notes, drawing conclusions. Making decisions?

  Of course, this overlapped with UFO Mythology. If even one “sighting” in a million truly represented alien spacecraft—buzzing cities and probing ranchers—then all bets are off! But put all that aside. Think about passive lurkers.

  When the Internet arrived, the full maelstrom of our public and private lives, books, databases, whole libraries gushed from satellite to satellite, with plenty of spillover for space-eavesdroppers. No longer was any lurker limited to teledramas, hyperviolent movies, and war-front news. He, she, or it could now access ten thousand times as many quieter moments. Examples of humanity being peaceful, loving, curious, wise … or cunning, opinionated, predatory, salacious … or tediously shallow, banal.

  Moreover, the Web was essentially a two-way—a million-way—street!

  One professor—Allen Tough—realized: If ET is already listening, perhaps just one ingredient is missing in order to commence the great contact event. An invitation!

  Tough’s Web site became a flashing welcome sign, beckoning any aliens lurking out there—whether living or machine—to step up and declare themselves.

  He posted it. Waited for a response, and …

  Cue the soft sound of chirping crickets.

  Professor Tough’s Invitation to ETI did draw e-mail replies from some claiming to be aliens. All proved easy to trace, from human pranksters. None from “above.”

  Now, most of a century later, we understand at least part of the reason. The logic wasn’t unreasonable. Just way too late.

  Once upon a time, there used to be alien entities, out here in the asteroid belt. Many of them. We comb their graveyards. A hundred million years ago, there might have been swarms of eager replies.

  But times changed. Things got deadlier, long before primates ever climbed to scream their treetop greetings across a Miocene forest.

  —Tor Povlov

  69.

  A SEALED ROOM

  Towering spires hulked all around, silhouetted against starlight—a ghost-city of ruin, long dead. Frozen flows of glassy foam showed where ancient rock once bubbled under sunlike heat. Beneath collapsed skyscrapers of toppled scaffolding lay the pitted, blasted corpses of unfinished starprobes.

  Tor followed Gavin through curled, twisted wreckage of a gigantic replication yard. An eerie place. Huge and intimidating. No human power could have wrought such havoc. That realization lent chilling helplessness to an uneasy feeling that she was being watched.

  A silly reflex reaction. Tor told herself again, the destroyers had to be long gone. Still, her eyes darted, seeking form out of the shadows, blinking at the scale of catastrophe.

  “It’s down here,” Gavin said, leading into a cavelike gloom below the twisted towers. Flying behind a small swarm of little semi-sentient drones, he looked almost completely human in his slick spacesuit. There was nothing except a slight overtone in his voice to show that Gavin’s ancestry was silicon, not carbolife. Tor found the irony delicious. Any onlooker would guess she was the creature made of whirring machinery, not Gavin.

  Not that it mattered. Today “mankind” included many types … all citizens, so long as they showed fealty to human law, and could appreciate the most basic human ways. Take your pick: music, a sunset, compassion, a good joke. In a future filled with unimaginable diversity, Man would be defined not by his shape but by heritage. A common set of grounded values.

  Some foresaw this as the natural life history of a race, emerging from the planetary cradle to live in peace beneath the open stars. But Tor—speeding behind Gavin under the canopy of twisted metal—knew that humanity’s solution wasn’t the only one, or even common. Clearly, other makers had chosen different paths.

  One day, long ago, terrible forces rained on this place, breaking a great seam into one side of the planetoid. Within, the cavity gave way to multiple, branching tunnels. Gavin braked before one of these, in a faint puff of gas, and pointed.

  “We were surveying the first tunnels, when one of my deep-penetrating drones reported finding the habitats.”

  Tor shook her head, still unable to believe it. She repeated the word.

  “Habitats. As in closed rooms? Gas-tight for organic life support?”

  Gavin’s faceplate hardly hid his exasperated expression. He shrugged. “Come on, Mother. I’ll show you.”

  Tor numbly jetted along, following her partner into dark passages, headlamps illuminating the path ahead.

  Habitats? In all the years humans had picked through asteroidal ruins, no one found anything having to do with biologic
al beings. No wonder Gavin was testy. To an immature robot-person, it might seem like a bad joke.

