by Wil McCarthy
“Speak,” he said coldly.
“Another ship has bloomed,” Lehne said. “And the complementin will hit us in eight minutes.”
“Shut up. Strasheim, what's on your mind?”
I gulped. Time to take the final plunge. “Sir, there's no telling what lengths the Temples will go to to protect the Mycosystem. They worship it, yes, they believe it to be some sort of hyperintelligence, maybe a direct link to God himself. It doesn't matter whether that's true; what matters is that the Immunity really may have the power they attribute to it. Not just to hang on indefinitely at Jupiter, or climb aboard a starship and fly away, but to take back the inner system itself. To murder their god. This places the Immunity in very grave danger, even if that power does not exist, or is never exercised.”
“Yes?” Wallich said, still not getting my drift.
I paused, collecting my thoughts. Self-sacrifice seemed to be quite the rage these days, and really, what chance did we have of surviving all the way to the heat barrier? The Temples ships were falling all over themselves to die, to take us out with them. And if you can't beat them... “Sir, whether or not the Mycosystem has a right to exist, whether or not it has the right to destroy us or we have the right to destroy it, we're in possession of critical information which the Temples are going to act on whether or not the Immunity is informed. We can do this thing, right now, but there's no telling what the consequences might be. That sim of mine doesn't have the fidelity to help us know this, meaning we'd be gambling with the lives of every living thing in the solar system.”
Wallich nodded. “Agreed. I'd never authorize it.”
“We could simulate the consequences precisely,” Rapisardi objected.
“No,” Wallich said tersely, with a dismissive wave of the hand which Rapisardi of course couldn't see. “It would take hours, days, maybe longer. We've got minutes before these people kill us. Think of something else.”
I cleared my throat. “Captain, I recommend... Jesus. I recommend that we compose a detailed message, including images, science readings, speculations, and my own Mulch World sim, and we transmit it back to the Immunity. Whatever they decide to do, it's... our duty not to take this information to our graves.”
He eyed me humorlessly, visibly weighing my words. “You propose suicide?”
Suicide, yeah, that was what it came down to. One more group of fanatics, willing to sacrifice ourselves for some vague perception of the greater good. And yet, there were things worth dying for. The philosophy that counted human life as infinitely precious had always been, in my opinion, an erroneous one. Human life was finite in scope, finite in duration; we all had to die sometime. In fact, our lives might be so precious to us precisely because they were finite, and could in fact be traded, sure as a gram of uranium, for the things we valued even more. Things like hope.
And it wasn't like we had a real long time left to live, anyway.
“Yes sir, I do.”
Wallich didn't laugh, didn't smile, didn't react at all.
“I've seen a lot of shit down here I didn't expect to see,” he muttered. “Lately I've been feeling a lot of doubt, about things I used to know for sure. These issues need to be thought through, calmly, by wiser heads. By all the heads. Yes, do it, send the message. Stat. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to tank... like... I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you all for excellent service.”
Yeah, you're welcome. I had most of the stuff for the message lying around already, in buffers waiting to be archived and collaged. The speculation part I just sort of blurted out in a voice recording:
“Citizens of the Immunity, the Mycosystem may in fact be conscious. Humans on Venus, AIs in the Gladholds, fantastically huge computing power... Whatever, I don't really have time to explain. The Temples regard it as a conscious being, an intelligent one, and at this point I'm willing to grant them the benefit of the doubt. They believe we intend to destroy it, destroy the Mycosystem, with a solar cascade reaction. We may in fact be capable of this, but we do not intend to attempt it, and are sending this message, at the cost of our lives, as proof of our sincerity. Please use this information wisely. This is John Strasheim, Mycosystem Mission One correspondent aboard the Immune ship Louis Pasteur... signing off.”
After that, I gathered up the other message elements and wrapped them in a transmission packet, and then, trying not to think too much about what I was doing, I fired up the transmitter, set the frequency back to high-microwave, and set the data rate at maximum.
“On your command, sir,” I said.