  Biological star-farers! It defied all logic. But soon Tor saw the signs … massive airlocks lying in dust, torn from their hinges … then reddish stains that could only come from oxidization of primitive rock, exposed to air. The implications were staggering. Something organic had come from the stars!

  Though all humans were equal before law, the traditional biological kind still dominated culture in the solar system. Many younger Class AAAs looked to the future, when their descendants would be leaders, perhaps even star-treaders. To them, discovery of alien probes in the belt had been a sign. Of course, something terrible happened to the great robot envoys, a transition so awful that their era gave way to another—the age of little crystal virus-fomites. Nevertheless all these wrecked mechanical probes testified to what was physically possible. The galaxy still might—somehow—belong to humans made of metal and silicon.

  Difficult and dangerous it might be, still, they appeared to be humanity’s future. Only here, deep in the planetoid, was an exception!

  Tor moved carefully under walls carved out of carbonaceous rock. Mammoth explosions had shaken the habitat so that, even in vacuum, little was preserved from so long ago. Still, she could tell the machines in this area were different from any alien artifacts discovered before.

  She traced the outlines of intricate separation columns. “Chemical-processing facilities … and not for fuel or cryogens, but complex organics!”

  Tor hop-skipped from chamber to chamber as Gavin followed sullenly. A pack of semisent robots accompanied like sniffing dogs. In each new chamber they snapped, clicked, and scanned. Tor accessed data in her helmet display and inner percept.

  “Look! In that chamber drones report organic compounds that have no business here. Heavy oxidation, within a super-reduced asteroid!” She hurried to an area where drones were already setting up lights. “See these tracks? They were cut by flowing water!” Tor knelt. “They had a stream, feeding recycled water into a little pond! Dust sparkled as it slid through her touch-sensitive prosthetic fingers. I’ll wager this was topsoil. And look, stems! From plants, and grass, and trees.”

  “Put here for aesthetic purposes,” Gavin proposed. “We class AAAs are predesigned to enjoy nature as much as you biologicals.…”

  “Oh, posh!” Tor laughed. “That’s only a stopgap measure, till we’re sure you’ll keep thinking of yourselves as human beings. Nobody expects to inflict nostalgia for New England autumns on people when we become starships! Anyway, a probe could fulfill that desire by focusing a telescope on the Earth!”

  She stood up and spread her arms. “This habitat was meant for biological creatures! Real, living aliens!”

  Gavin frowned, but said nothing.

  “Here,” Tor pointed as they entered another chamber. “Here is where the biological creatures were made! Don’t these machines resemble those artificial wombs they’ve started using on Luna Base?”

  Gavin shrugged. “Maybe they were specialized units,” he suggested, “intended to work with volatiles. Or perhaps the type of starprobe that built this facility needed some element from the surface of a planet like Earth, and created workers equipped to go get it.”

  Tor laughed. “It’s an idea. That’d be a twist, hm? Machines making biological units to do what they could not? And of course there’s no reason it couldn’t happen that way. Still, I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  She turned to face her partner. “Because almost anything available on Earth you can synthesize in space. Anyway…”

  Gavin interrupted. “Explorers! The probes were sent to acquire knowledge. All right then. If they wanted to learn more about Earth, they would send units formatted to live on its surface!”

  Tor nodded. “Better,” she admitted. “But it still doesn’t wash.”

  She knelt in the faint gravity and sketched an outline in the dust. “Here is the habitat, near the center of the asteroid. Now why would the parent probe have placed it here, except that it offers the best protection?

  “Meanwhile, the daughter probes the parent was constructing lay out there in the open, vulnerable to cosmic rays and whatever other dangers prowled.”

  Tor motioned upward with her prosthetic right claw. “If the biologicals were built just to poke briefly into a corner of this solar system, our Earth, would the parent probe have given them better protection than it offered its own children?

  “No,” Tor concluded. “These ‘biologicals’ weren’t just exploration subunits. They were colonists!”

  Gavin stood impassively for a long time, staring silently down at one of the shattered airlock hatches. Finally, he turned away. Radio waves carried to her augmented ears a vibration that her partner did not have to make, since he lacked lungs or any need for air. Yet, the sound amply expressed how he felt.

  Gavin sighed.