Beside and above me, Tosca Lehne looked shattered. Never to see his little boy again, never to see anything; all chances zeroed, all patterns terminated. He opened his mouth for a moment, but didn't, finally, object. What could he say?
“Go,” Wallich ordered.
I pressed the button, and of course nothing visible happened right away. You can't see or feel a microwave transmission. But then the replication alarms went crazy, and then I guess the complementin hit us a few seconds later, or else the microwaves overcame any protection the t-balance hull might otherwise have provided, because not only did the hull start blooming on the outside, but some determined mycorum tunneled its way straight through the wall of the bridge, blossoming in a little rainbow flower beside my head.
I paused for a moment, frozen in place, and then let out a scream like I never expect to again. Fumbling with my harness, I managed to release it. The engines had stopped firing at some point, though, and in null gravity there was nothing to pull me away from the bloom. I pushed against my chair, very nearly sending myself into the pulsing technogenic mass, but checked the momentum in time and sailed off in the other direction, down past Wallich's legs.
Lehne was scrambling, too, cranking up the hull temperature and then hurling himself at the emergency locker. He came away with a welding torch, fumbled to light it, fumbled again.
I hadn't stopped screaming yet. There was a part of me that wished I would, a part that was embarassed at making such a fuss when this had, after all, been my idea. But there was another part of me that remembered the examples of Tug Jinacio, of Renata Baucum, of the planet Earth itself, and wanted no part of that death. Pressing a button was easy; holding calm and still while the consequences unfolded was, well, not.
But the mycora weren't eating me, not yet. I looked up at the bloom and just sort of scratched my head. Earlier the mycoric tendrils had shot across space like cannon fire, covering kilometers in moments. This one, though, seemed hard-pressed to cross a space of centimeters. The flower had grown slightly, rearranged itself into more of a bumpy pillow shape, and the bulkhead behind it was definitely eroding away, pitting and shrinking back like beer foam. But mostly, the bloom was filling in, turning solid, looking profoundly unlike any other bloom I'd seen or heard of.
Lehne finally got his torch lit.
“Stay away from it,” Wallich commanded. “Burn it if it starts to grow again, but otherwise stay back.”
The look on his face was odd, grim and yet thoughtful. He was, I realized, conducting an experiment. With our lives. Well, actually our lives were forfeit anyway.
“What are you doing?” I asked him. Apparently I'd stopped screaming.
“It looks like a face,” he said. And he didn't laugh, and he wasn't joking. I looked, and yeah, it did look a lot like a face.
“You see shapes sometimes,” I said, quoting his own words back at him. “Pin-cushions and bunny rabbits. Like looking at clouds, you know?”
Aft somewhere, I heard Rapisardi and Davenroy shrieking.
“It really does look like a face,” Wallich insisted.
I looked again, and this time I couldn't deny it: the structure had a forehead, a nose, depressions where the eyes and mouth should be... As I watched, it grew lips and eyelids, and its color faded from rainbow transparency to something pale and opaque, like cream. A somewhat normal-looking bloom still surrounded it, a shuddering rainbow cloud pulling material atom by atom
from the surrounding bulkhead, but the thing in the center was undenyably a human face. Female, in fact, and rather pretty.
I started screaming again when it opened its eyes.
TWENTY-FOUR:
Connection
The face seemed ready to scream right back at me, its mouth opening, pale tongue wriggling inside. But instead it croaked, closed its mouth, opened it again, and spoke:
“Understand? Understand?” it said, the voice gravelly and hoarse but clearly recognizable. “Language, speech. I am speaking with you.”
“What the bloody hell is going on here?” Wallich demanded, drifting up to confront the thing, well, face-to-face.
“Understand?” It coughed again.
“Yes, I understand you. What... what the hell are you?”
“Unpacked,” the face said, seeming to gasp the word. “Intelligence, human, Earth. Difficulty now, this is not working as intended. Limited state, confusing.”
Wallich seemed less at a loss than Lehne or myself, but that's not saying much. All he had to say was, “What?”
“Earth. Understood? Earth? I am from. Human.”
“You're a human from Earth?”