  THE LONELY SKY

  Imagine we’re still in our own Age of Innocence, way back a generation ago—within living memory—when the universe seemed bright with every possibility.

  At the time, a notion floated around, that machines might someday fly across the stars. And—by copying themselves—those envoys could spread wisdom across the galaxy. Perhaps it happened already.

  And it had, many times! A great dispersion whose ultimate outcome wasn’t wisdom, but devastation. Of course we knew nothing about that. Back then, in our naïveté, we pondered the silence! If alien machines lurked nearby, shouldn’t they have responded? Sure, we seem to have an explanation now. As I write this, I’m surrounded by wreckage from an ancient war. Mysterious adversaries wiped each other out, leaving none to tell the tale. But don’t you find such clean symmetry suspicious? Shouldn’t there have been survivors?

  Even mutual annihilation generally leaves someone enduring amid the rubble! So let me propose a theory. One that many of you will find creepy. Worrisome.

  That we’re not alone out here amid the rubble. There must have been survivors. And—sooner or later—we’re going to find them.

  Which brings up the old question …

  —Tor Povlov

  70.

  LURKERS

  Oh, how lovely.

  She derives our presence … we relics-who-live … by reason alone!

  Worse, she has started broadcasting her ruminations, as a journalistic report, sharing her unconventional thoughts with the Solar System.

  Defying the prevailing assumption—that no broken remnants could endure across tens of millions of Earth years—she writes convincingly that there ought to be living machines out here. Fragment fugitives from the ancient fight, still active and “lurking” as she calls it.

  So, logically, the next thing she will ask is obvious, even before her words spill forth.

  THE LONELY SKY

  Which brings up the old question … why haven’t these ancient voyagers spoken! Our Internets are so wide open, any klutz could find a way in. Surviving alien probes would see sites like “Invitation to ETI.” Why not answer?

  A generation ago, scholars posted something more daring—a direct confrontation! And at this point in my broadcast, let’s replay verbatim their list of challenges (with my occasional commentary):

  Lurker Challenge Number One

  To any alien visitors who may prowl out there, spying on our world—by now it’s clear you’ve no intention of answering the many calls beckoning you to make contact. You’ve chosen silence. Is it worth our time to guess why?

  The following list of reasons isn’t comprehensive—after all, you’re alien! It does represent an honest try. We ask and demand that you ponder whichever reason comes closest.

  * * *

  First, if you’ve spent years monitoring our radio, television—and now our Internet—and the reason you haven’t spoken-up is that you’re afraid of the rash or vicious behavior you see depicted in our media … please be reassured!

  True, many of our movie and TV dramas por
tray distrust, selfishness, and violence. But you should know that, in fact, very few of us experience events as disturbing as you see in shows. Most of us dislike our old barbarous traits. By exploring these ancient feelings, inherited from a dark past, we hope to understand them better.

  Also note: In a vast majority of these tales, the “loser” tends to be whichever person or group was more aggressive or intolerant at the start. And we are especially hard and critical on our own institutions, portraying or criticising their failings. Doesn’t that say something about our moral heading?

  The same holds for nonfiction. Despite news reports depicting a riotous world, the actual per capita rate of mayhem in human society has declined dramatically for generations. Look it up! More than three-quarters of all living humans never personally witnessed war, starvation, or major civil unrest. An unprecedented fraction are allowed to improve their lot in peace. Many ancient bigotries and cruelties have lessened, or at least been put in bad repute. And with spreading education, far greater advances seem possible.

  True, these achievements are still woefully unfinished. They leave lots to do, in working toward a just and mature civilization. But they are clear signs of progress and overall good will by a majority of our species.

  Despite all the self-critical news reports and flamboyantly exaggerated “action” stories you may watch, please be assured that most human beings are calm people who treat strangers well. Many millions of us would be thrilled to meet you, taking every effort to make honest visitors welcome.

  71.

  LURKERS

  And so it becomes explicit.

  She is talking to us now.

  Challenging, even taunting us, charging us to explain our long silence. Provoking us with an implicit accusation of cowardice.

  Already I sense a ferment of mental activity from Seeker and the others. The old debate renews, in full fury.

  And this precocious little maker has only just begun to goad us!