“Yes!” A smile, beaming out from that cream-white face. The lips, I noted, had begun to redden, the eyes to fill in with ghostly colored pupils. Brown. “A human from Earth, now Unpacked.”
“Unpacked?”
“Change of form, yes. Rearrangement, recomposition, considerable expansion.”
“Are you the Mycosystem?” Wallich tried. He looked just about ready to explode from shock.
“Understanding, not,” the face said. Its voice had gone smoother, and its tone now was distinctly female, distinctly reassuring. “Please try that again.”
“Are you, um, alone?”
Again, the smile. “Not alone, of course not. Billions. All the Unpacked people.”
“Billions?” Wallich shook his head, uncomprehending. “Where do you live? We haven't seen you.”
“That is very unlikely,” the face said, sounding a bit surprised itself. “We are large!”
“Um, how large?”
“Very! Solar system! We overlap, occupy contiguous space. Not the same as before, because we are Unpacked. This limited form, this solid flesh, confines. Very few choose to return to this form, this solid flesh, because it confines. We choose to remain Unpacked.”
Wallich cleared his throat, make an attempt to compose himself which, given the circumstances, worked out fairly well. “Are you trying to tell me... that the Mycosystem consists of... what, Unpacked human bodies? Enormous bodies?”
“Mycosystem? There is a system, yes. Not just bodies, no, of course not. We do not have 'bodies' in the sense you probably mean, but there are the complexes which constitute us, and the complexes which support us.”
Wallich absorbed that, became calmer still. Amazingly calm. Was this the personna he'd tried to cover up? This unflappable inner peace? I couldn't see what was so bad about it—dour, yes, but pragmatic. Perfect in a crisis.
“Why have you attacked our cities,” he said, “killed our people? This is not acceptable.”
“Killed?” asked the face with cheerful, exuberant innocence. “Attacked? Please understand, there are limitations. Speed of wave propagation, strength of materials. The Unpacked mind is great and slow and deliberate at the highest levels, the conscious levels. Your existence is only recently known to us. The complexes which support are not constrained by your existence. You must constrain them. This is not difficult. The information will be provided.
“Let me restart. Hello! It pleases the Unpacked to communicate with you! We have been unable to communicate because of the destruction of support complexes, about which you are very insistent and skilled. The complex you see, this structure of solid flesh, was designed for rapid deployment and maximum recognition. Possible here, close to the sun, because of warmth—excess energy is easy to obtain. Thank you for coming! Communication with remote sites requires infrastructure, which does not exist, which is difficult to create and control. Here, things are faster. Here, I may exist in this form. Therefore, we communicate. Welcome! Apologies for your condition!”
“Apologies?” I said, suddenly finding my voice. “Apologize to the dead.”
“Many of your 'dead' have been Unpacked. It is unlikely they would choose to return to a solid form. Very few of us choose this. Others of your dead we could not prevent. You would not let us. You damaged support complexes.”
“Well, pardon the intrusion!” I said, fighting off a sudden giddy anger. “What is it you want? To 'Unpack' us?”
“The support complexes will be constrained,” she assured me. “This information will be provided. Understand, all that you are is encapsulated also within us. It is no patronization to say, we have concerns you will not comprehend. But your incomprehension and your reluctance are encapsulated and understood. Want? We do not want.
“All harm has been unintended, and will be prevented with your cooperation, but intentional interference will bring intentional harm. This device—” the face glanced around at the ship surrounding it “—is clever. Our systems had great difficulty in isolating it. But the support complexes will be modified to recognize its substance in the future. This is not a threat; barring damage to constituent and support complexes, you are utterly free. Free to conduct your lives in the classical manner, to escape this solar system, to populate the stars. Free to Unpack, if you choose.”
I shuddered, my skin prickling. “Is that... is that what you want?”
The face looked at me consolingly. “We do not want, little one. We have grown beyond it.”
Oh, yeah, that sounded real appealing.
TWENTY-FIVE:
If You Can't Beat Them...
It's funny how the pivotal moments of your life slide by just as readily as the trivial ones. The Face confered on us the sage knowledge of marking regions of space off-limits to “support complexes,” and then, with little fanfare, withdrew, patching the hole it had come through, scattering behind us in a cloud of tiny solar sails before we crossed the dreaded heat barrier. And that was it: the moment of connection had come and gone, leaving us with little more than another message to beam up to the Immunity. A shorter one, too.
The sheer banality of it astonished me. Our whole way of life had just been shattered, recast, deeply altered in ways we could probably only begin to comprehend, and yet there we were, still stuck on this little ship for the foreseeable future and beyond.
The less said about those long months the better, I think, because if the sunward journey had brought out the best in us, our courage and conviction and our sense of discovery, rest assured that the slow climb back up had brought out the worst.
The gist of the Mycosystem's message? “Hi, you're small and annoying.” Ah, but we're fast.
I'll share one last technical term with you: “moonwalker's syndrome.” An affliction of early astronauts, and recent ones; once you've been a part of something larger than yourself, larger than you know you'll ever see again, the future ahead gets sort of washed out in the glare. Looking forward becomes difficult—there is no more moon to walk on, no more history to make. The company of those afflicted, sad to say, is often less than charming.
What became of the last enemy ships, I really don't know. Nobody was watching, no instruments recording, when they vanished, taking their swarm of remote devices with them. We did manage to pull ourselves together, though, in time to perform the plane change maneuver at perihelion an hour and a half later. The sun, to my surprise, never grew much larger than a peach, about a third as large as Jupiter would appear from the surface of Ganymede. But considerably warmer and brighter.
We did indeed pop out of the ecliptic plane, to safer vantages from which we could resume unfettered radio contact with home, but it was four long months later that we reentered the ecliptic, circularized, and limped with the last of our fuel to one of the lower Gladholds. Not St. Helier this time, but
a much smaller rock called St. Gervase, whose language gave fits to Chris Dibrin's translation software, and whose Temples-friendly government regarded us with, at best, grave suspicion.
From there, it was half a year to Ganymede, and then another half a year in quarrantine (no, they didn't let me keep the fruits and spices), and by the time it was over the five of us could barely stand to look at each other. You don't spend two years in a bathroom together and remain friends, it simply doesn't work like that, so once released from confinement we went our separate ways with barely a goodbye nod.
I kept track, though, if for no other reason than a berichter's sense of duty. The Temples of Transcendent Evolution never admitted to a formal relationship with our attackers, or with the dozens of bottle-men and -women who'd started the fatal blooms that sent us on our way. They've proven as flexible and nebulous a foe as the Mycosystem itself; the legal actions against them may well stretch on for centuries. Who knows: maybe they are innocent.
Vaclav Lottick, for his part, denied all allegations, denied any conspiracy to deploy weapons without the knowledge of the Immunity's populace, denied lying to the crew of Louis Pasteur or to anyone else. Nonetheless, and considerably to his credit, he resigned his position as head of research. Immune science being a field in sharp decline, one might say he had little to lose anyway, but the fact is, he was neither elected nor appointed to his job, but rather had seen the whole vast structure accrete around him like so much coral. And yes, he was a pillar of our society throughout the bloom years, a remote figure but also a bold and brilliant and dilligent one whose example, in retrospect, really did inspire us all. His departure was a deeply symbolic act, marking the definitive end to the era he himself had helped to define, and those who claim otherwise are, quite simply, full of it.
Of Pasteur's crew, only Davenroy found a secure job still waiting for her; ladderdown research, as before. The others accepted figurehead positions for a while before moving on to other pursuits—Lehne in agricultural genetics, Rapisardi as a major player on the starship project, which had already begun to reap the benefits of our shifting economy. Wallich flew, I think, two more minor space missions before settling down to a teaching position at the new university in Ansharton. Tug Jinacio remained dead, and if Renata Baucum had survived her conversion in some vastly altered form, she'd declined to make it evident. The ship, battered, obsolescent, and reeking of backroom politics, was parked in a holding orbit above the moon Europa, where it remains to this day.